 I want to welcome you to the Arlington Author's Salon. I am your emcee, my name is Andrea Nicolai, and I'm also the Director of Libraries for the Town of Arlington. For all you Robbins Library lovers out there, starting Monday, April 5th, we are opening up for short term browsing by appointment, so go to our website robbinslibrary.org to learn more about that. I had to put in that little plug. Tonight's author salon, the theme is books inspired by books. We have with us this evening Michael Blanding, Kim Adrian and Alden Jones, and we're so thrilled to have these three authors here with us tonight. The Arlington Author's Salon is a free reading series with a twist. Each author's presentation includes a sensory experience to complement their reading, whether it be music, photos, tasty treats, fabrics, even sculpture and smells, although with Zoom webinar we do have our limitations. The salon normally takes place at the Kickstand Cafe in Arlington Center quarterly the first week of January, April, July and October with some exceptions to circumvent holidays. And our next salon will take place July 8th, so mark your calendars. I want to offer a few notes as you settle in. The salon will be recorded and is later going to be viewable on Arlington Community Media's TV channel and on demand at ACMI.tv. The list of attendees is not viewable during the program and won't be viewable in this recording to protect everyone's privacy. Each author tonight will have 15 minutes to read and share their element of sensory experience and we will have a combined Q&A at the end of the program. The chat function is disabled effectively but you can enter a question for the authors anytime during the program with the Q&A feature at the bottom of your screen. As hosts I'm the only one who will see your questions, I'll post them to the authors during the Q&A period at the end. I do want to give a nod to our usual hosts, Emily and the wonderful staff of the Kickstand Cafe in Arlington which incidentally reopened today for outdoor seating and continues to offer their delicious takeout. I also want to credit salon co-organizers Anjali Miraduva, Marjan Kamali, Whitney Sharer and Amy Yellen. This program is supported in part by a grant from the Arlington Cultural Council, a local agency which is supported by the Massachusetts Cultural Council. This program usually takes place in the heart of the Arlington Cultural District which was designated in 2017 by the Massachusetts Cultural Council. Books are for sale tonight courtesy of The Book Rack. The Book Rack owner Mike Buglio has an author salon page on his bookshop.org site and your books, the books for the authors tonight will be featured on bookshop.org so please do visit and support our authors. We will share out that link during the Q&A and it's also available on the salon website. So our first author this evening will be Michael Blanding. Hello Michael. Hello. Michael is a Boston based investigative journalist whose work has appeared in the New York Times, Wired, Slate, The Boston Globe, Boston Magazine and other publications. He is author of The Map Thief, the gripping story of an esteemed rare map dealer who made millions stealing priceless maps, which was a New York Times bestseller and an NPR book of the year. He is author of North by Shakespeare, a rogue scholar's quest for the truth behind the Bard's work. So I'm going to step away and Michael, take it away. All right, great well thank you so much Andrea and all the organizers of Arlington author salon I have been a big fan of author Arlington author salon for a long time, a regular attendee both in person and now remote. And it was actually also a previous presenter at the salon though not quite like this so I, my book literally just came out two days ago and so I'm still getting used to the technology but I'm going to try to share my screen here. So I am going to start by just giving a brief five minute overview of my book and just telling you a little bit about it to orient you. And then I am going to do a reading and I prepared a visual accompaniment of a slideshow and some video clips as well if everything goes right some clips of the theater so we're going to get to see a little Shakespeare tonight. I'm going to tell you a little bit about my book, North by Shakespeare, which like I say came out Tuesday. The book is about a scholar by the name of Dennis McCarthy who has a unique theory about how Shakespeare's plays were written. So rather than believing that someone else wrote Shakespeare's plays like the Earl of Oxford or Sir Francis Bacon. I'm pleased that they were all indeed written by William Shakespeare, but they were all based on earlier plays by an Elizabethan courier and translator by the name of Sir Thomas North. Now, McCarthy is not your ordinary scholar. He barely graduated from high school and he dropped out of college a few credits short of a degree. However, he was always very intelligent and he started doing research independently into the field of biogeography, which is the study of how plant and animal species move around the earth. And he even wrote a book on the subject. And interestingly enough, that's what actually turned him on to Shakespeare. After he wrote the book, he was interested to see if he could do the same thing with a story and see how a story moves around the world just like these animal and plant species. And with sort of a maximum amount of hubris, he decided to look at the greatest piece of literature in the world, Shakespeare's tablet. So as he traced it from a Norse legend from the 11th century to the Shakespearean play. He discovered that there was a another version of Hamlet that appeared in English before Shakespeare, and following a number of textual clues and various works. He would identify that the author of that Hamlet which is called the Ur Hamlet by scholars was Sir Thomas North. Now Thomas North is best known as the translator of a book called Plutarch's Lives, which is well known as the main source for Shakespeare's Roman plays, Antonin Cleopatra, Julius Caesar, and Coriolanus. And as McCarthy started looking more into North and his life and started tracing other texts of the period, he started finding references that seem to tie north to other Shakespearean plays such as the Midsummer Night's Dream, Macbeth, and the Tempest. And so he came to the conclusion that Thomas North may have written other plays that Shakespeare adapted. And he started using computer tools like plagiarism software this one called W Copy Find, which is the same software that a professor would use to now the student who was copying someone else's work. And he compared all of Shakespeare's plays to all of Sir Thomas Norse translations. And he was able to find thousands of parallel phrases and hundreds of passages which seemed like Shakespeare had taken from Thomas North and so he came to the conclusion that every Shakespeare play except for two had a previous source play written by north. And I'm just going to show you a little bit about what I mean here this is the entity in Cleopatra you can see all the words lit up in red are ones that appear in this passage from Plutarch and this passage from the play. And as I said it's no surprise that Shakespeare used Thomas North for