[inaudible] the lecture is made possible by generous contributions by martha dowd dowrimple in memory of her mother and grandmother and also by the family of eudora welty in her memory. in april 1983, eudora gave a series of lectures at harvard university, and the lectures were collected as a volume of essays entitled one writer's beginnings. published by the harvard university press, one writer's beginnings stayed on "the new york times"' bestseller list for almost a year. the essays detailed the inescapable bond between eudora's childhood and her later career as a writer and how her early experiences contributed to her distinctive literary voice. her novels include -- [inaudible] which was adapted for the stage in a tone award-winning -- tony award-winning musical. delta wedding, losing battles and the optimist's daughter for which she was awarded the pulitzer prize. eudora is a master of the short story, and her stories are collected in many places but notably two, a curtain of green and the golden apples. she received more than 30 honorary degrees from institutions across our country. the penn faulkner foundation and the welty foundation decided to collaborate to ask other writers of significance to speak in their own words about their beginnings as a writer and what formed their individual literary voices. the lecture will be an annual event here in washington. our inaugural lecturer was salman rushdie. i want to thank the d.c. commission on arts and humanities and the d.c. office of cable, television, film, music and entertainment for their gracious support of this event this evening. and i would like to remind all of you to refrain from taking photographs during the lecture and to, please, turn off your cell phones so that you and no one else will be interrupted during the evening. it is my pleasure this evening to introduce mr. ralph eubanks who has the honor in turn of introducing our guest lecturer tonight. ralph eubanks was born and raised in a, in the very small town of mount olive in south mississippi. he earned his undergraduate degree from the university of mississippi and later amassed his degree in english and english language from the university of michigan. he is the author of two autobiographical works, "ever is a long time: a journey into mississippi's dark past," which a washington post critic thought was one of the best nonfiction books of 2003. more recently, he published "the house at the end of the street: the story of three generations of an interracial family in the american south." he is the recipient of a guggenheim fellowship and has been a fellow at the new american foundation. he is the former editor of the virginia quarterly review, and he served as director of publishing at the library of congress for 18 years. his essays and criticisms have appeared in "the washington post", "wall street journal", the american scholar, npr and the new yorker. last year he was the eudora welty visiting scholar at mill saps college in jackson, and current hi he is a visiting professor -- currently he is a visiting professor of english and southern studies at the university of mississippi at oxford. he calls himself a born-again southerner, and in his own words he says he maintains a skeptical eye that serves as a faithful companion to his newfound intimacy with the south. i am proud to say that he serves as a member of the national advisory board of the eudora welty foundation. ladies and gentlemen, my good friend ralph eubanks. [applause] >> good evening, and welcome to the second annual eudora welty lecture. it is a great pleasure to speak here tonight in honor of ms. welty's memoir, one writer's beginnings, a book that served as a guide as i wrote my own memoir, ever is a long time. it is also a delight to introduce chimamanda ngozi adich irk e, a writer who grounds fiction. for ms. welty, the plate was our home state of mississippi. the magnolia state's geography and history and inevitably its politics are a powerful presence in ms. welty's fiction. for ms. adichie, the place is nigeria, one that seems distant from mississippi geographically and historically but is linked in unexpected ways. when speaking of eudora welty, my students always ask me why i usually refer to her as ms. welty. up until now my response was that to refer to her otherwise would violate southern manners, since we were never really acquainted. [laughter] but tonight i feel compelled to refer to her as eudora. as a longtime student and now teacher of her work, i've gained a closeness with her through my exploration with my students of the lyricism, the irony, the incisive description and narrative structure of both her fiction and her photographs. for a year i even lived in the shadow of her house on pinehurst street in jackson, mississippi, while i taught at millsaps college, a place where she also taught writing. during that time i came to think of eudora more as a neighbor than as a distant literary figure. so it's difficult for me to continue to be so formal. now, in eudora's essay she ponders whether works of literature should take crusading positions. the normallist works neither to correct, nor -- novelist works neither to correct, nor to condone, not at all to comfort but to make what's told alive, eudora wrote. yet the novel is not apolitical or morally neutral in genre. she continues, indeed, we are more aware of the novelist's moral convictions through a novel than any flat statement of belief from her could make us. so eudora believed that a novelist can contribute to social change in a way that an editorial or piece of journalism cannot. without a doubt, ms. adichie shares that belief with eudora. she did believe that a writer must have a point of view, a position and perspective about the world. like eudora, ms. adichie also has a distinctive outlook that guides her fiction n. her work as a novelist and public intellectual, she has sought to make us think