Mark Seinfelt - Mark Seinfelt

Word Patriots – Seinfelt and Shakespeare Filmography

billschiffler — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 04:01:18 +0000

Today, my father Dr. Frederick William Seinfelt again joins me on Word Patriots. We will be discussing Shakespeare on film and which cinematic versions of the plays speak most to us and why. We talk about the first three American sound films of Shakespeare: the 1929 Pickford Corporation’s “The Taming of the Shrew,” Max Reinhardt’s “A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream” and the 1936 Irving Thalberg produced and George Cukor directed “Romeo and Juliet.” Then we examine the strengths and shortcomings of Laurence Olivier’s and Orson Welles’ various cinematic versions of Shakespeare, John Gielgud’s many Shakespearean performances including his starring roles in two versions of “Julius Caesar,” and why most critics consider Franco Zeffirelli’s film of “Romeo and Juliet” to be the definitive cinematic version. We also examine Roman Polanski’s controversial 1971 “Macbeth.” Some feel Polanski imposed his own vision of evil and his personal despair in the face of existence upon “Macbeth” and argue, as does Charles Shattuck, that it “profits nothing to reduce Shakespeare’s tragedy to Grand Guignol, or Dachau, or the Manson murders,” but my father defends Polanski’s vision. At one point in the discussion, despite his prodigious memory, my father, who will be celebrating his eightieth birthday in August, conflates the characters of Banquo and Macduff. No doubt one reason Polanski feels Macbeth to be guilty of something akin to the crime of genocide is because the Scottish chieftain attempts to wipe out the progeny of both men. Macbeth succeeds in killing Macduff’s children. Banquo, of course, accompanies Macbeth when he meets the three witches. After first prophesying that Macbeth will become king, the witches tell Banquo that, while he will not be king himself, his descendants will rise to the crown. Macbeth in his lust for power sees Banquo as a threat and orders both Banquo and Banquo’s son Fleance murdered. Fleance, however, escapes. To conclude the program, my father recalls the high school teachers who first introduced him to Shakespeare and reads favorite passages from “The Merchant of Venice” and “Macbeth.”

Word Patriots – Samantha Schyuler and Stephen Urchick

billschiffler — Mon, 16 Apr 2012 04:01:43 +0000

Word Patriots often fall under the spell of the written word and find their vocation early in life. Several months ago, I celebrated my fiftieth birthday. Still it doesn’t seem very long ago since I was a high school student enrolled in Kay Hutton’s Nobel Prize authors and AP English classes or since I represented Indiana Area Senior High School at the Pennsylvania Governor’s School for the Arts at Bucknell University in the summer of 1979, where I was enrolled in my first creative writing classes. It was at that time that I became convinced that it was my destiny to write books and that I found my essential self. Late adolescence is a pivotal, memorable time for most of us. To adopt the title of Thomas Rogers’ classic novel of love in America, we find ourselves “At the Shores.” We feel that we have arrived or that we are on the brink of arriving. Just round the corner new and decisive experiences await us. We have great expectations as we emerge from our cocoons and burst into the sunlight. The world is our oyster. We feel as potent, effective and forceful as Siegfried as he emerges from the magic fire to search for new adventures in the opening act of “Götterdämmerung” but as with Wagner’s hero disappointment and frustration may very well be our portion as well. My guests are two very talented young authors Samantha Schyuler and Stephen Urchick. Both are seniors in the International Baccalaureate Program at Palm Harbor University High School in coastal-central Florida. Samantha writes that she has learned nothing in her four years at Palm Harbor if not how to function on four hours of sleep. She is fond of hiking, painting, and books; the last of which drove her to write a 5,000 word extended essay on the topic of Updike’s “Rabbit, Run,” as well as become the president of her school’s Creative Writing Club. Through the club she was able to attend and speak at the Associated Writers and Writing Programs conference in Chicago this year. At the podium, she presented the paper, “Decentralizing the Creative Writing Classroom,” to an audience of thirty-five professors. She presented with confidence, clarity, and poise and will be attending the University of Florida. Stephen Urchick describes himself as an 18-year-old masochist. He looks forward to graduating this June, when (in his own words) he can atone for his sins “by savoring many half-finished novels; by eating delicious, square meals each day and by steeling himself to write for one of the University of Chicago’s literary outlets.” He regularly cannibalizes his schoolwork for essay ideas and for short fiction devices. He will be attending the University of Chicago in the fall on a full scholarship. Also with us is Elisabeth Lanser Rose, a teacher in the International Baccalaureate Program at Palm Harbor and the sponsor of the Creative Writing Club there to which both Samantha and Stephen belong. Elisabeth is no stranger to Word Patriots. Her novel “Body Sharers” published by Rutgers University in 1993 was a finalist for the Pen/ Hemingway Foundation Award for first novel. She is also the author of the memoir “For the Love of a Dog,” published in 2002 by Random House. If you would like to know more about my books, please visit my website: www.markseinfelt.com. Please also see the webpage for Palm Harbor University High School: http://www.phuhs.org/ and the Amazon page for Elisabeth Rose’s “For the Love of a Dog”: http://www.amazon.com/Love-Dog-Memoir-Elisabeth-Rose/dp/0609606921/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1303074639&sr=1-1

Word Patriots – O’Dell on O’Connor

billschiffler — Mon, 09 Apr 2012 04:01:53 +0000

Today’s program is one of our periodic shows devoted to past masters, heroic word patriots who overcame great obstacles, who wrote in new and innovative ways, or who defied convention by visiting formerly taboo topics and thereby opened new fields of exploration for literature. On this episode of Word Patriots we will be discussing the work of Flannery O’Connor. The novelist and short story writer was born and died in Georgia and studied at the Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa. The following entry on O’Connor appears in the Avenel Companion to English and American literature: “She is usually said to be a Southern Gothic and/ or Catholic writer. Both are probably true, subject to severe qualification. Her typical characters are indeed God-ridden but not in a way that seems uniquely Catholic. Rather they seem the essence of Protestantism, seeking an individual and immediate relationship with God. They stalk him, defy him, try to trick him into some sign by doing the things ‘that people have quit doing—like boiling in oil or being a saint or walling up cats.’ Even the psychopathic murderer of ‘A Good Man is Hard to Find’ commits his murders in an attempt to force God to reveal himself. But grace can be arrived at only through the kind of self knowledge arrived at in ‘The Violent Bear It Away’ (1960) by Rayber, who has his eyes burned clean and is able at last to look into his own heart and recognize his real place in the world. Love, however, is not the clue to the saving communion with the world as it is with so many writers. The clue is suffering, and Hazel Motes (‘Wise Blood,’ 1952) burns out his eyes with quicklime so he can see better.” My guest today is Tawni O’Dell. She is the New York Times best-selling author of four novels. Her first, “Back Roads,” was both a Book-of-the-Month Club Main and an Oprah’s Book Club selection, and is currently in development as a major motion picture by Michael Ohoven, the producer of the Academy-Award-winning, “Capote” with a screenplay written by Tawni herself. Following the publication of “Back Roads” in 2000, Tawni has completed and published three more novels: “Coal Run,” “Sister Mine,” and “Fragile Beasts.” She is also a contributor to several anthologies including “Becoming Myself: Reflections on Growing Up Female.” Her work has been translated into ten languages and been published in over forty countries. Flannery O’Connor is one of Tawni’s favorite authors, as she is also one of mine. If you would like to know more about my books, please visit my website: www.markseinfelt.com. See also Amazon’s Flannery O’Connor page: http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_1?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=Flannery+O%27Connorand Amazon’s author page for Tawni O’Dell: http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_1?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=Tawni+O%27Dell .

Word Patriots – Rosaly Roffman’s “I Want To Thank My Eyes

billschiffler — Mon, 02 Apr 2012 04:01:53 +0000

Rosaly DeMaios Roffman, Indiana University of Pennsylvania Professor Emerita, still teaches courses in creative writing and myth and started a myth/folklore Studies Center at IUP. She is the co-editor of “Life on the Line,” author of “Going to Bed Whole,” “Tottering Palaces,” “The Approximate Message” and most recently “In the Fall of a Sparrow,” commissioned by the Pennsylvania Governor’s Institute for the Humanities, Harrisburg. She has collaborated on twenty pieces with composers and dance/theater companies in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, including “No More Masks,” a piece centering on archetypes of the feminine, “Homage to Vincent and Theo Van Gogh,” a piece for tape and voice which was also broadcast on the radio, “One Person Renga” for seven different instruments and voice, and “Clippings” a docu-theatre poetry mosaic based on George Orwell and newspaper clippings. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies including “Macguffin,” “Zone 3,” “Centennial Review,” “Pittsburgh Quarterly,” “Sing Heavenly Muse,” and most recently in these anthologies “Along These Rivers,” celebrating the 250th anniversary of Pittsburgh, in “Only the Sea Keeps,” and in the books “Come Together: Imagine Peace” and “The Working Poet.” The recipient of a Distinguished Faculty Award in the Arts in Pennsylvania, and of National Endowment Grants, she was brought to England by the BBC for a broadcast (as “Writer from Abroad”) on her work as an American poet with an abiding interest in “the ordinary and the sacred.” She facilitates the Squirrel Hill Poetry Workshop in Pittsburgh and has read her poems in Mexico, Israel, Ireland and Greece and at three World Congresses of Poets. Her latest book of poems “I Want To Thank My Eyes” will be published by Tebot Bach this month. Joan Bauer has called the collection an engaging blend of deep reverence, compassionate vision and quirky humor … food for the soul which makes us hungry for more.” And Jim Daniels says the collection “rings with tenderness and gentle wisdom, propelled by the quiet, intense urgency of a writer familiar with life’s complex physical and emotional landscapes.” This week Rosaly and I explore her lifelong fascination with myth and folklore and how that interest has empowered her work as poet, and discuss the transformative power of words, how language anoints us and permits metamorphosis. If you would like to know more about my books, please visit my website: www.markseinfelt.com. See also the web page for Tebot Bach books: http://tebotbach.org/

Word Patriots – William Gass remembers Stanley Elkin

billschiffler — Mon, 26 Mar 2012 04:01:37 +0000

The late Stanley Elkin was a two-time recipient of the National Book Critics Circle Award. The author of more than a dozen novels and short-story collections, including “A Bad Man,” “George Mills,” “The Rabbi of Lud” and “Mrs. Ted Bliss,” he is recognized for his humorous and satirical fiction and for the stylistic virtuosity of his ornately wrought prose. 1964 saw the publication of his first novel “Boswell: A Modern Comedy,” which relates the misfortunes of a death haunted man who lives off the reflected celebrity and fame of others, this Boswell’s Johnson a professional wrestler known as the Grim Reaper. Elkin’s second novel “A Bad Man” explores the human capacity for suffering and depicts both the absurdity and the regimentation of prison life. It established Elkin as “one of the flashiest and most exciting comic talents in view,” according to the New York Times Book Review. Department store-owner Leo Feldman’s business is illicit wish-fulfillment, but on the novel’s very first page the jig is up, and Feldman finds himself on the way to stir. Life’s manifold indignities and the human capacity for getting things wrong are subjects Elkin returns to again and again in his subsequent books. He also increasingly treats on life’s fragility. “The Franchiser” tells the tale of traveling businessman Ben Flesh who by the end of the novel creates a nationwide empire of franchises but whose body is ravaged and wracked by multiple sclerosis. “Stanley Elkin’s The Magic Kingdom” follows a group of doomed, terminally ill children on an outing to Disney World and his late novella “Her Sense of Timing” concerns a wheelchair-bound professor abandoned by his wife. As the “Cyclopedia of World Authors” points out, Elkin was an author of many facets and had “the distinction of multiple tenancy in some of the most compelling camps of contemporary fiction: He is categorized along with writers such as Joseph Heller, Bernard Malamud, and Philip Roth as a prominent contributor to the postwar Jewish American renaissance; he is often compared with Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Bruce Jay Friedman, and other so-called black humorists; and he was allied with Robert Coover, William Gass, and John Hawkes by virtue of his self-conscious craftsmanship and postrealist sensibilities .” My guest this week is William H. Gass, a lifelong friend of Stanley Elkin and a fellow faculty member at Washington University in Saint Louis. If you would like to know more about my books, please visit my website: www.markseinfelt.com. See also the Amazon Stanley Elkin page: http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=sr_tc_2_0?rh=i%3Astripbooks%2Ck%3AStanley+Elkin&keywords=Stanley+Elkin&ie=UTF8&qid=1331655817&sr=1-2-ent&field-contributor_id=B000APUV9U and also the Amazon page for “Life Sentences”: http://www.amazon.com/Life-Sentences-Literary-Judgments-Accounts/dp/0307595846/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1331655994&sr=1-1

Word Patriots – Joanna Scott’s “Follow Me”

billschiffler — Mon, 19 Mar 2012 04:01:46 +0000

Since the publication of “Huckleberry Finn” in 1885, countless readers, all small-town boys-at-heart, who envied and wanted to trade places with the free-as-a-bird Huck, have drifted down the Mississippi with him and his easy to fool, credulous yet capable and levelheaded companion Jim, whose thoughts constantly turn to his family still in servitude, following them as, fast on their toes, they survive by their flexible wits, pilfering and fibbing to get by, and encountering a panoply of colorful characters as they head southward, deeper and deeper into slave territory . Sixteen -year-old Sally Werner, the heroine of this week’s guest Joanna Scott’s lyrical 2009 novel and future American classic “Follow Me”—a New York Times Notable Book of the year—also flees home, and, from her religious German immigrant parents’ farm in Pennsylvania, follows another river, the fictional Tuskee, northward. I predict that if the human race is blessed to survive so long, generations of readers will keep coming back to this book, that it will prove a sister to “Huckleberry Finn,” every bit as enduring and perennial, and that a century from now it will be fettering and entrancing readers who will continue to follow Sally as she bursts her bonds, lives by her wits, and for six decades recreates, re-conceives and re-christens herself as again and again happenstance propels Sally to run away from town after town, proceeding forever northward, keeping the first name Sally but assuming a string of new surnames: aka Sally Angel aka Sally Mole aka Sally Bliss, all the time haunted by the fact that at the start and inception of her odyssey she abandoned her infant son on her parents’ kitchen table. Her tale begins as a lark. In 1946 Sally Werner allows her cousin Daniel Werner to take her for a ride on his motorcycle and in the ride’s aftermath conceives his baby. Her fundamentalist German parents naturally blame her for the sinful act, and she, too, is full of self-incrimination. As trapped as Huck or Jim, after her boy’s birth, she impulsively makes the decision to run away, a choice which will haunt her for the remainder of her life and which will have future, gut-wrenching, consequences for those she loves. If you would like to know more about my books, please visit my website: www.markseinfelt.com. See also the Amazon page for “Follow Me”: http://www.amazon.com/Follow-Me-Novel-Joanna-Scott/dp/B005Q697GQ/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1331074391&sr=1-1 .

