Jessica: Hello. Thank you so much for having me. How are you doing?

Dr. Kent: Very Good. So you just come back from Sweden I see.

Jessica: Yes we actually just got off the plan not long ago and then drove Atlanta where we flew in up to we are now in Middleton Wisconsin and we’re doing a show here tonight. So it’s been a good time. Everybody had a fantastic time in Europe, we were in Norway and Sweden for almost three weeks and now we are going on another 10 day run. Kind of in Wisconsin, Indiana, Pennsylvania, and down to Maryland and gong back home. We live in Callhoun Georgia. But our mother and father, we have a little brother who is 6 years old. His name is Thomas are very much anticipating out return home. But we’re having a good time.

Dr. Kent: Now your three sisters. Tell me about the family a little bit you told me you got a little brother and parents but tell me about the Lovell Sisters.

Jessica: Well my name is Jessica, I’m the oldest. I play fiddle. The middle sister, her name is Megan. She plays the Dobro. Our youngest sister Rebecca plays mandolin and also plays finger style guitar. That’s the three of us we’re also touring with two guys in our bank who are fantastic instrumentalists. Daniel Kimbro playing the bass and Matt Twingate playing guitar. So we really have fun on the road. It’s been really a great band. The band is really tight and of course we’re very excited about the new CD in our lives we’re playing the new songs and so it’s been awesome.

Dr. Kent: So how about without further a do I’d love to play the title track from the album were going to play the whole track so you can put me on speaker and chill out a bit. Its called “Time to Grow” the title track from the Lovell Sisters new album. When’s it come out?

Jessica: I think over the summer date not exact the release date not been quite set. That is should literally know that in the next couple days here. We’re really excited about that and I think its going to be released a little sooner but kind of more information TBA later on that.

Dr. Kent: Cool.

Jessica: The record we just finished recording in Nashville.

Dr. Kent: We’ll talk to you in a minute after this tune is done.

Jessica: Ok Thank You so much.

Music Playing

Dr. Kent: That’s a beautiful tune from the Lovell Sisters “Time to Grow.” It’s the title track of their album that’s going to be released this summer. Jessica promising us that there be a digital version to released before that. So welcome back to the show again Jessica.

Jessica: Thank you so much.

Dr. Kent: Tell us about tack

Jessica: Sorry one more time?

Dr. Kent: Tell us about that track a little bit.

Jessica: That track we had some fun making this record. I think for us the last couple years have been a real learning experience for us. WE basically have decided to keep creative control and through make the record the way we wanted to. Just play the music that inspired us and this is a song that Rebecca out baby sister and she’s playing finger style guitar on this track and Megan playing Dobro and I’m playing fiddle. So we went into the studio and were able to create the sound that we wanted I think that not being on a label is really giving us the able to do that and so “Time to Grow” I think is also kind of what this whole record really means for us. WE put out our debut CD in 2005 after going on Prairie Home Companion. Which was an awesome experience for us going on Prairie home Companion. We put out that first CD and so now it’s been awhile since we put out a CD. That time for us to learn a whole lot and find out own voice. I think this record really is a good snap shot of what we are over the last couple years. We’ve toured a lot and had the opportunity to meet a lot of really really cool people and artists and just to have a lot of experiences. We certainly wouldn’t have otherwise had except for just having people supporting us and going out on the road. Rebecca was 25-26 when that first record come out and she just turned 18. So getting involved with songwriting as well that all those different things floating around the creation of into this CD and which that was the title track.

Dr. Kent: I was listening to the show that night the Prairie Home Companion and that was my first introduction your group and you did a bang up job on that show. I remember going to your website that same day because I was so struck by it wasn’t only you guys have great sound and a great song style but I was blown away by your instrumental talent as a trio.

Jessica: Wow! Thank You so much. That’s really cool, I mean that was actually out 2nd official; gig we been involved in classical music and like sing in our church choir prior to that so we heard bluegrass and just started messing around more like at home on weekend and we played this little place called the Sigoneon Opry on Friday nights and that’s where we heard Bluegrass for the first time. That acoustic music that how we landed that one and found out the same time we were going to be playing on Prairie Home Companion. We sent in a demo and so we were so nervous to go on that program but it went well and that opened a lot of doors that we didn’t’ even know existed and its been am amazing ride since then. Now we’re making music which is just a great blessing it’s an opportunity for us to be touring around especially us sisters as well.

Dr. Kent: As part of that your on the your not an easy from the outside seem oh what a blessing you get to play all these gigs but then when you describe all the nitty gritty of it you get off the plan and drive for tons of hours to the next gig and to the next one. It’s a hard life on the road.

Jessica: You know it is but I think that from a lot of that comes a lot of inspiration for the song writing itself as well and makes you feel like a step away when your away from home. It’s a different kind of reality like for instance today we flew into Atlanta driving 14 hours from Atlanta to Wisconsin, snowing for part of it, it was raining for part of it. You get your good and you meet, there’s things on the road you never expect and I think its true of everyone you want to try and plan your life as much as you can but you know a lot of times stuff happens and it maybe the best thing that ever happened and you just have to be flexible and move forward and stay close to the people around you that’s something especially for us that we realized how important people are in your life no matter what’s happening around or to you that those people are really the whole part. Kind of been the point on another track of this CD that’s called “Subway song” that Megan wrote and that really incaps that for me. Yeah we’re having such a great time. Thank you for having me on by the way this is great talking to you.

Dr. Kent: Absolutely again your music fast want to ask you one more question and we’ll play another track from the record.

Jessica: Yeah Sure.

Dr. Kent: About your instrumental ability the three of you, How did that develop?

Jessica: You know we started playing classical violin and piano when we were younger little like maybe 6 years old. Music has always been a hobby for us. So all three of us started on violin and piano we played in symphonies and quartets. We still; we still love classical music although we aren’t as involved in it as we were starting out. Then we heard bluegrass music for the first time, that’s when Megan started playing the dobro and Rebecca started playing the mandolin. We were really proud of Rebecca, she become the first woman and youngest contestant ever to win the Merlefest International Mandolin competition. I think just being able to play and there’s more and more girl pickers out there we’re meeting. I think that’s really great. There’s a lot of women in the music industry just great role models for the girls getting started like Alison Kraus to the Dixie Chicks. There’s a lot of great singer/songwriter instrumentalists that are great role models. Yeah we’ve been playing bluegrass for I guess 5 or 6 years. So that’s how long we’ve been playing the current instruments. It’s a good time and the band we have is great.

Dr. Kent: Cool. You must be pretty good at it because you sure didn’t sound like you were playing your second gig on Garrison Keillor. Ever since then this is a beautiful album. It has the sound of the Dixie Chicks they play their own instruments and you guy do the same thing. You’ve definitely developed some serious talents there. I love this new album. Tell me about this track “Take One Moment” and we’ll listen to that.

Jessica: Sure “Take One Moment” I love that track. That was written its kid of funning talking about being on the road and off the road. It was written by Megan and Rebecca. We been on the road for at least a week and had 24 hours at home. As so as we were in the house, all of a sudden the girls were gone didn’t know where they were. They disappeared and breakfast came and breakfast went still no girls and they came back downstairs, they had written this song and recorded demo that’s how heard it. Rebecca has a little studio in her room its like a one Mic and a tool rig. She really enjoys recording things and kind of experimenting and this is one of the things that came out of Rebecca’s room. So I hope people will enjoy it I really love this track.

Dr. Kent: Thank You so much for chatting with me. We’re going to listen to this track and we’re going to say Good Bye for this week. I can’t wait to talk to you again sometime and I’ll definitely keep up with what you’re doing.

Jessica: Wonderful Thank You so much.

Dr. Kent: And we can go to lovellsistersband.com and there’s a whole bunch of information about their tour, which is going on all over the place right now. We’ll talk to you again soon.

Jessica: Thank You.

Dr. Kent: We’re going to play a track called “Take One Moment” and this is from the upcoming album from the Lovell Sisters “Time to Grow.”

Music Playing

Dr. Kent: That was a beautiful tune called “Take One Moment” from the Lovell Sisters album “Time to Grow.” Check out their CD when it comes out later this year, it their second release. An amazing group of sensitive vocals and incredible instrumental skills.

Wells its been my honor today to have three authors and one musician on the show. Of course I chatted with James Bond Anthology author Raymond Benson at the beginning that was a blast. Paul Doyle who was narcotics agent and chatted with us about his book. That is already doing very well and also Jeremy Robinson, who is the author of Antarktos Rising and talked to him special worlds in fiction. And take it easy this week and pick up a good book and we’ll see you the next time.

Raymond Benson: Hello Dr. Kent, How are you?

Dr. Kent: Very Good. Tell me about this new novel.

Raymond Benson: Well Dark Side of the Morgue is the second book in a series, featuring a Rock ‘n Roll detective named Spike Berenger. He’s a private eye. He works in the Rock ‘n Roll business. He is based in New York. The first book came out last year, took place in New York. The second book Dark Side of the Morgue just came out and this one takes place in Chicago. And lots of humor and music references. And cameo appearances by real rock stars. And sex drugs and Rock ‘n Roll. What more could you ask for?

Dr. Kent: Huh. True, true of that. Well tell me about the process of putting together this series, as well you know we talked about in past putting together the James Bond series. What do you do, when you have a character in your brain and you have to get him out?

Raymond Benson: Well Spike Beringer is really pretty much a lot like me. I’m a big classic rock fan myself and I’m a musician. I put a lot of myself into this guy, although he doesn’t look like me anyway. He plays guitar and I play piano, so there’s those differences.  He comes from Texas and which I do too. I lived in New York City for a long time as well. A lot of his taste in music and food and philosophies in life are very similar of mine. When I first got the idea for the series, it was mainly to come up with something commercial, that hopefully for people like music and like to read might latch onto.

Dr. Kent: And tell me about the first book in the series, and this is the second, and where is it going from here?

Raymond Benson: Hard Day’s Death was Spike’s first adventure. He is investigating the murder of a famous rock star in New York. It seems like he has too many suspects; the guy’s family, a many sons, and all ex-wives, ex-band members. And all this stuff, so he has to investigate that. In the new one I capitalized on the legendary aggressive rock school of music, that came out for the late 60’s, early 70’s. Guys like Sloth Machine and Jethro Tull, Yes, Gentle Giant. There’s like a family tree of these kind of musicians, and I invented a fictional one for the city of Chicago, with all these fans date back to 60’s. And one by one each member is being bumped off by some mysterious killer. So there is some common link between all these people, and Spike has to figure it out. I should add these books my tongue is firmly in cheek. Instead of Table of Contents, I have a track listing. So every chapter, name of a song. Instead of the acknowledgement, I have liner notes. So the book you can play the book

Dr. Kent: Wonderful, and tell me when you write book like this, compared to all the other books you’ve written. Do you have more fun with it, because you can bring in that side of you, the musical side?

Raymond Benson: Yes, its a lot more fun in any of my own original books, are more fun than when I’m writing for a franchise like James Bond for example. Or I’ve done some other tie in work, like last year I wrote the novelization of popular video game, Metal Gear Solid. And I’ll have a sequel coming out later this year. I wrote for Tom Clancy’s. I did a couple of his spin off series, The Splinter Cell 2 of Splinter Cell books. I kind of had my hand in the tie info world, which was for bread and butter money. Then I had my own original thrillers and novels that’s you know more personal.

Dr. Kent: Tell me actually as always, you know I’m very curious how is it to write for these other franchises. What is the whole process? What do they have you do? What kind of feedback do you give them? What’s the whole process like?

Raymond Benson: Well, it really depends on the franchise itself. With James Bond, I was approached in the mid 90’s by the Ian Fleming estates, to take over the original books continuation novels from John Gardner. Who been writing the books before me. I guess I got the job base on a nonfiction book that I wrote in the 80’s, call the James Bond Bedside Compaign. Which is everything you ever wanted to know about 007, type of coffee table book. And with that, I had full freedom basically the original stories that I came up with, they just had to approve them first. I had to write them in an outline. They gave me the green light, afterwards I wrote the rest of the books. Then I would also do novelizations of the movies that were coming out at that time that weren’t based on books. The later Pierce Brosnan films. Those were original screenplays to begin with, so they gave me a screenplay and I had to turn into novels.

And in those cases since I was king of working for the film company, instead of the Fleming estate, I had to stay pretty close to the script. I was able to embellish after a few of the scenes and add to it because you put a screenplay into pros, you’re about 30,000 words short. So I was able to actually invest some things and try to explain some of their complicated plots.

With Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell, that’s based on a video game. I was basically given the characters and was allowed to come up with my own stories featuring the characters that were in that video game. With Metal Gear Solid, they wanted an actual novelization of the actual game story, so I had to stick very, very close to that. So it really depends on who you’re working for, and how much freedom you have, and what you’re allowed to add.

Dr. Kent: And I know I’ve asked you something similar to this in our last interview, but with fascination of most the listeners with writing for James Bond. Did you ever sort of start to dream like James Bond? Did you ever wake up in the morning think I’m James Bond? Did you ever just slip inside that character?

Raymond Benson: *Chuckling* I went to all the locations that I wrote about. I would walk in Bond’s footsteps and stay in the hotels I put him in and order the food I’d give him on a plate. I would it important for a writer, especially with the Bond books; you they are kind of like travel logs in a way. They go to exotic locations and teach the reader about that country and that culture. So, um, yeah, I did that, but I’d never jump out of an airplane with out parachute, or get into fights with scary looking guys, and unfortunately, I didn’t get to bed a lot of women that way either.

*Both Dr. Kent and Raymond Benson have a chuckle. * I’m married. You know Bond was very much a wishful film of Ian Fleming. He was the guy, Ian Fleming, wanted to be. So I just had to basically dig into the characters and try to capture the spirit of Ian Fleming. But no I don’t ever wish to be James Bond. I don’t have a high tolerance for pain.

Dr. Kent: And when you talked about when you wrote about like when you wrote about the jumping out of airplanes, this and that, and what was your research for like that stuff? Where did you find your information?

Raymond Benson: Well as writers, we always cultivate a notebook full of resources of people in various professions, that we can contract when we have a question. For instance, I have a military guy I always go to about hardware and weaponry and military stuff. I have contacts in different government agencies. I have contacts in the medical profession. So its pretty easy to find someone when you’re a writer, put their name in the acknowledgement, not hard to find someone to talk to you and give you information like that.

Dr. Kent: Hmmm, and what’s your next project, are you writing a third book in the music trilogy here?

Raymond Benson: Well, I would like to, but the publisher is on a wait and see basis. To see how this one does. If it goes ok, I’m sure I’ll do a third one. If not, I’ll just move onto something else. This is what we writers do; we’re constantly trying to turn stuff out. My next published book, will be the sequel to Solid Metal Gear. It comes out in the Fall, it’s Solid Metal Gear 2: Sons of Liberty. And the next Spring, the late Spring, I got another Anthology of my James Bond work coming out. The one that you mentioned, the union trilogy, its contained 3 of my novels and a short story that was out right before Christmas. The next anthology will have the other 3 novels and some more short stories. I’m also working on with publisher, Hard Case Crime, on a series of Hope Adventures, featuring a character named Gabrielle Hunt. Kind of an Indiana Jones type guy, and there is going to be six books in the series. Different authors writing each book, and I’ve done the sixth book and final one. My issue will probably come out in 2010.

Dr. Kent: You’re a hard working writer. How do you wake up each morning? Say, ok what’s the number one priority book I’m working on or what’s your process with that?

Raymond Benson: Its juggling a lot of things at once. Its, we authors also have to do their own promotion and everything else. We keep websites, facebook, myspace up. I spend certain amount of time morning, kind of maintaining all my various promotional sites. I spend afternoon usually working on the books themselves, and it kind of depends on what phase of the book I’m in, whether outline writing or conceptual phase dictates what I do that particular day. If I got more than one book going at once, then sure the one I have to finish first is the one I work on with the priority sometimes. I worked on three books at once

Dr. Kent: Now as a kid, would you have a thought you’d be a authoring these James Bond books and all these other thrillers and so on?

Raymond Benson: Never, in fact I was a huge James Bond fan as a child growing up. I grew up with Sean Connery movies. So you know, I never in a million years even thought, I was even allowed to even dream of doing that. In many ways, it fell into my lap. Wasn’t that I even thought it out, it just came to me. Which was a miracle in itself. As far as when I was a kid, I never thought I’d be a writer. I always thought I was going to be in theatre. I studied in college; I was a theatre major. I did spend over a decade in New York City, in the off Off-Broadway scene, as face director and as music director. I’m a film historian, as well, I teach film history at one of the local colleges outside Chicago. So the writing thing just happened, but I’m glad it did.

Dr. Kent: Well its been real pleasure chatting with you again, and I hope I’ll chat with you next time down the road when another one of these comes out. And we can find out more about Raymond Benson, on his website at raymondbenson.com. You can sign up for anyone of those social networking things he was talking about, and a list of all the books are there, and where to buy them and all that stuff. Anything else I’m forgetting?

Raymond Benson: No, you pretty much covered it all. I really appreciate you having me on your program.

Dr. Kent: Alright, well you be well and can’t wait to see the next books come out.

Raymond Benson: Ok. Thanks a lot.

Dr. Kent: We’ve been chatting with Raymond Benson, his website is raymondbenson.com. The author of a ton of James Bond stuff, and his newest book is called Dark Side of the Morgue and a Rock ‘n Roll thriller. Lets all go out and buy that, so he’ll write the third book in that series.

Ok, the next guest on my show is going to be Paul Doyle. He’s got a book called Hot Shots and Heavy Hits, talking about the undercover drug world come on back for that.

Paul Doyle: Hi, Good Afternoon Dr Kent. It’s a pleasure for me to be here a chance to talk with people who like writing and reading its good. So Thank You for having me on your show and letting me talk to your audience.

Dr Kent: Absolutely, so tell me about this book and your life in crime.

Paul Doyle: Well basically in a nutshell my book Hot Shots and Heavy Hits is my memoirs about my experiences as an undercover agent in the DEA in the 1970’s and that kind of sums it up. Its my particular story, I tell in first person its more of a worms eye view of a the everyday life of an undercover agent. And although its my story and my book it runs with every cop in the world who works undercover I get so much feedback one of the first promotions we did was in the DEA has an exhibit in Times Square and I spoke about the book, sold book over number months. And I get feedback from police officers all over the world actually who told me I hit it right on the head and of course speaking to audiences I also very happy to hear from people in recovery people in 12 grams have been addicted tell me you’ve hit this right you’ve nailed it Paul described it the heroin overdose and heroin highs being in these drug dens. You’ve told it like we’ve never seen it before so realistic, so I feel very good about that. It think its one story needed to be told. People often would ask me about my fears because I never talked about it. What I did I never couldn’t do a lot of things but basically I worked undercover in the Irish law of Boston. Familiar names with people like Whitey Bulger. I worked undercover with Italian Mob the Cosa Nostra, the Chinese Mob which is tong young tongs. Outlaw motorcycle gang and South American drug cartels. So I got wide range of experience in all these areas kind of begging to be told especially with people with whats going on and I got a chance to do this in I feel very good since the book been published. I’m working on a novel now based on a lot of these things.

Dr. Kent: What is the world you know you dropped all these things about the mobs and this world and that world. I most of us what we seen on CSI New York or on these television shows we seen about it. Tell us how realistic is this stuff. What was the real world like doing this work?

Paul Doyle: Its actually care, I’m glad you asked that it’s a lot of these programs very interesting very realistic to a point, but you never look down the barrel of a gun. AS I have many other officers and undercover agents have you really can’t get a get understand. I think that’s where I had the benefit of writing a book first hand. Other words I can tell you exactly what I was feeling thinking and what the other guy looked like and how a deal proceeded. And now what happened to very action packed story lot of fights, lot shooting, a lot of action, lot of drug undercover buys, and not all these actions. One of the others things people commented on my book for example Anita Shreve, she’s on the cover of my book, she writes the tight rope walk bet good and evil confronting violence from without and within and having to make spontaneous life or death decisions that seem light years away from that beautiful wife and baby nights called home. I’m proud I was able to convey that to someone like Anita Shreve, who writes in a totally in his mind but yet enjoyed the book and turn on tell audiences about it. So that’s one plain, Frank McCord initially I was tell about you and I known Frank and Penelope for number of years been. I feel like they’ve been more less very kind to me and adopted me into their family. I enjoyed it like to get with them on a regular basis, but basically my writing is to be as to be expected hot and direct except love and good humor and deep feelings unfortunate of the world and in my writing from my point of view as an agent. I’m not just a cop with search warrant locking these people up I’m literal with these people. I understand their feelings I understand whats good and bad about them what went wrong I look at addicts and junkies I saw the sorrow and sadness in the eyes in the mothers and fathers who lost their kids to drugs. I saw things first hand and as result I’m able to tell the big picture in a way most authors could never do. Unfortunate a lot of cops can’t because they’ve haven’t they didn’t sit down and write their stories in times not able to put into words I’m fortunate since I did this I discover I did have a gift for words in a way that some people don’t have so.

Dr. Kent: What I’m most fascinated about what you just talked about where Anita Shreve where she talks about where you being out in the middle of this violent world doing these crazy things from what we see in from what we see in reality this crazy stuff and then you come home to your children and your wife. For a lot of cops it is kind of the same thing kind of dangerous profession and after dealing with all this aggression you come home and you’re with your family. Talk about that for a minute.

Paul Doyle: Well most people don’t realize in today’s world of the undercover agent not only men but women working undercover. So I you stars in family your doing this kind of work they play such a great role its very very difficult from their other half going off to a completely different world and maybe not hearing from them for weeks or months at a time. Assuming different identities and facing the kind of danger they feel that they face while their sitting at home, not knowing exactly what’s going on. It’s quite strenuous on the family. I’m very fortunate I had I’ve been back to the same girl I met in High School and we’ve been married for 40 years I have 4 children that have grown up. One just going off to college. One married to a marine fighter pilot, she has 6 children. My other daughter married Christian, she has 1 child and then I have to thank my wife for what she’s done and sacrifices she faced and my children’s made. Growing up they didn’t know what I did and that’s part of the reason I wrote the book. That’s why I wrote the book not that I go off on tangent if I may. People always ask me How did you, What made you write why did you write this book? And if I can say it this was ground zero right after the attacks with NYPD on the search and rescue team. I cam home my wife asked me what it was like I couldn’t even explain what it was like so I said let me sit down and write some of my thoughts and I did. She read them and she started to cry and each of my daughters read same thing. Eventually what I wrote was made into an article and was in four national magazines that I get high praise for that depiction of what I saw and what I witnessed death and destruction. That point I decided after all these years undercover that I got to write something about that because at the on the pile with all the fires raging around in dark I think of only days prior to thousands of people alive and their dead now it dawned on me for the first time in my entire life that I had been a paratrooper or I’d been a drug agent and survived all these incidents this could happen to me. I could be dead in a minute then what would happen my kids; my wife would have no idea what I did. That’s when I thought about maybe putting that on paper some day and eventually I did and that’s what happened with the book.

Dr. Kent: And Tell

Paul Doyle: I hope I didn’t go to far.

Dr. Kent: No No I could talk to you for days about all these things but tell us a store out of this book kind of briefly like what’s a small world into this Hot Shots and Heavy Hits?

Paul Doyle: You know its starts off a young agent coming out of the narcotics academy and going to an office. And how it begins my first pot day on street. How we go on a raid and how they have me kick the door in because I’m the young new guy. I go on a heroin raid later on in night. Eventually the first experience I had was a textbook case with as federal agent you want to go up the ladder. What I did was I get these University of Boston by small amounts of cocaine ounce for like $2,000 I eventually with this case I brought it up to the level where first federal case first time crime figure Mafia figure. I was involved in this so I write it all in the book. Hand to hand sale bought sold so many chills cocaine that was big for a number of reasons. Number 1 I remember walking to the federal building in handcuffs and I said to him listen to Joe your our help yourself in drug school they teach to that to get people to cooperate and get information how police survive. He stop looked at me said kid let me tell you something I made the biggest mistake of my life today he said don’t ask me no questions I can’t tell you anything. He says I’m in enough trouble as it is. I tried that because he was the first guy who ever said that to me. He was the only guy in my entire career who never cooperated. He didn’t’ tell me a thing. In those days it was omit code of silence they wouldn’t talk. This particular fellow looked like someone’s uncle that turns out he had a reputation they called him the man who got away with murder because the last time he went on trial. He had one witness against him. Days before the trial a witness disappeared and they found the witness in the trunk of his own car with his hands tied behind his back, hog tied, his private parts in his mouth and pins in his eyes and that’s omerita that the code of silence in the work it out don’t mess with this guy. The young narcotic agent and I locked him up so that’s one of the one of the quick stories. My I guess time for another quick one?

Dr. Kent: What’s that?

Paul Doyle: Hello? Do I have time for another quick story?

Dr. Kent: Yes Please.

Paul Doyle: Ok there purest white heroin was coming into Washington early 70’s from Hong Kong Shanghai, it was called China White. WE couldn’t do anything about it. They was spreading it all over the country they were distributing it to all over out to Portland Maine. We couldn’t break it because we couldn’t understand the code. We had wire taps but so many different dialects the Chinese wouldn’t deal with anybody and then got a call from a Boston Police Officer who had arrested a hooker a young hooker from HighO housing project one of the projects that I’d grown up in. She was not only a heroin addict but she was in the house one of the Chinese geos. She offered to bring someone in. I was elected the guy; my new assignment for the next 6 months was nighttime in Boston’s combat zone China town area as a pimp. I established myself in eventually hand to hand by heroin from the heroin geos and we brought them down that’s another quick stories kind of things we did on a regular basis. You know assuming different things and story talks cases my book talks about cases all over from Boston to quite a few New York City and up to San Francisco. From most my expertise was from heroin and cocaine. I also brought down a LSD laboratory in San Francisco big in 70’s.

Dr. Kent: And now your own, we only have couple minutes left but your own background.

Paul Doyle: Ok.

Dr. Kent: I want to talk about that for a second because your story growing up in a tough part of Boston. Talk about that for a minute.

Paul Doyle: Sorry. I was an orphan at birth. I was adopted when I was 5 by the time I was 12 I’d lived in a dozen different places mostly housing projects and changed schools many times sometimes twice in one year, so its not hard to figure out why I gravitated to boxing. I was an amateur boxer I became the 1967 I was Heavyweight Champ. I got scholarship to Rockford Watkins University. I was about a graduate and was going to turn pro and the biggest tragedy of my life; my younger brother was killed in Vietnam. I put a stop to that sent me off in a new direction I joined the military. I served with second infantry division ten Special Forces. Then eventually I took an interview and started with the DEA this was a time when this was the 60’s and 70’s. Drugs, sex, Rock ‘n Roll time we were inundated with drugs and its what happening at the time so I wanted to be a part of it it. I wanted to do some good I was altruistic and that why I did what I did. So that’s basically it.

Dr. Kent: This been a real honor chatting with Paul Doyle and we’ll have to have you on again. This is a fun conversation I could talk to you along time about this stuff.

Paul Doyle: The honor was mine. Thank You.

Dr. Kent: The book is called Hot Shots & Heavy Hits tales of an undercover drug agent by Paul E Doyle. You can visit his website.

Paul Doyle: Thank You.

Dr. Kent: Website at pauledoyle.com. Thank You so much we’ll chat with you again soon.

Paul Doyle: Thank You very much Doc.

Dr. Kent: Alright we’ll be back after a little break with the third guest on the show his name is Jeremy Robinson. Come on back for that.

Jeremy Robinson: Thanks for having me.

Dr. Kent: So tell me about this book. First of all how to pronounce it because I did a horrible job there.

Jeremy Robinson: Chuckling I wrote it Guess I’ll get it right. Ant ark toes Rising.

Dr. Kent: Ant ark toes Rising.

Jeremy Robinson: Antarktos is the Greek for Antarctica.

Dr. Kent: So tell me about this book. Tell me in a nutshell.

Jeremy Robinson: Its starts with a disgruntle placement history of the Earth crust shifting over the core so that North Dakota becomes the North Pole and Antarctica ends up at the equator. Where it thaws and after event happens 2.6 billion people after are dead and rest of the world is displaced their all kind buying control over this new thawed continent.

Dr. Kent: Now where do you come up with ideas like this.

Jeremy Robinson: Um a lot of research I think the initial idea of this was I want to thaw out Antarctica how can I do that? And I started doing researching different possibilities and there is what I found was the most not realistic but most fun for me.

Dr. Kent: What is the process researching the book you did a lot of research on Antarctica?

Jeremy Robinson: Yup

Dr. Kent: Tell me about that whole process. How do you get about do that? Do you bury yourself in books? Do you read everything you can?

Jeremy Robinson: Ok I initially got my start in writing actually as an artist, I was a comic book illustrator at the time I started writing comic books as well. And that when I realized what I was doing through my art was story telling, so I realized my passion was really telling stories not necessarily being an artist. I started doing screenplays after that moved to Los Angeles I realize I didn’t like Hollywood and decided to try writing a novel. The first novel I wrote was The Didymus Contingency, which I published in 2005 and it did really well. I think probably because the premise the guy goes back in time to get through the story of Jesus, so that got a lot of attention. Got an agent and after that I started my own small press because that book did so well I figured why not do some more. My second book was Raising the Past that book’s kind of arctic science fiction story that did very well then I moved on to Antarktos Rising. Which did well enough to get the attention of an investor from a business a major publisher in New York. Which I now have a three book deal. The first of those books Pulse come out May 26, and that’s been all over the past few years.

Dr. Kent: And how’s that process been for you?

Jeremy Robinson: Which process the publishing or?

Dr. Kent: Yeah I mean your in a new world where publishing the book with your own independent publisher. Which is now possible to have success and then get picked up by a major publisher. How you felt through that whole process?

Jeremy Robinson: It’s a lot of work. I think normally people do one or the other. For the last year I been running what’s now a large publishing company and getting my book ready Antarktos came out in October. My newest book came out in January or February and now I have a book coming out in May. So I’ve been nonstop marketing my book but also marketing other peoples books at the same time.

Dr. Kent: And now your newest book is actually Kronos is that right?

Jeremy Robinson: Kronos is about a father and widower an ex-Navy Seal and oceanographer. His daughter has been estranged from him since his wife died and to help reconcile with her, he takes her out to go scuba diving off the coast of Maine. Instantly while they are out there scuba diving she is swallowed whole by a very large creature. Which is unknown to Atkins at the time. He kind of goes on a Moby Dick hunt quest for revenge trying to hunt down the creature and on the way o his path to kill this creature. He makes a discovery that kind of turns the whole story around and it’s a big surprise kind of fun.

Dr. Kent: What’s fun about your books your able to create different types of worlds but an author that must be kind of a tricky process of being a creating a different reality. Talk about the difference in this kind of book and sort of a fiction story about family living in New England or something.

Jeremy Robinson: Right. That’s what I actually enjoy about coming up with this new world and creatures that don’t necessarily exist or that might exist but what makes it really hard making it believable so I can’t just say in this instance in Kronos, I have this really large creature but I just can’t make something up so I had to do research on local legends because this takes place in New England and I found that there is a New England sea serpent that has been reported over 200 times since 1638. So I have a lot of historical background for this creature and then I try and work in some pints behind is all well. So I can kind of create what I want but then I have to back it up with history of science or it won’t be very believable. Its not straight fantasy or science fiction like people say teleport to another world.

Dr. Kent: How about I usually ask fiction writers. Do you dream about your characters? Do you find that they sort of exist in reality? Do you have file of open on their lives? How do you keep them straight?

Jeremy Robinson: I do have files on them. I create worksheets on them with details of their lives. I can’t say I’ve ever dreamt about any of my books and that actually surprising now that you mentioned it. But that maybe because I think about them all day long. If I’m in the car driving I usually inside a book inside my head which maybe a good thing or a bad thing I don’t know. But I think about them so much during my waking hours my mind likes to take a break from them honestly.

Dr. Kent: So you got this contract your in now. What’s the next couple projects your working on and all of that?