differently about africa. she has also compelled us to think about how we all and should be feminists. in her fiction she writes outside of herself and creates real psychological acuity to the interior and exterior lives of her characters. when you enter the world of ms. adichie's fiction, she provides the reader with a glass-like clarity of where you are. on the surface, the setting may seem unfamiliar, but she quickly places you in the world she has created. she also knows when to make her reader comfortable as well as when to challenge them and push toward thought-provoking discomfort. ms. adichie has warned americans of the danger of a single story, the idea that people living in the surgeon area of -- the certain area of the world have only one kind of experience. we in the west often misunderstand the diversity of african culture, and ms. adichie's fiction has served as a clarifying force to think differently about nigeria and post-colonial africa. it is ms. adichie's recognition of the danger of stereotyping a region that i believe also ties her with eudora. the american south has long been a region that wrestles with its place in the world. so it's no surprise that southerners often find themselves at odds with what it means to be southern. it was a familiar con flick for eudor -- conflict, one that is represented in her story where is the voice coming from written on the night of the murder of civil rights activist medgar evers. it's the only story she said that she wrote in anger. when eudora herald the news, it occurred to her that she knew what was going on in the mind of the man who pulled the trigger. she knew because she had lived all her life where it had happened. now, neither the south's nor africa's self-reverential perspective, nor its competing narratives from both inside and outside the regions are helpful in defining what either place is or what it means to be from that part of the world. both places are filled with continuity and their sense of place as well as discontinuity in the ways that their sense of place is being transformed. interestingly enough, in reading her novel americana, i'm reminded of another link between ms. adichie's work and the american south. the character gathered pointed insights into the american idea of race, particularly as it applies to black americans. when the character struggles with what it means to be black in the united states, she's also struggling with an identity that has its roots in the american south. the history of american blackness is a southern story. not merely as a racialized category, but as a cultural, political and economic identity. for generations black americans, myself included, have struggled to separate themselves from the south. yet the south has always been with us. as eudora once said, one place understood helps us understand all places better. since your work seems to be guided by eudora with a sense of place and a belief of female empowerment that i know she shares, i sincerely hope that after tonight you, ms. adichie will feel the same connection i feel tonight with my neighbor, eudora welty. it is my pleasure to present chimamanda ngozi adichie. [cheers and applause] .. / after i moved from nigeria to the u.s. at the age of 19 to terrified college, began to read as much american fiction as i could to make sense of the new country whose cop toward have been mostly formed in my imagination but the films and television shows i had watched. i still remember reading eudora welty's short story, whether is the voice coming from. a knicksallized account of the murder of medgar evers. in the story. the white man who murdered the blacking aist ash activist tells his wife what he has done, and his wife says it's going to get him right back on tv. just watch nor funeral. that line did for me what the history books had not. it illuminated a particular white southern feud of black americans. i saw how dehumanizing a group of people turns your own humanity into a hollow shell. i saw the innocence, the grace, the resilience in at the face of mop mon industriesty. the senior of irish-americans in america. while i knew eudora welty's fiction i had not read her beautiful little moment moyer. not least because it is so refreshing lilacking in the kind of irony that contemporary memoirs seem to demand. i was struck by the clarity, the certainty, with which eudora welty's seamlessly makes the links between biography and creativity. she recounts her mother's rambling friend, who talked just for the sake of talking, and she connected the memory to her own use of monologue in her fiction. the trips she takes with her family are recounted not only in all their charming details but also as insight into her own writing process. she sees those trips as stories, taking on direction, movement, change. i found this book fascinating and unsettling. because my own story of my beginnings is utterly looking in clarity and certainty. because i have a contested relationship with the story of my own creativity. threat of bag writer today is that it is no longer sufficient merely to write. you must also participate in the rituals of book promotion. now i should say that unlike some of my fellow writers, who understandably hate any form of public performance, i quite enjoy some of the out, the operative word being "some." i interview interviews and readings and conversations, and i enjoy meeting my readers. but all of these performances and events necessarily involve a certain kind of explaining, and elucidation of one's own art. the premise is that the writer knows herself, knows her art, but the truth is that my fiction writing process is not always entirely conscious. i do not always know the why. the great joy in writing fiction comes during the magical moments of being transported, of being blissfully lost in one's imaginative space, and those moments are difficult to distill into coherent explanations, and