Emerging Form (Christie Aschwanden)

In this bonus episode, Rosemerry reads a poem from our episode 25 guest, Alison Luterman, and then presents a song from The Chain, one of the musicals that Alison discussed on the podcast.

Links:

The Chain

In the Time of Great Fires

Alison Luterman

If you’ve noticed that being outside improves your creativity, you’re right. We speak with Florence Williams about the science of awe, why cultivating openness is your muse’s best friend, and specific ways to nourish your creative practice by engaging with the natural world. We also talk about the writing of her new book, in which she studies how we recover from heartbreak. It’s an episode that appeals to heart, brain and the unselved soul, exploring “the science of the ineffable.”

Florence Williams is a science journalist, author, podcaster and speaker. Her book BREASTS: A Natural and Unnatural History won the LA Times Book Prize in 2013, in 2017 she came out with The Nature Fix: Why Nature Makes us Happier, Healthier, and More Creative , an Audible best seller, and her new book, Heartbreak: A Personal and Scientific Journey, now just out in paperback, is nominated for this year's PEN/Wilson Award for Literary Science Writing. She’s won two Gracie awards for podcasts based on her books, and she often writes for audio as well as print. She also leads workshops and retreats on topics ranging from narrative writing to the importance of finding awe and healing in nature.

What kinds of creative habits work best for you? How do different practices bring out a new flavor or new thrill in your art? We talk with professor and poet Brad Aaron Modlin, the Reynolds Endowed Chair of Creative Writing at University of Nebraska, Kearney, about various challenges and approaches he’s used with his students. We also talk about how engaging with strangers is an important part of his creative practice, resources for keeping you on track and healthy as you meet your goals, and he reads us his famous poem “What You Missed That Day You Were Absent from Fourth Grade.”

Brad Aaron Modlin’s book Everyone at This Party Has Two Names won The Cowles Poetry Prize. His poetry has been the text for orchestral scores; the springboard for an NYC art exhibition; and the focus of an episode of The Slowdown with U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón. The premier episode of Poetry Unbound with Pádraig Ó Tuama was about his poem “What You Missed That Day You Were Absent from Fourth Grade.” An Associate Professor of poetry, he teaches graduates and undergrads both in-person and online; coordinates the visiting writers series; and forgets where in the classroom he left his flip-flops.   

www.bradaaronmodlin.com  

Invitation to January Writing Blitz

Joy Workout

Everyone at This Party Has Two Names from SEMO Press

@BradAaronModlin (Twitter) 

brad.aaron.modlin.writer (Instagram) 

The in-person/online creative writing graduate program at University of Nebraska, Kearney. 

https://www.bradaaronmodlin.com/election-night-page-larger-view

How can you invite pleasure to be a part of your creative practice? In this bonus episode with professor and poet Brad Aaron Modlin we talk about his heart-opening, blood pumping, joy-raising way to start a creative day; ways to dismantle our fear of not being good enough; and how changing the genre can open surprising doors. 

Brad Aaron Modlin’s book Everyone at This Party Has Two Names won The Cowles Poetry Prize. His poetry has been the text for orchestral scores; the springboard for an NYC art exhibition; and the focus of an episode of The Slowdown with U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón. The premier episode of Poetry Unbound with Pádraig Ó Tuama was about his poem “What You Missed That Day You Were Absent from Fourth Grade.” An Associate Professor of poetry, he teaches graduates and undergrads both in-person and online; coordinates the visiting writers series; and forgets where in the classroom he left his flip-flops.   

www.bradaaronmodlin.com  

One of the best ways to support your creative practice? Try new things. In this episode, David Epstein, author of the New York Times #1 best seller Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World, talks about why many streams of interest, novelty, and beginner’s mind are important. The conversation touches on science, music, sports, art and even parenting. Highlights: Epstein debunks the 10,000 hour rule, shares how he keeps a Book of Small Experiments, navigates Christie & Rosemerry’s ongoing argument about talent, and speaks truth about luck. 

David Epstein is the author of the #1 New York Times best seller Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World, and of the bestseller The Sports Gene. He has master's degrees in environmental science and journalism and has been an investigative reporter for ProPublica, the host of Slate‘s popular “How To!” podcast, and a senior writer for Sports Illustrated. He lives in Washington, DC.

https://davidepstein.com/david-epstein-about/

David’s Substack

Instead of sweating the small stuff, what if we honor the small stuff–with curiosity, with wonder. In this episode of Emerging Form, we talk with podcaster and video editor Flora Lichtman about her work as host for the listener call-in podcast “Every Little Thing,” which was essentially an “exercise in curiosity.” We discuss who can best tell a story? How do we most courageously and interestingly get from point A to point F? How do you build stakes? How does collaboration help? And how do we know when to switch mediums to tell a story the way it wants to be told? 

Flora Lichtman is a host and managing editor at Spotify. Most recently, she created and hosted a listener call-in podcast called Every Little Thing. The show ran for 5 years and had more than 200 episodes. Previously, she wrote for the Netflix show, "Bill Nye Saves the World,” and co-directed the Emmy-nominated video series “Animated Life” on The New York Times Op-Docs channel. (They lost to Oprah.) Before that, she hosted The Adaptors podcast about climate change, worked as a video editor and substitute host at PRI's Science Friday and co-wrote a book on the science of annoyingness. And long, long ago, she worked for a NATO oceanographic lab in Italy. For the lab's research expeditions, she lived on a ship where apertivi were served on the top deck, hoisted there via pulley by the ship's chef.

Flora Lichtman’s website: http://www.floralichtman.com/

Every Little Thing podcast

How do you create a project that at the same time reaches toward grief and toward joy? What does it ask of our creative practice? What does it take, practically speaking, to make it feel cohesive? In this special episode of Emerging Form, the co-hosts talk about Rosemerry’s new book, All the Honey, which releases April 18 from Samara Press. They talk about how to select poems for a collection and how to order them. They talk about the somewhat mysterious arrival of the title and how some of the poems were written, including a romp of a poem about a time when our audio engineer Leah asked Rosemerry to make a laugh track after an audio mishap. It’s a tender and funny episode about completing a book that touches on devastation and elation and all points in between. “At first I didn’t think both kinds of poems could inhabit the same pages,” Rosemerry says, “and then I realized, ‘Of course, they can. Because that is what we as humans are asked to do—to inhabit worlds of great joy and great despair at the same time.’”

“All the Honey is an outpouring of love from a poet who understands: the world that breaks our heart is the same world that knits it together.”

—Phyllis Cole-Dai, co-editor, Poetry of Presence: An Anthology of Mindfulness Poems

All the Honey

Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

Book Launch on April 18

“I need a chair that will make me not want want to get up and do whatever important thing I think I must do. Why is it so hard to just sit?” —Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

When Laura Tohe went to school in the Navajo Nation, there were no books by Native writers for her to read. “That was an invisibility I grew up with,” she says. She knew she wanted to be a writer, she just didn’t know how. In this episode of Emerging Form, we talk with Tohe about how she found support from writers such as Joy Harjo, Simon Ortiz and Rudofo Anaya who encouraged her to write about what she knew. Now as Navajo Nation Poet Laureate, she encourages younger Navajo writers to share their stories and poems. 

Laura Tohe is Diné and the current Navajo Nation Poet Laureate.  She is Sleepy Rock People clan and born for the Bitter Water People clan.  She published 3 books of poetry, an anthology of Native women’s writing, and an oral history on the Navajo Code Talkers.  Her librettos, Enemy Slayer, A Navajo Oratorio (2008) and Nahasdzáán in the Glittering World (2021), performed in Arizona and France, respectively.  Among her awards are the 2020 Academy of American Poetry Fellowship, the 2019 American Indian Festival of Writers Award, and twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize.  She is Professor Emerita with Distinction from Arizona State University. In 2015 Laura was honored as the Navajo Nation Poet Laureate for 2015-2017, a title given to her in celebration and recognition of her work as a poet and writer.

Laura Tohe

Tseyí Deep in the Rock

No Parole Today

What business skills are most helpful for a creative career? And if you didn’t get a business degree, how might you best get these skills? Who might you rely on? How can you find play and creativity in the business side of your artistic dreams? We speak about this and more with fine art photographer Marisa S. White, co-founder of the True North Art Gallery.

Marisa S. White is an award-winning artist best known for seamlessly stitching multiple photographs together, weaving personal narratives through surreal and fantastical imagery. Originally a drawing and painting major, Marisa fell in love with photography in college and eventually began incorporating it into her work, creating mixed media collages.

Marisa’s work is collected internationally, and she has exhibited across the US and in Europe; most notably at the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento, California. She recently opened True North Art Gallery in Colorado Springs with two other artists. 

Marisa S. White website

How do we share our art with the world? In this episode of Emerging Form, singer/songwriter and incredible performer Emily Scott Robinson talks about the creativity of connecting. How do we help our audience feel seen? How can “mistakes” create bonding? How do we change energy that feels “off”? How do you make the same material feel fresh for yourself time after time? It’s a practical, heart-opening episode full of laughter. 

With a quarter million miles under her belt and counting, North Carolina native Emily Scott Robinson travels the dusty highways of America's wild country, capturing the stories of the people she meets and expertly crafting them into songs. Robinson received critical acclaim for her debut album Traveling Mercies. Rolling Stone named it one of the “40 Best Country and Americana Albums of 2019.” In 2021, Robinson signed with Oh Boy records, the label founded by the legendary John Prine, and released her follow-up album American Siren. It made numerous “Best of 2021” lists including NPR, Rolling Stone, American Songwriter, and No Depression. In 2022, Robinson released a collaboration for theater called Built on Bones, a song cycle written for the Witches of Shakespeare's Macbeth, featuring artists Alisa Amador and Violet Bell.

Emily Scott Robinson Website

Emily’s Instagram

Emily’s music

Built on Bones

Artificial intelligence is affecting creative industries–for instance Hollywood screenwriters–and frustrating creative writing instructors with papers turned in composed by ChatGPT. How dangers is AI to creative careers? Can it be helpful? How do we move forward in a world where human creativity and technology work together? What is the creative’s role in building a bridge between AI and the rest of the community? Is AI creative? Should we be scared? Our conversation with poet and engineer Uche Ogbuji gives context for the AI explosion and offers long term perspective. 

Uche Ogbuji, more fully Úchèńnà Ogbújí, is a poet, spoken word performer, composer and DJ. His chapbook, Ndewo, Colorado  (Aldrich Press, USA, 2013), won a Colorado Book Award and a Westword Award winner (“Best Environmental Poetry”). Uche's work fuses Igbo culture, European classicism, American Mountain West setting, Hip-Hop and afrofuturism. He is a 2022 Boulder County Arts Fellow for Literature and Music, and serves on the board of the Colorado Poets Center. Former stints include editor at Kin Poetry Journal and The Nervous Breakdown.

Uche’s Newsletter

Alan Turing

What happens to our writing when we begin with an I-don’t-know mindset? Our work becomes more loose, more fresh, more playful, more true. We speak with authors and teachers James Navé and Allegra Huston about their book Write What You Don’t Know: 10 Steps to Writing with Confidence, Energy, and Flow. It’s a practical and fun episode with many tips for escaping the rational mind and allowing your imagination to take the lead. 

