Last week I was interviewed for Oxford Lives by Jeremy Allen and Graeme Fry produced this podcast from the interview.
https://oxfordlives.libsyn.com/oxford-lives-episode-69-with-sylvia-vetta
For ten years, I wrote the life stories of 100 inspirational people from five continents and every background for my Castaway Series in The Oxford Times. My profile features were popular so they were made into three books. The only condition was that the castaways had to have a link to Oxford. The series could have gone on forever such is the turnover of amazing people who come to live, work or study in this wondeerful city which I call the Hollywood of Stories. It felt to me that Oxford Lives is the successor of Oxford Castaways except it isn’t written journalism. The tables had been turned but the conversational style of the podcast was in the style of the castaways series where my aim was to let the castaways tell their story and not select from it and edit it in a way that distorted it or could lead to misinterpretation.
The Oxford Castaway series enriched my life because I became friends with many of the Oxtopians and they turned the island into a kind of club, connecting people across careers and classes. All the Oxtopians from Town, Gown and County were achievers but were modest with it. The advantage of approaching an interview without preconceptions was that I was constantly surprised by the stories I heard. I told the castaways that I would share the copy with them and that they were welcome to delete anything or add to it. That was why they felt they could trust me and were willing to reveal themselves. For example, Sir Roger Bannister, the famous scientist & runner, told me a story, not then in the public realm, of how he used himself as a guinea pig in an experiment on heat disease.
I castaway the Chinese artist, Weimin He, and he made the cover illustration for the first book, he also attended many castaway related events including the launch of his fellow castaway Ray Foulk’s memoir ‘Stealing Dylan from Woodstock’. In 1969, Ray and his brothers stole Bob Dylan away from Woodstock to the most unlikely location of the Isle of Wight. The Beatles and those festivals blasted through the class-ridden, patronising, conservative norm of the UK I knew as a child. I compared the launch in Blackwell’s and here is Weimin’s sketch of the event.
Ray and I have become friends and we are two of the founders of The Oxford Indie Book Fair (oxib) which has grown and grown. The 2025 Oxib will be opened on Sunday 23 November by the Head of the Bodleian Richard Ovenden. The castaway series had came to an end when Newsquest stopped using freelance writers. I would LOVE to have castaway Richard and many of our speakers including Paterson Joseph with whom I was just interviewed on local radio.
Many famous Americans have passed through Oxford including Bill Clinton whom I never met but I castaway his fellow American, Bill Heine, who worked for a while for Robert Kennedy and documentary filmmaker, Dai Richards who did interview Clinton. I had the privilege of getting to know Steve J Gould when on sabbatical here. There are few scientists famous enough in their life time to be canonised by the US Congress as a ‘Living Legend’ but that happened to Steve. In 1997, he even voiced a cartoon version of himself on The Simpsons. I have used him to inspire a character Steve Darwin in my just published feminist crime thriller Reptiles.
A fellow oxib organiser James Harrison published Oxford Castaways 2&3. The cover illustration of the book above was by his partner and castaway the animator, Joanna Harrison of the Snowman fame.