(Alison Granucci, Jimmy Santiago Baca, Linda Hogan, Pam Houston, Mat Johnson) Sponsored by Blue Flower Arts. The human mind can be as wild as the landscape it inhabits. Through probing examination of notions of race, ruminations on identity, and social and historical commentary, these acclaimed writers chart the hidden dimensions of what it means to be human. using ecologically and socially conscious narratives, they explore our connections to the earth and to one another, reconciling loss and redemption.

Published Date: May 29, 2013

Transcription

Speaker 1 (00:00:04):

Welcome to the A W P podcast series. This event originally occurred at the A W P Conference in Chicago on March 3rd, 2012. The recording features Jimmy Santiago Baca, Linda Hogan, Pam Houston, and Matt Johnson. You will now hear Alison Guzzi from Blue Flower Arts provide introductions.

Speaker 2 (00:00:37):

Welcome everybody having a good conference. It's Saturday. We're all tired, so again, thank you for coming to our fiction reading Charting unmarked Terrain Fiction at the Borderland. As Amber said, I'm Alison Nui. I'm the president of Blue Flower Arts, which is a literary speakers bureau. We represent authors and filmmakers for their readings and appearances. We have a booth in the book Fair booth number 400. If you have a few minutes and want to stop by before you leave today, I'm delighted to bring you an ensemble of Blue Flower Arts clients for provocative voices in contemporary fiction, Jimmy Santiago, Bacca, Linda Hogan, Pam Houston, and Matt Johnson. I'm going to introduce all of them now upfront and they will be reading in that order. Charting unmarked terrain fiction at the borderland. The human mind can be as wild as the landscape it inhabits by exploring the untamed natural and the wild cultural landscape.

Speaker 2 (00:01:45):

They hail from. Each of these authors chart the hidden dimensions of what it means to be human while taking their readers on an adventurous ride of the imagination. They offer us new perspectives on notions of identity and selfhood and what it means to be free. Living in the interstitial lands between cultures, heritage and races, their characters find their way through both loss and redemption to find not resolution, but the ever expanding questions of how to better move through our journey on this earth. Jimmy Santiago Baca has lived his life at the Borderland, born in New Mexico of Chicano and Apache descent. He was raised first by his grandmother and was later sent to an orphanage, a runaway at age 13. It was not until Bacca was sentenced to five years in maximum security prison that at the age of 21 he began to turn his life around there.

Speaker 2 (00:02:48):

He learned to read and write and found his passion for poetry and for language. After living his first 25 years in the system last year, marked with the publication of the Isai poems 25 years and one day that he has lived outside the system, he's the author of the memoir, A Place to Stand, 12 books of Poetry and the Novel, A Glass of Water following a family of young immigrants from Mexico. A glass of water takes us deep inside the tragedies unfurling at our country's borders, providing as one reviewer claimed an antidote to the dehumanizing discourse in Washington.

Speaker 2 (00:03:32):

Linda Hogan is a Chickasaw poet, novelist, essayist, playwright, and activist, and she is widely considered to be one of the most influential native American figures in the American literary landscape. She's the author of many collections of poetry to memoirs and the novels, people of the Whale Mean Spirit, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize Solar Systems, a finalist for the International Impact Award and Power image Journal writes of Hogan to be human, according to her vision is to be situated on the planet and to be sensitive to its moods, its angles, and to its secrets. In Pam Houston's newest novel contents may have shifted. We travel across the globe with the narrator also named Pam as she searches for what? Understanding a sense of peace, love, spiritual fulfillment. While the quest may be for all of these things, the greatest journey she undertakes is not to Alaska or Tobet or the kingdom of Bhutan, but it is into the unmarked terrain of the heart.

Speaker 2 (00:04:54):

I know all about the anatomy of restlessness. Declares Pam early on, then later finds herself reflecting, how did I ever think I'd get to freedom without my arms swung open wide? Houston is also the author of the novel Sight Hound and two collections of stories including cowboys are my weakness. Matt Johnson takes us into the ultimate land of whiteness. In his novel pim, a comic epic journey under the permafrost of Antarctica and beneath the surface of American history, publishers Weekly wrote social criticism rubs shoulders with cutting satire. In this high concept narrative, PIM is caustically hilarious as it offers a memorable take on America's racial pathology and the whole ugly story of our world or as one of his characters declares upon reaching their destination after arduous travel, or should I say trudging? I saw that there was nothing out there, no sign of an eco habitat, no sign of life, nothing. What are we going to do now, Garth? I asked searching around for salvation and seeing nothing but snowdrifts born to an American Irish-American father and African-American mother. Matt Johnson writes primarily about the lives of African-Americans. His graphic novel titles are Dark Rain and Incog Negro. I'll leave you now with a slightly para phrased quote from Jimmy Bakkas, A glass of water

Speaker 2 (00:06:33):

As the words come forth from these hearts strung together like grains of rice to people holding out their souls like wooden bowls. May these words feed some deep hunger in your hearts. Please welcome.

Speaker 3 (00:07:04):

Thank you, thank you, thank you. I wanted to thank Alison for inviting me.

Speaker 3 (00:07:16):

Me, she pulled me away from New Mexico to come here and I wouldn't do it for anybody else. I don't think Alison and Fer over the years have displayed extraordinary and enormous amounts of love for me. I need love being a parentless child and Allison has always been there for me, so I strongly suggest Blue Flower Arts is an amazing and amazing group of people that have furthered the careers of many of the writers and poets that I know, including myself. So thank you very much Alison and over. You're the best. There's nobody you're unrivaled. Their booth is, I said 400 down in the big exhibit hall. You must go there and don't let them carry any books home with 'em.

