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Philosophy Prof Pens Mystery Novels to Reach Millennial Thinkers

“PHILOSOPHY GIVES MEANING TO PEOPLE’S LIVES.” Dr. Kelly Oliver believes that statement. It’s why she feels privileged to teach philosophy at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. It’s why she’s written 20 scholarly nonfiction books and launched a millennial feminist noir mystery series featuring Jessica James, a young & wry philosophical cowgirl detective. “Writing novels, I start with some social issue, the same kind of social issues that motivate and inspire my nonfiction and my work in philosophy,” Dr. Oliver explained. Her desire to write nonfiction books, like Hunting Girls: Sexual Violence from The Hunger Games to Campus Rape and Carceral Humanitarianism: Logics of Refugee Detention stems from the same inspirational impulse that generated Wolf, Coyote, and F.O.X.  Dr. Kelly will reveal her creative process next week on The Studio with Cheryl on solar-powered KRUU.

Battling Disease, He Seeks Solace in His Craft

Via poetry, essays & sketches Bruce Hopkins reflects on the fate of nature & man in The Art of Decay.

Afflicted with Alzheimer’s after a distinguished career as an educator, environmentalist, and author Bruce Hopkins opted to continue pursuing his craft. The result? The Art of Decay. Released by Ice Cube Press this collection of his drawings, essays, and poems contains Dr. Hopkins’ keen observations about all forms of nature and people of all ages. Artfully braided together, his reflections suggest the power of  hope, renewal, and familiarity. With his wife, Jeanette Hopkins, Dr. Hopkins will showcase The Art of Decay Live From Prairie Lights.

Picture book author Jeanette Hopkins at Fairfest 2014 with James Moore, Station Manager of KRUU-LP 100.1FM

 

Stationery Store Sparks Artists Creativity

People who are serious about their work are serious about their tools – Frank Broz, Co-Owner of the Tokyo Pen Shop

Award-winning author and artist Michelle Edwards writes & illustrates stories for children and adults. Her books are about family, friendship, knitting, and community. Instagram is her sandbox, where she explores new ideas. She enjoys drawing #StudioScrawls with Japanese pens at The Tokyo Pen Shop, too.

Who Iowans Are May Surprise You: Sanskrit Scholar

Tom & Linda Egenes

Universities in the United States, Europe, and Australia use Tom Egenes’s guides for learning Sanskrit. His latest publication? The Upanishads: A New Translation, coauthored with Vernon Katz. Tom lives in Fairfield, Iowa with wife Linda Egenes. Her latest publication? The Ramayana: A New Retelling of Valmiki’s Ancient Epic–Complete and Comprehensive, co-authored with Kumuda Reddy. I photographed this adorable couple at Fairfield’s solar-powered radio station after interviewing them for The Studio: click below to hear their discussion of their creative process.

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THREE ODD THINGS SPARK CREATIVITY OF OCTOGENARIAN AUTHOR

Anola Pickett

Each book begins with a specific incident or memory that someone has shared with me,” author Anola Pickett reported in an interview posted on broadwayworld.com four days after her 80th birthday.

Set in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1918, her newest historical novel is Callahan Crossroads. Its main character, 12-year-old George, must decide how to react when bullies harass his elderly, widowed neighbor whose husband was German. During a KRUU interview, Anola identified how the creative impulse to write this book arose.

In 1918, when her mother was six years old, neighborhood boys made a dummy of Kaiser Wilhelm, attached it to the back of a car, dragged it around, and then burned it. Anola’s mother shared many memories with her about growing up in Kansas City, Missouri during World War I, but, for Anola, this one stood out.

“That gave impetus to exploring the negative attitude towards anyone or anything German during the war,” Anola explained.

During an earlier KRUU interview, Anola revealed the origin of Whisper Island, her second historical novel. Long ago, she and her husband attended a park ranger’s program at North Carolina’s Outer Banks.

“One shipwreck story that happened in 1913 caught my fancy,” Anola explained, “because the first person off the ship was the captain’s wife, who was very large. Instead of being grateful to the men who were rescuing her, she complained all the way off the ship about losing her jewelry, her clothes, and her fine things,” Anola recalled.

“The other thing that caught my fancy was the fact that when the captain came off, he brought his St. Bernard dog with him. Later he gave that dog to the villagers. So that gave me two little things to spring off of and develop a story,” she concluded.

An eight-year-old shepherdess inspired Anola’s first historical novel, Wasatch Summer. Anola heard the shepherdess’s story from a friend of a friend whose ancestor she was. (An Author’s Note explains that Anola made her fictional shepherdess, Hannah, three years older due to her book’s complexity.) Alone, in 1889, the real-life girl took her family’s sheep to a Utah mountain valley, where she stayed to tend them alone all summer. While there, she met  Blackfeet Indians who helped and comforted her.

