Interview with Davy Liu | Sound Authors Radio

December 9, 2008 | Leave a Comment

Dr. Kent: Welcome to Sound Authors! Today is Friday, August 22, 2008. The Olympics are still going on. That’s my favorite pastime; I can’t get away from it, I watch every second of the day. I have four guests on the show, three authors and one musician as always. My first guest will be Davy Liu and he has a wonderful children’s book that is incredibly filled with art and all of that. My second guest on the show is Lillian Brummet. She is going to speak to me about her book Trash Talk. My third guest will be James D. Stein and that is for a book called How Mass Explains the World, A Guide to the Power of Numbers; that’s fun. My fourth guest will be Carolyn Solobelo from Red Molly, an amazing folk and bluegrass group. So my first guest on the show today is Davy Liu. He has extensive experience in artwork straight out of school. He went to work at Disney Animation Studio on Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, and the Lion King but his own work is very powerful. He has written a book called Fire Fish. It’s gorgeous and he’s got some films and books coming out in the near future. Welcome to the show Davy.

Davy Liu: Thank you very much.

Dr. Kent: Tell me a little bit about what are you working on now?

Davy Liu: I’m working on the third book, which is the donkey’s perspective of Jesus Christ.

Dr. Kent: The donkey’s perspective?

Davy Liu: Yes, the third book yeah. It’s pretty much the farm animal perspective of Jesus Christ because every year in the Jewish tradition they had to sacrifice an elderly animal but when Jesus came and was crucified and died on the cross there was no sacrifice needed so this group of animals wonders why this year their older son isn’t needed. So they want to find out who died for their son.

Dr. Kent: All of your books are about animals. Where did you develop your love of animals and telling these stories?

Davy Liu: I grew up with pets. I love the animals. Where I come from we can have monkeys for pets. I grew up in Taiwan and had a monkey for a pet and we get all kinds of exotic animals. So I grew this really strong dialogue with animals as a child and I’m in America and I couldn’t speak English so I could only live in my own world so I developed my own kind of visual communications. What if this were to speak languages and if we just understood things through pictures so when I was 13 I was taught doing all these drawings and I worked at that.

Then when I worked at Disney that kind of just was in tune with working with pictures and telling a story from the animals’ perspective. So it was actually very helpful that it was a language I could communicate around powerfully with animals’ thoughts because some of us as humans are kind of the same way. Animals just don’t talk, that’s all.

Dr. Kent: I’ve read the book Fire Fish, which is visually just stunning. How do you as an illustrator make artwork pop so well in an illustrated children’s book?

Davy Liu: For me again, working with Disney and Lucas Films, my role was always production design, which is the picture has to speak 1,000 words and not so much the actors speaking their lines. So visually it has to be very attractive. So all the books I created hopefully can find investors to admit to the quality of the final productions going to look. So I created each book pretty much pre-production design of what a movie package may be so you may see my book and a lot of kids say, wow, is this a movie? That’s exactly the idea; it’s not like making more for illustrations, making more for like a future animated movie film.

Dr. Kent: In all of your books have a theological message but their told through the eyes of the animals. So talk a little bit about that and how you got into that?

Davy Liu: For their first one, which I did the first one called The Giant Leaf, which is an animal perspective of Noah’s Ark. I kind of started with the book of Genesis chapter 6 because God called all the animals to come to Noah and I’m going like boy, that’s pretty daring. Even the animal has to listen to God and they have to take a giant leap of faith and really find the savior vessel, which is Noah’s ark. But for them it’s got to be, you know I have a cat and she’s afraid of the living daylights when I run my vacuum cleaner. I don’t even need to turn it on and she runs.

I’m thinking this big vessel and what was this things impact force when Noah took 120 years to build and what did the animals really think of what this things going to do? He was probably destroying their forests so I took that and started bouncing off and created the whole entire series basically hopefully to really draw not just kids but the theology of understanding I mean who God is. God really doesn’t think the way we think. And if we go and try to understand God through the animals then we can understand Noah’s Ark. So that’s what the Giant Leaf came from because God really put things in fair organic form and the great news is that God came as a human. He didn’t come as a UFO or a superpower being, he came as one of us humans; very humble as a baby on the manger.

So the whole entire story is the same thing with Noah and the Noah’s Ark story. He displayed a message of salvation through a giant leaf that’s floating in the water. My story happened to have dinosaurs because they were the slave driver. They oppressed them and they beat all the mammals on the ground. And all the animals want to do one day is live free from the masters. So that was where the idea came from. All the animals wanted to be free from this big giant and they had no idea this giant flood was coming. So all the animals had these dreams and they just have to leave and forsake their comfort place and they have to go find this giant leaf. Eventually they went north and saw this monster with a big mouth and the three main characters who were hitchhiking to this leaf; a monkey, a fox, and a koala bear are kind of puzzled and thinking why would they go in there all by themselves?

So eventually the flood came and they realized the only salvation was that animal eater so they went inside it and didn’t realize it was the best party in the world in this monster that Noah created to believe. I took that and just went on to different series which is Fire Fish and now Jordan’s Guest, which is the donkey’s guest, who is Jesus.

Dr. Kent: Tell me a little bit about when you say okay I need to breathe some life into this donkey, how do you go about doing that?

Davy Liu: Breathing life into the donkey I would say that very much would be a personal thing. I feel like I’m kind of that donkey because being Chinese growing up in a culture where my academic just doesn’t excel. I mean I had a C minus average (C-) throughout my entire academics and thanks to my parents who saved me and brought me to America where I could at least have a crutch saying that I don’t speak English so therefore I have a right to get bad grades.

