PRH Spring Book & Author Festival 2024: Literary Reads

am so excited to welcome ran Alam ran is the author of four novels including Leave the World Behind which was adapted for Netflix his forthcoming book entitlement follows Brooke as she begins a new job working for a billionaires foundation and discovers just how the Super Rich Live Michael degler early sobriety Michael's fiction has appeared in mixies and Harpers this is Michael's debut novel in early sobriety and newly recovered alcoholic drifts from couch to couch in Philadelphia as he reenters society as a sober person gu RIS halberg gu has written three books including City on fire which was adapted into a series on Apple TV plus his new book The Second Coming follows a daughter in crisis and an absent father who wants the chance to save her Susan rer Susan is the author of three novels and a Columbia Law graduate with a in Academia in her forthcoming novel like mother like mother lla overcomes her abusive childhood to Great professional success but the effects Ripple through her family life and Dany Senna card television Dany winner of the Dos pasos prize and the Whiting award has written four novels a memoir and a short story collection in her new book colored television Jane pivots to television writing when her career as a novelist goes into freef fall wreaking havoc in her her marriage thank you everyone for coming um so I'm going to ask our author some questions we're going to do it round robin style I'll call on them and um all the Librarians out there please put your questions in the Q&A all right so let's begin a common theme in your books is proximity to wealth or power ran this is obviously a major theme in your book I particularly loved how you have on the one end who seems to really buy into the freedom of this kind of unlimited wealth and gella on the other who rejects the concept from the outset um do you see these two as opposite ends of the spectrum and are they diametrically opposed right so the book is sort of you see these two characters have a relationship to one other character's vast fortune and I guess you're asking whether one character's rejection of that money and characters Embrace of that money represent different polls but actually what I think the what I hope the book is trying to explore is the way that money affects all of our lives and um a sort of rejection or acceptance of that is sort of neither here nor there so money is the atmosphere of contemporary life I have a really uh low rent analogy which is what U Miranda Priestley says uh to her assistant in the devil wor Prada where she says like you think that fashion doesn't apply to you but it does apply to you it sort of apply it sort of applies really broadly I can't believe I use that example apologies to the devil worst PR but I think it's sort of true that money no matter how much or how little you possess you have to accept as a term of contemporary life that money is a factor is a guideline that affects what you do and what your choices are and I think it's really sobering to realize that and I think I hope that's what the book is exploring yeah absolutely um Dany uh Jane seems to want The Prestige of being a literary novelist but the trappings of a successful career in the entertainment industry um can she have both can she have her Artistic integrity and have the house in Multicultural Mayberry yeah that is the question question that kind of drives her through this novel um because she and her husband have been living this kind of um paretic life of Bohemian artists in La for TW 10 years and they have two small children and she's been dragging this unfinished novel with her um the whole time which she's calling the uh molat War and Peace and um she and her husband who's a painter kind of looked down on all of the people they knew who used to be artists who've sold out to Hollywood and they're pure um but of course they're reaching middle age and they still don't have a home and they have these two children that they're dragging around as well and um Jane you know when her novel flops she kind of finds herself um in freef fall and kind of this desperate hunger it unleashes in her to be part of the kind of Bourgeois stable upper middle class and um and there's Al this creative urge to have her stories be read and the stories of kind of being of this mixed race world that she's never been able to kind of make America see and acknowledge and so she goes to television as much for the money as for the desire to be seen and heard and um and in my novel you know like race and class are never and in everything I've written really race and class are never um able to be disang and the idea of like um these things being part of the origin story of this country um that I don't think they can be separated and um so for her it's like you know can she find a home for her stories but also get rich at the same time and I think like Ran's novel um so much of my my novel is preoccupied with real estate and with owning a home and and what real estate being kind of you know the the the defining feature of wealth right and um and going and then thinking about race and and homelessness and how much um that defines our relationship to this country whether we own a piece of it um so this couple becomes a way for me to explore all of these questions of class anxiety and creative anxiety and representations all right great um Susan