Roni Robbins on The Authors Alley with Dori DeCarlo on WoMRadio

0:00 She is sure, she is sure, she is strong, she is true, is true, she is brave, she is she is you, is you, she is she is sure, she is true, she is strong, she is straw, she is true, is true, she is brave, is bray, she is she is you. Hello, everyone, welcome to today's Word of Mom Radio. Here on the Word of Mom Media Network. I'm your host, Dory Di Carlo, and you know we are here week after week, show after show, breaking those myths that morepreneurs and business women, especially those of us building our businesses from home, that we're just dabbling in between bake sales and getting our nails done. We're not. We are smart, we are savvy, and we are sharing the wisdom of women in business and in life. And I'm looking forward to bringing today's guest into our author's ali. Ronnie Robbins, a published writer for thirty seven years, is a freelance health reporter for The Atlantic Journal, Constitution and Medscape WebMD.

1:09 She was an editor at Medscape and a previously associate editor of the Atlanta Jewish Times. Hands of Gold won the twenty twenty three International Book Awards Multicultural Fiction and the twenty twenty three Global Book Awards Biographical Survival. The book was a finalist in the twenty twenty four American Legacy Awards Multicultural Fiction, twenty twenty three Reader's Choice Book Awards Best Adult Book, and twenty twenty two American Fiction Awards Family Saga, and a lot of awards went to this book. With all that being said, Ronnie, welcome to Word of Mom Radio.

1:49 Thank you appreciate it, love being a part of her mom group. You know what, it's a lot of fun. So I would love for you to take us on your journey as a published right or all of the different things that you have done that led you to write Hands of Gold. As you said, I've been a published journalist for thirty seven years. I started in high school. I took a journalism course and wrote the opening copy for my school yearbook in high school, and I wrote also the program for the graduation commencement exercises. And so I was already starting and being known for my writing. In high school.

2:33 I wrote the opening copy of the yearbook, but I also wrote most of the copy in the yearbook and was in charge of all the writing. And I went on to get a journalism scholarship in South Carolina from New York, so I checked off some demographic boxes for them, I believe, but they gave me a journalism scholarship, and I worked on the school paper, worked myself up to be editor in my senior year, and then I went out and was writing for newspapers, daily newspapers to begin with, then weekly newspapers or weekly publications, and developed some specialties along the way, in health care and environmental writing, Jewish writing, and women's issues, so all of those and probably a few others, and now I'm a healthcare reporter. I'm a freelancer.

3:29 I was an editor for a while, but I took some time off of full time journalism to raise my children, and during that time I freelanced, including health care, but other specialties. And my mom gave me cassette tapes that my grandfather left the family, and I had decided that when I was going to stay home to raise my children, because I didn't think I could do it all as we're supposed to do it all, as women raise children and also be career mind. I was hoping I could, but it didn't quite work out. My children were getting second class treatment, and I didn't think that was right.

4:09 So I stayed home and I worked on this book while freelancing for some pretty big publications. So it worked out well to get my articles in Forbes and Huffington Post. They picked up some of my mother Nature Network stories. And raised my kids and wrote this book, so I wasn't in any huge rush to get it published, which is good because it took me some twenty years while raising them until I went back into the workforce as a journalist and got the book published. So it all worked out. I guess I could say I did it all. I did what I was intended to do. But it's hard to be a career mom. It's hard to raise your children the right way or whatever that was it would be would be not by other people, and women find a way to do it. Journalism is not nine to five, so it made it much more difficult for that.

5:10 So I will I will give you that. It took me a long time and and but yeah, I've got a book published, Hands of Gold, based on my grandfather's life and his adventures. It's interesting to me, and it may seem an obvious question, but what is the difference between being a journalist and a novelist? Probably a simple or a complicated answer, but it should be obvious. One is based on facts and one is based on facts, and then you have more freedom to make up and go off facts, so you can expand upon the facts. You can play with the facts. You can you can make up whatever you want. You can't do that in journalism or your credibility gets shot. You know, you you are held to a higher standard. I would say so.

