Thad Carhart

We hear excerpts from a dramatic reading of Ernest J. Gaines’ novel, A LESSON BEFORE DYING by Enchanted Circle Theater actors. It’s about a young black man in Jim Crow Louisiana who is condemned to death. And we interview Thad Carhart about his new historical novel, ACROSS THE ENDLESS RIVER. It’s about Jean Baptiste Charbonneau, the son of Sacagawea who was a guide on the Lewis and Clark expedition and who lived both in the United States and Europe.

A Dramatic Reading

One in seven people sentenced to die are later proven innocent, according to studies cited by the ACLU. This terrible injustice is one of the themes of Ernest J. Gaines powerful novel, . Another is the dignity of all human beings, no matter what their situation is. Gaines, who is probably best known as the author of DRIVING MISS DAISY, explores these themes through the story of Jefferson, a young black man who is sentenced to death for his role in a botched robbery, even though he is not the killer. The action takes place in rural Louisiana during the 1950’s, when Jim Crow was still alive and well.

Published in 1997–and an Oprah favorite–”A Lesson Before Dying” was chosen as this year’s selection for One Book Holyoke, a community project based on the idea of the Big Read, a program by the National Endowment for the Arts to encourage reading. When I interviewed the founder of the Big Read, Dana Gioia, back in 2005, he asked me why there were no Big Read programs in Massachusetts. There are some now, and One Book Holyoke has gotten support from the Big Read. The idea is simple, Holyoke residents read a selected book during a set period of time. They then get together for a variety of activities planned around the book.

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One activity was a dramatic reading by the Holyoke based company, Enchanted Circle Theater. They compressed the action of the book into a dramatic script of about an hour and a half. Writers Voice went to a reading at Holyoke City Hall for an audience of local high school students.

You can listen to the entire reading on the Web Extra, but we air excerpts on the show.

The actors are Gilbert McCauley as Jefferson, James Lightfoot as Grant Wiggins, L’Kuicha Parks as Jefferson’s godmother Miss Emma, and James Emery in the roles of the book’s white characters, the defense lawyer and Mr. Henri Pichot.

You can get the Oprah Book Club edition of the audio book on Audible.com

The son of Sacagawea

Thad Carhart’s first book was the memoir, , in which he chronicled finding a piano shop tucked away on a little street that helped him rediscover his love of playing the piano. An American citizen with an Irish passport who lives in Paris, Carhart is an expatriate like the protagonist of his new book, . It’s an historical novel about the fascinating life of Jean Baptiste Charbonneau.

“you had this extraordinary story of survival and determination and…by anybody’s lights and in anybody’s culture that’s a remarkable life’s beginning.”

Charbonneau was the son of the Indian Sacagawea and a French Canadian voyageur. He was born while his parents were accompanying the explorers Lewis and Clark on their famous expedition of 1804 to 1806, was adopted by William Clark after his mother died, and lived for years in Europe as the assistant of Duke Friedrich Paul Wilhelm von Württemberg before returning to his native land.

Read an Excerpt from ACROSS THE ENDLESS RIVER

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One activity was a dramatic reading by the Holyoke based company, Enchanted Circle Theater. They compressed the action of the book into a dramatic script of about an hour and a half. Writers Voice went to a reading at Holyoke City Hall for an audience of local high school students. You can listen to the entire reading here, but we air excerpts on the show.

Listen to the full show here.

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Allan Kronzek

John Connolly

Irish mystery writer John Connolly tells us about his new spine-tingling and funny bone-tickling thriller for smart teens, THE GATES. And we air an archived interview with magician Alan Kronzek about THE SORCERER’S COMPANION, A Guide to the Magical World of Harry Potter.

The Gates of Hell Are About To Open, Want To Peek?

It’s that time of year again to turn away from the really scary things, like war, climate change and economic meltdowns to the lighter side of horror. Our first guest today is John Connolly. Best known for his Charlie Parker series, Connolly has also written a number of books that dip into the spookier side of fantasy fiction. One is , about a young boy who finds the characters in his books have come to life.

Connolly’s newest addition to that genre is . He jokingly calls it “a book about satanism for kids” — older kids, ages 12 and up. Grownups can enjoy it too, as I did. It reminded me of my own childhood fantasy favorites, like Edward Eager’s Half Magic, Edward Ormondroyd’s David and the Phoenix, and the Chronicles of Narnia of CS Lewis.

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Although THE GATES is in that vein of magical adventure, it’s more of a tongue-in-cheek romp through horror. It also has a smattering of fascinating facts about science and religion throughout.

An intrepid young boy, his spunky dachshund, and a soft-hearted demon named Nurd save the world from an invasion from Hell. It all happens when young Samuel Johnson notices some strange goings-on at a house in the neighborhood, 666 Crowley Road. It’s all the fault of the *Large Hadron Collider in Cern, Switzerland, which has opened a crack in space-time to let through a very nasty advance party sent by the Great Malevolence himself.

A Guide to the Magical World of Harry Potter

Performance magician Alan Kronzek really likes the Harry Potter series. He also knows a lot of magic lore, including the Philosophers Stone, shamanism, wizards, alchemists, basilisks and manticores. He talks with us about these and the connection between magic and religion and magic and science. He’s the author of the bestselling book, .

And check out our Halloween Book Picks For Kids (and Grownups!).

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Wanda Urbanska

Terry Gould

Investigative journalist Terry Gould talks about his book, MARKED FOR DEATH: Dying for the Story in the World’s Most Dangerous Places. It explores the stories of seven journalists who exposed the truth — even though they knew they’d be killed for their work. And Wanda Urbanska of the TV show Simple Living tells us the secret of genuine happiness. She edited LESS IS MORE with Cecile Andrews.

Journalism As An Act of Courage

At least thirty two journalists were killed in 2009 while reporting dangerous stories in dangerous places. Since 1992, 758 journalists have been killed on the job. Contrary to common assumptions, most of them — 85% — were not foreigners working in country as war correspondents. Instead, they were local journalists exposing official corruption in their own communities.

Terry Gould says those communities are most often in countries where corruption is embedded in the formal structure of government — places like Russia, Colombia, the Philippines and Bangla Desh. There, lawlessness takes place within the law, the system of organized crime is locked into the business of the nation — and journalists are murdered with impunity. Ninety five per cent of the people who ordered their murders remain unpunished.

