November 3, 2025 • 17 mins
In Cyborg Fever, acclaimed writer Laurie Sheck brings us a probing and lyrical philosophical fiction in the spirit of Umberto Eco, Italo Calvino, and Donna Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto that enacts an incisive and moving exploration into what it means to be human in the age of AI and increasing transhumanism.Throughout Cyborg Fever, many strange, surprising facts appear: an artist clones a flower from his DNA and the DNA of a petunia, an astronaut is playing golf on the moon, a mathematician on a rest cure rethinks the life of Shakespeare, and particles and antiparticles collide at lightning speed beneath the green hills of Switzerland and France. Threaded throughout, one question lingers: in this age of AI and genetic engineering, how can we come to know more fully what it means to love and be human among the wonders and destructions we have wrought on Earth?
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
If you love listening to podcasts, you've got to have
a choice. Right Arrow dot net A r r oe
dot net. It's not just about talking to the rock
stars and the chefs and the movie stars. This is
about your walk of life. Arrow dot net A r
r o e dot net.
Speaker 2 (00:17):
Hi Errow, this is laur Chef.
Speaker 1 (00:19):
How are you doing, LORI?
Speaker 2 (00:20):
I'm great?
Speaker 1 (00:21):
How are you fantastic? Looking forward to sharing a conversation
with you because you take us into an area that
is such a mystery today. We all think we know
about AI technology, we all think we've got it, you know,
under wraps and everything, and then cyborg fever steps into action.
You're going, oh my god, Lourie, what are you doing
to my imagination? And the thing about it is is
(00:46):
that it starts with you. You're the writer. You're the
one that felt it inside your imagination long before we did,
and somehow, some way it shifted into your fingers and
here it is.
Speaker 2 (00:57):
Yes, yes, I did get interested in it very early,
and as you can see, it's growing by leaps and bounds.
It's in all our lives now with chat, GPT and
all of that.
Speaker 1 (01:12):
Yeah, I'm so addicted to chat, GPT, it's not that
I am a poor speller. I just want to get
the stuff out and I'll let my chat GPT correct
everything I've got wrong. But that's not the way to go.
But then again, some people would say, yo it is,
yo it is, Just do it, let it do its job.
Speaker 2 (01:27):
Well, you know, it's interesting. I teach. I've taught the
biggest universities of Princeton, Columbia now I'm at the New School,
and it's a big issue in the university is because
students are using it all the time, and one question
is what is that doing to our thinking? I think
there's a way to use it where you can collaborate
with it and it can be really interesting. But if
(01:49):
you let it do everything for you, then the question
is what's it doing to your own thinking capacity?
Speaker 1 (01:55):
Yeah, because I'm also an instructor, and that's one of
the things that I'm having to deal with with people
that are utilizing anything that's ai is the fact that
I need them to do the work. I don't want
the computer to do the work for them. And I'm
having to readjust my attitude and my altitude because it's like, Okay,
I have to accept their world and I can't be
the old curmudgeon. I've got to be somebody who just
(02:16):
understands that we are in a growing process right now.
What do you feel.
Speaker 2 (02:21):
Absolutely it's not going to go away. I think there
are good things and bad things, and also we're just
so at the very beginning of it. But I think
in medicine it's really interesting. You know what AI can do?
I think we just don't know. In my book, in
Cyborg Fever, part of what I explore is that there
(02:42):
are two kinds of information. There's a kind of information
where we learn amazing facts about oh, the universe, the
world we live in. I'll give you one for instance.
I learned this one. I put it in the book.
The number of carbon atoms in one on paper is
(03:02):
greater than the sum of all the humans who ever existed.
Speaker 1 (03:05):
What I like stuff like that?
Speaker 2 (03:09):
Me too, Me too. I think that's the good kind
of information. Then there's the other kind of information where
we go online and there's just a glut of stuff.
You know.
Speaker 1 (03:21):
Do you see writing today and taking that writing and
sitting down with your computer and having that relationship with
the writer inside of you. Do you see AI technology
as being the new age of the thesaurus.
