Salon@615-Barbara Kingsolver & Ann Patchett

[Music] I I live as probably every person in this room knows I live right down the street and so Sparky you know wants to come and he doesn't get to come unless it is a very dog-friendly author and I am on stage and all of the criteria has been met today oh we're very very excited that you're here and Barbara and I did a lunch event today and it it went really well and I feel like we kind of opened the play in Connecticut and now we're bringing it to Broadway and I I got the sense of what people were really interested in hearing about so we talked about different things that we were gonna go over today and hey Barbara how are you I'm so fine I'm we're clearly warmed up and dogged up yeah and where where are you gonna be tomorrow tomorrow I get to go home I've been on the road for three weeks and I'm ready to see my own personal dog and family so yes I'll be in south-western on my farm and southwestern Virginia by sundown tomorrow beautiful beautiful so I know from personal experience that when you go on a book tour you are never really touring exactly for the new book because what people always want to talk about are the old books because they most of you haven't read the new book yet so we're gonna do a little bit of old book talk and then we're gonna do a little bit of new book talk but one of the things that really comes up whenever anybody talks about Barbara Kingsolver is the wonder that is your book Animal Vegetable miracle that's kind of an inside joke with us I get the title wrong a lot even my own relatives get my titles wrong trust me it happens a lot they get all the titles oh yes yeah except that I bet nobody ever gets the Poisonwood Bible wrong do they get that room well no it's sort of the opposite when my daughter Lily was young if that's the only Bible she knew about so would she she would go so that you know the hotel drawers and say mama somebody else wrote one that's good that's really good so that title I nailed at least in the family so let's talk a little bit about Animal Vegetable miracle people have such a strong personal connection to that and a lot of that has to do with the fact that it's nonfiction and that is personal but I'm just really interested in how that year affected your life how it affected your family and how it is still 10 years is 10 years later ten years later playing out in your life well thank you for for asking the it was a complete surprise to us that that that book Animal Vegetable miracle which see how that rolls off my tongue I usually get my titles right that's one of my goals in life so so when we mu we lived for 20 years I I lived for 20 years and then it was sort of acquired a family children and such in Tucson Arizona but the plan always was moved it was to move back to southern Appalachia which is my sort of my home culture to a farm that was my husband's farm and when we made that move we had been paying attention and thinking a lot about the problems with the with the sort of the industrial food pipeline and the the unsustainability of the US food system in the world food system and especially in Tucson which is like a Space Station everything that people consume there has to be brought in from elsewhere I mean it's a lovely space station but it's you know you get my point so when we move to the farm we sort of said as a family why don't we just try to grow as much of our own food as possible and for everything else you know just really pay attention to where it comes from get it from farmers markets or what have you and then we thought well well I guess I thought as long as we're doing this why not write a book about it and then the you know the family sort of agreed that would be a good plan and we would all we would we would write the book as a family so then I went to my publisher thinking there they're just one I'm gonna want another novel I've just figured that's always what they want but they said well no we could publish this book all right fine we didn't really think anyone would read it but you know we did it anyway and it was a it was a it was a it was it was our year of eating you know so the eating mindfully is how I would say it and the book was published into a moment when it just seemed like the whole world was waking up to the fact that we were we as humans doing something pretty stupid with our food system so we just kind of credit this wave crested and there was very very much interest in the book and we toured as a family and talked about it and and people asked and this is the moment when you can be reminded to put your phones on silence so you know people people sort of assume that the minute that year was over we would all just just speed down to McDonald's and get you know a giant greasy hamburger or something that's not how it at all it became it was I guess as much a spiritual as a material exercise in really paying attention to what we had rather than starting a meal with what's in season instead of thinking about what would what do we wish for that the world could perhaps bring to us at great cost it's just a it's a it's a shift in thinking that applies in so many way it can apply in so many ways it has to do with gratitude it has to do with just attending to what you have instead of more than attending to what you don't have and PS we ate really well I mean we discovered this is the one there's no deprivation involved in local you know in salute in the slow food movement as people are discovering so if you live in Tucson well yeah that's yeah true enough