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

After serving on the editorial staff of The New York Review of Books from 1988 to 2017 and founding the literary magazine Little Star, Ann Kjellberg launched her own Substack newsletter, Book Post, which she describes as “a bite-sized, newsletter-based book review delivery service.” In this episode, Ann shares stories from her long career, and we pick her brain about book reviews—why they matter, how they’ve evolved, common beginner’s mistakes to avoid, and what it takes to write a good one—before touching on trends in the writing and publishing industries writ large. 

Kai Franz is an artist with a background in computer science and architecture. For the past five years, he’s been collaborating with a machine he designed and built called the Dual-Axis Precision Deposition System—or plopper. The plopper primarily fabricates sculptures, but also produces prints, drawings, and films. Kai describes it as “the bad conscience of formal idealism.” This is but one of his many collaborations. 

Kai has taught at Princeton University and the Rhode Island School of Design, and he now splits his time between Berlin and Providence, Rhode Island, where he lives with his wife and children. 

In this episode, he recounts his journey from Europe to North America, and we discuss his creative process, his expansive approach to collaborations, and more. 

Elizabeth Sylvia is a poet and high school English teacher. Her first collection of poetry, None but Witches, offers a series of reflections on the women in Shakespeare’s plays and female experiences present and past. She is also the author of a chapbook, My Little Book of Domestic Anxieties, and she’s now working on poems about Marie Antoinette and the end of the world. 

In this episode, we discuss Elizabeth’s creative process, Titus Andronicus’s bloody conclusion, Marie Antoinette’s Potemkin farm, and more. 

Stanley Ridgley is an author, educator, and former military intelligence officer. He served for five years in West Berlin, where he received the George S. Patton Award in Leadership. His degrees include a Doctorate and a Masters in international relations from Duke University and an international MBA from Temple University. He’s also studied at Moscow State University and the Institut de Gestion Sociale in Paris. He’s currently working on his fifth book and teaching business and management at Drexel University in Philadelphia. 

He joins us to discuss the time he spent living in the Eastern Bloc, Russian life and literature, how artists and writers can leverage greater compensation for their work, his books on business, political ideologies, and social movements, and more.  

Susan Kougell is an award-winning writer and filmmaker. Her solo films can be rented at the Filmmakers’ Co-Op and are screening internationally, and her six short films with Ernie Marrero are held in MoMA’s permanent collection and archives. She is also a classically trained violist and has combined her passion for music and poetry in her choral texts and compositions. She teaches at Purchase College, SUNY and serves as a senior contributing editor for Script Magazine.

In this episode, we discuss Susan’s creative process and how she sustains a practice that integrates multiple artistic mediums. 

Jennifer Griffith is a musician and composer whose vocal and instrumental works are inspired by politics, social issues, and human relationships. She earned her PhD in composition at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and has written and performed jazz, classical music, and opera around the world. William Gadea is an author, animator, entrepreneur. In 2012, he founded IdeaRocket, an international commercial animation studio. Jennifer and Will are married and live in Buenos Aires, Argentina with their cat, Hildy. 

In this episode, we discuss their lives, relationship, creative processes, and artistic philosophies and take a brief detour into our own fiction. 

“Three Paths,” by Itto & Mekiya Outini: https://eunoiareview.wordpress.com/2025/10/05/three-paths/

Mary Simmons is a queer poet from Cleveland, Ohio. Her first collection, Mother, Daughter, Augur, was published by June Road Press in October of 2025. She’s also placed work in The Baltimore Review, ONE ART, trampset, Moon City Review, Variant Lit, The Shore, and elsewhere. Mary earned her MFA from Bowling Green State University, where she also served as managing editor of The Mid-American Review. She now lives with her cat, Suki, at the edge of the woods. 

Charles Ritchie has been drawing, journaling, and painting in watercolors from his studio window in Silver Spring, Maryland for 40 years. Many of his drawings and watercolors are palimpsests created over decades, comprised of overlapping images of his suburban neighborhood captured at various times throughout the day and year. Key themes in his work include light, time, and dreams. 

Charles holds an MFA in Painting from Carnegie-Mellon University and a BFA from the University of Georgia, Athens, and his work is held by public and private collections including the Baltimore Museum of Art, Harvard, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Public Library, Yale University Art Gallery, and elsewhere. In this episode, we discuss his creative process and the aesthetic redemption of the seemingly mundane.  

Jane Wong is the author of the memoir Meet Me Tonight in Atlantic City and two collections of poetry, How to Not Be Afraid of Everything and Overpour. She is a recipient of the Pushcart Prize and fellowships from the U.S. Fulbright Program, Artist Trust, Harvard’s Woodberry Poetry Room, 4Culture, the Fine Arts Work Center, Bread Loaf, Hedgebrook, Willapa Bay, the Jentel Foundation, Ucross, Mineral School, the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, Loghaven, and others. Jane holds an MFA in poetry from the University of Iowa and a PhD in English from the University of Washington, and she currently teaches creative writing at Western Washington University in Seattle, Washington. Her work has appeared in Best American Nonrequired Reading 2019, Best American Poetry 2015, The New York Times, American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, New England Review, McSweeney's, Black Warrior Review, Ecotone, The Common, The Georgia Review, Shenandoah, and elsewhere. 

Laurie Sheck is the author of three novels and five collections of poems, which have been reviewed in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Boston Review, as well as numerous essays, which have appeared in The Paris Review, Granta, The Atlantic, and elsewhere. She’s been a Guggenheim Fellow, a Radcliffe Fellow, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellow, a Cullman Center Fellow, and a Creative Capital Awardee and has taught at Princeton, Columbia, Rutgers, and the New School. In this episode, we discuss Laurie’s approach to speculative fiction, variously informed by Mary Shelley, Borjes, and Dostoevsky.