Jeremy Robinson: The next books area series. There is a three of them I’m contracted with Poblison Publishing, which is an imprint with St. Martin’s Press. And these are series called Chess Team series about a team of Delta Operators. Delta is basically our most special Special Forces unit, which is conspired of Army Rangers, Navy Seals, and all the best that we have. They in the all the best that we have. They in the story they are dealing with some strange things in the book the first book they are dealing with a genetics company who is trying to make a break through in a basically immortality. It starts with they are trying to regenerate arms and legs on people very quickly. They end up regenerating the mythical hydra and bring that back to life by accident. So its kind of a military thriller lot of mythology involved with a lot of with creatures or well so a lot of strange things happening.

Dr. Kent: It sounds like you have a career from the outside that seems kind of fun, and a tell us about the hard work aspects.

Jeremy Robinson: The hard work aspect is actually the marketing. The writing and the research and all the stuff that goes in to it before hand and during the writing is all the good fun for me. The hard part is marketing its putting yourself out there and traveling a lot doing book signing. I enjoy it, but its definitely not who I am wired. The hard part for me is marketing and large part of that I spend more time marketing than I do writing. Which for a writer is hard because we’d rather be in our office writing all the time. But to sell books you have to be out there and available out there doing things you aren’t necessarily comfortable with.

Dr. Kent: And what kind of things does your publisher or do you end up going to signing books? Do you go to mostly bookstores or do you go to larger events? What do you do?

Jeremy Robinson: I have it’s mostly bookstores. I will be at Thriller Fest, which is a large event in New York City at Grand Height. That’s a much bigger event there is a few hundred authors who go there and lots of fans tool. So its that’s more like a convention. I’m trying to thinking if there’s anything else but it’s mainly bookstores.

Dr. Kent: Cool. Well it’s been a pleasure chatting with you and I hope we chat with you again. It seems like you put out a book every six months so it’ll give us a lot of opportunity. Do you find that it’s hard to turn out books so quickly?

Jeremy Robinson: No that would actually be my preference to do one every six months. That will probably slow down this year been quick because we had three books that need to come out in about 12 month because I had written so many so there’s kind of a back log of books that need to come out. But now it’ll probably be once a year even though I’d like to see two. But someday.

Dr. Kent: Now do you have some sort of grand plan in mind like down the road you want to write a 1,500 page book on something? Do you have any sort of clever schemes down the road?

Jeremy Robinson: For world domination? (Chuckling) I don’t know it really just to improve each book has to be better than the next. I did the screenwriting thing for awhile so its always been a dream of mine to see something I created a film and that’s in the works for Antarktos Rising, as an animated feature that’s supposed to come out in 2010. I don’t know it that’ll happen or not that’s what the schedule is right now. But I’d really like to see my books as movies and I’d also like to see them as video games because I’m a big game player so.

Dr. Kent: Very cool, it’s been an honor chatting with Jeremy Robinson about his last two books. Antarktos Rising, Kronos, and about all his future projects. If you just go to Amazon you’ll find or ton of his book. Where else can we find out about you online?

Jeremy Robinson: You can find out about me at jeremyrobinsononline.com.

Dr. Kent: Wonderful all right lets chat again soon when that next book comes out.

Jeremy Robinson: Definitely.

Dr. Kent: My next on the show is a musician they are called the Lovell Sisters. They make a really incredible brand of music and they do it as a family so come on back for that we’ll be talking to them.

Janet Paschal:  Thank you very much, nice to talk with you.

Dr. Kent:  Well, I sure would like to listen to a couple tunes, I’ve got a couple in the queue.  But let’s talk for just one second before I do that.  Tell me a little about your latest record.

Janet Paschal:  Well, I’ve been doing what I do for a number of years, and over the years people have remembered songs from as far back as 30 years ago, and I’ve still continued to get mail and email about some of those older songs, so for this record project we went back and recaptured 12 of those most requested songs from as far back as 30 years ago and re-recorded them.  We kept the same, original arrangements and just updated the music and the technology of course, and we called it Treasure.

Dr. Kent:  I’d love to listen to a track from that, I’ve got the song Hide Me, Sweet Rock of Ages in the queue, so let’s listen to that.

Janet Paschal:  Okay.

Dr. Kent:  Actually, why don’t you tell me a little bit about that song before we listen.

Janet Paschal:  Ok, that song I recorded for the first time when I was singing with my first professional group.  I was 18 years old, I lived in North Carolina, I wanted to sing Christian music, and they were coming through my area, and they were looking for a soprano, and I auditioned and they hired me.  We recorded this song a couple years later, so it’s special to me for a number of reasons.  Because it’s a fun song, and because it was with my original group, but also, you know, a lot of times music and songs will take you back to a certain place in your life, and that’s just been another rewarding aspect of doing this CD, it recaptures those old tunes, and it reminds us of some of the places we were, and some of the experiences we had through those years.

Dr. Kent:  Wonderful.  So let’s listen to this song that will take us all the way back to the beginning, Hide Me, Sweet Rock of Ages.  Here it is.

(music)

Dr. Kent:  Wow, what a tune.

(laughter) It’s a fun song, it really is.

Dr. Kent:  It’s got to be fun, doing this kind of music.

Janet Paschal:  It really, really is, because it is feel good music.  It’s buoyant, and it lifts your spirits, and it has a positive message. It’s really a lot of fun, especially when you have a little history with it.

Dr. Kent:  You’ve been onstage for a lot of people in a lot of countries.  Tell us a little about that.

Janet Paschal:  Well, I have sung in almost every country.  Not every country, but certainly the majority of them, and it just astounds me that music seems to cross over language barriers, and facial expressions, and the actual chords and progressions of chords.  They translate in different languages, and I have always just sung in English, and many times the audience didn’t speak English, the majority of them.  But somehow they seem to have been communicated to, so it works.

Dr. Kent:  You are a unique musician on the show because you’re also an author.  So you’re a sound author and a sound author.  And your book is called Treasures of the Snow, and it looks very similar actually to the album Treasure, which is kind of neat.  But tell us about the importance of this book in your life.

Janet Paschal:  Well, it’s actually my second book, and I was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2005, and plowed through a year, about a year and a half of treatment.  I chronicled that journey, and of course I did newsletters and blogs and so many people requested that they get a copy of that, and was I going to publish it. So finally I was due for a new book.  So what I did is I worked this out so that the book is in three sections, and the first section deals with breast cancer, my plowing through that.  And then the other two sections are other stories from the road.  But the idea, and we did release the CD and book together, that’s the similar covers and the similar titles, but the idea is when Job was explaining to God about how faithful he had been, and explaining some of his (inaudible) to God, God just turned on him and asked where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth, and can you tell all the waters of the beaches, how far to come and no further? Do you know when a mountain gives birth? In other words he made Job realize how small he was.  But one of the things he asked him which intrigued me was, have you seen the treasures of the snow? And I had ton know on that a little bit, I didn’t quite understand it.  And then it occurred to me that snowflakes from a distance all look the same, but when you examine them closely, they’re very different, and they’re very unique.  So for me, that spoke to me in that the situations, the things that I will have to plow through, like breast cancer, you know, some of the rough places in life, if we just gnaw on those things and try to swallow them a little bit and understand what it means in the larger scheme of things, then there are real treasures to be had, there are wonderful life lessons to be learned, and great takeaways from those things.

Dr. Kent:  Well, and that’s such a hard thing to do when you’re going in and out of emergency rooms or clinics or hospitals, because those places have a horrible feel to them in some ways, and your family’s being dragged into it, and they’re all emotional, and…

Janet Paschal:  You know what was the strangest thing for me was following the signs to oncology for the first time.  I was treated at Duke Medical Center, and my husband and I were looking up at the ceiling following the signs to oncology, and it was just, it was so surreal, because my family didn’t have any history of cancer, and that was sort of a tough day for me, just following those signs.

Dr. Kent:  Yeah, and you are a very spiritual person no doubt.  Job is such a heavy book in the Bible that a lot of people like to skip over.  But when you’re going through times like that, it’s pretty brave to go into Job. Talk about the book of Job.

Janet Paschal:  Well, you know what I love about Job, a lot of times I go there and he does my venting for me.  Because a lot of times I’ll read in Job when he was saying, “Oh, God, why do the wicked prosper?” and a lot of times I sit and I read that and I go, “Yeah, yeah, I want to know the answer to that, too.”  And so it helps me just to sort of process whatever it is that I’m plowing through.  But you know, in the larger scheme of things we’re all creatures of this earth, and we’ll all have great days, and we’ll all have very painful days, and good times and bad times.  And so I think the crux of the matter is how we take the tough things in life, how we juggle those and balance them and how we incorporate all of that into our joys and our pleasures, and hopefully when we’ve figured it out, when it’s all said and done, then we have made good decisions and we have left the world a better place.

Dr. Kent:  Well absolutely. And certainly you have quite a list of accomplishments, and you’ve inspired a lot of people.  You’ve put out a ton of CD’s and probably all the way back to records.  Did you put out a record at the beginning, or was it a tape?

Janet Paschal:  Yes, absolutely.  My first solo project was an LP, and I still have people come up to me at concerts and want me to sign it.  (laughter)

Dr. Kent:  Well, I’ve got to say, I’m an iPod user, and an iPod lover, but there’s something about LP’s, the pictures on them, they’re so big and so tangible, and you put the needle down on them, there’s something about it.

Janet Paschal:  That’s exactly, and you know, the sound is sweeter too, I think.

Dr. Kent:  So you still have an LP player?

Janet Paschal:  Yes, I absolutely do.

Dr. Kent:  Well, it’s been such a pleasure speaking with Janet Paschal, she’s got a book Treasures of the Snow, and it’s really just a wonderful book to pick up, and such an inspiration to people, and for all of those like me who look at the book of Job with a little bit of fear, this is a good entrance into that.  And the album that goes with it called Treasure is really a great album, full of great energy.  So tell us where we can find out more about you.

Janet Paschal:  You can visit my website janetpaschal.com, or you can Google me, so Google will definitely get you there.

Dr. Kent:  Exactly.  Well, Janet Paschal has done so many wonderful things with her life.  Thank you so much for being on the show, and for helping so many people.

Janet Paschal:  It’s a pleasure talking to you. Thank you.

Dr. Kent:  Actually, before you leave, why don’t you say a couple words.  We’re going to go out with the tune We Shall Wear a Robe and Crown.  Do you have anything to say about that one?

Janet Paschal:  Ok, this is again, I recorded it back probably 30 years ago, but it was one of our, the group that I was in at the time, it was our big hit, so, and you know, it still is, it’s been recorded by 150 different people, but it is still a great song.

Dr. Kent:  Well thank you so much, and have a wonderful day.

Janet Paschal:  Thank you.  Bye.

Dr. Kent:  Now this song is from the album Treasure, and it’s called We Shall Wear a Robe and Crown.  Listen to this.

(music)

Dr. Kent:  And that was the tune We Shall Wear a Robe and Crown by Janet Paschal, off of her newest album Treasure.  Thank you so much to all my guests on the show today.  I had Mark David Gerson, I had Janet Paschal, I had Mark K. Updegrove, and at the beginning the wonderful children’s author Kathy Lasky, who wrote that wonderful biography of Charles Darwin.  Everybody have a safe week and pick up a great book.  I’ll talk to you on the flip side.

Mark David Gerson:  Thank you so much, Kent, it’s great to be here.

Dr. Kent:  I want to start out with Twitter, because you’re into Twitter, I’m into Twitter, what’s your take on this crazy engine of thought?

Mark David Gerson:  I think it’s fabulous. I had a friend about a year ago who I’d actually met on MySpace, which was my first introduction to social networking, who tried to get me to go onto Twitter, and go on the website and I’d kind of shrug my shoulders and say, “I don’t get it.” That happened frequently, and then one day, probably when I was trying to avoid writing, I got on, (inaudible), nosed around, and before I knew it I was having wonderful conversations with lots of brilliant people.

Dr. Kent:  So how does it help someone like you, and author of The Moonquest and The Voice of the Muse?

Mark David Gerson:  Probably if it weren’t for Twitter, you and I wouldn’t be having this conversation, just to start. It’s been a great way to connect with other writers.  It’s been a great way to market myself as an author.  And it’s been a great way to just meet interesting people all over, and some of the people I’ve actually met on Twitter I’ve met in person, and they’ve been just as personable in (inaudible).

Dr. Kent:  Absolutely.  And what I find fascinating is that in 140 characters you can be so much more to the point than you would be in an email or an interview or a conversation or this and that.

Mark David Gerson:  Well that’s true, it’s a great training for being concise, and also for being creative in your abbreviations.

Dr. Kent:  So let’s talk about your book, especially the Voice of the Muse where it’s talking about something that I’m very familiar with, which is authors starting out, authors getting published, and what you were just talking about, which is getting into places like Twitter and saying, “Hey, here I am,” as an author.

Mark David Gerson:  Sure.  Well, the book, both my books, the other book is a novel called the Moonquest, both books (inaudible) to me, I didn’t sit down one morning and say I’m going to write a book on writing, or I’m going to a fantasy novel.  They both just kind of snuck up on me, hit me over the head and dragged me to the computer, or the blank page, because part it was in longhand. I’ve been teaching writing, giving writing workshops, coaching writers for 15 years now, and out of all the wisdom I guess I had accumulated, which was mostly wisdom from me, because you know we do teach what we need to learn, and I think that is certainly true for me.  It found itself onto the page, and before I knew it I had a book that I’m very grateful to say (inaudible).

Dr. Kent:  And you are also a sound author in two ways, and I find it interesting on your website you have a title on the left side that says sound healing.  And that’s very similar to sound authors, I like that punk.  You’ve put out a lot of audio CD’s as well.  Talk about your work, and what you do every day.

Mark David Gerson:  Sure.  Well, just briefly, the sound healing is something I have not, I don’t do a whole lot anymore, but I did regularly for a couple of years. It’s a form of energy healing, like reiki is, where I use the sound of my voice instead of my hands.  I used to do a lot of teleconferences and live events and recordables, and those are a combination of kind of sound healing and guided meditation, and I do have a lot of CD’s, and they’re on my website.  But my kind of daily routine right now is working on a sequel to my novel, The Moonquest, and my daily routine really is a writing routine.  I write almost every day.  My goal is to write every day, but I cut myself some slack, so as long as I’m writing 4 or 5 or 6 days a week, I’m satisfied.  I tend to write in the mornings for a number of reasons.  One is, it’s nice to have it done. Not that it’s a horrible thing to do, but writers tend to be very distractible, writers can be really amazing procrastinators, writers can find really all kinds of awful things to do that somehow seem much more interesting in the moment than writing.  I find that if I get the writing done early in the day I don’t waste my time looking for things to do to avoid writing.  That’s part of it.  The other reason is that I find that writing does something to me, does something for me, it really shifts my mood and my energy in the morning, and I generally have a better day because I had written, not because I’ve done, I’ve gotten it over with, but because I’ve had the experience of writing, of connecting with that deep part of myself to let the story out. So I always start my day writing if I can.  And the rest of the day is whatever it is.

Dr. Kent:  It’s such an interesting thing, because different writers have different processes, and I’ve heard from many writers that they like to get up at dawn and do their few minutes of writing.  What’s your process?

Mark David Gerson:  I’m sorry, what was the question?

Dr. Kent:  What’s your process?  Do you get up at dawn and write a few minutes? Do you sometimes write all day long? What’s your process for writing?

Mark David Gerson:  Right, well, I don’t like getting up, period. So getting up at dawn is never fun, but I do do it sometimes.  I try to get up, and I have the advantage, most of the time I’m living on my own, I mean, it’s bad in some respects, but not in others, so that I can get up when I want and write when I want.  I have a 9 year old daughter who’s with me sometimes, and that changes the routine when she’s here, but for the most part I get up about 6 or 7 in the morning, and sometimes I will actually write in bed.  I have a laptop in the bedroom and I’ll just plop it on my lap and just get going.  But the days that I’m going to write all morning, I usually get up and do my stuff, and have my breakfast, and then sit down and just go at it for 1, 2, 3 or 4 hours.  I don’t usually write all day.  I think that would be really awesome to be able to, I’ve got other things going on in my life that sometimes makes it difficult to do.  But (inaudible).  I don’t write at night for the most part.  I know a lot of writers do. I’m just too fried at the end of the day to really be in a place where I can write, although I have.  It’s just not my preference.

Dr. Kent:  And we’re having just a little bit of technical difficulty, I think we lost you there for one second, but we got you back, so that makes me happy.

Mark David Gerson:  Good.

Dr. Kent:  Now, you’ve also written The Moonquest, and you won an “IPPY”, which is an Independent Publisher Book Award, a great honor, and a number of other awards. Tell us about that book, and are you doing a follow up to that, tell us about what you’re working on.

Mark David Gerson:  Sure.  Well, I’m very pleased and proud to (inaudible) award, won an “IPPY” gold medal last year, and it also won a New Mexico book award.  (inaudible) …really gratifying.  When I wrote the book I didn’t know I even had it in me.  The story is a fantasy, obviously, that takes place in a time and a place in a land where stories have been banned.  Storytellers have been banished or put to death, and the land, you may have no visions, songs, creativity, anything like that.  The legend in this land is that the moon was so saddened by the silence that she cried tears that extinguished her life, so the moon has not been seen for many generations. So The Moonquest is a quest story to restore the light of the moon and bring stories back to land.  It’s (inaudible) because I don’t think I could have done it that way, I think it really is a wonderful metaphor for a creative block and breaking through our creative blocks, it truly was for me in writing this story was a breakthrough of a creative block for me.  And right now I’m working on a sequel, which is tentatively titled The Star Quest. It seems to me as though it’s going to be a trilogy. Not a conventional trilogy because the second book is really about the daughter of the main character of the first book, who is already dead by the time the second book begins, so it’s more of a generational thing than a trilogy.  But that’s what I’m working on right now, and that’s what I’m working on every morning when I’m writing, for the most part, if I’m not working on a couple blogs. Some mornings I’m actually working on those.

Dr. Kent:  Tell us where we can find your books and CD’s.

Mark David Gerson:  Absolutely. The Voice of the Muse: Answering the Call to Write, and there’s also a companion 2-CD set, a recorded guided meditation called The Voice of the Muse Companion, and The Moonquest, all available through Amazon.  They’re also available through the publisher at www.lightlinesmedia.com, and the two books, not the CD, are available through other online retailers, and in some bookstores across the US (inaudible). And people can find me on the website at markdavidgerson.com.

Dr. Kent:  So at markdavidgerson.com we can find out everything, including all the stuff he just said, and information about The Voice of the Muse, and The Moonquest. Thank you so much for chatting with me, and for always tweeting with me online.

Mark David Gerson:  A pleasure Kent, thank you.

Dr. Kent:  Now my next guest on the show is a author and a musician.  We’re going to talk to her in just a minute.  Her name is Janet Paschal.  Come on back.

Mark K. Updegrove:  Well, thanks so much for having me.

Dr. Kent:  So tell me about this, I was just watching in the news Obama meeting the foreign heads of state, and it’s a great place to start talking about your book Baptism by Fire. Has he been baptized?

Mark K. Updegrove:  Well, yeah, I think on day one. Yeah, he came in, like the presidents I covered, into a time of unprecedented crisis, and I think he’s been immersed in the task at hand ever since. This is not a quiet time. But the good news for Obama is that times like this require great leadership, and he has an opportunity to make for himself a great place in history if he succeeds in combating the formidable challenge that he faces.

Dr. Kent:  Tell me about your book.  Eight presidents – which eight presidents took office in times of crisis?

Mark K. Updegrove:  Well, it’s George Washington, number one, Washington was of course our first president and had to contend with, really the presidency itself had never been filled by any man.  He had to sort of define what that role meant and preside over a very fragile, fledgling nation.  I think he did an admirable job of it.  The second was Thomas Jefferson, who was the first president to sit in the white house, went when there was a two-party split, a two-party schism in the country. It was probably the most contentious election, between him and the candidate for the Republicans, and John Adams, the candidate for the Federalist Party, in the history of this country, far worse than any election we’ve seen since, in my opinion.  The third is John Tyler, who was the first Vice President to assume the presidency upon the death of an incumbent, which he did 30 days into the tenure of William Henry Harrison, who died of pneumonia.  So the constitution was relatively ambiguous on what that meant. Was Tyler the actual President, or sort of the acting President, or a surrogate?  And he had to sort of define what that meant.  Abraham Lincoln for obvious reasons, presiding over the country at the outbreak of civil war. Franklin Roosevelt for other reasons that are, I think, pretty obvious.  He took office during the depths of the Great Depression.  Harry Truman, who assumed office after the death of Roosevelt in the end of the second World War. John F. Kennedy, who took office at the height of the Cold War, and Gerald Ford, who was the first President not to be elected by the national electorate, but rather to be appointed by the 25th amendment to the constitution.  So those are the eight.

Dr. Kent:  What propelled you towards thinking about the Presidents in this way? It’s fascinating, how did you get started with this notion?

Mark K. Updegrove:  You know, I assumed that our 44th President, I didn’t know that it would be Barrack Obama at the time, would be himself faced, or herself faced, because Hillary Clinton was running at the time as well, faced with unprecedented crises.  We were in unfinished wars, almost quagmires in Iraq and Afghanistan.  The economy was starting to founder a bit, and our stature abroad was at a low point during the George W. Bush years.  So those were definitely going to be crises that the 44th President would have to address.  I didn’t anticipate that the economic crisis would become as heightened as it’s been, so that’s clearly the number one thing, the number one challenge on the plate of Barrack Obama.

Dr. Kent:  Talk for a second about your personal interest in presidents. Fun facts about presidents can kind of be the life of any party, there’s no question.  But how did you start with your research on presidents?

Mark K. Updegrove:  I’ve always been fascinated in the presidency. When I was at Time Magazine I got to know a couple of them.  I got to know Gerald Ford pretty well, and the elder George Bush. I’d met Clinton, met Carter, and I wrote my first book based on a story which I don’t think has been told until my book, which is the notion of what a President does after he leaves office.  I don’t think that those stories have been told, and they’re fascinating human dramas, about what you do after you leave the most powerful position in the world.  Where you go from there? So I began to write Second Acts, based on that premise.  And Second Acts covered the lives of nine presidents after they left office, from Harry Truman through Bill Clinton. And each of those stories is really different, and I think is as revealing of the character of those men, as anything that they did in office, in many respects.  So again, I think that they’re sort of inherently interesting human dramas as well.  It’s something that we can all relate to when we’re going through transitions in our own life.

Dr. Kent:  Actually, can you speak as the author of Second Acts: Presidential Lives and Legacies after the White House, you know I have to ask you about George Bush and his legacy right now. People are talking about ok, now he’s writing his book, but his wife is the one who got the big contract for books.  What’s your take on his legacy?

Mark K. Updegrove:  Well, it’s a good question, and one that I don’t think can be answered until we see the forest for the trees.  We need a little perspective on the George W. Bush years.  I can say this, I don’t think it looks particularly good, regardless of whether we get some objectivity in looking at the George W. Bush years.  I think a lot of his legacy stakes on what happens in Iraq and Afghanistan to a lesser extent, and the culpability that we can assign to him around the financial crisis.  Again, I think we’re going to need a little objectivity on all those things. But even if it comes out better than we think at this point, I still don’t think that history is going to look favorably upon him. It might mitigate what we think of Bush right now, but I don’t think his will be looked at favorably.  I don’t think there are many listeners who would probably disagree with that.

Dr. Kent:  How about, for example, Bill Clinton, who kind of left office in a hailstorm, but now is still beloved in a lot of ways.  Do presidents sort of change personality and change tactics once they get out of office?

Mark K. Updegrove:  Not that they chance necessarily, but I think our appreciation for them normally gets greater.  I’ll give you an example of that. Harry Truman was a president who left with a very unfavorable rating among the public.  I think his approval rating was about 31%.  He was thought to be, by and large, a failed president by many Americans. But about ten years later, when historians were assessing his legacy, they realized that he was a near great president, or maybe some might consider him a great president.  There are very few historians who would have rendered that same assessment a week or two after he left office. So again, with objectivity we began to appreciate the trials that Harry Truman went through and the character it took to make some of the tough decisions of his presidency.  Now, Richard Nixon is another is another story.  Nixon left (inaudible), with the state of Watergate on his hands and went into exile for a period of about four years, but after that time he realized I want to get out there in the world, I want to do something for my country in the area that I’ve most been inspired by as a public servant.  And that is foreign policy. And despite this virulent opinion that folks had of him at that time, he got back into the arena and remarkably made a difference in the area of foreign policy. So like Nixon or not, you have to respect the fact that he went out there and really tried to do something for his country.  And when he was buried 20 years after leaving the White House in disgrace, in 1994, he was remembered as much as an elder statesman, or a respected statesman, as he was a former president.

Dr. Kent:  That’s very true.  Ok, let’s get back to your book, Baptism by Fire.  I’m so intrigued by this, because never until now have I sort of observed how, you step into the office on January 20th, and everyone was on Obama’s side this year. I heard people left and right and everywhere supporting him, and all of a sudden it was just everything hit the fan, and he was off to the races.  And of course people are saying oh, he’s doing too much, speak to how Obama’s done this past couple months.

Mark K. Updegrove:  I think he’s done pretty well on balance.  I just read an Op Ed tease on this, but I think the one thing I like about Obama is, you hear the nickname No Drama Obama in his campaign, and his equanimity, that utter coolness that he showed in the campaign is going to help him enormously in his role as president, particularly given the times he faces.  So I think on balance he struck the right message. We saw him do that sort of marathon race through the media, the very fragmented media world, sounding his message, which I think struck the right balance between pragmatism and hope.  He is not the ebullient cheerleader that FDR was, but I do think he’s staved off panic at a time when people are deeply concerned about the economy and our future. So I think he’s done a really admirable job, and I think the other thing you have to look at is, how has he done in translating the popularity that you talked about into and acting in his agenda? And he’s gotten this gargantuan stimulus package through Congress.  And that’s no mean feat given its proportions and its implications.  He’s also slipped health care reform in there, something no president has even tried since Clinton attempted it back in 1993 in his rookie year in the presidency, and that was something that failed miserably.  I think if you look at how he did in the G20 summit this week, I think he plays very well on the foreign stage.  You could see foreign leaders trying to cozy up to Obama for photo ops, given his enormous popularity, and I think he can help to darn the holes in America’s tattered reputation abroad in the wake of the device of George W. Bush years.  At the same time, many foreign countries aren’t stepping up to the plate as far as stimulus goes, something the President very much wanted.  So it remains to be seen if he can translate his influence abroad into getting their buy-in on what we can do together to solve this global financial crisis.

Dr. Kent:  Well, it’s been such a pleasure chatting with you.  Tell us what your next project is.

Mark K. Updegrove:  You know, I don’t know yet, I’m still thinking about some things. I started a novel, which I’ve been toying with in the last couple of years.  But I would like to continue to focus on the presidency, and in particular I’d like to continue this conversation in book form, in the sense that I’d like to cover Obama’s years in the presidency, because as we both know he has these formidable challenges, and I think that’ll make a fascinating book.

Dr. Kent:  Absolutely.  Here’s a good question for you, as someone who works with authors all the time, and this and that, I can’t read a book in the same way, I see all the flaws, and this and that.  And musicians, once they do a ton of music, they can’t listen to music in the same way. Are you the same way with the presidency?

Mark K. Updegrove:  You know, it’s such a vast subject that I find it continually fascinating.  To your point, I see the flaws in certain books, and what I’m very conscious of as a historian is getting it right, because I know that other historians will be looking at my book, formulating their own opinions based on it and others.  So I think you put pressure on yourself of being accurate, and for being fair in your assessments of the presidencies and the men you’re covering.  But I think I’ll continue to be interested in reading what other people say about the presidency, and I think the balanced historians do a pretty good job.

Dr. Kent:  Did you put your hat in the ring to be an advisor to the new president?

Mark K. Updegrove:  I would be honored to serve at the pleasure of the President if the phone rang. I did send him a copy of my book, and I know that George W. Bush read my last book, Second Acts, and was kind enough to send me a hand-written letter, but I have not heard from Obama, but assuredly if he asked me for my advice, I will do anything I can to help him succeed, I know we all would.

Dr. Kent:  And I think he would appreciate the title of the book and the premise.  I guarantee that he feels the concept the Baptism by Fire going on.

Mark K. Updegrove:  No question about it.

Dr. Kent:  Well, it’s been such a pleasure chatting with Mark K. Updegrove, and he’s the author of Baptism by Fire. Thank you so much.

Mark K. Updegrove:  Thank you so much for having me.

Dr. Kent:  My next guest on the show will be Mark David Gerson, and we’ll talk to him in just a minute.

Kathryn Lasky:  Oh, thank you.  Happy to be on the line!

Dr. Kent:  You’re the author of One Beetle Too Many.  Tell us about this book.

Kathryn Lasky:  Well, the full title is One Beetle Too Many: The Extraordinary Adventures of Charles Darwin.  So it’s basically what we call, in the children’s publishing world, a picture biography, which means it’s illustrated, and it’s 48 pages.  But it looks like a big picture book.  It is about the life of Charles Darwin.

Dr. Kent:  Just to get the fun stuff out of the way, first of all, are you running into anybody saying, “How could you do a biography of Charles Darwin?”

Kathryn Lasky:  No, everybody’s saying, “That’s a good idea! It’s the anniversary of his birthday, 300 years.

Dr. Kent:  That’s wonderful.  I think there’s so much talk in the media about creationism versus all of that stuff.  It’s neat to get to know Charles Darwin for what he really was, which is pretty extraordinary.  Now tell us about Mr. Darwin.

Kathryn Lasky:  Well, I decided to especially focus on the aspects of him, his personality, and his career that I thought would really appeal to children.  So first let’s begin with the title, One Beetle Too Many.  When Charles Darwin was a young boy, he wasn’t a very good student, actually.  But he did love observing nature, and going out and collecting things, like beetles. One expedition, this is just in the countryside around his home in England, he found one, he loved beetles, and he found one that was gorgeous.  And he had it in his left hand, and it was even more beautiful, and he had it in his right hand.  And then he saw a third, and he didn’t have a third hand.  So he popped the one from his right hand into his mouth and held it there, and then got the third one and went running home to put them in jars.  So that’s the title, and it’s sort of very indicative of his personality, and his enthusiasm.  He did try a few careers, but he did not succeed, well, studying for a few careers.  He studied to be a doctor, and couldn’t stand the sight of blood.  His father thought well, he should be a clergyman, but he didn’t like that much, but he was a fantastic observer of nature, and then he got his big break, which was to go as the naturalist on The Voyage of the Beagle.

Dr. Kent:  How cool is that.  Now, have you held two beetles in hand, and one in your mouth, just as part of your research?

Kathryn Lasky:  No, I don’t think I have to go quite that far.  I didn’t feel compelled.  (laughter) But I did do a lot of research.

Dr. Kent:  And what is, with a character like Charles Darwin, what was it about these creatures? I remember as a boy picking up a turtle and being so amazed, or catching my first firefly ad being so amazed at this little creature.  What was that that Darwin felt inside, and how do you transfer that into a children’s book?

Kathryn Lasky:  Well I think he was such a good observer, and he just started to feel, wonder how things are connected on earth.  Somebody said recently, and I can’t remember the guy’s name, but he’s an evolutionary biologist from the University of Florida, and he said 99% of what we know today Charles Darwin didn’t know.  But the 1% that he did know was really good.  Darwin had this capacity to kind of glance over, peek over the horizon and start to wonder about these connections, and wonder about time and change. So my challenge in the book was, how do you explain evolution to young readers?  So I tried to do it in kind of almost a visual and metaphoric way.  And I just kept my thoughts trained on three basic things: the notion of continuing change, the pressures that can bring about that change in living organisms, and the scale of time.  And you have to realize that when Darwin was born, people only thought the earth was something like, I don’t know, 6,000 years old.  At the time he reached maturity, they were thinking in terms of millions of years. Somewhere when he was in his 30’s or so, they were thinking in hundreds of thousands of years.  It’s only been in the 1920’s, maybe, that we started thinking in terms of billions of years.  So you just kind of, I tried to capture the moments in his travels, in his observations, I guess you’d call those eureka moments, and how he wove all this stuff together.

Dr. Kent:  Yeah, and he’s such a fascinating character from so many perspectives. So what made you start to think about writing this book?  You’ve done a lot of things, and what made you write this one?

