can tune in at 10 p.m. tonight in california, oregon and washington. now, on american history tv -- which is c-span3 every weekend, our companion network -- you can see a fuller tour of the museum at 6 p.m. on c-span3, american history tv at 10 p.m. >> c-span, where history unfolds daily. in 1979, c-span was created as a public service by america's cable television companies, and today we continue to bring you unfiltered coverage of congress, the white house, the supreme court and public policy events in washington, d.c. and around the country. c-span is brought to you by your cable or satellite provider. >> and now we bring you a couple of programs from the rose glen

literary festival in sevierville, tennessee. first up, mark powell discusses his book, "small temperatures." "small treasons." >> good morning. thank you all for coming to sevierville's rose glen literary festival. our first speaker, mark powell, has been called the best appalachian novelist of his generation by ron rash and a writer on the verge of greatness by pat conroy. he's the author of five books including "small treasons" published by simon & schuster in june of 2017. powell has received fellowships from the national endowment for the arts, the bread loaf and suwanee writers' conferences, and in 2014-a fulbright fellow to slovakia. in 2009 he received the chafen award for contributions to appalachian literature. he holds degrees from yale

divinity school, the university of south carolina and the citadel. he lives in the mountains of north carolina where he teaches at appalachian state university. ladies and gentlemen are, mark powell -- ladies and gentlemen, mark powell. [applause] >> good morning. thank you all for coming out. a little louder? is that -- all right. i'm going to give it to you as loud as i can. well, i'm glad to see you all first thing in the morning, i really appreciate it. i was going to read a little bit from my recent novel, "small treasons," and then just talk about it a little bit if that's okay. and if there's any questions, i would love to address those as well. before i read, let me tell you a little bit how i came to this. as was mentioned, in 2014 my family and i were live anything slovakia. i was teaching there. one should add, of all places. this obscure little eastern

european country. i do not speak slovac, nor do my family. in fact, not many slovacs speak slovac. so we were existing in this kind of isolated little bubble where the extent of our engagement with the english-speaking world was bbc world every evening, which we would watch with great devotion. this was around the time in the fall of 2014 that isis, or isil as i think they were being called at the time, was first gaining traction, first sort of appeal peering on the news, and they were beginning to kidnap and behead western journalists. and this is what we were seeing in the evenings. how lovely, you probably think. i had long been, prior to this, in what feels like three or four lifetimes, i had gone to seminary. and i had imagined myself a pretty devoted pacifist.

in fact, i have traveled at times with a pacifist group that was doing what's called accompaniment work or intervention work in colombia and in south america during the civil war there. and i had imagined, continued to sort of form my identity around this idea that i was a pacifist. the fall of 2014 when we were in slovakia as we were watching bbc world, this was the moment in which american and french jets first began to bomb isis positions. isis was laying siege to a little town, a syrian town called kobani on the turkish border. and basically they were just -- it was genocide. it was mass slaughter as they moved forward. so it was frightening to me, or maybe not frightennen, maybe unsettling to my sense of self as i watched these bombs fall that i found myself be cheering for them, you know, wanting these bombs to hit these positions. which i think, by the way, is a

completely morally and pragmatically defensible position. i'm not arguing against that at all, it was just that it wasn't who i thought i was. and it sort of led to this re-examining of what i actually believe or don't believe. so i started the way i approach writing, all writing, i usually write -- i never write out of a point of certainty. i always write from a position of confusion. what i'm interested in something and i don't quite know what i think about it, that's usually what i write about, because i'm trying to get to the bottom of something. one writer said writing is just a concentrated form of thinking. and i certainly think that's the case. so i began to imagine a woman -- because i often try to sort of distance myself from the characters to some degree because so much of me creeps into it anyway. i began to imagine a woman who was watching these same videos of bombs falling, of western

journalists being beheaded, and i imagined her being simultaneously repulsed by this and unable to look away. as this went on, i began to think about the way that the war on terror has affected most of our lives, the idea of terrorism over the last 15 or 16 or so years. largely, we are statistically safe, right? in most cases the vast majority of us will never experience anything. we have far more to fear from heart disease or something, right, than the bombs or the guns of terrorists. yet there also seems a way that -- the possibility is invasive. it seems almost i don't want to say it seems more likely than it is, but in a way it's present in the front of the brain. and i began to think that we have experienced our war, the united states' wars abroad and

