Books & Writers: Novelists, Screenwriters, Poets, Journalists, Playwrights, Non-fiction Writers & Showrunners Talk Writing, Creativity & The Creative Process (Novelists, Screenwriters, Poets, Playwrights, Non-fiction Writers, Journalists & Showrunners Talk Writing - Creative Process Original Series)
Explore every episode of Books & Writers: Novelists, Screenwriters, Poets, Journalists, Playwrights, Non-fiction Writers & Showrunners Talk Writing, Creativity & The Creative Process
| Pub. Date | Title | Duration | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 18 Oct 2023 | Highlights - ROXANE GAY - NYTimes Best-selling Author, Editor & Social Commentator: Bad Feminist, Hunger, Difficult Women | 00:03:50 | |
Roxane Gay’s writing appears in Best American Mystery Stories 2014, Best American Short Stories 2012, Best Sex Writing 2012, A Public Space, McSweeney’s, Tin House, Oxford American, American Short Fiction, Virginia Quarterly Review, and many others. She is a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times. She is the author of the books Ayiti, An Untamed State, the New York Times bestselling Bad Feminist, the nationally bestselling Difficult Women and the New York Times bestselling Hunger. She is also the author of World of Wakanda for Marvel. www.creativeprocess.info | |||
| 18 Oct 2023 | ROXANE GAY - NYTimes Best-selling Author, Editor & Social Commentator: Bad Feminist, Hunger, Difficult Women | 00:26:33 | |
Roxane Gay’s writing appears in Best American Mystery Stories 2014, Best American Short Stories 2012, Best Sex Writing 2012, A Public Space, McSweeney’s, Tin House, Oxford American, American Short Fiction, Virginia Quarterly Review, and many others. She is a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times. She is the author of the books Ayiti, An Untamed State, the New York Times bestselling Bad Feminist, the nationally bestselling Difficult Women and the New York Times bestselling Hunger. She is also the author of World of Wakanda for Marvel. www.creativeprocess.info | |||
| 18 Oct 2023 | NEIL GAIMAN - Writer, Producer, Showrunner - The Sandman, American Gods, Good Omens, Coraline | 01:04:27 | |
Neil Gaiman’s contributions to practically every literary genre have earned him a place in the Dictionary of Literary Biography as one of the top ten living post-modern writers. His series The Sandman is widely credited with reinventing comics. His books include American Gods, Stardust, Coraline, The Graveyard Book, The Ocean at the End of the Lane, and many have been adapted for television, film, and radio productions. His work has been honored with many awards internationally, including the Newbery and Carnegie Medals. His books and stories have also been honored with 4 Hugos, 2 Nebulas, 1 World Fantasy Award, 4 Bram Stoker Awards, 6 Locus Awards, 2 British SF Awards, 1 British Fantasy Award, 3 Geffens, 1 International Horror Guild Award and 2 Mythopoeic Awards. www.creativeprocess.info | |||
| 18 Oct 2023 | Highlights - NEIL GAIMAN - Writer, Producer, Showrunner - The Sandman, American Gods, Good Omens, Coraline | 00:09:37 | |
“I was fascinated because the two people who I, as a young writer, knew best, who were sort of established writers, were Douglas Adams–because I wrote a book called Don’t Panic: Douglas Adams & The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. I’d go to spend time and work with Douglas. And I was friends with Terry Pratchett, and what absolutely fascinated me was they couldn’t have been more opposite. Douglas hated writing, and he was incredibly good at it, but he didn't like doing it and he would do it when he was backed into a corner and he’d do it when he had to and he would expend energy in not writing, which in some ways is really good because he became–he'd create computer games or he'd become a–there were points where he’d do weird projects with computers, learn all about computers and things like that, in order to not write because the act of writing was painful. And there was a point where he had to be locked in a hotel room for 3 or 4 weeks by his publisher to get a book out on time. You know, they'd solicited it, everything was ready and they didn’t have a book and he was halfway through and he had given up, so they just locked him in and he would pass pages under the door. Someone would sit outside watching videos.” Neil Gaiman’s contributions to practically every literary genre have earned him a place in the Dictionary of Literary Biography as one of the top ten living post-modern writers. His series The Sandman is widely credited with reinventing comics. His books include American Gods, Stardust, Coraline, The Graveyard Book, The Ocean at the End of the Lane, and many have been adapted for television, film, and radio productions. His work has been honored with many awards internationally, including the Newbery and Carnegie Medals. His books and stories have also been honored with 4 Hugos, 2 Nebulas, 1 World Fantasy Award, 4 Bram Stoker Awards, 6 Locus Awards, 2 British SF Awards, 1 British Fantasy Award, 3 Geffens, 1 International Horror Guild Award and 2 Mythopoeic Awards. www.creativeprocess.info | |||
| 18 Oct 2023 | ADA LIMÓN, U.S. Poet Laureate - The Hurting Kind, The Carrying | 00:06:50 | |
Ada Limón is the author of six books of poetry, including The Carrying, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry. Her book Bright Dead Things was nominated for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. Her work has been supported most recently by a Guggenheim Fellowship. She grew up in Sonoma, California and now lives in Lexington, Kentucky where she writes, teaches remotely, and hosts the critically-acclaimed poetry podcast, The Slowdown. Her new book of poetry, The Hurting Kind, is forthcoming from Milkweed Editions in May 2022. Photo credit: Lucas Marquardt | |||
| 18 Oct 2023 | Highlights - ADA LIMÓN, U.S. Poet Laureate - The Hurting Kind, The Carrying | ||
"This poem was written when I was having a real moment of reckoning, not that I hadn't had it earlier, but where I was doing some deep reading about the climate crisis and really reckoning with myself, with where we were and what was happening, what the truth was. And I felt like it was so easy to slip down into a darkness, into a sort of numbness, and I didn't think that that numbness and darkness could be useful." Ada Limón is the author of six books of poetry, including The Carrying, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry. Her book Bright Dead Things was nominated for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. Her work has been supported most recently by a Guggenheim Fellowship. She grew up in Sonoma, California and now lives in Lexington, Kentucky where she writes, teaches remotely, and hosts the critically-acclaimed poetry podcast, The Slowdown. Her new book of poetry, The Hurting Kind, is forthcoming from Milkweed Editions in May 2022. | |||
| 31 Oct 2023 | MARCIA DeSANCTIS - Author of A Hard Place to Leave: Stories from a Restless Life | 01:04:43 | |
Marcia DeSanctis is a journalist, essayist, and author of A Hard Place to Leave: Stories from a Restless Life, 100 Places in France Every Woman Should Go, a New York Times travel bestseller. A contributor writer at Travel + Leisure, she also writes for Air Mail, Vogue, BBC Travel and many other publications. She has won five Lowell Thomas Awards from the Society of American Travel Writers and is the recipient of the 2021 Gold Award for Travel Story of the Year. Before becoming a writer, she was a television news producer for ABC, NBC and CBS News, for most of those years producing for Barbara Walters. She lives in Connecticut. "I started looking over the stories that I had done. I would say the majority of the essays were not really about travel. They were more about aging and marriage and memory and all of those things, but I did find in the travel essays those kernels of things that I wanted to explore - bigger kernels of things that were sort of scratching at me from the inside like a piece of sand in my pocket that was irritating me and that I wanted to explore. What I found was that the theme of coming and going, the theme of arrivals and departures, the theme of entrances and exits, and the theme of home and away seemed to repeat itself. I felt that whenever I was somewhere, there was always a tide home. And when I was home, there was always the urge for going. And so I just weeded out and weeded out and really wanted to keep this theme of home and away." https://marciadesanctis.com www.creativeprocess.info Photo credit: Elena Seibert | |||
| 31 Oct 2023 | Highlights - MARCIA DeSANCTIS - Author of "A Hard Place to Leave", "100 Places in France Every Woman Should Go" | 00:11:51 | |
"I started looking over the stories that I had done. I would say the majority of the essays were not really about travel. They were more about aging and marriage and memory and all of those things, but I did find in the travel essays those kernels of things that I wanted to explore - bigger kernels of things that were sort of scratching at me from the inside like a piece of sand in my pocket that was irritating me and that I wanted to explore. What I found was that the theme of coming and going, the theme of arrivals and departures, the theme of entrances and exits, and the theme of home and away seemed to repeat itself. I felt that whenever I was somewhere, there was always a tide home. And when I was home, there was always the urge for going. And so I just weeded out and weeded out and really wanted to keep this theme of home and away." Marcia DeSanctis is a journalist, essayist, and author of A Hard Place to Leave: Stories from a Restless Life, 100 Places in France Every Woman Should Go, a New York Times travel bestseller. A contributor writer at Travel + Leisure, she also writes for Air Mail, Vogue, BBC Travel and many other publications. She has won five Lowell Thomas Awards from the Society of American Travel Writers and is the recipient of the 2021 Gold Award for Travel Story of the Year. Before becoming a writer, she was a television news producer for ABC, NBC and CBS News, for most of those years producing for Barbara Walters. She lives in Connecticut. https://marciadesanctis.com www.creativeprocess.info | |||
| 18 Oct 2023 | ANTHONY JOSEPH - T.S. Eliot Award-winning Poet, Novelist & Musician, Lead vocalist of The Spasm Band | 00:17:01 | |
Anthony Joseph is a poet, novelist, academic and musician who moved from Trinidad to the UK in 1989. A lecturer in creative writing at Birkbeck College, he is particularly interested in the point at which poetry becomes music. As well as four poetry collections, a slew of albums, and three novels – most recently Kitch – Joseph has published critical work exploring the aesthetics of Caribbean Poetry among other subjects. He performs internationally as the lead vocalist for his band The Spasm Band. Sonnets for Albert is his first poetry collection since Rubber Orchestras. “Calling England Home” and “Language (Poem for Anthony McNeill)” were released in 2021 by Anthony Joseph and appear on his album "The Rich Are Only Defeated When Running For Their Lives”. | |||
| 18 Oct 2023 | Highlights - Anthony Joseph - Award-winning Writer & Musician - “Sonnets for Albert” | 00:12:06 | |
"My relationship with improvisational music is something that I'm still trying to theorize and trying to understand exactly why it is that it works. So all I know is that, in approaching a poem, it's about form and content. It's about matching process to content. And for me, the act of writing poetry is kind of like a jazz soloist puts together a solo. It's related in that way because as a writer, as a poet, you are always looking for the new. You're looking for something, a new way of saying something. You're using language that everyone uses, but you're always trying to reuse it in an original way. Always trying to have a phrase or metaphor that is new." Anthony Joseph is a poet, novelist, academic and musician who moved from Trinidad to the UK in 1989. A lecturer in creative writing at Birkbeck College, he is particularly interested in the point at which poetry becomes music. As well as four poetry collections, a slew of albums, and three novels – most recently Kitch – Joseph has published critical work exploring the aesthetics of Caribbean Poetry among other subjects. He performs internationally as the lead vocalist for his band The Spasm Band. Sonnets for Albert is his first poetry collection since Rubber Orchestras. His most recent album is The Rich Are Only Defeated When Running for Their Lives. | |||
| 25 Oct 2023 | DAVID FARRIER - Author of Footprints: In Search of Future Fossils - Prof. U of Edinburgh | 00:49:37 | |
David Farrier's books include Footprints: In Search of Future Fossils (2020) and Anthropocene Poetics (2019). Footprints won the Royal Society of Literature’s Giles St. Aubyn award and has been translated into nine languages. He is Professor of Literature and the Environment at the University of Edinburgh. "Just thinking about how our actions play out over multiple generations who will have to live with the consequences of these decisions. I think we need to stretch our sense of time, and within that stretch our sense of empathy. The philosopher Roman Krznaric talks about that in his book The Good Ancestor, that we need a more elastic sense of empathy that can encompass not just those close to us or living alongside us, but those who have yet to be born will have to inherit the world that we passed down to them. But I think in stretching that sense of empathy and stretching that sense of the times that we touch, if you like, because all of us are engaged in activities that will lead long legacies, long tails, in terms of the fossil fuels we're consuming. And so, alongside that, I think we need to accept that the time we live in is a strange one, and time itself is doing strange things in the anthropocene.” Footprints: In Search of Future Fossils www.ed.ac.uk/profile/david-farrier | |||
| 25 Oct 2023 | Highlights - DAVID FARRIER - Author of Footprints: In Search of Future Fossils | 00:10:48 | |
"Just thinking about how our actions play out over multiple generations who will have to live with the consequences of these decisions. I think we need to stretch our sense of time, and within that stretch our sense of empathy. The philosopher Roman Krznaric talks about that in his book The Good Ancestor, that we need a more elastic sense of empathy that can encompass not just those close to us or living alongside us, but those who have yet to be born will have to inherit the world that we passed down to them. But I think in stretching that sense of empathy and stretching that sense of the times that we touch, if you like, because all of us are engaged in activities that will lead long legacies, long tails, in terms of the fossil fuels we're consuming. And so, alongside that, I think we need to accept that the time we live in is a strange one, and time itself is doing strange things in the anthropocene.” David Farrier's books include Footprints: In Search of Future Fossils (2020) and Anthropocene Poetics (2019). Footprints won the Royal Society of Literature’s Giles St. Aubyn award and has been translated into nine languages. He is Professor of Literature and the Environment at the University of Edinburgh. Footprints: In Search of Future Fossils www.ed.ac.uk/profile/david-farrier | |||
| 18 Oct 2023 | Britt Wray - Author of “Generation Dread: Finding Purpose in an Age of Climate Crisis” | 00:42:06 | |
Britt Wray is the author of Generation Dread: Finding Purpose in an Age of Climate Crisis. She's a writer and broadcaster researching the emotional and psychological impacts of the climate crisis. Born and raised in Toronto, Canada, she is a post-doctoral fellow at Stanford University and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, where she investigates the mental health consequences of ecological disruption. She holds a PhD in Science Communication from the University of Copenhagen. Her work has been featured in the New York Times, Washington Post Guardian, and Globe and Mail, among other publications. She has hosted several podcasts, radio, and TV programs with the BBC and CBC, is a TED Resident, and writes Gan Dread, a newsletter about staying sane in the climate crisis. She is also the author of Rise of the Necrofauna: The Science, Ethics, and Risks of De-Extinction. "So I have a background in conservation biology and have been a science communicator for well over a decade and a half now, and of course, doing that work you're confronted with climate, environmental reports and studies, which were a consistent part of my emotional baseline, just being aware of the fact that this is not all going well, which every now and then would make me feel low, for sure, in a way that was quite noticeable. But it became much more poignant in my life in 2017 when my partner and I started considering whether or not to have a kid, and I hadn't connected the reproductive part of life to the climate crisis. And all of a sudden this topic was the only thing I could really think about because it became such a dilemma for me personally, as to whether or not I felt comfortable having a child, given what the science says about where we're headed and what the lack of historical action means for the future of any child born to date, even one with privilege and protection from its parental outset. So that then, you know, eco-anxiety and climate anxiety and eco-grief in these terms that we now have as kind of household items that people are familiar with, that we have lots of journalism around, which has especially emerged in the last three years or so. At that time, I didn't have words to describe what I was feeling and I felt very deviant for even questioning whether or not it was okay to have kids in the climate crisis. I didn't really see it reflected. I figured, Okay, this is probably me getting a little bit loopy here, and I ought to do something to bring more perspective into my line of view. And that started me on a research project looking at the psychological impacts of the climate crisis writ large beyond just the reproductive angle, but that was my on-ramp." www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/647141/generation-dread-by-britt-wray https://greystonebooks.com/products/rise-of-the-necrofauna | |||
| 18 Oct 2023 | Highlights - Britt Wray - Author, Researcher Working on Climate Change and Mental Health | 00:12:35 | |
"So I have a background in conservation biology and have been a science communicator for well over a decade and a half now, and of course, doing that work you're confronted with climate, environmental reports and studies, which were a consistent part of my emotional baseline, just being aware of the fact that this is not all going well, which every now and then would make me feel low, for sure, in a way that was quite noticeable. But it became much more poignant in my life in 2017 when my partner and I started considering whether or not to have a kid, and I hadn't connected the reproductive part of life to the climate crisis. And all of a sudden this topic was the only thing I could really think about because it became such a dilemma for me personally, as to whether or not I felt comfortable having a child, given what the science says about where we're headed and what the lack of historical action means for the future of any child born to date, even one with privilege and protection from its parental outset. So that then, you know, eco-anxiety and climate anxiety and eco-grief in these terms that we now have as kind of household items that people are familiar with, that we have lots of journalism around, which has especially emerged in the last three years or so. At that time, I didn't have words to describe what I was feeling and I felt very deviant for even questioning whether or not it was okay to have kids in the climate crisis. I didn't really see it reflected. I figured, Okay, this is probably me getting a little bit loopy here, and I ought to do something to bring more perspective into my line of view. And that started me on a research project looking at the psychological impacts of the climate crisis writ large beyond just the reproductive angle, but that was my on-ramp." Britt Wray is the author of Generation Dread: Finding Purpose in an Age of Climate Crisis. She's a writer and broadcaster researching the emotional and psychological impacts of the climate crisis. Born and raised in Toronto, Canada, she is a post-doctoral fellow at Stanford University and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, where she investigates the mental health consequences of ecological disruption. She holds a PhD in Science Communication from the University of Copenhagen. Her work has been featured in the New York Times, Washington Post Guardian, and Globe and Mail, among other publications. She has hosted several podcasts, radio, and TV programs with the BBC and CBC, is a TED Resident, and writes Gan Dread, a newsletter about staying sane in the climate crisis. She is also the author of Rise of the Necrofauna: The Science, Ethics, and Risks of De-Extinction. www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/647141/generation-dread-by-britt-wray https://greystonebooks.com/products/rise-of-the-necrofauna | |||
| 18 Oct 2023 | Special Earth Day Stories - Environmentalists, Artists, Students & Teachers share their Love for the Planet - Part 1 | 00:15:09 | |
Today we’re streaming voices of environmentalists, artists, students, and teachers. Enjoy Part 1 of this Special Series with music courtesy of composer Max Richter. All voices on this episode are from our interviews for The Creative Process & One Planet Podcast: MAX RICHTER INGRID NEWKIRK, Founder of PETA BERTRAND PICCARD, Aviator of 1st Round-the-World Solar-Powered Flight, Explorer, Founder, Solar Impulse Foundation CARL SAFINA, Ecologist, Founding President of Safina Center CLAIRE POTTER, Designer, Lecturer, Author of “Welcome to the Circular Economy” ADA LIMÓN, U.S. Poet Laureate, Host of The Slowdown podcast CYNTHIA DANIELS, Grammy and Emmy award-winning producer, engineer, composer JOELLE GERGIS, Lead Author of the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report, Author of “Humanity’s Moment” KATHLEEN ROGERS, President of EARTHDAY.ORG ODED GALOR, Author of “The Journey of Humanity”, Founder of Unified Growth Theory SIR GEOFF MULGAN, Fmr. Chief Executive of Nesta, Fmr, Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit Director & Downing Street’s Head of Policy, Author of “Another World is Possible” ALAIN ROBERT, Rock & Urban Climber known for Free Solo Climbing 150+ of the World’s Tallest Skyscrapers using no Climbing Equipment NOAH WILSON-RICH, Co-founder & CEO of The Best Bees Company CHRIS FUNK, Director of the Climate Hazards Center at UC Santa Barbara, Author of Drought, Flood, Fire: How Climate Change Contributes to Recent Catastrophes DAVID FARRIER, Author of “Footprints: In Search of Future Fossils” DR. SUZANNE SIMARD, Professor of Forest Ecology, Author of “Finding the Mother Tree” PETER SINGER, “Most Influential Living Philosopher”, Author, Founder of The Life You Can Save JENNIFER MORGAN, Fmr. Executive Director of Greenpeace International, Special Envoy for International Climate Action, German Foreign Ministry www.creativeprocess.info www.maxrichtermusic.com Max Richter’s music featured in this episode are “On the Nature of Daylight” from The Blue Notebooks, “Path 19: Yet Frailest” from Sleep. Music is courtesy of Max Richter, Universal Music Enterprises, and Mute Song. | |||
| 26 Oct 2023 | We All Live on One Planet We Call Home - Part 4 - Environmentalists, Economists, Policymakers & Architects Share their Stories | 00:22:57 | |
Listen to Part 4 of this Special Series with music courtesy of composer Max Richter. All voices on this episode are from our interviews for The Creative Process & One Planet Podcast: INGRID NEWKIRK, Founder & President of PETA - People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals JEFFREY D. SACHS, President of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network, Director of Center for Sustainable Development, Columbia University, Economist, Author JENNIFER MORGAN, Fmr. Executive Director of Greenpeace International, Special Envoy for International Climate Action, German Foreign Ministry MERLIN SHELDRAKE, Biologist & Bestselling Author of “Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds, and Shape Our Futures”, Winner of the Wainwright Prize 2021 WALTER STAHEL, Architect, Economist, Founding Father of Circular Economy, Founder-Director, Product-Life Institute ARMOND COHEN, Executive Director of Clean Air Task Force PIA MANCINI, Co-founder/CEO of Open Collective - Chair of DemocracyEarth Foundation, YGL World Economic Forum RON GONEN, Founder & CEO of Closed Loop Partners, Former Deputy Commissioner of Sanitation, Recycling & Sustainability, NYC AIMEE NEZHUKUMATATHIL, Poet & Author of “World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks and Other Astonishments” ANA CASTILLO, Award-Winning Xicana Activist, Editor, Poet, Novelist & Artist www.creativeprocess.info www.maxrichtermusic.com Max Richter’s music featured in this episode are “On the Nature of Daylight” from The Blue Notebooks, “Path 19: Yet Frailest” from Sleep. Music is courtesy of Max Richter, Universal Music Enterprises, and Mute Song. Artwork: Saudade, Mia Funk | |||
