By Max Lakin, Gotham Summer Intern

Midwest proponent, outer borough enthusiast, Internet crusader. These are a small sampling of the hats worn by Gotham Humor teacher Amy Shearn. She wears a few others, too: ghostwriter, novelist, impassioned traveling poet. (Okay, perhaps not the last one.)

An Illinois transplant, now resident Brooklynite, Amy is the product of hippy parents, and she knew she wanted to be a writer from the get. Amy says, “I spent a lot of time as a little kid reading and writing elaborate and fanciful stories about things like magical, time-traveling willow trees.”

Doing what most writers do in times of emerging adulthood and its concomitant existential crisis, Amy sought creative refuge, and found it—and her now-husband—in the fabled writer’s sanctuary of Iowa. Dabbling in creative workshops, independent studies, and a novella about a pair of doppelgangers, a boxer, and a few Siamese twins, Amy cultivated her organic style and translated it into an MFA from the University of Minnesota.

Not long after, the one time pink hair-dying, Doc Marten-clad Chicago suburbanite found herself in a Greenwich Village townhouse lending her voice to Jewtopia, a book derived from the politically incorrect play that satirized the nuances of the modern Jew. Amy was able to adapt her “fake it until you make it” stratagem and give her writing a versatility overhaul, finding out that “writing funny is actually just another skill that you can hone and control, a power that you can learn to use rather than this mysterious, nebulous force.”

“You know, just like a super-power,” Amy notes.

Since then, Amy has used her powers for good, gracing a laundry list of venerable literary journals and outlets, ranging from commercial strongholds to indie pursuits, in print and on the Web alike.

Recently, Amy has finished work on a novel, How Far is the Ocean From Here, of which she is unspeakably excited (and only the least bit terrified) over.

Amy is more than inclined to share the wisdom she has gleaned, through several stations of employment, habitation, and hair tone: “Oh well, sure,” Amy says, “I could wallpaper my apartment with all my rejection letters from graduate programs, literary magazines, and friends and family. But early on I figured out that it just doesn’t matter. And also, it wouldn’t be a very attractive look.”

And as far as redecoration is concerned, Amy is doing pretty well just expanding her hat rack.