LGBTQ+ Stories: The Creative Process: Gender, Equality, Gay, Lesbian, Queer, Bisexual, Homosexual, Trans Creatives Talk LGBTQ Rights (Gender, Equality, Gay, Lesbian, Queer, Bisexual, Trans Creatives: Creative Process Original Series)

Jericho Brown is author of the The Tradition (Copper Canyon 2019), for which he won the Pulitzer Prize. He is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, and the National Endowment for the Arts, and he is the winner of the Whiting Award. Brown’s first book, Please (New Issues 2008), won the American Book Award. His second book, The New Testament (Copper Canyon 2014), won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. His third collection, The Tradition won the Paterson Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. His poems have appeared in The Bennington Review, Buzzfeed, Fence, jubilat, The New Republic, The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, TIME magazine, and several volumes of The Best American Poetry. He is the director of the Creative Writing Program and a professor at Emory University.

· www.jerichobrown.com
· www.creativeprocess.info

· www.oneplanetpodcast.org

Neil Patrick Harris is a Tony and Emmy award-winning stage and screen performer, famous for his roles as Barney Stinson in the popular CBS sitcom How I Met Your Mother, and as the iconic and beloved Doogie Howser, M.D., and Count Olaf in A Series of Unfortunate Events. He’s hosted the Oscars, Tony, and Emmy Awards, and performed in several Broadway shows, including Rent, Cabaret, Proof, and Hedwig and the Angry Inch. His film credits include Starship Troopers , the Harold and Kumar series, and Gone Girl.

www.creativeprocess.info

Neil Patrick Harris is a Tony and Emmy award-winning stage and screen performer, famous for his roles as Barney Stinson in the popular CBS sitcom How I Met Your Mother, and as the iconic and beloved Doogie Howser, M.D., and Count Olaf in A Series of Unfortunate Events. He’s hosted the Oscars, Tony, and Emmy Awards, and performed in several Broadway shows, including Rent, Cabaret, Proof, and Hedwig and the Angry Inch. His film credits include Starship Troopers , the Harold and Kumar series, and Gone Girl.

www.creativeprocess.info

Writer and producer Rebecca Walker has contributed to the global conversation about race, gender, power, and the evolution of the human family for three decades. Author and editor of seven bestselling books on multiracial identity, Black Cool and ambivalent motherhood, she has co-founded the Third Wave Fund, which makes grants to womxn and transgender youth working for social justice. For her efforts, she has been named by Time as one of the most influential leaders of her generation.
· www.rebeccawalker.com
· www.creativeprocess.info

INSTAGRAM @creativeprocesspodcast
www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast

"The idea of writing memoir is about listening carefully. The way to find a story or, at least the story that needs to be told is that moment that you’re writing is the emerges from a deep kind of inner listening and finding the memories that are charged that don’t want to leave that have a certain kind of energy to them and, if you listen to them, and you allow them to be born in the writing, you discover your own story because your story is basically made up of all the memories that continue to hold the charge for you. All the memories that are lodged in your mind that you’ve secreted away and when you can excavate that story and you can write it down, then you can make sense of it and you can understand why you’re living the way you’re living and why you feel the way you feel. And you can also decide to to release those memories so that you can have new memories that can define and can shape your life."

Writer and producer Rebecca Walker has contributed to the global conversation about race, gender, power, and the evolution of the human family for three decades. Author and editor of seven bestselling books on multiracial identity, Black Cool and ambivalent motherhood, she has co-founded the Third Wave Fund, which makes grants to womxn and transgender youth working for social justice. For her efforts, she has been named by Time as one of the most influential leaders of her generation.


· www.rebeccawalker.com

· www.creativeprocess.info

“To not honor that we are all creative, beautiful, interesting deep, rich individuals. We’re not zeros and ones on a spreadsheet. We’re not scientifically explained. We are not mathematically judged. We are imperfect blobs of emotion and bone and spirit and life and when we come together there is nothing greater than the chemistry and the alchemy of musical theater… There’s a joy, there’s a bounce, there’s an effervescence that’s part of that music. I had a great teacher in college, the head of our program Brent Wagner said, 'With lyrics, I can tell you to open the door, but with music I can tell you how.’ Lyrics are information and music is emotion.”

Most highly noted for his stunning work in musical theater, Gavin James Creel is a Tony & Olivier Award-winning actor, singer and songwriter. On Broadway, he’s performed in shows including Throughly Modern Millie, Hair, The Book of Mormon, Waitress and Hello, Dolly!, his performance in which won him his first Tony Award. Creel is also a LGBTQ+ activist, having done much to raise awareness and fight for marriage equality.

· www.imdb.com/name/nm1342128

· www.creativeprocess.info

Most highly noted for his stunning work in musical theater, Gavin James Creel is a Tony & Olivier Award-winning actor, singer and songwriter. On Broadway, he’s performed in shows including Throughly Modern Millie, Hair, The Book of Mormon, Waitress and Hello, Dolly!, his performance in which won him his first Tony Award. Creel is also a LGBTQ+ activist, having done much to raise awareness and fight for marriage equality.

· www.gavincreel.com

· www.creativeprocess.info

HELLO, DOLLY! Photo by Julieta Cervantes

“All the themes are very contemporary. I think what moves this story is the search for instantaneous celebrity. That’s what the girls are all about, Roxie and Velma. They want to be famous. Of course everything that you cited, corruption, crimes, the press focusing on sensational stories–it’s all there. And I think that’s why the public relates so much to it.”

Paulo Szot won the Tony as Best Leading Actor in a Musical for his Broadway debut at Emile de Becque in the 2008 Tony-winning revival of South Pacific. This performance also netted him Drama Desk, Outer Critics Circle, and Theatre World awards. Szot’s opera credits include performances at the Metropolitan, Scala di Milano, Paris Opera, Carnegie Hall, and others. He’s currently starring as Billy Flynn in Chicago, the longest-running American musical in Broadway history.
· www.pauloszot.com

· chicagothemusical.com

· chicagothemusical.com/cast/#cast-gallery-3
· www.creativeprocess.info

Paulo Szot won the Tony as Best Leading Actor in a Musical for his Broadway debut at Emile de Becque in the 2008 Tony-winning revival of South Pacific. This performance also netted him Drama Desk, Outer Critics Circle, and Theatre World awards. Szot’s opera credits include performances at the Metropolitan, Scala di Milano, Paris Opera, Carnegie Hall, and others. He’s currently starring as Billy Flynn in Chicago, the longest-running American musical in Broadway history.

· www.pauloszot.com
· chicagothemusical.com

· chicagothemusical.com/cast/#cast-gallery-3
· www.creativeprocess.info

“For a writer of non-fiction or essayist that’s very difficult to work with because we aren’t, or at least some of us don’t consider ourselves journalists. The tools that we are working with aren’t–What your favorite color is. Where you grew up. Or what your favorite number is. If we’re writing a profile of something, the tools that we’re working with are long conversations in which people are sharing anecdotes about themselves. When I do an interview with somebody, I don’t take out a tape recorder. I don’t have a notebook. I invite them on a walk so that we can feel at least that we’re just chatting.”

John D’Agata is the author of Halls of Fame, About a Mountain, and The Lifespan of a Fact, as well as the editor of the 3-volume series  A New History of the Essay, which includes the anthologies The Next American Essay, The Making of the American Essay, and The Lost Origins of the Essay. His work has been supported by a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Howard Foundation Fellowship, an NEA Literature Fellowship, and a Lannan Foundation Fellowship. He holds a B.A. from Hobart College and two M.F.A.s from the University of Iowa, and recently his essays have appeared in The Believer, Harper's, Gulf Coast, and Conjunctions. John D’Agata lives in Iowa City where he teaches creative writing at the University of Iowa. The Lifespan of Fact was adapted into a Broadway play starring Daniel Radcliffe, Cherry Jones, and Bobby Cannavale.

· www.johndagata.com

· www.creativeprocess.info

John D’Agata is the author of Halls of Fame, About a Mountain, and The Lifespan of a Fact, as well as the editor of the 3-volume series  A New History of the Essay, which includes the anthologies The Next American Essay, The Making of the American Essay, and The Lost Origins of the Essay. His work has been supported by a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Howard Foundation Fellowship, an NEA Literature Fellowship, and a Lannan Foundation Fellowship. He holds a B.A. from Hobart College and two M.F.A.s from the University of Iowa, and recently his essays have appeared in The Believer, Harper's, Gulf Coast, and Conjunctions. John D’Agata lives in Iowa City where he teaches creative writing at the University of Iowa. The Lifespan of Fact was adapted into a Broadway play starring Daniel Radcliffe, Cherry Jones, and Bobby Cannavale.

