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And now it's my pleasure to introduce our panel this evening. Immediately to my left is Robert Atwan who's the series has been the series editor for The Best American Essays since its inception in 1906. He has written articles for The New York Times The Atlantic Monthly the Boston Review and The New York Times and The Los Angeles Times among other publications and has edited anthologies and journals of literature criticism journalism and political ass's and he is currently working on a short book on Shakespeare's creative process to his left is John H Summers who's a professor of history at locally at Boston College and who previously taught at both Harvard and Columbia universities. He's the editor of a collection of writings on C. Wright Mills and the author of the essay collection every fury on earth. His essay Gettysburg regress is included in this year's Best American Essays volume. And then on the far left my far left here far right Gerald Walker is a professor of creative writing locally at Emerson College. He's the author of the book street Shadows A Memoir of Race rebellion and redemption and his essays have appeared in Mother Jones

the Missouri review creative nonfiction and the Iowa review. He has twice been a contributor to The Best American Essays and twice a contributor to the best African American Essays. So I'll now turn the floor over to Robert Anton. Please join me in welcoming Robert Acts 1 John Summers and Gerald Walker. Thank you and I want to say that part of this occasion is that this is the twenty fifth anniversary of the series which went back to 19 86 the first year that it was published. And so we decided we would have with Lorne couldn't make it unfortunately people from previous edition so John's the only one from the 2000 10 edition and the other very unfortunate thing is that I was plenty to be here.

Way back I guess it was in the spring when Christopher Hitchens was supposed to. Read from his memoir here and I guess we all know the sad news with Christopher since there's a little extra time in Lorne would be reading I thought I would read two paragraphs since this is the anniversary of the series that I wrote back about in 1995 or 96 for the preface that is just a few paragraphs of what this was like when it started. Some of you probably don't remember 1985 as well as I do. When I began the series in 1905 the world was a slightly different place. I communicated with authors and publishers mainly by letter and phone. Now I often rely on fax and email. Now I don't use fax anymore it's all the mail a first class postage stamp cost 22 cents

overnight delivery was used only in special circumstances as publishers here might recall PC meant personal computer. And my only CD was a certificate of deposit. Looking back over my correspondence I see that no publisher's stationery ever listed a fax number. Information is sometimes took weeks to obtain. I now have in a matter of minutes and I was writing this in 1906 It's seconds. I guess now Google didn't exist then. For this year's collection I reviewed more periodicals and screen more S's than I had ever anticipated and that has even increased tremendously. The series just happened to be launched in the midst of the digital revolution that is still in process and that is shaping our lives in unpredictable ways. I can recall in the early 80s proudly showing a friend my newly set up home office an IBM PC sporting two five and a

quarter inch floppy drives too. And one hundred and twenty a K of memory an electric typewriter that could interface as a letter quality printer a one a 1200 baud modem a compact copier a phone with a built in answering machine but with a separate automatic dialer and a fax machine on the same line that spewed out a continuous roll of waxy paper. My friend was impressed and termed it I distinctly remember the office of the future. Well that future lasted about five minutes. Now I'll read from the beginning of the forward from this year's book 2010 book. As I write this forward and this was back in April I guess Apple has just released its I-pads to compete with Amazon's popular Kindle and the news media is once again abuzz over the death of the book. Well though

I think that prophesies in the end abound in printed books or magazines is somewhat hyperbolic. There can be little doubt that with each passing year we will be reading more and more electronic texts and it is possible that in years to come many years it would seem ink and paper book publishing short of vanishing would become something of a craft like basket weaving issuing objects to art for a special literary audience those who enjoy books as physical objects who love collecting in the splaying them who cherish first editions and autographed copies. It's also possible book lovers will begin collecting first editions of e-books. And even autographed e-books though it's difficult to imagine how and what they will look like and what will book signings be like when the electronic edition is the only edition. I try to picture that and I

can't. Earlier generations have fetishized printed books just as the younger generation now fetishized as the gadgets that can deliver books electronically. But the book is a handheld gadget too. A technology that once transformed the world as the new devices are doing today. How much will be sacrificed if e-books eventually become the major product of publishing and the first printings of hardcover books grow smaller and smaller as some are. How many years before authors would prefer to see their books published only in electronic form. I can imagine going to Philip Roth and say Philip your book is only going to come out as an e-book this year. That's it. At this stage of such momentous publishing the upheaval all we can do it seems is ask questions and try to make good guesses about the upsides and downsides and gains and sacrifices of moving to a predominantly electronic publishing.