so i have had to invent answers to the sorts of questions writers are often asked, about my process, my choices, my characters. in inscenting the answers, sometimes i believe myself and scheme is don't . it is like being you're psychoanalyst, which us not me most pleasant prospect. for me the ideal is this to write a piece of fiction ask then to talk to about anything else but that piece of fiction. and so i will speak of the touchstones in my life whom, family, church, school, not because i am certain of how this shape mist writing but because i know they must have shaped it. i am the daughter of a professor, and are me to be in a university anywhere in the world today is to feel immediate sense of familiarity. i grew up on the campus of the university of nigeria, a small town in southeastern nigeria. the campus was spread across undulating grounds, houses on tree-lined streets, red dust, well-tended hedges. it was a slow, small, and lovely place. its decline would come starting with military dictatorship that stopped funding education, but my childhood in the early 1980s was the last gasp of the university's sparkling age. at the main entrance of camp put was large gate with security guards in uniforms, complete with berets. many of them elderly men with gentle demeanors and before each car drove through, the driver stopped, got out of the car and open the trunk, or boot, as we called it. the word "trunk" is an american concession. when as perhaps the age of about 11 or 12 my mother or father let me come out and open the trunk, it felt like a rite of passage to adulthood, to responsibility, but checking cars as they drove in and out of campus, was really a specialness, set the campus was not part of the larger town, it and was not. it was a world of its own. had a catholic church and a protestant church, the children's library, well-staffed medical center. it had a primary school for the children of the staff. it had a switching pool and tennis courts courts and a hockh and a basketball court and when the general electricity was cut off, the campus generators came on. in these privileges, i was fortune to partake. as children, we were seen and we felt seen, and so we grew up with a sense of sureness of self-because our world recognized us and acknowledged us. in my family, was the child who wanted to know the story of who we were. i was a child who found romance in our history. who felt nostalgia for the things not yet experienced. i was the child who sharpened very early on the skill of eavesdropping, a pastime of which i'm still quite adept. at family gatherings i felt a part of things and yet also ever so slightly removed from things. i do not know a time when i was not drawn to story to human emotions, and human motivations. this is all i have ever known. this longing, this sense of being always one step removed, one step apart, and watching. always watching. when i was five, my father was appointed deputy vice chancellor of the university and was assigned a new house on campus, number 305 cartwright avenue. before my family moved in, the previous occupant happened to be in an odd bit of co incidents but would later gain significance, the acclaimed writer. chevy, who was also a staff of the university. i did not think much of this growing up since university staff moved in and out of university housing. until years later when my first novel was about to be published here in the u.s., my editor asked me to tell her about my life. and i did. and then i added oh, by the way, i grew up in a house formerly occupied by one of the greatest writers in the world. and she said to me, her eyes wide, that is the most interesting thing you have told me about yourself. i then resolved at that moment to make sure that this was always included in my biography. as one of my life great achievements. i remember the house as it was then, the light blue torn story house and a large yard, the green hedge of whistling pines, the gracious graveled driveway. he row of purple buie began veal -- flowers, bored bid lilies that floured when the rains came. the red and yellow roses and the flower bed by my mother's garage. the trees in the back, the first time well saul the house we looked at the living room, the dining room, the guest room and the kitchen. and then it was time to go upstairs. i began to cry when i saw the stairs. they looked insurmount by high. refused to climb. finally my big sister held my hand and we took it one step at a time until we got to the top. but only weeks after we moved in, i was sliding on a pillow down the banister with my brothers, to see who could do it the fastest. i remember playing football with my brothers and our neighbors, on the lawn, and cans for goalposts goalposts and badn the lawn, rope as our net to we argued whether the shuttle had gone over or under. remember our gardener, whose name was jomul, watering the plants with a metal watering can, and my brother following him around and alert told me a story that jomul told him. jomul used to have red eyes because he had fought any war and had killed people, and his eyes had turned red but after the war, he had gone through a cleansing ritual where he swore he had not killed any innocent people, and his eyes consequently lost their redness. my brother was about ten and i about seven but this story has stayed with me. and was there in my consciousness as i, many years laser, researchedded the war. i remember the tree that we climbed, and from which i once fell, a fall that left a mark on my arm, and because i aim specially alcohol happeninged it that mark i now use to tell my left from my right. i remember that the guava tree hat a kind of elegance slouch to its branches and was on its thickened stems that the white fluffy chickens, bought in the market, were tied before they were killed for sunday lunch. i remember riding my bicycle up and down the slope of the street. all the other children