{"id":2035,"date":"2017-09-07T11:19:28","date_gmt":"2017-09-07T15:19:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/houghton75.org\/?p=2035"},"modified":"2017-11-15T13:15:11","modified_gmt":"2017-11-15T18:15:11","slug":"harvard-review-salon-series-phillip-lopate-and-lily-king","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/houghton75.org\/?p=2035","title":{"rendered":"Harvard Review Salon Series: Phillip Lopate and Lily King"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/w.soundcloud.com\/player\/?url=https%3A\/\/api.soundcloud.com\/tracks\/341014448&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" frameborder=\"no\" scrolling=\"no\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>Did you know that Houghton Library is also the publisher of Harvard Review, a major American literary journal? In this episode of <em>Houghton75<\/em>, editor Christina Thompson talks to two contributors to the most recent issue: renowned essayist Phillip Lopate and award-winning novelist Lily King. The conversation, part of the Houghton 75th celebrations, marks the publication of Harvard Review&#8217;s 50th issue and the inauguration of our new Harvard Review Salon Series. It was held May 11, 2017, in the Edison and Newman Room at Houghton Library.<\/p>\n<p>For more information about Harvard Review, visit us at <a href=\"http:\/\/harvardreview.org\">http:\/\/harvardreview.org<\/a><br \/>\nFind out more about the exhibition and Houghton Library\u2019s 75th anniversary celebrations at <a href=\"http:\/\/houghton75.org\/\">http:\/\/houghton75.org\/<\/a><\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p><strong>Podcast Transcript<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><strong>[Title sequence background music: <em>Fireworks<\/em>, Igor Stravinsky, performed by the <a href=\"https:\/\/hro.squarespace.com\/\">Harvard-Radcliffe Orchestra<\/a>]<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Alex Csiszar: Houghton is just this amazing place.<br \/>\nDeidre Lynch: It\u2019s fascinating.<br \/>\nStephen Greenblatt: It\u2019s yours for the asking, and that is incredible!<br \/>\nStephanie Sandler: Plus it\u2019s cool.<\/p>\n<p>Christina Thompson (CT): Welcome to <em>Houghton75<\/em>. I\u2019m Christina Thompson, the editor of Harvard Review.<\/p>\n<p><strong>[end music]<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>CT: This May, in celebration of Harvard Review\u2019s fiftieth issue, we invited two of our contributors, the well-known essayist Phillip Lopate and the award-winning novelist Lily King, to talk with us about their work. Held in Houghton Library\u2019s beautiful Edison and Newman Room, this was the inaugural event in a new salon series sponsored by Houghton Library and Harvard Review. I began the conversation by talking about some of our aspirations here at the Review.<\/p>\n<p><strong>[switch to pre-recorded event at Houghton Library, 11 May 2017]<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>CT: We have this idea periodically at Harvard Review, which is I have this idea periodically, so we\u2019re going to get &#8211; we\u2019re going to do this feature called \u201cGetting Poets to Talk About Their Poetry\u201d in which they will explain to us what it is they think they\u2019re doing.<\/p>\n<p>[audience laughter]<\/p>\n<p>CT: The idea is not that this will enable us to understand the work, although it might, but it\u2019s really so that we can peer inside the writer\u2019s head, which is something that we love to do. Those of us who read a lot and love writing, we like to peer inside the writer\u2019s brain and what we want to do tonight is we want you to tell us what you think you\u2019re doing. That\u2019s what I\u2019m hoping for.<\/p>\n<p>Now, I thought we should start with your most recent books for this reason: they are both departures from what you have done before. And as I thought about it, I realized that in Phillip\u2019s case A Mother\u2019s Tale is a departure not in subject matter, but in form. And in Lily\u2019s case, Euphoria is a departure, not in form, but in subject matter. So, with that elegant (laughs) structure, I think we should start by having each of you tell us about this most recent book. And, I think, Phillip, you can start.<\/p>\n<p>Phillip Lopate (PL): Well, I\u2019ve written a lot of personal essays, and I\u2019ve even written about my mother in the past. The first time I wrote about my mother was in a piece called \u201cWilly,\u201d and she said &#8211; she was very touched by it and she said \u201cnow I realize that you love me.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>[audience \u201caw\u2019s\u201d in response]<\/p>\n<p>PL: I wouldn\u2019t say \u201caw\u201d because to me it was like, \u201cwhat? You didn\u2019t know I love you?