 Jim Risser is here. He is a Pulitzer Prize winning writer himself. So thank you for joining us this morning, sir. Thank you. Also, I want to thank Freda Casillas and Alice and all the volunteers that helped put this together. From our point of view, I think was a very smooth collaboration with Oregon Humanities. We are at the very tail end of Cata, which was the consortium of Asian-American theater artists here at OSF. And this is Culture Fest Weekend. And it's Pride Week. And there's just so much going on in Ashland. It's very exciting. And finally, another exciting thing that's happening today is that the gentleman sitting behind me to my left, it's his birthday. That's right. So birthday to you. I hate birthdays. Birthday to you. Birthday to you. Esta son las mananitas que canta. Yes, that's right. OK, it's now turning into a play. So I think we should start. OK, I want to introduce the executive director of the Oregon Humanities, Adam Davis, to talk a little bit about this series and introduce our guest. Thanks, Christopher. Thank you. You know, it's funny. Coming down from Portland, we run Think and Drink in a few different places. And we've never run a Sunday morning Think and Drink. And we thought, evidently appropriately, that it was going to be a fairly somber affair. It's also good to see with Think and Drink in mind that many of you have been preparing early. So that's great. Thanks for getting ready. We are super excited to be partnering with OSF on this, both because of what else is going on this week, but also because of the kind of work that OSF does here and in lots of other places. And to think of all the different ways we can marshal the arts and the humanities to strengthen community, to get people talking about the tough stuff, and to get us connected, especially with justice in mind, is really what's so exciting about being here this morning and especially with Luis and Hector talking in front of us. The backdrop for a lot of this kind of conversation and for a lot of the other kinds of conversations that Oregon Humanities and OSF and other organizations like us work on is, of course, the sort of political backdrop right now. And I point to that very briefly only to say that kind of conversation is getting a lot of attention and good that it's getting attention, but the nature of the conversation is maybe not the best sort of conversation for moving towards the communities that we wanna have. And so what we're trying to do is bring the other part, sort of the less visible, but I think even more important part of getting people talking to each other and maybe especially listening to each other, to the four and laughing together and trying to work on things together. And so with that in mind, I wanna say one quick thing about other stuff that Oregon Humanities has going on and then turn it over to Luis and Hector for a good chunk of time. The goal is at about quarter to 12 to open this space up here for a little reception and about 20 minutes before that to open up from a conversation to questions. It seems like you guys are gonna be pretty reticent, but maybe there'll be some questions. Real quick, we have another think and drink coming up in Portland with Catherine Boo on October 19th, which we're very excited about. Earlier this summer, Isabelle Wilkerson was in Portland and then out in Astoria. And then on October 28th, I just wanna point out that as a culmination to six weeks of conversations around the state, we've been doing a comprehensive set of conversations all around the state on the theme of power, place, and belonging. And they've been everywhere, Burns, Klamath Falls, Portland, Astoria. And on October 28th in Newburgh, we have an all day gathering around those themes, culminating in a think and drink with Bertoni Faust and a wine maker up there talking again about some of the themes that we'll be talking about today, I suspect. We'd love it if you join us on the 28th or the 19th and please just grab me or my colleague Adam Green, who's raising his hand back there with any questions about Oregon humanities. Right now I just wanna say thanks again to OSF and I want to say how lucky we feel to be with you guys here this morning, not only because it's your birthday, but also to be here really near the end of a year when we've been lucky to get Pulitzer Prize winners in conversation and so Hector Tobar, a novelist in many other things and I'm handing it off now. Thank you very much for joining us this morning. Well, good morning everybody. Just wanted to point out that Hector was awarded the Pulitzer for his writing on the 1992 Los Angeles riots for the Alley Times. It's just a pleasure to be here and before we start I thought very quickly I would ask if you're an artist to stand right now. Thank you so much. I think that Karen Finley put it best. It's always wonderful to come into the room with the black sheep members of our family. So we're here for you. I thought it was drink and think. So, okay, that was a bad joke. And then the other thing. I thought we would do it in Spanish. That was the other thing I was going to do. Just to be mean. So get us that. Hector and I go about pretty far back. We were both raised in downtown Los Angeles at the same time. I'm a year older than you and we were raised not far from each other. I was raised in downtown in the Pico Union district of downtown and Hector was raised in East Hollywood and then moved to Montaballo then South Whittier where I taught at the Fred C. Nellis Correctional Facility for Boys. I wasn't there then. That's what I wanted to check. So that's good till we started with that one. So just because we're in the space, it's Sunday, it's we're in the temple. It's theater. I wanted to ask you because you have this wonderful fascination with theater and you talked a little bit about your son has now shown interest in theater but you came up here 10 years ago roughly, started writing about OSF but before you were already interested in theater and you worked on Twilight in Los Angeles. So just could you talk a little bit about how you got involved and what's your fascination with it is? Well, first of all, thanks to Oregon Humanities and OSF for having us all here and I'm really glad they're serving a really powerful coffee out there I guess. See you all energetic and I'm surprised I'm stunned to have so many people here at 10.30 in the morning on a Sunday. I started writing in my professionally in my mid 20s and I've managed to do I think a little bit of every kind of writing you could possibly do. You know, I've been a newspaper columnist. I've been a foreign correspondent. I've written two novels. I've written two works of literary nonfiction and I even wrote a one-act stage play and I think of all the literary forms. I mean, I think all literary forms require cooperation even a novel which is like the most solitary thing you can do. You sit in a room alone for five years you know with this huge idea of what you're gonna do at five o'clock, six o'clock in the morning that's when I write to newspaper but you still have an editor you have someone who reads your book you have an agent who puts it forward you have the book designers but playwriting and the theater it just requires the most cooperation it's like watching this dance unfold and in the 1990s after the riots I was lucky enough to have my first theater experience which was that Anna Devere Smith who did this play called Twilight about the 1992 riots hired me and a few other people to be her dramaturgs we were like community advisors Doreen Kondo who's also been here this week she was another one and we watched Anna put together this play and it was just I just fell in love with the theater and to see it done at the highest levels there at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles and to see this written work come alive in the presence of Anna's one woman show where she becomes 20 different characters and it was really interesting because that play was a kind of hybrid of two different kinds of work one which I know really well which number one is interviewing so Anna Devere Smith would interview all