AuthorViews Video Podcast

AuthorViews is pleased to present two minutes with writer, graphic artist and publisher, Tedd M. Walley, cut from his interview at the 2008 Alternative Media Expo in New Orleans. Walley is the creator of Voodoo Maverick Publishing and its explicit, violent and unique comic book series, MATHILDA: The Forces of Evil VS. The 3rd Grade. At first glance, I didn't know what to expect. Walley approached the AuthorViews booth dressed completely in black -- black boots, black leather pants, black shirt and black hat -- with tattoos, piercings, aviator sunglasses, and even a few skulls here and there. You don't have to be a detective to figure out why Walley is often referred to as the "man-in-black" of the comic book world. Once the interview began, it was obvious that beneath the dark exterior was an extremely talented, creative and well-spoken individual. Walley is an entrepreneur, comprising his own one-man company called Voodoo Maverick Publishing. Walley founded the company so that he could launch, develop and market MATHILDA effectively. It's amazing how much effort Walley puts into Voodoo Maverick and MATHILDA. He does everything -- writing, penciling, inking, lettering, advertising, marketing, promotions and web design. All this on the side of his full-time job as the Professor of Visual Communication at Delgado Community College in New Orleans. In this video, Walley discusses MATHILDA and why he thinks readers enjoy it so much.

AuthorViews is pleased to present two minutes with writer, publisher, and now children's book author, Antonio Crawford, cut from his interview at the 2007 Virginia Festival of the Book. Crawford has been in the publishing business for years, but this is the first kids' book he has been involved with. What a debut! Henrietta the Hyena, written and published by Crawford, is a fun, captivating and educational children's story, filled with bright, colorful illustrations and a writing style that evokes learning. In this video, Crawford talks about Henrietta the Hyena and the joy he gets from working with and teaching children.

Louie Crowder's Calme Au Blanc is a play about living and loving in downtown New Orleans, around the two-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. AuthorViews met up with Louie Crowder at the 2008 Alternative Media Expo in New Orleans to talk about Calme Au Blanc. In this two-minute video cut from his interview, Crowder discusses how living in a city as culturally rich as New Orleans can have a profound impact on what people do and how they do it. For Crowder, New Orleans culture permeates what he writes about and even his writing style. We are releasing this video just in time for Calme Au Blanc's final week of performances. After a successful run at the Big Top Gallery in New Orleans, this is your last chance to catch the play. The final three performances are Thursday through Saturday, March 27 - 29, at 8:00PM at the Big Top Gallery. Also, to give you a preview of Calme Au Blanc, Crowder was nice enough to provide an excerpt from the play, which you can read below the video.

AuthorViews is proud to present two entertaining minutes with New Orleans biker, punk, and author Ethan Clark, cut from his interview at the 2007 New Orleans Book Fair. Leaning with Intent to Fall is a series of Clark's personal stories about public drunkenness, getting chased by stray dogs, hitchhiking across the country, and other wacky and amusing adventures that celebrate the biker-punk subculture. Clark's stories take place in pre-Katrina and post-Katrina New Orleans, as well as in Asheville, NC, where Clark relocated after the hurricane. In this video, Clark talks about some of the wild things that happened to him in his first month-and-a-half back to New Orleans after Katrina, while he was trying to finish up his book.

