June's Electric Muse Radio: Authors, Artists & Celebrities! Oh, My!

What is The Electric Muse with Mark David Gerson? It's a brand-new radio show featuring an eclectic blend of authors, playwrights, screenwriters, directors, musicians, photographers and visual artists -- all talking about themselves, their work, their passions and their muse. And it launches this month with an exciting roster of guests!

Read on to see who will be joining me in the studio. (Click on the date/name link for each guest to be taken to the show page for that episode -- to listen live or to hear the archived version after the broadcast. And visit the Electric Muse pages on my website for more about these and other upcoming shows.)

June 4 ~ Luke Yankee grew up around a glittering galaxy of stars that most of us know only from our seats in a darkened movie theater. Marilyn Monroe played catch with his older brothers on the set of Bus Stop. Paul Newman showed him how to upstage fellow actors in a school play. And in a true Auntie Mame moment, Ethel Merman taught him how to make the perfect Merman martini.

How did Luke Yankee get to be so lucky? An accident of birth: His mother was Oscar-winner Eileen Heckart, remembered by many in more recent years for her portrayal of Mary's feisty Aunt Flo on The Mary Tyler Moore Show, but a film and theater star long before that television success. Luke has written about growing up with his famous mother in his memoir, Just Outside the Spotlight: Growing Up with Eileen Heckart. And he'll share with us some of the funny and touching stories from the book, as well as some of his own accomplishments as a gifted writer/director/producer in his own right.

June 11 ~ Michael Scott is one of the most prolific authors you will ever encounter, with more than 100 books to his credit that span fantasy, science fiction, horror and Celtic folklore and that include his six-part New York Times bestselling fantasy series, The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel. Given that Michael has only been writing for some 30 of his 53 years, that's three books a year: a prodigious output for any writer, especially when you consider that he has also written for stage and screen and was, for a time, head of drama for the production company that created Riverdance. "Some stories wait their turn to be told," says Scott. "Others just tap you on the shoulder and insist you tell them."

But it was the quality not the quantity of his work that prompted the Irish Times to crown him "king of fantasy in these isles" and that caused Who's Who in Ireland to name him one of "the 1000 most significant Irish." During this episode of The Electric Muse, Michael will talk about the world of mythology and his writer's world and will, hopefully, tell us how we, too, can produce so many good books in so little time!

June 18 ~ D.J. McIntosh. How do you get from Toronto city planner to internationally acclaimed author? D.J. McIntosh will share part of that journey with us on this week's show, as she talks about The Witch of Babylon, the page-turning initial installment in a projected trilogy and a first novel that has already propelled her to the top ranks of historical-thriller writers. CNN called The Witch of Babylon, set against a backdrop of the Iraq war, one of the "top six enduring historical thrillers" and McIntosh has also been dubbed "an erudite Dan Brown" for her expert blend of intrigue and historical depth and accuracy. Book II, The Book of Stolen Tales, is just out, and we'll be taking about that too...along with some of McIntosh's more "interesting" writing habits!

June 25 ~ Melissa Vincent discovered her obsession for iPhoneography in 2011 when she created an account on Instagram. She had always taken photos of her kids, she says, but "Instagram stirred up a creative part of me that was dormant for a long time." The result: more than 200,000 followers on Instagram and an increasingly high profile, not just in the mobile photography world but in the photography world in general. Her surreal, storybook images with a Southern sensibility have been exhibited in galleries from coast-to-coast and were recently featured on National Geographic online, on the cover of Time magazine’s first annual wireless issue and in The Huffington Post.

Melissa takes all her photos on her iPhone; she processes them all on her phone as well. On this episode of The Electric Muse, she will be sharing not only her art and her passion but, for all you mobile photographers out there, she'll also be sharing her favorite apps and photography tips.

• Tune in to The Electric Muse with Mark David Gerson every Tuesday at 5pm PT / 8pm ET on the Authors on the Air Global Radio Network. Don't miss an episode! But if you must, you can always catch it after the fact. Just look for links to every episode on my website.

Don't forget! June 4 at 5pm PT / 8pm ET...and every Tuesday after that: The Electric Muse with Mark David Gerson.

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