(Bob Shacochis, Michael Thomas, Roxane Gay, John Freeman, Pablo Medina) A panel featuring three incredible, diverse Grove voices: cultural critic, essayist, and novelist, Roxane Gay; poet and novelist Pablo Medina, and IMPAC award winner Michael Thomas. Together, these authors will discuss their writing processes and read from new and/or forthcoming work. The conversation promises a range of thought, experience and opinion that will be invaluable to audience members who are there to learn about craft and be exposed to new and varied writing.The conversation will be moderated by author, literary critic, and former Granta editor, John Freeman.

Published Date: June 25, 2015

Transcription

Speaker 1 (00:03):

Welcome to the A W P podcast series. This event was recorded at the 2015 A W P conference in Minneapolis. The recording features Roxanne Gay Pablo Medina and Michael Thomas. You will now hear vice president of the A W P Board of Directors, Robin Regler and moderator of the event John Freeman provide introductions.

Speaker 2 (00:33):

Welcome, Ola. My name is Robin Regler. I'm the vice President of the A W P Board of Directors and I'm here to welcome you to this event. Before we start the presentation, I have a few quick requests. If you could please silence your cell phones for the reading and presentation, that would be great. Remember, there is no flash photography allowed during the presentation. Also, please give the writers about 15 minutes after the presentation to get out to the book signing table where they will be to sign your books. I want to thank Grove Atlantic Press for sponsoring today's event and without further ado, please welcome John Freeman.

Speaker 3 (01:23):

Thank you for that moderator love. We never get it. Welcome to finding your voice otherwise known as the what happens after three Days at a w p shouting at the Hilton to your friends that the bar is closing. Speaking of cell phones, I'll just reiterate, turn that off. Or Pablo will personally go out there and put a cigarette out on your phone here to talk Finding your Voice. So the idea of this panel is to talk about that spooky thing that writers do where you feel that you're spoken to on the page. And it occurred to me that we used to have one place for a lot of things. We went to the newspaper for news. We went to church for spirituality or guilt. We went home for abuse or love, and now thanks to the Internets and the tubes, we have a lot of places that we can be all at once simultaneously.

Speaker 3 (02:18):

And because of that, I think when we read something written that feels like it was written for us, we sit up and pay attention when it feels like someone is speaking to us, speaking personally to us, telling us a story that they have to tell. And in fact, in the telling of it, it is the only thing that they can do to make sense of what they're telling us. That necessity to me mixed with the first person is exactly what voice is about and this panel is an attempt to, I guess break that down a little bit. But before I introduce the panelists, let me just show you a little bit about what I'm talking about. Once upon a time in a far off land, I was kidnapped by a gang of fearless, yet terrified young men with so much impossible hope, beating inside their bodies. It burned their very skin and strengthened their will right through their bones. They held me captive for 13 days. They wanted to break me. It was not personal, I was not broken. This is what I tell myself.

Speaker 3 (03:31):

That's from Roxanne Gaze, an Untamed State, which is one of three books that she's written in addition to I E t, A Collection of Short Stories and Bad Feminist, which was a New York Times bestseller. She's been best American Short stories, best American Mystery stories. She's also a competitive Scrabble player. She's a professor of English at Purdue and is essay editor at the rumpus co-editor of Pink. And she will soon be, or is actually now I'm not sure, leading a vertical at the Toast, which will be called Butter Hunger. Her new book is out in 2016. Here's another example of voice. I came to CBO City as a boy, brought here by my parents who fled one Sodom and entered another and never looked back. My father was a soap maker. My mother was a housewife before I was born. She'd been an aspiring torch singer after I was born, she gave up the torch and tried to be a mother, but motherhood wasn't in her.

Speaker 3 (04:33):

She did everything in her power to keep me from coming into being, but she failed. Here I am. This is the opening of CBO City Blues by Pablo Medina, which is one of more than 12 books, which he's written, translated or edited, put together. He is a poet and memoirist. He teaches at Emerson University in Boston. He was born in Havana and came to New York at age 12. Something I'll always be grateful for because these books made that possible. One more example, I know I'm not doing well. I have an emotional relationship with a fish. Thomas Strawberry. My oldest son c named him and that name was given weight because a six-year-old voiced it as though he'd had an epiphany. He looks like a strawberry. The three adults in the room had nodded in agreement. That's the opening of Man Gone Down kind of novel that the Great American novel category was created for it's Michael Thomas's first book published in 2007. It won the 2009 Impact Prize and was named one of the 10 Best Books of the Year by the New York Times. He teaches that Hunter and is preparing his next book, the Broken King, a memoir about four generations of men in his family for publication this year. Sure, yeah. Alright, it's decided it's on the catalog now. Elizabeth, you can't back out. Please join me in welcoming our panelists.

Speaker 3 (06:08):

Alright, let's fire it off. First question. As infants we learn to speak by being spoken to and I think the same kind of idea applies to writers that someone speaks to us and clicks the switch on. Can be a person, could be a parent, could be a writer, could be an incident. And I wonder if each of you could talk a little bit about what that trigger switch was starting with Roxanne.

