Bart Casey – Elizabethan Intrigue

Bart Casey discovered the Monica Lewinsky of the Elizabethan age and turned her already incredible true story into an enthralling dual time line tale of historic intrigue and contemporary greed. Hi there, I’m your host Jenny Wheeler, and today Bart talks about his passion for forgotten stories, explains why Will Shakespeare continues to fascinate movie makers, and reveals how a mystery involving three famous Romantic poets is his work in progress. Six things you’ll learn from this Joys of Binge Reading episode: How adman Bart researched his fiction in his lunch breaks Why Shakespeare’s life fascinates him How sexual predation hasn’t changed over the centuries Why he values historical accuracy in his work When facts are stranger than fiction The appeal of dual timeline tales Where to find Bart Casey: Website: http://www.bartcasey.com/index.htm Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/bart.casey  Twitter: @bibliomad Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/bart_casey What follows is a “near as” transcript of our conversation, not word for word but pretty close to it, with links to important mentions. And now, here’s Bart.  Hello there Bart and welcome to the show, it’s great to have you with us. Bart: Very happy to be here. Very exciting. Jenny: Was there a “Once Upon A Time’ moment when you decided you must write fiction or you would have somehow let yourself down, or not completed something you were meant to do?  And if so, what was the catalyst for it Bart Casey – historical mysteries Bart: Well it was actually more than just fiction, because it was about stories- coming across stories – especially in college and graduate school. They just seemingly needed to be told, things that I didn’t think people would know about or that had been forgotten. Those stories then became the motivation I had to start writing. Sometimes, the non fiction ones are just as good. Once you find somebody like a Laurence Oliphant, the character I wrote a book about, who seemed to be like Forrest Gump – he sort of did everything. The fiction I write has a lot of non fiction in it. Anything I put in my upcoming book about Shakespeare or the Elizabethan characters is pretty much real. So it’s fiction, but it’s also pretty much non fiction. But to get to your real question; it’s the story. You come across a story, you think ‘I don’t know that, I don’t think anybody else knows that-‘ and you really have to tell them. That’s the motivation. Jenny: You seem to have real talent for finding these stories that have been forgotten or ignored – your non fiction books perfectly demonstrate that. Bart:You just have an “aha” moment when you come across some of thee wacky combinations, and you just think that’s so out of the ordinary and so compelling that it writes itself. The advantage of non fiction is of course it’s real, so you can tell it chronologically from the people’s birth to their death and not make anything up. When you get into fiction, you have to improvise a little. But I try to always be plausible, I don’t try to make up anything crazy. Shedding light on forgotten history Jenny: You’ve made a specialty of blending dual time lines – contemporary and Elizabethan – to shed new light on forgotten history.  How did this passion first get sparked off? Bart: Sometimes I think if the historical characters like Shakespeare, or Elizabethan people you read about them in school and you see anthologies of their poetry, and they don’t seem real. You don’t see them as people who have a cup of coffee, they didn’t have a stomach ache – they weren’t real. By putting them in the same type of treatment as the modern characters we can identify personally, they come alive more because they were real people. What do we really know of Shakespeare? So in this in this story I do have sections that talk about the Elizabethans but they’re always talking about their actual lives. You know – getting packed ready to go somewhere, being worried about what they’re going to find, what they might encounter at court, what shocks them, what happens to them. And then when it’s you it’s juxtaposed with the modern people, we all can think ‘oh well these are real characters.’ And my thought is that you’ll think the Elizabethans were also real characters, as they were. So that’s why I go back and forth because I think it makes these people come alive more. [00:04:14] As for where I where I came up with these the idea of The Vavasour Macbeth. I was a grad student in English and all of my education was about English literature. I mean just everything. Right up through graduate school I was going to be a professor. There weren’t any jobs however. So I did a lot of work studying up on people like Shakespeare and I was shocked at how few facts there are truly known about Shakespeare. My favorite biography of him by Sir Edmund Chambers is called William Shakespeare; A Study of Facts and Problems and there are more problems by far than facts – and that’s true even Macbeth. We all think we know everything about Macbeth, but that’s just not true. You know the play we know today is an abridgement of a much longer play that was lost. And so when I have papers discovered in the tomb and they find that long-lost version of Macbeth which scholars concede had to have existed. What we have today is a cut down version to get it done at court in under two hours for the audience. So those are interesting things that you discover in the book about even something as well-known and beloved as Macbeth and Shakespeare. Remarkable Elizabethan love affair [00:05:30] Jenny: Sure. And the “Vavasour” refers to someone who was a real courtier in the court of Queen Elizabeth I. Anne Vavasour. She’s such an interesting person and had such an interesting life that once again you think, ‘Gosh it’s amazing that we hadn’t heard more about her before.’ [00:05:51] Bart: When you think of all the industry that is the Tudor novels, I mean they’re wonderful Wolf Hall, (Hilary Mantell) The Other Boleyn Girl; (Philippa Gregory) They’re just wonderful but somehow they missed this couple and Anna Vavasour and Sir Henry Lee. She was from birth really, brought up by her uncles who were at court to be a companion for the Queen. She was educated like a princess to be somebody that could actually be in the innermost circle of the Queen’s attendance at court and they placed her there when she was 16. Tudor stories like Wolf Hall and The Other Boleyn Girl She went to court with her sisters and her uncles were there too. So she wasn’t all alone there, but she had the great misfortune to get seduced by a sexual predator, an older courtier, the Earl of Oxford of all people, Edward de Vere. He was at that point fourteen years older than her, estranged from his wife, at court alone and just kicking his heels with boredom, when in walks this beautiful young girl. He seduced her and ultimately ruined her because she gave birth to a bouncing baby boy in the room literally next to the Queen in the Attending Maidens’ Chamber and she was sent off to the Tower with the baby the next day. The Earl of Oxford was sent off to the Tower as well. He was banished from court for two years, but he was one of the greatest, most senior peers in all of the realm. So he managed to get somewhat back but she was just thrown out on her ear at age 17 with a baby. You’d think that that would be the end of it, but it wasn’t. There was an older courtier there, Sir Henry Lee who was the Queen’s Champion at the Joust and he was rumored to be even the Queen’s half brother, an illegitimate child of Henry VIII. [00:07:53] He was the one who founded the cult of Elizabeth – he introduced all this chivalry into the court and he was her champion when they had the tournaments jousting. He was fifty seven. He was about to retire and he invited Anne, who was then twenty seven and her son to come live with him. Sire Henry Lee – Queen Elizabeth’s champion He was one of the richest men in England and they lived together for twenty plus years. And when he died he left her all his money so she became one of the richest women in England – in fact one of the richest people in England. [00:08:29] And that her story didn’t even end then. It went on and on. The heirs to Sir Henry who were all very distant relatives, tried everything they could to get the money, but she wouldn’t succumb and she lived – apparently till a rumor has it – into her 90s. That means the first people who were Sir Henry’s heirs and even their children and perhaps their grandchildren didn’t get any money until she died – when they got whatever was left. So she had a hell of a comeback. You could think she was ridiculed as like the Monica Lewinsky of her age and made a mockery of. And then she came all the way back. She was even a great friend of King James and his queen, Queen Anne of Denmark. They got on like a house on fire. James and his son the Prince of Wales would come hunting with Sir Henry and the Queen and Anne would sit around chatting all day. Anne V : One heck of a comeback This is all well recorded and documented in the correspondence from the time. She just had a wonderful relationship with Sir Henry who saved her and then went on afterwards with his money and got married again. She was tried for bigamy at one point; she had two husbands but you know that was all fine with him. He was at Heaven by that time. So she was really a character. Jenny: [00:09:53] Yes. Well I mean you just told us what a fascinating person she was and she’s very much alive in the book. It’s amazing that she was left for you to discover with so many people writing in the area. Edward De Vere: sexual