faulkner foundation whose mission is to promote the love of the written. the lecture is made possible by generous contributions from author down in memory of her mother, aileen wallace and her grandmother, aileen lampton wallace and also by the family of eudorawelty . in april 1983, eudora gave a series of lectures at harvard university . the lectures were collected as a volume of essays entitled one writer's beginnings. published by the harvard university press, one writers 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 after early experiences contributed to her distinctive literary voice, her novels include the robber bridesmaid. which was adapted to the stage and a tony award-winning musical in broadway. delta wedding, losing battles. and the optimists daughter, for which she was awarded the pulitzer prize. eudora is the master of the short story and her stories have collected in many places but notably to, a curtain of green and the golden apples. she was received more than 30 honorary degrees from institutions across our country. the penn falconer foundation and the wealthy 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 in washington. my inaugural lecture of salman rushdie. >> i want to thank the dc commission on arts and humanities and the dc 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 yourcell phones so that you and no one else will be interrupted . it is my pleasure this evening to introduce miss ralph eubanks who has the honor and intern of introducing our guest lecturer tonight. ralph eubanks was born and raised in the very small town of mount college in south mississippi.he earned his undergraduate degree from the university of the city 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, 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 is a fellow at the new american foundation. he is the former editor of the virginia quarterly. and he served as director of publishing at the library of congress were 18 years . his essays and criticisms have appeared in the washington post, the wall street journal,the american scholar , npr and the new yorker. last year, he was the eudora welty visiting scholar in southern studies at novi college in jackson and currently he is a visiting professor of english and southern studies at the university of mississippi and 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'm 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 mister holmes adams. [applause] >> good evening and welcome to the second annual eudora welty lecture. it is a great pleasure to speak here tonight in honor of miss welty's memoir one writers beginning, a book that serves as a guide as i wrote in my own memoir, forever is a long time. it is also a delight to introduce chiamanda ngochi adichie. a writer who like miss welty uses place as a means of grounding perfection. to miss welty, the place was her home state of mississippi. the magnolia skate geography and history and inevitably, its policies, are a powerful presence in miss tran 11's fiction. for miss chiamanda ngochi adichie, the places nigeria, one thatseems to stem geographically and historically , what is linked in unexpected ways. when speaking of eudora welty, my students always ask me why i usually refer to her as ms. welty. until now, my response was that referred to her otherwise would violate southern manners and we were ever never really acquainted. 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 explorations with my students of the lyricism and irony and scientific descriptions and narrative structure of both perfection 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 millsap college, a place where she also taught writing. during that time, i came to think of eudora more as a neighbor. then as a distant literary figure. it was difficult for me to continue to be so formal. now, in her essay anomalous crusade she ponders whether works of literature should take crusading positions. the novelists work neither corrects nor condones, not at all to comfort but to make what's told alive, eudora wrote. that the novel is not apolitical or morally neutral. she continues. indeed, we are more aware of the novelists moral convictions through a novel than any statement of belief could make us. >> so eudora believed that a novelist can contribute to social change in a way that an editorial or piece of journalism or not. without a doubt, chiamanda ngochi adichie cheered that belief with eudora. >> while eudora believed the novelist is not a crusade, she did believe that a writer half a point of view. a position and perspective about the world. for eudora, chiamanda ngochi adichie also has a distinctive outlook that guides are fiction. and 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 can and should be better. 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 miss adichie's fiction, she provides the reader with a glasslike clarity of where you are. from the surface, the setting may seem unfamiliar, but she quickly places you in the world she's created. she also knows when to make her reader comfortable as well as when to challenge them and push toward thought-provoking discomfort. miss adichie has warned americans about the danger of the same story. the idea of people living in a certain area of the world as only one kind of experience. we in the west often misunderstand the diversity of african culture and miss adichie's fiction has served as a clarifying force to think differently about nigeria and postcolonial africa. it is miss 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 wrestled with its place in the world so it's not surprising that southerners often