Elizabeth Acevedo: 2018 National Book Festival

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>> Jennifer Abella: Hello, everyone, and welcome to the National Book Festival's Teen Stage. I'm Jennifer Abella, an editor at "The Washington Post," a charter sponsor of the National Book Festival. I love YA literature and I cannot wait to hear from our next guest. Before we get started, I'd like to thank our Co-Chairman of the Festival, David Rubenstein, and other generous sponsors who've made this fantastic event possible. If you'd like to add your financial support, there's information in your programs. We'll have some time after this presentation for your questions. There are mikes in the aisles and I've been asked to remind you that if you go to the microphone, you will be included in the videotape of this event, which may be broadcast at a later date. It's my honor to introduce Elizabeth Acevedo. Elizabeth is a DC-based writer and National Slam Poetry champion. She has performed on stages very close to here at the Kennedy Center and as far away as South Africa. She published her collection of poems, "Beastgirl & Other Origin Myths" in 2016 and made her YA fiction debut, "The Poet X" released in March. It's a novel written in verse about a young girl in Harlem who discovers a love for slam poetry. And a programming note, Elizabeth will be signing books at 4:30 PM today. Please welcome to the stage Elizabeth Acevedo. [ Applause and Cheering ] >> Elizabeth Acevedo: This is for us writers, us readers, us girls who never saw ourselves on bookshelves but we're still writing poems when we talked and we've been called teeth sucking, of snapping eyes, born bitter, brittle, of tangled tongues, sandpaper that's been origamied into girl, not worthy of being the hero nor the author but we were also Medusa's favorite daughters of serpent curls, of hard-eyed looks, dreaming in the foreshadow, we composed ourselves, since childhood taking pens to our palms as if we could rewrite the stanzas of life lines that tried to tell us we would never amount to much. And when we were relegated to the margin, we still danced bachata in the footnotes. We still clawed our way onto the cover, brought our full selves to the page, our every color palette and bouquet of pansies, of big gold hoops of these here hips and smart as quips and popping bubble gum kisses, us girls who never saw ourselves on bookshelves but we're still writing tales in the dark, as black and brown girls, brick built, masters of every metaphor and every metamorphosis. Catch us with fresh manicures, nail filing down obsidian stone and painstakingly crafting our own mirrors and stories into existence. Good afternoon. How y'all doing? Y'all alright? [ Applause and Cheering ] I like to open with that piece because I think it creates an umbrella for the impetus behind "The Poet X," that I'm often asked, you know, why did you write this story, what was the inspiration for this book about a young Latin America in New York City who discovers poetry and has a very contentious relationship with her mother. And the truth of it is that I've been a writer my whole life but I never thought I would write a novel. I was a poet. I was also a poet who was an eighth grade English teacher in Prince George's County, Maryland. [ Applause ] And the school that I taught at was 78% Latinx. It was 20% Black. And I was told on my first day of school by the vice-principal that I was the first teacher they had ever had of Latinx descent teaching a core subject. Right? And so I would walk into class and the students would walk in and they'd be like, "Oh, no, this is the wrong class." They try to walk out. I'm like, "Sit down." Right? They thought it was Spanish. I'm like, "no." And I'm this space and although I'm teaching eighth grade, a lot of my students are very low-level readers. So they were fourth, fifth, sixth grade reading levels, although they should've been already reaching ninth, right, because we're trying to get them ready for this next year. And I kept trying to do everything I could to hook these students into reading, right, that I fundamentally believed that the reason that I am where I am is because I was a veracious reader growing up. I was a reader before I was a writer, that to me I found answers in books. The things I couldn't ask my mother, the things I couldn't understand about my neighborhood or about why I was treated certain ways, I looked to books for answers. And so I'm trying to like this is the one key I have that I can maybe give these students who reflect the same background and it's completely being rejected. Right? Which if you're a teacher, you know this is like the most heartbreaking thing where you're like, this is my favorite book and you hand it over and they're like, "I don't want this thing." You're just like, "No!" And I had this one student, Katherine Bolanos [assumed spelling], who like if I was in eighth grade, we would've been best friends but because I was her teacher, I was like "Ah!" Like she was just a tough cookie. And she was not where she needed to be in terms of reading. And I'm like, alright, I'm going to get her to be a reader. So I bring in "Twilight." I bring in "Hunger Games," right. I bring in whatever book I could bring and Katherine's like, "I don't care about no sparkly vampires. I don't care about none of this." And she said to me, "Where are the books about us? How come we never read any books about us?" And so I go out and with my teacher