because he is america's black mozart and there was no one else who was going to tell it in my friends or my family they kept saying you have to write that story and here's my book eighth wonder the thomas  asli born blind people and leopard who started playing mozart at the age of three i had started in writing at the university of washington and while i was at the university of washington i took some classes mostly in broadcast journalism but i had an opportunity once i graduated to take a journalism class for print journalism i was working as an assisted at the seattle times in the sports editing department and the sports editor and i actually had a bar and she took an interest in my career i started writing for the beacon hill news and some local sports magazines and then i got an internship at the seattle times and from that in turn ship the managing editor the newspaper took interest of me and i had a meeting with the managing editors and we discussed how we could further my career and they suggested that i applied for this very prestigious program at the seattle times this mentorship program with supposed grammar where you were trained extensively as a reporter in los angeles you had eight weeks of journalism training from the top editors at the newspaper and then you were sent out as general assignment reporters in different areas of the newspaper there were i believe thirty reporters who were chosen out of a thousand reporters from the entire country out of the university of washington and i landed that program and i ended up leaving seattle moving to los angeles and starting a career as a los angeles times reporter at the end of the program you are guaranteed a job in eight times mirror newspaper and that's how mike writing career started and got off the ground from the l a times i was sit back and east to new york and i worked in new york and i worked in connecticut but i still had the budget of the entertainment industry that i had been exposed to when i was in the los angeles area and i decided to apply to graduate school and that's when i did i applied to cow state northridge and  about i got into both and i decided to go to northridge because the writers of my cousin vinny and a script that had been sold for a million dollars starring leonardo dicaprio as a teenager had been so writers at northridge and so i decided to roll at northridge and get my masters degree in screenwriting and that's what i did and then how did you get the jobs for screenwriting for screenwriting everything i thought when i left journalism that i was making a parent a parallel career move and i didn't understand that i was moving from a career into the art and the artist based on relationship once i realized that relationships were extremely important i spent another year and a half developing relationship with fellow filmmakers at u s c i worked on over thirty studio fields as an assistant director an associate producer and while i was working at u s c i decided to write and produce an independent movie called ken bolts that was picked up by a showtime incorporated and that was my first development deal so when i was in crit it was getting spirits for me because i had an opportunity to interview some of the most prominent people in the on the planet really and what they were there for my heart is when i was leaving to go to graduate school the school district the superintendent included they do be a party and they said that they had never done that for a reporter before but they wanted too honor me because i was such an honest and earnest reporter and they gave me flowers and they gave me a book and the book was a fictional book it was about a little beer that was so are this is so earnest that it became real and the superintendent when i left he said when i first met you i wondered if you were real and now on it now i know that you really are real and so that really touched my heart because i always tried to do my job with integrity and i wanted to do my job with excellence while at the take same time serving the newspaper and at the same time serving the community in a way that was beneficial to both and that's really a nice lead in to how you have all under this man's memory and you brought his life to life that was really important for me because time is spent you know he was treated well his stage name was polite but one thing that his mother said that stuck out to me in one of the articles from the new york times was that the family never called him tom if they did not like his stage name moniker and for some reason instinctively i knew that blind tom though famous in the way it brought a lot of joy to georgia and people of the south and for america in general i knew that we you know call our heroes we don't say the death beethoven and we don't say that your list band go and so instinctively i knew that they would probably perfervid for him to be colored thomas which is what they called him and thomas back to you so i felt that he was an american virtue also and he should be brought back and remembered as such because for a child in a blind eye to stick slaves to have one hundred eighty works produced in have it published is phenomenal and i think that by doing this book that we can somehow restored his legacy that they will into the cracks of history well i i think it's wonderful that you have honored his legacy thank you thank you thank you thanks for being on my show thank you so much for having me and we're going to have you on more to say with in the future thank you i think it's kevin hart says it's so funny that everyone says oh i can get up on the stage and tell a joke everyone thinks that they can write i would never tell that in the big athlete i can go out and run indian lympics the next day but a lot of people think that they well we are happy to have you on the show because your information is so remarkably important for the public to hear about how this is done and your struggle to get it produced and wri and also it's not worth your career in case that person when terril current you you know everybody can be tainted by everything and so the thing is people don't understand you have built