useful for us to think about or focus on as we finish the book. we are a third of the way through it. >> one of those kind of questions [laughter]. i will tell you about an e mail i got this entire high school on the east coast is reading the samurai's garden. i started to get 30 e mails. they discovered through the website an e mail which would come directly tow me. i started to figure it out when all the questions were the same. they -- it was the questions which they had to write their essay on. one young woman wrote me and said, i don't know if i have time to read the book can you tell me who the samurai is and where the garredin is? [laughter]. i thought these kids are going to be okay. you know this is our generation coming up. i wrote her and said, you know,

read the book. i think for me, because i think every book is a learning process for me. in terms of my culture because i am the first, i don't know about all that needs to be known of both being chinese and of course being japanese. i get a lot wrong. i cringe when i pronounce a japanese word because i know i'm not say itting correctly. i can get away with it. here i don't know, it's harder to get away with it in the bay area because we are such a melting pot. and so many people who know japanese where i don't. what i discovered i think on the whole, for all cultures both cultures and the writing process itself is the more i write about different cultures the more i realize how much alike we are. and if you take anything away take that. take the fact that all humanity

is the same. you know the -- culturesar a background for me it makes you who you are. if you are japanese you bow. if you are chinese you don't. there are certain things that are specific to each culture. but if you are writing characters there are specific things that are everybody. and that's more important to me in that sense. you have the culture's background but if you can understand why a person who lives in that culture feels the way they do or does what they do i think that's the most important thing. does that answer your question? >> yeah. >> thank you. >> you letting me off? [laughter] do i have another story to tell you? i would if i --

>> you seem very conscious of the writer's process you are aware of how you work. you mentioned you changed from a film major to an english major. can you talk about when you were conscious when you wanted to be a writer. >> as opposed to a film maker? >> yes. >> some writers are not aware of their process as you are and i'm fas nacinated by that. >> when i took my first film class it was so boring. and it had nothing to do about the story that i was watching on the screen. and everything to do about how many frames per second or per minute or whatever it was. i thought, this is not at all what i thought it would be. then i moved from you know, to the technical aspect film writing course i took.

it felt technical because i felt i had to be aware of the camera angles. literally aware it had to go down longshot or closeup and it was interfering with the story line. i graduated from san francisco state and it was creative writing within the english department. i was taking a class much like this. writers on writing and a writer came to speak to a group of young writers the first writer who came was a poet. and i was i fell madly in love with language. i think that's why i'm probably conscious with the writing process because i began with the foundation of language, which is poetry for me. it made me aware of how to use language. not to over use language. you know things like that that aspects of it. i talk a lot about the writing process for a lot of reasons because i think that if you tell

what it really means to be a writer people will think oh , it's not -- i think to a large extent you all think we run with the bulls. you know and you think we are sitting in cafes and i can never write in a cafe because i would watch people too much. how can you sit in a cafe and write a novel? we all have our process. i think the interesting things to talk about is the process how you do it because we all do it differently. i don't run with the bulls or sit in cafes. this is the way i do it. there are many ways to do it and you have to find your own way. >> around the web i googled through me to see what it looked like i saw the big bridge and it looked industrialized. >> there really is love. >> i did. a real place and how you pick

the location. i have family in japan and my kids are are in a bilingual program in san francisco that's japanese. >> i bet she speaks japanese better than i do. my kids might not me. >> when i had the gun i knew there was a [inaudible] and i started writing down things and i thought in my mind's eye, i think it looks like this. and it would be like that i had a small village in mind. there was a part in time i thought, i could go back to japan and go there and see how it looked. i had in the book and in my heart what i thought it was, i almost knew that if i had gone back it wouldn't be the same. so i made the conscious choice of not going. now that you tell me this i'm thankful i didn't i think it