find themselves at odds with what it means to be southern. it was a familiar conflict for eudora, one represented in her story, where is the voice coming from. written on the night of the murder of the civil rights activist medgar evers. the only story she said that she wrote in anger. when eudora heard the news, it occurred to her what was going on in the mind of the man who pulled the trigger. she knew because she had lived all her life. now, neither the south or africa's self referential perspective nor its competing narratives from both inside and outside the region 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 ofplace . as well as discontinuity in the ways that their sense of place is being transformed. interestingly enough, reading her novel americana, i'm reminded of another link between miss adichie work in the american south. >> the character in this blog gathers pointed insights into the american idea of race. particularly as it applied to black americans. >> when feminist struggle with what it means to be black in the united states, she's also struggling with identity that has its roots in the american south. >> the history of american blackness is 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, once misunderstood helps us understand all places better. since your work seem to be guided by the spirit of eudora with a sense of place and a belief in female empowerment, that i know she shares, i sincerely hope that after tonight, you miss adichie will feel the same connection i feel tonight with my neighbor, eudora welty. it is my pleasure to present chiamanda ngochi adichie. [applause] >> thank you. thank you, thank you all for being here. i'm very honored to be here today in the shadow of a woman who was one of the three had writers of the 20th century. and one whose work helped me better understand america. after i moved from nigeria to the us at the age of 19, i began to read as much american fiction as i could. to make sense of this new country whose contours had been loosely formed in my imagination by the films and televisionshows that i had watched . i still remember reading eudora welty's short story, where is the voice coming from? which is a fictionalized account of the murder of the civil rights activist medgar evers. in the story, the white man who murders the black activist is known afterwards and tells his wife what he has done. and his wife says it's going to get him right back on tv, just watch for the funeral. that line did for me what the history book had not. it intimated a particular white southern view of black americans. and i saw how dehumanizing a group of people turns your own humanity into a hollow shell.and i saw also what is powerfully left unsaid. the innocence, the grief, the resilience in the face of monstrosity that is the story of african americans in america. [applause] while i know eudora welty's fiction, i was ashamed not to have read until recently her beautiful little memoir, one writers beginning. not least because it is so refreshing really lacking in the kind of irony and savage self flagellation that contemporary memoirs seem to demand it. i was struck by the certainty with which eudora welty seamlessly makes the link between biography and fluidity. she recounts her mother's rambling friend who talks just for the sake of talking and connects thismemory to her own use of monologue in her fiction. the truth , she speaks of her family, i recounted the only in all the charming detail 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 beginning is utterly lacking in clarity and certainty. because i have a contemplative relationship with the story of my own fluidity. >> the reality of being a writer today is that it is no longer sufficient merely to write. you must also dissipate in the ritual of promotion. >> now, i should say that unlike some of my fellow writers understandably hate any form of public performance, i quite enjoy some of these outings. the operating award being one. >> i enjoy some interviews and readings and conversations and i enjoyed meeting my readers. but all of these performances and events, necessarily involve a certain kind of explaining and elucidation of one's own arts. the premise 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 lie. >> the great joy in writing fiction comes during the magical moments of being transported, of being beautifully lost in one's imagination. >> and those moments are difficult to dispel into intellectually coherent explanations. and so, i have had to invent answers to the sorts of questions writers are often asked. about my process and choices, my character. in inventing those answers, sometimes i believe myself. and sometimes i don't. it is in some ways like being your own psychoanalyst. it's just not the most pleasant prospect, really. but for me, the ideal is this. to write a piece of fiction and then to talk about anything else but that piece of fiction. >> so i will speak of the touchstones in my life. family, church, school. not because i am certain of how this shapes my writing but because i know they must have shaped it. i am the daughter of a professor. and for me to be a native of anywhere in the world today is to feel an immediate sense of familiarity. i grew up on the council of the university of nigeria. a small town in southeastern nigeria. the castle was spread, across onto native grounds, housed on three lines streets. rent off, well tended hedges. it was a small, slow and lovely place. >> it's decline would,, starting with military dictatorship. that stopped funding education. but my childhood in the early 1980s was the last gas of the university's