the Roman plays, but McCarthy found that he actually Shakespeare actually use Norse other translations as well the dial of princes and the moral philosophy of Donnie. And he didn't just use them for the Roman plays, but he used them as I said for almost every play in the canon. Now this is McCarthy's website Sir Thomas North calm, and I know you can't really read this but I just wanted to show you sort of the extent of these parallel passages that he found that linked Thomas North to Shakespeare. And not only did he find a connection between north and Shakespeare's language, but he also found a connection between Norse life and and events that took place in North life and Shakespeare's plays. Now North had a very, very active and interesting life. He was a soldier in war, he was a foreign diplomat in France and Italy, and traveled all over Europe, and had a lot of the experiences that someone who would would have who would be the author of Shakespeare's plays which is one of the reason why there's so much doubt about whether Shakespeare actually did write the plays because there's nothing in Shakespeare's biography that that would seem to to have that kind of life experience. A lot of the plays, however, McCarthy believes were written by North on behalf of his patron, a man named Robert Dudley the Earl of Lester, and he was a longtime suitor to Queen Elizabeth who spent years trying to win her hand in marriage. And in fact in 1575, he held a enormous festival at his castle of Kenilworth, in which he invited, you know, thousands of people and it went on for 19 days they drank 40 barrels of wine a day, and watched amazing performances of all kinds and this was Lester's attempt to try to get Elizabeth to marry him. And so for my book, not only did I talk to to Dennis about his theories and do my own research to try to prove or disprove them, but we went together to some of these, some of these locations including Kenilworth castle to see what we could find and tracing some of North's footsteps. And as we did, Dennis's daughter Nicole was also, she's a filmmaker and she was producing a documentary about her father so we actually traveled together and, and she filmed me interviewing Dennis and me doing my reporting along the way so we were sort of a roving entourage and had a really good time reporting this book. And there's Nicole right there and that's one of her camera people, but right. So, so with just that as an introduction, I'm now going to read you a passage about the Kenilworth festival. And I'm going to show you a slideshow and I said that I've got a few clips of Shakespeare that are going to try to intersperse along the way. All right, here it goes. This still stands today, a historic ruin often bundled into package tours with Stratford upon a bond and the Potswolds. As we approach it on a chilly November morning a stiff wind blows off the surrounding fields, where the artificial lake once stood, and the romantically crumbling walls of the castle stand out against the sky overhead. The stone edifice however, still hints at the grandeur that greeted Elizabeth on the night of July 9 1575 when one historian writes, the castle twinkling with the light from thousands of candles and torches looked like a fairy palace rising from the lake. As we pass the visitor center I try to imagine the sultry July of 1575 when thousands of gay revelers descended upon the palace, pregnant with the hope or dread that Lester would succeed in his wooing. The Earl of Lester's last chance to marry the Queen and become King of England which he desperately wanted said McCarthy as we walked along the wide gravel approach, and for which Thomas North was hoping as well. Unlike with his brother Roger there's no proof that Thomas attended the festival. It's not unlikely however that he accompanied his brother to the event. The North family's early 20th century biographer Francis Bushby certainly places him there. Like many writers she also speculates an 11 year old William Shakespeare also attended from nearby Stratford, and that the poet may have unwittingly rubbed shoulders with Sir Thomas. For two centuries, Shakespeareans have been gamely placing the young bard at Kenworth, given the uncanny similarities between the festival and William Shakespeare's most beloved play, his magic fairy tale of young lovers lost in the woods, a midsummer night stream. McCarthy doesn't rule out the idea that Shakespeare may have attended. Most of the entertainments were performed in the open air with locals allowed on the grounds at night. But he also thinks it more likely a gentleman with connections to Lester attended, rather than a Glover son from the countryside. As with other plays he is using a source play McCarthy says, and the person who wrote the source play was Thomas North Lester's playwright, who was witness to these events. Likely the most performed of all Shakespeare's plays dream has delighted generations of audience members with its depictions of an otherworldly fairy land. Professional theater companies and high school productions constantly reinterpret its woodland spirits, wrapping actors as Lester did in silk or moss or covering them in tool feathers lycra leather or tie dye. At times lyrical lusty and ludicrous, the play ultimately comes down to a commentary on love. It proposes that love is a dream or perhaps a vision that it is absurd irrational a delusion or pat perhaps on the other hand, a transfiguration says literary critic Catherine Belsey. The story's transformation into fairyland began as soon as Queen Elizabeth approached the castle. As the queen made her way through the tilt yard and into the castle's base court, a movable island floated toward her across the artificial lake, brightly blazing with torches. A woman in silk stepped off and approached her saying she was the lady of the lake, the mythical enchantress who made King Arthur monarch by giving him the magical sword Excalibur. She was bowed low saying the lake the lodge and the Lord are yours to command. Elizabeth, however, was having none of it. We had thought indeed the lake had been ours and you call it yours now she said with a smirk reminding Lester who really on the castle. Well we will hear in commune more with you hereafter. In the next two weeks, each day came with new surprises. Musicians and boats bear baiting Italian contortionists and nightly fireworks which showered the sky over the man made lake that left against the western wall of the castle. The spectacles lasted for hours including dazzling dragons fighting dogs and cats and rockets seem to shoot out of the water itself. A contemporary observer described them as a blaze of burning darts flying to and fro, leems of stars carousquant streams and hail of fiery sparks of such intensity that the heavens thundered the water surge the earth shook. It was like Disney World McCarthy says as we walk among the ruins. We climb up a stone staircase carved with centuries of graffiti to stand now atop the ruined wall where a fierce wind blows up the surrounding hills. Sheep graze far below us where the lake once stood but I can still imagine it stretching out glittering in the sun the long bridge crossing to the hunting chase beyond. As the queen returned from hunting by torchlight