An hour with Sara Paretsky

from the lawrence arts center at our prisons an hour with europe are empty i'm kate mcintyre borucki is the bestselling author of the fbi were shouts the mystery novels she grew up just outside lawrence in house which figures prominently in her latest book leading kansas are taught why i write the books i do is co sponsored by the hall center for the humanities at the university of kansas the lord's public library and the ravens and for now the fear is fearful if the fees that victim daily prayer hospitality jeannie will go for making it all happen as smoothly and effortlessly i know what an effortless and she made it seem effortless and for the hospitality the raven bookstore as well now at this stage lights are on and i can't really seeing everybody in the audience they clearly but i don't see a coach lindsey no this is new to me that we won the wind

for the last time kerry went to the winds will last previous time was two days after i left kansas foreseen good or bad in chicago and we all know what happened then and then this year i decided to revisit kansas to write a novel set here we went to the orange more we want to do i get the gratitude of the grateful dead for well i've been on the road around the country with bleeding kansas since january second and my tour winds down and finally returning to the scene of the crime there in the months that i've been and said amazing cities is houston phoenix and madison wisconsin i've had email messages from any number of lorenz eons past and present say that they've seen themselves or da vern naylor or sheriff rex johnson

and the characters of the laying low then there are any shape an area even ironies perfect read every nasty i know that its futile for me to say that all of these characters are figments of my imagination and the only real prison any of them is based on is me because they represent different aspects of my own personality as my brother jonathan explain to me yesterday we are all of us as readers bring our own lives and experiences to what we read so that in a very real way we're always present in someone else's novel i do understand that sort of anyway but really everyone inbreeding can says is made up of course some of the things in the novel are reality based including the old free mantle peretz the gilmore house i also benefited greatly from john in camp pendleton his willingness to open their farm to me whether i got

very many details right about farming is certainly open to question but i came away from my time when then much impressed by not just a constant round of work but the amount of creative thinking that has to go into successful farming thanks too to karen i am a proud honorary member of the meadowlark chapter of four h ide baseball of largo years for each project somewhat i saw this very impressive bunch of kids doing for the fair i couldn't make a desk i couldn't identify the three thousand beatles of northeastern kansas i couldn't build a raft out of orleans and among discarded plastic water bottles but those are just a few of the things that my fellow chapter meets have been doing michigan's in the grille year is that true farm families who make up the heart of my story occupy an extra half mile of land that i added between lawrence a

new door now i didn't want my publishers to include a map of douglas county in the end over leave but they refused to add to the expense of printing a book by doing mendieta of car tires especially since it would've meant freehand drawing in the extra half mile now the no and the ground here is my sort of main family my hero family there the new crops but the shape into dairy farmers and i did spend a very small amount of time on an organic dairy farm near to keep the arms when i was eleven i read dracula this book completely terrified me i didn't so i think that was the start of mine lifelong hobby of insomnia many many many nights before i slept i kept up controlling the

house looking outside for vampires and as you may know vampires can take the form of walls and then they'll jump the window break the glass and then they'll turn back into vampires insect your beloved ones night around two in the morning as i was patrolling the perimeter i looked out and there they were wolves in the back door and i scream really loudly and while both parents and for brothers to walk in running and looked out and they were actually cow's the famous and they hired thousand douglas county so the neighbor's cows are not given the benson the reading my mother's cooing i have to confess that someone cannot tell the difference between a wolf and a cow is probably not ideally a quick to write about a dairy farm i gave it my best shot all of these points raise a question of

what is the crossover between experience and fiction what's real what's imagined and how can you possibly distinguish between the two so that's what i'm going to sort of discuss tonight or try to discuss every story has its roots in the life of the writer you do your best most sincere work when you mine your own experience and then detach yourself from that and turned it to a story what may stephen king's horror novels so compelling and so convincing that is that's what's really going on inside his head and while i envy him his success i am very glad i don't have his nightmares i believe we all turn our experiences and the stories as we try to make sense of them whether we're writing them down the way i do where whether we're telling them to a friend or a partner or when they were just reciting an