lla fights her way out of a terrible childhood and home life to become hugely powerful and influential as an editor um she of course marries into old money along the way but lla herself seems pretty irrepressible so did the money make a difference to her in her approach to life well Lila is um there are a lot of competing voices in this book and but lla is the Beating Heart of the book and she grew up poor she grew up in a poor neighborhood and one of the reason ways she tells her children this is by saying that all of her clothes came from Goodwill except her Underpants she refused to wear somebody else's Underpants and and she sort of has to get out of her house and get out of Detroit to make her way her husband Joe is a third generation and he's an heir to a GM fortune and one of the ironies of the book is that lyla's father is on the GM line and and Joe is GM royalty um but when she meets him she doesn't know he's Rich her childhood is so impoverished in certain ways that she doesn't know what Rich looks like except in old black and white movies and so she thinks he's upper middle class but she's not really not quite sure what that is either um he dresses like everybody else he khakis and and sneakers he drives an old Chevy he's her TA in her history class what does she know she she doesn't think about his money until she visits his house in Bloomfield Hills and sort of KaBoom she understands what he is um jasine is a cushion but it's not anything Lyla cares about she wants to make her own money she wants to be self-supporting and what she wants is success that's what she wants and of a particular sort she wants to be an editor of a big newspaper someday and she in fact tells that to the editor and chief of the newspaper she ultimately becomes editor is that he asks her what does she want and she says I want your job um and that's how she goes through life um wanting those things but she what she wants from her husband is his experience and opportunities she tells her children she didn't know what um artichokes were she didn't know what avocados were she didn't know what asparagus were and those are just the vegetables she didn't know how to write a she didn't know how to write a book and she didn't know she didn't know about theater she didn't know about museums and Joe has all that and that's what she that's what she really wants from him um she uh so L really remains who she is to the end um and she makes money of her own and she worries about her children being rich but I don't I don't think money is important to her success is what she wants all right thank you uh Michael most of the characters in your book are just scraping by um but I did notice whenever Dennis comes near wealth or stability disaster seems to strike um our wealth or stability Within his reach uh thank you yeah that's uh that's that's the question um and that's you know that's a question I've I've wondered you know about myself for a long time um but yeah Dennis is he's he's recently sober he was a blackout drunk um for a long time and and that kind of precluded him from from really ever achieving uh stability or wealth um and now that he's sober he feels like he's um you know he's fallen behind he's lost all this time and and so he he as in other areas of his life he kind of just wants everything to be okay immediately you know he wants he wants not wealth but Comfort comfort and stability immediately which is you know impossible because those things sort of take time to to accumulate um and and one of the the kind of central questions of the novel I think is is him figuring out whether whether comfort and stability are things that he can achieve eventually or if he's just kind of like like dispositionally ineligible for them uh ever um and and I wanted the book to kind of reflect um you know the kind of economic experiences of my little Millennial cohort um who who entered the workforce during the Great Recession um and a lot of you know a lot of the characters in the book are are kind of languishing and the service industry or they have these kind of scammy jobs that require them to sort of uh uh you know prey on their customers or or the just intern forever um and it's sort of the rare person who has found like you know kind of a traditional white collar job or who owns a house and and when monk encounters one of these people he's very envious of them um and and you know tries to figure out uh what they've done that he he didn't do and and and if there's a way that he can sort of you know turn back time and and and make the right decisions great uh GTH both Ethan and Julie have brushes with poverty and with extreme wealth um there's a visit to the Occupy encampment for example but then there's also a mysterious benefactor who gives Ethan a place to live on an estate um does having brushes with both aspects keep Ethan and Julie in Balance um I wonder if maybe instead it keeps them off balance um I feel like um income inequality or really inequalities of wealth and power are sort of like the central social justice issue of our time if you stand far enough back they kind of feed into everything else and um I wanted to you know I ended up setting the book during the Great Recession that that Michael talked about where um all of a sudden this kind of you know credit card fueled fiction um that prevent Ed those inequalities from becoming too glaring kind of fell away and we were really