Today, we're going to continue talking about Gothic architecture. There's lots to talk about because Gothic architecture is not simply a local phenomenon in France, but it's an international style. We have Gothic architecture happening all over Europe. Today, we're going to focus our attention on Gothic architecture in the region around Paris, which is called the Île de Fonds. I have this map up here just to show you the difference geographically in where we find large clusters of Romanesque architecture and where we find large clusters of Gothic architecture. The little red dots represent major Romanesque sites. Here's Cluny, that huge monastery that really organized commerce, trade, and the economy in France and in much of Europe throughout the Romanesque period. And here's Paris up here in blue. The area around Paris called the Île de Fonds is the area where Gothic architecture tends to cluster. These little crosses are Google Maps representation of where a Gothic site is. And you can see almost nothing down here in the area around Cluny and tons and tons of stuff in the area around Paris. And these are some of the specific sites, some of which we looked at last time and some of which we're going to look at today. Paris, once again, famous. Here's Saint-Denis, where we had our first Gothic church. I don't know why it's not on the map, but right about here we have Laurent, which we also looked at. So we've looked at these three Gothic churches. And on this map, we have locations for a couple more. Ah-ha. I love to say these. Ah-ha. Ah-myah. And Beauvais, which we'll look at today. And those really represent the high point of Gothic architecture. And when I say high point of Gothic architecture, we could go back to the discussion we had when we talked about Greek temples. We were quoting Le Corbusier, who says, the architect should proceed as the engineer. The type should be identified. The question should be asked. And once the question is asked in a clear enough way, then subsequent generations of architects can work on perfecting the type. And if you want to take that analogy to Gothic architecture, it works very well. You could say, what are the questions that are asked? And certainly one question is, how can the structure be dematerialized? Another question is, how can verticality be achieved? Another question is, how can structure become expressive of an architectural ornament, et cetera? And you will find iterations of these things happening again and again. So here's our friend, Party Skeleton. I always like to say hi to Party Skeleton every morning. And what is the point of Party Skeleton? Who can tell me what the idea of this slide is with the skeleton? OK, it shows the structural part of the building. Be more specific. What is the structural part of the building? OK, we have flying buttresses. Over here, we have them looking like buttresses. Over here, we have them looking like Party Skeleton. OK, somebody add to that. Yeah, it shows the verticality of the building. Good, and the verticality of the building, to a large extent, is achieved through the flying buttresses. What else is going on here? Yes? It shows how the weight's distributed. We have a load coming down. And instead of just having giant, massive buttresses holding up the loads coming down from the vault, we have a skeletal system, hence Party Skeleton, by the way. We have a system of ribs. We have a system of linear elements that begin to translate all those loads to points. And the benefit of that is the wall can go away. You can have this kind of skeletal cage, like Party Skeleton has no meat on his bones, but he still stands up in the same way Gothic architecture has really no wall to speak of. It's all done in this rib fashion. We used the word attenuated last time, which means stretched or lengthened. So attenuation is another nice word to use or to think about using when you talk about Gothic architecture. It's the idea that there might be something familiar, I don't know, like a vaulted structure. Let's say a Roman vaulted structure. Then you stretch it, like Raggedy Ann and Andy are stretching their taffy. Or I think this one looks particularly Gothic, doesn't it? This is somebody's sad little shoe with goo coming off of it. It looks exactly like this section through a Gothic cathedral, because this massive solid has been pulled into a tensile mode and it becomes arcuated and thin. If we take the zeitgeist argument of Heinrich Wöschlen that we discussed earlier, which I will succinctly summarize as Gothic people like things pointy, it's worth looking for a moment at what the representation of a human figure would look like. And this is an illustrated manuscript from the 14th century. The same notion of attenuation that we saw here with the gummy shoe is more or less also going on here. We have these people who have the proportions of a Barbie doll. That is to say, not proportions found in nature. Tiny little pinheads and incredibly lengthened bodies. And by the way, observe their footwear, pointy. We spoke last time about the emergence of Gothic architecture in the Church of Saint-Denis. This shift toward a different kind of architecture was provoked at Saint-Denis by some of the theories of Abbe-Souget, the head of the monastic order at Saint-Denis, who was really trying to find a way to symbolize God. And what did Abbe-Souget come up with? How do you represent the presence of God architecturally? Yes, light. Yeah, Souget felt nothing that you make as an image could represent God. And in fact, there were even biblical prescriptions against graven images. But somehow, if you could create a powerful feeling of light, that would be a way to express the presence of God, the emanations of power from God, and to make it palpable. And so you look at the Romanesque envelope of Saint-Denis, which is very much about the wall, very much about little punch windows perforating this continuous membrane, heavy membrane. And wow, look what happens in the Gothic transformation of that building. It's as if everything has become skeletal, like party skeleton. I think this is pretty instructive. If you just look at the play between these little columns over here, in a sense, the Gothic column is even more massive than, or let's say the Gothic pier because these aren't single columns, they're pier bundles, is even more massive than the Romanesque one. But notice how the Gothic pier is rotated so that your perception of it would be the thinnest part and then it folds back. So it's here in the Romanesque instance of Saint-Denis, the geometry of the piers reiterates the geometry of the nave. Here in the Gothic version, it's rotated at 45 degrees and appears even more slender. Also, I think what's really interesting is what happens to the mass of the wall. And you can see that pretty clearly here, where the wall buttresses are perpendicular to the enclosing membrane of the building. And it's almost the same kind of rotation that we saw with the piers, only even more dramatic. It's as if wall, which here is parallel to the nave and enclosing the nave, swings out and opens up space in between the pieces of pier. So you have really as much wall as you had in the Romanesque version. It's just that the wall is perpendicular. And when the wall is perpendicular, you then have the opportunity to inundate the space with a light, to inundate the space with this presence of God expressed through colored light coming through the windows. In both of these plans, the Romanesque plan and in the Gothic plan, you can see where the westward comes down. And how do we know where the westward is coming down? How can we tell where the towers are? Yes. Go ahead. Absolutely, the walls are really thick. The walls are really thick because they're supporting massive towers. So here you see the westward and the heavy towers. Here also you see the westward and the heavy towers. Look what happens to the chevet or the apps with its radial form. The Romanesque is closed. By the time we get to the Gothic condition, once again, you have really no wall at all. You just have open spaces between structural elements. It's really quite amazing. If Romanesque architecture had to do with punched windows in a wall, when the wall goes away, the window is simply the space between structure. And you get an altogether different effect. This is what Saint-Denis would look like. And I have to say, this is fake Saint-Denis. And it's the real Saint-Denis. But it's a Saint-Denis that has been elaborated over time. So if you look at the size of a clearer story here, that's not original to Abbey-Souget's church. That's something that got added. Last time, we also looked at another early Gothic church. And that was the Church of Laon, the Cathedral of Laon, which has the extraordinary ornamental program of cows, lots of cows, which I just adore. But you can see that the type of facade that's been suggested in Saint-Denis becomes clarified in Laon. And by clarified, I mean it's more systematic. And it's also more plastic. Let me go back to Saint-Denis. Here at Saint-Denis, we have these buttresses that begin to make three-dimensional, the surface of the facade. But the horizontal elements are really pushed back behind that. And you still read an architecture that's essentially a wall architecture. Little rose window gets punched in. A couple of pointed windows get punched in. But they become elements in the wall. The wall itself doesn't become completely activated. Already here just a few years later, by the time we get into Laon, it's almost as if the wall has become a weave-in. The wall has become this weaving together of horizontal and vertical elements. And if you had to say, where's the surface of the wall, you would be hard put to do that because the wall presents itself as having so many different surfaces. The wall is so much a kind of exploration of the thickness and depth, the plasticity of the wall surface. And some of that stuff gets, I think, exaggerated and amplified even by the way the towers are positioned. We noticed when we looked at the piers at Saint-Denis that they were rotated. So that they were at 45 degrees with respect to the nave. Here the towers are rotated so that the cows are at 45 degrees. And that just, it's kind of like architectural contrapasto. I mean, it kind of forces you to explore the other side of the building because you get this oblique view of the element that you're admiring. The plan of Laon is strange. We don't have a rounded apps here. It's one of these transitional works but they don't exactly know what they're supposed to do. But probably the most indicative element in Laon, in terms of representing this period of early in an untampered with way, Saint-Denis was tampered with in later centuries, is the nave wall. And when we looked at the nave wall, we saw something that is incredibly clear in its articulation, where it's a four-part division. We have this arcade at the bottom. We have this gallery or tribune up here. We have this little triforium here and then clear story windows. And it's so clear that you just have to love it. You can read it. You can read the articulation of parts of the hole really, really easily. But it also enforces a rather diminished height for the clear story. And finding ways to bring more light in is one of the ambitions. Back to the whole Corbusian question, you define the problem you want to solve.  So Laurent and Saint-Denis posed the problem of the Gothic and subsequent churches begin to refine it. For example, Notre Dame in Paris, which is also an early church, 1163, already takes the idea of the facade that we saw roughly stated in Saint-Denis and elaborated in Laurent. And I really think this is the most perfect Gothic facade. And maybe I think that because it's so reined in. It doesn't try to do things that take it away from the volumetrics of the church by adding porches or adding finials. It seems to be an architectural expression that's gained through subtraction rather than addition. So you look at the wall. And it's a wall of great plasticity. But it's plasticity through carving rather than adding. So this elaborate portal on the west work is scooped into the wall of the church. The elaborate rose window that spans between two structural ways is scooped into the church and so forth. So it really is a kind of perfect geometrical construct. But it's not simply a perfect geometrical construct because Gothic architecture is not really designed for your aesthetic appreciation. When Gothic cathedrals were being built, people didn't say, I want this one to be really pretty. Or I want people to come and say, this is darling. I'm going to have my picture taken here. Rather, Gothic cathedrals had to mean something. And one way they meant something was simply, let's say, visceral. And by visceral, I mean you get this gut feeling.  