“While a lot of these journalists had been targeted beforehand, they persisted in their story, knowing they would almost certainly be killed for doing so. And I wondered who these amazing people were.”

The seven journalists Gould profiles in his new book, knew they would be killed. Yet they persisted. More than that, they were willing to give their lives defending the common people against the powerful interests that preyed on them.

Terry Gould wanted to know what made these journalists tick, what “psychology of sacrifice” drove them to persist in their investigations — people like Anna Politovskaya of Russia. She was murdered the very day Gould was on his way to interview her about the killings of two other Russian journalists. He found her and most of the other journalists he profiled to be deeply flawed, if incredibly courageous, individuals — all except the saintly Manik Saha of Bangla Desh, who was motivated by his own scientific theory of goodness.

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Gould has been following organized crime throughout his long career as an investigative journalist. He is also the author of as well as other books and numerous articles. He won the Singh Hayer Award for Bravery in Journalism, sponsored by the Canadian Journalists for Free Expression.

His book, MARKED FOR DEATH takes its title from a report by the Committee to Protect Journalists, a NY-based organization that keeps track of press freedom abuses around the world and lobbies on behalf of threatened journalists.

Read an except about Manik Saha from Terry Gould’s MARKED FOR DEATH

Watch a video clip of Gould talking about the book.

Less is More?

What makes us happy? That question is answered by a host of writers in a new book co-edited by guest Wanda Urbanska. She says genuine happiness comes from having more time and downshifting to a lower consumption, more satisfying lifestyle. The book she co-edited, , counts among its contributors Bill McKibben, author of DEEP ECONOMY, Ernst Callenbach who wrote the 1970’s classic ECOTOPIA, John de Graaf of AFFLUENZA, and Juliet Schor, author of THE OVERWORKED AMERICAN and its sequel, THE OVERSPENT AMERICAN.

Wanda Urbanska hosts the TV show Simple Living. Her co-editor, Cecile Andrews, wrote the book SLOW IS BEAUTIFUL and is co-founder of Phinney Ecovillage in Seattle.

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Susan Stinson

Nicholson Baker

Nicholson Baker talks about his new novel, THE ANTHOLOGIST. His hero Paul Chowder is looking back over his whole life and wondering what it’s amounted to. He’s also facing the dreaded disease: writer’s block. And Susan Stinson is just finishing her new novel, SPIDER IN THE TREE. She tells us about her protagonist, the 18th century preacher Jonathan Edwards who preached fire and brimstone – and love.

Nicholson Baker

The protagonist of Nicholson Baker’s new novel bears an uncanny resemblance to the author himself – like the character, Paul Chowder, Baker has struggled with writing an introduction to a poetry anthology. They both write in the same barn loft, with the same view. They both write poems – good and serviceable, if not great. They’ve both even injured their fingers carrying heavy computers downstairs. And they’ve both struggled with disappointing loved ones and overcoming those disappointments.

By turns funny, poignant and expository, Baker’s new novel follows Chowder as he struggles to do the introduction and get it out to his increasingly anxious publisher. He also wants to get his girlfriend to come back – she’s left him in exasperation over his failure to put his nose to the grindstone and start, much less finish, the task. Along the way, Baker (through Chowder) leads the reader into a fascinating exploration of poetry in rhyme. He invites us to consider the uses of rhyme, how free verse usurped rhyme in modern poetry, and even some tips on how to write verse.

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As is typical in Baker’s fiction, not much happens, but much is observed, all in language that is filled with delightful turns of the phrase. Baker’s approach to fiction is influenced by John Updike, a friend and literary mentor. Among Baker’s other novels are and .

Baker writes non-fiction as well as novels. Last year, we spoke with him about HUMAN SMOKE: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization. It was a kind of anthology itself, composed as it was of clippings from historical documents, newspapers and other contemporary observations from those experiencing World War II. And Baker received a National Book Critics Circle Award in 2001 for another nonfiction book, .

Susan Stinson

“Many people consider [Jonathan Edwards] the most brilliant theologian the country has ever produced. His most famous sermon was ‘Sinners in the Hands of An Angry God’, but he also wrote quite lyrically and beautifully about beauty as religion and love.”

We last spoke with Susan Stinson when we interviewed Leonard Nimoy about his photography book THE FULL BODY PROJECT in 2006. Stinson was on a panel about cultural images of fat women, with Nimoy, Stinson and and author Leslea Newman. All three were guests on that episode of Writers Voice.

How the culture views fat women is a topic Susan Stinson has written about in her novels, such as FAT GIRL DANCES WITH ROCKS. But now, she’s turning her authorial talents to a very different kind of subject. She’s just finishing a novel, titled SPIDER IN A TREE, about the 18th century theologian and minister Jonathan Edwards, who preached in Northampton, Massachusetts.

His church, now named First Churches, is still in use. Hadley, MA, right across the Connecticut River from Northampton, is celebrating its 350th anniversary, and it’s where Jonathan Edwards’ sister fled after her brother was drummed out of the church by his congregation as a result of the so-called “Communion Controversy”. The novel also takes up the issue of Edwards’ ownership of slaves and explores what life was like during the Great Awakening.

Links

• Read an excerpt from SPIDER IN A TREE.
• Read Jonathan Edwards’ sermon, Sinners in the Hands of An Angry God.

Books Mentioned This Show

• check it out on Amazon.com
• check it out on Amazon.com
• check it out on Amazon.com
• check it out on Amazon.com

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Last night I visited a local pub with an old friend I hadn’t seen in decades. He’s in town to talk to college students about his new film, What’s An Economy For, Anyway? It’s a good question. And John de Graaf, the filmmaker, comes up with a good answer. He says an economy is for “the greatest good for the greatest number over the long haul.”

De Graaf is best known for his film (and book) , one of the first popular works to point out that our obsessive quest to amass more stuff (and the money to buy it) is destroying our communities, our health, and our planet. It came out before the U.S. was confronted with a sudden, drastic cure to its “affluenza” in the shape of an economic meltdown that is seriously crimping the buying habits of the American consumer.

An upside to the downside of the recession?

