KPFA - Radio Wolinsky

Sue Grafton died on December 28, 2017 at the age of seventy-seven. Best known as the author of a series of mysteries featuring the detective Kinsey Millhone, Sue Grafton was at the forefront of the Sisters in Crime movement — women authors who wrote crime fiction – starting with her first mystery, A is for Alibi in 1982, and continuing the alphabet through Y is for Yesterday. The final book in the series, Z is for Zero, was never written.

On April 17, 1989, on a book tour for F is for Fugitive, and again on April 13, 1992, for I Is for Innocent, Richard Wolinsky and Richard A. Lupoff  spoke with Sue Grafton about the history of her career and her writing process. This program is taken from those two interviews. Originally posted on January 9, 2018.

Complete 1989 interview

Complete 1992 interview

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Noel Casler, blogger and You Tube influencer, developed a large following based on his violation of an NDA, revealing information about Donald Trump gleaned from his six years working on the Celebrity Apprentice program. In this interview recorded by computer on December 4, 2020 and posted on December 6, 2020, he talks about his work and his perceptions of Donald Trump and MAGA.

Noel Casler spent two decades working behind the scenes at live events as a celebrity handler, with such stars as Madonna, Michael Jackson, Bruce Springsteen and many others. But it was in 2015, having experienced Donald Trump on multiple occasions, that he decided to forgo his career and speak on the record about what he knew, first with the Clinton campaign (which chose not to follow up because of hubris and overconfidence) and later on Twitter, where he has amassed close to 300,000 followers.

In this hour-long interview, he discusses his background, the difference between the fictional businessman created for the two Apprentice TV shows, and the real Donald Trump, and goes into some depth about Ivanka Trump, who was his primary charge during the last three years of Apprentice live finales. He also discusses the role producer Mark Burnett played in the Trump make-over, as well as the role of Jeff Zucker in that endeavor, in charge at NBC at the time (and later at CNN).

Noel Casler Twitter Feed

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Francine Prose, author of “1974, A Personal History” in conversation with host Richard Wolinsky.

The author of twenty novels and ten books of non fiction, Francine Prose is best known for such novels as “Lovers at the Chameleon Club, 1932,” “The Vixen,” “Household Saints” and “Mister Monkey,” and non-fiction such as “Anne Frank: The Book, the Life, The Afterlife,” Francine Prose has also written two short story collections , and a picture book. Two of her novels have become films, and one, “The Glorious Ones,” became a Broadway musical.

In this book, she recalls her time hanging out with Anthony Russo, who along with Daniel Ellsberg, was responsible for The Pentagon Papers, in San Francisco in 1974 and then a few months later, in New York, capturing the vibe of what it was like to live in that time and place, and differences between then and now.

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Kinky Friedman, who died at the age of 79 on June 27, 2024, was a noted country western musician (Kinky Friedman & The Texas Jewboys) author of 18 novels, most of them mysteries featuring a detective named Kinky Friedman, and political activist who ran for Governor of Texas in 2006, columnist for the Texas Monthly.

This interview was recorded on September 20, 1994 with Richard Wolinsky and Richard A. Lupoff while on tour for the Kinky Friedman mystery, “Armadillos and Old Lace.” In the interview he talks about the death of country music, his view of the people of Texas, and how he became a novelist.

Digitized, remastered and edited in September 2024 by Richard Wolinsky, this interview has not been heard in over twenty years.

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Naomi Iizuka, playwright and screenwriter, “translator” of Shakespeare’s Richard II, at the Magic Theatre through September 8, 2024, in conversation with Richard Wolinsky,

Noted playwright Naomi Iizuka discusses her translation and adaptation of Shakespeare’s history play, Richard II, a play written in verse, into a theatrical piece in which the language is comprehensible to a modern audience while maintaining the essence of the story, the characterization, and the poetry. She goes on to talk about her work in television, and her work as a professor of theatre.

While known for plays such as Good Kids and Polaroid Stories, she has also worked in the writers’ rooms of several television shows, including Bosch: Legacy, The Terror, and The Sympathizer. She teaches drama and playwrighting at UC San Diego.

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Josh Costello, the Artistic Director of Aurora Theatre in Berkeley since 2019, in conversation with host Richard Wolinsky.

Before taking on the role of Artistic Director at Aurora, Josh Costello was the founding Artistic Director of Impact Theatre and Artistic Director of Explanded Programs at Marin Theatre Company. He directed several plays at Aurora prior to becoming Artistic Director, and was Director of “Eureka Day,” which is opening on Broadway in a few months.

