We Are All Going to Die

I was watching a murder mystery this evening and a thought popped into my head. Joni Ernst must hate murder mysteries. Why all the fuss and drama trying to apprehend a killer, after all we are all going to die.

If you follow the news at all, you have probably heard Senator Joni Ernst’s town hall response to a constituent who was concerned about cuts to Medicaid and shouted, “People will die.” “Well,” she said, rolling her eyes, “We are all going to die.”

I would have chalked this all up to a ramp up and an unfortunate flippant response, but Ernst decided to “double down” as we say these days. In a bizarre TikTok style video Ernst responded to the uproar with mockery.

“I made an incorrect assumption that everyone in the auditorium understood that, yes, we are all going to perish from this earth. So I apologize, and I’m really, really glad that I did not have to bring up the subject of the tooth fairy as well.”

She then urged people who are silly enough to worry about death to get right with Jesus.

“It’s just human life so what’s the big deal” has not always been her position. Four months ago she issued a press release with the title “Ernst Fights for Life.” Her web page boasts “Protecting life and the most vulnerable among us is the most important measure of any society. Throughout my time in the Senate, I have supported a number of measures to protect the sanctity of life at every stage…” Every stage, it appears, except the one where you need Medicaid.

Only a few days ago Ernst was testifying before a senate committee about the “heartbreaking story” of a constituent who was killed by a drunk driver who was an undocumented immigrant. Presumably she did not shrug and tell the family, “Well, we’re all going to die,” and then urge them to embrace Jesus if death bothers them.

Ernst’s pose is not true. She does not actually believe that it is foolish to care that people will die. She believes that it is weakness to care that certain categories of people will die. There are people who are deserving of our empathy and protection and people who are not. Dying because you couldn’t afford health care is not “heartbreaking,” but dying in an accident caused by an undocumented immigrant is.

In 1867, the British Liberal reformer John Bright coined the term “the residuum” to describe the people who deserve to be excluded from the privileges of citizenship for the well being of the rest of society. Who do we include? Who are the residuum? How should we treat them?

“This was the darker side of community,” I wrote in the novel Angel, “For a group to have a sense of cohesion, a sense of being ‘us,’ it had to define what was outside of the group. It had to define a ‘them’— the excluded. Who ‘they’ are changes over time and from society to society, but the process never changes. It is part of the nature of community life. To have an inside, a tribe must have an outer boundary.”

I discussed this passage in 2016 in a post called “The Others.” Since then we have entered an era where the entire thrust of our national politics is trying to narrow our sphere of empathy, increase the definition of the residuum, and aggressively police the boundaries.

“For those who would like to see eternal and everlasting life,” Ernst said in the conclusion of her sarcastic apology video, “I encourage you to embrace my lord and savior Jesus Christ.”

I find myself thinking of Jesus the healer and the story in Luke 13:10-17 where Jesus healed a woman who had been bent over and was unable to straighten herself for 18 years. “Woman, you are freed from your disability,” he said. He laid his hands on her, and she was able to stand straight and she glorified God. The ruler of the synagogue, however, was indignant because Jesus had performed this miracle on the Sabbath. “There are six days in which work ought to be done. Come on those days and be healed, and not on the Sabbath day.” The law about healing on the Sabbath was important to the leader of the synagogue because it defined what it meant to be part of the Jewish community. The law marked the boundary between those in the community and those outside.

Then the Lord answered him, “You hypocrites! Does not each of you on the Sabbath untie his ox or his donkey from the manger and lead it away to water it?  And ought not this woman, a daughter of Abraham whom Satan bound for eighteen years, be loosed from this bond on the Sabbath day?”  As he said these things, all his adversaries were put to shame, and all the people rejoiced at all the glorious things that were done by him.

Isn’t healing someone better than not healing her? Isn’t compassion better than non-compassion? Isn’t our general humanity more important than social rules that define who is an insider and who is an outsider?

Jesus died on the cross, and the old woman he healed has been gone for thousands of years. We do all die. Jesus took the time to heal the old woman anyway.

“Truly I tell you, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.”

