Thank you for coming. Now you've written a great deal about in some ways not having a native country, not having a language of your own that's clearly yours or even a culture, having read or re-read all of your work and surrounding works. And if I think, you know, how do I frame you? I would say I think of you as a Rhode Islander because that's where you grew up. You were born in England but came here when you were three grew up in Rhode Island. How would you react to that? Uncomfortably.  No, I mean, it's true. Well, first of all, thank you all very much for coming and for your warm welcome. It is true that I lived there. Well, let's see how long did I live there from the age of three to 18. So 15 years. And you went to Barnard at 18, right? I did. And so then I think I lived for as long in New York as I did in Rhode Island. But of course, one's childhood is one's childhood and is formative and in a way that later experiences are not.  But I don't feel, I mean, I've always had a very uneasy relationship with the place. And, you know, you mentioned the essay and state by state, one of these books that have been kindly assembled here is such a lovely display. Really, I'm so touched. But I was asked to write about Rhode Island in this anthology called State by State, which invited a number of authors to write about their home state or a state with, you know, that they had some sort of connection to in any case. And so I chose Rhode Island. I mean, I was asked to write about Rhode Island, I said yes. But partly, it was to get over this sense of discomfort about your very opening. Didn't work? Well, I mean, I think what was helpful about it is that it opened up the setting of the lowland, which is set, you know, in part in Rhode Island. But it's the first of my books in which I can actually mention Rhode Island by its name.  But I couldn't mention it. I couldn't name it as such. And I think that's telling. It was saying something, the fact that in the earlier books I was, you know, I was writing about the ocean, I was writing about this kind of, you know, small campus, little town and describing these settings that I knew very well, the settings I had grown up in. But I couldn't come out and say that it was Rhode Island and I kept calling it some suburb of Boston. And, you know, so I think the writing of that piece unlocked something and then in the lowland they're in Rhode Island and I don't pretend anymore. We'll get to your most recent work. But one of the things I like the most about everything you've done is I always get the sense you're trying to work out some problem for yourself and also for us. But I'd like to survey your whole writing life and just start with the question when you were young. When you were, say, 15 years old, what was your favorite novel and why? Well, I think I had started reading Russian literature around that age. I had some friends, or my family had friends with some, you know, one of the three daughters, one of them was a little bit older. She was already in college and so when I would visit them I would see these big volumes of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy on her desk, these Norton critical editions that they were really appealing to me. And so I think I tried to kind of, you know, rise to another, you know, another level of reading. And so that's my, that's probably what I was, you know, reading a lot of. I loved Hawthorne even then. So I was in 10th grade and when I was 15 I read The Great Gatsby that year. And then the following year I was introduced to Hardy who has become so important to me as well. So it was in high school that I encountered, fortunately, certain authors who have stayed with me for all of this time and who continue to inspire me. One of the things I've liked about just comments you've dropped is the way you read, say, Scarlett Letter is actually a novel of immigrants that maybe the characters wouldn't have behaved that way in a quote-unquote home country. Even a lot of Hardy, especially Tess, a favorite of yours. You can read as a kind of immigrant novel. Sure. Coming from the countryside, moving somewhere quite strange. And to use that as a lens for interpreting what otherwise might seem like strange character behaviors, but reading them through you is actually very rewarding. So through your eyes, through your fiction. Does that make sense to you at all? Yes. I mean, I think what I'm responding to is the sense of displacement in those authors and in almost any author. I mean, even, you know, Willa Cather, you can read this way, Homer, you can read this way. So many authors you can read this way, which is why I think some years ago I was asked this question by the New York Times Book Review about what was my problem with immigrant literature. And I made a kind of maybe cheeky remark about how I didn't believe in it, but this is, it wasn't being cheeky. It was just being, it was just saying what I felt was true, which is that this is something I've responded to in literature from the very beginning. And if I didn't have this response to literature, then, you know, these writers wouldn't have fed and inspired me the way they did because there would have been a quote-unquote barrier between their experiences and their times and mine. And that shouldn't be the case, right? That's not what literature does. Literature does the opposite. And it allows us to cross over those boundaries in a beautiful way, in a magical way. Now, if I can trust the Internet, you have three master's degrees in creative writing, comparative literature, and English. And for one of your degrees, you translated six Bengali short stories by Ashupur Nadevi, who's a Bengali writer, maybe the most famous woman writer or even writer in Bengal for much of the 20th century. What connects you to her and to what problem were you trying to solve by engaging in her work? Well, I knew about her through my, through my mother, who's a devoted reader of Ashupur Nadevi's work and talked about her a lot.  But she read in Bengali. And I remember the effort of going to Calcutta, ordering the books. My mother, the list she would give my uncle, who had the connections with all the booksellers on College Street in Calcutta, which is like the book kind of district, and the drama of this, you know, going and ordering all the books from the publishers and waiting and bringing them back, you know, in the brick shop, piling them, the whole thing, and then bringing them back to the United States. You know, I saw what it meant to her, you know, and I saw, I mean, as with everything with trying to get the right ingredients, what have you, but the literature was, you know, I could see that those books simply weren't available here. And they were, in some sense, you know, her lifeline. Anyway, so she would talk about these, she would talk about the work of this particular author among others. And I was struck by the things she described, you know, a very prolific author of short stories and novels, of some very incisive short stories about kind of domestic life, and sort of classified unfairly, I think, as a, you know, a writer for women, which I don't think she is at all. I think she has a much, you know, more universal power and vision. Anyway, in graduate school, I was taking this translation workshop. And so the assignment, at some point, I was asked to translate something. And I thought, well, what can I do here?  And I had some French. And then I had Bengali as my, you know, first language. But you didn't read Bengali. But I couldn't read it. And I still really can't. And I couldn't write in it either. And I still really can't. And yet I worked around this obvious obstacle. And I asked my mother to read a number of these stories out loud. And I taped her. And then I listened to them.  And I translated in this way. And I can read enough, I mean, painstakingly, slowly. But I can, I have, you know, it's not completely incomprehensible to me. So that I could then also go back in addition to the tapes that, you know, the, I could also look at the text and sort of see how things were structured, where the breaks were, etc, etc. And I even caught my mother a couple of times. She kind of skipped, you know, a paragraph here and there.  So it was a really interesting project. And I, but that's how it, that's how it, how it started. There's something about how she sets her stories in architectural space. Yes. Always that reminds me of your writings. When you have a scene, you describe a home very often or the place in advance. And that's imposing a structure on the scene. And that's in her. Do you get that from her? Well, I think I wrote the in the commentary I wrote to the thesis, if I've not mistaken, I mean, this was a lifetime ago. But I think that was part of the lens I brought to my reading, to my critical reading of the stories was that she was a writer very attuned to space, to physical space. And, and so I must have been affected by this in some sense. And then my doctoral dissertation kind of built on this in that I wrote about Jacoby in English drama and where it was set, specifically often in a corrupt Italian palazzo. And so what that meant. So I think as a reader of literature, when I was a student of literature, I was very attuned to where things were set and why and what it meant you know to have that, you know, that that literal architecture being an element of narrative. Now we're at George Mason University and George Mason, the man, he lived in a place called Gunston Hall. And that's one of the best known examples of Palladian architecture in Virginia, even the whole Atlantic seaboard. So you did a PhD dissertation on Renaissance studies. And what is it about Palladianism and Palladio that drew your attention? What's the magnet there for you? Well, I mean, some things just, you know, now that you asked me, I'm thinking, okay, so what led me to this? One of the classes again that I was taking as a graduate student was a class, a seminar. It was sort of a broad seminar with lots of different professors. Anyway, so I there was this one professor named Roger Sclutton, who writes a lot about architecture. I had a debate with him once on nature friendship. Yes, he's very I won. Congratulations. Yeah, I mean, he's a very well spoken man, and with a broad range of interests, aesthetics, philosophy, architecture. Anyway, and he taught part of this class and talked about the language of architecture, Italian architecture in particular. And I was I just was really struck by the class, the idea of it, looking at space, so carefully, these beautiful spaces, what they meant, the vocabulary implicit in architecture. So that was sort of step one. And then, and then I went to Florence in this time, I went to Italy for the first time, I went to Florence with the, you know, and not only did it lead to this whole other sort of phase of my life, Italian, writing in Italian, but it was I went with a special eye toward the architecture, looking at the places that I was seeing in slides, you know, as a grad student in Boston, and connecting to them for the first time really experiencing them, those spaces for the first time. And then when I came, you know, then when I was reading these plays, I mean, I was always interested in where Shakespeare said his plays. I was interested in his use of Italy as a setting. And then that just sort of got me started thinking about what was the relationship of, you know, in Renaissance England, you know, what was it all about? And what did what did Italy represent to those to that to to England and to English artists dramatists and what why what was his choice all about? Why were they setting clearly kind of English political drama in in on