Dr. Abraham Verghese

author of "Cutting For Stone"

Dr. Verghese visited our Palo Alto Book Club on 18 January 2011

Here are some of the things that he had to say to us. I wrote them down in the first person, though I am paraphrasing:

"Cutting for Stone" has now been on the NY Times best seller list for 51 weeks. I think that book clubs are terribly important for the success of a book. I have often fantasized about being a fly on the wall at a book club meeting while they discuss my book. I always think about the reader when I am writing.

A title should be a bit mysterious, so the reader can fill in the gaps. The story is really where the author's words meet the reader's mind. But long after I decided on the title for the book, I changed the name of the family in the book from Pickering to Stone, so the title would work even better.

John Irving is a good friend of mine. Frank Conroy was my instructor at the Iowa Writers Workshop. "The Tin Drum" by Günter Grass (1959 novel) heavily influenced my writing work. "Of Human Bondage" by W. Somerset Maugham (1915 novel) first got me interested in writing about medicine.

Nonfiction books sell 20 times more then fiction. But, as Dorothy Allison said, "Fiction is the great lie that tells the truth about how the world really lives."

I got a story called "Lilacs" published in the New Yorker, and have gotten other work published there too.

http://www.abrahamverghese.com/images/NewYorker_Lilacs.pdf

(October 14, 1991 edition of the New Yorker.)

The Prime Minister of Ethiopia was a classmate of mine and so the New Yorker sent met there to interview him. The New Yorker pays $1 per word.

I identify myself as a doctor, first and foremost. Whereas William Carlos Williams (1883 - 1963, poet, writer, and physician) probably worked harder at being a writer than he did at being a physician. It is a great luxury to be able to have a nice life without having to make my living from writing. I think writers do well to have a day job because then the pressure is off to make money from it, and also they are in the big river of life, which informs their work.

The editor had a huge influence on the book. At some point the editor said that I had to have more of the story fleshed out, so I went to New York and spent a few days getting more of the details nailed down with her. Sometimes the editor would say that I had to take 150 pages out and use it in some other book, that it wasn't necessary in this book.

I use my writing in the place where other Stanford faculty do research.

MPICT -Mid Pacific Information & Communication Technologies
Winter conference
6, 7 January 2011
City College of San Francisco

This annual conference is meant to support professional development of community college faculty in technical fields. Funded by the National Science Foundation, it also helps us make connections with local industry.

I gave a talk on "Self Managing Student Teams." Here are some of the new things I learned from other people's talks:

1) There is an organization called the fun theory:
http://www.thefuntheory.com/
and they have shown that if they make something fun for people then people will do it. The message is that if we can make learning fun then students will be more successful. For example, the more that we can incorporate games into our courses, the better.

2) The latest news in artificial intelligence is that IBM has created a computer that plays jeopardy. It has already had a match with the world's top human jeopardy player but the results won't be known until the game airs on TV.

3) A company called "square"
https://squareup.com
has created a very small cheap credit card reader that attaches to any iphone through the headphone jack. If you make an account with square, they will give you the gadget for free and you can use it to collect money from people's credit cards. Square collects a 3% service charge.

4) simplyhired.com
Combines all of the other jobs boards into one. It tells what jobs are most in demand. I would like to use this to help me decide which new skills I should study during my upcoming sabbatical.

5) polycom for teleconferences
This is an inexpensive speaker and microphone that would be useful for meetings that have participants participating from afar.

6) Qwiki.com
This is a new website that puts information together from many different sources to make a graphical, well rounded treatment of whatever subject you want. This is an improvement on wikipedia, because it gets some info from wikipedia but then joins it with info from other places.

7) Motivation: mastery, autonomy, purpose
I had heard about this before, but it is useful to review. People studying human motivation have found that people are not motivated by money, even in their work, but instead they are motivated by mastery, autonomy and purpose. That is, they are motivated to become good at something, they are motivated to work on their own without being micromanaged, and they are motivated if they feel they are doing something important (with purpose.) We can use this in our classrooms to motivate our students.

8) Hitachi Starboard WT-1
This is a tool used by my colleagues at Truckee Meadows. It allows the user to draw on electronic documents using a stylus. I could buy one for $100 on ebay, and use it to hopefully speed up my grading process. It is also preferred by students because they feel they are gettingmore personal feedback since it is in the instructor's handwriting instead of typing.