Q&A with Laura Lee about “Saturn’s Favorite Music”

The questions in this interview were AI generated based on a list of comments from reviewers. The answers are human generated based on whatever came to Laura Lee’s mind.

The title Saturn’s Favorite Music is intriguing. Can you share the story behind the title and how it encapsulates the essence of the novel?

Saturn is the fictional town where the radio station in the novel is based. So “Saturn’s Favorite Music” would be one of the on air tag lines for the station. I don’ t know where the name of Saturn came from. It was the name of the town that popped into my head early on. It was entirely subconscious. I was recently driving in one of the neighborhoods where I grew up in Lake Orion, Michigan and it suddenly dawned on me that I used to live on Saturn Drive. Maybe that is where it comes from. What that would mean, I have no idea. There’s a certain dreamlike quality always to writing a novel anyway. You know how dreams take little episodes from life and mix them together in new ways? It’s like that, but more controlled.

How did you go about recreating the behind-the-scenes feel of a small-town radio station in 1992? Were there any specific details from your own experience you were excited to include?

Well, I left radio in 1995 or 1996, I think. So when I remember working in radio it’s necessarily going to be about that era. I don’t have any more current experience in the field to pollute that historical perspective. I was going for humor and entertainment value. So there is a literary narrative arc, but I also was also trying to highlight the funny things that happen with live broadcasting.

Based on some of the early reviews, the book has struck a chord with readers who remember life before smartphones and constant connectivity. Was evoking that “quainter” time a deliberate choice to contrast with today’s world, or simply a byproduct of when the story needed to take place?

I don’t think people ever believe they are living in a “quaint” time. Quaintness comes in retrospect. The characters saw themselves as living through a forward-looking time of great change and technological advancement. People always think they’re living in a busy age. If anything, I was trying to find parallels between that time and our own. Some characters are excited for the new technology and some are nostalgic for how things were done in the past. None of them can know what those changes will bring to their own lives. There is a moment in the middle of the novel where the characters have an opportunity to reflect on the quaintness of the previous era when they find an old radio drama script hidden behind some records. At that point you have the characters looking back at other people the way the reader is looking back at them. So I suppose what I was trying to evoke was not nostalgia per se, although it is a nostalgic piece. It’s not just about remembering the 1990s. It is about the constant, ongoing, process of the present becoming the past. Also, it’s funny. I always try to get back to that when I get too deep into discussion of the more literary themes.

How does the novel use music as a storytelling device? Did any particular references stand out to you or trigger personal memories?

I listened to a lot of music while I was doing the book, and Spotify started to think I was a huge fan of 1990s adult contemporary. I wanted to re-create the soundscape of that place to help me visualize being there. Seth and Clara both love music, and both love music that the station does not program. So they have their work music and their private music. (The idea of private music is something that came up in the novel Identity Theft also.) Seth’s favorite band is The Kinks. Clara likes alternative music. Clara’s relationship to music impacts how she sees the world to a certain extent. If you’re a person who loves music, you can probably relate to putting on a song and playing it over and over for a deep listen when you’re depressed. Most of the time the music that is referenced in the book is just something that might have been on the station at that time. Occasionally the music highlights something that is happening in the story. For example, I listened to some old Casey’s AC Countdown shows from the period. One song that came up was Eleanor McAvoy’s “Only a Woman’s Heart.” I had forgotten about it, and it was on the AC chart around the time Clara would have been dealing with some internal struggles. So I had to have Clara announce the song. In a novel you can’t do a soundtrack like in a movie, but if you know the song you might pick up on the resonance. The music of David Bowie becomes central to some of Clara’s emotional processing towards the end of the book.

Clara’s boss seems to represent an archetype many readers recognized from their own early careers. How much of that character was drawn from real-life figures, and how much was narrative invention?

The character of the new boss who comes in and brings in automation and streamlines the format is really more of a personification of some of the forces in radio at that time. The sound of radio started to be more standardized and less local as big media chains started to buy up local stations beginning in 1992. He’s not based on any real-life person. I didn’t actually interact with the station owners all that much when I worked in radio. They usually had other business interests and there were managers that ran the stations day to day.

