It gives us great pleasure to present Season 10, Episode 28: Dr. Lawrence D. Mass for Arnie Kantrowitz!
Dr. Lawrence D. Mass, surviving partner to Arnie Kantrowitz, shares Song of Myself. We discuss Arnie’s inspirations, the spirit of Walt Whitman, and how this historical chronicle has become a cautionary tale.
Bio: Arnie Kantrowitz (1940 – 2022) leaves behind a legacy as a true pioneer, champion and sage of the gay rights movement. He is the author of the gay classic, Under The Rainbow, Growing Up Gay, of a monograph, Walt Whitman, and was a notable writer and figure in gay and mainstream media. He became vice president of Gay Activists Alliance in 1970 and was a founding member of the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) in 1985.
Dr. Lawrence D. Mass, Kantrowitz’s surviving life partner, provides context for the novel’s relevance in today’s socio-political climate.
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It gives us great pleasure to present Season 10, Episode 20: Robert Raasch!
Robert Raasch shares his novel: The Summer Between. We discuss coming out in earlier decades, the importance of location shaping story, and why we have to learn who’s harmful to us and who’s loving and supportive!
Bio:
Robert Raasch was raised in Northern New Jersey. He is a writer, architect/designer, and visual artist who is an active participant in 24PearlStreet and the Fine Arts Work Center (FAWC) in Provincetown, Massachusetts. He divides his time between Chicago, New York, and Copenhagen, where he is working on his second novel.
Robert is spearheading a grassroots campaign this summer to promote his critically acclaimed novel The Summer Between. Recent appearances, interviews and reviews have included The Bay Area Reporter; The Harvard Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide; Andrew Rimby’s The Ivory Tower Boiler Room; Matt Baum’s Sewers of Paris; and in New York, at The Bureau of General Services Queer Division: Robert was in conversation with acclaimed Author, Christoper Bram.
This Podcast episode is available on these channels (in order alphabetical):
It gives us great pleasure to present Season 10, Episode 19: Jonathan Lerner!
Jonathan Lerner shares his memoir: Performance Anxiety. We discuss the civil rights era, why being LGBTQ+ was even more lonely, and what it was like to find community while realizing you were different!
Bio:
Jonathan Lerner is the author of the novels Caught in a Still Place, Alex Underground, and Lily Narcissus, and the memoir Swords in the Hands of Children. He is a journalist focusing on urban design and environmental issues and a longtime contributing editor at Landscape Architecture Magazine. He lives with his husband, the nonprofit leader and community advocate Peter Frank, in New York’s Hudson Valley.
This Podcast episode is available on these channels (in order alphabetical):
It gives us great pleasure to present a Season 9, Episode 38 Interview: Paul Lamb
Paul Lamb joins us to share his contemporary, generational novels: One-Match Fire and Parent Imperfect. It leads to discussions of generations of fathers and sons (including two gay dads), different types of coming of age, and a cabin in the woods as the safe place to be one’s self.
Paul Lamb has a cabin in Missouri, at the edge of the Ozark Mountains. The cabin waits most of two hours away from his home in suburban Kansas City. The irony is that he doesn’t write there. The setting seems ideal, doesn’t it? A one-room cabin with a shady porch overlooking a sparkling lake, at the end of a road no one needs to come down, deep in a trackless forest. The only sounds that intrude are the occasional lowing of cattle from the ranch to the east or maybe a distant chainsaw. Paul has a chair and a table and pencils and notebooks there. He has uninterrupted solitude. He has everything a writer needs, and yet Paul cannot write at his cabin.
All he feels is a desire to go outside, into the forest, down to the lake, along the paths. He wants to see what bird is calling, whose shadow is floating across the ground, or what he heard scampering through the leaf litter. Paul wants to feel the sun on his skin or listen to the rain on the roof, to stare into the orange flames of a campfire, to throw a line in the water or watch for a beaver emerging from the lodge across the lake.
In short, when he’s there he wants to do all these things that keep him from entering the fictional universe where his characters go about their lives. So instead, he writes at home. Paul’s been doing this for a long time, so he calls it a win. He’s retired now from being a wage slave in the vulgar business world where he had worked to pay bills but had never sought a career. His children are grown and flown, leading fulfilling lives. Which leaves Paul free to pursue writing his stories as much as he wants.
This Podcast episode is available on these channels (in order alphabetical):
It gives us great pleasure to present a Season 9, Episode 37 Interview: Timothy Jay Smith
Timothy Jay Smith joins us to share his upcoming gay-coming-of-age contemporary thriller: Istanbul Crossing. It leads to discussion of homosexuality in Muslim states and a young man trying to help others get to safety and freedom, a story that grew from Timothy’s own experiences helping refugees.
From a young age, Timothy Jay Smith developed a ceaseless wanderlust that has taken him around the world many times. En route, he’s found the characters that people his work. Polish cops and Greek fishermen, mercenaries and arms dealers, child prostitutes and wannabe terrorists, Indian Chiefs and Indian tailors: he hung with them all in an unparalleled international career that had him smuggle banned plays from behind the Iron Curtain, maneuver through Occupied Territories, represent the U.S. at the highest levels of foreign governments, and stowaway aboard a ‘devil’s barge’ for a three-day crossing from Cape Verde that landed him in an African jail.
Tim brings the same energy to his writing that he brought to a distinguished career, and as a result, he has won top honors for his novels, screenplays and stage plays in numerous prestigious competitions. Fire on the Island won the Gold Medal in the Faulkner-Wisdom Competition for the Novel, and his screenplay adaptation of it was named Best Indie Script by WriteMovies. Another novel, The Fourth Courier, was a finalist for Best Gay Mystery in the 2020 Lambda Literary Awards. Previously, he won the Paris Prize for Fiction (now the de Groot Prize) for his novel, Checkpoint (later published as A Vision of Angels). Kirkus Reviews called Cooper’s Promise “literary dynamite” and selected it as one of the Best Books of 2012.
Tim was nominated for the 2018 Pushcart Prize. His stage play tribute to Matthew Shepard, How High the Moon, won the prestigious Stanley Drama Award. His screenplays have won or placed in dozens of screenwriting competitions including those sponsored by the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences, Capital Fund Screenplay Competition, WriteMovies, Houston WorldFest, Fresh Voices, and StoryPros.
This Podcast episode is available on these channels (in order alphabetical):
It gives us great pleasure to present Season 8, Episode 4: Josh Bookman + Sense8 review part 4!
Josh Bookman, author of the novel to: all the friends I killed, joins us to discuss the millennial experience regarding contemporary loneliness when friends pair off and move on, as well as the postponement of traditional benchmarks. Then Albert Nothlit returns for the final part of our review of Sense8’s first season!
Joshua Kent Bookman was born in Boston, Massachusetts, and reformed by life and work in Sweden, France, and Italy.
He has studied songwriting at Berklee College of Music, as well as languages at the Middlebury Italian School, Syracuse University, Alliance Française, and Folkuniversitetet. He holds a B.A. from Brandeis University and M.F.A. from ArtCenter College of Design.
This Podcast episode is available on these channels (in order alphabetical):
It gives us great pleasure to welcome Tyler Davis as the guest on Episode 307 – A Handbag With A Paintball Gun!
Tyler Davis delivers the first in his new political dystopian series, New America: Awakenings. We talk about how to craft a dystopian work without being centered on futuristic tech or fictional epidemics. It’s a great conversation all around.
It gives us great pleasure to present Season 10, Episode 28: Dr. Lawrence D. Mass for Arnie Kantrowitz!