Word Patriots – Darryl Strawberry’s “Finding My Way”

billschiffler — Mon, 12 Mar 2012 04:01:03 +0000

From the mid-1980s to the early 1990s, Darryl Strawberry was one of the most feted and prolific sluggers in baseball. Fans dubbed him the Black Ted Williams. An eight-time All-Star, a four-time World Series Champion, and a National League Rookie of the Year, he played for the Mets, Dodgers, Giants, and Yankees. His dazzling achievements on the field, however, were often overshadowed by his epic struggles off it. Darryl Strawberry became the first National League player voted to the All-Star Game in each of his first four full seasons, and, during his baseball career, he hit more than three hundred home runs, but as Buster Olney, author of “The Last Night of the Yankee Dynasty” writes, he will always be remembered as much for what he didn’t accomplish as for all of the things he did. The New York Mets drafted Straw in 1980, and Darryl won the National League Rookie of the Year Award in 1983, but he also began to dabble with the devil. Darryl’s marriage unraveled and he and first wife Lisa eventually divorced. Stays in Rehab did not curb his substance abuse and Strawberry eventually faced jail time. But in 2006, Strawberry changed course dramatically. In Reggie Jackson’s words, in the middle innings of life, with two strikes against him, Darryl got his groove back and smashed one out of the park. Strawberry turned to God and found redemption. Darryl’s 2009 memoir “Straw: Finding My Way,” written in collaboration with John Strausbaugh, recounts both the highs and lows of Darryl’s life, and the lessons of hope and survival he learned along the way. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch says, “If you’re looking for an interesting book about a chaotically interesting life, ‘Straw’ makes for good reading.” And David Cone writes, “Darryl has written a profound book on the meaning of celebrity, sports and manhood. Reading his story, you follow an incredibly talented ballplayer who fell prey to his demons off the field. This is a riveting and memorable account of one man’s pursuit of a meaningful life.” Today Darryl speaks about how he and Strausbaugh put together the book, growing up in Crenshaw, California, the pillar of strength that was his mother, and the efforts Darryl is now making on behalf of those who suffer from autism and cancer. If you would like to know more about my books, please visit my website: www.markseinfelt.com. See also the Amazon page for “Finding My Way”: http://www.amazon.com/Straw-LP-Finding-My-Way/dp/B006G8DP3O/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1331070686&sr=1-1

Word Patriots – Diane Ackerman’s “The Zookeeper’s Wife”

billschiffler — Mon, 05 Mar 2012 05:01:57 +0000

Among the many named and unnamed heroes of World War Two, when the Nazis sought to control the genome of the entire planet and to eliminate a race of people from the face of the earth, were the rescuers who provided a safe haven for those being methodically herded, in Antonina Zabinski’s words, to the entrance of crematoriums and the thresholds of the gas chambers. There were many hundreds of such rescuers. A number of these have been properly recognized and lionized. Others have fallen between the seams of history. Had it not been for my guest, poet and naturalist Diane Ackerman, the story of Polish and Christian zookeepers Jan and Antonina Zabinski would have remained largely unsung and unknown to American and English-speaking readers. While there were hundreds of such intrepid rescuers, many more Europeans collaborated with Hitler or looked the other way while six million died. Drawing on Antonina’s diary and other sources, Diane vividly recounts Antonina’s life as “the zookeeper’s wife” responsible for her own family, the zoo animals and the Zabinskis’ “guests”—Resistance activists and refugee Jews, many of who Jan, while leading a cell of saboteurs, had smuggled to the zoo from the Warsaw Ghetto. Ironically, the empty animal cages helped to hide scores of doomed people, who were code-named after the animals whose cages they occupied. Others hid in the nooks and crannies of the house itself. The Warsaw Zoo, whose code name among the Resistance fighters, was The House Under A Crazy Star, became a sort of Noah’s arc, for in addition to carrying for the human guests, Antonina also tended an eccentric array of stray creatures—pigs, hare, muskrat, foxes, and more. Dava Sobel writes that “Rarely does one read a book in which the author and heroine are so magically matched.” On this episode of Word Patriots, Diane relates not only Antonina and Jan’s heroism but also details for our listeners the very personal route by which she came to this story and her own love for endangered species. If you would like to know more about my books, please visit my website: www.markseinfelt.com. See also the Amazon page for “The Zookeeper’s Wife”: http://www.amazon.com/Zookeepers-Wife-War-Story/dp/039333306X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1330391990&sr=1-1.

Word Patriots – David Alan Johnson’s “Decided on the Battlefield”

billschiffler — Sat, 25 Feb 2012 05:01:12 +0000

Welcome everyone. My guest this week is David Alan Johnson, the author of “Decided on the Battlefield: Grant, Sherman, Lincoln and the Election of 1864,” which was published by Prometheus Books this past January. David is the author of many popular histories, including “Betrayal: The True Story of J. Edgar Hoover and the Nazi Saboteurs,” “Righteous Deception: German Officers against Hitler,” “Union: The Archives Photographs Series” and seven other books. “Decided on the Battlefield” examines a pivotal election year in U.S. history, a time of great flux and uncertainty. The fate of the United States, perhaps even the world, was at stake and things needn’t have turned out as they did. Had Jubal Early been able to successfully mount an attack on Washington D.C, had Jefferson Davis not relieved General Joseph E. Johnston of his command in Georgia, had the Democratic candidate for President campaigned more vigorously, history may have played out quite differently. Indeed, in the summer of 1864, Abraham Lincoln made a gloomy prediction about the outcome of the upcoming presidential election. He wrote: “I’m going to be beaten… and unless some great change takes place, badly beaten.” The American Civil War had dragged on for over three years, and the public blamed the president for the current stalemate against the Confederacy and for the appalling numbers of killed and wounded. Without a change in the fortunes of the war, Lincoln believed that he had no chance of being elected for a second term, and that he would be defeated by the Democratic candidate George B. McClellan, the former Union general and hero of Antietam. In “Decided on the Battlefield: Grant, Sherman, Lincoln and the Election of 1864,” Johnson examines the events of a critical year in United States’ history, when the course of American history might have taken a radically different direction. If McClellan had won the election, everything would have been different: the Democrats planned to end the war immediately, grant the South its independence, and let the Confederacy keep its slaves. If you would like to know more about my books, please visit my website: www.markseinfelt.com. See also the Amazon pages for “Decided on the Battlefield”: http://www.amazon.com/Decided-Battlefield-Sherman-Lincoln-Election/dp/1616145099/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1329712376&sr=1-1 .

Word Patriots – Paul West, Historical Novels and Later Fictions

billschiffler — Mon, 20 Feb 2012 05:01:44 +0000

Welcome everyone. This week’s show is our third devoted to the work of master novelist Paul West and we will be examining his historical novels and his writings of the 1990s and the 2000s. Paul will also be celebrating his 82nd birthday this week, so my guests and I will all be saluting him and sending our highest regards, thanking him for the wonderful body of work he has given us through the years. This particular show has a very crowded dance card. Novelists Dave Kress and Joanna Scott will be joining me later in the broadcast as will critic David Madden, author of the 1993 study “Understanding Paul West.” But first up, we have birthday greetings from William H. Gass. I taped Bill’s tip of the hat last November after we did a show on Bill’s forthcoming novel “Middle C.” Dave Kress and I discuss West’s opposing Apollonian and Dionysian inclinations and his aviation novel “Terrestrials.” My next guest is novelist Joanna Scott. She is the author of ten books, including “The Manikin,” which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Joanna and I discuss Paul’s historical novels “Lord Byron’s Doctor” and “Rat Man of Paris” and two of his more personal, autobiographical fictions “Love’s Mansion” and “Life With Swan.” Joanna also stresses how many of Paul’s protagonists are virtuoso performers and how Paul himself turns history into virtuoso artistic performance. David W. Madden is professor of American and Irish literature at California State University in Sacramento. In “Understanding Paul West,” Madden offers an analytical introduction to West’s fiction, charting the writer’s daring experiments with narrative structure and form as well as his unceasing commitment to stylistic virtuosity. Madden also examines the novelist’s longstanding themes of personal alienation and the role of the artist in an inimical society. David and I discuss how in his later works Paul continues to adopt historical figures and events as the subjects of his fictions and how he takes enormous liberties with his source material, recombining and modifying elements to suit his fictional needs. We also discuss Paul’s novel of 9.11 “The Immensity Of The Here And Now” and Paul’s memoir of his 2004 stroke, “The Shadow Factory.” If you would like to know more about my books, please visit my website: www.markseinfelt.com. See also the Amazon pages for “Terrestrials”: http://www.amazon.com/Terrestrials-Paul-West/dp/087951891X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1328813398&sr=1-1and “Love’s Mansion”: http://www.amazon.com/Loves-Mansion-Paul-West/dp/0879515031/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1328813482&sr=1-1 .

Word Patriots – Donald Anderson’s “Fire Road”

billschiffler — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 05:00:01 +0000

This week on Word Patriots my guest is Donald Anderson, author of the contemporary short-story cycle, “Fire Road.” Donald was born in Butte, Montana in 1946 and he is a dedicated practitioner of the short story form. His fiction and essays have appeared in “The North American Review,” “Fiction International,” “Epoch,” “PRISM international,” “Western Humanities Review,” “Columbia,” “Michigan Quarterly Review,” “Connecticut Review,” “Massachusetts Review,” and elsewhere. Since 1989, he’s been Editor of “War, Literature & the Arts: an international journal of the humanities.” He’s editor, too, of “aftermath: an anthology of post-vietnam fiction” (Henry Holt, 1995), “Andre Dubus: Tributes” (Xavier University Press, 2001), and “When War Becomes Personal: Soldiers’ Accounts from the Civil War to Iraq” (University of Iowa, 2008). A new book “Gathering Noise from My Life: A Camouflaged Memoir” is due out this fall. In 1996, Anderson received a Creative Writers’ Fellowship Grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. He holds an MFA from Cornell University. A former Air Force officer, he now lives in Colorado, where he directs creative writing at the United States Air Force Academy. The title story of his collection “Fire Road” was awarded First Place in the Society for the Study of the Short Story 2000 Contest, and the collection itself won Iowa’s prestigious John Simmons Short Fiction award in 2001. The judge that year was Susan Power, the author of “The Grass Dancer,” who wrote, “‘Fire Road’ is fascination—the perfect marriage of imagination and language. This collection is provocative, gorgeously crafted, a delectable feast for the mind and the heart.” Frederick Busch wrote of the cycle: “Donald Anderson dares strong emotion and straight talk. His book is populated by memorable characters to whom he is unswervingly loyal in both their cruelty and their generosity. He compels us to look directly into madness, and into the grievous world of our time, as well as happy individual enchantments.” In “The Last Puritan,” George Santayana writes: “Homer is merciless, covers up nothing, adds nothing, simply tells you the awful truth. Yet he walks on the sunny side of the world: it’s tragedy in the sun light, despair at high noon, death in the bloom of youth. And yet you feel that the sun will keep on shining just the same and that the next morning will be just as beautiful and just as cruel.” I think almost the same thing could be said of “Fire Road.” The cycle’s likeable central figure is the human, all-to-human Stephen Mann. Life throws a lot of punches at Stephen (as it does at us all if we live long enough), and no automaton he experiences fully all the pangs of doom, nostalgia, toil, alarm, fury, gesture, and loss. Many of the stories find him hard-pressed and up against one or another of the darker facts of life, facing yet another of the countless hazards, hurts and personal 9-11s that punctuate all our lives. Passionate and zealous, a man on fire, he often confronts his demons head on but also on occasion turns tail and avoids his responsibilities and feelings, becomes as insensitive and uncaring as a vinyl manikin, a frosty figure of ice, yet only for a time, for he faces and beats back the slings and arrows when he writes—for Mann is an author, though he finds himself writing technical manuals and ads as often as stories. Like Gary Cooper in “High Noon” he has got to go back to face what he fears and flees. He confronts his despair and longing on the page. The page becomes his boxing ring. If you would like to know more about my books, please visit my website: www.markseinfelt.com. See also the Amazon page for “Fire Road”: http://www.amazon.com/Fire-Road-Short-Fiction-Award/dp/0877457786/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1328561476&sr=1-1 and the website for “War, Literature & the Arts: an international journal of the humanities”: http://wlajournal.com/23_1/23_1_index.html .