sparkling age. >> as the main trends for counsel of the large east, that very few guards in uniform, completed really, many of them elderly men with gentle demeanors, and before each card, you'll see the driver stopped, opened the trunk. i've used the word trunk as an american conception. when at perhaps the age of about 11 or 12, my mother or father let me come out and open the trunk, it felt like a right of passage to adulthood, to responsibility. >> but checking cards as they drove in and out of camp was a symbol of apartments. of specialness. it served the campus. was not part of the larger town. and it was not. it was a wall wall of its own. it had a catholic church and a protestant church. it had a children's library. it had a well staffed the medical center. it had a primary school for the children of the staff. it had a swimming pool and tennis courts and a basketball court. and when the general and his team, the campus generators came on, these privileges i was fortunate to party. as children, we were seen and we felt seen. and so we grew up with a sense of shortness of self because our world recognized us and acknowledged us. >> in my family, i 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 nostalgic for the things not yet experienced. i was a child whose sharp and very early on. whose skills of deep drawing. the pastime 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 at times when i was not drawn to story, to human emotion and human motivation. 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 he was assigned a new house on campus from the 305 avenue. but for my family moved in, the previous shopkeeper happened to be in on bit of coincidence that would lead again significance, the acclaimed writer. who was also a staff of the university. >> i did not think much of this going on since university staff moved in and out of university housing. until years later when my first novel was about to be published in the us. my editor asked me to tell her about my life so that we could classify it. and i did. and then i added, by the way. i grew up in the 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've 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's great achievements. i remember the house as it was then, the light two-story house and a large yard. the sketch of whistling pines. the gravel driveway, the role of herbal bougainvillea's ordered by flowers that shrank and died each season and magically floured again when the rains came. the red and yellow roses and the flower bed by my office. >> the trees in the back. cashew, nine growth. and that's all lonely oil pan. the first time we saw the house, we look at the living room, dining room, room and kitchen. and then it was time to go upstairs. i began to cry when i saw the stairs. it looked insurmountable he high. i stood there and 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 brother. okay. let's see who can do it the fastest. i remember playing football with my brother and our neighbor . on the lawn. empty milk cans placed in groups. and that made me feel on the lawn too.a rope at our next so that we argued intermittently whether the shuttle had gone over or under. i remember our partner whose name was joel, watching the plans of the hand and my brother following him around and telling me a story that jamaal had told him. jamaal used have red eyes. because he had fought in the nigerian 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 that he had not killed any innocent people and his eyes consequently lost their redness. my brother must have been about 10 and i about seven. but this story has stayed with me and was there in my consciousness as i, many years later wrote my novel about the nigerian diaspora of the war.i remember the tree that we climbed and from which i once sailed.the fall that left a mark on my arm and because i am spatially challenged, it is that mark that i now use to tell my left from my right. i remember that the gore by 30 had a kind of elegant elegant slouch in its branches and it was in its thickened hands that the white fluffy chicken brought in the market was tied before they were killed on sunday lunch. i remember riding my bicycle up and down the avenue. all the other children loved going downhill but i face the loss of control so i went not fast as we did but slowly, carefully creating the bicycles wait. i remember the thinly flat oversized boxes that crawled in withthe rainy season , and it smelled horrible. we called them american cockroaches. true, i don't know why but true. [laughter] 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's larger than normal. i remember the veranda upstairs that looked across our neighbors compound. my brothers and i entertain people there and when i was a teenager i called there and spied on the older boys on whom i had a crush. when my parents retired from the university years ago and moved out of the house, i went through a morning that even now still feels raw. i visited the house a few years ago and i felt this terrible sense of loss because the new owners had scraped the art of all vegetation. it felt like a prison yard and felt oddly like a violation of memory. but my morning that house is less about an actual house that about what it represented and to whom. for my timely parents and their six children. it was in that house that i began to form a senseof self . and it was in that house that i began to read. reading was an abiding love of my childhood. i remember books as physical things, some with covers torn off, spines cracked. others with a 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 oldest