Speaker 1 00:00:11 Hi, and welcome to Small Publishing in a Big Universe. I am your host La Jacob. Today will be a panel with Vanessa McLaren Ray authors Lisa Jacob, Michael Thal, and Karen Beatty discussing their fictionalized stories based in real life. Coming from our sponsors this month from Water Dragon Publishing, dragon Gem series. Then they fight you by Stephen D. Brewer and the in of seven Stars by Kevin Beckett.
Speaker 1 00:01:01 200 years after the climate wars left Earth uninhabitable Johari and his giant robot companion lead a squad of scouts on a quest for a new Goldilocks planet to settle the remains of the human race. When one of the scouts and his bot go down in a hostile wilderness, Johari's fight to save them reveals complex behavior in the dragon like dominant species. The scout team fragments as Johari strives to rescue his friends and discover the truth about the aliens. If he's right, mankind will lose its best hope for a home or sacrifice its own humanity. A wreck of Dragons by Elaine ISAC is available this month at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Cobo smash words and other online book sellers or support your local independent bookstores by ordering through bookshop.org or indiebound.org. For more information, visit their
[email protected].
Speaker 2 00:02:31 What? Welcome to Small Publishing Big Universe. Today we're focusing on stories from real life and we have Lisa Jacobs, your usual host for this podcast and we have Michael Thal and Karen Beatty. These three books all draw on real life experiences but they're also really different. We want to talk about how you decided to write these books as novels, not memoirs and how you went about it. So let's do a quick round robin and tell us the title of your book so we've got it connected to you. And then how much in your story is what you would call facts. Give us just like a little snippet about what the story is. I will let Lisa lead off.
Speaker 1 00:03:19 The name of my book is Carnival Farm. It's basically about a veterinarian who buys a petting zoo that follows a carnival around. And the factual part was that I was a member of a carnival for one summer. I joined up with them with my husband that which wasn't my husband at the time, he was just a boyfriend. And we traveled up and down New England seeing all the different areas of New England and there was a petting zoo with one carnival and it was a poor and sorry site and that's where I got the basis for this book.
Speaker 2 00:04:00 Excellent. Karen, you're up.
Speaker 3 00:04:03 My book is entitled Dodging Prayers and Bullets and it's about a young girl from the hills of eastern Kentucky who is transitioning from a culture of poverty and religious fundamentalism into the middle class. And along with that she reconciles with some of the people who despite their good intentions, cannot save her from trauma and abuse.
Speaker 2 00:04:35 Heavy man
Speaker 3 00:04:36 <laugh>. Some of it's heavy, some of it's not like most of our lives, it's as far as factual. I actually was born in this small town near the Hollow and Eastern Kentucky and the book essentially follows a timeline that is the same of as mine, which made it easier to react to events I had to research and make sure my memory on it was good. But the characters are fictional and the most of the events, the major events in the book are fictional as well.
Speaker 2 00:05:14 Excellent. Michael, your turn. My
Speaker 4 00:05:17 Novel is a lip reader and I got the idea to write it after my wife passed away seven years ago. She had cancer during our relationship of 16 years. She told me all these stories, horror stories about growing up in Iran. She was Jewish and deaf and in order to survive she had to learn to lipread. And let me tell you, she could lipread like a champ. I'm near deaf and when we met she knew little sign language but I took some classes and and between the two I taught her and that's how we communicated through asl. And she told me about some horror stories growing up in Iran, how she was bullied in elementary school, not only by kids but by teachers. And she met uh, and when she was in college she was bullied by professors. Eventually she became a uh, geologist and she stayed with that profession till she was 35 years old.
Speaker 4 00:06:12 And then because of the Iranian revolution and how poorly the Jews are treated in Iran, she fled with her family. She was the first one to come and then they followed her um, here in the United States. She changed careers and became a healthcare provider. And we met when she was 49 years old. So it takes us into how our relationship and how she suffered when she passed away, but how she always kept a such a positive. She never complained. She was always positive about everything. She was just a wonderful human being and I wanted to do something to help the mood process. So I wrote it by my Gila.
