- [Host] Tonight on WPBS Weekly, Inside The Stories: Discover the volunteers of Jefferson County Hospice.

Their compassion and empathy is why they're considered the heartbeat of the organization.

And meet Canadian author Jen Braaksma.

Her first YA fantasy book is a page turner for any avid reader.

Also, central New York musician Mike Powell visits the WPBS studios.

Your stories, your region.

Coming up right now on WPBS Weekly, Inside The Stories.

(soft music) - [Announcer] WPBS Weekly, Inside The Stories is brought to you by the Watertown Oswego Small Business Development Center, Carthage Savings, the J.M.

McDonald Foundation, and the Dr. D. Susan Badenhausen Legacy Fund of the Northern New York Community Foundation.

Additional funding from the New York State Education Department.

- Good Tuesday evening everyone, and welcome to this edition of WPBS Weekly.

Inside The Stories, I'm Joleene DesRosiers.

Stefan has the evening off.

Senior isolation and depression is a fast growing issue in our nation, further exacerbated by the pandemic.

As part of WPBS TV's Aging Together in New York project, we dig into solutions for our aged population.

For our elders in hospice care the way to ease their sadness and isolation at end of life is with an unlimited amount of love and compassion.

The volunteers at Jefferson County Hospice provide that love and compassion and so much more.

(gentle tune plays) They've lived a lifetime.

Some have had families, others a long career for hospice patient Robert Marlow, his lifetime included volunteering at hospice in St. Lawrence County.

Today he finds himself on the other side of that work, as a patient.

Robert takes comfort in knowing that the time he once gave and now receives is one of the greatest gifts a senior patient can receive at end of life.

- This organization stands for not living yesterday or living tomorrow, but living in the now.

And so we bring that and this community into the now, into the present, and we celebrate it.

- [Host] Ask anybody at Jefferson County Hospice what the heartbeat of the organization is, and they'll tell you: It's the volunteers.

Sylvia Buttison has been giving her time to hospice patients for over 30 years.

Mabel Brach also has a few years under her belt.

And Nora, well, she's just beginning.

- Nora became a little fur volunteer here at hospice after I received her as a Christmas gift.

And the more staff and family all talked about the possibility of her becoming a therapy dog here it was a more family discussion and then staff supported us wholeheartedly.

And they love when Nora comes to work.

So we had a big support group and everybody agreed she was the perfect dog for it.

- [Robert] Match made in heaven.

- [Host] Part of what these amazing volunteers do is so much greater than we may realize.

- They are wonderful because they can face the end of life much better than we can.

We are feeling bad and we're trying to figure out what we can do to cheer them up.

And they are so accepting of what is going on to them.

And it just makes it so much easier because you know, they really don't.

Very few of them talk about death.

And we're here to listen if they do but they're so accepting of what's happening to them.

Sometime we do a jigsaw puzzle or I play cards with them or sometimes they just wanna talk and they will ask you questions or talk things to you that they wouldn't their family.

- Hi.

- Hi.

- How are you?

- I'm pretty good.

How are are you doing today?

- Good.

My name's Bob.

- Yes.

And I'm Mabel, hospice volunteer.

Well, I try to ease their depression and their isolation by just being there with them and talking to them and finding out what they would like to talk about.

You know, the spiritual body is important just like the physical, the mental.

And I think sometimes people are waiting.

They're waiting for someone to talk to them about their life, where they're going to spend eternity.

When I leave, walk out these doors, I'm a changed person.

They change me.

(gentle tune plays) - Easing depression and isolation for our folks is a really big deal.

Mainly because in a caregiver's instance if they have been taking care of their elderly father and for four years, sometimes we get these folks and they're like, I've been the caregiver four years.

And they're exhausted.

And if they get an opportunity to get outta the house, that is so beneficial for them to like recharge.

- [Host] Sylvia understands this.

She's dealt with loss.

Her brother, her sister, her father and her own son all left their physical bodies in her lifetime.

This room at Jefferson County Hospice is dedicated to her son.

