Hopefully, I'll roll over and pull the covers over your head tomorrow morning.
Because there'll already be a foot of snow on the ground.
I want to just tell you about some upcoming events, though you probably know of them, but
on Friday, we start our spring film series with a double feature of films by Edgar Ulmer.
I've known among film cognizant, but basically he's known to general film audiences.
He's known as the guy who could make a thriller on a dime.
We're showing a double feature detour with Tom Neal and Anne Savage.
I'm appropriately named to play the very predatory woman, True Fenth-Faitel.
In a late noir film or mid-term noir film, 1945, and it is deliciously grim.
We're following that with Blue Beard, starring John Caridding, True Classic itself.
These are relatively short films just over 60 minutes each, so we decided to do them
as a double bill.
Upcoming next week, we will have two authors, poet and novelist Bernadine Everisto, on
February 5th, the Thursday, and she will be speaking and reading from her new novel,
Blonde Roots.
She is a British writer of Nigerian origin, and she writes remarkable cultural social satires.
And basically, Blonde Roots is a story based on the premise, what if black Africans had
enslaved white Europeans?
An interesting turn of the tables that has already gotten a great deal of attention in
Britain.
And on Monday, an unusual programming night for us, but it's Groundhog's Day.
So we just decided we had to do something.
We will have fiction writer Sue Miller, who will be reading primarily from her recent novel,
The Senators' Wife, which actually, I think Barnes and Noble is listed.
Something among its political inauguration specials that 40% off if you want to pick up a copy
of it.
But she is also, as many of you know, the author of The Good Mother, while I was gone,
family pictures, and other works.
So those are upcoming events.
As many of you know, most of you are on a mailing list, but if you're not, the brochures
for the whole season are available in the lobby.
All right.
Now I can happily make remarks and introduce our guest this evening, Jane Ann Phillips.
I'm delighted to have back.
She was last here with her last novel in the year 2000, which is an indicator in itself of
the slow study process and care and study concern that this writer takes in her work.
Jane Ann Phillips hails from West Virginia.
One doesn't come from West Virginia.
One hails from West Virginia.
West Virginia is a place where people know how to tell stories, a place full of folklore,
secrets, shadows, and even a kind of repression.
And as she noted, and across referencing here, I think I was lucky in that I grew up in
one place.
And I suppose whatever that place would have been, I would have really absorbed it.
But West Virginia was really sort of the perfect place for me to grow up.
And I was there until I was about 21.
Just a place so full of secrets and history and weight in everything from the landscape
to the sort of generations of people.
My family had been there since the Revolutionary War back when it was Virginia.
So there are a lot of family stories, and most of them not to be talked about out loud,
but people really told stories and knew each other's histories.
So there was a sense of real myth, local myth, that I think was my first introduction
to what story was about and what it is for.
And I think that whole rumpel stiltskin spinning of words into gold, what vanished into something
that was present happened because it did seem to me then that people were born and died
in waves.
And it just went on and on.
And the only time you really knew about it was when somebody took the time to write it
down.
In its society, matriarchy and patriarchy, the strong cycle of mother-daughter, mother-daughter,
father-son, father-son is near transcendent.
She learned stories and storytelling before she learned form, craft, and the techniques
one reads these writerly influences.
For her, writers like James A.G. or Catherine Ann Porter, as well as William Burrows or Bruno
Schultz, were influences.
But Jane Ann Phillips, if I could put it this way, was born into language.
Although that instantly sounds awkward in what we all.
But she was immersed in it and still is approaching the language of prose with the craft of a poet,
as which she began.
Or she approaches it religiously as an act of devotion, of ritual and meditation, that anchors
patterns and obsessions in the ground of truth.
She recognizes that we exist in a past as well as a present and that she is a writer,
lives in both simultaneously as all good writers do.
Jane Ann Phillips first attracted widespread notice for her eclectic collection of short
fixed and black tickets.
There were books before that, actually one of which is for sale outside here, which included
a mixture of short interior monologues from, let's just call them socially disenfranchised
characters and other stories, exploring the complexity as a family life.
But black tickets was how I first encountered her in the late 70s by, indeed, reading
one of the most astonishingly energetic collections to come out in the past generation.
Black tickets provide excursions into the stranger-assorted sides of life.
You buy that ticket and you take that ride into worlds of violence and loneliness, of
mental illness and lovelessness.
Raymond Carver commented on the collection in its rather famous line, these stories of
America's disenfranchised men and women light years away from the American dream or unlike
any in our literature.
She is an original and this book of hers is a crooked beauty.
The family-centered stories have black tickets naturally fed, if not directly, into Phillips's
first novel, Machine Dreams.
If I could paraphrase them back to Carver, that crooked beauty became straight in Machine
Dreams.
It tells the sweeping story of the Hampson family in the years between World War I and Vietnam
through the experiences of characters, Mitch, Jean, Dan, or Billy Hampson.
She explores the pervasive cultural disillusionment that attends a slowly disintegrating system
of values, the myth of the American dream.
