50th PEN/Hemingway Award Celebration

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7:09 Good afternoon, everyone.

7:11 My name is Alan Price.

7:12 I am the director of the John F.

7:14 Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, and together with all of my colleagues,

7:20 including Rachel De Floor, executive director of the Kennedy Library Foundation,

7:25 and so many people contributed to the making of this event,

7:29 but I'm just going to quickly point out Liz Murphy,

7:31 who helped make all of this happen for us.

7:33 Thank you, Liz.

7:36 [applause] And on behalf of all my library and foundation colleagues,

7:41 I'm delighted to welcome all of you

7:43 to this year's PEN/Hemingway Award for debut novel ceremony,

7:47 the 50th annual celebration of this award.

7:51 Thank you for joining us this afternoon to celebrate

7:54 the work of the 2026 winners and honorees.

7:57 And to open, I humbly begin with a land acknowledgement to recognize

8:02 that the land on which we stand

8:03 and sit was once stewarded by indigenous peoples,

8:07 and this is an institution that preserves history,

8:13 makes history accessible,

8:15 and challenges all Americans to engage in the civic opportunity and struggle

8:20 of helping the nation grow ever closer to the noblest ideals of its founding.

8:25 And in accordance with that and learn more from our nation's history,

8:30 including indigenous history,

8:32 and contemplate how to honor and steward the land that each of us inhabits.

8:37 I'd like to acknowledge all those who make this event possible,

8:41 including the generous underwriters of the Kennedy Library Forums,

8:45 lead sponsors Bank of America and the Lowell Institute,

8:49 as well as the Mass Cultural Council, and the generous supporters who help us

8:53 sustain the Hemingway Collection and its programs,

8:57 especially the Hemingway family, Hemingway Limited,

9:00 and our Friends of the Hemingway Collection members.

9:04 We're very pleased to be collaborating in co-presenting this afternoon's

9:08 ceremony in conjunction with the International Hemingway Foundation and Society.

9:13 We are grateful, as always,

9:15 to the Hemingway family for their continued support of our Hemingway programs,

9:20 to PEN/Faulkner for their work administering the award,

9:23 and to the distinguished judges for their work in creating these 22 2026 awards.

9:30 We're thrilled to have members of the Hemingway family joining us here,

9:34 virtually and watching online.

9:36 Uh we dearly miss Ernest Hemingway's late son,

9:39 Patrick, who, with his late wife, Carol,

9:42 were long the vanguard of support for the Ernest

9:45 Hemingway Collection that resides here in the John F.

9:48 Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum.

9:51 We are honored to be the world's largest

9:53 repository for the writer's personal papers and photographs,

9:58 And we have an extraordinary amount of information on our website.

10:01 You should see it because this is all thanks

10:04 to the vision and dedication of our Patrick and Carol T.

10:09 Hemingway Scholar in Residence, Dr.

10:11 Hilary Justice.

10:12 Thank you, Hilary.

10:17 [applause] Uh for decades, Patrick's annual readings

10:23 from his father's works at the PEN/Hemingway

10:25 ceremony were a real pleasure for us here at the library.

10:29 And in recent years, Dr.

10:30 Sean Hemingway, the writer's grandson, and his wife, Dr.

10:33 Colette Hemingway, have taken up this mantle.

10:36 Thank you very much.

10:39 [applause] Together, they co-chair the Hemingway Council,

10:44 which raises funds for and awareness of the collection.

10:48 Thank you for joining us here today.

10:51 President Kennedy admired Ernest Hemingway and his work,

10:55 citing Hemingway's definition of courage as grace under pressure

11:00 in the beginning of his own Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Profiles in Courage.

11:05 After Hemingway passed in 1961,

11:08 President Kennedy arranged for Mary Hemingway to return

11:12 to Cuba to retrieve her late husband's belongings.

11:15 A few years later, Mary offered Hemingway's papers, photographs,

11:19 and selected momentos to Jacqueline Kennedy

11:22 for inclusion in President Kennedy's presidential library.

11:26 And so, we are particularly honored

11:28 and delighted to host this afternoon's program.

11:31 As we further the Kennedy administration's

11:34 legacy in honoring the arts and culture,

11:37 we are grateful indeed for the opportunity

11:39 to celebrate the work of this year's wonderful awardees.

11:43 I'm so glad that we are together this afternoon

11:45 to contemplate the beauty and power of the written word.

11:50 Now, it is my pleasure to introduce Dr.

11:52 Sean Hemingway.

11:54 Dr.

11:54 Hemingway is the John A.

11:56 and Carol O.

11:57 Moran Curator in charge of Greek and Roman

11:59 Art Department at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art.

12:03 He is a renowned archaeologist with a specialty

12:06 in Greek and Roman bronzes and has excavated prehistoric,

12:10 classical, and Roman sites in Greece and Spain.

12:13 He received his doctorate from Bryn Mawr College,

12:15 studied as a Fulbright Scholar at the American

12:18 School of Classical Studies in Athens, which I just visited like 3 weeks ago,

12:23 and has been a visiting curator at the American Academy in Rome.

12:27 He is the author of numerous scholarly publications,

12:30 including The Horse and Jockey from Artemision,

12:33 a bronze equestrian monument of the Hellenistic period,

12:37 and the novel The Tomb of Alexander.

12:39 He is also editor of the Hemingway Library editions of Ernest Hemingway's works.

12:44 Please join me in welcoming Dr.

12:46 Hemingway to our stage.

12:49 [applause] [applause] Thank you, Alan.

13:04 Good afternoon.

13:07 There's a long-standing tradition of giving

13:09 a voice to Ernest Hemingway at this event.

13:13 In tribute to our winner this year,

13:15 whose book draws so poignantly on letter writing,

13:18 and in tribute to the lost art of letter writing itself,

13:22 I will now read you a short letter from Ernest Hemingway to the noted scholar

13:26 and Renaissance painting expert, Bernard Berenson.

13:32 Hemingway was first encouraged to seek out Berenson,

13:35 who lived in a villa near Florence, or Firenze,

13:38 as Hemingway calls it in the letter, by his son,

13:41 Patrick, when he was studying art history at Harvard.

13:46 Hemingway and Berenson corresponded periodically over a period of 8 years,

13:51 but they never met in person.

13:54 This letter is dated August 25th, 1949,

13:59 and was penned at the Finca Vigía in Cuba, where Hemingway lived.

14:05 Dear Mr.

14:05 Berenson, thank you very much for your two last book your last two books,

14:11 which my wife, Mary, and I have read with great delight.

14:15 You write very well, General, and it makes me happy to read you.

