Washington State Convention Center | February 28, 2014

Episode 70: A Reading and Conversation with Chris Abani and Chang-rae Lee

(Chris Abani, Chang-rae Lee, Steph Opitz) Sponsored by the University of Washington Bothell MFA in Creative Writing & Poetics. Chris Abani, author of numerous works of prose and poetry, and Chang-rae Lee, author of the novels Native Speaker and The Surrendered, will present readings of their award-winning work, followed by a discussion moderated by Steph Opitz.

Published Date: June 25, 2014

Transcription

Speaker 1 (00:00:04):

Welcome to the A W P podcast series. This event originally occurred at the 2014 A W P conference in Seattle. The recording features Chang Ray Lee and Chris Banani and is moderated by Stepo bitz. You'll now hear Sarah Dowling provide introductions.

Speaker 2 (00:00:22):

My name is Sarah Dowling and I'm core faculty in the M F A program in creative writing and poetics at the University of Washington Bothell. Our program takes a cross genre approach and focuses particularly on the question of why we write what we write, what motivates our choice of subject, our language, what informs form in that regard. Our whole program is especially excited to be sponsoring this event and I'm very much looking forward to hearing Mr. Lee and Mr. Ban's work. There will be a book signing afterwards, so please stick around for that and there will be some kind of special instruction forthcoming as to allowing the authors some time to arrive at the table and that sort of thing. I'd like to welcome our moderator, the literary director of the Texas Book Festival, the fiction co-chair of the Brooklyn Book Festival and the book reviewer at Marie Claire Magazine, Steph Opitz. So please welcome her to start off the event.

Speaker 3 (00:01:28):

Thank you so much Sarah and thank you a w p, the board and the staff for putting this festival together, particularly Christian Therese as somebody who does a job that takes place in a weekend as well. I can vouch for the busyness of what you're doing during the rest of the year and how much effort it takes to put together something at this level of excellence. And thank you all for a hand in getting this together and thank you so much toting Ray Lee and Chris Banani for joining us today. As Sarah mentioned, I'm the literary director of the Texas Book Festival and we actually just announced our festival dates yesterday, so to do a little plug for that everybody come down to Austin October 25th and 26th for a very good time. Yay, YHA. It's really a great honor to be here on this stage with two writers that I admire so much and I hope that you guys will forgive me for taking sort of a personal slant, but I feel at a festival like this conference obviously must be the highest concentration of legit devout literature lovers.

Speaker 3 (00:02:31):

And I think you guys will know what I mean when I equate encountering a book for the first time, like encountering a love interest when you somehow discover a writer and some offbeat way at a reading or at a book festival or at an a w P conference and you flash forward a few years and find that you're completely devoted to everything that this person writes. That first encounter really sticks with you. And I feel so lucky because unbeknownst to a w p or probably these two with me, these are two authors that I have had great encounter stories with. My first job in publishing was at a small press in Los Angeles that actually has a big presence here at a W p Red Hen Press. And when we would walk down the hallway and there was bookshelves, floor to ceiling of titles of redhead and authors, and right before I got up the stairs to get to the office was the A section and two wonderful poetry books would look at me every morning, Daphne's Lot and Dog Woman by Chris Abbo.

Speaker 3 (00:03:28):

And while I was starting there, Chris was just finishing up his collection with Percival Everett. There are no names for Red. A gorgeous collection of art and writing that I would imagine Red hen probably has at their table and I'd encourage you to go look and buy because we're all here to support writing. So we're purchasing writing here and keeping it going and this, the staff loved Chris. Everybody was just such a big fan of his personality and then hearing so many wonderful things about him and then seeing this book that was two people who are so unique and forceful on their own as writers coming together and collaboration on this gorgeous book. Just seeing how much, I guess I want to say humility that takes to work with another person in that way was just a really incredible experience for me. And so I'm sure many of you know about Chris's poetry. He's also an essayist, a screenwriter, a playwright and a novelist. He's the recipient of the Penn u s a Freedom to Write award, the Prince Clause Award, a land and literary fellowship, California book award, a Hurst and Wright Legacy Award, a Penn Beyond the Margins Award, Penn Hemmingway book Prize and a Guggenheim Award.

Speaker 3 (00:04:44):

That's a lot of awards. And today after I introduced Chang as well, crystal be reading from his latest novel that just came out last month with Penguin, the secret history of Las Vegas. Chris, thank you so much for being here. Thank you.

Speaker 3 (00:05:03):

And to my right we have Ching Ray Lee when I was actually interning at Red Hen I was in grad school at the time and I took a class that was called something like Writing the Diaspora and we were reading Hector to Barr's Tattooed Soldier at which Dante Cotts the Do Breaker and Chang Rayley's little book. You may have heard of the native speaker. I know I don't need to explain this to you guys, but I do just want to take a minute to say, you know that feeling when you're reading a book that you love so much, you turn the pages slower and you pronounce every word in your head because you just don't want this book to end. I was doing that with a book that was on my reading list for grad school. I did not have that kind of time, but I loved the book so much I couldn't help myself just slowing down and really engaging with that book. And I actually had the chance to meet Chang a few months ago in New York and afterwards I emailed that professor and I was like, you'll not believe who I just met. It was amazing.

Speaker 3 (00:06:03):

Chang has also won many awards including the Ernest Hemmingway Foundation, the Penn Award, the American Book Award. He was named one of the 20 best American writers by the New Yorker, the American Asian American Literary Award, the Asian Pacific American Award for literature, Dayton Literary Prize. He was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize and we will be hearing from his most recent novel that just came out last month from Riverhead on such full sea. Thank you so much for being here. Thank

Speaker 4 (00:06:29):

You.

Speaker 3 (00:06:36):

So before I have Chang and Chris Reed, I just kind of wanted to set up their books a little bit. For those of you who have not yet had the chance to read it, there was a book that I spend a lot of time reading A hero with A thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell where he says A hero ventures forth from the world of a common day into a region of supernatural wonder. Fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is one the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow booms on his fellow men. Both of these books are incredibly different, but obviously I couldn't help thinking about them and how they relate since we're going to be in conversation today. And I wonder if you both could just talk about the heroes and these novels and how they are or not conforming to this monomyth that heroes allegedly subscribe to. Do you want to start Chris?

Speaker 4 (00:07:26):

Sure. Well, I mean I don't know if it's a monomyth though. I think that literature at its heart is really good gossip, which is why we love it and we don't like the literature. That doesn't sound like gossip. So really the hero's journey is the journey of the person you want to gossip about. And so essentially for me and this book, the book, it was strange about conjoined twins who may or may not be serial killers and a South African psychiatrist.

Speaker 3 (00:07:56):

It's just your average tale,

Speaker 4 (00:07:56):

Just your average book set in Las Vegas. And so the protagonist of this book is Sunil Singh, who is sort of biracial South African psychiatrist who was involved very much in experimentation during apartheid and has sort of come to Vegas in a sense to rewrite his own history. And so the journey of course is literally the solo hero goes through, which I think is at the heart of all narrative, which is the idea that we must go through the grotesque in order to get to the sublime, right? It's really, I mean if you think about even in religious terms, it's Jesus's story. They nail him to a cross, he dies, he goes to hell for three days and he resurrects. So the whole idea for my characters is that I put them through hell to see if they can actually earn the sublime. And so I think it is the hero's journey in that sort of sense of it. Sorry, I'm rambling.

Speaker 3 (00:08:41):

No, that's great. Let's ramble.

Speaker 5 (00:08:44):

I don't need to say anything else. I mean my hero goes through those same sorts of tribulations, obviously the harrowing, the bizarre, the downright shocking, but it's not just for the sake. I think of adventure and incident. I think it's so that all heroes, I guess there's a line from, what is it, from Malamud, from the natural. We're all playing people and we need heroes and playing in the sense that we want someone up there to screen for us all the emotions, ideations considerations, all the things that we're working through in our psyches and have them play out for us on a grander stage or on a particular sort of setting to embody all those things that we normally can't. Of course it's sort of an analogy for just reading of course, right? But that's one of the things that I saw for my hero, this girl named fan who is herself not endowed with a lot of the typical complexity that one might give a hero because she doesn't narrate her own story and the narrator of this novel really is the one who is accruing all the philosophical and emotional kind of anecdote about her and all that's supposed to I suppose affect their consciousness rather than fans fan is really just this kind of enactment I guess.

Speaker 5 (00:10:16):

And I like the idea of that looking at someone and without having the same kind of intricate knowledge of them, but seeing them from the outside and feeling that through I guess the interpretation of this other body.

Speaker 3 (00:10:29):

Great. Well Chris, do you want to start with reading?

Speaker 4 (00:10:33):

Sure. Do I read here or do I go there?

Speaker 3 (00:10:35):

I think podium, if you're okay. Podium it is. Okay, great.

Speaker 4 (00:10:39):

You can tell how lazy I'm right. I'm like, can I just read here? That's the secret to my success. Lying on the couch.

Speaker 4 (00:10:50):

Good afternoon everyone. Thank you so much for being here. It's lunchtime and we appreciate you coming. I wouldn't, I've eaten lunch. But anyway, I am going to start with a poem. I just want to say, just indulge me just for a couple of minutes because in 2007 I was stuck in Chiang Mai in Thailand. I was teaching a masterclass and I got a call that my mother was dying in London and so a person who was at that time a complete stranger to me, Patty Payne, decided to sit vigil with me all night for three nights while I sang my mother across the other side. And yesterday when I got here I found out that Patty just lost her husband Danny. And so I am offering this poem for Danny and Patty. This one which I read at my mother's funeral. It's by Yusef Kuka, who is one of the most amazing poets in the world.