Kathryn Lasky:  Well, first of all I have to tell you this story.  It took Darwin 20 years to write Origin of Species.  It took me four years to write this book.  I started this book years ago. I wrote, obviously, many in between. But I was in Cambridge, Massachusetts, very close to Harvard College, and when my daughter was about two I thought, “I’ve just got to get out of the house, I’m being driven crazy with diapers, and little kids running around.” So I hired a babysitter and what I did was, I walked over to Harvard.  It was only about a five minute walk from my house to the Science Center Lecture Hall, and I sat in and I audited the course of Stephen Jay Gould, who was the great evolutionary biologist. So that’s how it began.  And I started just educating myself.  From that course I went on and I audited another one that David Taube gave, who’s a paleoanthropologist on human evolution. So I just started putting all this together.  I just think, I know some people look at the stars and they wonder about the origins of the universe, they’re looking out into space. And I just started looking right on earth.  As a matter of fact, that was the name of the Stephen Jay Gould course, it was called Life on Earth.  So that’s when I started, but it was a bumpy road to getting the book out, that’s all I can say.  I won’t even bore you with the details.  But I’m very pleased.  I just want to say, the illustrations, which I did not do, but the wonderful Matthew Trueman did, are just fabulous.  I mean, they’re just beyond belief, and the critics have just raved about these illustrations. He just went and broke new ground with the illustrations as a medium.

Dr. Kent:  The most fun thing about being a children’s author is that you get some wonderful illustrations in all your books, right?

Kathryn Lasky:  Yeah, you do.  And this is certainly among the finest that I’ve ever had, and I’ve done a lot of picture books for kids.

Dr. Kent:  This book is called One Beetle Too Many: The Extraordinary Adventures of Charles Darwin.  Have you had a chance to read this for kids?

Kathryn Lasky:  I’ve read parts of it for kids, but I’ve been really pretty busy. So I haven’t sat down and read it with a group of kids yet.  All my kids are grown up and out of the house.  But I have a granddaughter now, but she’s just 8 months old, so she might be a little too young.

Dr. Kent:  You’ll have to wait a couple years to bring your whole shelf of books over.  So tell us about your career a little bit, where you’ve come from and where you plan to go with what you’re writing now.

Kathryn Lasky:  I am one of these children’s book authors who does a lot of different things, a lot of different genres.  Perhaps, like I did a lot of historical fiction, but perhaps right now my most popular books are a series called the Guardians of Ga’Hoole, which is a middle grade fantasy series, no humans in it, and only owls and other animals.  And it’s being made into a movie.  And actually the director of the movie is Zack Snyder, who just did The Watchmen.  So that is being made, as we speak. That fantasy series of owl books, Guardians of Ga’Hoole, has been enormously popular amongst kids.  I’m starting up another series, another two series.  I’m also doing a non-fiction book about spiders, and I call her Spider Woman, but she’s an arachnologist, and a professor of Biology at Lewis and Clark University. My husband, with the non-fiction books, he’s a former National Geographic Photographer, but he illustrates a lot of the non-fiction with photographs.  So we are just back from following Greta Binford, the arachnologist, around in the Dominican Republic.

Dr. Kent:  Did you have to actually get in touch with some spiders?

Kathryn Lasky:  Yeah.  Up close and personal with spiders, with tarantulas and the (inaudible) spiders, which their more common name is brown recluse, but there’s a lot of different kinds of brown recluse, so these were the ones in the Caribbean.

Dr. Kent: You are a brave human being.

Kathryn Lasky:  I thought I was going to be scared.  I really wasn’t that scared at all. What scared me more was driving on the roads in the Dominican Republic.  I realized there was a lot better chance that I was going to get killed on a road than bitten by a spider.

Dr. Kent:  I think it’s the same thing in New York here.

Kathryn Lasky:  Yeah, so anyhow, that’s what I do.

Dr. Kent:  It’s been such a pleasure speaking with the author of One Beetle Too Many: The Extraordinary Adventures of Charles Darwin.  It’s written by Kathryn Lasky and illustrated by Matthew Trueman. Or True-man? How does he say it?

Kathryn Lasky:  Trueman.  Not spelled like Harry Truman, but pronounced the same way.

Dr. Kent:  Well, and he has truly beautiful artwork in this book, there’s no question.  What a neat topic to have for a kid’s book, and thank you so much for chatting with me about it. Hopefully we talk to you again sometime.

Kathryn Lasky:  Oh, thank you. Have a nice day.

Dr. Kent:  You, too.  My next guest on the show is the author of Baptism by Fire: Eight Presidents Who Took Office In Times of Crisis.  Come on back in one second, and we’ll chat with him.

Susan Oetgen: Thank you, my last name is pronounced “Oetgen.”

Dr Kent: “Oetgen,” oh great.  I slaughtered it earlier.  Well, what an incredible track.  There’s a little bit of out music in there, there’s some classical, there’s some jazz.  Tell me about this.

Susan Oetgen: Well, that’s a piece that I co-wrote actually with the pianist in my band, Tony Malone, who trained, really as like a jazz pianist, and one of the reasons that I’ve loved writing this tune with him is because he really sort of brought that improvisatory and kind of off the rails sensibility of the jazz and improvisations you have, and we invited Peter Huff to play the clarinet, and Franz Nicolai who is on that track playing the accordian.  He’s also, I think maybe if you know the band, the whole study, Franz (inaudible) is the whole study, and they’re kind of old friends of all of ours from jazz circles and old circles in New York. It was just kind of a tune that we wanted to get pretty free form and let everybody have their way with.

Dr Kent: Well, it’s so cool.  How did you all find each other in the first place?

Susan Oetgen: The band? Likeness to Lily?

Dr Kent: Yes.

Susan Oetgen: Well, I started the band in 2003, and at the time I gathered together a group of musicians that I had worked with on different projects, and piano-based drums and guitar at the very beginning.  Ian Riggs and I are actually the only two originals who sort of started with the band.  But after a period of time, we were looking for a different drummer, and Ian suggested Evan Pasner, who he knew from lots of different projects around Brooklyn.  Then Tony Malone went to, I guess Ian and Tony met each other when they went at Oberlin, so he came on board a little while after that, and that’s been the quartet for the last two years, two and a half years.

Dr Kent: When you’re writing a tune like this, with a great piano player like he obviously is, and this crazy arrangement, what do you do? Do you start with some words? Do you fish out a little tune here and a little tune there?  What’s your process?

Susan Oetgen: Well actually I think one of the things that makes Likeness to Lily a unique, and sort of have the unique sound that it has is that it’s a very collaborative setup, the four of us are really good collaborators.  But every song that we’ve written so far…

Dr Kent: You still there? I think I might have lost Susan, but hopefully we’ll try and get her back.  Are you back? I lost her again. Their website is likenesstolilymusic.com, and it’s really inspiring music, incredible lyrics, and I’m pretty amazed by their whole sound, and it’s a mix of classical, jazz, and this and that.  I’m going to play another song from it, and in the meantime we’re going to get Susan back on the line, she’s the lead singer from Likeness to Lily.  So I’m going to play a track from their album called Farewell, Recruit, and we’ll talk to her about it right after the little pause here.

(music)

Dr Kent:  And what a beautiful tune that is.  That was called Farewell, Recruit, by Likeness to Lily.  And we’ve had some technical difficulties today, talking with Susan, but she’s going to be calling in here in a minute, and we’ll talk to her live on the show.  In the meantime, the band Likeness to Lily is four members, she’s Susan Oetgen, and there’s Tony Malone on piano, Ian Riggs on bass and Evan Pasner on drums.  And I think I have you live on the air again, Susan.

Susan Oetgen: Hi.

Dr. Kent: How are you doing?

Susan Oetgen: I’m good, I’m good.

Dr. Kent: We lost you for a minute there, but we’re now back.  That was a beautiful tune, my goodness, tell me about some of the other tunes from the album, including the one we just listened to, which is called Farewell, Recruit.

Susan Oetgen: Oh, sure.  Well, the record has six songs on it, there are twelve songs in total, but six of the songs on the record come from a piece that I was commissioned to write by the Brooklyn Philharmonic last year, where I was invited to bring Likeness to Lily and combine Likeness to Lily with chamber musicians, violin, cello and flute, and create a piece for a series that the Brooklyn Philharmonic does at the Brooklyn Museum, which involves collections, like the paintings or images in the museum’s collection.  And the program that I was invited to write this commission for was based on the Islamic Art Collection at the Brooklyn Museum.  So I had been working really with material related to the Marine Corp and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and somehow it kind of all came together when I went to the museum to research the actual paintings, and saw these really beautiful works of art that told the story of two lovers called Leila and Maglilan, which is sort of like the Romeo and Juliet of Islamic literature.  So I created a piece with six songs that told the story of Leila and Maglilan in a kind of updated version of a United States Marine and a woman who meet and fall in love and then are separated because he’s deployed, which roughly follows the same story line as the two lovers Leila and Maglilan, who are separated for various reasons.  So the song Farewell, Recruit, I think really sets the stage of that story and kind of introduces the rest of the record as like a sort of story that incorporates contemporary ideas as well as a more poetic and ancient one, too.

Dr. Kent: I’d like to talk about the words for a minute, before we get disconnected.  We were kind of talking about that, whether you were talking about the process of how Likeness to Lily is special to you, and I was asking you about words first, music first.

Susan Oetgen: Yeah, sure.  I think that the thing that makes Likeness to Lily unique is that really the songs start as poems or stories that I write and then set to a melody and then create for, and then bring to Tony and Evan and Ian, and as a group we arrange those melodies and create the songs that you hear on the record.  I think that as we’ve developed as a band one thing has become really clear to us, and that is that the music is really, it’s very storytelling, not just in terms of the lyrics, which are always, you know, really most of the songs have a really narrative point of view, they’re about characters or portraits of characters, and that sort of thing, but the music itself also contributes to that storytelling, because I think that what we create I the moment, either listening to the songs on a record or live, is a way to kind of escape into another universe where as an audience you can kind of have a keyhole viewpoint on a different story or different people living out a different story line. So yeah, they always sort of start with the lyrics, that’s for sure.

Dr. Kent: And one thing I like about Farewell, Recruit is in the middle of the song you talk about September 11th, and it’s such a visual story. This guy goes to become a member of the Army, and it’s definitely from the woman’s perspective, and she says, “Was it really so brutal?” It’s an interesting part of the story that we don’t often hear about, but it’s kind of the result of all these, there’s so many military men that are committing suicide and this and that because their relationships are, you know, people just can’t understand.

Susan Oetgen: Yeah.

Dr. Kent: A really powerful story for these times.  In what sense, how do you incorporate words? Are you like a poet that gets up every morning and does ten minutes of poetry? Or do you sort of explode with it?

Susan Oetgen: I think it sort of comes in little segments here and there.  Sometimes just a phrase or a word will seem really interesting, and then all of a sudden it will sort of spin out into a lyric, kind of of its own energy. But I think it’s mostly just because, as a way of communicating, language is so natural. I trained as a classical singer, and I’ve been a singer more than I would say a musician for most of my life. So the medium of words and language is something that is really natural, and I’ve spend a lot of time studying.  Like in classical singing you really study the words of an opera, or the words of an art song, because a lot of times they’re in foreign languages, and you really have to know what you’re singing about.  So in a way, I think that you, yeah, I heard of, I think it was E. Ennie Poole, the author who in an interview said that she gets up every morning, and it’s like any other job, she just sits down at the desk, and for like 8 hours, what she does is she writes.  I definitely am not like that.  I wish I had that kind of discipline, but it’s more just like, you know, words and images, or like a story kind of comes to mind and then it’s like a little bit of work at it whenever it seems inspired, you know.

Dr. Kent: Well, very cool.  I’m going to play one more track here, and I’ll say goodbye to you know, but it’s Helen the Blessed.  Tell me a little about that one.

Susan Oetgen: Oh sure, yeah. That actually, that piece is based on a poem that was written by my aunt, my father’s younger sister. She wrote a poem, which I adapted slightly to make it into more of like a song format lyrically, but it’s a song about my great grandmother on my father’s side, and her three sons, so she was, she lost three of her four sons before she died, and the fourth son I think was a priest. So in a way it was like saying good bye to all four of her sons, and it’s just, I thought that was an inspiring story because it seems so different than the kind of modern stories that you hear, like in the time of war there really is this thing where people have sons and daughters that go away, more than one, and it really affects the family life.  So I thought it was, even though it’s a song about a different place and a different time, it’s kind of topical to what we live today in our society today.  But it is about my great grandmother, a true story, if you will.

Dr. Kent: Well, very cool. Thank you so much for chatting with me.  I’ve been speaking with Susan, the lead singer of Likeness to Lily, and their website is likenesstolilymusic.com.

Susan Oetgen: Thanks so much.

Dr. Kent: I’m going to play a track from Likeness to Lily, from their last album, and that’s called Farewell, Recruit, of course named after that gorgeous song we just listened to, and this song is called Helen the Blessed.  Let’s listen to that.

(music)

Dr. Kent: That was a beautiful tune from Likeness to Lily, and that one’s called Helen the Blessed from their latest record called Farewell, Recruit.  Well, it’s been a great show this week, thank you so much for tuning in.  This is Dr. Kent, and I’m tuning out. I hope you have a safe one, and I hope you crack a book, and I hope you go to Likeness to Lily’s website and check out their music, what incredible sounds.  So be well, enjoy the new spring we’ve got and have a great weekend.

Terry Healey: Hey, thanks for having me.

Dr. Kent: Give me a nutshell about this book.

Terry Healey: Well, I’d like to say it’s an inspirational memoir that’s really about my experience overcoming a facially disfiguring cancer, but also probably more importantly, how I was able to eventually, over the course of several years, come to terms with that, accept myself, and ultimately in the end be grateful for the experience.  It was something that really other people encouraged me to do.  There was a lot of people from the support group that I was attending that just thought that it was a message that could help a lot of other people and so that’s why I ultimately wrote the book.

Dr. Kent: And what a story it is that you have to tell.  How did you, there’s so many people that have gone through awful events in their life, and they kind of give up.  Talk to us about how you kept going through all of this and have come out the other side.

Terry Healey: I would say that I was very lucky, actually, that I had a great support system, I had great family and friends who provided not just good solid support, but were full of positive energy.  I had a medical team that I believed in from day one, who I felt could do what they had to do, that believed in me, in getting through this.  So I trusted a lot of people around me and I think that helped a lot.  When I spend a lot of time with cancer patients who are newly diagnosed I often hear that they’re not very keen on their doctor, or they don’t feel very good about the treatment plan that’s ahead of them.  I was really lucky to have that, so it just kind of fell into place for me. But I definitely would pass that on to anybody that that support system that you have that’s around every day, if it is a medical team that you need, you owe it to yourself to go out and find the people that you connect with and that you trust.

Dr Kent: This happened to you as a young man.  It’s a time in life when we don’t anticipate anything happening to us.  The world is on a string, and it’s always so difficult for young people to deal with difficulties like this.  Talk about the beginning of this struggle for you.

Terry Healey: I think it’s a great question.  I was not unlike a lot of 20 year olds that think they’re invincible, you know, nothing serious is going to happen.  I think when I was initially diagnosed with the cancer and was told I had a rare form of cancer, I still felt that way, I felt that I’ll be able to lick this thing, this is no big deal. And fortunately I was able to beat it initially and really wasn’t left with any form of disfigurement, but it was 6 months later when I had this recurrence that it really hit me, hit me hard, and made me realize that I was in for a long road to hell.  This was something that was going to be life threatening, potentially and most likely was going to be very disfiguring, and so at 20 years old when you think about your life, appearances matte a lot.  We’re all kind of in that mode, especially here in the United States where that’s a very important fact. So kind of grappling with those issues.  Believe it or not, I think the disfigurement part became a greater challenge for me, especially given that it lasted quite a long time in terms of having to deal with that, have surgical treatments for years and years to recover from the disfigurement.

Dr Kent: I can’t even imagine what this was like, going through, as can most, I would say, a good portion of your audience is amazed that you were able to get through it at all, but then there’s another portion of your audience whom you give courage to. Talk about that part of your audience.

Terry Healey: First off, I think a lot of people on the surface will make comments like, “God, I don’t know how you got through that, I could never get through something like that.” Well, I think oftentimes we underestimate what we can get through, and you hear these stories on TV all the time about different types of adverse situations, adversities that people have to confront and deal with, and all different types of things that happen to us in life.  And so, I think people underestimate, I think we all have some human instincts that help us get through that stuff, but you know, I guess I do have messages for people in that I think it’s important for people to think about what if I was faced with something? What kind of survival kit would I need to get through it.  I won’t go through all those points, but when I public speak, I talk a lot about my survival kit, and some of those elements that can help other people, and I mentioned some of it before, but I think the first thing is you’ve got to make sure you’ve got a good support structure around you.  You’ve got to make sure you surround yourself with positive people.  But you also have to make sure that you have a purpose in life beyond whatever it is that’s hit you, and that’s probably the hardest thing, but I think making sure that there are other things that you’re always striving for, trying to look beyond the illness, beyond the condition, beyond the situation.  As hard as that is, I think that’s what helped me to try to look forward and believe that there was going to be something.  I didn’t know when it was going to happen, but down the road my life was going to be better.  And you know, I think it’s also important, especially for males to hear this, is to talk to a counselor, to go to a support group. A lot of men resist that more so than women, obviously, and so those are things I resisted as well, but when I actually opened my eyes and opened the door to it, I found that it was incredibly beneficial and really instrumental.

Dr Kent: What a neat, on the back side of things, what a neat way to take disfiguring events in your life, not just you, but this throws everything on its head, and you’ve been able to turn it into sort of a lifetime of devoting it to people.  How is that a blessing for you?

Terry Healey: It’s a blessing in so many ways.  I mean, to your point, I think it is kind of my little ministry, if you will, to make sure that I’m able to get out there and talk to other people and help them, but it’s a constant reminder for me of the fact that I appreciate every day now.  But it’s also taught me a lot about relationships, and I think we can take things for granted.  When you’re faced with something like this, it forces you to get that fresh perspective.  I’m the more forgiving person and I’m certainly more accepting of other people, and I think more tolerance.  All those kinds of things are really important, but primarily the blessing for me is what you just said, that I’m able to actually get out there and have that reward of being able to help other people in different ways, and my story isn’t just about cancer and disfigurement.  It’s the things that I learned and the things that I can share with other people. That’s really the greatest blessing through this whole thing.

Dr Kent: My father has been in a wheelchair for a while, and he’s completely fine, but after a car accident that he and I were in many years ago, he lost his ability to be the same human being that he was beforehand.  He can’t be the runner that he always was through his life, and that puts him into the disability crowd.  What I find interesting is I spoke to someone else about this very recently, is that this country sort of goes in stages.  Right now there’s the Prop 8 and homosexuality, the big issue right now.  There was different times when women’s rights was a big thing.  Do you think disability rights is ever going to come to the forefront?

Terry Healey: You know, you hope it does.  I think for any group that is not the majority, for any minority group, that’s always the greatest challenge, is how do you get the same rights as everybody else.  Unfortunately, the smaller that minority group it is, the more difficult it is, the less champions there are for it and so as horrible as any of those things are until somebody becoming disabled in some way during the course of their life, the people that have the ability to reach the masses, people like Christopher Reeves, for example, they can do so much, and bring so much to the forefront and help elevate a lot of those things that are important.  And just because you’re a small minority doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t receive the same benefits and be treated the same way as everybody else. So I’m certainly hopeful of that.  An aside is, I think about the cancer that I had, and the fact that I try to support it, I try to provide dollars to it, I try to help fundraise for it.  The problem is, it’s such a small percentage, that it’s really tough to get any mindshare, any research dollars to go toward it. So it tends to be this ignored type of cancer.  And unfortunately, it’s something that affects young people, so not to say that young people are more important than old people, but if you have a disease for example, that’s hitting people that are in their teens, even though it’s a small percentage, that to me is also an important thing to focus on.

Dr Kent: In talking about disabilities, what’s interesting is that you don’t really have a disability.  But your sort of experienced the same thing, probably, when you were young, and probably the most difficult thing to deal with is if you’d been in a wheelchair, people stare at you.  Right?  If you have a disfigurement, people stare at you.  Talk about that.  You’re the same guy you were, and now all of a sudden people stare at you, and they don’t quite understand.

Terry Healey: Yeah, that’s a great point.  It is, if people are different, they get treated differently.  If they look different, or if they act different, no matter what they get treated differently. That was the hardest thing for me, because when I was 20 years old my life was smooth sailing, and I never had issues of dealing with struggles with the opposite sex or anything like that, it was easy.  And then suddenly I was this monster, if you will, and kids pointed and stared and laughed, and even adults asked a lot of questions, which made me uncomfortable.  But what I think is amazing about the whole transformation, and we have to give ourselves time to transform, but over the course of many years I tried to work on the internal, as opposed to the external part of me.  At a certain point I cut off and ignored this, trying to reconstruct myself back to the way I was, and instead said I’ve become really insecure, I’ve got to focus on the inside.  What I found was, when I’d walk down the street in 1986 people would ask me questions.  But why, several years later, in the 90’s and beyond do I never get questioned anymore, do kids never come up to me and ask me questions.  It’s a rare thing now for somebody to notice that I’m different, and all I can think of is that, and granted I don’t have something that may be as noticeable as being in a wheelchair, but I think it’s how we carry ourselves, and the confidence that we have, and I think if we don’t make a big deal about being different, nobody else will.  Or people are less inclined to. That’s the only thing I can think of. I look the same as I did in 1986, or 1991, let’s say.  Why was I getting so many questions back then and so many difficult situations, and now it’s just so rare to have those.  To me, that was a real life transforming experience, and I was lucky that it’s worked out that way.

Dr Kent: Well, it’s been such a pleasure chatting with you, I could talk all day about this book, and about your life story.  Terry Healey’s website is terryhealey.com.  Tell us in just about a minute about your speaking business and what projects are you working on now, and of course, how is this book doing for you.

Terry Healey: I’m doing a fair amount of speaking.  I have a full time job as a marketing strategy consultant, so I have to pick these things and pick and choose a little bit, but I speak to a lot of corporations, sales and marketing organizations within those.  I speak to a lot of schools, and that’s something that I find probably the most powerful in terms of impact.  So, young kids in high school or even middle school, sometimes in college, who are dealing with issues of insecurity, dealing with appearance-related challenges.  So those are great ones for me, and right now I’m doing a lot around these Relay for Life’s and stuff with the American Cancer Society, so supporting events with other cancer patients that are dealing with things today.  So I’m trying to focus and pick those things that I think I can have an impact on and where my story will resonate.  The book just kind of comes secondary, and as much as people can read and not be distracted by all the other things around them, great, if they can pick up the book, it’s an easy read.  But it’s a nice complement to the book to have the ability to speak to people in groups.

Dr Kent: Well what a pleasure it’s been.  The book is called At Face Value: My Triumph Over a Disfiguring Cancer.  We’ve speaking with Terry Healey, and I can’t wait to talk to you the next time.

Terry Healey: Hey, thank you so much for having me.

Dr Kent: Now, my next guest on the show, as always, is a musician, and I’m going to start out playing a track from her album, and Susan Oetgen, and the group is called Likeness to Lily, and I’m going to play a track from their record.  It’s called False Hopes, a beautiful track.  Listen to this, and after we listen to the track we’re going to talk to her live, so come on back for that.

Steve Knopper: Yeah, I’m here, can you hear me? Hello?

Dr. Kent: Now I can hear you, how’re you doing?

Steve Knopper: Can you hear me now?

Dr. Kent: Yep, I can hear you.

Steve Knopper: Sorry, ok.

Dr. Kent: Tell me a little bit about this book.  Most people go into a CD shop, and they don’t think much about this, but as someone who is in the publishing end, music world, I’ve seen a lot of things change, as you certainly have.  Tell us about the changes that have happened.

Steve Knopper: Yeah, absolutely.  My book is on, it’s a chronology, and it begins with, it’s basically tells the story of the record industry, sort of the rise and fall.  It begins with the adoption of the CD in the early 80’s, and it goes through that period when everybody was replacing their record collections from cheap vinyl LPs to more expensive CDs.  And there was a huge boom in the industry, and everybody got real rich until about 1999 or 2000, and then Napster came along, and everybody got their music for free after that, and it kind of destroyed the whole model of selling CDs.  Then iTunes happened, and really the record industry has been shrinking and crashing and struggling ever since.

Dr. Kent: What are some of the industry’s big mistakes.  There’s so many, and it’s one after the other that we hear about and sort of laugh about. The famous one, of course is the 8-track, which wasn’t a mistake, but now it’s kind of something that we laugh about.  So tell us about some of the funny stories.

Steve Knopper: Sure.  I have a series of small chapters in the book called Big Musics, Big Mistakes.  And they’re separate (inaudible).  The first one is the CD longbacks.  Remember that cardboard thing that you had to buy in order to get the CD, you had to tear this thing open and get blisters all over your fingers and so forth.  That was actually created because record retailers like The Towers of the World were initially resistant to the CD, and they came after the industry basically said you don’t have to rebuild your LP racks, which would have cost a lot of money.  So they created these cardboard things, side by side they were about the same width as a vinyl LP.  So that was a big one, another one that I mention is killing the single.  By the late 90’s, part of the reason Napster was so effective was that people were just kind of sick of having to go out and buy $18.00 CD’s that had one or two good songs on them. Napster came along right at that time, and it allowed people to cherry pick the singles they wanted for free, and then iTunes later allowed you to do it for just 99 cents.  That destroyed that whole business model of selling an $18.00 CD as the only format.

Dr. Kent: And how is it, it’s such an interesting thing, now that there’s interactions directly with musicians, and musicians will put their own record labels together, and put their own music out, and this and that.  Is the record industry even breathing?

Steve Knopper:  Yeah, the record industry still is.  Basically when we have heard of the record industry we’re more or less thinking before major record labels.  Sony, DMG, Warner, Universal and EMI.  And those companies are huge companies that have a lot of overhead, they have a lot of payments to make, a lot of high executive salaries. So they’re carrying a lot of freight, and they’re not doing that well with their own problems, their own business model problems.  Then the economy is really giving that a hit as well.  So these companies are shrinking, shrinking, they’re laying off people left and right, they’re finding it harder and harder to discover new talent and market that new talent, although that’s still going on to an extent.  The question is, how that’s going to affect artists.  Sort of the glass empty way of looking at it is, it’s much more difficult for the artist to take that traditional path, sign to a major record label, use its connections to get on the radio, and become a huge star.  But I think the glass half full thing, which is sort of what I believe, is that no longer do you even need a major label for a lot of this stuff. You can use MySpace and Face Book and YouTube, and all these different ways of do it yourself marketing that didn’t even exist 10 or 15 years ago.  Maybe you won’t turn into Beyonce, but you can still eeke out a decent living as an act if you have talent and you’re willing to put a little work into the marketing.

Dr. Kent: It’s so much fun thinking about the rise of a company like Apple and the iTunes thing.  It’s so iconic.  Tell me about some other iconic moments in history.

Steve Knopper: Sure.  Again, Napster was sort of the most iconic of all dirt in this kind of profit, in this progression.  Napster came along, everybody knew Napster, used it, millions of people were on this thing, after Shawn Fanning invented it in 1999, and it’s become kind of a symbol, when you look back, of two things.  More negatively, it’s a symbol of piracy.  It’s a symbol of people being able to get all their music illegally for free, and copyright infringement and all that stuff.  But I think, as I say in the book, it’s also a positive legacy, or symbol as well because it showed the opportunity of the new digital business model, the new online, very convenient way of getting music where you didn’t have to go to stores and spend all that money on a CD.  So therefore I think that Napster was really a major crossroads at the time.  I argue in my book that the record labels at the time had a chance to make a deal with Napster, and they should have done so, but chose not to.

Dr. Kent: Is it all about money? Is all of what drives the market, is it ever what a consumer wants necessarily? It seems that Napster was, but are any of the decisions made by consumers and not money makers?

Steve Knopper: Yeah, everything in major business is all about money.  That’s true in the music business as well.  And you’re absolutely right, during that time period beginning in the late 90’s, even before Napster internet music was seen as an opportunity by some people in the music business.  But others, higher up in the business, who had been selling CD’s a certain way for a long, long time, and then before that final LP (inaudible) and gotten incredibly rich in the process.  They really had no interest in changing the business model and looking at the fork in the road, and taking the fork and going in the completely new technological direction.  And that’s true of many industries.  We certainly saw it with newspapers, we’re seeing it now with the auto industry.  If it works, people don’t want to change it, but that’s why you have to hire high tech people and listen to them.  And that’s where the record industry went wrong, is that they actually did have a lot of very credible high tech experts on their staff, very experienced people in both marketing departments and the new media, and the strategic department.  All the labels had lots of people like that.  But in the end the business affairs people and the people at the head of these labels didn’t listen to them and they just sort of poo-poohed them, and they went on their way selling CD’s and they wound up paying a major price for that decision.

Dr. Kent: I was the kind of guy when I was in college that was a little CD obsessed.  I remember so many people of my music-philic friends who had whole walls of their house devoted to CD’s.  Then talking through the years with folks, there’s still people that have whole walls full of LP’s.  You can’t really have a whole wall full of mp3’s.

Steve Knopper: Yes, that’s true.  I’m the same as you, I’m 40 years old, so I grew up right during that time.  I was in high school and college, right during that time when they were in that changeover from LP’s and CD’s, caught the tail end of getting obsessed with buying LP’s and having a big collection, and then obviously kind of grew up with CD’s and doing the same.  Yeah, I’m actually looking right now at my wall of CD’s, and I really like it, and I like that physical way of collecting records, and it’s sad to me that that’s a relic, that it’s kind of going out of style.  But on the other hand, you’re right to make the point that there’s something romantic that’s lost, because you can’t have wall of mp3’s.  But the iPod is pretty cool.  It’s pretty iconic, and I think if you’re a college student who’s grown up and come of age with music over the last 10 years, I think that you’re going to feel just as warmly and just as nostalgic as we do for CD’s about that moment when you got your first iPod, and you looked on it, and you realized you could carry 10, 20, 30, 40,000 of your favorite songs and play whatever one you want, and that’s a very, very powerful and cool idea.  So I do a lot of these interviews, and a lot of people bring up the same point, which is isn’t there something lost.  The physical collection going out, isn’t there something lost?  I think that’s true, but I also think that you have to look at the flip side of it as well, which is something really that’s gained.

Dr. Kent: And one thing that I’ve started to do is one people jettison their old record collections, I like to record my vinyl into my iPod.  I’m a big iPod freak too, and I’ve actually revived the classic feelings and the kids really can feel like they’re connected to that music, because it’s so diverse, and you can put anything in there, live shows, live shows have been revived again.  So talk about how has the music itself changed?  Because what’s interesting is you talk about the industry kind of scrambling and trying to figure out what to do, what have musicians done?  And I know part of that is in how they can release live shows and things that they might not have done before because they had to print 10,000 copies, or something like that.

Steve Knopper: I think that’s a really excellent point. I think you’re talking more about what established musicians can do as far as getting out different types of outside material, and stuff like that.  There are a lot of ways of doing that, if the musicians are willing, than there were even 10 years ago.  There’s YouTube.  When YouTube first started, as you remember, before the real copyright issues really kicked in, the stuff that you could see on YouTube was basically the entire history of music on video and DVD and VHS and TV, was right there, right in front of you for free, and that was a really cool moment.  For fans, not necessarily for people who have the rights for that stuff.  But still, you can go on YouTube and find all kinds of really interesting stuff. Live recordings, there’s another site that’s not totally supported by the original artists, there’s a little bit of controversy there, but there’s this site called Wolfgang’s Vault, I don’t know if you’re familiar with that, but they basically bought all the rights to the old King Biscuit radio shows, and also to Bill Graham’s Fillmore Auditorium recordings from the 60’s all the way up, and there is some fascinating stuff in there.  My two favorite artists to buy bootlegs of are Bruce Springsteen and Who, and there’s a lot of amazing material for both of those artists there.  So this whole internet thing has kind of broken open a dam.  I was actually just on a panel at South Heights Southwest last week, and one of my fellow panelists was Kim Quirk, who used to be in the band Too Much Joy, and is now with Rhapsody, and he made the point that when Napster came out, he thought there was no one who could be a bigger Clash fan that him.  He had all, no on could go deeper into the Clashions catalog than he could.  He thought he was as deep as he could possibly get with rare Clash and Joe Strummer recordings, and he said when Napster came out he realized ok, I’m going (inaudible).  So I think that’s dated in and of itself.  Obviously he has some more complex opinions about was Napster a good or a bad thing.  But I think that sort of sums it up in a nutshell, that this sort of internet stuff is a real opportunity for precisely the type of chance that you’re talking about.

