Radio interviews with the fascinating. My radio show via Rare Bird Blogtalk Radio now has logged in fifteen shows.
One caveat: When you click on a link below, a short pause and an ad (about 10-20 seconds) first appears, not of my making, so do forgive, but then you'll hear the show as it ran live. Each show is thirty minutes. Listen at your leisure to all or part of any of the shows.
You can also find on my Facebook Page news for upcoming radio shows and the newest column I've written on the arts, culture and love—or for the latter, click the flower in the right-hand margin of this page.
Here's the list of the fifteen radio interviews so far. Click on the name and you'll be taken to the radio show:
Jaki Scarcello, author of Fifty and Fabulous: The best years of a woman's life Douglas Rogers, author of The Last Resort: a memoir of mischief and mayhem on a family farm in Africa Peter Cox, British literary agent
Margaret Brown, publisher of the digital magazine Shelf Unbound: What to read next in independent publishing Maureen Stanton, author of Killer Stuff and Tons of Money Robert G. Pielke, author of Rock Music in American Culture Alan Cheuse, author and NPR book reviewer
Jacquie Kubin: managing and senior editor of The Communities atThe Washington Times Sarah C. Harwell, poet, author of Sit Down Traveler Derek Haines, self-published author of more than 14 books, novels and essays
Ravi Shankar, poet, author of Deepening Groove The Third Man and Déjà Vu: A Love Story: Conversation with journalist Harvey Black about the Graham Greene screenplay and movie starring Orson Welles and the Henry Jaglom film (I hope to interview Jaglom in June! We'll see if I can catch him...) Dana Gioia, poet, former head of the National Endowment for the Arts and author most recently of Pity the Beautiful, poems
Eduardo Santiago, Cuban author of Tomorrow They Will Kiss Molly Peacock, poet, memoir writer and author of The Paper Garden: An Artist {Begins Her Life's Work} at 72 Michael Johnson, journalist who lives in Bordeaux France and writes for The International Herald Tribune, Open Letters, Facts and Arts, The Columnists--and more.
Enjoy and do let me know what you think. Comments always welcome.
Starting Saturday April 20 with a party at a terrific bookstore with some great folks. In Los Angeles? Come on over. I'll be there and would love to meet you.
Also on Sunday stop by the Rare Bird Booth #065 at the LATFB
I'll be signing books from 2:00 to 2:30.
Monday April 22, 7:30 PM: Beirut Fiction Night w/ Eduardo Santiago, Richard Kramer, and Mary L. Tabor
Last month, I posted The Next Big Thing and am reposting today because I've added, yes, two more books and authors you're gonna wanna check out. And the new Shelf Unbound is now out!
Poet Derek Walcott said in a 1997 lecture, “All art has to do with light.” And that’s what each of us, in this game of tag, is doing: Shedding light on literary works we love.
The Next Big Thing is a game of tag among literary folk.
If you’re lucky, someone loves your book and tags you to “PLAY.” Playing means you love the art of the novel, the poem, or know the best reader of both.
I was tagged by Anne Marie Ruff who wrote Through These Veins: Scientific intrigue, love and a look into the cure for Aids. We’ll be talking soon on the Rare Bird Radio Show where we’ll get more of the scoop on her writing life. Link back to her and see her answers to the ten questions that, with some variations as needed, are part of this game of literary tag.
Catch them if you can:
The marvelous Margaret Brown publishes Shelf Unboundand it is The Next Big Thing. Brown has a blog to go along with the mag. Margaret Brown is doing what every published writer who has worked in the solitude of a literal or metaphorical attic could hope for: She reads to find the next big thing. She’s inspired by stories that matter and by writing that cares about the way that language expresses our humanity. She has created a digital magazine that is so gorgeous you can’t resist opening its pages on your computer, your phone or you iPad and every book she discovers links to the place you can buy it—and Shelf Unbound is free. Did an angel send her?