Speaker 2 00:06:51 It's a wonderful book Michael. Oh, thank you. I found it very moving. My next question, why did you fictionalize these experiences in each case? I can see a possibility that it could have been a straight memoir or biography or a non-fiction book on the topic life in the carnival or the history of America in the sixties and early seventies. So why make it a novel?
Speaker 1 00:07:20 Basically? Because being in a carnival can be really exciting and really fast paced and all kinds of stuff, but there's a lot of downtime, especially when it rains. So a couple of times we would have constantly working from eight in the morning until midnight and then other times there would be rain and we would lose the entire day. So I fictionalized it because if I did it straight up the way it was, first of all it wouldn't be as interesting. And second of all, I wouldn't be able to talk about animals cause animals are a lot of fun to talk about and to show and to use them as allegories of how people treat people. So that's why I fictionalized it. And also I was with my boyfriend at the time and then we got married and he passed away. And in a sense, like with Michael, it was to go through the morning process because the romance part of the story is how I met my husband. That's why I fictionalized it cuz it gave me enough distance that I could express it and not have to worry about crying over it.
Speaker 2 00:08:45 Very understandable. So Karen, why did your book become a piece of fiction with the made up characters rather than your own story?
Speaker 3 00:08:56 I write a lot and I've had published a lot of short stories. Some of them are creative non-fiction, some of them are fictional. Mm-hmm <affirmative>. I started this book when I started doing some exploration of my roots in Kentucky because we left there when I was young and I've been back a few times, but I fictionalized, part of it was because most of the books that I see that seem quite popular are fantasy, science fiction, maybe romance. And mine didn't fit in any of those categories. So I wanted to make it as engaging as possible. And actually some of the stories, I have a very interesting background and some and some of the places I've lived, some of them are in the book. Like I lived in a small town in eastern Kentucky and during the sixties I was in Berkeley, California when all the free speech stuff was going on.
Speaker 3 00:10:00 And then I moved to New York later. So all of those places figure into the book. But some of the things that happened to me, particularly in Kentucky and in my family, if I didn't fictionalize them, you wouldn't believe them <laugh>. I actually moderated them by fictionalizing them but also added some more dramatic elements because not everything that happens in real life turns out to be as interesting as some of the things that might have happened. I like to say that I created characters that I knew or heard about. I'm also a trained trauma informed therapist. Mm-hmm <affirmative>. So I had a lot of patience and I'm a college professor so I met students. Uh, many of them were firefighters, first generation college, uh, police officers. So they too have experienced a lot of poverty and trauma. So I had many rich sources to draw from besides my own
Speaker 2 00:11:06 Michael, yours is the least fictionalized, but you made a dramatic step in making it read like an autobiography that is from her point of view rather than your own, which is a really interesting choice. So did you consider just writing a straight up biography?
Speaker 4 00:11:27 Yeah, that's the way it was gonna be when I first started. But I told my daughter about it, she's a lawyer and she says, no, no, no, you get sued that way. And then I talked to the Sheila's family and they wanted me to change everyone's name. They didn't want anyone's re name recognizable. So in the book, Sheila's name is spelled Z H I L A where her name is really spelled j i l a. So I had to change everyone's name around and Sheila told me all these stories about growing up in Iran and from the time I guess she started, like when she was lining around elementary school, she told me all these horror stories and some beautiful stories about her family and I just incorporated them and tried to put 'em in a sequence that would keep the reader's interests and took that all the way through until she met me. And that was easier to write cuz I was there.
Speaker 2 00:12:25 Well it must have been a little bit difficult, so that must have been a relatively difficult part to write because you're writing from her perspective about your mutual love for each other and it's very beautiful. But it must have been difficult to write.
Speaker 4 00:12:39 It took me a long time to write that book, but it was worth the laughing and just like Lisa wrote it, it helped her get through the death of her husband. It helped me too. And so it was very cathartic and so I'm glad I did it and I'm working now on a sequel to it and it's gonna be Mickey's story. So let's start with my life story going through and that's really autobiographical.
