(T.C. Boyle, Ron Carlson, Kate Gale, Susan Straight) Celebrated authors Ron Carlson, Susan Straight, and T.C. Boyle present vastly different vistas of the American West, from the peaks and plateaus of the mountainous interior, to the endless variety of life in Central and Southern California, to the streets and alleys of Rio Seco, fictional seat of the Inland Empire. They will read from their work and discuss the importance of place in their writing. Moderated by Kate Gale, managing editor of Red Hen Press.

Published Date: December 9, 2015

Transcription

Speaker 1 (00:00:04):

Welcome to the A W P podcast series. This event was recorded at the 2015 A W P conference in Minneapolis. The recording features TC Boyle, Ron Carlson and Susan Strait. You'll now hear a w p Board of Trustees member Christopher Merrill and Kate Gale, managing editor of Red Press provide introductions.

Speaker 2 (00:00:33):

Welcome to this special extravaganza on rewriting the West, hosted by Red Hen Press. My name is Christopher Merrill. I'm a member of AWPs Board of Trustees, and we have just a couple of housekeeping issues to take care of. Please make sure you turn off your cell phones and remember that there is no flash photography allowed during the presentation and after the reading there will be a book signing. The books are for sale in the main lobby, but the signing will be taking place right outside the door. Give the writers a few minutes to get there. And now it's my great pleasure to introduce Kate Gale, who is the managing editor of Red Hen Press, who will be hosting this event.

Speaker 3 (00:01:23):

We are very excited to be here. Red He Press has been publishing poetry and prose in Los Angeles for 21 years, and it's been a really fun time. We got into publishing because we wanted to publish writing of the West, not because we wanted to duplicate what New York was already doing, but because we wanted to do something different. The kind of poetry that inspired us was the kind of poetry Claudia Rankin is writing that Pete Fairchild writes and that all these prose writers are writing big sprawling stories in which there's machinery against the sky and beaches and cliffs and people falling off those cliffs. When I think of what are the differences between West Coast stories and the stories you might read that are written in New York, I really think of air and light and space and all of the writers you're going to hear today are interested in place and how that affects how we think in the world and what we see and what we feel we can do.

Speaker 3 (00:02:24):

People come to Southern California to reinvent themselves. The thing about LA is that it feels like this mythical place where anything is possible. We have oranges, we have sex, we have drugs, we have parties, and that's before a w P comes to Los Angeles. So LA in 2016 is going to be amazing, right? People? Yes. I think of the California dream as being like the American dream only bigger. You don't just have, you have palm trees, you don't just have a house, you have a huge house. You don't just have a beautiful wife. You have a wife with ginormous breasts, you don't have a pet dog. You've got a pet dragon that's sort of like the American dream in neon, like the American dream, only bigger and better. And so I feel like all three of the writers that are here today have looked at how big a story can be and how a story can walk around on really big feet like Star Wars and allow us with our imagination to enter a whole new space. So we're very excited that all three of these writers are here today at a red hand press event here at a W P Minneapolis. We're all having an amazingly good time, right people.

Speaker 3 (00:03:50):

I'm going to introduce these three writers in the order in which they will be reading Susan Strait. We'll read first and then Ron Carlson, and then TC Boyle. When I talk about reinvention and the California dream versus the American Dream, I think of Susan Strait and her stories. She lives very near where she was born. I think she can see where she was born. The LA Times said there are two types of people, people who stay and people who leave. And Susan Strait is someone who's stayed. When you go to LA to reinvent yourself, if it doesn't work out, you move out to Riverside and then you have to start a whole new story. And Susan Strait is interested in what that story is. She's interested in sort of coming to the end of the line and what kind of a mythic place embraces people who haven't figured out who they are.

Speaker 3 (00:04:48):

When every time I go to uc, Riverside to give a talk, I encounter a group of students who have one thing to tell me. Susan Strait is the most amazing teacher you'll ever meet. I know some of her students are here today, and I think that it's an amazing thing to be someone who's a writer, but that is extremely generous to students and I know that's why she's so loved in southern California. Susan Strait was born in Riverside. She still lives there with her family. She can actually see the hospital from her kitchen window, which her daughters find kind of pathetic most days. She walks a dog past the classroom where she wrote her first short story at 16 at Riverside City College. She's published seven novels and one middle grade reader. Highwire Moon was a finalist for the National Book Award in 2001. A million Nightingales was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times book prize in 2006. Her short stories have appeared in Zoetrope, the Ontario Review, the Oxford American, the Sun, black Clock, and many other magazines. Her essays have appeared in the New York Times, reader's Digest, family Circle Salon, the Los Angeles Times, and many other places. She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to work on Highwire Moon and a Landin prize to work on Take one candle light a room. Please welcome the magical, the brilliant Susan Strait.

Speaker 4 (00:06:27):

Okay, so now I have to do the opposite of everything Kate just said. There's no wife with big boobs. There's none of that stuff. I have to tell a really quick little story about the man sitting next to me, TC Boyle. And by the way, Ron and TC are all, we are all teaching and they're great teachers too. And so I left Riverside when I was 17. My mom and dad put me in the pickup truck and dropped me off at U S C because I was supposed to be a sports writer so that my mother could meet Vince Scully with whom she was secretly in love. I guess my dad knows about it and doesn't care. So anyway, he's my stepdad and he's like, whatever, she'll come back. So I saw Tom Boyle and I was like, I'm not taking a class with him.