Speaker 3 (00:08:07):

This is from Amiro. This is, it's a border book. I live in New Mexico. A lot of people have died and a lot of people continue to die and like other friends of mine have said, it's an oxymoron. It's just all the Mexicans are much older tribes than we have here, but the Ikas, the Mayans Aztecas and they continue to kill 'em off. A lot of women. Yeah, a lot of young women. This is Castro. He's 14 years old. He's come to this country. He's from the RA tribe Mexican, and this is how he discovers his wife, how he meets his wife. He's run away from Mexico because he killed a banker trying to possess his parents' house on foreclosure, but this was January, 2006. Cato was, she's already dead. They killed her, but he's reminiscing. How he met her. Cato was burning brush and tumbleweeds. I got to say one more thing before I start Ky from the sun, the editor and publishers here, and we've been friends for 30 some years.

Speaker 3 (00:09:17):

When I was in prison, he was the first one to ever pay me. He paid me $10 for a poem and that $10 could have been 50 million to a prisoner who was only 25 years old. So thank you. Si. And of course Linda Hogan. I've had a crush on her for God knows how long. It's the first time I ever get to actually meet her. I just didn't know how to get ahold of her. I have picture all over in books everywhere. Anyway, you know what's Chicanos? We got the Mexican blood. It excuses all our weaknesses. Anyway, here we go. I've had a great time. There's been extraordinary people here. I got to get on with this. Here we go. Cato was burning brush and tumbleweeds. The night sky twinkle with stars and the red hot moon was slowly fading. He raked and scooped up embers in his shovel, glanced at his watch.

Speaker 3 (00:10:12):

It was a little after 5:00 AM he stepped near the heat and the crackle of the flames pleased him and within the hour he finished courting the northeast corner of the field and started banking, smoking mounds, burning ash. He privately begrudged God for allowing nopa to have been butchered so savagely. She deserved a lot better than that he thought, and he knew the proper way of enduring ADA's. Absence was through prayer, but it didn't do much to alleviate the melancholy, the chronic melancholy. His Catholic faith offered little relief and the only way to tolerate her absence was to work. Work every single day dawned the dusk until he fell. His stomach churned with a memory of the crime he had committed in Mexico. It was a curse that followed him and he often wondered, was it because of that, that his wife was murdered? The crime had trailed his footsteps to America like a scorpion in the dirt, a white one under the sheets, a clear one in the water base, and he washed his face in every morning a red and green scorpion in the rows of the chili plants he worked and picked and a golden one in the blistering sun of his brow, the poison of its many stings settling in his empty heart every day.

Speaker 3 (00:11:22):

The last Sunday afternoon of her life, they'd varnished the floor and stain the paneling in the Pullman car they called home. Nepal was humming her favorite corto, which she had written about coming to America when she was 16 in September, 1983 in the village of Ada Alonso. Casita was given the gruesome task of pitching corpses on the carts and hauling them down the crematorium. The village had almost been wiped out from some kind of strange virus. The work done, he put his torch to the roof timbers of homes and as the flames of our houses, they shredded every aspect of his own identity, reduced his previous life to a meaningless mound of smoldering ash. And it was an obvious sign. God's message was to start his life anew and so invigorated with the renewed faith that better things laid beyond the horizon. He bid the remaining inhabitants of the and he left and that was not the only reason he left.

Speaker 3 (00:12:16):

He remembered his father saying Sometimes a man is so poor. All the pride he has in the last cigarette is smoking. And it was true. A day or so into the trip, he sat on a boulder and smoked his last cigarette, feeling a little pride that he had escaped, inventing the story in his mind in case he needed to explain himself to authorities. And though he had tried to bury the incident in the ashes with the houses in his village, each dawn, the pistol in the man's expression when he shot him, carried, charred his mind in his heart and he could sniff the air every day and breathe it into his lungs. The crime was his burden to carry in life, carry alone until he died, keep it close to his heart until no one. Thus his two sons inherit the affliction. He sensed however, that the curse had already taken what he valued most in life.

Speaker 3 (00:13:06):

His wife, no, he coughed now as the field smoke blew his way. What do you think, patos? Was it my fault? Is it not? So he asked the sparrow, skimming the black and field referring to the fact that he had saved Noela day, married her and had children with her only to have her taken from him. The son was coming up and he resumed tending the burn line. He appeared dreamlike an aging five foot six silhouette against a blushed horizon, a shadow wearing a dirt stain cap to shade his eyes from the smoke. A denim collar pulled up around his ears, waistline riding high in khaki trousers stuffed into his oversized boots. The bandana that he was wearing was the one that noal used to wear in her hair when she picked chili, the breeze spiral around as he sifted over a flash fire. Dowsing flashpoints as they materialized now and then he blew on a twig to get the flame carrying it to redirect and control the fires wide in line.

Speaker 3 (00:14:02):

Nearby prairie dogs and black-footed ferrets bolted across his line of vision. Panicked quails, chirped rattlesnakes, melted scorpions, squirmed, descenders. He heard a hiss, a squeal and a rack attack, rack attack sound, which he believed was a spirit humoring itself at his expense. He watched as the spirit twitched its windy tail, he took a water bottle from his coat pocket and gulped it, snorting phlegm out through his nostrils and spinning until the saliva was clear and clean. He watched as the wind spirit skimmed the ground. He was 39. He had been in America 23 years, but it seemed like he had arrived only yesterday leaning on his shovel, mesmerized by hundreds of lit embers. He retreated into memory. I am standing in the desert looking around expecting something to happen. It's very strange and confusing. I walk most of the time at night, but I decide to walk through it at daytime.

