engaged the public in reflection and dialogue on the key issues of our day from an ethical perspective we invite those who are listening on minnesota public radio to visit us in person all forums are free and open to the public and information on upcoming events can be found online at westminster forum dot org you can like us on facebook and follow us on twitter as well my name is tim howard anderson i'm the senior minister at westminster presbyterian church located on nicollet mall in beautiful downtown minneapolis and moderator of the forum it's my pleasure to introduce tonight's guest speaker sue monk kid has been described as a truly original southern voice she is the author of the modern classic the secret life of bees the bestselling novel the mermaid chair and her latest novel on life in the south the invention of wings she has received wide acclaim for her books on feminine spirituality and theology as well including god's joyful surprise when the heart waits and dance of the dissident daughter in tonight's presentation life is a story the art of writing on the spiritual journey ms kid will explore among other things how writing shapes or spirituality spirituality shapes her writing she has come to minneapolis from her home in florida so please join me she told me it was seventy eight degrees when she left join me giving an actual warm welcome to one of the one of the literary world's most respected and beloved writer sue monk thank you very much i am so pleased and honored to be part of the westminster town hall forum and i want to thank the sponsors for bringing me here i think it's a very warm reception warm place here in minneapolis tonight and well i'm going to speak on the writing life and the right to life of the soul now i am a novelist and i am a memoir therefore i have a propensity to tell a story and to get personal so that's what you're going to get my  probably inborn and it would evolve into a writing life that really is about the spiritual life too and i'm going to tell you a highly a bridge story of my writing life my work and how it intersects with my spirituality by the age of ten i was announc to everyone that i was going to be a writer and i was writing little stories and announcing to my brothers that we needed to create a neighborhood newspaper and writing novels and pretty much assured of my life as a writer so as a child i think i found this one true small light in myself and then of course i lost it because this is often what happens in the spiritual life we find the light we lose the light we find the light it's always a kind of searching reclamation isn't it when i went to college i studied nursing and i abandoned my writing life i think this was perhaps my first failure of courage which when it comes to writing i decided to study nursing because it was more traditional because it's a noble profession and i admired greatly and because it was in the mid one nine hundred sixty s but as time went on i became increasingly homesick for myself do you know what i'm talking about that feeling inside where your longing for your true self or your place of belonging in the world  i think that's how the soul speaks to us often through that restlessness in our spirit through that since of yearning i began to read at the age of twenty nine thomas mert and this would change my life i discovered for the first time the interior life i discovered the reality of it that there was actually this inner life that we could call the life of the soul when i read new seeds of contemplation it cracked open some kind of very deep hunger in me that i had not known before it was a hunger i think for the deepest thing in myself for what merton called the true self and this was a real awakening it was probably not coincidental that around this time or soon after at the age actually at the age of thirty and on my thirtieth birthday that i began to write again i walked into the kitchen on my thirtieth birthday and i announced to my two toddlers and my husband that i was going to be a writer and they were eating their cereal and he was trying to get them to eat their cereal and they took it all in stride that was my and not see ation in the kitchen and my plan was very earnest but it was highly implausible i think of it now as my great absurdity but i do believe that every life needs at least one of these at least one great absurdity  perhaps more you know that we need to take our own breath away once in a while but i didn't know anything about writing i mean all i really had was this impulse of my heart i had worked as a nurse for since graduating from college in pediatrics obstetrical and surgical units so it was my great absurdity and of course what i'm talking about here is one of the key and central things i think in the life of writing and in the life of the so which is to find our place of belonging i wrote i had some quotations stenciled on the wall of my stairwell that led up to my writing study and the very first one is a woman must have a room of her and this is essential i think not just for women but particularly for women especially if you are going to cultivate the life of the soul and the writing life but what metaphorically that's talking about is finding what we belong to well creativity i think is  a spiritual experience at least it is for me i think it is a conversation that one has between oneself and one's soul it's not always a good conversation but it is some kind of conversation the poet once gave some advice to an aspiring writer and he said and this also i by the way i stand sold on a wall the wall in my stairwell he said go into yourself and see how deep is the place from which your life takes rise or it can be in translated from which your life flows i think there's a room inside of us we could call it the inner life or the interior life or the life of the soul or something else merton often referred to it is the true self and i think my thirty year old self was trying to start up a conversation with this place what i said i have in mind here is a kind of contemplative experience it's very easy to lose touch with this part of ourselves especially in our contemporary culture i think we often feel at least i do besieged by life i think the world seduces us with an artificial sense of urgency sometimes but the soul doesn't move at the