Let's Have a Renaissance: The DateKeepers Podcast with Itto and Mekiya Outini

Armand Rosamilia has written and published over 200 stories, including crime thrillers, supernatural thrillers, zombies, contemporary fiction, nonfiction, and more. In this episode, he shares some of the insights he’s gleaned from a long career in writing and publishing, including the red flags he’s learned to look out for in publishing contracts. 

Together, we write fiction about America, Morocco, and migrants from all walks of life. In this episode, we read and discuss three of our short stories, “The Rain Is Falling on Tangier" (originally published in Aura Literary Arts Review), “The New Sufyan" (originally published in "Gargoyle Magazine), and “A Scientific Mind" (originally published in DarkWinter Magazine), each of which dives into a different corner of Moroccan society while exploring a common theme: how do women make the best of bad options in a culture that does not have their interests in mind. You can find links to these stories and more on our website:

https://www.thedatekeepers.com

Virginia Wagner is a visual artist and writer whose work takes place in zones of conflict between nature and human construction. She’s received commissions from Guggenheim Works & Process and National Geographic as well as fellowships from several residencies, and she’s a founding editor of the online journal Painters on Painting, alongside Julie Heffernan. In this episode, she shares how she got started as an artist, speaks to the value of an ever-evolving practice, and discusses her work’s core themes. 

Brownell Landrum is the author of several self-published novels, children’s books, screenplays, works of nonfiction, and songs. In this episode, we discuss the hero’s journey as it pertains to writing, reading, and life, the power of wishing, why bad things happen to good people, and more.

Andrea Harrison is a retired educator turned content marketing writer and editor. She’s published her first children’s book, The Selfish Shellfish and the Sick Sea, and she’s currently working on a debut romance novel. In this episode, we discuss the challenges faced by aging women in business, romance, and life and how literature can restore the human connections that betrayals and tragedies have taken away. 

Rachel Whalen is a writer and translator from Buffalo, New York. She earned her MFA in creative writing from NYU in 2021 and her BA in English from Cornell in 2019. She speaks English, Spanish, Italian, and a little bit of Russian and currently lives with her partner in Mexico City. In this episode, we discuss the joys of multilingual partnerships, the fascinating challenges of writing in a foreign language, workshop cultures in the US and Mexico, and whether it’s possible to pursue both happiness and literary excellence.  

JD Adler has been an EMT, a bartender, a ski lift operator, a bookstore manager, a cook, a reporter, a librarian, a haunted pub crawl guide, and a vagabond. He holds an MA in communication, writes poetry, fiction, and journalism, gives performances as an oral storyteller with the Suncoast Storytellers, and runs his own publishing platform. In this episode, we discuss how written and oral traditions differ and converge, what factors make a work of science fiction “literary,” and the roles that stories play in our cultures and lives. 

Douglas Boyce teaches music at George Washington University and writes compositions that draw heavily on medieval and renaissance traditions while integrating modernist aesthetics. He holds a PhD in composition from the University of Pennsylvania, and his awards include a residency at MacDowell. In this episode, we discuss the power of enstrangement, highlight the parallels between avant garde chamber music and punk rock, and talk through how to tell a visionary from a fraud. 

After spending twenty years as an educator, Susan Carlisle joined a writing group and started penning romance novels. She hasn’t looked back since. She’s now published dozens of books, many with Harlequin, an imprint of HarperCollins. In this episode, we discuss the art of the romance novel, the importance of writing communities, how the publishing industry is evolving, how to make a perfect cucumber sandwich, and more.  

Siavash Golkar is an NYC-based visual artist, physicist, and neuroscientist whose work interrogates the economics of social exchange. His paintings render impossible anatomies—a head replaced by a human hand; a torso split open, revealing a hollow interior; a mouth disembodied—highlighting the clash between internal pretenses and superficial interactions. 

In this episode, we discuss how we, as individuals, can better value art, each other, and ourselves against the backdrop of an expanding and increasingly globalized population. We also touch on concrete steps that artists and artistic communities can take to support one another and enrich each other’s creative practices.