| 21 Oct 2023 | ANDRI SNÆR MAGNASON - Icelandic Writer & Documentary Filmmaker - On Time and Water, The Casket of Time, LoveStar, Not Ok | 00:42:52 | |
Andri Snær Magnason is an award winning author of On Time and Water, The Casket of Time, LoveStar, Dreamland and The Story of the Blue Planet. His work has been published in more than 35 languages. He has a written in most genres, novels, poetry, plays, short stories, non fiction as well as being a documentary film maker. His novel, LoveStar got a Philip K. Dick Special Citation, and the Grand Prix de l’Imaginaire in France and “Novel of the year” in Iceland. The Story of the Blue Planet, was the first children’s book to receive the Icelandic Literary Award and has been published or performed in 35 countries. The Blue Planet received the Janusz Korczak Honorary Award in Poland 2000, the UKLA Award in the UK and Children's book of the Year in China. His book – Dreamland – a Self Help Manual for a Frightened Nation takes on these issues and has sold more than 20.000 copies in Iceland. He co directed Dreamland - a feature length documentary film based on the book. Footage from Dreamland and an interview with Andri can be seen in the Oscar Award-winning documentary Inside Job by Charles Ferguson. His most recent book, Tímakistan, the Time Casket has now been published in more than 10 languages, was nominated as the best fantasy book in Finland 2016 with authors like Ursula K. le Guin and David Mitchell. In English six books are currently available: Bónus Poetry, The Story of The Blue Planet, LoveStar, Dreamland and The Casket of Time, (Tímakistan) and On Time and Water. "When I was writing On Time and Water somebody said this is not just one book. This is about your grandmother, about glaciers. You have to focus. You can't have this mythology and glacial and ocean sites, speculations about words like ocean acidification, and your grandfather's sister who is visiting Tolstoy. You have to focus. You can't put all this into a book. And then I thought, oh yes, I forgot my favorite uncle, who was the researcher of crocodiles. I also have to put him into the book. And when I put the crocodile's story into the book, it was like a keystone. Everything fell into a whole picture. Because we live in democratic societies and literature is an art of entertainment. People want to continue reading books, and it's based on instant ways of storytelling. Of course, it's strange to live in a society where we have to entertain ourselves to understand the most important issue in the world." www.creativeprocess.info | |||
| 21 Oct 2023 | Highlights - ANDRI SNÆR MAGNASON - Writer & Documentary Filmmaker - On Time and Water, The Casket of Time, LoveStar, Not Ok | 00:12:54 | |
"When I was writing On Time and Water somebody said this is not just one book. This is about your grandmother, about glaciers. You have to focus. You can't have this mythology and glacial and ocean sites, speculations about words like ocean acidification, and your grandfather's sister who is visiting Tolstoy. You have to focus. You can't put all this into a book. And then I thought, oh yes, I forgot my favorite uncle, who was the researcher of crocodiles. I also have to put him into the book. And when I put the crocodile's story into the book, it was like a keystone. Everything fell into a whole picture. Because we live in democratic societies and literature is an art of entertainment. People want to continue reading books, and it's based on instant ways of storytelling. Of course, it's strange to live in a society where we have to entertain ourselves to understand the most important issue in the world." Andri Snær Magnason is an award winning author of On Time and Water, The Casket of Time, LoveStar, Dreamland and The Story of the Blue Planet. His work has been published in more than 35 languages. He has a written in most genres, novels, poetry, plays, short stories, non fiction as well as being a documentary film maker. His novel, LoveStar got a Philip K. Dick Special Citation, and the Grand Prix de l’Imaginaire in France and “Novel of the year” in Iceland. The Story of the Blue Planet, was the first children’s book to receive the Icelandic Literary Award and has been published or performed in 35 countries. The Blue Planet received the Janusz Korczak Honorary Award in Poland 2000, the UKLA Award in the UK and Children's book of the Year in China. His book – Dreamland – a Self Help Manual for a Frightened Nation takes on these issues and has sold more than 20.000 copies in Iceland. He co directed Dreamland - a feature length documentary film based on the book. Footage from Dreamland and an interview with Andri can be seen in the Oscar Award-winning documentary Inside Job by Charles Ferguson. His most recent book, Tímakistan, the Time Casket has now been published in more than 10 languages, was nominated as the best fantasy book in Finland 2016 with authors like Ursula K. le Guin and David Mitchell. In English six books are currently available: Bónus Poetry, The Story of The Blue Planet, LoveStar, Dreamland and The Casket of Time, (Tímakistan) and On Time and Water. www.creativeprocess.info | |||
| 25 Oct 2023 | ALAIN ROBERT - Famous Rock and Urban Climber - Author of With Bare Hands | 00:46:29 | |
Alain Robert is a renowned rock climber and urban climber. Known as "the French Spider-Man” or "the Human Spider," Robert is famous for his free solo climbing, scaling skyscrapers using no climbing equipment except for a small bag of chalk and a pair of climbing shoes. Some of his most notable ascents include the Burj Khalifa, the Eiffel Tower, and the Sydney Opera House, as well as other of the world's tallest skyscrapers. He is also a motivational speaker and the author of With Bare Hands: The True Story of Alain Robert, the Real-life Spiderman. "For me, my mind is a kind of safety net. We human beings, unfortunately, are only putting safety on something that we can touch, a rope, a chain, a ladder, whatever. But safety, it can be something else. It can be your faith in yourself. If you meet a lawyer and you are telling him, I've been to court many times having to defend myself in front of a prosecutor charging me for reckless endangerment, and I explain to them when I'm climbing I know what I do, and I feel safe. And if I feel safe, it means that I am not endangering anyone else. We human beings, we are the problem. We are the ones who are putting a barrier on everything. We don't want to recognize that our human brain or mind is capable of doing something that we cannot put on paper. We cannot buy, like you buy some expensive insurances. And it's just a strong belief in myself. I can make it, and I will make it because I feel safe doing it. Actually, when you are at it, you are focused. Our survival instinct is really working very well. I don't feel like falling. I don't feel like dying, and even if something happens like a close call. It doesn't really bother me that much. It's like, Okay, I nearly fell, but I didn't. Then the show must go on. And that's it. I'm not panicking. I'm just dealing with the obstacles one by one." www.instagram.com/alainrobertofficial/?hl=fr www.creativeprocess.info | |||
| 24 Oct 2023 | Highlights - ALAIN ROBERT - Famous Rock and Urban Climber - Author of With Bare Hands | 00:13:52 | |
"For me, my mind is a kind of safety net. We human beings, unfortunately, are only putting safety on something that we can touch, a rope, a chain, a ladder, whatever. But safety, it can be something else. It can be your faith in yourself. If you meet a lawyer and you are telling him, I've been to court many times having to defend myself in front of a prosecutor charging me for reckless endangerment, and I explain to them when I'm climbing I know what I do, and I feel safe. And if I feel safe, it means that I am not endangering anyone else. We human beings, we are the problem. We are the ones who are putting a barrier on everything. We don't want to recognize that our human brain or mind is capable of doing something that we cannot put on paper. We cannot buy, like you buy some expensive insurances. And it's just a strong belief in myself. I can make it, and I will make it because I feel safe doing it. Actually, when you are at it, you are focused. Our survival instinct is really working very well. I don't feel like falling. I don't feel like dying, and even if something happens like a close call. It doesn't really bother me that much. It's like, Okay, I nearly fell, but I didn't. Then the show must go on. And that's it. I'm not panicking. I'm just dealing with the obstacles one by one." Alain Robert is a renowned rock climber and urban climber. Known as "the French Spider-Man” or "the Human Spider," Robert is famous for his free solo climbing, scaling skyscrapers using no climbing equipment except for a small bag of chalk and a pair of climbing shoes. Some of his most notable ascents include the Burj Khalifa, the Eiffel Tower, and the Sydney Opera House, as well as other of the world's tallest skyscrapers. He is also a motivational speaker and the author of With Bare Hands: The True Story of Alain Robert, the Real-life Spiderman. www.instagram.com/alainrobertofficial/?hl=fr www.creativeprocess.info | |||
| 28 Oct 2023 | LOVE - What is love? Filmmakers, poets, aviators, musicians, cave divers, environmentalists, writers, and artists explore what love means to them | 00:09:15 | |
00:25 JERICHO BROWN - Pulitzer Prize-Winning Poet, Author of “The Tradition” & “The New Testament” 00:39 JILL HEINERTH - Explorer, Presenter, Author of “Into The Planet: My Life as a Cave Diver” 01:02 ALICE FULTON - Poet - Recipient of MacArthur “Genius”, NEA & Guggenheim Fellowships 01:31 BERTRAND PICCARD - Aviator of 1st Round-the-World Solar-Powered Flight, Explorer, Founder, Solar Impulse Foundation: 1000+ Profitable Climate Solutions 02:31 CHRIS BLACKWELL - Founder of Island Records - Bob Marley, U2, Cat Stevens, Grace Jones, Roxy Music, Amy Winehouse…Author of “The Islander: My Life in Music and Beyond" 03:31 ALICE NOTLEY - Poet & Artist - Academy of American Poets Award Winner 04:08 MIA FUNK - Artist, Writer & Host of The Creative Process reads “In My Dreams" 04:45 MAX STOSSEL - Award-winning Poet, Filmmaker, Speaker - Creator of "Words That Move” 05:04 GERALD FLEMING - Poet, Author of the collections “The Choreographer”, “One”, “Night of Pure Breathing”, among others 05:29 MARGO BERDESHEVSKY - Award-winning Poet - "Kneel Said the Night”,"Before The Drought”, “Between Soul & Stone” 05:56 SAM LEVY - Award-winning Cinematographer of “Lady Bird” “Frances Ha” “While We’re Young” “Confess, Fletch” 06:31 CHAYSE IRVIN - Award-winning Cinematographer - “Blonde" starring Ana de Armas, “Beyonce: Lemonade”, Spike Lee’s “BlacKkKlansman” 06:57 KARINA MANASHIL - President of Mad Solar - Creative Confidante for Kid Cudi - Executive Producer of Netflix’s “Entergalactic”, A24’s “Pearl”, “X” 07:37 CARL SAFINA - Ecologist - Founding President of Safina Center - NYTimes Bestselling Author of “Becoming Wild: How Animal Cultures Raise Families, Create Beauty, and Achieve Peace”, among others www.creativeprocess.info Flower Duet - Leo Delibes | |||
| 28 Oct 2023 | DEAN SPADE - Author of Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, and the Limits of Law | 00:48:23 | |
Dean Spade is an organizer, speaker, author, and professor at Seattle University's School of Law, where he teaches courses on policing, imprisonment, gender, race, and social movements. Spade has been organizing racial and economic movements for queer and trans liberation for the past 20 years. Spade's books include Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, and the Limits of Law and Mutual Aid, Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the Next). In 2002, Dean founded the Sylvia Rivera Law Project, a non-profit law collective that provides free legal services to transgender, intersex and gender non-conforming people who are low-income and/or people of color, and which operates on a collective governance model. His writing has appeared in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Out, In These Times, Social Text, and Signs. “I want to see movements that embolden our tactics. Like people blocking oil pipelines all over the world. That's what's required now. Asking endlessly from the dominant system to treat us fairly doesn't work. And this frustrating kind of endless appeal and hoping maybe we can get it to work this time doesn't work. And the clock is ticking, especially on ecological collapse. We need to save each other's lives and act.” www.deanspade.net www.deanspade.net/mutual-aid-building-solidarity-during-this-crisis-and-the-next/ www.creativeprocess.info | |||
| 14 Oct 2023 | Highlights - DEAN SPADE - Professor at SeattleU’s School of Law - Author of Mutual Aid, Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the Next) | 00:18:01 | |
“I want to see movements that embolden our tactics. Like people blocking oil pipelines all over the world. That's what's required now. Asking endlessly from the dominant system to treat us fairly doesn't work. And this frustrating kind of endless appeal and hoping maybe we can get it to work this time doesn't work. And the clock is ticking, especially on ecological collapse. We need to save each other's lives and act.” Dean Spade is an organizer, speaker, author, and professor at Seattle University's School of Law, where he teaches courses on policing, imprisonment, gender, race, and social movements. Spade has been organizing racial and economic movements for queer and trans liberation for the past 20 years. Spade's books include Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, and the Limits of Law and Mutual Aid, Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the Next). In 2002, Dean founded the Sylvia Rivera Law Project, a non-profit law collective that provides free legal services to transgender, intersex and gender non-conforming people who are low-income and/or people of color, and which operates on a collective governance model. His writing has appeared in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Out, In These Times, Social Text, and Signs. www.deanspade.net www.deanspade.net/mutual-aid-building-solidarity-during-this-crisis-and-the-next/ www.creativeprocess.info | |||
| 23 Oct 2023 | SHEHAN KARUNATILAKA - Booker Prize-winning Author of The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida | 00:53:05 | |
What happens when we die? What happens to our memories and consciousness when our bodies cease to be? In the end, is it the things we did and the people we loved that give our lives meaning? Shehan Karunatilaka is the multi-award winning author. He is known for his novels dealing with the history, politics, and folklore of his home country of Sri Lanka. He won the Commonwealth Book Prize and the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature for his debut novel, Chinaman: The Legend of Pradeep Mathew, and the Booker Prize 2022 for his second novel, The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida. In addition to novels, he has written rock songs, screenplays and travel stories. Born in Colombo, he studied in New Zealand and has lived and worked in London, Amsterdam, and Singapore. "I was very inspired to know that humans are not the be-all and end-all. We're just one state. But you could be in this state of consciousness, this kind of godly state, even a demonic state, but also the fact that all living creatures had souls and were affected by karma. And this is something we tend to forget, especially because animals are so tasty and therefore we have to justify slaughtering them on such a mass scale. So we want to believe that they don't count. Or they are somehow lesser souls than us. The cat doesn't believe that it's a pet. The cat believes they are the center of the universe. I'm sure the cockroach believes that they are the center of the universe, just as we do. And back to the thing you said: how our bodies inform our view. I think every living creature suffers and experiences joy. And therefore it's convenient for us to say that certain things don't have souls...whatever the soul is." www.shehanwriter.com www.creativeprocess.info Photo credit: David Parry/Booker Prize Foundation | |||
| 23 Oct 2023 | Highlights - SHEHAN KARUNATILAKA - Booker Prize-winning Author of The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida | 00:12:43 | |
"I was very inspired to know that humans are not the be-all and end-all. We're just one state. But you could be in this state of consciousness, this kind of godly state, even a demonic state, but also the fact that all living creatures had souls and were affected by karma. And this is something we tend to forget, especially because animals are so tasty and therefore we have to justify slaughtering them on such a mass scale. So we want to believe that they don't count. Or they are somehow lesser souls than us. The cat doesn't believe that it's a pet. The cat believes they are the center of the universe. I'm sure the cockroach believes that they are the center of the universe, just as we do. And back to the thing you said: how our bodies inform our view. I think every living creature suffers and experiences joy. And therefore it's convenient for us to say that certain things don't have souls...whatever the soul is." What happens when we die? What happens to our memories and consciousness when our bodies cease to be? In the end, is it the things we did and the people we loved that give our lives meaning? Shehan Karunatilaka is the multi-award winning author. He is known for his novels dealing with the history, politics, and folklore of his home country of Sri Lanka. He won the Commonwealth Book Prize and the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature for his debut novel, Chinaman: The Legend of Pradeep Mathew, and the Booker Prize 2022 for his second novel, The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida. In addition to novels, he has written rock songs, screenplays and travel stories. Born in Colombo, he studied in New Zealand and has lived and worked in London, Amsterdam, and Singapore. www.shehanwriter.com www.creativeprocess.info | |||
| 02 Nov 2023 | RICK BASS - Environmentalist & Story Prize Award-winning Author of “Why I Came West”, “For a Little While” | 00:42:09 | |
Rick Bass, a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist for his memoir Why I Came West, was born and raised in Texas, worked as a petroleum geologist in Mississippi, and has lived in Montana's Yaak Valley for almost three decades. His short fiction, which has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Esquire, and The Paris Review, as well as numerous times in Best American Short Stories, has earned him The Story Prize, multiple O. Henry Awards and Pushcart Prizes in addition to NEA and Guggenheim fellowships. He’s an organizer and speaker at Climate Aid: The Voice of the Forest, a fundraiser event to benefit the grassroots environmental movement of Protect Ancient Forests & The Montana Project. Featuring Maggie Rogers and more great performers and speakers. The evening will advance the efforts to protect the Black Ram forest by designating the region as the nation’s first Climate Refuge. Portland, Maine, on Sunday, Oct. 15 at 7 p.m. ET, at the Merrill Auditorium. Tickets available at the Merrill’s box office and online at PortTIX.com. "Be specific. Show, don't tell. And it comes back to the five senses. If it's something we can touch, taste, scent, see, hear, then we're going to engage more deeply in the dream. And if it's an abstraction like beautiful or terrible, that's a kind of shorthand, and we lose a little bit of our connection with the reader every time we use an abstraction because beautiful is going to mean something slightly different to every different reader. And then you put another abstraction on that, terrible say, that's going to mean something different. Abstraction by abstraction, a degree at a time, two or three degrees at a time, finally you're 180 degrees away from the reader. Whereas if it's something specific, a yellow-handled phillips screwdriver with a bit of oil and the handles worn smooth from where the protagonist's father had done kitchen repair in their home 75 years before, falling off a ladder at the age of nine and breaking his neck... The specificity allows us to believe in the dream of the story. And that's what we as writers want the reader to be. We want to believe in the dream of the story. When we're not being specific as writers, it's because we are groping and grasping for the story. I think the best writing is the most specific writing, and there's this phenomenon as a writer when your story sags and you can't quite figure out what's gone wrong. You go back and look at it and wherever your best writing is, that's where the secret heart of the story is. That's where the story was trying to come up from below. And when you subconsciously were most engaged with it, you could see it, you could taste it, you could smell it, you could feel it, you could hear it. William Carlos Williams said, 'No ideas, but in things.' He said in five words what I just spent five minutes blathering about. No ideas, but in things. Don't tell me what something is. Show it to me. The meaning and the idea is in the image or in the sound, or in the taste." www.rickbass.net www.creativeprocess.info | |||
| 02 Nov 2023 | Highlights - RICK BASS - Author & Environmentalist - “Why I Came West”, “For a Little While” | 00:11:43 | |
"Be specific. Show, don't tell. And it comes back to the five senses. If it's something we can touch, taste, scent, see, hear, then we're going to engage more deeply in the dream. And if it's an abstraction like beautiful or terrible, that's a kind of shorthand, and we lose a little bit of our connection with the reader every time we use an abstraction because beautiful is going to mean something slightly different to every different reader. And then you put another abstraction on that, terrible say, that's going to mean something different. Abstraction by abstraction, a degree at a time, two or three degrees at a time, finally you're 180 degrees away from the reader. Whereas if it's something specific, a yellow-handled phillips screwdriver with a bit of oil and the handles worn smooth from where the protagonist's father had done kitchen repair in their home 75 years before, falling off a ladder at the age of nine and breaking his neck... The specificity allows us to believe in the dream of the story. And that's what we as writers want the reader to be. We want to believe in the dream of the story. When we're not being specific as writers, it's because we are groping and grasping for the story. I think the best writing is the most specific writing, and there's this phenomenon as a writer when your story sags and you can't quite figure out what's gone wrong. You go back and look at it and wherever your best writing is, that's where the secret heart of the story is. That's where the story was trying to come up from below. And when you subconsciously were most engaged with it, you could see it, you could taste it, you could smell it, you could feel it, you could hear it. William Carlos Williams said, 'No ideas, but in things.' He said in five words what I just spent five minutes blathering about. No ideas, but in things. Don't tell me what something is. Show it to me. The meaning and the idea is in the image or in the sound, or in the taste." Rick Bass, a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist for his memoir Why I Came West, was born and raised in Texas, worked as a petroleum geologist in Mississippi, and has lived in Montana's Yaak Valley for almost three decades. His short fiction, which has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Esquire, and The Paris Review, as well as numerous times in Best American Short Stories, has earned him The Story Prize, multiple O. Henry Awards and Pushcart Prizes in addition to NEA and Guggenheim fellowships. He’s an organizer and speaker at Climate Aid: The Voice of the Forest, a fundraiser event to benefit the grassroots environmental movement of Protect Ancient Forests & The Montana Project. Featuring Maggie Rogers and more great performers and speakers. The evening will advance the efforts to protect the Black Ram forest by designating the region as the nation’s first Climate Refuge. Portland, Maine, on Sunday, Oct. 15 at 7 p.m. ET, at the Merrill Auditorium. Tickets available at the Merrill’s box office and online at PortTIX.com. www.rickbass.net www.creativeprocess.info | |||
| 18 Oct 2023 | ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER: Athlete, Actor, American, Activist - Conversation with Editor DIAN HANSON | 00:58:04 | |