loved going downhill but i hated the loss of control. and so i went not fast and thrilled, as they did, but slowly, carefully cradling the bicycle's brakes. i remember the disgustingly flat, overside cockroaches that crawled in with the rainy season and smelled utterly horrible. we called them american cockroaches. true, i don't know why but -- they were not the usual smaller nigerian cockroaches. i'm not sure why they were called american cockroaches, but perhaps it simply makes sense to label as american anything that is larger than normal. i remember the veranda upstairs that looked across at our neighbor's compound. my brothers and i -- when i was a teenager, i spied on the older boy on whom i had a crush. when my parents retire from the university years ago and moved out of the house, i went through a mourning that even now still feels raw. i visited the house a few years ago and i felt a terrible sense of loss because the new owners had scraped the yard all of edge addition. ed looked like a prison yard and felt oddly like a violation of memory. but my mourning of the house is less about an actual house than about what it represented, home, for my close-knit family, my parents and their six children. it was in that house that it began to form a sense of self, and i was in that house that i first began to read. reading was the a biding love of my childhood. i remember books as physical things, some with covers torn off, spines cracked, others with the stiff and transparent plastic cover from the library. i remember books as mood and place, reading curled up in bed during the heavy rains, reading in the room downstairs that, after my older sisters left home, became the family dumping ground. the sunlight alarmingly bright through the large windows. reading as i ate at the dining table, the book propped against the tall flask filled with hot water for tea. i remember books of consolation and i remember books as absolute luminous pleasure. i was an early reader, and i read mostly british children's books. and because of her book is came to long for certain things, ginger beer, the circle, picnics. i was also an early riser, and the first stories i wrote were about white people in england who ate apples and talked about the weather because that was what the characters in the books i readied. even though could i not understand for the life of me white people actually said when they talked about the weather. in my world, the sun was always out, except for when it rained, and then the sun was out again. but i was a child, and like all children, was vulnerable in the face of a story. because i had not seen myself reflected in books issue did not think that people like me could be in books. my experience was not unique. it is in fact devastatingly ordinary. ii have heard similar stories from people who grew up in kenya and sly lan could and gentleman maim could and india to be brought up educated in a post colonial developing country is to encounter books as wonderful and fascinating and enjoyable but fundamental foreign. when did my view of literature expand? when did i learn that my stories were worthy of literature? when i discovered other kinds of writing as an older child. the begin mogboluwaga -- one oft beautiful book is ever read in nostalgia and elly and beauty about a boy growing up in guinea. it was glorious discovery, book that was delicious page-by-page, but also a kind of gesture of returned pride. it was book that said, don't you dare believe other people's story of you. i loved the books about women, the way they felt looked familiar and exotic can. a series called the pacesetters, and in reading them, i discovered the rest of africa. one, for example, was called, "meet me in conatry," and for a long time that west african capitol held a certain romance for me because of the book. on the university campus, books drifted in and out of homes, borrowed and returned, creased and torn, passed around. i read everything except for fantasy. the world steamed me so unknown and unknowable that it felt like an invasion to have to inhabit imaginary walled while the mystery of ore own world were yet to be deciphererred. i read every romance that came my way. suspect some people have had the same experience. i readed" in their reich." read suddenly sheldon and robert ludlum. read water babies. and like many teenagers in west africa, i read every single book by james chase, whose crime novels have such choice titles as ," like a hole in the head." they were set in america and had their own particular hard-boiled feeling. i was deflated to learn years later that nobody in america had apparently ever heard of james. the genteel romance of barbara cartland. i remember one in which a woman's husband was assumed dead in the great war, and he turned up years late on her doorstep, and she married another man who was his best friend. his name was charles, and his hair had gone white and he had changed terribly during the war, but she of course opens the door and knows right away that it's him. i feel genuinely affected by that book because in in the mellow -- melo drama where the human truths. i decide not know of the distinction between commercial and serious fiction. for me, the distinction was merely books that moved me and books that did not. i read, too about the catholic church. my father has books about the church, and on dies when there was nothing else to read i would dust them off and read them. because i grew up in -- the majority of people in my world -- were ethnic tribalism was not a specter on campus as no doubt it would have been had i grown up in the campus in one of nigeria's cosmopolitan centers. what we did have was religious tribalism. there was a catholics protestant divide. itself a legacy of the competing missionaries, the i-rich catholics and the english anglicans who divide as they convert. my father's family, for example, had become roman whack