 Good morning and welcome to my show, Moments with Melinda. I am your host, Melinda Moulton, and today I am overwhelmed and so excited to have as my guest, Daniel Hecht. How are you, Dan? I'm pretty good. Yeah. So far, so good. Doing well. I want to thank you so much for being on my show. To my viewers, let me tell you a little bit about Daniel Hecht. Moulton is an author, environmentalist, musician, nonprofit, organizational development consultant, educator, project manager, grant writer, and administrator for educational, environmental, and arts initiatives. And I know there's a lot more that you do, but that's, is that pretty good, pretty good overview? Yeah. That's what I've been doing for the last 20 or 30 years anyway. Well, well, you know, let's start by going back in time to your, your early days and talk to me a little bit about your life growing up and maybe a little bit about somebody who inspired you in your life. You know, it's very interesting. I was fortunate to be born into an unusual community in New York state. This was back in 1946, my mother and father moved to Croton Falls, New York. Croton on Hudson, a little town near the Connecticut border. And they got an old house, a house from the 1730s and moved in there. And it was just after the war. And so they had moved to Washington, D.C. from Chicago, and they had a lot of wonderful friends from Chicago who rallied around a group centered at the Art Institute of Chicago. So they're all artists. They're Bohemians. They're people who look like anarchists, had beards, and they all painters and photographers and writers and musicians. And what happened was, for whatever reason, after the war, a number of them congregated around my parents in that community. There was nothing formal. It had no community name. It wasn't a cult or a commune. What happened was their friend Al and Keith, who had been in the army, got out and came up there to visit and love the area, so much very rural area, and found an old building, huge old brick building, way out in the woods. And it was the ideal artists loft. So Al and Keith moved in and they spent their army discharge pay buying this huge old abandoned factory building and seven acres in West Chester County, New York, for $2,000. So they moved in there and over many, many years fixed it up. An interesting site. So that's where I was born. And around them, oh, then my aunt moved there. And he and she and her husband were ceramic artists. And then Al married somebody and her father was a famous sculptor. And he bought some land and joining theirs. And so pretty soon there's this whole community of social outsiders, Bohemians, artists, liberal, political sentiments, communistic, and yet firstly independent also. Interestingly enough, to cut to one of the chases is my father's best friend was Keith and Al also. But interestingly, later on, Keith had two kids. I ended up marrying Keith's daughter and we've been married for 31 years. So my wife is my father's daughter, my father's best friend. We have two sons. So the tradition continues here in Vermont. So I grew up surrounded by people who are very capable. It was a tiny Florence in the in the woods of West Chester. My father was in international public relations. So he traveled all over the world to the Philippines, to Venezuela, to to Ceylon, to Hong Kong, to, oh, I don't know, everywhere, Ecuador, Ethiopia. And he mainly worked for governments, helping the government promote new programs. So that was what he did for a living. He's the only one who had any money, but even his money was hit and miss. We had a good contract, they had money. Everybody else was poor as church mice. But Keith, my father and eventual father-in-law was a master carpenter craftsman. He did museum quality restoration of things. And he, Al Goodspeed, who also bought into that great big building. Master carpenter and a fabulous oil painter. We have some of his colorist paintings and so on. My aunt and uncle got hugely famous for their ceramics. They were on the cover of Life Magazine. In the Brussels World's Fair. They have an on permit display in the Museum of Modern Art. So eventually they went on to this, you know, an incredibly prolific, capable group. When I was a kid, I grew up just learning by absorbing all this, all these skills. How extraordinary. Yeah, so that's the that's the origins. My father died when I was three, though. And then my mother and my three sips and I moved all over the country. Wherever it was, she could find a job or find cheap living. So I was raised by a single mom and had three older kids, older siblings, all of whom are artists. And what did your mom do? She did whatever she is a brilliant woman. But she she did whatever she had to for a living. She was a secretary in the 1950s. Women didn't make a lot of money then. They don't make enough now, but she did what she had to support four kids. So she was a secretary. She eventually became a head of various programs like she was head of the Volunteer Corps of Cook County Hospital in Chicago, World's largest hospital. I think they had 5000 volunteers to supervise. But yeah. So then later in life, she quit doing all that