October 22, 2025 • 57 mins
Spokane WA critically-acclaimed author/award-winning teacher Jeffrey Dunn talks about his latest release “Whiskey Rebel” as a riveting portrait of characters one off behind the American Dream providing a glimpse of various issues hitting hard in American communities with a dark sense of hopelessness yet a powerful story of identity, friendship and the essence of freedom and the arduous journey to attain it! Jeffrey’s 41+ year teaching career focuses on student learning issues and implementing educational programs at local and national levels, plus the author of “Dream Fishing the Little Spokane”, “Hubcap Collection Plate”, “Radio Free Olympia” and more! Check out the amazing Jeffrey Dunn and his latest release on all major platforms and www.jeffreydunnspokane.com today! #podmatch #jeffreydunn #author #spokanewashington #whiskeyrebel #awardwinningteacher #americandream #studentlearning #dreamfishingthelittlespokane #hubcapcollectionplate #radiofreeolympia #spreaker #iheartradio #spotify #applemusic #youtube #anchorfm #bitchute #rumble #mikewagner #themikewagnershow #mikewagnerjeffreydunn #themikewagnershowjeffreydunn
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We're here at the amazing, critically acclaimed offer based in Bulkane, Washington.
Award winning teacher PhD in English Literature and Cultural Studies
forty one years of teaching focused on student learning and
(01:44):
issues and implementing educational programs at local national levels. He's
got a new book out which is a riveting portrait
of characters that's left behind by the American dream and
provide glimps of various issues that are hitting hard today
and American committees. The book is called Whiskey, Rebel, Live,
Laces and Gentleman plus twos and People.
Speaker 5 (02:05):
Downtown Spokane, Washington.
Speaker 3 (02:07):
The amazing, criculy claimed author, war winning teacher, and the
book is called Whiskey Revel the Multi ten. Jeffrey done, Jeffrey,
good morning, good Afternue, good aving, Thanks.
Speaker 5 (02:15):
For joining us today.
Speaker 2 (02:16):
Thank you, Mike.
Speaker 3 (02:17):
Good to be here, sir, and it's great to have
you on board as well too. So you're a curriculally
claimed author based on Spokane, Washington. You're war winning teacher.
You have a PhD in English literature and Cultural studies.
You've been teaching forty one years and it's basically focused
on student learning issues and implementing education programs at local
(02:37):
national levels. And you've also featured in MPR and Medium
and your cultural fiction works Washington State Book Award and
Surreal Fish and a Little Spokane. And also you've also
been number as well too that your new book is
a briving portrait at local national levels, behind the American Dream,
(02:58):
providing a glimpse of various issue was hitting hard American
communities with a dark sense of hopeless sense. The book
is called Whiskey Rebel for getting all at Jeffrey tell
us how he first got.
Speaker 2 (03:07):
Started, How I first got started? You talking about writing.
Speaker 3 (03:12):
Living till Selba all the way back, way back, way back, Sherman, way.
Speaker 2 (03:16):
Way back, way back. I was born in near Chicago,
Illinois and Wheaton, Illinois, the height of the baby boom.
They had no room for me, and I was told
at the hospital. I was told that instead of the
usual crib or a place where you put infants, they
put me in a buster brown shoe box. So that
(03:38):
says a lot. And lived there for five years and
parents moved to Pittsburgh. I grew up in Pittsburgh. My
family's all Midwesterners. I'm the only one who claims Pittsburgh Pennsylvania,
which was a lot more diverse, which for me was
a very very good thing. And graduated from high school
(03:59):
outside of Pittsbury and ended up teaching in Catholic schools,
Parochial School, Central Catholic High School for twelve years in
downtown Pittsburgh, Boys and Ties one one hundred boys and
ties and guys in robes, and I was a lay teacher.
Taught English there, met my wife the University of Pittsburgh.
(04:21):
I was easily bored, so I went to the University
of Pittsburgh. So they give me a reading list and
I took a class and I took another class, and
I took another class, and eventually it all ended up
with a PhD. Worked on a William Burrows, the man
who wrote Naked Lunch PhD. There and met my wife
and our first child. She said, there's better places to live,
(04:42):
so out to the northwest we came to first to
the west side, and it was too dark for her too, fogy, fogy, foggy.
And then we moved to Spokane where it's sunny. Spokane
Salish for children of the sun. Better place to be.
I've written my whole life since I well fourteen and on,
(05:05):
but entered school. Teaching takes a lot of takes a
lot of energy, so that was a sidelight. And then
when I retired five or six years ago, now I
could get serious and take all those manuscripts and start
cranking out a few books. So there we go, from
radio free Olympia a wildcat to whiskey rebel.
Speaker 3 (05:26):
This may that is certainly interesting what you have And
what is that one exact, precise moment that simply influencing
you into what you.
Speaker 5 (05:33):
Do in the rest of your career.
Speaker 2 (05:35):
Oh wow, Well, right off the bat, when I was
in ninth grade, I didn't like school, didn't like it
at all, didn't know I was dyslexic, blessedly mildly so
makes me creative but doesn't completely disable my spelling or
keep me from reading, because I make movies into or
make books into movies in my head. But my English
(05:59):
teacher ninth grade read Richard Broddigan to us and Watermelon Sugar,
and when my brain got a hold of that, because
it's very visual, very wild, very sort of magical realism,
I said, you can do that. That's interesting. So I
just started writing. He had to write as a short
(06:21):
write write something. In response, I wrote a short story,
read it to the class, and it just it just
went from there. I wanted to be a VET, but
I couldn't. I knew i'd never get through Biokim, so
I fell back on the English side of things, and
being an English teacher will allow you to feed yourself,
so took care of and I and my best my
(06:44):
best times are with high school kids, so that's that's
really where I wanted to be, with high school kids,
and really focused on on learning issues from especially dyslexia,
but ADHD, high functioning autism and a like and trying
(07:06):
to get them through high school so they could graduate,
deal with reading issues and writing issues and all those
sorts of things. See if you could break that cycle
of failure that kids start to do right about middle school.
Speaker 3 (07:19):
Okay, and also without qualify like maybe special ed or
anything like that too.
Speaker 5 (07:24):
It that made me kind of think in a sense.
Speaker 2 (07:27):
No, absolutely, So these are kids who traditionally don't have IEPs,
aren't in special education. And I actually taught at the WA,
which was the Washington Education Association, gave me an award
working with the special ed teacher for a mixed class
where we tried that out for a year and she
(07:48):
decided that she really wanted more control, so she went
back to what she was doing. And so these are
kids I trying to sort out the difference. And I
would say, I mean use i Q test, use all
sorts of things to tell the difference. But with a
reading test, I found at the high school level in
(08:09):
ninth grade that as students had a fourth grade reading
level or lower, they need an i EP if they
were in fifth grade or above, and those are fifth
grades four years below grade level, we could make two
years progress in a year. I had kids that could
make four years progress because they had the apparatus. They
(08:33):
just hadn't they hadn't been taught in such a way
that their brains could respond. And suddenly we go from
you know, from fifth grade to eighth grade to ninth grade.
And if you could got an eighth grade reading level,
you can graduate from high school. Be nice if you
can do better. But but if you can get to
(08:55):
eighth grade, you can get by and get out the door.
Speaker 3 (08:58):
That's it seems like a lot of people seem to
take that root and everything like that. Anything eighth grade
you can pretty much, you know, go from there. And
of course you know you've written some books and you've
gotten ball with reading and everything. Who are some of
my favorite authors and writers and your favorite books going up? Ah?
Speaker 2 (09:16):
Yes, so I mentioned Richard Brodigan, and I finally started
to grow past Richard a little bit. He was not
a lot of people know Richard anymore unless you were
unless you're an oldie like me. But he was. He
was quite the San Francisco was born in Tacoma, but
(09:39):
quite the San Francisco writer, a late beat generation guy
who got adopted by the hippies, which it drove him
nuts because he didn't consider himself a hippie. But there
was just a freedom and an imagination in his writing
and a voice like nobody else's that I kind of
(10:01):
glombed onto. But you know, from from there, just in
high school, Kurt Vonnegut. Uh, they were Big Cat's Cradle,
Slaughterhouse five. That was a big thing. And then beyond that,
whom Tom Robbins, who's even though he was born in
the Carolinas, mean he just died this year. Uh. He
(10:24):
lived in Seattle, and so he became a Northwest writer,
even if he didn't start out there. Love his love
his work, love Another's roadside attraction, Uh, Jitterbug perfume. And
then the one that was made into a terrible movie,
what's the one with the young lady with the Uh,
(10:48):
it's the hitchhiking girl with the giant thumbs. And I
can't dyslexic me. I'm bad at names, and I'm bad
at dates in there, and I can't just pull that
name up.
Speaker 5 (10:58):
Girl with thumbs.
Speaker 3 (10:59):
That's in the the movie trailer, the picture hitchhiking girl
with thumbs.
Speaker 2 (11:04):
Yes, and you're trying to remember it too.
Speaker 3 (11:07):
I know exactly what you're talking about.
Speaker 2 (11:11):
Not cowgirls get The Blues. There we go, that's The Blues.
Got it? Yes, the movie was absolutely awful, but the
book is a joy. The book is way funder read.
So they tried and they really failed with that one.
Speaker 5 (11:27):
And uh, go ahead.
Speaker 3 (11:29):
I was gonna mention some movies that there were great
books made terrible movies.
Speaker 5 (11:32):
But you're gonna say something.
Speaker 2 (11:34):
No, no, go ahead, I want to hear. I want
to hear your list. No.
Speaker 3 (11:37):
I was trying to think of one that that that
was like, you know, a really good book, but the
movie version was lousy, and I think it was what
was it not Hitchhiker's Galaxy. It was, uh, there's something
keepers it was ut The Highlander. That was when I
think that might have been a novel. Yes, but it
(11:59):
turns it I tried for a movie.
Speaker 5 (12:00):
It's like you.
Speaker 2 (12:01):
Awful, Oh my got it? Got it? Very good. Now
what I do is I read an awful lot of
nonfiction because what I'm looking for is is history, natural history, geology.
Just finished a book on vultures, finished a book on dragonflies.
(12:24):
And what it does is it it feeds my imagination
and then I take all those facts and then my brain.
It's just something that that does you know, decides on
you know, what happens if you get a couple of
characters in this setting, and where where can I go
from there? So yeah, Barry Lopez loved that. Terry Tempest.
(12:48):
Williams Andy Dillard is awful, wonderful. Bernheinrich's my favorite. A
German Man who ended up in the United States who
has is just wrote maybe my favorite nonfiction book, which
is about ravens, and he tries to answer the question
whether ravens are moral creatures. He's a he's a cognitive,
(13:13):
he's a he's a serious scientist. So he lives with
He lived with ravens and raised them from chicks, and
in the process of telling all these stories about living
with these birds, answers the question that can they make
moral decisions, which he decides at the end they can.
Speaker 5 (13:30):
That's interesting.
Speaker 3 (13:31):
I didn't know a bird of particular genre can make
a moral decision like a raven that you know, you
think of ravens, yew always attacking quote the raven. No,
the more, of course of Baltimore football team. That's all
you think about. I have that, but I guess I
kind of thinks about it. You also, you know, read
about giraffes, and I think there was also what was
(13:51):
that other creature you wrote about?
Speaker 2 (13:54):
Are you read what was that one? Vultures?