Speaker 4 (00:11:39):

It's called Old to the Drum Gazelle, I killed you for your skin's exquisite touch for how easy it is to be nailed to aboard rather raw as white butcher paper. Last night I heard my daughter praying for the meat here at my feet and you know it wasn't anger that made me stop my heart till the hammer fell. Weeks ago. I broke you as a woman once, shattered me into a song beneath her weight before you slouched into that grassy hush. But now I'm tightening lashes shaping hide as if around a ribcage stretched like five bow strings. Ghosts cannot slip back inside the body's drum. You've been seasoned by wind, dusk, and sunlight. Pressure can make everything whole again. Brass nails tacked into the ebony wood. Your face has been carved five times. I have to drive trouble from the valley, trouble in the hills, trouble on the river too. There's no colon nut, palm wine, fish, salt to caba. Now I have beaten a song back into you. Rise and walk away like a panther.

Speaker 6 (00:13:03):

Thank you.

Speaker 4 (00:13:10):

I write about people that no one wants to look at. My aesthetic is really, as my friend says, is situated in the alleyways. I'm drawn to the underbelly and so I wanted to offer you from Nigeria a verse from the Holy Book of efa and it's a chapter that birthed me as a babalawo and the verse that kind of I think explains my preoccupation with the underbelly of life and with the characters that I explore but explains why I do it, which is towards transformation. It's not pornographic, it's not spectacle, it is really trying to work with transformation in Yuba. The verse goes like this in English, it says The cattle egret lives in the mud yet rises to destiny of purity and light was divine for the boy who would know the secrets of God's stomach. And he was told that though he would never die, he must sacrifice his heart to this endeavor. To know the secrets of life, you must live 200 years in the mud of death. But whenever you speak, an egret will rise from your lips and shatter into light.

Speaker 4 (00:14:49):

I read you two sections from the novel. In the first section you'll meet the twins who are conjoined twins, fire and water that are parasitic twins from water is this beautiful, gorgeous, six foot tall, amazing man, I mean physically and fire is 18 inches and grows out of his side and it's just head and two arms and a cow. And this first section, the book is said in Las Vegas and the twins are born as a result of the nuclear tests that were conducted six miles outside of Las Vegas by the American military in the fifties. The first section is called bristle corn. This hands cannot do even interlaced across a pregnant woman's stomach. Even if the will that webs the fingers desires nothing more than to protect the unborn in her. Not even this is sufficient to form a barrier against the flash of light and a cloud that grows not into a mushroom, but rather into a thick tree with a dense plume, a tree to shame odin, a tree to make Adam cover the inadequacies of his a tree.

Speaker 4 (00:15:52):

Even shiver would stand back from in awe and bright, a constellation, no, a rogue star, a renegade sun, the very face of awe. And if there are names for divinity, then that too. As Sila watched the cloud mushroom up, she wondered if the babies in her womb were lit by the incandescence before her and had they beheld all this glory and what would it shape in them when they were born? A penetrating insight into mystery, a desire for a life tinged by the fear of death or eyes that see only constellations, only truth. But the warnings led in other directions. The oracle spoke mostly of death, of darkness of eclipse. But could she mold even this cloud into a defiant sign, A promise of good things. Perhaps this tone seems heavy Old Testament weighted even. But until you've seen this power bloom in a desert, you can never fully understand the truth that made Elijah weep or Elijah whale and despair.

Speaker 4 (00:16:52):

You cannot know the terrible loneliness of Moses, the crying Gemini, but sometimes simpler words can do the same work. And watching the explosion of a nuclear bomb in the Nevada desert from a spot less than two miles from its sky, obliterating epicenter sealer, said, shit, I'm fucked. And she was. Her babies were born fused like the glass phoned by the chattering of sangin and we cannot operate here. The doctors said as he placed the bundle of limbs in her arms, but we could ask the doctors on the army base they have the best minds and equipment, the idea of it an unspeakable insult that those who did this should be begged to undo it, curdled the milk in her. No, she said no. They were born this way for a reason and she named one water for the living waters from the throne and the other fire because his very existence was the curse she would use to end them.

Speaker 4 (00:17:46):

The boys were still young, barely seven. When the sickness began leukemia, the word itself conjured up only a deep royal blue in her mind. Beautiful like a Nile lotus, which she could not know because she'd never seen one but blue like the angle of light on Lake Mead at a certain time and place on a certain summer day terminal, the word rattled like the gates of a crypt all rust and the smell of decay, but also conjure an adventure, a train pulling into a station on an evening in Casablanca or roaring through a dark desert it slits, carriages pull in the night like a spell, an affirmation that it can all mean something. Then her job at the diner precarious as it was with a slow onset of decrepitude, which announced that their town Gabriel named for that indomitable angel of light was waning into ghosts.

Speaker 4 (00:18:35):

As the government moved, the freeway came to an abrupt end. Only the most adventurous tourists came through anymore. Even the steady flow of Indians from the reservation dried up like a desert creek in high summer when a Denny's made its way resolutely if reluctantly onto the outskirts of the res and the small strip of land. Her people had tried to grow artichokes and dates on when they moved north because as her father said, you came along my love, my sealer failed to yield anything more than dirt. The truth was her father was already caught in a pause in a moment of rest before the courage to move had come upon him. And that was why he named Hassah the Hebrew word. That marks a pause in a psalm, a moment to consider the music. And so they moved north and had lived here in Gabriel since that is until her father was shot by a sheriff.

