Chicago tribune printers row lit fest. Before we get started, id like to send out a special thank you to the lit fest sponsors. We are broadcasting live on cspan2s booktv, so were going leave some time at the end of this presentation for audience questions. When youre prompted, please come on up here to the microphone and speak into the microphone with the question so that our Live Television audience can hear the question. You can keep the spirit of the lit fest going all year long with a subscription to the printers row journal, thats the tribunes premium book section fiction series and membership program. Also please download the tribune books app. For more info on the lit fest as well as access to digital bookstore. Finally, the lit fest is very big on social media so feel free to take photographs and send messages, upload them to twitter, facebook and instagram with the hashtag prlf15. Before we begin the program, please remember to silence your telephones and turn off the flash on any cameras. And with that, i will introduce our interviewer Robert Polito, he is the president of the poetry foundation. Robert. Hi. Can everyone hear me . Great. So im Robert Polito president of the poetry foundation, but i think im here today mainly in my capacity as a nonfiction writer and for a number of years, almost a decade, i was lucky enough to be the judge for the gray wolf nonfiction prize. And over those years we got to pick and published some wonderful books by writers like Leslie Jameson or kevin young or teresa boda. And this extraordinary book by Margaret Lazarus dean is the most recent of the gray wolf prizewinning books. Its a powerful book that is about lots and lots of things. Its ostensibly about the American Space program, but i think its also a powerful book about the way that america has evolved over the last four or five decades since the early 1960s when, you know, john f. Kennedy promised to put a man on the moon and return him in a decade. Its i think its a book about the way that the various generations since then have interacted and intersected with america, and i think its also a book that very much in conversation with many of the other great writers in written the American Space program whether its tom wolf or Norman Mailer or arianna [inaudible] and i urge you to pick it up on the way out. But as we were talking, would it be appropriate, i think to start with, you know, you reading something and then maybe we could do a few readings kind of from it later and you can either do it from here or the podium, wherever youre more comfortable. Yeah, im going the read here. Can everyone hear me . So im going to read a few pages. This book has a prologue, so it doesnt need any explanation i can just right into it, because its page 1. Prologue, air and space. The Smithsonian National air and space museum in washington, d. C. Has a grand entrance on independence avenue, a long row of smoked glass doors set into an enormous white edifice. Most of the building nearby are marble or stone, neoclassical, meant to appear as old as the capitol and Washington Monument which flank them. The knew semiis an exception museum is an exception, it is meant to look futuristic which is to say it look like a 1970s idea of the future. I remember pulling open one of nose those doors as a child the airconditioning creating a suction that fought me for the doors weight. When i was 7 in 1979 i first visited the air and space museum with my father and little brother and for years of weekends after. This is what we did now that my parents were officially separated, now that the court gave our weekends a sense of structure they had never had before. Divorce is supposed to be traumatic, and as time went on, ours would become so, but not yet. For the time being, there was something festive about going on an outing with our father where we went each weekend was air and space. We stepped over the threshold and into the chilled hush of the interior one enormous room opened many stories high to reveal old time relics hanging by invisible wires from the ceilings. I knew the names of the artifacts long before i understood what they had done. The spirit of st. Louis, friendship 7. As a child i was vaguely aware that everything was out of chronological order, but i wasnt sure what the correct order was. The artifacts were simultaneously elegant and crude, all of them covered with an equalizing layer of dust. I liked to hear the sound of my fathers voice, and i liked the way he explained to me things most adults would assume were beyond my comprehension. My father was in law school, but being with him at air and space revealed how much he missed the air and space he studied most of his life. He told me about orbits gravity, escape velocity. I tried to understand because i wanted him to think i was smart. Even at its busiest air and space was always turned, the only sound hushed, the only sound the tourists who walked rev represently past exhibits. I looked at the exhibits. In the past, apparently, men ate food from toothpaste tubes while floating in space. Here was one of the tubes displayed in a case. In the past, men walked on the moon wearing space suits. Here was one of suits. Here were the star charts that astronauts used to find their way in space. Sometimes they had to do the math themselves in pencil and i could see their scrawled figures in the margins. Here was a moon rock brought back to earth in 1972 the year i was born. People lined up to touch the relic. Air and space, space flight seemed like an experience both pleasurable, the amniotic floating in zero g, the world out the window like a jewel in its black velvet case and also gruelingly uncomfortable, the cramped capsules and stiff space suits. No privacy, the merciless nothingness just outside the spaceships hastily constructed hulls. In the lobby was an artifact that at first looked like nothing more than a large charcoal gray circle 13 feet in diameter on the low platform in the middle of the room end cased in glass. That circumstanced was an object which turned out to be the crew capsule from apollo 11. The museums curators could have chosen