Aaron David Miller | The Much Too Promised Land

September 9, 2009 | Comments Off

Dr. Kent: Welcome to Sound Authors. Today is a great day here in New York. The skies are clearing and the sun is coming out. It’s Friday again, and on Sound Authors I’ve got three guests. Our musical guest at the end of the show couldn’t make it today. We’re going to get Chris Thile again on the show one of these times. But I do have three great authors on show and among them are, at the beginning will be Aaron David Miller. He’s the author of The Much Too Promised Land, America’s Elusive Search for Arab-Israeli Peace. The second guest on the show will be Larry Buttram, the author of The Curtain Torn. That’s based on a fascinating story about a plantation owner. And the third guest on the show will be Dillon Drake. He’s a young man and the winner of an essay contest, and we’re going to talk to him. That’ll be a fun interview as well. But now it’s my great honor to speak with Aaron David Miller. Welcome to the show.

Aaron David Miller: Pleasure to be here.

Dr. Kent: Well, and of course I know your daughter, Jennifer Miller, and she wrote a wonderful book also, Inheriting the Holy Land, and I knew her from Seeds of Peace, which you served as the President of for quite some time.

Aaron David Miller: Yeah, Jenny’s a remarkable author, I’ve learned a lot from her. She’s actually now writing a novel.

Dr. Kent: Oh, wonderful.

Aaron David Miller: She’s in Columbia doing graduate work at an MFA program.

Dr. Kent: Wonderful. Yeah, she’s an amazing lady. Well, let me ask you about this book, your latest. The Much Too Promised Land. What a wonderful title. How did that title come about?

Aaron David Miller: Well, it really is a kind of symbol, or emblematic of the history of this conflict. Palestine in its historical context was really promised multiple times. Of course, there was the divine promise made by God to adherence of three major religions, Slam, Christianity and Judaism. And conflicting promises of course were made for those who believed and those who would follow. The second promise was of course conflicting British promises outlined in the Dalfour Declaration, 1917, that there be a Jewish homeland in Palestine. Those contradicted to some degree the promises that British diplomats had made to various Arab rulers. Finally there was the commitment or promise that the UN General Assembly made in November of 1947 when they promised or outlined their call for a Jewish and an Arab state, the partition of Palestine. My book really deals with the fourth promise. The fourth promise was the American promise, and that promise essentially went like this, that if you Arabs and Israelis are reasonable, you ascribe to a kind of split the difference mentality between what you need and what you can actually have, then the United States will be prepared to assist you. We’ll stand with you in an effort to help you negotiate your differences. And sadly, for many reasons, most of which have to do with the attractability of the conflict and the politics of the locals, who are caught up in the conflict, that American promise has not been comprehensively delivered.

Dr. Kent: Well that’s such a fascinating time right now, even the last couple weeks of, in this country, with this awful shooting that happened in the Holocaust Museum this week, and then in the news, President Obama is again trying to bring the two parties to the table. What, do things ever change in the Middle East?

Aaron David Miller: Well, they do change over time. Amidst all the bad news and there, you know, no one ever wants money betting against Arab-Israeli peace, but there have been hopeful signs in the course of the last 40 or 50 years. We have an Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty, which signed in 1979, and it’s not perfect for sure, but it’s extremely important. We have an Israeli-Jordanian peace treaty, signed in October 1994. And again, it’s not perfect, but both parties wanted to continue. So yes, there have been positive developments on the two main fronts right now. That is to say, can Israelis and Palestinians negotiate a conflict detonating agreement, and can the Israelies, Syrians and the Israelis and the Lebanese negotiate treaties of peace. There of course, it’s a much less happy story.

Dr. Kent: Well now, and I remember back in July of 2000 I was actually at the summer camp with Jenny Miller, your daughter, and she told us that, she told me that you were at Camp David with these leaders. And I seem to remember the reason that the peace talks failed was something very small, if I’m not mistaken, it was just the issue of East Jerusalem?

