Interview with poet Kadeem Graham

Poet Kadeem Graham joins me today to chat about a new collection of poems, Eyes to the World.

Welcome, Kadeem. Please tell us a little bit about yourself.

I’m a fine art student in my 2^nd year with an inclination towards sculpture, I play piano, I am a voracious reader of classic literature and poetry and I have a passion for ancient history.

What do you enjoy most about writing poems?

For me, what I enjoy most about writing, is the expression of my soul into words and metaphors. It is a way of understanding the interior of my soul and an understanding of my place in the world. Also, for me is the ability to create a set of images or imagery that resonate with the emotions I feel, for example, I would compare crying and sadness to the flow of an endless river or rage and anger to the heat of a burning sun.

Can you give us a little insight into a few of your poems – perhaps a couple of your favorites?

Here are excerpts from some of my favourite poems

Two from my current book and two in other books to come

There’s A Dream

In the ones who lost it all

In the ones who lost the factories

In the ones who strike and rally 

In the ones who hope for more 

In the ones standing up against the establishment 

For me this poem, is an uplifting and inspiring piece, that captures the idea of hope in the midst of our turbulent political times. The idea that everyone regardless of colour, nationality, class, background has a dream, we haven’t achieved, but we want to reach towards.

Midnight World

The sun has run out of life

The thunder has taken a turn

towards our fate

The moon has moved from our compass

The stars have switched off their dreams

The meteorites march for the war

The sea run into dry mouths

This poem, is an almost apocalyptic vision of our world today, a world ravaged by environmental destruction, lawlessness, political chaos and lack of hope if we refuse to change our ways. In many ways, it is a forewarning piece of work about our uncertain future, as in the line ‘the thunder has taken a turn towards our fate’ we have created an extreme environment that is weaponized against us.

At Winter’s Mercy

The angels seem to be following me

The golden star has fallen off the tree

The freezing breeze is losing sleep

The snowy weather falls

The icicles drop like shattered hearts

The skeleton in the wind is walking free

This poem in it’s dark, almost gothic atmosphere it creates is one of my favourites. This was written in the winter a couple of years, when I was in deep emotional anguish. I was comparing the brutality and coldness of winter with Christmas imagery. I was feeling contradictory feelings joy at the coming of Christmas, but also sadness and hopelessness. The poem is incredibly painful, but is also very therapeutic to me.

Oh The Night 

The night skies were bright

The stars were blue flies

The clouds were silver dust

Sleep was a set of jewels

I came across and kept in a secret box

I was sailing in a sea of stars

Where the moon was raining in light

A more recent poem of mine. This poem comes from marvel, wonder, amazement and mystery at the enduring image of the night sky. As an artist and writer, the night sky is an endlessly inspiring place. In this poem, through use of imagery and metaphor, I wanted to conjure up the whimsical and almost magical quality of the stars, the moon and the night sky.

What form are you inspired to write in the most? Why?

I am most inspired to write in free verse, with the occasional rhyming scheme. For me, as a poet this is the most liberating exercise in being truly imaginative and creative with the scenes, images and metaphors I wish to create. I am not restricted by strict rules, I let my imagination flow.

What type of project are you working on next?

I usually write day by day, working from a word, phrase that has inspired a poem. I hope in the future, to release a collection of poetry based on love and my longstanding discussion of spirituality and faith.

When did you first consider yourself a writer / poet?

I first considered myself a poet, when one day I was on a journey to work and I was musing at the window looking at the sky and clouds, and I began writing how I felt about that. That inspiration lead to my first poem, The Clouds. I showed it to family and friends, and they told me it was amazing. I began to realize I could express my feelings into words about anything and everything and I used that to significant effect, I began to write more and more and the rest they say is history. Today, I write poems about my feelings and experiences and my reflections upon the world.