um faced collectively with this kind of precariousness and I hear other panelists as you talk I hear the way that that brushes with that precariousness leave scars you know whether it's scars because you're sliding back into it or whether it's scars because you find yourself surrounded by these fabulous trappings that you can't quite keep up with so Ethan as a character um is from you know a very impoverished and remote part of the country the eastern shore of Maryland and within that Mia you know he has some relative degree of privilege um his dad runs a private school so he sort of exposed to people who are better off but he really carries this you know insecurity kind of like Michael was talking about um he's an addict and he's like you know am I ever gonna have stability unfortunately for him he has a daughter um and so you know he's he's got someone else he's got to be worrying about too she has a relative degree of privilege in the sense that she's you know her mom's a professor uh any professors on this call might chuckle to hear that as equated with stability but um you know she has this ability to move through the other setting of the book which is New York City in 2011 and she can kind of you know go into classmates fabulous apartments and compare them to her own you know dumpy two-bedroom um and so you're kind of getting this constant oscillation between um wealth and pration and I think it's it's very um it puts a lot of pressure on the characters all right so another theme that came up quite a bit through everyone's book is rebirth um so G will start with you this time um Ethan desperately wants a rebirth or clean slate with his daughter um how does he approach this connection and transformation um badly haphazardly recklessly and disastrously um so as I said uh Ethan you know has has is has been an addict since he was a teenager um he's now you know in the book opens He's 33 and he and his daughter they're in interactions for the last three or four years have been confined to a handful of Skypes this is 2011 so zoom's not a thing you know you're Skyping um and he's on the west coast and she's on the East and he's not really a factor in her life um except that she's really having a hard time at 13 and 14 and and so maybe he is a factor there and he feels like she's headed for the same kind of rough Straits that he passed through uh at that age and he's desperate to prevent it but I think in your question you use interestingly the phrase Clean Slate as a synonym for a kind of rebirth or rekindling of connection and I think that's the problem I think that he thinks that he can sort of charge back into her life and be like let's draw a hard line under all these you know under the past and just move forward it's a very American way of thinking I think um and I I hope what the book dramatizes and really what I discovered in the writing is that a rebirth requires a reckoning you know it's not a wiping clean of the Slate it's a it's an honest accounting of the past and a a full exploration of what you can control and what you did wrong what you should take responsibility for and what are the things that you couldn't control and that you have to let go of um and so that's really the central drama of the book um him discovering that that's the task um Julie discovering that that's the task for her as well and can they pull it off and I hope that question hovers over the book right up to the very last scene yes absolutely it does um Susan many of your characters reinvent themselves in some way um is it a matter of rebirth or is it them making the world give them what they want you know that that question really struck me because I hadn't thought about it that way but in fact I I think I think you you identified it there are very a lot of very will driven characters in my book who are almost completely without self- knowledge they're not at all introspective the um the epigram of the book comes from step and fetcher where it says Don't Look Back something may be gaining on you and the motion at all times in this book is is forward especially for Lila and Grace who are um very similar lla says about her daughter um Grace is is uh just like me but I'm nothing like her which is um which is actually I think true um because she's Grace has grievances against her mother um for being negligent and not going to soccer games and not having dinner with the family and um and but Lila is always who she was I mean as a child dealing with her difficult father getting through Michigan getting jobs on newspapers she just barrels her way through um and it takes her to the end uh Grace is a little bit more thoughtful and there's a third one who's also very ambitious which is Grace's best friend Ruth who's um her college roommate and um Ruth Ruth is also very ambitious but she's also driven by anxiety which is something I think that the other two don't feel they uh not that they it's not it may be buried it may be sub Ros of but they're just they're just success driven and work driven work is very important to this book women's women working and in their lives it's it's it's often the dominating thing especially with Lyla so good question thank you oh oh thanks Michael it feels a little like Dennis is getting a second life as he drifts through Philly and reconnects with people who only knew him before um is each chapter or each couch that he's sleeping on a clean slate thanks