9UNP0221SD_Piazza_Allen_WordPress

- Good afternoon. On behalf of the Wisconsin Humanities Council, I'd like to welcome you to the 2008 Wisconsin Book Festival. I'm Dean Bakopoulos, former director the festival. Thank you for being here today. We wouldn't be here without our generous sponsors, so I'd like to take a moment to thank the Argosy Foundation, the Evjue Foundation, IMS, Isthmus, the Overture Center for the Arts, the Pleasant T Rowland Foundation, the American Girl Fund for Children, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Dozens of other organizations and hundreds of individuals contribute their time and funds, and thanks to all of them. If you need assistance with this event or with future events, finding your way around town, there are volunteers wearing yellow t-shirts in the lobby. Also, right in the lobby outside the auditorium, books are for sale. Both authors will be signing books after their reading and a brief Q&A session. Each author will read for about 15 to 20 minutes, do some questions, and then if you're planning to go to another event you will have plenty of time to get there. 

Last but not least, pagers, cell phones, anything that vibrates or beeps, please turn them off for silence then before we begin. Our first reader today, we're going to be hearing from two great authors today, Tom Piazza and Jeffrey Renard Allen, our first reader today is gonna be Jeffrey Renard Allen. He's a graduate of the doctorate program of creative writing at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He's the author of Harbors and Spirits, a collection of poems, and the novel Rails Under My Back, which won the Chicago Tribune's Heartland Prize for fiction. His other writing awards are numerous and they include the 21st Century award from the Chicago Public Library, the Breadloaf Writer's Conference 2001 and the Pen Discovery Prize in 1989. He's a writer who is also dedicated to the art and craft of teaching and he works at Queens College, the new school for social research, and is presently a fellow of the New York Public Library's Center for Scholars and Writers. The world of Jeffrey Renard Allen's short story collection, Holding Pattern, which he'll be reading from today, is a place like no other. A recognizable city, certainly, but one in which a man might sprout wings, or copper pennies might fall from the skies onto your head. These are no fairy tales. There is hostility, hurt, and humanity running throughout each of these stories, and we're pleased to welcome him to Madison and to the Wisconsin Book Festival. 

Please join me in welcoming Jeffrey Renard Allen. 
(applause)
 
- Thank you all for coming here. Most of the stories in the collection are too long to read in a given setting, so I'm just gonna read the beginning of one story, and then a later section of one story, same story. This one is called, "The Great Apocalypse," and hopefully it's funny, or at least partly funny. The epigraph is by the El Salvadorian poet Roque Dalton, which says, "The dead just ain't what they used to be." Down in the alley Chitlin Sandwich sat wide-legged on the fifteen-speed racer, fifteen himself, a schoolboy, just like somebody's granddaddy. A wide fedora slanted across his face, his tall, skinny frame entombed in a wide, double-breasted blazer. A diamond pin centered in a fat red and green polka dot tie, flashy argyle socks peeking above two-toned patent leather shoes. 

By two shiny puddles of mud beneath his cuffed and pleated baggy slacks. He was sipping from a can wrapped in a brown paper bag and drowning his fingers in a burlap newspaper sack that hung over one shoulder. Sheila was certain that the bike belonged to Hatch, her little brother, or that it was an exact replica, its twin. She pressed her face hard to the window glass and cut her eyes at him. He regarded her with frank indifference as still as an owl, then he tilted the bag and drank long and deep. She felt hot anger rising and spreading throughout her face, elongating her fingers in flames. His diamond tie-pin caught the sunlight. He took one final gulp, crushed the wrapped can like a mosquito between both hands and simply clattered it over his shoulder into an open trash barrel. He pulled a Daily Chronicle from the burlap sack, drew back his arm like a pitcher, only to toss the newspaper under handed like a softball. It soared in early-morning air and plopped like a dead bird onto Sheila's porch, inches from her window. 

A spasm of rage gripped her throat. "I'm 24 and educated and the assistant human resources manager for the Growing Eastshore Bank, and I will not put up with this." She went out onto the porch. "You're lucky you didn't hit my window," she said, fists clenched at her sides. "Ain't nobody trying to hit your window." "What are you doing here in the first place?" He narrowed his cunning eyes and grinned. Only later would she realize that this was the first time she had seen him mirthful in several years. "Can't you see? Here to deliver your paper, baby." 

"Look, I don't play." She swallowed, breathing more easily now. "If you want to play, go to a schoolyard." His eyes flared up with hate. "Shoo, boy, shoo." Her hands brushed at him, brushed him away like dirt. He started off on the bike, his eyes looking back at her. "I'll be seeing you, baby." He blew her a kiss. She exploded, felt her hair singe and crackle. 

"Boy, I'll slap the (---) out of you." She started down the porch steps. His eyes, limpid with rage, pedaling, bike and boy disappeared. 

"That's right, you better run." She turned back up the steps and went into her apartment. Paced the room. In her anger, she had forgotten to confront him about the bike. She had purchased the bike for Hatch a week ago, for Hatch, her little brother, after she learned that Lucky Green's grocery store had hired him as a delivery boy, his first job. 