The Clouds

The clouds awash with the skies

With their piercings and openings

Sights into other worlds

Slowly pulsating

Delicate and ethereal

Woven by the gods

Journeying across the globe

Visiting distant regions and unknown locales

Some journey alone, others journey together

On their way creating havoc and chaos to the people

Or peace and tranquility to the people who need them

I wave to the clouds a goodbye

For I know they will always be there

Awashing the skies with their beauty

How do you research markets for your work, perhaps as some advice for not-yet-published poets?

I haven’t got too that stage just yet, I am still working on marketing myself and my work to the general public. My advice for not yet published poets, is keep writing it will greatly improve your writing ability and insights into work. Have your own unique style of writing, be different, my way of writing will be different to yours. Have a read of works by other poets. Try and get published if you can, make sure it has a great front cover and you have the rights. Publish it for yourself most of it all, for personal achievement and don’t stop writing if it doesn’t succeed. Just keep writing.

What would you say is your interesting writing quirk?

I can write a poem from a verse or line that just pops into my head, like ice melting from a cloud’s shine, just thought of that now ha-ha.

As a child, what did you want to be when you grew up?

I wanted to do something creative, something interesting where I didn’t end working 9-5 in an office, disappearing into boredom. I am living my dream today.

Anything additional you want to share with the readers?

Have a look at a preview of my e-book on Amazon if you can and keep writing!

Thanks for being here today!

Interview with memoirist Albert Nasib Badre

A big welcome to today’s special guest author, Albert Nasib Badre. We’re chatting about his memoir, Looking West: TheJourney of a Lebanese a Lebanese American Immigrant.

Bio:

Albert Nasib Badre is an American author born in Beirut Lebanon. He immigrated to the United States with his family in 1960 at the age of fourteen. His family made Albany, NY their first home in America where he attended a private Catholic high school through his junior year. After three years in Albany, the family moved to Iowa City, IA when his father accepted a professor position at the University of Iowa. He finished his senior year at Iowa City High School, then went on to the University of Iowa where he got a Bachelor of Arts degree. After college, he spent a year as a social worker in New York City. Deciding social work was not for him, he went on to pursue graduate studies at the University of Michigan where he got his PhD in 1973.

He spent the next thirty years at the Georgia Institute of Technology, and today he’s Emeritus Professor of Computing at Georgia Tech. During his tenure at Georgia Tech, he was an international consultant specializing in designing technology to enhance the human experience. Albert was an early pioneer in the field of human-centric design, with some thirty years of experience in human-computer interaction, learning technologies, and human-centric e-learning. His background combines expertise in the empirical methodologies of the behavioral sciences and the design approaches of the computing sciences.

Albert authored numerous technical papers, is co-editor of the book Directions in Human Computer Interaction, and the author of the book, ShapingWeb Usability: Interaction Design in Context. His memoir, Looking West, is the story of his coming of age immigration to America and subsequent conversion to the Catholic Church.

Today, Albert and his wife live in Providence, RI near his son and family, where he leads a very active volunteer life, in service to the community.

Welcome, Albert. Please tell us about your current release.

It’s about my coming of age immigration with my family from Beirut, Lebanon to the United States when I was fourteen years old. The news I’ll be traveling to America excited me to no end. What I didn’t realize when my parents told us we’ll be coming to America, was with limited English skills, it was going to be a tough road for me. I struggled as I tried to learn new customs, make friends, and adapt to a different culture. In Beirut, my family was well established, I had many friends, and was surrounded by lots of relatives. We all, relatives and friends, lived within walking distance from each other in Beirut. In Albany, N.Y., our first home in America, we were unknown nobodies. When I started in ninth grade, not only I couldn’t converse in English, none of my schoolmates knew anything about my history. I literally had to start all over.

As I strove to adapt, I read voraciously, becoming increasingly interested in religion and philosophy. Books became my “American friends,” and reading soon prompted me to ask deep theological questions about my family’s Lebanese Protestant roots, my mother’s conversion to Catholicism, and the contrast between the Protestant and Catholic faiths. This ultimately led to my Catholic conversion.

