LUCY MUKERJEE:

So we'll be talking for about two hours altogether, and we'll take a break midway through so that you can stretch and get a drink and gather your thoughts. We'll go through chronologically, so we'll start with your childhood and your upbringing, and then we'll move forward to the present day. Of course, if there's anything that you wanted to talk about that I don't touch on, please feel free to bring it up. We're not restricted to my questions. All right,

LUCY MUKERJEE:

well, let's get started with an easy one. Can you please say your name and where, and when you were born?

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

My name is John Whittier Treat, the third. I was born in New Haven, Connecticut in 1953.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

Thank you. Thinking about the home where you grew up as a young child, can you paint us a picture of some of your earliest memories?

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

Well, we always

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

lived in a house, usually a house that my father had built with his own two hands. Maybe his brothers helped him with the concrete foundation and it would be a small house with one bathroom for my brother and my sister and my father and my mother, very New England.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

Thinking back to that time,

LUCY MUKERJEE:

was it a happy home? Did you feel like you had positive interactions with your siblings or the other children in your family, or cousins, as you were growing up?

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

I did. I got along well with my parents and my brother and sister. Though if you were to ask them, they may have a different version of events. I was the oldest, so no doubt

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

teased my siblings. My parents provided me with everything I needed and everything I wanted. Keeping in mind that in the 1950s perhaps we needed less, we certainly wanted less than children might nowadays. But I have very fond memories of growing up. I have many relatives on my father's side.

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

He was born in Bangor, Maine and his brothers, of which there were many, married and had children and their children had children. I always had many aunts, uncles and cousins in Maine who I would see for a week in August every year when my father would take us back home.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

When you were a young child,

LUCY MUKERJEE:

were you aware of any attitudes and beliefs from your family around you? Was it a conservative family or more open? Was it religious at all?

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

I was raised a Catholic because my mother who was born in Italy was Catholic. Even though she married my father who was of Quaker descent, he had to acquiesce to raising all children in the Catholic faith, so I was raised

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

as a Catholic, but it wasn't evangelical, it wasn't intense. It was a very relaxed kind of Christianity. Even though I don't consider myself a Christian anymore, I think I absorbed the best values from Christianity, those being charity and love.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

Would you describe your mother and father for us?

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

My mother was born in Italy. Her parents were refugees from Mussolini in the 1920s, so she and her brother were raised in the United States. After the second world war, her parents, my maternal grandparents, went back to Italy, but the situation was

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

not great right after the war in Italy, so my mother and my uncle stayed in the United States. My father on the other hand goes way, way, way, way, way, way back. I mean, the Treats were originally sent to Connecticut to run the crown colony. I have a long lineage in the United States

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

and also a rather shorter immigrant one as well.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

Interesting. How did your parents' expectations impact you when you were growing up well throughout your life, really?

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

They weren't insistent on anything. I was free to choose what line of work I went into.

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

My father, anyway, I think, was skeptical of me going into higher education. He worried I wouldn't make any money, which was absolutely correct. But I was not coming from a family that had a business or wealth to preserve. I was relatively free to do what I wanted to do. I did with no opposition, if, sometimes, a little skepticism

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

from my parents.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

Who were your closest allies within your family as a child?

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

I always got along well with my mother's brother, my uncle. There was something a little different about him that I identified with. He died young. He had diabetes, which resulted in an early death, but I was

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

close to him. I didn't know my paternal grandmother very well, but I knew my paternal grandfather. He was a gunsmith in Brewer, Maine. He was the last straight man to work in Annie Oakley's Wild West show. He would come out with a pistol and shoot all the glass jars, and then Annie Oakley would

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

come out with a blindfold on and do exactly the same thing. So even though I'm a New England family, there was something Wild West to it.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

Wow. That's a wonderful story. Who was your closest friend when you were growing up?

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

I had a couple, I would say growing up in my younger years, it was a kid five minutes' walk from my house called Jackie Wall.

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

But then when I entered high school I think he was sent to Catholic school. I didn't go to high school with him, but I went to high school with a fellow Gary O'Neill, who has become a rather well known potter in the Northeast. We got into trouble together. Not all of which I have yet to reveal to the world.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

Some source of information for future novels, perhaps . Do you remember some of the role models or sources of support in those formative years, perhaps a teacher?

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

Yes, I had a great teacher,

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

an art teacher, who had been a rather successful artist herself, Clara Guy -- her works are in the Metropolitan Museum of Art -- before she became a high school teacher. She had a great influence on me and also my best friend at that time, the ceramicist, Gary O'Neill, who I mentioned earlier.

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

I always admired my father. He was hardworking. He was quiet. He supported his family. He had no real vices. I still do admire him even though he's not here anymore.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

Beautiful. Thank you for sharing that. You mentioned that you would like to talk about the fact that you have a stutter. I imagine that

LUCY MUKERJEE:

that must have been particularly challenging in your early years when you were trying to fit in and be liked by other kids. How did your stutter affect you?

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

Well, as you know, many children stutter at an early age, equal numbers of boys and girls stutter, my brother stuttered, but most girls and my brother outgrow stuttering, I did not. It continued with me.

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

A stutter in a young boy is often thought of as cute. But when you get a little older, it's not cute anymore. It's interpreted as a sign of a lack of intelligence or a deliberately contrary nature. When those years began, I had to deal with problems of low self-esteem and

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

my ability to really carry out any complicated task that required confident communication with other people.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

Thank you. And may I ask how old you were when you first realized that you were attracted to men?