these people in LA and then she would choose she would do transcripts of the interviews which is something that I knew really well I mean I'm a professional interviewer and then she would become she would make that her script and she would become the character on stage and to me that was something that reaffirmed my sort of belief that journalism could be art that storytelling, that going and gathering information in a community that that could be a bridge or the beginning of an artistic project and you know it really not long after I met Anna I quit my job at the LA Times and got an MFA you know in creative writing I really could call myself an artist you know even though I wasn't published yet for a couple of years after that but that's where my love affair with the theater began and then you wrote one act that was done at the McCarter Theater that's right yes yes I remember it was called Mini Mall Heroes and it was basically it was about a mini mall in Los Angeles just before the riots take place and you know I wrote and there was wonderful actors who came down from New York to do the performance and it was myself and several other writers including Joyce Carol Oates was there Russell Banks the novelist he had also written a one act Joyce Carol Oates wrote a one act and then there was mine and I remember afterwards it was a reception and this guy came up to me this kind of guy looked homeless with like a long white beard he says hey I really liked your play you know I thought well who's this guy you know and then later I found out it was Atul Fugard the South African playwright you know he really liked my play and I knew who Atul Fugard was and so yeah so the theater is just a dick dean and my son now he's a senior in high school and he loves the theater and he loves acting and so we talk a lot about acting we talk a lot about movies we go to see and I tell him you know it's always been my dream to write a play and he says well you can start I said no it just takes too much work you know I sort of would know I know how much work it takes to produce great art and I just you know I would love to have the time and other life to do what you do and you know and get into the theater more fully well it's I'm looking at Octavio Salis right in front of me thinking wow it is a lot of work it's the ultimate collaborative art but you know I guess one of the things that really intrigues me about the fact that you show interest in all these different forms is that ultimately you're a storyteller and your column when you were writing for the LA Times they really were storytelling bits of information right and you really got characters and followed them through did that come from your life in Los Angeles you know your father was an avid reader I think I read that at 23 he kind of gave you the gift of did that really come from being on the streets or where? Well I think that one of the early sort of intuitive discoveries that led to my career as a writer was that there's a lot of intellectual energy in working class and immigrant communities there are people who really have a hunger for intellectual exploration and my father was that kind of person my father came with my mother who was pregnant with me she was 20 he was 21 to LA and my father's education had been interrupted in Guatemala since he was in the fourth grade he had not actually been in school since he was in the fourth grade until he arrived in LA and when he arrived in LA he went to school for the first time he went back to school he got his GED he went to LA City College and so when I was growing up there were books in the house there was this history textbook and so I think a lot of my desire the idea that books were symbols of power of personal power comes I think from my father and mother and also I discovered actually when I was in my mid 40s I wrote a column about illiteracy and my father came and told me a family secret he had been hiding his entire life which was that my grandmother, his mother, was illiterate and so I thought wow that makes sense this man whose mother could not write a single word her life his son became a writer and because he was ashamed of it he told me he was embarrassed that his mother couldn't write and so a reader write and so I became this writer and I think on top of that this intellectual sort of idea of the power of expression my family is a typical Latino family and they're great storytellers especially my uncle over a few glasses of rum we'll tell stories of the village in Guatemala and all the crazy things they do in this village in Hualan Guatemala in eastern Guatemala so yeah and my mother are romantic you know my father had betrayed her when she was 20 years old but he was still the love of her life and she would tell me stories of the romance so I think that's something that's really deeply ingrained in our culture this idea of storytelling and to use it do you feel like now as you write that in some way you're empowering the community forward it seems that a lot of the writing you do is this relationship of us as immigrants but also as migrant communities living in big cities is part of your writing very do you think of it as political writing well I think when I was 21, 22, 23 I really thought of each thing that I published was a revolutionary act you know I sort of saw it that way it was subversive and I still like to think of what I'm doing as subverting you know the paradigm you know I think that there's a really powerful thing to see yourself reflected you know on a screen or on a stage in a book I've had some wonderful experiences of people telling me that my novel The Tattooed Soldier which is about sort of setting against the backdrop of the riots it's about the war in Central America and about inequality in LA and how these two sort of violent places kind of intersect during the LA riots and it gets assigned a lot in community colleges state colleges in California especially but all throughout the west and I've had many people tell me that that was the first novel they read in English or that they gave it to their parents and it was the first novel they read in English and so I think that's like that experience is the justification for my becoming a writer the fact that my work would encourage people to come into this world of literature and hopefully they'll start with The Tattooed Soldier and they'll end up with Hamlet and Ulysses you know I mean that's sort of the idea and so yeah definitely I think it's something that and when I was at the LA Times I mean I was a Latino immigrant reporter in a room with in a newsroom with very few Latino people in it and also I had access to this immigrant story and seeing that in the paper and putting it in the newspaper made me feel powerful it made me feel like I was making my community more powerful and then there would be opportunities like meeting you you know I, when Luis Alfaro won the MacArthur Genius Grant I got to write the story on the front page of the LA Times and so oh that's you yeah that was me and it was like oh this is a story this guy from the barrio you know from Pico Union who you know wins this incredible prestigious thing and who has a career as an artist and so I get to tell that story so yeah it was a new journalism is a great gig and do you find now that one of the things that's extraordinary about you is you really are primarily a novelist right thank you ha ha ha ha ha I thought you were a novelist thank you for saying that primarily a novelist although you dabble still in journalism and you're an academic so just in terms of form, jumping around in form is that an easy thing for you Do you find that you need to really separate them out? Well, you know, I think it has been easy for me in terms of just, I think they feed off of each other. You know, I wrote a column for the New York Times a couple of weeks ago, and that's a whole different set of muscles. You know, you have to fit an argument into 700 words, 800 words, and that's, it's almost like it's math meets philosophy meets journalism, and that's a tough thing. And I write op-eds for the New York Times sometimes, and then there's