Interview with Paul Mullen | Sound Authors Radio
December 4, 2008 | Leave a Comment
Dr. Kent: Welcome back to Sound Authors. Today is Halloween and my next guest has been here before. Dr. Paul Mullen, he wrote a book called The Day I Hit a Home Run and his website is thedayihitahomerun.com. He’s had some great success getting that book out at baseball parks and he wants to talk with us about Halloween and read us some spooky stuff. So, welcome to the show Paul.
Dr. Mullen: Thank you very much for having me on your show Dr. Kent and happy Halloween to you.
Dr. Kent: Happy Halloween. Now tell me a little about the success your book has had before we get into some reading of it.
Dr. Mullen: Yeah, sure. We are going around not just in Ohio but we’re going to go to Iowa and we created another book and it’s called The Day I Hit a Home Run at Principle Park. What’s happened there is the Iowa Cubs are going to give away this book in 2009 and its written specifically for the Iowa market. This book has more of that Field of Dreams type of scenery. It’s that kind of a makeup but it still has the same kind of principle elements as the Great American Ballparks book had.
Dr. Kent: What got you into writing about baseball? Were you a baseball player as a kid?
Dr. Mullen: I loved baseball and I still love it. I liked seeing the Phillies seeing the World Series, probably the same as you’re area and neck of the woods also. My daughter also plays. She played hardball for a lot of years and in fact she just came home, she just got her masters degree and the first thing we did was go out and hit fly balls.
Dr. Kent: You’re a national speaker and you teach educators how to engage students better in reading and it’s such an important cause because literacy in this country is not where it should be.
Dr. Mullen: Exactly and the problem based on my research is and we talked a little bit about it, brushed it, is this inner voice and what we know is because so many children are getting hooked on television and video games that they don’t have this inner conscious, this thing when we were kids that if you get your hand caught in the cookie jar you knew that you did something wrong. With so many of these video games going on and the violence in them, children only know what they want to be rewarded by, they don’t have that feeling of hard work to get it. That’s why I’ve written these series of books is to teach them that yes you can have your dream but to get that dream to come true, these are the series of steps of what you have to do to get there.
Dr. Kent: So let me hear, I’ve heard that you’d like to read for us a spooky section from your book and now, which book is this from? Creeper and his Fake Eye, which book does this come from?
Dr. Mullen: This is from The Great American Ballpark and because it does so well with the children, we also included it into the Principle Park book. Let me first kind of describe why we called it Creeper if you don’t mind?
Dr. Kent: Sure.
Dr. Mullen: What happened was creeper, who was an older man, rumor had it he got in a fire and the right side of his face was very scarred and as a result, he lost his right eye and he had a glass eye. So at Tricks or Treat, that’s what we call it in the Midwest, we don’t call it Halloween, we call it tricks or treat night and on tricks or treat night what we used to do as kids is if we were brave enough and strong enough, we’d knock on creepers door. If we were able to hold his fake eye for 15 seconds, he’d give us a dollar treat, which was usually one of those big Hershey’s bars.
Dr. Kent: Wow.
Dr. Mullen: Yeah. So that wasn’t the only prize and this is where I’ll read. It’s about a page long in this series of books. The prize was back behind creepers house. Creeper lived in a mansion and his house was the biggest house on the block but he also had farmland behind his house and he had overgrown bushes. But he had a pond back there and that’s what we called Creeper’s Pond. That’s what this story talks about is when Foogie and his brothers and the gang went out camping out and rumor had it that if creeper caught you fishing in his pond, you were never seen again, so that’s the basis of the story. Now I’ll go ahead and begin reading, it’s about a page in length.
The moon was full and a gentle breeze rattling the swaying oak kept us from completely enjoying the tranquil moment. Larry and Elvin were serious fishermen. They had already hiked to the other side of the lake and were busy casting glow worms just along the edge of the lime green slurry. Butch dug through the barkers tackle boxes searching for additional fake bait when he stumbled across Larry’s midnight snack. He sniffed the cellophane and growled, “Mmm, peanut butter!” He tore at the wrapper like a kid opening his first Christmas present, and his bite was so deep that he nearly split the sandwich in two. His smile soured as he spit out, “Cucumbers? Too weird!” It was a cucumber and peanut butter sandwich. What if he had bit into Elvin’s sandwich? “Nice,” he countered. “Nice,” Butch hacked out, “what’s yours?” “Peanut butter and green olives.” “You’re sick,” was all he said as he flicked out his line with a nice juicy fat crawler on it just barely hiding the bar. “Don’t knock it ‘till you try it,” Lucky added. “Shh,” we dropped to the muddy bank. “What did you hear, Bill?” Bill was my older brother, I asked, my breathing beginning to labor. “Made you look,” Bill joked. Bills maneuver was cruel considering it was the bewitching hour. But he did cut down on the wisecracks. I was feeling rather peculiar. We were the hunters, baiting our prey with creepy crawlers and yet we were also the hunted, with Creeper’s Pond serving as our trap. I was feeling particularly bold. “Got one!” We could hear Elvin’s dragline screaming from the pool in which he had landed. “I’m going over there,” I commented. “Why do you think we suggested Larry and Elvin fish over there?” Butch asked. “I don’t know.” Then I thought about it, really thought about it. Creeper’s first move would be out the back porch and the Barkers would be his first victims. I plopped down next to Butch and cast out my line. Fishing this late at night wasn’t exactly relaxing. The ground was damp and when I closed my eyes for what I thought was a split second, it really seemed like an eternity. For all I knew, I was still on the back porch dreaming this whole episode. Creeper’s porch light doused us. “I’m going to get you kids once and for all!” Creeper shouted. The bright spotlight blinded us. We huddled together like a flock of chickens believing there was a safety in numbers. It was Bill that finally came to his senses, “Run!” he screamed. We dropped our poles. I took one step and slammed into Lucky. Fortunately he was kind enough to help me to my feet. Elvin circled to the other side of the lake. He reeled his line in at a furious pace but it was of no use. The fish was just too big. Creeper closed in on both of the Barkers. The final image I saw before turning and hightailing it out of there was Larry cowering to his knees. “Save yourselves,” were Larry’s final chilling words. And that was the last that we saw of Larry and Elvin.
Dr. Kent: Bravo! Love the story and we don’t have any more time but that will send me into Halloween with good thoughts.
Dr. Mullen: Well you make sure you dress up and give those kids the kind of candy they need, those dollar ones – the dollar size Hershey bars.
Dr. Kent: Exactly, I might just have to get a nasty glass eye to give them.
Dr. Mullen: There you go.
Dr. Kent: Well it’s been an honor speaking with Paul Mullen. We can visit is website on the Day I Hit a Home Run enterprise on thedayihitahomerun.com. We’re going to follow along with what you’re doing.
Dr. Mullen: All right, thanks Dr. Kent for having me on your show.
Dr. Kent: We should all think about children’s literacy as an issue in this upcoming new presidency. My next guest on the show is a musician. Her name is Marybeth D’Amico. I think I’m saying that correctly. She lives in Germany but she’s an American singer/songwriter. I’m going to play a song from her latest album, and that’s called Ohio. After that song is done, we’ll chat with her about that album and it’s called Heaven, Hell, Sin and Redemption. A great title for Halloween. So come on back after this tune.
Christopher Tennant | Rich & Famous
December 3, 2008 | Leave a Comment
Interviewing Christopher was a blast. His take on the lifestyles of the rich and famous is riveting. Pick up his book! An invitation to the book from his website:
WELCOME TO THE CLUB
Remember when having a couple million dollars meant something?
Neither do we.
Particularly when we recall (with just the slightest of tingles) that over 30,000 Americans are now sitting on at least thirty times that.
This crew includes every entry on the Forbes 400 (who, at last count, were worth a combined $1.54 trillion, more than all the money held in commercial U.S. banks) right on down to that guy back in B-school who first told you what a hedge fund was.
They’re not all famous, or even well known, but these 30,000 do have much in common. Relative to the average citizen, they can travel where they want, live where they want, do what they want, and even screw who they want—both for business and for pleasure. Their money allows them to be truly free, and isn’t that what our forefathers were getting at?
But, as we’ve been told so many times, freedom has its price. In the case of the aforementioned 30,000, it’s the tyranny of too many options. St. Barts or St. Moritz? Gulfstream or Boeing? Where to build your private golf course—or did you want a polo field? With all those wealth managers incessantly ringing you up, should you consider counter-surveillance measures?
We’re exhausted just thinking about it.
We call this tippity-top tier the Filthy Rich. As you’ll soon learn, you don’t need to earn or inherit more money than you already have to join their ranks. You just need to try a little harder.
Maybe a lot harder.
—Christopher Tennant
Interview with Ellie Cornell | Sound Authors Radio
December 3, 2008 | Leave a Comment
Dr. Kent: Welcome back to Sound Authors. It is our Halloween show and my next guest is Ellie Cornell and she is a known horror actress and she’s known as the infamous Rachel Carruthers and she’s going to share some experiences as that icon and also as a producer and all of that. Welcome to the show.
Ellie Cornell: Hi Dr. Kent, thank you for having me.
Dr. Kent: I see that you are from Long Island.
Ellie Cornell: I am, I was born in Glencove. I lived there just when I was little and then we moved down to the mountains in North Carolina.
Dr. Kent: Well it’s beautiful out on Long Island today, that’s where I am.
Ellie Cornell: It is indeed.
Dr. Kent: Where are you talking to us from?
