KRCB-FM: Word By Word

Paintings, drawings, photographs, moving pictures, poetry, and letters infuse this episode of Word By Word: Conversations With Writers. This is because host Gil Mansergh’s and studio engineer Anthony Garcia’s guest is the respected biographer Carolyn Burke with her latest book Foursome. The four people who burst forth in this volume are photographer Alfred Stieglitz, painter Georgia O’Keefe, movie maker Paul Strand, and writer/painter Rebecca Salsbury.

Northern California Public Media’s Word By Word: Conversations With Writers host Gil Mansergh wanted to juggle things up a bit, so our first guest for 2019 is the internationally renowned juggler, clown, teacher, playwright and author Jeff Raz.

Word By Word Listeners are due for a special treat treat today, for Gil Mansergh’s  guest is the celebrated local legend Gaye LeBaron in a conversation about her new book entitled:  The Wonder Seekers of Fountaingrove which she co-wrote with Bart Casey. This amazing—-but-true—tale of  Sonoma County’s premier mystical sexual cult, Fountaingrove, is the century-long saga of three men: New England prophet Thomas Lake Harris, British pilgrim Laurence Oliphant, and Japanese Samurai Kanaya Nagasawa. By the time LeBaron “semi-retired” in 2001, she had written more than 8,000 columns for the Santa Rosa Press Democrat and was considered “the most popular feature in the paper.” Her interview notes and research material are kept as the Gaye LeBaron Special Collection at the Sonoma State University Library. In addition to her new book, LeBaron co-authored two other books on local history: Santa Rosa: A Nineteenth Century Town, and Santa Rosa: A Twentieth Century Town.  She also taught Sonoma County history at Santa Rosa Junior College and the Lifelong Learning Center at Sonoma State University, and appeared in two videos discussing Sonoma County history that aired on C-Span in 2015. LeBaron continues to share stories with Press Democrat readers in a column that appear two Sundays each month.

In what has become a Word By Word tradition, your white-bearded Santa, Gil Mansergh, is once again pleased to welcome the book buyers for nine the local Copperfield’s Bookstores, Sheryl Cotleur and Michele Bellah with their carefully considered suggestions for gift books. Book Buyers play a critical role in a bookstore—because they are the ones who decide what books will be carried on the shelves. As you can imagine, there is a fierce competition between publishers for shelf space, and Michelle and Bellah read hundreds of books each year in their specific areas of interest. Sheryl was a fiction judge for the 2014 National Book Awards and is the Adult Books Buyer for Copperfields, while Bellah selects the children’s books, cookbooks and art & craft books.

Gil Mansergh hosts a very tasty Word By Word conversation this month. Tasty, because it features an insider’s look at the newly released Mary's Italian Family Cookbook. This book is testament to the talent and tenacity of the woman who started it all—Mary Fazio, who, in 1959 (at the age of 46), used her $700 life savings to open the original Mary’s Pizza Shack in Boyes Hot Springs, CA—a Sonoma County-based business that has 17 Mary’s Pizza restaurants today Gathered around the table with Gil are Mary's son Toto Albano, granddaughter Terri Williamson and grandson-in-law Cully Williamson. The book’s marketing group manager (and former Mary’s Pizza Shack waitress), Laura DiPietro offers insights on how the book was put together.

It is just over a year since the night of Sunday, October 9th 2017, when nearly 111,000 acres and nearly 6,000 homes in the Napa/Sonoma wine country were incinerated by unstoppable flames. Word By Word host Gil Mansergh marks this occasion by reprising the “After the Fires Are Out” show originally broadcast of November 12, 2017. Gil has added a new ending to todays show by, providing updates on how our fire-impacted Word By Word writers are today.

Word By Word host Gil Mansergh has a spirited conversation with two multi-talented women who worked full time when they wrote their novels about women escaping abusive relationships. Electrical Engineer Suzanna Solomon’s book Montana Rhapsody features a pole-dancer who escapes an assault by three men by stabbing one with the stiletto heel of her shoe and blinding the other two with a can of hairspray. Former Labor and Delivery Nurse and current Psychotherapist Cathy Zane's book Better Than This features a woman with an older, controlling husband and a past she’s tried to forget.