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

I guess I was in the sixth grade, so that would make me 12.

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

One of the public schools in my town burnt down in a fire. We had to go on what's called double sessions. The younger children went to the surviving schoolhouse in the mornings, early in the morning till noon time, and then at noon, the older kids would come. I remember my gym class was at the end of my morning schedule.

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

I would be getting dressed when the older boys had to come in to get undressed. That's when I realized I had an attraction to their bodies.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

Do you recall your first recollection of seeing someone who identified as gay?

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

Well, I guess it had to be Paul Lynde on Hollywood Squares, although it might possibly have been

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

someone telling me, it might have been my mother in fact, that Johnny Mathis was gay. So it was the entertainment world.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

Yeah. I know that you went to Vietnam at age 18. I'm wondering if you could talk about that decision. Do you remember that day when you left home?

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

Very well. I graduated from high school

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

a year early, so I had what they would now call a gap year. Though my father was not a practicing Quaker, I became very interested in Quakerism at that time. I had an opportunity to go as a hospital orderly to Vietnam, to a hospital in Quang Ngai province

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

run, then, by the American Friend Service Committee and the British Home Service Committee. It was the only hospital in then South Vietnam that outfitted civilian amputees with prosthetic devices. I had no medical training whatsoever. In fact, the hospital was at the end of the process of replacing all foreign personnel

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

with Vietnamese staff. I was one of the last foreigners to work there. I emptied bedpans, I helped patients get around, I did chores, I did whatever I was told to do. Yes. I remember it was the first time I ever rode a commercial aircraft. I had a coat and tie on,

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

and an airplane took me from Hartford, Connecticut via JFK to San Francisco. Then I remember making my way from San Francisco to Oakland, of course, with a brief whirlwind tour of San Francisco where a charter plane took me to Saigon. This was 1970.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

How long were you in Vietnam?

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

Nine months.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

Did you get the opportunity to travel while you were there or were you solely focused on what

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

No. I had a job to do and I had no money and traveling in Vietnam, of course, would've put my life at risk. So, no.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

When you were there, were you able to be open and confide in anyone about your gay identity?

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

No, it never came up and I was

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

interested in women in those years as well. But I didn't date men or women. I was very young. I was in a foreign country. I didn't speak the language. If I confided in anybody, it was the nurses. I slept in a room with the nurses. There was a thin curtain that separated my cot from those of the girls, and some of them spoke English. I'd had

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

French in high school, so I would try and speak French with those that could, and we shared stories, but it was mostly stories about the people we were helping in the hospital, not about ourselves.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

I know you said [inaudible] like the world and [inaudible] make sure to talk about all of those places, but I'm curious right after Vietnam, do you remember what it was like to arrive back in the US

LUCY MUKERJEE:

about [inaudible] changed from the boy who had left?

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

Well, first my journey from Vietnam back to the United States was interrupted by three days of what we'd call rest and recreation in Japan. It was Japan that became a real revelation to me because here was a country

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

where people were smiling. People were well fed, people led peaceful lives. They went to work, they drove cars, they took the subway and it was a revelation to me after seeing Asia at war in Vietnam. When I went back to the United States, I think even just in those nine months, either the anti-war movement

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

had become much larger or I paid more attention to it, so when I entered college, I entered college as a committed peace activist. I trained as a draft counselor and worked as one part-time. It was still the sixties, you have to understand, I don't think the sixties really ended until at least the Watergate scandal.

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

I definitely felt that there was a counterculture in the United States and that I was on the winning side of it.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

Looking back on those college years, what memories stand out to you? What emotions kind of stay with you about that time?

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

I had a wonderful time in college. I went to Amherst college in Massachusetts, which at that time was all men.

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

I was the last all male class and I have to say I loved it. I had good teachers, I made good friends. I was in a fraternity. I explored my sexuality, both with men and women. I got to spend a year in Asia on a junior year abroad program. I did sports.

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

It was stereotypically good.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

Where in Asia did you spend that year abroad?

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

I went to Kyoto, Japan, and I was an undergraduate at Doshisha University which had been founded by a 19th century alumnus of Amherst college. There, I really blossomed, I really grew.

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

I worked as a bartender, part-time. That's the best way to learn a foreign language, let me tell you, is to work in a bar. I had some serious relationships with both men and women and I got out of New England, I mean, for a second time. I was one of those young gay guys that really needed and wanted to do what we'd call a geographical,

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

to work on myself,

LUCY MUKERJEE:

Something that I recommend to everyone before they get out into the real world. So what did you do upon graduating? Did you fall into teaching right away?

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

Well, I looked for a job. It was a difficult time to look for work. I had a degree in Asian studies, which wasn't immediately practical.

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

I mean, I was eventually offered a job working for the microwave division of Motorola. It's a good thing I didn't take that job because American companies didn't make microwave ovens for much longer, but at the same time that I was looking for work, I was applying to graduate school and I was fortunate to get into one that was actually gonna give me financial aid. So

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

I set off for Yale, in my hometown.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

That's wonderful. As you are starting out in the world as an adult, do you remember how it felt to sort of find gay community in your area, that sort of realization that

LUCY MUKERJEE:

there were groups of gay men that you could be around and that you all had your identity in common, whether that's a gay bar or otherwise?

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

Well, as you know, the seventies was, from my point of view, a great time to be gay. It was after Stonewall and it was before HIV/AIDS. Some people may disagree with me, but I'm convinced, and many others think that Yale is the gayest of the Ivy league.