uh yeah that's a that's an excellent question um I should say the structure of the book is kind of like in every chapter he's he's staying with a new a new person um and it's it's sort of episodic that way and that structure appealed to me um because it it kind of like mirrors the the you know the kind of recovery program um Axiom of of you know taking things one day at a time like each day is sort of a new opportunity to to be sober um which doesn't mean strictly like abstinence from alcohol but you know to kind of like live to live honestly to live well um and sometimes he does and sometimes he doesn't um but uh but there's you know there's always that opportunity um but as as uh as G said very well uh you know there's kind of no such thing as as a clean slate um whatever happened yesterday happened and and you can address it or you can try to ignore it but it it doesn't go away and and I think you know that's that it's very interesting that you also have um an addiction novel grth I'm very excited to read it but but there's that there's you know that's that's a very inconvenient sort of reality for for for people um recovering from addiction uh you know because you know the the the problems that happen in in chapter one are still there in chapter two but there's also new problems in chapter two and it's it's sort of you know it follows him throughout his journey until you know eventually there there does need to be some some sort of Reckoning uh Dany Jane does seem to become a different person as soon as she starts thinking of herself as a TV writer is the industry itself what brings this about or the shedding of her old project or is it something else entirely yeah that's such an interesting um question to think about for me um because I think um my first draft of this novel I had in my head even a kind of hierarchy of arts and thinking of you know like she and her husband sort of pay lip too like his abstract visual art and her Opus this ten yearses in the making novel um are the real art and then the television is down here and you know at some point she teaches at a college and she bemon that even the English professors that she teaches with who devoted their lives to studying literature um spend their time around the water cooler talking about like what they watched on Netflix last night like tell tell them as kind of her worry as this is the novel of our time and this form has taken over the way we used to think about novels and so I think the binary gets broken down pretty quickly about art and what's high and what's low and what's um real and what's false but I also think that um you know Jane has signs of a kind of crack in her even before she goes into television and gets swept up with this producer and I'm really interested in um not having sort of this pure figure who gets corrupted by Hollywood but someone who's already got dishonesty in them and kind of gets drawn to and susceptible to this producer um because of things that already live inside of her and um and she already begins on a dishonest note um with her husband and tells him that she's only dabbling in Hollywood to gather more material for her novel that she's not she's exploiting Hollywood they're not exploiting her and um and the producer of course is this black um mega wealthy producer who's been tasked by the network by the streaming service to um to develop diverse content and I was really interested in like reducing these ideas that I've grappled with in all of my books like around racial identity and sort of Cl and um history and kind of reducing it all to content for streaming service and like a sort of taking something so complex and making it into yet another um thing to pitch at a meeting as a kind of get-rich quick scheme and sort of um kind of the movement from this very pure idea of these questions of identity and politics and race and and becoming sort of um the desperation that Hollywood brings out in people and and sort of Jane sort of finding herself like wanting to be the next racial specimen for Hollywood and wanting them to exploit her and kind of pick her as the new race that will be sold on the market um yeah um ruman I got the Feeling reading your book that Brooke was going to maybe like shed a skin or transform into something else some new version of herself um is that what was happening what was she becoming and what prompted her to go through this I mean I think in some ways that's what the book is about I mean the book is called entitlement and the one of the driving questions of the book is whether a black woman is in fact entitled to change or you know demand something from the world in the way that a white man is that's of the drama of the book what happens to her doesn't seem to me like a rebirth so much as an undoing so maybe that requires a spoiler alert for my answer to that larger thematic question um but I don't know it's funny to say this about a book that you wrote like I don't really know what is happening to her but I don't think it's great um rebirth seems to me like such a uh that there's a positive connotation of like as in Michael's book of like um progress toward like wellness or you know um health or something but I think that money which is sort of the ultimate objective in my book doesn't offer that promise to people it doesn't offer salvation is not going to be found and money and I think that this is a book about her experience of