[ Applause ] >> Shari Werb: Good evening, everyone. Thank you for joining us tonight. This is the third event in our new special series called The National Book Festival Presents. I'm Shari Werb. I'm Director of the Center for Learning, Literacy and Engagement here at the Library of Congress. Among many things, the Center is responsible for organizing our National Book Festival, which we held for the 19th time last month on August 31st. As we've come to expect with the Festival, we saw massive crowds there and I hope you were among the happy audiences and that you had a chance to see and hear from your favorite authors. Just wanted to get a sense of the audience. How many of you went to the Book Festival this year? Excellent. Thank you. Please mark your calendar for next year's Festival which will be held on August 22, 2020, at the Washington Convention Center and I hope I'll see you there. We initiated this National Book Festival Presents Series because so many of our attendees, people who can't live without books like Thomas Jefferson and like many of you told us that they loved the Festival so much that they wished it would last for more than one day. So we've answered your requests by putting together a series that will feature authors throughout the year, one at a time, and with a full spotlight, and with connections to the Library's collections. I've one more question to ask. How many of you have been to the Library before this evening? Terrific. And how many are here for the first time? Wonderful [applause]. Please come back. We have five more programs like this scheduled through November. These audiences are Captain Underpants and Dog Man creator Dav Pilkey, mystery writer Alexander McCall Smith and renowned religion writer Karen Armstrong, Brad Meltzer who writes for adults as well as young people and Andre Aciman, author of "Call Me By Your Name" and its sequel "Find Me." You can visit our website at loc.gov for more information and for tickets. But tonight I'm excited to introduce our author. She is the world renowned writer of novels, excuse me, novels and short stories such as "The Art of Death, Claire of the Sea Light and Brother, I'm Dying." Her acclaim includes a National Book Critics Circle Award and a coveted selection by the Oprah's Book Club. Both "Essence" and "Seventeen" Magazines have award her fiction prizes and when she was only in her 20s, "Harpers Bizarre" named her one of 20 people who will make a difference. That prediction surely came true. She has also received a MacArthur Fellowship Genius Award and a Ford Fellowship and "Jane" Magazine called her one of 15 gutsiest women of the year. Born in Haiti, Edwidge Danticat came to America when she was 12. She published her first work in English when she was only 14. Her work eloquently speaks of national identity by cultural lives, mother-daughter bonds, and a relationships of expatriate ethnic communities to their homelands. In her first novel "Breath, Eyes, Memory, Edwidge Danticat writes of a woman conceived in violence and about her tumultuous relationship with her mother. In her family memoir "Brother, I'm Dying" she writes of the pain of being separated from her parents at age four only to be reunited with them in America when she was 12 and then of being an immigrant in a strange land. Danticat also writes for young people including "Untwine," which was named Bank Street College of Education Best Children's Books of the Year and the picture book, "My Mommy Medicine." She will be joined this evening by Marie Arana, herself an acclaimed writer and the literary director of the National Book Festival. Marie is also the former editor of "The Washington Post Book World." Please welcome Edwidge Danticat and Marie Arana. [ Applause ] >> Marie Arana: Hello and welcome to you all. It's such a pleasure to be here for many, many reasons but we, Edwidge and I, have become friends after we were actually colleagues at one time. We worked on a film together, Girl Rising, and you wrote the part about the Caribbean and I wrote the part about Latin America, South America. So we had that early meeting, Edwidge, before we even knew each other, collaborating. So it's wonderful to be actually collaborating with you in person here. And it's such a pleasure for me to have read this newest book of yours which we'll talk about in a minute. But I want to talk about the fact that being children of diaspora, both of us, and having arrived when we were girls at about the same age, and yet there's so much that we have in common and yet there's so much that has informed us about your experience in Haiti with all of the books that you've written. Tell us about that early life, those first 12 years in Haiti. And you were at first without your father and then without your mother and then to the country that they had immigrated to. >> Edwidge Danticat: Well, first of all I want to thank you all for coming and thank you, Marie, for doing this. Marie has a book out now too that you should get, so plug, plug. So those first 12 years and it's interesting and I'm sure as it for you to look back now, like I turned 50 this year. So to look back at your early life as it's sort of, you know, drifting into the distance but basically my first 12 years, I was born in Haiti in 1969 during the Duvalier dictatorship. My dad left Haiti when I was two and left for many reasons, mostly economic but also nationally, you know, the tensions of the police that we couldn't live there without feeling and then when my mom two years after that, my mom left. And my brother, one brother and I stayed with my aunt and uncle. And my aunt and uncle -- My uncle was a minister and his wife, so there were many in the house in that same situation whose parents were in the Dominican Republic or in Canada. So it was kind of like young children with two older people but with other relatives streaming in and out. So it was that kind of childhood. I felt we all knew that we had parents in other countries who would eventually send for us. So that was always part of the reality of our lives. But we, you know, we went to school and we had a kind of life that was made possible by the fact that all of us, our parents were abroad because they would send money. And so in the summer we went to the countryside where was freer than the city because you can be, you know, out in nature more. And then when I was eight my parents came back to visit and