same pace as the world the creative life does it at least mine does and i think it doesn't it has a completely different slower pace about it so contemplative moments i think moments of being help us help me cultivate this life i'm talking about i often i often say to myself that there must be a silence beneath my words if there is not a deep silence beneath my words in my words are probably empty so the day after my thirtieth birthday i started writing quite honestly oh i was so earnest i i would eventually publish my book when the heart waits which was about moving through a spiritual crisis it was about the asset and decent and we make in the spiritual life and these interior passages i'm always fascinated with process more than anything else that process that goes on inside the human spirit then i wrote what would become my most difficult book the book i had to take the deepest breath for the book that intimidated me the most and that was the dance of the dissident daughter i remember sitting at the computer writing this book thinking i can't say that and then taking the breath you know and saying it anyway i finally put a little quotation on my desk that was a quote by nice nan which says the role of the writer is not to say what we can all say it is to say what we are unable to say and that takes a certain amount of courage i suppose the dance of the dissident dorter had a very freeing effect on me in many ways liberated me and in my early forty's the most unexpected thing happened after writing this novel i had this sudden enormous pull to write fiction i didn't see that coming i would be lying now if i told you that i wasn't also daunted by the idea of writing fiction i think i was afraid of becoming visible in the world in a whole new way norway that again i didn't know anything about the great novelist  from mississippi said no art ever came out of not risking your neck i don't know why it always felt like i was risking my neck but it did it's i look back on it and i think isn't that strange that i was afraid of telling the truth of my own experience or changing course in the middle of my creative life but there can be something quite terrifying about becoming visible it's like the poet david white said revelation can be terrible because she can't go back again so there is another quote i put on my stairwell which is a quote  says writing is an act of courage the courage to begin the courage to put your authentic voice in the world the courage to change course to be true to the conversation that's going on inside inside the real conversation the first piece of fiction i wrote was the secret life of bees and i had a pretty strong conviction about the idea for this book i thought it was a novel that i was supposed to write and i took the first chapter which is all i had i wrote the first chapter i took it to a writer's conference a very steamed one the first one i did tended as a fiction writer i'd never published any fiction and my teacher would read it and he said he didn't think it had any potential as a so he advised me to turn it into a short story and i thought about this i was a novice and i listened to my teacher and i turned it into a short story it was published in a small literary journal and they paid me with by free copies and i put it away and i never thought i would revisit it again four years went by and by a stroke of luck really and i had lot i like to think a little hard work i was invited to read a short story at the new york arts club i had gone on writing short stories trying to find my voice in fiction and when they asked me to do this it was suggested to me that perhaps i should read something southern being as i was a southerner and as they said people just love that stuff up here that's what they said so i looked through my bio and there was the secret life of bees short story which i really hadn't thought up and i pulled it out i thought well that is southern and i read it that night and the happened to be a real new york literary agent in the audience who came up to me and without missing a b said and i quote i hope that's the first chapter of your novel you see there is probably some lesson in this you know about listening to your own creative instincts again about courage risking your neck a little bit but i don't think i was really ready to write that novel four years earlier and in a weird sort of circumventing way i found the right timing to do it but it took me back to my original idea that this was a novel and so i returned to it and if you've read it you know it's set in south carolina in one thousand nine hundred sixty four during freedom summer and i got this image in my head of a white girl lying in bed at night about fourteen years old and bees were coming out of the wall and flying around in her bedroom now this was actually based on a memory i had because i grew up in a country house in georgia where bees lived in one of the walls and that's a whole other story we southerners know how to normalize our eccentricity i assure you so we just lived with that for a very long time but when i got this image in my mind i ask myself who is this girl and what does she want because this image wouldn't really leave me and i decided her name was a lily owens and she was lying there longing for her mother and once i knew that i could write the story and it's really a book about her journey toward healing a terrible wound in her life a feeling of guilt and betrayal and abandonment it seems like all of my novels turn out being the search for belonging and this is her search and she does this in the most american way she goes on a quest the novelist john gardner said there are only two plots in american fiction a stranger comes to town or somebody goes on a trip literally goes on a trip and she ends up in this pink house with three african american sisters and the reason this happened i'm quite sure is because what i really wanted to do was to write a story about women about a community of women and the streams and bonds of women a review in london newspaper said of the secret life of bees said it's to kill a mockingbird meets the ya ya sisterhood was i don't know if that's good or bad but i kind of liked it there was a union analyst in toronto who wrote to me after the came out and said that the pink house is a womb through