 Thank you. Can you hear me, Mike? Can you hear me okay? So it's an honor to give this keynote to all of you. And I just want to thank all of you and thank all the students and special appreciation for my fellow faculty members and Michael and Bill and Elizabeth and everything that you do. So this is called Life on Mars. When I was growing up in the 1960s and early 70s, the exploration of outer space occupied my family's imagination. We huddled around a small television on the coast of Maine in 1969 as Neil Armstrong braved the lunar atmosphere peering out of the window of his circular helmet. One step for man, one giant leap for mankind, he famously mouthed over the crackling reception. As my father described for us each of those steps, the first space shuttles orbit the other attempts at space walks and the increasing number of satellites spinning around our Earth. That night, we dreamed of the cold puckered rock orbiting us in a far away planets in the deep, empty regions of space. My father was a chemist. My brother is a plant geneticist. My uncles and cousins are engineers and doctors. My mother was a naturalist. Early on, I distinguished myself in a family of scientists believing in the facts of the tangible world as someone who had little interest in data and could wander aimlessly for hours in her imagination. I was spaced out, and my father frequently prodded Earth to Karen, Earth to Karen. One of his favorite questions when I was caught staring out into nowhere when I came inside the house with a glint in my eyes after running for hours through the fields and woods behind our house was, how's life out there on Mars? Scientists of the natural world, including chemistry and biology, are passionately interested in knowing and understanding the things of this world. One year when there was a partial solar eclipse, my father hung black plastic, the polyurethane he was partly credited with inventing and developing, over the bathroom window and spent hours researching how to use pinholes in the plastic so we could view the exact progress of the eclipse on the bathroom mirror. When we took summer trips to Maine, my brother and I trailed behind him as he walked along the rocky coast classifying rocks. I searched especially for those large round geodes that revealed a cave of crystals when my father broke them apart with his hammer. The process of weather, carbonation, locomotion, and migratory patterns were explained and re-explained. Field guides littered the kitchen table along with lists naming the birds my parents had spotted in our yard and the plants and trees that grew in the fields and woods behind our house. Whenever we traveled, they added names to those lists cataloging the earth's objects. I spent my days roaming those fields and woods around my house in the nearby Niagara River running with a wild bunch of mainly boys. Writers have to court risk and I learned to do this early on. We tore up and down narrow roads on our bikes, rode off ramps that shot us high into the air and swung out on ropes over swollen, swiftly moving creeks that fed into the river, stretching out a foot or a hand to skim the muddy water. I didn't wonder what types of trees grew in the woods or ask about the many species of roses my father grew. I climbed high into trees and hung upside down on their branches just to see the sky as if it lay underneath me. I pilfered a kitchen knife and used it to cut entire cities out of the thick brush behind our house, forming tunnels that led into secret passages and rooms in the thickly packed brush. We lived on an island between the United States and Canada just north of Niagara Falls. The island became a place foreign and strange each winter when everything was covered with ice, including the frozen white fields purpled in late afternoon sun. Even the river froze over, massive chunks of ice crowding its banks. In summer, that same river was fathoms deep. I stood on the deck of the marina and watched thrown twigs swirl down suck holes. The river was full of life, including the squirming gray fish inside the fisherman's rope nets, but that river also killed my friend's brother when he tried to paddle a canoe across it. The natural world surrounding me was good fodder for the imagination, including the falls where great quantities of water fell from heights impossible to comprehend, even when seen over and over again. The imagination depends on the natural things of this world. William Carlos Williams famously wrote, no ideas but in things, declaring that poetry depends on concrete language. Like scientists, writers need to have a vast knowledge of and curiosity for the natural world. They need to know that oak trees are the last to drop their leaves and that the purple trillium grows so close to the ground in the woods, its intricate flower is easily missed. They need to know whether intimately, including how storms brew, what it feels like when the temperature drops and how lightning travels. They need to be curious about the habits of animals and the way in which a person's eye color might change depending on the lighting. They need to know the symptoms of physical ailments and understand the process of convection. This need for knowledge of the physical world aligns us with the scientist. But writing also demands a curiosity for things