learning that firsthand all right um gu and Susan both of your books show the parents story and the child story kind of interwoven um so G your book is almost like a mixtape or a collage with those pieces woven together throughout um can you talk a little bit about putting those pieces together yeah I mean the F the first thing that strikes me about um the process of you know trying to integrate the parents point of view and the child's point of view um is that it was I found it extraordinarily difficult um I have had the idea for this book rattling around my head for probably 25 years The Germ of it and when it came to me it was it was Ethan's story you know it was um a young was a young man a young father who had um had a lot of Hard Knocks and maybe wasn't even a good person um and and you know struggling um with what it meant to become a father but the book really only took off for me when I you know discovered Jolie um and you know she kind of like I just remember the day at the writing desk where she came alive and just sort of took over the proceedings I was happy to be dragged along behind her um for a couple of years of writing but at a certain point you know I then had to tack back toward the father's point of view and say well how does this all look from from his side is she seeing this clearly um and so you know I ended up I guess kind of staging the book in the tension between these two um you know at first kind of irreconcilable points of view and you know trying to find a way for them to struggle um toward a place where even if only for a moment they could kind of see each other clearly um we've all been children of parents um and many of us have been parents of children and um I so I think everybody on this call probably you know senses how difficult that is um that you know know the the hardest person to have empathy for is are sometimes the people closest to you um but um you know I it just felt like such a necessary project in the book because I found it to be such a necessary project in my own life as a son and as a father um so it as difficult as it was to you know negotiate these two points of view it would have been much easier to have like 10 points of view somehow but two is really really hard uh for me it was immensely rewarding in the end and in Susan in your book we have three different sections focusing on three different characters um can you talk a little how do these sections change our perspective as we read I I think I have I think I this is a like mother like mother is a book about three generations of difficult women um smart women interesting women but difficult tied up in their naughty relationships with each other and trying to sort it out um and um Lyla is the middle Generation Um I mean but she's the first book because she insisted on it it's it's sort of as as G was saying sometimes your characters just take over and tell you what they have to do and you're really helpless to go along and Grace is second because she's pretty powerful too but she's so mad at her mother lla has to come first and then Zelda comes third the grandmother um of grace and the mother of Laya who disappeared from lyla's life when lla was two and and she's more of a ghost haunting the book um and so she comes last because her absence is more important than her presence and it's what but I'm not going to say anything more about Zelda because that's a kind of mystery of the book and it's a through line um and I'm not going to spoil what little you know uh tense action there is in the book that way yes please don't spoil it right but the but the other thing is I I I the book isn't written chronologically um and the first sentence you know it says you know lla Pereira died on the front page of the Washington Globe po I kill off my my heroin right there and um and I never I don't like to write chronologically so you get bits and pieces of everybody as you go along but that's how you really get to know real people too you you don't meet somebody and then sit down and go back to the egg and take them up through you know kindergarten high school and think you you you slowly more and more intimate things are revealed and they may happen at different times in a person's life and so I try to do that so giving the sections is a way of organizing that there's more of Laya and Lila and more of her perspective there's more of grace and grace the third second section her perspective and well Zelda you have to wait and see um but I I think that's I I my next novel I'm trying to write chronologically and I'm resisting it it's just not nothing anything that comes naturally to me I'm I'm always going sideways in my books so that's it uh Michael in your book Dennis is going through Cycles or you know episodic um an episodic nature uh drifting through Philadelphia almost like a like a Wandering Samurai type character did you have an archetype in mind as you wrote him uh thanks yeah W wandering Samurai might be a little more romantic than than what he is but um I think he's he's definitely you know I think fits into The Wanderer archetype which is probably one of the the older archetypes in literature um I think he you know is is descended in in some ways from uh some of the the characters from like beat literature or or existentialist novels um the kind of you know willfully migratory willfully lost um characters who who you know use their their kind of itinerancy as a