Speaker 3 (00:15:04):

Soon I see an object in the distance and I turn in the direction thinking hopefully there might be a person. It would be refreshing because it's been weeks since I talked except to myself, to the Es or to God. When I pray I hurry or reach it so I can rest under the shade. The heat is unbearable. What is it in the middle of nowhere in the desert out here? Is it a plane crash or maybe a minor shack or maybe God's will tell me the purpose of sparing me and I'm fighting in front of this truck and I smell the foul this order I've ever smelled and I want to get as far away and keep on running until I turn back and I don't see anything but the desert again. And I call out God and I hear a single little voice and I think it's my imagination and God's voice sounds very strange right now.

Speaker 3 (00:15:54):

I can hear it again weaker and I say out loud, is this really happening? Are you people really people? Can you hear me? Are you really there? I'm here in the suns above and the air still. And I walked here a little while ago and then I take a rock and I break the lock and I push the big door and as it goes back, sunlight floods the dark space of the truck back and there's chicken wire blocking axis in the back part of the truck. And I try to move it and I handle it roughly and I swing the screen away. There's another barricade of plywood and cardboard siding, and I shoved that barrier to the side, but the smells unbearable and I have to turn for a moment to puke. And then I fall to my knees pain as fast as I can for God to know that I wasn't involved in this crime.

Speaker 3 (00:16:37):

It was not me. And then uncontrollably for some reason, I start to weep and I want the poor victims to know I'm here. I'm here to help you. I want them to hear me. And my crying grows louder into groaning and through the tears and the groans. I shout prayer, yelling words like a madman, turning around on my knees, in circles, in the dust in desert until the voice comes again. I can't breathe. I'm lightheaded. I'm going to fall down. I'm feeling that I'm going to pass out. I'm thinking I'm lost in this other kind of reality. Where am I? Look around and I beg the angels. Please protect my soul wherever I'm at right now. And I hear the voice and it's a woman's voice and my mind's gone blank. And I can't think of what to do because it's just everything's overwhelming. Maybe I got hit over the head, maybe I fell down.

Speaker 3 (00:17:25):

Maybe I'm having a nightmare and maybe I'm really asleep and I need to wake up and get on the road, but I'm too exhausted to raise myself and I can't come up with an answer. And it scares me. I try to tell myself, do not be scared. And then there's an answer for everything that happens. And I'm trying to move and I'm trying to speak and I'm trying to do something to move an inch with my feet or raise my arm or move my fingers any motion. But I can't do anything. And I pray again to God, help me decide what to do next. And little by little I start to move first my fingers and then my toes and my feet and my hands. And I turn my head and I see bodies. Bodies on top of bodies twisted and bloated, left in this truck by some coyote to die. Piles of rotting bodies tied with ropes drenched in intestines and mucus neck metals, rosaries, little tiny babies, women, men, gunny sack belongings strapped to the vax infested with insects. And my whole body seizes up, speechless, petrified where I'm standing. But in a panic and with great, great effort, I pry one foot up. I step forward until I grip the ledge of the truck and I squint intently at the dark in the back and I see a small, tiny hand move I see as I search for God's voice and I find her alive.

Speaker 3 (00:19:09):

Thanks.

Speaker 4 (00:19:45):

I am short. Can you see me down here in front? I also thank Allison very much. Thank you for organizing this and everyone who's here, thank you my friends, my sister Deborah over here. And Jimmy, I wish you told me that you had a crush years ago because I could have had some self-esteem in my life. And Pam, you have been very good and kind and supportive to me also in the past. Thank you. I'm going to read a novel excerpt from something that's unpublished and this section is, I'll just tell you a little bit about it so it's not confusing. Hopefully I have the right section. I did everything to be organized.

Speaker 4 (00:20:39):

It is about the last of a tribe, the last woman, the last girl child whose father just died of tuberculosis after being the two of them being discovered together after hiding in a forest from people discovered by fox hunters, British fox hunters and colonizers of where they live. And as you know, new tribes are being discovered daily. So this is not set the long ago past and much of the story is going to be about her daughter. So this is the older woman telling the story to the daughter and it's from a new novel. It's not yet published, but I do have a new book out called Indios. It just came out so I don't know if you have copies back there, but it's from Wings Press and they do have copies downstairs, so I'm signing after this at two 30. I'd be happy to sign for you for that.

Speaker 4 (00:21:40):

And this is called Burn Talker. I live in Oklahoma and even though I don't sound like it and there is an Appalachian history healing, it's called burn talking. And so even doctors go to burn talkers when they're badly burned and people speak to the burns and they talk to the burn and it comes from the Appalachian areas and it's used as highly effective. This girl has been in a museum. She's seen what happens to bodies in a museum and she burns her father's body after he dies, so he won't be in a museum. In the meantime, to protect the burning of his body, she is burned because she has to stand there to keep his body on burning from all the people who are trying to stop it and to take him back. And so Lisa becomes her guardian later. But in the meantime, she's the burn talker who comes to help the girl who is herself burned burn talker.

