[laughs]

Um, and so I was very impressed and filled with a certain amount of trepidation.

And I, my memory is just of reaching up to the doorknob and turning the doorknob and opening it and looking into the room and seeing my grandfather sitting on the floor cross-legged, and he was rocking gently from side to side.

And he opened his eyes and we made eye contact.

And what was astonishing about this was that we were the same level, right? Our eyes were on the same level because he was sitting on the floor.

And you're not used to that.

I wasn't used to that.

What would you say to people who are listening and would like to get into meditation but find it hard? What- are there any things you say which could ease their way in?

Can you talk a little bit about the origin of this story?

Sure.

Well, this story, too, you know, started with a kernel of autobiography.

I grew up at Yale and I was a faculty brat and my father was was an anthropologist.

Most of his colleagues in the department at that time were were men and most of them were white men.

And I would say most of them had, you know, were married to Asian women.

And we didn't, at the time, the polite way of referring to, you know, Asian people was oriental, right? That was just the word everybody used.

But do you want to talk about that story, how it came to be for you? Sure.

Um, and you're watching your parents have a rough go of it.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

Well, Leaf Blower is, um, yeah, it's a, it's a story about a young woman, um, who has an MFA in poetry, um, which obviously is not really-You know, doing all that much on her resume to get her a job.

So she, anyway, she gets, she rents an apartment over the garage of, uh, a university professor and, um, and his, um, aging wife.

And, uh, so the professor, you know, he's retired.

He's a professor of old English and old Norse.

Right.

Can you talk a bit about the relationship between Ruth the author and various Ruths as characters? I know it's something you've said you initially rebelled against.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I've never been a big fan of autobiographical fiction or auto-fiction because I f- always felt it was a little bit too limiting in a way.

But, you know, clearly I, what I'm doing is something, you know, adjacent to auto-fiction.

When I first started writing-Well, I should actually back up a little bit.

As a child, when I was reading novels, I was always, you know, v- very often reading novels that were written by, they were written by men, they were written by, you know, British men.

How do you think about stories as collaborations and co-creations? How do we dream ourselves into being?