 Welcome to our interview show in which we interview LGBTQ guests who are important contributors to our community. We want to acknowledge that all things LGBTQ is produced at Orca Media in Montpelier, Vermont, which is unceded Indigenous land. Enjoy the show. Hey, everybody. I'm here with Carolyn Gage, a very accomplished playwright, short story writer, essayist, general renaissance woman who's been working for many years in theater primarily. Welcome, Carolyn. Thank you. It's a thrill to be here. Well, it's great to have you. Let's start with a little bio, if I may. Carolyn Gage is a playwright, performer, director, and activist. She author of nine collections of lesbian and feminist themed plays and 75 plays, musicals, and one woman shows. This is amazing. Actually, it's closer to 90 now, but, yeah. Is it really? That's so impressive. Yeah. Carolyn specializes in non-traditional roles for women, especially those reclaiming famous lesbians whose stories have been distorted or raced from history. For 22 years, Carolyn toured in the U.S. and Canada and in Europe in her award-winning one-woman play, The Second Coming of Joan of Arc, offering performances, workshops, and lectures on lesbian theater. From 2003 to 2016, she ran a production company, Cauldron and Labyrinth in Portland, Maine, where she workshopped and produced her own plays, frequently sending them to regional or national bookings. Let me continue. In 2014, Gage was one of six featured playwrights at the 53rd annual World Theater Day, sponsored by UNESCO in Helden, Rome in 2015. The Sophia Smith Collection at Smith College has your papers. That's great. That's a very prestigious archive also. Written the first book of lesbian-themed scenes and monologues, as well as the first manual for lesbian theater production, Take Stage. I'd like to pause here for a minute. You published it in 2016. It's the subtitle is, How to Direct and Produce a Lesbian Play. Actually, I published it, oh my god, I published it like I believe in 93. Yeah, but I think that it still holds true. It was written for lesbians in my generation, generally did not go to academic theater programs, nor did they come up through community theater because we're often gender nonconforming, women of size, butch women, et cetera. It's just a hostile environment. There was this burgeoning lesbian culture with all kinds of music festivals and drumming, but theater was not part of that. I wrote a book, so any woman who wanted to produce lesbian theater in her community would know how to do it, what the steps were and what you needed to do, because I was feeling like we clearly need to have our own theaters and we need to train ourselves to do it because we're not welcome in the traditional places where you learn theater. So I still feel that to some extent that's true, that lesbian culture needs to step up and start producing our own work. It sounds so daunting though. I've been reading lately a lot about grants culture and all that sort of fundraising stuff and the shrinking budget for all of the arts. Well, and the thing is with theater, it's the kind of the thing where it's the quality of your defect. I mean, it is live. That's why it's so powerful. That's why playwrights historically end up in prison and that doesn't happen to novelists. It is an incredibly powerful art form. You're creating an alternative world in real time and space and people are experiencing it and it is just so powerful and because it's live it has a short shelf life. You work for two months or 10 weeks or whatever and you put this thing up for two weekends and it's gone and if you missed it, you missed it and it doesn't translate well. You know, let's videotape it. Well, you know, one video camera in the back of the theater, it's not the same. So I think for a lot of people it's like, wow, for that same amount of effort I could have blah, blah. I think that the fact it's ephemeral, that it's there and then it's gone and it doesn't leave an artifact is, I personally find that magic and powerful, but in a corporate capitalist culture it's like, where's the product? You know, there's no shelf life here and if I make a video, I can sell it for 30 years. So I understand it and lesbian time is priceless because of, you know, we have busy lives. It's a lot and it takes almost military levels of organization and hierarchy because you have to have 15 people all doing the same thing at the same time on Friday night and then on Saturday. It's like a military maneuver and it requires that level of discipline and hierarchy, two words that are not big when you're talking about lesbian recreational activity, discipline and authority. It's like, no, thank you. I do that at the office. So there's a lot of reasons why I think it's a tough interface and it's why I wrote the book, but as I say I wrote it 35 years ago. It remains, you know, lesbian community and culture has never really, these little pockets of lesbian theater that arise and last for a few years and then goes away, but nothing like the gay male embrace of theater where historically it's been a refuge and a haven for gay men. It has been hostile territory for lesbians and we don't have that history and we don't have that affinity and that's, that's been a huge handicap in my career for sure. Let's turn to one of your plays that I've loved in this wonderful collection produced by the esteemed