Music Credit: “The Didda Fly and Dodger” written and performed by Liz Carroll, from the CD Lost in the Loop. Belinda McKeon: There is a very romantic view. It is quite limiting in many ways. You know, this view of the lyrical flourish, the melancholy. That may have been true of Irish writing in the 20th century, but the work that’s happening now – the books that are being published now, the younger generation of writers – there’s much more diversity. Formally, it’s much more experimental and audacious. Jo Reed: That’s writer Belinda McKeon. And this is Art Works, the weekly podcast produced at the National Endowment for the Arts. I’m Josephine Reed. There are few parts of the writing world that Belinda McKeon hasn’t embraced. She curates poetry festivals – both in New York and in Ireland – she was a journalist, an art and music critic to be precise. While she continues to write essays, she now focuses on her plays and her novels.  Since moving to Brooklyn eleven years ago, Belinda has written two novels: the award-winning Solace, which was voted the 2012 Irish Book of the Year, and Tender, which was published in 2015 to critical acclaim. Although Solace and Tender are very different novels, they each explore changing dimensions of Irish society. For example, Solace looks at the generational impact of the move from rural to urban, while Tender examines living as a gay person in 1990s Dublin.  And both novels have, at their heart, two deeply-intertwined and mismatched pairs.  In Tender, there’s Catherine, who’s rather inhibited, and the outgoing, charming James. These two form a passionate friendship that turns into something else. Whereas in Solace, we have Mark, who is a graduate student studying in Dublin, and his father, Tom, who’s a farmer. When these two talk at all, they just talk past each other. Not even Mark’s unexpected fatherhood can move them closer together, even though they both love the child, Aoife, deeply. While Belinda herself made that transition from a farm to city living, Solace was not inspired by her own experiences, but rather by an image she saw in the little country town close to her parents’ farm when she was visiting. Belinda McKeon:  This was Christmas, actually, probably 2003. It was quite a while ago. And outside a restaurant on the main street, I saw a young man standing outside the restaurant and he was wearing a paper party hat. And he was holding a tiny baby and it was dark – it was probably nine o’clock at night.  And I remember thinking, what’s going on there? Why has he stepped away from the party?  Why does he have this tiny baby in his arms?  And he was kissing her – just planting a kiss on her forehead. You know, I didn’t think any more about it, but a couple of weeks later when I sat down to work on a short story – I was starting to write a new short story – that image became the seed for the character of Mark, who is a young man who becomes a father. And fatherhood is a big shock to him. “Son-hood” has kind of been a big shock to him in many ways. And that was Mark and Aoife. Jo Reed: And Aoife is Mark’s daughter? Belinda McKeon: Yeah. Those characters somehow came from my memory and from my unconscious and they brought a lot with them. I still have that early draft of what was then a short story, and a great deal of the finished landscape of Solace was in that short story: the father, the son, the farm, the relationship that Mark got into, the birth of the baby. Jo Reed: Let’s talk about the characters of Mark and Tom. As you said, Mark is the son and Tom – I found him such an endearing character. Belinda McKeon: Did you? < Laughs> Jo Reed: I did! Belinda McKeon:  What did you find endearing about him?  I’m interested. Jo Reed:  There is something about the way you painted that life on the farm. The routine and the patience and moving through the seasons, moving through with the animals that just gave him such solidness. And almost like ‘old man of the hills.’ And at the same time, I felt there was such kindness in him. Belinda McKeon:  He’s very close to my own father. I will admit that. But I think he’s close to him in lots of ways. You know, the routine, that closeness to the land – I grew up on a small farm, so that’s the sort of knowledge you have that embedded in you. It’s the kind of background, deep knowledge that will turn up in a piece of writing. And you’ll find yourself writing about a life that you’ve left behind a long time ago but it’s still intact in your memory; the structures and the rhythms of it are still intact. And yet for Tom, for the character of the Tom, the farm is sort of the heartbeat of his life – in a way, more important to him than his family. Now, that’s not true of my own father, I should hasten to add. But for the character, the land is the reliable thing. Even when it’s very difficult, even when it – the part of Ireland that the novel is set in is not a part of the country where the land is good. Farming is actually quite difficult and mucky and unpleasant work there. But for him, that’s the reliable part of life. His son, his only son, who wants to do a Ph.D. in literature rather than taking over the farm is the unreliable part of life. And so I like that you find him kind. I find him quite difficult, Tom. You know, self-absorbed. But, he’s a character. He’s deep in my blood. He really is. Jo