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The Munn Avenue Muse Podcast

The Munn Avenue Muse Podcast

Di: Charles Levin
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Tips, Tricks, and Inspiration for Both Aspiring and Accomplished Authors from Munn Avenue Press

www.munnavenuemuse.comCharles Levin Arte Economia Storia e critica della letteratura
Episodi
  • Just Released: Dementia Care for Caregivers from Dr. Kenneth Robbins and Real Caregivers

    Just Released: Dementia Care for Caregivers from Dr. Kenneth Robbins and Real Caregivers
    Oct 6 2026
    There are things you can understand intellectually and still not understand at all. Dementia is one of them. Watch or listen to this podcast with guest author Dr. Kenneth Robbins and Munn Muse host and co-author Charles Levin.A doctor can know the diagnosis. A family can understand what is happening to the brain. Everyone can read the books, listen to the specialists, and prepare as best they can. And then one day the person you love says something that makes no sense, asks the same question again and again, or looks directly at you with a face you have known for decades and, for a moment, seems to be somewhere else entirely.That is when the clinical language stops being enough.The physician behind Until You’re In It, Dr. Kenneth Robbins, M.D., M.P.H., spent decades practicing medicine and is board-certified in both psychiatry and internal medicine. He understood dementia professionally long before he understood what it meant personally. Those turned out to be two very different things.He knew the symptoms. He knew the terminology. He knew what decline looked like on paper. What he did not fully know was what it felt like to live inside it.That difference eventually became the heart of the book. That, and we interviewed 20+ caregivers who shared their poignant stories—what they wish they had known, what they learned, and what advice they would give other caregivers.Because there is a reason it is called Until You’re In It. Until you are in it, you really do not know.Writing for His GrandkidsOne of the first problems he ran into while writing the book was that he sounded like a doctor. That was not especially surprising. Doctors spend years learning a particular kind of language. It is precise, efficient, and detached when it needs to be.They document patient encounters. They assess symptoms. They describe cognitive changes. All of that language has a purpose, but it is not necessarily how you talk to a daughter who is trying to understand what is happening to her mother.So he was given a simple piece of advice: write it for your grandkids.That changed the book.The medical terminology started falling away. The explanations became simpler. The stories became more important. Instead of trying to sound authoritative, he started trying to be understood.That is a useful lesson for any writer. We often think good writing means sounding smart. Usually, it means making the reader forget that you are trying to sound like anything at all.“It Looks Like It’s Raining”One of the stories that stayed with me involved a person with dementia looking outside on a perfectly clear day and saying, “It looks like it’s raining.”The obvious response is to correct them. No, it is not raining.But what if the sentence is not really about the weather? What if the person is wet, cold, or uncomfortable? What if “it’s raining” is simply the closest available language for a sensation they can no longer explain?That changes the whole interaction.Instead of asking, “Why are they saying something that is not true?” you begin asking, “What are they trying to tell me?”That is a much harder question. It also happens to be a much more useful one.Caregiving Turns You Into a DetectiveDementia can make ordinary conversation feel like detective work. A person may repeat something over and over, become agitated for no obvious reason, or ask to go home while sitting in the house they have lived in for years.The natural instinct is to respond to the words themselves. But sometimes the words are only the beginning.“I want to go home” may mean, “I am scared.” Anger may mean pain. Restlessness may mean discomfort. Silence may mean more than it appears to.None of this is exact. There is no decoder ring for dementia, and caregivers guess wrong all the time. But over time they begin to pay attention to different things: a facial expression, a tone of voice, the way someone is sitting, whether they seem cold, whether something in the room has changed.You begin listening beyond the words.That may be one of the strangest things dementia teaches us: communication can continue even when language becomes unreliable.When the Words HurtOf course, not all of those moments are gentle.Dementia can strip away some of the filters people use throughout adult life. Someone who was once patient may become angry. Someone who was soft-spoken may suddenly shout. A husband or wife may hear words they never imagined hearing from the person they love.“I hate you.”Those words still hurt. It would be easy to say they should not, but they do.The important thing is understanding that the sentence may not mean what it would have meant twenty years earlier. It may be frustration, fear, discomfort, or simply the strongest language available in that moment. The person may be reacting to a feeling they cannot explain and cannot regulate in the way they once could.That does not make the moment painless. But it can keep the moment from ...
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    35 min
  • He Answered an Ancestry Email. Twenty-Five Years Later, It Became a Book.

