Three Song Stories

Episode 41 – Charles Runnells

Charles Runnells is reporter who covers arts and entertainment for The News-Press. If you look around at a local arts event in Ft. Myers, you can probably find him sitting in a corner scribbling notes for a review or standing near the stage shooting photos with his trusty Nikon. Charles was born in Alabama, but he grew up all over the place thanks to his Army father. He has a journalism degree from Auburn University and started working at The News-Press in 1998.

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Episode 40 – Eric Riemenschneider

Eric Riemenschneider is an artist who makes large-scale oil paintings and mixed media digital designs. His works have been exhibited in the Robert Rauschenberg Gallery, Space 39, Tincture Gallery, Selby Gallery, Alliance for the Arts, Big Arts, Howl Gallery, Franklin Gallery, Yabo, Cru, and a solo show at the Sidney & Berne Davis Art Center.

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Episode 39 – Jesse Thorn

Jesse Thorn is host and producer of the public radio show and podcast Bullseye. Listen to it if you haven’t yet. He’s also host of the podcast Jordan, Jesse, Go!, and the co-host and producer of the podcast Judge John Hodgman. He’s also the proprietor of the podcast production outfit MaximumFun.org, which currently produces and distributes 39 podcasts if Wikipedia is up to date. From the number of times I’ve already used the word podcast you can probably tell Jesse might be the closest thing we’ve got in this world to a podcast mogul.

Episode 38 – Karen Feldman

Karen Feldman grew up in the Jersey suburbs of Philly. After getting her bachelor’s in English from Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, she headed to Manhattan and the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, where she earned her master’s degree, and came to the realization that northern winters were not for her. 

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Episode 37 – LIVE Show at the Sanibel Island Writers Conference

We were invited to do our show live on stage at the super awesome Sanibel Island Writers Conference with three renowned poets. Our guestS Major Jackson, January Gill O’Neil, and Annemarie Ní Churreáin.

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Episode 36 – Al Holland

A native of Detroit, Al started his musical career in classical music with his principal instrument being the Violincello. Al’s played in many orchestras including the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, The Highland Park Chamber Orchestra, and The Windsor Symphony. Then, he decided to try something different, so chose the keyboards as his new major instrument, which led him to join the show band, “Attraction” in 1970. He also spent many years touring with the Platters as an acclaimed vocalist and keyboard player.

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Episode 35 – Jen Ray

Jen Ray is a New York artist whose work has been exhibited primarily throughout the U.S. and Germany, where she used to live. Her art includes drawing, painting, performances, and sound works that celebrate female power and self-determination. She’s in town for a show called Blind Date at the Wasmer Art Gallery here at FGCU featuring both her work, and the work of artist Neil Bender.

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Episode 34 – Neil Bender

Neil Bender was born in New Jersey, and currently lives and works in Florida. His artwork has been shown nationally and internationally. Neil received the Joan Mitchell Foundation MFA Grant after getting his degree from the University of Georgia, attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, the ‘Painting’s Edge’ residency in Idyllwild, CA, and the Vermont Studio Center.

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Episode 33 – Robert Macomber

Robert Macomber is an award-winning and internationally recognized Florida author, lecturer, and TV commentator, best known for his Honor Series, which are naval thrillers which start during the Civil War and run into the early 1900s. He’s also been a consultant for the U.S. Department of Defense, specializing in strategic vision and planning by using historical analogies of what works.

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Episode 32 – Stephen Brittain

Stephen Brittain first came to our attention during our interview with Megan Kissinger – she mentioned a friend with pipe organ BUILT INTO HIS HOUSE. Stephen says a chance meeting in his early 20s with retired banker and theatre organ enthusiast began his love affair WITH the theatre pipe organ. Now his house is home to a 25 rank Wurlitzer theatre pipe organ that was once installed in Chicago and later San Francisco. He also owns 5 grand pianos, and an eclectic mix of antiques and historical items including things like early phonographs, a jukebox, old clocks, and a cat named Opus.