sisters left became the family dumping ground. the sunlight alarmingly bright, the large windows. reading as i ate at the dining table, the book propped against the tall flat that was filled with water. >> i remember books as constellations and i remember books as absolute luminous pleasure. i was an early reader and i read mostly children's books, in its license of favorites and because of that i became too longing for certainthings , ginger beer. the circus. picnics. i was also an early writer and the first stories i wrote were about white people in england ate apples and talked about the weather. because that was what the character in the books i read did. it was also i couldn't understand for the life of me what people actually said when they talk 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, i was vulnerable in the shape of the story and because i had not seen myself reflected in books, i did not think that people like me could read books. my experience was not unique because in fact, i was facing the ordinary. i have heard similar stories from people who grew up in kenya and sri lanka and jamaica and india. to be brought up educated in a colonial developing country and encounter books as wonderful and fascinating and enjoyable, but fundamentally boring. >> wended my view of literature and? when did i learn that my stories were worthy of literature. >> when i discovered other kinds of writing as an older child.>> the guinean writer and mara eliasson's novel, translated into english as the dark child or the african child, remains one of the most beautiful books i have ever read. and it's both apology and elegy and beauty, about a boy growing up. i really of god was a glorious stuff. here was a book that was initialed page by page but was also a kind of gesture of returned pride. it was a book that said, don't you dare delete another person's story of you. i love books about ybor women but we felt familiar and exhaustive. it was a wonderful young adult, african series called the page center, dramaand romances . and in reading them i discovered the rest of africa. one for example was called meet me in, three. and for a long time that west african country held a certain romance for me because of that 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 walls seemed to me so unknown and knowable. that felt like an even asian of happening in a mesentery world while the mystery of our own world was yet to be siphoned. >> i read every meal that came my way. >> and i suspect some people have had the same experience. i read albert's fears inside the third reich. i read sid sheldon and robert ludlum. i read anna karen any and water baby and the love of el dorado. and like many in new jersey, and from west africa i read everything every one of these books by james hatley whose prime novels such choice titles as a hole in the head. there were set in america. and had their own particular hard-boiled our god. so i was deflated to learn years later that nobody in america had ever heard of james a dj. the genteel romance of barbara heartland were everywhere and i read them all. i remember one in which a woman's husband was assumed dead in the great war. and it turns up years later at her doorstep and she is married another man who of course was his best friend. . his name was charles and his hair had gone white and he had changed currently during the war. but she of course opens the door and knows right away that him. >> i am so genuinely affected by that book. because in melodrama, i had not yet been indoctrinated into the cult of literary snobbery. i did not yet know that spurious distinction made between commercial and serious fiction. for me, the distinction was merely books that moved me and books that did not. i read to about the catholic church.my father had books about the church and indeed when there was nothing else to read, i would dust them off and read them. cause i grew up in a land and the majority of people in my world, they were in war, ethnic tribalism was not in pamphlets as no doubt it would have been had i grown up in nigeria's cosmopolitan centers. >> what we did have was religious tribalism. >> there was a catholic protestant divine. >> it self a colonial carryover, a legacy of competing missionaries that the irish catholics and english anglicans who divided the concerted. my father's family for example had to be calm catholic in the 1920s were discouraged from attending a wedding of relatives. the religious tribalism was largely mild and for most children consisted of arguments in the playground about which church was better. i was nearly always the spokesperson for the catholic side because i had read big books and i could use big words but the other children did not understand. of course, they didn't know that i had learned these words myself. transferring pronunciation into the ability of mystery him. and then, that word i grew up describing apology. i considered myself at the age of 12 a proud catholic apologists. . i read books to find out how catholic case where the blessed virgin for increased celibate and for the bible needing tradition. >> and today i can still quote bits of scripture that backup battery catholic sentiments of the anointing. >>. >>. >> my family in catholicism, marjorie, but consider this. the african mutation of romance catholicism with its cultural and not-so-subtle discernment of pre-christian africa. to be baptized you had to choose an english theme because english was christian and african religions were not, apparently. i went to mass every sunday all dressed up and after mass we took a drive to town to get newspapers. mass fascinated