KPFA - Radio Wolinsky

Mary Higgins Clark (1927-2020), who died on January 31st, 2020 at the age of 92, was the best-selling author of 51 books, most of them suspense novels featuring women in jeopardy, with four theatrical films and over thirty other books adapted for television. Richard Wolinsky and Richard A. Lupoff interviewed  Mary Higgins Clark for the Probablitiles radio program on May 24, 1989 while she was on tour for her 13th novel “While My Pretty One Sleeps.” The interview was conducted in her San Francisco hotel room.

Digitized, re-mastered, and re-edited by Richard Wolinsky in April, 2020.

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Colum McCann, whose latest novel is Apeirogon, in conversation with host Richard Wolinsky. This is the story of two men, Rami Elhanan, an Israeli, and Bassam Aramin, a Palestinian, best of friends, who have been traveling the world attempting to bring about peace in Israel and the Occupied Territories. Apeirogon is only tangentially a novel. These are real people and this reads more like augmented non-fiction.

Colum McCann is the National Book Award winning author of “Let the Great World Spin,” “Zoli,” “Thirteen Ways of Looking” and other books.

Special thanks to Richard Lavin for post-production assistance.

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Terrence McNally, who died of complications from the corona virus on March 24th in Florida at the age of 81, was a giant of the American theatre. He received tony awards for his plays Love Valour Compassion and Master Class, and for best book for a musical for Kiss of the Spider Woman and Ragtime. His plays, musicals and operas have been performed around the world. Among his other plays were Lisbon Traviata, Lips Together Teeth Apart, The Ritz, and Frankie and Johnnie in the Claire de Lune.

His plays, rich with humor and deft characterization, also were political in nature, and he never shied away and he was always willing to take a stand especially in the area of gay rights and the necessity for community.

Richard Wolinsky spoke with Terrence McNally on March 18, 2004 in the offices of New Conservatory Theatre in San Francisco, which was then running the musical, A Man of No Importance, for which he had written the book. The music and lyrics were by Stephen Flaherty and Lynn Ahrens, who he had previously collaborated with on Ragtime. He was in San Francisco as New Conservatory’s playwright in residence that spring, working on a play that would eventually become Some Men, a look at gay mens lives over the course of several decades.

Terrence McNally’s play Some Men played off Broadway in 2007 and would return to its theatre of origin, New Conservatory in San Francisco, in 2009. Over the fifteen years after the interview, he would write several plays that reached Broadway, including It’s Only a Play and Mothers and Sons, along with three musicals, most recently Anastasia, based on the animated film, which ran on Broadway for two years, closing in spring, 2019 after 808 performances.

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Lidia Yuknavitch discusses her collection of short stories, “Verge.” The author of novels, essays, a memoir and short stories, Lidia Yuknavitch details life of people on the margins of society. Her new collection is culled from several years of her work, and much of the book was rewritten or written for the publication. She is interviewed by Richard Wolinsky, recorded at KPFA, February 7, 2020.

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Katya Cengel, whose latest book is a memoir, “From Chernobyl with Love: Reporting from the Ruins of the Soviet Union,” is interviewed by host Richard Wolinsky.

“From Chernobyl with Love” tells the story of Katya Cengel’s years, around the turn of this century, as a reporter in Latvia and Ukraine — what life was like for a young American journalist dealing with countries on the brink of ruin, halfway between what they were as republics inside the Soviet Union, and halfway toward what they will become as independent countries. It also includes stories about her health issues while in the Ukraine, bribery, visits to other countries including Moldova, and about her reportage on Chernobyl, years after the meltdown.

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