Despite the many frustrations and difficulties, my goal was to become a successful American. I pressed forward pursuing my adolescent desire, which I announced to my family at the dining room table in Beirut, to strive for my place in the “realm of the mind.” Eventually my search lead me to social activism among New York City’s poorest. And, in time, to graduate studies, where my desire was to improve the human condition through information technology.

What inspired you to write this book?

Well, it all started after my father passed away in 2010. As I mentioned in the book, my father could not come with us to Albany the first three years of our immigration. He had work commitments in Lebanon the first year; the next two years, he lived in the (Belgian) Congo where he was the economic advisor on Congolese Economic affairs to the then UN Secretary General, Dag Hammarskjold. When my father passed away at the age of ninety-eight, my sister Maria, who lived with my parents, went through his file cabinets and found a considerable amount of papers and documents that he had accumulated over fifty years. Among these were a large collection of letters that my mother, my two brothers and myself had written to him between 1960 and 1963, our first years in the US. The majority of the letters were from my mother, who wrote to him at least once a week detailing the voyage by sea and telling him about our daily life in Albany.

After I read and reread all the letters and decided to start writing, I spent many delightful and enlightening hours conversing with my mother about our life in Lebanon and our American adventure. These conversations were at times bittersweet. Every time she would start telling an anecdote involving my father, she would weep. When she’d cry, tears would fill my eyes as well. My wife, Barbara, and I explored a large trove of photos from my parents’ files and albums as well as our own collection.

The more I wrote and as the immigration narrative in recent years became front and center in the national discourse, I felt compelled to tell my story to all those interested in modern immigrant narratives. 

What exciting story are you working on next?

I’ve started working on a sequel, except I am thinking seriously of writing it not as a memoir, but as a novel. It’ll be based on my life in academia. There’s lots of conflict involving people who are still around, or the families, and I am sure they would not take kindly to my relating some of the stories. It is about this idealistic individual who starts as a young assistant professor counting on spending the rest of his life pursuing a scholarly career in an intellectual paradise  disconnected from real world concerns. He finds out the truth about academic life very fast. He tries to fight to preserve his scholarly independence and, in the process, he makes enemies, is wounded more than once, and finds out academia is as cut throat as anywhere else, perhaps more. The story climax on how he overcomes conflicts and difficulties, and eventually reaches scholarly independence.

When did you first consider yourself a writer?

Actually, I started writing when I was a sophomore in high school. I wrote several pieces for the school newspaper, the Vincentian. Socio-political issues of the day interested me at the time and I wrote about them. In graduate school, I coauthored several papers with my Ph.D. advisor, and that’s when I learned the art of scholarly writing. The papers were published in highly reviewed journals. Then as a professor and academic researcher, I wrote many papers published in technical journals in my field and authored a book as well as parts of books. After I left my academic career, I wanted to write the memoirs. When I would first write and show it to people, for example in my writing group, they would say to me, “you write more like your trying to prove an argument or explore a set of points.” I guess they felt what I wrote is dry and lacks personal expression. It didn’t take me long to figure out creative writing is very different from scholarly writing, and I enrolled in continuing education courses on creative nonfiction at Brown University. We had to write a new piece for every class session, and got valuable feedback, mainly by the instructor, but also by participating students.

Do you write full-time? If so, what's your work day like? If not, what do you do other than write and how do you find time to write?

The early mornings, and I mean early—4:30 AM—is when I find it easiest to write. I write for about two to three hours, then I get ready for the rest of the day. Then I write some more before lunch time. A nap after lunch is a must. Then, I spend a good portion of the day reading, a habit I picked up when I was still in primary school, as you’ll find out when you read Looking West. I am sure, you can tell, I don’t do real work. I am a retired professor.

What would you say is your interesting writing quirk?

After four or five pages of writing, I like to read aloud what I wrote. This helps me make sure I am not writing a thesis, but telling a story.

As a child, what did you want to be when you grew up?