Dr. Kent: And you know, an interesting thing that I’ve found is that a lot of musicians that are sort of the octogenarian crowd, a lot of them are resistant to some of this stuff, but a good number of them say you know what, if I’d have had this when I was a kid, man, it would havd made everything so much easier.  As a musician, and I see, even my students, with their iPods, I’m amazed how much variety of music they get and how educated they are about music.

Steve Knopper: Yeah, I spoke to a high school class here in Colorado where I live a few weeks ago, and I walk in to talk about the record business, and as I walked in a couple kids were arguing at their desks, they must have been 16 or 17, about whether or not Robert Johnson actually sold his soul to the devil. I hear that often.  I’m a huge Robert Johnson blues fan, and so I actually, we all go, all the music fans, rock music or pop music, go through this process of, “Oh, I heard the Rolling Stones hit, where did that come from?” So you go back and look through the Muddy Waters and Howard Wolf, and then you go back and listen to Robert Johnson.  You just keep going back, and you learn all this stuff, and you and I when were kids buying CD’s and LP’s, the only way to do that was to raise some money and keep making these trips back and forth to the record store.  Which on one hand is awesome, you know.  It’s just a great rite of passage thing as a kid.  But there’s a great power to be able to just do all that stuff at your computer.  You know, iTunes certainly enabled you to do that, and streaming services like MySpace now, and Rhapsody.  Not everything’s out there, but it probably will be, and very soon.  If it were 1980-whatever, and I was 14 and I was sitting in front of my computer going, “Wow, I can do that whole process and go back as far as I want, just by sitting here for an hour,” I think that’s an incredibly powerful thing, and it just supports music enthusiasm across the board, and I think that’s good.

Dr. Kent: So was Napster kind of like the audio YouTube? I have several colleagues that always talk about, “Why is there no YouTube for audio?”

Steve Knopper: Yeah, well, that’s a complicated, that’s a really good question there, it’s got a complicated answer. The YouTube for audio, music, audio recordings from the time of Napster had issues, legal issues, involving who has the rights to that.  Obviously all these things were fought in the courts, who has the rights to various songs, and various audio recordings.  And that was really meticulously wrangled through in various court decisions involving Napster, and all these different other places.  But then, when YouTube popped around, I guess it was 2004 and 2005, people realized that they really hadn’t gone through that same discussion for music video.  Kind of the difference between music video and audio is that you can dowload audio really easily, and it’s leading to a mass huge collection of songs for free, and illegally, as you know.  But it’s a little bit more difficult to do that for video, and so YouTube became kind of a middle ground option where you can rent all this stuff by streaming it on the YouTube website, but you can’t actually buy it and own it.  So, that was a long winded way of saying it’s just two different things.  The YouTube for audio right now is being worked out.  Rhapsody is one answer to your question, you can go to that website pay twelve bucks a month, and you can stream whatever song you want, but you can’t really own it.  Another example that’s kind of developing is MySpace music.  I never thought MySpace music was that big a deal, but just in the last few weeks I realize that all kinds of records are out there for free streaming basically.  There’s like 27 YouTube albums on there, there’s the new Kelly Clarkson on there, there’s all kind of stuff on MySpace you can get.  (inaudible) So the answer to your question is it’s developing.  So sorry I got a little complicated there.

Dr. Kent: So tell us, in closing here, I mean I could talk with you for hours about this, I love it.  How’d you get into this, and obviously the book’s done very well by you, and how did you get into this and come up with this one?

Steve Knopper: Well, basically I’ve been covering the music business a long time.  I started out just by being a music writer and a music critic.  I became a freelancer in 1996 and I realized that everybody was writing about music.  I wanted to write a record review for a major magazine, I had to compete with a billion people.  But if I wanted to do a news story about the music business, and interview 20 people, it’s a little bit harder to do that, but then the competition among people who can do that exact thing is not as much.  And it’s easier to find story ideas that no one else is pitching.  So that’s sort of how I got into it, and I originally wrote for Billboard, and then I wrote for Spin, and now I write for Rolling Stone about the same topic.  I had done a piece for Wired a couple years ago about trying to kill my computer with viruses.  Basically just clicking on all the stuff you’re not supposed to click on, and downloading all the spam stuff.  I wounded it pretty well, and the story ran and got some attention.  And someone from New York called me and asked if I had any book ideas.  And then the story gets kind of long and drawn out, but the short answer is I sent him ten ideas and he liked one of them, and eventually we had a book deal.

Dr. Kent:  It’s wonderful, I love it.  The fascinating thing about it is that you come to all of this from I think a really fresh perspective.  We’re so used to hearing, “Oh, that damn MySpace,” or you’ll hear it from the other end, “Oh, iTunes has really changed the whole world, and it’s so perfect, and everyone has such a tact.  And so I think what you’ve done brilliantly is sort of bring everyone together and tell the whole history.

Steve Knopper: Well thank you very much, that’s what I realize is that nobody had actually really told the story from the perspective of the people involved.  I interviewed something like 280 people for this book, and they were the people who were right there in it, negotiating, and I realized no one had done kind of a journalism book, kind of like what you just said, kind of fleshing out exactly what you just said. People basically know what happened, but not too many people know the inside details of what happened, and that was my goal, and I’m just really gratified that people seem to like it.

Dr. Kent: Well, it’s so cool.  So where can we find your writing online, do you have a site?

Steve Knopper: Yeah, I do, I have a website.  It’s KNOPPS.com. My last name is Knopper, so that’s my long time nickname.

Dr. Kent: Well, Knopps.com, and we can check out all of his writing and I hope that also the piece from wired is up there somewhere?  I gotta go check that out. The book is called Appetite for Self Destruction: The Spectacular Crash of the Record Industry in the Digital Age.  You gotta pick this book up. Thank you so much for chatting with me.

Steve Knopper: Thank you for having me, I enjoyed it.

Dr. Kent: All right, my next guest on the show has an extraordinary tale to tell, Terry Healey wrote a book called At Face Value, and it’s really unbelievable the story that he has to tell us throughout more than 30 surgeries on his face, and has an incredible life story to tell.  Come on back for that in just a minute.

Darren Littlejohn: Hi.  Thanks very much for having me, pleasure to be here today.

Dr. Kent: So give us all a nutshell of this book.

Darren Littlejohn: This book is about deepening recovery for anyone who is either involved in a 12-step program, or wouldn’t be involved in a 12-step program because they’re afraid of the Judeo-Christian religiosity.  It’s for anybody who knows an addict, anybody who treats addicts, anybody who’s suffering from any kind of attachment related (inaudible), and it’s applicable to what Buddha said, “All beings who suffer.”  So we’ve combined the 12-steps, which are about attachment gone wild, and Buddhist terminology attachment is one of the root causes of our suffering, but in the addict it’s way out of control.  So we try to get sober and get free of our attachment in the extreme form with the 12-steps.  This really illuminates the Buddhist path because this is, after all, what the Buddha taught.  This is hard to see if you’re, it’s easier to see, I should say, if you’re an addict already.  So the two paths have a way of really complimenting each other and illuminating the nooks and crannies where it might otherwise be a little difficult to see.

Dr. Kent: Tell me a little bit about, to the non 12-step person, and to the non-Buddhist, give us some introductions into those two different worlds.

Darren Littlejohn: For the non-addict, everybody, of course we go from the Buddhist perspective.  So everybody, according to the Buddhist teachings, suffers from not getting what we want and thinking that whatever it is that’s going to make us happy is really what we call I Buddhism the inherent cause of happiness.  So in other words, one of my teachers always uses the reference of chocolate cake.  And if chocolate cake were the cause of happiness, I would simply back up a truckload to my front porch, have an unlimited supply of chocolate cake, and obviously we know that that’s ridiculous.  After your second piece you’re sick.  So chocolate causes a temporary happiness.  But then if we have too much of it, it becomes the cause of suffering.  So for the non-addict, even if you’re not a food addict, we can look at these examples in our own life.  Anything that we think is going to make us happy: more money, better job, better house, (inaudible), things along those lines.  We start to examine this and see that, hey wait a minute, what I thought was going to make me happy is not really the source of true happiness, any way you look at it.  And for the non-Buddhist, those terms are what work best, just looking at the three types of common known Buddhism, which are attachment, aversion, which is, when we don’t get what we’re attached to, we simply turn that around into something we don’t want and have an aversion towards entering.  In 12-step terms we get a big resentment over it.  So you don’t have to be a Buddhist to really understand attachment, and the fact that what we think we want is not in the long run every enough to make us permanently happy.  As a matter of fact, most people don’t even believe that total, absolute happiness is possible.  Most people don’t believe that ending suffering is possible.  So all beings suffer according to Buddha.  That’s the first simple truth.  Life is suffering, it’s not a negative, it’s an observation.  What it means is basically what I’ve just described.  What we think makes us happy in the long run really doesn’t, so there’s something more, maybe something on a spiritual plane. That’s basically what the chapter’s about.

Dr. Kent: And describe for us also, many of us know the 12-step program.  I have many family members who have gone through it, but it is deeply Christian most of the time.  Talk about what inspired you to, clearly it’s coming from something personal in you.  But what inspired you to do the 12-Step Buddhist?  It makes a lot of sense, and I know that, for example, Native Americans use some of the 12-step processes with their own religion.  Where did you get this idea?

Darren Littlejohn: I started in the 12-steps in 1984, and I had a sobriety period of ten years.  During that period I moved through the various (inaudible), and metaphysical Christianity, the science of mind, all of these types of positive thinking, and could really very much have Judeo-Christian Creator God monarcheistic based philosophies, which were really well suited to 12-step recovery.  Then I got into mediation pretty seriously, after a few years in recovery.  I found myself in a spot, after a few years of sitting, staring at a blank wall, I was practicing Zen Buddhism, I found myself in a spot where what I saw really wasn’t improving.  What I was looking at, as I followed that path and noticed my body, labeled my thoughts, after years and years of that with therapy and 12-step recovery, and education and psychology and so forth.  I found myself in a really dark, depressed place, and I didn’t want to look anymore, it wasn’t looking too good.  I couldn’t really get past that block.  The concept of praying to something that was going to fix me, or putting responsibility for my life outside of myself.  Even though I was willing to surrender and willing to follow the steps and principles, I never really felt that that task really amounted to much, I terms of un-enduring happiness.   So after all this week, after ten years of sobriety, all kinds of zen mediataion therapy and everything else, I found myself in a place that was dark enough for me, that I made the choice to go back and try the various substances of my addiction again.  So when I came back, because that doesn’t work, because the disease is incurable, the disease doesn’t go away with abstinence  It actually continues and sort of deepens.  So when I came back in 1997 I had to re-examine everything that I’d ever thought about before, and I got very much a good vibe again in 12-step recovery and zen Buddhism, and psychotherapy, but it wasn’t I found the teachings in Tibetan Buddhim. Which really explained a lot, and it went into a lot of detail of various types of methods and visualizations and practices that went hand in hand with the 12-steps.  So that inspired me to continue my spiritual path and to really stay involved in both the 12-steps and in Buddhism.  But I found that the problem I had is that in the 12-step program most people settle for just as much spirituality as is necessary to get sober through the day.  Most people aren’t capable of a real, super deep seekers are looking with a real spiritual (inaudible).  Some are, maybe not to a degree, but the people who are super into it are few and far between.  And those are the people who really stand out and become sort of legendary in the 12-step treatment community. In the Buddhist community I found that I was sort of an addict… when an addict speaks, particularly from the disclosure that we use in 12-step rooms, we basically tell anybody anything, we air those feelings, whether or not its appropriate, until you learn better.  But we really learn how to kind of be raw and truthful, and after many years of that, it’s pretty hard to tone down.  So, finding myself being in the Buddhist groups, sharing, or having relationships or communications with teachers and so forth, it’s really kind of awkward. Then I thought it was a bit odd that I would be so honest.  “Wow, that’s such a wise thing.” I’d say, “Oh, that’s not wise, I heard it in a meeting.” So I really had to learn instead of doing one or the other, instead of graduating from the 12-steps and finding a better, spiritual path, which leads to more disease and relapse, at least it did in my case, and in the case of many others. Instead of choosing this or that, I had to learn how to do both and find the similarities.  What we talk about in 12-step meetings is (inaudible) the difference is.  I found so many profound similarities between the 12-steps and Buddhism that I started blogging about it and eventually got a lot of feedback, people really enjoyed the writing. I decided to put those thoughts together, and came up with a lot of methods for the book after I started working on it.  I found that there is actually a lot more than I even, I really think I just scratched the surface in the book, to be honest with you.  Even though there’s a ton of chapters, and most people are finding it to be pretty dense work to get through it.  I feel like there’s actually a lot more to be said on the topic.

Dr. Ken: Well, it’s so fascinating.  Let’s talk about the issue of Buddhism.  It’s a very accepting religion.  I had a fellow on the show about a year ago who wrote one of the Dummies guides on Buddhism, and he sort of explained a lot of it.  It’s a fascinating and very accepting religion, whereas Christianity isn’t necessarily all that much.  Talk to that a bit.

Darren Littlejohn: I have kind of a saying I made up here, don’t throw the Buddha out with the bathwater.  You can look into the deep teachings of Jesus through the Sermon on the Mount, for example, and you can see, for example, teachings on karma if you just take the principle of we reap what we sow.  If you really take that principle and you look at karma and you look at Buddhism you can see that we’re talking about the same thing.  However, people hear what they want to hear, people take the message and turn it into whatever they want.  So I don’t discount the teachings of Christ on any level.  As a matter of fact, many Buddhists feel that Jesus was a Bodisapha, or a very highly developed practitioner, maybe a Buddha, the completely awakened one.  So there’s really no discounting of the teachings, but the way people behave is a little bit flighty there. There’s some room for improvement in a lot of it.  And even Jesus said, “Don’t cast your pearls before swine,” and what I think he meant by that was if people aren’t really ready for the truth, try to give them what they can handle.  Give them the teachings that they can deal with.  You can even see there’s some Buddhism in the very beginning of what was recorded orally, and later written down, from what Buddha taught, was one type of system.  That later evolved into other types of systems, which were much more advanced, much faster paths, and not everybody’s ready for that kind of thing.  Some of us, for example, I would say, we just need to keep our mouths shut and not cause any harm to anybody else, and that’s enough of a spiritual practice.  For others of us, we can get involved with other types of practice, which actually start to utilize some of the energy that we have, and to work with the breath and visualizations and so forth, and actually instead of repressing anger completely and shutting it off, you really start to kind of use the energy to try to assimilate that, and integrate that into our daily life.  So Buddhism to me is really more of a mind science, and a massive system of methods, which are available to help transform the sufferer into one who is completely awakened and free from all suffering, just like the Buddha.   Within that framework, there are fundamentalists in Buddhism.  There are fundamentalists in Christianity.  So I think that if you really use the teachings of Jesus, you’re not so far off from the teachings of Buddha. I wouldn’t say that they’re completely the same, and there are philosophers out there who talk about the similarities and differences, but who are the people that you want to associate with, and how are they living their lives?  That becomes a different conversation.  This is the same in the 12-step community, for example, we have a saying, stick with the winners.  So when a newcomer walks in there, just coming off the street and detoxing from crack or oxycotin, or something really bad, and we tell them here’s what you do, find those people who have what you want in recovery, and go ahead and stick with them.  And that really works to a high degree for many people.  However, depending on the group that you’re involved in, and that location in the country that you’re at, and the individual who happens to be the one that who touches you or that you connect with, you might get involved with some really sick people. There are sick people in the 12-step community, that’s why we’re all there.  We say, it’s a good thing we’re not all sick on the same day, luckily.  But again, within the 12-step community you will also find fundamentalists who are really kind of fascist and militant about their value system.  I’ll give you an example of that.  In the AA literature it says we realize, we know, and we have been told, when it comes to prayer and meditation and things like that, the world’s diverse and full, go find them. We’re going to talk about matters medical, (inaudible) and religious.  I went to a meeting not too long ago, on Thanksgiving, and there was a guy slamming his hand on the table saying, “This is the only book I read, and the only book I’ll ever need.”  And I was just wondering if you read the part in that book that said go read other books.  So we don’t want to throw the Buddha out with the bathwater, we don’t want to throw the teachings of Jesus or Buddha or the 12-steps out, because some people, out of their own fear, stick to a rigid viewpoint, to the point where they feel that they’ve got to impose those belief systems on others.  The 12-steps is supposed to be free and open for us to have a higher power of our own conception, but many, many people feel that it’s very Judeo-Christian oriented, and that if you don’t come along with the group thing, that you’re not welcome, and they don’t feel comfortable.  And that’s what I like about the audience that I’m trying to address with my book, The 12-Step Buddhist.

Dr. Kent: Well, it’s been a fascinating discussion.  I could keep talking with you all day, but I have to get to my next guest. I’d love to have you on again and talk more about this.  It’s so deep.  The book is called The 12-Step Buddhist: Enhance Recovery from Any Addiction.  There’s a lot more specifics that I wanted to get into and we didn’t have time for, but there’s some real plans in this thing, and it’s a useful book for a lot of people.  Where can we find out more online?

Darren Littlejohn: At the12stepbuddhist.com.  I’ve got podcasts, daily tips, some blogs, all kinds of resources and other information on there.  And you can order a signed copy of the book right from the website.

Dr. Kent: Well thank you so much for chatting with us.

Darren Littlejohn: Thanks for having me, I’d love to talk to you again sometime.

Dr. Kent: The 12-Step Buddhist: Enhance Recovery from Any Addiction, by Darren Littlejohn.  It’s got a foreword by Robert Thurman.  Go out and pick that up, it’s a gorgeous book, and some pretty amazing content for all of us.  Most of us know someone going through the recovery process, pick up a copy of this book and go to the12stepbuddhist.com also, or Google Darren Littlejohn.  My next guest on the show is going to be a very exciting one again.  This is a good show today, and Steve Knopper is the author of Appetite for Self Destruction, and we’re going to talk about the record industry and how it’s having trouble here in the digital age.  So come on back to that.

(music)

Dr. Kent: What a gorgeous rendition of that.  And it’s my honor now to speak to a member of the Imani Winds.  I’m speaking with Mariam Adam.  Are you there?

Mariam Adam: Yes, I’m here. Thanks for having me.

Dr. Kent: What a gorgeous sound.  Tell me first about that Ravel piece.

Mariam Adam: Well, it’s a piece that was originally for piano and then rearranged by Ravel himself for the orchestra, and that’s probably on of the more well known versions of the Le Tombeau De Couperin, and it was a piece that was actually dedicated to his friend that had fallen in the first World War. But then it was transcribed for the wind quintet by a horn player actually.  And it’s one of the few pieces that has transcribed well for the wind quintet, and is written in such a lush way that you don’t often get to hear these five instruments. So I think for that reason alone it has an appeal to every type of listener, classical, contemporary, and even some people hear a little bit of the jazz element in the movements.

Dr. Kent: Yeah, that’s a fascinating thing about your music is that it’s got a real edge to it of, it’s got the jazz in it.  We’re going to listen to some piet solo later, and you’ve got a whole bunch of different elements coming together in all of your music.

Mariam Adam: Yep, that’s our M.O. (laughter) Have to put in a little bit of everything.

Dr. Kent: Tell me about the group. Where do you guys play?  You’ve got all these things going on, and of course something that’s very fascinating about the group is you’re all African American players.  Talk about all of that.

Maiam Adam: Yeah.  Imani Winds is a group that definitely looks the way that we do for a reason.  Valerie the flutist had the name of a group before she even had the members of the group about 11 years ago and I knew her from summer festival out at Aspen.  We moved to New York at the same time to go to grad school, got this group started, had no idea where it was going to go, although she always says that she did, and I believe it.  But the group started out as African American, Latino musicians in classical music, one, to give the composers a similar background of voice.  Another reason to give younger players that look like us role models that we feel we didn’t necessarily have growing up on our instruments.  And also to really give a new direction to chamber music, and maybe a little bit of evolution of what chamber music is coming to.  You know, we’ll always have the classic pieces like Ravel, and for us classic pieces also mean Milton and Carter and things from the 1940’s and 50’s.  That’s about as recent as we get for the great works. But that led Imani Winds to take a path that was, one, educational, as well as slightly groundbreaking just for the reason that there weren’t many wind quartets out there doing what we do, and having two composers in the group, and think that is really the unique trump card that we have.  That we have two composers who don’t just transcribe things, they write original works, and they’ve had us as their guinea pigs for many years, so they’ve gotten quite good at it.  It has allowed us to expand into many different genres and bring it to our audiences.  And there’s always a little bit of something for everybody on our program. And the places that we end up playing.

Dr. Kent: And on your website, imaniwinds.com, that’s i-m-a-n-i winds.com, there’s some incredible information about your group.  And the bio page is just an incredible collection of folks.  A number of awards, the degrees like you said, the composers, the incredible jazz and classical performers.  What’s it like to play in such a small group with so many fantastic people?

Mariam Adam: Well, it’s wonderful.  It really is wonderful.  I think because we get along.  People see that, and it comes through in our music, and I think that is also a rare thing that people say in chambers, in the groups, is that we have fun on stage, we have fun with the music.  Everybody is really kick butt on their instruments.  It’s a technical term.  So we have a lot of freedom because of that, and not a lot of restrictions. Also, when it comes to our proper on stage, and we have stage etiquette, but also we speak to the audience and we allow them to respond to us, and we try to break down that wall that has been the stigma of classical music concerts.  So we’re at Carnegie Hall and Alice Kelly, and all the big halls of New York, and all the big venues across the state.  But we definitely want to celebrate the joy that we have in music and bring that infectious energy to other people.  And that’s not something you get to see all the time, and I think that’s why we’ve had the longevity that we’ve had, because we love doing what we’re doing, we know we’re very lucky, to be a full time touring wind quintet.  But we also work very, very hard with it, and that includes getting up at 8:00 in the morning, 7:00 in the morning, to go play for little kids in schools in every city that we visit, to bring this love of music to them.

Dr. Kent: It really is extraordinary also, for me, I have a background as a composer, and I went to Stonybrook, which I know you’re horn player did. You have a specifically, a commissioning project that’s aiming for people that wouldn’t necessarily be writing this kind of music, and featuring, well talk about that a little bit.

Mariam Adam: Yeah, the Legacy Commissioning Project started out as a commissioning project to celebrate being ten years together, same people.  And it’s really evolved into a mission and a movement to get new music into the chamber music repoirtoire, especially for the woodwind quintet, because there’s a lot of woodwind quintet pieces out there, but they’re not all very good.  And because people don’t have a group to write for a lot of the time, and to experiment with, they tend to write in a very similar style. So we’re getting composers like Jason Moran who is an incredibly, eclectic avant gardi and yet contemporary and down home swinging jazz pianos. And then you have Stephan Harris, who is also just multi talented.  Percussionist, vibrafonist, composer, band leader, and Tanya Leone.  Simoncho Hin is a ute player from Palestinian background.  And these are all people who come from completely different angles but we’re forcing them, essentially, to write for us. But with the idea that they get to collaborate and we get to come back to them and say look, this is an amazing idea, why don’t you expand on this.  Or, guess what, this doesn’t work.  So we have feedback with the piece, and that is also to ensure that the piece is going to have legs beyond the premiere, and beyond this first world premiere that would happen.  Because a lot of times that’s what would happen with commission pieces and then you never hear about them again.  And we want to make sure these pieces stick around, so that they’re written well and that the person who’s writing kind of outside of their norm, ends up feeling comfortable in it, and successful.

Dr. Kent: Absolutely.  I encourage everybody to go check out imaniwinds.com.  I love your last album, and we’re going to play a track from that coming up ahead, Liver Tango from Master Piazzolo, which is a very brave piece to play, and it’s an incredible version of it. Are you working on any new recording projects?

Mariam Adam: Absolutely.  We always have a couple in the pipeline, but one of them right now is going to be the Legacy Commissioning project pieces. We have one by Alvan Singleton. We have the piece by Jason Ran, we have a piece by Stephan Harris coming up soon.  We also have a great piece that was part of the commissioning project by Roberto Sierra that’s written for string quartet, plus wind quintet, which I think is going to be a new genre.  I’m so excited about it.  I love the sound, I love the power that we get with these two groups together.  And Valerie Coleman, our flutist, also wrote a piece to go with the concerts, with this collaboration of the string quartet. So we’re going to be recording that. We have a wonderful piece by Bucky (inaudible) who wrote (inaudible) for us called (inaudible) over Havana, and we might be putting out things in singles. But we also have a couple albums that we’ll put together from these Legacy Commissioning project pieces.  And there’s always something new on the horizon, so yes, please get into our website and check out Alejandro.  So we’ll probably be near somewhere near somebody soon. We’re all over the place.

Dr. Kent: Well I love it, incredible music.  I hope to talk to you again after some of these CDs come out.  It’s great stuff, and keep doing it.

Mariam Adam: Absolutely, and make sure you check out the Christmas album that we had, that’s the one that keeps giving back every year.

Dr. Kent: Oh, Ill bet, I’ll beat it does, yeah.

Mariam Adam: It’s great fun.

Dr. Kent: No Christmas songs here, but I want to play the song from their last Grammy nominated album, and this one’s called Libra Tango from Aster Piazzolo.  Thank you so much for chatting with me, Mariam Adam.

Mariam Adam: Thank you for having me.

Dr. Kent: And the website again is imaniwinds.com. Go check out their music. It’s amazing stuff.  So we’re going to listen to the whole track called Libra Tango from Aster Piazzoli, by the Imani Winds.

(music)

Dr. Kent: What a beautiful piece.  I’m going to cut it off right there, but if you want to listen to more go to imaniwinds.com.  That’s a piece called Libra Tango by Aster Piazzola, as performed by the Imani Winds.  Check them out. It was such an honor chatting with Mariam Adam about her group, and her performances on the clarinet.  And earlier in the show today we talked to Paul Austin.  I could have talked to him for several hours about his riveting stories from the ER.  And before that we talked to John Gilmore about his memories of Marilyn Monroe.  And at the very beginning of the show, of course, was the incredible, inspirational story of Missy Jenkins, who not only survived a school shooting, but she’s starting to really get her story out there into the world, and she changes so many people’s lives with it.  Well, have a great week, today is the first day of spring, and I hope you have a great one, and pick up a good book in the meantime.

Paul Austin: It’s my pleasure.

Dr. Kent: So tell me about this book, Something For the Pain.

Paul Austin: The title Something For the Pain, the subtitle One Doctor’s Account of Life and Death in the ER. It’s about the way my job almost wrecked my family.  It turns out that the ER can be a really stressful place to work. There’s an abundance of human suffering.  It turns out that you work rotating shifts, and at least in my case it turns out I took a lot of stress home with me.  So one of the major points of the book is the way in which someone’s job, you can bring that stress home with you and it can damage your family and your relationships in your family, and kind of what I did to kind of mitigate those factors.

Dr. Kent: It appears like we had a little station break and I apologize for that difficulty, and I’m back on the show now, live.  I welcome myself back on the show, and we have Paul Austin, the author of Something for the Pain: One Doctor’s Account of Life and Death in the ER. We still have you?

Paul Austin: Yeah, I’m still here.

Dr. Kent: Sorry about that.  So tell me, we were in the middle of, the ER is not only difficult for, obviously there’s scores of people waiting in the waiting room, thinking about their families, and scared about their loved ones, but that stress kind of carries on, it sort of sticks to your clothes when you go home.

Paul Austin: Yeah, it really can. That’s probably true with a lot of different jobs.  This job is, the need is so great, there’s so many people who have a very valid claim to your time and attention. Sometimes the ER can kind of be the bottom of the funnel of the people needing to come into the hospital, and we’re trying to get people in and out safely and quickly.  Understandably people can get really impatient.  Nurses, more so than docs, but just about anybody that works in the ER, the people can take out their frustrations in way that they wouldn’t in their doctor’s office, or at an upscale restaurant or bar.  Sometimes people can, understandably, vent their frustrations.  Add that to people having heart attacks, or people in a car wreck, or someone who’s not breathing, their could be a lot of other serious medical problems of which these are all kind of a background.  So the nurses and docs, and nursing assistants and ward clerks and housekeepers, all the people in the ER have to kind of figure out a way to give good care and be emotionally present to the people who need it, but yet keep their own defenses up. So that’s another aspect of the book, is how can one remain compassionate in what has become an increasingly industrial environment.  So that’s another theme of the book, is how to kind of regain your compassion if you get burned out, or how to understand what compassion means.

Dr. Kent: Well, I know when I was in the emergency room I had a doctor there who made me feel really at ease, and it’s such a strange place, it’s not meant to be a warm and inviting and friendly, but at the same time, what does a doctor do to save patients’ lives, to make the at ease?  And how much of that do you take with you, and how much can you leave behind?

Paul Austin: I’m glad you had a good experience.  I’m so relieved for people who say they went to the ER, and they may have had to wait a while, but the doctor was nice, or the nurses were nice, or the people were competent.  I think a lot of us that work in that environment are just hoping that the person we talk to had a good experience, because it can be a place where people wait a long time.  Sometimes a doc or nurse may speak sharply when they don’t mean to, and I’m so glad you had a good experience.  One thing that I’ve come to think about compassion is that it’s not an emotion.  When I started as an undergraduate I was working my way through college as a nursing assistant in an emergency room.  I was the guy who cleaned out the bedpans and pushed the stretchers to take people upstairs, and did that to pay for school.  At that point I thought that compassion was an emotion, I thought it was something you felt.  I have come to believe that it’s more of a discipline, that it’s more of a habit.  It’s a work habit, just like a carpenter keeps things plumb and square, a carpenter measures twice and cuts once.  A carpenter makes sure the angles are right before he nails it together.  I think a good doc or a good nurse views compassion in a similar way.  I think it has less to do with emotion and more to do with maybe philosophy or one’s personal belief system about the role of caring for people.  I’ve come to the conclusion that it involves kind of opening your heart and closing your heart as a situation demands.  Like, if someone comes in that’s critically ill, or they’ve stopped breathing on the way in, that requires a sort of, there’s kind of a drill that docs and nurses do together, it’s very much a team, and we kind of all know our roles, and it’s more like a pit stop at a race track than it would be an emotional event.  It’s more of a technical event at that time.  You really need to close down your emotions. You need just to function quickly, and efficiently and pleasantly and professionally, and without feeling much.  Then later, you may need to open your heart some.  It’s like if a mom comes running into the ER and her baby’s blue and not breathing, and the heart’s not beating.  They hand it to the nurse, and the nurse comes running back to the ER and says we need a doctor in Room 7 now.  I go in, and the nurses are trying to stick IVs in the baby, put an airway in, you put a tube down their windpipe.  And then the next step is to get IV access to give them meds or fluids for whatever they need next.  Often just opening the airway will do a whole lot towards resuscitating a child that age.  But say you’ve got an airway in, you’re breathing for the baby with a little bag through the tube down their mouth and into the windpipe, and you’re stuck on IV.  The nurses have tried a couple times and have not been able to get an IV.  The next step is to establish an intraosseous line.  That’s an IV that goes into the bone of the tibia.  The lower leg has two bones, pretty good sized bones, called the tibia and a smaller one called the fibula.  But you just stick a needle right into the bone itself.  The fluid goes into the bone marrow, and from the bone marrow into the bloodstream.  And it gets into the bloodstream almost instantaneously, it’s almost as good as an IV and it’s a lot faster.  And to do it you just hold the baby’s little leg in your hand, and the needle’s kind of like a finishing nail.  It’s a pretty good sized needle, and it’s got a little pea handle on it, and you just jam it down into the bone.  You hear kind of a crunchy little pop as it goes into the bone.  So it goes into the skin and through the muscle and pops into the bone.  If it wiggles, it’s not into the bone. It needs to feel like a nail that’s been driven into wood to know that you’re in the right place.  And then you hook an IV tube and then you go to the next step.  That process of jamming a needle into an infant’s lower leg is kind of a brutal procedure.  The child doesn’t feel it because they’re functionally dead, or out of it, but you practice on chicken bones, on chicken legs, at least when I was training that’s what we did.  But you feel, it’s not something you feel much about.  You just pop through that step and go to the next step.  You bring a very, not a harsh persona, but you bring a, you want to get things done attitude to do that procedure.  Now, when you talk to the mom, or the dad, you can’t bring that forceful, stick a needle in the bone personality, that would be cruel.  You have to kind of open your heart and take a deeper breath and relax your shoulders and unclench your fist when you’re talking to the family. So that’s kind of a little quick example of a time where you need to be kind of harsh, or hard, kind of bring something forward that will squeak us through a problem, and then kind of open up, and soften up.  What I’m trying to do, and what I think I’m getting better at doing is closing down my emotions when I need to, and opening them up when I need to.  Sorry to talk so long.

