>> From the Library of Congress in Washington DC. ^M00:00:05 >> I'm Ron Charles editor of Book World at the Washington Post which is a charter sponsor of the National Book Festival. Our guest this morning is Marilynne Robinson, one of the most celebrated writers and teachers in America. President Obama has referred to her as a friend and says her writings have fundamentally changed me. It's hard to get a blurb from the president. ^M00:00:28 [ Laughter ] ^M00:00:31 But she has one. In 2012 a laudatory essay in the New Yorker began by observing Marilynne Robinson has published only three novels in a career spanning more than 30 years but each of them is a masterpiece. He was talking about her first novel, Housekeeping, which was a finalist for the 1980 Pulitzer Prize and then her to stunning novels about a small town in Iowa, Gilead, one of my favorite novels was published in 2004 and won the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize. She went on to return to that town again in 2008 with a novel called Home which was a finalist for the National Book Award and then last year she published another extraordinary story about Gilead called Lila, which again won the National Book Critics Circle Award. In addition to her own work she has helped guide some of the finest young fiction writers in the country at the Iowa Writers Workshop where she has taught for many years and she sometime preaches at the Congregational United Church in Iowa City, in fact her name is always invoked in discussions about the treatment of religion and faith in American fiction. Thank you so much for being here today. >> It's a great honor, [applause] happy to be here. ^M00:01:44 [ Applause ] ^M00:01:52 >> Were writers or big novel readers? >> No actually not at all, what can I say, they just didn't read fiction. >> They didn't read fiction at all? >> No, and they didn't write anything but letters to relatives [inaudible] were very nice letters. ^M00:02:12 [ Laughter ] ^M00:02:15 >> Did you grow up expecting to be a novelist? What made you think of that as a potential career? >> I started writing poetry and so on long before I had any idea that you could be a professional writer. Dickens was like something that was on a book in order to tell me what to expect of the contents, you know Western Mark the fact that he was an actual historical figure, that dawned on me after I dread most of his work. I always liked, I did write poetry sort of imitative Lee because I read poetry. My poetry was considerably worse than the poetry I was imitating, but I've always liked language, I've always liked writing and when I was in college I became fascinated with a certain kind of metaphorical writing that you find in 19th-century American writers particularly and so I spent some time while I was working on a dissertation writing these metaphors just to make sure my hand was still in, in a way, and then when I was done with the dissertation and I looked at all these things together there weren't so many of them, I realized it was the beginning of a novel and I wrote the novel, but I thought it was unpublishable. I almost meant it to be unpublishable. >> What do you mean by that? >> Well for one thing at that time it was fairly unusual to write a book that had only female characters and also I was very aware of it as a certain language experiment as much as anything, while it was many things to me. I was obviously very invested in it I think but at that time also it seemed to me as if that was a past tradition of literature that I- >> But you were too late. >> Well I wasn't thinking about--, I really, I have a friend who had published a novel and therefore had the name and address of an agent and he took my manuscript without telling me. I mean he told me he had it but he didn't tell me what he was going to do with it which was to send it to his agent. And so out of a blue sky I got a letter from an agent saying I'm very happy to represent your book. It will be very hard to place. ^M00:04:53 [ Laughter ] ^M00:04:56 She is my agent to this day. ^M00:04:58 [ Laughter ] ^M00:05:03 >> You're one of my favorite writers and as I said Gilead is one of my very favorite novels so I hope you don't mind my asking but are you surprised that these quiet, difficult, theologically infused novels have found such a large and impassioned audience? >> I think that there's a certain tendency to write down to an imagined readership. I think people are very smart and very serious. I tell my students assume your reader is smarter than you are. Assume your reader is a better human being then you are. ^M00:05:38 [ Laughter ] ^M00:05:43 >> Religion and faith so rarely make a meaningful appearance in literary fiction unless of course it's fanaticism or abusive priests are kind of GUI spiritualality. Why is that? >> It's an interesting thing. People always say it's so surprising to create a minister who is a positive character and really that is