and just made a living off her art. Fabulous. Amazing. Well, I'm a Katie Gibbs girl, so I can sympathize with your mom. So now you lived in many, many places. Now, what brought her to Vermont and what keeps you here? Oh, well, I'll tell you. So remember, I was born in New York state, but then I moved to Wisconsin, a remote farmhouse there, no central heating or for a while, no running water. And I moved to rural Virginia to Washington, DC, then to rural Virginia, then to Chicago, then to north of Chicago. I believed in, oh, I forgot to mention that when I was young, lived in the Philippines where my father had a contract. So I grew up in the Philippines. I learned to walk and talk in the Philippines, in Manila. And I've lived in California, Vermont. But what brought me here was I just self-published an album of solo guitar music. I had fallen in love with the guitar when I was 15 and classical guitar. Andres Agovia playing masters of the guitar. And so I studied on my own. Then I went to a conservatory for a while. I was pretty good. Then I started writing my own music for steel string guitar using classical technique. I don't know if you ever heard of John Fahey, legendary guitarist. I actually have that in my in my interview. We was John Fahey. We followed. He was my 60s idol. Oh, yeah. So he was a cult figure in there. And so this is John Fahey. And then his really snazzy player named Leo Katke came along. Oh, my God. I synthesized classical music and their music and Indian classical music and English folk music a lot in my solo guitar music. So what happened was I put out this album self-published. Oh, I was encouraged by this guy named Moondog, Lewis Hardin, famous guy, six feet tall, big beard, wore red clothes and a viking cap. And he was blind and he was a composer. And so Moondog lived with me and my roommates in Madison, Wisconsin and a farm we had there. So Moondog had put out his own first album before he goes recording on Columbia Records, along with the Beatles and Janice Joplin. And so he encouraged me to cut my own record the way he did. And so I did. And then I was promoting this first horrible record, terrible music, horribly. I like to think it's carved by hand with a hatchet into the vinyl. But so I was traveling and I came to Vermont. I had an old girlfriend living going to Goddard College. I felt so in love with the landscape and the people and the funky houses. Remember, this is 1973 and it was you could live here for cheap. Or no, there's no work. But, you know, you could scrounge and I did logging. I did got up firewood, you know, I did fix my own car. Did everything went hungry sometimes. So where'd you settle in Vermont when you came to Vermont with your girlfriend? Where did you land? Well, I came to Plainfield. OK. My ex-girlfriend lived in there at Plainfield. But my current girlfriend, I settled in Plainfield where we were near Goddard and all the activities that Goddard brought to this rural area. So that's how I started. That's how you got here. So now now you you're a celebrate. You are an incredibly celebrated author and your eight novels are published in 14 languages and over 100 editions throughout the world. You are an author of bestsellers. Can you talk to us a bit about your most recent novel, The Body Below from Blackstone Publishing, which has been coined a first rate mystery and beautifully written. Tell us a little bit about that book. Well, I appreciate the kind words. Yeah, so that that's the first book I've written. That's really based here in Central Vermont. My prior book, I guess I should to back up a bit. I got when my music career fell apart, I had to do something for a living. And I figured I'd always been doing some writing. And my musical things were mainly telling stories anyway. They're musical narratives, not riffs or grooves, you know. So when my hands fell apart, I couldn't play music. I couldn't record. I'd recorded three albums and I had traveled all over the world. I played throughout the United States, played at Carnegie Hall twice, played throughout Europe, because my records were released there. And then I did a solo tour of China in 1989. My hands had recovered enough and I wasn't going to miss that. And I came back from that and put my put my guitar in the case, never took it out again, 1989. What? And then I went to the University of Iowa Writers Workshop and got an MFA in writing. So let's back up. Yeah. So what? Tell me a little bit about your hands and tell me so you so you do not ever go and pick up your guitar and sit in strut. No. So it's in the it's in the it's in its case. And it's been there since 1989. Well, I sold it. I had two very, very priceless handmade guitars that I sold. I just a gifted musician. And so you're not you're not drawn to it. You haven't taken up, you know, another, you know, a piece of another instrument. So what what happened? How could that what was it your hand? No, really interesting for a while. I was I was playing and I was playing with some really good people, really top form people, Michael Hedges. I toured with him. Alex Degrassi, George Winston, the pianist was a good friend and played with him a lot. The my