predator Bart:[00:10:09] But the only reason I did is because there are a lot of people for some reason who think that the Earl of Oxford, Edward de Vere, wrote Shakespeare. That he is actually the true author of Shakespeare. As a Shakespeare and English literature student I wanted to know things about him, and there among all the shreds about his miserable life. I found the story of his fling with Anne and that’s how I found it. And then there was one biography written by one of the great old Victorian professors of Sir Henry Lee, because he wanted there to be a biography of someone who wasn’t a duke or an earl in Elizabeth’s court, but someone who was a knight and he chose Sir Henry. Otherwise the whole story would have been lost we would have thought she was ruined by the Earl of Oxford and just disappeared. But she didn’t disappear. She spend her time in a 15 room apartment overlooking the Thames or in any of a half a dozen estates in England including the ground on which Blenheim Palace stands. So she had a wonderful life and a great love story. They loved each other very much. The Stratford Man mystery – solved Jenny:  [00:11:27] You mentioned about the controversy over who actually really wrote the plays that we equate it to Shakespeare and your own studies. Did you come to a definite conclusion just for your own satisfaction? Bart: [00:11:40] I did. I think that I myself think that the William Shakespeare who in these discussions is always referred to as the Stratford man. The Stratford man was indeed the driving force behind all the plays and poems of his name. However he was a collaborator and he had he had real strengths and and he recognized that other people had real strengths. I think the best characterization of how it really probably was is in the movie Shakespeare in Love. There’s this scene where William Shakespeare is out of cash, out of ideas. He’s got writer’s block and he goes to the tavern and he said Christopher Marlowe is at the tavern. And Marlowe says to him; ‘What are you working on?’ Shakespeare In Love – speculation close to truth? [00:12:30] And Shakespeare says he’s working on a play called Romeo and Ethel, the Pirate’s Daughter. Marlowe says ‘Well why don’t you make it about a young man who is always in and out of love – perhaps in Italian and who falls in love with his enemy’s daughter or something? [00:12:52] And you see you how Shakespeare’s eyes light up and he writes it all down and that he scarpers off and he starts writing. I think it was like that. I think that they collaborated. I think there are examples that show how the people trying to pay the rent by working in the play industry in London at that time helped each other. If one place burned down the others others made their theatre available. If there was plague they all went out to the country together to try and play county audiences around on the road. They really were in cahoots together. And that’s how the plays came. He was probably the best, the most amazing of the bunch. For sure. Almost unbelievably different than the rest of the literature at the time. There was one famous critic, I think a Yale professor in the States who said it was as if Shakespeare arrived on a spaceship from another planet and changed what was essentially morality plays that were so these wooden characters into full blown psychological dramas of what we’re thinking inside our heads. And it all happened like overnight Jenny: But the link that you have in the book between saying Sir Henry’s household and Shakespeare in the play – is that entirely fictional.? Bart: Well no. There were two sides of the equation for people like Shakespeare. There was a very small group of people who needed plays to be written or things to be written. The Earl of Southampton. People like Oxford or Leicester who had troops of players on the court. [00:14:41] The Queen wanted to be entertained and on the other side of the equation there was this bunch in the tavern. You know Will and Christopher Marlowe and all the others Thomas Dekker and Thomas Middleton, all sitting there trying to figure out what to do and what to write. And so it was a very small circle. [00:15:00] And Sir Henry Lee needed things written. He had an entertainment of the entire court in 1592, for two days and they put on a performance which the court actually was involved in. They led the queen and all the court, which would be like one hundred people around one of his estates and they interacted with these mythological characters in this whole pageant about love. Sir Henry needed somebody to write all that. And the guys in the tavern would be only too glad to get that assignment. [00:15:37] Sir Henry wouldn’t have cared about the money. He had the whole court and the Queen to entertain and he was living there in sin with Anne Vavasour. He was afraid they