Over a glass of Merlot, de Graaf told me there’s an upside to the downside of the recession (or “jobless recovery”, as it’s being termed now): health improves during recessions. As people spend less, they have more time for proven health boosters such as sleeping more, volunteering in their community, and getting together with friends and family. They drive less, smoke less, drink less, eat less artery-clogging rich foods – and of course, have less work-related stress. And that’s despite the fact that unemployment has often been associated with higher rates of suicide, domestic violence and chronic illness, not to speak of the potential consequences of losing one’s health insurance.

In other words, maybe “less is more”, at least after we are assured a basic package of goods and services to support our well being: decent health care, housing, education, a living wage job and a healthy environment. That’s what another new book of that title, edited by John de Graaf’s good buddies Cecile Andrews and Wanda Urbanska, says.

Schor is cofounder of The Center for the New American Dream, a non-profit dedicated to helping Americans “consume responsibly to protect the environment, enhance quality of life, and promote social justice.” Her chapter in Less Is More is called “Down-shifting To A Carbon-Friendly Economy.”

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She starts out with an idea she calls the “third rail in American politics”: that per capita consumption has to go down in the US “to achieve sustainable levels of greenhouse gas emissions”. To those who claim that sustainability can be achieved simply by increasing efficiency, she points to the paradox that as efficiency rises, so does consumption (e.g. more efficient cars = more miles driven). She also says those who put their faith in such greening methods as “Factor Four” and zero waste are overly optimistic.

But, Schor says, we can “downshift” to an economy that “meets people’s needs”, allows for a “healthy, well-functioning” private enterprise economy, and achieves carbon neutrality. She says that by workers trading money for time, consumer demand falls, thereby lowering the stress on the environment. Employment can actually rise, by decreasing per worker hours and spreading work among more people. Of course, per hour compensation would have to rise, or be compensated for by greater social provision of needs like health care, housing subsidies, and education. Countries such as the Netherlands, Germany and Denmark are all models of prosperous capitalist economies with fewer work hours and lower per capita consumption.

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Downshifting our economy to reach carbon neutrality is a must if we are to adapt our communities to the double whammy of climate chaos and resource depletion. So says a short but pithy book by David Holmgren, one of the originators of permaculture as an idea. lays out four options human societies face.

The “Brown-Tech” scenario happens with extreme climate change coupled with a slow decline in fossil fuel use. It involves “corporate fascism” imposing top down solutions to the crises, wringing every last drop out of fossil fuel resources, with authoritarian governments enforcing stability as living standards for the majority drastically decline.

The Green Tech scenario results if climate change turns out to be more benign. A “distributed powerdown” slowly reduces fossil fuel use while increasing conservation of resources and technological innovation. (For a fascinating – and optimistic — exploration of what this could look like, check out Harvey Wasserman’s book, .)

The Earth Steward scenario involves a rapid decline in fossil fuel use due more to economic collapse and the resulting political “stresses” (wars) than to climate change, which is mild also in this scenario. But the resulting collapse of society engenders a bottom-up renewal, with re-localized economies and a simplified technology base.

The final Lifeboat scenario is the most pessimistic. In it, climate catastrophe and fossil fuel depletion lead to widespread death through famine, wars and climate disasters, with a halving of global population. Human civilization is in triage mode, with oases of sustainable social organization, knowledge and technology preserving the possibility for some future recovery in the long term.

Faced with this dire prediction, perhaps the shocked reader will want to turn to Ralph Nader’s new book, . (He’s an upcoming guest on Writers Voice) Maybe the planet’s lifeboat will turn out to be – a yacht.

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Chris Hedges

Are you pessimistic about the future? Are economic woes, climate chaos, the capture of Washington by special interests and a host of other nail-biting problems in the reality-based universe getting you down?

Chris Hedges on threats from the Right, but also reasons for hope.

Listen to the full interview and read the article here.

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Chris Pyle

Chris Hedges

Journalist Chris Hedges talks about EMPIRE OF ILLUSION: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle. He says Americans are in thrall to a culture of narcissism, revenge, and fake “happiness” that is destroying our democracy – and our power to connect genuinely with others. And former Army intelligence officer and constitutional scholar Chris Pyle says the Bush Administration is GETTING AWAY WITH TORTURE. He tells us about secret government, war crimes, and the rule of law.

Empire of Illusion

Are you pessimistic about the future? Are economic woes, climate chaos, the capture of Washington by special interests and a host of other nail-biting problems in the reality-based universe getting you down?

Well, rather than doing something about it, why don’t you just sit back and forgot your worries by watching World Wide Wrestling, Jerry Springer, a gonzo porn video, or, for that matter, a PBS marathon with Deepak Chopra on how we can all be happy if we just think happy thoughts?

Pulitzer prize-winner Chris Hedges examines America’s turn from reality to illusion in his new book, . He examines five areas of illusion: in literacy, love, wisdom, happiness and our idea of America. He says that the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves are a dangerous pablum that’s sapping our ability to solve real problems. And, meanwhile, while “Brand” Obama exhorts us that “Yes, We Can”, American democracy is crumbling under our feet. Driven by corporate greed and domination, the spectacle society Hedges explores is, he says, creating a kind of “inverted totalitarianism” that exploits violence, pornography, and the anodyne nostrums of “positive psychology” to numb or lull us into passivity.

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Listen to the extended interview with Hedges on threat and hope here.

A former Pulitzer Prize-winning war correspondent and divinity school graduate, Hedges is also the author of numerous books, including the bestseller, . He is a senior fellow at The Nation Institute and writes for Foreign Affairs, Harper’s, The New York Review of Books, and Mother Jones. He is also a columnist for Truthdig.com.

Getting Away With Torture

The U.S. used to be the refuge for people fleeing human rights threats from dictatorial regimes abroad. America held herself up as an example of respect for law and human rights. No more. Under the Bush Administration (although it started earlier) human rights crimes like kidnapping, torture, and imprisonment without charges spread their stain on American policy and reputation.

If you want to get a full picture of how the Bush torture policy was devised and executed, you need go no farther than Chris Pyle’s new book, . From George Bush and Dick Cheney to George Tenet and Albert Gonzales, the torture policy was created and promoted with obsessive attention to detail. The “bad apples” of Abu Ghraib reached into the highest levels of the U.S. government. Not only that, it didn’t work to make us safer; quite the opposite.

