Episode #76: Family Secrets Come to Light with Hiram Johnson
Release Date: 08/07/2025
Episode #79: Jake Needham on Crime & Character
Books and Brews Podcast
Books and Brews: the place where beer and literature meet! Jake Needham is an American lawyer who became a screen and television writer through a series of coincidences too ridiculous for anyone to believe. When he realized how little he actually liked movies and television, he started writing crime novels. Jake has lived in Asia and Australia since 1980, first in Sydney, then in Hong Kong, and from 1992, in Bangkok. He and his wife, an Oxford graduate and prematurely retired concert pianist, have been married for thirty-two years and have two adult sons. Jake has published seventeen novels...
info_outline
Episode #78: Technology & Truth & a Paranormal Thriller with Ashley Fontainne & Andrea Emmes
Books and Brews Podcast
Books and Brews: the place where beer and literature meet! Ashley Fontainne is an author and co-author of more than 30 novels, known for her intricate plots and writing in genres from dark comedy to mystery/thrillers to suspenseful paranormal. Andrea Emmes, a singer, performer and one-time magician’s assistant who has narrated many of Ashley’s books, steps into writing for the first time with their co-authored paranormal and psychological thriller, ETERNAL BEAUTY. We talked about masks (psychological, not covid), childhood trauma, plastic surgery…and Aquanet wiggling into tight pants in...
info_outline
Episode #77: One Family's Story of Jack the Ripper, with Robert Gereb
Books and Brews Podcast
Books and Brews: the place where beer and literature meet! Róbert Geréb is a boundary-pushing author and accomplished AI developer. As co-author of Jack the Ripper’s Assassins—the cornerstone of The Dighton Chronicles, built on multigenerational oral history from a Romani-Viking lineage—he melds immersive storytelling with rigorous historical research. He also penned two nonfiction guides through Aspect Books: EASY MILLIONAIRE MATH, a practical blueprint for building scalable, passive-income businesses; and Declutter Your Life, Enrich Your Soul, an emotionally holistic program for...
info_outline
Episode #76: Family Secrets Come to Light with Hiram Johnson
Books and Brews Podcast
Books and Brews: the place where beer and literature meet! Hiram Johnson is retired law enforcement officer, currently teaching criminal justice as an adjunct, a father, author and creator. His book Reason to Fight: a search or truth is a surprising tale of a family mystery. We talked about the event that landed his grandmother in prison for murder, prison conditions for women in the 1920s, his search for his shrouded family history and the connection he developed with a previously unknown relative in the search for his grandfather’s identity. Find Hiram’s books at Xulonpress.com ...
info_outline
Books and Brews #75: UFOs with Dona Masi
Books and Brews Podcast
Dona Masi is a writer and editor whose short fiction and articles are used in reading and writing assessments throughout the United States. Her articles on several subjects have appeared in several newspapers. She is also a playwright, and two of her plays were performed at the Provincetown Theater Company. In her writing she loves bringing relatable characters to life and depicting them in all their heroic and flawed humanity. Her debut novel, The Taking, was inspired by her interest in UFO folklore and reports of alien encounters. She lives with her husband in Dover, New Hampshire. 00:00...
info_outline
Books and Brews #74: Sci-fi and More with Bill McSciFi McCormick
Books and Brews Podcast
Books and Brews: the place where beer and literature meet! Bill McCormick is an award-winning and critically acclaimed author of several novels, graphic novels, and comic book series, and has appeared in numerous anthologies. He began writing professionally in 1986 for the Chicago Rocker Magazine in conjunction with his radio show on Z-95 (ABC-FM) and went on to write for several other magazines and blogs. He wrote a twisted news & science blog at WorldNewsCenter.org. It provided source material for his weekly radio show on WBIG 1280 AM, FOX!, which aired for 12 years. We talked about...
info_outline
Books and Brews #73: Monsters & Appalachian Lore Come to Life with Clay Gilbert
Books and Brews Podcast
Books and Brews: the place where beer and literature meet! Clay Gilbert has always believed in the power of the imagination to dissolve differences and forge connections between people. Since 2013, he has published thirteen novels, from science-fiction and horror to YA dystopia and urban fantasy. His works include the science-fiction series Children of Evohe, which began in 2013 with Annah and the Children of Evohe, as well as the horror novel Dark Road to Paradise and the dark fantasy novel Pearl: A Monster Story. Clay lives and works in Knoxville, Tennessee, where his cat, Rosalind,...