foreign soil and what that meant? And they're also afraid of Italy, right? It's a symbol of corruption. It's a sort of a horror love horror kind of love hate, you know, attraction repulsion, contradictory, you know, attitude, which I tried to unpack a little bit in the course of the dissertation. So it's still working through some set of related problems in a way? Yeah. And I think one thing that's always sort of in there is this idea of translation and bringing back and crossing over, you know, I mean, one thing, certainly that was happening in the Renaissance was that these, you know, people were literally traveling to Venice to Florence to Rome and seeing this architecture, which is sort of, you know, born from that place and then bringing those ideas back, translating the works of, you know, Vitruvius or Alberti or whomever and then using those ideas to build, literally to build buildings in England. And then from there we have things here in the United States. So that also interested me. To continue the whirlwind tour of your career in preparing for this, I reread interpreter of maladies. And this was the sense I had this time around that one of your characters, Mr. Capasi, who is the interpreter of maladies. So if people come to the doctor and they only speak Gujarati, he's able to translate that for the doctor and explain what the symptoms are, that in a sense in the book, you view yourself the author as the interpreter of maladies. So people who are disconnected in different ways. And you're the one doing the interpreting and he's at the center of the book and he's a stand in for you. Is that just my imagination? Probably not. But I don't think I was aware of it at the time. You know, I mean, I think just yesterday I was talking in Princeton to, at a place called Dorothea's house, which is sort of dedicated to Italian American culture, so on. And you were talking about the most recent book and talking about, at one point I was talking about this idea of, you know, in antiquity, in Latin, the word for translator is interpreter. And I teach translation now. And, you know, I talk a lot to my students about translation being the most intimate form of reading and how there was a, there was, you know, there was the time when translating and interpreting and analyzing sort of were all one, one thing. And now there are translators and then there people who look at books and analyze them and are scholars and etc. And there's not, it's not necessarily, you know, the same activity. And it strikes me because now many years, I mean, so I wrote Interpreter of Maladies, that was my first book. I called it that. I heard the title in this strange, you know, flash. And now years later, years have gone by and I have, I'm now just setting out on a new phase of my creative life as a translator. And so I think it's all one continuum, but I just wasn't, one can't see, one can't realize these things in the moment. You know, you have to, it's only looking back that you kind of see certain patterns. Another thing that struck me about this book was how much it had in common with Elena Ferrante in some ways. And of course, this is at a time when you wouldn't have read her yet. But this notion of both feeling a need to set everything right for so many different people and being unable to, and that carrying a kind of sadness, and then interjected into the story always are books. So books both have this immense power, like everyone's reading them, everyone's looking to them for answers. And yet at the same time, books are somehow impotent because they don't actually allow anyone to actually set everything right for parents or other sets of people. And she has a bit of that, and you have a bit of that. And of course, it's completely independent. But your later fascination with her seems already to be an interpreter of maladies in some ways. Does that make sense to you? Well, I certainly recognize that in her work when I read her. And I wrote to her, I wrote some letters. I wrote two letters to her that were sort of public letters that I read in Rome some years ago in public. And maybe she was there, or maybe she wasn't. In any case, she did write back to me. And I talked precisely about this. I talked about how she uses, how books are characters in her work. And I think her work in some sense is about reading and about language and literature and what it means on a very deep level, a very sophisticated level. I don't think my work is doing that at all. But I think about it a lot. And so I was very struck by that element of her work and this focus on characters who write, characters who become writers, how books shape and form us and on the one hand, and how they betray us on the other hand and can't really contain what life is, this sort of contradiction at heart. Now, if you compare interpreter of maladies to your other short story collection on a custom dearth, do you think of the latter more recent work as being more about reconciliation and the greater role for children or families in at least some of the stories? Or do you think overall your fiction with time is moving in the direction of Hardy and becoming darker? I think it's becoming darker and I think that's usually the case as we get older, right? So I think that and that's my sense. And I feel that though I really try not to read a lot about what people say about my work, I also don't live in a vacuum in outer space. And so I sense reactions to certain things, right?  And that's fine. I remember even with the lowland, I don't think my editor would mind if I share this with you, but at one point she said, well, it's just really grim sometimes, what goes on. And we share a love of Hardy and I just said, would you really have said that to Hardy? And she didn't say anything else, but and so I published the book I wanted to publish, but a lot of people have said to me, I just couldn't read the book, you know, it was just too heavy, too dark, to whatever, whatever. And they miss I think the sort of bitter sweet quality of say an awful like the namesake. You bring up lowland. I'd like to ask you a few questions about Bengal. If someone's visiting India and they ask me for advice, I say you simply absolutely must go to Calcutta. If you to the extent you feel the same way, how would you articulate why it is people ought to go visit Calcutta?   Well, we'll know. I mean, yes, parts of it can be. Yes, of course. But but not in that conventional sense. And it's, it's, it's, it's challenging on a whole host of levels. And I, I, of course, you know, I don't know it as a tourist, right? Because my family's from there. And I've never known it in any other way other than when I was very young, where my grandparents lived, and then my aunts and uncles, my cousins, and so forth. So I have my own relationship to it. But, you know, it's, it's, it has its, it's, it's like, it's like not knowing New York City in the American context. I mean, it just, it's, it's, it's just its own thing, and it's so strong in its flavor and its power, and its energy. So, you know, it has to be reckoned with, you know, I think. And if I think of Indian economists, so two of the best known would be Amartya Sen and Abhijit Banerjee. And they're both Bengali, of course. Why does it seem that so much of the Indian intelligentsia comes from Calcutta or Bengal? What is it in the water, so to speak? I don't know.  I don't believe in them, but, but, but, you know, it's a city that believes in its poets, that, that is, believes in its politics, believes in its, believes in humanity in some sense. And, and, and life is so extreme there in so many ways. People are put to the test and, and you see life being put to the test constantly around you. And there's nothing you can really accept, you know, easily or take for granted about yourself or about the universe if you've been there. You know, I mean, it just, it's a jolt to your consciousness. And, but, but, but a fundamental one, an essential one, you know, to, to shake us out of this, whatever takes over if you protect yourself. Now, if I were to take a superficial reading of Indian history, earlier Calcutta is the central capital for the British Empire in India. And you could argue that it's the British left India since World War II. Calcutta has become significantly less central in some ways. Delhi and Mumbai seem to become more important. A, do you think that's true? And B, if it is true, do you think that actually in part accounts for why Calcutta has stayed so interesting? That loss of centrality or existing on the margins, you even have a nice Italian word for this? Well, I think it's, it's, it's retained a certain character that the other big cities, you know, have, have, have a more kind of Western overlay at this point. You know, I mean, Calcutta is not far behind and it's changed radically from, you know, the city I knew when I was a young girl.  And then the airport was, you know, distinctly not glamorous and any, all of these things, you know, so you felt, you know, okay, this is a different kind of experience, not, not designed for the tourist, not designed for the important person, you know, shall we say, but, and so now, so that has already changed and that, that distance is smaller, significantly smaller. But in, in some sense, you know, yes, I think it still retains its own particular flavor and energy because of this, maybe. And how emotionally tied do you feel to the earlier history? So in 1905 Curzon partitions what is now West Bengal, Bengal, from what is now Bangladesh, and you can easily imagine some alternate history where that hadn't happened. And the way the national borders would have been divvied up would be quite different from what we see. Is that just abstract history to you the way, you know, I might read about the English Renaissance? Or is that something that has emotional oomph in your mind, in your heart, and you feel somehow torn as a Bengali that you've been separated from other Bengalis in some way? Or is it just not part of your connection to West Bengal? Well, I mean, it's interesting. And my, my relationship with Indian history is kind of in these two, two categories. And some said, I mean, in some sense, you know, I didn't study any of it because I was raised here, right? And so India just wasn't on any map anywhere ever.   So I was always aware at the same time of these incredibly traumatic events in Indian history and the partition, most of all, what that meant, particularly for my father's family, the neighborhood that my father grew up in, which I describe in the lowland a little bit. I, you know, I was, I asked my parents when I was a young girl, you know, we, one of the stories in Interpreted Malady is called When Mr. Pirzada Comes to Dine comes from a kind of vague memory of a man from Bangladesh, a scholar who was living in Rhode Island in the 1970s during that civil war. And my curiosity about who he was and why he was there and then stories my parents told me. And then as I grew older, as I became more of a conscious, person, teenager, wondering about things, I was going back to India, you know, I was slowly starting to fill in sort of pieces like, okay, so this is what happened and it happened this, it happened at this time and then this and this is what, you know, this meant this wave of people came and all of these people, you know, lived this thing. But on top of that, there's the there's the residue, there's emotional residue of what it's meant for certain people, either in my family or people that my family knows who remain deeply scarred by those events and not only deeply scarred but actively hostile, resentful toward, you know, for the case of my family, toward East Bengal and Muslims, for example. And so this was something that I, you know, I took in and I still take in and that uneasy relationship between Hindus and Muslims in Bengali culture, right, is still very alive today.  