< Back The Blue Window Suzanne Berne October 17, 2023 Today I talked to Suzanne Berne about her novel The Blue Window (Marysue Rucci Books, 2023). Lorna is a clinical social worker, trained to talk to people, but she can’t get through to the two people most important to her; her miserable teenage son and her distant, unhappy mother. She grew up with a deaf father who never explained to her or her brother why their mother suddenly disappeared. Her brother died of AIDS in the 1980s and her father is also gone, but her mother had coming for Thanksgiving Day since Lorna’s son Adam was born. Now, a neighbor calls to say that her mother, Marika, has hurt her ankle and needs help. Lorna prepares to drive up, and hopes Adam will join her for the drive. Adam hopes to torture and negate himself, so he agrees to the journey. Lorna doesn’t expect that her distant son and mother will bond, or that she will be left out of their relationship. Suzanne Berne is the author of four previous novels: The Dogs of Littlefield , The Ghost at the Table , A Perfect Arrangement , and A Crime in the Neighborhood , which won Great Britain’s Orange Prize, now The Women’s Prize. She has also published a book of nonfiction, Missing Lucile , about her paternal grandmother. Berne has written frequently for The New York Times and The Washington Post , and published essays and articles in numerous magazines. For many years she taught creative writing, first at Harvard University, and then at Boston College and at the Ranier Writing Workshop in Tacoma, WA. She lives outside of Boston with her husband. They have two daughters. When she is not writing--or thinking about the writing she is not doing--she is often walking her dog or thinking about walking him. Listen to Episode Buy Book Previous Next

Vegan Recipes to Die For Soup, Vegan, Vegetarian Black Bean Mushroom Carrot Soup I love making "pantry" soups with what I've got on hand plus whichever vegetables I have in the fridge. I thought I was making my old Black Bean Edamame soup until I saw that I was out of the frozen edamame. Cooking, like jazz, is all about improvisation! Read Recipe Entrees, Vegetarian, Gluten Free, Soup Chilled Minty Cucumber-Melon Soup The perfect and refreshing snack for a hot day! Read Recipe Soup, Vegetarian, Vegan, Entrees Spinach-Lentil Soup Need iron? This delicious soup will do the trick! Read Recipe Soup, Vegetarian, Vegan, Entrees Sweet Potato Black Bean Soup Add an avocado for garnish or sprinkle with a little cheese for the perfect dish! Read Recipe Soup, Vegetarian, Gluten Free, Entrees, Vegan Alene’s White Gazpacho She blended a white gazpacho and served it with homemade rolls for lunch, then let the kids lie in her bed watching... Read Recipe All Recipes Baking Breakfast Cakes, Pies, & Icing Cookies & Brownies Dips & Sauces Entrees Gluten-Free Muffins & Breads Soup Vegan Vegetarian Load More

< Back Songs by Honeybird Peter McDade May 31, 2022 In Songs by Honeybird , Peter McDade (Wampus Multimedia 2022) tells the story of Ben and Nina, two people who meet at a college outside of Atlanta. The chapters alternate between the voices of Ben and Nina, how they met and became a couple before unravelling and slowly moving on with their lives. Ben’s story focuses on his life as a graduate student and the research he does into a possible dissertation about an integrated band from the late 1960’s before two of its members died in a fire. Nina’s story involves her quest for meaning, philosophical discussions with her talking dog who is possibly an incarnation of the Buddha and facing the untimely death of her father when she was too young to understand. The author, a talented, working musician, wrote and recorded a soundtrack of original songs to accompany the novel. In addition to being about fathers, race, growing up, relationship, and understanding one’s history, this is a novel about seeking the truth. As a drummer (who started playing at eight-years-old) for the rock band Uncle Green, Peter McDade spent fifteen years traveling the highways of America in a series of Ford vans. While the band searched for fame and a safe place to eat before a gig, he began writing short stories and novels. Uncle Green went into semi-retirement after four labels, seven records, and one name change; Peter went to Georgia State University and majored in History and English, eventually earning an MA in History. His first novel, Weight of Sound, was published in the fall of 2017, and like Songs by Honeybird, has an accompanying soundtrack of original songs created with help from friends in the music world. He teaches history to college undergrads in Atlanta, plays drums for Paul Melançon & the New Insecurities, and spends time writing, making music, and with his family, trying to understand how to raise teenage girls. Listen to Episode Buy Book Previous Next

