Live Radio
What happens in our youth ripples through our entire lives. Authors Marylee MacDonald and Elisa Stancil Levine join Suzanne M. Lang in conversation on their memoirs of resilience and courage. MacDonald’s Surrender, a Memoir of Nature, Nurture, and Love explores the double circumstance of her being adopted as an infant and then her giving up her first child to adoption; she eventually reunites with both her birth mother and her son.
Stancil Levine’s This or Something Better, a Memoir of Resilience starts with the firestorm of 2017 that had her fleeing Sonoma Mountain and takes us to her troubled youth along the American River. 
Shugri Salh was born in the Somalia desert and lived with her grandmother as a desert nomad herding goats before landing in an orphanage and the streets of Mogadishu during the Somali Civil War, and eventually making her way to North America. The Last Nomad, Coming of Age in the Somali Desert is her eye-opening memoir, and she joins Suzanne Lang in conversation.
Also featured is Hemu Aggarwal with her book The Forbidden Letters, a True Story. Hemu is an artist and graphic designer whose discovery of century old love letters written by her parents, set her on a mission to translate them into English from Gujarati. They represent an intimate look into the lives of two young people in an arranged marriage, very much in love but subject to customs and taboos challenged.
It's A Novel Idea, every first, third, and fifth Sundays at 10am on KRCB 104.9 FM, streaming at krcb.org.
Road trips seem to be uniquely American and Suzanne Lang talks with two authors about their unique takes on traveling the country. Miles to Go, an African Family in Search of America Along Route 66 is Brennen Matthews’ travelogue of his family’s emersion into America on its “Mother Road."
Brad Herzog goes a different direction with Detour 2020, a Cross-country Drive through America’s Wrong Turns, trying to get a bead on just what that year brought to us. It’s A Novel Idea, first and fifth Sundays at 10 a.m. PT, on KRCB 104.9 FM - Sonoma County's NPR station. Streaming and podcasting at krcb.org.
Suzanne Lang talks with equestrian Lissa Bachner. When Lissa became blind, it was the healing partnership with her horse Milo that physically guided her to become a show jumping champion and emotionally provided Lissa the love and confidence she needed to define herself outside of blindness. The book is Milo’s Eyes, How a Blind Equestrian and Her Seeing Eye Horse Rescued Each Other. 
Suzanne also talks with Amy Turner about her memoir On the Ledge. Nearly being killed when a truck ran over her while crossing a street, triggered the deeper trauma of her childhood self, living in the shadow of her suicidal Dad. When she was just 4 years old the media captured him standing high on the ledge of a hotel window, about to jump. He lived a long life, but it took her own near-death trauma to finally understand and shake her lifelong insecurity brought on by his suicide attempt. - A Novel Idea goes Way out West (Aired: October 30, 2022)
- Jori Lewis and Judith Berlowitz on A Novel Idea (Aired: October 2, 2022)
- Keri Blankenship and Dr. Dianna Grayer on A Novel Idea (Aired: September 4, 2022)
- Marston Hefner and Schuyler M. Wood on A Novel Idea (Aired: August 7, 2022)
- Jillian Haslam on A Novel Idea with Suzanne Lang (Aired: July 31, 2022)
- Amy Edelstein and Kathleen C. Stone on A Novel Idea (Aired: July 3, 2022)