But, you know, there were people in my family who commented on that choice of name thinking, well, you know, what does she think she's doing? Because it's Persian. Because it's associated with Muslims and et cetera, et cetera, and this kind of hatred intolerance, prejudice, you know, that is what I'm saying is it's still, it's something that's still very much in my, in my family's kitchen in their, in their dinner table. I mean, my parents are not like that at all, right? And they taught me to have, you know, to be free of these kinds of attitudes. But, you know, perhaps that's easier for me to say, because I didn't experience the trauma of losing my family, losing, losing their ancestral property, for example, you know, which some, some of their friends experienced, and therefore, even now in 2016, they're still, you know, saying, oh, but, you know, this horrible thing happened and, you know, we're still upset about it. So what's your literary or maybe even also emotional relationship with the works of Tagore?  In your stories every now and then, someone's reading his poems. There's a lot of themes from him that are in your work, like home in the world, this odd mix of tensions between the cosmopolitan and the particular. He was even interested in book design. He was a kind of polymath. He studied many things, worked in different forms. Is that just parallel or an influence or?  He's, you know, in this pantheon like place, right?  But, you know, for people, I mean, my parents, again, they aren't religious people, so they didn't give us a religious education, but they certainly taught us to respect the great minds and the great visionaries. And so Tagore is one of those, right?   My uncle was a painter. I grew up with portraits of Tagore all over our house. I have the portrait of him in my house, painted by a watercolor by my uncle. I have a beautiful photograph.  And so I have this photograph that's just next to me when I'm writing. So I feel this kind of, you know, this constant presence, shall we say.  I mean, I've read him in mostly in translation, I've read fiction, I've read poetry, I grew up hearing all of those songs, like 24 hours a day in my house. So, you know, but I don't, I'm not aware of any kind of conscious influence, if that's what you're asking. But again, what's conscious, what's unconscious? Now let's move to maybe what's my favorite book of yours. In other words, which I take to be your memoir of learning to engage with both reading Italian, dealing with Italian culture, and most of all writing in Italian, a remarkably brave thing to do. And it comes off extremely well. I'm just going to toss out the names of a few Italian writers, the lesser known ones. And if you have a connection to them, tell us why you think they're interesting or how they've shaped you in some way. Feel free to pass on anyone, of course. Lala Romano. Okay. Well, I had never heard of her until I was living in Rome. And I just was reading the paper one day and read an article about her. And it was interesting. I took a note. I took note of it. I took note of the name. And I went to the bookshop. And I said I'd like to read this author and they said, Oh, yeah, she's sort of hard to find, you know, kind of not that well distributed. Anyway, so I ordered some books. And, and, and in fact, what I did, because it was so hard to find the books, I, you know, I went through the person who wrote this is Italy, right? Everybody knows everybody. So I the person who wrote the article, I knew. So I said, you know, how do I get these books? And he said, Well, what you need to do is you need to write to her husband, who has all the books, you know, he has like a warehouse in his in their house. I said, Okay, so I wrote the husband. And so there was some back and forth. And then he sent me a packet of books from from Milano from Milan. And they never made it to Rome. Happens. They're still on a train. Yes. So I waited, I waited for these books, and they weren't coming. And then I said, Listen, these books, I know you kindly sent them. But and then one thing led to another. And I was, I found myself in Milan. And again, I kind of reignited this interest. And he said, Well, why don't you come over? And then I went to her house. And I saw her house where she used to live. And we had a, you know, very interesting conversation. I saw her desk, I saw her things, I saw her paintings.  And that was really exciting. But no, so I and anyway, so I started reading her with great interest. I mean, she's an incredibly sort of modernist writer in some sense, her language is incredible, essential in its quality.  And there's time I would like to translate called Neymari estremi. And it's a, it's a sort of two part memoir of her of losing her husband. And, and you know, there's so many books now about grief and the loss of a loved one and what that means. And, but this was something that was written a long time ago before all these books became kind of part of our cultural culture. So, so that's an amazing book of hers. She wrote a lot of interesting, very interesting novels. She wrote about homecomings to places that don't exist anymore. She, she did. And then one of the things that also really struck me was at the end of her life, she was almost blind. And, and still the drive to write was so intense and constant. And so her husband, her second husband, you know, the one who survives her, was, you know, was explaining that when, when she was in the final phase of her life, and could barely see, she would, you know, she had these enormous pieces of paper, basically, and would just sort of write a couple of words, a sentence or two a day, like this, and these very kind of, kind of the words were just burning with, with life and with her need to express herself in spite of the disability. And, and these, these writings were collected in, in a book called The Last Diary, which I read.  And one of them says, in Italian, it says la mia c'e città e un punto di vista, which means my blindness is a point of view. And, and I was really, I really marveled at that because I felt like it kind of explained at least to me the, the purpose of writing in Italian, because of course she wasn't totally blind, she was partially blind. And, and I'm not totally blind in Italian either, but I feel kind of partially blind. Now I don't want to compare myself to her because she had actually a physical, you know, issue with her eyesight, and she would didn't choose that for herself. And she suffered for it, whereas my project is something that comes from me and it's voluntary, but it is this kind of voluntary blindness, right? But it's richer for you to read in Italian, and maybe even sometimes to write in Italian now, because the partial blindness gives you a new lens on all these problems you've been trying to come to terms with. Well it makes you look harder. Yeah. Right. Another writer, Cesare Pavese. Well Pavese is huge, you know, he translated Moby Dick, and my, we were in Sicily a couple of years ago and the, we were sailing around the Aeolian Islands, and we had this long conversation one day with our skipper about how, according to him Pavese's translation of Moby Dick surpasses the work of Malville. And does it? Well, I mean, I actually haven't read it yet. I would like to, I keep meaning to pick it up when I'm over there. But, but he was, he was, you know, a colossal, colossal writer from Turin, that great literary city where you have Primo Levi, Natalia Ginsburg, Einaldi, the publishing house, you know, all concentrated in this part of Italy in the north over toward France. And Pavese wrote very much in the autobiographical vein and did things that, you know, again I think now it's, oh it's fashionable when the writer becomes a character and oh we all write about ourselves and there's a lot of memoir and things, but these are things that he was doing, you know, in after World War II.  He suffered deeply. He committed suicide. He left behind incredible sort of writer's notebook that is an extraordinarily powerful work, you know, very, very dark, very, very true. And wrote lots of short stories as well as, you know, a series of kind of slim novels. And he worked really hard as a translator, not only his own translations of many American authors, had a very rich relationship with the English language, but also sort of oversaw a lot of translation projects. He writes like an American writer in some ways. Well, he was influenced. I mean, this is what's interesting. He was influenced by reading and translating Melville, among others, and his Italian has a different energy as a result of that translation. And I think those translations and his relationship with English, and I think this is what's kind of missing in American literature right now in some sense.  I mean, you have examples of people who translate and make that part of their creative work, but relatively very few fiction writers stop to think about it. Or engage with it. But I think my knowledge now of Italian writers has opened up something because I think, for me, I mean, I just finished translating my first novel from Italian and it has been such a formative experience for me and and powerful and just deepened my awareness of what words are and literature and language and all of that. It's just been, I kind of can't believe it's taken me this long, you know, but I'm excited. And but I think someone like Pavese was like, you know, blazed the way in some sense. One of my wishes is that you someday give us a book on Italian fiction. And here's a writer, not Italian, but writing in another language, not the mother tongue, Agua took Christoph. Yes, amazing. What's important. You have her book there. Well, she is a trilogy, right? Yeah, she wrote this trilogy and she wrote some other books too. So she was Hungarian and left during the invasion to fled to Switzerland with her small kids, her husband and her dictionaries and writes about this and an amazing little book called the the illiterate an alfabetta. I read it in Italian. It must be called something else in French, an alphabet. But but she taught herself how to write in French. And and all of her literary work is is in French. And I read her. I came to her in Italian. So I came to her in translation, but not in an English translation in Italian translation. And my life was never the same after reading her.  