actually in wisconsin, and there was a couple sitting at the table and another couple came in and they knew them. here was the conversation. issa your out to dinner tonight. we thought we would come out to dinner tonight. it is a good night to come out to dinner. less that was not a good night to come out to dinner. there was no on the ground. i would not have liked to come out to dinner last night either. if we had been in mississippi the conversation when the bin, hey dewaal came out to dinner tonight. she started getting on me about that catfish and i could not get off that so come up by the way did you hear what harold said about the fish over there? the story is going. it is just the way be learn to talk and present things. ..

it is different and maybe it won't hurt me if i read that, but there are reviewers to say there he goes again and i for anathemas and the times and some money quoted to sentences of my but these are examples what the make of this and when you going to do with the writer who writes a sentence like this? with prairie earth that came to

the foreground and a few credits you'll understand, if you are one of 18 people in america who read it. earth. and i say this? i look at my notes and see what it doesn't say. i should have put on the dust jacket of prairie earth this little phrase -- using it on the instruction manuals that come with barbecue grills or hot water heaters or something else. some assembly required. [laughter] should have been there because to make very earthwork you have to participate in the assembly as readers are selma and i won't put it in this category but i will say it this way that i think in a good book demands of the reader and a good reader is one willing to participate and take an active role in what is going on in the text so for example in "roads to quoz" i hope you are going to participate in this word and quoz and what it means.

and hodes than to do that he will find it to get a copy of it you'll find at the back of the book this is an of the pages missing that they send out to reviewers, you'll find two pages that i concocted beginning with quoz. it was a helluva lot of fun to do, alphabetizing was tricky. on a very good on my laptop at alphabetizing. the idea and says the new quoz, 1,000 quoz first edition, but the first edition idea is you'll see some of these yourself and i can see writing letters someday using some of your own invention words. this will make more sense when i start talking about quoz in a moment. the more things i like to send. this is about the letter q, that became an organizing principle. when i'm traveling and may have a slight destination and this

new book he will see that there are experts in their that took place over four years of assisting thousand miles and six trips. each one of them has a kind of destination in mind, but from missouri where we lived to that destination somewhere example in the edge of to the southwest the left, get in the middle of the country and ended up in new mexico with the purpose of meeting a woman who had been writing me letters for 10 years, and almost seven year-old woman at the time. she had been writing me peculiar of letters and i wanted to meet her so that was the destination but between columbia, missouri and mexico the events that occur in that section happen. said that is where the serendipity comes in. i was saying, how do i put these together? and finally dawned on me because

my wife's name is joanne, she has never been happy with that name given that she is largely a tomboy when she looks of or not, joe would be a better name but she doesn't go for that. to tell me one day when i first met her that she really only wanted to be named quintana. i thought that is a great name and i love that the two. to love the name kean, which existed in mexico, old mexico. i said that as a great name, so she became for a time can, but then shirley q. to becomes q in the book for this reason. when a husband decides he's going to write about a spouse or a wife decides she's going to read about a spouse and if that spouse is an attorney and if that's spouses train to understand and libel and invasion of privacy, that writer had better know what he is doing.

[laughter] i am a fellow who writes not knowing what i'm doing, that is the purpose of writing to find out how i am doing so i said i'm going to make assertions in here how many of these might be liable and privacy invasion but if she goes by another name that could change things so for a while i struggled how to present her and finally i thought she will be q, i was free and i felt free to write things. i did run everything by her so she put her stamp on everything sign that as acrid but when you're writing you don't know that since she was q. while i was struggling with this team organizing principle behind this book, i don't know what got him i had but one day and went to my dictionary stand and i have the greatest work on american lexicography, merriam-webster second international dictionary. the later addition, it is about that thick in usually on a pedestal in the library and those of you who or more than 16

will remember this old dictionary. i got one at a garage sale for $15, my favorite book in the house. i can put one book in the english language or any language in my head and that is what i would put in, not the encyclopedia of the dictionary. so i opened it and thought of going to do something i've never done and made every entry on the letter q. and not a hard thing to do, thank god i did not pick s or to your m so i started reading through the merriam-webster second international about q. it was delightful but it took a couple of hours of it wasn't too bad. the last word in there was quoz. and i read the definition of the word in crown and was a term that was popular in london in the late 18th-century and i read it. and has several meanings, but the one that caught my eye was something mysterious and strange. i thought that is what i'm trying to look for a while out on the road, always looking for

