A Description of How Dark an Insecurity Addiction Can Be. This was mine.

http://freak-rebeccaodonnell.blogspot.com/2010/08/poetry-of-rage.html

Joey Reynolds was so kind and welcoming to me when I was on his show. We’re brothers and sisters of circumstance. He was great.

Hard to believe this video was made by the great Anre Fuentes after he read Freak. It was an honor to be interviewed by him.

My beloved stepdad Charlie was a Marine in World War ll. He fought on Bougainville, Guam and Iwo Jima with the Third Marine Division. I first began interviewing him for this trilogy of books (one for each island) decades ago. He lived in Illinois, I lived in New York. I came home with my kids every summer. In that time, Charlie could only ever do one interview per visit, they fried him so badly. Two weeks after our last Iwo Jima interview, he died. I was devastated. His death hit me far harder than I ever imagined it would. Every time I tried to write on his books, it was all maudlin crap. So I decided to put it away until I was able to write in the way he deserved. In the meantime, I wrote my memoir Freak: The True Story of an Insecurity Addict, Manifest Destiny, a sci fi horror novel, wrote and illustrated two children’s books: Hurt Magic and Robin the Mighty Red Breast (Robin is slated for publication in 2026), and did a boatload of other creative projects. Finally, I felt I could turn to the World War ll books and write them with the dedication and clear thinking they deserve. It has been the greatest honor of my life that Charlie trusted me enough to share his memories of that terrible time with me. I found out at his funeral that he never spoke of the war to anybody. So it is incumbent on me to do these books justice. And I will.