Octogenarian Anola Pickett spins odd things—Kaiser Wilhelm’s effigy aflame in Kansas City, Missouri; a St. Bernard rescued from a sinking ship near North Carolina’s Outer Banks; an eight-year-old shepherdess sent to tend sheep alone in a Utah mountain valley—into engaging and historically accurate fiction for children. Why? Her curious, caring, and compassionate nature compels her to share people who shaped our past with those who will form our future. Compassion, curiosity, caring—an octogenarian’s values seem oddly quaint in our present day era of hotly contentious division. If we could look at the world through kind, cool eyes like Anola’s, would our creativity flourish? Would we? Would our nation?

Where Good Stories Come From: Anola Pickett & Callahan Crossroads

Callahan Crossroads by Anola Pickett

Callahan Crossroads by Anola Pickett

Where do good stories come from? Anola Pickett crafts thoughtful yet funny and engaging historical novels for children. Set in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1918, her newest title is Callahan Crossroads. Like her other historical novels, Whisper Island and Wasatch Summer, Callahan Crossroads was published by Sweetwater Books, an imprint of Cedar Fort, Inc. During radio and online interviews, Anola identified how the impetus to write each story originated.

“Each book begins with a specific incident or memory that someone has shared with me,” Anola reported in an interview posted July 15, 2015 onto broadwayworld.com.

Stories her mother told her about growing up in Kansas City, Missouri, during World War I whetted her interest, she explained. One particular memory stood out: In 1918, when her mother was six years old, neighborhood boys made a dummy of Kaiser Wilhelm, attached it to the back of a car, dragged it around, and then burned it.

“That gave impetus to exploring the negative attitude towards anyone or anything German during the war and this is one of the book’s themes,” Anola explained.

In Callahan Crossroads, 12-year-old George must decide how to react when bullies harass an elderly, widowed neighbor due to her Germanic last name. His older brother’s pacifist stance, his mother’s support for women’s suffrage, and war-time food restrictions further disrupt George’s life on the home front.

During a 2013 radio interview with me on KRUU-LP 100.1 FM, Anola revealed that Whisper Island germinated for years. Quite a long time ago, she said, she and her husband visited North Carolina’s Outer Banks, where they attended a park ranger’s program about shipwrecks.

“One shipwreck story that happened in 1913 caught my fancy,” she explained, “because the first person off the ship was the captain’s wife, who was very large. Instead of being grateful to the men who were rescuing her, she complained all the way off the ship about losing her jewelry, her clothes, and her fine things,” Anola recalled.

“The other thing that caught my fancy was the fact that when the captain came off, he brought his St. Bernard dog with him. Later he gave that dog to the villagers. So that gave me two little things to spring off of and develop a story,” she concluded.

Anola’s Author’s Note in Wasatch Summer reveals that this novel also arose from a true story she heard. In a Utah valley in 1889, Hannah, the book’s 11-year-old main character, must tend the family’s sheep all summer alone in the mountains. There she encounters Blackfeet Indians, who help and comfort her. In the book’s Author’s Note, Anola confides that, “The girl in the original story was only eight when she took her family’s sheep to the mountains in 1889.” During a 2011 KRUU radio interview with me, Anola explained that due to the book’s complexity, she decided to make Hannah a couple years older than the real-life girl who tended sheep and met Blackfeet Indians in a Utah valley.

Interesting anecdotes lead to engaging fiction only when a lot of other factors converge. A former school teacher and school librarian, Anola knows how young people think, and she understands what kind of stories elicit their interest. Eschewing didacticism, she presents her readers with complex situations that her characters must strive to understand and untangle.

Anola fortifies her fiction with solid research. For Callahan Crossroads, she plumbed resources available at the National World War I Museum in Kansas City; the National Archives/Kansas City; the Midwest Genealogy Center, Mid-Continent Public Library; and the Missouri Valley Room of the Kansas City Public Library.

“All provided a fascinating look at the home front in Kansas City during ‘the Great War,’” she explained.

To make her story come alive, Anola culled specific details from this extensive research. Did you know that during World War I, the filters in gas masks were made from crushed prune pits? Anola does, and so do her readers.

Where do good stories come from? Good storytellers like Anola Pickett.

Whisper Island

Does proximity to nature enhance creativity?

My Journaling Desk

My Journaling Desk

Does proximity to nature enhance creativity? In September on The Studio with Cheryl on KRUU I interviewed three authors whose preferred writing spaces connect them with the outdoors. Cartoonist Francesco Marciuliano’s pet poetry books (like I Knead My Mommy and Other Poems by Kittens) appear on many best-seller lists. His first-floor New York City apartment boasts a small, private backyard. Weather permitting, Francesco writes there. Outside, under the shade of an umbrella, he sits at a small table in an Adirondack chair.

