S3 EP 136: Jeanne McWilliams Blasberg, Author of Daughter of a Promise

Hello Happy People, 

Dianne is  thrilled to bring you another amazing literary fiction author today. Jeanne McWilliams Blasberg may be best known as a bestselling and award-winning author, but she is also proud to add more to her credits, having recently become the steward of a 420-acre regenerative farm in Wisconsin.

Her farming venture aside, Jeanne has been working hard for several years to build a solid base for her writing career. Her first book, Eden, was published in 2017 and earned her a prestigious Benjamin Franklin Silver Award for Best New Voice in Fiction. She was also a finalist for the Sarton Women’s Book Award for Historical Fiction. 

Jeanne followed up that successful publication in 2019 with The Nine. As with the first book, her second novel added more awards to her growing list of accolades. It won the 2019 Foreword Indies Gold Award in Thriller & Suspense and the Gold Medal and Juror’s Choice in the 2019 National Indie Excellence Awards.

With such a prestigious start to her author career, there was much anticipation for her next release. Daughter of a Promise, which she published earlier this year, is actually the third in a thematic trilogy. 

To find out more about the exciting career progression Jeanne took to to become a bestselling, award-winning author, go listen to her interview now. 

Jeanne's Website
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Jeanne on Amazon

Transcript

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SPEAKER_02 0:02

Welcome to BookBanter with me, your host, Diane Burkhart. I hope you will join me every Wednesday as we explore all things to do with, well, books. Let's get on with our show today. Hello, my happy people. Today is September 18th, 2024, and while you are listening to this, I am actually on vacation in Berlin. It's been a while since we've had a good vacation, so this one is really something that we're looking forward to and has been well deserved, I think. But while we are enjoying our vacation, you get to enjoy today's special guest. We have got a fantastic literary author today that you are just absolutely going to love. She accidentally created a thematic trilogy that began in 2017 with the publication of her first book, Eden. It was followed up by the nine in 2019, and she brought her trilogy to a completion this last April with Daughter of a Promise. These novels have not only made her a best-selling author, but have won her numerous awards and accolades. But I think that's enough for me. Let's not waste any more time and bring out our guest. Please welcome to BookBanter with Diane Burkhart Jeannie McWilliams Blasburg. I always like to start out my episodes by just having our guest tell everyone who you are and what you do.

SPEAKER_00 1:33

My name's Jeannie Blasberg, and I am an author. I'm also most recently the steward of a 420-acre regenerative farm in Wisconsin. But many people know me as a novelist. I have published three novels, and most recently Daughter of a Promise, which is keeping me busy out on the road talking about it. It just came out in April.

SPEAKER_02 2:00

Now, this book is actually the last book in a thematic trilogy that you put out.

SPEAKER_00 2:07

That's right. I didn't set out starting to write a trilogy or a series, but it seems like I like to regurgitate the same themes, and maybe that's negative, but I'm obsessed with domestic drama, family relationships, parent-child relationships, and what's passed down from one generation to the next. And my first novel focused on four generations of women in a family summer home in southern Rhode Island. In my second book, similar themes, totally different plot. It's a mother and a son story, but my main character visits the summer town in Rhode Island. So I had a common setting. And then with my third novel, I actually have some of the minor characters from the first novel showing up as bigger actors, as well as from the second novel showing up as bigger actors. And I think as I started to write each of these books, I wanted to give a nod to people who'd really loved the first novel and its setting. But I also, as an artist, found myself really, this world that I'd created, it wasn't going away. These characters wanted to show up again and either have redemption or have a chance at a new storyline for themselves. So anyway, I really enjoyed creating this greater imaginary world where there's the summer community, there's this New England boarding school scandal, and now with Daughter of a Promise, there's young adults starting off their life at uh really elite investment banking training programs and that world of privilege and having it be discovered and kind of experienced by outsiders is something I've just enjoyed doing. So I think I've done it as much for myself as I have for my readers, but I hope people can read each book individually or say, hey, I like this author and read another one of my books and realize that you're getting a little Easter egg here and there. That is always fun as a reader. Which book actually came first? Was that Eden? Correct. Eden came first. Eden is the reason I became a writer. That story was in my head for so many years. It took me about 10 years to get it down in an appropriate form that was both a page turner and had a very good plot and a reason to want to keep reading with the psyche and emotional angst that all these women were going through. My first draft was filled with a lot of the emotional angst and interiority of these characters. But it took me a while to really learn the craft of novel writing and the creating the arc for each of these women and the arc of the story and the drama that needed to exist in order for it to be a pleasurable read.

