SPEAKER_02:
Hi, Rachel. Hey, Janette. Today’s podcast is with Keri Sullivan. Who is Keri?

SPEAKER_01:
What have you learned about Keri in our interview? I’ve learned a lot about Keri. First of all, I learned that she’s a librarian, and I love that. She is the founder and creator of the Jersey Collective, which is a website, also an Instagram account, which is all things Jersey, and she supports local artists who do illustrations and photographs and anything that is sort of Jersey related. So check that out. And then also, she is the editor and curator of a really awesome book, The New Jersey Fan Club.

SPEAKER_02:
She’s kind of like a Jersey expert now. So we did ask her in the interview at the stick to the end, what her recommendations are. And we had some of our own to pile on to hers. Yeah, but so please enjoy this interview, basically a Jersey love fest.

SPEAKER_01:
Listen up and love New Jersey even more.

SPEAKER_02:
Carrie, hello. Thank you so much for joining Lost in Jersey. Hi, thanks so much for having me. You do so many things. You do the New Jersey Fan Club book. And then you have the Jersey Collective, which is a really popular Instagram that you seem to have many artists that you feature on that. Is that your main thing that you, or how do you describe yourself with what you do?

SPEAKER_00:
Yeah, so Jersey Collective, I’ve been running for over 10 years now. It started in 2014 when I was in grad school. And it started just as like an Instagram account that different people could take over every week. And that was kind of my focus was just giving people a platform to share whatever they wanted as long as it was related to New Jersey and back then you could only do photos on Instagram so it was photography based and we did meetups and gallery shows and things like that and then over time I kind of just found other ways to use that as a launching pad for any kind of thing I wanted to do. If I could find a way to make it New Jersey related, it would become a Jersey Collective thing. So now we kind of publish work with other artists, like my boyfriend who’s an illustrator. We did a Go Fish, New Jersey Go Fish card game together last year. So that’s been out for about a year now. My book kind of came about partially because of Jersey Collective as well, which Rutgers University Press published. It’s an anthology about New Jersey. So kind of a similar thing to the Instagram account, just bringing a bunch of voices together all about New Jersey. And yeah, so that’s kind of and this isn’t my full time job. I’m a public librarian. So this is just what I do on the side for fun.

SPEAKER_02:
Yeah, I saw that you’re a librarian. And give us a little bit of a backstory how it all began. Like, so you’re from New Jersey, you’re from Mammoth County.

SPEAKER_00:
Yeah, I’m from Mammoth County. Originally, I bounced around a little bit. I’ve lived a couple different places. I’m in Essex County now. But But yeah, I’ve bounced around and I left for college. But besides that, I’ve only lived in New Jersey. And

SPEAKER_02:
And from what I’ve read about the book is that it’s kind of a collection to give people an idea that this kind of reputation that New Jersey has is not founded. I mean, the reputation that the media seems to have with the Jersey Shore and the mafia and everything, it’s kind of pigeonholed this state. And I think the book is geared towards telling people, hey, it is just such a so many things.

SPEAKER_00:
Yeah, that’s definitely part of it. Yeah, I wanted it to feel like a book for people like it could do a couple different things like people who really know New Jersey and love New Jersey would find it a nice read because they could kind of connect with it in that way. But I also think it does help challenge some of those stereotypes that people might have about New Jersey as well. Like if they read it, they might look at the state in a new way or learn something they didn’t know before or just learn about a part of the state that they were unfamiliar with. So that was definitely something I was thinking about when I was working on it.

SPEAKER_01:
I’m also fascinated about you being a librarian because I love books. I’m obsessed with books. Both Janette and I are and we we always talk about like once a month we give out our picks of like our top favorite reads. So we I wanted to know though because librarians are so important and to me I think back to my experience growing I grew up in Long Island with My librarian at our local library was so wonderful and helped me pick out books and sometimes I even showed movies like Willy Wonka’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. But how did you decide to become a librarian and what is that journey like?