Let’s talk about Clara’s co-workers. Seth, the morning man, is described as a rebellious character who mocks authority. Several readers called Seth funny, emotional, and grown-up yet childlike. What qualities make Seth stand out as a romantic interest? How does he contrast with Rad, the afternoon man, and what do those contrasts say about what Clara values?

The friendship between Clara and Seth grows over time. They have a similar sense of humor. You know how you just click with certain people? Clara and Seth click in that way. He enjoys showing Clara the ropes at the station. He is very natural in his delivery, whereas Rad is rehearsed. Rad is probably insecure underneath it all, but that doesn’t make him less annoying.

Clara and Leslie share a brief but impactful friendship. What role does Leslie play in Clara’s journey?

Leslie is the station’s traffic director and office manager. She has one of those quietly important jobs. Leslie is encouraging of Clara. They are the two women in an otherwise very male environment so they are able to talk about that. Leslie also gives some of the little nudges to Clara to notice how well she and Seth get along. I’m not actually sure if Leslie picked up on a vibe that was already there or if she played matchmaker a bit. Maybe readers can tell me what they think.

There has also been praise for the book’s straightforward language and slow-burn romance. Was it important to you to keep the prose accessible and the romance grounded, especially given the coming-of-age aspects of the plot?

In terms of the language, each story has its proper voice. With Saturn’s Favorite Music, I was going for something light and humorous so a more poetic tone, like I used in my first novel, Angel, wouldn’t have worked. In Angel, you had big themes of religion and nature. One thing that was important when writing Angel was that the dialog had to be naturalistic even in the midst of these literary reflections and mountain motifs. When you’re in that mode, there can be a temptation to have characters say things that are too elevated for them. My favorite bit of dialogue from that novel, actually, is when the main characters are having a fight and Ian just says, “Well then, shut up.”

In terms of the romance element, I wanted that to be something that added to and drove the story, but I didn’t want it to become the whole story. I wanted it to be first and foremost a friendship. I didn’t want to foreground it initially. To me, Saturn is the story of the “found family” of the radio station. It is a community that Clara is briefly part of.

You’ve mentioned that Saturn’s Favorite Music shares some themes with your earlier novels, Angel and Identity Theft. How does this novel differ in its exploration of those themes, and what new perspectives does it offer?

I usually end up seeing those resonances after the fact, not when I’m working on a book. I do think that Angel and Saturn both touch on the theme of impermanence. Angel looks at it from a grander scale– the lifetime of a mountain compared to a man– and Saturn looks back at a year in 1992 and a place you can’t really return to. (You learn before the story begins that the building is for sale and is considered to have “no value.”) Identity Theft and Saturn share a lot of the same DNA, they deal with music and rock stars, but I actually think they are more thematically different. Even so, little things pop up and I realize I was wrestling with some of the same questions.

Clara makes a serious judgment error during the story. Without giving away spoilers, how did you approach writing that moment? Did you see it as necessary for her growth?

It is a moment that makes her question the value of the things she thought she wanted. I don’t find stories particularly interesting when everything that happens to the character comes from the outside. A character has to get in her own way sometimes.

What’s something a reader has said about the book—whether in a review or private message—that made you think about the story differently, or that meant a lot to you?

I am just happy when people read it and take the time to tell other people about it. With every novel I’ve written, and also with books like Oscar’s Ghost, one of the most fulfilling things is to have an opportunity to hear what stood out to different people and what they brought to it and took away from it. That is the greatest thing ever.

Saturn and Titanic

I often say that a writer does not complete a book– the reader completes the book. Each reader brings his own experience and expectations to the text. So I can’t actually say what you will take away from Saturn’s Favorite Music. What I can do is give you a sense of how I conceptualized the story.

I wanted the radio station to be something of a character in its own right, similar to the ship in the movie Titanic. In James Cameron’s film, the romance between a third and first class passenger exists as much to allow the audience to view life in all parts of the ship, from steerage to first class, as the setting exists to provide a background for a Romeo and Juliet tale.

