Kerri Schlottman is the author of Daytime Moon and Tell Me One Thing. In Daytime Moon, readers meet Isa, an adrift woman who has a gift of premonition and a knack for tarot.
We asked Schlottman to answer our recurring My Reading Life Q&A so readers could get to know the books that shaped her life and influenced her writing.
What was the first book you were obsessed with as a child?
As a child, like very young, I was obsessed with Are You My Mother by P.D. Eastman. It was probably the first book I learned how to read on my own so I read it over and over. Apparently this book took some flack for its “marginalization of fatherhood” and for being “anti-adoption,” which is kind of wild since it’s just a picture book about a trouble-making newly hatched baby bird that goes on a quest to find its mom (who is out gathering food) and ends up questioning all kinds of animals and inanimate objects that are most definitely not its mom. Incidentally this book has a 4.22 rating on Goodreads as determined by 252,992 readers, one of whom gave it one-star review and wrote: “It took a while but it was ok.”
What book helped you through puberty?
Okay, so my mom was a huge Danielle Steel fan, so please understand why I’m going with her and how it came to be even though I can’t pinpoint an exact book. But I read a whole lot of them. I was also a huge fan of Sweet Valley High books. My best friend and I would swap them. I truly wish I could offer a more sophisticated answer… but this is the truth. I will say that I started reading Vonnegut in early high school so maybe that’s kind of redeeming?
What book do you wish 18-year-old you had read?
This is going to sound a little pretentious (I’m sorry!) but I wish I had read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig at a younger age. I read it when I was in my early thirties and it’s such a validating book. I struggled so much when I was younger with how to reconcile reality with a creative mind. That book made it okay, and natural, to be rational and also imaginative and to embrace that kind of chaotic place where those two things rub up on one another in the brain. I think that book could have grounded younger me quite a bit. I also love that it was rejected over 100 times before a publisher finally took it on and then it sold like 50,000 copies in its first few months.
If you were to teach a class on Damn Good Writing, what books would make the syllabus?
These are some books with Damn Good Writing that I’d love to force other people to have to read: Darcey Steinke’s Suicide Blonde, which I re-read periodically and continue to marvel at; Daisy Johnson’s Everything Under, which is such a stunningly beautiful/painful book; Baby Driver by Jan Kerouac (Jack Kerouac’s daughter), which has dazzling writing on a sentence level; Wild Dark Shore by Charlotte McConaghy, another recent read that was so well written that I re-read passages multiple times (it takes me a long time to read a good book!); Kiran Millwood Hargrave’s The Mercies, which will forever be one of my favorite books and also has mind-blowingly good prose; and really everything that Maggie Nelson writes.
What books helped guide you while writing your book?
Not necessarily because of the book, but while I was writing it, I re-read Lewis Hyde’s The Gift, which is such a treasure. It’s sort of about withstanding the commodification of art and creativity and examines other methods of cultural exchange. It definitely influenced some of the way I approached my protagonist Isa, who is a little counter-culture and anti-neoliberalist. At the time, I was also reading a lot of Sarah Smarsh and Matthew Desmond. I originally come from a struggling area of semi-rural Michigan and while that’s not at all where Daytime Moon is set (which is in a remote part of the California desert), there are some interesting socio-psychological overlaps. I also distinctly remember reading Weather by Jenny Offill during this time because we are both dealing with climate change themes and I admire the way she pulls it off.
What books are on your nightstand now?
Right now, I’m reading Elegies for the Brokenhearted by Christie Hodgen, and I love it so much. Each chapter/section is an elegy to someone in the narrator’s life who has passed away which builds into a growing story about the narrator’s life. It’s a pretty brilliant construct. Also on my nightstand is an ARC of Caroline Tracy’s book Salt Lakes: An Unnatural History, which will be out by the time this interview is posted. She writes about the Salton Sea, which is featured in my novel Daytime Moon. The book is so compelling. I also have Sister Creatures, a fantastic debut novel by Laura Venita Green, hanging around even though I finished it a while ago. I love the cover so much. It’s like having a little bit of artwork nearby. And I have an unpublished printed out manuscript for Scott Semegran’s book The Housesitters, which I’m lucky enough to get an early peek at.