fair enough and Oran I don't know Finland perhaps but but it was a wonderful exercise for our family that had all kinds of repercussions we carried it forward in our lives in in in different ways my husband moved in he's a he's a he's a college professor he teaches he teaches environmental science but he also started a community development project in our little rural town which involves well it's it it's it's a restaurant where local growers can sell their food sell their produce to to to diners and things like that that just really embedded the project more and our our family more in the community have come out of it and if you're ever in southwestern if you're ever going up i 81 check it out it's called the harvest table if you google Barbara Kingsolver to my shock because I don't do it that often but like the third or fourth thing that comes up is Barbara Kingsolver a restaurant so people do often go in there thinking I'm going to be in the kitchen I'll just tell you in advance I'm not but I you know I dine there that's that's what I do so but it has been a great thing for our community it's gotten a whole lot of young agrarians we are surrounded now by these millennial farmers many of them have have grown up there others have come from elsewhere but there's a strong local and sustainable agriculture movement in our community both my daughters have grown have have grown up and they are they are my younger daughter Lilly who was the chicken girl in that book is now a graduate in environmental science but long story short well it's too late for that I guess sorry in the subsequent 10 years our lives have absolutely borne many positive effects from that year that we undertook and at the 10-year mark our publisher asked if we would like to do a 10-year anniversary edition which we did do so it's been re-released you're you're welcome to look for it in any bookstore you choose no only one at the 10-year anniversary AVM edition has extra chapters at the end written by all of us including Lilly who now gets you know she kind of gets the last word because she didn't get to write the first time so we've all added extra chapters to that book and so if you care to know more it's it's all there and you guys have students who come down don't you to study farming with you well they're called woofers do you know what wolfing is yes that's the world a worldwide organization of organic pharming and it's a it's a network of people mostly young people but you can be any age and you go on to this website and you connect with farmers organic farmers all over the world who who are willing to feed and house you in exchange for your labor and so if you would like to go and work on I don't know in a vineyard in France or on a you know a vegetable farm in Tuscany you can you you can do that and so our farm amazingly against that competition our our little of our farm and the restaurant has its own farm as well in southern Appalachia gets lots and lots of woofers every year so so people come some you know and it's a it's it's a mix I mean the the work ethic is not always in there but people come with interest to learn about organic farming and and they they leave with dirty fingernails and something has happened in between for sure one of the things that was so interesting to me when I was at your house and I saw this farm you told me that you guys grow the onions and the potatoes and why because I love that well because a restaurant needs a lot of potatoes and onions and celery that most farmers around us or organic farmers don't grow because they you can't sell them for very much so at the farmers market I mean growers it's hard enough actually to break even as a farmer and in our farm in our region these are a lot of Tibet former tobacco farmers who have transitioned to organic vegetables because there's very little that you can grow on the kind of land that we have vegetable wise that really pays as much as tobacco does so growers for the farmers market are growing you know what they're growing heirloom tomatoes those beautiful colorful cauliflowers these beautiful exotic things that bring top dollar at the farmers market potatoes nobody's gonna pay very much potatoes but the restaurant needs them so the restaurant farm was actually started specifically to fill in the gaps of what what the restaurant needed that other growers weren't producing I think that shows enormous humility on your part oh I grow those potatoes oh I do I not only do I grow them I dig them and you can this one okay the most astonishing pantry your pantry is a work of art why thank you it's amazing and are you in there putting up those peaches and we can't the the the serious canning months are July August September yes and yes so the things that we grow a lot of in the summer we we put up so that we can eat them in the winter and it's just part of life I I like being a writer who lives on a farm because writing is it's it's it's an endeavor that takes place entirely in here and everything you know from here down gets neglected so you know it's so easy to all easy as them to write word it is so compelling and so frequently happens that especially when the writing is going well you know right you're in that part of the novel where you just can't wait to get to your desk and you're there and you're and you know I I'll get to my desk at five in the morning and and I might be there for five or seven or nine hours and completely forget that I have a body because you just go to this other place and then suddenly you wake up and you