That worked for about four or five years until I graduated from college and then I went to art school. So living in that culture where everybody’s grade point average is maybe 4.0 I was just a loser you know? I had no purpose and the one thing that I love is art. Somehow because I realized that was a gift that God has given me and I’m able to live freely and just enjoy that. So Jordan the donkey is the same thing. The donkey was tied in the yard and all the barn animals like the sheep, the cow, the camel and the horses, they all have a purpose, and basically this donkey is tied in the middle of the barn.

All the tourists that come to Jerusalem want to ride the horses and the camel to go see Jerusalem. They certainly don’t want to ride the short legged donkey but at the end of the story this donkey was used for The Savior and then the donkey became so famous he became the donkey that everybody wants to come and see when the donkey was the secondary character. I think because the story is not so much the donkey because it’s not who you are, if God uses you you’re wise and radiant. Like there’s no tomorrow in how God can use you and that’s what I did. I said, God I don’t have much I just have this artistic gift and I want to just serve You and just glorify You. Not to be preachy but I want people to know that He really loves humanity in a big way.

Dr. Kent: So you grew up Chinese you said in was it Thailand?

Davy Liu: Taiwan.

Dr. Kent: In Taiwan and you’ve been back to China and you lead tours. Is that correct?

Davy Liu: Oh many years yeah. I paint so I do a China tour every October we go to China and I love China. I mean I just love the people there.

Dr. Kent: What do you think about the Olympics there?

Davy Liu: Oh I think it’s awesome and the Chinese went over the top to run a show its like look at us, you know? That’s great. Good for them. It’s really going to be tough to top that one, whoever gets handed the next baton of an Olympic opening, that’s a tough one to top. I know they poured millions and millions of dollars of their own money just to impress and that’s because they can.

Dr. Kent: That opening ceremony was pretty amazing and quite artistic actually.

Davy Liu: Oh really good. The director, the movie director ### is really amazing with visual stunning stuff so they did a good job.

Dr. Kent: Let’s talk a little bit about your career, where you want to go and what your next projects are. You told us about the book from the donkey’s perspective but what else are you working on?

Davy Liu: Basically I own the preproduction company called Kendu Films and what we do is we pretty much do preproduction design for other companies. But my dream is hopefully that we get enough; we’ve got a broker now and we’re trying to get the first book, The Giant Leaf, which you can get on Amazon also, to go on to a movie. I wrote this thing when I was working on The Lion King and I wrote it as a movie script first. So I want to keep going with the series because I think in Hollywood right now they lack a lot of strong content and what I want to continue to do is produce excellent family entertainment content so that hopefully our culture will be impacted by it.

My passion is really not to create another Pixar. I think our culture needs to have a very strong value on human rights and that human right comes from God. It’s not because humans say so and that value is based on who God thinks we are and I’d like to continue that kind of strong based belief in our system, especially in America. We’re losing that kind of value so my goal is to continue to keep doing every single book from the bible from the animal perspective. My goal is to finish the twelve books and hopefully by then we’ve got some kind of movie film going and an ongoing thing in the pop culture. Again my passion is not to cater this thing to Christians or anybody that believes in my theories, I just want to allow them to enjoy from a new perspective of who God is.

Dr. Kent: It seems fascinating and how will you find all the rest of the animals? Are there that many animals in the bible?

Davy Liu: Oh there are lots of animals! There are a lot. I’m doing a lion’s perspective of the Book of Daniel and a camel’s perspective of Apostle Paul when he got blind because he was a super murderer. I mean he was going around crucifying all the Christians and oppressed them and the camel witnessed this bright light. So that’s one and then I’m doing a whales perspective of Jonah. The whale had a hernia, swallowed Jonah and realized he’s got something really unique that he didn’t even realize he was swallowing in those big teeth of his.

Then we’re doing a mystical animal in the Garden of Eden and the animals are all going to look very bizarre in the Garden of Eden the first time they witness a human was created. They came and ruled the garden and they destroy the garden so there’s a lot of stuff in the bible. It’s really very exciting and then the Jordan story, I mean in the Old Testament God used a donkey that spoke to the prophet and say why are you hitting me? I mean that type of stuff is really stuff that’s a lot of humor that God really did enhance in the bible.

Dr. Kent: Well it’s been a fascinating discussion. Where can we find out about all your projects?

Davy Liu: You can go to kendufilms.com. At Kendu the main character is the giant leaf and also you can find all the projects I’m working on.

Dr. Kent: Well it’s been a real honor and I love what you do so I’ll keep checking it out.

Davy Liu: Thank you very much, I appreciate it.

Dr. Kent: Have a great day. Now my next guest on the show will be Lillian Brummet with her book Trash Talk: An Inspirational Guide to Saving Time and Money Through Better Waste and Resource Management. That will be interesting. Come on back for it.

Posted by admin | Filed Under Childrens, Comics, Art, TRANSCRIPTS, Spirituality, AUTHOR INTERVIEW, Inspiration, Religion, PODCAST

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.

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

Interview with Mary Brigid Barrett | Sound Authors Radio

November 24, 2008 | Leave a Comment

Dr. Kent: Welcome to Sound Authors. Its Friday, October 24th and a beautiful crisp day out here in New York and it’s a political show for a political season. I’ve got three guests on the show today. I’ll talk about the second two guests first and then I’ll welcome my first guest. I’ve got David Mendell on the show with his biography of Barack Obama called Obama: From Promise to Power. Now that’s a Washington Post Bestseller. Then I’ve got Nikki Grimes on the show with a book that’s also illustrated by Brian Collier called Barack Obama: Son of Promise, Child of Hope. And then at the beginning we’ll start out by talking about a book called Our White House: Looking In, Looking Out. It’s a wonderful collection created by 108 authors and illustrators and has an introduction by famous author and historian David McCullough and it’s my honor to welcome the person who had the idea for the book; Mary Brigid Barrett. Welcome to the show.