the were encouraged from attend thing wisdom little of their anglican relatives. the religion on the campus was mild and for us children cysted of arguments on the playground about which church was better. was merely always the spokesperson for the catholic side because i had read big books and i could use big words that the other children did not understand. of course, they didn't know that i hardly understood those words myself. infall ability, and then that word i loved upon discovering it, apologist. considered myself, at the edge of 12, proud catholic apologist. i read books to find out how to argue the catholic case for the blessed virgin and for priest being sell bat and authorize at the bible needing tradition to back it up and i can skill quote the scripture of the anointing of the sick. don't tempt me. my family's catholicism was moderate but conservative. the african permutation of catholicism was subtle and no so subtle disparagement of prechristian africa. to be baptized you had to choose an english name because english was christian and african languages were not, apparently. we went to mass every sunday, all dressed up, and after mass we took a drive to town to buy snacks and newspapers. mass fascinated me. the drama, the colors, the rituals. at easter i cried during malls at night, when people lit candles and then raided them up in dark, and i felt like sea of stars. i knew words the priested said at mass and i would sometimes repeat them under my breath. sometimes i even wanted to be a priest. not a nun, which seemed to me a subservient role, devoid of the power and the drama and that halo hat seemed to come naturally with the priesthood. i was fascinated by faith, the idea of what people believe what immigrant can make -- what it can make them do. i see now how similar fiction and faith are. even our intertwined. faith is a form of fiction, and fiction requires faith. both have no need for proof. asked questions about catholicism, about doctrine, about religion, about god, at first my questions were asked of adults in my family, in catechism class and at confession, all in the service of defending catholicism. but soon, as young teenager, my questions became more about understanding, about dock trip that seemed to me to contradict the idea of a just and loving god. this kind of questioning made adults uncomfortable. and often was met with serious strategies of silence. when i did get answers, i found many of them unsatisfactory. too simplistic. or disseptember belling or nonsense scale did not understand the disturb born refusal on the parts of adults to admit to ignorance or incompleteness on matters of faith. i began then to rem nice in myself a strain of resistance, distrust of whatever seemed too easy or glib and that had deeply informed my writing. on campus, all the catholic children went to catechism classes three times a week, until such a time as they took the examination for first holy communion. that was very exciting. your mother took you to the market to buy white fabric for a dress, and white lace for a veil, and then to the tailor to make the dress, and you barely slept that night because you were delighted of having that smile white circle of breathed in your mouth, the host it's was called and you kept in mind all the stories you had been told about the host, especially the story about the child who stole one host and took it homerun, only for the room in the house to be filled with blood. i thought the host would melt like ice on my tongue. and when finally i received communion its dry, pastry texture was a disappointment to me. but this story is really about dogs and memories. to prepare for first holy communion i went to cat simple alone because my brother had already received this first holy museumon and my other brother was not old up in for cat sympathy. chump was 20 minute walk from home sway set off in the afternoon, wearing a day dress, rubber slippers and the requisite scarf for every visit to church girls girls girls ande scares. each day filled me win trepidation because i had to walk by a house that had dogs that were sprawled in front of the house. ... this is a very clear memory i have, running down the street pursued by a dog. i didn't know i was screaming as i iran until i -- for compound and my mother, who just driven it and stated by her car said is that why you were screaming and running down the street just because a dog and i thought she should've been more sympathetic. actually she said it sounded less pathetic and [inaudible]. sympathy came, however, in her previous the car taking to church. when i recounted the story years later, having been asked why i was. the dogs, my brother told me that racecar had flown ahead as i ran that he went back later picked it up the street about it. i do not remember this at all but i had added that detail to my memory of that date and i have come memories as a collected sculpture. when i read about jim joyce's fear of dogs, having been pursued by one as a child, i felt strangely comforted. i was a child which many questions and i was educated in a system in which questioning was not necessarily rewarded. in secondary school i always got straight a's in my subjects. this was pleased a parent but in the last term my stomach would tighten with anxiety because my teachers often wrote comments about what they termed my lack of perspective these comments always got me in trouble with my parents. i still have not forgiven those teachers lack of respect was delete my curiosity by asking questions by taking delight in intellectual argument. my refusal to accept easy answers and my reluctance to perform a certain kind of exaggerated deference. my teachers, i felt, should not have punished me for this. i suspect that this particular resentment, the sense of self righteous is that i has propelled some way rating and i do see now looking back that i could very well have been a bit