An Interview with John R. Rickford

Posted on June 13, 2022 by Ed Battistella
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photo credit: Linda Cicero

John R. Rickford is the J.E. Wallace Sterling Professor of Linguistics and the Humanities (emeritus) at Stanford University, where he has been since 1980. He won a Dean’s Award for distinguished teaching in 1984 and a Bing Fellowship for excellence in teaching in 1992. He has a BA from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania.

John R. Rickford is a Past President of the Linguistic Society of America. In 2017 he was elected to membership in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and in 2021, he was inducted into the National Academy of Sciences.

He is the author or editor of many books, including Spoken Soul: The Story of Black English (co-authored, with Russell John Rickford and winner of an American Book Award). In 2022, Routledge published his memoir titled Speaking My Soul: Race, Life and Language,  available from Routledge and from Amazon.

Ed Battistella: Congratulations on writing Speaking My Soul: Race, Life and Language. It’s a terrific memoir of your life and career from British Guyana to the United States of the 1960s. When did you decide that it was time to document your journey in a memoir?

John R. Rickford: As I note in the Prologue, “the Gift of Stroke,” I decided to write my memoir ten days after retiring on August 31, 1999, when I suffered a stroke, which made me painfully aware of my mortality. While still in the San Jose Rehabilitation Center, I began going to Rachael Herron’s Stanford Continuing Studies course on memoir writing. At first my goal was just to write something for my family and friends, but then the project grew bigger, especially after Routledge expressed interest. Frankly, I never thought I would live to see the memoir published! But luckily, and thanks to some of the best medical care in the world, I did!

EB: You were the first person ever to get an undergraduate degree in Sociolinguistics, in 1971, and you mention falling in love with black talk and linguistics as an undergraduate. How did that love affair come about?

JRR: Well I started my undergrad studies as a Literature major, but largely as a result of the influence of my UCSC Anthropology professor and mentor, Roger Keesing, I decided to switch to an individually designed major in Sociolinguistics. UC Santa Cruz was a very innovative campus, and Sociolinguistics was a brand new field at the time (late 1960s), with apparently unlimited scope for new theoretical and applied research. An article by British linguist R. B. LePage also influenced me, as did courses by professors Charles Ferguson, Joshua Fishman and Richard Tucker among others, at Stanford in the summer of 1970.

My love of black talk also began as an undergraduate, especially through the influence of my other major UCSC mentor, African American Sociology professor J. Herman Blake. It was through his Extra-Mural program that I spent a quarter living and working among the Gullah speakers on Daufuskie Island. The similarities between their Gullah variety of Black Talk and my native Guyanese Creole were amazing. I discuss the powerful Gullah praying of Deacon Plummy Simmons in chap. 11 of my memoir “How I fell in love with Linguistics and Black Talk” and note how it was bolstered by working with Bill Labov at the University of Pennsylvania, when I went there as a graduate student.

EB: Your memoir provides insights into race in Guyana and the United States and the ways that your perceptions changed when you came to US in 1968. Could you share some of that experience with our readers?

JRR: The switch from Literature to Linguistics was, as I note, one of two major transformations that accompanied my coming to the US. The other was identifying as Black in keeping with the “one drop” tradition of the US (see Yada Blay’s revealing 2021 One Drop book), rather than the more variegated system of racial classification in Guyana according to which I was mixed-race, colored, or mulatto. While my DNA revealed that my ancestry was 48% to 50% European (similar to that of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, of “Finding Your Roots” fame), it also revealed that my ancestry is 34% African, 13% East Indian, and 3% Amerindian. From the time I arrived at Santa Cruz, Black students began calling me “brother” and I have embraced my Black identity and my status as a “person of color” ever since.

EB: You mention several historic moments in African American history and your involvement and reactions, like leading the UC-Santa Cruz Black Students Association, hosting Rosa Parks at Stanford and South African poet Dennis Brutus at Stanford, and the work that you and Sharese King did on behalf of Rachel Jeantel. Do you think that academics have a special role and responsibility to promote justice and equality?

