0:00:01.012,0:00:03.539
A long time ago, there lived a Giant,

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a Selfish Giant, whose stunning garden[br]was the most beautiful in all the land.

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One evening, this Giant came home

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and found all these children[br]playing in his garden,

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and he became enraged.

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"My own garden is my own garden!"

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the Giant said.

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And he built this high wall around it.

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The author Oscar Wilde wrote the story[br]of "The Selfish Giant" in 1888.

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Almost a hundred years later, that Giant[br]moved into my Brooklyn childhood

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and never left.

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I was raised in a religious family,

0:00:41.109,0:00:43.887
and I grew up reading[br]both the Bible and the Quran.

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The hours of reading,[br]both religious and recreational,

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far outnumbered the hours[br]of television-watching.

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Now, on any given day,[br]you could find my siblings and I

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curled up in some part[br]of our apartment reading,

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sometimes unhappily,

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because on summer days in New York City,[br]the fire hydrant blasted,

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and to our immense jealousy,[br]we could hear our friends down there

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playing in the gushing water,

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their absolute joy making its way up[br]through our open windows.

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But I learned that the deeper[br]I went into my books,

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the more time I took with each sentence,

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the less I heard the noise[br]of the outside world.

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And so, unlike my siblings,[br]who were racing through books,

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I read slowly --

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very, very slowly.

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I was that child with her finger[br]running beneath the words,

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until I was untaught to do this;[br]told big kids don't use their fingers.

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In third grade, we were made to sit[br]with our hands folded on our desk,

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unclasping them only to turn the pages,[br]then returning them to that position.

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Our teacher wasn't being cruel.

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It was the 1970s,

0:01:49.282,0:01:52.256
and her goal was to get us reading[br]not just on grade level

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but far above it.

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And we were always[br]being pushed to read faster.

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But in the quiet of my apartment,[br]outside of my teacher's gaze,

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I let my finger run beneath those words.

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And that Selfish Giant[br]again told me his story,

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how he had felt betrayed by the kids[br]sneaking into his garden,

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how he had built this high wall,

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and it did keep the children out,

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but a grey winter fell over his garden

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and just stayed and stayed.

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With each rereading,[br]I learned something new

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about the hard stones of the roads[br]that the kids were forced to play on

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when they got expelled from the garden,

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about the gentleness of a small boy[br]that appeared one day,

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and even about the Giant himself.

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Maybe his words weren't rageful after all.

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Maybe they were a plea for empathy,

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for understanding.

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"My own garden is my own garden."

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Years later, I would learn[br]of a writer named John Gardner

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who referred to this[br]as the "fictive dream,"

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or the "dream of fiction,"

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and I would realize that this[br]was where I was inside that book,

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spending time with the characters[br]and the world that the author had created

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and invited me into.

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As a child, I knew that stories[br]were meant to be savored,

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that stories wanted to be slow,

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and that some author had spent months,[br]maybe years, writing them.

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And my job as the reader --

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especially as the reader who wanted[br]to one day become a writer --

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was to respect that narrative.

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Long before there was cable[br]or the internet or even the telephone,

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there were people sharing ideas[br]and information and memory through story.

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It's one of our earliest forms[br]of connective technology.

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It was the story of something[br]better down the Nile

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that sent the Egyptians moving along it,

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the story of a better way[br]to preserve the dead

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that brought King Tut's remains[br]into the 21st century.

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And more than two million years ago,

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when the first humans[br]began making tools from stone,

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someone must have said, "What if?"

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And someone else remembered the story.

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And whether they told it through words[br]or gestures or drawings,

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it was passed down; remembered:

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hit a hammer and hear its story.

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The world is getting noisier.

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We've gone from boomboxes

0:04:11.521,0:04:15.839
to Walkmen to portable CD players

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to iPods

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to any song we want, whenever we want it.

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We've gone from the four[br]television channels of my childhood

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to the seeming infinity[br]of cable and streaming.

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As technology moves us faster and faster[br]through time and space,

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it seems to feel like story[br]is getting pushed out of the way,

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I mean, literally pushed out[br]of the narrative.

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But even as our engagement[br]with stories change,

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or the trappings around it morph from book[br]to audio to Instagram to Snapchat,

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we must remember our finger[br]beneath the words.

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Remember that story,[br]regardless of the format,

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has always taken us to places[br]we never thought we'd go,

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introduced us to people[br]we never thought we'd meet

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and shown us worlds[br]that we might have missed.

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So as technology keeps moving[br]faster and faster,

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I am good with something slower.

