Times as well as the recipient. A wide and creative nonfiction writing her articles have appeared in the globe and the wall street journal, and she has received support for her research from the National Endowment for humanities, among many other. She holds b. A. In the humanities from yale. As we already know, i not go to yale and ph. D. In english from Columbia University. Please give a warm welcome to dr. Ilyon woo. Its wonderful to be here with you all today, and i want to thank you thank you to the savannah book festival for having me here. Thank you for that wonderful introduction. What they say about Southern Hospitality is absolute true. I was welcomed so warmly here by my sponsor ivy counsel and her son jonathan and to tell you the truth, ive been traveling a lot. Last month has been kind of a whirlwind. My book came out and ive been feeling bit homesick and stumbled in yesterday to shavers bookstore and the space was light and radiant and filled with books that felt like friends. And i felt right at home. So thank you, savannah. So, savannah has a special place in the story about William Ellen craft that im about to tell. Its special because its the first stop on their thousand mile journey and i the first thing that i did when i came into savannah a few days ago is i went straight to Johnson Square, which is where i discovered they actually paused and had tea and looked at those live oaks. And i felt the presence of that history. And i thought about something that i had learned on a tour on my last visit to savannah, which is that if you go to just about every other square and i dont know if this is true, but its with what ive experienced so far, theres spanish moss growing beautifully on all the trees, but the spanish moss does not grow in Johnson Square or perhaps theres a scientific reason. But i guess the laura that i heard is of all the suffering this square contained. So i greet savannah as a city of beauty and also. And as i walk through these streets, i honor the memory of william and ellen craft. So to that day, id like to share with you some stories ill talk a little bit about the story of the crafts of course and then i would like to share with you because this book does a better job than what i can try to summarize in just a few minutes, ill share with you a bit about my story with crafts, my journey, which has been full of its own twists. So ill begin with introduction to the story. How i first came across it, how i came, write about it before going deeper into the process and i offer this is a story in three chapters or acts. Chapter one. The draft chapter two prose diet, Chapter Three and archival deficit ellen craft and her mother and if theres time i try to squeeze in something about William Brown and his donkey, but i cant promise. Excuse me for a minute. So i first encountered the crafts through own written narrative. Its a beautiful book, running a thousand miles to freedom. It was published in 1816, and it was assigned and this class that i was taking the literature of passing at Columbia University and you, like me all must be readers. And i imagine youve had this moment as i had this book, where sometimes you read something that just for me it was a it was an audible experience of hearing this voice in my ear. And learning about their story. This adventure story, which is just a page turner in and of itself. Its 60 pages long or short, and it tells of their travels. From macon, georgia thousand miles to, philadelphia and beyond, and that the twists and turns in this story are amazing. And they conjure the moments. And reading this about this extraordinary adventure, i felt now i can identify because theres apparently a new book about this. I was reading about this book, the sensation that i felt was are so im in this space that elicits are and when i read i felt both the hugeness of their journey and the smallness myself and i felt deeply like i wanted to know more. I was moved the loss as they told of william and ellen craft journey in many ways begins with a love that they experienced with their family members. Ellen with her mother, and william with his parents and his siblings. Each of whom was stolen from them. So i reflected on the trauma they described, but i also wanted to learn more. So they they say in the beginning of this narrative that theyre not going to tell full story of their lives. Theyre just going to tell a piece of it. And theres good reason for this, because at the time of their writing ellens mother, maria was still enslaved by. The people who originally enslaved her. So there were both things that they both not and they would not tell. And those are the things, though the other questions as well as the voices kept calling me back. I wanted to know who loved them who taught them to love, who had they known and loved and bondage who held them in bondage. What was the world like at time . What was it like to travel on a train or on a steamboat in this era . How did they know where to go . Was there anything in particular that prompted this extraordinary run run . And what i started to do, its been about more than two decades since that moment. I read their narrative at Columbia University library. What i kept coming back to was the story and what i started to do was to dig a little bit, and i love to dig. And what i found excuse me. What i found was i started looking what other people had researched before and kind of, i guess ive described this as like knocking on a wall of something, but really the original feeling i had was like pressing, like excavating something. And then its like in a movie where you push and then like, something starts to open up. And i realized that with this, these leads that i was finding about these in their world, i had fallen into an alice in wonderland like space, a whole another space. And i thought