Short Fuse Podcast #71: Reading the City with Tyler Wetherall
By Elizabeth Howard
Episode Summary
In this conversation, Elizabeth Howard engages with Tyler Wetherall, focusing on how she connects with the literary community in New York City through her newsletter, “Reading the City.” They discuss the evolution of bookstores, particularly in the wake of the pandemic, highlighting how they have transformed into community hubs that offer a third space. The conversation emphasizes the importance of bookstores in fostering social justice as well as the changing landscape of reading culture and the vibrant landscape of reading venues and group book discussions. In their exchange, they deal with the challenges of promoting books in a crowded market, the importance of community support among authors, and the role of independent bookstores in fostering literary culture.
Episode Notes
Writer, editor, teacher, and author Tyler Wetherall. Photo: Sammy Deigh
Order Tyler Wetherall’s novel Amphibian
About Reading the City
“Reading the City” is a weekly newsletter of bookish events in and around NYC, a weekly diary of upcoming New York literary life on a need-to-know basis. No long blurbs, no reviews, just book events of all stripes. “Reading the City” links to the author’s books, website, or social pages when possible. Tyler Wetherall, the founder and editor, is a believer in the power of the literary community to raise each other up, champion one another, and help make the site an inclusive and welcoming space for all writers and readers.
Wetherall is a Brooklyn-based writer, editor, teacher, and the author of No Way Home: A Memoir of Life on the Run (St. Martin’s Press) and Amphibian (forthcoming from Virago). She arrived in New York from London in 2014, knowing just three people. She carried with her a manuscript she had written alone in a Victorian outhouse at the end of her mother’s garden in Devon. Her entire experience of the writerly life thus far was solitary — and pretty cold. She found herself in a very special place called the Oracle Club (RIP) in Long Island City, and there she met real life authors for the first time. After staying up late and talking craft, drinking gin, and playing records, or reading poetry and howling into the night, she had found her community, and through that community the practical and intellectual resources she needed to become an author herself.
The Short Fuse Podcast is hosted and produced by Elizabeth Howard. Her articles related to communication and marketing have appeared in European Communications, Investor Relations, Law Firm Marketing & Profit Report, Communication World, the Strategist, and the New York Law Journal, among others. Her books include Queen Anne’s Lace and Wild Blackberry Pie, (Thornwillow Press, 2011), A Day with Bonefish Joe (David Godine, 2015), and Ned O’Gorman: A Glance Back (Easton Studio Press, 2016). She leads reading groups at the Center for Fiction in Brooklyn, New York. @elizh24 on Instagram Learn more at Elizabeth Howard.
“Artists are here to disturb the peace.” James Baldwin.
The Short Fuse is distributed through The Arts Fuse, an online journal of arts criticism and commentary.