Reed:  Through the characters of Mark and Tom, one of the things I think you’re looking at is sort of the tension between rural Ireland – the agricultural Ireland – and metropolitan Ireland, as Dublin is. Belinda McKeon:  Yeah. I mean Mark would be for part of the generation of young people who were able to go to university for free in Ireland for the first time. That became a phenomenon in the, I think late eighties and early 1990s for the first time, university – which by American standards was already quite reasonable – became entirely free for most people. And there were also government grants and the like for farmer’s children. So Mark is of that generation for whom going to university and leaving the home place for Dublin or for Galway or for one of the other cities is just something that you do. And for him, that becomes his life. Tom is of the generation where that wasn’t done. And so it becomes a deep point of tension and of misunderstanding and really of heartbreak between the two of them. It’s an old story and it’s a story that has happened countless times in families in Ireland. I know that from the response that the book got, the personal responses I got from parents and from children – especially sons – talking about how this felt like their story in some ways. Jo Reed:  As you said, you grew up on the farm and you made the transition to the city, to Dublin. How was that transition for you? Belinda McKeon:  I remember it as being really easy but sometimes I look at the details of it and I think, ‘it can’t have been that easy.’ I was very young, first of all. I just turned seventeen, so I was still a teenager, and I was going home very weekend for the first year. And even the second year I went home almost every weekend. It took me a while to kind of find my feet in Dublin. But I do remember the first year still not being homesick really maybe because I hadn’t fully detached from the place and I went home for the full summer of the first year. I don't know. Ireland is such a small country, maybe that’s part of it, that Dublin was only 100 miles from my home place. It wasn’t as though I was getting on a plane and flying for five hours to go to college which kids here in the U.S. do. But it was a change. I remember it being a very positive change but sometimes like I say when I look at the details I think, ‘well it must have been difficult in some ways.’ Jo Reed:  Before you wrote novels, and before you wrote plays – we’ll get to that in a moment – you were a journalist and a book and theater critic as I understand. Belinda McKeon:  <Laughs> I was. I was a theater critic, oh my God. Jo Reed:  What drew you to criticism? Belinda McKeon:  I mean it was simultaneous really. I was working on the fiction all of the time but just managed to get something published in my mid-twenties. I wanted to be a journalist from a young age. I was writing fiction from a young age. And one of my teachers in primary school – what we call elementary school here – told me that in order to make a living as a writer, you’d need to have something else and that journalism would be a good option for me. So from that point on I decided I was going to do that. And I was very interested in the media as a teenager and wrote for college newspapers and the like. So when I finished university, I started to freelance for the “Irish Times,” which is one of the broadsheet newspapers in Ireland, and I wrote arts for them for almost ten years; interviewing writers and actors and creative people and then writing some arts – some of the news desk stuff on the arts side as well. And the theater criticism came about just because they needed somebody to review the fringe shows in that first year when I was freelancing. So I reviewed a couple of fringe theater festival shows. And from there I started to get more criticism work. And then one of the main critics was away for a year so I ended up getting a lot of his reviews that would have been written by him. I have very mixed feelings about that now how I sort of stumbled into it. I never felt entirely happy about doing it because I was trying to be a creator myself and there’s something about it that just felt wrong. So I do kind of look back on it as my dark past. <Laughs> Jo Reed:  How did you move into theater as a creative? Belinda McKeon:  Well, I moved to New York in 2005 and that was a sort of – that as a statement to myself that I was changing my routines. I was changing my priorities, I suppose. And I’d also that year had a radio play produced on Irish radio. It was part of a radio play contest called the PJ O’Connor Awards. And my play had been placed in those awards and got a production. And that was very validating for me. I kind of remember it as a start of being able to feel, ‘okay I’m really doing this.’ The problem was, I think, using the journalism, which – I was very busy. I was a very busy journalist. I had a lot of deadlines and I was using that as a way not to write my own fiction and my drama. And so that award or that placement, I think it got second prize, was really important to me. And it just made think I’m either going to do this or I’m going to do things which are of secondary importance to me and feel bad about that. Jo Reed:  Did theater come first? Or both were simultaneous? Belinda McKeon:  No, they were simultaneous. I mean if I look at back at what I was writing, say as a teenager – which I think you can often look back and say, ‘what did I want to write when I was sixteen?’ Well, that’s what matters to me. And it was both, because I used to write stories and also these sort of sketches, you know, sort like satirical plays with my classmates in them and characters from various TV shows. So there would be a play about these school girls in Longford, and Mulder and Scully from The X-Files would also be characters in it. <Laughs> Jo Reed:  <Laughs> How do you know, when you have an idea for something, which way you’re going to turn? When do you reach out to one and when you do reach out to the other? Belinda McKeon:  Yeah, it is intuitive I think. The idea comes with its shape. And so it’s very rare that something will come to me and I will think, well, could that be a play? Or could that be a story?  I think the unconscious does a huge amount of work for a writer. So if I get an idea, it’ll usually be an idea for a play, or an idea for a story. It won’t be an orphaned idea that has to find its form and I think that’s because work has a shape even in its gestation. Jo Reed: Does that dark past as a critic, does it haunt you in some ways when you’re doing your own work?  Are you a little more self-conscious perhaps? Belinda McKeon:  That’s quite a while ago now, so I think I’ve forgotten a lot of that. But I will say when I came to New York, I acted in a theater production at Columbia where I did my graduate work. I really wanted to act. I had never done it in Ireland. And once I became a theater critic, obviously, it was sort of off the table. So I got involved in a production at Columbia. It was just college amateur production. It was Mike Leigh’s play, “Ecstasy”. We rehearsed for three months and we had a week long run and it was very demanding – it was a very long play, almost three hours – probably because we weren’t very skilled at keeping it tight. And I just remember thinking I had no idea what goes into a theater production. I had no idea how much layered, complicated, demanding work it involves from everybody on board. It definitely haunted me then. Now, when I’m writing my own work, my own past as a critic doesn’t really make any difference to me, to my process. But reviews that I’ve received myself do. Jo Reed:  They do? So you read them? Belinda McKeon:  Yeah, I do. I always say that I won’t and I really said that I wouldn’t with Tender and then I completely forgot and I read all of them. Jo Reed:  Yeah, I would too. I couldn’t imagine people writing things about me and me not reading it. Belinda McKeon:  I know. And they do. I mean, everybody says this. You know, it’s funny, I did an event last week in New York with Gabriel Byrne and he was talking about how actors have the same experience. One which is negative in a review will just plant itself in your frontal lobe and stay with you until the day you die. But you could get a glowing review, you know you could get a five-page essay in the New Yorker on your book, and it could be glowing, and you won’t remember anything. None of the detail, none of the praise will stay with you. But the negative stuff will stay with you. And he’s talking about how Anthony Hopkins had talked about a bad review coming into his head as he stepped on stage second night of the production, the third night of the production. I just thought oh my god, I mean if Anthony Hopkins can’t be safe … Jo Reed:  I mean who among us can? Belinda McKeon: <Laughs>   Yeah. Jo Reed:  Let’s move to your most recent novel, Tender, which again has another mismatched pair: Catherine and James. I’d like to begin by having you read a bit from the novel. Belinda McKeon:  This is the opening of Tender: “Dreams fled away and something about a bedroom. And something about a garden seen through an open window and a windfall. Something about a windfall. A line which made Catherine see apples bruising and shriveling and rotting into the ground. Windfall sweetened soil, that was it. And the flank of an animal rubbing against bedroom wall. Though that could not be right, could it?  But it was in there somewhere, she knew it was. Something of it had bobbed up in her consciousness. She was on the lawn in front of James’ house, a wool blanket beneath her, one arm thrown over her eyes to do the job of the sunglasses she had not thought to bring. It was so hot. It was such a proper summer’s day. The French windows were open. They were to the left of the front door which seemed a bit strange or pointless or something. If you wanted to walk out to the front of the house wouldn’t you just use the door? Still, they were nice. Elegant. That was what they were. And modern. And through them now came the noise of James and his parents talking in the loud, excited way this family had. His mother shrieked at something James had said and James swore at her the fond, gleeful kind of swearing they did all of the time, this family. Catherine could not get over them. Jo Reed: That’s a great beginning. Lovely. What gave you the idea for this novel?  