We have a little time for me to answer questions,
if anybody wants to ask questions.
You don't have to if you don't want to, it's OK.
Is this part of the linked short?
Yes.
Yes, actually the parents--
the anarchist parents-- have their own story.
The wife has her own story.
We meet them when they're young, and we
haven't seen them since then.
So now we see them as parents.
A lot of the anarchists in the 20--
I placed them as anarchists in the 20s,
when it was really a dying movement.
And the ones who stayed with it, of course, got
upstaged by the communists and various sort
of socialist groups.
So there were a few anarchists who stayed with it.
I mean those were they beliefs, and they kept them.
And a few of them were against the war,
which is how I got the idea for this story.
Yeah.
Yes.
Since writing your book on time in fiction,
do you think differently now when your back to composing
your stories about how you want time to work,
or does that just play out in that way?
Well, I wrote the book partly because they
asked me to be in the series and I could pick my topic.
But I picked time, because I-- for a while
I had been doing stories that covered
very long spans of time.
And this one, we're mostly with this couple at this stage,
but there's another sort of third of the story where
we swoop forward and trace them to later middle age,
or middle middle age.
But I had always done that.
Or I had recently done that, and I
knew it was an eccentric thing to do.
So that made-- so it's the reverse, that
made me want to write the book and think
about different things to do with time.
Because I was always told summary
was a weak form in fiction, and I sort of love it.
So I was really drawn to doing these long, long stories.
Also I sort of have a belief that it
takes a long time for things to happen.
You know, that the kinds of results I'm interested in
don't happen in a scene.
So I wanted to push the form to do that.
Yes.
Have you ever [INAUDIBLE] he's a writer [INAUDIBLE]??
No, I know his name, but I don't know his work.
I read some of his short stories last semester
and they also have that summary style, all the way
through, told by a first person narrator.
Oh.
And it was a very, very odd story.
[INAUDIBLE] stories, what was the [INAUDIBLE]
Oh, I'm going to look for his stuff.
Thank you, that's great.
I'll stop.
That's great, thank you all.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
I just wanted to mention that there are books over there.
And will you sign?
Sure.
OK, so if you want to get a book, come on over here
and you can have Joan sign.
Thanks again for coming.
[APPLAUSE]