13Feb/26

Patricia Grayhall

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February 13, 2026

It gives us great pleasure to present Season 11, Episode 5: Patricia Grayhall!

Patricia Grayhall returns as a triple threat with her latest novel Framed. We discuss corporate greed, conspiracies, environmental awareness, immigration issues, unrequited love, and why the best novels have threads of multiple genres.

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Patricia Grayhall is a retired physician turned acclaimed author whose memoir Making the Rounds: Defying Norms in Love and Medicine earned a starred Kirkus Review and recognition as one of Kirkus Reviews’ Best 100 Indie Books of 2022. The memoir has won multiple prestigious awards, including the 2024 National Indie Excellence Award for LGBTQIA Non-fiction and Memoir and the 2023 Best Indie Book Award for LGBTQ Memoir.

Following the success of her memoir, Patricia co-authored the romance novel Golden Years and Silver Linings with her partner in 2023.

Her literary range expanded with A Place for Us: A Novel, published by She Writes Press in June 2025.

Patricia’s newest medical/legal thriller Framed, blends her medical expertise with compelling storytelling, marking her evolution from memoirist to versatile fiction author. Patricia lives with the love of her life on an island in the Pacific Northwest, where she enjoys other people’s dogs and occasional sightings of orca, eagles, otters, and black bears.

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June 13, 2025

It gives us great pleasure to present Season 10, Episode 22: Patricia Grayhall!

Patricia Grayhall returns to share her new romance: A Place for Us. We dive into connecting with lost loves, building a life together in the face of obstacles, and endings that bring happiness and hope!

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Patricia Grayhall is a medical doctor and author of the award-winning memoir, Making the Rounds; Defying Norms in Love and Medicine and a romance novel, Golden Years and Silver Linings, with wife and author Linda M. Ford. She has authored articles in Queer Forty, The Gay and Lesbian Review, The Millions, Lesbian Game Changers, The Seattle Lesbian, and Seattle Magazine, and has been interviewed on NPR.

Currently, Patricia is working on her third novel, an environmental crime novel. All of her novels are inspired by real-life experiences, one of the advantages of being an older author. Patricia lives with the love of her life on an island in the Pacific Northwest where she enjoys other people’s dogs and occasional sightings of orca, eagles, otters, and black bears.

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January 20, 2023

It gives us great pleasure to present Season 8, Episode 3: Patricia Grayhall + Sense8 review part 3!

Patricia Grayhall, author of the memoir Making the Rounds: Defying Norms in Love and Medicine, joins us to discuss her training to become a doctor before Roe v Wade, and her lifelong lessons about sustaining relationships. Then Albert Nothlit returns for part 3 of our review of Sense8’s first season!

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Patricia Grayhall is a retired medical doctor and author of Making the Rounds; Defying Norms in Love and Medicine that garnered a starred review in Kirkus Reviews, as well as positive reviews from Katherine Forrest and Radclyffe. She’s published articles in Queer Forty, The Gay and Lesbian Review, The Millions, Lesbian Game Changers, The Seattle Lesbian, and Seattle Magazine. In addition to a recent NPR interview, her book is among Kirkus Reviews’ Best Indie Books of 2022.

Patricia lives with the love of her life on an island in the Pacific Northwest where she enjoys other people’s dogs, big nature, and her second career as an author.

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[embedyt] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KCCM30oiJrg[/embedyt]

 

06Feb/26

Sophie Haeder

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February 6, 2026

It gives us great pleasure to present Season 11, Episode 4: Sophie Haeder!

Sophie Haeder returns with her latest novel The Lurking Demon. We discuss the evolution of Dohva, and the main characters – Sineth, Kima, and Avala. We also discuss world building and finding inspiration in Dungeons and Dragons.

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Born in 1992, Sophie Haeder lives in the picturesque countryside of Bavaria, Germany, where she embraces her nerdy nature alongside her roles as a wife and a mother of a little girl.

With a lifelong passion for fantasy, encompassing everything from fairies to witches to trolls, she has found solace in imaginative play since childhood. Playing Dungeons & Dragons with her favourite group of nerds brings her immense joy.

This love of storytelling eventually led her to writing, a natural progression from her professional career as a marketing manager.

She loves fantasy and art, and her writing combines all of her interests into one. That’s why she did all the artwork for her books herself, including the cover, the map, and every other illustration.

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May 23, 2025

It gives us great pleasure to present Season 10, Episode 18: Sophie Haeder!