She was excited that at age 15, Hatch had finally set his athletic-shoed feet on the road to maturity. Now Chitlin Sandwich was riding Hatch's bike. She halted, composed herself for work. One must be prompt. She moved into the bedroom, checked herself in the mirror, liked what she saw, long black braids with neatly-spaced colored beads flowed away from her brown face down to her nape, like trawl-lines in light water. The gray knee-length dress fit close on her tight and toned curves. I will marry when I find the right man. The thought died as suddenly as it had arisen. She quit her apartment, secured all six locks and descended scrubbed stone porch steps, feeling both nimble and heavy as if drawn by some force beneath the grassy lawn. She made her way down a short cement path to the speared wrought-iron fence and gazed out at the quiet streets, geometric lawns and hedges, prim flats like her own and houses of --. 

Gazed, searching from signs of Chitlin Sandwich. Nothing stirred. Disappointed, she opened the fence, closed it firmly behind her, and walked a few feet to her lime-colored car. Got behind the wheel. She was tempted to search for Chitlin Sandwich, but the bank came first, her job. The groan of ignition, she handled keys, gears, and buttons with the skill of an astronaut. She eased the car onto the expressway, watched the road through the windshield and the windshield watched her back. Thinking about her brother, buried reflections. Fifteen years ago Mama had gotten so disgusted with fat and greedy chicken-eating -- preachers that she stopped attending church altogether. A ghost began to plague her family. 

He would nibble shoeless toes, a fart above her bed, anything to prevent her from sleeping. She grew restless and dizzy, bumped into objects like a stunned cat. The ghost made comical faces whenever she sat on the toilet. But he soon tired of these games, tired of Sheila, and began to frequent Mama at night, singing low-down blues all the while. Mama found both prayer and potions ineffective. She sought the advice of her medium, who suggested she change the direction of the bed. This worked. Then her belly began to round. Nine months later the ghost made a final appearance. He hot-wired a car, drove Mama to the -- hospital, and set her down on the curb outside the emergency room. 

One hour later, Hatch came quietly into the world. That's not autobiographical. 
(laughter)
 So I'm gonna read one other section. This is a flashback a few pages later where Sheila first begins to believe that there is some weird thing going on with her brother, Hatch and with Chitlin Sandwich. So I'll just read this. "Boy, what's wrong with you?" Roused from sleep in her yellow housecoat with white flowers, Mama watched Hatch from her reclined position on the couch, the cords in her neck tense, as if straining to detain air-bound blood. Her red houseshoed feet crossed, ashy ankles like gray fish eyes, lips puckered from toothless gums. She lost her teeth as a child in the 'Sippi south, when a reckless car struck her on a lone dirt road. 

Specialists fashioned her a new set, which she had a hard time keeping track of. Once she left her dentures on her friend's dashboard and dispatched an embarrassed Sheila to retrieve them. "Speak up." She switched her gaze to Sheila for a moment, her eyes like stone, scraping Sheila's skin. Head down, Hatch cried without wiping his eyes, tears running, a swelling reddened his brow, a small red knot. He attempted to speak between sobs, bubbled words and saliva. "Boy, speak up." "Chitlin Sandwich bit me with a sock." "What?" "Chitlin Sandwich hit me with a rock." 

Mama continued to look at him, letting the wet revelation soak in, her eyes slowly found Sheila's face. Sheila had been put in charge of Hatch. They shared a two-bedroom apartment, she and Mama in one bedroom, Hatch to the other, on the top floor of a three-story, brick courtyard building, broad high-pitched window overlooking the Stonewall projects. A single playground the center of three seven-story steel high-rises that loomed at the city sky. Flecks of waste, free-floating rage, it was Mama's desire to spirit out of the neighborhood first chance. Mama rose from the couch, shuffled into the kitchen, house-shoes slapping the bare floor, and returned with two --. She took Hatch's hand and raised it, arm-upward, dagger fashion, placed the -- inside. "Don't let the -- of hatred rise in your heart," she said. "But I want you to go back out there and bust that Chitlin Sandwich 'side his head." "No, ma'am." 

Hatch was eight and tall for his age, threatening even, but he was clumsy and gentle, wrapped crooked band-aids around the wings of dragonflies. He would thank Mama when she whipped him, her blows were synchronized, his body jerked to avoid her rhythmic belt. He would thank her and promise to do better. "You back-talking me?" "No, ma'am." "Then get out there and do what I told you to do." "I would prefer not to," Hatch said. "What? Get." She shoved him, stumbling, out the door, still looking at Sheila. 

"What are you standing there for? Go with him." It was a day of filtered sunshine, half cloud, half sun. Chitlin Sandwich waited before the gray mass of the building. Chitlin Sandwich waiting, dark, red, sparkling, a child of unmothering and unfathering deeps. Anyone even remotely connected with Abraham Lincoln Elementary School knew that his mama dressed him from the Goodwill. She ran the streets in glossy hip-huggers, a new man on her arm every week, and she aided and supported two grown brothers, Snake and Lake, criminals in hiding, always pursued. She cooked every Sunday and used the leftovers for the remainder of the week. Her specialty was the Chitlin Sandwich. Chitlins on white bread with hot sauce, onions, lettuce, pickles, and tomatoes. 

Chitlin rose a full three inches over the tallest kid in the neighborhood. Feared, he was also called upon, since he instinctively understood electronics. He could repair a toaster and a computer, a television and a cell phone with equal ease. Word had it he never used tools. Chitlin walked, the hinged arms and legs of a cardboard Halloween skeleton. Hatch closed his eyes and whirled both --. One caught Chitlin, he made no attempt to defend himself. One caught him squarely behind the earlobe. Hatch opened his eyes to red sight. He ran back into the courtyard and halted beside Sheila. 