working on my novel, which this is Colossus epic story that I'm currently working on that takes place over several decades, 1960s, and 70s. This morning, in my imagination, I was in the Haight-Ashbury district. It's the day that Martin Luther King was assassinated in my novel, and you know, that's a whole sort of other set. That's, it's sort of a whole other set of muscles, artistic muscles that you use. And so I think they fed off of each other. I think being a novelist made me a better journalist, and being a journalist has made me a better novelist. And so yeah, I think it is sometimes a little bit exhausting. Can you talk a little bit about process? I was so, I get up really early. I don't know if there's a lot of writers in this room. So I think we'd love to know how you do it, but I get up really early and write, and I know that you get up really early. What is the process for your writing? We've talked about McDonald's. I think the world, I've discovered now that I teach writing too, that the world is divided into two groups of people. Morning writers and evening writers. You know, there's people who write at six o'clock in the morning, and there's people who write at 11 o'clock at night, at midnight, hardly, I only once have I had someone tell me, you know, I write at 2.30 in the afternoon, you know? So, so I'm in the morning tribe. And I think that was cemented when my kids were born some 20 years ago. And you know, your rhythms change when you have family and being up at five in the morning. I'm now up usually at six in the morning. And I begin revising usually, you know, lots of revision. I think that the way I write now, it's like, I don't think my brain, one of the wonderful things about writing prose, it's not like performance, you know? I don't have to bring the whole thing in at one time. I can build it slowly. And so the way I write is that I have usually this reverie, this idea I'm trying to sort of create. And it takes me really two or three times going through it to sort of build it up, you know? That's why I carry various notebooks in my back pocket. I had just had one, you know, I have hippies. It's 1968. And so I'm trying to write something about hippies as not cliched. And yesterday and this morning walking around, Ashley, you know there's a lot of people who are transients, you know? And so it's like, oh, I got some insights, you know? It's like some insights, this sort of person who looked a little disoriented, you know? And that is, you know, so I'm always writing. You know what I'm saying? I'm always writing. We're happy to feed you. I love this. Yes, yes. And last night too, you know, watching Roe and then watching all the plays here, you know, you sort of, when you're deep into a book, and I'm now 60,000 words into this 120,000 word project, you're always getting something. You're always getting a character. You're getting an image. You're getting a voice, you know? And so it's kind of crazy. Sometimes on Facebook, I love, because you post, I did a thousand words today, you know? And it seems like big milestones in terms of the writing. Is it because do you sit for literal hours, or do you break it up? Just how do you work? Well, I heard that Roe Dan said something like this. And he said something, just work. Work always, you know, just keep working. And so to me, the word count is kind of a semi-artificial thing because, you know, I could write 50,000 words and throw 15,000 away. But just kind of being on this bicycle and just being, just moving forward. And I remember hearing once that Mark Twain did this. And in fact, that one of his manuscript for Huckleberry Finn is in some museum, some place, and no one could understand the numbers on the margins. Until someone came in and said, he's counting words and they'd count every, it was the number. So he'd have, you know, he wanted to write like a thousand words a day and he'd write his thousand words and then go have a cigar, you know, and his day would be over. And so I think, you know, I think it's, you know, I feel what I'm doing is a kind of performance too. And there are good days and bad days. There are days when I can see what I wrote the day before and I say, God, I was really on yesterday and today I'm not. So it's a question of sort of just finding all these emotional textures and building it and trying to move forward. And word count helps me because it helps me be disciplined. You know, it's like, you can't make a film that's four hours long. Well, sometimes you can, but you really can't. And so, you know, you have this structure and so I know I can't linger too much longer here in the Haight-Ashbury district. I gotta get going, I gotta get my guy onto the plane. He's going to Honolulu next, you know. And so gotta keep moving forward. So you're thinking action, events, story, plots, always moving it forward that way. Well, this particular story that I'm writing right now has, it's about a real person. It's a novel about a real person who wanted to write novels and never succeeded, but who left behind hundreds and hundreds of letters of his travels. And so the novel is based on his letters and his travels. And so it's kind of like we're collaborating. And I get a little passage from his letter and he riffs on his letter and then I riff off of his riff. And so it has, so this particular novel has a chronological structure to it. I know when it ends, it ends when he died in 1982. In April 1982, a week short of his 40th birthday, it begins when he's 11 years old. So it's a study march in the chronology of the book. And the Miner's book that I wrote was also very chronological, sort of based on these real life events. So, I mean there's many, many ways to organize a work as you know. But in this case, the chronology is helping me move along. I really want to talk about this Miner's book. So there's a book called Deep Down Dark, which is extraordinary that Hector did. And it's, yeah, a lot of us know this book. And it's based on a 2010 mining accident where 33 Miners were trapped. Egypt Christ. And the thing that really I found extraordinary was that they collectively decided to tell their story to one writer and they chose you. And why do you think, so you're not Chilean, but why do you think they went outside of their country? And what was that about? Well, these guys are trapped 2,000 feet below ground. So imagine the 200 story building straight down, right? That's how far down they are. But after the 17th day they were trapped, they were found, but they weren't able to get them out. But they did lower a fiber optic cable down to them. And they also gave them mail. They started sending letters from the surface. So, and they also had a phone connection. They could talk to people on the surface. So they were trapped for 52 more days. And they realized as they were trapped in a room, let's say something like this. You know, that's how big the corridors were that they were trapped in. But they realized for those 52 days that they had become the most famous Miners on earth. Okay, so imagine being trapped. You're in the sort of semi-darkness. You start getting fed from the surface. They had been starving for 17 days. And so they start talking to all these celebrities. You know, it's like the most famous singer in Chile comes and some Chilean mariachis show up. Hey, how's it going guys? You're up here showing solidarity with you. And eventually, who comes? I don't know how many of you remember or have heard of the story of the Uruguayan rugby team that got stuck in the Andes and resorted to cannibalism. Well, some of those guys showed up. And they start talking to them. And then the Chilean, and there's a story written about two in the Chilean papers, and they lower the newspaper down to these guys. And they say, hey, look, these Chilean guys, I mean, these Uruguayan guys, they were stuck in the mountains. They did a book and a film and they became famous. And so obviously that's what we should do. We should have a book about ourselves. And the other guys would say, wait until we get rescued at least, you know. We still might die down here, you know. And so, and some of them