The Lisa D Show: March 2017

Thursday, March 23, 2017

The Lisa D Show with Zoe Zolbrod

Today our conversation with writer Zoe Zolbrod focuses on balancing paid work, parenting, writing and literary citizenship. We’re also going to explore how one puts together a creative life in the hopes that we inspire others to do the same.

Zoe Zolbrod is the author of the memoir The Telling (Curbside Splendor, 2016) and the novel Currency (Other Voices Books, 2010), which was a Friends of American Writers prize finalist. Her essays have appeared in Salon, Stir Journal, The Weeklings, The Manifest Station, The Nervous Breakdown, The Chicago Reader, and The Rumpus, where she is the Sunday co-editor. She’s had numerous short stories and interviews with authors published, too.

As a public speaker, she’s given talks at universities, workshops, and conferences on topics such as narrative voice; the differences between writing fiction and nonfiction; balancing paid work, parenting, and writing; child sexual abuse; and writing about trauma.

Born in western Pennsylvania, Zolbrod graduated from Oberlin College and then moved to Chicago, where she received an M.A. from the University of Illinois at Chicago’s Program for Writers.

Aside for periods of traveling in Southeast Asia and Central America, she’s almost always worked full time, making her living as an editor of comic books, text books, and other kinds of books and educational materials, despite her difficulties with spelling and proper nouns. She lives in Evanston, IL, with her husband and two children.

Learn more about Zoe at zoezolbrod.com

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The Lisa D Show is a podcast celebrates creatives. Listen to 20 minute, unedited conversations with host Lisa D. and the creatives who make our world a more connected, interesting and beautiful place to live. Podcasts will be posted at https://thelisadshow.blogspot.com

This podcast is recorded at 1100 Florence, an art event space in West Evanston, IL, owned and operated by Lisa Degliantoni and Dave Ford. It is a former Polish Grocery store, probably not the BEST place to record a podcast (boomy to say the least) but we're new and it will get better. Reach out to thelisadshow[at]gmail.com

Thursday, March 16, 2017

The Lisa D Show with Bill Swislow

Bill Swislow, a founder and longtime executive at Cars.com, is now a digital media consultant, writer and art collector, and a lecturer at Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism. He also operates the cultural website interestingideas.com and sits on the board of Intuit: The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art.

Today’s conversation covers Bill’s early pioneering days on the internet in the early 1990s at the Chicago Tribune and his personal interest as an outsider art fan.

You can hear Bill speak at his upcoming talk at the Skokie Public Library, March 23 at 7p.m., when he talks about the outsider artist Henry Darger 125th anniversary of his birth.

His website interestingideas.com is about outsider art, roadside art and architecture, vernacular culture, occasional political despair and really weird store names.

From Bill: Some of the most powerful art of the last 100 years has happened beyond museum walls. This “Outsider Art” is now starting to seep inside as it gains increasing acceptance even in the most conservative bastions of the art world. Find out what’s so exciting about this “art that doesn’t know its name,” created by people with no formal training but often touched with creative genius, including Chicago’s own Henry Darger (creator of the image to the right). Learn about Chicago-based Intuit: The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art, one of the world’s leading institutions devoted to this work.

We talk about Bill’s works as a board member at Intuit Chicago, one of the premier museums in the world dedicated to presenting self-taught art, defined as the work of artists who demonstrate little influence from the mainstream art world and who instead are motivated by their unique personal visions.

We also discuss how you can become an active outsider art collector, which starts with a visit to Intuit on Milwaukee Ave. Learn more at www.art.org (great url!).

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Thursday, March 9, 2017

The Lisa D Show with Melissa Blount

In this interview we talk about a community arts activism project Dr. Melissa Blount, PhD is creating in Evanston, the Black Lives Matter Witness Quilt. The public is invited to create this quilt together during M.E.E.T. Social Justice Sewing Circles this spring and will be on display this June in Evanston. Click here to RSVP for the next sewing circle.

From the invite: Please join MEET (Making Evanston Equitable Together) as we work to expand and highlight the Black Lives Matter movement here in Evanston. Recently our community was fortunate to have in our presence Seneca artist Marie Watt at Northwestern University's Block Museum. On two occasions she brought our community together around issues of equity through participatory sewing circles.

In that spirit, MEET wants to continue gathering our community to engage in social justice handwork activities and create what we are calling a Black Lives Matter Witness Quilt. We want to honor and draw attention to the lives of Black women and girls lost to violence in Chicago by incorporating their names into our community quilt.

We also discuss Melissa's work with community groups in Evanston, MEET (Making Evanston Equitable Together) and OPAL (The Organization for Positive Action and Leadership).

Melissa Blount is a licensed clinical psychologist in private practice in Evanston, Illinois. Dr. Blount has spent over twenty years studying human behavior, specifically interested in the way racism, gender and class impact physical and psychological outcomes for communities of color. She lives in Evanston with her husband and her precious and precocious tween girl.

Learn more about Melissa at www.blountpsychology.com

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Thursday, March 2, 2017

The Lisa D Show with Dana De Ano

Dana De Ano is a visual artist living and creating works in Evanston, IL. Her work hangs on walls, but has three dimensional elements, using domestic castaways sewn onto paper resulting in captivating and playful landscapes, always with a tiny house somewhere in the composition.

An alum of the Art Institute of Chicago, De Ano has always made room in her life to create art, is incredibly prolific, shows at galleries across the Midwest and has works in numerous personal and professional art collections. Recently De Ano’s work has undergone a change in both size (she’s stretching herself) and color, the results are fantastic, images below.

In this conversation we talk about De Ano’s creative routine, how domestic castaways like dryer lint inspire her and why size matters.

See her body of work at www.danadeano.com and reach out direct for a studio visit, De Ano welcomes the conversation and chance to engage around her work.

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The Lisa D Show