I love books as physical objects. They are extremely convenient and user friendly and they don't require chargers that are misplaced or forgotten. As I do all the time. But as we edge closer to the day when books as we are repeatedly informed though no one says when will be a marginalized medium. I find myself worrying less about the future of the book in our digital age and more about the fate of reading the issue it seems to me isn't so much about how books the books we read or delivered whether we read on paper or on a screen. The question that needs asking is what will be the impact of the new media on the art of reading. Allow me a digression. I can distinctly recall the moment I finally learned to read the Sunday afternoon. The drab apartment the old faded brown sofa on which I had leisurely stretched

out. The boisterous tavern that crowded my imagination. This isn't some dubious early childhood memory. I was a graduate student who had been an addicted reader since first grade devouring books newspapers magazines comics and whatever printed word came my way. Usually on milk cartons. Back then on that day the book happened to be a small paperback edition of Shakespeare's Henry the Fourth Part One. I was in Act 2 scene for I still own that edition. I had of course been exposed to the usual Shakespearean suspects in high school and then encountered them again in more specialized ways in college where in an introduction to Shakespeare course we were required to turn in a plot outline for every play assigned. That was a bear. But not until the apprentice tapster Francis finds himself the victim of a practical joke staged by the Prince of Wales and can only keep crying. Anon

anon meaning coming I'll be there soon. To the impatient calls of one of the princes taverns cronies stationed in another room that I truly realize how literature works. I had always read for content. Main point theme the big ideas and I read in a straightforward linear fashion whatever the genre. This enabled me to test well in certain circumstances. But as I realized after my sudden literary awakening I had been reading literature for years with proficiency and passion but without aesthetic insight though when a student I had been a B-minus reader I still feel embarrassed when I return to a novel I read in college I find scrolled in the margin. Man versus nature. That was part of the educational system maybe back then. Put simply I hadn't been noticing the intricately layered network of imagery

verbal interconnectivity conversational echoes and dominant tropes that could be found on practically every page of Shakespeare. I'm not speaking here of simply observing certain metaphorical strands or symbolic patterns or reading literary geniuses more like entering an astonishing zone of sublime verbal complexity in which we seem to encounter to borrow Hamlet's words thoughts beyond the reaches of our souls using the technology of that time. I began to picture a Shakespeare play with its overarching system of passages wired to other countless passages as a schematic or electronic circuit diagram the sort of large paper fold out that back then accompanied a new stereo set. Some of you people might have never seen one of these but you bought a stereo back in the old days of the sixties you had this big thing that folded out that showed you all the circuitry and how it worked and that's how I had the image I had in

my head when I started figuring out what was going on in Shakespeare. Today we would probably use some different kinds of configuration. Maybe a brain scanner. You know one of those things. I thought a schematic diagram that would represent graphically the internal circuitry of a play like Hamlet or Othello with all its signal paths laid out to show how any single passage connects to and illuminates many others throughout the grid would be a far more expressive way to imagine what was going on inside a Shakespeare work than the popular blackboard diagram. And some of you have seen this over and over. Some of the people here have had little more experience in the old fashioned classrooms. The big diagram was exposition rising action climax following action and day no more. No one officially after its

19th century German inventor as the freight tag pyramid a model still being used I checked this out and it's still there. After nearly a century and a half despite all the years of student yawns to explain Shakespeare when I eventually taught Shakespeare to undergraduates I would cover the blackboard with my circuit diagram. Far less tidy than freight tags linear model. My art work had at least the instructional advantage of displaying a play's unique internal wiring. It helps students understand that the language of the play unlike its action did not need to be processed sequentially but could be seen as existing simultaneously in different locations in variations throughout the play. For talented readers Nothing I've said here is surprising. Good readers detect the intricate internal wiring in the works of such literary figures as Jane Austin John Keats change Joyce or Vladimir. BOBKOFF. These readers as the Harvard

former critic and teacher here Reuben Brower aptly put it this was years ago. Such readers read in slow motion. A good reader also reads the great books. In fact the bulk of thought that just as there are major and minor authors. So two other major and minor readers. Such readers know. A good reader such as the bulk of said it Major reader is an active and creative reader and as a reader such readers know that as they expand their mental and emotional capacities. Reading Shakespeare or Joyce or in a book off they to participate actively in the creative experience. Minor readers thought those with restricted imaginations enjoy a novel because they merely identify with the situation a place and it is a logical point of view or one of the characters.

Oh that reminds me of my Uncle Paul. This fellow I really like this novel. Genuine imaginative writing he suggests the man's readers with broader imaginations. After my graduate school Pinney when I realized how a single comic incident can encapsulate the dramatic tension of an entire play I became by choice a much slower reader of literature. Pen in hand I often page backward and re read passages when I notice connections. I read always on the lookout for patterns and structures my inner eye focused on the writings wiring the text absorb my total attention. But I feel that my generation's style of slow patient and close reading may be a dying art in the age of YouTube Facebook and Twitter. In our multitasking environment how many find a leisure to read leisure. Philip Roth has talked about the join Ling core of serious readers and one can

speculate on the impact the new technology is having on our tolerance for long demanding literary works with a number of serious readers decline even further or where the concept of a serious reader change to accommodate all the new digital formats we are likely to see. I think these are serious questions that we're facing in education and anywhere else. There can be no doubt that the Internet has dramatically changed the way we read. People want information delivered faster in smaller chunks and with more visual company meant one needs only to examine the changes in student textbooks over the past decade to see the impact web design has had on reading and learning. And once these print textbooks evolve into e-books the opportunities for more embedded features will further alter reading skills creating I believe learning patterns that will be less discursive and more discontinuous in a few years American literature students may be reading an enhanced e-version of The Great Gatsby.