Mary Barrett: Well thank you for having me and I’m calling from Franklin, Massachusetts, the home of our country’s first public library.

Dr. Kent: Tell me about this book Our White House: Looking In, Looking Out.

Mary Barrett: It’s an absolutely beautiful book. I think if you have it in front of you that you can see how absolutely stunning it is. It’s a visual delight, it’s full of poetry, original stories, both historical fiction and non-fiction and absolutely breathtaking art. from the cover that David McCauley did all the way through to the last double page spread in the book where illustrator Bob Kohler has created this incredible presidential timeline that also acts as a game for young people and the adults in their lives to kind of open their eyes to kind of quiz you on presidential facts. So we cover over 200 years of American history looking inside the White House and looking outside into America.

Dr. Kent: Looking at the book, the wonderful front cover shows little people all over the front lawn of the White House dipping their fishing poles in the fountain’s water and running around and having picnics. Tell me about the illustrators and authors that are in the book and what inspired them to do all of this work?

Mary Barrett: The inspiration and original idea came to me from sort of two experiences I’ve had over the last couple of years. I had a wonderful opportunity to have a lunch with the historian you mentioned, David McCullough and his wife Rosalie down in Boston. It was during that conversation we talked about many things. We talked about our joint love as kids of historical fiction, specifically Robert Lawson’s wonderful books Ben & Me and Paul Revere & I, and especially how Lawson’s humorous and provocative pen and ink illustrations pulled us into these stories of Paul Revere and Benjamin Franklin.

Also during that conversation, David McCullough raised my awareness to the fact that our founding fathers and mothers adamantly believed that this great experiment of democracy was going to succeed only if all of our citizens young and old were both literate and informed. We discussed the direct link between literacy, historical literacy and civic engagements. Then also during the course of the last couple of years, because I’m head of the National Children’s Book and Literacy Alliance and I’m going to Washington a lot to advocate for kids and literacy and libraries, I found myself at the White House as a tourist, and also there’s the president of the NTDLA advocating for kids.

I had spoken and discussed these issues with both First Lady Clinton’s staff at the time and with Mrs. Bush and I’ve had the opportunity to be able to wander around the first floor of the White House and while you’re there, you do actually kind of hear the echoes of voices and footsteps in the hall. You’re being watched by all those incredible presidential portraits; the eyes of the former first ladies and the presidents looking at you and I kind of had the same feeling walking through the first floor of the White House as I did the first time I walked as a kid going into the main reading room of the Cleveland Public Library that this was my space. And that this was our house, the White House, it’s your house and my house.

It’s our house not just the president’s house. When this idea sort of formulated for the book, I had looked for a book, I had gone out there searching the bookstores in Washington. My three kids were in middle grades and high school at the time and I wanted to show this White House experience, this kind of feeling, the feelings of awe and wonder that you feel wandering through the halls of the White House and I couldn’t find that book. So coming home on the plane on one trip from Washington, putting together that conversation that had occurred with David McCullough and his wife Rosalie and my own experiences as a visitor to the white house sort of morphosized into this idea of Our White House: Looking In, Looking Out.

Of course, I couldn’t do the book alone so I first went to my fabulous NTBLA board of authors and illustrators Kevin Patterson and David McCullough who did the cover for the book. Steven Kellogg, Fred and Pat McKiznic, Patty McLaughlin, Nikki Grimes who you’re going to have on later and we talked about this idea of putting a book together. We wanted to reach out to our colleagues and thankfully they responded and went beyond the call of duty because it was not just a kind of an issue book that you would have with the environment that people would talk about their experiences as a kid loving the environment and could call upon their own experiences solely.

They really had to go out and do research to do these illustrations and to write the pieces in the book; the poetry and the stories for the book. When I started to contact them and Karen Lutz, our editor at Kendalwood Press, we started to call people and ask them to contribute. It was after 9/11 and I think people were very interested to do something to make our country a better place, to make the world a better place and to also start to raise the consciousness that we all have to be informed citizens if we’re going to be making decisions in the future. Why not start with our youngest citizens.

Dr. Kent: Wow and its such a huge book. It has so many illustrations. For grownup people like me, I love paging through it but what was your intention for a child picking this up? Of course, learning about the White House, learning about so many different perspectives on it. What was your take on should we educate our children more about the highest office?

Mary Barrett: I think number one we wanted to draw people into American history especially kids. So the book isn’t just full of serious things, the book is also full of wonderful entertaining moments. For example, Tobin Anderson wrote a great piece about the ghosts in the White House and he talks about Winston Churchill relaxing in a bath with a cigar and a glass of scotch and he steps out of the bathroom naked and begins to wander the halls of the White House and confronts the ghost of Abraham Lincoln.

Churchill startled him; and I’m reading directly from the book. Churchill startled but never at a loss for words tapped the ash of the end of his cigar and said, “Good evening Mr. President you seem to have me at a disadvantage.” I can’t think of what would be actually more startling a vision for the kids and parents and teachers reading the book, whether it would be the vision of the ghost of Abraham Lincoln wandering the halls or the vision of Winston Churchill standing there naked. Isn’t it great? So we want to draw the adults in with the kids, we want this to be a book that adults share with the young people in their lives and read together. We wanted to delight people and there’s a wonderful double page spread that the illustrator Steven Kellogg has done of all the presidential pats with the presidents and he’s even tucked in the corner.

It’s a delight for children from age six all the way to 20 will love it, but it’s also a delight for parents. Steven Kellogg has snuck in there that little bunny. do you remember that episode in President Jimmy Carters administration where a bunny kind of ran out to a boat that he was fishing on and he sort of like we’ll just say did something to the bunny as it was coming across the river and a lot of us older folk can remember that incident. Then when a child or young person finds that bunny in there and that illustration says, “What’s that bunny there for?” It allows the adult reader to share some of their memories of past presidents with the kids. There’s some really serious things in the book too.