budget, I buy Sandra Cisneros. I buy Meg Medina. I buy Matt de la Pena. I buy Jacqueline Woodson. Right? I buy Walter D. Myers. I bring all these stories into class and this student, who had never been a huge reader, within two weeks had finished every book I put in front of her. Right? [applause] And she goes, "Alright, Miss Ace, what's next?" I'm like, "What's next? That's it. That's my whole budget, like we're done." Right? And also that there's so little representative literature that I could actually hand to her for that age group and that was the spark, those two questions: Where are the books about us and what's next. Right? And I love the quote by Dr. Rudine Sims Bishop who inspired that first poem. All children's literature should be a mirror, an opportunity to see yourself and a window, an opportunity into an experience different than your own and that that was my main idea. I want to show these students, I want to show this community, I want to show my home girls, I want to show where I grew up and I want to invite folks to see themselves and also tell folks who are like, I don't know if I like verse, I don't know where Harlem is, what is a morenita, right, like here, learn a little something about something other than what you already know. And so after my second year of teaching, I decided I was going to go get my masters in creative writing. And I walked into a program and I was the only student of Latinx descent. I was the only student of Afro descent. Right? I was often the darkest person in the room, which being that I'm light skinned is a problem. And I was the only person who was born and raised in a major city and was writing about that experience. And so I would turn in all these poems, these hood morenita poems and I would get them back and the slang would be circled and the Spanish would have question marks. And I'm like, "You didn't want to Google that? Like Google is free." I spent my whole life having to Google all kinds of things because I don't come from a background where this literature is part of our tradition. And so there are many words that I still don't know how to pronounce because I've never heard them. There are many, many stories that I have to go back and be like, "Well, what does that mean?" Right? But when it came to my work, I wasn't always afforded that same kind of generosity from my readers. And I had this one professor my first year of school who was an old school dude. Right? Walt Whitman in the face, long-ass beard, the kind of person with a real melodious voice. So anytime he'd talk, he wanted to lean in. And he would say something real problematic and you're like, "Lean back!" Right? That kind of professor. He came to class and he's like, "I just read the most amazing poem about deer." And I have no beef with deer. I think venison is delicious. I'm not hating on anybody's wildlife. But I think we often have a stereotype about poetry, that it's about the clouds and the flowers and the deer. And for two and a half hours, because grad school classes are long, this professor goes on and on about this deer poem. And he goes one step further, he says, "I want everybody in the room to write an animal ode." Right? And he goes to one classmate, he's like, "You know, what do you think you'd write about?" And my classmate says, "Well, like Elizabeth Bishop, I would write about the blackbird, right, thirteen ways how to see a blackbird is incredibly popular poem. And so in my head, I'm like, "Well, you're writing into a tradition but I'm not sure that's the most original answer." He goes to another classmate and my classmate says, "Well, I would write about sea anemones." And I'm like googling and I say like, "What the heck is a sea anemone. Let me try to spell anemone." And then my professor gets to me and the one piece of writing advice you always get when you're in a writing program or when you're in an English class or you've probably heard this from your teachers is "write what you know." And so I puffed my chest up and I'm like, "Well, I would write about rats." If you grow up in any major city, you know you some rats. Right? You know, pigeons are just rats with wings. Squirrels are just rats with nice coats. We know them all. Right? And I feel like I'm on Family Feud, like good answer, like I'm ready for my accolade. And my professor looks at me and goes, "Rats are not noble enough creatures for a poem. Liz, I think you need more experiences." And I think both statements are devastating in different ways. The idea that someone who comes from a family that is from the Dominican Republic, which was the first place colonized in the Western Hemisphere, colonized by Christopher Columbus himself, by nobility, that that is what I'm supposed to be writing towards. But then that second piece, "you need more experiences," as if he knew absolutely anything about my life or what I had lived or the experiences that informed my work. And I think about this often when I walk into a space and I'm working with young people or I'm reading young people's stories, what are the experiences that I might discount that you are bringing into a space, the knowledge that you already have that I have to be open to, and what is the standard that I'm comparing your work to because it might not be the standard that is most appropriate for the tradition you are writing into or about or maybe, maybe it's never been written about before because the American canon is very particular about who it allows