late academic Rosemary Kerbs, she anthologized all these plays and Amazon All Stars is the title of the volume and also the title of your play. It was fabulous, but at point when I read it, many years after its publication, you know, I was struck by how much I missed seeing it in the theater because it's a musical and I wanted to hear, I wanted to hear the songs, you know, so it is, as you say, a difficult interface. Since we're talking about Rosemary, let me ask you about something that she said in the introduction to this volume, she said simply putting lesbians on stage is a radical political action. Is that still true? Amen, amen it is and I, much of my work is butch-centric and when you put, you know, the, the lesbian butch on stage, even if, even if she's just, you know, walking out and pouring tea and something like the importance of being earnest, she disrupts all of the narrative, all of the gender roles go out the window. The rest of the play won't make sense. She doesn't have to say a word, just walk across the stage in that tuxedo, pour the tea and leave. The whole rest of the play makes no more, no sense. I used to say that well, it's like this archetype, it's a universal solvent, it dissolves everything and then you're like, well, what kind of container are you going to put the universal solvent in? That's the sort of conundrum and I think, well, what's the narrative container? And it really has to be a butch-centric narrative in a, in a theater that is buy for, about and serve the interests of lesbians and we don't have that, you know, but yes, I, I do agree with that quotation that it is, it is absolutely a revolutionary act to put a lesbian on the stage. In 1996, and then still applies. Still applies. Maybe even more so because, you know, the disappearing L is actually a thing in queer community, which that wasn't true 30 years ago. I feel it's tougher now, that representation. The censorship is more rigid than it, than it is now. It is, than it was then. Let's talk about your bio if we could. Sure. You're originally from Richmond, Virginia. You left at 18 and how did you happen to start writing plays? Well, I kind of rattled around. I went and I went out to Boulder, Colorado, and I lived there for a while. And then I hitchhiked around the country for a while. And then I thought I was going to go to chiropractic school and be a doctor. And then I didn't. And, you know, so there was kind of a little bit of wandering the wilderness for about a decade. And then around the age of 32, I began to recover memories of my childhood. And I, which shouldn't have been a surprise. I really hadn't been home since 18. That is not, you know, the hallmark of a wonderful family. But I still had a lot of myths about it. And then I began to recover memories. And it was quite shocking that I didn't know my own history, which meant I didn't know my own identity. And so three, three things happened when I turned 32. I recovered my memories. I realized that I needed to be, I needed to be living a lesbian life. That's, that is where my heart, my politic, my identity really lay. And, and that also I needed to be an artist. Because I finally knew what I wanted to say, which if you don't have your memories, if you don't know your history, and you don't know who you are, it's very difficult to be an artist. So all those three things happened at the same time. And none of them could have happened without the other two. I mean, I was able to get my memories because I was realizing I was done with men that enabled me to access memories that would not have been useful if I was planning on having, you know, a husband. So, you know, it was a kind of red letter, just one of those. It's kind of like the before I was 32, and after I was 32. And, and also I've recently been diagnosed as autistic, and realized there was a lot of masking going on. But I think part of that was at 32, I began to really work on being authentic and authentically present. Prior to that, I had just been performing like, who am I supposed to be? What's the game? How do you play it? And I'm going to make sure that I play it really well. And all of that lost its appeal to me. And when I began to know who I was, and I began to drop the masking and all of that. So it was, and that was when I began to say I was a playwright and really dedicate myself, go back to school in theater and just dedicate my life to it. What happened? Why theater? You know, who knows? They say your thing is sort of set by age five. And I, as a young child, very autistic, I had a dollhouse of 50 dolls. And I really played dolls. And when I played dolls, I went into an altered state for six to eight hours a day. And I would enact enormous like BBC miniseries, like every doll, I could write a biography about them. And the relationships were incredibly complex and full of sex and violence. And I'm just a little kid. But I'm, you know, I look back now and I realize I was playwriting. That was, and my mother had to, in the summer, she made me pack up the dolls, because she realized this child's never going to leave a room, because I was, so I just got a set of miniature dolls. I'd go out in the woods and I would do eight hours of, I do the whole Peter Pan in the woods, you know, with the island and the, yeah, you know, now someone would have identified that as intensely autistic, literally living in my own