“This was not something that went on out in the field by angry soldiers who had lost comrades. It was so closely supervised, the lawyers were consulted to justify techniques that under American law had always been considered absolutely forbidden…”

Pyle knows a lot about how the US government violates the rule of law. A former Army intelligence officer, in 1970 he blew the whistle on the military’s domestic spying on civilians in the civil rights and antiwar movements. He served as an investigator on the Church Committee investigating the spying. That led to laws limiting domestic military surveillance; laws that were undermined under the Bush administration.

Pyle is a constitutional scholar, whose previous books include . We talked to him about the latter in 2006. He teaches constitutional law at Mount Holyoke College. In Getting Away With Torture, he brings all the evidence together to paint a fascinating portrait of how the war on terror – and the drive for revenge – has undermined our basic civil freedoms.

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John Pipkin

Nick Reding

We interview Nick Reding about how the methamphetamine epidemic is eating away at rural America. His book is METHLAND: The Death and Life of an American Small Town. And John Pipkin tells us about his debut novel WOODSBURNER. It’s about a very bad day in the life of Henry David Thoreau: when he started a forest fire that burned three hundred acres. Pipkin uses the fire as a starting point to examine the destruction human passions can cause.

Crystal Meth in the Heartland

Journalist Nick Reding grew up in the American heartland, then a place of small farms and good jobs in stable communities. In 2005 he went back to the heartland: to the town of Oelwein, Iowa — a place that used to be a lot like Reding’s own hometown. Now, it’s a community torn apart by the meth epidemic, with families destroyed, kids abused and neglected, broken lives and a poisoned environment.

An example of individual failings? No, Reding says. Oelwein’s tweakers and meth sellers are former hardworking Americans who were set adrift by a heartless corporate economy. It foreclosed on their farms, sent jobs abroad, and slashed wages by two thirds for the jobs that were left. Reding’s book is .

“… if you’re a guy who just lost your job, or whose father just lost his farm and now your wages just got cut two-thirds at the meatpacking plant, it’s not an unfair stretch to say that you’ve got big reasons to want to feel a little better about how poorly things are going. And meth is a cheap way to do that.”

Reding introduces us to some memorable people: meth dealer Laurie Arnold (sister of actor Tom Arnold), Nathan Lein, Oelwein’s county prosecutor and the town doctor, Dr. Halberg, eighty percent of whose practice is taken up with patients who are there because of meth.

Nick Reding is also author of .

Thoreau: burning down the woods

One fine April day in 1844 Henry David Thoreau was on an outing with a friend. They caught some fish, and Thoreau lit a match to start a cookfire. The woods were dry, the fire spread, and by day’s end three hundred acres of woodland had been destroyed.

The fire lies at the center of John Pipkin’s new novel, . The book’s action takes place over the course of that fateful day. Along the way, the reader meets an amazing cast of characters whose lives are forever changed by the fire Thoreau set. Thoreau’s life was also changed. He was working in the family pencil making business. He’d tried his hand at being a tutor, a teacher and a published writer. And he hadn’t yet had much success at all. After the fire — and possibly because of it — Ralph Waldo Emerson bought the land around Walden Pond and the rest is history…

From our interview with John Pipkin, author of WOODSBURNER:

“Thoreau [Frequently Asked Questions about Henry David Thoreau] really seems to have been at a crossroads of his life at this point. All of the great ambitions that he had for his life had yet to be fulfilled. And so, looking back now across the span of history we can see the things he’s going to do and the person he’s going to become, but he hasn’t quite gotten there yet…So in the Spring of 1844, Henry David Thoreau is essentially a pencil-maker. And he’s making a variety of innovations to the business, he’s perfecting the machines that were used for making pencils and it’s at this time that he decides to make a trip on the river with his friend as a break from his job and that’s when the fire starts…He begins by talking about how he felt shameful and guilty about bringing this destruction upon the natural world and then he stops and says, but the fire was a glorious spectacle and he was the only one there to enjoy it and that fire itself is part of the natural world and the fire was only eating its natural food, so he really hadn’t done anything unnatural.”

John Pipkin writes in Austin, TX. He’s taught writing and literature at Saint Louis University, Boston University, and elsewhere.

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David Lovelace

Andrew Levy

Andrew Levy talks about . Weaving his personal story together with reflections on science, art, history and spirituality, he gives us a surprising portrait of this malady. And David Lovelace tells us why he is “proud to be bipolar” despite the troubles the disorder has brought him. His memoir is .

More than 10 percent — 32 million — of Americans suffer from migraines — those debilitating headaches that make all sound and light intolerable for the victim. Emily Dickinson described the sensation as “a service like a drum” that “keeps beating, beating, till I thought my mind was going numb.”

Andrew Levy’s first migraine came when he was only six years old; three years ago, they got much worse. He was bedridden for months, racked by pain and nausea that came like clockwork every morning and retreated only in the late afternoon.

To cope, he started keeping a migraine diary. He began by detailing his own experience, and how it affected his family. But it soon led him to explore the history, science, art, and metaphysics of migraine. It’s a terrific book: eloquent, thoughtful and highly informative. It opens a way to healing, not the body, but the mind for suffers of any chronic pain, physical or mental.

Levy teaches English at Butler University and is the author of several previous books, including The First Emancipator, and Postmodern American Fiction: A Norton Anthology.

I felt a funeral in my brain,
And mourners, to and fro,
Kept treading, treading, till it seemed
That sense was breaking through.
And when they all were seated,
A service like a drum
Kept beating, beating, till I thought
My mind was going numb.
And then I heard them lift a box,
And creak across my soul
With those same boots of lead,
Then space began to toll
As all the heavens were a bell,
And Being but an ear,
And I and silence some strange race,
Wrecked, solitary, here.
And then a plank in reason, broke,
And I dropped down and down–
And hit a world at every plunge,
And finished knowing–then—
–Emily Dickinson

Bipolar disorder has carved a wide swath through the psyche of David Lovelace’s family. He, his father, his mother and his brother all suffer from the illness. But, as Lovelace writes in his powerful new memoir SCATTERSHOT, being bipolar is not all bad. If the extremes of the disorder are controlled through medication, it can bring great creativity and artistic gifts to those who are under its sway.

David Lovelace is a poet, and he brings a poet’s sensibility to the writing of his memoir. He’s also former owner of the Montague Book Mill, a much-loved establishment many of our listeners in western Massachusetts know.

David Lovelace writes and manages his bipolar disorder in Shutesbury, MA.