this was a room. And that room became house. And that house became a world. And then once was immersed in that, thats when i decided that this is this is a place where i need to start dispatching reports and start tell the story. So the archive yielded so much. Sometimes its like a magical feeling when youre in there, when it feels like papers are speaking to you, not talk about more in this in a minute. That but i found much that i quickly i felt to write about it and i found so much it quickly got to a point where i entombed my editor. So that brings me to chapter one. The bad draft so. I begin by saying that the craft story one of the things that so exciting about is that there are multiple acts to, their journey to freedom. So their first journey they went from making to philadelphia. That was a journey of a thousand miles. They land in philadelphia they could there they could go change their names. They start new lives, they could go to canada, all number of things could have happened. But activists seized upon story and they are invited to tell their story to share their story with people. And they do this at enormous risk to themselves. So thats at the beginning of act two. They they travel another thousand miles on the abolitionist circuit telling their story in service of not their own freedom, not fighting just for their own freedom, but the freedom, all those left behind, including their loved ones, then the middle of this dramatic act to the fugitive slave act passes and sending slave hunters from, georgia. And then theres another crisis, culminating in a second escape from the United States, because its not just from the south, but its from the entire United States. They have to run in order to be free free. So for me, reading that original story, running a thousand miles, the the emotional heart of the story began with a childhood of, william and ellen craft. And particular. I was drawn to the story of william craft. So he names a mr. Craft as being as an enslaver and he tells us a little bit of the background of how how he came into macon and how he launched on this journey. And where it began was with this mr. Craft. Essentially gambling on cotton and wagering the lives his loved ones. This man, as he tells, ends up selling his williams parents. And then one by one, each of siblings. And he and younger sister are the last ones to go. So theres a very powerful and painful moment that they recount in their story about when william craft is this Auction Block and he watches his sister be sold. This is the last member of his family to be sold from mr. Craft. And i wanted to honor him by starting with this moment. So started with this warm june day when he, a teenage boy of six years old, standing on this Auction Block, watching as a sister who has just been sold, has been is being driven away and knows that hes never going to see her again. And then i proceed this account of to pull out and i actually ended up finding so much more than i ever imagined possible about mr. Craft. The man who sold him about i found actually the mortgage by which william craft and sister remortgaged as property. This is the mortgage that ended leading to the sale on this june day. I pull it out and i basically told a lot more information. Any reader would probably be prepared for at this time. I thought i had with it with a strong beginning and. I knew i had a moving moment. I sent it to my editor. I sent about 100 pages or so and i thought, okay, shes going to say this is a really good start. Its a powerful opening and lets just go a day past or a couple of days past. You can imagine. What happened . I got an email back. It was a six page email and you know, they usually when people are trying give you constructive criticism, they start off as something positive, right. So letter starts off clearly youve done a Staggering Amount of research. That was that the good part. And she proceeded to say that. I had ive committed of this letter to memory if you cant tell she said that i had created a scholarly tomb. So the literary person in me is kind of interested is this like a place where researchers like myself to die, or is it a where readers like yourselves are buried alive . Neither of which was going to be very good. She said. I had to start again. I had to start absolutely from scratch, from the beginning. And she said i had to start the story with another scene, the scene in which i actually began my proposal, the scene that i started telling her, which is a scene in macon, georgia in 1848, this time in winter, right before christmas as william and ellen craft are in a cottage behind, the home of ellen crafts. And its a moment where at four in the morning, shes getting dressed, shes putting a gentleman shirt and and jacket and hat and boots. And the last thing that they do for costume before theyre about to leave is william cuts her hair short in the back and they touch hands and thats the moment where their journey launches the start of this thousand miles. So the problem is from a writers perspective. Theres that beginning of the story. And i understood that this was a powerful moment. But then i did all this research into what happened before and their loved ones and hugh craft and ellen craft enslavers and how do i how do i do . I put that right. If the story starts in 1848 with the journey and john said, as my editor, she said, you to figure out a way to tell it both at the same time. So the idea of the past being in the present, something that i had actually felt strongly from the beginning of connecting the story, in fact, so much that even before my bad draft, when i had chapters i started, my goal was to write the entire story. I dont think ive ever said this out loud. My goal was to write entire story in the present tense. So my initial were all in the present tense. That kind