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Episode 31 – Milton “Milty” Evans

Milton “Milty” Evans lives in San Antonio with his wife Kelly, and their three freaking adorable daughters Clara, Sadie and Mimi. He works at a job out there – something related to finance, management systems, and eyewear. Anyway, what he does isn’t why I’ve got him here, it’s who he is and the role he’s played in my life.

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Episode 30 – FGCU President Mike Martin

Dr. Mike Martin (who just so happens to be President of FGCU where we make this show) has been president here for almost a year and a half. Before FGCU, he served as chancellor, or president, or vice president, or as a faculty member at a number of universities, including Colorado State, LSU, UF, and University of Minnesota – it would be correct to say he’s had a long career in higher education.

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Episode 29 – Mike Donlan

Mike is creative services manager here at WGCU, where we make this show. That pretty much means he’s the station’s graphic designer – although I’m pretty sure he’s got more on his plate than just design. Formerly a newsroom graphics editor for Gannett newspapers in Florida and California, Mike also teaches visual storytelling in Florida Gulf Coast University’s journalism program.

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Episode 28 – Jim Brock

 

Jim Brock has been teaching poetry, literature, and writing at Florida Gulf Coast University since 1998, after having been something of an academic Kelly Girl before that, teaching at universities in Indiana, Tennessee, Idaho, Pennsylvania, and Miami, before landing in Fort Myers. Btw I had to google ‘kelly girl’ and you might need to, too.

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Episode 27 – Megan Kissinger

Megan Kissinger is an acrylic painter and artist who is interested in conservation and ecology. She grew up on Perdido Bay in the Florida Panhandle, and says she’s always been close to nature. Her background in scientific illustration informs her artwork, and she says drives her try to “make viewers aware of how everything in the world is connected in some way.”

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Episode 26 – John Loscuito

John Loscuito has been director of the FGCU Art Galleries since 2014. Before that he was Registrar of the Haggerty Museum of Art at Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Over the years he’s taught art and design, curated art exhibits, reviewed exhibits and theatre productions, and juried exhibits (that’s the person who picks which pieces wind up in group shows), and he worked at Theatre X in Milwaukee for about a year.

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Episode 25 – Stick Martin

My guest today is Stick Martin, who with Dave Dave Dave created this show’s theme song. He was raised in the backwoods of Pennsylvania and toured the country as a young kid with his parents who worked as food vendors on the carnival circuit. At some point he started fiddling around with drum machines and acoustic guitars and at age 15 started writing songs and recording them onto an old tape recorder, and he started seeking out places to play his music live and that took him to places like Philadelphia, New York, Boston, Cleveland and eventually Florida, where he found his (semi) permanent home in St. Petersburg.

Episode 24 – Luc Century

Luc Century is a self-taught artist got into etching while working at a resort engraving people’s names on snow skis, then a window washing job in the 70s led to a 4 year exploration of how how to transfer images and color onto glass, which resulted in an innovative photographic process for creating stencils that could be used in sand-blast engraving, which he has applied extensively and prolifically over the years.

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Episode 23 – Angel Duncan – BONUS CONTENT

Since the the ways music connects to memories is right in Angel Duncan’s wheelhouse we asked her to stick around for a bit after we wrapped up the 3SS session to dig in a little deeper. Just a reminder, Angel is self-professed brain nerd who is also Director of Education and a clinician at the Neuropsychiatric Research Center of Southwest Florida; Executive Arts Director at the Cognitive Dynamics Foundation; and she’s on the Research Council Committee at the American Art Therapy Association.

Episode 23 – Angel Duncan

Angel Duncan is Director of Education and a clinician at the Neuropsychiatric Research Center of Southwest Florida; Executive Arts Director at the Cognitive Dynamics Foundation; and she’s on the Research Council Committee at the American Art Therapy Association. She’s a widely published author and peer reviewer.

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