There is a predictable story arc that occurs after an author dies young: their work, their reputation gets renewed, debates rage about the legacy that this tragic figure will leave behind. Think of David Foster Wallace, for example. Love his work or hate it, his massive tomes are still written about, debated, dialogued upon as if we can gain insight into who he was and find portents in his words of his tragic fate to come. But for writers who have long and consistently productive literary output, authors who die wizened and aged, that story often unfolds in quite a different way vis à vis that authors’ reputation: they often fall off the radar altogether. Their works sit unread on shelves; they go out of print. They are passé. Who reads Czeslaw Milosz (1911-2004) these days or Derek Walcott (1930-2017)? VS Naipaul (1932-2018)? Carol Shields (1935-2003)? There are exceptions: writers who have a strong following in academia are often exempt from this generality as are authors whose work seems prescient (though it’s usually simply coincidental). And, significantly, it’s often not a permanent condition - inevitably someone in the future will “rediscover” the oeuvre and a whole new generation of readers will discover it. Iris Murdoch (1919-1999) is gaining new readers and new critical attention and many of her novels an entire new line of handsome editions by Penguin Random House. Writers like Umberto Eco seem to be included in the list of exceptions. Four years after his death at 84, there is still a plethora of attention paid to his work in both scholarly and popular media. A recent remake of his 1983 novel, The Name of the Rose (from which this recording is taken), was made into a six-part miniseries starring John Turturro, and was both a commercial and critical hit in Italy and abroad. Partly this is due to the sheer talent that Eco had in being both a serious scholar of semiotics but also a commercial success, a combination that is quite rare. Eco’s vaguely roguish and impish personality certainly helped, a personality that comes out in this reading recorded in Toronto nearly 40 years ago. He was one of those writers who was able to bridge popular culture and the ivy-entwined seriousness of academia without one side of his career detracting from the other. Another part of it seems that Eco simply didn’t take himself too seriously, and that’s a recipe for success and longevity in just about any field. This audio recording of Umberto Eco, recorded on stage at Harbourfront Reading Series in 1983, is used with the kind permission of La nave di Teseo and the Estate of Umberto Eco. It’s also used with the permission of Toronto International Festival of Authors which runs this year from Oct 22 to Nov 1. Check the full festival schedule out at festivalofauthors.ca.
Works by Umberto Eco
Other Related Books or Materials
Signs and Secrets: the Worlds of Umberto Eco (2013 documentary)
Always Narrating: The Making and Unmaking of Umberto Eco (link opens a 2020 Los Angeles Review of Book article)
The Man Who Loved Books: Interview with Umberto Eco (link opens a 2020 Counterpunch article)
Umberto Eco, The Art of Fiction, No. 197 (link opens a 2008 Paris Review article)
Umberto Eco, 84, Best-selling Academic Who Navigated Two Words (link opens a 2016 New York Times obituary)
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About the Host
Novelist Randy Boyagoda is a professor of English at the University of Toronto and principal of St. Michael’s College, where he holds the Basilian Chair in Christianity, Arts, and Letters. He is the author of three novels: Original Prin, Beggar's Feast, and Governor of the Northern Province. His fiction has been nominated for the Scotiabank Giller Prize (2006) and IMPAC Dublin Literary Prize (2012), and named a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice Selection (2012 and 2019) and Globe and Mail Best Book (2018). He contributes essays, reviews, and opinions to publications including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, First Things, Commonweal, Harper’s, Financial Times (UK), Guardian, New Statesman, Globe and Mail, and National Post, in addition to appearing frequently on CBC Radio. He served as President of PEN Canada from 2015-2017.
Music is by Yuka
From the Archives
Writers Off the Page: 40 Years of TIFA is the first series associated with the Toronto Public Library’s multi-year digital initiative, From the Archives, which presents curated and digitized audio, video and other content from some of Canada’s biggest cultural institutions and organizations.
Thanks to the Toronto International Festival of Authors (TIFA) for allowing TPL access to their archives to feature some of the best-known writers in the world from moments in the past. Thanks as well to Library and Archives Canada for generously allowing TPL access to these archives.