true if you look at American literature and at the same time Americans I find often are very deeply attached to a minister. >> You mean in real life? >> In real life. You walk through an American city, there's a church on this corner, a church on the next corner, a church on the next corner, and these things they are sustained by the fact that people love them and so I mean I think that our national character such as it is is divided in many strange ways and one of them is that we tend to ridicule what we value. And I think that it makes it, it makes life a little bit difficult for us because it makes us inarticulate about the things that we really do value. Frankly I think that we value goodness in people, I think it's a pretty thing, a handsome thing, that is the product of self-discipline and thought, you know. And we tend to treat representations of people who seem to be good as if they are hypocrites, as if they are really up to something bad. I don't know why we do that. We have to put a litter thorn and everything or a big one. I am not interested in that. I'm interested in what I see which is very different from what we tend to represent. >> Reading your novels makes me realize what I don't usually see in fiction which is something very intimate which is prayer. Tens of millions of Americans tell us they pray every day but it rarely shows up in the novel, rarely. Why is that so taboo? Why is that kind of intimacy the only kind of intimacy left that we can't read about? >> Right, Right [laughing]. Well you know we tell ourselves that we have a realist tradition of literature but that doesn't really mean that our realism is attentive to reality, it means that it's obedient to certain conventions of representing, and I mean I would be fascinated to read more that seemed to actually draw on what people do and experience, values, that we don't have to be told that we are flawed creatures. We know that, we see it continuously in everything that we do but if we are going to be realists we should talk about reality and that does include things like prayer and it does include things like actual admiration for people who show us how to live well. >> Do you feel self-conscious or anxious about setting a novel like that out into a culture that ridicules those kind of subjects? >> I've really never cared about that. There was that long space between Housekeeping and the other--, and I read a lot during that time and I read history, I read centuries of history as much from primary sources as I could manage and so you know I'm very interested in simply the world, the absolute world. I don't care about ridicule. I could very well have been ridiculed you know but I don't want to spend years writing something that is simply a kind of defensive cringe against attitudes that I hope I don't engage in and that I don't particularly admire. >> When you started Gilead did you have the whole trilogy in mind? >> No, no. I always promised myself that I wouldn't write a sequel and I don't think I have actually. >> You call it a companion with Home. >> Yes, well yes. ^M00:10:10 [ Laughter ] ^M00:10:14 [ Silence ] ^M00:10:19 [ Laughter ] ^M00:10:22 >> So you write Gilead. It's a tremendous success, then Home came to you separately? >> Well actually when I did readings and things I found that people were always asking me about characters and the thing is that when you write a novel you have spent years typically with these imaginary people that you become very fond of, very deeply emotionally engaged with. You feel as though you know them. You're ignoring your own family [laughter] and then my experience at least is that the novel ends itself. At a certain point it's just telling you this is where we wind down, you know? And so after all of this long time of obsessive interest in these nonexistent people there gone and it feels--, you miss them. I had that experience very strongly after Housekeeping I thought. It was like mourning but I waited and waited and waited until they were sort of out of my mind, but when I had finished Gilead and I had the same experience I thought why am I doing this. If they are still alive in my mind let them have their book. ^M00:11:41 [ Laughter ] ^M00:11:45 >> Now your newest novel focuses on a character we saw in Gilead but we really didn't get to know that much, a Reverend John Ames wife and in Lila we learned that she has this extraordinarily difficult childhood of abandonment and horrible poverty and sometimes even scrounging for food. Did you know all of that about her when you wrote Gilead, that she had had such a difficult childhood? >> I did in a sense. The character of John Ames and the character of Robert Boudin [phonetic] are both very highly [inaudible], very refined products of a particular theological tradition and so were their fathers and I have all the admiration in the world for these lovely traditions at the same time that the exclusivism of any traditions