>> From the Library of Congress in Washington DC.
[ Pause ]
>> I'm a contributing editor of the Washington Post Book World
and the Post is proud to be a charter sponsor
of the National Book Festival.
We were present at the creation and we've been a sponsor ever since.
Just summarizing the distinguished career
of Russell Banks is enough to make you dizzy.
He's written novels, short stories and adaptations for the screen.
He's been the New York State author and a fellow
of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
He's taught at Columbia, NYU, and Princeton.
He's received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation
and the National Endowment for the Arts.
He's been inspired by places as disparate
as Jamaica and the Adirondacks.
And that's only a smattering of the honors he's received
and the territory he's covered in his writing.
Among Banks' Novels are Continental Drift, The Sweet Hereafter
and Cloudsplitter, wonderful title I think borrowed
from old Native American term for Mount Marcy,
the tallest peak in the Adirondacks.
Set in North Elba, New York, an old free Negro community,
Cloudsplitter tells the story of the anti-slavery activist John Brown
from the view point of one of his sons.
Well, on the strength of these and other works, Banks has been hailed
for giving voice to outsiders and working class Americans.
But not long ago, as if to show that he has more arrows in his quiver,
he put a middle class painter in an upper class family at the heart
of The Reserve, the novel he published in 2008.
His new novel just published or I guess just about to be published is
"Lost Memory of Skin", and I'll leave it to him to talk about that.
But finally to underscore my point that Banks is a writer
who defies any categorization, let me quote an astute remark
that critic [inaudible] Michelle said about him.
She called him an optimistic tragedian.
Please welcome Russell Banks.
[ Applause ]
>> Thank you, thank you, Dennis, and thank you all for being here.
Could you hear me alright?
No problem, good.
I did agree to happily to talk about this new novel "Lost Memory of Skin"
which will be out officially on the 27th of the month.
Apparently you can buy it but you can't download it
to your Kindle until the 27th.
They can control that.
This is the first stop on what appears
to be a 5-week 13-city book tour, and I'm really happy to start here
in Washington at the Washington Book Festival for a number
of reasons before I take it out into the provinces like New York
and Miami and Philadelphia, Boston and then points west from there.
However, it's very difficult to talk about a novel
when you just finished it and after 3 years or so,
isolation of the extreme solitude working in my cabin
in the Adirondacks and in my studio in Miami by myself and I come
out now sort of for the first time developing a real awareness
of their being an audience out there.
I'm like a bear sort of blinking my eyes in the bright sunlight
after coming out of a cave, a long winter in a cave.
And I'm somewhat unsure how to speak to other human beings,
especially strangers and about something that has been my private
and almost secret enterprise for so long.
I'd like to just tell a little story because it relates I think
to this little question of audience for a writer of fiction,
who I'm writing for when I'm writing and how that shifts
and changes once the book is published and then is public
in the sense because it comes up in various ways
and it's especially pointed to me right now.
It is particular crossing at this moment in the history of this book.
In Upstate New York near where I live, it's a small town,
Elizabethtown, New York and a small public school and a friend of mine
who teaches the third grade found very quickly of course
that there were half a dozen of the student who were quick readers,
easy and confident readers and then another dozen who were reading
with difficulty, for whom books were threatening in some ways
and a challenge and who felt insecure about their abilities
and the relationship to reading.
And this man had a great big wonderful sloppy drooling dog,
a Newfoundland, and the dog used to come to school with him everyday
and they-- he had dispensation to let the dog sit in the classroom
with him and the kids love the dog naturally.
So, he separated out the slow readers from the fast readers
who intimidated the slow readers and he told these slow readers,
why don't they start reading to the dog.
And so the kids gather around the dog with the books of their readers
of the day and started reading to the dog.
And of course I'm sure you're not that surprised to know
that their reading skills rose very quickly.
They were unthreatened in that relationship to the dog.
Well this-- the story talks to me--
oh, I might add, eventually the fast readers decided they wanted
to read to the dog too.
And so now they all read to the dog together and they more
or less reached the same approximate level of skill.
I think my mic just went dead, did it?
No, Okay. Well anyhow, I was thinking about this
and thought that's really what it's like for me for those three years
or five years or however long it takes for me to write a book.
I'm sitting there and I'm writing to my dogs.
I have two dogs as it turns out.
They're not sloppy big, sweet, slightly dumb Newfoundland.