Speaker 4 (06:36):

That's a good question. I think it started with the Little house in the Prairie Books by Laura Ingles Wilder. I'm from Nebraska and growing up I would read all kinds of things and they were often about people who lived lives that were entirely different from mine and they happened in big cities and lots of exciting things were happening and it didn't really reflect my reality, which is not to say that a little House on the Prairie reflected my reality though I did go to school in a wagon, but when I read those books, I saw that you could be a girl from the Midwest and still have stories that matter and those stories could be told with confidence and Witt. And that really began to help me at least consider that I have a voice and that my voice might someday matter.

Speaker 3 (07:28):

Was the voice that developed in your head as you were reading, connected to the voice that started writing stories as a child?

Speaker 4 (07:35):

Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. I've been writing little stories since I was about four years old. I used to draw villages on napkins and then I would write stories about the people in those villages. And the older I got, the more I could see the similarities between these sort of small communities that I was creating and the small communities that were grasping for survival on the planes. And so there was absolutely a symbiotic relationship between my stories and the stories that most influenced me.

Speaker 3 (08:07):

Pablo, I'm curious, in CBO city, the narrator also known as storyteller, learns English partly from his parents' domestic help, but also by reading Encyclopedia Britannica. Was that the unlocking key to your voice?

Speaker 5 (08:22):

Absolutely not. Thank God. I dunno what it was, frankly, but mostly I think voices related to memory and thinking about this panel, I remembered mine must've been four or five, my grandmother who taught me how to play chess, she taught me how to play canasta and how to cheat at it, and she taught me by example how to eat. And I still remember her having a fried snapper and after she was done with all the meat, she took the head and stuck a knife in it and opened a hole in the skull and sucked out the brains. And I was horrified, but obviously she thought this was some sort of delicacy and it was that moment between the horror and her pleasure that I think sparked something in me.

Speaker 3 (09:21):

Did she tell you stories as well or was it mostly just mutilating animals? All

Speaker 5 (09:24):

The time, but I never did get to ask her how those brains tasted. Tasted. I'm still wondering,

Speaker 3 (09:33):

Michael, what about you? What was the trigger? I don't think the trigger's been pulled yet. I'm still searching for, and it's probably said memory. I started reading fairly early, but I didn't speak until late. How late? Maybe 11. You were silent for about, yeah, four or five. I didn't speak very much. My house was strange. A lot of sounds and a lot of visuals in my mom's from the south, my dad's from urban north, they sounded different. My neighborhood was a mix of Irish Catholic, Italian, black Caribbean, up south Northern, so I didn't know how to sound, so I just didn't want to be embarrassed. I didn't know how to shape a sound. My father sounded, my father also had a lot of different voices. He had a Boston accent, but he also had this Emersonian Miller beer enthused voice, so I didn't know how to gather it up, so I just didn't say anything and sound had a strange effect on me.

Speaker 3 (10:39):

I tasted it would have a physical reaction to sound, so it's something I still struggle with now with how to be and how to sound even in my head. What kind of things would he say your father, if you had a laugh track that was made up of four comments that your father would make? I was at a poetry reading and Susan Wheeler was reading these poems in her mother's voice and one of them just had this line, I think these saltines are stale. I think my mother said that too. But was there things that your father would say that echo in your head? My dad, not so much. He'd say, Michael, I believe in a wider society, not a wider one, a wider one.

Speaker 3 (11:24):

But my mom had these crazy lines I was talking about with a friend. One was tough titty said the kitty, I ain't going to chase you all around Robin Hood's barn and I'll snatch you. Right. So trying to reconcile those things. I didn't talk, I just kind of stared into space, so I'm not sure if it's funny. It wasn't funny then I guess it's funny now everything's funny with time. Roxanne, I'm curious about this idea about diction and accents because one of the great things I guess about the American literary language is it's a creol eyes language and it's constantly grabbing stuff from the street and putting it into literature, and that's what makes it so vibrant. But of course growing up, if you are from California like I am, you have to drop. Awesome. Otherwise people think you're an idiot. And I wonder if there were things that you came into, your parents are from Haiti, grew up in Nebraska, if there was a collision between how you were told to speak and the voice that was developing in your head and what it wanted to say?

Speaker 4 (12:31):

There was definitely a collision because I was American when I went to school and I was Haitian when I came home. My parents are both from Haiti and at home we speak a mixture of English, French, and Creole. And so I would have this one voice in my head that was this pais, this mix of these languages that we used interchangeably and oftentimes with no reason or rhyme. And then I would go out into the world where I had to talk like an American and sound like an American. And so it was a battle for a very long time. It was also challenging because in Creole there are words and phrases that simply don't exist in English and are very difficult to translate. And so oftentimes I would want to communicate an idea or a feeling or an experience, and all I could think of was the Creole version. And I didn't quite know how to convey that. The older I've gotten, the more comfortable I've gotten with just writing certain phrases in Creole and using context. Juno Diaz certainly gave me the confidence or the courage to believe I could do that too, the way he uses Spanish and English interchangeably. And just hoping that I put enough context in my words for non Creole speaking readers to be able to understand what I'm saying.