Aaron David Miller: Well, the portrayal of what happened at Camp David is very complicated. In fact, it’s kind of a poster child for post-modernism. There were a dozen Americans at Camp David, members of the delegation, and maybe half a dozen interpretations of what actually transpired there. And I think the, the problem with Camp David is that neither Ahud Barak, the Prime Minister of Israel, nor certainly Yassar Arafat, the leader of the PLO and the president of the Palestinian authority were ready to pay the price for what it would have taken in order to do a conflict ending agreement. And the Americans, however well intentioned under the leadership of former President Clinton really were not, in my judgment, I was one of the 12 smart enough, fair enough, nor tough enough to even get close to reaching an agreement. There is this notion that we were extremely close on all of the issues, including Jerusalem, but in reality there’s much confusion about this. In reality that wasn’t so. And I think that’s part of the problem, is that everybody has a vested interested in choosing their own particular favorite in this confrontation, and they don’t approach the subject with a kind of empathy and objectivity that is required to have any chance of trying to understand it. There’s enough ammunition, figuratively speaking, to keep this conflict going between Israel supporters and the Arab supporters for the next thousand years. But I think the goal should be to try to develop as detached and as objective of an assessment of what each side needs, and then try to figure out how to get there. That’s not so easy because it’s very emotional, but it’s necessary.

Dr. Kent: And now, as someone who’s been in, behind the scenes at a place like that, and you were at the helm of Seeds of Peace, and then for this book, interviewing all of these interesting people for the book, what, you know, how do you make sense of all this information and you know, is there, do you see a pathway towards peace, towards some kind of reconciliation over there? Is it going to take a long time?

Aaron David Miller: Well, on the first question, I’m all for, I’m a great believer of independent, critical thinking. I don’t think, there is no truth with a capital T that is somehow served up on a silver platter, whether it comes from a President’s speech or a minister’s sermon or on a mom’s prayer. Life’s much more complicated than that, and it requires an enormous amount of effort, particularly in a conflict like this, to get at an approximation of what is really the case. That requires hard work on the part of people, not to just take their information from one source, but to get out there and talk to as many people as possible, examine these things in their own right, see if it makes sense to you, and then try to fit all the pieces together. And I think, its not just true on the Arab-Israeli issues, it’s true of life in general. I mean, if you want to really understand something, it requires an enormous amount of diligence and energy in order to do the hard work to get there. In the case of Arab-Israeli peace, I don’t think it’s been absent for some sort of magical, metaphysical reason. I think it’s a question, frankly, of trying to find a balance of interests between parties in conflict. You know, whether it’s true of business relationships, personal friendships, or negotiations between nations. In the end the things that work reflect the reality that people’s needs and requirements are getting met in a way that not just satisfies their interests, but satisfies the others. And that’s really what is required on this one as well. It’s just that when you have a conflict like this where religious belief plays a large role, where people have a historic memory, where people have suffered. In the case of the Israelis, a long history of the Jewish people of persecution and genocide. In the case of the Arabs a long history of colonization, colonialism. And for West Bank and Gazans, particularly for West Bankers in Israeli occupation there are all of these terribly emotional and deep fears and insecurities that get in the way of trying to reach a solution. And that’s why, as with most things politics, leadership is really, really, really important. If I were to point to one concern I have about the prospects of getting Arab-Israeli peace, it’s the absence of leaders who are willing to rise above their own politics and their narrow political constituencies and turn themselves into statesman. That’s what’s missing here. And no matter how badly Barack Obama may want to do this, he can’t do it with one hand clapping. He’s going to need courageous leadership from the Arabs and the Israelis to pull this off

Dr. Kent: And what, you know, I love that one hand clapping image. I mean, it’s a great visual image for me. In these interviews you’ve conducted and these people you’ve talked to for this book, The Much Too Promised Land, was there anything surprising that someone told you that you didn’t expect?

Aaron David Miller: You know, I interviewed three of our last four ex-Presidents. I interviewed all nine secretaries of state. Most of the key Arab and Israeli negotiators, a lot of senators, representatives of the Jewish community, the Arab community. You know, what comes through in these interviews by and large is not emotion or extremism, for sure. It’s balance, it’s sometimes strongly held views, but also the interviews among the power elites that I interviewed seem to have a moderate, almost centrist view on what is required to do this. Everybody it seems, at least those representing the Arab and Palestinian and Israeli points of view, including, I might add, American Jews, Arab Americans that I interviewed, many evangelical Christians. Most of the key evangelical Christians, Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, Ralph Reed, John Hagy, even there there was a sense of balance. Either everybody wanted to appear reasonable, which I think was partly the case, or in theory this seems to be something that could actually work if you had leaders who would be able to draw some of these communities together. I’m writing a book right now called Can America Have Another Great President? It’s a book on presidential leadership. It’s going to come out the year Barack Oama runs again for election, in 2012. And it takes a look at leadership and the more I think about it, the more I’m absolutely persuaded that what stands between us and the abyss is our people. People at all levels of society who are prepared to act, and act with moral purpose in pursuit of I guess what we could describe as the common good. And I found in many of my interviews a real commitment to the common good. Everybody had a strong point of view but no one seemed to be so dug in that they couldn’t come off of their positions. And what occurred to me is what is required to pull all of this together, Kissinger told me once that you need in the interview that you needed a hand to pull the threads together. And the reality is that’s what you need here. You need three hands, an American hand, an Israeli hand and a Palestinian hand.