From the Crescent City, AuthorViews is excited to introduce Michael "Rex" Dingler, New Orleans artist, activist and creator of the NoLa Rising Project. We met up with Dingler at the 2008 Alternative Media Expo in New Orleans for an interview you don't want to miss. If you've had the chance to wander around New Orleans within the last year or so, anywhere from the bustling streets of the French Quarter to the emptiness of the lower Ninth Ward, you've no doubt seen the uplifting work of Dingler and his NoLa Rising Project. NOLA Rising is a post-Katrina art campaign encouraging the people of New Orleans to display works of art across all areas of the city, in hopes of renewing the creative spirit of New Orleans and just giving residents something bright and cheerful to smile about. Since the project's inception in mid-2007, Dingler personally has drawn over 2000 posters and 500 signs that have been put up by NoLa Rising "street teams" on walls, telephone polls, bulletin boards -- anywhere and everywhere -- throughout the Greater New Orleans area. Dingler has spawned an entire movement out of his vision to brighten up New Orleans. Friends and supporters contribute to NoLa Rising with paintings and signs by the hundreds, hoping to replace the bleakness of a hurricane's aftermath with creativity, color and the New Orleans spirit. For some (ridiculous) reason, there are a few individuals throughout the city who have taken offense at the project, viewing the art as nothing more than graffiti. According to an article in The Gambit Weekly, "Fighting the Aerosol Nation," for the past five years, Fred Radtke has been in charge of a Louisiana nonprofit organization called Operation: Clean Sweep, essentially an anti-graffiti task force. With the support of local government and law enforcement, Radtke is responsible for removing graffiti. But since he can't just erase the graffiti, Radtke covers it with gray paint, and consequently has come to be known as the The Gray Ghost. Over the past few months, Radtke and Operation: Clean Sweep have begun to target NoLa Rising, specifically Rex Dingler. This is not only unfair, but insane, since Dingler clearly has positive intentions, not to mention the fact that this project has nothing to do with graffiti -- it's installation artwork that can be removed easily. What's the point of painting the "gray ghost" over a stapled-up poster that you can simply pull down? Radtke has gone so far as to have a police officer cite Dingler for 1,100 counts of illegally posting on telephone polls, an absurd charge that Dingler is fighting wholeheartedly, despite the immense cost of his legal defense. As the trial date nears, here's what Dingler has to say about Radtke. Taking the advice of his legal representation, Buddy Spell of the law firm Spell & Spell, Dingler has set up a defense fund to help him raise enough money to cover his legal costs. Donations to the fund can be made to: SPELL & SPELL C/O Michael Dingler Defense Fund 924 Ellis Street Franklinton, LA 70438 Check out Dingler's AuthorViews video and the Defend New Orleans video, for more information on NoLa Rising and the trumped-up charges against the artist. There's also a good article in New Orleans CityBusiness, called "'Gray Ghost' Feuds with Nola Rising Creator," which offers statements from both Dingler and Radtke.

AuthorViews is excited to present two minutes with fantasy novelist Chris Matherne, cut from his interview at the 2007 New Orleans Book Fair. Matherne is a life-long fan of fantasy and adventure novels. In fact, he decided to write The Shaping of a Destiny because he was tired of reading "slow paced fantasy adventure books that seemed to crawl along at a snail's pace." Matherne's debut novel is anything but slow. In this video, Matherne discusses why he thinks readers enjoy The Shaping of a Destiny, and offers two humorous anecdotes about his writing experiences.

AuthorViews is proud to introduce Valentine Pierce, a native New Orleanian and staple of the New Orleans poetry scene. Pierce has been reading and performing her poems all over the country for years, from clubs and coffee houses in the French Quarter to art galleries and festivals on the West Coast. AuthorViews met up with Pierce at the 2007 New Orleans Book Fair to talk about her first poetry anthology, Geometry of the Heart. Although Pierce has had nearly 60 poems published in various books and anthologies, this is the first time she has published an entire book with her work exclusively. In this two-minute video cut from her interview, Pierce recites a poem she wrote about living in New Orleans -- a taste of the soul and passion we can expect from the rest of her poetry.

Renee Bobb is an expert in the fields of self-publishing and small business development. She has published four guidebooks on theses topics, and has founded a book publishing and small business consulting company called R.B.I. Enterprise. Through her firm and various workshops, Bobb has trained nearly 1,500 authors on how to self-publish. AuthorViews had the privilege of interviewing Bobb at the 2007 Virginia Festival of the Book about her new book, The Self-Publishing Process: The Beginners Guide to Book Publishing Success. In the two-minute video we cut from her interview, Renee talks about why authors and entrepreneurs find her books extremely valuable. Anyone interested in developing a business or publishing a book should check out Bobb's clip and related links.