JRR: Yes, particularly when the issues involve language, as they so often do when it comes to increasing educational opportunity or overcoming criminal injustice, especially for Black people in the US. In the words of Cornel West, which I cite in the Epilogue, “Justice is what love looks like in public, just like tenderness is what love looks like in private.” As I note in chapter 11, “black people face discrimination in almost every area of life—when encountering police and courts, applying for jobs and apartments, seeking health care or education and more. In almost every case, the discrimination is worse when those black people speak Black Talk.” It’s not enough to love Black Talk—we need to use our special knowledge of Black Talk to make a positive difference in the world.

EB: I enjoyed all the photos your shared and especially your poetry. I had not known you were a poet. Have you written poetry all your life? Do you have a favorite poem?

JRR: Yes, at least since high school, when John Agard (who wrote the Foreword to my book, incidentally), Brian Chan, myself and several others published our poems in Expression magazine. My favorite poem is “Epitaph” by Jamaican Dennis Scott, a class-mate of my wife Angela when she a student at the University of the West Indies, Mona, from 1968 to 1971. This relatively unknown and uncelebrated poem is extremely complex and powerful, much of its power deriving from the double meaning and unusual use of its words (clement, hanged vs hung, black apostrophe, and so on):

“Epitaph” by Dennis Scott 

They hanged him on a clement morning, swung
between the falling sunlight and the women’s
breathing, like a black apostrophe to pain.
All morning while the children hushed
their hopscotch joy and the cane kept growing
he hung there sweet and low.

At least that’s how
they tell it. It was long ago
and what can we recall of a dead slave or two
except that when we punctuate our island tale
they swing like sighs across the brutal
sentences, and anger pauses
till they pass away.

EB: I was impressed with the honesty and detail of your memoir. What was the writing process like for you? Writing your life must be different than writing an academic work.

JRR: It WAS very different from writing an academic work, but also more personal and revealing. I was learning about myself and my passions and fears as I wrote, and in many ways the process, once started, is continuing.

EB: Thanks for talking with us. I hope every linguist reads your memoir.

JRR: Thank you, Ed. I hope many do!

 

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An Interview with Diana Coogle

Posted on March 22, 2022 by Ed Battistella
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Diana Coogle grew up in Georgia and attended Vanderbilt University (graduating Phi Beta Kappa and fifth in her class) later earning an MA in English at Cambridge University and a Ph.D. in English from the University of Oregon. A former Marshall Scholar and Woodrow Wilson Teaching Fellow, she has taught at Gothenburg University in Sweden, the University of Oregon, and Rogue Community College.

Her books include Wisdom of the Heart, with artist Barbara Kostal, Fire from the Dragon’s Tongue (an Oregon Book Award finalist), Living with All My Senses: 25 Years of Life on the Mountain, An Explosion of Stars; and Favorite Hikes of the Applegate: A Trail Guide with Stories and Histories, with Janeen Sathre. Her most recent book is From Friend to Wife to Widow—Six Brief Years published in 2020.

Diana Coogle has made her home in the mountains above the Applegate for almost 50 years.

Maureen Flanagan Battistella: You are one of the most prolific writers I know, Diana Coogle. You’ve published books of poetry, you blog regularly, you write for Jefferson Public Radio and more. You live a life of thought, and experience so many senses. Can you describe what writing does for you, why the action of writing is important to you?

Diana Coogle: Some writers get excited by the blank page with all its promises, the emptiness that they will fill in whatever way their creative imaginations want. I am not one of those. I dread the blank page, its emptiness a gaping hole that it is my responsibility to fill with beauty or wit or, worse, with good, deep thinking. But I can’t get to my favorite part of writing, the part that flies and soars and does loop-de-loops with the verbal imagination, until I struggle some thoughts onto the page. So writing does two things for me: It forces me to think about things, and then it allows me to play with language as I work to express those thoughts. Writing is sculptor’s work: sculpting and chipping away with a chisel to make a work of art. I undergo an experience—a particularly beautiful ski through the woods, a bear cub on a trail, a once-only slant of the sun making rubies in the mud—and I begin to explore how best—most beautifully, most truthfully—I can express that experience. And when it’s done, what does the writing do for me? It makes my heart sing.

MFB: Nature is one of your most regular themes. Why is that?