Ellie Cornell: I am in Los Angeles.
Dr. Kent: Your newest project, you made your directorial debut with this film Prank and also Halloween 4 and 5.
Ellie Cornell: I haven’t yet. We haven’t shot mine yet. Danielle Harris has shot her section and essentially its three short films that will be made into a full length feature, the wrap around story around all three stories. Heather Langencamp is directing the third one.
Dr. Kent: Tell me what is it like being in the genre of horror, doing these films. Now when you’re doing them do you kind of think this is funny? Or do you go home at night and you cant sleep and all of that.
Ellie Cornell: I would probably go with the second one. When I did Halloween I was pretty new in the business, I was very new actually and I mean it feels kind of tongue in cheek when your doing it and you certainly don’t have the luxury of the music and some of the CGI special effects, but I think to really for me as a performer to commit to those moments, you have to go there and just from an adrenaline standpoint especially with Halloween 4 where there is a lot of physical stuff. The only time we used the stunt woman was free fall off the roof but still all the roof top stuff with Danielle Harris on my back and sliding down and being chased by Michael Myers so that was all us and I think to get fired up for it you have to bring a certain amount of truth to it.
Playing my death the first time was really weird because that was in Halloween 5 and you’re all kind of wired up with blood tubes for the fake blood and the blood guys under the bed with the blood pump. It’s all very synthetic but the moment itself is strange; it’s strange and it’s spooky and the stuntman that played Michael Myers was physically enormous and really towered over me. So there was something kind of scary about playing that moment as well.
Dr. Kent: How about the whole genre of horror. Its funny, the guest I just spoke with was talking about cemeteries and its such a solemn place.
Ellie Cornell: She was fascinating!
Dr. Kent: Yeah and at the same time you’ve got what’s turned into this sort of macabre holiday where people want to watch ten horror movies in a row and dress up in crazy costumes. What is the fascination with horror?
Ellie Cornell: I don’t know, I think I relate mostly to its amazing how much horror films have changed since I did my Halloween’s. The whole industry has really gotten darker and really pushing the envelope in a different way but I think its still fun to be scared. I think obviously there’s a dark, edgy side to it but for most people it’s really fun to be scared and you know it’s fake. The next day the stuff gets put away and you keep living your life. But I do think it’s a day where people can kind of go a little bonkers but horror films today are a different breed for sure.
Dr. Kent: You’ve done quite a bit of acting in television shows and things outside of horror. What makes you always come back to horror? Is it the fact that you’re well known in the genre?
Ellie Cornell: I’m just really lucky, no I’m kidding. My husband Mark Gottwald is a producer and his production company I mean he doesn’t, when he had a production company we did quite a bit of horror and I was lucky. They would say do you want to be in this one? And here’s the role you’re going to play. It was great and I don’t like to say no to work and I did it. I found that each experience I’ve never played the bimbo.
I just got to keep playing strong characters. I had really cool weapons that I got to learn to use and whether it was getting weapons training or pyrotechnic effects; blood bags exploding its just a fascinating way to go to work. There’s such a dichotomy. I remember when I was making House of the Dead up in the woods in Vancouver I had this enormous Mossberg gun; it’s really army used and with a laser scope on it. I would go do that from Monday through Thursday and I would go back to my home in Los Angeles and I was in this women’s club. I thought if these women only knew what I did during the week. It was such a kooky way to live. But its fun! I can’t complain.
Dr. Kent: You use the word kooky. Wasn’t that the tagline for the Addams Family, right?
Ellie Cornell: Well it is! There’s no other way to describe it. It’s just a whole cultural phenomenon and I know sci-fi fans are the same way but when you meet these folks, they love this stuff. They love the blood and the gore and I mean I’m pretty lucky. My stuff has been pretty tame and I like it that way. I’m not into going too crazy with my work but yeah, kooky is the only word that comes to mind to describe it, or nutty – take your pick.
Dr. Kent: Talk about your original character Rachel Carruthers and why was she so popular?
Ellie Cornell: Talk about getting lucky. I remember getting the script and when they tapped me for Halloween 4. I think she was kind of the girl next door and thought that was unusual about her and especially in hindsight because I didn’t really understand what she meant during the time but I do now looking back. I think she was one of those characters that broke the mold in general in terms of she wasn’t a bimbo, she wasn’t the popular cheerleader but you kind of rooted for her and she gave Michael Myers a run for his money the whole way through it and the fact that she lived, that’s my claim to fame.
I lived through a whole film without getting it. Obviously I got it in the first 12 minutes of Halloween 5 and I knew that was coming too when I got the script. I knew it was going to be in there somewhere and the writers had written Halloween 5 that Rachel was to get scissors shoved down her throat and I said, “No way. She’s too smart for that. No, that’s not how she’s going to go.” So they rewrote it and made it a little tamer and a little more dignified. I don’t know, I think they related to her because she was the girl next door. She didn’t even really get the guy. Brady ended up with the bimbo. People could relate to her, they wanted her to win.
Dr. Kent: How about today? You have two daughters, what does Halloween mean for your family?
Ellie Cornell: Oh, they get such a kick out of it. Like if I get recognized or whatever. I let them see Halloween finally pretty recently and it really scared them. It’s a really scary movie without being too over the top. It’s not scarring but it’s still a good fright. They think it’s really cool to be on it, they think it’s great. My husband loves horror films. We showed them Invasion of the Body Snatchers and that almost scarred them for life; the whole pod thing. It freaked them out but that’s not where their interest lies in terms of the films they go see with their buddies but like The Ring; there’s certain horror films. And I liked Disturbia, I thought it was great because it was more along the lines of Hitchcock where they really lead you along. They don’t need the in your face stuff.
Dr. Kent: I remember as a kid seeing Night of the Living Dead one day when my folks were away and I snuck down to the TV and watched it and then snuck back up to my room in the dark when they came home and man I didn’t sleep that night!
Ellie Cornell: My daughter I know one of them has seen that with my husband and that is really yeah. That kind of started it all; those old ones really hold their own for the most part.
Dr. Kent: What do you think? Do you enjoy all kinds of these horror movies or do some turn you off? Like the spoofs of horror movies, what’s your favorite?
Ellie Cornell: I think those are funny but I like things that are really fresh, that haven’t been done over and over again. I’m not that into the whole sequel thing. I don’t go to a lot of the sequel stuff but like I thought the Ring was really original. I still love Hitchcock, I think I always find something new and I think these films most of them are really smart in their own way. I think there’s a whole bunch of bad ones but the ones that are good, they stay classics and hold their own and stand the test of time. I really liked Halloween 4 for what it was, the writing and Dwight Little was a great director and it was simple. It wasn’t a complicated story.
Dr. Kent: Tell us a little about your upcoming film Prank and then what else you’re working on nowadays?
Ellie Cornell: Prank hopefully will happen after the New Year. Danielle’s already shot her segment and essentially I’m going to shoot a six day shoot which is fast and furious just perfect for me. I get to have a hand in all the casting and location scouting. Essentially it’s about three pranks. Each of our shorts are about three completely different stories. It’s a female character that drives all three stories, three different females. Mine is called Cassidy and it’s about pranks that go horrifically wrong.
So it’ll be a directorial boot camp for me, I’ve never done it and was thrilled to have the opportunity and I’m looking forward to it. Hopefully that will be January or February at the latest so that will take up a lot of my time in prepping and getting that ready. I’m psyched to cast it. When I’m meeting actors now I’m thinking where can I put you in? And I have a big cast and I did an elevator stunt and there was a cat and I said take the kitty cat out of there, I tried to keep it simple and keep the budget down so that it’s not too overwhelming.
We’ll see but I’ve seen clips of Danielle’s and she did a superb job. I’ll see her this weekend and she was my costar and little sister in the Halloween films. She played Jamie, but I’ll see Danielle Harris this weekend at the 30 years of terror thing in Pasadena. The original Halloween is 30, isn’t that unbelievable? Time flies.
Dr. Kent: Wow. 30 Years of Terror in Pasadena. We can go check out Ellie Cornell and its been a blast speaking with you. Happy Halloween.
Ellie Cornell: You’re so sweet Dr. Kent, thank you for having me.
Dr. Kent: My next guest on the show is Paul Mullen. He’s going to read from his book about Creeper and His Fake Eye and we’ll come on back for that.
Interview with Marilyn Yalom | Sound Authors Radio
December 2, 2008 | Leave a Comment
Dr. Kent: Welcome to Sound Authors. Today is Friday, October 31st (also known as Halloween). It used to be a spooky day but now it’s just a day to represent capitalism and little kids going out greedy for candy, but isn’t that truly American also? I’ve got four guests on the show today. The first guest will be Marilyn Yalom and her book is called the American Resting Place: 400 Years of History through our Cemeteries and Burial Grounds. My second guest is Ellie Cornell. She’s also known as the infamous Rachel Carruthers from the horror film series Halloween. My third guest is Paul Mullins, the acclaimed author of The Day I Hit a Homerun, which is going out to ballparks across the country. He has a spooky chapter to read. And my last guest on the show is the American singer/songwriter in Germany, Marybeth Damico and she has a couple tunes from her album, Heaven, Hell, Sin and Redemption. My first guest on this Halloween show is Marilyn Yalom and she’s written the book American Resting Place: 400 Years of History through our Cemeteries and Burial Grounds. Welcome to the show.
Marilyn Yalom: Hello!
Dr. Kent: So tell me, how on earth did you come across this idea in the first place? To write a book about cemeteries and burial grounds in this American history.
