Transcription of Musical Journeys #211
This is Dr. Lisa Belisle and you are listening to Love Maine Radio show number 211, “Musical Journeys” airing for the first time on Sunday October 4th, 2015. Journeys can be both literal and figurative. We can see the world through travel but we can also journey without leaving our physical space. Today we speak with international bestselling author Tess Gerritsen and musician Emilia Dahlin about the journeys they have each taken while practicing their craft and how the melodies of life have influenced their experience. Thank you for joining us.
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Lisa: I was first introduced to our guest, Emilia Dahlin, at a Tedx that happened a few years ago here in Portland. I’m really glad that we are able to connect and bring her in to speak with us today because she’s a pretty inspiring lady. Emilia Dahlin is a singer-songwriter based in Greater Portland. Born on a small farm south of Boston to a musical instrument collecting father and accordion playing mother, Emilia was destined for a life of music. She started piano, formally, at the age of five and trained classically for the next 13 years. It was Christmas day, 1996, when Emilia decided she wanted to play the guitar. She went up to the attic, pulled out a warped and worn guitar that once belonged to her great grandfather, and started to play. She never stopped.
She now lives in Gorham with her husband and son. Thanks so much for coming in today.
Emilia: Thank you for having me. Pleasure to be here.
Lisa: It’s such a lovely story of your life. I loved it that your father was a musical instrument collector and your mother was an accordion player. Those both have very different musical connotations in my mind.
Emilia: Oh boy, I don’t know. I mean, in some ways there were a lot of different genres and styles that I grew up with in the household. My mom is actually a really big Broadway fan, lots of musicals, Tommy tunes, and my dad really loves classical music and he has gone more towards Celtic and so there was always just a lot happening. Then we had my uncle who was a radio DJ in the 70s. He got his collection of vinyl, Led Zeppelin, Beatles, just classics from that era. I feel really lucky that I was immersed. In some ways I feel like it set me on this path early on.
Lisa: It was Christmas Day, 1996. What was it about that particular day that was so specific?
Emilia: This is going to sound really cliché in some ways…
Lisa: You can be as cliché as you want to.
Emilia: … For a sing-songwriter. I received 10,000 Curfews which was the Indigo Girls Live CD that day. My sister Ingrid had given it to me. I was listening, and they’re incredible songwriters, just so gifted and great musicians as well. I was listening and I thought, “I want to do this. I need to do this.” I knew that we had a couple guitars laying around which belonged to my great grandfather and so I decided that was the day. We had a few books laying around, instruction books, and that’s when I started.
Lisa: So this is actually more of a family business than just your mother and your father. It sounds like … great grandfather guitar, I mean; you’ve got some music running through your veins.
Emilia: Yeah, so my Italian great grandfather, he got to play clarinet at Giuseppe Verdi’s. I don’t know if you’re familiar with Verdi.
Lisa: Yes.
Emilia: At his birthday party when he was just a kid. So yeah, I’d say it runs in the family a bit.
Lisa: When I heard you speak at TedEx a year ago you were talking about the work you did travelling around the world and actually doing work with different groups, playing guitar, singing songs, and it was a very, it was like a, I don’t know like almost a musical missionary thing that was happening. It was really pretty fantastic.
Emilia: Thanks. I can’t say there was a mission in mind. I was travelling with a group of people and we were visiting sustainable and intentional communities in different places in the globe that had been longstanding there for 50 years and more, and really looking at the challenges and the successes of how a really strong community is built. Wherever we were music was the thing that brought everybody together.
Having a background in music I got to really plug in and pull people together a little bit in that way. It was just, it just cemented for me this idea of the power of music to really connect people, and in places where I could not speak the language at all, and these little islands in Indonesia, people, we really connected through music. It’s also amazing to hear when I was in the favela in Sao Paolo, Jason Mraz being pumped out through the speakers, and people who couldn’t speak English but they were singing along to the music, and in Indonesia people understood the rhythmics. It is incredible to hear the reach of songs in music that goes out into the world. Yeah, powerful stuff.
Lisa: So how did that work? If you couldn’t speak the language, and I’m assuming that you were playing songs that you knew. Did you also pick up songs that were from wherever it was that you went?