endlessly and i'm ahead in the dark we use stories to understand life howard reiter works what time we get to use a computer can't sell all those nuts and bolts indifferent free each person is no right way that mechanically physically to write this is the way that works for you but we only do we writers what everyone is doing turned life into stories and then turn stories into a way of understanding life when i was two my father who was born and raised in brooklyn took a job in troy the north end of the hudson river from new york city we used to take the train to visit his family and i love the escalators at penn station we didn't have anything that advanced in troy ny i also loved the only leasing on the subway i wasn't so crazy about the beet skin

glistening stand under bare feet in a blinding sun overhead but when i was four my dad found a job here at the university of kansas my older brother and i didn't want to move from our friends with whom we acted out the recently ended second world war in the drainage ditch the truth behind our house and especially we didn't want to leave the good humor truck which brought us fed's sickles on summer nights i guess the search for chocolate has been one of the enduring constant some of my life experiences you know when you read about it in the biographies of the really great writers faulkner chandler they weren't terrible drunks there's a wonderful story about faulkner and and hammett blame their way into a dinner party and it serves an unbowed and passing out this is a cross the threshold they can revive faulkner in line after problem other the table but haven't they had been bound and into a

taxi in sendai to his apartment edgar allan poe was a substance abuser wolf and plath were teetering over the edge of mental stability you just never hear about a really great writer who was found head first in a bucket of hop fans the police i actually completely different and your way out of that one what we didn't want to move away from the good humor truck in the fed's circles but my mother who many of you know was a gifted storyteller said you won kansas it's so flat you can see a hundred miles in any direction lou hundred long as our eyes and round with amazement we rode the train west reactors to st louis we sang shenandoah as we cross the wide missouri at this station in lawrence the stationmaster met my parents are talking about unloading our

trunks i couldn't understand a word he was saying i was terrified we move to a foreign country but my father reese was fluent in yiddish and read greek latin and hebrew and no trouble interpreting the midwest when we retrieve their chance and more important our fox terrier jeffrey been riding with them in the baggage car it was pouring rain it was a tag end of the great floods of nineteen fifty one when the call filled the streets in the tracks and sellers were underwater when we got off the train when the sun finally came out and my mother took us on a bus tour of the town we saw the hills and warrants wasn't flattened all she line we were better lawrence was as chilly as upstate new york and it had no good humor truck i was for though i had a child's adaptability soon i had a tie myself which i've never lost

realize how pronounced it wasn't so i mean i work for a number of years for an insurance company in chicago and i get my education back with until spelled i n t i l does she's just typing phonetically so i guess i knew that speech therapy next anyway we lived on a street with a lot of other children and we played hide and seek can kick the can on the endless nights of childhood summer after a stir in grammar school i fell in love with a history of kansas only in kansas i was seven when lawrence celebrated the centennial of its founding by anti slavery emigrants i was enthralled by the drama and by the role played by pioneer women one hand gathered and militias in the wind around lawrence women had to hold on to the home stands they lived in shanties with such wide gaps between the boards that mice ran out it will one woman came in from the fields to

find a rattle snake oil in her bed she hacked off its head with a hoe and proceeded to make supper for her children i'm glad i was not a pioneer women had to use coming to evade the border of dnc turned homesteads who burned homesteads and murdered free state farmers hoping that terror would drive anti slavery emigrants from the land in kansas city where slavery is controlled the passages from the slave state of missouri into kansas territory anti slavery women so when bullets into their criminal ones and smuggled ammunition to the militias in lawrence a heady time a thrilling history i had never expected to write about it but that history is in the bones of who i am and it doesn't lie in part behind my novel breed and kansas as i started work on the book i create i read a number of diaries kept by those pioneer women i created my own pioneer

families the free mantles the shape arms and the grill years and working diary for abigail brett grow year daughter of an important boston family who comes to kansas with her with her husband and her little girl very little of the diary that i wrote made its way into the finished novel imagining her life putting it into the shape of journals letters from abigail to her mother was among the most and snorting work i've ever done and i do or special thanks to sue novak from the kansas state historical society and cheryl williams at the university of kansas archives for their help in finding that material lawrence in kansas a funny places aren't i mean not the humorist butt of the nation's jokes weren't called fly over country where the home of carrie nation and