world. But I believe that, that what I needed to do with my life was pretty set at a very early age. And then when I put the dolls away, I kind of got lost for a long time. And when I started with theater, it was like, Ah, back in the groove. Yep. How did it happen to be so prolific? It's so impressive. And I, in researching your biography, I realized that you also have chronic fatigue syndrome. So how do you get to be, how did you get to be so prolific? And how do you accommodate chronic fatigue syndrome? Well, I was stricken in 87, which was shortly after the big red letter year, the stress of that, I had to estranged from my family of birth, you know, which was very, very difficult, stressful. And I was involved in an enormous lawsuit in a whistleblowing lawsuit. And then I was trying to be this new identity. And, you know, so not surprisingly, it was, yeah, I got sick. I got a case of really bad flu. And to my shock, I never recovered. I was very, very stricken for the first seven years of it where I'd say I was 95% disabled. There were days I couldn't read, I couldn't work, I couldn't walk around the block, that kind of thing. But what it did for me was I was able to write because my energy came, when I had it, it had to catch it. I would suddenly at three o'clock in the morning, I've got some energy and I could just get up and start writing. If I'd had to have a nine to five job, you know, I was touring, that's what I was doing for money. And I would, what I would do is I get a booking that was going to pay $2,000 to $2,500 or something, which back in the day, you know, I could live on that. And I get a booking and I take a whole lot of caffeine. And I would fly out and I would do the 90 minute show, I do classroom visits, I do some lectures and workshops. And I would do that for three days and then come home and go to bed for months. And yeah, it was hard. It was really hard. And chronic fatigue syndrome was not recognized. I couldn't get on disability with it, which was terrifying. I am grateful to see that the COVID long haulers are being treated very differently. It's the same thing. It's post viral syndrome. And they will be able to get on disability. They won't have the same struggle that my age cohort has struggled with for decades. The CDC in particular pretending it was not a real disease. It must have been so hard to be just starting out as a playwright and then be stricken with this. Well, but you know, I probably would have gotten, I probably wouldn't have chose, I, if I could have done something different that made money, I would have. But I was so sick. It was the only thing I could do. And I look back and I feel like there was a certain gift in that. And the silence was overwhelming when I, you know, I was so sick. I was just, you know, alone. There would be, I realized that that period of my life, if I dropped dead, it would probably be two months before they found a body. I just, there with my life, I was, the isolation was extreme. But, you know, it certainly motivated me to write because, and it was interesting because as sick as I was, when I was writing, I never felt sick. It was almost like I dissociated. I went into an altered state when I was deep in the playwriting. And whoever was writing the plays did not have chronic fatigue syndrome. That was very interesting. I know if I had to get up and get the mail, I couldn't do that two days in a row. That was too much. But yeah, it was, it was, but it was certainly hellish. And I'm very grateful that that time is gone now because of the COVID long haulers. There can be no denying of the reality of this horrendous condition. So that's a good thing. Now on Mount Desert Island in Maine. Yeah, I do. I live, I live in a little fishing village, Southwest Harbor. And it's very, very beautiful here. And we are infested with tourists six months of the year, but the winters are very quiet, very beautiful. I feel extraordinarily fortunate to be able to live here. It's a dream come true. My question, though, is how does it work? How does your work as a playwright become possible, even though you're not in a major city? Well, I, you know, I always needed to be around nature for a number of reasons. I'm realizing a lot that was autism and my relationship to nature and so on. But I could never really live in a big city. And so I think that a lot of people saw that as a real handicap. And maybe it was in a way, but I would have been really worn down and distracted by city rhythms, you know, that kind of thing. I don't know, but I just been very blessed in the pandemic year. I had 27 Zoom productions of readings and sometimes some actual productions. I had a good experience. I got to see my work all over the country, which I'm retired now. I don't travel so much. That's very difficult to do with chronic fatigue. So that kind of the pandemic was, I had a pretty good pandemic year, I got to say. And I think it's going to change things. I do too. And I think coupled with the environmental disaster, there's no reason. And I used to feel that when people would pay all this money for me to fly out and give a one hour lecture. And I think this is, first off, it was two days of traveling for me. You know, it was like, this is insane. You know, because the technology was there to have me videotaped. And people just, it just wasn't the culture. They'd have all this money and they want