the place the capsule on a pedestal or to hang it from the ceiling like so many of the others, but instead its position was unassuming, out on the floor where people could examine it closely. My father and brother and i did just that. And on the other side we encountered an open hatch revealing a beige interior with three beige dentist couches lying shoulder to shoulder facing a million beige switches. My father stood behind me. Three astronauts went to the moon in here. I noted the reverence in his voice. It took them eight days to get there and back. I murmured noncommitally. This made no sense, this claim that three fullgrown men had crammed themselves into a container even for an hour, the story seemed like a misunderstanding best politely ignored. Neil armstrong sat there my father said, pointing at the couch on the far left, Michael Collins sat here, and buzz aldrin sat here. For the rest of my life, the sillens of those syllables would call up those couches that tiny, cramped space the way the capsule felt both futuristic and outdated at the same time. Already the moon landings were fading into history, already my father had in his apartment a computer, much more powerful than the one carried onboard the spacecraft. For a child in 1979, the moon landing seemed largely fictional, an event our parents remembered from their own youth and liked to tell us about and therefore, boring and instructive. Yet standing in air and space, i found there was something pleasing about the contradictions contained in that capsule; the cozy utility of its interior combined with the risk of dust just past the hull. There was something i love in a way i couldnt describe still cant. This is the first time i understood that despite their long and growing list of appalling limitations grownups had at least done this. Theyd figured out how to fly to space. They had on at least a few occasions used their might and their metal machines to make a lovely dream come true. [applause] that was wonderful. Thank you. That was really, really beautiful. Maybe we should just sit with this opening for a beginning because id love to start with some writerly questions rather than just questions about the space program, which we can get into after a while. The bookin begins with a moment of kind of loss. Its when your parents separate. There could have been lots of other beginnings for the book. Was this always the beginning, and why did you start it there . This wasnt always the beginning. I had started and a coupled chapters later i start going as an adult i start going to the Kennedy Space center over and over to see all the last launches of the Space Shuttles. Andgo in many earlier versions, i had started at that point. I had started with the occasion of decidingh to start this sort of ridiculous project. But as i was finishing the book i kept sort of feeling like i hadnt quite dug in enough yet to the deeper meanings of the questions that i was asking. So iee was asking, you know what does it mean that the Space Shuttle eras ending what does itt mean that this vehicle which has accomplished so much is just being sort of unceremoniously retired and put away in museums . But i also felt like there were much deeper, sort of cultural questions, each emotional questions for the even motional questions for the individuals who care about space flight and just, you know, and our own experience of the world. And so i found myself wondering for myself well, where does this interest come from . Im not a physicist myself im not an astronomer, i dontse really know anything about it, but i love it and i feel deeply connected to it. And the more i thought about that, the more i really kept asking myself where was the beginning, what was sort of my firstt entry into the subject, and that was the answer going to air and space as a child. So i dont mean to emphasize the divorce can. People have asked me already quite a few times about the divorce material which i dont think is particularly tragic i think its sort of emblematic of that era in the 1970s. The divorce laws changed and suddenly a lot of people were divorcing. My family was part of that, but i dont mean to imply that, you know, the story comes from a painful ora traumatic place. But that yeah, those childhood visits to this place sort of, i think, planted a seed that took a long time to actually turn into a book. But i think whats so beautiful about it that withouto overemphasizing it its a moment where something whether somethings beginning or somethings ending, its blurred in a really kind of complicated way which i think hangs over the entire story of the, you know, of the shuttle. Because its sort of your family is ending in some ways while your interest in this is starting. Right, right. And i think that cultural moment is really interesting time to be starting this too. It sort of surprised me to think about, well, the first times i went there i was about 7, so it was 1979, and that was only ten years after apollo 11. A that seems long to me. It was already in a museum. Yeah. It was already in the museum covered with dust, and those events already seemed historical. The Technology Already seemed out of date. So that confusion too, i think finds its way into the book as well maybe in some useful ways. When did you make the decision to structure the book as the book is structured around the last three shuttle flights . Mainly . I tr think you brought the flashbacks. Tl right right. It was a lot of other material in between. I think i first came up with the idea that i should write about end of the shuttle in fall 2010 which was about when that decision was made final. Nasa decisions are never, never feel all that firm because their decisions are really made by congress. When Congress Makes a budget, theyre sort of deciding what nasas going to do in the future. So the news came out that thea shuttles going to end after these, you know, we have these many more missions left to do h and that felt uncertain. But it also seemed like this was probably going to be the end of an era. B so i did start with the idea that i should go to three. Launches. I wound up that