Allegra Huston and James Navé are co-founders of Imaginative Storm Writing Workshops and the publishing company Twice 5 Miles. They have been teaching multi-day and single-day writing workshops together and separately for over 20 years. For five years they taught a creativity retreat for screenwriting students at the National University of Ireland, Galway, and both have also taught for the University of Oklahoma OSLEP program. 

jamesnave.comimaginativestorm.com Instagram: @imaginativestorm allegrahuston.com Facebook: Imaginative StormLinkedIn: Imaginative Storm Youtube: youtube.com/@imaginativestorm 

For Phyllis Cole-Dai, mindfulness is “keeping my head and my heart where my body is … here and now.” In this interview with the poet, writer, community leader, and editor of the popular Poetry of Presence anthologies, we explore the role of mindfulness in a writing practice and how mindfulness helps our writing be in service to a larger community. How can our creative practice help further social justice? How can our creative practice honor “what is beautiful in every person, even the ones we have most strong disagreement with?” And how is joy an integral part of any practice, especially in a time of social upheaval? 

Phyllis Cole-Dai began pecking away on an old manual typewriter in childhood and never stopped. She has authored or edited books in multiple genres, “writing across what divides us.” Originally from Ohio, she now resides with her scientist-husband and two cats in a 130-year-old house in Brookings, South Dakota. She invites you to join The Raft, her online community on Substack, where members ride the river of life, buoyed by the arts and spiritual practice (phylliscoledai.substack.com).

website: https://phylliscoledai.com

Online community (The Raft): phylliscoledai.substack.com

Poetry of Presence (both volumes): https://poetryofpresencebook.com

Exploring Poetry of Presence II: Prompts to Deepen Your Writing Practice

Writing a memoir is so much more than writing down memories–it’s shedding layers of stories we’ve told ourselves for years, seeing ourselves in unflattering lights, opening up to compassion, and exposing our underbelly. And it’s powerful medicine. In this episode, we talk with Laura Davis about the story behind her memoir, The Burning Light of Two Stars: A Mother-Daughter Story. In her blunt, brave way, Davis tells the complicated story of how deep wounds exposed an even deeper love–and what it took to get to that place.

Laura Davis is also the author of The Courage to Heal, and four other groundbreaking books. In addition to writing books that inspire, the work of Laura’s heart is to teach. For more than twenty years, she’s helped people find their voices, tell their stories, and hone their craft. Laura has been published in Publisher's Weekly, Writer's Digest, CrimeReads, Brevity, and The New York Times, featured in Los Angeles Review of Books, and on QWERTY, Write-Minded, The Only One in the Room, and dozens of other podcasts. She's a featured speaker for The National Association of Memoir Writers and a popular craft teacher at The San Miguel Writer's Conference. Laura is teaching a special series of online summer pop-up classes this summer and will be leading her signature Writing as a Pathway Through Grief retreat in August. Next spring, she’ll be taking a group to Bali for an in-depth dive into Balinese spirituality and healing practices. You can learn about Laura’s retreats, workshops, and classes, and read the first five chapters of her memoir at www.lauradavis.net. 

Staying Open to Meet the Moment with Rosemerry on Breathing Wind

A special surprise! This week, instead of hearing Rosemerry as an interviewer, you can hear her as an interviewee, talking about the intersection of creativity and grief on Breathing Wind, a wonderful podcast that offers “warm, honest and insightful conversations for journeying introspectively through grief and loss.” Hosts Naila Francis and Sarah Davis talk with her about poetry as a practice for meeting each moment, her unfolding journey through devastating loss, how she’s been carried by an immensity of love since the death of her son Finn, in the same year that her father died, and how grief has deepened her trust in that love while inviting her, over and over again, to say yes to the world. 

For their show notes for this episode, visit here. 

Sometimes, a project just comes together in the most organic, meant-to-be way, and nothing can stop it. What’s that like? We explore that experience in this episode with our guest, Amy Irvine, who co-wrote Air Mail: Letters of Politics, Pandemics & Place with our previous guest, Pam Houston. We’ll talk about how the form emerged--what began as an epistolary exercise became a fully fledged book. We’ll talk about how creative endeavors can create friendships. We also talk about her previous book, Desert Cabal, about backlash against women writers and more. 

Amy Irvine won the Orion Book Award and Colorado Book Award for her memoir, Trespass: Living at the Edge of the Promised Land Her next book, Desert Cabal: A New Season in the Wilderness, is a feminist response to Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire, and one of Orion’s “25 Most-Read Stories of the Decade.” It was also added to Outside Magazine’s Adventure Canon and named by Backpacker as one of its New Wilderness Classics. During the pandemic, Irvine co-authored Air Mail: Letters of Politics, Pandemics & Placewith Pam Houston; the book is forthcoming in October 2020, as is Amy’s latest essay for Orion: “Close to the Bone.” Irvine teaches in the Mountainview Low-Residency MFA program at Southern New Hampshire University. In addition to frequently teaching for Orion Magazine, she has taught at Western Colorado University, the Free Flow Institute, Whitman College’s Semester in the West, the University of Utah’s Environmental Humanities Program at Rio Mesa, and Fishtrap’s Outpost. Irvine lives and writes off-grid on a remote mesa in southwest Colorado, just spitting distance from her Utah homeland.

Amy Irvine

Air Mail: Letters of Politics, Pandemics & Place

Desert Cabal

Desert Solitaire

Pam Houston

In this bonus episode of Emerging Form, our guest Amy Irvine surprises us right away when we ask to describe her writing practice. “Erotic,” she says. Find out what that means, and how you, too, might want to find your way toward that answer. We also talk about terrible writing advice from a therapist, Amy’s workspace, and the advice she would give her younger self. 

Mary Carr on Sacred Carnality

Amy Irvine

Air Mail: Letters of Politics, Pandemics & Place

Desert Cabal

Creative projects have a habit of taking on their own lives and bringing the creator along for the ride. In this episode, we speak with science writer Melissa L. Sevigny about how her book Brave the Wild River: The untold story of two women who mapped the botany of the Grand Canyon surprised her and required her to tell a story different from the one she set out to write. She also shares how she managed to work a full-time job while researching and writing, how she created three-dimensional characters out of archival information and interviews, how the book let her know she was done, and what she learned from this project to apply to future projects.   

Melissa L. Sevigny grew up in Tucson, Arizona, where she fell in love with the Sonoran Desert’s ecology and dark desert skies. She has worked as a science communicator in the fields of space exploration, water policy, and sustainable agriculture, and has a B.S. in environmental science from the University of Arizona and an M.F.A. in creative writing from Iowa State University.

She is the science reporter at KNAU (Arizona Public Radio) in Flagstaff, Arizona and her stories have been awarded regional Edward R. Murrow awards and featured nationally on Science Friday. In addition to Brave the Wild River, she’s also written Mythical River and Under Desert Skies.

Learn more about her at www.melissasevigny.com or follow her on Twitter @melissasevigny.

This episode is all about passion. What happens when a curiosity takes on a life of its own? How do you juggle a passion project with a full-time job? What are the benefits to working alone? How do you determine a project has chops? We speak with Christine Laskowski, who recently launched an independent passion project, T&J, a podcast devoted to 6th century Byzantium and the greatest recorded love story on earth, between Empress Theodora and her husband, the Emperor Justinian.

Laskowski is a Berlin-based, multimedia journalist with 15 years of reporting, music and storytelling experience from around the world. Her video and audio work has appeared on CBS News, NPR, FiveThirtyEight, and Vox/Netflix. Two years ago, she pitched and then supervised the first TikTok news account for the German broadcaster, Deutsche Welle. 

http://christinelaskowski.com/Christine_Laskowski/Home.html

vimeo.com/christinelaskowski 

@laskowski_c

https://tandj.buzzsprout.com/

Versatility in writing across genres can be a great blessing for a writer, and in this episode we speak with Cameron Walker who works as a journalist, writes poetry and fiction, and has two books coming out this year—one, a book of essays, and the other is an illustrated book for kids about US National Monuments. We speak about how to push yourself in different genres, the importance of trust in your process, how gratefulness became an important part of her writing practice, and the challenges of telling a complicated story in a way simple enough for kids to comprehend without sacrificing the truth of the complexities.

Cameron Walker is a writer based in California. Her journalism, essays, and fiction have appeared in publications including The New York Times, Hakai, The Missouri Review, and The Last Word on Nothing. She’s won awards for her writing from the American Society of Journalists and Authors, the American Institute of Physics, and Terrain.org. She is the author of National Monuments of the U.S.A., a book for kids beautifully illustrated by Chris Turnham. Her essay collection, Points of Light, is coming out this fall from Hidden River Press.

Links:

Cameron’s website: www.cameronwalker.net

Cameron’s Last Word On Nothing archive: https://www.lastwordonnothing.com/category/cameron/

Cameron’s beautiful book, National Monuments of the USA (with illustrations by Chris Turnham) https://www.quarto.com/books/9780711265493/national-monuments-of-the-usa

What happens when science, spirituality and poetry weave together? We speak with heralded poet David Keplinger about his newest poetry collection, Ice, which he playfully describes as “poetry via the Pleistocene.” The book, and our conversation, explores emergence–the emergence of Ice Age animals once preserved in ice and the emergence of feelings and old versions of the self as the heart melts with age and self-compassion. We talk about how creative practice can help us move from “stuckness to spontaneity” and how it is creativity helps us “remember we are here.”

David Keplinger is the director of the MFA Program at American University, recipient of two NEA fellowships, the Colorado Book Award, the TS Eliot Award (selected by Mary Oliver), the Cavafy Prize (selected by Ilya Kaminsky), the Rilke Prize, and the Emily Dickinson Award from the Poetry Society of America. He’s a longtime translator of Büchner Preis winning German poet Jan Wagner. His new poetry book is called Ice, which combines a concern for climate change with a metaphor for inner light.

How could embracing change help grow and develop your creative practice? We speak with best-selling author Brad Stulberg about “rugged flexibility” and new definitions for stability, how your expectations might be inhibiting your creativity, how the way you define yourself limits or grows your creative potential, and much more. We also discuss why it sometimes sucks to succeed.

Brad Stulberg is the bestselling author of Master of Change and The Practice of Groundedness. He writes for The New York Times and is on faculty at the University of Michigan's Graduate School of Public Health. He lives in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Western North Carolina.

Christie’s TEDx talk about envy and how someone else wrote her book.

Episode 73: Steve Magness on Doing Hard Things

As a culture, we spend a lot of our time watching tv and movies and reading and popular fiction, but we rarely stop to reflect on the influence these forms of entertainment have on our lives. In his new book, You Are What You Watch, data journalist Walt Hickey takes deep, fun, rambunctious dive into all the ways that movies, television, and other forms of pop culture are fundamentally important to how we experience the world, how we see ourselves and the kind of the values that we embrace. He explains how Jurassic Park inspired him to study math in college and got people interested in paleontology while also increasing funding for the field. He graphs how movies drive tourism and influence what kind of dogs people want. Best of all, the book contains an entire chapter exploring what stories do to their creators. Turns out, writing fan fiction puts a rocket on someone’s ability to write.

Walt Hickey is the Deputy Editor for Data and Analysis at Insider News. He  works on cool stories and supports the newsroom through data journalism. In 2022, he won the Pulitzer Prize for Illustrated Reporting. In Spring of 2018, he launched his creator-owned daily morning newsletter Numlock News. It’s all about the cool numbers buried in the news. It’s funny and makes you smarter. He also predicts the Oscars in the Numlock Awards Supplement, a seasonal pop-up spinoff of Numlock. He’s the author of the new book You Are What You Watch: How Movies and TV Affect Everyting.

We’ve got a quick announcement. You probably noticed that we didn’t put out a new episode today. 

That's not because it’s Rosemerry’s birthday, though it is! Happy birthday Rosemerry! Nope, we are taking a short break, this week and next, to get ready for some great stuff ahead. We are one episode away from our 100th episode, which is actually more like our 180th episode, because most episodes have a bonus to go along with it.

We are going to be going over some of our favorite moments from the podcast so far. In the meantime, Rosemerry and I are going to re-listen to ep 12, about saying no.