info_outline
Episode # 72: Wild Alaska with Mr. November
Books and Brews Podcast
Books and Brews: the place where beer and literature meet! Michael Modzelewski (Mojo-less-key) grew up in Cleveland, Ohio, the son of a famous NFL football player with the Cleveland Browns, Ed “Big Mo” Modzelewski. Michael graduated from Indiana University with a degree in English Literature. He is the author of five books, including INSIDE PASSAGE, about a two year stay on a wilderness island in the Inside Passage to Alaska. After living “date-less” on the wild island, Michael was chosen a “Bachelor of the Month” by Cosmopolitan Magazine. Mr. November received 5,000 letters from...
info_outline
Books and Brews #71: Time Travel, Sci-fi and Woodstock with Beth Duke
Books and Brews Podcast
Bestselling author Beth Duke's Anywhen is the ultimate outsider story—a young woman yearning to belong across time itself. With universal themes of love, jealousy, sacrifice, friendship, joy, loss, and forgiveness, this genre-defying novel is a story like no other...one that will stay with you long after the final page. Beth read from her latest book, Anywhen, that combines sci-fi, time travel, and historical fiction. We talked about Woodstock, the central event of Anywhen, about southern fiction, stereotypes, the good and bad of AI, and Utopias. Is Baezy’s world a Utopia? Did...
info_outline
Books and Brews #70: Sherlock Holmes Alive Again! with Richard T. Ryan
Books and Brews Podcast
A lifelong Sherlockian, Richard T. Ryan is the author of nine Sherlock Holmes novels and currently working on his tenth. He’s also written a well-received murder mystery “Deadly Relations which has been produced twice off-Broadway. He pursued graduate studies at Notre Dame where he majored in medieval literature. Our talk ranged from Knights Templar finding Minnesota in the 1300s to the reasons Arthur Conan Doyle killed Sherlock Holmes to the inefficient bombers of the 1880s and the Scarlet Pimpernel and Mark Wahlberg. 00:00 START 06:20 Drink 1: Watson’s Delight 07:20 Reading 1:...
info_outlineBooks and Brews: the place where beer and literature meet!
Hiram Johnson is retired law enforcement officer, currently teaching criminal justice as an adjunct, a father, author and creator. His book Reason to Fight: a search or truth is a surprising tale of a family mystery.
We talked about the event that landed his grandmother in prison for murder, prison conditions for women in the 1920s, his search for his shrouded family history and the connection he developed with a previously unknown relative in the search for his grandfather’s identity.
Find Hiram’s books at Xulonpress.com
00:00 START
06:26 Drink 1: the Blank Slate
8:14 Reading 1: Asking Daddy for the Truth
12:41 A quest leads to murder and miscegenation,
20:56 Creative non-fiction: fact vs conjecture
26:07 Drink 2: the Pot of Gold
28:50 Reading 2: My Mother Bernice
33:30 the need to know our family history
37:20 Did Fred’s father ever know the truth?
39:31 Drink 3: The Last Word
42:55 Reading 3: What Started it All
47:50 Convicted…for self-defense?
51:30 How Bernice faced the injustice
Visit our PATREON for our extended AFTER HOURS with Hiram Johnson
Www.xulonpress.com
www.lauravosika.com
www.gabrielshornpress.com
www.booksandbrews.net
~ ~ ~
If you enjoy our interviews or have benefitted from them, we invite you to help us continue our work. It takes a great deal of time and money to produce Books and Brews. We’ve been doing interviews since January 2017 as a free service to authors. We continue to promote those authors on our social media for years after their interviews.
- Subscribing, following, liking, commenting and sharing all help us to keep doing what we do.
- A $5 tip helps us pay for our many expenses: Libsyn hosting, web hosting, Google meets, providing the drinks for the interview and the many hours of preparation and editing that go into each episode.
- Patreon: patreon.com/BooksandBrewswithLauraVosika
- Tip Jar: paypal.me/booksandbrewsMN
- Books and Brews products:
https://www.zazzle.com/store/books_an… (more to come) - Sponsor an episode to promote your product or service: contact us booksandbrewslive@gmail.com
COMING NEXT MONTH:
Sam Ritchie…if walls could talk! To her, they do!
UPCOMING EVENTS:
Gabriel's Horn is accepting submissions for its anthology NEW THEMES: CHILDREN
See Laura's interview at Central Valley Talk on YouTube
Our theme music is from www.bensound.com.
Subscribe to our YouTube Channel to get notifications of all our new videos. We have now interviewed 115 authors! Would you like to be featured? Leave a comment.
https://www.youtube.com/@booksandbrews