Writers Off the Page: 40 Years of TIFA
Season 1, Episode 25
Umberto Eco: The Name of the Rose
[opening music]
Randy Boyagoda (RB): Welcome to Writers Off the Page: 40 Years of TIFA, produced by the Toronto Public Library. I’m Randy Boyagoda. In this episode, Umberto Eco invites us to imagine a strange and distant time and place where it’s entirely logical and necessary to wonder how a young monk can be healed of love.
Umberto Eco (teaser): I was frightened to read that the sincere lover, when denied the sight of the beloved object, must fall into a wasting state that often reaches the point of confining him to bed, and sometimes the malady overpowers the brain, and the subject loses his mind and raves. Obviously, I had not yet reached that phase, because I had been quite alert in the exploration.
RB: Near the beginning of my working life, I had the chance to move into a new office, as did a colleague of mine. Two offices were available, which were more or less identical, but just in case there were any differences, we agreed that the fairest way to determine who would get to choose first was by drawing lots. I lost. A few days after we’d moved in, my colleague knocked on the door and asked if he could just check something. He proceeded to pace, very carefully, the width of my office, counting his steps as he went. Obviously, he was worried I might have had a pinky length more space than he did. Obviously, he was a professor. The fierce pettiness of academic life is legendary; David Foster Wallace compared professors to great white sharks, fighting in bathtubs, while many people have been credited with the observation that the reason academic politics can be so vicious is that the stakes are so low.
RB: Now, keeping this in mind, imagine what it must have been like for professors who had to work with Umberto Eco. When he finished his dissertation at the University of Turin in the mid-1950s, his advisor told him it read like a whodunit story – the subject, incidentally, was the aesthetics of St. Thomas Aquinas. Eco was appointed the first professor of Semiotics at the University of Bologna, making him a prominent early scholar in a field that would have seemed very new at a university founded in the year 1088. For decades, he generated serious scholarship and developed an international academic profile while also writing cerebral and accessible and popular nonfiction and contributing columns to national newspapers in his native Italy. Also, he was beloved of his students, and was known to stay out late and discuss ideas and culture over cheap wine and cigarettes. How’s that for an impressive run as a professor?
RB: But wait – that’s the just the prologue. In 1980, at the age of forty-eight, he published his first novel, a 500-page intellectual murder mystery set in a fourteenth century monastery that, from a $4,000 advance, went on to sell ten million copies in thirty languages. In so doing, Eco was transformed from a very impressive academic to a global literary superstar. Thereafter, he continued with his scholarship and nonfiction and wrote a series of subsequent novels, all of which featured plots and characters as unabashedly high-minded as they were plot-driven and playful, sometimes even playfully sharp. That combination of qualities owed a great deal to the author himself, who was generally at ease with his fame – he explained his 1980s weight gain as the result of too many rich meals and martinis in business class during flights across the Atlantic for book launches – if not always with the backbiting he had to endure from fellow members of each of his guilds. And, not surprisingly for a historical novelist and academic, he had a long memory. In a 1989 review entitled “Reader: I hated it,” Rushdie ripped apart Eco’s novel Foucault’s Pendulum; twenty years later, the two of them appeared on stage together at a literary festival – of all the works Eco could have read from, can you guess which one he chose?
RB: I haven’t said much yet about what you’re about to hear – selections, in both languorous, slightly labored English and lyrical, nearly-electric Italian, from The Name of the Rose. Whether you've read it already, or plan to, you will now just enjoy following Eco’s giving voice together to very abstruse dilemmas of the mind, and universally recognizable problems of the heart, as with his narrator’s wondering “How can a young monk be healed of love?”
RB: One last thing, before we hear from Eco himself. He loved Toronto, and came here many times over the course of his public life to read at Harbourfront and also at the Metro Reference Library, and also at the University of Toronto; early in The Name of the Rose, he name-checks Etienne Gilson, the preeminent mediaevalist of the twentieth-century and longtime Praeses of the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies at St. Michael’s College, on the east side of the University of Toronto’s downtown campus. A close friend and colleague of professors in Italian and Semiotics, Eco also loved – like few others – Robarts, the brutalist concrete main research library at U of T and he credited it as one of the inspirations for the very important library at the heart of his most famous novel. If ever you visited that library, remember this observation you’re about to hear, from the author himself, that “It’s cold in the scriptorium”. Now imagine this big-brained, big-hearted man standing there, surrounded by books and scholars, imagining mischief … and murder.