that's when my parents were undocumented when they were, you know, for a while here and then they came back and we had two US born brothers. I think one of my brothers is here. And then they came back with them and then they were able to file the papers for us. When I was 12, I moved to Brooklyn. My brother and I moved to Brooklyn and then we were all a family again when I was 12 years old. >> Marie Arana: Well how was that, how was that for you, Edwidge, because by 12 you are a formed person. And I mean I always remember what [inaudible] said, which is you are the writer you're going to be by the time you're eight. And so you came as a formed person. In fact, you had already begun I think doing a little writing when you were nine or so. And yet you were coming to a country that your parents already knew. I mean, they knew what they were bringing you to. How was that for you and did you have to leave that little girl behind in many way? >> Edwidge Danticat: Well, it's funny. This past weekend I was with a writer who was from Australia and wrote, Maria, I'm forgetting her last name but she wrote a book called [inaudible] and it was about trauma. And in one of the chapters she's like show me a girl at seven and I'll show you the woman she's going to become. And I can't remember seven but certainly I think at 12, you know, all of those sensibilities were formed. And when I think of younger people in my family who came a little bit younger, you know, things that you remember versus things that you don't remember, but I was always in my family I was very quiet. People would say, you know, [foreign words spoken], you know, like nosey. I was really nosey. I was like soaking things in and I wasn't doing it necessarily for stories but I was observing and I was very much interested in books and writing and thinking how that was transformed. So having suddenly a whole new, you know, a blending in a place with but also having formed like when you're in this kind of household with very, a lot of surrogate parenting because, you know, you have the uncles, you have the aunts who are taking the place of your, you know, your mother, your father, and so you have different roles. And then to New York it was very different. And not knowing the language certainly and then suddenly when you do, you are then, you know it better than your parents suddenly. And one of the things I remember being very surprised by how much children, like that situation where children are interpreting for their parents. And so you can be in a house where the situation you're not even allowed to look at your parents in the eye but they'll take you to the doctor and you're like you're interpreting like the most sensitive information for your parents. And in the same way that even when I was Haiti as a little girl people would like ask me to write letters sometimes very like love letters for people. And so it kind of gave you like an entry into peoples' lives that I think fed into my being a writer. It's like what is better for a nosey person than to be allowed into, you know, the most intimate spaces of people's lives. And then afterwards people pretend like it didn't happen. You know, like okay, that was just a moment and then now you go back to being a small child. >> Marie Arana: And of course you're interpreting more than just language when you're put in that position. I was interested in the "New York Times" headlines that went along with the review for your book and it said, "Haitians may leave their country but it never leaves them." And I think it was actually quoting you to some degree. Tell us about that. What is it about -- I mean, I think there are immigrants who leave their countries behind and then they're not really replicated in their households or in their hearts or in their minds. How is that for you as a Haitian and as not leaving your country behind? >> Edwidge Danticat: Well, that was, you know, they were quoting me quoting my parents who always said that to us. You know, say we may have left Haiti but it didn't leave us. And it was certainly in the house, you know, in the language, in the food we ate, and, you know, the church we attended and the neighborhoods like the people who are around us but also I think in the responsibility we felt and in the connection we felt to the people back home, you know, to the family members who we left back home and I think also the pain of certain moments, like even this moment now that we're living in Haiti where you know we and there's a lot of direct communication, you know, with family members. So, you know, you have your cousins who sends [inaudible] like we couldn't leave the house today. There was a strike again on the street. It was, you know, even in this very, this morning, today. So it's very, you know, there's part of it is also the pride, the history, the things we, you know, that our parents were saying to us to lift us up but part of like blended into that was this connection that was also tied to pain because there was always, there were often things happening back home that were painful to us, you know, that we just, you couldn't but that was always, that still is part of us. That is part of us at this very moment that I'm sitting here speaking to you. >> Marie Arana: That's what you carry with you in the immigrant experience. You were not read to as a child you said. You basically you learned storytelling from the oral tradition because people told stories in family at the dinner table, et cetera. How has that colored -- That oral tradition, how has that colored your own writing and your own view of writing? >> Edwidge Danticat: Well I always say to people I think my first writing teachers were the storytellers of my childhood. And there were often people who in their daily lives weren't really celebrated much and who were really hardworking and people who at least in, you know, the case of my family, they were poor people. They weren't, you know -- So they would go into the public space and kind of have to bow their heads and have to be careful but when they were in that space, when they were telling story, when they were laughing, they were free. And it was also, you know, this moment of oral storytelling, whether it was in the provinces or where they were in the city was one of the few times that I would sometimes see the adults in my life, you know, really happily interacting with us, you know, because the rest