Monthly Archives: May 2017

An Interview with Author Gail Rubin

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Gail Rubin is not only an author, columnist, and radio/television host, she’s The Doyenne of Death®. As a Certified Thanatologist (death educator) and a Certified Funeral Celebrant, Gail brings light to a serious subject, helping others plan for the inevitable as well as remember the lives of loved ones. Her award-winning nonfiction books published by Light Tree Press include A Good Goodbye: Funeral Planning for Those Who Don’t Plan to Die (2011) and Hail and Farewell: Cremation Ceremonies, Templates and Tips (with Susan Fraser, 2015). Her newest book, Kicking the Bucket List: 100 Downsizing and Organizing Things to Do Before You Die, was published by Rio Grande Books in 2016. You can find Gail on her websites AGoodGoodbye.com and GailRubin.com, and on her Amazon author page.

What’s your elevator pitch for Kicking the Bucket List?
Kicking the Bucket List is two-thirds about downsizing and one-third about organizing for end-of-life issues. We’re more inclined to deal with our material goods than our mortality, and this book helps get the conversation started.

What unique challenges did this work pose for you?
At first, it seemed like coming up with 100 items for this particular Bucket List was going to be a stretch. It turned out I had to pare down and combine items to make everything fit. Each item needed a photo or other artwork. I found a great resource for free Creative Commons images at Pixabay.com, and I took my own photos around the house of my own junk and my cats.

How did the book come together?
Barbe Awalt and Paul Rhetts, the publishers at Rio Grande Books, have published a series of Bucket List books since 2015. It started with Barbe’s The Basic New Mexico Bucket List: 100 Things to Do in New Mexico Before You Die. Each bucket list item has one page, with a paragraph or two of description, a link to a website for more information, and a color photograph. By the time Barbe approached me about doing a book for the series, other titles in the pipeline focused on hot air ballooning, cowboy life, space buff activities, and other New Mexico topics. This was the first of the books to focus on a practical issue everyone will eventually face.

We met to discuss the book in August of 2015, and signed a contract in September. I first focused on doing an outline of tips that went from “why downsize” to “how to downsize” to “creative ways to downsize” to “organizing for end-of life issues.” Once I started the writing, found appropriate website links and gathered photos, it came together within three months. Paul said the editor commented this was the most polished manuscript she’d ever seen, so the editing process didn’t take long. I thank my critique group for helping make it so polished. And we have SWW member Steve Brewer to thank for the title. I believe alcohol was involved.

What was the most rewarding aspect of writing Kicking the Bucket List?
As a professional speaker, the book has given me a new way to speak about mortality issues. I now have a PowerPoint presentation with photos from the book that I can customize to focus more on downsizing or on end-of-life issues, depending on the emphasis desired by the organization having me speak. The talks have been very well received, and I’ve sold a number of books after these presentations.

Do you have a favorite quote from the book you’d like to share?
I love the promotional blurb provided by Caitlin Doughty, YouTube “Ask a Mortician” star and author of New York Times bestseller Smoke Gets in Your Eyes and Other Lessons From the Crematory: “The connection between downsizing and death acceptance has never been more obvious. Clear your mind and conscience by sucking it up and doing the things Gail suggests.”

How many of the 100 items from the list have you checked off?
You would think The Doyenne of Death® would have completed all of the items, but no, I’ve still got drawers, closets, shelves and rooms that have excess goods that need to go. I have done a number of the end-of-life organizing items, though.

Any “Oh, wow!” moments while doing research for this book?
Oh, wow—I still have a lot of stuff to get rid of.

What inspired you to write about planning for death?
I got married for the second time in 2000, and had a really creative and fun Jewish Western wedding. Everyone had such a good time, I wanted to write a book about creative life cycle events and call it Matchings, Hatchings and Dispatchings, about weddings, births and deaths. From 2006-2007, I did a monthly feature in the Albuquerque Tribune by that name, and it was the columns on death and funerals that got the most reader response.

