New Yorker Jen Epstein is a writer, activist, and worker bee raised by two mental health professionals. She holds a BA in communication arts and an MA in media studies. She currently works as a Media Logistics Operations Project Manager for Discovery Communications, and her new book, Don’t Get Too Excited: It’s Just About a Pair of Shoes and Other Laments from My Life, finds her using self-deprecating humor to expose her inner demons with stories that are sometimes heartbreaking and always deeply personal.
In this episode of Cover to Cover with . . ., Editor-in-Chief Jordan Blum speaks with Epstein about her new book, using humor to rationalize and normalize mental illness, racism in America, COVID-19, and much more!
Fall approaches. The novel scurries into corners, a rat-like beastie, and you attempt to slip the leash back on. You know this book will kill you in these next months, where the light fades and days shorten into stunted, despairing winter.
1. Smarmy with self confidence, you read the first draft for the English Department in your Thursday seminars. You discover “experimental” does not mean “entertaining.” Lined up like the Supreme Court, they purse their mouths like sucking lemon juice through straws. They suck all your optimism away.
2. In your epic novel of a prisoner-of-war camp, you discover your depraved commandant is a Roman Catholic. Your publisher, Holy Trinity College of San Luis Obisbo, won’t like this. Oh no! The commandant is gay.
Tom Kirkham is “a 30-something music obsessive and part-time explorer from North West England,” as well as a musician and songwriter in Silent Alliance, among elsewhere. Most recently, his the author of Pop Life – The Story of a Minor Musical Expedition, which finds Kirkham detailing how, after the deaths of David Bowie and Prince, he ‘learned to love music and life again via an intensive, year-long trawl through the back rooms and bars, concert halls and stadiums of the live gig circuit, searching for transcendence, or at the very least, an unobscured view.”
In this episode of Cover to Cover with . . ., Editor-in-Chief Jordan Blum also puts on his music critic hat to talk with Kirkham about his process and motivations for the book, his love for artists like Bowie, Prince, Kate Bush, Steely Dan, coping with anxiety, depression, and the dangers and polarization of modern society, and much more!…
There is a joyful terror to writing, to scratching an itch that doesn’t want to be scratched but must be if any comfort is to be sort. Writing is an abject feeling that, before the act, leaves one hollow-mouthed and begging.
2.
What lies in the undergrowth of our lives can be felt without words, in emotions that appear more like atmospheres superimposed upon the world than anything factual or real.
3.
Words have a pleasure that’s hard to deny. A putting down that solidifies on one side while opening up on the other. And what’s on the other side but endless interpretation, a hinterland of fragments and dreams left up to readers to stitch together with the resources of their minds.
4.
What is so terrifying is the fact that one’s words may appear faulty, lack-luster, or clichéd; that your innermost world is riddled with soap-opera fantasies whose presence on the page expose one’s own faulty mechanisms of imagination.…
Siobhan Vivian is the award-winning author of 2016’s The Last Boy and Girl in the World, 2012’s The List, and the trilogy of novels, Burn for Burn, which she co-wrote with Jenny Han. She graduated from the University of the Arts with a degree in Writing for Film and Television and received her MFA in Creative Writing: Children’s Literature from The New School in NYC. She was an editor at Alloy Entertainment and was a scriptwriter for The Disney Channel. Siobhan currently resides in Pittsburgh, PA, and teaches a Writing Youth Literature course at the University of Pittsburgh.
What was the first story you ever wrote?
It was a piece I had written to get into undergrad. I had done a little creative writing in high school because someone told me the [creative writing] class was easy.…
For over fifteen years, Corbin has worked as a developmental editor and writing consultant helping emerging writers. She holds a Master’s Degree in Education and teaches memoir, personal essay, and craft classes at the Richard Hugo House, universities, and at writing conferences. Her memoir Creating a Life (Catalyst Book Press) was nominated for Pacific Northwest Book Association and Washington State Book Awards; her other titles include Divorce as Opportunity (Booktrope) and her recent memoir God’s Cadillac (out for submission). Her essays have been widely published in journals and in parenting and writing anthologies. She lives in Seattle with her two children. Find her here.
How do you help emerging writers with their goals?
There comes a time when it would be helpful for every writer to have one-on-one feedback from someone with experience.…
A multi-Pushcart nominee in RHINO and Drunken Boat, Carol Smallwood’s founded and supported humane societies. Her 2017 books include: In Hubble’s Shadow (Shanti Arts); Prisms, Particles, and Refractions (Finishing Line Press); Interweavings: Creative Nonfiction (Shanti Arts); Library Outreach to Writers and Poets: Interviews and Case Studies of Cooperation; and Gender Issues and the Library: Case Studies of Innovative Programs and Resources (McFarland). Here, she is interviewed by author Aline Soules.
Your books cover a wide range of topics and genres—poetry, creative nonfiction, and non-fiction mainly aimed at the library world. How did you end up writing such a broad array of work? How do you balance these various projects?
I started when teachers asked me for classroom materials as a librarian. Then, seeing my first book spurred me to do another, and then another.…