14:20 I'm not always of the same opinion,

14:23 but it would be a sad world if we all agreed and could not argue.

14:28 Thank you also very much for being so kind to my wife, Mary.

14:33 You are more or less her hero,

14:35 and you are one of the living people that I respect most.

14:40 For your private information, I respect goddamn few of them.

14:47 This is just a letter that you do not have to answer.

14:50 I do not care for Firenze.

14:53 You do not mind a heretic, I hope, and I'm an old Veneto boy myself.

14:59 I love it and know it quite well.

15:02 Not as well as you, but in a different, disorderly way.

15:07 Mr.

15:07 Kipling, who when he wrote well, wrote properly,

15:11 wrote, "A man has only one virginity to lose,

15:16 and there his heart will ever be." This statement is slightly wet,

15:22 but it expresses how I feel about the Veneto, all parts, even Pordenone.

15:28 Please take good care of yourself,

15:30 and maybe we might meet sometime if I take care of myself,

15:33 too, and if we both have lots of luck.

15:36 My wife sends you her love.

15:38 Yours always, Ernest Hemingway.

15:44 [applause] [applause]

15:57 Good afternoon.

15:58 Thank you, Sean, for that wonderful reminder that Hemingway's letters

16:03 are also um a wonderful part of his literary legacy.

16:07 Some of you who know me know I'm a I'm a fan of his letters.

16:11 Um I'm Verna Kale, president of the Hemingway Foundation and Society,

16:16 and we are a nonprofit literary organization uh that's open to the public.

16:20 So, uh you are all welcome to join it if you would like.

16:24 Um I want to thank everyone in the audience today uh here

16:29 in person in Boston and also those of you joining us online.

16:33 The PEN/Hemingway Award is uh this this award

16:37 ceremony is always a special celebration,

16:39 but this year especially because this is

16:41 the 50th uh 50th anniversary of the award.

16:46 After Hemingway's death in 1961, President Kennedy arranged for Mary Hemingway,

16:51 Ernest's widow, to return to Cuba to gather some of his personal belongings.

16:56 Most significantly for us, this included Hemingway's papers.

17:00 And in 1980, Mary, along with Hemingway's son, Patrick,

17:05 dedicated this collection here in the newly opened JFK Library.

17:10 This is also when the very first meeting of the Hemingway Society occurred.

17:15 I was just a baby at the time, but I have heard the lore,

17:19 and um the meeting happened, you know,

17:22 right out there in the harbor on Thompson Island.

17:27 Um and today we also remember with gratitude

17:30 the contributions of Patrick Hemingway and his wife, Carol.

17:34 Uh Patrick passed away last year.

17:36 Um one of the earliest and most important missions

17:41 of the Hemingway Society has been the PEN/Hemingway Award.

17:46 And if you're doing the math,

17:48 then you know that the award actually predates the society.

17:53 Each year, this award uh offer each each year,

17:56 this award honors a debut novel of exceptional merit by an American author.

18:01 I'm delighted to congratulate this year's winner, Virginia Evans,

18:05 and this year's finalists, uh Susanna Kwan and Maggie Sue.

18:10 It's not a prerequisite of the award,

18:13 but I find it fascinating that uh several of this year's

18:17 finalists um made reference to Hemingway in the texts of the novels.

18:24 I thought that was really really neat.

18:26 But I think it's fair to say that all contemporary literature

18:29 has been touched by his influence in one way or another.

18:34 However, each of these books is truly remarkable in its own right,

18:39 and I am just thrilled to be sharing the stage

18:42 with all of you today um as we honor your amazing talent.

18:47 I want to extend um some thanks uh to this year's award judges,

18:52 Rachel Beanland, Dionne Irving, and Taimur Sumra.

18:57 Um I want to thank Alice McDermott for writing

19:01 a wonderful keynote that Alan Price will be sharing with us.

19:06 And I would like to thank Sean and Colette Hemingway,

19:09 the entire Hemingway family, the John F.

19:12 Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, uh and the John F.

19:17 Kennedy Library Foundation, including Liz Murphy and Hillary Justice,

19:21 for their work in organizing today's event,

19:24 and Caitlin Atlesberger and the Ucross Foundation,

19:28 which provides a writer's residency to all of the finalists of the award.

19:33 I especially want to thank PEN Faulkner,

19:35 our partner in administrating this award.

19:39 They've done [clears throat] a terrific job this year,

19:41 as you can see from the truly wonderful slate

19:44 of books that were selected as semifinalists and ultimately as finalists.

19:50 This is our first full year partnering with PEN/Faulkner and we

19:54 look forward to many more years

19:56 of celebrating excellence in American literature.

20:00 Um, at this time, please join me in welcoming Gwyn E.

20:03 Sullivan, the executive director for the PEN/Faulkner Foundation.

20:10 [applause] [applause] Thank you so much.

20:22 This is just it's great to be here.

20:24 I'm I'm I'm really delighted.

20:26 Uh, for those who haven't been introduced to PEN/Faulkner yet,

20:30 we are best known for giving out

20:32 the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and also the PEN/Malamud

20:35 Award for excellence in the short story

20:37 and now the PEN/Hemingway Award for debut novel,

20:40 but our mission is broader than that.

20:45 Our mission is to champion the breadth and power of fiction in America,

20:51 which is a glorious and honorable and important and never-ending task.

20:58 And it seems to get more and more and more important of late,

21:03 which I am sure you will all agree with.

21:05 Um, everyone in this room knows and loves

21:08 and believes in fiction as much as we do.

21:11 So, we are it's a real honor for us

21:14 to have taken over the administration of the PEN/Hemingway Award,

21:18 especially on the 50th anniversary.

21:20 We um, we have a tremendous gratitude and a sense

21:24 of the weight and importance of the role that we play.

21:27 I like to refer to us as the Price Um,

21:33 but that's a that's a serious task and we we tried you know,

21:36 we're going to try to live up to the 50 years that we are

21:39 stepping in at the tail end of and look forward to another 50 moving forward.

21:45 One of the ways in which the PEN/Hemingway Award

21:48 for debut novel is unique in the literary field,

21:51 it's the same thing that's true about the PEN/Faulkner Award.

21:55 It's judged entirely by writers,

21:59 rather than publishers or booksellers or critics.

22:02 They have uh, no influence.

22:04 It's completely free of any commercial influence.

22:07 It's just writers saying there's the good stuff.

22:13 People who are artists who have achieved

22:15 things in the field themselves pointing out um,

22:18 where the where the great new things are.

