We are in a webinar which means they can see and hear you though they can see your name so they know you are here. If you have anything you want to share, type your message in the chat window. If you have a question you would like answered you can use the q and a icon. When we get to the you and a, start thinking about it now. We are recording so look for video and audio versions later on, and this is the important part, bookstores are closed for shopping but johns books are available, i will paste the link in a minute but you can purchase it on the website and it is delivered, thanks for your support of john, we really appreciate that. Our interviewer this evening is Jazmine Hughes, she is a story writer for the New York Times magazine in 2020 recipient of the next award for journalists under 30. She will be talking with her colleague, featured author jon mooallem. A longtime writer at large and contributing to numerous radio shows including this American Life and wired. His first book wild ones, a reassuring story, looking at people and animals in america, notable book of the year by the New York Times book review, new yorker, canadas National Bookstore and his new book this is chance the shaking of an allamerican city, a voice that held it together is an electrifying, more relevant than ever portrayal of one Community Rising above the randomness. A real table of human connections with standing chaos. John will start is with a reading from the book and then talk with jasmine and take questions from you guys so take it away. Thank you for having me in my own home. I and thanks, Jazmine Hughes, for doing this. Hard to know what to read because the book just tells one long story so without having set anything up i thought i would read the first few pages. It is like a cold open for the book. This book is called this is chance the shaking of an allamerican city, a voice that held it together, published by random house, it tells the story of a single catastrophic weekend in a faraway town and the people who lived through it. Ordinary women and men who when the most powerful earthquake measured in north america struck just before sundown on good friday 1964 found themselves thrown into a jumbled and unpredictable world they did not recognize and would spend the next few days figuring out how to make a home in it again. The name of the town is anchorage, alaska. In those days the state of alaska was brandnew and often disregarded as a freefloating addendum to the rest of america. The biggest and proudest city, a community whose central spirit reached aggressively to grasp the future. Impatient with any suggestion that such things take time. Allotted a Frontier Town that imagined it was a metropolis straining to make itself real. That determination made it difficult for those living there to recognize how differently the city they were building could be knocked down, to imagine early one friday evening the ground beneath them might shake their town like a dog shaking an animal as one man later described it. The ferocious strangeness of what was happening in anchorage was hard for people to internalize or accept, buildings keel of their foundations, sunk in on themselves, split in half, ground waves rolled through the round so the pavement were liquid. The city of right angles buckled and bent. The people in anchorage pictured these things happening and dismissed them as impossible, they just never pictured them. They couldnt, nor to the point why would they. They looked around and registered what they saw as stable and permanent, a world that just was. There were moments the world we take for granted instantaneously changes, when reality is abruptly appended and the unimaginable overwhelms real life. We dont like thinking of that instability but we know it is there. Amid that warning, kind of terrible magic can switch on and scramble our lives. Struggling to explain the volatility to cause the earthquake, it is quivering all the time. You want to start. It is nice to have a book in hand and follow along while somebody does that a little bit like being in church right now, the most interactive experience i have had in a while so thank you. We can do more of that anytime. Thanks for being here. More nervous than i would be if i was in person. Im a narcissist but have a great job. Because we are endorsed, some of us have a little more time on our hands. Where do you begin . How did this begin to happen . Really good question. This was a labor of love for many years before it was work so the book is history, what happened, we will talk about and realize she was this radio broadcasters that had these recordings of herself on the air after the earthquake or family recorded them. Nothing had been done with them, i learned about that in a roundabout way and started looking for them and if you tell true stories, when you hear there is a cash of untouched material sitting somewhere it is like a Treasure Hunt and it was the process like in 2014, years of looking for that and any documentation, looking for survivors of the quake involved in these stories, calling 28 detailers in a phonebook at not finding what youre looking for and it sucked. Then every once in a while you would hit pay dirt somewhere and it was enough to sign up for a few more years of that. That was how it started, trying to get over here because i am a magazine journalist and i can call whenever i want and find out what i want to know and to go anywhere can i tell a story like this and hit points where people i need to talk to i did it wont remember it anyway and nothing would be written down about this particular question or turn that and what would happen if that happened and i was cowardly about it, i kept wanting to find more and more stuff. Host that was one of my questions. There so much stuff. It is earmarked. When you are describing, there is the woman on page 25, watching the spanish goods out loud, never liked that. Is the sort of thing that i noticed in your actual reporting. Listening to the recordings and studying all this for so many years how do you decide what to keep that . That was really hard. I definitely love, that is the pleasure of this job, the stuff you write, you catch people being themselves when they are not paying attention, you notice things and get to describe them and it