Lisa Mclaughlin - Full video

[audience applause]. (Lisa McLaughlin). Thank you so much. Let me make sure I am technologically connected here. Everyone can hear me? You guys can hear me in the back? Okay, I'm the kind of reader who tends to flail, so if my mic goes flying, you guys have to let me know that you've lost me. I would very much like to thank the university and the Department of English and the folks who constructed the Doudna Center, it's really spectacular. I dig those concrete, black concrete floors, those are really bright. It's the kind of thing where you want to wear some really shiny pants like nylon pants, and like, slide and see how far you... Let's see, Professor Martone and I, or Martone--I'm told I can call him--Martone and I went to graduate school together, and I've been trying to think of stories I can tell on him. And I'm pretty good at making things up on the spur of the moment, but needless to say he was one of those quiet guys who would sit there and crack you up after a workshop where we were dissected or torn apart or whatever. Where he'd give you a look and you could fall apart laughing, so, it's kind of wonderful to be here, I think in large part because John knows me and has been a huge supporter over the years, so I'm very happy to be here. Hi, welcome, grab seats, you guys, this is a huge crowd, I thought after the giant snowstorm of yesterday, no one would be here, so, you are really brave and wonderful to have come out tonight. Alright, alright, that's great. Because I'm from Wisconsin I was thinking eight inches? Nothing, nothing, so I was just thinking you guys would be too scared, but I'm very impressed. So what I'd like to do is start with a story that I think Martone has read to some of you recently, it's from a book called "The Grouper." And, I'll just give you a kind of warning at the outset, I went to grad school as a poet originally and then became a fiction writer and I've kind of backslid back into poetry or something like it, I don't know what to call myself now. I write perhaps poems that are often very narrative, so I'm going to hope that this stuff that is more abstract is still going to read to guys, and you guys will still have some interest, because there's usually a story attached. So this first piece is, I guess I would call a prose poem, and it's called "Something Godawful". "Something Godawful that you bought at a yard sale, you'll take it home. Maybe it talks to you, maybe an enormous guinea pig, maybe a badly made afghan. Unlooping, the yarn trips you up. Maybe it stands in the corner, using up air. Maybe you decide you made a bad mistake. Maybe your regret makes walking difficult. Maybe you begin to blame yourself. Maybe it looks just like you. Has your cheat passed your name, and maybe in the meantime, someone has gotten rich off you, gotten out from under, jumping now, up and down, straight up and down, for joy." I'm going to read a couple of I think more standard poems. This is "Would You Like Yourself Better". "Would you like yourself better as a woman? In stories, it's sometimes him, sometimes her, the box always arriving, crammed with special attractions. Catalogues heavy with gloss. The backs of sea creatures crushed into a delirium. So many the box crimps into teeth. And at the very bottom, brown paper wadded like skin. Ridiciously light, what you sent for. So much prettier than what you have. Would you like it better, opaque? A story all readied to assemble itself. And how to assemble what struggles here? She might be in here, or not. He might be listening for what comes next." "Branch". "A branch has no relatives, you wrote thirty years ago." I have to say, this is a poem for anyone who's ever had writer's block as a writer--let me start again. "Branch". "A branch has no relatives, you wrote thirty years ago. And in all this time, it is remained a rebuke. How could you know something sweet could eat the bowels. Something sweet could finish in dust. Or that studying sweetness can turn it sour. Sticks like dry syllables twitch in air. I wish I'd never started, you write. And turn away, and then they tremble. They burst into flower. When you don't write it down. There was a story of the woman you meant to in some word, the Martin's nest, up on sticks, as if something got under you, troubling all day, smelling, crying like a dog. This is a poem about getting lost on the way back from my sister's in Champaign-Urbana and driving. Felt like about cross half the country. So, and I want to make sure, I'm supposed to say, is it Mahomet? Is that how that town is called, Mahomet? Okay, okay, get ready, because