Time and. Thank you and welcome and good afternoon everyone im honored to introduce our next two speakers Heather Cox Richardson and Tracy K Smith, both writers of extraordinary talent and wisdom whose words and voices invited to reflect remain and revisit our and collective histories to make sense out of this time. A couple of years ago a good friend recommended Heather Cox Richardson newsletter letters from an american, which she now has in the millions. Im sure she some fans in this room too. Yes. I am grateful for heathers daily commentary because she to because what she does for me is she helps the firehose issues of the news her masterful she master translates the days events into segments pulls fact from fiction and grounds it all in the big picture of American History, while shining light where we need to be paying attention Heather Cox Richardson is the author of this book democracy awakening notes on the state of america. She is a professor of history, Boston College and an in 19th Century American, 19th Century America is specializing in politics and economics. Her previous books include, how the south won the civil oligarchy democracy and the continuing fight for the soul of america. She cohosts the podcast now and then with joanne freeman, and i just commented to her, just got her newsletter from america, an american at 430 this morning. So shes a busy woman. I remember being mesmerized by the words of Tracy K Smith when she served as the 22nd poet laureate of the United States from 2017 to 2019. During this time, tracy spearhead added american conversations celebrating poems in Rural Communities with the library of congress. She, the American Public media podcast the slowdown and edited the ever popular anthology 50 poems for our time. Tracy k smith is Pulitzer Prize winning poet memoirist, editor, translator and i brightest. She is a professor of english and african and African American studies at harvard university. Today she will be about her latest book to free the captives a plea for the soul of america. A plea for the american cell. Excuse me. I found this book a gorgeous and a reminder that the discomfort of the present time affects us all and that we can, in her words, choose to work alongside the generations that precede us intending to americas wounds. Please help in welcoming Tracy K SmithHeather Cox Richardson. Thank you for coming so excited that there and i get to have this conversation. Yes so thank you everyone for coming. Thank you for the Miami Book Fair for having us. Its been a great time. I dont know how anybody wants to sit in here. There are so many great books out there. But but because tracy was just very generous here. I get to have the first word and ill probably steal last. This is a book this is just phenomenal and i am so incredibly happy to be here to talk with dr. Smith about because everybody should go out and read it. Well, i feel like i want to say i am so excited and also deeply humbled and elated to be able to kind of feel like sit at your feet. A history is something that means so much to me i sometime times feel like i wish my mind were less slippery and that facts and dates would remain affixed where they belong. But i feel reading your work you. Make the movement of time and the recur of events and trends so useful. Even for someone like me and im so deeply for that. Well, so but this is a great place to start, i think, because you and i both do, and we are both explored the importance of stories to the individual, from the individual to the world. But were doing it in very different and and i found your book profoundly moving and and i got a quotation that i just have to to read and it has nothing to do with anything i want to talk about. But i just love this line. There is the lift of the plane, shocking gravity like. Dont you wish youd written that line . Because you can feel the plane ride. You can see the plane. And this is the sort of language that spoke to me. But but while were both dancing around issue of history and its meaning and the idea narrative and why it matters, im really interested that you to try to take it from the start of a memoir because i would no more write a memoir than i would pull my own teeth. And i thought that was because you come from a long history of course of people writing memoirs that changed society. So i wanted to know why you started with a memoir or started, but why . Why this book is a memoir . Yeah, thats a good question, because initial really i was adamant that i was not going to write another memoir. I wanted to try and think about citizenship and nationhood, but it felt impossible to approach conditions without entering through the body, without entering through my own life and the lives that i descend from and in in a way, surrendering to that me to move on. What felt like intimate terms with history, which is large, i call it, you know, like the the animal of history or even the beast of history. And so to be able to say maybe i can touch down on certain relevant regions of time through the of people that i know or claim and moving through my fathers and his i mean, his, his ancestors lives gave me a sense of proximity whereby i can imagine their and voices and bodies moving war moving through the circumstance of segregation in the jim crow south and it felt like a enterprise in a way it emboldened me to say i to experience and respond to and carry america and im willing i can become vulnerable and open up regions and complex within my own life to the same kind of questioning or scrutiny and. So it became a memoir well, so it definitely i thought i said this especially from the very beginning. I was hooked. But i have to ask as a writer, did you end up beginning that way or did you start writing that way . How did you start like physically this book . I ended up beginning that way. I started actually there were several lectures that id given and there were concepts that felt important, had to do with the american imagination, and another had to do with experience of time and grief and so those were starting points. And i think i was speaking from a detached place of like intellectual, especially in thinking about the terms of the american imagination, but in trying to bring that the