Speaker 2 00:13:03 That's wonderful. I I think a lot of people will find inspiration and comfort from all of these stories because you're trying to speak to a common experience. Michael already touched on this, but I think it is a generally important question that there are people in your stories that are real people and you may have renamed them, you may have given them slightly different roles. But do you worry that some people might be upset by your representation of them? Whether you've moderated their character or changed their name or left out things that might be really upsetting or even that you think it's positive but you're worried that they might not think it's positive. Lisa, are there people in your story that you worry a little bit might be upset by the book?
Speaker 1 00:13:54 Oh yeah. Weby is actually based on the person who was in charge of the carnival while I was there. And he acted the same way. Everything was the money. Everything was the money. And if you asked for a draw which means an advance, he would give you a hard time, what do you need this for? And he was a real hard guy to work for. Fatsy was based on my stepbrother whose name is also Fatsy and if he reads this, he's gonna think that I'm using him as the basis of that character. But it's really not. Fatsy is based on a boss that I had at one point a long time ago and Moose is of course based on my husband and that's where Moose actually, he was called Moose in the carnival because he was a really big strapping guy and he could lift up some of the rides by himself and carry them and put 'em on the trucks. So that's why they called him Moose. And
Speaker 2 00:15:02 You're not anticipating he's gonna read the book?
Speaker 1 00:15:06 No, I did dedicate it to him saying he would have read this book if he was alive. He would've liked it too and he would've known that it was him.
Speaker 2 00:15:18 Well that's good.
Speaker 3 00:15:20 I will definitely write a disclaimer but there's no one character in the book who's exactly like anybody working as a psychotherapist too. We all have parts, parts of ourselves and so I might have taken some parts of someone or an incident that maybe someone else knew about, but people need to be reminded of the definition of fiction and novel. So if I have to do that and as I think there may be people who are disappointed, they're not in the book <laugh>, uh, that could happen too. And then I would remind them that you don't wanna show up in anybody's novel if you can help it. Uh, so if you're disappointed, you may be better off. To me there's a big distinction between being real and being true, but it doesn't have to be real to be true. So I try to get inside my characters what would this person do and literally what would this character do?
Speaker 3 00:16:30 Who is a part of someone I know if that person literally went south and that's where you can get the drama in the sense of if it all went wrong or it all unraveled. And as I said, many of the incidents in the book are fictionalized but they may have been based on something that I heard about. My mother never really left the hills of Kentucky and she had lots of stories and reminisce and I was um, born there. So I had my own adventures and misadventures there and then into Berkeley when I was there during the sixties. I met a lot of different characters, real characters. So some that I could use I did. And I don't think there's anybody to be could sue me about. But I find what people often do with books is they think they recognize other people. They often don't recognize themselves that they'll say, oh that was Aunt Joe or that's cousin Frank, or whoever it is. And you just have to again gently remind them it's a novel and it's fictionalized.
Speaker 2 00:17:42 And Michael, you kind of started with recognizing that that could be a problem. Have you had any feedback?
Speaker 4 00:17:48 I had two characters that I worried about. First one was Z's husband Zanna comes to the United States because she's got breast cancer. So they came here for her treatment, then they stayed. Now she was a dentist in Iran and when you come here you gotta go all over again to get your degree. He was a ophthalmologist in Iran, so they're both studying to get their degrees here. She got hers, he couldn't do his, he didn't know enough English, she was too lazy to study. And I brought all that out. I was nervous about her reaction cuz I loved Zanna. She's just an amazing person. I did not wanna offend her and, and she never said boo to me about it. And then Rebecca, Rebecca's my ex-wife, but she doesn't go by the name Rebecca, but I put in the good stuff about her and the bad stuff about her and I was a little nervous, her reaction but, and I haven't heard anything from her.