sort of bothers me. I was very happy to create a character that I did not have to think of as being [inaudible] in that sense at all, having a different pallet, a different possibility of drawing theological conclusions. >> She knows nothing about his tradition. >> Exactly. >> She doesn't know the stories. >> Exactly. >> She hears them in sets of fresh sometimes funny way. She takes them very, very seriously. >> Yes, yes, trying to join the conversation. >> Right. >> I think that when I was reading the Old Testament thinking about her, how it would look to her, one of the things that was very striking to me was the poorer the people, the people that are rarely individually named or noticed, are what the book is actually about in the profits and the kings and all the rest of it they come and go, they succeed or they fail, but the measure of the success is always are you looking after my sheet? Are you looking after the people? And I thought we make the mistake routinely of identifying with the powerful people but she would identify with the people, the unnamed on the landscape whose well-being is of the primary interest of God. >> That makes her a very fresh listener of the Bible. >> That was what I hope for. >> And their relationship, I mean it is so sweet and so surprising, don't you think? ^M00:14:26 [ Laughter ] ^M00:14:29 She's much younger. They have nothing in common and you can't blame the townspeople for kind of gossiping about these two. And he wasn't even really looking for a wife. >> Right. >> He wasn't looking for love. How could they get together? How did you think of their relationship? >> Well you know I think that even perhaps as people mature or they age they become quite good at reading the lives of the people that they see. I mean I think she's a strong estimable innocent woman and I think that he can see that in her and he can see loneliness in her which he could answer in kind of course. I think that that sort of affinity that is not based on the narrative of an individual life but based on the character that has emerged despite or because of or whatever it is. >> Then she brings out his oddness to. She says you are the strangest man whereas he didn't seem strange to us before. To her of course she is. That is one of the surprising things that makes a novel so engaging of course is that love affair. It's really quite beautiful. Would you mind reading a passage from the novel, anything you'd like. >> Well I might just start from the very beginning because I didn't choose a passage [laughter]--, well I didn't know what would seem interesting. So I'll read a few pages. The child was just to their on the stoop in the dark hugging herself against the cold all cried out in nearly sleeping. She couldn't holler anymore and they didn't hear her anyway or they might and that would make things worse. Somebody had shouted shut that thing up or I'll do it and then a woman grabbed her out from under the table by her arm and pushed her out onto the porch and shut the door and the cats went under the house. They wouldn't let her near them anymore because she picked them up either tales sometimes. Her arms were all over scratches and the scratches stung. She had crawled under the house to find the cats but even when she did catch one in her hands it struggled harder the harder she held onto it and it bit her so she let it go. Why you keep pounding on that screen door? Nobody going to want you around if you act like that. And then the door closed again and after a while night came. The people inside [inaudible] themselves quiet and it was night for a long time. She was afraid to be under the house and afraid to be up on the stoop but if she stayed by the door it might open. There was a moon staring straight at her and there were sounds in the woods but she was nearly sleeping when [inaudible] came up the path and found her like that, miserable as could be, and took her up in her arms and wrapped her in her shawl and said well we got no place to go, where we gonna to go? If there was anyone in the world the child hated most it was [inaudible]. She'd go scrubbing at her face with a wet rag or she'd be after her hair with a busted calm trying to get the snarls out. [Inaudible] slept at the house most nights and maybe she paid for it by sweeping up a little. She was the only one who did any sweeping and she'd be cussing while she did it. Don't do one damn bit of good somebody would say, and someone would say then leave it be dammit. There'd be people sleeping right on the floor in some old mess of quilts and gunnysacks, you wouldn't know from one day to the next. When the child stayed under the table they would forget her most of the time. The table was shoved into a corner and they wouldn't go to the trouble of reaching under to pull her out of there if she stayed quiet enough. When [inaudible] came in at night she would kneel down and spread her shawl over her but then she left