It's in your body. When you walk into a Gothic cathedral, it's maybe 25 degrees cooler than it is outside because this building is like a cave. So your whole body transforms its sensory perceptions just by the quality of light and the quality of temperature. Then you look up and you see these vaults that don't seem to be supported by much. You kind of feel deranged and dazzled. And if you're a little peasant coming in from your mud hut and you walk into something that has these giant, soaring vaults, you would be truly of the opinion that only a miracle could make those things stand up. And the spatial qualities of the Gothic cathedral alone would clarify your faith. But also, in case you don't get all that, there's an elaborate sculptural program going on in these Gothic facades that will show you very explicitly scenes like The Last Judgment, where you know what kind of tortures will happen if you are a sinner, enthronement of Christ, or scenes like Adam and Eve. You can walk around a church looking at all the different sculptural elements, and you can get a pretty good instruction of the Bible. And you know these stories because you heard them in sermons, but you certainly never would have read them. On another level again, the form of the church encodes these complex meanings. Here's the facade of Notre Dame, which I say is darling and I want to be photographed near it. But it's also this map of a kind of scholastic order. We mentioned Thomas Aquinas on an earlier occasion. Here's his name down here. And he was a great scholastic philosopher who sought to find ways of really organizing and giving a kind of mathematical form to the cosmos. And in his categorizations and subcategorizations of elements, you can find a fairly strong correspondence in the way something like a Gothic cathedral is laid out. It is almost like a matrix. It is almost like a grid with different relationships that can be read in different ways across it. There are also other kinds of numbers going on here. Like when Notre Dame is being constructed, how big do you make it? Why do you make it that way? And part of it had to do with this desire to make visible on Earth certain things that are described in the Bible, like the Temple of Solomon. There are these complex measurements that recall those kinds of elements as well. So now let's move into a period that we didn't look at last time. It's really the High Gothic. It's the period when these ideas that are initiated and roughly sketched out in the early Gothic churches go farther and farther and farther. And you can probably see ways in which that transformation happens by looking at this slide, which shows you various nave walls. Laos, my favorite of all the Gothic cathedrals. I like Laos and the Vest because I'm so humble. Kind of short, turns out. Notre Dame, much bigger. Chartres, which we'll look at soon. Bigger again. Rhin, huge. Uh-uh, Amiens, even bigger. So on one level, the sheer verticality of these buildings, because they're drawn at the same scale here, is increasing in a rapid way. These churches are only a decade or so apart. They're not spread out by large periods of time. But in addition to the verticality of the building increasing, the wall is also becoming radically dematerialized. If you look at the condition of Laos with its four-part division of the nave and its relatively small, clear story windows, by the time you get to Notre Dame, there is a lot less mass. And the clear story windows are maybe twice as big. By the time you get to Chartres, the clearer story is almost as big as the arcade. The ability of the wall to simply become lantern-like and let light pour through the windows is increasing rapidly. And here, when we come to Amiens, it's kind of a miracle that the thing stands up at all. You have these spindly little columns and no wall, no wall, just nothing.  Now we're just looking at Chartres and Amiens. Here you can see this kind of rush toward dematerialization that happens progressively from one church to the next. Compared to Amiens, Chartres looks clunky. We have these thick old buttresses.  Look at Amiens. They doubled the buttresses. They made them thinner. This really looks like gum on the shoe, more than architecture to me. You might ask, how do you build these things? How do you finance these cathedrals? When we looked at the map of the Île de France, which is the name of this area surrounding Paris, we saw that there were a lot of these cathedrals being built more or less at the same time. And it's unbelievable. Where do you get the labor? Where do you get the materials? Where do you get the wealth to do it? And there was an increasing rise of the merchant class during the Gothic period. People believed that if they donated to these architectural campaigns, they could get indulgences and shorten their time in purgatory. And particularly in the case of Chartres, given to believe that laboring on the church would also buy them an indulgence. And so you're thinking, OK, I understand that the masons can labor in a profitable way on the church. But what about the lords and the ladies and the people with their pointy shoes? What do they do? And so at Chartres, one way materials were brought to the construction site was something called the cult of the carts.  So that was a way that materials came to Chartres. And Chartres was constructed in a ridiculously short period of time. We see here that the entire project of Chartres took about 25, 26 years, which is one of the fastest building campaigns of any church. St. John the Divine, for example, in New York City has been under construction for 100 years. And that's in New York City. The Sagrada Familia in Barcelona has been under construction for about 120 years. And that's in Spain. And these are people who have things like, I don't know, cranes and jackhammers and all kinds of technological devices to help them build the thing faster. But Chartres got finished in 26 years, which is unbelievable. Great-looking church, by the way. Here it is. And you might also wonder, well, why does it have lopsided towers? I would say that 26 years, it's enough time to get two ideas about towers going. Another reason that the towers are so different is that the present cathedral wasn't the first cathedral on the site. In fact, there had been an earlier Romanesque cathedral that was damaged by fire in 1194. And when a sacred relic of the Virgin was found in the ashes of the fire after they thought it had been destroyed, decided to redouble their efforts and construct a bigger cathedral. The South Tower, as we see it here, incorporates parts of the earlier Romanesque church while the North Tower is a more fully explored expression of the Gothic. Plus, there was nothing particularly necessary about symmetry. It wasn't as though they were striving to make these churches symmetrical. They were striving to represent very specific things. When Gothic churches get improved upon, it usually has to do with the fact that 19th century people knocked down the irregular tower and put up a matching tower. Because the 19th century thought that was the only way to go. Silly 19th century. 19th century was schooled in classical thought, schooled in the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Desire for Symmetry and Balance. And so they tried to make Gothic cathedrals more perfect. So here's Schacht. It really operates at a geological scale. It is so much larger than anything around it. You can see it from five miles away. And people must have as a kind of pilgrimage destination that they strove to arrive at. And here is the plan of Schacht. You can see, unlike some of the other Gothic churches we looked at, like Notre-Dame and Saint-Denis, the transept here is more pronounced. We also have a elaborated chevet where radiating chapels begin to pop out. And here's the section. And it's got this characteristic section of almost like the wagon wheel thing coming on and through here. And the increasingly dematerialized nave with a strategy of making the clear-storey window, not singular but compound, that we have this method, it's called bifiori, puts the tracery together so that you get little, little inside of big with a little flower on the top. And that adds an interesting rhythm. It adds a kind of secondary bounce to the rhythm. And here's the effect of that increased space of the clear-storey window. It's a very different quality of light. It's a very different quality of building envelope than anything that we saw in the earlier churches. There's also a transformation in the vaulting here. At long, for example, we had six-part vaulting so that you had six different ribs coming together. And here we have four-part vaulting, which is a kind of tighter rhythm. Here's one of the things that I think is kind of interesting. These are buttresses, of course. And we know that on top of the buttresses, you wanna put mass to make them more effective in resisting the thrusts. But look at how this little buttress is terminated.  There's this little temple there. So all the little buttresses at Shaw have little temples on them. Adorable. The sculptural program of the door jams at Shaw is considered to be one of the most amazing of all the gothic cathedrals. Really high-quality work, really elaborate symbolism. And the kind of arrangement of things in geometrical structure that we saw on the facades also happens here, where there are various hierarchies of people and symbols and saints ranged out radially from the centerpiece. And just look at some of the carving. Really? Okay. And here's another place where saints are insinuated into the pier bundle. Once again, stretched, attenuated. Rhin cathedral really is much more perfect than Shaw cathedral. And one thing that makes rhin, I think, so effective, is the wall is almost completely gone. In Shaw, we saw the rose window at Rhin. The rose window completely fills up the space between two structural elements. And it gets situated inside of a pointed arch. So you have this kind of double system of super dematerialization going on here. Big arch, big rose window. And another thing is going on, too, in terms of the plasticity of the wall. Quite different from, say, Notre Dame, which got its effect through subtraction of material. Rhin is additive. You get this big porch. And this big porch pulls away from the body of the church and becomes a kind of freestanding screen. Not freestanding, but, let's say, it is pulled out and becomes autonomous. And even the portals become like little towers and begin to invade the space of the upper range of the building. This aerial perspective begins to show you the degree to which the building envelope of Rhin is dematerialized. I don't know how well you can remember these plans from one to the other, but the amount of wall in between the piers is becoming greater and greater and greater as it becomes more cage-like and more lacy. Fabulous drawing by Vialet-le-Duc of Rhin Cathedral. And notice that Vial, don Cor, had been to Rhin and he did some sketches there, just as he did sketches of Laurent. And we can see that he's here interested in this complex rhythm of the nave wall, of the multiple scales of elements. Probably with Amiens Cathedral, High Gothic reaches its apotheosis. It reaches its high point. And part of that is that this is the tallest Gothic cathedral that managed to stand up. Some got higher for a little while, but Amiens still stands to this day. So we have to give lots of credit to the architects of Amiens Cathedral. And we even know the name of the architect of Amiens Cathedral, at least one of them, because this was an ongoing building campaign that lasted quite a long time, but Robert de Lousage. So here's Amiens Cathedral. And in many ways, it's playing a lot of the same games that I was in terms of the facade. And these are hard, right? You look at Amiens and you look at La and you think these things are incredibly similar. One of my colleagues, Professor Doug Graff, claims that when he was an architectural student, the only way he could tell them apart was to remember what car was parked in front of each one. So I don't know, I don't know what that car is, so you better learn the facade. And I would say certainly one thing to notice in the case of Amiens is that there is a round window and the round window is not inside of the pointed arch window. Otherwise, the two facades are