Standup comic and internationally known performance poet, June Melby recently penned a memoir: My Family and Other Hazards details her family’s years running a hand-crafted but unprofitable miniature golf course near Waupaca, Wisconsin. From her writing desk, June sees the woods surrounding her Decorah, Iowa log cabin.

Oral historian Esther Ehrlich’s Richmond, California home borders a large park filled with deer, foxes, and hawks. Tucked into a corner of her bedroom, her writing space consists of a shelf-like slab of wood positioned below two huge windows. Esther’s view includes a ravine, trees, a creek, birds, and wildlife. “It’s a very peaceful place for me to write,” Esther told me, adding that she wrote her whole book (Nest, her first historical novel) sitting right there.

In his nonfiction book Thrive, author Dan Buettner praised flow rooms, spaces in Danish homes designed to encourage families to cultivate the arts. I may never have a flow room. I may never succeed in making all my home’s rooms the tidy, nurturing spaces I want them to be. Thanks to the inspiration of people I’ve interviewed, though, I have created a flow niche.

During my teens, my parents bought a solid-maple vanity for my bedroom. After they died, I took it home to Iowa. At my request, my husband recently detached the heavy mirror from its back, and now the vanity fits perfectly under our bedroom’s north window. With a vintage chair of my mother’s beside it, the vanity feels desk-like. The north light draws me to it, maybe because it deepens the patina of use emanating from the vanity, the chair, and two old suitcases my husband kept to remind him of his father.  Sitting at the vanity, I see a stretch of sky, a gravel road, and trees, now mature, that my husband planted.

Tiny as it is, this space comforts me in ways I can’t explain. Journal writing is effortless here. Breezes from the window, the chirpings of crickets and birds, the daily deer sightings—these simple sensory impressions quiet my jumbled thoughts. In this small space, I feel connected not just to nature, but to the inner me, my creative self, and also to loved ones now gone.

NEST by Esther Ehrlich: “I just wrote the book I needed to write.”

Esther Ehrlich, Author of Nest

Esther Ehrlich, Author of Nest

Some things that I read make me long to meet the author. Anyone who can write like this, I think, must be a wise person. B. K. Loren’s novel Theft elicited that reaction. So did Elizabeth McCracken’s story, “Some Have Entertained Angels, Unaware” and “Welding with Children” by Tim Gautreaux.  And now there’s this new book, Esther Ehrlich’s historical novel Nest, which I found myself magically pre-approved to download to my Kindle and read free-of-charge thanks to NetGalley (which provides complimentary e-books to reviewers and media people).

Set in the 1970s, Nest is a children’s book, purportedly for ages 10 and up, but it didn’t surprise me to learn that Esther didn’t plan it that way.

“I did not write the book with any audience in mind,” she told me recently while taping a radio interview for The Studio on KRUU-LP 100.1FM. “I really feel like I just wrote the book I really needed to write,” she explained.

Reading Nest, I wondered, Who could do this? Who could tell a story with so much sadness yet still infuse it with so much hope and joy? Nest’s protagonist, eleven-year-old Naomi (nicknamed Chirp due to her fascination with birds) faces serious problems. Her mom’s longstanding struggle to overcome crippling depression crumbles after troubling symptoms lead to a multiple sclerosis diagnosis and end her dancing career. The insistence of Chirp’s dad (a psychiatrist) on addressing family crises with emotionally insensitive discussions intensifies family members’ isolation. The family’s religion—they’re Jewish in an area where most people aren’t—renders evangelical Christian spiritual advice, offered awkwardly from secondary adults in Chirp’s life, irrelevant. Finally, Chirp’s friend Joey, whose home life includes physical and emotional abuse, develops obsessive compulsions.

Esther tempers all this malaise with graceful strategies that Chirp grasps for psychic survival: dancing indoors and out, tromping to her favorite birding-watching spots, throwing rocks with Joey in his secret, glass-walled hangout. Chirp’s life is filled with hit 1970s records and with the sounds of crickets and songbirds. She exploits all the freedom enjoyed by 1970s-era children, children untethered to technology, children who explore the landscape around them in a very visceral way. Esther plumbs all the richness of children’s lives during this less technological era.

Naomi reads books, and from one, Harriet the Spy, she learns the value of being observant. Nothing escapes this girl, not scents (sweat, lavender, lemon) or tastes (Oreos, Ring Dings, Yodels) or traditions (making menorahs by sticking candles into holes poked in raw potatoes, riding swan boats in the Boston Public Garden).
Enlivened by Chirp’s innocent engagement with the sensory world, readers eventually suspect that, aided by Joey’s friendship, this strong, thoughtful girl—though mightily challenged—will emerge from the blanket nest she’s built on her bedroom floor and navigate her way to a successful and happy adulthood.

Nest by Esther Ehrlich

Nest by Esther Ehrlich

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