Gil Mansergh’s Word By Word guests for July are a pair of Marin County writers with books on decidedly different topics. Bonnie Monte’s The Sleeping Lady is a modern, cozy mystery novel set in the shadow of Mt. Tamalpais, and Francine Falk-Allen, who contracted polio when she was three, presents Not A Poster Child which is, as she writes, “a memoir of life as a handicapped person trying to be a normie.”

On the August, 2018 Word By Word: Conversations With Writers, host, Gil Mansergh welcomes the Barcelona-born NY Times bestselling writer Edgar Cantero with his decidedly different new novel This Body’s Not Big Enough For the Both of Us. Edgar writes short stories, screenplays and novels in three languages (Spanish, Catalan, English) that often include women kissing, things exploding and multiple versions of the same event presented like deconstructed Hollywood gangster films from the 1940’s. This Body’s Not Big Enough for Both of Us features a unique individual as the hard-nosed private eye called A.Z. Kimrean. But having just one name is inaccurate. The personalities of two twins occupy the same body—Adrian is the male with a high I.Q. and photographic memory, while Zooey is the creative female who plays musical instruments, writes, paints and is a practicing nymphomaniac. During the show, Gil and Edgar chat about the San Francisco private eye genre, hermaphrodites, desert gangster lairs, nymphomania, wether or not eleven-year-old girls can be femme fatales, the impact velocity of an armor-plated Jaguar sedan, and the course of true love—all of which can be explored more completely in the pages of Edgar Cantero’s new novel.

Word By Word: Conversations With Writers host Gil Mansergh’s June conversation is with two multi-talented Marin County novelists: Christie Nelson, and her latest historical novel, Beautiful Illusion: Treasure Island, 1939 a tale of a plucky female reporter, a dwarf anthropologist, and a Japanese diplomat and dangerous deceit at the Golden Gate International Exposition held in the middle of San Francisco Bay; and Jeb Harrison, with his picaresque family saga, The Healing of Howard Brown which begins with a middle-aged man vowing to fulfill his dying father’s final wish, “Find your sister!”

Word By Word: Conversations With Writers host Gil Mansergh likes to present writers from different genres, today’s show features valuable insider perspectives on creating documentaries from filmmakers Michael Shapiro & Eric Mcintyre—the co-directors of Junkyard Alchemist, a celebrated short film featuring Sebastopol’s internationally acclaimed junk artists, Patrick Amiot and Brigitte Laurent.

Gil Mansergh hosts a very special Word By Word: Conversations With Writers broadcast on North Bay Public Media, KRCB-FM. That is because the conversation is with the award-winning professor, novelist, screenwriter, historian and storyteller Greg Sarris and his new collection of Miwok stories entitled How the Mountain Was Made. Greg is also serving his thirteenth term as Chairman of the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria and explains, “The Miwok people’s most important contribution to Sonoma County is our Creation Myths, yet they are known by very few people. For example, it is said that Coyote was sitting atop Sonoma Mountain when he decided to create the world and people. As a storyteller, my task is to reimagine and share these tales with my neighbors.”

Word By Word host Gil Mansergh welcomes listeners to a time of trysts and love nests on this month’s show. The object of desire is Jack London’s wife Charmian. Her story is shared with the world in Rebecca Rosenberg’s novel, The Secret Life of Mrs. London. A familiar guest on Word By Word, Rebecca is the author of the photo book Lavender Fields of America, and historical novels about strong women including the forthcoming books in her Widows of Champagne series. Living on the border of the London’s famed “Beauty Ranch” (now Jack London State Park), sadly, she shares share another affinity with the Londons. Just like Jack and Charmian lost their under-construction home Wolf House to fire, Rebecca and her husband lost their home and lavender fields in the October firestorm that ravaged Sonoma County.