6:03 It allowed more freedom literary license than as an author. I had more literary license than I had as a journalist. Everything has to be backed up. I use many of those skills to keep things credible in in the historical authenticity of the novel, but I had much more freedom to go off track. Did you get held to a higher standard as a journalist because you were writing for medical journals and WebMD and medscape? Because it's kind of hard with what's going on in today's world, people stop at the headlines, and when we were growing up, anything that was on the news had to be verifiable three different ways, whereas now they market news is entertainment, so it doesn't have to be truth based. How is that for you as a journalist, How does that kind of you know, weave its way in.

7:06 So as a trained journalist in the same vein as a Walter Khonkite or any number of other respected journalists, whether I held myself to a higher standard or my editors did. I never work for a place that didn't hold me to that higher standard. So I will say that I tried to work for publications that did back up what they wrote, and if it wasn't in that way, then it was an editorial or an opinion piece and it was labeled as such. I did write for a publication that aggregated information from other sources, but it still had to be credible. So I think there is a lot of aggregating information that wasn't available when I started my journalism career. But it depends what you think is news and what the source is if it's a credible source.

8:19 So I would argue that you have to know the difference. So, yes, everyone is a journalist. Everyone claims to be a journalist or a reporter or an editor. But I went to journalism school and that's the way we were trained, and anyone I've ever worked for has that background. Most everyone I've ever worked for has that background, or I held myself to that higher standard because I wanted to be legitimate and credible and you know, have high values in that way. So you have to know what is opinion. You have to know what is You have to check your own information or trust or trust the source. And there are still those that are trusted in those that are not. I can only pull from from trusted sources in my articles. And if I do pull from trusted sources, I have to say where I got the information from.

9:16 So I think I back up my information a lot. It's too Hopefully I'm considered a reliable source and an a credible source. But if you're getting it on the if you're getting your news on the internet, on Facebook, on social media, or a certain publication has a certain bent, then you know you need to be aware of that. It's very important that you say that. So I have to ask, how was it for you listening to your grandfather's tapes throughout the years to develop this and create this wonderful story.

9:58 So I didn't listen to the tapes out. I listened to them, you know, once or twice through wants to listen once to as I was transcribing the tapes, and then the rest of the time I was massaging the information and building upon the information. So how is it like to hear my grandfather's voice. It was a little sad, but comforting, and I felt like he wanted somebody to write the story his story or and he said so on the tape, So I felt like that was me. It might not have been me, he could have been somebody else, but he said, if there's a writer who wants to do something with this, so be it. So I took that as a personal calling. It was comforting in the way to be able to hear his voice and try to capture his voice in the novel, which I'm told I have done proficiently. So I needed to hear it to be able to do that. Some people will say it's sad, that it should be sad for me, and yes, but if it was sad for me, then I can call upon that emotion in a way to let the reader also feel like this is their grandfather and this is something that they're listening to the story directly.

11:21 So that's all I tried to create. All of that. If I felt emotions, I wanted the reader to feel those emotions, because to me, that was powerful. That was really giving his memory a voice, which is a title of a column that I wrote originally about listening to the tapes, giving memories a voice, leaving a legacy to those you leave behind, well that repeats itself, but leaving a legacy behind for your progeny. So and we can all learn from some of the lessons that are in the book about experiencing life's hardships and not letting it get you down.

12:03 I have to agree with you. I actually kicked off twenty twenty five. My mother was a singer and this was her thirty first year racing heaven with her presence. And years ago my brother found a snippet of five songs. She was at Les Paul's house. They were hanging out and a couple of musicians, and they decided to do some recordings. And I initially had brought it back to the air and people were calling in and things like that, and I repurposed it for this new season and just created a little mini concert that's about seventeen and a half minutes long. And I just introduced it and everything talked about what was happening on word of Mom this year, and I said, and I'd just like you to enjoy listening to my mom, and so there is so much comfort in getting to hear that again and then that sadness.