Dr. Kent: Well no, it’s fascinating, and that kind of insight is, especially with these shows on television that are so obsessed with the ER, and you wonder how much of it is right, and in a lot of cases it really is brutal stuff that you have to do, but you have to do it to save people’s lives.  It makes a lot of sense that you can’t come up to someone and say I just rammed a needle into your baby’s bone.  You can’t do that, right?

Paul Austin: You can’t say the baby’s got a heartbeat, but probably going to be brain dead.

Dr. Kent:  Right, exactly.

Paul Austin: You can’t say that.  In the room, once you get then, say you get a pulse, yeah, you can’t be just real blunt with people, that would be cruel.  I think TV shows do a great, great job at what they’re good at.  They’re real good at getting the sights and sounds of an ER.  Like if you watch that TV show ER.  I’ve seen copies, I’ve seen a show or two.  Not recently, so I don’t know if it still does it, but it did a real good job of getting kind of that pace, getting that sound, getting the feel and texture of the moment.  I think they do an incredible job with that.  They don’t, very few TV shows are able to kind of get beneath the surface of what the spiritual experience of it is, or the emotional experience, or the real experience is. And that’s what the book, I was hoping, in the book I wanted it to be as much literature as a book.  I want it to have literary value just in its prose, just in the way the nouns and the verbs work on the page.  I want them to be good.  I was just thrilled when Norton decided to publish it, they’re my publisher and they’re known as a big, literary press.  I was just so thrilled that I had at least my editor’s satisfaction, or created a work of literary value, as well as a book that’s kind of pretty honest about what my job’s like.  But I think that literature can get at that.  I think a good book can get at what’s really happening on the human level, or where your heart is level, more than maybe a TV show.

Dr. Kent: Right.  Part of the reason this book is unique is that it’s something we really all experience in our lifetimes, the ER. If you’ve recently been to the ER with a family member, you might not want to watch a show like ER because it’s so real-seeming.  But what’s your take on, you talked a little bit about it, but doctors really do need to steel their emotions in some ways.  I don’t know, I think a lot of people don’t know if they could do it, in terms of where you start out in med school, operating on cadavers, and then you’re dealing with painful things all the time.  How do you steel your emotions to do it?

Paul Austin: I think getting the emotional armor up into place isn’t that big a challenge.  At least for me it wasn’t, maybe for my classmates and colleagues and co-workers it is.  I think that the bigger challenge is how to poke some holes in that armor.  What can happen is that, ok, you’ve seen the ER.  I don’t know about other types of medicine, but maybe in radiation oncology, where it’s kind of a foregone conclusion that people have an illness that will probably be terminal, and all we’re going to do is shrink down the tumor enough to ease the pain, or gain a couple years survival.  It may be in that situation there could be some emotional ferocity, because we’re not expecting a miracle here, so the doctor doesn’t feel that they’re a failure if the patient dies.  But at least in the ER the expectation is that we’re going to resuscitate somebody, that they don’t send people to the ER to get started on hospice.  They send them there because they want us to fix the problem.  So if you’re the person who’s going to have to fix the problem, if you fail to fix the problem, your defenses come up pretty quickly.  I think that may be human nature, to kind of feel a little defensive that someone said that, or whatever the bad outcome might be that you did your best, but couldn’t forestall the inevitable.  So I think most ER people, if you start in the ER all open hearted and caring and being very emotionally involved with everything that happens, those people kind of quit.  They tend to get in the way while they’re there, and then they finally quit because it’s just too emotionally painful.  Other adaptations can be like cynicism, people can become kind of hard and cynical.  Another thing is joking.  I joke a lot at work, and sometimes the humor’s cynical and sometimes it’s not cynical.  But I think that if you get too well defended, if you had scrubs that are made out of Kevlar and Teflon, which are bullet proof and nothing sticks, it’s hard to drop that when you go home. If you’re too well emotionally intact, if your barriers are up, if you’re defended against the emotional cost of doing the work, when you get home you have a hard time relating to your family, or to your friends, neighbors and stuff.  So I think that the more interesting and maybe more pertinent question is how can people that work in high stress environments learn to open up a little bit, close down a little bit, open up a little bit, close down a little bit. So that when they get home they’re not closed down.  Even at work they’re not closed down.  It sounds like your ER doc was fairly open, right, your ER doc wasn’t some hard ass who came into the room and told you this, told you that and then left.  He listened to you.  What was your experience like?

Dr. Kent: I remember one thing that was neat for me, it was a specific situation, of course, but he had been a Medic in Vietnam, cause I actually went back and thanked him later on, and this is another question.

Paul Austin: Good for you.

Dr. Kent: That’s the other question, is I felt like this person had changed the course of my father’s life, and I was just sitting in the next room pretty much, with a broken arm.  But you do kind of play God sometimes in the ER and some people probably do come back and say thank you.

Paul Austin: Mmm hmm.  I even get some thank you notes.  But it’s hard to catch us there.

Dr. Kent: Are there certain stories that kind of carry you through the years?

Paul Austin: Yeah, it’s hard to catch an ER doc at work because we work such rotating and crazy shifts.  Sometimes we get notes.  And most often they’ll bring by some brownies or something to thank the doc or the nurse, and that just means a lot to us.

Dr. Kent: Give us a story of something that happened that you didn’t think you could save someone and something happened, and you know…

Paul Austin: Ok, well here’s a story. This isn’t in the book, but about 8 or 9 years ago I was getting really burned out.  I mean, the people who are unhappy are so verbal in the ER.  They’ll call the nurse words that you can’t say on the radio.  They’ll call me a word you can’t say on the radio.  They’ll tell us to hurry up, “Well, hurry up.” I was getting kind of burned out.  And there’s a lady came in, the paramedics brought her in.  Probably a 75 year old female, she was in respiratory failure, she was just (hacking noise) with respiratory effort, just open mouthed breathing, and she was sweaty, she was pale.  They couldn’t get an IV when they brought her in, so they just kind of brought her in and dropped her off and I was going to try to stick a tube in her lungs to get her on the breathing machine so we could figure out what was going on.  The nurses were having a hard time getting an IV.  You can’t intubate them until you paralyze them.  There’s a medicine that we give them that relaxes all the muscles of the body so they can’t fight you when you’re sticking a tube down in their trachea.  So I was kind of wishing the nurse would hurry up and get an IV so we could tube, and they got one.  We gave her the medicine, and she just went flaccid, so I could stick the tube in her lungs, and I couldn’t get the tube in.  Epiglottis is a little trap door that covers up the vocal cords, and she had this big, floppy epiglottis, and I couldn’t get under it.  So the pulse ox is going down, the alarms are dinging off.  So we put the mask back on her and puffed her back up and then I’m trying to stick that tube in between her vocal chords again and couldn’t see it.  And we put the mask back on her face and squeezed that bag to puff air into her lungs.  On the third attempt, finally, thanks be to God, I got it.  I got the tube in, and by this point I was sweating as much as she was.  It was just really uncomfortable.  But we got her through, got her on the ventilator, she went off to the intensive care unit, and then I forgot about it.  The shift went on and we saw other patients and kept people moving.  A couple days later one of the nurses said, “Paul, you know that kind of chunky, white lady you had a hard time tubing?”  I said, “Yeah, yeah, what about her?” “Well, she made it out of the unit and she’s on the floor now.”  I said, “No kidding?” She said, “Yes, she’s on a regular ward and they’re hoping to let her go home in a couple of days.”  She had been in congestive heart failure and we had given her some Lasiks and meds to make her pee, and we got her out of a case of heart failure. Anyway, so I thought I’ll go upstairs and introduce myself, and she will say thank you for saving my life, and then I’ll no longer be burned out.  I thought, I have a strategy here.  I was working the day shift, so I got off duty and went upstairs.  Still had on my scrubs and my tennis shoes, and I went up top two, and I’ll just call her Ms. Smith.  I forget her name.  I said, “Ms. Smith, I’m Paul Austin. I’m one of the ER doctors, and I’m the one that took care of you when you came into the hospital.” She said, “Who are you?” I said, “I’m Paul Austin, one of the ER doctors.  I took care of you in the Emergency Room.” “Are you a paramedic.” I said, “No, no, I’m just a doc.” “Cause those paramedics were so nice.” I said, “Yeah, they were nice, they were really nice. The reason you remember them and you don’t remember me is cause you weren’t conscious by the time you got to me.  By the time you got to me your breathing was so bad that you lost consciousness, and I’m the one that put the tube in your windpipe to hook you to a breathing machine so we could get that fluid off your lungs.” She said, “You would not believe how sore that tube made my throat.” (laughter) What do you have to do to get a thank you from this lady? But I said, “I’m sorry it made your throat raw, but I’m glad they could get it out.” And she said, “Well, I guess I should say thank you.” Yeah, just say it, lady, so I can go home. (laughter) And she finally said, “Well, thank you.”  I said, “You’re welcome.” But it was so funny.  On the elevator back down to the ER locker room to get my stuff, I thought, you know, lady, you have no idea.  She was oblivious.  There she was, with her little pink nightgown and eating a little powdered doughnuts, little bits of white sugar all over her chest she was kind of brushing off, had no idea of how close she came to dying.  I mean, that would have been boom, end game, and move to the next patient.  But what I had to do, the nurse was new, and the respiratory therapist was new.  I mean, the team knows, we all know when we do a good job, and we all know when we kind of blow it.  So you get a lot of, I think most all of us that work there so value their relationships with the folks at work.  And one thing I really like about the ER is that the nurses and docs, it’s first name, it’s not Dr. Austin.  Some of the new nurses, just right out of the nursing school may say Dr. Austin, but no, just call me Paul, we’re good.  And the nurses are real free to come back and say, “Are you sure you mean 10 milligrams.” “Oops, no, you’re right, 1 milligram, you’re right, decimal place.” The nurses are real good about telling me what they think. “Paul, I don’t think she was on a breathing treatment.” “Oh, ok (inaudible).”  Where as nurses on the floor and maybe in other specialties, it’s not quite as equal a relationship.  But the ER is real democratic kind of place, and a place where pretense and puffiness isn’t tolerated much by the nurses or the docs.  We just want to move people through and it’s a great group of people to work with. I used to be a fireman for the city of Highpoint, and it was real similar like the firefighters back then.  Now they got one more fire department, which is a good thing.  When I was there it was all guys, but the guys at the firehouse, I mean, they believed in putting out fires and pulling people out of the houses.  And there’s kind of an innocence to that.  And the need, the kind of cynicism and joking and comments about the drunk in Room 2, I think most of the people I work with bring an innocent desire to help people under stress.  Sometimes if I’m maybe feeling burnt out, or if I’m working too many night shifts or too many evening shifts, I have to remind myself I get to work with some of the best people I’ve ever known, just on a regular basis.

Dr. Kent: Well it’s a fascinating discussion, and I have a feeling that we could talk for hours.  And this book Something For the Pain surely is chock full of these kind of stories. And I’m definitely going to crack my copy.  The book is called Something For the Pain, and we’ve been chatting with Paul Austin.  Tell us where we can find out more.

Paul Austin: It’s on Amazon. It should be at your local, independent book store. I have a website, paulethanaustin.com, and you can get links to the book, but it’s on Amazon.

Dr. Kent: Absolutely, and the book is Something For the Pain: One Doctor’s Account of Life and Death in the ER.  It’s been such a pleasure chatting with you.

Paul Austin: It’s been a pleasure, thanks a lot.

Missy Jenkins: Thank you.

Dr. Kent: So tell me about this story.  It’s been beautifully reviewed, it’s done so well.  Tell me about it.  It came out in October.

Missy Jenkins: Well, it begins with everything that I went through in the school shooting, what I experienced in the whole incident.  And then it kind of goes through my life before.  I have a twin sister, so I talk a little bit about me and my twin sister, and then it kind of goes into everything that I had to deal with, you know, to learning how to use a wheelchair to even coming face to face with the guy who shot me later on in my life.  Just kind of how I’ve grown from that day until now.  I set goals for myself and try to choose to be happy instead of being angry about the situation and trying to make the best of what I have.

Dr. Kent: It really strikes so many of us when we watch these school shootings.  One just happened in Germany, and it’s such a horrible thing.  Talk to that for a minute.

Missy Jenkins: Every time I see a school shooting that happens, there’s been plenty that’s happened after the one that’s happened to me, it just breaks my heart that it keeps happening over and over again.  I think I’ve seen some similarities in these different shootings, whether it be that the shooter warned that something was going to happen, or even to the point of someone saying something that sounds the same as what I heard.  Like describing the gunshots, like firecrackers.  It’s just kind of heartbreaking to me that it keeps happening through the years, and I just wish that there was something we could do to stop these things, and to keep them from happening in schools, where that’s the last place that anybody should feel unsafe.

Dr. Kent: Tell us a little about your journey from that moment.  Of course, I can’t even imagine coming face to face with the shooter that had done something like this to me.  Tell us about your process of self discovery and of forgiveness.

Missy Jenkins: Well, I spent about five months in the hospital just learning how to use a wheelchair and just kind of recovering from my injuries.  It was a lot of work.  I felt like a child, having to learn how to do things over again, from sitting up, to even learning how to put my clothes on.  Putting my clothes on took 45 minutes the first time I tried to do that. But as time went on, the more I did things, the more and more easier it got to me to be able to do certain tasks.  I still, every day, encounter something new that I’ve got to try to get past.  But, I’ve done my best and I’ve set goals for myself.  Like, going to college.  I went to Los Angeles and learned how to use the brace that allowed me to walk across the stage for graduation, and to actually use it at my wedding, standing up and saying my vows to my husband.  And then now, being married, and September the third of ’07 I had my son, and now I’m a mother in a wheelchair learning how to take care of a child.  Right now he’s just about to be nineteen months on April the 3rd.  So you know, everything, it’s a challenge.  The other day I was having a chase with my son, and being in a wheelchair and trying to go as fast as you can running after a child who’s fast.  It’s difficult, but every day I’ve had to kind of take it a little bit at a time and just get better at it.

Dr. Kent: My father is in a chair a lot of the time because of a car accident that happened years ago, and I know that issues of the handicapped accessibility, things like that, this country is better than a lot of countries.  But there’s a long ways to go in awareness.  Talk to that for a minute.

Missy Jenkins: Oh yeah, definitely.  When I first got into a chair, in the town that I lived in the movie theater didn’t even have spots where someone in a wheelchair could sit.  I remember having to sit in the aisle in the theater, and I don’t know how many times I got knocked into while I was sitting there.  Luckily now there is a movie theater that has seating for those that are in wheelchairs that they can put their chairs, and it’s made it easier.  But you know, it’s just like in the beginning, it was a lot to have to see. Even some of my friends, it was kind of funny, they’re just used to being with me, me being in a chair, and they might be with other people and say, “I can’t believe that, that’s so un-wheelchair accessible,” and then somebody will say, “Why is that such a problem?”  I don’t think that you realize it until you’re put in that position, whenever you see those kinds of obstacles. I remember even downtown in our city some of the ramps on the curbs, the curbs in the different areas, you could only see a pile of pavement at the end where someone could get their front wheels caught and cause them to flip out of their wheelchair.  Just different things like that, even when it comes to doors that don’t have the button to push for the doors to be wheelchair accessible.  Me being a paraplegic, I’m able to use my arms to open doors, sometimes with difficulty, but I can do it.  I can’t imagine somebody who was a quadriplegic that was trying to get through a door, and didn’t have a way to do that.  So you know, there’s still a lot of things that aren’t accessible.  One thing that I run into that drives me insane is going to hotels.  Hotels don’t understand, and some of them, they kind of equip them for a lot of people that are elderly, which is needed, but then sometimes they make the beds so high that someone who is paralyzed can’t even get into the bed.  Or they make for the bathrooms, you ask for a shower chair, and they’ll bring you a shower chair that has no back to it.  I’m paralyzed from my chest down, and I can’t balance myself on something that doesn’t have a back to it.  So just even small things like that that I’ve run into that are still not the same. Luckily I had my twin sister with me when I went, and she was able to help me get in and out of the tub.  But if I was by myself, I wouldn’t have been able to do it.

Dr. Kent: With folks that have disabilities it’s worth fighting for a long ways. The most highly built story in here, of course, is where you go in to meet the shooter who killed some people in that school shooting, and you confronted him.  Talk about that.

Missy Jenkins: Confronting the shooter?

Dr. Kent: Yes, Michael, I guess, is it Michael?

Missy Jenkins: Yes, I confronted him, I think I did speak with him December of 1998, and at that time when I spoke to him it was a sentencing, and it was mainly like the victims to get up and say something to him.  At that time I was able to speak to him and he was never able to say anything back to me. Later on, July of ’07, I decided to go to the penitentiary where he was, in Kentucky, and speak to him face to face.  That was very helpful to me to go to that meeting.  When I went, I really thought that he was going to be handcuffed, and in the orange jumpsuit, and actually that wasn’t the case.  He wasn’t handcuffed, he was just sitting at a table waiting for me.  We talked, and we had a good conversation.  He answered all my questions I asked, and one in particular was what he remembered that day.  And I also told him everything I remember that day. It was like one of those things where it felt like I wanted him to hear what I had to see.  And we just kind of talked about different stuff, but at the end of the conversation he told me, “I don’t know if I ever told you this, but I’m sorry for what I did.” I think that meeting with him face to face was the best thing that I could do.  I don’t think there’s any such thing as closure, I don’t, but that was the closest that I could get, actually speaking to him, and it was helpful to me.  I actually tried to forgive him when the shooting happened.  And the reason why I chose to forgive him was to release me from that anger. I knew that being angry was not going to make me walk again, it wasn’t going to change anything that happened that morning. It wasn’t going to bring the girls back that were killed, or even make the shooting go away, you know.  Being angry wasn’t going to change anything. So I decided to be happy, I didn’t want that to bring me down.  And I think a lot of people think that when you forgive somebody that you’re letting that person off, and I definitely don’t think that.  I think it lets you go, it let’s you away from that anger and it sets you free.  And just because I forgave him doesn’t mean that he still doesn’t have to serve the consequences of his actions.  He’s in jail 25 years to life.  And I still believe that he should serve that.

Dr. Kent: What a fascinating story.  I know you have to leave us soon, and we’ll talk to the next guest in a few minutes.  But what I’d like to know is how you’ve really been able to change your life and what you hope to do to inspire kids through this book, as well as adults.

Missy Jenkins: Well, I do a lot of motivational speaking to schools.  I’ve mainly kind of been in Kentucky but I’d love to branch out and go in different places.  But my main plan is just to hopefully, for people to learn from what I learned from the school shooting.  Not only did I learn, but the importance of telling if someone threatened to bring a gun to school.  That’s something that our school didn’t do, or a lot of kids were warned and nothing happened.  I also hope that people realize the power of their words. I do believe that bullying played a part in the situation that happened at my school, and I don’t think that kids realize how much their words affect people.  I think that we think that it’s a normal thing, and it just happens to us at that age, and it’s not.  It’s something that can have lifelong consequences when someone is made fun of and treated badly.  It’s something that people will remember forever. I also hope people see the power of forgiveness and realize that it’s ok to forgive someone, that they’re not letting that person off.  And then also, anybody that’s in a wheelchair that’s dealing with having to be in a chair for the first time.  I’d never known anyone that was in a chair before this happened to me, and for the fact of me thinking I didn’t know what I was capable of.  But then I started realizing that I was capable of anything that I wanted to do.  I might have to do things a little harder, but I was capable of doing anything that I wanted to do.  And I just hope that everybody, anybody that reads that, young or old, does get something out of it and realize that our life is precious and that anything can happen to us, that we’re not invincible.  And that we need to set goals for ourselves and realize that we do have purposes in our lives.  I think that this, the shooting, has given a purpose to me, and made me realize at the age of 15 that I had a purpose in life, and that I got a second chance at a life.  Because I was shot through the left shoulder, and it could have hit my heart.  And it missed every major artery and organ in my body besides my lung and spinal cord.  There’s a possibility that I could not be here today.  But I have that second chance.

Dr. Kent: What an incredible story.  The book is called I Choose To Be Happy: A School Shooting Survivor’s Triumph Over Tragedy.  It sure seems like you’ve been able to do that, and you’re an inspiration to a lot of people.  We can check out the book online. Can you give us the website we can go to?

Missy Jenkins: Yes, they can go to missyjenkins.com and it has an event calendar, where other places that I’m at, speaking engagements.  And then also there’s a link where you can order the book.

Dr. Kent: Wonderful.

Missy Jenkins: And it’s at any barnesandnoble.com and amazon.com.

Dr. Kent: And the book again is called I Choose To Be Happy, and it has a foreword by Sara Brady, who of course is the wife of the man who was shot in the assassination attempt on President Reagan, and that’s pretty neat also. Thank you so much for chatting with me on the show.

Missy Jenkins: Oh definitely, thank you.

Dr. Kent: Missy Jenkins is a true hero for a lot of people.  I Choose To Be Happy.  Go check it out at your bookstore. My next guest on the show is going to come in just a minute and talk to us about Marilyn Monroe, and they had a friendship, and he’s going to talk about the character behind the movie star, so come on back for that.

In 1989, Watkins, barely out of her childhood, started playing in a nascent version of Nickel Creek at the seemingly unlikely venue of That Pizza Place in Carlsbad, California, along with her guitarist brother Sean and mandolinist friend Chris Thile (and chaperoned, of course, by her bluegrass-playing parents). The prodigious young trio built a reputation in bluegrass, folk, and country circles, then catapulted to mainstream prominence in 2000 after releasing an album produced by Alison Krauss. When not on the road or in the studio with Nickel Creek, Watkins guest-starred as fiddler and/or harmony vocalist on albums by Bela Fleck, the Chieftains, Ben Lee, Dan Wilson, Richard Thompson, and Ray La Montagne, among others. In addition, Watkins and brother Sean established an informal get-up-and-jam residency called the Watkins Family Hour at L.A. club Largo, “an uber-cool but cozy music and comedy club in Hollywood,” as Sean has put it. Watkins brings the spirit of the long-running Watkins Family Hour to her debut. It was there, in fact, that she developed and fine-tuned the repertoire for the album: “I had lived with a lot of this material for a while. It was tested and tweaked through the years playing at Largo. Songs would come and go; these are the songs that have stuck. Some are newer than others—’Lord Won’t You Help Me’ was a deliberate choice for the record. Some I had done for years, like Jon’s ‘Same Mistakes.’ ‘Too Much’ is a David Garza song, and I always loved it.”

John Paul Jones, who’d briefly toured during 2004 with Nickel Creek and Toad the Wet Sprocket lead singer Glenn Phillips in an ad hoc group called Mutual Admiration Society, had long encouraged Watkins to make a record of her own, offering his services well before she was ready to hit the studio. As Watkins recalls, laughing, “A couple of years ago we saw John Paul Jones at the Cambridge folk festival. He came up after our performance and said that if I didn’t let him produce my record he would never speak to me again. I was thrilled that he was that excited about it. He actually stayed with it and kept in touch. At that point, in Cambridge, I believe we had already talked about winding down the Nickel Creek touring, so it was a really convenient time and it helped me stay focused. It was a perfect moment to start transferring over the creative energy.”

Jones kept a familial atmosphere, and maintained an unobtrusive presence, in the studio, says Watkins: “I think he was allowing the band to be a band and play for each other, rather than have us play through a song, then look to see if that’s what he was or wasn’t looking for. Eventually, John would give us his feedback and directions to guide us in. I think that has a lot to do with the sound of the record being band-oriented, especially considering there were a lot of different musicians coming in.” Cutting John Hartford’s “Long Hot Summer Day” was especially inspired—with Rawlings playing “caveman drums,” Welch strapping on an electric guitar, and Watkins revving up everyone with her fiddle playing. The compellingly straightforward arrangements she and Jones devised allow Watkins’ personality to come through, illustrating both her sensitivity and her strength. Theses sessions had been a long time coming, but it’s clear that Watkins has only just begun.

—Michael Hill

An intriguing tale of darts, drugs, and death.

Russell Harmon is the self-proclaimed king of his small-town Idaho dart league, but all is not well in his kingdom. In the midst of the league championship match, the intertwining stories of those gathered at the 411 club reveal Russell’s dangerous debt to a local drug dealer, his teammate Tristan Mackey’s involvement in the disappearance of a college student, and a love triangle with a former classmate.

The characters in Keith Lee Morris’s second novel struggle to find the balance between accepting and controlling their destinies, but their fates are threaded together more closely than they realize.

Keith Lee Morris is an associate professor of English and creative writing at Clemson University. His short stories have been published in A Public Space, Southern Review, Ninth Letter, StoryQuarterly, New England Review, The Sun, and the Georgia Review, among other publications. The University of Nevada published his first two books: The Greyhound Gods (2003) and The Best Seats in the House (2004). He lives in Clemson, South Carolina.

Sawney Beane’s clan of brutal thugs grabs comely young Elspeth Cumming as she journeys to meet her betrothed. Her abductor, Sawney Beane’s eldest son, holds Elspeth captive in the clan’s secret hideaway deep in the caves off the coast of Galloway. The caves are home to Beane’s inbred extended family — 48 in all, each worse than the last — and exhibit acts of unspeakable brutality. As she witnesses the horror of the clan’s vicious way of life, Elspeth realizes that the dreadful rumors whispered about the Beane clan are all too true. And as she comes to know and relate to her captor, Elspeth also sees just what the clan has in store for her — and that escape from the caves is near impossible…This compulsively readable historical thriller immerses readers in one of Scotland’s most colorful legends.

Luxury Pond is the songwriting project of Toronto-based musician Dan Goldman. In addition to writing and performing his own material, Dan plays regularly with Snowblink and Great Aunt Ida. He’s been a member in the Mia Sheard band, Justin Haynes’ John School, Tusks, Maps of the Night Sky, Breaking Sounds, and Kitchenmusik. He’s also created music for modern dance choreographers Jenn Goodwinn, Sara Doucet, Louis Laberge-Cote and Kathleen Rea as well as multi media producer/architect Filiz Klassen.

Hailed “The Vagina Monologues for birth” by renowned women’s health expert Dr. Christiane Northrup, Birth is a documentary-style play based on over one hundred interviews playwright Karen Brody conducted with mothers across America. It tells the true birth stories of eight women painting an intimate portrait of how low-risk, educated women are giving birth today.

Since 2006 the play been performed around the world as part of BOLD, a global movement using the Arts to inspire communities to improve childbirth choices and put mothers at the center of their birth experiences.

This special edition of the book includes the entire play, playwright’s introduction and reflections,and the impact the play has had on BOLD communities. It also includes a foreword by Christiane Northrup, MD, FACOG, author of The Wisdom of Menopause, Mother-Daughter Wisdom, and Women’s Bodies, Women’s Wisdom.

Jocelyn Elise Crowley is an Associate Professor of Public Policy, a member of the Graduate Faculty in the Department of Political Science, and an Affiliated Faculty Member of the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies. She has written extensively on the topic of family policy, including her book The Politics of Child Support in America (2003). Professor Crowley has also written on the subject of voluntary associations in the United States, and has recently finished a book related to the fathers’ rights movement in America that was published by Cornell University Press in 2008. In addition to contributing to an edited volume on international fathers’ rights movements, she has published numerous articles in the American Journal of Political Science, Social Science Quarterly, Health Education and Behavior, Legislative Studies Quarterly, the Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, Publius: The Journal of Federalism, Marriage and Family Review, Justice System Journal, Perspectives on Politics, Social Service Review, Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, Sociological Inquiry, and the Eastern Economic Journal. During the 2005-2006 academic year, she was chosen to be a Visiting Scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation in New York City. She spent the 2006-2007 academic year at the Department of Politics, New York University and the Social Indicators Survey Center, Columbia University School of Social Work.

Sharon Waxman is an author and award-winning journalist, currently working on a book about stolen antiquities. “Loot: The Battle Over the Stolen Treasures of the Ancient World,” will be published by Times Books in November 2008.

Who ought to own the trophies of history, Western museums, or the  countries that were plundered over 200 years? “Loot” takes readers on a journey to the countries where ancient civilizations began and to the great museums where their treasures now reside in a quest to understand the tug-of-war between East and West.

Waxman was a Hollywood correspondent for The New York Times until January 2008. Before joining the Times, she was a correspondent for the Washington Post based in Los Angeles, from 1995 until 2003.

As a long-time observer of the entertainment industry, Waxman’s is an influential and independent voice. She has covered studio sales and corporate mergers, the Oscars, the film festivals and the unusual personalities that make up Hollywood. She has taken readers deep inside the filmmaking and deal-making process, getting to know the key players and artists who make the movies. She is the author of the best-selling book, “Rebels on the Backlot: Six Maverick Directors And How They Conquered the Hollywood Studio System” (HarperCollins, 2005), about the emergence of a new generation of writers and directors in the 1990s, making landmark films in a corporate-run Hollywood.

Waxman began covering Hollywood for The Washington Post’s Style section in 1995, becoming the paper’s first correspondent to cover the industry from Los Angeles. She began her career as a foreign correspondent, and was sent on reporting stints to the Middle East during her years at the Post.

Born and raised in Cleveland, Ohio, Waxman attended Barnard College, where she studied English literature, then earned a Masters of Philosophy degree in Modern Middle East Studies from St. Antony’s College at Oxford University.

Having learned both Hebrew and Arabic during her studies, Waxman got her first real journalism job with the Reuters news agency in Jerusalem, covering the first Palestinian intifada in 1988 and 1989. At the end of 1989 she moved to Paris. While there, she covered the economic unification of Europe and the velvet revolutions in Eastern Europe as the Soviet Union collapsed. For six years she covered the culture, politics and economy of France and other parts of Western Europe as a freelance and contract writer, with frequent forays into Eastern Europe and North Africa. She wrote for a variety of U.S. newspapers, including The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, The Miami Herald, The Los Angeles Times and numerous other outlets, eventually landing a contract with The Washington Post. The Post then offered her a full-time position in a place she never expected to land: Los Angeles.

During her years in Hollywood, Waxman has become a frequent commentator on matters of movie and media culture. In 2000, she won the prestigious feature writing award for Arts & Entertainment writing from the University of Missouri. While at the Post, she returned to the Middle East on several occasions to write a series about Islamic culture, to cover the war in Iraq and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Waxman lives with her family in southern California.

James Reams & The Barnstormers plays
old-school bluegrass music.

James Reams formed James Reams & The Barnstormers in 1993. Originally from southeastern Kentucky, James migrated north in his mid-teens when his family moved to Appleton, Wisconsin, where he stayed until he moved to Brooklyn, New York, in the early 1980s. James has played both old-time and bluegrass music since he was a child. There were traditional singers on both sides of his family, and his father played in a string band. His hometown of London, Kentucky, honored him in 2004 for his contributions to the arts and sciences at its annual Laurel County Homecoming.

James is deeply involved in a thriving bluegrass and old-time music community in NYC. He has made several old-time and bluegrass recordings. His original songs (alone and co-written with Tina Aridas) are important additions to the bluegrass repertoire. His guitar playing was highlighted in Flatpicking Guitar Magazine’s Masters of Rhythm Guitar column. In addition to leading James Reams & The Barnstormers, he is the organizer of the annual Park Slope Bluegrass/Old-Time Jamboree, an annual music festival he started in 1998 that attracts 700 musicians and fans of traditional music to its workshops, jamming and concerts and is the only event of its kind in or around New York City.