The result was what Nadine Gordamer called a penetrating portrayal of the definitive experience
of her generation.
Jean and Phillips's second novel, Shelter, continued to explore family ties and generational
complexities through the perspectives of many different characters among them children
whose lives are in the midst of a profound, even turbulent change.
One reviewer said that no one writing in fiction in the United States today comes near to
her for linguistic beauty and adivistic, almost reluctant wisdom.
Except for the fact that when one uses the word adivistic in a review, usually when the
reviewer is either not sure they really get the whole thing, or perhaps when they have
a particular other axe to grind, I find myself an agreement.
And Jean and Phillips's recent mother kind explores a time of profound change in the
life of its main character, Kate Taitman, as she returns to her hometown in West Virginia
to inform her mother that she is pregnant.
And we soon learn that her mother Catherine is terminally ill with cancer and that she
has decided to forego chemotherapy in order to stave off the anguish of a protracted
illness whose end is inevitable.
It's a remarkable story.
And there's something that Jane Ann had said, actually, I believe it was the last time
she was here and it's from an interview that we had in our archives.
I think I write stories in my novels.
I think that I really have a need ever since I've had children to have a long and
during relationship with whatever I'm working on.
Because if I don't have that long and during relationship, I might not write at all.
I would add here that Yado among other places has helped her through some of the summers
that allowed her to compose work, including Lark and Termite, which we're here to hear
from tonight.
And she goes on to say it's as though the relationship with a novel sort of coalesces
inside me.
And even if I'm not writing or if I go stretches of time without writing, it stays very much
alive and the pressure to work on it increases and increases.
In a funny way, I sort of feel like that process draws the words together or makes it a little
more clarified.
So somehow I think that the relationship with the novel is something that I can make most
use of.
Indeed, her latest work, Lark and Termite, is sad again in West Virginia, but it also
Korea in the 1950s.
At its center are two siblings, 17-year-old Lark and her brother, Termite, who is mute and
cannot walk.
Their fragile mother Lola, their aunt Nani, who is raising them, and Termite's father,
Corporal Robert Levitt, who is serving in the Korean War.
Between Levitt's parallel situation, his unit has taken refuge with some South Koreans
in a railroad tunnel after being pinned down by friendly fire.
We come back to the family in West Virginia where remarkable things happen.
Let's just say no spoilers here.
The Jane Enfields dramatically captures intimate parallels and transcendent moments that bring
these stories together and knit them into a greater whole.
I should note that in this book everything works, technically, thematically.
If I can use the word, impactfully.
And it is singular to me in that it has been consistently positively reviewed since its
publication, I believe, on January 6th.
And virtually every major newspaper and magazine in the country.
It's something that I wish for any author that they could have a clip file like this.
Here's two, of course, from the Redoubtable of New York Times.
Catherine Harris and Jane Enfields renders what is realistically impossible with such authority
that the reader never questions its truth.
This is the alchemy of great fiction.
The fantastic dream that's created in Lark and Termite is when the reader enters without
ever looking back.
And then that remarkable review by Michiko Kakatani, whom any writer who has had more than
four or five books, runs for cover when she decides to review a book because she's not
extremely generous with established writers because she usually thinks they're out there
just phoning it in and especially beware if you're an older white male.
But she wrote, Jane Enfields' intricate, deeply felt new novel, reverberates with echoes
of William Faulkner, Virginia Woolf, Jack Kerwa, Carson McCulloch, and Michael Hurts'
War recording.
And yet it fuses all these wildly disparate influences into something incandescent and
utterly original.
Her characters are so indelible, so intimately drawn that they threaten to move in and take
up permanent residence in the reader's mind.
Here's a line in Jane Enfields' work, lines begun and not completed.
To me that encapsulates in miniature many character situations in her novels.
Goodbye was not so simple as a kiss, Jane Enfields' right-hills where goodbye went on and
on.
Birth and motherhood and fatherhood, the loves of siblings, new relationships and old,
loss and dying, grief and letting go, moving on, a sense of transcendence, all of these
are lines begun and not completed in the span of her stories.
And now, and now, they are here all at once.
These passages are not uncommon in Jane Enfields' fiction, and they give the reader cause
to marvel as much for the sheer breadth of possibilities for their lyricism and economy.
Embedded in the prose or gems of insight, moments of surprising and mode of power, delicate
wit.
Poignant moments that are both tragic and joyful, a celebration of all the wonder that life holds.
Please welcome Jane Enfields.
Well, thank you.
I'm really happy to be back here at the Writers Institute, which is a wonderful place,
and to see Dawn again.
And I want to thank all of you for coming before this no storm, and I want to welcome Annabelle
Lee, one of my first publishers, the vehicle editions, who brought a couple of very limited
edition books from the very old days with her.
Dawn pretty much explained a little bit about the novel.
I'm going to read from three of the four voices in the book, beginning with something
from Corporal Robert Levitt's first, this is too close to me, his first section of the
book.