With background music from the early twenties colorful ads for the luxury cars of that era are photographs of mansions along Long Island Sound clips from the various film adaptations appropriate multimedia links to the book's historical background and interactive responses from readers eager to exchange insights. The effect would be like reading a novel enjoying a movie watching a documentary and entering a chat room all at the same time. All in all it would be a far different literary experience than opening the classic Scrivener paperback and starting with Nick Carraway his first words in my younger and more vulnerable years. Thank you very much. And John will read this. One of the interesting things about the essay form and I think it's for Hitchens discusses this in his introduction

is the it's very flexible and interesting vehicle for for talking about autobiographical themes as well as cultural criticism. We have to see that in involves forward and I'll do a little different version of that in my piece which is about the about the Gettysburg battlefield. Well I was walking with my wife along Cemetery Ridge on the Gettysburg battlefield when an odd detail doing the site piles of felled trees. Stacked alongside the road. The cuts looked as fresh as the trees look strong. Well what happened to them we wondered. I grew up in Gettysburg and my mother still lives in the shadow of Lutheran Theological Seminary. Low in the lap of the ridge that it names said the seminary Ridge is one of the of a string of bridges that surrounds the town.

General Robert E. Lee stood there on July 2nd and July 30 1863. The woods atop the ridge had made it a sublime place to stroll. For as long as I could remember. Until that winter walk which ended in Congress Lee with a logging truck coming by asking around I learned that parts of the battlefield were in rehabilitation in the hope of providing visitors with an authentic historical experience. The National Park Service was seeking to restore some of the Gettysburg some of Gettysburg landscapes to their condition. When the Union and Confederate armies clashed on them. And so the trees that once crowned devil's den where confederate sharpshooters picked off Union soldiers were missing also hundreds of acres of woodland actually were gone or going. In July of 1863 the battle field contained about 900 acres of woodland.

Since that time the number has grown to more than 2000. The rehabilitation many and varied in its activities has also rebuilt fences replanted orchards and demolished large buildings including a car dealership. The goal of the National Park Service is regional director Dawn Barger told the Christian Science Monitor is to make the tourists almost feel the bullets. That is what you want to have happen in the battlefield. Well the project the lights the re-enactors who troop to Gettysburg every year in pursuit of authenticity. As well as the tourists who come expecting to encounter history excuse me a less to encounter history during their trip and then to experience it. And academic historians seem to be uniform in their approval as well. The rehabilitation project has something for everyone. It flatters the left's suspicion of cultural authority. It's invitation to ordinary Americans to participate in their

history. Even as it honors conservatism's fetish for an unchanged historically correct past as an historian I can appreciate the impulse to restore. And that my wife and I felt rather foul about my explanation of rehabilitation. Salvation through improvement and together in the weeks after our trip we ruminated on her reaction at seminary Ridge. Did those trees really have to go. The more we thought about this question the more the whole project troubled us. The trees were important of course. But we began to believe we saw something larger. A distinctive pattern of thought sweeping across a battlefield. Working in sympathy with the changing expectations Americans have been applying to their history. Well in the Gettysburg Address which was delivered over just about four months after that was conclusion President Lincoln famously cautioned we cannot dedicate we

cannot consecrate we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men living and dead who struggled here have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract. So it seems worth asking whether the rehabilitation of Gettysburg battlefield to its original state is really a process of adding or of detracting. It's also worth asking whether the managers of our battlefields not just get a spurt but elsewhere in their quest for maximum authenticity. Are cheating visitors and something more important. In high school I worked at the Gettysburg battlefield and I imparted the names and the dates and the locations that were by and large irrelevant to the moral history of the war. That was fine with me. I loaded the customers onto these a fleet of blue and gray double decker buses. I climbed to the top took my seat at the rear and sun myself. The

problem I had with most earnestly pleasure grounds was to how to pry visiting adolescent girls from their fathers. As for the matter of North versus South I thought you know along with most of the tourists I could go either way to really make it the main destinations then were not much more inspired than my tours. There were a few family attractions. Which conveyed some slight educational matter. The electric map of the National Civil War wax museum. The Lincoln train museum. The Hall of Presidents made these names ring a bell for those of you who've who have gone along beyond the town. There were diversions such as the land of little horses. The entertainments were neither authentic nor inauthentic. They were kitsch and they lacked any clear point of view. And since they were pointless they were also harmless. But today's drive to rehabilitate Gettysburg morning vicious in every respect has not dented on inspiration or on

