>> fight for social justice and party hearty. the sexual revolution has

arrived and marijuana perfumes the dorm. the vietnam war, the civil rights battle, intensify and the soundtrack segues from this is the dawning of the age of aquarius too, by the time i got to woodstock we were half a million strong, the two soldiers and nixon coming, we are finally on our own. prepare ourselves for the real world and we're going to fix it. i'm on strike i told my father over the phone after the invasion of cambodia and the killings at kent state. the hell you are, he shouts back into the receiver. you get to class. but my dad and richard nixon are more or less interchangeable that season. [laughter] so i hang up the phone on the old geezer and i stake my fist in the air and i to join the protest. vroom vroom, vroom vroom. it's 1972. i graduate from college but have not launched myself into the chaotic world.

i've taken a u-turn returning to the high school from which i graduated in order to teach english. hello, mr. and mrs. minke. it's a dorothy and jimmy. okay. my first class is one many other teachers want. comprised of students have been retained sometimes that some of them are my age, 21. [laughter] the sweat hogs are fond of calling themselves. my plan is to win them over by releasing them from the present of school has been into i had gotten there. i will open their minds by making their education relevant. the sweat hogs and a honeymoon for about a week until the day i approached seth jinks, a certainly senior and asked themm to take his hat off the desk and pay attention. seth works night so he sleeps at school during the day. he raises his head as i passed, opens his bloodshot eyes and

says, why don't you go -- why don't you go -- i know doors and ishmael would cool if i said what seth said but i don't want to offend chelsea more delicate sensibilities lifemark so let's just say that seth suggests in a profound way that i engage myself in an activity more commonly that involves two people when they are naked. the class and i hold our collective breath. the school of education is not prepared me for this, and so i've no clue about how to respond, but then mercifully set unfolds his long legs, stands and ambles voluntary out the door and up to the principals office, thereby saving my teaching career. so i remained at the school for the next 25 years left but about nine years into my tenure at the high school, without any premeditation i sit down wind

and to begin to write fiction. this is during the summer of 1981, the exact same month that jared, the first of our three sons is born. gerrit, when is a toddler and a just sent out my first short story will be published, i will pick up and tossed into the air so exuberantly that his head will hit the kitchen ceiling. [laughter] but not to worry, our kitchen at the time has one of those drop ceilings with acoustic foam panels. he doesn't hit his head it just disappears for a couple of seconds and then comes back into view. gerrit, who later when he is a high school senior, i will over your complaining about the old geezer. and i look around to see if my father has,. [laughter] but no, he will mean me. the great singer-songwriter joni mitchell once observed that the

seasons go round and round, the painted ponies go up and down, we are on the carousel of time. which indeed we are. parenthetically in another of her songs, she sang, woke up, it was a chelsea morning, which it is. [laughter] but that's besides the point. [laughter] bea has invited me here today to close something about my forthcoming novel. "we are water," store that has set both here in new york and also like several of my earlier novels in three rivers, connecticut. the template for the fictional three rivers is my nonfictional hometown, norwich, connecticut. when you mentioned that you've come from the nutmeg state come you're likely to conjure in peoples mind images of lethe bedroom towns, residents commute to manhattan and unwind to the

country club and send the kids to prep school. but i come from the other connecticut, east of the connecticut river connecticut. we're more feisty than fashionable. we are more liverwurst than half day. boston and providence have a greater poland is the new york so we drop our odds, root for the red sox and use the words wicked as an african as in this example. we had a nor'easter last winter and it snowed wicked hard and it was wicked heavy to shovel. in writing "we are water" i time traveled back to my own childhood focusing to dramatic events that are remembered vividly. the first was the death of a black man that was ruled accidental, but that might really have been murder. the second was a terrible flood that cut a path of destruction through the city and took five people's lives. i was eight when alice is a frozen body was discovered at

the bottom of his driveway which was stained by trail of blood that led back to his house. he had been a labor who in later in life begin an explicitly and incessantly to make art your he was unschooled. you know little about perspective or techniques, but his paintings were alive with color and story. he couldn't sell his work in his lifetime. but today it is highly prized by collectors of american folk art. two things about alice made him noticeable in the 1940s and 50s in norwich, connecticut. first, because they been awarded a substantial insurance settlement due to an accident in which he been hurt, he had been able to afford gleaming. convertible. second, he was no just first african-american resident who had married a white woman, a german immigrant named