Sophie Haeder shares her novel: The Land Within. We discuss being inspired by Dungeons and Dragons, the romantasy genre, and the prominence of LGBTQ+ characters in this literary style!

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Born in 1992, Sophie Haeder lives in the picturesque countryside of Bavaria, Germany, where she embraces her nerdy nature alongside her roles as a wife and a mother of a little girl. With a lifelong passion for fantasy, encompassing everything from fairies to witches to trolls, she has found solace in imaginative play since childhood. Serving as a gamemaster for her Dungeons & Dragons group brings her immense joy. This love of storytelling eventually led her to writing, a natural progression from her professional career as a content marketing manager. She loves fantasy and art, and her writing combines all of her interests into one. That’s why she does all the artwork for her books herself, including the cover, the map, and every other illustration in her book. If you play D&D yourself, you may recognize some of the mechanics of magic and world-building that follow this kind of vibe. But of course it is not necessary to know anything about D&D to enjoy her book.

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16Jan/26

S.M. Stevens

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January 16, 2026

It gives us great pleasure to present Season 11, Episode 3: S.M. Stevens!

S.M. Stevens shares her novel Beautiful & Terrible Things. We discuss this amazing diverse cast of friends, their social justice activities in immigration, racism, and mental health, and what it’s like to write about living in today’s America. She then shares how to get a free short story and novelette about her characters that were cut from the book.

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After many years as a business writer, S.M. Stevens found the time to pen her first novel when a pelvis broken in 3 places absolved her from housework and chauffeuring the kids around for several months. The result was her middle-grade novel Shannon’s Odyssey, written for adventurous animal-lovers.

A year later, while in treatment for cancer, she wrote the first of the Bit Players series to fill the void of fiction for music and theatre-loving teens. The YA series now has three books, and appeals to all teens not just drama-loving ones.

Her first adult novel (thankfully not prompted by another health crisis!) was Horseshoes and Hand Grenades, published in 2019. The story is a coming-of-age tale about two young women starting their careers in Boston while dealing with past and present demons.

Her latest novel, Beautiful & Terrible Things, was released by Black Rose Writing in Summer 2024 and has won numerous awards, including Indies Today Best Literary Book of 2024. The same characters are featured in her award-winning novelette, The Wallace House of Pain (available on Amazon).

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09Jan/26

Daniel Land

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January 9, 2026

It gives us great pleasure to present Season 11, Episode 02: Daniel Land!

Daniel Land returns to share his concept single: Pearl Daddy. He wrote two singles that compliment each other and tell a love story with each track from one lover’s perspective. We also discuss the North African influences that ghost into the music.

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Daniel Land has become both a scholar and a practitioner of the kind of music he creates, studying towards a PhD on artists like the Cocteau Twins and Slowdive at the London College of Music, whilst collaborating with artists as varied as Darkher, Swoone, and the electronica auteur Ulrich Schnauss. Meanwhile, Daniel’s music has found a wider audience by gracing campaigns by brands such as Expedia and appearing in films including Only You and The Art of My Scars.

He is currently working on the third draft of a memoir covering the period from 1997 to 2000, focusing on his late teens in rural Devon, UK, and the experience of coming out in the shadow of Section 28. It explores how homophobia shaped his early relationships, the depressive fallout that followed, and the activism that emerged from his recovery: working with a charity to support isolated queer young people, campaigning for legislative change, contributing to police diversity strategies, and helping to develop national guidelines for schools on tackling homophobic bullying.

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May 5, 2023

It gives us great pleasure to present Season 8, Episode 19: Daniel Land + Our Review of Alex Borstein: Corsets & Clown Suits!

Daniel Land joins us to share his upcoming album, Out of Season. He leads us into a discussion about identity and memory, then we review Alex Borstein’s Corsets & Clown Suits, followed by what won our weeks!

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Daniel Land has become both a scholar and a practitioner of the kind of music he creates, studying towards a PhD on artists like the Cocteau Twins and Slowdive at the London College of Music, whilst collaborating with artists as varied as Darkher, Swoone, and the electronica auteur Ulrich Schnauss.

Daniel will release his new album, Out of Season, in 2023. He is currently writing a concept album about the AIDS crisis, and is working on the second draft of a memoir about homophobia.

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[embedyt] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=plxYfpXXJzY[/embedyt]

02Jan/26

Neil Laird

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January 2, 2026

It gives us great pleasure to present Season 11, Episode 01: Neil Laird!