again so early in the morning that the child would feel--, pardon me, these lights make it a little difficult to read, the child would feel the shawl slip off and she'd feel colder for the lost warmth of it and stir and cuss a little but there would be [inaudible] and Apple something in a cup of water left there for her when she woke up. Once there was a kind of toy. It was just a horse chestnut with a bit of cloth over it tied with a string into knots at the side and two at the bottom like hands and feet. The child whispered to it and slept with it under her shirt. >> That's really haunting. >> Thank you. ^M00:19:58 [ Applause ] ^M00:20:05 >> And it's not the voice we said goodbye to in Home. Tell us about this narrative voice, this impressionistic voice. >> Well I wanted to be able to write things that I could take very seriously in very plain language. One of the oldest impulses in English and American literature is to try to get back to the sort of uncluttered functional poetry of natural English and I know there are 1000 problems with that formula but I have used language and enjoyed using language in Gilead and also in Home that would be current among people that were educated and especially theologically educated and I wanted to use another palette than that. I wanted to use another language and that was a lot of interest for me writing in her voice. >> It's not the first person but it's close in a way, isn't it? >> Yes. >> Can you describe the way you approach that? >> Well if this were workshop I'd say it's a close third [laughing] and so is Home. >> And so it approximates the child's impressionistic vision of what's going on around her which makes it a little cloudy for us to figure out what's going on at times just as she experiences. There were rumors of a fourth novel. >> Yes. ^M00:21:41 [ Laughter ] ^M00:21:43 I've heard those rumors. ^M00:21:44 [ Laughter ] ^M00:21:46 >> You already turned me down off the record. Now that I have you trapped here maybe John Ames' son, is that possible? >> Well frankly he has not emerged on a page at this point. >> Okay. ^M00:22:01 [ Laughter ] ^M00:22:04 What draws you back to this period 50 or 60 years ago? What is it about that moment in that remote to us geographical place? >> That's an interesting question. >> Finally. ^M00:22:16 [ Laughter ] ^M00:22:19 I'm just sweating up here. ^M00:22:20 [ Laughter ] ^M00:22:30 >> You know it's a strange thing. I started a novel when I was in college actually and it was set in a town in the middle west, a small town. I had never been in the middle west. I'd never--, and that little town that didn't exist has haunted me all this time but even as the river and the whole thing. I threw that novel away, it was terrible [laughter]. >> Oh we'll find it some day. ^M00:22:54 [ Laughter ] ^M00:22:57 There'll be money to be made someday. ^M00:22:58 [ Laughter ] ^M00:22:59 >> That's exactly--, [laughter], well in any case I--, so it's sort of predestined in a way. I like to write about a time where people have less access to each other, more privacy in that sense. I mean there's a kind of solitude that I think was necessarily present in a great many lives a great deal of the time because we could not be reached constantly the way we are now, you know? I think it may be made people experience differently and think differently. I'm sort of interested in that. I like people who think long thoughts. >> What comes to you first as you conceive of a novel? Is it the plot, the characters, a voice? >> It's a voice really, well a voice and a landscape which they seem to be simultaneous. I knew Ruth's voice from the qualities of the landscape I knew I would be writing about and the same is true with John Ames who was visited upon me, you know I was thinking of something else. >> There's been a fairly intense debate about the amount of critical attention that women novelists get in comparison to mail novelists. You get widely reviewed everywhere and you win important prizes but do you notice this disparate attention to men and women? >> Well you know I don't necessarily notice the attention or I don't weigh it that way. I do think it's much easier for a male writer to be treated as a serious writer. I think that the separate category of woman writer is marginal in a way, granting many very important women writers. >> You work with the kind of writers that we will be reading over the next few decades. Are you encouraged by what you see? Are you seeing a lot of talented, fresh voices? >> Absolutely, absolutely. >> And can you make someone a better storyteller? I mean I know this is your profession, but what does that process involve, teaching someone to write better? >> Well first of all you find somebody talented to teach. ^M00:25:31 [ Laughter ] ^M00:25:34 We find all sorts of--, in a year, in a big year, we will have 1300 applications for 25 places so Kevin knows we wring our hands over the number of talented people