Word By Word host Gil Mansergh celebrates Valentine’s Day by chatting with the esteemed voice-over actor and teacher Samantha Paris with her new memoir Finding the Bunny. Bobbi Block grew up in Los Angeles and started doing voiceovers for cartoons and commercials when she was 15-years-old. Since then, her voice can be heard in over 1000 regional and national commercials, and 200 animated half-hour TV shows. Discovering she had the gift of teaching her skills to others, she moved north, founded her VOICETRAX school for voiceover training in Sausalito, and legally changed her name to Samantha Paris.

On today’s Word By Word, host Gil Mansergh helps us travel back 112 years to join the hardy young men who spent a year and a day collecting specimens on the Galapagos Islands for the California Academy of Sciences (CAS). Our guide is Dr. Matthew J. James, Chair of the Sonoma State University Department of Geology, a Fellow of the California Academy of Sciences, science advisor to the Galápagos Conservancy, and a Governing Member of the General Assembly of the Charles Darwin Foundation. His book Collecting Evolution: The Galapagos Expedition that Vindicated Darwin was written to “set the record straight” after overhearing a CAS staffer tell visitors that the expedition “arrived in San Francisco with the fires still burning from the 1906 earthquake.” In fact, the ship didn’t sail through the Golden Gate until Thanksgiving of the same year.

Before listening to this 2017 holiday gift books edition of Word By Word: Conversations With Writers, host Gil Mansergh wants to remind everyone that this is a very important year to include books as gifts. Immediately following the firestorm that engulfed much of Sonoma County, Gil had survivors living and eating at his house. Since several rooms are lined with book shelves, he would often find them reading the titles and pulling down a personal favorite. “I love this book,” they would tell him. “It was in the den on the left side of the shelf, only mine had a blue cover.” The point of this, is that books are important to us—and especially to fire survivors. They can be touchstones to the past—as well as harbingers of new beginnings. So, what do outdoor sculpture creator Andy Goldsworthy, Presidents Grant and Obama, Philip Pullman’s prequel to his Golden Compass novels, a gigantic coffee table book of animal portraits, and a disaster which results in a sofware engineer having to keep a sourdough starter alive and happy by playing music have in common? These fascinating titles are all included among the gift books Gil talks about with Sheryl Cotleur, Michelle Bellah, the book buyers for the Copperfield’s Bookstores.

Several of Gil Mansergh’s previous Word By Word guests lost homes and businesses in the recent wildfires, and one of these, award-winning novelist and Sonoma State University fiction writing professor, Stefan Kiesbye his wife Sanaz and their dog Kurt escaped from the flames with just minutes to spare. His response was to write a piece for the Los Angeles Times he entitled “Your House Is On Fire, Your Old Life Is Gone.” Stefan shares his words and reflections with our listeners, with Gil, and with today's other in-studio guest, Sharon Hamilton. Sharon’s award winning romance novels may feature finely-chiseled Navy SEALS, but almost a decade ago, she lost her beautifully landscaped Bennett Valley home to a fire—and her life was forever changed. Sharon recently wrote about this on a blog entry she calls “Rising From the Fire,” and she will also share this piece and her recent thoughts on-air. CAUTION: This Word By Word conversation features tragic firestorm incidents which may trigger emotional responses for people impacted by the fire.

David Corbett and Word By Word host Gil Mansergh reprise a conversation they had about David’s very timely coming-of-age novel Do They Know I’m Running, a book that has become even more important with the recent changes to the DACA program and other proposals for immigration reform. In addition, listeners hear David singing Louie Louie while Gil provides a baritone back-up. Later, Anthony Garcia plays the voice of The Rancher, and Gil is The Narrator for the novel’s opening pages.