Speaker 4 (00:07:10):

He looks too scary. He looks like a biker from Fontana. And I just came from Fontana and so I was afraid of him and I was a sports writer and I hung out with football players. And then when I was a junior, I took a creative riding class and I wrote a short story and I never did take a class with you, but what you did was when I was a senior, he called me into his office, he sent for me and he said, you're a fiction writer and you should go to graduate school and here are the places that you should apply. And that made all the difference in the world, and I appreciate it because I wouldn't have done that if you hadn't told me that.

Speaker 4 (00:07:51):

Sometimes it takes that one little moment where someone tells you something that you know nothing about, and I knew nothing about college. Both my parents didn't graduate from high school. My mom had a green card when she was pregnant with me. So I am the classic person who didn't even know how to navigate college and that made the difference. I'm going to read you something that I haven't read for a long, long time because last night someone asked me about my brother and I started thinking about why we write fiction and about place because I knew that that's what Kate was going to talk about. So my brother and all my friends', childhood friends and family, they were pretty crazy actually. Now marijuana is legal, but my brother started growing marijuana when he was 10 and he was doing it hydroponically when he was 13, and that was in 1972.

Speaker 4 (00:08:39):

So he was really good at it. Yeah, so I'm sad that he is not here anymore and I will say more about that in a moment. But anyway, my brother was a master marijuana grower, but a lot of his friends manufactured methamphetamine and that was something we invented sort of, and we weren't proud of it, but it was what happened and I didn't do any of that stuff because I wanted to be a writer and I thought if I mess up my brain, I have nothing. But my brother came over to my house one day and he was really shaken up and he had been guarding a methamphetamine house. That was his job, and then he left and came to my house and it blew up the place where he had just been. So I'm going to read you a little section that I wrote a long time ago after he told me that story.

Speaker 4 (00:09:25):

It's from Highwire Moon because I thought that would work out well today it sleeps place in the desert, mountainous desert outside in Riverside County. Tiny rocks pinged under Elvis's father's truck. They stopped on a dirt slope and when Elvia stood up in the truck bed dizzy, her father's hand reached for hers, his palm as hard as a stone. His girlfriend Callie said, why'd you stop all the way down here? The house was up the hill, a brown wooden shoebox with a few matchbox size cars nearby. Her father said, I ain't taking the truck up that hill. This is close enough. I don't know what asshole might be hanging out. Still my toolbox, always hoping for the best. Right? Cali said, hoisting her son. Jeff's bottom onto her side. His thin white legs clamped around her like twist ties. So we got a hike. A lone mulberry tree stood like a feather duster in the yard when they made it up the hill. Elvia saw small toys scattered around the roots. A man blocked the doorway calling, who are you looking for? His voice came hard. From inside his beard, his hands were tucked inside his jacket. Elvia watched Callie smile and do her thing. Lee, she said like a lullaby. Lee called me up. She said, come on by and bring her these, the tiny glass pipes that they had made with a blowtorch from air fresheners cleaned inside the bag.

Speaker 4 (00:11:01):

El father said, look, all I want is a beer and a quiet place to sit down. Okay? And then the man grinned bone under the reddish hair and he said, you and me both man, them kids in there are driving me crazy. Ellie here is real good with kids. Callie said Quickly, come on sweetie. Her father and the other man walked toward the car. Their hands gesturing in his secret code, but inside the house was as hot as sleeping. Breath the darkness, a yawning mouth. Elvia smelled something sharp. Windex or pee coffee burned on the stove. The woman named Lee talked on a telephone balanced on her hunt shoulder while she bent over a box on the floor. Women always got to cook no matter what, right? She said, and then she hung up. Hey Callie, help me start on this box. The government's keeping all the rine locked up and some's coming from Mexico, but I can't get enough.

Speaker 4 (00:12:00):

Then her eyes landed hard and grey on Elvia and she said, who the hell is this? And Cali whispered is Larry's kid, her mom's Indian. She turned around and said, where's your kids? Lee bent her head toward a doorway and Cali said to Elvia, take Jeff in there sweetie. Lee's got some chips from the kitchen doorway. Elvia saw the huge blackened pots on the old stove. Lee handed her a bag of Doritos and then knelt again by the box. She pulled out packets of pills. I got these from the quick stop. We got Sudafed and Odac. Callie began pushing the pills from their foil packets, her thumbs curving as if she were snapping green beans on a porch and L v a guided Jeff's narrow shoulders toward the blue light coming from the bedroom.

Speaker 4 (00:12:55):

A baby slept in the crib against the wall, Elvia bent to see the small chest rising and falling as fast as she could blink. She smelled vinegar, milk, salt. That's my baby. A little girl said she was behind her. She was about three with blonde hair curled thin like spiderwebs around her ears. She wore pull-ups hanging low, and that's my brother. She pointed to a two year old standing near the bed. His diaper was heavy and long as a white beaver tail behind him vie stayed in the room for nearly an hour. She could smell chemicals threading through the air. Now like incense sharpened with burned metal, the little girl eventually slumped to her side and put her head in Avi's lap. The boys ate all the Doritos picking up the smallest triangles like confetti off the floor, and then they laid beside her too.