we have two pass by. >> Sure. >> But it's like teaching any art, you know you find someone who could be a dancer and you help her to be a better dancer or painter, violinist, whatever. People get in their own way, they don't understand how to keep a narrative moving for example, something like that, what kind of characterization is important and what part should be--, so you're basically sort of--, they give you what they produce, you look at it, you advise them the best way that you can, that's basically what you're doing. It's an art school, that's how it really should be understood. >> You are not creating young people to write books like yours? >> Well you know I don't think that I do that, I mean, no. >> I've read books by your famous students and their radically different than yours. >> Radically different, yes, I'm very proud of that. ^M00:26:50 [ Laughter ] ^M00:26:53 >> Would you mind--, I know people want to ask you questions of their own. Would you mind taking some questions? >> I'd love to. >> There's a mic here and here. It's very hard for us to see so just begin. >> Thank you for being here. I would like to ask you about the Gilead. How, why and your expectations to not having chapters or titles. What was your object? >> To my not having chapters? >> Yes. >> I just think--, chapters seem very unnatural for me. I've never written a book with chapters. The chapters in Housekeeping were put in by an editor. I just, I don't, I mean often when I'm doing a reading I think if I had chapters I could find the place, you know? ^M00:27:41 [ Laughter ] ^M00:27:43 But when I'm writing it just seems very, very artificial to me. It would distract me. >> Thank you. >> We'll have to switch back and forth. >> I teach Home. I love Home. And for. The final exercise with seniors in high school I ask them to try to imitate your style and write a final chapter. They can't imitate your style. ^M00:28:07 [ Laughter ] ^M00:28:08 But I promised one of my students I would ask this. Her final chapter said I know Marilynne Robinson would not do this but I have to make Jack be happy so she brought him back and his wife back at the end. Is there happiness for Jack? Is there a chance that part of the fourth book will deal with some happiness for Jack? ^M00:28:26 [ Laughter ] ^M00:28:30 >> You know that's kind of a problem [laughter]. My mother, I lost my mother just a couple of years ago, but every time I talked to her on the telephone which was virtually every night she would worry about Jack. ^M00:28:44 [ Laughter ] ^M00:28:48 But you know I can. I don't know what to do about that. I can't have this predetermined ending, you know? >> Hi. Thank you for being here. I love all your books. I was curious in Home the relationship between Jack and Grace is so interesting and yet their siblings are there as part of their world and how the two of them relate and I just don't know how did you do that? How did you make us understand all of the sibling relationships while really focusing in on Jack and Grace? >> I'm glad if I did it. ^M00:29:27 [ Laughter ] ^M00:29:30 You've nudged words so long you know and if you have the effect that you want when you're done that's a wonderful thing. >> I'm continuing a theme on questions about Jack [laughter]. He's such a remarkable character but when I was reading the book I kept seeing that character through the lens of our modern day thoughts about addiction and recovery but that doesn't--, you know the characters in the novel don't seem to because of the time period don't seem to see him through those lenses at all and I was wondering if you could just talk a little bit about that, about that character and alcoholism. >> That's an interesting question. I think that perhaps we have developed a very firm notion of normality which really means functionality for us perhaps, you know? And I don't--, I mean it's so--, this sort of tenuous quality of Jack's character, his scant hold on life in a certain sense, is simultaneous with his alcoholism. I can't really imagine the character without that being certainly an active pull for him, and act of recourse in a way because he finds if anything is painful--, I don't know, if there were a living contemporary Jack I don't know if he would be particularly successfully dealt with by our attempts at curing addiction and so on. ^E00:31:19 ^B00:31:25 >> We heard in the introduction that you've done some preaching and I was just wondering if the way you preach you write it for preaching is different or similar and if you've thought about publishing any of your sermons? >> I'm here to tell you that I will not publish any of my sermons. ^M00:31:41 [ Laughter ] ^M00:31:43 They went to the way of the college novel. I study theology and write about theology and so people think all we need somebody to give a sermon, let's ask Marilynne [laughter] and since this is usually done because there is some sort of emergency, some need, I do it. And