This is Unite and Heal America with Matt Matern. My guest today is Blake Newhem, who is an author and somebody who I think you all be very interested to hear about. So Blake, welcome to the show.

Thank you, sir. How are you?

I’m doing very well. Thanks for being on the show. Well, I think it would be great for the listeners to get a little introduction about your background, and you had been a ghostwriter for a number of years, and then were diagnosed with a brain tumor and, and then after that, have kind of gone on a journey in terms of a desire to write a million words and essentially 10 or 12 books. So tell us what that journey has been like over the last year.

Yeah, it’s been super weird year, as it has been for everybody. So I started as a professor of English and literature, and I was successful ghostwriter, which means nobody’s ever heard of me, but except for publishers and editors, and agents. So I worked a lot in business, I did a lot of health books, I did a lot of politics especially. And, and then I had during that whole period of time of maybe 1015 years, I had various cancers.

And at some point in 2015, you know, I got a diagnosis of brain tumor. And it turns out this tumor was an oligo, dendro, glioma, we, which was sitting right on the language processing center of my left frontal lobe. And so that’s kind of a devastating diagnosis for a writer. And it took me a couple of years after surgery to recover my abilities, especially my language abilities, and to be able to type again and everything else. And I took a big pause, and then got back to writing as the ghost.

And I realized some time later that, you know, I don’t have all this much time, because at some point, I’m going to lose my ability to, to write and to speak. And so I better get my fiction out there, because that’s what I really want to do in life. And so I’ve started that process. And it was going great. And I got the first three books out, and was getting lots of media attention locally and internationally, and was lined up for a bunch of talks and everything else and was getting great us and all of a sudden, COVID-19 head.

And obviously, first of all, I was, you know, devastated for the world, but also afraid for myself with this underlying condition. I couldn’t really go out at all, and then obviously, all press turned to the crisis. And so everything had to shut down. And it was a very weird process. And still then trying to figure out how to, to reboot everything.

Well, let’s, let’s talk about the three books that you did right over that period of time and what your inspiration for those books are and, and kind of talk about it from somebody who who might be a new writer or somebody who aspires to be a writer, that that journey and how your journey and how it might help other people will map out I would always tell my students that if you want to write, just write, go ahead and write, I happen to have a writing degree, a master’s degree, but I don’t think that that’s necessary. I don’t think creative writing programs are necessary, I think you just need to write.

And so I had already written well over a million words, as a ghostwriter, and worked with some pretty big publishers, and was successful in that field in terms of my own sense of satisfaction about being able to bring other people’s voices out. And I was proud of that, but secretly, sometimes not. So secretly, what I really wanted to do is do my own stuff. And there’s kind of a firewall between those two things. So all of the agents that I worked with, and the publishers and everything on that nonfiction side, they’re not necessarily open. It’s not necessarily an open door to fiction.

And so I would always kind of subsume those dreams and that passion for the people for whom I was working. And I edited magazines and I published students and I wrote for other people, but I kept writing my own books, but I never published them. And for me, self publishing was kind of a last ditch effort and in my head, I never wanted to do it. Until I realized once when I was on kind of an Olympic riding jag on one of my novels that you know, I’ve written a lot of books already a lot of unpublished books, which no one’s ever seen.

And when I got my diagnosis of the of the brain tumor, my first thought was not, I hate to say this on radio, but my first thought was not for my family, or for myself, or for the things that we’ll get to do. It was, Oh, my God, no one’s ever gonna read my fiction. And I’ve lived inside this head with these characters for so long, and no one will ever see it. And that seemed to be such a huge tragedy. And then I was thinking about Aron Ralston, I don’t know if you remember who that is.

But he’s the guy who had to cut his own arm off in the Utah, right. And I thought, you know, if I just if I just had a story like that, something cool, that could get people’s attention. And then I realized, while I was, you know, on this, this writing adventure for a couple of weeks, I was like, wait a minute, you do have that story, you’ve got a brain tumor on language expression. mean, what’s what’s more interesting than that, and you’re a writer, and you used to teach Chaucer in the original Middle English for the SUNY system.

Now, you can’t remember the word cloud. And, you know, it’s taking you 10 minutes to, you know, to remember words. So I thought this might be a good public relations opportunity, and a good opportunity for me to start getting things out. And, and so I put out the first three books. The first one was called Healing star. And it is a it’s set in the Revolutionary War, but it’s kind of a, a teen love story at triad. And then I put out a book called The elephant sigh, which is about three generations in an American family, and the elephant that kind of binds them all together.