Marilyn Yalom: Well it came after the death of my mother and my visit to her cemetery. I noticed the changing of seasons and the different offerings that people would bring. I got very interested in the lore of cemeteries.
Dr. Kent: You’ve written books before, several books that have done very well, including Blood Sisters, History of the Wife, History of the Breasts, and Birth of the Chest Cream. How did this differ from the other books?
Marilyn Yalom: The other books were clearly female focused whereas this encompasses all of humanity and the amazing thing was the diversity of religions and ethnicities that you find in this country and that are inscribed in stone.
Dr. Kent: Wow. Before we get into talking about cemeteries, since you talk about diversity, what do you think about the possibility of a black president here on Tuesday?
Marilyn Yalom: I think that the possibility of a man who is half black and half white is definitely a good thing for this nation. I could say more about that but then I’m so disenchanted with what we have had during the past eight years that the thought of a continuation makes me sick.
Dr. Kent: Let’s go away from that and talk about Halloween. It’s a nice departure for this one day to have a great American holiday. Most people think of death and cemeteries as morbid and taboo, but actually on Halloween it’s the day where people bring them out and celebrate them. How do you look at American history through the lens of this sort of morbid topic?
Marilyn Yalom: If you think of Halloween and then all souls day, which is the day of the dead in Mexico, preceded by All Saints Day on November 1, so you’ve got a trilogy of Halloween, all saints day, all souls day and this is essentially the belief that this is the time of the year when the dead return to earth. Some are afraid of that phenomenon and some welcome it. The Latino population makes it a celebration instead of a weekend of mourning. So if you visit and we have a Mexican-American cemetery in San Antonio, it looks like a huge festival with flowers and pictures and people come out with food. It’s the day in which even if you don’t believe that the dead return literally to the earth, you remember them, you encompass them once again in the tragic consequence of life.
Dr. Kent: What did you find them, you talked about diversity and I find that fascinating. In every election, for example right now it’s oh well, he might be a Muslim. I don’t have any trouble with Muslims, Jews or Christians or other religions as long as they’re good people. What did you find in these cemeteries?
Marilyn Yalom: It’s so interesting to see how people bring their religions and bring their languages and bring their ethnic customs to this country from everywhere; Europe, Africa, Asia, now from Latin America and the death rituals, the burial rituals, the mourning rituals are very conservative. They hang on a long time. One, two, three generations sometimes indefinitely. So if you go as we have done, my photographer son and I to 250 cemeteries throughout the country you will find the history of immigration written in stone and you will find this enormous diversity. Either people buried with their own so to speak, the Japanese with the Japanese and the Chinese with the Chinese in Hawaii.
Or you get ecumenical cemeteries, municipal cemeteries, with a variety and of course you mentioned the possibility of a black president. Blacks were buried separately for the most part not only in the south but also in the north and it took a law in the 50s in California to make it illegal to refuse burial to blacks in what was a predominantly white cemetery. Also you find discrimination in cemeteries along the lines of race and along socioeconomic lines and also as I write my book, the customs in the past were different for women than burial for men.
It was common to see a man with his first wife who had died and then a second wife on the other side. But that never pertained for women. For women, they were always buried next to the man who had been the last husband and whenever a woman was buried in the past you had her identified as wife, daughter, whereas that was much, much less common for men. So cemeteries are stone archives of our past. I learned more about American history visiting cemeteries than I had in my whole life before.
Dr. Kent: I’ve done a little bit of genealogical work when I was doing research on a musician. What significance to cemeteries have in our folk lore and in our chronicling of people, you know our biographies in our country?
Marilyn Yalom: Well they’re very useful in tracking down names, dates of birth and death, even when the records have been burned or destroyed. Paper records very often have but the stone continues to stand and is more or less legible depending upon the condition of the stone, which brings up another issue. I’m hoping that tomorrow in the New York Times there will be a picture by my son of the deterioration that takes place in cemeteries because of vandalism and because of the elements and acid rain. So even though we like to think that these are permanent markers, they can be whittled away and destroyed unless we do something about it.
There is an army of preservation that work today in this country; volunteers who go to cemeteries and record the inscriptions, repatch stones. The boy scouts have been very good at that.
Dr. Kent: One funny thing when you start talking about epitaphs I get two sort of images in my head. One is sort of the very serious solemn thing that I remember, but then there’s this other half which is the sort of comic epitaphs that have come through history. Did you find any comical epitaphs on the gravestones?
Marilyn Yalom: Yes, but not as many as one would think from the anthology of comic epitaphs that one can read but things like “I told you I was sick”, but it’s pretty uncommon. Usually you get “Rest in Peace” or you’ll get common epitaphs for women, “She did what she could”, talk about a self effacing epitaph, that’s one. One that I like is quite beautiful, “To live in hearts we leave behind is not to die” and that brings up a wistful note. The hopes that we will be remembered, which is of course the main reason that people put up tombstones. After all those are for the living rather than for the dead.
Dr. Kent: You said you visited 250 cemeteries across the country. How did you go about coming up with that plan? How did you go about it?
Marilyn Yalom: I did a lot of research, library research to begin with. There are a few other very substantial books on the subject differing from mine in that they are limited to a certain period or a certain region. So I am a scholar and a former professor so I did my homework reading whatever books there were before we sat upon this so I knew where to go. With a son who is adventuresome, we also made many discoveries that I couldn’t have done on my own because he’s sort of an intuitive person and I might be looking for something in the cemetery and he’d be off in another part of it following the light and come upon something that I would not have seen. So we were a good team and we did go everywhere.
As I said, 250 cemeteries, but there are 250,000 cemeteries in this country and it was a hard choice to go to New England and the south for the early American history. The Midwest and St. Louis, Chicago for the early 18th and 19th century, mostly 19th century. And then Texas, California and Hawaii. So we were really tracing the path of our immigrant ancestors and focusing on different ethnic groups. The Latino population in south Texas, the Japanese and Chinese population in Hawaii, not to mention the earlier immigrants; Anglos and Puritans in new England, also Irish and polish in Chicago; the French in New Orleans and St. Louis, so it really is a microcosm in the entire united states.
Dr. Kent: I have a couple more questions for you and one of them is what was the most beautiful cemetery that you found in all of your travels?
Marilyn Yalom: There are so many beautiful cemeteries and each one has its own aura. People say that Bonaventure in Savannah, Georgia is most beautiful; that’s the one that John Barren writes about in Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. That’s a very beautiful cemetery; Mount Auburn in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which is the first garden cemetery in the United States. That’s a very beautiful cemetery. We loved a very quiet, small cemetery, Amish cemetery in Lancaster County in Bird in Hand.
It’s so difficult to pick any one; Alsatians cemetery founded by Alsatian pioneers in Castroville, Texas. So I recommend that anyone who has a love for nature and particularly a love for the past, find your way to your nearest cemetery and find out if the dead need you. There may be stones that need to be cleaned up and patched and trash to be carried away. So this is going on all over the United States.
Dr. Kent: What changes do you see in today’s cemeteries and where do you think this will bring us?
Marilyn Yalom: I believe that we will think of the cemeteries that we’ve had in this country for 400 years as artifacts from the past. We are seeing an increase in cremation; about 1/3 to ½ of the population in this country depending on the region are choosing cremation. And the new movement is what we call a green burial, in which people are buried in biodegradable materials and some have just planted a tree or a bush over the grave and that is part of the new ecological movement with an emphasis on the planet rather than on using resources that can pollute the air. So I see a future in which our traditional cemetery will be something to be preserved but probably nothing that will be expanded.
Dr. Kent: What a fascinating discussion to have on Halloween. It’s not a book that’s gruesome and scary. It’s a beautiful narrative of American history called The American Resting Place: 400 Years of History through our Cemeteries and Burial Grounds by Marilyn Yalom. Thank you so much for being on the show.
Marilyn Yalom: I enjoyed it, thank you.
Dr. Kent: My next guest on the show is Ellie Cornell a different side to Halloween. The entertainment side of it where people dress up and get crazy and she is Rachel Carruthers from the horror film series Halloween and she’s going to share some of her experiences coming up. Be back for that.
Carson Gilmore | No Child Novel
December 1, 2008 | Leave a Comment
Carson Gilmore is the young author of “Boy on Fire,” a story built out of his critical thinking about the Bush administration’s implementation of No Child Left Behind… More from his website:
Author and actor. My first novel, “Boy on Fire,” is available on Amazon.com (go ahead…order…you know you want to…just let it happen: ORDER NOW ) The book, though fiction, is an indictment of No Child Left Behind, caustically addressing the program’s destruction of creative youths otherwise bound to be tomorrow’s leaders. Filled with sex and booze and achievement tests.
Other than that: I’m “breaking and entering” into the dingy remains of Hollywood as an actor/screenwriter/associate producer. I’m also a passable tenor and fledging sqwaker on the violin, and a composer of sonatas now and again; F. Scott Fitzgerald gazes blearily down at my work desk from a framed photo; and I dig anything of value from the 1920’s-1940’s.
Interview with Andrew Calhoun | Sound Authors Radio
December 1, 2008 | Leave a Comment
[Music]
Dr. Kent: Welcome to the show Andrew Calhoun who is on the line.
Andrew Calhoun: Yes, it is I.
Dr. Kent: Well that’s a beautiful song; Jaybird and Sparrow from the album Bound To Go by Waterbug Records. Now this is interesting. This is a bunch of spirituals and shout songs. I love these old records that you got some of these from. Tell us about where you found these songs.
