Word Carver

Terry Hill has hand-sold 6,000 books outside stores and stadiums in Washington State. Terry's story shows the reader what it's like to be given away to strangers as a child, grow up in poverty in a small Louisiana logging town, and be abruptly called back to his mother in Seattle as a teenager. Left to his own devices, and given examples of alcoholism and sex addiction as role models, young Terry soon became attracted to thieves in Seattle who had one destination -- jail. After decades of addiction to alcohol, sex, and then crack cocaine, and in prison on robbery charges for over a decade, Hill picked up a pencil and begin writing his story. By the time he was done with three drafts, he'd realized the damage of his addiction to crack cocaine. The writing process freed his mind from that addiction and laid a new path for Hill, one dedicated to giving back to the community he'd once robbed.

This episode is devoted to a little-known Columbus author, Tonya Lynette Daniels, who was brutally murdered in February 2019. In researching Tonya's death, I found she'd written a book, and this book is the subject of analysis on this episode of Word Carver.

Daniels' family has created a fundraiser for her funeral expenses, and donations can be given at https://www.gofundme.com/6ybmqiw.

Word Carver co-host Herbert Ndecki II interviews Oprah Book Club writer Imbolo Mbue about her novel Behold the Dreamer. Both Ndeki and Mbue are from Cameroon, and they speak about African writers and what it takes to keep going. Then, in the first of a two-part series, Word Carver host Cynthia Rosi talks about a little-known writer in Columbus Ohio who was murdered this year.

In Word Carver 40, Cynthia Rosi and co-host Herbert Ndeki II explore poetry. Ndeki reviews Ahmadou Kourouma's "Allah is not obliged to be fair about all the things he does here on Earth" (warning: strong language -- Kourouma makes liberal use of the n-word in his soldier-boy character) while Rosi reads several original poems.

Herbert Ndeki II, a Cameroon native and American emigre, reads poems from Aimé Césaire's work Cahier D'Un Retour and analyses the translation choices. Aimé Césaire was born in 1913 and pioneered the concept of "blackness." He grew up in the French colony of Martinique and moved to Paris where he encountered the racism of the colonizers.

Ndeki is fluent in French and English, and brings to Word Carver listeners his love for African literature.

Herbert Ndeki reviews "How to Cook Your Husband the African Way" by Calixte Beyala, and Cynthia Rosi reads the short story "The Company" which arrived in a dream, and was written over two days.

Herbert Ndeki, a native-French speaker from Cameroon, reviews authors from the African canon. Hemu Venkataraman speaks about her work as an artist, author, and architect.

Amy and Cynthia analyze poems they love and gossip about the writing life.

Master writer Lee Martin takes us behind the scenes in his new short-story volume The Mutual UFO Network, a book that took 16 years to craft. Martin is a Distinguished Professor at Ohio State University, and the author of a Pulitzer Prize Finalist, The Bright Forever.

Self-publishing is easy -- if you've spent 35 years as an engineer in product development like Charles O'Donnell. The discipline and pacing of engineering means that the author of The Girlfriend Experience and Shredded can keep up a production schedule and a writing schedule simultaneously: not an easy feat! Listen with a pencil in hand as O'Donnell describes his workflow, writing and editing processes, and ends with a passage from his book. Follow him on Twitter @kozmickid, on Goodreads, or his blog charlesodonnellauthor.com