    He Answered an Ancestry Email. Twenty-Five Years Later, It Became a Book.
    Sep 8 2026
    On Christmas Day in 2001, Nord Brue found himself home alone. His wife was away helping her mother through knee-replacement surgery, his three children were scattered in different directions, one of them climbing a mountain in Peru and the house was unusually quiet.With some unexpected time on his hands, Nord decided to do something he had never really learned to do: search the internet. Then an email from Ancestry.com landed in his inbox.He clicked it.Twenty-five years later, Nord is still an Ancestry subscriber, but that one small moment of curiosity led to something much bigger. It introduced him to a man born more than two centuries earlier: Nils Trulsen Bru, his three-times-great-grandfather.What Nord eventually uncovered was far more than a family tree filled with names and dates. Nils’s life included romance, war, political conflict, courtroom drama, and a stubborn determination to stand up for ordinary people. After decades of research, that story became Nord’s newly published book, To My Beloved Norwegian Countrymen.Sometimes the Dead Call Out to YouBiographer Richard Holmes once wrote that sometimes the dead call out to us “like owls in the night.” For Nord, one of those voices belonged to Nils.Nils was born in Norway in 1776, a year Nord likes to put into perspective for his grandchildren. That same year, the Declaration of Independence was written in America and Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations in Scotland. Nord likes to ask his grandchildren which of those three events was the most important.Their answer is always the same: Nils’s birth.From their point of view, of course, they are right. Without Nils, none of them would be here.That simple observation gets at what makes genealogy so powerful. History can seem distant until you realize that your own existence depended on ordinary people surviving wars, illnesses, accidents, heartbreaks, bad luck, and good luck.And Nils had plenty of all of it.A Love Story, a War, and Two TrialsThe more Nord researched Nils’s life, the more it started to resemble a novel.As a young man, Nils lost the woman he loved, Christy, to another man. After getting into trouble with his local priest, he left his community for roughly a year and a half. Then word arrived that Christy’s husband had died, apparently while fishing. Nils returned home, married Christy, and took over the farm.Their peaceful beginning did not last long. Within months, war reached Norway as the country was drawn into the Napoleonic conflicts.Nils eventually emerged as a leader among the local farmer-fishermen, at times helping coordinate enormous fishing operations involving hundreds of boats and as many as 2,000 fishermen. He also began challenging local authorities, especially over the fishing tithe, a tax imposed on the fishermen.That resistance eventually led to his arrest and two trials involving charges serious enough to threaten both his life and his honor. He was acquitted both times.Nord still enjoys one especially human detail from the court record: one of the men involved in deciding Nils’s fate happened to be his Uncle Peter. In another remarkable twist, the court not only cleared Nils but fined the prosecutor for overcharging him.But Nils was not finished challenging the establishment.“To My Beloved Norwegian Countrymen”Nils eventually turned his attention toward politics. He wrote and distributed a broadside urging ordinary Norwegians to elect more farmers to the Storting, Norway’s parliament.The document was not especially fiery. It was thoughtful and earnest, and it ended with the words that would eventually give Nord’s book its title:To my beloved Norwegian countrymen, for their consideration.The authorities were less enthusiastic. They worried about the possibility of a broader peasant uprising and resisted Nils’s political ambitions.The voters had other ideas.They kept electing him, and after years of resistance, Nils was finally allowed to serve in parliament, where he remained involved in public life until his death.For Nord, the deeper he went into the records, the clearer it became that this was not simply an interesting ancestor. This was a life worth writing about.How Many People Exist Because of One Couple?Nils and Christy eventually had 45 grandchildren, and two of their youngest children emigrated to the United States in the mid-19th century, settling in Story County, Iowa.That raised a fascinating question for Nord: how many people living today might descend from them?He used AI to help model the possibilities, factoring in generations, historical survival rates, and changing family sizes. The estimate surprised even him: approximately 16,000 people living in the United States today may be direct descendants of Nils Trulsen Bru.It is an estimate, not a genealogical head count, but it gives a remarkable sense of scale.If Nils had not survived his trials, if Christy’s first husband had not died, if one of their children had made...
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    25 min
  • Who Decides What Happily Ever After Looks Like?

