FAB Member Interviews
Since July 2020, to keep FAB members connected and to make us aware of the talented writers and subject experts in our midst, Anna Rabkin conducted short Zoom interviews. We enjoyed good attendance, topping at 50 participants, while we listened to stimulating presentations.
If you are aware of a FAB member who has published or has expertise in an area of interest to our membership, please contact us at fabnews4you@gmail.com.
Interviewees
Reculturing Museums:
Embrace Conflict, Create Change
Online Dating for Women Over 40
The Jews of Singapore
Whistleblower
Me, Madam; Peace Corps
Letters from Nigeria 1961-1963
Berkeley Path Wanderers
Association
Bright Lights, Prairie Dust
Fatima’s Room
Missing Persons: A Memoir
Through A Glass Darkly;
Lenses on Life with
Alcohol Addiction
Therapeutic programs for
children and adults
In the Rise of Public Woman
Living In Two Worlds; A Memoir
I’m Still Here
Out of the Bronx
Just Enough to Make a Story
From Czernowitz to China
and Beyond;
A 20th Century Life
Creole Son; An Adoptive Mother
Untangles Nature & Nurture
Lithuanian Roots in American Soil
Joan Bieder, April 2021, is Professor Emerita at the Graduate School of Journalism at UC Berkeley. She wrote The Jews of Singapore after spending several summers working as a consultant to television news companies in Singapore. The book traces the fascinating roots of Singapore Jewry from its Biblical, Baghdadi, and Sephardic origins to its presence in Singapore from 1830 to the present. This is history few of us know and it took a committed journalist to bring it to light.
Joan Bieder
Amy Block Joy
Amy Block Joy, Ph.D., October 2020, is a Professor of Nutritional Sciences, Emerita at UC Berkeley where she teaches "Eating Green: The science behind the grassroots food movement" to Berkeley undergraduates. While on the faculty at UC Davis, she discovered criminal activity and reported it to campus officials. Whistleblower (Bay Tree Publishing, 2010; Amazon, 2018) is the chilling true story of the consequences of one woman's resolve to report the truth at any cost. View the Wikipedia source of this case.
Christie Batterman-Jordan, January 2021, presented the empowering Online Dating for Women Over 40: The Hopeful Woman’s 10 Step Guide to Enjoyment and Success. Christie writes with verve and knowledge; she is happily married to a man she met online. The book is thoughtful and full of advice about how to define what you want to accomplish and how to meet potentially interesting men while having a good time together – definitely more enjoyable than having coffee! She recommends thinking of “dating as an overall project with many episodes.” Christie graciously donated some copies of her book, which flew out the door!
Christie
Batterman-Jordan
Doris Ash Ph.D., March 2022. An author and a professor at UC Santa Cruz, Doris has been researching and writing about issues of equity in education and, more recently, in museums. Her 2022 ground-breaking book, Reculturing Museums: Embrace Conflict, Create Change, identifies needed internal and external institutional corrections. She reasons that they are vital to keep museums viable and to ensure that all have equal access to the ideas, activities and objects on view.
Doris Ash
Dorothy Crews Herzberg, August 2023, talked about her book Me, Madam; Peace Corps Letters from Nigeria 1961-1963. Dorothy’s letters convey with intimacy what it was like to be there as the newly independent Nigerians struggled to create a new democracy. She was part of some four hundred volunteers who were sent overseas before the program was approved. The Corps’ proponents thought that having people in the field would strengthen their case in Congress.
Dorothy Crews Herzberg
Jacque Ensign, September 2021, is one of the founders of Berkeley Path Wanderers Association. She talked about the development, abandonment and revitalization of the little-known picturesque pathways that dot Berkeley. Thanks to the dedication of the BPWA these hidden treasures will play an important role in case of a disaster when streets are blocked and evacuation becomes necessary.
Karen Grassle, May 2022, played Ma in the TV series, Little House on the Prairie. She was interviewed by Anna Rabkin about her blockbuster memoir, Bright Lights, Prairie Dust. In this book Karen emerges as a skilled memoirist writing with candor, grace, and style. Introspective, she chronicles her courageous journey during the 1960s sexual revolution, training at London’s Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts, behind the curtains of Broadway, and onto Hollywood sets, all the while battling her own demons.
Charlotte Gray, July 2020, presented a reading from her novel, Fatima’s Room. Charlotte had spent several years in Khartoum, where she taught at a women’s university. Her book is based, partially, on stories her students told her about their home life. Her novel symbolizes the ultimate rebellion against patriarchal suppression.
Gayle Green
Gayle Greene, February 2021, talked to us about Missing Persons: A Memoir, a poignant story of loss and discovery. Gayle’s memoir is an account of her mother's and aunt’s final days and the year that follows, a year in which she reconstructs her life. This is a powerful story about family, what it means to have one, to lose one, never to have made one, and what, if anything, might take its place. It is also a search for home, as the very landscape shifts around her and the vast orchards are dug up and paved over for tract housing, strip malls, freeways, and the Santa Clara Valley, once known as the Valley of Heart’s Delight, is transformed to “Silicon.”