One of the things we did was we purposely included in the book primary and secondary sources that contradict each other. So that in the beginning of the book we have a whole section about the War of 1812 and we were somewhat surprised when we gave the initial contributors of the book very large choices in what they were going to write and illustrate because we felt we were asking for such a major contribution of time that things work better when people are uploading some points of what their interest is and their passion. Kind of surprisingly many people wanted to address the War of 1812 and at first it was somewhat shocking because the war of 1812 is not one of the prominent areas of American history we all discuss in school but it was post September 11 and it was also sort of an interesting comment on the historical literacy level of our punditry class because after September 11 many of the news people on television would say that the only other time that our country had been attacked was at Pearl Harbor in World War II.

But our country had been attacked long before that during the War of 1812 when the British burned down both the White House and the Capital Building. If you go back and read primary sources at that time, the effect on the nation was just as profound as the effect that was on us after the twin towers came down. So I kind of wondered if there was a sort of subconscious recycling of history with so many contributors being interested in the War of 1812.

In the book there is a regular straight history piece on what happened during the War of 1812 by a Madison scholar and then there is a wonderful imagined letter, a creative letter written by Susan Cooper who was originally from the united kingdom and I asked her if she would write a letter giving us the perspective of the British soldier who set the white house on fire. We wanted to show those contradictory perspectives and then on doing research because I had to do a great deal of research for the book even before we asked contributors to come on board so we had an idea of the ebb and flow and where we were going with the book.

When all these contributors were intersected in doing pieces on the War of 1812 I did more research and come across a journal by a slave of the Madison Paul Jennings, who actually contradicts the Dolly Madison story of Dolly Madison saving the great Gilbert Stewart portrait of George Washington; actually sort of the legend has us visualizing her grabbing the portrait and running out of the house while its on fire. Paul Jennings actually witnessed what happened at the white house during that bad day and contradicts that legend of Dolly Madison. So we also included the legend of Dolly Madison so you have a wide variety of perspectives in primary and secondary sources.

We hope that parents and teachers use that in the book as a learning opportunity to talk about the fact that if we are going to look for an objective truth both in our history and contemporary history that we search, that we seek these different opinions, that we investigate these different stories and discuss these things out loud with each other in that search for objective truth. In the contemporary section of our White House, we also juxtapose some contradictory sources. We have an excerpt from Tim Russert’s Meet The Press interview of Vice President Chaney as to what enfolded on September 11 in the White House.

We also have an excerpt from the 9/11 commission report that contradicts some of the testimony and that Vice President Chaney shared during that Tim Russert interview. Again, we put it in the book and we have a website, ourwhitehouse.org that we just actually launched the first stage of and there we will have discussion questions and activities so that people cannot only use these two sections of the book, but the entire book and use it as a learning opportunity for the young people in their lives.

Dr. Kent: This book is made possible by your organization, the National Children’s Book and Literacy Alliance. Tell me a little bit more about that organization, where we can find out about that as well.

Mary Barrett: We have a home webpage at www.thencbla.org, and we’ve been established for about ten years. We’re an education advocacy organization. We believe that literacy is intrinsic to a healthy democracy and basically what we do is the website itself is an educational tool; we have all kinds of ideas and activities for parents, for teachers to get kids reading. Also get kids reading books and we also believe that you don’t fight the internet.

There are reading materials in abundance out there and it should be a part of all of our daily lives. The other thing we do is go to Washington, we speak to the congress and whoever is in that White House right now and tell them how much we care about reading and literacy with young people; how important education is to our nation’s future. How we need to keep funding school and public libraries and one of the things we’re going to be working on in the future is that in 47 states right now literature is not mandatory for elementary certification for teachers and it should be. So those are some of the other things that we work for besides being education advocates.

Dr. Kent: Well it’s been a real honor speaking with Mary Brigid Barrett and the book is called Our White House: Looking In, Looking Out. Has wonderful contributions from 108 authors and illustrators. It’s really a gorgeous book. We can go to ourwhitehouse.org and it’s been an honor having you on the show.

Mary Barrett: Thank you so much. It’s been a wonderful opportunity.

Dr. Kent: At the very end of the book there’s a picture by Leona Gore that has a picture of an empty chair and it says “The Big Chair to Fill” and it’s a great place to end the book and a great place to find out in a couple weeks how everything continues here in the elections.

Mary Barrett: You might want to check our website next week because at the end of the book I mentioned Bob Kohler’s double page spread where there’s a presidential timeline. In it you will see that there is a blank space next to our current President Bush. On our website to promote this engagement we are going to have two presidential candidates, Barack Obama and John McCain, where kids and parents and teachers will be able to download those stickers and we are going to encourage families and teachers to have young people read about the election in the newspapers next week and watch for the results and they will have the opportunity to finish Our White House: Looking In, Looking Out by placing the appropriate winning candidates sticker at the end of the presidential timeline in our book.

Dr. Kent: Wonderful. So ourwhitehouse.org. It’s been a real pleasure and we will check it all out.

Mary Barrett: Thanks so much!

Dr. Kent: My next guest on the show is David Mendell and he is the author of the biography of Barack Obama called Obama: From Promise to Power. We’ll talk to him in one minute, don’t miss it.

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

Interview with Laura Duksta | Sound Authors Radio

November 19, 2008 | Leave a Comment

Dr. Kent: Welcome back to Sound Authors. Today is July 11, 2008. The next guest I have on the show is Laura Duksta. She wrote a book called I Love You More. It was on the New York Times bestseller list for awhile. It’s a flipside book and on the front she says Flipside book, like love, it never ends. Today on the show Laura is going to be talking to us about her book and then at the end she’ll be speaking to us about her music as well, or we could mix it up a little bit. But this will be a great honor speaking to the author Laura Duksta of I Love You More. Welcome to the show.

