Craft: Exploring Creativity

Vance Gilbert has released 13 albums so far, with another one on the way that he’s been working on live in concert. When the pandemic struck, he switched to the live streaming concerts every Monday at 7:30pm. For the past 107 weeks, he’s donated 10% of his live stream tip jars to charities with 107 checks sent out so far. Vance Gilbert will appear with Six String Concerts on May 6.

In and out of care facilities for many years, Dr. Carolyn Bailey Lewis persevered and became director and general manager of OUB public media at Ohio University in Athens, where she served for 13 years as the first woman and first African American to lead this entity and the first woman to be emerita. While recovering in different health care facilities, she decided to write a book about her experiences and those around her, which became Love and Loss: The Storied Nature of Nursing Home Care. Listen in to hear her remarkable journey of healing and writing.

Author, speaker and media specialist Christina Dorr, PhD, will appear as part of the Ohioana virtual Book Festival on April 29-May 1. Her most recent book is Profiles in Resilience: Books for Children and Teens That Center the Lived Experience of Generational Poverty. Dorr started work on this book after discovering that librarians who had grown up in middle class or higher income homes had difficulties understanding children living in generational poverty. Since Dorr identifies with growing up in poverty, she brought her insight into the issues that the books explore.

I think I became aware of The Talk that African American parents have with their children a few years ago, most likely during the start of the Black Lives Matter movement. This is probably one of the surest signs that I have lived a life of white privilege. I’d grown up around casual racism with the N-word being an accepted part of many people’s vocabulary, so my not knowing about The Talk was par for the course.

Brendan Kiely had in some ways a similar and in others a very different kind of youth, and that’s led him to confront racism and write The Other Talk: Reckoning with Our White Privilege. He’ll appear with at this year’s virtual Ohioana Book Festival from Friday, April 29 to Sunday, May 1, 2022.

Listen in as we discuss his book and efforts at understanding racism and how he feels he’ll deal with it with his children.

Ron Allan from Big Voice Productions in central Ohio has performed and taught voice acting throughout the Midwest and has over 30 years of experience. As he said during our discussion, “somewhere, right now, this minute, I’m on a radio commercial, a TV commercial, an industrial narration, a phone message, or an audio book.”

We discussed the background needed for voice acting and the potential careers that are available. Currently, there’s less demand for the traditional announcer voice and more for conversational voices, or as Ron put it: roles from “a grandfather to a child, and any age in between: the soccer mom, the stereotypes, the football coach in the locker room, the cop, the lawyer, the professor. There’s tons of roles to be played, even voices of aliens and animals.” Is there a voice acting role for you? Check out our discussion and decide for yourself.

Cleveland poet George Bilgere’s latest collection is Central Air, which was released March 2022. He hosts “Wordplay” on Cleveland Public Radio, which has been described as the car talk of poetry. He joins the Ohioana virtual Book Festival on April 29 through May 4.

Bilgere writes poems about his life and locations from Berlin to Cleveland Heights and all stops in between.

The last time we spoke, 10 years ago, he “was gloriously free.” Listen in to find out what’s happened since then and why it’s never funny when ribs are involved.

Celtic Folk rock group Tempest has a history of playing pirate songs and playing at WCBE. They will be in town on April 8 at Byrne’s Pub. I spoke with founding member and lead singer/electric mandolinist, Lief Sorbye, about how the band writes. music, especially during downtimes like the pandemic.

So listen to the interview and then get to Byrne’s Pub where you can do your imitation of a pirate.

On her way to selling over 30 million books, Lisa Scottoline has had plenty of time to imagine what’s the worst that could happen in any situation. And fortunately, she’s written about it.

This time, it’s tailgating that turns into carjacking that sends a family into hiding. Her latest novel What Happened to the Bennetts looks at what happens to a family under pressure. She’ll be in Columbus virtually on Tuesday, April 5 at 7 pm with Gramercy Books in Bexley.

Lisa Scottoline is a pleasure to talk to and I recommend her books. Listen in to the podcast and then get her latest, What Happened to the Bennetts.

It’s that time again: time to reach into your wallets and purses and neighbor’s couch cushions and help support central Ohio’s NPR station, WCBE!

In today’s show, I talk with Greg Moebius, General Manager at WCBE. We discuss the theme of the spring fund drive–community–and how WCBE supports a myriad of community programs. In Greg’s words:

So donate what you can at WCBE.org!

You ever look at something and think, “Yeah, that’s hiding a terrible secret?” Tonight’s story is just that kind of event, a moment that made me shiver with fear when I saw a deadly contraption roaming the sidewalks and streets of a local institute of higher education.

Enjoy this warm little celebration of the increasing mechanization of our daily lives. I’ll continue being the old curmudgeon in the corner, wondering why we have to replace people with machines and when it will end.

A professor in my graduate school was fond of saying that technology offered constraints and affordances meaning pluses and minuses in academese. Sometimes, all it affords is constraints, like it did for poor Karen.

Thanks to Freesound.org user Unfa for the soundtrack to tonight’s show.