15 minute read
AUTHORS INTERVIEWING AUTHORS - Scott Semegran and Kerri Schlottman
AUTHORS INTERVIEWING AUTHORS
Scott Semegran and Kerri Schlottman
Scott: Hey Kerri! I always look forward to talking to you about writing and living the author’s life and all that comes with that. How’s life for you in NYC right now?
Kerri: Hey Scott! It’s always so great talking with you. Life is good. NYC is beautiful this time of year and things are starting to slow down for the holidays, which means more time for writing. But for you, they must be ramping up! What have you been up to in preparation for THE CODGER AND THE SPARROW’s big launch in March?
Scott: So much! It’s crazy!! I’ve actually been waiting for the final approved text from my publisher that will go to the printer because the publisher of the audiobook edition of my novel is waiting for it so they can hand it off to the narrator. I’ve also been working with my publicist, Kathleen Schmidt, because she is pitching my novel to a long list of media outlets and newspapers for book reviews and interviews and things like that. You know as an author, you read about how much marketing and publicity will fall on your shoulders and it’s 100% true that it’s way more than it should be. I’m the type of person that when someone says, “you must do this thing to be successful,” then I try to do it. So when someone tells me, “you get to do a lot of publicity.” I’m like, “I can do that.” But in reality, I’m not a publicist or a marketer. I really shouldn’t be doing this at all. I’m just a fiction writer. I know from talking to you that you did a ton of your own publicity when your novel came out, the excellent TELL ME ONE THING. What was that experience like for you: the publicity part? Do you feel you did a good job? Or do you wish your publisher handled more of that?
Kerri: I feel for you! This is the hardest part of being an indie author by far. The writing is the easy stuff! I ended up hiring a publicist to help with TELL ME ONE THING because I knew I was in over my head and I really needed someone’s support with it all. My publisher doesn’t do promotion and marketing. That was made clear early on in my book’s lifespan. But also publicists have a somewhat narrow field of work that’s really about getting reviews, so you still have to get crafty as an indie author to help drive sales. For mine, I did a lot of events at indie bookstores, booked podcasts like your fantastic Austin Liti Limits and Passions & Prologues – which is also hosted by an author – and did a massive outreach emailing to bookstores and libraries on the East Coast. I also did things like create a book club page for my website with ideas on how to throw an 80’s themed book event, which helped to get book clubs interested. I wish there was more I could do, but I’m only one person, so I think I did the best I could. But yeah, you have to become nearly an expert in PR and marketing and for most of us writers, that’s not a natural feeling, not to mention that it’s like having another full-time job. What’s the biggest thing you’re looking forward to with your launch?
Scott: I think what I’m looking forward to the most is the book launch event which will be at BookPeople in Austin, Texas on March 28th. BookPeople is one of my all-time favorite bookstores and I love shopping there for new books and going there to watch author events and generally just browsing the store because it’s such a great space for books and coffee and writers and readers. The event will be MC’d by award-winning author James Wade who I’m honored to also call a friend. He and I have gotten to know each other pretty well over the last few years and he and his wife hang out with me and my wife on occasion and we talk about family and books and such. He read an early draft of THE CODGER AND THE SPARROW and loved it so much and wrote a very kind and beautiful blurb for the book. I’m looking forward to talking to him about it. I love talking to other writers about their work and my work, if they’ve read it. I remember when I was reading your novel TELL ME ONE THING and thinking that you had such a command of the story you were telling and the language you were using. So tell me one thing, what’s the first thing you remember feeling or thinking when reading my novel THE CODGER AND THE SPARROW?
Kerri: That sounds like a great event! I’m excited for you. Well, first of all, I was fortunate to have read your book TO SQUEEZE A PRAIRIE DOG last year and so I already had a good sense of your ability to infuse humor and lightheartedness into stories that are really, at their core, delving into complex human interactions. So when I started reading THE CODGER AND THE SPARROW, I felt that familiar feeling, but I think I was also very struck by how quickly you’re able to bring us into your characters’ lives and make us start caring for them from page one. I also love in CODGER how you take a story we’ve heard before – a relationship forms between two unlikely people who end up caring for one another – and flood it with a twist of storyline. It’s a really special thing to be able to do as an author, because it at once makes a reader feel comfortable but then uses that comfort level to dig into more complex ideas. And the next thing we know, we’re on this journey with Hank and Luis and we’re deeply invested in both of their lives. How do you go about building characters like that? Or what’s your process like?
Scott: Well, when the first nugget of the idea for the story came to mind I simply had an old white guy and a young black guy in a car going on a trip somewhere that looked like they were very comfortable with each other, like they were friends, not a grandfather / grandson type scenario. So then I started thinking, who are they? So, how my process works for characters then is, what do they look like? How do they walk through the world? What does their hair look like and what do they wear? Then I even get into things like what do they like to eat and what are their hobbies and what are the things that excite them and how do two men who are truly friends deal with each other and interact with each other. And once I had notes for all of those things, I wrote out notes for the back stories that helped define who they are in the story. So, I had the story of Hank’s marriage and what happened to his wife and daughter all written out. And then I had the backstory of how Luis’ mother became pregnant and the decisions that she made that brought her to the mainland from Puerto Rico. And I would refer to those notes as I was writing chapters in the book. So, to me if I couldn’t see them in my mind, like really see them, what they look like, who they are, where they’re from, all of those things, then I knew I would be in trouble writing the story. I had to really discover who they were before I wrote the first draft.
Kerri: That explains why your work feels so cinematic. In fact, I can fully picture a CODGER movie.
