SAL/on air

As with any condition, until we have language for what we are experiencing, until we can name it, we often feel controlled by it. In January of 2019 Soraya Chemaly renamed and redefined anger for us. In a riveting talk based upon her book, “Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women’s Anger,” Chemaly puts female anger into its societal context, revealing it as a tool of transformation, an untapped resource for change. Soraya Chemaly is the Executive Director of The Representation Project. An award-winning author and activist, she writes and speaks frequently on topics related to gender norms, inclusivity, social justice, free speech, sexualized violence, and technology. In this illuminating talk and Q&A with journalist Carole Carmichael, Chemaly details the very real ways that women are taught from an early age to control and suppress their anger rather than harness it for change—and the way that this socialization is harmful to women and men, and especially to people of color.

When Barry Lopez died at the age of 75 this past December, we knew we had lost one of the greats. His writings have frequently been compared to those of Henry David Thoreau, as he brought a depth of erudition to the text by immersing himself in his surroundings, deftly integrating his environmental and humanitarian concerns. In his nonfiction, he examined the relationship between human culture and physical landscape. In his fiction, he addressed issues of intimacy, ethics, and identity. This new episode of SAL/on air was recorded in April of 2010. In it, Barry Lopez speaks about the anthology Home Ground, which Lopez edited along with his wife, Debra Gwartney. The anthology brought together 45 poets and writers to create more than 850 original definitions for words that describe our lands and waters. Eleven years later, those lands and waters are still under attack, in increasing need of our attention. “Our issue with the land around us,” he says, “is how to rekindle an informing conversation back and forth. And if we hope to develop policies that ensure our children will have a chance at a full life, alive, shaped as much by imagination as by need, we need to listen to what the land around us says.”

“Every generation has to reiterate, rewrite what those genres are and what they mean in the vocabulary of the moment. So the elegy is not a set genre, it's not a set form. We each have to re-write that thing when we write. That's our job, in a way.”—Rick Barot On May 15, 2020, Rick Barot—the award-winning author of Chord, Want, and The Darker Fall—joined us for a virtual poetry reading in the midst of the pandemic. His latest book of poems, The Galleons (2020), was long-listed for this year’s National Book Award and, in honor of that, we’re pleased to present it to you now. His reading is introduced by SAL Associate Director Rebecca Hoogs, and then a conversation follows moderated by poet Jane Wong, the author of Overpour from Action Books, and How to Not Be Afraid of Everything, forthcoming from Alice James Books.

Have you ever had a slice of cake that had been soaked in a sort of syrup? Maybe rose-syrup? Maybe lemon? Dense and rich at the same time—soaked in joy—it’s almost not cake anymore. Every one of Aimee Nezhukumatathil’s poems, read at SAL’s May 2018 Poetry Series reading, was like that for us. Dense and light at the same time. Sweet and yet weighty. Aimee Nezhukumatathil is the author of a book of nature essays, World of Wonders, recently named a finalist for the Kirkus Prize in non-fiction, and four award-winning poetry collections, most recently, Oceanic from Copper Canyon Press. After her reading from Oceanic, a conversation followed between Aimee and Pacific Northwest poet Jane Wong, author of Overpour and the forthcoming How to Not Be Afraid of Everything.

As our annual reading program, Summer Book Bingo wrapped up, we asked readers to reflect on their favorite reading experience of the summer. One of you wrote: “My favorite reading experience was reading So You Want to Talk About Race. It forced me to explore my white privilege and challenged me to really examine the ways I have thought about myself, how I view race.” Ijeoma Oluo, the author of So You Want to Talk About Race, writes that it was: “A grueling, heart wrenching book to write.” She gives us all a tremendous gift by sharing her personal stories of experiencing the pain and violence of racism at the hands of school systems and police officers, and even friends and loved ones. On January 25, 2018, the Seattle-based Oluo joined us at Benaroya Hall for the launch of what’s become an essential primer on the racial landscape of America. We’re excited to be able to share that talk with you today as the first episode in Season Three of SAL/on air.

Almost exactly a year ago, on May 21, 2019, we closed our Poetry Series with a reading by Jericho Brown, followed by a conversation with Copper Canyon editor and poet Elaina Ellis. It was a riveting and joy-filled evening in celebration of Jericho’s third book, The Tradition. That book went on to win the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. Here we are, a year later, in a starkly different world. A world where we cannot gather together in the shared space of a theatre to hear poetry. A world where Jericho’s poems of rage and grief at the pandemic of violence against Black people in this country are newly resonant. The brutality of our country keeps coming back. But the best poetry—Jericho’s poetry—can be a space of healing and a space of learning—a space of revelation and anger that inspires action.