SPEAKER_02 5:12

Well, and it sounds like you actually achieved your goal because that book won the Benjamin Franklin Silver Award for Best New Voice in Fiction and was a finalist for the Sultan Women's Book Award for Historical Fiction. I mean, that's not a bad start.

SPEAKER_00 5:28

No, I know. I think I worked really hard on that book and wasn't gonna let it out into the world until it was my very, very best effort. And so I'm very proud of it. And I guess seven or eight years later, I'll look at it and I don't think there's a thing I would have changed. So it is another reason that it was very fun to continue on with those characters. And if people pick up Daughter of a Promise, they might really enjoy Eden as kind of a prequel, if you will.

SPEAKER_02 5:59

What inspired you to do that first novel? I mean, this obviously wasn't your planned career path.

SPEAKER_00 6:07

Well, to tell you the truth, I've always been a closet creative writer. Really, a lot of short stories in my teenage and college years. And then I went off and had a corporate career. But I always was a writer. I actually wrote cases for a professor at Harvard Business School. So the case study method is how classes are taught there. And I started to realize I could manage this life of writing with my goals for my family and for our children and the way I wanted to spend my time. So it's not that I've never been a writer, but definitely the novel writing was something I did in secret and didn't really emerge with this book until I thought it was done. It certainly wasn't done. And then I started taking a lot of classes. But the inspiration has to do with, I guess, my own life story. Always feeling that the narrative had to do with being born into a situation that wasn't necessarily joyful and happy. I mean, my parents loved me, but I was definitely not expected. And my mother's pregnancy changed both my parents' lives dramatically. And so living with that story in my head of how I came to be was just always something I thought about. And my husband's family had a similar situation where his mother became pregnant but gave their child up for adoption. And she was pregnant before she got married. I started thinking so much about how each generation in a family of women in the 20th century experienced an unexpected pregnancy with so many different circumstances. And so we don't have to go into that, but the whole area of reproductive rights was just a larger social construct. But then very personally and within a family, I really wanted to explore and butt these women up against each other, each who had had a similar experience, had to keep things very secret, but lived in a completely different time, even if they're in the same family and within a few generations of each other. So that was my initial inspiration. And to try to figure out how to tell that story right, it was inspired, like I said, by women I knew and women in my family, but not any one character in Eden is representative of somebody in real life. Every character is like this amalgamation, and I like to say a refracted light is infusing each of these characters. They each contain bits and pieces of real people and situations that really happened.

SPEAKER_02 8:57

After you published Eden, what was it that inspired you to go on and create the nine?

SPEAKER_00 9:03

Well, that's a great question. So Eden took forever, and it was a very complicated story. And all the people I showed it to and all the classes that I took, I'd always get the feedback. This is so ambitious, you have so many characters, it's such a long timeline. You know, you're trying to infuse it with these biblical illusions. Maybe you should try to work on a novel that has fewer characters, a shorter timeline, and has a lot more action. So I did put Eden in a drawer. And at that time in my life, I was, for better or worse, I was sending my kids off into the world at a fairly young age. They each went to a boarding school as freshmen in high school, so around the age of 14. And we lived in Boston. So they went to schools that weren't very far from where we lived, but it was this world that I was completely foreign to. I went to a big public high school in Southern California. And so this New England elite boarding school community was new, both as my kids were touring and applying, and then as they attended, and then as I heard other stories. So it was kind of easy for me to write the nine. It just flowed from this place of righteous indignation, to tell you the truth, at one point. Then I worked on it to make it a more universal story that wasn't kind of about me or my family and our experience. So it turned into a bit of a mystery and a scandal. And that book has won a lot of awards and suspense and thriller. A mother drops off her son at this prestigious boarding school thinking it's the key to his future. And it's anything but he gets sucked into a secret society and a crime happens on campus, and there's all sorts of twists and turns and um a lot of action. So, to tell you the truth, that book was basically written when Eden was published, and I had to work on it some more. It came out just two years later, but it was really in a drawer ready to go. And so people had said, why don't you publish the nine first? It's such a great action-filled story. And I thought I could do that, but the reason I wanted to write was because of this story and these women and this family in Eden. And by the time I'd finished the nine, I knew a lot more about how to put a book together. And I think working on the nine helped me just subconsciously figure out what was wrong with Eden. And so when I went back to work on it, I had more experience as a writer and had taken a lot more classes and had more mentorship. So it was very easy for me to pull that one out of the drawer and get it ready for the world.