would have destroyed what i created in my head. i thought places are best when they are imagined. i hesitated naming it after a place where my mom said what did exist. i'm glad i didn't go back. making that conscious choice would have changed had i gone back would have changed the direction of the book a lot. >> when i saw it it was so different than how an imagined from reading your books. >> does that teach you never to look up things. always listen to the writer? [laughter]. >> we have time for one more question. >> can't be our essay question. >> she didn't give us a question yet. i wanted to know what made you

think of the title like the samurai's garden? >> oh , know the title story. >> i'm sorry. >> quickly. this is actually a publishing business thing. i had written on the contract because i was reading about samurais and gardens. at the time the contract. i looked and said, oh , the samurai's garden. now they would put untitled. i put dount samurai's garden not thinking that would really with the title. and what happened was when it was time to choose a title my editor had a god awful title she felt was the most brilliant title since the grapes of wrath. it was like this long and everything was in it but the kitchen sink. love, samurai, garden and sushi. it was a terrible title and i

didn't like it and i didn't know what to say i had never disagreed. that was the first time i disagree. i said i don't want to look at my book case and see that book and cringe in 30 years. she called me from new york and said, i don't know why we are going over the title thing let's keep it the samurai's garden. then i was saying, thank you, god and it became the samurai a garden which in the end worked when you decide hathat samurai is in your class you will see how it works. it works in many, many ways. i'm pleased it stayed the samurai's garden. not of anybody's choice but because it was the one we didn't want to fight over anymore. >> okay. >> [laughter]. >> thank you. i >> i think you wanted something else. >> well, i met the samurai and

[laughter] >> thank you. >> thank you, gale so much for coming. >> [applause]. thank you. is a commentator

for national public radio's morning edition. he has written noert "new york times", the los angeles times and several magazines. his work has won the spirit of the west award as well as the colorado book award. the book, house of rain, is craig's latest book. please help me welcome craig childs. . >> hello. i come to you from out of the desert. i'm coming to you from a landscape where once you get an eye for things, 3 grains of sand out of place draw your attention, where everything is brought to bear, where

everything is hinged to a story, every drop of rain leaving a dimple in the ground. stories are everywhere out in this landscape. when you walk down into the bottom of the narrow canyons made of sandstone and you put your hands on the sand stone faces and the smooth shallow scallops that look like champagne glasses, you can feel the shape of the last flood that came through. every place in the desert is a story. every place is a passage way. it's really hard to walk very far in the desert for me because there are so many stories that start opening up and lead you from place to place and place and soon you start picking up the patterns of wind, of rain. you pick up the patterns of people who were there before you because, out there, things

seem to last forever. if you put a footprint down in certain places, that footprint will stay for 5 years, maybe even 10 years for somebody who's got a really good eye where you come walking along and you see the slightest depression in the ground and you kneel at it and you figure out that it was a person with about a size 9 foot walking across the desert 8 years before you. everything out there tells a story. that's why i'm here. because i'm looking for stories. i'm looking for these same kinds of stories that i find in the desert. i came to hear straight from grace cathedral today where i walked into the cathedral and i took off my shoes and walked on the maze that's right in the front, in the center. and i don't know if you've ever been to this place.

you have to stop in and walk this maze because it is very much like what it's like to be out in the desert. where you start walking along and you see where you are going eventually. you see the center spot and you know where you are going to be, except you are going away from it and then toward it and then away from it and all the way around it and then away from it again and back toward it. that's what it's like walking out in the desert in the deep cliffs, in the dunes where you want to go there but there's not a route from here to there. if you had a gps it wouldn't really work because it would point a straight line from here to there because there's a cliff face and to get down you have to go down a series of ledges and to get up you have to go down a narrow canyon where there's a big boulder jammed into the bottom. every place has this backward

trail, this labyrinth, leading you around. i was walking arpd this maze for about an hour before coming here and it does the same kind of thing where your mind settles, where you have to pay attention to where you are going. because if you look up for too long at all the passing architecture, you will forget where you are on the maze. you will end up in the wrong spot. you will end up going the wrong direction and you won't be able to find your way to the center. of course, out in the desert, you can't just walk off of the maze and out the front door and back into the street. out in the desert, you are there. the cliffs stand around you. the mazes are everywhere, passages opening up left and right. to write this book, house of rain, i walked a little bit over a thousand miles in legs

