On The Block Radio

Pam Houston’s most recent book is Contents May Have Shifted, published in 2012. She is also the author of two collections of linked short stories, Cowboys Are My Weakness and Waltzing the Cat, the novel, Sight Hound, and a collection of essays, A Little More About Me, all published by W.W. Norton. Her stories have been selected for volumes of Best American Short Stories, The O. Henry Awards, The 2013 Pushcart Prize, and Best American Short Stories of the Century. She is the winner of the Western States Book Award, the WILLA award for contemporary fiction, The Evil Companions Literary Award and multiple teaching awards. She directs the literary nonprofit Writing By Writers, is professor of English at UC Davis, teaches in The Institute of American Indian Art’s Low-Rez MFA program, and at writer’s conferences around the country and the world. She lives on a ranch at 9,000 feet in Colorado near the headwaters of the Rio Grande.

Robert Walter is an editor and an executive with several not-for-profit organizations. Most notably, he is the executive director and board president of the Joseph Campbell Foundation (JCF), an organization that he helped found in 1990 with choreographer Jean Erdman, Joseph Campbell's widow. In 1979, Bob began to work on several projects with Campbell, who subsequently named him editorial director of his Historical Atlas of World Mythology. Following Campbell's death in 1987, Bob served as literary executor of Campbell's estate, completing Volumes I and II of the Atlas and supervising its posthumous publication. With JCF publishing director David Kudler, he continues to oversee the publication of Campbell's oeuvre, including the video series Joseph Campbell's Mythos and the other works in the Collected Works of Joseph Campbell series, including the 2008 edition of The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Prior to his work in publishing, Walter was a founding faculty fellow at the California Institute of the Arts; lect

A Portland treasure and a voice of passion, wisdom and profound insight, Darlene Solomon-Rogers aka Blacque Butterfly is an entertainer, activist and event host. Her love for the arts has allowed her to explore several layers of her calling. Be it spoken word, motivational speaking, singing, theater or event promoting she has "allowed the Creator to use her ministry to inspire others to follow their calling." Blacque Butterfly is a native Oregonian, born and raised in NE Portland. She is the author of “Black girl can I comb your hair.” She has also released a spoken word CD entitled Collide -A - Scope. Currently she is working on her sophomore album slated to release by early 2017. Blacque Butterfly promotes and showcases local talent through her events “Blacque Butterfly Presents...” Butterfly mentors troubled youth and single mothers and facilitates a youth based theatre troupe, where she allows youth at risk to use the arts as a tool for social justice. She is a motivational speaker for women and men who a

everend Billy and the Stop Shopping Choir is a New York City based radical performance community, with 50 performing members and a congregation in the thousands. They are wild anti-consumerist gospel shouters and Earth loving urban activists who have worked with communities on four continents defending community, life and imagination. Over the last 15 years of their "church," they describe the Devils that plague us as Consumerism and Militarism. In this time of the Earth's crisis - they are especially mindful of the extractive imperatives of global capital. Their activist performance and concert stage performance have always worked in parallel. The activism is content for the play. They have won an OBIE Award, the Alpert Award, The Dramalogue Award and The Historic Districts Council's Preservation Award (for leading demonstrations to save Manhattan's Poe House), and half of their singing activists have been jailed, most frequently during Occupy Wall Street. Reverend Billy has been arrested about 70 times. Rev

Born in Detroit, to a politically leftist Greek American family, Dimitri Mugianis began writing poetry, music, and also using drugs at a very early age. As a teenager, Dimitri formed a band called The Leisure Class. After several years of local success, the band moved to New York City in 1983. There, Dimitri found a home at the Chelsea Hotel, and quickly developed close friendships, notably Beat legends Herbert Huncke and Gregory Corso. His relationship with cocaine, heroin and methadone would last over 20 years. By 2002, Dimitri had a daily habit of $150-200 worth of heroin, plus cocaine and 100 milligrams of methadone. By forty, he was surrounded by death, including his pregnant, common-law wife. Resigned that his life was nearing an end, using the last of his will to survive, Dimitri turned to a radical solution: Ibogaine. In 2003, he sought out an Iboga treatment center in Europe. Initially he planned to visit his ancestral home in Greece to die after the treatment, but Bwiti and Iboga had other plans. Ib

