Interview with Nomi Stone
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Nomi Stone’s second collection of poems, Kill Class is forthcoming from Tupelo Press in 2019. Poems appear recently or will soon in The New Republic, The New England Review, Tin House, Bettering American Poetry 2017, The Best American Poetry 2016, Guernica, and widely elsewhere. Kill Class is based on two years of fieldwork she conducted within war trainings in mock Middle Eastern villages erected by the US military across America. |
Read the transcription of the audio interview below.
Len Lawson: I'm here with Nomi Stone for a conversation about her work. She had a book previously published called "Stranger's Notebook" back in 2008. She has an upcoming book also that we're going to discuss.
We are here at the lovely Vermont Studio Center. We've been here for almost two weeks now. We're just going to dive into a discussion now, so, Nomi, thank you for doing this.
Nomi Stone: Thanks so much, Len.
LL: I really appreciate it! Let's talk about your experience here so far. What's it been like?
NS: Yeah! It's been wonderful. It's my third time at the Vermont Studio Center. I was here five years ago, and I was also here when I was 20. This is the second time I've been here in the winter...and I think I really prefer the winter even...for this insanely serene enclosure where also your nose hairs freeze inside your nose and there are icicles that are so thick they're like daggers that look like they might fall down and impale you...but everything is so quiet and encased in snow, so it's been a good writing period for me.
LL: Yeah! Me also. So, are you originally from Philadelphia? I know you are sort of in Philadelphia now.
NS: I just moved to Philadelphia. I grew up in D.C.
LL: Okay, cool! Alright, so what's your go-to restaurant in Philadelphia?
NS: Gosh, I just moved there in September...there's a really good taco place around the corner in Fishtown that I now can't remember the name of. (laughs) So, sorry Philly! Shout out to Nameless Cute Taco Place in Fishtown.
LL: So, what is your work there centered around? What are you doing out there in Philadelphia?
NS: I teach at Princeton right now, and so I commute from Philadelphia. I am teaching in the spring at Princeton a class--I'm cross-teaching it in the creative writing department as well--and it's a class on awe and wonder and terror. It's a class really on affect and aesthestics, but also on representation. How do you write beauty? How do you write violence? So, it's sort of woven its way, braided through into some of the poems I'm working on right now, too. I try to keep something kind of live between stuff I'm doing academically and what I'm doing as a poet.
LL: Wow, so, what's the response been like from the students taking your class?
NS: They dig it. The thing that's been really fun about the class is that the students switch off every other week. So, they do--the readings are really varied, everything from philosophical texts on the sublime, to novels about violence, to poems, to ethnographies, kind of classic anthropological work--and so, they read these works and then they switch off between offering up critical responses and offering up creative responses. When they do the creative response--if they're doing it for creative writing credit they have to write poems or prose, et cetera., but if they're not, they can do anything. They can make a soundscape or a podcast. They can do a monologue or write a short play, or compose music. So, it's been kind of a delightful dive into making things together.
LL: It's kind of wide open for them, then, huh?
NS: Yeah, it's really wide open.
LL: So, you grew up in D.C. Your father is a rabbi. So, what was that experience like, growing up in a Jewish family?
NS: Good questions...It's led me to be really interested in and in tune to questions of ritual and the aesthestics of ritual, and different kinds of temporality as you're experiencing--I guess I'll keep returning it to the question of awe because that's something I'm really interested in--so, for example, what is it like in those ten days in between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, where's there's this quality of waiting for inscription...Will you be inscribed in the book or not? What is the intensity of that time? I was always interested in that as a poet. How do we live inside of time admist the passage of time? I guess religion is just one vector into thinking through these things.
LL: Awesome. So, in your first book you dealt with a lot of that. Stranger's Notebook. From what I saw, you lived in a Jewish community in North Africa.
NS: I did.
LL: That's so--first of all, how did you know about the community, or was it like a mission or something?