Andrew Calhoun: A lot of them are in old books that are out of print. Jaybird and Sparrow was in a collection by Thomas Kelley who was a chemistry professor at the University in Nashville and he did a collection of these. His parents had been born slaves. He was born in 1870 so he was able to collect a lot of music from the European white collectors who were unable to get to and especially a song like that, that has some sort of the social attitudes about fairness of labor practice. His book was called Negro Folk Rhymes and it came out in 1922 and there’s a number of good books. There’s also some early recordings from people like Don Lomax but actually more songs in this project were from old books so I just go through and find some words you like.
Dr. Kent: What inspired you to do this collection of 35 spirituals and folk songs? After doing several albums of your own music and things like that?
Andrew Calhoun: I’ve always liked the spirituals and this project is really in memory of my mother and was attributed by her passing. My whole family gathered and it was sort of spontaneous but we ended up singing for several hours and one of the songs we sang was All Gods Children Got Shoes. Kind of when I get to heaven I’m going to put on my shoes and walk all over God’s Heaven. Those were songs she’d sung to us as kids and the song really struck me at that moment.
Because my mother hadn’t been able to walk for more than a year and I wanted to find out more about the people who gave us such a great song to help you through an experience like that. So after a few months of collecting spirituals I saw a connection to African religion and I started reading up on that and what I found was a lot. A lot survived the trip and kind of descents of ancestor connections and so forth that came from African religion.
Dr. Kent: You do also tend to your albums have kind of schematic, thematic elements. For example, Telfur’s Cows is a ballad of Scotland and Shadow of a Wing. You tie it together on your website with a description of your spirituality and things like that. How do you go about sitting down saying okay I need to do this album?
Andrew Calhoun: That’s a good question. I find that when I’m doing a creative project that things happen and I kind of let them change under my hand and maybe my original conception will shift and change a little bit. This project changed when I found Kelley’s collection of songs because I just didn’t even know they existed, some of those African American folk songs. But they were written out of our history so I’m trying to revive some of those.
Sometimes I don’t know, you have one idea and then it kind of changes according to the material you’re working with. The Scottish Ballads were a long time love of mine and I just translated them so Americans could follow the story better. I translated them to American dialogue so they’re easier to follow.
Dr. Kent: You’ve been doing this for a few decades, this folk singing. How have things changed for you?
Andrew Calhoun: They haven’t changed that much you know. The more the technology changes the more its still a struggle for me to make music. With all the downloads now or whatever it is, the price of gas, the cost of touring, so pretty much if you’re going to be a folk singer, if you work real hard you can get by but that’s about it. As far as it changing, when I was young there was more of an urban sort of folk singing that was connected to maybe anti-war politics and that urban edge to it.
So there would be clubs in the city where you’d play and it was kind of a community around that and its kind of changed to where I play a lot of house concerts in living rooms and there’s the concert series at the Unitarian Church but the club scene isn’t what it was and that may be true in other forms of music as people don’t go out to hear live music much but house concerts are wonderful. They’re real simple to put on and always very rewarding.
Dr. Kent: You have a quote from Dave Carter on your website and he’s I believe you’re talking about Dave Carter from Tracy Grammer and Dave Carter?
Andrew Calhoun: Correct, yes.
Dr. Kent: We lost him a couple of years ago and it seems like he said there’s no better songwriter alive than you. Did you have a relationship with him?
Andrew Calhoun: We were really good friends. I moved from Chicago out to Portland Oregon in 1999 and I played my first gig in Portland with Dave and Tracy who were writers around there and he helped introduce me to Portland and sent me a lot of songwriting students. He was certainly the best songwriter I ever met and very encouraging to me. Yeah, he passed away in July 2002 leaving four Dave and Tracy albums behind. I was very fortunate to get to know him; I never met anybody like him.
Dr. Kent: I saw him and Tracy Grammer about a year before he died and they were incredible, they had great energy together. Folk singing is so much about the live concert and talking about your songs and engaging the audience. Is that why you’re onstage?
Andrew Calhoun: I love performing and its funny, people ask you about your albums but to me it’s always about the next show and its what can happen in a room with people. Sometimes you just see people relax and let go their tensions and see their faces open up and shine. It’s just the greatest reward and every audience is different. I read Chuck Barry’s book and he said at the end of it, “Audiences are different than they were in the 50s. Every audience is different, it’s different every night and that’s why it’s so much fun.” The audiences as much of the show as the person onstage.
Dr. Kent: Folk audiences are one of the last remaining audiences that you can really interact with.
Andrew Calhoun: Well yes, especially in a small setting. A house concert you don’t even use a PA and people can talk back to you. I saw an English singer recently named Pete Morgan and the audience just kept answering back and forth, it was really like a living room show and people talked back. I like that interaction, its one of the great things about spirituals. They’re designed for dissertation. By the end of the first verse you know the response line and people can jump right in.
Dr. Kent: That’s an interesting thing. A lot of us have grown up with a lot of spirituals. For example you’ve got a song on there well, I won’t go there, but a lot of us grew up with a lot of these spirituals and you’re doing different versions of them that are from some older books or a different recording. Michael Haul The Boat Ashore, things like that. How much fun is it for you to see people’s reactions and say oh, I’ve never heard that version?
Andrew Calhoun: That song in particular got radio play because people are sort of familiar with the other one. Yeah it’s nice. The folk songs in sort of their natural sphere they’re always changing and there’s many versions of them. I mean that’s why they’re folk songs but they’re passed along the way jokes are now, you never hear quite the same version. So its very improvisational, a live kind of a form and when you hear different versions of a song, you get a sense of that. I never knew the story of Michael Rode the Boat Ashore, its kind of a folksy hymn along with Kumbayah, which is another song people don’t understand.
Both came from the Sea Islands. Kumbayah means come by here my Lord, it’s a prayer and people say its not enough to get together and sing Kumbayah, they’re kind of putting down some people; it’s their prayer. Well it’s like saying it’s not enough to say The Lords Prayer, sometimes that’s all you can do. Sometimes that’s exactly what you need to do. Michael Haul the Boat Ashore was rowing song from the Sea Islands and directed to the Archangel Michael. They would sing it when the tide was against them so it was kind of a work song and a religious song. I didn’t know any of this stuff when I started researching it. Light bulbs kept going on and I said what is with this song; then I knew.
There’s so much history around it. When I did the Scottish ballads it was kind of just about the songs for me but this project really drew me into it. I’m just finishing a book on the civil war and understand the African American story in America and also in my genre of folk music which has become largely a white genre and I’m trying to understand the reasons for that. I’ve kind of gotten some clues but it’s nice to be on this project and have an integrated group that’s working together and it’s been really, really fun.
Dr. Kent: I know the song No More Cane on the Brazes; I know that song from my own work and I’m fascinated by that one because the cane workers down in Texas, what they said the average life span of those guys was something like six years once they started working in the cane fields.
Andrew Calhoun: Yeah, people know that song but the story of that song; people need to know the convict leasing that went on after slavery really, I mean they kept slavery going in the prison system and to some degree they’ve kept on running the prison system for profit and that’s something that I didn’t want this project not to address. I wanted to talk about the fact that these problems are not in the past. They are still with us and also the way for people to endure slavery overcame them with this kind of spiritual sensibility.
It’s really a remarkable thing and I think of them as teachers. People don’t like to look back at slavery and it’s shameful and shame on both sides but the goal of the story is the grace with which those people endured their experience. They were just amazing individuals. I also wanted to get more of a sense of the individuals behind the songs on this record because people know a few spirituals but it almost has become a generic sense of Negro spiritual instead of well some artistry; it wasn’t people made this up you know. So I’m trying to connect the story to the song and that song No More Cane on the Brazes is a heck of a song. I mean it’s like a movie or a book; it captures a lot of what people went through on those work farms.
Dr. Kent: It’s been a real honor speaking with Andrew Calhoun about his music and his latest album Bound to Go. Thank you so much for being on the show. I’m going to play a little bit of Roll Jordan Roll off that album before we run out of time.
Andrew Calhoun: Great, thank you very much.
[Music]
Dr. Kent: That was a little bit of Roll Jordan Roll by Andrew Calhoun, a beautiful tune. It was an honor speaking with him and all the guests on the show today and we’ll see you next week.
Interview with Yolanda Renee | Sound Authors Radio
November 30, 2008 | Leave a Comment
Dr. Kent: Welcome back to Sound Authors. My next guest is the author of a book called Murder, Madness and Love. Her name is Yolanda Renee. Welcome to the show.
Yolanda Renee: Thank you, it’s good to be here.
Dr. Kent: I understand you also have a talk radio show.
Yolanda Renee: Yes, blog talk radio, Thursday nights, 9:00 starting in August.
Dr. Kent: Tell me a little about your book.
Yolanda Renee: Well it’s a murder suspense novel and its set in Anchorage, Alaska and Seattle, Washington and it involves a detective who is part Indian and part Irish; Tlingit Indian to be exact. And he falls in love with one of his people he’s supposed to be protecting, which is probably a no-no in the business. But he thinks she’s also guilty so that causes some tension.
Dr. Kent: How did you get into writing?
Yolanda Renee: I’ve been writing since I was a kid. I think I wrote my first play when I was in sixth grade and even got to produce it for Christmas so its something that I’ve always done but never really pursued until I decided to get serious about it a couple of years ago.
Dr. Kent: You live in Alaska.
