Storied Lives

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Meet The Authors

The National Book Festival brought together readers and authors on the National Mall for readings and signings. Book World asked authors about procrastinating, what excuses they use to avoid writing, and what's on their reading list.

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Then there was Richard Price, who read from his novel "Lush Life" and talked about the trouble with autobiographical fiction. "I feel like cannibalizing your own life is good for one or two books and then it gets deadly dull," Price said. "The world is so large and there are so many voiceless people out there." Then he offered his take on a somewhat tired question from the audience:

"What's the process of writing? All right, well, the thing is, you get up at the crack of noon. You have a good hearty breakfast, take a little nap to digest that good hearty breakfast. You get up, take a good cup of coffee, real strong. You wait for your hands to stop shaking. You pick out a pencil, you put it in that electric pencil sharpener and break the point. Then you realize it's probably not the pencil, it's the pencil sharpener, so you go down to Staples . . ."

As the laughter died down, Price said, "I wish I was lying."

Where does he get his ideas? "I gotta mix it up with life," he said. "I'd so much rather go off and interact with something and see what it does to me" than sit in a chair all day writing about "a guy who, nananadada, and then he goes and gets divorced, nanana, and then he finds out he's gay, and then he finds out he's not gay, he's lesbian.

"I mean, you know that story. So show me something new."

That, as it happens, is what CBS News correspondent Kimberly Dozier's bosses were saying to her about her coverage of Iraq. They wanted footage that wouldn't add to "image fatigue." Two years ago, she was nearly killed trying to provide it.

"From 2003 to 2006," Dozier told her rapt listeners, "I covered a war that became increasingly unpopular." No matter what she reported, someone didn't like it: Viewers called her both "a corporate pimp for George Bush's illegal war" and "a terrorist cheerleader." Then she walked into a car-bomb ambush. Five people were killed, including two of her colleagues, and Dozier's chances looked slim.

"I had shrapnel in my brain; I had both femurs shattered; my femoral artery was nicked and I was studded with burning shrapnel from my hips to my ankles," she said. "I coded on the operating table five times."

If she'd been hit like that in 2003, she'd be dead. But medical treatment of wounds like hers, she said -- applied by the heroic doctors and other medical personnel her book, "Breathing the Fire," is intended to celebrate -- has improved so radically that she's now "training for the 10K portion of the U.S. Marine Corps marathon."

Immaculée Ilibagiza's books cost her at least as dearly.

Born in Rwanda, Ilibagiza was home on vacation from the national university in 1994, when the country's Hutu majority began the mass murder of her Tutsi minority. Her father ordered her to run three miles to a Hutu pastor he felt he could trust. For three months, she and seven other women sheltered in a tiny bathroom in the pastor's home. Killers with machetes repeatedly searched the house. One put a hand on the bathroom doorknob, then changed his mind and told the pastor he trusted him.

"I couldn't put into words the fear," Ilibagiza said.

She emerged to discover that "everyone in my family" was dead. "I wish I was Rambo," she thought, so she could shoot all the killers. She did not want to forgive them, but God, she said, taught her how.

Ilibagiza's books are "Left to Tell: Discovering God Amidst the Rwandan Holocaust" and "Led By Faith: Rising from the Ashes of the Rwandan Genocide." When she finished her talk, her audience swiftly rose to applaud.

An hour or so before, the clouds had finally let loose. Over in the poetry pavilion, Stanley Plumly arrived a bit damp. Staffers from the National Endowment for the Humanities were filling in for another poet who couldn't make it, reciting favorite works by Shakespeare, Emily Dickinson, Gerard Manley Hopkins and others. Then it was Plumly's turn.

"Pretty rough out there," he said. But later he amended this judgment.

"It's been a long day, a very sweet day, a magical day," the poet said.