amelia earhart john brown dwight david eisenhower the birthplace of langston hughes and gwendolyn brooks the state came three into the union in january eighteen sixty one animal practice segregation for the following century when i was growing up the restaurants in downtown lawrence wouldn't serve african americans were the movie theaters relegated them to the balconies the journal world had a very moving series on some of that history a year and a half ago when lawrence hired its first african american school teacher the only homes a realtor showed him had dirt floors and no indoor plumbing my mother learned about this the valley are women voters she was furious and you became active in the movement for open housing and once all this segregation had affected our family a couple of years earlier it

wasn't until that episode that she became an active civil rights crusader my my father who was the first jew hired in a tenured position at the university you wanted to buy a bigger house for his growing family the realtors explained to my parents that jews could only buy in that dirt floor part of town but since my parents were educated and didn't look especially jewish they would be glad to slide them into a nicer area now my parents got a little cranky at this and they opted out of the whole situation by that line an old farmhouse five miles east of town five point two miles east of us dallas meaning gilmore used to farm ten thousand acres of these this is the story as i've been told that this is the reality now the gilmore experience as i understand it these defiant ten thousand acres in the car valley land that they bought or perhaps

taken i don't know from the delaware indians who once lived there and the eighteen sixties they built a house on the site of the previous house that had burned to the ground we had three fireplaces the mantles were made of polished walnut with the nation tiles lining their sides and forming a fire breaks in front of the harvest there was a silver back and drinking fountain in the upper hall the dining room had a tiffany chandelier although one of the panels was broken the house was beautiful and to me it was exotic it was a mansion we moved in during the winter of nineteen fifty eight my brothers and i started attending a tune country school cappelli district number ninety five began a massive garden now that country's school that started my baseball career in town my brothers and i were we somewhat chubby ungainly children in fact in photographs of that period

we look like bowling balls with feet and equipping grade school we were always the last chosen for any sport being plagued by con la district number ninety five baseball was kind of the heart of the school and although most kids had to play if we were going to have nine people on the team they still was a little bit of that try out to get on and my brother dan next younger than me and i we wanted desperately to be picked for the team so he would stand in there were hardwired each other as hard as we could every afternoon after school not using nets we were testing so that we're becoming athletes it's a sports injury one afternoon i broke my this finger would sever its call the fourth finger and my father felt that he could set it better than any doctor could we needed that all their troubles and he said it himself and and so privately concede or those in your current record over the middle

finger at it and they have a real sports injuries but well i think my lifetime batting average was a one seven but you know you did and exaggerated your achievements and memory so i maybe inflating that and i had a very powerful arm for a twelve year old i had a cousin who didn't want me to feel like the girl he taught me through and i can throw the distance from third which was my position to first but i didn't have a very good game so i could so that distance in a random direction and a lot of the time i spent looking far one ball in the cornfield them and to backstop you know rex stout grew up in this very i don't know people know that he went to water isn't under six which always be this always be a sitcom at the red shirted their players everything and twenty year olds who are

anyway we were always like oh intend for the season and doubt that prepared me to me it comes from kansas has this remained written for someone asked me today what i would do if it was the royals versus the cubs in the world series i should have been smarter faster on my feet and said iran had been a bombshell because i don't as you know the world at any way we had about one happy year in that wonderful house winning so far from town took a heavy toll on my mother and all my parents' marriage the house turned from a place of magic to a menacing creature that loomed over our lives my parents never cleaned repaired the chimneys or the drinking fountain ignored the water which seeped in along the chimneys and spread to blacken mold across the master bedroom wall the iron in the well water roger the pipes