The responses told me there’s a real need to have conversations about death, and humor is a good way to start the conversation. I focused on funeral planning, since there were already plenty of books on wedding planning. The course of my career changed when I wrote A Good Goodbye: Funeral Planning for Those Who Don’t Plan to Die. I went from being a public relations professional to a Certified Thanatologist (a death educator), a Certified Funeral Celebrant, a licensed insurance agent, a very busy blogger/podcaster/YouTube creator, and a contributing writer for funeral trade press.

How did The Doyenne of Death® come about?
My brother Mitch suggested the moniker, and I thought it was great. It wasn’t until I ran out and spent a lot of money getting the phrase trademarked that I realized most Americans don’t know what a doyenne is, although Europeans are familiar with the term. So, in addition to being a death educator, I’m educating people that a doyenne is a woman who’s considered senior in a group who knows a lot about a particular subject.

What marketing techniques have been most helpful to you?
I do drawings at my presentations for a free book or the 4-DVD set of my TV interview series that incorporates information from A Good Goodbye. The information requested includes name, email, phone number, age, city and state. If they include their email, they are added to my email list. I also provide check boxes to indicate if they’d like more information on A Good Goodbye programs and having me speak at other organizations.

I also offer several free documents on my website that people can access by opting in to my email lists. These include a 50-point Executors Checklist from Kicking the Bucket List, a free cremation e-book and a 10-page planning form from A Good Goodbye. Those offers help build my email list, which is almost 6,000 contacts at this point. Including lists or forms for download on the website was a must-have as I planned the marketing for the books. Visit my site, see what these forms look like, and sign up at www.AGoodGoodbye.com.

You’re active in Toastmasters. How has participating in this organization helped in marketing and promoting your books?
Being a good speaker is essential for writers to sell and promote their books. I joined Albuquerque Challenge Toastmasters in 2012, and it has made a huge difference in my competence as a speaker. I encourage all Albuquerque writers to visit our meetings to see how ABQ Challenge members help each other become better speakers. We meet on the second, fourth, and fifth Saturday of the month from 8:00 to 10:00 am (doesn’t conflict with SWW meetings) at Cooper Art Center (as in SWW’s Susan Cooper, the Queen of Mold). Learn more at www.ABQChallenge.org.

KLWagoner150_2KL Wagoner (writing as Cate Macabe) is the author of This New Mountain: a memoir of AJ Jackson, private investigator, repossessor, and grandmother. She has a new speculative fiction blog at klwagoner.com and writes about memoir at ThisNewMountain.com.



An Interview with Author Avraham Shama

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Former dean and university professor Avraham Shama is the author of four nonfiction books and numerous articles. His short pieces have been published internationally and in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Christian Science Monitor. The memoir Finding Home: An Immigrant’s Journey (2016) is his newest book, “a powerful tale of dislocation, despair and transformation.” Born in Iraq, Avraham now lives in the United States.

What is your elevator pitch for Finding Home: An Immigrant’s Journey?
Remember Alan Kurdi, the three-year-old Syrian refugee who drowned and washed to the Turkish shore? Finding Home: An Immigrant’s Journey is about another child who survived the trauma of exile to tell his story. It is an intimate, lyrical memoir of an Iraqi child looking for home, a powerful tale of dislocation, despair and transformation shared by refugees and immigrants at all times, including those refugees seen on TV almost every night. Narrated in the first person, it captivates the reader with its candidness, honesty and hope. The protagonist is a seven-year-old Jewish Iraqi child living a peaceful life with his parents and many siblings in the countryside near the Hanging Gardens of Babylon by the Euphrates River. When things change abruptly for the worse in 1951, he and his family flee to Israel, where they spend years living in tents and shacks in sub-human conditions in transition camps. He becomes a day laborer, survives a terrible disease, becomes an adult with a different name and personality, gets a college education and a doctorate, and ends his search for home in the United States, amazed and happy with his life.

