Interview with Anthony Pathfinder about the challenges of publishing in today's market About The Author Anthony Pathfinder was born in Kingston, Jamaica, and moved to the United States as a child. A voracious reader, his love of reading subsequently led to his writing a selection of short stories as a teenager. He has published seven novels. He doe...

Interviews with self-published authors about the challenges of publishing in today's market About The Author Author Luna Charles in her own words… I am a self-published author, Certified Life Coach, and the Director of Hardcastle Enterprises Corp., a business I created to help people realize their full potential. My first novel,  Men Are ...

Interview with Vic Fortezza about the challenges of publishing in today's market Vic Fortezza was born in Brooklyn in 1950 to Sicilian immigrants. He has had more than 50 short stories published worldwide. He has five books in print: novels Close to the Edge, Adjustments, Killing, Exchanges, and the story collection A Hitch in Twilight. He was empl...

Interview with Amanda Reen

Interview with Linda Braggs Director/Owner of Serenity for Life Sober Living in Arizona

An Arizona native, Linda Braggs is a writer, motivational speaker and creator of Serenity for Life Sober Living. She spent her childhood in Arizona and California and as a young woman she was soon acquainted with the destructive force of addiction that held her in its horrible grip for fifteen years.
A mother of four children, grandmother, sister, daughter and aunt, she found relief in God and his Love and then turned to help others, bringing hope into their lives.
She is currently working on a book titled, Colors of Addiction.

Interview with Envy Red – Author Philanthropist and Entrepreneur

Danielle Hutchinson also known as “Envy Red” is a Washington, DC area native by way of Birmingham, AL. A two time graduate of the University of Maryland, she resides in Atlanta, GA. with her two boys. She is a cancer survivor whose battle with a rare form of the disease has strengthened her dedication to philanthropy. She is a board member of Homebound Citizens Non-Profit as well as the co-founder of Sk8book Jr., a youth initiative committed to developing our nation’s youth to their fullest potential. She is also the owner of a children’s bookstore, boutique, and party venue called Drama Baby. It includes two unique private party rooms for baby showers, kid parties, literary workshops, and various other themed events.

Her literary accomplishments include:

Interview with Davida Green-Norris – Attorney and Published Author

A successful lawyer, Davida also writes under the pen name Dicey Grenor. She authored Shameful (Taboo fiction) and (The Narcoleptic Vampire Series): Sleepy Willow's Bonded Soul (Vol. 1), Sleepy Willow's Heartless Soul (Vol. 2) and Sleepy Willow's Loosed Soul (Vol. 3)

                                               Interview with Lemelia Johnson Bonner – writer

Interview with Luna Charles

Director of Hardcastle Enterprises Corp. and Author

 Interview with Imani Wisdom

Author, Entrepreneur, Blogger

When I started this series of interviews many cautioned me that black people would not want to talk to me. Wrong. As a matter of fact, after I started sending out emails, expressing my intentions to write about these issues, the positive response was overwhelming.

To be honest, people of color talked to me a long time ago, in various workplace settings. I remember vividly one lady who was a nurse and who told me -- wiping her tears -- that she was refused work because some would not accept a black woman as a caregiver. Or, when we were showing puppies, I was asked by a visibly embarrassed woman if her biracial child was allowed to play with them. Many similar scenarios have haunted me for years.

Interview with Quentin J. Tyson – Author and Documentary Filmmaker

Quentin J. Tyson age 36 aka Qwest Allah of the Nation of Gods & Earths.  First born in the year of Born Understanding & disciple of Timothy Muhammad of Medina (Brooklyn NY).  Quentin or Qwest (NGE) is a New Orleans native who attended NGE & NOI classes in New Orleans East as a teenager to find a way to safely separate himself from the drug culture.  While in college he found himself deeply immersed in the some of the deepest aspects of the criminal culture as a night club manager.  He joined the Navy at 24. 

“Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” “Beauty without virtue is like a rose without scent.” “When you have only two pennies left in the world, buy a loaf of bread with one, and a lily with another.” The bread and lily one is, supposedly, a Chinese import of wisdom. Chinese or not, it prompts me to ask myself and other women a simple question: what would you spend your penny on? Assuming that you will go for bread and beauty like most of us, simple females, it all depends on your culture and…hmmm… race. To make your choices easier there are instructions on achieving beauty carefully crafted for YOU. I grew up in Europe, in the 70’s when the tanning craze was in full swing. My city was fairly close to the Black Sea, so almost every summer my mom her girlfriends and I would go to the seaside resorts to enjoy the beauty of the beach. I was only a few years old. To most kids, yoghurt is their yummy morning snack that sometimes contains fruit. To me it was the white cold stuff we put on our wounds when we got sunburns. I did not get life-threatening sunburns until I was a teenager. But as a child I watched the ladies around me sitting in the sun for hours hoping to get “that sexy tan.” None of them ever entered the water; perhaps they needed a respite from that horrendous sun. They were there on a mission: to get as dark as they could. Some of them would remove their tops, too. On those rare occasions when we couldn’t make to the resorts, these brave women would climb on the hot roof of our home and burn their skin on there, slowly and steadily. My grandfather – may he rest in peace! – used to mumble while he sat under the cherry tree and watched them climb the burning-as-hell metal ladder: “Eh, if medieval torture designers only could see this!” And then he would start name various punishments our forefathers endured at the hand of the landowners, none of them even close to that extreme sunbathing. Long live the local yoghurt makers! The tanning craze began in the 60’s with Brigitte Bardot. If you want to see the consequences of a life-long tan, look up some of her pictures after she hit forty. Until the beautiful actress started this trend, tanned skin was perceived as a sign of social inferiority, since only peasants had to work in the field while upper class would enjoy reading and tea drinking in the shade trying to preserve their “whiteness.” Back then we did not have tanning salons, so the number of people getting melanoma was significantly lower, although I must say they tried very hard. They still do, and if you don’t believe me, visit Europe in summer time. Many years later after I moved to the United States, I noticed tanning salons everywhere, even in the smallest cities. It struck me that they were so popular even in a country where race continues to be an issue. I even spotted one in a small farmers’ town where people get naturally tanned from the work in the field anyway. I did not laugh. It scared me, and confused me at the same time. Then I learned that in the United States alone indoor tanning is a nearly $5 billion per year industry. Billion, not million, not hundreds, not pennies. Wow. And apparently twenty-something million people go tanning every year. That’s a lot of people. All this while we have studies showing the direct connections between tanning and cancer, and pretty strong campaigns against it worldwide. Interesting. Let’s forget about the tanning frenzy for a second, and take a trip to Africa. Nigeria, to be more precise. A few years ago a friend from that part of the world introduced me to afro-jazz and the beautiful music of Fela Kuti. To most people his music is just cool rhythms, but if you listen to the lyrics as I do, you are in for a surprise. I sure was when I listened to “Yellow fever” and I found out that it took place in the 70’s. Right when every female I knew as a child was acquiring at least a thousand wrinkles daily if not more from sun exposure. Kuti did not spare anything and anyone, so in his song he lays about the skin bleaching practiced by Nigerian women. He perceived it as a cultural inferiority syndrome. I did my homework on skin bleaching products, too. Many skin-bleaching products can contain highly toxic agents, such as hydroquinone, mercury and corticosteroids. They are also popular in India. I remember watching a commercial where one fair-skinned man tells a darker one that the reason why he cannot get a hot date is the color of his skin. One would think, too bad there’s nothing he can do about it. Oh, but there are options. There is this “magic” lotion that will whiten his face. The commercial ends with the dark-turn-white man riding away on a bike with a hot woman. If it wasn’t for the cruelty embedded in the ad, I would advise the young man to invest in a Mercedes rather than in lotions and cancer treatments. Then I read my friend Quentin’s article in which he talks about Eurocentrism and how some try to convince black women here that their race is ugly. What are we talking about on here? Hmmm… business. We’re talking about mass programs that tell me that I should PAY to get my cancer-guaranteed tan, while at the same time in some other part of the world, a dark-skinned woman applies equally life-threatening methods only to become whiter. The greed for money is sure sprinkled with some sadism, self-hatred and depending on historical and geographical location, a twist of racism. This is a greater work of… bullshit. Sorry, I am from Eastern Europe we are simple folk; you can fool us until we get it, and then expect us to react and some. A scientist at heart, I have never perceived the differences between races more than physical adaptations to the environment. I apply all the rules I have learned while working in the animal field. After all, before being the most “intelligent” and self-destructive species, we are mammals. We should be grateful for every mutation our race has suffered because thanks to them mutations we adapt and survive. This is why I cannot believe that thousands of years of “beneficial mutations” can or should be reversed. Actually, I think any attempt not only is futile but it can be very detrimental. Going back to the ancient wisdoms…When I have only two pennies left in the world, I will buy a loaf of bread with one, and a book about self-hatred and brainwash with another. Meows! © by Oana 2012 For more information on tanning, skin bleaching and other “medieval” beautifying techniques see below: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/04/11/skin-bleaching-jamaica_n_847373.html http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/2012/08/tanning-fairwarning.html http://www.fitnessmagazine.com/beauty/sun-care/skin-cancer-prevention/indoor-tanning-the-skin-cancer-risk-you-dont-know-about/?page=6 To read Fela Kuti’s lyrics from Yellow Fever click here http://www.songmeanings.net/songs/view/3530822107858797987/ To read Quentin’s article click here http://www.authorsinfo.com/index.php?option=com_easyblog&view=entry&id=289&Itemid=635