acts of terrorism in a way that i think no one in else in history has not experienced it. we are geographically removed, but it is ever present online. it's impossible not to be aware of what's happening in the world. i wanted to write about that. so is almost all of my work is set in the southern appalachian mountains where i grew up. and we often think and i think we often when we can read appalachian literature, we read about communities that are really isolated and are really insular. i haven't found that to be the case. it often seems to me that small towns like the tiny little town i grew up in are every bit as influenced by the larger world as los angeles or new york or anywhere else. so i wanted to try to write from that place. so let me read you -- this is the beginning of the book. and it is from the point of view of a woman named tess maynard.

tess has grown up in florida, and she has moved back to -- or moved with her husband to his north georgia hometown, a tiny little place that i imagine similar and close to where i group up. grew up. she feels alone and she feels isolated. she's at home with young children while her husband is away. she begins to watch these isis videos, and she feels herself getting pulled down this really dark rabbit hole. particularly she's interested in this one american journalist who is being held somewhere in a basement in syria. i'll read you this, and then i'll tell you about book too. so this is the prologue. they're watching in washington, in london, berlin, al-jazeera runs it on a loop and down in a subbasement in langley, analysts to play with pixels; enlarging this, erasing that. there's a tam at one of the strip mall spy shops that does

nothing but contrast. you heat the color, you cool it. another shop -- sonic mapping. a process or advancing the volume forward at the rate of pico seconds. they watch it at home too. american homes living their american lives at least until it disappear bees from first the networks and then the internet. it will reappear, of course, in a few days' time. pirated on a thousand servers. but for the moment, those who know better than you have seen to its erase your. before it vanishes, she will find it. she will watch on her wafer thin tablet sitting on a far corner of the made bed, barefoot and cross-legged and huddled over the screen. she's scared, of course, but she is also ashamed. her husband john is at work. her children in the living room in front of pbs kids. but there's still the fear,

irrational as it may be, that someone will walk in, and then it's all, hey, babe, what are you -- or, mommy, i need -- how could you ever explain it? beyond the shame, it's own form of grief. because grief is there. make no mistake about that, there is grief. but why can't she get past it? shouldn't she be able to get past it? tess considers this more often than she should. she's unloading the dishwasher or changing a pull-up or watching daniel tiger's neighborhood, and it comes to her that perhaps it isn't her fault, that perhaps it seeks a certain viewer and thenned a heres. like -- then adheres. like the way the street people always seem to single her out. husband and children around her, and somehow they come straight for her. homeless and bat-eyed, dreadlocked and dirty, and here's tess with her pockets

stuffed with kleenex and green chick lets. they just see something in you, honey, her husband explaining. they've got a radar for it. and it's true. she knows it's true. there's a gawkiness about her. and someday she expects to be led away in restraints. other days she feels a hand clap from sanity. but not this week. not today. today she watches in the bedroom. she watches the black flag with the swirl of white letters, elegant in everything except intent. and then the flag is gone, and what she is looking at is a man in all black, pants, shirt, boots, his face hooded. only his hands show. and in one, a long blade of what she has read is aer ceremonial tagging. there's a man in an orange jump suit for noncompliant in guantanamo protocol, she has

read this too. they are alone in a desert, colorless sand, a pale blue sky. the horizon -- the standing man just above the waist. it shows the dagger, raises it. the kneeling man -- western, exhausted -- he makes no move. not for several seconds. and then he -- [inaudible] his hand. >> she watches for it, studies the time marker or fun twitches, anticipates the slightest of gestures. when he begins to speak, this in the 39th second. words begin to block across the bottom of the screen that otherwise lovely arabic script. but he is speaking english. he is speaking perfect english, and what strikes her as a rather refined british accent. she only half hears. over multiple viewings, she has absorbed it. and the more she absorbs it, the less sense it makes. or not sense exactly, sense