enough to couldn't have you arrest on the shower walls my parents wouldn't invest in a deep well or a water purifier so we made in an iron world that smelled like blurred my father didn't like cancer you wouldn't allow us to encourage them by printing out trays of kitty litter since cats are big critics in the country they slip into the house to one or more of the five doors and a dirty basement and then crawled up the heating vents into the ground for cement house graduate took on a very distinctive cats damage as magnificent as the ground and seventh floor of the house where neither the gilmore is nor the press he's bothering the attic or the basement and i should say that nobody has ever called this the current ski house for all of the fifty years of my family lived there was always the gilmore house and i guess i knew we were transients

anyway i put this house and i'm leading and says at one point she lived rally air who are the teams who were there and a lot of people in the book at the grolier family are from either the heart of the book and why i really air her father gao marmite my heroes in this story and our and her older brother chip are sneaking into the house late at night it's been standing empty for two years and they've been using it as a secret hideout now my niece of one of the owners is going to move in and she wants to retrieve his stash of dope and large it's going to pick up her diaries for all the money they put into building a fancy house the original three medals in that the basement and finished it had a dirt floor where snakes and wolf spiders roland martin mind them so much in the daylight but she didn't want to land on one in the dark among the city held up right here we won't make

it snappy she set her eyes took a breath and slid down the coal c he called her at the bottom the white on the ground i don't want to step on a spider and don't fool around with me like that i don't like it she added he called his fingers up their scalp they ran up the steep stairs to the kitchen my house smelled like bleach from yesterday's cleanup of the most extensive cats pray and delay the bleach making large sick to her stomach pushed through the swinging door into the dining room while are headed for the staircase to the second floor wolf spiders as big as the palm of my hand they cannot sometimes in the basement in the living room or my mother would screen until someone came to deal with them and even though joe cannon an entomologist and some of you may recall assured us that not only remaining the nine but that they were active controllers of as insects something about a spider that data that just doesn't look very the

nineteen eighties really know when a crunch it so a coffee cans and cardboard my mother's sank under a sense of hopelessness about her life she turned much of the domestic side of our world over to me it was my job to dust and vacuum every saturday the road out front was dirt end up climbing us with next to impossible one rural town cleaning one so we couldn't make much of a dent in the dust that covered walls furniture drapes old casting wasp's nest was kind of the house an assurance the way these tasks where i had all the responsibility and no authority left me with a lifelong sense both that i'm responsible for cleaning up giant messes

and that the job is beyond me it became important to me as i wrote reading plans is to deal with the old build more gorecki house i did so at the end of the novel but i can't say that it has had the cathartic effect i had hoped for i fled to chicago when i was twenty it's the place where i've built my own life but certainly the place most closely identified with my writer's voice and yet a part of me has always remained here my beloved brother jonathan still lives here and a frequent visitor i wear my k t shirts probably in fact i was in phoenix going in and then during the orange bowl at a bookstore there and i made one of the key is going to back him like at the school on the computer every few minutes before i'm gonna marry so it's a kind of chicken wire and then

i certainly thought kansas politics and our local aberrations with the passion of an expatriate i think of hemingway in other americans in paris of harry's bar in the nineteen twenties reading about the states in the herald tribune there i am that harry's bar in chicago following phil klein's latest escapades are heating up with fred even so it somehow never seen like a place for i might seven bork some of it was the not of sickness of memories of my adolescence drew up and meet the crowd and my vision i couldn't see stories set in kansas and i have to see a story i had to see people in motion in order to write it wasn't until eight or nine years ago when i was spending a lot of time here is my parents became frail but i did begin to see a story set in this

part of the country it was a slow process that began with my recovering a missing sense of place when i was a teenager my two youngest brothers and i would sometimes hike the two miles from our house to the call river we would eat sandwiches on the muddy bluffs overlooking the river and then hike only telling each other stories or playing make believe we were a detective's we were soldiers my family has a tradition of military service that began in the sixteen forties and continued through vietnam the family dog would more or less a company as going up on mysterious dark errands and periodically rejoining his one july day when my youngest brother was five or six or something seven often became really angry on our way home he ran off into the cornfield to the east of our house and disappeared by late july the corn may not be as high as an elephant's eye but it is pretty darn