SPEAKER_00:
Yeah. So for me, it was a little roundabout. A lot of people are like English majors and then they become librarians. I was actually a film major. So I was really into photography when I was in high school and I liked writing. So my brain was sort of like, oh, if you go into film, you get to do kind of both those things. So while I was in college, I went to Drexel University in Philadelphia and they have like this thing called the co-op program where you have to spend usually it’s like six months of your college at some point you have to do your co-op so you do like an internship so I did mine at the Metropolitan Museum of Art with the photographs department they were looking for someone who who had experience with like film negatives for an archival project so I was working with I don’t know if you know the the street photographer Deanne Arbus she did a lot of street photos in the 60s and 70s. If you saw some, you definitely recognize them. They’re famous. They have her archive there. I was doing a negative rehousing project with her film negatives. I was like, what is this job? It never occurred to me because I really liked history too growing up. My jobs when I was in high school, I worked at historic living history places. I did dressed up and gave tours and things like that. Oh, that’s so great. It was kind of an interesting mix of stuff that I really liked, like history and working with photography and being in a museum setting. And so I was just like, what is this? And the person who was supervising me was an archivist. And she’s like, oh, you have to get your master’s of library and information science if you want to work in a job like this. So this could be kind of an interesting route to go. Like, I’ll just, you know, finish. You can you can major in anything and then go to grad school for library science. And then I went to Rutgers for grad school and got my MLIS. And from there, I kind of realized that part of the reason I didn’t want to work in film was because of how not stable it could be. and how you don’t know if you have health insurance or if you’re going to have a job and a lot of, you know, you’re kind of bouncing around and I didn’t think I really wanted to do that. So then I learned that a lot of archives jobs are also like that. A lot of them are grant funded. So I ended up getting a part-time job in a public library when I was almost done with school and I had never really considered, like I wasn’t sure that I was interested in public libraries but then I realized it was a lot more interesting than I had thought originally and And I just really liked it. So I’ve been in public libraries for about 10 years. I’ve worked a couple different places and had a couple different positions. I currently do all of the adult programming for my library. So I plan like the whole calendar of events for adults.

SPEAKER_01:
That’s awesome.

SPEAKER_00:
And I really like it.

SPEAKER_02:
You took a kind of a practical route for like stability and you know your life.

SPEAKER_00:
Yeah.

SPEAKER_02:
But as we know, you know, the first thing that we know about you is that you have a kind of an artistic, you know, face to the public, which is really kind of I love that, that we’re like, you know, I’m first, I’m going to make sure I get the foundation and safety down and do it in something that surprisingly, you ended up really enjoying, you know?

SPEAKER_00:
Yeah, no, I really like my job. And I think that they kind of work together in a nice way, too. I think there’s a lot of things that my my day job life and my out of work life kind of have in common is like trying to do things that bring people together, give people opportunities to learn new things or to connect with other people. Jersey Collective Project itself has been around since 2014. The book I started working on, it was a multi-year process. I started working on the proposal. So for non-fiction books, for people who don’t know, you have to write a book proposal to try and sell it to a publisher or to an agent. You basically are kind of making a business plan for your book. So you’re kind of making samples, you’re writing like why I’m the right person to do this project, what it’s kind of giving people a sense of what it’s going to be. So that I spent more time on that than I probably needed to, but I like really wanted to do a good job. And I’d never done it before. And I’m kind of just using books I got from the library to figure out how to do it. So I kind of spent like a couple years working on that, which is probably more than you have to do. And I started working on that probably in like 2018 or so. And then I finally sent it to an editor there in early 2020 and signed the contract with them in summer of 2020. And then I had nine months to make that book. And then it came out in June of 2022. So that was kind of the timeline with all that, yeah.

SPEAKER_02:
So I mean, once it got accepted, it was kind of fast to write that out.

SPEAKER_00:
Yeah, so nine months, yeah. So there’s 60 different contributors, if you include people who have a single photo or artwork in the book. So because I had to kind of find all of that, it was really time consuming. The pandemic being at its kind of height was sort of actually helpful for me because I was going to work. I was working in person pretty much the whole time. We had a brief period of time right at the beginning where we were closed, but you know, working in public library, we have to go in. So we were back in person in, I think, late June of 2020. So I was going to work and coming home and working on the book. So that was all I did for all that time.

SPEAKER_01:
When you got all the people to contribute to the book, how do you determine, you know, what you’re going to put in, what you’re not going to put in? In your mind, did you have an overarching theme of showing like, it has to come from every corner of the state?

SPEAKER_00:
Definitely. Yeah, that was all definitely stuff I was thinking about was how to make it as wide of a range as possible, both in the subjects that they’re about. There’s pieces that are really personal stories that people wrote about their own lives, but there’s some kind of New Jersey tie-in. And then there’s also really straightforward little history sections about something interesting or some kind of nature thing. There’s something about the ecology of the Pine Barrens. So I really wanted to just kind of cover a lot of ground. So those were all things I was thinking about.