me. the drama, the ritual. at easter, i cried during each mass at night. when people lit candles and then raise them up in the dark and it felt like a sea of stars. i knew the awards participating said in mass and i would sometimes repeat them under my breath. >> sometimes i even wanted to be a priest. not a none, which seemed to me a subservient, monochromaticrole . devoid of power and drama and that innuendo of instability that seemed to come naturally to priesthood. i was fascinated by the idea of what people believe and what it can make them do. and my first novel would be about this among other things. i see now how similar fiction and faith are, even intertwined. faith is more than fiction and fiction requires faith. both have no meaning for proof. i asked the questions about catholicism, about doctrine, about religion, about god. i suppose my questions were asked of adults and my family in class and at confession, all in the service of defending catholicism. butsoon, as a young teenager , i soon became more about understanding. about doctrines 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 silence. but i did get answers, i found many of them unsatisfactory. for dissembling, or quite simply nonsensical. and i did not understand the stubborn refusal on the part of adults to admit to ignorance or incompletenesson matters of faith . i began then to recognize in myself a strain of resistance , the trump of whatever seemed glib. and i think this way of looking at the world informed my writing. on pamphlets, all the catholic children went to classes three times a week. until such a time as they took examinations. communion was very exciting. your mother took it in the market for address and white leafs for avail and then to the table to make address and you barely slept at night because you were delighted and afraid of finally having that small white circle of red in your mouth. and you kept in mind all the stories you had been told. especially the story about the child who stole one host and took it home only for the room in their house and to become filled with blood. i thought the host would melt like ice on my tongue. and when finally i received communion, it's dry paper a texture was a disappointment to me. but this story is really about dogs and memory. to prepare for communion i went to catholicism alone because my brother had already received his holy communion and my brother kenny was not old enough for catechism. thechurch is a 20 minute walk from home so i would set off in the afternoon, wearing a day dress, rubber slippers and the requisite scarf for every visit to church . but each catechism date field filled me with trepidation because i would have to walk past horace house and they had dogs scrawled in front of their house, fierce dogs that were known to be poorly trained. so one afternoon i was walking past, terrified. my face resolutely turned away from their house and i had the dogs growl once and then again and i sensed rather than saw one of the dogs fly up and my body suddenly becamevery light as i ran . this is a very clear memory i have, running down the street being chased by a dog. i did not know i was screaming as i ran until i dashed into our compound and my mother who had just come in and was standing by her car said, is that why you are screaming and running downthe street, just because of the dog ? i thought she should have been more sympathetic. actually, she sounded even less sympathetic. when i read about james joyce, having himself pursued by one as a child, i felt strangely comforted. i was a child with many questions. i was educated in a system in which questioning was not necessarily rewarded. in secondary school i always got straight as in my subjects. which would have pleased any parent but each last day of term my stomach would tighten with anxiety because my teachers often wrote comments about what at the termed by lack of respect. these comments always got me in trouble with my parents. i still have not forgiven those teachers. [laughter] lack of respect, was really my curiosity, my asking questions, my taking delight in intellectual argument. my refusal to accept easy answers. 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 and fairness, that i felt, has propelled some of my writing. i do see now looking back, that i could very well have been a bit of an annoying child. and yet i wish that those who had authority over me in school had known how to guide my questioning, how to encourage my curiosity. i did have some wonderful teachers who did that. there were exceptions. gentle mrs. carlo in grade five, let me write plays produce them with my classmates and encouraged my writing and my reading. she said to me once, you feel things too strongly. and there was a wistful sort of sadness in our eyes as though she knew this would be both lesson and curse. it would infuse my writing, but that also it would lead to that curse of the -- depression. there was also the wonderful, brilliant, english teacher in secondary school who encouraged my love of english. she read mys says closely, encouraging me, guiding me, so great was her facing me that she would ask a question in class, a few people would get it wrong, and then, she would invariably turn to me and say, adichie, tell them. her confident in me, we lived in secret terror, imagining, when i would, would not know the correct answer. i was drawn early on to language, and to languages. i grew up with both ebol and english as first first languages. we would not allowed to in derogatory tone, speaking in the vernacular. even the word very -- vernacular was wrapped in shame. i looked