22:19 So, here today to introduce our writer judges for 2026 is Lauren Francis Sharma,

22:27 a gifted and terrific novelist herself, who is also the chair of the awards

22:32 committee on PEN/Faulkner's board of directors.

22:35 Lauren.

22:39 [applause] Hello.

22:53 What a wonderful afternoon.

22:54 I'm very excited to be here.

22:56 Um, when you're responsible for selecting judges, it is not easy.

23:02 You're thinking about people who understand what it is to write,

23:06 think, and examine texts well.

23:09 People who play well with others and who are willing

23:13 to contribute to this wonderful community of readers and writers.

23:18 People who believe in the power of fiction.

23:21 This process begins in July.

23:23 So, it's 9 months of reading and discussing and perhaps even arguing.

23:29 And selecting judges also comes with lots of no's,

23:32 but these three judges said yes at the very first call.

23:36 So, thank you.

23:37 And I'll be happy to introduce them.

23:40 Rachel Beanland is the author of the novels The Half-Life, The House Is on Fire,

23:45 and Florence Adler Swims Forever,

23:47 which won the National Jewish Book Award for debut fiction.

23:51 Beanland attended the University of South Carolina and and earned

23:55 her MFA in creative writing from Virginia Commonwealth University.

23:59 She lives in Richmond, Virginia and is currently the Donaldson writer

24:02 in residence at the College of William and Mary.

24:06 Dionne Irving is originally from Ontario.

24:10 She's the author of the novel Quint and the short story collection The Islands.

24:15 Her work has appeared in Electric Literature, Story,

24:17 Boulevard, and Lit Hub, among other journals and magazines.

24:21 The Islands was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award,

24:25 the Giller Prize, the New American Voices Award, and the Clara Johnson Award,

24:30 and was also named one of the best books of 2022 by NPR.

24:35 Irving teaches in the MFA program and serves at the as the director

24:39 of the initiative on race and resilience at the University of Notre Dame.

24:44 Tamar Soomro is the author of the novel Other Names for Love

24:48 and the co-editor of the essay collection Letters to a Writer of Color.

24:52 His writing has appeared in The New Yorker and The New York Times.

24:56 He has received fellowships from the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing

25:00 and Sozopol Fiction Seminars and of course the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference,

25:04 which is why I know him.

25:06 And thank you three so much for doing this.

25:08 We really really love that you've done it

25:10 and you've selected a wonderful wonderful list from uh,

25:14 from the finalists that we had.

25:15 Thank you.

25:19 [applause]

25:34 So, I'm excited to My name is Dionne Irving and I'm excited to introduce uh,

25:38 Susanna Kwan's Awake in the Floating City.

25:41 In the darkness of a world deteriorated by an ongoing climate crisis,

25:46 memory and art and human connection might be the last

25:50 things that have the power to save our species.

25:53 Susanna Kwan's Awake in the Floating City is a breathtaking achievement

25:57 that manages to be as intellectually demanding as it is emotionally resonant.

26:02 It asks us to consider a future not in which we have saved the planet,

26:06 but a future in which we try to save each other.

26:09 Art and care are mechanisms for survival

26:12 and resilience and while science can offer solutions,

26:15 memory and artists can affirm our humanity.

26:19 Kwan captures the visceral grief of watching our physical ideas

26:22 of home shrink from a vast bountiful planet to a precarious refuge.

26:28 What makes Awake in the Floating City a masterclass

26:30 in fiction isn't just the imagery of a submerged San Francisco.

26:34 It's how Susanna Kwan rejects the typical

26:37 climate the typical climate fiction tropes

26:40 to focus on the psychological and social

26:42 erosion caused caused by climate change.

26:45 In some ways, what Kwan posits is posits as the real

26:48 death is not just the tangible dying of our planet,

26:52 but the death of care for each other.

26:54 The story deconstructs the traditional nuclear family exploring how

26:58 kinship involve evolves when survival is no longer guaranteed.

27:03 It examines the fiction the friction between

27:05 blood ties and the tribes we form out

27:07 of necessity asking hard questions about loyalty

27:11 and who we choose to save when resources dwindle.

27:15 The preservation of memory is a is a resource is

27:18 a is a resource as vital and tactile as any other.

27:22 And this novel, like the art it presents on its pages,

27:25 is a testament to a future that will only continue if we

27:29 continue to be invested in those oldest desires that are fundamentally human.

27:35 The desire to express and create.

27:37 From the earliest cave painting to the projections

27:40 that Beau creates in Awake in the Floating City,

27:43 art will be the thing that sustains us.

27:46 The judges were drawn so much drawn to so much of Kwan's lyrical language,

27:51 the scope of the novel, and the story that while expansive remained grounded

27:55 in the messy reality of the human experience.

27:58 It is a story about the resilience of humans and that our survival,

28:02 while not guaranteed, can be maintained through memory, art, and love.

28:07 Which at the end of the novel, Kwan projects a future hovered soaked through

28:12 with memory between the buildings and beyond.

28:16 Thank you.

28:19 [applause] Hello.

28:31 Um, thank you for that beautiful introduction.

28:34 Thank you to PEN/Faulkner and the Hemingway Foundation

28:39 and family and JFK Library and you cross um,

28:45 and to the judges, Rachel and Tamar and Dionne.

28:49 Um, I am so grateful.

28:52 And congratulations to Maggie.

28:54 Congratulations to Virginia.

28:56 It's an honor to be here with you.

28:59 I'm going to read from about halfway

29:01 into the book and the main character Beau, an artist,

29:05 has just embarked on an art project and she needs some help doing research,

29:11 so she goes to the library.

29:15 None of the old library branches remained, but select collections had been moved

29:20 to two separate office spaces in sturdier high-rises.

29:24 Beau looked up the closer location,

29:26 which was staffed by a devoted librarian

29:28 who specialized in local history and had

29:31 volunteered to stay on as long as patrons continued to use the archive services.

29:36 She kept visiting hours flexible to accommodate their schedules.

29:41 Librarians were, of course, not just librarians anymore.

29:44 Trained in library science,

29:46 resourceful and skilled at interfacing with the public,

29:49 they had long ago become civil servant

29:51 generalists deployed to areas of greatest need.

29:55 They delivered mail, food, supplies to the housebound,

29:59 administered antidotes for drug overdoses,

30:02 connected the sick with health services,

30:04 tracked the movement of illness during epidemics,

30:06 monitored public housing sites,

30:09 conducted outreach to vulnerable communities, stanched bleeding,

30:12 exterminated pests, and even guided building interiors destroyed by water.

30:18 They cared for those who had no family left living,

30:21 no family locally, the ones left behind.