Speaker 4 (00:19:24):

Too excited to see that the gun the black man was holding was actually just a pipe he was packing with tobacco. Cila had just turned four when it happened and she never fully understood his death. Her mother did her best until she died shortly after heart attack was official reason, but Sila knew it was really heartbreak. At 18, she got pregnant from a boy in the nearby army base who promised to marry her but who slipped off soon as her belly began to show and she never heard from him again and many people have come back from worse. So Sila like everyone in the dusty town of Gabriel soldiered on, but her leukemia and the closing of the diner sealed everything into that premature death. Now there was nothing left for her, but the glass case, the display that old Dan, the mechanic had built from scrap, she could spare.

Speaker 4 (00:20:13):

It was a curious thing. This glass box moratorium than fish tank, four foot tall and four foot wide glass bolted together as though by Dr. Frankenstein with a sluggish fan powered by a car battery cut into the back panel, struggling to move the hot Nevada air and Cila sat with a box every day dressed like a carnival gypsy under large seven up umbrella, the terrarium by the table, a deck of cards before her offering ingredients for a dollar and for $3 the chance to look under the velvet cloth draped over the terrarium at the monster inside. And more often than not, people chose the terrarium and she would slowly peel back the glass, the green velvet drape to reveal the conjoined seven year old twins sitting or sometimes standing in the tank, one reading the other, holding caught loudly until an annoyed by a particularly careless onlooker, he would crawl under his cowl and hide.

Speaker 4 (00:21:07):

And that was how the years went by She'd getting sicker, the twins getting bigger until water couldn't stand in the tank anymore, but sat cross-legged at the bottom, still reading, always reading and fire held rapid fire, philosophical debates with customers while water red pausing only occasionally when prodded to engage, to look up and speak in simple facts like cats cannot taste sweet things or only humans and horses have hymens their fame. If one can call this fame spread. And soon Taurus was stopping over just to see them. And it wasn't long before traveling. Circus came by more sideshow than circus. Truth be told, the owner and Mr. Jacobs paid a hundred dollars to see the twins. It's more than you need pay. Sila said, as you can see, we're all alike. Mr. Jacobs said you and I, parents to what some might call freaks for which I tend to think of as a lord's marvels.

Speaker 4 (00:21:59):

And in my sideshow, all the marvels are natural. He boasted why? That's why we travel under that name Jacob and the Lord's. Marvels, he explained himself a man with what looked like lobster claws, where his hands should be and we're all a family. He added, we are the midget with him said we are a family. And Sila thought the midget had the saddest eye she'd ever seen. Mr. Jacobs offered Sila a very good deal to take the boys and look after them, teach them how to have a life in his show and in exchange you would pay for her to live in a hospice until she passed in her sleep, she demurred and coughed blood into a handkerchief, a clump of her hair falling out disgracefully as she did. So if you wouldn't have the money, what will you have? See the glance at the blood in her handkerchief, the boys were 12 and water was already smarter than she would ever be.

Speaker 4 (00:22:47):

Swear on this blood to treat them like your own. She said, I will. Mr. Jacob said offer a lobster and here's my own daughter, so you may know that I'm true. And a tall girl's slender as a whisper of smoke walked forward. How old do Sila asked? 12. The girl said, and your name Fred. And that seemed to cement it for her, although to confirm, she drew a card and laid it face up the hanged man, she sighed. Come by my house tomorrow. She said It's five miles from town under the blue barked bristle con tree. Mr. Jacobs nodded. And that night, through bouts of hacking, coughs and march, blood spat into handkerchiefs, sealer sang the boys to sleep with their favorite lullaby, then kissing them on the cheeks. She let herself out just before dawn when the mist was still upon the ground and dragging a length of rope behind her, walked up the slight rise behind that house to the Bristol corn tree Fairytale.

Speaker 4 (00:23:45):

What possible harm can a story do? You ask yourself as you fetch the small photo of your father from the mantlepiece, you don't have a fireplace. So it really isn't mantlepiece just a rickety shelf on a wall and then the small cramped living room with the bare cement floor painted red by your mother because as she says, poverty is no excuse for cleanliness, no harm at all. You tell yourself as you nearly knock over the small plastic vs. That holds the plastic flowers your father gave your mother on their first date. You have seen her dust around it carefully. Every Sunday wiping each petal with a soft cloth while she's sing softly under her breath, you write the vase and dash into the kitchen. Although even to you, that word seems too big for this space here you say showing the woman the picture. She's stirring a pot of beans on the stove in the small kitchen come pantry, this is my real father.

Speaker 4 (00:24:35):

You say I know this for a fact. You insist, although no one is arguing, the one in the fairytale you're about to tell is your father too. But you don't say that. I mean he can't be your real father if he's in a fairytale, can he? It's just a story like Red Riding Hood and that isn't real and telling it never hurt anybody did it. Although if the truth be told Red's big mouth did alert the wolf to grandma and though everything worked out really well in the end, there can be no joy in being eaten by a wolf swallowed hole. Even if you are old, even if it is temporary, like the nine year old boy in the homelands that drum magazine says was swallowed hole by a python but bit his way to freedom right through the snake's belly from the inside out.

