Alison Sawyer | Animal Kindred Spirit Award Winner & Author of No Urn for the Ashes

March 21, 2009 | Leave a Comment

Dr. Kent:  Welcome back to Sound Authors!  It’s my pleasure to welcome my next guest on the show.  Her name is Alison Sawyer, she’s a writer and she’s the operator of the unofficial humane society of Isla Mujares in Mexico.  She received the Doris Day Animal Kindred Spirit Award in 2005 and I can’t wait to talk with her about her brand new book, No Urn for the Ashes, a novel by Alison Sawyer Currant.  Welcome to the show.

Alison Sawyer:  Thanks a lot!

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

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

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

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

Dr. Kent:  Tell me about that.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Alison Sawyer:  Oh yes!  I just fed them!

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

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

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

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

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

Alison Sawyer:  You too!

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

Alison Sawyer:  I’d love to!

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

Posted by admin | Filed Under History, Travel, TRANSCRIPTS, Fiction, AUTHOR INTERVIEW, PODCAST 

Joseph Flynn, Author of The President’s Henchmen, Digger & The Next President

March 21, 2009 | Leave a Comment

Dr. Kent:  Welcome back to Sound Authors!  My next guest on the show is the author of The Presidents Henchmen.  It’s a thriller; he’s written the books Digger and the Next President in the past.  Welcome to the show Joseph Flynn.

Joseph Flynn:  Hello.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dr. Kent:  How much do you write?

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

Dr. Kent:  Do you write linearly or explosively?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Joseph Flynn:  Thanks very much!

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

Posted by admin | Filed Under TRANSCRIPTS, History, Politics, Fiction, AUTHOR INTERVIEW, PODCAST 

Sound Authors Radio Show Releases Interview of Award Winning Sara Watkins on www.blogtalkradio.com/soundauthors

March 9, 2009 | Leave a Comment

Blog Talk Radio network broadcasting Sound Authors, a live interview talk radio show, features Grammy Award Winning Sara Watkins
Best known as part of the Grammy award winning trio Nickel Creek, Sara is finally stepping out on her own, with an album that features both original material as well as a few classic renditions. Her solo-debut album is out April 7 on Nonesuch.  The album was produced by John Paul Jones (Led Zeppelin) and features guest appearances by many amazing musicians ~ Gillian Welch and Dave Rawlings, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers keyboardist Benmont Tench and Elvis Costello drummer Pete Thomas, as well as her Nickel Creek bandmates Chris Thile and Sean Watkins.
Sound Author’s host Dr. Kent Gustavson had the pleasure of interviewing Sara on the February 27th, 2009 show. This podcast and all archived podcasts can be searched from the Sound Authors website at www.soundauthors.com/category/podcast.
Each Friday at 3PM Eastern Standard Time, Sound Authors radio show features live interviews and readings from all varieties of authors, known and not-yet-known; all soon-to-be bestselling authors from all walks of life, from Hollywood actors to marathoners, to PhD therapists or life coaches.
Tune in next week, March 6th, 2009 to hear Frank Romano speak about his latest book, Storm Over Morocco. Romano gives an engrossing account of his journey to Morocco and the implications of his African experience for his spiritual self. Frank’s motivation to visit Morocco came after he went blasé on the ostentatious bustle of Parisian life and its dry intellectual themes. His observation of a couple of Moroccan servants in Paris sparked Frank’s interest in their religion and culture. This led him to seek a universal truth that will bring peace to mankind, and the young Parisian fled the chains of a passionate romance to set out for Morocco with the words of a Muslim servant in his heart.
Sound Authors radio show each week is replete with authors from around the country and around the world, each telling their tales, from self-help to fiction, children’s books to thrillers, how-to books to corporate guidebooks.
Original music is also featured, along with up-and-coming bands and singer-songwriters. Listen for musician interviews and fresh music each week! No need to run out to your nearest bookstore to find the next great book or CD. Tune in to Sound Authors every Friday at 3PM EST on Blog Talk Radio at http://www.blogtalkradio.com. The show also podcasts each interview separately, and all archived podcasts can be searched from the Sound Authors website at www.soundauthors.com or www.blogtalkradio.com/soundauthors .  Sound Authors - where authors sound off!
Sound Authors Host Dr. Kent Gustavson’s background is in music, but his career has been in publishing. He is the owner of an independent book publisher, and a publishing consultant around the world. His many CDs and his book are available from his website online, or through the Sound Authors website.

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Sound Authors
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amber@soundauthors.com

Posted by amber | Filed Under PRESS RELEASES 

Karen Brody | Live on Sound Authors

March 2, 2009 | Leave a Comment

Dr. Kent:  Welcome back to Sound Authors!  My next guest on the show today is birth activist Karen Brody.  Her latest book called Birth is based on her play and it deals with all sorts of issues with being born.  Welcome to the show Karen Brody.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You wouldn’t have seen that when I wrote my play, now you’re starting to see people saying actually due to medical intervention there are a significant number of women experiencing birth trauma.  I heard it again and again in the trenches with mothers on the playground and I thought something is wrong.  These are intelligent women, these are women who are educated and have access to good options.  They should have access to good options.  They have the money it takes empowering child birth class or whatever it is and yes, you’re hearing some horrible stories and its too many women I thought had these stories so I wanted to write about it.

