So I was looking over the tree, I was thinking about you.
And we both looked so much younger.
No, that's all I did.
I was told that you have not seen Hollywood.
Is this you and the West Virginia section of the state book of the strawberry?
No.
I wrote that essay, but no, that's not me.
No, I was not, I was in a few parades, but I was never clean and strawberry.
But this is, I have to ask this, I have to say, I have to go to your website.
I do not even know what your type is.
And maybe it's just a coincidence that I found this.
Yeah, that's not cool.
That was like my floor.
I mean, it's not exactly where it all comes from, but it is sort of a resource, like a resource bank.
I mean, there are certain photographs that I've used and certain things that I've looked at a long time.
And of course, the work is not figuratively, literally real, but...
And some of it was after the fact, some of it was sort of things I put together after the fact that sort of connected in an impugistic way.
But I hope to expand that to include a whole thing on lock and termite, but that's in the future.
Right now, I haven't had a webmaster for a long time, and I did not do it, so I just found someone and we're going to do some stuff.
That's really amazing.
Oh, the pictures of the birthday cake?
Oh, the pictures of the birthday cake?
Yeah.
So they were your...
I can't remember right now what novel the birthday cakes were in. Was it Mother Kind?
Yeah.
There were a couple of those birthday cakes.
That's amazing.
And then seeing the family pictures and...
I don't know. It was just like...
kind of like picking up some sort of stone or something, hiding these things.
Yeah.
But it also made me think a little bit of the kind of eerie healing sort of again, reading savel.
And you know whether... I mean, have you ever read any of these?
I like his work a lot.
And the fake photographs?
Yeah.
I like that idea of using fake photographs. I mean, I've never used photographs before in a book, and this sort of happened by accident with Law & Termite.
But when I was researching the book, and I was... I was actually, I think, at McDowell, three years ago or something.
And I was writing to travel book writers who written books on Korea, and trying to just connect with someone on the internet, and this wonderful guy said that he was in Korea at the time, he would go to the tunnel and take photographs for me.
So he took a series of color snapshots and mailed them to me. I'm sure he thought he'd never hear of me again.
But when I gave Kanoff, I gave them a bunch of research materials.
The little moon picture, the termite is so attached to, is something that I've had for ages.
The drawing was a drawing that a friend of mine, Mary Sherman, gave me many, many years ago.
And I had a series of photographs of the alley, where in fact I did see a boy 30 years ago, who in my mind became sort of the nexus for the story of Law & Termite.
And I also gave them Robert Nielsen's photographs, and they agreed to... I wanted to use that drawing of Mary's at first as the cover, but Kanoff said no to that.
Thankfully, I think, because I love the cover they came up with, it is going to be the UK cover of the book.
But they took those color photographs, and I really just gave them as a sort of setting the scene, think about it.
But they turned them into black and white, and they cropped them tighter and tighter, as sort of the end of the book comes closer and closer.
And I thought it, I like the way it works.
So all that will be part of the secret country of Law & Termite eventually.
I'm still telling Nielsen from that.
I don't know exactly why, I think it is just like...
I think on some level it's really just the forced readiness of it in me, and I don't know if Colossus is honest yet.
But if to say, like, oh, Rita, did you think these things just sprung out of my head out of nowhere?
Well, most things do, but if there is something that I have a literal representation of, you know, like the birthday cakes, that belongs in the secret country.
And it is a secret country because, as you say, not that many people know to look at it.
I've been working to figure that out.
So then, just to finish on that, you don't, you're not really using those photographs that some sort of made memoir or incitement to mention.
They usually come and confirm something that you...
Well, I only put those together for the website.
I mean, I had... I don't go looking up photographs of things in order to refresh my memory about them because my memory of them is very contextualized and angular.
And that's the sense memory that I work with.
But I went back afterward and found these pictures and put them on the website.
Thanks for talking.
Well, one of the things I just wanted to ask you to expand on.
Then we do this with people who have come more than once, just ask when it comes to a larger amount of time.
What have you been up to since the last time you were here?
Well, I was last year about nine years ago when Mother Kind came out.
And this book, Law and Termite, I've actually been working on it for probably 15 years.
But I, because I had written part of it and I had written part of Mother Kind.
And it was around, I don't know, 2000 or maybe 99 that I finally signed a contract with another publisher after Sam Lawrence died in 94.
And it was 4-2 book contract and I had sort of plans for both the novels.
And Knapp thought Mother Kind seemed more marketable and they asked me to finish that first.
And as it turned out, it was the best that I did because I think that book in a way, I think every book prepares the ground, you know, for the next one in a particular sense.
So I finished that book and then went back to working on Law and Termite.
And then four years ago, I took a major sort of change of direction by accepting a job at Rutgers Newark designing a new MFA program for them, which involved writing the proposal and getting it through several state agencies.
And then actually starting the program two years ago, we now have 44 students.
We have a great reading series, Goldbiteers at Newark that I curate and courses that are connected to the series called Writers at Newark, Contemporary American Lit.
We're working with that reading series as a basis for a lot of community outreach, working with several high schools in Newark.
And that's a huge undertaking. Our students are probably the most diverse MFA group in the country, almost half our students of color, over half our non-traditional students.
So they range in age from 21 to 60. They've many of them have had careers. They have ongoing careers now. We do all of our classes at 530 and later so that people can actually have jobs and families and be in the program.
And our students this year are publishing in McSweeney's and Grant Young Voices and Parrish Review.
So it's very interesting. It's really too interesting. It's too compelling.
And I pulled you away from...
It does pull me away from writing. But I had kind of settled into writing in the summers anyway, even before I took that job.