Laura Duksta: Thank you Kent thanks for having me.

Dr. Kent: Tell me a little bit about the success this book has had.

Laura Duksta: I self published it to start off with. I was a bartender with no real good idea what to do with my life after graduating from college and one night I had the idea for this book where it kind of came to me as divine inspiration. I was saying a prayer for my sister and nephew and all of a sudden this idea just flooded my being.

It was one of those ideas that wasn’t going away so I decided to self publish it after I had sent it out to a few agents and a few publishers and got a handful of nos. We self published the book and we sold 179,000 copies. Then last year it got picked up by Source Books Jabberwocky, their new children’s imprint and they re-released it and now our numbers are up to I believe 250,000 and like you said we hit the New York Times bestseller list three times.

Dr. Kent: How do you do that with a self published book?

Laura Duksta: The numbers; like one of the things we were able to do as a self published author and the way that we did it we kind of remained under the radar so we were this best selling book that nobody knew about. Not nobody but this is one of the tips that I like to pass on to authors, one of the things that really resonated with me when I was learning about the process. They said one of the toughest, not worst places, but one of the toughest places to sell your book especially if you’re a self published author is a bookstore.

One self published authors they have the bookstores have so many books from the publishers that they already work with to deal with that its hard to get your title in there and then its hard to get seen, even when you’re with a publisher. So the advice that I heard was find your niche, consider who your market is and then find out where they are. It was really just another I think divine moment of inspiration or divine intervention I should say that had me go into a they actually happened to be the number one American craft gallery that year. Seldom Seen Gallery on Source Boulevard.

I walked my book in there with every ounce of courage I had and I said, “I have this book and I live down the street and would you like to carry it? He said, “Well I don’t really carry books.” And I said, “Oh, I just got an endorsement from Wayne Dyer,” he said, “I don’t really much like Wayne Dyer.” I was like well if you can just stick it with some of the other artists you have and he took a look at it and said “Okay, I’ll take ten copies just as long as if they don’t sell I can give them back to you.” I said no problem. Three days later he had sold the ten copies; it was like from Monday to Thursday. He took another 12, I know fully believing that I had sent my friends and family in to purchase those first ten. But he sold those 12 by Monday and then he called me and said how do these books come and I told him they came in cases of 40. He said bring me in 40 and come sit in my office.

He started giving me the names of gallery owners and gift shops across the country that were taking 40, 80, sometimes 160 copies at a time and selling this as one of the only books in their store. It’s just a really special message, one that parents want to share with their children; grandparents want to share with their children. And then because the title of my book I Love You More, people would say, oh my goodness that’s what my mother always used to say to me, and they would buy one for their 80 year old mother or 45 year old children. What was so ideal about this market for us was that people that would never end up in the children’s section of a bookstore were seeing our book and the title and the message and buying multiple copies and sharing our message and our book all over the world.

Dr. Kent: You talk about your message. What exactly is your message?

Laura Duksta: This is another one of the things that I kind of learned in self development, human potential world that I was studying was have a mission or a cause greater than yourself. Ever since I was a child I remember being like seven or eight years old. I felt this strong connection with St. Francis and somehow knew that I was meant to travel the world, meet my brothers, and spread the message of love.

So when we came up with the idea that we were going to self publish the book, I said alright lets create a vision that is so great that we can kind of live and play too so we created the mission of the possibility of generating the conversation of love around the world. That was another thing that really helped us sell the book when I was talking to store owners, I’d show up sometimes unexpected all over the country and I’d tell them we have this book and our mission is to generate the conversation of love around the world, they were really moved by that and I think they liked the book and the message and the illustrations are beautiful. So I think they got really excited about helping to bring that conversation of love into their stores, into the lives of their customers and then into the world.

Dr. Kent: So I’m intrigued by you say you had a connection to St. Francis and I believe isn’t he the fellow who in the middle of the church took off all his clothes, gave them back to his father and said “Now I’ve paid you back for what you’ve given me,” and went off into the woods and took care of people and animals? Is that the same guy?

Laura Duksta: Yeah it is and I like to sometimes say that I’m like; well I have to add more. Like St. Francis meets Wayne Dyer meets Dr. Seuss and I have to come up with some jet set gypsy multi-billionaire. Because I resonate with St. Francis though instead of walking the earth in my sandals I think I would like to be flying around in my private jet instead and I do believe that anything is possible, but yes he is the patron saint of animals. He was known for walking the world in his sandals but yeah a little bit crazy and I can’t say that I’m not.

Dr. Kent: Now I want to ask you at the very beginning of your website you explain that you don’t have hair. Obviously in all promotional pictures you proudly show yourself the way you are. What does that have to do with your message of love, the book itself, any of that?

Laura Duksta: One of the things I guess is I had the opportunity to do so many radio interviews, which are great. What your listeners can’t see is that as you said I have absolutely no hair. I have a condition or disease called alopecia arietta that I got when I was 11 years old. I had long brown hair waving down my back and my hair slowly started falling out to the point that I had none and had to wear wigs. I wore wigs for 19 years and never let anyone see me without a wig on. I just became very introverted and shy and probably very depressed.

It was after I had the idea for the book I kind of just out of nowhere and its ten years ago this week, my 30^th birthday I decided I wasn’t going to wear wigs anymore. I didn’t know how connected the book and its message and the decision to stop wearing wigs really was until I started to experience it. It really freed me up so much creatively. It gave me this experience no longer always wondering if people knew, when I was going to tell them, I hadn’t realized how much of my life was consumed by this almost like this thing I was keeping a secret.