Dr. Kent: And you know, for me I guess the new complicating factor in my understanding of Palestine is this real divide between Gaza and the West Bank. Is that a real hindrance to finding peace?

Aaron David Miller: It’s a huge problem. You have, and I don’t want to make light of this, you have what I would describe to you as a Palestinian Humpty Dumpty, which is broken into several parts and which, frankly, is dysfunctional. The real problem for the Palestinians is that yes, it’s the Israeli occupation, and yes it’s settlements. But it’s also the fact that no single Palestinian leader controls all the guns, all the people and all the legitimacy of Palestine. And states can’t operate that way if they expect to be respected by their constituents or by their neighbors. This is a huge problem, fixing the Palestinian Humpty Dumpty. I think it’s beyond the capacity of outsiders to do. Every time we get involved in these politics we ed up doing more harm than good. There are certain things that we can do, but in the end it really will require a decision from the Palestinian national movement. How are they going to unify and can they agree on one strategy for realizing Palestinian national aspirations. So far they’ve proven that they couldn’t.

Dr. Kent: And you know, it’s such a, just as you’re saying all of this, it really does come to mind that people know what it needs to look like, what needs to be done, what they would like to happen over there. But at the same time all of the extremists of the world seem to point to Jerusalem. It’s because of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that we’re angry with the west, or is Jerusalem still the center of the world?

Aaron David Miller: You know, I think it, Jerusalem is probably the most sensitive thing and most contentious and will be the most difficult issue to resolve because it’s the issue o which I would argue there is the least margin and room for creative thinking and for compromise. I tell the story in the book that on the eighth day of the Summit when the Palestinians and the Israelis were asserting sovereignty over Jerusalem at Camp David, Americans tried to come in with what were very creative but very rational fixes. None of them worked, and the reason they didn’t work is because history has taught the Israelis and the Palestinians and the Arabs that Jerusalem isn’t to be shared. It’s not to be divided up like some piece of salami. It’s to be possessed in the name of God, in the name of the tribe, in the name of the nation. That’s what history tells us. Now, can those historical memories and can that history be overcome? Yes, but it’s going to require unbelievably heroic and bold decisions. Again, by leaders who have the confidence and trust of their constituents.

Dr. Kent: So then some of your belief in an organization like Seeds of Peace, is probably similar to my hope in it that as young people in an organization like that that will grow up to be leaders.

Aaron David Miller: Yeah, and I ran Seeds of Peace for three years. It’s a wonderful organization, basically trying to save the world one person at a time. There’s certainly a place for that. It’s just very difficult to go down that path when the realities on the ground undercut and undermine every day what it is you’re trying to do. And the occupation and the role that the occupier and the occupied play, this sort of deadly dance, fundamentally makes saving the world one person at a time extremely difficult. So governments in addition to programs like Seeds of Peace are going to have to act to change environments so that not just 200 young people can get to know one another every summer, but thousands ultimately will be able to live normal lives within their societies and then be able to reach out with hope and good intentions toward one another. And in the end that’s what’s missing now. There’s too much despair and cynicism and not nearly enough hope

Dr. Kent: Well, so I have a question for you about both Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter. Conservative Christians but Democrats, and both of them put forward a very significant effort in Mid East peace. Is there a difference between them and Barack Obama. Is there improvement in the technique? Is it more of the same?

