Word by Word

Gil Mansergh launches his second decade as the host of Word By Word: Conversations With Writers chatting with the international bestselling novelist Jane Green about her newest novel The Sunshine Sisters.

Jane Green is considered to be one of the founding authors of the “chick lit.” genre. Her 1997 first novel Straight Talking made her an overnight success and her second novel, Jemima J, became an international bestseller. Her first books were often reviewed as ”the kind of novel you’ll gobble up in a single sitting,” but now Jane writes more complex, character-driven novels that explore the concerns of real women’s lives. These cover marriage (The Other Woman) to motherhood (Babyville)and the complexities of having grown-up children (The Sunshine Sisters)

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This is a once-in-a-decade, retrospective look back at the last 10 years of Word: Conversations With Writers broadcasts with host Gil Mansergh. The first half hour features clips by novelists and writing professors Greg Sarris and Jean Hegland, SF literary agents Michael Larson and Elizabeth Pomada, Jamaican-born novelist Margaret Cezair Thompson, and Sebastopol childrens authors and illustrators Megan McDonald and Terri Sloat.

The second half hour includes clips with award-winning, bestselling author T.C. Boyle, Irishman Eoin Coffler, who wrote an immensely popular YA mystery series about the brilliant teen-aged master criminal Artemis Fowl, Robert Digitale, Dan Tayloeand Frederick Weisel—three writers who contributed chapters to the Press Democrat’s serialized Sonoma Squares: Red Harvest mystery, and graphic novelists Maia Kobabe and Trinidad Escobar.

As an added treat, Gil reads the sign-off quote by Eoin Cofler in his pseudo-Irish accent.

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Gil Mansergh welcomes Megan Miranda, the New York Times bestselling author of All the Missing Girls to Word By Word for a spirited conversation about Megan’s second novel of psychological suspense, The Perfect Stranger.

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Gil Mansergh welcomes the celebrated novelist and master of the short story, Eric Puchner as his guest on KRCB-FM’s Word By Word: Conversations With Writers show. Professor of writing seminars at Johns Hopkins, Eric includes nine stories in his Last Day On Earth collection—each falling into distincively different categories from coming-of-age to science fiction to psycho-drama.

Last months Word By Word guest, Chinese-born novelist, poet and memoirist Yi Yun Li writes the following about Eric:

“Eric Puchner is an alchemist who captures the joy and danger in everyday life and, with precision, humor, and empathy, turns these moments into gold… in an unforgettable collection from a great storyteller.”

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This month’s guest is McArthur Genius Grant winner, Yiyun Li talking about her memoir Dear Friend, From My Life I Write To You In Your Life.

Born and raised in China, Yi’s parents were victims of the cultural revolution but still encouraged their daughter to succeed in anything she chose to do. And succeed she did. Word By Word listeners may recall her conversation with Gil Mansergh where she explained how she wrote her first novel, The Vagrants in English and won the Gold Medal of California Book Award for first fiction. Since then, her books have been translated into more than twenty languages. She was selected by Granta as one of the 21 Best Young American Novelists under 35, named by The New Yorker as one of the top 20 writers under 40, and the MacArthur Foundation named her a 2010 fellow. She is a contributing editor to the Brooklyn-based literary magazine, A Public Space. Yiyun Li lives in Oakland, California with her husband and their two sons, and teaches at the University of California, Davis.

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For February’s Word By Word: Conversations With Writers host Gil Mansergh welcomes the award-winning novelist and writing teacher, Joshua Mohr, whose literary memoir Sirens has just been released. Joshua’s five novels are populated with word-pictures of individuals addicted to booze and drugs and alternative realities. His work has earned accolades including one of O Magazine’s “Top 10 Reads,” an “Editors Choice” in the New York Times and the Northern California Book Award. Joshua has turned inward for his latest book, Sirens, a literary memoir that grapples with the constant challenges involved with what Meredith May calls “letting chaos flow into sordid stories.”