Speaker 4 (00:25:14):

Tell me more. The woman says, and each time you have lunch since you first told her this story, she presses you to tell it again And you want to because she comes to you while your mother is at work and feeds you and you want to because she's your mother's special friend. And it's the same every time. You always begin with a photo that is your real father, not the father in the story. Because what harm can it do? What a rarity. A grownup who wants to hear the stories of a child and not just any grownup but a white woman too, although that is not immediately obvious when you look at her, she looks more colored than white. But this is South Africa in the seventies. And who can tell for sure this? You can understand because your mother is Zulu and your father is Indian.

Speaker 4 (00:25:54):

But there is nothing clear about that when people look at you, especially in this land where you are what your father is, but only women surround you. And so there is no clear proof that you are who you want to be, especially since everyone thinks you are just another Zulu bratt with a father lost to the minds, the war, the struggle, the bottle or all of them. And this story your mother tells is a lie that makes her not the slut she really is. And this photo of a Sikh man in a turban, this photo cannot be real because who would admit to a marriage that clearly broke the anti-sim imagination laws And children are just being cruel when they say this. You know it's not true because your mother told you it isn't, but it hurts nonetheless. And then your mother adopts a strange woman who claims she's white and brings her home and says, here's your Auntie Alice, even though everyone else calls her white Alice.

Speaker 4 (00:26:40):

So what harm telling this story? And always like a game she plays with you, this lonely only child, half starved for attention. She asks, have you ever seen your father? And you say No, but he's a hero just like the father in the story. And then white Alice says, tell me the story then Sunil tell it to me again. I love it. And she listens, wrapped, moving only to keep the beans from burning and stick into the pan. And then you begin long ago and far away. But today and so forever, the lived are brave. Then one day a big ogre invaded his land. He was a strong evil ogre from a land in the north where the sun hid its face. And at first the people said to the Olga, that is plenty of land to share. Why not share? But the ogre began to kill everyone.

Speaker 4 (00:27:21):

So the warrior fought the ogre, but it was too powerful. And so the warrior fled, escaped to the land of the Shona, a powerful but kind people to the north. And there the warrior made his home training other men who also escaped to the land of the Shona, driven off by the ogre how to be warriors and where does he live In the land of Shona White Alice asks, he lives by a big baab tree you say, on an island that looks like a mud fish in a big sea called Kariba. And there he and other mps trained and grew strong to become better warriors so they could return to defeat the ogre. It is a short story, but with each telling you ad detail, the dusty road that leased with the mythical forest of Che Sahan, which is the name of a powerful witch who protects all, who dwell there.

Speaker 4 (00:28:03):

The strange civilians who roam free and powerful medicine men who can fly to the top of Mount Kilimanjaro, the reeds by the water's edge that hid the magical fish shipped island from view like the ones that hid Moses as a baby. And then while you stuff your face with beans and bread sipping delicately on the Coca-Cola that you're not allowed but which is part of your secret white, Alice spreads the map out and asks you to tell her the story again, pen poised over to mark something. And with each telling the map gets more and more marks. And today, like all the other days, she draws lines across the map that has Rhodesia printed on it in big letters. She draws lines connecting the Chetan Shan area with a small town of Sibel on the shores of Lake Kariba looking, searching for an island, a ship like a mud fish or a whale.

Speaker 4 (00:28:50):

But it is only a story in what harm can it do. And if your mother trusts this white woman who looks colored and if she wants to hear your fairytale, then what of it? And then a few days later you come home from plane to find your mother crying on the floor, kneeling as if in prayer shoulders heaving a telegraph lying like a dead moth beside her and someone has died. That's the only time telegrams come to Soweto. You know better than to ask any questions better than to approach her. So you sneak to your room and you listen to her prowling, a muttering to herself as she deduces the mystery and you hear the terrible words that confirm a fear that until now has sat in the pit of your stomach gna. In a way, how did white Alice know the truth? She asks herself, was it Sunil?

Speaker 4 (00:29:33):

Was it Sunil story about his father where he was hiding that led Alice to the truth? And you know that she has put it all together and you realize that this was no fairytale, even though your mother had said it was said it in the Zulu word in Anaqua, this was no mere tale. Your father was the father in the story and he's real. And he was the head of an armed a n c faction launching gorilla attacks on shopping malls to bring down apartheid and he fled to Rhodesia to escape and was hiding in an a n C training camp on an island. The fairytale contained the directions and white Alice finally figured it out on a map while you ate beans and bread and drank Coca-Cola and told your story. And although you tell yourself you could not have known the truth, you know it is a lie because you were four when your mother first told it to you because your father left while she was still pregnant with you and you needed it.

