Episodi

  • The Lies We Tell Ourselves and Why We Believe Them

    The Lies We Tell Ourselves and Why We Believe Them
    Nov 3 2026
    What’s fascinating is how sincerely people believe the stories they tell themselves.Charlie Levin recently sat down with Dr. Jim Kleiger for a podcast conversation that got us thinking about this. Jim spent nearly 50 years as a clinical psychologist before becoming a psychological thriller author, and his understanding of human behavior comes through in the characters he creates. We talked about what makes people tick, why we sometimes act against our own best interests, and how those contradictions make fictional characters feel so real. One of the more interesting things from our conversation was that, after decades of studying real people, Jim created a fictional woman he couldn’t seem to let go of.After 50 years studying people, he created one he couldn’t figure outKleiger spent nearly 50 years as a clinical psychologist, working with people navigating trauma, mental illness, and the complicated ways our minds protect us from painful realities.Then he started writing fiction.His first novel, Tears Are Only Water, introduced Nicola Kitts, a decorated Marine turned sheriff’s deputy. She’s competent, exceptionally tough, and skilled at managing situations that would send most people running.She’s also deeply troubled.Nicola carries unresolved trauma, shame, and grief. She drinks too much, struggles with self-destructive behavior, and has an impressive ability to avoid confronting the very problems that are slowly consuming her.Kleiger expected her to appear in one book. Instead, she followed him through 3 novels, including Whispers and his newly released thriller Pareidolia: Illusions, Deceptions, and Murder.Eventually, he wrote an essay titled Nicola Kitts, Why Can’t I Let You Be?There’s something wonderfully ironic about a psychologist who spent decades studying real people finding himself unable to let go of someone he invented.But it says something interesting about how we understand human behavior.The longer we spend trying to understand someone, the more complicated they often become. What initially looks like a straightforward personality trait can turn out to be a defense mechanism. What appears to be confidence can conceal insecurity. And the behavior that makes the least sense from the outside may have a perfectly understandable explanation once you know the person’s history.Nicola is a good example.The people who look the strongest are sometimes the best at avoiding themselvesNicola can face danger without hesitation. She’s been trained to make decisions under pressure, handle violence, and keep functioning when most people would fall apart.But ask her to examine her own emotional wounds, and things get considerably more difficult.She wants to leave law enforcement and become a social worker. It’s a career that appeals to her compassion and her desire to help people who’ve suffered.The problem is that social work would force her to examine some of the very issues she’s spent years trying to avoid. It’s an interesting contradiction, and one I suspect a lot of people would recognize.Think about the person who’s always helping everyone else solve their problems but never seems able to get their own life together. Or the person who’s remarkably successful professionally but makes consistently terrible decisions in relationships.Sometimes being competent in one area makes it easier to avoid confronting what isn’t working somewhere else.We’re good at using our strengths to compensate for our weaknesses. Occasionally, we’re so good at it that we manage to avoid addressing those weaknesses for decades.For a writer, that tension creates an interesting character. For the rest of us, it might explain a few people we’ve known.Possibly ourselves.Our brains would rather have an explanation than admit we’re guessingKleiger’s latest novel takes its title from a fascinating psychological phenomenon called pareidolia.It’s the reason you can see a face in a cloud, a person in the shadows, or a vaguely annoyed expression on the front of your car.Our brains are constantly searching for recognizable patterns, even when we’re looking at random information. It’s a useful ability. We depend on it to make sense of the world quickly. But our minds can also become remarkably confident about interpretations built on very little evidence. Think Jesus in a slice of toast.Now consider how often we do something similar with people.Someone doesn’t respond to a text, and we decide they’re upset. A colleague seems unusually quiet, and we assume something happened at work. A friend cancels plans, and we start wondering whether there’s something wrong with the friendship.Sometimes those interpretations are accurate. Other times, we’ve built an entire explanation around something as unremarkable as a dead phone battery. We do this constantly.And once we’ve decided what something means, we often start collecting evidence to support our interpretation.Psychologists have a...
