I said and i will call you right back because they had the feeling he pacified want cnn the satisfaction to tell though world they had informed the white house of they sent me the email to let me know that he had died. Now we have the fee and in the york city. There is one . [laughter] [applause] from jasper it has his picture and to view that we ask you do you miss me . That is the results of greta that we get another dog after henry passed one night greg gutfeld said she was mad because proper route to taking pictures of her job she said you are known to fly into a rage i said no i want everyone to share my dog he can be americas dog and he is. [laughter] [applause] and the good news is. All of you have the book go to the lobby they will sign or they are for sale. The Richard Nixon president ial library. God bless america. [inaudible conversations]. Guest kathy is my mother and in the course of thinking about this book i realized that person that i grew up knowing which was such an obvious statement that one of my main wishes i wanted to read about my mother was to explore the impact of her death on my life, explorer relationship, think about the difference the different versions of myself that i was without her. I also had strong wish to bring her to lie for my children who were born after she was gone. It was so heartbreaking when i was pregnant with my daughter that she would never know this person. When i was lying in might be bed and my husband said when you write the book that will tell her who they were. And i had such a feeling of anxiousness in fear at the task that i knew that was exactly what i needed to do. The book became a lot more than that. It became a story about figuring out who i was and who i had done and i think some of the largest discoveries that a reader or my daughter might make, not about my mother brought about her mother. Host one of the things i got out of ordinary light was the differences between you and your mother in your experiences growing up africanamerican. Guest right. The generational difference is one marker that determines a different set of experiences obviously that she had growing up in the south in the 30s and 40s in the 50s then i had growing up in california and massachusetts in the 70s, 80s and 90s. When i was child i had a child i had a hard time framing the questions that i had into words. I knew that there was a huge piece of africanAmerican History and my parents had been experiencing that and it hurt me to think about that. The whole segment of my life i shied away from it. I remember learning about the Civil Rights Movement in grade school and images of people with the fire hoses in the National Guard and feeling so worried retroactively for the people in my family and the way that i chose to deal with that as a child was to back away from it. To create a kind of offer. I wanted to write in this book to find ways of interrogating data anxiety that i havent also trying to come closer to maybe a kind of empathy with my parents and their parents and the experiences that they would have been dealing with in the u. S. During a time when racial tension and racial violence were at a tremendous height. Im thinking about the difference between then and now, sometimes i think its not as vastly different. Theres a section in this memoir where i remember a story that i was told about a great uncle are or a great great uncle who have been murdered by a white man for money that he had obtained from property. Nothing happened. It wasnt even a question and thinking about that now as they went back and was editing the book in preparation for the publication during this year and we have so many verdicts that dont really feel that different host tracy smith you talk about an incident in your childhood when you are in school and the teacher tells you you are special and you are very excited about that. Guest yeah, i was in high school. I was in high school and one of my teachers in a really wellmeaning way said there will be a lot of opportunities to come your way. You are special. It was great and thats what i wanted to hear but she tempered that statement for something that i dont think was wrong as an adult. She said youre an africanamerican woman and that will open doors for you. When i heard a friend like that something crumble inside of me. Maybe it wasnt part the flip side of that same piece of myself that wasnt comfortable about racial differences and experiences impossibilities. I also lived with that voice in my head for years and getting into college and wondering to what extent was that a factor of my demographics. Was it about my own abilities . I think a lot of people wrestle with this. Its a complicated issue and i think there are a lot of disparities in terms of the way blacks and whites or people from different ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds and the opportunities they come into contact with. I think its a valid thing to seek diversity and implications. Like harvard, where he went, the feeling of shame that might sometimes trigger is something i feel that we need to talk about. I think its the result of a lopsided or shortsighted conversation about race and affirmative action and how it was a allowed when i was comingofage. Host somebody grew up in california why did you choose harvard . Guest yeah, i wanted to be in a place that in my mind had a history. Growing up in california every thing seemed brandnew. I was really enchanted by old things and brick buildings. Also in some ways it was probably a very imaginative choice because harvard seemed like a great place to be. I dont think my perspective was that new ones at that time. What would it mean if i went there and what would i be coming into contact with . Ultimately i think it was my choice. I had a wonderful four years there and i learned poetry there which i dont believe i would have been the same way if i had gone somewhere else. Host what the poetry mean to you . Guest i think when i was an undergrad i was initially enchanted by the way a poem and looking at something that was so small, vocal and perhaps seemingly inconsequential could open