SPEAKER_02 11:55

So, how long after you published The Nine did you start working on Daughter of Promise? Was it something that was already in your head, kind of the same way with the other two, that you were already ready to do the third one?

SPEAKER_00 12:07

Well, I'll have to say the first two came from this personal place of just having to get the story out. When I was touring with the nine, it was late in the year in 2019. And then when COVID occurred, I kind of stopped the book promotion for the nine. And I did have some character sketches. That's really all I started with. Getting through this pandemic and even just the early days when you didn't really know what was going on, maintaining the structure to my life and like producing something that might be, or just, you know, keeping up my writing practice was hard, but something that really helped me get through those days. So Daughter of a Promise was drafted with a lot of effort in the spring of 2020 as I was home. And it's no surprise the early days of the pandemic actually work their way into the timeline of Daughter of a Promise, not in a way that's like forced, but it does find its way into the novel. And it really was something that I started in earnest in 2020 and completed it much faster than the other two novels because, again, experience helps with making this process a little more efficient. But I attended a fellowship program through Stony Brook University in New York that finished up in July of 2022, then continued to work on the novel. That year-long program really helped me to revise the way the story was told and make it so much better. It basically was a completely different novel after that year-long program. But for maybe six more months, I worked on the novel before signing a publishing contract. And then that would have been in November of 2022, I think, and just goes to show you how long the publishing queue is. We then had a date for publication of April 2nd of 2024.

SPEAKER_02 14:11

That's one thing that I don't think a lot of people realize whenever they try to go traditionally published, they don't realize how long the process can actually take.

SPEAKER_00 14:20

Yeah. And even if your book is acquired, sometimes the publishing company has a lot of edits that you need to make and you have no idea when a publication date might be. They might have an idea of a season, which is either the spring or the fall of any given year. But yeah, you don't even have a guarantee that they'll actually publish it, even if they've acquired the rights. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 14:44

I've actually spoken to a few authors that they sold the rights, but then it was never published, so they bought the right back so that they could self-publish it.

SPEAKER_00 14:53

Yeah, there's no understanding. I mean, publishing is a business. Publishing companies all need to make money, and so they make business decisions. And sometimes there's great art that never finds its way to the public domain because of one business decision or another. And so, yeah, I applaud authors who take control of their work and believe in themselves enough to kind of sponsor that art getting out there.

SPEAKER_02 15:23

Daughter of Promises gotten some fantastic reviews already. I mean, Kyrkus Reviews gave it a fantastic one with this is a wonderfully wise book. It's a graceful modern-day retelling of a biblical love story. Then forward reviews, a powerful feminist novel set during a tumultuous year. I mean, these are some very engaging reviews that really make you want to find out more about this book.

SPEAKER_00 15:50

Thank you, Diane. It's true. Feeling like people are connecting with the message, it's the most satisfying thing as an author. Some people measure success with sales or different metrics of success, obviously, but I really feel like I've done my job and I feel great as an author, whether it's Kirkus or it's a bookstagrammer or anybody who's taken time with my book and they communicate back exactly what I was trying to say in this novel. It's it's like being heard and seen in the most incredible way.

SPEAKER_02 16:29

One of the things that I love about a book like this, my general taste for reading just something on a weekend when I want to relax tends to go towards horror or suspense or sci-fi. I very rarely pick up contemporary books just because I'm trying to escape that. I'm trying to escape the modern world around me. So I don't like reading books that are about the modern world around me and people in it. This book That's so interesting.

SPEAKER_00 16:59

That's so interesting.

SPEAKER_02 17:01

When I started reading this one just to get an idea of your style, so that we would be able to discuss it a little bit more intelligently. I got sucked in. You have such a fantastic writing style, it's very imaginative, it's very engaging, and it really just builds a world that you can see yourself falling into.