Speaker 3 (13:54):

Pablo, your books in some ways are constantly translating memory to the present. And I wonder if you could talk a little bit about the way that the voice has to carry that translation.

Speaker 5 (14:08):

Yeah, although everybody's constantly doing that at some level said at one point that we're always translating ourselves from thought to language and from language to audience. My first language was Spanish, and though I learned English in school in Cuba, really didn't use it on a regular basis until we came to New York City. And then the explosion began and I was just hearing this incredible language, which is English, but not English was New York but wasn't New York. It was very confusing and I didn't quite know how to place myself within that realm. And I still remember that I was working at a factory in the summertime and this guy who had a Spanish name came up to me and says, you want to have lunch? I said, sure, I'll have lunch. And we started talking and I got his name and I said, where are you from? And he said, I'm a Latin from Manhattan. And that nicely rhymed phrase did it all for me. And all of a sudden I knew where to place myself a Latin from my Manhattan. And ever since then I've been trying to make myself in that image.

Speaker 3 (15:35):

You translated poet New York? Yes. And I'm curious if you could talk about that project and Lorcas sort of work. Was he translating himself in those?

Speaker 5 (15:47):

Oh, I think so. He was translating a very deep part of himself. At one point in one of his letters he said, I wrote poet in New York. I should have written New York in a poet because he came to New York ostensibly to study English at Columbia University, but he didn't learn a word. He didn't go to a single class. Instead he just roamed the cities. The city went to parties, charm people was horrified too by that monster of a city. And he came in August of 1929, and then in October of 1929, as you know, the stock market crashed. So he was able to see New York and its worst moment up until that time. And when my Cott translator and I, mark Statman and I decided to do this translation, we realized this is right after nine 11. We realized that something awful happened in the city, which kind of connected to that poetry that Garcia Orca had written and resonated very, very clearly between those poems and the actual event and the aftermath of the event that we experienced. So that's how the project got started.

Speaker 3 (17:07):

Keep me on poetry, Michael. One of the godfathers of Man Gone Down is ts E and especially Tss E of four quartets. And this idea, which if you read the poem recently of the raid on the inarticulate, I think is such a great kind of keyhole to a lot of fiction. And I wonder if you could talk about Man Gone Down in that context because it's a very talky book written in the first person. And you can just read from this. Yeah, you want to read from that? Yeah. No. Is that a napkin? Sorry, what is that? It's four quartets. Oh, you have it with you? Yeah, always all times. I didn't plan this. This is pure matter. If you're

Speaker 5 (17:52):

Leaf through that one, I think you should get a new copy before

Speaker 3 (17:54):

It flows. Yeah. I'm not good to my books. But I mean, is that what your character is trying to do is to sort of drill down into the part of himself that's not yet spoken? Well, I'm remembering a lot of things about my childhood through my children, especially my middle child. My son Miles, he read early, but he had difficulty speaking the only way he could speak was to cobble other people's language together. So movies or books or things. People said he didn't have his own words, so he'd use them as proxies for his experience. And now that he's 16, he's starting to understand how to use language, but he's still in that limbic state and he does a lot of the things that I used to do. I said didn't speak, but I would howl and make sounds. And so he used to run through the house going like that all the time.

Speaker 3 (18:50):

There was no other. And it's a language. So using language, using words and using language aren't necessarily the same thing. Word being a subset of language. So I would use my body, I'd go run into walls or I'd make wings or things like that, trying to communicate stuff. But getting back to Elliot, I guess Elliot for me discovering him at about 12 or 13, I was just running about this. I used it as a spell to get my mother to leave me alone. One day was the loud lament of the consulate kyira. She just looked at me like, what the hell are you talking about? But she backed off and thought, I've got this book of spells. So they were that at first and then they were things to obsess about and I use them as in connotations or prayers or meditations. And I just got obsessive about them as you can probably see.

Speaker 3 (19:48):

But always as a proxy for experience, but also the difficulty of folding these different languages or seemingly disparate experiences into my own, but also recognizing, oh, that's what I wanted to say. You said something interesting. You said using your body as expression, and I know just from Googling you've worked as a, I'm reading a little bit of this new memoir, you worked as a plumber and carpenter, you can see he's got some serious guns. So he's a handsome guy. I'm sorry. But in truth, did you do those jobs out of necessity or were you drawn to them because it was a way of being in the world that meant you could be left alone largely and work physically. It was a way for me of making money, but also staying out of the world, not teaching or publishing or doing anything. I could just get my tool belt or sharpen my knives and go out and then come home, not speak or not do anything or as you were saying, speak a language with my hands by making a desk or framing a door or framing a house or something like that.