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

It certainly seemed that way to me. New Haven had a great dance bar at that time, it's still there, Partners, and everyone went there. Students, faculty, staff, visitors and I remember it as a totally positive ... It was a disco years, and I remember those years fondly.

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

My social set wasn't exclusively homosexual, but it became largely so, at least in my first four years there.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

You've been very open about your struggle with addiction over the years. I wondered if you found community also in the 12 step recovery program.

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

Well, that's a good question. Yeah, I began drinking when I was 29, 30 years old and it progressively got worse and it wasn't until I was in my forties that I sought help. I went to rehab, I had to go to rehab after relapsing. Most recovery programs, as you know, are built on the 12 step model. I, however,

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

affiliated myself, at first, with rational recovery which really isn't as available nowadays as it used to be because it's been monetized. But I have found a lot of friends in AA. I don't exclusively, but I tend to go to gay male 12 step meetings. I have sought out friends

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

in the clean and sober community. That's what all of this really did for me, was replacing a bad crowd that I was running with a crowd that provided me companionship and support.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

The lead character in your book,

LUCY MUKERJEE:

The Rise and Fall of the Yellow House, which I'm reading right now and enjoying very much. He has just moved from New York.

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

Yes.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

To the Northwest.

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

Right.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

I'm wondering if you also lived in New York and how your experience was there?

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

I did, when I was a graduate student at Yale. I would sometimes be living in New York if I had a New York boyfriend and I was living in New York at the time that I got

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

a job in Washington State, in Seattle. I was very, very happy to go. First of all, I had never lived on the West Coast and I was curious, hadn't really traveled there very much either. The AIDS crisis had descended upon New York as it had, San Francisco, Los Angeles. Seattle was

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

one of those second tier cities where it hadn't really appeared yet. Quite frankly, I was glad to get away from New York. I made a move that many, many people made. I mean, some people went to Paris. I went to Seattle, but of course the respite wasn't for very long,

LUCY MUKERJEE:

I think one of

LUCY MUKERJEE:

the characters tells the protagonist of the book that it's not going to be possible to escape the demons from New York.

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

Yeah. Didn't we all find that out. That was true. But nonetheless I understand why I and other people wanted to absent ourselves from the epicenter of what was happening.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

Of course. Thinking about your experience teaching, was it something that felt very natural to you right away or something that you sort of had to work up to become good at?

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

Well, Lucy, as you know, I'm a stutterer and so stuttering was always a problem when I taught. I had problems with that,

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

that I was afraid it was going to hurt my chances for success in my career, perhaps it did. I don't know. I mean, I think I did pretty well anyway, but that aside I really enjoyed teaching. I like young people. I still do, even though the gap between me, at this age, and college students is almost unbridgeable, but when I was younger, it was not. I really took to it

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

like a duck to water and I think I did a good job. I am in contact with a lot of my students, even from the earliest years.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

That's wonderful. I imagine you saw quite a significant shift in the student body over the years. How did your classrooms evolve both in terms of who was in the room and also your teaching style as well?

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

Well, of course, when I was in college,

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

couple things were different. First of all, the Vietnam war was going on, men could be drafted out of college. The lottery system came in. I got a high enough number that I wasn't in danger of being conscripted, but my classmates were. I just wanna say we were very serious, it was a very serious time. The civil rights struggle

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

was still going on, still is going on today, but I mean, the sixties-style civil rights struggle was still going on. There was, as perhaps is again today, a certain clarity about what was right and what was wrong that made college a laboratory in real life for me. I'm not quite sure it is anymore. But I also say the classroom is much more diverse

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

than it was back then, Amherst college was a men's college when I went there has now had an out lesbian as its president. When I was in college, Amherst college was about a thousand guys and our foreign students, our foreign contingency consisted entirely of two guys from Canada.

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

Of course, that's not true anymore. At a place like Yale where financial aid is available to students regardless of their national origin. I think freshman classes now are majority people of color, slightly. That's been the big change. Of course, that means more stories come into the classroom than perhaps used to.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

Thank you. That's really

LUCY MUKERJEE:

important to share. I've been asked to just pause a moment and ask you not to lean too forward because I think we're cutting off the top of your head in the screen. Thank you. Sorry about that. What, if anything, would you say that your students have taught you over the years?

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

They've taught me to be kinder. I think sometimes I was harsh with people, not just in the classroom, but in my personal life, without knowing the effect my words were having on people. I've come to understand that the lessons I have drawn from life are not necessarily the same lessons my students

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

have drawn from life. Even if they are, those lessons have brought them to different conclusions about how to conduct their lives. It's ethics, it's morality. I'm sure I learned facts from my students, but being involved in the study of literature, which for me always meant trying to put myself in

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

the place of other people and understand the lives they've led and the choices they have made, they will make, I found that my students were as rich a source of that kind of experience and information as the characters and the books we were reading together.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

That's really lovely. Thank you for sharing that.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

Now, you've published fiction and non-fiction books, of course, I'm curious how long you were writing privately before you decided to share your work publicly.

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

The fiction you mean?

LUCY MUKERJEE:

Yes.

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

I taught in Seattle for many, many years, and then in 1999, I got a job on the East Coast.