NS: No, so, I had gotten very interested in the Middle East and North Africa. I had been studying about that region of the world. I was a French Literature major and that segued me into thinking about North Africa. In particular also through the lens of thinking about empire and colonialism, actually, and wanting to read texts in Arabic. So I had this really strong desire to go to North Africa and work on Arabic and think about some of these questions. I guess in that period, particularly, around ritual. I had spent a little bit of time in Morocco while I was in college, and I was interested in returning, so I ended up...I was researching, and found this community that lived in Tunisia. So, I got a creative writing Fullbright to spend a year there. It was a really potent year, for sure, and it sort of opened the doors to the subsequent things that happened in my life and in my career. I think because of that, I was sort of blundering around and asking people questions and didn't really know what I was doing exactly in that period. I guess I came to understand that anthropologists moved around and asked people questions and thought hard about things. That's when I thought, "Oh, I think I want to be an anthropologist who writes poems." (laughs)
LL: That's not tough at all! (laughs) So, from the experience of creating that book, what takeaways do you have from living there, then writing, and...it's been almost ten years now, so what do you remember from that?
NS: Well, it has been almost ten years. What do I remember from that? I remember...
LL: Or even, how has that affected your poetry today?
NS: Yeah, I think I wrestled, starting in that period, with how to represent my own location within a space that was not my own. And so, there was this quality of difference and encounter, and how to not exoticize this with something that was really important to me. I think in that period I didn't yet have enough of the tools to know quite what I meant by that. I guess having spent the last ten years really thinking hard about those things, I think that was meant to be, for me, I guess a gift to my own thinking and a gift to my poems, ultimately.
LL: Yeah. That's awesome. So, you have an upcoming collection. For me, I'm kind of fascinated by the fact that, number one--you're doing research, but number two--you're actually writing poetry about what you're doing. So, I think those two things merged together is great. Can you kind of talk about the premise of the book and how that developed?
NS: Okay, the book is called Kill Class, and it's coming out with Tupelo Press in winter 2019. The fieldwork that I did, that this book is based on, took place within these war games around the United States. They are spaces erected by the American military training camps. They're set up to look like fake villages, fake middle eastern villages, when I was there at least. So, they had fake mosques and fake markets and lots of props--tea sets and the like, and this kind of repetitive acting out of spaces of war for the soldiers. These sort of rehearsals...these were rehearsals of bargaining and mourning and dying and the whole gambit. I was so, so shocked by the presence of these spaces, and really kind of devastated, to be honest. I wanted to explore them, and I saw them as kind of like satellite spaces of empire, which is what I write about as an anthropologist. I wanted to understand what was going on in them, and in particular, what it meant for the military to hire Middle Eastern nationals to act out war in a repetitive loop. And so, I was thinking hard about how do I represent this not only as an anthropologist, but as a poet. As a poet, the book is very driven by--the climate of the book is the woods, and there's a structure in the book that is sort of recursive, where you're continuously trapped in these woods. Every time you drive out, you're driving back in. So, I wanted a space that was really asphyxiating. I think that the tools of poetry are so rich. How do we make an asphyxiating climate in a poem? What do we do with repetition, et cetera? What is the right syntax? What do we use as poets to get inside this texture? I think this is my obsession as a poet, period, and I think that anthropology is always trying to represent worlds, but has a deficit of tools to do it as richly as perhaps a poet can.
LL: You have a poem that you want to read from the upcoming book?
NS: "Human Technology". This poem appeared in Plume.
<Read "Human Technology" in Plume HERE.>
LL: Thank you! In that poem you discuss having conversations with the soldiers. What was their reaction to you being in their space and doing research and writing poetry?
NS: I think they were a little bit befuddled and intrigued. I was curious about them. I was asking them questions. They were asking me questions.
LL: I get a threatening tone to the poem...you know, what's to come...The killing of the pig on the porch is very ominous. Did you want to bring about those types of threatening tones of war or loss or death? What would you say would be the overarching themes of that?
NS: Yeah. It was a climate that was...felt quite menacing. It is my impression that there has been a weaponization by the military of culture...the culture of the adversary, to try to sort of understand the adversary. There has been a weaponization of empathy. How do you know your interlocutor? How do you get information? And so, I found these things to be really quite dire. The climate, the mood in the poem, it's about that violence, but also there is a moment of pathos and connection in the poem. These very complex friendships that were coming into being with these soldiers. These exchanges of confidence that were happening between us as more time was passing.
LL: What's their perception of being, I suppose, used as weapons themselves, or maybe as pawns to fulfill this bigger purpose of war and what they are deployed there to do?
NS: Yeah. I think you get a range of responses. I think some felt conflicted. I think it depended for some what conflict they were involved in, and how they felt about it ethically and politically. I think it's true that war is a weaponization of human beings at large, and I have written in particular about the weaponization of others, non-American others, who are kind of caught up in these war trainings but it's quite correct that the soldiers themselves are weapons in the war as well.
