Writers of the Catskills: In Conversation with Martha Frankel (TMWYR Ep. #57)
Writers of the Catskills: In Conversation with Martha Frankel
A series of self-portraits by Catskills’ literary voices
My interview on October 24, 2025 of storyteller Martha Frankel, a memorist, essayist, celebrity profiler, book editor and reviewer, and founder and producer of Woodstock’s BookFests and Story Slams. (Photo Credit: Dion Ogust)
A condensed and edited version of this interview was published on November 7, 2025, in The Overlook, community journalism serving Hunter, Hurley, Olive, Saugerties, Shandaken, and Woodstock, New York, and my interview with Martha can be heard on my podcast, “Tell Me What You’re Reading”, available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and wherever else you listen to podcasts.
Howard Altarescu
H: On behalf of The Overlook, I'm in conversation today with writer and storyteller, Martha Frankel. Thank you, Martha, for joining me for this discussion. Martha, you're a literary voice and much more. You're a storyteller. You've written books, including your fabulous memoir.
You've written large numbers of book reviews, essays, and magazine articles, including lots of celebrity profiles. You've produced plays and story slams. You've been host of Woodstock Writers Radio on Radio Woodstock, you're a writing teacher and editor, and you're executive director of the annual and renowned Woodstock Book Fest.
You're living a full storytelling life and I'm glad to consider you a friend and almost my cousin. More on that later. Welcome Martha. Now let's talk about your writing and your storytelling. Your memoir. I loved your memoir. There's a sweetness about it. Your love for the Bronx, your love for Queens. Your family's great friends, the bungalow in the Catskills.
What inspired you to write your first book and why did you choose to write a memoir and to discuss your addiction?
H: It all sounds very much like my own life, especially when you write about our shared Aunt Tillie. But then you became a gambler and you had an online gambling obsession. What inspired you to write your first book and why did you choose to write a memoir and to discuss your addiction?
M: I was a little kid and it turned out it was something I was really good at. And so I was gonna write it. I was gonna write the other part of this story, like this family story about gambling, but fun, fun, fun, fun, fun. And then I got addicted to online poker and I spent four years or so in complete hell. And I got a new agent and…
While I was talking to her about some ideas, I said, well, I've been gambling online and she lit up and she was like, that's it. That's the one. was like, I don't think so. I don't think I wanna talk about that. Cause I was still doing it. But then I stopped and my mother died and I sort of spiraled out of control and thought, let me just write this. I'm never going to show it to anyone. I just need to tell the story to myself because it happened so quickly.
I wrote it and sent it to her and she loved it. And then I had to tell my husband and my family that I was a gambler. I mean, it was a nightmare. It sounds nice now. It was not nice while it was happening. So I come from a family of gamblers. Like my Aunt Tillie, our Aunt Tillie, Howard and I share, oddly found out that we share like my favorite person, my favorite people, my Aunt Tillie and my Uncle Benny were friends of Howard's family and he felt about them the way I did. And you know, we gambled from the time we were little. Tillie would give us money and say, you know, bet on this, bet on, I come from a family of gamblers. It was inbred in me, but gambling online took it to a whole new level.
H: It's interesting that you wanted to write it for yourself. I wonder how many other memoirs start like that. You want to write something so you get it out of you.
M: Yeah. I mean, I was not going to tell anybody this story. You believe me, you know, I've been an addict of one form or another most of my life and I'm in recovery for many things. And I would say it's only the last decade that I can honestly say I'm not hiding something. I'm not actively hiding something every day. So that's good.
Why did you call your memoir “Hats and Eyeglasses”?
M: Well, they called it Hats and Eyeglasses. It was a bad mistake. Hats and eyeglasses is like a gambling term that my uncles used. meant that the ship went down. It meant that they were doing badly. Like you'd say, how you doing? They'd say hats and eyeglasses. It meant that everything was going badly and they, you know, they were losing money and so they named, Penguin named it Hats and Eyeglasses against my better judgment because it sounds like it's a fashion book which it's not. yes I think it was the wrong term but whatever I wanted to name it Poker Face and we didn't and then a year later a famous woman poker player named her memoir poker face so yeah.
H: I agree that poker face would have been good.
What else have you written?
M: Well, I wrote a book about Brazilian wax. I started out at Details Magazine with my mentor Annie Flanders and wrote a book reviewer there and wrote book reviews for the London Times and many other places and then started doing celebrity interviews and turned out it was something I was really good at because I'm not that impressed by it and I know how to sit still for hours on a movie set. It turned out that worked in my favor. So that's what I did for many, many years at the height of the magazine world.