start getting offers, you know. Like, hey, honey, Italian television wants to send us to Milan as soon as you get out. Should I sign the contract, you know. And so some of them are gonna make money, others not, it wasn't, didn't seem fair. So they have one final meeting in which they decide, look, we've suffered here together. We need to stick together. We need to sign a contract all together. And so they decide that they are going to try and hire a law firm to do all this for them as soon as they get out. So they, one of them knows a local lawyer and he knows the biggest law firm in Chile. That law firm says, man, this is the biggest story that in Chile, you know. And who do we hire? Well, we gotta hire the Americans, you know, for the film. And so they go to William Morris Endeavour, you know, agency, based in New York. And they put together a film deal. They put together a book deal. And William Morris Endeavour thinks for the book, well, there's already been some cheap books that came out that weren't very good. So we need something more literary. So we need a journalist who's a novelist, who speaks Spanish, who writes in English, and who knows South America. And I was the South American bureau chief for the LA Times at one point. So that's three people in the United States. So they saved a lot of money then. Yeah. And I'm the only one I know of represented by William Morris Endeavour. So that's how I got the gig. But then I had to go down and persuade them that I was a cool guy, that I wasn't a jerk. And so that's really, I think, where I kind of won them over. And then the beginning of that experience is relationship with these men. And you have to give them a certain sort of depth. And what was that process like? Did you meet them individually? Did you meet them collectively? I would say I met almost all of them individually. I, when I was first introduced to them, in a room that was kind of like this, it was the back room to a restaurant. It was kind of like a restaurant kind of club. And they put me up on a stage like this and had me talk and introduce myself. And I said, senores, you are modern day heroes. You have just lived the 21st century version of the Odyssey. People are going to be talking about this story for centuries. You are like those men who went off to battle in Troy and tried to get back home. And people told the story of their journey home. That's my job. You have lived the 21st century Odyssey. And it's my job to be your homer. And I got a lot of blank stares from that, you know? But after that, the attorneys announced, you know, Hector's going to be here first trip for a few days. Anybody wants to be interviewed by him. And then I said, I wanted to talk to as many people as possible in their homes. Because you learn something about somebody in their homes. And some of their wives didn't want me to go to their homes because they'd already had enough of voyeurism in their lives. But usually I went and interviewed a guy alone. Sometimes his wife would come and join us and have an incredible story to tell about the family. My first questions were always, how did you get a job in that mine? How long have you worked in mining? And it was this exploration. I think the kind of you've done this many times yourself, where you go and you interrogate, you question, you interview the culture. You interview the subculture, the group of people. And so I learned about this place, this mining culture in northern Chile. And that sort of became the beginning of the project. I just had an experience in Chicago where I agreed to cook with people at their houses. And I never done that before in all my career. And I thought, well, let's try it. It was the most vulnerable and extraordinary experience I had, because when you're doing something in action like cooking, I don't think you're editing yourself at all. Right. And you're in somebody's house, so they're incredibly relaxed. And the stories were so much more deeper. You know, I have to try that at some time. Yes. I usually just have a beer or something. You've got to cook. You've got to cook. Just want to stay with that a little bit. So you were the bureau chief for Mexico City. And Buenos Aires later before that, yeah. Could you talk a little bit about place and how that affected you as a writer? Were you there for extended periods of time? What did that do to you? Well, when you're a foreign correspondent, usually you move with your whole family. And so I moved, my wife and I in 2001, we moved from LA. The movers showed up and boxed us all up and sent us down to Buenos Aires. And my oldest son started kindergarten in Buenos Aires. And so it's this immersive experience, you know? And I don't know how many of you, is anybody here from Argentina at all? No? Good, I can say something. No, I'm just kidding. No, but it was, you know, the Argentine sort of, you know, way of being. It's Italian and it's Spanish and it's German and it's kind of this all, this incredible mixture. And so you become immersed, you know, in a new place. And it's just, I think anyone who's been an artist and moved to a new place, you know, it can be really stimulating to be presented with this reality, new reality. And then the economy collapsed. There was a riot, you know, I'd covered a riot before in LA and then there was a riot in Buenos Aires in front of my building, you know? Because they devalued the currency and they froze the bank accounts. And there was a revolution, essentially, a popular revolution against the president. They kicked out the president. And so that's what being a foreign correspondent was like. It was these moments of comfort of having your kids' school paid for and having a big house with a swimming pool and then having to cover a revolution. I covered a revolution in Bolivia where I flew in on a Cessna and went into La Paz on a bicycle, on the back of a bicycle, you know? And a wonderful revolution in Bolivia, the Yamada rising up against the government. And so it was a wonderful experience. I mean, I think just, you know, it just, and it taught me the value of just, I mean, I think I always, I wrote about LA like a foreign correspondent, you know, just going to a place and understanding a place. I had a question I would always ask when I went to a new town, especially a smaller town. ¿Qué fama tiene este pueblo? You know, what makes this town famous? You know, what makes this, what is this town known for? And I remember once I went to a town in Mexico where they were had a big election controversy. Remember it was the López Ovalador Calderón, kind of fiasco, election fiasco. And so, señor, en este pueblo tenemos las calabazas más grandes de todo México. In this town, we have the biggest pumpkins in all of Mexico. And I said, really? He said, yes, you know, let me show you our museum. And he showed, and there's a museum to the calabazas, these vegetables, you know. Wow. So I always ask that, you know. It's like, what's this town famous for? Every time I go into a town, I have this trick. I do this sort of like you, where I say I'm the most ignorant person in the room. Can you please help me? I'm lost. And so there's a woman named Rachel Ray, do you guys know who she is? The chef. So she, every time she goes to a city, she says she asked people where she should have breakfast. And if the same thing keeps popping up, that's kind of the local place, right? And so I do that. I say, what's the biggest issue facing the town? And it's never what's in the paper, right? It's what's in the community. And I think that's just a fabulous way to go very deep, very fast, and get into the subtext of a story. Because you're asking people to be storytellers. Absolutely. And what's the story here? What can you tell me? And coming in and making yourself into a blank slate that they can write anything on, yeah. So in that vein too, I think one of the things that's extraordinary about your writing is that the language stays in that vein too. Do you think about words? Do you think about the use of words? But I mean, the use of words, the way these characters speak those words. Oh yeah, I think that, you know, with this