“Why I was different from all the other boys in my town I cannot tell you. I was simply born with the gift of vision.” – ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER Is there any better example of the American Dream than Arnold Schwarzenegger? What does it take to make your vision a reality? How do you cultivate iron focus to overcome any obstacle and realize your dreams? On the publication of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s limited edition two-volume book published by TASCHEN, we sat down with Senior Editor and Writer Dian Hansen to discuss Schwarzenegger’s life, accomplishments, and history of unforgettable performances. The book has been a decade-long collaborative process and along with portraits by leading photographers Richard Avedon, Annie Leibovitz, Robert Mapplethorpe, Herb Ritts, Francesco Scavullo, and Andy Warhol, it is also filled with photos from Arnold’s private archive and exclusive interviews. Dian’s other works include The Art of Pin-up, Masterpieces of Fantasy Art, and The Fantastic Worlds of Frank Frazetta. "I was really familiar with Arnold through bodybuilding. I became a weight trainer myself after meeting him at the 1981 Mr. Olympia contest, but I largely knew him through his movies like everyone else. And when you see him in the movies, he's famous for these very short one-liners that make it seem as if he is nonverbal, that he's not particularly intelligent. You don't get his humor. The first time I went to Arnold's house, I saw that this man is the greatest storyteller, the greatest entertainer ever. He is funny, he is witty, he is quick. He can tell a story like no one else, and not just tell it, he would act it out. He would get up and stomp around and make noises with his mouth. He told me a simple story about a woman in the gym who was not working out, who was just sitting on a bench and talking on the phone to her friend and eating a bag of potato chips. And he was able to replicate the sound of eating potato chips just with his mouth. He is underappreciated. I guess that's what it is. And as I started going through his archive, I saw that there are certain photographs that show him and his facial expressions like none other. And those photographs are always when he is interacting with children or interacting with animals and all pretense drops away. His face just lights up. It is real, it is genuine, it is open. And that's something that I tried to include as much as possible, particularly in the small book that is more personal, to show that human, affectionate, warm side of Arnold." www.taschen.com/en/limited-editions/film/03105/arnold-collector-s-edition www.creativeprocess.info Images courtesy of Taschen. | |||
| 18 Oct 2023 | Highlights - ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER: Athlete, Actor, American, Activist - Conversation with Editor DIAN HANSON | 00:10:23 | |
"I was really familiar with Arnold through bodybuilding. I became a weight trainer myself after meeting him at the 1981 Mr. Olympia contest, but I largely knew him through his movies like everyone else. And when you see him in the movies, he's famous for these very short one-liners that make it seem as if he is nonverbal, that he's not particularly intelligent. You don't get his humor. The first time I went to Arnold's house, I saw that this man is the greatest storyteller, the greatest entertainer ever. He is funny, he is witty, he is quick. He can tell a story like no one else, and not just tell it, he would act it out. He would get up and stomp around and make noises with his mouth. He told me a simple story about a woman in the gym who was not working out, who was just sitting on a bench and talking on the phone to her friend and eating a bag of potato chips. And he was able to replicate the sound of eating potato chips just with his mouth. He is underappreciated. I guess that's what it is. And as I started going through his archive, I saw that there are certain photographs that show him and his facial expressions like none other. And those photographs are always when he is interacting with children or interacting with animals and all pretense drops away. His face just lights up. It is real, it is genuine, it is open. And that's something that I tried to include as much as possible, particularly in the small book that is more personal, to show that human, affectionate, warm side of Arnold." “Why I was different from all the other boys in my town I cannot tell you. I was simply born with the gift of vision.” – ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER Is there any better example of the American Dream than Arnold Schwarzenegger? What does it take to make your vision a reality? How do you cultivate iron focus to overcome any obstacle and realize your dreams? On the publication of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s limited edition two-volume book published by TASCHEN, we sat down with Senior Editor and Writer Dian Hansen to discuss Schwarzenegger’s life, accomplishments, and history of unforgettable performances. The book has been a decade-long collaborative process and along with portraits by leading photographers Richard Avedon, Annie Leibovitz, Robert Mapplethorpe, Herb Ritts, Francesco Scavullo, and Andy Warhol, it is also filled with photos from Arnold’s private archive and exclusive interviews. Dian’s other works include The Art of Pin-up, Masterpieces of Fantasy Art, and The Fantastic Worlds of Frank Frazetta. www.taschen.com/en/limited-editions/film/03105/arnold-collector-s-edition www.creativeprocess.info Image courtesy of Taschen. | |||
| 26 Oct 2023 | DAVID FENTON - Founder of Fenton Communications, Author of The Activist’s Media Handbook: Lessons From 50 Years as a Progressive Agitator | 00:49:41 | |
How can we effectively communicate that we're moving beyond climate change to a state of climate crisis? The trapped heat energy on Earth is equal to a million Atomic bombs going off every single day. Today we talk to someone who's been mobilizing the public mind for over 50 years. David Fenton, named “one of the 100 most influential PR people” by PR Week and “the Robin Hood of public relations” by The National Journal, founded Fenton in 1982 to create communications campaigns for the environment, public health, and human rights. For more than five decades he has pioneered the use of PR, social media, and advertising techniques for social change. Fenton started his career as a photojournalist in the late 1960s – his book Shots: An American Photographer’s Journal was published in 2005. He was formerly director of public relations at Rolling Stone magazine and co-producer of the No-Nukes concerts in 1979 at Madison Square Garden with Bruce Springsteen, Bonnie Raitt, James Taylor, Jackson Browne, and other artists. He has also helped create JStreet, Climate Nexus, the Death Penalty Information Center, and Families for a Future. He sold Fenton a few years ago to work on climate change full time. He is the author of The Activist’s Media Handbook: Lessons From 50 Years as a Progressive Agitator. "The linguists and the cognitive scientists have established that as you're exposed to language from childhood and over your lifetime, it forms literal circuits in your brain. They call them frames. So in order to communicate successfully with people, the best way is to use language that activates existing frames. So for example, when I say we need to get to net zero by 2050, nobody knows what I'm talking about. There's no existing circuitry to process that language. What the hell is net zero? Is that less than zero? Now, if I say we have to stop pollution because pollution is heating the planet, we've formed a blanket of pollution around the earth that is trapping heat that used to go back out to space. And then everybody knows what I'm talking about because they know what pollution is. That's an existing mental frame. And by the way, no one will defend pollution. You won't find anyone that thinks pollution is a good thing. So it's a universally negative frame in all languages. And then when I say it's like a blanket around the earth, there's another existing mental frame. Everybody knows what a blanket is and how it works. It traps your body heat so you don't get cold. So that's what we're doing to the earth. And yes, all that trapped heat energy on Earth has to go somewhere. So it goes to create stronger storms and droughts and floods and melts the ice." https://davidfentonactivist.com www.creativeprocess.info All photographs © 1968-2022 David Fenton | |||
| 26 Oct 2023 | Highlights - DAVID FENTON - Author of The Activist’s Media Handbook: Lessons From 50 Years as a Progressive Agitator | 00:10:09 | |
"The linguists and the cognitive scientists have established that as you're exposed to language from childhood and over your lifetime, it forms literal circuits in your brain. They call them frames. So in order to communicate successfully with people, the best way is to use language that activates existing frames. So for example, when I say we need to get to net zero by 2050, nobody knows what I'm talking about. There's no existing circuitry to process that language. What the hell is net zero? Is that less than zero? Now, if I say we have to stop pollution because pollution is heating the planet, we've formed a blanket of pollution around the earth that is trapping heat that used to go back out to space. And then everybody knows what I'm talking about because they know what pollution is. That's an existing mental frame. And by the way, no one will defend pollution. You won't find anyone that thinks pollution is a good thing. So it's a universally negative frame in all languages. And then when I say it's like a blanket around the earth, there's another existing mental frame. Everybody knows what a blanket is and how it works. It traps your body heat so you don't get cold. So that's what we're doing to the earth. And yes, all that trapped heat energy on Earth has to go somewhere. So it goes to create stronger storms and droughts and floods and melts the ice." How can we effectively communicate that we're moving beyond climate change to a state of climate crisis? The trapped heat energy on Earth is equal to a million Atomic bombs going off every single day. Today we talk to someone who's been mobilizing the public mind for over 50 years. David Fenton, named “one of the 100 most influential PR people” by PR Week and “the Robin Hood of public relations” by The National Journal, founded Fenton in 1982 to create communications campaigns for the environment, public health, and human rights. For more than five decades he has pioneered the use of PR, social media, and advertising techniques for social change. Fenton started his career as a photojournalist in the late 1960s – his book Shots: An American Photographer’s Journal was published in 2005. He was formerly director of public relations at Rolling Stone magazine and co-producer of the No-Nukes concerts in 1979 at Madison Square Garden with Bruce Springsteen, Bonnie Raitt, James Taylor, Jackson Browne, and other artists. He has also helped create JStreet, Climate Nexus, the Death Penalty Information Center, and Families for a Future. He sold Fenton a few years ago to work on climate change full time. He is the author of The Activist’s Media Handbook: Lessons From 50 Years as a Progressive Agitator. https://davidfentonactivist.com www.creativeprocess.info All photographs © 1968-2022 David Fenton | |||
| 01 Nov 2023 | JIM SHEPARD - Author of The Book of Aron, Project X, The World to Come starring Casey Affleck, Vanessa Kirby, Katherine Waterston | 00:48:09 | |
How can literature help us extend our empathic imaginations? How can writing and reading expand our curiosity and compassion for people in situations distant from our own? Jim Shepard is the author of seven previous novels, most recently The Book of Aron (winner of the 2016 PEN New England Award, the Sophie Brody medal for achievement in Jewish literature, the Ribalow Prize for Jewish literature, the Clark Fiction Prize, and a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award) and five story collections, including Like You’d Understand, Anyway, which was a finalist for the National Book Award and won The Story Prize. His short fiction has appeared in, among other magazines, The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, McSweeney’s, The Paris Review, The Atlantic, Esquire, Tin House, Granta, Zoetrope, Electric Literature, and Vice, and has often been selected for The Best American Short Stories and The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories. He lives in Williamstown, Massachusetts, with his wife, three children, and three beagles, and he teaches film and creative writing at Williams College. His story “The World to Come” was adapted into a feature film starring Casey Affleck, Vanessa Kirby, and Katherine Waterston. "In terms of what I'm writing, I'm always trying to make myself a more interesting human being. And so that means I'm coming across these human dilemmas where I'm like what would it have been like to be in that position? And that snags my emotional imagination. I do think that literature is all about extending the empathetic imagination. And so I'm always looking to educate myself in emotional terms, too. Because I'm very interested in the way we respond in those situations where it feels like we both have responsibility, and we don't have responsibility." https://jimshepard.wordpress.com www.creativeprocess.info | |||
| 01 Nov 2023 | Highlights - JIM SHEPARD - Award-winning Author of The Book of Aron, Project X, The World to Come, Like You’d Understand, Anyway | 00:11:39 | |
"In terms of what I'm writing, I'm always trying to make myself a more interesting human being. And so that means I'm coming across these human dilemmas where I'm like what would it have been like to be in that position? And that snags my emotional imagination. I do think that literature is all about extending the empathetic imagination. And so I'm always looking to educate myself in emotional terms, too. Because I'm very interested in the way we respond in those situations where it feels like we both have responsibility, and we don't have responsibility." How can literature help us extend our empathic imaginations? How can writing and reading expand our curiosity and compassion for people in situations distant from our own? Jim Shepard is the author of seven previous novels, most recently The Book of Aron (winner of the 2016 PEN New England Award, the Sophie Brody medal for achievement in Jewish literature, the Ribalow Prize for Jewish literature, the Clark Fiction Prize, and a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award) and five story collections, including Like You’d Understand, Anyway, which was a finalist for the National Book Award and won The Story Prize. His short fiction has appeared in, among other magazines, The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, McSweeney’s, The Paris Review, The Atlantic, Esquire, Tin House, Granta, Zoetrope, Electric Literature, and Vice, and has often been selected for The Best American Short Stories and The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories. He lives in Williamstown, Massachusetts, with his wife, three children, and three beagles, and he teaches film and creative writing at Williams College. His story “The World to Come” was adapted into a feature film starring Casey Affleck, Vanessa Kirby, and Katherine Waterston. https://jimshepard.wordpress.com www.creativeprocess.info | |||
| 18 Oct 2023 | JERICHO BROWN - Pulitzer Prize-winning Poet - Editor of “How We Do It: Black Writers on Craft, Practice, and Skill” | 00:49:13 | |
How do you find your voice? As a writer, how do you take what you know and what you believe to share your stories with the world? How do we let young writers know just how powerful they are and that what they do matters? In How We Do It: Black Writers on Craft, Practice, and Skill Pulitzer Prize winning, and National Book Award finalist author Jericho Brown brings together more than 30 acclaimed writers, including the likes of Tayari Jones, Jacqueline Woodson, Natasha Trethewey, among many others, to discuss, dissect, and offer advice and encouragement on the written word. Brown is author of The Tradition, for which he won the Pulitzer Prize. He is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, and the National Endowment for the Arts, and he is the winner of the Whiting Award. Brown’s first book, Please, won the American Book Award. His second book, The New Testament, won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. His third collection, The Tradition won the Paterson Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. His poems have appeared in The Bennington Review, Buzzfeed, Fence, jubilat, The New Republic, The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Paris Review TIME magazine, and several volumes of The Best American Poetry. He is the director of the Creative Writing Program and a professor at Emory University. "I put this craft book together to create an opportunity for that advice, for those role models, for that access. And I think that what I'm grateful for about this book is that it is the book that I would have wanted back when I was a 19-year-old kid telling people I wish I was a writer. So, I think that's the real crux of the book." www.jerichobrown.com www.creativeprocess.info | |||
| 18 Oct 2023 | Highlights - JERICHO BROWN - Pulitzer Prize-winning Poet - Editor of How We Do It: Black Writers on Craft, Practice, and Skill | 00:15:16 | |
"I put this craft book together to create an opportunity for that advice, for those role models, for that access. And I think that what I'm grateful for about this book is that it is the book that I would have wanted back when I was a 19-year-old kid telling people I wish I was a writer. So, I think that's the real crux of the book." How do you find your voice? As a writer, how do you take what you know and what you believe to share your stories with the world? How do we let young writers know just how powerful they are and that what they do matters? In How We Do It: Black Writers on Craft, Practice, and Skill Pulitzer Prize winning, and National Book Award finalist author Jericho Brown brings together more than 30 acclaimed writers, including the likes of Tayari Jones, Jacqueline Woodson, Natasha Trethewey, among many others, to discuss, dissect, and offer advice and encouragement on the written word. Brown is author of The Tradition, for which he won the Pulitzer Prize. He is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, and the National Endowment for the Arts, and he is the winner of the Whiting Award. Brown’s first book, Please, won the American Book Award. His second book, The New Testament, won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. His third collection, The Tradition won the Paterson Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. His poems have appeared in The Bennington Review, Buzzfeed, Fence, jubilat, The New Republic, The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Paris Review TIME magazine, and several volumes of The Best American Poetry. He is the director of the Creative Writing Program and a professor at Emory University. www.jerichobrown.com www.creativeprocess.info | |||
| 22 Oct 2023 | ERICA BERRY - Author of Wolfish: Wolf, Self, and the Stories We Tell About Fear | 00:46:07 | |
The lone wolf is actually alone because it's looking for connection. They leave in order to find a mate and form their own pack. If loneliness is an epidemic, what can wolves teach us about loneliness, courage, and connection? Erica Berry is the author of Wolfish: Wolf, Self, and the Stories We Tell About Fear. Her essays in journalism appear in Outside, Wired, The Yale Review, The Guardian, Literary Hub, The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, and Guernica, among other publications. Berry has taught workshops for teenagers and adults at Literary Arts, the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology, the New York Times Student Journeys in Oxford Academia. "And I think for so long I thought I'm only going to write about the real wolf. That's the most important thing. We've had too many stories. And yet I've gotten to a point where I just think we are living in a world where any story that comes out of my mouth is shaped by these other stories I've heard which are rooted in ecology, just like stories about biology, stories about how we name wolves are rooted in human choices. Science is tied to colonialism. Stories about how people interact in the landscape are very tied to who those people are and how they feel. Are they meant to feel that they belong there?" www.ericaberry.com www.creativeprocess.info Photo by Andrea Lonas | |||
| 22 Oct 2023 | Highlights - ERICA BERRY - Author of Wolfish: Wolf, Self, and the Stories We Tell About Fear | 00:12:35 | |
"And I think for so long I thought I'm only going to write about the real wolf. That's the most important thing. We've had too many stories. And yet I've gotten to a point where I just think we are living in a world where any story that comes out of my mouth is shaped by these other stories I've heard which are rooted in ecology, just like stories about biology, stories about how we name wolves are rooted in human choices. Science is tied to colonialism. Stories about how people interact in the landscape are very tied to who those people are and how they feel. Are they meant to feel that they belong there?" The lone wolf is actually alone because it's looking for connection. They leave in order to find a mate and form their own pack. If loneliness is an epidemic, what can wolves teach us about loneliness, courage, and connection? Erica Berry is the author of Wolfish: Wolf, Self, and the Stories We Tell About Fear. Her essays in journalism appear in Outside, Wired, The Yale Review, The Guardian, Literary Hub, The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, and Guernica, among other publications. Berry has taught workshops for teenagers and adults at Literary Arts, the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology, the New York Times Student Journeys in Oxford Academia. www.ericaberry.com www.creativeprocess.info | |||
| 30 Oct 2023 | TOM LIN - Author of The Thousand Crimes of Ming Tsu - Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction 2022 | 00:41:56 | |
How can we retell the story of America? In the United States of Amnesia, why does the Western celebrate cowboys but not all people who built this country? What does a Chinese-American hero look like in the 21st Century? Tom Lin is an American writer whose 2021 debut novel The Thousand Crimes of Ming Tsu chronicles the story of a Chinese American outlaw seeking revenge during America's railroad boom. The book won the 2022 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, making Lin the youngest Carnegie winner in the prize’s history. Tom Lin is currently pursuing an English doctorate at the University of California Davis. "And so I did research to avoid writing. And what I would do is I would take these drives out into the desert, and I'd take notes. I went along the route of the Transcontinental Railroad east to west, west to east a bunch of times. And I went to all these history books and all these historical recovery projects that are being run. There's the project of Chinese and America and all these history books and synthesizing this sense of being in a place and time where I was not. And I think some of the things and some of the experiences that I felt while doing that research, I felt was necessary to preserve in the text because I think the text is always produced out of confluence with the body. And so in order to portray something in text, you have to pass it through the body and through the senses. And as a result, it was really important for me to go to these places and have that physical experience with the body in order that I would be able to put it down in the book and have it be true." www.creativeprocess.info Image courtesy of Little, Brown and Company & Tom Lin | |||
| 30 Oct 2023 | Highlights - TOM LIN - Author of The Thousand Crimes of Ming Tsu - Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction 2022 | 00:11:05 | |
"And so I did research to avoid writing. And what I would do is I would take these drives out into the desert, and I'd take notes. I went along the route of the Transcontinental Railroad east to west, west to east a bunch of times. And I went to all these history books and all these historical recovery projects that are being run. There's the project of Chinese and America and all these history books and synthesizing this sense of being in a place and time where I was not. And I think some of the things and some of the experiences that I felt while doing that research, I felt was necessary to preserve in the text because I think the text is always produced out of confluence with the body. And so in order to portray something in text, you have to pass it through the body and through the senses. And as a result, it was really important for me to go to these places and have that physical experience with the body in order that I would be able to put it down in the book and have it be true." How can we retell the story of America? In the United States of Amnesia, why does the Western celebrate cowboys but not all people who built this country? What does a Chinese-American hero look like in the 21st Century? Tom Lin is an American writer whose 2021 debut novel The Thousand Crimes of Ming Tsu chronicles the story of a Chinese American outlaw seeking revenge during America's railroad boom. The book won the 2022 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, making Lin the youngest Carnegie winner in the prize’s history. Tom Lin is currently pursuing an English doctorate at the University of California Davis. www.creativeprocess.info Image courtesy of Little, Brown and Company & Tom Lin | |||