Neil Laird helps us kick off the new year by sharing his series Prime Time Travelers. We discuss how his career as an Emmy-nominated director of historic series for television shaped writing his series. We also discuss uncovering examples of gay life in ancient times while balancing satire, romance, and historical drama in his series

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Neil Laird is a multiple Emmy-nominated director of historical films for Discovery, BBC, PBS, History Channel, National Geographic, and many other networks. He has produced over 100 programs around the globe that feature crumbling Egyptian tombs, lost Mayan cities, and mysterious shipwrecks at the bottom of the sea.

But to his continued disappointment, he has yet to stumble upon a time machine to see these things when they were shiny and new. His book, the first in a series, aims to remedy that grave injustice.

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26Dec/25

Gordon Blitz

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December 26, 2025

It gives us great pleasure to present Season 10, Episode 51: Gordon Blitz!

Gordon Blitz returns to share his novel Converso Jews: A Hidden Family Story. We discuss his recent plays and monologues, as well as the book’s dual story line and how it explores families in the past hiding their Judaism from the Catholics in control and how it has affected a modern family who doesn’t know where some of their rituals came from as they learn to embrace an interfaith, gay love relationship.

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After forty years as an accountant, Gordon Blitz retired in 2017 and became a passionate writing machine. As a senior LGBTQ+ man, he has a unique perspective on the many facets of being LGBTQ+ for the last fifty years. He is a multi-media creative artist, novelist, playwright and performer.

A Homeless Thanksgiving had a reading in 2025 as part of the Talking It Out Festival at the Spit & Vigor Blackbox Theatre in New York City.

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May 10, 2024

It gives us great pleasure to present a Season 9, Episode 18 Interview – Gordon Blitz

Gordon Blitz joins us to share his multi-genre strengths by writing about dementia, aging, and late-life same-sex love in Harmonic Dissonance. We then discuss his crime novel Murder Times Three-A Waverly Place Mystery where he highlights bisexual and asexual aspects of being queer while a cat uncovers clues that lead the amateur sleuth through the case.

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From a young child, Gordon was called a sissy, girlie, fag, queer, and homo. Getting towel whipped, stomach punched and spit on were part of his world. Being bullied like this made him go into a nice, staid, and stable career in accounting. Gordon didn’t find his writer’s voice until 2017 when he retired from forty years of debits and credits. Since then he’s become a passionate writing machine. Gordon has published work in Whoa Nelly Press, Wingless Dreamer, Two Hawks Quarterly, the Santa Monica College Journals Chronicles and On Going Moments, and Gay Wicked Ways.

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19Dec/25

Madeleine Nakamura

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December 19, 2025

It gives us great pleasure to present Season 10, Episode 50: Madeleine Nakamura!

Madeleine Nakamura shares her novels Cursebreakers and Angel Eye. We discuss the impact of queer speculative fiction, as well as authentic ways to introduce mental illness in main characters.

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Madeleine Nakamura is an author and editor based in Los Angeles. Her debut adult queer fantasy novel Cursebreakers, published by Red Hen Press, received starred reviews from Kirkus Reviews and Independent Book Review and won bronze in the Foreword INDIES. In her spare time, Madeleine enjoys tabletop RPGs, video games, cooking, and embroidery.

The sequel to Cursebreakers, Angel Eye, is available now and has also received a Kirkus Star.

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12Dec/25

Timothy Jay Smith

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December 12, 2025

It gives us great pleasure to present Season 10, Episode 598: Timothy Jay Smith!

Timothy Jay Smith shares his next novel Fire On The Island. We discuss arson as a political weapon and the refugee situation, as well as a look into why the USA’s aid and assistance abroad matter.

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From a young age, Timothy Jay Smith developed a ceaseless wanderlust that has taken him around the world many times. En route, he’s found the characters that people his work. Polish cops and Greek fishermen, refugees and arms dealers, child prostitutes and wannabe terrorists, Indian Chiefs and Indian tailors: he hung with them all in an unparalleled international career that saw him smuggle banned plays from behind the Iron Curtain, maneuver through Occupied Territories, and stowaway aboard a ‘devil’s barge’ for a three-day crossing from Cabo Verde that landed him in an African jail.