Speaker 2 (03:34):
Well, I didn't think of it that way. I think
you can see it as a tool, right, But when
it takes over entirely, well, what's happening in the universities
is when students are having AI write their entire paper,
then it's more than a thesaurus, right. So I think
there are ways we can use it as a tool,
(03:55):
and we have to think of how we are actually
interacting with it so that we're active.
Speaker 1 (04:00):
Your book is so spot on, and I want you
to know that that it freaked me out only because
you know the artist cloning the flower. Okay, first of all,
I think that's just the neatest thing on the planet
because I'm a plant lover and I would love to
clone a lot of my trees inside this forest. But
here's what freaked me out. When I came across the
story that Susanne Summer's husband has cloned her and the
(04:21):
article they wrote about it, was like, you've got to
be kidding me. And yet I feel I feel fulfilled
that he feels fulfilled.
Speaker 2 (04:30):
Wow, well that's where living. You know, it's like science fiction?
Speaker 1 (04:35):
Yes, wow, I mean you being the author, though, I
do you find yourself as being a visionary. I mean,
do you feel those moments.
Speaker 2 (04:45):
I don't feel like a visionary. I feel like I'm
a very curious and interested person and that when you
start to look at reality, nothing is more radical than reality.
You don't have to make anything up. Wow.
Speaker 1 (05:00):
I mean the way that you build this story, I mean,
it's it's I mean, with the dog going up into
space and making that cash you. I mean, I think
every one of us are waiting for that moment. We're
waiting because I'm jealous of the nineteen sixties when the
monkeys used to go up there. I know that what
really happened to him, But the fact of the matter
is it's like almost moving Noah's Arc up into space.
Speaker 2 (05:20):
Yeah. Well yeah. One of the characters, one of the
main characters in my books Cyborg Fever, Isika, the first
dog sent into outer space. She was, Yeah, she was
the first biological being sent up there, and nobody knew
what was going to happen to her. In fact, she
did die, but that was because the Sputnik two wasn't
(05:43):
really ready yet. You know, there was the race between
the Soviets and the US to get things done first,
and there was there was a big rush, and the
capsule that was that Laika was in the heating system
wasn't quite right. It ended up overheating and killed her
very quickly. But she was a very brave little dog.
She was. What the Soviets did was they they took
(06:06):
street dogs from Moscow because they thought they were tough dogs,
they had survived under very difficult circumstances, and they trained
them like little astronauts.
Speaker 1 (06:17):
Did you know that while you were writing this book
that it would stick with us and that you're probably
going to be meeting a lot of people along this
journey that are going to be going, Oh my god, Laurie,
I can relate with this book. Oh my god, how
did you picture? I mean, how did you even pull
this from my life and be able to put it
on a page.
Speaker 2 (06:32):
I had no idea. I just wanted to have a
really I wanted to be interested and to write the
best book I thought I could write. And the more,
as I said, the more I got into the facts,
the more, you know, fascinating it was. And I think
people are really interested in reality and these interesting facts
if you can give it to them. One of the
(06:54):
things another thing I discovered about well just the outer
space part is Alexi Leonov. He was the first person
to walk in space, and he carried in his spacesuit
of cyanide capsule because nobody knew what was going to
happen to him, if he was going to be okay
or not. And those are such It wasn't that long ago,
(07:15):
you know, and there were such crucial moments and see.
Speaker 1 (07:19):
And that's why I love sharing conversations with the authors,
because you're going to dig a lot deeper than what
we do, because most of us just want clickbait and
then we're on our way. But heck, no, man, there's Laurie.
She's digging, and she's you know, she's going into these
stories to find out who, what, where, why, when and how,
and then she brings it to us.
Speaker 2 (07:37):
Yeah. And the way I got interested in this really was,
you know, I was a poet for many, many years,
and that various things happened. My husband got sick, and
I got because of the way my husband was moving,
he reminded me of the monster in Frankenstein, and I
read Frankenstein for the first time. I got very, very
interested in that book, and I wrote a long novel
(07:58):
then A Monster's notes where the monster is still alive
in the twenty first century. But Frankenstein got me really
interested in science, and as Mary Shelley was interested in
the science of her day, and I started looking at
the science of our day.