In addition, James is working on a documentary film, Pioneers of Bluegrass Music, in which he interviews some of the first generation of bluegrass musicians about life on the road in the early days of the music. The project is still in production (a 20-minute preview was released on DVD as part of the Troubled Times CD).

Mark Farrell, like James, is no stranger to bluegrass and old-time country music, having played and recorded for many years with a number of bluegrass and old-time string bands, including Major Contay & The Canebrake Rattlers. He also contributes his great arranging talent to many of the band’s recordings. His great hoedown fiddling and edgy mandolin playing (as well as his sometimes unpredictable humor) earns him friends wherever he goes. Doug Nicolaisen has been playing banjo with bluegrass bands in the NY tri-state area for the past 17 years. His music incorporates many of the best elements of all the major banjo players yet his style reflects an individuality of its own and adds to the hard-driving energy of the band. The newest member of the Barnstormers, Nick Sullivan, has been playing bass since he was a tot. In the northern woods of Wisconsin he started playing 1950s rock and roll when he was 12 and has covered lots of musical terrain since that time, from ragtime jazz and West African traditional music to early country music and bluegrass. He adds rock-solid bass and great singing to the Barnstormers’ sound.

“This book is a nomadic adventure worthy of Ulysses. Sensitive, lyrical, funny, stubborn, impetuous, McCourt writes with a steady hand, a joyful heart, and an Irishman’s sense of life’s absurdities.”
- “Publishers Weekly”

“This book stands utterly and uniquely on its own. Beautifully written, with gentle wit, penetrating honesty and forgiving insight, it is a moving and poetic account of one man’s long day’s journey into light. I was entranced from first page to last. You will be too.”
- Peter Quinn, author of “Banished Children of Eve,” “Hour of the Cat” and “Looking for Jimmy”

“Fans of “Angela’s Ashes” will be fascinated by this alternate account of the McCourt family history. Alphie McCourt is a gentle, charming, philosophical narrator.”
- Brooke Allen, literary critic and author of “The Moral Minority”

“When the history of Ireland is written–the story of the ordinary and the extraordinary combined–the readers will thank the heavens for what the McCourt family have brought us. “A Long Stone’s Throw” is humble, humorous and honest. Alphie McCourt moves fluidly through time and geography, to bring us a brand new story, one that is necessary and real, one filled with tenderness and redemption.
- Colum McCann, author of “Zoli” and “Dancer”

“Life can be terrifying–or it can be amusing. Alphie McCourt has captured the rhythm of life as he has lived it, first in Limerick City, then in New York City. Nothing escapes his attention, be it the little mouse scraping among the poor McCourts for food in Ireland, the inanity of being a #10 can food inspector in the U.S. Army, the workings of New York’s saloon societies, or the search for the ultimate mortalsin–sex. “A Long Stone’s Throw” is marvelously and sensitively written. It will make you laugh, cry and thank God you were lucky enough to find this book. Alphie McCourt is a uniquely talented memoirist.”
- Dermot McEvoy, author of “Our Lady of Greenwich Village” and “Terrible Angel”
“In this time of anxiety about immigration, here is evidence of how essential to our sanity and our sense of the absurd, is a frequent transfusion of Ireland. This book is like an evening with a wonderful storyteller who describes scenes and people and events so vividly, and with such sly wit, that he transports you along with him on his journey. Here is a great immigrant tale, told with such charming modesty that it goes down like a smooth draught of ale.”
- Samuel Gibbon, Emmy-winning producer of “Sesame Street” and “The Electric Company”

“The world, courtesy of Alphie McCourt’s fertile prism of seems once again full of the promise of tomorrow. A memoir, yes, but so wickedly sly and witty–no self-pity here–in the talented hands of Mr. McCourt, the very word memoir seems inadequate.”
- John Mulholland, writer/director of “The True Gen”

“My brother Alphie is a writer, and always has been, but it’s public now. He has written a memoir where his unique voice, great style and literary talents shine through. It’s a funny, sometimes sad saga, but you will be delighted you read it.”
- Malachy McCourt, author of “Singing My Him Song” and “A Monk Swimming”

Product Description
It’s 1918, and Youngstown, Ohio, is brewing with social unrest as Italian and Irish immigrants vie for living space and low-paying jobs in the local steel mills. Amidst the discord, Abramo Cardone arrives from Italy hoping to escape the pain of his wife and child’s deaths. His uncle secures him a job at the steel mill, where he tries to bury his loneliness in work. Instead, he attracts the attention of two Irish men, one who wants to give him a leg up and one who wants to tear him down. In the thick of the violent power struggle that develops, Abramo is offered a wonderful gift-but he’ll have to fight to claim it.

About the Author
Donald Greco, an Irish-Italian, grew up in Youngstown and has lived in Ohio all his life. His novels are about ordinary people with extraordinary stories. The rich history and culture surrounding Ohio’s steel valley inspired Abramo’s Gift.

More from www.allanhamilton.com

Experience the Spiritual Side of Surgery:
Dr. Hamilton’s book, entitled The Scalpel and the Soul: Encounters with Surgery, the Supernatural, and the Healing Power of Hope is published by the Tarcher Division of Penguin Publishing, USA. The hard cover edition was published in March, 2008 and the paperback edition in April, 2009.

Based on thirty years experience as Harvard-educated brain surgeon, The Scalpel and the Soul: Encounters with Surgery, the Supernatural, and the Healing Power of Hope tells the stories behind remarkable patients and the moral and spiritual lessons they can teach everyone. In this book, Dr. Hamilton shares a rare glimpse of how the spiritual and the supernatural manifest themselves even in the high-tech world of 21st century intensive care units or operating rooms.

The soul often needs more than an Intensive Care Unit can provide:
The Scalpel and the Soul explores how premonition, superstition, hope and faith not only become factors in how patients feel, but can change the outcomes as well. The stories within this book validate the spiritual manifestations physicians see every day. The tales empower patients to voice their spiritual needs in medical situations. When the life is threatened, the soul can exert mysterious powers. Embracing that knowledge can help anyone, patient or caregiver, to cope with difficult and challenging times.

Paperback Edition
The paper back edition will be released in April 3, 2009. You can order now at ordered from Amazon.com, BarnesnadNoble.com, Borders, and all local, independent bookstores.

Dr. Hamilton:  Thank you for having me Dr. Kent.

Dr. Kent:  This is such an interesting issue.  My father is a doctor and I know quite a bit about doctors just from hanging around them all my life and it’s not something you hear about too often, the soul.

Dr. Hamilton:  Well it sort of one of our its we don’t feel comfortable sometimes talking about and one of the reasons that I actually tackled the topic was I went into my training and the first part of my career as a surgeon very unprepared if you will for some of the spiritual challenges and emotional challenges my patients were going to face and as you watch that process, it gradually begins to reflect on your own life and your own values and I thought that sort of took me by surprise if you will.

Dr. Kent:  It’s really an experience that just about everyone has in society at one point.  Being there, thinking about the scalpel and the soul as it were.  In the emergency room waiting area, waiting for a family member to come out, this and that.  It really is an emotional place, the hospital.

Dr. Hamilton:  It is kind of a crucible and for many people it’s going to represent not just the moment of tremendous threat but also a potential challenge and even spiritual transformation.  Many patients will come through a severe illness or major surgery and will have focused for them what their values really are, what they want their legacy to be and in many cases a lot of my brain tumor patients, cancer patients really have crystallized what they want their lives to be about and the purpose of their lives.

Dr. Kent:  Here’s a question you might not get all the time but I have a curiosity about the word scalpel.  It’s a word that came up on the campaign trail by both candidates this last year and I think we have a serious fear of that device, the scalpel and its only certain people that we trust with that and we trust them with our lives.

Dr. Hamilton:  The scalpel is an interesting symbol.  First off if you think about it, it really is a knife, like any other knife and yet its held with a completely different kind of grip and one of the most difficult things for young surgeons to learn is basically the way of wielding that scalpel so it actually is cutting tissue the way you want.  And that when you cross that threshold, it’s really as if the scalpel suddenly has become a part of your hand, of your fingers.  It’s no longer just an instrument but it carries a very special significance and you know it’s the knife that’s used in healing but still has a lot of the connotations of a knife.  I always say surgery is only a few steps away from murder.

Dr. Kent:  Wow. That’s a great statement, and a terrifying statement.  Now, we have such a stigma attached to doctors these days.  What’s your take on that?  In the world of people who say I’m going to sue my doctor and this and that, there’s a real trust issue and it really does come down to there’s a fine line between murder and surgery.  A lot of people think, go ahead.

Dr. Hamilton:  Well I think you’re right.  I think first off I think there’s a spiritual crisis going on in the midst of the whole medical health system.  Medical adverse events, which is our fancy word for mistakes, errors, are the fourth leading cause of death now in the United States.  Five times more people die a year from medical adverse events than those that die on the highways in America.  So the publics trust in terms of public trust, the healthcare industry is right behind the food handling industry and the nuclear waste industry; we’re third.

So we really have lost the publics trust and one of the reasons is we’ve gotten farther and farther removed from the patient and the immediate relationship and sense of a partnership and the sense of being if you will united with the goal of healing.  I think patients are gradually starting to feel more and more estranged.  If you watch video tapes and do a study, the average time from when a surgeon walks in the room to the time the surgeon walks out with a signed consent for surgery is seven and a half minutes.  So in 7-1/2 minutes you go from meeting a complete stranger to putting your life in their hands and asking people to trust a system like that I think is asking an awful lot.  There’s almost no other situation in the world where we come up against that asked of us.

Dr. Kent:  What’s interesting is that you talk about directly on your website, which is allanhamilton.com, there’s the soul often needs more than an intensive care unit can provide and I’ve experienced times in the intensive care unit visiting a family member and its not a place that; its an emergency place, its keeping people alive and its not a pleasant place to be.  Where does the soul belong in that?

Dr. Hamilton:  Well I’ll give you a very good example.  I was just with a group of residents and we were next to a little boy in the ICU after surgery for a tumor.  It really was an important point to remind the residents to step away from the patient’s room and the family and the immediate area if they wanted to have a discussion about certain things.  My feeling was I don’t want the patient hearing a word here or a word there that has very significant connotations.  I think you need to be aware that there’s an awful lot of stress in that ICU and we don’t want to add to it we want to actually address some of those emotional demands and that’s why I think we tend to look at the body in the ICU and often forget how desperate the soul is for support at the same time.

Dr. Kent:  You are a neurosurgeon and I find it fascinating that someone who deals so much with a concrete part of a human beings body in such a sensitive area also thinks about the soul and a spiritual side to things.  How does the physical tactile part of things connect up with the other side?

Dr. Hamilton:  I think there’s a disconnect.  I think one of the reasons I got so interested is because you’re working on the brain and because yes its an organ but it is a mind, it is the personality, it is the entire life experience, the values, you know, love and its all there and yet you’re just looking at an organ and at the same time very aware that the whole integrity of a person is in that organ.  You can’t see it, you can’t see what love is, you can’t see where altruism and sacrifice and hard work or fear are; you don’t see that when you’re working on it, you just know that its there and you have to be aware that this is in some ways you’re inside a temple.  It isn’t like any other organ.  If you take somebody’s piece of bowel out or even fix their heart, you’re not changing the fundamental character of the person and yet with this surgery we can actually end up doing that or removing speech or you can confuse sending somebody up so their completely confused or have no memory.  I think it makes you feel as if you’re far more connected with something beyond just the anatomy and the physical.

Dr. Kent:  So let’s talk about the book itself, The Scalpel and the Soul.  Its done very well and being carried by The One Spirit Book Club at Borders among other things and now why did you decide to write a trade publication?  This is certainly not written for a medical journal, it’s a wonderful read.  What did you want people to take away from it?

Dr. Hamilton:  Well I think it’s a conversation because on one hand as I explained earlier, people aren’t talking to us and training us as physicians that we’re going to be dealing with it and at the same time you have a huge number of patients and a growing number of patients who say no, I’m not just a body with a disease I’m a human being with a soul and a heart and that has to be addressed at the same time so I think what you have is one group of people who want to open up a dialogue with their physician and I think the other thing is you have a group of physicians who are saying why cant we even have a conversation about this?

Why can’t we all know that miracles are happening every day?  We all have had patients where we’ve said this patient isn’t going to survive another week and yet they say I have to wait another four months for my son to come back from Iraq so I can say goodbye and they do it.  If this is just a process, how does all that happen?  How did they summon the emotional strength, the spiritual strength, the will to impose their needs over a biologic mechanistic process so they could reach closure with their loved ones.  That’s really what’s miraculous and that’s where you want to have the conversation between physician and patient.

Dr. Kent:  How has the reaction been from your colleagues in your community?  The books done very well and I’m sure many a doctor has picked this up.

Dr. Hamilton:  Well surgeons, which I’m one, we’re the arch-conservative, the republicans of the medical world so I’ve had a lot of colleagues who’ve said you’ve been a surgeon 30 years, you’ve been chairman of the surgical department, how could you have sat down and written a book about spirituality like this?  I’ve gotten very good reactions from the younger doctors, they give me a lot of hope because they say we’re glad somebody’s talking about this and made the subject no longer taboo.  Then you have the intermediate group; I had a colleague going up in an elevator with me I’ve known for 20 years and he was saying I cant believe this book you wrote about spirituality and then he walked out of the elevator, turns around and says to me on the other hand I always know when something bad has happened to my children even before the phone rings.  I said, so you have a sense of being connected to something beyond yourself and he says yeah.  I said, well that’s what the books about.  So I think its run the gamut.

Dr. Kent:  Wow, well it’s such a fascinating title and with your background especially fascinating and I encourage everybody to go out and pick this up.  The Scalpel and the Soul and of course this is available from the Reading Group at Borders, the One Spirit Book Club.  What are you working on now?

Dr. Hamilton:  I’m actually working on another book about spirituality and our connection with animals so that’s the second book.

Dr. Kent:  I got to say I can’t wait to read that one.  I’ve got a great connection with my golden retriever so.

Dr. Hamilton:  Yeah.

Dr. Kent:  Well thank you so much for being on the show, this has been fascinating and we can find out more about Dr. Allan Hamilton on his website, www.allanhamilton.com and everywhere books are sold.  Thank you so much for chatting with us.

Dr. Hamilton:  Thank you it’s been a pleasure.

Dr. Kent:  My next guest on the show is a fellow named Donald Greco and we’re going to talk to him in a minute about his novel called Abramo’s Gift.  Come on back for that.

Donald Greco:  Thank you; I’m glad to be here.

Dr. Kent:  Tell me a little about this book.  Its 1918 and you’re in Youngstown, Ohio.  Tell us about the setting of this book.

Donald Greco:  All right.  Well, an Italian immigrant, the young man, and all the turmoil that was going on at that time; he lost his wife and child in one of the skirmishes that happened over there.  So he came to Youngstown Ohio where his uncle lived and his uncle got him a job in one of the steel mills.  The whole story is about his adapting to American life and to work life and a city that was at the time against the Italians.

Dr. Kent:  What inspired you to turn this into a novel?  It’s done quite well.

Donald Greco:  Well thank you.  My mother was Irish and my father was Italian and that was a big ethnic rivalry in the early part of the 20th century because the Irish had gotten here many years before the Italians and when the Italians came in, many of the mills used to make the Italians underbid the Irish people who were working in the mills.  So if an Irishman was working in a mill for $3.00 a day lets say, they’d tell an Italian he could have the job if he could work for $2.00 a day.  Then they would fire the Irish guy and hire the Italian guy.

Needless to say, that caused a great deal of animosity and hostility because all those people were trying to feed their families and just make a go of it in this country.  My mom and dad when they got married in 1940 it was quite a scandal that an Irishman was marrying an Italian. In fact, my mother, one of her uncles told my mother that she would forever be the black sheep of the family for marrying an Italian.  Of course, they’re both gone now, they both died within the last five years.  They lived a very happy married life for all that time.

Dr. Kent:  Things have changed a whole lot since then.  We’re going through a similar economic crisis that we saw in the late 20s and early 30s but times have really changed since then.  Paint that picture of the way the world was for these characters you created.

Donald Greco:  Okay; when they were living at that time around 1920, first of all there were no social agencies for these people.  If you didn’t work, you didn’t eat and you could starve.  Things were desperate and also people didn’t live as long in those days as they do today and so it was a tough life that they had because they worked hard in the mills.  The mills were dangerous, dirty places but yet, having said all that, today when an Irishman would marry an Italian, if they’re you know how they put brides pictures in the papers; no one cares, it probably doesn’t raise anybody’s interest that an Irishman and Italian are getting married.  Same thing would go for say a Lebanese and a German or a Slovak and a Jew.  Its one of the great success stories of the 20th century that starting with the very difficult lives that all those people, all those European immigrants had in this country, they found a way to live together and not only did they live together but they intermarried, raise families together and really put a wonderful imprint on this country.

Dr. Kent:  You’re background is very interesting.  You have a PhD and you were a mathematics professor for many years.  What brought you around to Abramo’s Gift?

Donald Greco:  Well, all my life I was interested in good stories and when I was a little boy my father and I, the one thing we used to do together more than anything else.  My dad used to go up to the local social club on Saturday and they’d play cards and so on and then he’d come home, he’d make it home around 3:00 every Saturday and he and I would drive up to a local library branch that we had.  We’d go in there and he’d get his books from the adult side and I’d get my books from the child side and we would talk about the kinds of stories.  He would ask me as I was reading the books did I like the story?  What kind of story was it?

He was always interested in good stories.  He himself loved a great story and he read most of the great classic novels that have been written and I kind of grew up with that.  I’ve always liked to write but I have to learn a living and was pretty good at math so I started at a math teacher many years ago and I stayed with it.  I earned my living as a mathematics professor but the great love of my life was writing.  So I would do that on the side very quietly without anybody knowing it and I produced this novel here is the fourth one that I have written.  I’m working on another one now but the other three have not been published.  This is the first one to be published.

Dr. Kent:  What do you hope people can take away from this book?  It’s about some deep culture that we don’t really have around anymore.  People like to escape from the world when they read a novel.

Donald Greco:  I would like the think when they read my story anyhow; they realize that there are some important things in life besides possessions and besides wealth and so on.  I think the most important thing is the existence of a family and the love that exists within that family and how that love sustains everybody that it touches.  I think that’s the story that I would like people to remember; that even in difficult times, under difficult circumstances, if people really were part of a loving family it would help get them through.  Also that there were people in the story are very what you would call great people but they are very ordinary people.   You could be great and yet be ordinary.

Dr. Kent:  Wow; well we’ve been speaking with Donald Greco the author of Abramo’s Gift.  It’s a beautiful novel from the cover on through.  It brings you into another world and I really appreciate you chatting with me today and we can find out more on the web I’m sure.  Where can we go to see more?

Donald Greco:  I’m in the process right now of developing a website.  I naively thought all I had to do is write a book and a good story and everything would take care of itself but I have been interviewed by gracious people like yourself and I realize now that I need a website.  So I talked to some young genius and he’s going to put one together for me.  Right now I don’t have one.  The book is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble but as far as a website, I don’t have it yet.

Dr. Kent:  We’ll check you out on Amazon; Abramo’s Gift.  Thank you so much for chatting with us about this great novel.

Donald Greco:  You’re welcome, thanks Kent.

Dr. Kent:  My next guest is going to be Alphie McCourt.  He is the author of A Long Stones Throw.  He’s the younger brother of the famous McCourt Brothers Frank and Maliki.  This is a beautiful memoir to add to his family’s legacy.  So we’re going to talk to him in just a minute.  Come on back for that.

Alphie McCourt:  Thank you!

Dr. Kent:  It’s a book called A Long Stones Throw, give me in a nutshell where this book starts, where it finishes and what it does in between.

Alphie McCourt:  It starts in New York City then I spend some time on between the two borders of Canada and the united states because of a glitch in my Visa and it comes back to New York and then carries on to my time in the Army and time on the east side of Manhattan and then I go back to Ireland and come back again and spend some time in California before coming back to new York and settling in New York.

Dr. Kent:  Talk about New York City at that time.  It was a different place.

Alphie McCourt:  It was a different place.  New York in the 1960s, the united states in the 1960s, was a different place in my own view I think it was probably the last period of real prosperity in the united states when people were free to develop and articulate even to protest the causes.  Of course it was a very turbulent time for everyone and for me personally being in my 20s it was a turbulent time.

Dr. Kent:  I’m so intrigued by your whole family.  I’ve now read books by your brother Frank, Maliki and by you now.  How did you all become so gifted in story telling, in writing?

Alphie McCourt:  Well Frank has been writing all his life.  I think he wrote his first book Ashes to Ashes under various titles.  I think he probably wrote it three times before he spent his life writing that book and he has been writing all of his life.  He has the real gift of writing.  Maliki has a different style of all the others, entirely spontaneous.  He has a gift of writing and the gift of talking.  He can as I said turn the world on its ear.  He has a great sense of the absurd.  As for myself, I’ve been reading more than writing bits and pieces all my life, but I’ve always wrote a lot.  My mother was a great reader and my father was conscious of sound and story always.  So I guess it comes, whatever it is, comes from the parents.

Dr. Kent:  And we in this country, we love Irish culture and I don’t know what it is exactly about it.  Maybe it’s some of the absurd things that we hear, the wild stories, some of the beautiful culture and music.  Why do Americans feel so obsessed about Ireland?

Alphie McCourt:  Well I think the Irish have a way, the best of the Irish have a way of taking everything seriously and taking nothing seriously and they think that’s the only way you can really survive and get through.  If you take everything seriously you’re done for and if you take nothing seriously then you’ll last.  So I think you have to find the path and always have some perspective.  It is said about Irish people that we have a great sense of tragedy and a great sense of [inaudible] that an Irish, I cant quote it exactly but the saying is “In times of great joy an Irishman is consoled by the fact that around the corner lurks great tragedy.”  That verse is a consolation in times of great joy, you know because we all lurk, we all have the guilt you know.  If you have great joy you know that somewhere down the line you have to pay.

Dr. Kent:  That’s true; we always want the one and the other.  We want the dark and the light.  So tell us about in this book A Long Stones Throw you talk about your early childhood and some of the difficulties.  Talk about your struggles.

Alphie McCourt:  It was peculiar the way we grew up because I described it to someone recently because we were white people among white people, Irish people among Irish people and more or less Catholics among Catholics.  Why even so, we were essentially excluded.  We were looked down upon and regarded with contempt.  I suppose if we have lived on [inaudible] Drive we would have had enough to eat and we could’ve just melded in but the fact that we lived in a large town in a small city, I guess we were early in the genteel life what they call it inner city children.  We were they and they were we and our we stunk because we were not clean enough we weren’t respectable.  And that was the stigma.  You can endure hunger and deprivation and all of that, but the stigma is a terrible thing.  Plus the fact that our father was as I said, our father who worked in England and left and never came back, never kept in contact, never hardly wrote or sent money or anything else.  If we had contact with my father we would’ve been better off but with no contact with the father, the stigma of poverty combined with the stigma of no father was horrendous.

Dr. Kent:  Now you have so many themes running through your book, including that one of course and then also you have Christianity, you have sports, all of these things and then you have New York.  You have a different, this grammatically different culture.  How did all of these worlds collide in your youth and young adulthood?

Alphie McCourt:  It was a very difficult adjustment in the sense that I was not an ordinary immigrant because the ordinary immigrant are not English speaking so the Irish have had the advantage of being English speaking so you kind of have one foot in the door, but its though to get in the door because you still have the you know, you can tell by looking at you still and you have the accent and you have a certain bearing which stamps you as an immigrant.  Plus the fact that I was the only one of my family to go through high school, secondary school.  So that opened certain doors for me.  I had the opportunity here to go to the university and all that but I could never seem to buckle down to it.

I never really got into it, I don’t know why and I don’t attempt to analyze it.  Its just the way it turned out, I couldn’t commit myself to that kind of academic endeavor.  I guess I was hungry for the excitement of New York and hungry for the glamour of New York.  They used to tell us when we were kids that presumption is the expectation of salvation without taking the means necessary to obtain it.  that’s a very weighty statement so I guess I was looking to have the glamour to have whatever you’re supposed to have without really doing the work necessary to obtain it.  Plus I think I felt overshadowed.  I have three brothers, my brother Michael is one who lives in San Francisco and a formidable character in his own right.  It’s agreed that probably he’s the best storyteller in the whole family.  He hasn’t written a book and probably never will, he doesn’t have to.  So I guess I felt somewhat overshadowed by the brothers.

Dr. Kent:  As the youngest of the brothers, did you get doted on by your mother?

Alphie McCourt:  While things improved once Frank came over here and went in the Army and they do the allotment when you give up your pay and the government matches it with an equal amount of money, so our situation improved.  Maliki did the same when he came and Michael did the same so I guess from age 12 on it was more or less better off.

Dr. Kent:  That’s something I remember very well from your brother Frank McCourt’s biography where he talked about visiting home.  He would send the money home and then he talked about visiting home.  What was it like to have your big brother be in a foreign land and talk about the military and all of this?

Alphie McCourt:  Frank is ten years older so when he would come home I guess I was about 14 and he was 24 so I was still looking up to him and America was and still is I think the promised land, where dreams come true, and having him come home and having Maliki come home and Michael come home in the splendid uniforms all striped and well scrubbed and clean and well fed and all of that, it was tremendous because this was still the 1950s and it was still shall we say the American century for America was the promised land.  I couldn’t get enough of them when they came home because they represented, it was a kind of generosity and a love about them when they came home.  It wasn’t to be found in our limited 1960s.

Dr. Kent:  You also detail in your book some personal struggles with alcohol and I guess my question about that is I hear so much about Ireland and so much of it revolves around alcohol.  What’s your experience with that and how have you come out on top?

Alphie McCourt:  I remember the 1980s I think we did a survey in Europe about alcohol consumption and I think the Irish came in number five after the French, Germans, Italians and such, so we were lower down the scale when we got to consumption, but maybe when we drink we become more demonstrative, more inclined to drink and sing and dance and fight or whatever and maybe we tend not to drink moderately – two or three drinks.  You know what they say, you tend to carry on once you start and I was like that.  Once I started I carried on, it didn’t mean I drink every day or two days, but when you begin to measure the amount that you drink, then you know that you’re in trouble with it.

The pub is the place, the pub is the social center so ideally the men, and when I was growing up would go there at night for a couple pints and that was about it, but when you come over here the bar is different even though they call it a pub.  You can stay there 12 hours.  In New York the bars are open until 4:00 in the morning so you can really spend your whole life, it’s very easy.  There’s a fellowship there you might not find outside and its very tempting once you get into it, you get stuck with it.  There used to be that show on TV about it.

Dr. Kent:  Well I love this discussion because like so many others as I said before one I’m fascinated by just your voice, by the Irish accent, I’m fascinated by your childhood in Limerick and about this pub.  There’s so much mystery surrounding it.  What’s the response been to your book and what was the response, do you remember the first response of your brothers’ book.  What was it like when he hit it big?

Alphie McCourt:  About Frank’s book?

Dr. Kent:  Yeah, and it’s come way down to your book since.

Alphie McCourt:  Yeah its funny how it’s all developed in the course of its now I think 12 years; it’s like we’ve gone around the world.  When Ashes to Ashes came out it was kind of a whirlwind because we brothers all went together to Ireland for the launching and then in 1996 and then in 1997 Frank was awarded by the university of Limerick so we went back to Limerick and oh man it was enormous, they had a three story book store there.  People were going around getting all of us to sign the books.  There was some resentment among some people because of my mother [inaudible] but he told the truth and you can’t dispute that.  Because people didn’t want to see their native place, our town to be depicted as a place of which it was at that time of misery and begrudgery and all the rest of it.  That’s the way it was, he told the truth.

Dr. Kent:  It seems as if all three of you tell the truth very well in your books.  Continue to tell me the story of how your memoir came about.

Alphie McCourt:  Of course when Frank’s book was number one, Ashes to Ashes, his came about and my brother Maliki came out with his book A Monk Swimming so every child in the street was asking me when is your book coming out?  I would say next year or now they would say are you writing a book and I would say sure I am isn’t everyone?  Everyone writes a book these days.  So time passed and well I began to get the idea maybe I should articulate my own memory and my own point of view and try to establish my own place in the family.  So did, I went away for four days to Pennsylvania to seclusion as the grandiose calls it.  I was in this small house for four days and shut myself off from everyone and every thing and I wrote half of it in four days.  That was the childhood part, the growing up part.  That was the easy part, it just flowed out, I enjoyed it and I enjoyed writing it and I enjoyed reading it.  The second part was more difficult, it took only a few years.

Dr. Kent:  I recall hearing your brother Frank McCourt speaks once he read from his book, Teacher Man.  He talked about it being a brutal process to write that book, he said it took him three years.  It’s a very difficult thing to pull these memoirs out.  It’s not like writing fiction.

Alphie McCourt:  No and people ask me and maybe asked him I don’t know, if I kept a diary or a journal and I didn’t and people are in disbelief so while in parts of it I may be a bit fanciful even there I think its permitted but there’s such a theory now about memoirs that you have to tell the absolute truth and nothing but the truth, I think there is nothing wrong with a little embroidery as long as you stick essentially.  You don’t introduce so called facts that are not facts.  I think it can be factual without being dull because if you just present the facts then it’s very dull.  You have to present in such a way and put a flair mark and some little bit of embroidery around it as far as dialogue and what people say.  Essentially you can remember what people said, you can certainly remember the tone of what people said and present it that way and I think in most of my life I have anchors in which I can hang the hats of my memory and each of those pegs prompts another memory and gives me a context on which I can expand.

Dr. Kent:  Has this been a good experience for you?  Writing this book and having this new platform?

Alphie McCourt:  It has been because as I said to someone there’s many things in my life went unfinished, many things I didn’t finish.  I don’t know if this is true of most people or if I’m only conscious of it, so there’s a number of things I didn’t finish but I’m very happy that I finished this book A Long Stones Throw and that its published and its there and some people have read it and loved it.  Some people are moderately cheerful about it and I haven’t met anyone who hated it.  Mind you three different women have told me it was an all nighter because they stayed up all night reading it.  I don’t know what that means but they say it.

Dr. Kent:  You are like your brothers, masterful in weaving the tragic in with the comic.  What you were talking about in Ireland when the good things happen you say well it’s good to know that the tragedy’s around the corner.  Talk to close this out here about this duality in Irish literature, especially McCourt literature of the humor and the tragedy.

Alphie McCourt:  It probably has a lot to do with the weather!  You know when its raining that there must be sunshine somewhere not too far behind.  We grew up in the rain so we always anticipate the sunshine and when we do get a little sun there’s an absolute certainty that the rain is not far behind and I found as a kind of sideline I find there’s a very stable appetite for our growing up and in my own book one third of it takes place in Ireland, two thirds of it takes place in the united states and yet when it comes down to destruction I’m always back in Limerick and I kind of hope that people will see me in Canada, in new York, and see me in my couple of years in the Army and couple years in California so its not an entirely one dimension of life.  On the other hand, people are curious, they want to know.  They really want to understand so I have to entertain and humor peoples desire to understand.  I can’t explain it, no one can explain all we can do is lay it out, illuminate it as best we can and let people draw their own conclusions.  But I’ve spent some years in the united states, I spent 19 years in Ireland, so that gives you some idea of my own perspective.

Dr. Kent:  Of course in a similar fascination that we have in this country with Ireland, there’s the great fascination with new York city, especially new York city of the 60s, new York city as it developed; the skyline as well as the culture and so much the center of American culture and you were right in the middle of a lot of that.

Alphie McCourt:  I was!  The late 60s was a time as I said before, the last period of great prosperity but also a massive unrest.  We didn’t know whether we were coming or going here.  Between everybody’s right were being asserted at that time.  African American rights, women’s rights, gay rights and everything else; plus we had the Vietnam War and all of that and the big conflict between college students on the one hand protesting the war and construction workers on the other hand wearing the emblem of the stars and stripes.  I saw a couple of incidents where I saw things really blow up.  The 70s of course was probably the worst time in the city when we went into economic depression in the 70s but we got through that too.  New York is very resilient, they said in the 1980s that the rest of the country went down very quickly.  In 1987 New York went down very slowly.  Then the country came back very quickly and we came back very slowly but we always come back.