one night. She was surprised by the poet George gas going who burst out of the trees as a savage man covered in moss and Ivy and uprooted oak sapling in his hand. He began by shouting for forest spirits, fawns, saders and nymphs before addressing the queen with a verse were galing Dudley's true love. The poem says McCarthy is reminiscent of one of the opening scenes of a midsummer night stream as the fairies and sprites of the forest welcome the fairy queen to Tanya. Gas coin refers to dry ads and people of the forest welcoming the queen McCarthy says, and a midsummer night stream has the exact atmosphere the exact imagery. The name to Tanya is even used in obvids metamorphoses as another name for the goddess Diana who was often associated with Queen Elizabeth. At the point the Earl states a giant water pageant as Elizabeth was making her way across a long bridge over the lake. An actor dressed as a sea god Triton wrote across the water to her on a mechanical mermaid, sounding a trumpet in the shape of a wealth. He commanded the seas to still shouting you waters wild suppress your waves and keep you calm and playing. After his speech another actor dressed as the fabled Greek musician Ariane serenaded her from a top, a 24 foot long mechanical dolphin music emanated eerily from the dolphins belly, where an ensemble of musicians had been secreted inside. There's no record of how the queen received the performance, whether she stood stony faced or smiled and clapped with joy, or felt a rise of love in her heart for the man who had gone to such extravagant lengths to please her. But the moment has been immortalized after a fashion in a midsummer night's dream. In one scene Oberon the king of the fairies reminisces to his underling puck, while in a jealous fit over to Tanya, using words that might have equally applied to the Kenneworth water pageant. Dolphins back uttering such dulcet and harmonious breath, but the roots see crucible in her song, and certain stars shot madly from their spears to hear the sea-made music higher than that. At very time I saw, but thou could not, flying between the cold moon and the earth, cupid, all armed. For more than a century those lines have been read as an illusion to Lester, who shot a love arrow at his own vessel, England's famous Virgin Queen Elizabeth, at a pageant complete with a dolphin mermaid in fireworks just as in Oberon's vision. When McCarthy first read about it, he immediately saw it as another case in which Thomas North was recreating one of the most important moments of his life in the plays. No one who attended Kenneworth would have been able to forget its magical sights, but knowing the stakes behind Lester's proposal, North must have seen the scene as especially critical, not just for the earl but for himself, his last chance to become an advisor to the king of England. The image is so specific McCarthy insists that North must have sat there, a promontory, that very night watching the water pageant unfold. McCarthy looks now over the fields using an illustration in the visitor's guide to determine where the bridge would have crossed the shallow valley and to locate where North must have sat. He points to a slight rise in the terrain near a country road cutting across the fields. It's that hill right there McCarthy says that's where he watched this extraordinary performance. As he studied North Thomas North's works however, McCarthy identified another connection with Oberon's vision that had gone potentially unnoticed for centuries. Just as at Kenneworth, in the play Cupid's arrow misses the mark as Oberon goes on to explain to puppy. The fiery shaft quenched in the chaste beams of the watery moon and the imperial vultures pass it on in maiden meditation fancy three. River western flower, the four milk whites now purple with luxe wounds and maidens caught it in love in the island. A genius flower, the herb I shall be one, the juice of it on sleeping islands laid will make all man or woman madly go upon the next life creature that it sees. Fetch me this herb feed out here again and the fire with the leaf of the together round about the earth in 40 minutes. Of course Puck does fetch the herb and so is mischief among four young lovers, Hermia, Lysander, Helena and Demetrius lost in the woods, who through the fairies chemical intercessions fall hilariously in and out of love with one another. For being such an important element in the plot, no scholar has identified a source for the magical love juice behind all the trouble. In Norse style of princes, however, McCarthy noticed a reference to an herb called Elabia which grows in Cyprus. When cut north writes it dropeth blood, and if that blood is rubbed on a person while it's hot, they will fall in love with the person who does it. Reading the passage McCarthy realized that this could be the inspiration for Oberon's flower in Norse own copy of dial of princes, now a Cambridge University in fact, he specifically calls out the plant in his handwritten marginalia. The blood juice of this plant McCarthy concludes is the bleeding herb from a midsummer night's dream. Thank you so much Michael. Oh my goodness, I should not be still muted at this point in the pandemic. Thank you so much for that reading. That was, that was wonderful. And the slide show was so engaging. Thank you and it worked. For the most part. All right, I'm going to go ahead and stop your video we'll bring you back when we have the Q&A of course. All right. Thank you again Michael and next up this evening, we have Kim Adrian. I'm going to bring Kim on screen. Hello Kim, and I'm going to ask. There we go. All right. So, I'm going to read about Kim now, while Kim is here on screen with us. Kim Adrian is the author of two books of lyric criticism, Dear Now Scarred, part of a series that aims to reinvent literary criticism and sock a Bloomsbury object lessons book. Kim's 18 memoir, the 27th letter of the alphabet uses the form of a glossary to tell the story of her mother's mental illness. Kim is the editor of the shell game writers play with borrowed forms and anthology of lyric essays, and is the author. Sorry, it's the creator of right on a free monthly newsletter for writers. Kim, thank you so much for being with us this evening, and take it away. Thank you. Thanks Andrea. Thanks for inviting me to this online event. I wish it were real and didn't feel so abstract. It's better than nothing. This is my book Dear Now Scarred that I'll be reading from tonight and Alden is going to read from a book that's also from the same series and the series is called afterwards. And it's put up by fiction advocate, which is this small, very wonderful, I think press. And this series is it, all the books in the series address pieces of the contemporary canon so it's, it's criticism that engages in a very personal way with the work that it's addressing. I ran into Alden on the train a few years ago and she told me about the series, and I got really excited about it because I love writing about literature in a kind of personal way. And so I contacted the editor Brian who was excited to have me write something but we were having trouble thinking about what might work. And it was a subject matter for me. Eventually we landed on on now starts my struggle. And