incredibly similar because both of them have this autonomous screen. Both of them are really, really cagey and really dematerialized, but the condition of the rose window is quite different in Amiens. Also, the plans are different, as we'll see quite soon. As an aside, when you have the test, I won't just give you one incredibly obscure image and say, I hope you can figure out what this is. Here's a picture of a nave, go for it, what is that? But rather, I'll probably give you something like a plan, a facade, and something else so that there'll be a lot of different kinds of images that you can use to help you understand what's going on. So here's the plan and the nave. And I think the plan of Amiens is a distinctive plan. You should be able to remember this one. It's distinctive in the same way that Notre Dame is distinctive. That is to say, you can remember the shape as the one that has the like, you know, who's number one? Amiens is number one. Because it's got this little terminal chapel that extends beyond the rest of the volume of the building. And here in Amiens, we saw, when we looked at those comparative sections, that the clear story gets to be really, really huge. And in fact, it is a miracle that Amiens didn't fall down because throughout its career, even in the early days, Amiens was always falling down. It was an ambitious project. The villagers wanted to construct a church that could accommodate the entire population of 20,000 people. So it had to be large and it had to be tall. It also had to be thin because there was a rivalry among the different towns to get the tallest, thinnest, most spectacular cathedral. And so these thin, clear story elements began to buckle. And in fact, professors from Columbia University do laser scans and have discovered that it's in perilous shape even now. But in the medieval period, an astonishing technique was introduced to keep this thing or at least to try to keep this from collapsing. And that was to move away from the stone technology of the skeleton and to actually introduce a material that had not been used in building. And that was metal. They reinvented a ancient Greek tool called a hydraulic hammer and deployed it at a metal shop in the little town of Fontenheim. And they made this metal chain and wrapped the stressed elements in a metal tensile chain and they installed it hot, red hot, so that when the chain cooled, it would contract and become even tighter. We looked at VR D'Encore's sketchbook last time and we saw a number of different kinds of sketches. Sketches of cows at Laurent, sketches of stars beginning to generate everything from a person's face to an eagle to a tower. But we also saw these funny little diagrams and we had some conversations about what those diagrams could mean. And the diagram that we looked at was the rotated square. What is the rotated square? So it's interesting to look at something like, say, Amiens Cathedral with the idea of how the masons would have laid this thing out on the site, given that they didn't have any architectural drawings, given that they didn't have any, you know, standardized measuring systems. And you can look at the disposition of, say, the space of the nave to the extension of the transept to the location of the aisles. And a lot of it can be derived from this rotated square, which would be a way that masons could lay out the plan of a building in the field. You know, you don't have drawings, you don't have measuring tools, but you have ropes and you can use these things to lay out the plan of the building. So it seems to work pretty well with Amiens that this whole system is governed by this system of squares. And this system of squares is called quadrature, like quad, quadrangle, and square. So the architectural proportioning system, based on a system of nested squares, is called quadrature. And it's considered to be something that Gothic architects probably did again and again and again, because they didn't have any other way to transfer an architectural idea to the scale of a real building. So we see it works not only on the plan, but it also works on the elevation. There's a secondary system on this drawing showing you another ordering system being used to figure out exactly where everything hits on the facade of Amiens Cathedral, and that's nested triangles. And that proportioning system is called triangulation. And so these geometrical systems are good because the masons can do it, it's a way to organize things, but they're also good because they carry meaning. The triangle is a symbol of the trinity. So if you can superimpose the triangulation on top of the quadrature, it's another kind of marrying together heaven and earth. A lot of the proportions in Amiens are governed by sacred numbers. For example, the number 50 begins to inform the general square that organizes this proportional bay. And if you read biblical descriptions of Noah's Ark, it's described as 50 by 50 qubits. So just as Notre Dame was somehow finding the geometry God used to construct the Temple of Solomon, here at Amiens, the sacred proportions of the Noah's Ark are being used and encoded into this building. But that's not all because the height of the building measured in the same feat that gave us the 50 by 50 unit is 144. And 144 is the height of the city of God, according to revelations. So Amiens Cathedral is as reliant on sacred proportions and the embedding of the sacred meanings through numerology as Notre Dame, as probably are all the cathedrals. The fabulousness of Amiens. And now the tragedy of Beauvais. I said that Amiens was the tallest cathedral. It's the one that managed to stand up while being tall. But for a brief moment, Beauvais Cathedral just to the north of Paris was even taller than Amiens. And you wonder, well, too bad they gave up on the sacred proportions just to make the church taller and to best their rival village only 35 kilometers away. That's not actually the case. The people in Beauvais use the same number of 144 to get the vertical height. The unit that the masons used in Beauvais was a slightly larger unit than the unit that they used in Amiens. And since the masons at Beauvais have larger feet than the masons in Amiens, the cathedral reached higher. So I don't even know how any of these things got built because if you think about it, these Gothic cathedrals are almost like a house of cards that if you get both pieces in at the same time, they kind of balance each other. If you just have one piece in, it's kind of lopsided. So the task in building these cathedrals is not simply the idea or the engineering or the stone cutting, but it's also the staging of the construction so that you can get the pieces coming in together to help balance this intricate cage work. And in the case of Beauvais, they were sort of doing that. And then they had terrible rains and there was a spell of really, really bad rain. And the really bad rain made everything way more than it was supposed to weigh. And if everything weighed more, the loads just couldn't be supported. So for Beauvais, we only have this little chunk of Beauvais left, but the original idea of Beauvais was that it would have been a Gothic cathedral like the other Gothic cathedrals with this extensive nave. So all we have is the little choir in the crossing part. And it's kind of tragic. And if you look at this thing here, you would be struck with how thin it is. And in fact, what we see here represents a doubling of the structure from the original Gothic moment. That once it fell down, they added intermediary peers. But there was such a bold idea about what architecture could do and maybe also a belief that the affectual sense of miracle, God must be holding this up, really meant God was holding it up and you could use less and less and less material. So Beauvais is spectacular because Beauvais is so vertical and because it is so small, you sense it maybe even more palpably than in a church like Amiens, which is also vast and also linear. And one piece of Beauvais that you can occupy is the crossing, which is the tallest part. The crossing is where the transept and the nave come together. This is a structural diagram. Professor at Princeton called Robert Mark did a book of these things in the 1980s. So this is a pre-digital structural analysis model and they're really kind of cool and so labor-intensive it would just break your heart because you know you could just do this really easily nowadays.  It's basically that, shaped like a cathedral. So there's some kind of, I don't know, some kind of matter inside that's heat-sensitive or stress-sensitive and you build the cathedral out of plastic and then you photograph it to see what parts of this model are experiencing different kinds of stresses. So the book is a kind of virtuoso thing and you can see these moments where stresses are becoming extreme and the idea of the cathedral standing up becomes less and less believable. But this is what the nave wall of Beauvais would have looked like if Beauvais had not been such a loser and had fallen down. And who knows, Beauvais might not have fallen down if the staging of the construction had been different and if there had not been the rain and if they had been able to get all the pieces in place quickly enough to assure the structural stability of this thing. And notice here this little partial plan shows you the rotated piers just like we saw the rotated piers in Sunday night. So that's sad. That's the last of the great Ildefrance big Gothic churches. But it's not the last of the Ildefrance Gothic. Gothic keeps going, but Gothic gets more and more and more, let's say flamboyant. And when I say flamboyant, I'm not just using the word flamboyant because I feel like saying it, but we call it flamboyant Gothic. And that means its ambitions shift a little bit. If one of the ambitions of high Gothic, let's say, is the expression of this Thomas clarity. Thomas means like Thomas Aquinas, the scholastic clarity of relationships between parts and the whole. By the time you get into the flamboyant or Reynette Gothic, the ornament becomes autonomous. The ornament begins to take over. Saint-Chapelle is a little bit of both, let's say. It's still pretty clear. It's quite small. You could probably fit, if we had a room twice this size and a lot taller, you could fit Saint-Chapelle inside of it. It's quite a small church. But look at the plan and look at the section. And the plan is dazzling. And this is a funny plan, by the way, because we're seeing two different conditions. The lower part of the plan is the plan through the crypt. So we're cutting through the buttresses and we're cutting through supporting walls down here. And the right-hand side of the plan is cutting through the upper part, where we see these thin perpendicular walls and this glassy surface. Because Saint-Chapelle is so small, it's easier to build than something as big as Amiens or Beauvais. And it's easier to support the vault because the vault is not so big, the vault is not so heavy. Saint-Chapelle is like a little lantern.  And this was originally a royal chapel. So functionally, it's quite different than the churches that we were looking at before, which had to accommodate processions and liturgical rites. This is what the interior of Saint-Chapelle would look like. And that is to say, almost no wall whatsoever. Just glass, glass, glass, glass, glass, glass, glass. But you also might notice this painted polychromatic tracery. Tracery, by the way, is the word for the structural elements that go through the windows. So all of this decorative stuff that we see over here we could call tracery. It holds the glass in place, but it also casts shadows and becomes another element in the ornamental program. A lot of this stuff is painted gold. The tracery is painted gold. And the vaults are painted royal blue with little gold stars on them, which is crazy because that was all done in the 19th century by a restorer called Eugen Emmanuel Violet Leduc. You don't need his name right now, but when we talk about the 19th century, we're gonna talk about him a lot because he was really an important theorist for 19th century architectural thinking but made his money by restoring Gothic architecture. And it has been said by scholars of Gothic architecture that two world wars did not do as much damage to the patrimony of Gothic architecture as Violet Leduc did in his lifetime. When we talk next time, we'll look at Gothic architecture outside of France and right now I would urge you to hand your papers in if they're ready and if they're not ready, be ready to hand them in by the end of the day.