30:25 They were nimble, quick to adapt their skills to meet staffing needs.

30:29 This librarian, Antonia,

30:31 also organized a food pantry that distributed dry goods and toiletries,

30:35 and managed city planning records and property deeds.

30:39 If you were in need of a birth or death certificate, she was the one to ask.

30:44 The bulletin at the top of her monthly

30:45 newsletter listed those in the district who had passed.

30:49 Beneath her signature, she always included this line,

30:52 "The commons keeps changing,

30:54 and I with it." Antonia posted regular updates in which she highlighted titles

30:59 in her collection and appealed to the public

31:01 to visit and make use of the resources.

31:05 Most of the city's archives had been lost to flooding,

31:07 she'd reported when the branch had opened.

31:10 Mounds of mold had devoured folios and records.

31:14 Bo pictured black spores forming constellations on the covers of books,

31:18 like drops of ink spread wet on wet,

31:20 each spot connecting to another to form a map of emerging ruin.

31:25 History had a history of vanishing this way.

31:28 "To the elements," the librarian wrote, "Think of Pompeii.

31:32 Think of Herculaneum." Other sets of knowledge had

31:35 been systematically erased over the course of human history.

31:39 Censored books incinerated, files wiped from servers,

31:43 memories stripped from the mind by electrical current.

31:47 Still, treasures waited to be discovered among the remnants.

31:51 She saw herself as a custodian of thinning knowledge

31:54 tasked with ushering it from one generation to the next.

31:58 Her current efforts were focused on reformatting materials

32:01 in preparation for migrating them to yet another storage system,

32:05 and she delighted even more than usual in being interrupted by visitors,

32:09 a pause in the endless task.

32:12 The library was now housed in an old office building

32:15 on a floor that had been abandoned by a renewable energy think tank.

32:19 The space had a clinical feel with low ceilings and metal furniture,

32:23 and a stained concrete subfloor where old carpet had been stripped.

32:27 Bo followed a light to a compact windowless room,

32:30 and found Antonia seated at a large desk in a puffy down jacket,

32:34 dutifully entering information into a database.

32:37 Behind her, a shelving unit held neatly folded clothing, bedding,

32:41 pantry items, a bowl, a stainless steel tumbler, and a portable stove.

32:46 She broke into a broad smile at the sight of Bo,

32:49 and welcomed her with a two-armed wave.

32:52 "How can I help you?

32:53 What are you looking for?" Thank you.

32:58 [applause] [applause] Hi.

33:09 That was such a beautiful reading.

33:11 Um it's such a privilege to be here and an honor

33:13 to introduce Maggie Sue and her brilliant novel, Blob.

33:19 Um Blob and its spiky protagonist charmed me.

33:24 It is such an irreverent novel.

33:27 It applies such care, such rigor, such tender insight to a story that might,

33:33 at first glance, seem really quite whimsical.

33:37 A young woman discovers an amorphous blob outside a bar,

33:42 takes it home, and transforms it into her ideal partner.

33:48 It's that chiaroscuro of light and dark, funny and serious,

33:52 tender and acerbic, that makes Blob so beguiling.

33:57 It's very weird, but it's also very familiar,

34:01 partly because it engages with familiar tropes,

34:04 fairy tales, genre fiction, Frankenstein amongst others.

34:09 It's written with a ton of style,

34:11 and it speaks so intelligently about how difficult it can be to love,

34:16 about how complicated desire can be.

34:19 "Desire is never benign," Blob tells us.

34:23 "It's never apolitical." Blob is a strange, unashamedly strange novel,

34:30 and its strangeness is what makes it true.

34:36 [applause]

34:44 Thank you so much.

34:45 That was so beautiful.

34:46 And thank you to the judges.

34:47 We were talking in the car, and we said,

34:48 "These judges must have had the biggest heart to pick

34:50 these three books," because I think they offer a lot of hope.

34:53 Um and yes, my weird little book that I wrote in the during

34:57 the pandemic in 2020 in my basement apartment that smelled pretty pretty funky,

35:03 I could never have imagined um that I would be here, so I'm really grateful.

35:06 I'm going to start at the beginning.

35:08 Um it's May, freshly turned and drizzling,

35:11 when I find the blob outside a dive bar.

35:14 A beige, gelatin splotch the size of a dinner plate sits

35:17 next to a trash can tucked between glass shards and chewed gum.

35:22 It reminds me of the slime I made as a kid with my brother,

35:25 a concoction of Elmer's glue, baking soda,

35:28 shaving cream, contact lens solution, food coloring, and water.

35:33 Before Alex abandoned me for the neighborhood

35:35 boys with their N64s and X-Men cards,

35:39 we spent hours sticking it on each other and peeling it off.

35:42 "You're a monster," we would say.

35:45 The blob looks like those times when we made the mixture too liquidy,

35:49 and the whole thing slipped from our hands

35:51 and disintegrated on the kitchen floor.

35:53 I bend down to get a closer look and make out a mouth and eyes.

35:57 Its lips form a downturned crescent moon, an exaggerated frowny face.

36:03 Two beady black eyes look up at me, no eyelids.

36:07 "Shit," I say, "this thing isn't slime." I

36:10 take a picture of the creature on my phone,

36:13 reverse search the photo, and an animal called a blob fish appears on my screen.

36:18 There are some similarities.

36:20 It's about 12 in long and seems to lack bones and teeth.

36:24 The problem is, blob fish are native

36:26 to Australia and live a thousand meters underwater.

36:29 It shouldn't be in a landlocked Midwestern college town.

36:34 I shiver through my jacket.

36:35 The street behind me is empty.

36:37 It's too early for Friday revelers.

36:39 A knotty branch sticks out from the bushes,

36:41 and I grab it without questioning my instinct.

36:45 I return to the blob and extend the stick.

36:48 Gently, I poke.

36:50 The wood meets flesh without any resistance.

36:53 I push deeper, and the stick glides through the blob.

36:56 I've gone too far, made myself a blob kebab, but when I pull back,

37:01 there's no I was really proud of that when I [laughter] wrote it.

37:05 There's no puncture wounds.

37:07 I poke again and see the blob flinching away from the intrusion,

37:11 forming a tunnel of open space to avoid the stick.

37:14 I stumble back, regretting my encroachment.

37:17 "What are you?" I ask.

37:18 I receive no response.

37:20 I'm going to skip so we get more blob.

37:22 Um A safe distance from the blob, I scroll through my phone looking for answers.

37:27 One 2013 poll named the blob fish the ugliest animal in the world,

37:32 beating out the aquatic scrotum frog and pubic lice.