12:58 And it was amazing to me that as many times as I had listened to those songs and everything else still choked me up. But it was so wonderful. And my brother once asked me, what's in it for me having a Word of Mom Radio? And I was trying to explain to him all of the wonderful things in sharing these women, and I realized that that was what's in it for me after twenty one years, because at that point it was twenty one years. So yeah, it was ten years ago that we found them that she had been gone, that I brought her back to the airwaves and said, if I never did another radio show as long as I lived, that was what was in it for me. So it kind of makes me identify because you brought your grandfather back and his story and told his story because you were called to do it.

13:44 So who does to you? Thank you, You're welcome. Really, we're going to take a quick break, say thank you to our sponsors, and we'll be back here in just a moment. On Word of Mom Radio, she is brave, She is bold, she is you, and we want to tell your story. Are you ready to share your journey with us on Word of Mom Radio. Go to wordomomradio dot com and register as a guest. We want to tell your story, because when you win, we all win. In twenty seventeen, Unsilenced Voices was formed to help survivors of domestic abuse and gender based violence worldwide. The organization currently serves Siri Leone, Rwanda, Ghana, and the USA. In twenty twenty two, Unsilenced Voices gifted over thirty three thousand dollars to survivors in the USA and in sierri Leone, there are over twenty six young girls who have been rescued from sex trafficking and domestic abuse and now going through vocational training school in order to better their lives.

14:56 We need your help. Donations are critical in order for us to continue our work. We also need volunteers to help with research and development. Please visit Unsilenced Voices dot org for more information. And we are back here on Word of Mom Radio. We are talking with Ronnie Robbins, published journalist and author. And I had to just stop there because it really just all hit me the significance of keeping someone's memory alive, because the only way you're truly dead is if no one remembers you, if there's no one out there that knows your story. And I find it very comforting the Jewish blessing of made their memory be a blessing. I just said that to somebody yesterday who was talking about their late wife and how they're coming to terms with the moving on and everything, and I think that is just such a beautiful blessing because it is in memory that we keep those people that we love in miss alive and well for other people to know their story. Ronnie, for you, looking at the things that you write about in this book and how much of these issues are kind of relevant today, where do you see all of that?

16:22 So I didn't really talk about the book. Why I thought this was as a journalist, why I thought there was a story to be told here beyond what I could write in a column. And my grandfather was a few things that were important. My grandparents died on the same day of each other, a year apart. I thought that was just so romantic in a morbid sort of way, but that my grandmother went first and a year later, which is significance in the Jewish religion. A year later on the anniversary that he went to follow her and she told him meet me in heaven. And my grandfather's response was, after sixty five years of marriage, you know, you do what you're told if you know what's good for you. So he had some humor in him, and it's just it's a love story. That's what was the initial spark, was the love story. Now he was a clinical trial patient for streptomias and he had TB. He was told he was terminal at twenty six, but he lived till eighty six. But in between there he was a clinical trial patient for streptomiasin which was an experimental treatment for TB at that time but has paved the way for medicines that are still used today. And tuberculosis is still the largest infectious disease killer in the world.

17:48 We think covid is or was, but it wasn't. TB is still the largest killer and largest infectious disease upper respiratory infectious disease in the world. And so he also saved people in a workplace shooting spree involving those that are rehabilitating from were rehabilitating from TB and these things are documented. This is history. This was based on newspaper articles and references that I pulled, So he was part of history. He made a mark on history in a small way. The Holocaust is in this novel. It's actually the publisher is the largest European publisher of Holocaust memoirs.