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

And so I knew I would be moving and perhaps never coming back to Seattle. I did come back to Seattle when I retired from Yale. I moved back here full time, but I didn't know that that's how it would play out. I felt, after years of teaching other people's stories, that I wanted to tell a story, and it was about Seattle, which is a city not as prominent in American writing as

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

Chicago or New Orleans, let's say. I wanted to write about Seattle before I forgot about it. I had a certain amount of urgency in writing my first novel and also I wanted to write about Seattle in the first years of the HIV/AIDS pandemic. As you know, I mean

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

for gay men of my generation, that's the theme that history has given us. South African writers have Apartheid, they have to write about it. Israeli writers have to write about the creation of a state of Israel. I felt I had to write about HIV/AIDS. I started work on The Rise and Fall of the Yellow House, but at the same time, Lucy, I realized that

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

to get a book published, I better write other things as well, so I started writing short stories, just to get my name out there. I think I published a few short stories before the novel came out in 2015, but I had on my list, my bucket list, a number of things I wanted to write about, Seattle was one of them, stuttering was one, and I've wanted

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

to write about the Pacific Northwest as a geographical area. The new novel, First Consonants, the latter third of it takes place in Alaska, which is a place I long wanted to write about.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

For aspiring writers who might be watching this, myself included, was there ever a point when creative writing scared or intimidated you?

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

Well, I can't say it's fun writing. It's hard work. It doesn't come to me naturally. It certainly doesn't come to me as a pleasure. But I am an organized person. I schedule myself and there's a certain time of day when I write, come hell or high water. Nothing has come easy to me; learning foreign languages hasn't come easy to me, athletics has not come easy to me, so I'm used to having to

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

discipline myself to get anything done.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

It sounds like that structure has served you well, and the short story as a gateway into getting published was a route that succeeded for you.

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

Yes, it was, and there was more I had to do. I was aware that my first novel, The Rise and Fall of the Yellow House, wasn't the best work

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

I could have done, so I decided to go back to school in my sixties. I entered the MFA program in creative writing at Antioch University Los Angeles. My second novel, First Consonants, is basically what I worked on while I was at Antioch for two years.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

That's so interesting that you decided to go back to school. Can you reflect

LUCY MUKERJEE:

a little bit about that time, those two years?

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

Well, one of the reasons I wanted to go to Antioch is because I didn't want to be in an MFA classroom with 21-year-olds. Antioch, like most low-residency programs, has people of many ages, and also the Antioch program because it takes social justice very seriously, had students

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

of many races and ethnicities. There were a lot of vets in the program whom I enjoyed talking to. I was, some of the time in those two years, if not all of the time, the oldest student. Of course, what I grew up reading was not necessarily what my younger classmates grew up reading. I had stories I wanted to tell, and I think a lot

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

of my classmates had stories they wanted to invent simply because they were so young. Tony Morrison used to say that when you get in an MFA, the faculty tell you, "Write what you know." She said, the problem is young people don't know anything yet. Well, that underestimates the power of imagination, as I'm sure she would agree. But I had

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

I had a series of life experiences, the Vietnam war, the HIV/AIDS crisis, that when students were talking about trauma in their lives, and I don't do that actually, but I would always think about what seeing people with limbs blown off in Vietnam or seeing people die in the most horrible ways

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

had done for me as a necessary storyteller.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

I often tell the filmmakers that I work with to write the stories that they wish they'd seen on the screen, the stories that are missing. So that's sort of a different approach than "write what you know."

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

Right.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

Did you come across any book recommendations during that MFA program that you wouldn't otherwise have discovered?

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

Many books came as a revelation to me, it was so nice to be in the classroom and be told what to do rather than telling others what to do. Virginia Woolf was a revelation for me. I can't believe I'd gone this far in life without reading To The Lighthouse. It changed me profoundly, not least of all because of the way she deals with

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

World War I in that book, and world wars have always been a theme for me. I had teachers who had written their own books, which may not be famous, were not best sellers, but absolutely changed the way I wanted to write. Even if I couldn't aspire to be as good as them, I'm thinking of writers like

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

Sarah Van Arsdale and Ana Maria Spagna, Brad Kessler, James Kosmac. I recommend all of them.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

I imagine it might have been intimidating for them to know that they had a professor in the classroom looking back at them.

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

I think it's easy to be intimidated at Antioch because there are

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

so many people who have led long and interesting lives in the classroom. It's not like if you're teaching eighth grade and everyone is the same age from the same town, this was very different.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

You recently published a piece online that is featured on your website where you talked about the fact that now, of course, we have a president who stutters. I wondered if you would talk about

LUCY MUKERJEE:

why it was important for you to write that article?

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

Well, the article is about many things but I did mention Joe Biden for the following: any stutterer who watches him give a speech sees all the signs of the struggle a stutterer goes through. They can be very subtle, the facial muscles tensing, for instance. I see him anticipating a stutter and finding ways, not always successfully,

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

to avoid it, but I have to say his age shows. I was troubled when, on the campaign trail, he met that young boy, I think he was 11 years old and he kept admonishing the young man to keep trying harder to suppress his stutter, trying hard. Well, you can try very hard and still not succeed and to tell a child to try harder and you won't stutter or maybe

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

setting him up for failure. That can lead to deeper problems. Sometimes trying hard does help, sometimes it doesn't. I can't say his advice was totally out of line, but I would say this, I'd rather have Joe Biden tell the speaking world, the fluently speaking world, that if someone stutters, it's okay, it's your problem,

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

not ours, the stuttering community. It's part of the empowerment of the disabled that we see across the spectrum, ableism, is an issue for people of all kinds of disabilities and trying to force people to correct what may be uncorrectable is

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

certainly one of the worst kinds of ableism. I don't know, someday maybe President Biden will stutter during a press conference and that will be okay. The world will be patient with him and they will understand that stuttering is part of who Joe Biden is, and he's part of the President of the United States, so let's

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

just get on with it.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

Yeah, well said, thank you. There was a line in that article that stood out and after this week we can take a little break, but I wanted to see if you could expand on it. You said that "Stutterers do not seek out each other's company. We can go to extraordinary lengths to avoid each other." Why do you think that is?