H: I loved the height of the magazine world.
M: I know.
Were there particular celebrity interviews that you're most proud of or that are most interesting?
M: Yeah, I’m looking at a wall of photos in my room from that time. I did three or four great interviews with Jeff Bridges. Absolutely loved him. I went to...this was before the internet, if I wanted to know something about somebody, I would go to LA and go to the Academy Library and they would hand you that person's clips. You wore white gloves and you would sit at a table and take notes and then they would take the papers back. So one day I went in to do the Jeff Bridges research and the woman comes back and she says, they're not there. And then she looks around and says, look, his dad's here researching something.
There was Lloyd Bridges. I had seen him on Sea Hunt And so I said, what should I do? She said, go over. So I went over and I sat down and said, I'm doing a piece on Jeff. And he said, well, here's some stuff for you to read. And he started talking and telling me these crazy stories about what it was like when Jeff was growing up, what it was like with Beau and Jeff and his mother. Anyway, by the time I got to the interview, I was steeped in Jeff. And so we went out to dinner and every once in a while I would say something crazy like I'd say, my mother has a whale penis bone in her entryway. And he'd say, my mother has a whale penis bone in her entryway. This went on for like an hour until he was until he said wait a minute what's going on here and we became friends and every time he had they wanted to do a cover story on him he would suggest me so I did I did four or three or four or five stories on him; love him
I did a great piece on Sean Penn, a couple of pieces. I went out to Omaha, Nebraska when he was shooting his first movie, The Indian Runner, his first director, first movie as a director. I did a piece on Floyd Patterson, the boxer who lived in New Paltz. I absolutely loved Floyd and knew a lot about boxing in those days. I went to Europe to do a piece on Anthony Hopkins and became really friendly with him and was the first person to say out loud that he might win an Oscar for Silence of the Lambs. When he did, that night he called here. Steve answered the phone. was like one in the morning and he said, he said, yeah, yeah. He said, it's Tony Hopkins. And I was like,No, it's not but it was and he said, you know you said it and I didn't believe you, I'm sending you a present and he sent me his directors, you know his chair from the set. I interviewed Elizabeth Taylor and Robert De Niro, Phyllis Diller.
H: Floyd Patterson, was the hero of one of the heroes of my youth. What a fine gentleman.
M: Yeah. Yeah. And he was training his son. So I went down to the gym where they trained in New Paltz. He couldn't have been lovelier or nicer.
So yeah, that's what I did for a long time. did magazine stories. And then when the magazine world changed, I knew I had to do something else because they went from, I used to write 5,000 words cover stories. And then they went to 500 words because they would clip them from other magazines. So that's when I started getting interested in writing a memoir. I love memoir. It's my favorite genre. It's what I read a lot of.]
Although I like fiction too, but I read a lot more memoirs. So I started to think about writing a memoir. I wrote this screenplay about the circus. I wrote this other screenplay. It wasn't my, I wasn't really comfortable in it. And so I wrote Hats and Eyeglasses and sort of sat on it for a while, then sold it. And then I later started the Woodstock Book Fest. What's now the Woodstock Book Fest. Which was originally the Woodstock Writers Festival. But it confused people who weren't writers because we wanted readers to come. So we changed the name.
What storytelling avenue do you prefer or do you just love them all?
H: And so you love memoir as I do, you love fiction. You've written screenplays as well and you've got the bookfest and the slams. What storytelling avenue do you prefer or do you just love them all?
M: The slam is perfect for me. I feel like every day I get up and I want to tell my mother and my Aunt Tillie a good story. That's how I was raised. If you could make those two laugh, it was a great day. And they laughed a lot. So I love the slams because of that, because I get to tell really personal stories.
And I write for the Mountains magazine. I do the back page now. It's just a diary of whatever I'm interested in that season. And you know, that's also really personal. I like personal storytelling. I like to know what's really going on in people's mind. I'm not, I'm very good at chit chat, but … Inside I'm like dying if I'm stuck in that loop.
I'm much more comfortable when people are really talking and telling me what's going on. I, you know, I've had dinner with you. I can quiz you for two and a half hours and not stop. I mean, there are people who won't have dinner with me anymore because I'm just impossible. But I want to know, like, I want to know where you come from. What do you do? Like what makes you happy? What makes you sad? What scares you? What do you do about your anxiety? I have a lot of anxiety. I don't look at it and I can mask it very well, but I do. And so I'm learning to just sort of live with that too, better, and to deal with it, to admit when it's happening, figure out something else to do instead of just freaking out. So I don't know.