my I had a psoriasis on my hands. I also had I was beginning to get arthritis and it was very painful to play. So that explains it. So you moved into into being a writer now. So so I want to I do want to talk about your books. Now, you've got Brossard's Farm is a love story. It's set in Vermont and Turner is the main character. It's about accepting love and this was hailed as a wondrous, unique love story by publishers weekly. And then you did the Cree series, the Cree Black series. And then I want to talk a little bit about Bones of Barbary Coast, which has Cree identifying the remains of a victim of the Great Quake in San Francisco of 1906, which is named Wolfman. So talk to us a little bit about your books. And I just want to tell you then you did the the battle effect, which is that explores the subtle mysteries of the mind of human values or spirituality and personal loyalty and love. And your first novel Skull Session became an overnight sensation sent you into the top of the, you know, the bestseller's list. And you were the worldwide bestseller. It is based on true events and cutting edge neuroscience. So my question to you is your books are laced with science and mystery, psychological exploration and deep mind bending thrillers. Where do you draw your inspiration and mental that that allows you to dive so deeply into your subjects and talk about these books a little bit? Yeah, you know, a lot of it's accidental. And I do, I would advise all writers to expect a certain measure of accident in their careers and in what they write. You know what happened was I went to the University of Iowa, best writing school in the world. I got out thinking I was hot stuff and, you know, applied for jobs at universities. And, you know, I finally applied to Skunk Gulch Community College and somewhere, Iowa, Idaho. And I was told, yeah, thanks, Mr. Heck, we have three hundred and ninety seven applicants of which two hundred eighty are PhDs. I turned out my MFA wasn't worth much in the field. So I knew a lot of really wonderful writers who were getting published or making any money. I had a funny story. Remember, we talked about where I was born, right, in that community? Well, one member of the community outlying was very, very wealthy. She had inherited a lot of money and had bought a former Vanderbilt hunting lodge way up on a hill. And I used to play there as a kid and she and my mother were good friends. It was a very spooky place, this great big house. The living room was 50 feet square. The fireplace you could park your Volkswagen in sideways, you know. But we lost touch with her after many moves. And then when I was living here in Vermont, this is many years ago now, we got a call from her out of the blue. She said, oh, my house has been vandalized. I'm living in California now. She had lived up there alone, you know, the driveways a mile long. And so she said, I don't I hear all my stuff is getting ruined. And Danny, you know, she knew me as a little kid. And you go check because my mother told her I was a carpenter and would, you know, cabinet maker. And so I said, yeah, so I went down and it was horribly vandalized. I mean, it was freakishly vandalized. The other thing with mysterious was she had left all her stuff there. I mean, talking about this 50 foot living room was three feet deep in mink coats and busted Louis Kahn's chairs and every other expensive thing. And why would people just trash it instead of stealing it? I, you know, anyway, the walls are ripped open as if somebody had been looking for something and it goes on and on. And it was so scary a story I would tell it at over dinner. People said, boy, that's the scariest thing I've ever heard. And so I finally said, well, you know, maybe I should just write a novel about that. So I did. And that was skull session. And I, you know, I thought I was writing a literary novel later on. I had never read a thriller. I didn't know what a thriller was. I just read literary stuff. I thought I wrote a literary thing in it. I was fascinated with neuroscience. So I had my main character was Tourette and there's a reason for that. And so I, you know, I finished this book, I sent it out, I get an agent. She puts it up and all of a sudden there's an auction with every major house bidding on it. And I basically ended up making about $2 million in my first two books. So that sounds like a lot of money, but you know, it takes a while to write those suckers in your agent. For an author, for a writer, for an author, that's a lot of money back then. No doubt about it. No doubt about it. You know, my, I had my first year of getting that advance. My income taxes were $387,000. I had never in my life in aggregate earned that much money, let alone paid it in taxes. So I had the easy come, easy go. So, you know, writing became your world, your work and your and your income. And you focused and you wrote eight, eight novels. And yeah, well, I tell you, it does, you get hooked on it. Plus, I found I really liked it when it's going well, writing is the funnest, bestest. And when it's going badly, it's hell, you know. But you're, but you're really accomplished. You're an accomplished, important