at absurdity of it. great sadness of it, how colonialisms most insidious legacy the ability to make you denigrate that which is yours. my nigerian education was exclusively in english. it was considered terribly uncool to take ebol as a subject until the secondary school level. i got highest in 8th grade. i enjoy the ebol, the language of the i spoke, although written was different than i spoke at home. it will remain with me the language of family. the language of informality. i can not make a philosophical argument in ebol because my education did not give me the tools. i regret this very much. it was important from the beginning to show in my writing this wall of two langages. where characters spoke as many people i grew up with, both languages and sometimes both languages in the same sentence. editors, mostly american editors, often tried to get me to take out the ebo bits in my fiction or tone it down or overexplain it but i always choose not to. trying to show the texture of my world is important to me. it was important to the integrity of my fiction. perhaps i wanted also to make a political and emotional claim but above all else, the truthful claim. that both languages belonged to my. that both languages are are fully mine. my father speaks ebo beautifully. he is a radiant story-teller. he told stories mostly of his childhood, so often through the years that i came to know the stories myself. i would sometimes remind him of a detail he had omitted from a previous version. my grandfather, who died in biafra during the war and who i never. >> you, came startling alive through my father's story telling. i deeply enjoyed spending time with me family, my parents and siblings, listen to my father bring up the past. he spoke always in ebo. unless he explain ad complex proverb above the angela sized ebo we children spoke. he would switch to english. i loved the anecdotes, the proverbs, the wit, the humor. i grew with a sense of pride from where these stories came. that grew from enterprising people. the best to listen to my igbo was my village. like most igbo families we had go homes. one in the town where we lived and the one where my parents worked and other homes in my father's ancestral hometown. it was in this home, our ancestral hometown we journeyed at christmas, easter, some weekends. or for short stays when we children were in holiday from school. ancestral house was a old, lovely, rambling two-story building enclosed by cement walls, a red gate, a sandy yard that was particularly good for playing. orange trees, a little orchard of banana trees in the back. once my mother, attempted the planting of flowers in our yard but some stray goats made their way into our compound when the gate man neglected to close the gates. these resourceful animals they saw in the red and yellow flowers, a perfectly colorful feast. so that was that for flowers in the village. pythons were sacred in eye igbo land. my sister told me about a story about a python curled in my mother's out house the year before i was born. my sister was terrified. my grandmother walked into the bathroom, spoke in gentle tones to the python, telling it to leave not to scare the children. the python uncurleyed itself and slid away. there were many other stories i heard in the village about life in the village people who killed you with igo. native medicine. people turned into animals. people's bodies as hard as metal, impervious as weapons. people who went to secret nightly meetings in the bottom of the sea. so when i discovered years later a genre of writing called, man call realism, i felt immediately suspicious because i knew very intimately this world where the magical was not considered magical at all, but merely ordinary, merely a part of life. at christmas, the big masquerades appeared in the village. children were filled with excitement and going to see them. but girls, i was told, could not see the most exciting masquerades. why i asked? , well, because they're girls. unfairness of this stayed with me. and i began early to question and argue about the need to discard the parts of my culture that diminished the humanity of women. and that arguing and questioning process remains ongoing. still today, to be back in my ancestral hometown is to feel a sense of almost belonging. it is quite simply home. it is where my first great-grandmother i am in family law supposed to be her reincarnation, lived. it is where i want to be bury buryied. i would like to think that this rootedness, this metaphysical rootedness with a physical place acts as a springboard for me and for my work and enables me ultimately to feel comfortable in any part of the world. when we first moved to number 305 margaret avenue i shared the biggest room upstairs with my mothers. it has three beds, dressers, a wardrobe, did it not have a desk. it led out to the veranda. the remember rand today had a -- veranda had a tech story to the study, lined with journals and dominated by a large desk. the desk was cluttered with files, books, paper clips, pens and at the fartherrest corner the black rotary phone. i wonder now why the phone was kept in the study instead of somewhere neutral downstairs. throughout secondary school i had uncomfortable coverses with my school friends where my father had. i wrote the first book at age eight, in lined exercise book entitled, down macintosh lane. those early books had characters with blue eyes or were called ann or kathy and hadding dogs called sox. at 13, i sent off two portfolio managers written to magazine called prime people. this magazine did not publish poetry. it was a gossippy weekly. my sisters read it. it