H: So the slams are a terrific example of storytelling and diversity because you have a number of people in the slams. Have you performed in the slams as well?
M: I do the last one every time. But I'm not in the way. My slams are a competition. Right, right. You're not in the competition. But there's a gong in it. But I don't, I'm not in the competition. So it's very freeing and while I'm telling my story the judges go off and figure out who won. I tell a story every time. And I, you know, I don't know, I have one in a week. I don’t have a story yet but the subject, the line that must be included is true or false, which I think is just so funny right now because who knows, who knows what's true or false anymore so I think I am probably going to write something really personal for this one. I'm excited. It's going to be at the Tinker Street Cinema, is that's a place I've always wanted to perform at. I mean, I've introduced many movies there over the years, but I've never been up on stage doing something. I'm excited.
How do you organize your writing?
H: So when you were writing your book or when you're writing your articles, how do you organize your writing, or not at all?
M: You know, I had an office in Boiceville for 25 years and it started off small and then other offices on my floor would come available and I would take them. I eventually had 600 square feet. My house is 1200. So then I had this other place that was enormous. And I taught there and I played poker there and it was insane. And then I had some surgery and they told me I couldn't drive for three weeks and I had a complication. They said I couldn't drive for another eight weeks.
I was sitting here one day and I said to Steve, I think I should give up my office. And he said, what do you mean? I said, I can work here. And he said, you'd have to be so organized. And I was like, well, I'm not organized now and I'm paying hundreds of dollars a month. And so I gave up my office and like I could work on the couch. You know what I mean? I'm a writer. And so I set up a beautiful office and it's in the spare room and it all works perfectly now.
I got rid of so much stuff. I got rid of most of my books, which was, I know when I say that to people like you, there's that look of complete and utter, just, I don't know, like I've nailed it. But I now want to get rid of more of them. Because I'm not going to reread them. I want to go forward. It's too much. You know, I have a limited amount of time in front of me and I don't want to go backwards.
So I'm not organized. I'm very unorganized about my writing. I used to being on deadline which is terrible for a writer, like I work right to the deadline because I was a magazine writer and everything was due like on the first of the month so on the 28th I would make sure. So I still work like that, I still work to deadline and I wish I didn't. When I teach, which I haven't in a while, I may go back to, but when I taught I told my students like don't wait till next week to write your piece, write it today while you're thinking about it but I'm not good at that. I'm very, I keep lots of notes. I have lots of pieces of paper with notes about stories, things I wanted to, you know, not only to-do lists, I have many, many to-do lists. But when I'm writing a story, I have to think it out for a long time. I have to figure out how it's going to look in the magazine or on the page. I'm very aware of that because of the magazine background. Like sometimes I think this story will look good if they do that thing where they do geometry and they put a picture in the middle and they figure out how the words will work around. Like, and I write like that sometimes. Like I'm writing for the art director instead of myself. So I'm not organized, but I know what I'm doing.
H: That's a good way to put it.
What is your writing process?
M: I have a deadline today. Yeah. Right after this, I have a deadline and I'm almost done with the story. I just need to now stand back and say it out loud, say it as if I'm telling it. So I will spend today reading it out loud to myself and realizing what doesn't work. And as soon as I do that, I mean, I don't know how people write without reading their stuff aloud. I have to do that over and over.
Like when I was writing Hats and Eyeglasses, I had to think of it as 14 magazine stories. I couldn't think of it as a book. That was too much for me. But 14 magazine stories, yeah, I could handle that. And I've read that aloud to myself so many times. And when I would read it aloud, I'd say, that's terrible, that doesn't sound right at all. But when I read it, I couldn't see it. Everything goes through my ears. That's the way I think of life. I hear everything. And so, some people are visual. I'm not really. I need to hear it. I need to know what it sounds like.
H: And when you start a project, do you know how it's going to end or does it develop over time?
M: No I don't. One of my favorite writers is John Irving and I know his process, which is that he does research for two years and then he writes the last chapter. And then he goes back and figures out how to get there. And I don't know about the newer stuff, but the older stuff of his, Cider House Rules, A Prayer for Owen Meany, even Garp. The last chapter is so amazing and it's not usually true in fiction. It's almost like the last chapter has to tie up ends, but for lots of writers, it loses momentum. His do not. And I think of that a lot as a way to work, which is that I want you to read to the end of my story. I'm a magazine writer. So I want you to finish it. That's my goal. I want you to be absorbed enough from the beginning to stick to the end. And that's a hard job. I feel like that's my job.