Speaker 4 (00:22:55):

I had a private entrance at the end of a road with plants and vines. It was a hill of plants with a dark gray door going into the earth. I kept as far away from the general population as I could in those days away from crowded streets. Not to attract any attention. Mrs. Willis beat on my door one day calling my name. She said it was an emergency. It's the girl she's burned. The doctor had called me already to help her. Your mother, she was burned badly. They said water dripped from the leaves above Mrs. Willis. As she watched me fold my clothing and put things in order, she talked to me all the while about your mother. I picked up my to leave. She followed as I walked with my large flowered bag. Finally at the footpath, she stopped. She wore no shoes. The brambles and broken glass were in her way.

Speaker 4 (00:23:59):

But when I looked back, she waved, let them know I'm on my way. I said in case they were anxious and called. I had seen your mother before. I watched her from hidden places near where they kept her. I watched for some time to be certain they treated her well. She was their source of income, but she was the source of my heart. She was so like a Tyrel, a new plant, vulnerable, a child subjected to treatment that had one devising methods to kidnap her. The fire had passed entirely without our knowledge. Even though like everyone on the islands, we knew the Manhattans. They had a mixed reputation. Philanthropists, philanders drinkers, art buyers who didn't pay people on the way down, who pretended not to know it and entertained too often.

Speaker 4 (00:25:02):

Even before I arrived I could feel your mother, the child crying inside the house. I didn't need to hear her. I felt it in my bones and then outside, near a stand of trees, I saw the burned mattress and blackened bed frame on the long grasses, a ticking covered pillow and pile of charred debris, clothing, books and papers. All had been hosed down. Then my ears hurt too. A whale of pain, not for her own burned body, but I have always known the sound of grief too. Well. I went around to the back door and knocked customary on the islands in places of seeming wealth. Inside was the smell of cooking. Clara, the cook with rosy cheeks was wringing her hands. She wanted to follow me from the kitchen, the room with light mingled with wisps of steam and odors of smoke. That on another day would've looked like the clouds in our forests.

Speaker 4 (00:26:10):

Then the misses came to the dining room. Oh, you are here at last. She looked me over, come with me. She was chic bangs, hair cut in a dark bob. She took in my appearance, which was not to her approval. I followed her reading her mind, what she thought of me, my embroidered blouse, my skirt and flowered bag, my everything. Not the kind of healer she'd imagined. The best practicing doctor would have recommended for assistance. Even at 10 30 in the morning, it was all darkness. You know how your mother hates dark rooms still? Nevertheless, everything was shadowed. The halls, the tables all through shadows, down like objects on the floor. The place seemed forever uninhabited by daylight or morning air, but at least I heard the sound of hammering, which I always believed to be the sound of new beginnings, buildings, new starts. Mrs.

Speaker 4 (00:27:16):

Manhattan tried to prepare me for what I was going to see, but I already smelled the burning flesh. We've moved her to a room. It's bare with some spite. She said this herself. She was well strange always. She said about the girl. She burned her own father's body. We don't know what came over her previous to that. She was mild, but as she said again, but she was strange. I noticed she spoke to the girl as if she had died. She spoke of the girl as if she had died for her. Perhaps it was true. I just thank God she didn't burn the whole building. Think of what that child could have done. She fumbled her words nervously as she did her clothing playing with the top buttons of the beige silk shirt. I hated her words. I felt what your mother might have been through in that house heavy with great misery.

Speaker 4 (00:28:21):

The cook followed us. Her hands in her apron pockets, her hair in a bun, straggly at the neck. She became our ally, but who knew at that moment, Libra Manhattan led us past the hallway of our down some stairs to another hall and we were there in the nearly bare room where Lily sat pale crying and shaking cold in the corner with nothing but underpants on her back visible to us. I started to cry to and Clara, the cook, my God, she was cooked. She'd be lucky to survive was my first thought. She was both hot and cold, shaking, trembling with something and more that none of us would ever come close to knowing she cared nothing for her burn back, which was burned so terribly, so deep. I felt there wasn't a chance in hell. I could make it any better. I'd have had a better chance if it was hell for her.

Speaker 4 (00:29:26):

It was all of us. All of it was and had been the entire time she'd been kept there. I sat to work anyway, bring me ice. I told them seeing that even with all this, even at that, the woman in fishnet hose with the bob just stood wring her hands at the doorway watching the cook who was crying too. Went downstairs to bring the ice and was back so soon. I know she ran. I tried to soothe the girl Lily, such a delicate name. The cook brought a whole tub of ice so much for her to carry. She was a good-hearted woman and her lips moved as she prayed. I could see that she wanted to stay and see how things would go in the room, but I went to the door and said, you'll have to leave now, and I closed the door securing the latch. The smell still lingered. I'm going to help you. I told Lily praying. I told the truth. I never knew what worked through me. It could have been St. Francis, St. Anthony, or any other saint or God only knows my first lover, Manuel. Now probably in the other world,

Speaker 4 (00:30:49):

Someone stole page four and they kept it. So anyway, this has never happened to me before, but I just gave a reading. Anyway, the woman comes back into the room and she says, Mrs. Manhattan, is it an herb you're using? No ma'am, it's ice and prayers. Oh, is that why you have the little statues? Some are plastic, I see. Yes, and some are plaster, but they work. That's all I can tell you. They could be chalk. I'd use them if they worked. Okay, you must leave us now. We have work to do. The door closed heels clicked outside the steps from my bag. I took the head of lettuce and the aloe vera. Vera, the word for truth. I lay the lettuce leaves on your mother's back. It is the one thing most like flesh. It breathes and does not stick. I learned this from my great aunt who had 18 children. She said butter didn't work. She didn't know why they used it. I worried she might get infected. Being a girl not immune to this world, she was susceptible to all the ills of humans. Her father had grown sick almost as soon as they found the two of them.