Emilia: Yeah, so we would teach each other songs. Even though you might not understand what the words are saying or exactly how to say them you can pick it up. There was a lot of just teaching each other or figuring it out, picking up my guitar and just noodling around until I could contribute in some way or participate.
Lisa: What about musical instruments? Did you pick up any musical instruments that were part of the culture of wherever you went?
Emilia: I did not. I got a couple of really small percussion instrument, but we were living out of a small bag. I had Doug Green of Green Design here in Maine lent me a little traveler guitar, a little backpacking guitar. It was light enough that I could take it with me. That was about the only thing that I had room for to travel.
Lisa: That’s interesting. I didn’t realize that they had traveling guitars. It kind of makes you seem like an itinerant musician.
Emilia: Backpacker, some look like little sticks, they’re very, very thin guitars so it’s pretty cool.
Lisa: You’ve been working with Seeds of Peace I believe and this kind of extends on this multicultural global interest that you have. Tell me about that.
Emilia: Before I left I always had this belief in the power of music to bring people together and that’s playing at a bar and the old sport or it’s playing in some kind of a multicultural setting where it’s really bringing people together. I think that serves in their own ways and really important ways. I had been touring really hard for over a decade before I went on this trip and was really, really getting tired. Also from feeling like something was missing. Being a DIY musician and doing a lot of your own booking and managing and promotion it was getting tiring for me and feeling like I was missing a little bit of that mission piece, like what can I do that’s greater outside of myself through music to do something positive in the world.
I had gone on this trip and when I left I was kind of at the height of my career and I had just released this new CD that I was really proud of, Rattle Them Bones, and I had just opened up for Ani DiFranco and I was touring around. It was a good time. I thought, “Okay, if I leave now is this going to be the end of things? Does this … Do I lose my momentum?” But I felt really strongly that I needed to find a different way to engage. So when I came back a good, dear friend of mine, Deb Bicknell who is a facilitator … You’re smiling.
Lisa: I’m smiling because I went to high school with Deb Bicknell.
Emilia: Oh you did?
Lisa: Yes. It’s a small world Maine thing.
Emilia: Yeah, and she’s famous around here a little bit. A lot of people know Deb for being an extraordinary person. She and I got together and she said, “You know, I have this idea. I just had this incredible experience in Gaza where I was brought to this place and they played music and I finally felt like I was home. I was in this really unfamiliar place and it just brought everybody together. And I’ve been wanting to do something like this here.” I had also been feeling like that. So we got together and we called this project, it was The Transcendence Project, the idea that music gives us this ability to transcend, our personal boundaries in some ways aren’t geographic boundaries and political.
Deb had been working with Seeds of Peace, for a while, we’re just listening for, okay, well; we want to do this thing. How is it going to manifest? And how it ended up manifesting is that we collaborated with the educators’ course through Seeds of Peace. This one particular year, so this was now 2012 I believe, 2012, they brought educators from nine different countries in conflict from the US, Pakistan, India, Jordan, Egypt, Israel, Palestine, there was somebody there from Gaza. I don’t know if I said Jordan. I want to make sure I have everybody. You can go on the website and check it out.
Speaker 5: You did say Jordan but can you maybe just list the last couple or list one more or …
Lisa: Or you can just say nine different countries such as, give a few.
Emilia: Okay, thank you. There are nine different countries in conflict from the US, Israel, Palestine, Jordan, Pakistan, India, and these are all people who engage the arts and the peace working work that they do in the world. 35 different people came to the camp here in Maine and they were having their own experience in the camp. What The Transcendence Project brought to it was a performance. We were brought in to help cultivate and foster this performance that would become a public performance and offering an opportunity for people here in Maine.
We had 10 days to get together these 35 people from nine different countries will all different disciplines from … They were writers and poets, singers, percussionists, and musicians, cellists, viola players, and we had no plan whatsoever of how we were going to do it. So we got everybody together in a room and over the course of 10 days these songs rose and these kind of theatrical dramatic pieces as well and readings. We were in Portland and put on this performance at the end of 10 days and it was a pressure cooker. Before the curtains opened we had no idea what was truly going to happen on stage. It was absolutely beautiful. It was a breathtaking evening with just an incredible show of creative solidarity.