Extraordinarily powerful, deep, profound, profound writer, dark and but very human. And the just the kind of stuff that you don't, you know, find very easily. Anyway, but she is, you know, inspiring to me deeply because of her because of this incredible effort she made her whole life to try to express herself in a learned language. Now, of course, the difference between her and myself is is that she I think she always had a sort of antagonistic relationship with French, even though she went out of her way to learn it, and to express herself in it because she was living in Switzerland, and she felt that she couldn't really function as a writer without expressing herself in French, whereas I've sort of gone out of my way to do this crazy thing that everyone discouraged me. Discard me from doing, which is writing in Italian. And you were fascinated with Italy way back when, right? Well, yeah, I mean, in a growing way. Yeah, yeah. Now, your most recent book, The Clothing of Books, it's about book covers. So I once had a hypothesis about book covers. And I thought I would go to his border's bookstore when it still existed and look at everything on the front table and try to ignore all other information I had about the book and simply buy the one whose cover appealed to me the most. And I wanted to see whether the publishing trade actually would do a good job of designing a cover so that it would match what I was looking for in a book. And I ended up buying Kate Christensen's The Great Man, which I thought was quite a good novel. Okay. And I only did that once, but I considered the experiment to be a success. So do you think, based on your study of book covers, your own books aside, but are book covers assigned to books efficiently? Or is there something in the process that's gone wrong? Well, I mean, I've never tried this experiment. I will, maybe. It's hard to block out all the other information because you recognize names, publishing houses, where they put it on the table. But still, you can approximate it. Yeah. I mean, I talk a little bit in this little essay about being drawn to certain books just because there's some allure appeal, something I'm projecting, something the book is projecting, something I'm projecting onto the book, some relationship I want to have with the book because it's, I don't know, some landscape I want to find myself in someday. Or, I don't know, you know, I mean, if you think of a book as a mirror, right? And if you just sort of think, well, that's how I would like to look if I were a tree, or if I were a whatever, you know, some image. But I, you know, no, the essay is really about the disconnect between what's on the outside and what's on the inside often, and what that feels like from a writer's point of view. Because it's both a disconnect and a source of can be, at least for me, a source of real anguish, because you can't really disconnect yourself from what you look like, you know, you can try, but you can't really, you know, Like when I read a custom dearth, and if I try to think of it as a kind of song cycle, I try to put the cover out of my mind, because I know how the covers are done and assigned. And I figure, well, the cover will mislead me because you didn't do it. But I find I can't put it out of my mind, even being aware of the entire process. And there's something about, you know, the floating tiara or crown or whatever it is. It leaves an imprint on my impression of the book, even though I know it's not by you. It's this. It's that. Oh, you have it on. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's what they literally designed it after that. So it's a very pretty cover, but maybe it's too pretty. I think I'm not going to get in any trouble any more trouble than I'm already in. How do you feel about blurbs? Well, I mean, I say what I feel about blurbs in the, in the essay.  Because I just say what I feel. And I think this is what one of the things about writing in Italian that people aren't prepared for is that I actually don't pretend anymore.  But, but no, I mean, one of the things I say in the book in this essay is that I actually can't, these books don't even, I mean, as much as I appreciate. Truly, this lovely display that you made, but I, this isn't my book anymore. You know, this once the cover is on it, it's not my book. And again, I mean, having lived in Italy and having Italian writer friends, so many examples of novels there have covers chosen by the author. Imagine that. But, you know, but suddenly you have a whole, you know, you have the inside of the words of the pages that the author created. And you actually, you have an image that the author felt that they wanted, he or she wanted to represent visually what the book is saying. I mean, if I had that freedom, if I had that ability, I would be such a happy, you know, it would make making to going to museums, even more exciting. Because I would always be thinking, oh, well, maybe, you know, maybe this, maybe that. You know, who knows, maybe an image could even inspire a book in that sense. If one had that ability to say, oh, you know what, I went to the show, this gallery the other day, and I saw this image and it was so beautiful. And I was thinking about it. And this whole novel grew out of it, or this whole collection of stories or whatever. These things can happen. They just don't happen here as much as I wish they did. I brought a copy of a German book. It's by Rilke. The publisher is Reklam. The cover is plain. It's just a color. And if you go to German bookstores, at least parts of them, they're actually organized by publishers. You probably know other countries in Europe sometimes. Like in Italy, too, in France. And the books more or less all look the same. How do you feel about this system? I love them. So you would opt into this system? Yeah, well, I mean, I talk about that in the book. The whole piece is a kind of meditation on the idea of wearing a uniform and dressing yourself, and how these contradictory approaches to presenting oneself, what they mean. It's like you have to make a statement about where you've decided to rest on the identity question. And a cover forces your hand in a way you'd rather be hovering in this ambiguity. Yeah, I mean, I prefer this kind of cover because, to me, there's a protective quality to the lack of specificity and the belonging to the series, which is what Europe... I mean, in the US, you have certain series as well. And in fact, I was thinking... I mean, I wrote the essay when I was in Rome and I was far away from my American library and my books and things.  City Lights books makes those beautiful little books of my copy of Allen Ginsberg's Howell and et cetera. I mean, these are beautiful books, American books that all kind of looked the same, similar dimensions, have a kind of sober quality, a lot of emphasis on type. So I won't say that it doesn't happen here, but I think for the average writer and the average publisher, it's a very different dialogue that's happening when it comes to putting a cover onto a book. And so I think if I had to choose, I would choose the safety of the uniform because of course, I mean, the whole piece, the whole little essay, whatever begins with the memory of being a child and being traumatized by having to dress myself because it just churned up so many problems and was a source of true anguish for me as a child to have to choose clothes and put them on. And this has economic ramifications. This has cultural ramifications. This has all sorts of ramifications because clothes are things we buy in stores and et cetera, et cetera. So I had this sort of crazy admiration, envy obsession with my cousin's school uniforms in Calcutta because they were all the same and they just put on what they had to wear to school every day and it was the same thing. And I dreamed about that. I dreamed of being able to wake up in the United States and just putting on my blue skirt and my white shirt and my black shoes and going to school and nobody commenting on what I was wearing because I was always so terrified because people were always commenting on what I was wearing and either teasing me or whatever. And so in that sense, I think there's this kind of where do you stand between wanting to express yourself and be free and being afraid of that freedom and being actually vulnerable to that freedom? I mean, I think America represents freedom with a big capital F and it always has and we hope it always will for the good. But there's also the danger of that in that, I mean, even as a young girl in the 70s, as a kid, a child of immigrants, I knew what it meant to shop in one store versus another store. I saw what the girls in my class were wearing, the kinds of shoes, the kinds of purses. I knew that my parents weren't taking me to those stores that they thought that was a waste of money and that we're not going to pay all of this $40 for Nike's, sneakers or whatever it is because it's a waste and you're going to grow out of them in six months. Whereas my other schoolmates had these things and suddenly there was the gap between me and them reinforced by these things. And I think for a child, at least for me, these things were traumatizing. And I imagine for others as well. Two last questions before we get to Q&A. I'll give them both to you together. First, what do you love most in Indian classical music? And second, what are you working on next? Well, again, from my mother, I inherited, received, learned to appreciate Indian classical music, most of all, sitar music, which she's always been passionate about in my family, all my uncles, my great uncles, my cousins. I mean, I come from a broad extended family, passionate enthusiasts of the sorrow mostly, the instrument of Aliad Barkan and Amzad Ali Khan. And so I grew up my whole life listening to this very complex, beautiful music that really has spoken to me. And just the other day I was in the Princeton Art Museum, there's a beautiful exhibit there right now, which it's not that far. I really do recommend a big collection of miniatures, two big rooms of extraordinary works. And one of the whole chambers of this exhibit is dedicated to like miniatures basically inspired by the rock cycles. And there was like, there were headphones and I put them on and I was listening to one of them. And it's just a part of, that music is a part of me. And I really am very, it's sort of part of my formation. I think it's extraordinary. And your next work? Well, my next work, so I have two kind of things that are happening. One is, so I just translated this novel called Ties in English. It's La Cci is the Italian title by Domenico Sarnone, who is my friend and whom I consider the finest Italian living author. And I just translated this novel. I'm just at the final stages and it will be out in March. I think it's an amazing novel. I read it two years ago and it was first published. I'm so grateful for the opportunity to have brought it into English. I'm really excited about it. And then on the other side, I am slowly, quietly writing some short, very short stories in Italian. Jumpa Leheri, thank you very much. Four questions. Q with the two mics. Please keep in mind these are questions, not statements.  Natasha? I was hoping you would ask about it, but and I think everybody asks about it. And maybe it's not such an interesting question anymore, but it's interesting to me and I'm hoping you would answer. You mentioned that you really like Yelena Ferante, and we all do too, at least most of us. And I wanted to hear your take on all this anonymity situation and whether you think right now, is it considered in Italy that everybody really knows who she is after all these articles which came out? Or is it still a mystery? And just what's your take on the whole situation? Well, I think the whole situation is completely blown out of proportion and ridiculous. I know personally the person who has been accused of being Yelena Ferante, she's actually the wife of Domenico Sarnone, who has also been, you know, accused whatever the word is.  I mean, and this is the absurd thing because whoever wrote those books did nothing wrong and it's been treated almost as if it were a crime. And the nature of the article, the very violent article, an appropriate article that was published a couple of months ago, the language of that was very disturbing and offensive to me. Whoever wrote those books, the world isn't no better off knowing who the actual person is. And I think, you know, we've all completely lost perspective in that, you know, so many beautiful things have been created by mankind that we still go to look at and marvel at or read or whatever the case may be. And nobody's hung up on who exactly the person was and what their name was and what their birthday is or, you know, this whole cult of the individual and the individual's hand and signature behind what's being done. These are kind of recent concepts if you think about them.  