unseen. Just as the imagination needs the known world in order to create poetry or prose that is accessible, it needs the unknown world in order to produce something new. Writers travel back and forth between these two worlds. We have to possess language and wordlessness, things and non-things, sensation and emotion, the body and its essence, the seen world and the invisible one. I found it easy to travel back and forth between these dichotomies when I was growing up, slicing the branches of the thick brush to create tunnels that suggested the cities I saw in my mind or swinging on a rope across a wide creek to mimic flying. Mixing these two worlds becomes more difficult when writing fiction. I can touch the entire book inside my mind. I can see its contours, I know the sounds and rhythms of its prose and I can feel the characters' emotions. But finding the words to make these invisible things tangible can take months or years and sheet after sheet of paper. I get lost trying to navigate that landscape. Problems of discourse arise. The point of view I've chosen is too intrusive. The present tense telling becomes tiresome and artificial, sounding. Characters misbehave, strained from my plot and rendering any cohesive structure impossible. These difficulties stem directly from the wide space that exists between the intangible world of the imagination and the tangible world of the book. Languages of the vehicle we use to cross this wide space. I asked myself what making this trick requires and I came up with three things. The curiosity to ask questions, a vision large enough to hold both the known and the unknown world and the courage to proceed without being able to see where you are headed. Any piece of literature is a dialogue between a writer and a reader. In that way, it's also a work of inquiry. Good writers pose questions and active readers read to get answers. In fiction, the questions are often narrative. A version of what will happen next. Will the girl get the boy she's in love with? Will the earth come to an end because of the invasion of aliens? Will the Ramses make their trip to the lighthouse? The process of writing is driven by the questions we ask of our material and these questions often need to be the ones that are impossible to answer and that drive us crazy. What makes people fall in love? How are events and people's actions linked? What does it take to forgive someone or yourself? Can love last? Why? Why not? Study of the natural world produces many questions that can be answered. My father delighted in answering questions about the weather or solar system or the reactions produced by combining chemicals. He patiently explained how a fire had started in our kitchen and the reason why measurements for building a birdhouse had to be precise. I asked questions like, what makes the leaf swirl in the air as it falls? Not the wind, dad, it wasn't blowing. Why do we have to die? His answer to these questions was usually a perplexed shrug. Unanswerable questions couldn't produce profitable outcomes. We frequently spent Saturday afternoons in art galleries. I remember being with my father in a museum when I was about 10. He would stand in front of one painting for 20 minutes or more, silently gazing. This time the painting was a Monet of the Gardens of Givery. You can't explain why it's beautiful, I said after a while, but the question is important. He smiled. Of course you can explain it, and proceeded to tell me about the relationship between visual beauty and proportion. I tore off on a search of a gallery and landed in front of a Jackson Pollock. When he found me, he said, it doesn't fit the theory because it's not beautiful. It was years later before we agreed that the nature of beauty is its elusiveness. The more one tries to grasp why or how something is beautiful, the more it escapes one's hold. The same way the bands of color that form a rainbow dissolve into the sky when we try to see them. Because we can't name what makes a work of art or literature beautiful, the work remains alive. Maybe because being alive and the feeling of being alive is ultimately just as mysterious. I often compare the art of explicating a piece of literature to the opening of Chinese boxes. There needs to always be another box. If you open the last one, or convince yourself that you can open the last one, you reduce the work. Each insight should lead to another question, and the questions should be endless. The same thing is true when we write, and this process of answering questions and finding other questions inside the answer can be maddening. For several months while writing The River Road, I was driven crazy by questions concerning one of the main characters. What would make someone accuse a possibly innocent bystander of a crime? And if she was found guilty, would her accuser be satisfied? What would satisfy him, and what tortured him? As soon as I arrived at an answer, he was tortured by his knowledge that his wife had had an affair with her neighbor. I saw that it wasn't really an answer. Something else would have gotten under his skin, even if his wife hadn't had the affair. These questions that can't be answered in a work of fiction become just as important as those that can be answered, even in a good mystery or a whodunit. Richard Dillard describes the necessity