Word Patriots – Turk asks about “At Last The Distinguished Thing”

billschiffler — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 05:01:27 +0000

This week on Word Patriots, we welcome Turk back into the studio, and I comment upon the eerie coincidence that while Turk was in the hospital, I was reading next week’s guest Donald Anderson’ s short story cycle “Fire Road,” in which the protagonist Stephan Mann undergoes the very same surgical procedure that Turk underwent and how Donald himself had an intestine that exploded. This leads to a discussion about nonfiction and fiction and how word patriots take events that happened in their own lives and transfer them to their fictional avatars. We briefly discuss Diane Ackerman’s wonderful nonfiction war story “The Zookeeper’s Wife” and Jared Diamond’s comment that “this powerful thriller would be a great novel—except that it happens to be true.” I note how Diane went to great lengths striving for accuracy and verisimilitude in her book about Polish Christian zookeepers Jan and Antonia Zabiniski, who secretly harbored over three hundred Resistance activists and refugee Jews at their zoo during WW2 and how I likewise, to the best of my ability, tried to be as precise and truthful as possible when I wrote “Final Drafts,” my series of biographical sketches of writers who committed suicide. Turk then brings up “At Last The Distinguished Thing,” my novel about the death of Henry James, the opening movement of “Symphonie Fantastique,” a collection of four novels each concerning a different haunted, obsessed individual presented under the banner of a single cover. Turk questions the propriety of writing a work of fiction about a real person. I respond that using real persons fictitiously is nothing new and that there is also a long tradition of writers writing novels about other writers. To conclude the broadcast, I read the closing pages of “At Last The Distinguished Thing.” If you would like to know more about my books, please visit my website: www.markseinfelt.com. See also the Amazon page for “Symphonie Fantastique”: http://www.amazon.com/Symphonie-Fantastique-Mark-Seinfelt/dp/1439246009/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1304950028&sr=1-2.

Word Patriots – Kress on Pynchon

billschiffler — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 05:01:59 +0000

This episode of Word Patriots is devoted to the fiction of the enigmatic prose virtuoso Thomas Pynchon, the author of such seminal works as “The Crying of Lot 49,” which the “New York Times” characterized as a “streamlined doomsday machine,” and which deals with a world-wide conspiracy involving the forging of stamps and ancient books and the placing of post horn images all over San Francisco and features a flamboyant cast of weirdly named characters—Hilarius, Mucho, Driblette, Fallopian, Pierce Inverarity and Oedipa Maas; “V,” that huge crazy quilt and acid trip of a novel detailing the madcap and zany adventures of Profane and Stencil and the neurotic intellectual coterie known as the Whole Sick Crew and which touches on such diverse and abstruse subjects as German colonialism in South-West Africa and the long and involved history of the Isle of Malta; the monumental “Gravity’s Rainbow” which begins with the sentence “A screaming comes across the sky,” is set in the last days of World War Two when German V-2 rockets are raining down on London and which is regarded as one of the most important—if also one of the most difficult—books of the second half of the 20th century; and the more recent sprawling and bawdy “Mason Dixon,” Pynchon’s reinvention of the lives of the famed pair of 18th century British surveyors. My guest is Dave Kress. Dave is a professor of fiction writing, contemporary literature, and literary theory at the University of Maine in Orono and is himself the author of three stunning and unconventional works of fiction “Counting Zero,” “Martians,” and “Hush.” The Exhibition X Fiction series at the University of Buffalo characterizes his work as follows: “Whether working in a short or long form, Kress operates at the logic of the sentence, each new line making unruly and ranging connections that create an unprecedented logic all of their own. His fiction, in this regard might be described as ‘viral’ in nature: growing and mutating, generating unprecedented connections that work to challenge and undermine his readers’ defenses, their ideas about the world we live in. His fiction takes risks without neglecting the elegant sentence: he tackles difficult issues without making them ever appear internecine or abstruse.” Dave is also contributing editor on two volumes of Harold Bloom’s Major Novelists Comprehensive Research and Study Guides, the books on Pynchon, and Italo Calvino. The volumes are designed to present biographical, critical and bibliographical information on the author and critical analysis of the writer’s most important works, tracing significant themes, patterns and motifs in each work as well as providing an annotated list of characters in the author’s books. If you would like to know more about my books, please visit my website: www.markseinfelt.com. Please also visit the Google book page for Bloom and Kress’ “Thomas Pynchon”: http://books.google.com/books/about/Thomas_Pynchon.html?id=5NwF-Gdgg9YC.

Word Patriots – Diane Ackerman’s One Hundred Names For Love (encore)

billschiffler — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 05:01:52 +0000

Due to the hospitalization of my producer Donnie “Turk” Schnars this week, we are re-broadcasting my July interview with the noted poet and naturalist Diane Ackerman. Diane is the author of over two-dozen books. Many know her as the author of the best-selling “A Natural History of the Senses.” She hosted a five-hour PBS television series inspired by that work. Her poetry includes “Origami Bridges: Poems of Psychoanalysis and Fire, “I Praise My Destroyer,” and “Wife of Light.” “One Hundred Names For Love” tells the story of Diane’s husband Paul West’s terrible 2004 stroke. Diane relates how frightening and frustrating the stroke proved for Paul and how devastating it was for her to witness Paul’s ability to communicate taken away, his essential self amputated. Diane also tells how she helped Paul find his way back to himself, how she threw a life-jacket out to that dark place without words for Paul to grasp, and drew him back to the light, a feat as heroic and epical as Proust’s recapturing of lost time. Many people will learn from her methods and successes. She lays out a plan of attack for stroke victims suffering from aphasia to recover lost skills and in the process details an incredible love story. To find out more about Diane Ackerman visit her webpage: http://www.dianeackerman.com/. Also see the Amazon page for “One Hundred Names For Love”: http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_ss_i_2_26?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=one+hundred+names+for+love&sprefix=one+hundred+names+for+love.

Word Patriots – A Conversation with A.J. Ali

billschiffler — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 05:01:37 +0000

A.J. Ali is the creator, executive producer and star of “Good Fellas of Baltimore,” which debuted on Fox 45 TV in the Baltimore market in the spring of 2011 and was responsible for raising more than a quarter million dollars worth of support for charity in the Baltimore area in one year. He is currently producing and hosting a national event and documentary film titled “Drive To End Cancer” to promote wellness and cancer prevention. He is also producing the “To End Cancer” series of public service announcements, the cancer prevention world’s version of the “Got Milk” campaign. Other TV successes include producing the special “Positive Choice” for the national youth soccer program “Soccer in the Streets” with marketing partners U.S. Soccer and Major League Soccer, producing numerous public service announcements and commercials and consulting on numerous projects. His “On the Tee with A.J. Ali” inspirational lifestyle column has been popular in various publications and online. He co-authored an inspirational wellness book with Vera Jones titled “The True Champion’s 30-Day Challenge” published in the fall of 2009. He has written two business golf books, which he uses in seminars and training programs nationwide. His recent work includes writing and producing the cancer survivor anthem “Through the Darkness, Into the Light” and producing the compilation music CD “Survivor Celebration” to benefit breast cancer survivors. He is currently writing his fourth book “L.O.V.E. Is The Answer” As a visionary entrepreneur, A.J. has created dozens of brands, founded two pro soccer teams and has raised more than $25 million for charity. Through his Eclipse Business Golf Academy program he has trained dozens of people in the U.S, the U.K. and Africa to become golf consultants, teaching them how to use the power of golf to help charities and companies meet their goals. He is the recipient of numerous awards including the prestigious 40 Under 40 Leaders in the Greater Baltimore area and the Hollywood Fame Awards’ “National Community Service Award.” This week on Word Patriots, A.J. and I discuss how A.J. always strives to bring his A-game whenever he writes, his method to unleash the winner within whatever one’s endeavor may be, the importance of self-control, his campaign to end cancer, and the many ways we all can come together to promote literacy in America. If you would like to know more about my books, please visit my website: www.markseinfelt.com. Please also visit A.J.’s webpage: http://www.ontheteewithajali.com/.

Word Patriots – In Memoriam 2011

billschiffler — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 05:01:05 +0000

This week we will be paying tribute to authors around the world who died in 2011 with special recognition to one of our own, the late Theo Matthews. In this special episode, we mourn the passing and celebrate the lifework of such diverse word patriots as Vaclav Havel, Christa Wolf, Ernesto Sabato, Jorge Semprún, Allen Mandelbaum, and Langford Wilson, among others. We also say goodbye to Theo, the author of the novel “The Chronicler’s Tale,” who came on this show as a guest in July 2011. We writers in the end become our books. We stitch our souls into our sentences and create our own afterlives, manufacture our own ghosts, the writings we leave behind. Since we still have their books, the authors we loved have not totally left us, even though we are understandably saddened by the fact that we will not have any future books from them. Looking at my very provisional list of writers the world lost in 2011— I found one hundred forty-six author obituaries while researching this show, a catalog that will certainly prove far from all-inclusive —I see that, even in this age of book inflation and the so-called death of the author, all across the globe word patriots everywhere are continuing the very human endeavor and task of fixing and fastening down time and soul on the page, of capturing and preserving consciousness through the medium of the word and that gives me cause to rejoice. After paying our respects to some of the better-known names on our roster, we conclude this week’s podcast with an encore presentation of Theo Matthews reading from “The Chronicler’s Tale.”

Word Patriots – Paul West, Writings of the 1980s

billschiffler — Mon, 02 Jan 2012 05:00:07 +0000

The 1980s was a particularly fertile period for author Paul West. He began and closed the decade with two of his finest historical novels, “The Very Rich Hours of Count von Stauffenberg” in 1980 and “Lord Byron’s Doctor” in 1989. He published the first volume of his Sheer Fiction series, a collection of essays drawn from twenty years of reviewing a panoply of novels from around the world and focusing on his interests in language and style, and wrote “Portable People,” a volume of short biographical sketches accompanied by illustrations by Joe Servello, that would be published in 1990. He also brought out two sharply contrasting novels “Rat Man of Paris” (1986) and “The Place In Flowers Where Pollen Rests” (1988) which in critic David Madden’s words “represent what appears to be the extremes of his fictional practices, the first, a compressed, tightly controlled novel, the second epical in its proportions, a grand expansive look at an ignored culture in our midst, that of the Hopi Indians.” Although the two novels are polar opposites stylistically, they both deal with the ravages of war. At the center of “Rat Man”—which concerns a crazed Paris street person who flashes rats concealed in his coat at those he passes on the boulevards—is a Nazi atrocity committed by Klaus Barbie when Rat Man was a child, and “The Place In Flowers” depicts in graphic detail the horrors of Vietnam, where Oswald Beautiful Badger Going Over the Hill, a onetime fugitive from the law via his stud participation in adult movies of the late 1960s, finds himself after years of living on the Arizona mesa as apprentice and caretaker to his aging uncle, George the Place in Flowers Where Pollen Rests, a representative of the achieved, matured artist, the finder of the way, a blind master carver of wooden kachina dolls which he sells to white tourists. As an Indian, Oswald’s ancestors were among the first victims of American imperialism. Ironically, an efficient killer in the jungles of Vietnam, he himself becomes an agent of that same imperialism. He is in turn the representative of the artist in aspiration, suffering from setbacks and perhaps insurmountable creative limitations. My guests this week are Dimitri Anastasopoulos and Christina Milletti. Both studied with Paul at Penn State in the 1990s. Dimitri is the author of the 2001 novel “A Larger Sense of Harvey” and Christina is author of the 2006 short story collection “The Religious & Other Fictions” published by Carnegie Mellon University. Both are Professors of English at the University of Buffalo in New York. If you would like to know more about my books, please visit my website: www.markseinfelt.com. Also be sure to take a look at the Amazon pages for Paul’s “The Very Rich Hours of Count von Stauffenberg” and “The Place In Flowers Where Pollen Rests”: http://www.amazon.com/Very-Rich-Hours-Count-Stauffenberg/dp/0879514183/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1325102576&sr=8-1 and http://www.amazon.com/Very-Rich-Hours-Count-Stauffenberg/dp/0879514183/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1325102576&sr=8-1 .
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Word Patriots – Big Hollow Road

billschiffler — Mon, 26 Dec 2011 05:01:53 +0000

Poetry had its beginnings as an oral art form. The sung lyric and the chanted narrative were, perhaps, one of the first forms of public entertainment. Gathered around a communal fire or chieftain’s hearth, audiences found their evening’s recreation in listening to a poet’s verse narrative. The Iliad, it has been estimated, would have taken about 24 hours to recite aloud in its entirety; so the ancient poet who had this epic memorized could provide twelve nights of entertainment for his listeners, presenting one of literature’s first recorded block-busters. As long as poetry retained its public, performative, aspect, there has always been a need for the long performance piece poem. In the early twentieth century, Vachel Lindsay traveled across America on foot, trading his poems for food, and creating performance pieces like “The Congo.” In mid-twentieth century, Allen Ginsberg created a sensation with his Beat performances of “Howl.” The long performance piece is a particularly uncongenial form for print publication, taking up too many pages in a magazine and too few for a book. Still, the performance piece, with all its off-putting length, continued in the chamber form of printed performance pieces for private reading like Hugh MacDiarmid’s “A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle,” and W. H. Auden’s “Letter to Lord Byron.” More recently, we find Robinson Jeffers’ “The Love and the Hate” and John Ashbery’s “The Skaters.” This week on Word Patriots, poet and librettist Jason Charnesky joins us to discuss poetry as performance art. Charnesky has recently completed a performance piece entitled “Big Hollow Road” which manages within its half hour performance to touch upon childhood memory, urban legend, plate tectonics, forest science, flying saucers and our current headlines’ most shocking scandal, all filtered through the voice of a sardonic yet almost embarrassingly sensitive narrator. The show ends with a reading of the first half of “Big Hollow Road.” A recording of the entire performance piece, along with the text of the poem, can be found at www.fantod.net. If you would like to know more about my books, please visit my website: www.markseinfelt.com.