controversy as a matter of fact. One hundred million dollar museum in the new museum and visitor center opened in the spring of 2008 has been grabbing headlines which are mostly is in the past now but that's because last year was driving a lot of headlines due to questions about the financing of the of the of the operation. But much less attention was trained on the ongoing effort to rehabilitate the battlefield to their July 1863 States. Thus this question had scarcely been asked. Is it possible to return the battlefield to its original appearance. This is the first question that we took. We went to investigate. And what did we find we found that in April of 1864 the Pennsylvania legislature had chartered something called the Gettysburg battlefield Memorial Association. It had taken burial gangs until March of that year to complete the bulk of their work and inter most of the Union dead in the Soldiers National Cemetery. And not until

1873 where the Confederate dead removed from their mass graves and we buried in Richmond and Raleigh Charleston and Savannah. The associations made the association made some efforts in the direction of restoration and repositioning canons for example and its founder and its founder argued for maintaining the July 1863 appearance of some key aspects of the battlefield. At the same time he urged the construction of monuments while his organization's charter called for it to commemorate the carnage with works of art in taste. In 1866 the legislature empowered the association to plant trees at the site. By 1895 when the Department of War assumed jurisdiction in created to get a National Military Park dissociation held title to 600 acres of land from which it had cart it had carved 7000 miles of roads in its first decade of Administrative the administration the war department added more than 800 acres of

land planted nearly 17000 additional trees and improved roads. The commemorative work then of boosters and government officials utterly in an argument irrevocably transformed the battlefield. Nonetheless the rehabilitation was a major initiative in the National Park Service. In its 1999 general management plan thanks to this John Lasseter who was until recently the park superintendent. Latter explained to Gettysburg magazine how he could tell me. Soon after arriving in 1904 the comprehensive program was needed to rescue the battlefield from the insults of time. I've been here a couple of weeks maybe and they scheduled my tour and I went out with a retired Marine colonel who's one of our best guides Blatter said. He carried with him a stack of photographs that was probably three quarters of an inch thick. I thought

what's he need all these for. But what he needed them for was to explain the course of the battle. Because so much of what the commanders could see in 1863 was obscured by vegetation that had grown up and it was at that moment the latter said. I can remember thinking to myself something's got to be done about this. Well in fact the scale and the complexity of the carnage at Gettysburg has made it fairly difficult to understand very much about it. Despite all of the histories that have been written. And this was also true for the commanders. Whose vision latter thought he was restoring by removing the trees in the vegetation was fairly clouded at the time. You have to do is imagine for yourself what it must have been like to be in the middle of this battle. The soldiers and the commanders alike you consult the records said they found their experience on the battlefield fairly in comprehensible. Their

vision is clouded by by by smoke among other things. In 1885 Gen. Abner Doubleday wrote this It is difficult in the excitement of battle to see everything going around going on around us. Each has its own part to play and that absorbs his attention to the exclusion of everything else. People are very much mistaken when they suppose that because a man is in a battle he knows anything about it. Much of what we think we know about what happened at Gettysburg is knowledge gained at a remove from the experience. Photographers like Matthew Brady Alexander Gardner and the Tyson brothers Charles and Isaac circulated the earliest images of the battlefield. In Tetum. The gardener had supplied many urban newspaper readers with their very first glimpses of dead soldiers at Gettysburg he captured images even before the bear the burials had finished. But it's easy to forget when you're looking at these photographs.

That neither Garner nor anybody else photographed photographed the battle itself. It would have been of course quite impossible. But suppose for a minute that the evidence was overwhelming. Suppose an abundance of available pictures eyewitness accounts are both reliable and comprehensive and maps that could guide histories with flawless accuracy. The question would still remain. Why should battlefield tourists want to almost feel the bullets. Earlier generations of tourists brought more modest expectations in 1869 for example the cut last seen Springs hotel opened in Gettysburg on the heels of news that a ministerial spring had been discovered just west of town. The hotel offered 300 guests the use of a billiard room and a bowling alley as well as a couple of provided a panoramic view of the battlefield.