Scott: What about you? How did you develop Quinn and Lulu in your novel? After the photo was taken, they never interacted again, but they were intimately tied together by Quinn’s photo of Lulu.
Kerri: My process is somewhat similar although I often use my characters to work out things in my brain. So they tend to come to me fully formed as people because they’ve been living in my head for a while. Then I just give them space on the page to do their thing. But I do have similar exercises as you in thinking about where they’d hang out, who they’d be friends with, what they’d eat. All those things that make us human and also create the atmosphere for the novel. I wonder with your work how humor plays a role. As I said earlier, you do such a great job of infusing humor into your stories even into moments that are really serious. What influences this or why is that important to you?
Scott: This is a great question for me and gets to the heart of what I’m trying to accomplish in my fiction. When I was a boy, I wanted to be a cartoonist and I loved reading Bloom County and Calvin and Hobbes, so I think that’s the origin of it. Then once I was studying literature in college, the only humor I encountered in fiction was Mark Twain, who I still love to revisit. But once I graduated, I had some stoner friends introduce me to Charles Bukowski and Kurt Vonnegut and Tom Robbins and I feel it was those authors’ irreverence and ability to “turn on” their comedic voices in their fiction that sparked something in me, that realization that humor was important to me in my work and finding my voice. Humor is like subterfuge in fiction and can disarm the reader. Once their guard is down, then I can really get into their hearts and minds with the themes I’m trying to work through whether it’s family dynamics or dealing with grief or the power of friendship. THE CODGER AND THE SPARROW really is the culmination of these themes. Hank and Luis both have suffered great loss in their lives and, even though they’re so different in their outward appearances--which offers so many opportunities for comedy--they recognize that in each other: their losses. Putting the two of them together in my story was fertile ground for both humor and drama.
Kerri: I love that, and I can totally see those influences in your work. Vonnegut is one of my favorites and has also been a huge inspiration to me as a writer.
Scott: Okay, left turn here: what’s your favorite novel or collection of short stories that you read in 2023?
Kerri: Well, I read all the same really great literary fiction books everyone else did in 2023 and they got a lot of attention, so I’m going to mention an indie that I think everyone should read: Indigo Field by Marjorie Hudson. It came out in spring 2023. I’m a sucker for beautiful language and there were times reading the book that I would realize I was holding my breath because her language is so gorgeous. But it’s also a mesmerizing and important story about race in the south and culture and history and all of these impressively layered themes. I highly recommend it! How about you? What did you love in 2023?
Scott: I read a lot of current and classic literary fiction, but I will go with these two (one a novel and one a collection of short stories).
The best novel I read in 2023 was BOOK OF GOOSE by Yiyun Li. It was released in fall 2022, but I didn’t get to it until January of `23 and, oh boy, am I glad I read this novel. The language is beautiful and the characters are very mischievous and quirky and weirdly co-dependent. It’s so amazingly good! It won the PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction and it’s a worthy winner of this award. It’s exceptional! Main characters Agnès and Fabienne are young teens stuck in a rural French village post-WWII. Fabienne is rebellious and often cruel. Agnès is passive and malleable. They concoct a plan to write a book of gruesome stories about village life and enlist a widowed postal worker to unwittingly help them get it published. Their book becomes a literary sensation and weak-minded Agnès is the one shoved in front of the media. I can’t say enough about how great this novel is.
The best collection of short stories I read was THE DISAPPEARED by Andrew Porter. Man, this book is so astoundingly good. I’m still thinking about most of the stories in this book. It came out in April 2023, but I didn’t get to it until this past October. It knocked my socks off. There are a few intriguing questions that run through this collection. What happened to who I used to be? What ever happened to the interesting people I used to hang out with when I was younger? What happened to those weird neighbors I used to live next door to at that shabby apartment complex? Where do these people and things disappear to? Porter handles all of these stories with a command of his craft. His writing is fantastic and the stories move along like a ship in the ocean, but without a hint of how these stories will end up. I loved it so much that I started reading his earlier collection The Theory of Light and Matter.
Kerri: Oh, I have both of those on my to-read bookshelf, so I’ll have to get to it!
Scott: So, what are you working on now in your writer life?
Kerri: Right now, my agent has my next book, A DAYTIME MOON, out on submission so I’m in that nail-biting phase of things. Meanwhile, I’m revising a novel I wrote about my hometown in Michigan which goes deep into our national political clashes. Some of the people involved in the plot to kidnap Governor Whitmer and also in the armed occupation of the Michigan State Capitol, which was a precursor to January 6th, live not far from where I grew up. It’s a very complex area and hard to write about, but I think it’s necessary if we want to start to bridge some of these divides. It’s the first book I’ve written though that really amps up my anxiety, so it’s been a bit of a slow road while I find the right story within the story. There are some big reasons I worked hard to leave that place so fully immersing myself back in it is tough. Hopefully I’ll be able to pull off something impactful though. How about you? Are you finding time to write even as you prepare for the CODGER’s launch?
Scott: I have a novel-in-stories that I finished editing last spring out on submission right now called STARMAN AFTER MIDNIGHT. And I have a novel I’ve been slowly working on that is a humorous story about grief and the main character’s life in a small Texas town that is quite different from his previous life in Austin, Texas. I’m taking my time with this novel. I feel it could be a special one for me.
Thank you for chatting with me about my new novel THE CODGER AND THE SPARROW which will be out March 22, 2024. It’s available for preorder everywhere books are sold.
And I encourage everyone to buy Kerri’s wonderful novel TELL ME ONE THING which can be found HERE.
Take care, Kerri!
Kerri: Congrats on all the exciting things coming and thanks for the great chat!