People were really moved by the experience and over the past few years we’ve all kept in touch and decided this music, these writings, this work has evolved from this piece, how can we carry it forward and how can we become kind of a clearing house … Not a cleaning house … How can we become a resource for other people who are out doing this kind of work, using the art as a catalyst for social change in the places where they are?
So Shoshana Gottesman who is the viola player and has worked at Seeds of Peace, she wrote a grant to continue this work, and it was funded. She’s been kind of the catalyst who’s roped everybody in, and I will say, trying to record. We re-recorded these songs. It was really difficult trying to get a singer from Gaza to record. I mean this is … We don’t … I feel like it’s hard to imagine here in the US just trying to move across borders can be incredibly challenging for a lot of these folks and in some cases really dangerous. What they’re doing and the people that they’re collaborating with is considered dangerous in some ways. So people are really putting themselves on the line for this vision.
We’re just releasing a website. We’re calling it, We Make the Road by Walking. There are writings. There are recordings. We’ve put it out on Bandcamp. It’s free. It’s by donation only so we really wanted to make it accessible. It’s connected to a link on the Seeds of Peace website which is again a resource for educators where they can find more material, ideas, and just hear the story of about what we’ve been doing. That’s the long version of We Make the Road by Walking. If you go to Bandcamp and type in “We Make the Road by Walking” you can find the CD.
Lisa: You also have your own personal live music CD coming up. Now you’re going to play a song for us which I’d like you to tell us about.
Emilia: This is a newer tune. It’s entirely inspired by Maine. Part of the reason why I’ve chosen to stay here in Maine is just I find it the natural beauty of Maine is so inspiring to me. We were living on a friend’s farm for the summer up in Montville, Maine, which is near the mid-coast and this arose over two days. The moonlight streaming in the window and the owls and the birds that were around, and just feeling a lot of gratitude for this natural beauty that I get to experience around me here. (singing)
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Lisa: Well that was very beautiful and I can imagine that your son probably enjoys hearing you sing that to him. You are the mother of an 18 month old at this point.
Emilia: I am.
Lisa: And he keeps you pretty busy I think.
Emilia: He does. I’ve got to say it’s been a real struggle to keep my identity as an artist during the past 18 months and keep a creative practice. I sing my way through my days. Always singing. But to really sit down, and I think people, anybody who has a creative practice can understand that it takes time and in some ways discipline to really continue creating work. It’s part of the reason why the new CD feels … Live recordings is really exciting. I am still getting out and playing and hoping to do more of that. I’ll be performing at Federal Street Folly which is part of the Press Hotel on October 2nd. It’s the first Friday. So the first Friday at Federal Street Folly, it’s a great alliteration, it’ll help you remember. Yeah, I’m feeling excited about, feeling like a song writer again.
Lisa: I must say for those of you who are listening and heard the Aaron Frederick interview there might be some echoes here because Aaron is actually Emilia’s husband. We actually had a conversation about what it was like to have a small child in the house and how it shifted one’s ability to I guess exist in the world in the way that one was used to previously. I’ve heard this before. It’s funny to hear it from your standpoint and also from Aaron’s standpoint.
Emilia: Anybody who’s a parent can understand. It’s just a major adjustment. You’ve got to reprioritize and it’s also just a shift in identity I think becoming a mother and thinking, “Okay, who was I, who am I now, who do I want to be, and who can I be,” are questions I’m asking all the time.
Lisa: Hey, I feel it. I have my own three children and I think it’s interesting how often I go out in the world and I am Campbell’s mom, Abby’s mom, Sophie’s mom and my oldest is 22, so that’s been a couple of decades which is about half of my life of being somebody’s mom. I totally understand what you’re saying. I think it’s interesting for you because at the end of the day I can leave my house and go to my job and I can be that person at that job. If you’re a creative individual who’s trying to be working creatively out of your home, then I’m guessing it’s not so easy to do that.
