Mark David Gerson, Author of The Voice of the Muse: Answering the Call to Write

June 4, 2009 | Leave a Comment

Dr. Kent:  Welcome back to Sound Authors.  It’s my pleasure on this show to have my next guest, Mark David Gerson, and he is a Twitter friend of mine, and we’ve tweeted back and forth a good bit. If you know me well, I’m a big twitterer, or tweeter, as it will, and Mark David Gerson has written a book called The Voice of the Muse: Answering the Call to Write.  Welcome to the show, Mark.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mark David Gerson:  Good.

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

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

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

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

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

Mark David Gerson:  A pleasure Kent, thank you.

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

Posted by admin | Filed Under Publishing, TRANSCRIPTS, AUTHOR INTERVIEW, PODCAST 

Mark K. Updegrove, Author of Baptism by Fire: Eight Presidents Who Took Office in Times of Crisis

June 3, 2009 | Leave a Comment

Dr. Kent: Welcome back to Sound Authors.  My next guest on the show is Mark K. Updegrove, and his book came out on St. Martin’s Press in January, and it’s called Baptism by Fire: Eight Presidents Who Took Office In Times of Crisis.  And that really couldn’t be a better title for right now, Baptism by Fire. So hopefully we’ll talk a little bit about our current president.  Welcome to the show, Mark Updegrove.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mark K. Updegrove:  No question about it.

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

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

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

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

Kathryn Lasky, Author of One Beetle Too Many: The Extraordinary Adventures of Charles Darwin

June 2, 2009 | Leave a Comment

Dr. Kent:  Welcome to Sound Authors!  Today is a stormy day in New York, there’s thunder and lightening all around.  It’s a great day for being on the radio.  I have four guests on the show today, three authors and one musician, as always. At the end of the show will be musician Janet Paschal, and she’s got a new album out called Treasure.  Before that I’ve got three authors, I’ve got Mark David Gerson, and he’s got a book that’s in the fantasy fiction category, and I’d love to talk to him about that.  Mark Updegrove is a former Newsweek editor, and I’ll be talking with him about Baptism by Fire: Eight Presidents Who Took Office in Times of Crisis, and of course that applies today.  And my first guest on the show is Kathryn Lasky, and she’s a children’s author.  And without further ado, I’d love to chat with her, she’s on the line right now.  Welcome to the show, Kathryn.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kathryn Lasky:  Well, first of all I have to tell you this story.  It took Darwin 20 years to write Origin of Species.  It took me 24 years to write this book.  I started this book years ago. I wrote, obviously, many in between. But I was in Cambridge, Massachusetts, very close to Harvard College, and when my daughter was about two I thought, “I’ve just got to get out of the house, I’m being driven crazy with diapers, and little kids running around.” So I hired a babysitter and what I did was, I walked over to Harvard.  It was only about a five minute walk from my house to the Science Center Lecture Hall, and I sat in and I audited the course of Stephen Jay Gould, who was the great evolutionary biologist. So that’s how it began.  And I started just educating myself.  From that course I went on and I audited another one that David Taube gave, who’s a paleoanthropologist on human evolution. So I just started putting all this together.  I just think, I know some people look at the stars and they wonder about the origins of the universe, they’re looking out into space. And I just started looking right on earth.  As a matter of fact, that was the name of the Stephen Jay Gould course, it was called Life on Earth.  So that’s when I started, but it was a bumpy road to getting the book out, that’s all I can say.  I won’t even bore you with the details.  But I’m very pleased.  I just want to say, the illustrations, which I did not do, but the wonderful Matthew Trueman did, are just fabulous.  I mean, they’re just beyond belief, and the critics have just raved about these illustrations. He just went and broke new ground with the illustrations as a medium.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dr. Kent: You are a brave human being.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted by admin | Filed Under History, Science, Childrens, TRANSCRIPTS, AUTHOR INTERVIEW, PODCAST 

Interview with Musician Susan Oetgen of Likeness to Lily

June 1, 2009 | Leave a Comment

Dr Kent: What a great tune, False Hopes, from the album Farewell, Recruit, and the band is called Likeness to Lily. Welcome to the show, Susan, I’m going to say your name incorrectly.  Why don’t you tell me how to say it.

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

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

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

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

Susan Oetgen: The band? Likeness to Lily?

Dr Kent: Yes.

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

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

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

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

(music)

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

Susan Oetgen: Hi.

Dr. Kent: How are you doing?

Susan Oetgen: I’m good, I’m good.

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

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

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

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

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

Susan Oetgen: Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

Susan Oetgen: Thanks so much.

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

(music)

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

Posted by admin | Filed Under TRANSCRIPTS, Experimental, Folk, Classical, MUSICIAN INTERVIEW, Jazz, PODCAST 

« Previous Page