 Major sponsors for Ableton on Air include Green Mountain Support Services, empowering people with disabilities to live home in the community, Washington County Mental Health, where hope and support come together. Media sponsors for Ableton on Air include Park Chester Times, Muslim Community Report, WWW, this is the Bronx dot info, Associated Press Media Editors, New York Powered Online Newspaper, U.S. Press Corps Domestic and International, Anchor FM and Spotify. Partners for Ableton on Air include the HOD of New York and New England where everyone belongs, the Orthodox Union, the Division for the Blind and Visually Impaired of Vermont, the Vermont Association for the Blind and Visually Impaired, Central Vermont Habitat for Humanity and Montpelier Sustainable Coalition, Montefere Medical Center of the Bronx, Rose of Kennedy Center of Bronx, New York, Albert Einstein College of Medicine of the Bronx. Ableton on Air has been seen in the following publications, Park Chester Times, WWW, this is the Bronx dot com, New York Powered Online Newspaper, Muslim Community Report, WWW.H.com and the Montpelier Bridge. Ableton on Air is part of the following organizations, the National Academy of Television, Arts and Sciences, Boston, New England chapter and the Society of Professional Journalists. Hi, welcome to this edition of Ableton on Air, the one and only program that focuses on the needs, concerns and achievements of the definitely able. I've always been your host, Lauren Seiler. Arlene is not here today, but before we get to our topic at hand which is a very interesting topic of being visually impaired, blind and being an author as well as having a wonderful career as a psychologist. Let's thank our sponsors Washington County Mental Health, Green Mountain Support Services and many many many others as well as the partnerships of the Association for the Blind and Visually Impaired and the Division for the Blind and Visually Impaired and many others. We would like to welcome our guest, Joe Covey, psychologist and author, welcome to Ableton on Air. Well, it's great to be here. Okay. First, let's begin. You are besides and accomplished author, you are also a psychologist despite your blindness. You know what, Larry? Technically, I cannot describe myself as a psychologist because I do not hold a license. Okay. Right? So I can say I'm a psychotherapist. Psychotherapist. Right? I can say I work in psychology, but I can't actually say I'm a psychologist. Okay. It's just a technical thing, but in the field. So go ahead. Would you like to begin there? Despite your challenges with your career, let's start there and then work in as you being an author. Sure. Go ahead. The floor is yours. What would you like to know? What made you go into your career despite your challenges? It was a necessity, right? I needed something to do. I had an entire, you might say, a whole previous life as a sighted person and in that life I worked as an, I was an antique dealer and I had a very active business which made precise duplicates of historic costume. For museums, motion pictures, historic sights, things like that, but in the early 1990s I lost my eyesight and the business ended and I found myself going blind with outwork and very bored. So and living on, living on Social Security and I was, so I was probably at that time 32, 33, 34 and it wasn't much of a life. I remember speaking actually with a blind psychotherapist and complaining to him and saying, you know, even if I don't try, I'm probably gonna live at least another 30 years barring some misadventure. So, you know, I can't, if that's what I have to do is listen, just listen to the radio for the next 30 years. I don't know if I can do that. So his response was, well, Joe, why don't you do what I do? Become a psychotherapist. He said, it's not that hard. You're smart enough, which may have been a compliment. I don't really know. It's not that hard. You're smart enough. And you know, I have to say that psychology was not a passion of mine. It was something that if I were waiting in a waiting room at the dentist, I might thumb through a copy of psychology today. But history was my real interest. But I thought, well, all right, what am I gonna do if push comes to shove? And my eyesight really goes. Well, I could listen to people. I could think and I could talk. And I could do this. It's comfortable work. There's no heavy lifting. Nice, comfortable chairs. Talk to interesting people. So I started, I didn't see, I did not go to college out of high school. I didn't, I had no, I had no college background whatsoever. So I started at the beginning. And it took, you know, the good thing is it gave structure to my life. It gave me deadlines to me responsibilities, work, and work is the best therapy of all. So it, it provided me with a goal. And fortunately, psychology, psychotherapy is like most things in life. The more you know about it, the more interesting it becomes. So without really expecting to love the work, I was fortunate enough to find that I love the work, which is, which is the same as teaching. I'm also 20 years now teaching psychology classes, college psychology classes. Now, in terms of you being an author, do you channel your, shall we say your, because, you know, this show, we focus on the abilities of people despite their challenges. Do you challenge, do you channel your, or how can I say, do you channel your blindness or is it channeled through your writing and how, how is it channeled? Are you asking me if my