I don't think it really spoils any secrets to tell you that Robert Levitt is helping
to evacuate some small villages in South Korea and the wake of a North Korean advance.
He's very much aware that his child, the child who will be termite is about to be born
in the States.
Lola, his wife, is the mother also of a young girl, Mark, who we'll hear from later in
the book.
From Robert Levitt, July 26, 1950, North Chun-chun Province, South Korea.
All month, he's carried a snapshot of Lola in the breast pocket of his stinking fatigues,
wrapped in a cellophane encased cigarette pack against the rain.
Lola and the hammock they'd strung on the third floor porch off her room.
Even in black and white, her dark red hair looks red, and her eyes look blue.
The pretty lines of the corners are a little deeper.
She rests one hand on her rounded belly, her smile langued in sweet, like she's about
to pour him a glass of that minted tea she spikes with a little rum.
This morning, when the platoon hurriedly pulled out, the new replacement stumbling and
nervous, Levitt missed the carefully flattened cigarette pack and Lola's picture, losing
it was bad luck.
On the back, she'd written seven months along.
He'll be hearing any day.
He's glad about the baby.
He's put his mark on her, held his territory until he can get back and claim her.
He thinks about her with other men in a past before he knew her and blocks images out
of his mind.
Lola has a past and a kid, a daughter who lives with her older sister in West Virginia.
When the sister manages a restaurant, pays a mortgage on her own house.
Noreen was the strong one, Lola said, and nobody's fool.
It was better.
Levitt imagines an ultra-respectable, school-armed type, kindly enough to raise Lola's daughter
while she disapproves of singers and bars and military towns.
Lola wouldn't say her daughter's name, even to him.
I gave her a bird's name, maybe she'll grow up safe and fly away.
Viral hamlets here are derivations of one another.
Dirt track villages of Shabby wooden buildings.
Levitt has scribbled the similar Romanized names of the villages emptied today in his dirty,
palm-sized notebook.
Chugokri, Nogunri, MKri, no plumbing, no electricity.
What did the refugees carry in those bundles on their backs and heads?
What did they gather up when the soldiers appeared, rousing them out before the North Koreans
swept through?
Intelligence warned that some carried ordnance and mortars to North Korean units.
If they did, Levitt thought they were North Korean infiltrators.
He'd heard South Koreans speak amongst themselves, and he understood enough to know that most
of them hated the North.
Whole villages emptied at news the NKPA were closing in.
They were considered bloodthirsty puppets of the Red Chinese, and their readiness to slaughter
civilians was legendary.
Remaining ROK units couldn't be trusted with a few North Korean prisoners they'd taken.
They shot them outright.
Still both sides took advantage of the American inability to tell them apart unless they were
uniformed.
Levitt takes off his helmet, wipes the sweat from his face without breaking stride.
Equal juror he calls to the Koreans, this way.
The double railroad overpass is closer now.
Levitt can see that the tunnels below are slightly curved and relatively deep.
He can't see through them.
The dirt road moves through one into dark shade, the stream through the other.
Their stone or concrete bunker like arched, like two deep eyes angled slightly a scance.
He'll keep the Koreans on the tracks and then direct them down the grassy incline to
rest in the shade of the tunnels.
He'll advise the refugees to proceed south on their own and circle his men back to
regroup.
Reduce chances that the platoon will be stranded or cut off.
Go watch a seo.
A girl stands full in front of Levitt blocking his path, burdened by the nearly grown child
on her back.
She fills his vision, shocking and sudden.
Go watch a seo.
She says again.
Help me.
It's a demand, not a request.
For a moment he wonders if he knows her, one of the girls from Seoul.
But no, this one's a village girl, beautiful, petite like most of them, dressed in the usual
white garments.
A purely rural girl who's never been to Seoul.
She seems as furious as Levitt feels as they should all feel walking away like this,
losing everything.
Frantically she gestures toward the tracks.
An old woman has fallen or maybe just collapsed.
How money, she says.
How money.
Not her mother.
It's the word for grandmother or great aunt.
The girl runs back to stand over her, looks at Levitt, pleads with him angrily as though
it's his job to help only her.
This girl has never left her village.
She's forgotten nothing and is fiercely herself.
The child's guardian, the old woman's protector.
She stands, legs outspread, one arm flung out, planted to provide the old woman a barrier.
The crowd and white, all of them, these farmers, were white.
Parts around her, barely disturbed, moving on.
She glairs at Levitt, enraged that she needs help, angry to herself.
She can't carry the boy on her back and pick up the old woman, yet she won't put the boy
down, not here, even for a moment.
Monitor, do not assist.
Those are his orders, repeated to his men just hours ago as this venture started.
Levitt's whistle rinses the air, signaling the platoon to tighten along the perimeter of
the refugee column, keep everyone moving.
Levitt looks at the old woman, at the girl.
She stands unbending, staring at and waiting, holding the child.
The boy tilts his head, oddly.
Too old to be carried.
He's crippled, slow-witted, something.
Levitt nods at the girl, yes, and dread breaks over him.
Something imminent approaches, something to hurt them all.