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

Yes, I think that's true. I'm not the only one who

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

has noticed it. I think stutterers are perhaps uniquely embarrassed by each other. Also, stuttering is the kind of disability that if I hear someone, it's like yawning, if you see someone yawn, you want to yawn yourself, stuttering can incite stuttering in yourself. There's a kind of danger, if you will, in being with fellow stutterers.

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

I encountered this, and I'm not proud of it, when I was teaching in the classroom, and there would be stutterers in class, many of them far worse than me, and I would not make eye contact with them. I would not go out of my way to spend time with them. Of course, if they came to see me they had every right to demand my time, but it is

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

a feature of stuttering that we make each other uncomfortable. In my novel, First Consonants, that comes out between Brian, my main character, and his younger brother, Bam, who stutters as a young man, they're not a happy pair of brothers.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

Okay. Let's get back to it. John, you have a new book coming out called First Consonants.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

You've spoken a little bit about it already. It seems like this is a story that is uniquely yours to tell. Did it feel that way to you? Was it a story that you had and needed to get out?

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

It's not autobiographical, however, it's about a stutterer, so perhaps I didn't need to do all the research that a non-stutterer might have had to do, but yes, it's a story I

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

definitely have wanted to tell for a long time, because in this culture, by which I mean, the West in particular, words are so important, first was the word. When one has trouble with words that trouble sends ripples out into all corners of your life. I wanted to explain that,

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

and I wanted a stutterer to be something other than an idiot or a fool, or there for comic relief as he or she so often is in contemporary writing.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

You've mentioned in the article that we spoke about earlier that the portrayals that we've seen in media of people who

LUCY MUKERJEE:

who struggle with a stutter, they often lean on coping mechanisms that then magically solve the issue, and that's obviously not everybody's experience. Did you feel that way with, I recall The King's Speech was a movie that touches on this.

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

Hmm. Yes. People bring that up a great deal. It's a moving story.

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

It's, however, some combination of the filmmaker and the King's story which I share very little of. I'm glad he made progress. He had an important job to do at the end of his reign, but like I say, our leaders should not try and act,

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

live as if their disabilities aren't there, they are there and I think it would be possible to admire and respect a stuttering king as well as one that overcame his speech disability.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

Absolutely. Thank you. Of course, in new news, you have another book in progress.

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

I do.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

You're on a roll. What is this latest book about?

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

Thank you for asking. It is about two young men, gay men, in their twenties, in Los Angeles, in nearly the present day, who form a relationship, an intimate relationship. One of them is HIV positive and has become something of a drinker. The other one is not HIV positive,

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

but he's developed a dangerous taste for methamphetamine. They decide they need to get out of LA, it's just too much of the fast track for their lives. They moved to a town in rural eastern Washington State. There I'm on firmer ground

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

because I've spent time in rural eastern Washington State. Of course, they find that they bring their problems with them, to think that there isn't alcohol or methamphetamine in small towns in America is the first mistake, but it's really how they become acquainted with, and then participants in the local subculture of what we call preppers or survivalists,

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

which there are many probably everywhere. I mean, they're in New York city, but in the rural Northwest, there are particularly a lot of them because this is one of the regions of the world they think might survive some sort of cataclysm. Anyway, they get to know these people who are preparing for the end of the world. They find that their own personal struggles

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

to survive overlap with the efforts that these townspeople are preparing for.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

As someone who finds the survivalist team particularly intriguing, I'm curious what drew you to this topic? Did you meet somebody who was sort of preparing for this

LUCY MUKERJEE:

future cataclysmic event that compelled you to write about [inaudible] in your latest book?

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

Well, for an American of my generation, we were terrified by the prospect of nuclear war. I remember the Cuban missile crisis very clearly and New England, where homes typically have basements, many people outfitted them with canned goods, drinking water,

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

things that they might need if nuclear war broke out, I grew up with that. I was the generation where we had to get beneath our desks in school. We would have these drills. Totally ridiculous. However, we did it. My father had, I now recognize, certain

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

survivalist instincts. Like I said, his father had been a gunsmith, we always had a lot of weapons around the house which he used to hunt with, but I'm sure he had plans to use them otherwise, if the need should have arisen. I remember in the early seventies, when there was a gas shortage, I think it was 1973, my father built

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

a prefab storage unit in our backyard, and within that storage unit, he put a huge, huge tank. The tank nearly filled the entire interior of the shed and he filled it with gasoline because he didn't wanna be caught short. He wanted to have gasoline to fuel his vehicles to get out of town, necessary.

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

Now you have to understand gas at that time, anyway, still does, have additives to it. It's not stable over long periods of time. My father was always very busy, replacing old gasoline with new gasoline. Must have been very strange if the neighbors saw him do this, but of course the truly dangerous thing is a tank full of gasoline can explode. We had a huge explosive device

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

in our backyard. I don't think the survivalists in my novel do anything which puts others at risk, but I suppose having a huge tank of flammable fuel and guns with ammunition certainly indicate that that risk can happen, dangerous things, terrible things can happen to other people, if it comes to that.