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Word By Word is fortunate to greet the New Year with two writers featured in an upcoming collaboration entitled Copperfields’ Presents: Redwood Writers Fiction 2017. Starting January 24th and every fourth Tuesday for the following six months, talented writers will share readings from their books from 6:00 to 7:00 at the Montgomery Village Copperfields’ Bookstore.

Patricia V. Davis is familiar to Word By Word fans from the revelations she shared from her first bestseller, Harlot’s Sauce: a Memoir of Food, Family, Love and Loss and Greece. Patricia’s new novel, Cooking For Ghosts is the opening part of a trilogy set aboard the cruise ship, the RMS Queen Mary—which has become a convention center in the Long Beach Harbor. While Jo-Anne Rosen’s engaging fiction collection, What They Don’t Know, anthologizes short pieces that first appeared in literary journals like The Sommerset Review, The Dickens and The Florida Review.

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Continuing a seven-year KRCB-FM seasonal tradition, with a hearty “Ho, Ho, Ho!” Word By Word host Gil Mansergh, welcomes Copperfield’s Books buyers Sheryl Cutler and Michelle Bellah to share their carefully considered suggestions for 2016 holiday gift books. Incorporating one deft seque after another, the trio share comments from THE SECRET HISTORY OF TWIN PEAKS, VINCENT’S STARY NIGHT, HOW TO MAKE A SPACESHIP, THE SECRET LIFE OF TREES, THE GIRL WHO DRANK THE MOON and YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN: A MEL BROOKS BOOK, THE STORY OF THE MAKING OF THE MOVIE. Fun times for everyone involved!
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“Movies as Teaching Tools” is the focus on November’s Word By Word: Conversations With Writers on North Bay Public Media, KRCB-FM. Today’s guest is SRJC media studies instructor and interdisciplinary scholar Tony Kashani, author of Movies Change Lives: A Pedagogy of Humanistic Transformation, and since host Gil Mansergh is a syndicated film columnist who uses film clips in his seminars, the discussion quickly becomes a knowledgeable interchange of how really good movies can be transformational.

As an aid to listeners, here is a list of the movies exploring “who and what we are” that Tony and Gil discuss during the show:

1. Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity (1944) starring Barbara Stanwick Fred McMurray, Edward G. Robinson

2. Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982) starring Harrison Ford, Rutger Hauer, Sean Young, Darryl Hannah, Edward James Olmos

3. Andrew Niccol’s Gattaca (1997) starring Ethan Hawke, Uma Thurman, Jude Law

4. Peter Wier’s The Truman Show (1998) Written by Andrew Niccol and starring Jim Carrey, Laura Linney, Noah Emmerich, Ed Harris

5. The Waschowski Brothers’ The Matrix (1999) starring Keanu Reeves, Laurence Fishburne, Carrie-Ann Moss, Hugo Weaving

6. Spike Jonze’s Her (2015) starring Joaquin Phoenix, Rooney Mara, Olivia Wilde, Amy Adams, Scarlett Johansson

7. Mira Nair’s Mississippi Masala (1991) starring Sarita Choudhury, Denzel Washington, Roshan Seth, Sharmila Tagore

8. Mira Nair’s Queen of Katwe (2016) starring Madina Nalwanga, David Oyelowo, Lupita Nyong’o

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Star Wars, Native American myths, and war-torn Japan during the time when Lord Oda was Shogun are just a few few of the fascinatingly diverse topics Gil Mansergh examines in this Word By Word conversation with actor, novelist, editor and educator David Kugler. David shares excerpts from and writing secrets regarding his newly released young adult novel Risuko. The conversation expands to explore some of the multi-cultural mythologies Joseph Campbell wrote about in Saki and Satori, Myths of Light and Hero With a Thousand Faces—posthumous editions of which were edited by David as Publishing Director for the Joseph Campbell Foundation.

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