Speaker 4 (00:13:53):

All the breaths rose around her like slow crickets. She went back out into the kitchen and Lee hovered over the stove, tiny blue crowns of flame onto the pots. The shimmering air enveloped alvia. It prickled her ears and lips hot. Just put him down for a sec, that baby, because I got to do one more thing. Lee said, he'll be okay. I don't feel good. Elvia whispered taking off the baby's sodden diaper and Lee laughed. Cali came in. Lee's baby was rocking on his hands and knees his moon white butt in the air. Elvia couldn't breathe. Lee turned from her stirring to take the diaper and the baby's eyes were gleaming circles of wet. Elvia went back outside. She sat in the truck. She said, I don't want to be up there. And then when she moved the gear shift the truck down the dirt slope with her father in it, the house roof lept toward the sky in a shower of light, the explosion thumped the truck door and reached into knuckle burn.

Speaker 4 (00:15:02):

Elvis' cheek, her father had said, dammit, I knew we shouldn't stay. What the hell? What the hell? She blew it up. She blew it up. Elvia said The dark car raced down the knoll and passed him no headlights. A black cockroach skimming the dirt heading down off the mountain and that house was burning like a lone jacko lantern go. Elvis's father said, you want to learn to drive home? Goddammit, go. Ellie. Elvia imagined all the kids in the bedroom, their pale arms and legs twined around each other as she had arranged them. When she stood up, she pushed her foot carefully on the gas and turned the wheel. The truck rumbled back up the slope toward the waves of heat. I forgot about the kids. Her father said, what the hell were they doing in there cooking? She said, her eyes red and wide. She turned the wheels as he had taught her to do, to park on a hill.

Speaker 4 (00:16:04):

The hot air was a scalding tongue on her arm and she opened the truck door to look for somebody. Anybody who had gotten out the heat forced her to a crouch. And then the little girl's, tiny figure floated like a moth past the tree. Her hands came first and then her arms gray, her hair singed and her cheeks red. My mommy told me, run. She will get my brother and my baby. But then the house fell in on itself. Fierce traces of blue streaking the flames, and Elvia saw the little girl's eyes shining empty and silver as dimes. Her father grabbed the girl and pushed Elvie into the truck. He started again, spinning the wheels and Alveo pulled the girl onto her lap. The hair curled black near her small ear and her thumb was in her mouth and her eyes were closed to the embers floating in the sky when the truck rolled down the hill. Thank you.

Speaker 3 (00:17:14):

The first story that I read of Ron Carlson, I was teaching and it was in an anthology and it was called Bigfoot Stole. My Wife and I really fell in love with this story and got excited and started reading more Ron Carlson and I found the following story, which is I am Bigfoot, which Bigfoot tells his side of the story and one of the things he mentions is that he's read the first story and that it's not well-written. And I just immediately liked that so much because I felt like I got to know the author a little bit and I felt like I was in the same room with him and he was telling me stories. I think most people who have read Ron's short stories have several stories that they've fallen in love with. I also love what we wanted to do, which starts, what we wanted to do was pour oil on the heads of our enemies.

Speaker 3 (00:18:05):

But as everyone now knows, we poured warm oil and Ron is very interested between the gap between what we desire and what actually happens and how crossing that gap transforms us. He's the author of five short story collections and six novels, including Return to Oak Pine and The Signal. His fiction has appeared in Harper's, the New Yorker, Playboy, gq, best American Short Stories and the O Henry Prize Stories. His book of poems, room service poems, meditations, outcry and Remarks was published by Red Hen Press in 2012, and his second book with Red Hen is the Blue Box, and we're working on a third book, his book on writing. Ron Carlson writes, A story published by Graywolf is taught very widely and probably many of you in this room have read it. He's now the director of the writing program at the University of California at Irvine, and he lives at Huntington Beach. Don't you wish you lived there too? Please welcome Ron Carlson.

Speaker 5 (00:19:17):

Thank you. It's a privilege to be here with these fine writers and with you you find writers and I am going to read the first few pages of a book called The Signal, which is said in the Wind River Mountains, and is the book most about place of mind? Perhaps? Although place is very, very important to me as a writer, I, as we all know, nothing happens nowhere and I work hard to create someplace that I can believe in so something can actually happen. And so when I dealt with these mountains in Wyoming, I spent way too much of my time in offices and I wanted this book to be a real solid love letter to that place. And of course in that place there are trees and mountains and lakes and some big weather and the kinds of things we see in literature many times where it's used in a decorative way and the rain is not a decoration.

Speaker 5 (00:20:12):

And in my undergraduate classes, I banned the rain. I had to the someone would write. Then Cheryl walked away in the rain and I said, Nope, not a chance. She's going to have to be dry, but she can leave. And so when I wrote the rain and I wrote a campfire and I wrote a mountain of all things a mountain, it's difficult. I wanted to make them as real as possible so that this book would offer me some sucker when I turned around and read it. And what I do with place is many times right from what I know toward what I don't. So the opening little page here when he's unloading his truck, that is actually a place I've been. I don't think it's necessary to be the places that you create, but it's very important to occupy them with your very muscular and empathetic imagination.

Speaker 5 (00:21:02):

Okay, and this first page, Mac is 30 and he's waiting. He's hoping that his ex-wife will join him for a trip into the mountains. They made an appointment, but he's not sure she'll keep it. Then the rest of the section is when they were 17, he drove the smooth winding two track up through the high Aspen grove and crossed the open meadow to the edge of the pines at the Cold Creek trailhead and parked his father's old blue Chevrolet pickup by the ruin sign in the September twilight he had been right. There were no other vehicles. There had been no fresh tire tracks on the 10 mile ascent from the old highway except for the set of duals that had come almost halfway and turned around. That would've been Blue bride's horse trailer seeing to his cattle. The week before, Mack had seen two dozen heads scattered in the low sage all along the way.