say oh I have a body and all of it hurts a lot so it's um it's really it's it's not just you know it's actually I think a very wonderful balance it offers a wonderful balance to live in a place where there are other things that I have to do we also we raise sheep we have Icelandic sheep and so in lambing season which is in April I might have to run down to the barn and turn a breech lamb I mean this is a regular thing or deliver triplets or or worse so and that won't wait you know I can't say not done with the chapter yet the farm has its own rhythms and I'm trained as a biologist this is this is what I believe in that there is a world beyond human construction that that that has that answers to its own laws and I really enjoy being a part of that I just think as a just as a physical and a spiritual exercise it's very good it's a very good life for me to do both of those things the other book that you have to talk about if you're sitting on a stage talking with Barbara Kean's caliber is Poisonwood Bible and there are so many different questions that I want to ask you but you are working on a film project related to Poisonwood Bible right now there's no Moses in it just so you know okay one of my questions about this is I I've never gone back and reread my books but I bet if I did I would think of some other things I would want to put in there I've had the experience of going someplace and thinking oh man I wish I had known about this when I was writing this book is there that feeling working on a screenplay for a book that you wrote how old is that book 98 98 okay so 20 years yeah and and that you know things now 20 years later you didn't know then you get a little man yeah well yes in a film yes in a screenplay it doesn't it has it has to be true to the book in spirit sure but it can it can diverge variously so if I discovered something really you know if I happen to discover some big mistake you know that would be an opportunity to correct it but it's interesting what you say about going back and to our earlier work which is not something we ever do now after the book tour after you know in which time you're forced to read segments of your work not necessarily then you put it away and you never open it again because why would you so actually the most interesting experience I had in that regard which is not was not the Poisonwood Bible but I think it's worth bringing up because it goes to this question of our earlier work and maturing as writers and confronting having to confront the writer we once were when I was when my first book came out in the early an 88 and audiobooks were not a big deal they had those abridged very highly abridged versions but I hated because they take you know 15 percent literally of your book and that like no so I didn't want to do that so my books were not in audio but I do I record my own audiobooks and that's a kind of another question but I love doing that and so my publisher recently decided to get my early books back into the catalogue into the audio audible or not I didn't say that word the audio but libro FM yeah that's right so they said well would you go into the studio and record animal dreams and so I said of course this was in June well that I wrote that book when I guess I was you know 33 so that was a while ago that was three decades ago exactly so um so I thought well this will be fun and then like the weekend before I was going into the studio I thought well I should probably read that book to reacquaint myself with you know how to pronounce people's names and such and the first chapter was just I just kept saying who wrote this and which is it's not that I thought it was terrible it's not even that I thought it was bad it just wasn't the book I would write now yeah and I would say the way I would characterize the difference is that I kept wanting it to be more economical I felt that it was the writer I am now kind of holds her cards closer to her vest I thought that it was emotional it was it was a book a 33 year old would write and I had to make my peace with that and I had to remind myself that many many people have told me even in very recent times this is their favorite of my books so if it's an interesting exercise to think about the fact that there needs to be room in the world for all of the different writers that you have been because there are so many readers and each one of them want something different from you and it's not even necessarily the 33 year old readers but there are people right now who want what that writer had to offer you know what I'm saying so and this is what we were talking about at home in terms of fashion and that fashion actually changes and we don't feel like we are influenced as novelists by the fashion of the moment and how people are writing but we are we are and I just went back and reread the the rabbit angstrom novels of John Updike which I don't think could be published today and they I think you're right they are astonishing and essential but so far out of fashion and and so I completely get what you're saying especially about economy because now that the world takes so many bytes out of our time you need you've got to get right down to it right down to it exactly so so the experience of going back into poison what Bible has not been it was it hasn't been quite such a journey in terms of being a different writer but the experience of really trying to translate that that novel into a form that has to be so very economical has been an adventure it's a 600 page novel a screenplay for a two-hour