Speaker 4 (00:32:23):

When I reached toward her, it felt like a cloud even though it was a hot humid day. Even though she was burned and should have felt warm, I felt the coolness and wetness of a cloud. I remembered that her people had once been called the cloud people. My father had passed on some of their story to me. He said they could sing the clouds toward them, and so I reached to the cloud to touch her. She held a blanket to her naked front and she wept again. But it was not about pain. It was grief for her father, even though she smelled charred. Yet there was also the fresh cloud smell. This is good. I thought it gives her a better chance. It is coolness, but I think that she had gratitude being touched with care by any other human being. This wasn't the first time I saw her.

Speaker 4 (00:33:22):

Since she'd been found. I was haunted by her face, her eyes. I worried about her and I had been there frequently spying anything to get her away from them. I knelt in my brown skirt. Why? I recall, I don't know, just that the skirt was on the dark wood floor, the floor that was once her forest. I closed my eyes to look at this curled up little body to keep it in my mind. It was like I could see backward in time the forest with the fern, people still in it. The first time I saw her, when I found her asleep and covered her naked body with the blue shaw, Manuel had given me. I was thinking of what this meant. The way she took back her father's body from them standing in front of it, protecting him in death by burning him. It's what she did for him.

Speaker 4 (00:34:22):

When I closed my eyes, I saw forward in time also us driving and on unpaved roads. It was the first time of late I'd had my abilities as the kids called them. It's funny, but she saw it too and she said, you're the worst driver I've ever seen in her little accent. I laughed. It was true. I couldn't tell her I saw happiness in her life because she no longer remembered what that was. She couldn't even imagine it, but I saw it. She won't eat, said the cook to me. The next day she handed me a plate of the girl's favorite food like I was the be all, the end all and could accomplish anything. Here, try this. All her favorites, a beautiful plate of mango and nuts. She needs water. I said lots of it. I'll bring you more lettuce. Thank you. This day she lay on a little cott on her stomach.

Speaker 4 (00:35:24):

She was lied, the most flexible body I have ever seen. I checked to see if she was feverish, then still on my knees feeling them hurt on the floor. I handed to her this food. The maid had brought beautiful perfectly cut slices of mango. There must be a special knife rice with sweet coconut. Your father wants you to live. I said, your father wants you to tell the story. How do you know what he wants? I heard her think you are going to have your own daughter. I told her not knowing why you are going to be happy. Then after a long time, a little hand itself slightly burned, reached out of the curled up body and took one piece of mango, keep giving her water. I said to the cook, she's eating, call me if she stops again. As I left, I said, I'll be back day after tomorrow.

Speaker 4 (00:36:33):

Tell the Mrs. Same time, 2:00 PM Would you apply this to her every hour I gave her a bottle of gel from my plants. She can sleep on her side, light cover, call me if she has any odor, it could mean infection. The doctor should give her an antibiotic, so call him and told him I ordered it. The cook was smart and got it that fast. The information. I could tell in my first glance that the Mrs wouldn't have recalled any of this even though she came in to talk to me to see if I needed help, nor would she have followed through. I said antibiotics and herbs. I went back again and again until Lily, your mother was sitting up. She healed because sometimes the body will do what the soul doesn't want. Thank you.

Speaker 5 (00:37:55):

Hello. I too am grateful to Alison and ER and a w p for having me and I'm very pleased to be here reading with my elders, my literary elders, but also just because nobody's mentioned the fantastic Matt Johnson. I thought I better. One of the pleasures of the spring has been discovering his work, so I'm very excited to hear him read next. In the meantime, this is from contents may have shifted. This is called Delta 55.

Speaker 5 (00:38:33):

The plane is gradually but perceptibly descending. It is barely light outside and we aren't due at orally until nearly noon. There is an odd ticking noise coming from the wing. Outside my window I come fully awake and realize we are listing strenuously to the right. I glance at my seatmate on the aisle. Her name is Rebecca. She's a 26 year old bank teller from Cincinnati who has never flown before, who has saved for five years to take her dream trip to Paris. I spend most of dinner telling her how much safer airplanes are than car travel. How the 7, 7 7 has a minimum of three fail safes on each of its major systems. How even if one of the engines fell clean off the fuselage, it is designed to tumble backwards up and over the wing so that it doesn't tear the wing from the plane.

Speaker 5 (00:39:27):

Now in spite of all my reassurances, we seem to be heading shoulder first into the North Atlantic. Ladies and gentlemen, the pilot says, as many of you are probably aware, we are descending, preparing to make an unscheduled landing into revic Iceland. Approximately 35 minutes ago we experienced an explosion in our number two engine and that engine is now inoperable. The ticking sound you hear is the wind running through it, spinning the blades backwards, much like a household fan. You can probably also tell that we are tacking toward Iceland much as we would in a sailboat, as our current engine configuration will not give us full power in a straight line. Now Rebecca is awake and looking at me wild-eyed. The man likes a metaphor I say and offer a small smile. The light out the window has strengthened and I can see white caps on an angry gray sea.