Speaker 3 (21:02):

Or welding. Yeah, playing sports was a language always was. That was really, I think my first mature language. My brother, my sister, my cousins. And we would Johnny most, I don't know if anyone's a Boston person. No. He was a famous announcer for the Celtics and he was incredibly biased. So he would say things like, we'd watch the tv but listen to him if it was a national broadcast. And the first thing I heard was, Jojo stops, he pops bang. And you'd listen and watch. And Jojo White wasn't doing any of this stuff. Like Jojo fiddles, he diddles bang. And when they play the Lakers and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar just molested Larry Bird.

Speaker 3 (21:52):

And so we would broadcast our own Woo football games and hockey games and just listen to the way these commentators. So we had Ned Martin doing the Red Sox and just a bunch of really great commentators and I think that's where it started. I don't know how I got from Elliot to then Martin, but that's the trouble with speaking, I guess rolling it up into a ball. Did you ever listen to Bill Walton announce? Yeah. I can't stand it. He's a real wet talker. But one of the things he was always commenting on the players. He used to say all the time Shaq is all lathered up. And it was really walked in a bunch of cliches and these platitudes and this false morality, this fugues on class and what are you talking about? Dope smoker from the Pacific Northwest following the dead around. What are you talking about?

Speaker 3 (22:42):

And a lot of it was have this racial and class commentary about what it is to be an athlete and how one's supposed to comport themselves. It's very strange stuff. Yeah. Well it bridges into something I'd also like to talk about vis-a-vis your books, which is the way that words are kind of written on the body and the words can be testimony. And I found each of you in your novels, the most recent ones are the story of your characters is also the story of them finding a voice in a way, especially Roxanne and yours. You have a character who's been kidnapped, who's being assaulted, raped, abused, and to survive, she has to play along, but she finds her voice. And I wonder if you thought about when you were writing this book, the arc of language across the book of her having to learn again in this new terrible context, how to speak.

Speaker 4 (23:40):

Definitely when I was writing the chapters where she's being held hostage or being held hostage while her father limits whether or not he's going to pay for his child, I wanted the language to be different because she starts to lose language as she begins to lose hope. And then in the flashback scenes where she's remembering her life as it was, the language is fuller and richer because that's the more whole and healed part of herself. And so the novel is split into two parts and at the beginning of the second part, she's running to freedom because she's finally been released and at that point she has no language at all. She can't articulate anything about what she's been through. She can't ask for help. She thinks she's speaking, but whatever she's saying is just garbled to everyone who hears her. And over the course of the second part of the novel, she has to try and find a way to speak again and to give testimony to what she's been through and how she has changed. And so I've thought very carefully about the language choices I used in the present and the past as I wrote the novel and in the first and the second parts of the novel to show how you can lose your voice and then to heal, you have to try and recapture that voice.

Speaker 3 (24:59):

It's a harrowing read. It's like a day in the life of I ivi, but in a very different setting. I wonder if you can read a little bit of it for us. I happen to have a copy right here.

Speaker 4 (25:09):

Thank you. I was going to read something different, but you read the first part. So now I'm going to read the first part I was just referring to it's not that pleasant that it's not as bad as it gets. Sorry, I'm always apologizing because people say your book, I wasn't ready. I'm just like Go to good reads.

Speaker 4 (25:34):

They'll tell you all about it. So this is the first chapter of the second part of the novel where she has finally been released after 13 days because her father has finally relented and paid the ransom for her. I ran down an unfamiliar street, my bare feet slapping against the pavement. I was free even if I did not know it yet or my body was free and my mind was in the cage. It was hot. Early evening, the hush of a day ending. I ran over shards of broken glass, felt my skin come apart neatly I bled. My feet were slick. I did not stop running. The commander told me to run until I could not run anymore. So that is what I did. My thighs burned. It was strange to be able to move so freely to breathe fresh air. I wanted someone to find me.

Speaker 4 (26:28):

I wanted to stop. I kept running. When I passed people standing in their doorways or ambling down the street, I stiffened. I knew they could not be trusted. I ran. I saw a cross rising into the sky. Reaching up a church would be a safe place. I hoped I was so tired, I was load some. I was not a person. I was no one. I was nothing. Sweat dripped down my face, burning my eyes, rolling uncomfortably into my ears. I took the stairs into the church two at a time, leaving bloody footprints. It was dark and quiet in the chapel where it smelled faintly of incense in the far corner there was a thin line of light in the silhouette of a door. I paused, leaning forward, panting heavily. I swallowed. I followed the edges of the room toward that sliver of light. I wanted to find something perfect behind that door.

Speaker 4 (27:23):

I wondered if I might find someone masquerading as God. My stomach was hollow. I was so hungry. I thought of the sensation of a dry disc of communion wafer on my tongue. When I reached the door, it was warm to the touch. Music was playing Barry Manalow singing about the Copa Cabana. My mother loves Barry Manalow when I was a little girl. She had his records and sometimes I caught her staring at them tracing Barry's face with her finger. I knocked on the door three times. I knocked so hard, it made my knuckles ache. I drew blood, I marveled, I could still bleed. An older man finally answered. I tried to concentrate on who I had been before I became no one. There was a name and the memory of it lingered on my tongue. Help me. I said The man looked at me carefully reached for me, but I stepped away and bumped into a wall.

