OF THE SOIL
the monthly dirt from midwest author,
Amy Fladeboe
Vlorë Bay, 2010
in the soil | in this newsletter
Welcome to my monthly author newsletter.
I’m new to this whole social media racket, and I gotta confess the whole content creator concept makes me a little nauseous. I don’t want to be your junk folder clog, but I do want to be in community with you. I wonder what that looks like in this virtual soil. Can we get our hands dirty together, and what kind of dirt are you even into?
For now (and maybe into the future), I’ll keep things brief. I’ll share a little something from a particular place featured in LET THE SOIL REST, a literary craft topic that’s got me percolating for my fellow writers, and some current art or research obsessions I’m digging into. If you’ve got suggestions for any dirt you’re into, let me know.
on the soil | making sense of place
what’s happening on the ground in Albania?
I hope my writing will always reflect place as character and character as place. We are terroir and the ground is alive.
My forthcoming novel, LET THE SOIL REST takes place partially in Vlorë, Albania, where the novel’s co-lead, Arjan was born and lived until the mass exodus in the early nineties when he fled to the US as a refugee. Vlorë is the third most populous city in Albania after the capital of Tiranë and it’s nearby coastal city of Durres. Vlorë is a breath-taking stunner of a city, the Narta Lagoon to the north, the Vetëtimës (Thunderbolt) foothills to the east, Llogara Pass and National Park to the south, and the mouth of Vlorë Bay kissing the tiny Island of Sazan to the west. This is the place in the Mediterranean where the Adriatik meets the Ionian Sea, where the sand turns to pebbles, and the waters shimmer like rare gemstones. I can’t even begin to describe the peace and awe that comes over your body when these waters touch your skin.
I took the photo above around 2010 in Vlorë Bay. I suppose this dreary photo doesn’t do much justice to my crystalized claims above, but it was a drizzly spring day, and this was the view that raised my character, Arjan through the 1980s minus that industrial ship you see. The only ships Arjan saw as a child were Albanian military ships or foreign cruise ships far into the horizon that he believed were mirages, but he wouldn’t have missed the Island of Sazan in this view, just to the right of the peninsula the photo shows. You’ll learn all about Arjan and the Vlorë bay of the 1990’s in the book, but I want to share a bit more about this special place, Sazan.
When I lived in Vlorë from 2008-2010, I rented a little house in a family’s compound just off Plazhi Vjeter. Sazan was in my daily view as well, but I never got to visit because this was a highly protected environmentally-rich island that required boat access and authorized permission to traverse. When I set out to write about this place more than a decade ago, I could not have predicted that these quietly preserved grounds and waters would receive so much international attention some day.
Fast-forward to 2026 and the Kushner-Trump family is trying to buy the Island of Sazan to turn it into a luxury private resort. Investment. Blah blah blah. Jobs. Blah Blah Blah. Good for the mainland. Blah blah blah. The Vlonjati’s are pissed off, and so am I. I can feel the nestled salty Adriatik air rising up in my lungs to scream, “You can’t buy everything! You can’t buy everywhere! Or everyone!”
Eriselda Balliu, my dear friend, an English teacher and activist from Vlorë will join me as a guest writer or interviewee in my next newsletter to give us the real dirt on what’s happening in the Flamingo Revolution in Albania. Stay tuned.
Children protesting, “Vlorë’s not for sale” recorded by Eriselda Balliu in Vlorë, Albania August, 2026
under the soil | craft musings
lit nerdery
Music is critical to my process as an artist. All my poems, stories, and my forthcoming novel have a song or soundtrack. Sometimes, I listen to this music while I write or edit, and sometimes, I swear, this music is listening to me. It finds me and my characters, and I rarely see it coming. That was the case with Chapter 6 of LET THE SOIL REST.
“[Arjan] tries the radio again and turns up the volume to pure static. He pushes “scan” against the fuzz, bypassing all the Detroit stations. It can’t catch an FM signal, so Arjan switches to AM until it finally lands on some folkie country station, with a couple of crooners, a man and a woman, trading verses. Arjan doesn’t recognize the voices or the song, but the chorus has an idiom he learned recently, ‘put it off’”
Now, here I am five years later editing this very chapter just days after that woman’s voice left us with a stunning discographical legacy of 69 albums and well over 200 global compilations and an even more stunning philanthropical legacy. RIP Dolly Parton. Thanks for loving. Thanks for listening. And thanks for being part of LET THE SOIL’s soundtrack and the collective conscious’s soundtrack for us all.
after the soil | what’s next
what am I working on now?
I have been neck-deep in proofreading the novel this summer so it can head to press soon, but I’ve got some new projects on the horizon:
I’m hoping to collab with some musicians in the coming months in preparation for my book launch party in Minneapolis in February so stay tuned for some exciting news about that.
I’ve gotten into some experimental poetry collage work featuring, deconstructing, and critiquing The National Geographic Society, and that has been super nerdy.
I’ve also started work on a new novel, still very conceptual at this point. All I know so far is it will include characters who play cards, spades, bridge, euchre. If you’ve got a weird family card game you want to teach me, please reach out. I’m in.
I’m gearing up for a sabbatical from Fall, 2027 to Spring, 2028, and I’d like to spend that fall in Europe, mostly Albania but perhaps some other stops along the way or the return. If you know of a family-friendly residency or some quiet places to write, research, and enjoy being a temporary local, I’d love to hear from you. Putting this out into ether and hoping for some literary connects.
Oh and I should probably mention, I’m working on making a human right now too. While this could change, the pub date for this little one is roughly 9/15/2026. That might keep me away from my pen for a bit, and if not, I hope you’ll all forgive my surreal and sleepless prose in the coming months. I’m a tad biased since my birthday is on Sept 14th (shared with my pal Bonnie Jo Campbell), but we are (ok, just me) thrilled to be bringing a virgo into the world.