Incidentally, when I was thinking about the movie Titanic, I realized that the characters of Rose and Jack conform to the classic coming of age gender patterns that I discussed in a previous article. Jack is an orphan whose parents died when he was 15, leaving the character free to embark on his hero journey unencumbered. Rose, on the other hand, comes onto the ship with her family. It is the constraints imposed by her family background that present the challenges she must overcome on her journey to self discovery.

The film Titanic can be viewed in a number of ways. It can be appreciated as a thrilling disaster movie or as a romance. People who want it to be only one or the other might be disappointed. If you want The Towering Inferno, you might think Titanic takes too much time focusing on the fictional Rose and Jack before getting to the action. If you want it to be a romance, you might think that it spends too much time on adventure at the end. (I personally think that being on a doomed ship is drama enough and having a character chase Jack around the sinking ship with a gun is action overkill.) Both of those dramatic strains are there, but when you add in the framing story with the Titanic at the bottom of the sea, it becomes something else as well. It is a reflection on the nature of time and impermanence.

There is a memorable moment in the movie where a video of the wreck of the Titanic at the bottom of the sea transitions to the ship preparing for her maiden voyage. It is thrilling because in that moment it becomes clear that fiction can do something that text books and documentaries cannot. It can take you back in time and put you into a place that no longer exists. The impermanent can be brought back to life through the work of vivid imagination. There is something deeply satisfying in that.

What They Said in 1992

Many years ago, while my father and I were browsing my favorite used book store, John K. King Books in Detroit I stumbled across a few books in the reference section with the title “What They Said In…” and then a year. The books, compiled by Alan F. Pater, collected quotes from notable people on the issues of the day. I fell in love with these books. You could picture Pater poring over newspapers and magazines, circling quotes and clipping articles in hanging files by subject. Over the years I collected most of the books in the series from 1969 to 1995, which may be the last year. It is hard to find much information on these reference books.

Today, because Saturn’s Favorite Music is set in 1992, I decided to take a look at the volume for that year. George H.W. Bush was president and in his State of the Union address on January 28 he announced, “…the biggest thing that has happened in the world in my life– in our lives– is this: By the grace of God, America won the cold war.”

I had almost forgotten the triumphant sense of “waking up from history” at that moment.

“Here, then, is my long-term plan to guarantee our future,” Bush said. “First, trade: We will work to break down the walls that stop world trade. We will work to open markets everywhere. And in our major trade negotiations I will continue pushing to eliminate tariffs and subsidies that damage America’s farmers and workers… The workplace of the future will demand more highly skilled workers than ever… we must be the world’s leader in education… We must encourage research and development…”

Bill Clinton and Al Gore were running on a message of unity. Bill Clinton told a reporter for U.S. News and World Report, “I’d like to be remembered for making people really believe that we’re all better off when we define our lives in terms of our common purposes… I think life is lonelier than it ought to be in America because we are so isolated from one another.”

Al Gore said that the country was experiencing a “crisis of meaning” because of a “culture of distraction… which constantly falls in 15 and 30 second bursts of commercial activity… Many people come home at night and just flip on the television and that is it.”

George Bush, meanwhile, at the UN Security Council summit meeting said “Democracy, human rights, the rule of law, these are the building blocks of peace and freedom…. its import is simple. It can mean the difference between war and peace, healing and hatred, and where there is fear and despair it can really mean hope.”

In a campaign event a few months later he said we need “an open world, open cities, open hearts, open minds, and only then can we not merely trade with other nations but profit from other nations.”

Hillary Clinton told Working Woman Magazine “I don’t know if I would ever run for office. People think so much is planned when, in truth, life has a way of just happening.”

But the quote of the year, as selected by the editors, was from the civil rights leader Jesse L. Jackson in an interview echoing his famous 1988 DNC “Keep Hope Alive” speech. (Full text here) “Cynicism is a luxury and is something people who have real needs can’t afford. I can’t afford to be cynical because it is hope that keeps the people alive. When your job is gone, and your electricity is turned off, and your loved ones are injured or dead… and you are down to your irreducible essence, only hope stands between you and collapse. That’s why we have to keep hope alive. It’s so fundamental to the human spirit. The very least that leaders can do, when they can’t supply the material goods yet, is to sustain imagination and hope.”