quoz. here i am writing my fourth book, fourth wrote a book, fifth book, and i did not have this word and i should've known this 25 years ago. quoz. so then i got to thinking about q. the other thing i look for when trying to find the structure of a book is a kind of totem the hallmark of the book. so with blue highways there is the hopi mesas of emergence, those who remember the book in the hardcover and dustin -- addition for parry earth as a mentioned looks like a tic-tac-toe design. for river horse and was a coiled snake which is american indian symbol for water in rivers. for this one i 112. and i thought, what is it went one afternoon i take maps sometimes working, i took my nap and those under a cold and my great-grandmother, she sought abraham lincoln speak at

gettysburg, she was from near redding, pennsylvania. to make calls for all of her grandchildren in their high-school colors so when she made from my father was supposed to be bold but came out orange. should and i giggled, speaking about 1910, to me this quilt and they all had the same pattern and i discovered in doing research that the pattern was called the wondering what two. and then q came up with research that there was a superstition in the early 20th-century if not before the two put a child, a sleeping child under a quilt with a wandering foot pattern of your going to cause the child when she or he grows up to wander off west and never be heard from again. [laughter] now some of you who are parents are thinking, what were they doing to this boy, what was the message they were sending to them? it worked because i did go

wandering off westin every other direction of the compass. then i started thinking the woman who made the clothes, the great-grandmother who sought abraham lincoln at gettysburg, raised turkeys and it was her talk is a cause me to get on my feet in 1940. i got up my hands and knees when i saw these turkeys on and on and made a staggering steps that we all do when we learn to walk going after turkeys and if you have a copy of a photograph of my published map of that moment and i thought of case we have got quilt patterns, we have got quoz, and then reading another book won by john hanson mitchell called abilene walking across vermont, a good book, he talks about the spanish concept panacea. it means several things, i think initially it was used by the old people in texas to describe a place where a longhorn is

mormon. the longhorn has a special affinity for that spot where it was born. and then i learned that apparently is used in bullfighting in mexico and spain. analysts correct in my version in portland, the currency of the bowl is a place that imagines in the ring that is its bought and wants to keep the matador and out of that spot and the matador wants to keep the bowl from getting to add. so they began fighting. well, i'm not talking about fighting, i am talking about really the vicarious definition for the longhorn. it comes from a spanish word which means to love so as i use it here it is a place that we have a special affinity for commonplace that we love. and what i am seeing more and more in this country perhaps across the world is that i have some concern that as we become

ever more like china -- electronic, we are losing some of this place is we love. and i really am concerned about the young because i don't thank you can have a virtual place, you either have the really or you don't appear in what i have tried to do over the last 30 or 40 years of my travels is ever expand my place so i go into places in alabama and the response i feel have a little bit of belong to. i think this is my tenth trip to seattle and so there are places in the city that i feel they belong to. as i mentioned when i began one is right across the street in the pacific hotel here and i spent three nights working on this story, i belong to just a little piece of that particular corner. i think we can get the younger feeling that they are connected to a place, that she began to behave differently and if there's one word that lies at

the base of all of my ethical flaw is connections and i suppose if you look you can say that everything i have written really is a bad connections, to be connected to. i think people are connecting them are much less likely to commit atrocities. i like to think of adolf hitler in one of his office is having to photograph let's say a and frank, the 12 year-old girl who wrote for marvelous a diary while she was sequestered away in an attic in amsterdam and later the nazis founder and took her to the concentration camp and in her in. but if hitler could have had a photograph of in frank, the jewish girl, on his wall and underneath and had him sign it this is the enemy. i think he might have had a little more trouble doing what he.com i think he might have rethought that. i have to confess to you that i wondered many times since 2001

if the current administration i forget his name. [laughter] it he had sat down with saddam hussein and talked, tinactin and tried to be connecting with things have been different? i don't know, i can say it would have done any harm and i certainly can say it would have been worse than it turned out here during this last election i was shocked and disappointed in as i am an american elections, not by the rolled so much of the some of the time, but by the way there are conducted. i'm sure you have that feeling but i saw that one of the party is not to mention here, one of the parties attempted to use the word preconditions as in --. so if one candidate says he was talk to someone without preconditions that is bad, don't vote for him because he is going to talk about preconditions. are we talking diplomacy or what? are you married, the you have a