Speaker 4 00:18:50 And my daughters read the book and they didn't complain. So that's it. The scariest time was Jill's family invited me for dinner at Donna's house. It was right after the book got published and I singing, okay, I'm gonna go away, they're gonna tear me apart, but okay, I'm gonna go. They told me how much they loved the book and one of 'em teared me an envelope and said Don't open this until you know, five miles away. So five miles away I get there and open it up. She wrote me a check thanking me for writing a book about her sister. Wow,
Speaker 2 00:19:25 That's so sweet. Here's the hard question because they all have very highly emotional past experiences and just for anyone who's listening who is also writing from past experience and struggling with that, how did you cope just emotionally yourself? Did you lean on friends and family? Did you just power through it? And it's not all bad strong emotions, some of it's good, strong emotions. So did the positive emotions help to balance the experience? How did you as a person, as a writer deal with writing heavily emotional stuff and what practical advice might you offer somebody else who's trying to do a similar piece of work? Lisa,
Speaker 1 00:20:13 The story was initially going to be about the veterinarian who buys the carnival in first person and who follows the carnival around. The romance kind of snuck its way in because I was drawing on my own experiences from the carnival. How I ended up dealing with it was initially, like I said, I wrote it from a first person point of view and was writing the veterinarian stuff. Then the romance stuff started to creep in. I said to myself, I can't do this first person because it was too close. So I did end up just scrapping most of it and starting from the beginning. And then that's how I dealt with it is I created some distance between myself and the book and I was able to work in a much more neutral area and that's how I handled it. I've been carrying this for a while. It wasn't until finally I sat down and wrote the story that it all just came Russian right out and it all just came right out onto the page. I had been percolating this for years, so it, it just rushed right out.
Speaker 2 00:21:33 Sounded like it was something that you needed to do.
Speaker 1 00:21:36 Yeah, I think that when you have high emotional issues such as a death or a trauma, that it's cathartic to first write it in your journal so you get all the raw stuff out and then fictionalize it or put it on somebody else putting on another character or on another person that isn't you. And that way you can work through it. I think that helped.
Speaker 2 00:22:04 I see our psychologist as nodding sagely.
Speaker 3 00:22:07 I was thinking I almost did the opposite. I started in third person and then decided to take a deep dive into the character and some of the other characters in the book. And I started this book decades ago, not as a book really. I started this investigation of my family and roots and I am a therapist and I am a therapy client because I think that's important for me to always be learning while I'm working with others. So I definitely talk to my therapist and probably will when the book is published. But there were times when particularly some of the events that were more realistic or actually happened were factual, like some of the domestic violence. I did come from a family where there was domestic violence and I talked about the actual feelings and experiences of someone going through that of abuse and violence.
Speaker 3 00:23:06 And so that part got pretty heavy and there were times when I had to put it away and not look at it again for a while. I'm a compulsive editor, so every time I look at my work I edit it and change it and do do that. So it, I also like to just put things away, sit with it, then go back and revisit. But yes, I think there was a lot of emotion that went into this that I had to find ways of dealing with. Mostly it was through my own therapy and through taking a pause and just being with myself and feeling the emotional separation, which I'm pretty good at doing for the work I do in teaching and training, you really have to be able to separate out what you're going through with how you're allowing yourself to be with another person. And that's what I think writing is too. You're allowing yourself to be with the characters and that can take a lot of stuff out of you and you have to find ways to replenish. I have lots of friends and so it was taken care of myself in order to nurture the book.
Speaker 2 00:24:22 Michael, yours is the most immediate and close. So what did you do to cope while you're writing this book about the person you love and how much did the positive emotions you were reliving help you
Speaker 4 00:24:35 When Gila was still alive? I wrote an essay called the Lip Reader for Writers Digested. They have a competition every year, and I sent it in in actually won first place and Gelo was so happy about that. In the essay, I basically told some of the stories that you'll find in the novel. I reread the essay and took out parts and started expanding. When I went through the expanding process, it was very emotional and when I first write something, I write it on pencil and paper, I sit down at the desk and I write it and you know what it's like getting in the zone. So I get into the zone and I start writing and it's like Zeus comes into my head and she takes over the pencil and she does all the work. Two or three hours pass, I don't even know it.
Speaker 4 00:25:24 And when I finally get out of the zone, I'm surprised at what I got. So I put it aside and then the next step is to take all that and type it up. The first part is the emotional part. When you are in the zone and peers are coming, but to keep on going, you're writing it and this part is just typing it up and adding stuff and then you do the editing. So far I also found that when you're writing heavy emotional stuff, it's really important to be honest, a hundred percent open and that's the way Gila was. So that's the way I wrote the book.