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    37 min
  • The Magical Power of Objects. How a Glass Bird Inspired a Brilliant Novel...

    The Magical Power of Objects. How a Glass Bird Inspired a Brilliant Novel...
    Oct 20 2026
    On the night Annette Libeskind Berkovits’s father lay dying, her son accidentally knocked over a nightstand in the dark. Four delicate Murano glass birds, a pair of doves and a pair of purple martins, fell to the floor and shattered.Annette tried to put them back together, but the damage was beyond repair. She normally had little patience for broken things, yet something stopped her from throwing these away. She gathered the pieces, placed them in her curio cabinet, and left them there.For years, she couldn’t explain why she’d kept them. It wasn’t until she began writing her sixth book, The Great Conjunction, published by Munn Avenue Press, that she started to understand.Annette, now 83, joined host, Charles Levin, on The Munn Avenue Muse to talk about the book, her family’s unusual relationship with memory, and how a few broken glass birds helped inspire a novel about the things we collect and the stories they carry.What if our possessions are part of who we are?Most of us have things we can’t bring ourselves to throw away. An old photograph, a chipped plate, a piece of jewelry that belonged to someone we loved. We may have forgotten how we acquired them, but the thought of getting rid of them makes us uncomfortable.In the author’s note to The Great Conjunction, Annette asks:“We’re supposed to declutter, downsize, make it easy for those who come after us. But what if the things we have collected over a lifetime are not clutter? What if they’re evidence? What if they are in a sense us?”Annette comes from a family deeply concerned with preserving memory. Her brother, Daniel Libeskind, is the internationally known architect whose work includes the Jewish Museum Berlin and the master plan for the rebuilding of the World Trade Center site.“If you had to define my family by a single characteristic, it’s concerned with memory,” she says.It makes us think about what happens when someone dies, and the family is left to sort through a lifetime of belongings. We know what these things meant to the person who owned them, or at least we think we do. But will anyone else understand why they were kept?Annette takes that question into some unusual territory in her novel.When objects have stories of their ownThe Great Conjunction uses magical realism, a style of fiction in which strange or impossible things happen, yet the characters accept them as part of ordinary life. Objects can have personalities. Birds can talk. The author doesn’t stop to explain how any of it is possible.During the conversation, Charlie compared magical realism to Impressionism in painting. An Impressionist artist can change the way we see a familiar scene by playing with light, color, and form. The result may be less photographically accurate, but sometimes it communicates the feeling of a place better than a realistic painting could.Magical realism can do something similar for fiction.For Annette, it gave her a way to write about grief, loneliness, and the isolation of the pandemic. By allowing objects to take on lives of their own, she could examine our attachment to possessions and the memories we store in them.And those broken Murano birds, which she’d kept all those years without understanding why, finally found a place in her writing.Two women on opposite sides of New YorkAt the center of The Great Conjunction are Bunny, an upper-middle-class New Yorker, and Fiona, a woman experiencing homelessness. Their lives unfold against the backdrop of the COVID-19 lockdown, when New York became an eerily quiet city.Annette recalled how the pandemic changed what people noticed. Those who could afford to stay home found themselves surrounded by their possessions, spending far more time than usual inside their own four walls.Meanwhile, grocery clerks, delivery workers, sanitation crews, and other essential workers kept the city functioning. Many were poorly paid and had little choice about exposing themselves to the virus.The contrast stayed with Annette. Through Bunny and Fiona, she explores how 2 women living in the same city can experience entirely different worlds.Their relationship also gives the story room to examine assumptions about wealth, security, and what people need to feel that they belong.An unlikely meeting in the night skyThe novel’s title comes from an astronomical event that occurred on December 21, 2020, when Jupiter and Saturn appeared unusually close together in the evening sky.The event, known as the Great Conjunction, was especially remarkable because the planets hadn’t appeared so close together in the night sky for nearly 800 years.For Annette, the timing offered a wonderful premise for a novel written during the pandemic. Here were 2 planets coming together at a time when people on Earth were being told to stay apart.She wanted the astronomy to be accurate, so she consulted her nephew, an astrophysicist, to help her understand the science. She also researched the history and manufacture ...