They have other things to think about and worry about at this point.  And then everybody moved onwards. I think here in America, it's become, it's just going, it's just ongoing and it never, it's just not dying. It's not people aren't moving on and saying, you know, let's just either read the books or not read the books. But, you know, if someone goes out of their way to say, you know, I would like to write with anonymity, why that can't be respected in our culture is really a kind of, you know, mystifying to me and also distressing in terms of, you know, what that means and the projection people have onto the idea of, you know, who the writer might be and the reasons and, you know, all of the speculation, which it could be a very simple thing, you know, but it's become kind of contorted, I feel like, at least in the United States, maybe in England, I don't know, but it's not the same in Italy. People aren't really talking about it in the same way. Next question. Hello, Miss Lahiri. I admire your writing. I'll start with this. So thank you for all your books. Thank you. I grew up in Poland, actually, and my first degree is from Gdańsk University. I'm bilingual, but I teach English here and I write in English, a fiction writer. When I think about being bilingual, I feel like I'm inhabited, inhabiting two different types of personality. When I am in Polish, I'm a different person when I'm in English. And I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about being bilingual and writing in Italian now. Do you feel like you are one person who inhabits sort of two different worlds, or you feel yourself splitting apart and sort of feeling that you are, depending on the language, a totally different sort of person? Well, I think anybody who is fortunate enough to have more than one language recognizes that, you know, I mean, some people go so far as to say, if you know more than one language, you have more than one soul. And that's a very thoughtful way of thinking about it.  And each language represents that. And I think, you know, even before I learned Italian, I always grew up with two languages side by side. And maybe I didn't know them in exactly the right kind of the same level of proficiency, but they were both incredibly strong influences on who I was. So, you know, I always was, you know, divided in that sense. So I think that's true. And I can say for the Italian project, you know, as I was saying, you know, this idea of a new point of view that comes from a new language. And in addition, the sense of freedom that a learned language might provide you to just kind of, you know, set to the side a certain baggage that the long distance you traverse in another language might be in some sense holding you back from saying what you really need to say. So for example, I would never have written another words in English. I would never have written the clothing of books essay in English, you know. So this is why the Italian is valuable to me. It's interesting. Next question. Hi, Jampa. So one thing I found really interesting about the namesake was how you describe vocal as kind of olive toned and sort of being able to pass as Mediterranean sometimes. And I think that's really interesting, especially given the obvious tension between his kind of Indian identity and like assimilating into American culture. And so was this a conscious decision to make him able to sort of pass as white? And if so, can you speak to how this relates to your own experiences of colorism and passing? Well, I wasn't really thinking about those things. I think I'm now recalling maybe there's a moment in the book where someone says to him, oh, you could be Spanish or something. But I think that's more about projecting. Not about who he is, but maybe how we project what we how we like to project kind of sameness onto other people to make them more comfortable to us and to dilute the sense of difference. Maybe that's what it's really about. You know, just to go back to this book covers piece, there's a certain part of the essay in which I talk about the intolerance of foreign my foreign publishers for the various book covers. So, you know, I mean, I remember showing my one of my publishers, I'm not going to make specify anybody here. But I remember I'll just say this, I was in Rome and the Italian cover of in other words in other word had come out and one of my other publishers was visiting and I showed it to this person.  And I think that is really what is that the heart of the matter. It's just that refusal to recognize ourselves in the other. Right. So if you have someone who has a kind of, you know, features that can can be perceived as this or be perceived as that. I mean, you know, I mean, depending on where I go in the world, I'm mistaken for lots of things, you know, if I'm in Latin America, if I'm in India, if I'm in, you know, maybe some other places and sometimes not. And sometimes I'm immediately identified as the other. But I think it's sort of more based on the context and not on the person. But I wasn't really thinking very deeply about it, to be honest with you. I think it was just one of those small details about other people's desire to render the same people who are who are actually different. Next question. Excuse me. One thing that I find so powerful about your work is that you not only understand the viewpoint of being a child of immigrants, but also your parents viewpoint as well. And if you feel comfortable sharing, I'm wondering to what extent have you spoken to your parents about the joys and challenges of the immigrant experience? Or was that something that you more so inferred from your own observations? So you're asking if I asked my parents what it was like to be an immigrant? Did you ever have those like deep, meaningful conversations about that experience? Or did you feel like it was more so something that you observed? I was living that experience. That was my whole experience. That was my whole life. I mean, there was no moment where I wasn't aware that my parents came from a place that was very far away where people spoke a different language and ate different food and wore different clothes and thought about the world in different ways and that they were not there.  That's my whole life. And there's no part of my life that was anything else. In every relationship I had that I made that I created that I forged outside of, you know, my family kind of base was informed by that awareness, you know, that these were the parents that had brought me into the world. And this is what their experience was. So no, I never sat down and asked them what it was like because I was living it every single day and I saw the effects of what it means to live your life away from your point of reference, right? And this just goes so deep and so vast and so specific and so minute by minute.  And I think that, of course, it's not ironic that my book is called the interpretive maladies and involves this character who is literally interpreting simultaneously for people because I feel like that's what, but that's not what I was necessarily doing for my parents. It was what I was doing for myself. You know? Next question. Thank you. Firstly, my compliments to both of you for such a wonderful conversation. My question is more related to the journey of an author. Do you think compared to when you began writing, do you feel more inhibited or uninhibited as an author now? And what brings that about? Well, writing always scares me and intimidates me. And I've always felt that. And I think if I ever stopped feeling that I probably shouldn't write anymore. I think now there's a kind of formal challenge of writing in a language that I don't have full control of. So that's intimidating and, you know, just very daunting. But I was talking to a group of students before this larger conversation about how even in English I started out with that same trepidation. And in some sense, I don't want to lose touch with that, you know, that unease because I think that's important. It's important to approach in that way, at least for me. You know, not to not feel totally comfortable and certainly not to feel confident because it's really more about an investigation and experiment, a challenge, you know, and so these things cannot be undertaken in the spirit of, sure, I can do that, you know, you have to question it at every step and you have to question what you're doing and how you're doing it and why you're doing it. So I believe that that's very important. Next question. Hi, I just want to start off by thanking you for Gogol's character, because there are very few authors that truly understand the Indian American immigrant narrative as well as you do. And my question is, of all the characters you've penned, which one do you see yourself most in or is there one and why? Thank you. Well, you know, I mean, there are pieces of me and some of various things I've written, aspects kind of concealed or jumbled together, rearranged, you know, so various characters, you know, if I had to say, you know, they're shadings that I feel close to literally. But I think, as I say in the afterword to, in other words, the most kind of explicitly autobiographical story I've ever written is the first story I wrote in Italian, which is called The Exchange, which is a very weird abstract story, but that came literally from an experience I had. And I wrote the story very quickly afterward, based on that experience, and it was just sort of lifted from something that had happened to me. So in that sense, I feel very close to that character, needless to say, because I shared, you know, what happened, though there are certain invented details in that story as well, and I'm not, I'm because it's fiction, you know, it's not the truth. But Agota Kristoff, if you really want to talk about this stuff and think about it, read Agota Kristoff, because she's just, she's the, she's a genius, she's like the oracle of all of this stuff, you know, she really knows what it means to create out of life and that incredibly fluid, mysterious boundary between real life and art. Her work investigates it just head on in a way that's unforgettably powerful. Last question, we have three minutes total, yes. I have a couple of quick nuts and bolts questions about writing and your process. Your prose is very much characterized by restraint and economy, and I'm curious, what kind of writer you are?  And my other question is, you write often of nostalgia and longing, and I'm curious how you avoid sentimentality. Well, that's nice to hear. I'm glad that that's the case, in your opinion. You know, I think I write about loss. I write less about nostalgia, I think, I mean, it's connected, of course. But that's really what the writing, you know, everything I've written has that at its core, the idea of loss. And as for how I write, I just, I mean, I don't know how I write, but I certainly am not, you know, I go through, you know, a million drafts, and I'm constantly reworking everything. So, you know, the idea of writing a sentence that's, you know, that's all set to go, and then moving on to the next one is, it's the opposite, whatever the opposite of that is, that's how I work. Jumbo, thank you very much. Let's have a big round of applause.


The number one regret for most people is the career choice they make, so tread very carefully. Pursue this one, not just haphazardly and go, oh my gut feeling says this, and then you spend your whole life pursuing a gut feeling that maybe, you know, maybe had nothing to do with a real logical conclusion you should have made.