it was a little bit tricky because, as many of you probably know it's a really enormous auto fictional novel that's 600 pages long, and I was actually near the end but I hadn't quite finished the very last book book six which is the biggest book and the most difficult book. When I had agreed to write my book. So, I wasn't a bit of a quandary for a while. After I finished book six and already promised that I'd write this book. I felt kind of cowed because the way book six kind of transforms all of now scarred the entire project retroactively, and gives it much more gravity, I think and it becomes a much more serious and much more interesting project even then I thought it was when I was in the middle of book five and had to agree to write this book. I was kind of worried about how it was going to critique such an important work of literature. And that all kind of fell away when I finally found the letter form. So this book is a series of I think it's 25 letters that I wrote to now start. The reason the letters are so helpful, or we're so helpful is that writing letters allowed me to respond to now scarred work as a reader, rather than just like a straight out critic. And that allowed me to be much more honest and playful. So I'm going to read part of the first letter the first letter is really long. And then I'll skip to the middle of the book and read another little bit. And my sensory thing is cookies, which I ate a lot of to write this book, I eat a lot of cookies all the time, in order to write period. And I wish I could share these with you. They're really good Italian hazelnut cookies but Okay, so the first letter is dated February 20 2019. Here at Mr now scared. My friend Lisa told me the other day. When we were standing in the children's section of the bookstore she co owns that she'd read in a recent interview that you've stopped smoking. I was so relieved to hear this. I actually felt a weight lift off me. I guess it was visible because Lisa laughed and gave my shoulder a nudge. Today, another friend who lives in London and who knows all the local literary gossip. Inform me that you've moved to that city from Sweden, and have fathered yet another child, your fifth with your newest wife or lover, whichever. I hope your latest domestic arrangement finds you happy. But as an avid reader of your work I confess I find it hard to digest these abstracted bits and pieces of your personal life. I prefer to read your work without the fluorescent glare of your public persona shining over it. God knows it's hard enough to keep you the author Carlo Bay now scarred separate from you. Carlo Bay now scarred the narrator and protagonist of my struggle. And not just because you've put every last obstacle in the way of the reader who seeks such a division. But because your face, pleasant as it may be, is plastered all over the FSG paperback editions of my struggle. At least as they've appeared here in the US over the past several years. How annoying I find those covers, which for a while were so boldly displayed in nearly every book store I've entered into. Even long before I cracked the spine of book one year rugged vaguely Christ like features, long graying hair, soulful eyes, scraggly beard dramatic cheekbones, actively repel me from countless display cases. Who is that glowering man I wondered. What kind of a writer would allow himself to glower so hamily. Isn't glowering outside of the most popular art forms, cinema, pop music, outdated even tacky. But your public persona clearly thrives on old school tropes like glowering. Indeed, your entire physical person appears to fulfill every last physiognomic stereotype of the macho male genius. Your modern day Hemingway, a Norwegian Nabokov, a Bologna with bone structure, a sebald with sex appeal. Of course, it's not your fault you look the way you do. But at the same time, you are the one regularly posing for all kinds of photos. And those tropes, which demand some cultivation, emanate from you in these photos like an aura of high voltage static effect FSG knew perfectly well when they decided to stick your face on the covers of the books that comprise my struggle, which they pumped out just as fast as humanly possible. But when all was said and done, the pace of things wasn't really that fast, given the gargantuan task you'd set your translators. What a monster you've written 3,600 pages. And here again, the question of ego arises simply by way of page count. I have to say this is just so odd to read. I'm reading to an entirely great screen right now. So it just feels almost unreal, like this isn't really, I'm not really reading to anybody so I'm trying to imagine actual people out there. That letter goes on. And it says continued to PM same day. It's incredibly blustery here today. The wind rises and subsides in audible crescendos and decrescendos pine cones and shriveled seed pods fly off the bare branches of the trees in our yard and pain against our roof before scattering noisely down its slope. The sky is no color. It's a little frightening. The entire building seizes up in the strongest of wins. And at these moments the architecture surrounding me feels like an extension of my own body. That's as if it's as if my own spine were at the center of it all. Just a few minutes ago the electric company called with recorded tips for what to do, in case we're hit by one of the many power outages affecting the area, but I hung up before it finished. I'm not sure why. I'm home alone as is usually the case during my son's school hours. His school happens to be right next door, which is nice, because unless for bidding days, I can often hear him running around outside, shouting to his friends during gym class and recess. The sound of Jonah's voice floating over the chain link fence that separates our yard from the school yard makes me incredibly healthy. Even though every time I catch it, I mourn the day I no longer will, because I'm built that way with nostalgia at my core, which is a bad way to be built. Nostalgia after all is just a sepia tinged indulgence and preemptive nostalgia is even worse on masochistic fantasy. One you yourself might call feminine, as you call so many things you deem mild weak or false. I don't mean to put you on the defensive. I see that already I've accused you only quasi obliquely of being hammy macho egotistical, and just now misogynistic. Honestly, it's not my intent to accuse you of anything. I only want to hash out my experience of reading my struggle with you, because it was just that an experience, one that changed some important things in my own life. For instance, the act of reading is for me different now than it was before I read my struggle. So is writing beyond that how I think about life itself has changed. And by life I mean not only my life and not only human life or social life, but all biological activity, which as you remind your readers again and again crawls and seeps and races and squiggles and flows over and in and through the cracks and crevices of everything that don't live, but simply exists, material reality in short. In fact this aspect of your work, your soft spoken but relentless metaphysics, a metaphysics obsessed with the inner and the outer with the living and the non living with the