DC: Because nature is deeply meaningful to me. Because we are a species of nature; we are not separate from nature; all the beings of nature are our kin or our environment. Because we need to care for and about nature, or else we are doomed. Because I am a proselytizer and desperately want to make the world pay attention to nature. Because I prefer to write about that which I love and I don’t like writing about people I know because I don’t like to describe character (that’s why I’m not a novelist). Because I love descriptive writing and nature creates opportunity after opportunity to describe beauty. Because I live so deeply in nature and what is most immediate to me is what I like most to write about.

MFB: Your latest work is a book of poetry, From Friend to Wife to Widow: Six Years Brief Years. It is a very personal work, and the cover photo speaks to your writing. Can you tell me how these poems came to you, and how they might help others?

DC: Ah, these poems. These heartfelt poems. One answer to the question of how these poems came to me is to say that many of them, the early ones, before Mike became sick, were written during my 75th year, when I was doing 75 things of 75 repetitions each, and one of those things was to write 75 poems of 75 words each. Many of the others were written during April, 2020, when I was writing a poem a day in recognition of National Poetry Month. But that’s only the structural answer. These poems came to me because, as with poems about nature, I was writing about what was closest to me. It was so unfair to lose Mike after such a short time together. Frustration, love, grief, anger—to turn it into poetry was to pry its claws out of my guts. In putting the poems into a book I was hoping to find common ground with others who suffered similar grief and such loss, especially during the pandemic. Maybe my turning frustration, love, grief, and anger into the beauty of language could be paralleled by the reader who could transfer that beauty of language to his or her own experience.

MFB: Do you ever feel that you’ve written enough? When do you know when to stop working on a specific project?

DC: Sometimes, yes, I feel like I have said all that I have to say. How many times, in how many different ways, can I say, “The birdsong is so beautiful this spring” and “There is nothing more beautiful than a fresh snowfall”? But it won’t stop. There’s always another snowfall that demands expression, another symbol to make out of birdsong. Another pattern of sound to explore, another thought that wants out. As for the individual poem or essay, because the revision process is my favorite part of writing, when I can get out my chisel and mold the sculpture into being, I will work on it and work on it and work on it, changing a word here, a word there, deleting a phrase, replacing it elsewhere, ruthlessly honing the piece till I can say, “Okay. This is it: what I want to say and how I want to say it.” I have, occasionally, in the past, worked a piece to death, though—taken all the air out of it as I try to condense the writing, spoiled the spontaneity, eliminated the fun bits. That doesn’t happen much anymore, though. I have learned to discipline my pen.

MFB: Your authentic, true voice resonates in your writing. Have you ever written from a point of view that is not your own? For example, dialogue that assumes the persona and point of view of another person.

DC: Well, yes, I have, though it’s true that I don’t do that very often. Once it was because that was the directive of the prompt: to write in another person’s point of view, so I wrote a sympathetic poem in the voice of my mother, expressing her unhappiness with and struggle to understand my hippy lifestyle (back then). My blog post for April Fool’s Day, 2021, was a poem about foolish money, in which I listed some ways to lose money foolishly, including a fictional account of a girl whose boyfriend left her in Paris. A friend’s sympathetic comment was that he didn’t know that had happened to me. Well, of course, it didn’t, but everything else in the poem did, so I can’t blame him for thinking it did. I think I speak best in my own voice. The danger, of course, is solipsism.

MFB: Do you have a favorite medium or channel for your writing? Have you experimented with other media?

DC: Radio, because it includes the voice, is actually my favorite medium, but I don’t have access to it anymore. I would like to do a podcast, but when I tried, I got stuck in the technological tangle. I like performance and spent about a decade of my career writing plays, mostly for children, but a good handful for adults, too. All were produced; theater is a wonderful magic. I did some acting during that time, too. I even enjoyed academic writing while I was getting my Ph.D. (2006-2012); I liked taking the creative aspect of writing to scholarship. The personal essay was my medium for decades; I have only recently turned to poetry. When I started, I suddenly felt like I didn’t even know what a poem was. I have enjoyed the explorative aspect to writing poetry and now write poems and essays at about equal frequency. And beyond writing? I played classical guitar for a number of years but gave it up when I went to graduate school. I do a lot of crafts (card-making, sewing, knitting), but performance is really the medium I enjoy most, second to writing. Presently, I have been memorizing poetry and presenting public recitations. Fun!

MFB: What’s next?

DC: Next? Is there no rest for the weary?