is the most pleasurable part and it is weird because it was like trying to capture that from the static old pieces of paper, you got the same i for detail but harder to find. What to leave out is honestly the problem, to tell a story of three days in anchorage, that is way to simplify things, like theres a whole universe but what was really painful was you hit pay dirt, you find huge resources and i would find things like theres a native alaskan communitywide out by tsunamis and i had read a lot about the man found people tangentially involved, this was not in anchorage, i felt like that is such an amazing story. I guess i just cant and at one point meeting with this older couple who lived in anchorage and this woman nancy, i was there for 2 or 3 days and she was like i want to show you Something Like a 400 page report that she had been in anthropology professor at the time and had done recreating the experience of those in the communities and she handed me a document she had never published, it had maps of where everyone in the village had been and what they were doing and she was making and all and this is crazy. I know i cant use this and if i dont use it no one will see it. It was a painful process. I try not to be huber stick about it, but in a sense i did because i was looking at peoples garbage and if i didnt make something out of it it was getting thrown out. A question that im into, how much was spent on location in alaska . I went there four four times in a couple year stretch and it was weird because there was some libraries there i was using for sure and some people i worked with and i would track down people and have so much documentation it that point that i knew what they had been doing more than they did. To be on dirty with my papers, you got the call at 8 30 p. M. And some 86yearold man, that was really disappointing. Some of those conversations were good to get the atmosphere, what was like to live in anchorage, that stuff, i would say i have been reading about this guy and sounds like a dweeb, and they tell you some stories and okay, check, i got it and it was weird how little time i spent relative to that. And at one point i took a trip to walk around and for my own confidence to go to the places i was writing about even though they were totally different, this intersection, just so i had confidence that i knew how this city fit together and i wasnt a complete carpetbagger about it. Host how did it make you feel . How did you get back into it . It did make me feel more like i had the authority to tell the story. I never felt entitled to tell the story but it did help that way and also really fun. It was a strange trip because it was like there wasnt a to do list really. It was just like looking at i had a genie account, where has she gone in the first hour after the quake and i walked that route. When she was here, seeing the mountains, to get it in my head. It was very indulgent process so i tried to make it productive but it was really fun. Host someone told me you had a pretty insane spreadsheet. Guest i would love to talk about my spreadsheet. When i was writing the book, like this book sounds like it could do well. I wanted to do well enough that other journalists ask me how i did this. So yes, thank you. Doesnt matter if anyone is watching. I was picking up all these odds and ends, letters and photographs, photographing them with my phone and i numbered them all and had a spreadsheet, more than 1000 individual things, a 50 page Interview Transcripts so i had that and i would read through them all and had a text document, i asked my techy friends. And i would transition into a master timeline, the fire chiefs having a conversation in here is where he recounts it all and i would have a monstrous timeline that goes for hundreds of pages sometimes with the records are so amazing in a 10 minute stretch. What is happening in the police station, that was superfun. Im not a very organized person normally. It was just overwhelming. What is my question . I can imagine being able to capture a moment and see it at every point, how it makes you feel like that, a huge seeing eye everyone is experiencing. Guest that is a really good question. In truth it felt that way. And we know what we didnt know. That was a real phenomenon and i write about it, you could see risks, and you could see the future. This guy is super in charge. He will diana plane crash. One third of the book, doing our town. Meeting a 90yearold alaskan guy i spent months reading about as the 30yearold or 40yearold alaskan guy, see where those stories end. When i finally read our town, a stage manager character in the play is in the same position, but never really explained to, sometimes he knows what will happen to all the characters and there are scenes happening. That started dictating how i wrote the book, that is how it happened. And it is the right way to do the story. The New York Times book review did not care for that. Host we dont do the New York Times in this family. Guest it felt strange to have that knowledge. If something is painful about seeing life on that scale. The superintimate three days im looking at minute by minute but you have this knowledge of the magnitude of what is going to happen to these people and where they are going and they are going the same place and they are all going to die and most of them are dead and you know how it happened and just a bizarre way to experience it and we dont have that in regular life. Guest you talk about the stage manager of the book. Guest lets do it. Host how do you know i am not. Guest we start with the opening quote of the book. I didnt realize for a while that new york set up the opening of the book. Lets talk about our town. For people who dont know. Guest i didnt know anything about it. Guest host i felt very ashamed. Guest all i knew about it was at the center of growing pains, kirk cameron in our town. I thought it was a play, my impression was very hokey kind of simpleminded play about americana and American Life in a small town and i started reading it and this is bizarre and so experimental and strange. You have a character on stage, the story is about three days in a small town so the action is very mundane, it is walking on and off stage walking to the audience, telling you the future. The themes of the