And then I put out a book of eight novellas, called to spirits. And then as I said, everything shut down. So it was a difficult process, the printers shut down, and all my media attention, dried up, and everybody needed to pay attention to this, including me. And it was pretty devastating. But I continued to write so at so I’m writing still.

And that’s my advice. For three young writers, it doesn’t matter. If you’re at the point where it doesn’t matter whether anybody is reading you whether or not you’ve had any commercial success, and you’re still doing it. This might be true for any kind of art that you’re doing, then you are an artist. And just keep doing, keep doing what you’re doing.

I think that’s great. In terms of words of wisdom to young people who are starting out, just keep doing it. And eventually, the doors will open. And even even if they don’t, it’s it’s important to express yourself and to follow those, those dreams. So in terms of where you find yourself on the healing journey front, maybe that you can tell our listeners a little bit about that and what you’re doing and and how’s that going?

Well, I can certainly empathize with anyone out there. And there’s lots of people dealing with chronic pain. So the worst of my issues is chronic pain. I’ve had 17 different surgeries, a lot of them for cancer, I’ve left a number of organs in dumpsters behind hospitals across the country and brain surgery craniotomy certainly no fun. I’ve had a radical neck dissection, that’s no fun, I get terrible pain in my head migraine headaches.

And that’s no fun. But I have to say that art from me writing for me is probably the most healing thing more so than any of the drugs I’m on or anything else. It is up to there’s a point at which the pain is so bad that you can’t do anything, of course. But for all those other times, it’s that thing that I can do, where hours can go by and I can get into the zone, I can get into a kind of flow state. It doesn’t matter what I’m writing, it doesn’t matter whether it’s my own stuff, or trying to bring a voice of some expert out in a ghostwritten book is equally, I don’t want to say distracting, it’s equally involving and consuming and immersive.

And I absolutely love that. And I realized at some point when I was much younger, in my 20s I’m 52. Now that, you know, not a lot of people get to experience that. And that’s, that’s a real blessing. And if if you can experience that kind of thing that athletes get and that artists get, it’s really the best medicine. And so for my own healing process, that’s been critical. And from a practical standpoint, there are days where I can’t work course, and just happened to get COVID Of course, which was inevitable.

I I, despite all my best efforts, just because my immune system is so bad. And so there are there are issues and sometimes months, weeks or months at a time where I can’t really work. And so what I tried to do, and as I tried to read and appreciate what others have done before me,

I can relate to the meditation aspect of what you’re talking about with the writing is that when you’re doing something like that, where you’re so immersed, it’s, it’s like a meditative state, you’re, you’re completely focused and, and then in that focus, you kind of lose track of other things that may be bothering you.

Exactly. And I love that it means that you are fully engaged. And it’s not necessarily the healthiest thing, by the way to be sitting at a computer for 18 hours. But it is amazing as a feeling that that flow state where nothing else matters, where you are completely and totally engaged and consumed and immersed in getting something right. And often think when it’s at the end of a book, whether it’s a ghostwritten book or something in fiction, it’s like you have a bunch of balls that you’re juggling and all up in the air at the same time.

And so it’s a delicate balance, because you need to need to complete that. And then you need to introduce that and you need to connect those two things. And all those things are happening at the same time. And it’s very exciting. And it’s a little bit nerve wracking. And it’s super satisfying when you get it done. And when you you know, you hit that final enter, and it’s done, and then you can relax.

And then you realize, oh my God, my legs are asleep, and I’m starving. And I haven’t been out of his chair 24 hours, I recommend people not to do that you take a break every once in a while and rest your eyes and stretch your body and do do a little exercise. It’s something I need to learn to do a little better. I guess that it’s it’s challenging.

Because once those flow states hit, you know that you just want to kind of let it out because those things don’t always happen. And as a writer, when they do you want to take advantage of them and and kind of get all your creative, creative juices out there. Is that Is that a fair statement? Or?

Yeah, that’s absolutely right. And all the people I’ve been blessed enough to work with as a ghostwriter are those kinds of people and I, I’m at the point in my career where I’m lucky enough to be able to pick and choose what I want to do. So if people come to me, I want to kind of test them there. And I want it not only get subject experts, but people who have that kind of passion.

