Speaker 1: Arrow. How are you doing today?
Speaker 2: I'm doing good. How are you doing?
Speaker 1: Doing? Fantastic? Looking forward to sharing a conversation with you,
because you have this great way of breaking down a
story in the most simplest way, but yet there's always
a message in it.
Speaker 2: Ah. Wow, I never thought of it that way, but thanks.
Speaker 1: Is it because of personal experience that you inside your
own creative mind? You know, you're that child or you're
that young adult that wants to read books just like this.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you know, I think it's because I was a
reluctant reader as a kid, and I know I know
the kinds of things that turns those kids on and
bores those kids. And so you know, I'm writing as
if I'm writing for some for myself, you know. And
I if I see something that I think is going
to bog down the story, you know, I cut it
out and I try and get to the action, get
to the gist of the story, so that I don't
lose my readers. Wow. Where are you located, by the way,
I am.
Speaker 1: Down here in a very wet and soggy Charlotte, North Carolina.
Speaker 2: Ah okay, all right, good, all right, thanks for having
me on again.
Speaker 1: I appreciate it absolutely because I believe in your storytelling.
And that's the one thing and one of the things
that inspires me most about you is the fact that
you are willing to talk with students and you do
it virtually, and because that is so important. Teachers will
show a student how to read, but they don't show
them how to write as much as you know, the
way that you and I like to dig into a
story and bring something forward.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, I used to do my school as it's
in person before the pandemic, you know, and then of
course all the schools closed down, and I kind of
figured out a way to do it virtually, and I
found it was so much fun visiting schools virtually and
not having to travel, you know, being able to do
it from my apartment was great. So I love the
visiting schools. Now I can visit schools all over the country,
all over the world, even virtually.
Speaker 1: Well, but see what on the other end of that
screen is someone who's going to pick up that writing
instrument or put their fingers on a keyboard, and all
of a sudden they're going to become the storyteller because
they got to see who really is and what they
look like, and it's like, oh my god, I can
be that.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Hey, when I was a kid, probably when you
were a kid, authors didn't visit schools. I never met
any authors, children's book authors, you know, and now a
lot of us. Hey, we do this for the fun
of it. We make money doing it, and we turn
kids onto reading, and it's just a win win for everybody.
Speaker 1: The Picasso Curse. You are releasing this book at the
right time because everybody is going back to school. People
in South Carolina are already in school. North Carolina is
just a few weeks away.
Speaker 2: Really already. Yeah, wow, that's quick. I think in New
Jersey and New York, I think it's like not until
the first week of September.
Speaker 1: My goodness sakes, you guys are spoiled up North Well,
in your heart, who is Edwin Hodge? I mean, a
character like this just doesn't happen. You had to have
created this character then and then shaped him.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, it's a long story. I'll try not to
bore you with it. But for years I had these
two thoughts were knocking around in my head. I couldn't
get them out of my head. The first one was
that back in nineteen eleven, the Mona Lisa, the most
famous painting in the world, was stolen from the Louver
Museum in Paris, Okay. Most people actually know that, but
very few people know that one of the prime suspects
of the theft was Pablo Picasso, the most famous artist
of the twentieth century. And I thought, oh, there's got
to be a story in here, somewhere. There's got to
be a way for me to tell this story in
a novel form. And my first thought was to do
it as a nonfiction book, just telling the straight story
of how it happened. But actually I was lucky because
somebody actually wrote that story. A guy named Nicholas Day
wrote a book called The Mona Lisa Vanishes a couple
of years ago. He basically told the story, but I
wanted to put it in a fictional form, you know.
