[upbeat jazzy music] - My name is Donna Wallace and I will be hosting this panel of authors today for you.

I have learned so much from them.

I'm a fan of their work, and I hope many of you know that there are many writers among us here in the Triad.

How many of you are from the Triad?

Okay, do you know, you probably know some writers, maybe some of you are writers.

But we are saturated with a wonderful writing community.

We're not going to talk a lot about the local scene, but really overarching all of this is featuring three Triad-area writers.

So I'm going to begin today by introducing them.

This is Jacob Paul.

He is an assistant professor of English at High Point University.

He has published fiction in a variety of literary magazines.

He is a novelist.

And today we will hear about his third novel, which is titled, Last Tower to Heaven.

Jacob is a 9/11 survivor and that has greatly impacted his work, and when you read his book, you will see that.

Secondly, I'd like to introduce Joseph Mills.

He's a professor at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts.

I first met him as a poet.

He has six published volumes of poetry.

Today, we're going to hear about his debut short story collection titled, Bleachers: Fifty-Four Linked Fictions.

Interesting format in this book that I think Joe is going to tell us a little bit more about.

And lastly, I want to introduce Valerie Neiman.

I would probably describe her as a triple threat.

She writes novels, short fiction, and poetry, has taught workshops in all of those.

She is a professor of English at North Carolina A&T State University.

So she has four novels, but today we are going to hear about her novel, her most recent novel, To the Bones.

Fascinating, fascinating work again with, that pushes the boundaries in genre, and Valerie will tell us a little bit more about that.

And so we're going to just let each of them talk about their book and include comments a little bit, include comments about the genre that that book occupies, because I think all of these are good examples of some very contemporary genres.

So Joe, why don't you start with [overlapping discussion].

- My name is Joe Mills and I have two children who are very athletic.

So this means I spend a lot Of time at basketball courts and soccer fields and track.

And they say that sports reveals character, and I find that it's true that sports reveals character of the parents.

[audience laughing] And so as I would go to these, I became very fascinated by the parents, and particularly when they were young.

You know, Dr. Martin Luther King, he said, Sunday morning is the most segregated hour in America.

Saturday morning, particularly when the children are young, is one of the most integrated hours in America because everybody is out there.

And so it is just fascinating to kind of watch.

I started writing, I do a lot of prose, poetry or flash fiction or working in that boundary, and I was writing a lot of pieces as these monologues.

And I started to think, well, what if they're all happening kind of at the same time, and I started trying to figure out ways to structure them together.

So I had literally written kind of hundreds of these as I was thinking about each parent's kind of perspective.

And the way I ended up structuring the book was using 54 of them because that's a deck of playing cards and that kind of amused me.

And there's 54 pieces.

They're all relatively short, but they're all linked together and they follow a single game from the beginning when we all kind of arrive to the afterward snacks.

If you have young children, you know the most important thing about the game is snacks, snacks and kind of uniforms.

And so that's how I ended up kind of linking everything together.

And whenever you go to a park you see people that you kind of know and kind of don't know and we are constantly, constantly misjudging one another, like looking at them and thinking, Oh, I know why they're doing that, and probably you don't know.

So as these stories kind of link together, your understanding of a character shift back and forth as they go.

So would you like me to read just like a paragraph?

- Yes, if you've got some, give us a taste of that.

- This first one is called Aging, and it's a woman who never wanted to have one of those blue chairs.

She was not going to be that kind of blue chair person.

"The waiting part of parenting "had taken Colleen by surprise.

"She hadn't fully appreciated how much "of a time commitment her children's interests "would require from her.

"Not the hours driving around, "but the hours she had to wait somewhere.

"Parenting at this stage felt mostly like being "in a waiting room, flipping through old magazines.

"They went off and played and she waited on a bench, "on the bleachers, in a chair.

"This was her job, waiter.

"She admired those who didn't do it, "the ones who dropped their kids off and drove away.