up a powerful kind of revelation for the reader and the more i thought about it the more i attempted to write and i realized the revolution was happening and it was this premeditated thing making choices in language and listening and taking the next that. Its almost like a pursuit. It seemed like a really helpful tool with which to examine the everyday as i knew it. At that time in my life although i wasnt consciously making the connection between poetry and some of the larger experiences that i was wrestling with with my mothers illness, being able to stop time and a poem and ask all the right questions, the kinds of questions that you need to in real time. It seemed like a power that i really needed. I wasnt writing many poems that were directly about my mothers illness at the time but i think that thinking about memory and again taking about looking at the right thing in the right way they could tell you something you didnt think you knew. All of that was really comforting, grounding for me. When i think back to that time i also realized that the kind of devotion that i felt and what language to use in a poem was probably a really wonderful alternative to the language of faith that i had grown up with. I was struggling to find that kind of comfort with a believe especially in thinking about the kinds of freedoms that you are eager for and individuation that still happening actively at that time. It made me hungry for a kind of distance from the person i had been as a child or my mothers child at home and some have poetry love me to take different kinds of steps into a sense of who i was and what was important to me. Do you ever surprise yourself by writing up. Guest yeah. Ideally thats the goal for any poem. If it doesnt happen i feel like maybe the poem isnt done yet or the poem isnt ready to be written. My last book of poems was thinking a lot about my father who passed away about seven years ago and i didnt know what i was after. I just knew that i sat down to write and i wanted to be able to dwell on aspects of our relationship and my memory that would make me feel closer to her. And one thing that i discovered an probably this is connected to some of the things i discovered in writing this memoir was that i was looking for a version of god a figure thats been in my life publicly since conception because god is a touchstone in my family. Some say no matter what i do it wont go away. I wasnt seeking to pry myself from that relief but rather finding a way to feel confident that the figures to whom i had entrusted my father was sufficiently large. I think the figure in the Sistine Chapel didnt at that point in my life. I was really fascinated by what i could comprehend and thinking about space as a literal place, thinking about some of the images from the Hubble Space Telescope and how they have given the visual vocabulary that we are somehow a part of. I wanted to try and mary my private sense of the leaf in my private sense of grief for something large and permanent and unknowable as that. So that was a big surprise. I didnt think that was why i was writing poems. Im curious about what the next set of poems will yield. Host where does the title ordinary light come from . Guest is looking for a long time for a title for this book and a colleague of mine said that sometimes the title can just come from a quiet phrase within a book. I was going back and rereading the book and i decided to stop listening for these huge log markers which was i dashed huge loud markers which was what i was trying to do and thought about the subtler feelings and the meditations that stems from. Theres a moment in the book where he remembered eating out in an orchard at night with two friends from high school who had also lost their mother. We were out there looking up at the night sky and listening to the night noises and trying to figure out what we believe in who we were the mother and girls. There was this wish in my mind to be able to run back and just be ordinary house thats intact. Everyone is there and everyone is still present. That image seemed to be so much about what the book was trying to recollect. If i look at it from the outside i think it might also have to do with the small space that we occupy for short trade of our lives with the family and the central others that make us who we are. And how temporary that is. Either glaring brightness that steers your mind in a different land yields these other kinds of clarity for the dark spaces. Host theres a. Max toward the end of your mothers life where she sat up in bed essentially and said i know tracy is going to be a writer. Why did you include that in your book . Guest it was a moment that frightened me when it happened and it also made me hopeful. Theres a strange event because my mother was heavily medicated at that time and sometimes she would say things in the media say im just confused. This is the medication, just ignore that. On this night she was kind of muttering and said whats going on, who are you talking to . She said there were some angels talking to me and one of them said you were going to become a writer. I felt not worried that this might not be rational thought. I felt myself in the presence of something very tremendous and terrifying for that reason. Thinking if it is true that at the end of our lives the world that we now and the world that and the world that we are about to enter or return to maybe porous. What is there to ask what is there watching and also my mother reflects on this vision she was having which reflected to me a few things. One, that she might be really going and she was dying. I also was living in the denial that maybe this isnt real. Maybe everything will change and everything will be fine. So it kind of made me have to accept that she was accepting that her life was ending and that would have to force me to accept as well. To be faithful to her sense of life and also i guess it also meant that may be someone was telling her to stop worrying about your child. This is what will happen and she will be okay. That course of firming of wish that i had for myself. All of those feelings terrified me