I can't be the only one that's tired of this Damia Lillard situation. It has nothing to do with the person, the player, the man that is Damia Lillard, but about this cloud that's hovering above him, the trailblazers, the Miami Heat, and the rest of the NBA. We're a couple weeks away from media day and training camp and there's not a lot to talk about. The only thing that's going on across the league is the outstanding trade request from Damia Lillard and James Harden.  Yes, I understand the irony in it. I'm talking about the clicks of the Damia Lillard video as I'm filming a Damia Lillard video, but I'm doing that differently. This man Damia Lillard requested a trade about two months ago and we're still twiddling our thumbs trying to figure out will he play for the blazers? Will he play for the Heat? Is there a mystery team out there? But as of right now, he's a blazer. And there's a reason for that. When Damia Lillard requested a trade, he gave the Portland Trailblazers a short list of teams that he would like to go to. This is not a new practice for NBA players. It happens all the time, especially when a star player requests a trade. The only difference is usually that list is three teams to five teams. Damia Lillard said, Hey, it's Miami or nothing. He is so on Miami that this man is reposting things on Instagram of people calling him a future Miami Heat. And he's cool with it for about 17 minutes. And then he takes it down. But for 17 minutes, that's up. When you have a player with a short list of one team, it makes things 10 times more difficult. Because the Miami Heat are 100% interested in Damian Lillard. This is a team that has been to multiple NBA finals, multiple conference finals over the last couple of years. You look at their roster and you think, if they just had a Damian Lillard, they would have an additional championship. So they're interested. Problem is the trade packets that they have, it's not as good as the Trailblazers want. You got to remember that the Portland Trailblazers are potentially trading the best player in their franchise history. No Lord than the second best player in their franchise history. You're trying to explain to them that he's worth title here. We're on a couple first round picks in 2028. The Blazers, it's not enough. And that's how we get to the point right now where we got this stalemate where everybody's looking at each other, waiting for something to happen. I would deem myself a Damian Lillard fan, not a super fan, like some people I know. But I had grown to become a Damian Lillard fan for the first reason is he's a demon on the court. The brother dropped 71 points in an NBA game early this season and made it look extremely, extremely easy. But deeper than that, I was a fan of Damian Lillard's branding and mindset, not running from the grind had been so much of Damian Lillard that it became a meme that people said, no day, maybe you should run away from the grind because you not running is resulting in first round exit, second round exit, and so on and so forth. And the reason that resonated with me is you don't get a ton of star level players and smaller markets that are willing to spend their entire career with one team. And until he actually requested the trade a few months ago, I was under the assumption that Damian Lillard was going to be one of those few one team guys. Look at the top players in 2023 majority of them, a great majority of them have already been on multiple teams in their career. And a few players that haven't changed teams that are really, really good are either really young like a Lucca Dodgers or they have a championship. Steph Curry, Warriors for Life, probably multiple championships. Nicolae Oakage got his first NBA championship this season and he might add a couple more. Seems like a guy that might be a one team guy. And then Yanis, I was feeling the same way, but that man Yanis has been yapping a little bit this offseason. So we don't really know what the future of Yanis looks like, but the top players that are one team guys typically have a championship under their belt and Dame doesn't have that. I say typically because Jordan B still don't got one. He might also be on the trade block zone, but that's another video. I hate the way we gauge player success rating in the NBA. It's all ring based. If you have zero rings, were you really a winner? And I think in a vacuum, you can look at it that way. But there are so many different factors to win in the championship that I can undoubtedly say that Damian Lillard is a winner, though he's never even touched an NBA finals floor. What do you mean? He has been a stellar performer in the playoffs as long as you exclude the one series against the Pelicans were Drew Holiday, Rizan Rondo and Anthony Davis upset them. That was one of my favorite series a couple of years ago. But other than that, this man has been nothing but great come playoff time. He's been so great that he's got two of the most iconic playoff game winners ever, ever. I was going to say this decade, the last two decades, but like ever the game winner when he was young against the Houston Rockets, legendary, waving Paul George off legendary. And he's done that time and time again. And I don't want to get past the fact that he has a conference finals appearance when the Western conference was as deep as it possibly could be. And they went into that series and I don't know a single person outside of Portland that picked them to win it. I mean, it was not even really close. But still, that team could could have potentially been enough to win it, but been playing in the wrong era in the wrong season, whatever you want to call it, he has that there are a lot of great NBA players that have never graced a conference finals and he's done that in Portland. So when he officially requests this trade, I didn't feel like he was forgetting about his branding of running from the grind and so on and so forth because it's been a decade of this and he deserves better, but better can be multiple things. Better doesn't just mean the Miami Heat. This is a classic case of having your cake and eating it too or trying to make that the case. Because I have no doubt in my mind that if Damien Lillard was open to going to some of these other teams that they'd have a better offer for. Again, I mentioned earlier that if you want clicks, talk about Damien Lillard and I feel like in the last 72 hours, there have been so many reports around him that it's hard to differentiate what is fact and what is fiction. The first one is that if another team outside of the Miami Heat ended up pulling off the trade for Damien Lillard that he would not even report to training camp. Whoa. And that's coming from Shamsherania, who's one of the two most trusted sources in all of basketball reporting that. And I got to pray that this is just a leverage pull from Damien Lillard in his camp because this dramatically changes the way he is viewed as an NBA player across the landscape of fandom.  I think most people respect the fact that Damien Lillard was willing to stay on the organization for a decade, even though they had struggled to put real talent around him. But if he got traded to another team that's not the Miami Heat and he decided, no, I don't I don't want to do this. All of not all of a good chunk of that respect is thrown out the window for NBA fans. Again, I'm just hoping that it's a leverage play looking at the other 28 teams around the league said, don't you dare trade for me because I might not report. But he don't mean it. Hopefully it's leverage. That's that's all I can hope another report in the last 72 hours that if you are one of the other 28 teams that trade with him that's not named the Miami Heat, he's just going to immediately request a trade in the first chance he gets again. Is it fact? Is it cap? We don't know. But that's the that's the world we're living in right now. And having one team on the list of teams you want to be traded to, it's not foreign. It just doesn't happen often. Look, Kevin Arant told us last off season he wants to play for the Phoenix Suns and it took six months. But he finally got there. James Harder said, I want to play for the Brooklyn Nets and he got traded to Brooklyn and he said I want to play for the Philadelphia 76s and he got traded to the 76s and now he said I want to play for the Clippers. I don't know if that's going to come a reality, but again, when you are this caliber player, sometimes it does work out, but everything just becomes way more difficult when it is just one team. And when Kevin said I want to go play for the Phoenix Suns, the Brooklyn Nets didn't just hand him away for a bad package. They got McKell Bridges, Cam Johnson and all of the draft capital for like the next seven years. The Miami Heat don't have the type of trade packs for Damien Lillard. And I'm not even saying that Damien Lillard is worthy of that kind of trade package, but remember the Troubles are trading one of the two best players in their franchise history in their mind. They think he's worth that because that's all they know. Telling me Rudy Gobert got traded for five first round picks and the Miami Heat are offering to stop it. The next rumor is that there is another Eastern Conference team in the mix, ladies and gentlemen. Who could it be? Some people speculate that it might be the 76 because again, they're dealing with the James Harden stuff. Some people speculate it might be the Toronto Raptors. Yeah, that's a team that could use them and others speculate that it's the Chicago Bulls, that the Chicago Bulls are the team that is secretly trying to get in on Damien Lillard. And listen, I don't know this guy. I'm not discrediting anyone. I just I just can't see. I just can't see it being a fact. But someone said it. So now it's going viral on Twitter and everyone must talk about the fact that the Bulls might be in on Dane, which is one of the most unlikely scenarios in my opinion. Now, if it did happen, welcome to Chicago. Welcome to Chicago, Damien. But it's unlikely in the timing of all of this is crazy because Damien Lillard just released his fifth studio album. How do you get to five albums? I have no idea. Shout out to Damien. I haven't listened. So I can't say if it's good or bad. But when any artist drops an album they go on a media run. And Damien Lillard is currently on that. And every single interview he does, they spend the first seven minutes talking about the album. And then the rest of the interview is like, Hey, what was the moment that you decided that you wanted to request to train? They're not even talking about the music no more. And Damien Lillard being the person that he is, he's answering every single question because that's just his brand. That's just who he is. And some of them come off worse. Some answers come off bad. So here we are a few weeks away from training camp. And we're going to see what happens. I think things are changing dramatically. And maybe before this video is even up, he's traded, but the rumors, the speculation, the sources of it all has just made it insufferable that I just needed to happen so it can be done. You know what else has been bothering me lately?


