His new book, this is chance the shaking of an allamerican city am voice that held it together talking with jasmine hughes. Youre in for an excellent evening. Want to give a huge thanks to everybody who is happening, jon and jasmine and all of you showing up. Green lot storefronts are closed but the community is still here and that means so much to us so thank you. Just a couple of housekeeping orientation kind of things. Were in a webinar which means you can hear and see the speakers but they cannot see and hear you but they can see your name. If you have anything you want to share, use the chat icon and type your message nets chat windows. If you specifically have a question that youd like to have answered in the q a you canny the q a icon. Jasmine will be pulling questions from there start thinking about them now. We are recording tonights event so look for video or audio versions on website and social Media Channels and books. This is the porsche part. Our book stores are closed for shopping but jons books are available on our website at greenlight become store. Com. So you can paste the living in the chat and purchase is on the website and gets delivered to your home from our suppliers ware shouse. So thank you for your support of jon and the become store in buying the book. So, introduce our speakers tonight. Or interviewer is jasmine hughes. She is a story editor and writer for New York Times magazine and a 2020 recipient of the asme next awards for journalists under 30. She will be talking with her colleague, jon mooallem. A longtime writer at large for the New York Times magazine and a contributor do numerous radio shows and other magazines, including this American Life and wired. His first become, wild ones, store but looking at people looking at nails in america. A note baseball book of the year by New York Times book review, canadas national post, among others. His new book this is chance is an electrifying and lavishly empathetic and portrayal of one Community Rising above the randomness. A real life fable of Human Connection with standing chaos. So youre in for something special. Jon with heal a reading from the book and then talk with jasmine and take questions. So, jon, take it away. Thank you so much for having me here in my own home. I thanks, jasmine, for doing this with me. Okay. Guest its hard to figure out what to read from a book because the book just tells one long story so without having set anything up i thought i would read the first few pages. And its almost like a cold open. The booked case this is chance. Written by jon mooallem, pushed by random house, eddiedty anti warmed tell tuesday store other single catastrophic weekend in a farway town and of the people who lived through it. Ordinary women and men who, when the most powerful earthquake ever measured in north america struck, just before sundown on good friday night 1964, found themselves thrown into a jumbled and ruthlessly unpredictable world they did not recognize and spend the next few days figuring out how together to make a home in it again. The name of the town is anchorage, alaska. A blotch of western civilization in the middle of emptiness. In those days the state of alaska was still brand new and often disregarded as a kind of free floating addendum to the rest of america. But anchorage was alaskas biggest and crowded city, community whose essential spirit one visitor rote reached aggressively and greedily to grasp the future, impatient with any suggestion that such things take time. It was a modern day Frontier Town that imagined wait as metropolis, straining to make itself real. That determination made it difficult for those living in anchorage to recognize how indifferently the city they were building could be knock down. To imagine that early one friday evening, the very ground beneath them might rear up and shake their town, like a dog shaking an animal he has kill as one man later described it. Even while the earth was moving, the ferocious strangeness of what was hang in anchorage was hard for team to internalize or accept. Build little, peeled off foundations, fronting on themselves, split in half or sank. Fourfoot high ground waves rolled the the roads as if the the pavement were liquid. The city buckled and bent. It wasnt as though before the quake people in anchorage pictured these things happened and looked them as impossibly. Nuss pickunder teed and why would they . They looked around and registered they saw as stan and permanent. The world that just was. But there are moments when world we take for granted instantly changes. When reality is abruptly upended and the unimaginable overwhelms real life women dont walk around thinking about that wi but its there,ed a random and without warning, kind of terrible magic can switch on and scratch bell our lives. As life magazine would put is struggling to explain the hidden volume actuality that it caused the earthquake, similar the earth is quivererring all the time. Host you want to start . Guest yeah. Host okay. Thats all. Host its a nice to have a book in hand and follow along while somebody else reads it. Feels a little bit like being in church. The most interactive experience ive had with someone in a while so thank you. Guest thank you. We can do more of that at any time. Just give me a call. Host hi, arch, thank you for being here, this is really weird and im, i think more nervous than i would be if i was in person, mostly becauses cant stop stare might own face but a is a narcissist. But jon because were all indoors and will be for the foreseeable future, some of us have a little more time on ours ons. How do you write a book . Where do you begun . How does it begin to happen . Guest yeah. Thats a really good question. This was like very much a labor of love for many years before it was, like, work, or so, yeah, just the book is history, right . And so what happened was i found out about the character, genie chance and realized she was radio broadcaster that had all these recordings of herself on the air after the earthquake. Her family roared them. And learned that nothing had ever been done with. The and i learned about that how to a roundabout way did started looking for them. And because if you tell true stories for your job, when you hear theres like this cache of untouched material sitting somewhere, its