I don't know.

He brought 85 CDs with him for a family road trip that would last 11 days.

He also brought his sketchbook, which started out as an art class project and has since evolved into a kind of diary, I think.

He tends to write things down like, Jesus, I got to find someone irrational, or the shit I'm passing off as writing is slowly killing me.

The first day of our road trip through North Dakota to South, the music war started.

His 12-year-old sister, Georgia, claimed the very backseat of the minivan and was content to lie there surrounded by nail polish and beads and thread and Hershey Kisses and Archie comics and listen to her music on her Discman, mostly R&B stuff, Destiny's Child and the Save the Last Dance soundtrack.

My husband Cassidy and I sat in the front and Owen sat on the seat right behind us so he could listen to his CDs on the stereo.

I definitely envy that.

Well, we'll talk some more after the reading, and now here's Miriam Toews reading Elephant by Raymond Carver.

Elephant.

"I knew it was a mistake to let my brother have the money.

I didn't need anybody else owing me.

But when he called and said he couldn't make the payment on his house, what could I do? I'd never been inside his house.

He lived a thousand miles away in California.

I'd never even seen his house, but I didn't want him to lose it.

What do you think those dreams do to him?

Serve them how?

By serving literally.

I mean, just in the home, domestically, you know? And at the same time, I mean, it's a community like any, like any other.

I mean, I- there's, there's joy there.

There's, there's love.

There's humor.

When I think of the humor, the way the, the conversations that we would have, me with my friends, with my relatives, and my cousins, and particularly my female cousins, we were so often kept kind of in a group apart from the men.

Did they ever do that?