Dr. Kent:  As my last question for you here, we don’t have much time left, but I want to ask you something that surprised you in the writing of this book, something that came out that you didn’t expect.

Alphie McCourt:  Oh!  That’s a big question.  I think probably the extent of my own wanderings kind of surprised me.  I had never thought about it that much and when I looked at it all I find that so much of my life I stood outside, I didn’t enter in, that I wanted to be kind of in it but not around it.  I spent a lot of my life looking askance and that’s an uncomfortable position but I guess at some point I adopted it.  I had a very early experience with politics when I was young, 16, 17, 18 and I think maybe it soured me on any kind of orthodoxy and caused me to look askance.  It doesn’t say that I’m cold, uncompassionate; I’m none of those things but kind of at the core Yates’ epitaph cast a cold eye on life on death all men ask why.  I think I did too much of that.

Dr. Kent:  Its fascinating speaking with you and the wonderful thing about a memoir is we can all speak with Alphie McCourt by reading his memoir and getting inside his life story going from limerick New York and many other places on the way.  The book starts out in fact between Canada and the United States.  What an honor it’s been chatting with Alphie McCourt.  The book is called A Long Stones Throw.  We can find out about that on the web at sterling and Ross website and its available just about everywhere.  Thank you so much for chatting with me today.

Alphie McCourt:  And thank you very much, it’s been a pleasure, I enjoyed it.

Dr. Kent:  We’ve been speaking with Alphie McCourt, author of A Long Stone’s Throw and what a pleasure that’s been.  My next guest on the show will be a musician.  His name is James Reams and we’re going to listen to a track that’s very timely from his album.  It’s called Troubled Times.  This is fun music; his band is called the Barnstormers.  So listen to this track and then we’ll chat with James Reams for a bit after that.

James Reams:  Dr. Kent, it’s so wonderful to hear your voice!

Dr. Kent:  You are from Kentucky and you ended up in New York.  Tell us about that journey.

James Reams:  What happened was when I was a kid I really enjoyed print work, there was a person that I met who was actually a young girl and I had some romantic interest in her and also I had some interest in print making and I came to new York city with a cardboard box and a pair of work shoes and got thrown into the whole trade and it was probably the best thing that happened to me in my life as I was raised there in eastern Kentucky and it was sort of hard scrabble but all of a sudden I came to new York and it was a completely different world.  I got to meet people from all walks of life and it was an amazing adventure and still is.

Dr. Kent:  As someone who, I live out on Long Island but I do know there’s an old time thriving music scene in New York and what I love about your music is it’s not polished to the T, it’s got that old time feel to it.  Tell me about your theories on music and how that fits in New York City?

James Reams:  Well you know yeah, I actually like the old time sounds and I was raised that way and I know also that you appreciate it too.  I know that you have a book coming out about Doc Watson actually and he’s a hero of mine and so many people and what I like about music is I like it to be authentic and real and when we go and record an album we do it live in the studio with very little fixing and I also for years in the city I helped support a blue grass and old time convention that happens every year and this following year will be 12 years that we’ve had it going on.  It’s called bluegrass and old time jamboree in park slope and it’s held by the Ethical Society and we have over 700 people who come in and have workshops and we have masters of the instruments.  New York has a lot of great figures and they show people how to play mandolin, fiddle, banjo, we have film series and we really enjoy it, we’re having it in September.

Dr. Kent:  Where do folks find out about that?

James Reams:  They can go to my website at www.jamesreams.com and also a facebook page that has a listing of things and a nice film of last year where we had a new lost city ramblers celebration.  We had two of the original new lost city ramblers and it was special to them because it had been 50 years from the night that they played together and its very rare film footage on that facebook page.  You don’t have to be a facebook member to see it.

Dr. Kent:  I’m looking at it right now, it’s in September 11-12, 2009 in Prospect Park area.  That seems pretty neat and there’s some video up there of John Cohen, I think that’s who you’re talking about right?

James Reams:  That’s right, John Cohen and Tom Paley.  Tom has this really interesting history because he used to work with Woody Guthrie.  Toms a New York fellow who is a big part of old time music and played with Woody Guthrie and now he lives over in England and he comes over occasionally.  I recorded an album with him too, something that came out on Copper Creek Records.  Mysterious Redbirds were Tom and I and Bill Christophersen recorded an old time album of some of the old-time songs and tunes.  Tom was just such a big influence on me and part of what I love about music is to honor those who have made it and I also had another opportunity to make an album with a real legendary character, somebody in bluegrass many people may not know probably, a cult legend named Walter Hensley who was the very first banjo player to play Carnegie Hall.  He played with Earl Taylor and I think it was 1952 [1959] and I did two albums with him and that was really exciting too and one was actually nominated for a blue grass recorded event of the year by the international bluegrass music association, which I know you’re a member of.

Dr. Kent:  I am now, I just joined and the funny thing about blue grass I like that the world talks about old time music as bluegrass but there’s such a big difference.  There’s a different amount of heart in old time music I think.

James Reams:  I think there is a big difference and the music that I love the most straddles those two and in the 1930s and 1940s and probably even a little into the 50s there were people who straddled those two and that’s the type of music that really inspires me and there’s still some people doing that today, like the Dry Branch Fire Squad and there’s a number of groups that try to straddle that old time bluegrass, but you’re right there’s two different camps and that’s sort of a shame.  Even in bluegrass there’s like two different camps, traditional and contemporary and I think all the labels and I know that you’re a believer in this too.  All those labels, they help have people understand, but also they hurt.  I think that a lot of times musicians like yourself and myself what we do is create music and its almost organic, it just comes out from us so I’m hard pressed to even sometimes label what I do even though I think most of the time I get my records thrown in the bluegrass bin.  It feels like an extension of me and I think that’s where music becomes a wonderful part of your life.

Dr. Kent:  I had the great pleasure this year, I went to the thanksgiving concert of Arlo Guthrie and Pete Seeger at Carnegie hall and that was a real blast for me because I grew up with that music and their music crosses over between bluegrass old time somewhere in there and Pete Seeger, it was so neat to see him as part of the inauguration ceremonies this year.  Talk about Pete Seeger and I guess the history of this music.  What’s your take on all of it?

James Reams:  Well Pete Seeger is I think an unsung hero of music and also his half-brother Mike Seeger too but Pete Seeger had that rainbow quest television program out of NYC and you still get the films of that where he brought in like Doc Watson and Clint Howard and Fred Price and those folks and also Johnny Cash and the Stanley Brothers.  People in the urban world had become aware so I think Pete Seeger has really made so many people aware of their roots and that’s what I think right now in America you really see this new type of music; Americana, and you see that its being embraced by more and more people and I understand how people say I don’t really like country music because its turned its back on the roots of music.  I think that if people have a sort of idea that they don’t like something like country music maybe they should explore the roots because the roots of it are extremely beautiful because it’s made by everyday people who struggle and with making their lives better through music.

Dr. Kent:  All right, so you’ve got this record Wild Card, another one Troubled Times.  Give us your advertisement about that.

James Reams:  The Troubled Times record is really interesting because it has a CD and DVD.  In the DVD I actually interviewed a lot of the pioneers of bluegrass music.  Jimmy Martin, Sonny & Bobby Osborne, and the DVD is free when you buy the CD Troubled Times, its one of those two-for discs and there’s a documentary about myself and the jamboree and the Barnstormers and follows us making this music out of NYC, which so many people say this seems so strange – a bluegrass band out of NYC but we do and if you look at our schedule we’ll be playing west Virginia this year and places like that.  The documentary shows how we grow bluegrass in the cracks of the city where we say red clay meets concrete.  I guess you can get it at cdbaby or amazon.  Plus I have a number of other albums available like you said; Wild Card, with the great John Glik and all of them are still available except my very first one Song Birds, which is out of print.

Dr. Kent:  I love the sound and we’re going to play one more track.  This one is from Wild Card, we’re the kind of people that make the juke box play.  Tell me about that?

James Reams:  I’ll tell you what that is; I like to take some of the older country forms and I love honky tonk country music and we’re the type of people who make the juke box play is a honky tonk song written by Johnny Paycheck that he was never able to record.  We found it, changed it and made it bluegrass and we’re just so proud of it.  So yeah, we hope that everybody enjoys it and I want to thank you for your time.  I really appreciate you calling.  I’m in Arizona now and I appreciate you tracking me down!

Dr. Kent:  Absolutely, I would love to have you on again sometime.  Its fun chatting about old-time music.  There’s not many of us out there, I think a lot of people would love it if they hear it, but I’m a big fan.

James Reams:  I know you’re originally from Oklahoma and the whole bit and I think it’s wonderful what you do along with everything else.

Dr. Kent:  It’s been an honor speaking with James Reams.  We’re going to listen to a track from Wild Card called We’re the Kind of People that Make the Jukebox Play.  Troubled Times has a bonus DVD and what a perfect song and album for these times.  Thank you so much for chatting with me and lets get together again down the road.

[music]

Dr. Kent:  That was a beautiful tune from a guy named James Reams and that was his band with him, the Barnstormers.  You can find out about him at jamesreams.com.  What an honor to speak with all our superstar guests today.  Alphie McCourt’s A Long Stones Throw, Dr. Allan Hamilton with The Scalpel and the Soul and Donald Greco’s Abramo’s Gift.  Be safe and we’ll see you next week and read a good book between now and then!

Frieda Gates:  Hello!

Dr. Kent:  So tell me a little bit about this book.  Where did it start?  Where did it come from in your mind?

Frieda Gates:  Well it’s based on an actual event.  The event was recorded by Daniel Defoe and actually when he wrote under the pseudonym Captain Charles Johnson and there’s some dispute there whether it was actually Defoe or not.  But it’s about Sawney Beane who was a legendary character throughout the British Isles and is noted because he existed on cannibalism and propagated incest.  For 25 years he lived in a cave and living in this manner until he was finally discovered, it took a long time.  And executed along with his entire family.  Now there’s some law where they wonder if the children, since they were brought up by these cannibals and therefore know no other way of life, yet they were executed just because they were his children and that’s been kind of a question of law whether children growing up in such circumstances are actually guilty.

Dr. Kent:  Now what a fascinating topic for a book and you know, we could all listen to this all day long about these mysterious times and events and all of that.  Now you’re well known for children’s literature and you’ve done a lot of other things.  This is a heavy topic.

Frieda Gates:  Yes, in fact I was wondering if I even should have written it under my own name because I didn’t want it to be put into the children’s section by mistake.  The fact that it has sex and violence it’s certainly not for children.  My other books are children’s books and textbooks.  So this is quite a ways and it was funny because I took a course in short story writing and one of the assignments was to write a dialogue while eating.  I did that and then I wrote 40 other short stories all in the same subject.  One had to do with cannibalism and I love research.  In researching cannibalism I came across Sonny Bean and couldn’t really understand why there was never another novel written about him other than the record by Daniel Defoe.  And it just was ripe for the telling so I did it.  Of course I had this reputation and they said if Frieda invites you to dinner watch out because she may be it.

Dr. Kent:  And this isn’t normally something we think about coming from that part of the world.  We have such a love affair with Ireland and Scotland and we think of upright folks and the hunt for the holy grail and the Dan Brown novel and the bagpipes and the kilts.  So what’s been the reaction to this?

Frieda Gates:  It’s interesting you say that because Daniel Defoe was English and a journalist and the Scots always claimed that the story was fictitious and he just made it up because he wanted to write something derogatory about the Scots.  I went to Scotland of course to do research and I was amazed that everybody knew who Sonny Bean was but they always had this reticence to talk about him because there’s ballads written about him and he’s very famous but whether it’s actually true or not is up for grabs.  Of course Daniel Defoe wrote under many different pseudonyms, in fact he wrote for four different newspapers at the same time with four different opinions and he was imprisoned for not paying debts.  He was a terrible character so even the life of Defoe is interesting.

Dr. Kent:  So bring us into what was the setting back then in the 15th century.  I mean it’s such a murky, we understand history back about to 1700 and 1600 and in this country people get a little nervous before that.  What was happening around there, before we usually hear about?

Frieda Gates:  I love research and I love history so I enjoy thoroughly going into all of this; actually 16th century and of course Mary Queen of Scots was executed at that time and monks were on the run and there was a whole thing about Catholicism, particularly in Scotland and Knox who was of course popular at that time so religion was a very important element and I had to of course include it in my story.  In order to get to the story of Sonny Bean and the record that Defoe tells is about Sonny Bean being a lazy kid who has a disagreement with his father, steals his fathers’ money and runs off and hooks up with this prostitute.

Then they meet up with a knight and find themselves living in a cave on the coast of Galloway.  Of course I get into the wars because the knight had just returned from all the wars the Scots and the English were having and the French were involved.  So history plays a big part in my novel and as I say I am a history buff so I enjoyed it all.  I would look up every thing like what kind of shoes they wore or when I talk about loot I wanted to know what the loot was that they stole from the people they killed.  I had to work in how they became cannibals.  Why they first decided to cook and eat the child and it gets a little bit weird.  Finding out what people taste like and I found that out had to inject that into the story.  So it was pretty fun doing the book really but friends didn’t really want to come here for dinner worried about what I was going to serve.

Dr. Kent:  Go into the story itself here.  It’s the abduction of Elspeth Cummings; Sawney Beane.  Give us a nutshell.

Frieda Gates:  Well the abduction is purely fabrication.  I had to somehow explain Sonny Bean and how he got caught so the easiest way to do it was to dwell on the life of a young girl who is captured by the family and kept alive for awhile.  So then since I got into that part of the story I had to backup and say how she came to be on the road where she was abducted so it all would tie together.  That’s when I really had to do research into what Scotland was like at that time, what the architecture was like, what the trades people were in, everything; even the clothes they wore and what they ate so its really a history lesson.

Dr. Kent:  What got you into this in the first place?  Tell us a little about your background as a children’s author.

Frieda Gates:  I started out in advertising and I was an art director and an illustrator.  I illustrated a book that a friend had written.  I was puppeteer at the time and I became very friendly with the editor who I was working with and she said to me why don’t you write a book on puppetry and I said well I’m really an illustrator and she said oh you can do it, I’ll help you.  So I wrote a book on puppetry and before I knew it in ten years I had written nine other books. It just seemed like one followed the other.

Then I started teaching how to write and illustrate for children and I realized there was no textbook on the subject so I wrote a book called How to write, illustrate and design children’s books, which I am at the moment revising because now I have to put in all the computer stuff that wasn’t in it 25 years ago.  So one book sort of led to another.  My husband was also a writer of textbooks so I worked with him on several textbooks he wrote in the art field and the last book I wrote for children was an Indian legend called Allies and I have a whole collection of Indian creation stories because my father was a Mohawk Indian, which is another area I’d like to write about some day.

Dr. Kent:  Your father was a Mohawk Indian?  Tell us more about that before you go on!

Frieda Gates:  Well he’s from kanawaka, which is a reservation on the other side of St. Lawrence and they were the first field workers when the Canadian company needed to put their bearings or whatever it is on the kanawaka’s land and the only way they could do it was if they employed the Indians there. The reason they were called Mohawks is because of the French Jesuits converted the Mohawks to Catholicism and when they got the reservation in kanawaka it was predominantly Mohawk although there were other Oneida and Quoi nations but Mohawk was the language that they adopted.

Anyway the Mohawks became these you know the lower kind of workers that would be carting materials around and they didn’t like that; they wanted to get out and become riveters, which they did.  There was a letter written one time saying it was like putting ham with eggs.  These Mohawks were just so great at it.  So they helped build that bridge and before you know it, they came to New York and they were building sky scrapers.  They started a community […] so the Mohawk language, they had grocery stores where they would sell things like bear grease and the community was Mohawk and all the people working there were sky men.  They had to fight for the right to live in Brooklyn because they came from Canada, and that’s a whole other story!

Dr. Kent:  Wow, so you’re full of them!

Frieda Gates:  A little bit yes.  Well I’m a researcher.

Dr. Kent:  Its really amusing speaking about all of these things.  Lets talk about now how has this book been received in public?  Back to the Sonny Bean, it’s a dark book but it’s great to read a dark book now and again.  Its not something you want to read curled up ready for bed, its kind of spooky, but what was it like going through the experience of writing a dark book?

Frieda Gates:  Well I’m fascinated by the macabre so it’s my cup of tea.  I had some trouble with the ending of it, I won’t tell you how it ends but the first ending my agent didn’t like because it wasn’t what she felt the ending should be and she had me rewrite the ending.  Then my editor with whom the book was finally being published said she didn’t like the ending and I said well that wasn’t my original ending, which I couldn’t find and had to rewrite it but then went back to the first ending, which my editor seemed to prefer and that’s what’s in the book.  So it’s a matter of whether it should be upbeat ending or not – well, I don’t want to give the ending away!

Dr. Kent:  Indeed not!  It’s been a great honor speaking with Frieda Gates, she’s the author of many, many books and I’m excited to now see if I can find the children’s book to go with the Sawney Beane copy I have to see the great extent of work she’s done.  This book is wonderful, put out by Cambridge House Press called Sawney Beane: The abduction of Elspeth Cummings.  Thank you so much for chatting with us today.

Frieda Gates:  Thank you for having me.

Dr. Kent:  My next guest on the show is going to be Bob Cesca; he’s the author of One Nation Under Fear: Fear Mongers in the Home of the Brave.  We’re going to speak to him in one minute; come on back for that.

Keith Morris:  Thank you, thanks for having me on.

Dr. Kent:  Tell me a little about this novel.

Keith Morris:  Well, it all takes place on one night in a bar in a small town in North Idaho.  A bunch of kind of regular guys hanging around, not too different from my own experiences back in Idaho several years ago but there’s a lot of back story and a lot more dramatic things going on underneath the surface.  One thing I wanted to do with the novel was try to write a book in which if somebody were to wander into this place where this novel is taking place on this particular night, you might not see anything really going on but from the readers privileged position, being able to get inside the characters heads, you know there’s an awful lot going on and the potential for stuff to happen.

Dr. Kent:  Now just the simple game of darts, give us a window into that world because I’ve been in a couple small town bars and I’ve seen that world but I’ve never participated in it and I don’t know much about it.  So tell us about your dart league king in this book.

Keith Morris:  I’ve never been a serious dart player; in fact I’m a very bad dart player although I used to play darts a good bit.  I had some friends, I used to live in New Orleans in the early 80s and had some friends who used to play in bars down there and got me started.  I would actually fill in for their dart league every once in awhile and you would have these people who come in; I’ve played before, I remember one time these guys came in who were professionals who play.  There was no way you could beat them and I was never very good anyway.  Later on when I moved back to Idaho it was in my hometown I started up a dart league there that went on for a couple of years and the way its described in the book, I mean that’s what we would do.

We would get together, there’s several bars there in town and people would get together and you’d have two teams matched up and play one another.  If you’re from a small town or if you know anything about how small town bars, there’s always some kind of drama there.  So what I was trying to tap into was to take the game itself and the people who were playing it are interested or committed to one degree or another, obviously it’s very important to the main character.  But the rest of it is people who happen to be hanging around on this Thursday night.  Darts is a good game to focus.  I love bar games of any sort, pool, darts, foosball, you name it.

Dr. Kent:  It’s so fascinating; tell us about, I actually grew up in a small town in Minnesota but I still heard a little about the gossip here and there.  What is it about towns and communities that, you sort of describe some of these twisted relationships in here?  Talk about that.

Keith Morris:  Sure, the town I grew up in was about 4,000 people and we went to high school and there was the same people year after year so naturally by the time you graduate high school and by the time you’re in your 20s everybody’s dated every body else’s girlfriend, boyfriend or somebody gets married and all the ex boyfriends and girlfriends are hanging around and you see them out at places so I think those kind of relationships definitely get more interesting and more involved in small towns.  I’ve seen a few people from bigger cities who read the book and said how strange that would seem to go to the same places and see the same people all the time.  Things from long ago still matter and are still part of what’s happening there.  The bar is a place where in small towns; it’s where it all happens.  I write about bars a lot actually.

Dr. Kent:  Now, you talk about Faulkner in several places and you name him always as a great influence on you.  I remember reading As I Lay Dying in high school and thinking I don’t quite get this and over time it grew on me.  He sort of is able to build a different window into American society.  How do you feel that you’re able to do that in a way?

Keith Morris:  There’s not a lot of fiction about Idaho for one thing and another thing I feel like with writing about the west there are some people I really like.  Marilyn Robinson lived in my hometown actually and her book Housekeeping was set in the same town.  I loved that book.  One of the things I find about writing about the west a lot of times is a lot of its done by people who aren’t from the west actually, who write about the west, they come over for writing programs that are from the east coast and I feel a lot of the writing about the west represents one side of it, which is the guys are strong silent type and they’re out fixing their car engines, and the women always endure and are hearty, et cetera, everybody’s very individualistic and that is one side of the west.  But having grown up there myself, having had a lot of different kinds of friends, its not that different than anyplace else and a lot of the things that people are doing there are the same.  They have the same desires, the same interests as people everywhere else.  So I think I try to give a little different picture of what goes on in a small town in Idaho than you would get from a typical novel set in the west and I’m generally sort of up to that same kind of thing.

Dr. Kent:  On the back of your book there’s a quote from Donald Pollack who I had on the show a couple months ago.  He’s the author of Knockemstiff, another wonderful book about a place and I was wondering with him in mind and then you’re also a professor and you work with students all the time.  What are your thoughts about where writing about small towns is going?  What do you teach your students?

Keith Morris:  That’s interesting; well I really enjoyed Donald’s book a lot, its one of my favorite books last year and I had a chance to correspond with him a little bit since my book came out.  He’s taken the whole sort of small town gothic thing a little further than I ever would’ve dreamed of doing it.  But I recognize those people and those situations you know.  I don’t think I write about small towns just the same way.  I teach at Clemson in South Carolina and a lot of my students are from small towns in South Carolina.

I don’t think there’s a lot of one particular thing that I talk about in terms of writing about small towns.  To me it’s all based on the same thing, its one of the things I think that drives my fiction.  It doesn’t matter if it’s a small town really, people are the same all over and while the person and the circumstances and where they’re coming from might seem different once you get to know the person as a character you’re finding some of the same things about that character that you would about anybody else.  So to me writing about people in small towns is part of the human experience, its trying to uncover those kinds of layers that everybody has, the different layers of experience that people have in different places and get to the same thing.  When people can read about my characters and coming from a different background and they’ve had and say they recognize some of these things as familiar, then that’s what I’m looking for.

Dr. Kent:  The reason I also brought up Donald Pollack is that his life story is very different than yours and I wanted to know a little more about where you come from because of course he came out of the coal mines to be a writer. Tell us how you became a writer.

Keith Morris:  I didn’t come out of the coal mines but actually I think he and I have a lot of similarities in our background in certain ways.  I was born in Mississippi, my parents are southerners born in rural south and we moved up to Idaho when I was six years old and lived in small towns up in Idaho and I messed up through school so I went off to college and managed to last a year and a half before I flunked out.  Then spent the next five or six years wandering around to different places.  I’d gotten into acting a little bit but I took all kinds of different jobs, spent some time in southern California, new Orleans, kept going back to my hometown in between and really kind of ended up back in college by accident almost.

The professor at the University of Idaho, who ended up being a good friend to me and a mentor got hold of some of my writing almost by accident and asked me to come in and talk to him.  He convinced me to go back to college; I was in my late 20s at that point, so I finished my undergraduate degree at the university of Idaho and got a graduate degree and by that time I had a wife and son and went to grad school with a family already and finished up in north Carolina, then ended up here in Clemson.  It was a fairly non-traditional way of getting through the whole thing.  Not as much as Donald’s though.

Dr. Kent:  What I find fascinating is now how much does your own life, what is it about what you lived through what you observe?

Keith Morris:  You mean in regards to my own work?

Dr. Kent:  Exactly, how much is the work that you produce based on what you observe and what you’ve experienced?  You always hear that adage that you have to have lived something.

Keith Morris:  Yeah you know and I think that’s true to some extent and not true to some extent.  Obviously you only have one set of experiences to draw from so that’s your stockpile furnace.  Then there’s all the things you hear, all the things you read, and all the things you see on TV or movies or whatever and just what your imagination then concocts.  I don’t really, I’m not an autobiographical writer, I don’t try to write things straight from things that actually happened in my life or somebody else’s life, I always try to make sure that my characters are in some way a little bit different from whether its me, a friend of mine, I always try to create some kind of gap or some kind of space there.

It’s easier for me to write that way.  I find that if I actually try to draw on real situations or real people it limits what I’m able to do with something because I keep getting stuck in this rut of trying to write what actually happened instead of what could have happened.  What could have happened is almost always more interesting and so I don’t write straight from experience but certainly my experiences shapes everything I write and I think I’m kind of fiercely loyal to north Idaho and consider that home and I feel like its part of what I’m doing to express what its like there for myself, and I have a lot of great friends back there now and still to this day and they all pay attention to what I write and that inspires me.

Dr. Kent:  Tell us the story of how you became published the first time.  You have two books out on University Press.  Tell us about those and how did you go about getting published the first time?

Keith Morris:  I’ve been publishing short stories since about the mid-90s so I was publishing for several years before I had a first novel published.  I can tell you the story as far as my first publication.  I was in grad school at the time and had been writing for years but not that seriously.  I knew that’s what I wanted to do.  I submitted a story that I finally got around to finishing things a long, long story, about 60 pages that I actually sent to Quarterly West in Utah and they lost the manuscript.  Of course I didn’t know what I was doing.  I called the editor after a few months and said are you going to tell me anything and he said they lost the manuscript.  But if you send it back to me and also if you have something else that you’d like for us to look at, send that too.

So he was kind of giving me a little bonus at letting me send two manuscripts at one time.  They usually don’t do it and I didn’t have any idea what was going on.  I had just written a two page story that when I wrote it was a poem and then decided it was a story and took out the line breaks essentially.  So I sent both of these things to quarterly west and they ended up rejecting the long story I had sent in the first place and taking this two page piece, which my first published story and almost one of the first things I’d ever submitted.  So I thought wow, this is easy what are people talking about?  This is no problem.  Between the first and the second came 100 rejection letters so by the time I got to the second published story I had a better idea of how things worked.

Dr. Kent:  Exactly, so the Dart League King is a wonderful novel in a beautiful setting and tell us just a little more.  Give us a kernel of something we can look forward to in this novel.

Keith Morris:  Well I hope everybody finds the five characters, I tried to, I worked very hard, trying to make each of them “equal weight” in the novel and I hope that what people enjoy about it is that they get involved with all the different characters.  Some of them seem really repugnant at the outset.  By the time you get to the end I hope they’re all sympathetic characters to one degree or another and people will feel like everything builds toward one moment where everything comes together towards the end of the novel.  My primary interest is in characters and the thing that makes me happy is when they can relate so I was happy with the response from this book.  It’s always a different character, I hear from people and it’s never the same, which tells me I hopefully did something right.

Dr. Kent:  Well it’s been such an honor chatting with Keith Lee Morris and his book is called The Dart League King, fantastic title, it’s a wonderful sized book also.  Very cleverly printed, put out by Tin House Books, it’s a beautiful novel.  Thank you so much for chatting with us.

Keith Morris:  Thanks so much, it’s been a pleasure.

Dr. Kent:  My next guest on the show, we’ve not been back in touch with our political guest Bob Cesca and we had a little more time to chat with Keith Lee Morris and that was great.  So my next guest on the show will be the famous musician.  In fact formerly of Nickel Creek.  Her name is Sarah Watkins and that’s a special treat because we only booked her yesterday because our former guest had the flu.  So come on back and we’ll talk to Sarah Watkins.  I’m going to play a song from her album and I don’t know the title of this track, it’s an upcoming album and we’ll ask her about that in a moment.  This is track 6 off the album being released in April.

Dr. Kent:  That’s a beautiful tune off of a brand new upcoming album by Sarah Watkins and that’s of course Any Old Time, by Jimmy Rogers if I’m right!  Welcome to the show Sarah Watkins!

Sarah Watkins:  Hello! How are you doing?

Dr. Kent:  I’m doing pretty well.  So I didn’t know the name of that track when I put it in, all I knew was track 6 and track 9 of the upcoming album and of course that’s Any Old Time.  Tell me about that tune.

Sarah Watkins:  Well I heard that song off Tony Rice record.  I think it was church street blues, his recording of that song and I just loved it and over the years of songs that I liked it sort of stuck around and ended up on the record.  It was really fun to record.  Tim O’Brien is on there too and that was fun to do.

Dr. Kent:  Yeah, Tim O’Brien is the best.  So lets get into right away, now you’ve been in the bluegrass scene for a long time for somebody whose 27 years old.

Sarah Watkins:  Yeah, I grew up playing in a band called Nickel Creek and we were together from the time I was eight until a little over a year ago now so this is my first solo record and that’s actually the only song of that style on the record.  Most of it well there’s a lot of different things on there, but that is definitely the only two-steppable song on there.

Dr. Kent:  I love the steel guitar and nickel creek towards the end was also you were starting to develop a real edgy sound and do some really interesting things and of course Chris Telay has gone off and done his own stuff; incredible mandolin player and you are a great fiddle player.  Do we hear some good fiddle playing on this album?

Sarah Watkins:  Well there’s fiddle playing, you be the judge of how good it is!  But its yeah, there’s a couple fiddle tunes on there and true to form when doing interviews on the phone there’s always a siren that goes by whenever I’m on the phone with somebody.  I hope it’s not too loud but yeah a couple fiddle tunes on there and I play a good amount on the record actually, probably on almost every song.  That steel stuff is awesome, Greg Reese plays all the steel stuff on the record and he’s amazing.

Dr. Kent:  So is there a point in your career when you started playing with people and saying wow, these are some amazing musicians and on this record of course you’re being produced by John Paul Jones and you’ve got all these amazing musicians.  Tim O’Brien singing harmony vocals, Gillian Welsh and David Rawlings on here, I mean at what point in your career did you all of a sudden say man, its pretty fun?

Sarah Watkins:  Oh a long time ago I started saying yeah.  It’s been great especially this last year working on this year working on this record has been really special and I’m so grateful and so glad to have all these musicians play on it who I have known and loved for a very long time. Some of them I know on a more personal level than others, but everybody who’s on this record means something to me, professionally, personally, very often both.  I’m so grateful to have that kind of connection with the record where I wasn’t necessarily having to pay for everything just to get it the way I wanted to buy the help that I needed to have.  It has so much more of a more personal attachment to me because I love Greg Reese, I love playing with him, I’ve had the privilege of playing with him over the last five years and now his music is a part of my life and I could say that about every musician on this record.  Each one of them has a special place in my life, whether it’s just musically I’ve grown up listening to them or I’ve just played with them over the years.  It was great to have Shawn & Mark Shaft and Christie Lee on the record, which have been for so very long, so there’s a deep attachment to all these songs and the performances that came out on the record.

Dr. Kent:  Here’s a question for you; Shawn is your brother, right?

Sarah Watkins:  Yes.

Dr. Kent:  Being on the road with him and Christie Lee and your bass player when you were young and being on the road, did you get into some pretty vicious fights?

Sarah Watkins:  Oh yeah, of course, every brother and sister and brother obviously get into fights and every band gets into lots of fights so it’s a great combination to have both in there!  but we also I don’t know if you have siblings but most people that I talk to, the best part about having siblings that you get along with on any level is you can have these huge blow out fights and just five minutes later you’re like alright, you’re my brother, your still here, hang out and move on to the next thing.  That’s a really great relationship to have in a band because you do live together and you’re traveling on the road and that’s a helpful basis for a relationship.

Dr. Kent:  Did you ever get sick of it?  Like the Ben Claiborne complex where he was famous so young and said I got to get out of the public eye.  Was there a time when you said this is too much?

Sarah Watkins:  No, I’m not in the public eye.  I mean nickel creek fans were really enthusiastic and totally into us and they made us feel like rock stars but that is a very small world and I don’t think we ever felt like it was too much for us or that it was an unreasonable amount of exposure.  The world is very big and nickel creek was very small so we didn’t have to deal with it.  I felt that I got tired of touring a lot because in that machine there’s five or seven years where I had not been home more than two months at a time and very often it was only a week or two weeks at a time.  After awhile it changes your relationships with your friends and family and I got tired of that.  So it’s nice to be home for over a year and be able to nourish those relationships back to functionality [inaudible].  That was what I got tired of and I’m really glad to have had some time and now I’m actually ready to go back out again and really excited for the record and all that.