which lily was reborn i'm always getting in line and about what i'm doing was and i'm serious i really am i mean of course i did think and know inside that the strength and bonds and community of women can be healing it can be very healing and i think these communities can empower us in so many ways and crucial in the story for me was that at the center of this household there is a statue of a black madonna she's the queen bee in the high she's the image of the divine feminine what has been missing something ancient missing in human experience for a very long time and lily search for a mother is really a kind of reflection of that my novel the mermaid chair is again about a woman search for belonging but in a different way it's about her search to belong to herself so it's a much more subtle search it's about a woman who in the middle of her marriage after about twenty years up and falls in love with a benedictine monk now this precipitates a crisis in her life as you can imagine and i think it as many crises are if we allow them they can become a kind of summons to some place we need to go and this crisis summoned her to this place of self belonging and i think what i was really trying to get out here what that conversation with my soul was trying to work out in that book is that there really is a place inside of a woman and i wanted to acknowledge it beautiful fertile unbridled place and when a woman stands there goes to that place she is utterly home she belongs to herself she's complete she is enough well following the mermaid chair i had the great joy of writing a novel with a memoir with my daughter and  taylor called traveling with pomegranates and it was about our travels to greece and france together over the course of about two or three years when the book opens it's the summer of one nine hundred ninety eight and i was turning fifty years old and my daughter was graduating from college and we went off to greece to mark these two big milestones in our lives and it was during these travels that i came to realize that i needed to reconnect with this daughter whom i hardly knew i need to i needed to find her in a new way so this conversation with myself became a search for my daughter but it also was about the transition going on in my life here this story is really a young girl leaving college with no idea what to do with her life and about a fifty year old woman heading off into older womanhood without any idea what to do with her life either because this is the moment when i began to decide whether i was going to write the secret life of bees or not was could i find the clarity could i find the courage to do that and i was in a kind of creative vacuum at the time you know how you want the you want to find that potency for the third act well it was in france that i found these black skinned madonnas these gorgeous madonna is the oldest mary's in the world silence in the my words and i found these dark skin madonna's to while i fondly call them the old woman and it was where i met this new image of what i thought of as the divine feminine and of course i came home and she found a starring role in the secret life  my new novel is about two women's quest for freedom and how they invented their wings it's about women staring it's about their desire to have a voice in the world i was in the brooklyn museum in two thousand and seven to see the chicago's the dinner party exhibit and while i was perusing the heritage panels where they list all these women's names who made significant contributions to western literature i came upon the names of sarah and angelina graham and i became very excited because they were from charleston south carolina and i was living in charleston at the time and i did not know who they were as it turned out i had been driving by their house for ten years unaware that they were the first official female abolition agents in america and among the earliest feminist thinkers and pioneers for women or women's rights in our country now what moved me about them is how unlikely it was that they would end up doing what they did they were from this wealthy slaveholding aristocratic family and yet few women have ever misbehaved so wonderfully katie you know that's that saying well behaved women never make history and they were arguably in the eighteenth thirties some of the most radical women to ever come out of the antebellum south they underwent this long painful metamorphosis breaking from their family their religion their culture their traditions and they became exiles and they became pariahs and i was so touched by sarah especially because of how deeply she yearned to to have her life matter she wanted to become and day air and speak and have a voice in the world and that makes me think of another quote ice didn't fold on my wall which is by the novelist a mills zola who said if you ask me what i came to do in this world i as an artist will answer i am here to live out loud and that's what sarah really wanted but almost from the first moment that i knew i would write a novel about the greenpeace sisters i also knew that i would i wanted to in twine it with the story of an inflated character that i couldn't write the novel unless i could do that that both worlds had to be there and i discovered that sarah had a waiting ma then she'd been given a ten year old probably waiting maid when she was all a girl of eleven or twelve and this is slave girl was named hetty and she died in probably in adolescence so we don't know anything about her but i thought here's the other half of the story so i wanted to imagine her life and what might have banned and there is a moment in the novel where handful says to sara my body might be a slight but not my mind for you it's the other way round and it was true sarah's quest was to liberate her spirit her mind and find her self and this is a classic timonen journey no matter what sin treat we're talking about that discovering and empowering sense of one's self oneself good and the ability the daring to declare that self so the things in the novel revolve around race and gender i can't seem to get away from this and in fact i don't want to get away from this i don't know why the list tend to gravitate to certain subjects over and over you know i wrote about civil rights and the secret life of bees this time i really