there's some stuff from Illinois in this poem. "On losing 39 South, halfway to Chicago, I realized I was lost. And went on my way, dull eyes, two bitter capers rolled out of the jar. Dry, they led me through tolls I couldn't remember. Oh, the eternity of being grateful you haven't killed someone yet the day before Thanksgiving. Planes rising and falling from O'Hare, and on the belly of the Mahomet water tower, a sunset so lovely, it bewilders." So I like to riff a lot in my work, and I sort of start often with language and take it somewhere, somewhere new. So I have a bunch of friends in Madison where I live, who are photographers. And I'm a really visual kind of person, really love images a lot, so a friend of mine photographed Native Indian mounds, burial mounds. He's a really amazing technician, so he photographed them at night, and he kept his shutter open a long time, and he ran through the picture back and forth so you see this sort of part of a leg, part of an arm, part of a neck kind of like ghosts. And I said to him, I'd love to collaborate, I'd love to write some poems off of your pictures, of these Indian mounds. And he said, sure, I'm pretty sure, assuming I would make these beautiful, or hopefully beautiful pieces about Native Americans and stuff about the geography, and you know, real stuff, but of course I didn't. I lied and I made everything up. But behind each one of these poems is a, in an image, often mysterious, of like a mound, like a part of a body at night, with these slices of human beings floating through. And, I just moved from those shapes and from that landscape and from the rhythms and the photograph into something else. So don't, if you feel bewildered, don't wrestle to understand, just sort of float around, and you'll get there, okay? So these are the Indian mound poems. This one is called "The Child." "Like a lot of dads, looking at a new baby, green snot, on its white, on its sweet face. These trees recommend, stay on the hip of a hill, strange green at night. And a ruby sky as if the crown on a child's head lifted the evil priest on TV with no one watching. Green inhabits what we fail to see, and what we do see, warms our palms like another hand." These probably would work better to listen to if you were really ***, but I'm trying to get you there. This is called "The Little Beacon." In this one he had a flashlight that appears, sort of traces of light through the image. "The Little Beacon". "Do not bereave, many feet and many legs stand here. A soldier echoes what his bugle said. Swinging something in his other hand, hills over hills repeat his legs, so baggy, staggering, so cotton, the rear pocket, the rear hem and the furrow he jogs in his heart swings back and forth, a little beacon." "Seal." "Now at dusk the little seal shifts a cold wife under a blanket, trying to cover herself. Shadow is a seal with whiskers of coal. Knowledge, the thing puckered like a forehead someone placed here for us to find. It is cold, it will get colder, while the seal noses what she doesn't know, and what she doesn't want to find, but will. Why did the Native Americans build mounds, when they could have erected semi-permanent earmuffs? Winnebago swings to the shoulder, muffler on fire, or leaks that could tell our fortunes. Ceaselessly this TV points remotely to our heads. In circles, they would walk, endless, flapping their arms open, when they could have become our Doppler, inching like a scow. "Circle the Tools Mound Builders Would Have Used." "If this is an effigy, then what am I? I crawl along my body, eager to know. Bear, bird, water, panther, spirit, golf course, and to the East, two conical mounds, no names on them. Could be ***, gas pump, let me up, just when I'm ready to golf. Furious sobbing without sound. The old dissolute next door curses everything that is. What is that thing he calls my shrub face hub cap along the highway. What pelvis is it turns my face for hours, fontanelle which will not leave me, though I finger it for hours." This one is just about sound, it's called "Say." This was a picture with a little bit of grass under the snow. "Say." "Moss and snow combine like a harvester careening downhill, gouging in all directions and the crop in ruins. Stop, dead still, a big engine grunts under mud, under pastelight compressed to ruts. A man's hand touches it, a heavy instance passed by here and the snow, too soft to say." And this is the last one in this series, and it's called "Wide." This is an image with some great colors in it, "Wide". "Pinch the light, and it opens into this mauve, the eye of the hill. Night and the eye winks. Usually