We’ll be back on Nov 16. Catch you then!

What guidance does the earth offer for creative practice? We speak with Jacqeline Suskin, author of A Year in Practice: Seasonal Rituals and Prompts to Awaken Cycles of Creative Expression about how to rest, when to push, when to engage in reflection, when to seek inspiration. We explore the rhythms of the earth and of creativity, specifically focusing on autumn and how this season might inform your creative practice. 

Jacqueline Suskin has composed over forty thousand poems with her ongoing improvisational writing project, Poem Store. She is the author of six books, including Help in the Dark Season. Her work has been featured in the New York Times, the Atlantic, and Yes! magazine. She lives in Detroit. For more, see jacquelinesuskin.com.

https://www.jacquelinesuskin.com/

**

Vanessa Zoltan explains why she believes “writing a bad novel is an amazing sacred practice” in this Slate article Christie and Rosemerry discuss: Don’t Just Write a Novel This November. Write a Bad Novel. It’s good for you!

Wow, it’s been a minute! Today’s episode is number 100, and we use the occasion to reflect on the origins of Emerging Form and how it has evolved since February 21, 2019 when we released episode 1. (We have been releasing bonus episodes every other week since episode 10, which means that this is actually episode 190!!)

We also discuss what we’ve learned how doing the podcast has enriched our lives and our friendship.

Episodes mentioned:

Ep 2: Is talent necessary with Jenn Kahn

Ep 76 Bonus Chris Duffy on Differentiating Between You and Your Ideas

Ep 28 The daily grind with Holiday Mathis

Ep 9: how should we think of awards and contests (live show!)

Ep 82 Bonus: Creative Pleasures with Brad Aaron Modlin

Ep 57: How play can fuel creativity with Catherine Price  (and #45 protecting your creative time)

Ep 88: Emily Scott on the art of performing

Ep 19: Creativity and COVID-19 with Peter Heller

Ep 79: Lauren Fleshman on Telling Her Story to Create Social Change

Ep 40: Envy, with Cheryl Strayed

Ep 74: T.A. Barron on the Magic of Stories

Ep 93: Melissa L. Sevigny

Ep 77 Bonus: Aaron Abeyta ep. 77 bonus  

Best way to tackle a creative fear? With a friend! We talk with comedians Chris Duffy and Zach Sherwin about how they offered inspiration and accountability for each other in a 101-day TikTok content creation challenge. We touch on creative habits, perfectionism, practical tips for negotiating TikTok, collaborative projects, the vicissitudes of algorithms, and metrics of success. It’s a heart-warming, laughter-full episode full of friendship, fear, birds, and success. 

Chris Duffy is a comedian, television writer, and radio/podcast host. Chris currently hosts TED’s hit podcast How to Be a Better Human. He has appeared on Good Morning America, ABC News, NPR, and National Geographic Explorer. Chris wrote for both seasons of Wyatt Cenac's Problem Areas on HBO, executive produced by John Oliver. He’s the creator/host of the streaming game show Wrong Answers Only, where three comedians try to guess what a leading scientist does all day, in partnership with LabX at the National Academy of Sciences. He has performed live in venues as big as a sold out Lincoln Center and as small as a walk-in closet (also sold out). Chris is both a former fifth grade teacher and a former fifth grade student. 

Zach Sherwin is a Los Angeles-based comedian and the creator and host of The Crossword Show, in which a panel of comedians solves a crossword puzzle live onstage in front of an audience. In 2022, he published his debut crossword puzzle in the New York Times. His writing for the web series “Epic Rap Battles of History” has received multiple Streamy Awards and Emmy nominations, and the Epic Rap Battles in which he’s appeared have amassed well over half a billion YouTube views and an RIAA-certified Gold record. His own YouTube videos have been viewed many millions of times, and his other writing credits range from “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend” (The CW) to MAD Magazine. As a performer, Zach has appeared on “Totally Biased with W. Kamau Bell” (FX) and “The Pete Holmes Show” (TBS), both long cancelled, as well as “America’s Got Talent” (NBC), which seems to be doing just fine! Zach has also worked extensively as a TV audience warm-up comic, including at the 2023 National Spelling Bee finals. For more information on Zach and The Crossword Show, please visit www.crosswordshow.com.

Zach’s first video of the 101 day experiment:

It’s the epiphany episode! Every year Rosemerry & Christie think back on the year in creative practice to see what we had hoped we might explore and do … and what actually happened. So many revelations in this episode! Full of laughter and sincerity, celebration and curiosity. We pick new words for 2024 to help guide our process, and of course, we hand out magic wands … though it’s surprising what happens with them. 

Christies’s 5280m essay

Liz Gilbert interview

How does one go from writing articles to writing a full book? How does this change creative rhythms of research, scheduling and writing? In this episode of Emerging Form we speak with journalist Rebecca Boyle whose first book, OUR MOON: How Earth’s Celestial Companion Transformed the Planet, Guided Evolution, and Made Us Who We Are comes out January 16. We speak, too, about how to do creative work while parenting young children and how to find focus with a subject literally as big as the moon. 

As a journalist, Rebecca Boyle has reported from particle accelerators, genetic sequencing labs, bat caves, the middle of a lake, the tops of mountains, and the retractable domes of some of Earth’s largest telescopes. Her first book, OUR MOON: How Earth’s Celestial Companion Transformed the Planet, Guided Evolution, and Made Us Who We Are (Random House, 2024) is a new history of humanity’s relationship with the Moon, which Rebecca has not yet visited on assignment. Based in Colorado Springs, Colo., Rebecca is a contributing editor at Scientific American, a contributing writer at Quanta Magazine and The Atlantic, and a columnist at Atlas Obscura. She is a frequent contributor to the New York Times, Smithsonian Air & Space, and Popular Science. Her work has appeared in Wired, MIT Technology Review, Nature, Science, Popular Mechanics, New Scientist, Audubon, Distillations, and many other publications.

How can you build a palace in your mind? We speak with Paul Hearding, the North American Champion for Reciting Pi, about how he used storytelling to memorize 16,106 digits in February 2020. He shares how his process evolved (obey the emerging form!) so that now, as he continues to memorize more, he’s included rhyme. It’s fun episode exploring passion projects and practical applications for story. 

After receiving his master's in Mathematics from the University of Delaware and teaching at the college level, Paul Hearding packed up his things and followed a lifelong dream of moving out west. That journey brought him to Telluride, Colorado, where he taught high-school math and science. Paul now runs his own tutoring business, nurturing an appreciation for the art of mathematics in his students while pursuing his own mathematical passions, including the practice of reciting digits of pi from memory. In 2020, Paul recited 16,106 digits of pi, setting the US record.He is actively doing original research in the area of finite fields and is currently researching permutation polynomials, a phenomenon in abstract algebra with applications to the information sciences, particularly cryptology. He plans to submit his dissertation this year and earn his Ph.D. from the University of Delaware.

How can a creative practice help us to meet what Rilke named the “dark hours of our being?” How can we participate in a more self-compassionate creative practice? In this heart-opening, soul-nourishing, deeply vulnerable episode of Emerging Form, we speak with comedian and poet John Roedel about how writing helped him wonder again and again “what if I go just a little bit deeper?” We talk about how through a daily writing practice in a period of personal struggle, he was able to become increasingly vulnerable, increasingly courageous about sharing his work, and increasingly connected to his own heart. 

John Roedel is a comic who unexpectedly gained notability as a writer and poet through his heartfelt pieces he shared on social media that went viral. He is the author of six self-published books that went on to become Amazon bestsellers, including—Hey God. Hey John, Upon Departure and his latest work, “Fitting In is For Sardines.”

Offering a sincere and very relatable look at his faith crisis, mental health, personal struggles, perception of our world, and even his fashion sense, John's writing has been shared millions of times across social media. He teaches at universities and retreat centers across the US.

It happens. We screw up. Sometimes, mid creative process, we realize we need to start over again. In this episode, we look at one of Rosemerry’s recent midnight bouts with “uh oh” and how it became a chance to explore trust in the process and trust in the creative self. “It was so empowering, so exciting, so revolutionary for my creative process to have this ability to be able to move forward with compassion toward myself instead of shaming of the self,” she says. In this heartfelt episode, Christie and Rosemerry explore vulnerability, authenticity, the gift of struggle, radical acceptance and the benefits of creating a cocoon of tenderness for the creative self.

When Kelly and Zach Weinersmith proposed a book on colonizing Mars, they had no idea that halfway through their research they’d change their position. Their title says it all: A City on Mars: Can We Settle Space, Should We Settle Space, and Have We Really Thought This Through? What happens when two people who eschew conflict find themselves in a position of dashing people’s dreams about space? In this light-hearted episode we talk about their research process, how they organized crazy amounts of information, their collaborative processes, negotiating critique with each other, how to make hard science more accessible and palatable to the public and how humor helps everything. 

Dr. Kelly Weinersmith received her PhD in Ecology at the University of California Davis, and is an adjunct faculty member in the BioSciences Department at Rice University. Kelly studies parasites that manipulate the behavior of their hosts, and her research has been featured in The Atlantic, National Geographic, BBC World, Science, and Nature. With her husband, Zach Weinersmith she wrote Soonish: Ten Emerging Technologies That’ll Improve and/or Ruin Everything, was a New York Times Bestseller.

and Zach Weinersmith is the cartoonist behind the popular geek webcomic, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal and he illustrated the New York Times-bestselling Open Borders: The Science and Ethics of Immigration. His work has been featured by The Economist, The Wall Street Journal, Slate, Forbes, Science Friday and many others. Zach and Kelly live in Virginia with their children.

“The day is about certainty, answers, lists, data,” says author Annabel Abbs-Streets. But at night, she says, “I felt I could put my arm through to another world” — a world of creativity, inspiration, open-mindedness and insight. In this episode, we discuss her new book, Sleepless: Unleashing the Subversive Power of the Night Self, which weaves science, memoir, and history into a powerful, intimate conversation about creativity and the night and why we (especially women) might find our empathy, creativity, and connection to the divine might be heightened after the sun goes down.

Annabel Abbs-Streets is an award-winning writer of highly researched fiction, non-fiction and memoir.  Sleepless is her seventh book, and her work has been published in over 30 languages.  She writes regularly for a wide range of newspapers and magazines, and has spoken at literary festivals across the world. She has a degree in English Literature, an MA in Marketing, Research and Statistics, and is a Fellow of the Brown Foundation. She lives with her family  in London and Sussex.

Annabel Abbs-Streets

Sleepless: Unleashing the Subversive Power of the Night Self 

Rosemerry’s album on endarkenment, Dark Praise

[image: Christie working with her Scientific American editor, Jeff DelViscio.]

We live in a society that wants to know. And yet uncertainty underlies all of science–one of our most essential tools for understanding the world. What is our relationship with uncertainty? Why is this relationship so important? And what does it have to do with creative practice? In this episode of Emerging Form, Christie Aschwanden talks about her new short-run podcast, Uncertain, hosted by Scientific American. We discuss the genesis of the project, the importance of finding people who are also passionate about your project, being receptive to opportunities, how we can be smart about creating congruent projects, how trying new media can spark our creative practice, and the importance of encouragement.

Uncertain from Scientific American https://scientificamerican.com/uncertain

Christie’s FiveThirtyEight story “There’s No Such Thing as ‘Sound Science’”

It’s all about balance–and in this episode we speak with botanist and writer Erin Zimmerman about choices she made in her new book Unrooted: Botany, Motherhood and the Fight to Save an Old Science. We also talk about the choices she’s made as she balances motherhood and work, being an introvert and finding a writing community, pursuing her passions and finding meaningful ways to recharge. Plus how she was inspired by Charles Darwin’s parenting. 

