Season 2, Episode 1: "The Constant Struggle of Creativity"
with Kerri Schlottman and Amy Shearn
On this episode, we're excited to bring you Kerri Schlottman in conversation with Amy Shearn.
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Kerri Schlottman is the author of the novel Tell Me One Thing from Regal House Publishing. Her writing has placed second in the Dillydoun International Fiction Prize, been longlisted for the Dzanc Books Prize for Fiction, and was a 2021 University of New Orleans Press Lab Prize semifinalist. Her work has been featured in LitHub, Shelf Awareness, Writer's Digest, Passions & Prologues, Austin LitiLimits, and New Books Network.
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Amy Shearn is the award-winning author of the novels Unseen City, The Mermaid of Brooklyn, and How Far Is the Ocean From Here. Her work has appeared in the New York Times Modern Love column, Slate, Poets & Writers, O: The Oprah Magazine, and elsewhere. Amy teaches creative writing at the Yale Writers' Workshop, Sackett Street Writers Workshop, and the experimental educational cooperative Writing Co-Lab, and works as a developmental editor and writing coach. Her next novel, Dear Edna Sloane, comes out from Red Hen Press in the spring of 2024.
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Kerri and Amy discuss their books, what they're reading now, why people should read fiction books and what we don't talk about enough in this country, including rural poverty. Join these two friends in a lively conversation and maybe you'll also learn out about "Solastalgia".....
Read Along!
Outside a rural Pennsylvania motel, nine-year-old Lulu smokes a cigarette while sitting on the lap of a trucker. Recent art grad Quinn is passing through town and captures it.
The photograph, later titled “Lulu & the Trucker,” launches Quinn’s career, escalating her from a starving artist to a renowned photographer. In a parallel life, Lulu fights to survive a volatile home, growing up too quickly in an environment wrought with drug abuse and her mother’s prostitution. Decades later, when Quinn has a retrospective at the Whitney Museum of Art and “Lulu & the Trucker” has sold at auction for a record-breaking amount, Lulu is surprised to find the troubling image of her young self in the newspaper.
She attends an artist talk for the exhibition with one question in mind for Quinn: Why didn’t you help me all those years ago? Tell Me One Thing is a portrait of two Americas, examining power, privilege, and the sacrifices one is willing to make to succeed.
Traveling through the 1980s to present day, it delves into New York City’s free-for-all grittiness while exposing a neglected slice of the struggling rust belt.
*GOLD MEDAL winner in the 2021 Independent Publisher Book Awards in Literary Fiction*
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In a city teeming with stories, how do lost souls find one another? It’s a question Meg Rhys doesn’t think she’s asking. Meg is a self-identified spinster librarian, satisfied with living with her cat, stacks of books, and her dead sister’s ghost in her New York City apartment. Then she becomes obsessed with an intriguing library patron and the haunted house he’s trying to research. The house has its own story to tell too, of love and war, of racism’s fallout and the ghost story that is gentrification, and of Brooklyn before it was Brooklyn.
What follows is an exploration of what home is, how we live with loss, who belongs in the city and to whom the city belongs, and the possibilities and power of love.
We are proudly supported by:
The Book Club
What'd you think about the episode?
Have you read the books discussed in this episode?
What authors would you like to hear on future episodes?
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Let's talk!