wanted to go back to the roots of racism i think i gravitate to issues of women and race because they matter so much to me because my spiritual ality is not just about creativity is about justice and injustice and compassion and inclusion they are at the core of my fate so one of the things i wanted to get across in  novel is that it was in fighting for the rights of others that women in this country became aware of the oppression of their own injustice the greenpeace sisters were the ones who linked abolition and women's rights for the first time in this country and it it set off quite a controversy they were out there fighting for a woman's right to speak here in the public sphere and they caught a lot of backlash because they were among the first to do this well in conclusion i want to just say that i am asked quite often what do you hope readers will take away from your work that's a large question my hope i suppose if i had to to articulate that would be that readers would have a felt experience of what it's like to be in an slaved person in the nineteenth century or a white woman without any rights which shockingly few rights or what it's like to be a fourteen year old girl looking for home and belonging or a woman adrift in the middle of her marriage or a fifty year old woman trying to find the third act what does it feel like and i'm talking of course about empathy which is taking another's experience and making it one's own i think that is perhaps the most mysterious transaction in the human soul and i think it's the real power of literature i studied ralph waldo emerson in college and he talked about this concept of the common heart he described it as a place inside every human where we share an intrinsic unity with all of humanity now this idea has remained with me all of these she hers i have never forgotten it and as a as a novelist i have to believe in this place and as a person i believe in this place so i began by saying that for me creativity is a conversation with one's soul and i think in that sense i could say maybe writing has been my longest prayer but i also think that in the sense that readers go to the common heart they can find their way into the common heart a horrid old a book that reading becomes their speaker is bestselling author sue monk kid while the ushers collect questions from the in house audience i'd like to invite the radio audience to join us here at westminster church for our next forum on thursday march twenty at noon when the executive director of the sierra club michael brune will be our speaker visit our newly expanded website westminster forum dot org for information on our current season and now sue monk kidd if you will return to the  present the questions from our audience you referred to several recurring themes in your books and i'm wondering to what extent do you sense your working something out in your writing and what is that i suspect most writers are trying to work something out and i think it's largely a mystery i mean i i think this is what's probably behind returning to certain things and for instance race why do i return to that probably because i grew up in preschool the rights south as a child in the fifty's and as an adolescent coming of age and the backdrop of my life is very vivid of separate water fountains and rosa parks and civil rights marches and martin luther king marching near my hometown being jailed in albany georgia where i was  born i remember these things very vividly and i think they were part of the stuff of my history and my life so maybe it's an act of redemption maybe it is an act of understanding but i suppose there's purpose there's purpose in it you're a daughter in a granddaughter and a great great granddaughter have you ever traced her heritage back and seeing how your family lives in the nineteenth century so well we've done we haven't done as much as genealogies we probably should but i was very curious about whether or not there were slaves in the family i assure you and so we did search and from and it's probably not as there as it should be but we could not find any evidence of this it doesn't necessarily mean that that my families didn't own slaves but we couldn't find sweat of evidence to in fact i don't think my family's from what i can tell had enough money to slaves i grew up in a little town in georgia and recently i returned there actually just this past december because we were celebrating the one hundred eighty fifth anniversary of the monk farm where my great great grandfather and great great grandmother are buried and they were squatters so we're very rooted in that time and place and i think that connection you know to to my family and to that place there and we actually built a wall they are similar to the one in the secret life of these i don't know if you've read that you might remember there's a wall where we put prayers and my in our society today what are your sources today well i've been influenced by many african americans i read the whole collective writing us of martin luther king and i found his life deeply inspiring also alice walker's book the color purple had a big impact on me as well i've been moved by reading the biographies of harriet tubman and sojourner truth and reading all through the slave narratives of the one nine hundred thirty s in the nineteenth century slave narratives you know twelve years a slave is a book that i read in for research for my novel some years ago and there is one by a female enslaved woman called incidents in the life of a slave girl that's really worth reading as well a very dramatic and howling stories i think all of these stories and narratives have inspired me to write as fully and deeply as i can about race is really one of your characters in your novels you most identify with well sarah was a dissident daughter and i actually adin a file a little bit with her in some ways you know she she had to find her voice and she had failures of courage like me she was sometimes slow to take her leap i kenned in a fire with a lot of that i mean my cultural ration was very strong and i had to learn how to think and act outside of the world that shaped me and i think this is sometimes a journey you know we have to make internally so i didn't if i was sarah and probably a part of all my characters even the bad ones i