isn't the right word. it's all allahu akbar and infidel this and infidel that and america and obama and israel and jews, it's interchangeable and not relevant to what she's trying to get to the bottom of. the gut-level panic she feels every time she watches the video. she wants to know why it's so satisfying. ing she wants an answer as to why she can't stop watching. it's evil, yes, but don't give her evil for an answer. somehow that feels too easy. that there's something coming off the screen? yes. just sitting there with a tablet in her lap, she feels it. a radiation of sorts. a presence, something dangerous. she is invited in. a demon, her husband would say, were her husband ever to know. but don't give her demon either, too obvious, too easy no matter how true it is. don't give her blood or terror

or horror. don't talk to her about the train wreck, the decapitation, some bottled-up christian thing. so long as there was living memory of actual crucifixion, the cross was not an icon. no pendants, bracelets or t-shirts, no elaborate his pain our gain tattoos. she heard someone say once it would have been like walking around with a picture of the electric chair on your back. she doesn't know the answer except to say that isn't it. all she knows is that she can't stop watching. all she knows is that it has begun to permeate things; her hair, her clothes, her m room, her life. outside is an entire world of sunlight and bees, and the way her children run through the do dewy imagining their animals. she wants to say real, but the

world feels so heavy, so freighted with the kind of significance that, generally speaking, embarrasses her. so she doesn't want to say anything. she only wants to see it. she only wants to feel it because feeling it so much, christ forgive me, feeling it so much feels like prayer that it frightens her. she opens the second tab to check cnn. u.s. and french jets are bombing targets on the outskirts of kobani. turkey has closed the border. it's possible the man in the basement is somewhere in the city. it's possible the man in the basement can hear or or the bombs falling. -- can hear the bombs falling. what she can hear, what tess can hear are are her boys in the living room arguing. and what she wants to know is what difference does it make if she watches or not. she believes it matters, the this or that of her choose, only

she can't say how. for the moment, she puts the questions aside, closes the cnn tab so in the center of the screen beats a great arrow, right facing, almost hart-like in -- heart-like in its insistence. and she touches it again so that he can begin to die again and so that she can watch again and so that she can think again. amen. so on that particularly bright note -- [laughter] we enter the larger book. there's three stories that kind of move through the novel. one is tess maynard, this woman, who has sort of become i guess you could possibly say addicted to watching these videos. she can feel her marriage drifting farther and farther apart, and she feels almost imprisoned in this small town in which she didn't grow up and she knows no one, and she's home with her children. and in that sense of imprisonment, which she realizes

is inflated and overly dramatic, she begins to feel this sort of resonance with this american who's being held somewhere in syria, all the while knowing how ridiculous it is to sort of equate the two. so while this is happening and as she begins to try to salvage her marriage, the second line of the story is her husband, -- jon maynard, who is a college counselor here -- and what we gradually learn is john has a long past about which she's not really aware. she gradually comes to awareness of this. and then there's a third plot that runs through the book, and it is about a young man who is steadily becoming radicalized, a young pakistani-american who's living in atlanta who may have been approached by a group of salafi fundamentalists or maybe part of a larger fbi sting. and one of the notions i wanted

to play with-in the book is -- almost in the book is that tess begins to imagine the possibility of these horrific things. she gradually becomes almost so paralyzed that she can't go out in public without imagining some sort of horrible mishap happening to her children. these plot lines begin to intersect, and it almost becomes as if tess has sort of conjured this through her fear, she's almost brought it into being, the idea that she's let something into her life that she should have kept out. so it is -- if you haven't gathered from my description thus far -- it is a somewhat dark book, though i hope not without glimmers of hope. but i wanted to write something that reflected a couple of things. one is i wanted to write about what it's like to be in the appalachian south, to live in the small towns as i've spent most of my life living in in a

way that i don't often see reflected in literature. it so often feels like what we get is a sort of take on mayberry where the town is either everything is wonderful or everything is horrible, and whatever it is that exists in its own little bubble. and i simply didn't want to write that sort of thing. i wanted to write about the larger reach of the universe. and i wanted to write about people like me, people like my family in a way that i feel is accurate and in a way that maybe isn't always appreciated outside of the south where so often southern people are viewed as stereotypes who don't engage with the larger world or have no interest in the larger world. i've just found that throughout my life to be completely false. so that is the story. it's really about the way the larger world has permeated everything, right from wars abroad to the internet to whatever it may be.