Erin Zimmerman is an evolutionary biologist turned science writer and essayist. She studied at the University of Guelph and at the Université de Montréal before traveling to South America to collect plant specimens, and then working at the Royal Botanic Gardens in England. In addition to her academic writing, her essays have appeared in publications including Smithsonian Magazine, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Undark, and Narratively.

image: Eben Pariser and Molly Venter

How do we get in the zone? What does that even mean for creatives? And how do we stay in it? And how do we get back in when kicked out? We speak with musicians and marriage partners Molly Venter and Eben Pariser about using the ancient technologies of poetry and music to help people tap into their subconscious and explore what treasure they have within them. 

Goodnight Moonshine is a guitar and vocal duet, and a musical marriage in all senses. The Duo combines the evocative voice and songwriting of Molly Venter, with Eben Pariser’s adventurous guitar playing. The result is folk music with a depth of improvisation and tonal subtlety usually reserved for jazz. 

Molly is well known for her sublime singing in the prominent female-vocal-group Red Molly, Her voice has been called “biker-chick smoky,” and with Goodnight Moonshine she is in full force as a songwriter with a trance-induced stream-of-consciousness writing style.  Eben cut his teeth as a street performer in New York City, playing guttural music of New Orleans with his band Roosevelt Dime, but he was quickly captured by classic jazz, and his improvisational skills are a hallmark of Goodnight Moonshine’s sound. 

“Invest always in relationships before you need them, be vulnerable with them,” says Courtney E. Martin, journalist, author, podcaster and speaker. In this episode, she shares with us an essential question for all journalists and creatives and discusses how it shaped a specific project, plus she offers advice for living a creative life based on Parker Palmer’s thoughts on “the tragic gap.” This is an episode focused on transparency, vulnerability, community and humility.

Courtney E. Martin is the author of four books, most recently, Learning in Public, a popular newsletter, called Examined Family, host of “The Wise Unknown” podcast from PRX, and co-host of the Slate “How To!” podcast. She’s also a co-founder of the Solutions Journalism Network and FRESH Speakers, and the Storyteller-in-Residence at The Holding Co. Her literal happy place is her co-housing community in Oakland, Calif. Her metaphorical happy place is asking people questions.

When fiction writer Lydia Millet found herself “preoccupied by the overwhelm of the world,” she turned to writing nonfiction. “I thought if i tried to write about it I might think more lucidly about it.” We speak with her about her newest book, We Loved It All (part memoir, part bestiary), about the challenges and joys of changing genres, about the gap between her projections about being a novelist and actually being a novelist, and how books not only save lives, but souls. 

Lydia Millet has written more than a dozen novels and story collections. Her newest book is a memoir, We Loved It All, published this month. Her novel A Children's Bible was a New York Times "Best 10 Books of 2020" selection and shortlisted for the National Book Award. In 2019 her story collection Fight No More received an Award of Merit from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and her collection Love in Infant Monkeys was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2010. She also writes essays, opinion pieces, book reviews, and other ephemera and has worked as an editor and staff writer at the Center for Biological Diversity since 1999. She lives in the desert outside Tucson with her family.

What if we dropped our expectations and preconceived ideas about our creative practice? In this episode, we speak with elite runner, author Katie Arnold about how her Zen practice of “coming to whatever you do in your life with a fresh and open mind” has influenced her creative work. We explore the story behind her new book, Brief Flashings in the Phenomenal World: Zen and the Art of Running Free, which tells the story of a traumatic wilderness accident and her path to healing. Plus, we discuss the choices we make around including other people’s stories in our writing. 

Katie Arnold is a longtime journalist and bestselling author of Brief Flashings in the Phenomenal World: Zen and the Art of Running Free (2024), which tells the story of a traumatic wilderness accident and her path to healing. Her critically acclaimed memoir, Running Home, was published in 2019. An elite ultra runner and student of Zen, Katie teaches writing workshops exploring the link between movement and creativity. A former managing editor at Outside Magazine, she has written for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Outside, ESPN The Magazine, Runner’s World, and Elle, among others, as well as been a guest on NPR Weekend Edition Sunday and The Upaya Zen Center Podcast. She has been awarded fellowships from MacDowell and Ucross. Katie lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, with her husband, Steve Barrett, their two teenage daughters, and two dogs.

Christie’s review of Katie’s book, Running Home.

What is our relationship with our bodies? Our past? The planet? The rest of humanity? We speak with Nadia Colburn about how she weaves together a yoga practice, mindfulness, writing, and activism to explore these questions. “Our writing, our living, our experiencing is deeper when we can come from a bigger perspective and bring all the awarenesses,” she says. We speak about common obstacles to creative practice, ways to include the body, how teaching affects her writing practice and how she came to write her most recent collection of poems. 

Writer, yogi, activist and teacher Nadia Colburn is author of two books of poetry, The High Shelf and I Say the Sky and her poetry and creative nonfiction have been published in The New Yorker, American Poetry Review, Spirituality & Health, and dozens of other journals. She’s been a professor at MIT, Lesley, and Stonehill College, and she is currently the writer-in-residence at Northeastern's Center For Spirituality, Dialogue and Service. She’s also the founder of the Align Your Story School for writers which combines a traditional academic background with a more holistic, mindful approach. 

Nadia Colburn

I Say the Sky

Free five-day meditation and writing practice

“I had built up a lot of don’ts in my head about writing,” says bestselling author Paolo Bacigalupi. In this episode, we speak with the speculative fiction novelist about how he went from wondering if he would ever write again to publishing his new book, NAVOLA. We cover daily habits, discipline, pleasure, and meeting the negative voices in your head. 

Paolo Bacigalupi is an internationally bestselling author of speculative fiction. He has won the Hugo, Nebula, World Fantasy, John W. Campbell and Locus Awards, as well as being a finalist for the National Book Award and a winner of the Michael L. Printz Award for Excellence in Young Adult Literature. Paolo’s work often focuses on questions of sustainability and the environment, most notably the impacts of climate change. He has written novels for adults, young adults, and children, and his new book NAVOLA releases July 9, 2024. He can be found online at windupstories.com.

Ambition. Perspective. Competition. Kindness. These themes are at the heart of our conversation with essayist and cartoonist Tim Kreider. Drawing from his essay, “The Ones Who Turned Back” we talk about mid-life changes in creative practice, plus thoughts on the tension between doing what you want and doing what you are rewarded for (or what people expect of you) and why you want to stay not only young at heart, but young at mind.  

Tim Kreider is the author of the essay collections We Learn Nothing and I Wrote This Book Because I Love You. His Substack is called “The Loaf” and he has contributed to The New York Times, The New Yorker, Vox, Nerve, Men’s Journal, The Comics Journal, Film Quarterly, and Fangoria. His cartoons have been collected in three books by Fantagraphics Books. His cartoon, “The Pain—When Will It End?” ran for twelve years in the Baltimore City Paper and other alternative weeklies, and is archived at the paincomics.com. Tim was born and educated in Baltimore, Maryland. He lives in New York City and an idyllic compound in the Ozark woods. His cat The Quetzal died in 2013. His new cat is Richard, who is a fool, an adorable little fool.

The Referendum

The Ones Who Turned Back

What happens when a project grows way beyond its original scope? We talk with Nicola Twilley about her new book  Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet and Ourselves, originally envisioned as an article. In this episode we cover being fluid with our plans, research, rewriting, the differences between writing alone and with a partner, and how what looks like bad luck can turn into a blessing. 

Nicola Twilley is the coauthor of Until Proven Safe: The History and Future of Quarantine, named one of the best books of 2021 by Time, NPR, The Guardian, and the Financial Times. She is cohost of Gastropod, an award-winning podcast that looks at food through the lens of science and history and a frequent contributor to The New Yorker. 

How can trying a new art form vitalize and fuel your creative practice? Christie and Rosemerry travel to Nashville to meet in person with their most frequent guest, Holiday Mathis, and converse about her experiences with learning about writing and performing stand-up comedy. The laughter-filled episode explores developing your creative voice, the benefits of a creative community, meeting your fears and showing up vulnerable in your creative practice, and much more. 

Holiday Mathis writes the daily horoscope for The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post and hundreds of newspapers around the world. In her decades-long syndication she's published almost nine million words on luck, the stars and the human condition. She's also a multi-platinum selling songwriter with songs recorded by Miley Cyrus, Emma Roberts and more. Holiday is the author of several books including How to Fail Epically in Hollywood.  

Previous Holiday episodes:Episode 28: The Daily GrindEpisode 28 bonus: Extended Interview with Holiday MathisEpisode 63: Reviving abandoned projects with Holiday MathisEpisode 63 bonus: Holiday Mathis on creative processEpisode 80: Holiday Mathis Wrote a NovelEpisode 80 bonus: Audio Excerpt from How to Fail Epically in HollywoodThe blog post that started our friendship with Holiday: I Know Astrology Is B******t, But I Can’t Stop Reading My Horoscope by Christie Aschwanden

“It took me years to reclaim my creative life as not other than my spiritual life but the very place my spirit flowers,” says Mirabai Starr award-winning author, internationally acclaimed speaker and a leading teacher of interspiritual dialogue. In this episode, we speak with Mirabai about how she created an intimate, welcoming tone in her most recent book, Ordinary Mysticism: Your Life as Sacred Ground. We speak, too, about the intersections of creative practice and spiritual practice, the importance of the imagination, dismantling the hierarchy of the mentor/protege relationship, and how she steps out of the way to let “the [creative] thing” come through.

In 2020, Mirabai Starr was honored on Watkins’ list of the 100 Most Spiritually Influential Living People. Drawing from twenty years of teaching philosophy and world religions at the University of New Mexico-Taos, Starr now travels the world sharing her wisdom on contemplative living, writing as a spiritual practice, and the transformational power of grief and loss. She has authored over a dozen books, including Wild Mercy, Caravan of No Despair, and God of Love. Starr has received critical acclaim for her revolutionary contemporary translations of the mystics John of the Cross, Teresa of Avila and Julian of Norwich. Starr continues to teach seminars, workshops and retreats, both in person and through her online community, Wild Heart. She lives with her extended family in the mountains of northern New Mexico. 

www.mirabaistarr.com

www.wildheart.space

https://www.instagram.com/mirabaistarr/

https://www.facebook.com/mirabai.starr.author/

https://www.harpercollins.com/products/ordinary-mysticism-mirabai-starr?variant=41325260668962

This week, Christie interviews Rosemerry about her new book, The Unfolding, out on October 1st. Do her a big favor and pre-order it now at this link. Rosemerry explains how the poems came together, how she structured the book and why the cover is pink. It’s a wonderful conversation we know you’ll love.

Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer is a poet, teacher, speaker and writing facilitator. Her daily audio series, The Poetic Path, is on the Ritual app. Her poems have appeared on A Prairie Home Companion, PBS News Hour, O Magazine, American Life in Poetry, and Carnegie Hall stage. Her most recent poetry collections are All the Honey (Samara Press, 2023) and The Unfolding (Wildhouse Publishing, October 2024). In January, 2024, she became the first poet laureate for Evermore, helping others explore grief, bereavement, wonder and love through poetry. One-word mantra: Adjust.

One of the most thrilling stories of creative inspiration is that of Rainer Maria Rilke writing Sonnets to Orpheus and the Duino Elegies following a time of great international and personal upheaval. Translator and poet Mark S. Burrows shares Rilke’s story with us and talks with us about the art of translation–full of creative conundrums and choices and impossible invitations. It’s a heart-opening, deeply compelling episode about how we are all translators, “listening to the deepest voice” and how life itself is our greatest creative act. 