The Art of the Rejection Letter

There is a foundation here in Michigan that awards large annual fellowships to individual artists. My level of success in applying for these awards qualifies me to speak with authority on the quality of their rejection letters.

Once the organization has chosen its small slate of winners, it sends out a form letter to the much larger cohort of losers. After sharing the news that the applicant was not chosen for an award, the letter goes on to say, “While we understand this is disappointing news, we encourage you to consider applying again in the future.” It goes on to “recognize the dedication it takes to apply” and to suggest that the applicant use the materials for the application to apply to other organizations.

The letter pisses me off every year.

The part that bothers me the most is “we understand this is disappointing news.” This morning I was giving some thought to why this line sticks in my craw. After a brief diversion looking up the meaning of the word “craw,” I decided that I was annoyed by the organization projecting on to me what it thought I was feeling. An old song came to mind.

“You have no right to ask my how I feel,” says the chorus of Phil Collins’ “Separate Lives.” (This song is also known as the “love theme” of the film White Knights. Why is a break up song called the love theme? But again, I digress.)

So let’s put the rejection letter in the context of another kind of rejection– a break up. Imagine your boyfriend is breaking up with you and he says, “You must be feeling bad about this. I recommend you go look for a new partner. Here is a list of dating apps you might try.” It doesn’t seem appropriate, does it?

What you really want when you have just broken up is to get a beer and listen to Gloria Gaynor on repeat.

You don’t do that with the guy who dumped you. You go out with a friend who will tell you you’re way too good for that guy.

So here is my unsolicited advice to people who write rejection letters. I don’t need you to empathize with my disappointment. You do the rejecting, I will handle the coping, thank you very much. Now excuse me while I go listen to my “Songs for Self Pity” playlist on Spotify on noise cancelling headphones.

The Pattern of Truth

Yesterday I read an article in The Conversation about Oscar Wilde’s Ballad of Reading Gaol. The article quotes Banksy calling Wilde “the patron saint of smashing two contrasting ideas together to create magic.”

I have an audience that comes here, in large part, to read about Oscar Wilde, and I have a new book that appears to have very little to do with that subject. So I thought perhaps I could use this as a hook and smash Oscar Wilde and Saturn’s Favorite Music together to create magic. (The kind of magic that shows the audience for one book why it might like the other book too.)

So what do 1892 and 1992 (the setting for Saturn’s Favorite Music) have in common? Well, if memory serves Oscar Wile and Lord Alfred Douglas met around 1892. And Lord Alfred Douglas, like Clara Jane, the protagonist of Saturn, was young and just starting out in life. Like Clara Jane, he was optimistic about the future and his own power to control his destiny. Neither character yet knew of the obstacles that would be put in their paths. As Douglas wrote in a poem that I believe was written for Wilde and then disguised later as a poem for his wife:

When we were Pleasure’s minions, you and I,
When we mocked grief and held disaster cheap…
I lived and laughed and loved, and knew not why.

But this observation did not yield enough for a full article. So I tried another approach.

I imagined Oscar Wilde in a small town radio station circa 1992. Wilde lived long enough to see a phonograph speaking machine at the Paris Exhibition. But the technology of the little station would all be unfamiliar to him. Clara Jane’s goth fashion might make her appear to be a sorceress. Wilde would be curious, I imagine. “How marvelous.”

Clara’s hand shakes as she tries to cue up The Eurythmics on turntable 1. She finally manages to get it ready and fire the turntable, only to realize she has it set to the wrong speed. She quickly moves the lever from the 33 to the 45 position.

“You’re distracting me,” Clara says to the man in the Victorian suit.

A bit out of his depth himself, but trying not to show it, Wilde resorts to self-quotation: “The only things one never regrets are one’s mistakes.”

The author feels tempted to chime in here that the beauty of mistakes is a theme of Saturn’s Favorite Music, but she exhibits a bit of restraint and lets the characters continue the story.