LL: Right. How about we take a step back. So, how does one go about doing this type of work? Like, "I want to write a poem about this in particular". What do I do? How do I start off by doing that?
NS: Well, I guess I spend two years doing this research, and I do a lot of interviews. I took a lot of field notes. Field notes are a really fertile space for me, so, I keep in my field notes everything that I might need for anthropology or poetry--sensory triggers of all kinds, snippets of things I've heard, moments of revelation that I've had. Then, for me usually, my writing process is a bit akin to what's happening right now at Vermont Studio Center. I go inside a particular intensity or lived experience, and then I extract myself, ideally, if I can, and then I go somewhere like this, and I finally have...I take a little space and perspective. Then I comb through my field notes, where they're already kind of partially written poems, I just have to extract them out. Then I write. That's how it works.
LL: Outstanding. So, that collection is coming out. Now you're working on a third collection as well. So, we're going to have you also read something from that.
NS: This is called "Wonder Days", and it's just come out in the New England Review.
<Read "Wonder Days" in New England Review HERE.>
LL: Thank you. So, your work is kind of shifting from something very niche to something maybe expansive and even personal? Do you want to talk about that?
NS: Yeah. I would say so. I sort of dared myself to write about that which I had not permitted myself to write about in the past. So, more intimate spaces, and I think that my great goal is to bring in everything as fodder and to not create partitions within myself. So, the anthropologist self, the poet self, the human self, these are all strands, these are all different streams. How do we bring our most composite selves together every time we write a poem? That's what I want.
LL: Sounds great! So, I'm sure you go around and do a lot of readings in different areas. What do the aspiring or emerging poets ask you and what's your response to them?
NS: That's a good question. Poets sometimes ask me about my writing practices. Do I write every day? Who do I read? These kinds of things. I guess I would say this--I was just talking about this with a wonderful playwright who is here, RN Healey, and we were talking about when one chooses this life as a writer, there are fallow periods and there are generative periods, and the fallow periods are also important. They are these quiet, gathering periods, and furthermore, that one must be patient sometimes, and imagine all parts of the life to be part of the eventual coming of the poem. And I really believe that. So, even if one is not writing every single day, if one is living deeply and seeing deeply, those things can be re-funneled back into the writing. As far as who I'm reading...a book that I adore is Allison Titus' book The True Book of Animal Homes. She's also a really dear friend of mine. It's an extraordinary book of poems. I'm reading also Christopher Kempf's Late in the Empire of Men. Usually when I read, I read towards something that I'm puzzling through. So, I'm reading Allison for bursts of the lyric...kind of lyric intensity. And I'm reading Chris' book because of the complexity of the unfolding syntax. So, both things are really interesting to me right now.
LL: Fantastic. We both had the opportunity to work with Jane Shore. That was fabulous for me. Can you talk a little bit about working with her?
NS: Oh, she's fantastic. I love Jane Shore. She is a fountain of warmth and generosity and also incredible intuition as a poet. She is one of those mentors who goes the length with you, I think, and she goes inside the poem's intention, and she takes you on as a whole human, and she was just such a loving but also demanding reader for me, which was my biggest hope for a reader. The day she left I put another poem I had just written in her pocket, and she wrote me a long beautiful letter about it, so I hope we'll keep corresponding.
LL: Yeah, I hope so, too. (sounds of snowblowers nearby) We got a lot of snow around here! I don't know if the snowblowers are picking up, but they're working hard.
NS: They are!
LL: So, when you immediately leave here from Vermont, what will be your next task with your poetry or anthropology?
NS: I have to switch to anthropology for a bit. I'm writing a piece now on empathy as a weapon. And so, I have to know--I'm thinking about mimesis and how when you perform empathy you mime your interlocutor. What does it mean to sort of mirror a person? And it's something that we all do half-consciously when we interact with people. But what does it mean to cultivate that as a kind of weapon? I guess in some sense, I'm writing about that as an anthropologist, but as you saw in the poem I read, "Human Technology," it's something that circles back into my poems. So, I keep switching off between then, but I really always hope that one is compost for the other.
LL: Yeah. They're two interesting worlds, and to merge them together is fantastic. Well, I want to say thank you for doing this. This was sort of impromptu, but we pulled it off! Great to just meet you and know you, and I'm definitely a fan, and I will keep in touch with your work.