| 27 Oct 2023 | CARL SAFINA - Ecologist - Founding President of Safina Center - NYTimes Bestselling Author | 00:04:44 | |
Carl Safina’s lyrical non-fiction writing explores how humans are changing the living world, and what the changes mean for non-human beings and for us all. His work has been recognized with MacArthur, Pew, and Guggenheim Fellowships, and his writing has won Orion, Lannan, and National Academies literary awards and the John Burroughs, James Beard, and George Rabb medals. Safina is the inaugural holder of the endowed chair for nature and humanity at Stony Brook University, where he co-chairs the steering committee of the Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science and is founding president of the not-for-profit Safina Center. He hosted the 10-part PBS series Saving the Ocean with Carl Safina. His writing appears in The New York Times, National Geographic, Audubon, CNN.com, National Geographic News, and other publications. He is the author of ten books including the classic Song for the Blue Ocean, as well as New York Times Bestseller Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel. His most recent book is Becoming Wild: How Animal Cultures Raise Families, Create Beauty, and Achieve Peace. "So we tend to take living for granted. I think that might be the biggest limitation of human intelligence is to not understand with awe and reverence and love that we live in a miracle that we are part of and that we have the ability to either nurture or destroy. The living world is enormously enriching to human life. I just loved animals. They're always just totally fascinating. They're not here for us. They're just here like we're just here. They are of this world as much as we are of this world. They really have the same claim to life and death and the circle of being." IG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast Photo: Carl Safina in Uganda | |||
| 23 Oct 2023 | What Kind of World Are We Leaving for Future Generations? - Part 3 - Activists, Environmentalists & Teachers Share their Stories | 00:17:00 | |
Listen to Part 3 of this Special Series with music courtesy of composer Max Richter. All voices on this episode are from our interviews for The Creative Process & One Planet Podcast: PAULA PINHO, Director of Just Transition at the European Commission Directorate-General for Energy PIA MANCINI, Co-founder/CEO of Open Collective - Chair of DemocracyEarth Foundation, YGL World Economic Forum JENNIFER MORGAN, Fmr. Executive Director of Greenpeace International, Special Envoy for International Climate Action, German Foreign Ministry WALTER STAHEL, Architect, Economist, Founding Father of Circular Economy, Founder-Director, Product-Life Institute MERLIN SHELDRAKE, Biologist & Bestselling Author of Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds, and Shape Our Futures, Winner of the Wainwright Prize 2021 RON GONEN, Founder & CEO of Closed Loop Partners, Former Deputy Commissioner of Sanitation, Recycling & Sustainability, NYC MANUELA LUCÁ-DAZIO, Executive Director, Pritzker Architecture Prize, Fmr. Exec. Director of Venice Biennale, Visual Arts & Architecture Dept. NICHOLAS ROYLE, Co-author of "An Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory”, Author of “Mother: A Memoir” MARK BURGMAN, Director, Centre for Environmental Policy, Imperial College London, Editor-in-Chief, Conservation Biology MIKE DAVIS, CEO of Global Witness JAY FAMIGLIETTI, Fmr. Senior Water Scientist at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Exec. Director, Global Institute for Water Security, Host of "What About Water?" Podcast BRITT WRAY, Author of “Generation Dread: Finding Purpose in an Age of Climate Crisis”, Researcher Working on Climate Change & Mental Health, Stanford University RICHARD VEVERS, Founder & CEO of The Ocean Agency ARMOND COHEN, Executive Director of Clean Air Task Force BILL HARE, Founder & CEO of Climate Analytics, Physicist, Climate Scientist DAVID PALUMBO-LIU, Activist, Professor & Author of “Speaking Out of Place: Getting Our Political Voices Back”, Host of Speaking out of Place Podcast IBRAHIM ALHUSSEINI, Founder & CEO of FullCycle Fund GAIA VINCE, Science Writer, Broadcaster & Author of “Transcendence” & “Adventures in the Anthropocene” INGRID NEWKIRK, Founder & President of PETA - People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals www.creativeprocess.info www.maxrichtermusic.com Max Richter’s music featured in this episode are “On the Nature of Daylight” from The Blue Notebooks, “Path 19: Yet Frailest” from Sleep. Music is courtesy of Max Richter, Universal Music Enterprises, and Mute Song. | |||
| 29 Oct 2023 | We All Live on One Planet We Call Home - Part 4 - Environmentalists, Economists, Policymakers & Architects Share their Stories | 00:22:57 | |
Listen to Part 4 of this Special Series with music courtesy of composer Max Richter. All voices on this episode are from our interviews for The Creative Process & One Planet Podcast: INGRID NEWKIRK, Founder & President of PETA - People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals JEFFREY D. SACHS, President of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network, Director of Center for Sustainable Development, Columbia University, Economist, Author JENNIFER MORGAN, Fmr. Executive Director of Greenpeace International, Special Envoy for International Climate Action, German Foreign Ministry MERLIN SHELDRAKE, Biologist & Bestselling Author of “Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds, and Shape Our Futures”, Winner of the Wainwright Prize 2021 WALTER STAHEL, Architect, Economist, Founding Father of Circular Economy, Founder-Director, Product-Life Institute ARMOND COHEN, Executive Director of Clean Air Task Force PIA MANCINI, Co-founder/CEO of Open Collective - Chair of DemocracyEarth Foundation, YGL World Economic Forum RON GONEN, Founder & CEO of Closed Loop Partners, Former Deputy Commissioner of Sanitation, Recycling & Sustainability, NYC AIMEE NEZHUKUMATATHIL, Poet & Author of “World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks and Other Astonishments” ANA CASTILLO, Award-Winning Xicana Activist, Editor, Poet, Novelist & Artist www.creativeprocess.info www.maxrichtermusic.com Max Richter’s music featured in this episode are “On the Nature of Daylight” from The Blue Notebooks, “Path 19: Yet Frailest” from Sleep. Music is courtesy of Max Richter, Universal Music Enterprises, and Mute Song. Artwork: Saudade, Mia Funk | |||
| 18 Oct 2023 | JOHN PATRICK SHANLEY - Academy Award-winning Writer/Director - Doubt starring Meryl Streep, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Amy Adams - Moonstruck | 00:47:29 | |
John Patrick Shanley is from The Bronx. His plays include Prodigal Son, Outside Mullingar (Tony nomination), Danny and the Deep Blue Sea, Savage in Limbo, Italian-American Reconciliation, Welcome to the Moon, Four Dogs and a Bone, Dirty Story, Defiance, and Beggars in the House of Plenty. His theatrical work is performed extensively across the United States and around the world. For his play, Doubt, he received both the Tony Award and the Pulitzer Prize. In the arena of screenwriting, he has ten films to his credit, most recently Wild Mountain Thyme, with Emily Blunt, Jamie Dornan, and Christopher Walken. His film of Doubt, with Meryl Streep, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Amy Adams, and Viola Davis, which he also directed, was nominated for five Academy Awards, including Best Adapted Screenplay. Other films include Five Corners (Special Jury Prize, Barcelona Film Festival), Alive, Joe Versus the Volcano (which he also directed), and Live From Baghdad for HBO (Emmy nomination). For his script of Moonstruck he received both the Writers Guild of America Award and an Academy Award for best original screenplay. In 2009, The Writers Guild of America awarded Mr. Shanley the Lifetime Achievement In Writing. "I knew Philip Seymour Hoffman for several years. We went on vacation together. He produced a play of mine. Before we did Doubt, we worked in the same theater company together, and he was, you know, very committed to excellence. And so he could become impatient with anybody who was not committed to excellence, and that could make him a volatile person to deal with. Phil cared. He cared a great deal. And he worked really hard. They're very committed. Like with Viola Davis. Viola had done a decent amount of big work before Doubt, but she was not recognized yet. And she was careful. You know, she certainly wasn't throwing weight around. She was, I'm the new kid on the block, and I'm just here to work and be serious and do my job, keep my head down, and get out. And pretty much that's what I was doing too, you know, because I've got Meryl Streep, I've got Philip Hoffman, who I was friends with, but Phil's not an easy guy to be friends with or was not easy to be friends with. He's a very prickly person prone to getting pissed off about things that you might not expect. And then Amy Adams was somebody who, you know, tried to get along with everybody and Phil would say like, 'You just want everybody to like you.' So, you know, you're in the middle of that group, and you just, you don't want to put yourself in a position where you're trying to prove something. You have to let them...they're very, very smart people, and they're going to figure out whatever it is that you're doing. They're going to figure out whether you are in any way trying to handle that. And that's not going to go well. And so I didn't do that. Meryl is very, very smart and very focused and, in a sense, very private. Her work, you know, she isn't going to talk a great deal about her secrets, the secrets of her character. She's going to carry them with her." www.creativeprocess.info | |||
| 18 Oct 2023 | Highlights - JOHN PATRICK SHANLEY - Writer/Director - Doubt starring Meryl Streep, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Amy Adams, Viola Davis - Moonstruck | 00:15:20 | |
"I knew Philip Seymour Hoffman for several years. We went on vacation together. He produced a play of mine. Before we did Doubt, we worked in the same theater company together, and he was, you know, very committed to excellence. And so he could become impatient with anybody who was not committed to excellence, and that could make him a volatile person to deal with. Phil cared. He cared a great deal. And he worked really hard. They're very committed. Like with Viola Davis. Viola had done a decent amount of big work before Doubt, but she was not recognized yet. And she was careful. You know, she certainly wasn't throwing weight around. She was, I'm the new kid on the block, and I'm just here to work and be serious and do my job, keep my head down, and get out. And pretty much that's what I was doing too, you know, because I've got Meryl Streep, I've got Philip Hoffman, who I was friends with, but Phil's not an easy guy to be friends with or was not easy to be friends with. He's a very prickly person prone to getting pissed off about things that you might not expect. And then Amy Adams was somebody who, you know, tried to get along with everybody and Phil would say like, 'You just want everybody to like you.' So, you know, you're in the middle of that group, and you just, you don't want to put yourself in a position where you're trying to prove something. You have to let them...they're very, very smart people, and they're going to figure out whatever it is that you're doing. They're going to figure out whether you are in any way trying to handle that. And that's not going to go well. And so I didn't do that. Meryl is very, very smart and very focused and, in a sense, very private. Her work, you know, she isn't going to talk a great deal about her secrets, the secrets of her character. She's going to carry them with her." John Patrick Shanley is from The Bronx. His plays include Prodigal Son, Outside Mullingar (Tony nomination), Danny and the Deep Blue Sea, Savage in Limbo, Italian-American Reconciliation, Welcome to the Moon, Four Dogs and a Bone, Dirty Story, Defiance, and Beggars in the House of Plenty. His theatrical work is performed extensively across the United States and around the world. For his play, Doubt, he received both the Tony Award and the Pulitzer Prize. In the arena of screenwriting, he has ten films to his credit, most recently Wild Mountain Thyme, with Emily Blunt, Jamie Dornan, and Christopher Walken. His film of Doubt, with Meryl Streep, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Amy Adams, and Viola Davis, which he also directed, was nominated for five Academy Awards, including Best Adapted Screenplay. Other films include Five Corners (Special Jury Prize, Barcelona Film Festival), Alive, Joe Versus the Volcano (which he also directed), and Live From Baghdad for HBO (Emmy nomination). For his script of Moonstruck he received both the Writers Guild of America Award and an Academy Award for best original screenplay. In 2009, The Writers Guild of America awarded Mr. Shanley the Lifetime Achievement In Writing. www.creativeprocess.info | |||
| 19 Oct 2023 | DEBORA CAHN - Showrunner & Executive Producer of Netflix’s The Diplomat starring Keri Russell & Rufus Sewell | 00:44:03 | |
Debora Cahn is the Emmy-nominated showrunner and executive producer of Netflix’s The Diplomat, a political thriller series starring Keri Russell and Rufus Sewell. She’s worked with television’s leading showrunners, including Shonda Rhymes, Terence Winter, Steven Levinson, and Howard Gordon. Her career began working on Aaron Sorkin’s The West Wing which has led to projects such as the hit Showtime series Homeland, ABC’s long-running medical drama Grey’s Anatomy, and HBO’s Vinyl, which was co-created by Martin Scorsese. She’s the winner of two Writers Guild of America Award for The West Wing and FX’s limited series Fosse/Verdon. "First of all, how desperate are all of us for lightness and optimism and hope, and a sense of possibility in the people who are navigating and steering world affairs? That was really important to me to bring that in. And I think that I see all really dramatic moments as kind of streaked-through with a bit of the absurd. Those are always the moments that stand out to me. If you're not just at a funeral, but you're at a funeral where somebody dropped their purse, and there's a now a thousand things on the floor and a lot of people trying to pretend that there aren't. Those moments, for me, are the moments where our humanity really kind of shows through the cracks. And I was interested in this world that's so much about a facade and so manicured and presentational and looking at those like tragically human moments that pop up right in the middle of all of that. The juxtaposition between those two things, I find to be delightful." www.imdb.com/name/nm1263223 www.creativeprocess.info Images courtesy of Netflix/Alex Bailey | |||
| 19 Oct 2023 | Highlights - DEBORA CAHN - Showrunner of The Diplomat starring Keri Russell - Exec. Producer Homeland, Grey’s Anatomy | 00:11:23 | |
"First of all, how desperate are all of us for lightness and optimism and hope, and a sense of possibility in the people who are navigating and steering world affairs? That was really important to me to bring that in. And I think that I see all really dramatic moments as kind of streaked-through with a bit of the absurd. Those are always the moments that stand out to me. If you're not just at a funeral, but you're at a funeral where somebody dropped their purse, and there's a now a thousand things on the floor and a lot of people trying to pretend that there aren't. Those moments, for me, are the moments where our humanity really kind of shows through the cracks. And I was interested in this world that's so much about a facade and so manicured and presentational and looking at those like tragically human moments that pop up right in the middle of all of that. The juxtaposition between those two things, I find to be delightful." Debora Cahn is the Emmy-nominated showrunner and executive producer of Netflix’s The Diplomat, a political thriller series starring Keri Russell and Rufus Sewell. She’s worked with television’s leading showrunners, including Shonda Rhymes, Terence Winter, Steven Levinson, and Howard Gordon. Her career began working on Aaron Sorkin’s The West Wing which has led to projects such as the hit Showtime series Homeland, ABC’s long-running medical drama Grey’s Anatomy, and HBO’s Vinyl, which was co-created by Martin Scorsese. She’s the winner of two Writers Guild of America Award for The West Wing and FX’s limited series Fosse/Verdon. www.imdb.com/name/nm1263223 www.creativeprocess.info Images courtesy of Netflix/Alex Bailey | |||
| 20 Oct 2023 | TREVA B. LINDSEY, PhD - Author of America, Goddam: Violence, Black Women, and The Struggle for Justice | 01:04:23 | |
Treva B. Lindsey, PhD is a Black feminist historian and Associate Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at The Ohio State University. She is the recipient of several prestigious fellowships including the ACLS/Mellon Scholars and Society Fellowship, The Equity for Women and Girls of Color Fellowship at Harvard University, and The Woodrow Wilson Career Enhancement Fellowship. Lindsey is the founder of the Transformative Black Feminisms Initiative at Ohio State and the co-founder of Black Feminist Night School at Zora’s House in Columbus, Ohio. Her latest book entitled America, Goddam: Violence, Black Women, and The Struggle for Justice explores contemporary violence against Black women and girls and how they mobilize to halt violence against them. · https://trevablindsey.com | |||
| 20 Oct 2023 | Highlights - TREVA B. LINDSEY, PhD - Author of America, Goddam: Violence, Black Women, and The Struggle for Justice | 00:16:23 | |
“We have to be unwavering in our commitment to principles of justice and freedom and be harbingers of hope. So for me, this is a lifelong thing, and I think of it as ancestor work that I one day will be somebody's ancestor, and I want them to be proud of the work that we did to give them a world that’s a little better of an inheritance than the world that I was born into. And I think that is how we mark progress in more nuanced ways, in more honest ways. It doesn't need to be a straight line towards freedom, more of a journey with wins and losses, setbacks and victories.” “It's what can feel like regression that’s happening. It’s like, okay, there is. I'm thinking about in the country right now, we’ve had these incredible moments, seeing a show like “Pose” on television with so many queer, trans, black, and brown actors. You have Laverne Cox on the cover of TIME, a really wonderful documentary “Disclosure” about trans representation, and some really positive steps made towards trans healthcare. And right now we're seeing all of these bills popping up across States criminalizing trans youth, and it is important for us to recognize at that moment part of that backlash is because certain progress was being made. Because we were starting to question gender and its fixity today and the ways that transphobia operates. Because people were becoming aware of how vulnerable trans people are in our world to violence. And, so of course, we see a response, which means we have to retool and keep fighting. That’s the charge. The struggle is at this point still in an ending one, but it doesn't mean that along the way that certain victories haven’t amassed that give us hope to propel us forward and be ready when the next attack on freedoms, on rights, on justice emerges, because it will. Right? We’re pushing in ways that are uncomfortable because we’re disrupting the center. We’re disrupting the default. We’re disrupting power. And Power it's not just going to concede because we're demanding it.” Treva B. Lindsey, PhD is a Black feminist historian and Associate Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at The Ohio State University. She is the recipient of several prestigious fellowships including the ACLS/Mellon Scholars and Society Fellowship, The Equity for Women and Girls of Color Fellowship at Harvard University, and The Woodrow Wilson Career Enhancement Fellowship. Lindsey is the founder of the Transformative Black Feminisms Initiative at Ohio State and the co-founder of Black Feminist Night School at Zora’s House in Columbus, Ohio. Her latest book entitled America, Goddam: Violence, Black Women, and The Struggle for Justice explores contemporary violence against Black women and girls and how they mobilize to halt violence against them. · https://trevablindsey.com · www.creativeprocess.info · www.oneplanetpodcast.org | |||
| 20 Oct 2023 | THE ART OF WRITING: NEIL GAIMAN, JERICHO BROWN, ADA LIMÓN, MARGE PIERCY, E.J. KOH & MAX STOSSEL | 00:26:05 | |
Novelists, poets, activists, translators discuss the Art of Writing and The Creative Process. This episode features: NEIL GAIMAN - Writer, Producer, Showrunner - The Sandman, American Gods, Good Omens, Coraline JERICHO BROWN - Pulitzer Prize-winning Poet: The Tradition ADA LIMÓN, U.S. Poet Laureate - The Hurting Kind, The Carrying MARGE PIERCY - Award-winning Novelist, Poet & Activist E.J. KOH - Award-Winning Memoirist & Poet - The Magical Language of Others, A Lesser Love MAX STOSSEL - Award-winning Poet, Filmmaker, Speaker www.creativeprocess.info | |||
| 27 Oct 2023 | Highlights - Carl Safina - Author of “Becoming Wild: How Animal Cultures Raise Families, Create Beauty, and Achieve Peace” | 00:11:10 | |
"So we tend to take living for granted. I think that might be the biggest limitation of human intelligence is to not understand with awe and reverence and love that we live in a miracle that we are part of and that we have the ability to either nurture or destroy. The living world is enormously enriching to human life. I just loved animals. They're always just totally fascinating. They're not here for us. They're just here like we're just here. They are of this world as much as we are of this world. They really have the same claim to life and death and the circle of being." Carl Safina’s lyrical non-fiction writing explores how humans are changing the living world, and what the changes mean for non-human beings and for us all. His work has been recognized with MacArthur, Pew, and Guggenheim Fellowships, and his writing has won Orion, Lannan, and National Academies literary awards and the John Burroughs, James Beard, and George Rabb medals. Safina is the inaugural holder of the endowed chair for nature and humanity at Stony Brook University, where he co-chairs the steering committee of the Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science and is founding president of the not-for-profit Safina Center. He hosted the 10-part PBS series Saving the Ocean with Carl Safina. His writing appears in The New York Times, National Geographic, Audubon, CNN.com, National Geographic News, and other publications. He is the author of ten books including the classic Song for the Blue Ocean, as well as New York Times Bestseller Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel. His most recent book is Becoming Wild: How Animal Cultures Raise Families, Create Beauty, and Achieve Peace. | |||
| 27 Oct 2023 | HALA ALYAN - Palestinian-American Poet, Novelist & Clinical Psychologist - Dayton Literary Peace Prize Winner | 00:44:29 | |
Originally aired 2021 halaalyan.com | |||
| 27 Oct 2023 | Highlights - HALA ALYAN - Dayton Literary Peace Prize Winner - Palestinian-American Poet, Novelist & Clinical Psychologist | 00:09:28 | |
Originally aired 2021 “We become the stories we tell ourselves…I started writing around the time I learned English because we moved to the States soon after my fourth birthday, and so I was here for kindergarten into elementary school. I grasped this new language just as I was learning how to also put things onto the page. Those two things really happened at the same time for me. I entered this world where I felt very different and very other, for all intents and purposes I was set to be raised in Kuwait. And then that of course got turned upside down after the invasion by Saddam. I think that so much of my trying to make sense of the world had to do with the displacement, exile and these experiences that my parents had experienced but then that I had as well as we were fleeing the war. It’s hard to know because I think that language was being formed in my brain at the same time that these things were happening.” Hala Alyan is the author of the novel Salt Houses, winner of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and the Arab American Book Award and a finalist for the Chautauqua Prize, as well as the forthcoming novel The Arsonists’ City, and four award-winning collections of poetry, most recently The Twenty-Ninth Year. Her work has been published by the New Yorker, the Academy of American Poets, Lit Hub, The New York Times Book Review, and Guernica. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband, where she works as a clinical psychologist. halaalyan.com | |||