was one launch for each of the three orbiters that were still flying. I wound up going to a lot of other events. I was invited to go to hinges that i would not to things that i would not have anticipated i would have the chance to go to, which was great. But i think i had started with the idea that id see the launch of discovery, of endeavor of atlanta dis, and each of them atlantis, and each of them would be a Different Event and following that trajectory would sort of follow what its like for something to so big to wind itself down. Were you always a major character in the book . Was it always you going to the launch, or was there ever a version of the book that was a little bit more abstract and historical . It was always first perp. It was always me going to the launch. Andwa partly because i so admires the nonfiction writers who doec use reportage who use thoseyo kind of techniques where they talk about their own experience of being in a place, including the experience of, you know being bitten by mosquitoes or being tired or needing coffee or, you know, wishing that you werent there. Of i find that i respond really well to Historic Events being written about in that really honest and subjective kind of way. Iti mean i think i hadnt realized how much i would need to put myself into it in order for it to make sense and that was something i worked on throughout many drafts. It often felt like i was putting myself in as a character but i wasnt entirely honest about what my own involvement in these events was. So i think i had to push myself to put myself into it more even though for me and, i think, for a lot of writers thats not veryi comfortable. When did that happen, and how did you dou it . I think very gradually. It had to do with the advice that i got from readers on various drafts including my husband whos also a writer and has always been a good reader for me, but also my editor at gray wolf and Steve Woodward who helped me finish the book. I kept getting feedback that it was working but we dont feel you there yet or i dont get how you feel about this. I kept sort of trying to speak for everyone, like all space fans feel this way all americans feel this way, and that theres a place for that but, ultimately, i think, in this kind of nonfiction i had to be able to say i feel this way for my own very idiosyncratic reasons. And that in a weird way that speaks to people emotionally much more effectively than trying to speak for everyone. And what about the other major characters in the book . Maybe we could start with two,ar omar and buzz aldrin, who are kind of opposites in a lot of ways. Yeah, yeah, thats interesting. So this book really wouldnt have happened in the way that itk did if not for my friend, omar who works at the Kennedy Space center for many years. His father worked at the Kennedy Space center for his entire life, sohe hes really, you know,s grew up in a nasa family, grew up in that part of the country ande. Knows these shuttles very well. And i got to know him when my first book came out. He wrote to me, we became, you know as one does in the modern era, we became friends through social media. We followed each other on facebook and twitter. And as the shuttle era started winding down he started inviting me to events at the Kennedy Space center which are not open to the general public, but space workers are allowed to invite family and friends forto certain e events. I really wouldnt have access at f the beginning to a lot of the things ii saw but aside from the physical access, i felt like by getting to know one person and his family i was able to see a kind of individual and emotional dimension to what it means for this era to be ending that i might not have gotten otherwise. I mean, to meet people whose entire careers their entire lives have been devoted to making the space vehicle fly and they are seeing it, you know, being put into museum ises yeah. Because hes simultaneously like virgil to your so i love that. But hes also somebody whos watching his world diminish and, to a certain extent kind of fall apart in the course of the book. So he serves lots of functions. And then kind of set against him is somebody like buzz aldrin and i think thats one of the set pieces, you know, of the book where you meet him and introduce him at its a book festival, in fact, right . Much like this one. Yeah. Yeah. Theres a chapter in the book inte which i spend the day with buzz aldrin, and i was asked to introduce him at a book festival because i was only other writer at same book festival whod written anything about space. And so we were sort of thrownth together. And i because its such a big best value and festival and his event was the headliner, we were in an auditorium that seated thousands of people. We wound up being trapped together for the entire day and it really was a chance not just to meet someone whos walked oned the moon which was remarkable, but it was also a chance to talk to him about what it means to him that the Space Shuttle was ending which it was at that time. I think there were still five flight toss go at the time that i met him. And it was interesting to see how my guesses to how he would react didnt always measure up with how he actually did react. He went to the moon in 1969 and ever since then has just been waiting foro us to get our act together and go to mars, and heth doesnt quite understand, as i dont want either, guess, why that hasnt come to pass. But as we talked before, he was a bit like, you know, kind of like spock at a Star Trek Convention [laughter] waiting for them to make theten next movie or Something Like that. Yeah,k yeah. I mean, what he did that we know him for he did so long ago now yeah. But hes just, he has this magnetic kind of rock star appeal. People wait, you know, outside in pouring rain for hours just to shake his hand and thank him for doing whatou he did. And sol its a weird kind ofnd combination you know, hes in his 80s. This was a long time ago that we went to the moon. But a kind of, a real outpouring of affection not just for what he represents and what he did but for him as a person who took a real perso