Interviewing The Interviewer: Author Amy Shearn On The BOOKISH Series At Park Slope Library
Some of the most intriguing authors today regularly make their way to Park Slope Library (431 6th Avenue at 9th Street) for an exciting interview series called BOOKISH.
The series is curated and hosted by novelist Amy Shearn, who interviews authors with a range of exciting questions.
The fall series continues on Thursday, November 12 as Shearn speaks with the acclaimed writer Amy Fusselman.
Fusselman is a writer and editor based in New York City. She is the author of The Pharmacist’s Mate, 8, or more recently, The Pharmacist’s mate/8. Her new book, Savage Park: A Meditation on Play, Space, and Risk for Americans Who Are Nervous, Distracted, and Afraid to Die is out now and will be the primary topic of the evening’s discussion.
Recent guests for the series have included novelists Amy Sohn, James Hannaham, and Naomi Jackson.
Shearn is an accomplished author, which provides BOOKISH attendees to gain insights from this “author-interviews-author” series.
Shearn is the author of the novels The Mermaid of Brooklyn and How Far Is The Ocean From Here. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, Real Simple, Oprah.com, and elsewhere.
Shearn began the series back in May, and we had a chance to speak with her about the recent authors, as well as what’s on her bedside table.
PSS: Thanks for taking the time to speak with us. Would you tell us a bit about how the BOOKISH series got started?
Amy Shearn: Thank you so much for featuring the series! My friend Ben Gocker is a librarian at the Park Slope branch, and he noticed my latest novel getting put on hold a lot there, so he thought it would be fun to do some events together. The series was really his brainchild. I had been hosting a reading series called Lit at Lark for two years at that point, and while I loved curating those events and getting to introduce all these fabulous writers, I also liked the idea of doing something that allowed me to interact more with the authors and engage with their work on a deeper level.
How do you select the writers in the series? Do you have an overall curatorial idea about the type of material you’d like to cover?
I try to book authors whose writing resonates with the community. I’ve spoken with wonderful novelists like Amy Sohn, James Hannaham, and Naomi Jackson, and with memoirists writing on topics like the single woman’s life, health, and motherhood. Coming up on December 17 I’ll be talking with a historian, Judith Wellman, who wrote this incredibly well-researched history of Weeksville, a pre-Civil War rural community of free African Americans in what is now Crown Heights, Brooklyn. I tend to compulsively read novels, but I want to remember about nonfiction and short story writers too!
Tell us a bit about the upcoming discussion with writer Amy Fusselman. How does her work resonate with you?
I’ve been a huge fan of Amy’s work since McSweeney’s published her first book, The Pharmacist’s Mate — as I recall, it was the first book they ever published, and I loved the literary journal so was of course excited about her book from the get go. Her memoir 8 was a kind of bible to me when my kids were very small. And this newest book, Savage Park, is a fascinating and poetic look at how kids play, how we mediate their wild tendencies, how our fear as adults affects how we interact with our children, space, time, and the world around us. She has this great way of finding profound meaning in tiny moments. And selfishly, I’ve been wanting to meet her for a long time, so this is very exciting for me!
You’re an accomplished writer yourself. How do the conversations you have with other authors inform you as a writer?
I love talking to writers about how they make their work, and I think my questions to them tend to reflect my interest in craft. I find talking with other writers to be intensely soothing, actually. It’s like an affirmation to hear other writers say, This was hard to do, I didn’t know if it would work, I have to start all over again with every project, I’m making it all up as I go. Also, I think if you work and read in a vacuum, you can start to get intimidated thinking about all these accomplished, published authors, but then when you get to meet them in person you realize, as I once heard Karen Russell say at a reading, “most writers are just nice people in sweaters.”
We couldn’t finish this without asking you what’s in your bag or on your bedside table that you’re reading right now, or plan to read?
Oh, I love this question! Right now I’m embroiled in novel revisions and am very piously reading only books that relate directly to the historical period I’m writing about. But I have this huge stack of books on my bedside table to dive into as soon as I’m done with that “work” reading, including my friend Caitlin McDonnell’s poetry collection Looking for Small Animals, and some new and forthcoming novels — Helen Phillips’ The Beautiful Bureaucrat, Elizabeth McKenzie’s The Portable Veblen, Benjamin Wood’s The Ecliptic, Andria Williams’ The Longest Night, Jeanette Winterson’s The Gap of Time…I mean, that’s just the top of the stack. It’s a big stack. It’s probably going to topple over and kill me before I get to read any of it.
Check out BOOKISH at the Park Slope Library (431 6th Avenue at 9th Street) on Thursday, November 12 at 7:30pm, when Amy Shearn will speak with Amy Fusselman about her book Savage Park: A Meditation on Play, Space, and Risk for Americans Who Are Nervous, Distracted, and Afraid to Die. It’s free!