of had to stop. But the idea was there, the impulse was there, and when she said, you know, you have to put the past present simultaneously as an idea, that made sense to me. But i had no idea where to begin. And so i didnt look to at least not writing, not historical writing. I look to novels, i look to musicals, and i look to my own history and music. So what this brought to mind was when i was girl in middle school and, i was playing the piano. Theres a piano piece that i really to play. Its chopins impromptu, and its a rollicking piece. It just feels like something careening almost out of control and that speed come from comes from learned is from a difficult rhythm. So i asked my teacher, can i please play this piece . And she said, okay but you have to learn the rhythm. I said, okay, whats the rhythm . And it turns out the rhythm has two parts. So in the left hand you have triplets triplets. And the right hand you have 16th notes. One, two, three, four. One, two, three, four. One, two, three, four, one, two, three, four. So you have pump that bump, bump, bump, bump, bump, bump bump, bump, bump, bump, bump, bump, bump, bump, bump, bump, bump, bump, bump, bump and have to go at the same time. So my my Little Middle School brain was kind of blown by this. And i thought, how do you do that . My mothers a pianist. And i said, you know, could you do this for me . Because i was going to, like, copy it, you know, but she was too quick and she said, no, youve got feel this. So i went over everywhere, tapping on my knees on my body, on know surface. I found it. I found that beat. And the way i found it and the way my teacher said i to find it, it was absolutely right. You have to find where the beats converge. And i realized thinking about this piece that i had was done not piece now a book the left hand is the past. The right hand is the present. I had to find that moment together where past present meet and the story thats you tell the story, the past. You move with the present. But you feel past as its own beat. And once i found that once beats started coming together, then there was no stopping me. I mean, i was writing like crazy and i wrote, in fact, so much that i had another with don and this vehicle, a prose diet. So ive always been a prolific and i started this sort of bad sense that i writing too much. I had not i mean, the crass even halfway where they needed to go and i a couple hundred pages. This didnt feel right and i met don at a party and i kind tried to ask like sideways you like how much how long you expect the book to be and then thought, well, actually, maybe how long is the very longest it could possibly be. And first she says 350. And then i guess i looked away and shes like, all right, maximum 400 and i, i mean, i guess i tried to change my but i must have looked like, you know, terrified. And shes a really good reader both of books people and people and, and she said, oh, you need me to cut. And then she got this gleam in her. And shes like, because i can cut. And i thought, oh, my gosh, i know you can cut. I know you can cut. And i was thinking about this yesterday night because there was that speech about Preston Childs talking about like murder darlings. I mean, i was seeing a bloodbath. Her eyes. And so what i did as i wrote the story and as i had all these pages was i kept i kept i kept actually hundreds of pages of outlines im not outline. So timelines and next to that i kept a crazy chart which was like a diet chart for words. So like some people count calories i always counting my words like all right just much here just as much here i go over and it was a painful process. At some point during this process husband im also like a packrat and my husband who is not a packrat got this book this marie kondo book having to do with like clearing up spaces know and the central idea of that is like take each object like one at a time and you hold it and you say, you know, does this bring me joy or in this case, in the book, it would be like, is this meaningful to me . And so i take each item, each research thing, and i was like, yes, this means something to me. And then at a certain point, i turn and say, okay, everything means something me. But will it mean something to you . And that so you in my mind came into this process and i decided that there are going to be certain things that you dont want to read as hard as it was for me to part with them, i parted with them. And now we have, instead of a thousand page book, a more manageable sized book, at the end. But against all this abundance and this archival abundance that i found, and there are things that i felt, there were moments in the archives where just was i was stunned. I found one of the earliest trips that i made out to macon, georgia. And i there have been a number of times on this trip where ive been like, what am i doing here . And this is of those times i was driving on the highway, it was raining, and i thought i, dont know what im doing, what am i doing . This is like crazy. How am i going to try to tell this story . And i just to myself, if i find something new in the archives is this yield something . If i can see you william and ellen craft that i will continue. And if not. Maybe this is just not meant to be and i got to this courthouse where they let me upstairs. They let me actually they i was astonished by this because they photocopies on the downstairs level. I dont want to get anybody in trouble. But they had photocopies on the downstairs love. I couldnt read them very well i said well can you show me is it can i look at the originals and was very very nice guys like sure you go upstairs theres like a whole upstairs. Its like this you can see through the floors underneath, like its this raised sort of metal structure thing and its just lined with these all dig books and it so happened