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    27 min
  • 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
  • From Book to Movie: An Author's History-Making Journey

    From Book to Movie: An Author's History-Making Journey
    Aug 11 2026
    A haunted house on the edge of the Arctic Circle.Two world leaders carrying the weight of the nuclear age.A meeting expected to be little more than a photo opportunity.And ten and a half hours that nearly changed the course of history.In the latest episode of The Munn Avenue Muse, Charlie Levin sat down with Ken Adelman, former Director of the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency and author of The Brink of War.Adelman did not study the 1986 Reykjavik Summit from a distance. He was in the room as Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev came astonishingly close to an agreement that could have transformed the nuclear balance.What happened inside that small white house was tense, exhausting, unpredictable and deeply human.The haunted house at the center of historyThe summit took place at Hofdi House, a white building on the outskirts of Reykjavik rumored to be haunted.Reagan called the gathering a simple “business meeting.” It was expected to be brief and largely ceremonial. Instead, it became a marathon.Gorbachev arrived with an entourage of roughly 300 people. Reagan brought a team of only 12 professionals, including Adelman. The talks stretched for ten and a half hours. Adelman recalled sleeping only about ten hours across three nights, with one session lasting until 6:20 in the morning. At several points, Reagan and Gorbachev came breathtakingly close to a sweeping nuclear agreement.Then the opportunity collapsed.The failure that changed the worldThe Reykjavik Summit is often described as a failure because the two leaders left without signing a deal. That misses the larger story.The meeting revealed how far both sides were willing to go and helped prepare the way for the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty signed the following year. Sometimes the meeting that appears to fail becomes the meeting that makes everything else possible.That tension drives The Brink of War. Adelman’s book is not only about missiles, treaties and negotiating positions. It is about ego, exhaustion, instinct, conviction and fear. It is about the people inside the room and the details official history tends to leave out.From the page to the screenFor writers who dream of seeing their work adapted, Adelman’s experience offers both encouragement and warning.The Brink of War has been developed into a major motion picture, with Jeff Daniels portraying Reagan and J.K. Simmons among the cast. It is scheduled for release in 1000 theaters in the U.S. on August 14th—this Friday!Getting there took decades. Adelman spent more than ten years working with Michael Douglas, who cared deeply about nuclear disarmament. After finishing the book at 1:30 one morning, Douglas called Adelman unexpectedly the next day.He loved the story, but he also understood the challenge of turning diplomacy into drama. At one point, Douglas said a script draft dragged between pages 47 and 72. Those happened to be the only pages in which Reagan did not appear.The lesson was clear: history alone is not enough. A film needs momentum, character and an emotional center. After years of rewrites and false starts, Adelman offered authors one blunt piece of advice: “Never be involved in making a movie because it’ll drive you crazy.”How to make history readableAdelman faced a familiar nonfiction problem: how do you tell a heavily researched story without burying the reader? His answer was to keep the human drama in front.The book contains 370 endnotes, but the technical material stays at the back. The main narrative focuses on what people were thinking, saying, and doing.He also resisted turning Reagan into a flawless hero. Adelman admired him, but he knew the story would be weaker if Reagan appeared perfect. Strong characters need contradictions, habits and blind spots.During our conversation, we also discussed a technique used by David Morrell, creator of Rambo. Before beginning a book, Morrell writes himself a long letter explaining why the story matters. The exercise forces a difficult question: Am I interested enough in this idea to live with it for the next two years?When the answer is no, he walks away. That may be one of the best lessons in the episode. A story has to survive more than the excitement of the first idea. It has to survive research, revision, doubt and time.The summit behind the summitSome of the most memorable stories had little to do with official negotiations. Both sides had agreed that Reykjavik would be a “wifeless” summit. Then Raisa Gorbachev arrived. She reportedly changed clothes four times on the first day, attracting press attention and leaving Nancy Reagan furious in Washington.While their husbands were discussing nuclear weapons, another diplomatic drama was unfolding in the background.Adelman also shared the tragic story of Soviet Marshal Sergei Akhromeyev, who played a central role at Reykjavik and later took his own life following the attempted coup and collapse of the Soviet Union.His story, largely absent from ...