Speaker 2 00:25:56 Two of these books are already available, one is coming soon, but they're all done. And it's one thing to sit down and start a project like this and work through it and deal with your emotions, but there's that moment when it's done. Can you speak to how it feels for two of you? The book is out in the world, people are reading it, you've had feedback from Stranger about your story, you've seen it, people purchase it. How does it feel? Does it feel the way you expected it to feel? Do you have closure <laugh>? And if that's what you're looking for, and Karen, your book it, it's nearly out. So are you experiencing the feelings that you thought you'd experience in this time? I'll make Lisa start first. It's not what I expected because
Speaker 1 00:26:43 I thought it was a story of a veterinarian helping animals and then people latched onto the romance part, which surprised me because I was, oh, I'll just talk about veterinarians and I'll, it was just all romance. It's a romance. What do you mean? It's a romance. Oh, okay. And the feedback that I got from other people were, they were reading way deep into this <laugh> and no, it's just a story <laugh> and And it wasn't meant to be this theme driven kind of thing, allegory or any, it was just a story. It totally wasn't what I expected. I didn't expect that it was received the way it was and that people latched onto different things than I expected.
Speaker 3 00:27:36 I think mine people will also be dragged into some things from reading the book. So I had my daughter read it and I braced myself for all the questions she was gonna ask me and the things she was going to be upset about her. And no, she just really said, oh, I love this. I think it's very well written. Wow, mom, I didn't know some of this stuff and I'm glad to know something about your history. So I don't know how it will be accepted. Sometimes I have brief moments of panic in which I think, oh God, what if this is too much for people? Or what if uh, they say it's too uh, open or too too many fragile topics and that sort of thing. Well see. I may be running back to my therapist again. I didn't address what you said about closure from writing the book. I would say more than closure. It was an opening to me to move on with some other things and ideas and I don't know that the concept of closure really works for me and maybe for others as well, but certainly it was sort of like a way I dug into my roots and pulled up some seeds and threw them out there to see what plants would come of them. So I surprised myself sometimes <laugh>,
Speaker 4 00:29:00 So So it's not closure, it's opening anymore doors?
Speaker 3 00:29:03 Yes. Mm-hmm. <affirmative> and I immediately started getting a lot more of my short stories and things and some of the stuff I cut from the book, some of those got published. In fact, all of them surprisingly got published as short stories or essays and things. So that was kind of interesting to see.
Speaker 2 00:29:22 It's always fun when you can repurpose something that you had to take out an novel. I I do the same thing <laugh>. Michael, how close is the experience to what you expected and have you gotten the closure you were hoping for?
Speaker 4 00:29:35 Yeah, actually I did get the closure I was hoping for, and the reviews have been amazing, so I'm really, really thrilled about that. What I didn't expect it won the next generation indie book awards, so I'm really proud of that.
Speaker 2 00:29:53 I was gonna round off with just a couple books specific questions. An in carnival farm, Lisa couldn't just rely on her own experience because she is hard reveal. She is not a veterinarian. So you had to do some kind of serious research to make other elements of the book true to life other than things that you could just mine out of your own experience. So you wanna talk a little bit about what you did there?
Speaker 1 00:30:18 I did exactly two hours of research. Really all I needed was the vaccines that all animals get animals like horses and cows and pigs. All I needed was the names of those vaccines. I didn't care about the dosages, I just needed the names. So, and I ended up not using them. That was the entire extent of my research. The rest of it was drawn from my own experiences at the carnival. My boyfriend didn't have a job and he didn't have any place to stay, so he stayed with the carnival and he would tell me the stories of what other people would do. So that's where I got most of the research from was his stories, my experience.
Speaker 2 00:31:08 You did some due diligence.
Speaker 1 00:31:11 I kind of figured that if I threw the names in there, it would make me sound like I knew what I was talking about.
Speaker 2 00:31:17 Karen's book, especially early on in the novel, you jump around in time because you're trying to knit together things and the whole story covers quite a long period of time where you're pegging events to real world events and some of them really major ones that most of us boomers remember. So how do you decide which events along with what world events and then there's the story events. What kinds of things were you thinking when you were trying to decide when should what happened?