Word Patriots – Dickens and Christmas

billschiffler — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 05:01:41 +0000

Charles Dickens’ name had become so associated with Christmas that in 1870 a little costermonger’s girl in London, having been informed that Dickens had died, asked, “Mr. Dickens dead? Then will Father Christmas die too?” David Purdue writes: “It was the Christmas stories of Dickens, particularly his 1843 masterpiece ‘A Christmas Carol,’ that rekindled the joy of Christmas in Britain and America.” Dickens did not invent the holiday. Nor, of course, was he the first English author to write about Christmas. An unknown medieval poet wrote “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” with its Christmas contest and wagering of head against head between its two protagonists. Much later Walter Scott also wrote about medieval twelve-day Christmas celebrations, feudal feasting among the lords and ladies of the hall and their vassals and retainers. “A Christmas Carol,” however, has become iconic and what set it apart from previous depictions of the holiday is its urban setting and the want and destitution it portrays. Dickens describes the holidays as “a good time: a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time: the only time I know of in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of other people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys.” While everyone it seems is familiar with “A Christmas Carol,” Dickens wrote countless other Christmas stories and indeed four other short Christmas novels “The Chimes,” “The Cricket on the Hearth,” “The Battle of Life” and “The Haunted Man.” Throughout his long and storied career, Dickens returned to Christmas again and again, thinking no doubt that he had cornered the market and that Christmas would continue to prove a money-spinner for him. The other Christmas novels with the exception of “The Battle of Life” can be characterized as variations of “A Christmas Carol,” the Christmas Carol retold. Moreover, throughout his life Dickens revised “A Christmas Carol” numerous times. For his popular reading tours, he wrote many additions and retooled and retooled his most popular work. “A Christmas Carol” has been filmed many times. There have been many memorable Scrooges including Reginald Owen and George C. Scott. My personal favorite is Alistair Sims. This story, above all others, seems destined to shapeshift like some jolly supernatural being, to always be old and new, to be told and retold, to be constantly reborn in ever new and varying avatars much like Christmas itself. At the conclusion of the broadcast, I read from the novel and offer my own interpretation of Scrooge. If you would like to know more about my books, please visit my website: www.markseinfelt.com.

Word Patriots – Rhonda Winchell Sharp’s “The Nine Most Famous Reindeer of All”

billschiffler — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 05:01:47 +0000

For many word patriots, their role in the literary world is clearly defined, often by a particular strength, such as a writer’s creativity, an editor’s attention to detail or a publisher’s business acumen. Not so for my guest this week, Ronda Winchell Sharp, whose roles have included writer, publisher, editor, graphic designer, consultant, critic and agent. A child of the baby boom raised in California, she grew up in a house that encouraged a love of reading which fueled her passion for the written word. Her mother’s unfulfilled goal of writing the great American novel is a memory that motivates Rhonda and is the reason her work is always “in memory” of the woman who influenced her so. In the mid-1990s, a good friend who recognized her appreciation for a wide variety of literature coaxed her into becoming a literary agent and the rest, as they say, is history. She went on to found the artisanal publishing house Tea Road Press, where she published the much acclaimed book “Locked In To Life,” before post 9/11 financial challenges set in. More recently she launched Hologram Rose Press, a publishing house for writers who write with eloquence and passion and expansiveness. The company’s first two books are children’s stories written by Winchell Sharp herself: “Rudolph the Recycling Reindeer: A Gardening Tale to Live All Year Long” and “The Nine Most Famous Reindeer of All,” a cadenced profile of each of Santa’s team that pays homage to the glory of teamwork and beauty of the individual. In the future Rhonda hopes to publish fiction that is at once beautiful and popular, a non-fiction line that brings readers increased knowledge and understanding and an expansive poetry list. And of course, a number of personal writing projects that are in various stages of completion much like all other “real writers” or, as we like to call them, Word Patriots. I am personally excited to have Ronda on the show as she was the agent for my book “Final Drafts”. As an especial treat for both younger and older listeners, Rhonda will read in its entirety “The Nine Most Famous Reindeer of All” at the conclusion of this podcast. If you would like to know more about my books, please visit my website: www.markseinfelt.com. Also be sure to visit the website for Hologram Rose Press: http://hologramrosepress.com/.

Word Patriots – Bildungsroman or Coming of Age Novel

billschiffler — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 05:01:25 +0000

This week my father Frederick Seinfelt returns to Word Patriots. We will briefly discuss the archetypal Bildungsroman “Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship” and several other early German specimens or representatives of the genre and then examine three prominent 20th Century educational or coming of age novels —William Somerset Maugham’s “Of Human Bondage,” Thomas Mann’s “The Magic Mountain” and George Santayana’s “The Last Puritan.” The critic Karl Morgenstern coined the term Bildungsroman during a lecture at the University of Dorpat in the 1820s. Literally the word means “novel of formation.” The most famous example is, of course, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s “Wilhelm Meister.” The poet who was fascinated by what we today term evolution, the morphology and ongoing transmutation of plants and animals, would also necessarily find himself interested in individual human development, the formation of personality and character. Beginning with Goethe, the classic German novels of education were written in the late eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth. By and large, Bildungsromane depict the psychological development of a central character from adolescence or young man- or womanhood to maturity, through a search or quest for identity. The classic Bildungsroman recounts the progress of a usually sensitive and gifted young person toward both self-awareness and a greater communal or societal conscientiousness. Sexual or social encounters may spark the protagonist’s transformation though his or her development is usually a protracted and extended one and the hero or heroine normally encounters a number of different often antagonistic teachers and makes numerous false starts before achieving his objective. To a certain extent, German Bildungsromane stress and lay emphasis on extended Platonic dialogues between pupil and pedagogue over plot, thereby focusing the reader’s attention on the intellectual growth of the hero or heroine. My father and I will also discuss how the genre migrated to England, France and America, and how it altered and transformed when it jumped soils. At the show’s conclusion my producer/ technician Donnie “Turk” Schnars will read from Santayana’s “The Last Puritan.” If you would like to know more about my books, please visit my website: www.markseinfelt.com.

Word Patriots – Paul West Early Years

billschiffler — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 00:44:13 +0000

Some writers are known primarily for a single work. Others for the totality of their oeuvre. British-American author Paul West has produced as prolific a canon as any living writer: twenty-five novels, three volumes of poetry, and eighteen works of nonfiction. He is a writer of great distinction and originality and a veritable sorcerer of language. One of the most intrepid and stylistically dazzling practitioners of the craft living today, he has shaped and fashioned so many books that readers making their way book by book through his long list will no doubt develop favorites and pet peeves as they go: there is such a plentitude of West that it is not surprising that his partisans sometimes disagree sharply over which titles constitute his best work and variously award the palm to his experimental novels, his historical and realist fictions, or his more personal, autobiographic books. Over the course of the next few months, we will be devoting several episodes of Word Patriots to examining various facets of Paul’s work with a variety of guests and experts. Today we will be taking a look at West’s early novels and exploring the “poetics of violence” throughout his fiction. My guests this week are Ed Desautels, Jason Charnesky and Donald Anderson. Ed and Jason are no strangers to Word Patriots. Ed is the author of the novel “Flicker in the Porthole Glass,” which was published by Mammoth Books in 2002 and drew favorable notice in “The Review of Contemporary Fiction.” Jason Charnesky has written the lyrics and librettos for many works by composer Bruce Trinkley and is a poet and instructor of English. Ed, Jason and I all had the privilege to study with West in the 1980s and 1990s. In the first segment of the show we will discuss certain key West novels of the 1960s and 70s—“Tenement of Clay,” the Alley Jaggers trilogy, “Caliban’s Filibuster” and “Gala”—and how they stood as harbingers of things to come. Donald Anderson will then come on to discuss Paul’s preoccupation with war and his vividly rendered depictions of carnage and battle—how Paul constantly seeks to give beautiful expression to the ugly and horrific. Donald directs the creative writing program at the United States Air Force Academy. His story “Fire Road” was awarded First Place in the Society for the Study of the Short Story 2000 Contest, and the collection “Fire Road” won Iowa’s 2001 John Simmons Short Fiction award. If you would like to know more about my books, please visit my website: www.markseinfelt.com. Also be sure to take a look at the Amazon pages for Paul’s “Tenement of Clay”: and “Words For A Deaf Daughter and Gala”: http://www.amazon.com/Tenement-Clay-Novel-Paul-West/dp/0929701275 and http://www.amazon.com/Words-Deaf-Daughter-Gala-Paul/dp/1564780368/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1322038487&sr=1-1

Word Patriots – William H. Gass, “The Tunnel,” and “Middle C”

billschiffler — Mon, 21 Nov 2011 05:01:07 +0000

In the first quarter of the last century the great men and women of literature were both numerous and grand and they routinely carried out radical and groundbreaking experiments in fictional form. Linguistic virtuosity was the order of the day.
Today, we live in a more sedate age, the so-called postmodern era which rejects the notion of high art and champions the quotidian. But don’t tell my guest that ….
Quintessential Word Patriot, novelist and philosopher William H. Gass describes himself as an unreconstructed modernist and if anyone in America is still writing today as if the world were well lost for art that person is Bill. Bill is one of the most important American authors of our time. His innovative works of fiction include “Omensetter’s Luck,” “Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife,” “In the Heart of the Heart of the Country,” “Cartesian Sonata” and the mammoth, monumentally original, and controversial novel “The Tunnel.” But perhaps Gass is best known for his seven volumes of sprightly, arch, audacious, masterfully crafted essays, which include “Habitations of the Word,” “Finding a Form” and “Tests of Time” all of which earned him National Book Critics Circle Awards for Criticism. He has received numerous other awards as well. His “Reading Rilke: Reflections on the Problems of Translation” received the PEN/American Nabokov Award and his most recent volume “A Temple of Texts” (2006) won the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism. To any reader coming to his work for the first time, no matter which of Bill’s books he or she happens to open, from that book’s inaugural sentence it will be immediately manifest what a lapidary Bill is; how he polishes, sculpts and crafts everything he writes with utmost diligence and scrupulous care. Bill and I discuss the distinction between telling stories and fashioning fictions, the traditional view that true art is moral, the ends for which Bill writes, Bill’s mammoth, monumentally original novel “The Tunnel,” and Bill’s novel-in progress “Middle C.” If you would like to know more about my books, please visit my website: www.markseinfelt.com. Also be sure to take a look at http://www.readinggass.org/, a website exploring this esteemed American writer’s work and his readers’ reactions created and curated by Stephen Schenkenberg.

Word Patriots – Laura Bordas / Holt Memorial Library

billschiffler — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 05:01:19 +0000

My guest this week on Word Patriots is Laura Bordas, President of Holt Memorial Library in my hometown of Philipsburg, Pennsylvania. Everyday, all across this nation, in small towns and big cities, a wide assortment of individuals battle ceaselessly and untiringly for the cause of the word. These frontline soldiers include teachers, librarians, library staff and board members, as well as government and non-profit learning agencies which offer basic literacy, English as a Second Language, and family literacy services to adults and children who lack the basic communication skills needed to navigate through their day-to-day activities, and the thousands upon thousands of tutors who volunteer and sign up at such agencies or who on their own initiative work one-on-one to help those who have difficulty reading to succeed and accomplish their goals. Laura is one of these frontline soldiers. Prior to her retirement this year, Laura spent thirty years on staff at Penn State University, first as Assistant to the Dean in the College of Agricultural Sciences at University Park and finally as Assistant to the Campus Executive Officer at Penn State DuBois. For over seventy years, Holt Memorial Library has been seeking a permanent home. On a blustery evening last January, a ribbon cutting ceremony marked the grand opening of the new downtown location of the library. This week Laura relates the story of the decades-long struggle of the library to find a permanent address. She also details what services are presently available at the library. On a more personal level, she tells how she fell in love with reading and books as a child and how her taste in literature and poetry evolved over the years. To conclude the program, she reads four poems from “Robert Frost Seasons,” an anthology of Frost poems arranged by spring, summer, autumn and winter.