All right, it is 6.03 and I would like to welcome all of you to how to transform traumatic events into published writing with Louise Nair and Lisa Gehr. My name is Taryn Edwards and I am one of the librarians here at the Mechanics Institute of San Francisco. And I'd like to thank those of you who elected to support this event and pay a little something to attend. Let's just say it goes a long way to help us do more in these challenging times, help us provide more free events to the public, and help us continue the work that the Mechanics Institute has done in San Francisco since 1854. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the Mechanics Institute, we are an independent membership organization that houses a wonderful library, you can see it right behind me. It is the oldest library designed to serve the general public in California, not just mechanics, but I might add that the term mechanic really refers to anyone who works with their hands. As a writer, you are indeed a mechanic. The Institute also is a cultural event center and houses a world renowned chess club that is the oldest in the United States. So, right now, due to the lasting effects of the pandemic, many of our events continue to be virtual, but we are slowly working our way towards offering in-person events again.  We're open Monday through Saturday and membership is only $120 a year. And with that, you help support our continued contribution to the literary and cultural world of the San Francisco Bay Area. Now, I am delighted to introduce our speakers tonight. We have Dr. DeLise Daguer, who is a clinical psychologist, an author, and a childhood burn survivor. She earned her doctorate in clinical psychology from Weidner University, and she has written for and appeared on numerous media outlets, and also is a national keynote speaker. She currently is in solo practice in New Jersey, and tonight she will be talking about her writing and also referring to her multiple award-winning book Flashback Girl, Lessons on Resilience from a Burn Survivor. And then we also have Louise Nair, who has spoken for us before. She is the award-winning author of five books, including her memoir, Burned, which was an Oprah Great Read and winner of the Wisconsin Library Association Award. She's taught creative writing classes for over 40 years and has been interviewed widely, including on NPR. And by me at the Mechanics Institute. She is a member of the Writers Grotto here in San Francisco and teaches memoirs through Ali Osher Lifelong Learning Institute via UC Berkeley. All right, a little bit of technical stuff. Before we get started, I just want you to, I want to encourage you to use the chat space, which many of you are doing already. And if you have any questions, let's pose them there. And we will get to them at the end of the reading. And as I said earlier, I will send all of you registered guests a link to the YouTube video in a couple of days. Can I hear from Elise first? Are we ready? Absolutely. Hello, can you hear me okay? You sound great. Okay. Hello. It's nice to connect with all of you this evening. I'm a psychologist and an author. I'm going to start with telling you a little bit about the, my story, and then go into talking about some psychological issues in memoir writing. Can you share with me while I share my screen? Okay, very good. I am only going to show you a couple slides from this. My story begins. And a house that looks very like this. Can you see it? Can you nod if you can see the house and everything? Are we good? All right, thank you. My story begins in 1967 when my family went to take a very brief trip to New Hampshire. And this is the beautiful Lake Wenna Pasaki. We were not in this house, but we were in a similar house, and it was dinner time. My mother decided to start to cook dinner. She was very much around the house for something that she thought was lighter fluid. And she went to pour the lighter fluid on the charcoals. I was standing right next to her. I'm four years old. She pours the lighter fluid on the charcoals, but they don't light. So they take the can again. She pours it on the charcoal. And this can, it turns out, was carrying actually a highly flammable household solvent. So she poured it on the coals. And at that point, there was a giant burst of flame that immediately covered my mother and myself. My mother, in that moment, realized that the only way to save herself was to dash through the wall of flame and right down into the lake. And that's what she did. But she left me in the fire. So I was trapped alone and abandoned behind this giant wall of flame. Thank goodness my father was able to see me and he dashed around the side of the porch where he was, and was just tall enough to reach me. And I was just small enough to be pulled through that fence. He got me out through me in the lake. And I was saved. And it turns out that the very small town of Wolfboro, New Hampshire had absolutely no ability to take care of my mother and myself and they took one look at us and they said, there's nothing we can do for these two people. But we were very near Boston and Boston, Massachusetts had actually the very best burns hospital in the country. So that's where we were transferred. And I was saved. This is a picture. And I should have warned you, I'm sorry, you can look away if you wish to this is a picture of how I looked after this fire. This, you know, 90 seconds of horror left me burned on 65% of my very little body, third degree, which is the most severe kind of burns. You can sort of see in this picture that I lost my lip. My chin was burned away. My neck was burned away. My arms were fused to the sides of my body. And I lost my face to the degree that I couldn't speak actually, other than using my tongue as my bottom lip, nor could I smile. Or do you really anything that one has to do with one's face. And this is how I started out. I've had, I, as a child, I had something like 40 or 50 operations. I really don't know how many because my family didn't count because my family was pretty neglectful. And then as an adult, I've had about 25 or 30 more operations. So what you see now is the product of tremendous amounts of time and pain, because burns are very painful and mess. Because burns are very messy and time away from school and from work and bullying and all kinds of difficulties that I've had in my life. Difficulties dating, you can only imagine. This is how I looked in first grade. This is my first grade school picture. And then I'm doing a reading just about my book Flashback Girl. This is the part in which I start to do a rather long reading about being bullied as a child and what that was like. I'm not going to do that with you guys today, but this is how I started off in my life. You can see, I think by the look on my face that I was friendly and eager to connect with people and also very, very, very badly disfigured. And that was tough. It's tough now was really tough in 1967. Back before there were any interventions for bullying and bullying wasn't even really something honestly anybody acknowledged happening. Okay, a little bit more setting up the stage. This is my family. I want to show them to you because they are major cast of characters in my book this, the cast of characters in my book is me, my mother, my father, my brother, some other people too but this is the main cast of characters and what I wrote about. This is the first known picture that I know of anyway that was taken after the fire of the four of us together. And this picture tells you everything you would want to know about my family in one quick snapshot as great pictures too. You can see me there. I'm the one smiling without a face. But look at me trying so hard to be cheerful, trying to do the right thing you know, you can see nobody has their arms around me. I'm sitting between my parents but neither one of them is comforting me in any way. There's no protection. It's every man for themselves in this family. My father there. If you had known him, you would find this picture shocking, because my father was in a brilliant happy cheerful, lively go getter of a man. And in this picture he looks completely stunned. He's just shocked from what we had all been through. My mother there you can see she looks like she has in a care in the world. She's completely emotionally separate from the traumatized child sitting next to her. She's fine. My brother on the other end is looking intense and troubled. The last picture I'm going to show you from my slideshow this is my brother. This is the last picture of him taken before he died. My brother died when he was 19. He died quite young. Okay. I'm going to stop screen share. There we go. So that's the setup. That's what I wanted to tell you, kind of the, the teaser of my story, what I wrote about how traumatic it was. And honestly, I have to tell you, I really haven't even covered half of the rather intense amounts of trauma that are in my book flashback girl. I'm going to assume because you're here that most of you are also interested in writing about what you have been through. And I'm here to address those issues not only as a writer, which I am, but also as a psychologist, which I also am. One thing I would say, and hear me loud and clear on this. I really think it's important to be quite well before you set out to write a memoir about trauma that you have endured. Not that there isn't a place for writing when you're not well, because I could show you a stack of 30 journals that I went through in my childhood and adolescence and 20s, and every one of those journals, help me to ground myself and to understand what was going on and healed me in many ways. But that journal writing would have never made a good memoir. It was, I lacked the perspective. I lacked the clarity. And I God knows I lacked the healing. I wrote my book a full 50 years after the events that I began describing to you today, a full 50 years now I'm not saying you have to wait 50 years, I did. Why did I wait 50 years I first of all I had to heal physically, and very much I had to heal emotionally. Also I had to heal socially, because being a burned woman in this world is not easy let me tell you. There's another reason why I waited, and I'll get to that reason in a little bit, because I had healed a lot and gone through a lot of therapy. I'll just be honest with you, a ton of therapy, which helped me to have perspective on what I went through, and help me move out of just being depressed, or just being angry, or just being, you know, rageful really. I was able to approach the material of what I was going through with much more clarity, and I think make it a much more interesting read. One of the things that you know I hear a lot from people who read my book is like they really appreciate the humor in it, because there is a lot of humor you might think there wouldn't be but there is there's a lot of funny things that happen and, and they really appreciate the pacing, and they really appreciate that I wasn't just sort of complaining. And all of those things I was able to do because I had years of distance from what I went through to when I was writing it. I think I strongly recommend that I mean journal all you want.  