· www.johndagata.com

· www.creativeprocess.info

"If you are thinking about too much, you're probably not doing it right. Some nights you do it and you're just like, that just felt like it was ten minutes long and I just was on cloud nine. What was I doing? A great, great American actor George C. Scott had a great quote once, he said, "Every actor worth their salt has one good show a week and spends those other seven shows wondering what they did that made them so good that night." And nobody knows. If you could figure that out and if you could bottle that then, of course, everybody could do it."

John Benjamin Hickey is a veteran of the stage and screen, with a Tony Award-winning performance as Felix Turner in The Normal Heart and his Emmy-nominated role as Sean Tolkey on The Big C.

On stage, he’s had leading roles in Cabaret, The Crucible, The Inheritance - Parts 1 and 2, Six Degrees of Separation, and Love! Valour! Compassion! also starring in the latter’s movie adaptation. His film appearances include The Ice Storm, The Bone Collector, Flags of Our Fathers, Pitch Perfect. On television, he’s had roles in Manhattan, Life with Judy Garland: Me and My Shadows, The Good Wife, and Marvel's Jessica Jones, among others. Set to make his Broadway directorial debut this spring in a revival of Neil Simon's Plaza Suite starring Matthew Broderick and Sarah Jessica Parker, the production was postponed due to COVID-19.

· www.imdb.com/name/nm0382632/

· www.creativeprocess.info

John Benjamin Hickey is a veteran of the stage and screen, with a Tony Award-winning performance as Felix Turner in The Normal Heart and his Emmy-nominated role as Sean Tolkey on The Big C.

On stage, he’s had leading roles in Cabaret, The Crucible, The Inheritance - Parts 1 and 2, Six Degrees of Separation, and Love! Valour! Compassion! also starring in the latter’s movie adaptation. His film appearances include The Ice Storm, The Bone Collector, Flags of Our Fathers, Pitch Perfect. On television, he’s had roles in Manhattan, Life with Judy Garland: Me and My Shadows, The Good Wife, and Marvel's Jessica Jones, among others. Set to make his Broadway directorial debut this spring in a revival of Neil Simon's Plaza Suite starring Matthew Broderick and Sarah Jessica Parker, the production was postponed due to COVID-19.

· www.imdb.com/name/nm0382632/

· www.creativeprocess.info

Dr. François Clemmons is perhaps best known as Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood’s Officer Clemmons. He made history as the first African American actor to have a recurring role on a children’s television program. He received a Bachelor of Music degree from Oberlin College, a MFA from Carnegie Mellon University, and an honorary degree from Middlebury College. In 1973, he won a Grammy Award for a recording of Porgy and Bess; in 1986, he founded and directed the Harlem Spiritual Ensemble; and from 1997 until his retirement in 2013, Clemmons was the Alexander Twilight Artist in Residence and director of the Martin Luther King Spiritual Choir at Middlebury College in Vermont, where he currently resides.

· https://francoisclemmons.net
· www.creativeprocess.info

“I always find it an ironic thing to think about the fact that Fred Rogers was colour-blind. He could barely tell a blue from a grey. I was young and to him I was a child and I certainly played the role of a child and he played the role of parent… He was profoundly patient.”

Dr. François Clemmons is perhaps best known as Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood’s Officer Clemmons. He made history as the first African American actor to have a recurring role on a children’s television program. He received a Bachelor of Music degree from Oberlin College, a MFA from Carnegie Mellon University, and an honorary degree from Middlebury College. In 1973, he won a Grammy Award for a recording of Porgy and Bess; in 1986, he founded and directed the Harlem Spiritual Ensemble; and from 1997 until his retirement in 2013, Clemmons was the Alexander Twilight Artist in Residence and director of the Martin Luther King Spiritual Choir at Middlebury College in Vermont, where he currently resides.

· https://francoisclemmons.net
· www.creativeprocess.info

Roxane Gay’s writing appears in Best American Mystery Stories 2014, Best American Short Stories 2012, Best Sex Writing 2012, A Public Space, McSweeney’s, Tin House, Oxford American, American Short Fiction, Virginia Quarterly Review, and many others. She is a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times. She is the author of the books Ayiti, An Untamed State, the New York Times bestselling Bad Feminist, the nationally bestselling Difficult Women and the New York Times bestselling Hunger. She is also the author of World of Wakanda for Marvel.

· www.roxanegay.com
· www.creativeprocess.info

Roxane Gay’s writing appears in Best American Mystery Stories 2014, Best American Short Stories 2012, Best Sex Writing 2012, A Public Space, McSweeney’s, Tin House, Oxford American, American Short Fiction, Virginia Quarterly Review, and many others. She is a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times. She is the author of the books Ayiti, An Untamed State, the New York Times bestselling Bad Feminist, the nationally bestselling Difficult Women and the New York Times bestselling Hunger. She is also the author of World of Wakanda for Marvel.

· www.roxanegay.com
· www.creativeprocess.info

“I just want to make the poems like a living being…There are moments that I’m not at the desk, but I’m living life. And living life is actually what leads to writing. You have to have experiences to write about. Whether or not you are aware of those experiences as you are writing them down because if you’re doing music first, maybe you’re not aware of what you’re writing. And yet, those experiences are what come to fruition in your writing. You become aware. Oh, I did come on that roller coaster that time that I haven’t thought about in twenty years. Oh I did make love to that cute person that I haven’t thought about in ten years, but you’ve got to make love, you’ve got to get on roller coasters, you’ve got to get your heart broken. You’ve got to dance. You gotta get out and do things and that, too, is a part of writing. You have to trust you’re a writer by identity. And if you can trust that you’re a writer by identity, then you don’t have to be at a desk.”

Jericho Brown is author of the The Tradition (Copper Canyon 2019), for which he won the Pulitzer Prize. He is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, and the National Endowment for the Arts, and he is the winner of the Whiting Award. Brown’s first book, Please (New Issues 2008), won the American Book Award. His second book, The New Testament (Copper Canyon 2014), won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. His third collection, The Tradition won the Paterson Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. His poems have appeared in The Bennington Review, Buzzfeed, Fence, jubilat, The New Republic, The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, TIME magazine, and several volumes of The Best American Poetry. He is the director of the Creative Writing Program and a professor at Emory University.

· www.jerichobrown.com
· www.creativeprocess.info

· www.oneplanetpodcast.org

Mark Seliger was born in Amarillo, Texas. He was Rolling Stones chief photographer for 20 years, where he shot over 150 covers silica shoots frequently for Vanity Fair, GQ, Italian Vogue, Harper's Bazaar, L, and other magazines. His advertising work includes projects for Adidas, Anheuser-Busch, Levi's, Netflix and Ralph Lauren. Seliger received the Alfred Eisenstadt Award, Clio Grand Prix, the C Award, Cannes Lions Grand Prix, The One Show, ASME, SPG and the Texas Medal of Arts were exhibited in museums and galleries around the world. 

His photographs are in the permanent collections at the National Portrait Gallery at the Smithsonian, the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston and the National Portrait Gallery in London.
· markseliger.com
· www.creativeprocess.info

Dr. G. Samantha Rosenthal is an Associate Professor of History and Coordinator of the Public History Concentration at Roanoke College in Salem, Virginia. Rosenthal teaches courses in public history, women’s and gender studies, and general education. She is interested in environmental studies, working-class studies, LGBTQ, queer, and trans studies, community organizing, and scholar-activism. She is the author of Living Queer History, and Beyond Hawai’i.

· gsrosenthal.com
· https://gsrosenthal.youcanbook.me
· Living Queer History: uncpress.org/book/9781469665801/living-queer-history/
· www.creativeprocess.info
· www.oneplanetpodcast.org

Ali Schouten is a showrunner, executive producer, and writer who is quickly establishing herself as a creative on the rise as her formidable talent and artistic versatility continue to make waves.