Belinda McKeon:  These two young characters have been with me for a very long time. I actually started writing about them eighteen years ago when I was still in college. They’re based on myself and a very close friend of mine, who I met in college, a young man who was at that time struggling to coming out as a gay man. It was late 90s Ireland, and the climate still wasn’t particularly supportive even though he was part of the first generation of young LGBT people to come of age after the decriminalization of homosexuality in 1993. It still was a culture of silence and of hiding and not a supportive culture. And so he was my closest friend and he remains my closest friend. So I wanted to write characters based not that experience. But eighteen years ago I had no idea how to do that or what to do. So I wrote a story and abandoned it. And then when I finished Solace, those two characters came back to me in a similar way, maybe, to the way that young man outside the restaurant had come to me when I was writing Solace. And I started to work on the story and that became Tender; this story of two young people finding each other, being immediately connected in the way that happens when you’re eighteen or nineteen and you make a friend and it just feels like the friend of your life. But things were complicated for these two characters. And the story moves from a kind of innocence and loveliness to something much darker. And I suppose what I was interested in was the idea or the reality of cultural inheritance and of internalized prejudice, you know, of how a person can be ostensibly, or in their own mind, a very open non-prejudiced person but carrying all sorts of inherited ways of thinking and inherited rules which will impact on the way they behave and the way they treat the people that they meet. So Catherine, for instance, really wants to help James and to be a good friend to him. But she’s naïve and she’s also sheltered and she’s got a lot of unrecognized, internalized fear. And she ends up making things much more difficult for him. Jo Reed:  There’s an obsessive nature that really comes to bear on that friendship. I’d like you to talk about obsession and what interests you about that. Belinda McKeon:  Well, I mean it’s fascinating. It’s unpleasant as well. One of the things with Catherine as a charter has been how unlikeable she is for so many people. Readers have had really strong responses to her - either they love her and then other readers just are offended by her because all of her consciousness, everything that’s going through her head I put on the page. I wanted the novel to be that very close study of what a person goes through as they become obsessed. The obsession as a theme or as a reality in the novel – for me that grew out of an interest really in co-dependency and in what co-dependency is, how people become dependent on each other in unhealthy ways and lean on each other too much and come to actually demand things from each other that are not reasonable. And how that could actually just look like a normal relationship from the outside or a normal friendship. But again, the things you carry with you from your culture, from learned behavior and the things you’re told by a society, they will impact. People have different forms of baggage I suppose. So that's where the obsession grew from, I suppose, as a theme. And then once I knew that Catherine was becoming obsessed with James and becoming possessive and controlling of him, my duty as the novelist was to follow that to its nth degree and really to go into the dark spaces. Jo Reed:  Of which there are many, yes.  When you get an idea for – let’s talk about fiction – d o you start with character? Do you start with plot?  Do you start with setting?  What typically propels you to begin? Belinda McKeon:  I start with character. I’m interested in people, really interested in people, and in what people are like under the surface. The writers that I most admire-- I mean one of the writers I love, Deborah Eisenberg, the short story writer, Alan Hollinghurst, the British novelist – writers who go really, really close to the weave of a character’s consciousness, to the interiority and to what’s going on in a person’s head as they’re walking around, as they’re having their encounters. The distance but also the tension between the public and the private self. So that’s what I’m interested in and in that way it is about character. It’s about personality. So it’s almost as though I get the feel of a person and then I begin to write about them and what happens plot wise, that’s almost secondary. And in fact, that can be a technical challenge for me because sometimes I become so absorbed in the personality of the character that I forget that there needs to be some kind of plot. Jo Reed:  This story, Tender, it takes place in Dublin and it takes place in New York. How was incorporating another country into the work? Belinda McKeon:  To be honest, it was a relief. <Laughs> I felt as though I had broken through a wall finally not writing about Ireland anymore. I’ve been here in New York for eleven years. This the first time – not the first time I’ve tried to write about New York – but it was the first time it had felt natural. Jo Reed:  You’ve curated a number of poetry festivals, both in Ireland and in the United States. Do you write many other things? Do you write poetry too? Belinda McKeon:  No. But, I mean I have, but to me that’s very secret. And I don’t – I’ve just given it away – but I don’t attempt to publish it. And I don’t even really attempt to finish my poems. I’m