in conjunction with one another. It was something that i needed to return to an dwell on in language. I think so much of what i is a writer and doing is trying to find ways that language can help me understand what happens. Maybe what has happened or maybe what is happening in terms of my understanding of what that means and what i should be moving toward as a person, as an individual. Language helps me calibrate my sense of experience and it helps me clarify myself. So coming back to memories like that i think it was really a matter of trying to come to grips with this thing that happened and that maybe couldnt face headon in real life. Host what is your goal is a professor of creative writing . Guest i want to give my students access to the kinds of tools that will help them interrogate the world as they know it and i dont know that there is much more than that. I think thats a really nuanced task in both reading closely and reading differently than one might read in a literature class in my classroom we are looking at craft space choices that writers make and trying to say using this metaphor what possibilities are being opened up and it is the right or take advantage of that and what is yielded and what do we as readers feel or experience or come to recognized as a result . I think that the writers wish is to come into what feels like real contact with his or her material and because of the nature of the time its either material that happened in the past that we are trying to return to and understand differently or material that has happened at a great removed and we might not have literal access to that we are curious about. That idea on that takes you to another geographical location or another persons experience that is remote from you. But then there are whole regions of the imagination. Sometimes we are writing about rings that were real at all or an offensive that might also be important to question. I just want to give my students this money tools that might happen different kinds of material. Host tracy k. Smith won the pulitzer in 2012 for book of poetry, life on mars. She has written a memoir, ordinary light. Heres the cover. You are watching booktv on cspan2. We are on location at princeton university. There are Republican Rep party has been beaten in the election. Growers coming into office the mckinley has been the governor of ohio seeing the country descend into a deep depression and republicans take the election is going to to be theirs pretty wants wants to be the nominee but hes not the frontrunner. Hes not the favorite of the party bosses. Going to introduce tonights event. Jessica. [applause] city macadamia brine. I am Jessica Bagnulo as ted said when we are pleased tonight to be hosting Tanehisi Coates in brooklyn and his book between the world and me going to be speaking with James Bennett for an excellent evening. We are so grateful for this partnership beside Josephs College which allows us to bring you the this event in a burqa voices series and has a lot more Seating Capacity than a bookstore and fulton street. We have had a great fall season with Jonathan Franzen and patty smith and looking for more great events this fall. We have Kristin Hersh to talk about her memoir a big chestnut on october 21 the creators of the podcast welcome to knightdale on november 12. You can get the details and Ticket Information on our web site greenlight bookstore. Com. A few little housekeeping things. First please silence your cell phones or Electronic Devices and now theres no photography during the event that if you purchase a ticket to this event just the party received your copy of between the world and me. Additional copies as well as other titles by coates are for sale throughout the evening. There are no books on a snipe at all copies of between the world and me have been presigned by Tanehisi Coates. Please also note some index cards were passed around before we started. If you have a question you would like to have coates answer please write it on the card. We will be collecting those and we will select some that will be answered at the end of the event. If you would like a card and you didnt get one would just wave your hand and we will bring a card. Please note that this event is being recorded by cspan member tv as well as livestream to saint joseph students here on campus. Now let me introduce the speaker. I have this great introduction written and Tanehisi Coates said you are not allowed to say that. Her interviewer is James Bennett is a president editor of the atlantic that he was speaking be speaking with Tanehisi Coates was a National Correspondent with the atlantic. He is the author of between the world and me and he is or isnt received a macarthur fellowship. The book is an recently nominated for a National Book award. [applause] and we just found out this evening evening to both just won the kirkus prize tonight. [applause] for the rest of the evening im going to left tanehisi for himself so please join me in welcoming James Bennett and Tanehisi Coates. [applause] hello everybody. Thank you jess again thank you ted, thank you st. Josephs and greenlight and thanks to all of you for being here and your interest in tanehisis work. I think you want to mig a statement to. A statement. This is my manifesto. I wanted to talk a little bit about why i wrote between the world and me and today before i signed those 900 books i stopped at book court and i signed nearly 100 bucks. That was awesome. There was a young lady who was the book buyer do i remembered 20 years ago and she worked at a bookstore called vertical books and in d. C. I worked there for one summer in the summer of 1995, literally 20 years ago. I was a horrible bookseller, and an awful, awful bookseller. You can only love books so much and be a great bookseller because if you love love books and you are deeply adjusted and books in fact deeply interested in doing the things books do you tend not to Pay Attention to things like shoplifters. I wasnt very good. I did at that summer biking i had a 30 discount at the store and i probably spent 30 of my check on books just buying books. I was it wa