Dr. Kent:  It’s been a hot political topic talking about mother’s rights in situations of rape or with talk about abortion and the rights of the mother versus the rights of the child.  It seems like its been an issue since the day the world started.

Karen Brody:  Well reproductive rights absolutely has been, unfortunately for some reason childbirth doesn’t get up there in ranking.  Everyone will go rally Washington on abortion issues but whose rallying Obama and Washington right now about childbirth?  There’s a big push for midwives.  They are finally doing a really wonderful job at mobilizing people to start speaking out and we’ve got to start changing the model of care of how we treat maternity care but for the most part reproductive rights have been big buzzwords, but childbirth doesn’t rank up there.

Dr. Kent:  Huh; what’s your goal with your company, which is Bold Action?

Karen Brody:  The boldaction.org and the goal I mentioned is really to mobilize communities so that they will take action and educate their community members about maternity care and to tell the truth.  We have to start telling the truth about the care so our cornerstones are education, truth and action.  Do we really want people to start figuring out, learning what is happening today, and I in childbirth through my play the reason I didn’t initially write a book is because I felt who’s going to read it?  Maybe a few birth activists would read it but I wanted to get these ideas out to a more mainstream audience and also wanted to take a different medium like theater which is much less threatening.  My grandmother wouldn’t pick up a book about the childbirth crisis but she would go to the theater and see a play on birth if her granddaughter said hey come with me and that’s been a transformative experience for many people because story telling has a long history of people retaining that information and taking it with them.  Stories can live on in people more so than statistics.

Dr. Kent:  Tell me about the success of the play, the whole process of putting this on and then also about your work with women’s groups around the world.

Karen Brody:  Well the play has sort of an organic following, meaning I wrote the play and it initially had been reading the play in Washington DC where I had written it and really didn’t tell many people about the first reading and that night it was a very cold winter night in December over 100 people showed up to a space that seated 30-35 people.  That showed me and that was without I mean there was no marketing or publicity; it was word of mouth, with the internet people can send an email saying hey why don’t you come?

Mothers, fathers, packed into a theater where we did a reading of the play, babies in swings, everything.  In there really because they felt passionate about this; finally somebody’s written about this, finally something creative like a play is showing the truth about maternity care.  So from there it really just took off because again the interest in it is unbelievable in terms of studying information and I started getting emails from all over the US at first saying that we want to do this in our community.

People started bringing it to their communities about six productions happened initially the first year and the second year I decided to start an organization called Bold; boldaction.org and that organization was from then on people did it under the auspices of bold which is to raise money and awareness about maternity care.  Kind of what V-day does with the vagina monologues, it’s very similar.  That’s the mission and from then on we had over 100 performances of the play and raised over $150,000 in the last couple of years.

Dr. Kent:  Just flipping through the book it’s a lot about conversations, a lot about people and actual stories, how do you feel working within that medium?

Karen Brody:  The book is eight stories.  I did pick eight women who I had interviewed out of these 118 women total.  So eight women I thought were typical of what’s happening in childbirth.  I chose their stories with a little creative license to make it more for the stage.  That’s the play; the play is these women telling their stories.  The stories range from a woman who has a planned c-section to a woman who doesn’t want any drugs in the hospital and has a range of stories.

Dr. Kent:  It’s such a fascinating topic.  You list on your website among many other things one woman dies every minute worldwide in pregnancy and childbirth related causes and it’s something we don’t often think about.  We heard a lot in elementary school talking about the old west but we don’t think about it happening these days.

Karen Brody:  We have to be careful about those types of statistics because those types of statistics often scare women about childbirth.  Its not risky, childbirth the problem with those statistics and everyone says oh when I have my baby, here’s this low risk woman, the likelihood you’re going to die is very low and if you go to the hospital the likelihood you have interventions and not a good experience is high because of the intervention medically.  So people have to be aware.  Women were dying in childbirth during the frontier days because there weren’t adequate supplies; there weren’t all these things that women are still dying of in third world countries.  That’s why the statistic was so high.

Dr. Kent:  So how about this in conclusion my father is a developmental pediatrician and deals with a lot of kids after birth, so I don’t know a whole lot about the birthing process but I do know he said that there’s certain things that happen the more children that women have and I recall in working in the middle east a couple of my young students said oh yeah I have 20 siblings or 15 siblings.  Around the world there’s a big difference between having two or three kids than 20 or 25.

