Something (rather than nothing)

Emily Somoskey is a 2-D mixed media artist and painter from Northeast Ohio. She pursued a BA in Art Education/Painting at The University of Akron in Akron, OH (2013) and her MFA at Michigan State University, in East Lansing, MI (2020). Emily is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor in Painting at Whitman College, in Walla Walla, WA.

Emily’s mixed-media paintings use representational and abstract methods to explore the ways we simultaneously experience physical and mental space. On a material level, her work is largely built through layering paint and various forms of photographic imagery. These disparate mediums collectively create a complex and nuanced language that weave together moments of clarity and ambiguity. Through her work she references the shifting and overlapping nature of our experience with the sensate and psychological realms; giving form to the complexity, instability, and enigmatic nature of our lived experiences.

https://www.emilysomoskey.com/

This episode is very different than others. Jim LaBelle, this episode's featured guest, passed away recently. I wish, hope and pray that our conversation gives tribute to Jim's contributions and advocacy. Thank you and farewell Jim.

Host Ken Volante

"There are certain individuals that go under the radar their entire lives despite being one of the most resilient people in the room, and that is without question Jim LaBelle. A father, world traveler, lawyer, disability advocate and professor, Jim’s story isn’t well known to many, but we hope to change that. A quadriplegic since 1969 and passing on April 21st, 2024, he was paralyzed for nearly 55 years and showed a life can be well lived in spite of paralysis."

Spinalpedia Blog

"For over fifty years, I have been pushing my chair. I graduated from law school and passed the bar exam in three states. My travels took me to twenty-three countries. My story is not an inspirational anecdote; it's about finding love, losing love, grief, joy, and single parenthood.

Don't call me 'bound' or 'confined' to my wheelchair. My chair gives me freedom.

A wheelchair user today has more rights than one did fifty years ago. Yet there are still many obstacles in finding housing, transportation, employment, and medical care.

I am not trying to be a role model, just a possibility. There are obstacles, and people may not always treat you properly, but there is progress."

Jim LaBelle

The Ill-Fitting Skin is layered with surreal storytelling but remains an extraordinarily realistic read, in the sense that even the most solid realities of life—and death—tend to blur and shimmer at their raw edges. The talkative bird that nests in a woman’s womb is as real as the “previous tenant.” The love of a mother for her uncontrollable son is as real as the wildness that is in her too. The women of The Ill-Fitting Skin are real women—who work and grieve and create and destroy, who love and do not love, whether at the roll of the dice or because “the pages are paths, and you will have to choose among them.”

Shannon Robinson’s debut short story collection, The Ill-Fitting Skin, is winner of the Press 53 Award for Short Fiction (forthcoming with Press 53 in May 2024). Her writing has appeared in The Gettysburg Review, The Iowa Review, Joyland, Water-Stone Review, Nimrod, failbetter, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA in fiction from Washington University in St. Louis, and in 2011 she was the Writer-in-Residence at Interlochen Center for the Arts. Other honors include Nimrod’s Katherine Anne Porter Prize for Fiction, grants from the Elizabeth George Foundation and the Canada Council for the Arts, a Hedgebrook Fellowship, a Sewanee Scholarship, and an Independent Artist Award from the Maryland Arts Council. She teaches creative writing at Johns Hopkins University and lives in Baltimore with her husband and son. www.shannonrobinson.org

Producer / composer / multi-instrumentalist Angel Marcloid records music under the moniker Fire-Toolz. Though Marcloid’s output emerges in a litany of distinct aliases and projects — from the jazz fusion / new age of Nonlocal Forecast to the vaporous nostalgia of MindSpring Memories — the Fire-Toolz catalog remains the central focus of the prolific artist’s musical universe and a home for Marcloid’s most ambitious and combinatory work. 'I am upset because I see something that is not there.', the fifth Fire-Toolz album to join the Hausu Mountain catalog since 2017, follows 2021’s sprawling double-album Eternal Home (HAUSMO111) and 2022’s self-released EP I will not use the body’s eyes today. I am upset [...] offers listeners a prismatic cross-section of juxtaposed genres and compositional contortions to explore, maintaining Fire-Toolz’s signature density and complexity while tightening the scope of Marcloid’s experimentation into the project’s most focused song cycle to date. Perhaps more than any previous Fire-Toolz album, I am upset [...] presents some form of pop music, carried in Marcloid’s passages of clean vocals, in the bright synth and keyboard tones that animate its tracks, in the yearning saxophone lines that pour into view and whisk the narrative onto a new path. The format of a one-person “band” carries a different weight in a landscape of solo artists crafting abstract modernist productions that don’t allude in the slightest to various twentieth-century rock-related traditions. Fire-Toolz exists on both sides of this divide.

Fire-Toolz

SRTN Podcast

Besa is a film photographer and model who resides in Chicago. Her work is largely editorial, drawing inspiration from old Hollywood film noir and the creative direction of Sofia Coppola.

Besa

SRTN