of the time it was all really especially with young girls, it was like close your legs, scrub your face, you know, it was always like directions but in those moments, it was just the really people were happy and it was lively and they were singing. There were songs in the stories. There was suspense. There was really this like connection with the young people. And so I would look at that and really be in awe. I was like what was this thing that was transforming the mood of these really usually stern women in my life. But I would look at that and think I don't think I can do that because I was shy, I didn't have that sort of performance part to me. But then when I started reading books, I thought, oh, this is another way that this is done where you really don't have to be performing. But then you realize too that you lose something in the living story because I remember when I there was a collection of folktales called the Magic Orange Tree and other folktales by a wonderful storyteller Diane Wolkstein and I remember reading those and then trying to tell them to my mother. I was like this is how she wrote it. My mom was like, no, no. That's not how it is. And then she would tell me her version. And I would tell my aunt and she was like, no and then her version was different than my mother's. So then you realize there's something valuable to the living story but when that person is gone, that version of the story is gone. But when you write something and I think that's what I felt was more fitted to my personality, that sort of intimate, quiet way of telling a story on paper where you revise it. And it may not be as lively as the story that's being told but at least it exist in this way. >> Marie Arana: But that's really interesting what you say because, you know, a story is dynamic, organic if you're in a group and you're watching the people's faces to whom you're telling to story and there's a sense that you're getting back as you're telling the story. When you're actually writing, you are all alone. You know, you are speaking into the void and you are, you know, writing without a reaction but you're probably remembering something about especially when you were a little girl listening to those stories about rhythm and tension and resolution and all that sort of thing. For whom do you write when you sit down and write? >> Edwidge Danticat: Well, it's interesting. One that I would -- Before I tell you for whom I write and it won't surprise you. But one way that I comforted myself about with this idea of the living story versus the story that you write is that there was and I put it in "Breath, Eyes, Memory," there's this proverb that, you know, my grandmother used to say but she would say it as a cautionary like, you know, we were living in a dictatorship. You had to be -- You know, words had a lot of power. You had to be very careful what you said and she would say, you know, [foreign words spoken] words have wings, words have feet. And it was told to you like, you know, to be like you have to be careful what you said. But for me when I heard that, I was like, oh it's a way that the words will find their way, you know, especially and it's proven true for me like in my writing, like you know being here tonight for example, like in a way that you couldn't guide the words. But when I started writing and I think to a certain extent up until this very moment, I really started writing for the girl I was when I arrived here at 12 years old. And I had just gone through the whole public library. They had a shelf [inaudible] with Haitian books, Haitian novels that I had not had had a chance to read in school in Haiti. And I just went through those books like Jacques Roumain, Jacques Stephen Alexis, Marie Vieux Chauvet, [inaudible] Dominique and all the Haitian writers that they had on that shelf and I read through. And then I read Maya Angelou's "I know Why the Caged Bird Sings, with a dictionary." And then I remember thinking like I want to, like I wanted something else like that was a combination of all those things so far and something that was purely me. So I started writing, you know like Toni Morrison said, if there's a book that you want to read and it doesn't exist, you write it. And so I really was writing for that girl. And to a certain extent I feel like I still am, like I'm still writing for that girl who went to that library and was looking for that thing. And we all if you're a voracious reader you know that feeling, you know, like I'm looking for something and then you find something close but you're like -- So I feel like what I write is for that girl who was looking for those books, yeah. >> Marie Arana: And of course you mention the library we're sitting in, the largest -- >> Edwidge Danticat: Like The library. >> Marie Arana: Cultural institution in the world, a wonderful library. Libraries have meant something to you? >> Edwidge Danticat: Oh, absolutely. And I'd love to hear about like you and libraries too because I think I read something that you had written about that. But so when I got to New York, my dad, I remember, took me to the main branch of the Brooklyn Public Library and at that time you can only borrow ten books. And I borrowed ten books. And then like three days later I would bring my ten books back. And I just remember the first time he took me and I was like, you mean they're going to let me keep the books for a while, like I'm going to go home with these books. And he said yeah. And I was just amazed that they were trusting me with these books. Of course, he had to show like his gas bill or something to prove where we lived and they could've come for the books if they wanted. But it just was like, wow, I get to live with these books for a little while. It just felt amazing to just be -- And then you would walk into it. It was like, you know, the Brooklyn Public Library is like a tenfold place this and you're just walking and you're like, oh my goodness, all these books and you can touch them. So that library felt like church to me. It just felt like a religious experience. It was like all the books, you know, because I hadn't owned books in my -- I had owned like a book now and then but I didn't, it felt like to be allowed to be trusted with these books was an amazing experience. How about for you? >> Marie Arana: Well, I'm having the same feeling because I'm remembering that feeling of first taking a book out of a library