\u201d<\/p>\n<p>[audience laughter]<\/p>\n<p>PL: Typical of my mother to doubt it. And then wrote about her again and she said \u201cno, you can\u2019t write about me anymore.\u201d She said, \u201cit\u2019s all lies.\u201d And I said, \u201cwhat do you mean, it\u2019s lies? Tell me what I got wrong.\u201d And she says, \u201cwell, it happened, but why must you write about that period all the time?\u201d Meaning my childhood.<\/p>\n<p>[audience laughter]<\/p>\n<p>PL: \u201cI\u2019m not like that anymore! I\u2019m so much wiser now!\u201d You know. So then I said, \u201cI\u2019m not going to promise anything like that. I\u2019m going to continue to write about you because you spring alive on the page when I write about you, so, tough!\u201d So she said, \u201calright, I\u2019ll go to your book party, but I\u2019ll tell everybody you\u2019re my nephew, not my son.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>[audience laughter]<\/p>\n<p>PL: So this idea lodged in my head, and lodges in many memoirs, autobiographical writings &#8211; that they\u2019re not exactly pleasing the person they\u2019re writing about and the person they\u2019re writing about may see himself or herself in a very different light. So about 30 years ago, I actually tape recorded my mother. I said, \u201cokay, I\u2019m going to give her the chance to tell her story.\u201d She wanted to correct these misapprehensions that I had of her, which basically came down to the fact that I judged her in a different way than she judged herself. So we met and she talked, and she was a great talker and a great storyteller. And basically, I taped over 20 hours of her telling her life story over maybe five different sessions. So, I got down the story of her life and then I put it in a shoebox, all of the cassettes, and that shoebox sat in my closet for 30 years. And I\u2019m often asked now why I didn\u2019t listen to them, and I really don\u2019t have a good answer. I just put them away and was kind of spooked by them you could say.<\/p>\n<p>She died around the year 2000, so she died around 17 years ago. Then about a year and a half ago, maybe two years ago, I said \u201cwell, time to take them out and listen to them.\u201d Probably I felt some sense of inner tranquility that I could now deal with it, because my mother was a very overwhelming person and so I had felt shy of listening to them for so long. But then I said, \u201cokay, well let\u2019s listen to them.\u201d And I started listening to them and I thought, \u201cthis is good material, you know?\u201d That has nothing to do with anything particularly personal, that\u2019s just the fact that I\u2019d written about 15 books and I felt I knew what good material was and that this was too good to pass up. So I started transcribing them. In any case, I was fascinated by the flavor of her language, and 30-year-old me was trying to get her to understand some things that I\u2019d felt she didn\u2019t because she was an amazing grudge keeper. She could keep grudges forever, you know? And so I was trying to explain, maybe this person had another point of view, maybe she could let it go, and underneath it all I was hoping that she would forgive me because the main complaint seemed to be that I was too clinical &#8211; I didn\u2019t love her enough, I didn\u2019t love her the way she wanted to be loved as a mother. And I thought I loved her fine, but she had a different view. So in part I was trying to nudge her, in the days when I was tape recording her, toward a sort of more compassionate way of seeing things.<\/p>\n<p>Lily King (LK): Like you were going to change her after all those years? (laughs)<\/p>\n<p>PL: With lots of luck, you know?<\/p>\n<p>So we fought to a standstill. And in the book there\u2019s actually a half hour argument in which I tried to convince her that I loved her using logic. You know, Cartesian logic &#8211; well if x then y, you know? (laughs) So, it ended up a kind of standstill, but I really felt that that was much truer to life than the kind of On Golden Pond redemptive moment where the child and the parent fall into each other\u2019s arms and say \u201cnow I understand\u201d and everything like that. To me, it was filled with the nitty-gritty of family life and how much continues to be irreconcilable between the people who ostensibly love each other.<\/p>\n<p>CT: Alright, we\u2019re going to come back to you and your mother (laughs).<\/p>\n<p>PL: Oh, good. She\u2019d be pleased, anyway.<\/p>\n<p>[audience laughter]<\/p>\n<p>PL: She liked attention.<\/p>\n<p>CT: Definitely doesn\u2019t seem like a subject that you\u2019re going to ever let go of. Although, who would?<\/p>\n<p>PL: I don\u2019t think we do let go of our parents, really.<\/p>\n<p>CT: No, I\u2019m with you on that one.