This vantage point high and above the grounds was quite popular. In 1878 private developer constructed in observatory on East cemetery hill which also offered a panoramic view. In the War Department raised 5 steel observation towers overlooking the battlefield. In 1974 a developer erected a tower more than three hundred foot feet high over the strenuous objections of preservationists superintendent last year demolished the structure. It's called the The National Tower. In the year 2000. A key symbolic moment in his drive for rehabilitation. The towers enforced a moral distance between the seer and the seen. Accordingly the earliest ones sprung up when the memory of the suffering at Gettysburg was still wrong. But the towers also impeded the abilities the ability of visitors to experience the battle and experience is what today's managers

aim to provide. But consider. To truly experience what it was like. To be at Gettysburg in July the 1863 we would need to lie with the soldiers as they bled to death groaning in pain rotting corpses missing limbs streams running Red Wind swarming with flies in the air stinking of burning horse flesh as we cannot know the precise cartography of the battlefield where the movements of every soldier. Or the location of every tree. So we should not in my opinion try to leap backward into authenticity. We should not expect to become an eyewitness to history simply by showing up. I guess elsewhere the parties of preservation restoration and rehabilitation seek to transport transport scheme transport us forward into the past by scrubbing off the blemishes

of time. But in offering us the illusion of authentic experience inviting us to almost feel the bullets. They promised both too much and too little they forget that suffering historical suffering must be regarded from a distance. It's tragedies to make us humble. Even if we are to understand tragedy at all. Well if a battlefield is not a locus of authentic experience. Then what is it. We might say it's a shrine. We might say it's a classroom. But I would say that the trees are important. The trees themselves could teach us something important. As the flesh decayed at Gettysburg. It fertilized the earth for new vegetation. What the park service calls non historic trees that is trees that grew after eight hundred sixty three trees that were not actually standing during the battle

once were seedlings since then in the change from this of the seasons. They have formed a palimpsest. Offering the closest we may come to communing with the lost souls of the battle. By Steven crane wrote in The Red Badge of Courage. As he gazed around him the youth felt a flash of astonishment at the blue purer sky and the sun gleaming on the trees and fields. It was surprising that nature had gone tranquilly on with her golden processes in the midst of so much devilment. Most of us like my wife and seminary ridge into it. The connective tissues of trees and wreaths. That humans plant trees on the grave sites is a spiritual fact of great and ancient significance. Homer signals a transition from war to peace by telling us how. By telling how to deceive us. Returning home found his father tending a young fruit tree. Of it in the metamorphosis tells of separateness begging

the guards to let him grieve forever after he accidentally kills a stag. I say is life blood drained away with never ending tears his limbs began to take a greenish cast and the soft hair that used to cluster on his snow white brow became bristling crest. The boy was now a rigid tree with frail inspiring crown that gaze on the heavens in the stars. The trees on seminary Ridge were standing reminder of the pity and terror of war those who run get a spring would grasp this if they were less obsessed with authenticity and more inclined toward history. Thank you thank you. My essay is from 2009. Best American Essays. I don't have an essay in 2010. Not really happy about that.

The essay is called the mechanics of being a decade after dropping out of high school. I did manage to arrive like some survivor of a tragedy at sea on the stores of a community college. My parents were thrilled when I phoned to say I was pursuing my childhood dream of being an architect. They were just as happy when I decided to be a sociologist instead and after that the political scientist finally a writer I'm going to write a novel based on my life. I said to my father one day. I was in an MFA program by then starting my second year. I had recently found some statistics that said there's been a 60 percent chance I'd end up in jail. I had stories to prove just how close I'd come. But after writing the first draft my tale of black teenage delinquency it seemed too cliche to me told too often before. I decided to write about my father

instead. He like my mother was blind. My father lost his sight when he was 12. Climbing the stairs to a Chicago brownstone he somehow fell backward hitting his head hard against the pavement and feeling his cranium with blood. It would have been better had some of his blood seeped out alerting him to seek medical attention. But when the area of impact did no more than swell the little one throb he tended to himself by applying two cubes of ice and eating six peanut butter cookies. He did not tell anyone about the injury. He also did not mention the two weeks of headaches that followed the month of dizzy spells or the fact that the world was growing increasingly terrifyingly dim. His mother had died of cancer four years earlier. His alcoholic father was really around so at home my father only had to conceal this condition from his grandmother Mama Alice who herself could barely see past her cataracts. And his three older brothers and sister

who had historically paid him little attention. His grades at school suffered but his teachers believed him when he said his discovery of girls was the cause. He spent less and less time with his friends gave up baseball altogether and took to walking with the aid of a tree branch. In this way his weakening vision remained undetected for three months until. One morning at breakfast things fell apart. Mama Alice greeted him at the table as he sat. She was by the stove he knew from the location of her voice as he listened to her approach. He averted his face. She put a plate in front of him and another to his right where she always sat. She pulled a chair beneath her. He reached for his fork accidentally knocking it off the table. When several seconds had passed and he made no move. Mama Alice reminded him that forks couldn't fly. He took a deep breath and reached down to his left knowing that to find a utensil would be a stroke of good fortune since he couldn't even see the