like a treasure hunt, and it was just a process of that walk back in 2014 so years of just looking for that, looking for any other documentation, and archives, call looking up for survivors. Get names of survivors of the quake who are involved in the stories and calling, 28 people in a phonebook and not finding who your looking for. That went out for years and sucked. So bad and then every once in a while there would be you rid hit pay dirt and then it was enough to like sign up for a few more years of that. That was just like how it started. Just like trying to get over the fear because im a magazine journalist and usually i can call whoever i want and find out whale want to no with enough persistence and i was worried can i tell a story lick this if i hit points where the people i need to talk to are dead, not going to remember it anyway, and nothing would have been written down about this particular question i have or this particular turn the story took, and what would happen if that happened, and i was just cowardly about it. I wouldnt write a book proposal for a long time because i kept wanting to find more and more stuff so i felt like i had i would have enough. Host actually going to be one of my questions. Theres so much stuff. One of the my very favorite part offed the book is i earmarked it is when youre describing the earthquake itself and the woman on page 35, the earth opened and fell apartment one woman in turnagain said, good, outload. Never licked that car. Just like never liked that car. Stuff like that. The sort of thing that as a big fan of your magazine writing, have come to notice in your actual reporting because its so much easier to recreate. Immersing yourself in the archives and listening to recordings and studying this, how do you decide what to keep out . Guest oh, yeah. That was really hard because like i definitely thats the pleasure of this job. You do the stuff you write you get to catch people kind of being themselves when theyre not paying attention to themselves. You get to notice things, and then you get to describe them and thats to me is the most pleasurable part, and that was weird because it was like trying to capture that from these static old pieces of paper. Like you you got that same eye for detail but its harder to fine them. And so what to leave out is like honestly the problem of what to leave out was i decided would tell a story of just throw days in anchorage and i thought that would be a way to simplify things. And of course they theres a whole universe in the three days. What was painful was finding these hit this pay dirt, find huge resources and find them for things some native alaskan communities wiped out by tsunamis and i had read a lot about them and i found a few people that werent who were tan tan general sally involved but that it was not in anchorage and they came to anchorage but not for the the days and felt like thats an amazing story, be wonderful to try to recreate that but i cant. Then one point i was in sitka, meeting with an older couple who lived in anchorage, and this woman nancy sort of like i was there two or three days and on my last afternoon there she was like i want to show you something, she handed me this four or 500 page report that she had been an an to the anthropology professor in anchorage and she had spent months recruiting experiences of people in the communes and hands me this document she never published. It had everything maps of where everyone in the village had been when the tsunami hit, what they were doing, he playing monopoly, she was making a doll and this crazy. I know i cant really use this and if i dont use this, no one will see this. So it was a really painful process. Try not to be hubristic about it like i had some outside role in preserving this but in a sense i did. Was looking at peoples garbage. If didnt make something of it, it was getting thrown out. Host a question already which im actually how much of your Research Time was spent on location in alaska . Guest yeah. I went there three or four different times, guess, in a couple years stretch, and it was weird because there wasnt their there was some libraries there i was using for sure, and there were some people i worked with that i had to track down but a lot of time its would track down people and have so much documentation, i knew more but what theyd been doing that weekend than they knew. So i be all nerdy with my shuffling my papers around. And you got the call at 8 30 p. M. And this is like some 86yearold man was like issue dont know. So i was really disappointing. Some of the conversations were good just to get the like the atmosphere, learn about what is was like to live in anchorage at this weird moment in its history. I would say, ive been reading all about this guy and he sound like kind of a dweeb, just like he just likes fixing radios. Hes lake, oh, yeah and tell you some story they walked in the Radio Station in the more than and he had been up all night. And check issue got it. So, no it was weird how little time i had to spend there relative to howard to recreate it. At one point i took a trip to essentially just walk around and just for my own confidence i think to feel like go to he place is was writing about even though they were totally different 50 some odd years later, their intersection, this part of town so i had some confidence i new how the city fit together and wasnt a clean carpet bagger about it a complete carpet bagger. Host how did that trip make you feel. It made host how you get back intosorry, didnt mean to cut you off. Guest yeah. No. Did make me feel more look i have the authority to tell the story. I never thats always the struggle. I never feel like entitled to tell the story but did help in that way and also just really fun. A strange reporting trip because it was like there wasnt a todo list really. I dont know. Just like looking at i had a genies account of where she had again in the first hour after the quake and i walked the route. If she turn to her right would have soon the mountain and to get it in my head and that was fun. Very indulgent process to spend money to do that but i tried make productive, so it was really fun. Host so i asked around and someone told me that you had a pretty insane spreadsheet where you kept track of your research. Guest yeah. Id love