book and it had, you know, it became a New York Times bestseller and I had more readers than ever before. And going to all these events, I realized that there was a reason why people read that I wasn't fully appreciative of. And you know, I think that as a journalist especially, you're trained to think that people read for the facts. And then you become a novelist and you think, well people read also to be transported, you know, to go into an emotional space. But people also read for love of language because reading makes us feel happy and being around words and being in the presence of someone playing with words makes us happy. And I tell that to my journalism students. I say, look, I want you to go out and play, push the language. A lot of them say, we've never been told that before. You know, I really want you to take a chance. I want you to risk it. Don't worry in my class, you can look a little silly if you want. I'm not gonna lower your grades. Sometimes I'll not even grade them because I want to encourage this idea of play with language. My new thing now is to tell them, look, I want you to use, if you can, a neologism. What's that? Well, coin your own word. You know, go out and make up a word. I'm reading Ulysses now and there's all of these incredible coinages of James Joyce. And so one student last year went to a Bernie Sanders rally. And he really, he took this to heart, he said, and he wrote, oh, his lead was, as I entered the Bernie Sanders rally in Eugene, I was struck by the sheer caucasionality of it all. And so. What a good word. Yeah, that was a great word. And I tell them, you know, that's what language is. You know, Shakespeare himself, coined expressions, you know, language is all, hip hop is famous for that. So I want you to go out and realize that this language is a malleable thing. You know, we're trying to sort of play with it and create something beautiful. You know, I put the word, maybe I'm bragging, but I believe I'm the only journalism instructor in Oregon ever to write the word transcendence. You know, I'm seeking transcendence, you know, on the chalkboard. And so we talk about, we had a discussion about art the other day in my reporting two class, you know, undergraduates. So, you know, we seek, I seek to seek that almost every day. I, when I was a reporter at the LA Times and I was in my 20s, I had this trick that I would play with myself, which is that every story I write, I'm gonna try to use a word I've never written before. And you know, and I don't want people to notice. I don't want people to think that I'm showing off, you know, like the word verdant, I had never used before. I mean, that grew up kind of poor public schools, you know, they didn't ask us to write pretty, you know? And so, and I'm still, I'm still trying to do this. I'm still trying to sort of play every day with language. That's beautiful. I find, I'm not schooled. I graduated high school and that's as far as I got. So I find that when I'm writing, I am definitely connected to the dictionary. So the dictionary sits there, right? And those big words that once always escaped me now become part of the vocabulary. Well, it's also concrete things, you know? And it's also the language of people. So for example, in the Chilean Miners book, there was, there's this expression, huevón, okay? But huevón doesn't mean the same thing in Chile as it means in Mexico. Huevón in Mexico means lazy, right? But in Chile, it means more like dude, you know? And there are all sorts of derivations of the word, una huevada, you know, they really hear that in Mexico. And so, yeah, so it's always sort of constantly listening to people and trying to sort of, you know, I, for example, from my students, I learned, I learned the expression recently that I did not know because I'm, you know, I'm in my early fifties now, cross-faded. I was like, what? And I said, well, my students wrote that, you know? They were all cross-faded. So most of you don't know what that means, right? Cross-faded means being drunk and stoned at the same time. So you don't really know that unless you're under 25, you know? So that's, that's words, it's play, you know? Wow. I was telling, I hacked her last night, I was telling one of the first times I went to Mexico City as an artist, I was opening for Guillermo Gómez Pena, who was, you know, arguably the amazing intellectual Mexican intellectual force. And people would say, Vasaila, performance? And I felt incredibly ignorant and just realized that they didn't have a word for performance art, so they would say, performance, as if they said it in a Spanish accent, it was going to become a magical new word, right? So it was so amazing to me that there were so many words that were not translatable. Yeah, we do that in English. You know, we have so many words that we borrowed from French, you know, on you, we, you know? Yes. Things like that, you know, definitely, yeah. We'd love to open it up and hear from you. And if you have a question already, there's a young man, is that you? Yeah. Yeah, please stand up and be loud and be proud since it's Pride weekend. Not to your gay, not to your gay. I was just curious, do you actually, a few minutes ago you mentioned the oddity and the difficulties with like expressing what you were there to do to these Chilean minors. And I'm curious on the other side of that, when you were trying to take and capture their experience in Spanish and then bring it and write it in English, what the difficulties were with that and how you circumvented the cultural significance of those words. Yeah, I think, I don't really see them as difficulties as much as opportunities. So for example, I had one, this guy, Mario Sapulveda, who in the film based on my book, The 33, he's played by Antonio Banderas. I always like to drop his name. So Mario was a lunatic and just somebody had these incredible mood swings and he went on this rant against his fellow minors in which he used the incredibly vulgar South American expression, concha de su madre. And so I thought, you know, how do I translate this? I consulted with a poet and I thought, you know, but I didn't really see that as a difficulty as much as like, oh wow, now I get to do a whole riff on this vulgar expression, which comes, it's a slang word for women's genitals, right? But concha de su madre doesn't, if I translated it literally, it would be your mother's shell, which would be meaningless. You mother's shell, you never listen to me, you know? And so I talked with this Chilean American poet, friend of mine, and we came up with Motherfucker. But sorry, because that had sort of the sense of it, you know? And then I did a little asterisk and I did a footnote in which I explained, you know, what that meant. And so that was, you know, that was a lot of fun. But also in this book too, I sort of realized, and it's something too that comes from having the experience of finishing several books, right? Is that you learn after a while that the book really only comes to you when you finish a first draft and the whole book is there for you. And so when I finished this book, I realized it really was like the Odyssey, because it was about a book about guys who wanted to go home, right? They were trapped in this mind and they wanted to go home, like Odysseus wanted to go home. And so that became a very powerful sort of metaphor in the book, this desire to return to home. They realized that the best thing about them was that they were loved by their wives and by their girlfriends or by their wives and their girlfriends, you know? And their kids and their daughters, you know? And so they wanted to return back to this home. I love how you complicated that story without really complicating it. Did somebody else have a question? Yes, I see a hand right there. There's a mic right next to you. I'm so curious that you keep going back to the word Odyssey, because in Chileno, there's an expression, una odisea. Yes, I heard that, yes. And it's so common in our Spanish that I was surprised the miners looked at you with a blank face. Unless, I mean somewhere from Bolivia, and unless it's an education thing. No, I think