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Nigel Hunt (NH): So now, without further ado, tonight's guest, professor of semiotics and the author of 'The Name of the Rose', which after making a big sensation in Europe for the past three years, is now doing the same thing in North America, and has already over 60,000 copies in print. Please welcome Umberto Eco.
[applause]
Umberto Eco (UE): Well, as you probably suspected, in Italy, we speak Italian [chuckle], and that means that English is not my language. And I am pretty terrified by this perspective of reading in English. I would have preferred to have a candid conversation with you because, by reading in English, the problem is not to make me understandable or not, but to spoil my novel, so it'd be... [laughter]
UE: Anyway, I have chosen four pieces, but one of them, let me say the second one, would be in Italian, not only because I think that some of the audience are understanding Italian, but also because I chose a few pages which there is a certain rhythm, a certain lexical musicality, and I would be unable to render it in English. So even though you don't understand Italia, you can follow the rhythm.
UE: Then I made another perverse decision, because I start by reading the last three pages. I tell you why, at this moment, the narrator of my story is probably 80 years old, so he goes slowly, and it's easier for me to read this text.
UE: “Years later, as a grown man, I had occasion to make a journey to Italy, sent by my abbot. I couldn't resist temptation, and on my return, I went far out of my way to revisit what remained of the abbey. The two villages on the slopes of the mountain were deserted, the lands around them uncultivated. When I climbed up to the top, a spectacle of desolation and death appeared before my eyes, which moistened with tears.
UE: Of the great and magnificent constructions that once adorned that place, only scattered ruins remained, as had happened before with the monuments of the ancient pagans in the city of Rome. Ivy covered the shreds of the walls, columns, the few architraves still intact. Weeds invaded the ground on all sides, and there was no telling where the vegetables and the flowers had once grown. Only the location of the cemetery was recognizable, because of some graves that still rose above the level of the terrain. Sole sign of life, some birds of prey hunted lizards and serpents that, like basilisks, slithered among the stones or crawled over the walls. Of the church door, only a few traces remained, eroded by mold. Half of the tympanum survived, and I still glimpsed there, dilated by the elements and dulled by lichens, the left eye of the enthroned Christ, and something of the lion's face.
UE: The Aedificium, except for the south wall, which was in ruins, seemed yet to stand and defy the course of time. The two outer towers, over the cliff, appeared almost untouched, but all the windows were empty sockets, whose slimy tears were rotting vines. Inside, the work of art, destroyed, became confused with the work of nature, and across vast stretches of the kitchen the eye ran to the open heavens through the breach of the upper floors, and the roof, fallen like fallen angels. Everything that was not green with moss was still black from the smoke of so many decades ago.
UE: Poking about in the rubble, I found at times scraps of parchment that had drifted down from the scriptorium and the library, and had survived like treasures buried in the earth. I began to collect them, as if I were going to piece together the torn pages of a book. Then I noticed that, in one of the two towers, there rose, tottering but still intact, a circular staircase to the scriptorium, and from there, by climbing a sloping bit of the ruin, I could reach the level of the library, which, however, was only a sort of gallery next to the outside walls, looking down into the void at every point.
UE: Along one stretch of wall, I found a bookcase, still miraculously erect, having come through the fire, I cannot say how. It was rotted by water and consumed by termites. In it, there were still a few pages. Other remnants I found by rummaging in the ruins below. Mine was a poor harvest, but I spent a whole day reaping it, as if, from those disiecta membra of the library, a message might reach me. Some fragments of parchment had faded, others permitted the glimpse of an image's shadow, or the ghost of one or more words. At times, I found pages where whole sentences were legible, more often, intact bindings, protected by what had once been metal studs. Ghosts of books, apparently intact on the outside but consumed within. Yet, sometimes a half page had been saved, an incipit was discernible, a title. I collected every relic I could find, filling two traveling sacks with them, abandoning things useful to me in order to save that miserable hoard.
UE: Along the return journey, and afterward at Melk, I spent many, many hours trying to decipher those remains. Often, from a word or a surviving image, I could recognize what the work had been. When I found, in time, other copies of those books, I studied them with love, as if destiny had left me this bequest, as if having identified the destroyed copy were a clear sign from heaven that said to me, "Tolle et lege." At the end of my patient reconstruction, I had before me a kind of lesser library, a symbol of the greater, vanished one, a library made up of fragments, quotations, unfinished sentences, amputated stumps of books.