Speaker 5 (00:40:25):

I always wanted to go to Iceland, I say, but by now Rebecca is no longer looking at me. She has her eyes closed tightly, has given herself I imagine to prayer. We'll be landing in approximately 15 minutes. The captain says, please give your undivided attention to the flight attendants as they instruct you in landing in the brace position. I like that he did not say crash. I like that he's a language guy. The ocean is getting quite a bit closer. No sign of Iceland out my window and I hope that Revic airport does not turn out to be a metaphor for fucked.

Speaker 5 (00:41:04):

Just when it seems that our wheels have to be skimming, the water, land and runway lights appear and then more of them, so many lights, it is hard to count them. A sea of spinning red and blue. Every ambulance and firetruck in Iceland seems to have come out to greet us. Holy shit. I say just before the wheels hit the foam and the foam splashes up and covers all the windows throwing the cabin in a half light exactly like waking up in a tent after a snowstorm and then everyone is cheering as the plane to a jerky sticky stop much later in an upstairs blank space of terminal as we are being fed rice with some kind of yellow chickeny goo all over it by something resembling the Icelandic Red Cross. The crew tells us the reason for the emergency equipment. When the number two engine exploded, it spit jet fuel all over the fuselage. We were a Molotov cocktail hurdling through space is the way the literary captain puts it. There was no way to be certain that the friction of the tires on the runway wouldn't make a spark and ignite us. Turn us into a 90 mile per hour ball of flame.

Speaker 5 (00:42:12):

This is chapter 25, ban Zang High Laos. My guide Z and I are standing in the warm mist of a Mekong River morning in the village of Ban Zang High Laos. Watching an unusually tall Laotian tend his boiling vats of La Lao, the rice wine moonshine that has put his village on the map. Monkeys scream in the trees above us and a gentle faced woman stands nearby. Holding a glass I fear is meant for me. It is slightly after 8:00 AM and in America that would be good enough reason to decline politely. But here in Laos where decorum is far more rigorous and complicated than it is in America, I'm pretty sure there isn't going to be a way out of drinking the pickled Mekong water that is about to come from the steaming rusted 50 gallon drum. I reassure myself that no self-respecting amoeba could possibly live in 80 proof hooch and quickly down the glass of white I am offered, which gets me another glass and then a glass of red, which I realized the second it goes down my throat without searing, my tonsils isn't nearly as strong as the white.

Speaker 5 (00:43:25):

I am seized with regret flooded by premonitions of feverish vomiting in a Laotian healthcare facility. I do what any sophisticated world traveler would do and stuff an entire antibacterial wipe into my mouth and during the tour of the brightly painted temple, suck every drop of juice out of it I can and swallow outside the temple. A beautiful woman is making ferns and bogan via out of paper and I buy a small bouquet from her and ask if I can take her picture. She says something to Z and he translates. She says she should take your picture because you are the beautiful one and I can tell by the tone in his voice that he thinks she is mistaken. Za is the most formal guide I have ever had in Asia, which is saying a great deal. He had been a monk for three months at 18, then he became one again for one day last year when his mother died so he could carry her body.

Speaker 5 (00:44:22):

He says to the other side, his English is impeccable except that he says electric city when he means electricity and comfort table when he means comfortable and anyone can see why he would think that was correct, at least twice a day. He says, if I'm not speaking right, you will please graduate me, but I rarely do. I'm pretty sure I have managed to eat the antibacterial wipe clandestinely until we are back on the boat heading down river to the magical city of Luang Pang and Zai says, have I told you yet how the Buddha died? When I say no, he says he was invited to the house of a friend for dinner and they were serving Pac P I say Pac P. He says, mildly impatient with me as usual and he makes an inking noise in his throat. Aha. I say, and Zai smiles. He knew the puck was bad. Zai says, knew even that it would kill him, but he ate it anyway because it was most important not to offend his hosts. I guess that's the difference. I almost say between Buddha and me, but on the off chance that Za has paid me a compliment, I smile out at the muddy river and nod.

Speaker 5 (00:45:38):

This is 59 Tucson, Arizona. I have not been on the property 30 minutes when I'm lying on a massage table in a softly lit Fran pani scented room with a person named Trevor towering over me. I can see he says that you are doing a lot of spiritual work because look how far you are out in your hair. His accent is vaguely South African and he has the most impressive unibrow I have ever seen. I do not read poetry. Trevor says, because I live poetry, he picks my feet up and lets them fall back to the table. May I ask you, he says, why the lower half of your body is perpetually standing in ice cold water? He means energetically of course, because the room is warm and my legs are dry, and what happened here? He asks, not waiting for an answer, he has his hand on my leg at the exact place where when I was four years old, my father threw me so hard against a big oak wardrobe that I broke my femur, the bone healed 40 years ago I was casted from the tip of my toes to my armpits for months, but Trevor is not the first healer to be able to see what happened.

Speaker 5 (00:46:51):

My father, I began, I'm not afraid of your pain. Trevor says, I'm not afraid of your grief. I'm not afraid of your terror. You want to know why? I'm not afraid of your terror. I nod. I am not afraid of your terror because I have gone inside the monster and inside the monster is pure wonder. Somewhere in this building, my friend Willow, who I have come to Canyon Ranch with is getting a nice simple lavender scrub and an herbal wrap. Willow looked through the catalog thought yes, the first night may be a nice herbal wrap. After all that travel, Pamela Trevor says, will you tell me your father's name so that I may ask him to excuse himself from the lower half of your body? Yes, I say, and I do Sebastian. Trevor says, Sebastian, you must get out of there, Sebastian. He says, this does not belong to you.

