CBS Radio’s Benji Cole interviews J. Donald Oakes, author of “The Stump’s On Fire And I’m Naked”
J. Donald Oakes, author of “The Stump’s On Fire And I’m Naked,” was interviewed by CBS Radio’s host, Benji Cole. The interview in the People of Distinction program is about discussing the message of the book as well as the author’s purpose for writing this masterpiece.
People of Distinction is one of the most wide-ranging radio shows in the United States, hosted by Benji Cole and Al Cole from CBS Radio. People of Distinction is the right fit for authors and readers to discover newly published books, mostly written by passionate and independent authors.
Benji Cole, the host of the program, is a world-class interviewer, video formulator, Los Angeles actor, and filmmaker. He’s shared the acting stage with superstar Tom Hanks.
Author J. Donald Oakes currently resides in the pristine North Georgia Mountains, where he enjoys fly fishing, gardening, and sightseeing. He is actively involved in protecting and preserving the beauty of his surroundings.
Whether the abuse comes in the form of enduring his mother’s irrational fear of storms or overhearing his parents’ incessant fighting at night, Donald begins at an early age to exhibit the classic symptoms of a child who is in the throes of a full-fledged emotional crisis. He suffers from enuresis (bedwetting), encopresis (involuntary bowel movements), and debilitating anxiety attacks. He develops asthma so severely that at times he digs through the family’s fireplace in search of discarded cigarette butts, thinking that inhaling the smoke will help him to breathe.
These stress-related ailments leave him so incapacitated that he is unable to help his family pick cotton in the fields, prompting them to label him “lazy” and accuse him of faking his illnesses in order to get out of work. He is so ashamed of the stained bed sheets his mother hangs out to dry while he is at school that he distances himself from other children, thereby increasing his sense of isolation because he doesn’t want to bring peers home to see the soiled sheets or the dilapidated, crowded shacks that the family lives in from the time Donald is born until he leaves home.
Never before has such a powerful and touching book been written on one person’s quest for emotional survival. Beginning in the hopeless environment of a sharecropper’s grasp, the author takes you on a true-life journey that you will never forget. Sometimes humorous, always intriguing, the book will command your attention, beginning in the eyes of a five-year-old in the 1940’s. At age five, the author witnessed a strange procession of apparitions that would dramatically impact his life forever with a haunting mystery. This encounter held the key to emotional salvation but took many years to unravel.
Donald’s journey is one that we all take, in some fashion, and it is the brave few who can bring their own personal pain to a level of healing that Donald has done, who can transform their suffering not into perpetual violence and hatred but transcend it for personal and spiritual growth that others can learn from.
What is the meaning of existence? It is a question we must each answer for ourselves. Donald poses it to himself at the end of the book and discovers the answer in the final place he searches—inside his own heart. All of us would do well to heed his lesson.
Find the spring that controls your own Universe. Donald Oakes, in “The Stump’s On Fire And I’m Naked” gives us hope that we can.
Get to know more about the author and the work as you listen to the full interview below: