Fans of NPR’s Weekend Edition Saturday know that host Scott Simon is more than just a radio host. As an author of a variety of books from novels to very personal non-fiction, Simon was invited speak to the Friends of the Central Library's 20th season of the Rosamond Gifford Lecture Series. WRVO News Director Catherine Loper spoke with Simon about his upcoming visit.
Catherine Loper: So you're coming to Syracuse to talk to the friends of the Central Library's, part of their author lecture series. What are you going to talk to them about?
Scott Simon: Boy, do we want to give that away? Don't we want people to pay for tickets?
Catherine Loper: Can you give a little tease?
Scott Simon: Yes, I can give a little tease. We're talking at a time when the entire definition of literature is kind of being rethought and reanalyzed. What's going to happen to book? What’s going to happen to narrative in an age of bytes (B-Y-T-E-S) and tweets? And I don't know the answer to that, but I had the sensation a little over year ago of becoming kind of a new media figure too and all of the attention that the tweets I did around the time from my mother’s room at the intensive care unit at the hospital in Chicago got all the attention they did. And I had just finished writing the first draft, at any rate, of the book that will come out next spring, which is about my time with my mother in the ICU. So I've gone through the process of trying to convert tweets -- new media -- into the rather traditional media of the book. So I think I'm going to talk about that process and maybe some of the strengths in narrative that we can draw from the distilling process that social media can be. And electronic media has still not come up with a device that is as dramatically effective as turning the page.
Catherine Loper: And I will say that experience of tweeting while you were with your mother at her bedside as she was dying was quite compelling. Why did you decide to tweet out what you were going through, an experience some people just don't even talk about?
Scott Simon: Well, it must be understood, when I joined my mother in the intensive care unit, I didn't know she would die there. So it's not as if I said my mother’s dying I'm going to tweet. I keep it active Twitter account and I think like a lot of people, particularly media figures who do that, we try and pass on something that's interesting. The most interesting that things we have heard when we interview somebody, when we encounter somebody, thoughts that strike us about what's in the news for the day. And when I was in my mother's room at the intensive care unit, of course, in most respects my world shrunk to very small place. I keep coming back to the fact that my mother was just so interesting and funny, and what she said was worth passing along. At one point she said to me, and I passed this on, she said you know you should spend more time talking to people in their 80s, because they have looked across the street at death for more than a decade and they know what's really important in life. Well I heard that and I thought, you know, look my mother knows what I do for a living; this is something that not only worth sharing, but something I think she wants me to share.
Catherine Loper: Well you’ve told stories in various different formats, whether it's Twitter or on radio. But one of the reasons why you were chosen to come speak here in Syracuse is because of your work as an author. Why did you choose to go into book writing and do you find it fulfilling in a different way than being an NPR host?
Scott Simon: Oh yes. Absolutely. I mean for one thing, I can cram my books with a lot of profanity and gratuitous sex. Which you will notice my average story on NPR we just can't do. Yes, I do think it expresses a different side of me creatively. I enjoy that. It's a different discipline. It’s different muscles. What we do in broadcasting, you know we have a bromide here, which is that what we do disappears into thin air. But I don't mind saying it gives me some pleasure to know that all of my books, that my daughters can see these books on a bookshelf. And years from now when I'm gone assuming that we still have books and bookshelves, they can say to their friends this is something my father really cared about.
NPR host Scott Simon will be speaking Tuesday evening in the Friends of the Central Library's Rosamond Gifford Lecture Series.
