1
00:00:01,012 --> 00:00:03,539
A long time ago, there lived a Giant,

2
00:00:04,353 --> 00:00:09,167
a Selfish Giant, whose stunning garden
was the most beautiful in all the land.

3
00:00:10,072 --> 00:00:12,053
One evening, this Giant came home

4
00:00:12,077 --> 00:00:14,519
and found all these children
playing in his garden,

5
00:00:14,543 --> 00:00:16,136
and he became enraged.

6
00:00:16,773 --> 00:00:20,128
"My own garden is my own garden!"

7
00:00:20,152 --> 00:00:21,570
the Giant said.

8
00:00:22,359 --> 00:00:24,720
And he built this high wall around it.

9
00:00:25,886 --> 00:00:30,881
The author Oscar Wilde wrote the story
of "The Selfish Giant" in 1888.

10
00:00:31,947 --> 00:00:37,060
Almost a hundred years later, that Giant
moved into my Brooklyn childhood

11
00:00:37,084 --> 00:00:38,261
and never left.

12
00:00:39,060 --> 00:00:41,085
I was raised in a religious family,

13
00:00:41,109 --> 00:00:43,887
and I grew up reading
both the Bible and the Quran.

14
00:00:44,566 --> 00:00:47,990
The hours of reading,
both religious and recreational,

15
00:00:48,014 --> 00:00:51,078
far outnumbered the hours
of television-watching.

16
00:00:51,102 --> 00:00:54,315
Now, on any given day,
you could find my siblings and I

17
00:00:54,339 --> 00:00:57,460
curled up in some part
of our apartment reading,

18
00:00:57,484 --> 00:00:59,022
sometimes unhappily,

19
00:00:59,046 --> 00:01:02,802
because on summer days in New York City,
the fire hydrant blasted,

20
00:01:02,826 --> 00:01:05,993
and to our immense jealousy,
we could hear our friends down there

21
00:01:06,017 --> 00:01:07,551
playing in the gushing water,

22
00:01:07,575 --> 00:01:11,048
their absolute joy making its way up
through our open windows.

23
00:01:11,588 --> 00:01:14,716
But I learned that the deeper
I went into my books,

24
00:01:14,740 --> 00:01:16,875
the more time I took with each sentence,

25
00:01:16,899 --> 00:01:19,524
the less I heard the noise
of the outside world.

26
00:01:19,960 --> 00:01:22,952
And so, unlike my siblings,
who were racing through books,

27
00:01:22,976 --> 00:01:24,565
I read slowly --

28
00:01:24,589 --> 00:01:26,943
very, very slowly.

29
00:01:27,816 --> 00:01:31,146
I was that child with her finger
running beneath the words,

30
00:01:31,170 --> 00:01:35,672
until I was untaught to do this;
told big kids don't use their fingers.

31
00:01:36,138 --> 00:01:39,879
In third grade, we were made to sit
with our hands folded on our desk,

32
00:01:39,903 --> 00:01:44,241
unclasping them only to turn the pages,
then returning them to that position.

33
00:01:45,061 --> 00:01:47,552
Our teacher wasn't being cruel.

34
00:01:47,576 --> 00:01:49,258
It was the 1970s,

35
00:01:49,282 --> 00:01:52,256
and her goal was to get us reading
not just on grade level

36
00:01:52,280 --> 00:01:53,767
but far above it.

37
00:01:54,199 --> 00:01:56,722
And we were always
being pushed to read faster.

38
00:01:57,769 --> 00:02:01,459
But in the quiet of my apartment,
outside of my teacher's gaze,

39
00:02:01,483 --> 00:02:03,914
I let my finger run beneath those words.

40
00:02:03,938 --> 00:02:06,804
And that Selfish Giant
again told me his story,

41
00:02:06,828 --> 00:02:10,704
how he had felt betrayed by the kids
sneaking into his garden,

42
00:02:10,728 --> 00:02:12,747
how he had built this high wall,

43
00:02:12,771 --> 00:02:15,262
and it did keep the children out,

44
00:02:15,286 --> 00:02:17,660
but a grey winter fell over his garden

45
00:02:17,684 --> 00:02:20,247
and just stayed and stayed.

46
00:02:20,784 --> 00:02:23,338
With each rereading,
I learned something new

47
00:02:23,362 --> 00:02:26,950
about the hard stones of the roads
that the kids were forced to play on

48
00:02:26,974 --> 00:02:29,084
when they got expelled from the garden,

49
00:02:29,108 --> 00:02:32,496
about the gentleness of a small boy
that appeared one day,

50
00:02:32,520 --> 00:02:34,662
and even about the Giant himself.