They are sharp aggressive and highly intelligent Border Collies.
But it's kind of a gift to me to have these dogs gather
around my desk as they do and then look at me
as Border Collies are inclined to do,
staring at me in fact while I'm working.
But I decided long ago when they first are doing this
that I'm gonna write to the dogs.
And it liberated me from human beings entirely.
It liberated me from that idea of an audience while I'm writing,
the self consciousness that writers are constantly talking about
and that you're trying to dodge, you're trying to avoid,
especially on the early stages of the writing.
And so as long as I had my dogs there I'm quite comfortable
and I can say almost anything.
It makes me much more courageous as a writer.
And because they're Border Collies, it makes me more honest in a way.
They know when I lie.
They can tell about my body language.
They can just tell by my face when that I'm faking it for a paragraph
or two or a sentence or two and then they get restless and I have
to start revising and get shifting until they calm down again.
But anyhow, that really is now the moment when I have abandoned my dogs
and come out and now I'm aware of the existence of human readers,
of an audience in a sense.
I'm often asked, you know, who you write for
and in fact is-- I can now answer.
I write for my dogs but this is just the way I'm saying I write
for myself.
I'm finally alone in the world when I'm writing.
And if I can't sustain that isolation,
then I can't say what I really want to say.
I can be as honest as I need to be.
I can be as intelligent as I need to be and I can be as risky as I--
as any-- as brave let's say as I need to be.
Now let me talk a little bit about the origins
of this novel while I can still remember them.
In a few years from now I won't be able to remember
where that book came from but I can still remember now.
I spend half a year in Miami Beach and in the condo there that's
on the bay side that looks out towards the skyline of Miami
and also looks out towards the tidal causeway which crosses
from the mainland over to-- over to the--
to Miami Beach, to the islands.
And I learned about 4 years ago that there were-- was a colony of men,
of homeless men living under the causeway
and they were all convicted sex offenders who had served their time
and were now paroled out and wearing electronic anklets
and under permanent parole and supervision.
And the reason they were all gathered together in a cluster
down there in that degrading and squalid shanty town was
because of legislation which have been passed
in Miami-Dade prohibiting the convicted sex offenders
from living anywhere within 2500 feet of where children might gather,
which essentially meant they couldn't live anywhere
in the city except under this causeway
and in the US Airways terminal at Miami International Airport,
which was impossible, or in the eastern end of the Everglades swamp.
>> So there, there they were and at one point, they were up to a hundred
of them living down there.
And I could see this causeway from the terrace of my apartment.
I'd look out every morning and see that and begin to imagine what
on earth their lives must be like.
These men which ranged from serial rapist to a 19 or 20-year-old kid
who had sex-- sexual relations
with his 15-year-old high school girlfriend,
to some poor old alcoholic who exposed himself in a parking lot
or something like that, I mean from major to minor all lumped together
in the same category and established in this little spot,
in this city as a kind of colony, if you will, of pariahs, of outcast.
So I just started just thinking about it from their point of view.
And that was I think the origin, the real origin of the novel.
Novels really begin, mine certainly and I think it's true for most
of us, begin with questions, with mysteries,
mysteries that you can only really answer or understand or penetrate
through the process of writing fiction.
You can't do it by research again in a library.
You can't do it by journalistic inquiry,
getting the facts down, just the facts, ma'am.
You can't do it like interviewing people really.
I mean that all goes into it in some way but you need more than that.
You need to imaginatively inhabit the lives
of the people you are writing about that are mysterious to you,
whose lives, inner lives
and subjective lives are a mystery to you.
And, the inner lives of these men was a mystery to me.
I did not have a clue as to what it was like to be them and I wanted
to understand a phenomena like this, this particular colony
in Miami settlements like these clusters of men,
like these springing up all across the country.
They're essentially homeless and ostracized and watched.
It's an ongoing permanent kind of imprisonment
and they're clustered together, the worst with just the confused,
the psychotic and sociopath with the dumb, the idiot,
the kid who made a bad judgment one night, the drunk,
the drug addict whose behavior was influenced
by his addiction or his alcoholism.
They were all together.
And so I started just to do that kind of investigation,
the journalistic, the historical, the economic, the psychological kind
of inquiry that would lead me deeper and deeper into this mystery
of what it was like to be one of those human beings.