So not only that but then I started going into schools to talk about my book, my mother was the kindergarten teacher I was like okay this is great I’m going to go and read my book in her classroom and the first thing that every five year old will say to you is “Hey lady, how come you have no hair?” so really quickly it began and the funny thing is what I realize is adults will sit there and wonder and they might not ask but you could talk to them for 30 minutes or three hours and they may not hear anything you say because they’re wondering is it cancer? Oh she’s so young; oh my sister had cancer without getting a question answered.

So I really turned my school programs into something that we call self esteem through love, empowering our children to shine. The first thing that I address is why I have no hair and that’s really important. Simple, though not always easy lesson to just be yourself but we learn from kindergarten and sometimes I really think we spend our whole lives learning to embrace.

Dr. Kent: You’re lucky you don’t really have any strange lumps on your head. I think if I didn’t have hair I would look pretty horrible but you have a good looking head.

Laura Duksta: Thank you. So many people say that and its kind of a joke in the bald community that you know God made a few perfect heads and the rest he put hair on. Who knew?

Dr. Kent: It also explains all the times your parents dropped you come out once you don’t have hair.

Laura Duksta: It’s been a real blessing.

Dr. Kent: Tell me a little about the movement. I know you have a web presence beyond your website lauraduksta.com. You have an expanding interest in helping people and things like that. How are you doing that?

Laura Duksta: The internet is so fascinating and I think one of the things that really helps is like what I said. I want to travel the world, meet my brothers and sisters and spread the message of love. Generate the conversation of love around the world. One day I’m sitting in front of my computer. I have a social network called cocreatingourreality.com and I’m sitting there and connecting with people all over the world and all of a suddenly realized that this isn’t exactly how I planned to travel the world and meet my brothers and sisters but how amazing the internet is that it can connect us as in your program with people from all over the world. It’s just a phenomenal entity.

So I have several websites and it’s just so brilliant that you can get your music out there, your message out there, products out there, people can download products in Australia if they’re interested in being an author. I’ve got transcripts and mp3s on self publishing and how to market your book successfully. As I said, I have an amazing community that I started with two other women called cocreatingourreality.com and we started that a few years ago and after the release of the secret and especially after their appearances on Oprah our community really took off and I would say we’ve got close to 2,000 members who are setting intentions, goals and co-creating the life of their dreams using universal laws and principles, which I really believe.

With how, generate the success of our book especially self published and now we’re with a publisher. A couple on MySpace, we got Lauradukstamusic and the I love you more book tour and we’ve also got lauraduksta.com and my illustrator has a website, we call ourselves hippie and the bald chick.

Dr. Kent: I was about to ask you about the hippieandthebaldchick.com website. That’s pretty fun. Can you talk about your illustrator? The illustrations are gorgeous of course. How did you end up teaming up to write this? She’s obviously your original illustrator?

Laura Duksta: Yes and she and I were friends from our bartending days in South Beach on Miami’s infamous Ocean Drive at the Clevelander Hotel. I had gotten the book done and one friend thought that he would illustrate it for me but his career really started taking off by the time I had it done and I was looking for a mutual friends name or number who I knew as an artist and Karen said, “Well, why? What do you have there?” I said, well I wrote this book about love and she said I remember as clear as day. “I might not be a famous artist but I know what love looks like to a five year old.”

She pulled out a bag of pastel chalks she’d gotten at yard sale for 50 cents and she said I’m sure if we sit down together we can do these pictures. She started drawing these beautiful pictures that do have this child-like quality and softness and beauty to them that are I believe are really genius; they’re just gorgeous. I kind of laughed like who would have thought after seven years of bartending that hippie and the bald chick would be sitting here writing a book about love.

Dr. Kent: The book itself is a flip book. You flip it over on the other side it also says I Love You More, it also says New York Times Bestseller and there’s a picture of you see the child and on the front cover you see the mother but it’s the same picture on the front and on the back. Where did you get that idea? Was that her idea, yours?

Laura Duksta: Yes this book was really a collaboration, one with spirit. Like I said I was praying for my sister and something clearly answered me and said your sister is fine, pray for your nephew. I began praying for my nephew. Well first of all I said that’s strange. But as I began praying for my nephew this whole idea for the book came to me and it was just all these different random ideas. I love you more than spaghetti and meatballs, I love you more than chocolate milk, and then gradually over the next few months, several months actually, I began to put it into a book format.

The first person that I showed it to after it was done and I was certain that it was fabulous. I showed it to my mom who was a kindergarten teacher for 38 years. She said honey its great and we argued and she says but; we argue that she says she said and, and she’s probably right, she said “And if you really want this young audience, teachers and parents to love this book it really should rhyme.” So when I first wrote the book it didn’t rhyme. I huffed and puffed a little bit but I went back to my office and rewrote it so that it rhymed and then I showed it to my sister who has four children.

So she had read a few children’s books in her life and she said oh this is a really great book but I think at the time it was called The Story Between A Mother And A Son, but it was just read like a regular book and every other page was mother, son, mother, son. She said I think this would make a really great flip book if you took out the son’s story and took out the mother’s story and have them meet in the middle. I thought it was a really great idea and will make the book unique. What I see with the students when I go into a classroom visit is that how many drafts, how many rewrites it actually took to get it to look just the way it does.

When my sister said this would make a really good flip book I had to pull out the two stories. That meant I had to go back and rewrite the entire book to make it rhyme again; that was how we made it a flip book. And then when we self published it, it actually had the exact same cover on the front and the back. Then together with our publisher we came up with the idea of putting the mothers face so that you see it on the front cover because its her sharing with her son or child how much she loves him or her and then when you flip it over it’s the child story so you see the child’s face. And that’s what the message of the book is, the story of a love shared between a mother and a child.