Emilia: No, in fact, when I leave here I brought my guitar and I’m going to the park, I’m going to the east end and I’m going to bring my guitar and I’m finding space away from home. That’s what I need for my own creative process. I think that’s been a really important part of figuring out how to do this, is okay, how can I support my creative process best? And for me that means being away from the responsibilities that I have and finding quiet space and being outside too.
Lisa: You also do work as a teacher. You are an artist in residence at a local school and this is something that you find pretty gratifying.
Emilia: Yeah, it’s been incredible, it’s been great. My role as a teaching artist started through The Telling Room here in Portland. I just have a huge amount of respect for the work that The Telling Room does in the community. They had pulled me in to do a songwriting workshop. I had also done that with Rippleffect. I had started doing this a little bit more with kids. I’d go in and we’d talk about some of the literary tools and basics of songwriting and then within a few hours we’d whip a song together and it was a lot of fun.
I started working with the Maine Academy of Modern Music as well and the founder and director Jeff Shaw is on the PTO over at Ocean Avenue elementary school, as well as Gibson Fay-LeBlanc who’s former executive director over at The Telling Room, so the PTO over to grant that was funded through the Maine Community Foundation and in part by the Maine Arts Commission to fund arts enrichment throughout the year for these 450 kids, K-5, a very diverse vibrant school. They had writing, they had dance, and they had some sculpting as well.
I went in to write songs with all 450 kids, so I was working with in tandem with Dr. Mack who’s the music teacher over there. We wrote a song over the course of the year, a song for each class, so 21 songs. We’ve written 63 songs throughout the past three years, some of them not as complex as others obviously with the kindergarteners, and some of them very complex and I think sophisticated for an age group that you might not otherwise think that they’d be up for that kind of a challenge. Every year there’s been a different prompt but it’s been really gratifying.
As part of that we’ve brought in musicians and song writers from the community, so we’ve brought in The Fogcutters, a 19-piece big band to play for these kids. They were blown away. Sontiago came and rapped. Sam James came in and told stories and played and showed them all his guitars, The Resonators. It’s been really exciting and a way to engage the community here. I think for some of these kids it’s the first time that they’ve been exposed to live music like that. The kids have loved it and the school has been really welcoming. I hope I get to continue that work with them.
Lisa: Because you’re talking about this I’m interested because I’m thinking about the different ways in which we communicate. Obviously we’re in a multimedia world these days, so we’ve got social media, we’re very image, very photo driven. The songwriting piece though it’s not necessarily something you immediately jump to. We think about sharing music but we don’t necessarily think about writing a song and sharing our story through music.
Emilia: It’s a really wonderful way to engage and talk about imagery, creating imagery only through words and through the feeling of the song. We talked a lot about literary tools and how to create really strong imagery, and storytelling. As humans we’ve been storytellers, every culture throughout history, and I think there’s a piece that’s really … Stories are important and for a lot of different reasons, for legacies, in terms of history, in terms empathy and being able to understand each other, and compassion, that is what stories do, they bring us in and allow us to live in somebody else’s shoes or experience somebody else’s experience.
I think all kids should be storytelling more and I think as a culture it’s becoming a lot more popular and kind of in vogue when you think about the moth and all these storytelling events that are becoming huge and it’s simple but I think it’s because it’s part of what we do as humans and crave in a way.
Lisa: I have recently done some … I guess some studying up on linguistics because I love language and I love the idea of languages. I had no idea that there are more than 6000 languages in the world. We think of some standards but what some people would call dialects, they’re actually languages. It’s just that they aren’t maybe as codified, they aren’t as written down. Also this idea that if the world were 24 hours old then it would only be 23 and a half would be when we started to write things down, so there is this amazing oral history tradition and probably part of it is carried through with song. You have this long legacy behind you.
Emilia: Without a doubt. Without a doubt. We’re doing it digitally but I still firmly believe there’s no substitute for resonance and what happens when you hear a voice and it comes from a real body with emotions and we are all, we receive it in a different way when it’s actual sound.
Lisa: Emilia I know people are going to want to hear you at the Press Hotel at the first Friday that’s coming on October 2nd and they’re going to want to get your Live CD and they’re going to want to learn more about Seeds of Peace. Do you have a website?