SPEAKER_00 17:25

Thank you. That means a lot. So I guess, you know, this world is one that I think a lot about. I think for me, setting is so important and kind of the energy and vibe of a certain time of and place is something I'm really trying to capture. And probably as a lover of fantasy and other genre, you appreciate good world building. And I think that's a key component, regardless of whether you're writing contemporary literary fiction or horror or mystery or something like that. So I'm appreciative that you felt that way.

SPEAKER_02 18:02

I think pretty much anybody who reads this book is going to feel that way. Because you just have such a great descriptive style and your characters are clearly developed. They're complex and they're interesting, and the story just flows and has like a wonderful pace. It's not too fast, it's not too slow. It's a nice, comfortable read that is engaging and entertaining.

SPEAKER_00 18:29

Wow, Diane, you're making me feel so good. But the key is to create a novel that's very pleasurable for the reader. And so to have a story that flows at a good pace is the ultimate goal. It's not without a lot of hard work because I wrote a lot of words, and the words that actually end up in the novel are just a fraction of what you write. And you read and you're like, this is overwritten. I can get the point across saying it this way. I could take out paragraphs or pages, I could take out a whole chapter, and I don't think it would change. And so if you think of a construction worker paving the most beautiful road that's so easy to ride your bike on or drive on, you're like, oh, this is a nice even path. I'm really trying to get all the potholes out. I don't want you to bump on anything. I don't want you to feel like, ugh, maybe I'll turn off or arrest now because this road is kind of getting to me. But it is the hardest part of the writing process, those final edits when you are really just hoping the reader isn't going to get stuck up on anything. And when I do have beta readers or final readers, other writers who I share and workshop with, that's what we really read for towards the end of somebody's work is what are you stumbling on? Like what just trips you up? It could be a word, it could be a sentence, or it could just be an idea, it could be some fluff that just doesn't matter. But thank you. I do work hard on that final pavement.

SPEAKER_02 20:03

And I think having beta readers or people that you can just bounce your work off of is so important. I am part of a memoir writing group over here in Germany, and those people are absolutely a necessity for whenever I get stuck on my writing. Having other people who have never seen your work before to read it or listen to it while you read it and have that feedback from all of these different people who are hearing the same story in a different way because of their own experience and understanding is so vital because you never have any idea of how somebody is going to read and understand your work. You can only write it from your perspective and understanding. So having those other voices lets you know how well you're actually getting your intended message across.

SPEAKER_00 20:58

Yeah, that's such a good point. And when we talked earlier about the length of time it took me to write Eden compared to Daughter of a Promise, I think it's because I'm part of writing communities now. I partake in these classes and I share my work very early with folks, not even sharing written pages, but like sharing outlines and a concept. And yeah, it's like having a focus group as you're creating a product. I don't want it to sound crass, but it saves you a lot of time when other people kind of unanimously say, nah, that doesn't really work for me. I mean, if one person says it, you can take it with a grain of salt. But if five or six people are saying it, then I think to myself, Jeannie, this is just one of your little interests. It's not really working with readers who you respect. So I would say, as a writer, the process becomes a little bit more streamlined if you're willing. To engage with those readers and workshop earlier on in the process.

SPEAKER_02 22:04

Daughter of Promise just published this past April. Why don't you go ahead and tell us a little bit about this particular book?