Cuban novelist Eduardo Santiago loves to play. Read Tomorrow They will Kiss, where Cinderella meets her match in New Jersey among the Cuban immigrants who struggle to hold body and soul together. You gotta love his women and him! He helps literary folk as if it's his mission. And in 2006 he wrote an op-ed for the LA Times that includes one of the funniest, most candid bits I’ve ever read on meeting Fidel Castro by accident in the offices of CBS news! And here’s a scoop: He’s got a new novel coming soon.
Sarah Harwell, poet, author of Sit Down Traveler writes evocative poetry that will haunt you. In Sarah's book, you’ll hear echoes of T.S. Eliot, Kafka, Pablo Neruda and, believe it or not, Tarot cards and the evocative question of predicting the future. In one of her poems, the speaker says, “I have the number of a psychic,/ but when I phone, I answer.” She explores life, love: The good, the hard and the unpredictability of it all with the Tarot Cards as her guide and ours.
Ravi Shankar, poet, is a philanthropist of the heart because he sheds light on other writers wherever his name appears. He’s written Thirty Stills, a seamless collection where, like Wallace Stevens, Shankar creates “his unreal out of what is real” and amazingly blends the poems of this book into another: Deepening Groove that won the 2009 National Poetry Review Book Prize. The link here is to his literary journal Drunken Boat. We'll find out soon, where he will play and shed light.
Jaki Scarcello wrote Fifty & Fabulous. Jaki quotes Joan Erickson, the wife of psychologist Eric Erickson. On her 94th birthday Joan said, “Our bodies wear out, our thoughts come more slowly. But our life cycles are our most creative effort. We can’t ever not be in them, right? The struggle is to try and obtain a sense of participation in your life the whole way through.”
Jaki is a living, breathing example of this spirit. She'll be my guest on Rare Bird Radio on May 8 at 4 pm eastern time. Tune in then or go to the Goodreads book club and listen after it's run.
Douglas Rogers wrote the memoir The Last Resort, that recounts the harrowing story of his parents and their farm in Zimbabwe. His first book by this established journalist has been widely and well-reviewed. Douglas will be my guest on Rare Bird Radio on April 10. Tune in live at 4 pm eastern time go to the Goodreads Book Club to hear the interview once it's run.
Here are my answers to the Ten Questions that are part of this literary game of tag (Writers I've tagged will adjust their q.s as needed so that this all makes sense—or so we hope):
What is the title of your book?
Golly, thanks for asking. Who by Fire
Where did the idea come from for the book?
I saw a fire in Iowa, a controlled burn of an old wooden storage bin, and I knew I would write about it. But lost love is closer to the heart of the book.
What genre does your book fall under?
Dare I say literary fiction? It’s a love story but so unconventional that I can’t call it a romance.
Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition?
Since I recently met the gorgeous Lena Olin and since I love all her work and since Lena is the name of my main female character, it’s gotta be Olin. She has a husband and you’ll have to pick an actor who can stand up to Olin. I don’t dare. Lena has a lover named Isaac, aka Pierce Brosnan. Isaac is married to Evan, such a dear soul that I see Laura Linney in the role. But this is all make believe and wishes and dreams.
What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?
Love and betrayal and the interminable chain of longing may lead to forgiveness if you’re willing to search for heroism in the ordinary.
Was your book self-published or represented by an agency?
Agency: Outer Banks Publishing Group
How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript?
Two years and then eight more to figure out how the narration works.
What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?
I hope I learned something from Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair but somehow I think D.H. Lawrence’s Women in Love is deep in my unconscious mind.
Who or what inspired you to write this book?
The deep-seated fear that I was losing the man I loved.
What else about your book might pique the reader's interest?