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Chimamanda Adichie

Honor Moore

Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie talks about her stunning collection of stories . And poet Honor Moore reads from and tells us about . Our guests use fiction (Adichie) and poetry (Moore) to evoke the lives of women with power, honesty and grace.

Chimamanda Adichie

Award winning author Chimamanda Adichie was born in Nigeria and lives in the United States. She’s written about the hardships and political turbulence of her own country in her novels,   and . She’s also written about the dislocations and difficulties of Nigerian immigrants to England and the United States.

Her new short story collection, The Thing around Your Neck, traverses both these territories. The stories are powerful, both in their unflinching look at the some of the darkest recesses of the human heart, as well as the capacity for redemption. The Seattle Times said about the book, “Adichie shows a rare talent for finding the images and gestures that etch a narrative moment unforgettably in the reader’s memory.” And the Times Online called Adichie “one of Africa’s brightest new literary stars.”

Adichie’s favorite author is the great Chinua Achebe, also of Nigeria, who has inspired her own writing.

You can also buy the unabridged The Thing Around Your Neck as a great audio book.

Honor Moore

In her poem about the climber Elvira Shatayev, Adrienne Rich uses the image of a cable of blue fire as a metaphor for the solidarity of women facing the challenges of their lives. Before the women’s movement was born in the 1970’s, the idea of women’s solidarity was foreign to our culture. Women were supposed to compete for a man, not join together to explore and enrich their own lives.

Poet and writer Honor Moore was there at the beginning of that movement. She points out in her wonderful introduction to the new collection she edited, POEMS FROM THE WOMENS MOVEMENT, poetry was vital to the movement, giving eloquent voice to lives that had been until them unspoken. The collection is part of the American Poets Project from the library of America and spans works from 1965 to 1982.

Honor Moore has authored three collections of her own poetry, Red Shoes, Darling, and Memoir. She’s also written plays and a celebrated memoir The Bishop’s Daughter which was a National Book Award finalist.

Along with other poets and readers, Moore will be talking about POEMS FROM THE WOMENS MOVEMENT at a reading at Amherst College on September 16.

Phantasia for Elvira Shatayev

Now we are ready
and each of us knows it I have never loved
like this I have never seen
my own forces so taken up and shared
and given back
After the long training the early sieges
we are moving almost effortlessly in our love

We know now we have always been in danger
down in our separateness
and now up here together but till now
we had not touched our strength

What does love mean
what does it mean “to survive”
A cable of blue fire ropes our bodies
burning together in the snow We will not live
to settle for less We have dreamed of this
all of our lives

Adrienne Rich

LINKS

Online archival collection of documents from the Women’s Liberation Movement

Honor Moore’s poem, Polemic-1

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Max Page

Patrick Radden Keefe

Host Francesca Rheannon talks with architectural historian Max Page about . And journalist Patrick Radden Keefe tells us the story of China’s outmigration to New York in the 1980’s and the “snakeheads” who facilitated and exploited it. His book is .

This week marks the eighth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. But before Al Qaeda’s jets crashed into the twin towers in the real world, millions of players of the software game Flight Simulator had crashed their fantasy jets into the same towers for years. Before that, King Kong threatened the Empire State Building. New York has been destroyed by flood, a sudden ice age, aliens from other planets, anarchists and immigrants and nuclear war — all in the imagination of American writers, filmmakers, and artists. What is it about the New York that excites such fantasies of destruction? That’s what Max Page explores in his gorgeously illustrated book THE CITY’S END: Two Centuries of Fantasies, Fears, and Premonitions of New York’s Destruction.

Page says, “each era has found it useful to destroy New York in its own particular way.” He links fantasies of “the City’s end” to fears about immigration, modernity, and technology, as well as love for and homage to New York.

Max Page teaches history and architecture at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.

LINKS

• NYT review
• Alexis Rockman, Manifest Destiny
• Download Caesar’s Column at Project Gutenberg
• The Day After Tomorrow trailer

The US is a country of immigrants, yet ever since the 9/11 attacks, life has become increasingly precarious for them, especially if they came here illegally: thrown into jail, summarily deported, sometimes denied due process of law. But such harsh policies didn’t begin with 9/11. They began under the Clinton Administration, with the shipwreck on the shores of New York of the Golden Venture. The ship was carrying Chinese migrants from Fujian Province. Ten of the migrants died during their six month journey to America.

The wave of immigration from Fujian was facilitated by the so-called “snakeheads” of Chinatown. They smuggled people into New York in return for a hefty fee of thousands. Journalist Patrick Radden Keefe uncovers their story in his book, THE SNAKEHEAD: An Epic Tale of the Chinatown Underworld and the American Dream.

In addition to THE SNAKEHEAD, he’s also author of .

LINKS

• Article on Golden Venture
• Governor Gary Locke’s Inaugural Address January 15, 1997

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Douglas Rushkoff

Jeff Sharlet

Media critic Doug Rushkoff talks about LIFE, INC. and Jeff Sharlet, author of THE FAMILY, returns for another interview, updating us on how the sex scandals in Washington are splitting the Christian Right.

In his book DAS KAPITAL, Karl Marx posed the idea that capitalism leads to a peculiar distortion of relationships in society. He called it commodity fetishism. He said that although the market and the ways things are produced for it are social constructions —  relationships between people — this social relationship assumes the “fantastic form of a relation between things”. And that meant that capitalism appears to be natural and eternal, rather than just one way among many that people have created and organized an economy.

Doug Rushkoff says corporate control of our society has reached into all arenas of human relations, so much so, that we are increasingly disconnected from each other and locked out of expressing our true creativity and humanity. The free market is a fiction and so, fundamentally, is democracy. Rushkoff’s new book is .

I was joined on this interview by guest co-host Bill Baue. He and I produced another radio show about business and sustainability called Sea Change Radio.

When sex scandals involving three prominent Republican politicians hit the media this summer, few initially made the connection with a secretive fundamentalist group that calls itself The Family. But in a surprise move, the fundamentalist christian journal World recently published a scathing investigative critique of the Family and its relationship with the three, Senator Ensign of Nevada, Governor Mark Sanford of South Carolina, former Congressman Chip Pickering of Mississipi. All three reside or have resided at a house on C Street in Washington DC owned and operated by the Family.