Is it her, someone in the crowd?
Unlikely an infiltrator would attack here, unless the crowd was full of them.
The girl looks at Levitt, willing him closer.
Her eyes burn into him, her perfectly oval face, nearly opalescent.
She could be the kid's mother or his sister who could tell, the women here all look so
young until they're suddenly ancient.
That steps back to sight his men, then he wades quickly into the crowd.
As though on signal the girl reaches out, ships the burden of the child to him, and bends
over the old woman.
Stronger than she looks, she lifts the old lady to her feet and half supports her, moving
on as though Levitt will simply follow.
He nearly does but reaches out to touch her shoulder.
Kujukuro, he shouts, to the side, moved to the side, out of the flow of the crowd.
The kid's legs circle Levitt's waist.
He shifts his rifle to one shoulder and clasps the boy to his hip.
Bikyya, he says calmly, out.
The girl needs no further direction.
She stays close and follows Levitt, urging the old woman along.
The boy ways nothing.
He must be eight, nine.
The grip of his thin arms is firm, the aspect of his upper body, holy tense.
He moves his head, listening.
The curved shell of his ear turned up.
Their faces are inches apart.
Levitt sees into the boy's stunning, nearly reflective eyes.
The obsidian irises float a pale blue milk, and his pupils are invisible behind blue
splashes of cataract.
He's blind.
That's why the girl wouldn't put him down.
The cloudiness in his eyes seems to subtly pulse or dilate.
The boy looks with complete attention seems to see past Levitt or into him.
He's not slow or not exactly.
He seems preternaturally alert.
Levitt has difficulty looking away, but he averts his eyes and quickens his pace.
He feels the girl's frantic hand on his lower back and slows just enough to accommodate
her progress with the old woman.
Follow me, he calls to her in Korean.
Stay with me.
Moving quickly, edging through, he feels the boy's small body go rigid, his apprehension
heightened to a nearly audible pitch.
Levitt imagines the clear high tone of a tuning fork struck in mid-air.
It's that kind of focus, emotionless and pure, so sharply true that nothing else exists.
Suddenly he understands and he hears what the boy hears, planes, the rumbling overhead,
closing fast.
There's no way out.
The refugees move doggedly forward, perfectly exposed.
For a white column seemingly moving in formation and the strafing begins.
July 26, 1959, Wynfield, West Virginia, Lark.
I move his chair into the yard under the tree and then Noanie carries him out.
The tree is getting awful of seeds and the pod is hanging down.
Soon enough the seeds will fly through the air and Noanie will have hay fever and want
all the windows shut to keep the white pups out.
Termite will want to be outside in the chair all the time then and he'll go on and on
at me if I try to keep him indoors so I can do the ironing or clean up the dishes.
Sun or rain, he wants to be out early mornings especially.
Okay you're out, Noanie will say and he starts his sounds quiet and satisfied before
she even puts him down.
She has on her white uniform to go to work at Charlie's and she holds Termite out from
her ways not to get her stockings run with his long toenails or her skirt stained with
his fingers because he always has jam on them after breakfast.
There's Termite.
Noanie puts him in the chair with his legs under him like he always sits.
Nobody else's legs would go to sleep all day like that.
You keep an eye on him, Mark, Noanie says and give him some lemonade when it gets warmer.
Noanie straightens Termite.
Get him one of those cleaner bag ribbons from inside.
I've got to go.
Charlie will have my ass.
A car horn, blares in the alley.
Termite blares to them, trying to sound like the horn.
At least he's here, Noanie says.
Don't forget to wash the dishes and wipe off his hands.
He's already walking off across the grass but Termite is outside so he doesn't mind
her going.
At least waves at me from inside her Ford.
She's a little shape in the shine of glare on the window, in the gravel crunches and
they're moving off fast like they're going somewhere important.
Termite, I say to him and he says it back to me.
He always gets the notes right without saying the words.
His sounds are like a one-tone song and the day is still and flat.
It's seven in the morning and here and there are a little bit of air moves in pieces like
a tease.
Like things are getting full so slow, no one notices.
Termite I tell him, I'll fix the radio.
Don't worry.
He's got to have something to listen to.
He moves his fingers the way he does with his hands up and always fingers pointing, then
curving, each in a separate motion, fast or careful.
He never looks at his fingers but I always think he hears or knows something through them
like he does it for some reason.
Charlie says he's just spastic.
That's a spastic motion.
No, he says he's fidgety with whatever he has that he can't put to anything.
I think his fingers never stop moving.
Unless we give him something to hold, then he holds on so tight we have to pry whatever
it is away from him.
No, he says that's just cussiness.
Maybe when he holds something, his fingers rest, he doesn't always want to keep hearing
things.
I tell termite, it's not going to rain yet.
There's not going to be stars though, it's going to be hot and white and the white sky
will go gray.
Then really late, we might have that big storm they talk about.
Big storm they talk about, termite says back to me in sounds like my words.
That's right I tell him but you'll have to watch from the window.