UE: The more I reread this list, the more I am convinced it is the result of chance and contains no message. But these incomplete pages have accompanied me through all the life that has been left me to live since then. I have often consulted them like an oracle, and I have almost had the impression that what I have written on these pages, which you will now read, unknown reader, is only a cento, a figured hymn, an immense acrostic that says and repeats nothing but what those fragments have suggested to me, nor do I know whether, thus far, I have been speaking of them or they have spoken through my mouth. But whichever of the two possibilities may be correct, the more I repeat to myself the story that has emerged from them, the less I manage to understand whether in it there is a design that goes beyond the natural sequence of the events and the times that connect them. And it is a hard thing for this old monk, on the threshold of death, not to know whether the letter he has written contains some hidden meaning, or more than one, or many, or none at all. But this inability of mine to see is perhaps the effect of the shadow that the great darkness, as it approaches, is casting on the aged world.
UE: Est ubi gloria nunc Babyloniae? Where are the snows of yesteryear? The earth is dancing the dance of Macabré. At times, it seems to me that the Danube is crowded with ships loaded with fools going toward a dark place. All I can do now is be silent. O quam salubre, quam iucundum et suave est sedere in solitudine et tacere et loqui cum Deo! Soon, I shall be joined with my beginning, and I no longer believe that it is the God of glory of whom the abbots of my order spoke to me, or of joy, as the Minorites believed in those days, perhaps not even of piety. Gott ist ein lauter Nichts, ihn rührt kein Nun noch Hier. I shall soon enter this broad desert, perfectly level and boundless, where the truly pious heart succumbs in bliss. I shall sink into the divine shadow, in a dumb silence and an ineffable union. And in this sinking, all equality and all inequality shall be lost. And in that abyss, my spirit will lose itself, and will not know the equal or the unequal, or anything else, and all differences will be forgotten. I shall be in the simple foundation, in the silent desert where diversity is never seen, in the privacy where no one finds himself in his proper place. I shall fall into the silent and uninhabited divinity, where there is no work and no image.
UE: It's cold in the scriptorium, my thumb aches. I leave this manuscript, I do not know for whom. I no longer know what it is about: Stat rosa pristina nomine, nomina nuda tenemus.
[applause]
UE: This is a... Well, for... For those silent majority who has not written... Read the book, this is a chapter, more or less, in the middle. The narrator, Adso, at the age of 18, being a novice and a monk, has a strange accident that shouldn't happen to young monks, a love affair with a girl, which lasts for a few minutes, the only few minutes in his life.
UE: And the day after, he is caught by many strange feelings that he feels for the first time in his life, and [indistinguishable] visiting the library, he comes across, said here, to a book full of Arab and Christian quotations, explaining what the lovesickness is. And the text is full of parentheses in which Adso comments, in this sort of stream of consciousness, what he's reading, because he recognized that they are speaking of something he's just feeling in this moment.
UE: “But at a certain point, and just as we were moving around the rooms of the south tower, known as Leones, my master happened to stop in a room rich in Arabic works with odd optical drawings. And since we were, that evening, provided not with one but with two lamps, I moved, in my curiosity, into the next room, realizing that the wisdom and the prudence of the library's planning had assembled, along one of its walls, books that certainly couldn't be handed out to anyone to read, because they dealt in various ways with diseases of body and spirit, and were almost always written by infidel scholars. And my eye fell on a book, not large but adorned with miniatures, far removed, luckily, from the subject: Flowers, vines, animals in pairs, some medicinal herbs. The title was Speculum Amoris, by Maximus of Bologna, and it included quotations from many other works, all on the malady of love. As the reader will understand, it did not require much once more to inflame my mind, which had been numb since morning, and to excite it again with the girl's image.
UE: All that day, I had driven myself to dispel my morning thoughts, repeating that they were not those of a sober, balanced novice. And moreover, since the day's events had been sufficiently rich and intense to distract me, my appetites had been dormant, so that I thought I had freed myself by now from what had been but a passing restlessness. Instead, I had only to see that book and I was forced to say, "De te fabula narratur." And I discovered I was more sick with love than I had believed. I learned later that, reading books of medicine, you are always convinced you feel the pains of which they speak. So it was that the mere reading of those pages, glanced at hastily, in fear that William would enter the room and ask me what I was so diligently investigating, caused me to believe that I was suffering from that very disease, whose symptoms were so splendidly described, that if, on the one hand, I was distressed to discover I was sick, and on the infallible evidence of so many auctoritates, on the other, I rejoiced to see my own situation depicted so vividly, convincing myself that even if I was ill, my illness was, so to speak, normal, inasmuch as countless others had suffered in the same way, and the quoted authors might have taken me personally as the model for their descriptions.