Yolanda Renee: I lived in Alaska, yes. I actually worked on the Trans-Alaskan Pipeline.
Dr. Kent: My goodness. Tell me a little about that. I know very little about the Trans-Alaskan Pipeline. I do know that people can walk along it because it’s such a beautiful thing. What was that like?
Yolanda Renee: Well it was one of the most interesting times of my life. I went to Alaska on vacation in 1975 and I had a weeks’ vacation. I called two days after arriving and told my boss I would not be back at my job I was staying in Alaska. I had fallen in love with it that quickly. I found a new job and I did stay there. After a year of living in Fairbanks I went to work on the Trans-Alaskan Pipeline. It was formerly not open to women to work up there and things started changing because of women’s lib and equal rights and that sort of things.
I got a job and I was actually one of the first women up on the line as an employee. I worked for Bachtel, the inspection group, and I got to go out on the line to see the work being done and the inspection part of it. I produced the reports and filed things away and my title was Assistant Field Engineer. It was an eye opening experience.
Dr. Kent: How does that bring you to being a novelist now?
Yolanda Renee: Well I’ve always written stories of things I have done and places I have been and I’ve traveled across the United States several times. And I would write letters back to family and just tell them my experiences. My first hiking experience in the Alaskan mountains; it was a four day hiking trip in the wilderness and I would get responses back to my letters that it was just like being there. I had described everything so well and that’s how I like to write, very descriptive and it’s the way I like to read too. I like to be put into the place by the words on the page. It’s just something that I’ve always done and I decided I wanted to write a novel and mysteries are something I’ve always loved.
Dr. Kent: Obviously you enjoy other authors. You host a radio show like I do, which features authors as well. I’ve got to say I love speaking with different authors. What’s your inspiration?
Yolanda Renee: I’m finding that its very educational to speak with other authors and one of the reasons I started doing this is trying to find the marketing niche for myself I realized how hard it was to get an interview on a radio show if you’d written fiction. I mean if you write non-fiction you can almost get an interview anywhere with anyone, but fiction; people don’t seem to want to take the time to know why you wrote that particular book or what inspired you and so on and so forth. The non-fiction authors have a better niche because they can be the expert in their field. When you write fiction, it’s very difficult to be an expert in murder if you know what I mean.
Dr. Kent: It’s true and do you have, have you thought of writing a non-fiction tale of being the first women to work on the Pipeline?
Yolanda Renee: Yes in fact that is one of my goals, to write a non-fiction book about my experience up there because like I said they were very eye opening. I was in my early 20s and I learned quite a bit. I grew up so to speak by moving there and living there by myself and it was just an experience that I would like to share. I just have not had the courage to sit down and write in first person yet.
Dr. Kent: And you have on your website you talk about two upcoming novels that I guess people enjoy writing in trilogies. I had an author earlier in the show that wrote a trilogy and you have two more in your novel trilogy coming out soon, right? Or in the next couple years?
Yolanda Renee: I’m hoping to get Murder, Madness and Memories out by the end of the year and Murder, Madness and Obsession by next year yes. I’ve already got them both written, I’m just in the editing format right now.
Dr. Kent: Are you going to stick with three or are you going to keep going like Agatha Christie?
Yolanda Renee: Well, you know that’s the funny thing about it is I already have the idea for the fourth novel growing in my head. I mean I’m trying to ignore it while I get these other two out there but its pushing itself forward. So there may be a fourth and a fifth, I haven’t decided yet.
Dr. Kent: It’s too much fun, right?
Yolanda Renee: It is. When your characters speak to you and continue to speak to you, you kind of have to go with that. But it’s also dependent on the fans and what they want so you kind of pay attention to that too.
Dr. Kent: Tell me a little more about the book itself? We spoke very little about it. The book is called Murder, Madness and Love, and it started out well you tell me about it.
Yolanda Renee: Well it’s about a young woman who loses her husband in a tragic car crash and it’s a very unusual car wreck in that she bought him a Porsche on his birthday and they think the brakes failed. Which is kind of an unusual thing to happen in a brand new car but they can’t prove that there was foul play. She is under suspicion of course for murdering her husband for his money because he was very rich. During that time she goes into hiding and then when she comes out she decides to take over the chairmanship of her husbands company.
She moves back to Anchorage and becomes haunted and stalked by a killer who murders look-alikes on the 14th of the month, starting in November. He sends her evidence of his crimes and of course then the detective gets involved and he thinks he’s going to solve both cases, which would be catch her for killing her husband and of course catch the person who’s stalking her. I tried to weave a tale where it left you in doubt as to who could be guilty. Whether she was involved in some way or whether it was her friends who were the ones stalking her? I tried to weave a tale that left you asking questions and I think I’ve done that.
Dr. Kent: It sounds like it and of course it’s important that you’re writing about Alaska. I think its funny, for me it’s the great beyond that I haven’t visited. I lived in Washington State and I’ve been all around the country and I think many people really stigmatize Alaska as this wild expansive wonderful place and remote and all of that. So there’s a real mystique attached to that and there’s very few books set in Alaska.
Yolanda Renee: That’s one of the reasons I chose it. That’s another reason I chose Indian as the background for the main detective in the story. The Tlingit Indians, Tlingit means human being and I wanted it to be set into more of the Tlingit background in my other books that I’m coming out with. I think Alaska is an exciting place. I look forward to going back there and visiting. I probably will not settle down there because it’s just a little bit too cold and too dark sometimes, but not the whole state.
You can find a variety of weather patterns and a variety of light and darkness because Alaska is such a huge place. You can find just about anything that you can find in the lower 48 in Alaska but its an exciting setting and I think when I went up there to work on the line, I had a lot of people who believed it was more of an iceberg than an actual place.
Dr. Kent: This is an Alaska question – this time of year apparently it’s fairly warm and pleasant, right?
Yolanda Renee: Oh it’s beautiful. Right now it’s beautiful up there. In anchorage it’s probably in the 60s and 70s. In Fairbanks it can be in the 70s and 80s and of course you have to acclimate to that. It probably would feel like 20 degrees different if you’re coming from the south. If you’re coming from the northern part of the United States then it would probably be pretty normal for you. But the darkness starts closing in around September, that’s when winter starts closing in and you have more of a winter up there than you do down here. You don’t have the four seasons like you do and so things do kind of close in on you a little bit but during the summertime, the light and the brightness of the midnight sun is just aesthetic and energizing, it’s wonderful.
Dr. Kent: Thinking about it, it’s a great setting for a mystery novel too because of the fact that we always hear oh, people go a little wild in the wintertime and it must seem a little more normal. I’ve heard there’s a few more domestic disturbances and things like that because of the high pressure of the wintertime up there.
Yolanda Renee: Right because you feel closed in and they call it cabin fever and there are ways to deal with that and you have to be prepared for that as far as getting yourself out and doing things. Because it does close in on you, the darkness, the ice fog. I don’t know if you’ve ever experienced that, it’s almost a crystallized fog surrounding you. its like little lights all over the place and it does close in on some of the places up there, especially Fairbanks gets hit with it pretty good. Anchorage not so much because they have a breeze off of the inlet there, the ocean. But in Fairbanks its kind of a valley setting so they can get closed in by the fog a pretty good bit. And that will drive you a little bonkers at times. I know the weather up there is usually 50 below during winter and that’s quite a temperature change.
Dr. Kent: I grew up in rural Minnesota and it got that cold sometimes and when it did, we bundled up pretty well but it’s cold.
Yolanda Renee: But it’s an exciting place and its got wildlife galore and experiences I don’t think you’ll get anywhere else in the world. I was lucky to have been able to do that when I was in my early 20s. It was a very lucky time in my life.
Dr. Kent: It’s been a wonderful chance to speak with you about Murder, Madness and Love. Yolanda Renee has a website online, www.yolandarenee.com. Thank you so much for chatting with me.
Yolanda Renee: Thank you for having me.
Dr. Kent: Her books are available all over the web and you can visit her on her website. There’s a nice ordering page there to buy some books. My next guest on the show is musician. You’re going to want to listen to this song coming up and then we’ll chat with him. His name is Andrew Calhoun so we’re going to listen to a song called Jaybird and Sparrow. Come on back.
Amiri Baraka | Visionary Poet
November 29, 2008 | Leave a Comment
It was a huge honor to speak with Amiri Baraka on the show. More about him from Wikipedia:
Baraka’s writings have generated controversy over the years, particularly his use of often-violent imagery directed towards (at various times) women, gay people, white people, and Jews. Critics of his work have alternately described such usage as ranging from being vernacular expressions of Black oppression to outright examples of racism, sexism, homophobia, and anti-Semitism that they perceive in his work.[9][10][11] The following is a typical example cited, from a 1965 essay:
Most American white men are trained to be fags. For this reason it is no wonder their faces are weak and blank. … The average ofay [white person] thinks of the black man as potentially raping every white lady in sight. Which is true, in the sense that the black man should want to rob the white man of everything he has. But for most whites the guilt of the robbery is the guilt of rape. That is, they know in their deepest hearts that they should be robbed, and the white woman understands that only in the rape sequence is she likely to get cleanly, viciously popped.[12]
Amiri Baraka was New Jersey’s Poet Laureate at the time of the September 11, 2001 attacks. He wrote a poem titled “Somebody Blew Up America”[13] about the event. The poem was controversial and highly critical of racism in America, and includes angry depictions of public figures such as Trent Lott, Clarence Thomas, and Condoleezza Rice. The poem also contains lines claiming Israel’s involvement in the World Trade Center attacks:
Who knew the World Trade Center was gonna get bombed
Who told 4000 Israeli workers at the Twin Towers
To stay home that day
Why did Sharon stay away? […] Who know why Five Israelis was filming the explosion
And cracking they sides at the notion
Baraka has said that he believed Israelis (and President George W. Bush) were involved in the Sept. 11 attacks, citing what he described as information that had been reported in the American and Israeli press and on Jordanian television. He denies that the poem is anti-Semitic, and points to its accusation, which is directed against Israelis, rather than Jews as a people.[14][15] The Anti-Defamation League was amongst the critics who denounced the poem as anti-Semitic.[16], though Baraka and his defenders to defined his position as Anti-Zionism.