So I just did a business book with with somebody from LA, who is, you know, a world expert in his particular field, but so passionate that it’s incredibly motivating and incredibly inspiring. He lives his ethics. And he believes so strongly in what he does, that it infiltrates every part of his life. And so every day for him at work, it’s a kind of flow state like that. I’ve worked with doctors, same way with tech people in the same way.

And with a number of politicians, the best of whom are passionate about what they believe in, and Ken kind of muddle through the day to day, you know, bs of what you have to do to be a working politician in our country. But they they believe in what they’re doing. There’s some core belief system there that can keep them in that flow state, because they’re all their interactions. And everything they do, they try to make serve that mission.

Right, I was just listening to a podcast of a neuroscientist who was talking about something similar to that and, and self regulation and the ability to self regulate in a challenging circumstance. So that you can navigate those, those difficult times in a good frame of mind. And that’s, that is a true skill and a skill that can be learned. So all of us can learn to navigate those difficult situations in life. If we if we focus and learn those techniques of kind of mindfulness or meditation, that type of thing.

Yeah, not to fess up, ever. And I’m guilty of getting quite impatient with things like bureaucracy and stuff like that. But if you have, I think, a sense of mastery over something that helps you with the confidence to get through difficult times, and the challenges and certain kinds of injustice. But but it’s not easy. It’s not ever easy.

And that’s why you know, if you’re an artist, writer, and you’re just working none of that is true. It’s you can just do that and you can do that wherever you are in a coffee shop and train. If it’s your own office, and it’s solitary but you’re with your own your with your own thoughts, you’re creating worlds you are architecting something beautiful. And you don’t really need at that stage any other human interaction. When you add for their ghost experience, this whole other person, it becomes totally about them.

And you’d think that for the average writer, there’d be an ego problem with that and you know, a lot of us are pretty ego based. But I found just the opposite. It’s really exciting and it’s a real incredible mission. And a great feeling of success to get that call in the middle of the night from the from the author client who says How did you know this is exactly what I dream about. You got my voice perfectly. It’s it’s a great feeling and so I still enjoyable.

That is a tremendous skill to and I guess a gift to be able to send somebody else into to kind of get into that zone but we’ll be picking that up when we come back from the break. This is Matt Matern and Unite and Heal America and KABC 790, my guest Blake Newhem. We’ll be back in a minute.

Hi, this is Matt Matern. Back with you on Unite and Heal America. My guest Blake Newhem. And we’re talking about his writing and just want to get back to you about the inspiration for your first book. Healing star and and what, what led you to that? That whole topic. And if you could just kind of tell us about that.

So I tend to write a lot about a fictionalized Native American tribe from upstate New York. And it shows up in a lot of my short stories and a lot of my novels. It’s called the taqwa tribe. And it’s based loosely on my experiences growing up in upstate New York, hiking around with my father, and understanding the geography and the topography, especially of upstate New York, and especially the Hudson Valley.

And it is also based upon some experience I had with the Oglala Lakota tribe, after college in South Dakota, where I spent some time on a writing grant. And so I’ve always been very interested in the Native American culture in particular. But this story was also it also takes place during the Revolutionary War. And it’s about a British drummer boy, who essentially falls in love with a Native American girl who has become chief of her tribe of the taqwa after the British slaughter all of her relatives.

And it started with just an image with just a scene in my head, which is amazing that that can happen of of just one little thing that happens in the woods. And I based the whole book on it. And actually, that book I wrote in a few weeks, amazingly, first draft, of course, the the subsequent drafts take a lot longer. And the second book, elephants, I was rather a 20 year odyssey.

So putting everything together and conflating stories and homeless ideas that suddenly found home in this particular story, and went and did some research in Africa on elephants and spent some time doing elephant rescue and tried to incorporate as much of that as possible. And I feel that although I get a lot of satisfaction of ghostwriting, I do think I’m good at it.

There’s nothing like writing like creating your own world. And I get to not only create these worlds, but to but to return to this kind of place that feels like a spiritual home. That doesn’t actually exist. There is no Kotaku tribe, but it feels like home. And even if I don’t intend to write about it, it just keeps coming back.

Well, tell me a little bit more about homeless ideas. That’s kind of a fascinating subject.