were going to have their house put in order, by the Queen. But because of the great fun they all had, he got sort of a tacit approval from Elizabeth that he should just carry on with Anne. And it was all fine. So Sir Henry needed things written. And at that year of 1592, is the same year that Shakespeare in Love is set in. In other words the play houses were closed for the plague. People couldn’t put on the plays, but they needed to make money. And when somebody like Sir Henry Lee said ‘I’ve got a writing assignment’ there would be a queue at the door. So Shakespeare would know Sir Henry Lee and Sir Henry Lee would certainly know Shakespeare. And so the plausibility of them interacting in my book is high. They did interact. [00:16:32] They knew each other. The Vavasour Macbeth sequel Jenny: [00:16:36] And now you’re working on a sequel that involves Stephen and Margaret. They are now off having another adventure, following in the footsteps of the Romantic poets, Lord Byron, Keats and the Shelleys, I gather. Bart: [00:16:52] Yes. And I’m gonna give it a little little space because I liked The Da Vinci Code very much but then it seemed to me that you know Robert Langdon had these adventures with incredible, you know, frequency. So I’m going to make this second book about 12 years or so after the first book. So Stephen and Margaret will be older. In the first book they adopt some Bosnian refugee children who are eleven and eight. [00:17:26] Those children will now be in their 20s and they all go on a family holiday over to Lake Geneva and then over the Alps and down into Italy as did Byron, Percy and Mary Shelley and Keats eventually was you know went to Rome as well. And that’s just the sort of thing that Stephen likes to do in his life in the book. Villa Diodati, Lake Geneva – literary landmark Travel and follow in the footsteps so of where great events or great literature was was occurred. In fact that’s exactly what Shelley and Byron were doing. They were going to Lake Geneva because that’s where Voltaire wrote his books and they were following in the footsteps of of other famous writers themselves and renting like Air BnB’s although you know Lord Byron’s Air B and B was the Diodati villa on Lake Geneva. But they were all doing exactly what Stephen and Margaret will do, renting houses and following in these footsteps. [00:18:31] And you know it’s called hard duty to go to Italy to say Jenny: To research that book did you had to do exactly the same tour? Bart: 00:18:39] Sadly last year about this time I was in Lake Geneva and then over the Alps. I saw where Mary got the idea for Frankenstein you know, in the snowy Alps. And then I went down into Pisa where Shelley camped out with his friends and followed Byron around. Yes I did. Hope to go back next year. Fact stranger than fiction Jenny: Your book The Wonder Seekers of Fountaingrove goes a long way to proving the old adage that fact is sometimes stranger than fiction. It’s the story of a Californian religious cult predicting the Second Coming of Christ, who also ran a highly profitable Santa Rosa winery. Bart: [00:19:43] That is the difference between this particular cult the prophet who really believed he was in touch with heaven and celestial angels will go visit them and he even had a father to family and heaven then had a fan of a wife and celestial children and heaven He was during the day a shrewd businessman which makes him very different from any other cult leader and they had a fabulously profitable winery. I mean they they lived in opulence and he had a campus with about 20 or 30 different buildings and this beautiful Sonoma County right in the heart of wine country and they were they they did very well. And so the the community persisted for about 70 years . . . Jenny: Right through prohibition I gather? The Wonder Seekers of Fountaingrove – Bart Casey Bart: Yes they made sacramental wine and sold it to Christian ministers and rabbis and they made various tonics that were approved for medicinal use by the prohibition authorities. The person who was running it then was a young samurai from Japan, one of the first Japanese to ever come to America. He got caught up in the cult but he was more interested in the agriculture and he ran the winery after the prophet had died and kept it going and then presented it at the end of prohibition with all the fine wine stocks still in place. [00:21:13] So it was a really good run from about 1865 to 1934. Jenny: What happened to them in the end? Bart: [00:21:22] Well what happened in the end was that the Japanese guy was in charge and his family was helping him run the place and then he they got sort of caught up in the anti Asian fears that there was gonna be an invasion of the United States from the Pacific side. And then when World War Two occurred his whole family was sort of