On March 24, 2026 the writer Tracy Kidder (age 80) died of lung cancer. I hadn't heard he had died last month, and only realized when searching for something in his wikipedia. Upon reading of his death, I went searching through some old dvds to see if I still had the recording I made of a talk he gave at a small liberal arts college in Baltimore many years ago.

I found the disk and upon putting it in my computer saw the rather ominous words Last Modified 18 years ago on the files. It doesn't seem like it could have possibly been so long ago that I met him. He came to my little writing class and talked to us for a while, and later that evening gave a lecture that was open to the community.

He was and remains one of my literary heroes. Often when authors would come to give lectures, they would spend most of the time dully reading from their latest book and answer a few questions. His talk was nothing like that, he told us the story of how he became a writer, and spoke on the craft of writing in a way that still resonates with me today.

I took a little bit of time to try to clean up the audio, and generated a transcript with Whisper and wrote a little audio player with transcript highlighting that has been in idea form on my list of things to do for a while now. Click the text below and the audio will start playing.