NS: Well, it's absolutely mutual. Your work is just phenomenal, Len. I'm so happy we got to have this conversation.
LL: Thank you so much, and tell us the name of your upcoming book once more.
NS: Yes, my second book is called Kill Class.
LL: Kill Class. Alright, thank you!
NS: Thanks so much, Len.
We are here at the lovely Vermont Studio Center. We've been here for almost two weeks now. We're just going to dive into a discussion now, so, Nomi, thank you for doing this.
Nomi Stone: Thanks so much, Len.
LL: I really appreciate it! Let's talk about your experience here so far. What's it been like?
NS: Yeah! It's been wonderful. It's my third time at the Vermont Studio Center. I was here five years ago, and I was also here when I was 20. This is the second time I've been here in the winter...and I think I really prefer the winter even...for this insanely serene enclosure where also your nose hairs freeze inside your nose and there are icicles that are so thick they're like daggers that look like they might fall down and impale you...but everything is so quiet and encased in snow, so it's been a good writing period for me.
LL: Yeah! Me also. So, are you originally from Philadelphia? I know you are sort of in Philadelphia now.
NS: I just moved to Philadelphia. I grew up in D.C.
LL: Okay, cool! Alright, so what's your go-to restaurant in Philadelphia?
NS: Gosh, I just moved there in September...there's a really good taco place around the corner in Fishtown that I now can't remember the name of. (laughs) So, sorry Philly! Shout out to Nameless Cute Taco Place in Fishtown.
LL: So, what is your work there centered around? What are you doing out there in Philadelphia?
NS: I teach at Princeton right now, and so I commute from Philadelphia. I am teaching in the spring at Princeton a class--I'm cross-teaching it in the creative writing department as well--and it's a class on awe and wonder and terror. It's a class really on affect and aesthestics, but also on representation. How do you write beauty? How do you write violence? So, it's sort of woven its way, braided through into some of the poems I'm working on right now, too. I try to keep something kind of live between stuff I'm doing academically and what I'm doing as a poet.
LL: Wow, so, what's the response been like from the students taking your class?
NS: They dig it. The thing that's been really fun about the class is that the students switch off every other week. So, they do--the readings are really varied, everything from philosophical texts on the sublime, to novels about violence, to poems, to ethnographies, kind of classic anthropological work--and so, they read these works and then they switch off between offering up critical responses and offering up creative responses. When they do the creative response--if they're doing it for creative writing credit they have to write poems or prose, et cetera., but if they're not, they can do anything. They can make a soundscape or a podcast. They can do a monologue or write a short play, or compose music. So, it's been kind of a delightful dive into making things together.
LL: It's kind of wide open for them, then, huh?
NS: Yeah, it's really wide open.
LL: So, you grew up in D.C. Your father is a rabbi. So, what was that experience like, growing up in a Jewish family?
NS: Good questions...It's led me to be really interested in and in tune to questions of ritual and the aesthestics of ritual, and different kinds of temporality as you're experiencing--I guess I'll keep returning it to the question of awe because that's something I'm really interested in--so, for example, what is it like in those ten days in between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, where's there's this quality of waiting for inscription...Will you be inscribed in the book or not? What is the intensity of that time? I was always interested in that as a poet. How do we live inside of time admist the passage of time? I guess religion is just one vector into thinking through these things.
LL: Awesome. So, in your first book you dealt with a lot of that. Stranger's Notebook. From what I saw, you lived in a Jewish community in North Africa.
NS: I did.
LL: That's so--first of all, how did you know about the community, or was it like a mission or something?
NS: No, so, I had gotten very interested in the Middle East and North Africa. I had been studying about that region of the world. I was a French Literature major and that segued me into thinking about North Africa. In particular also through the lens of thinking about empire and colonialism, actually, and wanting to read texts in Arabic. So I had this really strong desire to go to North Africa and work on Arabic and think about some of these questions. I guess in that period, particularly, around ritual. I had spent a little bit of time in Morocco while I was in college, and I was interested in returning, so I ended up...I was researching, and found this community that lived in Tunisia. So, I got a creative writing Fullbright to spend a year there. It was a really potent year, for sure, and it sort of opened the doors to the subsequent things that happened in my life and in my career. I think because of that, I was sort of blundering around and asking people questions and didn't really know what I was doing exactly in that period. I guess I came to understand that anthropologists moved around and asked people questions and thought hard about things. That's when I thought, "Oh, I think I want to be an anthropologist who writes poems." (laughs)
LL: That's not tough at all! (laughs) So, from the experience of creating that book, what takeaways do you have from living there, then writing, and...it's been almost ten years now, so what do you remember from that?