writer. And so that's fascinating. Talk to me. I want to talk a little bit about the Brassard's Farm, the love story. It's set in Vermont and Ann Turner is the main character. And as I said, it's about accepting love. Talk to us a little bit, because that's not your only book set in Vermont, or is it? Let's see. Well, it's the first one fully set in Vermont. And the newest one, The Body Below, is also set totally in Vermont. Yeah. So when I first moved to Vermont, at some point, I bought some really remote acres, you know, for 30 bucks an acre, way up on a mountain in Peach and Pond, above Peach and Pond, way up on Hooker Mountain there. And I lived there summers, six months of the year, sometimes alone, because my girlfriend was finishing her degree, had a job in Madison, Wisconsin, still. And so I lived out in really remote woods for bears and moose and mysterious things. And so I've also worked at manual labor. I've been a carpenter and a logger. And then I got into, in my organizational development side, I spent a lot of time working on Vermont farm, dairy farm issues. So the story of that love affair or that study of love is a romantic love, for sure. But it's also coming to love a place and to love through learning to work hard. She works harder, she eventually, you know, buys this land, moves out, lives in a tent, and works on the dairy farm nearby. It's a small dairy farm, struggling as they all are, and learns to love hard work and the honesty and integrity that comes from hard work and the difficult parts of getting up when it's 20 below and going out to milk at 4.30 in the morning. It's tough stuff. And dealing with 120 pounds of manure a day from those cows is tough. So I really wanted to write a book that encapsulated some of the things I had learned from living in the deep woods and to celebrate the wisdom and durability of rural peoples and rural experiences. And women. And women, yeah. It's interesting and a good question would be, Daniel, you've written eight novels. The Cree Black series were focused on a, were written in the woman's voice and Turner's first person woman's voice. The body below is half a woman and half a man written there. I did buy. So what's that about? And the answer is I don't know. That was a question. That was where I was heading is. Yeah. And I, I don't know what it is. That's, I didn't, I didn't do that intentionally. You have a feminine side. Do you have, are you in touch with the relationship with your mother being raised with a single mom? Could be part of it. Your mother and the strength of your mom? You know, nowadays we place such primacy on gender. Well, I'm gender fluid and I'm gender neutral. I'm non-binary. I'm, I'm they, I'm he, I'm she. And the horrible thing about that is it actually promotes a sense of there being hard barriers between genders. And I don't think anybody's that well-defined and simple in their makeup. How fascinating. I think you feel that, you know, I just, the person who wanted to tell those stories happened to be a woman. I have received a few people say, this guy doesn't know how women think. And my answer is what women think a single way. There's one way that women think that's so sexist. Makes me sick. Mainly I get is Daniels Hecht woman is a completely credible woman. How does he think that way? And I, I don't, I just think like me, but except that Ann Turner in, in On Brasses Farm is a lot like Cree Black, the protagonist of her three books. Right. They're both sensitive. They're introspective. They're compassionate. They're courageous. They're vulnerable. And so I, I love them very much. Oh, I, and, and you're, and your readers to do, I just, for my viewers out there, we're talking with Daniel Hecht to his, who is an author, environmentalist, musician, a renaissance man, but you can go to his website, which is Daniel Hecht, d-a-n-i-e-l-h-e-c-h-t dot com and learn more about Dan and his books and his music. Now I want to, I want to move to the fact that you were a director of the Vermont Agency of Agriculture and that you produced the Farm Energy Handbook and you edited and co-wrote with 20 renewable energy experts. Talk to us about this work. What, what moved you into this environmental work? Well, just to be correct, I wasn't a director of the agency. I was a director of Vermont Environmental Consortium, which is a statewide nonprofit. Right. Read businesses and environmental stuff. We had all the colleges, we're members of that, all the renewable energy companies and many more engineering firms and so on. I have ran that outfit for a number of years and then got to know everybody in renewable energy and in, especially associated with bio-digestion, farm bio-digestion. But so when the agency of agriculture, I, oh, I know where it came from. I put on a conference, major conference up at the Sheraton up in Burlington. 