When readers turn the last page, what do you hope they take away from it?
I hope that at least some aspects of the book will resonate with all readers and remind them of events in their own lives. Several American-born readers of the book, seemingly not connected in any way to this story which spans Iraq, Israel and the United States, felt an immediate connection with it. They told me some of the family dynamics portrayed in the book, as well as the fears, aspirations and hopes of the protagonist were reflected in their own lives. I guess that is why we all read: to see ourselves in others, know that we are not alone, feel human and connected with fellow human beings, especially when life’s events are difficult, even impossible.

What was the hardest part of writing your memoir? The most rewarding?
When I was very young and living in a transition camp I contracted typhoid fever and almost died. For many years, I did not dare think about that deadly experience. Every time the thought of writing about it crept to my mind, however faintly, I would run away to save my life. Deep down, however, I knew one day I would face that brutal experience. This happened a few years ago in my old age, when I confronted it and found a way to convey the many weeks of confusion, fever and psychosis to readers. I tried many different writing styles until I found a suitable one. Writing about this set me free and helped me understand myself. For me, memoir writing was a path for knowing myself better, which was most rewarding.

When did you know you wanted to write your story? What prompted the final push to begin?
I have published many academic books and articles, but I always knew that someday I would write my memoirs—not only mine and my family’s, but of a whole generation of 120,000 Jews who had to leave Iraq empty-handed like refugees and start over. But I did not want the exposure which comes with writing my own memoirs. I was much more comfortable writing academic books because I was not personally invested in them. Then I took a class about memoir writing and immediately began writing.

Tell us how the book came together.
I say I “began writing,” but reality was a lot more complicated. My research required several overseas trips to interview relatives and other sources about life in Iraq before I was born and the difficulties of life in Israel later. This was important and urgent as many of my relatives were already very old. Then, of course, I had to make decisions about what to include in the book, how to tell the story, etc. This was a process of trial and error, sifting and distilling until I found my voice and rhythm. I wrote in the mornings, edited in the evenings and decided how to tackle the next morning’s writing in my sleep. And my conversations with my characters in my sleep were most satisfying. As usual with me, my better writing is my re-writes, many re-writes, and extensive editing way before a draft is submitted to an editor. My guiding principle, always, was to engage readers in the conversation, to lure them into the plot and to make them crave hearing the narrator’s familiar voice chapter after chapter. I decided to publish the book through CreateSpace and to hire an Albuquerque artist to design the cover. I had two excellent editors who contributed to the readability of the book and whom I sometimes drove crazy because I kept changing my mind, sometimes about small details that most readers would not notice. In all, the book took about three pregnancies from start to finish.

What surprising facts did you discover while doing research for Finding Home: An Immigrant’s Journey?
In researching the book I found out that beginning in 1947 the Jewish Agency, and later the state of Israel, secretly sent Zionist messengers to Iraq to convince the Jewish population there to migrate to the infant and poor state of Israel. Their means of persuasion included setting fires to Jewish Synagogues and businesses. The Iraqi Jewish population immediately assumed those fires were set by hateful Muslims and decided that Israel was the only safe place for them. Imagine that: Jews from Israel killed Iraqi Jews and harmed their synagogues and businesses in order to push the rest of the Jewish population of Iraq to move and populate the barren land of the new state of Israel.

Do you have a favorite quote from the book you’d like to share?
Thinking back about my favorite quote from the book, I realize it did not pertain to an action, a deed or something that one of the characters said. Rather, it pertained to a feeling, a mood that concluded turmoil or an inner emotional explosion. When such an emotional chaos happened and the characters found a way not to fall to pieces, they reaffirmed their lives by saying “all is good, right and proper.” Like a mantra, this had the effect of cooling their inner fires and establishing peace and acceptance. I found this very reassuring, even rejuvenating. Strangely, I began using it myself. And it works!

KLWagoner150_2KL Wagoner (writing as Cate Macabe) is the author of This New Mountain: a memoir of AJ Jackson, private investigator, repossessor, and grandmother. She has a new speculative fiction blog at klwagoner.com and writes about memoir at ThisNewMountain.com.



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