which I didn't encounter until I was ten years old and in his country, newly in this country. And it was almost like being a thief. I mean, you felt like a thief. I had that same feeling many years later when I was taking home a baby from the hospital [laughter]. They let people do this? >> Edwidge Danticat: I know. It's like I can take her, yes, that's right. So true. I remember with the baby too, I was looking, I was like where is -- >> Marie Arana: This must be against the law. It must be against the law. You mentioned something very important about being in Haiti and the things that you could say and the things that you couldn't say because history was somewhere out there in the streets and perhaps even overtaking you. The tie to history particularly in your books is very strong. History is a character in so many of your books. How did that come to be? How is it that you began to think not only of just narratives about human beings and what happens to them but about the way that as Faulkner said, you know, the past is never a past. It's, you know, the past is never -- What is it? What is it? The past is never gone. It's not even past or whatever and you have that feeling. >> Edwidge Danticat: That's closer to it. There must be a Faulkner scholar in the audience. I think it goes back to the old storytelling and there was a kind of double entendre in even certain things that you were told. And, you know, I think and I write about this in "Create Dangerously" the example of one of our great poets, Felix Morisseau-Leroy who lived in Haiti during the dictatorship and wrote, rewrote in Creole Antigone and staged it. And it was a response to when people we're killed and they couldn't get their dead out of the street because that would indict you. And he wanted to stay in Haiti, wanted to write but like so call the Greeks and sort of repatriated the Greeks. And so history also just our relationship with history, you know, is so rich and that will, you know, if you are speaking to some Haitians within ten minutes, you learn that we were the first Black republic in the Western Hemisphere. And you should know that, you know. But, you know, there are things like historical that we're very proud of and then there are things that are so painful, you the fact that that independence made us [inaudible] in the world, you know, embargoed economically, you know sort of straddle the country. And so all of these things we like this relationship with history both triumphant and painful and other, you know, repercussions in the present. And so for example the way I first learned about -- I wrote a book called "The Farming of Bones" about a massacre of Haitian cane workers in the Dominican Republic. And the first time I heard about it was through oral telling, where someone was saying oh, you know, they were talking about someone who had gone over to Dominican Republic and they said, oh, I hope she comes back okay. I hope it's not like the time of the [foreign words spoken] which is not the historical term but it's like people were like [foreign words spoken] means like the knifing and then what is the knifing. You know, in Spanish el corte and then you're like you just start and then it starts like that and I started looking into it. So there was that always you were like living history all the time but I was always interested in the [inaudible] of history like those gaps that people don't talk about. And so for me like even a thread would lead me to researching and finding out about it. And then fiction is great for that because you can invent a person and put them in that gap, right. And then you can have them tell that story and you can have them follow a thread throughout their history. So that even when I wrote about my father and my uncle, I felt like I couldn't write about them without writing about the history of the country, the way that it affected their daily lives. But I'm also fascinated by history by how it's reflected in the moments that we are living. >> Marie Arana: Well, it certainly comes alive in your work. I'm thinking of "The Farming of Bones" for instance which was the time that of Rafael Trujillo who decided that he was going to do an ethnic cleansing of the Dominican Republic and he began to kill everybody who was of Haitian descent. And it was called "The Parsley Massacre." Why? >> Edwidge Danticat: And Rita Dove wrote a very wonderful -- >> Marie Arana: Yes, Rita Dove did. >> Edwidge Danticat: Yeah, because people were one way because there were places you know on the border and that's one of the places I began my research where you couldn't even tell people apart. And so one way that they could tell if you were Haitian or Dominican were by saying, asking people to say the word [foreign words spoken] and as you can tell I would have failed because you had to, the turning of the R. There are certain, you know, was difficult, was harder for a person of Haitian descent to say and that's how they would differentiate. And then there was something that went as far as like in the Bible, there's like the shibboleth where people were asked to say that. So it's sort of like interesting ways that history repeats itself because when, you know, when you can't build a wall, when you can't like close the river, then you go to language. Right. And when you can't differentiate physically or phenotypically, then you go to words. And for me that was and that's in the Rita Dove poem "Parsley" you know she discusses it too. And for me it's like the idea of using language as a border was just -- You know, dictators are often very maniacal geniuses sometimes, not stable geniuses. So it was just like -- >> Marie Arana: Or ingenious maniacs. >> Edwidge Danticat: So then they -- Exactly, that's probably more accurate. And then so to somebody to have like sat around and think of you know to think of that, it's like Carolyn Forche with the ears. So I wanted to -- For me, that's the kind of you know the kind of history too that you feel like you couldn't make this up, you know. And people often when they read that book, they're like did you make that thing up about the parsley. I said, no. Some maniac did. >> Marie Arana: Right. Right. Well, you know, in that instance he was a dictator who was blaming all the ills of his country to this group of people that had you know actually Haiti had been in. This is an island that is divided between the Dominican Republic