NS: Well, it has been almost ten years. What do I remember from that? I remember...
LL: Or even, how has that affected your poetry today?
NS: Yeah, I think I wrestled, starting in that period, with how to represent my own location within a space that was not my own. And so, there was this quality of difference and encounter, and how to not exoticize this with something that was really important to me. I think in that period I didn't yet have enough of the tools to know quite what I meant by that. I guess having spent the last ten years really thinking hard about those things, I think that was meant to be, for me, I guess a gift to my own thinking and a gift to my poems, ultimately.
LL: Yeah. That's awesome. So, you have an upcoming collection. For me, I'm kind of fascinated by the fact that, number one--you're doing research, but number two--you're actually writing poetry about what you're doing. So, I think those two things merged together is great. Can you kind of talk about the premise of the book and how that developed?
NS: Okay, the book is called Kill Class, and it's coming out with Tupelo Press in winter 2019. The fieldwork that I did, that this book is based on, took place within these war games around the United States. They are spaces erected by the American military training camps. They're set up to look like fake villages, fake middle eastern villages, when I was there at least. So, they had fake mosques and fake markets and lots of props--tea sets and the like, and this kind of repetitive acting out of spaces of war for the soldiers. These sort of rehearsals...these were rehearsals of bargaining and mourning and dying and the whole gambit. I was so, so shocked by the presence of these spaces, and really kind of devastated, to be honest. I wanted to explore them, and I saw them as kind of like satellite spaces of empire, which is what I write about as an anthropologist. I wanted to understand what was going on in them, and in particular, what it meant for the military to hire Middle Eastern nationals to act out war in a repetitive loop. And so, I was thinking hard about how do I represent this not only as an anthropologist, but as a poet. As a poet, the book is very driven by--the climate of the book is the woods, and there's a structure in the book that is sort of recursive, where you're continuously trapped in these woods. Every time you drive out, you're driving back in. So, I wanted a space that was really asphyxiating. I think that the tools of poetry are so rich. How do we make an asphyxiating climate in a poem? What do we do with repetition, et cetera? What is the right syntax? What do we use as poets to get inside this texture? I think this is my obsession as a poet, period, and I think that anthropology is always trying to represent worlds, but has a deficit of tools to do it as richly as perhaps a poet can.
LL: You have a poem that you want to read from the upcoming book?
NS: "Human Technology". This poem appeared in Plume.
<Read "Human Technology" in Plume HERE.>
LL: Thank you! In that poem you discuss having conversations with the soldiers. What was their reaction to you being in their space and doing research and writing poetry?
NS: I think they were a little bit befuddled and intrigued. I was curious about them. I was asking them questions. They were asking me questions.
LL: I get a threatening tone to the poem...you know, what's to come...The killing of the pig on the porch is very ominous. Did you want to bring about those types of threatening tones of war or loss or death? What would you say would be the overarching themes of that?
NS: Yeah. It was a climate that was...felt quite menacing. It is my impression that there has been a weaponization by the military of culture...the culture of the adversary, to try to sort of understand the adversary. There has been a weaponization of empathy. How do you know your interlocutor? How do you get information? And so, I found these things to be really quite dire. The climate, the mood in the poem, it's about that violence, but also there is a moment of pathos and connection in the poem. These very complex friendships that were coming into being with these soldiers. These exchanges of confidence that were happening between us as more time was passing.
LL: What's their perception of being, I suppose, used as weapons themselves, or maybe as pawns to fulfill this bigger purpose of war and what they are deployed there to do?
NS: Yeah. I think you get a range of responses. I think some felt conflicted. I think it depended for some what conflict they were involved in, and how they felt about it ethically and politically. I think it's true that war is a weaponization of human beings at large, and I have written in particular about the weaponization of others, non-American others, who are kind of caught up in these war trainings but it's quite correct that the soldiers themselves are weapons in the war as well.
LL: Right. How about we take a step back. So, how does one go about doing this type of work? Like, "I want to write a poem about this in particular". What do I do? How do I start off by doing that?