Because I think, as I get either older or deeper into my own material, I really have to be kind of shut off from outside stimulus and forced to go to, say, writers' prison, where the meals are served and everyone's working,
and everyone feels very guilty if one isn't working. And there's isolation and there's a bit of community at night, you know, sort of blunt, the loneliness of it all a bit.
Sneak over to Skidmore.
Sneak over to Skidmore now and then.
And I wanted to tell you basically, just in touch with you through the first, whatever you've tried to tell me.
And had I known, had I known that you were often in this school, writing this down? I think, gosh.
And actually, I guess the next question will probably do talk around stuff like this in the general session.
But I, and probably use a line with some of my introductory notes.
I don't think I've seen the book reviewed as extensively and as consistently, enthusiastically.
In literally years, it's like this, you know, it's home right?
Did you have a sense that you were hitting, touching all the bases, hitting all your marks?
That this was something that was going to garnet the kind of tension it has or is it, as one of my friends says, the real turns and sometimes more it lands on you.
But at other times, where something equal significance might not be heard.
You know, I don't know.
I feel as though this book resolves more specifically, I always write in a very layered way, but I don't always resolve things as specifically as things are resolved in this book.
And I think it connects with the reader, and it's a very specific way, maybe because of that.
I mean, intentionally, sometimes I leave things a bit more open.
And while Lock and Turnright's only suggests a future beyond the book, it connects in so many ways.
And most of those connects were not necessarily planned from the beginning.
Because I think I worked very much inside the material, material dictate form and follow the material into the form, and that's very much what happened with this book.
I didn't intend initially.
It was going to be a short little book composed of, Lock's voice and None's voice, and None's voice was going to be short fictions, sort of one or two page fictions, that was my initial plan.
And I just got more and more and more complex, and from the time that I tried to sort of embrace the idea of working with parallel worlds with the 1950s sections of the 59 sections they got endlessly complicated.
And there were times when I despaired of ever sustaining those two worlds.
And fortunately, I'm extremely persistent.
And the book had a very compelling hold on me.
I felt as though I just had to keep with it, stay with it until I got there.
And the ending of the book was a surprise to me.
I wanted to know who that boy was that I saw sitting in that chair 30 years ago looking at an empty alley holding this piece of blue, dry cleaning bag in front of his face and blowing on it.
And I wanted to know what he was doing.
And this book answered that question, and it works as sort of the dimensionality of past, present, future in a way that I've always been fascinated with.
It resolves in a very particular way, and it suggests certain things that I think have been surprising.
I mean, you never know what reviewers are going to do, and I don't connect myself to that process.
I mean, that's sort of about the book.
But the way I feel about it is that I'm glad to be walking termite or sort of on their way.
You know, they're in transit.
The whole thing about this, a few things of yourself.
I think, well, basically, see your point and agree with you about how this work could only come of your capacity to really learn how to face yourself in the remaining persistent across nine years of distractions.
And to be able to not really fight for, actually, use, perhaps the transitions and interruptions as maybe even designed the approach.
Well, I wish it had worked that way.
I mean, I think it wasn't so much that the gaps in time were a help.
It was more that it necessitated going over and over and over the work.
And I'm a very line-oriented, and many of the lines have remained the same from, you know, for years.
But the layering and the way one thing connected to another and the cutting up of the sections and the way we went into one another did change every time.
And maybe I said set up because we'll probably again come back to the system.
You've spoken in interviews more, kind of, that too, and I guess, about how you've shown to incorporate the theory and material.
It wasn't part of the original example.
I mean, I've never discovered you or something.
Could you talk a little bit more about how you found the valuable strategically?
How you found it useful and hard to get a substantial story?
Well, the large section of the book was the beginning of the book.
Something about I put his chair, reassuring to the art of the tree and the no-nee.
And her first section of the book defined is a lot of things about the town and what she knows and what's kept secret from her and what she thinks about Termite, which she thinks about herself.
And she states in that first section that LARTS, that Termite's father was killed early in the Korean War.
And that they never got his body back. And that they had to have the service around the flag that was folded up, which of course is an echo of what happened to Billy and the Changes.
But the world that I invented for the children was very much, you know, sort of, West Virginia-based, kind of living behind it across the tracks, you know, kind of near the train yard and the empty alley and the river.
Termite's fascination with big sounds like trains and his love in particular for this double railroad tunnel.
That's very similar to a lot of WPA constructed chiseled stone, almost monumental structures in West Virginia.
And so there was this double railroad tunnel with this sort of double tracks that went across the river.
And on September 30, 1999, the AP, Martha Mendoza and her team of AP reporters broke the story of no gunry, which had been hidden for 50 years.
And there was a big color photograph on the cover of the times with this stone tunnel that looked exactly like what I had been imagining in the world of these children.
And I knew that his father had been killed in the Korean War early on, and I looked at that tunnel, and I knew that was why they had never found him.
And then I began doing a lot of research into that incident and the beginning of the Korean War in general.
And kind of patterned everything that happens to Levitt after what happened.
And actually this did not actually happen, but it could have happened.
And of course the children that he's trying to help are counterparts or lock and terminor echoes of them, or they are living counterparts of one of those, and they must have beat about the same ages.
Not the same ages, because Levitt's being born at that time, and the boy is the kind of precursor of him.
And the idea that Levitt sort of enters into the boy's perceptions momentarily in the beginning, and then more and more, and his senses expand as he grows closer to death, or to transition, or have what we want to term that passage.
Levitt's amazing family, symmetry, and transitions, and impact, and the action of the distance, powerful forces that go beyond the Middle East.
I think that's how it is. It's just, it's unconfident. It gives it to minister.
We can again conduct without him, but more. I think we have to not go and just surface up over it together.
Please, but I have to just ask him, is there a national moment here, where it's between you?
Do you have anything you need, son, about the Steelers?
The Steelers? They don't stand a chance.
I don't know.