for ambiguity using an analogy of shooting rabbits. At the beginning of a novel, he says, we let all the rabbits loose to run around and create havoc. By the end of a novel, we need to have shot them. I always loved his dictum about this, which was, don't shoot all the rabbits. Besides being driven by active pressing questions, those that can be answered and those that can't be answered, we must possess a wide enough vision to hold both what is known and unknown in our view. Those rabbits that can be seen, and the ones out there somewhere in trees and bushes, the ones we're not even sure actually exist. In a recent article in the New York Times magazine, Breeding In vs. Spacing Out, Dan Hurley describes meditation or mindfulness to coin John Kevitt's Zen's word for it as the quote, simple, non-judgmental observation of a person's breath, body, or just about anything else, claiming that this act of meditation is the opposite of spacing out or what he calls quote also, spacing out in quotes or mind wandering. Both physicists and writers, he claims, come up with their most insightful ideas while spacing out. I found this distinction both puzzling and interesting, and it begs the question, what is spacing out and what happens in the minds of writers when they are spacing out? I would describe this activity as a loosening of attention. For example, when I'm in the midst of writing out a dialogue between two characters, the moment of invention happens if I let go of my knowledge of where I think the conversation is going or what each character is about to say. The release of expectations that occurs because I have loosened my mind's grip creates a sense of floating within the dialogue. The conversation is already present, separate from myself, and I'm merely listening. I'm like the net that gradually closes around it. If the net pulls too tightly or closes too quickly, it will miss many of the fish. The trick is to suspend the urge to grab hold of the thing, in this case the dialogue and where it's headed. Inevitably, if I gradually gather the strings of this net, I would be surprised by something within the dialogue, a turn of phrase or an insistence of voice that reveals a character is gay. This happened to me recently, where the realization that two characters I was convinced would love each other will also betray one another. What is the mind doing when it's released its hold in order to wander? I recognize this state is the same one I experienced as a child wandering the woods or fields that ran along the river. When I had no destination in mind, I came across a bird caught within a palace of ice. I saw the purple pools of a sunset forming on the snow. I heard the rush of the river's rapids. While this state of mind seems the opposite of focusing one's attention on a single point, or awareness on a single point of attention, say the breath, it's actually paradoxically similar. Spacing out happens when the mind is empty of judgments and expectations, when awareness resembles an empty field. The writer watches that field with a sense of heightened curiosity or playfulness or arousal or excitement. There's life within that field. But one has to release one's grip on the story or the poem or the character or even language itself in order to perceive it. I look for this process when I read. It can be felt in moments when a poem or story comes suddenly and inexplicably alive. I sense that process in Galway Canal's well-known poem, The Bear. When the narrator hunter finally comes upon the bear he has killed from within by enticing it with a piece of blubber that hid a sharply whittled bone meant to tear open its insides. Up until this point in the poem, the narrator acts as a hunter following the bear's tracks, dragging his bear knives. Some of the early details begin to suggest a different, unexpected and more imaginative direction for the poem. The narrator becomes hungry enough that he eats a bear turd, socked in blood, for example. But in the fifth and sixth section of the poem shifts course and no one who reads it will forget the image of the human being wrapping himself inside the bear's skin against the cold, dreaming himself into the bear's body. There is a similar moment in Frost's poem after apple picking, which I heard Baron Wormster refer to as a slice of dreaming. In a moment of daydreaming, the narrator sees the apples he's been picking and simultaneously sees the sleep that will disable his ability to harvest those apples and perhaps even his ability to desire them. This conundrum lies at the heart of the poem. Neither the sleep nor the harvest and our abundant desire for it can be explained away. Questions lie inside of questions. Why is his desire endless? What is sleep? What is dreaming? What is consciousness? And what is the absence of consciousness? Mystery lies inside of mystery and in order to experience the astounding resonance of those questions we have to suspend our reasoning and our pretense that we can know or understand anything. Curiously, I find myself writing a portion of this talk while in bed with the flu. I want some of this last spring. I can't resist sharing the irony of my delirium. I had a pretty good fever. As I lie here wondering about dreaming and imaginative moments. Good fiction is full of these moments. Often an unexpected reversal