*****TUNE IN THIS SUNDAY 5/17 @ 3:00PM (PST) TO L.A. TALK RADIO ~ LISTEN ONLINE @ WWW.LATALKRADIO.COM OR DOWNLOAD WWW.FLYCAST.FM TO YOUR BLACKBERRY OR iPHONE AND LISTEN ‘LIVE’ FROM YOUR DEVICE!***** (on Flycast, search “LA Talk Radio 2″)
Listeners, call in during the show and chat with us! Call-in # is: (818) 602-4929
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
I really enjoy every guest that comes onto the show. And I gotta say…..I am SO looking forward to the interview with our next guest:
DIANE HAMMOND
VERY interesting lady. VERY gifted writer. Instead of writing about her, I’d rather have you read a little of what she has written about herself:
“It’s hard to believe that anyone could possibly care about where I was born, but for the sake of due diligence, it was in Queens, NY. I grew up in Upper Nyack, a suburb of New York City, without a lot of drama, and the most important thing I learned in my four years at Middlebury College in Vermont was that I could write in James Joyce’s stream-of-consciousness style fluently and for long periods of time without breaking a sweat. That was also the very first time I dabbled in fiction, though I wasn’t aware of it at the time, only that I was having fun.
I began my professional life at a department store in Honolulu, Hawaii in 1977, but I was fired, so who cares about that job. I badly wanted to be an advertising copywriter but no one would hire me, so instead I became an editorial assistant for a publisher of building industry tabloids. At the first office Christmas party the executives exchanged, with a lot of fanfare and as tokens of their highest mutual regard, a decommissioned and presumably disarmed land mine and a surplused torpedo. The staff were then encouraged to exchange sexually explicit gifts and open them publicly for the amusement of the group (this was in 1977, before there was such a thing as sexual harassment). There was rumored to be a lot of cocaine circulating on the executive floor (where I was not), which might have explained why decisions were made very, very quickly and no one had a weight problem. It was an interesting place to work. I lasted there for two years, until a move took me to Washington D.C. in 1980.”
Early in her career, Diane Hammond wrote for Woman’s World, Mademoiselle, Yankee, the Washington Review, and (in her words) “other periodicals that I can’t remember the names of right now. I was much prouder of the fact that I began receiving personal rejection notices from C. Michael Curtis at The Atlantic Monthly, and Daniel Menaker, then an editor at The New Yorker.”
Love her attitude!
She has written about a number of things…..the people around her, you name it. Then, as the official spokesperson, she started writing about one of her most interesting “colleagues”: Keiko, the killer whale star of the hit movie “Free Willy”
“I watched Keiko’s keepers regularly spend hours in a frigid pool with him, encouraging him to exercise, stimulating his mind and keeping him company,” Hammond says. In her novel (“Hannah’s Dream” - below), Hannah’s primary keeper Sam and his wife Corinna have spent countless evenings with her in her small barn, watching television and offering companionship. “Zookeepers do what they do not for public recognition or hefty salaries—neither of which they generally receive—but out of love and concern for the animals in their care,” Hammond says. “And the more inadequate the facility is, the more important the quality of the hands-on care becomes.”
Later in Diane’s career, she headed up communications efforts for the Oregon Coast Aquarium, which owned the facility built for the whale; and then for the Free Willy Keiko Foundation, which owned the whale but not the facility. In 1998, the Keiko project ended for both her and her husband, at which point they fulfilled a dream and moved to Bend in the high desert of central Oregon to reinvent themselves.
Diane quickly moved on to release her first novel, “Going to Bend” and then her second, “Homesick Creek”.
And recently, she released her now bestseller, “Hannah’s Dream”, truly one of the sweetest, richest stories - easily a ”reader’s favorite.”
Diane Hammond is very obviously a gifted, talented writer and very accomplished in her career. But what stands out even more is the very entertaining, real, rich, and lighthearted way she shares about her life and experiences.
The story about her journey, her subjects…..just really great.
http://www.dianehammond.com/
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
THE LONDON GARCIA SHOW ~ www.londongarcia.com, www.londongarcia.com/musicboxx, http://londongarcia.com/blog, www.myspace.com/londongarcia
On L.A. Talk Radio: www.latalkradio.com (New! We’re on CHANNEL 2 now!) ~ access archives at http://www.latalkradio.com/London.php (from 10/25/08 to present) and www.londongarcia.com (click on “RADIO SHOW” - archives back to 2007)
Subscribe to weekly announcements - email hollaback@londongarcia.com
