Cabana Chats

On episode three of our second season, we bring you a conversation with writer, and Resort teacher, Amy Jo Burns.

In this episode, Amy Jo Burns, author of Shiner and Cinderland, talks with Resort founder Catherine LaSota about her process of note-taking and working with tone in her writing, and the importance of community in a writer's life. Amy Jo and Catherine also talk about baths, old shoes, dancing, and Twitter.

Amy Jo Burns is the author of the memoir Cinderland and the novel Shiner, which was a Barnes & Noble Discover Pick, NPR Best Book of the year, and “told in language as incandescent as smoldering coal,” according to The New York Times. Her writing has appeared in The Paris Review Daily, Tin House, Elle, Good Housekeeping, Ploughshares, Electric Literature, Literary Hub, and the anthology Not That Bad. You can find her on Twitter @amyjoburns.

Sign up for Amy Jo's self-paced Make Your Memoir Remarkable class at The Resort here!

Find out more about Amy Jo Burns here: https://amyjoburns.com

Join our free Resort community, full of resources and support for writers, here: https://community.theresortlic.com/

Cabana Chats is hosted by Resort founder Catherine LaSota. Our podcast editor is Jade Iseri-Ramos, and our music is by Pat Irwin.

Special thanks to Resort assistant Nadine Santoro.

Follow us on social media! @TheResortLIC

It's season two, episode two of Cabana Chats! In this episode, the amazing Lisa Lucas, Senior Vice President and Publisher of Pantheon and Schocken Books, chats with Resort founder Catherine LaSota about the importance of maintaining a whole life outside of one's work, what she reads for pleasure, and their love for the physical objects of books (as well as Lisa's ability to always be giving away books, yet still have a home that is very full of books).

Lisa Lucas is Senior Vice President and Publisher of Pantheon and Schocken Books. Prior to her current position, Lisa served as the Executive Director of the National Book Foundation and as publisher of Guernica Magazine.

Follow Lisa Lucas on Twitter here: https://twitter.com/likaluca

Join our free Resort community, full of resources and support for writers, here: https://community.theresortlic.com/

Cabana Chats is hosted by Resort founder Catherine LaSota. Our podcast editor is Jade Iseri-Ramos, and our music is by Pat Irwin.

Special thanks to Resort assistant Nadine Santoro.

Follow us on social media! @TheResortLIC

Welcome to season two of Cabana Chats! We are thrilled to bring you a conversation with writer, editor, and literary organization professional Halimah Marcus in this first episode of the season.

In this episode, Halimah Marcus, Executive Director of Electric Literature, talks with Resort founder Catherine LaSota about city life and country life, leaning on your community for support with big new projects, and the opportunities that working together online has created for building an even greater community. Halimah discusses the relationship between her editing and writing, the way she has structured her time during the pandemic, and the variety of skills involved in bringing together the excellent anthology she edited, called Horse Girls.

Halimah Marcus is the Executive Director of Electric Literature, an innovative digital publisher based in Brooklyn, and the editor of its weekly fiction magazine, Recommended Reading. She is also the editor of Horse Girls (Harper Perennial, 2021), an anthology that reclaims and recasts the horse girl stereotype, which was a New York Times “New and Noteworthy” pick. Her short stories have appeared  in Indiana Review, Gulf Coast, One Story, BOMB, The Literary Review, and The Southampton Review. Halimah has an MFA from Brooklyn College, and lives in the Catskill region of New York.

Find out more about Halimah Marcus here: https://www.halimahmarcus.com

Join our free Resort community, full of resources and support for writers, here: https://community.theresortlic.com/

Cabana Chats is hosted by Resort founder Catherine LaSota. Our podcast editor is Jade Iseri-Ramos, and our music is by Pat Irwin.

Special thanks to Resort assistant Nadine Santoro.