Speaker 1 (08:15):
Please do not move. There's more with Lori Shck coming
up next, the name of her book, Cyborg Fever. We're
back with author Lori Shack. We have poetry as that
one thing in common and the one I was on
the I was blessed with the opportunity to be on
the Barnes and Noble tour for two and a half
years when it came to poetry, and I would go
and I would sit with other writers and poets and things.
(08:36):
And one of the lessons that I did with them
was that they would sit there and say, I've got
the greatest piece of poetry. I'm the best, I'm the best,
I'm the best. So I would make them sit in
the poetry section at Barnes and Noble, and I said,
come back in thirty minutes and tell me what goes
on in there. And everyone, every one of them came
back saying nobody came in the row. I said, exactly.
I said, Now we have to be creative writers? Where
are we going to put our words? How do you
(08:58):
teach your writers that there's more to what you're putting
on paper than what you think?
Speaker 2 (09:04):
Oh yeah, I mean I think first of all, you read, yeah,
you know, yeah, you read and and and you see
what's been what's been done before, and what makes something
really stick? What you know when you when you put
words together, what makes them really come alive? So that's
part of it. And you know, creating images, creating rhythms,
(09:29):
and and you know, you just start you sort of
go from there and see when something really turns out. Well, well,
you know, I teach, I teach creative writing, so I
teach poetry workshops and fiction workshops now too, And we
sit around for two and a half hours we discuss
(09:50):
the student's work. And so it's sort of it's it's
sort of like a machine made of words, and you
can kind of take it apart and figure out what
makes at work. But then there's also the mysterious part
of it to sort of the soul, right, the soul
of the poem, which you can't quite say what it is,
but you know when it's real.
Speaker 1 (10:11):
Yeah, it's always fun to go back there and then
try to figure it out. And that's what happened with
my very first book. It was supposed to be a
book of poetry, and when I went in to do
all the research and the studying, what ended up it's
a book of motivation because I thought everything around the
poetry where I was explaining it had had the influence,
and the poetry itself was just sitting there going no, no, no, no, no no,
you didn't give me this time.
Speaker 2 (10:32):
Yeah. It's very interesting and any piece of writing where
the energy really is And that's so like what you're
saying about your book. It seemed to be the poetry,
but it was actually something else, and you can almost
it can almost sense it like a force field where
the powerful writing really is.
Speaker 1 (10:52):
Now one of the things that you put yourself into
when it comes to writing the narrators. I love the
fact that you know that you make that such a
major part of what's happening. And the thing is is
I have to go, who is the narrator that you're
allowing their voice to be on the page? Is it
you or is it somebody you've met along the way
that has that voice? Because there's been many times that
I would take the narrator inside of me and say,
(11:13):
be quiet, this is not your time to talk. We
will write soon, but you're not talking now.
Speaker 2 (11:19):
Yeah. Well, you know it's funny, since I wrote poetry
for so many years, I didn't really have a narrator.
I had this eye voice, and you know, my poems
had done what. One of my books was a Pulitzer finalist.
But there was something that I that I missed, and
part of what I missed was a narrator. And so
when my husband got sick. My husband and I were
(11:41):
very close and we talked a lot, and when he
got sick, we couldn't really talk in the same way.
And so my narrator of my first novel was the
Monster from Frankenstein, and he became sort of I thought
of him. Partly he felt like me, but partly he
was like my imagine a companion. And so I really
(12:03):
liked having a narrator in that way, and I would
hear him in my head, and when I would go
to the movies, I would think, Oh, what movie would
the monster like to go to? You know, let's go
to Blade Runner. You would like that.
Speaker 1 (12:17):
I always feel like Russell Crowe in beautiful mind, because
it's like, okay, so we have all of these people
inside of us and what's going on yet? But yet
nobody sees that person. They don't see the narrator, They
don't see the characters in your book. But you know
we're carrying him, Laurie, absolutely.