lies at their heart. There's a very short story called The Continuity of Parks by Julio Cortesar in which we seem to be entering the experience of reading a highly suspenseful and dramatic mystery when suddenly we realize it's the person who's reading the story in his green armchair with his slippers who is about to be murdered. That victim lies inside us. As readers, we are victims to the heart of suspense as part of the unending architecture of boxes within boxes. A similarly affecting reversal occurs at the end of Chekhov's story, Sleepy, in which a young girl forced to labor for a family not her own is expected to quiet a crying baby throughout the night so that everyone else in the house can sleep. Repeatedly she no sooner falls asleep and begins to dream than she's forced awake again by the baby's cries. The moment we don't see coming but perhaps sense within our own lucid dreaming within the story is the girl's final action of smothering the baby. That accomplished she sinks down at last into her own sleep and we feel to our shock complete relief that the baby is silenced. Inside our relief lies a feeling of horror at the brutality of the girl's actions and inside the feeling of horror lies our knowledge of what will happen once the girl's actions are discovered. I sometimes pretend I wrote something I admire. By this I mean I try to imagine the process of writing it. Recently I reread the great Gatsby wondering how much Fitzgerald knew in advance about his ending. I hypothesized that he knew Gatsby would die. The image of Gatsby at the end of the book floating in his pool is an image you can feel everything heading toward and it feels linked to that early image of Gatsby looking seaward at the single green light minute and far away. We sense that he won't get that light which he longs for and that the sea or the water will somehow overpower him. Gatsby's death is the inevitable event that creates the book's forward momentum. We don't want Gatsby to die and yet we sense he has to which makes his death feel tragic. I imagine that the surprising plot turn was Myrtle Wilson's death. It comes out of left field, out of the subplots spun by Tom Buchanan's desire. The fact that Myrtle's death lies inside of Gatsby's death and that conversely Gatsby's death lies inside of Myrtle's death forms a long string of questions inside of questions most of which can't be answered and end up echoing long after one has finished the novel. Because of course inside of Gatsby's pure idealized desire for that green light lies Tom's desire for Myrtle which includes the brutal desire for power and control and ravaging betrayal. Desire spins both outcomes in the complicated plot such that even the strictly narrative questions that's been out from this inventive connection are endless. Did Wilson suspect his wife was having an affair? How could Tom have convinced Daisy to leave? How and when did Daisy learn of Gatsby's death? Did she feel anything? Loss, remorse, love? I've demonstrated how I read because it's so important to how I write. In a good novel story or poem we can never arrive at definitive meaning. This makes the act of reading feel alive. The same is true for the writing process. Chekhov once said that we aren't psychologists. I think what he meant is that it's not our job as writers to explain characters. Instead our job is to dream them into being. This dream has to be concrete and specific but it also has to retain a sense of the mysterious. The more we dream our characters into being the more they should paradoxically disappear under our pens or computer keys. What we know about them is as important as what we don't or can't know. Some characters appear suddenly, full blown and real. I experienced this with one of the sisters in Patchwork. An older neighbor of mine who had worked in the cotton mills of Norris, South Carolina told me about sitting outside the mill, leaning up against the building and feeling the vibrations of the looms while nursing her baby on a work break. Quote, giving it the titty. I saw that young woman in a flash and it was only later as I fleshed out many scenes that I saw what I hadn't known about her. That faith and humor allowed her to confront hardship. Other times a character comes more slowly to life slowly through torturous detours. So I start out knowing nothing and every detail I invent feels false. As writers we are constantly synthesizing what we know with what we don't know. Invention is the mechanism that makes this synthesis possible. As writers we have to find the language for wordless truths and invent whole worlds by stumbling upon surprises, along with using sensory details and thinking hard about a plot or a character. These requirements form the central paradox of the writer's trade expressed by Emily Dickinson, the spreading wide of my narrow hands to gather paradise. Poetry is sometimes divided into two impulses, the narrative and the lyric. The narrative or storyline made up of characters, actions, speech, setting, the things of this world, and the lyric or song consisting of what can't be seen or known or explained. I was taught these strands separately. Emily Dickinson an example of a lyric poet, Walt Whitman or Robert Frost examples of narrative poets. In much of the best poetry however, the two impulses twine together. The