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 15: Del Blackwater!
Del Blackwater shares her novel: Dead Egyptians. Her lifelong love & pursuit of Egyptology has lead her to writing about Egypt in 1902, and a gay British Egyptologist who was there when the Egyptians began to take back their country, plus mysticism, reincarnation, and porch time!
Bio:
Del Blackwater is a novelist and travel writer based in Wisconsin.
Her life vacillates wildly between a quiet existence in the country and a feverish, risk-centric existence when on the road. Her travels have taken her to four continents, and she makes questionable decisions in all of them.
While Egypt is inevitably the high-water mark of both her travels and her writing, she tries to spend time in other places as well.
Del is the author of Dead Egyptians, a historical fantasy series set in the Edwardian era. She is also published many times over as a board game and tarot deck designer, notably as the creator of Playlist Wars, a music game.
When not keeping busy, she unwinds by taking care of a menagerie of critters and enjoying something she calls porch time.
This Podcast episode is available on these channels (in order alphabetical):
It gives us great pleasure to present Season 10, Episode 14: Scott Terry!
Scott Terry shares his novel: The Gift. We discuss fiction exploring the intersection of racism and homophobia under the certainty of religious superiority.
Bio:
Scott Terry (also writing under Scott M. Terry) was raised as a Jehovah’s Witness, and spent his childhood praying for God and Armageddon to heal him of his homosexual thoughts. At the age of sixteen, he escaped from home and was riding bulls in the rodeo as a gay cowboy.
Scott’s memoir, (Cowboys, Armageddon, and The Truth) was named one of the Top 20 Must Read Books of 2013 by Advocate magazine. It was named one of the best LGBT releases of 2012 by Out In Print and Band of Thebes book lists, and was a double-award winner of the Rainbow Book Awards (Best Gay Debut, and Best LGBT Non-Fiction, 2013). Scott’s new novel, The Gift, is a work of fiction and released in Spring 2025. Scott has written often for the San Francisco Chronicle, and his essays has been featured in the Huffington Post and Alternet Magazine, amongst others.
Scott’s rodeo gear, clothing, and championship buckles are in the permanent collection of the Autry Museum of the American West (Los Angeles), and are currently on display in the museum’s Imagined Wests exhibit. He and his husband operate an organic farm in the San Francisco Bay Area.
This Podcast episode is available on these channels (in order alphabetical):
It gives us great pleasure to present Season 10, Episode 13: Jim Provenzano!
Jim Provenzano shares the audio revival of his novel: Now I’m Here. We discuss writing love story arcs and perspectives, and the art of producing an audiobook.
Bio:
Jim Provenzano is the author of the novels Finding Tulsa, Now I’m Here, PINS, Monkey Suits, Cyclizen, the 2012 Lambda Literary Award winner Every Time I Think of You, its sequel Message of Love (a Lammy finalist), the stage adaptation of PINS, and a short fiction collection, Forty Wild Crushes. He edited and published his late uncle John Rigney Jr.’s 1950s novel, The Lost of New York, in 2022. His latest work is the YA novella, Lessons in Teenage Biology, out June 1, 2024.
Degrees include a BFA in dance from Ohio State University and an MA in English from San Francisco State University. Born in New York City and raised in Ohio, he lives in San Francisco.
A journalist in LGBT media for three decades, and the guest curator of Sporting Life, the world’s first gay athletics exhibit, he also wrote the award-winning syndicated Sports Complex column for ten years. He is the Arts Editor with the Bay Area Reporter.
This Podcast episode is available on these channels (in order alphabetical):
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.
This Podcast episode is available on these channels (in order alphabetical):
It gives us great pleasure to present Season 10, Episode 7: Lewis DeSimone!
Lewis DeSimone joins us for the first time with his book: Exit Wounds. We discuss middle age, the disappearance of gay touchstones in culture, and jury duty as a lens for seeing life.
Bio:
Lewis DeSimone has supported his writing habit through a long career in marketing and academic publishing. His debut novel, Chemistry, investigated the impact of mental illness on a gay couple. In subsequent works, The Heart’s History and Channeling Morgan, he tackled subjects as diverse as AIDS, drag, cults, and the celebrity closet. At the core of all of his work is the hard and necessary struggle for self-knowledge and acceptance. As his latest novel, Exit Wounds, demonstrates, that effort doesn’t end at some magical point of “maturity,” particularly in turbulent periods like the present, when cultural shifts happen so quickly we don’t have time to fully grasp what we’re losing in the process.