Do you write any fiction?
M: I’ve been writing a piece of fiction for a long time. It's total pornography. I mean, it's got a story, but it's really porn. I now sort of, I think I should Substack it and put it out that way. Cause it's fun. It's a fun story. It's about two adults and this affair they're having, but it's sort of porn. And it's fiction. Like I made it up and I made up like places, like I've never done that before. It's so much fun. Yeah, and so I think maybe I'll do a little bit more of that.
I would like to do something short. I don't want to do anything long, like people say you're gonna write another book I don't think so the publishing business is so slow And I'm sort of like, okay, let's get on to the next thing. It's too slow for me. I don't want to wait two years for a book to come out. It's just not in me anymore.
Has living in the Catskills influenced your writing?
M: It definitely has had an influence on my life. I mean, when I did the celebrity stuff, I was in L.A. at least one week a month, sometimes 10 days every month for five years, seven years. But this has always been home. And while I don't appear it, I like solitude. I'm home a lot. I now have a little dog, so me and the little dog are home together. Living here is, I mean, that's who I am. You know, I'm very much part of my town. I was a fireman. I have mentored at the school. I very much care that my town keeps thriving, although it's getting harder and harder. But, you know, this is home. You know, I come from New York, but I haven't lived there in 50 something years in the city. And I never will. Yeah. You know, I love it up here. We have a nice quiet house in a nice quiet area. And, you know, when my friends come from the city, they're always like, are you afraid to be here? One thing I never feel in this house is afraid. It’s serene. Yeah. I'm totally comfortable here.
And I think the Catskills, you know, I came here on my honeymoon with my first husband who I was married to for a minute. But we went back to Miami and I knew immediately on the plane I was like, I gotta go back there. I have to go back there. And I had spent summers up here, but in a different way. But I just knew I needed to live here and figure it out. And when I moved here, when I met my husband, I met Steve 50 years ago, 51 years ago, I had no idea how to dress or I had no idea where electricity came from. I mean, I truly knew nothing. Like every day I'd say to him, it's really cold. And he'd say, yeah, you have to put on long underwear and a sweater. I'd be like in a little dress. I still don't really know how to dress that well. I have to say to myself, okay, put on another layer. You know, I love the winter, I love the summer here. I of course love fall and spring.
Something happened to me during COVID. Like the one thing that happened during those years is that it knocked me off the axis a little. I'm not sure like where, I'm never sure what month we're in and what part of the, like I went to get my car fixed and the guy said, do you want a calendar? And I said, why would I want a calendar? And I left and I said to Steve that night Walt wanted to give me a calendar, and he knew like Steve knew and he said, yeah it's October I was like right it's the end of the year I don't know that stuff anymore. We're very social and COVID sort of changed that and now we're back to being very social but something happened to me during that time I really have a hard time figuring out where we are.
When is the 2026 BookFest?
M:The 2026 Book Fest will be the last weekend in March. I think it's March 29th or something. And the next story slam we'll do will be part of the BookFest, which is the big one. We do it at the Woodstock Playhouse. It's a big to do. That was amazing, the last one at the Playhouse.
How did Book Fest To Go get started?
M: Nan Tepper, who does my web design, approached me about doing this, where we would have ongoing classes. And Susan Brown, who was my mentor while I was writing Hats and Eyeglasses, she's a terrific, terrific, terrific teacher, the best I've ever had and she wanted to be involved in it too. So we have Chris Wells as part of it now and so there's always like a class running. I don't have that much to do with it because it's all organizational and that's not me. You know I say that but like I organize the entire book festival on my phone. Like all of it is done on my phone.
H: But while you're doing several other things. So Susan is my writing coach as well. And she's phenomenal.
M: She's phenomenal. She's phenomenal. So she does these classes a couple of times a year through Woodstock Book Fest To Go and Nan's teaching how to write for Substack. And it's good.
Tell Me What You’re Reading
M: I oddly enough am reading a lot of fiction right now. So I just finished Wally Lamb's new book. I love Wally Lamb. He's written some books that I just love, I'm gonna look it up. I have a list of books that I've read. So I just finished Wally Lamb's book. I'm reading Lily King's new book, Heart the Lover. I just finished Shark Heart by Emily Habak. That was fiction too.