Speaker 2 (12:31):
And you know there's a pleasure to it too, when
you allow those voices to come forward. The narrator in
Cyborg Fever is a very brilliant boy. He's an orphan
and he falls into a year long fever and during
that fever, he meets a cyboard. He has different experiences
(12:55):
of outer space and things like that. He sees lots
of facts on a computer. I mean, I couldn't be
farther from a little boy, but that's the voice that
came into my head, and I could really feel his being.
I think as a writer, one of the things that's
important when you create a narrator is that you feel
(13:16):
enormous empathy for them. You know, you really feel their
their being, their vulnerability, and you sort of speak to that.
Speaker 1 (13:28):
Now, who was your inspiration? Because in listening to your voice,
your passion, your drive, your ambition. I swear I feel
like I'm talking with Julia Cameron.
Speaker 2 (13:39):
Well, I don't know who my inspiration was. You know,
when I grew up in a family that really didn't
want me to be a writer. No, yeah, And well
my parents thought writers were people who went crazy and
became alcoholics. Yes, so they were, you know, they were worried.
(14:00):
But I feel like I was sort of born that way.
I just loved words, and when I was a little girl,
I felt like words were my friends. Yeah, So I
think that's kind of I just was kind of born
that way. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (14:12):
See, I just call it a word dump. I'm gonna
go over here and dump some words out. I don't
know what I'm gonna do with them. I'm just going
to dump them out.
Speaker 2 (14:19):
Yeah. Well, you know, and each person who writes has
their kind of own way of doing it right, their
own temperament, you know.
Speaker 1 (14:29):
So you being a poet, Laurie, what are you doing
with all of your writing? Because I'm at that point
in my life where I have I started daily writing
in in July of two, nineteen ninety four, So I
have all of these decades of writing. I don't know
what to do with it when I transition. What are
you doing with yours. I need to learn from the master.
Speaker 2 (14:50):
Well, I think, you know, I think there's no one way.
Speaker 1 (14:54):
You know.
Speaker 2 (14:54):
I published what I have, like five books of poems
and three novels, and now I'm writing a monthly column
for an online magazine called three Quark Staling, which is
a new kind of thing for me to do. Just
sort of write micro essays. That's how I think of them.
I can write on it I want, And I don't know,
(15:15):
I don't know, I don't. I live in the New
York apartment, so I don't have a lot of storage space,
so you know, I sort of I publish what I do.
I have rough drafts, I guess in some closet and
a lot of things I've gotten rid of. Do you
live in a house where you can like keep lots
of store lots of things?
Speaker 1 (15:33):
I do. And I live in a forest too. In fact,
my my latest ambition has been basically that when it
comes time, I'm gonna I'm gonna hire a big old digger.
And because I've always believed that this forest is the
one that's the writer. I am just the one that's
putting it on paper. It's not the forest. I mean,
it's not me, it's the forest. So I feel like
I should give it all back to the forest, dig
a gigantic hole and put it in the earth.
Speaker 2 (15:55):
Well, that's interesting. The poet W. S. Merwin, who died
about maybe ten years ago, he won the Pulitzer twice.
He start, he went to Hawaii and he raised He
planted thousands of palm trees in an area that had
been ecologically decimated, and he brought a forest back to life.
It was an amazing thing to do. But when people
(16:17):
would send him letters, he would take that paper and
he'd bury it in the forest, Like you're talking about.
Speaker 1 (16:23):
Yep, yep, because of trees speak so to the rocks.
If we would just take more time to go out
and just listen to him, they've got a story for you.
Speaker 2 (16:30):
Yes. And part of what's happening in our in our
technological society and our business society, is that we're able
to listen less and less to this beautiful earth that
we've been given. Wow.
Speaker 1 (16:44):
Where can people go to find out more about you?
And you're writing, Laurie because I want them to embrace
what you're doing.
Speaker 2 (16:51):
Thank you.
Speaker 1 (16:52):
Well.
Speaker 2 (16:52):
I do have a website, laurishek dot com and you know,
my book is a Cybord Fever is a on Amazon
and other you know, online places to purchase. And I
think that's you know, and they can google me. I'm
very googleable, and I have an and I have an
Instagram too.