400 people came, a lot of them farmers. It was called agriculture and the environment. And so one of the topics there was, of course, renewable energy for farms, you know, for what can farmers do? And it's not just bio-digestion, but that's one aspect of it. But that's where I started working with farmers a lot. So after that, the agency of agriculture approached me and commissioned me to put together this book. I called upon, oh, 20 or more experts in the field. We did, you know, micro-hydro, micro-wind, ethanol, bio-digestion, conservation, efficiency, you know, geothermal, every kind of photovoltaics, passive solar, you know, et cetera. And it's all in that book was the first of its kind. And Ben and Jerry's donated the artwork and cover artwork and the printing. The agency paid for the printing. It's a good, full-colored book. I'm very proud of it. Where can folks get it? Where can folks get this? You can't get it anymore. They were only, oh, that's... 5,000 were printed and they were sent free to every farmer in Vermont. Magnificent. And all the legislators and all the agency heads. You also did the green makeover video, which you produced and scripted. And eventually your work led to the construction in 2013 of a $3.5 million food waste and manure biodigester. Montec campus. I mean, you were not just writing about environmentalism. You were making stuff happen. Well, I got to know everybody. You know, I had a syndicated column for a while for a couple of years called The Green Grapevine and came out every two weeks. And I interviewed people and learned about what they did. You know, they might be in renewable energy or they might do, put in a foam insulation or they might be engineers or they might be colleges. If I had to do the environment, I got to know everybody in the state. So it was pretty nice. And so out of that, it came pretty... I got to know Senator Leahy, Senator Sanders, agency secretaries, the governor. I worked closely with the governor, lieutenant governor. So I went on international trade missions with Governor Douglas and Lieutenant Governor Brian Duby. And so I had my fingers on the pulse of what was happening. Oh, developments in LEDs. I knew about that, you know, nanotech. I did an article about a company that was working to develop nanofiber water filtration things that you could, if you're in a drought area, you just have these straws and they're full of nanofibers. You can actually drink out of a mud puddle. You know, a lot of stuff like that. Some of these technologies worked. Some didn't work so well, but they... So I had my finger on the pulse. So I worked with the Waste District here and Vermont tech. And we applied for and got a $600,000 Department of Energy grant to study food waste to energy biodeigest. So I ran that program, that study for three years, and in which time, Vermont tech really wanted to build a biodeigester. So we looked for another bunch of money and they did build it on that campus. Never worked out, though. Neither the study nor the biodeigester unfortunately throws a complicated technical reason. It is, and, you know, I hear you, but we have to do better. So talk to me, Dan. I want to talk to you a little bit about COVID and how this pandemic affected you and your views about the future of our humanity. You got to keep it short. I mean, we're definitely going to go over, but I want to go over with you. I'm going over my time with you here. But I want your views about the future of our humanity on the planet, a planet which might prefer for us not to stay here. Yeah, COVID for us was kind of not so bad. We live in downtown Montpelier. We had a son who was finishing high school and starting college. He had a girlfriend and so he was part of, she was part of our pod of people who could come into our house. You know, so she was here a lot. So we had enough social flow through. We never felt isolated. And by nature, I was finishing up whatever book I was working on, probably finishing off on Brassard's farm and starting the buddy below. So I work at home anyway. So my consulting, I mostly am working from home. But about a pandemic. I mean, this fact that the whole world stopped, just stopped. Yeah. Now in the Babel Effect, the people there, I studied epidemiology to write the Babel Effect. And I can tell you that for 30 years, every epidemiologist in the world has saying the planet is going to blow because it has every kind of, all the mechanisms are in place for a global pandemic. As it turns out, COVID became it. But we have a lot of transportation between cities. We have people living densely together. We have constant exchange of goods and services all over the place. So everybody's been saying for years that we're ready. And it's so hard for the public to accept. But science stepped up and look where we are today. Now, I also want to take you into the world of our democracy and talk to you about how we can function in a society that's being fed lies by everyone. And what has happened to our country and where we are headed? And how are you feeling about this, about where we are? Because you were born in 1950, as was I. So we've been through a lot, right? We've been through a lot in our 73 years. But where do you see our country where we are right now? I'm not too optimistic. What I don't like is that, I don't like the... Look, we were creatures of the age of reason. There was this wonderful explosion of rationality in the 1700s. We had guys like Thomas Jefferson and