tall certainly higher than a tall man's head and he quickly become disoriented under a cloudless sky you see the shadows known landmarks i've seldom been more frightened than i was pushing my way through those rows of corn looking for nicolas knowing that the only nearby adult had already passed out for the afternoon it was the dog who found him the daughter nodding happily through fields really was normally forbidden dance scene between me and my brother until he led me to him and both of us home thirty years later when i was spending days in a nursing home with my father i would hike out to the nearby fields and why they're in the prairie grasses listening to the wind line still enough the butterflies would land on the birds are perched nearby and i let the mysterious beauty of the land

seeking to me like ewing waters they came to me during those painful days that i wanted to write about that land to reclaim that landscape both its beauty and its terror and it is there that leading kansas begins the devil's shimmered over the cornfield it was late july the midday sun so hard that it raised blisters on juarez arms it turned the leaves into green is it reflected back and blinding light large shut her eyes against the glare and held out her hands trying to reach the edge of one field by feel that she tripped on the rough ground and fell grazing her knees on the hard so while she had had twenty words falls but this one's so humiliated her that she started to cry don't be such a baby she whispered fiercely she sat up to inspect the

damage her dress had a long streak of dirt up the front and her knees were bleeding sandman addresses part of the summer for a huge crowds it to the county fair it was pink long with a placard at the left side and jane rowse galloping and she'd won first prize for it she got up any stinging when she straightened them and hobbled the last few yards into the cornfield the corn was so tall that walking into the field was like walking into a forest after a few dozen steps she couldn't see the house or any of the out buildings there isn't the same in all directions neat hills about two feet apart if she turned around in circles a few times she wouldn't know what direction she'd come from sunni fifty yards from home but would be so lost she would die in here probably soon die of thirst within a day it was so hot and then refined and bones in october picked clean by perry hawks when they

came to visit the call to harvest the corn she laid down between the rows and stared at the sky through the weaving of leaves and castles the corn was as tall as young trees but it didn't provide much shade the leaves were too thin to make a bower overhead the way burr oak wood she skirted close to the stasi that leaves covered her face and walk out the worst of the punishing sun was a close winter's day when she'll a completely motionless she get your wrestling of the leaves a sort of who she knew as if they created their own little wind with in the field grasshoppers word around her a few bird sang through the rows picking the corn the years were just taking shape the kernels a listers states she races still that a meadowlark perched on the stock right above her pick up a bright eye at her as if wondering her opinion on the world emily corio

here in the field it's clean but they're not to get to theres still big factories and truman into gasoline or plastic or some other nasty thing the birds chirp in agreement and turned a packet one of the years trying to get through the thick house one law reached up an arm to strip the husks back to help out the bird took off in front and what happens in those fields to inspiring beauty in between my all the confusing things that make up our state ordinary people trying to make a stalk of wheat come up out of the ground whose lives are damaged been forever altered by events in the world over which they have no control these are the grill years the family who make up the heart and soul of the novel then there are their neighbors the sapiens sapiens and grow is both came west a meeting fifty four as anti slavery emigrants jim gray is ever so great grandmother

abigail had seen a vision of mary as a black slave cradling a dead son both of them in chains this was a vision that a number of women actually had in the eighteen forties and fifties these were calvinists congregational lists they were not prone to visions and when the women were startled by this site and mary as an african slave they took the site very seriously in the current generation of the grill your family jim's wife susan who cherishes heavy gales diaries and letters is what the victorians would've label aren't so susan longs for her own vision and she keeps the causes who redefined one as big as slavery to satisfy her ardor susan was the hardest character really to write about in the novel

her highs and lows the passions that she had to try to make them believable in and to make her a likable character that was a challenge in some ways she is the most pro isn't part of my personality in the novel and i guess perhaps it's my i fear that i'm not a very likable person up close and made her hard to make likable like susan i'm always yearning for that big cause my own vision my own something that is worth giving my wife to i suppose their neighbors the shape dozens have a constant chip on their shoulders in the early days in the earliest days when the families came out together they were very close but they haven't drawn apart and contemporary times they disagree on