I'm reading a lot, people are sending me stuff for Bookfest. The thing I really want to dig into is called The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai. I hear it's incredible. That's also fiction, but I'm reading memoirs. I just read Greta Morgan's book about losing her voice.
People are sending me stuff for Bookfest, even though I think Bookfest is so far away, but I guess it's not. I just reread Warren Zanes' Deliver Me From Nowhere, about Bruce Springsteen, and Warren’s coming to Bookfest. So that's exciting. Yeah, I went to see the movie the other night, and it was just incredible. But I wanted to read the book again before I saw it. And then I wrote to Warren and said, my God, this was incredible. Can I get you to come back to Bookfest? And he was like, yeah.
Yeah, I'm reading a lot. I'm back to reading. I feel like that is one thing from summer to fall. I feel like just give me a good book and nice fire and I'm comfortable.
Yeah. So you know, when I taught, the first thing I said every day was, or every class was, what are you reading? And I don't think you can be a good writer without being a good reader. So I'm happy that it's this time of year. The Wally Lamb book I just finished is called The River is Waiting and it's really terrific.
H: This has been great. That was great fun. Thank you. We have a couple more minutes because I want to do one other thing. So let's sign off and I'll be right back.
M: OK, thanks.
The Aunt Tillie postscript
H: So Martha, I read your memoir in preparation for our discussion. I should have known from the very beginning, but it took me until page eight or nine to realize that although you and I had never met before this past spring, we are essentially long lost cousins.
I don't know if our mothers knew each other. I'd like to think that they did.
M: I'm confident that, I'm sure they did.
H: I'll ask next time I speak with my mother.
M: Your mother's still alive?
H: No, no, but I still speak with her.
M: Next time. I get it.
H: But our mothers both had a great dear friend named Tillie Kaplan, such a good friend. She was known by both of us as Aunt Tillie. The dedication to your memoir includes sweet tributes, really wonderful tributes to your mother and to your father. That was really wonderful. And then to Uncle Benny and Aunt Tillie. And I thought, that sounds so interesting. I didn't even think, I didn't even connect.
But you wrote that your mother and Aunt Tillie were like two sides of the same coin. They weren't sisters but friends since they were five. Tillie had a voice like a truck driver and I was thinking, hmm, she had a voice like a truck driver with a vocabulary to match. And when your family went to Tillie and Benny's apartment, Tillie let the kids, you kids slurp daiquiris, taught you kids to curse. She always dressed to the nines.
And Tillie and Benny, who didn't have their own children, could not have been more generous to the children of their friends. And I've always told the story of them coming to our house. My brother and I both have birthdays near each other in December. And they brought the biggest gifts. And one time, they brought a big gift and a small gift. And I was the younger of my brother and myself, but I was a wise guy. I said, I want the big one.
And I don't remember what it was, but I of course wished I had the small one, but they were so generous. So as I read all of this over the first several pages, I began to realize that, and also the fact that you were born in the Bronx and grew up in Queens, I was born in the Bronx and grew up in Queens. I began to realize that your Aunt Tillie was also my Aunt Tillie, one of my mom's great friends for many years, many, many years.
My mom and Aunt Tillie had worked together in the 1940s at R &K Originals, the dress manufacturing company in the Garment Center. We often visited Aunt Tillie and Uncle Ben in their apartment in Electchester. It's interesting, you know nothing about electricity. You grew up in Electchester. And they visited us in our home in Jamaica.
My mom took me and my older brother to R &K to show us off to Aunt Tillie and her other old friends at the company, including many actual relatives who worked at the company, which was owned by my mother's actual Uncle Henry.
M: You know, it's really funny because my best friend, the person I call Keith in the book, was really my cousin, Neil Sesskin. I mean, not cousin, but ... And his uncle worked at R &K.
H: Well, my uncle Dan Sesskin who was the love of our lives.
M: And Neil was the love of mine, my best friend. That is unbelievable.
I was in Miami visiting my old college roommate and I was at the pool and I got your email and you said, you said, love your book, blah, blah, blah. And then like two minutes later you wrote back and said, oh my God, It's my Aunt Tillie and Uncle Benny and I started crying and laughing.