larger format of a book. I felt myself like i felt language brittle ling a little bit. I a distance and an authority also cut myself off from other vocabularies and so almost a distraction or a means of procrastination. I said i want to find i want to look for my dad in the archive. I want to look for his and grandfather and and so i took this, this side path and finding them there, i almost felt like theres a moment in, the book, where i say, i almost feel like im a minor traveling through these tunnels. And then my my grandfather waves to me and says, here i am. But it felt like that. And every time i found evidence of these quiet in the archive, i felt claimed. And so this other vocabulary came in. I would love to ask you some questions. We were talking earlier about writing history and i really loved the values that youre aware of and that you impart to your students. Would you like to talk that by way of this particular and how it took shape or in terms of what you think readers need to be reached by history . Yeah, id be happy to talk about that. But but i just want to say one thing about finding your people in the archives that match is exactly what historians feel like. Our happy places in the archives, even if we dont have personal can. In fact, for me usually when usually when i dont have personal personal connections to whos in the archive because it feels like it feels magical it feels like theres this i always describe it as the holodeck you know you get to you to start filling in in star trek you get to fill the holodeck and the world starts to come alive around you. And there is an alchemy to that is. You know, one of the reasons we work as hard as we do at what seems sometimes to people to be obscure efforts to bring to light. You know the history of something that nobody else cares about its that its that i think and i love that that you have found it because stories that are waiting to be told are myriad. So when i wrote. Democracy awakening, i, i was intending simply to tell the story of a series of very short essays describing the questions, the answers to the questions that people ask me every day how did the parties switch sides . What is the southern strategy . But then i realized pretty quickly that the larger and i find this fascinating because its your larger question, too. But you came it from an individual forward and i came at it from the big story, i think, which is really powerful. But i quickly realized was that people always ask me how, did we get here . What does it mean to be in this place were in . And how do we get out . And so i wanted write a series of short essays, answer those questions. So i short essays that were divided into three sections, each one of which embodied a part of that narrative arc. And what were talking about before was it usually i write a book, i quite literally take a sheet of paper. Once i figured out its thinking about a book that takes a long time, not the writing. The writing is somewhat i wont say mechanic, but you got to know what you think. And that parts really hard. So if ever write another book. And by the way, i like your main hat back there. I already know its going to be, but i have already put four years of work into thinking about it, and i dont even have a book proposal at the best. In my best case scenario, ill have one in 2 to 3 more years. Thats the hard work. But i block out the book and i figure out what the narrative arc is and the narrative arc of this book was quite easy. Where are we . You know, how did we get here . Where are we and how do we get out . Then i chopped it up into the ten pieces in each section. You had to know to get there. And then within each one of those sections, the beats i was talking, i tried to make the essay completely stand alone, yet fit into a larger story. So took a lot of crafting. And then within that i tried demonstrate what i was doing by starting in the first section of how we got here with the main characters, i always write everybodys always acting in the books that i write. Theres no passive voice unless my editor threatens quit because i have never used passive for an entire essay. The first section is largely white male powerful actors, the middle section with the trump years is that arc, but underneath that, you start to see other voices up and the third section highlights the voices of marginalized americans. And that was really very deliberate. But thats very different than the way you go about working as a poet. I this may be very wrongheaded, but i feel like the act of writing is the means of discovery for me and so seldom do i do much mapping. I have to find a way to begin. And then as i move forward, i begin to feel questions arise. Memories in the periphery that announce themselves as relevant and i move through. I was saying that with this book sound is an operating a compositional mechanism for partly i believe because i was listening for voices theres a whole thread of this book that has to do with actually listening for voices with a meditative practice, which i believe myself to have entered into a kind of dialog with ancestors, others. And so part of the compositional method was to be aware of rhythms. Patterns of sound, internal that created forward momentum. So you explain to and i assume, everybody else is interested in this too. What does that look like . I mean, do you do you just carry a notebook with you during the day or do you sit and start to type and see what comes out . I make notes all the time, you know, trap flying somehow, like, is a good place to get ideas. But i, i, my sessions are long. I said ill spend an entire day if i can. Sitting and writing and and thinking and deleting and and so one way of thinking about it is in a poem. Oftentimes when i get to a place i dont know what to say next, i go back and i look at what ive said are images, concrete images that have been used that could be used further so that we are able to move in to what feels like tactile or concrete encounter with the terms of of place or person or memory that the poem has explored. Are there sorts, sounds, words that have been said, whose sound might give me a sense of what i might say next . And the i ask those questions is because im looking to deviate from