I think that this might be well I don’t know I’ve never had this conversation with anybody but it could be that writers and poets especially and, and maybe visual artists, you sometimes just noodle around with something, something is stuck in your head and you get it out there and you test it you drafted you do to it or whatever. In the case of a writer, you you keep journals. And there’s just these ideas that are irreversibly, you know, they’re all the time but you but they’re there, I call them homeless because they haven’t found their context yet.

So it could be a scene, it could be a character, it could be a name, it could be a setting, and they’re just there. And they have all the things that you write and that wind up just in the junk pile. And eventually, somebody just throws out those cartons after you’ve died, some things survive. And they keep going it for me, it’s often just an image, a quick, a very quick, you know, to second scene in my head as though I’m flipping channels, and it needs to go somewhere, it belongs somewhere.

And I find that a very rewarding process and writing is when you suddenly realize, let’s say, on page 200 of a book, oh my god, this is where that goes, I have to introduce that character that’s been sitting around for 20 years, or this is where that scene goes. And that happens kind of organically as a connection in the brain. And that’s been especially exciting and interesting for me, as I as my brain has to regrow, and exercise its plasticity, and find new ways and new routes and new connections to things. Because a lot of what I used to know and what I used to be able to summon up instantly is inaccessible there, there’s doorways there that I can’t get through anymore since my surgery.

And since the inflammation and since the part of the tumor that’s left there. And it’s earlier I said language processing. And that’s an that’s one of my common mistakes. It’s language expression, where the tumor is there, they’re two separate things. And so I can understand language and words, but process but expressing them getting them out. Being able to work something is where the challenge is. And so this is a similar process.

So if I’m trying to find a word as I’m talking to you, I’m kind of playing a chess game where I’m thinking ahead a little bit. And I’m finding workarounds to words that I can’t remember. So that I, you know, I can communicate. And that same thing happens on a larger scale, when I’m at the point in a book where I realize this is where that scene goes, or where that character goes, or where that line that stuck in my head goes, it just belongs here. And so I’m not really making it up as I go along. And it sort of pre exists, it’s just homeless and needs shelter.

Well, it’s a fascinating journey as a writer, and you reminded the neuroplasticity, this, neuroplasticity in terms of, you know, having focus. And that’s what this scientist was saying was that the more we focus on something, even in later in life, that we can create those new pathways and our brains can be as young people, and those of us who are not quite as young, in our 50s.

You know, that’s a, that’s a hopeful thing, that with work and focus, we can maybe regain some of that magic. And, you know, I certainly wish the best for you on that journey. I was I was thinking about as a youth, having watched the movie Last of the Mohicans, and right, and, you know, fascinated by that world. And it sounds kind of similar to what you were talking about with your first book and healing star?

Absolutely.

Did you? I can’t recall, if the Mohican tribe was also in New York and upstate New Yorker in that area, absolutely.

They were spread out all over the place, but they’re associated with upstate New York and around the Finger Lakes region. And there are a lot of their history I’ve incorporated into the katok with tribes, so it’s kind of an amalgamation of my research and what I believe to be authentically honest, but not necessarily accurate. So for example, you know, involving them in in Revolutionary War battles that happened in you know, didn’t necessarily happen with this tribe, but I’m trying to be as as honest as possible and as authentic as possible.

And that’s a little scary nowadays, because of you know, it’s it’s a canceled culture, a period of time and it’s a period of time where it’s difficult to take on someone else’s voice, authentically and I think if you do it with honesty, and if you do it with clarity, and if you do it with sensitivity and if you do it with some advice and counsel so that you don’t accidentally get something wrong. You, you maybe unconsciously carry your own biases into something.

So it was it was scary to put that book out, because I spent so much time working on it. And I did research and I did interviews, but it’s still not my world. You know, I’m, I’m a white, Jewish gay guy from you know, 60s 70s, baby. And so just to, to to take on someone else’s voice was a real challenge. But I think that’s what we do. I mean, I’m a writer, I can’t, you know, it’s necessary.

Yeah, I think that it works of art should not have strict boundaries. And cultures certainly don’t have strict boundaries, and that there’s amalgamations of cultures, through through many different methods that have occurred over time. And that’s in some ways, as uplifted us all by by sharing our various cultures and, and as more comes to light and more research, historical, you could probably add that to the mix.

And it’s, it’s a work in progress, our living history of learning about what the Native American tribes were doing, and partly works of fiction, I would imagine, kind of excite that imagination to readers and historians to dig a little deeper and ask those questions.