as a means of self-discovery um somebody who read it wrote that it was kind of a a a road novel without the road um because he he stays in one city the whole time uh and I liked that that kind of sounded sounded true um and you know I guess it's like sort of Maybe funny or or or sad that his like big journey of self-discovery is just like in South Philadelphia uh like you know he doesn't really get to go anywhere cool but um but I think for him you know we're all kind of the the the protagonists of our own Odyssey you know and I think for him it it really is like a very you know he's on like this sort of spiritual Quest you know into himself and and and South Philadelphia kind of takes on this sort of metaphysical landscape quality and and it it for him it really is like a you know kind of a a struggle between like salvation and and Damnation you know but uh um but you know I think for uh uh that's how you make any story seem important as like the you know those those Stakes for the for the character to to Really you know be very high um Dany a lot of unhinged but completely believable things happened to Jane in La um is your story a satire or is La in the TV industry just unsatiable that question made me laugh um I know actually think that anything is the Civil sort of post- civil rights movement interracial family um or Brooklyn in the 90s um I'm always seeing things with a slight tinge of comedy in my world view and um I think that um what I love about writing and comedy as a as a vantage point and I don't really choose it but it just kind of comes to me is that um it holds all of the other feelings I have and it allows them to be accessed without overwhelming the story my feelings of Rage or alienation or anxiety or sadness um and so for me you know Hollywood is absurd it has high stakes it's got you know plenty to to make fun of but I would say that exists in everything I write about and um I'd also say comedy you know for me is really important to the work I do because I'm us writing about characters who are like myself of mixed race who are black and white and um that story sort of since the beginning of this country has been told as a tragedy and a kind of modelin tragedy of the mixed race figur is a tragic figure and um laughter and irony and comedy for me have been a way of reshaping that narrative and reshaping The Gaze that looks on that narrative the white gaze has seen it as a sad story and um and the earnestness and the sort of violence of that earnestness is something I try to um disrupt in my work and to I think when you're laughing at yourself or you're laughing at the those who see you in a certain light you're sort of reclaiming a lot of power um and in that laughter is a sort of implicit survival um so for me the comedy is very important in everything I write and Hollywood was just one other space to to see the absurdity in great um veran reading your book I got a sense of tension and Menace that built throughout how do you build this uneasiness into your story in a way that kind of draws people in and intrigues people without spoiling the end it's so it's so interesting to me that that was your experience of it because I also think the my book is really funny and I felt this way about my last book too and I say this all the time and I feel like nobody agrees with me so maybe what I think is funny is actually really disturbing to other people um but I think that that I think that like that every writer only has access to the same toolkit which is language like I don't think there's any other um way to do anything on the page it's all you have and so I think that there's a sense of um Distortion or you know instability in the book as as it progresses and I think it's it's inside of the language I think it's inside of the word choice I think it's inside of what the book is noticing I think that um it's all inside of it and uh so yeah I I sometimes wish that I did have access to some other tool like when you see a film uh this the score communicates to how you're supposed to feel like you know it will sound um mournful or creepy and sort of indicate to some part of your brain that you're not even really aware of that you're supposed to feel a certain way or you're supposed to prepare for a jump scare or whatever it is but the writer has a much smaller toolkit at their disposal um and so yeah I I think we're all working with the same thing I do just want to say that I'm a little bit in shock that Susan is working on another book when we're all here talking about our forthcoming book so I didn't want that to get lost in the shuffle and I just feel like she needs acknowledgement as a role model to me personally for persevering like that well that's actually a great um segue into Q&A time so while we wait for some questions from the audience I have some kind of possible questions for you guys so we can go into um what's what's up next for you so someone like Susan I guess is working on another book already I assume most of you are not so are you going on a book tour do you have something exciting happening are you just you know booking a vacation to get through all this um let's start with uh Dany what's up next for you um I actually you know um against all of my psychological well-being against my children's well-being I've started another novel and I feel badly about that but I was compelled by something that happened in the way that things come