I don't think you're going to sit out here in the rain with lightning flashing all around
you.
He doesn't say anything to that.
He might be thinking how great it would be.
Wind and rain, real hard rain.
Not like the summer rain we let him sit out in sometimes.
He likes motion.
He likes things on his skin.
He's alive all over that way.
No, he says I put thoughts in his head.
He might not be thinking anything.
Maybe he doesn't have to think, I tell her.
You don't you be thinking a lot of things about him that aren't true, she'll say.
But no one can tell what's true about him.
Termite I tell him, I'm going back in.
Back in, back in, back in.
I hear him as I walk away.
Now he'll be silent as a breather, quiet as long as I let him be.
I stand at the kitchen sink where I can see him, run the water as hot as it can get.
When I watch termite, I can see him blowing on the ribbon, blowing and blowing it, not
too fast.
Termite likes the blue of the plastic and he likes to see through it.
He blows it out from his face and watches it move.
And it barely touches him and he blows it away.
He'll do that for 30 minutes for an hour, till you take it away from him.
I'm so used to being with termite, he feels like a loan to me.
He's like a hum that always hums so the edge of where I am is blunt and softened.
And I push the dishes under, I don't even look at them, I keep my eyes on him out the window.
He moves that clear blue ribbon with his breath, ripples it slow in front of his eyes.
Sees through blue if he sees or just feels it touching him.
I can hear the air it is open lips.
I hear the air conditioner down at the restaurant, too.
Tony is taking orders in the breakfast rush and it's already crowded and hot, tables and
stools at the counter filled and the big box over the door is grinding its firm noise.
Charlie calls it the system.
Later in the afternoon when most everyone is cleared out, a no-ne is getting ready to come
home.
The system will be catching and pulling like it can't quite breathe, saying sip, sip,
sip, all wounded.
Tony leaves while it's sighing when they're setting up for dinner.
Charlie wanted me to take the dinner shift after I graduated, but Noanie said I wasn't
graduating high school to be a 17 year old waitress.
She says I don't need a job, termites my job, and barkers secretaryal when she can be home
nights to stay with termite.
The point is to make things better, Noanie says, have a future.
I'm looking at termite in the alley past his chair and it's funny how that piece of
see through blue he holds to his face looks how I think a future would, waving like that,
moving, start to finish, leading off into space.
I'm going to read just the beginning of termites first section of the book.
July 26, 1959.
Termite.
He sees through the blue and it goes away.
He sees through the blue and it goes away again.
He breathes blowing just high.
The blue moves but not too much.
The blue moves and stays blue and moves.
He can see into the sky where there were no shapes.
The shapes that move around him are big, colliding and joining and going apart.
They're the warm feel of what he hears and smells next to him, of those who hold and move
and touch and lift him, saying these curls get so tangled wipe off his hands, bark, there's
termite.
He sings back to keep them away or draw them near.
That's all he'll say.
He won't tell and tell.
Lark bends over him and her hair falls along his neck and shoulders.
Her hair moves and breathes over his back and chest and a dark curtain that falls and
falls.
Her hair smells of flowers that have dried, like the handful of rose petals he grasped
until they were soft and damp.
Lark names the flowers and he says the sounds, but the sounds are not the flowers.
The flower is the shape so close he sees it still enough to look blue like that, long
and tall, each flared tongue with its own dark eye.
In the shape moves and the flowers too close or too far.
The shape becomes its colors, but he feels Lark touch it to his face and lips like a
weightless velvet scrap.
The flower moves and blurs and smears.
He looks away to stop it disappearing.
Pictures that touch him move and change.
They lift and turn, stutter their edges and blur into one another.
Their colors fall apart and are never still long enough for him to see, but the pictures
inside him hold still.
He sees them without trying.
It's how Lark sees everything, everywhere they go.
She couldn't walk and runs so fast and be so sure through his moving colors, his dark
that blurs.
But she can't hear what he hears.
He listens hard to tell.
She never knows what's coming, but he can't say and say.
Lark says, feel your soft blue shirt, want to wear this?
She says, hold the crayon, it's green, it's grass is green.
She says, listen to the radio even if it's not so loud as you like.
She says, eat your toast while it's hot and she gives him toast.
Thick and warm and buttery on his hand with the warm jam on the knife like the farmer's
wife.
The knife comes and goes across the plates.
The table holds the pouring and crashing and banging while Noni walks hard and fast in
and out of the kitchen in her white shoes.
Her legs swish every step and he can feel her stepping room to room to room.
No matter where she is he can hear and he puts his head on the table to hear the sound
alone through the wood without all the other sounds.
But she picks him up.
One strong armor on his chest and the other bent for the seat under him.
She calls his throne.
They move fast, thudding across the floor out the door onto the ground where the sound
goes hollow and deep.
The porch door bangs.
All the while he can hear and leases car roll its big wheels closer until it turns roaring
into the alley but Noni puts him in his chair.
She brushes his hair back with her two broad hands while the car throbs in the narrow
tracks of the alley.
