Tonight we are thrilled to welcome Rebecca Solnit of the publication date of her new book recollections of my nonexistence. Please note there will not be a signing tonight after the event but Rebecca Solnit did arrive early to sign each and every one of your books. [applause]. And now a bit our guests, Rebecca Solnit is the author of more than 20 books including a field guide to getting lost, the faraway nearby, a paradise built in hell, rivers, shadows and wanderlust. A history of walking, shes also the author of. [inaudible] a product of the California PublicEducation System from kindergarten to graduate school she is a regular contributor to the guardian and lid hub. Leslie jamison is the author of the New York Times just sellers the recovering and empathy exams and the novel the gym closet. She is the contributing writer for New York Times magazine and her work has appeared in publications including the atlantic, harpers, New York Times book review, oxford american and virginia quarterly review, she directs the graduate Nonfiction Program at Columbia University and ab please help me welcome Rebecca Solnit and leslie jamison. [applause] [applause] [cheering] [applause] before we get started i wanted to say, im not doing book signings afterwards because a more Perfect Technology for lots of people to handle objects which i then handle before i handle other peoples objects has never been invented and we are in a global pandemic. I also want to say, im canceling most of the tour for the next couple weeks because its the responsible thing to do. I want you all to wash her hands and i want you to use Hand Sanitizer between washing her hands and i want you to not touch anything and dont sneeze or cough on anybody, be really careful. Those of us who are healthy and robust and have options have an obligation to exercise utmost care for those who are more fragile and for the social body. [applause] i decided last week i wasnt going to sign books and assigning line because of germs. The pandemic is clearly, is not rumbling, is this a sign . Is it a sign or a subway . Is that like the ultimate new york question . I wasnt worried about my health but i didnt want to be running around the country being a vector and i didnt want to be an occasion for large gatherings because they are being banned. Thats the pandemic conversation, which may intersect with the recollections of my nonexistence conversation. I wanted to make that psa im going to read a little bit and then of a sit down with leslie to whom im so grateful to paying so much attention and coming up with such fantastic questions for our conversation. This is just a little bit of the beginning of the book. One day long ago i looked at myself as i faced a fulllength mirror and saw my imaged documents often and seemed to retreat as though i was vanishing from the world rather than my mind shutting it out. I studied myself on the doorframe just across the hall from the mirror and then my legs crumpled under me. My own image drifted away from me into darkness as i were only a ghost fading even for my own site. I blacked out occasionally had dizzy spells often in those days but this time was memorable because it appears as though the world wasnt vanishing from my consciousness but that i was vanishing from the world. I was the person who was vanishing and the disembodied person watching her from a distance. Both and neither. In those days i was trying to disappear and to appear and trying to be safe and someone. Those agendas were often at odds with each other. And i was watching myself to see if i could read in the mirror what i could be and whether it was good enough and whether all the things ive been told about myself were true. To be a young woman is to face your own annihilation in innumerable ways or to flee it or the knowledge of it, or all those things at once. The death of a beautiful woman is questionably the most political topic of the world, said edgar allan poe, who must not of imagined it from the perspective of women who prefer to live. I was trying to not be the subject of someone elses poetry and not to get killed. It was trying to find a poetics of my own with no maps, no guides, not much to go on. They mightve been out there but hadnt located them yet. Or find a way to admits amidst abwork that many and most young women have to do. In the early years i did not do it particularly well or clearly but i did it ferociously. [applause] [applause] thank you for being here rebecca, its wonderful to have the chance to talk to you and its a gift to all of us. It was wonderful to hear the beginning of the book in your voice. Thank you. I was wondering, we are in a strange time and theres a lot i want to ask you about the book on its own. In the past couple days leading up to this event ive been thinking about the ways in which the ways in which some of these ideas in this book, particularly about ideas about how Community Functions and how art arises out of community and how identity raises out of community. They feel like they speak to this moment in particular ways but maybe we could start with how you been thinking about this present moment we are in, thinking about contagion and health in the ways we met care for each other. How some of those very urgent realities of the moment are spoken to you by the book, speak to the book or how whether they are connections that feel present for you . The tragedy of epidemics is that no ordinary disasters earthquakes, hurricanes, etc. , if the authorities and racism dont muck it up too much, people often come together in amazing and beautiful ways as they did for example in Hurricane Sandy and 9 11, much more so than anybody really reflected at the time as we let the bush administration, i think i can say, hijacked the meaning of that event. The idea we all have to be separate to be safe is such a complicated one that gets so close to xenophobia and as we sit here in a synagogue, weird ideas about purity and although im excited to be in a synagogue and especially a synagogue that ab whats interesting to me is we have to be separate to be together, that being separate is how we take care of each other, we are going to separate ourselves in various ways out