AuthorViews would like to introduce Dedra Johnson, an accomplished writer, blogger and novelist, who has been doing fantastic blogging work with our sister company, Patron Saint Productions. Dedra sat down with AuthorViews at the 2007 New Orleans Book Fair to talk about her debut novel, Sandrine's Letter to Tomorrow, an inspiring story about a light-skinned black girl who grows up in 1970s New Orleans in an environment of poverty, racial prejudice and emotional abuse. A resident of the Crescent City, Dedra has received tremendous praise for her book locally, as well as nationally. Sandrine's Letter to Tomorrow is well-written, with rich, realistic characters that seem to touch readers who grew up not only in New Orleans, but in any city where race and class were often divisive issues. In this two-minute video, Dedra describes how 9-year-old Sandrine evolves over the course of the story, ultimately learning to stand up to some of the negative forces in her life.

AuthorViews is proud to present two minutes with Ann Conti Morcos, cut from her interview at the 2007 New Orleans Book Fair. With nearly two decades of writing and editing experience, Morcos published her first children's book in 2002. The Tale of Nada Nutria is a story about a community of nutria that gets separated when a hurricane destroys their home. Nutria are large rat-like rodents, ranging from 10-20 pounds in adulthood. Native to South America, nutria were brought to Louisiana by fur traders in the early 1900s. The Tale of Nada Nutria is truly one-of-a-kind, the first and only children's book ever written about nutria. What's remarkable is that Morcos is able to express themes as powerful and human as friendship, family and courage with nutria as her main characters. In this video, Morcos describes the two historical Louisiana events that her story is based on, and explains why she actually decided to write a children's book about nutria.

AuthorViews is excited to introduce Reverend Goat Carson, a remarkably fascinating and worldly figure who truly has done it all: musician, songwriter, Native American spiritual leader, published author. He even ran for President in 1992, amassing 100,000 votes before losing to Bill Clinton. Rev. Goat spent most of the 1970s immersed in the Hollywood scene, recording songs and working as a screenwriter on various films. Shallow Graves is Goat's twisted and intense satire of the Hollywood lifestyle, complete with movie stars, satanic cults, zombies and human sacrifices. In this video, Rev. Goat talks about Shallow Graves and how his work experience in Hollywood influenced his writing style.

AuthorViews would like to introduce the charming Margaret Sartor, Duke University professor and author of Miss American Pie: A Diary of Love, Secrets, and Growing up in the 1970s. This 2-minute clip was cut from Sartor's interview at the 2007 Tennessee Williams/New Orleans Literary Festival. Miss American Pie is a compilation of diary and notebook entries, letters and photographs from Sartor's adolescence. She fuses them together to express not only the story of her own childhood, but the influential themes, events and issues of the 1970s as well. In this video, Sartor describes how telling a story through the use of primary documents produces an "authenticity in voice" that you simply can't create with any other form of writing.

AuthorViews is pleased to present two minutes with military history expert Will Hutchison, taken from his interview at the 2007 Virginia Festival of the Book. As a former officer in the US Marines and Army, and a Federal Law Enforcement Agent, Hutchison's knows a thing or two about combat. Now a renowned writer and lecturer on military history, Hutchison has gone through great lengths to create a flawlessly realistic tale about one of the most famous regiments in British military history. Follow Me to Glory won the Independent Publisher's Bronze Award for Best Regional Fiction and was a Finalist in the 2007 ForeWord Magazine Book of the Year Awards. In this video, Hutchison describes some of the extensive research he needed to conduct in order to bring Follow Me to Glory to life.

AuthorViews is proud to release 2 minutes with the lovely Amy Guth, cut from her interview at the 2007 Tennessee Williams/New Orleans Literary Festival. Guth's debut novel, Three Fallen Women, is a violent and graphic, yet touching portrayal of the struggles of three women who don't know each other, but are connected thematically throughout the book. In this video, Guth discusses Three Fallen Women and how writing the novel has influenced her perspective on women and life in general.

AuthorViews is proud to present 2-minutes with author, editor and publisher Kathryn Lively, cut from an interview at the 2007 Virginia Festival of the Book. Lively is currently the publisher of Phaze Publishing, an erotic romance imprint with over 100 titles, most of which are e-books. In this video, Lively talks about the marketing and promotion of erotic romance, as well as the distinction between erotic romance and traditional romance.