and Haiti. And they're all present on an island. But yet he singled these out, the Haitians out. This has often happened in history that Haitians get blamed. I'm thinking also of your extraordinary independence, Wars of Independence, which actually not only inspired the Wars of Independence in Latin America, Alexandre Petion, who was the president at the time, actually funded the liberation of Latin America from Spain. And the United States was blaming Haiti in a way for revolutionizing the whole business of slavery which at that point was a money-making operation in the United States. And then people blamed Haiti again in the whole AIDS crisis, I remember, and you have written about this. So there seems to be this thing of blame against Haitians. How do you feel about that? >> Edwidge Danticat: Well, I don't like it one bit [laughter], as you can imagine. But I think it has some real consequences, right. And starting from the creation of the nation, right. And Haiti and the United States were the first two republics in this hemisphere and Haiti was the first place that enslaved people, overcame their masters and created their nation. It was -- To a lot of people who still were enslaving people, it was a bad example, you know. And you had the founding fathers like pulling their wigs out to like what are we going to do with this, you know, with this example nearby. And one of the ways was to embargo Haiti, like to completely isolate Haiti. And I think it's just you know from that point on from like the creation, from the beginning of that, that sort of the piling on of the blame. But it has actual consequences. Like for example you know with the remarks that the president made about Haiti for example, so that's humiliating, that's degrading, that's awful but that also reflects immigration policy of trying to you know they're in court now trying to completely revoke temporary protective status, canceling Visas. So it's not just I think the way that Haiti is maligned, it's not just words. It has actual consequences and policy and an immigration policy that for years like if someone from Cuba came on the same boat as someone from Haiti, the person from Haiti was detained and returned. The person from Cuba was kept. So it has actually real policy implications that affect people's lives you know sometimes in terrible ways including my own uncle who I wrote my memoir about "Brother, I'm Dying" who came in 2004 when there was some trouble in Haiti. He was 81 years old and had survived throat cancer and spoke with a voice box. So he had a valid Visa, had been coming to the US for 30 years but that day, because he's you know they asked how long he would be staying, he said he would be staying longer. He said well he requested asylum, was detained, had his medication taken away and five days later died chained to a hospital bed, in immigration custody. So those things like that might not have happened to him if he were from a different place. So there's the rhetoric of that sort of maligning but there are also real life consequences for them. >> Marie Arana: You've talked about that in your books and it's quite striking the difference between the way Haitians are received in the country and the way perhaps Cubans were received which is a completely different way. But the history that most comes alive in this particular book and I want to talk about everything inside. It's a wonderful book and it has all of the aspects of Edwidge's writing that you would expect, kind of lyrical precision, a very intense sort of internal lives of people and yet told in this economical way that you have, Edwidge, of getting across things in a pristine, unadorned and un, I would say, sentimental way. It's a wonderful, wonderful book. The history that I most feel in this book is of course a very recent history. It's the earthquake of 2010. And what was that -- What was the impact of that earthquake, how many people died, it was hundreds of thousands. >> Edwidge Danticat: We'll, it's -- Soon, it will be the tenth anniversary of the earthquake and it's very hard to imagine that it's almost been ten years. The estimated number was something like 300,000 and with a million and a half people initially displaced. And so I lost some family members and friends. Certainly I think many of us, so many of us did. And one of the things that initially you know in the initial moments in terms of I mean in the part that goes to of course there's all kinds of ways that one could talk about the earthquake economically, you know building codes but for me one of the initial things was the lack of rituals for a lot of people you know. And even in the case of my own cousin who our family home had collapsed and he and his, my cousin and his son died there and then just like the whole thing of reclaiming bodies, burying people. And so that's one of the things that with this distance you know I wanted to in one of the stories talk about, so like what is the aftermath of grief when you've had no rituals, right. And for a lot of people and there were a lot of people like that who I knew who they were saying you know she left that morning and then we've never seen her since. And often there might be someone who was walking down the street and then they're taking to the mass grave and a family member you don't have a place to go. You don't have a plot of land. You don't have -- You know at least in our case with my cousin, we knew exactly you know we had to excavate but you knew the exact location but there were a lot of people who said goodbye to someone that morning that they never saw again. And so what does that mean in terms of if you're thinking in terms of story, in terms of mourning, in terms of elegy and eulogy and especially in a place where often the way we bury people is the last great honor we pay them. And then that's one thing I wanted to explore in this way. And again as I was saying this, all these other ways and those ways will come up you know as the anniversary comes with how do we honor the dead. And so for me a story, you know it's remembering, it's naming, it's also wrestling with the inability to as I say put a period at the end of that you know that kind of sentence. >> Marie Arana: I want to just mention in the middle of all of this that there is a wonderful display as you came in and as you will go out that the librarians put together of your books, of pictures of Haiti, a very