Speaker 5 (13:59):
Bulchers?
Speaker 2 (13:59):
That was the one.
Speaker 3 (14:00):
Okay, So will you gravitated towards animals at that time too,
or just a fascination of them?
Speaker 2 (14:06):
Oh? No, yes, I was. I wanted to be a
vet and uh my oldest son tried a little vet
tech education and he got disappointed because he found out
it's more about the more about the owners than it
is about the pets. So there we go. But yeah, absolutely,
And so where we live, we have a resident ravens
(14:27):
who live a quarter of a mile from where and
they from where we do, and we see them traveling
back and forth over the road, feeding family, doing what
ravens do because their their brains twice as big as
a crow. So they're they're they're quite intelligent. They look
you right in the eye when they see insize up. Yeah,
(14:51):
all of those things. I mean, we have deer, we
have moose, we have bear, hear the coyotes at night
and then and we're only I mean we're just on
the edge of the city of Spokane. But you wouldn't
kind of know it where we are with the big
Ponderosa pines around us and Douglas Firs.
Speaker 5 (15:10):
And that too as well too.
Speaker 3 (15:11):
And plus you have a couple of books as well too,
with Radio Free Olympia and wildcats. It's one of the
subjects of animals. Somehow we'll get to that one with
Risky Whoever from Jeffrey Dunn. But first listened to the
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Here It's amazing quickly acclaimed author based on Spokane, Washington
World winning teacher Jeffrey Dunn.
Speaker 5 (17:40):
Here on the micro Winder Show. Before we talk about.
Speaker 3 (17:43):
Whiskey Rebel, you did Radio Free Olympia and Wildcat and
tell us about those.
Speaker 2 (17:48):
Ah radio free Olympia. I started that twenty years ago.
I was living on the Olympic Peninsula. And if anyone's
been to the Olympic and the Peninsula, it's a magical,
scary place. It's the last it's the There aren't a
lot of roads, it's logging roads and whatever. There's the
(18:09):
Olympic National Park, these Olympic National Forest with one highway
one on one that goes all the way around it
and not much in between. And so we moved there
from Pittsburgh and the culture shock, and it was called
a nature shock, was was huge. At the beginning of
(18:31):
the book, I just described on the on our little
we rented a little loggerhouse in Olma, Washington, and standing
on the porch and there were it was like a
thousand frogs. You were overwhelmed by the sex song of
a little froggies out there and what what was behind that?
It's just darkness and and frog sex. And it was.
Speaker 6 (18:51):
Crazy, No, absolutely, and so as I as I taught
kids there who were quite fit, many of them lived
in the woods, and school was not second nature even
though they'd been going to school for fourteen fifteen years.
Speaker 2 (19:09):
Who and I love them all dearly. They were all
wildly creative and very untutored, very very lightly socialized, let's
put it that way. So at one point I just
started I wanted to write something that like James Joyce
did trying to give you the voices of Dublin in Ulysses,
(19:33):
and I wanted to do something that had the peninsula speak,
and so how do you do that? And so I
just started writing and writing, which is kind of my
method anyway. But different voices came to me. One was
a character named Raven, who ends up being the kind
of the master ceremonies of the book, but it's done
(19:54):
in a male female fashion, where the odd chapters are
A young man who has an infant washes up on
the beach and is taken in by an ietenant logger
who lives in an old logging railroad car and in
the middle of nowhere and doesn't The guy doesn't tell
anybody he's raising this child. He just takes him in.
(20:15):
And when the man dies at fifteen, or he's when
the young man's fifteen, he goes into Aberdeen, Washington, which
is where Kurt Cobain grew up, and nobody much has
much to say, including Kurt about Aberdeen. But he ends
up with a pirate radio transmitter and decides to hike
(20:35):
east to west across the Olympic Peninsula, and he broadcasts
the spirits of the Olympics, folklore characters, more voices, people
who have died, all sort of historical, with Raven Overhead
following him as he goes. And so those are all
(20:55):
the odd number chapters, and the even number chapters are
a young woman who lives on what's called Grace Harbor
on the hump Tulips River, which is a real river,
it's just a wonderful name, hump Tulips, And she has
a cranberry farm she inherited, and she starts a women's
roadhouse called Wild Sisters, and she takes in broken women
(21:16):
and kind of creates a convent. It's just what women's
all women's roadhouse. And of course she writes she's writing
a poetry journal, and it's not poetry, like it's poetry
you can't read. It's just it's pros but it looks
like poetry and just telling the story of starting this
roadhouse and the women who come. And eventually she picks
(21:38):
up his signal and that's where I'll stop, because, of course,
you know, it's a novel. So we got young woman,
young man, they've connected through the radio waves, and where
do we go from there? With all the different voices
on the peninsula. So my developmental editor was an X.
(22:02):
I was looking for somebody not to help me with
the fiction side, but to help me with the nonfiction,
so to speak. I wanted to feel like it's a
walk through the Olympic Peninsula, like it's like it was real.
And she lived in Seattle and it was a ex
National Park ranger, and so she took she walked with
the book, so to speak, walked the trails and and
(22:26):
then made sure that everything was true to life, that
it was like you were there, you know, on the peninsula,
in this magical, realistic world with realism but the magical
all applied over the top of it. So it's it's
it's it's it's quite a it's quite a creation. I'm
pretty happy with that. It took twenty years to get
(22:48):
to the point that I could get the whole thing
to make sense a lot. It was a lot of
balls in the air and a number of critics that
I didn't believe that he could keep all those balls
in the air and then at the end they would
they wouldn't just follow the floor. But every critic said,
oh my god, he did it. Good for him. It
actually makes sense at the end. So that's that book.
(23:09):
It takes that one takes a little explanation.
Speaker 3 (23:12):
Well that's okay, I mean, did a great job with
that makes you want to pick up, you know, a
book and readspecially being radio for Olympia, y'all scout Wildcat
as well too.
Speaker 2 (23:21):
Until so that one's much that one's much as hard
as Radio Free Olympia, as this one's much simpler. It
was a thought experiment when I was sixty five. I decided, Uh,
since I grew up in Pittsburgh, what would it be
like if I left Spokane and I moved back to
a little rust belt town along something like the Allegheny River.
(23:44):
I grew up very close to a little rust belt
town that was called Brayburn, And I used Google Maps
to kind of as a map. And Brayburn had an
old steel mill and had had a coal mine that
no longer is shut down, but there was a coal
mine and has a damn and so forth. So on
a river and all that stuff. What would happen if
I moved back there? And it's a fictional memoir of
(24:08):
somebody like me moving back there and discovering a place
that is, on the one hand, in the present undergoing
a fairly magical transformation. It's become a sustainable place that's
overcome it's it's capitalist technological sins that it had to
live through. Where everybody is, it's much more community. He
(24:32):
moves into the old hotel, which is now essentially a
communal living and dining space, although the houses are still
there too, and and and then the same heed. He
needs to deal with all the demons of when he
was there, when he was in high school. And of
course he had to have a girlfriend and he left
her there, and of course she's still there when he
(24:53):
returns somewhere in between, but she's still there. And will
they will they? Will they see each other? Will they
get to I mean, it's all that sort of novelistic stuff,
But it's this, it's the gritty realism of the Appalachian
rust belt in the fifties, sixties, seventies, and eighties, and
Pittsburgh fiftee twenty five steel mill shut down and one
(25:16):
hundred thousand people left. And I was teaching at Central
Catholic High School at the time, and it was I
was just I was shocked that there was so little unrest.
Somebody somebody put a you know, a dead fish, and
somebody's and some steel steel owners you know, uh mailbox,
(25:38):
or or somebody disrupted a Presbyterian church dinner. But other
than that, the city went down without a fight. With
all of that unemployment and everything had happened, and I
wanted to deal with that and in this book, to
deal with that change and come out of the other
(26:01):
end with something more positive than what was so dark
at the time.
Speaker 3 (26:07):
You know, you were talking about Pittsburgh as well too,
and of course you know they made a comeback most
I guess maybe twenty years ago somewhere around there, right. Look,
the Ross Belt cites, like with Buffalo, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Eerie
and Gary, Indiana, Chicago, going up to Milwaukee, that a
good portion have turned into archie communities.
Speaker 2 (26:27):
You know.
Speaker 3 (26:28):
Pittsburgh he got the brand new, spanking new P and
C Park, He became a technological center. I think, trying
to think a few companies moved in, and of course
Buffalo they beautified their area, Cleveland with the Rock and
Roll Hall of Fame and they become more of like
a music culture. And Detroit, you know, just tuck down
Tiger Stadium, built America Park and they're trying to rebuild
(26:51):
it as a financial industry, not just you know, crank
out gms for Chevy's everything like that. And of course
Milwaukee and you know Harley Davison Chicago Technological.
Speaker 5 (27:03):
It's like it's all changed in that time too.
Speaker 3 (27:06):
And I'm thinking about it's like Pittsburgh's probably meant made
the most progress and anybody else.
Speaker 2 (27:11):
Right, I went, I went back there this this summer
for my fiftieth and high school reunion. Okay, And two
quick stories. One one is just it has to do
with the novel. When I went back my I did
about a number of readings at the at the Historical
Society and and different things bookstores and stuff, and uh.
(27:34):
When I went to the reunion, a number of my
uh classmates came up to me and said, so who
is she? Who is Who's the girl? So that was fun.
And at one point I turned around and she was
standing right behind me. So there we go. That's one story.
There's there's the there's my own personal story the city. There.
There was a huge renaissance in the in the fifties
(27:58):
when they when they built the city Arena, when they
did a lot of urban renewal downtown, tore out all
the train tracks and everything on the point, put in
a park, and put a number of the Alcoa building,
the US Steel building, and all that stuff went up,
and mals went in and so forth and so on,
and then as you said, in the nineties into the
two thousands, there's this big tech and medical change. What
(28:24):
it's created is a is a city, a very we
talk about wealth disparity. It's a very two tier city now.
So there's the one hand, there's all the young folks
you know, who had gentrified various areas. And then there
are all the neighborhoods that are still there and they
look no different than they did when I left, that
(28:46):
are still there and and nothing in that way has changed.
It's you go back and you can just go from
one block to another, and you go from one world
to the next. There's a whole foods here, and then
there's a there's a bunch of old eighteen nineties row
houses right across the street. M h. It's an interesting experience.
Speaker 5 (29:09):
And something does as well too. And there's also two
of the books.
Speaker 3 (29:12):
That you have Hubcat, Clutch and Plate, and also dream
Fishing The Little Spoke Cane tell us about those.
Speaker 2 (29:20):
Okay, this will be even shorter, so I'll start with
dream Fishing. Dream dream Fishing is surreal short stories. And
I live above the Little Spokane River. It's a it's
a it's a I like little magical natural places, and
there aren't a lot of people who live along it.
They're protecting more and more of it with the conservancy,
(29:42):
and in my area, a lot of that is is protected,
but it's just outside of the city. And so I
decided right out of in in before I retired, Actually,
my oldest son died of a fentanyl overdose. Oh my gosh,
and it, yeah, it ripped me apart, and I just
(30:06):
my whole notions of writing and whatever. I just threw
it out the window and started over and just wrote whatever.