Take your time to heal first, and you'll do a better job at it. Another thing that I wanted to address is the importance of having a theme to your memoir that is not just telling your story. Now, I will say that when I sat down to write flashback girl, I didn't yet had that theme. To me, I was just like, I had to write this, I had to write this, I had to write what I went through. I had to get it out there on the page. It was a really a compulsion. In writing it, I found a theme, and the theme was something that was beyond me, and something that would be helpful to other people. And I've read a lot from other memoirs on the singular importance that your memoir be something that can be helpful to other people, because, you know, let's be clear, people are reading it for themselves. They don't want to just be entertained. They want to learn something from it, get a message from it, be uplifted in some way, be inspired in some way. So, my theme, as I developed it, was that life is incredibly challenging, and often far more challenging than we expect or admit. But the good news is that resilient recovery is possible. I went through something, some things, so horrific you can't even imagine them. And yet here I am, 50 years later, a psychologist, happy, married with children, living a beautiful life. And my theme is basically, if I can do that, you can do that too. So that's my theme. Having a message to the memoir, I find has been incredibly useful in giving presentations afterwards. And I'm going to assume that as writers, a lot of you are aware that, you know, one of the ways that you get people interested in your book is presenting. And having a theme that is not just about you but is applicable to other people is what's going to get people interested in coming to your presentation and buying your book. So that theme is huge, I think, in terms of getting people interested in what you've done. Another thing I wanted to bring up is writing about other people. And I showed to you the cast of characters in my book, my mother, my father, my brother and myself. And I told you that I waited 50 years to write my book. So the other reason why it takes me 50 years to write this book is that I literally waited until every single one of those people in that picture had passed away. I had to. Because they're the honest and true story of what I went through, unfortunately did not reflect particularly well on my parents and in particular my mother. So I waited until my mother died. I didn't wish to cause her pain. I didn't wish to cause a family rift. I didn't, I, you know, I just was not wanting her to have to deal with that. So I waited until she died. And three weeks after she died, I started writing my book. And that is, you know, generally an issue with memoirs is how you want to deal with the other people if you're writing about them. One of the decisions I made when I wrote was that when I was writing about people positively, I would use their accurate first name, I didn't really identify anybody by last names. Well, maybe a couple people but very few. I would use their first name, if I was writing about them positively. And if I was writing about anybody negatively, I changed their name. Having done that, there was one person in my book who will not be named, who pointed out to me that he could be figured out if one really wanted to, even though I changed his name I changed identifying stuff he said, you could still figure me out and he was mad at me. He was really pretty darn mad at me actually. What I learned after a couple of these mad at me conversations is that really as long as you're writing about people accurately, and you're not, you know, making things up about them. You can write about them and you don't even have to change their name if you don't want to, because you're not lying. But why not change their name. The other thing I learned is that if you are writing about people accurately, and it is something that is life destroying to them.  They might have the ability to sue you for that. Other than that. I mean they could sue you, but no one would win. That's what I learned in my panic googling when this person was mad at me. So definitely it's safer to wait until people are gone. But then I think a lot of times you are waiting a long time. The other thing that came up in writing about others was extended family members, and I was pretty worried about that at the time, how that would go, especially with my mother's family. I learned that it really didn't cause problems. I believe that the tone of my memoir is so vulnerable. And I am so devastatingly truthful about myself as well that it's kind of hard to be mad at me. Except for that one person who I won't say who it was. But if you read the book you figured out. I guess the last issue I want to bring up before I pass the torch to Louise here is the psychological exposure that comes with writing memoir. If you're going to write a book at least the way that I wrote a book, my book is really, as I mentioned, highly vulnerable. There's really not much about myself that I leave unturned. And it, I'm very out there now for anyone who has read this book. And that is another reason why I strongly encourage people to have healed as best they can, before they put themselves out there, because lots of people know lots of things about me now when I have no control over what they know. And most people have been awesome and great and kind. And a couple people haven't. And that's hard. So, I think, again, the tone that I set in terms of being sincerely and honestly and kindly vulnerable helps a lot. But it takes a lot of courage to put yourself out there. And I encourage you to be thoughtful about that. Okay, so I'm going to stop here I'm going to rest and let Louise take over for now. Thank you so much, Lisa. It's just amazing, your presentation. So many things that are common to my journey in writing the memoir. And I just want to say one thing I had had a lot of therapy and a lot of something called co counseling before I wrote, and people would always say, Oh, what you wrote was healed you right. It did, but on the other hand, it brought up a lot. So I was dealing with panic attacks, as I was writing, and I got tremendous help. I mean through actually a hypnotist and therapist and support so I would echo, you know what you said that it's really important to get support as you're writing. I'm going to share my screen now and think that hopefully. Okay, is that can everybody see or yes, yes. Okay, yes. Okay, good. And this is my book, which actually this press went defunct, which was unbelievably disappointing after writing the, you know, spending so many years writing the book but it was published by another press. You know, I was, I'm so happy that it's still out in the world. And what I wanted to say about that is persistence, whatever that's, you know, if you don't, if you go away with one word from me at least, it's just to keep persisting keep getting the writing better and better and better, and however you get it out, believe in your story, and find the time to do it. Because a lot of people will say, I don't even have the time, but I used to write on napkins at coffee shops or when I was giving final exams. So just keep persisting. Okay, this next slide is my dad and me and my sister and my sister might be here I'm hoping, and I printed this out picture because there's total joy in my face. And this was a year before the accident that severely burned both my parents when I was four. I wasn't physically burned, but I saw my mother horribly facially burned and my dad as well. And they also disappeared from my life quite suddenly for nine months. Writing is a way of transforming trauma. And because I love language so much. And it's really like painting with words. So yeah, writing about trauma is difficult. But if you love to write and you love to get better as a writer.  So writing can be both difficult and liberating. A little bit about the story. My sister and I were upstairs and my parents came home and lit the pilot light on a gas heater in the cellar, and it turned out gas had been escaping for hours with no smell. And there was a flash fire. My parents were taken away. We're very fortunate because they were in the medical field to have people who took really good care of them. My mother almost did not live.  I spent over 10 years and it might even be a little bit more. But what I want to say to all of you is I have learned so much. So when I teach memoir classes I say I can take about seven of those years away by helping you in how to write a book. I was busy with, with teaching full time and with my kids. And I had been a poet for many years. So I could write with images, paint with words, but I had no idea how to create suspense at the end of chapter so somebody would actually want to read on how to have character development. And I guess the people as least was talking about in your book are usually your family, those are characters, and you have to kind of separate yourself and say, Okay, who is this person. And also are because and least talked about this too in terms of a wider world. What are you trying to say, and what have you learned on the journey. I want to mention a writing schedule, because you can always find a little time. If it's something that you're compelled to do, and you're driven to do, you can always find the time. But how do you start. Okay, I started with memories and scenes. I started the book into three parts the accident, the farm, and then reconstruction. And it would take a long time for the final shape to happen so that's one thing I would say be very patient with yourself. I woke up in the middle of the night with an aha moment, where I realized in the reconstruction part of the book, we were all living in our different orbits. We reacted to this accident differently my parents were terribly burned, and my sister and I were really traumatized but we were trying all the time to look and seem normal. And that took a lot of effort. And so, really, I would say, take classes workshops like this, and learn the craft, because it took me a long time I actually didn't take a lot of classes but I got a lot of books, like Judith Barrington's writing the memoir which I use in my classes which really helped. The next slide is in my mother's face, burned and if this is going to be hard for you to look at you can look away. My mother was actually the frontist piece of a plastic surgery book. My mother's position was a friend of my father's. And so this was over, I think three or four years of all the surgeries. And one of the reasons I'll move off the slide but one of the reasons I wanted to show that slide is that my mother's face is threaded through the whole book. And so little when she was burned that it was almost like I was part of her body. So suddenly her body changed, and also her desire through many years to have her old face back was part of something that we all longed for. I hardly look at the photo when I started writing the book. And now I have another memoir coming out at the end of this year, and I say my mother's face was a face rearranged by fire. And that was it.  But she had these burns. This picture is on the farm at where we lived. And of course it's Halloween.  I have my arm around my sister who I was very dependent on which, you know, as a six year old, she was only six. But my, my whole look has changed, even though the farm was a wonderful solace and it was a respite from all that was going on in New York and the hospitals. And so another thing about writing from trauma is to make sure that you go back and forth.  