| 27 Oct 2023 | AI & THE FUTURE OF HUMANITY | 00:06:06 | |
What will the future look like? What are the risks and opportunities of AI? What role can we play in designing the future we want to live in? Voices of philosophers, futurists, AI experts, science fiction authors, activists, and lawyers reflecting on AI, technology, and the Future of Humanity. All voices in this episode are from our interviews for The Creative Process & One Planet Podcast. Voices on this episode are: DR. SUSAN SCHNEIDER NICK BOSTROM BRIAN DAVID JOHNSON Futurist in residence at Arizona State University’s Center for Science and the Imagination, a professor in the School for the Future of Innovation in Society and the Director of the ASU Threatcasting Lab. He is Author of The Future You: How to Create the Life You Always Wanted, Science Fiction Prototyping: Designing the Future with Science Fiction, 21st Century Robot: The Dr. Simon Egerton Stories, Humanity in the Machine: What Comes After Greed?, Screen Future: The Future of Entertainment, Computing, and the Devices We Love. https://csi.asu.edu/people/brian-david-johnson DEAN SPADE ALLEN STEELE www.creativeprocess.info | |||
| 30 Oct 2023 | SUSAN SCHNEIDER - Director, Center for the Future Mind, FAU, Fmr. NASA Chair at NASA | 00:34:27 | |
Will AI become conscious? President Biden has just unveiled a new executive order on AI — the U.S. government’s first action of its kind — requiring new safety assessments, equity and civil rights guidance, and research on AI’s impact on the labor market. With this governance in place, can tech companies be counted on to do the right thing for humanity? Susan Schneider is a philosopher, artificial intelligence expert, and founding director of the Center for the Future Mind at Florida Atlantic University. She is author of Artificial You: AI and the Future of Your Mind, Science Fiction and Philosophy: From Time Travel to Superintelligence, and The Blackwell Companion to Consciousness. She held the NASA Chair with NASA and the Distinguished Scholar Chair at the Library of Congress. She is now working on projects related to advancements in AI policy and technology, drawing from neuroscience research and philosophical developments and writing a new book on the shape of intelligent systems. “So it's hard to tell exactly what the dangers are, but that's certainly one thing that we need to track that beings that are vastly intellectually superior to other beings may not respect the weaker beings, given our own past. It's really hard to tell exactly what will happen. The first concern I have is with surveillance capitalism in this country. The constant surveillance of us because the US is a surveillance capitalist economy, and it's the same elsewhere in the world, right? With Facebook and all these social media companies, things have just been going deeply wrong. And so it leads me to worry about how the future is going to play out. These tech companies aren't going to be doing the right thing for humanity. And this gets to my second worry, which is how's all this going to work for humans exactly? It's not clear where humans will even be needed in the future.” www.fau.edu/artsandletters/philosophy/susan-schneider/index www.creativeprocess.info | |||
| 30 Oct 2023 | Highlights - SUSAN SCHNEIDER - Author of Artificial You: AI and the Future of Your Mind, Fmr. Distinguished Scholar, US Library of Congress | 00:13:08 | |
“So it's hard to tell exactly what the dangers are, but that's certainly one thing that we need to track that beings that are vastly intellectually superior to other beings may not respect the weaker beings, given our own past. It's really hard to tell exactly what will happen. The first concern I have is with surveillance capitalism in this country. The constant surveillance of us because the US is a surveillance capitalist economy, and it's the same elsewhere in the world, right? With Facebook and all these social media companies, things have just been going deeply wrong. And so it leads me to worry about how the future is going to play out. These tech companies aren't going to be doing the right thing for humanity. And this gets to my second worry, which is how's all this going to work for humans exactly? It's not clear where humans will even be needed in the future.” Will AI become conscious? President Biden has just unveiled a new executive order on AI — the U.S. government’s first action of its kind — requiring new safety assessments, equity and civil rights guidance, and research on AI’s impact on the labor market. With this governance in place, can tech companies be counted on to do the right thing for humanity? Susan Schneider is a philosopher, artificial intelligence expert, and founding director of the Center for the Future Mind at Florida Atlantic University. She is author of Artificial You: AI and the Future of Your Mind, Science Fiction and Philosophy: From Time Travel to Superintelligence, and The Blackwell Companion to Consciousness. She held the NASA Chair with NASA and the Distinguished Scholar Chair at the Library of Congress. She is now working on projects related to advancements in AI policy and technology, drawing from neuroscience research and philosophical developments and writing a new book on the shape of intelligent systems. www.fau.edu/artsandletters/philosophy/susan-schneider/index www.creativeprocess.info | |||
| 03 Nov 2023 | BRIAN DAVID JOHNSON - Author of The Future You: How to Create the Life You Always Wanted - Futurist in Residence, ASU’s Center for Science & the Imagination | 00:47:16 | |
Brian David Johnson is Futurist in Residence at Arizona State University’s Center for Science and the Imagination, a professor in the School for the Future of Innovation in Society, and the Director of the ASU Threatcasting Lab. He is Author of The Future You: How to Create the Life You Always Wanted, Science Fiction Prototyping: Designing the Future with Science Fiction, 21st Century Robot: The Dr. Simon Egerton Stories, Humanity in the Machine: What Comes After Greed?, Screen Future: The Future of Entertainment, Computing, and the Devices We Love. "I think, oftentimes, what'll happen as a trap when we talk about technology. People say, 'Well, what do you think is the future of artificial intelligence? Or what is the future of neural interfaces? Or what is the future of this?' And I always pause them and say, 'Wait a minute. If you're just talking about the technology, you're having the wrong conversation because it's not about the technology.' So when people talk about what's the future of AI? I say, I don't know. What do we want the future of AI to be? And I think that's a shift that sounds quite subtle to some people, but it's really important because if you look at any piece of news or anything like that, they talk about AI as if it was a thing that was fully formed, that sprang out of the Earth and is now walking around doing things. And what will AI do in the future and how will it affect our jobs? It's not AI that's doing it. These are people. These are companies. These are organizations that are doing it. And that's where we need to keep our focus. What are those organizations doing. And also what do we want from it as humans?" https://csi.asu.edu/people/brian-david-johnson/ www.creativeprocess.info | |||
| 04 Nov 2023 | Highlights - BRIAN DAVID JOHNSON - Director of the ASU Threatcasting Lab - Author of The Future You | 00:11:00 | |
"I think, oftentimes, what'll happen as a trap when we talk about technology. People say, 'Well, what do you think is the future of artificial intelligence? Or what is the future of neural interfaces? Or what is the future of this?' And I always pause them and say, 'Wait a minute. If you're just talking about the technology, you're having the wrong conversation because it's not about the technology.' So when people talk about what's the future of AI? I say, I don't know. What do we want the future of AI to be? And I think that's a shift that sounds quite subtle to some people, but it's really important because if you look at any piece of news or anything like that, they talk about AI as if it was a thing that was fully formed, that sprang out of the Earth and is now walking around doing things. And what will AI do in the future and how will it affect our jobs? It's not AI that's doing it. These are people. These are companies. These are organizations that are doing it. And that's where we need to keep our focus. What are those organizations doing. And also what do we want from it as humans?" Brian David Johnson is Futurist in Residence at Arizona State University’s Center for Science and the Imagination, a professor in the School for the Future of Innovation in Society, and the Director of the ASU Threatcasting Lab. He is Author of The Future You: How to Create the Life You Always Wanted, Science Fiction Prototyping: Designing the Future with Science Fiction, 21st Century Robot: The Dr. Simon Egerton Stories, Humanity in the Machine: What Comes After Greed?, Screen Future: The Future of Entertainment, Computing, and the Devices We Love. https://csi.asu.edu/people/brian-david-johnson/ www.creativeprocess.info | |||
| 08 Nov 2023 | MICHAEL S. ROTH - Author of The Student: A Short History - President of Wesleyan University | 00:48:06 | |
What is the purpose of education? How are we educating students for the future? What is the importance of the humanities in this age of AI and the rapidly changing workplace? Michael S. Roth is President of Wesleyan University. His books include Beyond the University: Why Liberal Education Matters and Safe Enough Spaces: A Pragmatist’s Approach to Inclusion, Free Speech, and Political Correctness on College Campuses. He's been a Professor of History and the Humanities since 1983, was the Founding Director of the Scripps College Humanities Institute, and was the Associate Director of the Getty Research Institute. His scholarly interests center on how people make sense of the past, and he has authored eight books around this topic, including his latest, The Student: A Short History. “So I wrote this book and it was a lot of fun because I had to learn so much. The book examines three iconic teachers: Confucius, Socrates, and Jesus. And I look at how each of those teachers encourage a certain kind of student. The student as follower, someone who will take on the path that you've developed. In the case of Socrates, the student as critical interlocutor or critical conversation partner, someone who will, in dialogue with you, learn what they don't know, how to take things apart. And in the case of Jesus and the apostles, I look at trying to imitate a way of life to transform themselves to strive towards being the kind of person that Jesus incarnated. And so that's the beginning of the book, these models of studenthood, if I could use that word, and being a teacher. And then I look at the way in which these ideas reverberate in the West across a long period of time. So I'm interested in the idea of the student before there were schools. What did we expect young people to learn even when they weren't going to school?” https://www.wesleyan.edu/academics/faculty/mroth/profile.html https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300250039/the-student/ www.wesleyan.edu www.creativeprocess.info | |||
| 10 Nov 2023 | Highlights - MICHAEL S. ROTH - President of Wesleyan University - Author of The Student: A Short History | 00:12:42 | |
“So I wrote this book and it was a lot of fun because I had to learn so much. The book examines three iconic teachers: Confucius, Socrates, and Jesus. And I look at how each of those teachers encourage a certain kind of student. The student as follower, someone who will take on the path that you've developed. In the case of Socrates, the student as critical interlocutor or critical conversation partner, someone who will, in dialogue with you, learn what they don't know, how to take things apart. And in the case of Jesus and the apostles, I look at trying to imitate a way of life to transform themselves to strive towards being the kind of person that Jesus incarnated. And so that's the beginning of the book, these models of studenthood, if I could use that word, and being a teacher. And then I look at the way in which these ideas reverberate in the West across a long period of time. So I'm interested in the idea of the student before there were schools. What did we expect young people to learn even when they weren't going to school?” What is the purpose of education? How are we educating students for the future? What is the importance of the humanities in this age of AI and the rapidly changing workplace? Michael S. Roth is President of Wesleyan University. His books include Beyond the University: Why Liberal Education Matters and Safe Enough Spaces: A Pragmatist’s Approach to Inclusion, Free Speech, and Political Correctness on College Campuses. He's been a Professor of History and the Humanities since 1983, was the Founding Director of the Scripps College Humanities Institute, and was the Associate Director of the Getty Research Institute. His scholarly interests center on how people make sense of the past, and he has authored eight books around this topic, including his latest, The Student: A Short History. https://www.wesleyan.edu/academics/faculty/mroth/profile.html https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300250039/the-student/ www.wesleyan.edu www.creativeprocess.info | |||
| 10 Nov 2023 | ANDREW KLAVAN - Edgar Award-winning Author of The House of Love and Death - True Crime - Don’t Say a Word | 00:52:39 | |
What makes a good drama? What advantages do human storytellers have over their AI counterparts? Where do ideas come from? And what do spiritual beliefs share with artists' faith in the creative process? Andrew Klavan is the author of such internationally bestselling crime novels as True Crime, filmed by Clint Eastwood, Don’t Say A Word, filmed starring Michael Douglas, Empire of Lies and When Christmas Comes. He has been nominated for the Mystery Writers of America’s Edgar Award five times and has won twice. He wrote the screenplays to A Shock to The System starring Michael Caine, One Missed Call starring Edward Burns, and Gosnell: The Trial of America’s Biggest Serial Killer starring Dean Cain. His essays have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times, his political satire videos have been viewed by tens of millions of people, and he hosts a popular podcast The Andrew Klavan Show at the Daily Wire. He is also the author of a memoir about his religious journey The Great Good Thing: A Secular Jew Comes to Faith in Christ and the USA Today bestseller The Truth and Beauty: How the Lives and Works of England's Greatest Poets Point the Way to a Deeper Understanding of the Words of Jesus. His latest crime novel is The House of Love and Death, the third book in the Cameron Winter series. "Resolved questions don't actually make for good drama, and they don't actually help people on their own journeys. If you just tell people that you have all the answers, which I don't, then you're, first of all, lying to them. And second of all, you're boring. And it's just a lecture and propaganda that you're giving people. A story can be interpreted, but a great story can be interpreted different ways because you're looking at it from different angles. And there might be wrong interpretations, but there might be many correct interpretations. And so I'm not looking for...I'm not telling allegories. I'm trying to communicate a vision of life. I'm trying to communicate what I've seen of life to you. That, to me, is what art is. It is the communication of the internal experience of being human. But when you look at your life, where does the joy come from? It comes from growing. It comes from changing. It comes from finding out something, having something happen to you that never happened before. And I think that it's very encouraging to me that if you are growing towards something infinite, there's no end to that journey. You can always become better and more and life can become more abundant." www.andrewklavan.com www.creativeprocess.info | |||
| 13 Nov 2023 | LEAH THOMAS - Author of The Intersectional Environmentalist - Founder of IE Platform & @GreenGirlLeah | 00:36:35 | |
Leah Thomas is an intersectional environmental activist and eco-communicator based in Southern California. She’s passionate about advocating for and exploring the relationship between social justice and environmentalism and was the first to define the term “Intersectional Environmentalism.” She is the founder of @greengirlleah and The Intersectional Environmentalist platform. Her articles on this topic have appeared in Vogue, Elle, The Good Trade, and Youth to the People and she has been featured in Harper’s Bazaar, W Magazine, Domino, GOOP, Fashionista, BuzzFeed, and numerous podcasts. She has a B.S. in Environmental Science and Policy from Chapman University and worked for the National Park Service and Patagonia headquarters before pursuing activism full time. She lives in Carpinteria, California. She is the author of The Intersectional Environmentalist: How to Dismantle Systems of Oppression to Protect People + Planet, and Winner of the Creative Force Foundation Award 2023. "Intersectional Environmentalism to me means prioritizing social justice in environmental movements and really thinking about what communities are most impacted by different environmental injustices. So, for example, in the United States, a lot of communities of color, Black, Indigenous communities, and also lower-income communities struggle with things like unclean air and unclean water, and those are environmental injustices. So I thought it was important to have an intersectional approach to environmental advocacy that doesn't ignore these things and these intersections of identity, but explores them to make sure that every community, especially those most impacted by environmental injustices, no longer are. And I wanted to write a really accessible introduction that was targeted at school kids or anyone who wants to learn more." www.intersectionalenvironmentalist.com Season 2 of Business & Society focuses on CEOs , Sustainability & Environmental Solutions | |||
| 20 Nov 2023 | MARY HAYASHI - Healthcare Advocate, Former Assemblymember - Author of Women in Politics | 00:49:57 | |
A recent UN report shows that women are underrepresented at all levels of decision-making worldwide. They say that women in executive government positions and gender equality in the highest positions of power will not be reached for another 130 years. How can we close the gender gap and achieve true representation? With a distinguished career in public service, Mary Hayashi has spearheaded substantial reforms in mental health services, championed gender equality, and forged powerful, unprecedented partnerships for social causes that previously had no financial or public backing. Recognized as “Legislator of the Year” by the American Red Cross and the California Medical Association, Mary has also been featured on Redbook’s “Mothers and Shakers” list and Ladies’ Home Journal ’s “Women to Watch.” Mary remains a steadfast proponent of social justice expansion and the rights of underrepresented communities. She is author of Far From Home: Shattering the Myth of the Model Minority, and Women in Politics: Breaking Down the Barriers to Achieve True Representation. "My parents expected me to go to college just enough that I could find somebody, marry, and have kids. Because over 21, you're like an old maid and nobody's going to want to marry you. That was really their mentality. I'd only been in the country for seven years at that time and just kind of feeling lost and didn't know what I wanted to do with my life. And one day I signed up for this Women's Studies class. And I thought it was more about how I could be a better woman to my husband and my kids, that type of home economics class. And that's when I was introduced to feminist literature. And I started reading about the women's movement and how Gloria Steinem went from being a Playboy model to becoming a feminist and how that transpired. And when I started reading about these women who did what they did, a light bulb went on my head that I actually could have a career and do something with my life. And so, I'm not a professional writer. I'm a politician. I do government affairs work but publishing a book is a way to help other women realize their path because that's what feminist literature did for me." www.maryhayashi.com www.creativeprocess.info | |||
| 11 Nov 2023 | Highlights - ANDREW KLAVAN - Author of True Crime dir. Clint Eastwood - Don’t Say a Word starring Michael Douglas | 00:09:48 | |
"Resolved questions don't actually make for good drama, and they don't actually help people on their own journeys. If you just tell people that you have all the answers, which I don't, then you're, first of all, lying to them. And second of all, you're boring. And it's just a lecture and propaganda that you're giving people. A story can be interpreted, but a great story can be interpreted different ways because you're looking at it from different angles. And there might be wrong interpretations, but there might be many correct interpretations. And so I'm not looking for...I'm not telling allegories. I'm trying to communicate a vision of life. I'm trying to communicate what I've seen of life to you. That, to me, is what art is. It is the communication of the internal experience of being human. But when you look at your life, where does the joy come from? It comes from growing. It comes from changing. It comes from finding out something, having something happen to you that never happened before. And I think that it's very encouraging to me that if you are growing towards something infinite, there's no end to that journey. You can always become better and more and life can become more abundant." What makes a good drama? What advantages do human storytellers have over their AI counterparts? Where do ideas come from? And what do spiritual beliefs share with artists' faith in the creative process? Andrew Klavan is the author of such internationally bestselling crime novels as True Crime, filmed by Clint Eastwood, Don’t Say A Word, filmed starring Michael Douglas, Empire of Lies and When Christmas Comes. He has been nominated for the Mystery Writers of America’s Edgar Award five times and has won twice. He wrote the screenplays to A Shock to The System starring Michael Caine, One Missed Call starring Edward Burns, and Gosnell: The Trial of America’s Biggest Serial Killer starring Dean Cain. His essays have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times, his political satire videos have been viewed by tens of millions of people, and he hosts a popular podcast The Andrew Klavan Show at the Daily Wire. He is also the author of a memoir about his religious journey The Great Good Thing: A Secular Jew Comes to Faith in Christ and the USA Today bestseller The Truth and Beauty: How the Lives and Works of England's Greatest Poets Point the Way to a Deeper Understanding of the Words of Jesus. His latest crime novel is The House of Love and Death, the third book in the Cameron Winter series. www.andrewklavan.com www.creativeprocess.info | |||
| 24 Nov 2023 | GLADYS KALEMA-ZIKUSOKA - Founder/CEO, Conservation Through Public Health - UN Champion of the Earth for Science & Innovation | 00:51:25 | |
How do some people face incredible tragedies and find within these experiences inspiration to improve the lives of others? Our guest today lost her grandfather, who was the assassinated Prime Minister of the Buganda Kingdom, and her father, who was disappeared by Idi Amin, and yet she went on to become a leading conservationist. Dr. Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka is Uganda's first full-time wildlife veterinarian and the Founder and CEO of Conservation Through Public Health. Interested in animals from a young age, she pursued her studies at the Royal Veterinary College at the University of London before returning to Uganda. In the time since, she's worked tirelessly to preserve the animals of Uganda, being awarded the Whitley Gold Award, Sierra Club Earth Care Award, Edinburgh Medal, National Geographic Explorer, and most recently an appointment to become a United Nations Champion of the Earth for Science and Innovation. She is author of Walking with Gorillas: The Journey of an African Wildlife Vet. "I have always wanted to be around animals and growing up, I cannot remember a time when there were no pets at home. My elder brother Apollo Katerega, who was 10 years older than me, also liked animals, especially dogs and was always bringing stray dogs and cats home. I was the last born of six children. My sister, Veronica Nakibule, who I followed, was five years older than me so were just outside each other's age bracket for playing. Thus the pets at home became my main companions, and we developed a strong bond. Along the way, I eventually fulfilled my lifelong dream to not only become a veterinarian, but a wildlife veterinarian. In 1996, I began to take care of the critically endangered mountain gorillas of Uganda. Since then, they've increased in number from six hundred and fifty to 1,063 individuals in Uganda, Rwanda, and the Democratic Republic of Congo(DRC). There are no mountain gorillas surviving in zoos outside their range countries, and their only hope is to keep the population thriving where they are naturally found. The gorillas have shaped my life's calling since I first studied them as a student at the Royal Veterinary College, University of London. I've treated them as the first full-time wildlife veterinarian in Uganda and supported them as Founder and Chief Executive Officer of a grassroots NGO and nonprofit, Conservation Through Public Health, more commonly known as 'CTPH,' that promotes biodiversity conservation through not only improving the health of gorillas and other wildlife, but also the health and wellbeing of the people and livestock with whom they share their fragile habitats." www.ctph.org www.creativeprocess.info | |||