it really is, it is sort of an education thing. It also might have been the Omedo reference. I mean, I think they know what an odisea is. It's an expression that I heard. I think I used it once in the book. I said, es una odisea. A character said it would odisea. But I'm a character, excuse me, one of the people in the book. Sorry. And so, yeah, I think that was part of it. Because a lot of the guys had not traveled outside of their town, but they had this incredible poetic sensibility, which I think is something that I was really, I tell people I'm really lucky because these guys were Chilean because everyone in Chile grows up with the idea that poetry is valuable, because they have Neruda and Gabriel Mestral. And so, and I think it's sort of a Latin American thing, too, very Central American, you know. My current book ends in El Salvador, it ends with peasant boys and girls writing poetry to each other. And so, there is this, so I had all these wonderful expressions. When a man told me that he watched one of his fellow miners stand up, he was really weak because he hadn't eaten for 17 days. And he told me, when he stood up, it was like when a baby colt is being born for the first time and his legs are all twisted and he acted it out for me, you know. And so, there were so many beautiful turns of phrases that come from the miners themselves, from their language, yeah. The community always gives you the poetry, right? You just have to listen, yes. I wanted to quickly ask you about Oregon itself because we've talked about these lands, right? And one of the things that I've been so impressed with is this is the first time that I've traveled north across the border and not south. And I wonder if that's affected you in any way, the landscape here and what you've gleaned from the state. Well, I think there's a way of being here that's markedly different. And, you know, I work in, I live and work in Eugene. Well, actually, Springfield, Eugene. And then I also, my family was in LA so I travel back and forth a lot like a lot of people do in Oregon. And so to come to Oregon and have, you know, time moves a little bit differently, you know. And I can't be so rushed. You know, I kind of like arrive with, from off the airplane from LA and on my LA self. And suddenly, you know, I'm at the pizza place or at the, you know, at the store and things are moving a little bit slower. And people are much kinder, you know. And so that's really cool, the whole Oregon nice thing. I had a professor friend of mine who told me she had moved from Illinois to Eugene and she had a car accident her first day in the city. You know, she had a car accident. And so the person comes out of the car, he's a Eugene native and she's like, she's all, you know, torn up. It's like, oh my first day, Eugene, I had a car accident. And the man looks at her and he says, I hope this doesn't give you a bad impression of our city. You know, nobody in LA would say that, you know. Oh, never. Well, because we have a car accident every 10 seconds in LA, right? Did somebody else have it? Yes, on the back there. Aside from Oregon Sharks Reef Festival, what's the most famous thing you've learned about Ashland Oregon? Oh, I learned from my kids that Ashland is the setting of the film Coraline. Did you know that? No, I didn't know that. Yeah, you know the film, there is an animated film by this animated film company that's based in Portland, right? And they did a film called Coraline about this family that moves to a town in Oregon. And my kids, after watching this film and seeing there's, it's all animated, but there's a scene where the town has a Shakespeare festival sign. And then later they actually researched it and found that even though it's an animated film, it actually is set in Ashland. So that's the most famous thing that I've learned about Ashland. That's not really widely known. See, a lot of you didn't know that. And the Mary and Barry too, right? I mean, I think it's very interesting when I first arrived here 10 years ago, I didn't have an office at OSF. I was actually at a place called La Clínica del Valle, which is in Phoenix. So I was working with doctors who were having a terrible burnout rate because there was a huge crystal meth addiction in the state of Oregon. So it's always interesting to me as a writer, when I go to a city, it's not that I look for the bad, but I'm looking for the drama. I'm looking for the problem, right? I think I picked up on that too, coming here. And also being in Eugene, the class divisions that there is an apparent lack of racial diversity in some parts of Oregon, but there really is a diversity of socioeconomic experience that you're witnessing. And there is that drama that's sort of unfolding every day. Yeah, my first event was I was asked to do the graduation speech for the first graduating migrant workers kid. It's high school. It was very moving, but anyway, I wore a suit and a tie. I got in my car and I passed Medford and I kept going and there were no more buildings. And then I was going through these form areas and then I pulled up and it's in the middle of the field and they're having Cardinal Sada and so I got there and the woman goes, could you take off your tie? And I said, oh yeah, yeah. And then she goes, could you do this in Spanish? And I was like, okay, and could you speak to the people who are eating and the people who are lined up for the Cardinal Sada? And all of a sudden you discover a community, right? And I think that's maybe one of the most extraordinary things here is to see how actually diverse the state really is. Somebody else? I think we all want to get to drinking, yes. As you moved away from where you were born and now you live in Eugene, how would you define home? Wow. Well, you were talking earlier about writing process and I think there's a part of me that has home is where my MacBook Air is, you know? Because I don't really, you know, I have an office in Eugene, but I'm always traveling and I don't really have an office in my home in LA. I have a desk in my room in Springfield where I stay. And so, but for me home is being, part of what home is, is being in that intellectual space of creation. I mean, that's the kind of thing that's always with me. And so that to me is very, very important. I think definitely there's a Los Angeles will always feel like home to me, even though it's sort of changing in so many ways and becoming a very difficult city to live in and kind of cruel in many ways. I think Los Angeles to me is becoming more like New York, we're becoming more like New Yorkers, get out of the way, you know? Kind of a sort of that kind of mellow LA angelinoness that we kind of grew up with in the 60s and 70s. That's sort of fading a little bit. But I think home is where you plant yourself. I love being, talking to readers and being on a stage and that also there's a sort of feeling of home in that. And I just, I really, I believe the idea of home being in every place that I go to and trying to make a home there, yeah. We talk a lot about art this way. It's been 10 years after I was at the Mark T. Performing and I actually produced Twilight Los Angeles. And one of the, after the experience of leaving there, I went around the country and I lived in a different city in America. So I was in Tucson, Arizona, I was in Harvard, Connecticut, I was here and one of the things I realized was that I had a day where I was kind of depressed and I was working with the filmmaker for Venezuela and she said, what's wrong with you? And I said, I kind of miss home. And she said, well, you know, the only thing that art asks you to do is to change and that's the thing you're gonna have to do or you're not gonna survive it. And I thought, this is very interesting. So you change with every city, right? You find the comfort of every city and every city that I go to becomes comfort. Like this woman here, I don't even know you, but we see each other all the time and she always hugs me and so she's kind of like my aunt and you know, all of a sudden she becomes your city, right? But in a way, I think that is what happens. I'm always in small towns where