Word Patriots – Paul Trout’s “Deadly Powers”

billschiffler — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 05:01:59 +0000

Devouring lions, ravenous bears, and deadly snakes — these and other animal predators in search of human flesh are a staple of ancient mythology, along with their mythic counterparts — dragons, griffins, gorgons and more. The message is clear: for millennia our ancient human ancestors lived in very real fear of very real predatory animals. Our ancestors reflected the dangerous reality of their daily existence in the many myths wherein the animal monster lurks. My guest this week is Paul Trout, author of “Deadly Powers: Animal Predators and the Mythic Imagination.” Paul is a now retired associate professor of English at Montana State University, where he taught for thirty-eight years. He has published widely on cultural and academic issues, and his articles have appeared in the “Chronicle of Higher Education,” the “Washington Post,” the “Washington Times,” “Commonweal,” the “Christian Science Monitor,” and other publications. “Deadly Powers” is an illuminating and provocative exploration of the origin and function of storytelling. Trout argues that mythmaking evolved as a cultural survival strategy for coping with the constant fear of being killed and eaten by predators. Trout argues that, beginning nearly two million years ago in the Pleistocene era, the first human stories functioned as warnings about man-eating carnivores. At this earliest period, before the development of language, these rudimentary stories were acted out in mime. Later, when language appeared, the stories were recited, memorized, and much later written down as the myths that have survived to this day. Anyone with an interest in mythology, archeology, folk tales, and the origins of storytelling will find “Deadly Powers” a challenging exploration into the environmental and psychological forces that shaped human culture and, possibly, gave rise to storytelling and myth making itself. If you would like to know more about my books, please visit my website: www.markseinfelt.com. Also be sure to take a look at the Amazon page for “Deadly Powers”: http://www.amazon.com/Deadly-Powers-Animal-Predators-Imagination/dp/1616145013/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1320370320&sr=1-1

Word Patriots – H. Scott Conklin on the patriotic necessity to critically analyze and persuasively communicate

billschiffler — Mon, 31 Oct 2011 04:01:54 +0000

Today on Word Patriots we explore the full measure of what this show’s title stands for: the patriotism of those who have come before us, and whose creative acts, and acts of sacrifice and service, have vouchsafed us the promise which is our legacy; and the words which we, the living, use to create an ever-renewing vision of our nation and of our world, whether those words be used in the form of poetry, novels, conversation, declaration, or legislation. The word is an act. And a defense of the word is the defense of freedom. Joining us today is a man whose own sense of patriotism has led him into a life of service, and who presently serves as the representative for the 77th legislative district in the Pennsylvania House of Representatives: H. Scott Conklin. The 77th district comprises a wide swath of central Pennsylvania, and includes, at its most urban segment, Penn State University; and at one of its most rural sections, the little town of Philipsburg, Scott’s hometown as it is mine. Scott serves on many Committees in Harrisburg. Perhaps most importantly to us Word Patriots, he sits on the Committee for Education and is an advocate for both literacy and public education. He was instrumental in securing a literacy grant from the Pennsylvania Department of Education, obtaining over four hundred thousand dollars for adult basic education programs which will bring to many the gift of being able to read. Today Scott and I speak about the gift and the responsibility of literacy, the lateral thinking that the arts foster, and the place of the fine arts, and creative writing in particular, in developing the critical insights and imaginative leaps that citizens of the twenty-first century will need in a society of creative enquiry and economic progress.

Word Patriots – Chuck Navasky and One Less Tear

billschiffler — Mon, 24 Oct 2011 04:01:30 +0000

Paradox, irony, the seemingly contradictory are the very stuff of art. Beauty often finds its genesis in the very opposite of beauty. Often the new spark of hope ignites only after an artist has plummeted and touched bottom, been made aware of his own mortality and experienced the dark night of the soul. My study of literary suicides, “Final Drafts” begins with the following sentence: “If our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thoughts, then perhaps our saddest songs are those that tell of sweetest.” The songs of this week’s guest Charles “Chuck” Navasky concern both the sad and sweet and seek to expel the former and to give hope and encouragement to cancer victims and their families everywhere. After battling cancer, Chuck began writing songs to give others the strength, hope, and motivation to keep fighting. If, because of his efforts, one less tear is shed by any of the millions affected by this dread disease—whose onset Chuck likens to a terrorist attack—he has accomplished his mission, his life is fulfilled. “Then I can go on,” he says, “and no matter what happens to me, I’ll know I did my best. I won’t quit until my last breath is taken.” Chuck is a businessman, a philanthropist, a word patriot and of course a singer-songwriter. Recently his foundation presented a check for $5,000 to kick-start the new library drive, here in Philipsburg, Pennsylvania. The act of a word patriot to be sure. Chuck represents the fourth generation of his family to own Falcone Suits. In 1979, Chuck enrolled in pattern school in New York City to learn the family trade. A musician since age ten, Chuck responded to a Village Voice ad for a bass player and ended up playing in a band behind front man and songwriter Mitch Albom, who later wrote the best-selling book “Tuesdays With Morrie.” Playing with the band around Manhattan and Long Island, Chuck crossed paths with many future stars while they were still scrounging for work in clubs. In August of 1999, Chuck’s life changed forever when he was diagnosed with a stage 1 cancerous tumor on his false vocal cord. Chuck has since founded his own cancer foundation, One Less Tear. Recruiting music industry friends including the Van Zant brothers, Michael McDonald, Mark Slaughter, M.C. Hammer, Kevin Sharp, Olivia Newton-John and Vince Neil (Mötley Crüe), he assembled a CD of songs to inspire fellow cancer patients. Today Chuck and I speak about how illness can prove an impetus to art, his family’s commitment to the written word, and the many challenges an enormous project like One Less Tear entails. Chuck also reaches out to any persons listening who have just been diagnosed with cancer. If you would like to know more about my books, please visit my website: www.markseinfelt.com. Be sure also to visit Chuck Navasky’s two websites: http://www.navaskyfoundation.com/home2.htm and http://www.onelesstear.com/.

Word Patriots – The multifaceted Eugene O’Connor

billschiffler — Mon, 17 Oct 2011 04:01:23 +0000

Word patriots often wear different hats and serve the word in multiple ways. This week’s guest Eugene O’Connor is a perfect example of such a comprehensive and versatile word patriot. A poet and translator, Eugene is also the managing editor and acquiring editor in classics at The Ohio State University Press. His research interests include Greek and Roman elegy and epigram and the reception of the classics. Eugene received his Ph.D. in classics at the University of California. In 1993 he translated “The Essential Epicurus: Letters, Principal Doctrines, Vatican Sayings, and Fragments,” which was published by Prometheus Books in its Great Books in Philosophy series. John J. McGraw, author of “Brain and Belief” wrote that “O’Connor’s translations personify the philosopher himself—they are clear and elegant. ‘The Essential Epicurus’ is an insightful, exciting, and pleasant read.” Among Eugene’s recent publications is an English translation, with introduction, notes and commentary, of “Hermaphroditus” by the fifteenth century Italian Renaissance humanist and scholar Antonio Panormita. Eugene’s translation, published in 2001 by Lexington Press, brings to life this little known Renaissance writer’s bawdy masterpiece. O’Connor’s excellent introduction offers a wealth of historical and literary information on Panormita’s often profane poetry, which is presented in both English and the Latin original. Although Eugene claims he came rather late to poetry, he has published poems and translations in many journals and anthologies, including “The Columbia Anthology of Gay Literature.” His most recently published collection of poetry is a chapbook of original poems titled “Derelict Mansions” (2011, Puddinghouse Press). On a personal note, Eugene was my editor at Prometheus Books, where he aided me in preparing and polishing the manuscript of “Final Drafts.” This week Eugene and I discuss what an author should expect from his or her editor, the difficulties of translation, how Epicurus’ philosophy has been maligned and misunderstood over the centuries, and Eugene’s current research project with Kenneth W. Goings, of the African American and African Studies Department at The Ohio State University, on the subject of African Americans and the classics from the 1870s to the 1940s, particularly the teaching of the Greek and Latin classics at black colleges in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. If you would like to know more about my books, please visit my website: www.markseinfelt.com. Be sure also to visit Amazon page for “The Essential Epicurus”:
http://www.amazon.com/Essential-Epicurus-Great-Books-Philosophy/dp/0879758104/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1318273453&sr=1-2.

Word Patriots – Dr. Turkensteen and Igor-Mark’s Creature

billschiffler — Mon, 10 Oct 2011 04:01:46 +0000

Halloween is just around the corner and today’s show marks the halfway point of our inaugural year at Web Talk Radio, a milestone of sorts for my producer Donnie “Turk” Schnars and me. We are going to use the occasion to look both forwards and backwards. In the past six months we have spoken to a wide assortment of word patriots and explored their work. We urge new listeners, those who have only just discovered our program, to stream or download our older archived episodes. Recording those shows, caught in the moment, we often taped more than we needed—extra questions, alternative readings, comic asides, off-the-cuff remarks and warm-up material which ended up on the cutting room floor. Today, we thought we would dip into our own private archive and create a new show from some of those unused gems. So Dr. Turkensteen and I have assembled a kind of Frankenstein creature out of leftover and spare parts. Highlights include Diane Ackerman reading an additional passage from “One Hundred Names For Love,” her 2011 memoir chronicling her husband novelist Paul West’s devastating stroke in 2004 and James Morrow and I conversing about Morrow’s current novel-in-progress, which concerns the naturalist Charles Darwin. The program will conclude with Ed Knapp reciting two more original poems and his daughter actress and Actors Studio Drama School faculty member Jacqueline Knapp reading Ezra Pound’s “The River Merchant’s Wife.” In the course of the program, I will also preview upcoming shows. Our listeners have a lot to which to look forward. The adventure is just beginning. If you would like to know more about my books, please visit my website: www.markseinfelt.com.

Word Patriots – A Chat with Tawni O’Dell

billschiffler — Mon, 03 Oct 2011 04:01:55 +0000

Welcome fellow word patriots. This week we have a real treat. Novelist Tawni O’Dell will be stopping in to discuss her latest book, 2010’s “Fragile Beasts.” Everyone has heard of Tawni. With the exceptions, perhaps, of the actor Jimmy Stewart and the opera singer Renee Fleming, Tawni O’Dell stands as the most famous artistic figure to emerge from my own little hometown of Indiana, Pennsylvania. She is the New York Times best-selling author of four novels including her first, “Back Roads,” which was a Book-of-the-Month Club Main Selection and an Oprah’s Book Club pick, a dramatic and stunning turn of events, and a huge personal triumph, especially as “Back Roads” was Tawni’s debut novel. The book is currently in development as a major motion picture by Michael Ohoven, the producer of the Academy-Award-winning, “Capote” with a screenplay written by Tawni herself. Following the publication of “Back Roads” in 2000, Tawni has completed and published three more novels: “Coal Run,” “Sister Mine,” and the aforementioned “Fragile Beasts.” She is also a contributor to several anthologies including “Becoming Myself: Reflections on Growing Up Female.” Her work has been translated into ten languages and been published in over twenty countries. Tawni earned a degree in journalism at Northwestern University. She was born and raised in the coal-mining region of western PA, and she writes about this territory with striking authenticity in all of her novels. She writes every bit as incisively as John Updike and John O’Hara and, dare I say, has just as uncannily accurate an ear for dialogue as the latter. The characters in her books seem so startlingly real and authentic they could be made of flesh and blood rather than mere words on paper. The hardworking, hard boozing, sports loving, and often deeply eccentric folks who inhabit the hardscrabble towns of rural Pennsylvania are the subject of Tawni’s laser-sharp depictions. I greatly admire her most recent novel, “Fragile Beasts.” The plot reminds me a little of “Great Expectations.” Set against the bruised backdrop of Pennsylvania coal country and the flamboyant bullrings of southern Spain, the story takes place during the course of one tumultuous year. It is, in part, the story of two boys: Klint Hayes, a troubled high school baseball star burdened by the weight of an entire town’s hopes for redemption and glory. And Kyle, his younger brother, a bright, artistic boy, who has to conceal his talent and idealistic nature in order not to be ostracized by the bitter remnants of the dying blue collar world in which he lives. Faced with the trauma of their father’s violent death and the return of a long absent mother, the boys fall into the protection of the town’s eccentric matriarch, Candace Jack, an elderly woman and sister of the legendary founder of J&P Coal. A lifetime ago, she had an affair with a famous Spanish torero. His horrible death, and her subsequent obsession with the bull that killed him, the country that created him, and her inability to stop mourning him have kept her imprisoned in the past. Tawni and I speak about not only “Fragile Beasts,” but also our own high school days, her ability to write convincingly from the point of view of teenaged boys and her novel-in-progress “Company Town.” If you would like to know more about my books, please visit my website: www.markseinfelt.com. Be sure also to visit Tawni’s webpage: http://tawniodell.com/.

Word Patriots – Charnesky on Lowry

billschiffler — Mon, 26 Sep 2011 04:01:33 +0000

This week on Word Patriots, Jason Charnesky returns for one of our periodic shows devoted to past masters, heroic word patriots who overcame great obstacles, who wrote in new and innovative ways, or who defied convention by visiting formerly taboo topics and thereby opened new fields of exploration for literature. A poet and instructor of English, Jason Charnesky has written the lyrics and librettos for many works by composer Bruce Trinkley, including a trilogy of one-act comic operas: EVE’S ODDS, GOLDEN APPLE, and CLEO. A full-length opera, YORK: THE VOICE OF FREEDOM was filmed by PBS station WPSX. SANTA ROSALIA, a cantata based on a painting by Fernando Botero, was performed in Bogotá, Colombia in 2007. Jason and I will be discussing the works of Malcolm Lowry, one of the last century’s greatest writers, the author of “Under the Volcano,” and “October Ferry to Gabriola,” and the creator of one of modern fiction’s most memorable self-destructive characters, the Consul Geoffrey Firmin, the antihero of “Under the Volcano,” whose death is one of the saddest and dingiest in all literature. Most of the obstacles Lowry faced were of his own making, and in real life Firmin’s creator suffered an equally shabby death, an end every bit as preordained as the one he gave his alter ego and fictional stand-in and he was just as ripe for it. I still believe Lowry probably took his own life, but Jason cites new evidence suggesting that he might have been murdered. If you would like to know more about my books, please visit my website: www.markseinfelt.com. To see and hear works by Bruce Trinkley and Jason Charnesky visit www.trinkley.blogspot.com.

Word Patriots – Fishing With Fields

billschiffler — Mon, 19 Sep 2011 04:01:11 +0000

My guest this week on Word Patriots is Wayne Fields. For more than four decades, Wayne has been a professor of English at Washington University in St. Louis. His scholarly focus includes rhetoric, American literature, non-fiction prose, and American political discourse. He has worn many hats at the university, serving as English department chair, dean of University College, and director of its Master of Liberal Arts Program. Countless former and current students look up to Professor Fields as an instructor and mentor, including myself. Many years ago, he sat on my MFA dissertation defense committee along with William Gass and the late Donald Finkel. Wayne is a textbook example of a Word Patriot. His publications include the memoir, “What the River Knows: An Angler in Midstream,” the short story collection “The Past Leads a Life of Its Own,” and “Union of Words: A History of Presidential Eloquence.” His articles on subjects ranging from contemporary politics to the American prairie have been published in periodicals such as “American Heritage” and “Playboy.” He also served as editor for “James Fenimore Cooper: A Collection of Critical Essays.” Fields writes nimble, lyrical sentences, no less philosophical or provocative for being lucid and musical. Images, drawn from nature but far more than natural, glide through his prose and tell their own stories. The autobiographical meditation “What the River Knows” concerns an arduous journey Fields undertook at the age of forty-two, when, toting fly rod and creel, he waded the near twenty-mile stretch of Cook’s Run, a small river in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. “The Past Leads a Life of Its Own” is a series of interrelated stories focusing on one boy’s childhood in the rural Midwest in the 1950s. It is also a meditation on memory and its distortions, of what we retain and what is inevitably lost. If you would like to know more about my books, please visit my website: www.markseinfelt.com. Also be sure to take a look at Amazon’s Wayne Fields page: http://www.amazon.com/gp/search/ref=sr_tc_2_0?rh=i%3Astripbooks%2Ck%3AWayne+Fields&keywords=Wayne+Fields&ie=UTF8&qid=1315845859&sr=1-2-ent&field-contributor_id=B000APVAHC.

Word Patriots – James Morrow, Satirist and Novelist of Ideas

billschiffler — Mon, 12 Sep 2011 04:01:01 +0000

My guest this week on Word Patriots is James Morrow. Morrow is a wry and trenchant satirist in the tradition of Swift, Voltaire, Heller and Vonnegut. The Denver Post has hailed him as Christianity’s Salman Rushdie, only funnier and more sacrilegious. He has won Nebula and World Fantasy Awards and been nominated for both the Hugo and Locus Fantasy Awards. He is the author of three short story collections and eleven novels including the acclaimed The Godhead Trilogy: “Towing Jehovah,” “Blameless in Abaddon,” and “The Eternal Footman.” His other novels include “The Last Witchfinder” (2006) which he sees “as a qualified defense of the 18th-century Enlightenment” and “Shambling Towards Hiroshima” (2009), a parable of the dawn of the nuclear era which also celebrates the halcyon pleasures of monster movies. “Towing Jehovah” begins with the archangel Raphael announcing the death of God and the toppling of His corpse into the sea to disgraced supertanker captain Anthony Van Horne, who is wracked with ecological guilt due to an oil spill he failed to prevent while captaining the Carpco Valparaiso. In short order Van Horne finds himself again at the helm of that ill-fated vessel, dispatched on a secret mission by the Vatican to tow the Divine Corpse—a two-mile long white male with a gray beard and smiling face—to a tomb carved by the angels, prior to their also expiring out of divine empathy, in the Arctic ice. Meanwhile, in an extended subplot, a group of committed atheists plan on destroying God’s body as the existence of the corpse proves their mechanistic view of the universe to be in error. The novel ponders questions of ethics and morality in a post-theistic world as do it its two sequels. Today Jim and I discuss, among other things, if the concept of God will continue to haunt us as a species, the importance of realism in fantasy, and the provocative idea that books beget other books (albeit with unwitting human assistance). If you would like to know more about my books, please visit my website: www.markseinfelt.com. Also be sure to take a look at Morrow’s webpage: http://www.sff.net/people/jim.morrow/.

Word Patriots – Dwight Riverbottum, First Among Equals

billschiffler — Mon, 05 Sep 2011 04:01:25 +0000

My guest this week on Word Patriots is “Dwight Riverbottum.” Dwight Riverbottum is the pen name of an author from Pittsburgh, currently living in NYC. The above sentence, Mr. Riverbottum has written me, “has always reflected the extent of the information I divulge.” He further states, “I can only imagine that this is the manner in which any and all who use pen names prefer to operate, so I hope that I’m not being problematic in making this request. I just want to talk about the work itself—not me.” I plan to honor Riverbottum’s request. The author will be speaking to us today in propria persona. I think that it is no coincidence that “Dwight Riverbottum” publishes poems in two distinct ways—both on the Internet. There are two entrances. One for the eye. One for the ear. One finds the written version of the poems on Riverbottum’s blog. Below each poem there is video clip from u-tube, a scene from a film, a commercial, a newscast that mirrors directly or indirectly the poem above it. The aural versions of the poems—recitations of the poems by Riverbottum himself—can be found on Soundcloud. Mr. Riverbottum’s poetry is genre bending. His poems seem part narrative, part confession, part aural experience. Riverbottom’s imagination gives birth to a new form. Several of his poems I would call short shorts—they remind me so of perfectly crafted miniature short stories. Riverbottom does have antecedents. I think of Walt Whitman’s free-flow of language, but I’m also reminded in a way of the Beats, of David Antin’s “talk poems,” of Bob Dylan’s “Last Thoughts on Woody Guthrie.” During the show, we learn that the author uses other pen names as well, that “Riverbottum” is only first among equals. If you would like to know more about my books, please visit my website: www.markseinfelt.com. Also be sure to take a look at Riverbottum’s blog: http://riverbottum.blogspot.com/ and listen to his poetry readings at: http://soundcloud.com/riverbottum

Word Patriots – Jonathan Maxwell’s “Murderous Intellectuals: German Elites and the Nazi SS”

billschiffler — Mon, 29 Aug 2011 04:01:08 +0000

Throughout history, the perpetrators of holocaust and genocide have offered endless reasons and justifications for their crimes. This week on Word Patriots@Webtalkradio, my guest is Jonathan Maxwell, author of “Murderous Intellectuals: German Elites and the Nazi SS” which explores why so many well-educated professionals willingly joined the Nazi Party as well as the broader topic of genocide in human history. Published by American Book Publishing, “Murderous Intellectuals” is Maxwell’s first book and an auspicious start since it received the 2011 Allbooks Review Editor’s Choice Award in the category of Best Nonfiction Book. A Georgia-based journalist and public speaker, Maxwell holds a BA in English with a minor in psychology from Berry College in Rome, Georgia, as well as a paralegal certificate from North Metro Technical College. This fall, he is enrolling into the Master’s of English program at Jacksonville State. Today Jonathan and I will discuss both aspects of this terrible, frightening subject, looking at the Nazi movement and the greater historical context of man’s propensity to violence. If you would like to know more about my books, please visit my website: www.markseinfelt.com. Also be sure to take a look at the Amazon page for “Murderous Intellectuals”: http://www.amazon.com/Murderous-Intellectuals-German-Elites-Nazi/dp/1589825632/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1313859002&sr=1-1.

Word Patriots – Ray Goss’ Misadventures in Broadcasting

billschiffler — Mon, 22 Aug 2011 04:01:10 +0000

This week on Word Patriots@Webtalkradio, my guest is Ray Goss, the author of the memoir “Misadventures in Broadcasting: Zany stories from 50 plus years of sports play-by-play.” My preference is, of course, literary fiction. But I’m not a monomaniac. I love all kinds of books. In the sweltering heat of summer, I’m less inclined to tackle James, Kant or Pynchon. I want something light and funny, a book which will make me laugh and chuckle. I’m something of a sports fan. Not a fanatic, mind you, but a love of sports is something that is in the blood—that is bred into us here in Western and Central Pennsylvania. Of late—since I myself got into the game with Word Patriots—I have become very interested in radio and broadcasting. Make no mistake about it. Ray is a master broadcaster. I know this because, growing up in Indiana, Pa, in the 1960s, I got up with Goss. Ray was the morning man on our local radio station WDAD. But that is only the beginning. For 40 years, Ray has been the voice of the Duquesne Dukes Basketball, the longest continuous association of a radioman with a single team in the history of Pittsburgh sports. He has broadcast at least 3,000 games in the last half century, usually on radio, occasionally on TV, and not only Duquesne basketball but also harness racing and countless high school and college football, baseball and softball games as well. In our interview, Ray recalls some of the off-beat, unusual, incredible, humorous, and at times embarrassing experiences that have occurred over the last half century while he was broadcasting sports events throughout the country. He narrates many more such amusing incidents in his 2008 book “Misadventures in Broadcasting.” He hopes the reader will enjoy reading about them as much as he has enjoyed writing about them. If you would like to know more about my books, play visit my website: www.markseinfelt.com. Also be sure to take a look at Ray’s website: http://www.raygoss.com/

Word Patriots – A Duet—Man of Letters Edgar H. Knapp and his daughter Jacqueline

billschiffler — Mon, 15 Aug 2011 04:01:41 +0000

New Englander, WW 2 Navy veteran, footballer, wrestling coach, and pick-up baseball player, Edgar H. Knapp, 89, is exuberance personified, a remarkable and wonderful teacher, a man who has had a life-long love of poetry. He attended Lawrence Academy and Wesleyan University and later taught at Groton and Penn State. In 1965, he edited a small volume of poems for study in secondary schools entitled “Introduction to Poetry.” Later he served as general editor of a four volume series with Harcourt Brace—“Ideas and Patterns in Literature.” He has shown his enthusiasm for theoretical criticism and aesthetics in essays on Gerard Manley Hopkins and John Barth. His essay on Barth’s novella “Lost in the Funhouse,” “Found in the Barthhouse: Novelist as Savior” initially appeared in “Modern Fiction Studies,” and thereafter was reprinted four times, most handsomely beside the Barth story in “The Process of Fiction,” edited by Barbara McKenzie, Harcourt, 1974. Since his retirement from teaching, he has penned the engaging autobiography “B- in the course,” which former United Nations Ambassador Jonathan Moore characterizes as “very funny. The eye and pen of the writer perceive comedy naturally welling up throughout life’s adventure.” Finally, Ed is also the author of a number of “long forgotten birdsongs” or “fun children,” as he calls his poems. Some have been published in literary periodicals. Others he has sprinkled at turns in his autobiography, as one does “Parmesan cheese on spaghetti.” Recently he has collected a selection of his poems in the self-published chapbook “To Troy And Back.” Ed has the best pipes for poetry of anyone I know. His declamatory recitations are mesmerizing, and his love of poetry simply infectious. Word Patriots beget Word Patriots. In addition to his poems—his fun children—Ed is the father of eight flesh-and-blood children. His daughter Jacqueline—also a lover of the written and recited word—has followed in her father’s footsteps as artist and educator. A New York-based actress, Jacqueline has a busy resume, from Broadway (Brian Friel’s “Dancing at Lughnasa”), to film (“Dominick & Eugene,” “You Don’t Know Jack”) to primetime TV (“Law & Order”) to serving on the board of the acclaimed Actors Studio. She is also something of a regular at the Caldwell Theatre in Boca Raton, where she appeared in the James Joyce bioplay “Himself!” and as the Italian-speaking housekeeper Costanza in “Enchanted April.” She is also a faculty member at The Actors Studio Drama School at Pace University, a three-year graduate program for the theatre arts, which grants MFA degrees in acting, directing, and playwriting, and where James Lipton serves as Dean Emeritus. This week on Word Patriots@Webtalkradio, I interview both Edgar and Jacqueline, and the two perform works by Walt Whitman, Vachel Lindsay and Edgar himself. If you would like to know more about my books, visit my website: www.markseinfelt.com. Also be sure to visit the Amazon page for “Introduction to Poetry”: http://www.amazon.com/Introduction-poetry-New-dimensions-literature/dp/B0006YNBKG/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1312653760&sr=1-1 .

Word Patriots – Theo Matthews’ Story of the Stories

billschiffler — Mon, 08 Aug 2011 04:01:23 +0000

This week on Word Patriots@Webtalkradio, my guest is Theo Matthews, AKA Teddy Kistler, the author of the novel “The Chronicler’s Tale: A Story of the Stories.” Matthews describes himself as “an optimistic hominid and experimental writer who enjoys twisting words until they bruise and turning phrases to their breaking points.” He writes in a sub-genre of Fantasy/ Magical Realism and styles his work as “philosophical-comic.” In addition to being the author of “The Chronicler’s Tale,” Ted also maintains his own blog, “The Inner Fool of Theo Matthews” at http://theomatthews.blogspot.com,where he posts random nonsense, including his most recent short stories. Matthews attended the Columbia School of Journalism. He began his professional writing career as an assistant editor for a classic car magazine and has also worked for newspapers as a free-lance writer. The biographical material on the back of his book reads: “Matthews enjoys the lessons of life the old-fashioned way: by doing many reckless, stupid and foolish things. He looks forward to more learning,” His novel harkens back to any number of a traditions. First, I would characterize “The Chronicler’s Tale” as a peripatetic novel. There is a lot of moving about and walking in the book, and the chronicler’s stories told to William of Umber, as the two make their journey through the forest to the city of Arudel, are interpolated into the main narrative. One can’t help but thinking of Chaucer’s Canterbury pilgrims. Even Matthews’ title recalls Chaucer. Theo’s work also brings to mind the medieval Arthurian poems of the quest for the holy grail, such as Wolfram von Eschenbach’s “Parzival” with its fictitious kingdoms and fantastic characters such as Parzival’s half-brother the piebald Feirefis and its alluring temptresses who can place brave knights in love trance. If you would like to know more about my books, be sure to visit my website: www.markseinfelt.com. Also be sure to take a look at “The Inner Fool of Theo Matthews” at http://theomatthews.blogspot.com.

Word Patriots – Through A Glass Darkly With Barbara Michel

billschiffler — Mon, 01 Aug 2011 05:01:33 +0000

This week on Word Patriots@Webtalkradio, my guest is Barbara Michel, the author of seventeen books. She is a graduate of the British American School of Writing. Several of her novels have won first-place awards at writers’ workshops and conferences. Her “Colorado Blaze” entry won a national award in “The Writers’ Digest” 2006 contest.
While director of the Christian Writers’ Guild, Norman Rohrer endorsed Michel’s four novel Amish Eden series, concluding: “Her writing is bright and creative and her plots superb.” Reviewing Michel’s “Fortress of a Rebel” trilogy, Christine Clinger writes that Michel “uses the backdrop of the Civil War to entwine a story with the perfect combination of suspense, romance, history and spiritual enrichment.” Michel has studied various aspects of the Bible and Christian theology. While her husband Gerald Michel served as a United Methodist pastor, she directed youth and young-adult gospel-singing witness groups and led services in churches of various denominations. A soprano soloist, she has given numerous gospel concerts, and, for a few years, she and her husband broadcast a Biblical-teaching and gospel-singing radio program. She has written and edited articles for various Grace Ministries publications. Michel has been blind since the age of twenty. Barbara speaks about the loss of her eyesight as a young woman, the special computer program she uses to compose text, the endless revision process all authors face and which is particularly painstaking and troublesome for her, the various genres she works in, her advocacy of wholesome moral fiction, and how she strives to make all her characters—even the flawed ones—human and sympathetic. If you would like to know more about my books, be sure to visit my website: www.markseinfelt.com. To find out more about Barbara Michel and her work, check out her website: http://joybooks1.com/index.html

Word Patriots – Moore on Milton

billschiffler — Mon, 25 Jul 2011 05:02:02 +0000

This week on Word Patriots@Webtalkradio, I will be discussing the importance of reading the classics and the poetical works of John Milton with John W. Moore, Jr. John is an Associate Professor Emeritus of English and Comparative Literature at Penn State. A zealous word patriot, he earned his B.A. and M.A. at Boston College and his Ph.D. from Stanford University. He has stressed to countless students the importance of reading the great books and studying the humanities. Blindness did not break the Olympians. Sightless as Polyphemus (or so it has at any rate been passed down), Homer sang of Troy’s sack by seagoing Akhaians, heroes with sun-bronzed bodies and hair the color of burnished gold. Milton became God’s exegete. The scales never fell from his eyes after he lost his sight; nonetheless he performed day labor, justifying the ways of God to man, when light was denied. In glorious lofty hymns, he celebrated the throne and equipage of the Almighty. Milton remains for me such an enigmatic figure. He read himself blind working so diligently translating Latin into English and vice versa for the Puritans and the blood-stained government of Cromwell—it’s a wonder Charles the Second upon assuming the throne did not send him to the headsman and the block—but in other respects he seems so liberal and modern, as in his advocacy of divorce. The great poet of Christianity and the Hebrew tradition, he of course modeled “Paradise Lost” on the Pagan epic poems of Homer and Virgil, and he also observed the classical unities in his play “Samson Agonistes.” Matthew Arnold speaks about the two great competing traditions of antiquity, the Greek and Hebrew. They wed so beautifully in Milton. Professor Moore and I discuss the many contradictory aspects and competing sides of Milton’s character, to what extent the civil war in Heaven in “Paradise Lost” reflects the civil war in England and the great events of Milton’s own time, Milton’s view on women and how Milton’s work remains timeless and inexhaustible.

Word Patriots – Diane Ackerman’s One Hundred Names For Love

billschiffler — Mon, 18 Jul 2011 05:01:36 +0000

This week on Word Patriots@Webtalkradio, my guest is the noted poet and naturalist Diane Ackerman, the author of over two-dozen books of poetry and non-fiction. Many know her as the author of the best-selling A Natural History of the Senses. She hosted a five-hour PBS television series inspired by that work. Her poetry, which has enthralled me since I first read the original version of The Planets: A Cosmic Pastoral as a college student, includes: Origami Bridges: Poems of Psychoanalysis and Fire; I Praise My Destroyer; and Wife of Light. Her nonfiction includes the 2007 Orion Book Award winning The Zookeeper’s Wife, which tells the story of Jan and Antonia Zabinski, the Warsaw zookeepers who sheltered Jews from the Warsaw ghetto in World War II; An Alchemy of Mind, a poetic exploration of the brain and the marvel of the mind; and The Moon By Whale Light. She has also penned several children’s books and is the only person I know who has a molecule named after her—dianeackerone. Today she is coming on to primarily discuss her most recent book One Hundred Names For Love, which came out in April. The New York Times says of the book: “Ackerman weds exquisite writing and profound insights. This book has done what no other has done for me in recent years. It has renewed my faith in the redemptive power of love.” Booklist calls it “a gorgeously engrossing, affecting, sweetly funny and mind-opening love story of crisis, determination, creativity and repair.” One Hundred Names For Love tells the story of her husband novelist Paul West’s terrible 2004 stroke. Diane relates how frightening and frustrating the stroke proved for Paul and how devastating it was for her to witness Paul’s ability to communicate taken away, his essential self amputated.

Diane also tells how she helped Paul find his way back to himself, how she threw a life jacket out to that dark place without words for Paul to grasp onto and drew him back to the light., a feat as heroic and epical as Proust’s recapturing of lost time. Many people will learn from her methods and successes. She lays out a plan of attack for stroke victims suffering from aphasia to recover lost skills and in the process details an incredible love story. To find out more about Diane Ackerman visit her webpage: http://www.dianeackerman.com/. Also see the Amazon page for One Hundred Names For Love: http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_ss_i_2_26?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field keywords=one+hundred+names+for+love&sprefix=one+hundred+names+for+love.

Word Patriots – Desautels on Big Bad Bill Burroughs

billschiffler — Mon, 11 Jul 2011 05:01:42 +0000

This week on Word Patriots@Webtalkradio, Ed Desautels returns for one of our periodic shows devoted to past masters, heroic word patriots who overcame great obstacles, who wrote in new and innovative ways, or who defied convention by visiting formerly taboo topics and thereby opened new fields of exploration for literature. This week he and I will be discussing the compositional techniques of William S. Burroughs, the author of “Naked Lunch,” “ The Adding Machine,” “Nova Express,” and “The Western Lands.” Big Bad Bill is one of Ed’s literary heroes and favorite authors. We will discuss Burroughs’ influence on Ed’s own work and how Ed employs a variation of Burroughs’ famous cut-up and fold-in technique. We also touch on Burroughs’ polyvocal approach, his innate talent for rendering vocal impersonations in narratives, the feeling of timelessness in his later work, his great stage presence and whether authors should write with performance in mind. Desautels is the author of the novel “Flicker in the Porthole Glass,” which was published by Mammoth Books in 2002 and drew favorable notice in “The Review of Contemporary Fiction.” His fictive critical essay, “Totally Wired: Prepare Your Affidavits of Explanation,” appeared in the critical anthology “Retaking The Universe: William S. Burroughs in the Age of Globalization,” published by Pluto Press in 2004. Currently he is at work on a new novel “Housebreaking the Muse.” He also maintains his own blog, “Maximum Fiction: Writing up the Multiverse.” If you would like to know more about my books, be sure to visit my website: www.markseinfelt.com. To find out more about Ed Desautels and his work check out his blog: http://maximumfiction.wordpress.com/

Word Patriots – Turk Turns the Tables: The fiction and nonfiction of Mark Seinfelt (part two)

billschiffler — Mon, 04 Jul 2011 05:01:37 +0000

This week on Word Patriots@Webtalkradio.net, my recording technician Donnie “Turk” Schnars continues to discuss my work with previous guests—this time my two most recently published works of fiction “Symphonie Fantastique” (2009) and “Baldr and Beatrice” (2011). First we hear Dave Kress on “Symphonie Fantastique.” Dave is a professor of fiction writing, contemporary literature, and literary theory at the University of Maine in Orono and is the author himself of three stunning and unconventional works of fiction “Counting Zero,” “Martians,” and “Hush.” “Symphonie Fantastique” is a collection of four short novels each concerning a different haunted, obsessed individual presented under the banner of a single cover. The collection takes its title from the great five-movement symphony by Hector Berlioz. Paul West says of “Symphonie Fantastique”: “It is tumultuous, overpowering and yet meticulously planned. Few people have the oomph to rise to this for a second novel. A superbly literary feat.” It is interesting that West sees the book as a single novel and not a collection of four discrete tales. The Midwest Book Review” writes, “ ‘Symphonie Fantastique’ is an intriguing read that will please many a reader.” Next Turk talks to my very first guest on “Word Patriots” Edward Desautels about my most recent book, the Tolkeinesque fantasy “Baldr and Beatrice,” which came out in January 2011. A rich and subtle analysis of the psychology of friendship and love, “Baldr and Beatrice” revisits the old time-proven formula of girl and boy forever desiring but never fully achieving the culmination of their love. Here, it is a matter of their accidental disuniting as primal essences, depicted in grand Miltonic flourishes, through severing time warps and their reemergence in different times, places and cultures. Ed is the author of the novel “Flicker in the Porthole Glass,” which was published by Mammoth Books in 2002 and drew favorable notice in “The Review of Contemporary Fiction.” His fictive critical essay, “Totally Wired: Prepare Your Affidavits of Explanation,” appeared in the critical anthology “Retaking The Universe: William S. Burroughs in the Age of Globalization,” published by Pluto Press in 2004. Currently he is at work on a new novel “Housebreaking the Muse.” He also maintains his own blog, “Maximum Fiction: Writing up the Multiverse.” If you would like to know more about Mark Seinfelt’s books be sure to visit his website: www.markseinfelt.com. To learn more about Dave Kress visit his faculty page: http://www.umaine.edu/english/faculty/david-kress/. To find out more about Ed Desautels check out his blog: http://maximumfiction.wordpress.com/.