She knew what he was thinking. Stand his ground or answer to Mama. Chitlin crossed the street for Stonewall, blood trickling fingers stopping his wound. He did not hurry, steady and calm. Sheila watched from the courtyard, drawn by the clinging power of curiosity. She had never seen such stoicism or determination in a child. She caught one last glimpse of him before Stonewall swallowed him. "Did you see that?" she said. "See what?" 

Hatch said. "Did you see that?" "He bleeding, he gonna beat me up." "You didn't see it?" As her brother's fear weighed upon her, Chitlin Sandwich reappeared, walking with swift, firm steps, dragging with one hand some object that scraped the concrete behind him like a fallen muffler. Sheila held one hand up to block the sun so that she could see better. But there was no light to block. Sight improved as he came closer. She felt a violent knocking in her stomach, neither fear nor anger, but comic disbelief. "That Chitlin Sandwich got a sword." 

"What?" "Look," she said. The sword was better than three feet long, the dark brown handle imbedded with tiny red stones like mosquito bites. The blade itself was even sicker, with pockets of rust like sores in a mangy dog. Boy and sword were less than a yard away now. She burst out in a spasm of giggles. "Look at that old silly sword!" Hatch tripped over his own feet making it behind her. He encircled her waist with his arms and held her tightly. "He gonna cut me up. 

Don't let him cut me up. I'm sorry, Chitlin." He peeped out from around Sheila's waist. "Let me go." She tried to shake him loose, but couldn't. "He ain't gonna cut up nobody." Using both hands, Chitlin raised the sword above his head like a sledgehammer and brought it wildly down onto the sidewalk. Sheila was too swift, even with Hatch hugging her waist. A taste of gall rose up inside her. She pried Hatch loose. 

Chitlin readied the sword. She ran right up to him and punched him in the face. He fell straight backward, a domino, and -- the concrete. The sword fell, clang. Nothing moved. Silence, time. "Why you hit my baby?" A lady under a helmet of pink curls was running toward Sheila from across the street. She moved with incredible speed, flabby thighs bouncing and balancing her skinny bird calves. "Why you hit my baby?" 

Black dots peeked through her faded green t-shirt, cut above the navel, and pubic hair crept up her belly over blue jean shorts, panties small and tight. "Yo, Slim," someone yelled. People were hanging out of windows, watching from the playground. "Tell her, Shorty. Y'all get it on. Party, ladies. Fight." "You ain't got no business putting your hands on my child," the bird-slut said to Sheila, close now. "How'd you like me to punch you?" "You ain't gonna punch nobody." 

Sheila looked over her shoulder, Mama standing there. Mama, malice still and angry, in red house slippers, her hand on something inside the pocket of her flowered housecoat. She'd snapped in her dentures. Hatch was gripping her free hand with both of his. "Hey," somebody yelled, "Pick on another 
(---)
. This should be good, y'all. Go on and fight, ladies." The bird-slut fixed Mama with a hard, cold squint. 

Mama watched her back. Chitlin Sandwich managed to raise himself on shaky legs. Then he dropped back to the sidewalk, cartoon-like, as if his bones had been liquefied. His mother trained her eyes on him. "Sheila," Mama said, "Get your behind over there." Sheila obeyed Mama's orders. Mama and Chitlin's mother stood there, eternally -- and traded cold stares, eyes flickering. "I don't think no hitting will be necessary," Mama said. Mother Chitlin made no response. "I tell you what. 

Since our children can't play together, we gonna keep them apart." "Fine with me." The bird-slut leaned from one thin leg to the other. Mama eyed Hatch. "Now, he ain't gonna play with you, and if I find you playin' with him, I'm gonna beat your 
(---)
." "Yes'm." "Chitlin, get up from there," his mother said. "Now, if he bother you, come see me." 

"Yes'm." "Chitlin." In one moment, Chitlin Sandwich rushed to his feet, fast and stiff, like a stepped-on broom. "Get your sword." He retrieved the sword. Mama stiffened. Hatch lowered his head. Chitlin staggered over to his mother, his shirt collar soaked with blood. He watched Sheila, his powerful will packed into his stare. "You heard what she said." 

His mother eyed him, her voice faltering. "He ain't gonna play with you, and you ain't gonna play with him. Find you some new friends." Chitlin watched Sheila. The slut snatched him around, then they started across the street, the sword dragging behind, sparks showering, crowd parting. He swirled around on one foot and shook his fist at Sheila, slow and stiff. She rolled her eyes. The slut snatched him forward. He craned his bloody neck and threw his eyes back over his shoulder at Sheila. His mother slapped him upside the head. 

A week later, Sheila watched the Stonewall playground through the all-knowing third-story picture window, swingset, two figures at either end, vast space between them. Chitlin Sandwich swinging in one direction, Hatch swinging in the other. I'll stop there. Thank you. 
(applause)
 
- And our next reader is Tom Piazza. And Tom is the author of nine books, he's a gifted novelist as well as a gifted music critic and writer on all matters of pop culture and we're thrilled to have him here today. His most recent novel, the one he'll be reading from today, is called City of Refuge, he's also the author of a great novel called My Cold War, which preceded that. He's been awarded a James Minchiner Award for fiction, and the Faulkner Society Award for the Novel, among many other awards. 

