This podcast features writer Bill Cotter (photo credit: Leon Alesi), talking about his creative space. Cotter constructs crossword puzzles and is the author of the novel Fever Chart (McSweeney's 2009).
It's part of a series spun out of Fusebox Festival's The Writer's Room, A Home Studio Tour curated by Elizabeth Doss and Annie La Ganga.
Producer Deepa Donde in association with American Short Fiction gathered writers into a studio for this series. Donde got a preview of the walking tour, and shares these thoughts about Cotter's space:
Sometimes word on a page cannot do justice to capturing this writer's most intimate space. So I leave it in the hands of Leon Alesi, our illustrious one part photographer, two part documentarian, and third part voyeur partner who we have both become as part of this Fusebox/American Short Fiction collaboration.
One cannot speak of Billie without mentioning Jerome Coe who is the protagonist of his first novel, Fever Chart - a modern day Holden Caulfield. J.D. Salinger would have been so proud. Coe is a troubled young man who confronts his personal demons through our country's mental health system.
And yet in the organized chaos of his space, you see the delicate tools of bookbinding, a lost art. And a tension erupts that I as a writer in between the ages of books and cyberspace believe I will grapple with for the rest of my life. Then my eyes rest upon a Richard Avedon book that sits in between the crooks and crevices of his creative space. The same one I have found in the home of my glamorous Westlake girlfriend's own personal library. And you see that's what connects as humans beyond class, an appreciation for singular beauty. This is what best represents the home that Billie and Annie have created together.
The Writer's Room, A Home Studio Tour was part of the 2012 Fusebox Festival in Austin, Texas.
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