I have toyed around with the idea of a book of nature poems. And I wait for the next assignment for the Marshall Scholars’ Newsletter, my next column for the Jefferson Almanac, the next prompt for a poem,…. What’s next, at this moment, is what’s most immediately in front of me. That’ll do for the present.

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An Interview with Lynn Ransford

Posted on March 7, 2022 by Ed Battistella
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Lynn Ransford grew up on a chicken farm in the San Fernando Valley, where she was surrounded by a variety of animals. A little like Beverly Cleary’s Ramona, or L.M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables, Lynn often got into small bits of trouble. Years later she married Grandpa Jack, a mountaineer, who introduced her to animals in the wild and some wild adventures. Grandpa adds, “She still gets herself into a little trouble occasionally.”

Lynn Ransford has a Master’s degree in Education, three lifetime credentials and is an Early Childhood Specialist. She recently earned her Naturalist Certificate from Siskiyou Field Institute in Selma. She writes the scripts for her docent work at the Historic Beekman House in Jacksonville, Oregon, and for Living History programs offered at historic cemeteries in both Ashland and Jacksonville. Lynn says, “dressing up” in period costumes for the roles of Oregon pioneers is “a lot of fun.”

She also enjoys hiking, camping, quilting.

Maureen Flanagan Battistella interview Lynn Ransford about her book Grandma, Tell Me a Story… About Bears.

For more information “…About Bear“ stories, please go to luckyvalleypress.com/bears.

Maureen Flanagan Battistella: You got started telling stories to your children and grandchildren, so you must have a lot of experience telling stories. What’s your storytelling background?

Lynn Ransford: Thank you for the opportunity to tell a story about my story-telling! Storytelling has been part of my background for as long as I can remember. All the way back to my daddy: “I’ll tell you a story about Johnny Manory; now my story’s begun. I’ll tell you another about Johnny’s brother. Now my story is done.” My siblings and I would wail and scream, “No, Daddy! A real story! Tell us a real story!” And he’d repeat “Johnny Manory…” until we all laughing hysterically. Storytelling is an integral part of our family tradition to this day. Three generations of us still enjoy sitting around the dinner table, recalling fine old memories, entertaining one another with tales of past (and sometimes current) events.

My professional storytelling background began when I was a teenager and my mother employed me in her pre-school, with the instructions: “Never turn your back, remove ’no’ from your vocabulary, plan an activity for every 5 minutes, and be ready to tell them a story.” One of my responsibilities was to transport preschoolers home from school and I told stories to them the whole way. Earning my way through college and then after graduation, I continued storytelling to preschoolers. Later, throughout my 50 years of teaching all grade levels, reading, writing, and telling stories was an everyday occurrence. As you know, I continue telling stories at Beekman House in Jacksonville, at the Historic Jacksonville Cemetery, and at the Genealogy Library.

MFB: How have your stories influenced and affected your children and grandchildren?

LR: Of course, I continued to read to and tell stories to my own children, who did (and still do!) the same with their children. Those grandchildren are the main reason that I decided to publish some of our favorite family stories. Especially on our long trips to and from camping adventures, there was always a request from the back seat, “Grandma, Tell Me A Story.” Stories about our adventures with bears were ones they never tired of hearing, over and over. You ask how storytelling affected them: our two oldest granddaughters are professional writers; all are storytellers themselves.

MFB: What are you hoping to convey, to teach with your “Grandma …Tell Me a Story” series?

LR: What I hoped to accomplish with writing “…Bear Stories” was to record for them some of our family history. It was my granddaughters who said, “Grandma, you need to write down all the stories so we’ll always have them…” I hope, hidden in the stories, are lessons on how to conduct yourself responsibly in the wild, respect and care for animals and our environment, and also family values: appreciation and care for one another, enjoyment of life, curiosity, adventure, humor… In this way, “…Bear Stories” is like memoir writing — giving something of myself, my love, to my children and grandchildren.

MFB: Is “About Bears” a cautionary tale?

LR: I don’t consider “…Bears” to be a cautionary tale though there are cautions to be taken in the wild, of course, and I do address those, including how to conduct yourself in bear territory. But I certainly don’t want readers to be cautioned to avoid the wilderness; on the contrary. I hope readers will be amused by the stories and eager for their own adventures!