open and the close is one of the more important gifts I've received from reading my struggle. It's like a puzzle I didn't have before. I play with it all the time. It's one of the things I receive from reading those books, but they are harder for me to put my finger on. So I'll stop there I'm not going to read the little bit later section, which is a little birthday party, which involves some big goods, which I thought might relate to my cookies, but there's a lot of big goods in my, in my book generally. Okay. Thank you. Thank you, Kim. Where did you get your Italian hazelnut cookies. My husband got them at a dead end. There's a little Italian deli and he gets them there. I'm definitely asking for everyone. Thank you for that reading. I'll bring you back for the Q&A. Thank you again Kim. All right, our third and final reader this evening is Alden Jones. I'm going to bring Alden up on screen now. Alden, welcome. All right, I'm going to tell you a little bit about her and then she will take it away. Alden Jones is the author most recently of the hybrid memoir, The Wanting Was a Wilderness. Her story collection, Unaccompanied Miners, won the New American Fiction Prize and was a finalist for a publishing triangle award and a Lambda literary award. In her memoir, The Blind Masseuse was named a notable travel book by National Geographic, Publishers Weekly, Pan America, and The Huffington Post. Her stories and essays have appeared in New York Magazine, Agni, Prairie Schooner, The Iowa Review, The Rumpus, and the Best American Travel Writing. She is core faculty in the Newport MFA and also teaches creative writing and cultural studies at Emerson College in Boston. Alden, thank you so much for being with us this evening. Thank you, Andrea. Thank you, Anjali, and thank you, Arlington, and thank you, Michael and Kim, for those great presentations. As Kim mentioned, my book, The Wanting Was a Wilderness is from the same series as Dear Knausgard, and the premise of the series is to reinvent literary criticism to take this idea of literary criticism in a more lyric or personal direction. My project was on Cheryl Strait's Wild, which is a book about a woman who takes a solo journey hiking the Pacific Crest Trail. And my objective in The Wanting Was a Wilderness was to understand how someone who'd done something that actually I'd done something similar. I'd gone on an 85-day outward bound excursion, which was not a solo journey, so it was very different from Cheryl Strait's journey, but I had always had a really hard time not even just writing about it, but talking about it. I found I either was very, very earnest about like how I grew and what I learned, or I was like milking how badly we behaved for the humor. I attempted to write in fiction in the second way, just by, you know, making, creating this cast of characters who were just bickering, and I realized I hadn't really rendered, I hadn't really told the true story. So I'd looked at Cheryl Strait's Wild as an example of someone who was taking a book about taking a trip that was just a hike, which is a redundant activity, and turned it into this amazing inspirational memoir that so many people connected to. So my question was really, how did she do it as a memoirist? What were her craft methods? So I started breaking down Cheryl Strait's Wild and looking at it in a critical way, and then while I was doing that, using the tools to build my own story of my time in The Wilderness, and when I was asked to add a sensory element, I was really thinking about like what was connected to my hour bound time and, you know, we were obsessed with food, of course, because we were, you know, we had this very strict ration of food and alcohol, drugs, of course, were completely forbidden and if you were caught drinking alcohol, you would get kicked off the program and they were very strict. So I remembered this one moment when I was in our culminating activity was climbing a 17,000 foot volcano in Mexico, outside of Mexico City. And right after this hike, we were all together in a restaurant, you know, just a side of the road type place in outside of about an hour outside of Mexico City. And these guys were like, oh, you did it, you climbed the volcano, like have a, have a shot of tequila. And we were all like, oh God, we really want that shot of tequila, but we were not allowed. And I went, I was like, innocently leaving my table to go to the bathroom. And this guy was like, here you go, have a shot of tequila. And it was a very memorable shot of tequila. And a couple of years later, I went back to Mexico and discovered sangrita. So I think I'll just so I can sip along sip while I read. I'm going to go ahead and do the sensory element and show you the sun or tell you about sangrita and then drinking myself if we were together I would pass it around for you. So sangrita is a popular drink in places in certain places in Mexico. And by the way, this is very weird to be just I feel like I'm talking to myself. I hope you're there. So the idea of sangrita is you have it's a chaser to tequila so you have your shot of tequila. And then you have a salted glass that you will fill with salted rimmed glass which you will fill with this lovely mixture of tomato juice it's very simple someone's going to be the recipe verbally and you do it how you like it I like mine really So this is tomato juice, orange juice, lime juice, lemon juice, Tabasco, salt and pepper, all to taste. The idea is it's around some people like a half tomato juice half orange juice 5050 with like less of the other juices. I like mine really tomato so I do it just a touch of to me of orange juice and then lots of lemon and lots of lime. Light on the Tabasco. So I'm going to pour it now. Hopefully you can get some two senses at once imagining the taste and hearing the sound of it pouring. And the key part of this recipe is putting it in the freezer so that it gets nice and cold and also a little there's like a texture to it. Some people like it smooth which case just put it in the fridge. I like mine a little icy. Actually reminds me of my mom. She used to like to put Coke bottles in the freezer so they were a little, little icy. So, I've taken after my mom so cheers everybody to Mexico. I'm going to read a little bit from the memoir thread of the wanting was wilderness. Elliott and Robin were my leaders. Elliott and Robin believed in a hard outward bound line. We did things the most difficult way they could be done, or we received a lecture about challenging ourselves. They offered the briefest lessons and orient hearing that sat back and watched as we turned the map the wrong way. Missed geographical cues and stopped off course. They confiscated thermal rest sleeping pads and rock climbing shoes, asserting there were no special comforts or shortcuts. Some outer bound leaders allowed coffee or black tea, but to our leaders caffeine was a crutch. Despite from two breaks, one at the end of each month, we did not stop running, hiking, climbing paddling preparing meals, organizing gear, scrubbing pots, setting up camp and breaking down camp for three months. We were hairy and filthy and scabbed and scarred. After the Appalachian trail, I did not know how to pitch a tent, tie a proper knot, light a camping