    Who Decides What Happily Ever After Looks Like?
    Aug 25 2026
    Most of us learned the formula pretty young.Princess meets prince. Something goes terribly wrong. Prince saves princess. Wedding. Castle. Happily ever after.Heather Petitpas kept wondering about the girls who didn’t quite fit into that story.Girls who were independent. Girls who didn’t need rescuing. Girls whose lives might turn out beautifully without following the script they’d been handed.That question eventually became Not Your Average Fairy Tale, Heather’s new illustrated book about Maggie, a teenage princess who has her own ideas about what she wants her life to look like.Heather joined Charlie Levin on The Munn Avenue Muse to talk about Maggie, publishing her first book, working with an illustrator halfway around the world, and a subject that goes well beyond fairy tales:How much of our lives do we spend trying to become the person we think we’re supposed to be?The story we’re handedHeather grew up with Disney princesses and traditional fairy tales like everyone else.Over time, she started noticing the same pattern.The women were usually waiting for something to happen to them. A prince arrived. Somebody saved them. Romance solved the problem.Heather started thinking about the girls she knew who simply didn’t operate that way.She’s a licensed mental health counselor in Massachusetts, and some of Maggie came from the teenagers and children Heather has worked with over the years. Some came from friends. And some, she admits, came from Heather herself.Maggie has opinions. She makes choices. She walks to the beat of her own drum.She also happens to be a princess.That part makes the story fun.The rest feels pretty familiar to anyone who has ever looked around at the life everyone else seemed to be living and thought, I’m not sure that’s mine.There are a lot of versions of “supposed to”Heather talks in the episode about the “cookie cutter” life people can feel pushed toward.For authors, there’s another version of it.You should have started younger. You should already have an agent. You should know what you’re doing. Your first draft should be better. Your book should sell faster. Everyone on Instagram appears to have figured out something you missed.Heather’s book took more than a year to produce.The manuscript went through rounds of editing. The illustrations went through multiple versions. Her illustrator, Nabila Anu, was in Bangladesh, roughly 12 hours away, which made a quick back-and-forth anything but quick.And still, they kept going.That’s probably the more useful version of a publishing story anyway.A book gets finished through hundreds of ordinary decisions made over a long stretch of time and persistence.Then Maggie has to tell her parentsOne of the biggest scenes in Not Your Average Fairy Tale comes when Maggie tells her very traditional parents that Rebecca is the person she wants to get to know better.She’s anxious about telling them. Of course she is.Their expectations for her have been clear, and Maggie knows she’s about to say something they didn’t see coming.Heather wanted young readers to see a character who was nervous and still told the truth about who she was. And there’s a line from the conversation that stuck with me.Heather says what Maggie really wants from her parents is simple:“I want you to be happy.”That sentence covers a lot of ground.It works for the kid who wants to study music instead of medicine.The teenager trying to understand who they’re attracted to.The adult changing careers at 45.The 70-year-old finally writing the book they’ve talked about writing for 30 years.We spend a surprising amount of time wondering how the people we love will react when our lives stop looking the way they expected.“I needed this book when I was a young girl.”After Not Your Average Fairy Tale came out, one of Heather’s friends read it and sent her a review.She told Heather she wished she’d had the book when she was young and trying to figure out who she was.That’s about as good a reason to write a book as I can think of.Writers rarely know exactly where their words are going to land.Someone may read your book because the cover caught their eye. Someone else may pick it up years from now at precisely the moment they need what you wrote.You don’t get to control that part.You do get to write it. And your book could change lives.A very fitting last nameThere’s a small detail near the end of the episode that feels almost too perfect.Heather explains that her last name, Petitpas, translates roughly to “small step” or “small foot.”And that’s how she describes the whole process of making the book.Small steps.Write the manuscript.Revise it.Find the right illustrator.Review another drawing.Make another change.Wait.Try again.Keep going.Eventually, there’s a finished book sitting in your hands.Heather had wanted to write and publish a book for years. It was one of those bucket-list things she knew she’d regret leaving ...
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    22 min
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