SUMMARY: What makes a family? Blood? Circumstance? Closeness? In author Robin Benway's "Far From the Tree," she tells the story of three siblings who are put up for adoption as babies, and grow up without knowing each other exists. Benway, who won this year's National Book Award for Young People's Literature, joins Jeffrey Brown for a conversation.
SUMMARY: Award-winning author Jesmyn Ward writes the stories of the people and places she found absent in literature while growing up. Her new fiction novel, “Sing, Unburied, Sing,” weaves the supernatural with genuine characters that are molded by the rural and poverty-stricken life in her Mississippi hometown. Ward joins Jeffrey Brown to talk about her community and the stories that have come from it.
SUMMARY: "Fortune Smiles," a collection of stories by Adam Johnson, was the winner of this year's National Book Award for fiction. He joined Jeffrey Brown at the Miami Book Fair to discuss what inspires his stories.
ADAM JOHNSON, Author, “Fortune Smiles”: I love the short story.
Having written two novels in a row, I missed the power of the short story. To me, a short story is like a battery that can store emotion and just charge you up directly with it, and it can hold emotion for as long as you want and then transmit it.
I have always loved research. I have always loved going out into the world and finding a twin for what’s going on inside me. Maybe technology’s part of that.
JEFFREY BROWN (NewsHour): So, what starts a story for you?
ADAM JOHNSON: I have learned over the years to trust my obsessions.
JEFFREY BROWN: Obsessions.
ADAM JOHNSON: When I get obsessed about Nirvana songs, listening to them over and over, or buying Maori jade over the Internet late at night and running up my eBay bill, it usually means it’s connected to something inside. And I won’t know what it is until I put that obsession into a story.
I am Retired U.S. Navy (22yrs) and a Vietnam Veteran. After my Navy retirement I was in the computer related industry, now retired. In 2000 I was a registered Republican and voted for George W. Bush. Six months of having Bush in the Whitehouse forced me to re-evaluate my political stance. I had always thought of myself as a Moderate Republican, but was a Republican by "default" NOT because of close examination of the GOP. Due to what has happened in America since 2000, I now consider myself a progressive, and registered as a Non-Affiliated voter.
*Anti-First Amendment policies that attempt to turn America into a theocracy by enshrining ANY religious belief as law.
* Any attempt to suppress human or Constitutional rights.
* Any law or policy that supports discrimination based on religion, ethnicity, race/color, gender, sexual orientation, or any law that does NOT support Equal Treatment under the law.
*Any law or policy that attempts to suppress Freedom of the Press or Free Speech.
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