In a simple way, I mean this is nothing mysterious
about that kind of research.
Most novels require some kind of research,
especially if this novel is dealing with material and experiences
that you yourself have never lived and in a place
that you're not physically familiar with.
I happen to be very familiar with South Florida and having been there,
going there and either living there or visiting there since 1958
when I was an 18-year-old boy and ran away from home.
I was a dropout and in the winter of 1950, I'll just digress
for a second here, 1958, I hitchhiked to [inaudible]
from Massachusetts where I was living in to join Fidel Castro
and the boys in the mountains of Cuba, in the Sierra Maestra,
and helped them overthrow the hated dictator Batista.
And I only got as far as Miami when Fidel and Che and the boys marched
into Havana no longer needed the skinny kid from Massachusetts
who couldn't speak Spanish anyhow and had no clue how
to get across the gulf to Cuba.
And so I was stuck there moving furniture in a hotel and that sort
of thing and fell in love and married young
and nearly ruined my life.
But anyhow, I have known Miami since then and I've always been fascinated
by the city and so I didn't have to do much research there on the ground
but I certainly had to do a lot of research into the legal system
that surrounds what we call-- the behavior of what we call--
people we call sex offenders.
And the kind of panic that exists across the country with regard
to sex offending individuals and behavior and the need to the fear
that we're not protecting our children sufficiently
and so we're throwing things at them which we hope would legally
and otherwise that we hope will protect them.
And so, having gone that far and got that,
I then had to begin writing a story.
After all this is a story.
It's not a sociological report.
It's not a piece of investigative journalism.
It's a tale and that's all I really am in the end is a storyteller.
And to do that, I had to find a character whose life I could enter
into, that my dogs could enter into also with me.
And so I started imagining a kind of a kid who was a loser,
a kid who managed to graduate high school, barely able to read,
with no math skills about that or basic mathematics,
basic arithmetic I should say, a kid who belonged to no group,
who had as he says no specialty.
A latchkey kid, a kid who is essentially a feral child in a way
who raised himself, was mother-- left with his mother,
mother is gone, work, et cetera.
A loser, the kind of kid that most of us ignore and the kid who is also
at the same time and perhaps because of some of this is addicted
to the internet, addicted to pornography so readily
and available, actually almost unavoidable to an adolescent boy,
to anyone in fact who beats up his computer.
And this kid began gradually to appear to me his inner life,
his subjective experience, and I began to understand how he could,
how such a person could be both sympathetic at least to me
and also commit what would be a crime, a sexual crime.
And before long, I had a boy living under the causeway.
I call him a boy although he's 22 years old.
But he's one of those young Americans who are caught trapped
and maybe permanently ensconced between childhood and adulthood
who in fact will end up 40 years old perhaps or 50 years old even,
will live his entire life sort of lost in that little bubble
between childhood and adulthood that we sometimes call adolescence,
but it's really where an awful lot
of Americans live their entire lives,
perhaps especially males, I don't know.
But it was easy enough for me to go there and to get this kid going
and then to surround him with other lesserly-- lesser--
characters of lesser importance whose crimes might be much greater
than his.
And some of those whose crimes were as trivial and as accidental
and then the result of the same kind of stupidity
or ignorance or confusion as his was.
So this was the-- this is really the origins
of the story, "Lost Memory of Skin".
I'll tell you a few more other things about it because technically
at this stage, you start to have to answer questions
that are very basic about writing.
How am I gonna tell the story, from whose point of view first
of all am I gonna tell the story.
And I knew I couldn't tell it from the point of view of the kid.
He doesn't really know his story.
He's incapable really of telling his story,
but I wanted to get very close to him, into his inner life as much
as I could, into his perceptions of this world as much as I could,
but use language that had little greater range and a language
that he had accessible to him.
So I decided to adopt what we call a close third point of view
where you-- it's third person and in this present tense, it is intimate,
it moves right up on the character and penetrates his thoughts and mind
and his dreams and his memories and so forth in a very, well,
close and intimate way and yet it's-- you can--
you have access to language
that that character himself wouldn't have access to.
>> I also needed another point of view on the kid,
some other perspective than the kid's own
or the story would frankly would become rather depressing.
And I've been accused of writing depressing books in the past.
In fact that was after I think it was--
I wonder if it was in USA Today for a few years ago for a book
that began, the first sentence was another bummer from Banks and--
[ Laughter ]
>> And I swear then that I'm never gonna do that again.