It's an honor she says that makes her all the prouder to give her time to those in hospice care.

- It's very special because, I mean, naturally my son was very special and he was only 28-years-old.

So, you know, so many people come in or they don't know about the room.

And they'll call me when they get home and say, "Guess what?

I went into Dan's room today."

And that really makes me feel good.

- [Host] Down the hall is the family room.

That's where Nora struggles to be still for the moment.

- Nora come, Nora come.

Sit.

Sit.

Good job.

Lay down, lay down, lay down.

Good girl.

Stay.

Stay right there.

- [Host] But she's not trained for the camera.

She's trained to give comfort and that she does very well.

- Is there any way I forgot my phone that I could take a picture of her and I together?

- Of course you can.

So when Nora enters a room, when there's a patient and their family, I can see the patient light up.

I can see their faces smile.

I can also see their body language just relax.

And they become almost a puddle of mush because there's a free little friend that they wanna pet and they love that.

I'm not sure if Nora understands end of life with patients but I do know that she understands when to be soft and gentle and when the time is appropriate that she can't jump, she can't run around.

She quietly approaches a patient.

- Volunteerism of any degree is a different part of your life.

First of all, because you're giving of yourself and you're not being a paid person.

You are being a heartbeat to the community.

- [Host] The heartbeat is strong, it's compassionate and it shows up with these hands and paws, easing fear isolation and loneliness, so the person who lived a lifetime moves on.

- I'd already been with many family members that had passed in my arms just as I was there at that time.

And it's a privilege really.

- Some people think when they hear hospice, it's so depressing.

Not, not at all.

Not at all.

- [Host] In Jefferson County, for WPBS Weekly, I'm Joleene DesRosiers.

(gentle tune plays) This interview was part of WPBS's Aging Together in New York project and is produced in association with the New York State Office for the Aging and the New York State Education Department.

For more interviews and stories on senior isolation please visit wpbstv.org.

Our next story is for avid readers and if young adult novels are something you enjoy, this next segment is for you.

Canadian author and book coach Jen Braaksma sat down with us to talk about her book, "Evangeline's Heaven".

And welcome to the studio.

We are inside the studio with another author.

She is Jen Braaksma from Ottawa, Canada.

And I'm very excited to have you here because you are a YA novelist and this is a fantasy novel called "Evangeline's Heaven".

And I'm excited to talk to you about this.

And we've been chatting before the cameras came on because your world building and your concept to me is really what's gonna draw readers in.

And you're a brand new author, so that's exciting.

So first of all welcome.

- Thank you.

It's wonderful to be here.

- Yeah, so glad you made the trip.

Let's talk about the book "Evangeline's Heaven".

First of all, this is a story that's your take on Lucifer's revolt against God.

But it's not a Christian book it's not a religious book, it's a fantasy book.

How long was this story in your head?

- Oh, good heavens.

A decade maybe.

I thought about it for a long time.

I researched for a long time angel lore, anything to do with the idea of the heavens.

It's based on Christian mythology, but you're right it's not meant to be a religious book.

And then it was a lot easier to keep researching than to start writing.

- Yeah right.

Writers do that.

We get that.

Some of us call it a block.

But you get that moment where you're uncertain about yourself.

And we're gonna talk about that because you were uncertain about yourself when you sat down to write.

And the reason I wanted to meet with you is after learning about the book and reading you paused for a while before you pushed this out.

Why?

- Because imposter syndrome is real.

It's like, who am I to write this book?

Or any book?

I don't know what I'm doing.

I'd always love to write since I was a kid.

And so I thought, yeah, I can do this, I can do this.

And then maybe I couldn't.

And then life gets in the way and I chose to go into journalism in university and then I made this switch to teaching.

So I was a high school English teacher for almost two decades.

And I had this ridiculous thought that, oh I can just write in my spare time.

Any teachers out there?

Oh my God, there's no spare time.

And then I had young children and then so it was easy to push off writing because I don't know am I any good at it?

I think so maybe, maybe I know what I'm doing.

