Music Credit: “NY” written and performed by Kosta T from the cd Soul Sand. Used courtesy of free Music Archive. <music up> R.O. Kwon:  “Carillon bells chimed. Distant birds blowing white, strewn like dandelion tufts, and outsized wish. It must've been then that John Leal came to her side. In his bare feet, he closed his arm around her shoulders. She flinched, looking up at him. I can imagine how he'd have tightened his hold, telling her she'd done well. Though before long, it would be time to act again, to do a little more. But this is where I start having trouble, Phoebe. Buildings fell. People died. You once told me I hadn't even tried to understand. So here I am, trying.” Jo Reed:  That is R.O. Kwon reading from the second page of her debut novel, The Incendiaries and This is Art Works the weekly podcast produced at the National Endowment for the Arts. I’m Josephine Reed. Meet R. O. Kwon she’s is a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellow.  And her novel, The Incendiaries has been named a best book of the year by over forty publications. Not bad for a first book! The Incendiaries tells an unusual story. A young college woman, Phoebe Lin, gets involved with a cult of Christian extremists and bombs an abortion clinic in the name of faith.  It’s not a path anyone could have predicted since Phoebe was an extremely popular girl at her elite college—she was at the center of anything that was amusing, indulgent and carefree.  And this we slowly learn is a reaction to an unhappy past, steeped in secrets, guilt and disappointment.  Will Kendall, on the hand, is a scholarship boy who tries desperately to fit in while hiding his own hardscrabble back ground and his previous zeal as an evangelical boy preacher. Phoebe and Will come together and end up meeting John Leal—a cult leader who incites a very different response from each of the pair. That’s truly is a thumbnail sketch of the plot—R.O. Kwon’s powerful language and vivid portrait of faith, love, obsession, loss and fanaticism drives a story so complex and layered, I wondered at its origins. R.O. Kwon:  For me, I think the first sort of genesis of it was that I grew up so Christian that my entire life plan until I was 17 was to become a pastor. I wanted to live in service of god. And then I lost that faith, and it was devastating for me in ways that I still find very difficult to talk about. And it was devastating on multiple levels, so there was that first level, of course, of losing this god whom I'd loved so much, that I'd really meant to give my life to him. Secondly, all my friends and family, pretty much all my friends and family at the time, they ranged from moderately Christian to extremely Christian. I grew up outside of L.A. and so I lost, in a lot of ways, my community. And then, let's see, a year after I lost my faith, I went to college on the east coast. And pretty much all my new friends had no experience of religion. Like they'd maybe gone to Easter Sunday with their grandmother once or twice. And so I would start telling friends, as I got to know them, "Well, I used to be really religious. I thought I was going to be a pastor." And across the board, their reaction was more just, "Well, that's weird." And people were like, "Well, you know, good for you. You're free. You can drink and have sex like the rest of us." And I was just like, "Well, you know, that's true, but it doesn't feel like a liberation. It felt and feels like the pivotal loss of my life." And so I wanted to write about that. I wanted to write about that loss, but also how wonderful it was to believe, because I think that's something that a lot of people don't necessarily understand who haven't experienced this. I loved being Christian. I loved believing. I loved the sort of calm that I felt. I loved that I walked around in what felt like a haze of love, and I grieve that still in a lot of ways. And I think I wanted to write a book that could perhaps serve as an imaginative bridge between different parts of the faith spectrum, that could perhaps make sense or maybe just shed some light on what it could be like to exist on one part of the faith spectrum and that could be legible even to people who have only ever experienced another part of the spectrum. Jo Reed:  Well, certainly loss is very much at the center of this book, as is faith. There are three main characters. There's Phoebe, there's Will, and there's John Leal. And all three of them speak to an examination of faith and of loss. Can you just tell me a little bit about each? R.O. Kwon:  Yeah, of course. So Will Kendall is the one who, in his experience of faith, and he's sort of the primary narrator of the book. Will Kendall is the one who—I would say I gave him the most directly autobiographical experiences of faith. And I mean that emotionally. I don't mean that, like, every detail maps onto my life. But I really wanted to-- it was so important to me to get that right, to make that feel as truthful-- as close as possible to what it felt like to me, how crushing it was to lose that faith. So he goes off to college and he's the one who wanted to be a pastor and he's lost his faith. He goes off to college and he meets Phoebe Lin, who has lost a great deal. I don't think I'm giving anything away by saying she's lost a great deal. In