Emilia: Yes, emiliadalhin.com. My name is spelt with an E, it’s E-M-I-L-I-A, Dahlin is D-A-H-L-I-N so emiliadahlin.com. I also have a Facebook page. You can find me in the digital world pretty easily, but I’d say the website and Facebook page are probably the best ways to find out about what’s going on and about The Transcendence Project Seeds collaboration.
Lisa: You can also see a picture of Emilia and her beautiful child and her lovely husband. They’re all in the Old Port Magazine Active Life. This is with Aaron Frederick. You can listen to the conversation we had with Aaron not so long ago. We’ve been speaking with Emilia Dahlin. She’s a singer-songwriter based in Greater Portland. It’s really been wonderful to speak with you today and thank you for all the great things you’re doing to bring music to the world.
Emilia: Oh I appreciate it. Thank you for having me. I’m grateful.
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Lisa: We have many amazing people in Maine who are doing things on the international scene. One of these individuals is Dr. Tess Gerritsen who is both an international bestselling author and a physician. Dr. Gerritsen, Tess, is known for the Rizzoli & Isles series, which was just renewed for its seventh season on TNT, and it’s going into syndication. Her latest book is “Die Again.” She also has the book “Playing With Fire,” coming out, not a “Rizzoli & Isles” book but something I think people will want to read because I certainly found it to be a page turner. Tess is creating a feature horror film set in Maine with her son and she lives with her husband in Camden. Thanks so much for coming back in and talking with us today.
Tess: Oh thanks, it’s great to be back.
Lisa: Well you came in and had a conversation with Susan Grisanti not so long ago. Susan is the editor of Maine Magazine. You were talking about your book “Playing With Fire” and you really got us interested because it has the strong musical theme. You’re a musician, you were a musician-
Tess: And strictly amateur.
Lisa: Okay, but still you have a very strong musical background and there is something about that, and also this idea of travel to a foreign place because this next book is set in Italy. All these things came together to create this book for you which is very different than the “Rizzoli & Isles” series. Tell me about this.
Tess: I think of it as a gift from the larger world. It’s usually when I sit down to create a book my editor wants a particular type of book, and that is the “Rizzoli & Isles” mystery series which sells very well. This book came to me as a gift almost from the universe. I was in Venice for my birthday and I had a nightmare. I dreamt that I was playing my violin and it was very dark and disturbing piece of music. As I was playing there was a baby sitting next to me and the baby’s eyes suddenly glowed red and she turned into a monster.
I woke up thinking, “I have no idea where this dream comes from.” I mean yes, I do play the violin, but who was the baby, and why did the baby turn into a monster. I was really quite haunted by that whole idea of music turning innocence into horrifying people. I walked around Venice that day thinking there’s a book here. I don’t know what the book is about, something about evil children, and where does this music come from.
I ended up in the Jewish quarter, the origin of a ghetto in Venice and was walking around where they had these memorials to the 246 Venetian Jews who were deported to Poland and executed. All of a sudden the whole story came to me, just like in a flash. I mean just from beginning to end I knew what the story was about. I went home and I began to write it. It is about a woman violinist who picks up a mysterious piece of handwritten music in Rome, takes it home and every time she plays it her three-year-old goes berserk and does something violent. This is the monstrous child. What is the history of this music?
The book really goes into great description about the piece what it sounds like. I mention devil’s cords, and those of you who are musicians will understand what those are, they’re tritones and they’re very disturbing to listen to. One morning after having worked on the book for about a year I woke up with the melody in my head. This was the other thing it was a gift from the universe. I heard the music from my dreams and I composed it. So not only do we have a story about this mysterious piece of music. We also have a piece of music that is recorded by a very, very well-known violinist and will be available for readers to hear as well.
Lisa: I’m interested in the story of the bedeviled child because it’s not something a lot of authors want to take on.
Tess: It was scary. For those of us who are parents, it’s probably the worst thing you can imagine is being terrified of your own child. I made the child three because that is that an innocent age, that’s an age when you don’t think of children as being evil. So this mother who is confronted with the possibility that her child is evil, she’s living this horrifying life now because her whole family is falling apart. She is afraid of her three-year-old and everybody else thinks she’s going crazy because who’s afraid of a three-year-old?