everything really from religion to how to raise children how to farm sapiens have a constant sit on their shoulders they liked some of my relatives many people that you know yourself friends or coworkers and we all know the trippy optimist his glasses half full and very pessimistic his glass is half empty but the shape inside my great aunt chile say or every woman got a glass no matter what happened whether it was a hailstorm or a county tax levy schaper has felt that they've been cheated sometimes by defeating free mantles sometimes online grow years sometimes the government or the indians where the jews but always someone was trying to drive them out of the out of the valley take what they'd fall short over the decades shaped instrument more and more inward away from the rest of the farms around them at the time chicano art came

along everyone was so steeped in the mindset of this really shape ads or the grill years didn't even tried to be friendly did jr who is chips age or romney who is in juarez grade the savings in recent generations have also turned to that old time religion the fundamentalism has many different forms play such a central role in the drama of contemporary american life satan's religion is an aspect of cancers life indeed of our national life that i try often to understand him come to grips with i went to chicago originally to work for a community based social justice program run by the presbyterian chicago and the people i worked for their the ones with whom i still worship from time to time practice an inclusive life affirming religion or i feel not just the ease that inspired but when

my mother was dying she received a letter from a fundamentalist a woman all costs and tell another had known show and tell for decades and even mean close to her search came as a shock when santo big to believe judaism incomes and she says in the last month of her life in order to escape the torments of eternal damnation i think we were all of us my mother my brothers and i too numb from the new military no emotions of loss and dying to react much of the time but it's certainly a letter that i've never forgotten gentile's letter wasn't my first encounter with forthright christians when i was an undergraduate abundant know one of my dorm mates came to me for help with western city which he needed to posterity to keep her music scholarship that i know what the courses like to date that bag then we covered live there and calvin and

one of the differences is that in we had to go over until the night that night was palin's belief that once god called someone they were for ever among the elect and since hardened called the jews first the jews were not dammed luther thought otherwise and mathilde announced that luther was right then jews are bound for those searing fires are rejecting jesus as the messiah but what i said are you telling me that you're taking like helping keep from flooding this chorus and all this time you think i'm going to help her she turned very pink which he squeaked out ways i couldn't think of a meaningful respond so i said well ok back to lutheran town now in nineteen sixty six encountered did make me laugh but the letter to my dying mother made me thinking long and hard about what kind

of personality someone like that might happen everyone has some core beliefs that are not negotiable i certainly have a few myself and i know i've made some people unhappy with the way have expressed them but what kind of prison is so sure that she's right that she can't allow a dying woman to have a pointer year and dying patients until then sent home morphed into myers shaken him bleeding cannes is while the old house that i grew up and turning to the free mental home as i said in the novel admits be standing empty since i mean as i said earlier in the novel the house has been standing empty says all this is free mental died since none of her three children want to farm they've gone far afield than made really successful careers for them and finance one of the three men to air is suddenly rights can grill year has been looking after the house to say that his niece gino is

coming to live in the house essentially rent free while she recovers from france from some devastating life experiences jean as a new yorker she is what tommy franks called a latte liberals she has a shiny cappuccino machine very much like my own i actually realized a friend of mine was editing a paper for a japanese graduate student at the receipt chicago in and the japanese didn't was writing about in the barren god of the people of northern hokkaido the northern island of japan and i realized as i listen to gillian talk about the bear gotten the rituals surrounding the worship of the bear god that that this is very much how i treat my cappuccino machine except that i don't throw almond blossoms on it but i might i might order to placate him and to prevent

cavities anyway do you know it turns out as a lesbian and awaken and her arrival on the car river valley turns the shape and grow your lives upside down dear sister wiggins join her in the country to celebrate the holidays in the pagan year these ceremonies include drumming drinking and dancing around a bonfire it's a tennis rally is indeed everyone in the valley are all or to what gene is do they knew lived half a mile away that in the country as you know well nobody has to privacy you know there's a congregation was i created at church right along the edge of the color centennial park part is riverside congregational church that was founded by abigail in and had tim curley air and that's where the grill years worship susan is even on the board of directors but with her ardor in her desire for big causes she's drawn dinging as