play, the story of the earthquake. It is about peoples inability to appreciate daily life. You dont realize how beautiful they are or how fragile they are until we step outside them all and it ends with this young woman who died and her soul is looking at the fact that ordinary life, so painful for her to realize she wasted her time and didnt look her mother in the eye. Now what happened with the earthquake, it is like the realm we are living in where we are all inside or at least adjacent to disaster. We have a different lens on things and in some sense things simplify. The spirit of oh my god, we have a special place. Our town took over parts of the book to some degree. Hard to explain. You should all read the book and this would make sense. It is hard to talk about. I cant analyze it, such a true way to tell the story. Are really lucky. Some stupid musical or something. Host was it hard to do . In actually writing this book. Guest it felt like the only possible way to do it. Doesnt it always feel like that . That is host just kidding. Guest you just that is what it is. That is the story, wasnt any real decision, must have hit me at some point. I am writing a profile, sort of a genius writer. Didnt think i was supposed to say it. Something he and i have been talking a lot about. You dont have a choice but if you do it badly, it is a bad version and we got to keep pushing in that direction and that describes how this felt and i said this, when i sent in the book to my editor, i send him a document, by john walsh, although things, the manuscript, that was the first one, putting the our town thing off, it seemed like that. Amazing in any sort of way. We are used to spending a lot of time with someone even in our head or reallife and consumed with them. Whenever i profiled somebody, for six years, i wonder what your relationship was with jeannie at the beginning and how it changed. Guest it totally did. This is jeannie. Host cool guest this is jeannies campaign poster. I necessarily just so i could feel like i knew her. Two little kids, you could do that, but kind of this protofeminist figure. To talk about homemaking or actually have her recipe from when she did a show like that and she became a news reporter. Driven and working mother, with all these expectations the told her she shouldnt be doing this thing. I saw her in retrospect kind of 1dimensional he, me too, seems like a type. It is a familiar that is a familiar type now. The woman who succeeds and the process i was completely enamored by who i thought she wasnt she was that but as i learned more about her, with interior monologue and the picture became much more rich and deeper and more complicated. I saw that all the men she worked with were difficult that were absolutely sexist and another situation, a difficult person to work with but in their family or whatever, defied the glowing portrait and that was really great because that makes you real. I learned that she was being abused by her husband, not very early on. This was the darker parts of her life in the background this whole time. It wasnt that my vision of her necessarily changed but there kept being more and more around that initial portrait that i had at the beginning. Host this is my acid trip question. I read now six pages of the journal, and writing about jeannie. Writing about people through your own rigmarole, to be translated to an audience. Guest i dont know, too soon to say that. In the book i am the writer who shows up. Or caused me to look deeply or harshly at myself. Then look at the appearance. Writing about i did feel a responsibility about writing about these people more than we do with people that we meet. And trust the impressions with them more when working with a bunch of documents through peoples eyes in their own eyes, like you make judgments, and a certain thing. It is tight and that made me think how much i missed when writing about people i am with. I shouldnt be trusting those judgments as much. The truth is i havent done this in the process. Host when you were working on the book, on the fact you worked on it for so long and so good. The story you did in the times magazine, with a place of disaster. Guest that was the story, and last year. A century and a half ago, i dont write about myself. This is a story when i was in my early 20s and went to alaska, people who were living up there, we were walking at the giant tree fell on my friend. Getting them out and survived, worked at the New York Times. When life continues. And similar to randomness. A tree falling on someone is random and the rescue unfolded just as much. Could very well not have happened. We got lucky and a lot of ways. When i think of that story, i was finishing the book at that time. It is a part of the same idea. Host hard to tell. This is about disruption. And entry you did about it. You were working on it right after the election in the midst, considering the alaska trip, seems like a hokey question. If anyone can give strong words and perseverance and human grit, putting in a lot of that. I have anything in researching this book. Guest 100 . So much of the book is about the stories in the book, what people did in anchorage was helping. As soon as the earth stopped moving people started moving and digging people out of rubble and doing crazy things. A neighborhood that slid off a cliff and dozens of houses, lowering themselves on ropes so there is that kind of heroism. That to me is what the book is about. We dont it is vibrating a and sometimes it throws us. And in those moments, similarly a force of nature like our own nature there is something in us that propels us to meet that and fixing all the stuff that got broken. It is really weird now to try to apply that and see through that lens. You are helping and im helping in our homes. With all the direct benefits, we have a place on that. And and we see ourselves as we are empowered enough to be part of the solution and stay out of the way for people who follow it. And and doing an important job like that, to take a break and explain what is too complicated we need to see ourselves in that light. I was looking at these protests, open it back up and get back to doing stuff, and harnessing that spirit, we are not working too much. I did learn that. That energy is a. We miss a lot of times but