Speaker 4 (28:18):

I hissed. There was a name of a woman I had once been. I rubbed my forehead wanted so desperately to remember the name. So someone who knew me, who knew I had been might come for me. Please say something. The stranger asked, staring at me curiously, I need help. I said, hot air rushing from my chest. The stranger shook his head. I don't understand you, he said. I repeated myself. My chest tightened. I looked back toward the church doors hoping the commander had not chased me down again. I wanted to barricade myself in the sanctuary. What is your name? I pulled what remained of my shirt around my body so tightly mire, kidnapped. He approached me again in wide threads of fear, nodded around my throat, don't hurt me. The stranger smiled kindly. He was a small man, his white hair trimmed neatly. He wore a pair of dark slacks, a dress shirt and a tan cardigan with thick wooden buttons.

Speaker 4 (29:21):

You have nothing to fear for me. He said, what is your last name? There was a man who knew the name that had once been mine. A man with an easy smile and blonde hair. He wore too long hair that curled in his face in the morning when this man said the name that once had been mine. The sound came from deep in his chest. The sound of my name and his mouth spread easily was full of joy. I remembered a little boy who also had curly hair, both brown and blonde. His cheeks and thighs were chubby. I leaned against the wall behind me and sank into a tight crouch. I could see their faces. I could hear that man with the easy smile calling out to the woman. I had been calling out to me before I became no one. I said I took a deep breath. Michael, the name came out awkwardly. Sounded like three names rather than one. The stranger removed his glasses and looked at me closely. My goodness, I think I know you. I tried to give him some way of making sense of who I was. I was so lost. Thank you.

Speaker 3 (30:37):

If you don't have this book, you have to go get it. You can leave now. We'll keep going. Meantime, Pablo, I was curious if you could speak a little bit about your fiction in particular as written about the Cuban diaspora and the struggle to keep memories alive of a place that is not preserved in amber. That has obviously changed and obviously there's changes now in the relationship between the US and Cuba, and I wonder if that perceived or soon to happen change will affect or has affected the way that you're writing about memory now?

Speaker 5 (31:19):

I think I'm too old to be affected by whatever happens and my memory is sort of fixed in place and it's a place that it's more a notion than a nation. And by that I mean that it's ceased to exist actually. But it's the source of much of what I think about and what I transfer to the page as a continuum. But it's not going to affect me in any significant way. That doesn't mean that I'm not going to go back or stay. I have no idea. But you reach a point in which writing, especially fiction is about language and not so much about what happened, what is happening or what will happen outside of the page, but what happens on the page and trying to link sentences into some sort of coherent narrative that has its own dynamic and it doesn't necessarily follows what happens outside of that.

Speaker 3 (32:29):

Is that why CBO City is like, or basically New York, but it's not named as New York?

Speaker 5 (32:34):

No cbo. Just a little bit of explanation about that. CBO was a type of music, former music developed by Dizzy Gillespie and a great Cuban percussionist by the name of Puso. Chao came to New York and started playing with Dizzy and his orchestra and Dizzy all of a sudden said, there's something different going on here that hasn't happened. He kept telling Chano play those TomToms. He was talking about the Congu drums. We called them. I don't think that would be very politically correct these days, but that's the term he used. And out of that synthesis of Cuban rhythm and came this cbo and along came another Cuban musician, he wrote a composition called CBO City using very much that new kind of rhythm and music. So that's where the name CBO City came. But CBO City was New York back in the forties and from cbo it was just a step to Latin jazz. So I grew up in New York. I was listening to a lot of music then and a lot of these Latin musicians, a lot of them were Puerto Rican, there were Cubans, there were people from the Caribbean and so on, and they were really doing something very different and it was just New York speaking through them. So that's how I thought of New York. As Cuba city.

Speaker 3 (34:08):

I'm curious, is music part of your next project?

Speaker 5 (34:12):

Not at all.

Speaker 3 (34:13):

Do you want to lay some on us?

Speaker 5 (34:15):

Sure. This book called The Cuban Comedy, and I just read the first title. It's actually a translation of this mysterious biography that the narrator receives via attachment to an email. And so this is just a little bit of the beginning of it. Snow falls in many ways. In late autumn, wet snow floats down in small clumps. It falls so thickly that you think the world would drown in snow, but the flakes melt soon after landing. In mid-winter, the snow is dry with flakes like fine needles that seek you out and sting your cheeks and make you wish you'd stayed indoors. Sleet is snow and rain falling together and you can scarcely call it snow, except that it accumulates on roads and sidewalks and makes it quite a mess of it. For pedestrians at the crossings, not so much here but in the city where people actually get places by walking, there's light, snow and heavy snow and snow that is so soft it doesn't seem to fall, but gathers imperceptibly until there are two or three inches of it on tree branches, the picnic table, the dog dish, the lawnmower you left out in the yard the last time you cut the grass.