"But that wasn't her.

"She was a waiter.

"And since she was, she could at least be comfortable.

"When she had bought the chair, "she had told Steve, we'll just keep this in the car.

"She had wanted to say, don't tell your father, "but that would have made it more likely that he would.

"Nick had hurt her rant too many times "about blue chair zombies and the city dead "and she didn't want to be charged with hypocrisy.

"She also didn't want to hear any suggestion "that she was changing or compromising, "selling out or getting old.

"Sometimes she felt Nick looking at her "as if assessing her grain hair and her wrinkles.

"He was aging as well.

"The gut she pretended not to notice, "the glasses he needed a few years ago, "the way he didn't take the stairs two at a time anymore.

"But there was nothing like a pregnancy to take "a toll on a body.

"She relied on her son being oblivious, "not thinking to tell his dad about the chair, "not seeing it as important since it wasn't about him.

"Colleen had realized long ago, she rarely went wrong "counting on the self-centeredness of men."

[audience laughing] Oh, it's got a zombie reference in it.

[overlapping discussion] And you know, all of these, pretty much all of these, maybe all of my work is this is not what I thought it was going to be, and that's all the parenting, you know?

This isn't what I thought the experience was going to be.

- Well, you talk about parenting and certainly when you read these stories, that's definitely something, that's really the setting, the setting of the parent, the child, the soccer field.

But as I read some of those stories, I realized that it goes a little bit, a level deeper.

It isn't just about parenting, but in our parenting that uncovers and reveals the deeper issues that these characters are struggling with.

- And the values that you think you have, and then when your parents arrive, it's like, okay, so what are your values?

Kind of really, I didn't realize how it was going to change my relationship with my own parents, and the idea of kind of grandparents, and I didn't realize that parenting was as public act.

That's what really shocked me, how everybody kind of judges your decisions and comes up and talks to you about them.

[audience laughing] It's like, you shouldn't do that.

And then, you know, you see that really wonderful Facebook moment of Saturday morning and it's the soccer field, but there's alcoholics out there and there are people whose parent has died, and there are people who have been abandoned, and there's a thief in amongst them, and there are people with guns.

And so I'm exploring kind of all of that as we go.

One of the central things, and I'm gonna spoil it because I don't believe in spoilers, so I'm just going to tell you: There's a woman whose child has died and she still goes to the field to try to imagine.

So she's standing out there, but nobody knows what she's doing, and they're all kind of suspicious.

And so these characters kind of weave in and out.

- That's a good example of the point I was making.

It brings up and reveals something much deeper.

Valerie, let's talk about your book.

- This book is a genre mashup.

It has elements of mystery, horror, Appalachian tall tale, it has an environmental focus.

I had a lot of fun writing it because it all came out of here.

I lived for many, many years in West Virginia and I homesteaded a farm.

And the farm actually was over the workings of an old mine, and so there was a mind crack in the back.

So I was trying to get started on a new book.

I'd been fighting with a novel that was giving me trouble and I had revised it and revised it and I was complaining to a friend.

I said, You know, I always said, when I lived in West Virginia, if I was going to murder somebody, I'd throw them down a mine crack.

[audience laughing] And so he looked at me and he said, Well, do it.

So I'm going to read you just a little piece.

"The last thing he remembered, he'd been driving, "a two lane road, the trees so close, "an inky tunnel pierced by his headlights.

"Maybe the car went off the road.

"Maybe you're buried, his unpleasant thoughts mocked.

"There was a faint lessening of the gloom ahead.

"He kept crawling, sticks rolling under his hand.

"Something chitinous and leggy moved across his fingers.

"He pulled his hand away, then put it back down.

"The thin gray light increased.

"He could see that if not much else with his glass has gone.

"And his shoes were gone too, "the toes of his socks dragging across the damp rocks.

"He seemed to hear things breathing nearby, waiting.

"No one's coming back for you ever.