as i was going through these that i found, for example, this page by allen crafts biological. I guess i havent gotten to this part of the story yet but her her biological father gives her away as piece of property to his biological daughter and legal daughter as a wedding present. So this is something i guess i spoke about krafts journey already and experience of it. This is family, but theres at the powerful heart this story of loss and is the connection that ellen craft had had with her mother, maria and the forced separation between allen and her mother. When allen was 11 years old. So allen was the daughter of this woman, this enslaved woman named who was 18 years old when she gave birth to allen and her first enslaver james smith. James smith also had a legal wife who was probably pregnant at the same time that maria was pregnant with allen. And they were all in the same household. And whether or not this mr. Smith, as i call her, because there are a lot of eliza elizas in this book. So mr. Smith was so enraged as the crafts describe in their own narrative by the site of this child who bore a such a strong physical resemblance to her own husband, to allens father and she was so upset that allen was for a legitimate child of the family that at the soonest opportunity she gave away ellen craft as a wedding gift to her own 18 year old daughter. When this 18 year old daughter was going to get married so be at the end of this rain soaked journey into megan upstairs in the space and opening up this book to find this paper by which this action was made possible to see and this beautiful hand, i mean, the handwriting was just gorgeous. See, in this beautiful hand, james, saying out of the love that i bear for my daughter, eliza im giving her this property. And im not just giving her this property, but im giving this property. Allen and all of her increase, which meant that for generations upon generations, allens crash children and their children and their children would forever be the property of her half sister. Elizas children. And on and on. So have this story. And i im able to find out a lot, actually, about the smiths ellen craft father and, his wife, and especially through his wife. I didnt want to write a story, which its just simply good guys, bad guys, because these are real people that i wanted to respect as real people, people who made choices. And i think its much easier to hold people at a distance and say, oh, i would never do if you kind of ever other them or separate them and. I wanted to know as much as i could about, lets say this, mr. Smith and theres a lot about this. Mr. Smith and and the archives. But what ended up happening and this is, again something that i was aware of because, there are a lot of great scholarship, especially black feminist scholars whove led the way pointing out to there being this archival deficit, this this imbalance, that we find in the archives between especially people in power like james smith, you have of records for them. You dont have records for people like. Maria and allen and i wanted to find i wanted to find them. So you find as much as they could possibly. And actually, a lot of it i able to find a lot about maria through through mr. Smiths archive of materials and remnants. But not enough that it was going to be a parody. And so that got me really about if you have this imbalance and if youre using the slavers records to get to the enslaved and i cant make up, i can tell you where mr. Smith was buried. I can you her religious views. I can tell you things that she read in places that she liked to go. I can tell the names of her children. I cant tell you all of that about maria. I, i found her as a name listed in property records valued at 500, along with her age. So how to honor that and how to create a full picture without replicating the very skew the very imbalance that it is that i strove to address. Thats when with the writing i started going and each sentence, each paragraph, each section and each chapter and thinking who owns sentence, who owns the paragraph, who gets the topic sentence . Who the story. I thought maybe i can give ellen craft her mother the story and change the axis upon which all this Historical Information turns what i ultimately hope to create is return to the musical analogy an orchestral score score one with economy, but one in which there are multiple but where above all the crafts. And above all, allans has to soar. So i want to close where i began, which is with savannah. So as i said the cross made their first stop and savannah they would also make their last stop. Last home near here about an hours drive in bryan county. And there. So this is the thing thats so amazing me and inspiring about the crafts is every moment they make a really difficult so they make that incredibly difficult decision to leave macon and then as i said they once they get to philadelphia they could disappear. They make the decision, tell their story in boston, slave hunters come after them. The fugitive act is passed. They are made a test case for the fugitive slave act and their friends are saying, run, go to canada, get away from here. You are too big and too. Do they run . No, dont they stand their ground . They stand. They rally. All of boston. You people like douglas and William Miles and all these different people who have spoken for them. You have douglass returning. You have a lot of boston, a lot America Rising up as a result of their efforts. These are people who made difficult choices throughout their lives, even after. So they end up in england. Theyre there for almost 20 years after the civil war past has has thats the only point which they are actually free to back and they return they could have stayed in england. They could have had their ever after. There they come to the United States, they could have come