stove, attach a harness for climbing, or wring out my clothes so they actually had a chance of drying before we broke down camp. When I didn't know how to execute a task, I turned to look for a helpful boy. And in this way it took me longer than it should have to learn how to tie a proper knot, or set up the sleeping tarp. We had no shame. We cried, swore, kicked trees, we argued over roots, pace, divvying up gear, and especially food. We ate things that packed easily into our 70 pound backpacks, things that didn't spoil. Powdered hummus and falafel, grocery store bagels, peanut butter and jelly rationed in plastic bags that we punctured and squeezed. Jumps owe chicken in generically labeled cans. I remember the food in great detail, because we were always hungry. It rained almost constantly on the North Carolina section of the Appalachian trail in September of 1992. We ate our lunch of cheese and crackers while rivulets of rainwater snaked down our hoods and into our polypropylene undershirts. I would have killed for a dry, clean pair of socks. We climbed rock, canoed, repelled, caved. We acquired skills. We told jokes and posed riddles. We sang every new, every song we knew from start to finish. We flirted with each other because it was our greatest pleasure. Actual intimacy was strictly verboten. It compromised self-reliance. But we would learn how to get around those rules. On our feet astounding blisters, pinky toes transitioned into tiny, whitened nubs. We had circle time during which we processed our experiences, our group dynamic and discussed how to, we groaned in anticipation of the phrase, challenge ourselves. We traveled from the Appalachian trail in North Carolina to the Everglades in Florida, where the mosquitoes were so bad we used 100% deet to fend them off. If we leaned a deet sprayed leg against a plastic backpack liner or slid cheap sunglasses onto a deet slathered face, the plastic melted, leaving black smears on our skin. We spent three days in canoes without stepping on land. Whoever drew the shortest draw had to sleep on the edge of the last together canoes. Their bodies is still and stiff as the boars underneath, so as not to roll into the black water. We canoed all the way to the Gulf of Mexico and slept each night on a different deserted island. Had we gotten along better and minus the mosquitoes, it might have been paradise. The trip culminated in the climb of a 17,400 foot dormant volcano east Taxiwattle, 43 miles northwest of Mexico City. Full ascent took a week. Three of the group developed altitude sickness and a fourth or consummately fit leader, Elliot, was hospitalized. His lungs perforated. The summit was above the clouds. I'd never seen anything like it. Look down and below you a carpet of clouds. It suggests that it would hold you if you jumped. We hiked narrow ridges in the snow, wearing spiked shoe attachments called crampons. For days I was nauseated and short of breath, but I kept swallowing food and I kept ascending. But by now, I understood that it was possible to override the protests of my body. The angle was steep, and we tied into ropes to traverse dangerous crevasses, repelling each other as the wind ripped at our cheeks. It was easy to imagine falling to our deaths. Over 20 years later, it remains recorded in my muscles. How to wield an ice axe in order to halt a fall down a snowy mountainside. Our feet were so cold in our boots. The only way to warm them up was to take up our boots, and then our socks and place our bare feet on the belly of a friend. Stop there. Thank you. And I'm going to toast. You everybody who's here. Thank you. Thank you Alden cheers. Thank you so much for that reading and the demonstration of how to make us think Rita. I'm going to bring all three of our fabulous authors back on screen now for the Q&A. I should add the important detail that you're supposed to alternate steps like that's probably obvious but I didn't say that out loud so you take it. And then if you want to do what's called a bandera. You have a shot glass of lime juice and so that makes the Mexican flag. Wait red. That makes it easy to remember thank you. I didn't have any tequila but I went and grabbed a glass of wine in the entrance so you're not drinking alone Alden. Thank you Michael. I have some bourbon. This might be our busiest salon ever. All right, well we've definitely got some questions for you and I want to get right into it. And I'm going to start with a question from Michael. He hasn't spoken in a while. Michael. How familiar were you with Shakespeare's work before writing your book. The audience member is assuming that you weren't a secret Shakespeare scholar. So how did you make it yourself into an expert while writing. Yeah, it's a good question. I think the right answer is sort of passingly familiar moderately familiar. I'd always been a fan of Shakespeare as I'd seen a lot of the plays I'd read a lot of the plays but you know as an investigative reporter I think my, my best skill is just taking a break and just learning it very deeply and writing about it and you know as an investigative reporter you can be writing about cancer one day and you can be writing about you know world economics the next day and my last book I learned the history of maps and map making and this one I just really intensively just sought to just immerse myself in Shakespeare so I could really know what I was talking about and I of the 38 plays by the end I had I had read or reread 26 of them. I had watched a lot of them I had read multiple commentaries and all the plays I'd read Shakespeare biographies I'd read you know tutor and Elizabethan history and so you know, I really wanted to make sure that I was that I was writing from a place of knowledge and a place of accuracy and hopefully that's, that's what happened. All right, thank you. This next question is for you Kim. This audience member is hoping that this isn't a dumb question, but do you know if NASCAR knows about your book and or has read it. I don't know. Fair enough. I find it interesting that all three of you wrote about people who are living and you know who whose work is is available and who are who are still with us and it strikes me that. I mean Michael you worked very closely with your subject, I would imagine in Shakespeare is not still with us just to be clear yes. But Kim and Alden, Alden, do you have any idea if, if Cheryl Strait is aware of your, your essay. She is aware. Yeah. I actually did an event with Cheryl at the Center for Fiction right after the book came out. And she hadn't, you know, I had told her previously I kind of marched up to her at a conference and was like I'm writing a book on wild and she was so gracious and I was like, Oh, here's my email if you have any questions and we kind of that we had a connection before that so I wasn't completely out of nowhere. But she I didn't want to bother her when I was when I was working on it too much and I also didn't want to have her voice in my head too much while I was writing and I didn't want to be, you know thinking too much about what she was going to think. Relating the narrative. So I didn't really want to be too conversational with her even though she was very generous about being so and then I sent her the book and