Speaker 5 (00:47:44):

He has his eyes closed and his hands tight around my ankles. No Sebastian. He says, more forcefully now. There are no options. We stay like that for an excruciating amount of time. Then he folds my hands across my chest and covers them with his. If you could have only one thing, he says, would you choose peace or ecstasy? Ecstasy. I think though I'm pretty sure I'm supposed to say peace. Peace is an illusion. Trevor says, I'm in the ecstasy nearly all the time now, even when I sleep, I think of the composer's lonely bedroom, the terrible black sheets, the clock radio projecting blood red digits onto the ceiling, his bald head, a glinting cabernet color like someone already dead. Pamela Trevor says, slapping the bottom of my feet with his palms. Yes sir. I say out of habit, he's got my wrist now is stretching them back over my head.

Speaker 5 (00:48:38):

No one has ever called me Pamela except my father. You have two glasses. Trevor says, one is completely full and one is completely empty in which glass is stillness possible. The full one. I say the questions are getting easier. Trevor now has his powerful thumbs wrapped almost completely around my uppermost vertebrae. You can get to stillness through ecstasy, he says, but you can't get to ecstasy through stillness. I think about all the ways the language of the new age is custom made for terrorism. I think about when a pink mouth opened in a white sky over Davis and I saw for the second time the cupped waiting hands when one of the doing lines in your life intersects with the circle of your Now, Trevor says, what happens? It has to bend. I say confident. It bends and bends and eventually becomes a circle. Precisely he says and releases his death grip on my neck.

Speaker 5 (00:49:35):

This is 111 Trenton, New Jersey. Let's say for the sake of argument that my back hurts so much because when I was four and in my threequarter body cast, my mother found it easiest to carry me around upside down like a monkey using the plaster bar. The doctors had fashioned between my knees to keep them for three and a half months, the correct distance apart, and let's say she did just that until my second to last appointment when the orthopedic surgeon said, you haven't been carrying her around by this bar, have you and my mother shot one quick glance at my father and said, of course not. No. And it became a funny story. The two of them liked to tell together to friends over a couple of drinks and let's say that when their friends asked as of course they would, how in the name of heaven a four year old breaks her femur?

Speaker 5 (00:50:26):

They said, I had somehow managed to pull the giant wardrobe over onto myself except instead of wardrobe, they would've said credenza because it would've made us sound richer than we were. I still don't see how it would make me feel any better to think of the pain in my hip and spine as anything other than my most loyal and valuable companion. The continuous non-voice in my ear that says, you got out alive and you still get to go. No two people who have ever lived love to travel more than my mother and father. They gave that love in their fashion to me. And finally, Istanbul Turkey at the Sultan's palace. Beautiful, long limbed girl, sexy but not too sexy, lots of brassy hair surrounded by seven or eight international travelers her age to an Australian boy with acne scars. She says, you are walking through the top kapi palace with three beautiful women.

Speaker 5 (00:51:26):

What more do you want? The other young women are not in the same room of beautiful as she, but they accept the compliment. Don't dare to interrupt. The boy says Maybe if you were all naked and laughs. One of the other girls, a Swede says No meaning Go fuck yourself, acne face. The brassy haired girl holds her finger to the Swedes lips says My parents taught me never to say no immediately to men, the sweet ass, to anything she says. Istanbul is the only major city in the world that is situated on two continents since three 30 AD it has been the capital of the Roman empire, the Byzantine empire, the Latin Empire, and as recently as 1922, the Ottoman Empire in the hilly streets ruin leans into palace, leans into internet cafe. We are in line waiting to get into the harem miles of tiled low lit corridors and rooms so thick with ghosts of women in captivity.

Speaker 5 (00:52:28):

You can feel their hair on your arm, their jasmine scented breath on your face. In contemporary Istanbul, the dervishes have finally invited the women to whirl. In the blue mosque. There are 250,000 tiles. The color of sky when the sun comes out inside is sky and outside is golden. I'm 46 years old and ashamed of the fact that this is the first mosque of my life, but later when the evening call to prayer catches me in the garden between the blue mosque and the HIAs, Sophia call and echo, echo and answer, bouncing off domes and turrets that have stood on this hill for 1500 years. I know faith springs out of doubt like top soil and one thing I am is here right now across the golden horn where the Bosphorus meets the sea of Marmara, the Asian part of the city, glistens in the twilight as a candidate for the center of everything. Istanbul beats Colorado. Hands down the gull are turning cartwheels around the towers of the blue mosque and calling like crazy women. Byzantium. I say to them, Constantinople, the circle of my now is wreaking havoc with the lines of my doing. I am learning to say yes, if not always immediately a sweet faced Turkish boy, maybe 19 offers me a Kleenex, puts both hands over his heart when I take it says I look just like his mother when I cry. Thank you.

Speaker 6 (00:54:14):

I hate going after Pam. Thank you. I'm last, so I'm either be so rude not to thank for an Allison or I just am redundant, so I'll go for redundant and also thank you so much. It's an honor to read with this crew. Today I'm going to read from my novel PI and this story that I'm working on or this book is about sort of sequel to Edgar pose narrative of Arthur Gordon Pim, which takes place across the Americas and eventually in Antarctica. My book takes place in Antarctica. The part that I'm going to be reading is the protagonist is this professor. He's trying to find out if PI's story is actually true and he gets a lead into one of the characters from the book Dirk Peters, and so he goes and talks to a distant relative of Dirk Peters named Mahalia Mathis, who he finds on the internet and I'll just pick up from there.