NS: Well, I guess I spend two years doing this research, and I do a lot of interviews. I took a lot of field notes. Field notes are a really fertile space for me, so, I keep in my field notes everything that I might need for anthropology or poetry--sensory triggers of all kinds, snippets of things I've heard, moments of revelation that I've had. Then, for me usually, my writing process is a bit akin to what's happening right now at Vermont Studio Center. I go inside a particular intensity or lived experience, and then I extract myself, ideally, if I can, and then I go somewhere like this, and I finally have...I take a little space and perspective. Then I comb through my field notes, where they're already kind of partially written poems, I just have to extract them out. Then I write. That's how it works.
LL: Outstanding. So, that collection is coming out. Now you're working on a third collection as well. So, we're going to have you also read something from that.
NS: This is called "Wonder Days", and it's just come out in the New England Review.
<Read "Wonder Days" in New England Review HERE.>
LL: Thank you. So, your work is kind of shifting from something very niche to something maybe expansive and even personal? Do you want to talk about that?
NS: Yeah. I would say so. I sort of dared myself to write about that which I had not permitted myself to write about in the past. So, more intimate spaces, and I think that my great goal is to bring in everything as fodder and to not create partitions within myself. So, the anthropologist self, the poet self, the human self, these are all strands, these are all different streams. How do we bring our most composite selves together every time we write a poem? That's what I want.
LL: Sounds great! So, I'm sure you go around and do a lot of readings in different areas. What do the aspiring or emerging poets ask you and what's your response to them?
NS: That's a good question. Poets sometimes ask me about my writing practices. Do I write every day? Who do I read? These kinds of things. I guess I would say this--I was just talking about this with a wonderful playwright who is here, RN Healey, and we were talking about when one chooses this life as a writer, there are fallow periods and there are generative periods, and the fallow periods are also important. They are these quiet, gathering periods, and furthermore, that one must be patient sometimes, and imagine all parts of the life to be part of the eventual coming of the poem. And I really believe that. So, even if one is not writing every single day, if one is living deeply and seeing deeply, those things can be re-funneled back into the writing. As far as who I'm reading...a book that I adore is Allison Titus' book The True Book of Animal Homes. She's also a really dear friend of mine. It's an extraordinary book of poems. I'm reading also Christopher Kempf's Late in the Empire of Men. Usually when I read, I read towards something that I'm puzzling through. So, I'm reading Allison for bursts of the lyric...kind of lyric intensity. And I'm reading Chris' book because of the complexity of the unfolding syntax. So, both things are really interesting to me right now.
LL: Fantastic. We both had the opportunity to work with Jane Shore. That was fabulous for me. Can you talk a little bit about working with her?
NS: Oh, she's fantastic. I love Jane Shore. She is a fountain of warmth and generosity and also incredible intuition as a poet. She is one of those mentors who goes the length with you, I think, and she goes inside the poem's intention, and she takes you on as a whole human, and she was just such a loving but also demanding reader for me, which was my biggest hope for a reader. The day she left I put another poem I had just written in her pocket, and she wrote me a long beautiful letter about it, so I hope we'll keep corresponding.
LL: Yeah, I hope so, too. (sounds of snowblowers nearby) We got a lot of snow around here! I don't know if the snowblowers are picking up, but they're working hard.
NS: They are!
LL: So, when you immediately leave here from Vermont, what will be your next task with your poetry or anthropology?
NS: I have to switch to anthropology for a bit. I'm writing a piece now on empathy as a weapon. And so, I have to know--I'm thinking about mimesis and how when you perform empathy you mime your interlocutor. What does it mean to sort of mirror a person? And it's something that we all do half-consciously when we interact with people. But what does it mean to cultivate that as a kind of weapon? I guess in some sense, I'm writing about that as an anthropologist, but as you saw in the poem I read, "Human Technology," it's something that circles back into my poems. So, I keep switching off between then, but I really always hope that one is compost for the other.
LL: Yeah. They're two interesting worlds, and to merge them together is fantastic. Well, I want to say thank you for doing this. This was sort of impromptu, but we pulled it off! Great to just meet you and know you, and I'm definitely a fan, and I will keep in touch with your work.
NS: Well, it's absolutely mutual. Your work is just phenomenal, Len. I'm so happy we got to have this conversation.
LL: Thank you so much, and tell us the name of your upcoming book once more.
NS: Yes, my second book is called Kill Class.
LL: Kill Class. Alright, thank you!
NS: Thanks so much, Len.
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