Aaron David Miller: Well, first of all, of the three there is only one clear success, and that was Jimmy Carter at Camp David. Jimmy Carter with a huge amount of help from (inaudible) succeeded at the first Camp David, September ’78 in hammering out a framework that would ultimately lead to an Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty. Bill Clinton, very well intentioned. Extremely skilled, very committed, could not succeed in almost seven years in producing agreements, either between Israelis and Palestinians or Israelis and Syrians. And Barack Obama is still untested. The fact is negotiations succeed or fail when three elements are present. Number one, there again, as I mentioned repeatedly, leaders who are prepared to take risks. Number two, there is urgency. There is real, real, a real need to make decisions, either out of fear of too much pain, or alternatively out of the prospects of real gain .And finally, you need a third party, a mediator. But you need a third party who is, and I use three words here that are very important. Tough, smart, and fair. Tough, smart and fair. Jimmy Carter, even though I would disagree with much of what he proclaims leaving the White House on the Israeli issue, deserves enormous credit between 1977 and 1980. His policies were tough, smart and fair. At least as it pertained to the Egyptian-Israeli process. Bill Clinton was not nearly tough enough. And I would argue not nearly fair enough. Extremely smart. Very smart. Barack Obama is still a work very much in progress, and I have hope that he does have the right skills. But then again, he’s going to need enormous help from an Israeli Prime Minister and a Palestinian President in order to pull this off.

Dr. Kent: And that seems to be a difficult way forward. How does Palestine first of all become somehow sovereign, and how does it find its President?

Aaron David Miller: Well, sovereignty is a function in this case of finding a way to end the Israeli occupation through negotiations and creating a unified leadership, which exercises authority control over the forces of violence within Palestinian society. This is an extremely important point, I don’t care if it’s New York City or Chevy Chase Maryland, or Washington D.C. where I live. Unless you can control all the guns you’re not much of anything, because you’re never going to have the support of your constituents, and you’ll never have the respect of your neighbors. So sovereignty in this sense must come through negotiation. But it also has to be an internally generated process in which Palestinians can find a way to unify. And there’s no magic quick fix here, there’s no cavalry that’s going to ride to the rescue. This is going ot be done through institution-building on one hand, and very tough and excruciatingly painful negotiations on the other hand. And it’s a long movie. Not going to happen quickly, and it’s not going to happen easily. The important thing is that it gets started and headed in the right direction.

Dr. Kent: Well, and let me ask you this. You served also under our most recent President, George W. Bush, and did you find that it was a different kind of administration than Bill Clinton’s administration? Was it a struggle to …

Aaron David Miller: No. George W. Bush had different priorities, and he gave in different value to the Israeli issue. He didn’t really treat it with much of an importance or concern during his first four years. And then under Secretary of State Condoliza Rice the administration tried during the second four years to accord it greater priority, but it had gone untended for too long. And the conflicts within the administration were just, and not only the administration, but conflict, the tensions and the problems within the Arabo-Israeli conflict itself, particularly between Israelis and Palestinians, were just impossible by 2004. By the beginning of 2005 with the second Bush administration, impossible to reconcile. So I’m not sure the Bush administration, having not taken it seriously during the first four years, had much of a chance for doing much about it during the second four years.

Dr. Kent: Well, and something else from the Clinton years, I read that you were appointed by the President to serve on the US, on the Holocaust Memorial Museum governing counsel. What are your, I mean, it was obviously shocking this week to read about the shooting. What’s your take on that?

Aaron David Miller: You know, I think that, I’m a great believer in America. I believe that we have done something here that no other society on earth has done. We’ve created a big tent, and under this big tent, courtesy of the framers and the founders, we have created a society which allows extraordinary interaction between groups and individuals in various religious denominations that often have very fundamentally different views. And they co-exist here sometimes uneasily. But by and large, in a relatively civil matter, we just did something by electing Barack Obama that no other nation on earth would ever do. We elected a member of a formally enslaved minority group. Even though Obama’s not a direct descendent of slaves, and still despised by millions of Americans and made him President of the United States, the most powerful man on earth. No other democracy in the world today would ever, could ever, elevate a minority group to a level of such significance. Only the American system could do this. So I believe in the American system, and yet the system allows and tolerates a degree of freedom and freedom of expression, including the freedom to hate others. And far too often we’ve seen it on the attack at the Lucrene Center, we saw it in the murder of Dr. Tiller, who was performing abortions, we saw it the other day, this poor man, his poor security guard, who gave up his life in the face of extremists from a variety of different points of view who decide to translate their right to hate, however abominable it may be into actions that can kill. And whether or not this is the price we need to pay in a society like ours which gives wide latitude to groups to protest and speak out on their own, for their own causes, even though those causes may be racist, anti-semitic, hostile to this group or that, I don’t know. But it’s a painful reminder that prejudice, tolerance and hatred are still alive and well in America. We’re also reminded that a security guard, a normal working guy, demonstrated real courage just in the act of doing his job. So it’s a terrible tragedy and to have it happen on the mall magnifies its significance.