the early pages, we learn that she grew up believing that she'd be a piano prodigy and she's-- and then she realized, or she believed, at least, that she wasn't good enough. She wasn't good enough to try to make a life out of piano. And so there was that sort of tremendous loss of a purpose, really. And then there is John Leal, who is in a lot of ways a more enigmatic figure. He's a cult leader and he-- yeah, maybe I'll leave it at that. Jo Reed:  Leave John out. Yes, we can. And all three narrate the book, though Will more than the other two. What's with that decision to do that? R.O. Kwon:  Yeah, with writing in general, I feel less as though I make conscious decisions and more as though, as I write and as I revise, I'm asking the book to tell me what it wants to be, and asking the characters who they are, what they want from me, what they want from one another. Not long ago, I was working on my new novel and it was the middle of the night and I was really tired. And I realized that I'd written in all caps on my screen, "Who are you people? What do you want from me?" <laughter> And so I feel almost as though, and I know this isn’t quite the case, because it doesn't sound real, but I feel almost as though the book preexists me. And it preexists me in an ideal shape and it's my job to find my way toward it. All that as a long way of saying that having the book narrated by three characters came about over time. So for the first two years, it was narrated by Phoebe, the ex-piano prodigy. For the next three, four years it was narrated entirely by Will who loves her and opposes the cult and much of what it represents. And then I showed it to my agent and my agent, my literary agent, felt strongly that there wasn't enough of the cult. And I agreed with her. I never made a single change to this book that I didn't fully agree with. But I found that I agreed with her, and that was when John Leals' perspective started coming in. And then she, at the end of all this-- this is at may be the seven and a half year mark, my agent was like, "I just feel as though we still don't have enough of Phoebe." And I was like, "Oh, drat." Those first two years of work. But I realized that there was a lot I knew about Phoebe that never made it on the page, necessarily. And so that was when Phoebe's perspective started coming in. Jo Reed:  Okay. I'm just going to ask how long did it take you to write the book? R.O. Kwon:  <laughter> I know, we're just going through the number of years. It took 10 years. Jo Reed:  Wow. R.O. Kwon:  It took 10 years of near-daily work. I know this is not true for all writers, but for me, I work best if I'm working every day, even if it's just, at my busiest, even if it's just a sentence. I really need to be with it every day. Jo Reed:  So 10 years. I'm so curious about this process. Did you toss everything out at any point? Was the nugget always there and you were just trying to massage it into some kind of shape? Tell me how you wrestled with this for ten years. R.O. Kwon:  Yeah, of course! Let's see, so the first two years of work, which is when I-- so I love language. I love syllables. I love words. Sometimes someone will just say a word and I'll just space out thinking about the word and how interesting it is. So all of that is nice. It's fun. It's less good for writing early drafts of something as large as a novel. Jo Reed:  I know what you mean. I was in news for a while and it was way back. There was a lot going on in the Middle East, and I loved the word "Kandahar." And I would try any story that had Kandahar in it. I was always, "Oh, I'll take that one. I'll take the Kandahar story." Because I just loved the way it felt in my mouth and it was just a beautiful word. R.O. Kwon:  Yeah. I get a lot of "Word of the day" emails from the various dictionaries. And I love those. So yeah, so the first two years, I just reworked the first 20 pages of this book over and over and over again and wanted to get the language exactly right. At the end of those two years, I threw it all away. Jo Reed:  Just.. R.O. Kwon:  I threw it all away because I realized… I realized I had been agonizing over the language, again without really knowing who the characters were, what they wanted from one another, what the shape of this book might be. And so that was when I started-- I spoke with friends who are writers who also care deeply about language. And I used a variety of techniques to just try to get through early drafts as fast as possible. To not let myself fixate as much as I want to on the words. Jo Reed:  What would you do? R.O. Kwon:  There are so many things. So one that was very helpful was I used a program that turned my laptop into a typewriter, so I could only backspace one letter ever. I couldn't copy and paste. I couldn't go back and delete whole paragraphs. It sort of forces you to move forward. <laughter> You look so distressed. Jo Reed:  I'm just remembering when I was an undergraduate and that's sort of how you would-- you know, it was pre-computer when I was an undergraduate. And oh lord, boy, was I happy to see computers. R.O. Kwon:  Yeah, but you know, it forces you to move forward, so that was really helpful. I wrote multiple drafts by hand. There was one draft I wrote where I turned each paragraph white as I went so that the