Stand up comic, actor, and podcaster Erin Foley will be in Columbus on February 8 at the Woodlands Tavern. I talked to her about comedy, her Sports without Balls podcast, and my inability to understand sports or do stand-up.
Erin Foley poster
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Tuesdays with Morrie is the best selling memoir of all time but author Mitch Albom spans genres with sports writing, fiction, and nonfiction. His latest, The First Phone Call from Heaven, is a novel exploring themes of loss and religion, and Mitch tells me about the book and the people he most likes to mentor.
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Daniel H. Pink, bestselling author of Drive and a great TED talk, returns with his latest, To Sell Is Human: The Surprising Truth About Moving Others. In this interview, he talks about his thesis that almost everybody is trying to sell themselves at work. And then I take him off topic to talk about how these techniques can be used to get kids to clean their rooms.
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Ohio State University’s Chief Data Officer James Brenza and Metcalf and Associate’s CEO Maureen Metcalf have a common interest: how does Big Data illustrate leadership choices? Brenza and Metcalf recently published an article looking at the role of Big Data in integral leadership and they tell me about the intersection of these two fields. Listen in to hear how Brenza defines data scientist and why they are ok with being wrong.
Craft with Maureen Metcalf and James Brenza
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This week’s guest Byron Edgington describes his memoir The Sky Behind Me and reasons why he became a helicopter pilot even though this mode of transportation has no “hands free” setting.
Cover of The Sky Behind Me by Byron Edgington
Here’s this week’s Craft promo with Byron Edgington, author of The Sky Behind Me.
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Every now and then I read an article like this Time to Write? Go Outside that gives advice on where or how to write and it makes me think again about the many pieces of advice I’ve heard from authors over the last five years. Sometimes I imagine that if I put them all together, they would immediately contradict each other so thoroughly that no one would bother listening to practitioners again. Other times, I think I see a theme in the advice I’ve heard: practice stay in the chair, keep writing and kill your critic.
If, like me, you’ve listened to Prairie Home Companion for years, you know the Hopeful Gospel Quartet. Half of the Quartet is Robin and Linda Williams, a folk duo with 40 years of performing in their past. Their latest album is Back 40, an interesting retrospective of their career in which they re-recorded various songs that had for various reasons not been as successful or as well-known as they’d liked them to be.
They wrote or co-wrote 11 of the 14 songs on the album with the rest by luminaries like Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan, and Hank Williams. Tune in to find out the background to some of the songs and which one of their albums I just couldn’t get to work for me, not matter how many times I listened.
They will be performing at the Midland Theater on November 21 at 7:30. Be there!
The Craft of Robin & Linda William
Doug Dangler
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Dar Williams has been singing, playing, and writing great music for a while, but Columbus has a special place in her heart since it’s where, in 1994, she opened for another well-known singer at Six String Concerts and gained a duet partner for her cover of a great Pink Floyd song. First person to ID the song or the partner gets a free book (pick up at WCBE 90.5FM in Columbus, Ohio). Catch her in Columbus with Six String Concerts on November 9th.
Craft interview with Dar Williams
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Valerie Plame came to the spotlight when her cover as a CIA operative was revealed by conservative columnist Robert Novak. Since then, she’s written an examination of the incident in Fair Game: How a Top CIA Agent Was Betrayed by Her Own Government. Now she’s co-written a spy thriller starring a female CIA operative named Vanessa Pierson. Sensing some real-life overlap? Listen to her explain it all in this week’s Craft
Craft-2013-10-11-Valerie_Plame
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