of an annoying child [-left-square-bracket yet, i wish the adults who had authority over me school had known to guide my questioning to encourage my curiosity. i did have someone teachers who did that and there were exceptions there was a gentle, wonderful grade five teacher let me write place in prison with my classmates to encourage my writing and reading and she said to me once you feel things strongly and there was a wistful sadness in her eyes as though she knew this would be both lesson and curse us it would infuse rewriting but also that it would lead to that curse of the depression. but there was also the wonderful brilliant english teacher in secondary school who encouraged my love of english and she read my x-rays closely and encouraged and guided me so great was within me that she would ask a question class and people would get it wrong and then she would invariably turn to me and say tell them. [laughter] her confidence and we really want to be better but i also lived in secret terror, imagining the day when i would not, in fact, know the correct answer. was drawn early on to language in two languages. i grew up with both english is my first language but we were not allowed to speak with a lot in school. it was called said derogatory tone speaking in the vernacular. even the word. killer was wrapped in shame and i look back now at the observatory of this and the great sadness of this and how colonialism most insidious legacy is its ability to denigrate that which is my nigerian education was exclusively in english. it was considerably uncool to take [inaudible] as a subject but i did up until the secondary school level and i got the highest grade. i enjoyed learning the formality of the language i spoke although written [inaudible] was a different version of what i spoke at home. it will remain for me the language of family and the language of formality. i cannot make a philosophical argument because my education did not give me the tools and i regret this very much and it was important for me to show in my writing this world of two languages where characters spoke as do many people i did crew up with and both languages and both languages in the same sentence. mostly american editors often try to get me to take out the igbo out of my fiction or to over explain it but i always told that too. trying to show the texture of my world was important to me. it was important for the integrity of my fiction. perhaps i wanted also to make a political and emotional plea but above all else a truth claim that both languages belonged to me and that both languages are fully mine. my father speaks igbo beautifully and he is a radiant storyteller. he told stories mostly of his childhood so often the years that i came to know the stories myself and sometimes i remind him of the details he had omitted from a previous version. my grandfather died during the war whenever new came startlingly alive. my father's storytelling. i deeply enjoyed spending time with my family and my parents and siblings and listening to my father the past and spoke always in igbo except for when he had to explain a particular complex proverb above the level of the igbo level of the children we spoke. i love the anecdotes in the wit and humor and i was soaked them all up and observe them and as i became older and began to feel a sense of pride in the culture for which these stories came from a pride that i came from a wide and humorous in enterprising kind people. but the best place to listen to those who spoke igbo was at my ancestral home, my village. like most igbo families we had two homes and one in the town where we lived and where my parents worked in the other home in my father's ancestral hometown. it was his home, our ancestral hometown, that we journeyed at christmas, at easter and some weekends or for short stays when we children were on holiday for school. ancestral house was an old, lovely, rolling two-story building enclosed by cement walls and the red gates and this sandy yard that was particularly good plane. orange trees and the little orchard of banana trees in the back and once my mother attempted to picking up flowers in her yard but some stray goats made their way into her compound when the caveman neglected to close the gate and these resourceful animals saw in the red and yellow flowers a perfectly colorful feast. that was that for the village. [inaudible] was sacred and my sister told me a story of a python found curled in my grandmother's outhouse years before i was born. my sister was terrified but my grandmother walked into the bathroom and spoke in gentle tones to the python asking it to peasley so as not to scare the children. python then crawled itself and slid away. there were many other stories i heard in the village about life in the village and of people killed you with awful, native medicine and turned animals and those who buys were impervious to metal and weapons and those went to secret nightly meetings. so when i discovered years later the genre of writing called magical realism i felt immediately suspicious because i knew very intimately this world where the magical was not considered magical at all but merely ordinary and part of life. at christmas the big masquerade kids in the village and children were filled with excitement at seeing them. but girl, i was told, cannot see the most exciting masquerade why, i asked. well, because they are girls. the unfairness of this state me and i began to question and argue about the need to discard the parts of my culture that diminished the humanity of women and that arguing in question and process remains ongoing. still, today to be back in my ancestral hometown is to feel a sense of an almost longing and it is quite simply home. it is where my first great-grandmother, it's supposed to be her real carnation, lived and it is where i want to be buried. i like to think that this rootedness in this metaphysical within