yeah, so maybe i'll leave it right there and ask if you all have questions or if there's particular things i could talk about? we have a microphone in the middle. if you are, please don't be shy. i can continue to just riff on and on til they shut the cameras and the lights off if no one has anything to ask. >> actually, i have a question for you. >> yes, please. >> one thing as i'm listening to you talk, what gave you the inspiration for such a, just a unique perspective on comparing these things? what inspired you? >> yeah. no, no, that's a wonderful question. as i said before, so in 2014 my family and i were living abroad, and i guess in hindsight we felt really isolated. we were living in this tiny little flat somewhere deep in eastern europe, and it's just like you imagine, you know, like

some bigging stalin-esque building with this brutalist architecture. and i was working on this really massive novel that i thought i was going to spend the year depleting. and i was, i was working really hard on it. and one day my wife and our children and i, we were walking down the park -- we lived about a half mile from really wonderful park -- and as we were going, i started imagining this woman, tess maynard. she didn't have a name yet, but i saw that opening scene very clearly. i saw her with her children in the other rom. my children were -- the other room. my children were very young at the time, so these things were very much in the forof my mind. ing so i started imagining her while they're sitting in here very innocently slipping away back to watch these sort of things as if she had to -- and you do, right, to some degree -- she had to hide the larger world from the children.

yet never nevertheless, she feln to it. so we were walking along this path to the park, and i really started hearing this very clearly, this voice coming to me. and it was a little troubling because it wasn't the novel i was working on and making very little progress on. so we just about made it to the park, and it was coming really clear, and i said we have to go back. i'm sorry, we have to go back, i have to write this down before i lose it. and my children, of course, were not pleased. and i'm like, please, just indulge me this one time. so we marched back, and i sat down and started writing as fast as i could, and i wrote the first couple of chapters. and then, of course, i never know exactly where i'm going, right? when i start writing something, generally i start with a moment of resonance, something that i keep going back to psychologically, emotionally, spiritually. and i don't know why, especially if i don't know why, right? if there's -- i often find if there's a powerful, emotional moment in my life and i can

explain that emotion like, you know, the death of a loved one or something like that, something that the motivation is clear, it doesn't interest me to write about. but if there's something that affects me deeply and i can't articulate why it affects me deeply, then i know that is something i'm going to have to put on the page to try to make sense of. and then, you know, if you write, you know, you're just going from that point, and you're trying to back out of the story. i remember thinking about it in like a linear fashion, this woman's doing this and what's going to happen next. i was just thinking about who is, who is this woman? what is she doing here? what is the status of her life? i knew a few things but not much. so then it's just a matter of trying to create that world around it, right? and you're simultaneously trying to create a world, and while you're trying to reflect the larger world too. so i think that, that's where it came from. that's not a very good answer, i know, but that's as near as i can get to it.

yes, ma'am. >> [inaudible] >> i think, ma'am, they -- if you don't mind, i think they want you to come to the microphone. thank you. >> anyway, i just think you touched on the very essence of a woman isolated no matter what nationality. in their own country, raising children and also with all of the, like, the trade towers going down, that really came to the forefront for me. because i think that isolated but fear of that world out there, from what i've heard, very nice. >> well, thank you, i appreciate that. you know, i don't know if you all have ever spent large amounts of time indoors with small children by yourself. but if you, so for several years when my children were very young, my wife and i were living in florida. and for much of the year it would be too hot and muggy to go

out with babies. and i was working, my wife was working, and there would be days as she was walking in the door from work, and i would walk out the door for work, and we would pass a child between us. and then you're there alone for eight or nine hours with a young kid, and you begin to -- or the walls start to creep and crawl. it's a wonderful thing, of course, but there's also a way where you can feel like you're getting a little unhinged. but then there's this also wonderful sense that you are in a safe place where the people you care for most in the world. it's wonderful. and i think sometimes one of the things i wanted to bring out with tess is the way in which you're a parent especially of small children, you want to hold on to every ing -- single second. but simultaneously, there are times when you are ready for that child to go to bed, right? and you wish those seconds away. it's such a, an interesting kind