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My finger beneath the words[br]has led me to a life of writing books

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for people of all ages,

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books meant to be read slowly,

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to be savored.

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My love for looking deeply[br]and closely at the world,

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for putting my whole self into it,[br]and by doing so,

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seeing the many, many[br]possibilities of a narrative,

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turned out to be a gift,

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because taking my sweet time

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taught me everything[br]I needed to know about writing.

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And writing taught me everything[br]I needed to know about creating worlds

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where people could be seen and heard,

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where their experiences[br]could be legitimized,

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and where my story,[br]read or heard by another person,

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inspired something in them[br]that became a connection between us,

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a conversation.

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And isn't that what this is all about --

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finding a way, at the end of the day,[br]to not feel alone in this world,

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and a way to feel like[br]we've changed it before we leave?

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Stone to hammer, man to mummy,

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idea to story --[br]and all of it, remembered.

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Sometimes we read[br]to understand the future.

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Sometimes we read to understand the past.

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We read to get lost, to forget[br]the hard times we're living in,

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and we read to remember[br]those who came before us,

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who lived through something harder.

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I write for those same reasons.

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Before coming to Brooklyn, my family[br]lived in Greenville, South Carolina,

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in a segregated neighborhood[br]called Nicholtown.

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All of us there were[br]the descendants of a people

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who had not been allowed[br]to learn to read or write.

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Imagine that:

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the danger of understanding[br]how letters form words,

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the danger of words themselves,

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the danger of a literate people[br]and their stories.

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But against this backdrop[br]of being threatened with death

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for holding onto a narrative,

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our stories didn't die,

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because there is yet another story[br]beneath that one.

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And this is how it has always worked.

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For as long as we've been communicating,

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there's been the layering[br]to the narrative,

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the stories beneath the stories[br]and the ones beneath those.

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This is how story has and will[br]continue to survive.

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As I began to connect the dots[br]that connected the way I learned to write

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and the way I learned to read

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to an almost silenced people,

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I realized that my story was bigger[br]and older and deeper

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than I would ever be.

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And because of that, it will continue.

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Among these almost-silenced people

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there were the ones[br]who never learned to read.

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Their descendants, now generations[br]out of enslavement,

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if well-off enough,

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had gone on to college,[br]grad school, beyond.

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Some, like my grandmother and my siblings,[br]seemed to be born reading,

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as though history[br]stepped out of their way.

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Some, like my mother, hitched onto[br]the Great Migration wagon --

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which was not actually a wagon --

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and kissed the South goodbye.

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But here is the story within that story:

0:08:23.296,0:08:25.805
those who left and those who stayed

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carried with them[br]the history of a narrative,

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knew deeply that writing it down wasn't[br]the only way they could hold on to it,

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knew they could sit on their porches[br]or their stoops at the end of a long day

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and spin a slow tale for their children.

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They knew they could sing their stories[br]through the thick heat of picking cotton

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and harvesting tobacco,

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knew they could preach their stories[br]and sew them into quilts,

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turn the most painful ones[br]into something laughable,

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and through that laughter,[br]exhale the history a country

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that tried again and again and again

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to steal their bodies,

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their spirit

0:09:02.700,0:09:04.032
and their story.

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So as a child, I learned[br]to imagine an invisible finger

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taking me from word to word,

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from sentence to sentence,

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from ignorance to understanding.

0:09:18.742,0:09:22.322
So as technology continues to speed ahead,

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I continue to read slowly,

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knowing that I am respecting[br]the author's work

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and the story's lasting power.

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And I read slowly to drown out the noise

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and remember those who came before me,

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who were probably the first people[br]who finally learned to control fire

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and circled their new power

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of flame and light and heat.

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And I read slowly to remember[br]the Selfish Giant,

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how he finally tore that wall down

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and let the children run free[br]through his garden.

0:10:03.325,0:10:07.377
And I read slowly to pay homage[br]to my ancestors,

0:10:07.401,0:10:09.517
who were not allowed to read at all.

0:10:10.171,0:10:12.760
They, too, must have circled fires,

0:10:12.784,0:10:16.154
speaking softly of their dreams,

0:10:16.178,0:10:18.726
their hopes, their futures.

0:10:20.417,0:10:25.001
Each time we read, write or tell a story,

0:10:25.025,0:10:27.300
we step inside their circle,

0:10:28.339,0:10:30.509
and it remains unbroken.

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And the power of story lives on.

0:10:36.047,0:10:37.200
Thank you.

0:10:37.224,0:10:40.407
(Applause)