A frequent panelist at the Saints and Sinners Literary Conference, Lewis has published fiction and nonfiction in the Advocate, Christopher Street, Chelsea Station, and a range of other journals and literary anthologies.
Lewis grew up in Boston and earned a bachelor’s degree from Harvard. He also has a master’s in creative writing from the University of California, Davis. After spending 25 years in San Francisco, he retired to Minneapolis, where he lives with his husband.
This Podcast episode is available on these channels (in order alphabetical):
It gives us great pleasure to present a Season 9, Episode 41 Interview: Catherine Lundoff of Queen of Swords Press
Catherine Ludoff of Queen of Swords Press returns to share her latest Wolves of Wolf’s Point series updates, as well as some of the latest offerings from Queen of Swords Press authors Michael Merriam, Melissa Scott, Lisa A. Barnett, Amy Griswold, and others!
Catherine Lundoff is the publisher at Queen of Swords Press, a small Minneapolis-based press specializing in fiction from out of this world. The Queen of Swords catalogue includes the Vogel Award-winning dapper lesbian capybara pirate tales of The Voyages of Cinrak the Dapper by A.J. Fitzwater, the Lambda Literary Award-winning Lynes & Mathey duology by Melissa Scott and Amy Griswold as well as the Astreiant Series by Melissa Scott and Lisa A.Barnett, plus books by Heather Rose Jones, Michael Merriam, Jennie Goloboy, Dee Holloway and some of Catherine’s own work, including her Wolves of Wolf’s Point series and her short fiction collections Out of This World and Unfinished Business: Tales of the Dark Fantastic.
This Podcast episode is available on these channels (in order alphabetical):
Or Listen/Watch Right Here:
October 15, 2021
It gives us great pleasure to welcome Catherine Lundoff & Queen of Swords Press as the guest on Season 6, Episode 41 – There’s a Fair Amount of Juggling!
Catherine Lundoff from Queen of Swords Press joins us to talk about their upcoming releases, what they look for in a submission, and touch on author involvement in marketing!
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Catherine Lundoff is a transplanted Brooklynite who lives in Minneapolis with her wife Jana, an amazingly talented book artist, and the two cats that own them. When not writing, she works as a professional computer geek. In former lives, Catherine owned a feminist bookstore (Grassroots Books in Iowa City) and has lived in Nicaragua, El Salvador and Mexico. She was once a professional archaeologist and before that, worked at a bar in St. Louis that laid claim to having the world’s largest collection of Elvis memorabilia outside Memphis. Catherine started writing professionally in 1996 while in law school. She sold the first story she ever wrote and quit law school a week later; she has not looked back since. In addition to writing and editing, Catherine is also the publisher at Queen of Swords Press.
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It gives us great pleasure to present Season 8, Episode 8: Matthew Clark Davison + our “The World to Come” review!
Matthew Clark Davison, author of Doubting Thomas and the upcoming The Lab: Experiments in Working Across Genre, joins us to discuss the way his novel explores the sometimes daily fears LGBTQA+ folks STILL feel while at work and among well-meaning family. Then Liz Faraim joins us to review The World to Come!
** GIVEAWAY! ** Sign up for Matthew’s newsletter by the end of March 2023 to be entered into a drawing to win a physical copy of Doubting Thomas!
Matthew Clark Davison is the author of Doubting Thomas and creator of The Lab :: Writing Classes with MCD, and his textbook The Lab, Experiments in Writing Across Genre, co-authored by bestselling writer Alice LaPlante, is due out in 2023. His prose has been recently anthologized in Empty The Pews and 580-Split; as well as published in or on Guernica, The Atlantic Monthly, Foglifter, Lumina Magazine, Fourteen Hills, Per Contra, Educe, and others; and has been recognized with a Creative Work Grant, Cultural Equities Grant, Clark Gross Award for a Novel-in-Progress, and a Stonewall Alumni Award.
This Podcast episode is available on these channels (in order alphabetical):
It gives us great pleasure to present Season 10, Episode 20: Robert Raasch!