Clara is not sure what to make of Wilde’s answer. “Didn’t you die, like a century ago?”

“Only in body.”

“Well, yeah, but that’s kind of the important part, isn’t it?”

“Fortunately, I lived before my time,” Wilde said. “I am embarrassed to say, I have become a reputable person.”

“Just wait until they invent social media and AI,” the author pipes in, unable to constrain herself. “You will be quoted as saying all kinds of marvelous things, all entirely original.”

At this point the author realizes this is not working. So she decides to stop referring to herself in the third person and to do what writers do these days when they are feeling lazy and want to churn out some content. She fires up Chatgpt.

Chatgpt is not that great at a lot of things, but it’s core competency is synthesizing information. So I decided to ask it what commonalities it could identify between the books I wrote about Oscar Wilde and my novel set in a 1992 radio station. First I asked it if it was familiar with the book “Oscar’s Ghost.”

“Yes, Oscar’s Ghost is a well-regarded biography of Robert Ross by H. Montgomery Hyde. It focuses on Ross’s life and especially his devotion to Oscar Wilde’s legacy after Wilde’s death.” It went on for another two paragraphs giving a summary of Hyde’s “Oscar’s Ghost.”

“Can you double check that?”

“Got it—let me clarify. Oscar’s Ghost: A Biography of Lord Alfred Douglas by H. Montgomery Hyde is actually about Lord Alfred Douglas, Wilde’s close friend and sometimes adversary, rather than Robert Ross.”

Now that we got that settled, I asked my digital friend how I might bring together the topic of “Hyde’s” book and “Saturn’s Favorite Music.”

It recommended that I “touch on how Wilde’s life and work were full of contradiction: pleasure and punishment, artifice and sincerity, wit and pain. This sets the tone for embracing complexity as a form of creativity. Transition into how your novel, though very different in tone and form, also navigates contrasts: analog vs. digital, chaos vs. control, ambition vs. authenticity. Emphasize how Clara’s story, like Wilde’s, is about finding beauty in what doesn’t quite fit the mold.” These are a lot of words that are organized in a grammatically correct fashion that sound kind of persuasive if you don’t actually delve into them too deeply.

Unprompted, the computer went on to suggest I use a quote that it claimed was a passage from De Profundis. “It was my own soul that I was looking at. My own soul that I was pitying. I was always very fond of being loved. I liked it when he used to say to me things like ‘I am not worthy to be your friend,’ or ‘You are so much better than I am.’ It was all wrong and foolish of course. It is only the weak who are made vain by praise.”

“Is that really a quote from De Profundis?” I typed. “I’m quite familiar with it and I don’t remember it.”

“You’re correct to question the authenticity of those quotes,” said Chatgpt. “Upon reviewing De Profundis, I couldn’t find the exact lines previously mentioned.”

Uh. Ok.

I asked the AI engine how it came to suggest I use a quote that it had just made up out of thin air. “What you encountered is a known issue in large language models called hallucination—when a model generates plausible-sounding but false or unverifiable content,” it explained. “When I say something like ‘this is from De Profundis‘ and it’s not, that’s a hallucination plus a failure of citation discipline. In human terms, it’s almost like talking to someone who’s extremely articulate and persuasive, but who sometimes confabulates without realizing it—saying things they believe are true because they fit the pattern of truth, even when they’re not.”

They fit the pattern of truth.

It struck me that Wilde might like this idea. He was, after all, the author of The Decay of Lying. “There is such a thing as robbing a story of its reality by trying to make it too true… Lying and poetry are arts–arts, as Pinto saw, not unconnected with each other–and they require the most careful study, the most disinterested devotion.” (See also my post on Wilde’s fascination with crime and forgery.)

Producing language that sounds lovely and fits the pattern of truth, while being a lie was right up Wilde’s alley. “I rarely think anything I write is true,” he famously said under oath.

Yet, I have to imaging he would find AI entirely uninteresting. AI is always trying to draw you back to the mundane, the already written. It is not cleverness but the pattern of cleverness in an endless stream of original unoriginality.

“The public imagine that, because they are interested in their immediate surroundings, Art should be interested in them also,” Wilde wrote, “and should take them as her subject matter.”