blindness is evident or present in what I write? Yeah. No. Yes. Okay. Let's talk about your books. The quiet room. Let's start there. Well, what made, what made you write, or you write about the past in a lot of your books? Let's start there. What made you start writing the quiet room, which was quite interesting. Quiet room and the sequel to it, Female Academy, were originally written as one book under the title Psychotherapy with Ghosts. And that has now become the title for a series. So there are, there are at this point, three of them. And the third one, Bound by Faith, is going to be released on November 1st. So what is that, 10 days? Yeah, something like that. Yeah. What, what started it? I was at my stepdaughter's home asleep, or maybe not asleep in a, what they would probably call a hypnagogic state around dawn one morning, trying to get in another, an extra hour or so of sleep. She lives in a house built in 1822. So if you're familiar with old houses like that, they creak. Oh, they're noisy. I mean, if, if, if a cat walks across a room downstairs, you can hear it. So I was laying in bed, not quite awake, not quite asleep. I don't know. And I had a very, very distinct impression that someone came into the room, walked around the perimeter of the room, over to my side, stood over me, leaned over me, looked at me square in the face, held that position, straightened up, turned around and walked out. And it was all silent. But it was a very distinct experience for me. It really gripped me. I, as I mentioned, my, my interest really intensive interest is in history, particularly the 19th century. So why is that? What's the main reason behind? I mean, there's been a lot of historical writers, but what's the main reason that you wanted to choose the 19th century? You know, I, I don't know if I chose it as much as I was born in 1957. So I was a was what, four or five, six years old during the Civil War Centennial. And I think that made an impression on me. That's, that's one explanation anyway. That's the only thing I can point to that's concrete. And the second part to the quiet room, the female academy, let's lead into that. What? Yeah. What? Um, why did you call it female academy? Because much of it takes place at the Albany Female Academy, which was a real school. It was that the Albany Female Academy was founded in 1813. It is still in operation, in fact, operating as the Albany Academy for girls. So it, it, uh, it has the oldest women's alumna association in the world. I did not realize that there was an Albany Female Academy when I started writing into what was then one novel. There were a lot of very odd, serendipitous things that happened to me in the course of writing these quiet room and female academy were originally written as one book. But I very quickly found that in trying to find a publisher, if one does not have a publishing track record, then the great majority of publishers are not interested in anything that is even approaching 100,000 words. Those two novels together were about 120,000 words. And I also became aware that publishers like series, they see it, and rightly so. They see it as an opportunity to sell two books or three books or four books, as opposed to just one big book. So, so I, I had written Psychotherapy with Ghosts, these two books together as one book was trying to sell them to a publisher already starting on a sequel and thinking, I don't know if I can come up with another 120,000 word sequel. So, I had the brilliant idea, worked anyway, so brilliant enough, right? I had the idea of, this is what we do. We take the first 120,000 word book, we cut it in half, and the third book is another 65,000 words. So, when I presented the whole thing as a trilogy under the umbrella title, Psychotherapy with Ghosts, I was able eventually to find a publisher. But literally, I probably did get a hundred rejections. Yeah. Well, yeah. Now, I looked up a small list, well, obviously the list could be longer, but there's quite a few authors that are blind and visually impaired. And one of them is Oliver Sacks, Alice Walker, James Thurber, and so on. So, you know, there's more. For those that want to tackle who are visually impaired and they want to be a writer as a career, do you have any advice that you could give our viewing audience? You know, some people are scared when they write, some, you know, some people channel their thoughts when they write. Do you have any advice to anybody that would like to be a writer? Yeah, I would say two things. Yeah. Don't. Don't even try it. Yeah, if you think you're gonna make a career out of it. No, you're not. That's, you would have better luck buying scratch tickets to be altogether candid, right? Why do you say that? It's a very, it's a very difficult thing to break into. Nobody makes money at it. If a person is under the under the impression that they're going to have some kind of income stream, that's highly unlikely. That is highly unlikely. So you suggest that people have something else to back up? You have to. You have to. Yes. So, you know, I'm a psychotherapist. I also teach all of these things. So I have not made, I haven't made any money. These books have cost me much more just in researching than I ever made in royalties or I ever actually expect to make in royalties. The other part, the other part of my answer to that is you're asking me if someone is disabled and they want to go into writing? Yeah, we focus on abilities, but go ahead. Yeah. My advice would be focus on