Dr. Kent: Yep. Well, and you know, kind of in closing here, when you’re speaking about the amazing nature of this country and the sometimes extremism, it really is remarkable that in those interviews, as you said, the responses of all the world leaders and these people was this sort of beautiful, moderate, almost agreement. Did you find agreement between people?

Aaron David Miller: You mean in the sense…

Dr. Kent: In your book?

Aaron David Miller: …Arab-Israeli? I’m sorry, what?

Dr. Kent: In The Much Too Promised Land book, did you sort of find, did you discover that you found agreement between all of these people, despite their backgrounds?

Aaron David Miller: Well, there’s a sort of a sad position that everybody wants to aspire to, and I encouraged a good deal of that centrism. With respect to the Arab-Israeli conflict itself, Arabs, Israelis, these are really by and large good people, caught up, who manage to maintain their dignity, their sense of humor, and their sense of hope, who are caught up in a very nasty, historic, and some people would argue intractible conflict. I don’t think it need be intractable, it’s just, it’s going to take a long time to sort out

Dr. Kent: Well, it’s been such an honor chatting with you, and please do give my greetings to your daughter Jen. And she’s got a wonderful…

Aaron David Miller: I will.

Dr. Kent: …book of the Middle East as well, called Inheriting the Holy Land. And Aaron David Miller’s book is called the Much Too Promised Land, America’s Elusive Search for Arab-Israeli Peace, and I’m definitely going to read it cover to cover.

Aaron David Miller: Terrific.

Dr. Kent: Thank you so much for chatting with me.

Aaron David Miller: Thanks Kent, I really appreciate it.

Dr. Kent: And my next guest on the show is a fellow named Larry Buttram. He’s the author of The Curtain Torn, and it’s based on the life of Robert Carter, who’s a plantation owner that freed over 500 slaves. Come on back for that.

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

Sharon Waxman | Loot & Hollywood

April 3, 2009 | Leave a Comment

Interview with Sharon Waxman | Author of LOOT [22:42m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Sharon is an incredible author, researcher, and gossip columnist! What a pleasure to chat with her about her diverse skills and interests, and most importantly about the amazing book LOOT! This is one of my favorite titles of the year, and I truly enjoyed chatting with Sharon. More about her from her website:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Waxman lives with her family in southern California.

Posted by admin | Filed Under History, Travel, Art, Religion, Politics, AUTHOR INTERVIEW, Hollywood, PODCAST

Alphie McCourt | True Stories of Ireland & Brothers Malachy & Frank McCourt

March 27, 2009 | Leave a Comment

Dr. Kent: Welcome back to Sound Authors! Its my great honor to have as my next guest on the show the great memoirs of Alphie McCourt of the well known McCourt family; Frank McCourt, Malachy McCourt and Alphie McCourt, all memoirs and all successful at that. Welcome to the show Alphie McCourt.

Alphie McCourt: Thank you!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Alphie McCourt: About Frank’s book?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Frank Romano | Author of Storm Over Morocco

March 22, 2009 | Leave a Comment

Dr. Kent: Welcome to Sound Authors! It’s a beautiful day out here in New York, there’s still snow on the ground and I’ve got four guests on the show today, three authors and one musician. At the end of the show it’s my honor to have musician Sara Lee Guthrie on the show with me, the daughter of Arlo Guthrie and the granddaughter of Woody Guthrie. Before that, I’ve got three authors and my third author will be the author of The President’s Henchmen; Joseph Flynn. I’ll be speaking to the author of No Urn for the Ashes – Alison Sawyer, a beautiful story and right now I’m speaking to my first guest, his name is Frank Romano, the author of Storm Over Morocco. He’s written an incredible book that is placed in an area we’re thinking about all the time these days. There’s been some serious unrest in the middle east and when hasn’t there been, honestly. So welcome to the show Frank Romano.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Frank Romano: You bet! Anytime Dr. Kent.

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

Frank Romano: Thank you very much doctor.

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

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

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

March 21, 2009 | Leave a Comment

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

Alison Sawyer: Thanks a lot!

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

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

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

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

Dr. Kent: Tell me about that.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Alison Sawyer: Oh yes! I just fed them!

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

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

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

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

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

Alison Sawyer: You too!

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

Alison Sawyer: I’d love to!

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

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