I'm trying to learn.

So life just kind of got in the way and it was easier to push it off.

But finally I decided, you know what?

I really wanna make a go of this.

- So here's what pulls me in and what pull in viewers who love fantasy novels.

And I don't typically read them, and I was pulled in.

You built a concept, your world is based on seven different levels of heaven.

Talk to me about where that concept came from.

- Yeah, the expression, "Oh, I'm in seventh heaven."

That's what got me thinking.

Like, oh, okay, well what are the other six then?

So the idea I guess is God might be in that seventh heaven or that's what's really good about it.

But it also came from the idea, I was really interested in the concept of the binaries of good versus evil.

And who better to represent that than the devil himself.

But that's much too simplistic.

None of us is good and or evil.

It's nothing so simple.

So I thought about how we deal with angels.

There's lots of wonderful stories about angels but as often here on earth, right?

What happens?

And so I thought, well what if those angels are actually in heaven?

And we know from the lore that there's this battle in the heavens as Lucifer revolts against God.

I wondered what that would look like.

The heavens came out of that concept.

If there was gonna be a battle, what were they fighting for?

- And in one of your worlds with her best friend.

And we have to obviously talk about the heroine of the story.

When she visits her parents and her parents are shuttered in the house and whatnot.

In my head I thought, I'm amazed at how you took these layers of heaven and made them almost so common, I forget they have wings.

- That was actually done on purpose.

So one of the reasons why I love to write young adult literature, I love reading it.

As a high school teacher, I was around teens all the time.

So I really enjoy their company.

I really enjoy being in their world.

And they're so idealistic.

Yeah, you, not everyone I grant, you know over generalization, but teens in general often really really love something or they really, really hate something.

And so that intensity, that passion really drew me into young adult.

And so that's what I wanted in my characters.

But I wanted them relatable.

I wanted my heavens to feel like it's something we could actually live in.

- [Host] Like a town?

- Right!

And I wanted my characters, they're angels absolutely.

But I wanted them to feel like we know them.

And I think it works again for the lore.

The idea is that angels and humans they're like sister species if you will.

So the commonalities between them made sense for our human readers in order to feel, yeah, maybe I know who this Evangeline person is.

- Let's talk about her because I said in the beginning, it's your take on how Lucifer revolted against God, wanting to banish him.

Who is she?

- She, Evangeline is Lucifer's daughter and Evangeline loves her father because, I have Lucifer as a fantastic dad.

He's a single dad and he dotes on Evangeline.

They travel all over, especially the first heavens.

And he home schools her and he's just everything to her.

She's bought into his cause.

She feels that there's an injustice against her class of angels.

It's the lowest class of angels.

So she buys into everything her father says.

And he's a good dad except no one else realizes just how he is with her.

Because people start to see actually, he's a little more nefarious than that.

The whole book is her journey about discovering not just who her father is, but who she is in relation to who she discovers her father is.

- Which is pretty remarkable 'cause you touched on so many different themes.

Love, faith, loyalty, courage, trust.

Which theme would you say you resonated the most with with writing?

- Love.

- Yeah.

- Love the idea.

There's so many different types of love, different layers of that.

The love for her father, the love for the people that she meets along the way.

The love for the people who have been missing in the story because of the war.

There's shifting loyalties, absolutely.

But those loyalties are going to be based on love.

There is a bit of a romance, a bit of a love story in there too.

So, you know, I can't get away from that.

I love that part of it too.

And I think that especially the idea Evangeline has to figure out what's going on with her father but she's 18 at the beginning of this story.

So, you know, in our world the cusp of people moving from teenage hood into adulthood, their views of their own parents may be evolving or shifting.

So who are we against our parents?

But also recognizing that our parents may not be, you know, this ideal hero that in Evangeline's case, that she felt her father was.

- It's very, very intelligent writing.

- [Jen] Thank you.

- Just a shift here, you mentioned you were a high school teacher you had a shift in your career and this book had something to do with it.

You are a book coach and I want the audience to know this because I said earlier, everyone has a book in them.

