SLA Buff: Matt Sorrell

The Saint Louis Author (SLA) Buff blog highlights the unique and surprising authors who live and write in Mound City.

Reedy Press released St. Louis freelance writer Matt Sorrell’s book Matt’s St. Louis Food Story on September 1. He’s been writing about food in town since the early 2000s, and his work has been  featured locally and nationally. His last book is a collaboration with Chef Clara Moore—Shop Like a Chef: As food Loves Guide to St.Louis Neighborhoods.  I wanted to learn why Matt writes about food and why—I did! 

Matt will be signing copies at Barnes & Noble, West County Mall, Des Peres this Saturday, September 13 from 12 to 3 p.m

What is the purpose of this book?

Eating is a fun way to explore, and it is low risk. You try it, you don’t like it, you move on. You like it, you come back. As much as possible, I wanted to get people out of their comfort zone to try different, new food. We’re very provincial. We all have a few blocks radius we tend to frequent, and anything outside of that seems too far away. I’m trying to change that with Matt’s St. Louis Food Story.

Why write about food? What led you to that?

In the early 2000s, I was looking for freelance opportunities. When Sauce Magazine appeared in 2001, I sent an email, ended up getting assignments, and started learning a lot about the local food scene and restaurants.     

I have always been fascinated with commercial kitchens in restaurants. I’m not a cook but I love the hustle and bustle. Over the years I interviewed a bunch of different bartenders and realized that what they do is culinary, and I might be able to do it. When you make a drink, the risk is low; we’re only talking about a few ounces. So if you screw it up, it’s not like ruining a good and very expensive piece of meat. So, I started bartending. Writing for Sauce led to writing for Feast and St Louis Magazine, among other publications.

Why write a book?

Twelve years ago, a chef friend named Clara Moore had been working on a book about grocery stores, and food shopping. She asked me to help. When the book was coming up on its 10th anniversary, I contacted several local publishers to see if they’d be interested in doing a Volume 2.  None of them were interested at the time. But one publisher, Josh Stevens from Reedy Press, reached out to me later with an idea for a food guidebook, which eventually became St. Louis Food Story.

I wanted to represent and contribute to the good reputation of the St. Louis Food Industry. I'm part of it, I have high regard for it, and I respect the people who work in it. Everyone--owners, cooks, dishwashers--it's a hard gig. I wanted to make sure they got light shined on them.

Tell me about the cover

The cover was created by a local artist named Dan Zettwoch. He did a fantastic job! He’s very much in-demand, and we were lucky to get him to create this cover for the book.

How did you choose the restaurants featured in the book? Were you worried any of them would go out of business before you published the book?

Many of them are places I've worked and am a fan of. In addition, I wanted people to know about places they might not have tried--historical, brand new, ethnically non-American. I focused on really cool cuisines and neighborhoods--Cherokee, Grand. I wanted to create a path for people to get out of their comfort zones.

As far as staying in business, I wasn't too worried. As I was writing, I kept talking to the editors and kept my ear to the ground. Places do go out of business all the time. I am happy to say that didn't happen! We were considering other ideas in case we lost one. It is a crapshoot business, I don't see how people do it.

The author, Matt Sorrell

What will you do next?

I work at Bistro La Florisan in Clayton and will continue to do that. I have a couple of book ideas that I am running by Reedy Press-- books on food and drink in the St. Louis area, also on near East side, and a little further west. I'm as bad as the next guy as far as getting out of my comfort zone, and I’d really like to explore these areas more.

I would love to write a follow-up to Food Story  in a couple of years. If I had included every place that deserved to be in the book, it would have been very long. As small as this metro is, we have a lot of really great restaurants and shops. I don't think a lot of people understand that. You don't have to go to Chicago to eat well

Matt will be signing copies of Matt's St. Louis Food Story as follows:

Barnes & Noble, West County Mall, Des Peres, Saturday, September 13, 12 to 3 p.m.