my knowns and to move toward what might be under the surface, but present in useful and that process helps me move forward into this book toward imagining a past, toward finding language to. Describe things i havent described before in my own voice, like the experience of realizing that i had an alcohol problem and coming toward sobriety, or the experience of saying with full belief, im sitting here and im getting a message from someone else. And so part of these other help me find what to say or find a way to to anchor hard and, vulnerable making to the page. So did, you know, you were going to write this book about history when you started writing it it. I didnt know i was going to go to alabama. I thought i was going to be thinking in 2020, maybe some experiences that id had before the pandemic, traveling in the south and thinking about forms of ritual and community practice. But i didnt know. I didnt know i would leap off in terms of my my people in the way that i did. Do you want to describe for people the arc of the book or you or do you want me to now . Go ahead . I think the arc of book begins with claims, a sense of the not only the external and social circumstances that touched the lives of my ancestors, but the terms of i think of like improvisatory hope and and continue ins that bolstered their sense of self and community and thinking through those chapters i come up with the notion that in this country we are sorted into different categories where freedom and are entitlement to it is concerned. And so there are some who we have been taught to perceive free people who appear to descend from histories of power ownership and authority over others. And the myth that we are encouraged to accept is that this freedom is inherent. Its inseparable from ones very self. And it also means that the others of us who appear to descend from histories of colonization or enslavement, forced migration, are not free, and well never be free, but rather remain freed and as such. The ceiling of our aspiration, the things we might reasonably be allowed to demand or critique of the nation, the free that are limited and, that really made me want to think about how we hold these terms, which i believe, many of us disagree with in and in body. And so the book turns toward an examining portion of the american imagination. What it that holds us beholden to so many hierarchies and visible hierarchies, and what it is that encourages us to practice ipx8 and this notion or the mythology of ascent climbing up, which is inevitably a matter of finding leverage against others to inch our way upward or forward and. Then i guess the other concepts that the book is also trying to say like in the face of this are there other vocabularies or counter logics . Not only have sustained communities of the freed over centuries, but that might be useful to all of us wish to be no longer captive such a limiting diminishing system sobriety e is one other context that feels important as somebody who had a drinking problem and then, you know, quietly which became clear to me as my responsibility as a parent, i realized i was living in such a way to forget certain layers of that responsibility, to try and like, imagine i could move to the young version of myself who free, quote unquote, free or free or from responsibility and the responsibility for others and saying maybe we all, no matter what our relationship to substance is, maybe we are all in this country to be in an enterprise of forgetting and maybe claiming a civic sobriety which is what i think is another word for accountability, could be a vocabulary for for resisting ing the temptation to let go, go backward and not not question ourselves and others. So thats kind of the arc, i think the book ends with this an anecdote from when i was poet laureate. I was traveling in kentucky. I visited a small town called glasgow, and i read a number of poems of mine that derive from other kinds of Archival Research of black soldiers and families during the civil war. And i read this this poem in a space, in a which was mostly white and woman came up to me afterward and said, i really was so moved by the voices in that poem. And they reminded me of other voices, you know, from history that i know of. In fact, my grandmother who lived to be, you know, almost 100. We recorded her. And i want to go home and get this recording. You will you wait for me . So i waited and she eventually came and she appeared just stricken. And i said, what happened . And she said, well, believe me, my grandmother would never have wanted to hurt you. And suddenly i said, of course, of course, i understand these old kentucky stories, songs and mythologies would have cast a person like me and very hurtful light. But i have to say, i give that woman credit for going home having this realization. Maybe she listened to the recording again. Thats why she took so long. And coming back and saying, im accountable to this stranger. And not only that, but i somehow need to say that i learned something from my grandmother in that time. Maybe said its time for us to begin to remember different things. And so where i end up is were capable of we have to make choices about the mythologies that we cleave to and the lives that we might begin. Imagine as i dont want say worthy, because i dont like that word, but meaningful to us. Maybe thats a good way for me to ask you to talk a little bit about the that that you frame for us so clearly and one that feels so wonderful and useful and affirming. And to me was the shift between terms conservative and radical and how that has been used to sell different perspectives to us . Yes, id to do that. I just want to point out that the arc that you described, i think, is incredibly smart and very and its interesting to me that you described it in such scholarly terms when the book is i describe it to someone recently as a river. It is the story, a life, and it doubles back on itself and it turns around and you look at things from different perspectives and theyre all p people that you care. Theyre not ideas, although the ideas are obviously embedded in them so that its interesting that you described it in such scholarly terms when the book itself is about family and people and indi