This excerpt, I hope: I’ve heard that color can’t be remembered or that color memory is a gift like perfect pitch. Whether or not one has perfect color memory, color evokes memory, the way of all the senses. Like the scent of apples and pears—her skin. Like the sound of the first four notes of the Schubert in G flat—the echo of her climax in my mind. The red-orange-pink of the tiles I see in the old brick in the buildings where I live on 21st Street—her mouth when she slept and then when she was gone, when all that was left was memory and my obsession with fire (blue, red, white, green, black fire) and with perspective.
Bonus: Margaret Brown, publisher of Shelf Unbound, the magazine that is in the business of shedding light, was my guest on Rare Bird Radio on March 27. Here's the interview with this visionary for books
The Next Big Thing is a game of tag among literary folk. Poet
Derek Walcott said in a 1997 lecture, “All art has to do with light.” And
that’s what each of us, in this game of tag, is doing: Shedding light on literary works we love.
If you’re lucky, someone loves your book and tags you to “PLAY.”
Playing means you love the art of the novel, the poem, or know the best reader
of both.
I was tagged by Anne Marie Ruff who wrote Through These Veins: Scientific
intrigue, love and a look into the cure for Aids. We’ll be talking soon on the Rare Bird Radio Show where we’ll get more of the scoop on her writing life. Link back
to her and see her answers to the ten questions that, with some variations as
needed, are part of this game of literary tag.
Catch them if you can:
The marvelous Margaret Brown publishes Shelf Unbound and it is The Next Big Thing. Brown has a blog to go along with the mag. Margaret Brown is doing what every published writer who has
worked in the solitude of a literal or metaphorical attic could hope for: She
reads to find the next big thing. She’s inspired by stories that matter and by
writing that cares about the way that language expresses our humanity. She has
created a digital magazine that is so gorgeous you can’t resist opening its
pages on your computer, your phone or you iPad and every book she discovers
links to the place you can buy it. Did an angel send her?
Cuban novelist Eduardo Santiago loves to play. Read Tomorrow They will Kiss, where
Cinderella meets her match in New Jersey among the Cuban immigrants who struggle
to hold body and soul together. You gotta love his women and him! He helps literary folk as if it's his mission. And in 2006 he wrote an op-ed for the LA Times that includes one of the
funniest, most candid bits I’ve ever read on meeting Fidel Castro by accident
in the offices of CBS news! And here’s a scoop: He’s got a new novel coming
soon.
Sarah Harwell, poet, author of Sit Down Travelerwrites evocative poetry that will haunt you. Sarah doesn't have a blog so her tagging will appear back here with me. In Sarah's book, you’ll hear
echoes of T.S. Eliot, Kafka, Pablo Neruda and, believe it or not, Tarot cards
and the evocative question of predicting the future. In one of her poems, the
speaker says, “I have the number of a psychic,/ but when I phone, I answer.”
She explores life, love: The good, the hard and the unpredictability of it all with
the Tarot Cards as her guide and ours.
Ravi Shankar, poet, is a philanthropist of the heart
because he sheds light on other writers wherever his name appears. He’s written Thirty Stills, a seamless collection where, like Wallace Stevens, Shankar creates “his unreal out of what is real” and
amazingly blends the poems of this book into another: Deepening Groove that won the 2009 National Poetry Review Book
Prize. The link here is to his literary journal Drunken Boat. We'll find out soon, where he will play and shed light.
Here are my answers to the Ten Questions that are part of
this literary game of tag (Writers I've tagged will adjust their q.s as needed so that this all makes sense—or so we hope):
What is the title of
your book?
Golly, thanks for asking. Who by Fire
Where did the idea
come from for the book?
I saw a fire in Iowa, a controlled burn of an old wooden
storage bin, and I knew I would write about it. But lost love is closer to the
heart of the book.
What genre does your
book fall under?
Dare I say literary
fiction? It’s a love story but so unconventional that I can’t call it a
romance.
Which actors would
you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition?
