KZSM — Entertainment, radio and reading
In these days of diminished opportunities for entertainment, radio and reading always help to pass the time. Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, KZSM.org offers programming to educate, engage, enlighten, and entertain. For listeners and readers, I host “Bookmarked” from 4-6 p.m. Tuesdays.
In the studio or over the phone, authors, experts, and readers discuss everything from science fiction to self-help, depending on their interests. I connect with the San Marcos Public Library’s Virtual Book Club (www.facebook.com/ groups/SMPLVirtualBookClub) thanks to my regular guest Jennifer Kabay, the club admin. Also, “Bookmarked” is underwritten by the Wittliff Collections at Texas State (www.thewittliffcollections.txstate.edu). Literary Curator Steve Davis has introduced me to some of the amazing Texas writers who have donated their archives to the Southwestern Writers Collection.
Over three years of “Bookmarked,” I have been fascinated to learn how fiction writers draw inspiration for their stories. San Marcos native Elizabeth Crook explained how she created the distinctive voice of Ben Shreve, a teenager in mid-nineteenth-century Texas, for “The Which Way Tree.” In the house where her grandmother was born, she found an old book, “Now You Hear My Horn,” the journal of James Wilson Nichols, who came to Texas in 1836 at the age of sixteen. “Reading Mr. Nichols’ writing, I perceived the first faint intonations of Benjamin’s voice,” she writes in her “Acknowledgements.”
Another Texas writer, Ann Weisgarber, grounded her novel “The Glovemaker” through a sense of place. For her story of Mormon settlers founding an orchard in the late 1880s, she visited Capitol Reef National Park in Utah, where their fruit trees still thrive. In her interview, she described how she made a point of hiking the rugged park in a snowstorm to experience it as her characters did.
Severo Perez grew up in San Antonio, where he worked in the public library as a college student. He talked with our listeners about his novel “Odd Birds,” set there in the early 1960s. He and his friends speculated about the life of an unusual-looking man the saw frequently on the street, and years later Perez give that imaginary life to the protagonist of his novel.
My guests on “Bookmarked” continue to open up new worlds for me and for our listeners. Contact KZSMSanMarcos@gmail. com to learn how you can develop your own broadcast, how you can volunteer your time, or how you can donate to support our 501(c)(3) non-profit.