feature film is a hundred and twenty pages but not really have you seen a screenplay it's like mostly white space so it is it's just you know look the the dialogue goes in a little column down the middle and if you really counted it up you might have 75 pages so trans getting you know it's like you know the trash compactor how much can you squash into that into that minimal form it just it doesn't work that way it has to be it has to be a different kind of translation and that's been the adventure and and I the principal conclusion I reached after two years of working on that adaptation is that I could not fit it into two hours but and I'm not really allowed to say a whole lot about it because they were you know they'll they will make their own have their own press conferences and so forth but I what I can tell you is that the project is no out no longer to make it a two-hour film but a 10 hour film and and and so I think that what I'm learning it's very it's so it's so thrilling to be to reach this age to be at this point in my career and to be learning something new about writing as you have with writing children's book right it's just a thrill to feel like you're still alive you're still you know even though it's all taking place in this little tiny part of your body there's still room to grow in there and so I love what I have learned as a screenwriter and I brought I've made a promise to my editor because you know with the people who like you to write novels and like you to write books and like to bring those out in a regular schedule HarperCollins is so not excited about you when is she gonna finish that screenplay if something needs to get back to what she should be like the other woman I say this to me they say it to me to my yes that I guess you were over there with the screenplay you know it's like her so I'm so I made a promise to my editor I said okay this is a sabbatical everybody's allowed a sabbatical and meanwhile I was with that book that you're holding I was working on that for the last five years I never put it damp you know I was there different there were different kinds of work that you do on a novel and I was carrying that on the whole time but I said give me a couple years really to apply my craft as a as a screenwriter and when I come back to you from her I will be a different writer and I'll be a better writer and I believe that's true and I think that I learned things about economy and about pacing from film work that I I'm really happy to bring into into my into my world as a novelist and I mean I really felt it I was when I was on the first draft and I was I was kind of two-thirds of the way through the first draft of unsheltered and I looked at the page count and I said oh man third act gotta get this cooking get this wrapped up and I ended up actually contracting leaving out a lot of things that I had planned because I just had a feeling for the pacing that I needed I needed to have this three act arc not precisely there's much more fluidity with a novel and you it's not I don't mean to say that I write to a formula but I just felt I had new instincts for pacing that and my and my editor said sure enough she said she could see the difference and so happy ending and you've also written a screenplay for protocol summer right yeah yeah but that one is the problem is that any film any any kind of screen adaptation that is most whose characters are mostly women and mostly women over the age of let's say 21 is very very difficult very difficult to finance and that's just the flat-out truth I was talking to Jane Anderson the other day I wrote the screenplay for the wife she wrote that 14 years ago and she said that's how long she's been working on getting that made yeah it's it's really all about the financing and this is about women because it's about women and they're not running around naked or in a prom dress with blood dripping down that was the important part the blight so yeah so forth so so that project is still you know it's it's still cooking but it's a bit I'm very excited about it and I'm working with the director who's super excited about it and so yeah so these things it's not another career I'm not going to leave my spouse for the other woman or whatever or other man I guess to whatever I am but I love having just in the same way that I've always loved being able to choose from many different vehicles for an idea as a writer some some some themes need the sort of the station wagon of a novel you know to be carried but some need the wheelbarrow of a poem and I love or or a narrative nonfiction there there are so many vehicles and I love having that that choice that that fleet I guess you could say in my in my virtual garage just to take the metaphor is that's right can we work the the serviceable Toyota into here so so I feel like film work screen work is just screaming a screenwriting is just another one over those and but what I always will love best I think is the novel well let's talk about this one then okay that we love the best because you always love the new in the back yes of course these will come up to the table and say alright I haven't read any of your books which one should I have you know which one do you like the best this one I just finished it there's no content none unless of course you really have one percolating in your head and then and then an accent is even better right but it's like where they know it's the cute little baby this is the one that you want yeah and this is the one that nothing tired out all the others all the