Speaker 1 (17:13):
I love it. You got to come back to this
show anytime in the future. I love where your heart
is and I'm glad that you didn't go silent and
You've been someone who expresses and gives us something to
put in our hands.
Speaker 2 (17:23):
Oh well, thank you so much. This has been really
a pleasure.
Speaker 1 (17:26):
Will you be brilliant today?
Speaker 2 (17:27):
Okay, Laurie, Oh thank you
If you love listening to podcasts, you've got to have
a choice. Right Arrow dot net A r r oe
dot net. It's not just about talking to the rock
stars and the chefs and the movie stars. This is
about your walk of life. Arrow dot net A r
r o e dot net.
Speaker 2 (00:17):
Hi Errow, this is laur Chef.
Speaker 1 (00:19):
How are you doing, LORI?
Speaker 2 (00:20):
I'm great?
Speaker 1 (00:21):
How are you fantastic? Looking forward to sharing a conversation
with you because you take us into an area that
is such a mystery today. We all think we know
about AI technology, we all think we've got it, you know,
under wraps and everything, and then cyborg fever steps into action.
You're going, oh my god, Lourie, what are you doing
to my imagination? And the thing about it is is
(00:46):
that it starts with you. You're the writer. You're the
one that felt it inside your imagination long before we did,
and somehow, some way it shifted into your fingers and
here it is.
Speaker 2 (00:57):
Yes, yes, I did get interested in it very early,
and as you can see, it's growing by leaps and bounds.
It's in all our lives now with chat, GPT and
all of that.
Speaker 1 (01:12):
Yeah, I'm so addicted to chat, GPT, it's not that
I am a poor speller. I just want to get
the stuff out and I'll let my chat GPT correct
everything I've got wrong. But that's not the way to go.
But then again, some people would say, yo it is,
yo it is, Just do it, let it do its job.
Speaker 2 (01:27):
Well, you know, it's interesting. I teach. I've taught the
biggest universities of Princeton, Columbia now I'm at the New School,
and it's a big issue in the university is because
students are using it all the time, and one question
is what is that doing to our thinking? I think
there's a way to use it where you can collaborate
with it and it can be really interesting. But if
(01:49):
you let it do everything for you, then the question
is what's it doing to your own thinking capacity?
Speaker 1 (01:55):
Yeah, because I'm also an instructor, and that's one of
the things that I'm having to deal with with people
that are utilizing anything that's ai is the fact that
I need them to do the work. I don't want
the computer to do the work for them. And I'm
having to readjust my attitude and my altitude because it's like, Okay,
I have to accept their world and I can't be
the old curmudgeon. I've got to be somebody who just
(02:16):
understands that we are in a growing process right now.
What do you feel.
Speaker 2 (02:21):
Absolutely it's not going to go away. I think there
are good things and bad things, and also we're just
so at the very beginning of it. But I think
in medicine it's really interesting. You know what AI can do?
I think we just don't know. In my book, in
Cyborg Fever, part of what I explore is that there
(02:42):
are two kinds of information. There's a kind of information
where we learn amazing facts about oh, the universe, the
world we live in. I'll give you one for instance.
I learned this one. I put it in the book.
The number of carbon atoms in one on paper is
(03:02):
greater than the sum of all the humans who ever existed.
Speaker 1 (03:05):
What I like stuff like that?
Speaker 2 (03:09):
Me too, Me too. I think that's the good kind
of information. Then there's the other kind of information where
we go online and there's just a glut of stuff.
You know.
Speaker 1 (03:21):
Do you see writing today and taking that writing and
sitting down with your computer and having that relationship with
the writer inside of you. Do you see AI technology
as being the new age of the thesaurus.
Speaker 2 (03:34):
Well, I didn't think of it that way. I think
you can see it as a tool, right, But when
it takes over entirely, well, what's happening in the universities
is when students are having AI write their entire paper,
then it's more than a thesaurus, right. So I think
there are ways we can use it as a tool,
(03:55):
and we have to think of how we are actually
interacting with it so that we're active.