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    39 min
  • How a Real Family Argument Became a Technothriller

    How a Real Family Argument Became a Technothriller
    Jun 9 2026
    This week on the Munn Avenue Muse, Charlie Levin sat down with author John Kuendig to discuss his new technothriller, The Good Club, a novel built around a question that refuses to go away:What if some of the things dismissed as conspiracy theories turned out to be true?For John, that question wasn’t born in a writer’s room. It started during heated debates with his brother, who followed QAnon and other fringe theories. After one particularly spirited exchange, John found himself walking along the San Francisco shoreline wrestling with a thought he couldn’t shake.“What if he’s right?”That single question became the foundation for The Good Club, a story set thirty years in the future where power, technology, and control intersect in unsettling ways.Building Fiction on a Foundation of FactOne of the reasons the novel feels so believable is the amount of research behind it.John spent countless hours investigating emerging technologies, studying scientific papers, and testing whether some of the book’s more alarming concepts could actually work. He used Google Earth to map streets in Taiwan so that action scenes would unfold exactly as they would in real life.It’s the kind of attention to detail that separates a good thriller from one that keeps readers awake at night.The Unexpected Writing SecretLike most authors, John battled writer’s block.His solution wasn’t forcing words onto the page. Instead, he stepped away. A movie, a walk, another book, or simply giving his brain room to work often sparked the breakthroughs he needed.Ironically, his biggest burst of productivity came after hip replacement surgery. With four weeks of forced downtime, he finally pushed the manuscript across the finish line.Not a writing strategy most of us are eager to try, but effective nonetheless.Learning to Trust the ReaderOne of the biggest lessons John learned during the publishing process was a familiar one: show, don’t tell.Rather than telling readers a character is embarrassed, show the flushed face. Show the hesitation. Show the reaction.He also discovered the importance of raising questions immediately. Munn’s early editorial feedback led him to completely rethink his opening chapter, creating a stronger sense of mystery and urgency from the very first pages.More Than a ThrillerAt the heart of the novel, The Good Club explores a timeless danger: what happens when people become so convinced they’re right that they begin viewing anyone who disagrees as a problem to be eliminated.History offers plenty of examples of where that road can lead.What makes the novel resonate beyond the thriller genre is the question it leaves readers with:What happens when good intentions become justification for control?The answer may be fiction.For now…🎧 Listen to the full episode of The Munn Avenue Muse featuring John Kuendig wherever you get your podcasts.📘 The Good Club is available now at:AmazonBarnes & NobleBookshop.org✍️ ✍️ If you are working through your own story, whether it is personal, professional, or somewhere in between, Munn Avenue Press can help you shape it into something lasting. If you are ready to publish your book or audiobook, or are just beginning to explore the idea, visit MunnAvenuePress.com to learn more.👉 Subscribe below for more conversations with authors, publishing insights, and behind-the-scenes stories from The Munn Avenue Muse.🎙 Ask Siri or Alexa to “Play The Munn Avenue Muse podcast!”This post is public. Feel free to share.Happy Writing,Charlie LevinPublisher & Founder This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.munnavenuemuse.com
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    22 min
  • The Nuclear Reactor in Your Belly

    The Nuclear Reactor in Your Belly
    May 26 2026