wonderful sort of artifacts about Haiti. A lot of it represents the breadth, I think, of your writing, Edwidge, because you range and we were talking about this a little bit in the back, you range from essays and nonfiction, to memoir, to historical novels, to short stories. You have this -- You're all over the place. You don't concentrate on one. >> Edwidge Danticat: In a good way, right? >> Marie Arana: In a good way all over the place. >> Edwidge Danticat: Because you do the same. >> Marie Arana: But here's the question I want to ask you is do you write poetry? >> Edwidge Danticat: None that I would ever share with anybody alive. >> Marie Arana: What is your feeling about poetry because there is, you can read Edwidge Danticat on a sentence level and it is and you know you almost feel you could push this woman into poetry. >> Edwidge Danticat: Well I love poetry. I actually did start out writing poetry. And I think it was very good training for like the economy of it. And I read a lot of poetry when I'm writing. But I just feel like it would be I need more room, you know. And my books are short relatively, you know like for fiction books they're short. But I still feel like I would like I need more room than the poetry but I love working on that level too on the sentence level and I feel like the best poets you know are just like give you just, they can give you like an image, like a whole story in one sentence. And I love reading that type of poetry. It's just you sit there and it's like oh. You just blew me away. >> Marie Arana: Knock you out of the park, yeah. Absolutely. But you've taught, I mean you've taught before and I know there will probably be some students in this hall. What do you say to aspiring writers? Do you tend to tell them not to try it and then they will try it because they really want to or do you actually have sort of words of encouragement? >> Edwidge Danticat: Oh, I will just say initially -- Well first, for me, my first writing, like the first day of seminar, I will always, I'll say we're all writers here. I'm a writer. You're a writer. And facing the blank page, we're all, we all start in the same place. So I think I always like to sort of stabilize that space, like we're in this together. And then to just write, you know I don't tell people what to write. I feel like what I am in the classroom, especially among writers, is a kind of midwife, you know like this thing is going to happen. It's like as my midwife said, it's going to happen whether you want it to or not [laughter]. You just now have to cooperate a little bit to make it less painful. And so I see myself as like that or maybe a doula, right. And I try to grasp like what the person is trying to do and help them in that direction but I don't like to impose -- Because when I started, when I would go to classes and people would say, oh, I don't even understand what you're doing and it takes a lot of you know I guess passion or stubbornness to overlook negative things that people and you can you know and you can kill a baby writer like that if you're not careful. So I try to see where people want to go, what they want to do but I would say just write. And often if you're a young writer and you're in a classroom setting, you already have a structure built in, that helps you because you have deadlines but often older people who want to write, like I'll meet people who will say, I'm going to write as soon as I retire and then when they retire, they're like I just have too much time. I can't write. So I always say just start where you are you know even if it means like wake up an hour early or just like work the writing around the life that you have now you know as opposed to postponing it or as opposed to like waiting for an idealized situation in which to write. >> Marie Arana: Now we're going to have a question and answer portion of this, so I want you to think about questions that you will have of Edwidge. But Edwidge, I hear that you like surprises. I think you've read, I've read somewhere that you like surprises. Certainly in your stories, my goodness, there are surprises that come in the middle of a story that you think, oh, and you stop and you say, oh, she was pregnant! You know, that sort of thing. And you're constantly -- >> Edwidge Danticat: There's no surprise -- >> Marie Arana: Giving us surprises. So we have a surprise for you from the Library. And I'm going to ask Madam Schadl, Suzanne to come out. This is proving that you can find something, anything in this vast cultural institution. This is Suzanne Schadl, ladies and gentleman [applause]. She is the Director of the Hispanic Division and the Caribbean Division and she is here to present something to Edwidge. >> Edwidge Danticat: It's not my 12-year-old poem, is it? >> Suzanne Schadl: First let me say that we know this won't fit in your luggage and we'll make sure that we send it to you. Second, it is a privilege for me to be here but I'm representing the work of many, many, many people who helped put this together. I'm going to show you and I think maybe the audience will see because you're going to recognize the person who is honored on this print very quickly. In fact, you said her name earlier when you were talking about being in the Library and having that little box of books from Haiti. Have you seen it? >> Edwidge Danticat: Oh my gosh! Is it [inaudible]. >> Suzanne Schadl: This is Marie Vieux Chauvet. >> Edwidge Danticat: Oh my gosh! It's Marie Vieux Chauvet. Wow! >> Suzanne Schadl: And it is her name of course, her likeness, and words from a piece of her work in French. The wonderful thing about this piece is sort of like me representing a community, people working in [inaudible] photographs here, people working in manuscripts who we pooled from and people working in the Hispanic Division and many, many other service divisions to get a copy of this. This comes from -- It's even better. It's even better. This comes from a collection of 27, representing 27 letters in the Spanish alphabet. Marie is the T. You can see the T here. And each of those letters is an author from a different part of the Antilles who make up this lettered community of the Antilles. >> Edwidge Danticat: Oh my goodness. Wow! >> Suzanne Schadl: So the piece is called -- And imagine a mural with 27 authors. The piece is called "Las Antillas letradas" the lettered Antilles. It's done by a Puerta Rican artist Antionio Martorell