Being a happy corporate camper.

Ever wonder if you can go to work and be your real self? What if you're a little weird? At Zappos.com, that's just the type of people they want working there. They even have a question on their employment applications asking future employees to decide how weird they are on a scale from 1 to 10.

Tony Hsieh, CEO and author of "Delivering Happiness - The Path to Profit, Passion and Purpose" describes a brand new kind of corporate culture. A corporation that recognizes and celebrates each employee's personality and creativity. He says it's possible to make customers happy, employees happy and make a profit, all at the same time. Even though Zappos was purchased by Amazon, Tony has made sure that they haven't lost their focus on happiness as a business model and he's proud that Zappos.com is listed with Fortune 500 as one of the best companies to work for.

But that doesn't mean everything always goes the right way. Failure is part of the path to success, according to Tony. And his favorite quote from Thomas Edison says it all, "I've failed my way to success." Learn more about Tony's unique path to success and see how passion, creativity and maybe a little weirdness can help you be a happier, healthier corporate camper.

Also, in the same podcast, you'll hear an interview with filmaker Eric Byler about the immigration issue and the new documentary, "9500 Liberty". Exploring the issure of how the dollar doesn't discriminate, the economic impact of immigration laws on local businesses in Prince William county, Virginia.

The oil spill, diving and his father: A Conversation with Jean-Michel Cousteau

A Conversation With Cousteau
"The Sea is Everything"

Ever since his father pushed him into the ocean at age 7 on his first dive, Jean-Michel Cousteau has been in love with diving and the ocean. Now he dives for fun and for science, as did his famous father, Jacques Cousteau. His visit to the Gulf oil spill left him deeply saddened by the destruction of wildlife and the ocean itself. In this podcast on Voices of Living Creatively, you can listen to Jean-Michel talk about the disaster in the gulf as well as his famous father.

His new book "My Father, The Captain: My Life with Jacques Cousteau." is being released now as a celebration of the 100th anniversary of his late father's birth on June 10th 1910. The conversation reveals a complex and loving relationship between father and son who also worked together as captain and crew, boss and manager of the Cousteau Society.

Jean-Michel Cousteau, who is also President of the Ocean Futures Society and Executive Producer of Ocean Adventures on PBS, talks about the disaster in the Gulf and how to avoid future oil spills.

Denis Hayes: Founding the environmental movement

It was the smell of the pollution belching from the local pulp mill in his childhood home of Camas, Washington that started Denis Hayes on the path of his life work in the environmental movement. Today, Denis is President and CEO of the Bullitt Foundation in Seattle. As an environmental lawyer, he's published more than 100 articles, books and papers on energy and the environment.

But it all began 40 years ago, when he left his Harvard graduate studies to coordinate the first Earth Day in New York city. You can hear the rest of the story in Mike Turner's interview podcast with Denis Hayes at Voices of Living Creatively website.

Darcelle reveals himself.

Portland, Oregon's most celebrated drag queen has a new show called, 'Just call me Darcelle' that tells the story of the man behind the costumes. Playing to sold out crowds, this one man show covers Walter Cole's life from the shy, quiet boy to a drag queen in Portland's famous Darcelle XV Showplace.

It all started when Walter Cole opened a tavern in Portland and dared to dance. At the time, there was a law prohibiting entertainment and dancing in taverns. But Walter wanted his tavern to expand beyond beer and fist fights, so he and his partner put together a show that's still entertaining audiences with top quality songs, dancing and comedy.

For many years, Darcelle took center stage in anything connected with the show or tavern. Now, at 80, Walter Cole decided to come out of the closet and tell his story on stage. You can hear the whole story along with music and song, in a podcast interview on the Voices of Living Creatively website.

It's a positive journey from the voice of a man living a very creative life.

Keeping Portland Weird: A creative way to make a living.

According to two Portland business owners, being weird and living creatively are not only good for your life but good for business, too. Music Millennium owner, Terry Currier brought the saying "Keep Portland Weird" to the city and Impresa consulting firm owner, Joe Cortright say it makes perfect economic sense to keep Portland weird. It's these weird ideas that eventually lead to new ideas and innovation that create new business and a thriving new economy.

Many companies in the so-called new economy see a creative company culture as an important element of their success. One such company is Zappos.com, where CEO Tony Hsieh asks those who apply to the company, "How weird are you?" Zappos uses a weirdness gauge from 1 to 10 to hire new employees.