Speaker 4 (00:30:21):

But now you are 12 and if what the Bible says about Jesus's truth, then old enough to debate your elders in a temple and certainly in Soweto in the seventies to be 12 is like being 20. But there is still a four year old who missed his father he had never seen and who needed someone to hear his story. This is what you tell yourself, but you hear the terrible whisper truth as your mother p prowls, a house like a hungry ghost and white Alice who was once white but turned colored because of a sickness white Alice who lost it all, her husband, her kids, her nice home in a white suburb, her white past her privilege and had to live in Soweto like a kafa white Alice Dorothy had taken in, taken to a fellow lost soul. Alice had betrayed her stolen Sunil story and day by day reconstructed the truth, the truth she sold to the secret police in the hopes of getting her life back, her kids, her husband, her home, and her whiteness.

Speaker 4 (00:31:10):

And who wouldn't? Dorothy muttered, who wouldn't, but still, but still and now her husband and many other men dead and Sunil without his father, not even a mythical one and all of this because a story, a story in a mouth that told it the last sound you hear that night draws you into the kitchen and you see your mother sitting there shoulders shaking with sobs, terrified. You approach terrified because you've never seen her this way. This woman who everyone deferentially calls nurse Dorothy. And then when she looks up, you call to her and you scream. You don't scream because of the mascara running down her face in black, which tend rolls or the rouge of her cheeks smeared with tears and sweat. It is her mouth that terrifies you. She has sown it shut. The needle is still dangling from a piece of black surgical thread, not a mouth at all, but flesh meat, raw and bleeding.

Speaker 4 (00:32:04):

And so you run to white Alice's house and then the men come in an old ambulance and take your mother. And though there is a murderous rage in her eyes when she sees white Alice, there is also an understanding gratitude for this gift. And Dorothy looks from you to white Alice and because her mouth is still sown shut, the women can only exchange looks. Yes, white Alice says, yes, I will take care of Sunil again, the murderous rage and the gratitude then Dorothy is gone. You are 12, you never tell your story again. Johnny 10 10 who lives down the street at 10 10 says, do you know why your mother sore her mouth shut and got taken away to the crazy house? You know better than to answer. Do you know that children can be cruel? Thank you,

Speaker 6 (00:32:47):

Thank

Speaker 3 (00:32:54):

You, thank you so much Chris. Thank you. If you guys haven't already read this book, I mean I've obviously read it, but that gave me the chills to hear you read it. It's such a tense moment. The fairytale in particular, and thank you, you read it wonderfully Chegg, I'd like to take the podium.

Speaker 5 (00:33:11):

Sure. This novel on such a full sea has been I think rightly described as something that seems like a dystopian tale, but to be honest, I actually thought of it originally as sort of a folktale or fairytale, a folktale or fairytale sort of set in a very different kind of place in a different kind of future. And I'm not a huge fan of reading my work to tell you the truth. So what I thought I'd do is just read just the opening pages about five pages. It's a little portrait of the hero fan that I was talking about before. It is known where we come from, but no one much cares about things like that anymore. We think why bother except for a lucky few. Everyone is from someplace, but that someplace it turns out is gone. You can search it, you can find picks or vids that show what the place last looked like.

Speaker 5 (00:34:01):

In our case, a gravel colored town of stoop shoulder buildings on a riverbank in China, shor hills in the distance, rooftops, a mess of wires and junk. The river tee still a swath of black and blunting. It all is a haze that you can almost smell a smell you think you don't want to breathe in. So what does it matter? If the town was raised one day after our people were trucked out, what difference does it make that there's almost nothing there now. It was on the other side of the world, which might as well be a light year away though probably it was mourned when it was thriving. People are funny that way. Even the most miserable kind of circumstance can inspire a genuine throb of nostalgia. The blood was pumping, yes. Weren't we alive? You can bet that where we live now was mourn two in its time.

Speaker 5 (00:34:57):

And though it may be surprising to consider someday this community might be remembered as an excellent place even by those of us who recognize its shortcomings, but we don't wish to dwell on theh details. Most would agree that any rational person would leap at the chance of living here in BeMore, given what it's like out there beyond the walls in the open counties. And even those relative few who've secured a spot in the charter villages might find certain aspects of life here enviable, though they would definitely never say so we on the other hand will offer this. You could rely on the time here, the tread of the hours if you think about it. There's little else that's more important than having a schedule and better yet counting on that schedule, it helps one to sleep more soundly, to work steadily through one shift, maybe even to digest the hearty meals.

Speaker 5 (00:35:54):

And finally to enjoy all the free time available to us right up to the last minutes of the evening. Then if the stars are out and they do seem to be out most every night, now we can sit together in our backyards and wave a hand to neighbors over the fences and view our favorite programs while sitting in the open air and authentically believe that this stretch of sky sings its chorus of light for us alone. Who would tell us we are wrong? Let them come forward. Let them try to shake our walls. Our footings are dug deep and if they like, they can even bring up the tail of fan. The young woman whose cause has been taken up by startling number of us, she's now gone from here and whether she's enduring or suffering or dead is a matter for her household. Whatever their disposition, they are gone too.