Main Street Books St. Charles, Saturday, September 20, 11 a.m.-1 p.m.

The Ultimate St. Louis Breakfast, (making drinks and selling books), Cedars Banquet Hall, 939 Lebanon Drive, St. Louis, Saturday, September 27, 9 to 11 a.m.

The Royale, 3132 S. Kingshighway Blvd., St. Louis, Friday, October 10, 5:30-7:30 p.m.

The Novel Neighbor, 7905 Big Bend Blvd., Webster Groves, Saturday, October 11, 4 to 5 p.m.

Vom Fass, 7314 Manchester Rd., Maplewood, Sunday, October 19, 3 to 5 p.m.

And other events in the works all around town.

SLA Buff: Shana Youngdahl

The Saint Louis Author (SLA) Buff blog highlights the unique and surprising work of authors who live and write in Mound City.

St. Louisan Shana Youngdahl's 2025 second novel, A Catalog of Burnt Objects, appeared in bookstores this past Spring and earlier this week made the St. Louis Magazine A-List Editors’ Choice Award for new fiction. This thoughtful and bracing YA family saga juxtaposes the challenges of family for young people and the 2018 wildfire disaster that faced and still faces the town of Paradise, California. I spoke with Shana about what brought her to town and how she finds it as a place to live and work.

Shana Youngdahl, YA author and 2025 St. Louis Magazine A-List Editors’ Choice Award winner

I consider you to be a St. Louis writer, but I'm guessing you spend most of your time in St. Charles. Do you consider yourself a St. Louis writer?

My realtor told me that everyone calls the entire metro "St. Louis," maybe she was wrong? I know there are differences, but I don't feel a particular affinity for being from St. Charles. So I will say yes, I do. I have moved enough that being "from," any one place is rather complicated for me. My hometown is still the most formative place I have lived, and I still have very strong ties to Maine where I spent a decade. But to get back to the point I wouldn't have even applied to my job if it weren't in the Saint Louis metro so I hope the St. Louis writers will claim me.

What brought you to St. Louis and how do you find the area as a place to work, write, live?

I moved to St. Louis from Maine with my family in 2021 to take a job in the MFA program at Lindenwood University in St. Charles. A bookseller friend of mine in Maine suggested I look up Main Street Books in Historic St. Charles when I got here, which I did. He knows the owner, Emily Hall Schroen, and when I went into the store for the first time and introduced myself as the new writing professor, she said, "Kenny told me to watch out for you." This greeting immediately put me at ease and made me feel welcome. A writing colleague also sent introductory emails on my behalf to introduce me to the writing community at large. It's been an easy community to come into. The people are very friendly.  I am thankful for all of the writing networks here.

I love the sense of place created in A Catalog of Burnt Objects in the opening paragraphs. As the reader finds out, the fictional town of Sierra is central to the novel, a main character--what techniques do you use to write to about place to bring the reader there?

If you look at Sierra on a map, you'll see it's shaped like an obtuse scaling triangle. You won't see all the backyard bee keepers, grow operations and do it yourself houses. Flatten our town out like that, and it will look ordered, contained. But Siera is part of a wild, that rolls down off the mountains, that reaches between the houses, cabins, trailers, a wild that creeps out in the shape of foxes, deer and mountain lions. Wild is still there prowling.  (Shana Youngdahl, A Catalog of Burnt Objects, Dial Books, 2025)

Two things make that happen. First, it's based on my home town, the place I have lived longer than anywhere else. It contains the landscape of my dreams, of my childhood. I still did a ton of research--names of the plants, details related to the fire, what type of trees exploded. What birds live there? What are the flowers, and when do they bloom? Then, thinking about the town as a character, in what ways, even though Sierra is based on Paradise, it is not really Paradise. It's a fictional town, so I could make changes to the fictional town so the story worked better. I looked at how Sierra the character was impacted by the story and what it's narrative arc should consist of.