writing. Don't focus on your disability. I would say it's immaterial. Because if you're not a good writer, I don't care what you write or how disabled you are. Nobody wants to read it. Nobody wants to read it anyway because you're unknown. So how does a person make themselves known? Just keep writing and writing? Keep writing and keep promoting. It's like a never-ending door-to-door salesman life. I'm always hawking books. And very frequently they get given away, but I'm always selling books. I'm always trying to promote them constantly, one way or another in every way that I can. Whether it's by word of mouth, whether it's public speaking, whether it's a venue like this, social media, I have a YouTube channel. I'm putting up a commercial on YouTube, so producing a commercial for that. I have a Facebook page, of course. Publishers, as much as I have personally no interest in social media, right? If you have no interest in social media, well, okay, then why do you use it? Is it a catalyst to make things better for people who want to read your books? I use it principally and initially because publishers will not consider a submission from someone who has no social media presence. They see things like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, all of those things. They see that as the principal means to promote books. That used to be the publisher's job, but that was the publisher's job from the 20th century. In this 21st century, publishers have given that job to their authors by and large. It's up to the author to promote their books. Publishers see social media as the principal means to do that. What I have since discovered, in my experience, is that it doesn't really matter how many visits on a Facebook page. It doesn't really seem to affect sales. I think that that is in part because the average time somebody is looking at the screen when you're at a site like Facebook is something like two or three seconds. It's very difficult to get anything across. I have switched my emphasis to YouTube on the belief expectation. I think I am correct in this that if a person goes on YouTube, they are already settling down to watch a five minute, a 10, a 30, maybe an hour long video, an entire show, a program like this. They are set up for a more extensive longer duration of attention. I think that a YouTube channel has more potential to sell books than Facebook. Let's talk about psychotherapy with ghosts. Since you're in the psychotherapy field, what made you want to write that? Is the book set up as though you were interviewing the ghosts themselves? Can you explain more about that? Parts of the book are literally psychotherapy sessions between the main 20th century protagonist and a ghost. Can you explain those that don't know what is a protagonist? Main character. Main character in any fiction. Can you give an example? The premise of the whole series is that in two parallel plot lines, at two points in time, in 1970 a Manhattan disillusioned failed psychotherapist quits his practice and decides to start his life over again as an antique dealer. He buys an abandoned building on the shore of Lake Champlain, intending to make that his home as base of that operations and discovers that one of the upstairs room in the house is haunted by the ghost of a beautiful young woman. So against his, against his better judgment and against his insistence that he's never going back into practicing psychotherapy, he finds himself sitting up all night long speaking with this woman. And of course falls in love with her. It has complications in his own personal love life. The other plot takes place more or less in 1840 and it is the story of that woman's life and what happened to her to cause her to become trapped between life and death. Did you base psychotherapy, did you base it on your own life or pieces of your own life and why was that? The answer to that is yes, though I would, I would hasten to add that only recently did someone point out to me, Joe, you were an antique dealer and now you're a psychotherapist. This guy was a psychotherapist and became an antique dealer. You switched it around. I switched it and it honestly didn't even occur to me. You would call that a blind spot in psychology, right? What is meant by a blind spot? There's something that's patently obvious to anyone else but the individual is oblivious to it. So yeah, the main protagonist in 1970, he is in some ways a lot like me. There are many objects in the house which are objects which I have in the past owned. In some cases still do own. You know, I spent first 35 years of my life as a person with ordinary eyesight consumed of antiques. So I know these things very well and I remember them in great detail. So those objects and that life, that way of life is drawn from my memory quite a bit. But also his experiences as a psychotherapist are drawn from my current, my more current or contemporary experiences. Do you miss, since you are blind and you had your sight, do you miss not seeing, yes or no, and how has that made you more, you know, or made you better as a person? Let's see if I can rephrase that. Well, do I miss having eyesight? I would say yes but not as much as I expected I would. Okay, can you explain why? I would say that in the first few years of being completely blind, which I am completely blind. I have no light perception whatsoever. So there's nothing there. It's just a gray amorphous plane. In the first couple of years or a few years I was much more cognizant of not