others were leading to this run and how sad it would be if if your answer were oh the one that I wrote eighteen years ago and I've just haven't been able to match that again actually when somebody walks up with a copy of patron saint of liars and it's like you never top this I know the bee trees they're waving at me and say this is your best and I wanted to say I had no idea what I was doing when I wrote that book but that but it just goes to what I was saying before about all of the writers you have ever been have a right to be in the world because there's a reader for there are readers hopefully more than one reader for every one of them and it's and it's true and I also think to myself all right I'm glad you love the bean trees eventually you'll love this one the best I also really think that people love whatever book they first read so what people say oh I love Bel Canto I love your first book it's like it's the first one you read right you know yeah the one first one that I wrote right yeah and it's very meaningful to them because that's the book that brought it's the event into your okay so give me the elevator pitch for unsheltered give me the plot I mean I can do it but how many floors are we going up give us a good description of this book well if you were we're only going to floor three I'll tell you it's two families in two centuries living at the corner of 6th Street and disaster [Laughter] do you want to go far I would like to I mean I can do it if you okay well I'll tell you I always come into a novel with a burning question something that's just really really troubling me that I feel like I need to kind of grapple with for a few years and kind of it's not that I'm going to provide you with an answer it's Queen it's that I'm going to show you what a big and horribly difficult question this is and wouldn't you like to think about it with me so in this case when I finished I finished what was it called flight behavior thank you and so in 2013 I was looking around for what would lead me into you know what big question would lead me into the next novel and my question was sort of like WTF like is this the end of the world as we know it so many things seemed so many different kinds of shelter that we had always counted on we're failing us economic shelters social sort of civility leadership that promised to take care of everyone rather than just just some even just basic things like that there will be a job at the end of the college degree that there will be a pension at the end of your career that you'll be able to get good health care that the ice on the poles would stay frozen that there would always be more fish in the sea all of these things seem to be sort of ending and yet people just we just keep trying to solve the problems the way we have solved them all our lives so we just have this one set of tools you know we just say okay we're running out of everything so what should we do growth and can sub just more growth in consumption that should do it you know it's sort of like we just have this limited set of tools and so we just keeps growing and screwing and screwing and wondering why it doesn't work so I thought that would be an interesting thing to write about and this was 2013 so the question grew more urgent during the next five years and so I thought early on that I would structure it in a way that gave it broader scope because I wanted to write about what do how do we deal with paradigm shift how do people deal when it seems like the end of the world as we know it so I thought that I would set up two two sets of characters one in the present it's kind of runs from the summer of 2015 to 2016 and I would have another set of characters living at an earlier time of great sort of failure of shelter paradigm shift when it seemed to be the end of the world as we knew it which was right around 1870s early 1870s and I would put these two sets of characters in the same house and and of course the house would be falling down because that's what we do we just we just make a mess and so that is unsheltered one of the for your great description that elevator went so far and and here's what really amazes me so I tell you I've just constructed a novel about these people having every kind of misery you can imagine and you say yeah cute I always say you know when I described you know this book I think why would you want to read it but I promise you it's really good it's a good time I don't laugh you'll cry one of the many things that I found so interesting is that the people in in both moments in time and the families are all very well educated I mean they they are 1/8 of an inch away from complete despair and ruin and being out on the street and it seems that they have done everything right you did a wonderful by the book column last week in the New York Times and you answered the last question which was a book that is overrated by talking about hillbilly ology and I think that we are so wired to think about poverty and being unsheltered in all the ways you talked about as the Providence of the poor and uneducated and this book really says that you know this is a problem that's coming for all of us exactly I've written a number of novels set in Appalachia where I live where there are a part of the country that is chronically poor where that has been really just ruined sort of physically geographically again and again by extractive in industries so we have historically had poor schools and have had a lot of trouble with people getting educated so yes I've written a lot about