people hug you, right? But that is a way of creating and a kind of comfort of home because I think that for us to be able to do our work is to end something and start something new with the same enthusiasm and the same passion and desire and knowing that you can't always be in the same place, right? And the way our industry works, which I think is a lot like novels too, is that you can't just be one place anymore. You know, the industry doesn't work that way and it's so true that a Mac Air, wherever the Mac Air is, is the place where you hang. Well, it becomes a place of your imagination, you know? It's like where your imagination wants to sort of settle and feel comfortable, you know? And yeah, I lately, I used to be, I drop off my kids at school when I'm in LA and there's Starbucks, but I got kind of tired of the Starbucks and I discovered McDonald's and now I have this sort of this long, sort of I used to be vegan and so I have this whole kind of thing against McDonald's but the line's shorter, the coffee's better, the Wi-Fi is faster and it's all sort of a mellower scene, you know? There's not any pretension at all in the McDonald's. The guy comes around after I'm there for the second hour and he refills my cup of coffee. It's like, wow, you know? So... Well, you know, in the pro McDonald's stance, I have to say that I also write at McDonald's. But one of the reasons why I write at McDonald's is I start reading about how they do this bamboo flooring and all the furniture is a certain kind of furniture and it's, you know, eco-friendly, you know? I don't know if that's actually true, but I write there and I kind of love it and I have to say the coffee, the coffee is like a dollar cheaper, so there you go. It's all about economics and environment, right? So speaking of environments, we're going to have a little bit of a performance art in there right now because we are going to transition. Is that right? We're going to transition in a few minutes into another environment and which I was hoping was going to be the starting environment, but it'll be the ending environment, so we're going to drink. And I don't know exactly what we're going to drink, but we're going to drink a lot of fun things. And so, Chris, am I running ahead too fast? Oh, okay, great, so let's keep going. I thought you were telling me to stop. Oh, so does anybody else have a question? I could keep talking, yes. Well, I just think one of the gifts that you bring is that you've lived in our culture and you've lived outside of our culture. And I just wonder what stories we don't see. We're not telling, we're not talking about it. Great question. That's a great question. I have to write an op-ed for the New York Times every once in a while and I'm supposed to do it a monthly, but I ended up doing it every eight weeks, you know? And I wanted to write something about what it's like to be in a place that is less Latino than I'm used to and what I've learned working in Eugene. And so, I have all these students who are mostly white and they don't really realize how awesome the places they come from really are, you know? It's like, because if you're a Latino person, we grew up with a sense that we're colorful, you know? You know, ballet folklorico and, you know? And she loves a mole and, you know, and sort of we're proud of, you know? And so, I just met a lot of people from small towns in Oregon, especially working class people, who have really incredible stories to tell about their towns. And I feel one of my jobs is to get excited as an outsider about those places and make them feel that those stories are important, you know, that they have the beautiful artistic things are happening in their lives already. And so, you know, and you just get all kinds of stories about this sort of unsettled feeling of small town Oregon, this sort of, this change that people feel happening, the sense of sort of confusion but pride. And I just, you know, I just try to give people this element of my own experience. And the central message of my own experience is be proud of where you're from, you know? Celebrate it. And so, that's been really wonderful for me. To be in this place that's very unlike where I came from and to find this sort of universal human kind of connection. I had one student write a beautiful story, set of stories, journalism about the small town that he was from and how one of the theater teacher in the town wanted to put on a play about the mass shooting that took place in Thornburg. And how this caused all of this discussion about depression and the town was divided and how this theater teacher brought the town together and this play, and it was really amazing. I just had no idea. And so, to bring sort of this LA enthusiasm for their stories to me is something that's helped me and taught me a lot about them. And I think I've taught them a little bit about themselves in the process. Yeah. Yes. Oh, I'm sorry, sorry. Okay, well, I'm also a professional interviewer. I find that when I'm given my subjects that I write about, I write entirely in, I write for engineers and software developers and that sort of thing. And I write for them the words they will speak eventually. And I found that in my process, I do so much better when I'm completely out of my element. We've talked so much about here about people you have so much in common with the three people that could have done the interviews with the Chileans. How does that affect your process at all when you are speaking and responsible for communicating for people that are outside of your own personal experience or life experience? Well, I think, like you were saying, Luis, about I don't know anything and admitting to that. I think that's really important because a lot of people think when you show up as a writer, they think you're this powerful person and you're going to not treat them seriously. You're not gonna treat them with respect. And so my job is to turn that upside down and say, well, you have to tell me is really important. I'm not here to find out a list of things about you. Like those guys in Chile, the press would show up at their door and ask, did you guys think about each other or did you masturbate while you were trapped underground? Really disrespectful questions. And so my question was like, well, first tell me who you are and what happened. What do you need to tell me? And so what I tell my students in interviewing is that interviewing is really writing with questions. And so you have to think like a writer when you're interviewing. And so you can't really know what they have to tell you. You have to be able to think on your feet. And if they tell you an incredible story, then follow the story. Try to get the details that make the story come alive. And so I think to me, I always try to be really respectful, because I think people can tell if you're kind of condescending, they'll tell, they'll shut off. And that's, we're looking for people to open up to us. And so, yeah. It's moving towards the authentic. I always think about that. So there's a great Joe Chakin book called The Presence of the Actor. And I use it a lot in my writing exercises because actors, there's a process in it for actors where they ask questions of their characters. And I started doing this for people that were non-theater people that I had to interview. And I go into cities sometimes and interview just regular folk in jobs, right? And I'd say, is there a part of you that I cannot see that you would like me to see? Is there a part of you that has not lived yet? What would make that part live? And these are Joe Chakin's beautiful questions that he asks of characters. And so I really got into that. So now one of the things I do is I start happy. I was walking with a smile. My thing is joy, right? And then almost immediately I'll say, can you tell me a regret that you have? So I had this amazing story. We were talking last night about South Whittier and then I did a semester at Rio Hondo College where I was asked to tell the story of a little town called Pico Rivera. And I went to meet the yogurt lady, the frozen yogurt lady who had built a business with her