Mark S. Burrows is an award-winning poet, translator, and scholar. An historian of medieval Christianity, he is a much sought-after speaker and retreat leader in the US and Europe. He is a past president of the Society for the Study of Christian Spirituality and currently edits poetry for the society’s journal Spiritus. His most recent translation is Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus (2024). He recently published You Are the Future: Living the Questions with Rainer Maria Rilke (2024), cowritten with Stephanie Dowrick. He lives and writes in Camden, ME. 

https://www.msburrows.com/

www.soul-in-sight.org 

“I believe that telling our story, even the story of a moment, the story of an emotion, is one of the most healing things we can do,” says James Crews, poet, teacher and speaker. His new book, Unlocking the Heart: Writing for Courage, Mindfulness and Self-Compassion blends poetry, essays and writing prompts to help readers tell their own stories. We speak about this unusual blending of genres, writing as a healing practice, and how to write titles and first lines that draw people in. 

James Crews is the editor of several bestselling books, including The Path to Kindness and How to Love the World, which has over 100,000 copies in print. He has been featured in The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, The New York Times Magazine, The New Republic, The Christian Science Monitor, and on NPR’s Morning Edition. The author of four prize-winning books of poetry and of the book Kindness Will Save the World, James also speaks and leads workshops on kindness, mindfulness, and writing for self-compassion. He lives with his husband on forty rocky acres in the woods of Southern Vermont. AND The Wonder of Small Things just won the New England Book Award for Poetry! He also hosts a monthly writing community and sends out a weekly newsletter.

To purchase signed books and join his newsletter: https://linktr.ee/jcrewsjr

More on James Crews: https://www.jamescrews.net/

For info on his monthly writing community: https://www.themonthlypause.com/

When is lack of knowledge a writer’s best friend? New York Times bestselling author and Guggenheim winner Richard Panek has found that starting from a place of relative ignorance allows him to research and then write about complicated subjects in a way that allows the average reader to find their own way in. We speak with Richard on the book birthday of his newest title, Pillars of Creation: How the James Webb Space Telescope Unlocked the Secrets of the Cosmos. He discusses how he found the form for the book, his favorite punctuation and how it helps to create a more conversation tone, how blog writing informs his book writing, and trying creative things you haven’t tried before. 

Richard Panek is the author of numerous books including The 4% Universe: Dark Matter, Dark Energy, and the Race to Discover the Rest of Reality, which won the American Institute of Physics communication award and was longlisted for the Royal Society Prize for Science Books. The recipient of fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and the New York Foundation for the Arts as well as an Antarctic Artists and Writers grant from the National Science Foundation, he is also the co-author with Temple Grandin of The Autistic Brain: Thinking Across the Spectrum, a New York Times bestseller. His own books have been translated into sixteen languages, and his writing about science and culture has appeared in publications including the New York Times, the Washington Post, Scientific American, Discover, Smithsonian, Natural History, Esquire, and Outside. He lives in New York City.

Pillars of Creation: How the James Webb Space Telescope Unlocked the Secrets of the Cosmos

When we asked prolific novelist Laura Pritchett to speak with us about writing fiction, little did we realize that not only would she offer us a host of practical advice about character, revision and ambition, she would also teach us about meeting our art with great self-compassion.  We speak about her two new novels out this year, Playing with Wildfire (Torrey House Press) and Three Keys (Random House Books), writing without a plot outline, and much more, including why joy must be a part of a fiction writer’s practice. 

Laura Pritchett is the author of seven novels. Known for championing the complex and contemporary West and giving voice to the working class, her books have garnered the PEN USA Award, the Milkweed National Fiction Prize, the WILLA, the High Plains Book Award, several Colorado book awards, and others. She’s also the author of two nonfiction books, one play, and was editor of three environmental-based anthologies. One novel, Stars Go Blue, has been optioned for TV rights. She’s published hundreds of essays and short stories in national venues, most recently in The Sun, Terrain, Camas, Orion, Creative Nonfiction, and others. She directs the MFA in Nature Writing at Western Colorado University and holds a PhD from Purdue University. When not writing or teaching, she can be found sauntering around the West, especially her home state of Colorado. She particularly likes looking at clouds and wildflowers.

Laura’s website

GOING GREEN: True Tales from Gleaners, Scavengers, and Dumpster Diver Edited by Laura Pritchett (with contributions by Christie and her mom, Ruth Friesen).

How does creativity help us meet a difficult time? In this episode, co-hosts Christie Aschwanden and Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer talk about ways that creative practice can nourish us, how it can help us envision a way forward, how it helps us to widen the lens and see beyond the moment, how it helps us embrace paradox, opens us to connection, and more. We hear from previous guests poet Jack Ridl and astrologer/filmmaker/novelist/musician Holiday Mathis, plus from listeners in our Facebook group, too.

Link: Charlie Jane Anders blog post

How does the writing practice help us know what we most want to say? How do we translate an intimate, interactive personal style into a practical, how-to book? In this episode of Emerging Form, we interview Rebecca Mullen who has spent decades as a marriage counselor and recently translated her experience onto the page. “My process as coach is as question asker,” she says. “When you are writing a book, it’s not a conversation, it is one way. It’s still important to me to be the coach pausing to ask questions, inviting readers to try this on. I wanted the book to have an interactive style and conversational tone.” We speak about how to organize your ideas, how to grow into an authoritative voice, how to get clear, and how writing a how-to book about marriage can profoundly affect your marriage.

Rebecca Mullen is an artist, writer, and coach. She hosts the podcast Habits for Your Happily Ever After, and her TEDx Talk invites you to create peace at the dinner table with the stories you tell. Her brand-new book is called 6 Steps to Better Marriage Communication.

Rosemerry on Rebecca’s podcast: How Does the Death of. Child Impact Your Marriage

Christie on Rebecca’s podcast: How Science Can Help Your Marriage Communication

It’s our annual end of the year episode, in which we review the year that was and assess how things went. We share our revelations and highlights and what we hope to do better in the coming year. We also pick new words for 2025 to help guide our process and look back on our words for 2024 and how they served us.

And we have news! Starting this month, Emerging Form is also a radio show on KVNF radio. You can hear us every other Tuesday from 6:30pm to 7pm mountain time.

Christie’s essay about living with uncertainty.

The Scientific American feature story Christie wrote about metabolically healthy obesity.

Uncertain, Christie’s limited run podcast series released by Scientific American.

The Unfolding, Rosemerry’s latest book of poetry.

“If you are sitting around waiting to be inspired, you won’t get a lot of painting done,” says mixed-media artist Kellie Day. In this episode, we talk about finding inspiration, a practice of showing up, the difference between creating from the head vs. creating from the spirit, how “shadow careers” can be an attempt to get closer to our passion, the miracles that can come from mistakes, and working through self-judgment, and how to “open to greater creativity.”

Kellie Day is mixed-media artist whose paintings hold serendipitous treasures including Sufi poems, stenciled spray paint, handmade stamps and bold drips of acrylic paint applied with a paint syringe, creating rich textured layers of collage and acrylics. This unconventional approach has caught the eye of major brands like Trader Joe's, The North Face, and Alpinist Magazine who have featured her work in their collections. She’s also worked as a US Forest Service Ranger, firefighter, and graphic designer, and brings both structure and great freedom to her role as an International Art Mentor, helping women discover their artistic voices and explore their own creativity.

There’s an art to deep listening and eliciting enlivening conversation, and in this episode we speak with celebrated interviewer Mitzi Rapkin, founder, host and producer of the literary podcast “First Draft: A Dialogue on Writing.” Join us in an exploration of how to draw out authenticity and invite conversations “with a life force of their own” that allow you to “go to a place you never thought you could go.”

Mitzi Rapkin is the founder, host and producer of the literary podcast, “First Draft: A Dialogue on Writing,” which features a new author interview each week. There, she has interviewed more than 500 contemporary writers over the past eleven years, exploring the decisions and psychology that went into the writing of featured books, writers’ themes and the human experience. Rapkin is also a journalist, fiction writer, certified integral coach, facilitator and fiction-writing instructor. Her company, Full Light Communications, helps clients articulate and achieve their vision through facilitation, coaching, and communications services. She is never far from a bar of dark chocolate.

How does storytelling matter? Why might we bring in feelings about our children or a moment of being overcome with beauty into a book about, say, climate change? In this episode of Emerging Form, we speak with Auden Schendler about the power of story, about how we are drawn to tell the stories we most need to tell, and how and why it’s important to let humility be a part of our practice.

Auden Schendler has spent almost thirty years working on sustainability and climate change in the corporate world, focusing on big scale change that rejects tokenism. Currently Senior Vice President of Sustainability at Aspen One, he has been a town councilman, a Colorado Air Quality Control Commissioner, and an ambulance medic. He’s the author of Getting Green Done: Hard Truths from the Sustainability Revolution, which climatologist James Hansen called “an antidote to greenwash,” and new this year, Terrible Beauty: Reckoning with Climate Complicity and Rediscovering our Soul, which historian Naomi Oreskes called “compelling and weirdly fun.”

Artificial Intelligence now permeates our daily lives. What conversations are we not having about AI? And how can creative projects help open these discussions about what is really at stake? In this episode of Emerging Form, journalist Evan Ratliff shares with us how he cloned his voice, connected it to a chat bot, and created a voice agent that took calls and made calls–both to strangers and friends–all in a voice that sounded as if it were him. He shares the project, his questions, his concerns, his discoveries on a new podcast, Shell Game. We speak with him about the genesis of the show, how having no prescriptive ideas on the outset can benefit creative practice, how financing your own creative project offers more creative freedom, and why it was so important in a program about AI to have all the content created by humans

Evan Ratliff is an award-winning investigative journalist, bestselling author, podcast host, and entrepreneur. He’s the author of the The Mastermind: A True Story of Murder, Empire, and a New Kind of Crime Lord; the writer and host of the hit podcasts Shell Game and Persona: The French Deception; and the cofounder of The Atavist Magazine, Pop-Up Magazine, and the Longform Podcast.

Links:Shell GameEvan interviewing Christie on the Longform Podcast

“Find what you long for and be brave and vulnerable enough to offer it to the world.” So says Kayleen Asbo, our featured guest on this episode of Emerging Form in which we speak about how to foster and shape creative community. Asbo is a cultural historian, composer, musician, writer and teacher who weaves myth, music, psychology, history and art with experiential learning. We talk about passion, about ways to help a group find juice, about how a group leader can encourage trust and intimacy, as Asbo says, by leading “with your own breaking open heart.” At their best, creative communities refresh, encourage, support and inspire us--and offer us discipline. This episode is full of thoughts and tips on everything from creating commitment to how to create intimacy online.

Kayleen Asbo holds master's degrees in music (piano performance), mythology and psychology. She has been a faculty member at the Pacifica Graduate Institute and the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, and the Osher Life Long Learning Institutes at UC Berkeley, Sonoma State University and Dominican University. She teaches on a wide array of topics, ranging from Jungian Depth Psychology to Dante to the History of Classical Music. As theCreative Director and Resident Mythologist for Mythica, Asbo used to spend three months a year leading workshops and retreats in sacred sites in Europe and has turned her treasury of pictures and stories from these pilgrimages into online "Virtual Pilgrimages."

Kayleen Asbo

Virtual Pilgrimages

To learn more about Christie’s freelancing workshops, visit https://christieaschwanden.com/workshops/ or email Christie@nasw.org

**

The Hero of the Imogene Pass Race

--Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

When I think of encouragement,

I think of Jack Pera,

who stood every year

at the top of Imogene Pass—

in snow, in sun, in sleet, in fog.