closed, unusually wide, this chance, this grasp, trees fanning a million dusks. Grass spit by locusts, intricate, sloping, wide, eye, like a tackle at the forty yard line brings you blinking to your knees." A year or so ago an old friend of mine, I don't think John knows her, but I knew both of them in Rhode Island, where I used to hang out, and my friend had moved from Rhode Island, which is a state which she really liked, it's kind of a nutty state. We were saying at dinner how some of the politicians are kind of like the governor of Illinois. So the stories I'm reading these days about him, very familiar from my old grad school days. Anyway, she called, and she had moved to Connecticut, and she was complaining about it. Connecticut was too straight-laced for her. She said to me on the phone, I should have known when I moved to a state nicknamed, "The Land of Steady Habits". So, I thought, I jumped back, it's the way my mind works. I thought, I've got to write something called "The Land of Steady Habits," and what happened is, I actually got hooked on this sort of method of, I went and googled all of the nicknames for states, and that really is one of the names for Connecticut. And, you guys are, of course "Land of Lincoln" among other things, right? Wisconsin, we're "Forward". So I made a whole bunch of little pieces, fifty of them, in fact, and each one is titled, one of the nicknames of the state in question. Some of these are sort of vaguely responsible pieces, they're kind of really about the state, and they mention place names. A lot of them are not though, a lot of them just go flying. So, the first one I'll read, in part in honor of not only Martone, but my old wonderful friend Arkansas, who took me to the town mentioned in this piece. So this is about Arkansas, and it's title is "Natural". What you'd want in a fruit, except prunes, or the Ozarks, or make-up. Plus, it's natural to have a couple of RVs, at least one shiny hog in the driveway ready to jump you loose. In Toad Suck, critters latch on the first chance they get, scream out laughing, slapping sin away. Like that last guy you dated, or the church choir sweating down their arms. But don't it feel good to open your mouth and sing your guts out? Jesus ducks when you lose the towel, scooch the bible in your lap. Pretty soon pick up your cigarette, the one thing you can count on when God digs his fingers in the sky and day falls down with a whomp." This one is from the nickname for West Virginia, "To be, rather than to seem, Is a book you brought to the office, thinking today's the day. Those sheds where they hung tobacco are condos now. The AC comes on just when you're ready to scream. It's still in your purse, one or two pages touched. Like recalling something you did when you were very young. Something worthy, and oddly bright, and you're looking for a place to put it. Maybe the picnic table out back, the computer flickers, you're smoking way too much these days. They danced the great leaves to the back of the shed, then lifted their arms flying." This one's from a nickname for one of Colorado's nicknames, it's "Mile High." And this is one where I just sort of stole the phrase and I don't really mean to imply that all Coloradans are druggies, but there's some of that in here. There may be one or two in Colorado, I don't know. "Mile High." "***, Crank, Shrooms, Oxycotin, here's your wedding list. Tapping your head, scratching your wrists, nosebleed on your underwear, window you forgot to shut. Hustling this counter, something drops by each minute and you work all day at it. Straining to hear the order it says in its nicest voice." This one's about Delaware, "Land of tax-free shopping." It's true, I kid you not, it's really. Part of the difficulty of writing this series is that there were so many good nicknames for these states. "The Land of Tax Free Shopping." "She gets off the ferry with her girlfriend, because they're bored at home. 'How much money do you have,' asks her girlfriend. 