Award winning travel writer, Inga Askamit shares how she created her piece about alfresco theatrics, Transcendant Summer Night. Catherine Bramkamp chats about being a poetry judge for the anthology, as well as writing her poetic elegy, Wolf House: Jack London State Historic Park Roger C. Lubeck talks about the seductivness of dancing in a story he calls Crush, and reads his poem, “Valley of the Moon.” In addition, Roger has been assigned the task of “official question answerer” by the anthology’s editor, Robert Digitale. Word By Word host Gil Mansergh joins the conversation as well, by revealing some of the pitfalls of creating historical nonfiction in his “written in Elizabethan English” piece Exploring the Bay of Nova Albion for Captain Francis Drake.” Linda Loveland Reid reads from the nonfiction piece that captured Press Democrat columnist Chris Smith’s attention at the Sonoma County Fair, Confessions of a Prune Picker.

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

This is a once-in-a-decade, retrospective look back at the last 10 years of Word: Conversations With Writers broadcasts with host Gil Mansergh. The first half hour features clips by novelists and writing professors Greg Sarris and Jean Hegland, SF literary agents Michael Larson and Elizabeth Pomada, Jamaican-born novelist Margaret Cezair Thompson, and Sebastopol childrens authors and illustrators Megan McDonald and Terri Sloat. The second half hour includes clips with award-winning, bestselling author T.C. Boyle, Irishman Eoin Coffler, who wrote an immensely popular YA mystery series about the brilliant teen-aged master criminal Artemis Fowl, Robert Digitale, Dan Tayloeand Frederick Weisel—three writers who contributed chapters to the Press Democrat’s serialized Sonoma Squares: Red Harvest mystery, and graphic novelists Maia Kobabe and Trinidad Escobar. As an added treat, Gil reads the sign-off quote by Eoin Cofler in his pseudo-Irish accent.

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

Gil Mansergh welcomes the celebrated novelist and master of the short story, Eric Puchner as his guest on KRCB-FM’s Word By Word: Conversations With Writers show. Professor of writing seminars at Johns Hopkins, Eric includes nine stories in his Last Day On Earth collection—each falling into distincively different categories from coming-of-age to science fiction to psycho-drama. Last months Word By Word guest, Chinese-born novelist, poet and memoirist Yi Yun Li writes the following about Eric: "Eric Puchner is an alchemist who captures the joy and danger in everyday life and, with precision, humor, and empathy, turns these moments into gold... in an unforgettable collection from a great storyteller."

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

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

Word By Word is fortunate to greet the New Year with two writers featured in an upcoming collaboration entitled Copperfields’ Presents: Redwood Writers Fiction 2017. Starting January 24th and every fourth Tuesday for the following six months, talented writers will share readings from their books from 6:00 to 7:00 at the Montgomery Village Copperfields’ Bookstore. Patricia V. Davis is familiar to Word By Word fans from the revelations she shared from her first bestseller, Harlot’s Sauce: a Memoir of Food, Family, Love and Loss and Greece. Patricia’s new novel, Cooking For Ghosts is the opening part of a trilogy set aboard the cruise ship, the RMS Queen Mary—which has become a convention center in the Long Beach Harbor. While Jo-Anne Rosen’s engaging fiction collection, What They Don’t Know, anthologizes short pieces that first appeared in literary journals like The Sommerset Review, The Dickens and The Florida Review.

Continuing a seven-year KRCB-FM seasonal tradition, with a hearty "Ho, Ho, Ho!" Word By Word host Gil Mansergh, welcomes Copperfield’s Books buyers Sheryl Cutler and Michelle Bellah to share their carefully considered suggestions for 2016 holiday gift books. Incorporating one deft seque after another, the trio share comments from THE SECRET HISTORY OF TWIN PEAKS, VINCENT’S STARY NIGHT, HOW TO MAKE A SPACESHIP, THE SECRET LIFE OF TREES, THE GIRL WHO DRANK THE MOON and YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN: A MEL BROOKS BOOK, THE STORY OF THE MAKING OF THE MOVIE. Fun times for everyone involved! .