to bring in the author. And now I think people are really thinking twice about that. You know, partly because nobody wants to travel with the pandemic on. I like to think we will never go back to the promiscuous, especially air travel, which is a huge global warming thing, right? Kind of up there with cruise ship, and not as bad as cruise ships. But, you know, I agree with you. I think that there is no reason to have for a lot of that travel. But I worry about theater coming together in the theater. Yeah. Well, I agree with you there. And one of the things I've always encouraged lesbians to do is to, because we, many lesbians have pods, safety pods, they have people that they know are as careful as they are, and that they socialize with without masks and stuff. Get together and read a play together. You know, reading a play can be very, I find that if you read a play, you can capture a great deal of it without throwing all the production values, costumes, props, sets. You can, and sometimes those are distractions. I feel like a really good play. And many people have said Shakespeare, you'll never have as fully realized experience of Shakespeare on the stage as you will if you curl up with it, because of the brilliance of the work. You know, if you're reading it, you're not going to miss a thing. But I, yeah, I do, I would worry about live theater. However, that has never embraced lesbian culture. So I kind of feel like, oh, the pandemic, what are they going to do? Not produce lesbian plays now? And even mainstream theater has been so prohibitive and expensive. You know, it's been out of the price range for a lot of lesbians. Well, honestly, I mean, I'm old, okay? And I grew up going to theater and theater was, it was the Greeks, it was Molière, it was Shakespeare, it was Moss Hart, it was like two intermissions. And it was an evening in the theater. And generally, it was a cast of 10 to 15 or sometimes 20, you know, and big plays. And you had a big theme, like South Pacific interracial marriage, it was refracted through three entirely different subplots that all kind of woven and out of each other. And that is where I learned my craft. And my best plays, everybody knows me for this one woman show with a stool because of the economics of lesbian theater. I have some, I have some plays I've spent 18 years on, I have plays with huge casts, two intermissions. And they can't even get a reading. And it's frustrating to me because the way theaters look at it is, we have a season subscribers, season subscribers, they will come see whatever we put up. So if we just have a husband and wife arguing with each other in the living room, as opposed to mounting a Molière play or, you know, whatever, or a Shakespeare God help us with cast of 23, we will save tons of money. And so theater has systematically, as with everything corporately driven, has stripped away every element of drama that's actually dramatic, the spectacle, the multiple subplots, the length and size of the evening, which includes the two intermissions, it's you are having an experience, you have to have two breaks, you are working. And that is going away with these 90 minute and do not try to have a 90 minute play with no intermission, that's really unfair to old people with bladder issues. But that is the way it's going 90 minutes with no intermission. So you can't express your disdain for what's going on by not coming back after intermission. I always find that's healthy. And two to four people, generally middle class, generally in a living room. How boring is that? And I just compare that with the Moss Hart plays or, you know, and it's not just me being old. I mean, we have 2000 years of theater that looked like that. If you ask Anton Chekhov or Morgueir to write something for two or three characters in a living room, they would just be like, I can't. I what I have to say, that doesn't interest me for starts. And the themes that do cannot be covered with those parameters. I just feel, I feel really soap boxy about that. Like, y'all don't know what live theater is because it's not being done anymore. And you realize most of the great writers, I used to feel bad that there weren't lesbian theaters. I was produced, my first theater company was in a bar. And then I remembered the greatest playwrights in the world wrote for bare stage broad daylight. It's like, don't sweat it, Carolyn. And Shakespearean actors wore their everyday clothes. They wore Elizabethan clothes, even though they're Cleopatra. It's like, you know what? You don't need that. This isn't film. This is live theater. And you'll be the better playwright for that. You can't lean into all these props. You're going to have to really, you're going to have to really make it happen, make the magic happen. Yeah, but I feel like we don't really need to throw all this money. Make a movie. You want to do that? Make a movie. We don't. Good theater just doesn't require all of that stuff. You know, it really doesn't. We're getting to the end of the interview. Oh my gosh. I have a couple of quick questions. What are your current projects? I just finished a play that I really love. It's called Star Pattern. And it's based on a real woman read a star pattern. And she was on campus 1966. The University of Texas tower shooting, which was the first contemporary mass shooting. And the first victim outside the tower was an 18 year old