Social Impact Authors Helping To Change Our World

As part of my series about “authors who are making an important social impact”, I had the pleasure of interviewing Michael Swerdloff.

Michael Swerdloff has been a Counselor, Coach, Social Worker, Community Organizer, Educator, Writer, DJ, and Reiki Master for over twenty-five years. He laughs often, hugs deeply, and practices meditation, Reiki, yoga, and dance daily. His memoir, Raised by Wolves, Possibly Monsters: From Mobster to Reiki Master, was launched in October of 2024!

Michaelswerdloff.com

Thank you so much for joining us in this Social Impact Authors interview series! Before we dive into the main focus of our interview, our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you tell us a bit about your childhood backstory?

I grew up in a pretty violent home in NJ. My mom loved me dearly. My father cheated on my mom with dozens of women until they got divorced when I was ten. My older brother was the violent one. He used me as his practice model for expressing his rage. He spent significant time in jail, prison, and a federal penitentiary. He became a strong-arm in the mob after prison. I was a kind, thoughtful, and caring child, and by my teen years, most of those attributes had disappeared.

When you were younger, was there a book that you read that inspired you to take action or changed your life? Can you share a story about that?

It wasn’t a book; it was a news article in the New York Times a few days after Dr. Martin Luther King was murdered. I remember reading it to the best of my ability as a young child and somehow knew that what my parents, schoolteachers, and all the other adults in my life were telling me was a lie, just like they did about The Black Panthers. I wasn’t old enough to understand much of the article or what they were lying about, but I just knew it didn’t feel right. I brought it up in class, and the teacher dismissed my questions.

It has been said that our mistakes can be our greatest teachers. Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?

Yeah. I had written the rough draft of the manuscript and was discussing it with the editor. I was trying to make a point of why we needed to watch what we wrote about my brother so as not to scare people too much or create serious triggers for readers, and she didn’t understand.

It finally occurred to me that in my head, I had included the crimes and violence he had committed, and because it is such an integral part of my early life, it had not crossed my mind I completely left all of it out! We added content to fill in these gaps.