of tension in which to live. and, of course, my children are here with me. they are down at the water park. and yesterday we rode the water slieds, and it was absolutely fantastic. we enjoyed it, had a great time. this morning they were up at five so excited to go back and, you know, ride in them again. and it was one of those things where i'm so excited that they're excited, and also i really want them to go to sleep. and they, of course, they didn't. and now my poor wife is with them. so thank you for saying that. that is a sense i wanted to convey. and in that sense that outside of that bubble, right, is this larger world. and our country, we are fueled very deeply by fear, right? i think we are fueled in so many ways by fear and ignorance. and one, of course, breeds the other. prl yeah, we live in that tension now whether we want it or not, and it's impossible --

my daughter was recently asking me, of course, she was asking about the parkland shooting that had happened in florida. and it's not that we had tried to completely shield -- she's 6 years old -- shield her from this knowledge, but with we hadn't exposed it to her either. it's in the water, it's in the air, it's impossible not to be aware of these things, i think, as americans now. and again, we're statistically safer than we have ever been, as far back as these statistics go. but it just doesn't feel like that anymore in so many ways. thank you for that question and that kindness. [inaudible] >> i want to know how long you've been writing. some of the best storytellers

i've ever heard came out of north carolina. how did you get started writing? >> yeah. so i didn't start writing til i was out of college. so i got kind of a late start, i think. but i grew up in one of those -- i think this is not uncommon for a lot of writers and especially writers in the south -- i grew up in a huge family. all of my family are, and still i'm the outlier because i live a couple of hours away, all of my family are still right there. they live on the same stretch of road, and there's multiple generations. so i spent most of my childhood kind of being not exactly ignored, but just sitting quietly on a porch while a lot of older folks, grandparents and great uncles, told stories, and i just sort of absorbed it. so although i didn't start writing until i was, i guess, about 21, in some sense i was absorbing these stories, you know, all through the years. i went to a military college, i

went to the citadel, and i went with the intention of joining the military. my vision is so terrible, nobody wanted me. it turns out i think probably to have been a good thing. i absolutely just fell in love with books while i was there, and i got out, i graduated, and it came to me one day with great clarity, and i just thought i'm going to be a writer. that's what i'm going to do. and then i thought, well, i should write something, you know, if i'm going to be a writer. so i sat down with a big yellow legal pad and wrote out this story, and i remember giving it to my then-girlfriend and now wife, and she read it and said, you know, a lot of english majors go to law school. i was like, that can't be a good sign. [laughter] [laughter]

like a typical, you know, i played sports and played outside. i just started writing and i started reading and eventually my wife said, you know you can go to school for this, graduate school, and i said, well, that sounds better working at minimum wage job, that sounds a lot better than that. yeah, i just kept writing. my grades -- my grandmother who passed a few years ago, lived into late 90's had told me the remarkable story about when she was a little girl about her uncle who had fled -- fled the family and had disappeared up in the mountains of like around andrews, north carolina, the pretty deep mountains over there

and lived basically like a hermit, kind of disappeared for about 20 years and they saw him again in 1950's in bryson city barefoot and walking through the streets. it was a remarkable story and i thought, i will write this down for the benefit of our family and my grandfather had told me a lot of stuff about the second world that he had never told anybody else. i thought, i need to write things down to preserve them. what i quickly realized is that their knowledge was very limited. my mother could tell me about when her uncle disappeared and she could tell me about when he reappeared but he knew nothing about, of course, how he had lived. i found myself just kind of speculating you know e, i think probably this happened and i think maybe this happened and then pretty soon i realized that my speculation was far surpassing what was actually fact and that i was writing a novel and i needed to abandon

family history and realize i was writing a book. i think it was one of those things where i was fortunate enough to have written it before i realized i was writing it if that makes sense. if i thought, i'm going to sit down and write a novel, that would have been overwhelming, i wrote this thing and i just kept rewriting it over and over, you know, again, finally i was in graduate school and i was about 24, a couple of years later and there was a contest and it was from the university of tennessee press no knoxville and the one contest that i saw that was free, it didn't cost anything to enter and up until that point i had been writing the thing on yellow legal pads and the most park deadline was five days away so i had to sit down and try to type out the things over the course of five days. i actually mailed it on the last day to be postmarked by and it didn't win contest but it was the runner-up, so they agree today publish it which it was