UE: So I was moved by the pages of Ibn-Hazm, who defines love as a rebel illness whose treatment lies within itself, for the sick person doesn't want to be healed. And he who is ill with it is reluctant to get well, and God knows this was true. I realized why, that morning, I had been so stirred by everything I saw, it seems that love enters through the eyes, as Basil of Ancira also says. And, unmistakable symptom, he who is seized by such an illness displays an excessive gaiety, while he wishes, at the same time, to keep to himself and seeks solitude, as I had done that morning, while other phenomena affecting him are a violent restlessness and an awe that makes him speechless. I was frightened to read that the sincere lover, when denied the sight of the beloved object, must fall into a wasting state that often reaches the point of confining him to bed, and sometimes the malady overpowers the brain, and the subject loses his mind and raves. Obviously, I had not yet reached that phase, because I had been quite alert in the exploration of the library. But I read, with apprehension, that if the illness worsens, death can ensue, and I asked myself whether the joy I derived from thinking of the girl was worth this supreme sacrifice of the body, apart from all due consideration of the soul's health.
UE: I learned, further, from some words of Saint Hildegard, that the melancholy humour I had felt during the day, which I attributed to a sweet feeling of pain at the girl's absence, was perilously close to the feeling experienced by one who strays from the harmonious and perfect state man experiences in paradise, and this "nigra et amara" melancholy is produced by the breath of the serpent and the influence of the devil, an idea shared also by infidels of equal wisdom, for my eyes fell on the lines attributed to Abu-Bakr Muhammad ibn-Zakariyya ar-Razi, who, in a Liber countenance, identifies amorous melancholy with lycanthropy, which drives its victim to behave like a wolf. His description clutched at my throat: First, the lovers seem changed in the external appearance, their eyesight weakens, their eyes become hollow and without tears, their tongue slowly dries up and pustules appear on it, and the whole body is parched, and they suffer constant thirst. At this point, they spend the day lying face down, and on the face and the tibias, marks like dog bites appear, and finally, the victims roam through the cemeteries at night like wolves.
[laughter]
UE: Finally, I had no more doubts as to the gravity of my situation when I read quotations from the great Avicenna, who defined love as an assiduous thought of a melancholy nature, born as a result of one's thinking again and again of the features, gestures, or behavior of a person of the opposite sex. With what vivid fidelity had Avicenna described my case. It doesn't originate as an illness, but it's transformed into illness when, remaining unsatisfied, it becomes obsessive thought. And why did I feel so obsessed? I who... God forgive me, had been well-satisfied? Or was perhaps what had happened the previous night not satisfaction of love? But how is this illness satisfied then? And so there is an incessant flutter of the eyelids, irregular respiration. Now the victim laughs, now weeps, and the pulse throbs, and indeed mine throbbed, and my breathing stopped as I read those lines. Avicenna advised an infallible method already proposed by Galen for discovering whether someone is in love: Grasp the wrist of the sufferer and utter many names of members of the opposite sex, until you discover which name makes the pulse accelerate.
[laughter]
UE: I was afraid my master would enter abruptly, seize my arm, and observe, in the throbbing of my veins, my secret, of which I would have been greatly ashamed. Alas, as remedy, Avicenna suggested uniting the two lovers in matrimony, which would cure the illness. Truly, he was an infidel, though a shrewd one, because he didn't consider the condition of the Benedictine novice, thus condemned never to recover, or rather, consecrated through his own choice or the wise choice of his relatives, never to fall ill. Luckily, Avicenna, though not thinking of the Cluniac order, did consider the case of lovers who cannot be joined, and advised, as radical treatment, hot baths.