this acts as a springboard for me and for my walk and enabled me ultimately to feel comfortable in any part of the world. when we first moved to number 305 cartwright avenue shared the biggest room upstairs my broth brother. it had three beds, dressers, wardrobe, it did not have a desk. it led out to the veranda and the veranda had a second door that led to the study and my father's dusty layer, lined with shelves of journals and dominated by a large desk. the desk was filled with pens, paper clips, files and at the farthest corner of the black [inaudible] forms. i wonder now why the form was kept in the study instead of somewhere neutral downstairs but it was and so through secondary school i had a comfortable phone conversations with friends while my father sat there marking students assignments. i wrote my first book at the age of eight on the desk and aligned exercise book titled down mcintosh lane. those early books invariably had blue eyes and were called and or kathy and had [inaudible]. at 13 i sent off two poems i had written to prime people and this magazine did not publish poetry. it was a gossipy cultural weekly but my sisters read it and so it was always in her home. the editor had been so startled by those poems and by my cover letter stating how old i was that the poems were promptly published in the next edition [-left-square-bracket at 17, i was sent it off to reputable publishers and i was happy when it was accepted for publication. then there was a poetry collection that i called my anthology of 100 poems. my mother asked her secretary, tall, warm ambitious man to type them up and have them found in the manuscript. john, my mother later told me, did not mind at all that he had to type up this teenage poetry. she knew because he read them aloud as he typed and at the end he told my mother which he liked. [speaking in native tongue] let's wait and see what this child will become. when, at the age of ten, i had to have an appendectomy i went to the university of nigeria teaching hospital and i stayed away from school for more than a week after the surgery. i was thrilled by this. it meant time to do nothing but write. what do you want me to bring for you my sister asked me, right after the surgery. i was supposed to ask for all the things i might not ordinarily get about the benefits of being sick, sweet and biscuits and [inaudible] but i asked for exercise books and as many as she could bring because i intended to fill them up with writing. is there any americans were confused, exercise book is really a notebook and has nothing to do with actual exercising. [laughter] i wrote on my hospital bed and there was an element of subversion in the act of writing in my hospital bed. the idea that i was doing this thing that was my first love instead of the sensible thing which was schoolwork and later when i was briefly in medical school which i applied for because anyone who does wellin school in nigeria is expected to become a doctor i would write short stories sketches at the back of my notebooks during biology class and i felt then that element of subversion. my family was supportive of my writing but it was understood and unspoken that this is not a potential career and it was something you did in addition to your career. i was, for example, in the young writers club in primary school and this was very much encouraged by my parents but i graze in the way subject came first for anything to do with the young writers club. at home i wrote at the dining table when i cannot use the study desk because my father was working or because the siblings was on the phone. the dining table, light green in long, was sometimes used by my brother and his friends my parents were out as a table tennis table. it was also the family dumping ground of newspapers and university circulars and wedding invitations and bananas and the tiny ants that lived underneath it appeared to breakfast to crowd around the sugar. i always cleared a space for myself at one end opposite of the grand old, woodpaneled air-conditioner which was used so rarely that a pop-up dust always burst out first for claire follows. i remember that we seemed to put it on during birthday parties and it was noisy and made a loud whooshing sound so during birthday parties when the parlor was pulled of friends there was always that loud, vacuum like sound of the air conditioning in the background. my brothers and i had separate rooms after our oldest siblings left home. mine had a girlish table where i played my lotions and powder compact and it still did not have a desk. in 1997 i left home to attend college in america. when i returned four years later with the final page of my first novel my parents had put a writing desk in my room. it was a square and sturdy and i spread out my page. an edited and mocked them there. a few years later when i was writing my second novel i knew i needed to go to my ancestral hometown to smell the dust and interview my relatives that survived the war. i also needed to be in three or five margaret cartwright avenue is that nurtured me. when i returned at this time my parents had installed an air conditioning in my room and the light blinks when i turned it on. i don't know if that is assigned but that i'll be done soon. [laughter] i sat at the desk and i wrote long chapters and time to time i would look out at the veranda, no longer used much, where years of rain had stayed the four adult great. it is now almost ten years since i was little last in that house. i remember my very last night they are and my parents had gone to bed and there was a power failure and i did not know how to turn on the generator but i knew that there were candles in the cabinet downstairs and so in the pitch blackness i walked from my room down the stairs into the dining room to find a candle in the cabinet. i did not stumble once. thank you. [applause] [applause] [applause] >> thank you for