Speaker 5 (00:36:48):

Transferred to another facility in the far west, the best scenario for them after the strife she caused, we can talk about her openly because hers is no grand tragedy, no apocalypse of the soul or of our times. Yes, there are those who would like to believe otherwise that each and every being in the realm is a microcosm of the realm that we are heartened and chastened and diminished and elevated by a singular reflection. This is a fetching idea, metaphorically and otherwise most often enlisted for promoting the greater good. But more and more we can see that the question is not whether we are individuals, we can't help. But this has been proved case by case we are not drones or robots and never will be. The question then is whether being an individual makes a difference anymore that it can matter at all. And if not whether we in fact care did fan care about such things.

Speaker 5 (00:37:52):

We can't be certain we know much about her daily life, but that still leaves a great deal to be determined. She was perhaps brighter than most, certainly less talkative. But otherwise, in terms of character, not terribly distinctive nor would anyone have thought she could do the thing. She did such a lamentable action. She did stand out physically and not because she was beautiful, she was pleasing enough to look at. She was tiny, was the thing just 150 centimeters or not quite five feet tall and slim besides which made her the perfect size for her job in the tanks at 16, she had the stature of a girl of 11 or 12. And thereby when first encountered she could appear to possess a special perspective that one might automatically call wisdom but is perhaps more a kind of timelessness of view. The capacity as a child might have to see things and people and events without the muddle of the present and all it contains perhaps fan truly had that kind of clarity and not just assemblance of it, but if we may let us picture her before the trouble, just as she was clad in black, neoprene only the pale gleam of her bare feet and hands and face to indicate her humanity.

Speaker 5 (00:39:15):

Once she pulled on gloves and flippers and her eye mask, she looked like a creature of prey, a sleek, dark, seabird, knifing into the waters. Of course, that's not what she did in the tanks where her job was to husband and nurture the valuable fish that allow our community to do so well in this mostly difficult world. She was one of the best in her function as a diver, easily able to hold her breath for two minutes or more while she scrubbed and vacuumed and replaced tubing and filters and patched whatever tears had formed in the linings, a half weight vest to hold her beneath the surface. Even that was almost too heavy for her. And she would have to bend her knees while at the bottom of the two meter deep water and propel herself upward to breathe before descending again. Her various tools attached to her work belt once submerged, a diver is not easily seen given all the fish in the water naturally as many healthy fish are raised as possible.

Speaker 5 (00:40:17):

She is a mere shadow among them trained to do her task quickly and unobtrusively. That is why she uses no special breathing apparatus aside from a snorkel, compressed gases causing too much of a disturbance. Fearful fish are not happy fish. The diver is not one of them, but is part of the waterscape from the time they're hatchlings and they see her customary form and the repeated cadence of her movements and the gentle motor of her flipper feet, that must come to them like a motherly lullaby, a dream song of refuge right up to the moment of harvest. The diver is there at harvest of course, and sees to it that the very last of them finds its way into the chute. And it is only then for the span of the few hours while the tank is being cleaned and filtered before the next generation of hatchlings is released, that the water is clear of activity that the diver is alone.

Speaker 5 (00:41:15):

How somber a period that must be the constant light from the grow bulbs filtering through the canopy of vegetables and herbs and ornamental flowers suspended above the tanks, throws bluegreen glints about the facility walls, this cool Amazonian hue that suggests a fecundity, primordial and unceasing. The diver inspects each aquarium, which is roughly the dimension of a badminton court. And by the end, she's exhausted, not by the work or holding her breath, but instead from the strange exertion of pushing against the emptiness for she is accustomed to the booing lift of their numbers. How sometimes the fish seem to gird her and bear her along the tank walls like a living scaffold or perhaps lead her to one of their dead by swarming about its upended corpse or even playfully school themselves into just her shape and become her mirror in the water at the pellet drop.

Speaker 5 (00:42:11):

They're simply fish again and thrash upward mouths, agape, the vibrato of the water chattering and electric as if bees were madly attempting to pass through her suit. And wouldn't it be truth enough to speak of those bristling hundreds as not only being cared for by the diver, but as serving to shepherd her too through the march of days for who is she given the many hours she and all the other members of her household spend at their jobs? And how generally sparse their conversation is during downtime or when they're having their morning or evening meal while watching a vid or game all around be more. It's much the same, which is happy enough, but maybe it's the laboring that gives you shape. Might the most fulfilling times be those spent solo at your tasks, literally immersed or not. When you are able to uncover the smallest surprises and unlikely details of some process or operation, that in turn exposes your proclivities and prejudices both.

Speaker 5 (00:43:14):

And whether or not there is anything to be done about it, you begin to learn what you value most for fan more than the other. Divers took to the tanks with a quiet abandon, rarely climbing out at the ending hour to peel herself for the suiting in the changing room with the others. She would appear just as they were leaving for home or if she didn't and they grew concerned, someone would go to her tanks and check that she was still working. For divers have perished from time to time as they can believe too. Well they are one of the throng, but fan would be there simply swimming about scrubbing or patching and the other diver would splash the water and wait until fans surfaced with a thumbs up. She once told us that she almost preferred being in the tanks than out in the air of be more that she liked the feeling of having to hold her breath and go against her nature, which made her more aware of herself as this mere lone body.

