Keep the Channel Open

I knew that I was going to read Lindsay Hatton's debut novel, Monterey Bay , as soon as I saw the title—I grew up in that area, after all—and I was pleased to discover that between the covers of the book lay a story that is by turns funny, sexy, and profound, an alternate history of a place I know and love so well. I talked to Lindsay about her book, about our shared experiences growing up on the...

Chantel Paul is the Program Coordinator of the San Diego State University Downtown Gallery, a space which has rapidly become an important part of the vibrant art scene here in San Diego. In this wide-ranging conversation we talked about the Downtown Gallery, her role as a curator, the burgeoning San Diego arts community, and photography portfolio reviews from the reviewer's perspective. In the sec...

David Emitt Adams recently won the 2016 Clarence John Laughlin award for his photography, and if you've ever seen it before, you know why. In his work, David uses the wet-plate collodion process to create images on objects from his students' used film canisters to discarded cans found in the desert to oil drum lids, and the interplay between the photographs and the objects on which they're exposed...

Shaindel Beers is the author of two full-length collections of poetry, A Brief History of Time and The Children's War and Other Poems , and her poems have also been published in numerous journals and anthologies. I found both of her books deeply moving, from her depictions of growing up on a farm to poems inspired by child survivors of war, and I was pleased to get to talk to her about her books....

José Iriarte and I go way back, and it's been with great pleasure that I've watched his writing career start to take off over the past few years. He's had short stories appear in a number of publications, including Motherboard, Strange Horizons, and Fantastic Stories of the Imagination, and what I particularly love about his stories is that how he uses genre and genre elements to put a new perspec...

Esmé Weijun Wang's debut novel The Border of Paradise is one of my favorite books so far this year. A multigenerational epic centered on an interracial family, the Nowaks, this book touches on so many profound topics, from mental illness to intergenerational trauma to culture clash to the very question of what it means to be a family, all done in stunningly beautiful prose. Esmé and I had a great...

In his lecture at the 2014 Medium Festival of Photography , photographer Kurt Simonson said that the common thread running through his work is the idea of longing; whether through family or friendship or community, the desire for connection is something we all feel, and that feeling is something he examines in his work. For this episode Kurt and I talked about his 2015 book The Northwoods Journals...

This week, our very first poetry episode with Ohio poet Hannah Stephenson! I first started reading Hannah's blog, The Storialist, a year or so ago, and although most of the poems she posts there are short, they really invite you to spend some time with them. For this week's show, Hannah and I had a great talk about her 2013 book In the Kettle, the Shriek , and the thought process behind her poems....

Tucson-based photographer Ken Rosenthal's work has always stuck in my mind for both its striking visual style and the way that he uses images to represent and explore his internal emotional and psychological state. Whether he's looking at landscapes or family members or familiar objects, his photographs resonate because they represent the personal. We talked about several bodies of work, including...

Aline Smithson may well be the busiest person in photography. Not only is she a brilliant artist in her own right, she is also the editor of one of the top photo blogs in the world, Lenscratch , where she posts new material every single day. On top of that, she teaches workshops around the country, gives lectures at photo festivals internationally, participates as a portfolio reviewer, juries all...

Amanda Dahlgren was one of the first friends I made in the San Diego photography community, and I always look forward to a chance to talk with her. Amanda's work combines a strong sense of formal composition with an inquisitive mind, and we had a great conversation about her work, as well as about the benefits of going through art school and the value of community. Building community is something...

If there's a recurring theme that runs through photographer Jennifer McClure's work, it's about connection, the presence or absence of it. We talked about her ongoing portrait series of singles in New York, and that led to a rich discussion about working with portrait subjects, finding your own style, and self-acceptance. For the second segment, we started off with the topic of what our end goals...

Carrie Elizabeth Thompson is a photographer whose work I've been following for several years. Her work is rich in storytelling, and I was drawn in by its complexity and emotional honesty. We recorded our conversation the day after Prince died, and of course that was on both of our minds as we started talking. But as we talked about her work one idea we kept coming back to was the idea of sharing,...