I love Caprice's app project and the references to writing computer code with the words "If" and "Then" in the narrative and how she uses it as a technique to manage the trauma of the fire itself. How do you stay current on what young adults do--like coding-- to create a narrative that will engage them?

Good question. On one hand, until moving to St. Louis, I was spending most of my time teaching 18 year olds. On the other, my oldest kid turned 13 when I moved here. I have teenagers around me all the time and I have for a years. Also I don't think it matters that much if the reader is into coding, as long as I have effectively sold that this character is into it. I got a Masters in Educational Technology and have been involved with teaching girls how to code and as a parent advisor. That work ended up being part of my research for Caprice's app. I hope that reader's believe she's into it. She's such a planner, and for someone who plans things it's especially hard to face the uncertainty caused by the wildfire.

Novelists have to create disasters--it's required for people to want to read it. I read that you chose to rename Paradise to Sierra to provide yourself with some emotional space from the very real Paradise tragedy and to avoid making the story a historical reference to it. What other strategies do you use to write fiction when the disaster was real and affected you deeply?

There are a couple of layers to this. As a novelist, you are making a decision that you're writing fiction. The minute you decide to write fiction, you have decided that the story you need to tell will be told more authentically through emotional rather than literal truth. When operating from the emotional truth, the core is the emotional experience. From that you can derive infinite plot lines, images, stories, arcs. It just becomes a matter of how you're going to take that emotional story and craft it into the world. How one does that isn't easy. I struggled with the project because it was so personal, also since I wasn't physically in Paradise, I really wanted to get it right. Many friends who I loved were there, and it mattered to me that I honored them. That helped hold me to a standard.

One small is example is daffodils, they have become a symbol of Paradise and their return is mentioned in the book. Daffodils live deep enough under the ground to survive the fire and return the following Spring. This is symbolic of how in spite of the tragedy, they were waiting underground and would bloom again. I wanted to address the important challenge that, as people, we need to be thinking as scientists are about reforesting, and looking to find acorns from already dryer regions, genetic predispositions of certain plants to survive dryer, hotter temperatures. I hope that the story will introduce ideas about how to address the problems we're facing with climate change. 

I’m a fan of your substack “Their Will Be Typos.” Great title! Where did it come from?

I’m sure the title makes some people laugh and others want to claw their eyes out. It started because I was afraid to write a newsletter in part because I knew it would have typos! This was me battling the perfectionism monster again, and I realized that I should probably face it the same way I faced making spelling errors on the board in my classroom, and that is I made it a game. I learned that when I admitted to my students that I was a very talented poor speller, but that I had learned to use dictionaries and spell check, that students related to me more, so I told them if they caught a spelling error they would win a prize. So, with my newsletter the first person to catch a typo also gets a prize. The prize varies each month, sometimes it is a postcard, sometimes a book. Maybe I'll give out flower seeds or something in the spring. It really depends.

As I was starting the project I realized that the title would also give me a theme for the newsletter--that is in order to live a creative life you have to embrace the process and the mess of it. That isn't easy. So, the title was a way for me to go out on a limb and have a theme. Since my newsletter started out as a project that I did alongside my students in one of my Lindenwood classes, it made sense that this would be the focus. [Blogger note: subscribe to There Will be Typos substack and newsletter.]

In your substack you mention a London Fog coffee drink. Where do you go in St. Louis/St. Charles to write and drink fancy coffee? 

We have some wonderful cafes! I love Pipers Tea & Coffee, Upshot, Kaldi's, and Picassos. Protagonist Cafe is great, but I don't get out there too often and I'm excited to try Antagonist Cafe soon. 

How does teaching writing impact your own writing?

If I'm teaching writing, I have to be actively writing or else I'm not a good teacher. I have to be a regular practitioner so I can be accountable. Writing is being in conversation with yourself. Teaching writing helps people to be in conversation with themselves. 

SLA Buff: Chris Naffziger

The Saint Louis Author (SLA) Buff blog highlights the unique and surprising work of authors who live and write in Mound City.