font would disappear so that - what I had written would disappear onto the page, so I couldn't see it. Something that I loved doing and that I always do now any time I write anything, pretty  much, I will write, like, five words, press enter. I'll write seven words, press enter. Three words, press enter. And so at the end, what I have is a giant manuscript that looks like a very sad, ragged epic poem. But it's not. It's prose, but just by spatially breaking it up, it makes it so that I cannot visually see it as a sentence the way I want to, and I find that to be really helpful. Jo Reed:  Interesting. Wow, so those were some of the things you did after two years to get you through it. R.O. Kwon:  Yeah. Jo Reed:  Now all through all that process, as we just heard, we hear right at the beginning, "People die, buildings fall." Was that always the case that this terrorist bombing was going to open the book? R.O. Kwon:  Yeah, so that came in around that two-year mark, after I had thrown everything away, because for the first two years, the book was centered on Phoebe. And in a lot of ways, it still is, the woman who falls into the cult. But for those first two years, she was just sort of wandering around by herself, meditating on the nature of an absent god and feeling sad about it. Which was exactly as fun and sexy to read, let alone to write, as that sounds. And I love walking around, meditative books. Like I love Teju Cole. I love W.G. Sebald. But I don't think that's what this book wanted to be. And I found out once I started externalizing some of my obsessions with loss, with grief, with faith, with god, with all of it, with love, once I started externalizing some of that, that's when the book really started to come to life. And so that's when I think things quite literally started to blow up on the screen. Jo Reed:  And did that also enable you to move forward with exploring the characters and the situations they found themselves in? R.O. Kwon:  Oh, that's such an interesting question. I don't know that I've ever thought about it that way, but I'm sure it did, for sure. Because there were just-- concretely there were things happening. And then there are ways in which the characters are then contending with what happens and-- yeah. Jo Reed:  It's also interesting because this book that's about so much, also explores class, I think. R.O. Kwon:  Mm-hmm. Jo Reed:  Very clearly in this book, and I would-- which I think very astutely. And class is something that especially in literary fiction, it doesn't get explored very much. I find if I want to read about class, I need to pick up genre fiction, where people really are still concerned about working. R.O. Kwon:  Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. Yeah, and that was something that was very interesting to me, and I think it remains interesting in my fiction and in what I write. Very directly, since this book is set on a college campus, and it's set on an elite college campus, and class just very much seeps into every day of life at a college like that. And for me personally, so I grew up in LA in a small town that is something like 80 percent Asian. And I went to a public school that was 80 percent Asian, and of course there were differences in how parents-- what parents did and how they sort of survived, because a lot were first-generation immigrants, how they survived moving to the US and how they were-- whether they were surviving or whether they were thriving. There were differences, but they were not differences as stark as what I encountered the minute I went to college. And I was just like, "Oh well, I have classmates whose names are on buildings. This is wild. This is just an entirely different way of being." And I think just sort of that shock of encounter with such differences in class in a country that I think-- in a lot of ways, I think in America there's this ongoing lie that we don't have class, that everybody's equal, and it's just not true. And I think that that lie is harmful, because then there can be so much shame if you're not socioeconomically doing well, I think, if you're struggling. And I think that that lie directly can lead to that kind of shame, and so I wanted to bring some of that to the forefront. Jo Reed:  Yeah. I think you did so well with Will, who doesn't even want his classmates to know that he's working. R.O. Kwon:  Yeah. Yeah, yeah, for sure. He hides the fact that he has a job because he doesn't want his relatively very privileged classmates to know that he doesn't have the kind of money they have. Jo Reed:  Yeah. Very, very interesting. And doubly so because what is it called? The fiction of meritocracy? And he is in there on a scholarship, but the scholarship isn’t enough. R.O. Kwon:  Right. And that's such a problem with-- I have friends who work in institutions and programs that help people who are maybe the first to go to college-- to go to college. And yet there are a lot of colleges that wonderfully give very generous scholarships, full scholarships. But they still don't take into account, maybe, what about the air fare? What about the books? The cost of the books? What happens if the dining hall closes for Spring Break and there isn’t food? That's a real problem for a lot of families and a lot of students, and I think that