wilhelmina. and when ellis with drive-through norwich in his big car with his white wife beside him, he was construed by some as rubbing his good fortune in the towns face. perhaps he should've been more leery because a few years earlier a relative who lived on his property had been found drowned, and the court had ruled that death accidental, too. i was 12 in march 1963 when an earthen dam holding back a late at norwich's north and gateway on a rainy night unleashing millions of gallons of water and descending slabs of ice the size of refrigerators shooting downhill carrying trees, cars, family pets, and human beings. the raging floodwaters came perilously close to our own house, and to this day i can still hear the thunderous roar as well as the screams of third

shift factory workers who were buried alive in the rubble of a collapsed yarnell. besides those factory workers, a young mother lost her life that night. she and her husband both in their mid '20s made the fateful decision to try out run the water that they have been warned was heading their way. and so they loaded their three little boys, age four, two and 10 months into their car and they took off. but sadly they couldn't outrun the flood water. it carried the car along with it and pitched it off a 10-foot wall. the family went underwater but managed to get out of the car and onto the little rough of the storage shed at the back of a ford dealership. the father climbed into a nearby tree, the mother handed the three boys up to him and then just before margaret herself got up into the tree, the water carried her away and drowned her.

her husband has passed on now, but those three little boys have survived and thrived, and are today in their early '50s. in the writing of my novel i became their friend. and two summers ago the four of us walked the flood path all the way from now fortified dam to the tree from which they were rescued. the tree of life tom and jimmy and sean nicknamed that treat. and, indeed, it was. so when i began writing "we are water" i took those two actual unrelated hometown events, alice's untied death and the norwich flood, and i set them apart from each other like polls, electrodes i guess, and in the space between them, a kind of electrical energy began to bounce and crackle and generate itself, and electrical art if you will over the next

four years became the arc of my story. and so as facts became fishing, ellis became the younger and more there'll josephus jones who dies at the hands of the bigoted white father who suspects that ellis has had a clandestine sexual relationship with his daughter. and the margaret moody became flood victim moral, his baby daughter perishes with her in the flood, and his five year old daughter grows up and becomes an unschooled outsider artist, and one of the novels two main characters. so before i close let me do one last bit of time traveling. this time into the not-too-distant future. at the end of october of this year, "we are water" will become available in libraries and brick-and-mortar stores and electronically over the internet, and i want you to know how grateful i am teach-in everyone you, the publishers,

and booksellers, and librarians and writers and bloggers who will connect my book, and ishmael's, endorses and chelsea's, to those who might wish to read them. i want you to think of it this way. that the writer and the reader are two poles, apart from each other. and you, ladies and gentlemen, are the electricity that connects us. thank you. [applause] >> thank you, while olympic you're obviously section of system with me las. [laughter]

i think it's unappropriate to talk about those kinds of things so early in the morning. this is been wonderful to hear from everybody. and again i want to reiterate how grateful -- grateful as all of us are, how grateful we all are two of people like you who are able to put our products out into the open so we can reach and touch somebody people, no matter how we do it. [laughter] we will continue today here doing whatever we do when we come here, and i think a bunch of us will go out and take photos for whom ever decides to have one with each one of us. i hope you'll enjoy your breakfast and we all will enjoy the rest of the day. thank you very, very much. [applause] >> you are watching booktv on c-span2. 48 hours of nonfiction authors and books every weekend. >> what are you reading this

summer? tv wants to know. >> i have several books. one that i have been currently reading is the genius in the design. it's about a rivalry between two sculptures, architects, artists who built basically, or design and rebuild st. peter's. and the reason is that my niece just had a confirmation this year and i was responsive and i promised her a trip to the vatican council will go. the second book is "rome." so these are the two i hope i get done in the next two weeks. then if i time i want to rea red the book about predictions anything am looking at my ipad because i've got them all downloaded. i think it's called the signal

in the noise. it's about predictions. of course nate silver was the one who did the baseball, these are the players and help to get a winning team based on probabilities, kids, et cetera. he has now apply that signs of probability the politics. some interested to hear what he has to say about probability and predictions. there are several other books that i have, but one of them is, i'm reading it right here, is on my ipad come is beauty. it's about the velocity of beauty in our lives and what type of impact it has and what it really important. some interested to read that. and also have a stephen hawking's book, theory of everything, that i wanted to

read for a while but that's been on my reading list for a bit and i still haven't gotten to it. so three or four books if i'm lucky in the next month i get to finish them up and read them. >> let us know what you are reading this summer. tweet us at booktv. posted on her facebook page or send us an e-mail at booktv.org. >> keel hunt is a political consultant and speech writer and recounts the removal of tennessee governor ray blanton from office in 1979, next on booktv. the author reports that the former three term governor was taking money for political pardons. this is a little over an hour. >> tonight we've all come together to relive a moment in history. to be more accurate, we're going somewhere five and six hours