it always goes very badly. ^M00:32:07 [ Laughter ] ^M00:32:09 >> That's hard to believe. >> Well you're very kind. Please never come to any sermon- ^M00:32:13 [ Laughter ] ^M00:32:15 I don't want to disillusion you, but it is odd but I think it to be the cosmos telling me I do not belong in a pulpit [laughter]. >> I think that's basically my question. I just graduated from seminary and so I was going to ask you your secret for writing sermons and maybe my main question is how do you bring your storytelling gifts into that kind of storytelling and call--, I'm just curious how you see some of that. >> Well I wish I could tell you how I do that. I wish I could tell you long stories of success in that particular regard but I mean I love the stories [inaudible] and Sarah are wonderful you know, Adam and Eve you know are wonderful, but pulpits make me so nervous that I don't basically carry over my enthusiasms into the pulpit. >> Thank you. >> You're welcome. And good luck. ^M00:32:22 [ Laughter ] ^M00:32:24 >> She doesn't need luck. >> She has God. >> That's true [laughter]. >> Good morning, good afternoon. I would like you to talk a bit about the Midwest and its impact on your life and your writing. True confessions, I'm born and bred from Minneapolis and I've lived here for 30 years. I'm still deeply rooted in the Midwest. I'd love to hear you talk about whether your writing has to take place where it does, if there are special things about the landscape that you just can't separate out from your writing. >> I think it's sort of true but I never know these things for certain, but I think it is true that I probably will write about that region for as long as I continue writing. Things happen that surprise you. I thought I would not write a novel from a male point of view and then I have this man's voice in my head, so you never know. But I read a lot of history of the middle west when I first moved there. I only went there because I was invited to come to the workshop to teach and that such a sort of mythic establishment that I had to do it, and there I was in Iowa. And I had to learn to read the landscape. I had to learn to understand it because I'd grown up in the mountains, I'd lived in the Berkshires, you know you get this--, and so I did, I studied it, I read about the patterns of settlement and so on. It's very beautiful and when you get so that you actually can see the Prairie that's very beautiful but it took--, I spent years because I loved being there, I loved the teaching that I was doing and the people I was meeting and all the rest of it but I wanted my soul to love the landscape you know? So I made quite a discipline of that. The Audubon Society was my good friend and it's the longest human narrative that I know well, that the abolitionist movement of the foundation of all the little colleges, those wonderful little colleges that are all over the landscape, the sort of high achievement and very little pretentiousness which is a lovely combination. It seems very middle western to me. >> Thank you. >> You're welcome. >> Thank you very much for everything that you've written. I'd like to ask you a question about Gilead. Ten years ago a few of my friends and I read the book together and since then we found it kind of inescapable. Every time we are talking to each other about major life decision, I'm thinking of getting married and I was thinking about this passage from Gilead, I'm thinking of becoming a pastor and I was thinking about this passage from Gilead [laughter], I've been battling depression but then I thought about this passage from Gilead [laughter]. We've all rented several times since and we found the book completely inescapable and we don't find that a bad thing but I wanted to ask you if you have thoughts, suggestions, maybe even warnings for people who- ^M00:36:35 [ Laughter ] ^M00:36:38 can't seem to stop living inside your book. ^M00:36:40 [ Laughter ] ^M00:36:43 >> All I can say is I hope I gave you a comfortable--, not comfortable congenial humane book to live in [laughter]. I'd like to give you another one just to sort of expand the world for you. ^M00:36:57 [ Laughter ] ^M00:37:00 >> Thank you. ^E00:37:01 ^B00:37:06 >> I grew up on a farm in southern Minnesota just 6 miles from Iowa. My brother and his wife are both pastors. I like to your comment just now about the lack of pretentiousness because that is very, very real. So if you could speak about that for just a minute I'd appreciate that. >> If I could expand on that you say? >> If you could say a little bit more about the lack of pretentiousness that you feel in the people in your books, in that area in particular. >> Well I mean you meet some very distinguished people. It's a very hard thing to say, to explain, but there are no signals of status. There are no--, there is very little display and anything that people do. They very quietly in many cases are very excellent at some very difficult things