Lisa: That was something that as I was reading the book I was struck by that her husband didn’t believe her, it was threatening to break up her marriage. She actually had to leave and get away from her husband so that she could get her head on straight. Then there’s an interesting twist at the end. Turns out that the child, well, I don’t even want to …
Tess: That’s a spoiler.
Lisa: I don’t want to say anything. There’s an interesting twist at the end let’s just say. One of the things that you and I talked about with Susan Grisanti was the fact that you do the type of work that you do always has some basis in reality, it was important to you that there would be a good reason for this all to have happened.
Tess: Right, I don’t like to play with the supernatural I mean I like to tease you with the possibility of the supernatural because the supernatural fascinates me, but I am at heart a science person and I always want to circle back to something logical, to something believable, and to something possible.
Lisa: You also in the book “Die Again” you go into an interesting thing for me which is the killing of animals.
Tess: Yes, which is in the news now surprisingly, yes.
Lisa: Exactly, exactly. Talk to us about that.
Tess: I went to Africa on safari a couple of years ago, and we had really, my husband and I had an interesting experience out in the bush. Those people who’ve been on safari will know you take a plane out in the bush and some guy meets you in a jeep at the airstrip. Our guide who met us said, “I’m here to keep you safe. You must not get out of the jeep unless I tell you it’s all right,” and we listened to that, his advice, because a couple of months before there had been a group of Chinese tourists who did not understand those instructions, and they stopped to look at lions and two men jumped out and were killed. So of course we stayed in the jeep.
One afternoon we stopped for cocktails in the bush. We all got out of the jeep because we thought it was safe and we were sitting around looking and drinking our gin and tonics. My husband said, “I need to go pee. I’m going to go walk into the bush over there.” Our guide said, “Why don’t you go in the other direction because I’ve heard reports of a leopard being seen down that valley.” So my husband walked in the other direction and less than a minute later out of the bush that he had originally been headed for a leopard walked out.
We’re all out of the jeep, we’re all standing around with our cocktails, and the leopard came towards us. Our guide just, he just stepped between us and the leopard, made himself really big and the leopard decided she didn’t want to tackle him and walked back into the bush. I realized after that he saved our lives, that man; we have to trust our guide. But then of course the writer always takes over and the writer thought, “But what if you trust the wrong person? What if the man who picks you up at the landing strip is not who he said he is? What if it turns out the most dangerous creature in the bush is on two legs?” That was the basis for “Die Again.” As you mentioned, it talks a lot about big game hunting, about the killing of protected animals, and a lot about the nature, the real nature of cats.
Lisa: I think what I liked about “Die Again” was again it was an interesting twist at the end because there was these two stories, the two story lines, and I couldn’t quite see how they were all going to come together, but I had an idea, “Well, maybe this is going to happen,” but at the end you surprised me. I turned the page you surprised me and I was like, “Wow, she’s masterful.” Obviously you’re very good at what you do.
Tess: I try, I try. The truth is I did not know the answer to that mystery until about two thirds of the way through the first draft. That’s the way I work. I really kind of … I set off without a net, standing up there on the tight rope, trying to figure out just step by step by step and then about two thirds of the way through I thought, “Oh, now I know the answer.” That’s just my technique for writing. I don’t recommend it because it drives you crazy and I get writer’s block but it works for me.
Lisa: It is very interesting because as a physician in many ways even though we have to be problem solvers we’re also trying to be fairly linear. So there’s algorithms, you follow the algorithm and then you come out with what you hope is going to be the expected outcome. That’s not the way writing is.
Tess: Yeah, it’s crazy, isn’t it? Because I know lawyers who are also novelists and they line up their ducks, they have their ducks all lined up in a row, they plot out their book and then they write it. I’m sure that the average doctor would probably do it that way as well. I’ve tried to do it that way. What happens is that about halfway through the book I just veer off my outline because I get bored. I think part of it is that when you have an outline you know what’s going to happen and it takes the excitement out of writing the story. I like the opportunity of being able to veer off the track to let the characters do something that surprises you. I’m always waiting for them to surprise me and when they do I’m just thrilled.