'A lot' she says. At the ATM, she's overdrawn again, payday's next week, but it's already too late. Her girlfriend stalks off and the ferry backs away with a toot. Herds of tourists start crashing for the stores, so this is Delaware, the only part she'll ever see. And now her girlfriend's mad, won't shop now either, which was the whole idea. She likes old things, the cemetery, where guys in knee pants use to dance and sing, and the street wives hold hangers for their husbands, stuff saltwater taffy in their mouths. These graves look smashed, makes her thirsty, one little beer would be just thrilling. But that costs a bundle too, in this land where the ATMs suck." This is about Alabama, "Heart of Dixie." And actually it's about a, well let me just say to you that I once saw on TV a show about what happens when people go into shock. You know, you hear about people dying of shock, and actually you can--what happens is your heart does this strange thing where one chamber gets stuck and it doesn't move, it doesn't beat. And all the blood from that chamber goes into the other side, so the other side gets really really big, so you've got like a stuck chamber and a ballooning chamber. And they call that, which I think is a most beautiful phrase, stunned heart tissues. So this really kind of--"Heart of Dixie" was just an excuse to write this thing, "Heart of Dixie." "Hushpuppies, grits, gravy, shreds of tobacco left over from last night. This sweat is not from heat, it's cold like someone put freezer wrap on your face. Or grabbed your arm to shake it where the meat is, muttering, hey, you done with that beer? Or sat on your chest in second grade and you still see it. Stunned X-ray, a wedgie on one side, and the other a ridiculous balloon, and you want to yell, cut it out guys, but it's thumping too slow to keep up." This one's from Maine, "Down East," and I want you guys, it's a riddle, I want you guys to try to figure out what I'm talking about here. "Star eye mother creeps knee-high on rocks. Minerettes, her heavy fists. In kitchen fixing dinner, eggs drag against her apron when she moves from shelf to shelf. Puts condiments in the dark, puts steps, puts eyes, niggling in the cold. Rips off glasses, calculating, distributing, rips off stockings, black metallic. Rips off girdle full of years, rips it off and drops it. Her very own, only backbone, into the salty drink." What do you think? Want to hear it again? Let me lay it on you one more time. "Down East"--so be thinking, think about Maine. This is really kind of a real Maine thing. "Down East." Star eye mother creeps knee-high on rocks, minerettes, her heavy fists. In kitchen fixing dinner, eggs drag against her apron when she moves from shelf to shelf. Puts condiments in the dark, puts steps, puts eyes, niggling in the cold. Rips off glasses, distributing, calculating, rips off stockings, black metallic. Rips off girdle full of years, rips it off and drops it. Her very own, only backbone, into the salty drink." So what dumps their own skeleton? (male speaker). Snakes? (Ms. McLaughlin). Snakes, not quite, but pardon? (male speaker). Lobsters. (Lisa). Lobsters, nice! Okay, that's the riddle one. He gets a, whatever, big ticket, big ticket, you came here and you get to skip the rest of the semester and whatever, okay. [audience laughs]. Okay, this is the last one in the state series I'll read. This is called, this is from the nickname for Tennessee, "Volunteer". "Volunteer for this or any war, and see where it gets you. Eighteen, no money, the poster loud and in charge, and now this. Skin not quite yours, hands heavy, full of sounds, groping for words. No one gives them, you have to volunteer to read, down on your knees where some blood is blinking. First grade again, the words explode as you push your silly mind close." So the end of my reading will be from a brand new series, which I'm calling "Bible Stories." After I finished the states series, I really missed being with these little things. They would collect after breakfast, I would write them, the state things just happened, I'd write a couple a day and they were, I just felt giddy writing them, I felt like I was getting to know America in a strange way. So I've always been a lover of the Old Testament. I was one of those eggheads in grad school who actually took a course, I tried as much as possible to avoid my writing workshops, so I would take courses in film, courses in stuff, so I took a course called "The Old Testament as a Narrative", and it was really this wonderful exploration of the language of the Old Testament. So I don't read the Bible that often, but I feel very much that some of my work has been informed by, its teaching, kind of rabbinical impulse, that it's about teaching. And it's about something always beyond itself. But I also have always felt kind of heartbroken that the Bible has been used not only to inspire but to injure, and so some of these pieces are kind of protests against some of the uses to which the Bible has been put. Others, are sort of celebrations of what we are as humans. So what I've done again, sort of like the others, the state thing, I've ripped off, I've torn off almost off the page, phrases from the Old Testament and used them as titles and then riffed on