floor. After a few seconds of sweeping his fingers against a cool hardwood he set back up. There was fear in Mama Alice's voice when she asked him what was wrong. There was fear in his when he said he couldn't see. He confessed everything then eager like a serial killer at last confronted with the evidence of his crime. To have the details of his awful secret revealed. And when pressed about why he hadn't said anything sooner he mentioned his master plan. He would make his site get better by ignoring as much as possible. The fact that it was getting worse. For gutting out his fading vision and silence mama Alice called him brave. His father called him a fool. His teachers called him a liar. His astonished friends and siblings called him Earl and. The doctors called him lucky. The damage was reversible they said because the clots that had formed on and now pressed

against his occipital occipital loads could be removed. But they were wrong. Those calcified pools of blood were in precarious locations and could not be excised without immediate paralysis or worse. The surgeons inserted a metal plate. My father never knew why and later told mama Alice that the clots would continue to grow. Not only destroying a little sight he had left but also killing him. They gave him one more year to live but they were wrong again. They were wrong too and not predicting the seizures. He'd have them the rest of his life. Internal earthquakes that toppled his body and pitched it violently across the floor. I remember these scenes vividly as a young child I would cover with my siblings at a safe distance while my mother her body clamped on top of my father's tried to put medicine in his mouth without losing a finger or before he chewed off his tongue. My father was a big man in those

days loaded on fried food and sluts. One wrong move of his massive body would have caused my mother great harm. But she rode him expertly desperately or cock a crocodile hunter in the back of her prey. I expected one of those attacks to be fatal. But their damage would be done over five decades rather than all at once. Slowly and insidiously wrote in his brain like water over St.. So we knew it was an Alzheimer's when he began forgetting the people and things that mattered and remembering the trivia of his youth. He knew it too. That's why at the age of 55 he retired from teaching moved with my mother to an apartment in the suburbs and waited like we all waited for the rest of his mind to wash away. By the time I started teaching when he was in his mid sixties he had forgotten us all. According to the American Foundation for the

blind every seven minutes someone in this country will become blind or visually impaired. There are 1.3 million blind people in the United States less than half of the blind complete high school and only 30 percent of working age blind adults are employed. For African-Americans who make up nearly 20 percent of this population despite being only 12 percent of the population at large the statistics are even bleaker. There are no reliable statistics for the number of unemployed line prior to the 1980s. But some estimates put it as high as 95 percent. Most parents of blind children then had low expectations hoping only that they would find some more useful role to play and exciting than selling pencils on street corners or playing a harmonica in some subway station accompanied by a bored dull faithful basset hound. Usually the blind were simply kept at home. Mama Alice expected to keep my father home for just a year but even that was one year too many.

She was elderly diabetic arthritic and still mourning for her daughter and other accumulated losses. Now she had to care for a blind boy who spent his days crying. Or when his spirits lifted smashing things in his room. His school had expelled him. His friends had fled and his sister and brothers had not been moved by his handicap to develop an interest in his affairs and so on the second anniversary of his predicted death. Mama Alice packed up his things kissed him goodbye implored him to summon more bravery and sent him to jail. Thank you. You're resting. Right. Yes yes yes yes yes. We're here.

So like yourself there are arrested. Here. So you're giving us an opportunity to be humble is that it. They're. Going to think this. You can start a follow up. I don't. You know there are there are tremendous number of very fine us as members of your I. Yes you're right. I say OK well I was hoping that's human. I will say that the this essay my essay on was happening and get us burgers delighted that it was included but it was a failure in a very important way which is to say that yes it was a protest against an ongoing project against a policy decision. The SS had no effect whatsoever. So the best one can hope for in a situation like this is that you know NSA can continue to raise

questions and values assert values against a policy that continues implacably against all any essay that would be written against it. I got a lot of hateful emails from re-enactors but the Park Service didn't didn't didn't condescend to take any notice. I will say that John Lotter the superintendent of the National Park Service at Gettysburg of the gotten from National Military Park is no longer the superintendent but this will give you an indication of what gets things moving. In the government. He was there was an investigation by the Department of Interior's inspector and Inspector General's inspector general's office into the financing of the new visitor center in the course of the investigation they seized his computer and they found on his computer hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of pornographic images that he had downloaded from the internet goods

including some fairly awful you know images allegedly of geology and so on. For this they transferred him. I was happy that he was out of there. Nevertheless my ass I had nothing to do with it in the rehabilitation goes on. So. Carol it woke me. This. Morning. You see it really so well harmless relatively relatively speaking relative to deforestation. I would have you know I would prefer a number of the land of little horses and other kind of entertainments to uprooting beautiful trees. Sure it is my great hope that the day will arrive when I can be upset that one of my essays was chosen over a different essay for Best American Essays. So no I'm I'm pleased and honored to be in this anthology whenever it happens.