Speaker 5 (35:31):

Tonight the snow is not falling, but flying sideways, the wind is very strong, 30 miles an hour, the television said eight to 12 inches, expected the flakes as fine and sharp as brown glass. Daniel Garcia remembers walking with a friend in Paris after a snowfall. It was the first time Daniel had seen snow and he danced giddily around his friend who looked gravely at him and said, you Cubans suffer from a prenatal nostalgia for snow. The Frenchman was right. Cubans hate the heat almost as much as they hate the beach and the tropical sun, which beats down mercilessly most of the year and drives them to shade wherever they may find it. Daniel never became used to the desperation of summer afternoons when the air is thick as molasses and is difficult to breathe. He understands now why the sidewalks of old Havana are lined with arcades where one can walk out of the sun from one end of the city to another. He he's enthralled by snow, wants it to keep coming down until the roads become impassable and New Jersey comes to a complete snow utter stillness. That's what he longs for most and only the snow can provide that. On winter nights, he sits for hours in front of the window remembering his visits to Paris and Prague and the year he spent in Moscow surrounded by tough Russians, his favorite people and their vodka without which they would not be so tough.

Speaker 3 (37:11):

You can tell this guy's written six collections of poetry. You see that attention to language in CBOs city. I'm going to move on. Michael, you also know a tiny bit about music. You've probably heard you in an interview say you stopped at Coltrane, so you're in terms of jazz and I felt like the other godfather hanging over man gone down would be Ralph Ellison, who didn't quite, but almost codified his aesthetic around the jazz musician. Not so much as Albert Murray, but he was close. And I wonder, your novel is big and sprawling, but it's also intricately made. And I wonder if you were thinking of music, thinking of that as a kind of melody and a variation as a way of looking at how to tell that story. Well, I just think of the Baldwin line from Sonny's Blues. All I know about music is that most people never really hear it.

Speaker 3 (38:10):

I don't know. I listened to different things at the time. I grew up in a house with Glen Campbell and Chaka Khan. It was just things were on always. Oh, they didn't live with you. Sorry, they didn't live with you. No. Yes, they were there and they used to have terrible fights, mostly about keys and chord progressions. Yeah, I find myself certainly then going to music to figure things out. How did this musician do this? How did Otis Redding do this? And I think I've used musicians as role models. I started smoking because I wanted to sound like muddy waters and I And you stopped because you didn't want to sound like Tom.

Speaker 3 (39:00):

No, I stopped because my wife was pregnant and I was tired of going outside. I do miss it terribly, but going to songs and just again, that limbic, those were the first voices I heard. So that's where I go and I probably go to film next, the images, the end of the Godfather, the door shutting. How do I do that? How do I make that happen with words? But yeah, music throughout that, I don't remember writing that book, so I can't tell you what I was listening to. I'd stop listening to Coltrane because things would get crazy listening to Coltrane. But I was talking to a friend, they were asking about what I've been writing, and so I played Al Green. I don't know if anyone's seen this Singing A Change is going to Come. And I said, I want it to be that. And they just looked at me like what Al Green gets on his knees and is hollering and it's hard to rival Sam Cooke, right? But there he is on his knees and I want to be like that. I want to sound like that. And this is the soundtrack for your next book. I don't know, but I do want it to sound like something and I'm not sure what it is. And so that's been the struggle because when I do read it out loud, I hear all these influences that don't seem to cohere, at least to me. Why don't you let us judge and read a bit. Okay, look at that segue. That was smooth.

Speaker 3 (40:35):

I was going to read a non jazzy part. Maybe I should read a jazzy part. There's no music in this part. Sorry. This is about my son, Alex. It's called The Beautiful Game. When he was about three or four, he began to be troubled by the fact that he might be brown. His white schoolmate started asking him unanswerable questions. He was teased by some along with this. He sat through curriculums that introduced him to various historical figures. All were white, but it was more than these local pains. He seemed to have a premonition about what it would mean if he weren't. His discovery, I don't think was sudden. It took place over time in both the public and private spheres, although because of how gradually this feeling grew was very different. I couldn't help think, but about WB du Bois's, sudden realization, his Valentine spurning or the fictional characters like James Weldon Johnson's ex colored man who suddenly jerked the first world to the third rehearsed in Janie Alphabet who can't identify herself in a photograph.

Speaker 3 (41:39):

But when she's pointed out utters the regret. Ah, shuck, I'm colored. For Alex, that realization was more like a slow epiphany. The awareness of meaning or God and everything came to him like adult teeth, meaning rather than illumination was more like a passing shadow that God like Jonah's eternally dogged, hardly merciful. As much as he struggled with his racial identity, what it would cost him, he began to embrace brown people. His allegiance is ran counter to that which he at times sought to reject. When we'd watch sports, he'd root for the black pitcher, quarterback or coach. He weed their local struggle to win with the largest struggle to be free, which burdened he and they he found through the TV screen kinship with them or at least witnessed from the relative safely his relative safety. Those who were in the big sea, neither hiding below the deck of a storm to ship, nor in the belly of the whale, nor a adrift, but moving confidently through it.

