2012writers STILL ALIVE: Jennifer Gracia and How I Made It: A Caregivers Guide to Coping With Cancer

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If you have a book on the market and would like to be considered for an interview, please email writersalive@yahoo.com with INTERVIEW in the subject line and include links to your book and biography in the body of the email. No attachments. Currently, I'm ONLY interested in the genres of crime fiction, romance or science fiction. NONE OF THESE PODCASTS MAY BE DOWNLOADED AND REPOSTED ON ANOTHER SITE WITHOUT WRITTEN PERMISSION BY JOHN H. BYK. ONLY LINKS ARE ALLOWED. OTHERWISE, I WILL TAKE APPROPRIATE COPYRIGHT VIOLATION PROCEDURES AND REPORT ABUSE.

"When my son heard our interview, he said it sounded just like a piece on NPR! You do an exemplary job, and I am pleased that you are being rewarded for your efforts. You are prepared, engaging, sympathetic, astute and you encourage your guests to be forthcoming with ease. From my experience - well over a dozen of these and counting - yours was the best!" --Pam Bitterman, Author of Muzungu

"I had fun chatting with John!" David Mack, NYT best selling author of the Star Trek Trilogy, Cold Equations.

"It's always so much fun talking to you!"--Rebecca Forster, USA Today best selling author of the Witness Series.

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Wednesday, April 11, 2012

Jennifer Gracia and How I Made It: A Caregivers Guide to Coping With Cancer

Born in Huntington, NY J. Gracia attended Wilberforce University in Wilberforce, OH. She was introduced to the arts as a means of self expression. In high school, she discovered her desire to write from a teacher who made the English language fun to learn. Initially, she wrote as a way to releases emotions and feelings. She soon discovered she had a passion for writing. While in college J. Gracia took creative writing classes to hone her craft. She wanted to expand her abilities of conveying messages in a way her audience would understand. After dealing first hand with caring for a cancer patient, She decided to write and publish her first book, How I Made It: A Caregivers Guide To Coping With Cancer. She speaks about her experience in dealing with family members who were diagnosed with cancer, and how she was able to maintain strength and be a source of comfort. More info at www.jgraciapublishing.com

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Collision Course With Collison

Friday Night Knife and Gun Club by Linda Collison
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Okay. It's a short story. Make sure you read the book description before you cough up a few pennies (99 cents) and complain that it's too short or has no definitive ending. That kind of review tells me more about the reader than the writer.

Now listen.

I've known nurses that have worked trauma. Some of them in one of the most meanest cities on the planet in the worst possible location--downtown Detroit. That's, incidentally, where I grew up and used to live and work for awhile until I ran for my life when I was strong enough to. I grew up on gallows humor. There's no way you can cope under those circumstances if you don't. And I recognize it immediately. Most people who live happy, sheltered lives can't. And maybe that's a good thing. Maybe not everyone needs to know how staring at death everyday in the face affects your psyche. Maybe not everyone wants to know. No. It's a fact that most people don't want to know. Better to tune into Dancing With the Stars than thinking about the barbarism that has permeated almost every facet of American life. Discretion is the better part of Valium.

In the Friday Night Knife and Gun Club, Collison gives a smack down account of one night on the graveyard shift in a hospital Intensive Care Unit from a nurse's point of view. It's brutal. It's honest. It's concise and it's told with someone who's got a hangman's noose draped over their neck. A shooter comes into the hospital and goes on a killing spree. It's something that's in the news regularly so it's not so far fetched. In fact, it's so supra-real that it makes you either wonder is this writer out of her mind or is she trying to drive home a point that our society, which has become desensitized to violence, can only recognize if it hits them hard in the face at point blank range? I'm certain it's the latter.

Here's the ugly beauty about gallows humor: It covers truth with absurd comedy. People don't like truth but they can tolerate comedy, even if the humor is horrific. Dark comedy. Black comedy. Call it whatever you want. I know it when I see it and I use it often in my own writing and most people just don't get it because they choose not to. It's safer to turn on the TV, microwave a frozen pizza and watch The Big Bang Theory-a popular sitcom that appeals because it relives the same, stupid theme of a bunch of nerds trying to get laid on every episode. That's not newsworthy. In fact, it's more ridiculous than Friday Night Knife and Gun Club. Also, there's no definitive ending to people wanting to get laid just as there's no definitive ending to the seemingly out of control, senseless violence that our society has begun spiraling downwards into.

Collison is going to be a guest on my podcast blog at http://2012writersalive.blogspot.com on April 1st. Pity the fool.

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The Perennial Philosophy by Aldous Huxley
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Like I have stated before elsewhere, I truly believe the Golden Age of American Literature has passed. Very few authors write anymore about universal, deeply philosophical themes that capture and reflect the essence of our culture and society and, if they do, publishers will most likely ignore them and hardly anyone will read them. Instead, we have a market flooded with superficial and redundant themes that offer artificial escapes from pressing societal problems. Think about it. Who was the last American to receive a Nobel Prize for literature?

Huxley, of course, was British and this book was written after WWII when the world was still trying to come to terms with the horrors that humanity recently perpetuated upon itself. Those horrors still exist, even more so in the 21st century, but very few people care to reflect upon them in depth but instead desperately seek diversion through technology, sex or drugs in order to anesthetize themselves which inevitably leads to desensitization and increased barbarism.

The Perennial Philosophy does not, per se, deal directly with the problem of how to deal with evil in the world. Huxley was far too intelligent to try that approach. Instead, by using a comprehensive collection of history's most morally uplifting texts, he breaks down into layman's terms one of the most enduring problems faced by mankind--how to achieve a proper spiritual balance with a supreme, cosmic consciousness that we assume to be inherently loving yet distant.

Brave New World was, of course, Huxley's most famous fictional account of a futuristic, dystopian society that we are now very much on the edge of entering if we haven't already. Now, after finally having read this book, I understand why BNW was such a watershed book in 20th century literature. The author who wrote it had an in depth grasp of human motivations, desires, vices and other personality aspects that lends authority to what would otherwise have been just another pulp fiction novel lost in the dustbins of literary history. Although, I don't agree with quite a few observations made by Huxley in this book, I have to admire with awe the spectacular writing and timeless inferences that need to be rediscovered, perhaps more than ever, in a world that today has gone completely gaga over fetishes, trends and memes that do very little to enrich an intelligent reader's level of consciousness and understanding.

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Goodreads Book Giveaway

Lumpen Rednecks

by Conrad Johnson

Wednesday, April 11, 2012

Jennifer Gracia and How I Made It: A Caregivers Guide to Coping With Cancer

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