bonfires and she starts taking part in the ceremonies while my re shape in that ad something head of the shape and household is beside herself now i call her church the salvation through the blood of jesus full bible church there's a certain chicago that i pass on my way to the airport called a hot flowing lot of the volcano of jesus love cheers and i was really tempted to use that i thought that people might think i was making instead i take it very seriously so myers my researchers first of all of course they don't think the grill years are true christians and all the congregational church supports teaching evolution for one thing and ample bible christian if you don't accept the bible's creation story is literally true you were pretty much on satan's team

after the ferry's we can fire is when susan kelley is wincing even do you drink meyer can't wait to share her reaction when the world to save it and i keep a blog and meyer writes on it you know i have to say as a novelistic in doing things to people that you couldn't in real life and meyer has badly fitting didn't choose them to clap like a loose combine sheen some of our neighbors don't seem concerned about their immortal souls they think that drinking dancing naked and other abominations on the nine acts of the creator overlooks on any re joyce has been nothing further from the truth we pray for our neighbors to come to jesus and experience a close personal relation with their creator and savior

then you profess jesus and dance before the fires that are a foretaste of jail apparently one of our neighbors set herself on a higher plain than jesus thinking she can do both instances and intense and in the plains that week for her on the other side it's not my form by both christians are there not totally joyless bunch of people robin the younger grandson he loves music he plays guitar he writes signed plays in his church's heavy metal man they're not a happy family and i know that that's not fair to show and tell i've been with her unseen the pleasures she has with within her family circle but leaving kansas is a work of fiction and the work of fiction is to use stories to understand life and death love and loss faith and bigotry all those fears and loves and passions that make up our human lives writer

tim lahaye for instance might've shown ago years when the flesh being ripped from their bones because they didn't cross the divide between their religion is their savings as i said a dairy farmers in one part of the novel is the perfect red heifer they have on their farm heifer that's needed to fulfill the prophecies about jesus' return given i think in the book of revelation a different writer than me dan brown for instance would have discovered leaking natural prophecies from isaiah even mary magdalen and i would be making a billion dollars as raymond chandler put it it's always a question of who the writer is and what we have in us to write with in my novel the work of my hands i wanted to

explore the landscape of my childhood but the interior and the exterior and look like this couldn't take place in chicago there's no place for me i was asking that sharp tongued risk taking problem solver in the world of the shape ins in the grille years there's no room for any outsider there especially not ones eccentric as gina harry the wiccan let alone it on i certainly wouldn't be able to have the bonfires and chicago or a perfect read have her nor could i have the winter wheat coming to life i needed to return to my childhood to be able to write about jim and susan growl year to write about land and the cycle of life and death it presents to us the winter wheat had broken dormancy i'm starting to grow all week and pale green and shimmered under the brown tufts barely visible like a shy girl at the school dance don't look

at me i'm here this morning though the whole field was suddenly alive the sky was still dark barely pay lower than the land beneath it means you can smell the greenness of the plant's afresh tang like why i'm rising from the land when he meant to feel the stalks they were supple and soft as we're down between his fingers he heard footsteps we careen through the clatter grass and then susan not beside him like him sing them to feel so i o n roots it smells like spring day squatting for a time without speaking all the poetry about spring that lie was studying for her english class april is the cruelest month wasson by blossom the spring begins now that april with his shower of sweet and liars own ernest clumsy mindset

celebrated becoming blue skies and pink roses why did no one write a poem about the winter we come into life susan took a deep breath and i'm sorry about that and so you had to sell the reception that he had to sell it for army to had to sell it to army i'm sorry for letting you down for being the reason you had to do it he put his finger over a religious person the bubble links were calling to each other their long line of song counting the metal arts the bombings have come back from south america a week ago as they had every spring for twenty thousand years and we're working in earnest on their nests they sailed around jim and susan in the dark they know more attention to the humans into the silos across the fields