So in this section of the book we were sledding down the hill we were ice skating. We had a family by the way with no screens at all, no TV, no computer so we played games and we played outside. And also I would say sensory detail is so important. You want to engage the reader, not just with what you see, but what you hear what you feel. If you're writing for instance about a beach, go to a beach nearby, pick up a shell, feel the shell in your hand. We have the internet so you can even see what a neighborhood looked like in the 1950s. So research is really, really important. Okay. The other thing is, you can find out things like what book won the Pulitzer Prize in 1954. My dad was a big reader so yeah you can say it's a little embellishing it because I didn't really know, but I knew that he would have read the old man in the sea. I also know that Ajax was called Bon Ami because I researched it.  So you're creating a whole world, and a world that's very different. I'm going to move from this one. The book consisted of many stories that I had to merge, and I worked with three editors and I must say that the last editor I worked with who sadly passed away a friend of my sisters helped me enormously. They told me to create a timeline for each story. So for instance, my sister and I had a story on the farm. What were the important moments for each of us. My parents were in the hospital. Were the important operations or things that they went through. And I was very lucky to find a list of all the operations because there was a there was a lawsuit and a deposition. And I had a lot of material. Another thing for research if anybody important to your story is still alive and willing to talk. I would say, call that person up now, because when people pass away, the stories are gone, you can't really get them anymore. The other thing really. Okay. I guess to end with, I want to talk about probably similar in some way to what least was talking about but finding your truth. I really did not even realize that. I had gone through anything, because it was so buried inside me I didn't have the physical scars and so I wondered, why am I feeling the way I'm feeling or why am I more on high alert or why do I get the panic attacks. And I had to really get a lot of help and realize my truth was something I wanted to share with the world. The book started that way, you know, what about me, I went through all this, these things what about me, and over the years it became a bigger book about my parents a much bigger hearted book. This is picture of my family, my husband, my two daughters are dog who passed a while ago we have a new dog. And, you know, the importance of family that you know least talked about that too that we were both able to create families, however you do it or it could be a family of friends it's just love in your life. We have people and connections. And that's me and my sister at a little book party that was given for me by a close friend.  And if it's hard, move away from it, writing the scene of the accident, I wasn't actually there, took me a long time so be patient with yourself. I was very excited, you know, as Lisa's gotten a lot of awards to get the mention a USA book news the opera mentioned. I did readings all over the country. There's a speaker at the World Burn Congress which in some ways was one of the most meaningful talks I gave, which is that people in a family where somebody who is burned also go through a lot of things and, and it's important to understand that. And people have written to me from all over the country about the book and how it moves them and that's why you write to connect with other people. So I think I am going to stop here and we'll open it up for questions. Great. Thank you both for sharing all of this personal information but also this this writers advice is fantastic so I, I can tell just on the basis of the comments that are so far in the chat space that you're you're really touching on something here. So some people have made a few comments, and I'd like to encourage people to go ahead and put your questions in the chat space. So it looks like the first comment is by Rick. Since we have rather small audience right now Rick, would you like to ask your question or make your comment directly or maybe you're not in the audience. No, I don't see Rick. Okay, let's move on to kin, kin, would you like to ask your question directly is kin still here. No, Kin's not here either. Dropping like flies. Strange. Okay. Looks like Winna is here. Winna, would you like to speak and ask your question directly. I'm trying to turn you on. Here we go. Okay somehow she's not muting herself. I'll ask her question for her. So how did you find a publisher for your stories did you, did you query them or did they find you or how did that work out for both of you. I think we should go first. Yeah, first. Okay, well, yeah, I, I that that took me a long, long time. And I did query and I did work with I forgot to mention that in the story. I worked with two agents each for a year, one gave me an in-house editor, and then dropped the book. It was really devastating. And I just kept going and found, I finally found an agent who spent a couple of years, you know, saying, oh, she could sell the book and it's wonderful and then wasn't able to. And then suddenly on Valentine's Day, I think in 2010. He was emailing me. I was at a writers conference and gone into a kinkos it was freezing outside. And anyway, I got the email that she had sold the book to a small press that, you know, so I got a very I got it, I did get an advance quite small. But it, it was just wonderful to have the book out. But it took me a long time and a lot of agents and a lot of letters and all of that. But that's not the only way to publish a book. So, please, you take it away. So that was a good, good handoff there. So my, my memoir came out in 2020. And I, when I was done with it, I landed my very first person I query signed me. That's how quickly I got an agent. I met her at a conference, big New York agent and I'm like, psych, I am done. She could not sell my book proposal. My book proposal went to publisher after publisher after publisher and was eventually rejected and I am not making this up 30 times. And the publisher said repeatedly, love the story, love the writing, we're really not doing memoirs of unknown people. And I am not famous.  I really do think that most publishers are just not that interested in publishing memoirs unless you are famous or have a huge platform. And for some exceptions, I was not lucky enough to be one of them. So I self published, I figured it out. I, I just, I figured it out. And it actually has turned out very well for me. Because if you can figure it out, and if you are able to put out a quality product, and if you're able to speak and promote and do all the things that one does, you get a lot more of that money back. So, you know, it is a way to do it. I still sort of feel a little bad that I wasn't able to find a traditional publisher, but I will tell you this story. I recently was interacting online with a woman who is a well known author. I don't want to say because I'm not sure how much he's putting it out there. And she just self published her memoir. And I wrote to her and I said, why did you choose to self publish. She said, no publisher would take my book. She said I've sold 8, 1.8 million books. And no one would publish her memoir. So it's really getting tough. If you're an unknown person. But, but there was a way to do it. And you can figure it out. And it's actually awesome self publishing. It's not only getting harder, but I think that the rewards are getting bigger for self published people. Yeah, so don't discount that but it is, it is a lot of work. Okay, now we have a question from Mary M. And, Mary M. Would you like to ask her question directly. The question has to do with unexpected physical illness. If you're not yet healed from it. You can have learned a lot along the way, but there is no. You can say all the things that you have learned along the way, but my difficulty is that there's no therefore to my story. And I wonder if you have any input on that. I'll jump in on that Miriam. I was talking about healing. So, you know, and I made that point earlier. I really was talking about psychological healing. I was not talking about physical healing, although that was a part of my journey to so I think that it is good to come to some place of psychological healing before you write your memoir but, you know, I also, I will never be 100% physically healed I am scarred on 65% of my body and, and it is a lifelong health condition for me so I can relate to what you're saying. I don't know how to tell you what meaning there might be in your journey, but I imagine it's there. And I just encourage you to look for it. It doesn't have to be a happily ever after thing, but meaning. Those are my thoughts anyway I hope that's helpful. Yes, thank you. Okay, Nancy can does not have a microphone so I'm going to ask her question for her. When looking for an editor for your memoir. Do you have any suggestions about the types of experience that that might be helpful for them to have. And did any of your editors have similar experiences to what you are writing about. And if they did did that help or not with getting your book edited and packaged. I can start with that. I actually for burned. I can't remember the name, three or four editors. It didn't. What I was really after in in bird was writing the best book that I can write in terms of the writing, engaging a reader, learning all those things that I mentioned you know there is plot in memoir. There are characters so I didn't care so much whether the person had had a similar experience as me. I just really cared whether they could help me get the book in better and better shape. But all of them. And by the way, I would, I really put this out that you don't have to be an English instructor or even an editor to help somebody with a book. So you can show it to friends you can swap with other people because editors can be expensive. But I would say, you want to look for somebody who's sensitive who's insightful, and who really really is helping push you. To the best writing that you can do. So I'll just jump in and add a couple additional thoughts to everything I mean I agree with everything Louise just said, and add a couple of extra thoughts for myself. It was very important for me to hire people, because I wanted them to really put a lot of time and effort into the book. I had friends read it to, and they were mostly like it's great. You know, and that was wonderful and helped me feel good but didn't really help the book improve so I set out to hire editors, I hired three of them, and I concentrated on people who were like, you know, experienced writers. And also people that I felt could both support me and challenge me. People who knew how to start with the compliment, and then say, Okay, now let's look at this.  