Speaker 5 (00:21:53):

He got out of the truck and reached back for the coffee he'd picked up at the Crow Hart General Store. An hour ago it was cold. He walked back and opened the tailgate and sat finally lifting his eyes to look east across the tears of Wyoming and spread beneath him in the vast echelons of brown and gray. It was dark here against the forest, but light gathered across the planet and he could see the golden horizon at 150 miles. He wanted to see headlights, but there were none. He wanted to see headlights bumping up that old road to meet him here at the appointed hour. He could tell that it already snowed once sometime last week, but there was no sign of it now, no patches in the deep shade, no mud in the tracks, but the country was blonder. The grass is still standing but bleached once paler as if slapped by the first weather of the season, max sipped the cold coffee thick with cream and looked for her car. She would come or she wouldn't come and he would still have his mission. He said it aloud, she'll calm her. She won't, but you're still going in.

Speaker 5 (00:23:01):

He'd met Vonny when they were both 17 and he didn't like her immediately because it was his personal policy to dislike all the people who came to the ranch, the families from Gross Point and Greenwich and Manhattan and Princeton, and from the 10 other platinum republics in their beautiful flannel shirts and new Levi's. He treated them well and sought of their safety around the horses and he taught them what he could about the ranch and securing knots and fire safety and the birds and the snakes and the occasional bears. He took them to big springs and rock tree trailhead, but he didn't bring them here. He envied their gear, their bright boots, their gorgeous bone pocket knives, but he never stole one. He was quiet and known as being quiet and it was not an act. He had learned that it was the way he kept any power at all after his mother died of the cancer and his father and the ranch manager Sawyer Day saw the money story.

Speaker 5 (00:23:57):

They had started taking 10 weeks of guests in the summers. They needed the money. They hired a great cook, a woman named Amantha out of Logan, Utah, and she laid a table like he had never seen for that time. The ranch paid its bills. The reputation of Box Creek grew and they were booked steady all those years, 24 people every week, and Matt grew up with them for when he was 10, answering the same questions about horseshoes and hay and can I feed this horse an apple without him biting me a horse on a dude ranch eats a lot of apples. Vonnie's family came out from Chapel Hill where her mother was a professor of political science and he gave her the same horse every year. Rusty, a benevolent rone who was golden once a day if the sun was right. Vni was a strong athlete and played soccer in college, but Mack avoided her as he did all the guests.

Speaker 5 (00:24:50):

Many weeks the guests had romances with other guests, intrigues afoot and Mac had plenty of work grooming horses when the day ended while everyone showered in the big house and then in the two cottages and lined up for Amantha's, astounding buffet, plus his father had spoken to him after the third summer. It was obvious the way the kids hung out by the rail fence when Mack was shooing a horse or working the attack, they'd follow him around the boys and the girls and they wanted to know about him. His father called him into the big house and they sat in a small front office that Sawyer Day used the two days a week. He came out to do the books and his father swiveled the oak chair to Mack and they talked. The room was dominated. The room was cloistered by the varnished pine shelves full of books, his father's collection of Zane Gray and Jack London and Western history and a beaten tin umbrella stand full of rolled maps.

Speaker 5 (00:25:47):

These kids look up to you. His father said, I don't know, max said he sat on the dark leather hassock orphaned from its long lost chair. Yes you do. They should look up to you. You're a good hand. They're not used to this. All they've got is their car in the junior prom. You're an exotic iac. Okay? The boy said, but what we are to these people is sort of a cliche. They come out here to taste this and it's good for all of us, but these girls, some of them are going to fall for you. You big strong cowboy. His father tapped Max's knee with his two fingers. Come on, you can look at me. I know you're a good kid. Some of these gals from New York even come after your old man, a little fling out west for a week. You want to be a cliche?

Speaker 5 (00:26:34):

No sir, said I don't. You need me to recount the history of Sheridan the racehorse? No sir. Please. His father smiled. Have you recovered from that lesson? He'd taken the boy to witness their only thoroughbred Sheridan at stud when Mack was nine years old. No sir. Mac said truly no one could. M went on and repeated what his father had said that day. That's enough of the birds and bees for one boy. Well, good. As father said, we won't be cliches then. That's all I expect. You know what to do. Talk the day with these kids and riding and horses and weather and then send them back to supper. Don't walk with them or have them out near the bunkhouse. My eyes are right here. I know you know what to do. I don't want this business venture we're in to hurt you. Boy, I love you and I love this place.

Speaker 5 (00:27:21):

Do you know it? Yes sir, I do. Show me your hands. Mac leaned and held his hands out and then turned them over. They'd always done this. A show of hands, his father looked him over, nails, cuticles, knuckles, palms. You could tell a good ranch hand by the number of nicks, the fewer the better. And as the years passed, Max's hands cleared up. His father squeezed his son's hands now and said, that's enough of that quite a talk for the old homestead. You go get to work. And he did the work on the long day ranch schedule. On Thursday nights. He ran the one late night campfire, all those chocolate crackers. And then the spooky story. He had started it when he was 13. The story he'd heard part of from his own dad about Hiram, broken hearted and half mad, who still roamed the woods near here, living in rotten logs and following campers in his search for a beating heart at night when the fishermen's campfires would shrink down to wavering coals, Hiram would sneak into the camps and reach into the tents and put his head against the camper's chests to try to hear again the thumping of a heart.