I don't wanna see that kind of review beginning
with that kind of line again.
And so I needed a kind of counterpoint, a foil to play
against the kid, and for this a character began to appear
which we will call the professor, who is a sociologist and who looks
at the kid in a kind of scientific way, who wants--
he's a social scientist, he wants to understand not in the way I wanted
to understand the kid but he wants
to understand him the way a sociologist wants
to understand the phenomenon and they link between homelessness
and conviction, convicted sex offenders.
And the professor appears on the scene fairly early in the book.
And for reasons I can't explain,
although they later became more apparent to me,
I made him morbidly obese.
He weighs a quarter ton, and he's very tall
and he is somewhat eccentric.
In Florida, he wears a three piece suit, long haired and bearded.
I don't know why I did this.
I think I did it just to keep my dogs interested
and also I have known professors like that.
And I think, however, what I was doing was creating a character who I
and my dogs would realize had a secret life
and I could gradually begin to reveal that secret life both
to the reader, my dogs and to the kid himself, and that the tension
between the two, the secret life of the kid which is
in some ways understandable who was a boy man who is powerless
in the world and marginalized in the world and the secret life
of a powerful figure, socially powerful figure,
a professor much respected social scientist and so forth.
And the tension and the dialectic between the two would begin
to let the story of the kid extend out into the world
of what we call normal people.
And so the professor becomes very important and significant.
But this is again a part of the process of discovery,
you don't know what you're doing
when you're writing fiction most of the time.
You only dimly know what you have done after you've done it,
which is what I'm trying to grapple with here today
over the next 5 weeks of book touring and talking about this book.
My great mentor as a young writer
when I was just beginning was the novelist Nelson Algren,
the great Chicago writer of the 1940s and 1950s
who at one point kind of took me under his wing when I was
in my early 20's and had a great influence on me.
But I used-- he used to say is that a writer
who knows what he's doing doesn't know very much, and I believe that
and I kept that in mind ever since.
But I think what I would like to do is just to give you a taste
and a flavor of from the book is the way just the opening few pages of it
so you can get some sense of the voice of the book,
the world of the kid and then I'd like to take questions
from the audience for about whatever remaining time we have
if that's okay.
I'm just gonna read you about 7 or 8 minutes from it.
It's a-- and this is the first few pages,
so I won't be giving away very much.
There are no spoilers here.
[ Pause ]
>> It isn't like the kid is locally famous for doing a good
or a bad thing and even if people knew his real name,
it wouldn't change how they treat him unless they looked it up online,
which is not something he wants to encourage.
He himself like most of the men living
under the causeway is legally prohibited from going online.
But nonetheless one afternoon, biking back from work
at the Mirador, he strolls into the branch library down on Regis road
like he has every legal right to be there.
The kid isn't sure how to get this done.
He's never been inside a library before.
The librarian is a fizzy lady, ginger colored hair glowing
around her head like a bug light, pink lipstick,
freckles wearing a floral print blouse and khaki slacks.
She's a few inches taller than the kid, a small person above the waist
but wide in the hips like she'd be hard to tip over.
The sign on the counter in front
of her says reference librarian Gloria something,
the kid is too nervous to register her last name.
She smiles without showing her teeth and asks if she can help him.
"Yeah, I mean I guess so.
I don't know actually."
"What are you looking for?"
"You're like the reference lady right?"
"Right, do you need to look up something in particular?"
The air conditioning is cranked and the place feels
about 10 degrees cooler now than it did when the kid came
through the door and he suddenly realized that he's shivering
and thinks at first that it's the air conditioning
but the kid's not cold, he's scared.
He's pretty sure he shouldn't be inside the public library even
though he can't remember there being any rules specifically
against entering one as long as he's not loitering
and it's not a school library
and there's no playground or school nearby.
At least none that he's aware of, you can never be sure though.
Playgrounds and schools are pretty much lurking everywhere.
And children and teenagers probably come in here all the time this late
in the day to pretend they're doing a homework or just to hang out.
He looks around the large fluorescent lit room,
scans the long rows of floor to ceiling book lined shelves.
It's like a huge supermarket with nothing on the shelves but books.
It smells like paper and glue, a little moldy and damp except
for a geeky looking black guy with glasses and a huge Adam's apple
and big wind catching ears sitting at a table
with half a dozen thick books and no pictures open in front of him
like he's trying to look up his ancestors.