I had to have that balance which I think is kind of similar to what Louise is saying as well. Yeah, I agree with that and that's so important in terms of critiquing to find the good things in it but really you want to get better, and that's so important. You can get better from almost any level where you are, you know, even if you're you think oh the writing is really good. You can often go deeper and add more important detail. So I think having that drive to get better and better is really is really good. And then to know when it's done. All right, Thomas has a question that kind of piggy piggybacks on that how to go deeper. Comment that you made his daughter had has a tragic story and his question is how to balance the multiple perspectives. In the story that one tells of the, you know, of all the characters that are in in the story that are part of it. How do you balance their perspectives with with the way your narrative takes shape. I can, I can start with that when my book. You know, left just being well what about me. You know our story wasn't told I'm talking about me here and my sister and moved into the story of my parents. I had to actually imagine. For instance that I was my mother, when she was getting hand therapy her hands were very badly burned. She had to walk through Peter Cooper village housing development that we lived in in New York City. I didn't want people to look at her face so she would look down at the ground, and I actually went and I did that walk, and I tried to imagine it and look at the cracks in the concrete and hope that nobody else would stare. So and then with my dad who went into a huge depression and was almost suicidal. I wanted to imagine what he was feeling and what he was reading. So I was able to put in multiple points of views, but there were only four of us. I would say that could I mean some people could do it with a lot of people but, but I think the story of the, you know the main protagonist has to kind of go through the whole really be clearly threaded through, because you don't want to lose that. I often say when I teach memoir, you know, put yourself in it more, you know, don't just write about other people. So you have to balance that. I don't know if that helps it's a it's a very important question and it's not easy. But yeah, it's, it's trying to get to the truth of each person. I'm just going to rest that with Louise because she teaches writing and knows so much more about this, the craft of it than I do. Yeah. Thanks, please. Yeah, and just general, you know, general advice is to read lots of memoirs and see how other people do it, because, you know, really that's going to be a really great teacher is to find, find someone else's memoir and to admire and study how they threaded the stories through one that I really wanted to recommend is the story of Henrietta locks, and I'll put that in the chat space, because the author of that book has written a lot about her process for drafting a memoir and how specifically I remember how like literally she threaded in the multiple perspectives of the other characters in the story to form a braid as she calls it. So I'll put that in the chat space for you, Thomas. And now we have another comment and question from Teresa. She has PTSD from past abuse and is trying to write a memoir about overcoming that abuse, and she's looking for advice on writing, specifically if you have any step by step advice. She has to stop for periods of time. And in order to get through the writing because I presume it's so painful and so she's looking for any steps on how to I guess process the abuse that she's feeling and keep writing. So I can step in on the writing part. I use this book, you might maybe put it in the chat writing the memoir by Judith Barrington, and I find it very nuts and bolts, and very helpful about the different elements, I mean, learning about sensory detail and summary, and also point of view time shifts, you know she goes through all of these elements. And I would say to Teresa that, you know you could put in the writing, the difficulty about writing it. In other words, that's part of what's going on. So I would say, you know if you have to stop you could even put at the end of a chapter, whatever. I'm stopping now.  So, so the reader sees the process that you're going through. I love that I love that idea of actually putting in the writing, what you're going through I think that's perfect. I also want to come back to the idea about the difference between journaling and writing, and how the journaling might might have even eventually become what you're writing. But I wouldn't put pressure on yourself when you're going through all that that it's got to, you know, come out and be some perfect book because I just don't think that's possible. I know for myself and I was not going through PTSD when I was writing this book, although I've had it. In the beginning, I was just writing it out, just putting it out there. And then I would go back and shape it and craft it and shape it and craft it and edit and read it and read it. But in the beginning, I wasn't putting pressure on myself that it had to be a certain thing. And I think if you're going through anxiety, it's important to not put any more pressure on yourself. It's also to know whatever whatever it is that you know grounds you and have those things nearby you, whether it's the ability to take a walk if you're getting too upset or a friend that you can call or, you know, I know when I get upset or when I pet my dog and I feel better and just kind of making sure you're taking the time to ground yourself and take care of yourself. It's not a race you don't have to race yourself through this process you might be writing it for years, I don't know. That's okay. Those are my thoughts. Those are great. All right, we have one time for one more question penny asks, how did your books impact your family your husband and children. Yeah, I can, I can start with that. And, you know, it's, it's, it's very complicated in a way because my openness about writing the book, and the fact that I had panic attacks because my children were four and six. I started writing it, and my sister and I were four and six at the time of the accident and I had what people call an anniversary reaction, where I just felt panicky. So I think, you know, there's something called vicarious trauma, where trauma is passed down and I think there was a certain amount of anxiety passed down. I'm sure I would have been so open about talking about it when they were young. And yet, there was something very powerful about that. And when the book came out everybody was just so excited and my husband drove me to all these readings and Cape Cod all over the place so you know it was something we shared. And, and I think in the end they were proud, very proud, but yeah, it was difficult for my children, writing about that material. And I'll just jump in and say that my, my, my daughters, I think learned a lot about me having read this book. My older daughter wound up doing the audio book for the book because she's an actress and so it in many ways brought us closer, because they understood a little bit more, you know, what my life was like they're young ladies so it you know they were ready for that. And I think also my husband I think it in some ways brought us closer because it's one thing to hear the stories it's another thing to see it all laid out be like, Oh, that's what you went through, huh. And they're proud, you know, they're proud because whoever thought I'd be doing all this at my age so it's been a wonderful family thing. Yeah. All right, great well I want to thank you for all of these insights. It sounds as if you are really tickling people's thought process as far as how to make their own writing deeper. Thank you both for all that you've shared today. And I want to thank our audience for their insightful questions, because I think the Q amp a period of the event is often the, the most interesting. And I just want to tell you that the mechanics Institute about a third of our members are writers so we have a lot of programming, much of which is free to help people become better writers and, and part of that's because we're a library I mean the last thing everyone wants to do is to read bad writing, but also that's a joke. But really, as an institution we honor the process. And just because it's, it's a wonderful thing to do, even if you're writing is bad, the act of writing helps, helps you and helps your readers to know. So we have a drop in writers group that's over zoom, it's every Thursday from 11 to one it's called right if you dare, and I will include a link to that when I send out the video. And once a month we have an event called the writers lunch, which is also over zoom. And that is really a learning experience where writers from our community pop in and share, share their knowledge with our community at large so both of those are free I hope to see you in those zoom spaces. And I just hope that all of you have a nice evening. Thank you, Karen. Thank you so much. Thank you, Lisa and Louise. Thank you. Wonderful. Have a nice evening. Bye bye.


Hello and welcome to NewsClick, I am Samedha and today we are bringing you a glimpse of some of the most important stories that we report about at NewsClick. A two-day nationwide strike that has been called by 10 trade unions across the country kicked off in the wee hours of Tuesday morning. More than 20 crore workers from across the country are taking part in this general strike against the anti-people, anti-labour and more importantly anti-national policies of the BJP government. The reports that are coming in are suggesting that the strike has been fairly successful in almost every state of India. Take a look. Unions from across spectrums such as banking, insurance, telecom, education, health and more importantly industrial workers are expected to take part in this two-day strike. But what are the demands of these workers? The workers across these spectrums are demanding minimum wages to be given to them. More importantly for industrial workers who are demanding an increment of the minimum wage to about 18,000 per month. While the contractual workers are demanding permanency of positions, women workers even in 2019 have to struggle and fight a battle for equal wages. It seems that the Rafal controversy is not leaving the BJP any time soon. According to the current chairman of HAL, R Madhavan, the company is awaiting long overdue payments by the Indian Air Force. The payments can actually range up to rupees 20,000 crore by the end of this financial year. The Indian Air Force owes HAL the money for aircrafts, helicopters and other services that the company provided. The current dues by the Indian Air Force amount up to rupees 15,700 crore but this amount can actually see a rise by the end of the year to about 20,000 crore rupees. Now what's interesting to note here is that while the Indian Air Force is delaying payments to HAL, it has been paying foreign vendors on time. Talking about controversies, the BJP government is humiliated yet again by the Indian Supreme Court. The court ordered that the exiled CBI chief, Alok Verma, to be reinstated to his office. The BJP government had divested him of his powers and sent him on a forced leave in the midnight swoop three months ago. While Alok Verma can go back to his office, he cannot take any major policy decisions for now. In the election season, the Supreme Court's ruling is being seen as a major setback for the BJP government as well as a huge embarrassment. Opposition and other critics have repeatedly pointed out that the CBI is being used by the BJP to manipulate its rivals. There's good news which is coming in from our neighbouring country Pakistan. A recent hearing which was held by the National Commission for Human Rights has paved a way to resolve a long-standing farmer's struggle. The hearing which took place on December 31st related to the issue of the Okara military farms whose farmers had waged a long struggle so that they were not evicted from their own land. During the hearing, the army actually admitted that they did not own the land and that the land belonged to the farmers. That's all that we have for you today on this episode of the Daily Roundup. Stay tuned and for more updates, log on to our website www.newsclick.in. Also follow us on Facebook as well as subscribe to our channel on YouTube.


