What's Kraken with Jo Szewczyk

Alison McBain is an award-winning author whose novels have picked up more than 13 awards, including the Foreword INDIES. She’s also a ghostwriter, an editor and associate editor of the magazine ScribesMICRO. She joins Jo Szewczyk to compare notes from the publishing trenches: how editing turned into ghostwriting, why most of that work was romance, and what it took to write 34 books in a single yea...

Author Mercale SilverStorm joins Jo Szewczyk to talk about Living Spirit , a practical, grounded guide to bringing spirituality out of the weekend and into traffic jams, long shifts and hard days. It’s a practice built over 33 years and tested by loss, six kids, and five extra teenagers taken in all at once. Three bathrooms, one heroic grocery bill. They get into seeing the sacred in trees and car...

Award-winning author, mental health advocate and Write or Die Show host Randi-Lee Bowslaugh joins Jo Szewczyk to talk about turning Goodbye Too Soon, her book about losing her brother Brandon to a drug overdose, into her first feature film. She gets into what survives the jump from page to screen, why ‘based on a true story’ gives a writer room to move, and what it’s like to cast actors to play yo...

Writers of the Future winner John Haas joins Jo Szewczyk to talk about writing three novels in a year while holding down a day job, plotting chapter by chapter, and building his Midnight Library stand-alones (Stay Out, Lunatics, Camp Nightmare) to read like movies. He also explains how a review calling his story racist became the seed of a prequel, and why a few of his best ideas are waiting until...

Carla Matthes is a memoirist shopping her first book, and she tells her story the way she wrote it: with dark humor and zero interest in looking good. On this What’s Kraken with Jo Szewczyk, she covers a dad who ghosted her before ghosting had a name, a stepfather’s Independent Fundamental Baptist church that banned pants, movies and eventually even clapping, and a senior year spent making up for...

Jaymes Buckman is back, and this time it’s all craft. The Hot Apollo frontman started as a poet, still writes lyrics faster than his band can learn them, and treats the stage as the one place his brain finally shuts up and stays in the present. Jo and Jaymes get into lyrics-first songwriting, why spoken word doesn’t do it for him, the merch-table problem, and what it took to stop being stubborn ab...

David R. Wilcox, award-winning author of Protecting Pat Robertson: Confessions of a High-Priced Bag Man, spent the mid-'80s to the mid-'90s as Pat Robertson's bodyguard. On What's Kraken with Jo Szewczyk, he takes us into the back seat of the company car where one sentence, 'give them the list,' sent the Christian Broadcasting Network into a tailspin. From secret diamond-mining deals with dictator...

Former Berkeley cop turned police chief Brian Brady writes the Golden Gate Tales, a series of San Francisco crime novels built from decades on the job. He and Jo talk about why fiction beats true crime for him and the dead time TV never shows. They also get into AI as a research tool rather than a writer, and the $3,000 ‘bestseller guarantee’ that burned an ex-cop who should have known better. Key...

Llewellyn author and medium Sharon Farber wasn't born with 'the gift' — she chose it. A massage therapist and energy healer for years, she took up mediumship after a single home demonstration, trained at England's Arthur Findlay College, gave 118 free practice readings, and now teaches others to do the same. Jo and Sharon get into ghosts versus spirits, why she doesn't believe in demons or attachm...

Bean is the friend who's been in the hot seat since 1996 — the one who drove Jo everywhere, fronted the better motel, and shows up in Surviving Gen X because he was actually there. For Jo's birthday they go back through all of it: the AOL messages that started it, the two-for-a-dollar Big Macs, the sofa they kept shaking down for taco money, and the motel in LA that turned out to be an old brothel...

Jo Szewczyk talks with Rob Gutro — a pet medium and award-winning paranormal author who spent his career as a meteorologist, working for the Weather Channel, NOAA, and NASA before retiring after 25 years. Rob uses the law of conservation of energy to explain what he thinks happens after death, draws a hard line between ghosts and spirits, and talks about what animals communicate back to the people...

Tonya Todd identifies as an author, actress and activist, and when she stepped off the board of the Henderson Writers Group she decided the third A needed work. So she built a banned books series — seven books a year, seven different panels, and a new episode every day of Banned Books Week. Jo and Tonya get into who actually does the banning, how the fear of it is already changing what publishers...