Four weeks after her passing in her hometown of Dublin, we want to celebrate the ways Eavan Boland drew up a new science of cartography for Irish poetry—one that included women in their everyday lives. One that depicted children, the routines of the suburbs, marriage, and then radically, that laid this map over received ideas about Irish history, about poetic form. Her poems elegantly re-charted the tensions of history, memory and legends, with the unnamed. In this episode of SAL/on air, we hear Eavan Boland's 2007/08 Poetry Series reading with Seattle Arts & Lectures, followed by an interview with SAL Associate Director Rebecca Hoogs.

In a time like this, where do you look to for joy? In a recent episode of Krista Tippett’s podcast, On Being, poet Ross Gay recently said, “It is joy by which the labor that will make the life that I want, possible. It is not at all puzzling to me that joy is possible in the midst of difficulty.” Besides being a disciple of joy, Ross Gay is a gardener, a painter, a professor, a basketball player, and a founding member of the Bloomington Community Orchard, a free-fruit-for-all non-profit focused on food, justice, and joy. He is the author of three collections of poetry. The title poem in his most recent, "Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude," is a long piece which, Ross told the Los Angeles Times, was begun as a “way to publicly imagine what it means for a person to be adamantly in love with his life. I wanted to realize joy as a fundamental aspect of our lives and practice it as a discipline.”

What drives storytelling? What is the story—who gets to tell it—and how? In a twist on the American road trip genre, Valeria Luiselli’s Lost Children Archive explores these tensions. As an artist couple and their children embark on trip from New York to Arizona, wrestling with their family’s crisis, a bigger one comes to them through the car radio: that of the tens of thousands of unaccompanied Central American and Mexican children arriving in the U.S. without papers. Author Valeria Luiselli was born in Mexico City and grew up in South Korea, South Africa and India. She was only able to write her new novel, she tells us, after writing a work of non-fiction first, Tell Me How It Ends. That book, a polemic about the US-Mexico border, is structured around the 40 questions that she translated and asked undocumented children facing deportation as a volunteer court translator. After Valeria’s talk about these two works she’s joined by Florangela Davila, news director at the Seattle-Tacoma NPR station, KNKX, for a Q&A. This event took place at Benaroya Hall in April of 2019.

What the 20th century economy typically required of Americans who wanted success was to step away from their passions and embrace sameness. Now, in this new century—amidst concerns about our jobs being stolen by computers, about the middle class vanishing, and about the super-rich getting richer, Adam Davidson sees another narrative. Davidson, who is the founder of NPR’s Planet Money and an economics writer at The New Yorker, argues that living a passionate life and living a financially stable life aren’t as separate as they used to be. Despite the pain and anxiety of around our current economy, Davidson admits that he sees a lot to be optimistic about in his new book, The Passion Economy. In this talk, he explores what’s next for Americans, from Amish furniture makers to accountants after the invention of AI, social media, outsourcing, and global trade. After Davidson’s talk, which took place at Benaroya Hall in January 2020, he’s joined by Jon Talton for the Q&A. Jon is a novelist and former long-time economics columnist for the Seattle Times.

When Rachel Maddow, host of the Emmy Award-winning Rachel Maddow Show on MSNBC, set out to research her latest book, "Blowout," she wasn’t necessarily looking to write about the oil and gas industry. Instead, the question she was asking was this: At a time when democracy is falling and authoritarianism is rising globally, what do we do? In October of this year, Maddow gave a lecture and had a conversation with multi-media journalist Joni Balter at a packed Benaroya Hall. From man-made earthquake swarms in Oklahoma, to Ukrainian revolutionaries, to Russians hacking the 2016 election, Maddow unwinds the skein of the unimaginably lucrative and equally corrupting oil and gas industry worldwide, and warns us what’s at stake if we leave the industry highly subsidized—and largely unregulated.

Port Royal in Henry County, Kentucky has a population of less than a hundred. And it’s there that farmer, novelist, poet, and cultural critic Wendell Berry—whose family farmed Kentucky land for 7 generations—has been writing for much of his life. With work like The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture, Wendell has functioned as both literary maverick and visionary to Americans for half a century, issuing warnings about industrial farming and the breaking apart of rural communities—concerns that are more immediate than ever. Back in May 2011, Berry appeared at Benaroya Hall for what he, with his trademark humor, terms a “prose sandwich:” the reading of a few poems, followed by his short story “Sold,” and ending with a final poem. After, he is joined by editor and publisher Jack Shoemaker, who talks with him about what “sustainability” really means, how to save our agricultural landscapes, and advising the young (which he calls “a cheap form of entertainment”).