them. So some of you who may know the Bible well may recognize some of these phrases. They're all Old Testament scriptural lifts except for a few from Revelations, so let's see how this goes. And I don't intend to blaspheme or to offend anyone's sensibilities, but I am I think, very sincerely honoring some of this language and its power. "Take the little book which is open. Go ahead though it's not much. Pages in it like stairs, climb them or not. Open or put it down, or drag something across it to leave marks. It can't complain, really, no worries. Can't speak, resist, peddle, humiliate, insult, or sink. Just open or shut. Put your finger there, save the dark place you made." "When I washed my steps with butter." I swear, it's really in there. "When I washed my steps with butter, I was drunk. Really, I had been at my cousin's wedding, and I had more after, you know how it goes. People get joking, and do things, if you even remember. Bob and I made out, even though I wasn't speaking to him, not after last time. 'Let's go back to your place,' he said, 'and get some butter.' I snorted into his drink, and he drank it. My fridge was full of beer, like my cousin needed it after everyone's coolers plus the kegs behind the grange. I said, go out on the steps and get comfortable, sing to me. So he started yowling, and I pulled out the butter. To scare him, I stuck it down his back. In that heat the steps were shiney and Bob had to jump. Not that I'm rich, but I did have steps, and Bob, and butter. A moment of fat, and the night seemed awfully young." "Stand on the Sea of Glass." "You could be on Mars or in a lab, or at some manufacturer's designed to wow. Stiff on every side, tides and fish hung there, walk back and forth, Jesus or something. It's so wierd, hurry, who can you phone?" Have to read a couple of those edgy ones, John was saying. Okay, "There Went up a Mist". "Tracked by doppler across Montana, says the weather girl, and under the palms on the gulf. Note her blonde hair, heaps of it, like something you'd bank for a long time to develop interest, or find like a knife in a drawer. It's late, she's kicked off her shoes and unbuttoned her blouse, you see her black heels as she shadows the map, clear across the room really, a trick of the hour. Really she's propped against an old file cabinet, one hand inserted, and she's playing with some old tape deep inside. On TV, all you see is that hand missing, and the other pointing, and her face, cracked up with boredom. There, she says. There, in that place, there it went up a mist all day, in these latitudes, longitudes, she laughs and people got wet. Man were they surprised, they expected highs in the 90s, not some *** mist, her finger flicks the tape, prods it. In these backwaters, not San Francisco, which is half underwater now, but Florida's so dry and the Mustang's kaput in Montana. She laughs, bored, too short a laugh, she's trying to rip up the tape. Some mists go up, she snorts, and why in hell should I care? She's got the tape rolled between her fingers without seeing you know it's yellow, cracked like a really dead fingernail. She can't stop playing with it. Soon she'll take off her blouse and wipe under her arms with a bag leftover from lunch. She'll scratch herself, touch herself. At this hour, the picture tilts, sways. The cameraman's asleep, Doppler approaches her skin in extreme closeup, the large pores, a landscape. It's dry there, so dry, and soon the locusts will swarm." "As the sparks fly upward." "Is his job, it requires concentration, concentration from a man. Oh some women try, they can a little, but, you know, this one's really no one else's. Not flying a plane, not picking a brain apart. The solemn decent job of a man, and by God he'll do it. It will kill him. At the end, he'll lie down, eyes rolled back in his head, as leaves creep up sticks and bombs fall to sing. A man is born to a job. Okay, I'll read for just a couple more minutes. "Nor Discover his Father's Skirt." "They were through in the barn, his old man yelling, back off, aim higher. He'd wrecked his shoulder in the kid world, tracking something pink. Pellet, too small for a shotgun, too hungry to wait. It slapped between the old man's legs, screaming almost a car, and the kid blowing snot fired again and again then went inside to change his shirt into a T-shirt with a little animal. At the end of the hall, his father had a skirt on. Through the bathroom door, he spied him, slowly smoothing it, hands dimpled with blood. Now, the child gagged, why is this world so cruel?" I wrote this piece after I'd been working with some kids in an after-school