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Feature

Unconventional Wisdom

A Conversation with IPPY Award Winner, Lawrence Velvel

by Nina L. Diamond

Lawrence Velvel proudly carries the liberal banner in his critically acclaimed blog, VelvelOnNationalAffairs.com, and in his collection, An Enemy of the People: The Unending Battle Against Conventional Wisdom, which won the 2009 IPPY Award Gold medal in the Essay/Creative Non-Fiction category.

Velvel’s social conscience led him to create the Massachusetts School of Law, an accredited, affordable institution that “educates the working class, mid-life people, minorities and immigrants,” he explains. He’s the Dean of that school as well as The American College of History & Legal Studies, which he also founded, and which will open in 2010 in Salem, New Hampshire.

He hosts the award-winning Comcast cable television show, Books of Our Time, which can also be seen online anytime through the show’s archives at mslaw.edu.

We first spoke at the IPPY Awards, where we covered just about everything that’s wrong with the world and how said world might be fixed. We continued that conversation on the phone, then focused specifically on writing, books, the media, and the Internet. Unlike so many who interview authors, Larry Velvel prepares extremely well for Books of Our Time, he says, because “I just loathe the lack of competence and lack of honesty in the world right now.”



IP: How long have you been writing your blog?

LV: I started in mid-2004, and only last week did I learn how to turn on a computer! I don’t know how to type, so I write everything out longhand and my secretary types it. It goes through three or four drafts. She types it and puts it on the Internet. People have lost sight of the fact that it’s the output that counts.

And not what kind of technology you’re using to put it out there. What motivates you to write your blog?

I thought I had something worthwhile to say. Years ago, I had one article in The Washington Post and two Op-Eds in The Wall Street Journal. But there was no way I was going to break in on any sustained basis into the mainstream media. Maybe I didn’t play the game that people need to in Washington and New York. I was unwilling to do the things that have to be done on a daily basis by people who have a public voice. I did a lot of writing. I thought that there were many people who might have something to say who were shut out of the mainstream media. I’d also been involved in creating other things, like a new law school.

And then Doukathsan Press, the law school’s publishing division.

In 2004, the first book we published was the four books put into one that comprised my memoir Thine Alabaster Cities Gleam. The first three were published by an independent press, but for the fourth one we created our own press and then put all four into one book.

Your next books were collections of the essays in your blog.

I’d looked at the Internet and saw that it’s revolutionary because it gives every person a voice and allows the reader to judge whether it’s worthwhile or not, without the vast intermediary group of editors and publishers, an in book publishing the agents, editors and publishers. So, I started writing a blog. Then USA Today rated my blog among the top four among the political blogs, which shocked me.

Our press, Doukathsan, published the first book of my blog essays, Blogs from the Liberal Standpoint, which covered my blog from 2004-2005, and it won an award. And then we published An Enemy of the People: The Unending Battle Against Conventional Wisdom, which covered my blog from 2006-2007 and was published in 2008 and won the 2009 IPPY Award. America 2008 was published in 2009, and so was Madoff: The First Six Months.

I consider this no different than when columnists put their columns into books. Some blogs have been picked up by mainstream media. The Internet has become what picketing was 50 or 60 years ago: the poor man’s printing press. A technological revolution gave millions of us a voice. Without the intermediaries.

The intermediaries censor, and the Internet gets rid of that problem.

What I’m saying isn’t going to be in the mainstream media.

What are your plans for Doukathsan Press?

So far, we’ve published my books and one I did with Kurt Olson, a professor at the law school. It’s a book about legal education. If other people have good books we’d be happy to look at them. We haven’t tried to solicit anything yet.

What’s your next book?

In another six months I’ll collect the next group of my Madoff writings from my blog. Then I’ll get back to general writing in my blog.

You also created and host the TV program Books of Our Time. What prompted you to create the show and what’s your mission?

We started the show because as a law school for "the common man," we focused a lot on teaching and we did a law review for a little while, but we stopped, so we decided to make our intellectual contribution with this program. We started more than 10 years ago, and we’ve done about 400 shows that have won a lot of awards.

The show is archived at our website (mslaw.edu), so people can see it anytime. It airs on Comcast cable in New England and the mid-Atlantic states. We do two new shows a month, but the cable system in New England runs those multiple times. It’s on at 11 a.m. on Saturday and Sunday in New England, and also in the morning on weekends in the mid-Atlantic states.

We also have a show called The Educational Forum, which is hosted by Diane Sullivan, a professor at the law school. They just won an award for a show about women in politics. The Educational Forum actually went on the air first, then about a year later Books of Our Time premiered. They both cover many, many subjects.

I read a lot, and it’s a way of giving an author a forum. It’s an hour per show, but sometimes we’ll do two hours with an author and it’ll be spread over two shows. We do economics, history, politics, biography, medicine, many different subjects. I choose the authors. Diane and I do a lot of research for our shows. I spend about 50-60 hours on every book.

Who’s on your wish list? Do you have one?

No, because I don’t do it by author, I do it by book. We’ve had famous authors and those who aren’t particularly famous but they’ve written a book that fascinates me. It’s not that I have favorite authors, I have favorite books.

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Nina L. Diamond is a journalist, essayist, and the author of Voices of Truth: Conversations with Scientists, Thinkers & Healers. Her work has appeared in numerous publications, including Omni, The Los Angeles Times Magazine, The Chicago Tribune, and The Miami Herald.

Ms. Diamond was a writer and performer on Pandemonium, the National Public Radio (NPR) satirical humor program, for its entire run in Miami and select markets nationwide from 1984-1998. As an editor, she works frequently with other authors and journalists on both fiction and non-fiction.

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