37:36 Another news item corrects the ugliest misconception.

37:40 It turns out that the infamous photo

37:42 of the grumpy-looking goo is a dead blob fish.

37:45 At its normal depth, the blob fish looks like any other bony fish.

37:49 It's decompression damage that makes it ugly.

37:52 The pressure difference when the fish is dragged

37:54 up thousands of meters to the surface is 200

37:57 times what a human would experience if they

37:59 were blasted out of the airlock of a spaceship.

38:02 The fish doesn't stand a chance.

38:04 It unspools.

38:06 I step closer to the blob and watch

38:08 its body slowly rise and fall, definitely alive.

38:11 I'll stop there.

38:12 Thank you.

38:14 [applause] That was incredible.

38:29 Okay.

38:31 A year after its after its publication, this novel needs little introduction.

38:37 It's been called a sleeper hit, a slow-burn success story,

38:43 a breakout novel that no one saw coming, and the little book that could.

38:50 When the book was released in April of last year,

38:52 it didn't make any big lists, nor was it picked by any celebrity book clubs.

38:57 It had a pretty nice blurb on the cover,

39:00 courtesy of Ann Patchett, but that was about it.

39:04 The novel, which sold fewer than a thousand

39:06 copies a week for its first six weeks,

39:09 could have gone the way of a lot of books and had a quiet run.

39:13 But by the end of the summer, something strange had begun to happen.

39:18 Sales were picking up.

39:20 Booksellers couldn't keep it in stock.

39:22 The publisher kept ordering bigger and bigger printings.

39:27 In October, five months after its publication,

39:30 the novel hit the New York Times bestseller list.

39:33 And in late December, it took the number one spot,

39:37 which it held for eight weeks.

39:40 This sort of thing doesn't except when it does.

39:44 And when it does, it's not because a publisher pumped a bunch

39:48 of money into marketing or because an author was really good at TikTok.

39:53 This kind of slow burn success is the result of individual people reading a book

40:00 and being so moved by it that they didn't just tell one friend, they tell 10.

40:07 By the time I was introduced to the cantankerous

40:10 Sybil Van Antwerp and her letter-writing habit,

40:13 I'd already had at least half a dozen friends tell me to read the novel.

40:18 I read it on a plane,

40:19 prepared to be mildly disappointed when the book didn't live up to the hype,

40:23 but this is not what happened.

40:24 What happened is that I ugly cried several hours,

40:28 then turned to my seatmate and said,

40:29 "Boy, do I have a book recommendation for you."

40:34 Sybil Van Antwerp is not your everyday heroine.

40:37 She's older, near the end of her life,

40:40 with a pretty good understanding of what it all meant.

40:43 As with any life, there were joys and hardships, and in Sybil's case,

40:47 the death of her young son is

40:49 a hardship that defined everything that came after.

40:53 Sybil can't rewrite the past, but she can write these letters,

40:56 and through her continued interrogation of the world and her place in it,

41:01 she finds some semblance of peace.

41:04 The book is heartbreaking and it's also redemptive,

41:07 a reminder that we are capable of change right up until the end.

41:12 Virginia Evans wrote seven novels before writing

41:15 the novel we are gathered here to celebrate.

41:18 Starting at age 19, she set her alarm for 5:00 a.m.

41:22 and wrote for 2 hours every morning.

41:25 She did this for 20 years, and with each book,

41:28 she got a little closer to her goal.

41:31 With with one manuscript, she got as far as querying agents.

41:35 With another, she managed to land an agent.

41:38 And then finally, there was a book

41:39 that went out on submission but got no takers.

41:43 It would have been easy to give up, but instead,

41:46 Evans realized she had more to learn, and in her mid-30s,

41:49 she enrolled in a one-year master's program at Trinity College Dublin,

41:53 where she studied with Claire Keegan,

41:55 Kevin Power, Carlo Gebler, and Owen McNally.

41:59 And here's the kicker, even the book she wrote there,

42:03 which she thought was a great book, did not sell.

42:08 It was on the heels of that crippling disappointment that she

42:11 sat down to write what she calls a palate cleanser.

42:16 We call it The Correspondent.

42:20 All three of this year's finalists

42:22 for the PEN/Hemingway Award are superb, but as judges,

42:26 what stood out to us about Virginia Evans'

42:28 The Correspondent was how little we talked about it.

42:31 No one needed to convince anyone else of the book's virtues,

42:35 because once we'd all read it,

42:36 it was clear that what we were dealing with was just a very good book.

42:42 The three of us are different writers, coming from different backgrounds,

42:46 but we had each been moved by Sybil's story, and as the months passed,

42:50 we concluded that she had stayed with us, that we had, in our own small ways,

42:55 been changed by her barbed missives, by her gumption, and by her heart.

43:00 Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Virginia Evans,

43:03 author of The Correspondent and this year's

43:05 winner of the PEN/Hemingway Award for debut novel.

43:11 [applause] [applause] [applause] I think I'll just read, but I'm very grateful.

43:34 There's something I did in this book which was told to me

43:38 by an interviewer at The New York Times was taking a big swing,

43:43 and that was writing in the voice of Joan Didion, and that was a very big swing.

43:49 It worked out, but um This is a letter that Sybil is writing to Joan Didion.

43:56 Miss Joan Didion, 30 East 71st Street, Suite 5A, New York, New York, 10021.

44:05 November 14th, 2012.

44:09 Dear Joan, thank you for your letter, which did arrive,

44:12 as you'd intended, on the 7th of November.

44:15 It was very good of you to remember that.

44:18 You asked how long ago Gilbert had passed away,

44:21 and this past July, it was 39 years.

44:25 He would have turned nine at the November 7th following.

44:29 Do you know I had to sit down and do the math again, and that made me feel bad.

44:33 I feel it's something I should know immediately,

44:35 and it's a bit like disrespect that I don't.

44:38 Another way of punishing myself for the rest of time.

44:42 In response to your second, more complex question,

44:46 I've sat and thought for nearly a week.

44:48 How does it all feel to me now?

44:52 I suppose there is this one part of it, which is Gilbert has never left me,

44:57 and the circumstances of his death have never for one day diminished.

45:01 And as I age, it feels so strange that the majority of people

45:05 with whom I come in contact don't have the slightest inkling that he ever lived.

45:11 I had him for so much less time than I've lived without him,

45:15 and yet his presence is enormous, though I keep it to myself.

45:19 It is as if I have swallowed a hot air balloon, but try not to let on.

45:24 There is an articulation of life one hears again and again.

45:29 People will say, "Oh,

45:30 this is only a season." You know what I'm referring to, don't you?