And so there's some stories in there that have his
fingerprints on him, so to speak. One about autism and
so forth and so on. But it's it's simply imagine
walking along a very small river a very big creek
(30:30):
and where your mind just goes. And so that I
did a lot of historical and other sorts of natural
history research, and then from that took it places like
there's a there's a tiny little forgotten cemetery and imagined
what if that was a library where all the books
that have never been published go, and all the shelves
are empty, but when you go in, you hear the
(30:52):
book speak to you if you're open to it. Stories
that like that as you work your way along that
that go on, that continuum from magical to realism as
you work your way along the river. And if you
know the area, you know all the different spots, all
the little creeks to flow in, and all the little
places I'm talking about, all the lakes that are connected
(31:13):
to it, and all those things. So it's a it's
a it's a lot of fun. I self published that,
so I learned how to do that, which was also
a fun technological thing. And then Hubcap Collection played as
poems and poets do things called chap books where they
kind of publish their own things in little twenty page segments,
how to make their own books like zines, so to speak.
(31:36):
And this is a collection of six of those kinds
of things into one. So they're they're different, they're there,
I would say, in some ways, they're Broughtigan Ginsburg inspired.
They're not hard to read, they're not the difficult poems
of the world, but they're very Spokane oriented, just in time,
(31:57):
in terms of time and place. The big one, the beginning,
is called Cup of Joe, which is it's a quiz
for boomers to see how many cultural reverences they can get.
Because it's just me. I started it like the last
week I retired and just started imagining sitting down with
a cup of coffee and just everything that came to me.
(32:19):
And it's all in there from you know, starting with
Brian Jones and Jimmy Hendrix and uh oh, Janice Joplin's death,
so forth and so on into the psychedelia and all
the way to whatever else came to me. So there's
there's that book. There's one of them is written in
(32:40):
response to my son's passing away, and that's in there, okay,
which brings us up to the current one if that's
where you're going or something else, right.
Speaker 5 (32:52):
Yeah, And that is Whiskey Rebel.
Speaker 3 (32:53):
We'll get to that with Jeffrey Dunn In one minute
you listen to The Mike Winder's Show at the Mike
Wedershow dot Com. Power by Socks to buy, official sponsor
to Mike Wagner's show, Internuts, Worrying author Mea Mulson Say
and Missing the Sweet Saves by Serena Wagner based on
Life Up David Amazon dot com. Keywords sweet saw as
Serena Wagon, We'll be back with you Amazing author Jeffrey
Dunno whiskey rebel after this time.
Speaker 1 (33:14):
The Mike Wagner Show is powered by Sonicweb Studios. If
you're looking to start or upgrade your online presence, visit
www dot Sonicwebstudios dot com for all of your online needs.
Call one eight hundred three oh three three nine six
zero or visit us online at www dot sonicwebstudios dot com.
(33:35):
To get started today, mention The Mike Wagner Show and
get twenty percent off your project. Sonicweb Studios take your
image to the next level.
Speaker 7 (33:44):
Hey there, Dana Laxa here, American news anchor. Hey, let
me ask you something real quick.
Speaker 8 (33:49):
Why do you read a book? You're buying a story,
a thought, a message, and.
Speaker 7 (33:54):
A good book entertains and inspires, and that's exactly what
a Missing By Award winningfor me. On the Ziadas, I
have his book right here, and it's based on real
events with relatable characters that hook you from start to finish.
Speaker 8 (34:08):
I personally love this book.
Speaker 7 (34:10):
It's super powerful and meaningful. Three you can actually get
it on Amazon right now.
Speaker 3 (34:14):
The Mike Wagner Show is brought to you by Serena
Wagner's book The Sweet Sawmist, now availed on Emson. This
book includes thirty exquisite pintings by well known and unknown
painters and King David Psalms. The Sweet Salmist gives us
a new perspective on his life in this book through
the songs he wrote. His time as a shepherd in
the field is where the book starts, and it goes
on to describe a complicated and turbulent relationship with King Saul,
(34:35):
as well as other events. It's a story of love, betrayal, repentance,
and more. It also offers advice and approaching God and
living a life that pleases him. Check out the book
The Sweet Salmist by Serena Wagner, now available on Amazon
Keywords Sweet Salmist Serena Wagner. Hey, Hey, this is Ray
Powers and boy are you in luck right place?
Speaker 2 (34:54):
Right time?
Speaker 3 (34:56):
Tuned into the Mike Wagner Show. You heard me, We're
back with author Jeffrey Dunna Whiskey Bubble here on the
Mike Wadners Show. Quickly acclaimed offer based in Bulkane, Washington,
and this book is basically a riving portrait of characters
left behind the American dream and tell us more about that.
Speaker 2 (35:19):
Yeah, so where do I start? Well, I'll just start
with a plot. So it starts with characters. And there
are two characters, and one is the speaker. So it's
it's a it's it's written in first person of a
young man trying to make take make some sense of
(35:40):
what's just happened to him. And he grew up. He
grew up in the like the Cascade Crest on the
Cascade Mountains in the in the and excuse me, the
Cascade Mountains. And he's he's he's in the fog belt,
so to speak, where it rains a lot and the
trees are are two hundred and fifty feet tall. And
(36:01):
his father was a lagger. His mother was a library
in a little town called Packwood, which you can go
visit sometime. They have a library. And it's if you
live in places like that, you're living there because you
don't want to be around too many people and you
just want to be to be yourself and around other
people who are just like that. And so he had
(36:23):
to decide, you know, when he when he was of age, finally,
you know, what was he going to do with his life.
And he tried community college and I didn't work. And
then he tried the military and he went to Iraq
and this is all backstory that's in the book, and
he and he encounters an ied in a humv and
gets his brain scrambled and comes back and his parents
have died. So he hears about panning gold on the
(36:48):
on the on the dry side when you get on
the other side of the cascades. And so while he's
panning gold, this guy comes along. He's the Whiskey Rebel
and he grew up western Pennsylvania and in seventeen ninety
four there was the American Whisky Rebel. That not many
of us know about rebellion. Many of us know about
what it was, the first rebellion against the United States.
We were five years old, and we already were raising
(37:11):
an army to battle the United States because people like ralatives,
the Scots Irish didn't want to pay any whiskey tax
because what was the point of the revolution. So he's
a direct descendant and he thinks it's his his, his,
his lot in life to make taxery whiskey. So he's
(37:33):
walking down the road and he sees this guy panning
for golden calls down and this guy down there does
anything to do. So they get together and they team
up to make tax rey whiskey. And along the way,
as you said, the quirky characters come in. Punksy, Punksy, Tawny.
It's a bit of a joke there. It's that's where
(37:55):
the groundhog lives. His parents last name are Tawny, which
is the last name, and they thought it'd be funny
to him and Punksy. So Punksy's right in this book.
And he has his idea of freedom, and Hamilton Chance,
the whiskey rebel, has his, and these other characters have
completely different ideas, but they all get together because they're
(38:19):
all singular human beings who are fairly fairal And if
you go into central Washington and you go in the
little towns, and you go outside the little towns and
you encounter the geology what's called the Scablands, which is
a story in in itself. How that happened with giant
floods from Montana that stripped all the soil off and
(38:42):
it's down to basalt and all that. You can imagine
somebody get lost because they want to be and making
whiskey and nobody would know they were doing it, and
then finding somebody to fence it and sell it, which
they do is spirit whiskey. So it's tax free because
it's religious. Okay, that's the book. There we go. Okay,
(39:05):
what happens with these folks? Your thoughts, sir? Well?
Speaker 3 (39:12):
I guess my question about it is that you simply
have just you know, just six people coming in and
you know, try and achieve something. And I guess the
whole thing is is that they want to achieve the
American dream. But they're having a very very very civical
time doing so. And one of my things is that
(39:32):
you know, they try every which way to break through
the American dream. And of course our question is is
that you know, how do they end up, you know,
achieving American dream or their.
Speaker 2 (39:43):
Version of it, right exactly. So the first thing that
at this point in our history I think is clear,
except for those people who are political and somewhat delusional,
is that. And if you live in Wenatchie, Washington, if
you live in in the places I'm thinking of, if
(40:07):
you live in Inaffreida, if you live in these towns
in this area, the American dream comes to you. If
there's somebody, if you've got what it called generational wealth,
Can you find examples of people who beat it? You can,
but you won't find a lot of them if you
(40:27):
if you look at things per capita. So they're all
fully aware of what has preached to them in school,
and Punksy writes about that he philosophies about what he
was preached at, what the military posters told him, Like
like my father who came back from World War Two,
he came back very disillusioned because even though he knew
(40:51):
that that the fight that went on there was a
righteous cause, the actual when he came back, the old
timers that he had to go talk to with the
VFW didn't have a clue what was going on and
had no idea what he'd been through and and didn't
really care and it was really really hard on him.
(41:12):
He took a bullet in the head on the battlefield
and survived, which is a story in and of itself.
So that kind of informs, you know, my sense my
father's stories. You know what what's going on with punksy
and so and the others are all victims of some
kind of trauma. So with the women as sexual trauma,
(41:35):
with the Native American, it's cultural trauma. With Hamilton it's
it's both. And he's ADHD completely uh distractable and whatever
he plays drums to calm me, he'll pick up a
bucket and just play it to calm down. I taught
a lot of I taught a lot of kids like this,
(41:56):
perfectly lovely kids if you if you didn't try and
make them do the stuff they weren't meant to do.
And but he's got but he's very focused on these things.
So they're all trying to get somewhere and make it,
and they as happens with these sorts of people, they
fall together because there's nobody else to fall together with,
(42:18):
because they're still social creatures. And even though they differ
on what any of this means and their sexual tension
because we've got men and women, you know, all that
stuff going on, and and the Native Americans got his
bone to pick two and he's himself. So if your
question is how do they achieve it, they don't what
(42:42):
they what they what they do achieve? I mean, while
you're reading, and maybe that's a spoiler, I shouldn't have
let go. But what they're what they're shooting for is
who are they as human beings as an identity in
this world? And how do they reconcile how you know,
(43:05):
the rest of their lives given who they are. It's
it's it's it's self discovery with kind of like therapy
where they're all getting together and just letting it out
without a therapist in the room because they can't afford
a therapist.
Speaker 5 (43:20):
That's interesting.
Speaker 3 (43:21):
It's almost like, you know, trying to achieve American dream capitalism,
but they got their own version of American dreams. Somebody dyslac,
somebody ADHD where it's like, hey, I built something, I
got a credit for it.
Speaker 5 (43:34):
That's American dream.
Speaker 3 (43:35):
Or somebody won a national war but did not make
a millionaire, that's National dream. Or invented something which helps
so many people. But you didn't make a lot of
money that was like American dream. So it's not necessarily capitalism.
It can be in other forms. It doesn't have to
be material or or a monetary or anything like that.
(43:56):
It can be just outright creative or social.
Speaker 2 (43:59):
Yeah. And of the women, you know that they want
the freedom to be themselves instead of having men telling
them what to do, because that's that's worked out tragically
for them growing up. One of the young ladies is
is a foster child and the other one left home
early to avoid the abuse. And so how do you
(44:21):
make your how do you make your way in the world?
You know your dream is just to be self sufficient?
Is just do it? Is just this if you don't
heal at least at least end the cycle of what's
been done to you, you know for twenty years, lots
of left of different ways.
Speaker 3 (44:41):
Right or is it's like, you know, everybody's worried about
the American dreaming. Hear about the house and everything like that.
Some people like you know, the big house Bill Gates
has on his own island Washington, or some are like
the American dream just a simple two three bedroom, one bath,
really some where it can be just a plain ol
college coag your kabuts.