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

If you go further East from where my novel is located, you begin to encounter the Aryan Nation, white nationalism, white Christian nationalism, where these survivalist groups fear race wars.

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

Seattle may be a very liberal city, Portland may be a very liberal city, but you don't have to travel very far out of city limits to encounter a different kind of culture.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

Thank you. I didn't know that. I think my survivalist stage dreams have extended as far as growing my vegetables to making my own toothpaste, so nothing [inaudible],

LUCY MUKERJEE:

certainly coming handy these days.

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

Yes. Well, I'm ready to raise chickens if I have to, I guess I'm a survivalist too.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

When you embark on a new book, [inaudible] how the story's going to end, or sometimes typically surprise you during the writing?

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

Well, when I wrote The Rise and Fall of the Yellow House, I had a very detailed outline

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

and I followed it precisely, but one of the things I learned at Antioch was to understand that a novel isn't a narrative interrupted by scenes, but a novel is scenes that are then connected by narrative.

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

I'm not quite sure how The Sixth City of Refuge, my current work in progress, is going to end, though I have written scenes which I know will be near the end. I'm trying to write differently than I have before. We'll see if it's better or worse. Having written scholarly books before I turned to fiction, of course, research and outlines were sine qua non. I mean, that's what we did.

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

I'm in the process of, experimentally anyway, trying to unlearn some of the things I used to follow.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

Well, that makes sense. The Rise and Fall of the Yellow House feels particularly cinematic to me. I think it's a time capsule of its [inaudible]. Have you explored the possibility of adapting your novel [inaudible] screen?

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

That's very kind of you to say that please

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

talk to your colleagues about making a film script out of it. I'd be very happy. I didn't think that -- I think maybe I'm a little better at dialogue than I am at discursive writing. But I'll tell you this, when I was writing The Rise and Fall of the Yellow House, I felt like I was late to the party. I felt like this is the 21st century.

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

I'm writing about HIV/AIDS a quarter of a century after it's worth, what's the point? But encouraged by fellow writers, I came to look at it a little differently, that hindsight, distant perspective isn't necessarily better, but it does produce worthwhile results. I think it was a book that I couldn't have written earlier,

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

didn't want to write earlier anyway. It was appropriate for its time, which was 30 years after the depths of that calamity.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

Have you had the opportunity to hear from your readers about how you had impacted them?

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

Some people kindly reviewed it.

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

I think that I have a lot of friends who are heterosexual that really understood the book and I wouldn't have been disappointed if they hadn't, but I was immensely pleased that they did. I had written a quasi-memoir some years earlier. It was published by Oxford university press

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

and it was called Great Mirrors Shattered, it's still called that. I talked about living in Japan in the 1980s when the country was gripped by an HIV panic. I hadn't been tested in those years. I didn't know my own status. That book prompted a lot of mail from fellow academics, really,

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

who were themselves HIV-positive, but never told anybody, and what they told me in their letters, of course, I would never share those letters or share their names, but I decided that that was the audience I had wanted, unexpectedly, in hindsight, to reach, and I think I did.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

That leads quite nicely into my next question. Can you talk about the countries that you have been around in the world and whether you think there is a better place to be gay, [inaudible] different cultural, political environment?

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

Well, let's start with the fact that what gay is

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

is different in different countries. There's a very famous lesbian critic in the United States that went to Tokyo and wrote about it. She said, where are all the gay people? I don't see any gay people. Well, they were invisible to her. She expected gay men and women to present themselves in a major modern world city,

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

the same way they would in her native New York. That's simply not true. I've been to extremely repressive places, I've been to North Korea, for instance, but you'll see people on the street who wear their red scarf around their neck a little differently, or their pants will be

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

a little shorter than they should be. That's a signal. We know who you are, they know who we are, it's irrepressible, and it's everywhere. Once you learn the language, which is seldom verbal, but it's there.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

Thank you. Are there countries that you still want to travel to [inaudible] the language because you still want to learn?

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

I have been lucky to travel. A young person nowadays may not have the opportunities to travel as easily or as cheaply or as safely as I have. I tend to be attracted to unusual places. I went winter camping

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

in the Arctic Circle in February one year. I went to Easter Island, Rapa Nui, which is the site of one of the greatest ecological disasters in human history. I want to go to Greenland. I want to go

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

to ancient places. I've never seen Egypt. I haven't seen the Minoan ruins in Greece. I'm a very curious person. I want to see places where I know it was hard for people to have survived, which is, I guess, why I went to Easter Island and why I went to the Arctic Circle. These places have had human beings,

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

in the case of the Arctic Circle, living there for 70,000 years, in what we would consider the most inhospitable environment, and they thrived. How did that happen? I would go to Antarctica if I could, it's disappearing quickly. I better make plans, but no, I'm not your London, Paris, Rome kind of tourist. That's just more white people

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

with a lot of churches, with a history surprisingly short, actually, compared to the rest of the world. I have traveled and I hope to do some more.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

I'm interested in your perspective of the evolution of LGBTQ culture and community. Obviously,

LUCY MUKERJEE:

persecution of our community exists everywhere. But it seems to have sort of gone backwards in recent years in this country, I'm wondering, how does it seem to you? Does it feel still -- [Inaudible] than it was in your formative years to be identified to be identified LGBTQ?

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

In so many ways, I was born at a very lucky time.