On race day, a thousand plus runners

would reach the top,

weary, having climbed

over five thousand feet in ten miles,

and Jack, he would hold out his hand

and pull each of us up the last foot,

launching us toward the long downhill finish.

I remember how surprised I was

the first time, and grateful,

grateful to feel him reaching for me,

grateful to feel his powerful grip

yanking me up through the scree.

“Good job,” he’d say to each one of us,

cheering us though we were sweaty

and drooling and panting and spent.

After that first race, I knew to look for him

as I climbed the last pitch,

trying to make out his form

at the top of the ridge.

And there was. Every time.

“Good job,” he’d say

as he made that last steep step

feel like flight.

There are people who do this,

who hold out their hand,

year after year,

to help those who need it.

There are people who carry us

when we feel broken,

if only for a moment.

When I heard today Jack had died,

I couldn’t help but imagine

an angel waiting there above him

as he took his last breath,

an angel with a firm grip and a big smile

holding out a hand, pulling him through that last effort,

telling him, “Good Job, Jack. Good job.”

And may he have felt in that moment

the blessing of that encouragement,

totally ready to be launched into whatever came next.

Good job, Jack Pera. Good job.

“Marvelous things happen when you follow your heart’s truth … open doorways you can’t imagine.” So says our special guest Kayleen Asbo in this special bonus episode with the amazing Kayleen Asbo, cultural historian, composer, musician, writer and teacher. We talk about her “pillars of the day,” and her “bookends,” plus habits she has for cultivating beauty and creating anchors in an itinerant life, plus things she wishes she’d known before that she trusts now--especially about reckless generosity.

Kayleen Asbo

Christie’s upcoming workshop, Level Up: business planning for freelancers

How do you “reduce the drag” and make yourself the most available to daily output in your creative practice? To help with ideas, we turn to Holiday Mathis, who has written over eight million words in her daily, syndicated horoscopes. Talk about learning how to negotiate the daily grind! In this episode, we talk about how improvisation rules help in daily discipline, about Holiday’s muses and how she serves them and great advice from a soap opera actor. We talk ambition, how she got her start, and the role of the reader vs. the process of the writer. It’s a light-hearted, metaphor-rich, treasure trove of advice for creatives of all kinds. 

Holiday Mathis writes the syndicated daily horoscope column for hundreds of newspaper publications internationally including The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, and in her hometown, The Tennessean. She is working on the Guinness Book World Record for the most consecutively published words by a single author in newspapers, having currently been published every day since 2005. Mathis is also a multi-platinum songwriter whose songs have been recorded by Miley Cyrus, Emma Roberts and many others. She lives in Franklin, Tennessee with her husband, daughter and two Shih Tzus. 

Holiday Mathis

Today’s horoscopes by Holiday

Some of Mathis’s songs

Christie’s blog post about Mathis: I Know Astrology is B******t, But I Can’t Stop Reading My Horoscope

Rosemerry’s poem about her birthday horoscope last year

Koko the gorilla muse

Photo: A Holiday Mathis horoscope. [This thing you’re trying to accomplish cannot be accomplished as a linear pursuit. It’s a holistic process. So when you' feel yourself drawn “off track,” maybe you’re actually just working things from a different angle.]

In this bonus episode, we continue our conversation with horoscope writer Holiday Mathis, who also happens to be a multi-platinum songwriter whose songs have been recorded by Miley Cyrus, Emma Roberts and many others. We talk about the difference between writing horoscopes and lyrics, more about attending to and chasing the muses, and about the essential quality of openness. 

Holiday Mathis

Holiday’s daily, syndicated horoscopes

Christie’s blog, I know that astrology is b******t, but I can’t stop reading my hororscope

The Book of Laughter and Forgetting by Milan Kundera

Rosemerry’s poem about her birthday horoscope last year

“You remind me of my humanness by talking about yours,” says this week’s Emerging Form guest Danusha Laméris. We speak with the award-winning poet about how the small stories--what she calls “the understory”--mean as much, perhaps more, as the big headlines, and the creative process around finding and sharing these stories. We talk about the importance of leaning into the complexity and not needing “to be a motivational speaker.” 

Danusha Laméris’ first book, The Moons of August (Autumn House, 2014), was chosen by Naomi Shihab Nye as the winner of the Autumn House Press poetry prize. Some of her poems have been published in The Best American Poetry, The New York Times, TheAmerican Poetry Review, The GettysburgReview, Ploughshares, and Tin House. She’s the author of Bonfire Opera, (University of Pittsburgh Press, Pitt Poetry Series, 2020), and the recipient of the 2020 Lucille Clifton Legacy Award. Danusha teaches poetry independently, and was the 2018-2020 Poet Laureate of Santa Cruz County, California. 

Danusha Laméris

The Hive Poetry Collective Podcast

“Small Kindnesses” by Danusha Laméris

“June 20th” by Lucille Clifton

“Bonfire Opera” by Danusha Laméris

_____________________________

Writing Haikus for Rosemerry

—Christie Aschwanden

My dear poet friend

Does not recognize that I

Wrote her a haiku

Photo: A Holiday Mathis horoscope. [This thing you’re trying to accomplish cannot be accomplished as a linear pursuit. It’s a holistic process. So when you' feel yourself drawn “off track,” maybe you’re actually just working things from a different angle.]

**Note: Apologies! We are re-sending this episode, as there was a technical problem in the first audio file. If you haven’t listened yet, this is the better version.

In this bonus episode, we continue our conversation with writer Holiday Mathis, who writes a syndicated daily horoscope column and also happens to be a multi-platinum songwriter whose songs have been recorded by Miley Cyrus, Emma Roberts and many others. We talk about the difference between writing horoscopes and lyrics, more about attending to and chasing the muses, and about the essential quality of openness. 

Holiday Mathis

Holiday’s daily, syndicated horoscopes

Christie’s blog, I know that astrology is b******t, but I can’t stop reading my hororscope

The Book of Laughter and Forgetting by Milan Kundera

Rosemerry’s poem about her birthday horoscope last year

In this bonus conversation with acclaimed poet Danusha Laméris, we learn about her nocturnal writing habits, her leap from painting to poetry (and the advice that came with her), and the importance of “belonging” and “the tribe.” 

Danusha Laméris’ first book,The Moons of August (Autumn House, 2014), was chosen by Naomi Shihab Nye as the winner of the Autumn House Press poetry prize. Some of her poems have been published in The Best American Poetry,The New York Times,TheAmerican Poetry Review,The GettysburgReview, Ploughshares, and Tin House. She’s the author ofBonfire Opera, (University of Pittsburgh Press, Pitt Poetry Series, 2020), and the recipient of the 2020 Lucille Clifton Legacy Award. Danusha teaches poetry independently, and was the 2018-2020 Poet Laureate of Santa Cruz County, California. 

Danusha Laméris

The Hive Poetry Collective Podcast

What does play have to do with creativity? Could a hula hoop help you finish your book project? In this episode, we argue about what is play, anyway—is it something you set time aside for? Or something that is always available to you? And how might it help your creative life? Then we are joined by author and happiness coach Sherry Richert Belul to get her take on our two questions: 1) How does play inform your creative process? and 2) What’s an example of a project that has been shaped by play? We’d love your feedback on these questions, too!

Episode Notes:

Meet our new production wizard, Rob Dozier

Play: How it shapes the brain, opens the imagination and invigorates the soul by Stuart Brown, M.D.

Playing at Work: Organizational Play as a Facilitator of Creativity, dissertation by Samuel West

Christie’s spam poetry on Last Word on Nothing

Rosemerry’s collaborative book of three-line poems, Even Now

Snark Week: The Wrath of the Sloth on Last Word on Nothing

Slaughterhouse Five, by Kurt Vonnegut

Sherry Richert Belul and Simply Celebrate

Say It Now: 33 ways to say I love you to the most important people in your life

Secret Agents of Change Facebook Group

***

Wild Rose Shops for a Bathing Suit

         —Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

Not the full-coverage shorts.

Not the black one-piece

with the ruffle around the hips.

She wants to show off some skin.

She doesn’t care who’s looking.

Or who’s not.

She’s got flesh and a lot of it.

A woman needs weight in the world.

Damn, she is getting hot just thinking

about the way the sun likes to touch her.

She finds a strapless bikini

in her favorite color, brilliant magenta.

Barely a bottom. Perfect.

Another suit in hunter orange.

She plans to be swimming with sharks

and wants them to know she is there.

God, she loves shopping for bathing suits.

She could do it all day with that long tri-fold mirror

that knows she gives squat

about who’s the loveliest of all,

but dang, how could she not notice

how great it is to have hips, like hers,

how fine to have some real meat to swing around.

If you are lucky, as an artist, you have a mentor--someone who recognizes your potential, who offers feedback, who pushes you and helps you grow. In this episode we talk with one of Rosemerry’s mentors, the phenomenal Art Goodtimes, about his relationship with his mentor, Dolores LaChapelle. We cover everything from The problem with the greek alphabet to the mushroom parade down the streets of Telluride and how ritual takes us out of our minds and into our bodies, making us “more than what we are.”

Poet, basket weaver and former regional editor/columnist, Art Goodtimes served as San Miguel County Commissioner (Green Party, 1996-2016) and Western Slope Poet Laureate (2011-13). Former poetry editor for Earth First! Journal, Wild Earth and the Mountain Gazette, currently he’s poetry editor for Fungi magazine and co-editor with Lito Tejada-Flores at the on-line poetry anthology SageGreenJournal.org. His latest book out from Lithic Press is Dancing on Edge: The McRedeye Poems(Lithic, 2019). Since 1981 “Shroompa” has been poet-in-residence at the annual Telluride Mushroom Festival in August. A recent cancer survivor, Art serves as program co-director for the Telluride Institute’s Talking Gourds poetry program, including the national Fischer Prize and Colorado Cantor Prize contests. 

Talking Gourds

Fungi Magazine

Sage Green Journal

Dancing on Edge: The McRedeye Poems

www.facebook.com/art.goodtimes

Dolores LaChapelle

Art Goodtimes (right) with Emerging Form patron saint, Jack Mueller. (photo credit: Jimi Bernath)

In this bonus episode, Sherry Richert Belul, happiness coach and founder of Simply Celebrate, talks with us about co-founding Secret Agents of Change, how even the way you walk to the office can be playful, and how it is that she came to find herself a happiness coach. 

Want to make sure you receive every bonus episode? Subscribe to our newsletter!

As Mentioned in the Podcast:

In this week’s podcast, we mentioned a poem I wrote about my dear friend Sally Estes when she was told she had three months to live. Here I am reading the poem. It’s also printed below.

They Say It’s the Best Bloom in Ten Years

         —Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

She wants to go see the bluebonnets, she says.

This is after she tells me they’ve said she has three months to live.

And I want to find her vast fields of bluebonnets,

acres and acres of white-tipped blue bloom.

And I want to send her more springs to see them in,

more days to live one day at a time. I want to remove

the pain in her belly, the pain that aggressively grows.

I want to make deals with the universe. Want to say no

to the way things are. I want to tell death to wait.

I want to tell life to find a way. I want to hug her

until she believes she’s beloved. I want to give her

the pen that will write every brave thing

that she’s been unable to say. There are days

when we feel how uncompromising it is, the truth.

How human we are. There are days when the bluebonnets

stretch as far as the eye can see. There are days

we know nothing is more important than going to see them,

a billion blue petals all nodding in the wind, teaching us to say yes.

—forthcoming in Hush, Middle Creek Publishing, 2020

Engaging in a creative project can be hard enough when the subject matter is fun. But what about when it’s emotionally taxing, too? In this episode, we talk about many techniques for working with topics that make us uneasy—from changing perspective to creating rituals. Then we talk with Thea Deley, speaker, writer and improviser, and ask her two questions: 1) When do you know you are ready to write about something difficult—what is the role of perspective, and 2) How do you navigate stories that might hurt someone? We are interested in your answers to these questions, too!