Since I recently met the gorgeous Lena Olin and since I love
all her work and since Lena is the name of my main female character, it’s gotta
be Olin. She has a husband and you’ll have to pick an actor who can stand up to
Olin. I don’t dare. Lena has a lover named Isaac, aka Pierce Brosnan. Isaac is
married to Evan, such a dear soul that I see Laura Linney in the role. But this
is all make believe and wishes and dreams.
What is the
one-sentence synopsis of your book?
Love and betrayal and the interminable chain of longing may
lead to forgiveness if you’re willing to search for heroism in the ordinary.
Was your book self-published or represented by an agency?
Agency: Outer Banks Publishing Group
How long did it take
you to write the first draft of your manuscript?
Two years and then eight more to figure out how the
narration works.
What other books
would you compare this story to within your genre?
I hope I learned something from Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair but somehow I
think D.H. Lawrence’s Women in Love
is deep in my unconscious mind.
Who or what inspired
you to write this book?
The deep-seated fear that I was losing the man I loved.
What else about your
book might pique the reader's interest?
This excerpt, I hope: I’ve
heard that color can’t be remembered or that color memory is a gift like
perfect pitch. Whether or not one has perfect color memory, color evokes
memory, the way of all the senses. Like the scent of apples and pears—her skin.
Like the sound of the first four notes of the Schubert in G flat—the echo of
her climax in my mind. The red-orange-pink of the tiles I see in the old brick
in the buildings where I live on 21st Street—her mouth when she slept and then
when she was gone, when all that was left was memory and my obsession with fire
(blue, red, white, green, black fire) and with perspective.
Bonus: Margaret Brown, publisher of Shelf Unbound, the magazine that is in the business of shedding light, will be my guest on Rare Bird Radio on March 27. Here's the bonus scoop: her April/May cover.
I write in gratitude. My thanks to Margaret Brown, the publisher of Shelf Unbound: What to Read Next in Independent Publishing. Margaret Brown read my novel Who by Fire. She found it worthy and interviewed me in a two-page feature of this fabulous and gorgeous publication.
This journalist, who is a lifetime member of the National Book Critics Circle, has a quarter century of experience in the book publishing and magazine editing worlds and she is re-inventing how we approach magazines while discovering writers who are not coming out of the big six publication houses.
Her questions show how deeply she read the novel that I wrote about in a post on this site that Margaret refers to in her interview:
Shelf Unbound's February/March issue takes us on journeys from The Odyssey to Stanley Kubrick—and I got in there somehow.
Those of us who choose to write in the solitude of our attics expect anonymity even when we hope to close the round through publication. I feel lucky when a friend or family member chooses to read me, am deeply humbled by that extraordinary gift of time and, yes, effort.
So, when a complete stranger does what Margaret did, I must thank her, express my indebtedness and recall how important it is for me to help others who struggle in solitude: The reason I taught for so many years, the reason I have tutored for free, the reason I have worked so often for no compensation, or as with George Washington University, where I taught for more than a decade, with virtually no compensation (something very few if any of my students ever knew) and the reason I continue to do so.
Magaret Brown has now agreed to be my guest on Rare Bird Radio on March 27, 2013.
You can access all the links to my interviews with poet Dana Gioia; novelist Eduardo Santiago; poet, memoirist and historian Molly Peacock; journalist Michael Johnson (He not only read my novel; he reviewed it); poet Ravi Shankar; poet Sarah C. Harwell; self-published author (some 15 books!) Derek Haines; journalist Jacquie Kubin; NPR's "Voice of the Book" Alan Cheuse, who's been the master of discovering the best of the best, by joining the Goodreads Who by Fire Book Club.
Here's the paradox: Rare Bird Radio owns the book club site and the owner's choice has been to say that we'll be discussing my novel, something I've not done on any show so far. That means you don't have to read the novel to join and find all the links to the radio interviews of folks who fascinate.
But Margaret Brown did read my novel and for the rest of my life and breath I will be indebted to her.
