SAL/on air

What happens when your world shifts, and you have to come to terms with a whole new reality? Barbara Kingsolver – the bestselling author of The Poisonwood Bible, The Lacuna, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, and more – has some idea.

In October 2018, SAL’s Executive Director, Ruth Dickey, sat down with Kingsolver to discuss her latest book, Unsheltered, at Benaroya Hall. The novel toggles between a small New Jersey town in 1870 and 2016, exploring both societal and family struggles. Unsheltered is a beautiful book about politics and economics and science and dogmatism and hope. It finds the parallels between the Victorian era, when Darwin’s theory challenged the Judeo-Christian worldview, and our own time, when global warming has challenged beliefs about the future of humanity. And Unsheltered is also—because this is Barbara Kingsolver we’re talking about here—a book about love and connection, about family and meaning and grief.

Why write about slavery in 2019? And when you write about, how do you defy the popular conceptions about slavery that readers have in their heads? How do you make the subject new? It took Ta-Nehisi Coates – author of the bestselling nonfiction works The Beautiful Struggle, We Were Eight Years in Power, and Between The World And Me – ten years of writing and meticulous research to produce his first novel, The Water Dancer, and in that time, he unearthed some incredibly powerful answers to these questions.

Dr. Charles Johnson, author of 24 books and winner of the 1990 National Book Award for his novel, Middle Passage, sat down with Coates in October 2019 to discuss The Water Dancer at Benaroya Hall. Already a NYT bestseller and Oprah's Book Club pick, his novel follows the life of Hiram Walker, born into slavery on a Virginia plantation. In the book, Harriet Tubman says of the Underground Railroad – “This is war. Soldiers fight in war for all kinds of reasons, but they die because they cannot bear to live in the world as it is.”

In this episode, we hear from Indian-born food and travel writer Madhur Jaffrey, who joined us in November 2013 for a talk on how we become who we are. At the time of her visit, Jaffrey, who is recognized for bringing Indian cuisine to the western hemisphere, had written nearly 30 cookbooks and won several James Beard Awards, as well as her critically-acclaimed memoir, Climbing the Mango Trees.

We learn how Jaffrey evolved to be an ambassador for Indian cuisine through her career as a prolific cookbook writer. We also learn of Jaffrey’s lively, food-infused childhood in India, of her time in New York where she made a living as a freelance writer while waiting for acting gigs, and of the acting career that followed. Listen to find out how she became an unofficial ambassador for Coca-Cola, how Jaffrey learned to swim with the aid of a watermelon, and how she joined in a peace prayer with Gandhi.

In this episode, we hear from poet Ada Limón, who joined us in October 2016 at McCaw Hall for a reading from her collection Bright Dead Things. Named a finalist for the 2015 National Book Award in Poetry and the National Book Critics Circle, Bright Dead Things follows a female speaker’s experiences of love and loss, exploring how we build our identities from place and from human contact.

“Ada Limón doesn't write as if she needs us. She writes as if she wants us. Her words reveal, coax, pull, see us,” writes poet Nikky Finney. “We read desire, ache, what human beings rarely have the heart or audacity to speak of alone—with the help of a poet with the most generous of eyes.”

In our latest episode of SAL/on air, we hear from actor and filmmaker Tom Hanks, who joined us at McCaw Hall in December of 2017. Seattle’s beloved librarian, Nancy Pearl, was in conversation with Hanks, who shared with us how he came to write his first book, the short story collection "Uncommon Type," plus all about his obsession with vintage typewriters and highlights from his prolific career.

In 2003, Azar Nafisi electrified readers worldwide with "Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books," which went on to become a long-running #1 New York Times bestseller. A modest professor of English literature, Nafisi taught at the University of Tehran as the Islamic Revolution raged around her, until she was fired in 1981 for her refusal to wear the mandatory veil. Before leaving the country in 1995, Nafisi spent two years holding secret classes on forbidden Western literature in her home. 

"Reading Lolita in Tehran" recounts seven young women students passionately relating Nabokov’s works, as well as novels like "Madame Bovary" and "Pride and Prejudice," to their own lives, claiming intellectual freedom through their survey of banned literature. In episode, we hear from Nafisi, who joined us at Benaroya Hall in February 2006 for Seattle Arts & Lectures’ 2005/06 Season. At the conclusion of Nafisi’s talk, Margit Rankin, then-Executive Director of Seattle Arts & Lectures, joins her in an interview about teaching, intellectual integrity, and the dire consequences of banning books.

In this episode, we hear from poet Jane Hirshfield, who joined us in March 2009 at Benaroya Hall for a reading spanning across her career, and for a discussion on the importance of inviting the intimacies of poetry and finding ways to say “yes” to the difficult.

Described by The New Yorker as “radiant and passionate,” Hirshfield is now the author of eight collections of verse, many of which are influenced by her Zen Buddhist practice and her knowledge of classical Japanese verse, and which are concerned with the many dimensions of our connections with others.

In this special Thanksgiving episode, we hear from Viet Thanh Nguyen, author of The Sympathizer and The Refugees, who joined us at Benaroya Hall in May 2018. He is introduced by Ruth Dickey, SAL Executive Director, and is interviewed after his talk by Jamie Ford, celebrated author of Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet.

In Viet Thanh Nguyen’s story “Black Eyed Woman” from The Refugees, the narrator speaks to us about the arrival of stories and of ghosts, saying: “Stories are just things we fabricate, nothing more. We search for them in a world beside our own, then leave them here to be found, garments shed by ghosts.”

This slight of hand illuminates the heart of Nguyen’s writing – the ideas that stories are just fabricated things, nothing more. Yet also that stories are everything we search for, the only things that remain of us, the things we leave to be found, the things that give meaning.

In this episode, we hear from Frank McCourt, who joined us in November 2006 for a lively talk about committing his youth to paper in his phenomenally popular memoir series, beginning with Angela’s Ashes. At the conclusion of McCourt’s talk, Margit Rankin, then-Executive Director of Seattle Arts & Lectures, joins him in an interview.

McCourt, a New York City schoolteacher who taught for nearly three decades, always told his writing students, “Write what you know.” It wasn’t until his mid-60s, in 1996, that he decided to follow his own advice, sitting down to produce the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winning Angela’s Ashes, based on his poverty-stricken childhood in Limerick, Ireland. At the time of McCourt’s visit, two more best-selling installments had followed his first offering: ’Tis, describing his struggle to gain his footing in New York, and Teacher Man, an account of his misadventures as a public-school teacher. Sadly, McCourt is no longer with us, but his incomparable voice lives on.

In his talk, hear McCourt, with his uncanny humor and profound sense of humanity, characterize the Irish Catholic school of his youth as “the school of fear and trembling.” Find out how, as a young Korean War veteran with “no high school diploma and no self-esteem,” he was able to convince the dean of NYU to admit him, and how his education ill-prepared him for what he calls the “flying sandwich situations” in the tough vocational high schools of Brooklyn.

When Lucie Brock-Broido, poet of the witching hour, sadly passed away in March 2018, we released audio of her reading "Infinite Riches in the Smallest Room," a title that's an apt description of her entire body of work.

In our latest episode of SAL/on air, we are delighted to share her SAL reading in its entirety, which took place on April 2015 at Chihuly Garden and Glass. At the time of Brock-Broido’s visit, she had produced four astonishing collections of poetry: A Hunger, The Master Letters, Trouble in Mind, and Stay, Illusion, a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Books Critics Circle Award.

"You have harnessed yourself ridiculously to this world," she read, words that ring true hearing her now.