Hello and welcome to GabFest Reeds for the month of November.

I'm Emily Bazlon, one of the hosts of Slate's Political GabFest.

I am so pleased to be joined today by James Sturm, who is the author of a new adaptation of Watership Down.

Hey, James.

Hello, Emily.

And I should say also that this book is adapted and illustrated by you and also Joe Sutton.

Watership Down was originally published in 1972 by Richard Adams.

It's an epic fable about rabbits. Hazel and Fiver and their

companions are in search of a home. They're looking to establish their own Warren, safe from

human intrusion on their natural world, and also from other rabbits who want to control them.

The book is a childhood classic that is not just for children by any means. It was actually

banned in China in 1965 because it has a message supposedly about Marxism and government

corruption, though I confess that when I read it as a kid, I didn't think about that at all.

James, let's start with just this basic question. What drew you to this book? When was the first

time you read it? And do you remember

how you responded to it then? The book has kind of been in my life for as long as I remember,

though I didn't read it until I moved to Vermont in 2001. My parents had a copy on their bookcase,

and I remember trying to read it and failing. It kind of was very bewildering. The title was

bewildering. Like, what's a watership? Why did it go down? There was like this old-fashioned engraving

of a rabbit on the cover. The book started with a quote from Agonemnon, and then it launched into like a page-long description of a meadow.

And I was like, okay, no thank you. I'm going to go back to my Fantastic Four Comics, and I left it there on the shelf.

So when I moved to Vermont, the first place we lived was on a dirt road, and we had one car, I was out in in the woods a lot and um my first

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