she agreed to an event but she hadn't told me how she felt about the book yet and then right before the event she was like I just have to tell you I love your book and she's like I want to save it up for the conversation but we went up having a really fun conversation and it was you know of course I'm spending the whole time I'm writing trying to pretend I don't really care what she thinks but of course it was very exciting to hear that the author I just spent four years thinking about thought I you know got it right so. This next question is also for Kim. What was your process for reading my struggle and deciding which aspects you were going to address and did you read through one time first and then go back several times. My process was, once I figured out I wanted to write the book as letters my process was really just to concentrate on my experience as a reader. And so that gave me freedom to just concentrate on the parts I found most interesting. And you know I'm, I'm a pretty careful reader and so I had been picking out all along even before I knew I was going to be writing about this huge novel, picking out certain patterns and interesting themes. And I did go back I didn't reread the whole thing that would have taken a really long time but I read big chunks of it that I had previously marked as being special in some way. Thank you. The next question is for Michael. What do Shakespeare scholars, including McCarthy and you make of Maggie or Farrell's Hamnet, which came out last year and is a fictional retelling of Shakespeare's life and the death of his sons. Well, I have to confess that I have not read him Hamnet. In fact, I just bought it. It's the next book that I'm going to read because I knew that I was going to get this question on my book tour. So as far as the novel I can't speak to it directly but you know it's interesting that a lot of scholars look at the death of Shakespeare's son Hamnet as influencing Shakespeare's plays and you know particularly Hamlet and some of the later tragedies and you know some of the grief that's expressed in them and, and yet there's no, no evidence that that's the case that you know we'd actually know very little about Shakespeare's biography we know very little about his son and even the timeline doesn't really match up he actually died, you know a number of years before Hamlet you know came from the name Hamlet and Hamnet that connects them so you know it kind of shows just how I think of Farrell's reading of Hamnet is probably as good as anyone else's and as legitimate as anyone else's based on what we know. And, you know, I will say that I was really interested in talking to McCarthy that he has a completely different theory about why, why Hamlet is obsessed with death based on what was happening in Thomas Norris life at the time that that he supposedly wrote the source play and and I won't, I won't spoil it here but in some ways it made a lot more sense to me when I talked to McCarthy then you know the step of this son that we know very little about but I'll just leave it there. Hey, enjoy Hamlet. This, this next question is for both Kim and Alden. How did you feel about taking on these huge bestsellers and I know Alden you spoke to this a little bit but we'll start with you Kim how did you feel about right about taking on this huge bestseller were you intimidated were you self conscious about it. How did you approach it. I wasn't intimidated until I started reading book six after I'd already agreed to write the book like I thought it was fantastic novel already by the time I was reading book five when I said I would write about the whole thing, but the translation for book six hadn't come out yet. And then when I read book six and I kind of understood that are what I think now scarred was really up to for the whole thing the whole his whole project just became just much bigger. Like I understood it as being way more significant than what I was already thinking, and then I got really intimidated. I was like super paralyzed for a while. I just thought you know who am I to critique this. And I think one of the letters were so freeing was just getting out of that rigid idea of what literary analysis is and finding a much freer way to engage critically with the work, but in a personal way. Yeah, I think that's really what the fiction advocate series afterwards is about is about like, what is the next. What's the thing beyond standard criticism. I was not intimidated by the idea of, you know, taking a critical approach to wild. I was more the bigger sort of terror was like what do I have to say about this book that hasn't been said a million times and all the other reviews that have been written, because so much has been written if you want to know what's, you know, what the pros and cons of wild are you can just, you know, Google it. But I had to have something new to say and I took some some writing to figure that out so I started out with a critical, you know, pure critical like I'm just going to think of some important sort of along the lines of what Kim was describing before, like break it down to certain categories I was interested in and then start writing. And then at a certain point I was like, Oh, I actually this question of how to write a memoir is really my question like that's the big question like how did she do it like how did she take So, you know, almost, you know, boring. It's walking and then transform it into something so powerful that so many people could connect you whether or not they cared about hiking. So it was more like unraveling that mystery that became the the intimidating part like I got unraveled this mystery and then I got to do it myself. And how am I going to do it. So those were the questions that drove me forward. I'm going to piggyback onto that because there's another similar linked question. Can you say more about what you meant when you said Cheryl straight thought you got it right. Oh, that was just a shortcut. It was actually a whole interaction where she had my friend Valerie in the chat also mentioned this but she had received it and it sort of sit up with sitting on her dresser for a while and she was like afraid of it like what could possibly be in there like what it was this person thinking about for this long about me in my memoir you know and and so I think I was I was curious if she thought and she she wound up liking it like she liked what I had to say. But also when I asked her directly do you think I got it right like do you think I got the criticism angle right. She said, yes, like to an astonishing degree because I think I had just decided to align with her like I wasn't trying to like, I'm a critic and I'm going to tell you what she did right which did wrong and this from my high throne or whatever like it was more I think I let's start with the premise that I think this is a really good book and then like try to understand why like how she did it so how did she use flashback, how did she create a persona that you can attach to, even if you don't agree with some of her decisions. How did she create sympathy how did she create this idea of radical empathy so I think locating those things I felt, I felt like I, you know, managed to like get very close to aligning with her intentions. Thank