Word by Word

Gil Mansergh’s SeptemberWord By Word conversation is with Jean Hegland, author of Into the Forest, the bestselling novel of a near future, and the soon to be released Still Time, a novel about a Shakespeare scholar with alzheimers.

Long time listens may recall that Jean joined novelist Greg Sarris on Gil’s very first Word By Word broadcast, way back in May, 2007. A lot has happened in the intervening years, including actress Ellen Page falling in love with Into the Forest and guiding the book’s transformation to a film as its producer.

The Canadian-made movie stars Ellen Page and Evan Rachel Wood and is directed and written by Patricia Rozema who created two of Gil’s favorite films (I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing and Kit Kittredge: An American Girl), and is pleased to announce that the movie version of Into the Forest will open at Sebastopol’s Rialto Cinemas next Friday, September 16.

The book launch for Still Time begins at 7:00, Friday, October 7th at the Occidental Center for the Arts.

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Charles Markee & Waights Taylor This month’s Word By Word guests have written novels set in distinctive times and places. As he did in his first detective novel, Kiss of Salvation, Waights Taylor takes us back to 1948 in the segregated Birmingham, Alabama worlds of detective partners Joe McGrath and Sam Rucker in Touch of Redemption, while Charles Markee’s novel of magical realism, Maria’s Beads, features a Latino lettuce-packing family living in present-day Salinas, California.

Host Gil Mansergh tells us that after the show was recorded, Maria’s Beads won the silver medal for Junior Fiction in the prestigious Colorado Independent Publishers Association 22nd annual competition.

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Revisiting Lisa See.

Last month’s Word By Word conversation was with the talented graphic artists Maia Kobabe and Trinidad Escobar who shared verbal descriptions of Maia’s lushly illustrated comics The Thief’s Tale, and her award-winning Tom O’Bedlam, and Trinidad’s biomythography, Crushed which explores the interior landscape of her experience as a magikal, transnational Filipino adoptee.

During our conversation, Trinidad shared how she needed to carry a dead baby’s first name for most of her life because adoption paperwork had already been approved with that name. I made reference at that time to the Chinese immigrant “paper sons” that Lisa See wrote about in her novel Shanghai Girls and talked about on a Word By Word show broadcast in June, 2009.

Listeners let host Gil Mansergh know they were unable to find a podcast of that show, so he takes care of that problem by doing this rebroadcast.

In that show, Lisa See shared stories of her Chinese ancestors, and introduced us to Shanghai Girls Pearl and May, sisters who escaped from the war-torn China on the 1930’s to Angel Island in the San Francisco Bay and on to Los Angeles where they got involved in the movie business.

Listeners will be glad to hear that in Lisa See’s novel Pearls of Joy they can read about Pearl’s 19-year-old daughter Joy, who makes the trip the other way—back to a China trapped in the disastrous consequences of Mao’s cultural revolution.

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Trinidad Escobar and Maia Kobabe are two talented artists and writers with MA degrees in “Comics” from the California College of Arts, who create distinctively different comic books and graphic novels. This is a very visual medium so you may want to accompany today’s conversation by viewing some of the comics online. Maia has shared her work at museums, galleries, libraries and conventions from coast to coast, and host Gil Mansergh believes she is the only Word By Word guest to have been a visiting cartoonist at the Charles Schulz Museum and a panelist at Kraken Con. Her long comics The Thief’s Tale and Tom O’Bedlam are available in print and online, at http://redgoldsparkspress.com
and Trinidad’s in-progress graphic-memoir, CRUSHED, is a “biomythography that explores the interior landscape of her experiences as a magickal transnational adoptee, and the intersecting worlds of Western science and Filipino spirituality.” CRUSHED will be published in 2017, but excerpts are accessible online at www.wearegazillionstrong.org

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This month’s guests on the Word By Word: Conversations With Writers are from the upcoming “Pen to Published—Redwood Writers Conference,” which will be held at the Santa Rosa Flamingo Hotel on Saturday, April 23, 2016.

The conference co-chairs William Haigwood and Robbi Sommers Bryant join host Gil Mansergh, along with the poet/writer Fran Claggett who will present “Lifelines: A Memoir Writing Workshop at the conference.

