Author of The Soloist on KCUR
Tyler Allen
Issue date: 11/9/09 Section: Culture
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Before him was a ragged looking homeless man playing a violin with the name Stevie Wonder scrawled on the side.
Lopez had no clue this chance meeting with Nathaniel Ayers would lead to "The Soloist," a New York Times best-selling novel and critically acclaimed film.
"I had no idea when I met Nathaniel Ayers almost five years ago that I would be in Kansas City talking about this," Lopez said.
On Wednesday, Lopez was at the Kansas City Public Library-Plaza Branch for a live taping of "New Letters on the Air," a nationally distributed public literary program that airs on KCUR and is hosted by UMKC Communications professor Angela Elam.
A string quartet from the Conservatory kept the crowd entertained before Lopez and Elam took the stage to discuss Lopez's book "The Soloist."
During the interview, Lopez described how his meeting with Ayers evolved into a series of columns in the Los Angeles Times and, eventually, a book and movie.
"I was bored by my own newspaper," Lopez said. "I would read the stories and think 'well that just has no life in it, no character.'"
After he started writing about Ayers and his exceptional musical talent, Lopez realized this was the kind of story he had been searching for.
"I realized that, as I was telling that story, it accomplished something that newspapers do too infrequently - it really connected with people," Lopez said. "I've covered stories all over the world - natural disasters, volcanoes, hurricanes and floods, political conventions, I've been to Bosnia, I've been to Iraq - and nothing I ever wrote got the reaction that the first Nathaniel column got. Something about the Nathaniel story clicked."
In his columns, Lopez described the story of Ayers, an exceptional musician whose battle with mental illness took him from classical music training at Julliard to the streets of Los Angeles.
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