[laughter]
UE: Was Berengar trying to be healed of his lovesickness for the dead Adelmo? But could one suffer lovesickness for a being of one's own sex, or was that only bestial lust? And was the night I spent perhaps not bestial and lustful? No, of course not, I told myself at once, it was most sweet, and then immediately added, "No, you are wrong, Adso, it was an illusion of the devil, it was most bestial, and if you sinned in being a beast, you sin all the more now in refusing to acknowledge it!" But then I read, again, in Avicenna, that there were also other remedies: For example, enlisting the help of old and expert women who would spend their time denigrating the beloved, and it seems that old women are more expert than men in this task. Perhaps this was the solution, but I couldn't find any old women at the abbey, or young ones, actually, and so I would have to ask some monk to speak ill to me of the girl, but who? And besides, could a monk know women as well as an old gossip would know them?
UE: The last solution suggested by the Saracen was truly immodest, for it required the unhappy lover to couple with many slave girls, a remedy quite unsuitable for a monk. And so, I asked myself, finally, how can a young monk be healed of love? Is there truly no salvation for him? Should I perhaps turn to Severinus and his herbs?
UE: I did find a passage in Arnold of Villanova, an author I had heard William mention with great esteem, who had it that lovesickness was born from an excess of humors and pneuma, when the human organism finds itself in an excess of dampness and heat, because the blood, which produces the generative seed, increasing through excess, produces excess of seed, a "complexio venerea," and an intense desire for union in man and woman. There is an estimative virtue situated in the dorsal part of the median ventricle of the encephalus, what's that? I wondered, whose purpose is to perceive the insensitive intentions perceived by the senses. And when desire for the object perceived by the senses becomes too strong, the estimative faculty is upset, and it feeds only on the phantom of the beloved person. Then there is an inflammation of the whole soul and body, as sadness alternates with joy, because heat, which, in moments of despair, descends into the deepest parts of the body and chills the skin, in moments of joy, rises to the surface, inflaming the face. The treatment suggested by Arnold consisted in trying to lose the assurance and the hope of reaching the beloved object, so that the thought would go away.
UE: "Why, in that case, I am cured, or nearly cured," I said to myself, because I have little or no hope of seeing the object of my thoughts again, and if I saw it, no hope of gaining it, and if I gained it, none of possessing it again, and if I possessed it, of keeping it near me, because of both my monkish state and the duties imposed on me by my family's station. "I am saved," I said to myself, and I closed the book and collected myself just as William entered the room.
[applause]
[background conversation]
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Randy Boyagoda (RB): Umberto Eco was born in the Piedmont region of Italy, in 1932. He grew up a devout Catholic and received his PhD at the University of Turin, in 1956. He lectured at his alma mater and worked in Italian media and publishing until 1971, when he was appointed the first professor of semiotics at the University of Bologna, Europe’s oldest university. A polyglot and prodigious scholar and popular columnist, Eco gained worldwide fame with the publication of The Name of the Rose, in 1980. Subsequently he published six other novels that were consistent bestsellers in multiple languages, taught at leading universities in North America and Europe, and won an array of honors and prizes and honorary doctorates. Married with two children, Eco died in 2016.
This audio recording of Umberto Eco, recorded on stage at Harbourfront Reading Series in 1983, is used with the kind permission of La nave di Teseo and the Estate of Umberto Eco. as well as the Toronto International Festival of Authors.
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Writers Off the Page: 40 years of TIFA is a year-long podcast series that celebrates 40 years of the Toronto International Festival of Authors. It's produced by the Toronto Public Library. The Executive Producer is Gregory McCormick. This episode was produced by Gregory McCormick and me, Randy Boyagoda, with technical support from George Panayotou – who, I want to add, has been a source of great insight, care, and remarkable patience as I’ve recorded, re-recorded, and re-re-recorded these episodes in a child’s bedroom during the pandemic. Further technical support has come from Michelle De Marco, with marketing support from Tanya Oleksuik, and research support from Marcella van Run, who, by happy coincidence, had started reading The Name of the Rose the week before she was asked to research Eco’s life and work for this episode.
For more about Writers Off the Page: 40 Years of TIFA, visit writersoffthepage.ca where you will find links to the books mentioned in each episode and links to other relevant materials in TPL’s collections. For all of Toronto Public Library's podcasts series, check out tpl.ca/podcasts.
Music is by YUKA.
I'm Randy Boyagoda and we'll be back soon with another episode of Writers Off the Page: 40 Years of TIFA.