Follow us on social media! @TheResortLIC

Join us for a special, between-seasons Bonus Episode of the Cabana Chats podcast! This episode features a recording of a January 29, 2022 event that we held on Zoom: our four Fall 2021 Resort Fellows (Mai Tran, Lourdes Dolores Follins, Jaysen Henderson-Greenbey, and Dasia Moore) all read briefly from their amazing work, and then Resort founder Catherine LaSota is in conversation with the fellows for the second half of the episode.

Listen in for some powerful flash non/fiction, memoir, novel excerpt, and poetry -- there is something for everyone!

Cabana Chats is hosted by Resort founder Catherine LaSota. Our podcast editor is Jade Iseri-Ramos, and our music is by Pat Irwin.

Special thanks to Resort assistant Nadine Santoro.

Follow us on social media! @TheResortLIC

For our final episode of season one of Cabana Chats, podcast host and Resort founder Catherine LaSota turns the spotlight on five members of the Resort community who are also wonderful writers in our Cabana Club membership program for writers! Victoria, Nicole, Ian, Jules, and Devin reflect on what community has meant to them and their writing over the past year, and their goals for the year ahead.

About this episode's guests:

Victoria Melendez is a writer based in Washington, DC. She writes at the intersection of spirituality, identity and current events. She recently won an Honorable Mention in the Medium Writer’s Contest and her work has been quoted in the Washington Post. You can follow her writing on Medium here: https://victoria-tm.medium.com.

Nicole Zhu is a writer and developer based in New York. Her stories and essays have appeared in Catapult, Eater, Electric Literature, and elsewhere. Her website is http://nicolezhu.io and you can subscribe to her biweekly newsletter at https://nicoledonut.com.

Ian MacAllen is the author of Red Sauce: How Italian Food Became American. He is a writer, editor, and graphic designer living in Brooklyn. His website is https://www.ianmacallen.com, and you can follow his Red Sauce blog at http://www.redsauceamerica.com.

Jules Chung can’t stop thinking about women, gender, and family. She writes mostly fiction, lives in New Jersey, and shares her work at https://www.juleschungwriting.com.

Devin Kate Pope is a writer paying attention to how people try and (sometimes) fail to connect with each other. She lives in Tempe, AZ, and online at @devinkatepope (Twitter and Instagram).

Join the Cabana Club!

Join our free Resort community, full of resources and support for writers, here: https://community.theresortlic.com/

Cabana Chats is hosted by Resort founder Catherine LaSota. Our podcast editor is Craig Eley, with help from Jade Iseri-Ramos, and our music is by Pat Irwin.

Special thanks to Resort assistant Nadine Santoro.

Follow us on social media! @TheResortLIC

In our fourteenth full episode of Cabana Chats, writer and cultural organizer MARS talks with Resort founder Catherine LaSota about their love for Detroit, the possibilities that can be created in moments of tension, and the importance of carving out and protecting dedicated writing time, especially when you are so committed to your other work and to your community. Bonus: Catherine conducted this entire interview while recovering from her Covid vaccination booster shot!

MARS. is a writer and cultural organizer born and raised in Detroit. Their work has been published or is forthcoming in Obsidian Literature & Arts for the African Diaspora, Michigan Quarterly Review: The Mixtape, Foglifter Journal, Gertrude Press, and elsewhere. MARS is a 2021 Kresge Literary Arts Fellow and a 2019 Lambda Literary Art Emerging Writers Fellow in Poetry. They work with Allied Media Projects as Director of the Allied Media Conference.

Find out more about MARS here: https://blkboimars.com/

Mentioned in this episode:

Follow MARS on social media:

Join our free Resort community, full of resources and support for writers, here: https://community.theresortlic.com/

Cabana Chats is hosted by Resort founder Catherine LaSota. Our podcast editor is Craig Eley, and our music is by Pat Irwin.

Special thanks to Resort assistant Nadine Santoro.

Follow us on social media! @TheResortLIC

In our thirteenth full episode of Cabana Chats, writer and editor Sari Botton talks with Resort founder Catherine LaSota about co-working spaces for writers, the importance of building a community around you, and how aging can mean different things to different people. If you want the full experience of this conversation, we recommend listening while enjoying a pizza around a fire with some friends!