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

There was work for my family, paying work, and I came out after Stonewall, effortlessly. I could never write a coming out novel because it would be very short and very boring. I just came out. I, however, have a perspective of life

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

getting better and better for people, gay people like myself. Granted, I enjoy many privileges as a male and as a white person, but I've seen things get better for gay people. I was prepared for social progress to cease in this country.

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

I didn't see any reason why it would continue to get better for oppressed peoples, minorities. I was not prepared for things to go backwards and they have, and they will. Abortion is no longer a constitutional right. Other things that gay people enjoy, the right to employment, to housing, to civil marriage, those may disappear as well. It's interesting. It's not worldwide, but the retreat from democracy seems to be worldwide,

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

whether you're talking about Hungary or India or China, or the United States, we're on the verge of something new. I don't know whether this thing, which is new, will coexist or allow to exist, civil liberties which younger people, anyway, have come to count on.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

In your travels around the world.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

Have you been able to observe how other countries managed the HIV and AIDS crisis differently to how the US did?

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

Well, I've spent time in Australia and I think they did a very good job from what I know. My Australian friends may disagree, but I thought having national insurance

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

for one thing, but also having a responsible and educated citizenry without, perhaps, some of the extreme religious fundamentalism that my country has made for a pretty successful mix there. Japan, certainly, not the worst, but not the best either.

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

Hospitals were afraid of treating HIV positive people because word would get out and paying customers would be frightened of going to those hospitals for treatment. I personally had the experience of going to hospitals and being, oh, we don't treat you for that here, you have to go somewhere else. And I knew what that was all about. But there isn't,

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

again, that religious stigma against homosexuality in a country like Japan, that we see as resurgent right now in parts of the United States. I have to say, too, that South Africa impressed me. Although, when I was in South Africa, I became aware that there were white homosexuals that thought

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

HIV/AIDS was a problem of black homosexuals and vice versa; black homosexuals thought it was a white problem. But for a country with such uneven resources as South Africa, it's a country like Brazil, it's a country with extreme wealth and extreme poverty. Despite the setbacks that South Africa had, some of them

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

self-imposed, I'm afraid, they've done a good job at getting medicines to their people, unless I'm mistaken.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

Thank you. I want to shift gears a little bit and come to talk about your personal life. You were in a long term relationship.

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

Yes.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

I'm wondering if you could share, how did you meet your partner?

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

Well, I met Doug in 1984 or '85 and I met him the old fashioned way, I met him at a party. This is before apps, which I don't quite understand. But yeah, we met and we've been together ever since. We've had our ups and downs, like every couple has,

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

but sometimes my students, my graduate students, would ask me for romance advice and my advice was, don't go for the best looking one, don't go for the one with money, go for the nice woman, go for the nice man. I found the original nice guy, so we've been together for a very long time.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

Oh, that's wonderful.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

Can you talk a little bit about the life that you built together?

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

We're both academics. We're both retired. My husband is a mathematician and he's doing some of his best work now. I still have scholarly projects in addition to trying to write creatively. We get up and we go to work. We're fortunate enough to have a three story house. He works in the first floor, I work on the third,

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

and we co-mingle on the second. We're very lucky we can do that. Especially during COVID where, as you know very well, we have many friends that were cooped up in a studio apartment with a significant other, both trying to get work done. We were more fortunate than that.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

How has Doug made you a better partner, do you think?

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

Oh, he calms me down. I'm half Italian; I'm excitable, I'm used to noise, I'm used to drama, I'm used to screaming, I'm used to crying, I talk with my hands. Doug is a combination of Icelandic, Norwegian and Swedish. He's very Scandinavian. He's very calm. He brings routine and peace to the household.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

You mentioned in prep that he saved your life. I wondered if you could expand on that.

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

I've suffered from depression my whole life. I've been under a doctor's care since I was 12. I got into drugs and alcohol because I was self-medicating, very common. He rescued me from that downward spiral.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

Looking back on your experiences, what are some of the recurring lessons that you found yourself learning throughout your life?

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

Well, recurring lessons, I guess that means I don't learn it the first time and I have to keep learning it again and again.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

Right.

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

Gee, where to start?

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

It's very easy for someone with my personality to be narcissistic and the lesson I have learned over and over again is that I am not the center of the world. I'm not anywhere near the center. I'm at the periphery. My job may be to listen to others

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

more attentively than I listen to myself.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

How has your perspective shifted as you've gotten older?

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

Good question. Well, like lots of older people, I say to myself, I've seen it all. Of course, I haven't, but I have seen a lot and

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

I know this too will pass. I mean, people talk about how bad Trump is. Yes. I remember Nixon, people talk about how bad Iraq and Afghanistan were, and they were, but I remember Vietnam and I remember that things do let up,

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

things do release, not permanently, nothing is, but we just have to hang on till a better time. I know a better time is coming because I've seen better times come in the past. Although I used to tell my students, narcissistically, I would tell my students that the years 1975

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

to 1981 were the happiest years of my life. I had six happy years, I would say because the Vietnam war ended, which risked my life. Then the HIV/AIDS epidemic started, which risked my life. Then one day I realized six happy years is more than 99.99% of humanity ever gets. I should be grateful for those six years

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

instead of feeling that I was cheated because there weren't more of them.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

Wow. That's very profound. Thank you for sharing that. I'm wondering if you and Doug ever -- Did you dream about packing and heading off together to another country until this country becomes less intolerant.