known world converses with the unknown world. In Frost after apple picking, the action of harvesting apples becomes the dream, both waking and sleeping, both human and inhuman, dreamt by the apple picker and ultimately by the reader. In A Favorite Calm Mind of Fish by Elizabeth Bishop, it's the images of the brown skin hung in strips, the barnacles and that lip with its old pieces of broken fish line that turn the enormous fish that's hauled up onto the boat into an unknown creature that exists beyond the imagination's grasp. These two strands, song and story, exist also in fiction. We're more used to identifying narrative elements, setting, characterization, dialogue, plot, point of view, but we can sympathize ourselves to notice the other element as well. In The Great Gatsby, it's there in the glitter that winds through Gatsby's mansion and parties and in Daisy's laughter, which turns money, greed and power into something akin to a fairy palace. In Virginia Woolf's To The Lighthouse, it's felt in the snatches of lives that drift through the summer house, similar to the winds that sweep everything away when summer is over and the years are passing. A good story often juxtaposes a mysterious world with a concrete world of things and people and houses. In Gusev, another of Chekhov's stories, a man lies dying in an infirmary ship, returning from a far away military duty to Russia. In his delirium, his bad fever is contracted, he drifts between dreams of his family back in Russia and the conversations going on around him in the ship. This swaying back and forth between dream and reality becomes the central conflict of the story, more important than his fight to live. At the end of the story, he is wrapped in a sail. His body, resembling a large carrot or turnip, is dumped overboard and we watch as the fish approach him, swimming round and round this strange package. We see the slow recognition of a shark and finally the entirety of the ocean teeming with life. The mysteriousness of the world opens up and just like that, death and its meaning lies beyond us, even while that world is imagined by us. Viewing a construct of boxes, nestling inside of boxes from the perspective of the writer who must sit down to produce them is much harder. One can't build those boxes deliberately the way one might construct a house. A good floor plan, while important, will only take us so far. In workshops, we are often mostly concerned with the narrative or story elements of fiction, setting, characterization, dialogue, plot, point of view. It's harder to know how to talk about elements that are mercurial. I sometimes ask where the story comes alive or where the heart of a story is. These sorts of misnomers are the closest I can get and it can feel almost sacrilegious to talk about the life of a story at all. In my own work, I get spooked about paying too much conscious attention to these unnameable elements which can disappear upon examination. The process of writing both poetry and fiction often begins with observation which recalls the child's curiosity. I was forbidden to go to the marina, probably because there was a seedy bar in the back. I would stand in the trees just beyond the parking lot and watch the women come out on the porch, leaning against the railing of the steps in their flimsy dressings. One of these women wore a thick coating of makeup and I couldn't tell that she was old until she came out into the parking lot and stood under the lights. I heard the low laughter of a man who walked her to his car and I watched her stumble. When would she notice that she left her high heeled shoe behind in the gravel parking lot? What were they saying to each other? Sitting, pressed together on the front seat of his car. There was an abandoned house in the woods near the marina said to be haunted. One evening after exploring it, I sat in the upstairs hallway determined to see if there was actually a ghost. I never saw one appear, but as I watched the muddy lights that fell through the windows fade, the old cabinets turned into lurking shapes. Chandelier in the front hallway creaked with movement. The house I realized was just as mysterious as it would have been if a ghost had inhabited it. Finding those moments in my writing requires watching for places where the story is not the one I thought I was telling. Those moments unnerve me because the story isn't in my control anymore. Go straight into your discomfort. Head towards the thing that scares you. There is no list of instructions. While we can help each other by noticing a place in the story or the poem that feels full of mystery or life by saying go into that. Follow that image or trust that voice. I think that ultimately you as a writer have to stumble off the map. Feeling hopelessly lost can be a good thing. I've worked on a novel for months, sensing that there's something exciting somewhere underneath all my words before finding it. Oh, I realized recently, it's right there in the contrast between what my character thought she wanted and what she really wanted. Quick, I thought, write that down. Yet when I went back to that insight later, the resonance it held for me had slipped away. I knew I'd have to stumble on it again in a new way. Last one, stumble. I did not know where this talk was going when I began with the idea of