Right. And if at the same time that you’re doing that, you’re not owning that space, you’re recognizing that it’s not yours, and doing everything you can do to kind of uplift use your word, the voices of the legitimate people with that experience. So as a professor not teaching the stuff that’s in the canon, which has all kinds of, you know, capitalistic and and so…

I’m not sure Blake kind of cut out there for a second. But we’re you’re here with? Yeah, this is Matt Matern on KABC 790. Unite and Heal America. We’ll be back in just a minute. You’re back with the Unite and Heal America on AM 790. With my guest, Blake Newhem. So Blake, we were just talking about your first novel, why don’t we pivot over and talk about your second novel, elephant eye and, and tell us what the inspiration for that one was?

Sure, the elephant’s eye is a big novel that I was working on for a long, long time. In some ways, I started it while I was still in college, with a short story about two boys in the 1950s in upstate New York, right in that same region that I always write about. And then I started to write about elephants. And I realized that those two things belong together.

And so it’s a story. It’s an epic kind of story that spans generations and continents. And what links it together is the, the adventure of a particular elephant, from its early days in Africa, when it’s born, to its mother getting poached to getting carded, and, you know, piloted across the ocean, to winding up at a petting zoo, in upstate New York to its abusive owner, eventually, and then eventually, the boys rescue it.

And so it was sort of a kind of a kitchen sink novel that initially had everything I wanted to say. And I was a young writer when I started it, and I had to do a lot of culling and kind of surgical extraction of a number of systems inside that book in order to get it reasonable. And it’s worth noting that to commit to writing 12 books in 12 months, which was the original intention, it’s essentially impossible to do that unless you have something to work with in advance. So I had drafts of things. I had ideas I had, you know, complete books that just needed a lot of work.

And this was one of those. And as I mentioned, I only got through the first three before everything collapsed around me and I have to start again, at some point but that book Um, I think if I were going to die, I’d want that to be the book that I’m remembered for, because it has my ethos, and, you know, everything I really want to say about the world is, is in that book about love and redemption and the connection between things and how our lives are so nested into everything that’s preceded us and everything that’s gonna follow.

You know, I used as a, a model for that book, Cloud Atlas, and I’m not sure if you’re familiar with that book, or the movie version. But, and the Barkoff was my favorite writer. So it was it was a challenge to do it, but I’m probably most excited about it, and very proud of it.

I’m sure that getting all that out there into the universe so that people can share it as as got to feel great, because having it bottled up inside, you just feel like you haven’t, you haven’t had a chance to let people know what is going on with you your interior life and it’s, as a writer, explain to us or tell us about how maybe fears that get in the way of letting that out there in the public and letting people see that interior life?

Yeah, that’s a that’s a huge question. And it it’s, it’s very triggering, I’m sure to a lot of people out there you are. Yeah. What if you’re, what if you’re gross? What if you’re, what if you embarrass yourself? What if it’s humiliating? What if you tell a secret you shouldn’t tell. And I think if those are concerned reviewers and the writing, and the writing is not going to be good, before you publish something is worth considering whether or not you’re going to do harm, either to yourself or someone else. But I think that you have to be fearless.

And I think very relevant to your show is that during the period that I started this, I was doing a lot of political writing. And I’m a progressive liberal. But for some reason, I got a lot of experience writing ghosting, for conservative politicians. And, you know, one was telling the next and then I just kept sort of rising up the ranks there. Everybody knew who I was. And I prided myself in getting their messages out in, you know, an authentic way in an honest way and trying to get in touch with what is, you know, what’s what’s, what is truly conservative, that I can kind of get behind as a liberal, and then expressing their feelings and articulating it that way, so that it made sense.

And it was empathetic, and it was reasonable. And it had good, a good legacy, good history with some, you know, powerful thinkers and philosophers. But what I was finding was in running all those social media campaigns after the books came out, that there was a lot of hate there. And I had to deal on a daily basis with just tremendous amounts of disparagement, and kind of horrible. What turned into Q anon type thinking, and this was on a daily basis.

And so it was just overwhelming. I think that the the last administration kind of opened the doors up for all that to happen. And so it became a really unpleasant space to live in, for me and for my author clients, because I was trying to, you know, they were not like that they were reasonable, empathetic kind. People with families, and they were not, you know, they didn’t hate immigrants. They didn’t, they weren’t anti gay, they, they were just, they were just believed in old fashioned conservative politics. But the responses were, you know, almost pure hate.