SPEAKER_00 22:13

Oh, I'd love to. So I think you alluded to the fact when you read the Kirkus review that this is the modern retelling of a biblical love story. But just like you don't have to read my other two books in order to enjoy this third book in a trilogy, you really don't have to be that well-versed in the Bible to appreciate this. It's a retelling of the story of David and Bathsheba. And I really approach that story as a piece of literature, as a foundational text in our canon, not really from a religious point of view. So I think I want to just state that. I mean, I think some people conflate biblical retellings with an author who has a religious agenda. And that's not what I have. I have a respect for the Old Testament as an incredible piece of literature that survived for millennia. So that said, I take this powerful king and I make him the head of mergers and acquisitions at an investment bank in the year 2019. And my young Beth Sheba, her name is Betzabe Ruiz. She's just graduated from college and lands her first job in New York at this investment bank where David works. She's in the training program. She has a roommate, another friend from college. You know, she kind of shows up in New York with a slew of college grads as they do after graduation, finding apartments, going out, making friends. But Sabe finds herself, however, as a theater and psychology major, not a hundred percent ready for what she's walked into. So she takes it upon herself to do a lot of study and work late into the night so that she does well in her training program while other people are kind of going out to the bar of the moment or taking weekends at the beach. She ends up finishing the summer, top of her class, and enters this world of mergers and acquisitions, which is kind of the macho department and the big money maker for the firm. And there's all these long hours. So the long hours at work really infuse her relationships with her colleagues with a lot of intimacy. And you know, you're kind of in the trenches with these folks. And I love that idea because it's a little bit of an incubator for relationships going on steroids, because you are spending so much time with people. So things happen and she has friendships and she has flirtations. But as a backdrop to all of this, she's finding herself more and more attracted to David. And if people do know the biblical story, this coming together is sort of inevitable. And the way I've decided to tell this story is something that I think works well and is resonating well with readers. Batsabe is writing this story in the first person as a letter to an unborn son. She's now several years in the future, and this year has unfolded, her first year in New York, and she wants to write about it. She wants to capture it before it completely fades from memory. And she also wants to get her own version of the story out into the world. So the entire novel is in one long letter, and she has the ability at beginning of chapters, ends of chapters, or even sometimes in the middle of chapters to insert her older and wiser voice, like this might be hard to read, or this wasn't my proudest moment, or you know, there's just this sense of her now having reflected on the events of that year. And so the reason I think I also really wanted to do this as a retelling is that in the Old Testament, the story is told entirely in the third person with regard to its effect on David's life. And the young woman who has such life-altering experiences has no voice in the original text, and we know nothing of her reactions or her emotions. So I really loved creating this character in Beth Sabe, being 100% in her head and telling this story 100% in her voice, both her older and wiser voice, and her voice as an enthusiastic over-the-moon 23-year-old with New York City and all its excitement as its backdrop. As I kind of mentioned, COVID enters the timeline in the second half of her year in New York, and the sequestration that was required and all of the tragedy fits well into the story as a whole. And it also created this amazing vehicle where it became very believable that an older man and a younger woman could avoid the scrutiny of both their colleagues and the world at large because they could hide behind the need to sequester in place or quarantine together, and nobody really knew that they were an item. It gave me an opportunity to find another incubator where a relationship can kind of go on steroids and progress much more quickly than it would under normal circumstances. I did have experience my own first job after college was in an investment bank in a training program, although that was many decades ago. I relied on that emotional, like treading water feeling to create that world. And I also was able to use vocabulary in some of those scenes that created a sense of authority, like I knew what I was talking about in this corporate and financial world. And then, of course, pressure test it with some of my children's friends and their colleagues all in their mid to late 20s to keep it real and engaging and current.

SPEAKER_02 28:31

How did you go from starting out in investment banking to teaching, writing, and co-chairing book festivals and things like this? Because that's quite a different world.

SPEAKER_00 28:42

It is, but I've lived a long life, Diane. I I don't know if I told your listeners that I'm almost 60 years old, 58, almost 59. I graduated from college and went to Wall Street because it was a really prestigious opportunity, really. I was a competitive person. And when other people in my class were interviewing and applying to certain jobs, I thought I want to do that. And I also really wanted to be able to support myself right out of college. I did not want to return home and I did not want to depend on my parents any longer. And I saw this as an amazing opportunity, but I had that experience of just treading water and not really feeling like it was a natural fit for me. I did fine, but it definitely was not the way my brain worked. So the whole time I was working on Wall Street, I also knew it's not what I was meant to do and it wasn't what was making me happy. But it was something that also translated into then several other jobs in corporate finance and strategy. And it wasn't until we moved to Boston and I had a young baby and took on this job at Harvard Business School that I was kind of able to first marry the business side of all the experience I'd had and the writing side and to write these cases in a way that were both they were a bit formulaic, but they also needed to be very entertaining. And there was a spark that went off that, you know, I'd always enjoyed writing, and I should really pay more attention to this excitement I'm feeling about these case studies. And Boston is such a great city because there are so many universities around, and many of them offer extension schools or adult education. And so again, I became a student, and I then eventually became immersed in some of these literary communities where I was a student and became the consummate volunteer. I always end up, you know, being a champion of the communities that I think have really helped me and I want other people to have access.