broad. or girlfriend or children? have you ever had a discussion with their partner and simi said i will talk about this but here are the preconditions. there goes the talk right there. you can have a talk without preconditions except for two babies civility and listening. those are my preconditions. fortunately american people decided that preconditions could be a very destructive thing. so i look forward to talking without preconditions. okay, quoz, the third q. i want to say too much because i want to use of air and invented for yourself as you read about it. you know that is not a term i made up, that it is in the good dictionary. the phrase that i should have put in a book about that but i do not think about it until four weeks ago when it was too late, if you get a copy bredesen to your brain housing group as lisa saying in the navy and arrive in your book this phrase because i

think it will help make sense of things: that quoz as i see it is marked primarily by a being a silent and persistent energy. when i saw that phrase i got from christopher morley a book called the haunted bookshop. he was talking about books as silent persistent energy and i thought is that the best definition of a book i ever saw. if you have books on home on your show is you want to read but haven't read and on the open, but enough of that book is sitting there and its potential energy, it does not work until you open it up and you begin as the reader, the good reader doing some assembly and you begin tapping into that energy in that book. well, that is what quoz is. quoz are everywhere across the land, anything can be quoz, a person, event or thing.

there's nothing that can't be quoz as far as i can see, but your quoz will not be my quoz. maybe but probably not. but it is quoz that makes us to my mind significant members in the universe. id is b1 that connects us, so once again use the i'm talking about connections. time for something completely different. an engine as i get letters over the 30 years generation that had been a published writer and the many letters. i noticed in those letters generally they expressed a kind of an action and i can tell you how many times i have been struggling along time to get a sentence on page down and i thought i don't think i can do this, maybe i never did have it.

one of my doing? what kind of presumptuous person and i to think that i could write something down in my steny in columbia, missouri that somebody in seattle or florida would want to read it? i got a letter and somebody says something, there is one person i reached so you keep going after these little straws when you're buying, anything to keep you going especially the first draft done here and here is a letter slightly different kind -- i'm reading the first sentence or two. if you are becoming a writer this may help to a little bit. your new book is one of the dulles things i have rhetoric read. [laughter] trust a, i read every word of it. i even read portions of it to my wife so she could see how bill it was. [laughter] i think the word here that we're looking for is anal compulsive of although i do know once i start a book i really don't like

to quit in the middle and anybody in that category here, you keep going and say damage but to keep going. i do this and i found i can read faster and faster and with labor isn't working but i've developed this, before i commit a start reading and say i'm not reading the book, i am looking at it and browsing so to speak. so if i quit i have been a quitter that way. it helps a little bit. i am eager for your next book so please hurry up with that. i got your last book and a broad sale for a dime. [laughter] one and you know how long it takes things before they get to a garage sale. one more. i find your book about traveling around america one of the finest and most well written books have ever read a. but what have you riddances travels and charlie? [laughter]

let me tell you this about a couple of people, there for a while it was blue earth and then carry high weight, and then it river highway,. worse, now is going to be blue quoz and i don't know what else. it gives me amused and i'm getting tired in trying to think of something it comes out like that. there is a man i met near columbus, ohio, frank xavier brusca. he amassed nearly person was hoping to meet on the back rows. alice hoping to meet people who use an old in the american way of speaking, people who think of the seventh generation beyond. it seems to me so america has

not been doing too good a job of that of late. you can sit in washington, and individuals as early on wall street. let me quote in god bless you mr. rosewater, a character saying that the philosophy is grabbed much too much or you will get nothing at all with and i think sometimes we in this country might do well to remember that sews looking for people who are thinking be on themselves, thinking about people who want to leave something behind it. people who are concerned about their legacy. i want to leave something behind, i know what my days to pass and say all he did was use of energy and left a big carbon footprint, and i have a feeling that many of you would like to do that too. yes, we can do it with family and children and grandchildren but they eventually die to -- what can we leave behind that may go beyond family?