And. And I hope it happens again. Yeah it's being put on the spot here I'd say. Well Gerald usually has you know a CD in different periodicals usas a year. I have a I try my best each year I send 100 essays so actions to the whoever's guest editor and often the same writer will have three or four essays published that year this usually happens when there's a collection coming out and the essays are all going into Barrios journals being printed before the publication of the question. And I since I started this I don't like sending multiple essays of the same writer to the guest editor. I have to pick one and I'm going to only send one now that's

not always the case. You know years ago John Updike I thought had two splendid essays and I sent both of them to Susan Sontag and she said I want both of them in the book and I said well no one else has ever been and why she said no I want both of these in the book let's do it that way and I said sure there's no rule against that. But then she also wanted her son in the book as well right. We agreed on that since David Rieff is a wonderful writer so so I often have to choose what you know one essay of several and tried to bake. I try to calculate which one might be most appealing to the to the guest editor based on topic arc or length or other considerations. Yeah. Well. That's. What I thought. First. For. Sure.

First. It's the. First. Time I miss it. Yes. But there's a these two books can be probably. But I think that I mean people have it with a dress that I I I know exactly what you're talking about. I find that they are. When E.B. White writes a personal narrative often it's an essay it's a narrative essay. When someone starts a personal essay that's considered they're thinking of doing a memoir. It's often not an essay it's just a piece of narrative prose that doesn't have the kind of essayist

shape to it. And that's why I think a lot of pieces that are Rick that are parts of memoirs that appear in periodicals over time. To my mind are not necessarily essays they're that that's why the term creative nonfiction and I think it though that term doesn't really solve anything. But I like to pass as Gerald is someone who writes first person narrative almost always and I like to hear your take on this. OK. And you teach this as well. I do. And now let's see if I can prove that. I think an essay is a personal essay when it when the content can move beyond the author and begin to include the readers. And so when it stops reading like a diary something intended only for the person who is composing it and can somehow start to connect in some universal way to the reader. And so my essay for

instance about my dad losing his sight is on its surface about a man losing his sight. Beyond that it is about a son who is mourning for his dad. It's about a father who is struggling to make sense of his life and a son who's trying to struggle who is struggling to make sense of his and his father's life. And so it's about family and the more you can have your essay rise above itself where all of the universal themes reside. Family love longing. Then it becomes a personal essay and stops merely being a piece of a chronicle of someone's experience which is self-contained and often only interesting to the person doing the writing. I think that's well put we're not when I'm looking at narratives I'm judging them to send out you know for genial Wolf once said that a good essay has you know

at its backbone some idea and I like to see some subject. You know I you know I'm sure that John could have written the entire essay he grew up in Gettysburg not dealing so much with the subject but with his childhood in Gettysburg and looking at at the trees. But but but he put his personal experience and he begins the essay with being there with his wife and in Gettysburg. And so there's that backbone of an idea which I like to see personal essays that are you know seven or eight pages and there's nothing there other than I did this I went here I did this and often in the most pedestrian of fashions I mean I can't tell you how many. Essays and so-called essays I look at and periodicals over the year and I've come up with the my paradigm passage which is one paragraph

I can't repeat it here but it's a composite of every bad piece of writing I've ever seen and it goes something like this. That night after arguing with my wife I pulled out of the driveway and I drove to my parents house in Hightstown New Jersey. I went down Route 138 and turned off that exit 9 where I usually made my exit and drove to my parent's driveway and I parked the car in front and I waited nervously while and it's no coincidence to me that the as I realized when I began the series that the rise of the memoir as a popular form of art coincided with the development of the keyboard you just typed as well it was a Truman Capote he said that he thought it was very unfair because I love Kerouac's On the road but he said it wasn't writing it was typing. And I think that a lot of these the personal essays that don't go anywhere are just cool

keyboarding and that they just don't add up to much. But would you like to say anything on the subject of ideas. But I'm curious to just ask you based on what you just said do you select from magazines that are only online or or blogs do you read them. I see looking for users. There's so much I see some of the major literary magazines online but most of the magazines I see are sent to me submissions of the I find most of the really quality essays are in literary periodicals like Antioch review or Kenyon review or Georgia review Gettysburg review these are the prime. But but I look at New Republic where your essay appeared all the time because even though they don't do a lot of self-contained essays they do so I don't want to miss those. Gerald your essay was in mechanics was on the Missouri River story review right. And that's a

really excellent review. But those are usually the sources but the blogs you know I'd have to clone myself into about five people to catch all the stuff on the internet but I do look at things that are and I ask in the each edition of the book I asked editors who are working with online magazines to send me their contributions. But I don't give them my e-mail address because I don't want all the submissions coming to me in huge documents so I just ask that they be presented in print for The New Yorker here earlier editions. It's very soft. In terms of the choices that were made for some years. In New York it was almost every other yet not quite heavy piece and I've noticed recently that it's said See here it's worth a look. At it as the selection choice. Based. On what you noticed that particular. Day.