45:34 I mean, how if someone is in difficulty, they'll say,

45:36 "It's only a season." Or if someone is

45:38 having a new baby and in the sleepless nights,

45:41 an older woman will comfort with this idea that the expanse of time is a season,

45:45 a winter, I suppose, or rather a hurricane season,

45:49 and the season will change eventually to something sunnier.

45:52 I take issue with this.

45:54 There are, by definition,

45:56 four seasons that repeat in measured pattern year after year.

46:01 As there is no such rhythm in the human life,

46:03 I have to think that when it comes to seasons, we all get one round.

46:08 We are born and grow through childhood in spring.

46:11 We live those glorious, lively,

46:13 interesting years of our 20s, 30s, 40s in summer.

46:17 We settle into ourselves in autumn,

46:19 that cool but not yet cold time, rich and aromatic.

46:23 And in winter, we age brutally and die.

46:28 One turn of the seasons per person, unless it's cut short, like it was for Gil,

46:33 and like it was for Quintana Roo, that was Joan Didion's daughter.

46:36 I suppose on this schedule, we'd say your John had made it to fall,

46:40 and my mother died in summer.

46:43 But I think of life rather like a long road we walk in one direction.

46:48 By and large, a lonesome walk out

46:50 in the wilderness of hills and wind, mountains, snow.

46:56 And sometimes, there is someone to come along and walk with you for a stretch,

47:00 and sometimes, this is what I'm getting to, sometimes,

47:03 you see in the distance some lights,

47:06 and it heartens you, the lone house or maybe a village,

47:09 and you come into the warmth of that stopover and go inside.

47:13 Maybe you have a warm supper and stay a night,

47:16 or maybe you stay there a few years.

47:18 I had one of those stopovers when the children were young,

47:21 just before Gilbert died and Don and I were happy,

47:25 even though I didn't know it was happiness at the time,

47:28 because it felt like busyness

47:30 and exhaustion and financial stress and self-doubt.

47:35 But Gilbert's death was a swift ejection back back out onto the loneliest,

47:40 bitter stretch of road, and that is the bone-crunching grief.

47:46 I'm not saying I've not come in from the wind a few more times in my life.

47:50 I have.

47:51 And of course, I have my other children, and they have been a joy and comfort.

47:55 I'd like to say they were enough,

47:57 but it wasn't enough, and that is another avenue of grief.

48:00 But anyway, my point is,

48:02 I tire of people speaking of seasons as if you can count

48:05 on 3 months of winter turning out 3 months of summer on repeat.

48:09 It's not so.

48:11 The stretches on the high,

48:12 wind-blown road are far commoner than the stopovers in comfort,

48:16 and aren't we always trying to get back to the happier times?

48:20 I think that is what it feels like with Gil.

48:23 I've spent my life trying to get back to having him,

48:26 even though I know I cannot.

48:29 I understand perhaps you are asking how the grief wears over time,

48:33 partly from a place of kindness and partly,

48:36 on the other hand, from a place of self-preservation, and understandably so,

48:40 wondering what you should expect in your own situation of hell.

48:44 Perhaps reading this, you would like to think

48:46 you will fare better than I have fared, and perhaps you will.

48:50 In any case, I wish I could say,

48:52 after all this time, it's easier, but it's not easier.

48:56 I do have longer stretches, though, when Gilbert doesn't come to mind,

48:59 and that is a relief, I suppose.

49:01 This time of year, though,

49:02 with the trees fully bare and the leaves collecting in drifts,

49:07 the sky rather endlessly gray,

49:09 the expanse of now through to the end of the holidays is abhorrent to me.

49:13 I hold my breath and wait for January.

49:16 I barely decorate.

49:17 A few lights in the windows is all I can muster.

49:20 Do let me know how you're getting on with your own life and work,

49:24 and how you are feeling, your own musings, anything, when you have time.

49:27 I'll look forward to your next letter.

49:29 With very warm regards, I write, Sybil.

49:35 [applause] Thank you.

49:44 [applause] Wow.

49:54 Virginia, thank you.

49:58 Good afternoon.

49:59 My name is Dr.

50:00 Hillary Justice.

50:01 I am the Patrick and Carol T.

50:03 Hemingway Scholar-in-Residence here at the JFK Library and Foundation.

50:10 Today my job is to introduce keynote speaker author Alice

50:15 McDermott who because of a family medical emergency isn't here today.

50:20 So first of all, I know you all join me

50:22 in sending her and her family our absolute very best wishes.

50:28 Her remarks will be read by Library Director Alan Price.

50:34 The author of nine novels and winner of the National Book Award,

50:38 Alice McDermott is one of the most admired

50:41 and highly regarded fiction writers in America today.

50:45 Publishers Weekly lauds her as a singular voice in American letters.

50:49 Highlighting her impeccable sentences.

50:51 Isn't that a great phrase?

50:52 I love that phrase.

50:54 Impeccable sentences and authentically human characters, many of whom,

50:58 like her, are Irish-American, Catholic, and from New York City.

51:04 Her recent novel Absolution was an instant New York Times bestseller,

51:08 winner of the 2024 Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award,

51:13 finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award,

51:15 and named one of the best books of 2023 by Time,

51:18 NPR, the Los Angeles Times, Vogue, Esquire, and others.

51:25 Her previous novels were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize, three of them.

51:30 That Night, At Weddings and Wakes, and After This.

51:35 The National Book Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award,

51:37 the National Book Critics Circle Award, Kirkus Prize, and Dublin IMPAC Award.

51:43 Her novel Charming Billy won the National Book Award for Fiction.

51:48 The Ninth Hour received Prix Fémina Étranger.

51:53 She is also the author of a book of essays What About the Baby:

51:57 Some Thoughts on the Art of Fiction.

52:00 Her works appear in lists of top 10s, best books, and notable works,

52:05 selected by organizations like the Washington Post,

52:07 the Wall Street Journal, Time Magazine, Library Journal, and NPR.

52:12 Her stories and essays have appeared in The New Yorker,

52:15 Harper's, The New York Times, and elsewhere.

52:18 She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

52:23 Of her writing the Boston Globe says,

52:26 "Alice McDermott reminds us of the pleasures of literary

52:29 fiction and its power to illuminate lives and worlds.

52:33 She is a virtuoso of language and image,

52:36 allusion and reflection, reference and symbol,

52:40 demonstrating her expansively attentive literary care

52:44 and its quiet power." Please join me in welcoming to the stage Library Director

52:50 Alan Price to read for Alice McDermott.