Futurist, scifi author and former Microsoft executive Ramez Naam has some definite ideas about where we are heading as a species. And it might be in a different direction than you think. Ramez was born in Cairo, Egypt, and came to the US at the age of 3. He’s a computer scientist, futurist, angel investor, and award-winning author. He spent 13 years at Microsoft, where he led teams developing early versions of Microsoft Outlook, Internet Explorer, and the Bing search engine. His career has focused on bringing advanced collaboration, communication, and information retrieval capabilities to roughly one billion people around the world, and took him to the role of Partner and Director of Program Management within Microsoft, with deep experience leading teams working on cutting edge technologies such as machine learning, search, massive scale services, and artificial intelligence. Between stints at Microsoft, Ramez founded and ran Apex NanoTechnologies, the world’s first company devoted entirely to software tools

Dorothy Allison grew up in Greenville, South Carolina, the first child of a fifteen-year-old unwed mother who worked as a waitress. Now living in Northern California with her partner Alix and her teenage son, Wolf Michael, she describes herself as a feminist, a working class story teller, a Southern expatriate, a sometime poet and a happily born-again Californian. The first member of her family to graduate from high school, Allison attended Florida Presbyterian college on a National Merit Scholarship and studied anthropology at the New School for Social Research. An award winning editor for Quest, Conditions, and Outlook—early feminist and Lesbian & Gay journals, Allison's chapbook of poetry, The Women Who Hate Me, was published with Long Haul Press in 1983. Her short story collection, Trash (1988) was published by Firebrand Books. Trash won two Lambda Literary Awards and the American Library Association Prize for Lesbian and Gay Writing. Allison says that the early Feminist movement changed her life. "It

Kelly Carlin has always been curious about the big questions of life. Watching her father, George Carlin, be an iconoclastic comedy legend certainly didn’t hurt too. Like him she loves to use humor to question the status quo, and she loves to seek out the unique angle into any subject she tackles. But unlike him, she brings a more personal and emotional tone to her work. With her personal story, pathos, emotion and psychological insight she reveals the joy and challenges that comes with trying to live an authentic life. As a child, Kelly explored her own creativity by writing skits and doing imitations (her Ethel Merman was quite good for an eight year old), but began her professional life in her teens working behind the scenes with her father and mother, Brenda, on various shows for HBO that continued into her twenties. In 1993, at the ripe age of 30, she graduated from UCLA, Magna Cum Laude, with a B.A. in Communications Studies. While at UCLA, Kelly discovered her voice as a writer, which led her to a care

“I know a lot of people. A lot. And I ask a lot of prying questions. But I’ve never run into a more intriguing biography than Howard Bloom’s in all my born days.” --Paul Solman, Business and Economics Correspondent, PBS NewsHour Howard Bloom has been called “next in a lineage of seminal thinkers that includes Newton, Darwin, Einstein,[and] Freud,” by Britain’s Channel4 TV , “the next Stephen Hawking” by Gear Magazine, and “The Buckminster Fuller and Arthur C. Clarke of the new millennium” by Buckminster Fuller’s archivist. Bloom is the author of The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History, Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century, The Genius of the Beast: A Radical Re-Vision of Capitalism, and The God Problem: How A Godless Cosmos Creates. And his book Global Brain was the subject of an Office of the Secretary of Defense symposium in 2010, with participants from the State Department, the Energy Department, DARPA, IBM, and MIT.

Barbara J. King is Chancellor Professor of Anthropology at the College of William & Mary. In addition to her new book on animal grief, she has authored Being With Animals (Doubleday 2010), Evolving God (Doubleday 2007), The Dynamic Dance (Harvard University Press 2004), and a number of other books. A reissue of Evolving God is due out in 2017. Dr. King has studied monkeys in Kenya and great apes in various captive settings in Africa and the US. Her research has advanced the thesis that humans and animals have deeper emotional relationships than previously thought. She takes the work of our friend and colleague Dr. Chris Ryan in the other direction, examining the ways our anthropomorphic tendencies have robbed our non-human relatives of their dignity, emotional complexity and moral agency. Barbara is a popular guest on interview programs and recently appeared on the Diane Rehm Show and National Geographic Radio. Previously, she has been interviewed on radio programs in Canada, Austria, Germany, and Austral

