I'm Christopher Leiden. This is open source with the novelist and teacher Marilyn Robinson,

the soulful American believer, a mainstay of American morale. I'm thinking Marilyn of your conversation with

Barack Obama over the years, with tables turned from the start. It was never the

usual writer profiling a president or a candidate, he was the inquiring politician asking you about

Iowa and the country, about the image of God in other people, the presumption of goodness in others that underlies

cooperation and democracy in the end.

Last winter, times changed a bit, but you said if you and citizen Obama were still

writing letters back and forth, you would be asking him to say something to cheer me up. Say it again that the people ultimately are wise and good.

How would that conversation go today?

Well, you know, there's a limit to the degree that I can speak for him. I have had a nice letter from him not too long ago talking about good things that were to be done and also, you know,

wondering the way the rest of us are, I think,

about what will come out of all this strange kind of dissolution

of things that we've relied on.

I don't want to put words in his mouth, but I felt that he also was simply

sort of waiting to see how things would become organized again, you know, after so much has been treated so destructively.

You're the voice, the artist voice, if I may say that I and millions of people trust to observe the damaged heart of America and tell us what we're going through.

I've been reading and re-reading your early fiction, especially Gilead from 20 years ago and your recent essays, and I must

say I take courage in all of it. There are voices in your fiction in that Ames family that we hunger to hear in life today. Do they speak to you

about where we're at? I think of a time in American culture where we've simply had more respect for one another with all kinds of consequences,

like more ambitious education, more ambitious learning, less being enthralled with sort of cheap

forms of competition and so on, you know, protective and nurturing attitude

toward just children as a group, you know, to the

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