Marina Shifrin, writer of Pickled Herring, and Bryan Simpson and Taylor Simpson, creators of Creating Things. This conversation was recorded as part of a special live podcast and film screening event we held last month at the Library. The filmmakers—who grew up here in Deerfield—all traveled home to share their films and an illuminating panel discussion with an audience of community members, friends, and family. You’ll hear how Marina, Bryan, and Taylor all reconnected on the film festival circuit, as well as entertaining and deeply felt reflections on the surprising thematic connections between the films, which both center on fathers and the power of translating life into art.
The documentary Creating Things (2022) was created by brothers Bryan Simpson and Taylor Simpson and uses clips from an interview with their late father, Roger Simpson, in which he shares his personal philosophy of creativity as an artist, creative director, and person. Set to Taylor’s beautiful score, and featuring pieces of art and family mementos, it is a moving exploration of art-making and legacy.
Creating Things won Best Documentary at the 2023 Pittsburgh Shorts film festival. We are honored to announce that Bryan and Taylor have made Creating Things available to stream for free on their website as of our podcast release, in celebration of their father’s birthday.
Pickled Herring (2023), written by our guest Marina Shifrin, and directed by and starring Milana Vayntrub, tells the autobiographical story of a woman who has a major accident requiring assistance for her basic needs. Enter her Russian immigrant father, who has ideas of his own on how to help, from finding the best Russian foods or fixing her garage to cultural clashes over family, lifestyle, and art.
Pickled Herring won Best Narrative Short at the Santa Clara International Film Festival. You can watch the trailer of Pickled Herring on Marina’s website.
Marina has written about her father before, including in her book of essays 30 Before 30: How I Made a Mess of My 20s and You Can Too. Listen to our 2019 podcast conversation with Marina on 30 Before 30, or check it out here at the Library.
Blog post: https://www.deerfieldlibrary.org/deerfield-filmmakers/
We hope you enjoy our 63rd interview episode! Each month (or so), we release an episode featuring a conversation with an author, artist, or other notable guests from Chicagoland or around the world. Learn more about the podcast on our podcast page. You can listen to all of our episodes in the player below or on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or anywhere else you listen to podcasts. We welcome your comments and feedback—please send to podcast@deerfieldlibrary.org.
The Best That You Can Do (Soft Skull Press, 2024) by our guest Amina Gautier, one of the most prolific and acclaimed short story writers working today. She lives in Chicago.
The Best That You Can Do is a beautiful and wide-ranging collection, made up of what Gautier calls “very short fiction”—most of the 58 stories span only a few pages. This distilled form gives us lyrical explorations of Afro-Puerto Rican identity, the ups and fearful downs of romantic relationships, and political satires and counterfactuals in response to violence against Black bodies, among other concerns.
In this captivating conversation, Gautier also reflects movingly on how cultural forms from classic literature to Gen-X nostalgia both ironically comment on and inspire her characters to action. Explaining the title, she tells us:
“I’m always asking myself with fiction, “how do we get in our own way?” or “when we find ourselves trapped or in an inescapable space, what things can we do to try to claim agency or to try to free ourselves or try to find our way?” which evolved into the [new] collection: what is the best that we can do in any given situation?”
Listen to hear more from a master storyteller responding to her time.
You can check out books by Amina Gautier through our library, or find out more on her website.
Amina Gautier is the author of the story collections At-Risk (2011), Now We Will Be Happy (2014), and The Loss of All Lost Things (2016). She is the recipient of the Blackwell Prize, the Chicago Public Library Foundation’s 21st Century Award, the International Latino Book Award, the Flannery O’Connor Award, and the Phillis Wheatley Award in Fiction. For her body of work, she received the prestigious PEN/MALAMUD Award for Excellence in the Short Story.
The Best That You Can Do was published as the winner of the inaugural Soft Skull-Kimbilio Publishing Prize. Kimbilio for Black Fiction is a community of writers and scholars committed to developing, empowering, and sustaining fiction writers from the African diaspora and their stories.
We hope you enjoy our 62nd interview episode! Each month (or so), we release an episode featuring a conversation with an author, artist, or other notable guests from Chicagoland or around the world. Learn more about the podcast on our podcast page. You can listen to all of our episodes in the player below or on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or anywhere else you listen to podcasts. We welcome your comments and feedback—please send to podcast@deerfieldlibrary.org.
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The Deerfield Public Library Podcast is a program from the Adult Services Department at the Library and may include Adult Language.