Speaker 6 (00:55:22):

I didn't know that meeting Mrs. Mathis also meant I would be forced to travel from Chicago to the bleak urban landscape of Gary, Indiana. After thoroughly reading her website, I was under the impression that Mahalia Mathis was a resident of the second city. I soon found out that what I thought was a residential address in Chicago was in fact a post office box and that her driving directions led me not only out of the city but out of the state of Illinois. Altogether, this information arrived at my cottage in an overnight package from Mrs. Masses, along with the elaborate press package that included a glossy headshot of the lady and several print clippings from her neighborhood newsletter, some more than a decade old, all attesting to her numerous creative abilities. I found her residence an hour out of O'Hare without much trouble. It was harder to leave my rental car parked on the street with its thugs hanging around like concrete bats, hanging caves niggas.

Speaker 6 (00:56:28):

Mrs. Mathis yelled out at them and she let me into her townhouse a response which only increased my concern that my rental car was done for despite the fact that she insisted that this would scare them away. For a little while, the home of Mahalia Mathis was elegant on the inside, ornate. It was crowded too. There were many possessions on display in this house and many, many cats. To guard those possessions, Mrs. Mathis struck an impressive figure herself wearing a oo of green paisley silk and a sparkle turban to match. She was a statuesque woman both in height and in weight, aside from an occasionally violent fit of coughing. She didn't look sick or weak to me as she went about her overcrowded house with its many boxes and piles of antiques and random curiosities. She was a hoarder, and I was happy about this because if this woman had ever possessed anything that was of use to my quest, it was clear she still had it.

Speaker 6 (00:57:32):

It was in Mrs. Mathis living room seated at a large mahogany table covered in antique la so we began our discussion in earnest tape recorder, a notepad on my side of the table, a dusty box marked pictures on its lid in a handwritten crawl between us. You must realize this man, you speak of jerk Peters. I interrupted. I wanted no mistakes about this. Dirk Peters, she acknowledged with the hands to the side of her temple as if even uttering those words made her nervous. You have to understand, in my family, we weren't even allowed to say his name. No one in my mother's generation talked about 'em, and that's because no one in her mother's generation did or the one before that. But why I asked largely because Ms. Mathis took a couple seconds off of her opening confession, dabbing her head with a handkerchief repeatedly, even though it must've been barely 60 in the room.

Speaker 6 (00:58:31):

I was still wearing my coat because he is the Dirk Peters written about by the great author Edgar Poe all those years ago, the one who accompanied Arthur Gordon Pi on his southern adventure. She shot back at me as if I was the fool, but I did not feel like a fool in that moment. To the contrary, I felt brilliant. I hadn't even mentioned PO's novel before this point. Mrs. Mathis, do you realize this is a major historic revelation I asked, struggling to constrain myself. It's an important discovery for American literature and for America itself. Why did you keep this secret for so long? In response to my query, Mahalia Mathis made no attempt to hide her disappointment in the poor display of intelligence on my part for even pursuing this line of questioning. After much eye rolling and elaborate head wagging had been completed, Mrs.

Speaker 6 (00:59:24):

Mathis finally saw fit to compensate for my lack of intuition. Well, he left that poor white man down there to die, didn't he? Not only did he go along on a mutiny, which would've brought shame to enough to my family name had it been widely known, but the fact he let that poor white man down there to die on some iceberg to freeze the death, the fact that Arthur Penn was a famous white man just made it worse time was if white folks here your king killed one of them, they liable not to let that fact that it was a hundred years ago stop them from getting a rope. Oh, I get it. I see, right? Why didn't I think of this before? Of course, there would've been a larger real world repercussions to worry about, particularly as an African-American man in a what Mrs.

Speaker 6 (01:00:13):

Mathis hand shot down to collapse on my own and African-American men. I repeated, assuming I garbled the last of my words and the excitement of the moment when I said African again. Mrs. Matthew squeezed my finger so tight, it left me with the impression of being gripped my blood pressure machine. Honey, I got a lot of Indian in me. I got Irish and I got a little French too. I got some German or so I'm told I even got a little Chinese in me on my mother's side. Matter of fact, I'm sure I got more bloods in me than I know, but I do know this. I ain't got no kind of Africa in these bones. Mahalia Mathis delivered poking her naps back under her turban as she snorted at me derisively. So he ends up going to, she bribes him into going to a meeting with him. I'll state before this, we gave everybody's lineage and I'm a descendant of the Muskogee Nation of the Black Muskogee Freeman. I'll put that out before I read the rest of this.

Speaker 6 (01:01:21):

It turned out that Mahalia Mathis was not the only resident of Gary, Indiana to claim Native American descent. Despite the fact that the satellite city of Chicago was 84% black, there were enough Indians to form a club and it was to participate in its gathering that Mrs. Mathis had recruited me. The Native American ancestry collective of Gary Naac G met on the first Thursday of every month at the Miller Beach Senior Center. To my surprise, the Miller Beach Senior Center was not actually in Miller Beach, but in an adjacent community that merely aspired to appropriate the heirs of this more reputable neighbor. During our long and illuminating ride, I was simultaneously given a tour of the modern day Gary Complete with a commentary on its most famous entertainment family, and told the saga of Mahalia Math, his own family, the Jacksons no relation, Malia's late husband Charles had passed a decade before Charles Mahalia acknowledged had indeed been colored.

Speaker 6 (01:02:24):

Mrs. Mathis went on to note that both