we're still so behind on, on addressing these inequities. Joe Reed:  Yeah, yeah. No, I would agree. When did you come to the conclusion that writing was what you wanted to do? R.O. Kwon:  I was a reader first, you know? I didn't write very much when I was a kid. I wasn't one of those kids who's written, like, 40 books by the time they're 17. So when I was in senior year, I remember at some point the principal asked a few of us, "So what do you want to be when you grow up?" And I said, "I want to write novels. I want to be a novelist." But when I went to college, I majored in economics, which was a gigantic mistake. I hated every second of it. But I think I didn't know how I could be an Asian-American writer, an Asian-American artist. There were so few models then. There are more now, thank goodness. I'm Korean and I didn't start reading Korean-American writers until after college. Jo Reed:  Not in college? R.O. Kwon:  No, never in college. There were a few Asian-Americans, but not Korean-Americans. And that was-- and in retrospect, it's just so wild to me that I loved-- I grew up loving an art-form in which I physically could not and did not exist. So I think those sort of absences made it hard for me to imagine a life in the arts. And I was concerned about minor things like healthcare. I'm from an immigrant family. I didn't want to be without healthcare, and so I majored in economics. I took a job in management consulting, of all things. I think I lasted seven months. I always say nine months, and then my husband's like, "No, dude, it was seven months." And then I went to grad school for writing and I haven't really looked back since. Jo Reed:  How did your parents take it when you said, "I'm quitting my job and I'm going to graduate school for writing?" R.O. Kwon:  I feel so lucky about this. I think this is actually part of what turned me toward econ. So once I got to college, they were just like, "You know what? You get one life. You should do what makes you happy." And I think that's what freaked me out, or that's part of what freaked me out: that freedom. And that's part of why I wandered sharply toward doing exactly what wouldn't make me happy. But there was this key moment-- my mother was actually instrumental in my applying to grad school in the first place. So I was at this job. I was working, like, 90 hours a week. I was so miserable and I was mostly miserable because I had no time to write, let alone barely had time to read. And I just genuinely could feel myself dying inside. I could feel parts of myself dying. And I was talking to my mother and I remember I was in the grocery store and she knew how heartbroken I was and she said, "You know, why don't you apply to grad school? That was something you were talking about. There is grad school for writing. That would give you a little bit of time and you can figure things out a little more." In the minute she said that, and this sounds so cheesy, but I was staring at-- I was in the soup aisle and I was staring at one of those walls of a gazillion types of soups. And just the colors became so much more vibrant. It was as though my vision had actually almost gone gray for a while with how heartbroken I was. Because I knew I'd lost my purpose. I knew I wanted to write. I felt as though it was what I should be doing, but I wasn't doing it. And so the color just rushed back into my world. I applied to grad school and then I went to grad school. Jo Reed:  When you were in grad school I’m assuming you focused on writing fiction and in particular, novels? R.O. Kwon:  Yeah. And I have written and published a number of short stories along the way. I love reading all fiction. I also love reading poetry. I love reading plays, I love reading nonfiction. But I think my true love is novels, and it's the bulk of what I read, too. Jo Reed:  Now, I know you received an NEA lit fellowship. When did you get that and how did-- tell me how you used it for your work? R.O. Kwon:  Yeah. Oh my gosh, that NEA fellowship, I mean I'm sure you know. I applied to the fellowship, but of course I didn't expect to get it. Just like, "Okay, might as well apply. The chances are so slim." And what happened was this was at the eight-year mark. So background, I was feeling pretty low at this point, because my novel still was at about the eight and a half year mark. And so I was just like, "I've been working on this book for eight years. What am I doing with my life? How is this taking me so long? Why didn't I become a dermatologist? I think I'd have been a good dermatologist. I love thinking about skincare." And then I had this call from a D.C. number and I only saw it late at night. And then it was a voicemail saying, you know, this is the NEA. Can you call us back? We haven't been able to reach you today. And I think my body registered what had probably just happened before my mind did, and I saw that the world was moving up and down and I was like, "What's going on?" And I realized I was jumping up and down, because I thought if they called, well-- I couldn't sleep that night because I was like, "Well, probably this means I won an NEA, but it's also possible they called me to tell me I'd screwed up the application so hideously they're asking me to never apply again. I don't know. I don't know what this could