Gathering at Leviathan Bookstore for Chris Naffziger’s July 10 reading. The store has sold out of Adam Lemp and the Western Brewery twice since the reading. Photo: James Crossley

Local historian Chris Naffziger published his debut book, Adam Lemp and the Western Brewery, earlier this month. It focuses on the fascinating and unexplored history of a successful nineteenth century St. Louis family and its brewery. Naffziger will speak at the Central Library in downtown St. Louis on Thursday, July 24 at 6:30 as part of St. Louis Public Library's Summer History Series.

Chris Naffziger, Local Historian.

Photo: Virginia Harold

Naffziger holds degrees in art history and museum studies and has been passionate about architectural and cultural history his entire career. He has worked in a wide variety of museums, from house museums to the National Gallery in Washington, D.C. On returning to St. Louis in the mid-aughts, he brought his focus to the Gateway City and launched his award-winning history blog, St. Louis Patina. The idea for the book started then, and Naffziger developed a particular interest and expertise in the nineteenth Century German-American brewing industry as well as the unique qualities of  St. Louis architecture. He has been a contributing culture and architecture author to St. Louis Magazine for many years;  his contributions number in the hundreds.  I spoke to Naffziger last week about the book and his plans.

What inspires you about St. Louis history?: People are really interested, yet not a lot of people are doing serious research and writing about it. There is an enormous wealth of subject matter and people respond very positively when someone commits, dives deep, and describes it in an engaging way. 

Why Lemp?: It came from my interest in the physical remains of the brewery itself. St. Louis is famous for more than 40 breweries, but most of the buildings are gone.  95% of the Lemp building is still standing. It makes it natural to wonder why is it there? Who built it? The cave, which was originally used for cooling the beer, is fascinating and with the permission of the owner, I've been down in it twice. The family itself is very interesting and well documented. The Lemp Mansion--restaurant, inn, and event space--remains an active business in the city. It's all relevant today. 

What's Next?: The book publication launches a new website--The Lemp Story.  I'll be sharing new research that didn't get into the book, additional photographs, maps and color illustrations.  My next book project will focus on Adam Lemp, Senior who took over the brewery in 1862.  

At last check, all 18 copies of the book in the collections of the St. Louis Public and County libraries are in use. Also available at Leviathan Bookstore. Get yours today!

Tools for Inspiration: Lion + Owl founder, Jeff Bender

When you’ve been working on a novel for years, it’s hard to stay motivated. This is the case for me, and I made a decision to attend “The Writers Toolbox: A Full Day Conference for Authors and Self-Publishers” late last month at The Heights in Richmond Heights, Missouri for inspiration. I knew almost nothing about the co-sponsors—The Missouri Writers Guild and The St. Louis Publisher’s Association, and it cost me $75—not being a member of either organization—but it was money and time well-spent.

The title of the first panel, “Telling My Story Can Hurt: Transforming Your Personal Experience into a Relatable Story” did not sound super fun to me, but I was blown away by the three panelists and the insights they shared. The first one was Jeff Bender.

That's me on the left, Jeff, and a sign promoting the products of Lion + Owl. 

Jeff Bender is the Founder of Lion + Owl, an ALLkids+ Apparel Company whose mission is to break gender barriers in children’s apparel. He has written two books, Apparel Has No Gender and Oh, I Just Didn’t Know, which support his mission. Unlike most authors, promoting his books is not his top priority, and in fact, to protect his transgender teenager he’s working on staying out the mainstream limelight. He described being yelled at by a Missouri legislator for his beliefs, and about how important the remaining group of parents of transgender children in the state is to him and his family. He said that nine families of this tightknit community have moved out of the state this year. When I asked him why he stays, he said, “That’s what they want, for people like us to leave so they can do what they want and forget about us. I’m not okay with that.”

Jeff Bender describing Lion + Owl books and apparel to a conference attendee.

Please follow this blog for more authoring inspiration from the conference!