Speaker 2 (45:03):
Right, that for many of these people, it's actually having
a roof and having and having something to eat. I
mean that's a goal. I mean, Punksley sleeps on the
ground a lot. They're they're they're that. I just in
the middle class world, in the middle class novel we
are were fairly unaware and ignorant of how a good
(45:27):
portion of the United States lives. And that kind of
story generally doesn't get into fiction because fiction or novels,
novels are middle class art forms. And so you're at
when you write something like this, you're writing what I
call anti novels. All three of these, all three of
these books are anti novels. They're they're books that try
(45:50):
and do something with the novel that the novel wasn't
originally designed to do, which has been something that's been
done since inteed fifty But that's and and als aren't
exactly new. But it's not the kind of of novel
where you expect, you know, the way you were taught
in ninth grade, with the plot triangle and character development,
(46:12):
and they discover something and somebody is going to have
you know, get married. At the end, it'll I'll be successful.
That's that sort of thing. That's that's not that's not
the world of these characters. It's just it just isn't.
And I taught in two communities where that was seventy
five percent of the community that's who they were, and
(46:33):
many kids twenty five percent of them much more like
these characters. And and so they were kind enough to
look to trust me and let me get to know
them on a certain level, never too much, because they're
still a damn English teacher.
Speaker 5 (46:52):
Oh yeah, you got that question it, yes.
Speaker 2 (46:56):
No, absolutely. I had a student in Alma, Washington, who
lived in the woods with his dad, who was in
a wheelchair from from from Vietnam, Bob Oliver. And Bob
couldn't speak a sentence without a cuss word. And at
the very end, when he went through graduation, he came
up to me in his gown and he stuck his
hand out and he shook me hand. He looked me
(47:18):
right in the eye and narrowed his eyes and he
said done, You're the best damn English teacher I ever had.
And from Bob, that was a high compliment. So because
because you couldn't rise above being a damn English teacher.
That wasn't possible. So or or dart or shoot or
an I know, yeah, exactly. Yeah, but this is Bob.
(47:41):
I got to quote Bob. I would be doing Bob
the service to uh to English teacher his language. So
my apologies to your audience there.
Speaker 3 (47:51):
Oh that's perfectly okay, we all understand. And lastly, what
can people get from the book?
Speaker 2 (47:59):
Oh my goodness. Well, the first thing, with all this
all that we said about it, it's funny. So Hamilton
Chance is an absolute hoot, and he's funny from the beginning,
and he's funny from the to the end. He's not
funny and stand up, but he's filled with malaprops. He's
(48:21):
his sense of the way he puts things together and
tells stories is just an awful lot of fun and
Punksy's introspective and so you get to figure out, you know,
what's going on with the characters because he's trying to.
He's essentially being the reader trying to figure out what's
going on, so you're not left in the dark necessarily.
(48:42):
And the two women characters, I say, it sounds like
this is it, you know, It starts out as a
male buddy book, but the women characters come in and
they're they're very central. In fact, in some ways, I
think they're the most important part of the book because
they kick the boys butts and cause them to reflect
(49:03):
because they're there is so many women are to get
by in these areas. They do it on their own,
you know, they were, they haven't they're not any kids yet,
but they raise kids on their own because the men
are not reliable because they drink or they're broken by
their jobs. Which happens with loggers, what happens with an
awful lot of working class folks. So they're they're tough.
(49:26):
So there's a lot to love about this book.
Speaker 5 (49:28):
And a lot to learn as well too.
Speaker 3 (49:30):
Where when you find your book, Jeffrey, And how and
how do people get ahold of you?
Speaker 2 (49:34):
Yeah?
Speaker 8 (49:35):
You?
Speaker 2 (49:35):
I mean you can find it anywhere Amazon. There you go,
Jeffrey Dunn. I have a website jeffreydun dot com where
you can click and you can go to Barnes and Noble,
you can go to to other book sites. You can
go to Amazon. From there, you can go to any
independent bookstore. You can go to Barnes and Noble. You
can order it because it's through Ingram Spark, which is,
(49:56):
you know, your standard worldwide distribution network. You can go
through there. As you said, I do some writing on Medium.
I have a substack channel which i'm my I'm under
Culture Raven. There you go, there's my Raven again, just
my name you could say, ye, got it absolutely so yeah,
(50:16):
so it's not hard if you want to find me
or just just google it and I'll come up.
Speaker 5 (50:21):
Okay, we'll certainly do that.
Speaker 3 (50:23):
And we're here with Jeffrey Dunn of Whiskey Rubble Hill,
The Mike Wadner Show, Jeffrey a few more things. What
else can you expect me twenty twenty five and beyond.
Speaker 2 (50:32):
Yeah, well, I'll keep writing some things on both medium
and substack. So and I've I'm started on something new
I'm all about. Yeah, I won't. I won't give any spoilers.
There you go, because it's it's got a long way
to go, but I got to start. But I'm working
on a big novel like Radio Free Olympia for the
(50:53):
Spokane area. So I've got my two characters. I got
the male and female to go back and forth. I've
got my magical characters. This one is mister white a
mountain whitefish. He's my raven. I've got a vulture character
that goes by Turk for Turkey vulture. I'll have a
dragonfly coming in here. They're all what what gets translated
(51:17):
as animal animal people right from the Native American world,
except that the sailors didn't call them animal people. It's
a bad translation. So they're their own critter. But but
but uh. The mountain whitefish in the beginning comes right
and explains all that as to exactly what he is
because he doesn't want the humans to get the wrong
idea from that book that Jeffrey Dunn wrote. So he
(51:41):
disses me right off the bat too. So good fun,
good fun.
Speaker 5 (51:45):
It sounds like a lot of fun.
Speaker 3 (51:47):
We're looking forward to it. And who do you consider
biggest influence in the career In.
Speaker 2 (51:51):
My career, biggest influence, Wow, I mentioned I mentioned Richard Broddigan. Absolutely.
I love Jethro Tulleny. Ian Anderson is as growing up
Tom Tom Robbins and just the way he his imagination
(52:12):
worked and developed over time as a writer. So there's
big things. And and my wife and my and my
son just throw them there. My wife is one special
lady to live with me. She's very creative and in
all sorts of ways. My son's a musician nice bring
brings a lot of sound. I was a music DJ
(52:34):
and and and music director for for a while. And
though I don't have the fingers out of the dexterity
for music, I got a musician's brain. So he's teaching
me a lot about musical composition, how that works. So yep,
there we go. That's a lot nice.
Speaker 3 (52:53):
Okay, that is certainly amazing. And let's let's see we
got that? And who you considered bags and lose the courage?
I asked that I forget.
Speaker 2 (53:02):
Yes you did? Okay, all right, our biggest big just influence,
did you say, correct?
Speaker 5 (53:07):
Yeah, biggest influence?
Speaker 2 (53:07):
Yeah? Yeah, there we go, Yes, all those five? There
you go?
Speaker 5 (53:11):
Okay, we got that.
Speaker 3 (53:12):
I must have my punky moment right there too, and
exactly and what's the best and what's the best advice
you can give to any boy at this point?
Speaker 2 (53:20):
Oh, the best advice I can give to anybody Just
experience as much a life as you can. We all
have different brains, and we all process differently, we all think,
we all want to be the same, but we're so
so different in the way we think and share and
(53:41):
all of that. And that's all fantastic, but it only
works if we'd like open up our our our like
the radio dial to everything and and just take it
all in and let our minds go to work on it.
I mean, that's my goal every day, is just to
do that and then just watch the magic of what
your brain does with it. It's very cool, it's very fun.
Speaker 3 (54:04):
It really sounds like and a great thing as well too.
Here with author Jeffery you've done a whiskey revel hill
on the Mike Waders Show. Jeffrey Rayby, thankf you time
you've been. App's amazing, learned a lot looking for Heaven soon.
Keeps up today, keep in touch, laugh at you back
and watch website. How do people contact you? Where can
people purchase or check out your books?
Speaker 2 (54:24):
I went through that. Say it again again? Yeah, no,
I'd love to do it again. No, no problems. We
have more than one hit. Oh no, no, no, so
yeah Amazon, Jeffrey Dunn, there you go, or the names
of the book. But I have a website Jeffrey Dunnspokane
dot com. If you remember the city of Spokane's just
(54:44):
Jeffrey Dun Spokane dot com and it has links to
my books. Go to the bookstore and order. You can order,
you know, through any any bookstore from Barnes and Noble
to your independent bookstore. It's all their meeting and substance
have links. It's all good. So thanks for that extra
opportunity there, Jeffrey Dunnspokane dot com.
Speaker 3 (55:06):
Thanks man, I got that, you got that right. And
once again, Jeffrey baby, thank you time. You've been absolutely fantastic.
Looking forehand soon keeps up today, keep in touch, lave
at your back. We wish I'll best and Jeffrey, you
definitely have a great fits you hey, you too, Thank you.
Speaker 1 (55:20):
The Mike Wagner Show is powered by Sonicweb Studios. If
you're looking to start or upgrade your online presence, visit
www dot sonicwebstudios dot com for all of your online needs.
Call one eight hundred three oh three three nine six
zero or visit us online at www dot sonicwebstudios dot
(55:40):
com to get started today, Mention The Mike Wagner Show
and get twenty percent off your project. Sonicweb Studios. Take
your image to the next level.
Speaker 7 (55:49):
Hey ver Dana Laxa here, American news anchor. Hey, let
me ask you something real quick. Why do you read
a book.
Speaker 8 (55:56):
You're buying a story, a thought, a message, and a
little book entertains and inspires.
Speaker 7 (56:02):
And that's exactly what A Missing By Award winning author
of Me on the Zia does. I have his book
right here, and it's based on real events with relatable
characters that hook you from start to finish.
Speaker 8 (56:14):
I personally love this book. It's super powerful and meaningful
through and you can actually get it on Amazon right now.
Speaker 3 (56:20):
The Mike Wagner Show is brought to you by Serena
Wagner's book The Sweet Sawmist Now availve on emsoon. This
book includes thirty exquisite pintings by well known and unknown
painters and King David Palms. The Sweet Sawmist gives us
a new perspective on his life in this book through
the songs he wrote. His time as a shepherd in
the field is will. The book starts, and it goes
on to describe his complicated and turbulent relationship with King Saul,
(56:40):
as well as other events. It's a story of love, betrayal, repentance,
and more. It also offers advice and approaching God and
living a life that pleases him. Check out the book
The Sweet Sawmist by Serena Wagner, now available on Amazon
keywords Sweet Sawmist Serena Wagner.
Speaker 4 (56:57):
Thanks for listening to The Mike Wagner Show by Sonicweb Studios.
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We're here at the amazing, critically acclaimed offer based in Bulkane, Washington.
Award winning teacher PhD in English Literature and Cultural Studies
forty one years of teaching focused on student learning and
(01:44):
issues and implementing educational programs at local national levels. He's
got a new book out which is a riveting portrait
of characters that's left behind by the American dream and
provide glimps of various issues that are hitting hard today
and American committees. The book is called Whiskey, Rebel, Live,
Laces and Gentleman plus twos and People.
Speaker 5 (02:05):
Downtown Spokane, Washington.
Speaker 3 (02:07):
The amazing, criculy claimed author, war winning teacher, and the
book is called Whiskey Revel the Multi ten. Jeffrey done, Jeffrey,
good morning, good Afternue, good aving, Thanks.