just wonderful, a completely overwhelmed by it and subsequently published my second and third novel and published a couple more since then and that's how i got started. it was sort of thing that happened, conno says she writes because it was her habit of being, it's what she knew to do, i did the same. i often it takes me -- i'm a very slow learner and slow reaction to things, and i have to sit down for a while and do--- i frequently do two nights of the party i think of the great joke and great line that i should have had right there in that moment, but i think that's the writerly part. the one thing that most to have writers i know having, is they tend to drift to the edges and notice things rather than being in the center. i heard the wonderful -- i

mentioned the writer don who is one of my heros earlier i saw him read once many years ago in new york, he's published i don't know maybe 20 books or something, at the end of it, the interviewer said, could you just sum up everything -- all your whole message in a sentence which of course is -- i thought, the poor man, he has written 2 million words and you want him to sum up in a sentence, amazingly he could. he got back to microphone and said, i want you to pay attention, he said that was it, the point of reading, look is not to be removed from the world, right, it's to be thrust deeper into the world so we see it with fresh eyes, you take the ordinary and you recognize the extraordinary in it. there's a mystery to life, a larger thing that we can't really articulate but we all experience.

we read books because books don't try to explain what that mystery is, but they create situations in which we recognize it, right? when we are deeply moved by something, i'm sure we've all felt this, we might be able to explain this happened, thus i feel excited or happy but you can't really describe what it feels like and with why it really matters to you on the deeper levels, all you can do is try to say this is -- this was the situation and describe it in as much detail as possible and if they're listening to you, if they're paying attention, they'll get it, right, they'll get the emotional complexity because we are all complexity creatures and we all experience this, books, not jonathan, david foster wallace said books are supposed to make us less lonely and i think the idea that they make us less lonely comes out of

the university of experience. you can read the great colombian novelist gabriel garcía márquez and writing about south america in 19th century and it's a completely different culture, a completely different world in the one we live and yet there's something there that you get because adora said, as you drill deep enough you get water that's universal. we all experience love, hope, fear, anger, that is the commonality between us, right, and if you write in a way where characters specifically and whatever world they live in experience these things, we get that notion, when i talked to writing students, i also talk about the idea that if you're trying to write something that will appeal to everyone, ultimately it will appear -- appeal to no one, right, it

would be this sort of watered-down notion of the world but if you write really specifically out of your own experience, out of this world right here right now, whatever that world is for you, the more specific the better because we will get it, you will hit that common ground water, the great lie, i think that's been sold to us as being the western world is the notion that, you know, someone -- i was listening -- my wife and i were listening yesterday boko haram captured girls and the others in the world don't feel intensely as we do, i heard amen at a timer strategies like this in africa are very common, which is true, the implication seems to be thus it's not as bad as if it happened to you, right, that's just literature, a fight against

the insufficiency and the brutality of that idea, right, the idea that all of us don't feel with that same incredible intensity, but i've gone way past your question, i'm just kind of rambling at this point. thank you for having me that. >> hello, mark. >> hello. >> i'm not sure this is working, is it? >> i don't know. >> because i don't hear anybody. by the way, i don't hear you very well either. >> sorry. >> could you raise his microphones, either he get on his knees. >> i will lean now. >> you want to get on your knees because i do want to ask a question and i do want to hear your answer. >> yeah. >> well, you know that william and critics said he doesn't write novels, he writes words and so my question to you is, given the fact that nobody is going to come up with an original story, you referred to

several stories which have been done by many, many writers in different ways, what makes the difference is the ability of the writer to come up with word choice through style so that thomas wolf is totally different from hemmingway through words and not through ability to tell stories. so in the revision process, do you find a certain level of excitement, maybe even better than that which you experienced in writing in the first draft, the first draft usually people find is full of terrible word choice and bad sentences, so does it excite you to find a bad line and work on it and choose better words? >> oh, absolutely. i hope i'm leaning close enough here. yeah, i mean, the revision process is part of writing i love. writing is difficult in a way you're free because if you go anywhere, but that freedom can be paralyzing too. i love that when george

