Transcripts For CSPAN2 Roger Rosenblatt The Story I Am 20240

Its my honor to introduce three people to you this evening. First is Roger Rosenblatt whose work has been published in 14 languages. Roger is the author of five New York Times notable books of the year and three times bestseller. The story the story i am mad about the writing life came out in april and a cool moon a life love and responsibility will be in october. Rogers written seven off broadway plays notably the one person free speech in america that he performed at the American Theater which was the times 10 best plays of 1991. Last spring he performed them play piano in his play living in the basement is nothing which would go to the Stoller Center for the arts at stony brook and the theater in new york next year. He also wrote the screenplay for a bestselling novel rapid rising which is currently in production. Roger is distinguished repressor at english and writing at stony brook. He formerly held the copeland appointment to creative writing at harvard where he got his ph. D. Among his many honors are to george polk awards the peabody and essays from Time Magazine and pbs of fulbright to ireland at the Irish International Basketball Team seven honorary doctorates the kenyan review award her lifetime literary achievement and the president s medal from the chautauqua institution. We are incredibly pleased to have roger with us. Next we have Erica Freudenberger who works at the library for Community Lead change as the outreach and engagement consultant that engagement consultant at that they had around doc Library System to ensure works were 34 member libraries including the Saratoga Springs Public Library and our community to help people live there dust life. Morse recently erica along with the local history laboring at the Saratoga Springs Public Library and the Adult Services and local History Library at the skylar ville public by braylon with her colleague jack scott from the southern Adirondack Adirondack library has been leaving a fingerprint documented covid19 in the southern adirondack a project to collect firsthand accounts of life during the coronavirus in real time to create a peoples history of covid19. The 34 Member Library the adirondack labor system works in tandem with our communities to document this historical pandemic. Everyone is welcome to participate in this collaborative effort to capture the impact of the virus in our region. And finally and certainly not least ellen beal the founder and president of the saratoga book festival. She is a former International Book editor in publishing executive at National Geographic looks for travel migrants publishing and writing press where she made the Editorial Development in multilingual publishing projects. While serving as a volunteer reading could she became deeply interested in promoting litters and the love of reading and she is the driving force behind the saratoga book festival and with that i will turn it over to you ellen beal for a few words. Thank you very much. Im really very thrilled at the saratoga book festival to launch her First Virtual event. We are sad of course we are not launching our first in person book festival this ear but we are working on plans for 2021 and during this part that we are going through wanted to find ways to stay connected and also to make sure we were helping authors get their message out to all of you and we are thrilled to partner with Saratoga Springs Public Library who is ben so important to us in launching the book festival and we are thrilled to present to you roger and erica. Are any of you who would like to volunteer who would like to suggest ideas for future Virtual Events or authors for next year please visit us at saratoga book festival. Org and of course we are in facebook as well. Enjoy our authors and best of health to you. I hope you find the content useful here as well. Roger your most recent book the story i am mad about the writing life is a collection about your love and obsession i would say with writing. Some of these are new in some of these are published and it is getting rave reviews. Someone who is been known to be snarky at times jared l. Brown who recently won the dash that will inspire anyone. Would you care to share a little bit . I would and i share my gratitude for both of saras comments. Ill give a sense of most writers can identify with. This memoir i wrote 10 years ago. The characters in a novel im writing have lost control of themselves. The one eyed haggis become a two legged dog to travel solo and plays bluegrass on the banjo. The gatekeepers become a beekeeper and he tries to open and close the gate made of bees. The pages spread in 100 directions. As for the villains there are so many by now be dead or guilty in them under a single name. This is what happens when you do not hate tension to the novelty right oh yes and death. A character called death has stuck its roman nose in. He plays a vampire who gets a transfusion. Its a bad idea dont you think to give a transfusion to a vampire . Sometimes i wish him the shop instead anything but books. People of come to my shop to get what they want and i would give them what they want and we would does get satisfaction from the transaction. The trouble is writing is set you give people what they dont want and by the time they realize they need to watch you meanwhile have never noticed them in the first place were intent on your work which consists of patricide. I read it cover to cover for the sole purpose of reading. Theres only one point to writing. Allows you to do exhaustive things. Most of the time his chimney sweeping or plastering. A lot of times writing is plastering or caulking that theres a moment in the dead of morning when everything is still of starlight and something invade your room like a bird that has flowed through the window and you are filled with the most joy and then you think i can do anything. Thank you for that. I believe the topic of tonights conversation