Hugging My Father’s Ghost with Zack Rogow

Zack Rogow is the author, editor, or translator of more than twenty books or plays. His tenth book of poems is The Kama Sutra for Senior Citizens: and Other Poems on Aging. Zack’s play, Colette Uncensored (coauthored with Lorri Holt), had its first public reading at the Kennedy Center in Washington DC, and has been staged in London, Catalonia, San Francisco, Indonesia, and Portland. His newest book is Hugging My Father’s Ghost: A Memoir of a Shortened Life.

Zack discusses his memoir, Hugging My Father’s Ghost, in which he creates imagined dialogues with his father, Lee Rogow, a promising writer and drama critic killed in a 1955 plane crash when Zack was only three. By reading his father’s published and unpublished works, wartime journals, and family papers, Zack uncovers secrets, reconstructs his father’s witty personality, and experiences a cathartic form of literary after-death communication. Rogow explores how this process of “literary cloning” brought a deeper sense of connection across generations and mirrored therapeutic approaches to grieving.

00:00:00 Introduction
00:04:19 Literary after-death communication
00:08:50 Inspiring dialogues with the deceased
00:11:51 First conversation with father’s ghost
00:16:57 Family tragedy of the plane crash
00:20:56 Imagined exchange with Herman Wouk
00:25:57 Discovering father’s words at Yale
00:29:24 Family secrets involving Sugar
00:34:28 Sparse memories of a lost father
00:37:09 Conclusion

New Thinking Allowed host, Jeffrey Mishlove, PhD, is author of The Roots of Consciousness, Psi Development Systems, and The PK Man. Between 1986 and 2002 he hosted and co-produced the original Thinking Allowed public television series. He is the recipient of the only doctoral diploma in “Parapsychology" ever awarded by an accredited university (University of California, Berkeley, 1980). He is also the Grand Prize winner of the 2021 Bigelow Institute essay competition regarding the best evidence for survival of human consciousness after permanent bodily death. He is Co-Director of Parapsychology Education at the California Institute for Human Science.

(Recorded on October 13, 2026)

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