As I mention in Looking West, when I was still in Beirut, sitting at the dinner table, I told my family in America, I want to work in the realm of the mind. When my father asked what do I mean, I said I mean the realm of ideas, I want to become a great thinker, and write books. This was very different than what most children my age in my family circle said they wanted to be when they grew up—Doctors, Lawyers, Engineers, business people.

Links:

Website | Amazon | Goodreads | Twitter

To learn more about Albert, feel free to check out any of his other virtual book tour stops:

Launch Day – April 8th

Albert Nasib Badre launches his tour of "Looking West; The Journey of a Lebanese-American Immigrant” with an interview and giveaway at the Muffin!

April 11th @ World of My Imagination with Nicole Pyles

Nicole Pyles shares her review of "Looking West; The Journey of a Lebanese-American Immigrant" with readers at World of My Imagination. Don't miss a chance to learn more about this heroic memoir.

https://theworldofmyimagination.blogspot.com/

April 12th @ Bring on Lemons with Crystal Otto

Crystal Otto shares a 5 star review or the touching and empowering memoir "Looking West" by Albert Nasib Badre.

http://bringonlemons.blogspot.com/

April 15th @ Selling Books with Cathy Stucker

Cathy Stucker interview Albert Nasib Badre about his empowering memoir "Looking West; The Journey of a Lebanese-American Immigrant". Readers at Selling Books are looking forward to learning more about this touching journey.

https://www.sellingbooks.com/

April 16th @ To Write or Not to Write with Sreevarsha Sreejith 

Sreevarsha Sreejith reviews “Looking West” by Albert Nasib Badre. Don't miss this opportunity to hear from Sreevarsha and visit To Write or Not to Write.
http://sreevarshasreejith.blogspot.com/

April 16th @ Lisa Haselton Reviews and Interview

Don't miss today's empowering and honest interview between Lisa Haselton and Albert Nasib Badre - you will want to learn more about "Looking West; The Journey of a Lebanese-American Immigrant" in this touching memoir.

http://lisahaseltonsreviewsandinterviews.blogspot.com/

April 17th @ Linda Appleman Shapiro

Well known book reviewer and fellow memoirist Linda Appleman Shapiro reviews "Looking West; The Journey of a Lebanese-American Immigrant" by Albert Nasib Badre.

http://applemanshapiro.com/category/book-reviews/

April 19th @ Memoir Revolution with Jerry Waxler

Jerry Waxler thoroughly enjoyed reader "Looking West; The Journey of a Lebanese-American Immigrant" by Albert Nasib Badre and shares his thoughts with readers at Memoir Revolution. Don't miss this insightful review of Badre's touching memoir.

https://memorywritersnetwork.com/blog/

April 22nd @ Author Anthony Avina

Author Anthony Avina delights readers at his blog as he reviews the moving memoir "Looking West" by Albert Nasib Badre.

https://authoranthonyavinablog.com/

April 23rd @ Beverley A. Baird

Beverley A. Baird reviews the memoir "Looking West; The Journey of a Lebanese-American Immigrant" by Albert Nasib Badre.

https://beverleyabaird.wordpress.com/

April 26th @ Breakeven Books

Today's author spotlight at Breakeven Books is none other than memoirist and immigrant Albert Nasib Badre with his touching story "Looking West; The Journey of a Lebanese-American Immigrant". Don't miss this opportunity to learn more about this inspirational coming of age memoir.

https://breakevenbooks.com/

April 30th @ Choices by Madeline Sharples

Today's guest post titled "The Backstory: Letters, Photos, and Conversations" is penned by Albert Nasib Badre. Don't miss this great post and opportunity to learn about Badre's memoir "Looking West; The Journey of a Lebanese-American Immigrant"

http://madelinesharples.com/

May 1st @ Lisa M. Buske

Description:Fellow author Lisa M. Buske reviews the inspirational and touching memoir Looking West by Albert Nasib Badre. Don't miss this opportunity to hear Lisa's thoughts on this powerful story.

http://www.lisambuske.com/blog

May 7th @ Bring on Lemons with Karen Levy

Israeli-American author Karen Levy reviews "Looking West; The Journey of a Lebanese-American Immigrant" by Albert Nasib Badre.

http://bringonlemons.blogspot.com/

Interview with novelist/writer Jerome Mark Antil

Writer Jerome Mark Antil joins the blog today. He’s chatting with me about his new literary fiction, Mamma’s Moon: The Hoodoo of Peckerwood Finch.