Speaker 5 (00:28:29):

His own had stopped So long ago, Mack would let the big ranch fire dwindle and collapse and lower his voice as he told the episodes. M's. Heart had been broken by his own true love when one night he came calling and saw her through the lighted window in the arms of another man, a fisherman. Some kid would ask, not much a one Mack would say, but maybe. And Hiram turned and fled that place and he went into the woods. These woods forever. Half the kids would already be in their pajamas and robes, sitting legs up and arms folded in the canvas. Camp chairs listening. They'd all heard of Hiram from last week or from last summer, and his legend was part of the box creek lore. Now, Mack would hold out his hand like a claw and say how RA only wanted human contact. His loneliness was larger than Wyoming.

Speaker 5 (00:29:23):

He only wanted them to hear a beating heart, but he was misunderstood and called a cannibal, though that was never any proof of that. I think he was cannibal. Some boy would say he ate the campers and cooked them over the fire. They never came back. Mack would let this remark hang in the air. Oh, he's out there would say indicating the circle of darkness around them, and now we know for sure that he's misunderstood. If the children got too frightened, which was why they came every week, Mack would back up until about RA's younger days working with wild geese and his travels in the cities which did not agree with him. Then as the hour turned, Mack would stand and stir the fire pit, and as the senders schooled up red, he would say, Hiram listens for a beating heart. Can you hear your beating heart?

Speaker 5 (00:30:08):

The night would glow with silence and the popping of the fire. Now scoot. We're going to ride horses tomorrow and I don't want you falling asleep. It was a favorite time for him. Watching the young people scurry back to the cabins lit porches. They tried not to run, but they sometimes ran. It was his first love the ranch, and he loved it night and day, and then came the second, the year he was 17, Mac took the weekly ridge ride with all the kids, nine riders winding up the line shack trail to the aspen draws that led to the mountaintop. He rode his horse Copper Bob, the captain. There were two old log cabins along the way, slumped and fallen in the new trees, thrusting through the collapsed roof beams. They always stopped and took stagey pictures with the young people pretending to knock at the doorway or looking out the ancient window frames.

Speaker 5 (00:31:01):

Sometimes they dug around for old cans or bottles and they made up stories about the lonely man who lived there, how they had a dog or played cards all winter. One of the young writers would always say, maybe this is where Hiram lived, and Mack would explain that he never slept in the same place twice. He was always wandering and without a home, the cabins always sobered Mack because he knew how hard such lives would've been over the years, he'd found and kept purple medicine bottles and boot buckles from the old places. Vannie was a good rider and Rusty knew and they liked to lead the train. Through the gloomy tree shade, the horses stepped quietly up the grassy slopes past the wildflowers along the faint trail. They'd walked a hundred times their tails, swishing silently timed to the gate. Mack watched the girl float in her saddle at the top of the easy parade.

Speaker 5 (00:31:51):

This was the golden center of Max's life. All these fine animals geared upright and taking the bobbing children up every step farther from home than they had ever been. Max saw a shadow in the hillside and knew what it was. In a second, he sat up and snugged his reins from where he rode behind the children. When the bear sat up in the tall June grass at the top of the draw, Mack thought he saw him rub his eyes like a man might in disbelief it was a luxurious black bear and he didn't stand or look alarmed. He sat and looked into the face of the first horse. Mack had known moments like this, and usually something happened very fast. As the surprises doubled, rusty stopped short without rearing, but Vannie went over the front of her saddle and fell. Mack felt something open in him.

Speaker 5 (00:32:38):

All the horses stopped. Veterans Mack knew that when Rusty turned riderless, all the horses would turn and start stepping down. He loved it that they knew not to run. They never ran even on the last flat stretch near the ranch yard. Even when the tourists urged them with their heels or reigns or any cowboy moves they had seen in films for years on end, Mack was moving. He clucked and Copper. Bob eyed the bear and still approached. Vni was down and Mack had to get down and lift her with an arm and lead the horse to turn away. The bear hadn't moved. Watching the performance at 20 paces, Mack boosted the girl up into his saddle and walked Shirley down behind the children's cavalcade, which was now headed inexorably toward the ranch two miles below. Those who had been at the rear and hadn't seen the bear would be astonished and envious as they heard the story, but by supper, they would have their own tails of the close call and the huge beast as they passed below the cabin shambles under the open hillside, m whistled and Rusty stopped and the line of rider stopped.

Speaker 5 (00:33:44):

Are you okay? Mack said it was a bear. Funny said she was lit. They reached her horse and Mac helped her down. Let's see, she had skinned her wrist and she pulled out her shirt and showed him where her waist was bruised her belt full of dirt and grass. I'm okay. Can we go back and get a picture? Everybody had a camera? Not today. He said that Bear doesn't want his picture taken today. He still had their arm and turned her in examination. Did he attack? One of the kids? Said no. Max said he was sleeping and we woke him hibernating. One of the kids said, not yet. Max said, let's go down. He held Rusty while mounted. She was turned. Looking back up at the hill, that bear was hibernating. Bears hibernate. The expert offered again. Go-Go. Matt called and the line of horses and riders began to walk home. Thank you very much.

Speaker 3 (00:34:51):

So as with Ron Carlson, the first work I read of TC Boyle was a short story. I think like many of you. It was Greasy Lake and then I read the short story, the long haul, and I was just completely taken in by this whole world that he would create inside A short story. The first novel I read, if you haven't read this novel of TC Boyles, you need to read. It was water music. Water music enters this whole other time in place. And TC Boyle has written books that are all over the place, not obviously just on the West coast, but novels that happen with all kinds of characters. He's the author of 24 books of fiction, including most recently, the Plague. His novels include Drop City, the Inner Circle, tooth and Claw, the Human Fly Talk Talk, the Women Wild Child When the Killing's Done San Miguel and several collections of short stories and this novel I mentioned, water music.