being able to see things. But, you know, you can get used to just about everything and I lead, I lead just as much of a visual life as I ever did. I'm just not necessarily seeing with eyesight what is actually out there. But, you know, the occipital lobe in my brain, back here where eyesight happens, that's as active as it ever has been. I dream visually and I keep going. And I'm constantly, I'm constantly visualizing everything. So I'm visualizing this right right now. I visualize everything all the time. Now my, and the odd phenomena is that I develop because of that visual memories of things that I've never seen. Now, how is that and why is that? The visual memory part. Why of that is because I'm the same person as I was as the visual person. As the sighted Joseph Covey is the same person sitting here. He just can't see with eyesight now. But he still thinks like a sighted person. He still has this tremendous library of still and moving pictures in his mind to draw from. So my thinking processes are the same. My creative processes are the same. People have commented that these novels are very visual. And I guess they are. And I have visualized everything that takes place in them. Well, what is your, before we end, because we have a couple of minutes left, what is your future goal as an author or a psychotherapist or both? I wouldn't say I have any real future goals as a psychotherapist except to continue doing what I'm doing. As an author, I'd like to produce at least one more novel. I'd like to produce, I am working on a non-fiction work right now. Do you see any of your books turning into a movie or a documentary or any of that? Of course. But that's every author's fantasy. So of course I do, sure. But you know, the odds that that will happen are not great. You know, Larry, you asked me a few minutes ago the extent to which these books are, maybe in some way, autobiographical. And I would be remiss if I did not add that the point of these books really is about our relationship with God. I'm not a religious person. But if you had known me 30 or 40 years ago, you would have known me as the most atheistic, anti-God person you'd ever met. And that is very much not the case for me now. I am not actively religious in the sense of an organized religion, but my relationship with a God is very important to me. So in the course of these novels, the protagonist goes from being a staunch atheist to becoming someone who believes that there is a God, and he comes to believe that because of his experience with the ghost, it's a symbionic thing. Because as he puts it, you cannot believe in ghosts and not believe in God. If you accept the existence of a spiritual dimension, then you are accepting that there is a God or a spirituality out there. So she, the ghost, saves his life because she takes him from being an atheist into someone who believes that there is a God of some sort. And he saves her life because she is trapped in that crevice between life and death because of her inability to forgive God for the events of her life. So she needs him as much as he needs her. And that is the real, that is the real story. And with that said, I would like to thank you for joining us on this edition of Abledon and Annette. And what are you going to have me back? That's the real question. Very soon. Is there... I'm just warming up. Yeah, you wanted to see, it was kind of, well it's not comical, you wanted a three-hour block. Can you tell people where they can reach, where they can reach you if they want to get some of your books or get in contact about your writing? These books are available anywhere books are sold. You can go to any bookstore and they can order it for you. If you go to the Barnes & Noble in South Burlington, they have it on the shelf. They can be ordered from Amazon. They can be ordered in all electronic forms. Kobo, Kindle, all of those things. You can get books anywhere. Joe Covey is also on YouTube. And for more information on Abledon Annette and what you've seen on today's show and many other shows, you can go to www.orgamedia.net, www.orgamedia.net. This has been a wonderful episode of Abledon Annette. Arlene is not here today. I'm Lauren Seiler. See you next time. Major sponsors for Abledon Annette include Green Mountain Support Services, Empowering People with Disabilities to Live Home in the Community, Washington County Mental Health, Where Hope and Support Come Together. Media sponsors for Abledon Annette include Park Chester Times, Muslim Community Report, www, this is the Bronx.info, Associated Press Media Editors, New York Power Online Newspaper, U.S. Press Corps, Domestic and International, Anchor FM and Spotify. Partners for Abledon Annette include Yachad of New York and New England, where everyone belongs, the Orthodox Union, the Division for the Blind and Visually Impaired of Vermont, the Vermont Association for the Blind and Visually Impaired, Central Vermont Habitat for Humanity, and Montpelier Sustainable Coalition, Montefiore Medical Center of the Bronx, Rose of Kennedy Center of Bronx, New York, Albert Einstein College of Medicine of the Bronx, Abledon Annette has been seen in the following publications, Park Chester Times, www, this is the Bronx.com, New York Power Online Newspaper, Muslim Community Report, www.h.com and the Montpelier Bridge. Abledon Annette is part of the following organizations, the National Academy of Television, Arts and Sciences, Boston, New England Chapter and the Society of Professional Journalists.