Craft: Exploring Creativity

The daughter of a 1950’s widowed working mother, Carolyn Aaron grew up in an unusual circumstances, some of which she’s used in her acting. She calls her civil rights activist mother an “inverse influence” on her character of Shirley Maisel, because her mother “would not have any relationship to Shirley whatsoever.”

Aaron has plenty of other projects besides acting, including her podcast Angst And Daisies, a call to political action, which she looks at as “I feel like everything I do… has to do with…how do we make things better?” For her, it comes down to taking a measured view and not trying to make huge changes but to “make a difference to one [person].”

So make a difference to your day by listening to Carolyn Aaron.

Comic Sumukh Torgalkar will return to central Ohio after a few years on the West Coast to record his second comedy album at Madlab on June 3. Listen in as we discuss his comedy interests, the impact of the pandemic, and what kind of comedy he prefers to do.

Singer-songwriter Jeff Black will appear on June 3 with Columbus’ Six String Concert series. He brings a back catalog of 12 albums and a new one that he’s in the process of writing, so be prepared for something potentially new. We talked about his career, his childhood musical interests, and how the pandemic may have played to his strengths of being something of an introvert, a feeling to which I can relate. We also discussed the genre he’s often placed into – roots/Americana-and what this means for him.

And thanks to the magic of Zoom, you can now watch Jeff Black. I once again play the role of the hidden interviewer as I do on WCBE, 90.5 FM every Wednesday at 8 PM.

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.