Brad Zellar | Till the Wheels Fall Off

Author, editor, and photo collaborator Brad Zellar joined me at the 2025 Chico Review to talk about his life as a writer, including his work with Alec Soth and Little Brown Mushroom, and his novel, Till the Wheels Fall Off (Coffee House Press). We discussed Brad’s love of photography and how Chico and Montana have become a second home for him. Brad also shared how his early struggles with addiction and an unintentional photography grant helped him to refocus on his writing and clarify his relationship to photography. (Cover photo: Eric Ruby)

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This podcast is sponsored by the Charcoal Book Club

Brad Zellar has worked as a writer and editor for daily and weekly newspapers, as well as for regional and national magazines. A former senior editor at City Pages, The Rake, and Utne Reader, Zellar is also the author of Suburban World: The Norling Photos, Conductors of the Moving World, House of Coates, and Driftless. He has frequently collaborated with the photographer Alec Soth, and together they produced seven editions of The LBM Dispatch, chronicling American community life in the twenty-first century. Zellar’s work has been featured in the New York Times Magazine, The Believer, Paris Review, Vice, Guernica, Aperture, and Russian Esquire. He spent fifteen years working in bookstores and was a co-owner of Rag & Bone Books in Minneapolis. He currently lives in Saint Paul.