two worlds, that of the scientist, naturalist, and that of the writer's imagination. But the more I asked questions about the writer's access to imagination, the more the two seemingly opposing worlds converge. It's the observable world that leads to the imagined one. We can see this process in any good poem. For example, the other worldliness of a sudden appearance of the moose in Elizabeth Bishop's poem, The Moose, depends on the very ordinary images that preceded of cabbage roses and rubber boots. The feeling that we can't comprehend what we're looking at when we see the strange looming image of the moose comes from first looking closely at the interior of the bus and the landscape outside it. Paradoxically, if we pursue the concrete aspects of craft, including a careful observation of the physical world, that otherness, the intangible, unnameable quality will emerge. This is, I think, what's meant by faith as it relates to writing. One has to trust that in creating a tangible world, the otherness, which is the opposite twin, will reveal itself. The farther one goes into the creating of that world through concrete sensory details and the sorts of specifics found in field guides, the more likely it is that the unknown will well up and make its presence felt. My brother once told me that the world becomes more real when we quantify it. I might claim the opposite, which is that the more we identify and quantify the things of the world, the more they disappear into an unknown vastness. My first semester of graduate school, I was called into James Whitehead's office. I need to pause for a minute and say that James Whitehead, who was a great poet, novelist, and really great teacher, was also incredibly intimidating. He was something like 6'5", and had played football at Vanderbilt. He was a massive man and body, mind, and spirit, and he had a booming voice. His office was down at the end of the hall, and he would stand in the doorway and shout your name if he wanted to talk to you. I was always Osborn, get down here. He could also explicate a piece of literature like no one I've ever known. He called me into his office to talk about a poem I'd written. I saw the poem as a narrative scene, but he was arguing the poem was a lyric. The poem described a group of old women seen by the narrator through her window when they walked into the woods to collect flowers, moving one behind the other like a line of poplars. Osborn, he said, tell me what the poem is about. I don't know, I replied, and in hindsight that was my best answer. Then I went on to say, I supposed it was a dream moment. I had been taken with the image of the women moving across the field toward the trees, one of them pausing, holding onto a fence post while she tied her laces. When they disappeared, I knew they'd eventually come back with the flowers. It's not about the old women, he said, smiling, enjoying the fact that I was dense about my own poem. It's about the narrator, the woman watching the old women. It's the knowledge that she'll be pulled across that field also. He said something about time and its relentless progression, and I remember thinking that he was trying to make the poem into something it was not. I was in my 20s and had no thought of myself aging when I wrote it. He was telling me that the poem was not entirely mine, and it took me a long time to learn that lesson. The poem had become larger than my conception because I'd been so intent on seeing the women and making them real. They're heavy legs rolling under their skirts, the folds of their dark cotton clothes like shadows, and that empty field after they'd gone into the woods with the rush of wind on it. The concrete particulars yielded from my observations had produced something I couldn't entirely comprehend and hadn't conceived. Whitehead was suggesting that as writers we are not just craftsmen moving our characters through actions or fleshing at a scene or a metaphor. We are creators, which implies that we are inipotent, but our power is actually in reverse. When our creations come to life, it's in spite of us. We become absorbed with the particulars of language or imagery or detail, and those particulars do the work of transforming our limited vision into something we couldn't have imagined. We have to loosen the reins if we ever held them, trust the narrative or the language, and watch to see what they reveal. Those revelations will be the truths that can later be opened by a reader, not the points or thoughts or messages we intended. In fiction for me, it's often in dialogue where I have to let go the reins, and when you think about it, dialogue is a place in fiction where conflicts or problems in the story are pinned down and quantified. In Hemingway's famous short story, it was like white elephants. A man and a woman argue about the abortion he wants her to have. We'll be fine afterwards, he tells her, just like we were before, I know we will. You don't have to be afraid. I know lots of people who have done it. He pushes her in this way until she finally says, I'll do it, because I don't care about me. This elevates the argument to another level. More is at stake, including an unspoken specter of guilt. The man says, I don't want you to do it if you feel that way. Seeing could have stopped there, but Hemingway makes us listen