To find out how the weirdness scale works and how other companies are getting business by being weird, listen to the podcast on Voices of Living Creatively website at www.voicesoflivingcreatively.com

Staring at a blank wall inspires artist Gina Wilson to create an art mural.

Listen to an audio interview podcast on Voices of Living Creatively.

Chuck Wilson said to his wife one day, “I’m tired of looking at a blank wall. Would you be willing to paint a mural there?” Gina Wilson, award-winning fine artist, replied, “Sure.”

By the next day, Wilson, Beaverton Sub Station owner, had called the mayor, the arts commission and the owner of the building with the blank wall, Ickabod’s Tavern. Everyone thought the idea was wonderful, but there was a catch.

“It turns out that murals were under the laws of signage at the time and only a certain percentage of a business could be in signage,” explains Gina Wilson. There was a way around the law, a variance permit, but it could cost up to $3,600. Although Mayor Drake was willing to wave the variance, he suggested they wait. He wanted to change the law.

A year or so later, the law was changed designating murals as art instead of signage. The Beaverton Arts Commission formed a mural committee and Wilson submitted her design. Three months later, Gina was turning the blank wall on the back of Ickabod’s Tavern into an art mural for the City of Beaverton.

“Just me and my ladder,” said Gina. “There were a lot of people who were willing to help, but I’ve never made a mural that size before.” Gina learned on the job and it involved a lot more than just painting. “My husband power washed the wall. Bonnie, from Ickabod’s, painted the whole building so the surface was fresh paint for me. Once you have the idea, you grid it out and get it up there. Then, you kind of want to tweak the lines and move things a little bit here and there. The brown of the mural is actually the brown of the whole building. So although, I painted over the brown sometimes, because I’m moving lines around, most of the brown was already there, so it was really a matter of getting the lines in right and putting in the bits of color.”

The mural concept evolved out of Gina’s figurative abstract work as well as the site itself. The mural’s brown color reflected the color of the bank building next door. The four blue figures matched the number of the trees planted in front of the mural. The color purple, the only secondary color missing from the mural, will appear in the blooming bushes along the wall in the spring. “I looked at it as three different ways in which I dance with it. I’m really trying to make it interact with its environment,” Gina explained.

Decades ago, Gina and her husband, Chuck graduates of University of Illinois, packed up their truck and moved to Portland. Together, they’ve owned the Beaverton Sub Station, renovated an historic 1800 farmhouse and raised two daughters. “Mostly I’m enjoying life with my family, getting to know my children, helping Charles and working hard at my own craft and my own art,” Gina says.

Her art, family and community have come together before as you can see when you enter the deli. All along the side wall is a mural that started as a project for Gina’s two daughters and their friends, but now continues to evolve as customers come in and add pictures they’ve found. “It started about 12 years ago,” said Gina. “We’re still working on it and it’ll never end. It’s just fun and a real sense of community.”

The new mural for the city of Beaverton gave Gina another way to connect her art with her home town. “Anytime we interact in our community, we feel more like it belongs to us and that’s a really good feeling. I feel more involved and it’s empowering,” said Gina. “We really can change things. We thought we’d like a mural and in the process, laws got changed.”

The change that started with Chuck Wilson’s wish for a better view outside his window led to a beautiful new mural for the whole Beaverton community to enjoy. Gina hopes this means more art all around the city, “Hopefully there will be a lot more murals, now. I want to encourage people to work with the matching funds program and get other murals started.”

Helen Hollick pens a different path for the legend of Arthur.

Listen to an audio interview podcast at Voices of Living Creatively website.

”I was just so intrigued that he might have been real and that all of the stories of the knights of the Round Table, the Holy Grail, Camelot and Lancelot were all just made up. But as soon as I realized that maybe there was a real Arthur, I became fascinated.”

Author Helen Hollick remembers the stories by Mary Stewart she read about Merlin and the young Arthur. But for Helen, it was something in the back of Stewart’s book that actually brought another sort of magic into her life. “The thing that intrigued me was her author’s notes which said if Arthur had been real, he would have lived around post Roman times,” explains Helen. “Now that really got me interested. Because I had never liked the stories that had placed him around Medieval times. When I read that, I thought, oh, I’ll check into that.”