Speaker 5 (02:15):
For joining us today.
Speaker 2 (02:16):
Thank you, Mike.
Speaker 3 (02:17):
Good to be here, sir, and it's great to have
you on board as well too. So you're a curriculally
claimed author based on Spokane, Washington. You're war winning teacher.
You have a PhD in English literature and Cultural studies.
You've been teaching forty one years and it's basically focused
on student learning issues and implementing education programs at local
(02:37):
national levels. And you've also featured in MPR and Medium
and your cultural fiction works Washington State Book Award and
Surreal Fish and a Little Spokane. And also you've also
been number as well too that your new book is
a briving portrait at local national levels, behind the American Dream,
(02:58):
providing a glimpse of various issue was hitting hard American
communities with a dark sense of hopeless sense. The book
is called Whiskey Rebel for getting all at Jeffrey tell
us how he first got.
Speaker 2 (03:07):
Started, How I first got started? You talking about writing.
Speaker 3 (03:12):
Living till Selba all the way back, way back, way back, Sherman, way.
Speaker 2 (03:16):
Way back, way back. I was born in near Chicago,
Illinois and Wheaton, Illinois, the height of the baby boom.
They had no room for me, and I was told
at the hospital. I was told that instead of the
usual crib or a place where you put infants, they
put me in a buster brown shoe box. So that
(03:38):
says a lot. And lived there for five years and
parents moved to Pittsburgh. I grew up in Pittsburgh. My
family's all Midwesterners. I'm the only one who claims Pittsburgh Pennsylvania,
which was a lot more diverse, which for me was
a very very good thing. And graduated from high school
(03:59):
outside of Pittsbury and ended up teaching in Catholic schools,
Parochial School, Central Catholic High School for twelve years in
downtown Pittsburgh, Boys and Ties one one hundred boys and
ties and guys in robes, and I was a lay teacher.
Taught English there, met my wife the University of Pittsburgh.
(04:21):
I was easily bored, so I went to the University
of Pittsburgh. So they give me a reading list and
I took a class and I took another class, and
I took another class, and eventually it all ended up
with a PhD. Worked on a William Burrows, the man
who wrote Naked Lunch PhD. There and met my wife
and our first child. She said, there's better places to live,
(04:42):
so out to the northwest we came to first to
the west side, and it was too dark for her too, fogy, fogy, foggy.
And then we moved to Spokane where it's sunny. Spokane
Salish for children of the sun. Better place to be.
I've written my whole life since I well fourteen and on,
(05:05):
but entered school. Teaching takes a lot of takes a
lot of energy, so that was a sidelight. And then
when I retired five or six years ago, now I
could get serious and take all those manuscripts and start
cranking out a few books. So there we go, from
radio free Olympia a wildcat to whiskey rebel.
Speaker 3 (05:26):
This may that is certainly interesting what you have And
what is that one exact, precise moment that simply influencing
you into what you.
Speaker 5 (05:33):
Do in the rest of your career.
Speaker 2 (05:35):
Oh wow, Well, right off the bat, when I was
in ninth grade, I didn't like school, didn't like it
at all, didn't know I was dyslexic, blessedly mildly so
makes me creative but doesn't completely disable my spelling or
keep me from reading, because I make movies into or
make books into movies in my head. But my English
(05:59):
teacher ninth grade read Richard Broddigan to us and Watermelon Sugar,
and when my brain got a hold of that, because
it's very visual, very wild, very sort of magical realism,
I said, you can do that. That's interesting. So I
just started writing. He had to write as a short
(06:21):
write write something. In response, I wrote a short story,
read it to the class, and it just it just
went from there. I wanted to be a VET, but
I couldn't. I knew i'd never get through Biokim, so
I fell back on the English side of things, and
being an English teacher will allow you to feed yourself,
so took care of and I and my best my
(06:44):
best times are with high school kids, so that's that's
really where I wanted to be, with high school kids,
and really focused on on learning issues from especially dyslexia,
but ADHD, high functioning autism and a like and trying
(07:06):
to get them through high school so they could graduate,
deal with reading issues and writing issues and all those
sorts of things. See if you could break that cycle
of failure that kids start to do right about middle school.
Speaker 3 (07:19):
Okay, and also without qualify like maybe special ed or
anything like that too.
Speaker 5 (07:24):
It that made me kind of think in a sense.
Speaker 2 (07:27):
No, absolutely, So these are kids who traditionally don't have IEPs,
aren't in special education. And I actually taught at the WA,
which was the Washington Education Association, gave me an award
working with the special ed teacher for a mixed class
where we tried that out for a year and she
(07:48):
decided that she really wanted more control, so she went
back to what she was doing. And so these are
kids I trying to sort out the difference. And I
would say, I mean use i Q test, use all
sorts of things to tell the difference. But with a
reading test, I found at the high school level in
(08:09):
ninth grade that as students had a fourth grade reading
level or lower, they need an i EP if they
were in fifth grade or above, and those are fifth
grades four years below grade level, we could make two
years progress in a year. I had kids that could
make four years progress because they had the apparatus. They
(08:33):
just hadn't they hadn't been taught in such a way
that their brains could respond. And suddenly we go from
you know, from fifth grade to eighth grade to ninth grade.
And if you could got an eighth grade reading level,
you can graduate from high school. Be nice if you
can do better. But but if you can get to
(08:55):
eighth grade, you can get by and get out the door.
Speaker 3 (08:58):
That's it seems like a lot of people seem to
take that root and everything like that. Anything eighth grade
you can pretty much, you know, go from there. And
of course you know you've written some books and you've
gotten ball with reading and everything. Who are some of
my favorite authors and writers and your favorite books going up? Ah?
Speaker 2 (09:16):
Yes, so I mentioned Richard Brodigan, and I finally started
to grow past Richard a little bit. He was not
a lot of people know Richard anymore unless you were
unless you're an oldie like me. But he was. He
was quite the San Francisco was born in Tacoma, but
(09:39):
quite the San Francisco writer, a late beat generation guy
who got adopted by the hippies, which it drove him
nuts because he didn't consider himself a hippie. But there
was just a freedom and an imagination in his writing
and a voice like nobody else's that I kind of
(10:01):
glombed onto. But you know, from from there, just in
high school, Kurt Vonnegut. Uh, they were Big Cat's Cradle,
Slaughterhouse five. That was a big thing. And then beyond that,
whom Tom Robbins, who's even though he was born in
the Carolinas, mean he just died this year. Uh. He
(10:24):
lived in Seattle, and so he became a Northwest writer,
even if he didn't start out there. Love his love
his work, love Another's roadside attraction, Uh, Jitterbug perfume. And
then the one that was made into a terrible movie,
what's the one with the young lady with the Uh,
(10:48):
it's the hitchhiking girl with the giant thumbs. And I
can't dyslexic me. I'm bad at names, and I'm bad
at dates in there, and I can't just pull that
name up.
Speaker 5 (10:58):
Girl with thumbs.
Speaker 3 (10:59):
That's in the the movie trailer, the picture hitchhiking girl
with thumbs.
Speaker 2 (11:04):
Yes, and you're trying to remember it too.
Speaker 3 (11:07):
I know exactly what you're talking about.
Speaker 2 (11:11):
Not cowgirls get The Blues. There we go, that's The Blues.
Got it? Yes, the movie was absolutely awful, but the
book is a joy. The book is way funder read.
So they tried and they really failed with that one.
Speaker 5 (11:27):
And uh, go ahead.
Speaker 3 (11:29):
I was gonna mention some movies that there were great
books made terrible movies.
Speaker 5 (11:32):
But you're gonna say something.
Speaker 2 (11:34):
No, no, go ahead, I want to hear. I want
to hear your list. No.
Speaker 3 (11:37):
I was trying to think of one that that that
was like, you know, a really good book, but the
movie version was lousy, and I think it was what
was it not Hitchhiker's Galaxy. It was, uh, there's something
keepers it was ut The Highlander. That was when I
think that might have been a novel. Yes, but it
(11:59):
turns it I tried for a movie.
Speaker 5 (12:00):
It's like you.
Speaker 2 (12:01):
Awful, Oh my got it? Got it? Very good. Now
what I do is I read an awful lot of
nonfiction because what I'm looking for is is history, natural history, geology.
Just finished a book on vultures, finished a book on dragonflies.
(12:24):
And what it does is it it feeds my imagination
and then I take all those facts and then my brain.
It's just something that that does you know, decides on
you know, what happens if you get a couple of
characters in this setting, and where where can I go
from there? So yeah, Barry Lopez loved that. Terry Tempest.
(12:48):
Williams Andy Dillard is awful, wonderful. Bernheinrich's my favorite. A
German Man who ended up in the United States who
has is just wrote maybe my favorite nonfiction book, which
is about ravens, and he tries to answer the question
whether ravens are moral creatures. He's a he's a cognitive,
(13:13):
he's a he's a serious scientist. So he lives with
He lived with ravens and raised them from chicks, and
in the process of telling all these stories about living
with these birds, answers the question that can they make
moral decisions, which he decides at the end they can.
Speaker 5 (13:30):
That's interesting.
Speaker 3 (13:31):
I didn't know a bird of particular genre can make
a moral decision like a raven that you know, you
think of ravens, yew always attacking quote the raven. No,
the more, of course of Baltimore football team. That's all
you think about. I have that, but I guess I
kind of thinks about it. You also, you know, read
about giraffes, and I think there was also what was
(13:51):
that other creature you wrote about?
Speaker 2 (13:54):
Are you read what was that one? Vultures?
Speaker 5 (13:59):
Bulchers?
Speaker 2 (13:59):
That was the one.
Speaker 3 (14:00):
Okay, So will you gravitated towards animals at that time too,
or just a fascination of them?
Speaker 2 (14:06):
Oh? No, yes, I was. I wanted to be a
vet and uh my oldest son tried a little vet
tech education and he got disappointed because he found out
it's more about the more about the owners than it
is about the pets. So there we go. But yeah, absolutely,
And so where we live, we have a resident ravens
(14:27):
who live a quarter of a mile from where and
they from where we do, and we see them traveling
back and forth over the road, feeding family, doing what
ravens do because their their brains twice as big as
a crow. So they're they're they're quite intelligent. They look
you right in the eye when they see insize up. Yeah,
(14:51):
all of those things. I mean, we have deer, we
have moose, we have bear, hear the coyotes at night
and then and we're only I mean we're just on
the edge of the city of Spokane. But you wouldn't
kind of know it where we are with the big
Ponderosa pines around us and Douglas Firs.
Speaker 5 (15:10):
And that too as well too.
Speaker 3 (15:11):
And plus you have a couple of books as well too,
with Radio Free Olympia and wildcats. It's one of the
subjects of animals. Somehow we'll get to that one with
Risky Whoever from Jeffrey Dunn. But first listened to the
Mike Whitner Show. At the Mic Winners Show dot com
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Studios dot com for all he needs looking at a
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(15:53):
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out there Me and Molson's The If You Love Fast
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Speaker 5 (16:31):
Check it out on Amazon.