Speaker 3 00:31:48 The timeline actually doesn't jump as much as you might think it did because I wanted to start it out with a chapter that would introduce the character and draw people in. So that was why I started with that chapter when she was a young child. And then part of the whole idea of it was that she talks about repressing and not dealing with that stuff. So that's why the next chapter jumps to when she meets up with someone from her past who jolts her back into that early childhood. And then it's pretty straightforward timeline after that.
Speaker 2 00:32:29 Michael, when I was reading it, I could forget that you had written it because it really felt like I was hearing sherra's voice. I wasn't hearing your voice and that is a challenge. Did you do things consciously to kind of bring her tone and the way she would speak into your writing or did it just kind of naturally flow from your long relationship?
Speaker 4 00:32:54 It naturally flew from a long relationship. When I sat there and got into the zone, I don't remember writing anything and it just all came out regarding research that was heavy. I had to do a lot of research. First of all, I knew nothing about Iran in the 1960s. You have to go get all this information and then was you're writing, you feed it into the storyline.
Speaker 2 00:33:18 Let's do one last round, Robin to close it out. If somebody's looking at your book on Amazon, it's the one thing they need to know that will make them buy the book. And And what do you hope they take away from it when they finally get a chance to read it?
Speaker 1 00:33:34 Animals are great. No love happens in surprising places. You can find love and friendship and camaraderie in the most unlikely places,
Speaker 2 00:33:47 Karen.
Speaker 3 00:33:49 Somebody can go through these kinds of experiences and come out of it without having to be the most brilliant and intelligent that you can survive your past. You can survive the pain, you can grow, and even in the most vulnerable situations. And even when people can't save you or don't, you can save yourself and you don't have to be number one in your class to do it.
Speaker 2 00:34:20 Michael, what do you want people to get from this story?
Speaker 4 00:34:25 How to treat deaf people. It brings out deaf culture throughout the book. Throughout the book, it explains how important it is to look directly at the deaf person speak slowly enunciate and this is good for the death, the heart of hearing anyone has a difficult time hearing and uh, people need to be more sensitized to it. And that that's one of my bookers trying to bring out at least a message I want to give to people so that when they meet someone that's hard up here, they meet someone deaf, they'll know what to do and they'll be more compassionate. And learn some sign language please.
Speaker 2 00:35:04 Thank you everybody.
Speaker 1 00:35:11 Once in a generation, the matriarchs of Jessica choose a new king to manage the government and command the guard protecting Giss from crime invaders and insurgency. Corins been training for that job since he was six, but this is an unsettled time. Rumors of strange incursions, grumbling, discontent, and increasing brig. Andry, Koran's own problems are multiplying his father, a skeptical shaman has gone missing and his polyamorous foster brother keeps interfering with his personal and professional business and the king needs him to track down the conspirators behind a simmering insurrection. When a strange woman turns up wearing a shaman's cape speaking a weird language and hiding knowledge that doesn't belong in this world, all his plans will have to change. Shadows of Insurrection. Book one of the Unremembered King by Vanessa McLaren Ray is available from Water Dragon Publishing on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Cobo Smash words and other online book sellers or support your local independent bookstores by ordering through bookshop.org or indiebound.org. For more information, visit their
[email protected].
Speaker 1 00:36:54 Thanks again to our guests. We plan on publishing new episodes every second Wednesday of the month. Watch for new episodes around that time. Theme music is provided by Melody Loops. Other music is found for free on the web. If you want to know more about small publishing in a big universe, visit our
[email protected]. Tweet us at S p dash podcast and like us on Facebook at s p u dash podcast. This podcast was recorded and edited by yours Truly, l a Jacob Executive producer is Steven redi. Transcription services provided by Remi of Sleepy Fox Studio. This month's episode was sponsored by Paper Angel Press and its imprints order, dragon Publishing and Unruly Voices. You can hear our podcast on Apple Podcast, Spotify, Stitcher, and Amazon Music, and most of your favorite podcast services. Thank you very much for listening. Talk to you soon.