Jennifer Pastiloff Taleghany, Beauty Hunter, Is The Founder Of The Manifest-Station, a website that uses writing, yoga, social media and activism to save and change lives. With millions of followers, Jen is a true champion of change, and a voice for compassionate transformation in a world that so desperately needs more of both. She is a writer and yoga teacher living with her husband in Los Angeles when she’s not on an airplane. She travels the world with her unique workshop: The Manifestation Workshop: On Being Human-a hybrid of yoga, writing, sharing out loud, and occasionally a dance party. It's an experience that has been described as distinctly NOT "woo-woo," unpredictable, heart-mending and sometimes messy- just like life. You do not have to be a good yogi, or writer. Just a human being with a body. Jen has been featured on Good Morning America, New York Magazine, CBS News and more for her unique style of teaching. She’s developed a massive and loyal following from her personal essays. She studied poetr

You may have heard of Zach's dad. He almost single-handedly started a little thing called the counterculture. But here at OTBR, we are not star fuckers. We do not obsess over the cult of celebrity. We DO, however, want to know about engaging stories of creativity and transformation. We ask how people have taken the life they have been given and turned it into something meaningful and beautiful for themselves and for others. We are not our parents, but we are, in some sense, the collective experience, the collective victories AND failures, of our ancestors. We stand in a trajectory of light that reaches into infinity in both directions. We are the ancestors, for better or worse. We are responsible for our own becoming; our own transfiguration. And we are responsible for helping each other in love and light along the way. Zach Leary has certainly done that. In spades. Zach is the host of the “It’s All Happening” podcast, an infrequent blogger/writer and a seasoned digital marketer and brand strategist. He is al

Frank J Miles is a pandisciplinary artist based in New York City: a visual artist, an artistic philosopher, a social sculptor who studied at Columbia University, and a former speechwriter for President Bill Clinton. His work is about atheism, death, competition, bonding, density and utopia. The creator of Communitas, his next step is an MFA PhD program overseas in art and philosophy. Communitas is an essential part of his art practice. It is: a downtown Manhattan creative think tank and salon; a pandisciplinary arts collective; a future global arts movement and civilization Communitas is a symposium of the occurrent arts and social sculpture, captures the times we are moving toward – continuing the tradition of a Downtown Manhattan participatory social practice where the evolving ideas of society, culture, and New York City converge. This creative think tank is a salon which brings artists and audiences from many worlds of New York City and beyond to create what is the next vanguard for the city – welcoming a

Winner of the Media Ecology Association’s first Neil Postman award for Career Achievement in Public Intellectual Activity, Dr. Douglas Rushkoff is an author, teacher, and documentarian who focuses on the ways people, cultures, and institutions create, share, and influence each other’s values. He is Professor of Media Theory and Digital Economics at CUNY/Queens, technology and media commentator for CNN, digital literacy advocate for Codecademy.com and a lecturer on media, technology, culture and economics around the world. His new book, Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity, argues that we have failed to build the distributed economy that digital networks are capable of fostering, and instead doubled down on the industrial age mandate of growth above all. His previous best-selling books on media and popular culture have been translated to over thirty languages. They include Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now, Program or Be Programmed: Ten Commands for a Digital Age

Bryan Rill is many things. He is the president of the Society for the Anthropology of Consciousness: a group of academics that study the nature of consciousness from an anthropological perspective. He is a leader in the field of conscious design. He also has ties in the worlds of robotics, biomimicry, quantum physics, shamanism, electronica and cultural anthropology. But this is not the primary reason we brought him on the show. Several years ago, Bryan suffered a horrible accident that left him without the ability to use most of his brain. He has, quite literally, rebuilt himself from the ground up. A walking model of physical, intellectual and psychic transformation, we thought his story would be perfect for the show. He credits a lot of things for his remarkable recovery, including his commitment to walking the path of Shugendo Buddhism that he learned under some pretty intense Japanese masters. It is a wide-ranging conversation that we hope you will enjoy!