Good morning My name is Francie Cordova, and I'm the director of the Office of Equal Opportunity and the Chief Compliance Officer for the University of New Mexico. Welcome to UNM. I'd like to start by welcoming our out-of-state guests, and I apologize sincerely that I told you it was 57 degrees here in New Mexico. The weather is fickle in New Mexico, so I apologize. I'd like to welcome our New Mexico sister university attendees and also our special welcome to our military leaders and personnel, especially to Secretary Mowdley. I would also like to recognize a few UNM dignitaries, and there's many here, so I can't mention them all, but I have seen Regent Board Chair, Doug Brown, and I believe Regents Sandra Begay and Melissa Henry are here as well, and of course our President, Garnet A. Stokes. We have a few people out sick, so I'm going to ask them, but our Vice President for HR, Dorothy Anderson, and Vice Chancellor for HSC, Dr. Amy Levi. And then we also have our Associate VP for Student Services, our Dean of Students, our Chief Counsel, our Police Chief, and our Athletics Director, so thank you all for your support. So in April of last year, my colleague and I, Angela Cattina, were invited to attend the first national discussion on sexual assault and sexual harassment at service academies, universities, and colleges, and this was going to be at the Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland. So when we registered, we, honestly, had a lot of discussions about what the discussion was going to be like, and some of those were, what is this going to be like, and do we have any interest that align with service academies? And are these conversations going to be honest and open? So we attended, and we were incredibly struck by the honest, committed discussions that ensued at that national discussion. Most powerful to me was the intimate stories told by service leaders, by congressional leaders, by university leaders, and by students about their own experiences with sexual harassment and sexual assault, and how it affected their career and education trajectory. When we left the academy, participants signed a statement of future commitment, and there's going to be one in the room right next to us that you can all sign, and we all left knowing that the missions of service academies and universities do align, primarily that we cannot educate and train our future leaders if we do not address the issues of sexual assault and sexual harassment in our institutions. A few months ago, after the national discussion, we learned that our partners at SUNY were going to be hosting the first regional discussion on the east coast, and our SUNY partners are here today, and we were thrilled to learn that we were going to be the second regional discussion. We had been selected for the southwest and west, and this is the conversation you're engaged in today. Similar to service academies and other universities, UNM is cognizant that any instance of sexual assault and sexual harassment takes a toll on our mission, and we're proud that UNM has built capacity to help survivors report and to respond as a university to their needs after. We're grateful to have so many partners in this room, faculty, staff, students, and community members that have supported this commitment, and most importantly, a consistent commitment from our President, Garnett Stokes, to move the needle forward on this issue. I think you will leave the regional discussion today feeling energized and ready to continue this important work, and with that, I would like to introduce to you the Master of Ceremonies for today, Ashley Merriman. Ashley Merriman is the co-author of 2 New Mexico Times Best Sellers, Nurture Shock, New Thinking About Children, and Top Dog, The Science of Winning and Losing. Currently, Ms. Merriman is serving as an advisor to the Department of Navy's Sexual Assault Prevention and Response Office. Thank you, Ms. Merriman. Morning, everyone. It is such a huge honor to be here. Thank you so much for letting me grace the stage with these luminous dignitaries. So, first up is Ms. Melissa Cohen, a member of the Senior Executive Service. Ms. Cohen is the Director of the Department of Navy's Sexual Assault Prevention and Response Office. In this role, she is the Secretary of the Navy's Principal Advisor on issues relating to sexual assault and sexual harassment. Under her leadership, the Department of the Navy has established new partners with academia, like here in the room, and she's also been guiding the Navy and Marines' development and assessment of intervention programs. She was instrumental in the development of the national and these regional discussions, and I know it's going to be an inspiring day with Ms. Cohen. Thank you. Morning. Good morning. President Stokes, Secretary Modely, distinguished guests from the University of New Mexico, from the Department of Defense. We have ROTC students, staff, and faculty. Canadian Armed Forces representatives are here today, representatives from Capitol Hill, and of course, the many diverse colleges and universities from across the region and around the country. This is an incredible turnout. It is an honor to be here today, so thank you so much. In my office, I have the original statement of commitment document that Dr. Cordova mentioned, where the University of New Mexico, along with other colleges and universities, signed it just less than a year ago and brought the national discussion, and every time I look at that document, I am incredibly inspired. I'm inspired by just the invitation to start a dialogue, can turn into such a meaningful event like today. I'm inspired that a piece of paper can be, can turn into like a loud speaker on this issue to students, to service members, to civilian employees, that together the Department of Defense and educational institutions will be relentless in combating sexual assault and sexual harassment. I'm not sure if you get this question, but sometimes I do, and the questions are, what is the return on investment on an event like today? What's the value? Are we just talking and should we just be past talking at this point? And my response when I get those questions is really twofold. First of all, we cannot afford to stop talking, not when there is need, not when there is still embarrassment and shame, when seeking help, not when there are so many societal and environmental influencers that perpetuate these behaviors. So we have to keep talking and our, these events like this are a unified voice and really underscore the importance of these events and addressing these behaviors. And two, these discussions have impact. For example, and it was referenced earlier, we did, in September, the State University of New York. We were in Manhattan, we were with SUNY, and we left that event with a shared vision. We wanted to look at our data, we wanted to look at our reporting and our survey data and to see if we could get them to be a little more consistent. We wanted to make sure we were as transparent as we could be with our data and look for our strengths and weaknesses to see how we could shape our prevention efforts. You'll hear a little bit more about that progress this morning. And I have no doubt that we're going to do the same today. We're going to find new ways to collaborate. We're going to find ways to effect change. Along the way, I ask that you have a prevention mindset. That's our focus. And to include thinking about ways that you go back to your department, to your academy, to your service, and think about ways you can influence an environment, continue to influence an environment of dignity and respect.  But there are so many elements that we can make progress on. To that end, I want to underscore the importance of networking and getting to know the people in this room. Why? Because many of the answers to the problems we face are found in rooms just like this. There are many subject matter experts in this room. There are innovators. I'm so eager to hear how you exchange ideas on the role of leaders, the role of peers, high standard intervention, building healthy relationships, promoting a positive work environment. That's how we effect change, not in isolation, but together leveraging the passion, the talent, and the commitment that we have here today. And I thank you so very much for participating. Thank you so much. At this time, we're going to have two video messages from our New Mexico representatives of Congress, Representative Holland and Representative Torres Small. Thank you. Good morning, everyone. I'm Deb Holland, Congresswoman for New Mexico's First Congressional District, which is home to UNM. I'm sorry I couldn't be with you today, but I'm sending a warm welcome to all of you. Before I begin, I want to thank Acting Secretary of the Navy, Mr. Mobley, and University of New Mexico's President Stokes for their tremendous effort in making this event possible. I also want to take a moment to thank the panelists and speakers for being here to share your expertise. This is an important issue and one that must be resolved. My staff and I will do our best to assist so we can protect New Mexico families and vulnerable populations while informing good policy moving forward. As a UNM alumni and a New Mexican native, I'm honored to speak with you all today. I want to begin this discussion by highlighting a poll conducted by The Washington Post. The poll was expanded to include interviews of dozens of students that have experienced unwanted sexual contact or faced an attempted assault during their college years. It revealed that adults fear being stigmatized and that survivors are often left feeling traumatized and alone. More than one in three women and one in four men experience sexual violence involving physical contact at some point in their lives and 21% of transgender, genderqueer, and non-conforming college students have been sexually assaulted. And American Indians are twice as likely to experience a rape or sexual assault compared to all other groups. These numbers should alarm everyone. I commend the University of New Mexico for making sexual assault prevention a huge priority. By implementing the gray area, nearly 37,000 students received in-person sexual misconduct awareness training. These students learned about healthy relationships, intervention, reporting procedures, and follow-on care, attributing to a growing culture of mutual respect, dignity, and a safe place to learn and socialize. The Navy has also set a great example of building coalitions around sexual assault prevention, showing commitment and leveraging the strengths that come from diverse information sharing. And like UNM, the Navy also practices a zero-tolerance policy. This policy is reinforced by family support centers, improved training and personnel management processes, and aggressively targeting the stigma and barriers that prevent people from seeking help following a sexual assault. Don't let up now. Continue to listen and advocate, and remain committed to educating students and staff, raise awareness, and regularly take a hard look at ourselves to understand where and how we can refine our processes and personal actions. Please join me in pledging to never remain silent about sexual violence. Today's event is a testament to the dedication and effort of the staff, students, and community at large. We've come a long way, and I'm truly honored to serve you and be a champion for this movement. And to the students, parents, staff, and other participants here today, my hope is that this event will give you the tools to spread awareness and promote positive change in our communities. By working together to address sexual assault, our communities will grow safer and more inclusive. Hi, I'm Congresswoman Sochil Torres-Small, proudly representing New Mexico's Second Congressional District. As a member of Congress, I'm often faced with tough statistics about the state of New Mexico and our country overall. But a few stats should alarm us all. According to a 2015 Association of American University's Campus Climate Survey, almost one in four women and more than 5% of men reported some form of sexual violence during their undergraduate studies. In service academies, the Pentagon reported between 46 to 56% of women and 11 to 13% of male cadets endured sexual harassment during the 2017-2018 academic year. Students should be able to focus on their studies without the fear that they may fall victim to unwanted sexual violence. These statistics should not only alarm us but also propel us into action. In Congress, I've supported the reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act. By reauthorizing VAWA, the House sent a clear message nationwide that our federal government will protect all survivors and condemn domestic and sexual assault offenders. As leaders on your campus, you also play an important role in helping shape culture of respect, support and safety. You each can be part of the cultural shift needed to make sure all campus community members are treated with respect. And leadership is not only modeling good behavior but having the courage to call out others, even our friends, when they make comments or take action that you know in your heart is unacceptable. I am confident that by working together we can reduce the high rates of sexual violence among college-aid students, because the statistics I mentioned earlier are more than numbers in a report or a survey. They are our friends, family, classmates and members of our communities. We can create a culture where no one needs to feel unsafe during a time when they should be able to focus on building a future. It just takes the courage to show others around us that change is possible. It begins with each of us. Thank you. A terrific way to begin the morning with engaged leadership. And speaking of engaged leadership, it is now my honor to introduce the hosts for today's event. Garnet S. Stokes is the proud to serve as the 23rd president of the University of New Mexico, the first woman to hold those posts in the university's 130-year history. Our first-generation college graduate, Stokes earned her BA in Psychology from Carson Newman College in Jefferson City, Tennessee, and MS and PhD degrees from the University of Georgia in Industrial and Organizational Psychology. For nearly three decades, she served as a professor in psychology at the University of Georgia, and then seven years as dean at the UGA Franklin College of Arts and Sciences. From 2011 to 2015, she served as provost for the Florida State University, where she spent several months as the university's interim president. From 2015 to 2018, she served as provost and executive vice chancellor for academic affairs at the University of Missouri. She was named president of the UNM in May 2018. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome President Stokes. Good morning, everyone. It's a great day, and it's great to see so many people here engaged in this conversation. It is my great privilege to welcome you to the University of New Mexico and to the city of Albuquerque for what is truly a vital conversation for all of us. I also want to welcome you to the ancestral home of some of New Mexico's indigenous people, as our university is located on lands that once belonged to the Sandia and Isleta Pueblos. We're proud to acknowledge that unique part of UNM's history. It's an honor to have been selected as the location for the second regional discussion on sexual assault and the harassment at our colleges and universities and service academies. As you know, this is a matter we take very seriously at the University of New Mexico. We have recently and successfully completed a three-year formal agreement with the Department of Justice to proactively examine our efforts to prevent and address sexual misconduct, and to provide clear and consistent policies and procedures for reporting, investigating, and responding to any such conduct. In fact, we've gone well above and beyond the recommendations and legal requirements of the agreement, making us what I believe is a role model for how universities, colleges, and service academies can take on these critical challenges. You should also know that UNM has a commitment to our military veterans that sets it apart from many other universities, a commitment, I think, that also makes us an ideal host for this particular regional discussion. Military service academies and universities are helping to create not only educated and informed citizens, but also the leaders we need, now more than ever, to guide and protect our nation, both now and in the future. As someone who was raised in a military family with a husband in the military, with nephews, military, at all generations, it seems, I've seen up close and personally the unique challenges that military service and our veterans can face when they get into a university setting, challenges that our service academies also prepare them for every single day. Here at UNM, we've implemented campus-wide green zone training to give our faculty and staff a better understanding of the experience of veterans and service members and their families while they're here in our classrooms and on our campus. These are the kinds of training opportunities we're integrating across our campus to ensure the kind of seamless and streamlined accountability our faculty, staff, students, and community at large demand and deserve. And so we're grateful that the Navy has linked arms with UNM to create a place where we can all share best practices, share our experiences, and synchronize our data in the name of our shared goal, the reduction and ultimately complete prevention of sexual misconduct and violence. This room is filled with some of our best minds and smartest leaders and I'm looking forward to spending the day listening to and learning from everyone who is here. Thank you again for being here with us, for being in this really critical conversation, for our university, for our region, for the country. It is now my pleasure to turn the floor over to the Secretary of the Navy, Thomas B. Mowdley. Mr. Secretary, welcome to the stage. Good morning, everybody. How's everyone doing this morning? Good, hope so. I want to start with a story and it's a story I told last week at UTEP. I tell it various times and I figure, well, you know, one of the odds that someone was there last week is actually here today. Oh, can anyone, you guys can't hear me? Is that better? Let me take it off.  And then I thought, well, you know, what are the odds that someone who was at that speech at UTEP is here today and we'll have to hear this story again. Sure enough, someone came up to me and said, oh, I heard your speech at UTEP last week. So I apologize. You're going to hear this story again. But, you know, it is a really good story, isn't it? Yes. Okay. So I'll start off with it. And it's kind of hard to tell the story and not come across as a little bit pretentious. So just so bear with me. This is absolutely true story. So I'm having dinner with Tom Cruz. I was in San Diego. He was there filming Top Gun 2. And I got invited to dinner with him and his sister and a couple other people from the production crew. And sitting across the table for me and I'm talking to him. And I say, you know, Tom, I call him Tom now, because we have dinner together. But I said my son is an F-16 pilot in the Air Force. And he grew up in Annapolis. I was a Navy pilot myself. I took him to the Blue Angels as a young child. And I said, but I bet you that the reason he's a fighter pilot today has a lot more to do with your movie Top Gun than anything that I ever did to influence him. So I figured Tom Cruz would look across the table and say, well, you know, sir, he calls me sir.  But instead, he looks over at me and goes, you know, you're probably right. But those of us who have served in the military, and this is just a shout out to the folks that are here both in the ROTC unit and active duty people, the truth is that somewhere at some point in your life, someone convinced you, whether it was a parent or a friend or a mentor or teacher, that service in the U.S. military was an honorable thing to do because the country's good and it's worth defending. So I just want to thank you for making that leap, all those folks that are here, particularly the ones that are just starting their careers. But also, I'm sure every single person in this room knows somebody who's in the military. And at some point in their lives, you encourage them to serve. And we can't lose that. And I'm looking at statistics recently that show back in 1990 when I got out of the military back in the last century, that age demographic from 18 to 27 year olds in the United States had 40% of those people had a parent that had served in the military. Now it's only 5%. So the connection that we have as a population to our military, to our armed forces is getting more distant. And I don't think that's good for the country. So I'm very encouraged by events like this because we all are facing a lot of similar challenges with our youth, people who are just learning how to be mature adults. And we have those problems and they cross across our society. We see this in suicide rates, all kinds of things that are cultural issues that we have to address together. So the other thing I want to say, because we've got some Canadian colleagues here, where are the Canadians?  And I used to go all around the world looking at different defense establishments and trying to bring lessons learned back to our clients here in the U.S. and clients globally. And you always get this question, what can we learn from a nation that spends one-tenth or one-one-hundredth of the amount of money we spend on defense? And we can learn a lot. We can learn a lot about how other countries make do with a lot less money than we have and how they deal with cultural issues like we're dealing with. So whenever I see the Canadians, this is one of the things I learned about the Canadians. If you ever want to understand how a nation loves its country, how people love its country, go to a Canadian hockey game, NHL game. And you don't even have to watch the game. Just go and stay for the national anthem and watch the way the fans react to that song. It's really, really inspiring to see it. And so I think we can learn a lot from a lot of different people, a lot of different countries. When I talk to the Navy about the things, the kind of values that we need to be pushing in our Navy, I talk about this concept of agility. And agility has a lot of different characteristics to it, but that I've come up with over the years. I mean, they're not exclusive, but they're things that I think about. And two of them are humility and the other one is skepticism. And those are pretty good American characteristics. We tend to be sort of humble and assuming people for the most part, and we're very skeptical about things. We don't take things at face value. And this is one of those challenges that we have to really pull those types of characteristics into our approach to the problem. And I will tell you, from personal experience, I went to the Naval Academy from 1979 to 1983. When I came in in 1979, we were the first class to have women as first classmen. The first Plebe summer run by women at the Naval Academy. And my class of women, class of 83, I think we started with about, I told this story last night too, so I apologize again for repeating myself, but most of you weren't there. But we started out with about 100 women in my class, and I think we graduated something in the 30s because of how difficult the circumstances were for them. At that stage of the game, they were not really accepted as part of the team, as part of that common culture at the academy. So those women that graduated, I have tremendous amount of respect for the women that graduated in my class to have sort of made it through that gauntlet where conversations like this that we're having weren't being held at all. And when I had the fortunate opportunity to step out of the Navy for 30 years and then come back in and I see the differences now, it makes it it's encouraging because we get after problems. It takes time for us to get after problems, but the difference now is tremendous. I was on an aircraft carrier last week, our brand new aircraft carrier, the USS Ford. And I went down into the nuclear power plant of that carrier. And it is the most advanced nuclear power plant, the most efficient nuclear power plant in the world. And it's out there on the ocean traveling around at 35 knots. And I walked down into the engine room and the person in charge was a woman commander. And 30 years ago, people would have been looking at her with very different eyes than they are today. She is now the authority figure down there. And that takes time. And so when we think about how long these processes take, we should be very proud of how much progress we have made in the country in a lot of a lot of ways. We're now measuring these things. We're understanding the depth of the problems. And we're getting after the problem. So I'm convinced that with efforts like this, over time, this problem will get better. It will get better. So one final thought, one final story I'll leave with you to think about. I was reading a story about Malta in World War II, 1942. Malta is an island in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea. And it was a critical base for the British and keeping the Germans and the Nazis and the Italians at bay in northern Africa. So the Germans decided they were going to basically destroy this entire island. And they dropped more bombs on Malta in a two or three month period than they did on all of England during the entire Battle of Britain. The island became very isolated. They had no fuel. They had no food. They were down to six ounces of food rations per person per week on Malta. And if Malta fell, the ability for the allies to come in and get the Germans and the Italians out of North Africa were going to be thrown back by at least five years. So the British decided they were going to do a resupply convoy to Malta. And so they assembled something like 40 ships that left, maybe more, left England, a couple of aircraft carriers, six or seven destroyers, 12 cruisers, and about 12 supply ships. And one of these supply ships had the most important commodity, the most precious cargo that Malta needed, and that was oil, to maintain power on the island and keep the heat and all that going on the island. They get attacked relentlessly on the way down. When they get down there, more than half of the ships were sunk. A thousand people died trying to reach Malta. And that one critical supply ship, the SS Ohio, I know this because I'm from Ohio, the SS Ohio was struck several times and was starting to sink. Two destroyers also were struck. They decided to saddle up next to the SS Ohio and get it into Malta safely. And that one resupply mission saved Malta at great risk to those two destroyers. Those two destroyers basically, because the ship was listing so much, they were coming in like this, coming in. It's a really good analogy for what people can do to help in with solving this problem. I heard, we heard today about how victims are still very reticent to come forward because they don't feel it's safe, they feel ashamed. We have to reinforce with everybody that you have to saddle up to people like that regardless of the risk to yourself, to your career, to how you're perceived by your peers. You have to saddle up to people like that who are hurting because you never know what precious cargo is inside that person that's going to survive and change the world. So how do we find those people to do that? Look below the horizon. Find the young people. They're the ones that are going to sustain this effort beyond the time that we're here. So with that, thank you so much for having me here. Thanks for the great support from universities. Our service academies really, really treasure the interaction with other universities. We want to be part of this solution. We know we're part of the problem and we want to be part of this solution. And so thank you so much for everything you do. Thanks. Thank you, President Stokes and the Secretary. Another round of applause.