Stacey D'Erasmo

"A woman tries to rebuild her life after her husband's conviction for huge financial fraud"-- After her husband Alan's decades of financial fraud are exposed, Suzanne's wealthy, comfortable life shatters. Alan goes to prison. Suzanne files for divorce, decamps to a barely middle-class Massachusetts beach town, and begins to create a new life and identity. Ignoring a steady stream of calls from Norfolk State Prison, she tries to cleanse herself of...

How do we keep doing this -- making art? Stacey D'Erasmo had been writing for twenty years and had published three novels when she asked herself this question. She was past the rush of her first books and wondering what to expect -- how to stay alive in her vocation -- in the decades ahead. She began to interview older artists she admired to find out how they'd done it. She talked to Valda Setterfield about her sixty-year career that took her from...