I was so honored that I got to speak at Tillie's funeral. Tillie and my mother lived next door to each other and Tillie had a heart attack and Benny had a heart attack, and they spent literally 20 years saying to him, sit down, stand up, have a drink, only one, go to sleep, get up. And then Tillie had a heart attack. And so I went down there and I kept saying, you know, you guys have to, like if you have another heart attack, you have to have a signal. And of course, that's what happened Tillie had another heart attack and called my mother. But by the time she got there Tillie was dead, and it was so shocking to all of us because she was such a force in all of our lives. She had like never been to the doctor. I'm not kidding. We once said something over dinner, like me and my other cousins, female cousins, we were like, so who's your gynecologist? And she literally walked out of the room.
And we were like, does she not have a gynecologist? How is that possible? No, she had never been to any, until she had the heart attack, she'd never been to a doctor. Which sort of says everything and you know, there was pot roast and potato kugel all the time. She was an incredible cook and an incredible connector.
And that's really what I learned from her is that you don't have to worry if people like each other. Let them worry about that. You just have the party. They'll figure it out.
H: God, I love that. That's so great. Well, she connected the two of us.
M: Which is unbelievable. It's I mean, she'd be so tickled at that. think. Yeah.
H: Well, she is. I'll speak to her later, So anyhow, cousin, It was so moving to read your memoir. So glad to get to know you and to feel the warmth of Aunt Tillie again.
M: I know, we're so lucky. Yeah. You know, we thought, my uncle Benny worked at the airport.
H: I want to talk more about that. Who knows what he did.
M: Yeah, right. Who knows? He once told us that he knew Jacques or we were watching a thing and Jacques Cousteau was on and he said, he probably said, I've met him. We made up this thing that he was like part of Jacques Cousteau's traveling circus and we had him as part of the CIA. The first time we ever flew, he came on the plane to make sure we were okay. He came on the plane, like we almost died.
I think now that I think about it because Tillie made a lot of money. Yeah, I think he had like sort of a minor job. Yeah, yeah, no one knows. Yeah, no one knows his own nieces and nephews don't know, like nobody knows.
H: And you're also writing your book, at one point on one of your birthdays, he and his pals delivered some clothing that had fallen off a truck.
M: Not him Yeah, my other uncles worked in the garment district and so I wanted these pants that had buttons, sailor pants. But my dad had just died and I was really upset and freaked out. So they brought me a box of them from size 2 to size 20. Just a whole box. And I was so disappointed. But I loved those pants for a long time. would die to have them back. But Benny wasn't part of that crew. Benny was not.
He was not, he was a gambler but not that much and he would go to the track but he would like basically just sort of wander off and come back and talk. He wasn't a gambler like my mother and Tillie and my other uncles and aunts were. Benny was sort of more refined. I don't know what he did. Maybe he was in the CIA.
H: I thought he worked for the post office.
M: No, no, he worked at JFK. I know he did, JFK.
H: Well, Idlewild. Yeah. Amazing. What did he do?
M: Like, who knows? Maybe he worked in the post office at the airport. But we thought he was like on a mission with Jacques Cousteau.
Aunt Tillie traveled all over the place. I went with her to Houston once when I was a teenager. She took me to Houston because there was a big buyer there for R &K. I mean, that seemed like it was like a trip to Paris. Yeah. You know what I mean? Houston was just as foreign as Paris.
H: And I mentioned my Uncle Henry. So Henry Kalman was the owner of R &K, it was his company. But she was a very senior executive.
M: Yeah, she was, she was one of the biggest sellers there. And she loved it. I mean, she just was so good at it.
It’s just incredible meeting you, how we met and that we met right before that too. Yeah, during the book festival. Right, right, right, right.
Susan Brown
H: Yeah, I was sitting next to Susan Brown. So there you go.
M: You were?
H: And I met Susan Brown because I saw her on your BookFest To Go email.
M: Really? Oh, that's nice.
H: And also, so our friend Jeff Moran in Woodstock, he plays poker with Susan every week.
M: I played there many times.
H: So I had heard her name and asked Jeff, is this your Susan? Oh, yeah, you should spend time with her.
M: Yeah, she's an incredible teacher. I recommend her to many people. When I went to Susan, I had this idea for a book that was not the book I wound up writing. And she immediately, she listened to me and she nodded and smiled and then said why don't you do this and had me write this chapter that was so different from anything I had ever written before, it was so much more personal and it was just incredible and I knew right then that like I didn't know what was going to happen but I was following her.
H: Yeah yeah that's great that's great, I feel the same.
All right, we're great. Thank you. I'm going to fiddle around with all this and we'll get something written up.
M : Call me if you need me.