SPEAKER_02 31:00

Now, this is the point of the show that we like to do five quick questions that never turn out to be quick, but we always keep trying and hope that one day we'll succeed. Are you ready? Sure. Question one What is the best thing that you have found about being a teacher?

SPEAKER_00 31:20

Oh, that's easy. Being a teacher, well, I learn more from my students, and I learn more in the process of trying to teach a topic than I do in any other way. It really forces you to be able to explain things clearly. And the opportunity to edit and read other people's work is a lesson in being concise and being a good line reader and a good editor. Those teach you so much about writing and communication as well.

SPEAKER_02 31:49

Absolutely. So question two What do you love to grow most in your garden?

SPEAKER_00 31:57

Oh, okay. So people are gonna think this is weird. But we have a lot of native and perennial plants here on our farm in Wisconsin, and we grow vegetables. If that's our main commercial operation, 24 different varieties of vegetables. But close to the house, I have my own plot of kale, and it's not a perennial. I have to put it in every spring, although kale is so hardy and it lasts well into the fall. I like a dinosaur kale. I grow mint and basil close by, and I clip a few leaves and make a delicious smoothie in the morning. So my breakfast comes out of the garden, and the mint, the basil, and the kale are three staples of my morning smoothie.

SPEAKER_02 32:45

That sounds fantastic. Whenever I was living back in Kansas, I used to grow kale and would make kale chips. I love kale chips.

SPEAKER_00 32:53

Oh, Diane, last season we had so much kale that we were growing in our beds for sale. And the customer who we had counted on to be buying that kale had a change of plan. So we had a surplus of kale and we were giving it to places that send food to folks with food insecurity, and we were using second harvest in all sorts of ways to make sure people could eat this kale that we grew. We still had extra. And I made so many batches of kale chips. However, my kale chips with the olive oil and all the parmesan cheese I had on them were not even a healthy alternative.

SPEAKER_01 33:37

But that sounds so good.

SPEAKER_00 33:40

Yeah, I'm looking forward to that. Actually, my neighbor came over for dinner the other night and she said something. Are you gonna make those kale chips again? So I think they were good. Everybody liked them.

SPEAKER_01 33:50

Well, you know, and so many people you say kale and they're just like, oh, really? It's like, no, try it. It is so good.

SPEAKER_00 33:57

Yeah. The dinosaur leaves I like much better than the curly leaves, although we use curly leaves for the chips, but massaging the dinosaur leaves in some oil and making like a kale Caesar salad, I just deep dark green, you look at it and you think, all these vitamins, they're just it's just so full of nutrition. Yeah, I do really love kale. And I love it as a gardener because it's so hardy and it's sort of hard to mess up. Yeah. And hard to kill it, that you can plant it early and it lasts long into the fall.

SPEAKER_02 34:32

Now, question three. Since you are so nomadic, living in New England, in Park City, Utah, and Wisconsin, what is your favorite travel destination?

SPEAKER_00 34:43

You know, I've been thinking a lot about that because I have not been quote unquote vacationing much in the last four or five years. But maybe I found the secret is that I have landed in beautiful places. You know, I'm in Park City in the winter, where so many people, you know, travel from from all over the world. I feel like I'm so lucky to live there. And I'm on a beautiful shoreline in many of the months of the summer. And, you know, I feel so lucky to have created this life with this pattern that allows me to have real purpose and community in each place, but not necessarily be a tourist.

SPEAKER_03 35:28

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 35:29

But I guess if I was to be a tourist, I don't know, I've gotten really into hiking and walking. So I would pick a destination that offers an amazing trail to walk. And I've never been to New Zealand and I've heard about the hiking there. And I think I just really love a beautiful natural environment, but also the opportunity to travel slowly by walking or hiking and to kind of, I don't know, experience the birds, the plants, the topography. I've gotten a little bit more solitary in my later life. I'm not going to the restaurants and the clubs and worrying about that as much as I am enjoying what I've heard and pictures I've seen about some of these beautiful walks and hikes in the world.

SPEAKER_02 36:21

Well, I think that's definitely a good travel destination. Yeah. Question four. If you had to choose another career, what do you think you would choose?