| 27 Nov 2023 | Speaking Out of Place: BILL McKIBBEN, Co-Founder of 350.org, Founder Third Act & CAROLINE LEVINE, Author of The Activist Humanist | 00:36:06 | |
In this episode of the Speaking Out of Place podcast, Professor David Palumbo-Liu talks with legendary climate activist Bill McKibben and scholar Caroline Levine. McKibben relates his long struggle to get companies to divest from fossil fuels and for the world in general to act immediately to seriously and substantially address this existential crisis. Levine tells of her efforts to get the giant pension fund, TIAA-CREF, to divest. She also talks about her new book, The Activist Humanist, and its relation to both her teaching and her activism. Bill McKibben is founder of Third Act, which organizes people over the age of 60 for action on climate and justice. His 1989 book The End of Nature is regarded as the first book for a general audience about climate change, and has appeared in 24 languages. He’s gone on to write 20 books, and his work appears regularly in periodicals from the New Yorker to Rolling Stone. He serves as the Schumann Distinguished Scholar in Environmental Studies at Middlebury College, as a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and he has won the Gandhi Peace Prize as well as honorary degrees from 20 colleges and universities. He was awarded the Right Livelihood Award, sometimes called the alternative Nobel, in the Swedish Parliament. Foreign Policy named him to its inaugural list of the world’s 100 most important global thinkers. McKibben helped found 350.org, the first global grassroots climate campaign, which has organized protests on every continent, including Antarctica, for climate action. He played a leading role in launching the opposition to big oil pipeline projects like Keystone XL, and the fossil fuel divestment campaign, which has become the biggest anti-corporate campaign in history, with endowments worth more than $40 trillion stepping back from oil, gas and coal. He stepped down as board chair of 350 in 2015, and left the board and stepped down from his volunteer role as senior adviser in 2020, accepting emeritus status. He lives in the mountains above Lake Champlain with his wife, the writer Sue Halpern, where he spends as much time as possible outdoors. In 2014, biologists credited his career by naming a new species of woodland gnat—Megophthalmidia mckibbeni–in his honor. Caroline Levine has spent her career asking how and why the humanities and the arts matter, especially in democratic societies. She argues for an understanding of forms and structures as essential both to understanding links between art and society and to the challenge of taking meaningful political action. She is the author of four books. The most recent, The Activist Humanist: Form and Method in the Climate Crisis (Princeton University Press 2023), grows out of the theoretical work of Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network (2015, winner of the James Russell Lowell Prize from the MLA, and named one of Flavorwire’s “10 Must-Read Academic Books of 2015”). Levine has also published The Serious Pleasures of Suspense: Victorian Realism and Narrative Doubt (2003, winner of the Perkins Prize for the best book in narrative studies) and Provoking Democracy: Why We Need the Arts (2007). "Viewed one way, we live in a very hopeful moment. Thanks to in large part the work of university scientists and engineers, we now live on a planet where the cheapest way to produce power is to point a sheet of glass at the sun. That is to say, we could run our Earth on energy from heaven instead of hell, and we could do it fast. The fast is the hard part here. The only difference between all the examples of the long victories of social justice activism that we're in now is that this one is a time-limited problem. If we don't solve it fast, then no one's got a plan for how you refreeze the Arctic once you've melted it. And so we have to move very quickly. Our systems are not designed to move quickly. It's the easiest thing in the world to slow down and delay change, which is all that the fossil fuel industry at this point is trying to do, and that means that it's time for maximum effort from all of us. The story to tell is that the planet is outside its comfort zone, so we need to be outside ours." https://billmckibben.com https://english.cornell.edu/caroline-levine www.palumbo-liu.com | |||
| 13 Nov 2023 | Highlights - LEAH THOMAS - Author of The Intersectional Environmentalist: How to Dismantle Systems of Oppression to Protect People + Planet | 00:10:34 | |
"Intersectional Environmentalism to me means prioritizing social justice in environmental movements and really thinking about what communities are most impacted by different environmental injustices. So, for example, in the United States, a lot of communities of color, Black, Indigenous communities, and also lower-income communities struggle with things like unclean air and unclean water, and those are environmental injustices. So I thought it was important to have an intersectional approach to environmental advocacy that doesn't ignore these things and these intersections of identity, but explores them to make sure that every community, especially those most impacted by environmental injustices, no longer are. And I wanted to write a really accessible introduction that was targeted at school kids or anyone who wants to learn more." Leah Thomas is an intersectional environmental activist and eco-communicator based in Southern California. She’s passionate about advocating for and exploring the relationship between social justice and environmentalism and was the first to define the term “Intersectional Environmentalism.” She is the founder of @greengirlleah and The Intersectional Environmentalist platform. Her articles on this topic have appeared in Vogue, Elle, The Good Trade, and Youth to the People and she has been featured in Harper’s Bazaar, W Magazine, Domino, GOOP, Fashionista, BuzzFeed, and numerous podcasts. She has a B.S. in Environmental Science and Policy from Chapman University and worked for the National Park Service and Patagonia headquarters before pursuing activism full time. She lives in Carpinteria, California. She is the author of The Intersectional Environmentalist: How to Dismantle Systems of Oppression to Protect People + Planet, and Winner of the Creative Force Foundation Award 2023. www.intersectionalenvironmentalist.com Season 2 of Business & Society focuses on CEOs , Sustainability & Environmental Solutions | |||
| 29 Nov 2023 | HOWARD GARDNER - Author of A Synthesizing Mind & Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences - Co-director of The Good Project | 00:50:09 | |
How do we define intelligence? What is the point of creativity and intelligence if we are not creating good in the world? In this age of AI, what is the importance of a synthesizing mind? Howard Gardner, Research Professor of Cognition and Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, an author of over 30 books, translated into 32 languages, and several hundred articles, is best known for his theory of multiple intelligences, a critique of the notion that there exists but a single human intelligence that can be assessed by standard psychometric instruments. He has twice been selected by Foreign Policy and Prospect magazines as one of the 100 most influential public intellectuals in the world. In the last few years, Gardner has been studying the nature of human synthesizing, a topic introduced in his 2020 memoir, A Synthesizing Mind. For 28 years, with David Perkins, he was Co-Director of Harvard Project Zero, and in more recent years has served in a variety of leadership positions. Since the middle 1990s, Gardner has directed The Good Project, a group of initiatives, founded in collaboration with psychologists Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and William Damon. The project promotes excellence, engagement, and ethics in education, preparing students to become good workers and good citizens who contribute to the overall well-being of society. Through research-based concepts, frameworks, and resources, The Good Project seeks to help students reflect upon the ethical dilemmas that arise in everyday life and give them the tools to make thoughtful decisions. "And I became interested in synthesis and I wrote the memoir quite a while ago, but now with the advent of large language instruments or ChatGPT, the pressure to figure out what synthesis is, what these computing systems can or can't do that human beings are still the privileged cohort in carrying out those tasks, that's made the interest in synthesis more important than ever. If we're trying to decide what policy to cover, whether it's an economic policy about interest rates, or whether - we're talking now during the beginning of the war in the Middle East - what policies to follow militarily, economically, and ethically. For that matter, do we entrust that to some kind of a computational system, or is this something that human judgment needs to be brought to bear? And if so, how and at what point? And these are quintessential synthesizing questions. You can't just look up and say, 'Well, what should we do with the Gaza Strip? Or what should we do in Japan, which has had low interest rates, but the rest of the world has got very high inflation.' These are not things where we just want to press a button and get the answer. These are things we want to discuss and debate and review and maybe even pit one large language instrument against another and see do they come up with the same answers. They might well not." www.howardgardner.com www.creativeprocess.info | |||
| 05 Dec 2023 | DUANE L. CADY - Philosopher, Author of Moral Vision: How Everyday Life Shapes Ethical Thinking & From Warism to Pacifism | 00:47:32 | |
How can we resolve conflicts without compromising our ethics and moral vision? Each year, wars are being fought in our name or with our support that citizens never get an opportunity to vote on. How can we make our voices heard? “Warism, taking war for granted as morally acceptable, even morally required, is the primary obstacle to peace.” Duane L. Cady is a philosopher and Professor Emeritus at Hamline University. He was nominated for the 1991 Grawemeyer World Order Award, was named Outstanding Educator of the Year by the United Methodist Foundation for Higher Education, and a festschiff in his honor was published in 2012. Cady is best known for his works on pacifism, including Moral Vision: How Everyday Life Shapes Ethical Thinking, and From Warism to Pacifism: A Moral Continuum. "So when I think about the importance of the liberal arts and the humanities, they literally are the skills that free us. I think our freedom depends on the liberal arts, learning about music, learning about mathematics, learning about history, reading books, the kinds of things that we need that are not going to turn into a market job, at least not immediately. But employers understand they need people who can think, and who are articulate when it comes to speaking and writing. And I also think the humanities generally are well-named because they in fact humanize us. Once we see the rich literature, artwork, theater, and so on, of previous generations, it gives us a much deeper perspective on who we might be, and how we might put our freedom and lives to good use." www.creativeprocess.info | |||
| 08 Dec 2023 | JULIAN LENNON - Singer-songwriter, Author, Doc Filmmaker, Exec. Producer of Common Ground | 00:41:31 | |
How can the arts inspire us to lead lives of greater meaning and connection? What kind of world are we leaving for future generations? Julian Lennon is a Grammy-nominated singer-songwriter, photographer, documentary filmmaker, and NYTimes bestselling author of children's books. Executive Producer of Common Ground and its predecessor Kiss the Ground, which reached over 1 billion people and inspired the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) to put $20 billion toward soil health. The natural world and indigenous people are also the focus of Lennon’s other documentaries Whaledreamers, and Women of the White Buffalo. In 2007, Julian founded the global environmental and humanitarian organization The White Feather Foundation, whose key initiatives are education, health, conservation, and the protection of indigenous culture, causes he also advances through his photography, exhibited across the US and Europe. His latest album Jude spans a body of work created over the last 30 years. Julian was named a Peace Laureate by UNESCO in 2020. "We're polluting the air that we breathe. We're polluting the seas and the waters. We're polluting the soil. We're polluting every aspect of our lives. So there's no getting away from it. That's absolutely sure. And yes, there is absolutely a way forward to make change. And yes, it is a question of relearning so much, without question. I mean, part of the reason that not only did I start the White Feather Foundation with indigenous tribes in mind back then. And then, one of the key ways forward for me was education, of course. I think that's been part of our problem worldwide. People just haven't known how serious or taken it seriously enough before. And there's so much propaganda that's misinformation that's pushed out into the world. You see in the film as well how the truth gets pushed away and shoved aside by money and greed and corporations. And that's a really difficult one to get over, but, you know, writing the children's books was a way to get in the same theme. Again, not shoving it down their throats, but presenting the situation as is and getting children to say...Reading and asking and reminding their parents, and relearning as well. Why is there plastic in the water? Why don't they have any water over there? Why, do you know, why? And there are answers for all of this, and the parents need to pick up on that too. But this should be made, you know, these two films and many more should be mandatory. I mean, you want to talk about Clockwork Orange...I don't mean pinning their eyes back, you know, forcing them to watch the film, but certainly, this really should become part of the curriculum in many ways. I hate to use the word logic all the time, but if you're not ignorant and you have an understanding about the world around you, then you know how you can help it. You can know how to make changes and how to move forward. And this is exactly what these films do. So, may that Josh and Rebecca and everybody who supports them continue moving forward and making more films because until things change, which they are changing, thankfully. I think it's a real credit to Josh and Rebecca, how many lives they've changed and how many eyes and ears they've opened through the course of their filmmaking." https://julianlennon.com www.creativeprocess.info | |||
| 08 Dec 2023 | Highlights - JULIAN LENNON - Singer-songwriter, Author, Founder of The White Feather Foundation, Doc Filmmaker | 00:17:11 | |
"We're polluting the air that we breathe. We're polluting the seas and the waters. We're polluting the soil. We're polluting every aspect of our lives. So there's no getting away from it. That's absolutely sure. And yes, there is absolutely a way forward to make change. And yes, it is a question of relearning so much, without question. I mean, part of the reason that not only did I start the White Feather Foundation with indigenous tribes in mind back then. And then, one of the key ways forward for me was education, of course. I think that's been part of our problem worldwide. People just haven't known how serious or taken it seriously enough before. And there's so much propaganda that's misinformation that's pushed out into the world. You see in the film as well how the truth gets pushed away and shoved aside by money and greed and corporations. And that's a really difficult one to get over, but, you know, writing the children's books was a way to get in the same theme. Again, not shoving it down their throats, but presenting the situation as is and getting children to say...Reading and asking and reminding their parents, and relearning as well. Why is there plastic in the water? Why don't they have any water over there? Why, do you know, why? And there are answers for all of this, and the parents need to pick up on that too. But this should be made, you know, these two films and many more should be mandatory. I mean, you want to talk about Clockwork Orange...I don't mean pinning their eyes back, you know, forcing them to watch the film, but certainly, this really should become part of the curriculum in many ways. I hate to use the word logic all the time, but if you're not ignorant and you have an understanding about the world around you, then you know how you can help it. You can know how to make changes and how to move forward. And this is exactly what these films do. So, may that Josh and Rebecca and everybody who supports them continue moving forward and making more films because until things change, which they are changing, thankfully. I think it's a real credit to Josh and Rebecca, how many lives they've changed and how many eyes and ears they've opened through the course of their filmmaking." How can the arts inspire us to lead lives of greater meaning and connection? What kind of world are we leaving for future generations? Julian Lennon is a Grammy-nominated singer-songwriter, photographer, documentary filmmaker, and NYTimes bestselling author of children's books. Executive Producer of Common Ground and its predecessor Kiss the Ground, which reached over 1 billion people and inspired the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) to put $20 billion toward soil health. The natural world and indigenous people are also the focus of Lennon’s other documentaries Whaledreamers, and Women of the White Buffalo. In 2007, Julian founded the global environmental and humanitarian organization The White Feather Foundation, whose key initiatives are education, health, conservation, and the protection of indigenous culture, causes he also advances through his photography, exhibited across the US and Europe. His latest album Jude spans a body of work created over the last 30 years. Julian was named a Peace Laureate by UNESCO in 2020. https://julianlennon.com www.creativeprocess.info | |||
| 12 Dec 2023 | MAX BENNETT - Author of A Brief History of Intelligence: Evolution, AI, and the Five Breakthroughs That Made Our Brains - CEO of Alby | 00:55:39 | |
The more the science of intelligence (both human and artificial) advances, the more it holds the potential for great benefits and dangers to society. Max Bennett is the cofounder and CEO of Alby, a start-up that helps companies integrate large language models into their websites to create guided shopping and search experiences. Previously, Bennett was the cofounder and chief product officer of Bluecore, one of the fastest growing companies in the U.S., providing AI technologies to some of the largest companies in the world. Bluecore has been featured in the annual Inc. 500 fastest growing companies, as well as Glassdoor’s 50 best places to work in the U.S. Bluecore was recently valued at over $1 billion. Bennett holds several patents for AI technologies and has published numerous scientific papers in peer-reviewed journals on the topics of evolutionary neuroscience and the neocortex. He has been featured on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list as well as the Built In NYC’s 30 Tech Leaders Under 30. He is the author of A Brief History of Intelligence: Evolution, AI, and the Five Breakthroughs That Made Our Brains. "When I read some speculative fiction that moves me, for example, part of the reason it moves me is because it came from a human mind who experienced something they were trying to share with a fellow human mind. And it moves me because I can tell in the writing that another human felt something and wanted to share what they experienced, the pain or the joy they felt, or the story they built in their heads. And what I think is interesting about the stories created by ChatGPT is none of them have been any good yet. To me, the only distinction I can draw is when humans do it, there is a message imbued in the art because I am experiencing something as a feeling, thinking human, and I am channeling that into the thing that I'm creating as a little message gift and human solidarity to others who might experience it themselves. And I think that is something missing from AI that does that. And I think it might not be that they're not quote-unquote creative, but that the creativeness is almost vacuous because it lacks that message from another thinking sentient being that's trying to communicate with us. And that's why when we look at it, we see something feels missing. That's hard to articulate. So it begs an interesting question: Do you need to feel and suffer a little bit and to get the trials and triumphs of the human experience to write art that is compelling or to create art that is compelling and meaningful to a fellow human?" www.abriefhistoryofintelligence.com/ | |||
| 22 Dec 2023 | ROBERT WALDINGER - Co-Author of The Good Life: Lessons from the World's Longest Scientific Study of Happiness | 00:38:22 | |
What makes a good life? How important are relationships in helping us lead happy and meaningful lives? Dr. Robert Waldinger is a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, director of the Harvard Study of Adult Development at Massachusetts General Hospital, and cofounder of the Lifespan Research Foundation. Dr. Waldinger received his AB from Harvard College and his MD from Harvard Medical School. He is a practicing psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, and he directs a psychotherapy teaching program for Harvard psychiatry residents. He is also a Zen master (Roshi) and teaches meditation in New England and around the world. His TED Talk about the Harvard study “What makes a good life?” has been viewed more than 42 million times and is one of the 10 most watched TED Talks ever. He is co-author of The Good Life: Lessons from the World's Longest Scientific Study of Happiness. "One of the big differences I've noticed talking with people from more communally oriented cultures is that American culture has a strong emphasis on the individual on individual happiness, individual achievement on individual self-expression. And there are other cultures where the community, the family, and the neighborhood where they live and the well-being of others are paramount and are the first thing they think about. The most exemplary instance of that is in Bhutan, where they can't even propose a law for the legislature to consider unless they have a full section describing the effect on the community of any given law, the effect on the well-being of the whole population. So nothing is about the individual. It's all about the collective." https://www.robertwaldinger.com/ www.creativeprocess.info | |||
| 22 Dec 2023 | What makes a good life? - Highlights - ROBERT WALDINGER, Psychiatrist, Author, Zen Priest | 00:10:35 | |
"One of the big differences I've noticed talking with people from more communally oriented cultures is that American culture has a strong emphasis on the individual on individual happiness, individual achievement on individual self-expression. And there are other cultures where the community, the family, and the neighborhood where they live and the well-being of others are paramount and are the first thing they think about. The most exemplary instance of that is in Bhutan, where they can't even propose a law for the legislature to consider unless they have a full section describing the effect on the community of any given law, the effect on the well-being of the whole population. So nothing is about the individual. It's all about the collective." What makes a good life? How important are relationships in helping us lead happy and meaningful lives? Dr. Robert Waldinger is a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, director of the Harvard Study of Adult Development at Massachusetts General Hospital, and cofounder of the Lifespan Research Foundation. Dr. Waldinger received his AB from Harvard College and his MD from Harvard Medical School. He is a practicing psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, and he directs a psychotherapy teaching program for Harvard psychiatry residents. He is also a Zen master (Roshi) and teaches meditation in New England and around the world. His TED Talk about the Harvard study “What makes a good life?” has been viewed more than 42 million times and is one of the 10 most watched TED Talks ever. He is co-author of The Good Life: Lessons from the World's Longest Scientific Study of Happiness. https://www.robertwaldinger.com/ www.creativeprocess.info | |||