"Movies as Teaching Tools" is the focus on November’s Word By Word: Conversations With Writers on North Bay Public Media, KRCB-FM. Today’s guest is SRJC media studies instructor and interdisciplinary scholar Tony Kashani, author of Movies Change Lives: A Pedagogy of Humanistic Transformation, and since host Gil Mansergh is a syndicated film columnist who uses film clips in his seminars, the discussion quickly becomes a knowledgeable interchange of how really good movies can be transformational. As an aid to listeners, here is a list of the movies exploring "who and what we are” that Tony and Gil discuss during the show: 1. Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity (1944) starring Barbara Stanwick Fred McMurray, Edward G. Robinson 2. Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982) starring Harrison Ford, Rutger Hauer, Sean Young, Darryl Hannah, Edward James Olmos 3. Andrew Niccol’s Gattaca (1997) starring Ethan Hawke, Uma Thurman, Jude Law 4. Peter Wier’s The Truman Show (1998) Written by Andrew Niccol and starring Jim Carrey, Laura Linney, Noah Emmerich, Ed Harris 5. The Waschowski Brothers’ The Matrix (1999) starring Keanu Reeves, Laurence Fishburne, Carrie-Ann Moss, Hugo Weaving 6. Spike Jonze’s Her (2015) starring Joaquin Phoenix, Rooney Mara, Olivia Wilde, Amy Adams, Scarlett Johansson 7. Mira Nair’s Mississippi Masala (1991) starring Sarita Choudhury, Denzel Washington, Roshan Seth, Sharmila Tagore 8. Mira Nair’s Queen of Katwe (2016) starring Madina Nalwanga, David Oyelowo, Lupita Nyong'o

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

Gil Mansergh’s SeptemberWord By Word conversation is with Jean Hegland, author of Into the Forest, the bestselling novel of a near future, and the soon to be released Still Time, a novel about a Shakespeare scholar with alzheimers. Long time listens may recall that Jean joined novelist Greg Sarris on Gil's very first Word By Word broadcast, way back in May, 2007. A lot has happened in the intervening years, including actress Ellen Page falling in love with Into the Forest and guiding the book’s transformation to a film as its producer. The Canadian-made movie stars Ellen Page and Evan Rachel Wood and is directed and written by Patricia Rozema who created two of Gil's favorite films (I've Heard the Mermaids Singing and Kit Kittredge: An American Girl), and is pleased to announce that the movie version of Into the Forest will open at Sebastopol’s Rialto Cinemas next Friday, September 16. The book launch for Still Time begins at 7:00, Friday, October 7th at the Occidental Center for the Arts.

Charles Markee & Waights Taylor This month’s Word By Word guests have written novels set in distinctive times and places. As he did in his first detective novel, Kiss of Salvation, Waights Taylor takes us back to 1948 in the segregated Birmingham, Alabama worlds of detective partners Joe McGrath and Sam Rucker in Touch of Redemption, while Charles Markee’s novel of magical realism, Maria’s Beads, features a Latino lettuce-packing family living in present-day Salinas, California. Host Gil Mansergh tells us that after the show was recorded, Maria’s Beads won the silver medal for Junior Fiction in the prestigious Colorado Independent Publishers Association 22nd annual competition.

Revisiting Lisa See. Last month’s Word By Word conversation was with the talented graphic artists Maia Kobabe and Trinidad Escobar who shared verbal descriptions of Maia’s lushly illustrated comics The Thief’s Tale, and her award-winning Tom O’Bedlam, and Trinidad’s biomythography, Crushed which explores the interior landscape of her experience as a magikal, transnational Filipino adoptee. During our conversation, Trinidad shared how she needed to carry a dead baby’s first name for most of her life because adoption paperwork had already been approved with that name. I made reference at that time to the Chinese immigrant “paper sons” that Lisa See wrote about in her novel Shanghai Girls and talked about on a Word By Word show broadcast in June, 2009. Listeners let host Gil Mansergh know they were unable to find a podcast of that show, so he takes care of that problem by doing this rebroadcast. In that show, Lisa See shared stories of her Chinese ancestors, and introduced us to Shanghai Girls Pearl and May, sisters who escaped from the war-torn China on the 1930’s to Angel Island in the San Francisco Bay and on to Los Angeles where they got involved in the movie business. Listeners will be glad to hear that in Lisa See’s novel Pearls of Joy they can read about Pearl’s 19-year-old daughter Joy, who makes the trip the other way—back to a China trapped in the disastrous consequences of Mao’s cultural revolution.