<\/p>\n<p>Okay, Lily. So one of the things that, in thinking about how it\u2019s a departure for you from other work, it seemed to be the thing that many people noticed about Euphoria. The first thing everybody said was \u201coh look! It\u2019s a historical novel.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>LK: Mhmm.<\/p>\n<p>CT: I know it\u2019s not the terminology that you would use, and so maybe you could explain that.<\/p>\n<p>LK: Well, the whole thing was a huge accident. I didn\u2019t mean to write that. A friend of mine came over to my house and took me to a bookstore, this is back in 2005, and she loved this bookstore. We\u2019d just moved to Maine, she was a new friend, this bookstore was going out of business, and I felt like I should buy something, you know, because she\u2019d taken me there. I couldn\u2019t find anything, and finally I saw this old biography from the \u201880s of Margaret Mead and I picked it up thinking I would never read it. And I did end up reading it, and I got to this part fairly early on in the book where she was 31, and she was already on her second husband, and they were in Papua New Guinea doing field work. And they were trying to avoid this other anthropologist, Gregory Bateson, and then they decided to leave because they wanted to be where he was but he kept being there, and then finally they just decided \u201clet\u2019s go meet him and then we\u2019ll go to Australia.\u201d And Mead said in her memoir that her husband got drunk very quickly. Like, they met, he seemed to get very drunk and either asleep or just sort of incoherent, and she ended up talking to Gregory Bateson for 36 hours straight.<\/p>\n<p>PL: And many years after that.<\/p>\n<p>LK: Yeah, exactly. And he begged them to stay. So anyway, this chapter in this biography is about 12 pages. And when I got to that part where I realized they were there in Papua New Guinea for 5 months in this very intense love triangle and her second husband, Reo Fortune, had a gun, a pistol, and she was convinced &#8211; she said in a letter later to her ex-lover, mentor, and dear friend Ruth Benedict that she was convinced that he was going to shoot her, shoot Gregory, and then shoot himself. And there was just a lot, there was kind of a threat of violence the whole time, and yet they were also having these very intense conversations about their work, and about anthropology, and about human nature, and about gender, race, class, everything that we\u2019re still talking about today. Anthropology was just at the beginning of its growth really, at the beginning stages, and they were really on the cusp of changing it, and these conversations were happening. And I just read this and was like (gasp!). And then she was falling madly in love with him, and he was falling madly in love with her, and Reo was getting jealous. And it just seemed, they were, you know &#8211; She just had these suppurating sores all over her body, she had so many things wrong with her, she had broken her ankle, and he would never admit that she had broken her ankle, and she was limping around for like a year and a half just in a lot of pain as well.<\/p>\n<p>CT: And you were deeply attracted to this story?<\/p>\n<p>LK: (laughs) This is exactly the kind of story I like! Except that it wasn\u2019t a family story. You know, I was really a family writer, and whenever I wrote a character they always, you know, a mother, a father, a brother, a sister always walked in the room. I could never separate, just have a character without the rest of their family. So that was the first thing that was like, \u201cno, I\u2019m not touching this. This is a love triangle about adults,\u201d you know? (laughs) And then, you know, it takes place in Papua New Guinea in 1931, and these people don\u2019t have running water. I don\u2019t do this kind of thing. I didn\u2019t know anything about trying to do that kind of research, and I was like, \u201cthat is a great story and someone should write it\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n<p>CT: &#8230;but not me!<\/p>\n<p>LK: (laughs) But then what happened was, I was writing Father of the Rain and that was a really intensely emotional book to write, and I kept on having to take these long breaks. And when I took the breaks, I just kept on going back to the Margaret Mead story. And I had to read the books she wrote about that time and read her memoir, read the biography of Gregory Bateson, which was just fascinating. And then I started taking notes, and then I started imagining scenes, but the whole time I was telling myself, \u201cI am not writing this novel. I do not write historical fiction. I don\u2019t read historical fiction. I don\u2019t like historical fiction.\u201d You know&#8230;But then I finished Father of the Rain and didn\u2019t have anything better to do, so I wrote the story.