51
00:02:34,686 --> 00:02:37,737
Maybe his words weren't rageful after all.

52
00:02:37,761 --> 00:02:40,032
Maybe they were a plea for empathy,

53
00:02:40,056 --> 00:02:41,600
for understanding.

54
00:02:42,438 --> 00:02:45,738
"My own garden is my own garden."

55
00:02:47,566 --> 00:02:50,300
Years later, I would learn
of a writer named John Gardner

56
00:02:50,324 --> 00:02:52,601
who referred to this
as the "fictive dream,"

57
00:02:52,625 --> 00:02:54,345
or the "dream of fiction,"

58
00:02:54,369 --> 00:02:57,580
and I would realize that this
was where I was inside that book,

59
00:02:57,604 --> 00:03:01,391
spending time with the characters
and the world that the author had created

60
00:03:01,415 --> 00:03:03,007
and invited me into.

61
00:03:03,031 --> 00:03:06,119
As a child, I knew that stories
were meant to be savored,

62
00:03:06,143 --> 00:03:08,723
that stories wanted to be slow,

63
00:03:08,747 --> 00:03:13,568
and that some author had spent months,
maybe years, writing them.

64
00:03:13,592 --> 00:03:14,939
And my job as the reader --

65
00:03:14,963 --> 00:03:18,169
especially as the reader who wanted
to one day become a writer --

66
00:03:18,193 --> 00:03:20,280
was to respect that narrative.

67
00:03:21,445 --> 00:03:27,179
Long before there was cable
or the internet or even the telephone,

68
00:03:27,203 --> 00:03:31,764
there were people sharing ideas
and information and memory through story.

69
00:03:31,788 --> 00:03:35,359
It's one of our earliest forms
of connective technology.

70
00:03:35,953 --> 00:03:38,377
It was the story of something
better down the Nile

71
00:03:38,401 --> 00:03:40,833
that sent the Egyptians moving along it,

72
00:03:40,857 --> 00:03:43,041
the story of a better way
to preserve the dead

73
00:03:43,065 --> 00:03:46,462
that brought King Tut's remains
into the 21st century.

74
00:03:46,486 --> 00:03:48,431
And more than two million years ago,

75
00:03:48,455 --> 00:03:52,084
when the first humans
began making tools from stone,

76
00:03:52,108 --> 00:03:53,759
someone must have said, "What if?"

77
00:03:54,203 --> 00:03:57,203
And someone else remembered the story.

78
00:03:57,227 --> 00:04:00,765
And whether they told it through words
or gestures or drawings,

79
00:04:00,789 --> 00:04:03,754
it was passed down; remembered:

80
00:04:03,778 --> 00:04:06,646
hit a hammer and hear its story.

81
00:04:07,536 --> 00:04:09,472
The world is getting noisier.

82
00:04:09,496 --> 00:04:11,497
We've gone from boomboxes

83
00:04:11,521 --> 00:04:15,839
to Walkmen to portable CD players

84
00:04:15,863 --> 00:04:17,807
to iPods

85
00:04:17,831 --> 00:04:20,489
to any song we want, whenever we want it.

86
00:04:20,513 --> 00:04:23,863
We've gone from the four
television channels of my childhood

87
00:04:23,887 --> 00:04:27,416
to the seeming infinity
of cable and streaming.

88
00:04:27,440 --> 00:04:32,192
As technology moves us faster and faster
through time and space,

89
00:04:32,216 --> 00:04:35,452
it seems to feel like story
is getting pushed out of the way,

90
00:04:35,476 --> 00:04:37,918
I mean, literally pushed out
of the narrative.

91
00:04:38,640 --> 00:04:42,256
But even as our engagement
with stories change,

92
00:04:42,280 --> 00:04:47,847
or the trappings around it morph from book
to audio to Instagram to Snapchat,

93
00:04:47,871 --> 00:04:50,416
we must remember our finger
beneath the words.

94
00:04:50,440 --> 00:04:53,059
Remember that story,
regardless of the format,

95
00:04:53,083 --> 00:04:56,374
has always taken us to places
we never thought we'd go,

96
00:04:56,398 --> 00:04:59,249
introduced us to people
we never thought we'd meet

97
00:04:59,273 --> 00:05:02,432
and shown us worlds
that we might have missed.

98
00:05:03,043 --> 00:05:06,956
So as technology keeps moving
faster and faster,

99
00:05:06,980 --> 00:05:09,116
I am good with something slower.