woman, eight months pregnant. And she was wounded but not killed. And she lay on this 127 degree pavement under the tower, struggling. And nobody could rescue her because she was still in the line of fire at the sniper. It was too dangerous. Rita runs out, lies down next to her and talks to her for an hour until she's rescued and keeps her conscious keeps her from losing consciousness and saves her life. And Claire, the victim, she has given many interviews about what they talked about. And they did that thing where women in crisis who don't know each other, establish an immediate intimacy and then collaborate on creating anti patriarchal space in a crisis situation. And this was really a patriarchal inferno. This guy was just shooting dozens of people. And she's eight months pregnant. The baby's dead. Her partner is dead next to her. And here's Rita. And they go into the secret language of women. That was really clear to me listening to Claire. It's like, oh my God, they are talking in a highly symbolic secret language of women. They're doing that thing. And I have done that for women when I stopped for car accidents. And women have done that for me when I was in crisis. And I wanted to put that on the stage. And I did. And I really like the play. It's in the secret language of women. It's called star pattern. If you go on my website, you can get a download or paperback of it. But I felt like it was, it was like a, it's sort of a snapshot of the apocalypse as a short play, but it's also a template for, you know, surviving. It was like how, how much power can we have in an apocalypse? And the answer is quite a bit, quite a bit. You know, what Rita did was breathtakingly feminist. She came out as a lesbian shortly after that and went on to found a women's press and then a women's arts center that is still thriving in Austin. I think it was transformative for her. And of course it saved Claire's life. But it's a very, it's an extremely compressed play. And I, yeah. And so that's, and I have three projects right now. I'm working on that. I'm not ready to talk about yet, but I'm excited about star pattern because yeah, I just, I just did. A couple of minutes. Any last words for the audience? Oh, read, buy my plays, read my plays and consider putting together a group of a play reading group, particularly because you can do them on zoom. And I have a number of one acts that have small casts that you can do on zoom. And yeah, we've been waiting for the prince seriously for 40 years were lesbians. And we've been waiting for the queer prince. And that is way not going to happen either. You know, we, you know, we have to stop waiting for the prince. The lesbian theater prince is never going to show up. And if we don't make our own theater, we are going to be stuck with secondhand stories, which is, that's how we get colonized. That's how we can't remember who we are. So, Carol engage. Thank you for joining us. It was my pleasure. Thank you. Hi, everybody. I'd like to welcome back Bill Mathis. He was on before with his perfectly wonderful novel that I really enjoyed reading. And, and he had now has a new book called the memory tree. And here it is. And I can't tell you how, how, how like you just, it's page turners. It's just wonderfully written page turners. And so thank you, Bill for agreeing to be on again to talk to you new book memory tree. So let me tell you a little bit about Bill. And then we'll talk a little bit about a review of his book. And, but let's just tell you a little bit about who he is. Bill Mathis was raised in a large family in a small Michigan village. He moved to Beloit, Wisconsin after retiring from careers in the YMCA, camping and foster care in the Chicago area. He began writing a year after retirement and has two novels published through Rogue Phoenix Press with the third one under contract for release in 2020. Besides writing, Bill enjoys volunteering, reading and traveling with his partner. And as I learned from Bill, I knew love which is collecting art during the pandemic, which sounds perfectly delightful. So are you enjoying that? I certainly am. It's been fun. And I'm not, I'm not sure I'll leave much to my kids, but that's fine. I'm not buying, I can't afford real expensive stuff anyway. So I know. And I was, I always said, you know, I saw this bump was taken that said, I'm spending my children's inheritance. Yes. Oh, you know, they'll have to be on their own. Yeah. And about your book, you have a review here about memory tree, which I will read, is a poignant novel about a dying man, his relationship with his caretaker, and his entanglements with his previously deceased family. The book is metaphor, meant a physically complex describing death as a kind of conscious, but constrained, or legious. Is that is our legious? A religious, a religious. Okay. Because it's about a are anyway. Okay. At this says of the novel, to me, memory tree encapsulates many levels of life, secrets, race, races and revenge, regrets, death, love and hope. I believe we are made from elements of stardust and return to similar elements when we die. So you've won some awards for this new book, right? Yes, this book. And by the way, this is my fifth novel. Yeah. Yeah. I probably didn't edit that other stuff close enough. But this is my fifth novel. And it won the Chicago Writers Association's took third place in their first chapter