to every last piece of this argument because he's able to listen to it. The word choice is deceptively simple and direct, including a simple shift in tense that produces an unnameable but very palpable sense of dread. And finality and sin and loss and regret, she says, we could have everything, referring to the child she carries. He says, we can have everything, referring to their ability to be free of responsibility to continue on as before after the abortion. Right there, in between the very tangible conditional and present tense, the world of the story opens up. And one senses the texture of the unknown, a bigger reality lying underneath their words. A world that contains the future, which will be utterly different depending on the choice decided on right now. I thought about that passage when I was writing difficult scenes in Centerville between a minister and killer. I completed many drafts before I could erase my assumptions of where I thought the scene would go and hear the simple spoken words one by one that would reveal everything. How can we cultivate that strand of greater knowledge or insight that leads us to the heart of the story or center of the poem? How can we lead the life of the imagination? How can we experience a productive dreaminess or spaced out wandering of the mind? I'm big on mapping a plot and making lists of setting details. I use field guides and research, historical incidents, and the reasons for whether. These activities address the very necessary concrete aspects of writing. But dreaming the story is just as important and doing that requires descending into the mysterious and sometimes dark world of the self. The images that carry me to this place often involve large bodies of water. The feeling of a story lives right inside the feeling I had when I stood on the banks of the Niagara, watching the steady flow of its swift current. It's inside the feeling I had when I worked all afternoon with a kitchen knife, cutting out a city inside a thick patch of brush. The rhythm of the language I need exists in the physical rhythm of running through the woods. These archetypes deliver me into the world of the story or poem and sometimes they carry me into the center of disturbing emotions or insights. The knowledge that people create acts of violence or betrayal or theft for unknown reasons that love exists side by side with cruelty. That our actions have consequences we can't avoid or imagine and that any life is both finite and infinite. Writing requires courage and therefore talismans and rituals, a feather or a necklace hung above your desk, the skull of a small animal polished by wind and weather, a gray piece of rock filled with crystals, a window brimming with plants, or the walk you take every morning in which you feel an unexplainable rhythm in your body. Follow rituals, allow for superstitions, say a prayer, meditate on a phrase, or read a passage from a book you love over and over. My father had a rye sense of humor when he was dying about his inability to explain anything that was happening to him. While growing up in the tenements of New York City, he'd been one of those young boys of eight or nine standing on street corners selling newspapers. When it was cold and he stood in the doorway of a store or business to catch a little warmth, he might get caught or thrown out on the street. His papers scattered, but if it was really cold or he had a cough, he'd stand in that bit of warmth and he'd whistle as if he knew everything would come out. On the morning when he was about to undergo a dangerous surgery from which he sensed he wouldn't recover, he was told to walk up and down the hospital hallway. He did this, leaning on my sister for support and singing snatches of snow tunes. The sun will come out tomorrow, bet your bottom dollar. It only occurred to me later that he was whistling in the cold again. That is my final directive, whistle. When you don't know where and how your plot is going or if the language of a poem or paragraph feels empty, or if there is no piece of emotion or invention to be felt anywhere inside the dozens of pages you've written, pretend it's there. Move forward as if you're certain the entirety of your creation is just about to reveal itself. Well, certain fear or uncertainty with its opposite and write another page. Trust that ultimately the known things of the world of your creation are the same as the mysterious otherness of that world. And trust that all of it is in the end amazing. I've written these pages in an upstairs room of my house that sits high in the treetops. Through the open window I can hear two birds crawling back and forth to one another. One cheeks quick short trills, the other has a low pitched who what. When I look out my window all I see are the trunks and branches of the trees fleshed out with thick dark oak leaves. I have to spend several minutes peering through the depth of greens and browns before I find the birds. But finally when I've forgotten about the speech I have to write, when I've stopped noticing how long everything is taking me, I see the white head of a downy tiny downy woodpecker on the silvery trunk of a beech tree not 10 feet from my house. A pale purple finch in the nearby branches of the oak is joined by a second one and the song changes. What is life like on Mars