that class of poor people I decided because this really does seem like the end of something that we have always expected would last forever I decided to write about middle-class poor people so these are these this family the Mott the contemporary family is a woman who were who worked as a journalist all her life she's arrived at her mid-50s she was the editor of her magazine and it folded her husband is an academic he followed he chased the tenure-track he got tenure and then his college closed there are two kids you know went to school and have terrible College just on just enormous college debts and then of course the grumpy old father who is described as a a Titanic of pre-existing conditions you know he's just a mess and he's they're all living in this one house all of these problems are problems that that I didn't have to make this up every family I know has one or more of these problems few people I know have all of these problems but you know it's a novel it's a novel that's right but I will tell you it's so interesting that I've done you know many many as you do interviews about this book for four months because the magazine you know interviews start early so I can't tell you how many times I've picked up the phone and the interviewer introduces herself by saying hi I'm Willa the protagonist who used to work for a magazine whose magazine folded and now she's trying to hustle as a freelancer and so I say well great I guess you're in my corner but it's it's just where I live there are three liberal arts colleges have closed in the last five years and and so many others are on the brink so I feel like you know as a nation we've been pretending for quite a while that well yes we have these problems with poverty but the middle class is still you know sort of the educated there is a you know we'll still get by if we can just you know keep trying well this is a this is a novel about what happened there really ceases to be an easter egg at the end of the hunt how is it that some people find a way to look beyond the easter egg and figure out you know what comes next while other people just hang on so hard to the possibility that we can get it all back that we can bring back the way it used to be and line up behind leaders who promised that it when I was writing it honestly I was watching these sort of the strange political circus starting to come up on the horizon and this guy that I had never seen on television although you know I'd heard of his show and I thought I'm never gonna see him on TV running for president is what I mean to say and I was writing this kind of in real time thinking oh man by the time I finish this and it's published nobody's gonna remember that guy yeah yeah well bad for the world good for the novel it just panned out the way it did well not only that but then in the past your character is a schoolteacher who's struggling because his principal doesn't believe in Darwin right he has to like suppress his belief in Darwin we're still dealing with that we are in fact in a different way though in a different way but the the earlier time I chose first sort of to contrast the the earlier end of the world I picked was the 1870s because the country had just been split into two countries had spent five years really very effectively killing each other they delight the loss of life in the civil war was an enormous loss of property loss of livelihood there was no one under it had just ended by treaty but not but the country was still as polarized as a is now and into that mess arrived these two books written by Charles Darwin that suggested for the first time ever that rather than humans being put here having been put here to be in charge of the bosses of the planet maybe it seems it seems certain that the same natural laws the laws of physics and chemistry and natural selection that apply to all other living things apply to us too instead of being overlords of the earth we are of the earth this just knocked people's brains out they hated it and poor Darwin he didn't he didn't see this coming he did he was a sweet man you know with his wife and his eleven children as if it was yet a really gentle dear man and he just decided that he's just thought well after after carefully observing the natural life on earth for thirty-three years taking really good notes it is it is it is my conclusion that you know this is this is the case I just need to let people know they'll probably be glad that's what he thought he didn't thank God there was no internet he was he was so despised people it was it was it people did feel like it was the end of the world it would they were so disoriented in already precarious times that they responded by actively hating this notion and this man they burned him in effigy and hung him in the public squares and it was deeply deeply unsettling and there was sort of a rallying of Lee of people who said I can bring back just I don't let it in I can bring back the old way of thinking just stick with me and we can we can get back to where we were so it seemed very similar and so I [Music] it took I had this plan for the novel and then I went on a search for I wanted to put some real historical characters in yeah in that part of the novel tell us about that okay I wanted to find a champion of Darwin who could be in mind a real a real scientist who was who was a champion of Darwin who could really bring some friction into this novel someone who had a dog in that fight you know who was really involved in the debate and I needed I thought about you know putting