Marilynne Robinson & Sara Paretsky

to others to books to community reading programs and k mcintyre and today on dr bruce then housekeeping to read across florida selection for this year will also hear from their upright ski boots book leading kansas if the two thousand fourteen kansas reads books chosen by the state library of kansas housekeeping was the first novel written by marilynne robinson published in nineteen eighty it was nominated for a pulitzer prize in literature prize robinson eventually won in two thousand five for her second novel juliet housekeeping won the pennant hemingway award for best first novel and has been called one of the best english language novels of the twentieth century marilyn robinson is coming to lawrence on march six as part of the reid across lawrence programs sponsored by the lawrence public library the library has sponsored several book discussion groups and this tuesday march fourth the nineteen eighty seven film adaptation of housekeeping will be screened at

katie's woodruff auditorium marilyn robinson joins us by telephone from her office in iowa city iowa where she talks about housekeeping the two main characters ruth and her sister lucille and how they end up in the care of their eccentric and sylvie mother of the few growth leaves the met her mother can fit an even commit to the fact that with a former mechanic but i am then the grandmother dies and they're left with the care of two great time when they are too old for the expected to love one to care for them and so then they go to their mothers for fear that the m filthy and he had a third of everything you know what that there and i can feel without the cliff

notes you know practically feel ease in housekeeping is the contrast between their family home which in its sense of permanence it was billed by recently seals grandfather and it's the one stable part of the story the permanence of that home and the transience of the people who come to care for lucille and ruth oh well i mean i think we have a fairly well that's a very iffy attempt to maintain household in the end the indefensible so that little nurturing capful of reality that a family can live within and be reassured by in life ian so even though it might be very moderate even though you know that the sort of comfort that about preserving i've been vocal from mouth of the racquet and the fact that you've become

very aware of when you're living in a place with a the fear of climate and one but all these human arrangements that are quite fragile and that you don't need the aspiration to build permanent see insecurity and so on on the planet you know i heard him unwelcome will have time to kind of you know it's a very poignant i think very abruptly water plays a huge roll in housekeeping that the town that they live on and finger bone is located on all laid out there's a lot of rain that there's an epic flood when info becomes to care for them and they're so wonderful quote that i'd like to i'd like to repeat from the book water is almost nothing after

all it is conspicuously different from air only units tendency to flood and founder and drowned well i i think that that probably my opinion of water in here but a fairly big factor in life for people living environments that are on the coast i like steak for whatever the fact that though in large quantities that you know formidable and however beautiful colorful you know people often have to contend with in one way or another the name of the time that they live in is finger bound can you tell me what would think are bound means to you well you know it's hard to know exactly where

they have come from when you're writing fiction but one of the things and quite with that the vetting of that novel you've been a part of the country where big names like flat head and here bob and ann richards were pondering mean they'd be like that if actually i'm there like of gunfire names like that and it came to me i mean it came to me as an analogy to the threat of rape maiming that you know that for some reason a fixed characteristic there's a memo you know when i was a very small child i remember hearing my father he got tired of the ground and the committee and we kind of have a group called billable to my ear and i could think of that only the primal memory that's a

great story this book housekeeping is a story that is full of women there's the girls ruth and lucille their mother bear and sylvie their grandmother they come under the care for well as you mentioned of their great aunt's not only is there an absence of many in the book very bad and they're also doesn't seem to be a tremendous sense of curiosity about the man who might be in their lives their father for example sylvia's husband they're families that didn't i didn't really intend to write a book that had so you know that comes when you're excluding male characters that you know one thing in frequent that i grew up in that you know a very sort of from your feeling part of the word the fare even my family which we're all going to very much be

about women and but when i went back with crooked know i became very aware that in the five people at any notion of the way if at all it was very much dominated by threat of giant aggressive men end this week the thing to me to be on a problem if not something that that i think we've been convicted away with an unfunded famine felt that something that's been imposed by the threat of you know so i would thing i'm dr everything in fairfield that when i found that writing the book i would write in a male character and then he could fit in them there's nothing without the name fighting in baghdad again at hand done you know so by the time the book we have a reasonable momentum that we thought they found female characters which made without being of the fifty eight intention of mine this was published back

in nineteen eighty eight and chosen as the reid across lawrence here in two thousand fourteen would like for you to revisit this book thirty four years later well you know i mean if i have that correct every felon nobody can change that will kind of you know you have to be aware of that definitively visiting the medical field of my youth although i were very young whatever the things that i am i and you know i like it and i would not change it completely cut the debt i think would you know that the faithful to the kind of thinking that i was doing at the time and that i have become you know that have a legitimate thing for me we've been visiting with marilyn robinson seed joins us from her office in iowa city still be in town on march six speaking at the plymouth congregational church as part of their reach across land activities thank you so much for joining us today ms robinson

kansas public radio has two copies of housekeeping to give away thanks to the generosity of the lord's public library if you like it seems to win a copy god or website k pr that kay you that edu and click on ticket giveaways again that's k pr that pay you that ed you click on ticket giveaways you can find out more about the read across lawrence program at the lawrence public library's website lawrence that allied be that paid as that us every year the state library of kansas host a state wide reading program this year's election is bleeding kansas buys their property who grew up in lawrence borucki is best known for her be a worse as key detective novels but her novel bleeding kansas is a bit of a departure borucki spoke about the book at the lawrence arts center in january two thousand