Did you ever think, I'll never get to ask ____ the things I really want to know? Jacquie Kubin, Chief Communities Officer and Executive Editor and the architect, meaning she built it and
they came, of the Communities at The Washington Times, never sleeps, is so busy that getting an interview with her seemed impossible. But on January 30, we talked and she was a WOW, to say the least. She talked about her faith in women, about the digital revolution where she's a key player, her views on what the word "journalist" should mean, the Reverend Sun Myung Moon, whether writers need to be politically conservative (I'm not) to write for her, writers she adores and how and why she home-schooled her son.
Jacquie Kubin
To say the least, this reluctant interviewee was fascinating, but here's the thing: She was candid and totally lovable. See if you agree and leave a comment if you do or don't, what you liked, what you didn't. Join the conversation and I'll respond. I bet Jacquie might too. The interview is on (click to get to the show) Rare Bird Radio. She even asked writers—"It does no good to scream from you basement", she notes—to contact her. My thanks to the lovely Jacquie Kubin.
To hear all the radio interviews I've done, join the Goodreads Book club and hear poet and professor Dana Gioia, Cuban author Eduardo Santiago, poet and author of The Paper Garden Molly Peacock, poet Ravi Shankar, self-published author Derek Haines (he told how he publishes and why he does it without help! Get the scoop), and coming up February 20, NPR's longtime "Voice of Books" Alan Cheuse will be my guest.
Maybe you'll be next. Contact me if you want to be on the show.
I want to know what you think. So comment here and at the book club.
I had the honor and pleasure to interview the evocative poet Sarah C. Harwell on Rare Bird Radio where you can hear that conversation.
Sarah C. Harwell is gorgeous inside and out and she writes evocative poetry that will haunt you. We discussed her work, T.S. Eliot, Kafka, Pablo Neruda and, believe it or not, Tarot cards and predicting the future. Of course, even T.S. Eliot was no stranger to the Tarot deck as The Waste Land so richly proves.
I urge you to buy Sarah's book Sit Down Travelerand be blown away as, indeed, I was.
Here is the poem she read during the interview and that appeared in The Washington Post on Sunday, May 11, 2008, in the column "Poet's Choice," introduced by Mary Karr. This poem on motherhood is brave and insightful on the gentle, inexorable burden we who have children find suddenly thrust upon us in the hope and challenge that we can protect our charges, keep them safe and love them well.
DEAD for Hannah
The way my daughter sleeps it's as if she's talking
to the dead. Now she is one. I watch her eyes roll
backwards in her head, her senses fold
one by one, and then her breathing quiets to a beat.
Every night she fights this silent way of being
with all the whining ammunition she has.
She wins a tired story, a smothered song, the small
and willful links to life that carry her away.
Welcome to the Egyptian burial. She's gone to Hades
with her stuffed animals. When she wakes,
the sad circles disappeared, she blinks
before she knows me. I have listened
to one million breaths of her. And every night
my body seizes when she leaves to go
where I am not, and yet every night I urge her, go.
I urge all my readers to join the Goodreads Book Club (Bless you, Sarah, for honoring me by joining) where I am interviewing OTHER artists—not as the site asserts (Rare Bird Radio owns the book club site; I am the interviewer and moderator for the book club)—I repeat: not to discuss—my just released novel Who by Fire. I talk about why I say: not to discussmy own work in my blog post entitled Who by Fire, a novel: What if no one reads it?Some day a discussion of my own work might be worthwhile but here's what keeps me going: The writing of the book was the gift. I hope what I've written in that post encourages all who work in the attempt to create art in the silence of their attics to be encouraged no matter what. The attempt to do so affirms that the search for meaning matters.
Sarah C. Harwell will make you believe, as I do, that that last statement is indeed so. This is a collection of poems worthy of reading and re-reading. Buy it!
And do let me and Sarah know what you think about the poem posted here, or anything we discussed in the interview. I want to hear you! On Twitter after the inauguration: I saw this tweet by @jaktraks