was inspired by when you and i had a conversation that you had with your students about journalism by daniel defoe about the 1665 london bubonic plague epidemic and theres a little bit of a dispute about whether that should be fiction or nonfiction and i think most would agree that its a novel rather than history of a reportage and thats certainly where the librarians classify it and i get the basic question of what exactly is the journal. Are you asking me . Yeah i am roger. Im sorry. Its a wonderful question because if it were fiction that might not give journal because fiction with be it journal that is using a forum. Defoe certainly wrote fiction and its based on his uncles notes or they were real. They were known to have actuality. Im not sure the distinction makes much difference when youre reading. The five of us too well know as well as a wonderful audience for this book festival. There is some events that are so big and so preposterous and so unbelievable that they seem like fiction when we are experiencing them and this is one of them. When somebody writes a journal of the pandemic its no doubt people would think you are making that up but of course you are not making it up. Does feel like something we have read a lot about in postapocalyptic fiction. Absolutely. So verrico much of rogers work as a writing teacher imagine and roger correct me if im wrong and false providing prompts for your students and in many ways i think leaving the fingerprints project feels like a mother of all projects basically. You want to tell us a bit about that project and its goal . Absolutely and if its okay with you im going to take over the screen and im going to share some pictures. I love stories but i also love pictures. You certainly may be that he is. Thank you. You are welcome. So, with let me go back. Here we go. I have always written stories and that shouldnt be surprising for someone who is a librarian and a journalist. Words have been my comfort zone and stories resonate with me so pro family the collections that we tell and we hear and absorb and thats what gives us life and makes our world. Obviously to become a librarian and a journalist and enjoy the written word but when it comes to the pandemic which was off my radar until february when i was traveling home from nashville and while i was at the airport the airlines began making a lot of changes. They were asking people to use on their fun instead of putting their fun on the counter to hold it above board trying to get people to take protections as well and i thought wow that strikes me that we were in for something serious and i think it was a couple of months ago. By the time i was working from home in march the pandemic had pretty much taken over my life. I was going through twitter which i shouldnt do because i was procrastinating writing this story i recommended keeping a journal to document what we were experiencing during a pandemic. Even though im the laziest direst on the planet the idea really struck with me. I was working on a story about how covid19 was hitting libraries across the country and i could only equate trying to do that with wrestling water. Each time i began to piece together a narrative it would slip away and morph into where there was no way to get my arms around it. As the pandemic continued and kind of moved from deep concern to utter catastrophe the interviews i was holding with people were taken on a very earnest quality i would say the they became a lot more personal and even though many were strangers we would start inquiring about Peoples Health and Employment Status and their anxiety levels. All that made me start thinking more about the initial twitter post that i saw. At the southern adirondack Library System we were holding meetings, meetings with the directors of the 34 libraries to kind of keep in touch with them and whats going on. Its my job to think about how we can work with our communities and i was struggling to do that when her buildings were closed in one people had to socially distance and be away from everybody. In april i thought about the power of stories and how transformative that can be and the importance of the story and dark times when we are looking for a light or a way forward. I started thinking about what it would be like if we could help people tell their stories of what it was like to be in the pandemic. When i mentioned the idea of whenever we meetings, my epiphany or what i thought was an epiphany was not at all unique. Everyone else was thinking the same thing to which was graded including the association of public historians of new york state. So i went to their web site in lake george and i said hey do know about their initiative and they were talking about all the great journals that were cap during the spanish flu in 1918 and how that informs the work of epidemiologists and historians and gave us a lens through which to think about what we were doing. Thats when a number of our Amazing Library directors like ike and Caitlyn Jones from the skylar fill library had all been thinking about doing some projects. It was a matter of willing it together but there was a lot of talent to tap into. We formed this merry band which included the local Historian Library and michelle who is from skylar fill and my colleague jack scott. We began meeting to talk about how to capture very personal history of our friends and neighbors in real time and in our own words or images. As we were talking michelle who had a teenage daughter said that her daughter and her friends didnt communicate as much the writing is they did through other means are things like tik tok video so we were thinking how we capture this new way of communicating . Until we created this very Simple Survey of 20 questions and this is her big reveal tonight. I will. It in the chat box. It fills out the information. You can pick or choose what you respond to but what we are trying to do is create a robust resource where communities have the chance