Speaker 5 (00:44:12):

In the hour or so after the shift with no more tasks to be done, she would pull her knees to her chest and drift to the bottom and stay there in that crouch until her lungs screamed for forgiveness. She wasn't inviting oblivion or even testing herself, but rather summoning a different kind of force that would transform not her, but the composition of the realm, make it so the water could not harm her. And we would say, please, fan, please, you cannot truly believe this. And she would almost smile and mostly nod. But the impression you were left with was that she did in fact believe in such a possibility. And if that is an indication of her instability, everything else that happened makes sense and no more needs to be accounted for. But let's suppose another way of considering her, which was that she had a special conviction of imagination. Few of us do, to be honest, we wish and wish and often with fury, but never very deeply for if we did, we'd see how the world can sometimes split open in just the way we hope that it and we in fact are unbounded free. Thank you.

Speaker 3 (00:45:35):

Thank you for going against your nature and reading for us. Both of you started writing very young. Native speaker was published when you were 29 or 30. And Chris, I think I remember you saying that you won a writing contest for teenagers when you were maybe 11 10, 10 entered under a false age and won the contest

Speaker 4 (00:45:57):

And won the contest.

Speaker 3 (00:45:59):

Do you have any advice now that you are much further along in your career for younger writers who are just starting out that you wish you could have known or that you've learned through your experience?

Speaker 5 (00:46:10):

I think one of the things that I've seen over the years as a teacher and someone who's been trying to write all these years is that people often get, and I knew that this was the case with my first novel native speaker, that was when I was 29, but I'd written a whole book before that right out of college. I think I suffered from the curse of what I think happens to a lot of people, which is younger writers tend to be super impatient. They never give themselves the leisure of really thinking things through, of really marinating in the work of really letting the language speak to them. And I think it's because they have so much ambition and energy and exuberance. But I think sometimes you can just roll over that. Sometimes that exuberance really works to your advantage, of course. But I find that lesser experienced writers tend to move so fast, they don't see all the wonderful things that they're laying down for themselves as a sort of guide for what's going to be next,

Speaker 3 (00:47:14):

Chris?

Speaker 4 (00:47:15):

Well, I mean, it's really hard to talk about this because one of those annoying people who kind of always knew what they were going to do. I published my first novel at 16, so I've been doing this as long as, but here's what it is, I think, and maybe it's a cultural difference. I think that what happens to a lot of young writers is they get lost in the romance of being a writer, that they're somehow special and that they're channeling something important. And this is not the case. Writing is a job. You're a carpenter, you're building a table. And if you're a carpenter who says things like, I don't make round tables, then you, you're not really going to know how to make tables. It's a job and it's a craft and it must be approached as that. And so what's the hardest thing for younger writers to figure out is how to separate their own real neurosis.

Speaker 4 (00:48:09):

We all live with neurosis, but there are really important neurosis. Will I ever be loved? Will I ever find love? These are important neurosis, but it's really hard to be a writer. It is not an important neurosis. It's a waste of time. Just write. And I remember one time personal Everett an amazing guy. He was my professor in the PhD program and we worked on my first American novel for nine months together, Graceland. We'd done like 12 drafts. He was crazy. He'd call me at 4:00 AM and be like, are you asleep? It's like, no, not anymore. It was like, good, you should be writing. And I remember when I finished the draft, it was again towards the end of it, and I said to him, I'm really, really worried about this. And he said, why? And I said, because this book is shit. No one's going to publish it.

Speaker 4 (00:48:56):

And so he took me on a trip to Barn and Noble and he said, as we're walking down the fiction night, he just said, pick random books. So I ended up with a big stack of them and he took me up to the coffee shop and he bought me a cup of coffee and he sat me down. He said, I'll be back in 30 minutes, make three piles. The shit pile, the good pile and the important pile. And so he comes back and there's a pile like that and a pile like that, and a pile like that. So he points to the big pile and he says, what pile is this? And he says, that's a shit pile. He says, well, why are you worried? Your book is shit is bound to be publish.

Speaker 4 (00:49:28):

So he said to me, what's wrong here is that you're not asking the right question. The question, what you're really trying to ask is write an important book. And the moment you start to do that, all those ridiculous neurosis move away. And then what happens is you actually confront the deeper neurosis and that gets, somehow, it becomes this kind of melancholy that seeps into the work and helps you shape it and makes you take it seriously and take yourself seriously. And I'm known for confronting students in rather rude ways. At one point a few months ago, I lost my temper in my M FFA class, and apparently I don't remember this, apparently, I said to them, right, literature motherfuckers or Get the fuck out. And so a bunch of them made a t-shirt with this and wore it to commencement. So I just think that that's really what it is, is to take the work you make very seriously, but don't take yourself seriously at all. That's really the only thing.

Speaker 3 (00:50:29):

Well, and both of you teach writers and are managing to write on the side. How is that balance happening while you're spending so much energy working with fostering other writers? How are you able to divide the time and manage your own writing?

Speaker 5 (00:50:45):

It's difficult. I always say that often it's hard to want to go to class because I'm working on something that said I enjoy my students and I enjoy the teaching. So when I exit the class, I'm always happy. But getting t


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