Isaac Newton and all these lovely science types who were looking for... And on the basis of their understanding, we built secular democracies, which we found to be probably the best form of human society, social organization ever. Great. But now we have to doubt all science, in fact. And I have for years studied psychology and neuroscience. And I still cannot understand the mechanisms by which belief is created or uncreated. All I can learn from my studies now is that efforts to persuade people of something they don't want to believe backfire, it actually makes them believe it harder. And, in fact, a lot of anything that's forced on people... God, I just read a meta study of DEI trainings, diversity, equity, and inclusion trainings that big corporations do and universities do. Good thing, you know, let's accept people of all color shapes. You know what? They actually are county productive. Downstream studies of people who've received them find them to be more prejudicial than before they had them. Before they had them. I'm not real hopeful. I do not like the cultish thing that's going on right now, this personality cult, the denial of any fact, every fact. There seems to be an erosion of faith in democracy. We actually want an authoritarian leader to make everybody toe the line. A lot of the world is falling that way. Look at India, look at Pakistan, look at Hungary. So, Dan, thank you for that. I appreciate that. So, what words of wisdom would you give to our children and their children who will be living another 40, 70, 100 years from now on this planet? What's your words of wisdom for your own children? You're challenging me here. I am challenging you, my friend. I want to give you a... Yes, I am. I appreciate it. Let me think for a second on that. I think learn a lot of skills, put together a lot of skills. Try to master your physical and mechanical environment a bit. Learn to grow food because when systems break down, you'll get hungry and you wish you had it. I've been working with a group here in Montpelier. It's informal, but it's been six months now. We're really concerned about local food supply. Vermont really raises only about 10% of its edible food. We say 20%, but most of that is alcohol, is beer and spirits, which is our idle mind, those either, but they're not much protein in them. So, keep some basic skills. Stay physically fit. Keep all your parts alive. One thing that kids don't do anymore is read. Even my own sons don't do much reading. They listen to podcasts, but reading a book strings together ideas in a flow that's important to maintain. It contextualizes. Look at context. So what are you working on now? What's your next project? Since I completed the body below, a lot of what I had to do is marketing stuff. Unfortunately, the book came out at the very end of August, last day of August, but we were hit by the flood here in Montpelier on July 10th, including the building. I own a building in Montpelier. I live in one part of it. It's three houses stuck together. Well, one of the houses got flooded. It's below grade. So I had to go fix all that. I do all the carpentry, plumbing, and wiring myself. So I did it all myself. And then there's dealing with small business administration, FEMA, our car, wonderful wiring, our car, which was just fine, but it had some cosmetic work was at the body shop. If it hadn't been here, it would have been fine, but it got flooded at the body shop. And we liked that Subaru out back. Damn. And then with two months of fighting with the insurance company who didn't want to reimburse us for us. So I don't know. It was a long, hard summer. So do you have a book that you're working on now? Are you taking this book? I actually have one I've been working on for many years. And it's called My Father's Novel. And it's almost magical realist. It is based in the present, a guy kind of like me in the present, and flashing back to that period in the late 40s and early 50s and my parents and their artistic community. Fascinating people, amazing adventures and misadventures, constant poverty, constant reassurance in finding others of their same ilk. So I've got about 350 or 400 pages of it. And I just have to write another 100 or so pages of it. That'll be fine. Well, it's a good time to do that. It's winter and we're all sort of hustled in here. And well, Dan Hect, I want to tell you how privileged I am to have you on my show and to share your story with my viewers. And I'm just delighted to get to know you better. Please put me on your mailing list if you're going to do any readings or you're going to, you know, whatever anything you do, I would love to be become your new fan, your new groupie. And thank you for sharing your life and your work and your wisdom with me and my viewers today. Thank you so much, my friend, for being with me. Oh, this has been fun. I hope I've answered some of the questions. Magnificent. I'm so delighted. And to my viewers, I hope you're all doing well. After this last storm we had and that your power has been restored. And I want to wish you a happy new year. And thank you for tuning in and into my show. And I will see you all soon. Thank you very much.