And so I found that returning to was a refuge from that kind of hate mongering and that kind of unpleasantness where it doesn’t matter how reliably intellectual you are, in fact, that’s kind of a negative in that space. It doesn’t matter how empathetic you are, because there is an insecurity there that leads people to want to feel better somehow, it doesn’t matter. In other words, what you say it’s just going to be a world of hate. And it became really unpleasant to live in and I was talking to other ghost writers who were in that same space.

And so I think I it became a refuge to work with my own stuff, because it didn’t matter whether or not it was embarrassing or sad, or or I revealed something. At least it was true and it was empathetic. It was karmically sound. It was about bringing people together. It was about risk. Doing humanity. Whereas working in the political space, to a, to a great extent is not like that anymore. And it was just a highly unpleasant couple of years working there. And I had to extract myself from most of it.

Now, you when you were talking about there were some of these conservative folks that you, you know, you could find, obviously, some redeeming values and connected with on some level. You know, I sometimes tease some my very progressive friends, that they are conservative in many ways.

And maybe you can talk about that, in terms of these things that are conservative, I like to talk about conservation of the environment is clearly what would be a, a, a conservative value, if you want to just take the core of the word in matches directly to conservation.

But what about that? Yeah, conserving a lot of traditional things? Well, first, let’s make let’s make the clear distinction that, that I think you’d agree with that. Capital C conservatism has nothing to do with Trumpism, or any of the digitization that happened. And I’ve been in rooms with, with governors and senators, and, and, you know, fairly high level people during that whole entire process, and not a one of them ever said anything nice about about their president.

So that makes them even more, you know, culpable, I think, because they’re hypocritical, they didn’t speak up. And if more people spoke up, that would be one thing. So there was a kind of coward, cowardice, that that was painful for me to watch. But you know, it’s my job to bring out their voices. And, you know, I thought you could do something good here, which is not cooperate at all, the conservative movement with the basically the power and the voice you’ve got, there were politicians who never said a word without coming out of my mouth.

You know, I ran out whole, everything, their social media, their speeches and everything. And that’s an enormous responsibility, which takes seriously. So I had to dig deep, I thought it was going to be deep, it wasn’t so deep faith, family, those things make sense to me a belief in something bigger than me, a kind of personal responsibility, not necessarily to the extent that people often take it politically, but I believe in that, that, that comes from my family.

A you know, a connection to, to ancestors, that, you know, all these people came from, and a sense of, you know, clean up your own desk first, like our first grade teachers taught us, you start close to home, before you start preaching elsewhere. And those things were important than I tried to base as much of what I talked about, for them on those principles. And with no hypocrisy at all, because I believe that those make sense.

And the other thing that was interesting is I found, especially with old school guys, with old school, I say, guys, because most of those were male, you know, the ones that were, you know, well known people who are already in their 70s or 80s. If you ask them questions in the right way, they turned out to be pretty progressive.

You know, they don’t necessarily they’re, they’re bound by what they feel they must be bound in terms of what the hot button issues are for their, for their constituencies, but they’re not inherently racist. They’re not inherently homophobic, they’re not inherently sexist. Any more than anybody else says. I think that the movements have become such that it becomes impossible to express any kind of, you know, just look at Mitt Romney now.

Look at Liz Cheney. Now, I mean, literally just expressing their conscience, you know, are getting railroaded out of town. And I just I find that it’s just it’s, it’s awful to watch. On the one hand, on the other hand, you know, I think that that party needs a reboot.

Oh, absolutely. And, yeah, I mean, if you look at traditional conservatism, there were more votes, Republican votes for the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and there were Democratic votes. So that was where the party came from. And it was the party that created the EPA and a congressman here in California Republican Congressman authored the Endangered Species Act.

So there were, you know, voices within that party which were, you know, very progressive in in a lot of ways But unfortunately the party Mark morphed into a different direction and then metastasized with President Trump. But that’s, that’s a story for another day. And fortunately, he’s been retired. So we get to talk about some other things, which is one of the beauties of his retirement is that there’s a little more space for maybe some healing. And so with that, I kind of like to turn to your your third book, two spirits. And tell us a little bit more about that one.

Well, two spirits is interesting interconnected novellas, there’s eight of them. And the first one is very related to healing star because it’s that kind of concurrent story about what happens to the, the Native American takle girl’s brother, who is in a very quick scene, in healing star kidnapped and enslaved by Europeans. And so it’s a, you know, 100 page story, that is his story. And it’s kind of a sort of a boutique storyline.