program and an eight-year-old came up to me and described what it was like to shoot a pig for his disabled grandfather, so that's what happens there. "The Lamb's Wife." This is for my sister Meg, who's in the audience, and she's a medieval historian of all things. This is called "The Lamb's Wife." "Stands in the meadow, or on a shelf behind some glass, or wrapped in nice white paper. A juvenile wife, very tender. A child bride just a few inches tall. In a child's book who knows, are lambs real, are there still animals? This requires research, while the lamb waits, tapping his hoof in the aisle." Okay, let's read a couple more of these. "There Fell a Noisome and Grievous Sore." "She couldn't figure out, cold sores she knew, hickeys, scars from the past. This one, a ruckus. A voice for her other skin was dumb, intent where her other skin was kind. She flinched to listen. How could she sleep when it beat on her like pans? She became the neighbor she was dying to hate." I'll read just two more. So who in the audience is a fashion expert? Who knows how to say the word R-U-C-H-E? Come on you guys, someone must know. It's a detail in sewing where there is, it's sort of a gather. I'm going to pretend it's pronounced ruched, okay. So here we go. This one is called "Which Have Not Known Man." There skin pink, pink, pink and the angels beige, beige, beige. Daughters are nothing as skin, but angels, skirts carefully ruched, must by snagged whole from strangers. They are expensively fertile. Just as fetuses open movements, and old men decorate a cross, so must daughters stand for something, fit must fit into skirts other nations choose. Before that, sacrifice them, let strangers open their legs, open to strangers everywhere. Their skin is ugly. Sewn into lampshades, it throws an ugly light. So tear it, tear it joyfully, and leave the angels alone." And this is the last one. "Behold, He Cometh with Clouds." Baffled boats sit on the lakebed, birds press tongues to themselves. We forget to cry over books, pictures. Tears go extinct, no legislation recalls them. In some bereft nation, one old guy still remembers. Faces appeared in them, crying light. Thank you. [audience applause]. (male speaker). Will you take questions? (Lisa). I'll take questions, sure. You know, and if your question is, 'why are you such a nut,' I'm happy to try that one. Yeah, please. (male speaker). Why are you such a nut? John said that you were going into a hospice-type situation. Were you going to use your writing? (Ms. McLaughlin). I think, I guess so. I'm going to be a grief counselor at a local hospice. Whoops, am I still, still plugged up to you guys? Okay. You know, I've been an art therapist and I really, really like to listen to people and listen to their stories, so I'm fortunate to have been offered a position at the hospice with residents who are occupying the beds there, but a lot of their families will be coming in, and my job is just to be ears. It's, well, yeah, I think it's really an honor. You know I volunteered at hospice, and I really just, it's pretty amazing work. (male speaker). Isn't there a writing project? (Ms. McLaughlin). They have a support group called Writing Through Grief, and they'll, I think I'll be leading that one. But one of the coolest people I've ever met was this 89-year-old woman who was dying of heart failure there a couple of years ago, and she looked, still looked like a little girl, she was amazing. And I got to work with her, she had been a pretty accomplished artist, and she could do the best imitation of a goose. When she was little she used to get in a lot of trouble with the animals, she was always teasing them, so she would take a piece of corn and tie it on a string and lead it for this goose and the goose would swallow it, and then she would pull it back up. And this little tiny old lady, and she'd say the goose would go along and it would go "boop!" So every time I saw Norma, she'd go, it would go, "boop!" And you know, I said she's great at geese, we're going to get along just fine. And she lived for three or four months drawing and writing hilarious things. One of the last things she wrote with me, only because I instigated it and got her going was something called "The Hawaiin Goblet". About this goblet that wine could, once wine went in it, it turned into two colors, pink and white, and you could sort of drink out of two edges of the goblet. It was just wackier than me, so those are the kinds of people I'm looking for, and thank you for your question, I know I'm making light of it, but I'm a little nervous. It's a pretty big responsibility. Any other questions about