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

We had a plan. We had

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

lived long ago in Australia and liked it very much, and we were unhappy with the second Bush administration, so we started to look for jobs abroad. I was offered a job in Auckland, New Zealand. However, we didn't take it

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

because Doug is older than I am, and they make immigration very difficult for older people because they're afraid you'll be a burden on social services. Anyway, we didn't go. And anyway Bush was followed by Obama. Like I say, the darkest days are followed by a dawn. We don't think about leaving now. I've spent a lot of my life in countries, speaking a language

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

which is not my native language. I really enjoy speaking English. Fortunately, we live in Seattle, which means in two or three days' time, I can walk to Canada, so there's always an out for us, I'd like to think, but no, we are here, and increasingly, I'm involved in improving not the country I live in, not the state, not even the city, but just the neighborhood I live in

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

because my impact is palpable on my street, and it's not anywhere else.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

That's a very practical approach. I sense [inaudible], which is really lovely to hear. I'm wondering if your relationship with religion

LUCY MUKERJEE:

or spirituality has evolved over your life, does it still relevant at all?

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

I'm not a spiritual person. I am an agnostic. I do attend Quaker meeting on occasion because I enjoy an hour of silence. It could be Zen, but it's not, it's a Quaker meeting.

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

I seldom speak. I, maybe in 40 years, have spoken three times at a Quaker meeting. Even though we don't talk to each other while we sit for worship, I know that these are people like me. I know these are people who are committed to social justice on a large scale, and they are committed to kindness on the smallest of scales.

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

I'm happy with that. I know a lot of my fellow Quakers have doubts about the existence of God. We live with that.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

Thank you. I think this is a good time for you to consider what else you might want to share that we haven't touched on yet? I do have some closing questions, but I wanted to pause and leave the next few minutes

LUCY MUKERJEE:

just for you to discuss what you'd like to say.

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

Well, let me say that I'm very grateful for the work you're doing, Lucy, you and your colleagues. I think that gay culture at least in this country is in danger of evaporating, or rather the record of it evaporating. Books are out of print.

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

Libraries are defunded. There's increasing interference in what's taught in the classroom, but I also noticed that younger, I guess they would call themselves queers, tend to be less than knowledgeable about history. The other day I heard a young queer women talk about how queers were invisible in the 1980s, unlike today. Well, I have news for you

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

we were not invisible in the 1980s. It's all too common for people to think homosexuality was invented with them and it's not true. Scholarship proves otherwise, you can read John Boswell to begin with. I think creating an archive of our voices is very important because

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

we will be continually rediscovered. There will be incentives for, can I say, society to evacuate us from history and as long as there's a written record, as long as there's a video record, as long as there is an audio record, maintained somewhere, someone, if so

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

inspired, can prove we were always here.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

Yes. That's so important. If you could tell your year-old self one thing, what would it be?

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

You know, there are things I did after age of 15, which I suppose I shouldn't have done, but one thing recovery's taught me is that we don't close the door on our pasts. Whatever I did when I was younger has made me what I am today. I not only live with that, I embrace it.

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

What would I tell my 15 year-old self, I would say, just remember that you inhabit this world with other people and they have as much right to be there and to be happy as you do, and be sure you leave room for everyone.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

Yeah, I like that very much. Thank you.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

Why is it important for you to share your story?

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

Well, it's not it's not unique in any way. There are many, many people with the same story. I share it because I'm a narcissist, because I'm a writer and because more than wanting to educate anybody else in the world, I'm still

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

trying to make sense of what I've done and understand why I haven't done certain things. It's a process of taking stock. It's taking inventory. Without that, I won't make another sure step forward in my life. I'm an audience of one, at minimum.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

I wonder if you would think about the people listening to these people of all ages who might be seeking strength and guidance, what advice or wisdom would you like to share with them?

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

Well, that person could be gay, that person could be in thrall to drugs and alcohol, that person could be suffering from mental illness.

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

What would I say? There is help out there. Much of it will be ineffective. Not everyone responds well to the same things, and it is possible in theory, in my case, in practice, to sometimes solve your problems completely on your own, but you can't count on that, and there's no harm in reaching out, reaching out can

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

simply mean reading the stories of people who have come before you, it can consist of lending a hand to people younger than you who are coming up after you. This is sounding awfully 'kumbaya-ish' of me, but I really believe it.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

Oh, that last sentence cuts out. Sorry. Do you mind repeating the last sentence, please?

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

I was saying that my advice to people may sound a little saccharine. It may sound a little 'kumbaya-ish', but given the alternatives of the sorts of advice people give each other nowadays, I'll go with it. I'll stay with it.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

Thank you. This is the last question that I have. This final answer will serve as your parting words.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

I'm curious, what does happiness look like to you?

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

I have been so lucky in my life. I'm alive, there was no guarantee of that. People ask me, what's it like getting old, I say, well, contemplate the alternative. I'm in

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

relatively good health. I'm in a loving relationship. I have a roof over my head. I feed myself, I clothe myself, I have everything. And as you know, I don't think most of the world can always say that. Happiness is

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

washing up the dishes after the dinner my husband has made for me.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

Beautiful. Thank you so much, John, that this has been such a pleasure. I hope you enjoyed it. I certainly did.

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

Thank you, Lucy. Should I be looking for work of your own to read?

LUCY MUKERJEE:

One day. I will take your advice and start with the short stories first.

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

oh, yes.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

That feels more knowledgeable.

JOHN WHITTIER TREAT:

Oh, yes. Good for you.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

Thank you so much.