After this poem’s publication, Governor Jim McGreevey tried to remove Baraka from the post, only to discover that there was no legal way to do so. In 2003, after legislation was passed allowing him to do so, McGreevey abolished the NJ Poet Laureate title. In response to legal action filed by Baraka, the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit ruled that state officials were immune from such suits, and in November 2007 the Supreme Court of the United States refused to hear an appeal of the case.[17]
Baraka was named the poet laureate of the Newark Public Schools in December 2002.[18]
- Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note, poems, 1961
- Blues People: Negro Music in White America, 1963
- Dutchman and The Slave, drama, 1964
- The System of Dante’s Hell, novel, 1965
- Home: Social Essays, 1965
- Tales, 1967
- Black Magic, poems, 1969
- Four Black Revolutionary Plays, 1969
- It’s Nation Time, poems, 1970
- Raise Race Rays Raize: Essays Since 1965, 1971
- Hard Facts, poems, 1975
- The Motion of History and Other Plays, 1978
- Poetry for the Advanced, 1979
- reggae or not!, 1981
- Daggers and Javelins: Essays 1974-1979, 1984
- The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, 1984
- The Music: Reflections on Jazz and Blues, 1987
- Transbluesency: The Selected Poems of Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones, 1995
- Wise, Why’s Y’s, essays, 1995
- Funk Lore: New Poems, 1996.
- Somebody Blew Up America, 2001
- Tales of the Out & the Gone, 2006
Interview with Stephanie Chandler | Sound Authors Radio
November 29, 2008 | Leave a Comment
Dr. Kent: Welcome back to Sound Authors. My next guest on the show is Stephanie Chandler. She’s got a book that’s all about being an author and building an online platform. It’s called The Authors Guide to Building an Online Platform: Leveraging the Internet to Sell More Books. Welcome to the show.
Stephanie Chandler: Thank you so much.
Dr. Kent: Tell me about what your mission is. Of course you’ve got a website devoted to writers and things like that. Give me a sound bite about what you do.
Stephanie Chandler: Well I wrote the book on how to build an online platform because that’s exactly the process that I used when I ventured into publishing back in 2003. I had wanted to write a business start up guide and I was getting doors closed in my face left and right. A wonderful agent called me and said he loved my work, that I needed to be reaching tens of thousands of people. And I said isn’t that kind of putting the cart before the horse? Once I publish a book I’ll be invited to speak and he said, well its kind of your problem to solve. You got to figure out how to build your platform.
I didn’t want to travel extensively and I thought what’s the quickest way I can do that and I launched a website targeted towards my audience, which was entrepreneurs. That was businessinfoguide.com and I started working on building traffic and driving people to the site. I was publishing a monthly newsletter. The first one incidentally went out to eight people and after several years I have thousands of subscribers. I self published my first book The Business Start up Checklist and Planning Guide and it started selling a full two months before it was in print. I thought, okay I get it; this is why they want you to have a platform - so that you have an audience for your book.
Dr. Kent: What’s the big secret? How do you create? Of course you certainly have connections already and to a certain extent because you had founded several websites, is that correct?
Stephanie Chandler: Well I did that because I wanted to build a platform. So what I did was I thought about who’s my target audience for my book? And I wanted to write business and marketing books. So the first site businessinfoguide.com in an effort to bring in an audience. So what happened after I self published the first book, I had built a high traffic website.
So when I wanted to publish my second book, I sent out a whopping two proposals to two different publishers and I had a contract in 30 days with John Wiley and Sons for my second book, which was From Entrepreneur to Intrapreneur. And I would argue that they took me because I came to the table with a platform and it was a beautiful thing.
Dr. Kent: I’ve heard a lot of people tell that the easiest way to get published these days is to prove that your book is already selling self published and then publishers will pick you up.
Stephanie Chandler: Definitely and there’s so many opportunities with the internet and for authors to excel. You’re doing this with your radio show, blogs are just so hot. They are a wonderful opportunity to build an audience and so what happens is you want to go get published with a major publisher and you can say, hey I have tens of thousands of people visiting my blog every month or receiving my newsletter or listening to my radio show and that is probably the quickest way to get publishing success.
Dr. Kent: Tell me a little about the book itself; The Authors Guide to Building an Online Platform. How many secrets do you actually reveal?
Stephanie Chandler: I reveal it all, I have nothing to hide. I’m all about sharing what I know and in addition to that I interviewed several successful authors who have used the internet as well to build their platform and that was really helpful. There’s some really great people in there like Dan Kennedy who’s really well known in the business world and great stories in there about how they used the internet to really build a platform to sell more books and really build a career around your book. There’s other ways you can do that like selling e-books and information products and those types of things.
Dr. Kent: It’s a complicated thing I guess for most authors is they might not be as savvy as you seem to be with businessinfoguide.com for example. It looks pretty complicated for your average author.
Stephanie Chandler: It looks complicated but I built that site on a $20 template I got on the internet. I taught myself how to use Microsoft FrontPage and I built that site from the ground up just with useful content. My goal is to share as much information as I can and really am a big believer of giving away free information. That’s how you build an audience, that’s how you build a fan base. So I share everything I know as much as I can and that’s what brings people back and inspires them to sign up for my newsletter and my programs that I offer.
Dr. Kent: Were you in business before all of this started?
Stephanie Chandler: No I was in the Silicon Valley for 11 years. I got an ulcer and decided to leave that behind and I moved to Sacramento and I wanted to write novels quite frankly. I opened a bookstore in Sacramento and in that process I really fell in love with small business marketing and wanted to help other people do what I did, realize there was life after corporate America. So I put a staff in my store and instead of writing novels I started writing for business magazines. I started writing my own book and like I said building content for business info guide. So I really just learned through trial and error, studying how other people do it. I’m an avid reader and my goal is always to share with other people what I’ve learned.
Dr. Kent: When’s your first novel going to be coming out?
Stephanie Chandler: You know what? I’m not even touching novels and it was an accidental discovery of a passion I didn’t know I had and really educating small business owners is wonderfully rewarding and I think I’d be a very frustrated novelist. I’m grateful I figured it out.
Dr. Kent: Do you get on the road with John Wiley & Sons or with Quill Driver Press? Did they put you out there?
Stephanie Chandler: I have to say they really don’t, most publishers aren’t going to a lot of the marketing. They certainly have booked me some radio gigs and things like that. I definitely take the initiative myself to market my book and I’m speaking at writer’s conferences and things like that. But I think that’s true no matter what your situation; whether you’re self published or you have a major publisher backing you. It’s really up to you to be successful and if you want a long term career as an author, you have to take the initiative to promote yourself. And that’s what I also talk about in the book, ways to do that. Through the internet from the comfort of your home or office.
Dr. Kent: There’s something like 300,000 to 400,000 books a year in this country. There are many aspects to publishing but how do people make themselves stand out? Is it going into another market or finding their target market or making sure their cover is nice? What’s the first step for an author?
Stephanie Chandler: I think its finding your market and I think it’s with a website. Any author who doesn’t have a website is really missing an opportunity and like I said the blogs are really wonderful right now. If you’ve got something to say, get on there and have fun with your blog. We’re writers; we should have no problem coming up with content. A blog doesn’t need to be a big deal. You write one to three paragraphs several times a week and you can schedule those out so you can sit down on Sunday night and write your three posts for Monday, Wednesday, and Friday of that week and you’re done. And you really start to build an audience, but to me the number one key is to build your web presence. That’s the quickest way.
Having owned a bookstore, which I eventually sold, I met authors every day who were out pounding the pavement looking to do book signing events. That’s all great but the average author sells eight copies of a book at a book signing event. So you’ve got to do a lot of book signing events to really make that pay off. If you get on the internet, you can do things like virtual book tours, you can do internet radio shows; you start getting seen and heard everywhere and you’re going to have no problem selling your books and getting the attention of the publishers.
Dr. Kent: So what is your next big project?
Stephanie Chandler: I am working on my fourth book which is all about small business growth and my goal in my new book is to write the books I want to read. So for several years I’ve been looking for a book on how to take my business to the next level and it doesn’t exist, the books that I want to read. So that’s what I’m working on and I’m really excited about it. I’ve been working with my agent, I have an agent now and hopefully we’ll see that in 2009. We’re working with several publishers to see who’s going to invest with it.
Dr. Kent: It’s been a real honor speaking with you Stephanie Chandler, the author of The Authors Guide to Building an Online Platform: Leveraging the Internet to Sell More Books and clearly she’s done a great job herself of leveraging the internet.
Stephanie Chandler: Thank you it’s an honor to be here today.
Dr. Kent: Thanks, it’s been fun being with you. My next guest on the show is Yolanda Renee, author of Murder, Madness and Love. Come on back for that, it will be fun to talk with her.