There's no other customer in the library.
A customer, that's what he is.
He's not here to ask this lady for a job or look into rent an apartment
from her, and he's not panhandling her, and he's for sure not gonna hit
on here, she's way too old probably 40 or 50 at least
and pretty low in the hotness scale.
No, the kid is a legitimate legal customer who strolled
into the library to get some information because libraries are
where the information is.
So why is he shaking and his arms all covered with goose bumps
like he's standing naked inside a meat locker?
It's not just because he's never actually been inside a library
before even when he was in high school and it was sort of required.
He's shivering because he's afraid of the answer to the question
that drove him here even though he already knows it.
"Listen, can I ask you something?
It's kind of personal, I guess."
"Of course."
"Well, see, I live out in the North end and the people
in my neighborhood, my neighbors, they're all like telling me
that there might be a convicted sex offender living there
in the neighborhood.
And they tell me that you just go online to the site that tells you
where he's living and all and they asked me if I'd check it
out for them for the neighborhood, is it true?"
"Is what true?"
"You know that you can just like go online and it will tell you
where the sex offender lives even
if you don't know his name or anything."
"Well, let's go see," she says like he's wondering what's the capital
of Vermont and leads the kid across the room to a long table
where 6 computers are lined up side by side and no one is using them.
She sits down in front of one and does a quick Google search
under convicted sex offenders
and then pops the National Sex Offender registry
which links straight to www.familywatchdog.us.
The kid stands in a forward tilt behind her shifting his weight
from one foot to the other.
He thinks he should run now, get out of here fast before she clicks again
but something he can't resist, something he knows is coming
that is both scary and familiar, keeps him staring
over the librarian's shoulder at the screen, the same way he used
to get held to the screen when cruising pornography sites.
The librarian clicks find offenders and then of the new menu hits
by location and another menu pops up and asks for the address.
"You're from Colusa, right?
What's your neighborhood zip code?"
"It's, 33135."
"Any particular street you want to look up?"
He gives her the name of the street where his mother lives and he used
to live and she types it in and hit search.
>> A pale green map of his street and the surrounding 20
or so blocks appears on the screen, small red green
and orange squares are scattered
across the neighborhood like bits of confetti.
"Any particular block?"
The kid reaches down to the screen and touches the map on the block
where he lived his entire life until he enlisted in the army
and where he lived again after he was discharged.
A red piece of confetti covers his mother's bungalow in the backyard
where he pitched his tent and built Iggy the iguana's outdoor cage.
The librarian clicks on to the tiny square
and suddenly the kid is looking at his mug shot,
his forlorn bewildered face, and he feels all over again the shame
and humiliation of the night he was booked.
There's his full name, first last and middle, date of birth, height,
weight, his race, color of his eyes and hair and the details
of his crime and conviction.
Slowly the librarian turns on her chair and looks
up at the kid's real face then back at the computerized version.
"That's you, isn't it?"
"I gotta go," he whispers.
"I gotta leave."
He backs away from the woman who appears both stunned and saddened
but not at all afraid which surprises him
and for a few seconds he considers trying to explain how his face
and his description and criminal record got there
on the computer screen.
But there's no way he can explain it to someone like her,
a normal person, a lady reference librarian who helps people look
out the whereabouts and crimes of people like him.
"Wait, don't leave."
"I gotta go.
I'm sorry.
No kidding, I'm really sorry."
"Don't be sorry."
"No, I'm probably not even suppose to be here,"
he says, "in the library I mean."
He turns and walks stiff legged away and then as he nears the door,
he breaks into a run and the kid doesn't stop running until he's back
up on his bike heading for the causeway.
I'll stop at that point.
[ Applause ]
>> Now we have 10 minutes or so which is my favorite part
of this program where people get to ask questions and I try to answer
and there are mics, I guess most of you know there are mics.
One in front and one on this side here, so anybody who wants to come
up and ask a question or make a statement [laughter].
>> Thank, thank you very much.
>> Sure.
>> It is very interesting to hear you talk about your preoccupation
with your narrator in your new novel.
I think you do some of your best moves across your novels
when you're dealing with who is narrating.
You spent some time in academia, do you ever consult theories
about narrators or academic notions, or critical notions of narrators
or it's strictly organic for you?