So you know, I was thinking and thinking. I was
asking my friends, you know, how could I make this
into a story, and nobody seemed to be able to
help me. And then I kept reading, like every year
or so, you read about some person who who goes
to a flea market or buys some kind of a
painting or whatever, and you know, there was this guy
in Pennsylvania. He bought a painting and then on the
back of the painting was a copy of the Declaration
of Independence, you know. And I thought, Oh, here's here's
what if. Here's a what if scenario I can come
up with. And I thought, what if when Picasso was
being questioned for the theft of the Mona Lisa. He
didn't steal, of course, but when he was being questioned,
what if he did a doodle, you know, in his
sketch book while he was nervously waiting, you know. And
what if once they said okay, you can go home,
you didn't steal them on Lisa? What if he threw
the doodle into the garbage can. And what if the
janitor there in Paris pulled the doodle the drawing out
of the garbage can. And what if one hundred years
more and more later, that drawing happened to find its
way to a flea market in Illinois, Okay, And what
if what if a kid, say, brought a poster at
that flea market for ten bucks, He brings it home,
takes this cheap frame off of the poster, and Picasso's
original drawing slides out how would it impact this kid's
life in positive and negative ways? And that was the
gist that was the inspiration for the Picasso Curse.
Speaker 1: Please Do Not Move. There's more with Dan Gutman coming
up next. The name of the book, The Picasso Curse.
There's something about this book that I can totally relate with,
and it's the way that Dan sets it up that
gives me the opportunity to share something that a lot
of people do not know. I think that's the reason
why I can relate with this book because in my
own paintings that have been in galleries, if they're those
who actually bought the paintings, if they would take it
out of the frame, there's all there's always a painting
behind it that that was my signature. But the thing
is is that nobody ever takes the frame apart. But
yet this dude did Edwin does?
Speaker 2: You're blowing the cover on yourself. Arrow. You know, now
all these people who bought your paintings, they're going to
take him out of the frames and find these hidden paintings.
Speaker 1: It's just because you know, when you're an artist, you
have so many paintings inside your room. You've got to
get rid of them, so you team him up with
something else.
Speaker 2: I had no idea that people do that.
Speaker 1: It's just it's it's you know, you know, because you want,
you want someone to have something of value, and because
when when when it comes to what these art galleries
are charging, it's like you know, you said, there, you know,
please don't just just ask for a buck, just get
a power for it. And you know in you as
a writer, you know you must feel the same way.
It's like you want to charge what Okay, okay, I
know you've got to get your your ear things, you know,
be charged up. But me, I just want to write.
I just want to write.
Speaker 2: Sure, Yeah, And it was it was interesting just thinking
about all all the things that might it's kind of
brainstorming about what might happen if that had happened to me,
you know, like all the good things, like you know,
you're going to start making new friends of people who
suddenly want to be nice to you, you can make
a lot of money, you'll get famous, you know, and
stuff like that. But then you've probably heard about these
people who like win the lottery and it ruins their
life because they don't know how to handle their sudden
famine fortune, you know. So I figure, like, all these
bad things could happen to this kid. You know, people
would be jealous, they'd want to steal his money. There'd
be scam artists and shady people, people trying to rip
him off, people saying the thing was a fake to
begin with, or that he stole it, and all these
bad things start happening to the kid. And he starts,
you know, researching Picasso and finds that, hey, while Picasso
lived to be into his nineties, just about everybody in
his life died young and tragically, you know, like his
sister died when she was seven, one of his girlfriends
hung herself, one had a nervous breakdown, his son died
from drinking bleach, and all this kind of horrible things happen.
And I thought, this kid is going to think, hey,
maybe there is a Picasso curse and maybe I've got it,
and maybe something horrible is going to happen to me.
And I don't want to tell you the big surprise
at ending. You probably know the surprise heding. I don't
want to tell your listeners the surprise ending, but I'll
just say that he comes up with an idea out
wageous idea that could possibly solve all his problems. That's
all I'm gonna say. Wow, that's all I'm gonna say.
Speaker 1: You've got to come back to this show anytime in
the future. You know, you're a man of brilliant writing
and I always want to share your stories with with listeners.
Speaker 2: Oh, I really appreciate you doing that. Ro It means
a lot to me and the other authors that you
cut on jags.
Speaker 1: Will you be brilliant today?
Speaker 2: Okay, okay,