[sniplet amazon search]

We talked with my next guest Jeff Sharlet in 2008 about his . He gave us a terrific interview, so when he emailed about World’s article and what it meant in the landscape of America’s Christian right, I leaped at the chance to bring him back on the show. He gives us the low-down in this interview.

Sharlet also tells us about the growing influence of the extreme Christian Right in the higher ranks of the U.S. military. You can here more about that from a previous appearance on WV. And you can read his Harper’s Magazine article, “Jesus Kills Mohammed” here.

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Rutherford Platt

Colin Ellard

We talk with scientist Colin Ellard about .

And urban geographer Rutherford Platt tells us about .

The Polish-American scientist and philosopher Alfred Korzybski is famous for his dictum, “The map is not the territory”. It was a warning against confusing the abstraction, or representation, of a thing, for the thing itself. And it’s an apt warning for us modern humans, who seem ever more connected to abstract space, like maps and the digital domain, and ever less connected to our real environment.

It wasn’t always so. Older human cultures, like the Inuit, the Australian Aborigines, and the Kung! people of the Kalahari desert are exquisitely tuned to the signals of the natural world.

Colin Ellard says our capacity to both disconnect from and be attuned to where we are has to do with the way our minds work. As a scientist, he studies how people act when they confront problems of space, both in the real world and in virtual reality at the University of Waterloo’s Research Lab for Immersive Virtual Environments (RELIVE). His fascinating book on our relationship to space is called YOU ARE HERE. He says, while we’ve gained much ease from modern technology, we’ve also fallen prey to much dis-ease,  from our alienation from the real places in which we are embedded. And, he says, it threatens our very survival.

Urban geographer Rutherford Platt is the founder of the Ecological Cities Project at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He’s edited a collection of cities on how to make cities more liveable and sustainable, called , which:

“explores the prospects for a more humane metropolis through a series of essays and case studies that consider why and how urban places can be made greener and more amenable. Its point of departure is the legacy of William H. Whyte (1917-1999), one of America’s most admired urban thinkers. From his eyrie high above Manhattan in the offices of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Whyte laid the foundation for today’s “smart growth” and “new urbanist” movements with books such as The Last Landscape (1968). His passion for improving the habitability of cities and suburbs is reflected in the diverse grassroots urban design and regreening strategies discussed in this volume.”

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Jean Kilbourne

Writers Voice host Francesca Rheannon talks with Dr. Jean Kilbourne about . Also this week, Francesca speaks with Matthew Aaron Goodman about his debut novel .

So Sexy, So Soon

We live in a society that gets hysterical about teaching sex education to high school students. The same society allows kids as young as preschool age to be targeted by a marketing industry selling products soaked in sex and violence. It’s cognitive dissonance. Whether it’s sexy clothes and Bratz dolls for girls or Grand Theft Auto and other violent fare for boys, our kids are being taught to treat themselves and others as objects to be exploited and conquered. Parents stand by helplessly while their kids go down before the media marketing onslaught. It’s a kind of child abuse that pervades our culture, yet we so seldom see it for what it is and are blind to its effects.

[sniplet amazon bookstore widget]

Media critic Jean Kilbourne has been questioning the impact of advertising on our society for a long time. Her film series, Killing Us Softly, examined advertising’s image of women. Other films looked at alcohol and tobacco advertising. Her book  explored how advertising impacts how we think and feel. Now, with her co-author,  Diane E. Levin, Dr. Kilbourne has come out with SO SEXY SO SOON: The New Sexualized Childhood and What Parents Can Do to Protect Their Kids.

Tips for Talking To Your Kids About Sex

Jean Kilbourne’s Resources for Change

Hold Love Strong

The main character of Matthew Aaron Goodman’s debut novel HOLD LOVE STRONG is:

Born to a thirteen-year-old in the bathroom of his family’s small apartment; Abraham Singleton enters a world laden with the obstacles inherent in an impoverished community. In spite of the crack epidemic and the HIV crisis that ravages his neighborhood, his family, the Singletons—cousins, an uncle, and aunt, Abraham and his mother—are held together by Abraham’s heroic grandmother, whose deep faith and stoic nature have always given them a sense of wholeness and hope. But when the family goes through seveal harrowing losses, not even his grandmother may be strong enough to lead them through.

Matthew Aaron Goodman

Goodman was not to the ghetto born. He’s white, Jewish and a graduate of the elite university, Brandeis. But he felt driven to take on the story of this family to process what he learned while working with ex-prisoners in creating The Leadership Alliance. The project united ex-prisoners and volunteer partners. Goodman’s respect and love for the people he works with comes through strongly in this wonderful and compassionate book. His most recent project is the Scholar’s Institute, a literacy project for Exalt, a program serving youth involved with the criminal justice system.

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Richard Wilbur

We speak with former U.S. Poet Laureate Richard Wilbur about new poems and old, the art of translation, and his evolution as a poet.  Richard Wilbur is one of America’s greatest living poets. He earned the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry twice, once in 1957 and then again in 1989, and was named the U.S. Poet Laureate in 1987. Wilbur also reads from his work for us.

Wilbur’s poetry is honed to a deceptive simplicity. As one reviewer wrote, “All of them are easy to read, while being suffused with an astonishing verbal music and a compacted thoughtfulness that invite sustained reflection.”

His work celebrates the world and the individuals within it. The poet Randall Jarrell said that he was ever reminded of  Petronius‘ phrase “studied felicity” whenever he read a book of Wilbur’s.

Host Francesca Rheannon and guest host Christian McEwen paid a visit to the poet at his Cummington, MA home to record this interview.

You can also listen to Wilbur read his poetry in the audio book collection Poetry on Record: 98 Poets Read Their Work, 1888-2006, Volume 2.

Read Love Calls Us to the Things of This World

Read Advice to a Prophet

We also hear an excerpt from an interview Writers Voice did with Jeanne Braham, about her book .

Christian McEwen asked Richard Wilbur what he thought about the removal of the following words about nature from Oxford Junior Dictionary and their replacement by words about technology. In order to make room for modern words like MP3 player, chatroom, and database, the latest edition of the Oxford Junior Dictionary removed many nature-related words as a result of the changing landscape. So BlackBerry takes the place of blackberry, and so on.