eight well i've been on the road around the country with leading 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'd had email messages from any number of lorenz eons past and present say that they've seen themselves or da vern miller 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 certain he opened a question but i came away from my time when then much impressed by not just the 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 four h 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 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 a different car tires especially since it would've meant freehand drawing in the extra half mile now they're done

and the ground here is my sort of main family my hero family there the new crops but michigan's a 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 did and 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 suck 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 makes even kings horror novels so compelling and so convincing 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 at 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 and i also love the only leasing on the subway i wasn't so crazy about the beet skin glistening stand under bare feet and 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 the scene is across the special 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 to talk 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 in trouble interpreting the midwest when we retrieve their trunks 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 themselves 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 time 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 because 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 keep the can on the endless nights of childhood summer air doris starred

in grammar school i fell in love with a history of kansas of bleeding 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 amen 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 board's advice 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 crown once 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 when 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 absorbing 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 humorous 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 into 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 value of 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 and my father who was the first jew hired in a tenured position at the reason 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 line an old farmhouse five miles east of town five point two moves east of

that house a family name 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 side of a previous house that had burned to the ground we had three fireplaces the mantles were made of polished walnut with the nation tyler signing their sides and forming a fire breaks in front of the hearth 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 it quickly 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 that 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 you would stand in your heart wide 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 say words it's called 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 head 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 do tend to exaggerate 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 throw 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 see in the world at anyway we had about one happier 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 they 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'd begun 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 cancer and big would it's in the country they slip into the house to one or more of the five doors and a dirty basement then crawled up the heating vents into the ground for cement house graduate took on a very distinctive cast 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 a 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 memoir grill you're 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 a niece of one of the owners is going to move in and she wants to retrieve his stash of dope anwar is 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 wrong why didn't mind them so much in the daylight but she didn't want to land on one in the dark another city held up right here we won't make it snappy she set her eyes took a breath and slid down the coal shoot he caught her at the bottom line on the ground i don't want to step on a spider i don't fool around with me like that i don't like it she added he crawled 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 come up 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 pesky 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 and duck cleanliness 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 of usher in the us

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 perhaps the 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 and certainly the place most closely identified with my writer's voice and yet a part of me has always remained here or 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 teams going back in like 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 s going off 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 you 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 in turn the leaves into green is it reflected back and blinding light was 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 raising 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 have a long streak of dirt up the front and her knees were bleeding sandman addresses part of the summer four h project to the county fair it was thinking along with a placard at the left side and jane rowse galloping and she 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 quake to harvest the corn she laid down between the rows and stared at the sky through the reading 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's good and 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 birds sang through the rows picking the corn the ears were just taking shape the kernels a listers states she races still that a meadowlark perched on the stock right above her pickup to bright eyes years of wanting her opinion on the world the

making of corn 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 bird 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 greer is ever so

great grandmother abigail had seen a vision of mary as a black slave cradling her 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 sight of 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 abigail as diaries and letters is what the victorians would've labeled an ardent so susan longs for her own vision and she keeps the causes who redefined one his biggest 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 president part of my personality in the novel and i guess it perhaps it's my my 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 chip on their shoulder is there like some of my relatives many people that you know yourself friends or coworkers and we all know the trippy optimist his glasses have full and in theory pessimist ms glass is half empty but the shape inside my green chili say or every window on 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 shape 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 to junior who is chipped stage 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 work 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 bewildering know 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 seventy needed to pass in order 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 a loser was right then jews are bound for those searing fires are rejecting jesus as the messiah which i said you're 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 that nineteen sixty six encountered did make me laugh but the letter to my dying mother made me think 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 appointed career and dying patients until then sent home morphed into myers shaken him bleeding can says while the old house that i grew up and turning to the free mental home as i said in the novel and to 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 and 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 get 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 key holidays in the pagan year these ceremonies include drumming drinking and dancing around a bonfire the shape is it really 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 grier's a congregation was i created at church right along the edge of the color centennial park parked his riverside congregational church that was founded by abigail in and get him to really 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're pretty much on satan's came

after the first of the wiccan bonfires when susan grill year has been seen dancing and even taking a drink meyer can't wait to share her reaction when the world that shaped 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 or maybe re joyce is and nothing could be further from the truth we pray for our neighbors to come to jesus and experience a close personal relation with their creator and savior can you profess jesus and dance before the fires that are a foretaste of jail now my full

bible christians are there not a totally joyless bunch of people robbing the younger grandson he loves music he plays guitar he writes signs 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 minds 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 guns in the grille years there's no room for any outsider there especially not one as eccentric

as gina harry the wiccan let alone a v i i certainly wouldn't be able to have the bonfires and chicago or a perfect read have her no and 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 black grass and then susan not beside him like him sing them to feel so oil and 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 blossom 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 the bubbling it's recalling 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 center on jim and susan in the dark they know more attention to the humans and in the silos across the fields in the east a faint strain of pink heralded the rising sun they're fearful if the reading from leading him to this year's campus re election for its key will be taking part in a twitter conversation about leaving kansas on march eleven find out how you can take part at daddy daddy daddy you that casey f b that info i'm kate mcintyre kbr present is a production of kansas public radio