Dr. Kent:  What’s it like so far the difference for you between being on the road with Nickel Creek and now being out there under Sarah Watkins, your own name?

Sarah Watkins:  It’s a huge difference.  I’ve done limited amounts of touring by myself, I went out and opened for a few people this year; for [inaudible], and a couple others and its completely terrifying at first and then after awhile, I started remembering I can do this, this is fine, people do this, I can do this.  It’s a matter of getting used to it and making changes in how I perform and I can learn how to be a better entertainer.  Its an adjustment but its really fun to realize more and more that I actually can do it and I’m not going to be out there all by myself a whole lot this year, I’ll be out with one, two or three other people depending on the trip, or if I open for somebody or do my own show, I’ll have a band.  It’ll be a huge range of situations this year and I’m looking forward to experimenting with each scenario and just you know having fun with it.

Dr. Kent:  Tell me about this record.  Its self titled as far as I can tell and it’s coming out on the None Such Label.  We heard one song off it, you’re western swing tune, tell me about the rest of the tunes.

Sarah Watkins:  Well half are mine and half are songs that I borrowed from other songwriters and they’re not terribly far off from Nickel Creek stuff, except there’s not much mandolin because one you play with Chris Deeley it’s hard to play with others and we have the shining crewship of [inaudible] playing mandolin and John Paul Jones on one.  So it’s represented.  Chris plays mandola but the songs I wrote are well, you’re just going to have to listen to find out.  It’s not super crazy but I was glad to be able to play some songs that my friends had written that have come close to my heart in recent years and it’s good to record them.

Dr. Kent:  Immediately once you’re in the process of getting on the road to support an album, you’re already thinking about the next album because it’s been so long since you recorded that one.  Are you already planning the next one?

Sarah Watkins:  I’m not planning it.  I kind of feel like I’m not ready to start packing away ideas but I’m looking forward to it and I’m always trying to gather songs and thinking about what the next step will be but I’m actually still very anxious to look forward to see what happens with this record.  Since it’s my first one I don’t know what to expect, I don’t know if I’ll be touring this summer or working throughout the year, it depends on how people respond.  I’m just taking it day by day, month by month and see what happens.

Dr. Kent:  Now you got a couple shows coming up – you had one last night in LA and you have a couple more coming up?

Sarah Watkins:  Yeah, when I’m home off the road, we have a residency in Los Angeles at a club called Largo, which has basically my home club.  Shawn, my brother and I played there for six or seven years but we used to be our little outlet from nickel creek when we were off the road, it was our way of playing non-band material, songs we liked.  It was a safe plays to spin with songs we had written which we maybe hadn’t finished developing and since the bands off tour, we’ve played there more often.  Basically almost every Thursday we play so yeah, next month until I start traveling more promoting my record.

Dr. Kent:  Awesome!  The record’s called Sarah Watkins, it’s on None Such Records, and it’s coming out April 7, is that still right?

Sarah Watkins:  That’s correct, yep!

Dr. Kent:  I’m excited to listen to it and now you don’t know what track 9 is do you?  That’s what we’re about to play?

Sarah Watkins:  Oh shoot track 9, there are fourteen tracks on there so I have no idea what track 9 is actually.

Dr. Kent:  Okay well we’ll be surprised then.  It’s been such an honor chatting with Sarah Watkins of the very well known group Nickel Creek, with her own upcoming solo record, Sarah Watkins.  Thank you so much for chatting with me.

Sarah Watkins:  Thank you.

Dr. Kent:  Let’s listen to track 9 off Sarah’s upcoming solo album.

[Music]

Dr. Kent:  That was a gorgeous track off the upcoming album by Sarah Watkins; its self titled on the None Such Label and we chatted with her about time with Nickel Creek and her upcoming tour and all of that with the new record.  Go out and buy that record, it’s beautiful.  Amazing vocal tracks; some originals and beautiful fiddle tunes like that one.  Thank you so much for tuning in to Sound Authors today, this is Dr. Kent and enjoy these last days of winter.  Pick up a good book.

Frank Romano:  Hi Dr. Kent, glad to be here.

Dr. Kent:  Tell me a little bit about Storm Over Morocco.

Frank Romano:  I was studying in 1977 at the Sorbonne in Paris trying to find myself and studying philosophy and had sort of a vision that if I traveled to the middle east maybe on the way I would find myself, find out what my spirituality was and maybe help in the peace process.  So I just took a train and went down to northern Africa.  Started out from morocco and was going to head out across Africa and then Dr. Kent, I decided that I would learn about Islam before I got there because that’s one of my goals.  So I was invited, I met this group that invited me to learn about Islam in their mosque and learn Arabic as well and after a week of doing that, I was no longer free to go.  They had me imprisoned and it turned out to be an extremist group there on the outskirts of Sri Lanka.

Dr. Kent:  I’ve always wanted to go to morocco.  I don’t know if you know but I’ve actually been in the Middle East for awhile, I lived in Jerusalem and Bethlehem.

Frank Romano:  Oh really?  Great, so you know about the area, good.

Dr. Kent:  Oh yes and I try not to read the news about each day’s bloodshed and this and that.  But now talk about I wanted to go to morocco on vacation but now you ended up in I guess the cradle of the Middle East in the holy land.  Talk about the conflict there as well.

Frank Romano:  Yeah Dr. Kent I just got back as a matter of fact and my goal is to bring together different religions, Christianity, Islam, Judaism, and other religions such as Buddhism and Hinduism, but in particular the three main religions that believe in one God.  I organize interfaith teach marches and I just got back yesterday from a ten day visit to Bethlehem.  Of course I visited Jerusalem one day but I’m focusing on involving the Palestinians since it’s hard for them to get through the checkpoints and stuff in Jerusalem to participate in a myriad of groups that are doing things for peace, serious groups in Israel except they can’t get in there.  I go to Palestine and I’m trying to just contribute in my own little way to bring people together and start thinking about working together.

Dr. Kent:  What’s your take on the whole situation right now?

Frank Romano:  Well for one thing people have a tendency of putting Gaza in the same basket as the west bank and we’ve got two different places.  In other words we are organizing now to go into Gaza and do the same thing for sure.  Do the peace march and of course bring in medicine and so forth because it’s difficult right now.  My take is this, I really feel, as opposed to a lot of people, a lot of Palestinians, have no hope, they don’t think they’re ever going to settle the crisis, there’s always going to be conflict, and they’ll never have their auto determination with respect to a country having their own country.

So my take is this, there is a chance for peace and a lot of people are talking about ways of doing it and helping people financially but the bottom line is we got to get over there and start working with these people and I wrote Storm Over Morocco version and I added a last chapter of a meeting I had with extremist militant Muslims in the Jeanine Refugee Camp, which is suicide bombing derived and the suicide bombing that took place in Jerusalem came from there, and from Hebron to talk with extremists first and even those folks really want to work with Israel, I mean sincerely and if we can get beyond the hate and knee jerk stereotypes that one person of one religion has of other people.

For instance an extremist Muslim might think that a Jew because he’s a Jew is an agent of the devil because they don’t understand what Judaism is about.  So my goal Dr. Kent is not a political goal, bring people together to work together for peace but take religion out of the conflict.  That’s my take.

Dr. Kent:  Absolutely.  The work I did quite a while ago, I’ll tell you in a nutshell.  I work for an organization called Seeds of Peace for a few years.

Frank Romano:  I’ve heard of them, yes!

Dr. Kent:  Then I created a curriculum called Sound Peace and I actually was in a very similar way hoping to bring kids together in a musical way and talk about the conflict and then all of the fighting started.  It was a very hopeful time when I went over there, it was the year 2000.  I was there when all the fighting broke out again in the autumn of 2000.

Frank Romano:  That was the second [inaudible] that you were there?

Dr. Kent:  Since then it hasn’t stopped and now with this incursion into Gaza that was just breathtakingly awful in terms of the toll on human life.  Is there hope over there?

Frank Romano:  You know Dr. Kent there is hope and I spoke with a Shake in Jerusalem, a Sufi Shake whose daughter just got married five months before the conflict broke out and now she’s stuck in Gaza and can’t get out.  A lot of people are pointing the finger at Israel, others are pointing the finger at Hamas, I believe that when they can both sit down with the help of the US and realize mistakes because both sides have committed errors.  People are now pointing fingers in particular at Israel and yeah they had to react against the missiles being shot into their land.  But the Hamas I think on their end of it were provoking this attack as well.

So I do see there’s a lot of serious minded people, lots of effort to work with both sides, haven’t given up, even though yes it has intensified.  I think with the new administration it seems to be open on both sides of the fence through the delicate negotiations and bringing in these groups there’s a lot of angiose over there, which is the types of group you were.  Seeds of Peace work with people that are members of it and the music thing you did probably would include Jews and Palestinians together to play music.  These groups are starting to crop up again.

In spite of the conflict, the bottom line is the very difficult part is people will not go into the west bank and its difficult to get in and out of Gaza but that should evolve.  I think people should go into the west bank and see that the Palestinians are not just frothing at the mouth bloody terrorists.  Most Palestinians want peace and work with them as well as the Jews.  I’ll tell you I’ve met Jewish soldiers on the checkpoints and they’ve got a bad rap.  They’re always a minority that commits atrocities in every army and every altercation but those young Jewish soldiers want peace as much as anybody does and I spoke with them and they would rather not be at the checkpoints.  If somehow Israel can feel that their borders are secure.  Some people say it’s a two state solution; I’m not sure, but you know what?  There is a lot of positive vibe happening but I’m going over there three to four times a year trying to coordinate all these groups working on both sides of the fence.  I think peace can happen with just good old fashioned hard work and working with people.  I really believe that.

Dr. Kent:  It’s such a fascinating topic.  There’s so much depth to it and at the same time it’s been about nine years since I’ve been over there but not much changes at the same time.  It’s perpetually the same situations over and over.  The first thing that they say when you show up is what are you?  And you have to identify yourself; are you a Muslim, a Christian, a Jew and once you identify yourself the amazing thing about the Palestinians or the Israelis is I was able to identify and fit with both, like you say you do.  They’re great people.

Frank Romano:  I’m going to add another chapter to Storm Over Morocco 3 about just that.  Three days ago I met an angio in Bethlehem and there are many Jews working there.  they’ve been warned to not even go to the west bank but they’re not being held hostage or being held and they’re working not just blindly on the side of the Palestinians, they’re working for peace and I really feel hopeful but with concerted efforts and hopefully the news will come down.  Often the news is filtered from Israel and the US and they pull the fear string so that it will mobilize people to focus on the aggression coming from Palestine as opposed to the true problem.

The state of Israel is in danger here.  Why do I feel that?  Well first of all they had to fight.  The mandate in 48 wasn’t just giving a part of land to form a state of Israel, they had to fight for it but now as human beings, as Jews are, just like Palestinians, they’ve gone overboard in the settlements and religion is very much a part of it.  The settlements in the west bank are mainly inhabited by Jews who feel it’s their duty and obligation to be in the west bank.  But the religious interpretation of the Torah, which I think is a misinterpretation, so there’s all kinds of religious elements here that working with people, getting beyond whether you’re a Jew or Muslim you hit the nail right on the head; that’s the solution.

Now Jews have conflicted with each other as Agnostic Jews and Cathartic Jews and many Jews now have moved beyond that.  Why not now Jews and Palestinians?  The Jews just say I’m Jewish, not I’m a cathartic Jew, I’m not an agnostic Jew in Jerusalem and there was tension between the two types of Jews and they’ve gotten over that.  I think we can do the same thing with respect to Palestinians.  Instead of having a two state solution we could say we are human beings living in the holy land inst4ead of polarizing into different religious and political groups.  That’s what causes tension.

So my work is bringing people together to love each other but dig in there and bond together by doing stuff together.  Palestinians, Jews and Christians in that particular area, and its going to happen, we’re going to have peace.  It may not be in our lifetime, but we’re planting the seeds now and I feel positive it’s going to happen, I really do.

Dr. Kent:  It’s been a real honor chatting with you and I’d like to talk with you another time, we’ve run out of time today but we had such a nice chat we’ll have to hook up again down the road.

Frank Romano:  You bet!  Anytime Dr. Kent.

Dr. Kent:  Storm Over Morocco: Finding God in the Midst of Fanatics, by Frank Romano.  I can’t wait till the next time.

Frank Romano:  Thank you very much doctor.

Dr. Kent:  I’ll be back with our next guest on the show who is Alison sawyer who wrote a book called No Urn for the Ashes.  Come on back for that.

Alison Sawyer:  Thanks a lot!

Dr. Kent:  Tell me a little about this book.

Alison Sawyer:  It’s a great book.  I wrote a book that was the kind of book I would like to read because I’m an avid reader and I really know what I like and don’t like and it’s a great suspense story and the characters are terrific.  I was so familiar with them I felt I was going to run into them in the street.  My husband used to make fun of me when I was writing because my face would change with everything that was going on and he thought it was pretty funny to watch.  It’s about families, loss, reconstruction; it’s just a great book.

Dr. Kent:  What exactly inspired you to put this book together?  You do a lot of work with animals; tell us about that and about giving in to writing this book.

Alison Sawyer:  It was an interesting way that I got into it; 20 years ago my first husband and I got divorced and I went in with this group of women sort of a therapy group and we were told to write about the way we feel but I’m a very goal oriented person so it was hard for me to just write about how I felt.  So I wrote everything in story form and I just loved it!  I just loved doing that and that was 20 years ago and I’ve been writing ever since.  I finished the book in June or it came out in June and I work with the animals in [inaudible] and most of the proceeds are going to go into our work with the animals.

Dr. Kent:  Tell me about that.

Alison Sawyer:  Well my husband and I moved here nine years ago and the situation then was pretty fierce.  There were packs of wild dogs on the beaches and they would sometimes pack up together and get aggressive and the local response to that was to capture them and electrocute them or they would poison them; none of their solutions were very good solutions.  When they were picking up the wild dogs or the ones causing trouble, they often picked up peoples pets as well because they didn’t discriminate that carefully.

We came in and people that work in the animal world that the ultimate goal here is to lower the population and the way to do that is with ongoing spay and neuter clinics.  So that’s where we started; we started with we brought down veterinarians from the United States, we’ve brought them in from Mexico City, we had a vet here on the island and we’ll fund him to do it.  We try to do at least five or six spays or neuters a week and the population has truly dropped dramatically.

Dr. Kent:  Wow.  I’m one of those people that are transfixed by the animal planet channel.  I watch the shows about the Dog Whisperer and when some of these shows about going and picking up the dogs.  I love my dog; we treat her way too nice.

Alison Sawyer:  That’s great!  I love to hear that!

Dr. Kent:  About this novel; it’s set in the place where you work down in Mexico, right?

Alison Sawyer:  Yeah, it’s set in actually five different countries, Canada, the United States, Mexico, Nicaragua, and Scotland.  All places that I’ve been and one of the things I put in the book was a lot of history because I love to read a fictional novel but then learn a lot while I’m doing it.  so I did a lot of research, which I enjoyed immensely and a lot of the book is in [inaudible] and its set in 1989 so Islam has changed a lot since then but it tells a lot about the history and what its like and what the streets look like, how the beaches are; and it tells the history of the island.  People who live here are loving the book, they just love it and I even put myself in the book because one of the characters takes home a dog.  So I mention the dog lady which would be me.

Dr. Kent:  Do they call you the dog lady?

Alison Sawyer:  They do!  They call me a lot of things; I’m not always really popular with the locals because I’m making them change.  Its much easier in their mind to do what they normally do, which is poison and electrocute the dogs and I’m very much in their face about it and I take in any dog that is brought to me; any dog, and bring it back to health because its usually a street dog or has been abandoned and needs medicine, vitamins, vaccinations, and lots of food and loving.  I just took in a dog that I’d been worried about for two months.  I knew this fisherman had this puppy; it looked like a little golden retriever.

I could see it from the roof next door and he would get rip roaring drunk and abuse the hell out of this dog and it just broke my heart and I sent the vet there to talk to him and did everything I could but I can’t just go in and steal a dog.  There are limits to what I can do and then finally I guess he got really drunk one night, kicked the dog out and wouldn’t let it back in for three days.  The neighbors nabbed it and I have it now.  I couldn’t be happier; I called him Guapo and when he first came he would just duck when you put your hand out and now he’ll let us pet him and he’s doing better every day.

Dr. Kent:  The ones that always make me so sorry is the dogs that you really have to nurse back to health over a long period of time.  Have you run across dogs that you just couldn’t bring back to reality?

Alison Sawyer:  I have but you know, not as many as you would think.  I work with the vet here and the dogs stay with us.  We’ve had up to 40 dogs at our house at a time and we separate them sort of by age and there is very many location specific diseases we’ve become very familiar with and know how to treat.  Only a few have we not been able to save.  It’s more a behavioral thing because the islanders are not very kind to their dogs.

They seem them more like possessions that are there for their entertainment so if they get to be a problem, they just throw them out in the street or take them to the city dump.  I just sent a dog out to Minnesota today that had one ear and somebody had taken it and tied it up in a box and thrown it into the dump and some children heard it crying and brought it to me.  Her name is Una and she’s all healthy and on her way to Minnesota to a rescue group there.

Dr. Kent:  So we can find out more about you and your book at bayfirepress.com?

Alison Sawyer:  You can find out about my book at bayfirepress.com but you can find out about the animal work at islaanimals.org and I put all the dogs that I have on there.  The dogs that are up for adoption; I mean my ultimate goal is to get them off the island until we get the population under control.  I write a newsletter as often as I can and it’s got a lot of information on there, and lots of pictures.

Dr. Kent:  Isn’t that neat, I’m looking at it right now, I love dogs and I love looking at dogs and thinking about them.  I sure hope they all find wonderful homes.  We’ve got three minutes left; tell me where this book is available.  It’s doing very well numbers wise, how’s it been treating you?

Alison Sawyer:  It’s just been great because it’s the first book I published so you feel very insecure, you just don’t know what’s going to happen when you put it out there and everybody’s just loving it.  You can get it on amazon.com but they’ve been sold out a lot, or you can email me and I can give people instructions on how to get it.  It’s in a few bookstores but not in the major bookstores yet.  So amazon.com is the best way to get the book.  If they don’t have it they order it and we send it out.  It’s been exciting.

Dr. Kent:  Let me ask you about these puppies, the airport pups.

Alison Sawyer:  Oh yes!  I just fed them!

Dr. Kent:  Do you go out and look for dogs?  Do people call you and say hey here are these dogs we found?  What do you go through?

Alison Sawyer:  Exactly, people call me because I’ve been doing this for so long and a man named Cliff called me and said “I was walking down by the airport and this little puppy came out one of the drainage holes and I’m afraid he’s going to get hit by a car.”  So I went down there and we got all five puppies and they were horribly dehydrated.  They are just thriving; we’re feeding them and giving them lots of vitamins and electrolytes and they were very young when we got them, three or four weeks old, but now they’re four or five weeks old and just plumping up.  They’ve all got little personalities and they are so much fun!

Dr. Kent:  There’s a bunch of beautiful dogs on this site.

Alison Sawyer:  We get a lot of beautiful dogs and we don’t send them out until they are healthy, vaccinated and behaviorally ready to go.  It’s just been wonderful, in fact one of my favorite things is my before and after pictures which I have to concentrate more on because some of them are extraordinary.

Dr. Kent:  Well it’s been a pleasure chatting with you.

Alison Sawyer:  You too!

Dr. Kent:  I’m happy to talk again down the road about dogs and writing.  We’ll talk to you again.

Alison Sawyer:  I’d love to!

Dr. Kent:  We’ll talk to another guest in a couple minutes so come on back for that.

Joseph Flynn:  Hello.

Dr. Kent:  Tell me about this new book The Presidents Henchmen.

Joseph Flynn:  Well I was looking to write a detective story and I wanted to set it in the place that I thought would be unfamiliar for the genre.  I had earlier written a book as you mentioned The Next President and that book I imagined what it would be like for the first African American who was a nominee of a major party.  So I sort of covered that ground but thought maybe if I imagined a female president, the first female president and her husband was a private eye.  He would be the first private eye to live in the white house.

Dr. Kent:  Let’s go back for a second; you said your last novel dealt with an African American candidate for president.  So what do you think about your portentous prediction here?

Joseph Flynn:  I thought it was bound to happen.  I actually got the idea for the next president in 1988 when Jesse Jackson was a candidate for the democratic nomination and that year he won I think four or five primaries.  So I asked myself, what would happen when an African American wins a major party nomination and is even money to go on and win the president.  So I thought it was kind of interesting when Barack Obama had his election night speech in Grant Park in Chicago because the action of The Next President takes place at a labor day speech in Grant Park in Chicago with a huge crowd, so that was kind of interesting.

Dr. Kent:  Right, so tell us about now is this The Presidents Henchmen is a different story.

Joseph Flynn:  Yes, it’s a different story and what I hope will be the first of a series of eight books.  It features a character by the name of James J. Hill; he is the second husband of the first female president.  Her name is Patricia Darden Grant and the way he got to know his future wife was when he solved the murder of the president’s first husband at the time that the murder occurred she was a congresswoman representing a district on the north shore of Chicago.

Dr. Kent:  This book has done quite well so far.  Tell me about that adventure. What’s it like being in the industry and how has that sort of rocky road been down these last few books?

Joseph Flynn:  I’ve been very fortunate.  I started with a book that was published out of new York called The Concrete Inquisition and that book was just a paperback original, it was just tossed on the market and left to fend for itself and it sold about 20,000 copies but when my books get out there and get promotion, I find that there’s an audience for them.  I try to write what I call intelligent entertainment.  I like to do books with mystery and suspense but I also try to make sure that there’s a very strong streak of humor in everything I write.  So I think that there’s an audience that finds that combination appealing.

Dr. Kent:  Absolutely!  So talk about this Henchman.  It’s such a funny term, I can’t even remember where I heard it growing up but what did you mean by the presidents henchmen?

Joseph Flynn:  The book opens with the lead character, McGill, being formerly introduced to the white house press corps after the inauguration and Helen Thomas asks him how does it feel to be the nation’s first, first-gentleman and McGill responds, “I prefer to think of myself as the Presidents Henchman.”  Now henchman has come to acquire something of a sinister connotation but if you look in the dictionary, you’ll see the actual definition is loyal follower.  So it’s really a positive term that has grown to have sinister connotation so I like the irony of it.

Dr. Kent:  How was it writing about a female president?  We’re all curious what would have happened if Hillary Clinton had been elected.  What do you think would’ve happened?  What would Mr. Clinton’s role had been?

Joseph Flynn:  I think he probably would have offered all the advice she could use and more and at some point she probably would’ve told him to back off.  I think it would be great to have a really intelligent, involved female president.  I think that it’s probably overdue for us, and when the time comes assuming that the candidate is well qualified I think it will be a good thing.

Dr. Kent:  So let’s talk about this book again.  You said you’re thinking of a series of eight books.  Is that because your so in love with the characters?

Joseph Flynn:  I do really like the characters and I’ve been getting strong reactions from people who’ve read it.  They tend to really like the characters but my thinking is I’d like to do a book a year for the equivalent of a two term president, so that would come out to be eight books.

Dr. Kent:  Wonderful.  What’s the process you go through?  You know these characters, you sort of live with them, how do you put them to rest after eight books?  How do you keep them living for eight books?

Joseph Flynn:  What I do when I’m creating any characters, I’ll start with a bio and I’ll try to take their biographies back to say their grandparents.  Then I’ll work down to their parents and finally to them so I have a really clear idea who each of these characters is.  I’ll also try to do some kind of physical description so I have a clear picture in my mind.  In terms of McGill, there’s a running joke through the story that he thinks he resembles an old time actor, Rory Calhoun and complains that nobody remembers who Rory Calhoun is.

He was one of sort of a 50s kind of character with dark wavy hair and a big jaw and big smile and that kind of a guy.  For the president, her secret service code name is Holly G, for holly go lightly, a role that was played by Audrey Hepburn.  So that’s sort of the short hand way of describing her and in terms of keeping them alive and fresh for eight books, well they have to grow, they have to face different challenges, learn new things about themselves, how they express themselves can change, there are all sorts of things going on.  Over the arc of eight stories I hope to have the president’s character bring up important things to the country, important issues.  In The first book, one of the issues is pro-choice versus pro-life, which is a very big issue and in the second book it’s going to focus on foreign affairs.  The third book will be something else.

Dr. Kent:  As a writer of thrillers, there’s a lot of these books that we see all around.  The airport stores and this and that, people love to pick them up and zoom through them, what are the forms you are restricted to?  Do you have to write at a certain grade level?  Do you have to have a certain amount of thrill?  How do you go about fulfilling those requirements?

Joseph Flynn:  Certain publishers do ask for a certain amount of what you think of as action beats, where something big and bold and dramatic happens.  In The Next President, at Bantam Books when she read the first draft said we need to trim the story overall and make the action beats closer together.  I really didn’t care for that approach.  With The Presidents Henchman, I was given much more creative freedom so I got to explore the characters as much as I liked and felt much more comfortable with that editorial approach.  As to the level of the writing, I like to include as many references to both popular culture and to more esoteric things really and I figure that if people are hooked into the story, then if there’s something they don’t get the reference too it’ll make them want to go and look it up.

Dr. Kent:  Right, okay so here’s a fun question.  If I was going to write a book like this and knew I had an audience, do you write yourself in?  Do you do the Alfred Hitchcock walk through your own themes?

Joseph Flynn:  No I don’t do that for myself but one reviewer asked me because he’s familiar with my family if I had written my daughters name into it and I did.  McGill has three children, two daughters and a son.  His younger daughter I named after my daughter.  So somebody picked up on that but you’d have to know me to know that.  Other than that I just try to maintain a discreet distance from my characters.

Dr. Kent:  Do you have, I know that for example when I have a certain character that I’ve thought about a lot or I like a certain persons music a whole bunch I’ll often have a dream where I have a conversation with that character.  Do you ever dream about your characters?

Joseph Flynn:  It’s interesting that you would mention that, I do all my best work in the morning.  If I get up as I usually do at an earlier hour and go straight to work, then I have a very easy time getting into the story but the way I prepare for that is the preceding night I will go back and read what I had written that day and then I carry that with me into my sleep so its percolating at a subconscious level even if I’m not actively dreaming of it.

Dr. Kent:  How much do you write?

Joseph Flynn:  I try to write the equivalent of four to six double spaced pages a day and I try to do that.

Dr. Kent:  Do you write linearly or explosively?

Joseph Flynn:  When I first started I would do an outline of the story.  I think it’s very important to know how your story is going to finish, what your ending will be before you start writing.  So I evolved from working from an outline to doing what I now call a raw draft.  Scenes come to me pretty much of apiece so instead of writing just a five word outline description, I’ll sit down and write a whole scene.  For example, I’m doing what I call the raw draft of the sequel to The Presidents Henchman right now and I do that scene by scene and the scenes just sort of present themselves in what pretty much works out to be a logical order.

Dr. Kent:  Cool, give us a little nutshell of the next book?  You already told us a little about it, then the six after that; what do you know about them?

Joseph Flynn:  The next one has to do with foreign affairs so the president is going to a G8 meeting in London and at the same time, McGill has been asked by a former colleague of the Chicago police, a guy he knows but doesn’t really like to help him out of a fix he’s in in Paris, so McGill is working on a case in Paris at the same time his wife is having to deal with world leaders on a number of different issues.

Dr. Kent:  Its been an honor chatting with you and I think everybody’s going to have to pick up a copy of this book The Presidents Henchman, it sounds thrilling and we have a promise of comedy inside it, some real issues, and seven more to come that’s great.

Joseph Flynn:  I hope so; if anybody would like to they can read a free excerpt on my site josephflynn.com and if they like that then they can click right through to Amazon from there.

Dr. Kent:  All right, josephflynn.com.  Thank you so much for chatting with me, I can’t wait to chat with you about the next one.

Joseph Flynn:  Thanks very much!

Dr. Kent:  My next guest on the show is an incredible musician, Sara Lee Guthrie, she’s the daughter of Arlo Guthrie and the granddaughter of Woody Guthrie and her partner in music is Johnny Irion and they’ve put out some beautiful albums together.  I’m going to play a track from their first album called Exploration.  We’ll listen to that then we’ll talk to them about the album.

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Sound Authors
As broadcasted on Blog Talk Radio
Broadcasted on the World Talk Radio Network
Voice America Network
Modavox 
amber@soundauthors.com

Karen Brody:  Thanks so much, happy to be here.

Dr. Kent:  So tell me a little bit about this whole movement that you’ve got.

Karen Brody:  Well I wrote a play about birth in America because I thought I noticed a lot of low risk pregnant women were going in the hospital and coming out having what I would term bad birth experiences.  They suddenly went from low risk to high risk and there didn’t seem to be any clear reason.  So I interviewed over 100 women and afterwards I thought I’d write a book.  I ended up writing a play and then I wrote the book.  What came out of the play was a movement of people in their communities who also saw this happening in maternity care where there weren’t satisfactory birth options for women in communities and people felt that we needed to raise awareness and money for better birth options for mothers and that’s what came out of my play was a movement called Bold and its an organization that is a theater for social change, using my play as a catalyst in communities.  The book is not only the play but its also stories from the Bold Movement, really understanding what people in their communities are doing to make maternity be more mother friendly.

Dr. Kent:  For those that aren’t as familiar with the issues you’re talking about, tell us the issues surrounding birth these days.

Karen Brody:  Well I think that most people when a woman gets pregnant they just ask them after the birth how’s the baby, the question I wanted to ask is how’s the mother?  When you start to ask that question, you start to find that today in childbirth there’s over, if you look at statistics alone, over 30 percent cesarean rate and many of those cesareans are not necessary.  You hear the stories to that and you know just looking at the statistics alone you see that the world health organization says for an industrialized country a 16% or less cesarean rate is what they deem appropriate.  To have something over 30% we know we have a crisis.

There’s a problem; most women are going into the hospital and while drugs are wonderful when used properly, unfortunately women get into the hospital and they’re on a clock; meaning within 12 hours if you don’t have the baby, they start using drugs and usually way before 12 hours; they want you to have the baby in less than 12 hours.  So there’s a crisis in maternity care today.  There’s also just the general philosophy in the United States.  If you look at other countries, it’s very clear in England, they say immediately we use midwives because they’re cheaper and out comes our excellent bid for low risk pregnancies.  The US doesn’t use that model of care that is more in view with those models of care where low risk women should be getting midwives and women who are higher risk should be getting obstetricians who are the trained surgeons, the people who you want when your high risk and there are women who are high risk.

Dr. Kent:  You must discover this in your work in this genre but people must always go back to their own birth so now of course I want to tell the story that my mother when she had me she was in labor for more than 24 hours and I had a big head and they had to pull me out and I think I was on my face instead of my back and all sorts of mishaps.  Every birth is different, right?

Karen Brody:  Absolutely every birth is different.  I think we have to the model now unfortunately is birth is an illness and its treated that way in the US where if we saw birth as normal I think it would revolutionize how we treat maternity care and the mothers having the babies, but yes, every story is different and there are many factors that go into a woman’s birth story.

Dr. Kent:  How did you get into this field?

Karen Brody:  Surprisingly I had two kids!  I actually never thought I’d write about maternity care but I was really astounded after I had my first son.  I had him with midwives and had him at home, not because I knew much about birth I just instinctively felt I didn’t want to medicalize my birth.  I didn’t know anything about the politics of birth but I found after I had my son I had a wonderful supportive compassionate birth experience and then I went to the playground with both my sons as they were getting older and I heard horror stories from women, traumatic stories which I’m really happy to hear now just this past year in 2008 The Wall Street Journal had a piece about birth trauma and motherhood.

You wouldn’t have seen that when I wrote my play, now you’re starting to see people saying actually due to medical intervention there are a significant number of women experiencing birth trauma.  I heard it again and again in the trenches with mothers on the playground and I thought something is wrong.  These are intelligent women, these are women who are educated and have access to good options.  They should have access to goo