Darwin in the novel and then I just thought poor guy I'll just leave him alone he's been through enough and I oh and I wanted to set it in the US so I started with a sick gray who was probably the best-known champion of Darwin he was a botanist at Harvard I thought I'll set this in Boston I was reading a lot about ayzik ray and his colleagues and just I read and read and read about ASA gray it was just like one of those dates that you know looks good on paper and it's just the chemistry was not I tried so hard and just finally just swipe left hey didn't do it but in the process of all that I ran across this name marry treat as someone who who had actually she actually delivered the eulogy of ASA Gray's funeral and she was a she was a great champion of Darwin and a court she corresponded with Darwin she did experiments with him and I mean a crowd they never met but you know as by correspondence as people did in those days she was a she was she she was so such an active interesting scientist and naturalist and row many books both for a scientific and for popular audiences and nobody now knows anything about her she's just disappeared so I thought she might be my she might be my gal so she just about the only biographical detail I could find out about her was that she had lived in a place called Vineland New Jersey I didn't know a thing about New Jersey the Garden State maybe you've been really I don't know I just didn't know any I had no feeling for New Jersey but I called up the they had a Historical Society there and I called and asked do you have any archives related to Mary treat and it was an amazing phone call this woman said basically I've been waiting for you to call so so I got on a plane and I went there and sure enough there was this wonderfully deep archive of merry treats letters turns out not only was she a very accomplished an interesting scientist she had a fascinating life including well she was self-taught as of course you would have to be in that time women weren't allowed to go to college she just had the Moxie to you know just correspond with all of these men and and impressed them with her her work she also had this wackadoo husband who ran off to New York in pursuit of this it's beautiful suffragettes who believed in free love and and so Mary mariya evidently said go go with God a more room for my experiments it it actually left her in an ideal position if you wanted to be in the 19th century if you wanted to be a woman who could pursue your own passions your own vocation the best thing to be would be a woman whose husband has run off chasing a suffragette because then nobody's pestering you to get married but also nobody's telling you to go cook dinner so she she has she's sacred it's a sacred space believe you me so so so she she was just what I was looking for as a character so but the bonus was I also learned that Vineland New Jersey was a was established as as utopian community a utopian town in 1862 by this interesting interesting fellow Charles Landis who bought this big he was a real estate mogul he bought this big plot of land brought in the railroad laid out the streets named him after himself his first his first one of the first buildings he chartered in his utopian city was a Historical Society so that from the very first issue of the newspaper which he wrote and edited entirely by himself it could be deposited in the Historical Society and so he was the mayor he was the postmaster he had hotels his leadership style was to every every every law kind of helped his own businesses and his friends businesses he I was quite an eco he this odd hair okay are you ready for this he really did shoot somebody on Main Street you can't make this up so so that was it so I had it so so then then then the the the challenge and the pleasure of this novel was telling these two families story in stories in a way that weaves them together and makes them into one story and boy did you do it thank you did you ever put your finger in a Venus flytrap um that's not a spoiler but Mary Mary tree really did she really did was been a with her finger in a Venus Fly yeah to see if it will eat her oh she really did that she discussed she was that kind of a hairpin she was this she was one of those rare and beautiful people I believe this from reading so much of her own writing and what other people wrote about her she was one of those people who really doesn't care what other people think of her and so she was just uh I really enjoyed sort of setting her at the kind of at the at the moral center of the nineteenth-century story and then the her the protagonist protagonist of that story because of course I need I need people that I can invent myself who will carry out my plot I need people who will just do whatever I you know tell them to do and so the that's her neighbor Thatcher who is the the schoolteacher who has come to this utopian place to teach to teach school and discovers they don't want new ideas writing this in this place so that's the conflict and she's she looks at him like well yeah but it's true so what are you gonna do in closing today when we were having lunch one of the questions and this is always one of the questions what are you going to do now and I didn't know this I was very surprised and so this is this is how we're going to end this Barbara what are you gonna do next what's your next book my next my next book is a collection of poetry very very exciting and I said this earlier but it bears repeating it's so fantastic that you can be a spokesperson for