Inside the Episode with Mitch Hampton:

 “I was first introduced to Jaimee Wriston Colbert by her daughter Mailie Colbert, who told me I should read her mother's books. I read Climbing The God Tree, and later Shark Girls, and more recently, Vanishing Acts with the greatest pleasure. Colbert's work is exciting in its formal inventiveness: it blurs the line between short stories and the novel for one, magical thing, moreover it is fiction rooted in the real lives of ordinary humanity, sometimes, and in some instances people who are unfortunately forgotten or overlooked in a lot of books and stories. The characters in Colbert's fiction really are like the people you could know in life except that she gives you more than a glimpse into their inner lives such that would be ordinarily unavailable to you in life. The people in Colbert's fiction have extraordinary dignity and integrity, even in some of the hardest social situations, and the struggles of the characters come alive in ways that make you look at human social life in a thoroughly novel way. In the proverbial phrase, you grow to care about them as you read. In having Colbert on the show, the artistic medium being celebrated is what used to be called the art of prose, and it is a medium in which she undoubtedly excels.”

Jaimee’s Biography: Jaimee Wriston Colbert is the author of six books of fiction: Vanishing Acts, winner of a 2018 Pinnacle Book Achievement Award, and finalist for the 2018 American Fiction Prize, 2018 Foreword Indies Book of the Year, the National Indie Excellence Award in Literary Fiction, and the 2019 International Book Award in Literary Fiction; Wild Things, winner of the CNY 2017 Book Award in Fiction and the 2018 International Book Award in Fiction-Short Stories; Shark Girls, finalist for the USA Book News Best Books of 2010 and ForeWord Magazine Book of the Year; Dream Lives of Butterflies, winner of the IPPY Gold Medal/First Place Award for story collections; Climbing the God Tree, winner of the Willa Cather Fiction Prize; and Sex, Salvation, and the Automobile, winner of the Zephyr Prize. Her work has appeared in numerous journals, including The Gettysburg Review, New Letters, Tampa Review, and Prairie Schooner, and broadcast on “Selected Shorts.” She was awarded the 2012 Ian MacMillan Fiction Prize for “Things Blow Up,” a story in Wild Things. Other stories won the Jane’s Stories Award and the Isotope Editor’s Fiction Prize. She was recently awarded the 2018-2019 SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Scholarship and Creative Activities. Originally from Hawai’i, she is Professor of Creative Writing at SUNY, Binghamton University. 

Links to Jaimee’s Works: https://sites.google.com/binghamton.edu/jaimeewristoncolbert http://www.fomitepress.com/Vanishing_Acts html http://www.newletters.org/bkmk-books/wild-things https://livingstonpress.uwa.edu/htm%20(web%20pages)/shark_girls.htm https://www.binghamton.edu/english/faculty/profile.html?id=jcolbert https://www.linkedin.com/in/jaimeewristoncolbert/ https://www.facebook.com/jaimee.wriston.colbert: 

Artist's Referenced: Tillie Olson: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tillie_Olsen Jack Driscoll: https://fictionwritersreview.com/interview/tell-me-the-landscape-in-which-you-live-an-interview-with-jack-driscoll/ 

*Please note a correction in the episode,  artists mentioned in the episode : I mention an important novella by Tillie Olsen called Tell Me A Riddle. I say that the filmed version was directed by John Sayles. John Sayles was not the director. Lee Grant was!