Nature Words Removed From Oxford Junior Dictionary

In order to make room for modern words like MP3 player, chatroom, and database, the latest edition of the Oxford Junior Dictionary removed many nature-related words as a result of the changing landscape. So BlackBerry takes the place of blackberry, and so on.

[sniplet amazon bookstore widget]

Words taken out: Coronation, duchess, duke, emperor, empire, monarch, decade, carol, cracker, holly, ivy, mistletoe, dwarf, elf, goblin, abbey, aisle, altar, bishop, chapel, christen, disciple, minister, monastery, monk, nun, nunnery, parish, pew, psalm, pulpit, saint, sin, devil, vicar. Adder, ass, beaver, boar, budgerigar, bullock, cheetah, colt, corgi, cygnet, doe, drake, ferret, gerbil, goldfish, guinea pig, hamster, heron, herring, kingfisher, lark, leopard, lobster, magpie, minnow, mussel, newt, otter, ox, oyster, panther, pelican, piglet, plaice, poodle, porcupine, porpoise, raven, spaniel, starling, stoat, stork, terrapin, thrush, weasel, wren. Acorn, allotment, almond, apricot, ash, bacon, beech, beetroot, blackberry, blacksmith, bloom, bluebell, bramble, bran, bray, bridle, brook, buttercup, canary, canter, carnation, catkin, cauliflower, chestnut, clover, conker, county, cowslip, crocus, dandelion, diesel, fern, fungus, gooseberry, gorse, hazel, hazelnut, heather, holly, horse chestnut, ivy, lavender, leek, liquorice, manger, marzipan, melon, minnow, mint, nectar, nectarine, oats, pansy, parsnip, pasture, poppy, porridge, poultry, primrose, prune, radish, rhubarb, sheaf, spinach, sycamore, tulip, turnip, vine, violet, walnut, willow

Words put in: Blog, broadband, MP3 player, voicemail, attachment, database, export, chatroom, bullet point, cut and paste, analogue. Celebrity, tolerant, vandalism, negotiate, interdependent, creep, citizenship, childhood, conflict, common sense, debate, EU, drought, brainy, boisterous, cautionary tale, bilingual, bungee jumping, committee, compulsory, cope, democratic, allergic, biodegradable, emotion, dyslexic, donate, endangered, Euro. Apparatus, food chain, incisor, square number, trapezium, alliteration, colloquial, idiom, curriculum, classify, chronological, block graph.

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Robin Wheeler

Sasha Abramsky

We talk with journalist Sasha Abramsky about his new book .  And sustainability expert Robin Wheeler talks about her book, .

Do you know where your next meal is coming from? For a staggering 25 million Americans the local food pantry is their source for putting food on the table. The general recession has hidden the ongoing  problem of hunger; while everyone might be feeling the money crunch, for too many there is no food to bite into. This year there was a more than 20% increase in the use of food stamps to 34.9 million Americans (one in nine), 14 million American children are in danger of going hungry everyday.

Sasha Abramsky’s new book Breadline USA chronicles this daily struggle to eat. the author reports from communities like Siskiyou, CA, where 50% of the population is on food stamps. He even put himself through an experiment of what it’s like to have to live on a paycheck that barely breaks the minimum wage. Abramsky exposes the surprising connections between such things as high gas prices with hunger. But the author hasn’t left his readers banging the refrigerator door in frustration, he offers down to earth solutions for this devastating problem.

Sasha Abramsky is a senior fellow with Demos, a progressive think tank in New York. His other books are CONNED andAMERICAN FURIES. His next book, Inside Obama’s Brain,  will be out this December. We’ll talk to him again when it’s published.

Read Abramsky on Breadline USA in the Huffington Post

While Sasha Abramsky’s book focuses on the food insecurity facing the poor, sustainability expert Robin Wheeler believes we all face the potential of being food insecure. In FOOD SECURITY FOR THE FAINT OF HEART, she points out that our global food supply chains are extremely vulnerable. Disasters like hurricanes or earthquakes can wipe out months of stored food when the power goes out, pandemic flu could shut down international trade, plant diseases could wipe out major food crops. And then there’s climate change: when we called Robin Wheeler at her home in British Columbia, she told us her community was facing a severe — and uncharacteristic — drought.

In her book, Wheeler helps the reader understand how to become more food secure in the face of these challenges. It covers preserving garden food,  saving freezer food during a power outage, managing through natural disasters, preparing quick herbal medicinals, and foraging for wild food.

Read an excerpt from FOOD SECURITY FOR THE FAINT AT HEART

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Les Leopold

Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA)

Everything you want to know about instruments of financial mass destruction — but were afraid to ask! Les Leopold explains the financial meltdown in plain English — and what we should do about it.  Also, Representative Representative Barney Frank talks about the TARP.

Les Leopold and THE LOOTING OF AMERICA

On July 16 the New York Times reported, “A new order is emerging on Wall Street after the worst crisis since the Great Depression.” The article pointed to soaring profits by Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase. A few days later, Bank of America exceeded earnings expectations. Altogether, Bank of America Corp., JPMorgan Chase and Citigroup Inc., the three biggest U.S. lenders by assets, reported a total of $10.2 billion in profits for the second quarter.  Wall Street ate it up, with the Dow Jones now up more than 2000 points from its February low and the S&P 500 up 40%.

But something else is also going up—and that’s the unemployment rate, now at its highest level in a generation, with 25 million out of work. What’s going down is real wages—unless you’re a CEO. The banks, for example, are taking a hefty slice out of their huge profits for big payouts to their staff.

Is there a connection between big profits on Wall Street and continued suffering on Main Street? Les Leopold explores that question in his new book, . He argues that the meltdown was caused by an income distribution that’s wildly skewed. The ratio between the top CEO salaries and the bottom rung of workers wages went from 40:1 in 1970 to almost 1800:1 in 2006. That resulted in an excess of capital from the top hungrily seeking outsized profits from speculation (what Leopold calls instruments of financial mass destruction) instead of investing in the real economy. He says it’s something like fantasy baseball–and when the season players — the banks — went on strike, the whole house of cards came tumbling down.

[sniplet amazon bookstore widget]

We first talked with Les Leopold in December of 2007 about his biography of labor leader Tony Mazzochi, The Man Who Hated Work and Loved Labor. He also directs the Labor Institute and the Public Health Institute.