Word Patriots – Turk Turns the Tables: The fiction and nonfiction of Mark Seinfelt (part one)

billschiffler — Sun, 26 Jun 2011 05:01:41 +0000

This week on Word Patriots@Webtalkradio.net, my recording technician Donnie “Turk” Schnars ousts me from my interviewer’s chair to discuss my first two books “Final Drafts: suicides of world-famous authors” and “Henry Boulanger of Mushannon Town: A Novel of the American Revolution” with two of my previous guests, novelist and memoirist Elisabeth Lanser Rose, author of “Body Sharers” and “For the Love of a Dog,” and poet Jason Charnesky, who has penned the lyrics and librettos for many works by the composer Bruce Trinkley, including a trilogy of one-act comic operas: EVE’S ODDS, GOLDEN APPLE, and CLEO, a full-length opera, YORK: THE VOICE OF FREEDOM and SANTA ROSALIA, a cantata based on a painting by Fernando Botero. Elisabeth is up first with her review of “Final Drafts.” My study of the phenomenon of literary suicide in the Twentieth Century was published by Prometheus Books in 1999 and was chosen as an alternate selection of the Reader’s Subscription Book Club in 2004. Randall Curb wrote in “Book Page”: “Final Drafts is an intriguing bedside-table book. The stories are necessarily grim and disturbing but the subjects rarely fail to fascinate.” In “Rambles Net Reviews,” Gregg Winkler stated: “Final Drafts is an amazing look at the mind-boggling frequency in which influential writers take their own lives. By examining writers spanning the entire 20th Century, Seinfelt takes his readers on some of the most uplifting and depressing trips I have been on in a long time…. It’s a fine piece of writing Seinfelt has produced, and despite one unhappy ending after another, ‘Final Drafts’ is inspiring in a strange way. Seinfelt shows us time and again the thin line between the height of one’s life and the depth of one’s despair. And that is perhaps a task that many of the writers portrayed in Seinfelt’s book would have been quite envious of.” Jason follows with his review of my first published novel “Henry Boulanger of Mushannon Town,” which won the 2010 Pinnacle Book Achievement Award in the category of historical fiction. “The Mid-West Review of Books” issued the book a five-star rating: “The new world was an apt name for it. ‘Henry Boulanger’ tells the story of a shoemaker turned soldier who gets a sample of both worlds. France and Germany are degrading into a cesspool of filth and corruption about to implode on itself, so Henry during his travels finds much to enjoy in the less spoiled and more optimistic land of America and soon finds himself fighting to sever all ties to his past world. ‘Henry Boulanger’ is a fine piece of historical fiction and would do well for those who enjoy Revolutionary War era-based tales.” After Jason finishes his review, he and Turk discuss his friendship with me over the years and my other works, and then I come on to read from “Henry.” If you would like to know more about Mark Seinfelt’s books be sure to visit his website: www.markseinfelt.com. Please also visit the Amazon page for Elisabeth’s “For the Love of a Dog”: http://www.amazon.com/Love-Dog-Memoir-Elisabeth-Rose/dp/0609606921/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1303074639&sr=1-1. To see and hear works by Bruce Trinkley and Jason Charnesky visit www.trinkley.blogspot.com

Word Patriots – A Chat with Robert C.S. Downs

billschiffler — Mon, 20 Jun 2011 05:01:48 +0000

This week’s guest Robert C.S. Downs has published six novels, one collection of short stories, and written one television film. His novel “Going Gently,” published by Bobbs-Merrill in this country and Faber and Faber in Great Britain, was produced for television by the BBC. It starred Norman Wisdom and Judi Dench. The production won five British Academy Awards and was voted best television film of its year. His novel “Peoples,” also Bobbs-Merrill, was produced as a World Premier Movie by NBC-Television, “Billy: Portrait of a Street Kid,” that starred LeVar Burton, a drama about a ghetto youth’s efforts to escape his dismal existence and his chance at a future as a veterinarian’s assistant. Downs’ novel, “White Mama,” a story about a poor elderly white woman and a tough, streetwise black kid whom she eventually adopts, published by Ballantine, was a production of CBS television that was directed by Jackie Cooper and starred Bette Davis, for which she received an Emmy nomination. His screenplay of “White Mama” was a finalist for the NAACP Image award. His other novels are “Country Dying,” Bobbs-Merrill, “Living Together,” St. Martin’s Press,” and “The Fifth Season,” published by Counterpoint. His collection of short fiction, “The Cape May Stories,” was published in paperback by Orchard House Press in 2008 and in hardback in 2010. He has taught in and been director of the MFA programs at the University of Arizona and Penn State. A former Guggenheim fellow, he lives in State College, Pennsylvania. Bob taught my first fiction workshop, and I consider him a mentor. Join us as we examine Bob’s fiction and how two topics occur over and over again in his books: dying and surviving—surviving against all the odds through courage and quiet resistance. We also discuss the film adaptations of his novels, how deeply committed a writer must be to his vocation, and the long struggle an author usually faces to reach publication. On a personal note, just before taping this conversation with Bob, I learned of the death of another mentor—my uncle John H. Sinfelt, who invented a superior platinum-iridium catalyst that was important in the quest to produce lead-free, high-octane gasoline. He was the author of the book “Bimetallic Catalysts: Discoveries, Concepts and Applications” and the holder of forty-two U.S. patents. I dedicate this episode of Word Patriots to him. If you would like to know more about Mark Seinfelt’s books be sure to visit his website: www.markseinfelt.com. To learn more about Robert C. S. Downs go to his Amazon Author Page: http://www.amazon.com/gp/search/ref=sr_tc_2_0?rh=i%3Astripbooks%2Ck%3ARobert+C.+S.+Downs&keywords=Robert+C.+S.+Downs&ie=UTF8&qid=1307975164&sr=1-2-ent&field-contributor_id=B001K81JQ0a and visit the Amazon page for “The Fifth Season”: http://www.amazon.com/Fifth-Season-Robert-C-Downs/dp/B000H2MRR0/ref=sr_1_5?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1307975170&sr=1-5 .

Word Patriots – The many Christina Millettis

billschiffler — Mon, 13 Jun 2011 05:01:46 +0000

This week’s guest Christina Milletti is the author of the 2006 short story collection “The Religious & Other Fictions” published by Carnegie Mellon University Press. Her stories have appeared in the Chicago Review, Harcourt’s Best New American Voices, Pennsylvania English, and the Alaska Quarterly Review. There are many Christina Millettis. She is an author, mother, wife, and an Associate Professor of English at the University of Buffalo in New York. One or several of these multiple Christinas is the author of the wonderful debut collection “The Religious & Other Fictions” published in 2006 in the Carnegie Mellon University Press series in short fiction. Janet Kauffman writes that Milletti “has a knife-thrower’s flourish and aim,” that hers is “a fiction of ease and ferocity” and that it’s difficult “to tell order from disorder in her stories, the lavish from the spare. They meet in a super clarity of language that is wondrous, as dark as it is illuminating.” This week, in addition to her work, Christina and I discuss the difficulties contemporary women have juggling their many identities and her relationship with her husband, last-week’s guest, novelist Dimitri Anastasopoulos and what it is like when two authors share one household. If you would like to know more about Mark Seinfelt’s books be sure to visit his website: www.markseinfelt.com. To learn more about Christina go to her University of Buffalo faculty page http://english.buffalo.edu/faculty/faculty/milletti/ and visit the Amazon page for “The Religious & Other Fictions”: http://www.amazon.com/Religious-Fictions-Carnegie-University-Fiction/dp/0887484530/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1307369180&sr=1-1.

Word Patriots – Dimitri Anastasopoulos and his ongoing “langoo-adj” project

billschiffler — Mon, 06 Jun 2011 05:01:21 +0000

This week’s guest Dimitri Anastasopoulos is the author of the 2001 novel “A Larger Sense of Harvey” published by Mammoth Books, which concerns a team of linguistic scholars, their friendships and hatreds, and the tensions which sabotaged their “langoo-adj” research project, a groundbreaking attempt to break down Indo European language barriers. He is currently at work on two novels-in-progress, the science fiction extravaganza “Farm for Mutes” and “New Crimes of the Terrorist,” a historical novel set in the Balkans in both the post World War Two period and in the tumultuous, bloody 1990s. Born in Greece and a United States immigrant, Dimitri is an assistant professor in the department of English at the University of Buffalo. His interests include fiction writing, avant-garde fiction, and postmodern and contemporary American fiction. His stories have appeared in Notre Dame Review, Black Warrior Review, and elsewhere. I consider Dimitri to be one of the most talented phrasemakers among my contemporaries and English is not his first language. His prose is polyphonic and rollicking and always a little off kilter and out of control. In this week’s interview, Dimitri and I cover a wide variety of topics. In addition to exploring his work, we discuss the author’s inability to accomplish his intentions in fiction, how writers like Dimitri move in between languages and in between cultures, and the responsibility of the author in depicting atrocity in his work. If you would like to know more about Mark Seinfelt’s books be sure to visit his website: www.markseinfelt.com. To learn more about Dimitri go to his University of Buffalo faculty page www.english.buffalo.edu/faculty/faculty/anastasopoulos/ and visit the Amazon page for “A Larger Sense of Harvey”: www.amazon.com/Larger-Sense-Harvey-Dimitri-Anastasopoulos/dp/0966602889

Word Patriots – Lyrical Theatre: An Interview with Composer Bruce Trinkley and Librettist Jason Charnesky

billschiffler — Mon, 30 May 2011 05:01:20 +0000

Bruce Trinkley is the composer of incidental music, songs and choruses for over twenty theatre and dance productions. He has also written extensively for choral ensembles. A poet and instructor of English, Jason Charnesky has written the lyrics and librettos for many works by Trinkley, including a trilogy of one-act comic operas: EVE’S ODDS, GOLDEN APPLE, and CLEO. A full-length opera, YORK: THE VOICE OF FREEDOM was filmed by PBS station WPSX. SANTA ROSALIA, a cantata based on a painting by Fernando Botero, was performed in Bogotá, Colombia in 2007. Join us for a show full of lively debate and personal reminiscence as Bruce and Jason discuss their concept of lyrical theatre, following in the tradition of other works that are through-composed, like opera, so that every word is sung, and so that there is a dramatic thrust and pacing to the entire piece; the roles of artist and audience; collaborative artistic endeavor; and, first and foremost, how words and music, composer and librettist, work together. The opening music of today’s show is “The Siciliano” from SANTA ROSALIA, A Chamber Cantata for Vocal Quartet, Woodwind Quintet, and Harpsichord Based on the Painting by Fernando Botero; Music: Bruce Trinkley; Words: Jason Charnesky. It features Eleanor Duncan Armstrong, flute; Tim Hurtz, oboe; Smith Toulson; clarinet; Lisa Bontrager, horn; Daryl Durran, bassoon; and June Miller, harpsichord. The “lyrical theatre pieces” that conclude the broadcast are “The Resume Aria” from CLEO; Music: Bruce Trinkley; Words: Jason Charnesky; Elisa Matthews, soprano, and “Lost In Translation” from CONFESS/CONFUSE; Music: Bruce Trinkley; Words: Jason Charnesky; Margaret Benczak, soprano; Elisa Matthews, soprano; Raymond Sage, tenor. If you would like to know more about Mark Seinfelt’s work be sure to visit his website: www.markseinfelt.com. To see and hear other work by Bruce Trinkley and Jason Charnesky go to www.trinkley.blogspot.com and also to their second website www.fantod.net.

Word Patriots – Windgate Vineyards and Winery/ the second annual “Meet the Authors of Indiana County, Pennsylvania, and Beyond”

billschiffler — Mon, 23 May 2011 05:01:09 +0000

This week we have a real change of pace episode. On April 30, my recording technician Turk and I attended the second annual “Meet the Authors of Indiana County, Pennsylvania, and Beyond” book expo at Windgate Vineyards and Winery in Smicksburg, Pa. This unique event was hosted by the award-winning winery’s owners Cay and Dan Enerson. Twenty local authors–none of whom I had ever met before–including Paul La Violette, Barbara Michel, Timothy Spence, Nancy Skultety, Denise Weber, Jay Hawkins, William Betts, Jr., Elizabeth Baran and Ray Goss–greeted and mixed with the public and sold and signed their books and of course sampled the wine. Attending book shows is a must for authors during these difficult times when publishers’ marketing budgets–always tight–have been slashed even further. My friend Al Galasso of the North American Bookdealers Exchange has stressed over and over again to me the importance of attending book expos. For twenty-seven years NABE has been showcasing books at tradeshows on the west coast and elsewhere giving countless authors product exposure to the book market, library field, mail order arena, media outlets and internet book buyers. He has urged me again and again to hit the road. So that’s what Turk and I did. We spent the morning driving through the rolling hills of Pennsylvania, and passed through Punxsutawney, the home of that weather prognosticator, the famous groundhog Punxy Phil. Attending a book show is like visiting an aquarium. You meet a lot of colorful and interesting characters. The mini-interviews which follow were recorded live in the art gallery at Windgate Winery. The show concludes with a follow-up phone interview with William W. Betts, Jr., and a reading from his biography of the Seneca war-chief Cornplanter, “The Hatchet and the Plow.” If you would like to know more about Mark Seinfelt’s work be sure to visit his website: www.markseinfelt.com. Also visit the Windgate Winery site, www.windgatevineyards.com and the Amazon page for “The Hatchet and the Plow,” http://www.amazon.com/Hatchet-Plow-Times-Chief-Cornplanter/dp/1450267130

Word Patriots – Fathers and Sons: Wagner, Moore, Mann (part two)

billschiffler — Mon, 16 May 2011 05:01:10 +0000

In the second part of my interview with my father Dr. Frederick William Seinfelt, the author of the 1975 book George Moore: Ireland’s Unconventional Realist and two companion essays: Wagnerian Elements in the Writings of George Moore and Thomas Mann and some American and British Writers, we continue our discussion on Richard Wagner and his influence on world literature, this week focusing primarily on the novels of the German Nobel Prize-winning author Thomas Mann. The compelling presence of Wagner remained with Mann in the writing of all his major works of fiction, from “Buddenbrooks,” and “The Magic Mountain” down through the last ones “Doctor Faustus,” “The Holy Sinner,” and “The Confessions of Felix Krull.” Mann’s great middle work, the one which occupied him steadily from 1926 to 1942, the Biblical tetralogy “Joseph and His Brothers” was perhaps the most Wagnerian of them all, and “Joseph and His Brothers”—the subject of a joint essay by my father and myself “Wagnerian Elements in Thomas Mann’s Joseph Tetralogy” which appears in the appendix of my book “Symphonie Fantastique”, a collection of four novels each concerning a different haunted, obsessed individual presented under the banner of a single cover—is discussed in depth on this week’s show. If you would like to know more about Mark Seinfelt’s work be sure to visit his website: www.markseinfelt.com. See also the Amazon pages for “Joseph and His Brothers” and “Symphonie Fantastique”: http://www.amazon.com/Joseph-His-Brothers-StoriesProvider/dp/1400040019/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1304949778&sr=1-1 and http://www.amazon.com/Symphonie-Fantastique-Mark-Seinfelt/dp/1439246009/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1304950028&sr=1-2