Speaker 1 (04:00):
Your book is so spot on, and I want you
to know that that it freaked me out only because
you know the artist cloning the flower. Okay, first of all,
I think that's just the neatest thing on the planet
because I'm a plant lover and I would love to
clone a lot of my trees inside this forest. But
here's what freaked me out. When I came across the
story that Susanne Summer's husband has cloned her and the
(04:21):
article they wrote about it, was like, you've got to
be kidding me. And yet I feel I feel fulfilled
that he feels fulfilled.
Speaker 2 (04:30):
Wow, well that's where living. You know, it's like science fiction?
Speaker 1 (04:35):
Yes, wow, I mean you being the author, though, I
do you find yourself as being a visionary. I mean,
do you feel those moments.
Speaker 2 (04:45):
I don't feel like a visionary. I feel like I'm
a very curious and interested person and that when you
start to look at reality, nothing is more radical than reality.
You don't have to make anything up. Wow.
Speaker 1 (05:00):
I mean the way that you build this story, I mean,
it's it's I mean, with the dog going up into
space and making that cash you. I mean, I think
every one of us are waiting for that moment. We're
waiting because I'm jealous of the nineteen sixties when the
monkeys used to go up there. I know that what
really happened to him, But the fact of the matter
is it's like almost moving Noah's Arc up into space.
Speaker 2 (05:20):
Yeah. Well yeah. One of the characters, one of the
main characters in my books Cyborg Fever, Isika, the first
dog sent into outer space. She was, Yeah, she was
the first biological being sent up there, and nobody knew
what was going to happen to her. In fact, she
did die, but that was because the Sputnik two wasn't
(05:43):
really ready yet. You know, there was the race between
the Soviets and the US to get things done first,
and there was there was a big rush, and the
capsule that was that Laika was in the heating system
wasn't quite right. It ended up overheating and killed her
very quickly. But she was a very brave little dog.
She was. What the Soviets did was they they took
(06:06):
street dogs from Moscow because they thought they were tough dogs,
they had survived under very difficult circumstances, and they trained
them like little astronauts.
Speaker 1 (06:17):
Did you know that while you were writing this book
that it would stick with us and that you're probably
going to be meeting a lot of people along this
journey that are going to be going, Oh my god, Laurie,
I can relate with this book. Oh my god, how
did you picture? I mean, how did you even pull
this from my life and be able to put it
on a page.
Speaker 2 (06:32):
I had no idea. I just wanted to have a
really I wanted to be interested and to write the
best book I thought I could write. And the more,
as I said, the more I got into the facts,
the more, you know, fascinating it was. And I think
people are really interested in reality and these interesting facts
if you can give it to them. One of the
(06:54):
things another thing I discovered about well just the outer
space part is Alexi Leonov. He was the first person
to walk in space, and he carried in his spacesuit
of cyanide capsule because nobody knew what was going to
happen to him, if he was going to be okay
or not. And those are such It wasn't that long ago,
(07:15):
you know, and there were such crucial moments and see.
Speaker 1 (07:19):
And that's why I love sharing conversations with the authors,
because you're going to dig a lot deeper than what
we do, because most of us just want clickbait and
then we're on our way. But heck, no, man, there's Laurie.
She's digging, and she's you know, she's going into these
stories to find out who, what, where, why, when and how,
and then she brings it to us.
Speaker 2 (07:37):
Yeah. And the way I got interested in this really was,
you know, I was a poet for many, many years,
and that various things happened. My husband got sick, and
I got because of the way my husband was moving,
he reminded me of the monster in Frankenstein, and I
read Frankenstein for the first time. I got very, very
interested in that book, and I wrote a long novel
(07:58):
then A Monster's notes where the monster is still alive
in the twenty first century. But Frankenstein got me really
interested in science, and as Mary Shelley was interested in
the science of her day, and I started looking at
the science of our day.
Speaker 1 (08:15):
Please do not move. There's more with Lori Shck coming
up next, the name of her book, Cyborg Fever. We're
back with author Lori Shack. We have poetry as that
one thing in common and the one I was on
the I was blessed with the opportunity to be on
the Barnes and Noble tour for two and a half
years when it came to poetry, and I would go
and I would sit with other writers and poets and things.