"He crawled around the ragged corner and the light became a crack in the sky, "a white intensity that squeezed shut his eyes "and made the back of his head spasm in pain.

"He opened his eyes just enough to see a hazy field "of rocks and debris.

"He picked up a large round object "and brought it close to his weak eyes.

"A pair of empty holes stared back.

"He flung the skull away, "hearing it crack and roll to a stop "and he realized that the rocks "and the sticks were bones and that he was among the dead."

So one of the great tropes of literature is the stranger comes to town, and also one of the great tropes of horror movies is getting off on the wrong exit.

So the hero of the book, or one of the two main characters is a mild-mannered government auditor and he gets off at the wrong exit in West Virginia and he gets hit over the head and thrown down a mine crack to die.

But he doesn't.

He manages to crawl his way out of there, to climb out and to finally find his way to town.

And at that point, he runs into the first of three local people who will form a sort of band of very unlikely people who are going to go after the coal barons who run this community in a very evil way.

So my years as a newspaper reporter in West Virginia and as a farmer all went into this book.

I had my farm, and as I say, it was over the workings of a coal mine.

It was a very particular coal mine.

It was the Farmington No.

9 mine, which blew up 50 years ago this year and 78 men were killed, and 19 of them are still down there because it was too dangerous to get them out.

So they simply sealed the mind, left them down there, put up a memorial up a couple of runs from where I lived and that's that.

But I was always aware of that.

I thought of those men, you know, left forever down in that mine.

And so as this book evolved, there were a lot of things I wanted to deal with.

I wanted to deal with Appalachia for one thing, because certainly coal mining regions get a bad rap, and it's not true.

I mean, they're quite aware of what's going on.

They're also aware that they don't have a whole lot of choices in many of these areas.

Now, West Virginia is diversifying.

There are technology industries there, tourism, a lot of other things, but mining is still an important part of not only the current economy, but also the legacy economy.

So all of these things were going on as I wanted to start writing the book.

- The thing that I appreciate about Valerie's work here in this book is, you'll get the creeps, I mean, thinking about, you know, all of a sudden that your dog's tennis ball is going to feel like a skull in the crack of the couch and you're going to look... Read it in the dark.

It's going to be even better.

Jacob, we've got a great story here for you to tell us about.

- Yeah, thank you.

So I don't know how many of you are Pixies fans.

My students were surprised that I still listen to them.

I remember hearing Black Francis, their lead singer, perform in Salt Lake City when I was still living there.

And he made this statement, which was that when he got his indie rocker card, he had to sign a pledge saying he would never play a medley, which he then proceeded to do, and then said, I guess they'll revoke it now.

Growing up Orthodox Jewish, being a gen X-er, writing fiction, I sort of felt the same way about ever writing anything to do with the Holocaust.

Like it's too big, it's too long ago.

It's somebody else's story.

I'm not gonna do it.

And then I had this house in Salt Lake City that was on a steep hill and it had, therefore, a parking strip, that section between the sidewalk and the road that was long and steep and west-facing.

And in a misguided attempt to be conservative about water, I had done desert landscaping with it instead of growing grass, which meant that I spent much of my time in the hot Western sun, trying to pull weeds out of the baked earth, which is my least favorite task.

And while doing that one day, this sentence popped into my head, which is the first sentence of this book, which I'll read for you because otherwise I'll botch it, because there's like filming happening and an audience.

Which is: "Seven days before his 33rd birthday, "Jacob Paul discovered to his dismay "that his life was the dream of a man slowly gassed "in the back of a box truck, "headed from the Chelmno extermination camp "to a mass grave in the Polish woods."

And I was like, this sentence needs, like what do I do?

Goodbye sentence.

I'm gonna keep pulling this morning glory that's apparently able to survive for a hundred years as a rhizome and hope that this is not the year it comes back.

And then, you know, the sentence stayed there, and I was like, this is really annoying.