solid asolidarity. And how do we communicate that . Its almost the antithesis of what happened to me as a young woman, i remember at a certain point i was like why was by political when i was young . Then realizing to be politically up to feel like you have something in common with other people and that you have power. I started out with neither of those things and obviously have ended up with plenty of both. But it was a journey. If you like also, every crisis is partly a storytelling crisis. How do we tell the story that we are doing this not because other people are bad and we must shun them but because we care about them, how do we tell the story that we are separated physically because were coming together. In terms of managing the cdc, the information flows and the rest. I think i think theres a lot to say from what you said but i think there is something really subtle and vital about the role that narrative can play in framing separateness as a form of care rather than a form of fear mongering or scapegoating or distancing and that even just starting to talk about it in that way the separateness is a way we are trying to care for each other rather than protect ourselves. Its already an important framework to put out there. Thinking about care rather than protection. Its also good to be interesting because we are such a profoundly unequal society, some of us have great healthcare coverage, some have none. Some people can telecommute from home, some people are gig workers who will be, lose their apartment if they dont show up and work even if they are worried, even if they are sick. Theres been a bunch of people, this is not my original point, noting that a better case for medicare for all, paid sick leave and a bunch of other stuff could not be made then by this pandemic, which i think also makes a great case for Elizabeth Warren, sadly, who was a [applause] [cheering] my people [applause] saying smart things about the pandemic and economic crisis last month and saw it coming. Of course, Elizabeth Warren could be a beautiful segue to the fear and loathing and silencing of women in american society. I was gonna pick up on something you said a few minutes ago about how when you are young woman thinking about it meant to be political to you then that you neither felt he had power nor deeply in touch with the feeling of having things in common with others and us connecting that to the portion of what you read where you talk about one of the really core ideas of the book that to be a young woman is to face the prospect of your own annihilation. Both of those made me think of one of the really compelling origin stories in the book that i thought would be a great point of departure which is the story of your writing desk the concrete literal base of the writing comes from and you tell the stories, and him hoping you might share with us of receiving the desk as a gift from a friend who had experienced trauma and you say i wonder if everything ive ever written is a counterweight to that attempt to reduce the young woman to nothing. I wonder if you could tell us the story about desk and the fraud reflected the writing that happened on it. The book has a pretty mild start after that opening passage. Its the moment when the economy was going to turn away from the new deal and the Great Society and social safety net to become the monster that now destroys so many lives in this country. I was looking in the want ads for the cheapest apartments in San Francisco and there was a 200 a month apartment and i called the number and the building manager told me to come and look at it and i made an appointment and so i start with this story thats also a really positive story about a complete stranger and old black man who saw how much i wanted and needed this apartment and a place of my own and went out on a limb to make it possible for me to have it. Then i talk about the apartment and the neighborhood which was a black neighborhood in a deeply spiritual neighborhood this is the chapter about my experience as a young woman constantly harassed and menaced on the street and elsewhere. In a society that would not acknowledge existence of this violence except by telling me that i just had to accept it as a given and adapt myself to the fact that lots of men want to kill and harm and torture and degrade and intimidate and insult women all the time. The chapter begins as a segue from pleasant stuff from my apartment about writing desk and describing it it was given to me right after i moved into the apartment by a friend of mine id known for a few years who had left her boyfriend the year before to punish her for daring to leave him for daring to choose what she needed rather than he wanted he stabbed her 15 times and left her to bleed to death. And because somebody came along, because there was an ambulance, because they were transfusions in the hospital, she didnt die, all the police blamed her and the school she was and blamed her and everyone blamed her for what happened and there was no justice. She moved far away this is one of the really interesting things about writing is that it makes me look harder, go deeper, everything ever written, i write in chairs i write on sofas, i write in bed, i write everywhere but mostly ive written at that desk since i was 19 and it was only writing this book i realized everything ive ever written has been given to me everything ever written has been written on a platform given to me by a woman and mad tried to silence forever. And therefore i can think everything ever written, which was pretty early on about feminism in my pocket magazine cover story 1985 in wanderlust and so many things since then. It has been a counter to that attempt to make women nobody and nothing and dead and silent and powerless. There was actually kind of shocking. Now i know i can get a bigger desk. [laughter] for a while. Or that you have been writing on a really big desk the whole time. Thats a great way to think about it. The desk has been bigger than you. The desks legs go all the way down to the bottom of the story. I was thinking about how sort of you make choices around what that writing involves and i think certainly for me as an admirer of your