100
00:05:09,562 --> 00:05:13,216
My finger beneath the words
has led me to a life of writing books

101
00:05:13,240 --> 00:05:15,636
for people of all ages,

102
00:05:15,660 --> 00:05:17,500
books meant to be read slowly,

103
00:05:17,524 --> 00:05:19,008
to be savored.

104
00:05:19,805 --> 00:05:23,508
My love for looking deeply
and closely at the world,

105
00:05:23,532 --> 00:05:26,799
for putting my whole self into it,
and by doing so,

106
00:05:26,823 --> 00:05:30,403
seeing the many, many
possibilities of a narrative,

107
00:05:30,427 --> 00:05:32,086
turned out to be a gift,

108
00:05:32,110 --> 00:05:34,203
because taking my sweet time

109
00:05:34,227 --> 00:05:37,062
taught me everything
I needed to know about writing.

110
00:05:37,086 --> 00:05:40,738
And writing taught me everything
I needed to know about creating worlds

111
00:05:40,762 --> 00:05:44,247
where people could be seen and heard,

112
00:05:44,271 --> 00:05:47,624
where their experiences
could be legitimized,

113
00:05:47,648 --> 00:05:51,065
and where my story,
read or heard by another person,

114
00:05:51,089 --> 00:05:54,284
inspired something in them
that became a connection between us,

115
00:05:54,308 --> 00:05:55,716
a conversation.

116
00:05:56,352 --> 00:05:59,004
And isn't that what this is all about --

117
00:05:59,028 --> 00:06:03,725
finding a way, at the end of the day,
to not feel alone in this world,

118
00:06:03,749 --> 00:06:07,647
and a way to feel like
we've changed it before we leave?

119
00:06:08,242 --> 00:06:11,364
Stone to hammer, man to mummy,

120
00:06:11,388 --> 00:06:15,352
idea to story --
and all of it, remembered.

121
00:06:16,641 --> 00:06:19,576
Sometimes we read
to understand the future.

122
00:06:20,211 --> 00:06:23,132
Sometimes we read to understand the past.

123
00:06:23,156 --> 00:06:27,155
We read to get lost, to forget
the hard times we're living in,

124
00:06:27,179 --> 00:06:30,128
and we read to remember
those who came before us,

125
00:06:30,152 --> 00:06:31,969
who lived through something harder.

126
00:06:32,643 --> 00:06:34,990
I write for those same reasons.

127
00:06:35,893 --> 00:06:40,006
Before coming to Brooklyn, my family
lived in Greenville, South Carolina,

128
00:06:40,030 --> 00:06:42,849
in a segregated neighborhood
called Nicholtown.

129
00:06:43,749 --> 00:06:46,176
All of us there were
the descendants of a people

130
00:06:46,200 --> 00:06:48,997
who had not been allowed
to learn to read or write.

131
00:06:49,651 --> 00:06:51,081
Imagine that:

132
00:06:51,105 --> 00:06:55,076
the danger of understanding
how letters form words,

133
00:06:55,100 --> 00:06:58,224
the danger of words themselves,

134
00:06:58,248 --> 00:07:02,333
the danger of a literate people
and their stories.

135
00:07:03,666 --> 00:07:06,835
But against this backdrop
of being threatened with death

136
00:07:06,859 --> 00:07:09,151
for holding onto a narrative,

137
00:07:09,175 --> 00:07:11,470
our stories didn't die,

138
00:07:11,494 --> 00:07:14,540
because there is yet another story
beneath that one.

139
00:07:14,564 --> 00:07:16,675
And this is how it has always worked.

140
00:07:16,699 --> 00:07:18,778
For as long as we've been communicating,

141
00:07:18,802 --> 00:07:20,903
there's been the layering
to the narrative,

142
00:07:20,927 --> 00:07:24,593
the stories beneath the stories
and the ones beneath those.

143
00:07:24,617 --> 00:07:29,239
This is how story has and will
continue to survive.

144
00:07:29,263 --> 00:07:33,573
As I began to connect the dots
that connected the way I learned to write

145
00:07:33,597 --> 00:07:35,326
and the way I learned to read

146
00:07:35,350 --> 00:07:37,511
to an almost silenced people,

147
00:07:38,336 --> 00:07:43,473
I realized that my story was bigger
and older and deeper

148
00:07:43,497 --> 00:07:45,253
than I would ever be.

149
00:07:45,277 --> 00:07:47,522
And because of that, it will continue.