The crushing gravel to the rattles and slides and bleeding loud.
He calls and calls and he wants to go but Noni goes.
Under the motor sound he hears the car take her weight aside before the door slams.
The car roars away down the stone onto the smooth pavement and goes until it's gone.
There's a shape in the air where the car was.
He feels the shape holds still before it begins to end.
Slowly the air comes back.
The grass begins small sounds.
Termite, lark says.
I'll fix the radio.
Don't worry.
Here's your ribbon, lark says.
She wraps the blue around his wrist.
He moves it to his face just above his eyes but he doesn't look.
Mo the grass, lark says.
Big storm they talk about.
He waits.
Soon she'll go.
She says don't think you're going to sit out here in the rain with lightning flashing
all around you.
He holds still listening.
Far down the alley where the gravel meets the street.
He hears the orange cat paw forward on its ragged paws.
Away down the alley the ragged orange cat is stepping careful dragging its belly along
the stones under the lilacs.
The cat waits then for lark to go.
The cat waits low and long where no one sees and the growl in its belly thrums deeper.
The cat knows lark will throw a stick or a handful of gravel that lands like stinging
rain.
Termite, lark says.
She puts her face close to his, her eyes against his eyes.
Larks brown eyes are stirred like the river when the river is milky with rain.
She knows he can see if she's very close.
He doesn't look now.
He doesn't try.
He doesn't want her to stay.
She says you ring the bell if you want anything.
He wants to hear the train.
Far off the train's bell sound is long and wide and dark as the shade under the railroad
bridge.
The bridge goes over the river and the trains pour over top.
He wants to feel the roar.
I'm going to finish by reading a short section that comes further back in the book from one
of Levit's sections of the book.
Levit is a musician from Philly, a Jewish kid.
He plays a horn and met Lola at a club called Onslaues when he was in basic training in
Louisville.
In this section of the book he's in the tunnel with South Koreans and is very badly injured.
In fact the children in a sense the girl is taking care of him.
The hard mouth of the canteen tastes sharp and metallic against his teeth.
He's in a blank shell.
The girl has turned his head up to give him water but there isn't much left.
He understands she's rationed it, kept it hidden from the other survivors who are moaning
for water, for help.
The child corpses the only barrier to American fire.
It's dangerous now to move it all to stand or be seen, to leave the tunnel wall.
The light is gone, shadows of lengthened.
The girl is holding the canteen to his mouth but Levit forgets to drink.
Water tracks down his face and the girl's hand moves to catch the liquid, touch it to
his lips and her finger.
He can smell blood.
He would know not to waste water.
She's wiped his face with her bloody clothes, moments of past, not hours.
The troops outside are waiting for orders and the orders will come.
Daybreak Levit thinks command will be forced to act, squeezed by the invasion from the
north, their own lack of troops, the need to move.
Am I speaking?
He asks the girl.
Do you hear me?
Nay, nay she says, yes.
Do you have the gun?
He asks.
She nods.
She keeps it, he says.
He knows he can't hold the gun now, can't lift it.
She tries again with the canteen.
He swallows twice, carefully, and she turns his head back, returns him like an infant to
his darkness.
He sees his mother lying on the cracked green linoleum of the store in Philly, her eyes open
and still.
He remembers that he shut her eyes and straightened her head, then stood and left immediately.
Now he stays.
He rests his palm on her forehead, just at the curve of her skull, and lets himself see
how fast she's finally fled.
How she's letting him go in the precise moment her freedom begins.
He goes upstairs this time as the granted permission and packs the same clothes and schoolbooks,
takes his trumpet and a folder of sheet music, as before he doesn't call anyone, but the
dark panic he felt that day, the inability to leave is gone.
She wants him to go.
He understands that she's directing him.
His release is the only ceremony she requires.
Eventually, the old man will come home and find the last evidence of his broken promises,
his astrangement.
It's a moment she's arranged and neatly escaped.
Bobby, go ahead, practice.
Sounds nice.
The vague heaviness he took on as a child, as a young man who couldn't save her is distinct.
She lifts it from him.
This weight he's carried in his chest for years, like a red ember.
Her loneliness, her aloneness but for him and the thousand details she managed daily,
was her own jewel that flared in the dark.
You're like me, she would say to him when they were alone.
And you're like me, he tells her now.
Listen, this is for you.
He plays her favorite, the same euphonious solo rendition of my funny Valentine that
became a standard at Oslo's club between Lola's sets.
A pure melody he could play in his exacting pitch perfect sleep.
Sometimes it was like sleep, like an exalted dream, standing there on stage in the white
light of the spot.
Look of countless cigarettes, frilled wavory and blue, ascending in the air around him.
He must have played the song for his mother hundreds of times, late at night to block out
the sound of the street.
He was thirteen, fourteen.
Stay out all night when you're a man, she'd tell him, you'd be in this house by eleven,
and he nearly always was, in time to stand in her doorway before she lay down in her
darkened room.
She'd be up at five to take deliveries for the store, and she didn't stop all day.