Speaker 3 (16:32):
Also brought to buy The Sweet Salmons by Serena Wagner,
based on Life of Dave, including Thirty Squizz of Pains
and King David Psalms. The Sweet Salmist gives a new
perspective of the life of David and the Psalms he
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compighi turbo relationship with King Saul. It's a dof love
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(16:54):
Regino Wagner. Also check out the Mike Waidners Show at
the Mike Winners Show dot com, fifty podcasts, platforms, her
and over countries. Follow us on Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter,
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(17:14):
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Speaker 5 (17:34):
And Themike Winnershow dot com.
Speaker 3 (17:35):
Here It's amazing quickly acclaimed author based on Spokane, Washington
World winning teacher Jeffrey Dunn.
Speaker 5 (17:40):
Here on the micro Winder Show. Before we talk about.
Speaker 3 (17:43):
Whiskey Rebel, you did Radio Free Olympia and Wildcat and
tell us about those.
Speaker 2 (17:48):
Ah radio free Olympia. I started that twenty years ago.
I was living on the Olympic Peninsula. And if anyone's
been to the Olympic and the Peninsula, it's a magical,
scary place. It's the last it's the There aren't a
lot of roads, it's logging roads and whatever. There's the
(18:09):
Olympic National Park, these Olympic National Forest with one highway
one on one that goes all the way around it
and not much in between. And so we moved there
from Pittsburgh and the culture shock, and it was called
a nature shock, was was huge. At the beginning of
(18:31):
the book, I just described on the on our little
we rented a little loggerhouse in Olma, Washington, and standing
on the porch and there were it was like a
thousand frogs. You were overwhelmed by the sex song of
a little froggies out there and what what was behind that?
It's just darkness and and frog sex. And it was.
Speaker 6 (18:51):
Crazy, No, absolutely, and so as I as I taught
kids there who were quite fit, many of them lived
in the woods, and school was not second nature even
though they'd been going to school for fourteen fifteen years.
Speaker 2 (19:09):
Who and I love them all dearly. They were all
wildly creative and very untutored, very very lightly socialized, let's
put it that way. So at one point I just
started I wanted to write something that like James Joyce
did trying to give you the voices of Dublin in Ulysses,
(19:33):
and I wanted to do something that had the peninsula speak,
and so how do you do that? And so I
just started writing and writing, which is kind of my
method anyway. But different voices came to me. One was
a character named Raven, who ends up being the kind
of the master ceremonies of the book, but it's done
(19:54):
in a male female fashion, where the odd chapters are
A young man who has an infant washes up on
the beach and is taken in by an ietenant logger
who lives in an old logging railroad car and in
the middle of nowhere and doesn't The guy doesn't tell
anybody he's raising this child. He just takes him in.
(20:15):
And when the man dies at fifteen, or he's when
the young man's fifteen, he goes into Aberdeen, Washington, which
is where Kurt Cobain grew up, and nobody much has
much to say, including Kurt about Aberdeen. But he ends
up with a pirate radio transmitter and decides to hike
(20:35):
east to west across the Olympic Peninsula, and he broadcasts
the spirits of the Olympics, folklore characters, more voices, people
who have died, all sort of historical, with Raven Overhead
following him as he goes. And so those are all
(20:55):
the odd number chapters, and the even number chapters are
a young woman who lives on what's called Grace Harbor
on the hump Tulips River, which is a real river,
it's just a wonderful name, hump Tulips, And she has
a cranberry farm she inherited, and she starts a women's
roadhouse called Wild Sisters, and she takes in broken women
(21:16):
and kind of creates a convent. It's just what women's
all women's roadhouse. And of course she writes she's writing
a poetry journal, and it's not poetry, like it's poetry
you can't read. It's just it's pros but it looks
like poetry and just telling the story of starting this
roadhouse and the women who come. And eventually she picks
(21:38):
up his signal and that's where I'll stop, because, of course,
you know, it's a novel. So we got young woman,
young man, they've connected through the radio waves, and where
do we go from there? With all the different voices
on the peninsula. So my developmental editor was an X.
(22:02):
I was looking for somebody not to help me with
the fiction side, but to help me with the nonfiction,
so to speak. I wanted to feel like it's a
walk through the Olympic Peninsula, like it's like it was real.
And she lived in Seattle and it was a ex
National Park ranger, and so she took she walked with
the book, so to speak, walked the trails and and
(22:26):
then made sure that everything was true to life, that
it was like you were there, you know, on the peninsula,
in this magical, realistic world with realism but the magical
all applied over the top of it. So it's it's
it's it's it's quite a it's quite a creation. I'm
pretty happy with that. It took twenty years to get
(22:48):
to the point that I could get the whole thing
to make sense a lot. It was a lot of
balls in the air and a number of critics that
I didn't believe that he could keep all those balls
in the air and then at the end they would
they wouldn't just follow the floor. But every critic said,
oh my god, he did it. Good for him. It
actually makes sense at the end. So that's that book.
(23:09):
It takes that one takes a little explanation.
Speaker 3 (23:12):
Well that's okay, I mean, did a great job with
that makes you want to pick up, you know, a
book and readspecially being radio for Olympia, y'all scout Wildcat
as well too.
Speaker 2 (23:21):
Until so that one's much that one's much as hard
as Radio Free Olympia, as this one's much simpler. It
was a thought experiment when I was sixty five. I decided, Uh,
since I grew up in Pittsburgh, what would it be
like if I left Spokane and I moved back to
a little rust belt town along something like the Allegheny River.
(23:44):
I grew up very close to a little rust belt
town that was called Brayburn, And I used Google Maps
to kind of as a map. And Brayburn had an
old steel mill and had had a coal mine that
no longer is shut down, but there was a coal
mine and has a damn and so forth. So on
a river and all that stuff. What would happen if
I moved back there? And it's a fictional memoir of
(24:08):
somebody like me moving back there and discovering a place
that is, on the one hand, in the present undergoing
a fairly magical transformation. It's become a sustainable place that's
overcome it's it's capitalist technological sins that it had to
live through. Where everybody is, it's much more community. He
(24:32):
moves into the old hotel, which is now essentially a
communal living and dining space, although the houses are still
there too, and and and then the same heed. He
needs to deal with all the demons of when he
was there, when he was in high school. And of
course he had to have a girlfriend and he left
her there, and of course she's still there when he
(24:53):
returns somewhere in between, but she's still there. And will
they will they? Will they see each other? Will they
get to I mean, it's all that sort of novelistic stuff,
But it's this, it's the gritty realism of the Appalachian
rust belt in the fifties, sixties, seventies, and eighties, and
Pittsburgh fiftee twenty five steel mill shut down and one
(25:16):
hundred thousand people left. And I was teaching at Central
Catholic High School at the time, and it was I
was just I was shocked that there was so little unrest.
Somebody somebody put a you know, a dead fish, and
somebody's and some steel steel owners you know, uh mailbox,
(25:38):
or or somebody disrupted a Presbyterian church dinner. But other
than that, the city went down without a fight. With
all of that unemployment and everything had happened, and I
wanted to deal with that and in this book, to
deal with that change and come out of the other
(26:01):
end with something more positive than what was so dark
at the time.
Speaker 3 (26:07):
You know, you were talking about Pittsburgh as well too,
and of course you know they made a comeback most
I guess maybe twenty years ago somewhere around there, right. Look,
the Ross Belt cites, like with Buffalo, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Eerie
and Gary, Indiana, Chicago, going up to Milwaukee, that a
good portion have turned into archie communities.
Speaker 2 (26:27):
You know.
Speaker 3 (26:28):
Pittsburgh he got the brand new, spanking new P and
C Park, He became a technological center. I think, trying
to think a few companies moved in, and of course
Buffalo they beautified their area, Cleveland with the Rock and
Roll Hall of Fame and they become more of like
a music culture. And Detroit, you know, just tuck down
Tiger Stadium, built America Park and they're trying to rebuild
(26:51):
it as a financial industry, not just you know, crank
out gms for Chevy's everything like that. And of course
Milwaukee and you know Harley Davison Chicago Technological.
Speaker 5 (27:03):
It's like it's all changed in that time too.
Speaker 3 (27:06):
And I'm thinking about it's like Pittsburgh's probably meant made
the most progress and anybody else.
Speaker 2 (27:11):
Right, I went, I went back there this this summer
for my fiftieth and high school reunion. Okay, And two
quick stories. One one is just it has to do
with the novel. When I went back my I did
about a number of readings at the at the Historical
Society and and different things bookstores and stuff, and uh.
(27:34):
When I went to the reunion, a number of my
uh classmates came up to me and said, so who
is she? Who is Who's the girl? So that was fun.
And at one point I turned around and she was
standing right behind me. So there we go. That's one story.
There's there's the there's my own personal story the city. There.
There was a huge renaissance in the in the fifties
(27:58):
when they when they built the city Arena, when they
did a lot of urban renewal downtown, tore out all
the train tracks and everything on the point, put in
a park, and put a number of the Alcoa building,
the US Steel building, and all that stuff went up,
and mals went in and so forth and so on,
and then as you said, in the nineties into the
two thousands, there's this big tech and medical change. What
(28:24):
it's created is a is a city, a very we
talk about wealth disparity. It's a very two tier city now.
So there's the one hand, there's all the young folks
you know, who had gentrified various areas. And then there
are all the neighborhoods that are still there and they
look no different than they did when I left, that
(28:46):
are still there and and nothing in that way has changed.
It's you go back and you can just go from
one block to another, and you go from one world
to the next. There's a whole foods here, and then
there's a there's a bunch of old eighteen nineties row
houses right across the street. M h. It's an interesting experience.
Speaker 5 (29:09):
And something does as well too. And there's also two
of the books.
Speaker 3 (29:12):
That you have Hubcat, Clutch and Plate, and also dream
Fishing The Little Spoke Cane tell us about those.
Speaker 2 (29:20):
Okay, this will be even shorter, so I'll start with
dream Fishing. Dream dream Fishing is surreal short stories. And
I live above the Little Spokane River. It's a it's
a it's a I like little magical natural places, and
there aren't a lot of people who live along it.
They're protecting more and more of it with the conservancy,
(29:42):
and in my area, a lot of that is is protected,
but it's just outside of the city. And so I
decided right out of in in before I retired, Actually,
my oldest son died of a fentanyl overdose. Oh my gosh,
and it, yeah, it ripped me apart, and I just
(30:06):
my whole notions of writing and whatever. I just threw
it out the window and started over and just wrote whatever.
And so there's some stories in there that have his
fingerprints on him, so to speak. One about autism and
so forth and so on. But it's it's simply imagine
walking along a very small river a very big creek
(30:30):
and where your mind just goes. And so that I
did a lot of historical and other sorts of natural
history research, and then from that took it places like
there's a there's a tiny little forgotten cemetery and imagined
what if that was a library where all the books
that have never been published go, and all the shelves
are empty, but when you go in, you hear the
(30:52):
book speak to you if you're open to it. Stories
that like that as you work your way along that
that go on, that continuum from magical to realism as
you work your way along the river. And if you
know the area, you know all the different spots, all
the little creeks to flow in, and all the little
places I'm talking about, all the lakes that are connected
(31:13):
to it, and all those things. So it's a it's
a it's a lot of fun. I self published that,
so I learned how to do that, which was also
a fun technological thing. And then Hubcap Collection played as
poems and poets do things called chap books where they
kind of publish their own things in little twenty page segments,
how to make their own books like zines, so to speak.
(31:36):
And this is a collection of six of those kinds
of things into one. So they're they're different, they're there,
I would say, in some ways, they're Broughtigan Ginsburg inspired.