Interview with Larry Buttram | Sound Authors Radio
November 28, 2008 | Leave a Comment
Dr. Kent: Welcome to Sound Authors. Today is August 1st, it’s finally August. Larry Buttram, author of The Third Generation; Stephanie Chandler, author of The Authors Guide to Building an Online Platform: Leveraging the Internet to Sell More Books. My third guest is Yolanda Renee, author of Murder, Madness and Love and my last guest as always is a musician. His name is Andrew Calhoun, contemporary folk singer. My first guest is Larry Buttram, the author of The Third Generation. Welcome to the show.
Larry Buttram: Well thank you Dr. Kent, I appreciate you letting me be on.
Dr. Kent: Tell me a little bit about The Third Generation.
Larry Buttram: It’s the third in my I call it the false witness trilogy, I’ve got two other novels – False Witness and Honor Thy Sister and The Third Generation is the last in the trilogy. The books track the lives of a white family and a black family in Tennessee and you see how their lives are thrown together over a shooting incident so you track each generation and how their lives are intertwined.
The Third Generation is kind of ironic because it’s the third story in the trilogy but it builds with the younger girl in the family and she’s a freshman at the University of Tennessee and she uncovers something by accident that puts her life in jeopardy. Something actually happened decades before that puts her life in jeopardy. So you follow her life and see what happens with that.
Dr. Kent: This is the third book in a trilogy. What inspired you to do a trilogy?
Larry Buttram: Well I grew up in east Tennessee, not far from where the stories are set. I grew up in the 50s and 60s and I’ve been writing my whole life since I was 12 years old. When I retired from AT&T I just had the vision of a young boy walking down a dusty country road back in the early 60s and I thought what would happen if he was alone and two strangers picked him up and he was white and the strangers were black. They gave him a ride and then a deputy sheriff stops them and starts harassing the two guys and one of the strangers kills the deputy and they get away and never get caught.
So I sort of envisioned this scene, I don’t know it just came to me and then the rest of the book sort of built on that. For 25 years you see what happens to the families over that shooting incident and how it impacts them.
Dr. Kent: What’s your process of writing? I always like to ask fiction authors what’s your process of sitting down and creating characters. Do they play around in your life? Do you wake up in the morning and you know what your character is doing that day? How do you do that?
Larry Buttram: You know, that’s an interesting character. My characters, I mean the book is fiction but there is factual information behind the scenes. Information and what’s going on in the background is factual. But the characters, I spend a lot of time developing them and I don’t know if this will make sense, but they sort of take on a life of their own. I live with them. Actually when I was writing False Witness, the first one, there would actually be times when I would forget that Ethan; Ethan Ward is the main character and I would forget that he wasn’t real.
One time I even thought, well I’ll ask Ethan what he thinks about that and I stopped and said, “Wait, he’s not a real person you know!” But so yeah, I’d go to bed at night thinking about them and in the morning I think about this. You sort of get, at least for me, I get obsessed when I’m writing a book and the people are just real and once you develop them, I think they take on a life of their own. You know there are things they would do and things they won’t do and the story sort of takes on a life of it own. Does that make sense at all?
Dr. Kent: Let’s say how does the book compare to your own life? Do you find that things that have happened to you come out in your books?
Larry Buttram: It certainly might. My mother passed away last year, she was 95 years old and up until the very end her mind was probably better than mine but when she read the book she said oh, I’m sorry I know that little boy in the book was you and I’m sorry about all the things you went through.” I said, “Mom, the boy in the book wasn’t me.”
There’s things that I saw and I realize there’s things I put in the book of things I’ve seen in my life I guess it was a better version of me but I really didn’t think too much about it until she said, “Well I know this happened and that happened and so on.” So I guess there are some of my own feelings and emotions put into the book but at the same time I tried to be objective. The main hero in the book Ethan was probably a lot better person than I was, especially with all the things that he went through.
Dr. Kent: Tell me a little about False Witness and Honor Thy Sister because of course this is the third in a series. Folks I assume have to start with the beginning? How does that work.
Larry Buttram: Well you don’t have to. When you do a trilogy and one of the things I struggled with and I talked with a lot of other writers. You don’t know if people are going to pick up the first, the second or the third. Obviously I think if you’re just beginning False Witness I still sell a lot more of that one than the other one, but each book although they’re a trilogy, they give you some background information about what happened before but not so much that you would ruin it.
I have had people pick up Honor Thy Sister and not the first. We didn’t mention it but Honor Thy Sister is a story of two women that are sisters and one of the women was sort of evil and the other was a school teacher and prim and proper. When the sister moved back home bad things started to happen in the family and she wanted to know if her sister was behind it or was an innocent victim but that’s the second story. But yeah, to answer your question I don’t think you necessarily have to read them in order but I think for most people its better to start with the first.
Dr. Kent: Now you’re from Virginia. Did you grow up in Virginia also?
Larry Buttram: No I grew up in east Tennessee. I moved here in the late 60s. I used to work for the FBI and I delivered mail to J. Edgar Hoover and a lot of people don’t even know who he was anymore, but yeah I’ve been here but I grew up in a small, very rural area in east Tennessee in the country in a different time. We didn’t have paved roads back where I lived and no running water, no electricity until I was older. So it was a lot different back then unlike the way my kids and grandkids live today.
Dr. Kent: What do your kids and grandkids think of your new career as a writer?
Larry Buttram: Well my grandson Brady is eight years old and he sends me emails. He said, “I want to know if you’re famous. You must be famous since you’re on the radio.” I said, “Well I’m not very famous.” But he decided that he’s writing a book now and he’s finished three chapters of Aunt Bear and Chipmunk on the Loose. Hopefully someday he’ll be a better writer than me probably.
Dr. Kent: Very cool. So when it comes to supporting your book, do you do some readings, things like that?
Larry Buttram: Yeah I had a writers group and one of the people in there said to be a great writer you have to read 10,000 books first. Well I don’t agree with that, I think that’s a ridiculous statement to be honest with you but I do understand the philosophy. I mean, who’s going to read 10,000 books in their life? But I read a lot of different writers, the old classics.
I’ve been reading since I was ten or 11 years old and love to read and love to write. I think it helps you when you read other peoples work and see how they do things. I’m reading a book now by Randy Singer, I just finished another Virginia writer and I think he’s as good as John Grisham, just a fantastic writer. But yeah I think you have to do that if you’re a writer to keep up with the things that are going on and pick up things from other writers.
Dr. Kent: Here’s a question. You talked about John Grisham. He’s certainly not from Tennessee. I always like in southern writers, you’ve got your Faulkner and folks like that. Do you feel that you have a different style being a southerner? What’s your take on that?
Larry Buttram: That’s a tough question. Obviously I think no matter who you are I think your writing will reflect your background somewhat. If you’re from the old days from Russia or Christian, I mean there’s so much research you can do and I do a lot of research for my books until I finish them but I can point out some things that I was familiar with in growing up. I think that does affect your writing style and how you look at things. I do believe that.
Dr. Kent: Tell me a little about this book. Again from False Witness and Honor Thy Sister, through The Third Generation. How does the story develop and is this the last book in the series?
Larry Buttram: I think I’ve taken this series as far as I can. I got a note from a lady from Tennessee who said she just finished it and didn’t know how she could go on knowing there wasn’t going to be anymore stories about the Edward family. I thought about doing a fourth one but to be honest with you I couldn’t come up with another story. It ended; it covered 25 years of their lives and I see, oh what are some of the movies out? Lucky Twelve or Lucky Eight or something and I think you take success and you just try to take it too far. Most people don’t know when to quit. This is really as far as I can take these stories.
So what I’m doing now is something totally different and I sort of stumbled onto it. I’m doing a fictional history book that is set in the pre-civil war era. It’s about a guy that freed more slaves than anyone in history and I think he’s truly one of the greatest unknown Americans. He was filthy rich and freed 500 slaves. His family turned against him and the courts; he had death threats and everything but he did it because he knew it was evil. So I’m working on that now. It’s fictional, but its half fact and it’s a lot of research.
Dr. Kent: That sounds like fun. And you also have a book called The Greatest Gift, which are short stories?
Larry Buttram: Actually that was the first book I wrote years ago and I put it away and never did anything with it. I just had a book of short stories and it deals with people in all different difficult life situations, like loss of a loved one or marital problems, financial problems. And it looks at what the bible says how you’re supposed to handle these things. I done it 30 years ago and when I had some success with my other books and my wife said I should release this one and I actually have had more publicity from that one believe it or not. I’ve been on TV a number of times across the country discussing my book of short stories. So people seem to like them, I’ve gotten pretty good feedback so far.
Dr. Kent: It’s been a real pleasure chatting about Larry Buttram about his book The Third Generation and the other books in his series. Thank you so much for being on the show.
Larry Buttram: I appreciate it. People can get them at any major book store or go to my website which is larrybuttram.com.
Dr. Kent: Will do; larrybuttram.com and there’s some great information on there as well. The First Generation, it’s a book the first two are False Witness and Honor Thy Sister and then of course the Greatest Gift and we’ll look for your next book.
Larry Buttram: I sure appreciate you having me on here.
Dr. Kent: I’m going to come back in one minute with my next guest Stephanie Chandler, author of The Authors Guide to Building an Online Platform. Come on back for that.
Interview with Arupa Tesolin | Sound Authors Radio
November 27, 2008 | Leave a Comment
Dr. Kent: Welcome back to the show. Today is July 4th, it’s an Independence Day show and my next guest has a great thing called The Spark. It’s a good thing for today; we’re all thinking of sparks, explosions, and fun noises. Tonight we’ll see the fireworks. Welcome to the show Arupa Tesolin.