    Most people grow up hearing the same thing about anger:Control it. Calm down. Let it go.But after listening to clinical psychologist Dr. Mitch Abrams talk about anger on the Munn Avenue Muse, I kept thinking about how backwards a lot of that advice feels in real life.Abrams has spent more than two decades as a psychologist working with athletes, high performers, and people in high-conflict environments (like prisons), and his perspective is surprisingly refreshing. He doesn’t treat anger like some emotional glitch that needs to be removed. He treats it like energy.His book, I’m Not F*cking Angry: Adjust the Flame to Get What You Want from Life, centers around one idea that instantly clicked for me:Anger isn’t the enemy. Lack of awareness is.Anger Is EnergyOne metaphor he uses really stayed with me. He describes anger as a “nuclear reactor in your belly.” That sounds dramatic at first, but the more you sit with it, the more accurate it feels.Anger creates momentum. It sharpens attention. It pushes people to act, compete, build, protect, and persist.The goal isn’t to shut that energy off. It’s learning how to direct it.That’s where the phrase “adjust the flame” comes in. Too much emotional heat, and people lose perspective. Too little and they lose drive. Somewhere in the middle is the sweet spot where emotion becomes fuel instead of friction.The Difference Between Aggression and DriveMost people hear the word “aggression” and immediately picture somebody out of control, but Abrams makes a distinction between reactive aggression and instrumental aggression. Reactive aggression is impulsive and emotional. Instrumental aggression is focused. It’s the determination that helps someone finish school, build a business, raise a family, or finish writing a book after wanting to quit ten different times.That distinction matters.Because ambition itself requires a certain level of aggression. Every meaningful accomplishment usually involves persistence, competitiveness, urgency, or intensity at some point.Why Awareness MattersAnother point that stood out was his emphasis on early awareness.Abrams said many people don’t realize they’re angry until they’re already fully activated. By then, the body has already taken over the conversation. The real skill is noticing the signs earlier: the tighter jaw, the faster speech, the tension in your chest, the shift in your breathing.That small moment of awareness changes everything. It creates enough space to respond intentionally instead of emotionally.What Writers Can Learn From ThisAs a writer, I also found his approach to communication incredibly valuable.He writes exactly the way he speaks. Direct. Conversational. Honest. No clinical performance. No overexplaining. And because of that, people trust him immediately.A lot of nonfiction writing loses readers because it sounds polished instead of real. Abrams avoids that completely. He understands that readers connect to specificity, personality, and lived experience more than perfectly structured advice.One thing he said really stuck with me: ideas are the skeleton, but stories are the flesh on the bone.That’s probably why his message resonates with people. You can feel the honesty in the way he writes.He also touched on something that feels especially relevant right now: how much modern communication strips away emotional nuance. Texts, DMs, emojis, and AI-generated responses all flatten tone and remove context. Human conversation has texture. Timing. Energy. Presence. You can feel sincerity in someone’s voice in a way you never can through a reaction emoji.That part honestly felt less like a criticism of technology and more like a reminder that real connection still matters.The biggest takeaway from the conversation was simple:Anger is part of being human.When people understand it, recognize it early, and channel it with intention, it becomes one of the most powerful sources of motivation we have.And sometimes the thought that gets people through the hardest moments is still the simplest one:“Watch me.”🎧 Listen to the full episode of The Munn Avenue Muse featuring Mitch Abrams on your favorite podcast platform.📘 I’m Not F*cking Angry! is available now at:AmazonBarnes & NobleBookshop.org🌐 Connect with Mitch through his official website✍️ If you are working through your own story, whether it is personal, professional, or somewhere in between, Munn Avenue Press can help you shape it into something lasting. If you are ready to publish your book or audiobook, or are just beginning to explore the idea, visit MunnAvenuePress.com to learn more.👉 Want more author insights, mindset strategies, and behind-the-scenes publishing wisdom? Subscribe below for weekly inspiration from The Munn Avenue Muse.🎙 Ask Siri or Alexa to “Play The Munn Avenue Muse podcast!”This post is public. Feel free to share.Happy Writing,Charlie LevinPublisher & Founder This is a public episode. If...
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    39 min