They're not hard to read, they're not the difficult poems
of the world, but they're very Spokane oriented, just in time,
(31:57):
in terms of time and place. The big one, the beginning,
is called Cup of Joe, which is it's a quiz
for boomers to see how many cultural reverences they can get.
Because it's just me. I started it like the last
week I retired and just started imagining sitting down with
a cup of coffee and just everything that came to me.
(32:19):
And it's all in there from you know, starting with
Brian Jones and Jimmy Hendrix and uh oh, Janice Joplin's death,
so forth and so on into the psychedelia and all
the way to whatever else came to me. So there's
there's that book. There's one of them is written in
(32:40):
response to my son's passing away, and that's in there, okay,
which brings us up to the current one if that's
where you're going or something else, right.
Speaker 5 (32:52):
Yeah, And that is Whiskey Rebel.
Speaker 3 (32:53):
We'll get to that with Jeffrey Dunn In one minute
you listen to The Mike Winder's Show at the Mike
Wedershow dot Com. Power by Socks to buy, official sponsor
to Mike Wagner's show, Internuts, Worrying author Mea Mulson Say
and Missing the Sweet Saves by Serena Wagner based on
Life Up David Amazon dot com. Keywords sweet saw as
Serena Wagon, We'll be back with you Amazing author Jeffrey
Dunno whiskey rebel after this time.
Speaker 1 (33:14):
The Mike Wagner Show is powered by Sonicweb Studios. If
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Call one eight hundred three oh three three nine six
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(33:35):
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Speaker 7 (33:44):
Hey there, Dana Laxa here, American news anchor. Hey, let
me ask you something real quick.
Speaker 8 (33:49):
Why do you read a book? You're buying a story,
a thought, a message, and.
Speaker 7 (33:54):
A good book entertains and inspires, and that's exactly what
a Missing By Award winningfor me. On the Ziadas, I
have his book right here, and it's based on real
events with relatable characters that hook you from start to finish.
Speaker 8 (34:08):
I personally love this book.
Speaker 7 (34:10):
It's super powerful and meaningful. Three you can actually get
it on Amazon right now.
Speaker 3 (34:14):
The Mike Wagner Show is brought to you by Serena
Wagner's book The Sweet Sawmist, now availed on Emson. This
book includes thirty exquisite pintings by well known and unknown
painters and King David Psalms. The Sweet Salmist gives us
a new perspective on his life in this book through
the songs he wrote. His time as a shepherd in
the field is where the book starts, and it goes
on to describe a complicated and turbulent relationship with King Saul,
(34:35):
as well as other events. It's a story of love, betrayal, repentance,
and more. It also offers advice and approaching God and
living a life that pleases him. Check out the book
The Sweet Salmist by Serena Wagner, now available on Amazon
Keywords Sweet Salmist Serena Wagner. Hey, Hey, this is Ray
Powers and boy are you in luck right place?
Speaker 2 (34:54):
Right time?
Speaker 3 (34:56):
Tuned into the Mike Wagner Show. You heard me, We're
back with author Jeffrey Dunna Whiskey Bubble here on the
Mike Wadners Show. Quickly acclaimed offer based in Bulkane, Washington,
and this book is basically a riving portrait of characters
left behind the American dream and tell us more about that.
Speaker 2 (35:19):
Yeah, so where do I start? Well, I'll just start
with a plot. So it starts with characters. And there
are two characters, and one is the speaker. So it's
it's a it's it's written in first person of a
young man trying to make take make some sense of
(35:40):
what's just happened to him. And he grew up. He
grew up in the like the Cascade Crest on the
Cascade Mountains in the in the and excuse me, the
Cascade Mountains. And he's he's he's in the fog belt,
so to speak, where it rains a lot and the
trees are are two hundred and fifty feet tall. And
(36:01):
his father was a lagger. His mother was a library
in a little town called Packwood, which you can go
visit sometime. They have a library. And it's if you
live in places like that, you're living there because you
don't want to be around too many people and you
just want to be to be yourself and around other
people who are just like that. And so he had
(36:23):
to decide, you know, when he when he was of age, finally,
you know, what was he going to do with his life.
And he tried community college and I didn't work. And
then he tried the military and he went to Iraq
and this is all backstory that's in the book, and
he and he encounters an ied in a humv and
gets his brain scrambled and comes back and his parents
have died. So he hears about panning gold on the
(36:48):
on the on the dry side when you get on
the other side of the cascades. And so while he's
panning gold, this guy comes along. He's the Whiskey Rebel
and he grew up western Pennsylvania and in seventeen ninety
four there was the American Whisky Rebel. That not many
of us know about rebellion. Many of us know about
what it was, the first rebellion against the United States.
We were five years old, and we already were raising
(37:11):
an army to battle the United States because people like ralatives,
the Scots Irish didn't want to pay any whiskey tax
because what was the point of the revolution. So he's
a direct descendant and he thinks it's his his, his,
his lot in life to make taxery whiskey. So he's
(37:33):
walking down the road and he sees this guy panning
for golden calls down and this guy down there does
anything to do. So they get together and they team
up to make tax rey whiskey. And along the way,
as you said, the quirky characters come in. Punksy, Punksy, Tawny.
It's a bit of a joke there. It's that's where
(37:55):
the groundhog lives. His parents last name are Tawny, which
is the last name, and they thought it'd be funny
to him and Punksy. So Punksy's right in this book.
And he has his idea of freedom, and Hamilton Chance,
the whiskey rebel, has his, and these other characters have
completely different ideas, but they all get together because they're
(38:19):
all singular human beings who are fairly fairal And if
you go into central Washington and you go in the
little towns, and you go outside the little towns and
you encounter the geology what's called the Scablands, which is
a story in in itself. How that happened with giant
floods from Montana that stripped all the soil off and
(38:42):
it's down to basalt and all that. You can imagine
somebody get lost because they want to be and making
whiskey and nobody would know they were doing it, and
then finding somebody to fence it and sell it, which
they do is spirit whiskey. So it's tax free because
it's religious. Okay, that's the book. There we go. Okay,
(39:05):
what happens with these folks? Your thoughts, sir? Well?
Speaker 3 (39:12):
I guess my question about it is that you simply
have just you know, just six people coming in and
you know, try and achieve something. And I guess the
whole thing is is that they want to achieve the
American dream. But they're having a very very very civical
time doing so. And one of my things is that
(39:32):
you know, they try every which way to break through
the American dream. And of course our question is is
that you know, how do they end up, you know,
achieving American dream or their.
Speaker 2 (39:43):
Version of it, right exactly. So the first thing that
at this point in our history I think is clear,
except for those people who are political and somewhat delusional,
is that. And if you live in Wenatchie, Washington, if
you live in in the places I'm thinking of, if
(40:07):
you live in Inaffreida, if you live in these towns
in this area, the American dream comes to you. If
there's somebody, if you've got what it called generational wealth,
Can you find examples of people who beat it? You can,
but you won't find a lot of them if you
(40:27):
if you look at things per capita. So they're all
fully aware of what has preached to them in school,
and Punksy writes about that he philosophies about what he
was preached at, what the military posters told him, Like
like my father who came back from World War Two,
he came back very disillusioned because even though he knew
(40:51):
that that the fight that went on there was a
righteous cause, the actual when he came back, the old
timers that he had to go talk to with the
VFW didn't have a clue what was going on and
had no idea what he'd been through and and didn't
really care and it was really really hard on him.
(41:12):
He took a bullet in the head on the battlefield
and survived, which is a story in and of itself.
So that kind of informs, you know, my sense my
father's stories. You know what what's going on with punksy
and so and the others are all victims of some
kind of trauma. So with the women as sexual trauma,
(41:35):
with the Native American, it's cultural trauma. With Hamilton it's
it's both. And he's ADHD completely uh distractable and whatever
he plays drums to calm me, he'll pick up a
bucket and just play it to calm down. I taught
a lot of I taught a lot of kids like this,
(41:56):
perfectly lovely kids if you if you didn't try and
make them do the stuff they weren't meant to do.
And but he's got but he's very focused on these things.
So they're all trying to get somewhere and make it,
and they as happens with these sorts of people, they
fall together because there's nobody else to fall together with,
(42:18):
because they're still social creatures. And even though they differ
on what any of this means and their sexual tension
because we've got men and women, you know, all that
stuff going on, and and the Native Americans got his
bone to pick two and he's himself. So if your
question is how do they achieve it, they don't what
(42:42):
they what they what they do achieve? I mean, while
you're reading, and maybe that's a spoiler, I shouldn't have
let go. But what they're what they're shooting for is
who are they as human beings as an identity in
this world? And how do they reconcile how you know,
(43:05):
the rest of their lives given who they are. It's
it's it's it's self discovery with kind of like therapy
where they're all getting together and just letting it out
without a therapist in the room because they can't afford
a therapist.
Speaker 5 (43:20):
That's interesting.
Speaker 3 (43:21):
It's almost like, you know, trying to achieve American dream capitalism,
but they got their own version of American dreams. Somebody dyslac,
somebody ADHD where it's like, hey, I built something, I
got a credit for it.
Speaker 5 (43:34):
That's American dream.
Speaker 3 (43:35):
Or somebody won a national war but did not make
a millionaire, that's National dream. Or invented something which helps
so many people. But you didn't make a lot of
money that was like American dream. So it's not necessarily capitalism.
It can be in other forms. It doesn't have to
be material or or a monetary or anything like that.
(43:56):
It can be just outright creative or social.
Speaker 2 (43:59):
Yeah. And of the women, you know that they want
the freedom to be themselves instead of having men telling
them what to do, because that's that's worked out tragically
for them growing up. One of the young ladies is
is a foster child and the other one left home
early to avoid the abuse. And so how do you
(44:21):
make your how do you make your way in the world?
You know your dream is just to be self sufficient?
Is just do it? Is just this if you don't
heal at least at least end the cycle of what's
been done to you, you know for twenty years, lots
of left of different ways.
Speaker 3 (44:41):
Right or is it's like, you know, everybody's worried about
the American dreaming. Hear about the house and everything like that.
Some people like you know, the big house Bill Gates
has on his own island Washington, or some are like
the American dream just a simple two three bedroom, one bath,
really some where it can be just a plain ol
college coag your kabuts.
Speaker 2 (45:03):
Right, that for many of these people, it's actually having
a roof and having and having something to eat. I
mean that's a goal. I mean, Punksley sleeps on the
ground a lot. They're they're they're that. I just in
the middle class world, in the middle class novel we
are were fairly unaware and ignorant of how a good
(45:27):
portion of the United States lives. And that kind of
story generally doesn't get into fiction because fiction or novels,
novels are middle class art forms. And so you're at
when you write something like this, you're writing what I
call anti novels. All three of these, all three of
these books are anti novels. They're they're books that try
(45:50):
and do something with the novel that the novel wasn't
originally designed to do, which has been something that's been
done since inteed fifty But that's and and als aren't
exactly new. But it's not the kind of of novel
where you expect, you know, the way you were taught
in ninth grade, with the plot triangle and character development,
(46:12):
and they discover something and somebody is going to have
you know, get married. At the end, it'll I'll be successful.
That's that sort of thing. That's that's not that's not
the world of these characters. It's just it just isn't.
And I taught in two communities where that was seventy
five percent of the community that's who they were, and
(46:33):
many kids twenty five percent of them much more like
these characters. And and so they were kind enough to
look to trust me and let me get to know
them on a certain level, never too much, because they're
still a damn English teacher.