Art, instead, should present the public with what they have not yet thought to look at, to see the familiar in an unfamiliar way. Reading is, at its core, spending a bit of time looking at the world through another person’s very human perspective.

In the end, I think I have failed to come up with any great resonances between the themes of Oscar’s Ghost and Saturn’s Favorite Music except that the same author produced both. Maybe Oscar’s Ghost readers will recognize some of my particularly human way of looking at things in Saturn’s Favorite Music. It is worth giving it a try.

Six Things Saturn’s Favorite Music is Not

It is not a genre of music.

As interesting as it might be to imagine what Saturn’s favorite music might sound like, Saturn’s Favorite Music is a novel, as Google explains:

It is not science fiction.

The titular “Saturn” is a fictional small town in northern lower Michigan which is home to a radio station with the tag line “Saturn’s Favorite Music.” It is not about the planet, although there are a number of spacey things in the book from a listener who thinks he’s an alien to 1950s b-movies to David Bowie’s “Space Oddity.”

It is not a young adult novel.

Although the protagonist is fresh out of broadcast school and beginning her radio career at the beginning of the story, the author was not specifically targeting a young audience.

The author is not British.

The author has frequently begun speaking engagements by pointing out that she is not British. This is because early reviews of many of her humorous reference books often mistakenly refer to her as “British author Laura Lee.” Presumably someone made this mistake once and the others used that as a source. Once ChatGpt assimilates the misinformation she will probably have to just give up on correcting the record and change her citizenship.

The author is not psychic and has no special wisdom about coping with the loss of your pet.

There are a number of other authors who go by the name Laura Lee. One wrote books on coping with the loss of your pet. The author of such books as “The Pocket Encyclopedia of Aggravation” and “Oscar’s Ghost” discovered the existence of the other Laura Lee after receiving a number of e-mails from people randomly talking to her about the death of their companion animals. There was also a famous radio psychic named Laura Lee. This Laura Lee was once booked as a guest on a radio show in the mistaken belief that she could tell listeners their futures. The hosts did not realize she simply had a book to plug until the interview had already started.

Saturn’s Favorite Music is not on your bookshelf.

This can be easily corrected.

WFRA Mix 99.3 FM Franklin, PA

It is sometimes easy to forget that the world wide web has not always been with us and that much of life passed by almost entirely undocumented in the early 1990s. I noticed this when trying to remember details about some of the radio stations where I worked back then. Because the stations started to disappear before everything started to go online Googling the call letters and names of personalities comes back with very little. (Usually directories containing lists of the years the stations were sold.) So I thought I would take a little time to add a few data points about the stations where I worked to the oral history of the web.

I will start today with the station where I worked for the shortest period: WFRA FM in Franklin, PA. This would have been in 1994. The station was located in a wing of the Venango Inn (now Quality Inn) on Liberty Street. It took up what was probably the space of four guest rooms along one side of the hall. I had my job interview with station manager Thom Sauber in the hotel’s restaurant. When I got the job I discovered a listing for an apartment right next door. I just walked across the parking lot to go home and never had to use my car. I sometimes went to the hotel restaurant for their $5 pancake breakfast before work. My cat sometimes wandered over and watched me through the window.

I came across a page today with some old photographs of WFRA FM. It is on a subpage of a site called watchpocket.net, which appears to belong to a former DJ. It belongs to Melvin Q. Watchpocket and is licensed under a Creative Commons attribution license. The photos were taken by Dennis Woytek in the 1970s.

This photo is identified as the production studio. In my time this was the main broadcast studio for the FM station. It was particularly small, as I recall. Beyond this was another studio, which was the broadcast booth for the AM station which had a “Music of Your Life” format. (1940s and 1950s pre-rock era). There were windows all the way through from the office to the back studio. So when you were doing your show in studio A, you could see the announcer doing his show in studio B. Beyond that was the production studio, which had no window and which later became the place where announcers would record voice tracks.

