[APPLAUSE]
Thank you, Kim, for that beautiful introduction
and linking cakes which is very satisfying.
And Diana and the Poetry Center for hosting this.
And Kate Bernheimer for inviting me here
who we've corresponded for years but never actually
met, so what a pleasure.
And to all of you for being here.
What a neat space.
Sort of interestingly like long shape.
[LAUGHTER]
I like it.
It's like a-- it's sort of a triangle but sort of not.
It doesn't have a point.
All right.
So this comes second.
I have all my little--
I don't have pockets or I have like one
little pocket so I was carrying things around anyway.
So I'm going to read two stories.
One is very short and pretty new and the other one
is older and in The Color Master.
So as a little intro to this newer one.
Thinking of fairy tales, it's a Rumpelstiltskin tale.
But I've been very preoccupied a little bit fictionally
with this idea of what we-- what if I
took sort of scientifically literally some of the changes
and transformations that happen in fairy tales.
Obviously, they can't happen in real life but somehow it felt--
it has felt interesting to try to think about, in this case
like how would you turn straw into gold.
How would that happen?
How could that be?
Because it's a big change.
Like somehow my mind has just arrived finally
many years later to being like it really is a big change.
[LAUGHTER]
Like how would that happen?
So I think that's the impetus in some ways for this story, which
is called No Name.
And also I'm happy to do question and answer
after the reading.
Once I was named, says Rumpelstiltskin
sitting at the small table folding himself
an origami swan.
All the gold I had spun reverted to straw.
There were storerooms of it from when
I helped the Miller's daughter who became queen
and who was then exiled.
They did not know, he says forming a delicate point
for the beak, that it was precisely due to my anonymity
that the trembling space was created chemically.
Where something ordinary like straw, a compound of cellulose
that includes many elements such as carbon, hydrogen,
and minerals, could transform into pure gold, isotope Au-197.
There are rare opportunities like that
when something physical in the world
can truly change if implemented by someone also
in a mutable state.
I'm actually going to pause here.
I don't know if I should figure out
how to include this but to say those of you that aren't
freshly remembering Rumpelstiltskin
it's not until he's named that he's discovered.
And anyway he can't have the child.
He asked for the child.
OK.
So I'm figuring out how much of that
do I need to reveal in the story.
He leans back into his rocking chair gazing
through the canopy of trees.
What I wanted most, he says, eyes focused far away
was of course the baby.
I am so fond of the transitory creature known as baby.
I am also partial to the child.
But I wanted to do it a little differently you see,
to raise a person away from that world.
It was a boy you know though any kind would have been fine.
We were going to move away from kinds.
If they had just given me the baby
then they could have kept their gold
and then had more children later and me and the baby
would have gone off and traveled around in the in-between.
But they wanted their baby, their known baby,
a baby to grow up in the world of the kingdom.
He shrugs, fine.
He said fine but then no gold from me.
He spent some time in silence, completing the swan's wings.
The evening is cooled and the trees around us
are gathering their shadows back to their trunks,
leaves swirling from quickening breezes.
I need to be home soon to make dinner.
The walk back to the car is long.
I was not allowed to bring a photographer Rumpelstiltskin
sighs and fills in the rest of the story
how the king, outraged, threw out the queen and child who
ran to the forest and became forest people or so he'd heard.
That straw, the formerly gold straw
was he believes fed to the horses.
For a moment he rests his hands.
He uses a wooden leg and hip now formed
after he split himself in two which he attaches with leather
straps to his waist.
When I asked why he did such a thing, splitting himself
in two, he laughs, harsh.
It was not, he says, planned.
Are we done?
Just one more question, please.
How did you learn such a skill in the first place?
He spreads the swans wings pale blue,
blows into the tiny hole on its underside
so its belly fills and places it into my hand.
For me, I ask, please.
Then he tucks the crutch into his armpit
and stands the wooden leg reaching to the ground
but not exactly in line with the other, putting him at a tilt.
It is unclear where he lives.
We will be walking in opposite directions.
I had a teacher once, he says, who
taught me of chemistry and its volatility, a goblin.
My goodness, it was a wonderful class.
And then he stumps off until he's enveloped by darkness.
I take my swan with me through the trees
which are shadowier by the minute, the ground
bumpy and broody until I glimpse the hulking
shape of the Jeep at the edge of the dirt and its corners
console me.
Its big in rugged wheels.
The swan rests on the passenger seat
through the traffic to home but my bag crushes it slightly.
And although the children are charmed by it, after a while
its wings rip and they're drawn to something else, some kind
of wind up popcorn with feet.
I tell them who I met and they find it very funny.
And they want to hear about it again and hear again
the story in the old book and hear details
about the leather straps.
But when I ask them if they want to come with me to the forest
to see if we can find him again and speak with him maybe
learn from him they say no and run out of the room.
There's something distasteful even in the question.
And for the rest of the evening they
ignore me and play with each other
and brush their teeth without prompting
as if they are model citizens.
To complete the article or in an effort
to lean toward what might appear to be completion,
I visit the royal stables the next day
to inquire about the state of the horses.
The horses that ate the enchanted hay.
When I arrive there is red tape around the barn and one
stable hand tells me in a low-- in low agitated tones
that the horses left weeks ago.
Just galloped off and cleared the fences,
shaking their manes, kicking the dirt unrecognizable really
and it was a terrible loss and the new arrivals should
actually be coming today.
He's holding a bundle of carrots, watching the road,
eyes hopeful.
We wait together.
And after some time the long truck drives up
and parks and the red tape is cleared.
And with help, the new rows of horses exit.
Chestnut, roan, midnight black, blinders on,
stepping with their long and elegant legs
into new stalls where stable hands await with fresh water
and hay.
It is a lovely pretty sight.
But something about its smallness, its tameness,
is bad.
And it seems the man lodged it in me to now, the unrest.
The man person I mean, the being.
I have to do my best to unname him.
I so want him to get his powers back, to return to the flux.
But his name is unforgettable and I can't lose it,
can't get away from it.
And I imagine myself an old woman demented in a home,
forgetting almost everything not knowing my previous days,
hardly recognizing my own children
but holding on to his name.
Rumpelstiltskin, I will tell the nurse, desperate to purge it
from my head.
And she will misunderstand, will pull the book out
from the side table and flip to the well-worn page
to read me the story again.
[APPLAUSE]