Episode Notes

Christie’s farewell to David Corcoran on Last Word on Nothing

Opening Up: The Healing Power of Expressing Emotions, by James W. Pennebaker, PhD

Pablo Neruda: Tonight I Can Write

American Psychological Association: Writing to Heal

Harvard Health Publishing: Writing About Emotions May Ease Stress and Trauma

Thea Deley (photo of Thea by Mike Maxwell)

Christie’s ode to Holiday Mathis, “I Know Astrology Is B******t, But I Can’t Stop Reading My Horoscope.”

**

Simple Tools

         —Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

I am so grateful for the rubber spatula,

the way it sits quietly in the drawer

yet is always ready for action—

is game to scrape the walls of the blender

or to fold chocolate chips into cookie dough.

It evens and swirls the frosting on cake

and welcomes the tongue

of a child. In a sharp world,

it knows the value of being blunt;

it knows that to smooth is a gift to the world.

Some people are knives, and

I thank them. Me, I want to belong

to the order of spatulas—those

who blend, who mix, who co-mingle

dissimilars to create a cohesive whole.

I want to spread sweetness, to be a workhorse

for beauty, to stir things up,

to clean things out. I want to be useful,

an instrument of unity, a means, a lever for life.

first published in Braided Way, 2019

In this bonus episode, we continue our conversation with Thea Deley about creating on emotionally difficult topics. Thea talks about the one woman play she created about her struggles with her family and their religious belief system and about the issues that arise when addressing personal issues through art.

Thea Deley (photo of Thea by Mike Maxwell)

Telling someone else’s story presents a host of pleasures and challenges. In this episode, we interview Catherine Saint Louis, senior editor of podcasts for Neon Hum Media, about “Rubber Bullets,” a podcast episode released on Telescope in early July 2020, about a man who had guided implicit bias workshops for the San Jose Police Department for years, then found himself trying to de-escalate the same police department at a Black Lives Matter protest. He was shot in the groin with a rubber bullet. We talk with Catherine about the process of creating the episode from conception to execution. We discuss how she considers the interview process to be “a journey” that the interviewer and interviewee embark on together, and how Catherine was able to move beyond the facts of Derrick’s story to deliver the heart of it by drawing on her own humanity. 

Catherine Saint Louis is the senior editor of podcasts for Neon Hum Media, an L.A. based podcast house founded by Jonathan Hirsch. Her latest podcast that she's edited is Smoke Screen: Fake Priest, a wild story about a man who pretended to be a priest for 30 years, stealing people's money and their faith. Fake Priest is a Neon Hum original as is Telescope, a podcast that tells stories about people living through COVID and later in our first season, the twin pandemics of racism and COVID. This year, she also edited Murder on the Towpath, an eight-episode podcast set in 1964 that features two women who never met but whose lives become linked one of them is killed. Past projects include: Sonic Boom, This Land, The Thing about Pam, Larger than Life, and Break Stuff. She lives in Brooklyn where she runs with a sweaty mask.

Show notes:

Jill U Adams’s delightful comics

Last Word On Nothing

Neon Hum

“Rubber Bullets” episode of Telescope

Fake Priest

Catherine Saint Louis interview about podcast editing on Servant of Pod with Nick Quah.

Catherine wants to encourage more POC to get into podcast editing and would love for anyone who is interested to get in touch. Catherine@neonhum.com

It’s only two letters long, but the word “no” can be one of the hardest words to say out loud. In this episode, we talk about why no is every bit as important a word for a creative as yes. We’ll talk about earthworms, the trifecta of yes, how to strengthen your no muscle and Christmas candles. Then we interview the international bestselling “anti-guru” Sarah Knight, author of the No F*cks Given guides and ask her these two questions: 1) How do you decide when to say no? And 2) What’s the best way to say no? We’re interested in your answers to these questions, too. 

Episode Notes:  

The Craft of Science Writing: Selections from The Open Notebook

Poetry of Presence: An Anthology of Mindfulness Poems

Rosemerry’s book Charity: True Stories of Giving and Receiving

Rosemerry’s book Celebration: The Christmas Candle Book with Poems of Light

Veronica Dewey, costume designer extraordinaire

David Plotz’s trick for saying no (which he admits he stole from his wife, Hanna Rosin, and her friend, the writer Margaret Talbot)

Sarah Knight (photo of Sarah by Alfredo Esteban)

Sarah’s article Just Say F*ck No!

Sarah’s F*ck No page 

To buy her most recent book, F*ck No: How to Stop Saying Yes When You Can’t, You Shouldn’t or You Just Don’t Want To: visit Amazon, Barnes & Noble or Indiebound. 

In this bonus episode, Sarah Knight talks about the four kinds of yessers, how she went from overachiever to having a fully operational no muscle, how to build “the gates of hell no” and then cultivate your own private “okay corral,” the calming effects of pina coladas, how her daily tweets might help you discover and maintain your own boundaries, and more. **Please note that this episode contains language that may not be suitable for kids. (See title of Sarah’s book…)

Guest: Sarah Knight

JUST SAY F*CK NO! No is an acceptable answer. It’s time to start using it.

“We’re sorry, your work does not suit our needs at this time.” These words are so common. Rejection is a difficult reality for most (all?) writers and artists. So how do we handle rejection? Can we use it to improve our work? What does it have to tell us and teach us? In this episode, we talk about a useful phrase in the face of rejection, Christie’s Southeast Asia Problem, and one of the poetry worlds’ best rejection letter writers. Then we’ll talk with memoirist and essayist Claire Dederer and ask her two questions: 1) How do you process rejection, especially when it’s a work that feels very personal? And 2) What have you learned from rejection? We’re interested in your feedback on these answers, too! 

Episode Notes:

Halcyon Poetry Prize

Christie’s article on mammography in Mother Jones

Christie’s report for the Pulitzer Center on Agent Orange in Vietnam

Colorado’s New Poet Laureate Bobby LeFebre

Most Rejected Books of All Time

Claire Dederer (photo courtesy Claire Dederer)

Claire Dederer’s essay “What do we do with the Art of Monstrous Men?”

Claire Dederer’s essay “Eclipsed: In our two-writer household, my husband's literary star shines all too brightly”

**

Tim Green’s Outstanding Rejection Letter

Dear Rosemerry— 

Thanks for sharing this. The subject matter is perfect for the series, but we receive over 100 poems every week, and I can only pick one (or occasionally two). This week I ended up choosing something else—check our website tomorrow morning to read it. 

This decision is, of course, no reflection on the importance of the event you were writing about, or of your response. It's great to read poets reacting in a meaningful way to current events, and very difficult to choose just one. 

I'm sorry that I can't reply individually, though many poems make me want to—reading all these every Saturday morning is a lot of work! We do have a closed Facebook group, where you can safely share your poems with each other, if you'd like—just join: https://www.facebook.com/groups/poetsrespond/

Anyway, don't hesitate to try again whenever you have another timely one—or to send general submissions any time. 

Best, 

Tim

In this bonus episode, we talk with memoirist and essayist Claire Dederer about the role of ambition in a writer’s life. She also discusses the different ways she responds to rejection, and how it differs when it comes from a professional source versus from a reader. She also talks about the writer’s imperative to write about difficult subjects, why it’s important it is to have clarity and distance before sharing difficult personal stories, how domestic labor can affect a writer’s work life and how devoting time to her work has, at times, made her feel monstrous.

Claire Dederer (photo courtesy Claire Dederer)

Claire Dederer’s essay “What do we do with the Art of Monstrous Men?”

Claire Dederer’s essay “Eclipsed: In our two-writer household, my husband's literary star shines all too brightly”

Photo: Christie & Rosemerry shortly before the pandemic began. (Yes, that is one of Rosemerry’s poems on Christie’s tights.)

For creatives, the new year is a chance to look back on what we’ve accomplished and how we’ve grown in the past year, and also a chance to dream about our creative endeavors in the future. In this episode, Christie and Rosemerry have a conversation about how to do your own “year end report,” how a magic wand might help you identify your goals, and how two questions from Motivational Interviewing can help you verbalize why your goals are important to you. We talk about bonfires--both literal and metaphorical, a few of our own goals, some of our skepticism around goals, and our mottos and themes for moving forward. 

Motivational Interviewing

A story Christie wrote about how to make New Year’s resolutions

Christie’s 2021 New Year’s resolution

Christie’s Instagram and Rosemerry’s

A little new years goal advice from our episode 28 guest, Holiday Mathis. “Do not set targets for results that are beyond your control. Keep asking yourself what can be done to help this along. Set targets for what you can produce, actions you can take, miles you can move.”

_____

Bonfire in the Heart

by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

I throw in any tallies

I’ve been keeping,

the ones that record

who did what and when.

I throw in all the letters

I wrote in my head but didn’t send.

I throw in tickets I didn’t buy

to places I didn’t visit.

I throw in all those expectations

I had for myself and the world last year

and countless lists of things I thought I should do.

I love watching them ignite,

turn into embers, to ash.

I love the space they leave behind

where anything can happen.

For Auld Lang Syne

         —Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

We’ll drink a cup of kindness yet,

says the song, and I would give you

the cup, friend, would fill it

with whiskey or water or whatever

would best meet your thirst.

I fill it with the terrifying beauty

of tonight’s bonfire—giant licks

of red and swirls of blue that consume

what is dead and melt the ice

and give warmth to what is here.

I fill it with moonrise and snow crystal

and the silver river song beneath the ice.

With the boom of fireworks and with laughter

that persists through tears. With

Lilac Wine and Over the Rainbow and Fever.

I toast you with all the poems we’ve yet to write

and all the tears we’ve yet to weep,

I hold the cup to your lips,

this chalice of kindness, we’ll drink it yet,

though the days are cold, the nights so long.

         —Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

 ____

The Next Storm Comes

And suddenly you know: It’s time to start something new and trust the magic of beginnings.

         —Meister Eckhart

And suddenly you know it’s time

to shovel the drive. For though snow

still falls, at this moment it’s only

three inches deep and you can still push it easily

with your two wide yellow shovels.

Yes, it’s time to start something new—

though it doesn’t feel new, this

shoving snow from one place to another.

In fact, your shoulders still feel

the efforts of yesterday.

But with each push of the shovels,

the path on the drive is new again. At least

it’s new for a moment, new until snow

fills it in. Then it’s a different kind of new.

How many beginnings are like this?

They don’t feel like beginnings at all?

Or we miss their newness?

Or they feel new only for a moment

before they’ve lost their freshness?

There is magic in beginnings, says Meister Eckhart,

and sometimes we see beginnings all around us,

a new path, a new promise, a new meal.

A new prayer. New snow fall. A new song.

Is it too grand to call it magic, this new calendar year?

Too grand to call it magic, this momentary

clearing on the drive? Too grand to be magic,

this momentary clearing in my thoughts?

Or is it exactly, perhaps, what magic is—

something we allow ourselves to believe,

despite logic, despite reason, something that brings

us great pleasure, makes us question

what we thought we knew, our sense

of what is possible changed.

—Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

_____

Watching The Wizard of Oz on New Year’s Eve, I Think of a Resolution toward Peace

As for you, my galvanized friend, you want a heart. You don’t know how lucky you are not to have one. Hearts will never be practical until they can be made unbreakable.

—The Wizard to the Tin Man, The Wizard of Oz, Frank L. Baum

Give us hearts that break

when we see how cruel the world can be

and hands that extend toward others.