<\/p>\n<p>[audience laughter]<\/p>\n<p>LK: And I just kept on thinking, you know, that I would never show it to anybody. I just had to write it, you know? That was my thought about that novel. The whole time I was writing it I thought I was failing, you know? It wasn\u2019t &#8211; I had a vision, and I had the reality, you know, a sort of T.S. Eliot thing, and I couldn\u2019t &#8211; I just couldn\u2019t connect them for a long time.<\/p>\n<p>CT: So, the thing that &#8211; one of the things that interests me a lot is how you pull different things together to make a book. So you &#8211; I think of it as, like, drawing from the different wells. There\u2019s the well of memory, and there\u2019s research, and then there\u2019s the imagination. And they\u2019re all kind of different, and they come together in different ways in different projects. So that\u2019s sort of what I want to think about just for the moment.<\/p>\n<p>I was reading your To Show and to Tell. This is a craft book. It\u2019s a book about how to write non-fiction, and I really recommend this for anybody who is interested in writing in any way, shape, form, whatever, because it\u2019s just a &#8211; I think what I like about it is that when you hear the voice of someone who has been writing for many, many, many, many years, the things they say about writing just sound really, you know, they\u2019re wise. They come from a place of great knowledge. And that\u2019s the way I felt about reading that and I enjoyed it a lot.<\/p>\n<p>PL: Thank you.<\/p>\n<p>CT: There\u2019s a place, I think it might be in that book, where you talk about the difference between fiction and non-fiction, and one of the things that you say about fiction that\u2019s so interesting is that it creates in the reader a kind of hypnotic state.<\/p>\n<p>PL: Right.<\/p>\n<p>CT: That it\u2019s a sort of trance state that you get into, and that you lose track of the fact that you\u2019re reading.<\/p>\n<p>PL: Yes.<\/p>\n<p>CT: And that, you know, in non-fiction there\u2019s this idea of following the mind at work, which is a more self-aware, self-conscious or something, or sort of active or something, or &#8211; I don\u2019t even know what I mean.<\/p>\n<p>PL: It\u2019s hard to forget that somebody is talking to you. You don\u2019t go into a dream state&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>CT. Right, right.<\/p>\n<p>PL: &#8230;usually when you\u2019re reading most essayists, you know?<\/p>\n<p>CT: Right, right.<\/p>\n<p>PL:And I found myself, having written both, and I don\u2019t know how you feel about this, Lily, but you know, I\u2019ve written a few novels and novellas, and when I write fiction I feel like I\u2019m in a kind of feverish state, you know?<\/p>\n<p>LK: Mhmm, mhmm.<\/p>\n<p>PL: And sometimes it lasts for years, you know? And it\u2019s very hard on the people around me, on my wife and daughter, you know, because, like, \u201cearth to Phillip,\u201d you know? I\u2019m in this state, I\u2019m in an alternate state at the same time as I\u2019m going through my daily life. And when I write essays, I simply feel calmer.<\/p>\n<p>LK: Mmmmm.<\/p>\n<p>PL: I don\u2019t feel as feverish. And, coward that I am, I\u2019ve come to prefer that state.<\/p>\n<p>LK: I would like that. I need to take some advice from you.<\/p>\n<p>CT: This would be interesting to hear from you on this, because I find your books very immersive, you know? I find them very &#8211; they do give me &#8211; I don\u2019t &#8211; I\u2019m a non-fiction writer, too, and I sort of enjoy the same kind of analytic, self-conscious sort of state of reading, and so I don\u2019t read as much fiction. But when I read your fiction, I kind of disappear into it. I lose track. And that, you know, I think is really &#8211; what\u2019s it like to write it? Do you lose track? No? It\u2019s like hard work?<\/p>\n<p>LK: This is maybe a bad time to ask me. I\u2019ve been working on the same book for a couple of years, and it\u2019s been really hard going, you know, where I feel like that I can\u2019t point to very may days where I feel like I lost myself, you know? But just in the past week, I\u2019m going to totally destroy it now, but just in the past week, knock on wood, I\u2019ve kind of gotten somewhere with the book finally where it is &#8211; time passes in a different way and I feel, well &#8211; Okay, the full truth is that my parents both died last year. And it did a number on my imagination. It seemed to, like\u2026<\/p>\n<p>PL: It\u2019s tough.