I mean, for days, and then it got another sentence which was this: "Just when Jacob had finally grown "into the full range of his faculties, "when his professional life was stable, "the business he'd founded profitable and growing, "when the same could be said for his relationship "with Esther and for a his social sphere, "when he actually managed to ride his bike several times "a week and to be to bed at a consistent hour "and to drink too much only occasionally appropriately "so that it was okay to drink too much occasionally "in the appropriate circumstance, "when he'd finally moved past the obsessive ruminating, "second-guessing part of his thinking habits, "when he'd last come to genuinely enjoy "his own company, this."

And then I was like, ah, I'm stuck with this story.

And then, you know, like nine years and 444 pages later, as it turns out, you know, I had this novel which eventually like sort of the main issue is that Jacob, who quickly becomes Jay because it was really uncomfortable to write my own name in it is not in magical realism.

He's not in a surreal space.

He's in our world.

He's stuck with it.

He doesn't really have access to his dreamer, but he's got this information that he has to, feels that he must do something with.

And so he keeps trying things, which sort of makes this a little bit of a picaresque.

He ends up wandering around, he loses Esther immediately, and then finds a new love interest, this woman, Chase, and he follows her different places, and at the core of this is this basic question, which is, can one actually tell a Holocaust story at all, not just because I'm several generations out from that event, but because stories are based around, or narrative fiction, is based around causality.

In other words, like this event causes this event, which leads to this, which leads to climax, which leads to DAHN-YOO-MAHL, which leads to resolution, right?

And thus, we're all happy or unhappy with how that turns out.

So the book keeps dealing with that and I think my favorite late addition to it was when a Jay finally runs into Chase again after a long absence in New Mexico.

He discovers that she's been married the whole time to a man who's the governor of Albuquerque and who is closet-ly an evangelical Christian.

And that guy's heard from Chase about Jay and a lot, and about these arguments about the story and about even the Holocaust Museum.

So he decides that they should build a Holocaust museum that will not be about Nazis.

It will never mention Nazis.

And then he's sort of sponsored by these three guys I think of as being a little bit like the Koch brothers, but they're three of them and they've, amongst being his his financial, his political sponsors, they also have funded the Creationist Museum and the Noah's Ark recreation in Northern Kentucky, outside of Cincinnati.

So Arthur, King Arthur takes Jay to meet with them and they have this lunch where they're like, You need to run for governor.

And he's like, Only if you build this museum.

And they're like, sure.

And they build this thing, and eventually, Jay goes to visit it and it's like sort of a cross between a Lithuanian shtetl and an old West village, and a guy dressed as a Hasid who's a Lithuanian shtetl dweller recreator comes bounding out to meet, Jay, and he's like, Welcome to Yiddville, and Jay punches him, which is a problem because he's arrested for being a potential anti-Semite activist at that point.

But this question sort of drives a lot of the, sometimes... [audience laughing] Thanks, I feel like I'm just going to stumble further down the rabbit hole.

- Well, one thing I loved about your book is it raised a lot of the deeper, or the deepest existential questions even about good survival, why me, why this, and I really enjoyed the various layers of the book.

You mentioned earlier about when you're, the first sentence came to you and then the following, I've heard Valerie talk about that experience with Leopard Lady, a story that pestered you until you could get it on paper.

- That's a poetry collection.

It's actually a novel in verse.

And I was sitting on my porch working or trying to work, hoping something would happen, and it happened where this voice just appeared, and 13 pages later, I just took dictation as quickly as I could because this voice was talking.

And I'm like, who is this?

It's not anyone I know.

And that was the genesis of that book because her voice was so powerful and so assured, and then I had to go in search of her.

- Joe, do you hear voices?

[laughing] Oh, no, no, no, I know when he does.

He sits in the bleachers and observes people and reads their minds.

- I think most of us as writers hear voices and that's a good thing.

I've become recently worried because I let those voices out as I'm walking along.

So I'm like that old guy walking along muttering to himself.