Links

• Les Leopold on Huffington Post: Saving Obama from Political Suicide
• Articles by Les Leopold on Alternet

Barney Frank on Wall Street

In September of 2008 I interviewed Congressman Barney Frank for the other radio show I produce (with co-producer Bill Baue), Sea Change Radio. Bill and I talked with Frank just before the House Financial Services Committee, which he chairs, submitted the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) — otherwise known as the Bailout Bill — to the full House. It eventually became law, with some changes.

In our interview, Frank promised an oversight board for the TARP that would ensure liquidity in the mortgage markets. He also promised “significant” help for homeowners from foreclosures. And he said the TARP would include limits on executive pay. Ten months have passed since we talked to Frank, so let’s look at some of what actually has happened:

According to a report from the Treasury Dept, the Financial Stability Oversight Board, which was written into the TARP, has “overall helped mortgage borrowers by increasing liquidity in the mortgage market.” On the other hand, mortgage foreclosures continue to soar, spreading beyond the subprime mortgage sector as unemployment rises. So the significant foreclosure protection Barney Frank mentioned hasn’t worked out so well.

And what about limits on executive compensation? The TARP didn’t end up doing much to control executive pay, but the Stimulus Bill did put some limits on bonuses for firms that accepted bailout money. But they only apply before those firms have paid the US government back for the taxpayer funds they received. Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase paid back their bailout money to avoid having to conform to limits on pay, with Goldman Sachs giving out the biggest bonuses in the firm’s 140-year history. Citigroup and JP Morgan are raising salaries instead.

Finally, how much are the paybacks really worth? The US Treasury says the true value of the warrants being paid back can’t really be determined. That has raised concerns that the government is getting less than it’s owed.

Links

• Nomi Prins, “The Big Bank Bailout Payback Bamboozle“
• Peter DeFazio’s bill on the transaction tax

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Sara Felder

Andrea Wulf

We talk with design historian and writer Andrea Wulf about THE BROTHER GARDENERS. Also, playwright and juggler Sara Feldman tells us about her new play OUT OF SIGHT, playing at the Ko Festival of Performance in Amherst from July 24-26.

Here in the Northeast, the interminable rains of June have given way to a sunny July. The lawns are a deep lush green, and I see a few flower gardens, too. But while Americans love their lawns, the British are mad about gardens. The typical English Garden hosts a profusion of different plants jostling each other in an artful imitation of nature. But the original seeds that gave rise to those gardens are not native to England. They came from America.

John Bartram

They were the product of an extraordinary network of personal relationships between plant enthusiasts of the eighteenth century: men like the American farmer, John Bartram, the London cloth merchant, Peter Collinson, and Carl Linnaeus.

My guest, design historian Andrea Wulf, has delved into the story of these men and how they changed the practice of botany forever. Her book is .

In the interview, host Francesca Rheannon refers to Georg Rumphius, the seventeenth century botanist who wrote a compendium of herbal plants and their uses from the Indonesian spice island of Ambon. The herbal was translated by E.M (Monty) Beekman, professor emeritus of Germanic languages at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and is due out from the Yale University Press. The Mayo Clinic examined the first volume of Beekman’s translation for clues to medicinal plants that could develop modern pharmaceuticals to treat disease. They isolated several, the most promising of which may prove effective against the devastating and common infection MRSA (multi drug resistant staphylococcus aureus). The press published a previous translation of Rumphius by Beekman, THE AMBONESE CURIOUSITY CABINET.

Listen to a 2007 report about Rumphius’ herbal Francesca Rheannon produced for NPR affiliate WFCR in Amherst

Most mothers and daughters love each other. But it’s not always easy for them to really see each other. The past clouds the lens and communication falters.

In all kinds of human conflict, where the sides can’t see each other, humor can be a light to slice through the darkness. That’s what juggler and comic playwright Sara Felder believes. She brings her unique brand of humor to bear on the story of an aging, blind Jewish mother and her adult lesbian daughter as they struggle to bridge their differences–differences that crystallize over the conflict between Israel and Palestine.

OUT OF SIGHT will be playing at the Ko Festival of Performance from July 24 to 26. Friday’s and Saturday’s performances are at 8 pm. Sunday’s performance is at 4 pm.

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Arecelis Girmay

Peter Brown

Francesca Rheannon talks with children’s book author and illustrator Peter Brown about and Katy Lorah of Friends of The High Line. Also, poet Arecelis Girmay talks with guest host, Christian MacEwen. 

New York’s The High Line was an elevated railway line that carried freight to and from New York’s meatpacking district on the west side from 1930 to 1980. But then the trains stopped and for the last thirty years, the High Line has lain dormant. Until this June, that is. That’s when the new High Line Park was opened. It celebrated its coming out party July 12, with such luminaries as Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Congressman Jerrold Nadler in attendance.

Illustrator and children’s book author Peter Brown takes the High Line as the inspiration for his charming new book, THE CURIOUS GARDEN. It tells how a little boy named Liam discovers a struggling garden high above a city that has no other green spaces. Liam decides to take care of the garden and under his tending, it spreads throughout the city, transforming it into a lush, green world.

Peter Brown is also the author of two books about an unconventional dog named Chowder, and The Flight of the Dodo. He also illustrated two books for older children written by Cat Wetherill, Snowbone and Barkbelly.

If you decide to enjoy the charms of the High Line, you can thank Friends of the High Line. It was founded in 1999 by residents of the High Line neighborhood to advocate for the High Line’s preservation and its reuse as public open space. Friends of the High Line’s Katy Lorah tells us how the organization kept its vision of a park alive for ten years until it could finally bring it to life.

If you decide to enjoy the charms of the High Line, you can thank Friends of the High Line. It was founded in 1999 by residents of the High Line neighborhood to advocate for the High Line’s preservation and its reuse as public open space. Friends of the High Line’s Katy Lorah tells us how the organization kept its vision of a park alive for ten years until it could finally bring it to life.

Read about the history of the High Line

More images of the High Line

UPDATE: The New York Times reports on the high salary of the Friends of the High Line’s executive director. He did a great job, but does he deserve so much?

Christian MacEwen talks with Aracelis Girmay, who writes writes poetry, essays, and fiction, as part of the series, Sparks from The Anvil, which Writers Voice is co-producing. The series features poets who have come to the Smith College Poetry Center.

Read more poems by Arecelis Girmay

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