in the east singing pink heralded the rising sun it's been the point and i did this one the walt if you ever have a writers' bloc countries don't want to give it that you want us to go back and read yourself the question was when i had writer's block what do i do decide do you want chocolate i have frequent riders well i think i think some of it's a bit that is not a good enough writer in that my ideas aren't good enough

and that the id i have stinks and nine nine dollars sometimes it's because the idea really does think i can make it work and i think in times like that it would be better to just let it go go away go to italy for a month i'm in my name's ann and then come back to have that and so terrified that i'll never write again or that all have to go back to selling from his insurance agents which is what i was doing but earlier that i just kind of amazon lansing and small rubber burning but at times like that i have to read my old comfort which i can't read new material since two makes me two jittery i see how good everyone else is doing and how bad i'm doing it just can't cope with it and so i go back and i'll i'll read some of my old comfort mysteries margery allingham i often turn to are times like that or around where the victorian novelists in mind and i've always liked

dickens in la is of course jane austen and then when i'm actually writing again i'm happy to read new work and work that i know is he's really good in bed and what i'm doing perhaps i have to say i read until a head and when i just was about halfway through the first draft of bleeding kansas a rain delay air than i thought that is such a beautiful book just about as close to a perfect novel as anything i have ever read and some of it is said in kansas during the civil war and some of it is set in a small town in iowa and i thought why am i bothering then i thought this is a slender clean pure novel there's room for a big cluttered novel so i went on thank you so much the question was about my essay

collection riding in an age of silence i had been since iran since the passage of the patriot act i had been speaking out libraries an eye including here in lawrence and dumb library associations around the country about some of the things i knew that were happening as a threat to civil liberties in the wake of the act and also i think some of the things that very few people know how her relic librarians have been in trying to stand up for for our are almost nonexistent fourth amendment rights are in poor librarians in connecticut went to prison for just for the crime of seeking legal advice when they got served with national security letters of winning records about there patrons librarian in new jersey actually

defined the conditions of the act by reporting a time when in the fbi came and arrested one of her patrons for reading foreign language pages on the web i assume i had been tightening around the country about that and a lot of the places that i talk to wanted a published version of the speech or so which is a small publisher in britain and my american publishers in one of these small it's a collection but very so very so actually did and they asked if i would write it somewhat autobiographical ii so that people can see where i came from and how it i came to the view is that that i do all my passionate belief that women are actually fully human that we

actually despite what justices kennedy school year and so on and said we actually are entitled to the protection of the fourteenth amendment although we currently don't have it i am hopeful that before i die i will be returned to us iran anyway where did i come to those radical beliefs and how did it all come about and that's the essay collection is a little bit of my personal history a little bit of why and how i came to write crime fiction is the way my summer in chicago in nineteen sixty six can't change the eye with which i see both the world and how to help me shake my writing voice when i alternately found it and then the final chapter is what i call truth lies and duct tape which is my take on on what has happened to us as readers and writers and speakers in america and what the role of the writer is in

times like this so that's the book and they didn't have that at the raven i think you can just about one last question they have another novel mulling around or do i have writer's block yes to both putnam my publishers have been incredibly supportive of bleeding campuses it would have been really easy for them to say why briefly was your mind will just dump it out there and let it go and come back and write the eye instead they have done ally to support the publication of his novel and down and i'm really grateful to them for that in today's publishing market that wasn't i'm sure a light on a decision they made lightly but the quid pro quo was that i agree that i would write another novel in the series i mean that the ice here ease and i am on wednesday september first alas

i've written fifty pages and i know i've started it the wrong way so i'm going to let those go when i get done with my tour and i hope that i think of some good way to tell the story i kind of know what i wanted to be at at the in the lull but not how to tell a syrian and you know it's not a fearful if he recorded january twenty second of two thousand a powerful moral person or it was a presentation of the hall center for the humanities at the university of kansas and co sponsored by the lawrence public library and the raven bookstore it was recorded by kate you media services and j mcintyre kbr present is a production of kansas public radio at the university of kansas