It gives us great pleasure to present Season 10, Episode 8: Robert Bruegmann!
Robert Bruegmann joins us to share his first fiction book: Roman Ivory – A Novel. We discuss men loving men in the 19th century. It leads to a discussion of coded signals, generational discover, the author’s expertise in art & architecture, and the backdrop of murder.
Bio:
Robert Bruegmann is an historian of architecture, landscape and the built environment. He received his BA from Principia College in 1970 and his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in 1976. In 1977 he joined the faculty at the University of Illinois at Chicago where he is currently Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Art History, Architecture and Urban Planning. He has also taught at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia College of the Arts, MIT and Columbia University. He is author or editor of numerous award-winning non-fiction books and articles and a novel, Roman Ivory.
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It gives us great pleasure to present Season 10, Episode 1: J.M. Frey!
J.M. Frey helps us ring in the New Year by sharing her recent novel: Time & Tide. We discuss time travel and time slip stories, the Regency/Georgian era, and lesbian/bi romances, all while keeping an eye on causality of changing the first lesbian kiss in literature.
Bio:
J.M. is an author, screenwriter, and lapsed academic. With an MA in Communications and Culture, she’s appeared in podcasts, documentaries, and on radio and television to discuss all things geeky through the lens of academia. She also has an addiction to scarves, Doctor Who, and tea, which may or may not all be related. Her life’s ambition is to have stepped foot on every continent (only 3 left!)
J.M.’s also a professionally trained actor who takes absolute delight in weird stories, over the top performances, and quirky characters. She’s played everything from Marmee to the Red Queen, Jane Eyre to Annie, and dozens of strange creatures and earnest heroines as a voice actor.
Her debut novel Triptych was nominated for two Lambda Literary Awards, won the San Francisco Book Festival award for SF/F, was nominated for a 2011 CBC Bookie, was named one of The Advocate’s Best Overlooked Books of 2011, and garnered both a starred review and a place among the Best Books of 2011 from Publishers Weekly.
Her sophomore novel, an epic-length feminist meta-fantasy titled The Untold Tale, (book one of the Accidental Turn Series), debuted December 2015, and was followed up by The Forgotten Tale in 2016 and The Silenced Tale in December 2017. The Skylark’s Song, book one of The Skylark’s Saga, a steampunk action novel about a girl vigilante and her mysterious rocketpack, soared into bookstores in 2018, and was followed up by The Skylark’s Sacrifice in September 2019. The Skylark’s Saga was signed to a shopping agreement for an animation series in 2018. All six of these novels were reprinted under Frey’s personal backlist imprint Here There Be in late 2023.
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It gives us great pleasure to present Season 9, Episode 50: Davis Summers!
Davis Summers joins us to share his debut novel: Eating & Praying. Our discussion covers seeing the world through a millennial lens, growth and grief, being young and queer trying making sense of the narcissistic internet age, and all the biting comedy that ensues.
Bio:
Davis Summers is an author and artist living in Los Angeles, California. He was born and raised in Poplar Bluff, Missouri (the homeland of both Gone Girl and Designing Women, fittingly). Davis pursued acting and journalism at New York University where he obtained his Bachelor of Fine Arts in 2019. After moving to Los Angeles to pursue a career in the film industry, Davis made the pivot to the tech industry where he still works to this day in addition to his writing. Eating & Praying is his debut novel which has been described as “endlessly relatable” by New York Times Bestselling Author Casey Wilson as well as “a beautiful debut novel” by Emmy-nominated actor Michael Urie.
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It gives us great pleasure to present Season 9, Episode 47: Gerard Cabrera!
Gerard Cabrera joins us to share his novel: Homo Novus. We discuss Latinx characters, HIV/AIDS, religion, the complexities of abuse, and what characters have to face to move forward. We also touch on the importance of community as a writer, and The Publishing Triangle as a resource.
Bio:
Gerard Cabrera earned a degree in English and American Literature at Brandeis University, his Masters’s Degree in Public Health from Hunter College, and his law degree from Northeastern University School of Law. He served on the board of Gay Community News, was a member of the theater troupe United Fruit Company, and competed in the 1994 Gay Games.