Schouten currently serves as the showrunner and executive producer of the wildly successful iCarly revival for Paramount+, which set 10 years later, features Miranda Cosgrove reprising her iconic role. The series was renewed for a second season and will return on April 8th after swiftly becoming one of the streaming service’s top acquisition drivers, ranking among their most streamed titles since the series’ debut. The series, which holds an impressive rating of 100% on Rotten Tomatoes, continues to receive praise for its modernized and inclusive approach from audiences and critics alike, with Variety applauding its ability to “straddl[e] the line between childhood nostalgia and newfound maturity”. 

This follows her role as co-executive producer on the Latinx-led family series from Disney+, Diary of a Future President, created by Ilana Peña and executive produced by Gina Rodriguez. Schouten also served as a supervising producer on the Netflix holiday miniseries, MERRY HAPPY WHATEVER, starring Dennis Quaid, Bridgit Mendler, Brent Morin, and Ashley Tisdale.

Additional credits include serving as consulting producer and writer on the CBS All Access series NO ACTIVITY, supervising producer and writer on the Hulu series ALL NIGHT, and co-producer and writer on the NBC series CHAMPIONS from Mindy Kaling and Charlie Grandy. Schouten also served as an executive story editor and writer on the hit ABC Family series, YOUNG AND HUNGRY, in addition to the Verizon go90's series, RELATIONSHIP STATUS, for which she received a Daytime Emmy Award nomination for ‘Outstanding Writing in a Digital Drama Series’.

· www.paramountplus.com/shows/icarly-2021

· www.creativeprocess.info

“In developing Harper’s character, it felt like just very realistic. We’re in a major city that's very liberal, that’s very creative, that this would be someone who would be a stylist, who would not necessarily need to have a coming out story because maybe they aren't from a background where… She might have come out as pansexual when she was 13. That probably didn’t need to be said. Carly wouldn't be someone you needed to sit down and hold her hand and say, “I’ve got something to tell you.” That this is someone who would say, “Oh, cool, my roommate brought home a woman.” Or, my roommate brought home someone nonbinary. That's not something that we have to discuss. And Laci has talked a lot about how there is a place for that in a lot of shows and it's really important to have art like that, but it’s also equally important to have shows where it's not this big deal coming out scene. That these are people just existing joyfully and living their lives and pursuing their dreams and relationships. That’s equally valuable. I think we really felt that with the nature of the show that was the opportunity we had. It’s such a joyful show that why not just show someone dating who they want to date and who they connect with.”

Ali Schouten is a showrunner, executive producer, and writer who is quickly establishing herself as a creative on the rise as her formidable talent and artistic versatility continue to make waves.    

Schouten currently serves as the showrunner and executive producer of the wildly successful iCarly revival for Paramount+, which set 10 years later, features Miranda Cosgrove reprising her iconic role. The series was renewed for a second season and will return on April 8th after swiftly becoming one of the streaming service’s top acquisition drivers, ranking among their most streamed titles since the series’ debut. The series, which holds an impressive rating of 100% on Rotten Tomatoes, continues to receive praise for its modernized and inclusive approach from audiences and critics alike, with Variety applauding its ability to “straddl[e] the line between childhood nostalgia and newfound maturity”. 

This follows her role as co-executive producer on the Latinx-led family series from Disney+, Diary of a Future President, created by Ilana Peña and executive produced by Gina Rodriguez. Schouten also served as a supervising producer on the Netflix holiday miniseries, MERRY HAPPY WHATEVER, starring Dennis Quaid, Bridgit Mendler, Brent Morin, and Ashley Tisdale.

Additional credits include serving as consulting producer and writer on the CBS All Access series NO ACTIVITY, supervising producer and writer on the Hulu series ALL NIGHT, and co-producer and writer on the NBC series CHAMPIONS from Mindy Kaling and Charlie Grandy. Schouten also served as an executive story editor and writer on the hit ABC Family series, YOUNG AND HUNGRY, in addition to the Verizon go90's series, RELATIONSHIP STATUS, for which she received a Daytime Emmy Award nomination for ‘Outstanding Writing in a Digital Drama Series’.

· www.paramountplus.com/shows/icarly-2021

· www.creativeprocess.info

Seán Curran began his dance training with traditional Irish step dancing as a young boy in Boston, Massachusetts. He went on to make his mark on the dance world as a leading dancer with Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company. He received a New York Dance and Performance Bessie Award for his performance in Secret Pastures. A graduate of New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, Curran was an original member of the New York City cast of the Off-Broadway percussion extravaganza Stomp, performing in the show for four years. He has performed his solo evening of dances at venues throughout the United States as well as at Sweden’s Danstation Theatre and France’s EXIT Festival.Current and recent projects for Curran include productions of Much Ado About Nothing and A Midsummer Night’s Dream for The Shakespeare Theater, the twentieth anniversary production of Nixon in China and Street Scene at Opera Theater of St. Louis; choreography for the New York City Opera productions of L’Etoile, Alcina, Turandot, Haroun and the Sea of Stories, Capriccio, and Acis and Galetea; the Playwrights Horizons’ production of My Life with Albertine; Shakespeare in the Park’s As You Like It. He recently made his Metropolitan Opera debut choreographing Romeo and Juliette. Curran’s work has appeared on Broadway in James Joyce’s The Dead for Playwrights Horizons and The Rivals at Lincoln Center Theater. He has created works for Trinity Irish Dance Company, American Ballet Theatre’s studio company, Denmark’s Upper Cut Company, Sweden’s Skanes Dance Theater, Irish Modern Dance Theatre, Ririe Woodbury Dance Theater, and Dance Alloy, as well as for numerous college and university dance departments.
· www.seancurrancompany.com
· tisch.nyu.edu/about/directory/dance/109207637.html
· www.creativeprocess.info
· www.oneplanetpodcast.org

“I do feel that we are infinite choice makers. You make millions of choices all the time. Make the right choice and if you make the wrong choice, understand that mistakes are great teachers. Learn from that and move on. I do have this sense of responsibility of passing something on a love of dance history that really informs my process. Speaking in old language in a new way with a contemporary accent.
Something so wonderful about dance and the arts is that you never stop learning. It is like always just this long process, and I continue. Students teach me every day. It is such a gift.
It is probably the most important thing I can think of. Especially when I think of two things. In terms of history, the humanities show us how we were, why we were, and while we were...But then I also think about the future. What are we doing now? What seeds are we planting to inform the future?...And I said it earlier about making sense out of a chaotic universe where bad things happen to good people. Arts will help you figure that out.”

Seán Curran began his dance training with traditional Irish step dancing as a young boy in Boston, Massachusetts. He went on to make his mark on the dance world as a leading dancer with Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company. He received a New York Dance and Performance Bessie Award for his performance in Secret Pastures. A graduate of New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, Curran was an original member of the New York City cast of the Off-Broadway percussion extravaganza Stomp, performing in the show for four years. He has performed his solo evening of dances at venues throughout the United States as well as at Sweden’s Danstation Theatre and France’s EXIT Festival. Current and recent projects for Curran include productions of Much Ado About Nothing and A Midsummer Night’s Dream for The Shakespeare Theater, the twentieth anniversary production of Nixon in China and Street Scene at Opera Theater of St. Louis; choreography for the New York City Opera productions of L’Etoile, Alcina, Turandot, Haroun and the Sea of Stories, Capriccio, and Acis and Galetea; the Playwrights Horizons’ production of My Life with Albertine; Shakespeare in the Park’s As You Like It. He recently made his Metropolitan Opera debut choreographing Romeo and Juliette. Curran’s work has appeared on Broadway in James Joyce’s The Dead for Playwrights Horizons and The Rivals at Lincoln Center Theater. He has created works for Trinity Irish Dance Company, American Ballet Theatre’s studio company, Denmark’s Upper Cut Company, Sweden’s Skanes Dance Theater, Irish Modern Dance Theatre, Ririe Woodbury Dance Theater, and Dance Alloy, as well as for numerous college and university dance departments.

· www.seancurrancompany.com
· tisch.nyu.edu/about/directory/dance/109207637.html
· www.creativeprocess.info
· www.oneplanetpodcast.org

Carmen Maria Machado is the author of the bestselling memoir In the Dream House and the award-winning short story collection Her Body and Other Parties. She has been a finalist for the National Book Award and the winner of the Bard Fiction Prize, the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction, the Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ Nonfiction, the Brooklyn Public Library Literature Prize, the Shirley Jackson Award, and the National Book Critics Circle's John Leonard Prize. In 2018, the New York Times listed Her Body and Other Parties as a member of "The New Vanguard," one of "15 remarkable books by women that are shaping the way we read and write fiction in the 21st century."