not really sure what’s going on with that. I suspect that maybe later in life it will become more central to my practice as a writer. I’ve always loved poetry. In college, for instance, when I was doing my undergrad, the American poets of the midcentury were just so deeply important to me. And Plath is a big part of Tender, actually. I gave that sort of obsession to Catherine as well as a student. So the character becomes really obsessed with Plath, which is a pretty good fit for a distressed young woman, I suppose. So, my activities with regard to poetry just grew out of a love of the forum. A lot of my work, as a journalist, a lot of my most satisfying work as a journalist was interviewing poets, international poets, because there was a festival in Ireland which brought a lot of wonderful poets to the city of Dublin every year. And then I was offered the curatorship of that festival in 2007 and I did that for five years, traveling back from New York to Dublin for the festival. It just was this amazing weekend bringing together 25 or 30 poets from all over the world for a weekend by the sea in Dún Laoghaire in County Dublin. And when that finished up, my husband Angus and I started a festival in New York called Poetry Fest. It’s at the Irish Art Center. It’s now in its eighth year I believe and we had a really great time doing that bringing over terrific Irish poets and pairing them with terrific American poets. I don't know. It’s just a thing for me. Jo Reed:  How different are the Irish and American literary cultures? Belinda McKeon: Well, I suppose the Irish one is small in terms of, you know, the scene; so, other writers. You see one another all the time and that’s because of an important aspect of Irish culture, which is the festival culture. There are so many literary festivals in Ireland I can’t even begin to name or enumerate them. This time of year – so we’re in March now -  from now until November there will be at least one festival a week in Ireland bringing together anything from ten to thirty writers in small communities around the country and they’re a really big deal. They get big audiences. They get big names. So, that’s a thing. Bookstores are wonderful there. There’s a really great thankfully very healthy culture of independent bookstores. Yeah, people are very interested in reading and in books and in writers. And here, the American scene, I mean, I would think of it in terms of the New York scene rather than the American scene. It’s different. I mean festivals are not nearly as much a thing here, but bookstore readings, for instance, are often of an amazing quality. You wander down to McNally Jack’s or to Greenlight on a Tuesday evening and you’ll get to see, you know, somebody – you’ll see like Marlon Robinson just happens to be there. It's amazing. The scene such as it is feels – it’s not really something I’m a part of, you know, going to the right parties and having the right contacts. I tried that a little bit in my twenties but it’s exhausting and it creates a lot of self-consciousness and insecurity. So I think it’s better just to stay at home and write. <Laughs> Jo Reed:  Do you find that we in the United States, especially in New York and Boston, have this incredibly romantic view of Ireland and Irish writers? Belinda McKeon:  Yeah, you do. You do. <Laughs> Jo Reed:  Yeah, I kind of think we do too. <Laughs> Belinda McKeon:  Yeah, and of Ireland, you know? I just feel – the accent – we get away with a lot because of our accents here as writers, I think. There is a very romantic view and it is be quite limiting in many ways. It's this view of the lyrical flourish, the melancholy. That may have been true of Irish writing in the 20th century, but the work that’s happening now – the books that are being published now, the younger generation of writers – there’s much more diversity. Formally, it’s much more experimental and bombastic really and audacious. You know, I don’t want to generalize either. I would say that Irish writing is a much more multifaceted field than the romantic view can begin to understand or to capture. That said, as a writer who comes from a rural background, it is still okay and necessary to write fiction that’s about rural Ireland. There can be a little bit of a perception – with all of the great new wonderful energy that’s happening in Irish writing – there can be a little bit of a perception that it’s time to leave rural Ireland behind as a subject, that that belongs the mid-century novelists. But, I mean, that simply doesn’t make sense. If you’re going to write about Irish life, you write about Irish life in all settings and you write about Irish life in the place and in the atmosphere and the milieu that makes sense to you as a novelist. There’s still a rural Ireland. Maybe it’s not the pastoral Ireland of old and it’s not a romantic one, but it’s still very much a reality and quite a complicated reality now. Jo Reed:  Do you feel equally at home in Brooklyn and in Ireland? Belinda McKeon:  In a way, yeah, I do. And I go to back to Ireland a lot and that I think that’s partly because I want not to feel disconnected – too disconnected from Ireland. So I do return to Dublin a lot. And I go back to my home place occasionally as well. I suppose I feel more at home in Brooklyn now because I’ve lived here for so long. And it’s