Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Kerri Schlottman. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.
Hi Kerri, thanks for joining us today. Can you talk to us about how you learned to do what you do?
For most of my life, I’ve been a person who learns by doing. I grew up in a working-class suburb of Detroit where most of the young people had jobs by the time they were fourteen, if not much sooner. We had to work. I started working at age ten cleaning a law firm where my single mom worked. By the time I graduated high school, I’d been employed at Kmart, Dunkin Donuts, Meijer, and, for the longest stretch, a factory called Morley Candy Makers where I worked on an assembly line with about thirty other young women stuffing chocolates into boxes – every day after school and on Saturdays. Because of the need to work, many of us missed out on the kinds of academic opportunities that I would later understand were necessary to get into competitive colleges. We simply didn’t have the luxury of time for it.
I had been creative writing since I was very young, but when it came time to apply to college, I wasn’t sure what to pursue. I had very little direction from the adults in my life. I ended up meandering through my college years, focusing mostly on Literature and Journalism. When I finished my Bachelor’s degree, I took a job copy editing for an advertising agency, but still there was this creative voice in my head, pushing me forward. I decided to apply to MFA programs in Creative Writing, but without a portfolio or the support structure needed for such things, I wasn’t accepted at any of the places I applied to (mostly in New York City). Instead, I started graduate studies in English and Visual Culture at Wayne State University in Detroit where I fell in with experimental writers who were playing with language in ways I had never experienced. It was exhilarating and also terrifying. I felt like an outsider only watching as others were doing these amazing things, and doing them with seemingly an abundance of confidence – something I sorely lacked.
But I kept writing. And I read everything I could get my hands on. I learned narrative structure from Anne Tyler and voice from Joan Didion. Mood from Kurt Vonnegut and experimentation from Darcey Steinke. I might not have been an MFA student, benefitting from craft classes and exposure to the publishing world, but I was working my way into becoming a strong storyteller and a thoughtful writer.
In 2005, I moved to New York City with a friend, fulfilling a lifelong dream. Without the access that MFA’s buy, I struggled to break into traditional publishing. And living in one of the most expensive places in the country, I spent a large amount of time working to make ends meet. I finished my first novel-length manuscript in 2008 as the economy went bust and new authors without the benefit of a leg up had almost zero chance of getting published. At the same time, self-publishing was just beginning to take hold and new services were making it very easy to get one’s work out in the world. I took that route and proceeded to self-publish four books over the next few years, with the help of some very talented friends who proofread my stories and designed my books. By that point, I was working full-time as an arts administrator and writing was very much a hobby for me. I did little to promote the books once I published them, but they found a strong and dedicated audience anyway, which I’m grateful for.
Despite this, I still felt very much outside of the publishing world. I continued my craft studies, now taking session-length workshops and classes with established authors who used words I didn’t know but talked about things I had instinctively been doing. I built the craft vocabulary I needed to talk about my work with professionals. I continued writing, which is, of course, the most important aspect of being a writer. I finished another novel in 2019 and decided to try to find an agent, which ended up being a painful almost two-year process with no luck. Meanwhile, I watched as writers in MFA programs got impressive advances for their debut novels. It was hard. I didn’t want to self-publish again. I was ready to make a shift to identifying as a writer first and an arts administrator as how I paid the bills. I sent my manuscript to a few independent publishers who accepted unagented work and was fortunate that Regal House Publishing acquired it. My novel, Tell Me One Thing, came out on January 31, 2023 and the response has been very positive. I couldn’t be more pleased.
While I had always lamented not being able to pursue an MFA, and no doubt it gives authors a running headstart, I’ve come to appreciate the ways I’ve had to learn to doing. I continue to take craft classes (ones that I could probably teach myself) to keep my creative thinking sharp and to gain new perspectives on how to approach my writing. I know I’ll be a lifelong learner, and instead of thinking of that as a weakness or a setback, I’ve come to understand that as a very positive aspect of who I am and how I approach my work.
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?
Most of my work centers around inequalities. Because I grew up in a very economically challenged area and situation, I understand a lot of the issues that are causing some of the major divisions we have in this country. My novel that just came out, Tell Me One Thing, is a story about an emerging photographer in New York City in 1980 who takes a provocative photograph of a little girl in rural Pennsylvania sitting on the lap of a trucker. The photo launches the artist’s career while the young girl has an incredibly hard life with struggle after struggle. The book was inspired by a photograph titled “Amanda and Her Cousin Amy” that was taken in 1990 by Mary Ellen Mark as part of a commission by Life Magazine. In the photo, Amanda is nine years old and smoking a cigarette while standing in a kiddie pool in rural North Carolina. When Mark passed away in 2015, NPR found Amanda, who was then in her last 30’s, and they asked her why she allowed herself to be photographed. She said she thought someone would see it and it would be a way out of her environment. That story hit me hard.
I want to write things that move people to take notice of others, and that hopefully build empathy. Over and over, the social and political structures in this country teach us to compete and all that’s done is separate us further. For me, this means my writing often goes to dark places or underbellies, but I really think we need to expose these things and face the situations that perpetuate them. I’ve made a commitment to myself as a writer to do that at least in some measure in all of my work.
Writing is such a powerful way to express ideas and open perspectives. It’s why book banning is an age old means of silencing what people have to say. There’s so much power in words and in most creative output. I want to use my writing skills to push harder into that. And I find myself drawn to others who are doing that work too. I was just recently in conversation with fellow author Jakob Guanzon who has written a fantastic novel of capitalistic critique called Abundance that at the surface is a father-son story but one layer in is a lacerating story of poverty and the way systems are designed to keep people down. I want more of that kind of work and I want everyone to read it.
How can we best help foster a strong, supportive environment for artists and creatives?
Having worked as an arts administrator for the past twenty years for large and small organizations such as the Guggenheim Museum and more recently at Creative Capital, which supports artists, filmmakers, performers, and writers with funding to create new projects, I’ve had an up-close view of what society needs to do to support artists. And honestly, that’s money. The current philanthropic structure is really broken. Big foundations sit on massive amounts of money while being unwilling to take risks on innovative and non-traditional cultural endeavors which are the breaking ground for most creative people. Meanwhile, large cultural institutions, which have the luxury of massive amounts of funding and have historically been gatekeepers to supporting a more diverse representation of artists and creatives, continue to garner the largest amounts of support.
We are one of few countries of our type that does not provide significant funding to creative practitioners, which is one of the main problems. Regardless, the idea of arts patronage is historically problematic and perpetuates some of the worst inequalities we have in this country. The pandemic forced some reckoning but I’ve watched as many of the main funders of culture have fallen back into their old ways. I’m not going to be so radical as to say we need to end the non-profit complex, but it’s one of the few sectors that has seen the least innovation in this country.
Because that’s a lot about structure and systems and most of it is out of the average person’s control, my maybe easier answer is: Support the creative people in your life. Buy the books they write. Go see the films they produce. Purchase their artworks. Get a ticket for their performances. Etc. etc. etc.
For you, what’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative?
The most rewarding aspect of being a writer and also of being around artists throughout my career is that living in a creative mind and environment is a good place to be. It’s hard, don’t get me wrong, but the luxury of being able to imagine and to create and to share is a privilege I don’t take lightly.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.kerrischlottman.com
- Instagram: @kerri.schlottman
- Twitter: @kerrileejc