What happens when your world shifts, and you have to come to terms with a whole new reality? Barbara Kingsolver – the bestselling author of The Poisonwood Bible, The Lacuna, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, and more – has some idea. In October 2018, SAL’s Executive Director, Ruth Dickey, sat down with Kingsolver to discuss her latest book, Unsheltered, at Benaroya Hall. The novel toggles between a small New Jersey town in 1870 and 2016, exploring both societal and family struggles. Unsheltered is a beautiful book about politics and economics and science and dogmatism and hope. It finds the parallels between the Victorian era, when Darwin’s theory challenged the Judeo-Christian worldview, and our own time, when global warming has challenged beliefs about the future of humanity. And Unsheltered is also—because this is Barbara Kingsolver we’re talking about here—a book about love and connection, about family and meaning and grief.

Why write about slavery in 2019? And when you write about, how do you defy the popular conceptions about slavery that readers have in their heads? How do you make the subject new? It took Ta-Nehisi Coates – author of the bestselling nonfiction works The Beautiful Struggle, We Were Eight Years in Power, and Between The World And Me – ten years of writing and meticulous research to produce his first novel, The Water Dancer, and in that time, he unearthed some incredibly powerful answers to these questions. Dr. Charles Johnson, author of 24 books and winner of the 1990 National Book Award for his novel, Middle Passage, sat down with Coates in October 2019 to discuss The Water Dancer at Benaroya Hall. Already a NYT bestseller and Oprah's Book Club pick, his novel follows the life of Hiram Walker, born into slavery on a Virginia plantation. In the book, Harriet Tubman says of the Underground Railroad – “This is war. Soldiers fight in war for all kinds of reasons, but they die because they cannot bear to live in the world as it is.”

In this episode, we hear from Indian-born food and travel writer Madhur Jaffrey, who joined us in November 2013 for a talk on how we become who we are. At the time of her visit, Jaffrey, who is recognized for bringing Indian cuisine to the western hemisphere, had written nearly 30 cookbooks and won several James Beard Awards, as well as her critically-acclaimed memoir, Climbing the Mango Trees. We learn how Jaffrey evolved to be an ambassador for Indian cuisine through her career as a prolific cookbook writer. We also learn of Jaffrey’s lively, food-infused childhood in India, of her time in New York where she made a living as a freelance writer while waiting for acting gigs, and of the acting career that followed. Listen to find out how she became an unofficial ambassador for Coca-Cola, how Jaffrey learned to swim with the aid of a watermelon, and how she joined in a peace prayer with Gandhi.

In this episode, we hear from poet Ada Limón, who joined us in October 2016 at McCaw Hall for a reading from her collection Bright Dead Things. Named a finalist for the 2015 National Book Award in Poetry and the National Book Critics Circle, Bright Dead Things follows a female speaker’s experiences of love and loss, exploring how we build our identities from place and from human contact. “Ada Limón doesn't write as if she needs us. She writes as if she wants us. Her words reveal, coax, pull, see us,” writes poet Nikky Finney. “We read desire, ache, what human beings rarely have the heart or audacity to speak of alone—with the help of a poet with the most generous of eyes.”

In our latest episode of SAL/on air, we hear from actor and filmmaker Tom Hanks, who joined us at McCaw Hall in December of 2017. Seattle’s beloved librarian, Nancy Pearl, was in conversation with Hanks, who shared with us how he came to write his first book, the short story collection "Uncommon Type," plus all about his obsession with vintage typewriters and highlights from his prolific career.

In 2003, Azar Nafisi electrified readers worldwide with "Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books," which went on to become a long-running #1 New York Times bestseller. A modest professor of English literature, Nafisi taught at the University of Tehran as the Islamic Revolution raged around her, until she was fired in 1981 for her refusal to wear the mandatory veil. Before leaving the country in 1995, Nafisi spent two years holding secret classes on forbidden Western literature in her home.  "Reading Lolita in Tehran" recounts seven young women students passionately relating Nabokov’s works, as well as novels like "Madame Bovary" and "Pride and Prejudice," to their own lives, claiming intellectual freedom through their survey of banned literature. In episode, we hear from Nafisi, who joined us at Benaroya Hall in February 2006 for Seattle Arts & Lectures’ 2005/06 Season. At the conclusion of Nafisi’s talk, Margit Rankin, then-Executive Director of Seattle Arts & Lectures, joins her in an interview about teaching, intellectual integrity, and the dire consequences of banning books.