in this mysterious illogical world where stories don't have clear or predictable outcomes and a disturbing sense of otherness can suddenly rise up inside of the known presence of trees, bushes, rivers and houses. It can be maddening and scary but it's also breathtaking, it's a worthy journey. This is that important as long as I'm like in that fly room. But I write on hand so I write first. I do eventually do a lot of work on the computer. Sometimes I will like, especially if I've already got a couple of drafts of something, sometimes I will be working more on the computer, but I first drafts as long as I can. I think that kind of is different for everybody. I think for me, yeah, the rhythm is different. I write on hand and I feel the rhythms of the words. The mic's up there. Sorry. Oops. Yeah? I mean, how do I balance getting everything moving and the story itself? Oh yeah, that's a good question. Well, I mean, I think I'm doing different things at different times, although you must mix. I mean, sometimes I am specifically thinking about a character and I might be trying to either puzzle them out or I might have a scene. Often what it is is I'll start with a scene that I have in mind. So I like to write in the morning when I first get up, I tend to get wake up early. And so before I've talked to anybody or everything's still swimming around in your brain at that point. And so often as I'm waking up, or I might have seen from the day before that I'm going to write, like, I can't wait to write the scene. And I'm sort of visualizing it in my mind. And so as I start writing out the scene in terms of it's the first draft, for me, seeing it is really important in my mind and feeling it and so using that whole thing of experiencing it with five senses. But the other thing that's important to me, and this is, I don't know, this is probably kind of odd, and maybe it does come from having, you know, from also writing poetry. But I, voice is really, is really crucial. If I get the voice right, I can write the whole scene. And so I will often have lists and lists, sometimes pages of words that don't fit together, that are just the sound, I like the sounds of them or whatever. And then I just start pulling from the list. Like, you know, I'm sort of thinking of words in my own, in my mind as I go along, but then I'm also pulling from the list. I mean, it sounds weird. I'm crazy, but what it does, I think what it does, I don't really know what it does, but I think what it does is I think it keeps me off balance a little bit so that that whole thing of, you know, of things going in unexpected directions can happen and that details come up that I, if I was consciously trying to think of these details, I wouldn't have thought of them. So I guess that that's a way in which, another way to think about it might be, it's a way in which I'm trying to use both the, or access both the conscious and the unconscious mind maybe. Yeah. How do you achieve that state and if that's possible, how do you recognize it? And then you also... I'm unfortunately just in it a lot. I seem to have no choice. Quite the same way. So it seems inherently elusive. How do you manage that? Yeah, it does. But yeah, I don't know if I have an answer because this is sort of just frustrating. I don't know that I'm able to do that always. I mean, I think that I just always have been sort of, I was always spaced out as a child. And now it's not always a good thing. I can tell you, driving down a road is not a good time to be spaced out. But yeah, you know, when you're riding it's perfect to be spaced out. So it's kind of the natural thing. You know, I do keep, you know, little notebooks. I walk around with post-its lately, which is probably not the best thing. And then I write down, if I think of something, I write it down. Sometimes if you write it down, then it's there later on. Yeah. Yes. I don't know if I'm supposed to, but this is something about, like, writing about ultimately not really coming to any conclusion or knowing anything. I don't know if that's a point or not. But I think that's, like, when you have to usually apply it, of course, you may be trying to apply it to something. But a lot more times it's usually like, it's made out of that in a way. Because if that's all it's about, you know, I guess it's just double-edged means, like, that's what it's about me. Writing has got that openness, sort of, like, by knowing more about research. But then on the flip side, a lot of times it makes me very optimistic. I think it's like, why am I even doing this? Because nothing can be known. Well, the thing is, is that I think what I was trying to say is that things can be known and that you do, there are answers. I think in any good piece of literature, and then when you're writing the same thing happens, is that you do answer questions. You answer questions about your characters, you find out about an event that you thought you didn't understand, and all of a sudden you can see the whole event. So you are getting answers, but that those answers open up other questions. And then you might get an answer to that question, but there's always another question behind the answer. So that you can't ever know everything, I guess is what I would say. Which I'm ultimately really glad about. Any other questions? Alright, thank you.