The studio changed quite a bit from the 1970s to the 1990s, but the window into the office is as I remember it. The woman at the desk is identified as the “front office secretary.” When I started at WFRA I was broadcasting from the studio from 10-2, but automation was introduced soon after and I started recording voice tracks around 9 and then sitting at the the “secretary’s” desk until 5 PM writing commercial copy like this, and this, and doing other administrative tasks. (I enjoyed the commercial writing much more than the “other administrative tasks.”)

I had more of a social life when I worked here than at my other stations. This is probably because I had normal hours. At my other stations I worked afternoon drive or mornings, which puts you a bit out of sync with the world.

I don’t have any photos of myself in the studio here. (How often do you take pictures of yourself at work?) The only one I have is from a remote broadcast at, if memory serves, a donut shop.

There is another remote broadcast photo that I previously posted, along with a photo of what the station looked like when I stayed in the hotel again as part of my ballet tour a few years ago. (Nothing but some rolled up carpet and station logos on a cracked window remained). We were randomly assigned a room across the hall from where I had once worked.

I Wrote a Pantoum.

The Rules of Engagement

Don’t scroll away
Have you seen my post yet?
I performed myself flawlessly
Alive with potential affirmation

Have you seen my post yet?
Was I funny enough?
Alive with potential affirmation
Just a moment of your attention

Was I funny enough?
Although I am sad
Just one moment of your attention
You see the truth, don’t you?

Although I am sad
A thumbs up emoji
You see the truth, don’t you?
Only one like emoji

A thumbs up emoji
The rules of engagement
Only one like emoji
I must be entertaining

The rules of engagement
I performed myself flawlessly
I must be entertaining
Don’t scroll away

-Found this in my journal from February 2023.

Emerging Artist and Persisting Artist

Do you have a song that you play on repeat for consolation when you are feeling down?

This is my keep going song of the moment. Glen Hansard’s “There’s No Mountain” expresses the mature world weariness of someone who has been through highs and lows. When he thought he was soaring life cut him down to size, but when things were dark something came along to lift him up.

“Life is a zebra,” my partner says. Black stripes and white stripes next to each other on the same animal.

I’ve been toying with the idea of writing a book on the writing profession for people who are in the middle of their careers. Most of the books on writing are aimed at “emerging writers.” They are focused on publishing a first book and then, presumably, living happily ever after.

It turns out publishing is not the end of a fairy tale, but the cliff hanger at the end of the first book in a series.

An artist’s career is not a straight line. In this video you see the patchwork quilt nature of it. There are small moments, connecting with a few people in an intimate way. Then there are moments when you find yourself on a bigger stage. You’re the same person either way.

There are many, many artists persisting out there. Not rich. Not famous, or only intermittently so. They are accomplished and have spent years honing their skills. They keep going.

Yet, most of the pep talks and advice for writers are aimed at beginners. There was a time when I was just starting that I needed permission to speak. I needed to be told that rejection was not personal. I needed to be told that I was allowed to think of myself as a writer even before I had a lot of credentials to prove it. At some point, though, you have gotten beyond those fears and you start to look back and look at where you are and you wonder if you’ve accomplished anything, if all that work meant anything. Weren’t you supposed to have a happily ever after? Shouldn’t you have some laurels to rest on by now? Does it always have to be so hard?

To be given the same advice at this stage is not only inappropriate, it can be downright annoying. Rejection letters are a common feature of a writer’s life. Initially they sting because you’re not sure if you are any good or not. Eventually, though, you just come to expect a lot of them. It is not having your work rejected that bothers you, but it is dispiriting to be rejected with one of those notes that says that “it is a great accomplishment to have completed a novel!” I wanted to punch the editor in the nose who sent a letter recently declaring my writing had “promise.”

I often get asked in interviews what advice I would give to someone just starting out. I never get asked what advice I would give to someone who is persisting.

Maybe I don’t need to because Glen Hansard did it for me. Songs are better anyway. There is no straight line. Like Sisyphus you climb the mountain over and over. You persist. And in this song, that feels like a triumph.

And right as I thought I was all out of answers
You said ‘no, there’s no mountain great or small you can’t climb
There’s no mountain you can’t move or you can’t climb’