< Back Dreaming in Spanish Sara Alvarado June 6, 2023 In Dreaming in Spanish: An Unexpected Love Story In Puerto Vallarta (Little Creek Press, 2023), Sara Alvarado tells the story of growing up in Madison, studying Spanish, and escaping alcoholism, substance abuse, men, and sexual assault by moving to Puerto Vallarta in Mexico. She’s honest about her struggle to overcome her weaknesses, her relationships, and her addictions at the age of twenty-four. In 1999, with $10,000 from her grandmother’s will, her goal is to live near a Mexican beach and get her act together. She commits to six months of celibacy and vows to avoid her previously reckless, party lifestyle in favor of reading, meditating, and getting healthy. Sara Alvarado is a writer, speaker, and fierce advocate for racial equity in real estate. She is the co-founder of OWN IT: Building Black Wealth, co-owner of Alvarado Real Estate Group, author of the Racial Justice Toolkit for Real Estate Professionals (2020), A Guide for Change Agents (2016), and creator of the Conversation Challenge: helping white people talk about race. Sara has also had numerous essays and articles published in Madison365, HuffPost, and Scary Mommy. She graduated from the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis with a BA in Spanish and feels most at home in Madison, WI. and Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. Sara is a lover of love, spirit, dance, and adventure (with the music turned up), and enjoys traveling, challenging the status quo, and writing. Listen to Episode Buy Book Previous Next

< Back Kantika Elizabeth Graver August 1, 2023 Rebecca Cohen and her family live in Istanbul, until they lose all their wealth and are forced to leave. It’s also no longer safe for Jews, and many are trying to find a place to go. Rebecca’s father, once a successful businessman, now cleans a synagogue in Barcelona. Rebecca finds work as a seamstress and marries a man who is barely at home. He later dies, leaving her with two young sons to raise on her own, but she’s already started her own business. A second marriage is arranged, but she has to get to Havana to meet her potential husband, and he has to lie to get back to the states faster than the usual bureaucracy allows. Finally, married and in her new home, she’s challenged with helping her disabled stepdaughter, learning yet another new language, and building a new life. Rebecca was a tenacious heroine whose story has been lovingly fictionalized by her granddaughter, author Elizabeth Graver. Elizabeth Graver’s fourth novel, The End of the Point , was long-listed for the 2013 National Book Award in Fiction and selected as a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Her other novels are Awake , The Honey Thief , and Unravelling . Her story collection, Have You Seen Me? , won the 1991 Drue Heinz Literature Prize. Her work has been anthologized in Best American Short Stories, Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards, The Pushcart Prize Anthology , and Best American Essays . She teaches at Boston College and tends to a field of rocking horses known to her and her family by a secret name but to the wider world as Ponyhenge. Listen to Episode Buy Book Previous Next

< Back The Lost Book of Adana Moreau Michael Zapata February 13, 2020 In 1916, Adana Moreau’s parents are killed by American Marines. She flees to Santo Domingo and then to New Orleans. There, she marries a pirate, Titus Moreau, and gives birth to their son, Maxwell. While Maxwell wonders the streets, Adana spends hours at the library. She writes a book, Lost City , and it becomes a science fiction hit. Then she writes a follow-up book, which she and Maxwell definitely destroy, just before she dies. The story of how that book ends up decades later in Chicago is interwoven with train-jumping, alternate universes, and the heartbreaking tales of displaced people. Michael Zapata is the author of The Lost Book of Adana Moreau (Hanover Square Press, 2020). He is also a founding editor of MAKE Literary Magazine . He is the recipient of an Illinois Arts Council Award for Fiction, the City of Chicago DCASE Individual Artist Program award, and a Pushcart nomination. As an educator, he taught literature and writing in high schools servicing dropout students. He is a graduate of the University of Iowa and, as an ardent wanderer, he's lived and traveled extensively through the Middle East, Europe, and Latin America. The place he reveres most on the Earth is the Cuyabeno Wildlife Reserve in Ecuador. Currently, he's catching up on the extraordinary sci-fi show 'The Expanse' and lives with his family in his hometown Chicago. Listen to Episode Buy Book Previous Next