· carmenmariamachado.com
· www.creativeprocess.info
· www.oneplanetpodcast.org

“I would say that I write liminal fantasy. I write surrealist work and literary fiction. I write horror. Horror is probably the genre that speaks to me the most. I feel horror is the genre that I feel the most affinity towards. For me, that is the sweet spot where the beautiful and the grotesque meet each other. It's very interesting to me, and I think encouraging people to look at certain ideas that are horrifying, making them beautiful and interesting, that intersection of beauty and pain, humor and darkness, it’s the most interesting place.”

Carmen Maria Machado is the author of the bestselling memoir In the Dream House and the award-winning short story collection Her Body and Other Parties. She has been a finalist for the National Book Award and the winner of the Bard Fiction Prize, the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction, the Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ Nonfiction, the Brooklyn Public Library Literature Prize, the Shirley Jackson Award, and the National Book Critics Circle's John Leonard Prize. In 2018, the New York Times listed Her Body and Other Parties as a member of "The New Vanguard," one of "15 remarkable books by women that are shaping the way we read and write fiction in the 21st century."

· carmenmariamachado.com
· www.creativeprocess.info
· www.oneplanetpodcast.org

Treva B. Lindsey, PhD is a Black feminist historian and Associate Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at The Ohio State University. She is the recipient of several prestigious fellowships including the ACLS/Mellon Scholars and Society Fellowship, The Equity for Women and Girls of Color Fellowship at Harvard University, and The Woodrow Wilson Career Enhancement Fellowship. Lindsey is the founder of the Transformative Black Feminisms Initiative at Ohio State and the co-founder of Black Feminist Night School at Zora’s House in Columbus, Ohio. Her latest book entitled America, Goddam: Violence, Black Women, and The Struggle for Justice explores contemporary violence against Black women and girls and how they mobilize to halt violence against them.

· https://trevablindsey.com
· www.creativeprocess.info
· www.oneplanetpodcast.org

“We have to be unwavering in our commitment to principles of justice and freedom and be harbingers of hope. It's what can feel like regression that’s happening. It’s like, okay, there is. I'm thinking about in the country right now, we’ve had these incredible moments, seeing a show like “Pose” on television with so many queer, trans, black, and brown actors. You have Laverne Cox on the cover of TIME, a really wonderful documentary “Disclosure” about trans representation, and some really positive steps made towards trans healthcare. And right now we're seeing all of these bills popping up across States criminalizing trans youth, and it is important for us to recognize at that moment part of that backlash is because certain progress was being made. Because we were starting to question gender and its fixity today and the ways that transphobia operates. Because people were becoming aware of how vulnerable trans people are in our world to violence. And, so of course, we see a response, which means we have to retool and keep fighting. That’s the charge. The struggle is at this point still in an ending one, but it doesn't mean that along the way that certain victories haven’t amassed that give us hope to propel us forward and be ready when the next attack on freedoms, on rights, on justice emerges, because it will. Right? We’re pushing in ways that are uncomfortable because we’re disrupting the center. We’re disrupting the default. We’re disrupting power. And Power it's not just going to concede because we're demanding it.

So for me, this is a lifelong thing, and I think of it as ancestor work that I one day will be somebody's ancestor, and I want them to be proud of the work that we did to give them a world that’s a little better of an inheritance than the world that I was born into. And I think that is how we mark progress in more nuanced ways, in more honest ways. It doesn't need to be a straight line towards freedom, more of a journey with wins and losses, setbacks and victories.”

Treva B. Lindsey, PhD is a Black feminist historian and Associate Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at The Ohio State University. She is the recipient of several prestigious fellowships including the ACLS/Mellon Scholars and Society Fellowship, The Equity for Women and Girls of Color Fellowship at Harvard University, and The Woodrow Wilson Career Enhancement Fellowship. Lindsey is the founder of the Transformative Black Feminisms Initiative at Ohio State and the co-founder of Black Feminist Night School at Zora’s House in Columbus, Ohio. Her latest book entitled America, Goddam: Violence, Black Women, and The Struggle for Justice explores contemporary violence against Black women and girls and how they mobilize to halt violence against them.

· https://trevablindsey.com


· www.creativeprocess.info


· www.oneplanetpodcast.org

Mario Alberto Zambrano is the Associate Director of Juilliard Dance. He was born in Houston, danced for Batsheva Dance Company, Hubbard Street Dance Chicago, Nederlands Dans Theater II, and Ballet Frankfurt between 1994 and 2005. He then returned to school and earned an MFA in English at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he received a John C. Schupes fellowship for excellence in fiction. His first novel, Lotería (Harper Collins), was a Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers pick in 2013 and a finalist for the 2014 John Gardner Fiction Book Award. Zambrano, who was awarded the Alice Hoffman Prize for Fiction for his short story “Some of You,” has been a YoungArts Presidential Scholar in the Arts and a Princess Grace Award winner. He has been awarded literary fellowships to MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, the National Endowment for the Arts, and Scotland’s Hawthornden Castle. Before joining Juilliard, he was a lecturer in theater, dance, and media at Harvard. He serves as program director for Orsolina28’s summer program and curates The LIT Series, a library of interdisciplinary thinking consisting of series of  lectures, interviews, classes and discussions.

“In both writing a first draft and in the improvisation of a dancing body, what is so key and relevant and exposed is voice. That internal voice of the artist of what they're writing on the page or what they're writing in space. If you go to fiction workshop, you talk about plot, structure, and you talk about character development, but there are very few classes within a dance curriculum where you break down an improvisation and you talk about voice, point of view, metaphor, or musical composition within a phrase. The lifespan of a phrase. And so this realisation is helping me understand that a one minute post of improvisation or even a ten-minute span of improvisation if it’s recorded is very similar to a first draft of creative writing, where then the artist is in a position to evaluate those 10 minutes and identify what is the setting? What is the voice that has come out of my experience of writing this first draft of an improvisation? And how can I give it structure? How can I give it form?”

· IG @juilliardschool
· IG @malberto777
· IG @thelitseries
· www.thelitseries.com
· www.juilliard.edu/dance/faculty/zambrano-mario-alberto
· marioalbertozambrano.com
· www.creativeprocess.info
· www.oneplanetpodcast.org

Photo by Julien Benhamou

Best-selling author Courtney Peppernell is from Sydney, Australia. Her poetry collection Pillow Thoughts was a worldwide success. Her Young Adult novels and poetry books have struck a chord with young readers and the LGBTQ+ community. Her other works include I Hope You Stay, Watering the Soul, as well as Hope in the Morning, profits of which were donated to assist relief efforts for injured wildlife affected by Australian bushfires.

“I really hope that kindness is preserved. I really think manners and being polite can go a long way. People are in such a rush these days. Everybody wants to acquire so much, and they forget to just be thankful for the little things in life. To slow down, how you move through the world and how selfless you are, holding open a door for someone, or just telling someone to have a good day. Those are all things that can have a lasting effect on another person and make them want to be better as well.”
· https://www.peppernell.com
· https://www.instagram.com/courtneypeppernell/

· WIRES, Australia’s largest wildlife rescue organisation
https://www.wires.org.au

· www.creativeprocess.info
· www.oneplanetpodcast.org

“I really hope that kindness is preserved. I really think manners and being polite can go a long way. People are in such a rush these days. Everybody wants to acquire so much, and they forget to just be thankful for the little things in life. To slow down, how you move through the world and how selfless you are, holding open a door for someone, or just telling someone to have a good day. Those are all things that can have a lasting effect on another person and make them want to be better as well.”