award that they offer. And the book before it revenge is necessary took first place. So they both have the first chapters are good. Well, from what I read, I think they're all good. So but this is the first chapter contest, right? Yes. Yeah, it's just the first chapter. Yeah. So how has life been for you during the pandemic? Just kind of hanging at home? Well, I was retired before it. And so life didn't change a lot. I mean, Groundhog's Day is Groundhog's Day. It did get a little boring. But, you know, like I said, the worst part is we couldn't travel my partner and I, you know, I've done very little traveling. And therefore, a while at the worst of the pandemic, we even ordered our groceries in. We're not doing that now. But with the, but we were fine. I mean, it wasn't a huge upset. We missed a couple of wonderful trips we'd planned. But, you know, that's life. And I haven't seen my daughter and grandkids in two years. But I'm certainly not alone in that factor. And we have a coffee group that met every Saturday morning locally. And we switched to Zoom. And and actually that expanded it because people who'd moved out of the area could join. And so that enriched it. We went back to personal meeting. And then with this Delta variant, we're back to part of us are back to Zoom, part of us, part of a meet live, but they go early. But it's just not worth the risk in a crowded restaurant. Yeah. So, but other than that, you know, it's been fine. It's and we collected art. And I'm sure it's given you much more time. I know for me if I tend to socialize if given the opportunity. And so without that opportunity all the time, I tend to write more myself. So I don't know whether it's having that effect on you. Well, our writer's group met in person at the library and we switched to Zoom. And we actually thought that much more productive. We just got right to it. I know because we had groups and then, you know, everybody would bring food and then you'd eat the food. But, you know, it's easier to get right to it on Zoom. So do you still keep up with your writing schedule or you have? I haven't in the last nine months. It started to slow down a year ago as I finished up memory tree. And the the issue is is 20 plus years ago, I was diagnosed with chronic fatigue syndrome. And it was so severe. I was off work for five years and on disability. And I gradually got somewhat better. I'll never be over it. But I got better enough to function and go back to work in a different capacity and then retired and started writing. But it started to slowly recur or get worse again over the last year. And so the last nine months I have done very little. So in some ways the pandemic's been a blessing because I couldn't do anything if I felt like it. And just the concentration and focus of writing just it isn't there right now. I think it'll come back and I have lots of ideas. But so I know. And you'll probably write it in, you know, really quickly because you've had so much time to sit on this. The idea. Right, right. And I've got a couple of things in progress. I've got a plot. That's the problem. Got these great characters with no plot. Well, you know, I think if you keep. Maybe do something about the apocalypse. Yes, yes. So when you're not writing, what do you like to read? If you couldn't be like fiction or mystery? Or I mostly read fiction. And I like sometimes I like psychological thrillers. And and thrillers. I'm trying to draw blanks at names. I just read a couple of really good ones. I was going to give the author a blog, but I got to remember a name first. It's the book is The Marsh. The Marsh King's Daughter. And it's actually being made into a movie. But it's Paula DeAnne is the author. And she has written some marvelous things. Her books are marvelous. So and then I bounce around. I read a little bit here and a little bit there. So and being a ex evangelical, I follow religious news. And I'm not sure why. But there's a lively group. But I'm not going to get into politics. Yeah, good. I mean, I could but I'm not gonna. But anyway, so you're you move you're from a large family. Does that import like the drama of I know you have a lot of LGBTQ characters in your novels, which is wonderful. But do you find that your large family in a small town kind of gave you ideas about family life or about, you know, what it is to live in a small town or yeah, I think it definitely shaped a lot of what I write because all of my books involve family. Um, and and several of them large families and and and that type of thing. And so I I have this ideal family of growing up in the fifties and sixties in a small town. And I've always looked at that as just the ideal. And then as I've gotten older and I didn't come out as gay till old age, maybe it's senility. But but but I realized it wasn't an ideal life. I mean, there was a lot of issues in families and I'm sure homophobia and racism were uh, yeah. Yes. Yes. So which probably a lot of us coming out. Yes. So so that's affected it. And and I think my books with families present flaws and secrets and and none of the secrets that I've shared are are personally that I know of. I don't I don't think my six siblings were or psychopaths. But it definitely shaped and and and it's been interesting to see how that plays out in my writing. Now stardust now there's an interesting concept. I know there are some people that believe