who sends his regards and says he's thrilled for us to make a copy of this for this particular purpose and to give it to you because you are a part of the lettered community. >> Edwidge Danticat: Oh my gosh! [ Applause ] Thank you. Well I now want to -- Can I -- Can we just leave it close to me? >> Suzanne Schadl: I can leave it close and I will invite you and everyone in the audience to come see this beautiful, beautiful piece. It comes with maps of all of the islands as well as the images of the authors in their words, in their language as well. >> Edwidge Danticat: That's fantastic. I want to tell them a little bit more about Marie Vieux Chauvet because -- [ Applause ] So we -- There isn't an English translation of her seminal work which was "Amour, Colere et Folie," Love, Anger, and Madness, and I wrote an introduction for it. It's in the modern library. But she died in exile in New York but she was you know one of the you know one of our, certainly was one of our great writers but is often the most cited story and I mentioned it in the introduction and it's also in "Created Dangerously" where this book " Amour, Colere et Folie" and it's wonderful that it's sort of in this space because when the book was about to be published and then someone came to her family and said you know if this book is published, you're entire family is going to be wiped out and it was during the dictatorship. But she was already doing -- You know, she had a writers group called Les Araignees du Soir, you know spiders of the night and they would meet secretly to write and some wonderful poets from Haiti. And so this book which I think the words are from was banned, you know the family bought all the copies so nobody would be killed. And the book wasn't even circulating for a very long time. And recently we're able to work with the family and got the translation going and it has been one of the things that I feel like having had this career I'm one of the things I'm most proudest to have been a part of that now people like my nieces and my nephews can read her books even if they don't you know read them in French. So this means like a whole lot and it's wonderful. It's always great for me to walk into these spaces and bring people with me like that and she came with me. [ Applause ] >> Marie Arana: Now we are going to have questions from the audience and we have a microphone that will fly to your side if you raise your hand. So questions of Edwidge? >> Edwidge Danticat: We have a small -- We have a little one who has a question, a little girl back there. >> Marie Arana: Over here. We'll start with the young one. [inaudible] little girl. Yes, please. >> A. J. Verdelle: Edwidge, this is A. J. >> Edwidge Danticat: Oh my God, A. J.! This is A. J. Verdelle, everybody. She wrote "The Good Negress" another wonderful book [applause]. Hi, A. J. How are you? >> A. J. Verdelle: I'm terrific. I'm happy to see you. I didn't actually have a question but since this mike is in my face I will ask you to talk a little bit more about speaking a beautiful language and being in a country where there's another language spoken and what kind of pressure or not you feel that places on your writing. >> Edwidge Danticat: So my parents when my brother and I got here, they were -- So we have my two younger brothers who are US born and my parents were like, they'll teach you English. You guys make sure they're Creole stays on point, you know. And so I feel like the Creole I write has, the English I write has the Creole behind it. And I mean when people talk about like even when [inaudible] like the lyricist and I feel like that's all from like the way my parents were speaking, you know. And there was so much, there's so much metaphors, so many wonderful images in Creole that and ways that sometimes our parents would be speaking around us. And they would be speaking Creole and we would speak Creole but we had no idea what they were saying because they sort of had a roundabout way of speaking and all the double entendres and the beauty of the language for me I feel like is certainly something that I carry with me in the English that I write just as you do in your beautiful language. You know certainly in "The Good Negress" there's some stunning language but it's also you give voice to the people, you know to the characters the way they speak. And often you know it's something that in publishing sometimes if you present your book and they're like, oh, there's too much Spanish or too much Creole and I'm not sure what these people, you know but to try to stay faithful to the way that you hear the characters is how the you know both of you know like the Creole manifests for me in the English. >> Marie Arana: Thank you for the question. Another question? Over here. >> Hi. My name is Gabby [assumed spelling]. I'm an English and creative writing student at [inaudible] university. So I've been really lucky to get to read your works and study them in class with my peers and professors. I guess the question at the top of my head when I read your short stories -- My favorite one is Children of the Sea. When do you decide -- How do you decide when to keep something as a short story and when to expand it to a novel? >> Edwidge Danticat: Thank you. Thank you for coming and thank you to your professor who probably is giving you extra credit I hope for coming. When do I -- So in that -- And Children of the Sea is in Krik? Krak! And Krik? Krak! is a collection of stories and I've been as I was thinking about this book I think of the people in this book as kind of like the children and grandchildren of the characters in Krik? Krak! So there's one story in Krik? Krak!, "1937" that started out as a short story and became the "The Farming of Bones." And that's really the only time that that's happened for me where I had a short story that then suddenly that I felt like, oh, I need to say more and became a novel. Usually it works the other way. So there's a story in this book called "Seven Stories" that I was like writing a novel like with these characters. And then I realized as I was writing along, I was like I'm only writing this because I'm really enjoying the company of these people but nothing is happening. You know and I'm like I really like being in this world and I'm following them around in their fabulous life. And then I shrunk that into a short story. But often, and we were talking about that backstage, the