150
00:07:48,722 --> 00:07:51,286
Among these almost-silenced people

151
00:07:51,310 --> 00:07:54,100
there were the ones
who never learned to read.

152
00:07:55,433 --> 00:07:58,933
Their descendants, now generations
out of enslavement,

153
00:07:59,798 --> 00:08:00,966
if well-off enough,

154
00:08:00,990 --> 00:08:04,325
had gone on to college,
grad school, beyond.

155
00:08:04,758 --> 00:08:08,463
Some, like my grandmother and my siblings,
seemed to be born reading,

156
00:08:08,487 --> 00:08:10,872
as though history
stepped out of their way.

157
00:08:11,546 --> 00:08:15,267
Some, like my mother, hitched onto
the Great Migration wagon --

158
00:08:15,291 --> 00:08:17,772
which was not actually a wagon --

159
00:08:17,796 --> 00:08:19,754
and kissed the South goodbye.

160
00:08:20,362 --> 00:08:23,272
But here is the story within that story:

161
00:08:23,296 --> 00:08:25,805
those who left and those who stayed

162
00:08:25,829 --> 00:08:28,269
carried with them
the history of a narrative,

163
00:08:28,293 --> 00:08:32,776
knew deeply that writing it down wasn't
the only way they could hold on to it,

164
00:08:32,800 --> 00:08:37,028
knew they could sit on their porches
or their stoops at the end of a long day

165
00:08:37,052 --> 00:08:39,581
and spin a slow tale for their children.

166
00:08:40,330 --> 00:08:44,524
They knew they could sing their stories
through the thick heat of picking cotton

167
00:08:44,548 --> 00:08:46,302
and harvesting tobacco,

168
00:08:46,326 --> 00:08:50,274
knew they could preach their stories
and sew them into quilts,

169
00:08:50,298 --> 00:08:54,128
turn the most painful ones
into something laughable,

170
00:08:54,152 --> 00:08:56,836
and through that laughter,
exhale the history a country

171
00:08:56,860 --> 00:08:59,485
that tried again and again and again

172
00:08:59,509 --> 00:09:01,033
to steal their bodies,

173
00:09:01,057 --> 00:09:02,676
their spirit

174
00:09:02,700 --> 00:09:04,032
and their story.

175
00:09:05,954 --> 00:09:09,536
So as a child, I learned
to imagine an invisible finger

176
00:09:09,560 --> 00:09:12,956
taking me from word to word,

177
00:09:12,980 --> 00:09:15,356
from sentence to sentence,

178
00:09:15,380 --> 00:09:17,908
from ignorance to understanding.

179
00:09:18,742 --> 00:09:22,322
So as technology continues to speed ahead,

180
00:09:22,346 --> 00:09:24,268
I continue to read slowly,

181
00:09:26,054 --> 00:09:29,809
knowing that I am respecting
the author's work

182
00:09:29,833 --> 00:09:32,422
and the story's lasting power.

183
00:09:32,446 --> 00:09:35,673
And I read slowly to drown out the noise

184
00:09:35,697 --> 00:09:39,468
and remember those who came before me,

185
00:09:39,492 --> 00:09:45,698
who were probably the first people
who finally learned to control fire

186
00:09:45,722 --> 00:09:48,117
and circled their new power

187
00:09:48,926 --> 00:09:52,713
of flame and light and heat.

188
00:09:53,853 --> 00:09:57,546
And I read slowly to remember
the Selfish Giant,

189
00:09:57,570 --> 00:09:59,872
how he finally tore that wall down

190
00:09:59,896 --> 00:10:02,356
and let the children run free
through his garden.

191
00:10:03,325 --> 00:10:07,377
And I read slowly to pay homage
to my ancestors,

192
00:10:07,401 --> 00:10:09,517
who were not allowed to read at all.

193
00:10:10,171 --> 00:10:12,760
They, too, must have circled fires,

194
00:10:12,784 --> 00:10:16,154
speaking softly of their dreams,

195
00:10:16,178 --> 00:10:18,726
their hopes, their futures.

196
00:10:20,417 --> 00:10:25,001
Each time we read, write or tell a story,

197
00:10:25,025 --> 00:10:27,300
we step inside their circle,

198
00:10:28,339 --> 00:10:30,509
and it remains unbroken.

199
00:10:31,515 --> 00:10:35,098
And the power of story lives on.

200
00:10:36,047 --> 00:10:37,200
Thank you.

201
00:10:37,224 --> 00:10:40,407
(Applause)