The old man was out most nights with cronies or women and slept on the twin bed they
kept in the living room in lieu of a couch.
It was just Bobby and his mother in the apartment.
Neon signs on the street flashing altered pastels through the windows and across the floor.
He played the notes in time with those hues of light, a braille that fell across his mother
as she closed her eyes.
He worked to perfect each note because it was all he could give her, and he tested himself
a new each time he played the song.
The familiar chords pushed everything away, and his use of the tune as a solo refrain
between sets at onslaues was like a return to ritual.
The fluid notes said what language could never phrase.
He played them over the world that was his mother's grave.
Loleah said she couldn't listen while she was backstage, changing one dress for another
hair, eyes, lipstick.
The song distracted her so, made her want to lie down in it.
When he told her it was his mother's song, she looked at him a long moment and smiled.
Of course it was, and you were the whole world mended.
He hears the slow swing of the song's wordless phrases now, and sees himself standing in
the spot, playing alone on stage, eyes closed.
But he's on the dance floor with Loleah.
Her hands are laced easily behind his head, moving on his neck as they dance close in the
crowded club.
Sometimes they dance to the jukebox, but now they're in this strange, split moment, hearing
him play a song that only he plays exactly this way.
There together, and she's got that langerous, satisfied smile and weddied look she wore
in the wake of making love.
A look that always seemed unbearably sad to him.
He has to go now.
There's no more time.
He knows she loves this song, the serious, funny words like a question and answer game,
a riddle for mended hearts.
Is your figure less than Greek?
He's kissing her because this is the last time ever laughable, unfodegrappable.
They could go into Anseless office and lock the door, but the Korean girl is watching
them through the phrases of the song, holding the sightless boy in her arms, pressed on all
sides by the crowd, pouring into the tunnel.
He looks at the boy and looks at him, and Loleah sees him too through her own labored
breathing.
She cries out sharply, as though it's she who must reach the boy, save him.
She often cried out as though in pain when they made love, until Bobby moved her past
her first sharp arousal.
It was like moving through a steep and narrow passage, like following her up flights of narrow
stairwell at the club that first night, with only shadows and colors showing in the dark.
He knows her body as he knows his own, and he listens with his muscles and his nerves,
with his pounding heart, pacing himself, moving with her and holding back, opening, opening
into her.
When he's inside her, nothing seems haphazard or happenstance.
It's all inevitable, terrible, beautiful.
He touches her hard, high belly then, and feels the baby pushing, pushing to get out of
her.
The tense bands of muscle in her pelvis are like iron.
Love it wants to hold her, but she screams and anguish, falling away from him.
She can't follow him.
She stays.
Her breathing is strained and loud.
He knows she won't come with him.
She's staying with the boy.
Thank you.
I don't know if there are questions.
I think if you have questions, Don is going to dance over to you with the microphone.
He's going to repeat them.
He's not going to dance over to you.
Any questions?
I just find that the last section of your ridden, it's movement in time and place to
do so.
We're remarkable and seamless.
I think it's really great.
What might be that there aren't any questions?
That's right.
I gave, I kind of inadvertently gave you what I call a serotonin introduction, which means
that it was too long.
Okay.
That's fine.
I hope you're out, moved and indeed moved to purchase a copy of the book.
If you have any, oh, there's one question back there.
Go ahead.
What kind of research goes into the construction of the entire book or the career section in
particular?
The sections with termite as well as the career section.
I guess there's a lot of different types of research.
I mean, I am really not a musical person.
I mean, I suppose I'm a musical person since I write musically, but I have no knowledge
of music and could never read music.
But writing the sections about Levit and making him a believable musician and trying to
be in his head, I think it's just a kind of a leap.
Then there's trying to be that cat, which was an interesting leap to sort of being an
animal that rips its food apart with its teeth.
We remember that from way, way back, sort of in our cells, I suppose.
And then the research on the Korean War really was just a matter of reading accounts of
what actually happened during the incident at Nogunry, which is the event that this book
moves into.
What happens to Levit did not happen as far as anyone knows, but it could have happened.
So there was a lot of research around the beginning of the Korean War, and in particular,
the first few weeks of the war, which North Koreans invaded on June 26, 1950, and this
takes place about a month later.
At that point, the Americans had retreated some 70 miles, and we're just being really
slaughtered, but they were completely unprepared, and most of them had never been in combat.
And I made this world in which Levit had been in country for five months in LIS, language
immersion soul, which is something I completely made up.
But it was a way to bring language itself into the book in a more direct way, the fact
that he knows some Korean.
And the book really turned into a kind of parallel worlds, sustaining these two parallel worlds
that were very much connected to one another.
Because I think in reality, we exist in parallel worlds all the time, whether we're conscious
of it or not, and language, and literature sometimes makes that connection palpable and
real.
All right, now I'll see you.
All right, please.
That's okay with you.
The material really held a lot of secrets inside it that I did not know about.
That's pretty much the case with my work in general.