MFB: What has been your most exciting bear experience? Your most dangerous?

LR: The most dangerous bear encounters are detailed in the book, namely in the last chapter when Grandpa Jack was charged by three grizzlies. That incident and others during some of our hikes in Alaska when we came face-to-face with grizzly bears, were definitely scary. Any time you spot a bear, it’s exciting!

MFB: How was storytelling transformed from an oral tradition into a printed book? And why? What was your process?

LR: Transforming storytelling into a book is easy. Once you’ve told stories over and over, you have them down. They are in your head, along with the vivid pictures and clear memories. It’s just the task of choosing the right words to put on paper, not being too repetitive or too verbose, trying to keep up interest and suspense…checking for punctuation and syntax… I was taught that “keeping your audience in mind” is important. I think of those eager faces in the back seat of the car, and I want to keep them nodding, attentive, grinning, and wishing for more.

MFB: What’s your favorite story and why?

LR: My favorite bear story is probably the first in the book — my first encounter with a bear outside the zoo. It’s my favorite because the three other characters in the story (my parents and my brother) are now dead. Retelling that story keeps them alive for me. I can then freshly recall everything: their voices, the affection and warmth we shared, and the laughter.

MFB: About Bears is only the first story you’ve published. Will there be others? Will Grandpa tell any stories?

LR: “…Bears” is not the only book I have published. Years ago, I wrote “Creepy Crawlies for Curious Kids,” “Happy, Healthy Bodies,” and “ABC Crafts and Cooking.” Those were books for teachers, with lessons and hands-on activities for preschool through 2nd grade students. I am currently working on the second in a series of “Grandma, Tell Me A Story…” books. This one is “…About Critters.” Again, it is inspired by our grandchildren’s frequent requests…this time for snake stories, stink bugs and crickets, rats and moles, tarantulas… These are all true stories, most of them quite funny.

MFB: Where can we pick up a copy of About Bears and your next works?

LR: “Grandma, Tell Me A Story…About Bears” can be found at books stores in Ashland (Bloomsbury’s, Tree House, Northwest Nature Store, The Book Exchange, Hermeticus Books, Paddington Station’s Oregon Store) and in Jacksonville at Art Presence Gallery and Rebel Heart Books. It can also be ordered online through Amazon or Barnes and Noble.

 

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An Interview with Rick Bleiweiss, Author of Pignon Scorbion & the Barbershop Detectives

Posted on January 9, 2022 by Ed Battistella
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Rick Bleiweiss began his career in the music industry as a recording artist, Grammy-nominated producer, recorded songwriter and record label senior executive. He worked with such music industry legends as Clive Davis, Robert Stigwood, Pink, Alicia Keys, Kiss, Donna Summer, U2, The Village People, Young MC, Tone Loc, The BeeGees, Run-DMC, Wu Tang Clan, John Mellencamp, Whitney Houston and scores of other superstars. He was named Music Executive of the Year by the Coalition of Independent Music Stores and at times ran his own record labels.

He has written numerous local and national newspaper and magazine columns and articles (including for the Ashland Sneak Preview), chapters in anthologies and books about music, and an award-winning short political humor book.

Bleiweiss is the Head of New Business Development at Blackstone Publishing & Audio, where he has worked since 2006. For Blackstone he secured works by James Clavell, Leon Uris, Catherine Coulter, Gregory McDonald, PC & Kristin Cast, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Pablo Neruda, Andrews & Wilson, Rex Pickett, HP Lovecraft and scores of other well-known and debut authors. He served on the boards of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival for eight years and the Ashland Independent Film Festival for two years and on SOU’s President’s Advisory Group for ten years.

He lives in Ashland with his wife, Deborah Morgan, and a Havanese named Gracie.

Ed Battistella: I really enjoyed Pignon Scorbion & the Barbershop Detectives. What should readers know about the book? Who is Pignon Scorbion?

Rick Bleiweiss: The book is very much in the vein of Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes. It takes place in England in 1910, when the eccentric Scorbion becomes the new Chief Police Inspector for the countryside town of Haxford. Scorbion is very much cut out of the mold of Poirot and Holmes, but he solves his cases in a very unique environment and manner – he holds his interrogations in Haxford’s barbershop where he is assisted by a colorful group of amateur sleuths including the three barbers, the shoeshine man, a young reporter, and a beautiful and brilliant female bookshop owner. The book is a combination of historical fiction, a good old-fashioned whodunit and a cozy mystery.