back to boston. They decide to come to georgia and they decide to a farming and agric cultural and Educational Cooperative if they have to two of these one, they start in South Carolina and their night writers come and they burn the place down. They start and i want to end with a quotation from 106 year old woman whose name is unknown, but who is words for me reverberate through space and time. So this is a woman reflecting on the space thats now become a church. Now become a school now become place that is night and day from the place where this once was. So this is a woman who had enslaved on these same grounds, and she had seen most of her 15 children sold away from here. And she says of this place that the crafts found it and their later lives, it used to seem as though the devil was turned loose on this plantation, blood from the backs of the people was made to flow like water. But now bless the lord, it has been turned into a temple of the living. I hope that. I hope that this story runs by you as as inspires me. I hope that as you to Johnson Square and you see the names theres so many names that are coming rated there theres daniel webster, theres lafayette. There is henry clay, all those people actually appear in my book. But there are the walk ons, william and ellen craft, they are the american heroes. And this is their story. And i hope you will join me on this journey. Thank you. If youve got questions and i dont if you have not read the book, i thought that had read a great deal about slavery and the civil that whole era. This book was so wellresearched. It brought me to tears. Time and time again, i would just encourage you to to read it. But anyway, if those of you out there, if youve got questions, we need you to come to the mike. Is that on . Just to make sure it sounds like it. Okay. Great. Tell us about the archive process and what does that mean in 2023 . Is it digitalized, is it still papers . What are you doing and how do you interpret those words are so hard to read. How do you do you have assistance help you with that . How do you do that . Thank you. I love talking about research and we are so lucky that we can in so many different ways now. So i told you about the breadcrumbs that i was following with. Early scholars, you know, they had to look every single newspaper. One of the biggest resources that we have today are digitized newspaper. So i mentioned that i found a huge is only named as craft in in the narrative. I found him at my own Kitchen Table which was just astonishing because i was thinking, all right, theres this man named man named craft. Hes had some money problems. Is there maybe some record of that in the newspaper or is there some craft to his having some financial difficulty and . I just put the name in and each craft came up. Then i got hugh and then i did some google searching. And then i literally screamed at my in my kitchen and my children are completely and because it all came together, it used to be that these your eureka moments, you know, happen in like the county and things like that. But now so many of those, those materials available digitally. That said nothing like that feel of the paper right and sometimes you know as you suggested, handwriting can be really difficult to decipher. So when youre seeing replicas, you know, there are things that can be missed and critical things. So i urge both a a digital and in our art, like an inperson archival. Thank you first for an absolutely incredible that was wonderful. Did your proteger go to upstate new york at all and peterborough. No. Okay. Yes. The in the United States they mostly stayed in the northeast. They so at first when you when you i started seeing of all the different places where they went and they went it. So they went actually in the company of this man whose story i didnt to tell today but William Wells brown who was a self emancipated man. Novelist performance artist, artist speaker. I kind of had an archival crush on him every time i went to the archives. His name wasnt too far from the crabs because brown and kraft. So id see what he was up to. He told a lot and he was he was taking them, dragging them over the place like zigzag in massachusetts, mostly also here in rhode island. But they were following the railroad. So just as they escaped by a railroad, so rode the railroad to tell their story story. You mentioned something about descendants. Have you met the families. I have had the honor of meeting a number of their descendants and honestly its been one of the most enriching parts of this journey for me. Im thinking actually about the previous presentation on jefferson because theres a connection there to of the descendants who i have the honor to know is peggy trotter. Damon priestley was an oral historian and a poet and a freedom writer. She is also descended from the hemings and and actually several other really famous, illustrious people. But she and other other kraft family members have been incredibly welcoming and, wise and storing and sharing many stories that, you know, as again, as a previous presenter was discussing their oral historians that are passed down there, lots of different kinds of stories that exist outside the archives and family members, descendants are a critical piece of that. And actually one of the true highlights of my experience in actually throughout all of this, visiting the grave site of william kraft, we dont know exactly where ellen is buried. Somewhere like around an hour from here, but we dont have the exact spot. William kraft is buried outside are in charleston, South Carolina. And and i was there with three of William Ellen craft great great granddaughters. And its a day i will never forget. For those of you who havent read the book, theres some very interesting about the time 1848 and what was going on in the world. And