Speaker 3 (00:35:57):

You actually, if you try to keep up with all of his books, which I do, you start to wonder if he's writing them more quickly than you can think about them afterwards. He received a PhD in 19th century British literature from Iowa in 77 and his M F A from the University of Iowa as well. He was distinguished professor at U S C for many years, also much beloved by his students. His work has been translated into a couple dozen foreign languages. He's read all over the world, even Serbian and Sloven, Lithuanian, Latvian, Turkish. I like to think of all these people in these other countries reading water, music and Greasy Lake. His work has been published in many magazines, including New Yorker, Harper's, Esquire, the Atlantic Monthly, Playboy, Paris Review, gq. He has a Penn Faulkner prize for best novel of the year, the Penn Malamud Prize for a short story and the best foreign, our novel in France for tortilla Curtin, which is set in Los Angeles. He currently lives in a Frank Lloyd Wright house in Santa Barbara. Please welcome TC Boyle.

Speaker 6 (00:37:19):

Hello, folks. Well, it is quite a pleasure to get to be on stage with real old friends and wonderful writers. We're supposed to tell you what California is like. I have brought an artifact with me. This was from the Santa Barbara Historical Museum and I'm not sure how to work it actually. And yesterday in St. Louis, I saw water in its natural state. For the first time in years, we are having a drought. Folks, you may have heard that Jerry Brown, our governor has asked everybody to cut back 25%. However, where I'm living in a little village just east of Santa Barbara, we were put on a 25% ration February a year ago. So we are pretty used to it. The deal is my wife and I are bathing just once a week together in the tub, after which we wash the clothes there, then boil the spaghetti and throw the rest out on the rose bushes.

Speaker 6 (00:38:12):

And it is tough. It's really been tough. So that's California. That's what it's like today. I would like, since this is so much fun, I am on tour for the Harder They come right now. This is my eighth stop of 22, and so it's so nice, but I don't want to talk about that. I want to read you a new story that's not published yet. It's called The Five Pound Burrito. And people are always saying, well, where do you get ideas for stories? This one is extremely specific. I read in the LA Times two years ago, an obituary of Cesar Rojas. Who was he? He was a guy who owned a little cafe in Boyle Heights in LA and his legacy. And we all want a legacy.

Speaker 6 (00:38:56):

Teachers, students, writers. We want to leave something behind. His legacy is the five pound burrito. So I wondered about this, how could this be and what kind of legacy is the five pound burrito? So as usual, I wrote a story in order to find out, and here it is. He lived in a world of Greece and no matter how often he bathed, which was once a day rigorously and no shower, but a drawn bath, he smelled of caritas machaca and chopped white onion and soapy cilantro that he folded each morning into his pico de gallo. The grease itself was worked up under his nails and into the folds of his skin folds that hung looser and penetrated deeper. Now that he was no longer young. This was a condition of his life and his livelihood. And if it had its drawbacks, Pete was 62 and never married.

Speaker 6 (00:39:46):

Because what woman would want a man who smelled so inveterate of fried pork? It had its rewards too. For one thing, he was his own boss, the little hole in the wall cafe he'd opened back in the sixties, still doing business when so many showier places had come and gone for another. He was content. His world restricted to what he knew, the sink, the dishwasher, the griddle and the grill. And he saw his customers, the regulars and one-timers alike as a kind of flock that had to be fed like the chickens his mother had kept when he was a boy. What did he do with himself? He scraped his griddle, took his apron shirts and underwear to the Chinese laundry that had been an operation nearly as long as he had, and went home each evening to put his feet up and sit in front of the tv.

Speaker 6 (00:40:30):

His only employee was a sour woman named Sade in Iranian, or as she preferred it, Persian immigrant who'd escaped her native country after the regime change and was between 45 and 60, depending on what time of day you asked her. In the mornings she was uncomfortably old, but by closing time, her age had dropped. Though she dragged her feet, her shoulders slumped, and her makeup grew increasingly tragic. She was dark skinned and dark eyed, and she dyed her once black hair, black all over again. People took her for a Mexican, which was really a matter of indifference to him. He didn't care whether his waitress was from Chipotle or Hokkaido as long as she did her job and took some of the pressure off him, and she did and had for some 20 years now and counting on this particular day, midweek, dreary, the downtown skyline, obliterated by fog or smog or whatever they wanted to call it.

Speaker 6 (00:41:22):

70 day was late because she took the bus from the section of town known as Little Persia where she lived with her mother and an equally sour faced brother. He'd met once or twice and it had broken down. As luck would have it, there was a line outside the door when at 11 o'clock on the dot, he shuffled across the floor and flipped the sign from closed to open. In came the customers, most of them wearing familiar faces, and as they crowded in at the counter and unfolded their newspapers and propped up their tablets and laptops on the six tables arranged in an narrow line along the far wall that featured the framed black and white photo of a dead president, he began taking orders. First in line was Scott, a student from the university who had the same thing five days a week, black coffee and the chorizo and scrambled egg burrito.