from the four corners region from arizona, new mexico, colorado and california meet down to the chijuajua area of new mexico. there was one excavation along the way i remember out in the desert nears winslow, arizona. the desert out there is just a still life with a few landmarks on the horizon and this empty hole, the little colorado river desert, the painted desert, and we were working on a 500-room pueblo dating back to about 1400 ad. i just remember the wind just hailing down on us for days and you would be working down with trowels inside of a trench and if you stop for too long, the sand would start to fill up your hole again because it was

blowing so much and everybody was turned away from the wind. so it looked like some kind of religious thing was going on here, all these people bowed to the ground for days and days tinkering with some unimaginable smallness in front of them while the wind just pushed harder and harder, sand blasting across you, filling up all the rooms that you just emptied out as if the desert is rolling back over itself. because even where trails are left, trails disappear out there. nothing stays for too long, even the footprints that last for 7 years eventually disappear. i found something out there that i'd like to read to you. it was a site, an archeological site on the colorado plateau,

that i ran into a number of years ago. and i've gone down to it a couple of times now. when i first found it, i had been on the river for 7 days in a canoe. and i tied off and broke through the tamarisk which if you've ever been down on those desert rivers, the tamarisk, the invasive species of plant that runs along the shore line, it makes this jungle, this dry, hard jungle that you just work your way through until you have sticks stabbed into your ears and hair and tamis buds is what they call it, it's the stuff that rains down off these trees and it fills up the back of your shirt. i came up to this flat area and this cliff was there and i saw a piece of pottery on the ground, a broken piece of pottery. if you start looking around,

you see broken pieces of pottery that date back 800 years, 900, 1200 years, and i dropped down on my hands and knees when i saw that one and i started brushing away sand until i could see others and i blew the sand away and i could see the rim of a broken pot. once i saw that, my eye was much sharper and i could see the details around me. i could see a small community, a family of maybe 12 had lived here. when i looked up into the cliff, i saw stacks of rock behind a little spall of the cliff that had stuck out and i realized there was a granary up there. i immediately started for it, climbing hand over hand up the

cliff base. my breath tasted hot with discovery. i had found a secret. in past travels i had seen many granaries belonging to the anastasi but they had all been broken open by pot hunters or even by the residents themselves. this one had been built so no one would see it, like an attic accessed through a hidden floor. the structure was rectangular, like a cupboard. i touched its face with probing, diagnostic fingers, measuring it my eyes. 3 feet tall, 2 feet wide and 3 feet deep. i got up on my haunches and lightly dusted off the granaries roof which was

undamaged. for 3,000 years not a breeze had entered this chamber, not an inkling of light. what tightly woven baskets were here, what woven textiles, what stockpile of cobalt blue and honey-colored seed corn left many years before the boom of spanish rifles. with my fingers i traced through the dust of fallen rock debris on the granary roof. when i'm out there looking for stories and routes and trails, i find things like this. i have so far come upon 3

baskets in the desert and 3 different whole ceramic vessels that people had put underneath ledges and these are things that i don't dig for, i just look in cracks and crannies to see what's left behind. you find pieces of sandals or sometimes whole sandals. you find little bits of people, signs that in this desert, there were people everywhere and they aren't always small like that. they aren't always a ceramic vessel under a ledge. sometimes they are huge. sometimes they are 3-story dwellings built up into the cracks. they are buildings that they made in the 11th century ad, that the anastasi, the pueblo people made, that a base 5 stories tall. they built at least 400 miles