ruined and thrown off the estate. They however did persist. When we launched the book out in California in Santa Rosa they were all there with about 20 of the young generation, to hear about the story of what their Great Great Uncle had had done. They’re all very proud and happy and successful today. But the winery was sold. It became a ranch, a cowboy thing, and then it was also right where the one of the first of the big California fires took place in October of 2016 I think or 17? I get the years mixed up but they call it The Fountaingrove Fire. That was one of the first ones of the horrific fires that they had there. So it was just a corker of a story. Victorian pilgrim and prophet And this other book I wrote about Laurence Oliphant. He was at that commune for 14 years but he had other things going on in his life. But I when I discovered the commune and I wrote a book specifically about the life of Mr. Oliphant which intersected with the commune. But then the Commune itself needed a whole book about it from cradle to grave as well. So it is a good story. Jenny: [00:23:07] You discovered Lawrence first . Laurence Oliphant, that book was selected as one of the best books of the year by Kirkus in 2016 and it’s a biography of a fascinating guy who was an adventurer or a mystic. He was a spy and he impressed Queen Victoria with his ability to communicate with fairies. I guess he learnt that at Fountaingrove did he? Lawrence Oliphant – a remarkable Victorian Bart: [00:23:40] Yes he did! She has a note in her diary saying that she had dinner with Mr. Oliphant who “has some very strange ideas about religion” and that was exactly what the monarch recorded. [00:23:53] He was very good friends with a lot of her children who were really of his generation. [00:23:59] And he moved in the highest circles of the British elite and was well known to them. He was English and Scottish. The father was like the third son. [00:24:18] So he wasn’t gonna to inherit the estate, so he went out into the colonies. They were in Colombo and in South Africa. That’s where he grew up. And then he wrote travel books all around the world and got hooked up with this commune for a brief 14 year period. Very interesting. So even though it’s non-fiction I think your fiction readers and listeners would like it! Jenny: [00:24:49] It’s a great story and it’s interesting that you started out by talking about stories because I get the sense you really are a storyteller. Bart: [00:24:58] That’s right. And those so far have had a few good ones. A Mad Men world Jenny: [00:25:02] So you started out in academia as you’ve said. What happened? You didn’t get a professorship because things were very tight in the academic world. So what did you do before you began full time writing? Bart: [00:25:19] I had grown watching my parents – my father was in advertising in the 50s in that crazy Mad Men era. [00:25:31] We moved to England from America when commercial television started in UK in 1957, and suddenly they were going to have something new called TV commercials. We were over there and I was a child growing up in a house in the middle of London right in behind Selfridges in this huge flat where I could see people being entertained and having what seemed to be great fun and travelling and everything. So when I was in school and I couldn’t pursue English Literature I decided to go into advertising. You have to write well and communicate well in advertising. But during all the years I did that I always kept up the habit of doing research for these stories. [00:26:21] So you know I went to the British Museum at lunchtime from the ad agency in Soho Square in London where I was working for a few years. That’s typical. I was doing research on the Sir Henry Lee for my book even while I was working on the advertising business. When I stopped the ad game I wrote full time. That’s been since the end of 2013 and these are the first four books I’ve written. Key to success as a writer Jenny: [00:26:49] Fantastic. So what’s the one thing you’ve done more than any other you credit with having made a success of this writing career? Bart: [00:27:05] It has to be perseverance. That is the most important attribute if you want to be a writer today because everyone will tell you you you can’t get an agent. You can’t get a publisher, you can’t. It’s impossible. But you just have to keep going. And I think that’s been the lesson and the encouragement I would give to anyone who wants to do this is. You just have do as Winston Churchill said, you know. K.B.O you know, you “keep buggering on.” You keep going. You have to keep going. He signed all his wartime correspondents K.B.O. and he says even whether the generals had lost or won he just told them to keep going. You know that’s so perseverance is I think the most important. Jenny: [00:27:50] Shakespeare still has a great vitality in our cultural life today and I know that there’s a movie based on his life that’s being positioned for the next lot of Oscars. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1I5cKmiONDI All Is True – the latest Shakespeare movie to be an Oscar contender? Jenny: [00:28:01] It hasn’t been on general release but it examines a period in his life which I think you’d be very familiar with the last few years of his life. Bart: [00:28:17] No it’s not in the States yet. But I’ve looked at the trailer and I and I see what it is. And I know that there are certain facts known about Shakespeare. And one is that he did buy the house in Stratford in 1597. I think that was the house called New Place which was one of the finest houses there. [00:28:40] He sort of went back and forth to London. Most of his life was in London but then at the end of his life before he died around 1616 he went back to Stratford full time. He wrote there for about three or four years, about a play a year which seemed to probably really satisfy his friends back in London. They would get this material and that he would then still be able to be a main shareholder in the theatrical company. But he stayed there and then for the last three years of his life he really didn’t write anything. And there’s a record of him, you know, being a local business man and sort of loaning people money or making them pay him back or getting in disputes and just a non literary time. End of life a ‘wonderful time’ [00:29:31] So I would see that there’s this mystery of this literary genius sort of melting back into that community and his wife Anne you know where he had been sort of a visitor. And that’s I believe where the filmmakers have have gone with this new movie called All is True. I think that’s it. Jenny: [00:29:57] And I get that that’s the alternative name for one of his own plays, Henry VIII, isn’t it? Bart: [00:30:01] Oh could be. Absolutely. And I think that that is a wonderful time to speculate about in the same way that Shakespeare in Love speculates about what the young Shakespeare is like. We don’t really know much about it. [00:30:17] I’m sure they based it on as much research as they could. But with Shakespeare you have to just take a leap of faith. Like when you go to Stratford and they say ‘oh this is where he went to school.’ Well they don’t know he went to school there. It’s likely he went to school there, but there’s no documentation that he went to school there. Yeah. You know here’s where he did this that and the other. Well maybe. So I think it’s gonna be great. And that is I think what draws people to Shakespeare’s story. [00:30:52] There are so many possibilities that I think there’ll be many more biopics about Shakespeare along the way and I’m looking forward to them that this one and Shakespeare in Love were certainly super. Jenny: [00:31:06] This one obviously has got a high level of talent. Kenneth Branagh or Judi Dench and Ben Elton and written the script. Sorry. We hopefully have something to look forward to. Yeah. Bart: [00:31:16] Judi Dench is back, as she got the Best Supporting Actress award in Shakespeare in Love. So she’s double dipping here herself. What Bart likes to read Jenny:   The series is called “The Joys of Binge Reading” because I see it as providing inspiration for people who like to do just that – binge read.  So – turning to your taste in fiction – who do you “binge read?” Any recommendations for listeners?  Bart: [00:31:35] Yes. Well I think throughout my life I mean in high school in boarding school , it was Ian Fleming, and James Bond. You know my friends and I, we just had a set of them and we read them cover to cover, the whole lot. Then with our children, when they were growing up, it was the Harry Potter books. With our youngest child, we’d read a page each at the table to get him interested in reading during meals, and as soon as he go to bed we’d have to run in and grab the book from under his pillow to read because he had moved on 20 pages ahead of us. [00:32:09] And you know I read all the J.K. Rowling books with the children and then again for myself. Then I found really old classics, so the things that are great to go back to again and again, books like To Kill a Mockingbird and Dickens. In my book club, just up here in Vermont with my friends, we had a “Pick your Dickens month” and everybody chose one Dickens that they wanted to read themselves and then we all got together and shared about you know A Tale of Two Cities or Oliver Twist and so forth so. So that’s great. And then Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway and good old John Grisham, Recently I was really blown away by the book Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman on both the printed book and the audio book. It was just fantastic. And also – although it’s not fiction – Educated by Tara Westover which is at the top of the bestsellers here now, about her growing up as a sort of fundamentalist Mormon in a cult very much like the wonder seekers of Fountaingrove. You can’t really believe that it wasn’t fiction but it was actually her her life which was pretty amazing. So those are all books that I find really exciting to come across and read great stories with all of them. Doing it all again? Jenny:  At this stage in your career, if you were doing it all again, what would you change – if anything?  