Rios De La Luz is a force to be reckoned with. An outsider coming at you from the very center of her experience, she tells stories of her xicana heritage that are as wild and diverse as the day is long. Rios is a queer xicana/chapina living in Oregon. She is brown and proud. She is always working on decolonizing her mind and being louder. She is in love with her bruja/activist communities in LA, San Antonio and El Paso. She is the author of, The Pulse Between Dimensions and The Desert via Ladybox Books. Her work has been featured in Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Entropy, The Fem Lit Magazine, World Literature Today and St. Sucia. Here we discuss her evolving relationship to her xicana identity, the Portland writing scene and the complexities of being embraced by predominantly white communities, and how time travel and Dr. Who are as much a part of her identity as is The Day of the Dead and her ancestral roots.

Kerry Cohen is a psychotherapist, specializing in sex and relationships, writing faculty at The Red Earth Low-Residency MFA, and the author of Loose Girl, Dirty Little Secrets, Seeing Ezra; the young adult novels Easy, The Good Girl, and It’s Not You, It’s Me; Spent, an anthology of 30 astounding essays concerning women and shopping; and The Truth of Memoir. Kerry has been featured on Dr. Phil, Good Morning America, the BBC Saturday Live, and many more television and radio shows. She has published in The New York Times Modern Love column, the Washington Post Outlook, Brevity.com, and many more journals and magazines; and she has essays in numerous anthologies. Kerry got to tell a story about her ‘loose girl’ days in front of 3,000 people in the Moth, Main stage. She lives with her family in Portland, Oregon. Here we discuss her robust connection to her wild self, the significance of creating safe, liberated spaces for young girls to establish relationships to their own bodies, how autism is not one thing, and

Garth Greenwell is the author of What Belongs to You. He is also the author of a novella, Mitko, which won the 2010 Miami University Press Novella Prize and was a finalist for the Edmund White Debut Fiction Prize and a Lambda Award. A native of Louisville, Kentucky, he holds graduate degrees from Harvard University and the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where he was an Arts Fellow. His short fiction has appeared in The Paris Review, A Public Space, StoryQuarterly, and VICE. He lives in Iowa City, where he holds the Richard E. Guthrie Memorial Fellowship at the University of Iowa. He is a pretty brilliant guy with a strong sense of his purpose as a writer: a gay writer standing in a tradition and engaging in a dialogue that challenges our deepest understandings of our relationships to our own bodies, and through them, to the rest of the world. Here, we discuss his embracing of the label "queer" author, the intense privilege and responsibility of writing one of the first novels to normalize homosexuality in Bulgaria,

Gurucharan Khalsa, PhD, LPC (khalsa@chapman.edu) Gurucharan is an expert in the design and delivery of applications of meditation and controlled breathing. He is the author of several texts on yoga and meditation including the recent “The 21 Stages of Meditation”- read and used as for meditation training worldwide. He is currently Research Professor in Contemplative Science and Transdisciplinary Dialogue at Chapman University. He works with the Fish Interfaith Center and the Institute of Quantum Studies to explore the nature of consciousness and human potential using meditation and the insights of science. He continues a broad based consulting and clinical counseling practice and co-authored The Psychospiritual Clinician’s Handbook. Whether in his clinical psychology practice, his workshops on meditation, leadership or the nature of consciousness, his delight is in the application of simple, immediate and effective tools that elevate well-being and solve the daily challenges of modern life. He guides people a

Obo Addy was one of a kind. The Ghanaian master drummer, bandleader, and teacher who made Portland his home for over 30 years, passed away in 2012, but his influence in Portland and the Pacific Northwest continues. Having spawned a love for African music in musicians and listeners alike, Obo's greatest contribution was his tireless work in the region's schools --providing exposure to African music and culture for generations of children. By the time he died he had performed for over 1 1/2 million people in the United States. And taught tens of thousands of children about the beauty and significance of Ghanaian cultural traditions and music. Susan Addy continues her husbands important work through the Obo Addy Legacy Project. Addy was renowned as a leader, a teacher, an entertainer and an artist of numerous genres. Under his leadership and vision, the Obo Addy Legacy Project concentrated its efforts on producing major artistic performances, teaching in both K-12 schools and at the college level, and writing co