Best-selling author Courtney Peppernell is from Sydney, Australia. Her poetry collection Pillow Thoughts was a worldwide success. Her Young Adult novels and poetry books have struck a chord with young readers and the LGBTQ+ community. Her other works include I Hope You Stay, Watering the Soul, as well as Hope in the Morning, profits of which were donated to assist relief efforts for injured wildlife affected by Australian bushfires.
· https://www.peppernell.com
· https://www.instagram.com/courtneypeppernell/

· WIRES, Australia’s largest wildlife rescue organisation
https://www.wires.org.au

· www.creativeprocess.info
· www.oneplanetpodcast.org

Tey Meadow is an assistant professor of sociology at Columbia University, where she teaches courses on gender and sexuality, queer theory, qualitative methodology, law, and the analytics of risk and uncertainty. Meadow’s published work focuses on a broad range of issues, including the emergence of the transgender child as a social category, the international politics of family diversity, the creation and maintenance of legal gender classifications, and newer work on the ways individuals negotiate risk in intimate relationships.
Meadow is the author of Trans Kids: Being Gendered in the Twenty-First Century (University of California Press, 2018), and the co-editor of the volume, Other Please Specify: Queer Methods in Sociology (University of California Press, 2018). She has published essays in academic journals like Gender & Society, Politics & Society, Sexualities, Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, Transgender Studies Quarterly and multiple edited volumes.

“So while there is no kind of one size fits all story, there are plenty of times when...kind of like clusters of activity. And some kids don't come out as trans. They come out as wanting to begin a process of exploration around gender, wanting to sort of bend things a little bit or begin to present themselves in slightly different ways without a concrete cross-identification. So it's really a pretty diverse range of phenomena.”

· https://teymeadow.com
· https://sociology.columbia.edu/content/tey-meadow

· www.creativeprocess.info
· www.oneplanetpodcast.org

Interlude music: “Di zun vet aruntergeyn”
Words by Moishe-Lieb Halpern
Melody by Ben Yomen

Performed and produced by Beila Ungar

“So while there is no kind of one size fits all story, there are plenty of times when...kind of like clusters of activity. And some kids don't come out as trans. They come out as wanting to begin a process of exploration around gender, wanting to sort of bend things a little bit or begin to present themselves in slightly different ways without a concrete cross-identification. So it's really a pretty diverse range of phenomena.”

Tey Meadow is an assistant professor of sociology at Columbia University, where she teaches courses on gender and sexuality, queer theory, qualitative methodology, law, and the analytics of risk and uncertainty. Meadow’s published work focuses on a broad range of issues, including the emergence of the transgender child as a social category, the international politics of family diversity, the creation and maintenance of legal gender classifications, and newer work on the ways individuals negotiate risk in intimate relationships.

Meadow is the author of Trans Kids: Being Gendered in the Twenty-First Century (University of California Press, 2018), and the co-editor of the volume, Other Please Specify: Queer Methods in Sociology (University of California Press, 2018). She has published essays in academic journals like Gender & Society, Politics & Society, Sexualities, Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, Transgender Studies Quarterly and multiple edited volumes.

· https://teymeadow.com
· https://sociology.columbia.edu/content/tey-meadow

· www.creativeprocess.info
· www.oneplanetpodcast.org

Interlude music: “Di zun vet aruntergeyn”

Words by Moishe-Lieb Halpern
Melody by Ben Yomen

Performed and produced by Beila Ungar

Redefining being a multi-hyphenate for artistic control and representation, Sandoval made her television debut directing the 6th episode for the new FX limited series, Under the Banner of Heaven based on the New York Times best seller by Jon Krakauer. 

Isabel Sandoval is a Filipina filmmaker who made history with the World Premiere of Lingua Franca at the 2019 Venice International Film Festival’s Giornate degli Autori section and was the first film directed by and starring a trans woman of color ever to screen in competition. In honor of her achievements with the film, Sandoval was nominated for the John Cassavetes Award at the 2021 Film Independent Spirit Awards. Her early film works debuted last summer on The Criterion Channel platform, displaying her growth and evolution as a creator, able to embrace new mediums.

“With Lingua Franca, I think maybe the radical idea in centering a film about this minority character, a trans Filipina immigrant...I think a lot of films or media that depict or feature that kind of character almost always emphasize their trauma and just their marginalization or being subjected to all kinds of prejudice and discrimination.

But what I set out to do in Lingua Franca was to bring out and depict her sense of selfhood and agency first, especially in the first few sequences of the film, by just observing her being and going about her daily morning rituals and routines as a caregiver to this elderly Russian lady.
And I think by training my camera at those rituals, which seem mundane and routine, I'm essentially saying as a filmmaker, that this is a person. A woman and her daily rituals are worth chronicling, are worth paying attention to anything. Just by seeing this woman go about her daily tasks, I think I was already dignifying that life and that perspective, that it's important and that it matters.”

www.imdb.com/name/nm4583383/

www.fxnetworks.com/shows/under-the-banner-of-heaven

The Criterion Channel

www.creativeprocess.info

www.oneplanetpodcast.org

“With Lingua Franca, I think maybe the radical idea in centering a film about this minority character, a trans Filipina immigrant...I think a lot of films or media that depict or feature that kind of character almost always emphasize their trauma and just their marginalization or being subjected to all kinds of prejudice and discrimination.

But what I set out to do in Lingua Franca was to bring out and depict her sense of selfhood and agency first, especially in the first few sequences of the film, by just observing her being and going about her daily morning rituals and routines as a caregiver to this elderly Russian lady.
And I think by training my camera at those rituals, which seem mundane and routine, I'm essentially saying as a filmmaker, that this is a person. A woman and her daily rituals are worth chronicling, are worth paying attention to anything. Just by seeing this woman go about her daily tasks, I think I was already dignifying that life and that perspective, that it's important and that it matters.”

Redefining being a multi-hyphenate for artistic control and representation, Sandoval made her television debut directing the 6th episode for the new FX limited series, Under the Banner of Heaven based on the New York Times best seller by Jon Krakauer. 

Isabel Sandoval is a Filipina filmmaker who made history with the World Premiere of Lingua Franca at the 2019 Venice International Film Festival’s Giornate degli Autori section and was the first film directed by and starring a trans woman of color ever to screen in competition. In honor of her achievements with the film, Sandoval was nominated for the John Cassavetes Award at the 2021 Film Independent Spirit Awards. Her early film works debuted last summer on The Criterion Channel platform, displaying her growth and evolution as a creator, able to embrace new mediums.

www.fxnetworks.com/shows/under-the-banner-of-heaven

The Criterion Channel

www.imdb.com/name/nm4583383/

Photo credit: Michelle Faye/FX Networks

www.creativeprocess.info

www.oneplanetpodcast.org

Mario Alberto Zambrano is the Associate Director of Juilliard Dance. He was born in Houston, danced for Batsheva Dance Company, Hubbard Street Dance Chicago, Nederlands Dans Theater II, and Ballet Frankfurt between 1994 and 2005. He then returned to school and earned an MFA in English at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he received a John C. Schupes fellowship for excellence in fiction. His first novel, Lotería (Harper Collins), was a Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers pick in 2013 and a finalist for the 2014 John Gardner Fiction Book Award. Zambrano, who was awarded the Alice Hoffman Prize for Fiction for his short story “Some of You,” has been a YoungArts Presidential Scholar in the Arts and a Princess Grace Award winner. He has been awarded literary fellowships to MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, the National Endowment for the Arts, and Scotland’s Hawthornden Castle. Before joining Juilliard, he was a lecturer in theater, dance, and media at Harvard. He serves as program director for Orsolina28’s summer program and curates The LIT Series, a library of interdisciplinary thinking consisting of series of  lectures, interviews, classes and discussions.

“In both writing a first draft and in the improvisation of a dancing body, what is so key and relevant and exposed is voice. That internal voice of the artist of what they're writing on the page or what they're writing in space. If you go to fiction workshop, you talk about plot, structure, and you talk about character development, but there are very few classes within a dance curriculum where you break down an improvisation and you talk about voice, point of view, metaphor, or musical composition within a phrase. The lifespan of a phrase. And so this realisation is helping me understand that a one minute post of improvisation or even a ten-minute span of improvisation if it’s recorded is very similar to a first draft of creative writing, where then the artist is in a position to evaluate those 10 minutes and identify what is the setting? What is the voice that has come out of my experience of writing this first draft of an improvisation? And how can I give it structure? How can I give it form?”

www.marioalbertozambrano.com

IG @juilliardschool

IG @malberto777

IG @thelitseries

www.thelitseries.com

www.juilliard.edu/dance/faculty/zambrano-mario-alberto

www.creativeprocess.info

www.oneplanetpodcast.org

Cynthia Daniels is a Grammy and Emmy award-winning producer, engineer and composer working extensively in film, television, and music. Her career has led her around the world, initially specializing in orchestral pop from Big Band Jazz to Broadway, and then crossing over into producing records for young and seasoned artists in the rock, country, and folk-rock world. She is owner and chief engineer at The Hamptons first world-class recording studio, MonkMusic. She has hosted or engineered sessions for Chaka Khan, Beyonce, Coldplay, Paul McCartney, Nile Rogers, Alec Baldwin, Julie Andrews, Sarah Jessica Parker, and Billy Porter.