that when we die we turn to stardust. So I find that really intriguing. How did you come up with having a character in the book at stardust? Oh, don't ask how my mind works. I I I liked I I my my personal belief system is is gone from being raised in a independent fundamental pastor's home pk to later in my mid 30s being a born again Christian and living in evangelicalism for 30 years. To that gradually dying and then gradually a deconstruction and eventually deconversion and process. And so I really liked Neil deGrasse Tyson's thing. We come from stardust and we return to stardust. Now all the elements of of of us originated in stardust that somehow the earth is made of. And and so I like the idea of this little girl kind of being in limbo even though I don't believe in a purgatory or a limbo but but it just it just made sense to give her this interim this interim time of of of waiting for her father to return because he didn't rescue them and he should have and they were murdered. She and her twin brother and their mother were or murdered and their dad was on the way to rescue them to save them and he didn't he never showed up. And so she's her stardust is waited in the old farmhouse all these years in case her dad comes back or shows up or so she can learn what happened. And he does he does come back. He's dying of cancer and and he's white and it kind of slowly the book slowly moves into the the racial issues. A couple friends read it and said oh we didn't realize so-and-so was black or the kids were mixed until and I said well that was kind of the design. I just kind of wanted to ease into that part. So he had been in a mixed-race relationship and his his common law wife was African-American and his kids were mixed and he had hang-ups about it. He loved his wife he loved his kids but he never took them in public any place. They would go out he would go out but they never they never went to the town ball games together. They never and he was out of town a lot he was a forester. So anyway this little girl one of the twins is a stardust and when I read I'll read the opening which kind of explains her. And and and so the nurse who comes to care for Duane the dying old man the little girl's father is African-American and and she's a true character. She doesn't take crap from nobody and she her role in life is to help people die and die well and that with a lot of regrets and guilt and of course he's come home to die with all of his guilt and all of his regrets and nobody around other than this nurse just take care of him till he kills. And and so she works on him and gradually the reader will learn you go back into his story how he met his girlfriend common law wife and they had kids and then you'll go back into Rita the old nurse's story and and gradually they come together overlap. They never met each other but they were going to and then the story continues and then it ends it ends with the old man dying and the stardust of her father and the stardust of the little girl are together and then she realizes their stardust is actually going to become real dirt and and she wants she hopes that a pink lady slipper grows up grows from her dirt because they lived on the edge of a national forest so they spent all their time in the woods and it's a very nature-oriented book from the standpoint of enjoying the outdoors and being involved with the growth of a forest and all of that. So and then the central character is memory tree and that's the old tree in the front yard that they talk to and it kind of gives a history of of the tree and it's just kind of another character. And I believe in African American lore and I'm not sure about this but there's a lot to do with trees and memory and you know going there to pray. Yeah yeah I didn't explore that but that's that's with the ancestors I believe. Yeah yeah. Well I don't think I've ever heard of another book that shows stardust but you know I'm sure if there is we'll we'll get emails on our account saying well so you stardust but yeah but you know to my knowledge I have never heard it so I think it's a very unique and original idea. So would you like to read to our audience now and they can get a taste of your novel? Yes I would. Okay. This is from memory tree. The book opens with two poems written by friends of mine. The trees talk the trees talk all night they never sleep they hug the earth and never sleep the wind which rattles leaves does not frighten them their roots hold each other in such wind hold I tell you the trees talk all night and wait for light and that's a poem by Tom Montag who's a Wisconsin poet and very prolific. Life lasts a long time as stardust forever more now that's impressive that's a haiku sorda by Bob Wood he calls them haiku sordas. Memory tree split creek county Michigan which is a fictitious county access road 35 miles east of Lake Michigan I've been talking to memory tree for a long time ever since I could talk back when I was alive now through my stardust memory trees in my front yard and is old really old and tall really really tall we mostly called her memory because she was kind of part of the family and she remembers everything we also called the tree she mommy was glad memory wasn't called he she said men couldn't remember things very good my name is Yula and you can't see me my stardust is what's talking to memory tree yeah my stardust that's kind of