probably identify with i hate to go so far as to say their projections of who i am because we've got a whole range of them i think parts of me are in them probably did you stencil the words on your wall before you started writing while you wrote or after you were successful i'll tell you how that started it was very strange one night i had a dream right i'm one of these people who writes my dreams down because you know i have written read a lot of the work of c human and he talks about the importance of dreams so i started writing my dreams down because i think it is another way that the soul tries to speak although it's often incoherent but one night i had a dream and i was walking up the stairwell and these end of the walls were speaking the most inspiring things to me and the next morning i said i think my walls want to talk to me and i'm going to so what i think they ought to say and so i went on this quest for these quotes that would really go to the heart of what was important to me as a writer this came after the secret life of bees was published and it informed my the writing that i have done since then what is the most difficult part of the writing process for you well the most difficult process is also my favorite process so this is a real paradox the solitude i love the solitude of writing and i find it difficult and this last novel that i wrote the invention of wings took me four years to write and i was in chile hibernated or cook him and and working very hard in this place of solitude i was alone most of the time my husband would send the dog and to get me and she would come in with a toy and drop it at my feet and she was about the only one that could get me out of there i guess but i'm very immersed in that world and it is an alone place for me with my characters and the story in the narrative and the kind of focus i have to find to bring to it so yes it's it's the solitude is hard sometimes you spoke about the world's sense of urgency and contrasts are that with the souls slower pace in today's world of instant answers and barrage of information how has that affected your writing if at all well i find it distracting from my writing actually and i'm a big you know an odd duck i don't know but i find that i have to find this particularly when i'm writing a contemplative rhythm i i like to refer to it as conscious loitering because loitering really is a good thing in a lot of ways it's just too to be without any purpose other than being within oneself in this center is to me it grounds me it allows me most of all the time in place to have this conversation that i need to have with this deeper part of myself or to go to that deeper part of myself and to listen i think listening is so important i don't know how to do that with all of the you know twitter and facebook and all of this that is going on it's kind of a world when and i think our attention span is shrinking dramatically with it and i'm about the long form so it's a tension actually i think for many writers and it is for me and i kind of go tack back and forth in these worlds and try to navigate both of them and  poorly you know many people feel that books are outdated art form given the electronic age in which we live in the immediacy of information you agree with that or as your is an art form here to stay you cannot convince me that books will go away no and of course i'm talking about the physical you know but i also acknowledge that something very new is here to stay to and it's going to grow and big and it's part of our world and i i see my grandson reading you know books off the kindle and text books and so it's a different world but i still believe that we are always going to want to hold that concrete book in our hands and i think that we will find a place for both of them because you know a book can be beautiful and it can be solid and as a writer i deal in obsessed i deal in abstractions all the time i'm in an ideal world so when it comes time for me to read maybe because of that i want something with heft in it i want to feel it you know and i love the beauty of the book itself and i think i think the soul needs to be fed that so you know i'm old school but i bless everybody who reads electronically to that i do us is one of the most literate cities in the country as you know well read bunch tonight i'm guessing that most of you are members of book clubs are you a member of a book club yes myself me and my how often do you know me every night in bed at nine o'clock i open my book and have that experience well i have been part of book clubs and in a way i guess i am in a book club with my daughter we read books together at the same time and we meet and discuss them so i think that probably qualifies and i think they are fantastic and i  great deal to book clubs and i have been members of many book clubs over the years but at the moment i think it's just my daughter and i reading together picking books do you ever regret  changing your career from nursing to writing you know i don't but i think there are many people out there that are happy i changed directions because i'm not sure i was that good you know you you i think the thing that you love and you give yourself over to is the thing that you probably are most likely going to excel at and so i'm not sure that i was the best nurse in the world and i probably never killed anyone i'm glad to say but i think i belonged in writing so i don't regret that now do you write more for yourself or for others and maybe to affect others beliefs or their world view well this is a question i go back and forth about when i'm in my study and i'm writing i'm not thinking about who i'm writing for i'm just in the story i'm trying to write almost instinctively and listen to what's coming and trust that but when i'm not in my study i'm all about the reader i'm all about  picturing that reader and how this will become an empathetic experience for the reader i mean i can't separate myself from the experience of writing and think about it in that  way it's not a dialectic like that it's it's just an immersion in the process and becoming sort of flow in the flow of that but if i had to say who i'm writing for and who i'm thinking about i'm thinking about the reader and how this will affect their heart i want to change people's thoughts i want to