thing that you're willing will often direct you in how it wants to be told. And you have to be but sometimes you have to be brave enough to say, you know, I need to turn this down. I need to kill my darlings as they say you know and get to the gist of it. >> Marie Arana: Wonderful question. Another question? Right here in the front. >> Edwidge Danticat: And then you have to get to the little girl back there. Is that Gia [assumed spelling]? Gia, did you have your hand up? That's my niece. Oh, is it Sasha? Oh, okay. Okay, I'm now afraid of your question, Sasha. >> Marie Arana: Let's start here. >> Thank you for speaking so beautifully this evening about what I'll call your informal education from the books and the libraries and the stories at the table and your own experiences. Could you speak just a little bit about your formal education and what parts of it were useful and which parts were not? >> Edwidge Danticat: Well, I feel like it was all useful. I mean even at least that's what I want to convince my girls, right, about geometry. It's all going to be useful in some way. But my formal education, you know, in Haiti was initially was very rigorous. So my mom took me to school when I was three and I went screaming and kicking and it wasn't the kind of school where you're coloring at three. There was like you were already trying to read at three and so I started reading very early under duress but eventually I liked it and it was -- And formal education at that time was very you know you were reading, so I remember before I was 12 you were like reading [inaudible] and it wasn't -- And it was a very strict kind of school which was made possible by the fact that my parents were able to send money from the States for us to go to that kind of school. And then there were state exams that you took. And so one was like the [inaudible] was like the big one and so I took that when I was like ten, which was like I was on a speed track for this thing. And the way you found out at that time, they don't do this anymore, if you passed was that your name was read on the radio. So it was like read alphabetically and then you would just like sit there and wait for them to say Danticat and you're like yay! But if they went past your name, you flunked and you had to either do that year over or take the exam. But when I came here, I went to a junior high school in Brooklyn, at Intermediate School 320 Jackie Robinson in Brooklyn and then I went to Clara Barton High School for the Health Professions. And I initially didn't get into that school but my father really wanted me to be a doctor. Like on his deathbed, my dad was like I'm not going to have a doctor. And so he went and convinced the principal to let me into that particular school so I could be a doctor. And so I didn't become a doctor but by the time I graduated from that high school, I could have like I could have taken care, like I would've been like a nurse's assistant or something. It was geared to that way. But at some point when I went to Barnard [assumed spelling] and I studied French literature and I always told my parents, I said, well I can be a teacher and they sort of were like okay, whatever, it's not a doctor but you know. And then I started writing. But informal, you know, formal education too I think I studied, I decided to study French literature actually in order to better understand some of the literature I read when I was younger. So I find that all of it was in some way helpful. >> Marie Arana: That's a good question. Does your niece want to ask you a question? >> Edwidge Danticat: Do you have a question? No, she said no. >> Marie Arana: She said no. Okay. We have time for one last question. Here in the front? Oh, sorry. >> Hello and thank you for being here. >> Edwidge Danticat: Thank you for coming. >> It's exciting to hear you talk about how you write and the stories that you've told. And so I'm wondering, you mentioned Toni Morrison, I finished reading your book a few weeks ago and I'm wondering what you have on your bedside table, what do you have stacked up next to your desk or bed for inspiration that you're interested in that's kind of keeping you motivated and inspired? >> Edwidge Danticat: Yeah, it's interesting that you brought up Toni Morrison, you know both A. J. and I knew Ms. Morrison and after she passed I started reading those, I started reading the books again, now "Tar Baby," which I hadn't like -- It's funny because that's the Caribbean one and I realized I hadn't read it like I hadn't read it and so I'm reading her again. And there's some wonderful new books too. There's " Dominicana" by Angie Cruz and Angie wrote a book called "Let it Rain Coffee." And she's obviously from the Dominican Republic and it's a really incredible book about a young woman who comes to the US young and it's almost like a child bride and it's really a strong book. And so those two but I'm going back like through Ms. Morrison. And part of it as you know a way of having her in my mind but also learning because one of the things like for the young writers out there, one of the things I used to do for myself when I just started it's more like the informal education element of it is I would sometimes read like a writer's entire [inaudible] through like a summer, so I would start with the first book and read through their last book. It's almost like a course for myself because you can see how they're growing and because you're in the craft too. You know how you're growing. You know there are things that you hadn't done before that you're like, oh, things that I'm learning. So I like to see how a writer's progressing and then you start noticing some threads. And so that's one way I have instructed myself and I feel like I'm like relearning her work but also relearning a whole new thing about like if you're going through the work linearly and it's like you're traveling with the writer. So I feel like I'm traveling with her through these works. >> Marie Arana: Well Edwidge, we are so fortunate to have had you here. You are a wonderful representative from Haiti. I know the weight of Haiti should not fall on your shoulders but you carry it very well. And we so appreciate your work for so many years, 21 books and numerous essays and short stories and so much work in the world for literature. So we thank you, Edwidge. Thank you so much for joining us at the Library of Congress. Thank you. [ Applause ]