Speaker 6 (00:42:06):

He lathered with jalapenos just to wake up as he put it on the mornings he was capable of speech next to him were Umberto and Baltasar. Two baggy pants, old men from the neighborhood who would slurp heavily sugared coffee for the next three hours and try to talk 'em to death as he hustled from Brill to griddle and refrigerator and back. And here were two others, easing onto the stools. Beside them, new faces, more students, but big, all head and neck. Shoulder and belly footballers, no doubt who would devour everything in a two foot radius, complained that the portions were too small and the burritos like prisoners, rations and try to suck the glaze off the plates in the process. Of course, he should be happy because the students had discovered him yet again and how many generations had made the same discovery and then faded away in the lean months when he could have used their business.

Speaker 6 (00:42:54):

He dealt out a stack of plastic menus as if he were flipping cards like the dealer at the blackjack table at Caesar's, where he liked to spend his two weeks off every February, made in the little spotlight that illuminated the table, a gratis rum and coke sizzling at his elbow. Then he leaned over the counter and announced in the voice that was dying in his throat a little more each day as he groped toward old age and infirmity. No table service today, you people back there got to come up to the counter if you want to get fed. That was it. He didn't need to give an explanation. If they wanted Michelin stars, let them line up over in Beverly Hills or Pacific Palisades. But he couldn't help adding, she's late today, seppa day. And so it began breakfast. Then the lunch rush furious work at a hot, cramped kitchen and all he could see was people's mouths opening and closing and the great wads of beans and rice and marinated pork, chicken and beef, swelling their throats.

Speaker 6 (00:43:48):

It was past noon before he could catch his breath. He didn't even have time for a cigarette. And that put him in a foul mood, the lack of nicotine. And when he saw the face in the tortilla that provided the foundation for the burrito, he was just then constructing. He ignored it. There was nobody's face, eyes, nose, cheekbones, brow, and it meant nothing except that he was exhausted, already exhausted. And he still had six and a half hours to go. And sure he'd seen faces before Muhammad the Buddha, Sandy Koufax once. But Jesus never. The woman over on Broadway had seen Jesus exactly as he was in the shroud of Turin. Only the shroud in this case was made of unleavened flower, lard and water. He could have used Jesus himself because that woman rich and the lines for her place went around a whole city block.

Speaker 6 (00:44:35):

If only he had Jesus, he could hire somebody more competent and dependable than Sade and sit back and take a load off. That was what he was thinking. As he smed Fritos over the face of the tortilla and piled up rice and meat and guacamole and krema cheese shredded lettuce, pico, the gallo, the works, and why not for yet another pair of footballers who were sitting there at the back table like statues come to life, call it whimsy or maybe revenge. But he mounted the ingredients up till the barita was as big as a stuffed pillowcase. Let them complain about that one. That was when he had his moment of inspiration, divine or otherwise. He would weigh it, actually weigh it, and that would be his ammunition and his pride too. The biggest burrito in town. If he didn't have Jesus, at least he would have that.

Speaker 6 (00:45:23):

We each live through our time on earth in an accumulation of milliseconds, seconds, minutes, hours, days, months and years. And life is a path we must follow invariably until the end. Is there change or the hope of it? Yes, but change is wearing and bad for the nerves and almost always for the worst. So it was with Sal, the American born son of Mexican immigrants who'd open Salvador's cafe with a loan from his uncle James when he was still in his twenties and now nearly 40 years later, saw his business take off like a rocket on the fuel of the five pound burrito. Suddenly his homely cafe was a destination not only for his regulars and the famished and greedy of the neighborhood, but for the educated classes from the west side who pulled up out front in their shining new German automobiles and stepped through the doors if they expected the floor to fall away beneath the soles of their running shoes and suck them down to some deeper darker place.

Speaker 6 (00:46:16):

This was change, positive change, at least at first. He hired a man to help with the dishes and the sweeping up and a second waitress, a young girl studying for her nursing degree, who gave everybody in the place something to look at. And on the counter raised at eye level on a cloth covered pedestal was the big butcher scale on which he ceremoniously weighed each dripping pork, chicken, or beef burrito. Before Sep day or the new girl, Marta made a show of hefting, the supersized plate, and setting it down laboriously in front of the customer who had ordered it. A man from the newspaper came and then another, the line went round the block and nevermind. Jesus s was there one early morning. Typically he arose at five and was in the kitchen by six, preparing things ahead of time. And of course, with success came the need for yet more preparation when he felt a numinous shift in the atmosphere, as if all those timid first timers from the west side had been right after all, the floor didn't open up beneath him, of course, but as he cut meat from the bone and shocked avocados for guacamole, he felt the atmosphere permeated by a new presence and no ordinary presence, but the kind that makes a dog's hackles rise when it sniffs at the shadows.

Speaker 6 (00:47:28):

For a moment, he felt dizzy and wondered if he were having some sort of attack the inevitable myocardial infarction or stroke that would bring him down for good. But the dizziness passed and he found himself in the kitchen still. The knife clenched in his hand and the cubes of pork gently oozing on the chopping block before him. He shook his head to clear it. Something was different, but he couldn't say what the morning wore on and a fugue of chopping, dicing, and tearing up over the emanations of aban and jalapenos, his back, aching in his hands, dripping with the juice of the hundred millionth tomato of his resuscitated life. And he forgot all about it till the knock came at the alley door. This was the knock of Stanford Wong who delivered produce to the restaurants of the neighborhood and was as punctual as the great clock in Greenwich, England that kept time for the world.