I met San Diego artist Pastilla in March at the MAS Attack event at the San Diego Art Institute, and after talking with her for a few minutes I knew that I wanted to continue the conversation. We started off talking about the piece of hers that had moved me so much when we first met, "La Metamorfosis de Kafka F2," about the story behind its creation, the frustration and tension in the piece itself...

Carolina Montejo is a San Diego-based photographer and writer whose work looks very futuristic, but don't be fooled: it's all about the contemporary. Carolina and I had a fascinating talk about the inspiration behind her in-progress series "Era: Fragments of an Evolving Landscape," covering everything from her visual technique, her combination of text and image, and the influence of Jorge Luis Bor...

Photographer Andi Schreiber was one of the first people whose work inspired me to try to make meaningful photographs, myself. Andi's bold, vibrant work is a reflection of her life, looking at family and raising her two sons, and more recently looking at herself and how things are changing for her as she enters middle age. In our wide-ranging conversation we discussed parenting, growing and aging,...

Daniel Abraham has written or co-written over twenty novels, among them some of my favorite recent science fiction and fantasy series. You may know him as one of the creators of the popular SyFy show The Expanse , but most recently he's just finished up his excellent series The Dagger and the Coin , the last installment of which— The Spider's War— came out in March. In our conversation, Daniel and...

The images from Claire A. Warden's series Mimesis are visually striking and delightfully inscrutable. Like most viewers, I was immediately grabbed by them when I first saw them, but it wasn't until I talked with Claire and read her artist's statement that I really understood what she was trying to say with these pictures. Having that experience, though, really deepened my appreciation for the work...

I first saw TML Dunn's work last month at the opening of the "Energy: Made in Form" exhibition at the SDSU Downtown Gallery, and his work stopped me dead in my tracks. Visiting his studio later and getting to see the breadth of his work was great fun, and we sat down and had a conversation about his work and process. For the second segment, Matt was interested in talking about art education and wh...

I've known Bryan Ida for a long time, which makes sense because we're family. But that's not the reason that he's one of my favorite living painters. Bryan's work uses bold colors and geometric forms to suggest the urban landscape, and his layered paintings function as a sort of personal archaeology, delving into memory and emotion. We had a great conversation about how his creative expression has...

Jeffery Saddoris is a painter and amateur photographer, and the host of several popular photography podcasts. I've been a longtime listener to his shows and am happy to have him as a guest on KTCO. We talked a lot about Jeffery's background and how he came to photography and writing about the arts, as well as about the community he's helped to build with his listeners. For the second segment we ta...

Robert Jackson Bennett is one of my favorite contemporary fantasy authors. His Divine Cities series—so far comprising the novels City of Stairs and City of Blades —is unlike anything I can recall seeing before, combining urban and epic fantasy with noir thriller to tell a story of adventure and politics and dead gods, redemption and sacrifice. In this week's episode we talked about the series, as...

Samantha Geballe's photographs made a deep impression on me when I first saw them back in 2014. Her fearless series of self-portraits are some of the most intense, honest portrayals of an artist's inner life I've seen, documenting her emotional journey from obesity through gastric bypass surgery toward self-acceptance. In this week's episode we talked about her work, about honesty and fear, and ab...

Photographer Drew Nikonowicz ruffled a few feathers at the 2015 Medium Festival of Photography with his series This World and Others Like It , but far from being put off by a divided audience, Drew looked at it as an opportunity to have a conversation. In this week's episode we talked about his work, photographic manipulations, and photographic truth. In the second segment we talked about video ga...

I've known movement artists Elke Luyten and Kira Alker for a long time, and I always love getting the chance to talk to them. In this week's episode we spoke about their history with movement theater as well as their recent work on David Bowie's video "Blackstar." In the second segment, we talked about the focus and craft involved in Japanese food, and how a trip to Japan became a source of inspir...