Kerri Schlottman: On Giving Literary Voice to Visual Art

Kerri Schlottman’s writing has recently been featured in The Dillydoun Review, Belle Ombre, and Women Writers. Her work has been honored with the Dillydoun International Fiction Prize (second place), Dzanc Books Prize for Fiction (longlisted), and the 2021 University of New Orleans Press Lab Prize (semifinalist).

Kerri is a native Detroiter who has worked in the arts in New York City in various capacities since 2005, most recently at Creative Capital where she helped to fund new projects by artists, performers, filmmakers, and writers, including Maggie Nelson, Paul Beatty, and Dana Spiotta. Find her on Twitter and Instagram.

In this post, Kerri discusses the real-life documentary photograph that helped inspire her literary novel, Tell Me One Thing, what surprised her most in the publishing process, and more!

Name: Kerri Schlottman
Book title: Tell Me One Thing
Publisher: Regal House Publishing
Release date: January 31, 2023
Genre/category: Literary Fiction
Elevator pitch for the book: Tell Me One Thing is a portrait of two Americas, examining power, privilege, and the sacrifices one is willing to make to succeed as it tells the story of a provocative photograph, the struggling artist who takes it, and its young and troubled subject. Traveling through the 1980s to present day, Tell Me One Thing delves into New York City's free-for-all grittiness while exposing a neglected slice of the rural rust belt.

IndieBound | Bookshop | Amazon
[WD uses affiliate links.]

Tell Me One Thing was inspired by a 2015 NPR segment about photographer Mary Ellen Mark, who had recently passed away, and her famous photograph "Amanda and Her Cousin Amy." The photo depicts nine-year-old Amanda smoking a cigarette in a kiddie pool. She’s wearing makeup, a bikini, and fake nails. The photo is not staged.

Mark had met Amanda while on assignment for Life Magazine in 1990. She had been sent to photograph kids in a special school for problem children in rural North Carolina. Years before, as a student of art history, I had fallen in love with the photograph and Mark’s larger body of documentary photography. I had always wondered about Amanda’s life and what had happened to her after that photograph was taken.

On the occasion of Mark’s death, NPR had found Amanda, then in her late 30s, and asked her why she allowed herself to be photographed. Her reply was: “I thought it might be a way to get out, but that was not the case.” My heart broke. At the time, my husband and I were on a road trip crossing through rural Pennsylvania where we had to stop for gas. The exit took us into a tiny town with only a gas station, a diner, a motel, and a trailer park. Tell Me One Thing began to take form at that moment.

Tell Me One Thing diverges from its real-life inspiration by focusing on how a different provocative photograph launches the career of a struggling artist (Quinn) and the parallel story of its young subject (Lulu) who has an incredibly challenging life. The book begins in 1980 and flashes through time to present day.

Documentary photography has always fascinated me for the way it can tell a full story in a single image. When I decided to write Tell Me One Thing, I knew I wanted to include Lulu’s perspective as well as Quinn’s. Documentary photography is powerful for the fact that it captures real life, but often the subjects are voiceless in the medium. I wanted to give the subjects a voice.

I began writing Tell Me One Thing in 2018 and the novel was acquired in January of 2021 with a publication date of January 31, 2023—so almost five years from idea to publication. It took me about two years to write the book, and I spent a year querying literary agents before finding and submitting directly to Regal House Publishing.

The idea for Tell Me One Thing remained the same in my writing process, though Quinn’s character took on various forms as I toyed with the idea of responsibility and how to balance her desire to achieve recognition for her work with the fact that she was capitalizing off a problematic photograph that she had been “lucky” to capture.

Additionally, the way I initially chose to tell the story changed quite a bit in revisions with my editor. Originally, the book flipped back and forth between Quinn and Lulu’s perspectives with each chapter, but, ultimately, we decided to extend the storylines with longer introductions to both protagonists that spanned approximately the first year after the photograph was taken. After that, their stories begin to weave more closely together.

There were so many surprises and still are. The first surprise was the length of time from the novel being acquired to the date of publication. Two years felt like an eternity to me, though it ended up going by rapidly with revisions, cover design, and proofreading. I remember being in a writing workshop several years ago where a literary agent on a panel said it takes about five years to write and publish a novel and, at the time, I thought that sounded far too long. But she was totally correct.

Regal House Publishing is an independent publisher, so my second big surprise was just how hands-on with the process I’ve had to be—everything from writing my own metadata for the distributor, to handling most of the PR work, and arranging and managing the post-publication events like the book launch, interviews, appearances, and requests to bookstores to carry the book. It’s like having a second full-time job, but it’s such a great learning experience and ultimately very empowering.

Yes, mostly because I thought I knew more than I did. I had studied contemporary art, along with writing, when I was in graduate school, so I thought I had a good grasp on the 1980s art world going into writing the book. But I learned so much new information through my research, and each new thing I discovered forced me to make new decisions about the setting of the story.

There were several New York City art scenes back then, just like there are now, and so I had to decide which Quinn would have been part of based on who she was, the type of artist she wanted to be, and how she would have engaged with the culture and social climate of that time. I also had to decide where my characters hung out, what they did, how they had fun.

There were some very well-known venues like CBGB, Limelight, and Studio 54, which initially I thought would feature in my book, but I found many others that had fascinating stories and had been central to launching some of the fringe artists of that era. It made more sense that my characters would have spent time in these places, but they’re also less documented than the better-known venues. So, I ended up going deep into archives and talking to people who had frequented these alternative spots, which was very fun.

At its core, Tell Me One Thing is about disparity. This is something I think about often, mostly in relation to economic inequality, which is a large theme of the book. The novel surfaces this concept in several different ways, not just the obvious situation that Lulu is in, but also Quinn. There are layers to these challenges and it’s a ubiquitous problem. I hope readers will think deeply about it because for me it’s the largest problem we face as a society, and while it’s not a new problem, much of it can be traced back to the early 1980s.

Ultimately, I hope that reading Tell Me One Thing will help people understand each other better and encourage people to move away from an us vs. them mentality.

Keep hustling! I spent nearly a year looking for representation for Tell Me One Thing and was declined by over 50 literary agents before I submitted it directly to Regal House Publishing. This business is hard and takes a lot of elbow grease, but it’s so worth it.

Click to continue.