into its hallowed walls. Right? And so I have to be mindful of that moment when I was an educator of what do I take from this interaction with this professor and what do I leave. Right? And I still wrote that poem. It's called "Rat Ode." It's an official back to that professor. But mainly it serves as a reminder for any of us who have ever been told our story is too small or too ugly or too different for high art, that we are all of us deserving of poetry. And so if you will allow me, I will recite that poem for you. [ Applause and Cheers ] And this is for all the rats in the room [audience laughter]. To the rat, because you are not the admired nightingale, because you are not the noble doe, because you are not the picturesque ermine, armadillo or bat, they have been written and I don't know their song the way I know your scuttling between walls, the scent of your collapsed corpse rotting beneath floorboards. Your frantic squeal as you pull at your own fur from glue traps, ripping flesh from skin in an attempt to survive because in July of '97, you birthed a legion on 109th, swarmed from behind the dumpsters, made our streets infamous for something other than crack. Shoot, we nicknamed you cat killer. Raced with you through open hydrants, squeaked like you and [inaudible] blasted aluminum bat into your brethren skull. The sound slapped down dominos. You reigned that summer rat, and even when they sent exterminators half dead and on fire, you pushed on because even though you are in an inelegant, simple mammal bottom-feeder, always fricking famished. Little ugly thing who feasts on what crumbs fall from the corners of our mouths, you live uncuddled, uncoddled, can't be bought at Petco and fed to fat snakes because you are not the maze rat of labs, pale, pretty eyed, trained. You raise yourself, sharp fangs, claws scarred, patch dark because of this, he should love you. But look at the beast, the poet tells me. The table is already full. And rat, you are not a right worthy thing. Every time they say that take your gutter, your dirt coat, filth this page, rat, scrape your underbelly against street concrete. You better squeak and raise the whole world, rat. Let loose a plague of words, rat. And remind them that you, that I, we are worthy of every poem, here. [ Applause ] I think the best thing my writing program did for me was reaffirm that not everyone is my reader and that that is okay. But that does not mean that I don't have a readership. I think it reaffirmed who is it that I am writing for and what is it that I'm trying to get across and that it might not be the head of the English department and that that is okay. That whenever I'm asked for writing advice, I say write your rats. Write the little ugly things, the markers of where you are from, of who made you, of what makes you, and that is what will resonate. That I could have decided to write the poem that was going to get the most approval. I could have imitated the poets that I knew the head of the department loved or I could have said, I know the community I'm trying to reach and I know the story I'm trying to tell and that I honestly believe in Toni Morrison's quote, write the book you've most wanted to read. And as a huge reader, I think a book like this would've changed my life. And that's why I dedicated myself to this novel. And I began writing this novel as an MFA student who was working on a thesis that was not in young adult literature and that was not in verse novels. Right? So I'm like sneakily on the side like working with this character without knowing where this was going to end up, who was going to read this, who wanted to read a verse novel about a Dominica from like New York. I don't know, right? But like I trusted that if nothing else, I would arrive to a closer truth about my own story and my own inspiration behind why I wanted to write. And that the main character in this novel, I'm always asked, like, "Is it autobiographical?" And I'm like, "Not if my mama's asking." Right? Like, pure fiction. But she is loosely based on me, on young women I've known, on some of my closest friends. Right? She's a compilation of a lot of different women. And so many of the characters are that I pulled from all these folks I know who I haven't seen on the page, I'm like, "I got to get [inaudible] on the page, even if it's just his name, even if it's just him opening up the hydrant, like, I got get him there, because I would have loved to see these cultural markers in a book one day, right. And so I'm going to read from "X." How many folks have read the novel? Oh, y'all adult, look at y'all. Yes. Those of you that haven't, this is an intro. And those of you that have, you can maybe hear it in my voice if you didn't get the audio book. Xiomara Batista is 15 years old. She is coming from a very conservative Catholic household. She developed very young. She got her period when she was nine and so her body grew very large, very quickly and she didn't know what to do with the attention that it received. All of the sudden, she is objectified in a way that she was not prepared to deal with and she is taught that it is her fault. It is her body. It is her fault. And all the things that happen to her is because she is a walking problem. And what a lot of people don't know is that Xiomara is a secret poet, that she has this journal that she writes all of like her interactions in. And although she wouldn't call herself a poet, she is processing the world through poetry. When