Speaker 5 (46:52):
Oh yeah, you got that question it, yes.
Speaker 2 (46:56):
No, absolutely. I had a student in Alma, Washington, who
lived in the woods with his dad, who was in
a wheelchair from from from Vietnam, Bob Oliver. And Bob
couldn't speak a sentence without a cuss word. And at
the very end, when he went through graduation, he came
up to me in his gown and he stuck his
hand out and he shook me hand. He looked me
(47:18):
right in the eye and narrowed his eyes and he
said done, You're the best damn English teacher I ever had.
And from Bob, that was a high compliment. So because
because you couldn't rise above being a damn English teacher.
That wasn't possible. So or or dart or shoot or
an I know, yeah, exactly. Yeah, but this is Bob.
(47:41):
I got to quote Bob. I would be doing Bob
the service to uh to English teacher his language. So
my apologies to your audience there.
Speaker 3 (47:51):
Oh that's perfectly okay, we all understand. And lastly, what
can people get from the book?
Speaker 2 (47:59):
Oh my goodness. Well, the first thing, with all this
all that we said about it, it's funny. So Hamilton
Chance is an absolute hoot, and he's funny from the beginning,
and he's funny from the to the end. He's not
funny and stand up, but he's filled with malaprops. He's
(48:21):
his sense of the way he puts things together and
tells stories is just an awful lot of fun and
Punksy's introspective and so you get to figure out, you know,
what's going on with the characters because he's trying to.
He's essentially being the reader trying to figure out what's
going on, so you're not left in the dark necessarily.
(48:42):
And the two women characters, I say, it sounds like
this is it, you know, It starts out as a
male buddy book, but the women characters come in and
they're they're very central. In fact, in some ways, I
think they're the most important part of the book because
they kick the boys butts and cause them to reflect
(49:03):
because they're there is so many women are to get
by in these areas. They do it on their own,
you know, they were, they haven't they're not any kids yet,
but they raise kids on their own because the men
are not reliable because they drink or they're broken by
their jobs. Which happens with loggers, what happens with an
awful lot of working class folks. So they're they're tough.
(49:26):
So there's a lot to love about this book.
Speaker 5 (49:28):
And a lot to learn as well too.
Speaker 3 (49:30):
Where when you find your book, Jeffrey, And how and
how do people get ahold of you?
Speaker 2 (49:34):
Yeah?
Speaker 8 (49:35):
You?
Speaker 2 (49:35):
I mean you can find it anywhere Amazon. There you go,
Jeffrey Dunn. I have a website jeffreydun dot com where
you can click and you can go to Barnes and Noble,
you can go to to other book sites. You can
go to Amazon. From there, you can go to any
independent bookstore. You can go to Barnes and Noble. You
can order it because it's through Ingram Spark, which is,
(49:56):
you know, your standard worldwide distribution network. You can go
through there. As you said, I do some writing on Medium.
I have a substack channel which i'm my I'm under
Culture Raven. There you go, there's my Raven again, just
my name you could say, ye, got it absolutely so yeah,
(50:16):
so it's not hard if you want to find me
or just just google it and I'll come up.
Speaker 5 (50:21):
Okay, we'll certainly do that.
Speaker 3 (50:23):
And we're here with Jeffrey Dunn of Whiskey Rubble Hill,
The Mike Wadner Show, Jeffrey a few more things. What
else can you expect me twenty twenty five and beyond.
Speaker 2 (50:32):
Yeah, well, I'll keep writing some things on both medium
and substack. So and I've I'm started on something new
I'm all about. Yeah, I won't. I won't give any spoilers.
There you go, because it's it's got a long way
to go, but I got to start. But I'm working
on a big novel like Radio Free Olympia for the
(50:53):
Spokane area. So I've got my two characters. I got
the male and female to go back and forth. I've
got my magical characters. This one is mister white a
mountain whitefish. He's my raven. I've got a vulture character
that goes by Turk for Turkey vulture. I'll have a
dragonfly coming in here. They're all what what gets translated
(51:17):
as animal animal people right from the Native American world,
except that the sailors didn't call them animal people. It's
a bad translation. So they're their own critter. But but
but uh. The mountain whitefish in the beginning comes right
and explains all that as to exactly what he is
because he doesn't want the humans to get the wrong
idea from that book that Jeffrey Dunn wrote. So he
(51:41):
disses me right off the bat too. So good fun,
good fun.
Speaker 5 (51:45):
It sounds like a lot of fun.
Speaker 3 (51:47):
We're looking forward to it. And who do you consider
biggest influence in the career In.
Speaker 2 (51:51):
My career, biggest influence, Wow, I mentioned I mentioned Richard Broddigan. Absolutely.
I love Jethro Tulleny. Ian Anderson is as growing up
Tom Tom Robbins and just the way he his imagination
(52:12):
worked and developed over time as a writer. So there's
big things. And and my wife and my and my
son just throw them there. My wife is one special
lady to live with me. She's very creative and in
all sorts of ways. My son's a musician nice bring
brings a lot of sound. I was a music DJ
(52:34):
and and and music director for for a while. And
though I don't have the fingers out of the dexterity
for music, I got a musician's brain. So he's teaching
me a lot about musical composition, how that works. So yep,
there we go. That's a lot nice.
Speaker 3 (52:53):
Okay, that is certainly amazing. And let's let's see we
got that? And who you considered bags and lose the courage?
I asked that I forget.
Speaker 2 (53:02):
Yes you did? Okay, all right, our biggest big just influence,
did you say, correct?
Speaker 5 (53:07):
Yeah, biggest influence?
Speaker 2 (53:07):
Yeah? Yeah, there we go, Yes, all those five? There
you go?
Speaker 5 (53:11):
Okay, we got that.
Speaker 3 (53:12):
I must have my punky moment right there too, and
exactly and what's the best and what's the best advice
you can give to any boy at this point?
Speaker 2 (53:20):
Oh, the best advice I can give to anybody Just
experience as much a life as you can. We all
have different brains, and we all process differently, we all think,
we all want to be the same, but we're so
so different in the way we think and share and
(53:41):
all of that. And that's all fantastic, but it only
works if we'd like open up our our our like
the radio dial to everything and and just take it
all in and let our minds go to work on it.
I mean, that's my goal every day, is just to
do that and then just watch the magic of what
your brain does with it. It's very cool, it's very fun.
Speaker 3 (54:04):
It really sounds like and a great thing as well too.
Here with author Jeffery you've done a whiskey revel hill
on the Mike Waders Show. Jeffrey Rayby, thankf you time
you've been. App's amazing, learned a lot looking for Heaven soon.
Keeps up today, keep in touch, laugh at you back
and watch website. How do people contact you? Where can
people purchase or check out your books?
Speaker 2 (54:24):
I went through that. Say it again again? Yeah, no,
I'd love to do it again. No, no problems. We
have more than one hit. Oh no, no, no, so
yeah Amazon, Jeffrey Dunn, there you go, or the names
of the book. But I have a website Jeffrey Dunnspokane
dot com. If you remember the city of Spokane's just
(54:44):
Jeffrey Dun Spokane dot com and it has links to
my books. Go to the bookstore and order. You can order,
you know, through any any bookstore from Barnes and Noble
to your independent bookstore. It's all their meeting and substance
have links. It's all good. So thanks for that extra
opportunity there, Jeffrey Dunnspokane dot com.
Speaker 3 (55:06):
Thanks man, I got that, you got that right. And
once again, Jeffrey baby, thank you time. You've been absolutely fantastic.
Looking forehand soon keeps up today, keep in touch, lave
at your back. We wish I'll best and Jeffrey, you
definitely have a great fits you hey, you too, Thank you.
Speaker 1 (55:20):
The Mike Wagner Show is powered by Sonicweb Studios. If
you're looking to start or upgrade your online presence, visit
www dot sonicwebstudios dot com for all of your online needs.
Call one eight hundred three oh three three nine six
zero or visit us online at www dot sonicwebstudios dot
(55:40):
com to get started today, Mention The Mike Wagner Show
and get twenty percent off your project. Sonicweb Studios. Take
your image to the next level.
Speaker 7 (55:49):
Hey ver Dana Laxa here, American news anchor. Hey, let
me ask you something real quick. Why do you read
a book.
Speaker 8 (55:56):
You're buying a story, a thought, a message, and a
little book entertains and inspires.
Speaker 7 (56:02):
And that's exactly what A Missing By Award winning author
of Me on the Zia does. I have his book
right here, and it's based on real events with relatable
characters that hook you from start to finish.
Speaker 8 (56:14):
I personally love this book. It's super powerful and meaningful
through and you can actually get it on Amazon right now.
Speaker 3 (56:20):
The Mike Wagner Show is brought to you by Serena
Wagner's book The Sweet Sawmist Now availve on emsoon. This
book includes thirty exquisite pintings by well known and unknown
painters and King David Palms. The Sweet Sawmist gives us
a new perspective on his life in this book through
the songs he wrote. His time as a shepherd in
the field is will. The book starts, and it goes
on to describe his complicated and turbulent relationship with King Saul,
(56:40):
as well as other events. It's a story of love, betrayal, repentance,
and more. It also offers advice and approaching God and
living a life that pleases him. Check out the book
The Sweet Sawmist by Serena Wagner, now available on Amazon
keywords Sweet Sawmist Serena Wagner.
Speaker 4 (56:57):
Thanks for listening to The Mike Wagner Show by Sonicweb Studios.
Visit online at Sonicwebstudios dot com for all your needs.
The Mike Wagner Show can be heard on Spreakers, Spotify, iHeartRadio, iTunes,
YouTube Anchor, FM Radio Public, and The Mike Wagner Show
dot com. Please support our program with your donations at
the Mike Wagnanshow dot com. Join us again next time
(57:20):
for another great episode of The Mike Wagner Show
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I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!
Ruthie's Table 4
For more than 30 years The River Cafe in London, has been the home-from-home of artists, architects, designers, actors, collectors, writers, activists, and politicians. Michael Caine, Glenn Close, JJ Abrams, Steve McQueen, Victoria and David Beckham, and Lily Allen, are just some of the people who love to call The River Cafe home. On River Cafe Table 4, Rogers sits down with her customers—who have become friends—to talk about food memories. Table 4 explores how food impacts every aspect of our lives. “Foods is politics, food is cultural, food is how you express love, food is about your heritage, it defines who you and who you want to be,” says Rogers. Each week, Rogers invites her guest to reminisce about family suppers and first dates, what they cook, how they eat when performing, the restaurants they choose, and what food they seek when they need comfort. And to punctuate each episode of Table 4, guests such as Ralph Fiennes, Emily Blunt, and Alfonso Cuarón, read their favourite recipe from one of the best-selling River Cafe cookbooks. Table 4 itself, is situated near The River Cafe’s open kitchen, close to the bright pink wood-fired oven and next to the glossy yellow pass, where Ruthie oversees the restaurant. You are invited to take a seat at this intimate table and join the conversation. For more information, recipes, and ingredients, go to https://shoptherivercafe.co.uk/ Web: https://rivercafe.co.uk/ Instagram: www.instagram.com/therivercafelondon/ Facebook: https://en-gb.facebook.com/therivercafelondon/ For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iheartradio app, apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
The Joe Rogan Experience
The official podcast of comedian Joe Rogan.