Good afternoon and welcome to the Monday market update with me David Madden. Today's date is Monday the 24th of February 2020 and the time has just gone 12 or 5 GMT and it's been a pretty brutal start to the training session here in Europe Essentially the coronavirus has taken as taken hold in Italy Sadly, there's been an increase in the number of fatalities in relation to the health to the health crisis With that a couple of provinces and a couple of regions in northern Italy appeared to be in a lockdown the number of towns essentially are in lockdown public buildings closed and This is called major widespread fear across European Across the Italian stock market, but also across the European markets European equity markets as a whole and that's built further down into Sentiment on the on the dial futures on the US index futures So what what's the kind of the development and this story has been that a Few weeks ago. They're gonna believe was or the traders have the view that that was the largely Far East health crisis or to be precise about Chinese health crisis now that we're seeing The spreading further in the Far East, but also here in Europe Particularly in Italy the fear is that this is going to be coming a global issue and seeing as European stocks were kind of held up held the belt relatively well onto the Short while ago the kind of traders are now taking the view that this what we're seeing in Italy could be chapter one of the kind of wider crisis beginning in Really kicking off in Europe. So keep mind, you know the stock 600 Only last week hit a record high This this morning Rather the story in Europe is very different. The footage made the Italian market is down in excess of 4% They had the foot to 100 cac and the dachs are all down in excess of 3% So you see massive losses across the board here on European equity markets. We've seen a classic and a risk-off Strategy stocks are lower on the flip side broadly speaking the Japanese yen is higher as is the Swiss Frank not higher against Every single currency, but the broad you're doing well and gold is doing well too. So It's another kind of class example of a Class example of a risk-off play What I'll do now is I take a quick look at the week ahead article run through the major economic Corporate stories of the week ahead and then I have a look have a look at some of the big markets So looking head to tomorrow. We have US consumer confidence tomorrow We also have fourth quarter numbers out from home depot as you do from Coca-Cola Full year results are respected from Metro Bank on Wednesday also Wednesday Taylor Wimpy the home builder They're going to be potting numbers on Thursday. We have US GDP for the fourth quarter Thursday as Martin's is going to be an interesting one the company's had quite a bit of problems in the last in the last time in the last number of In the last over months. So the full year update is going to be it's going to be importance Looking head to Friday. We have full year figures from the London Stock Exchange We also have full year figures from Rolls-Royce and also Friday. We have the Eurozone flash CPI rating So we take a look now at the puts we don't as you mentioned we've had major declines on European equity markets We can see here. We've got a sharp decline on today's training session We're basically falling back to levels last seen in in early December We're not a million you know that the lows of today's session have been too far away from this area here in around 7,132 there there abouts the lows of early December So if you press and lower from here these are the sort of areas we could be targeting And if you do go below this zone here, it could take us back towards 7,100 and move below that could take us back towards the lows of early October if you do have a rebound in the Infancy 100 we could be looking heading back up towards either say 7,300 or this red line here the 208 moving average and that comes in the play at 7,370 Taking a look at what's going on over in Germany pretty brutal session there as well We had a quite a large gap to the distance gap to the downside. We can see here that the We've been moving at rest below in the training session We've you know, we've fallen we fell to a level last seen at the beginning of the month So nearly three nearly three week low, but nonetheless, it's been quite aggressive sell-off If you continue to press on lower from here, we could be looking at targeting 13,000 big psychological number And if you go below that, we could be looking at targeting this zone here in around 12,900 we can see on a few occasions that that particular metric Active resistance in early October and on a few occasions In late October in mid-December and also late January on a few occasions that area Active as support and if an metric has been important in the past it makes it more likely it'll be important in the future Although there are no guarantee. So a break below that could be quite significant If you do look to kind of rebound from here on the on the dax We could be like you heading back towards this blue line here the 50 moving average and that comes in the play north of 13,400 and it's we'd really need to be getting back above that Before we could begin to think, you know what? Maybe the recent kind of scare relation it and the has come to an end I'll take a look at the Dow Jones now. We're calling. We're calling the Dow Jones massively lower You can see here that there was a quite large gap created on the on the on the open between Friday's close and the and the and the trading of Monday in relation to the our out-of-hours Pricing so we're spitting a large up on the Dow Jones was cast trading gets underway We can see here that that the lows of our session here on the US 30 haven't been too far away right from the lows Achieved in late January. So keep an eye for this zone here in around 28,000 164 and if you do have a break below that it could take us back towards 28,000 a big psychological number If we do see a bit of a rebound In the Dow Jones, we could be looking at heading back up towards this blue line here the 50 moving average That comes to the play around 28,873 But obviously that's a fair distance away from where we currently are so about a 500 500 points or so We're expecting the Dow Jones to open Take a look now on the S&P 500 It's a fairly similar situation whereby a fairly large gap was created to the downside But if you refer to the S&P it's holding up in a better better state than the in the Dow Jones But nonetheless is still looking relatively bearish There's a decent gap was created to the downside here. We're currently expecting the S&P 500 to open at two thousand three thousand two hundred and sixty six Keep in mind that the fifth at a moving average is north of that in around in around 3284 if we can continue to hold below the fifth at a moving average It's likely that we could see further losses in the near term I should that be the case if you press on lower from here We could be looking at targeting the loads made January in around This zone here in around 3214 And if you do have a decent break below that it could take us back towards 3200 or 3100 and 80 that 20 point zone as I mentioned we're seeing major declines in stocks we have seen a Decent move to the upside in the gold market gold has been pushing steadily higher the last few sessions on account of the fear surrounding the coronavirus crisis We're currently seeing gold in around 16 80 16 79 Which we're looking at we've hit levels today at last seen in early 2013 so given indication how strong The gold market is and if you look to press on higher from here the capability heading towards 1700 probably the next big kind of psychological number ahead of us Even if you do see a bit of a tapering off In the fears and we do see the gold market pull back a small bit seeing as we have gained ground the last few sessions We could look at a finding support in on this zone here in around for 16 49 1640 and even if you go below that this zone here in around the kind of 1611 zone This area here could also act as support notice how far we are from this blue line here Which is a fifth at a moving average that's well away That's in at 1553 or you have quite a large gap between the market and and this and this and the fifth Moving average it would suggest that the market is overstretched, but markets can remain over straight over overstretched There's nothing to say that it's absolutely going to turn around But just something mindful of that a gold market is looking reasonably overstretched at the moment now the other commodities which are not do so well Started starting off of a look at a brain crude We can see here that between early January and into the in the early February crude had a terrible month Sold off excessively for about four weeks also around the China health crisis The market had a rebound here on brain crude to kind of bounce back up for the kind of 60 zone Maybe not perhaps a bit north of it It's a big psychological number and then lo and behold the market has turned over on itself again And we put to be moving lower So if you do press on lower from here on brain crude We could look at retesting for recent loads of that early February early to mid-February in around 53 spot 67 and if you go beyond that, we could be heading down towards 52 We'd really need to be kind of taken out the other the highest year in around 60 spot 28 before we begin to think that the the market is going to Is market is going to shake off the recent negative trend and then if you do go beyond that Resistance could could come into play at this red line here. He turned the moving average in at 62 spot 68 That's Brent crude. I take a look at WTI It's a fairly similar situation where I had a fairly dreadful month between early early January and early February had a rebound rebounded up here Up towards 54 spot 41 We can see here at the Reba where the market the market kind of ran out of steam was in this kind of consolidation zone in around here The markets now turning lower yet again if you do break below 51 It could take us back down towards this zone here down around 49 spot 29 And a move below that could take us back down towards 48 similar to Brent We really need to be taken out the highs in kind of mid to late February before we can before we could begin to think You know what? Maybe the recent sell-off on the panic panic surrounding the health crisis has come to an end And even if you do head north of that We could run into resistance at this red line here the eternity moving average and that comes into play at 56 It's about 28. I take a look a couple of currency appears now starting off with Euro dollar So Euro dollar had quite a negative run for most of last week and had a decent rebound on the On Friday we can see here and I was quite a bullish candle here and could state I could appear the body of this candle here could suggest that that is a daily bullish reversal could suggest it but If it is a daily bullish reversal, you'd want to see that be confirmed by a continuation of the upward move Well, we haven't actually done that on today's on today's session So it's still not particularly clear why they were looking at kind of a turnaround point on Euro dollar Now if you take a look on the weekly chart, we can see here That there was granted on the weekly chart. We've had two excessive selling weeks And we had the long wick of this so it would denote indecision but there's still no kind of guarantee that the market is you're gonna fully turn around and I'm not overly convinced that we're gonna see a major rebound in your dollar Just because of today's session have started off well within the kind of body of a Friday's candle But that being said if you can get hold of both the lows of last week in around one spot 077 we could stand a chance of heading back up towards one or nine or potentially up towards one spot all 925 But if you do turn over ourselves and take ahead take out the recent lows It could take us back towards one spot 07 one spot 06 and the likes Lastly, I take a look at the British pound Versus the US dollar so we can see here that For the last few weeks, there's been a bit of weakness In the in the British pound versus the US dollar not excessively but just a small bit so we can see here Look at look at what the February From late January going forward. We had a lower low a lower high couldn't take off this blue line here Good to be moving average the lows of late February take off. I've taken up the lows mid-February We're still looking a bit on the kind of soft side in comparison with you know, the levels you're at it in mid-December So if you do drop back below the recent lows here in around one spot 2849 it could take us back to work down toward this zone here down around one spot 2768 But keep in mind if you do manage to push on higher from here get back above 130 Get back above the fifth of the moving average in at one spot 30 46 It could it could then put us on track for this area here in at one spot 32 And and then beyond that it could take us towards the late December highs of one spot 32 84 Keep in mind the wider term view over the last several months I've been very much at the upside on Paul and daughter. Just be just be mindful of the wider upper trend But also it is worth noting that Next month we're gonna have the the budget announced and this talk We could have be it could be a bit of a fiscal boost to the UK economy could be revealed in that particular update Now, thank you for listening. Please tune in next week and have a good trading week