I used to be better about keeping them inside.

I think we do, and we get excited about that, and then we write them down and, you know, I once did an interview where somebody was praising a poem and then said, "Recite that for me."

And I said, "I can't."

And he thought I just wanted encouragement.

And I said, "When I write it down, it's now gone.

I have released it from my head in a certain way."

So I think that's the way a lot of us work, but we also, I loved your opening of, I wanted people to know I was funny so I decided to write this novel about the Holocaust, right?

And when you're kind of talking about causality, so for me, I had this issue of I've written like a hundred pieces of what happened at a soccer game, there's no story there.

There's no, how do you, what structure do you find?

And yet it's nagging at you.

I keep writing them.

So anytime I hit a topic, whether it's Shakespeare or wine, Mark Twain used to talk about finding an ore pocket and then trying to mine out as much ore as you could from that.

But then how do you structure that.

And finding the form for all of this stuff that's nagging at you.

- After I've read the last page and closed the cover, I'm not really finished with the book.

What do you want us to be thinking about or that you hope, I should say, maybe you hope, or presume we might think about as a result of reading your book?

What's Donna Wallace going to be thinking about when she turns the last page.

Jacob, you want to?

- Sure.

One of the things about writing my books for all of them has been that, like, I don't, maybe get a good draft pretty early, but it's a long time before I actually know what the question is that I'm really exploring.

I might have a sense of it if it keeps evolving.

In some ways, my second novel, until I was pretty far into this novel and then had to go back and do revisions on that one before it came out, I didn't really understand what the primary question was in it.

And I think in this book too, it took a long, it took the whole book, really, for me to get what I was trying to understand.

And so maybe that's partially when I, I guess, I think about lingering, which is this question of, what does it mean to derive one's agency in the world from something that one finds, claims loudly they wish wouldn't have happened?

You know, what does it mean to be, in the case of Jay, a dream of the Holocaust?

Ultimately it means he's dependent upon the Holocaust, right?

Like, I mean, he doesn't exist without it.

And so that problem sort of sticks with me.

The other thing, I think, too, that sort of has an ongoing echo for me is this, you know, when I started writing, it gives me access to the Holocaust, right?

The book is more about the inaccessibility of the Holocaust than it is about the Holocaust itself.

And so I think about lots of other traumas and thinking through questions of what is it, what do people look like, post-trauma, and what does that agency look like?

- [Donna] How about you, Valerie?

- I think for me, I think of Emily Dickinson talking about, tell the truth, but tell it slant.

And when you're dealing with trauma, if you confront it head-on, sometimes you can't.

And I think there is a trauma, there's trauma in my book, but it's told slant and it's told with satire.

It's told with a sense of often very dark humor.

But it it's a story of destruction.

It's a story of loss.

It's a story of what it means to love a place and not be able to keep it in some ways.

So I wanted to use these genre tropes because when you think about the coal industry and the deaths that have happened in it, it's very easy to see the mine owners as monstrous, and there are some who are.

And so I've sort of pushed that envelope that they are in fact, how do you fight back against someone who has all of the strings, who has the strings of money, the strings of political power, the strings of police power?

That isn't so much the case anymore but I think that is a legacy that people talk about.

So that kind of trauma of living on land that you can't control.

- What I really love about sports is that it is unpredictable.

We do use repetitions, repetitions, and we think we know what's going to happen, and then something happens, you know?

A world-class soccer player headbutts somebody during the World Cup Finals, or the New England Patriots lose to the Giants, things that we don't expect, and then how do you kind of deal with that?

We were talking earlier saying we have three very different books, and yet they're all, in some way, deal with kind of trauma and human existence, but they do it by humor and kind of dark humor at times.

- Which makes all these books very entertaining to read, but also if you've got a mind for it to help you focus and deal with some serious questions.

So thank you for your time today, and thank you for joining us.

[audience applauding] [upbeat jazzy music]