Emerging Form

• Episode 146: Maria Kelson on Switching Genres

  One day, nationally acclaimed poet Maria Kelson hit “a poetry wall” for no identifiable reason. “It was frustrating,” she says, “because I had devoted myself to poetry. For 15 years, it was my primary focus.” What happened next–she followed an emerging passion, crime fiction. ‘As i was casting about I thought, I want to explore the dark side.” In this episode we talk with Maria about shedding layers of creative identity, finding new community, art as a way to explore and expose issues of social injustice, and the surprising ways poetry informs her new award-winning thriller.Maria Kelson has two collections of poetry (as Maria Melendez) with University of Arizona Press, which were finalists for the PEN Center USA Literary Award and the Colorado Book Award. NOT THE KILLING KIND is her debut novel. If you're a mystery/thriller reader drawn to strong female leads, the scary beauty of the redwood country, moms who push it to the limit, or crime-fighting ESL teachers, she wrote her debut novel NOT THE KILLING KIND for you! It received the inaugural Eleanor Taylor Bland Award for Crime Fiction Writers of Color from Sisters in Crime and just won the WILLA award for best mystery/thriller. She has served as an American Voices arts envoy in Bogotá, Colombia. A Mexican-American educator from California, Maria lives near Yellowstone. She’s writing a new thriller set there. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit emergingform.substack.com/subscribe

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• Episode 145: Starre Vartan on What it Really Means to Be Strong

  When Starre Varten sat down to write her book The Stronger Sex: What Science Tells Us about the Power of the Female Body, she came to the project with two things: an intellectual thesis and a very personal bodily story. In this episode, we talk with Starre about how both mind and body fueled her creative practice. We also talk about how what began as an article became a book, how to turn toward the part of the book you might rather turn away from, how an outsider’s perspective can help us see our project more clearly and what it really means to be strong.Starre Vartan is a science writer who was raised in a family of creatives and medical professionals. She grew up in New York and now splits her time between the Pacific Northwest and Sydney, Australia. She contributes regularly to Scientific American and National Geographic and has written for CNN, the Washington Post, Slate, and New York magazine, among many others. Her new book, The Stronger Sex: What Science Tells Us about the Power of the Female Body, is a science-backed, myth-busting love letter to the female body—think endurance, immunity, and the kind of strength that doesn’t flex, it lasts.Starre’s Website: https://starrevartan.com/Her Washington Post story why dancing is good for your body and soul. Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/starrevartan/TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@thecurioushumana This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit emergingform.substack.com/subscribe

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• Episode 144: Making Peace with Promoting Your Creative Work

  Making something is fun. Promoting it? Not so much… On this episode of Emerging Form, Rosemerry and Christie discuss the what happens when you put something you’ve created out into the world. How do you get it to your intended audience? How do encourage people to find it without feeling like an icky self-promotional nag? We also discuss the pain of realizing that your friends didn’t and won’t read or watch or listen to your new thing, the importance of remembering why you’re doing this, and the 100 day promotion project we tried (inspired by previous Emerging Form guests Chris Duffy and Zach Sherwin) and what it taught us.Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer is a poet, teacher, speaker and writing facilitator. Her daily audio series, The Poetic Path, is on the Ritual app. Her poems have appeared on A Prairie Home Companion, PBS News Hour, O Magazine, American Life in Poetry, and Carnegie Hall stage. Her most recent poetry collections are All the Honey (Samara Press, 2023) and The Unfolding (Wildhouse Publishing, 2024). In January, 2024, she became the first poet laureate for Evermore, helping others explore grief, bereavement, wonder and love through poetry.Christie Aschwanden is author of the New York Times bestseller, Good to Go: What the Athlete in All of Us Can Learn From the Strange Science of Recovery and host and producer of Uncertain, a podcast from Scientific American. She’s the former lead science writer at FiveThirtyEight and was previously a health columnist for The Washington Post. Her work has appeared in dozens of publications, including the New York Times, Wired, Smithsonian, Slate, Popular Science, Discover, Science and Nature. She’s received fellowships from the Santa Fe Institute, the Carter Center and the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting. She lives in Cedaredge.Rosemerry’s new album Risking Love on Bandcamp, Spotify and Youtube This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit emergingform.substack.com/subscribe

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• Episode 143: Shelley Read on Becoming a Novelist in Midlife

  “I am just discovering myself as a novelist,” says international bestselling novelist Shelley Read, author of Go as a River. In this conversation, Shelley shares with us how her journey from poet and non-fiction writer shifted into fiction with a single moment of observation and wonder. She shares with us how she crafts scenes, her penchant for playing with language, why she didn’t share with anyone about what she was doing for many years, how a love affair with her main character drove the whole novel, and what she has learned about her own creative process along the way.Shelley Read’s debut novel,Go as a River, is an international bestseller that has sold over a million copies worldwide, been translated into thirty-four languages, and is in development for film with the Mazur Kaplan Company. Winner of the High Plains Book Award for Fiction and the Reading the West Book Award for Debut Fiction, Go as a River is also a Sunday Times bestseller, a Goodreads Choice Award finalist, an Amazon Editors’ Pick Best Debut Fiction, an Indie Next Pick, and a Colorado Public Radio Books We Love selection, among other national and international accolades. Shelley was an award-winning senior lecturer at Western Colorado University for nearly three decades, where she taught writing, literature, environmental studies, and honors. She is a mom, mountaineer, world traveler, and fifth-generation Coloradan who lives with her family in the Elk Mountains of Colorado’s Western Slope.You can meet Shelley in person at the Grand Mesa Writer’s Symposium August 8-10 in Cedaredge. The event features numerous workshops and gatherings, including an open mic. For the keynote, Christie will talk with Shelley, the poet Wendy Videlok (a previous guest on our show) and nonfiction writer Tim Winegard about their work. More info at: https://www.grandmesawriters.org/ This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit emergingform.substack.com/subscribe

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• Episode 142: Bonnie Tsui on Finding the Right Container to Tell a Story

  “I try to be really open to anything that comes my way,” says bestselling author Bonnie Tsui. Her newest book, On Muscle, isn’t a memoir, but it begins with her recounting her father encouraging her and her brother to “make a muscle.” Tsui appears in many sections of the book interacting with the various characters she introduces. Yet it’s not a book explicitly about her, and if there’s a main character it’s probably human muscle. In this episode we speak with Tsui to find the right balance of personal storytelling, history, science, experts and interesting characters. Plus why poetry is a part of her research and the value of pulling multiple disciplines into her writing.Bonnie Tsui is a longtime contributor to The New York Times and the author of the new book On Muscle: The Stuff That Moves Us and Why It Matters—a vivid, thought-provoking celebration of musculature and one of the most anticipated books of the year; it is currently being translated into six languages. Her bestselling books include Why We Swim, a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice and a Time magazine and NPR Best Book of the Year, and American Chinatown, which won the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature. Her work has been recognized and supported by Harvard University, the National Press Foundation, the Mesa Refuge, and the Best American Essays series. She lives, swims, and surfs in the San Francisco Bay Area.Links:Website www.bonnietsui.comInstagram www.instagram.com/bonnietsui8https://www.bonnietsui.com/Rosemerry’s new album, Risking Love videos or on SpotifyGrand Mesa Writer’s Symposium This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit emergingform.substack.com/subscribe

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