enlighten their minds you  to get their heart that's what i want you create and employ the notion of ritual in many of your novels can you describe how how that happens as you write women's rituals well they just seem to pop up it's like women's communities i didn't set i don't set out to well there's going to have to be a community of women in this novel and it's going to have to be original i don't think that way i'm just  writing and seeing what comes organically in the story and it does seem though given who i am and my for clarity's in what matters to me and my world view and all of that you know the history of the writers always in there somewhere and also memories of the writer and also the worldview of the writer i think is somehow tucked in there even not in all the characters but in some perhaps and so here comes the rituals you know i i believe in the power of ritual religious ritual and spiritual ritual to change us they give us a way to navigate and do commerce with the soul and so that's why the wall in the secret life of bees you know i had it was a way for them to put their prayers or their burdens in order to lighten something inside suggests that ritual act of doing it just like communion or any other kind of religious ritual has a certain effect and power on us it has gravity in us so i believe in it so here it comes you know it will just find its way into the story some number of questions asked about the film version of the secret life of bees were you satisfied with the movie i thought they did a good job with that movie actually i have a healthy respect now for how hard that is i mean to take a three hundred plus page novel and turn it into one hundred pages of just pure dialogue is a very hard thing to do and i didn't quite realize that until i had some collaboration's with these green writer and director of the secret life of bees and i thought she understood the novel and i thought she did a very good job of representing the novel and it was something i worried about a little bit in the beginning but i'm pleased with that turned out did you have any control over any aspect of this did they ask you your opinion on certain features of the book they did ask my opinion but i don't think i had much clout really didn't ask your casting opinions as you you know they were very generous in asking me my opinions they asked me about cast initially i don't think they paid much attention to me about that but they did  send me the scripts going through various straus and they ask me a lot of my thoughts and ideas and sometimes they really did listen to me and i had a finger in it but they i think that's a little unusual that a so i was fortunate that way one of our guests here the seeding notes that the best line in your book was missing from the movie you no doubt remember with the best line your book was well like i said i'm always getting enlightened about what i'm doing so please somebody tell me here's the best line in your book it was something like now you get to be your own mother you know yeah i do that well that's the whole idea isn't it that we have to find the mother in ourselves and that was something that my character auguste tried to bestow on my character lily is there comes a time when you have to figure out how to mother your own self to bring that kind of nurturing to her so i'm glad whoever that is like that line  my work through my writing i mean this is this is the only set of skills i have people has is to write and i give everything i have to it you know so i want to ignite in people maybe a sense through the invention of wings for instance of how far we've come but how far we have to go with race and gender that you know races the original sin of this country and a great wound and it's not healed and it's not resolved yet and i feel that way about women too and i think their best way for me to approach issues of injustice in their just so many is to is to write because that's what i do best out of our audience members says i'm a high school english teacher and we teach the secret life of bees other than that what book should every teenager read oh gosh well i try to think of i always feel like i'm on jeopardy when this happens i'll try to think of books that i read in high school that had a big impact on they may be different now but when i read kate chopin's the awakening it was quite profound for me i think sometimes looking at lives through the historical realm is sometimes the clearest way to see ourselves in the present and that's what that book did for me the roe walden big impact on me and frank course the diary of anne frank  not proud of it i hadn't thought of that in so long that was a hugely important book for me i think is by john gunther about the journey of his of his son who had a brain tumor and i remember it ripped my heart out as a teenager in high school but i never thought about life the same way again so i mean those are a few that come to my mind  letters to a young poet by real k to kill a mockingbird we have time for one more question and answer we probably have some aspiring young writers either here tonight or in the radio audience what advice would you give to an aspiring young writer just getting started i think it would be the same advice i gave my daughter when she went to college it turned out she was an aspiring writer eventually but at that time she had no idea what she wanted to do but i sat up you know till about two am right trying to give her some parting advice in a card i had bought for her and i couldn't think what to say it was as if i thought i would never get this chance again so i was going to take her to school the next day her father died and so what i ended up writing was be true to yourself have the courage to be true to yourself and stand by yourself it was as simple as that and maybe that is really the key you know writing as i said is an act of courage it's it's about having something to say and the ability to say it but the real thing is about the courage to say it a ll and it has to do with some sense of truth in oneself and finding that truth and being willing to have an authentic conversation with it so i think i would say that believe in yourself but first of all find the self you want to stand by and then believe in that self because that's fundamental to writing thank you