and you have to sort of know this obliquely, you know. It's just something that is certainly where I've lived and people that I've known very characteristic. I don't want to say dismissive things about people in other places but you know I mean people don't flaunt anything. >> I find out things about my family from other people. Because they don't tell about their accomplishments. >> Exactly, exactly. That's very characteristic. >> Thanks. >> You're welcome. >> Hi, good afternoon. I teach high school religion and philosophy and it's a particularly tough audience especially for those disciplines and I found both your fiction and your nonfiction to be very useful to getting the access to high school kids strangely enough. I know you draw a lot on John Calvin, [inaudible] and I'm wondering if there are any contemporary theological voices that have been [inaudible] in your current thought especially as you unpack something like Lila and her character. >> Well you know it sounds terrible for me to say no [laughter] but you know it seems to me as if there is a lot a very classic theology that is foundational and that has been lost track of and there's this sort of in many cases sort of weakening of the tradition, a sort of loss of the humanist magnificence that it's capable of so I tend to be looking to [inaudible] or earlier. >> I'm curious about some of your students. Can you talk a little bit about some that we should have heard about or will soon hear about? >> Well you know so far only one of them has won a Pulitzer Prize. ^M00:40:06 [ Laughter ] ^M00:40:12 >> Slacker. ^M00:40:13 [ Laughter ] ^M00:40:17 >> Paul Harding wrote a book called [inaudible]. Ian Mathis is a student of mine, has been a student of mine. It's terrible, I always blank when I think of trying to list names. And you have the list and won't help me. >> No I don't, I'm sorry. ^M00:40:36 [ Laughter ] ^M00:40:38 >> Z.Z. Packer is a former student of mine. I don't know who you would have heard of. >> Well I guess the question is who should we have heard of? >> Well lots of them, lots of them [laughter]. >> Thank you. >> I'm a little odd by standing here. I've read Gilead three times and I'm not a religious person so I have nothing but compliments for your ability to weave a subtle complimentary novel about things that are inner as well as daily and I know you've gotten compliments from all of the critics but you need to know that the real people out there are listening also and I'm looking forward to your next book which is apparently coming out soon, a collection of essays. Could you tell us a little bit about that? >> Well my essays are actually always a collection of lectures that I've given. Two of these are lectures that I gave at the Divinity School at Edinburgh in Scotland. There are things that are on my mind. There's always a strong coherence in my essays and there ought not to be because I think I'm lecturing on different subjects but when I put them together they are about contemporary culture, Shakespeare, there's some Shakespeare essays in there, theology, of course it's a theological view of Shakespeare, [inaudible] a sort of Shakespearean view of theology but anyway I think they are worth reading. ^M00:42:31 [ Laughter ] ^M00:42:34 >> Well, my compliments again. >> Well thank you very much. >> Just one more question, I'm sorry. >> Ms. Robinson. More than theosophical [inaudible] and doctrines I find a lot of [inaudible] intensity in your works and kind of if you could trace the connection between poetry and prose and if you have any message concerning poetry to prose writers/novelists and two poets about writing, prose writing. Thank you. >> Well, there is an element in the 19th century American tradition which interests me very much which is the sort of Emersonian and tradition or Theroux where prose borders on poetry. It works from the logic of poetry and Emily Dickinson, you know she crosses the line. I mean she's on the other side but dealing with the same subject. I wanted to write poetry. I considered prose to be this sort of consolation prize for my inability to write poetry but there are ways in which particularly figurative language carries meaning beyond the explicit meaning, you know? And I think that when I'm writing fiction I'm always trying to push the language beyond flat meaning, to sort of put another spin which I consider to be similar to the impulse that moves poetry. I think that the distinction between the two is conventionally sharper than it is intrinsically sharp. I think more narrative in poetry would often be a good thing, a little answer to the obscurity that is so often characteristic and I think more poetry and prose would be a good thing because it makes language do more. >> It's been such a pleasure to have you here. >> Thank you. >> Thank you very much. ^M00:44:58 [ Applause ] ^M00:45:00 >> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress. Visit us at loc.gov.