Karen Brody:  That’s not really the point of my book but that is an issue and certainly I think in the US you’ve got to think of the 30% or higher cesarean rate; to have major abdominal surgery three times or more is extremely risky for women.  The more surgeries you have the higher risk you become and its very serious for women to be having two, three, four cesareans and that’s what’s happening in this country because we have something called VBAC, vaginal birth after cesarean that is being denied to women in hospitals today, not every hospital, but the American College of Gynecologists and Hospitals put out guidelines that made it very hard for hospitals to adhere to those guidelines and therefore their not allowing women who had one cesarean to have a vaginal birth the second time.

We’re more or less forcing women to have major abdominal surgery if they want more than one child if the first one was cesarean.  So if women want three children, they need three surgeries. We’ve got to think about that.  That is a HUGE cost to women; or you just got to stop having babies.  I mean it’s no joke it really isn’t and I think people who see the statistics and that’s why I wrote the play because you see 30% over 30%, no you want to hear the stories of how women are really being treated in maternity care and through that you see what needs to change.

Dr. Kent:  Give me a sound byte about your work and I know we can find out more at boldaction.org.  Tell me more.

Karen Brody:  My work is the play and it started a global movement to make maternity care mother friendly so there are more communities that want to be involved and now we do red tents which is such an inspiration to many communities that we were finally telling women’s birth stories that the communities wanted to tell their own birth stories.  So women are gathering all over the world to have gold-red tents and tell their birth stories.

Dr. Kent:  It’s a beautiful book, it’s called Birth by Karen Brody and it’s available across the web or in the stores.  Of course we should check out boldaction.org and go see a play nearby.  Thank you so much for chatting with me Karen Brody.

Karen Brody:  Thank you

Dr. Kent:  My next guest on the show is a musician.  He has a wonderful sound; sometimes strings, sometimes electronics.  His name is Dan Goldman and I’m going to play a short little bit of his music before we talk to him live about it.  This is a song called LeMetro.  I’m sure I slaughtered that French pronunciation but this is a song by Dan Goldman.

Posted by admin | Filed Under History, Health, Medicine, TRANSCRIPTS, AUTHOR INTERVIEW, PODCAST 

Sound Authors Radio Show Releases Interview with Dr. Allan Hamilton on www.blogtalkradio.com/soundauthors

March 2, 2009 | Leave a Comment

Blog Talk Radio network broadcasting Sound Authors, a live interview talk radio show, features award winning Dr. Allan Hamilton.

Based on thirty years experience as a Harvard-educated brain surgeon, Dr. Hamilton’s book, The Scalpel and the Soul tells the unspoken stories behind remarkable patients and strange events, and shares the moral and spiritual lessons found in them. Doctors are trained to disregard the inexplicable and the unbelievable. They push aside the powers of the soul, and the healing forces of belief. In this book, Dr. Hamilton shares a rare glimpse of how the spiritual and the supernatural manifest themselves even in the high-tech world of 21st century intensive care units or operating rooms.
Sound Author’s host Dr. Kent Gustavson had the pleasure of interviewing Dr. Hamilton on the February 20th, 2009 show. This podcast and all archived podcasts can be searched from the Sound Authors website at www.soundauthors.com/category/podcast.
Each Friday at 3PM Eastern Standard Time, Sound Authors radio show features live interviews and readings from all varieties of authors, known and not-yet-known; all soon-to-be bestselling authors from all walks of life, from Hollywood actors to marathoners, to PhD therapists or life coaches.
Tune in next week, February 27th, 2009 to hear author Bob Cesca speak about his latest book, ‘One Nation Under Fear’. In post-9/11 America, authoritarians and politicians are happily leaning on the panic button for fun, profit, and the ongoing oppression of a frightened populace. This timely book examines that fear: where it came from, how it’s promoted, and what can be done about it. Bob Cesca hits a bracingly wide range of targets — the right-wing noise machine, climate change deniers, creeping fascism from the Bush White House — before presenting a sober, sensible plan for fighting and overcoming this potentially irreversible trend.
Sound Authors radio show each week is replete with authors from around the country and around the world, each telling their tales, from self-help to fiction, children’s books to thrillers, how-to books to corporate guidebooks.
Original music is also featured, along with up-and-coming bands and singer-songwriters. Listen for musician interviews and fresh music each week! No need to run out to your nearest bookstore to find the next great book or CD. Tune in to Sound Authors every Friday at 3PM EST on Blog Talk Radio at http://www.blogtalkradio.com. The show also podcasts each interview separately, and all archived podcasts can be searched from the Sound Authors website at www.soundauthors.com or www.blogtalkradio.com/soundauthors .  Sound Authors - where authors sound off!
Sound Authors Host Dr. Kent Gustavson’s background is in music, but his career has been in publishing. He is the owner of an independent book publisher, and a publishing consultant around the world. His many CDs and his book are available from his website online, or through the Sound Authors website.

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

Posted by amber | Filed Under PRESS RELEASES 

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