He won a 2004 Grammy award for his album notes to Martin Scorcese's Presents the Blues: a Musical Journey. And this was a sort of easy intro for me to write because I had the pleasure of being sent an early manuscript of Tom's book to do a blurb, so I'm just going to read the blurb I put on the back of the book in this case. Like the city he writes about, Tom Piazza's newest book, City of Refuge, is beautiful, harrowing, passionate, and complex. It does what all great American novels must do. It gives voice to the voiceless and remembers the stories the politicians want us to forget. The future of American fiction, and perhaps America, depends on novelists who can tell us stories like this. Please join me in welcoming one of my favorite writers to the book festival, Tom Piazza. 
(applause)
 
- Oh man. 

No way I can possibly live up to that introduction, but thanks, Dean. It's great to be back in Madison. I'm very proud to be reading today with Jeffrey Allen, and I'll try to hold up my end here. Thank you for coming out, spending this beautiful, part of this beautiful day indoors. I'm gonna read to you from my novel City of Refuge, which is what Dean was talking about. I live in New Orleans, and after Hurricane Katrina happened three years ago, I wrote a short book called Why New Orleans Matters, which was kind of a response to a lot of people who were saying after the storm that perhaps New Orleans shouldn't be rebuilt. And that book did one kind of job in the world, I hope, to some extent. And to my surprise, about six months after the storm, the characters in City of Refuge began not just suggesting themselves to me but insisting themselves upon me. And I found that a novel had grown, I suppose, in my brain when I was paying attention to other things, and I started writing it. And I wrote it in just under two years, and it's just come out. 

So let me tell you very briefly what this book is about and then I'll read you a short section from it. It's a story about two New Orleans families, one African-American family, one family actually Midwestern transplants, who live in different parts of New Orleans and have very different experiences of the disaster that we call Katrina. Both families very scarred by what happens and both families, though, finding their way through it in very different ways. And facing the choice that everybody faced after that storm who was from New Orleans, which is, do I go back to New Orleans or don't I? So both families have to work that out. I can tell you that the African-American family live in the part of town that many of you probably heard of after the storm, after the disaster, called the Lower Ninth Ward. It's a part of town that was almost completely obliterated by a catastrophic breach of the levee on the industrial canal. And the head of that family is a man named SJ Williams, and he's a carpenter and a builder and a Vietnam veteran and a widower. And he sort of takes care of his sister Lucy, his older sister Lucy, who's a bit of a mess, but a soulful mess. People love her, but she's always kind of in and out of trouble. 

And he also looks out for her son, Wesley, who figures in this segment I'm going to read to you. Wesley is about 19 years old and he's kind of teetering, let's say, on the brink of a lot of the bad influences that young people face in parts of any town like the Lower Ninth Ward. But he's a good kid and he knows what a family is, but still. The Williams family stays in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina and they end up being rescued and scattered to the winds and SJ ends up in Houston with some cousins. Lucy, his sister, ends up in Missouri, and Wesley ends up with an older couple up in upstate New York who, through their church group, take in, signed up to take in an evacuee. And the process of those three getting back together and reuniting forms one of the main plot threads of the second part of the book. The other family, very briefly, is the Donaldson family, Craig and Alice, mother and father, met in graduate school in Ann Arbor, and, I'm sorry, I really feel like I should have set it at University of Wisconsin. I just have to apologize to everybody, it just happened to be Ann Arbor, okay? But anyway, they moved to New Orleans mainly because of Craig, his great love for New Orleans culture, the music, the food, all the things that draw outsiders to New Orleans and make them stay. And initially his wife Alice loved the city too and participated in the life there. 

But they have two children now, Annie and Malcolm, eight and three respectively, and as they have been growing, Alice, Craig's wife, has been more and more doubtful about staying in New Orleans. Because of the poverty and crime, and the crumbling infrastructure and the crumbling schools, etc. So as the novel opens, both of these families are facing, and that's to say, August of 2005, both of these families are facing certain kinds of tensions in their family. Craig and Alice are arguing about whether to stay in New Orleans even before the storm hits, and SJ is worried about his nephew Wesley who's just been arrested for beating on his girlfriend. And SJ gives him the talk that you would hope you'd be able to give to your nephew in a situation like that, but it's still a question about what's gonna happen. In any case, the storm comes and everybody's lives are thrown into chaos. But in any case, the section I'm gonna read to you is right about from the middle of the book. And this is a passage in which Wesley, who ended up at the Superdome, I'm sure you all remember what happened at the Superdome, yes? The Superdome was the shelter of last resort in New Orleans where there was probably enough medical care and food and other supplies to last for a day and half, two days, and people were there, in a -- house, for about five days of unspeakable unpleasantness. In any case, Wesley ends up on a plane to a place he's never been. 

Wesley's never been out of New Orleans like many people in New Orleans, black and white. So many people in that town have never been out of New Orleans, have lived their whole lives there and don't know much else. Wesley ends up on a plane and he lands in Albany, and I'm gonna read to you two segments, two sections from this chapter where he goes and is picked up at the airport by this older couple. And I'm assuming you can hear me okay, yeah? The Albany airport is small and Wesley was hard to miss when he came down the concourse. Art and Elle Meyers had a picture of him, taken at the facility in Phoenix, which Elle had printed from the internet. Through their church they had answered a call for members to temporarily house displaced people from New Orleans. Their own two boys, grown up now, had long since moved out of their modest three-bedroom home to different cities, and Elle thought it would be nice to have someone back in the empty nest for a little while. Wesley emerged carrying a brand new duffel bag with the pricetag still on it, and wearing a cheap dark blue parka with fur trim around the hood over a long t-shirt. He had no checked baggage. 