We all have a book in us and sometimes we don't want that book to come out 'cause we don't think it's good enough.

We don't think we have the talent.

What do you do as a book coach?

- I help writers at any stage of their writing.

So people who have never written a word in a book but they have a story to tell, either fiction or memoir.

There are other book coaches who help with non-fiction books.

That's not my specialty.

And if you don't know where to start, I can help you right from the foundation and go from there.

If you have a manuscript already and you're not sure how to make it better, I can help you fix that.

It's really about being there.

It's one-on-one support.

So not just taking an online class not just going to a class when there were classes available.

It's one-on-one.

Hey, here's how you can improve your particular story.

That's what I'm able to do for my clients.

- And we were talking earlier and I said do you have an outline?

Because some people who are writers, namely some people in this room, sometimes we throw up on the page but then we don't know where the story goes.

And I asked you, do you do that?

And you told me - Yes, yes.

But there's, there's a big but here.

So I used to be a pantser, someone, you know, seat of the pants, sit down, write it out, whatever comes, comes.

And I thought, you know, this is the way it is.

And I learned the hard way because there was a novel, it's, you know in the bottom of the drawer never to see the light of day kinda novel where I wrote 300 pages, just no outline just sit down like, this is amazing.

This is so much fun.

And I get to the end, and there was no way the end made any sense because the beginning made no sense.

I wasted 300 pages.

So a little bit despondent.

I ended up discovering my own book coach.

I didn't even know such a thing existed.

You know, it's like a sports coach.

You wanna get better at sports, you know you work with a coach.

So I found Jenny and she taught me an outlining process that worked that works for my clients, for me, for her clients.

Because it doesn't take every single thing in the story and strip away all the creativity.

It's meant to be just two pages, maybe three pages.

It's just your foundation.

It's just the skeleton of your story.

But it tells you the story arc, the plot, the what's happening.

- Right.

- But it also tells you the character arc, how that character grows and evolves.

And those two pieces together help me figure out, okay I can write an outline and that outline is just a roadmap.

I can change it, but it's my starting point.

- And you said when we were talking about that outline you can move that outline.

You can, it's a roadmap.

It's meant to be shifted and moved, but it keeps you in a place where your story continues and flows.

And finally, as we wrap things up you are not done writing this.

This was published in August of 2022.

You have another one on tap in the same world?

- So I am working on this sequel to this one.

"Evangeline's Hell", - Woo!

(laughs) - Yes.

But it it's going to be part of a trilogy.

So two more to come.

But those, the plans are still up here.

Not yet on the page.

So it'll be a little while.

But I do have another young adult dystopian thriller coming out in 2024.

It's a different world with different characters.

It's about a worldwide pandemic.

- Shocking!

(laughs) - Before, this was before the worldwide pandemic!

That's the joy and fun of writing.

It can be timeless, but it's another young adult female protagonist.

I really love delving into their psyches.

So I'm excited for that to come out in 2024.

- And we are gonna wrap things up now just right at this camera.

What is your website?

- Jen Braaksma writer.com.

- Beautiful.

Thank you so much.

Go to the website for the purchase of the book or if you've got that book in you and you want a writing coach I have to say it was an absolute delight speaking with you and thank you so much for making the drive and joining us here in Watertown.

- My pleasure.

Thanks so much.

- Our next musician is a favorite throughout central and northern New York.

His songs are filled with powerful imagery and thought provoking themes and his performances are animated and oh so colorful.

Mike Powell visited our studios for a session and here he is with his band singing Jot-Em-Down, Texas.

- My name is Mike Powell and I'm a singer-songwriter.

I went down the road of playing music.

I guess the road started when I was 13-years-old.

I found my dad's old guitar in our attic.

It was an old fender guitar and it just had the top three strings on it.

Brought it into my room and could figured out that baseline, that old country baseline.

Boom boom boom, dika di, dika doo.

And I wrote like a hundred songs in my room just with those top three strings.

I was always into poetry and writing as a kid, as an outlet.

