Voices that Inspire

What inspires you from WFSU Public Media? Here's this week's Voices That Inspire. I'm Mark Muschin. I'm an author. I'm the president of the word of South Festival. I'm a lawyer, a husband, father, resident of Tallahassee for 50 plus years. We moved to Tallahassee when I was five and I went to school here, went away to college and law school came back about three years later and I've been here ever since. I've been fortunate enough to have had a few novels published and the last one that was published, I got invited to these literary festivals around the country. I'd never been to one and I went and said, God, these are great. We should do something like this until I had to. And I was on the city commission then and I decided I needed to get off to do this and I did and we decided to start this festival to combine books and music. So we called it word of South. We started it in 2015 and it rained all weekend long. There was enough there that we decided to keep it going and now we'll be in our ninth year next year. I want to keep doing sort of innovative stuff. I mean, it's great to bring national level people to Tallahassee but if that's all we're doing, that's not as much as we can do. So I'd like to do more stuff like the Adelaide Tribute that we did this year. One of the things we wanted to do with the festival is also showcase the talent that is currently here. And so the beauty of that whole program is we had national level people come from all over the country to play. We got national level people here that they played with and it's tribute to some people from Tallahassee that are absolute legends in the jazz field. I think Tallahassee in a way is sort of like a little European community where people are willing to invest in the community. They're willing to invest for nice public things. I think we have a vibrant art community. We have a vibrant music community. We have a vibrant intellectual community. It's a great place to live. I'm Mark Muschin. Thanks for having me. Thanks for letting me be a part of this community until I ask you. You're listening to Voices That Inspire.