to sit back and reflect on our collective experience well preserving future generations. All of the responses are anonymous. We ask for a first name and a last initial and for people to identify where they live. Thats mostly be so you can share the information with local historians who might want to archive some of this. Im going to stop sharing my screen and get out of this, maybe or maybe not or i can take it back i will put the link to the project into the chat box. Thank you. You are welcome. Thank you. Roger you made greer best snow books or memoirs and i wonder if you have any thoughts on the distinction between journals and memoirs . I havent thought of it that way but my last book my last eight looks have all been written as it a were journals that as they were written in segments and my attempts and i dont know if i succeeded is to write the essay. I like the idea of the movement of the sections of the book into one song eventually, one tune. There really is no distinction between writing a memoir and fiction. I do the same thing with fiction in the book thats coming out the publisher in the fall is the hymn to life and life love and responsibility. It just plays the tune. I make no claims this is something i feel comfortable with. Wonderful songwriter and lyricist and his brilliant wife wrote the way we were and what are you doing the rest of your life and a lot of songs we know and allen said to me once that he hears the words in the music and thats where the lyrics come from. I realized that i hear the music in the words so when i write thats what comes out. Its a long answer to your good question ike but i get one reason the memoir is memories and active faith and so it comes as close to fiction as one can do in life. Thank you for that. I dont leave that either one of you are but it did seem and eric are you talked about how you see your description of this project reminded me of it. People often journal therapeutically and in addition do you know reading a documentary and allen and roger a lot of your writing feels therapeutic. Is that a Fair Assessment . Yeah. I. The patients. But you are right. Its a feels very revelatory and i suppose thats what memoirs do and i wonder if either one of you have any thoughts about journaling at a time like this as therapy or as recordkeeping. Or as an act of generosity. You really want to think well of the public and you want what you do to do some good and keeping a journal at this time im not doing it at keeping a journal is at this time has the potential of doing a lot of good even if you just write the facts. Im a great lever in writing the facts. Just write what you feel. These her rent is mad themes on beaches where people are in some sort of frenzy not caring if they live or die. You can track that to the breathtakingly heroic people who work in the hospitals who are as careful as they can be. Id my shoulder recently so i was in the hospital. So im looking around at all of these people in peril and its amazing verses and doctors. One i project at this time is this has people realize what an immense gift nurses give to society. On the one hand this is your journal. If i were keeping an journal what i saw on the beach annella burma and alabama people are saying its a interesting you mentioned the therapeutic quality because we just went live today. We havent done a promotion but we have had 11 people responded start to fill out the form submit that people from i think the youngest is 16 and the oldest is 77 police three of those responded and said directly remarks on how therapeutic it was pretty think what it is that we are living, although we are socially distant and hunker down at home we are still living in this incredibly chaotic universe and to stop and be still and quiet and reflect on whats going on in our lives is i think really powerful and for people to start to think just to give themselves the time and the space to think about the grief and the anxiety and Everything Else thats going on but also about the tremendous beauty like rodgers talking about. Different things emerge from this. There are horrible things but also really extraordinary moments of kindness and beauty that come out of these really unimaginable situations. Thats what i think is interesting. Ellen we are all stunned by the our grief and terror in the arab unity and truth. At least we get a glimpse of the other side of life. It has been a joy for me to see like everyday people. You mentioned nervousness roger like everyday at the grocery store. They are putting their lives on the line for society. Along that line how adaptable we as animals are. A few months ago you were going down the street wondering about your boyfriend or your girlfriend or whatever does and a couple of least weeks have passed and we adjusted with the turn of the dime to survive ourselves and help our neighbor survived. I hope we do it obviously but in my long life this is the most impressive moment. Now is a commonality that we have seen in the responses that people talking about this kind of endless generosity of friends and neighbors and people who maybe didnt know each other that well before but now we are checking in to see if anybody needs anything especially if they were concerned about people going out for help and really a sense of community thats coming out of an extraordinary situation. If you are keeping a journal watch the things that ellen is talking about and write as carefully as you can about the role of the writer could let the reader see every detail of whats going on in the homes and hospitals and the beaches and so forth so that nothing is lost on the senses that will tell future generations what was going on here. Eric are you journaling . Are you keeping a journal . Well i have plans. I have the best of plans. [laughter] but you know im a journalist unless i have a hard deadline im going to procrastinate. I did try to explain because this morning i made two entries but it was interesting to see t