Speaker 6 (00:48:16):

Sal wiped his hands on his apron and hurried to the door because Stanford understandably didn't like to be delayed. They might've been a noise outside the door, afraid of scratching as of some animal trying to get in, but it didn't register until he pulled back the door and saw that it wasn't Stanford station there at all. But an erected five and a half foot rooster dressed in Stanford, Wong's khaki shorts and khaki shirt with a black plastic nameplate Stanford fixed over the breast. Was he taken aback? Was he seeing things? He'd had his breakfast, hadn't he? Yes. Yes, of course. Eggs, chicken, embryos, fried and butter, topped with a sprinkle of co hot cheese and served up on toast. He just stood there blinking. But the bird, which somehow seemed to have hands as well as wings, was impatient and brushed right by him with a crate of lettuce and half a dozen clear plastic bags of tomatillos peppers and the like, balanced against his its chest, setting the load down on the counter and swinging round abruptly with Stanford's receipt book in hand.

Speaker 6 (00:49:14):

But there were words now, the bird saying something out of a beak that snapped and glistens to show off a pink wedge of tongue. And yet the words made no sense unless you were to interpret them in the usual way as in same order tomorrow, and you take care now. The door swung shut, the crate satisfied the counter just as it had yesterday and the day before and the day before that it took him a moment and maybe he'd better have another cup of coffee before he went to the crate and began shoving heads of lettuce into the refrigerator. All the while thinking that there were two possibilities here. The first and most obvious was that he was hallucinating. The second and more disturbing was that Stanford Wong had been transformed into a giant rooster. Either way, the prospects could hardly be called favorable. And if he was losing his mind in the uproar over the five pound burrito, who could blame him?

Speaker 6 (00:50:05):

Next? It was ade dressed in black skirt and white blouse, but with her head covered in feathers and her nose, replaced by a dull puce beak and no shoes on her feet because her legs, her scaly yellow legs, supported dot phalanges and painted toenails, but displayed naked claws of an delian hen. She was never talkative, especially in the morning. But whatever she had to say to him came in a series of irritable clocks and gavels and he just, well, he just blew her off. Then came Marta and she was a hand too. And by the time Oscar Marti, the cleanup man showed his face. It was no surprise at all that he should be a rooster, just like Stanford Wong. And for that matter, once the door opened for business, that all the male customers should be crowing and flapping their wings while their female counterparts clocked and brooded and held their own counsel over pocketbooks, stuffed with eyeliner, compacts, and lipstick that had no discernible purpose.

Speaker 6 (00:50:59):

Something was wrong here, desperately wrong, but work was work. And whether he could understand what anybody was saying, customers or staff, really didn't seem to matter. As everything by this juncture had been reduced to routine, spread the tortilla, crown it with toppings, fold it, dip the ladle in the salsa every day and serve it up on the big white scale. That was Monday. Mondays were always a trial. What with forcing yourself back into the routine after the day of rest, the Lord's day, when people went to church to dip their fingers in holy water and count their blessings, Sal locked up after work that night. And if he noticed that everyone, every living man, woman, and child on the streets and sealed behind the windows of their cars was a member of a different species, poultry, that is, he didn't let it affect him even so the minute he came in the door of his apartment, he went straight to the mirror in the bathroom and was relieved to see his own human face staring back at him out of drooping eyes.

Speaker 6 (00:51:53):

He poured himself a drink that night, a practice he found himself engaging in less and less as he got older. Heed up a ato, regular size in the microwave and watch reality TV until they couldn't hold his eyes open anymore. It would be one thing to say that his dreams were populated with hens, roosters and bobbing chicks. But the fact was that he dreamed of nothing or nothing he could remember on awakening, he was a blank canvas tabular asa. Mechanically, he shaved mechanically, he broke two eggs in a pan and laid three strips of bacon beside them, and he drove mechanically to work in the dark. When Stanford Wong's knock came precisely at eight, Sal moved briskly to the door, his mood soaring on his second cup of coffee and the prospect of yet another record setting day. If things kept up like this, he'd soon be sitting in a chair all day long watching the world come and go.

Speaker 6 (00:52:44):

While the new grill, man, he'd hire and train himself, did all the work. And it was all due to the inspiration of that day, six months back when he'd brought out the scale and piled up the burrito and made his statement to the world, the five pound burrito. It was a concept, an innovation unmatched by anybody in the city, whether they had a sit down place or a lunch cart, or even one of those eateries with the white tablecloths and the waiters who looked at you as if you belonged on the plate. Instead of sitting upright on a chair and putting in an order, people just couldn't understand what it took to consume a burrito of that caliber. No individual, not even the greediest, most swollen footballer could ever hope to get it all down. In a single sitting though, people placed betts and Sal agreed to advertise that if few could manage to eat the whole thing, it was on the house.

Speaker 6 (00:53:32):

Very few could. In fact, only one man, skinny Asian, the size of a child was able to accomplish the feet. And it turned out later that he was world famous as a competitive eater who'd won the Nathan's hotdog eating contest three years running. But here was Sanford Wong's knock, and as Sal opened the door, he didn't know what to expect, least of all what he saw standing there before him on its hind legs, his hind legs. This wasn't Stanford Wong, and it wasn't a chicken either. No, this was a hog with pinched little hog's eyes and a bristly inflamed snout. But it was dressed in Stanford. Wong's khaki shorts and khaki shirt with a black plastic nameplate fixed over the breast. It he trotted brusquely into the kitchen and set the crate of lettuce and plastic bags of vegetables on the counter, then swung round with Stanford Wong's accounts ledger c