<\/p>\n<p>LK: &#8230;I don\u2019t know, I couldn\u2019t access it! I did a lot of writing in my journal. The thing was, I was in a novel. I had done all the research for another historical novel and I\u2019d started in on it. I had, like, pages and pages of, sort of, ideas and everything. I had started in, and she, my mother, died very, very suddenly. Out of the blue. And I just, I couldn\u2019t go near it. I couldn\u2019t go near it. I\u2019ve only looked at it just once and then put it away. And I don\u2019t know why! It didn\u2019t have anything to do with her or anything, but when &#8211; after I started &#8211; I just wrote in my journal. It\u2019s all I did during my writing time. And then, finally, I started another novel and it, it\u2019s sort of, I\u2019m trying to remember a lot for this novel. It\u2019s fairly autobiographical. And I wasn\u2019t able to get to that\u2026<\/p>\n<p>PL: Present. Moving into the present.<\/p>\n<p>LK: &#8230;that wonderful state where you combine memory and imagination in this beautiful way that seems to just expand everything and it feels so right. And it doesn\u2019t &#8211; you don\u2019t even know what you\u2019re remembering and what you\u2019re sort of imagining slash dreaming. And that has happened to me a lot in certain things that I\u2019ve written, and it wouldn\u2019t happen. I couldn\u2019t get off the ground. I couldn\u2019t &#8211; I could just\u2026<\/p>\n<p>PL: But don\u2019t you think sometimes something so big happens like the death of parents that, you know, that just takes center stage? That\u2019s what\u2019s happening?<\/p>\n<p>CT: It\u2019s grief.<\/p>\n<p>PL: And, you know, I keep having this problem with Trump where, you know,<\/p>\n<p>[audience laughter]<\/p>\n<p>LK: It\u2019s the same thing!<\/p>\n<p>CT: I knew going to come up.! It was only just a matter of time.<\/p>\n<p>LK: It\u2019s true!<\/p>\n<p>PL: I try not to think about it.<\/p>\n<p>LK: No, it\u2019s very true.<\/p>\n<p>PL: So, sometimes something big happens and then, you know, you either have to give it a to-do or else you have to put yourself on a diet, like, I\u2019ll only think about this one hour a day or something.<\/p>\n<p>LK: Yeah, yeah. I didn\u2019t really feel that, after a certain point, that thoughts were coming in and intervening. It just &#8211; it felt like a quality, a part of my personality was gone. I couldn\u2019t access it, and it was very scary. And it, you , again, it kind of feels like it\u2019s come back a little bit and I can now play in a way that I haven\u2019t been able to play in my mind for a long time. And it\u2019s funny that you mentioned the Trump thing, because it\u2019s strange. I feel like I\u2019m almost insulting my parents in some way, but I feel like I\u2019ve had three deaths! A lot of the feelings that I have about Trump, and the way I wake up and it\u2019s already in my head and I\u2019m already, you know, wrestling with it, it feels very much like I felt when they first died.<\/p>\n<p>PL: No, I do feel that &#8211; one thing that I like about writing essays and non-fiction is that, you know, I can approach them and say, \u201cwhat do I think about this?\u201d instead of being, you know, laid low by some powerful feeling, you know?<\/p>\n<p>LK: Yeah.<\/p>\n<p>PL: I know that feelings have to come into it, you know?<\/p>\n<p>LK: Yeah.<\/p>\n<p>PL: But I can still start at a place that\u2019s a little more reflective, and that feels like, \u201cokay, let me just work out these thoughts on the page.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>LK: That\u2019s interesting.<\/p>\n<p>CT: One of the things that I wanted to ask you about, and I\u2019m sure other people ask you all the time, is that you have these, as you said, you have these kind of hothouse family scenes, stories, these early novels. The earlier novels are about &#8211; one\u2019s about an American girl who is sort of embedded in a French family as an au pair, and one is about a mother and son, and one is about a sort of father and daughter and the rest of this rather dysfunctional family (laughs).<\/p>\n<p>LK: Were you about to say crazy? (laughs)<\/p>\n<p>CT: Yeah, I started to, but I kind of, (laughs), I shut that off. But, you know, there must be &#8211; because the portraits are so vivid, it\u2019s almost impossible not to ask oneself as one is reading them, \u201cIs this &#8211; how close is this to the author\u2019s life?\u201d (laughs) \u201cWas her father like that?\u201d I mean, people shouldn\u2019t do it. They shouldn\u2019t think that way, but I think it\u2019s sort of inevitable. Do you just fend that off? Or do you &#8211; what do you do?<\/p>\n<p>LK: Yeah, you know, it\u2019s a funny thing because I hate it when people do that&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>CT: I know. I\u2019m sorry.<\/p>\n<p>LK: &#8230;and yet, I\u2019m the first to do it when I\u2019m reading someone else\u2019s book. I mean, it\u2019s running through my head the entire time. But I do remember when I wrote The Pleasing Hour, the first novel, it is about a young American and very fictional. Very made up. I mean, I can pick a few, a handful, I mean, I did live in Paris, but with an entirely different family and entirely different circumstances, you know? I never gave a baby to my sister.