On the one side you’ve got the boy saying mommy, just how much do you love me? And she’d say things like I love you longer than the longest path ever wound; I love you prettier than the prettiest flower ever found and then when you flip the book over the mother asks the child, well just how much do you love me? He responds more childlike things like rocket ships, lollipops, kites and bubbles.

Dr. Kent: It truly is a beautiful book but lets talk a little about you have another life; well you have many lives. You can sell some self publishing and things like that. You’re a speaker of course, you talked about that. You’re also a musician and this show features authors of sound as well as sound authors. So I’d like to play an entire track from you called We Are One. Can you tell me a little about that song?

Laura Duksta: Thanks and I love the way you just phrased that. Authors of sound, that’s gorgeous. I’ve been trying to figure out singer/songwriter musical artist but artist of sound is beautiful. We Are One came about when you hear the words you will see that it really resonates with the message of generating the conversation of love around the world and really believing that we are all brothers and sisters and it’s a little bit of a wake up call to get back to that awareness.

Dr. Kent: Let’s listen to the entire track, We Are One, by Laura Duksta.

[Music 19:03 – 23:16]

Dr. Kent: There it was, We Are One by Laura Duksta. Tell me a little bit about your music career.

Laura Duksta: Actually this is just kind of getting, I’m still in the inquiry I guess really of what this next stage is going to look like. I have a company called I Shine Inc. As I said our mission is to generate the conversation of love around the world through books, music, speaking, TV, film and the web. So this is my first step into the music arena. I always had it in my heart when I was young and I wanted to sing and I think I actually remember an older and much cooler cousin of mine told me you don’t sing, you say the words.

I don’t even know if they said you can’t sing or you’re not a good singer, but I just kind of shut down that dream for a long time. Then a few years ago I said you know what? I think its time to revisit that. I wrote twelve songs, got into a studio, found an amazing group of partners that were producers that really helped me with the music and getting it out there and a little bit with my voice. We’re still working on that a little bit and I really wanted to create music with a message.

Not necessarily a children CD, I’d like to say our book is a book about love presented as a children’s book because it certainly is a children’s book but the message is for everyone. So a lot of people ask me about the music and ask me if it’s a children’s CD and I say no, its adult contemporary but its one you can listen to with your children. All of the songs have some sort of message about life, human potential and of course love.

Dr. Kent: Well it’s been a real pleasure speaking with you. The book is called I Love You More. Of course that’s been on the New York Times Bestseller list. Do you have any more books in the hopper? Are you thinking about writing some more?

Laura Duksta: Yes, Karen and I are doing another book together called Purple Potatoes, which doesn’t have a release date yet. And then I’ll be doing another book, the fourth book with Jabberwocky, which will be released next fall. Again it’s a children’s picture book but the message will certainly be for all my brothers and sisters.

Dr. Kent: Wonderful. I’d love to listen to one more track after we find out we can go to your website lauraduksta.com, and we can Google you on the web as hippie and the bald chick, there’s your MySpace page, there’s tons of things. What do you have planned in the near future? Are you on tour?

Laura Duksta: Well actually, this summer I have the next two months to write my next book that will be released next fall. So that’s first and biggest on my plate. Then really just stepping into looking at how to get my music and my message out to the world so I appreciate this opportunity you’ve just given me today.

Dr. Kent: We’re going to play one more track. Would you like to hear They Say or Expose?

Laura Duksta: They Say is a little dancey. So let’s show them that, this is good for dance music in the clubs and we’ve gotten a good response from that one.

Dr. Kent: Perfect; it’s been a pleasure speaking with Laura Duksta. Her website again is lauraduksta.com. Thanks for being on the show.

Laura Duksta: Thank you Dr. Kent have a bright and blessed lifetime.

Dr. Kent: This is They Say from Laura Duksta.

[Music 27:05 – 31:03]

Dr. Kent: Thanks for tuning in today to Sound Authors. It was a real pleasure speaking with John Straley, Peter Webb and Laura Duksta. Special thanks to Jody Walls, Amber Bean; see you next week.

Posted by admin | Filed Under TRANSCRIPTS, Childrens, Motivation, Folk, Fiction, AUTHOR INTERVIEW, MUSICIAN INTERVIEW, Inspiration, PODCAST

Interview with Jeanie Ransom | Sound Authors Radio

November 16, 2008 | Leave a Comment

Dr. Kent: Welcome back to Sound Authors. Today is the first day of summer and what do kids do in the summer? Hopefully they’re reading! I know a lot of kids are planted in front of the TV but we all wish that they were all reading these wonderful books. My next guest on the show, her name is Jeanie Ransom. She has a fantastic children’s book put out by Peachtree Publishers called What Do Parents Do When You’re Not Home and its hysterical, it’s built on a great premise, something we all wonder about. So welcome to the show Jeanie Ransom.

Jeanie Ransom: Well thank you very much it’s nice to be here great to be talking to you from lovely Ireland over here. It’s very green at the moment.

Dr. Kent: Tell me a little bit about where did this come out of? Did you have children? Did you think as a child what are your parents doing when you’re not at home?

Jeanie Ransom: Actually I have three boys and they give me some really good material and like many of my books the idea came out of something my one son said. He said why are you something about when they went to stay with grandma and grandpa what are you doing when we’re not here? It’s going to be so boring with us not here so that’s where it started from. The young boy in the story imagines what mom and dad are going to be doing when they are at grandma and grandpas, which it’s all G-rated of course.

Dr. Kent: The funny part of the title of course is that any one of us who reads the title starts laughing hysterically because we have a special secret that our children really don’t know, right?

Jeanie Ransom: Yes that is true.

Dr. Kent: And that’s part of like you’re building a myth just like the story. I really love it. Tell me a little about your children’s books. This isn’t the only one you’ve written, you’ve written several; a story about divorce. You tend to write things that are very useful for children. Talk a little about that.