>> Did you all hear the question or should I repeat it a little bit?
Yes, no?
[ Inaudible Remark ]
>> You could hear it okay, okay, good, that's good.
Yeah, point of view, narrative point of view is
of some considerable importance to me
because it raises the question of, well, of language for starters.
No matter who we're talking to, whoever we're talking to shapes
to an enormous degree of what we say.
And so for me there's been some concern
from the beginning unconsciously to figure out first
of all who I'm talking to.
This is why I brought the dogs into the story really 'cause I'm--
that's who, in this particular book, I was talking to.
In other books, it's been different.
In a book like Rule of the Bone which is told by an adolescent boy,
a 14-year-old kind of homeless kid, I say when does a kid
like that tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth
and I realized it was, when did I do that?
And I was 14 and rarely I know but only when I was in the dark
and talking to my brother who is a little younger than I and looking
at the ceiling in the dark and only then would I tell what frightened
me, what I desired, what I had really done, I would tell the truth.
So I imagined myself in a cut next to this character, this kid
and him speaking to me but I was also an adolescent boy
in that imagined scenario.
So that's about as far as I get.
I mean, your question has to do with having taught in universities
and so forth for so many years.
How was I influenced or was I influenced
by academic critical analysis [inaudible] theories about point
of view, is that correct?
And I like to say not in the slightest but you know I'm lying
when I say that, lying to myself first of all.
I thought that I was and after many years of teaching,
I retired in 1990, spring of '98,
and I thought I had not been infected by the virus
of critical theory in any way or the notions of the canon, you know?
I always thought of myself as a kind of saboteur
in academe, over those years.
But within a week, I was no longer--
I didn't about any of those things in any conscious way.
What I was really interested in was why when I go down in the morning
at 5 o'clock on the way to the airport or something,
is the light on in the house at the bottom of the hill.
And not only is the light on but the television is on
and I got really interested in those kinds of issues
and I realized I was thinking like a writer.
I was thinking the way I had when I was 20 years old and 22 years old
like a writer who had a kind of permanent ongoing curiosity
about other human beings.
And it was a great restorative for me to find that out
and I realized slowly and small increments
over the years I had become infected with that virus to some degree.
I had an anxiety, a low level of anxiety about those questions.
Once I stopped teaching and stepped out, I haven't had a moment
of anxiety since of that sort.
I've had plenty of other anxieties.
[ Laughter ]
>> Yes, yes.
>> Okay. My question, I read Continental Drift years ago,
I read all the time I forget even what I'm reading,
while I'm reading it or, you know, the author of the title whatever.
I have never forgotten Continental Drift and so many of your books deal
with people who, I mean, you get to the underside, the disenfranchised
and I just wonder, did you set out to write like,
how did that become your subject matter?
>> How did Continental Drift become specifically or?
>> No, I mean, I love to hear that.
What I mean across the board, because there's kind of a theme here
and do you think any of it is going, I mean how much
of it whether conscious or not is on a biographical?
>> Well, actually, very little.
From very early on in my writing life I realized I wasn't too
interested in my own life, as material for fiction.
I'm very interest in it otherwise
but it was essentially boring to me as a writer.
And so, what I was really interested in was,
as I said earlier, was the other.
I was interested in lives that weren't like mine and I was devoted
to the process of writing fiction and how it allowed me
to enter the life of the other in a way that no other kind
of activity I could think of did.
When you begin to be a writer you discover pretty early
on that it requires you to be more honest and more compassionate
and more intelligent than you can be at any other time in your life.
The rigors and the discipline of the art require that,
the traditions of the art require that.
And I didn't wanna waste that intelligence and generosity
and compassion and honesty on my own life, let us say.
I would rather use it to enter the life of the others.
So, in a sense I suppose on some level it's a kind of a political,
it's a political statement or it's a commitment,
but it's not to me experience
as a political statement or as part of an agenda.
It's just how I understand the practice of my art as well.
And so, yeah, I end up applying it, you know,
to lives that are different from my own.
>> And what about Continental Drift, I mean, I don't mean--
>> Oh, its origins?
>> Yeah.
>> Well, I was actually sitting in The State Library in Concord,
New Hampshire in 1982 and doing research on a novel I planned
about the relationship between Nathaniel Hawthorne
and Franklin Pierce, the 13th President of the United States
and New Hampshire's only President who was both alcoholic
and pro slavery and yes, it's really boring idea, I know.