Screenwriter, publisher, and Horror Writers Association member Eric Miller joins What's Kraken? with Jo Szewczyk to talk about his first novel, Whatever Happened to Uncle Ed? It's a horror-comedy where a washed-up high school basketball star inherits a fortune, a haunted mansion, and a family curse played out in magical games against shapeshifting demons. Eric's spent three decades in Hollywood wr...

Raymond Creamer, the writer-director of Goody Goody, a Shudder original about a home birth that goes very wrong in a snowbound cabin, joins What's Kraken? with Jo Szewczyk on press day for his feature debut. We get into festival whiplash, why Kill Bill: Volume 1 taught him cinema can hold everything, directing Samantha Robinson in dance terms, and the reshoot where the cast threw his pages away an...

Mark Blacknell grew up in working-class Philly in the '70s — the son of an atheist socialist union organizer who had him reading Mao at eight. He ran bets for guys named Little Sween and Big Sween, joined the Marines to spite his father, and got out of boot camp just in time for Saddam Hussein to invade Kuwait. Then came a master's degree, a band, a job with the governor of Pennsylvania, two years...

Grief coach Camille joins Jo Szewczyk on What's Kraken? for one of the most open conversations this show has had. After losing her youngest son to suicide in 2010, Camille refused the victim role and built a practice out of what she learned — helping people rebuild an identity after loss instead of waiting for grief to end. Jo opens up about his own father's death and the shoulda-coulda-woulda tha...

Mark Steven Porro was a carefree LA bachelor — never married, no kids — when his mother stopped eating at 89 and hospice was called in. He moved from Los Angeles into the New Jersey house he grew up in and became a first-time parent at 50, to his own mother. A Cup of Tea on the Commode came out of that, and he's now eighty percent through a second book about his father. Jo and Mark get into the ri...

Dr. Rob Yonover is a volcanologist who rode a submersible two miles down, and an inventor whose See/Rescue Streamer has been saving lives for over 40 years. It's 40 feet of orange plastic with no batteries, no chemicals, and nothing to break — you deploy it in the water and it makes you visible from the air. He pitched it on Shark Tank and walked away without a deal. Jo and Rob get into where the...

Dan Henk is back — tattoo artist, novelist, illustrator, and a guy who got his head tattooed because brain cancer treatment left patches where his hair wouldn't grow. He's on his fifth novel, D-Day Is Here, and he's painting the cover and nine interior illustrations himself, the way the old pulp magazines used to do it. Jo and Dan get into how tattooing changed from a secret society to something y...

Five people who have never met each other, and one voicemail from my mom. I asked friends from every era of my life to come on and tell me who I was to them. Nobody compared notes. They agreed on more than I'm comfortable with — including one thing all of them independently decided was wrong with me. Featuring Amélie, Bean, Charlotte, Sarah and Cory. Contains a brothel, a triangle choke, a quincea...

Jaymes Buckman fronts Hot Apollo, a band he describes as Tempest Rock — loud like thunder, sparkly like lightning. He started out as the kid whose friends told him they hated his voice and handed him a drum kit instead, so he built his own band where nobody could tell him not to sing, and got better through sheer stubbornness and repetition. Jo and Jaymes get into where the name came from, what ha...

Francis DiClemente spent ten years turning medical records, teenage confessional poetry, and a shoebox of photographs into STUNTED: A MEMOIR OF DELAYED MANHOOD. Diagnosed with a brain tumor at fifteen that left him physically underdeveloped while everyone around him grew up, the Emmy-winning Syracuse filmmaker walks Jo through the whole grind — the bad first draft, the query-letter void, and the d...

Yvonne Pelling is the Patient and Community Engagement Lead at PASSERELLE, the SPOR National Training Entity — Canada's national hub for capacity development in patient-oriented research. She came into the field through Access Open Minds, a youth mental health service design project, and she's spent the years since arguing that collaboration isn't a value you hold, it's a skill you practice badly...

Linda Drattell wrote her first poem at sixteen and started her novel thirty years ago — long before she lost her hearing in her thirties, and long before she survived the 2016 Bastille Day truck attack in Nice. She talks with Jo about the dragon that turned out to be everybody, the two women who carry her poem "The Torrent and the Tree" into chemotherapy, and the therapist who refused to discuss t...

Dr. Randy Overbeck is back, and this time there's not a single ghost in the book. Abigail Trench is his first historical — a novel about the Culper Ring, George Washington's spy network in occupied New York, and specifically about Agent 355, the one woman in it whose identity nobody has ever established. He and Jo get into what the historical record actually contains (almost nothing), why he doesn...