Jeanie Ransom: Yeah, I have. I tend to write humor books and then since I’m a counselor I also write self help books for kids. So it’s kind of a mix between funny books and practical books. So a little humor and a little just regular everyday serious topics that kids have to deal with, like divorce as you were saying.

Dr. Kent: When did you first start doing the children’s books?

Jeanie Ransom: I’ve been writing for a very long time. But so much for kids, you know a lot of people start writing for kids and I started thinking oh, I can write a children’s book and I did and that’s when I started my standards as a writer or whatever and reading those books over and over somehow I could write one of these. It’s got to be really easy and I found out its not real easy. You can write them but to get it published is pretty hard in the children’s market.

Dr. Kent: One of the fascinating things about the children’s market for me is that books have to have wonderful text and rich text but the book really won’t sell without a good illustrator. How did you find an illustrator that could express your ideas?

Jeanie Ransom: Well I’m very fortunate. I can’t draw; I am advanced at stick figures so my publisher finds the illustrator for me and I get three different publishers and was just very fortunate that they’ve found someone that clicked with the text. You kind of just let the illustrator go and do their job and hope that its going to be the very best it can be so I’ve gotten very lucky.

Dr. Kent: Talk a little about, you’re also a counselor, you visit schools, and you think about children’s book publishing in a different way than many children’s authors do. This is something where it gives you an opportunity to get into a child’s world. So talk a little about that.

Jeanie Ransom: You’re right; I’m a counselor as well so I visit schools a lot of children’s authors do visit schools but I think that working with kids therapeutically, you do get into their world and you want to write about things that matter to them and help them. It’s kind of my goal. Like the divorce book.

I wasn’t a counselor before I wrote it, I just knew that I couldn’t find a book that I liked for my niece because my sister was getting divorced. I looked and looked but I couldn’t find something that was simple and dealt with the feelings that kids go through so I wrote the book and it’s been a really good one. So if I can help one kid with my books, that’s what it’s all about for me.

Dr. Kent: Talk about in this world, it’s so funny. I watch the TV and see these ads that have books that talk to your children for you and then they’ve got children’s video games that are supposed to be good for mind development and I can’t help thinking that one of the best things for my childhood were these children’s books, what’s your opinion on that.

Jeanie Ransom: I agree. Growing up that was the best thing. In the summer you would go to the library, fill up a bag with books and you go home and read them and go back in a week and fill it up again. That’s the way I grew up and my husbands a reader. My kids are readers and in fact we’re on vacation now and we all visited the book store at least once to get some more books. I think if parents are reading they set a good example for their kids. I know there’s so many distractions like the computer and video games like you said and all those kind of things. We’re missing something.

Dr. Kent: What do you do when you go into a school and there are kids that are used to having video games and here you’re a children’s author. What is it, are they excited? Are they stimulated?

Jeanie Ransom: Yeah they are very excited because they get to see if they know about authors, they learn about illustrators and it doesn’t matter really if you’re a famous author or just an every day author. Just the fact that you wrote a book; there’s something magical about that to them. Even in this as we say jaded video game society. The kids really get excited especially because at school they’ve been learning how to read and write so they kind of understand the whole process. But to see someone that’s actually done it. That’s big stuff and it can make a really big impact on them.

Dr. Kent: Tell me about all your books. You’ve got; I Don’t Want To Talk About It, Grandma U, Don’t Squeal Unless It’s a Big Deal, and that’s a book about tattletales; but tell me about all of those books.

Jeanie Ransom: Okay, well the first one was a divorce book; I Don’t Want to Talk About It and its been a story about divorce for young kids and it goes through all the different feelings that children feel when their parents are separating and getting a divorce. I wrote that before I was a counselor and before I even went back to school to get my degree in counseling. It was kind of instinctive and now many years later I am a counselor working with divorced kids and their parents so it’s kind of an interesting full circle on that one.

Then my second book Grandma U came about again from one of the questions one of my sons asked as I was driving around in the car. Driving around in the car you get some great discussions between parents and kids and he said, “Mom, how come grandma knows so much. She knows everything.” I said I don’t know maybe she went to school and of course she went to school. And I said well what if she went to a grandma school to learn how to be a grandma and answer all those questions. So Grandma U is actually Grandma University. It’s a school where grandmas go to learn how to be modern grandmas so that’s where that one came out of.

Then let’s see, what’s the next one. Don’t Squeal Unless It’s a Big Deal; a book about tattletales and that grew out of my experience as a school counselor and year after year the teachers coming to me and going please come in and talk about tattling because its just such a problem with kindergarten on up to second or third grade. So I wrote that book and it’s been a really good book too. School counselors tell me how they use it in the classrooms so I’m real pleased with that one. What Do Parents Do When You’re Not Home is the fourth one and we’ve already talked about that one. Then I have a fifth book coming out next spring. That’s a fiction book mystery, What Really Happens At Home.

Dr. Kent: What do you have planned for the future? I have only fifteen seconds left. It’s been a pleasure speaking to you and we can find you on jeanieransom. What’s your next plan?

Jeanie Ransom: Well the next book is a picture book mystery so I’m going to hopefully just keep writing and selling picture books, visiting schools and hopefully bringing joy and help to kids everywhere.

Dr. Kent: Well it’s been a real honor speaking with Jeanie Ransom. I love the book What Do Parents Do When You’re Not At Home and all the others as well. We’ll visit you on the web and thank you so much for being on.

Jeanie Ransom: Well thank you.

Dr. Kent: Thank you for tuning into Sound Authors this week. I had four guests on the show. Jeanie Ransom, Raymond Benson, Mac Morin and Susan Benjamin. Thanks to all of them and thanks to Sound Authors, the people behind the scenes, I appreciate all their work. We’ll see you next week. Be safe.

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

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