He turned a couple of heads because of the odd combination of clothes and also because of his hyper-alert quality, looking around like a cat in a cat carrier. He didn't know how to act, really, out in the world. SJ and to some extent Lucy had taught him manners, basics, like saying please and thank you. And to take your hat off inside the house and things like that. But he had no real idea of how the parts fit together in the world beyond the Nine, expect what he had seen on television. In the Lower Nine, if you made a misstep, it could cost you your life, or part of your life in jail, at least. And he assumed that the same was true everywhere. Walking down the concourse now, as he had been directed to, Wesley felt exposed, and anxious, as if he were being processed for prison. He didn't know where the people he was supposed to meet were going to be, or how long he was going to have to walk. It was hard to tell what information was important, and what wasn't important. 

He noticed one or two people looking at him, but he was afraid to meet their gaze. Most ignored him completely. There were very few other black faces and the few he saw didn't really look to him like New Orleans folks. He came out into a wider area and as he was trying to see which way he should go an older white couple approached him, smiling. The woman holding a photo of him and saying, "Wesley?" "Yeah, that's me," Wesley said. "Oh, you must be exhausted," the woman said, opening her arms and hugging Wesley who stood their rigidly, dutifully putting his free arm around the lady. He didn't especially like being embraced by strangers, never had. This woman had thin gold-gray hair, done in a permanent, and she was wearing a pink sweatshirt with a bunny piqued on the front. Her eyes bulged slightly. 

"Welcome," the man said, when the lady had let go of Wesley. The man put out his hand to shake and Wesley shook it. "Art Meyers, and that's Elle." "Which way we gotta go to get out?" Wesley said, because that's what he was wondering. Art Meyers wasn't quite sure what to say. A frown came into his manner if not his face at the rudeness of the question, the lack of manners. Elle stepped in and said, "We're just parked right out here in the short-term lot. This isn't a very big airport," she said, smiling at the young man who was looking around as if he expected to be shot at. "Do you need a hand with that bag?" 

she said to Wesley, but looking at Art. She knew her husband had been annoyed by the young man's response, Art was a good and generous man, but he had rigid ideas about order, manners within the perimeter of his attention. "I got it," Wesley said. They headed out into the parking lot. It was after rush hour and the sky was still light, though the sun was behind the houses and the hills. They walked without speaking, Wesley having no idea what he should or shouldn't say, so he stayed quiet, and the Meyers were in the same boat. Wesley recognized the surroundings as someone's version of normal, but not his. They left the airport and headed up the Northway. Wesley sat in the back seat, looking out silently at the ridge of silhouetted hills to the west. At one point he said, "Is that the Rocky Mountains?" 

Art and Elle exchanged glances in the front seat, unsure if the young man were joking with them. "Those are the Adirondacks," the man said. "Adirondacks," Wesley repeated, watching the darkening shapes pass by the window. That first night at dinner Art and Elle sat thinking variations on the same general thought as they watched the young man eat. What have we gotten ourselves into? The young man didn't seem to know how to make normal conversation, although Elle was more ready to chalk it up to the undoubted trauma of the past week than was Art. They had fixed up their son Richard's old room for him, cleared off the desk, just generally straightened up. Richard was in Savannah at an architectural firm and would certainly not be back before the holidays and Daniel, their younger boy, lived and worked in New Jersey so they left his room open. There had been a predictable emptiness in their lives after the boys left which Art filled with his woodworking and Elle filled with volunteer work at a soup kitchen in Troy. Volunteer work at the Elba Library, and keeping the house straight. 

She stayed in touch with relatives via the internet. Elle had prepared a pot roast with potatoes and carrots stewing in the juice. Although she expected the young man to be hungry, he ate sparingly. And he seemed to be examining each bite of food intently before eating it. Out of nervous politeness, they asked Wesley questions the received monosyllabic answers about his house, whether he knew where his family was. The longest string of words he put together was, "Do you have any, like, Crystal sauce or anything to put on this?" "Crystal sauce?" Elle said, leaning in slightly. "Like hot sauce." " "No," she said. 

"Would you like some ketchup or some A-one?" "No, that's all right," he said. He made note of her eyes again. It was the kind of face he might have made covert fun of under other circumstances. "Crystal sauce," she said. "Would I be able to find it in a store around here?" "I don't know," he said. After dinner Art went into the living room to read the newspaper. Elle said, "You must be tired. You can go to your room if you like, or we usually watch the TV in the living room, just make yourself at home. 

For whatever time you are here, act like this is your home." "Thank you," he said. "When they say I can try to find my people?" "Well, we can try first think tomorrow, I suppose it's a little late right now." "Can I try my Mama phone again?" "Of course," Elle said, "of course. There's the telephone, you go ahead and make as many calls as you like." "Thank you," he said. He knew to say thank you. Lucy had drilled that into him. 

If they went to get a snowball and he didn't say thank you to the man, she would give him a swat on his bottom, even if she was going off about something else, or drunk. If Wesley neglected to say thank you for something, she would notice that. "Everybody likes to hear thank you," she said. "Everybody like to hear thank you and everybody like to hear their own name." One time for one of his birthdays she had got him a red plastic fire engine, a small thing, but Wesley always liked fire engines, and he had gone and made a big sign for her, it just said "thank you" in red crayon, and she had put it up on the refrigerator in the apartment off Jackson Avenue and it stayed there for years. That was before they moved to Tennessee Street. Wesley called Lucy's cell number and SJ's cell number and got circuits-are-busy messages on both of them, the same messages he got when calling out on his own phone. He tried to think if there were any other numbers to call but he assumed everyone else he knew in New Orleans was now in the same situation. He set the phone back down and stood in the dining room, chewing on his lip, staring into the distance. "Know what?" 