like my spirit did you know dead people always stay the same age like the pictures on granny's wall old people young people want a baby they're all dead she used to tell us anyway we dead people always stay the same age we never get older my twin brother Jimmy and I were nine years and six days old the day we died I call it the bad day I bet by now granny has pictures of me and jimmy on her wall mommy too she was 29 I'm not sure about a picture of dad anyway memory knows my stardust is here all alone in the house she remembers mommy dad jimmy and granny too memory will never forget us I know that for a fact chapter one my real name is Bula but I couldn't say the B when I was learning to talk so Oula became Yula mommy said adding an H to the end of Bula made it sound too old besides I was named after granny and her name didn't have an H at the end either she wasn't old yet at least she wasn't back then some people think stardust is like spirits which are like ghosts I'm not like that ghosts and spirits can touch things or move things or spook people or animals or birds I can't it's like I'm a dandelion all white and poofy except I'm a cluster of stardust nobody alive can see I think where I want to go and somehow I'm there only I don't want to go to other places not away from the house I'm afraid to I mostly stay at the top of the archway between the kitchen and dining room I can hear and see and think I can't smell talk out loud sneeze or touch but I can remember those things I don't cry real tears but I sure remember what they were like and the pain and fear in my mind I'm telling all this to memory I always liked writing stories now it's telling them I'm just an invisible poof of stardust waiting telling my life to memory and now do you but by this me there is no oops there are no pictures of me or Jimmy hanging in our house now or of mommy even dad anywhere there used to be somewhere of mommy and us kids somewhere of me and Jimmy with dad none were with all four of us together I don't understand why the pictures are missing it would be nice to see them every day sometimes something to look at while I remember think and just exist as sawed us oops again I almost said sawed us now that would be weird I meant stardust maybe I was thinking of sawed us because dad was a woodcarver too a good one the wood carvings he made of us are also gone how would they be missing too who would sneak in and take them in the pictures how could I have not seen them do it see I've been waiting a long time in our old farmhouse for dad to come back when you're dead you don't think about time that's why I can't tell you how long I've been waiting I won't leave until my stardust meets dad's or at least I know he remembers us I don't know where else to look for him so I'm waiting here things are really scary that bad day a big angry man attacked mommy down by the lake she yelled for us to run and get dad we did we screamed for dad when we got to the house he hollered to wait on the porch he was in the shower and to pull some clothes on and get his gun he yelled he was hurrying as fast as he could he sounded upset makes out we didn't wait for him instead we ran down to the back down to the dock mommy was gone then the crazy man attacked we ended up in the lake next to mommy after dad didn't rescue us or show up jimmy stardust kept telling mine to go up to the house and wait for dad stardust mommy agreed she thought maybe dad died near the house or on the way to save us she said I was always a daddy's girl anyway so I should go mommy also said jimmy stardust would stay by hers forever and mine could be with dad's until all four of us can get to can get together she said memory tree would look over me even inside the house so I went it took a while for my stardust to get through the water the only problem was when my stardust finally got to the house dad wasn't here not him alive or a stardust I did see that the barn had burned down wouldn't dad stardust have found mine if he died in the fire how did the barn burn down it must have burned down after the bad man attacked us but how why wasn't dad here if he wasn't dead someplace around the house where did he go dad was supposed to come rescue mommy me and jimmy too dads do that rescue their family our dad never came so I'm here in the house waiting for dad waiting to learn what happened waiting for my forever to start and that ends the reading of the word all right well I'm ready I'm gonna start reading them maybe today so where can people get this book I'm sure the usual places the amazon bookstores do you have a direct place that people could buy they can buy it through amazon or any of the major online retailers their local bookstores can order it for them they'll have to prepay it but they can they can be ordered and I encourage people if they don't mind doing that to support their local bookstores if they want signed copies they can contact me the easiest way would just be through my email um bill mathis frider at gmail.com or my website is bill mathis frideretc.com so those are the simplest ways okay well you got the news get the book folks and um we'll see you again when your book when you have another new book thank you which we hope is very soon it'll be a little while I gotta figure out a plot first thanks bill thank you thank you for joining us we'll see you in two weeks but in the meantime resist