Category: Interviews
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Peace Through Pieces
An avid hunter and seller of antiques for more than four decades, 84-year-old Bob Swisher no longer buys anything he can’t lift. He also no longer strips and refinishes furniture. Yet like his great old finds in still another store, Swisher is durable; he understands what personal restoration means.
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Meals at Maize Served with Authenticity, Love for Community
Armando likes to talk, and he breaks the ice when we first sit down by telling me about a well-known C-U writer who drunkenly approached the Sandovals only two weeks after Maize opened in 2011, seemingly coming at them with a complaint near closing time on a Friday night. But the this person wasn’t complaining.…
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Authoritarian Rule in a College Town
Our world has no shortage of power-hungry dictators, sadly. What might the college town of Champaign-Urbana have looked like in 1991 under an authoritarian government? Author Sarah Lariviere, a Champaign, Illinois, native with deep roots in Central Illinois, offers a look at such a life in her rousing novel Riot Act, published in 2024 by…
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Q&A with Archer Cook: ‘Her Second Husband’ and a Second Chance
The memoir Her Second Husband by Archer Cook was the surprise read of 2024 for me. It’s about “a husband who lived through an abusive relationship” with a woman named Hildegard. I thought at first this was an odd premise for someone’s life story, but as I delved into Cook’s world, I saw how his…
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Author Daniel Kraus Shares His Whalefall
Daniel Kraus is an unapologetically multi-genre author who has written almost every type of fictional book except a western, and even that type of read is coming soon from the Chicago resident. An “omnivorous” reader and writer by his own account, Kraus enjoys everything from romance books to thrillers, calling himself an “agent’s nightmare” because…
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Q&A with Rosalind Barden: Keeping the Spark Alive
Author Rosalind Barden just released the fourth book in the Sparky of Bunker Hill Mystery series. This one is called The South Seas Shenanigans and is different from previous Sparky books, in that it doesn’t occur in downtown Los Angeles, where the author resides.
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Grace McClellan Thriving in Her Creation and Teaching of Art
Meet artist Grace McClellan, whose work as a senior at Eastern Illinois University is getting noticed.
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I Am Book, Hear Me Roar
Founded by a dedicated two-man team from the southwest region of the UK — Andy and Roger — BookRoar has proven to be a viable platform for book authors who are looking to get their reads reviewed.
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Q&A With John Hoeffleur of Green Boots
With his new one-man project, Green Boots, John Hoeffleur said the creative restrictions are different: only one person making the generally 3- to 4-minute compositions, a dependence on technology, and a desire to mostly leave guitar out of the equation, even though he’s a stellar guitarist.
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Good Old Chicago: A Q&A with Photographer and Nurse Practitioner Sam Logan
Photographer and nurse practitioner Sam Logan talks about his inspiration for his publication “Old Chicago: Street Portraits of Older People,” and reveals his on-the-job observations in the health care field.