hospice, or about Wisconsin, or about, so how many of you guys are writing students? Okay, a few of you. What are the rest of you doing, doing here, what are you doing here? So what else are you guys studying? So writing, you guys look like students, how about the other folks back there? Yeah? Are you getting reverse tickets from Martone? So do you writing folks have any questions, tell me what you... Yeah? (male speaker). What do you do when you get writer's block? (Ms. McLaughlin). Well, I wait 30 years like in that one, I think the thing about writer's block is that for me, it's like a condition that comes and goes. So it's like having really bad hives or something. And you don't always know what brings it on and what ends it. I went through a very long period when I was struggling with some stuff and I couldn't write, and that's when I picked up a camera and started photographing. And that was what cured that moment of my writer's block. Once I saw images in front of me, and once I went in the darkroom and saw images floating up out of the dark, because I was working with chemistry, I knew that I hadn't lost my images, and that things would return, and little by little I started writing again. So I don't know, what do you do when you have a writer's block? (male speaker). I just start writing randomly. (Ms. McLaughlin). Writing randomly, does that seem to get you there? (male speaker). I don't know, it tends to be random will, like another person's writing inside of me. (Ms. McLaughlin). Does that feel good or does that feel weird? (male speaker). It feels kind of weird. [unclear dialogue]. different like, I wrote that? Sort of weird but it makes sense to me. (Ms. McLaughlin). Get ready, because every time I write stuff, I go, did I write that, who wrote that? So I think that gets to be kind of, sometimes when the stuff is, you know, you make yourself available to it, I kind of think of myself as magnetizing myself, so these weird images or phrases will stick to me, and then I write off of them, and often I feel like, okay I just, I'm available, I'm open to what needs to be written and it'll travel that way, so. (male speaker). Do you know what direction those little prose poems are going to go when you start them? (Ms. McLaughlin). No, I deliberately don't know where anything is going to go, when I start. I'm the world's worst organizer, so I could never, I could never make outlines when I was trying to write critical papers. They just went anywhere they wanted to, so that's why I'm not a professor, I think. But I deliberately cultivate not knowing, and I really would prefer not to know, and if, if I start putting a roof on the whole thing, and it can only go so far, often it dies. So I try to step back from that, did I see another hand? (male speaker). When you were working on those 50 states, who were you imagining as your audience? (Ms. McLaughlin). That's another great question. Who was I imagining as the audience for my fifty states pieces? I don't know. (male speaker). Don't you find yourself kind of thinking about someone when you're writing a piece, I mean, maybe not consciously, but almost like a muse and you imagine someone reading it. (Ms. McLaughlin). Well, you know you would hope writers would answer, of course I imagine a reader, but in fact, because I'm so self-centered I guess, I find when I do imagine a reader I can't write. So what I have to do is write to, I guess it's sort of more, my answer would be something like often what writers for kids say, they write for the kid in them. So I'm writing for some part of myself that wants usually to be surprised, and sometimes freaked out, and sometimes you know taken somewhere new. And I do think that's the part that I hold the piece out to ultimately. Don't we all have, you know, some part of ourselves that's hungry for something that's never been seen before, and not that all our stuff isn't derivative, but I mean, I, that's what I love to do. Then it's sort of like you're on... What's that big old amusement park, that huge roller coaster in Ohio? Yeah yeah, Cedar Point, it's like your own Cedar Point. It's cheap, it's free. (male speaker). I should add, I was going to ask you about that child too because Lisa also has a children's book that she's wrote and illustrated called, appropriately enough, "Why won't winter go?". And it's all about skunk habits, or that's part of it. Very interesting characters and I'm going to stop us here and you can continue the conversation at Jack. And I would like to thank Lisa again and thank all of you. (Ms. McLaughlin). Thanks so much. [audience applause]. [no dialogue].