Speaker 3 (42:38):

He conflated his burgeoning awareness with them and assumed whether it was true or not, that they were aware and grappling with the same things as he, and he was sure they'd win. As a boy, I had many heroes from Jim Rice to Achilles. I tried without much success to emulate the right-handed slugger swing, the Warrior's rage. Frederick Douglass was one of them. I'm not sure which came first. My trying to mimic the diction and syntax of his speeches and prose, or if a voice like his existed in my head before I knew of the man. I do know that my father spoke in the same emersonian grandiose manner, which in the late 20th century sounded absurd. But since I was an absurd child with a penchant for mythic transcendent language and thought whether or not it was inherent, I kept that voice as my own.

Speaker 3 (43:27):

And Douglas served me well, his legacy, his purpose. He was the perfect synthesis of courage or addition and rage, gentil in manner inspirational and oration brutal with his hands. When I got older and began to lean towards nihilism, his story straightened me out. When I thought about him, life had a purpose. He helped me form at least a temporary identity. Black people questioned my racial loyalties. I was often called an Oreo or a honky nigger. They'd mock how it spoke and I'd tell them that I sounded like the baddest black man. This side of Nat Turner. Sometimes my wife friends would refer to other black people with epithets and rather than apologize or retract, they explained that I didn't seem black or that I wasn't really black. And I'd tell them that my mother was from the Jim Crow South and had seen the burn crossed firsthand that we lived in public housing, that I was yet to meet a cop who was impressed by my linguistic facility and that not a single quotation from the western canon nor my deathless devotion to all of Boston sports teams or grant me safe passage through Charlestown, Rosalyn Dale or Southie, not even in the bleachers of Fenway.

Speaker 3 (44:34):

By the time Alex was six, he was ready. I was ready. I got him the abridged version of the narrative of the life of Frederick Douglass after his younger brother had heard his own story, we'd sit on the floor and I'd read, I read this version, the unedited version when I was his age, and I remembered how it had the unbalancing power of being both familiar and strange. Near and far. I'd read to Alex and he'd stare at the pages, perhaps envisioning the deep clefts in the author's feet, the endless fields full of dark people. Master Aaron Anthony standing on the porch or walking past the slave quarters, ignoring him. Perhaps Alex saw old Baltimore, the glyphs and c ciphers, young Frederick scrawled and chalk on the cobblestone streets. Mrs. ALDs cruel transition from educator to slavery. The inches given by good Christian folk and the Ls taken by niggers.

Speaker 3 (45:23):

When reading about the blessing and curse of literacy and knowledge, I couldn't help think of Baldwin's words and Sunny's blues concerning the danger of children who know too much too soon. I wonder what conflations were occurring in my son's mind. Whether or not the characters in the book found their likenesses in the world he lived in. Was it too much parenting as anything else requires balance how much you tell your child and when you tell them their preparation can either shackle or liberate them. And America being the parent of a black child, requires that an equilibrium is struck. The world you and your child inhabit is underpinned by the manual and cultural work of your ancestry. And in part, these contributions, if not celebrated, are certainly obvious. They are undeniable. I feel great pride, black pride because of this history, this present day, the potential up the mighty people.

Speaker 3 (46:16):

And this pride can be an incredible force that drives both the individual and the collective forward. This pride, real or not sanctimonious are not useful, not is an outgrowth of the underpinnings. There's of course the counterpoint, the bodies, the millions of bodies which are also our foundation. The other people perhaps equivalent to the achievement based pride that my country wants me dead, if not dead, then erased or assimilated. Which for any black person who has ever subsisted on dignity and pride and the hope that they would on their own terms have the right to move through their country with that same dignity and pride without fear of retribution, such acquiescence to their own disappearance is like saying yes to being a ghost. What am I knew the question was coming, had been coming. You're many things. He looked at me in a distant, unknowing way.

Speaker 3 (47:04):

You're the descendant of slave and slave master. He climbed up on the top bunk and laid top his covers. What are you the same sort of, what would you have been back then? A slave? What would I have been a slave. He saddened because of you? No, because of mom. She's not a lot of things, is she? I told him about our lines, the history of the folks, the Allens, the Millers and the Browns, the Thomases. I told him about Virginia, how my mother had been born not far from Douglas's Plantation. How Douglas, in spite of what he went through, married a white woman. I told him that although he is one of our nation's greatest sons, Douglas spent much of his free life in exile. And how a man with a mine like his unfettered from the absurd need to argue for his humanity could have done other great things.

Speaker 3 (47:52):

How many people with great minds have forgone what they desired their private dreams or risks, what they had done so that we could be free to be who we needed to be? Who we must be, our one true inalienable, right? We are free to choose, free to pay the cost for that choice, free to define ourselves. He could be what he wanted. Claim both worlds. All worlds without fear or shame. We all of us are so much more than our color. And when I look to him for an answer or another question, some kind of response, he was asleep.