"We all are looking for a little magic in our lives, and I think that's what art and the creative process allow for, above all. In a world that can be either way too predictable and mundane and create tedium, the creative mind, for me, is the curious mind and the mind that's always learning and allowing yourself to make mistakes. To generate from your core, from your soul, and from your experience something new and experimental and something that is unique to yourself.”

www.cynthiadaniels.net

Monk Music Radio

www.creativeprocess.info

www.oneplanetpodcast.org

"We all are looking for a little magic in our lives, and I think that's what art and the creative process allow for, above all. In a world that can be either way too predictable and mundane and create tedium, the creative mind, for me, is the curious mind and the mind that's always learning and allowing yourself to make mistakes. To generate from your core, from your soul, and from your experience something new and experimental and something that is unique to yourself.”

Cynthia Daniels is a Grammy and Emmy award-winning producer, engineer and composer working extensively in film, television, and music. Her career has led her around the world, initially specializing in orchestral pop from Big Band Jazz to Broadway, and then crossing over into producing records for young and seasoned artists in the rock, country, and folk-rock world. She is owner and chief engineer at The Hamptons first world-class recording studio, MonkMusic. She has hosted or engineered sessions for Chaka Khan, Beyonce, Coldplay, Paul McCartney, Nile Rogers, Alec Baldwin, Julie Andrews, Sarah Jessica Parker, and Billy Porter.

www.cynthiadaniels.net

Monk Music Radio

www.creativeprocess.info

www.oneplanetpodcast.org

Sonnet L'Abbé is a Canadian poet, songwriter, editor and professor. They are the author of A Strange Relief, Killarnoe, and Sonnet's Shakespeare. Sonnet's Shakespeare was a Quill and Quire Book of the Year. In 2014 they edited the Best Canadian Poetry in English anthology. Their chapbook, Anima Canadensis, won the 2017 bpNichol Chapbook Award. They teach Creative Writing and English at Vancouver Island University, and are a poetry editor at Brick Books.

"You know, when we were in undergrad, gender or orientation around being bi or straight or gay was what we felt empowered to explore. And that even as a person who at that point was like, Okay, I'm a girl and find myself desiring people with penises, that means I must be straight, right? I wouldn't have questioned anything other than like, Well, if I have this body, and I desire that kind of body, then I am straight, but in undergrad you could still make out with a girl and be like, I'm just experimenting, but now it seems to me that the opportunity to ask oneself about one's own gender is there. And the more I learned about fluidity, the more I thought about my own relationship to the pronouns that I've grown up with, the more I was like, I think that these other pronouns really more accurately express how I've lived most of my life. So 'they' feels deeply right for me now."

https://www.instagram.com/sonnetlabbe/

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet-books/2017/12/tree-i-invented-a-new-form-of-poem

www.creativeprocess.info

www.oneplanetpodcast.org

"You know, when we were in undergrad, gender or orientation around being bi or straight or gay was what we felt empowered to explore. And that even as a person who at that point was like, Okay, I'm a girl and find myself desiring people with penises, that means I must be straight, right? I wouldn't have questioned anything other than like, Well, if I have this body, and I desire that kind of body, then I am straight, but in undergrad you could still make out with a girl and be like, I'm just experimenting, but now it seems to me that the opportunity to ask oneself about one's own gender is there. And the more I learned about fluidity, the more I thought about my own relationship to the pronouns that I've grown up with, the more I was like, I think that these other pronouns really more accurately express how I've lived most of my life. So 'they' feels deeply right for me now."

Sonnet L'Abbé is a Canadian poet, songwriter, editor and professor. They are the author of A Strange Relief, Killarnoe, and Sonnet's Shakespeare. Sonnet's Shakespeare was a Quill and Quire Book of the Year. In 2014 they edited the Best Canadian Poetry in English anthology. Their chapbook, Anima Canadensis, won the 2017 bpNichol Chapbook Award. They teach Creative Writing and English at Vancouver Island University, and are a poetry editor at Brick Books.

https://www.instagram.com/sonnetlabbe/

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet-books/2017/12/tree-i-invented-a-new-form-of-poem

www.creativeprocess.info

www.oneplanetpodcast.org

Aniela Unguresan is Co-founder of EDGE Certification, the leading global assessment methodology and business certification standard for gender equality. Launched at the Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum in 2011, EDGE Certification measures where organizations stand in terms of gender balance across their pipeline, pay equity, and effectiveness of policies and practices to ensure equitable career flows, as well as the inclusiveness of their culture. EDGE Certification has been designed to help companies not only to create an optimal workplace for women and men, but also to benefit from it. EDGE stands for Economic Dividends for Gender Equality and is distinguished by its rigor and focus on business impact. Their customer base consists of 200 large organizations in 50 countries across five continents, representing 30 different industries.

Prior to co-founding EDGE Certified Foundation, Aniela acquired extensive professional experience as a consultant with Arthur Andersen and Andersen Consulting, as a trader and project manager with TXU Europe and SIG Geneva, and as the CEO of CT Technologies.

"I think that what is really important on this journey is to understand when we talk about gender and intersectional equity - and yes, gender is that element that is the most universal across different geographies. So for organizations that are present across many different countries and many different continents, there will be one backbone which will be gender, the binary definition, to which they will be adding other aspects of the broader diversity spectrum based on the specificities of the countries of operations. For example, L'Oréal in the U.S., they look at the intersection between gender, race, and ethnicity. We have organizations in Europe that are very often looking at the intersection between age, gender, and sexual orientation. In Southeast Asia, sexual orientation and working with a disability are definitely emerging topics.

So allowing ourselves this flexibility in saying we have a solid backbone - which is the one that can be legally measured and tracked across all geographies - which is the gender binary. And on this, we will be building this intersectional view with other beautiful characteristics that compose us as individuals. Having this flexibility allowed organizations such as L'Oréal, but then also some other institutions that we are working with within the UN system or international finance institutions, such as the IMF or the World Bank, to add different intersectional lenses to their gender binary approach."

https://edge-cert.org

www.creativeprocess.info

www.oneplanetpodcast.org

"I think that what is really important on this journey is to understand when we talk about gender and intersectional equity - and yes, gender is that element that is the most universal across different geographies. So for organizations that are present across many different countries and many different continents, there will be one backbone which will be gender, the binary definition, to which they will be adding other aspects of the broader diversity spectrum based on the specificities of the countries of operations. For example, L'Oréal in the U.S., they look at the intersection between gender, race, and ethnicity. We have organizations in Europe that are very often looking at the intersection between age, gender, and sexual orientation. In Southeast Asia, sexual orientation and working with a disability are definitely emerging topics.

So allowing ourselves this flexibility in saying we have a solid backbone - which is the one that can be legally measured and tracked across all geographies - which is the gender binary. And on this, we will be building this intersectional view with other beautiful characteristics that compose us as individuals. Having this flexibility allowed organizations such as L'Oréal, but then also some other institutions that we are working with within the UN system or international finance institutions, such as the IMF or the World Bank, to add different intersectional lenses to their gender binary approach."

Aniela Unguresan is Co-founder of EDGE Certification, the leading global assessment methodology and business certification standard for gender equality. Launched at the Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum in 2011, EDGE Certification measures where organizations stand in terms of gender balance across their pipeline, pay equity, and effectiveness of policies and practices to ensure equitable career flows, as well as the inclusiveness of their culture. EDGE Certification has been designed to help companies not only to create an optimal workplace for women and men, but also to benefit from it. EDGE stands for Economic Dividends for Gender Equality and is distinguished by its rigor and focus on business impact. Their customer base consists of 200 large organizations in 50 countries across five continents, representing 30 different industries.