And I’m very interested in that, you know, if you, if you what happens to these characters that only show up once and you only see them on one page, like they have a whole other life. And so I wind up writing a lot about that kind of thing, and it creates whole other stories. If you read them in the same book, then it becomes unwieldy and ridiculous. And I think they need to be separated out.

So that’s the first story and two spirits and it’s really about the notion of the notion of two spirits and the Native American sense, which means, you know, being twins, soulmates, doppelgangers, you know, multiple personalities twin beings that exist and require each other for a full expression of their manifestation. And that’s a I’m doing a super poor job in articulating that. So let’s bring let’s blame my brain tumor for that.

We’ll, we’ll come back to it after the break. You are listening to Unite and Heal America with Matt Matern and my guest, Blake Newhem. We’ll be back in just a minute KABC 790

. Welcome back to Unite and Heal America with Matt Matern. Again, my, my guest, Blake Newhem. And we’re talking about his third novel two spirits. And just wanted to get back to a point that you were just making about having these characters that would come up in a book, where, you know, you’d never know sometimes what their trajectory was, I’m thinking, I’m a more of a nonfiction reader.

So I recall LB, the LBJ book autobiography or not autobiography biography, written by Robert Keroh. That won a bunch of awards and he came across this governor Koch Stevenson, who LBJ had had ran against in the 1948 Senate race and, and I think he was so fascinated by this one character, he spent an extra chapter to discussing him because it was, it was so clear, the archetype of that character was, was so much different than LBJ.

And it was really fascinating to kind of juxtapose these two, these two characters. I love that. Yeah, and if you continue that same thing, then what about that guy’s wife or his secretary? It’s all connected together, and a huge web. And all of those things inform and influence each other. And that’s, that’s life, that’s the world and so if fiction can recreate that, where at least give you a sense of that, then I think you’re you’re in business and people can relate.

Right so it’s, it’s always fascinating to the author, I mean to the reader as to somebody comes into a scene and they seem like a fairly important and fascinating person and yet, you don’t you don’t hear anything else about him. You’re like, Who is that? Who was that guy?

Right. I love that.

Well, it was I was just reading a biography. I guess it wasn’t a biography was more like a story about Lafayette. And it was, it was written by a modern historian. And she had it so Lafayette focused, they didn’t really explore the Hamilton aspect of it at all. And, and I’d written read the Hamilton biography and of course, was I really loved to that.

And but it was, it was I as a reader, I’m kind of like, Where’s Hamilton? Come on I because I had read about Hamilton and was fascinated about him. And I wanted to know more about the relationship between Lafayette and Hamilton and, and this author was not was not going there.

Right. It’s hard to picture him as a minor chapter in anyone’s life. Right?

So where, where are you going? Where did two Two Spirits lead it as, as that journey progressed?

So two spirits was a, you know, have a lot of short stories out there that were, you know, either published or unpublished. And I needed to think early on about where I would put them how I would arc, what’s the word how I would group them together. And this one was mostly novellas. So they’re, they’re long stories of, you know, there’s only eight in the entire book.

And they’re basically about you know, one of them is an escaped slave who learns the bone setting trade by by spying on a child master up in Canada, that’s the brother who is kidnapped. And another is about a mythical boulder that, that coughs up beings and swallow souls, and crates, twins, and others about a loss of the World Series of Little League Baseball, that leads to a suicide pact.

And another is about serial killers. So they’re grouped together these stories by theme, and there are two more scheduled for the run. I don’t know when exactly that’s gonna happen now. But watch this space. And those are also by theme, and also by by size, those are going to be shorter stories. So two spirits is about the notion that I think Native Americans had that we don’t really about the kind of duality of the being.

So you can be one thing and another you can be, you know, we have a really binary dualistic way of thinking about things like say gender, where the the roles and the prescriptions and the prescriptions for how you’re supposed to behave based on your anatomy or based on your color or based on whatever. And I think that Native Americans were a lot sort of more progressive and a lot more sensible and a lot more organic in the way they thought about those things.

That’s a fascinating discussion we’re having here with Blake Newhem and thank you Blake for being on the show. We’ll be back next week with Unite and Heal America with Matt Matern on KABC 790. Thank you all for listening.