That started Helen on a path leading her to write a trilogy of books about Arthur before and after he becomes king. The first book, The Kingmaking, was a down to earth portrayal of Arthur as the supposed bastard son who takes the throne and becomes king. The second book, Pendragon’s Banner covers the years between 459-465 A.D. and tells the tale of Arthur’s struggle with the power, politics and family strife. This book details the daily life of Arthur, Guinevere, their three children, servants and soldiers. Her take on the fighting among the family for control of the throne is just as believable as the battle scenes.

And begs the question, how did Helen Hollick write so richly of a past that may or may not have existed at all. The answer is some of it comes from extensive research and a diploma in Early Medieval History. Hollick says, “I looked into what facts we do know of that period, really researched post roman and early saxon, so in weaving in the real facts, that can make what we don’t know for sure to be more real. I looked into daily life. I looked into what kind of horses they would have had, harnesses, armor, and the buildings.”

Helen’s research also includes personal experiences as well. “I’ve actually been to all those places in the books, Glastonbury, visited Summerset, been to Scotland. It makes a great excuse for a holiday,” says Helen.

Some of the plot details, like the scene where Arthur’s young son falls into the river, come from her feelings and experiences as a mother. “We were actually on vacation camping by that very river,” Helen explains. “My own little girl was about 5. It had been raining, and we went down to look at the river. It was in flood, flowing very fast exactly as in that scene. I held my Cathy’s hand so very tight, because I had a vision of a child falling into the water. I pulled her back from the bank, told her to be careful and picked her up and held her. Then I went back to the camp and just wrote the scene down. It was very hard to write. I was in tears the whole time.”

And that wasn’t the only scene that was hard for Helen to write. The Battlefield scenes were a challenge as well. Helen says, “I have to say I don’t know how I manage to write the battle scenes. It really helps to be in a bad mood. It’s a really good way to get rid of angst, to write a battle scene.”

The battle scenes details aren’t the only thing that grabs you as a reader but it’s also the depth of Arthur’s feelings about the work a soldier must do. According to Helen, “When you read a story of battle it’s always made out to be a glorious thing, propaganda, of course, to get people to go out and fight. But you don’t think about the other side, people get killed, horses get hurt. This is the reality.”

The battle scene that begins Book Two, Pendragon’s Banner came after a long period of writer’s block. “I got to the point where I thought, if I don’t do something about this writer’s block, I’m not going to get this book finished,” explains Helen. “And I was determined to write the words, ‘the end’, even if I never got published. So I went along to a writer’s course and the teacher said, I want you to write down your feelings. I just wrote down the first word that came into my head. Before I knew it, I wrote the word, sword, then the word battle. And all of a sudden the whole battle scene just came into my head and I just sat and wrote. It was really funny because then the teacher said, ok, you can stop now and I said no way, I haven’t written for 6 months and if you think I’m going to stop now, you’ve got another thing coming.”

Even though Helen’s extensive historical research gives the scenes detail, it’s not what got her started writing. “I hated history when I was at school, absolutely hated it,” says Helen. “When I was 13, I was writing pony stories, because I really wanted a pony of my own and we couldn’t afford one. So I made one up.”

From then on, writing has been a life long passion. Even when her original publisher stopped printing her books, she got the copyright back and self-published them in the U.K. Then found a new home for her trilogy here in the United States with Sourcebooks. In addition to her Arthur trilogy, Helen Hollick has written a fantasy adventure series about pirates for fun and most recently, a movie script about the battle of Hastings called 1066.

“We hope to shoot in the UK but it will be on release in American as well,” Helen says. “We’re talking big blockbuster here. Fingers crossed, I’ve even got my dress.”

But whether or not her books or movies about Arthur, pirates or the battle of Hastings are a success, Helen would never stop writing.

“I’m always scribbling something down, even if I’m not working on a book. That short time when I heard that they weren’t going to publish my books, I was devastated,” says Helen. “I sobbed for 2 weeks. Then I pulled myself up and thought come on, it doesn’t mean you can’t publish your books.”

Helen Hollick advises everyone to follow their dreams, too. “Do it. Don’t think about it, go out and do it,” says Helen. “At least try, I feel that at least I tried and I’ve managed it. Ok, if my books don’t sell it doesn’t matter, at least I’ve done it. Rather than looking back in a few years time and thinking oh, I wish I’d done that. At least have a go, give it your best shot.”