Prior to co-founding EDGE Certified Foundation, Aniela acquired extensive professional experience as a consultant with Arthur Andersen and Andersen Consulting, as a trader and project manager with TXU Europe and SIG Geneva, and as the CEO of CT Technologies.

https://edge-cert.org

www.creativeprocess.info

www.oneplanetpodcast.org

Fury Young and BL Shirelle are the powerhouse team behind Die Jim Crow Records, the first non-profit record label in United States history for currently and formerly incarcerated musicians. DJC Records’ mission is to dismantle stereotypes around race and prison in America by amplifying the voices of our artists.  As a pair, Fury Young and BL Shirelle form a perhaps unlikely, but unstoppable duo.  Young is a Jewish New Yorker who has not experienced incarceration. Shirelle is a queer, Black woman from Philadelphia who has been heavily impacted by police violence and incarceration. The two formed an inseparable bond. As friends, musical collaborators and now Co-Executive Directors of Die Jim Crow Records, their leadership and commitment to values of representation, fairness, passion for the cause, and a love for art, are at the core of DJC.

"So when you go into parole, like when you're on your way, your friends will tell you, the ones who have been there, "Don't let them like upset you. Don't let them get you out of your character." And I remember the first time I went up to parole, I survived a police-involved shooting. So I was shot multiple times. And it was my time to go down there and talk about this situation. And I was wondering if I wanted to tell the truth, or if I wanted to say what they want you to say because if you go in there with the truth, it's called "not taking responsibility.” You have to say exactly whatever is on that police report. So that was gonna be hard for me because they was basically trying to make it seem like I knew that these guys were cops, and I just shot this guy because he was a cop. That wasn't true. And I went in there and when I got to them asking me those questions, because they start tearing you down, they start saying, you're a horrible mom. Look what you did. Look, you left your kid. Now your kid is all f***ed up. They go in, they call you all kind of...despicable, worthless, bad mom, you know, horrible person, whatever you are and whatever your thing is, what they attack. And I remember them telling me that I was not taking responsibility. I still had came this far, and I still was choosing to lie and X, Y, and Z. And I remember my eyes started to well up, and I was like, I'm not going to let 'em do it because even crying to them is like manipulation. You can't cry while they're attacking you. Can't talk back, you just kind of have to take it. So I remember just kind of self-absorbing it. And when I walked out, and my eyes was like to the brim, the guard was like, "You did great." She was like, “You're going to get parole. You did a wonderful job."

www.diejimcrow.com

http://www.blshirelle.com

http://www.furyyoung.com

www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org

"So when you go into parole, like when you're on your way, your friends will tell you, the ones who have been there, "Don't let them like upset you. Don't let them get you out of your character." And I remember the first time I went up to parole, I survived a police-involved shooting. So I was shot multiple times. And it was my time to go down there and talk about this situation. And I was wondering if I wanted to tell the truth, or if I wanted to say what they want you to say because if you go in there with the truth, it's called "not taking responsibility.” You have to say exactly whatever is on that police report. So that was gonna be hard for me because they was basically trying to make it seem like I knew that these guys were cops, and I just shot this guy because he was a cop. That wasn't true. And I went in there and when I got to them asking me those questions, because they start tearing you down, they start saying, you're a horrible mom. Look what you did. Look, you left your kid. Now your kid is all f***ed up. They go in, they call you all kind of...despicable, worthless, bad mom, you know, horrible person, whatever you are and whatever your thing is, what they attack. And I remember them telling me that I was not taking responsibility. I still had came this far, and I still was choosing to lie and X, Y, and Z. And I remember my eyes started to well up, and I was like, I'm not going to let 'em do it because even crying to them is like manipulation. You can't cry while they're attacking you. Can't talk back, you just kind of have to take it. So I remember just kind of self-absorbing it. And when I walked out, and my eyes was like to the brim, the guard was like, "You did great." She was like, “You're going to get parole. You did a wonderful job."

Fury Young and BL Shirelle are the powerhouse team behind Die Jim Crow Records, the first non-profit record label in United States history for currently and formerly incarcerated musicians. DJC Records’ mission is to dismantle stereotypes around race and prison in America by amplifying the voices of our artists.  As a pair, Fury Young and BL Shirelle form a perhaps unlikely, but unstoppable duo.  Young is a Jewish New Yorker who has not experienced incarceration. Shirelle is a queer, Black woman from Philadelphia who has been heavily impacted by police violence and incarceration. The two formed an inseparable bond. As friends, musical collaborators and now Co-Executive Directors of Die Jim Crow Records, their leadership and commitment to values of representation, fairness, passion for the cause, and a love for art, are at the core of DJC.

www.diejimcrow.com

http://www.blshirelle.com

http://www.furyyoung.com

www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org

Amanda E. Machado is a writer, public speaker and facilitator whose work explores how race, gender, sexuality, and power affect the way we travel and experience the outdoors. She has written and facilitated on topics of social justice and adventure and lived in Cape Town, Havana, Mexico City, Berlin, Rio de Janeiro, and other cities. She has been published in The Atlantic, The Washington Post, The Guardian, New York Times, NPR, and other publications. She is also the founder of Reclaiming Nature Writing, a multi-week online workshop that expands how we tell stories about nature in a way that considers ancestry, colonization, migration trauma, and other issues.

“So after coming out, I went to Mexico, which is where my mother's from, and spent most of my time there interacting in queer communities and queer spaces. And it just made such a huge difference. It was, again, such a flip from what I had seen in the US where so much of queer media and queer representation is mostly white, right? And creates this idea that the queer community automatically means the white community and Thankfully, I think that's shifted a lot. I think shows like Vida that came out recently and just a ton of other movies that are coming out lately and books by Latinx queer writers are really shifting that. I think this generation coming up now will have so much more representation to look at. But for me, I think what was most healing and most necessary at that time was to go back to Mexico and to see for myself what queerness looked like under a Mexican context. How it was different than what I had seen in the States, how it might more feel like home.

And also really unpacking the history behind queerness and Latinx culture is how it had always been there, right? This idea that it was invented recently or something that just came out of nowhere is completely false. And really understanding the way indigenous communities in Mexico had interpreted queerness, had words for queerness. There was a word that I learned, patlacheh, which is a Nahuatl word that meant women that were in love with other women. And had been used for a really long time. So learning that history of transgender communities in Oaxaca that were called muxes. Just knowing that there was always terminology for this. These ideas always existed.

A lot of writers of color have talked about this. James Baldwin had a similar experience when he went to France, you know, that was the most American he had ever felt. And I think this is the case for a lot of people who have a marginalized identity in the United States.”

www.amandaemachado.com

IG www.instagram.com/amandaemachado0

www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
IG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast

“So after coming out, I went to Mexico, which is where my mother's from, and spent most of my time there interacting in queer communities and queer spaces. And it just made such a huge difference. It was, again, such a flip from what I had seen in the US where so much of queer media and queer representation is mostly white, right? And creates this idea that the queer community automatically means the white community and Thankfully, I think that's shifted a lot. I think shows like Vida that came out recently and just a ton of other movies that are coming out lately and books by Latinx queer writers are really shifting that. I think this generation coming up now will have so much more representation to look at. But for me, I think what was most healing and most necessary at that time was to go back to Mexico and to see for myself what queerness looked like under a Mexican context. How it was different than what I had seen in the States, how it might more feel like home.

And also really unpacking the history behind queerness and Latinx culture is how it had always been there, right? This idea that it was invented recently or something that just came out of nowhere is completely false. And really understanding the way indigenous communities in Mexico had interpreted queerness, had words for queerness. There was a word that I learned, patlacheh, which is a Nahuatl word that meant women that were in love with other women. And had been used for a really long time. So learning that history of transgender communities in Oaxaca that were called muxes. Just knowing that there was always terminology for this. These ideas always existed.

A lot of writers of color have talked about this. James Baldwin had a similar experience when he went to France, you know, that was the most American he had ever felt. And I think this is the case for a lot of people who have a marginalized identity in the United States.”