Elle said. Wesley shook his head. "We'll find her tomorrow, don't worry. We'll go down and get you registered. We'll find your mom." She looked at the young man standing there in his sweatshirt, and he looked so lost to her that she went over and put her arms around him and gave him a hug. His body was rigid, stiff, as it had been at the airport. "I guess maybe I'll go to bed." "You do that," she said, "Sleep as long as you want. If there's anything you want in the night I'll leave a light on and you can just come downstairs and help yourself." 

"Thank you," he said. "Thanks," he said to Art. "Okay," Art said, letting the newspaper drop to half-mast. "Y'all set? Elle got you covered?" "Yeah," Wesley said, "I'm all set." Upstairs in the room Wesley prowled for a minute or two, looking at the pictures, the posters of unfamiliar faces. He sat on the bed. Then he was up and looking around again. There was a small framed photo of their son. 

He assumed it was their son, in a tuxedo with a girl in a gown. A prom picture. A small wooden bear, foreign coins in an ashtray, boy scout books. Wesley looked out the window at the backyard which was dimly illuminated by the light from the house's windows. His heart was racing. Anxiety was like a constant noise in the room with him. It was harder being here in this place, with all the evidence of life continuity and all its foreignness than it was being in the shelter. In a time of total disruption, disruption was what felt natural. This sense of continuity was what was hard to assimilate. He fought down in himself an overwhelming impulse to bolt, but he knew, he knew that that was crazy. 

There was nowhere to go. He lay down on the single bed with its nubby white bedspread. He did not take off his clothes, not even his shoes, and he left the lights on. All he wanted was to find his family and be out of there in a day or two. He lay there, looking at the ceiling. Within a minute, he was asleep. He woke up all at once, looking around, inside a dream, everything inverted. You wake up out of a dream, not into one, but now he knew where he was. He was in someone else's life. He sat up on the side of the bed, listened hard. 

The clock on the nightstand said 7:20, the window curtains were light. Wesley stood up, walked as quietly as he could to the closed door of the room and listened to hear whether anyone else was up. He couldn't hear anyone moving around, no noise from the street, no cars, after some deliberation he opened the bedroom door as quietly as he could and stepped out. And what happens is he goes downstairs, he has a strained conversation with Elle over breakfast, out of nervously she kind of keeps talking and eventually they kind of go out, and she takes him shopping to buy some more clothes, and then she takes him to the church office where they have a database where evacuees were able to check on their families who were also being registered at other church offices and evacuee camps around the country into these databases. This was a story that replicated itself tens and hundreds of thousands of times across the country. In any case, after a day in which, after spending some time together, Wesley begins to kind of loosen up and get the feel of this human who's there, and she begins to loosen up and get a feeling for him as well. And they come home at the end of the day and I will read you to the end of that section now, okay? They're in the car, driving back to the house, and they've kind of started warming up to each other. At one point, because it occurred to him at that moment, Wesley asked Elle why she and Art had decided to volunteer to take him in. "Well," Elle said, "It's just what you're supposed to do. 

When people are in trouble, you're supposed to help out. That's really all there is to it." She looked across at him and back at the road. "We all can do something to help somebody else. Somewhere, somebody has done something to help each one of us, and you're supposed to give that back or pass it along, I guess you'd say. And, you know, in our church we believe that Jesus gave his life for us so if you believe that way you're just acting by his example. But you know, every religion has some version of that in its own way. We're all very lucky to be alive and we should treat each other better than we do." Wesley sat back in his seat and watched the road. They arrived back at the house around five o'clock, scooting in just under the wire before the evening traffic began in earnest. 

The Albany commuters and the Schenectady people. They came in with the packages and first thing asked Art if there had been any calls, which there hadn't been. Then Elle said she was going to busy herself making supper. Art asked the young man a few questions about the day and then they watched the five o'clock news for a while, still full of images of New Orleans, which Wesley watched attentively. Afterwards there was still time before dinner and Art said, "Wanna see how I spend my golden years?" He led Wesley through a door and down some stairs into the basement. A large, damp-smelling, cement-floored room of a type which Wesley had never entered, since nobody built cellars in New Orleans. The ground was too wet. Art had turned on the light going downstairs and now Wesley saw a room something like a bunker in one of the war movies he had watched with his Uncle J. But this one full of hardware under the overhead lights, woodworking materials that Wesley recognized from SJ's workshop. 

Art walked around the room, taping his hand on different tools as if ticking off inventory. "Bandsaw, jigsaw, table saw, lathe, over here I do my sanding, I got it rigged up with oversize exhaust fans for the varnish, that's nasty stuff, first of all, and Elle's sensitive to the fumes. Over here is for painting, double vices over there." Wesley listened to be polite, although he knew what the tools were. Art took him to a low table under the far wall and pulled the cord on a double fluorescent light under a hood. And it shone down on three wooden model planes, done in meticulous detail. And one apparently in process. "Do you like planes?" Art asked Wesley. Wesley shrugged, smiled a little. 

"This is a SPAD here, that's a -- tri-plane, like what the Red Baron flew." "Like in Peanuts," Wesley said. He remembered that from the Christmas TV show. "Right," the man said absently. "This is the flying tiger, and I'm working on a Sopwith Camel." "What do you use them for?" Wesley asked. "They fly?" "No," Art said, "I just like them. They're beautiful, or I find them to be so." 