you. This next question is from Michael. Michael did you have an aha moment when researching McCarthy's theories for your book. Was there one specific moment that you remember. Yeah, well, you know from the very beginning when McCarthy first started sending me his research I was really intrigued by it and I hadn't really hadn't really thought very much about Shakespeare authorship theories to be honest, until he started sending me a lot of his research and it just really started to make sense to me I mean he, you know for each of the plays he would have these kind of parallel passages you would have these current correspondences with with his life corresponds with history and then he would find these other sources that were sort of pointing to these, these plays so he came at it from a number of different angles but I think for me what really, you know and I maintain sort of my skepticism throughout the book I never say that you know I really was was completely swayed by McCarthy's theories or not swayed I try to sort of let the reader decide but in terms of what what really I found compelling was that at a certain point I started doing my own research and I actually went I made multiple trips to England and I went to various archives and and tried to see if I could prove or disprove his theories and that that copy of dialed princes that I showed you there was actually something that Dennis had never even looked at before he's been so busy on his computer he had never actually gone to Cambridge and actually looked at this physical evidence and I just found a wealth of information there that seemed to support his theories and there were all these marginal arguments that seem to be really related to Macbeth and related to that summer night stream and these other plays and I started the question of myself and say did I just drink the Kool-aid am I just sort of seeing you know what I want to see based on on his theories. But but no I mean it was really there was just some some aspects of it. I'm 100% positive that that in the margin marginal comments of this of this book is the source for Shakespeare's famous line exit pursued by a bear. And again Dennis didn't even know about it and I sent it to him and he was like you know, you know, I can't believe this and he took it much further than than what I had found but it was things like that that really started persuading me that yeah maybe he's not. Maybe his whole theory is 100% correct about Thomas North but there's got to be something more here than scholars have realized and that's what really excited me about about writing the book. I imagine he sees you as a collaborator now. It was, it was like, I went into as a journalist and I, and I think, you know, I, I maintain my journalistic sort of objectivity throughout the whole thing but it doesn't mean that I didn't sort of you know use my own judgment as as I went along and and yeah at a certain point I think I was sort of, you know, finding information that he was able to use and like I say take further and develop into his own theories so like I say I'll I leave it to the reader to decide. Thanks. Okay this next question is for you Kim. You mentioned that this experience changes how you read and changed your life. In what ways. Mm hmm. I think, I think what now scarred is suggesting that we do in my struggle. Certainly is like a very Buddhist idea, which is to, to really be in the present to really, to really think about the difference between sort of information, just like ideas that we have about what life is, and, and what our ideas about what our experiences versus the experience itself. And I think it really, it really, it really pushed me further into being very careful about recognizing when I was having an idea about a situation, and I think it really pushed me further into being very careful about recognizing when I was having an idea about a situation and, and maybe stopping and just trying to experience it. And, and for now scarred that's like this radical freedom. And that's another thing that I think the part that I want was going to read but did not read is a little birthday party, I thought it would take too long but I'm where I am thinking about how his radical sense of what freedom is and how far away I, I feel from that. But it's, because I'm so interested in things like cookies and cake and tea parties with my friends, like cozy comfortable things. But that's been a big change I think that reading his work has been an eye opening experience in terms of thinking about what freedom means to me personally, and exploring that in a new way. And I think we'll wrap up with this last question that is directed to Kim and Alden. Would you be interested in talking about the risks slash rewards in blending autobiography and criticism as a creative process and we'll start with you all then risks and rewards. It was, I found this, this writing this book one of the most rewarding experiences of my writing life I think I had had this idea in my mind it's like somebody who thought you know maybe I'll be an English professor maybe I'll be a writer you know like that. And so just so you know criticism and creative writing has been so divided like you have to pick one or the other. And recently, you know, starting with maybe Maggie Nelson, it's, it's been this more like, why have we done, why have we separated things like that like why, why don't we try to see what happens if we take our scholarly work and insert it into our, thinking because of course if we're people who do scholarship and are creative, that's a natural thing to do so it seems like the most speaking of freedom Kim like the most freeing thing and it was very it was like a process of discovery and I also just want to note that I think it's really a genre that's really emerging like this whole idea of what Kim calls lyric criticism or we've called you know critical memoir like this idea that that these two genres of writing can exist as a different you know its own kind of genre. Yeah. Yeah, I agree. I think it's, I know, I know there are risks, because I was having a really hard time with this project for a while until I found the letter format but once I found that. I mean I just, I love working this way. I think for certain writers it's, what was the question risks and benefits or something like that. I mean, to me it's much more rewarding than risky. I mean that the risks are there you have you have to balance the lyricism with the critical thinking, but if you, I mean some people like working that way I really love working that way so maybe it depends on your style of writing but All right well I want to thank all three of you, Michael, Kim and Alden thank you so much for being with us this evening and it's really been a pleasure having you with the Arlington author salon. I'm just going to add a couple of notes. The next salon is July 8. And you can sign up for notices about future salons through the salon web page or through the library's monthly newsletter. So again round of applause for our authors and I'm applauding for all of the attendees tonight. Thank you for being with us. And, and we look forward to the next salon and hope, hope you all can join us. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.