of roads are documented in the four corners area. when i'm saying roads, i'm saying swaugts cut across the desert that are 30 feet wide that have berms about this high on both sides and run absolutely straight. and if they hit a landmark of some sort, they don't around it, they go up and over it or they go down a cliff and when you are on one of these roads and you get to the edge of a cliff, you can see that it's easier to go down maybe 20 feet over to your left, but they go right down the cliff. and you look down the cliff and there are stairs carved into the cliff face so that this road stays absolutely straight. my take on this is that out in the desert, the ultimate commodity besides water is visibility. and if you set a line across the desert, you are going to see it from everywhere. every butte top, you are going it look down on this desert and

see these bold lines coming across the desert and you know that line goes somewhere. you get on it, you stay on it, and it will lead you to what are called great houses, up it 3 acres in size. these great houses are often aligned in a certain way so that at certain times of year, say summer solstice, light comes through certain windows. i have sat in these at different times of the year and watched this light show start at sunrise where lights start appearing on the walls all around me and you realize this is how you tell time out in this landscape. this is the way they did calendars. this is the way they understood the larger sphere, the moving of the heavens, was by setting up structures that could receive the light in certain ways. i mean, it's happening everywhere. i was just in salt lake city

and i took a walk downtown and i saw a pillar that had been built in the last 4 years that a big block of sandstone that i recognized. it was probably wingate sandstone that had been hauled up there from about 200, 250 miles away, but i noticed in the pillar that was a gap at the bottom and i walked up and looked through the gap and i saw there were some posts in the distance and i looked around and there was a circle around the gap and there were signs around it and then each post a prism in it so that light going through the crack would hit the prism and that light would go to another prism and you would be able to tell the time of year by this object that was built in the last 4 years. and i saw this and i thought, what would archeologists think if they encountered this? they would look at this and say, what civilization was this? what religion drove them to do

this? we keep doing the same things over and over again. many researchers believe these archeo-astronomical sites are very specifically designed where other researchers say it's all coincidence. but not long ago i was up at a place called chimney rock in southwest colorado. and it's over 8,000 feet. and you are up at the southern end ftd rocky mountains and there is this scarp of rock that rises up probably about a thousand feet out of a valley floor and right at the tip of this scarp there are two twin towers of rock. if you get to a certain place on top of this very narrow butte, you can see between these twin towers and there happens to be a great house

built between these two towers and every 18.6 years when the moon goes into its northernmost point on the horizon, it rises between those two towers. i was there at the beginning of the last 18.6 year cycle and we stood up there, probably 20 of us, researchers, forest service people, all gathered at the same spot with cameras and huddled -- it was late december at 8,000 feet and we were all watching this gap. and somebody had done very intricate work to figure out exactly where you need to stand to see the light at exactly the right time. and as we were all gathered up there, i remember this older archeo-astronomer said it's too bad this isn't celebrated any more. this is such a momentous occasion, the moon finally coming up between the gap and nobody celebrates it. i looked at him as we were all bundled together and thought, do you not notice all of us

here pressed to the edge watching this one gap just to see a breach of light come through the spot? if this isn't celebrating this moment, i don't know what is, a bunch of researchers coming from all over the country, in fact, all over the world for this event. this is probably what happened a thousand years ago. i imagined a man very much like the one who had figured out where we needed to stand at what time, or perhaps it was a woman, it was someone who came up and checked this site every day until he sent out the word saying, okay, on this particular day you can put on your feathers and everybody get your stuff, we're going up and it's going to happen. because as the moon was rising i could see he was nervous, pacing back and forth because he wasn't sure if he was exactly right. you use spherical trigonometry to figure it out and he was pacing back and forth and i

could see he was going through his numbers going, okay, a lot of people came for this, am i right about this? and i thought about these fierce-looking mayan dudes who came out of chaco and the great house, the tree rings taken out of it, show it was constructed every 18.6 years. every time the moon came through the gab, they did massive construction for it. so you know it was the time and you know there was somebody pacing up there just checking whatever watch he had, looking at that gap and thinking, i hope this is the day. and it was the day. we stood there and waited and he said first light, we all looked and we couldn't see it. he had a better eye, he had been watching this much l