mean." And then I finally got-- and then I called the next day in the morning and I learned I had an NEA and it was-- it meant so much to me. I think especially since I was feeling so bleak. The money is so helpful. There's also something really meaningful about feeling supported and seen by my country. And so the NEA, I'm so grateful to them. I'm so grateful for what they did and what they do and how much it helped me with my book. Jo Reed:  That enabled you to help move you past that eight year mark into the eight and a half. R.O. Kwon:  Yeah, it really did! It lifted my spirits for a significant while, which was wonderful. And I pretty much just used the money to keep writing, because after I sold the book at the eight and a half year mark, there was still-- there still ended up being a year and a half of edits with my editor. And then yeah, <laughter> books are not fast, man. Jo Reed:  They are not. So when were you able to just be a fulltime writer? R.O. Kwon:  I'm not sure that I would even now call myself a fulltime writer. Since The Incendiaries came out, which is in July of last year, and the paperback just came out pretty much I've been on the road a lot, and a lot of it has been-- which I'm very glad to do. I'm very grateful to do, but that's part of how I've been able to make it work that I'm not currently teaching because I've been on the road so much. So speaking engagements at universities, at institutions, at MFA programs or graduate programs, that's made it so that I don't have to have a day-to-day job just now. But starting this fall, I am thesis advising at the University of San Francisco. And in the spring, and I'm very excited about this, I'm going to teach at Scripps College, which is one of the Claremont Colleges, and it's for women and non-binary students. And I've never taught at a place that's specifically for women and non-binary students. And I'm so excited about what that could mean. Jo Reed:  That's fabulous. I want to go back to the book for a second, and that is Will, who is our, ostensibly, good guy, does some pretty indefensible things in the book. And I want you to talk me through that process of how that unfolded in the writing. R.O. Kwon:  Yeah, good. I love your use of the word "unfolded" because yeah, that does feel very much more like that to me. And I won't give it away for people who haven't read the book, but there's a pivotal instance of violence. And Will is involved. Will is guilty of a pivotal act of violence. And I remember when I started, I was working on that scene, and when I started realizing what might be happening, I was just like, "Oh, no, this is who you are? This is who you turned out to be?" And I was genuinely- Jo Reed:  Me too. R.O. Kwon:  Yeah, and I was genuinely appalled, because in a lot of ways, I love all my characters. You know, I love them in the way that my grad school mentor, Michael Cunningham, said something that I love and I think about all the time. And he said, "We must love our characters as God does, and not more." And to me, that indicates that I can't try to force my characters into behaving the way I want them to behave. They're going to behave the way they want to behave. And the way I respect them is by-- or one of the ways I respect them is by letting that happen. By following them rather than asking them to follow me, rather than jerking them around. <laughter> So with this scene, I tried writing so many versions of the scene in which this pivotal act of violence does not happen. And it just kept feeling so false, and I couldn't understand why. And I went back through the book and I read through what I have, and I realized there are so many ways in which I hadn't really noticed it at the time, there's so many ways in which Will privileges his own desires. And I realize that that scene that I'm talking about, that was actually the most truthful rendition of what he would have done in that moment when something he wants is being taken away from him. Jo Reed:  Yeah, it was interesting, because I absolutely believed it. But I was also saying, "What are you doing?" As a reader, of course I'm looking-- you do the same thing. You stop and you think back. They're suddenly doing something that on one hand is so out-of-character, but then when you think about it, sometimes you think, "Wait, but there were nuances of that. There were shadings of this." And that certainly was true with Will, too. And of course I change the way I looked at him going forward as a reader. Was that true for you as a writer? R.O. Kwon:  Oh, that's a fascinating question. Let's see, no one has asked that just yet. My understanding of Will expanded, because now I had to incorporate this thing that he does into my understanding of Will. Yeah, but I think this book went through-- I have no idea how many drafts this book went through. It could be 40, it could be 90, but it's some number like that. And I think I don't want to know because-- I don't have children, but I feel as though it's perhaps lightly analogous to what people say about childbirth. That your body, in a lot of ways, forgets what happened so that perhaps you could work up the energy to do it all over again. And I think that's kind of how I feel about writing. I've forgotten so much of the sort of minutia of what happened, and