(08:36):
And one of the lessons that I did with them
was that they would sit there and say, I've got
the greatest piece of poetry. I'm the best, I'm the best,
I'm the best. So I would make them sit in
the poetry section at Barnes and Noble, and I said,
come back in thirty minutes and tell me what goes
on in there. And everyone, every one of them came
back saying nobody came in the row. I said, exactly.
I said, Now we have to be creative writers? Where
are we going to put our words? How do you
(08:58):
teach your writers that there's more to what you're putting
on paper than what you think?
Speaker 2 (09:04):
Oh yeah, I mean I think first of all, you read, yeah,
you know, yeah, you read and and and you see
what's been what's been done before, and what makes something
really stick? What you know when you when you put
words together, what makes them really come alive? So that's
part of it. And you know, creating images, creating rhythms,
(09:29):
and and you know, you just start you sort of
go from there and see when something really turns out. Well, well,
you know, I teach, I teach creative writing, so I
teach poetry workshops and fiction workshops now too, And we
sit around for two and a half hours we discuss
(09:50):
the student's work. And so it's sort of it's it's
sort of like a machine made of words, and you
can kind of take it apart and figure out what
makes at work. But then there's also the mysterious part
of it to sort of the soul, right, the soul
of the poem, which you can't quite say what it is,
but you know when it's real.
Speaker 1 (10:11):
Yeah, it's always fun to go back there and then
try to figure it out. And that's what happened with
my very first book. It was supposed to be a
book of poetry, and when I went in to do
all the research and the studying, what ended up it's
a book of motivation because I thought everything around the
poetry where I was explaining it had had the influence,
and the poetry itself was just sitting there going no, no, no, no, no no,
you didn't give me this time.
Speaker 2 (10:32):
Yeah. It's very interesting and any piece of writing where
the energy really is And that's so like what you're
saying about your book. It seemed to be the poetry,
but it was actually something else, and you can almost
it can almost sense it like a force field where
the powerful writing really is.
Speaker 1 (10:52):
Now one of the things that you put yourself into
when it comes to writing the narrators. I love the
fact that you know that you make that such a
major part of what's happening. And the thing is is
I have to go, who is the narrator that you're
allowing their voice to be on the page? Is it
you or is it somebody you've met along the way
that has that voice? Because there's been many times that
I would take the narrator inside of me and say,
(11:13):
be quiet, this is not your time to talk. We
will write soon, but you're not talking now.
Speaker 2 (11:19):
Yeah. Well, you know it's funny, since I wrote poetry
for so many years, I didn't really have a narrator.
I had this eye voice, and you know, my poems
had done what. One of my books was a Pulitzer finalist.
But there was something that I that I missed, and
part of what I missed was a narrator. And so
when my husband got sick. My husband and I were
(11:41):
very close and we talked a lot, and when he
got sick, we couldn't really talk in the same way.
And so my narrator of my first novel was the
Monster from Frankenstein, and he became sort of I thought
of him. Partly he felt like me, but partly he
was like my imagine a companion. And so I really
(12:03):
liked having a narrator in that way, and I would
hear him in my head, and when I would go
to the movies, I would think, Oh, what movie would
the monster like to go to? You know, let's go
to Blade Runner. You would like that.
Speaker 1 (12:17):
I always feel like Russell Crowe in beautiful mind, because
it's like, okay, so we have all of these people
inside of us and what's going on yet? But yet
nobody sees that person. They don't see the narrator, They
don't see the characters in your book. But you know
we're carrying him, Laurie, absolutely.
Speaker 2 (12:31):
And you know there's a pleasure to it too, when
you allow those voices to come forward. The narrator in
Cyborg Fever is a very brilliant boy. He's an orphan
and he falls into a year long fever and during
that fever, he meets a cyboard. He has different experiences
(12:55):
of outer space and things like that. He sees lots
of facts on a computer. I mean, I couldn't be
farther from a little boy, but that's the voice that
came into my head, and I could really feel his being.