to talk about my spreadsheet, jasmine, bless you. I remember saying to my wife when i was writing the book, when she was like i think i like this book sounds like it could be commercial. You could do well. I didnt want to do well enough to like other journalists will ask me how i did it so thank you. Doesnt matter if anyone is watching. So, yeah, basically i was just picking up odds and ends of letters and photographs and everything and just photographing them with my phone, and i just numbered them all and just have this spreadsheet of more than a thousand individual things, some of which were like a 50page interview transcript, and so i had that and i would read through them all and i had a text document. I tried to find some fancy software that would let me do it and i just asked all my very techy friends and i just got confuse sod i had this rinky dunky text document that was a time line and was i read through the thing is would transfer information to the timeline. 8 00 p. M. On friday the fire chief is having this conversation and heres what re he rounds and type it into the timeline. Then i had this monsterrous timeline document that went for hundreds of pages basically. Sometimes like even within the the records were so amazing that sometimes even within a tenminute stretch id have thousands and thousands of words just like here is what is happening in the Police Station and this neighborhood. And i was super fun. That was a very challenging. Im not a very organized person normally. But i was very proud of myself. Managing all this information. It was just overwhelming otherwise. Host did you feel like whats my question i can imagine that being able basically to capture a moment and be able to see it in every single vantage point, how kind of makes you feel like god. Thats how i would feel but im a nerd. What is it like to have a huge trove of information and be the huge seeing eye of everyones experiencing and able to collate everybody tell the. Guest thats a really good question. I mean issue think in truth it didnt definitely felt that way. I think it feels that way more now that ive written the book because you dont know what i didnt know. I was able to write around things didnt know but that was real phenomenon, and i write about it in book. Also just you could see everything. You could see risks that people were taking they didnt understand they were take, theres dramatic irony. Or see the future. See this guy is super in charge and everyone likes him and he is doing great work but in a month he while die in a many crash. So i talk about that in the wood bus the third of the book is the fact this Community Theater was doing our town and was have these weird feelings, and meet 90yearold alaskan guy who i had spent months reading about at a 40yearold alaskan guy and then to meet him and be like youre an old man. Thats like see where the stories end was also really erie. And so i finally read our town theres the statement manager character in the play who is in that same position. Somehow never really explains but he notes what is going to happen to up a character is standing on stage and theres escapes happening around him and hell see that paper boy will go to war in a couple years and die and that kind of started dictating how i wrote the book, the beginning of the book the reason why i say this booked call the the chance. Thats hour ourston starts so i did nat the become. Basically nash ahead and show you just really quickly where these people wound up, not everyone dish mean, its auld but it felt like thats the right way to do that story. The anytime nims book review did not care for that element of the host we dont read the New York Times in this family. Guest it felt strange to do it because it felt strange to have that knowledge but i just felt lick theres something to painful about seeing the seeing life on that scale. That its lick this super intimate three days, but you have all this knowledge of the magnitude of what is going to happen to these people and where do they come from and where are they going . And theyre all going to the same place, all going to die. And most of them are dead and i knew hough it happened, and thats like just a bizarre way to experience it. We dont have that in regular life. Host right. Do you kind of talk about you as the stage manager of the book . Lets talk but our town. Guest started to sound like were on acid or something but lets do it. Host how do you know im not on acid. Special occasion. Guest i dont know. Host lets we can just start with the opening quarter of the book. I thought it was really interesting. I didnt realize for a while that youre fed up of thing of the book is the setup of our town. Let talk about our town for. Guest did you know what was your knowledge of the display i didnt know anything about it really. Host i didnt know anything about and i went to performing Arts High School so i felt very ashamed. Guest yeah. Host i put in the end notes all i knew was from like an episode of growing pains putt. I always thought was this play that my impression was its this very hokey kind of simple minded play about americana and American Life in a small town. And then i started reading and i was like this is bizarre. So experimental and strange. You have this character on stage, the story is but just like the book is about throw days in a small town. So the action is all very much dane and mundane and nothing dramatic happens but you heard weird touches the stage manager walking on and off statement talking to the audience, tellogy you the future. So that i think that in the play, the themes of the play are very much like the themes of the story of the earthquake. Theres we all going on bowed the plot of the play. Basically about peoples inability to appreciate daily life, and that we go through these times and dont realize how beautiful they and are how fragile they are until we can step outside them somehow and play ends with this young woman who died and her soul is looking back at ordinary life and just its so painful for her to realize she wasted her time. She didnt look her mother in the eye, didnt value what was there. That is what happened with the earthquake. It sort over threw people in anchorage into this other realm, its sored like the realm were living in now, were all inside or at lea