Wesley sensed that the man was slightly disappointed in his reaction, so he pointed to the jigsaw and said, "What does that one do?" "That's the jigsaw," the man said, turning off the fluorescent light and walking over to the high bench with the tool on it. "Like what they make the puzzles with." "Well, yeah, you got the idea anyways. Nowadays they make the puzzles with big stampers. You couldn't work each one individually with a jigsaw, it would be prohibitively expensive and it would take too long." "Why they call them jigsaw puzzles then?" "Well, I think they just got started when a carpenter had a little too much time on his hands and decided to cut up a picture somewhere and they found out it was fun trying to put it back together." "My uncle have a shop." "A woodshop?" 

A sudden drop in Wesley's stomach, sinking. Uncle J. "Yeah," Wesley said, "He has a shop in his backyard." He was looking at the jigsaw. Thinking about SJ, or talking about him, made him feel bad suddenly. "Does he have his own business?" "Yeah," Wesley said. "He make things. Fix houses, I help him." Then, looking at Art with a look that Art would later remember as sudden and frantic, like an animal that's spooked, or a cat struggling to get out of your arms, he said, "You think I can make my calls yet?" 

Slightly startled, Art looked at the young man, with his scared eyes, skinny, standing there in his long t-shirt, and he felt a sudden rush of tenderness come over him. Yesterday the abrupt response would have bothered him, but now he saw a kid, a couple thousand miles from home, with nobody in the world. The poor fellow, he thought. "Well, let's go see." Then, out of nowhere, he looked the young man in the eyes and said, "It's gonna be all right, son. We'll get you hooked up with your family." Wesley looked at him and looked at the floor and said, "Thank you." "Come on," Art said, putting his hand on Wesley's shoulder. "Let's go find Elle, she's the boss." And they went upstairs to the kitchen to find a pot of water boiling, unattended on the stove, and Art's wife of 42 years lying unconscious on the floor. 

Okay. 
(applause)
 
- You can tell Tom's a pro because he leaves you at the cliffhanger. Both books are for sale, all of the authors' books are for sale in the lobby. We have a few minutes for some questions and answers, so I'll have Tom and Jeffrey come back on up for Q&A, and if you're going to ask a question, I ask that you come up to this microphone because we are recording the event for public television and that way the question would be heard by everybody. So if you have a question, anyone out there? I think we got one coming. 
- As someone who has been to New Orleans briefly before the Katrina and also in volunteer stance after Katrina, I can see as you indicated that many people have left the community that have never left the community, and people that were in a perhaps depressed economic state, and they go into communities where there is better education and other opportunities, and may not return to New Orleans. Will some of that culture then be lost in New Orleans? 

- Well, you know, any time you lose a sizeable percentage of a city's population, the culture is gonna be altered, it's gonna be shifted. And depending on the circumstances, it can affect how that culture is shifted. New Orleans has been wounded not just -- or materially, but I think spiritually by what happened down there. Because it wasn't just a storm, it wasn't just a natural event, it was the result of a failure of levees that were improperly designed and improperly built. So, I think it is probably true that the majority of the people who have left New Orleans and had to stay gone because they had to put down some kind of roots in another place, put their kids in school, didn't have FEMA money, didn't have insurance on the house, most of those people were probably lower-income people. Plus the city has been resolutely tearing down public housing. So if you have a lot of the people who really built the most characteristic culture of the city, which is to say the music, the cuisine, in many cases the actual physical buildings themselves. If those people are gone, the city is gonna be less like itself and less soulful and less real and less human. And this is something a lot of people are working hard to try to figure out some kind of solution to, it's also something a lot of people maybe don't want some of those folks back in the city and they have a vision of a New Orleans that's very different from the one that's been around. But that's a roulette wheel that's still turning and the ball hasn't really dropped in any of the slots yet. 

There are all kinds of things that are going on. But the city's spirit is still extraordinary. Parts of the city looks like bombed-out parts of Dresden after World War II, and parts of it look just the way it looked before the storm and people are defiantly trying to put the culture back together again. 
- I was just wondering when each of you found your literary voice, what was that experience like, when you found, you said, this is me speaking and not somebody that you're trying to imitate. And the other question is, to what degree are you motivated by internal things and to what degree are you motivated by external things like what happened in New Orleans? Each of you can respond to those. 
- I guess somewhere in my mid-20s I think I found my literary voice. But you know for a while I was imitating Kurt Vonnegut, so much so that I was called the black Kurt Vonnegut by my college mates. One of the reasons I liked to read the story I read from today was that was sort of the first story where I thought I was going to get it together as a writer. And I think a part of it is trying to figure out to do things your own way and to find out what it is you're trying to say about the world. 

Does that answer both of your questions? I hope so. I think it all comes from inside. But you certainly want to connect to readers and have important things to say to people who read your work. 
- Yeah, I think as a writer you're constantly finding your literary voice. I think if you ever actually say, I've found my literary voice, you're in trouble and you need to sort of

- I think we each could say we've found our literary voice, but with each project you do you kind of need to find it again, you know? But that moment that I think Jeffrey was telling about, and I get the sense that you're asking about, is like the first time you really did something that you knew it was your own. I honestly don't think that, I think that happens when you have your back against the wall for some reason. Like you've really got your back against the wall and it's like sink or swim. 

