Common Knowledge

On our sixth episode Pittsburgh poet and writer Madeline Izzo will read two of her poems,  discuss her novel, Bloodof the Inkas and explain her creative process.  We will hear about her inspirations, writing methods, publishing, and also her personal battles fending off cancer.  

Madeline’s first poem, The Rivers Beneath Us, is about her home city of Pittsburgh and the streams that have been buried under this modern city of concrete.  During a heavy rainfall the water emerges from its shallow grave like a dangerous ghost intent on terrorizing the living.  The second poem, On Legacy, is about the mental, physical and spiritual affect of her experiencing breast cancer and amastectomy.

On our fifth episode, Cleveland attorney Terry Gilbert describes his experiences as an activist lawyer.  Terry represented members of the Lakota Sioux Tribe during the legal battles of the 1970s stemming from the uprising atWounded Knee, South Dakota. He also discusses his efforts to persuade the Cleveland Indians baseball team to remove the Chief Wahoo logo and change the name of the team.  More recently, he has established a wrongful conviction clinic at the Cleveland State University law school as a proud legacy to his lifetime achievements.

In today's episode, Iranian native and Ohio resident, AliMakarachi, discusses his experience growing up in Iran, protesting the Shah, entering the Iranian army to fight Iraq in 1980, and his perspective on the current conflict between Iran and the United States.  The Iraqi invasion of Iran unified andmobilized the country in 1980.  A similar invasion in 2026 could easily do the same. Being from northern Iran, Ali is a native speaker of Turkish Azeri, not Farsi or Persian and he explains how the tension between these two languages persists today in Iran.

This is the story of Omar Kasalo who was born in the eastern part of the Democratic Republic of Congo in 1999.  When war broke out with Rwanda, he and his family fled as a 10-year-old to the nearby country of Burundi. He discovered tennis in Burundi and participated in international tennis tournaments as a young boy.  But he also lived for several years inrefugee camps in eastern Africa, dealing with, among other things, witches and black magic. Omar and his family then immigrated to the United States where he recently graduated with a degree in mechanical engineering. Omar tells his fascinating tale to us at Common Knowledge.

A special interview on this second episode. Attorney Karl Kammer shares some of his wartime experiences serving in General George Patton's Third Army in Czechoslovakia, guarding the prison for the Nuremberg war crimes trial, practicing law for 70 years and meeting Ukranian President Zelenskyy at the 80th D-Day celebration in France.

On this episode of Common Knowledge, former Coast Guardsman Joe Bercik describes life in the Coast Guard, rescuing boaters on Long Island Sound and buying and transporting a 44 foot Coast Guard boat from Seattle to Ohio.