In this episode, we hear from poet Jane Hirshfield, who joined us in March 2009 at Benaroya Hall for a reading spanning across her career, and for a discussion on the importance of inviting the intimacies of poetry and finding ways to say “yes” to the difficult. Described by The New Yorker as “radiant and passionate,” Hirshfield is now the author of eight collections of verse, many of which are influenced by her Zen Buddhist practice and her knowledge of classical Japanese verse, and which are concerned with the many dimensions of our connections with others.

In this special Thanksgiving episode, we hear from Viet Thanh Nguyen, author of The Sympathizer and The Refugees, who joined us at Benaroya Hall in May 2018. He is introduced by Ruth Dickey, SAL Executive Director, and is interviewed after his talk by Jamie Ford, celebrated author of Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet. In Viet Thanh Nguyen’s story “Black Eyed Woman” from The Refugees, the narrator speaks to us about the arrival of stories and of ghosts, saying: “Stories are just things we fabricate, nothing more. We search for them in a world beside our own, then leave them here to be found, garments shed by ghosts.” This slight of hand illuminates the heart of Nguyen’s writing – the ideas that stories are just fabricated things, nothing more. Yet also that stories are everything we search for, the only things that remain of us, the things we leave to be found, the things that give meaning.

In this episode, we hear from Frank McCourt, who joined us in November 2006 for a lively talk about committing his youth to paper in his phenomenally popular memoir series, beginning with Angela’s Ashes. At the conclusion of McCourt’s talk, Margit Rankin, then-Executive Director of Seattle Arts & Lectures, joins him in an interview. McCourt, a New York City schoolteacher who taught for nearly three decades, always told his writing students, “Write what you know.” It wasn’t until his mid-60s, in 1996, that he decided to follow his own advice, sitting down to produce the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winning Angela’s Ashes, based on his poverty-stricken childhood in Limerick, Ireland. At the time of McCourt’s visit, two more best-selling installments had followed his first offering: ’Tis, describing his struggle to gain his footing in New York, and Teacher Man, an account of his misadventures as a public-school teacher. Sadly, McCourt is no longer with us, but his incomparable voice lives on. In his talk, hear McCourt, with his uncanny humor and profound sense of humanity, characterize the Irish Catholic school of his youth as “the school of fear and trembling.” Find out how, as a young Korean War veteran with “no high school diploma and no self-esteem,” he was able to convince the dean of NYU to admit him, and how his education ill-prepared him for what he calls the “flying sandwich situations” in the tough vocational high schools of Brooklyn.

When Lucie Brock-Broido, poet of the witching hour, sadly passed away in March 2018, we released audio of her reading "Infinite Riches in the Smallest Room," a title that's an apt description of her entire body of work. In our latest episode of SAL/on air, we are delighted to share her SAL reading in its entirety, which took place on April 2015 at Chihuly Garden and Glass. At the time of Brock-Broido’s visit, she had produced four astonishing collections of poetry: A Hunger, The Master Letters, Trouble in Mind, and Stay, Illusion, a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Books Critics Circle Award. "You have harnessed yourself ridiculously to this world," she read, words that ring true hearing her now.

Madeleine Albright was America's first-ever female Secretary of State, from 1997 to 2001. Her distinguished career of public service includes positions in the National Security Council, as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, and on Capitol Hill. In her latest book, Fascism: A Warning, Albright gives us an urgent examination of fascism in the 20th century and how its legacy shapes today’s world. A fascist, observes Albright, “is someone who claims to speak for a whole nation or group, is utterly unconcerned with the rights of others, and is willing to use violence and whatever other means are necessary to achieve the goals he or she might have.” In this episode, we hear from Albright, who sat down in April 2018 at the Paramount Theatre to discuss Fascism: A Warning with Mark Suzman, Chief Strategy Officer and President in Global Policy and Advocacy at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Albright draws upon both her experiences as a child in war-torn Europe and her distinguished career as a diplomat to demonstrate how fascism not only endured through the twentieth century, but how it now presents a more virulent threat to peace and justice than at any time since the end of World War II.