During his virtual book tour, Jerome will be awarding a $10 Amazon or Barnes and Noble (winner’s choice) gift card to a lucky randomly drawn winner. To be entered for a chance to win, use the form below. To increase your chances of winning, feel free to visit his other tour stops and enter there, too!

Bio:

Jerome Mark Antil writes in several genres. He has been called a “greatest generation’s Mark Twain,” a “write what you know Ernest Hemingway,” and “a sensitive Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.” It’s been said his work reads like a Norman Rockwell painting. Among his writing accomplishments, several titles in his The Pompey Hollow Book Club historical fiction series about growing up in the shadows of WWII have been honored. An ‘Authors and Writers’ Book of the Year Award and ‘Writer of the Year’ at Syracuse University for The Pompey Hollow Book Club novel; Hemingway, Three Angels, and Me, won SILVER in the UK as second-best novel.

Foreword’s Book of the Year Finalist for The Book of Charlie – historical fiction and TheLong Stem is in the Lobby – nonfiction humor. Library Journal selected Hemingway, Three Angels and Me for best reads during Black History Month.

Before picking up the pen, Jerome spent his professional career writing and marketing for the business world. In this role, he lectured at universities - Cornell, St. Edward’s, and Southern Methodist. His inspirations have been John Steinbeck, Mark Twain, and Ernest Hemingway.

Welcome, Jerome. Please share a little bit about your current release.
I never start my first sentence until I’ve exhausted my research on the times, the area, the topics. I conduct interviews. I also match my characters to living people or on screen characters – and then I use their voices.

What inspired you to write this book?
My editor was a several time worldwide bestselling author. He edited the first in this series One More Last Dance – and he encouraged me to write a sequel. When I had, he said it was a rich, strong next step. He said I had reached the Truman Capote and Tennessee Williams leagues. Hemingway teaches me to write what I know. My first chapter is nonfiction.

Excerpt from Mamma’s Moon: The Hoodoo of Peckerwood Finch:

“Old man you are a dead man the second you come out of this store—a dead motherfucker. You hear me, old man?”

With cold, gray eyes, the boy stared at Gabe and backed down the hall, pointing and cursing his threat.

Gabe turned to his left and went looking for the store manager.

What exciting story are you working on next?
I’m writing a trilogy. Tall Jerry – Legend One of the Delphi Falls Trilogy. Semi autobiographical tales about growing up in the shadows of WWII. I’m Tall Jerry (I was 6’3” at 12.)

When did you first consider yourself a writer?

When my 8^th grade English teacher wrote on the corner of one of my compositions – “This is the loveliest autumn I’ve ever read about.”

Do you write full-time? If so, what's your work day like? If not, what do you do other than write and how do you find time to write?

I am in my writing studio, writing, every morning, 7 days a week, from 6:30AM until 1:30PM. I relax for an hour – then I handle my marketing, interviews – research on future books. Then I have a sherry with my wife and muse…

What would you say is your interesting writing quirk?

I nearly always start on my last chapter first. (Sometimes there are more than one option) That way, I know where I’m heading. In one of my novels chapter 36 became my first chapter. It seems I write – and it’s all put together later, as a jigsaw puzzle.

As a child, what did you want to be when you grew up?
Superman and Mark Twain.

Anything additional you want to share with the readers?
If you like my written voice, you would like every genre I have written in.

Links:

Website | Facebook | Amazon

Thank you for being a guest on my blog!

Thank you for having me.

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