was still in my home. the editor was startled by the poems and my cover letter stating how old i was, the portfolio managers were published in nix edition. i was gratified. there is poem anthology of 100 portfolio managers. my mother asked, her -- a tall ambitious man, john, type them up. bound in manuscript. he did not mind at all he had teenage poetry. he read them aloud as typed. at end he called my mother, with delight. let's wait and see what this child will become. when, at age of 10 i had to have an appendectomy, i was taken to the university of nigeria hospital, i stayed away more than a week after 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 without the benefit of being sick. sweets and business cuts and lucavid but i asked for exercise books. as many as she could bring. because i intended to fill them up with writing. and as any americans were confused, exercise book is really notebook. it has nothing to do with actual exercising. [laughter]. i wrote on my hospital bed, and there was a element of subversion in that act of writings on my hospital bed. the idea i was doing this thing that was my first love, instead of the sensible thing which was school work. and later when i was briefly in medical school, which i applied for because, anyone who does well in school in nigeria is expected to become a doctor, i would write short story sketches at the back of my notebooks during biology class. i felt then too, that element of subversion. my family was supportive of my writing but it was understood and unspoken that this was not a potential career. it was something you did in addition to your career. i was, for example, in the young writers club in primary school. this was very much encouraged by my parents. but my grades and my subjects came first before anything, it was a young writers club. at home, i wrote at the dining table when i could not use the study desk because my father was working or because of a sibling was on the phone. the dining table, light green and long, was sometimes used by my brother and his friend when 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 after breakfast to crowd around bits of sugar. i always created space for myself at one end, opposite the grand, old, wood paneled air conditioner, used so rarely, a puff of dust burst out first before cool air followed. i remember that we seemed to put it on only during birthday parties, and it was noisy. it made a loud, whooshing sound. and so during birthday parties when the parlor was full of friends, there was always that loud vacuum-like sound of air conditioner in the background. my brothers and i had separate rooms when older sibling left home. i had a table where displayed my lotion and compact. i still did not have a desk. in 1997 i left home to attend college in america. when i returned four years later with final page proofs of my first novel. my parents put a writing desk in my room. it was square and sturdy. and i spread out my page proofs, and edited and marked them there. a few years later when i was writing my second novel, half of the yellow sun, i knew i needed to go to my ancestral hometown, to smell the dust and interview my relatives that survived the war. i needed to be in five, house that nurtured me, when i returned this time. my parents installed air conditioner in my room. the light blinked when i turned it on. i know that is a sign but i will be done soon. [laughter]. said at that desk and i wrote long chapters of half of the yellow sun, and from time to time i would look out at the veranda, no longer used much, where years of rain had stained the floor in a dull gray. it is now almost 10 years since i was last in that house. i remember my very last night there, my parents had gone to bed. there was power failure. i didn't 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. and i did not stumble once, thank you. [applause] [applause] >> thank you, for inspiring us with your story past and present. the questions of your creative beginnings. the why, the where, in this second annual eudora welty lecture. i'm darlene taylor, executive director of the pen faulkner foundation. on behalf of the pen faulkner foundation board, the eudora welty foundation i thank each of you for joining us here tonight, in this historic washington building, a place with its own story, known for its celebration of black culture and music, the black broadway, a place that provided a home for the voices of some of america's most talented artists. being here, you feel the convergence of past, present, sight and sound. and the voices linking us in a special way. this is a thrilling night for us. a hall of more than 1200 people, excited about literature, and, a writer's creative journey, thank you all, for sharing that he love of literature, at pen faulkner our mission to create lifelong love of literature. thank you for joining us. we build to work new audiences for contrary fiction. the eudora welty lecture is unique format. a partnership brings most acclaimed writers to washington. to share their stories of their beginnings. this is the first of pen faulkner's literary conversations this evening. we hope you enjoyed this, and will join us again. i close by saying again, thank you to the many people who make it possible for to us be here. the dc office of cable television, film, music entertainment. the dc commission on hearts and humanities. our mayor, muriel bowser, and the team at the lincoln theater, thank thank thank you for graciousness following us into your home. the welty foundation and the volunteers who helped us tonight. thank you to c-span, and to d.c. cable for bringing this