In this interview, he discusses the impact of the pandemic on Aurora’s finances (and the finances of all local theatres), along with a look at the upcoming season and other topics. Recorded August 22. 2024 in the KPFA studios.

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Erik Larson, author of “The Demon of Unrest: A Saga of Hubris, Heartbreak, and Heroism at the Dawn of the Civil War, in conversation with host Richard Wolinsky, recorded at Book Passage Bookstre on May 31, 2024.

Erik Larson is the author of several bestsellers of non-fiction narrative, including The Devil in the White City, The Splendid and the Vile, and In The Garden of Beasts.

His latest book concerns the days and months preceding the start of the Civil War, focusing on Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor, along with what life was like in the antebellum South at the time, the march to war, the election of Abraham Lincoln, and the various triggers that led to the Civil War.

In this interview he discusses how he came to write the book, some of the more interesting facts about the time of the Civil War, and how he became an author of these best-sellling narratives.

Photos: Richard Wolinsky.

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​​​​​The great Irish novelist and playwright Edna O’Brien died at the age of 93 on July 27, 2024 after a long illness. A controversial figure from the start, her first novel from 1960, The Country Girls, which dealt with sexual and social issues in Ireland following World War II, was banned in Ireland and denounced on the pulpit, and while she moved to London with her husband before publication, she never moved back to her native land.

This interview was conducted in the KPFA studios on April 28, 2000 while she was on tour for her novel, “Wild Decembers,” third in a thematic trilogy of novels set in the recent past in Ireland. It was later adapted for television in 2008..

Of Edna O’Brien, from Wikipedia, the novelist Andrew O’Hagan wrote, “She changed the nature of Irish fiction, she brought the woman’s experience and sex and internal lives of those people on to the page, and she did it with style, and she made those concerns international.” In her lifetime, Edna O’Brien wrote seventeen novels, several plays, eight short story collections, eight works of non-fiction, four children’s books and a collection of poems.

Edna O’Brien continued to write novels and plays well into her nineties. Her final novel, Girl, was published in 2019.

This interview was digitized, remastered and edited in August 2024 and is heard for the first time in its entirety. A second interview, recorded in 2003 while in San Francisco working on her play “Triptych” at the Magic Theatre will be posted on a later date.

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John Barth (1930-2024), who died on April 2, 2024 at the age of 93, was America’s leading writer of metafictional and post-modern fiction. This interview was conducted by Richard Wolinsky and Richard A. Lupoff on November 12, 2001 in the KPFA studios, while on the book tour for the novel Coming Soon.

John Barth began to receive notice for his two earliest novels, The Floating Opera and End of the Road in the late 1950s, but burst on the scene with his epic comic novel about colonial life in Maryland, The Sot-Weed Factor, and his allegory of the Cold War, set on a university campus, Giles Goat-Boy. His short story collection, Lost in the Funhouse and novella collection Chimera cemented his reputation as a writer of meta-fiction, as the stories zoom back on themselves and on the writing of those stories.

From Wikipedia: “In his epistolary novel LETTERS (1979), Barth corresponds with characters from his other books. Later novels such as The Tidewater Tales (1987) and The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor (1991) continue in the metafictional vein, using writers as protagonists who interact with their own and other stories in elaborate ways. His 1994 Once Upon a Time: A Floating Opera casts Barth himself as the protagonist who on a sailing trip encounters characters and situations from previous works.”

After the 2001 interview, he continued to work in the same vein with a triptych of novellas, Where Three Roads Meet in 2005, interrelated short stories set in a retirement community, The Development: Nine Stories in 2008, and Every Third Thought: A Novel in Five Seasons in 2011. A, book of collected stories was released in 2015 and Postscripts (or Just Desserts): Some Final Scribbling came out in 2022.

This interview was both the last interview conducted with Richard Lupoff as co-host, and the final interview recorded and edited on analog tape. This program was digitized and edited in July 2024 by Richard Wolinsky.

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Jonathan Kellerman and Faye Kellerman discuss their careers as mystery writers with host Richard Wolinsky, recorded October 28, 2004 while they were on tour for their stand-alone book, Double Homicide: Boston and Santa Fe.

Jonathan Kellerman, as of summer 2024, has written 39 novels in the Alex Delaware series, the most recent of which is The Ghost Orchid, along with nineteen other novels, seven of which were in collaboration with their son, Jesse Kellerman.

Faye Kellerman has written 27 novels in the Peter Decker and Rena Lazarus series, along with nine other novels, including one collaboration with their daughter, Aliza Kellerman. This interview has not been posted as a podcast or aired in full until now.

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