Check out our interview with Susan L. Katz, the author of "Pole Dancers at the Red Barn."
What was your inspiration behind your most recent book?
Because of my own complicated feelings about my body and my experience of feeling different, I admired women who could embrace their bodies with sensuality and glamour. I wanted to write about a group of people brought together by a shared skill and a way to use their bodies to earn a living. I envisioned something like Cirque du Soleil dancers from a working-class background—and that led me to pole dancers.
As a psychotherapist, I was also interested in how a person’s upbringing shapes their worldview and sense of self, particularly how a mother’s experiences can influence her child. That became central to the structure of the book: each section pairs a mother’s story with the story of her adult child, allowing readers to see how experiences and emotional legacies move across generations.
What does Reading Rainbow mean to you?
Reading stories that let us feel a sense of belonging and help us experience our identities with joy.
Why do you feel representation of a variety of people is so important when it comes to writing books?
Books are a wonderful way to experience lives that are different from our own. We can all identify with the human experience, but we come to that experience from different backgrounds and challenges. Books can help bridge those differences and connect us to one another.
Tell us a little more about the book and why you decided to write it.
Pole Dancers at the Red Barn is a novel-in-stories about people reinventing themselves through found family. At its center is the Red Barn, a no-nonsense pole-dancing venue where four women and one nonbinary performer turn the stage into a place of truth. Their performances captivate, but it’s what happens offstage—reckoning with their mothers’ choices, buried fears, and long-held silences—that drives the book’s emotional power. Each story reveals a fight against poverty, violence, or prejudice and the determination to build a life that means something.
Foreword Review described the book this way:
“Through its episodic structure and generational
lens, the involving novel-in-stories
Pole Dancers at the Red Barn is about how
sexuality, shame, labor, and belonging intersect
within disparate lives shaped by social
expectations and personal compromises.”
My decision to write this book grew organically from one story about a nonbinary pole dancer and my desire to understand more about their relationship with their mother. From there, I wanted to know
more about the Red Barn, how it came to be, and what makes this venue and the other dancers so special.
I have lived with these characters for so long that the vibrant world of the Red Barn and the rich, complex lives of those who inhabit these pages feel deeply real to me. I've rejoiced in their successes and celebrated their growth
What can fans expect from your book?
I hope readers come away with a sense of hope and the understanding that difficult circumstances don’t have to define or bury us. Change requires us to face what is difficult, work through it, and find a way forward. I believe that hope comes from creating a life that has meaning and authenticity for you.
And, as these stories show, we don’t have to do that alone. Connection, community, and the courage to be ourselves can help us move through even the most difficult circumstances.
What's up next for you in the bookish world?
I’m writing a memoir-in-stories that combines short stories with collaged images to explore my experiences of medical trauma and what it took for me to move beyond despair. I’m also considering a sequel to Pole Dancers at the Red Barn, following the dancers as they undergo further transformations. In the next book, I’m interested in exploring a deeper kind of transformation—one that comes from connecting with something within ourselves, perhaps even the soul.