And this gave me like a foundation to work with.

The song I'm gonna play today is called Jot-Em-Down Texas.

So this guy goes down to Jot-Em-Down, Texas and his wife shows up.

She ends up saying, come on, let's get, we gotta go back home, get outta here.

We're not staying in Jot-Em-Down, Texas.

So the song is about them staying together in Jot-Em-Down Texas and having a night.

My name is Mike Powell and this is a song called Jot-Em-Down Texas.

(guitar plays soulfully) (band joins in) ♪ She come in on a midnight bus ♪ ♪ A pillow case and a picture of us ♪ ♪ Greasy hair and a mouth full of dust ♪ ♪ Like a bottle that was long ago drunken.

♪ ♪ I feel a fist at the back of my head ♪ ♪ I turn around and her eyes would go red ♪ ♪ I swear she'd kill me even if I were dead ♪ ♪ The party's over I'm going home in my (indistinct) ♪ ♪ Now I been out here waiting ♪ ♪ Watching the lights turn blue ♪ ♪ Left a prayer front of window ♪ ♪ Drew a heart between I and you ♪ ♪ It's Friday night in Jot Em Down Texas.

♪ ♪ And I just want to dance with you ♪ (band plays joyfully) ♪ And a shotgun wedding ♪ ♪ And a ten gallon hat ♪ ♪ Throw me a bone, I'm smoking alone ♪ ♪ Come on let's have us some fun ♪ ♪ Take you to the red I get a two for one ♪ ♪ I said our love was like a loaded gun ♪ ♪ She said the bill was already smoking ♪ ♪ I was down on my hands and knees ♪ ♪ Please darling won't you come along with me?

♪ ♪ I kissed her hand and I lost my teeth ♪ ♪ But coughing is better than choking ♪ ♪ I been out here waiting ♪ ♪ Watching the lights turn blue ♪ ♪ Left a breath on the window ♪ ♪ Drew a heart between I and you.

♪ ♪ It's Friday night in Jot-Em-Down Texas ♪ ♪ And I just wanna dance with you ♪ ♪ And a shotgun wedding ♪ ♪ And a ten gallon hat ♪ ♪ Throw me a bone, I'm smoking alone ♪ ♪ Come on ♪ ♪ (cheerful melody) ♪ ♪ It's Friday night in Jot-Em-Down Texas ♪ ♪ And I just wanna dance with you ♪ ♪ (cheerful melody) ♪ - And that does it for us this Tuesday evening.

Please join us next week for a fresh look Inside The Stories.

Meet a recovery peer advocate from Farham Family Services in Oswego County and discover how they make a difference in the world of addiction.

And learn about a program in Kingston, Ontario that hosts community focused events for the deaf in an effort to raise awareness.

Also meets Sackets Harbor poet Christine Grimes.

She shares her verses inside the WPBS studios.

Meantime, we wanna tell your story.

If you or someone in your community has something meaningful, historic, inspirational, or educational to share please email us at wpbsweekly@wpbstv.org and let's share it with the region.

That's it for now, everyone.

We will see you again next week.

Goodnight.

- [Announcer] WPBS Weekly.

Inside The Stories is brought to you by: the Watertown Oswego Small Business Development Center, a free resource offering confidential business advice for those interested in starting or expanding their small business.

Serving Jefferson Lewis and Oswego Counties since 1986.

Online@watertown.nysbdc.org Carthage savings has been here for generations.

Donated time and resources to this community.

They're proud to support WPBS TV online at carthagesavings.com.

Carthage Savings, Mortgage Solutions since 1888.

Additional funding provided by the J.M.

McDonald Foundation, the Dr. D Susan Badenhausen Legacy Fund of the Northern New York Community Foundation and the New York State Education Department.

♪ Watching the lights turn blue ♪ ♪ Left a breath on her window ♪ ♪ Drew a heart between I and you.

♪ ♪ It's Friday night in Jot Em Down Texas ♪ ♪ And I just wanna dance with you ♪ (gentle tune plays)