if you could expound on that, because i think that that had a lot to do with what you were the both crafts were experiencing and others that time. Yes thank you for that. So actually book begins again to extend the musical analogy. It begins with an overture and ends with a coda. So i did begin with the cabins and thats really where the actions starts. But right before that, i give an overture. So if you think about like an opera or if you go to a musical, a broadway musical, theres an overture that kind of like sings the themes of the story, right . The the themes of the piece that youre going to be. So they sound familiar to you and you can be attuned to those notes as you keep going, as you, as you, as the piece unfolds. Well, 1848 revolutions of 1848. Thats my overture because this is an incredible time. This is you know, theres a transportation revolution going on. Theres an Industrial Revolution going on, an information revolution going the boundaries of the United States. States are exploding. People are moving across the country. News is moving across the country. And income. The crafts. Harnessing all those revolutions and partake in them. Theres a gold rush. There is seneca falls this year. There is. I mean, what is not happening in this year . This is a time of Rapid Movement and new of declarations. And this is the crafts come in and to declare their own independence, its seeking a freedom of their own. This is a little bit of a different question given. The fact that two of your protagonists dont really have a voice in this document. Did you ever consider presenting this as historical fiction . And if or if so, why or why not . Thank you. Thats a these all wonderful questions. The simple answer is no. I didnt feel like it was my place or my strength to invent anything. So even though i have written this in a very novelistic style and that was very intentional because i wanted i wanted a story that had the pacing, the tasting of a novel. But the nutritive value of nonfiction. So you get a little bit of both, right . So because thats how i like to read, i personally love to read novels much more, ill gobble up big histories of the related, but but i like to read novels that said i wasnt going to make anything up. And fortunately we have the voice of the craft, we have the voice of the crafts through their 1860 narrative we have it newspaper reports of lectures. The one voice that i really wanted to and summon as much as possible was allen crafts, because thats one that is less heard when they go on the lecture circuit. In the beginning, both crafts are up and theyre speaking and theyre getting all kinds of questions because they have to kind of authenticate themselves. People dont believe or people are skeptical. Could this really have happened. So they volley back different questions about making detailed questions about the history, the people who live there and all kinds of things. And at one point, william craft is asked, who is the mayor or who is the governor of georgia . Several years ago, like three years ago. And hes stumped. But he has so worn one over the crowd that somebody shouts out, who was the in massachusetts seven years ago . And the poor guy who asked the question cannot answer this question. And so william, william craft is off the hook. And and is able to continue speaking, telling his story. So william has a very empowered voice that we can hear through the archives. Alan i heard had to go through sort of sideways. I found much more of her than again than i ever thought possible. And the story really begins and ends with her. Its sort of one thing id love, although i dont want to reveal the end the story, her reuniting with her mother. If you could share that him because that was just that was so powerful and you think about the journey that she had to make to reunite with her daughter, england. If you could comment on that. I have to say i actually i listened to this in the audiobook. I was fortunate to have both male and female readers Janina Edwards and leon. And they are beautiful readers and my text actually closely hews to a newspaper article where this reunion is described. And i also i mean, just hearing leon nixon read this reunion and made me cry. So if you imagine that the civil war is over and is abroad and england, her husband has actually been going to africa. So theres lots that we havent on here, but one of the reasons why she doesnt go with is because she knows as soon as the emancipation proclamation is passed that her mother may be accessible to her. So she uses this whole network of people of active west and she reaches down powerfully into georgia and, she here she learns that mother is safe right on mulberry street, which is very street from which ellen craft herself escaped. And then this newspaper, which i attempt to summon a little bit here, describes how maria goes to this train station. The nerd in me has to point out its not exactly in the same location as that was, but its the same line. So shes at this train station. Maria, and shes looking out and theres like theres thousands of people there. So is her daughter. She had to hide and was terrified. This moment, all sorts of things happened right from . The get go. Maria is looking out and shes seeing the thousands cheering for her as shes going to go on the same train that her daughter took so many years ago. And she speeds across thousand miles. She moves across ocean. She ends up at train station in london where there are more crowds, where theres her daughter, arms open and her daughters child her free born child. And they into each others arms. And its its a moment that were grateful to have reported. And im honored to share. Just cry all over again. Please join me in thanking mazrui for a wonderful, wonderful presentation. David quammen is with us today, courtesy of