< Back Escape Route Elan Barnehama June 21, 2022 In Elan Barnehama’s new novel, Escape Route (Running Wild Press 2022), it’s 1968 and 13-year-old Zach is about to become a bar mitzvah. That’s when his sister changes his life by switching his radio from AM to FM. Zach’s family lives in Queens, and he’s comfortable roaming the New York City subways, heading to the public library, the Metropolitan Museum, and all kinds of diners. Zach is in accelerated classes, smart but confused. He worries about his older sister at Columbia, the war in Vietnam, his grandparents, and how his parents escaped Europe during the Holocaust. He meets a cute girl and is beyond relieved to have his first girlfriend, his first kiss. He thinks about music, math, religion, drugs, and more than anything else, baseball. He doesn’t know when to stop asking annoying questions or irritating the people around him with his goofiness. And just in case there’s another Holocaust and they have to leave the country; he joins the AAA auto club and figures out an “Escape Route.” Elan Barnehama grew up in Queens, NYC, has lived in several places on both coasts, and currently lives in Boston. He earned an MFA from UMass, Amherst, and a BA from Binghamton University. He writes literary fiction, flash fiction, and creative non-fiction, which has appeared in Drunk Monkeys, Entropy, Rough Cut Press, Boston Accent, Jewish Fiction, RedFez, HuffPost, the New York Journal of Books, Public Radio, and elsewhere. Barnehama was a Writer-In-Residence at Wildacres NC, and Fairhope Center for the Writing Arts in Fairhope, AL. He’s the fiction editor at Forth Magazine LA, and at different times has taught college writing-currently at American Musical and Dramatic Academy in New York, worked with at-risk youth, had a gig as a radio news guy, coached high school baseball, and did a mediocre job as a short-order cook. When he’s not reading or writing, Barnehama likes running and walking urban landscapes, travelling to see friends, seeing new places, coffee shops, diners, libraries, and public spaces. He remains a Mets fan. Listen to Episode Buy Book Previous Next

< Back Prospects of a Woman Wendy Voorsanger March 23, 2021 When Elisabeth Parker and her husband leave Massachusetts and arrive in California to join her father, she quickly learns that her father is not who she thought he was. It’s 1849, and she also realizes that her new husband is also not who she thought. She’s forced to confront her preconceived notions of family, love, and opportunity, and finds comfort in corresponding with her childhood friend back home, writer Louisa May Alcott. She also spends time with a mysterious and handsome native Californian. Armed with Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Self-Reliance , she sets out to determine her role in building the West, even as she comes to terms with the sacrifices she must make to achieve independence and happiness. A gripping and illuminating window into life in the Old West, Prospects of a Woman (She Writes Press, 2020) is the story of one woman’s passionate quest to carve out a place for herself in the liberal and bewildering society that emerged during the California gold rush frenzy. Born and raised on the American River in Sacramento, Wendy Voorsanger has long held an intense interest in the historical women of California. Her debut historical novel—Prospects of a Woman—tells the story of one woman’s passionate quest to carve out a place for herself in the liberal and bewildering society that emerged during the California gold rush frenzy, and is included in 2 BuzzFeed Books must read lists. Voorsanger currently manages SheIsCalifornia.net, a blog dedicated to chronicling the accomplishments of California women throughout history. She earned a BA in journalism from Cal Poly SLO and an MFA from the Vermont College of Fine Arts, and has attended Hedgebrook, the Squaw Valley Writers Workshop, and Lit Camp. She is a member of the Castro Writers' Cooperative, the Lit Camp Advisory Board, the Historical Novel Society, and the San Mateo Public Library Literary Society. She lives in northern California with her husband and 2 boys. Listen to Episode Buy Book Previous Next

< Back Song of the Siren C.P. Lesley March 25, 2019 Since being sold into slavery as a child and working her way up to becoming concubine and mistress for several different men, Lady Juliana's survival has depended on her allure. Then her place in the world is shattered by a debilitating illness and she is spurned by the entire Polish royal court. Enter Felix Ossolinski—scholar, diplomat, Renaissance man. A riding accident in his teens forced him to redirect his energies from war to the life of the mind, and alone among the men of the sixteenth-century Polish court, he sees in Juliana a kindred spirit, a woman who has never appreciated her own value and whose inner beauty outweighs any marring of her face. Then the Polish queen offers Juliana a way out of her difficulties: travel to Moscow with Felix and spy for the royal family in return for a promise of financial independence. Facing poverty and degradation, Juliana cannot refuse, although the mission threatens not only her freedom but her life. Felix swears he will protect her. But no one can protect Juliana from the demons of her past. Join me for a discussion with C.P. Lesley about her new novel Song of the Siren (Five Directions Press, 2019). Carolyn Pouncy (who holds a PhD in Russian history from Stanford University) writes under the pen name C.P. Lesley (who doesn’t exist and has no degrees). Carolyn (aka C.P.) is the author of The Not Exactly Scarlet Pimpernel, The Golden Lynx, The Winged Horse, The Swan Princess , The Vermilion Bird , and The Shattered Drum . Song of the Siren is the first in her newest series, Songs of Steppe & Forest, based on 16th-century Russian history. When not thinking up new ways to torture her characters, she edits other people’s manuscripts, reads voraciously, maintains her website, and practices classical ballet. That love of ballet finds expression in her Tarkei Chronicles. A historian by profession, she also hosts New Books in Historical Fiction for the New Books Network . Listen to Episode Buy Book Previous Next