Quentin, I read your article on Eurocentrism. I hope others will read it as well, and will share their thoughts with us. I am sure that many wonder why you are so aggressively fighting Eurocentrism here in the United States. I admit I asked myself this question, and my first reaction was to think your article dealt with it from a racial perspective, although you use the term “non-Europeans” and that confused me.Yet the more I thought of it, the more I came to realize that the picture is bigger than we think and it does not only affect black people. It’s not even limited to the United States. I agree that European white supremacy is a business, but is it, ultimately, about color? And who in Europe is the creator of Eurocentrism?I don’t know how much it is known here about the part of the world where I am from – I was born in southern Romania, which is part of the Balkan region.(See http://eurodialogue.org/balkan-countries-map)Allow me to introduce you to the Balkans, home of violent history, wars, slavery and ethnic cleansings, foreign domination, and what not. Actually, my people don’t even remember to be “free,” perhaps with few short-lived exceptions. Starting with the rise of the Ottoman Empire in 13th century, Ottomans came by, filled their harems with our women, took male kids (it was called “the blood tax”) raised them by their law and make them Janissaries (soldiers) in the Ottoman army, only to send them back to attack their homeland..Later on the Ottoman legacy lingered, and we rarely had our own rulers; they were foreigners and most of them could not even speak the language, did not know and care about the people they ruled. Hundreds of years and different Masters later, after everyone had sold everyone, here we stand proudly bearing the same slave mentality. I believe that slavery is not (only) physical; it is a mentality, a way of living. Sure in the meantime we, the slaves, also learned how to hate each other. You should read sometime about the prejudices and historical stereotypes in the Balkans. What a fun read that is! Romanians hate Hungarians, Greeks hate Bulgarians, Bulgarians hate Romanians, Bosnians hate Serbs and vice-versa, et cetera but all of them hate Jews and Gypsies and a Hungarian Gypsy will hate the Romanian one and the other way around, see how subtle and refined we are in our hatred? It takes a keen eye to peel off the layers here. We carry the legacy of hatred with out mouths full of Baklava and Sarailie and Sarma, all of them Turkish delicacies we had cooked for our slave owners and finally came to love (great recipes by the way, I will share). There is controversy over the dishes, as everyone claims they’re “theirs.” Now and then a researcher pisses off everyone with his findings, like the linguist who suggested that the root of word “baklava” could be… Mongolian WHAT? The guy might be right because there are records of this ancient dish in China, under the…Mongolian dynasty Yuan. SAY AGAIN?As one who grew up in this explosive perpetual state of slavery, helplessness and ultimately self-hatred, I had struggled to understand the mechanism. These people hating and killing each other so “passionately “ for centuries do not even belong to different racial groups.Dr. Will Moreland a distinguished African American public speaker author and leadership expert told me in a recent interview on the Complex Image of the African American Man that “When we hear about racism many times people think it is about skin color, but the foundational essence of racism is about economics. The root word for racism is race; racism comes in when one group is trying to race another group to economic security.”I think Dr. Moreland makes a great point.Slavery in the Roman Empire wasn’t about race or color, was it? How about Greece? In fact, I heard that in the Roman Empire slaves looked so similar to the free citizens that they were trying to come up with some distinctive signs to set them apart. Apparently, the house slaves with nobility wore plaques around their neck stating what family they belonged to, how many languages they spoke and if they could read and write. This is what my local History teacher told me. The atrocities committed against Jews were not based on the fact that they were that different, but on socio-economics. Gypsies are usually dark-skinned, but some Gypsy