SPEAKER_01:
Were you surprised with what some of the submissions that you got then went and drove there immediately? I feel like I would be wanting to see everything that somebody told me about in this state that was super cool.

SPEAKER_00:
Yeah, there were some things that I learned a lot, too, putting the book together. There were definitely areas of the state that I didn’t know as much about, especially the further south we get and away from the coast, I’m like, I don’t know what’s going on down there. So I definitely wanted to include stuff like that. But yeah, no, it was definitely a really cool experience of wading through all that stuff. And not everybody had super positive things to say either. There is a lot of, I know the subtitle of the book is like, there’s the word celebrating the Garden State is in it, but it’s not a total celebratory book. There are a bunch of essays about people kind of grappling with like, either moving to the state or leaving the state or coming back after living elsewhere. There’s definitely a little more complexity in what people were thinking about.

SPEAKER_01:
Did you find that a lot of it was about food?

SPEAKER_00:
Yes, there’s definitely a lot of food.

SPEAKER_02:
Well, let’s talk a little bit about the artwork. that we see on these cards, and also the sticker art that you do. Tell us a little bit about these Go Fish cards, and who’s the artist behind those?

SPEAKER_00:
Yeah, so the artist is named Alex Flannery. He is my boyfriend. He’s also Essex County most of his life. But yeah, so he did all the illustration and the design, and it was my sort of direction of, this is something I think would be cool to do. And and he’s just the best. So there’s no one else I wanted to work with for that, for sure. But yeah, I think that’s been an exciting part of kind of expanding beyond just being an Instagram account that people can share photos on is getting to work with different artists to bring different like items to life. So we did the go fish cards and then, of course, made a bunch of stickers with the art from the cards. And I have a couple other stickers that are out there, too, that different artists have designed. The other fun thing I have is a sticker vending machine. So it’s a physical vending machine. I saw that.

SPEAKER_02:
It’s so cool.

SPEAKER_00:
Yeah. So it’s actually going to be popping up in Montclair for a couple of weeks starting on January 25th. It’ll be there until February 15th at Iris. the art book store on Valley Road. I don’t know if you’ve been. It’s one of my favorite places. It’s fairly new.

SPEAKER_02:
Yes, it’s new.

SPEAKER_00:
Yes, it’s new.

SPEAKER_02:
I haven’t been there.

SPEAKER_00:
Maybe this is a good excuse to go. Yes, I am definitely going to go. The sticker machine, I bought a bunch of years ago and it sat on my living room floor for a while. I realized what I wanted to do with it was curate series of stickers that are by different artists from New Jersey or who live in New Jersey, have some kind of New Jersey connection, and just kind of bring it around to different places. So sometimes it’ll stay somewhere like this one, it’ll be there for three weeks. Sometimes I just bring it with me when I do like a one day market. And people can swap, you know, if I’m on site, I’ll give them quarters for their bills. but if you know if people visit it at a location if they can bring their own quarters that’s always great and yeah and then you just get a little nice piece of little art very accessible price of a dollar and you can stick it on your water bottle or your laptop or whatever you want to do with it and you’re supporting a local artist and just kind of spreading the jersey love. That’s awesome. I really like that. That is so cool.

SPEAKER_02:
I’m looking at it right now. Okay, we’re definitely going to post that this is going to be up for people and it’ll help the new bookstore.

SPEAKER_00:
Nice. Yeah, that place is amazing. I also do a monthly newsletter on Substack where I do a little five or six question Q&A with someone every month who I think is kind of interesting or doing something interesting. And then I have like links of other New Jersey things and you know like if there’s some interesting kind of fun New Jersey related culture reference or something like I’ll put that in there. I try to do lists of opportunities for writers and artists that are New Jersey specific like I see if I see a call like a photography contest locally or something like that. So I put things like that in there. We are very excited about seeing the sticker thing in this our neighborhood.

SPEAKER_02:
I’m really excited to ask you what our final question is to all of our guests, because we always ask people something that they love about New Jersey. And I feel like, you know, You’re the right person to ask. You’re going to need to bring it, Kari.