| 27 Dec 2023 | MELVIN VOPSON - Physicist - Author of Reality Reloaded: The Scientific Case for a Simulated Universe | 00:42:24 | |
Are we living in a Simulated Universe? How will AI impact the future of work, society & education? Dr. Melvin M. Vopson is Associate Professor of Physics at the University of Portsmouth, Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, Chartered Physicist and Fellow of the Institute of Physics. He is the co-founder and CEO of the Information Physics Institute, editor-in-chief of the IPI Letters and Emerging Minds Journal for Student Research. He is the author of Reality Reloaded: The Scientific Case for a Simulated Universe. Dr. Vopson has a wide-ranging scientific expertise in experimental, applied and theoretical physics that is internationally recognized. He has published over 100 research articles, achieving over 2500 citations. "These ideas go as far back as Ancient Greece, which basically gave birth to two lines of thinking, two ideologies, materialism and idealism. And the idealist thinkers like Plato regarded reality as a projection of our minds, as something that is not real. And the only thing that is real is our consciousness and our minds and everything else around us is just constructs of our proception and projections. And that was a philosophy that was opposed to materialism, which regards the world as in a materialistic way, made up of atoms and matter and our minds are a product of these chemical reactions and the matter is coming together and forming our minds and consciousness. And everything in the world exists regardless of our consciousness or our minds and the universe is there and it's a materialistic view of the world. So these are two competing ideologies, and this is actually how we see the world today in a materialistic way. What the simulated universe philosophical idea belongs to is this idealistic view of the world. And the idealism philosophy morphs into something else in this simulation hypothesis where not only everything is a simulated construct, but our minds and our consciousness are part of it. So for example, Plato saw our minds and, if you want, our spirit as a fundamental central piece and the only real thing, and everything emerged from this. The simulated hypothesis assumes that everything, including our minds and consciousness, is part of a simulation. So it's a bit of a modern iteration of idealism which has been triggered by these recent developments in advancing technologies and computing science that began in the 1940s with the development of silicon technologies, early microchips, and digital computers creating digital memories. This highly accelerated rate of development, in terms of our technological progress, in less than a hundred years going from analog technologies means we are entering a new era of quantum computers, like generative AI, and artificial intelligence, and all these VRs are a reality today. So this development has helped in some ways to lead to the emergence of this simulated universe concept because we are now reaching a new technological level where we see that we are beginning to simulate virtual realities and they are becoming more and more immersive and sophisticated." https://www.port.ac.uk/about-us/structure-and-governance/our-people/our-staff/melvin-vopson https://ipipublishing.org/index.php/ipil/RR www.creativeprocess.info | |||
| 28 Dec 2023 | Are we living in a Simulated Universe? - Highlights - MELVIN VOPSON | 00:09:19 | |
"These ideas go as far back as Ancient Greece, which basically gave birth to two lines of thinking, two ideologies, materialism and idealism. And the idealist thinkers like Plato regarded reality as a projection of our minds, as something that is not real. And the only thing that is real is our consciousness and our minds and everything else around us is just constructs of our proception and projections. And that was a philosophy that was opposed to materialism, which regards the world as in a materialistic way, made up of atoms and matter and our minds are a product of these chemical reactions and the matter is coming together and forming our minds and consciousness. And everything in the world exists regardless of our consciousness or our minds and the universe is there and it's a materialistic view of the world. So these are two competing ideologies, and this is actually how we see the world today in a materialistic way. What the simulated universe philosophical idea belongs to is this idealistic view of the world. And the idealism philosophy morphs into something else in this simulation hypothesis where not only everything is a simulated construct, but our minds and our consciousness are part of it. So for example, Plato saw our minds and, if you want, our spirit as a fundamental central piece and the only real thing, and everything emerged from this. The simulated hypothesis assumes that everything, including our minds and consciousness, is part of a simulation. So it's a bit of a modern iteration of idealism which has been triggered by these recent developments in advancing technologies and computing science that began in the 1940s with the development of silicon technologies, early microchips, and digital computers creating digital memories. This highly accelerated rate of development, in terms of our technological progress, in less than a hundred years going from analog technologies means we are entering a new era of quantum computers, like generative AI, and artificial intelligence, and all these VRs are a reality today. So this development has helped in some ways to lead to the emergence of this simulated universe concept because we are now reaching a new technological level where we see that we are beginning to simulate virtual realities and they are becoming more and more immersive and sophisticated." Dr. Melvin M. Vopson is Associate Professor of Physics at the University of Portsmouth, Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, Chartered Physicist and Fellow of the Institute of Physics. He is the co-founder and CEO of the Information Physics Institute, editor-in-chief of the IPI Letters and Emerging Minds Journal for Student Research. He is the author of Reality Reloaded: The Scientific Case for a Simulated Universe. Dr. Vopson has a wide-ranging scientific expertise in experimental, applied and theoretical physics that is internationally recognized. He has published over 100 research articles, achieving over 2500 citations. https://www.port.ac.uk/about-us/structure-and-governance/our-people/our-staff/melvin-vopson https://ipipublishing.org/index.php/ipil/RR www.creativeprocess.info | |||
| 05 Jan 2024 | RUPERT SHELDRAKE - Biologist & Author of The Science Delusion, The Presence of the Past | 00:49:30 | |
How do we navigate ambiguity and uncertainty? Moving beyond linear thinking into instinct and intuition, we might discover other sources within ourselves that lie beyond the boundaries of science and reason. Rupert Sheldrake is a biologist and author best known for his hypothesis of morphic resonance. His many books include The Science Delusion, The Presence of the Past, and Ways to Go Beyond and Why They Work. At Cambridge University, Dr. Sheldrake worked in developmental biology as a fellow of Clare College. From 2005 to 2010, he was director of the Perrott Warrick Project for research on unexplained human and animal abilities, funded by Trinity College Cambridge. He was among the top 100 global thought leaders for 2013, as ranked by the Duttweiler Institute. "The idea that the laws of nature are fixed is taken for granted by almost all scientists and within physics, within cosmology, it leads to an enormous realm of speculation, which I think is totally unnecessary. We're assuming the laws of nature are fixed. Most of science assumes this, but is it really so in an evolving universe? Why shouldn't the laws evolve? And if we think about that, then we realize that actually, the whole idea of a law of nature is a metaphor. It's based on human laws. I mean, after all, dogs and cats don't obey laws. And in tribes, they don't even have laws. They have customs. So it's only in civilized societies that you have laws. And then if we think through that metaphor, then actually the laws do change. All artists are influenced by other artists and by things in the collective culture, and I think that morphic resonance as collective memory would say that all of us draw unconsciously as well as consciously on a collective memory and all animals draw on a collective memory of their kind as well. We don't know where it comes from, but there's true creativity involved in evolution, both human and natural." www.amazon.com/Science-Delusion/dp/1529393221/?tag=sheldrake-20 www.amazon.com/Science-Set-Free-Paths-Discovery/dp/0770436722/?tag=sheldrake-20 | |||
| 05 Jan 2024 | Highlights - How do we navigate ambiguity, uncertainty & move beyond linear thinking? - RUPERT SHELDRAKE | 00:15:35 | |
"The idea that the laws of nature are fixed is taken for granted by almost all scientists and within physics, within cosmology, it leads to an enormous realm of speculation, which I think is totally unnecessary. We're assuming the laws of nature are fixed. Most of science assumes this, but is it really so in an evolving universe? Why shouldn't the laws evolve? And if we think about that, then we realize that actually, the whole idea of a law of nature is a metaphor. It's based on human laws. I mean, after all, dogs and cats don't obey laws. And in tribes, they don't even have laws. They have customs. So it's only in civilized societies that you have laws. And then if we think through that metaphor, then actually the laws do change. All artists are influenced by other artists and by things in the collective culture, and I think that morphic resonance as collective memory would say that all of us draw unconsciously as well as consciously on a collective memory and all animals draw on a collective memory of their kind as well. We don't know where it comes from, but there's true creativity involved in evolution, both human and natural." How do we navigate ambiguity and uncertainty? Moving beyond linear thinking into instinct and intuition, we might discover other sources within ourselves that lie beyond the boundaries of science and reason. Rupert Sheldrake is a biologist and author best known for his hypothesis of morphic resonance. His many books include The Science Delusion, The Presence of the Past, and Ways to Go Beyond and Why They Work. At Cambridge University, Dr. Sheldrake worked in developmental biology as a fellow of Clare College. From 2005 to 2010, he was director of the Perrott Warrick Project for research on unexplained human and animal abilities, funded by Trinity College Cambridge. He was among the top 100 global thought leaders for 2013, as ranked by the Duttweiler Institute. www.amazon.com/Science-Delusion/dp/1529393221/?tag=sheldrake-20 www.amazon.com/Science-Set-Free-Paths-Discovery/dp/0770436722/?tag=sheldrake-20 | |||
| 25 Jan 2024 | From Ancient Wisdom to the Language of the Earth | 00:10:45 | |
Scientists, artists, psychologists, conservationists, and spiritual leaders share their stories and insights on the importance of connecting with nature, preserving the environment, embracing diversity, and finding harmony in the world. Music courtesy of composer Max Richter. All voices in this episode are from our interviews for The Creative Process & One Planet Podcast. 00:05 Adapting to Earth: Indigenous Perspectives 01:06 The Beauty and Fragility of the Natural World 02:01 The Importance of Whales in Ecosystems 03:27 The Importance of Community and Collective Well-being 04:19 The Power of Love, Respect, and Unity 05:05 The Importance of Cultural and Scientific Knowledge 0:6:18 Mastering Confidence & Human Potential 07:01 The Magic of Coral Reefs 08:06 Lessons from Ancient Trees and Tundra 09:36 Understanding the Flow of Life Max Richter’s music featured in this episode are “On the Nature of Daylight” from The Blue Notebooks, “Path 19: Yet Frailest” from Sleep. www.creativeprocess.info | |||
| 09 Feb 2024 | ED ZWICK - Academy Award-winning Writer, Director & Producer - Glory, The Last Samurai, Shakespeare in Love, Thirtysomething | 00:49:07 | |
Ed Zwick is a writer, director, and producer who's been active in the film industry for over 40 years. He has been nominated for two Golden Globes for directing the films Glory and Legends of the Fall and received an Academy Award as one of the producers of Shakespeare in Love. Zwick continues to work with his longtime friend and partner, Marshall Herskovitz, at their company Bedford Falls, where they created the widely loved TV show Thirtysomething. His memoir Hits, Flops, and Other Illusions details many of his greatest experiences in the film industry. "Actors are remarkable teachers. They are often brilliant in their unique way, often not in a way that is schooled necessarily. They often don't have the language some of us who are more academically inclined have, but you underestimate their brilliance at your peril. And, in fact, you are missing an opportunity if you presume that they are just reading words. They are performing a very particular kind of magic in their process when they are great. And they save you constantly. They find solutions to your weaknesses in the words. They help you make implausible situations more plausible in your staging." "I've, like anyone, always had a fascination with movie stars, an attraction to the romance of who they are, men and women. So I wasn't immune, but what I realized very quickly is that I could acknowledge that and try to take those things that had always drawn me to the movies and provide them to the audience and have them really lift up these stories that I wanted to tell because finally, it was the stories themselves that I was trying to serve. There were ideas in those stories. Some of the ideas were about the characters and personal, but some of the ideas were a larger canvas. They were often about subjects. And the subjects could have been historical, they could have been political, they could have been social, cultural subjects, but they had some other agenda in them. And yet, that's not why people go to the movies. They go to the movies because they want to see relationships. They want to see - whether it's beautiful people or powerful people - they're drawn to relationships. In some sense, you’re creating a kind of stew where you're doing more than one thing at a time." www.simonandschuster.com/authors/Ed-Zwick/212290077 www.creativeprocess.info Image Courtesy of Dick Thomas Johnson Creative Commons 2.0 | |||
| 09 Feb 2024 | Forty Years in Hollywood - Highlights - ED ZWICK | 00:16:25 | |
"Actors are remarkable teachers. They are often brilliant in their unique way, often not in a way that is schooled necessarily. They often don't have the language some of us who are more academically inclined have, but you underestimate their brilliance at your peril. And, in fact, you are missing an opportunity if you presume that they are just reading words. They are performing a very particular kind of magic in their process when they are great. And they save you constantly. They find solutions to your weaknesses in the words. They help you make implausible situations more plausible in your staging." "I've, like anyone, always had a fascination with movie stars, an attraction to the romance of who they are, men and women. So I wasn't immune, but what I realized very quickly is that I could acknowledge that and try to take those things that had always drawn me to the movies and provide them to the audience and have them really lift up these stories that I wanted to tell because finally, it was the stories themselves that I was trying to serve. There were ideas in those stories. Some of the ideas were about the characters and personal, but some of the ideas were a larger canvas. They were often about subjects. And the subjects could have been historical, they could have been political, they could have been social, cultural subjects, but they had some other agenda in them. And yet, that's not why people go to the movies. They go to the movies because they want to see relationships. They want to see - whether it's beautiful people or powerful people - they're drawn to relationships. In some sense, you’re creating a kind of stew where you're doing more than one thing at a time." Ed Zwick is a writer, director, and producer who's been active in the film industry for over 40 years. He has been nominated for two Golden Globes for directing the films Glory and Legends of the Fall and received an Academy Award as one of the producers of Shakespeare in Love. Zwick continues to work with his longtime friend and partner, Marshall Herskovitz, at their company Bedford Falls, where they created the widely loved TV show Thirtysomething. His memoir Hits, Flops, and Other Illusions details many of his greatest experiences in the film industry. www.simonandschuster.com/authors/Ed-Zwick/212290077 www.creativeprocess.info | |||
| 15 Feb 2024 | ALAN POUL - Emmy & Golden Globe-winning Producer/Director - Tokyo Vice - Six Feet Under - Tales of the City - My So-Called Life | 01:09:55 | |
What does learning another language and living in another culture do for your humanity and creative process? Alan Poul is an Emmy, Golden Globe, DGA, and Peabody Award-winning producer and director of film and television. He is Executive Producer and Director on the Max Original drama series Tokyo Vice, written by Tony Award-winning playwright J.T. Rogers and starring Ansel Elgort and Ken Watanabe, as an American journalist in Japan and his police detective mentor. Poul is perhaps best known for producing all five seasons of HBO's Six Feet Under, all four of Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City miniseries, My So-Called Life, The Newsroom, Swingtown, and The Eddy, which he developed with director Damien Chazelle. His feature film producing credits include Paul Schrader's Mishima and Light of Day, and Ridley Scott's Black Rain. "I think all great work comes from the need to say something. And so this is the challenge for young artists and also maybe one of the essential elements that can never be completely taken over by AI because there has to be something you feel has not been said, and you feel an urgent need to say it. In fact, you can't not say it. That need to express is what gives birth to unique expression, which is where all of our visual, performance, and creative arts come from." https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0693561 www.creativeprocess.info | |||
| 15 Feb 2024 | How does knowing a second language increase your creativity & humanity? - Highlights - ALAN POUL | 00:12:55 | |
"I think all great work comes from the need to say something. And so this is the challenge for young artists and also maybe one of the essential elements that can never be completely taken over by AI because there has to be something you feel has not been said, and you feel an urgent need to say it. In fact, you can't not say it. That need to express is what gives birth to unique expression, which is where all of our visual, performance, and creative arts come from." Alan Poul is an Emmy, Golden Globe, DGA, and Peabody Award-winning producer and director of film and television. He is Executive Producer and Director on the Max Original drama series Tokyo Vice, written by Tony Award-winning playwright J.T. Rogers and starring Ansel Elgort and Ken Watanabe, as an American journalist in Japan and his police detective mentor. Poul is perhaps best known for producing all five seasons of HBO's Six Feet Under, all four of Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City miniseries, My So-Called Life, The Newsroom, Swingtown, and The Eddy, which he developed with director Damien Chazelle. His feature film producing credits include Paul Schrader's Mishima and Light of Day, and Ridley Scott's Black Rain. https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0693561 www.creativeprocess.info | |||
| 23 Feb 2024 | Spirituality & Selfhood: TARA ISABELLA BURTON - Author of Here in Avalon, Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World | 00:46:18 | |
What are we willing to give up to find meaning, connection, and a sense of belonging? What happens if we don't self-promote, self-create, and self-brand on social media? Will we find the right partner? Will we get into the right college? Or find the best job? Tara Isabella Burton is the author of the novels Social Creature, The World Cannot Give, and Here in Avalon, as well as the nonfiction books Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World and Self-Made: Curating Our Image from Da Vinci to the Kardashians. She is currently working on a history of magic and modernity, to be published by Convergent in late 2025. Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in The New York Times, National Geographic, Granta, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and other publications. www.taraisabellaburton.com www.creativeprocess.info | |||
| 23 Feb 2024 | What are we willing to give up to find meaning & a sense of belonging? - TARA ISABELLA BURTON | 00:09:20 | |
"I wanted to both look at the kind of vast, rich tapestry of spiritually adjacent practices among millennials and younger people, particularly in the unaffiliated world, but more broadly, what is the underlying ideology underpinning it all? This idea that religion is something for us because the goal of religion is to make us live our best lives, and it doesn't matter, which is the sort of shadow side of this, if it's true or not. If it's real or not. What matters is if it 'works for you.'" Tara Isabella Burton is the author of the novels Social Creature, The World Cannot Give, and Here in Avalon, as well as the nonfiction books Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World and Self-Made: Curating Our Image from Da Vinci to the Kardashians. She is currently working on a history of magic and modernity, to be published by Convergent in late 2025. Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in The New York Times, National Geographic, Granta, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and other publications. www.taraisabellaburton.com www.creativeprocess.info | |||
| 25 Feb 2024 | Songs of Nature - Musicians, Writers, Ecologists, Philosophers on the Mysteries of the Natural World | 00:09:25 | |
“The natural world has its own sonic language. Its own fingerprints. And that's one of the beautiful things about being out here. There is another acoustic environment, another sort of sonic fingerprint, and it is always changing. Every day is a sort of a different sound picture. I walk out the door and you do hear it changing over time. The leaves are coming in now, different kinds of bird song. The wind sounds different. It's a wonderful thing to be around and experience.” —Max Richter Excerpts of interviews from One Planet Podcast & The Creative Process SY MONTGOMERY MAX RICHTER MERLIN SHELDRAKE THOMAS CROWTHER TIOKASIN GHOSTHORSE ERLAND COOPER RICK BASS PETER SINGER KATHLEEN ROGERS www.creativeprocess.info www.maxrichtermusic.com Max Richter’s music featured in this episode are “On the Nature of Daylight” from The Blue Notebooks, “Path 19: Yet Frailest” from Sleep. Music is courtesy of Max Richter, Universal Music Enterprises, and Mute Song. Photos courtesy of Unsplash | |||
| 26 Feb 2024 | Reshaping Our World: Climate Change, Education, Mental Health & Advocacy for Nature | 00:09:56 | |
"Climate change gives us a chance to re-imagine the world in a way that every single human being can participate in. And so whether you're in a remote part of the United States or some other country, when you learn about climate change, it shouldn't just be the science. It should be the opportunity." –Kathleen Rogers Excerpts of interviews from One Planet Podcast & The Creative Process. KATHLEEN ROGERS POORVA JOSHIPURA DAVID FENTON BRITT WRAY DR. FARHANA SULTANA ANDRI SNÆR MAGNASON THOMAS CROWTHER DR. SHIV SOMESHWAR PAULA PINHO ARMOND COHEN MAYA K. VAN ROSSUM Max Richter’s music featured in this episode: www.creativeprocess.info Photo courtesy of Unsplash | |||
| 27 Feb 2024 | Comics, Music, Ethics & AI: KYLE HIGGINS, KARINA MANASHIL & KID CUDI on the Making of Moon Man | 01:07:18 | |