tribes are light skinned blondes, and some naturally have blue or green eyes. Yeah, you heard that right. As a matter of fact, if you travel in that area, I challenge you to tell a Romanian apart from a Hungarian, from a Bulgarian, and whoever else you happen to see. How can you tell my genetic make up just by looking at me? How do you know what breed I am? What if I am Gypsy? What if I have Jewish or Turkish blood, how can you tell? See, this is where I go back to Dr.Moreland’s theory. It is about money. Creating and maintaining a “healthy” slave mentality is good business. All you have to do is take one particular population, convince them they are inferior, ghetto them and let the mentality grow inside their heads for a couple of generations. Then they are born convinced they are of a lesser value and they belong in a cage. It works, I have seen it with my own eyes, and hey! I have seen it on animals too, when I was working wildlife. If you have an animal who spent too much time caged you can leave the gate open as many times as you wish, he will not take off, he will stare at the gate with a bland resigned expression, just like some of my Romanian fellows in 1989 when we executed Ceausescu and were “free.” They said, “Oh well, Ceausescu’s regime was not that bad, it gave us some safety.” They wanted their slavery back, because you see, freedom meant responsibility and risk. WHAT?When I heard that crap I started packing, not because I was a coward and I did not want to stay and “build a new country,” but because I was FREE, I was physically free to go wherever I wanted. Freedom is a state of mind, and I was born like that, and I my parents and my teachers enforced that in me. I will never forget how my long life mentor Ms.Segal used to tell me -- and this mind you, in times of great fear and oppression --“Oana, I’ve always felt a free person in a free country. We are free.” Now I see that leaving Romania was good, because a new slavery was ahead. People were not even fully recovered from the nastiness of all those totalitarian regimes and wars, when all the former communist countries got sucked into a new trend: Greater European Union. We had to be accepted into this Europe “thing” at any cost. Whoever was left outside was bad, junk, lesser value. Of course, this would not happen just like that, acceptance was not granted automatically. We had to obey their rules and “behave,” in other words we had to be what I called my puppies when I was doing veterinary healthcare, “good foofoos and fifis.” (foofoos are boys, fifis are girls.) We had to be humble and serve our Western masters well, same subservient attitude that we had been forced to have throughout history, nothing new to me. And for many years we had crawled to their doors begging “Puleeez let me in,” knowing very well that no matter what we did we would always be second hand citizens. It was the same good old competition between slaves, “Who pleases the Master better?” To the Master it was just a matter of numbers, and it was all about …economics. Quentin, most people in the former communist countries hated the “European Union” concept just like the blacks you were writing about who hated to be taken to white schools. They felt this “forced love” came at a price. And they were right, it was the price of Eurocentrism for…non-Europeans. Because Western Europe and Eastern Europe have always been two different worlds, no matter how hard they try to glue them together now.So I moved to the United States, hoping to leave this entire bullshit behind, but surprise! Every place has its own history of hatred and yes, here color is a tool, and yes, being white gives you privileges in some circles, or at least some acceptance. Unless you have an accent like me, and you are an immigrant. I am white until I open my mouth. I had never been aware as of why I was treated so poorly by some white folks, until my friends (some of them black by the way) told me that the moment I opened my mouth I became brown. Think “brown” as in “category” not color. It’s very subtle. I had an epiphany. So this is what it was. I crossed the ocean just to be second hand citizen in another country. And what is happening here is the extension or the legacy of that Euro-centric thinking that I basically ran away from. Silly me! You can’t hide from that. I could not