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

This month’s guests on the Word By Word: Conversations With Writers are from the upcoming “Pen to Published—Redwood Writers Conference," which will be held at the Santa Rosa Flamingo Hotel on Saturday, April 23, 2016. The conference co-chairs William Haigwood and Robbi Sommers Bryant join host Gil Mansergh, along with the poet/writer Fran Claggett who will present “Lifelines: A Memoir Writing Workshop at the conference.

Today’s Word By Word broadcast begins with an Irish toast befitting this weekend’s weather: May the sun shine warm upon your face and the rains fall soft upon your fields. Today’s guests represent the Ninth Annual Sebastopol Documentary Film Festival (SDFF) which opens on St. Patrick’s Day, Thursday Evening, March 17th and runs through Sunday afternoon, March 20th at the Sebastopol Center for the Arts. Sharing the microphones with Gil are the Program Director and documentary filmmaker, Randy Hall. We also have a phone conversations with magician and Filmmaker Ben Proudfoot whose feature film Rwanda & Juliet tells the unlikely story of a well-intentioned man’s attempts to stage a production of Romeo & Juliet in Rwanda as a means of reconciliation. Several of Ben’s short films (Rust, Stone, Ladybug, The Ox) are presented from his “Life’s Work” made-for-streaming docs. Gil is hosting the Thursday night festival opener, Kent Jones’ exceptional documentary Hitchcock/Trudeau, and he invites listeners to join him.

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

This month’s Word By Word: Conversations With Writers was prompted by Diane Peterson’s recent Press Democrat article about the collaboration between Redwood Writers and Copperfield’s Bookstores. Entitled the “Redwood Author Spotlight,” six local novelists will conduct readings and discussions about their novels on the last Thursday evenings from January through June at the Copperfield’s Montgomery Village location. In this show, host Gil Mansergh welcomes the first three novelists and their books: Marian Lindner, with San Francisco Marilyn Campbell, with Trains to Concordia Linda Loveland Reid, with Something in Stone

With a loud, "Ho, Ho, Ho!" host Gil Mansergh, welcomes listeners to our 2015 holiday gift books edition of Word By Word: Conversations With Writers. He asks: "What do bird portraits, The Golden Gate Bridge, dining in the Yucatan, an illustrated Harry Potter book, carved Viking ivory chessman and a roadtrip with Gloria Steinem that lasts 81 years have in common?" These fascinating topics are all included among the gift book suggestions shared by Sheryl Cotleur and Michelle Bellah—the book buyers for the Copperfield’s Bookstores. As Sheryl and Bellah told Gil: "We love doing this show. It's like we're chatting about our favorite books in front of a cozy fireplace."

Award-winning novelist Elizabeth George is creator of the bestselling Inspector Lynley mysteries. George introduces listeners to A Banquet of Consequences, the19th book in the series. Since many readers first encountered Scotland Yard’s dapper Detective Inspector Thomas Lynley and his down-to-earth partner, Sergeant Barbara Havers on PBS’ British produced Masterpiece Mystery TV shows on KRCB Channel 22, listeners may be surprised to learn that Elizabeth George is American and a former Orange County "Teacher of the Year" for her work as a high school English teacher. She now lives on picturesque Whidbey Island in Washington state. In 1988, Elizabeth’s first mystery novel, A Great Deliverance won an Edgar and Agatha Award as well as France’s Le Garnde Prix de Literature Policier. Elizabeth also has a 4-book, YA paranormal/mystery/romance series that takes place (not surprisngly) on Whidbey Island. The first of these, The Edge of Nowhere introduces us to the resilient young Becca King. Host: Gil Mansergh.