Over the years, Gerard has worked in non-profits, universities, and in government. Active in New York’s queer communities, he has practiced public interest law his entire legal career. Gerard is a Massarican from Springfield, Massachusetts, the birthplace of Dr. Seuss, basketball, and the first American dictionary. He lives and works in New York City.
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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.
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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.
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It gives us great pleasure to present a Season 9, Episode 35 Interview – Mark Salzwedel!
Mark Salzwedel joins us to share his latest novel The Miraculous Life of Rupert Rocket! We discuss blend of magical realism vs urban fantasy, fairy curses and blessings, and the effects that can have on generations of family.
Mark Salzwedel is a gay performer, writer, and composer living in Brooklyn, NY, with his husband, fashion designer Jesus Soto. His science fiction and fantasy short stories have appeared in a variety of publications, and he has two novels published through the Queer Space imprint of Rebel Satori Press — THE LEVER, an LGBT sci-fi thriller published in 2022, and THE MIRACULOUS LIFE OF RUPERT ROCKET is epic LGBT urban fantasy published in April 2024.
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It gives us great pleasure to present a Season 9, Episode 32 Interview – H.N. Hirsch
H.N. Hirsch returns to share the release of the third novel in his Bob and Marcus series: Rain! We get to talk about the evolution of crime series, using location and real-world political climate, and the growth of character careers and relationships.
Titles for writers interested in learning to write crime fiction: Immediate Fiction by Jerry Cleaver, Don’t Murder Your Mystery by Chris Roerdan, Writing Mysteries edited by Sue Grafton, Mastering Suspense, Structure, and Plot by Jane K. Cleland
Bio:
Born in Chicago and educated at the University of Michigan and Princeton, Hirsch has taught at Harvard, the University of California-San Diego, Macalester College, and Oberlin, where he served as Dean of the Faculty and is now the Erwin N. Griswold Professor of Politics Emeritus. He is the author of The Enigma of Felix Frankfurter (“brilliant and sure to be controversial,” The New York Times), A Theory of Liberty, and the memoir Office Hours (“well-crafted and wistful,” Kirkus), as well as numerous articles on law, politics, and constitutional questions.
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December 29, 2023
It gives us great pleasure to present a Season 8, Episode 54 Interview – H.N. Hirsch
HN Hirsch shares his Bob and Marcus Mystery series with us: Shade, Fault Line, and Rain coming next year. We discuss how the series follows the growth of the men and their relationship over the decades as they contend with murders set in the political climates of each book’s era.
Born in Chicago and educated at the University of Michigan and Princeton, Hirsch has taught at Harvard, the University of California-San Diego, Macalester College, and Oberlin, where he served as Dean of the Faculty and is now the Erwin N. Griswold Professor of Politics Emeritus. He is the author of The Enigma of Felix Frankfurter (“brilliant and sure to be controversial,” The New York Times), A Theory of Liberty, and the memoir Office Hours (“well-crafted and wistful,” Kirkus), as well as numerous articles on law, politics, and constitutional questions.
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Once Chris Kim earned her MA in applied linguistics, she was left wondering, ‘What now?’ A desire for self-renewal led to her accepting a university teaching position in Daegu, South Korea. While there, she gained a new cultural perspective, particularly when she married into the Kim family. Her father-in-law gifted her with the name “Kim Sujeong,” translated as crystal (or, as she’s been told, “white quartz”). After six years, she returned to the Tampa Bay area with her family and now teaches English to immigrants.
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April McCloud is a 1% bionic human who worships her cat and hopes to be reincarnated as a red panda. A librarian, educator, and opinionated black belt, she hails from Rochester, NY and enjoys plotting, be it a book, vacation, or a heist at a GF bakery. She identifies as disabled, LGBTQIA+, neurospicy, and as a struggling practitioner of Zen Buddhism.
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It gives us great pleasure to present Season 10, Episode 8: Robert Bruegmann!