Give us eyes that weep when we feel

the beauty of home, and

lips to speak love, to apologize.

Give us courage to say what must be said

and ears to hear what we’d rather not hear

and eyes that will not turn the other way

from anyone in need.

Give us brains that are wired

for helpfulness, compassion

and curiosity. Yes, let us ask for hearts

that break and break and grow

bigger in the breaking. Let us

love more than we think we can love.

And the cup of kindness, may we

ever remember to drink of it,

let us share it with each other.

         —Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

How can working in one art form strengthen our practice in another? Our guest Sarah Gilman describes herself as a “creative smush,” and in this episode, the artist/writer/editor talks about how all these art forms inform each other--how all of them allow her to “think in terms of metaphors.” As she says, by working in multiple fields at once, she can enter into a place where “themes can combine in immersive ways that foster empathy, respect for nuance over polarization, and a sense of awe for and accountability towards the world as it is—still huge and full of mystery and beauty, however threatened or diminished.” We also talk about how to get out of our own way, the importance of going outside, and how community and connections can fuel our work. 

Sarah Gilman is a Washington state-based freelance writer, illustrator and editor who covers the environment, natural history, science, and place. In her writing, she seeks to illuminate the complicated ways people relate to landscapes and other species. In her visual art, she’s most interested in the cultivation of wonder, and the ways it might help more of us come to value and make space for wildness and each other. Her current work is at the nexus of the two fields. Her writing and reporting have appeared in The Atlantic, Audubon Magazine, The Washington Post, High Country News, BioGraphic, National Geographic News, Smithsonian.com, The Guardian, Patagonia’s The Cleanest Line, and The Last Word on Nothing. Her work has been anthologized in The Best Women’s Travel Writing, Volume 11. In 2021, she will be a Knight Science Journalism fellow. She’s also a contributing editor at Hakai Magazine.

https://www.etsy.com/shop/HiddenDrawerDesigns

https://sarahmgilman.com/

South America's Otherworldly Seabird, Sarahs’ narrative and illustrations of how scientists are working to save a tiny seabird in the Atacama Desert.

How do we abstract our sense of self-worth from our creative work? That’s one of the themes in this bonus episode in which we converse with writer/artist/poet/editor Sarah Gilman. We learn about her reliance on small blank notebooks, the efficient layout of her office and the importance of having books around.

Sarah Gilman is a Washington state-based freelance writer, illustrator and editor who covers the environment, natural history, science, and place. In her writing, she seeks to illuminate the complicated ways people relate to landscapes and other species. In her visual art, she’s most interested in the cultivation of wonder, and the ways it might help more of us come to value and make space for wildness and each other. Her current work is at the nexus of the two fields. Her writing and reporting have appeared in The Atlantic, Audubon Magazine, Hakai Magazine, The Washington Post, High Country News, BioGraphic, National Geographic News, Smithsonian.com, The Guardian, Patagonia’s The Cleanest Line, and The Last Word on Nothing. Her work has been anthologized in The Best Women’s Travel Writing, Volume 11. In 2021, she will be a Knight Science Journalism fellow. She’s also a contributing editor at Hakai Magazine.

https://www.etsy.com/shop/HiddenDrawerDesigns

https://sarahmgilman.com/

Photo: Rosemerry’s altar for her recent writing retreat.

What would it be like to give over completely to your creative self? To get away from daily distractions and responsibilities and just write or paint or dance? In this episode of Emerging Form, Rosemerry and Christie talk about writers' retreats--why going away somewhere to write (or create) is so important, what it might look like, and how you might plan for one. From food prep to altars to finding daily rhythms, we talk about some of the ins and outs. Do you need one? Maybe you can’t afford not to have one. 

A few words about what happens at a writing retreat.

Good to Go: What the Athlete in All of Us Can Learn from the Strange Science of Recovery

How might stillness and a heightened sense of awareness infuse your creative endeavors? In this episode we speak with poet, editor and writing coach James Crews about how a daily mindfulness practice can help us meet creative stumbling blocks such as self-judgment and writer’s block with more clarity, curiosity, acceptance and even surprise. Can mindfulness be a hindrance to creativity? Are there “rules” for how and when to to do it? Can being quiet really help an art that depends on words? How might your creativity infuse your mindfulness? 

James Crews is the author of four collections of poetry, The Book of What Stays, Telling My Father, Bluebird, and Every Waking Moment. He is also the editor of two anthologies: Healing the Divide: Poems of Kindness and Connection and How to Love the World: Poems of Gratitude and Hope. His poems have appeared in Ploughshares, The Sun, The New Republic, The New York Times Magazine, and have been reprinted in Ted Kooser’s American Life in Poetry and featured on Tracy K. Smith’s podcast, The Slowdown. Crews teaches in the low-residency MFA program at Eastern Oregon University and lives with his husband on an organic farm in Vermont.

John Kabat-Zinn

Sharon Salzberg

Jane Hirshfield

Naomi Shihab Nye

Darn Lucky

for James Crews

It happens, you know—the day opens itself

like a tulip in a warm room, and you meet someone

who amazes you with their willingness

to be a thousand percent alive, someone

who makes you feel grateful to be you.

And it’s as if life has been keeping a beautiful

secret from you—like the fact that they make

elderberry flowers into wine. Like muscadine.

Like the yellow-green floral scent of quince.

Like the perfect knot for tying your shoes.

And it turns out life does have wonderful

secrets waiting for you. Even when the news

makes you cry. Even when some old pain returns,

that’s when you will meet this new friend.

Someone wholly themselves. Someone

who makes you smile in the kitchen, a smile so real

that when you go out, the whole world notices.

It’s enough to make you want to wake up in the morning.

To go into the day. To be unguarded as a tulip, petals

falling open. You never know who you might meet.

--Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

Like a lot of life plans over the past few weeks, this episode veered from our original schedule. We’d planned to discuss the joys and challenges of creating things with friends, but instead we found ourselves talking about these strange times. In this emergency episode of Emerging Form, we talk about how COVID-19 is changing what and how we write, and how it’s affecting all kinds of creative careers. Warning: we get a bit emotional at times. Topics include toilet paper hoarding, coronavirus anxiety, the importance of the arts, financial insecurity, online alternatives to in person events and how our lives are different now. We check in with our fabulous audio producer, Rob Dozier, and then we talk with our scheduled guest, Sarina Bowen, a USA Today best-selling author who has written more than 30 contemporary novels and is cohost of the #amwriting podcast. 

Read Rosemerry’s daily poems

Future of Another Timeline by Annalee Newitz

Rob Dozier

Sarina Bowen

#amwriting podcast

coronavirus image by pixabay

Tonight I Pray for All the Doctors, the Nurses

the Healthcare Workers

And tonight I think

of the seventeen Italian doctors,

dead. And the hundreds

of thousands of people

whose test results were positive.

And all the doctors, nurses,

health care workers—

some right here in our town.

I think of them eating breakfast,

reading the same discouraging news,

then kissing their loved ones,

putting on their shoes,

and walking out the door,

though resolution’s as elusive

as last month’s peace—

the peace we didn’t

even know we had.

         —Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

In this five-minute bonus, Rosemerry reads four poems responding to the coronavirus pandemic: 

A Change in the Light

The Afternoon the World Health Organization Declares a Pandemic

Staying Home

Tucking in My Daughter in the Time of Corona Virus

Rosemerry’s Daily Poem Blog, A Hundred Falling Veils

Early to bed, early to rise, coffee and quiet--these are some of the daily routines that help drive the creative life of poet, editor and writing coach James Crews. In this bonus episode, we talk about life on the farm in Vermont with his husband, the importance of trust in our creative life, how we can sabotage ourselves by trying to know where our creative path will take us, and Crews’ mentor Ted Kooser’s advice about conditioning the mind. 

James Crews is the author of four collections of poetry, The Book of What Stays, Telling My Father, Bluebird, and Every Waking Moment. He is also the editor of two anthologies: Healing the Divide: Poems of Kindness and Connection and How to Love the World: Poems of Gratitude and Hope. His poems have appeared in Ploughshares, The Sun, The New Republic, The New York Times Magazine, and have been reprinted in Ted Kooser’s American Life in Poetry and featured on Tracy K. Smith’s podcast, The Slowdown. Crews teaches in the low-residency MFA program at Eastern Oregon University and lives with his husband on an organic farm in Vermont.

Jack Kornfield

Ted Kooser

Everyone agrees: creative routines can ignite our creative practice. But why are they so hard to maintain? How can we create more sustainable creative practices? In this episode of Emerging Form, we talk with science writer Jill U. Adams about her morning routine--how she established it, how she changes it, how it serves her, how it pushes it, and how she makes it sustainable. A sweet surprise: How postcards have become a way to engage with letting go of perfectionism. 

Jill U. Adams is a science journalist who reports on health, psychology, teens, and education. She lives in upstate New York and tweets as @juadams. Check out her drawings on Instagram: @juadams1

Jill’s essay at Nieman Storyboard, “Jumpstart your writing routine: coffee, journals, sketches and postcards,” in which she explains how her morning writing rituals lifted her out of COVID malaise.

Wouldn’t it be great if we had a crystal ball so we could see where our creative road might take us? Or, perhaps as we discuss in this bonus episode of Emerging Form, perhaps what we really want is to just stop worrying where our path might take us. We talk with science journalist Jill U. Adams about her own creative arc and the surprising chat with a college counselor that sticks with her.

Jill U. Adams is a science journalist who reports on health, psychology, teens, and education. She lives in upstate New York and tweets as @juadams. She shares her drawings on Instagram: @juadams1.

Jill’s essay at Nieman Storyboard, “Jumpstart your writing routine: coffee, journals, sketches and postcards,” in which she explains how her morning writing rituals lifted her out of COVID malaise.

How might gratefulness infuse your creative practice with trust, awe, acceptance and wonder? In this episode we speak with Kristi Nelson, author of Wake Up Grateful: the Transformative Practice of Taking Nothing for Granted, about the surprisingly practical ways gratefulness inspires and fuels our creativity. She offers lots of prompts and how-to steps. 

Kristi Nelson is the executive director of A Network for Grateful Living and author of Wake Up Grateful: The Transformative Practice of Taking Nothing for Granted. She has spent most of her adult life in non-profit leadership, fundraising, and organizational development. In a wide variety of roles, she has helped to lead, fund, and strengthen organizations committed to progressive social and spiritual change. In 2001, Kristi founded a values-based fundraising consulting and training, and leadership coaching business, and in this capacity worked with organizations such as the Institute for Jewish Spirituality, Buddhist Peace Fellowship, Spirit in Action, Wisdom 2.0, and The Center for Contemplative Mind in Society. During this time, she was also founding Director of the Soul of Money Institute with Lynne Twist, Director of Development at Kripalu Center for Yoga and Health, and Director of Development and Community Relations for the Center for Mindfulness in Medicine, Health Care, and Society. She received her BA from UMass/Amherst, a graduate certificate in Business and Sociology from Boston College, and her Master’s in Public Administration (MPA) with a concentration in Leadership Studies, from Harvard University.

Kristi Nelson’s book: Wake Up Grateful: The Transformative Practice of Taking Nothing For Granted

https://gratefulness.org/

Kristi’s story of moving through stage IV cancer 

https://gratefulness.org/resource-category/poetry/

In this bonus episode, we continue our conversation with USA Today best-selling author Sarina Bowen, who has written more than 30 contemporary novels and is cohost of the #amwriting podcast. She tells us the most important thing to remember when we think we are utterly stuck and shares with us tools from her “deep bag of tricks” for how to get unstuck.  We also talk about how genre writers are like chefs, and she shares stories about three collaborative writing projects and what they taught her. 

Sarina Bowen