Bart: [00:33:53] Well I think I would have been more focused about gathering my material for these stories earlier, so I had a few more in the pipeline now. I mean my start as a writer has come a bit late so I am in a hurry, but maybe that’s a good way for me to be just now. [00:34:12] But I think I wish I had brought more of them in into the hopper to get developed for writing later. I do have next projects in mind but I wished I had started a little earlier. I was in the advertising business a long time. They weren’t lost years but I wish that I had a few more books ready to pop out: maybe one about the ad game, that might be good. Although I think I sued. Jenny: What is next for Bart the writer? We’ve already referred to the sequel you are working on. Have you a finish date in mind for that, and what’s next after that? Bart:  [00:34:56] Well I’d like to finish the second book about Stephen and Margaret. The Byron Shelley and Keats book, this year or very early in 2020. And while I was doing that research I found myself being drawn back and I’ve been many times, to the Protestant Cemetery in Rome. That is where Keats and Shelley ended up. They are both there but there are also 4990 other people there, some of whom had amazing lives. [00:35:27] These are only people who were from out of town if you will. They weren’t local Italians and there are some very interesting people and I thought a book about about some of those characters. There were a lot of artists and sculptors, a lot of diplomats, a lot of poets and writers. That is something I’d like to write. And of course sadly it would mean probably relocating to Rome for a few months to work to do the research would be like hell itself. But I would try and endure. Where to find Bart online Jenny:  Where can readers find you on line  – and do you enjoy interacting with them? Bart: [00:36:11] Yes! My website is is my name, It’s www.bartcasey.com and I’m also on Goodreads and this year trying to get more serious about blogging because I’d love to tell little bits of stories and then have some interaction with people about them and hear what they think and go back and forth. So Goodreads is really the place where I can be found. I would love to get into any type of conversation with readers about the books and if God help us, if any of your listeners decide that they’re going to have The Vavasour Macbeth at their book club! I’ll be happy to call in and we could chat about it. So I very much would like to interact with readers about these stories. Jenny: [00:36:59] It’s wonderful if they could do it by Skype couldn’t they? Bart: Apparently. Here we are. Jenny: [00:37:06] That’s right. Thank you so much, it’s been wonderful to catch up. And I’m really looking forward to the Shelley Byron Keats book when it comes out. You’ve obviously got to develop a totally different plotline for that one. Bart: [00:37:21] Oh yes! I’ve got it cooking. It should be good. We all know those names and we’ve seen their poems in some anthologies but they don’t quite seem to be real people and I’m hoping that I can make them as real as I did for Sir Henry. Byron and Shelley were very different. Yes they became the closest of friends and Mary was it was you know she was such a modern woman to be with these playing you know in the same game as these two she was she could take each of them for her and hold her own ground and any conversation or this quite a remarkable group and poor Keats you know died at 25 or 26. Unbelievable. Jenny: [00:38:13] Lovely thank you so much. Thank you. Thanks To Our Technical Support: The Joys of Binge Reading podcast is put together with wonderful technical help from Dan Cotton at DC Audio Services. Dan is an experienced sound and video engineer who’s ready and available to help you with your next project… Seek him out at [email protected] or Phone + 64 – 21979539. He’s fast, takes pride in getting it right, and lovely to work with. Our voice overs are done by Abe Raffills, and Abe’s another gem. He got 20 years of experience on both sides of the camera/microphone as a cameraman/director and also voice artist and television presenter. Abe’s vocal delivery is both light hearted and warm and he is super easy to work with no matter the job. You’ll find him at [email protected]