SPEAKER_00:
I’ve been thinking about this for a while, because when we talked about this earlier in the week, I was like, oh no, that’s a big question for me. So I mean, OK, so I have a more general answer, and then I’ll give you a more specific answer. OK, great. So my more general answer is I think one of the things I love most about New Jersey is just the variety across every metric, like the food variety. You can get really good food from all over the world because of how diverse New Jersey is. Depending on where you go in the state, you can have some really incredible food. And also just the variety of landscapes and you can drive an hour and be at the beach or you can be in the mountains or you can be in rolling hill farmland like it’s just so different and it’s really contained in even though you know like other parts of the country you have to drive for hours to see something that with that much variety so I think we’re really lucky with all those things. And then something more specific and more like kind of local is I’m going to give a shout out to Branchbrook Park in North because it’s really beautiful. You know spring is going to be here hopefully before we know it. The cherry blossoms is a really good time to go if people haven’t been before that’s a really nice like first introduction like that’s I think the first time I went there was for that. Me too. Me too. Yeah. So that’s a really nice time to go. But it’s a really historic, really beautiful park. And if people haven’t been, it’s incredible. It’s a stunning place in every season, but especially during cherry blossom time.

SPEAKER_02:
That is a great, great reminder of that.

SPEAKER_00:
That’s a really good shout out. But also another NORC thing is the NORC Museum of Art is incredible. Oh, it is.

SPEAKER_01:
It’s a great museum.

SPEAKER_00:
I think people don’t realize how amazing of an art museum that is, and specifically the art collection too. They used to just be called the NORC Museum and they changed it to include the of art because I think a lot of people thought it was like a history museum, which they have some of that. The art collection is really incredible. From all over the world, they have a really interesting collection from Tibet. That’s one of their big collections. They have a lot of African art as well. A couple of years ago, I was at the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia and I did the audio tour. They had curators from the Louvre and the Met and these huge world-class museums all over the world talking about different pieces that were in the Barnes Foundation. Then there was some African art and the curator that they had on was from the Nork Museum. So, like, they really are a world-class art museum and have an amazing collection.

SPEAKER_02:
I just want to say, the way that you pronounce Newark… Yeah, I was gonna ask that, too. Is it… Because you’re from New Jersey. Yeah. So, I would assume that you are saying it spot-on correctly, but I don’t say it like that.

SPEAKER_00:
Yeah, that’s… Yeah, that’s how the locals would say it. It’s rubbed off on me because of my proximity and how much time… We go there all the time. My boyfriend’s a season ticket holder for the Devils, and we have… a lot of restaurants we like to go to and things we like to do there. So yeah, it’s rubbed off on me. So it’s N.O.R.K. Yeah. There’s another interesting person you might want to look into who has a project called the N.O.R.K. Project. So it’s N.O.R.K. Project. N.O.R.K. Yes. So that’s kind of how I think a lot of people there. We will. We will look into that. Instead of Newark. I kind of switch. I switch on and off. I feel like I say both.

SPEAKER_02:
The touristy touristy thing is that when people come here who have never been, I believe that the Liberty Science Museum is the best view of the Statue of Liberty. Absolutely. It’s a great view, period.

SPEAKER_00:
Liberty Park. Yes, it’s beautiful. Technically, the Statue of Liberty is in New Jersey. People fight about it, but if you look on Google Maps, you’ll see the dotted line that separates New Jersey and New York. Sweet. Oh, I love that fact.

SPEAKER_02:
yeah that is such a fun fact that was the first fact that i posted on our podcast instagram when we first started it was the first fact that i was like oh my god really well thank you so much for coming on and and if somebody wants to uh submit art to you to be part of any of your projects, how do they get a hold of you?

SPEAKER_00:
Yeah, people can just email me. It’s jerseycollective at gmail.com. It’s on our website as well, jerseycollective.org. But yeah, I’m always looking to work with new people on different things. And once the stickers kind of run down and I’m looking for more, I usually post about it on Instagram to get some new artists, because we usually do eight or nine people at a time for that.

SPEAKER_02:
We’ll let people know. All right. Well, Carrie, thank you so much for coming on the podcast.

SPEAKER_00:
Thank you. Thanks so much. It was a pleasure to talk to you.

SPEAKER_02:
Yeah, thank you.

SPEAKER_01:
This podcast is produced by Rachel Martens and Janette Afsharian. Please follow us on Facebook and Instagram. We hope you share this pod with your friends and family and let us know what you think. Check out our website at lostinjersey.site. And don’t forget to get lost.