You might remember the jump-rope rhyme “Rich man, poor man beggar man thief, doctor lawyer, indian chief” and regular listeners to Word By Word: Conversations With Writers know that host Gil Mansergh has interviewed writers who who are rich and poor, who beg and steal, heal people, defend people and serve as Chairman of a local Native American tribe. But, Gil has never had a celebrity chef as his guest… Until today. The conversation is with Cat Cora the first (and only) female Iron Chef, America and author of her very frank autobiography Cooking As Fast As I Can: A Chef’s Story of Family, Food and Forgiveness. Cat and Gil discuss an amazingly varied array of topics centered around the world famous chef's life including what the world was like growing up in the south in the 70's and 80's, kissing a girl (and liking it), coping with sexual urges by keeping "overly busy," "coming out" to you mom and dad, reconnecting with your birth mother, having Julia Child change your life at a book signing, discovering your career path on a Greek island, battling inner demons, what the constant challenge of being the first female Iron Chef.

Gil Mansergh welcomes Christina Goulart, Susan E. Gunter, and Susanna Solomon, three of the talented writers featured in a special 10th anniversary writers anthology collected, edited and published by Redwood Writers. With over 150 members, our local Redwood Writers branch is the largest and arguably the most active of the 21 branches in the California Writers Club. The anthology project began as a labor of love by editors Catherine Farrell, Karen Batchelor and Linda C. McCabe when they found an on-demand publishing house and collected and edited the 2005 anthology entitled Vintage Voices: A Sonoma County Writers Club Harvest. Today’s show begins with readings from the new, 10th Anniversary Edition entitled Journeys: On the Road and Off the Map edited by Amber Lee Starfire, Helen Sedgwick, Kate Farrell, and Michelle Wing.

This month, it's a news-worthy “What Are They Up To Now?” version of Word By Word, Conversations With Writers, as host Gil Mansergh reprises conversations with guests who are in the news. Late breaking new stories includes the just-released movie starring Billy Cruddup playing Stanford psychologist emeritus Philip Zimbardo, and new books and honors for Word By Word guests Adam Johnson, Steve Hockensmith, Amanda McTigue, Matthew Pearl, Joan Price and YiYun Li.

Listeners to Word By Word: Conversations With Writers host Gil Mansergh wants listeners to know they have a great opportunity to hear two conversations with award-winning advocates for radical forms of entrepreneurism on July's show. “Find your voice,” says KIVA co-founder Jessica Jackley. “This means expressing something about you and what you believe. It is the first step toward doing valuable action in the world.” While her micro-lending organization continues to change the face of poverty across the globe, this social entrepreneur with a Stanford MBA has also started ProFounder to help U.S. startups through crowd funding, and is a venture partner at the Collaborative Fund. Her new book is Clay Water, Brick: Finding Inspiration From Entrepreneurs Who Do the Most With the Least. “Listen carefully and learn from what your customers tell you,” says Barefoot Wines co-founders Michael Houlihan and Bonnie Harvey when they talk with many of the same audiences as Jessica Jackley to share the practical yet universal lessons they learned while developing America’s best-selling wine brand.Their books are The Barefoot Spirit: How Hardship, Hustle and Heart Built America’s #1 Wine Brand, and The Entreprenurial Culture: 23 Ways to Engage and Empower You People.

Gil Mansergh hosts a special Grateful Dead version of Word By Word Conversations With Writers on North Bay Public Media KRCB-FM. His guest is librarian and cultural historian David Dodd, author of a massive book with the rather long title: The Complete Annotated Grateful Dead Lyrics: The Collected Lyrics of Robert Hunter and John Barlow, Lyrics to All Original Songs With Selected Traditional and Cover Songs. In addition to being a Dead Head, David is also the Collections Manager for the Sonoma County Library System and is especially interested in identifying and collecting the work of Sonoma County writers, musicians and visual artists. The conversation is enhanced with snippets of music from some of David's favorite songs and tales of the Dead to which "only David Dodd has approved access."