nominee times and they do think of your great grandparents or your great great-grandparents'? how many you know the names of your great great-grandparent's? we really need to think beyond that generation so i was looking for people doing that. i also was thinking that as we retire earlier at least we used to be for george bush got a hold of the economy, there were a lot of people who now have much more time on their hands in their retirement days but who did not always know what to do with all of that time. how to give themselves a purpose forgetting up in the morning. looking for people who has all the problem and the frank brusca in ohio has spent the last 30 years, he spent the last 30 years attempting to photograph virtually every mile of the old national road, highway 40. which begins on the atlantic coast of maryland and ends up in

seven cisco so it is a coast-to-coast road, in classic road appear in he started a photograph in the old stone milepost, the first choice in a drawing of one of the first ones stone marker. he photographed that and then he got into some finding others and began finding and one time there are 600 miles of milestones between near atlantic city anna middle of illinois. then that to him, and he ended up in colorado and kept going until he reached california. on this project would take into years. that was 30 years ago. he has not finished yet and started off with ordinary film and is using digital cameras. he was inspired by a book by george direct the time at the university of california who did a book, his book is called a u.s. 40 in the late '50s,

published in 57i think. he photographed about 100 sites along highway 40 coast-to-coast, made two trips to do that. and frank saw that book and wanted to read photographic projects so he took it out. what he has left now is instead of just an ordinary black and white photograph, now he is using a digital camera and taking 360-degree views, and off the photograph in the site and then he began extending some of them. so now with computers frank can give you sort of a time machine, you can watch his computer and he will start off with this photograph taken by george stewart sometime after world war ii and then you can see things more, more or less into 78 years frank has taken. is the kind of time machine to wash his computer work. he is a man who is trying to leave something behind when he

is gone. he has a daughter but he wants more than that. there is another man in the corner of northeast pennsylvania, bill young, we were on our way to the main north woods and i have seen pictures of a bridge in northeast pennsylvania extreme corner, almost on the new york line. the stone arch bridge called this. >> up viaduct. it has 17 charges in los like a roman aqueduct. it is to own and put up in 1848, maine to carry 50-ton locomotives and now it needs to carry to trains at once, to -- it is an amazing piece of architecture and i wanted to see that. i was fascinated and immediately i wanted to find the authority, who could tell me about this bridge so q went looking and finally we got out the authority on it was a man named bill young

who lived not far from the bridge itself. i called him on the phone and said allied to talk to him and like to buy a copy of his book, he said they are not printed right now and i said can you -- i will pay the price of the book and xerox and it. down and he said come on down here and he did find a copy so bill young, he is the authority on the planet for this line that. if anybody thinks that's not a core very big mistake, i think it is an important legacy. just one thing -- when is your life with? or the summit two centuries now will be reading? the answer to me only seems, yes. a friend of mine who appears in the vote in florida, he is a georgian from macon, moe davis, retired from an insurance company. and wanted to find something to do now that he did not need to rule living so he tried saving and bought a 34-foot sailing

boat and that work for about four years and then he began to get tired of that with the upkeep and so on. he cast about and thought i have always loved of the water of caverns and the commercial fisherman in taverns and eateries often connected with marine hardware stores. it is a focus of a life of a commercial fisherman on the gulf coast and he said i want to record those so he began searching for them. one. i went down to join him and was falling in his tracks and watching another writer search. unfortunately he on his way a bit too late to take that particular time that will make the book that he wants but maybe it'll work out, but i stumble on to another topic if you read "roads to quoz" it is not relevant now. there is a dentist in idaho, richard smart, who has invented

what he calls a real cycle. you will see an image of it in it "roads to quoz". it is a bicycle ordinary mountain bike which he brings a wheel to the other side and you put it on top of a steel rail, the other will on the other rail and get on the bike and ride down the rail. in abandoned railroad lines usually. [laughter] i heard about him and rode him a letter. >> [inaudible] >> i heard about this and i wrote him a letter and said i want to try your real cycle and he wrote back and said come on out so you read what it is like to get on top of a bicycle rail in idaho and tried to read it the idaho mountains on a bicycle on steel rail. okay, i will say the last day

and so we can -- do have some questions otherwise i can keep on going? let me finish with this. but mr. fuller said in the 70's or 60's keep in mind you're talking about a good generation ago, he said in the 21st century we're going to find out what the humanity is a failed experiment are not. take your life back some of you can quite that far but mostly can come and take your life back 21978 the year i made it the blue highway trip coincidentally, and think of the highways -- think of the problem sorry about is 78 and the problems we're talking about now. what were we not talking about in 1978 that we are talking about now? i thank you get sort of an indicator of which way this human experiment is going. yet a little sort of