understand this one and for many years. But hey, now I know and this makes me aware. To avoid unpleasant experiences, I stay silent, and pretend to suffer from a mysterious muteness while writing down everything. Sometimes, I am summoned to stay silent, like in my last trip to Nogales, Arizona, when my Mexican/Native American girlfriend who was driving turned to me as we were getting closer to the border and hissed at me, ”You shut up.” I know she meant well and she loves me and she did not want us standing there being searched and questioned for three hours.YES, color makes it easier to discriminate against people here, and yes, I know a lot about the extermination of the Native populations, African Americans and whatever was/is not “white” by their standards. I must tell you one thing that I find to be very interesting. Back in Ceausescu’s schools, especially during the last years of the Cold War we were told about the discrimination against people of color here in the United States and… we did not believe it. We did not buy into that, we thought it was yet another Stalinist lie. You see, we had been fed lies and bullshit so long, we could not believe the truth anymore.Ah, all these populations and how they move around. This blonde blue-eyed lady was telling me the other day how she got a mole on her arm and she went to a specialist and they did all sorts of tests to rule out cancer and guess what? The doctor took her aside and told her that this type of mole is specific only to a certain genetic group and it is frequent in … Mongolians. WHAT? Is there anything on this planet that Mongolians have not touched yet?Quentin, you sure brought up some memories I wanted to bury deep inside and move on. But maybe this happened for a good reason. Some stuff need to be analyzed over and over again, until we finally get it. I bet you if we were to run comprehensive genetic tests, we would be in deep state of shock. We might even not know who we are, that is why I have always thought racism is ridiculous. On a deeper level, I am a citizen of the world. I have amazing friends from all over the place, including Western Europe, Africa and you name it. There are good things about the Western European culture too (such as emancipation of women). It is always dirty politics that mess things up.In the end, it is about humanity. It is about us reaching out to each other and listening to each other, and not about greedy corrupted rulers and governments.After all, this is why we go to school to understand the connections between Here and There, and Everywhere.Your Mongolian (?) friend,Oana© 2012 by Oana For those of us who haven’t read Quentin’s article yet you can find it here: http://www.authorsinfo.com/index.php?option=com_easyblog&view=entry&id=289&Itemid=635Dr. Will Moreland’s interview can be found here: http://www.authorsinfo.com/index.php?option=com_easyblog&view=entry&id=220&Itemid=635

Interview with Anthony Pathfinder – Author, proofreader, poet, reviewer and contributing writer for the Urban Book Source

The image of the aggressive-looking African American male, who cannot spell his name, has a limited vocabulary and has trouble keeping a job has become -- sadly! – common in the media. However, there isn’t too much said about those who not only speak proper English, but are committed servants of the written word, being an inspiration for us all.

Everything started with that sexy dress I saw on display one lazy afternoon while I was window shopping downtown. I wanted that dress, but she did not want me. She stretched desperately on my body, but love was not there and we could not become one.

Interview with Dr. Will Moreland

America’s #1 Leadership Life Trainer

   The Black Man as a Protector

There is an old Romanian saying similar to, “It is only the dead who do not return.”  Indeed, in the aftermath of tragedy and life loss there is nothing we can do for the person who is no longer with us.

In this short informal series I will analyze the so-called “nuggets of wisdom,” or old sayings that are passed on to us from one generation to another.

We, the passive recipients, rarely question these words, if at all. We rush to share them on Facebook and elsewhere but… have we ever stopped and analyzed the words and the possible unwanted meanings/interpretations? Is wisdom a set-in-stone type of deal?