interviewed hemmingway, the line which i'm sure you know, david, something like hemmingway telling interviewer, i wrote the last page of a farewell to arms 75 times and clinton said, 75 times, what was wrong with it? and hemmingway said, the words. the perfect sarcastic response but, of course, what else could be wrong with it, the words it's all they are, the only thing. one of the things i felt in love with, one of the reasons i started writing, so often a writer is just a reader moved, you read something and you love it and you want to do something like it. i remember reading mccarthy's great knoxville novel, i think it was one of the first big difficult books i had ever read. same is true with the found and the fury, i had no idea what was going on in the book and i knew

something was, i felt it in my gut, i didn't have the tools to figure it out at the time, oh, my gosh, something was happening and i was just amazed by it. and it was in the language, the beauty of the language, resonance of the language, like so many writers, i've written my share of poetry, mostly in high school which i hope is all forgotten, poets were easier because you have space to make mistakes, certainly there are writers who read just for the pros because they write so beautifully,ic my own writing has been more spare over the years. when i first started writing and i was so in love with figurative language, if a sentence didn't have at least two simils and two

metaphors i was like let's get it going, he wrote six pages, what's happening here, nothing is happening yet, right now i'm giving you beautiful sentences, he said i think that's the problem, maybe we need to cut some of the beautiful sentences out. yeah, the revision process is the beautiful thing of taking something that started out being completely about you because it's just your baby, your child, you put it on the page. through process of revision it not only becomes about you but the reader, eventually this thing of letting go. you never get it exactly where you want it to go. eventually you abandon it, right, but you've taken it as far as you can go and you're sick of it and ready to move on, you're trying to get it somewhere, one of the hardest things that the british novelist smith talked about the idea of

scuffling. you take it down. writing is the same way. there's parts that are for you, but when you get to the end, it has to come down and the problem has always been twofold, one is recognizing what's for the reader and what's for me and then the other is taking down things that i love. i had this one paragraph i've written, it is -- it's really, i think, lovely poetic description of the sun going down over a river and the shadow is being cast. i tried to put it in every single novel i write, i cut and paste it in and it goes in there and i, of course, know it doesn't work, i will write another book after this. i also think that novel is to find a place for sunset description.

there's things that you love but are for you and they have to come out. yeah, that's -- revision is a great pleasure. novel that i'm currently working on, i have finished a bulky draft, what i'm having to do is cut it. i inevitable overwrite, i have too many characters, too many plot lines, too much figurative language and the books need to get leaner. i sit around and mark out things and i know that if i'm going to add something, i need to mark out like three more things to counterbalance the fact that the things the book is already grossly bloated and then i think, wow, the book is lean as it can get and i give it to my agents and says i think we have to cut 20% out and we do and my editor takes it, you know, could we drop another 5,000 words and we are getting in the range that's readable.

yeah, i guess we are wrapping on time or getting close to, do we have one more question or good to go? yes, sir. >> real quick, earlier you alluded and even in prologue you brought it up in a way, the fact that americans are statistically safer today than in the past but at the same time we tend as a group to be worrier or concerned, don't you think it's all about the technology, nothing bad in the world that can happen in the world that you don't know about in 10 second? >> absolutely. i guess i do have a smartphone in my back pocket right now. i hate technology but that would be some degree untrue. i think it's done us a great disservice, i think we are less mentally healthy, i think we are less cohesive as a nation, i think it's hurt us in many ways,

i think it's regrettable. i frequently talk to my children about the days before and i'm sure you can imagine this too, the days before everybody -- i look at my students often and there are times i feel like they don't know each other, they go to school for four years but most of the time they are spent staring down at their phones, right, it severs so many relationships or so many potential relationships and nervous edginess that isn't necessary, we don't have to have that. susan talked about the idea of the suffering and i know i have to wrap this up fast, the suffering of others, so when you look at tragedy, is it in a way and the conclusion that she came up, if you are looking at these sort of things, if you're not engaged in somehow changes or

alleviating things, then you are, indeed, a voyer and we shouldn't be and to an extent, many of us have become sort of voyers in the nation and i better leave it at that. folks, thank you so much. it was a pleasure talking to you. i hope i get to see you later today. [applause] [inaudible conversations] >> we will continue now with author katherine smith, talks about and portray it is gatekeeper, fdr and untold story of the partnership that described the presidency. >> the author of the gatekeeper, untold story that defined the presidency. if you are not familiar with missie lahan, she was the