< Back The Great Reclamation Rachel Heng April 25, 2023 In the 1940s, Singapore was controlled by the British occupied by the Japanese and comprised of rubber plantations and decrepit fishing villages. A timid little boy is the only one who can help his father, a fisherman, find a string of mysterious islands surrounded by teeming ocean life that will change the fortune of his family and neighbors. While his older brother fishes with their father, Ah Boon gets to go to school, where he meets his first friend, the beautiful Siok Mei. As they grow up, Siok Mei becomes entranced with improving the country through communism while Ah Boon focuses on his own livelihood. The British finally leave, the communists are banished, and the new rulers continue to rule Singapore with punishing vigor of previous colonizers. Ah Boon works with the new rulers to modernize the country, replace swamps with buildings and roads, and improve living conditions, but not everyone accepts the changes. The Great Reclamation (Riverhead Books, 2023) is a both a personal tale and a sweeping story of political and historical upheaval in 20th century Singapore. Rachel Heng is the author of the novel Suicide Club , translated into ten languages. Her short fiction has appeared in The New Yorker , Glimmer Train , McSweeney’s , and elsewhere. She received her MFA from the Michener Center for Writers and has received grants and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and the National Arts Council of Singapore, among others. Heng, who was born and raised in Singapore, is currently an assistant professor of English at Wesleyan University. Listen to Episode Buy Book Previous Next

< Back The Good Time Girls Get Famous KT Blakemore November 7, 2023 K.T. Blakemore’s Wild-Willed Women of the West Series (The Good Time Girls and The Good Time Girls Get Famous) opens when Ruby Calhoun’s former dancehall partner Pip Quinn, shows up at Ruby’s cigar shop in Kansas to tell her that Cullen Wilder, her former lover, wants them both dead. Ruby and Pip plan to warn Verna, a third woman at risk, and embark on an exhausting trip filled with blunders, con-men, cheating, and the breaking of several laws. Now there’s a bounty on their heads and Cullen’s henchmen are looking for them. As they struggle past challenges, Ruby recalls her former life in the Arizona Territory. In the second book, Ruby and Pip are still running from the law, but they can’t pass up the money they’ll earn by starring in a moving picture about how they survived their encounter with a notorious outlaw. After they get the money, their plan is to head for Mexico, but that’s as much as they know. K.T. Blakemore grew up in the west and never left. Her novels The Good Time Girls and The Good Time Girls Get Famous are the first two adventures in the Wild-Willed Women of the West Series, featuring women who take no prisoners and succeed through sheer grit, determination, humor, and a parcel of luck. Her award-winning historical thrillers and young adult historical fiction, written under the pen name Kim Taylor Blakemore , have been awarded a Silver Falchion Award, Tucson Festival of Book Literary Award, and a Willa Award for Best YA Fiction. The Good Time Girls was honored as a New Mexico-Arizona Book Award Finalist. She is a member of Historical Novel Society, Women's Fiction Writers Association, and Women Writing the West. In addition to writing, she is a developmental editor and founder of Novelitics Writers Collective . She teaches editing and creative writing workshops to writing groups around the United States, Canada and the UK. She has hung her hat in California, Colorado, and currently the Pacific Northwest. The rain does not deter her research whether it be train timetables from 1905 or the best way to catch a loose horse. Listen to Episode Buy Book Previous Next

< Back The Lindbergh Nanny Mariah Fredericks November 15, 2022 Today I talked to Mariah Fredericks about her new novel The Lindbergh Nanny (Minotaur Books, 2022). The kidnapping of Charles Lindbergh, Jr in 1932 shocked the country and made international headlines. The famous Charles Lindbergh Sr became an American hero after successfully flying solo across the Atlantic. He was married to the wealthy and beautiful Anne Morrow Lindbergh, also a pilot. Their son Charles Lindbergh, Jr was suddenly kidnapped from his family home in New Jersey, and the case made international headlines. The parents were out on the night of the kidnapping, but the nanny was home. After the baby disappeared from his bed, that nanny, Betty Gow, became a prime suspect, and her life was never the same. She was known thereafter as the Lindbergh Nanny. Mariah Fredericks is the author of the Jane Prescott mystery series, set in 1910s New York and nominated twice for the Mary Higgins Clark award. She was born and raised in New York City, graduated from Vassar College with a degree in history and was the head copywriter for Book-of-the-Month Club for many years. Mariah lives with her husband and teenager in Queens and has a beloved French bulldog named Dita. Listen to Episode Buy Book Previous Next