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Today’s Word By Word broadcast begins with an Irish toast befitting this weekend’s weather:

May the sun shine warm upon your face
and the rains fall soft upon your fields.

Today’s guests represent the Ninth Annual Sebastopol Documentary Film Festival (SDFF) which opens on St. Patrick’s Day, Thursday Evening, March 17th and runs through Sunday afternoon, March 20th at the Sebastopol Center for the Arts.

Sharing the microphones with Gil are the Program Director and documentary filmmaker, Randy Hall. We also have a phone conversations with magician and Filmmaker Ben Proudfoot whose feature film Rwanda & Juliet tells the unlikely story of a well-intentioned man’s attempts to stage a production of Romeo & Juliet in Rwanda as a means of reconciliation. Several of Ben’s short films (Rust, Stone, Ladybug, The Ox) are presented from his “Life’s Work” made-for-streaming docs.

Gil is hosting the Thursday night festival opener, Kent Jones’ exceptional documentary Hitchcock/Trudeau, and he invites listeners to join him.

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Word By Word host Gil Mansergh wishes every one a Happy Gothic Valentines Day by welcoming Sonoma State’s newest professor of creative writing, Stefan Kiesbye. Born in Germany, and with an MFA from the University of Michigan, Stefan’s books prompted Die Welt to write that he “is the inventor or the modern German Gothic novel.” Stefan’s debut, Next Door Lived a Girl, won the Low Fidelity Press Novella Award and his second book, Your House Is on Fire, Your Children All Gone, was a Top Ten pick in Oprah Magazine and made Entertainment Weekly’s “Must Read” list. Stefan’s newest novel,The Staked Plains, is set in a desiccated town in Eastern New Mexico that is “ similar but decidedly different” than the Eastern New Mexico University community where Stefan taught before relocating to Sonoma County.

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This month’s Word By Word: Conversations With Writers was prompted by Diane Peterson’s recent Press Democrat article about the collaboration between Redwood Writers and Copperfield’s Bookstores.

Entitled the “Redwood Author Spotlight,” six local novelists will conduct readings and discussions about their novels on the last Thursday evenings from January through June at the Copperfield’s Montgomery Village location.

In this show, host Gil Mansergh welcomes the first three novelists and their books:
Marian Lindner, with San Francisco
Marilyn Campbell, with Trains to Concordia
Linda Loveland Reid, with Something in Stone

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With a loud, “Ho, Ho, Ho!” host Gil Mansergh, welcomes listeners to our 2015 holiday gift books edition of Word By Word: Conversations With Writers. He asks: “What do bird portraits, The Golden Gate Bridge, dining in the Yucatan, an illustrated Harry Potter book, carved Viking ivory chessman and a roadtrip with Gloria Steinem that lasts 81 years have in common?”

These fascinating topics are all included among the gift book suggestions shared by Sheryl Cotleur and Michelle Bellah—the book buyers for the Copperfield’s Bookstores.

As Sheryl and Bellah told Gil: “We love doing this show. It’s like we’re chatting about our favorite books in front of a cozy fireplace.”

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Award-winning novelist Elizabeth George is creator of the bestselling Inspector Lynley mysteries. George introduces listeners to A Banquet of Consequences, the19th book in the series.

Since many readers first encountered Scotland Yard’s dapper Detective Inspector Thomas Lynley and his down-to-earth partner, Sergeant Barbara Havers on PBS’ British produced Masterpiece Mystery TV shows on KRCB Channel 22, listeners may be surprised to learn that Elizabeth George is American and a former Orange County “Teacher of the Year” for her work as a high school English teacher. She now lives on picturesque Whidbey Island in Washington state.

In 1988, Elizabeth’s first mystery novel, A Great Deliverance won an Edgar and Agatha Award as well as France’s Le Garnde Prix de Literature Policier. Elizabeth also has a 4-book, YA paranormal/mystery/romance series that takes place (not surprisngly) on Whidbey Island. The first of these, The Edge of Nowhere introduces us to the resilient young Becca King.

Host: Gil Mansergh.

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