Scorbion is a complex character whose heritage is Egyptian and Haitian (while he was born in Paris and raised in England). He is an immaculate dresser whose distinctive custom-made clothes are not worn by any others of the time period, he holds opinions and attitudes advanced for the era, and he has foibles – of which he is self-aware.

Pignon Scorbion & the Barbershop Detectives publishes on February 8, 2022 and is available for preorder now as a hardcover, eBook or audiobook most everywhere (on-line and at brick and mortar locations), including Bloomsbury Books in Ashland.

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EB: Scorbion is from the same time period as Sherlock Holmes and I think you even mention that Dr. Watson was a friend of his. Was Holmes an inspiration?

RB: I have been an avid reader and fan of both Holmes and Poirot my whole life and wanted to recreate the style of writing that worked so successfully for those characters. In the numerous endorsements and reviews that the advance copies of Scorbion have received, many have mentioned the book as being similar to Poirot and Holmes books, but unique in its own right. And I have set it up so that the reality that Scorbion is in (the ‘universe’ of the book) is one in which Holmes, Poirot and Watson exist as well. In the book Scorbion does talk about having met Watson and them befriending each other, and also about Scorbion’s planning to travel to meet Poirot at some time.

EB: When you think of Scorbion, whose face do you see? Who would play him in a movie?

RB: If this was 60 years ago, I would have said Anthony Quinn, but I’m withholding comment about this in the present as we are approaching actors to play him in a TV series or film, and I’d rather wait until we see who is most interested before I fully comment on that.

EB: What’s the fascination of detective – or detecting – fiction in your opinion?

RB: To me, people like detective fiction because it challenges them as they try to figure out who did it before the detective does, and also because, in most cases, the characters in a mystery book are interesting and people want to know what happens to them. In the case of my book, I have written Scorbion and the supporting characters as colorful individuals who, hopefully, become a reader’s friends during the course of the book. Also, as opposed to hard-core bloody thrillers, Scorbion’s kind of mystery is lighter fare that won’t make you cringe. Hopefully it will make people smile. In fact, Nancy Pickard, one of mystery writing’s most decorated authors, talks about how much she laughed out loud while reading the book. To be clear though, the book is not a comedy, it’s a full-on mystery with humorous elements.

I find it gratifying that the book has appealed to authors who write in many different genres, all of whom have endorsed it, including Rex Pickett (Sideways), Heather Graham (paranormal, suspense, romance), Andrews & Wilson (military fiction), Shelley Shepherd Gray (romance), Natasha Boyd and Pamela Binnings Ewen (historical fiction), Robert Arellano, Dick Lochte, Nancy Pickard, Amanda Flower and Reed Farrel Coleman (mystery), James Wade (literary fiction), Eric Maikranz (science fiction). And you as well. People just plain like a fun whodunit with interesting cases and good characters.

EB: Scorbion has a whole ensemble of helpers—the Barbershop detectives—what’s their function in the story?

RB: They serve as his foils and assistants and lend color, humor and interest to the book. They help him solve cases, and together become an ensemble that hopefully readers enjoy meeting and knowing. The female bookshop owner serves in that role as well, but also becomes a love interest for Scorbion. She is beautiful and brilliant – a match for Scorbion – and provides a voice for the modern woman of 1910 as she engages in the women’s suffragette movement and other causes. The young reporter serves as Scorbion’s chronicler, somewhat in the way that Watson was for Homes, but also contributes a different perspective at times for Scorbion to consider.

EB: The story and the roles of all the characters was really complex, so there was a lot for you to keep track of, it seemed. Any tricks you can share about the plotting a mystery?

RB: I didn’t start with an outline or anything like that. In fact, I started writing Scorbion as a short story in 2015. I, and the Ashland writing group that I was a member of at the time, so fell in love with him and his associates, that I wrote a second short story. Then, I just kept writing and writing until I expanded the stories to become this book.

You are totally correct, it is complex, and during the writing, I had to continually go back and remind myself what had happened previously in the story, so I made sure to have the entire book be consistent. I also regularly returned to the earlier parts of the book and added more red-herrings and plot points to make the story work to its fullest.