poetry because all of the people who read your novels and read your nonfiction will read your poetry and I am sure that a lot of us really mean to read more poetry and we you know we don't or maybe you do but I'm always struggling with that and we need desperately to move poetry back into the mainstream to have it be something that we feel comfortable with and good about so you're putting that on me I am I really I think you're the one I think Billy Collins has done a great job he has and I think that he needs some help he's getting older and and you need to be there for my thinking is that this is the book that I wouldn't have to sign first edition clubs and to go and book to her but but thank you I love poetry is so important to me as as as a lover of words as a writer I read poetry ever I I have I keep poetry on my nightstand so that it's the last thing that I read every night because I think of it as it's like flossing the word loving parts of your brain it's so important to read poetry and I have always written poetry all along no matter what else I was doing so I'm really I'm really excited to be to be publishing a collection so I asked Barbara if today usually when you do an in conversation the author will read a couple of minutes 5 or 10 minutes of the novel which is never a great experience well it just is I mean I just say that as a novelist it's not very fun just the piece that tells you yeah the elevator pitches exactly you don't want to read for an hour so I asked Barbara if she would read us a couple poems - well since I wasn't expecting to be asked right there on my iPad so you know I don't have like I once saw Junot Diaz read off his phone I know he does that something I don't well but okay all right this is exciting this is the front this is the beginning of the book tour of the future well thank you for your support of poetry and may we all read more so I'll just read you a few poems these are okay I have different sections and one of the sections of the book is how two poems I have quite a lot of how two poems but they're perhaps unexpected things like how to fly in 10,000 easy lessons that kind of thing so it's hard to know where to study this one is how to shear a sheep walk to the barn before first light take off your clothes cast everything on the ground your nylon jacket wool socks and all throw away the cutting tools the shears that bite like teeth at the skin when hooves flail and your elbow comes up hard under a panting throat no more of that sing to them instead stand naked in the morning with your entreaty ask them to come lay down their wool for love that should work it doesn't Wow I think we should have started with this okay okay we have do we have how to how to be married and how to get a divorce you get to you get to pick married please married oh really I thought sure you'd go for divorce okay both okay yeah in which order well the divorce one is funnier but the married when I wrote for my brother and sister-in-laws wedding how to be married think of rain the gathering shear fall on a quaking plane like a kiss the long slake here we stand in blissful drench it only Falls no calling it back from here water moves in one direction only River infinite grinding belly on bedrock pairing the plane to a canyon changing the shape of the world love is no granite boulder praised for its size it's the water that parts around it moving mountains nothing new this union is ancient steady at the bottom as ocean wave and sure that always move and can't come apart think of horizons blue gray and heavy-lidded don't rule out surprising possibilities an ocean can rise up hole into firmament given eternity no going back from this day water flows downhill and still we are here brand new as naked children standing in the cool precipitous fall think of rain okay I'm gonna leave you on a hopeful note because because we need it yeah okay this is ah this is that I've never read from my iPad my messages from my family keep popping okay this is how to be hopeful look you might as well know this thing is going to take endless repair rubber cement rubber bands tapioca the square of the hypotenuse 19th century novels heartstrings sunrise any of these could be useful also feathers the ignition is tricky sometimes you have to stand on an incline where things look possible or a line you drew yourself or the grocery line making faces at a toddler secretly over his mother's shoulder you may have to pop the clutch and run past the evidence past everyone who is praying for you definitely not directly to jail but passing all previous records is okay or passing strange just not passing it up or park it and fly by the seat of your pants with nothing in the bank you will still want to take the Express tiptoe past the dogs of the apocalypse asleep in the shade of your future pay at the window you can pass off hope like a bad check you still have time that's the thing to make a deposit Wow you know while you were reading I thought that's really bold to ask somebody to read poetry when you haven't read their poetry that could actually that could have gone very badly there was was a lady from Nantucket I say this in I say this both personally and on behalf of everyone who is here I love you [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Applause] [Music] you

Channel: Nashville Public Library

Views: 5,943

Rating: 4.9245281 out of 5

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Id: Lr5bCceZb7o

Length: 62min 52sec (3772 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 06 2018