Tim has won top honors for his novels, screenplays and stage plays in numerous prominent competitions. Istanbul Crossing, his fifth novel, won the 2025 Next Generation Indie Book Award (LGBTQ category), Leapfrog Press’s 2023 Global Fiction Prize (which led to its publication), the Eyelands Book Award, and the Page Turner Award for Writing. Fire on the Island (also published by Leapfrog Press) won the Gold Medal in the Faulkner-Wisdom Competition, and his screenplay adaptation of it was named Best Indie Script by WriteMovies. Another novel, The Fourth Courier, was a finalist for Best Gay Mystery in the 2020 Lambda Literary Awards. Previously, he won the Paris Prize for Fiction (now the de Groot Prize) for his novel, A Vision of Angels. Kirkus Reviews called Cooper’s Promise “literary dynamite” and selected it as one of the Best Books of 2012.

Tim was nominated for the 2018 Pushcart Prize. His stage play tribute to Matthew Shepard, How High the Moon, won the prestigious Stanley Drama Award. His screenplays have won or placed in dozens of screenwriting competitions including those sponsored by the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences, Capital Fund Screenplay Competition, WriteMovies, Houston WorldFest, Fresh Voices, and StoryPros. He founded the Smith Prize for Political Theater, which identified emerging playwrights for 17 years until terminated due to covid-related causes.

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September 20, 2024

It gives us great pleasure to present a Season 9, Episode 37 Interview: Timothy Jay Smith

Timothy Jay Smith joins us to share his upcoming gay-coming-of-age contemporary thriller: Istanbul Crossing. It leads to discussion of homosexuality in Muslim states and a young man trying to help others get to safety and freedom, a story that grew from Timothy’s own experiences helping refugees.

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From a young age, Timothy Jay Smith developed a ceaseless wanderlust that has taken him around the world many times. En route, he’s found the characters that people his work. Polish cops and Greek fishermen, mercenaries and arms dealers, child prostitutes and wannabe terrorists, Indian Chiefs and Indian tailors: he hung with them all in an unparalleled international career that had him smuggle banned plays from behind the Iron Curtain, maneuver through Occupied Territories, represent the U.S. at the highest levels of foreign governments, and stowaway aboard a ‘devil’s barge’ for a three-day crossing from Cape Verde that landed him in an African jail.

Tim brings the same energy to his writing that he brought to a distinguished career, and as a result, he has won top honors for his novels, screenplays and stage plays in numerous prestigious competitions. Fire on the Island won the Gold Medal in the Faulkner-Wisdom Competition for the Novel, and his screenplay adaptation of it was named Best Indie Script by WriteMovies. Another novel, The Fourth Courier, was a finalist for Best Gay Mystery in the 2020 Lambda Literary Awards. Previously, he won the Paris Prize for Fiction (now the de Groot Prize) for his novel, Checkpoint (later published as A Vision of Angels). Kirkus Reviews called Cooper’s Promise “literary dynamite” and selected it as one of the Best Books of 2012.

Tim was nominated for the 2018 Pushcart Prize. His stage play tribute to Matthew Shepard, How High the Moon, won the prestigious Stanley Drama Award. His screenplays have won or placed in dozens of screenwriting competitions including those sponsored by the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences, Capital Fund Screenplay Competition, WriteMovies, Houston WorldFest, Fresh Voices, and StoryPros.

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05Dec/25

Troy Ford

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December 5, 2025

It gives us great pleasure to present Season 10, Episode 487: Troy Ford!

Troy Ford shares his first novel Lamb. We discuss placing a series in a boarding school in the 90s, casting an unnamed narrator as a main character, and touch on the newsletters and substack he runs for you, the readers and writers.

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Troy Ford’s debut novel Lamb released June 3rd, and was an Amazon #1 Hot New Release for LGBTQ+ Literary Fiction. He overcame a 34 year episode of writer’s block to finally write his first novel during Covid lockdown – Lamb is actually his second, though it is first to be published. He runs two newsletters – Ford Knows Books about writing and publishing, and Qstack, a Community for queer writers on Substack. He, his husband, and their Amstaff Terrier relocated to Spain in 2019 – a little gay Mecca half an hour down the coast from Barcelona called Sitges.

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28Nov/25

West Ambrose

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November 28, 2025

It gives us great pleasure to present Season 10, Episode 47: West Ambrose!

West Ambrose shares his first novel The Last Boy On Earth. We discuss navigating our world when it’s unrecognizable and finding the agency to define one’s self! Plus a way to view climate fiction that addresses science and experience.

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West Ambrose is a scrivener and performing artist. Check out his art-works at westofcanon.com. If you want anything published in The HLK quarterly or The Crow’s Nest, just ring for the masthead, and let them know!

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