Sunny Stalter-Pace
Sunny Stalter-Pace is Hargis Associate Professor of American Literature in the English Department at Auburn University. Her first book, Underground Movements: Modern Culture on the New York City Subway, was published by University of Massachusetts Press in 2013. Imitation Artist: Gertrude Hoffmann’s Life in Vaudeville and Dance (Northwestern University Press, 2020) is her first biography.
Twitter: @slstalter
Is there a genre of music that influences your writing/thinking? Do you listen to music while you write?
When I went to college in the 90s, there was a “lounge music” revival: jazzy, Latin, or orchestral mood music from the 50s-70s, or contemporary music with that same feel. That’s my favorite thing to listen to while writing, usually on the streaming station Luxuriamusic.com. It’s often instrumental or has lyrics in a language other than English. It was made to be unobtrusive – elevator music or easy listening. And it puts me in a fun, retro frame of mind.
What’s your favorite comic strip or graphic novel?
I love early twentieth-century newspaper comics, especially the Winsor McCay comic Little Nemo in Slumberland. It has a childlike quality, and it plays with the form of the comic strip: panels expand and contract, and characters eat the letters of the title. For more contemporary comics, Ben Katchor makes great ones that get at the loneliness, nostalgia, and quirky historical particularities of American cities.
Have you ever experienced Imposter Syndrome?
Oh yes. I definitely did not imagine myself writing a biography. English professors are used to interpretation, but not to writing something that could be proven as factually right or wrong. Plus, it seemed like biography was something that real authors did, or maybe historians. But once I admitted to myself that was what I was doing, I really enjoyed telling the story of Gertrude Hoffmann’s life.
Vacation druthers… City or Rural destination? Why?
City! The place where I live and teach is Auburn, Alabama, which calls itself “the loveliest village on the plains.” But I went to college in Chicago and spent a lot of my time in grad school living in New York City. I miss big museums and walkable neighborhoods and hole-in-the-wall shops. So my choice will always be a city, unless it’s just to hang out with friends and family somewhere peaceful where our kids can run around.
If you could create a museum exhibition, what would be the theme?
There’s a book that inspired me early on called Women Vaudeville Stars by Armond Fields. I’d love to have a museum exhibit with that title, one that showed theater programs, costumes, luggage and makeup kits, promotional photos and videos – just putting everything together to really get a sense of what it felt like to be a female vaudevillian.