also more solitary. I mean I know people there, but you’re very unlikely to bump into people in the street on Brooklyn. Whereas in Dublin, you cannot walk without bumping into thirty people that you know. I feel more self-conscious in Ireland and here I feel completely anonymous. It’s sort of like – well nobody knows you’re here. You just do your thing and if you want to meet up with people you make arrangements to meet up with people. But in Ireland, you are going to bump into people the minute you take a step and there’s something that that does to just your feeling of feeling at home almost. Jo Reed:  It’s interesting you touch on that in Tender, both in the way that Catherine and James can go to pubs and bump into many people that they know. But also, the kind of malevolent version of that in the character of Pat Burke, the old gossip. Belinda McKeon:  Yeah, he’s a local guy who spots Catherine and James just listening to music together on the Walkman or the disc man – it’s the late 90s. They’re listening to music, you know, that kind of thing you did where you gave one part of the headset to your friend and you listened to the other. So he sees them and he reports back to her father. I mean this actually happened to me. Not that exact thing but I did have my father saying to me, “Oh, you know, X, a neighbor down the road saw you with your boyfriend and you never told me you had a boyfriend.” And I was like, “I don’t have a boyfriend. I was walking with my friend and I can’t believe” – well, I can believe – because that's the constant eye of the neighborhood. It’s still a reality. People, as you might say in Ireland, they have their tongues out for news. <Laughs> Jo Reed:  Good saying! <Laughs> Belinda McKeon:  A secret in Dublin is something that’s told on the north side at noon, and has reached the south side by ten past noon. Jo Reed:  <Laughs> Belinda McKeon:  And there’s so much fun in that as well. I mean it’s a great, fun, vivacious sort of merciless kind of culture. Jo Reed: But there is something about being known. Belinda McKeon:  And it’s not about being known as a writer or anything like that – Jo Reed:  No, no, no, I mean as a person. Belinda McKeon:  That’s what I was going to say, exactly. It’s not about what you do. It’s about the fact that you are X. You’re the daughter of X or you’re ex of X. You can always be placed. You can’t do anything without being observed. It’s terrible, but fun. Jo Reed:  Tell me what you’re working on now, what’s next for you? Belinda McKeon:  I’m working on a play at the moment. It's a commission for the Abbey Theater and I’m very late with it, unfortunately. I take full responsibility for that in a way. But also, you know, there has been a lot of conservation in Ireland in the last six months about the way in which the theater in Ireland has been dominated by male writers. And that all came to a head very recently when the Abbey Theater announced its program for 2016 and it was an almost entirely male program. So a couple of people really took issue with this, me being one of them, and an extraordinary designer called Lian Bell, a friend of mine. And the movement gathered force and it has become a phenomenal movement in Irish theater called “Waking the Feminists”. It was in response to the program called “Waking the Nation.” And this organization, this movement has brought about real change already by pointing out the institutionalized and internalized bias that has held female artists, not just writers, but designers, playwrights, actors, everybody across the board in theater sharing their stories and talking about their experiences of gender bias.  And so from that has grown a movement which is demanding and is bringing about change in policy and in funding and in programming to make gender balance a reality. It’s been really necessary. So that’s a preamble. I’m under commission to the Abbey and I did talk about-- when I was criticizing the program, I did talk about the fact that as a commissioned playwright I’m conscious of being late with my work, but that doesn’t mean that there are not other female playwrights who are not procrastinators and surely could have contributed work to this centenary program which is what the 2016 program is because as you probably know 2016 is the centenary of the 1916 rising in Ireland. So it’s a very important year culturally. That's what I’m working on at the moment. It’s a work in progress. It's hard to talk about, but it is a play about two women who are brought together by something tragic. And it's about a journalist and a politician. Although that could change. By tomorrow it could be about a journalist and a botanist. I don't know. It’s talking about work in progress it’s a little hairy for that reason. Jo Reed:  Well Belinda, it was such a pleasure to talk to you and such a pleasure to immerse myself in your work. Belinda McKeon:  Thank you for the time and for the invitation. It’s been lovely and I really appreciate it. Jo Reed: That was Belinda McKeon. Her novels are Solace and Tender. You’ve been listening to Art Works, produced at the National Endowment for the Arts. To find out how art works in communities across the country, keep checking the Art Works blog or follow us @NEAArts on Twitter. For the National Endowment for the Arts, I’m Josephine Reed. Thanks for listening.