52:54 [applause] I am not Alice McDermott.

53:09 Uh Alice truly wished she could have been here in person with us today.

53:13 She wanted to convey her warmest

53:16 congratulations uh to Maggie, Susanna, Virginia,

53:20 and express her hope that your paths and her path

53:24 would cross again in the long arc of your careers.

53:31 So Alice sent her remarks and her wordcraft

53:34 and the spirit behind the wordcraft are genuinely beautiful,

53:40 and it is neither my place nor my wish to change a single word.

53:45 I'm deeply honored to share her words with you now.

53:53 In January 1961 my Irish grandmother was in the front row of JFK's inauguration.

54:03 She had traveled with her eldest daughter by train from Brooklyn the night

54:07 before and had arrived at the capital bright and early that morning.

54:13 Famously, there was a blizzard the day they made their way

54:17 to Washington and the temperature on January 20th was in the low teens.

54:23 My grandmother was in her early 80s.

54:27 She was there for the entire ceremony.

54:30 The poem recited by Robert Frost, the historic inaugural address,

54:36 the swearing-in, Hail to the Chief, and when she returned to Brooklyn,

54:42 she assured everyone who asked and even some who

54:45 failed to ask that she never felt the cold.

54:49 Not a bit of it.

54:51 I tell you this and not to assure you of my own Irish-American JFK bonafides,

54:58 but rather as we gather to greet

55:01 these three novelists at the beginning of their careers,

55:04 careers which, as Emerson said to Whitman,

55:08 "Yet must have had a long foreground somewhere

55:12 for such a start." I recall my grandmother's trip to DC as a way to invite you

55:19 to consider for a moment the notion of transcendence.

55:25 It is perhaps an increasingly anti- antique notion as far-flung

55:32 from our current state of letters

55:35 as those two transcendentalists transcendentalists themselves,

55:39 Emerson, Whitman, are from today's influencers and Instagrammers and TikTokers.

55:46 Or maybe as far from the soaring rhetoric of JFK's

55:51 inaugural speech as is our present tweet-brained public discourse.

56:00 But I don't know how to celebrate the wonder, the delight of the literary art,

56:06 the delight of incomparable things said incomparably well.

56:11 That's Emerson to Whitman again.

56:14 Without mentioning what seems to me the most astonishing aspect of that art,

56:20 the opportunity to experience, through words alone, something of transcendence.

56:27 By which I mean those moments in our reading lives

56:31 when we feel we are in the presence of something shared,

56:36 essential, breathtakingly true.

56:40 Those moments when we recognize that we

56:43 have always known about our mortal existence,

56:47 about what it is to be human, even as we understand, simultaneously somehow,

56:54 that this knowledge would have eluded us completely if we

56:59 had not encountered it in this particular work of literature.

57:03 True impressions, both Tolstoy and Proust called such moments.

57:09 Those moments when something the author has written infects, Tolstoy's word,

57:14 the reader with this shared, authentic, revelatory,

57:19 and yet familiar experience formed by words alone.

57:26 "There is one indubitable indication distinguishing

57:30 real art from its counterfeit," Tolstoy wrote,

57:34 "namely the infectiousness of art.

57:37 If a man, without exercising effort

57:40 and without altering his standpoint on reading,

57:44 hearing, or seeing another man's work,

57:47 experiences a mental condition which unites him with that man

57:52 and with other people who also partake of that work,

57:56 then the object evoking that condition is a work of art.

58:01 And however poetical, realistic, impactful, or interesting a work may be,

58:08 it is not a work of art if it does not evoke that feeling,

58:12 quite distinct from other feelings, of joy and of spiritual union with another

58:19 and with others." Hemingway wrote about discovering the sequence

58:26 of motion and fact which made the emotion and which

58:32 would be valid in a year or 10 years,

58:35 or with luck and if you stated it purely enough, always.

58:40 And Saul Bellow said this, "The essence of our real condition, the complexity,

58:45 the confusion, the pain of it, is shown to us in glimpses.

58:51 This essence reveals and then conceals itself.

58:56 But we never seem to lose our connection

58:58 with the depths from which these glimpses come.

59:03 A novel, he said, moves back and forth between the world of objects,

59:09 of actions, of appearances, and that other world from which these true

59:15 impressions come and which moves us to believe

59:19 that the good we hang on to so tenaciously in the face of evil, so obstinately,

59:26 is no illusion." Transcendence,

59:30 or if you prefer a more grounded, more embodied notion,

59:36 Nabokov said that for the wise reader who

59:39 reads the book of genius not with his heart,

59:42 not so much with his brain, but with his spine,

59:47 those transcendent true impressions will be identified by a telltale tingle.

59:55 Of course, for those of us who are day laborers in the mine fields of prose,

1:00:02 who find it challenging enough to hack at an ungainly

1:00:06 sentence or to tame the kudzu of an overgrown metaphor,

1:00:12 to cultivate character, plot, cultural relevance,

1:00:17 the transcendence achieved by the discovery of these enduring

1:00:22 true impressions might seem simply too much to ask.

1:00:28 We writers have enough to do just to get a story planted,

1:00:31 watered, and ready for harvesting.

1:00:35 We novelists might in fact prefer to offer our readers the simpler,

1:00:41 far more appealing promise of escape.

1:00:45 Not a momentary spine-tingling glimpse of the things

1:00:50 that bind us and outlast us, but an opportunity to forget all

1:00:55 that, to absorb ourselves in mere mental rubbernecking,

1:01:02 the harmless anonymous voyeurism that the poor folks who market

1:01:06 our books will be grateful to call beach reads or page-turners,

1:01:14 shocking, graphic, or per the familiar algorithm,

1:01:19 a book just like whatever else you've already read.

1:01:25 Not [snorts] casting any aspirations here,

1:01:28 it's a legitimate choice every writer makes.

1:01:32 And the novel, like any creative endeavor,

1:01:36 thrives best without artificial parameters, high or low.

1:01:42 I write, as the poet Philip Levine said, what's given to me to write.

1:01:48 We all do.

1:01:50 But here in the presence of these three talented first novelists,

1:01:54 and of course in the repository of the manuscripts of one of America's finest,

1:02:00 most innovative prose stylists,

1:02:02 it seems incumbent to remember literature's remarkable gifts.

1:02:08 Remarkable, and yet I would argue available

1:02:11 even to the not quite Tolstoys among us.

1:02:16 Because I can assure you with utter

1:02:18 confidence and long experience that these true impressions,

1:02:22 these spine-tingling glimpses of truth,

1:02:26 are available to all of us who work honestly at words.