I mean, the tiny, italicized paragraph at the beginning of shelter, for instance,
I wrote when I was in graduate school as a kind of prose poem, and I knew there was
something inside it, but I had no idea what it was.
But 20 years later or so, I began to write the book that became shelter, the world of
these girls, and what was happening inside that little moment.
So I tend to feel that a book is like the idea of a piece of marble, you know, the sculpture
is inside the marble, and somehow the marble suggests the shape that is in it.
When I first began to think about this book, I thought of it as a short book, it was a
pretty short book, in which Lark and Noni would tell the story in alternating voices,
and Lark, and the Noni sections would be short fictions, one to two pages long.
And I imagined writing the book pretty quickly.
But when I began to write the Levit sections and introduce the whole world of the Korea
sections, and saw how they were connected to the world in 1959, it made the book much,
much more complex.
And I had originally not planned to include a point of view for termite.
I imagined the book would just sort of focus around him, and he would not be heard from.
But I simply was pulled into trying to represent the way that he thinks, and for me it was
one of the most beautiful experiences in terms of being inside the book.
And of course, he is really a living secret.
And the reader is in the strange position of knowing things that none of the other characters
knows, because the reader has this entrance into what termite sees.
Termite himself doesn't recognize what he sees, but the reader does.
So I couldn't have really planned those things.
They sort of emerged from the language itself.
And when I started the book, I knew that Lark didn't know who her father was, but I didn't
know myself who the father was.
There were a couple of likely candidates.
And when the book was finished, it sort of seems inevitable that all of the questions
were answered in the way that they're answered.
But you really don't know what termite is looking at, or what the echo is of that strip of
blue until you get to the very end.
And I didn't know either.
So I wouldn't say surprised, but it was, you know, that
in termite sources, Lark's hair falling over his back and revealing slowly, falling apart
as though we're revealing a picture that's more like that kind of thing.
The veils slowly lift or slowly fall away.
Good question.
Any other questions?
Down here?
No, that wouldn't be possible because he doesn't speak.
So there's no way that he would have a first-person voice or relate to a first-person voice.
It was a more, you know, interestingly, levitt and termite are both written in the third-person
point of view, whereas the two women are first-person.
I mean, levitt's section had to establish this very confused, kinetic, catastrophic event
that he's physically inside, but also introduced his whole life, what he came from in a kind
of imagistic shorthand.
And also the opening of his consciousness, because as he gets closer to death, in a sense,
his senses open.
He begins to see and hear things, just as in that short section I read, just before the
strafing.
He sort of hears because he senses from the boy.
But later on in the tunnel, he begins to hear things differently almost as though he's
learning how the boy sees things as his, in his sensory shutdown.
So it's sort of straddling worlds in a lot of different ways.
Well, I think it's unconscious.
I mean, it's simply the way that I approach language.
I do think that a line of prose has a rhythmic beat to it in the same way that a line of poetry
had, you know, should have.
And that's very much what I try to impart to students, and sort of thinking about a line
of prose as a line of lyric, a line of music.
And I think, you know, language has a whole unconscious built-in layer to it that we're
not even conscious of using when we write, but it's sort of there, floating up from underneath.
And the silence between the lines, of course, is part of what operates in fiction.
And it's knowing how to sort of ride that or, you know, move with it.
And I think with practice becomes a kind of instinct, because at least if I had to think
about it, I don't think it would work.
Let's make this the last question.
Do you want to repeat that question?
No.
I'll just cut to the chase of what he said.
But, termite, how much of it could be research, or projection, or imagination?
But the questioner being kind of caught up in this wonder about how do you actually get inside termite
if he's in some ways impenetrable?
Maybe that's why I'm brodery on the question then.
I think just feeling a deep empathy, and also the idea of music very much a part of it.
I mean, he doesn't know his father, but his father was a musician.
And it's almost as though if this boy had been born a normal boy, he might have been someone interested in music,
because he thinks very musically.
And the language has a kind of rhythm and internal rhyme.
At the same time, you know, he, most of his cues are auditory, because his vision is in fits and starts.
So trying to represent that.
And then he slips back and forth in time.
And when he's thinking about something in the past, it feels like it's the present.
And trying to work with that kind of frame of time.
And trying to sort of indicate the repetitions, the things that he sees, that he recognizes again and again,
but he has no context for them, and he doesn't know what they are.
And his sense of willfulness, I mean, I see him as a bright boy in a sense,
because even though he doesn't have normal capabilities, in a sense, he controls the people around him to a certain degree.
He wants large to go back inside so he doesn't communicate with her, or he wants them to do such and such, so he does such and such.
And he actually exerts an amazing amount of control over his life.
He can't move, and so he has this wagon, and he's taken from place to place.
And early in the book, as Levit realizes how injured he is, he's thinking about what it's like to be just moved and carried.
And in a strange way, the reader begins to pick up almost sort of cross-currence of thought between one being and another.
It comes very Stein-like, I don't know, the language. I had never heard it voiced, so it's fascinating to hear.
Oh, okay. Last last question. Absolutely.