I think it's so that I can be excited about writing my next book. <laughter> Jo Reed:  Well, this book has been such a great success for you. Has that made writing this second book more daunting in some ways? Because people have expectations now, whereas The Incendiaries was a debut novel. So how is the second book? R.O. Kwon:  Well, thank you for saying that. I'm three years into it. I keep calling it my new novel, and at some point, I was like, "This isn’t new. This is just a novel." So I'm three years into it. I think when I write fiction, it's impossible for me to keep anyone else in mind. I find it to be so absorbing. That's part of what I love about it. I find it to be so utterly absorbing that I can't think about audience. I can't think about reception. I just have to follow what the book is. And so in that way, when I'm writing, I'm still able to go back to that place of privacy. That said, for pretty much all of 2018, I was on the road a lot, again, as I've mentioned. And I'm not complaining, but I was on the road so much and I think there are ways in which the first book was occupying headspace so that I couldn't write any fiction, really. I barely wrote any fiction for all of 2018, which was new for me, because I'd been writing fiction pretty much every day since grad school-- since sometime in grad school, so that was a change. But now I'm getting back to a place where I am very much writing fiction every day, even if it's just a sentence. So today was a busy day. I set the alarm for thirty minutes early than I normally would have gotten up and I wrote for thirty minutes. I eked out one sentence that I could live with for now, and then I proceeded with the rest of my day and the things I had to do. But I'm trying very hard to make that a priority now. Jo Reed:  Can you read fiction while you're writing fiction, or does it clog-- does it inspire or does it clog you? R.O. Kwon:  Oh, no, I read so much fiction while I write my novels. I know there are writers who say that they can't read books in their genre while they're writing them.. Jo Reed:  Exactly, yeah. I've heard that. R.O. Kwon:  But I don't-- I mean, fiction, I love fiction. It's my first love. If I weren't reading, that would mean I wouldn't have read any fiction for ten years. I think that would, for me, be another way of dying inside. Yeah, I'm reading all the time. It's so much so that I know that if I'm not reading a lot, then the writing is suffering. The books feed my book. Jo Reed:  Do you re-read? R.O. Kwon:  Yes. I believe very much. <laughter> Jo Reed:  Not everybody does. I love-- I'm always re-reading a book and reading a new book simultaneously. R.O. Kwon:  Yeah. I mean, I love when Nabokov said, that “the only reading is re-reading.” And for me, I get pretty stressed out on the first reads of books. You know, I get worried about characters and what's going to happen to X, what's going on with Y. And so I get stressed out enough by the story and by the characters' situations that I can't-- I often can't really focus on the language the way I want to. And so it's really only on the second read or the tenth read or the fifteenth read that I can really hang out with the language slowed down, that I can really just live with the book in a way I can't on a first read. Jo Reed: I completely agree. And it's also like seeing an old friend. I just want-- sometimes I just want to see my friend again. R.O. Kwon:  Yeah. I love that. And there's something, too, about every book I truly love. I can re-read a passage or a page or a chapter hundreds of times, and it never stops yielding riches. Jo Reed:  Yeah, I agree. R.O. Kwon:  There's always something else there. And I think that, for me, in a way is the truest test of what I love, is “am I able to re-read it?” Jo Reed:  Who do you love? Who do you re-read? R.O. Kwon:  So many. Okay, one I re-read a lot while I was writing, The Incendiaries is Virginia Wolfe. She's very important to me, and I love her fiction, I love her journals. I love her letters. I love her nonfiction. I just love her across the board. Something I realized about the books I love most is I think I love-- I think it's what we were talking about, about books that try to reach up against the top-most limits of what might be possible. And I've been thinking about it almost like wildness rather than truth or beauty. I mean, I love beauty. I love truth. Those are good, those are good too. But I love when books just seem to be pushing past received forms. Pushing past the already-available, already much-used structures and seeing what else they can do. And I think that's something that I'm very interested in trying to do with my own work. Jo Reed:  I am so looking forward to reading your next book. The Incendiaries is wonderful. I so truly hope you know how wonderful it is. R.O. Kwon:  Thank you. That's so kind of you. Thank you. Jo Reed:  It's true. R.O. Kwon, thank you so much. That’s R. O. Kwon she is the author of The Incendiaries. You've been listening to Art Works, produced at the National Endowment for the Arts.  You can subscribe to Art Works wherever you get your podcasts, so please do. And leave us a rating on Apple because it helps people to find us. For the National Endowment for the Arts, I'm Josephine Reed. Thanks for listening.