18:41 Although mine is a new area, was a new area for fiction, Holocaust related fiction. Though they lost most of the of their family in Auschwitz, my grandparents, but they were here so they had to hear about They were here, but they had to listen to they had to learn about what went on in Europe to their family and wiped out their whole entire family. And the guilt of should could I have done more there? But for the grace of God go I. There's a lot of survivor guilt to that that they had to deal with. And we don't often hear that kind of perspective from those who were already here but could have been there, didn't serve, didn't go through the Holocaust, didn't experience the Holocaust, but heard about it and was impacted by it. So there was a brother who survived, and that works into the novel too. There's some secrets revealed, and those are some of the highlights of the novel. But anti Semitism, what went on in Europe had never really went away either, just like tuberculosis never went away. Anti Semitism has risen in recent years, and October seventh, twenty twenty three is a good example of a mini Holocaust that happened in Israel that we're still trying to get those hostages home.

20:09 So I didn't realize when I wrote this book obviously that these issues would still be in the news. Healthcare challenges, war in both Russia, because that was going on at the time of when my grandfather was born. Russia was fighting and taking over territory, and so there was a lot of change of authority ownership, land ownership at the time, with most of that area becoming Ukraine where my grandparents were grew up. Wars, healthcare challenges, these are cyclical themes that my novel includes that I did not know that they would be back in the news or continue to be news today. I was writing about his life, but they just happened to be rare relevant to what's going on in the world today.

21:03 An amazing thing, how history. He's repeating itself, and one would think that we can learn from the horrors of history, and it just continues to perpetuate itself. To that listener that has that book out there in them, but they haven't done it yet. What do you want to say to them? Do it? Just do it. Doesn't matter how long it takes. Start slow, carve out some time, make it a side hustle. You can do it even if you're raising children, un as I did, even if you're freelancing too. Just you figure out when, and then's just make it happen, because if it's a dream, then you will feel unfulfilled if you don't make it happen. It's somehow or another. I made it a priority at one point, and I just kept plugging on at it. I was young enough that maybe it wasn't I had to do it quickly, so I took my time with it and and massaged it and made it something that could win awards and finally get a professional publisher, which was my goal. So it didn't begin as the ultimate goal of mine to become an author. I was a journalist, so it just sort of fell in my lap. And now that I am an author. I'm working on my second book, which is

22:33 based on another strong personality in my life, my dad, who passed away within the past year. And I'm now an author, so I'm pursuing that as I'm freelancing for two publications. But I'm not having to raise my children with all that goes on with the responsibilities that that involves. So this is my new side gig, and I think others can make it work if they want to set it as a goal and then accomplish it, just like you accomplish everything else in life. What a great way to wrap up. I love that.

23:14 That's a great message to wrap this up with, Ronnie. What do you want to leave us with? And how may everyone reach out to you? So whatever it is that's your dream, I hope that you can make it happen for yourself. We only have one life to live, and you know, if it's a career goal, or it's a personal goal, or if it's travel, just do it. And as far as how to reach me, I'm all over social media as either my Ronnie Robbins or Ronnie Caine Robbins ky an E. I am on most every major social media and my website is a good place to reach me or find out more about where I'm going to be appearing for book signings, or if you have a book club, you can find discussion questions there. All the media that have picked up my book reviews and libraries and so you can find out all of that by following me on social media or to check out my website www dot Ronnie Robbins dot com r O N I Robbi NS and I hope that folks will consider passing hands of Gold into more golden hands, so I try to get more people to more golden hands on Hands of Gold.

24:47 All of Ronnie's links are going to be live, including a link two hands of Gold. Get the book, enjoy the book, and share the book because it's a good story, and it's a story needs to continue to be told. It's a wonderful thing when we can pass on family two others. So Ronnie, thank you very much for taking the time to coming and share with us today. I'm word of mom Rady. I really appreciate it. Thank you, it was my pleasure. And for all of you tuning in, thanks so much for being here. We're going to close out with our fabulous theme song. I'm Smith's sisters and the Sunday Drivers. So till next time. This is Dory di Carlo saying, go out and create a marvelous you.

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