she's out in the world, she's fighting with her fists. She is a quiet kid. She is walking machete. But in her journal, she's allowed all of the metaphor and all of the language to figure out what is it that I'm grappling with. And so I want to read just a couple of pages for you to get a sense of how Xiomara sees herself. I am unhideable, taller than even my father with what mommy has always said was a little too much body for such a young girl. I am the baby fat that settled into D cups and swinging hips so that the boys who called me a whale in middle school now ask me to send them pictures of myself in a thong. The other girls call me conceited, ho, thought, fast. When your body takes up more room than your voice, you are always the target of well-aimed rumors, which is why I let my knuckles talk for me, which is why I learned to shrug when my name was replaced by insults. I have forced my skin just as thick as I am. Mina muchacha is mommy's favorite way to start a sentence. And I already know I've done something wrong when she hits me with that look, girl. This time it's mina muchacha. Maria from across the street told me you were on the stoop again talking to los vendedores. Like usual, I bite my tongue and don't correct her because I hadn't been talking to the drug dealers. They had been talking to me. But she said she doesn't want any conversation between me and those boys or any boys at all. And she better not hear about me hanging out like a wet shirt on a clothesline just waiting to be worn or she will go ahead and be the one to ring my neck. [Inaudible], she asks, but walks away before I can answer. Sometimes I want to tell her the only person in this house who isn't heard is me. I'm the only one in the family without a biblical name. Shit, Xiomara isn't even Dominican. I know because I googled it. Clearly, my characters are just as like enamored with googling as I am. Clearly traumatized. I know because I googled it. It means one who is ready for war. And truth be told, that description is about right because I even tried to come into the world in a fighting stance, feet first, had to be cut out of mommy after she had given birth to my twin brother Xavier just fine and my name labors out of some people's mouths in that same awkward and painful way until I have to slowly say Xiomara. I've learned not to flinch the first day of school as teachers get stuck stupid trying to figure it out. Mommy says she thought it was a saint's name, gave me this gift of battle and now curses how well I live up to it. My parents probably wanted a girl who would sit in the pews wearing pretty florals and a soft smile but got combat boots and a mouth that's silent until it's sharp as an [inaudible] machete. "Pero tu no eres facil" is a phrase I've heard my whole life. When I come home with my knuckles scraped up, "pero tu no eres facil." When I don't wash the dishes quickly enough or I forget to scrub the tub, "pero tu no eres facil." Sometimes it's a good thing like when I do well on an exam or the rare time I get an award, "pero tu no eres facil." When my mother's pregnancy was difficult and it was all because of me, because I was turned around and they thought that I would die or worse that I would kill her. So they held a prayer circle at church and even Father Sean [assumed spelling] showed up to the emergency room, Father Sean who held my mother's hand as she labored me into the world and pappy paced behind the doctor who said this was the most difficult birth she had ever been a part of but instead of dying, I came out whaling, waving my tiny fist. And the first thing pappy said, the first words I ever heard, "pero tu no eres facil." You sure ain't an easy one. [ Applause ] Thank you all. I want to make sure that we have enough time for the Q&A. So I try to give a little bit of my trajectory of how this book came about and the different poems and arcs that informed that. But for me, the best part is actually engaging with you all and the questions that you might have. And so there are mikes on these middle aisles here. I will not be saying any more poems. That's it. Thank you so much for being here and for spending time with me and thinking through "The Poet X." If you have any questions [applause] -- Oh, y'all are sweet. Thank you. [ Applause ] Thank you. We have about ten minutes. >> Hello. >> Elizabeth Acevedo: Hi. >> My question is about somebody I know who is an incredibly talented writer and spoken word poet but has never published, entered her poetry into any competitions. What kind of advice would you give to somebody like that to lift their writing off the ground? >> Elizabeth Acevedo: I think I would -- First, my instinct is to complicate what you're asking me a little bit. Right, that we live in a world where if your letters are not printed, we assume that they are not being held to the same regard as something that is published. Right, that I always felt this huge anxiety that because I was primarily known as a spoken word artist or a slam poet or a performer and I'm doing quotes because I think that these are very complicated terms or I'm a poet who reads out loud pretty well, right, I think, and I come from a tradition of oral poetry. And so I uplift that at all times. And so if this person is walking in a stance of I want to be in the room when the poem is heard and poems should always be heard, right, that whenever someone's like I don't get poetry, I'm like, "Have you read it out loud because that's