What does the future hold for our late-stage capitalist society with mega-corporations owning and controlling everything? How can the world-building skills of the makers of films and comics help us imagine a better future? Kyle Higgins is an Eisner award-nominated #1 New York Times best-selling comic book author and award-winning filmmaker known for his work on DC Comics’ Batman titles as well as his critically-acclaimed reinventions of Mighty Morphin Power Rangers for Boom! Studios/Hasbro, Ultraman for Marvel Comics, and his creator-owned series Radiant Black, NO/ONE and Deep Cuts for Image Comics. Kyle is the founder and creative director of Black Market Narrative and The Massive-Verse. Karina Manashil is the President of MAD SOLAR. After graduating from Chapman University with a BFA in Film Production, she began her career in the mailroom at WME where she became a Talent Agent. In 2020, she partnered with Scott Mescudi and Dennis Cummings to found MAD SOLAR. Its first release was the documentary “A Man Named Scott” (Amazon), and she then went on to Executive Produce Ti West trilogy “X,” “Pearl” and “MaXXXine” (A24). Manashil received an Emmy nomination as an Executive Producer on the Netflix animated event “Entergalactic." She also produced the Mescudi/Kyle Higgins comic book “Moon Man” which launched through Image Comics. She is next producing the upcoming Mescudi/Sam Levinson/The Lucas Bros film “HELL NAW” (Sony) and the animated feature “Slime” from auteur animator Jeron Braxton. The Making of Moon Man “So, as we started talking and going through what this could look like. I run a creator-owned superhero universe at Image Comics called the Massive-Verse, which is spearheaded by the main book I write called Radiant Black. I like to describe it as it's like Power Rangers with adult problems. It's very contemporary kind of reimaginings of superhero storytelling for the 2020s. So in that context, talking about what any type of new superhero and, in this case, what a new black superhero in 2024 could look like, what the threats would be, what the world might look like if it's maybe not even five minutes in the future. I would argue it's like two and a half minutes in the future. And then what kind of really complex, emotionally layered journey we could put this character through?” -Kyle Higgins moonmancomics.com Audio of Scott Mescudi courtesy of Mad Solar and Moon Man Comic Book Release and Revenge Of (Eagle Rock, CA, Jan 31, 2024) | |||
| 27 Feb 2024 | What does the future hold for our late-stage capitalist society with mega-corps controlling everything? - Highlights - KYLE HIGGINS, KARINA MANASHIL & KID CUDI | 00:14:22 | |
The Making of Moon Man Kyle Higgins is an Eisner award-nominated #1 New York Times best-selling comic book author and award-winning filmmaker known for his work on DC Comics’ Batman titles as well as his critically-acclaimed reinventions of Mighty Morphin Power Rangers for Boom! Studios/Hasbro, Ultraman for Marvel Comics, and his creator-owned series Radiant Black, NO/ONE and Deep Cuts for Image Comics. Kyle is the founder and creative director of Black Market Narrative and The Massive-Verse. Karina Manashil is the President of MAD SOLAR. After graduating from Chapman University with a BFA in Film Production, she began her career in the mailroom at WME where she became a Talent Agent. In 2020, she partnered with Scott Mescudi and Dennis Cummings to found MAD SOLAR. Its first release was the documentary “A Man Named Scott” (Amazon), and she then went on to Executive Produce Ti West trilogy “X,” “Pearl” and “MaXXXine” (A24). Manashil received an Emmy nomination as an Executive Producer on the Netflix animated event “Entergalactic." She also produced the Mescudi/Kyle Higgins comic book “Moon Man” which launched through Image Comics. She is next producing the upcoming Mescudi/Sam Levinson/The Lucas Bros film “HELL NAW” (Sony) and the animated feature “Slime” from auteur animator Jeron Braxton. moonmancomics.com Audio of Scott Mescudi courtesy of Mad Solar and Moon Man Comic Book Release and Revenge Of (Eagle Rock, CA, Jan 31, 2024) | |||
| 19 Mar 2024 | Exploring Trauma, Healing & Redemption with ANDRE DUBUS III | 00:55:21 | |
What can reading teach us about loss, healing, and survival? How can we transform anger into empathy? What can we learn from the creative act about turning personal setbacks into opportunities for self-discovery and growth? Andre Dubus III’s nine books include the New York Times’ bestsellers House of Sand and Fog, The Garden of Last Days, and his memoir, Townie. His work has been included in The Best American Essays and The Best Spiritual Writing anthologies. His novel, House of Sand and Fog was a finalist for the National Book Award and was made into an Academy Award-nominated film starring Ben Kingsley and Jennifer Connelly. His most recent books are the novel, Such Kindness and a collection of personal essays, Ghost Dogs: On Killers and Kin. "All creative writing is that act of reaching for the pieces to put it back together again. And with the memoir, the essay, it's human memory. Your memory for your own existence. With fiction, it’s a dream world where you're reaching for the shards. And I find it's so moving because that's what it feels like when I feel that I might be writing well. It's just uncovering and uncovering. www.andredubus.com www.creativeprocess.info | |||
| 19 Mar 2024 | The Transformative Power of Writing with ANDRE DUBUS III - Highlights | 00:13:03 | |
"All creative writing is that act of reaching for the pieces to put it back together again. And with the memoir, the essay, it's human memory. Your memory for your own existence. With fiction, it’s a dream world where you're reaching for the shards. And I find it's so moving because that's what it feels like when I feel that I might be writing well. It's just uncovering and uncovering. Andre Dubus III’s nine books include the New York Times’ bestsellers House of Sand and Fog, The Garden of Last Days, and his memoir, Townie. His work has been included in The Best American Essays and The Best Spiritual Writing anthologies. His novel, House of Sand and Fog was a finalist for the National Book Award and was made into an Academy Award-nominated film starring Ben Kingsley and Jennifer Connelly. His most recent books are the novel, Such Kindness and a collection of personal essays, Ghost Dogs: On Killers and Kin. www.andredubus.com www.creativeprocess.info | |||
| 12 Apr 2024 | Exploring American Rust: Broken Justice w/ DAN FUTTERMAN & ADAM RAPP - Award-winning Screenwriters/EPs | 00:39:11 | |
What role do the families we’re born into or the traumas we experience shape the people we become? Do good deeds offset bad deeds? How can the arts increase our capacity for empathy, understanding, and kindness? Dan Futterman is creator, executive producer, and writer of Amazon Prime's American Rust, the acclaimed crime drama starring Jeff Daniels, Maura Tierney, and David Alvarez. Previously, Dan has written screenplays for Capote, Foxcatcher, In Treatment, and Gracepoint. He served as executive producer on The Looming Tower. Dan is also an actor, director, and two-time Oscar nominee. Adam Rapp is the executive producer and writer of American Rust. He has written plays, films, and series, including Red Light Winter, The Sound Inside, In Treatment, Blackbird, The Looming Tower, and Dexter: New Blood. His latest novel is Wolf at the Table. He recently wrote the book for the new Broadway musical, The Outsiders. "You can't choose your family. You know, I hear that all the time. I'm always amazed when I see families that stick together and wind up being friends at the second, third, fourth decades of their lives. I didn't grow up with that. I didn't see that. I've only seen it as an adult, and it's remarkable when I see it. So I think viewers will relate to this nature versus nurture versus DNA, raising all the questions of psychological and biological inheritance." "Philipp Meyer wrote a very, very beautiful book and it was the reason that made me want to do it. Jeff Daniels gave me the book. He'd been having trouble getting it made, getting a script that he liked. And he said to me, "Will you read this and just remind me what I love about it? And if you feel that way?" And I read it very quickly and felt that it was terrific. And there were a lot of possibilities in making it. So just kudos to Philipp Meyer. He wrote a beautiful novel. And if anybody's listening is looking for a great novel to read, there's that and there's Adam Rapp's novel Wolf at the Table." www.imdb.com/name/nm0001246 www.creativeprocess.info | |||
| 12 Apr 2024 | Do good deeds offset bad deeds? How do our families shape who we become?- Highlights - DAN FUTTERMAN & ADAM RAPP | 00:11:07 | |
"You can't choose your family. You know, I hear that all the time. I'm always amazed when I see families that stick together and wind up being friends at the second, third, fourth decades of their lives. I didn't grow up with that. I didn't see that. I've only seen it as an adult, and it's remarkable when I see it. So I think viewers will relate to this nature versus nurture versus DNA, raising all the questions of psychological and biological inheritance." "Philipp Meyer wrote a very, very beautiful book and it was the reason that made me want to do it. Jeff Daniels gave me the book. He'd been having trouble getting it made, getting a script that he liked. And he said to me, "Will you read this and just remind me what I love about it? And if you feel that way?" And I read it very quickly and felt that it was terrific. And there were a lot of possibilities in making it. So just kudos to Philipp Meyer. He wrote a beautiful novel. And if anybody's listening is looking for a great novel to read, there's that and there's Adam Rapp's novel Wolf at the Table." Dan Futterman is creator, executive producer, and writer of Amazon Prime's American Rust, the acclaimed crime drama starring Jeff Daniels, Maura Tierney, and David Alvarez. Previously, Dan has written screenplays for Capote, Foxcatcher, In Treatment, and Gracepoint. He served as executive producer on The Looming Tower. Dan is also an actor, director, and two-time Oscar nominee. Adam Rapp is the executive producer and writer of American Rust. He has written plays, films, and series, including Red Light Winter, The Sound Inside, In Treatment, Blackbird, The Looming Tower, and Dexter: New Blood. His latest novel is Wolf at the Table. He recently wrote the book for the new Broadway musical, The Outsiders. www.imdb.com/name/nm0001246 www.creativeprocess.info | |||
| 15 Apr 2024 | DON McKELLAR on The Sympathizer with Hoa Xuande, Robert Downey Jr., Park Chan-wook | 00:38:57 | |
What are the stories we tell ourselves to justify our actions in times of war? How can the arts convey complexity and foster understanding? Don McKellar is a highly accomplished writer, director, and actor. He has written films including Roadkill, Highway 61, Dance Me Outside, The Red Violin, and Blindness. He won the Prix de la Jeunesse at the 1988 Cannes Film Festival for his directorial debut, Last Night, which he also wrote and starred in. He is an eight-time Genie Award nominee and a two-time winner. He wrote the book for the acclaimed musical The Drowsy Chaperone, for which he received a Tony Award. Most recently, Don served as writer, executive producer, and co-showrunner on The Sympathizer, a television adaptation of Viet Thanh Nguyen's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of the same name. The series was co-created with Park Chan-wook."I think the reason for success of the novel The Sympathizer was the very unique voice in the book. It's told in first person with this kind of raconteur who's very intelligent. It's satiric. It tackles big issues, and it's very lively and fun at the same time. It's quite and it's also complicated where it's coming from. It's a confession. It's written in theory under duress. It's very hard to replicate because it's sort of very freewheeling, and we didn't want to weigh the show down with just a lot of voiceover, you know, that feeling of a literary adaptation you get where you just have a voiceover quoting the book all the time. So, the first thing we tried to do, well, the first thing we did was get Park Chan-wook involved because he has a very similar visual language. We tried to replicate that voice visually, and we've tried to come up with parallel visual narrative devices that would give that feeling that the book had." www.imdb.com/name/nm0001528/mediaviewer/rm2411273728/?ref_=nm_ov_ph Photos courtesy of HBO | |||
| 16 Apr 2024 | There’s another side to every war. Satire, War & Hollywood - Co-creator DON McKELLAR on The Sympathizer | 00:09:44 | |
"I think the reason for success of the novel The Sympathizer was the very unique voice in the book. It's told in first person with this kind of raconteur who's very intelligent. It's satiric. It tackles big issues, and it's very lively and fun at the same time. It's quite and it's also complicated where it's coming from. It's a confession. It's written in theory under duress. It's very hard to replicate because it's sort of very freewheeling, and we didn't want to weigh the show down with just a lot of voiceover, you know, that feeling of a literary adaptation you get where you just have a voiceover quoting the book all the time. So, the first thing we tried to do, well, the first thing we did was get Park Chan-wook involved because he has a very similar visual language. We tried to replicate that voice visually, and we've tried to come up with parallel visual narrative devices that would give that feeling that the book had." Don McKellar is a highly accomplished writer, director, and actor. He has written films including Roadkill, Highway 61, Dance Me Outside, The Red Violin, and Blindness. He won the Prix de la Jeunesse at the 1988 Cannes Film Festival for his directorial debut, Last Night, which he also wrote and starred in. He is an eight-time Genie Award nominee and a two-time winner. He wrote the book for the acclaimed musical The Drowsy Chaperone, for which he received a Tony Award. Most recently, Don served as writer, executive producer, and co-showrunner on The Sympathizer, a television adaptation of Viet Thanh Nguyen's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of the same name. The series was co-created with Park Chan-wook. www.imdb.com/name/nm0001528/mediaviewer/rm2411273728/?ref_=nm_ov_ph www.creativeprocess.info Photo courtesy of HBO | |||
| 23 Apr 2024 | Voices of the Earth: Reflections on Nature, Humanity & Climate Change | 00:11:43 | |
Environmentalists, writers, artists, activists, and public policy makers explore the interconnectedness of living beings and ecosystems. They highlight the importance of conservation, promote climate education, advocate for sustainable development, and underscore the vital role of creative and educational communities in driving positive change. 00:00 "The Conditional" by U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón 01:27 The Secret Language of Animals: Ingrid Newkirk, President of PETA 03:03 A Love Letter to the Living World: Carl Safina, Ecologist & Author 04:11 Exploring the Mysteries of Soil and Coral Reefs: Merlin Sheldrake, Biologist, Author of Entangled Life 04:47 Exploring Coral Reefs: Richard Vevers, Founder of The Ocean Agency 05:56 The Importance of Climate Education: Kathleen Rogers, President of EarthDay.org 07:02 The Timeless Wisdom of Turtles: Sy Montomery, Naturalist & Author 07:38 Optimism in the Face of Environmental Challenges: Richard Vevers 08:32 Urban Solutions for a Sustainable Future: Paula Pinho, Director, Just Transition, Consumers, Energy Efficiency & Innovation, European Commission 08:57 The Circular Economy: Walter Stahel, Founder & Director of the Product-Life Institute 09:39 The Power of Speaking Out for Sustainability: Paula Pinho 10:16 Empowering the Next Generation Through Education: Jeffrey Sachs, President of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network www.creativeprocess.info www.maxrichtermusic.com Max Richter’s music featured in this episode are “On the Nature of Daylight” from The Blue Notebooks, “Path 19: Yet Frailest” from Sleep. Music is courtesy of Max Richter, Universal Music Enterprises, and Mute Song. | |||
| 25 Apr 2024 | Travel, Literature & Identity with INTAN PARAMADITHA - Author of The Wandering | 00:48:06 | |
How are writing and travel vehicles for understanding? How can we expand the literary canon to include other voices, other cultures, other experiences of the world? Intan Paramaditha is a writer and an academic. Her novel The Wandering (Harvill Secker/ Penguin Random House UK), translated from the Indonesian language by Stephen J. Epstein, was nominated for the Stella Prize in Australia and awarded the Tempo Best Literary Fiction in Indonesia, English PEN Translates Award, and PEN/ Heim Translation Fund Grant from PEN America. She is the author of the short story collection Apple and Knife, the editor of Deviant Disciples: Indonesian Women Poets, part of the Translating Feminisms series of Tilted Axis Press and the co-editor of The Routledge Companion to Asian Cinemas (forthcoming 2024). Her essay, “On the Complicated Questions Around Writing About Travel,” was selected for The Best American Travel Writing 2021. She holds a Ph.D. from New York University and teaches media and film studies at Macquarie University, Sydney. “The Wandering is a choose your own adventure novel, and the reader is situated in the shoes of this brown woman from the Global South. She's 27 and in a way, she is stuck with her life. She aspires to be middle class, but her job doesn't allow her to achieve this social mobility. In her condition, she makes a deal with a devil, a reference to the story of Faust and Mephistopheles, finally getting a pair of red shoes that will take her anywhere. But that means she will never be able to find home—that's the curse of the shoes. The title in Indonesian is Gentayanga, which is a word used to describe ghosts who exist in a liminal state. This is a metaphor for people who travel. I came up with the idea for this novel in 2009 when I was an Indonesian international student studying for my PHD in New York. When I went back to Jakarta, I felt like I was not at home, but New York wasn't my home either, so there's a feeling of being neither here nor there. I wanted to capture the sense of being everywhere, which is liberating, but also the sense of displacement.” https://intanparamaditha.com www.creativeprocess.info | |||
| 25 Apr 2024 | Feminism, Resistance & the Global South - Highlights - INTAN PARAMADITHA | 00:11:50 | |
“The Wandering is a choose your own adventure novel, and the reader is situated in the shoes of this brown woman from the Global South. She's 27 and in a way, she is stuck with her life. She aspires to be middle class, but her job doesn't allow her to achieve this social mobility. In her condition, she makes a deal with a devil, a reference to the story of Faust and Mephistopheles, finally getting a pair of red shoes that will take her anywhere. But that means she will never be able to find home—that's the curse of the shoes. The title in Indonesian is Gentayanga, which is a word used to describe ghosts who exist in a liminal state. This is a metaphor for people who travel. I came up with the idea for this novel in 2009 when I was an Indonesian international student studying for my PHD in New York. When I went back to Jakarta, I felt like I was not at home, but New York wasn't my home either, so there's a feeling of being neither here nor there. I wanted to capture the sense of being everywhere, which is liberating, but also the sense of displacement.” Intan Paramaditha is a writer and an academic. Her novel The Wandering (Harvill Secker/ Penguin Random House UK), translated from the Indonesian language by Stephen J. Epstein, was nominated for the Stella Prize in Australia and awarded the Tempo Best Literary Fiction in Indonesia, English PEN Translates Award, and PEN/ Heim Translation Fund Grant from PEN America. She is the author of the short story collection Apple and Knife, the editor of Deviant Disciples: Indonesian Women Poets, part of the Translating Feminisms series of Tilted Axis Press and the co-editor of The Routledge Companion to Asian Cinemas (forthcoming 2024). Her essay, “On the Complicated Questions Around Writing About Travel,” was selected for The Best American Travel Writing 2021. She holds a Ph.D. from New York University and teaches media and film studies at Macquarie University, Sydney. https://intanparamaditha.com www.creativeprocess.info | |||
| 01 May 2024 | Remembering PAUL AUSTER - Writer, Director (1947-2024) | 00:49:14 | |
It is said that people never die until the last person says their name. In memory of the writer and director Paul Auster, who passed away this week, we're sharing this conversation we had back in 2017 after the publication of his novel 4 3 2 1. Auster reflects on his body of work, life, and creative process. Paul Auster was the bestselling author of Winter Journal, Sunset Park, Invisible, The Book of Illusions, and The New York Trilogy, among many other works. He has been awarded the Prince of Asturias Award for Literature, the Prix Médicis étranger, an Independent Spirit Award, and the Premio Napoli. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and is a Commandeur de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. He has also penned several screenplays for films such as Smoke (1995), as well as Lulu on the Bridge (1998) and The Inner Life of Martin Frost (2007), which he also directed. “But what happens is a space is created. And maybe it’s the only space of its kind in the world in which two absolute strangers can meet each other on terms of absolute intimacy. I think this is what is at the heart of the experience and why once you become a reader that you want to repeat that experience, that very deep total communication with that invisible stranger who has written the book that you’re holding in your hands. And that’s why I think, in spite of everything, novels are not going to stop being written, no matter what the circumstances. We need stories. We’re all human beings, and it’s stories from the moment we’re able to talk.” We apologize for the quality of the recording since it was not originally meant to be aired as a podcast. Portrait of Paul Auster by Mia Funk, inspired by his novel 4 3 2 1. www.penguinrandomhouse.com/authors/1045/paul-auster | |||
| 15 May 2024 | What Lies Ahead for Bookstores in the Age of Generative AI? - DANNY CAINE, Bookseller, Poet | 00:48:22 | |
What is the future of literature in the age of generative AI? How can bookstores build community and be engines for positive social change? What does it mean to try to have a meaningful human life? Danny Caine is the author of the poetry collections Continental Breakfast, El Dorado Freddy's, Flavortown, and Picture Window, as well as the books How to Protect Bookstores and Why and How to Resist Amazon and Why. His poetry has appeared in The Slowdown, Lit Hub, Diagram, HAD, and Barrelhouse. He's a co-owner of The Raven Bookstore, Publisher's Weekly's 2022 Bookstore of the Year. “Bookselling captured my imagination and my heart as soon as I started working at the bookstore because I could see the potential for this great, amazing community-oriented work. Of course, it's a thrill to be around books, to meet authors, to read all this stuff, and to spend all day with people who love books, but what I think I really fell in love with was the sense of community, the people behind it, and the way a bookstore can really be an engine for positive social change within its community and in a broader sense as well. My whole nonfiction book project started with a tweet thread. It was about how every bookseller has to be prepared to have this discussion: a customer comes in, and they're like, this book is 50 percent off on Amazon. Why should I buy it here? So, I don't think about it quite as withholding from Amazon as much as contributing to these local community-oriented businesses. www.dannycaine.com www.creativeprocess.info | |||
| 15 May 2024 | How to Protect Bookstores and Why - Highlights - DANNY CAINE, Bookseller, Poet | 00:12:04 | |
“Bookselling captured my imagination and my heart as soon as I started working at the bookstore because I could see the potential for this great, amazing community-oriented work. Of course, it's a thrill to be around books, to meet authors, to read all this stuff, and to spend all day with people who love books, but what I think I really fell in love with was the sense of community, the people behind it, and the way a bookstore can really be an engine for positive social change within its community and in a broader sense as well. My whole nonfiction book project started with a tweet thread. It was about how every bookseller has to be prepared to have this discussion: a customer comes in, and they're like, this book is 50 percent off on Amazon. Why should I buy it here? So, I don't think about it quite as withholding from Amazon as much as contributing to these local community-oriented businesses. Danny Caine is the author of the poetry collections Continental Breakfast, El Dorado Freddy's, Flavortown, and Picture Window, as well as the books How to Protect Bookstores and Why and How to Resist Amazon and Why. His poetry has appeared in The Slowdown, Lit Hub, Diagram, HAD, and Barrelhouse. He's a co-owner of The Raven Bookstore, Publisher's Weekly's 2022 Bookstore of the Year. www.dannycaine.com www.creativeprocess.info | |||