Arupa Tesolin: Hello, how are you?
Dr. Kent: Very good. Now your book is called Spark: Raise Your Mind to the Power of Infinity and Create Anything. Tell us about that.
Arupa Tesolin: Spark is kind of a different book in the sense that it’s a book about personal innovation, which means how we actually create things and the role we play in creating anything. That’s why the title is raise your mind to the power of infinity, because that is the backdrop of the creative process. The spark is actually what happens when you start to create anything and you set about a chain of events in the world around you to start bringing you what you imagined you want to create.
I was very interested in looking at that side of the creative process because we know a lot about what goes on outside that creative process, but that first spark, which is the most creative thing we know less about. By being more conscious about it we can actually leverage different kinds of results.
Dr. Kent: What do you do on a daily basis? I know you coach and consult, what does the spark have to do with your daily practices?
Arupa Tesolin: I operate an innovation training company so we’re doing training for organizations on innovation and intuition skills and a lot of the skill sets that deal with the creative side of human beings as they gather together in a business enterprise. So we conduct spark training programs and another set of programs called TING Training, which is after my intuition book and surprisingly if you listen to intuition you do business better called TING. So that’s what I do. I’m more of a consultant trainer speaker than anything else. The coaching comes in through the consulting process.
Dr. Kent: Your website and the book itself are so bright. The spark is whether a sunflower on the website or the bright orange of your book. Is it a positive thing for people? How does this change a company’s life? A person’s life?
Arupa Tesolin: Well we have to realize that there is an immense power that we have literally at our fingertips with engaging the creative process. It affects everything that comes after and that’s what’s so exciting about it. I was interested in how the creative process works since I was very young. I used to have a creative laboratory hidden in the bricks in the wall outside my room and in that creative space living laboratory I could create different things. And I realized I didn’t have to just create one thing or another, I literally had an imagination laboratory and that’s what the book spark is advocating.
We have to take hold of the power, whether we’re ourselves individuals, whether we’re going after business or having our own careers and literally we look at other people that have different lifestyles and maybe some inventors or creative people who seem to be quite adept at creating things and we long for that sort of thing. So by taking a look at what’s actually happening inside the creative process, we can start to take on parts of it for ourselves and do better with it. That’s got a big payoff in organizations who are interested in doing more innovations because that adds to their bottom line.
For people, it’s a thrill to be able live the life you conceive of because most people cant see after tomorrow. Their tomorrow looks exactly like the day before and the day after but once they realize, hey this is actually being creative because of my thoughts today, then something clicks in and I think we’re mature enough as a society now to really start looking at what’s happening inside the creative process. There were great people that preceded us in the guise of different masters, different gurus, and different spiritual leaders who always said, we have all this power and we’re starting to look at it. And through other people and books like this starting to look at what this means for us and how to use it.
Dr. Kent: What exactly is this spark? Let’s say a family celebrating the 4th of July; dads got the day off work; he works in a business somewhere; what’s the spark for him?
Arupa Tesolin: What the spark for him is “what do I really want to be doing and how do I create that?” It can happen right at this moment when you’re listening to this program you can actually decide that this is what you want and to take the spark process. As soon as you make the commitment to something, everything starts off as an image, a vision, and as soon as you make a commitment to it, the heart enters in and says yeah, that’s what I want, I’m committed to this. But you have to in the spark stage, that first step actually determines all the outcomes. It determines the complete construction and destruction of what you’re doing.
It’s important to hold a fully finished image. In other words to envision that you’re already there. That you’re already doing what you want to do or having what you want to have. It’s already there; it’s just like you go to the tap for a glass of water. You turn on the water and you know that waters going to be in that glass. That same level of certainly when you’re creating an image in knowing that in that point in time which we call the spark, that you literally set a change into motion in the universe, beyond form, to start forming around that image, that thing.
Dr. Kent: Tell me a little, the spark of course we know so well. We always talk about every fire starts with a spark. There’s so much attached to that in culture and obviously that’s the core of the theory. Talk about the beginning.
Arupa Tesolin: That spark, that’s the ignition point. When you start your car, without the spark the car doesn’t go anywhere. All of the adventures you have after your car don’t happen unless that ignition goes off. In a similar way metaphorically that spark is that beginning point. That beginning point and what I’m advocating with the book is that we start doing it consciously. That we’re conscious when that spark happens and we put ourselves in a space where we can create in the greatest way with awareness and intelligence at that time.
Then that phase actually ends pretty quickly and you kind of have to let go of things. Most people they’re either telling themselves either the reason they cant have a certain thing or they’re re-imaging the day before yesterday so it comes into their life tomorrow. And spark is all about teaching people to look at what’s really real. If we know that everything our eyes see, everything we perceive through our senses is actually attached. That spark state where you only see an image in your imagination, that’s a living presence and understanding that requires a real reorientation to the way we think and the way we expect results to happen.
Dr. Kent: What are the five senses? You write about the five senses; what role do they play?
Arupa Tesolin: Hearing, seeing; what the important thing is what you see is already dead. You’re seeing the skin on the outside of people’s faces; that’s dead skin, its coming off. The real growth is happening inside. Same thing if you look at an organism’s tree. The real growth is happening inside, it’s literally invisible and that’s the same thing metaphorically as with our spark point.
Its invisible, you can’t see it yet. It’s going to come out later and it’s learning to work with that. And then there are different stages that happen after the spark and you learn to sort of be patient while you cant see anything but if you continue to expect that its going to happen, it makes it a lot easier over time. It’s more about conscious creating.
Dr. Kent: Let’s talk a little bit, I only have about 30 seconds left, but on Fourth of July my favorite things were sparklers. Can you make a metaphor about sparklers with your book?
Arupa Tesolin: Mine too, I remember. Sparklers, little ideas from sparks. Basically to set a goal is to limit infinity. That’s a good sparkler. And I hope if nothing else you remember that. To set a goal is to limit infinity. In other words you can have anything you want, as soon as you limit infinity to that thing that you want.
Dr. Kent: That’s a lot like when I read Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. It says, “It’s easy to fly. You just fall and miss the ground.”
Arupa Tesolin: Yeah, that’s a good analogy.
Dr. Kent: It’s just a different way of thinking about it.
Arupa Tesolin: Exactly.
Dr. Kent: It’s been an honor speaking with Arupa Tesolin. Her book is called Spark and her website is intuita.com, and if you go \spark, you’ll find out about the book. Thank you so much for being on the show.
Arupa Tesolin: Thank you for your invitation. Have a great independence day.
Dr. Kent: You too. My next guest on the show is actually a good friend of mine. Its an honor to every once in awhile to be able to indulge in that opportunity so come on back, we’re going to listen to just a little bit of a song that he recorded. It’s called Tina, and it’s from his album called Ilijic. He’s a Serbian pianist and here’s a little bit, actually a full track from that album called Tina.
Interview with Dejan Ilijic | Sound Authors Radio
November 27, 2008 | Leave a Comment
[Music]
Dr. Kent: That’s a beautiful tune, it’s called Tina and that’s from Dejan Ilijic’s album called Eyot. He’s a good friend of mine and we’re trying to get through to him in Serbia but he’s in the middle of a thunderstorm right now and we’ve had a little trouble. So, I’m going to play another track. It’s actually an album he recorded with me recently, but this is a song he wrote and I helped him out with a few instruments but it’s a song called Molme’ and it’s an album that we have together called I Am Here. It’s with Kent Gustavson, that’s me, and Dejan Ilijic on piano and on electronics and things like that. So we’re going to listen to that full track and we’ll have Dejan on another day to chat about his music. We wish him the best in the middle of that thunderstorm over there. So I’ll play that track and if we get Dejan on the line we’ll have him join the show. Listen to this.
[Music]
Dr. Kent: We have one minute to chat with Dejan. We have him from Serbia. Welcome to the show.
Dejan Ilijic: Hello, thank you for inviting me on your show.
Dr. Kent: Tell me a little about your music. You’re a piano player and you did this album with me of course with the electronics. What’s your career goal?
Dejan Ilijic: First of all happy Fourth of July to you and to all the listeners in the United States and to all the listeners around the world. Now about my music; well I’m happy to start with a career that’s an all piano album and with the album that we made together. I have now two more solo piano albums in the future and I hope you and me will work together; I don’t know. It’s important to me that I continue with great music and have fun.
Dr. Kent: Me too and the album I Am Here is a very different thing than your solo piano albums. Do you like all kinds of music?
Dejan Ilijic: Yes, I grew up with pop rock bands like U2, and then I did classical training. I think music is one beautiful thing and why not play all of the different stuff.
Dr. Kent: So I’m running out of time here, but I’m going to start the track Mome again and we’ll listen to a little bit of Dejan Ilijic’s music. It’s been a real honor chatting with you on the show and I’ll have you on many more times I hope to play our music and your music. Dejan Ilijic has some albums out, if you go to his website ilijicdejan.com or if you go to www.ninetyandninerecords.com you’ll find information about our album together. What are you doing to celebrate the American Independence Day this evening?
Dejan Ilijic: Well I don’t know. It’s our anniversary, my girlfriend and me, seven years and ten months, so we will celebrate that.
Dr. Kent: Seven years and ten months?
Dejan Ilijic: Yeah at least I think it is.
Dr. Kent: Very nice and what’s your next project? What are you working on ri