I think as a writer, one of the things that's
important when you create a narrator is that you feel
(13:16):
enormous empathy for them. You know, you really feel their
their being, their vulnerability, and you sort of speak to that.
Speaker 1 (13:28):
Now, who was your inspiration? Because in listening to your voice,
your passion, your drive, your ambition. I swear I feel
like I'm talking with Julia Cameron.
Speaker 2 (13:39):
Well, I don't know who my inspiration was. You know,
when I grew up in a family that really didn't
want me to be a writer. No, yeah, And well
my parents thought writers were people who went crazy and
became alcoholics. Yes, so they were, you know, they were worried.
(14:00):
But I feel like I was sort of born that way.
I just loved words, and when I was a little girl,
I felt like words were my friends. Yeah, So I
think that's kind of I just was kind of born
that way. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (14:12):
See, I just call it a word dump. I'm gonna
go over here and dump some words out. I don't
know what I'm gonna do with them. I'm just going
to dump them out.
Speaker 2 (14:19):
Yeah. Well, you know, and each person who writes has
their kind of own way of doing it right, their
own temperament, you know.
Speaker 1 (14:29):
So you being a poet, Laurie, what are you doing
with all of your writing? Because I'm at that point
in my life where I have I started daily writing
in in July of two, nineteen ninety four, So I
have all of these decades of writing. I don't know
what to do with it when I transition. What are
you doing with yours. I need to learn from the master.
Speaker 2 (14:50):
Well, I think, you know, I think there's no one way.
Speaker 1 (14:54):
You know.
Speaker 2 (14:54):
I published what I have, like five books of poems
and three novels, and now I'm writing a monthly column
for an online magazine called three Quark Staling, which is
a new kind of thing for me to do. Just
sort of write micro essays. That's how I think of them.
I can write on it I want, And I don't know,
(15:15):
I don't know, I don't. I live in the New
York apartment, so I don't have a lot of storage space,
so you know, I sort of I publish what I do.
I have rough drafts, I guess in some closet and
a lot of things I've gotten rid of. Do you
live in a house where you can like keep lots
of store lots of things?
Speaker 1 (15:33):
I do. And I live in a forest too. In fact,
my my latest ambition has been basically that when it
comes time, I'm gonna I'm gonna hire a big old digger.
And because I've always believed that this forest is the
one that's the writer. I am just the one that's
putting it on paper. It's not the forest. I mean,
it's not me, it's the forest. So I feel like
I should give it all back to the forest, dig
a gigantic hole and put it in the earth.
Speaker 2 (15:55):
Well, that's interesting. The poet W. S. Merwin, who died
about maybe ten years ago, he won the Pulitzer twice.
He start, he went to Hawaii and he raised He
planted thousands of palm trees in an area that had
been ecologically decimated, and he brought a forest back to life.
It was an amazing thing to do. But when people
(16:17):
would send him letters, he would take that paper and
he'd bury it in the forest, Like you're talking about.
Speaker 1 (16:23):
Yep, yep, because of trees speak so to the rocks.
If we would just take more time to go out
and just listen to him, they've got a story for you.
Speaker 2 (16:30):
Yes. And part of what's happening in our in our
technological society and our business society, is that we're able
to listen less and less to this beautiful earth that
we've been given. Wow.
Speaker 1 (16:44):
Where can people go to find out more about you?
And you're writing, Laurie because I want them to embrace
what you're doing.
Speaker 2 (16:51):
Thank you.
Speaker 1 (16:52):
Well.
Speaker 2 (16:52):
I do have a website, laurishek dot com and you know,
my book is a Cybord Fever is a on Amazon
and other you know, online places to purchase. And I
think that's you know, and they can google me. I'm
very googleable, and I have an and I have an
Instagram too.
Speaker 1 (17:13):
I love it. You got to come back to this
show anytime in the future. I love where your heart
is and I'm glad that you didn't go silent and
You've been someone who expresses and gives us something to
put in our hands.
Speaker 2 (17:23):
Oh well, thank you so much. This has been really
a pleasure.
Speaker 1 (17:26):
Will you be brilliant today?
Speaker 2 (17:27):
Okay, Laurie, Oh thank you
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