Speaker 3 (48:35):

That's really beautiful. And now we know from today, it's coming out this year, right, Elizabeth? Yes. All moving on. Something you mentioned in that made me want to move on to the last question, then I'll open it up to questions from you guys. But that pressure to be erased obviously falls heavier on some people on our culture than others. And that difference is magnified when one is a writer. Roxanne, you've written fiction and nonfiction and I wonder if when you switch gears or sides of the page and you're writing with the I, that is you, if you move differently, if you have different sounds.

Speaker 4 (49:23):

No, I don't.

Speaker 3 (49:27):

Thank you.

Speaker 4 (49:31):

It's two sides of the same coin. I think both my fiction and my nonfiction are reaching for some kind of truth. And so for me, the rhythm I feel in my chest when I'm writing is the same for both fiction and nonfiction. And I don't know why, but it's about urgency and necessity and really demanding visibility for issues that Haitian. In my fiction. I write about other things too, but in my novel, this focusing on the issues that women in Haiti are facing, and in my nonfiction, I'm often tackling social issues

Speaker 3 (50:16):

Or people,

Speaker 4 (50:17):

Oh, well yes,

Speaker 3 (50:19):

I like when you tackle people.

Speaker 4 (50:21):

So do I do tackle people. I think that sometimes people behave in ways that demand response and we have to say something about it and we have to point out this behavior and say, this behavior is not acceptable. And I think that words are a great way to do that because they last, you'll forget about a TV broadcast eventually. But a book in many ways is forever. And so I like being able to take these kinds of things on and bring visibility to issues and people who are moving through the world in ways that I either approve or disapprove of. Mostly I disapprove. I find it to be useful.

Speaker 3 (51:06):

Pablo, you've written a memoir as well, and you use the eye there. You use the eye in fiction. Do they operate differently for you? Is the voice doing different thing? Well,

Speaker 5 (51:16):

I try and make 'em act differently, but they wind up being the same much as I try. The eye is just a, I like to think of it as a diving suit so that you go down under the water with this heavy diving suit and you try and find whatever is at the bottom of the water. You come up and you feel freer when you take the diving suit off. But it's still a diving suit. It's a disguise for what I'm dealing with on the inside. I mean, I think that every fiction writer at some point has to deal with whatever's going on on the inside and bring it to the surface and look at it. Speaking as a reader, I'm, I'm a voyeur. I'm looking at what I read, trying to figure out what's the connection between this fiction and this writer. I would make a terrible new critic because you were supposed to divorce the biography from the writing.

Speaker 5 (52:12):

But in my case, I'm looking at Hemmingway and try to figure out where is the real person in this. I just finished rereading Death in the afternoon, which is a great book. It's really a book about art, not bull fighting. And he's talking about bull fighting, but invariably he's talking about himself and he's talking about his own struggles, his own insufficiencies as a person. And once you discover that the book comes alive. And I think that happens. At least that's the way I read just about everything that comes across my hands with a eye toward who's the real person here and where's the disguise and where does the disguise come down and show me the real person. The one I'm going to identify with. I'm reading Elena Ferrante is my brilliant friend right now. It's a great book. And again, it's very close to autobiography, but you just don't know. So the mystery for me is trying to find out whether real Elena Ferrante lies.

Speaker 3 (53:14):

I once worked at a publishing company that bought a novel that came out last year that got a lot of attention that I won't name, but basically they didn't want us to circulate it in house. He hadn't changed the names yet.

Speaker 3 (53:26):

So apparently everything is in that little bit of change. Michael, final question for you and then we'll open up to the audience. You dropped James Weldon Johnson's name in that brief bit you read and I wonder why did you write what you wrote in this book as nonfiction rather than as a novel? Why use the fictionalized eye of yourself rather than the fictionalized eye of a character? Well, I'm trying not to be glib. I'm sorry. That was my resolution. I thought I could get more money. Was that true, Elizabeth? Really? I mean that was an idea in my head at that time. It was kind of desperate. But I didn't want to write a novel. I didn't want to write fiction. I want to write poems. And then I went to graduate school and wrote fiction and then I didn't want to write a novel. I wanted to write short stories and I with a novel and then I want to write a memoir. And I think I called them what Linked essays and they said, no, that's terrible. So I don't know. It was supposed to be one thing and it became another thing. I guess I brought up Johnson just because that if you haven't read this book, autobiography of an Ex Colored Man, another book, please leave and go get it. It's an incredible book. But if it were published today, everyone would say this is a hybrid

Speaker 5 (54:46):

Form. Originally it came out anonymously.

Speaker 3 (54:49):

Anonymously as an autobiography or people assumed it was, and other people claimed

Speaker 5 (54:58):

It's a book narrated by a man. His story, he's mixed race and he's passing and passing as a white person

Speaker 3 (