important literary conversation to many more thousands of readers who are out there. good night. [applause] ♪ >> the c-span bus tour continues its 50 capitals tour in january with stops in raleigh, columbia, atlanta, and montgomery. on each visit we'll speak with state officials during the live "washington journal" program. follow the tour and join us on january 16th at 9:30 a.m. eastern for our stop in raleigh, north carolina, when our "washington journal" guest is north carolina attorney general josh stein. >> so this is chapter on all sorts of ways you might get the space a little more cheaply than our current conventional rocket method. so we explore a bunch of of different technologies, a pretty long chapter. six or seven different paradigms. some happening, some total i implausible. it is going to be tough. but, yeah, so, in this, i guess for this talk we'll tell you about a few of them. i guess advance the slide here. thank you. that is a rocket. so, i guess we should first talk about reusable rockets, which is just starting to happen. so the idea, of the reusable rocket to make rocket travel a little more like plane travel. the way we describe it is, imagine, every time you wanted to fly from new york to los angeles, you flew over to los angeles, jumped out and then the plane exploded in the pacific ocean, it would be really cool, but, expensive, right? and that is essentially what we do right now, with rockets. and so, a big part of why it costs something like $60 million to put a relatively small payload in lower earth orbit, is because the way rockets, work right now, so, one idea, if you get the most expensive part, the machine itself, back, then you would save a lot of money. the fuel is like negligible part of the cost. it's a few hundred thousand. so, spacex, yeah, just couple hundred thousand. but, you know, yeah, as these things go, that is not too bad. so spacex was kind enough to do this they landed part of a rocket. have you come up with part of a rocket. the way space travel works, the rocket is like three rockets snapped on top much each other. each smaller than the last. the reason you do that, once you use up a chunk, you don't want to carry dead weight of metal hulk, you drop it into the ocean. what spacex was able to do, first stage landed on a barge. this is a good first step in this direction. elon musk said, get the price down 90%, on pace launch. if you multiply that by elon musk conversion factor, you end up with a pretty reasonable number, spokespeople said 30 to 40% which is enormous. do you want to? >> so that is what is happening right now. we talk about some other technologies that we were told about nasa advanced inconcepts group. like a pogo stick. to oomp to get things going. we talked about a space elevator. a space elevator is three parts. a station we put somewhere in the ocean with a stage in place. it is gigantic cable. its is a counterweight a big rock. there is elevator that climbs it. you beam power to the elevator. the elevator goes slowly up the cable. the people interested in this design. estimated they could get stuff up into space for about $250 per pound. that is amazing right now because it costs $10,000 per pound. if you want to send a big gulp up to space. $25,000 or something. $250 a pound would be amazing savings. the main thing that they need to still figure out, is like this middle part. and that middle part is like, kind of important, so the problem with the middle part is that it sneads to be really strong but also can't weigh a lot. t needs to be 62,000 miles long. if it weighs a lot the weight of this cord will yank it down. it needs to be lightweight, really strong. recently discovery of carbon nanotubes. configure of carbon in a tube. like width of a hair. much less than a human hair. >> very small. thank you. >> good working together we know all this information. >> yes. >> so anyway, so people have managed to get them to be about a foot 1/2 long. and, you may have remembered, you may remember that i said it needed to be 62,000 miles long. we have a long way to go. it looks like it might be strong enough to do it. a problem coming up, this is interesting part of writing the book, economics might be the thing that makes this not happen. forter rest teal-based purposes for carbon nanotube. you need foot 1/2 nor carbon nanotube. if you drew out projections, like we're getting length of these tubes longer and longer, faster and faster. it is kind of flatenned out ever since. so we need to like, if you could be the person who makes carbon nanotubes long enough to make a space elevator, get that moving again. either based reason why we need really long carbon tubes, we need questions at end. hold on to it. so, the other problem with this middle part, is that if you can get the carbon nanotubes long enough, turns out they're really not very good if there is lightning. and so we were asking nasa's advanced innovative concepts group, what do you do about lightning? apparently there is a little area in the pacific ocean that has never, as far as we can tell, experienced a lightning bolt. and so the answer is to put it there hope the past tells us all we need to know about the future >> i hope climate never changes. >> you can watch in other programs on line, at booktv. org. >> good evening, everyone. we have another wonderful full house. dale gregory vice president for public programs. it is always a thrill to welcome you to spectacular robert h. smith auditorium. i like to ask how many people are members. i don't have my glasses on so. you can just shout but no, i, saw the blurry hands, looks like almost everyone is a member