1:02:32 In my own four decades of teaching novice writers,

1:02:36 or of coaching them as John Barth called it,

1:02:39 I have seen time again how the sincere effort to get it right,

1:02:45 a character, a scene, a sentence, a metaphor, to be in language precise,

1:02:51 original, and innovative inevitably yields an unexpected insight,

1:02:58 a revelatory detail,

1:03:00 a written moment that the author had not planned or anticipated,

1:03:05 but that shimmers, astonishes, changes everything almost against or in spite

1:03:11 of the young author's intentions for the work.

1:03:15 A true impression that affects the author much as it will affect the reader,

1:03:21 something always known and yet never before recognized

1:03:25 until it was discovered in the working at words.

1:03:30 What's so delightful about these moments is

1:03:33 the student author's own astonishment when you,

1:03:36 the coach, point out what has been almost inadvertently achieved.

1:03:43 The great Irish short story writer, Frank O'Connor,

1:03:46 said that the only honest thing a teacher of writing can do

1:03:51 is to look at a student's manuscript and ask, "Why a tree?

1:03:57 Why a cup?

1:03:59 Why this detail and not another?" A kind of reckoning for the aspiring

1:04:05 writer with the words he or she has placed on the page.

1:04:10 And it is this simple reckoning and sorting and discarding,

1:04:14 something like what Hemingway himself called this good and severe discipline,

1:04:19 that so often opens the young writer's

1:04:21 eyes to the unconscious intention behind the choice,

1:04:26 the meaning behind what at first seemed arbitrary.

1:04:31 A careful reckoning that moves the fiction towards connectedness, E.M.

1:04:36 Forster's demand, the connectedness that is essential

1:04:40 to any carefully composed work of art.

1:04:44 Why this and not this?

1:04:48 Where all is choice, why this choice?

1:04:52 What does it mean?

1:04:54 "I just put it in there," the astonished student writer will

1:04:59 tell I see how it connects to everything in the story,

1:05:03 how essential it is." It's the story revealing itself to you.

1:05:09 I've been known to tell these gobsmacked writers,

1:05:12 "It's your own unconscious understanding of the piece

1:05:16 making itself known through your working at words."

1:05:22 I've often taken the opportunity at such

1:05:24 moments to extol the wonder of language itself,

1:05:29 pointing out to the apprentice writer that for every one of us,

1:05:32 the thoughtful use of language is always unique,

1:05:36 if we leave AI out of the equation.

1:05:42 [snorts]

1:05:41 Always a product of who we are, how we attained language in the first place,

1:05:48 who leaned into our cribs or bounced us on a knee,

1:05:55 who preached to us or lectured us or yelled at us from a window,

1:06:00 and more, how we write is also a result

1:06:05 of how our language has been nurtured through our lives,

1:06:10 with reading, with music, with conversation, with eavesdropping.

1:06:17 If you leave AI out of it, you will discover,

1:06:19 as I have discovered in four decades of teaching,

1:06:23 that no two human beings will compose a sentence or a story

1:06:28 or shape a metaphor or recount a dialogue in exactly the same way.

1:06:34 And so I have been known to tell my students to discover a meaning in your own

1:06:40 work that you did not precisely place there

1:06:44 is only a result of the writing process.

1:06:48 But if I really want to freak them out,

1:06:51 I'll say, "Actually, it's the divine spark.

1:06:54 It's the hand of God." [snorts] Here's Bellow again.

1:06:59 The sense of our real powers,

1:07:02 powers we seem to derive from the universe itself, also comes and goes.

1:07:09 We are reluctant to talk about this because there is nothing we can prove,

1:07:13 because our language is inadequate,

1:07:16 and because few people are willing to risk talking about it.

1:07:20 They would have to say, "There is a spirit." And that is taboo.

1:07:26 I suppose, finally, that this is what I

1:07:29 mean by the sense of transcendence literature can provide.

1:07:33 I mean, there is a spirit.

1:07:36 I mean, in the best writing, there is always a momentary glimpse,

1:07:42 perhaps a latent memory, of the glory of creation,

1:07:48 a true impression of what we all somehow

1:07:51 share as mortal creatures on a spinning planet,

1:07:56 the fleeting glimpse of what we already know,

1:07:58 the sense of our connectedness, of what endures.

1:08:04 My Irish grandmother left Bundoran just before the turn of the last century.

1:08:10 She was alone, 17 or 19, depending on how she told the story.

1:08:18 [snorts]

1:08:16 She left not for economic opportunity or even a teenage sense of adventure,

1:08:21 certainly not because of famine or politics,

1:08:24 but because her widowed mother had married a cruel and dangerous man,

1:08:31 incentive out of a fairy tale.

1:08:34 She went to Philadelphia first, where she had some distant relatives,

1:08:38 and then made her way to New York.

1:08:40 She worked as a cook and a housemaid.

1:08:43 She married another Irish immigrant and settled in Brooklyn.

1:08:48 One by one, she brought her siblings and step-siblings to America,

1:08:53 away from that terrible man.

1:08:56 She was pregnant with her fourth child when

1:09:00 her husband was killed in an industrial accident.

1:09:03 That child was a toddler when she adopted her younger sister's baby,

1:09:09 a beloved younger sister who had died in the flu

1:09:11 epidemic 3 months after giving birth to my mother.

1:09:18 Surely all of this, in the way of Hemingway's famous iceberg metaphor,

1:09:24 was stored in the invisible heart of the old

1:09:27 woman who sat in the first row of JFK's inaugural.

1:09:34 All of it transcended.

1:09:35 The griefs of the past, no less than the tragedies to come, transcended.

1:09:41 Not escaped, not forgotten, certainly not redeemed.

1:09:46 In that hour of pride and hope and wonder, of joy and spiritual union and yes,

1:09:53 of words, of incomparable things said incomparably well.

1:10:00 An hour in which she never felt the cold, not a bit of it.

1:10:10 [applause] [applause] [applause] Thank you, Alice.

1:10:31 [snorts] And thanks to all of you in the audience for joining us

1:10:33 to celebrate these marvelous writers and all they've done to enrich the world.

1:10:39 On behalf of my colleagues, the JFK Library and Foundation,

1:10:46 the International Hemingway Foundation and Society,

1:10:48 PEN/Faulkner, the Hemingway family, and all our honored guests,

1:10:52 thank you so much for coming today.

1:10:55 This concludes our awards program and it now

1:10:57 gives me great pleasure to invite those of you

1:11:00 who are here in person to the lobby

1:11:02 outside this room to this year's awards reception.

1:11:06 So, thank you very much.

1:11:11 [applause]