a game changer." That maybe they are not interested in publishing. I also believe that if you are not someone who reads widely and who is reading poetry, it's going to be incredibly difficult to publish poetry because what journals do you send to if you're not sure what journals are in conversation with your work. If you're not sure what poets are on the same thread as you, to just hold it as an accolade of I want the publishing credit, if that is not the vein that you want to be in, I think what we have to do is deconstruct where we say the writer should go, right, or deconstruct what we think of as the upliftment of poetry. However, if this is a poet who feels like they have been pushed to the side and like, well, maybe publishing isn't for me, that's what other people do. We don't do that. I don't do that. I can only be on a stage, I think that that is a very different approach, right, because that's oftentimes a fear of the rejection of academia, of a fear of the canon and that right now we're an incredible moment where so many different kinds of voices are being published, specifically within poetry, right, that that's so -- Like the Ruth Lilly was just announced and I mean all of the poets are poets of color. Right? And that to me was an incredible moment of the different backgrounds, gender nonconforming, right, like we had all kinds of diversity represented there, so I think it's about finding your readership. Going back to the rat poem, like who are the people that are already on the same page with you and sending your poems there and starting small, right. That I started kind of with homies, like I knew a homie who was editing a journal and I'm like, alright, here's my poem. And like you have to take it because you love me. And the circulation of that journal was pretty small but it just gave me the confidence of okay, a poem of mine is out in the world. It's on the Internet and this is an incredible thing and I'm not there to mitigate how it's being read and maybe that's okay. And so I think it's about just encouraging your friend to release and maybe finding where their poem is going to be most well received. Great question. >> Hi. First of all, you're amazing. >> Elizabeth Acevedo: Oh, thank you. Very sweet. Thank you. >> Huge fan. I'm a poet and as I was going through my college application process, everybody was like, oh, you're going to writing school. And I was like, nope. But the reason why I think, I think a lot of the reason why didn't apply to creative writing schools was because of listening to experiences like you had. And as a writer of color, my question is what would you say to young poets, especially young poets and women of color who don't want to enter or are afraid to enter academic writing programs because of the lack of acceptance of our stories and what advice would you give if somebody was interested in doing that but didn't know how to? >> Elizabeth Acevedo: Right. Thank you for that question. I hope college applications were okay. Right? Hey, you better get it. Howard contingency in the front. Congrats. I think that whenever you're walking into spaces where you already know like this space has been traditionally blank, you have to be incredibly purposeful with what you are trying to get from that space. And if what you're trying to get from that space is approval, you've already failed. And that was probably the biggest lesson I had to learn. No one was going to be able to give me enough approval in any single program to make me feel confident enough to work into the world, right. It was always scary. I always feel like a fraud. I continuously have imposter syndrome because it's just the way that we have been programmed to exist in these spaces of we are not worthy to be here. And you have to do it anyways, right. But that there was never going to be a stamp of approval and I couldn't look for it because I would've been crushed that first semester if I had. Right? And so when you're applying, you kind of just have to go for like the best of the worst in all honesty because I think the programs that we have right now are geared in a very particular direction and workshops in general are looking for a thing, right, that I think the programs that are allowing the most eclectic thought processes or they're very few and far between. And so you kind of have to go in knowing what do I want from this thing. Do I want to have the space to read widely? Do I want to find maybe one or two cohort members that I can share work with in the future? Do I want to work with this particular professor? That you can't go in being like I want a Disneyland of creative writing because that is not going to happen. But if you are very specific about what you want to do in that space, I went in like I'm going to come out with a book. That didn't really happen but having that intention I think kept me very focused on no one is going to sway me from creating a piece of writing that I feel has my heart in it by the end of this program. And I left with a [inaudible] book, right. And so I think that that is what you have to do in any of these spaces and that probably speaks to both of your questions, I think. But I want to go back to what you said about going into a program that wasn't about creative writing, that I think that that's even more adventurous and exciting, right, don't study writing. Like what if you studied something else and that inform the writing, that so often people think they need a writing degree