[ Laughter ]
>> And I wasn't getting anywhere with it.
And I opened the New York Times that morning
and I remember it quite vividly and I saw a photograph of a Haitian,
brown Haitian bodies rolling up on the beach just outside Miami.
>> And I had lived in Jamaica before this and I had traveled in Haiti
and other parts of the Caribbean and I had lived in Miami too
and I knew instantly how that could happen.
I mean, how someone could be so desperate
that they would take a chance to put themselves on a boat
that was commanded by a smuggler, a cynical and yes,
cynical man, American white man.
But also, I was raised by working people in working class background
and plumbers and so forth and-- in New Hampshire and Massachusetts
and I knew how desperate early '80's, late '70's,
early '80's desperate one could be deeply in debt one could fall,
that one would take a chance and end up smuggling Haitians into Florida.
I could see that very easily.
And both stories kind of came together for me in a flash,
the structure, the novel arose right out of that,
that morning reading that newspaper.
And from there it was just a matter of spending the next, you know, 4,
5 years of my life get putting it down.
>> Yeah.
>> Right.
[ Laughter ]
>> Thank you
>> Yes.
>> Unless I missed it, I did not hear you say whether you had gone
walked over to the causeway and met and talk with people there.
>> Yeah.
>> If you did--
>> Yes.
>> -- what did you learn?
If you did not, why in the hell not?
[ Laughter ]
>> No I did, yes.
I did not make it my mission however.
I wanted, first of all, I wasn't, didn't want so much
to interview these guys because, you know,
they were journalistic accounts [inaudible] journalist stuff
for the Miami Herald had done that job and I could read them.
I wanted to know what it smelled like.
I wanted to know what the light was like
or the dark was like, the mold, the dampness.
I wanted to know, yeah, the physical, sensual experience of it.
That's what I think a novelist needs to do.
The rest of it I can kinda get online or, you know,
any number of sources but I can never get the fall
of the light right, the physical surround.
And every time I've written a novel, even I've gone to Liberia
to research Liberia, well not just to find out what happened there.
I wanted to know what does Liberia smell like?
What does the market place smell like and the same thing
when I was writing about John Brown an abolitionist and then the history
of it in Bloody Kansas and so forth and Harper's Ferry,
I wanted to see the fall of light in December at Harper's Ferry
when John Brown was executed, or the fall of light in October
when the raid took place in 1859.
So, that's what I think is essential research for a novelist.
The rest of it, it really can be done online most
of it or in a library.
I've [inaudible] done a lot of research right here at the Library
of Congress where I wanted primary texts, letters,
and documents that I couldn't get online and so forth.
[ Inaudible Remark ]
>> I wouldn't know what if feels like inside from the experience
of sitting down for an afternoon with one of these men.
I would only know what if feels
like by imaginatively inhabiting that man's life.
I learned in the making of films
that a novelist isn't like a director.
Novelist is like an actor.
We inhabit the bodies and lives of our characters in the same way
that an actor has to inhabit the body and life
of his character or her character.
One more and then, oops, I'm overtime.
One more short question, yes?
>> Growing up in Mississippi, I was given one impression of John Brown
and then I read your books and I've--
he became an incredibly sympathetic figure and I wonder
if my sympathies are misplaced?
[ Laughter ]
>> Well, if your sympathies are misplaced, I can't say.
I am glad that you ended up feeling sympathetic toward my fictional
character John Brown because that certainly an ambition
for any novelist.
And that the question of his activities
and his terrorist acts became morally much more complex and not
as simple as they had been portrayed both in Mississippi
and in the North too during his lifetime and afterwards and right
up into the present so I'm grateful.
One thing I will say and then I'm gonna end about John Brown is
that it's interesting to think that--
one my conclusions in spending all those years with him was
that he was probably manic depressive and bipolar
and had he lived today, he would have been treated medically
and he would have calmed down some
and we would never have had Bloody Kansas,
never would have had Harper's Ferry
and Lincoln would not have been elected President by the Republicans
and the Civil War would have been put off
for at least another 25 years.
So, I'm not so sure that medication is that necessarily that good thing.
[ Laughter ]
[ Applause ]
>> Thank you all for your attention, I really appreciate it.
[ Applause ]
>> This has been a presentation of the Library
of Congress, visit us at loc.gov.