This month's Word By Word:Conversations With Writers is one of the show's signature round-table discussions where four guests share microphones, and host Gil Mansergh tries to make sure listeners know whose voice is filling the airwaves. This conversation is even more fun than usual, because the room is populated by four of the six prize-winning playwrights from the 6th Street Theater’s and Redwood Writers New Voices on the Vine Wine Country Play Festival. Which runs from May 21st to 31st at the 6th Street Playhouse. Their names and plays are: Malaaana Eljunmaily (The Call) Scott Lummer (Love Her Madly) Lynn Millar (Crossed Connections) And a certain radio show host named Gil Mansergh (Felix the Cat and the Real Estate Guy) Joining them is Lenni Dean the Festival Director and 6th Street Playhouse Education Coordinator.

Internationally beloved bestselling author Alexander McCall Smith calls his hour-long chat with Word By Word host Gil Mansergh "something quite extraordinary...a real conversation." The creator of The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency has over 100 titles in print. A fabled raconteur, McCall-Smith shares anecdotes and advice for other writers while reading selected passages from his latest challenge - the updating of a classic Jane Austen novel in Emma: A Modern Retelling.

This month, Word By Word host Gil Mansergh has a sparkling conversation with Laurie R. King, the winner of the John Creasy Memorial Award for The Beekeeper’s Apprentice - the first of a dozen historical mysteries featuring Mary Russell and her mentor (and eventual husband) Sherlock Holmes. Laurie R. King was inducted into the prestigious Sherlock Holmes literary society, "The Baker Street Irregulars" in 2010. Her newest mystery novel, Dreaming Spies, debuted this week on The New York Times bestseller list.

Since Valentine’s Day is fast approaching, KRCB-FM's Word By Word: Conversations With Writers host Gil Mansergh invited the North Bay thearapist and bestselling author Susan Pease Gadoua and award-winning journalist Vicki Larson to help us reconsider our thoughts about love and marriage with their groundbreaking book, The New I Do: Reshaping Marriage for Skeptics, Realists and Rebels.

January's Word By Word: Conversation With Writers broadcast is a special tie-in with the Martin Luther King holiday. Host Gil Mansergh welcomes Birmingham, Alabama-born writer Waights Taylor Jr. and his award-winning historical memoir, Our Southern Home: Scottsboro to Montgomery to Birmingham--The Transformation of the South in the Twentieth Century. Waight's newest book is the first of a mystery series set in the segregated South in the middle of the Twentieth Century. Featuring the “White” homicide detective Joe McGrath and the “Black” private eye, Sam Rucker, it is called Kiss of Salvation.

Continuing an annual tradition, the 2014 holiday gift books edition of Word By Word: Conversations With Writers on North Bay Public Media, KRCB-FM. host Gil Mansergh welcomes back the book buyers from the local Copperfield’s Bookstores, Sheryl Cotleur and Michelle Bellah with their always challenging task of choosing which books to talk about when they only have an hour to do it. We are doubly pleased this year, because Sheryl served as one of the judges for the 2014 National Book Award for Fiction, and she gives us an insider’s peek at that process and the panel’s final selection, Philip Klay’s novel Redeployment. In addition to fiction, we hear selective ideas for exceptional coffee-table books, nonfiction books, biographies, resource books, cookbooks, and how-to-do-it books, as well as books for young adults and children. It’s a lot of ground to cover, but Bellah (as she likes to be called), Gil and Sheryl approach the task with joy and happiness.

Word By Word Host Gil Mansergh has a conversation with the celebrated writer, teacher, and Tiny Lights Journal editor and publisher, Susan Bono as she shares some of her personal narratives from her new book , What Have We Here: Essays about Keeping House and Finding Home.