Sari Botton is a writer and editor living in Kingston, NY. She is a contributing editor at Catapult, and the former Essays Editor for Longreads. She edited the anthologies Goodbye to All That: Writers on Loving & Leaving NY and Never Can Say Goodbye: Writers on Their Unshakable Love for NY. She teaches creative nonfiction at Wilkes University, Catapult and Bay Path University. She publishes three newsletters: Oldster Magazine, Adventures in "Journalism," and Memoir Monday. Her memoir-in-essays, And You May Find Yourself... will be published by Heliotrope in June 2022.

Mentioned in this episode:

Matthew Salesses's Fine Lines essay: https://longreads.com/2019/04/22/to-grieve-is-to-carry-another-time/

Cabana Chats is hosted by Resort founder Catherine LaSota.

Special thanks to Resort assistant Nadine Santoro.

Follow us on social media! @TheResortLIC

Our twelfth episode of Cabana Chats is a throwback! In 2018, Resort founder Catherine LaSota chatted with the incredible writer Min Jin Lee, in Catherine's then-office on the campus of Columbia University. This episode features the recording of that conversation, in which Min Jin Lee compares the best writing projects to love affairs and talks about how parenthood irrevocably changes you. There is also a lot of discussion about prioritizing what is important, as well as advice for headache cures, and acknowledgement of the importance of understanding those who hate you. Chocolate is also consumed.

Find out more about Min Jin Lee here: https://www.minjinlee.com/

Cabana Chats is hosted by Resort founder Catherine LaSota.

Special thanks to Resort assistant Nadine Santoro.

Follow us on social media! @TheResortLIC

In this eleventh full episode of Cabana Chats, writer Amy Shearn talks with Resort founder Catherine LaSota about how our life circumstances impact our writing, and the joy of finding writing that speaks to you and connecting with strangers via your own writing. Some possible podcast spinoff ideas are also discussed! Also -- is Amy alien or human? You'll have to listen to find out!

Amy Shearn is the award-winning author of the novels Unseen City, The Mermaid of Brooklyn, and How Far Is the Ocean From Here. She is the Content Lead for Writing at Medium and editor of Human Parts and Creators Hub. A former fiction editor at the literary magazine Joyland, Amy's work has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Poets & Writers, Literary Hub, Catapult, and many other publications. Amy has an MFA from the University of Minnesota, and currently lives in Brooklyn with her two children. You can find her at amyshearnwrites.com or @amyshearn.

Find out more about Amy Shearn here: https://www.amyshearnwrites.com/

Cabana Chats is hosted by Resort founder Catherine LaSota.

Special thanks to Resort assistant Nadine Santoro.

Follow us on social media! @TheResortLIC

Our tenth full episode of Cabana Chats is a special LIVE event episode, featuring a conversation we had with writer Leigh Stein as part of the 2021 Brooklyn Book Festival Bookends program. Leigh chats with us about how she conceived of, wrote, and published her newest poetry collection, What to Miss When, entirely during the pandemic, in 2020. We talk about how much community came into play in putting this book out into the world, and in the second half of the episode we hear from some wonderful members of the Resort Cabana Club! This live event was called Building an Online Community and Writing Through a Pandemic and took place on September 28, 2021. You can check out the video of the event in our free online Resort community!

Leigh Stein is a writer interested in what the internet is doing to our identities, relationships, and politics. Her critically acclaimed satirical novel Self Care was released in June 2020, and her poetry collection What to Miss When was released in August 2021. Leigh is also the author of the memoir Land of Enchantment, the poetry collection Dispatch from the Future, and the novel The Fallback Plan. Her non-fiction writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the New Yorker online, Allure, ELLE, Poets & Writers, BuzzFeed, The Cut, Salon, and Slate.

Cabana Club members featured in this episode:

Cabana Chats is hosted by Resort founder Catherine LaSota.

Special thanks to Resort assistant Nadine Santoro.

Follow us on social media! @TheResortLIC