work and somebody whos been really influenced by your work im sure i speak for many people when i talk about that admiration, one of the things i love the most is the way that you are work totally raises distinctions between what it means to talk about the personal and political and the counterweight youre describing very much involves invoking both in trying to document the kind of constant conversation between the personal and political. I was really struck by a moment in this book when you describe coming out of this background as an undergrad was more focused on journalism and shifting or pivoting away from the more objective language of reportage or kind of the mode of the oped toward trying to find a more personal language that could get i wonder if you could talk a little bit about what that evolution was like away from the sort of objective editorial journalistic mode not that you have banded the methods of reportage but claiming the role that the personnel could play in the political import the choice to invoke the personal in your work, how both how thats evolved for you over the years and how you think about that question of invoking the personal. aball of us speak from a particular place that has to do with who we are and values and consequences. Because before that there was such a sense of something neutral and objective which is usually white and usually male and usually pretending to some weird rationality. But what i was really doing back then and 80s was writing in three different veins, trained as a journalist actually abi was doing journalistic work, writing working as an art critic or you sue authoritative tone but its personal and your opinion but its very extra light these are my opinions and associations but not this is my inmost story. Then i was writing much more personal lapidary essays and it just felt like three things that were really far apart and then it was actually being an activist that changed everything. We so often talk about activism as a kind of broccoli you should eat because its good for you with implication a [laughter] a lot of the best things that ever happened to me came to me and the best people that ever happened to me in the 1988 i started going to the annual spring actions begun by franciscans were more than 9000 Nuclear Bombs had been detonated experiences that became part of it comes up later. It was such an extraordinary experience. You had mormon down windows atomic veterans, nuclear physicist, japanese survivors of atomic bombs dropped there and japanese buddhist monks, these wonderful franciscan priests and nuns who were radicals. Lesbian and separatist payday guess because of still 80s. Scary tiedyed guys who kept trying to hug you. But it was abwe were dealing with the rehearsals for the end of the world and this dusty remote place very few people had ever seen was where the cold war was being enacted. It was also western shoshone land i became very involved in the western shoshone land rick stargell which was one of the most transformative and eyeopening and wonderful things that ever happened to me. I did a few things for them but they did so much for me. It was the complexity of all the layers of meeting western attitudes toward the desert, the history of civil disobedience from throw through gandhi antinuclear activism all these other layers ia realized they needed every tool i had that meant journalism, critical analysis, you can actually take the tools you use for criticism and apply them to the politics of the nonrepresentation of native people. The representation of Nuclear Weapons and war and the coded masculinity that an anthropologist was decoding in new among nuclear physicist. You could use all those tools but also the personal experience. What is it like standing in handcuffs watching the most beautiful sunset in the world in a kettle pin with 500 people who care about the same things you do. I realize that, i bought into the idea this was three different kinds of writing but could all be one kind of writing. And at the personal voice experiential thing was it like to actually be in this place. What is it like to camp next to a nuclear crater. What is it like to be handcuffed and driven 70 miles in these rituals of arrest . Was it like to unlearn the versions of western history that so erased native americans . Was it like to drive to join the indian wars in the 1990s manifestations. So that was actually probably my one big literary breakthrough was, they all belong together and then predicts my second butch savage dreams. So, in a way your answer to the question enact the very thing you are describing by invoking those particular examples of being handcuffed and that cattle pen and watching that beautiful sunset 500 people who care about the same things you do. It gives me chills anyway that feels quite related to what youre saying. There is a beautiful passage in the book where you describe a long essay about so much of this book as people are getting is about you coming of age as a writer and not just comingofage one but comingofage over and over again. You talk about adulthood as a constant process of evolution rather than a single threshold to reach but you describe trying to work on this essay about walking alone at night and you say you are looking for a way to wed the poetics of what you wanted with the politics of what obstructed you from having it or reaching it. I was so struck by the desire to wed the poetics of desire with the kind of politics of obstruction it made me think about the role of poetics. I was curious to hear you speak to as it moves through this book. What role you think beauty has come of the production of beauty, the production of beautiful language. The particular articulation of outrage or injustice. What role does beauty play in that project . Works on a great later literary influences is abyou saved us from the hideous clichcs of marxism warned over moldy casserole in the back of the refrigerator marxism. And gave us this poetic language that was grounded as girls people are in metaphor and flowers and animals. Theres a sense that politics is ugly and impersonal and very separate from beauty. Somebody asked me what was the last book that made yo