sister. And I said, rather quickly, we were joking, joking, joking. Then I said, can you tell me a big regret you have? And so caught her off guard and she says, well, you know, I own this business with my sister. And then she passed. Oh, my sister. So all the stories in that silence, right? Now I can choose to write the silence. And then what was most exciting is I said, I'm gonna come back to that question and we get to know each other better. And then we go back to that question. And that's really what that play was about, a woman who built a business with her sister, who left her way too early, right? And I think I feel like one of the things you do so well is you're always looking for the authentic. I think it started in your journalism. It goes into your novels. I can see how teaching for you is about looking for the authentic voice. I think that people can tell when something's real and when something's baloney. So like last night I saw Ro, and the story just felt all the details of it, the textures of it were just incredible. This thing you could not make up, this incredible story of these two women whose lives intersect and had that feel of authenticity to it. And I think that's my lesson from journalism is there are things out there that I could never imagine. And then I think that people can tell when you're trying to manipulate them. I think that that's part of journalism is often you begin a story thinking I'm going to make a point. And so you use chunks of what people told you to build this argument. And that is what sort of gives us a little bit of a bad name. And I think over the years I've realized that my, I owe my career to respecting the intelligence of my readers. The total opposite of what some people tell you, oh people, they don't know anything. It's like no, I have a lot of respect for my readers and that's what's brought me this far. Beautiful, yes. What made you say yes to teaching a new gene? What made me say yes to teaching a new gene? They were really nice to me. And to start off with. And it's a great university. I'm not going to do the whole ducks thing, I'm sorry. Maybe I should, but because everywhere you go they're doing this, you know. And there was that. And the university is really the setup in the school of journalism. I teach writing classes that never have more than 16 students. Now I told these kids that I work with, I said, you guys, this is really, this is, you guys are really lucky here. Because University of California, the same classes are being taught with 35 students. University of California, UCLA, UC Irvine. I know this because I've talked to people who work there. And so there's that. I think the department I'm in has had the good fortune to have people look after it. There are anonymous rich people who have dumped money on the place and thank God, whoever they are, you know. And so there's that, it's just a really, and also I just really enjoyed the whole European Eugene Springfield scene. I live in Springfield and so I look for the ghost of Ken Keezy around there every once in a while. And there's a brand new mural to him and I just really have enjoyed working there. And what is it about teaching, one thing that we never talk about in these panels is, well, something bigger that I've been thinking a lot about, the sacred, the sanctified, the spirit, what is it about teaching that calls you to teach? Is it, does it have that larger idea attached to you or not, does it feel very practical? No, it feels really, it feels both practical and emotional. I think almost once a term in every class, I cry. And I cry when I read something beautiful a student has created. And I mean, it's genuine. I just, some insight, some turn of phrase. And I think there's something really, I'm just, it's nice to be a confident teacher. It's nice to be a teacher when you've already had a career and you know you do something pretty well. I don't really have anything to prove to my students. I have no, I don't need to prove to them the smarter than that, because I don't think that. I don't believe that. I just had more experience. And so being able to share that and see and excite someone is really redemptive. It's just, it's one more thing. I mean, having, creating a work of art, seeing, filling up an auditorium as happens here several times a day, that is itself just wonderful to create a work of art that's successful, that resonates with people. But this is something really very personal. It's giving of yourself and passing on this tradition. This is Western civilization. It's, you know, it's centuries of passing on this knowledge, you know, and so it just feels very sacred. It's very sacred, the idea of learning and passing on experience. And I talk over and over again about crafts, you know, respect crafts, respect the craft, learn your craft, these are traditions, you know. And so it's very exciting. I love teaching. Look, Davio and I studied with Maria Breen Fornez who I never forgot said to me, you know, there were many great artists before you. There will be many great artists after you. And for today, you get to tell the story of what it was to be here. And so you are part of a continuum, right? And you have to see yourself as part of the ancient tradition. And I love that so much because when I was younger, when you were talking earlier about that passion you have and you want to get it all done. And so I wrote a lot of plays where I had like 30 people in them and everything happened, life, death, love, everything, right? And I remember when she said that, she said, just relax, you're gonna do this for the rest of your life. So if you don't see, if you don't do just one, if you don't think about this play, but you think about the 30 plays you're gonna write over your lifetime, then you can relax into doing this. Didn't she, and Irene had this wonderful way of, we would do an hour of yoga, an hour of writing, and then an hour of reading. And that was terrible, yoga. I just did like cat yoga, I'd go like this for an hour. But it was, but it was a really wonderful way of saying relax into the form, relax, but also relax into the ancients. Relax into the tradition of what you're saying, the craft, you are part of a great tradition. Well, the other thing that I sort of realized late in life is that I go to a bookstore now and I look at my books and I do this incredibly, I call it vein browsing, where I go look for my own books on the shelf, you know? Oh, there I am, Tobar, you know? And so I do that, oh, come on, we all do it, you know? And so I do that, but you realize after a while you read about writer's lives, that really all that makes you, when I first started writing, I thought of the writer as this exalted person, you know? This genius, you know, Steinbeck Shakespeare. And then you read about writer's lives, you do it yourself for like 30 or 40 years, and you realize that there are a whole bunch of guys and women who pounded their heads against the wall for decades, you know? And suffered and been depressed, you know? And like you have, and that's what makes you into a writer, it's just a desire to do it and sticking to it. It's what makes you an artist too, you know? I'm thinking about Edward Albee who passed this here, right, and Albee, the years of what people call failure, but really he called instruction, right? And that those years are just doing the work and not being popular, where it's just as important as those moments where you are. Well, listen, we could probably talk forever, but I just wanna thank this extraordinary man, Hector Tobart, for being here with us today. Thank you. Thank you, everybody, thank you. We want to invite you to our reception, which is happening just outside on the deck here. Also Oregon Humanities, if you want to learn a little bit more about that program, there's some materials in the back there. Also at noon is a green show featuring a Portland-based musician named Ed Navazquez, so amazing. So thank you also very much. And also to HowlRoundTV or HowlRound.com who's been live streaming this conversation today. So thank you very much, everybody. Enjoy the rest of your day. Thank you.