Whatever that situation, some people are born into that situation, some people find it because of a failed love or some kind of external circumstance like what you were talking about. But generally I think literary style in the most meaningful sense is something that comes out of necessity, rather than a kind of arbitrary choice. It's something that comes out of necessity and then everything that you've read and everything that you've thought and every conversation you've had you do something that serves a purpose that you have, a certain kind of expression. I think maybe that covers both parts of that question, I'm not sure. Was that adequate? 
-
(inaudible)
 
- The question I have is, there are some stories, and I assume your Katrina story was motivated by Katrina, and there are other stories that are motivated more by something that needs to be said within you, not necessarily an external event, but something that needs to bubble up inside of you. And I was just wondering if you could speak to that. 

It sounds for instance like yours were your own need to express things, and the only thing I heard of yours was the thing about Katrina, and I'm sure partially your internal thing and partially the external thing, too. I'm just interested. 
- Well, I'll just, since you seem to be pointing that one at me, I'll just briefly say, I think it's always, I think the writing comes out of tensions between apparent opposites. And so I think in this particular case obviously there was a certain external trans-personal event that was happening that I was affected by and on some level obviously wanted to address, but I think also, plainly that wouldn't be worth a whole lot unless there was something on a very subjective level going on at the same time. So I think most good writing comes out of a tension between those apparent opposites. 
- This is for both of you, the first one. The first question is, I noticed you both use a lot of African-American imagery and whatnot, my question is, how much of the African-American imagery is stereotypical versus personal experience? And the second question is for you. Would your story have had the same impact had the families been, the one from the Lower Ninth Ward, had it been a Caucasian versus African-American family? 
- I'll start out with that. 

So, well hopefully nothing is stereotypical in what I do. I write from a particular culture, having grown up in Chicago, south side, that kind of thing. I think, you know, you try to work from the culture that's there but just from some of the things you know and some of the things you want to express, but in this particular story, the whole thing with the sword was partly based on reality. There was a kid in my neighborhood, kind of the local troublemaker, and whenever he got in a fight and lost he would go get his sword. And then there was a tough girl in the neighborhood who would still beat him up, that kind of thing. So that was kind of the gist of the story. I think I'm always trying to tune into the rhythms of African-American speech and culture, music, and all those kinds of things. But the book I'm working on now is a historical novel about a black musician from the 19th century, who didn't play what we typically think of as black music today, so presents a different challenge in trying to step out of what I know to write about, that particular time. 
- So the question was, you're asking what percentage do we think of what we're doing as stereotypical and what percentage is taken from real life? Well, I'd agree with what Jeffrey said, if you're a good writer, you don't make characters out of a cookie cutter or out of a set of preconceptions. 

But that goes for whether you're writing, I don't think of that as really a black-white thing or an Asian, Caucasian, that's any character because it's hard to see anybody real for who they are. It's a discipline, it's almost like a spiritual discipline to actually see people as they are. I don't know if you're married or not, it's hard to see your husband or wife as who they are, you know? So any imaginative rendering of a character in fiction is a challenge to your humanity, period. I do think there are obviously special challenges involved in people writing about, in writers writing about characters who are not from their background, ethnic, national, gender, whatever. But I think that's the abiding challenge of writing fiction, it's one of the great things that fiction can do and deliver is that reaching and understanding experience that's unlike your own. And because after all, if you're not willing to do that, if you don't have both the humility and the arrogance to do that, as a writer, you'll end up writing about yourself, period. And maybe not very well. In my particular case, I've lived in New Orleans for 14 years, and I've spent most of my life around, first around musicians, in New Orleans and all different parts of New Orleans. So as a writer you hope you keep your eyes open and your heart open and your ears open and you try to understand who people are and what they're doing. 

I hope I did a good job with that in my book, not just the African-American characters, but with all the characters. What was the second part of the question again? 
- 
(inaudible)
 
- Well, I felt it was important in the book, because New Orleans is such a multi-cultural, I can't believe I'm using that word, talk about a stereotype word. But because it's a society, a culture, it has so many elements, ethnic, national, in it, I didn't think it was gonna be possible to really tell a true story of what happened to that community without having African-American characters and Caucasian characters, whatever you might want to say. At the same time, you can't say, I'm gonna have one person, like Noah's ark, one person from every conceivable, I'm gonna have a French person, a Spanish person. I felt that this was a way, though, with these two very different experiences from different parts of town, different class backgrounds, that I could use them also to get out and talk about people, not just those two families, but other people upon whom they impinged, and so, of course the novel would be different if both families were Caucasian. Maybe I'm not really understanding the question. 

Oh, you mean if the well-off family had been the African-American family and the poor family had been the white? It would have been a very different novel, I'm sure it could've been an interesting novel, too. But this was the way this one fell together. And also, the thing was, in writing about Katrina, the fact of the matter is that there were very glaringly demarcated class lines that fell along so-called racial lines, also. So in other words, I think that overwhelmingly the people who suffered the most severe effects of Katrina were African-American residents of New Orleans who lived below the poverty line. Almost overwhelmingly. So I made the choice to go ahead and do that. But that would've been an interesting exercise, I hope somebody does write that novel, actually. 

- Thank you all for coming, again there'll be a book signing afterwards, there'll be an event here starting at four o'clock, Elizabeth Strout, Tom Perotta, and Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum at four o'clock, so you can take a little break, get some fresh air, and come back, three great fiction writers coming up at four. Thanks again for being here and thank you to our authors. 

(applause)