or they need to go to a specialized high school in creative writing or they have to like and I think that you live, right. The MFA programs are very recent phenomenon, right, for the last like 45 and some odd change years. But before that, people were doctors and engineers and garbage men and then they wrote on the side and that that to me is so [inaudible] to allow yourself to figure out what is the best thing that's going to feed my writing and let that guide you, not just what you think you have to do in order to follow the steps, right, because writing is not engineering and you can't -- There's no like blueprint to how you become this kind of thing. You live and you keep writing and you read widely and you figure out what space you need to feed that. Thank you and good luck with your semester. >> Hi. I also teach middle school. Yay! And I teach creative writing in middle school and I've already got plans to use all kinds of things that you've said in my classroom. But your rat poem story really spoke to me because I spend a lot of time trying to convince seventh and eighth graders that they have something to say and then I don't want them to fill in the blanks of a five paragraph essay the way think they think they're supposed to do it. So I have two questions. One, if you have any inspirational words for my students, I would love to share those with them. And two, I would like to know how you did on that rat poem. What grade did you get? >> Elizabeth Acevedo: I think the -- I don't know if it's words of inspiration but I hope your students whatever task they take on, they take on with empathy, right, even if it's like a math problem, like whatever it is that I hope that that is as much a part of their curriculum or how they're moving through the world. Right, like where am I practicing empathy, did I practice empathy today because I think that that is how we build a better world. I turned in the poem and my thesis at the very end and he couldn't remember the interaction, which I found hilarious and a little bit sad, right. But for him it was like, where did this poem come from. And I'm like, "You, bro, you!" And yet here we are, right, we say things all the time and we don't realize how they resonate and that's okay. So, thank you for that. I'm going to try to be very quick because I know we only have a couple minutes. >> Okay, so this is kind of a two-part [inaudible], so I'll keep it -- So the first part, you kind of already answered. So you can maybe keep it a little short, this idea of transitioning and going back in the elitism that happens sometimes between the spoken word world and the creative, the page poetry world and I remember when I started writing, I was writing on the page and they were like, "Don't look at the spoken word poets. That's bad." But I think that we can learn a lot from a lot of great spoken words poets, like, you know, Patricia Smith, for example, for you and I wanted you to first of all talk about what you've learned from each world that maybe we can teach each other and then also just talk about your writing process in general as like the second part of my question. >> Elizabeth Acevedo: I think in terms of what we can learn, I feel like the community that primarily comes up through spoken word is looking towards the rest of the world, right, but they're looking at it as like we are the misfits. We don't fit into these programs. But oftentimes we've already been exposed to poetry in school. We've been exposed to poetry in class. We may not always understand it. We may struggle with connecting to it but there is exposure there, right. And so I think I would speak less to that side of it because often that's a side that's coming from rejection. I turned to this form of poetry because it's the one that felt the most like home. Right? But I think in terms of what the flipside, right, you know, Patricia Smith is funny because I don't think -- I think she would agree with me. She is a poet who has performed. That's what she would say. Right? Like people should just be better readers of their work. Like literally we engage every day with other human beings and we figure out how to make them understand and then you get on a stage and you're awful at reading your own work. Right? And I guess people don't want to fall into being an entertainer but it's like if you wrote this with love and passion and emotion, how do you now bring that through. And I had a professor who told me like a reader should be a blank slate. I was like that sounds awful. Right? And so I hope that both sides go to different kinds of readings in order to engage with one another and see the work that they're doing. I am being told to wrap it up and I want to respect the time and space. Justina Ireland is going to be coming into this room in ten minutes. You should stay for her. She is freaking fantastic. Or you should come and get your book signed by me. Those are your options. The folks who are waiting to get on the mike, I'm going to be over here if you want to just come chat with me real quick. Thank you so much for being beautiful, beautiful audience [applause and cheers]. I appreciate you.
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Channel: Library of Congress
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Rating: 4.9615383 out of 5
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Length: 35min 8sec (2108 seconds)
Published: Fri Oct 12 2018
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