inspiring us with your story. bringing us the past and president in the questions of your creative beginnings supply the where and why in the second annual lecture. i'm darlene taylor, executive director of the faulkner foundation and on behalf of kenneth pulver foundation and our partner in hosting this lecture the foundation i think each of you for joining us tonight in this historic washington building, a place with its own story, known for its celebration of black culture and music in the black broadway, a place that provides a home for the voice of some of america's most talented artists. being here is still the convergence of past, president, site, sound in the voices linking us in a special way. this is a thrilling night for us and our hall of more than 1200 people excited about literature and writers creative journey. if you all for sharing that love of literature and at penn fokker our mission is to create a lifelong love of literature so thank you for joining us. we work to build new audiences for contemporary fiction. the lecture is in a unique format and partnership that brings the most acclaimed writers today to watch to share their stories of their beginnings. this is the first of penn fokker's literary conversation for the season and we hope you have enjoyed this will join us again. i close by saying again thank you to the many people who make it possible for us to be here in the dc office of cable television film and entertainment and the dc commission of arts trinity, our mayor uriel bowser and the team at the lincoln theater. thank you for your graciousness and welcoming us in your home. also, my colleagues at penn fokker, our chair susan freeze president and the wealthy foundation in the front volunteers that helped us tonight. thank you to c-span2 dc cable for bringing this important literary conversation too many more thousands of readers were out there. good night bac. [applause] [applause] >> here is a look at some authors recently featured on the tvs "after words", our work our weekly author interview program. >> he was exactly the same on stage as hostage. he lit up the room wherever he went and an early story of this is interesting is i always ask on the campaign trail the girls who do make up 20 and that's a place where no one can see you. no cameras and no campaign staff and you can be as nice or as rude as you want to be and those wonderful women will help you out anyways. i said who was the most immediately surprised me with the answer. then i said was the nicest and they said it was donald trump and one of the girls said stop it, we will get in trouble. i thought it was interesting that when i met him on the campaign trail so different from other politicians and was genuinely nice and authentic like these other people who had run everything for a poll to make sure it worked heated out of that didn't higher those who as he strangely bragged one point. >> afterward airs on the tv every saturday at 10:00 p.m. eastern and sunday at 9:00 p.m. eastern. >> why did you want to write about these women in the suffragist? this wasn't just the suffragist movement but it aspect that has gone virtually no attention. >> i went back to school and i knew very little about the suffrage and they did not teach in school. it was one of the topics that interested me while i was back in school and i was first going to write about suffrage in the 19th century, when there was this terrible schism between the two branches of the movement in between elizabeth cady stanton and susan b anthony on the side and lucy stone and her husband henry blackwell on the other. stone and blackwell after the civil war are staunch abolitionists and they believe that the black men should be enfranchised first. the 15th amendment was given block for the right to vote which would ratify and then women can fight their vote. susan b and if they were going into the constitution we are going with them or else were fighting it. this split the movement for almost 30 years and they had rival organizations and deeply damaging for the cause. i was set out and i was going to be my dissertation topic. i was going to prove that susan b and elizabeth were horrible people and ruin the movement and support but it was so depressing [-left-square-bracke.[laughter] i wanted to start thinking about what finally worked and wanted to look forward to the positive news that women finally got to vote so i started researching the early 20th century to see what was going on and i started reading newspaper accounts and i tripped over these women and no one had noticed them. they were there and they were too famous to notice. >> you didn't know about them when you started this, as i write? >> no, i was reading newspapers from the 1900s and there would be occasional lessons to these events where these wealthy celebrity, socialite coming out for suffrage and what happens when they joined the suffrage in 19 oh eight this again is a movement that has been in the doldrums and been languishing and it is considered the cause of the french and the intellectual fringe and there's very codeword and there are codewords for the lesbian friends or radical fringe that clearly is not the mainstream. then companies society women and their covered already in their celebrity figures already and are covered by the press for their decor in their clothes and their travel in their entertainment and they are just over the top. it is one reason it is such a fun read. when they came out for votes for women in electrified public opinion. it's sort of interested the mainstream and it would be like angelina jolie embracing and suddenly you when refugees get sexy. who would've thought? ... >> host: why did you why did you decide to write the book? >> guest: because people around me didn't get it. journalists who often take themselves seriously think they are super smart and understand the world were frequently underestimating it. at the