Whether. Anything. Could Say. Well The New Yorker became at a certain point and if anyone like this is my personal opinion I think the humor stinks now in the New Yorker used to be so good David Sedaris isn't great but he's not an Ollie He doesn't do a humor column for them he does personal writing the humor is awful. You find only one story used to have the thing get three or four short stories back in the day and they became very news oriented and topical much more so than they used to be. This tendency started when Tina Brown took over and it's gotten slightly better but there the New Yorker is just is no longer a major source of the personal essay and when you do find personal essays in the New Yorker they're often. Excerpts from forthcoming books just as they often are in the Atlantic so that to

my mind the New Yorker has really you know they shifted gears and they decided as the Atlantic Monthly did to become a much more topically driven magazine. So I I don't read as much of the you know I get go through it every issue and I look at all the cartoons. I wish sometimes I wish I did best American cartoons and I could really you enjoy myself. But they're still great there. But the talk of the town the talk sections aren't even as essay as thick as they used to be used to find little vignettes. I think Ted Hoagland used to write small things and they used to be pieces I don't know if anyone reads the New York Times op ed column but Vernon Klinken Bourg writes these little sketches that are lovely. They're too short to be essays but I've often thought of maybe accumulating eight or nine of them and putting them all together in in in the volume. But New Yorker used to do more the more that there's so

topic they got very politicized I don't know when and they change very much. And he wouldn't want to comment on. I want to hear this question from young lady. There's another question. It's yeah yeah. Oh it's my you know story. That's what you want me to say. And I was one of those things that are some of the first on this and. I think. Well I have a you know if someone else were doing this I'm sure they would have different candidates. Each year there be so many permutations I look for pieces that are not overly long that have a real personal voice. And at the same time have some what Virginia Woolf said the backbone of an idea. So when I see something and I don't see a lot I mean I think in the course of the year there maybe it's not like there are so many

short stories or I would never want to do best American poetry because there must be a million poems published every year. But I think I probably. I'd imagine there are not more than 100 really genuine essays and I being a genuine as a NSA that you know it's stands alone that has that voice that you can say oh this is an essay. It's not a news item. And and you get tipped off by things if I start reading something it looks like an essay and I see acronyms all over the place the NC double way or the n double B or there's then I you know and I see numbers and dates statistics that I know I'm not in the world of the essay anymore I'm in the world of the article. So I you know that that's just the tip off. But I'm generally looking for things that are within that realm so most of the books probably show a very similar type of essay unless the guest editor is someone who comes from a more

journalistic background or has different and he's he's selecting different things because I I always give them free reign in their choices. But we maybe one more question is and when have in the center. Oh yes. That's. Me. Oh. I was. Bob. Gets sold. In. Search of jobs. Well. I say let's. Say versus. Let's talk love the nature of polish. Oh I. Just. Was were. Working. Your. Way. Through. College. Bob. Swears. Buzzfeed.

Lol. Lol. And also unpublished pieces can be there too. Yes have. You noticed that it was. All. Just. Stop. That's. Right. But he's creative nonfiction the journal goes back far so he was taking things in. You know doing this annual But we're sort of different and there's more of a I guess what I was saying before he leaves. I mean first of all I've never done the numbers but I would imagine in these and thought Geez that 60 to 70 pieces have to do with medical reporting or something like that. He's got this you know fixation on that subject but a lot of his stuff are he is more inclined to do the kind of memoir narrative

that fell on the back of the stone hell I guess was referring to that I don't consider essays so there is that differentiation that we we both make you know every now and then something will fall between you maybe we'll both choose the same thing but he he's looking at more of it and he's also he doesn't have the same restrictions I have and one of them is that every piece must have been published. Somewhere and I and I am privileging a lot more print magazines probably than than he is and I just I just because I find there's more quality work there and it's more accessible for me. But things are changing as I mentioned in my my talk and where as we move more and more toward you it's more like trying to publishing I mean I search. Certainly you know looking for essays in those places as well. Right.

Now. There are. You know more. Right here. Well I have a problem. My biggest problem is that it's hard enough to know what NSA is I certainly don't know what creative nonfiction it's. You know when I started this I had trouble I've never come up with a definition of the essay but Creative Nonfiction seems to me almost oxymoronic. And I know that Lee and I just have a piece that they're reading to be published is dealing with this issue of you know how far can you go creatively and still be writing what's called nonfiction if nonfiction means something that you're presenting as truthful and honest straightforward fashion. So that's that's that that's an issue that just doesn't seem to get resolved anywhere. And I've just been dealing with it so if you read creative nonfiction and they publish my list

based on what you know what you think and Gerald's in the end you're in the latest version. And that's an essay. Yes they publish Creative Nonfiction just published his latest piece in the latest issue. If anyone sees it. Well thank you all for coming. We appreciate it.