SPEAKER_00 36:34

Well, I guess I dabbled a little bit with this writing retellings and uh studying the Old Testament and the different stories I really like alluding to. I don't know. I've studied with my rabbi for so long, for 20 years we've been studying together, and everything I've learned from her in some ways have worked its way into my books. But I guess I, and not that I would be a member of the clergy, but I have so much admiration for the wisdom and the emotional support and healing that she provides. I don't know. I can see myself being in like a social worker, a therapist, someplace like a role in which I'm interacting with people who really need to talk and figure things out and have stuff going on. I don't know. I I spent a lot of time in my own head thinking these types of things through. And maybe I think if I had a different career and I had thought about it earlier and got the training, I think I could make a difference in that area and that might be satisfying. And a very noble pursuit, too. Yeah, yeah. I mean, noble, but also we talked about teaching, how much we get out of teaching as individuals. I'd have to think like therapy is a similar thing. It elevates your consciousness in a way or takes you on a different plane, or it has you appreciate humanity in a different way. I mean, I can't think that it also doesn't like improve your own life being in a role like that.

SPEAKER_02 38:15

Definitely. Question five What book would you recommend to the readers to pick up?

SPEAKER_00 38:25

Oh wow, that's a great question. Um, I'm a big fan of audiobooks. I don't know that this is light reading. I just finished James by Percival Everett, which came out last month. And it is also a retelling of Huckleberry Finn, but it is from um Jim's point of view. And I find it to be a really important book going back to a classic by Mark Twain and hearing it in the voice of a character who was really pigeonholed as a slave as not being very intelligent and not kind of knowing how the world works and being a passenger on that raft as opposed to like a leader. The this book, James, is a very, very profound retelling that does an amazing job of uh flipping that classic work on its head. And maybe it's because I've become a nerd of these retellings, but it's an important book. And I think along with all the summer reading people might do that's fluffy and fun, it's important to throw one in that makes you think a lot. And I would say reading James really had me thinking.

SPEAKER_02 39:49

This has been absolutely fabulous. I want to thank you so much for being with me today, but please, before we go, remind everybody who you are and where can they find your books.

SPEAKER_00 40:00

Thanks, Diane. Um, it's been so much fun. My name is Jean Blasberg. My latest book is Daughter of a Promise, and you can learn all about my writing and my novels on my website, which is geneblastberg.com. I also have links to my social media on my website, but I'm pretty active on Instagram and Substack as Jean Blasberg author.

SPEAKER_02 40:25

And links to your social media and your website will be in the description of today's podcast on bookbanter.com on our broadcast page and also in the BookBanter magazine, which is currently available at Burkhartbooks.com. Thank you again. This has been absolutely fabulous. Wonderful Diana had such a good time talking with you. So there you have it, folks. My incredible interview with the fantastic Jeannie McWilliams Blasberg. Now remember, you do not have to read her books in order they were published. You can start anywhere, and you will find that they are fantastic no matter which order you read them in. So don't be afraid to go grab Daughter of a Promise first. It is available wherever books are sold. And if they don't have it on the shelf, have them ordered in. It'll be worth the wait. Now next week we have Mary P. Fisher and we are going to be discussing her memoir, The Other Side of Nursing, Lessons I Learned from My Patients. You might recognize her name. She has been a featured poet in BookBenture Magazine before, and we're going to talk all about her memoir and her long career in nursing. Now, if you have not been checking out BookBenture magazine, you are really missing out. We have grown so much in the last year and we are coming up on our one year anniversary. We have grown from a 34-page digital-only magazine to almost 80 pages each issue, and it's still growing. We have added poetry, we're adding book reviews, and we have got so much more coming. And to celebrate everything that we have achieved and everything that we have planned for the future, we want to give away a one-year subscription to the digital download version of BookBanter magazine. You can find all the details about this contest in our October-November issue of BookBanter magazine coming October 1st. You can buy your copy directly from our website, BurkhartBooks.com. It's only $2.99 and you get a digital download to keep that has all of the live links so that you can click and go to find information about all of the authors we feature on BookBanter with Diane Burkhart, our Book Talk podcast, and in BookBanter magazine. By buying a copy of BookBanter magazine, you are helping to support BookBanter with Diane Burkhart and everything that we're doing to bring you great authors every week. So that's it for today, folks. Time for you all to go forth and be very happy that we've got more great things in store for you.