In our latest episode of SAL/on air, we hear from one of the pre-eminent authors of the 20th century—Philip Roth. He joined us back in October 1992 for a reading from his National Book Award-winning memoir, Patrimony: A True Story. Written with great intimacy at the height of his literary powers, Patrimony is Roth’s elegy to his father, who he accompanies, full of love and dread, through each stage of terminal brain cancer. As he does so, Roth wrestles with the stubborn, survivalist drive that distinguished Herman Roth’s engagement with life, and his own anxieties around remembering the man with precision. “You mustn’t forget anything – that’s the inscription on [my father’s] coat of arms,” Roth writes. “To be alive, to him, is to be made of memory.” At the conclusion of Roth’s reading, he takes questions from the audience. Sadly, Roth passed away in May 2018 at the age of eighty-five, after a long and vital career of investigating what it meant for him to be an American, a Jew, a writer, and a man, through many different masks. He once said: “Updike and Bellow hold their flashlights out into the world, reveal the world as it is now. I dig a hole and shine my flashlight into the hole.”

This episode is Part Two of our double-feature with legendary Chilean writer Isabel Allende, who joined us for the second time for Seattle Arts & Lectures’ 2017/18 Season. On November 28, SAL had the pleasure of welcoming Allende back to our Literary Arts Series after her last visit thirty years ago, which we shared in our previous episode. SAL Executive Director Ruth Dickey was in conversation with Allende that night, who shared with us how she came to write her newest book, In the Midst of Winter, as well as her thoughts on love, loss, and healing. From the transformative potential of women in power, to the healing work of truth-telling, to advice for eternal youth, her warm talk reveals Allende to be not only a candid comic genius and a passionate storyteller, but ultimately, an ambassador of joy.

One of the world's most widely-read Spanish language authors, Chilean writer Isabel Allende is a master of the magical realism form and a colorful storyteller. At the time of Allende's first visit to the SAL stage, she had authored her astonishing debut, "The House of the Spirits," "Of Love and Shadows," and "Eva Luna." This episode is Part One of our double-feature with Allende, who first joined us in March 1989 for Seattle Arts & Lectures’ inaugural season. In her talk, she describes surrendering to the power of writing, and its potential to unify what she calls the “extended family” of the world. Allende is introduced by Seattle Arts & Lectures’ visionary founder, Sherry Prowda. Stay tuned for Part Two of this double-feature, when Allende returns to the SAL stage in November 2017 for an update on her storied career.

Ruth Ozeki is a novelist, filmmaker and Zen Buddhist priest, whose award-winning novels have been described as "witty, intelligent and passionate" by the Independent, and as possessing "shrewd and playful humor, luscious sexiness and kinetic pizzazz" by the Chicago Tribune. At the time of her visit, Ozeki had written three novels, most recently A Tale for Time-Being (2013), shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. In this episode, we hear from Ozeki, who joined us in November 2014 at Seattle Town Hall for a self-reflective, humorous talk about the writer’s relationship with time, and the ways in which we can learn to cultivate patience and find time to become better writers and better human beings. How did Ozeki’s time in a “neo-Luddite enclave” help her redefine her relationship with technology and birth her most successful novel? How do ideas from the 13th century priest, Dogen Zenji, remain relevant in our lives today? Listen and find out why Ozeki believes that “practicing patience is the most deeply subversive thing you can do.”

Elizabeth Strout is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Olive Kitteridge, the bestsellers Abide With Me, The Burgess Boys, My Name is Lucy Barton, and the award-winning Amy and Isabelle, all set in New England, all exploring the twists and turns of family dynamics, small-town gossip, and experiences of love, loss, and grief. “The pleasure in reading Strout," writes Louisa Thomas for the New York Times, "comes from an intense identification with complicated, not always admirable, characters. [...] There’s nothing mawkish or cheap here. There’s simply the honest recognition that we need to try to understand people, even if we can’t stand them.” In this episode, we hear from Strout, who joined us in January 2011 at Benaroya Hall for a talk on why fiction matters, followed by an interview with Linda Bowers, then-Executive Director of Seattle Arts & Lectures. Strout's appearance begins with the tale of an ire-inducing comment at a wedding reception, then traces how, through reading John Updike’s Rabbit books and understanding the despicable Harry Angstrom, she learned to be a more compassionate person. With her signature dry New England wit, Strout shares stories from her puritanical childhood, her battle with writer's block, and her belief that reading fiction is the one guaranteed way to “find out what it means to be human.”