All that said, I didn’t know exactly where the book was going at any specific time. I am fortunate that the characters/story plays out in my head almost as though I am watching a movie of it and my job is to write down what I’m seeing in my mind and make sure I describe it in a way that the reader sees what I see and meets the people I meet.

Also, I did a ton of research for the book. I wanted to make sure it was accurate to the time period and the place (even though Haxford is a fictional town). Also, in the book I incorporated real-life people and events that were taking place in both England and in the world at that time so I had to make certain that everything felt and read like it could have really happened.

EB: I think you’ve mentioned that you have a series in mind? What’s Scorbion’s next case?

RB: I am pleased to say that at this time, the next Scorbion book is written, and those who have read the early, unfinished manuscript have said they love it– which of course, I’m very pleased about. The next cases Scorbion and his amateur sleuths take on are a hot-air balloonist who is shot and killed by an arrow while aloft alone in the balloon, a blacksmith who is murdered on his way home from birthing twin calves, a usurious money lender who suddenly dies in one of the barbers’ chairs and a visiting cousin of one of the characters who is attacked and left unconscious.

EB: What else are you working on?

RB: For Scorbion, video game developers FalconInteractive are creating a Scorbion “find the hidden objects” video game, centered around the book, its scenes and the characters. The game is free and already in app stores, but the last two of the six levels are locked, and the unlock code is in the book and audiobook.

I have also written, played and recorded a theme song for Scorbion called – what else(?) – Scorbion’s Theme. It will be in the audiobook and the video game, is in the video trailer for the book and will be used other places as well. In addition, Blackstone and I are making Scorbion t-shirts for both promotional purposes and to sell.

There’s a fabulous video trailer for the book on my YouTube channel (and Blackstone’s as well). I had no idea that the video maker was going to use me in it as the voiceover, but he did, and I think it came out really well.

I have just completed having my new website created – rickbleiweiss.com – and one of the unique features in it is a listing of most every independent bookstore in the U.S. so that people can find ones in their area easily. At present the list is over 1300 bookstores. I am a huge supporter of independent bookstores and libraries. Also on the website is a Cast of Characters for the Scorbion book.

I have created and am hosting a YouTube video show called Rick Bleiweiss’s Chapter & Verse. Each “episode” is a recorded video conversation between me and a best-selling author, literary agent, film/tv executive and others from the literary and entertainment industries talking about their careers, their books, their jobs and giving advice for aspiring authors and tips on writing. I am in the process of repurposing the audio tracks into a podcast. As of this writing the Chapter & Verse sessions I’ve done, or have on tap, include ones with authors Catherine Coulter, PC Cast, Rex Pickett, Heather Graham, Andrews & Wilson, Susan Purvis, and Howard Bloom, as well as literary agent Mark Gottlieb, tv/film executive Brendan Deneen, author/agent Richard Curtis, and agents Nicole Resciniti & Julie Gwinn. Many more to come. I think of it as the Inside the Actor’s Studio for authors and writing.

I have a story in a short story mystery anthology that’s being published in May called Hotel California. The book includes newly written stories by Heather Graham, Jennifer Dornbush, Don Bruns, Andrew Child (he has taken over the Jack Reacher books from his brother Lee and has contributed a new Reacher story for the book), John Gilstrap, Reed Farrel Coleman, and Amanda Flower – all best-selling and award-winning authors.

My story centers around a New York City hitman named Walker who escapes to Hawaii when he becomes the target of a hit himself, and his adventures on Maui as he plays a cat and mouse game of survival with the hitman sent to finish him off.

I also have a short story in what will be the follow-up anthology, Thriller.

For the past two years I’ve been writing, playing and recording pop/rock songs with singers Jake Howard and William Ray. And lastly, at least for now, I am finishing up a science fiction rock opera that I have co-written with an ex-bandmate of mine (from back when I was a working rock musician) called The Eye of Jupiter. It’s something like what Star Wars would be like if it was a musical combined with the Rocky Horror Picture Show. The demo music from the rock opera and my other recordings can be accessed through my second website rickbleiweissmisc.com

EB: Thanks for talking with us.

RB: Thank you for asking me to and thank you for the kind words you personally wrote about Scorbion.

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