<\/p>\n<p>CT: (laughs) Right.<\/p>\n<p>LK: For example. And yet I remember, it was the early days of Amazon and kind of the early days of the Internet, it was 1999, and I remember one of the first reviews it got was from a German in Germany saying, \u201cthis is so clearly thinly disguised autobiography.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>PL: Mhmm.<\/p>\n<p>LK: And I just &#8211; the authority with which this person, you know, said these lies, you know? I was taken aback that people could do that, and I tried to take it as a compliment but no, it really, really irritates me. Of course, I feel like it\u2019s none of their business.<\/p>\n<p>PL: But in a way everything does come from one\u2019s self. I mean, you know, you can\u2019t get around it. Even if you\u2019re writing science fiction, you\u2019re starting from something you know and you\u2019re bridging to something that is made up. But there has to be &#8211; the root has to be started in you.<\/p>\n<p>LK: Yes. Yeah, that is true, and I think, you know, human experience is limited.<\/p>\n<p>PL: Yeah.<\/p>\n<p>LK: And you substitute.<\/p>\n<p>CT: Right<\/p>\n<p>LK: Like with Euphoria, it was very easy to substitute a lot of things in that book for things that were familiar. Even though they were completely unfamiliar in that book, you know, you just bring it to your\u2026<\/p>\n<p>CT: Right.<\/p>\n<p>LK: &#8230;to what you know.<\/p>\n<p><strong>[switch to podcast studio]<br \/>\n<\/strong><br \/>\n<strong>[Closing music: <em>Fireworks<\/em>, Igor Stravinsky, performed by the <a href=\"https:\/\/hro.squarespace.com\/\">Harvard-Radcliffe Orchestra<\/a>]<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>CT: We\u2019d like to thank Phillip Lopate and Lily King for joining us here at Harvard for the first Harvard Review Salon Series event. This series, featuring poets, essayists, and short story writers in conversation with the editor of Harvard Review, will be held annually at Houghton Library in the spring semester. We hope you\u2019ll join us here next year. For more information about Harvard Review, visit us at harvardreview.org.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" src=\"https:\/\/w.soundcloud.com\/player\/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fapi.soundcloud.com%2Ftracks%2F341014448&#038;auto_play=false&#038;hide_related=false&#038;visual=false&#038;show_comments=true&#038;show_user=true&#038;show_reposts=false&#038;color=ff5500\"><\/iframe>\n<p>Did you know that Houghton Library is also the publisher of Harvard Review, a major American literary journal? In this episode of Houghton75, editor Christina Thompson talks to two contributors to the most recent issue: renowned essayist Phillip Lopate and award-winning novelist Lily King. The conversation, part of the Houghton 75th celebrations, marks the publication of Harvard Review&#8217;s 50th issue and the inauguration of our new Harvard Review Salon Series. It was held May 11, 2017, in the Edison and Newman Room at Houghton Library.<\/p>\n<p>For more information about Harvard Review, visit us at http:\/\/harvardreview.org<br \/>\nFind out more about the exhibition and Houghton Library\u2019s 75th anniversary celebrations at http:\/\/houghton75.org\/<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"give_campaign_id":0,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[123],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2035","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-podcast"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7SlKy-wP","jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/houghton75.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2035","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/houghton75.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/houghton75.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/houghton75.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/houghton75.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2035"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"http:\/\/houghton75.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2035\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2148,"href":"http:\/\/houghton75.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2035\/revisions\/2148"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/houghton75.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2035"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/houghton75.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2035"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/houghton75.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2035"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}