Claire Heinzelman
Claire Heinzelman, November 2020, formerly worked in corporate finance and music education; her latest role is as the editor of her recent anthology Through a Glass Darkly; Lenses on Life with Alcohol Addiction. The collection features several FAB members, all the pieces are intensely personal and movingly written by a group rarely heard from: older women who’ve lived with an alcoholic. Embedded in these beautifully rendered pieces is the wisdom of wounded, but brave and resilient, women speaking to us from a past that haunted and shaped their adult selves.
Mary Kawar
Mary Kawar, November 2021, an internationally recognized occupational therapist who for over 60 years has specialized in therapeutic programs for children and adults with sensory processing and motor control issues. She is passionate about informing aging adults about the power of daily engagement in precise movements that stimulate and maintain the viability of the vestibular system to support our ability to sustain our balance when stationary and while moving safely and efficiently through space.
Glenna Matthews, May 2021, is an historian who investigated the changes in the role of women in American society. In the Rise of Public Woman, she surveys efforts of diverse women over three centuries to establish their right to shape the public world and take their place alongside men. Recently women’s visible leadership was inspiringly evident when House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Vice President Kamala Harris stood behind President Biden as he addressed Congress.
Glenna Matthews
Vivian Pisano
Vivian Pisano, May 2022, is author of the recently published Living In Two Worlds; A Memoir, a story of love, loss, and reflection. Born to an American mother and Chilean father, Vivian has an idyllic childhood in her father's country among his loving, extended family. Abruptly, because of her sister's illness, Vivian's mother takes her daughters back to the US. The idyll and her father are left behind. In the book Vivian unpacks, with sensitivity and imagination, a fraught mother/daughter relationship and her search for identity and belonging.
Martina Reaves, August 2020. Her recently published memoir I’m Still Here braids her cancer odyssey and her life story in a chronicle of hope, fear, family, friendship and perseverance – presenting readers with a nuanced, poignant, and humorous exploration of what it means to live and love authentically.
Martina Reaves
Irene Sardanis
Dr. Irene Sardanis, March 2021, in Out of the Bronx summons her inner strength and a powerful narrative voice to tell a story of a traumatic childhood as the youngest daughter of Greek immigrant parents--a charming but irresponsible father and a depressed and physically ill mother. With courage and honesty, Irene describes the chapters of her life, and how the interception of a kind and perceptive therapist helped pull her out of emotional despair and into independence, confidence, and the courage to advocate for herself. A book that you open and before you know it you've read half of it and don't want to put it down.
Nancy Schimmel, June 2022, is author, song writer and committed singing activist. A children’s librarian for ten years, she took to the road as a storyteller and wrote and published a how-to book about storytelling, Just Enough to Make a Story. She wrote songs and co-produced six albums for children and adults. She joined Bonnie Lockhart and several singer/songwriters to form the song-leading group Occupella which brought humor and inspiration at Occupy demonstrations. Her book, Occupella: Singing in the Lifeboats, chronicles their adventures. Ten years later, Occupella is still going. And Nancy is still writing songs.
Nancy Schimmel
Margot Smith
Margot Smith, June 2021, introduced us to her book From Czernowitz to China and Beyond; A 20th Century Life, her mother’s extraordinary account of a peripatetic and adventurous life. Ethel Wiesinger (neé Liebman) was born in 1890 in the eastern Austro-Hungarian Empire, spent years in China, New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. She married a gentile German who fought in China during WWI and on the Nazi side during WWII. She survived wild political swings, the Depression and divorce, brought up two accomplished daughters, and attracted the interesting and influential to her side.
E. Kay Trimburger, September 2020, is a retired professor of women's and gender studies. She brings a researcher's rigor as the author of Creole Son; An Adoptive Mother Untangles Nature & Nurture, and searches for answers in her struggle as a single, white woman to understand the growing disconnect between her and her Creole son.
Kay Trimburger
Audra Willeke
Audra Willeke, July 2022, talked about her book Lithuanian Roots in American Soil. Her family escaped Lithuania after WWII (1944) and lived in displaced persons’ camps in Germany. After the U.S. Congress approved the Displaced Persons Act in 1948, and after finding a U.S. sponsor, the family left in 1949 and settled in Boston. Audra has used parts of her father’s memoir to recapture her family’s challenging story when they lived with great difficulty first under brutal Russian, then German occupations. Lithuania was annexed by the Soviet Union in 1940, and in 1991 it was the first of the Soviet republics to declare independence. The current war in Ukraine puts Lithuania once more at risk of being swallowed up by its neighbor.