Lisa: Well I appreciated that and I appreciated actually both of these books. I was reading them at the same time and I was thinking the idea that you could come up with something that was not what the reader would expect is pretty wonderful.
Tess: It is and I, again I just go back to my subconscious, I don’t know where it comes from. I think that part of creativity is … This is my theory about creativity about where you come up with new ideas, is all your experiences, your reading, all the kinds of things that you, all this data you collect, the facts you collect, if you can somehow match up part A with part Q, things that people don’t even think are connected, that is what causes you to have something new and creative and new and different, is that you are seeing connections between things that have no connections. That’s what I’m always trying to do with the books. For instance, with “Playing With Fire” we start off with music and we start off with a crazy child, but then I also put neuroscience into it, and that all ties together at the end for the solution.
Lisa: You also threw in a little bit of interesting history in about the Jews that were deported to Poland from Italy. What you also were describing to us when you came in and you were saying that the interesting cultural aspect of Venice that kept it so there were only so many Jews that were deported compared to some of the other countries were so many more.
Tess: Well that was what really fascinated me about this topic. I mean yes, the book was about music, but it’s also about World War II and Italy and how Italy was so different from the rest of occupied Europe. I was looking at the statistics of Italy. They were an axis power and yet 80% of their Jews survived the war. What made it different from Germany where 90% died, Poland where 90% died, even Holland where I think it was like 80%, 77% of their Jews died. What was different about Italy and the stories that I came across from what really moved me the most, because it was, I think it was the courage of the common ordinary Italian which was so beautiful. People would hide their neighbors. They had nuns and priests who would hide Jews in convents and monasteries at risk to their own lives.
There were some funny things too about what made Italians different and there was one psychologist who said, “Well, drive around Rome and you will see that Italians don’t follow the rules if they don’t believe in them,” just traffic. That’s true. I mean, if they don’t believe in the law they won’t follow it. I think that’s what happened in Italy is that a lot of Italians just said, “You know, screw this. I’m going to turn over my neighbors.”
Lisa: That must’ve really appealed to you. You’re the person who likes to veer off the track.
Tess: Isn’t that funny because this really moves me. I guess the idea of quiet heroes, people who don’t have to do something heroic and do it anyway, I mean even when I was writing the book I was just so moved by these stories.
Lisa: It’s interesting that even now it brings up these emotions for you.
Tess: It’s going to be talked. I’m going on book tour with this particular book.
Lisa: Yeah, I feel it’s …. I think you’re interesting. Well having interviewed you twice you have this very sort of let’s take control of the, I don’t know, the horror mystery. Then there’s these things that crop up for you and they kind of tweak you in a way that you don’t expect.
Tess: I think writing for me is very much an emotional process. I think you can’t tell a convincing story unless you are so thoroughly entwined in your book that the emotions come through you. I think that’s what happened with “Playing With Fire” was that the emotions of this young couple that fall in love and this doomed love affair, and then the overall tapestry of a whole country trying to come to grips with a leadership that is telling them to do things that they don’t believe. How do you react to that? Why were the Italians different from the Dutch who were by and large liberal people but nevertheless they did things they knew were wrong because somebody told them to do it? You ask yourself what would it be like in the United States if something came down from above, turn over your neighbors, turn over all the Muslims, turn over all the Jews, what would Americans do?
Lisa: I think when I went to the Holocaust museum in Washington I wondered the same thing, what would I do if I was one of these people. I’m not Jewish. I’m Christian. Would I be the one who was hiding my neighbor in my cellar, or would I be the one who felt compelled to turn my neighbor over?
Tess: Even take it a step further, would you be the one to hide your neighbor in a cellar at risk of getting yourself executed? That was the extra step they took, to risk their own lives or families lives to do the right thing.
Lisa: This book was so important to you, “Playing With Fire”, that you were willing to take a risk and say to your publisher, “Look, I know this is nothing like ‘Die Again.’ It’s nothing like ‘Rizzoli & Isles.’” In fact, on the front page of the book there is a note from the publisher that says, “This book is nothing like ‘Rizzoli & Isles.’ This book is going to be what it is. You’re going to love it anyway.” But it was a huge risk for you. You felt really strongly about this.
