"Buffalo Plaid" by Robin Russell Gaiser
– “You know one about grace or somethin’? My mama sang it.”
Leaning in closer to him, I softly improvised music on my harmonica.
Robin Russell Gaiser, MA, CMP, added a certificate for music practitioner to her degrees in English literature and psychology. As an experienced multi-instrumentalist and vocalist, Robin gave live bedside acoustic music to critically and chronically ill, elderly and dying patients in hospices, hospitals, rehabs, nursing and private homes. Her first book, Musical Morphine: Transforming Pain One Note at a Time (Pisgah Press, 2016) chronicles such work. Her second book, Open for Lunch (Pisgah Press, 2018) offers readers a look at what happened when Robin asked random diners to join her for lunch. She and her husband live in Asheville, North Carolina. www.robingaiser.com
Author’s Talk
Robin Russell Gaiser
When my publisher, Andy Reed at Pisgah Press in Asheville, NC, told me he hoped I would write a third book, I laughed. “No way!” After publication of Musical Morphine: Transforming Pain One Note at a Time (Pisgah Press, 2016) and then Open for Lunch (Pisgah Press, 2018), I was done. PR, book talks, presentations, radio interviews, weekly website blurbs, monthly recordings, newspaper write ups, never let up. I was grateful, but exhausted.
When ‘Musical Morphine,’ a memoir about my work as a therapeutic musician, became a 2017 finalist with USA Book Awards, (Health and Alternative Medicine category), I was flabbergasted. What a treat to affix gold award stickers on my book covers.
After Open for Lunch was released, I received a call from NPR in Boston. Evidently, Christopher Kimball ( formerly of Cook's Illustrated, now Milk Street radio and television), picked up my book thinking he would find recipes, cooking ideas. When he realized I was writing about asking random diners to eat lunch with me, he couldn't put the book down. A young recording engineer came to my home and managed the live hour-long radio interview with Kimball. I will never forget how he and I clicked during that sixty minutes of unscripted Q and A.
Meanwhile, a two-foot-tall stack of writing in every genre, generated in classes at Great Smokies Writing Program, UNCA, and Flat Iron Writing Room in West Asheville, occupied too much space in my office. I rifled through it last winter, saving and tossing. Maybe there was a book in there--a collection of selected pieces. Andy sat up straight when I told him about the 'possible book.’
I'm considering the title, The Possible Book, and have catalogued every bit of saved written work as per Andy's suggestion. Currently, I am choosing pieces I love— polishing, revising, editing. Poetry, vignettes, prompt writing, essays and short stories now populate my expanding possible book file. Andy thinks there might even be more than one book in the works! I think that’s possible.
The story you will hear, "Buffalo Plaid," a true story about a man I encountered at the hospice where I worked as a Certified Music Practitioner, was originally a chapter in ‘Musical Morphine.’ My then-editor thought it too similar to other chapters. PSPP’s spring 2024 theme, ‘Now or Never,” cried out for this story. After all these years, it is finally published. www.robingaiser.com