to you when you're a novelist and you think this has to be a novel so I've begun a novel and um we'll be working on that all summer before my book comes out um before color television comes out and I also have been um pulling together I've written about race and identity uh as in a non-fiction context for my whole adult life and so I've been doing a sort of selected essays collection about um things that I've written over the last 25 years that's incredible you look so relaxed and calm I can't believe you have so many things happening Susan what's up next for you do you want to are you ready to talk about this I'm ready sure why sell early um the book is called um the book I'm working on is called the original husband and it was the book I was supposed to be writing when I wrote like mother like mother because I I I couldn't get into it my um I had an original husband um and uh and and I'm much older than the rest of you and I I I really had to wait until he died before I could write it because my sensibility is I is is Comic I think basically dealing with hard subjects in a comical way and and it was just too heartbreaking um watching him on his way out um so now I think I'm I'm ready to do it and it's it's and the question is and it's not my story at all is but what do you owe your original husband when he's on hard times and getting old and your children are in their 30s and they just can't deal with him do do do you have to step up and do something for him and um I'm always I'm always interested in in families that's what I'm interested in that's that's my um my bailey Wick and um so that's where I'm going and also my agent is on my butt all the time to keep going as I said I'm older than all of you I published my first novel when I was 67 I'm I'm a very late starter so um I have to keep going now oh wonderful um G what's up next for you um Susan I love that I love that premise that what do you owe your original husband it's like a that's a that's a thought provoker um yeah so uh so I guess I've got Michael and I I think are have a may we share a May Pub date these other people look very relaxed and chill because their books aren't coming out for a while but also Dany because what you know what's good psychologically for a writer is writing which I've learned the hard way so I tried to take a sabatical like a couple summers ago and it like totally didn't work so I try to always be writing just for sanity so I'm kind of like um trying to finish a book of stories right now um I have a story that I refer to as My Little Monster that I've been working on for years and years that's a retelling of a very famous text and that's um Preparatory to the next novel which I hope to start you know on after book tour which is a retelling of an even more famous text um that I've been thinking about for 25 years also um so that's what's next for me very exciting um ran what's up with you what's next well I didn't know I was goingon to be doing a panel with a bunch of show offs here A bunch of hardworking serious writers I feel a little um I feel like I go through these cycles of um input and output and I am like a little drained from the experience of writing this last novel and I sort of need a break so I'm I find that I been really like eager to read and to see movies I've seen a lot of movies um and to see art to see theater so I've been sort of like shoving things in my head um which tends I think that sort of yields unpredictable it is too too soon to predict like what results that will yield and I am trying to do other thing I'm trying to write a short story which is um something I'm really terrible at it turns out and I'm also trying to write a screenplay but I'm mostly doing these those are mostly engagements just sort of to keep like G said like you have to it's sort of like psychologically damaging weirdly if you don't do that and it doesn't have to produce anything it it's more sort of like an exercise like a like when the marathon runner goes for like a one mile run I sort of feel like that's what I'm doing at the moment oh well there's a lot of excitement about you veran in the chat so take a look at that but we're almost out of time and I definitely want to hear from Michael Michael what's up next for you um yeah I'm not I'm not I'm I'm not working on anything I'm being you know I'm I'm I'm far less impressive than the rest these guys the main thing for me I'm doing I have my little uh uh East Coast book tour at the beginning of May um and I don't really have like a fan base or anything so if any if anybody in the the audience here uh if you're in like New York or or Philadelphia or DC and want to come see me read a little bit from my book um I'm trying to you know fill some bookstores so that' be much appreciated yes everyone please go see Michael on his book t his book is excellent um and all of your books are excellent I am so privileged to have been able to read them early and I encourage everyone in the audience to read all five they're really all fantastic um but we are out of time uh so thank you everyone this has been a fantastic discussion and to everyone in the audience if you haven't already make sure to V visit the booths in the exhibit hall and next up is the afternoon keynote with Deborah Harkness all right thanks everybody and thank you to our authors you guys were all fantastic thank you for speaking with us about your forthcoming novels than