Tess: The books that I love the most that I write are the ones that nobody actually wants. They’re the books my publisher goes, “What is this? What are we going to do with it?” I remember I wrote a book called “The Bone Garden,” which again completely off topic, no “Rizzoli & Isles,” not even a contemporary novel. It was set in 1830s Boston. I think my publisher was not quite sure what to do with it, but luckily we’ve been working together so long that they realized, “Well, she wants to publish this book, and this is an important book, and even though it may not sell as well there it goes off to market.”
Lisa: You’ve also championed something that is maybe not as I guess popular as perhaps some other medical problems, and that’s Alzheimer’s. I mean we have a huge outpouring of support for breast cancer and breast cancer research, and Alzheimer’s which impacts so many of us doesn’t have quite the same cache. You raised $50,000 which went directly to Alzheimer’s research in your first campaign. You’re doing a second campaign and that was important to you because your father had dementia. You don’t necessarily … When you feel strongly about something you get behind it.
Tess: I think I’m not only behind it, I’m angry about why it is not getting more attention. I always go back to how much money we spend on wars, how much money goes into building an aircraft carrier or some new B whatever B2000 bomber and we spend so very, very little on neuroscience research. Yet this is what is going to destroy us as a country in terms of money. By 2050 we’re going to be spending a trillion dollars on taking care of Alzheimer’s patients. Now that to me is worth saying let’s declare war on this particular disease.
If we were to put a lot more resources into just the research aspect of it, the basic science research, how does Alzheimer’s arise and how do we treat it, we would be saving our country a lot of money. This is the penny … What is it? Penny wise and pound foolish, that the way we’re going about it now is ignoring the situation and letting baby boomers who are now coming into the danger time of Alzheimer’s really suck up all the Medicare dollars and suck up a lot of our resources and families’ resources because it’s not just hospitals and nursing homes, it’s all the families that cannot work because they have to take care of their loved ones.
Lisa: You’re putting your money where your mouth is. You’re actively raising money for Alzheimer’s research. Also you were talking about how much we spend on wars. You’re supporting the troops anyway. You’re still going out, you have a USO tour coming up with another author, Diana Gabaldon. It’s not that you’re saying that we shouldn’t be putting support over here. You’re saying, “And. And we also need to be putting support over here.”
Tess: You look at what is really affecting our country and what is killing Americans right now at this moment. I just, I’m appalled that we don’t put more money into neuroscience research. When I started this idea of raising funds the idea was that it would go straight to scientists. I wanted to go to the people who were in the labs who were doing the basic science research. I chose the Scripps Research Institute in San Diego and Florida because I know this institute, I know the scientists, I know that it will go straight to them. But I just wish that other people would step in and find and identify their own research institutes that are in their states. It doesn’t have to go to Scripps. If you can do your own fundraiser and identify something in your own state that’d be great. But we really have to get down to basic science here for this.
Lisa: Tess how can people find out about your fundraiser or the work that your other novels that you’re writing?
Tess: Can all go to my website at tessgerritsen.com and I have sort of like where I put everything. I’m also on Facebook and on Twitter if anybody is interested.
Lisa: It really has been a pleasure to have you come in and speak with us today. We’ve been speaking with international bestselling author and physician Tess Gerritsen. I, having personally read “Die Again” and “Playing With Fire” they were page turners, I encourage people who are listening to read them, and I do encourage people who are listening to consider putting some money behind Alzheimer’s research because as a physician I see this on a regular basis, how much it impacts patients and their families. Thanks so much for all the work that you’re doing Tess.
Tess: Thank you.
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Lisa: You have been listening to Love Maine Radio show number 211, Musical Journeys. Our guests have included Tess Gerritsen and Emilia Dahlin. For more information on our guests and extended interviews, visit lovemaineradio.com. Love Maine Radio is downloadable for free on iTunes. For a preview of each week’s show, sign up for our e-newsletter and like our Love Maine Radio Facebook page. Follow me on Twitter as Dr. Lisa and see my running, travel, food, and wellness photos as Bountiful One on Instagram.
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Announcer: We leave you now with a song from Portland Maine recording artist Sara Hallie Richardson. This is the title track from her new album, Phoenix.
Sara: (singing)
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