Amanda E. Machado is a writer, public speaker and facilitator whose work explores how race, gender, sexuality, and power affect the way we travel and experience the outdoors. She has written and facilitated on topics of social justice and adventure and lived in Cape Town, Havana, Mexico City, Berlin, Rio de Janeiro, and other cities. She has been published in The Atlantic, The Washington Post, The Guardian, New York Times, NPR, and other publications. She is also the founder of Reclaiming Nature Writing, a multi-week online workshop that expands how we tell stories about nature in a way that considers ancestry, colonization, migration trauma, and other issues.

www.amandaemachado.com

IG www.instagram.com/amandaemachado0

www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
IG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast

Michael Begler is showrunner, writer, and executive producer of Perry Mason, which debuted as HBO’s most-watched series in nearly two years upon its premiere in June 2020. The critically-acclaimed show stars Emmy-winner Matthew Rhys, Juliet Rylance, Katherine Waterston, Hope Davis. In the second season of the Emmy-nominated series, the scion of a powerful oil family is brutally murdered. Power, social justice, immigration, LGBTQ rights, and what it truly means to be guilty, are among the issues raised by the series.
Begler’s previous series include the Peabody Award-winning The Knick, starring Clive Owen, directed by Steven Soderbergh, writing/producing credits also include comedy series The Tony Danza Show, The Jeff Foxworthy Show and the film Big Miracle starring Drew Barrymore and John Krasinski.
“Creators Ron Fitzgerald and Rolin Jones and Team Downey, this was a sort of a thing that they came up with, but I think what we wanted to explore in season two was really to dig more into this idea of what is it to be a woman with ambition in this era, 3% of attorneys were women in the entire nation in 1933. So that alone is an uphill battle. And then when you add the complication of being queer in this time, and that there are laws against it that you have to make sure every step you take is so calculated and so careful that you don't slip up. It's all based on fear and threat and what happens if something you've established all of a sudden, a woman can come in and do it.

When we look at the current political climate, and we look at the way they're trying to erase history, to whitewash history, I think is such a dangerous precedent because we can only learn from our past. We can learn from our mistakes. We can learn from what happened. If we don't tell the truth, where does that leave us? If we can cherry-pick what's important to know and not know, and by an elite view, well, how different are those elite views from the elite view of a hundred years ago? We have to learn from our past. It's the only way to have a future. And I think that to me is essential.”

www.imdb.com/title/tt2077823
www.instagram.com/perrymasonhbo
www.imdb.com/name/nm0066764

www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
IG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast

“Creators Ron Fitzgerald and Rolin Jones and Team Downey, this was a sort of a thing that they came up with, but I think what we wanted to explore in season two was really to dig more into this idea of what is it to be a woman with ambition in this era, 3% of attorneys were women in the entire nation in 1933. So that alone is an uphill battle. And then when you add the complication of being queer in this time, and that there are laws against it that you have to make sure every step you take is so calculated and so careful that you don't slip up. It's all based on fear and threat and what happens if something you've established all of a sudden, a woman can come in and do it.

When we look at the current political climate, and we look at the way they're trying to erase history, to whitewash history, I think is such a dangerous precedent because we can only learn from our past. We can learn from our mistakes. We can learn from what happened. If we don't tell the truth, where does that leave us? If we can cherry-pick what's important to know and not know, and by an elite view, well, how different are those elite views from the elite view of a hundred years ago? We have to learn from our past. It's the only way to have a future. And I think that to me is essential.”

Michael Begler is showrunner, writer, and executive producer of Perry Mason, which debuted as HBO’s most-watched series in nearly two years upon its premiere in June 2020. The critically-acclaimed show stars Emmy-winner Matthew Rhys, Juliet Rylance, Katherine Waterston, Hope Davis. In the second season of the Emmy-nominated series, the scion of a powerful oil family is brutally murdered. Power, social justice, immigration, LGBTQ rights, and what it truly means to be guilty, are among the issues raised by the series.
Begler’s previous series include the Peabody Award-winning The Knick, starring Clive Owen, directed by Steven Soderbergh, writing/producing credits also include comedy series The Tony Danza Show, The Jeff Foxworthy Show and the film Big Miracle starring Drew Barrymore and John Krasinski.

www.imdb.com/title/tt2077823
www.instagram.com/perrymasonhbo
www.imdb.com/name/nm0066764

www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
IG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast

David J. Linden is a Professor in the Department of Neuroscience at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. He is the author of Unique: The New Science of Human Individuality, The Accidental Mind: How Brain Evolution Has Given Us Love, Memory, Dreams, and God, The Compass of Pleasure: How Our Brains Make Fatty Foods, Orgasm, Exercise, Marijuana, Generosity, Vodka, Learning, and Gambling Feel So Good, and Touch: The Science of the Hand, Heart, and Mind. His laboratory has worked for many years on the cellular substrates of memory storage, recovery of function following brain injury and a few other topics.

"So there is a small genetic but significant genetic component to sexual orientation. And it's slightly different in males and females. And interestingly, it's not general. So for example, if I were to have a gay brother, then the chance of me being gay would become higher. But if I have a lesbian sister, that does not change the chance of me being gay or vice versa.

If a woman has a lesbian sister, then the chance of her being attracted to women is higher. And if she has a gay brother, it doesn't make any difference at all. So it's not like gayness or straightness is what heritability is acting on. It's attraction to males or attraction to females. And that's a subtle distinction, but I think it's very important.

The other thing that is really interesting and fascinating is that there is, from a big meta-analysis that was done by the American Psychological Association, there is really no evidence whatsoever that links events in the family to your probability of being gay or straight or bi. So, well, that's a mystery.

If it's not how you were raised by your family and it's only a little bit genetic, what is it? Well, you know, I think you had a hint of some of it when you're talking about hormones. There is some evidence that hormonal exposure in utero matters. So, for example, if biologically female fetuses are exposed to what we call androgens, the class of male hormones, that includes testosterone, that increases the probability that the child who is born and then grows up will be attracted to women when they grow up. Even if that child is biologically female. Likewise, there seems to be something similar for gay men and exposure to estrogen and female sex hormones. That said, there's of course mystery. We're far from understanding in totality how the trait of sexual orientation arrives. And we also know that there are enormous cultural influences. There are societies that have sort of a revered place for homosexual behavior in the Pantheon and others where it is really looked down upon, and that seems to have influence on how this trait develops."

www.davidlinden.org

www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
IG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast

"So there is a small genetic but significant genetic component to sexual orientation. And it's slightly different in males and females. And interestingly, it's not general. So for example, if I were to have a gay brother, then the chance of me being gay would become higher. But if I have a lesbian sister, that does not change the chance of me being gay or vice versa.

If a woman has a lesbian sister, then the chance of her being attracted to women is higher. And if she has a gay brother, it doesn't make any difference at all. So it's not like gayness or straightness is what heritability is acting on. It's attraction to males or attraction to females. And that's a subtle distinction, but I think it's very important.

The other thing that is really interesting and fascinating is that there is, from a big meta-analysis that was done by the American Psychological Association, there is really no evidence whatsoever that links events in the family to your probability of being gay or straight or bi. So, well, that's a mystery.

If it's not how you were raised by your family and it's only a little bit genetic, what is it? Well, you know, I think you had a hint of some of it when you're talking about hormones. There is some evidence that hormonal exposure in utero matters. So, for example, if biologically female fetuses are exposed to what we call androgens, the class of male hormones, that includes testosterone, that increases the probability that the child who is born and then grows up will be attracted to women when they grow up. Even if that child is biologically female. Likewise, there seems to be something similar for gay men and exposure to estrogen and female sex hormones. That said, there's of course mystery. We're far from understanding in totality how the trait of sexual orientation arrives. And we also know that there are enormous cultural influences. There are societies that have sort of a revered place for homosexual behavior in the Pantheon and others where it is really looked down upon, and that seems to have influence on how this trait develops."

David J. Linden is a Professor in the Department of Neuroscience at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. He is the author of Unique: The New Science of Human Individuality, The Accidental Mind: How Brain Evolution Has Given Us Love, Memory, Dreams, and God, The Compass of Pleasure: How Our Brains Make Fatty Foods, Orgasm, Exercise, Marijuana, Generosity, Vodka, Learning, and Gambling Feel So Good, and Touch: The Science of the Hand, Heart, and Mind. His laboratory has worked for many years on the cellular substrates of memory storage, recovery of function following brain injury and a few other topics.

www.davidlinden.org

www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
IG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast

Have you ever experienced the feeling of being alone and not having a community? How can we build an atmosphere of inclusion and greater understanding?

Brooklyn-based artist Elliot Lee fuses dark pop melodies with edgy vocals and innovative electronic-rock soundscapes to create an unpredictable sound, acting as a voice for the voiceless. Elliot Lee holds an awareness of what music that is unhindered by norms can do for the underrepresented. Elliot’s single "Easy To Be You” is dedicated to the LGBTQIA+ community and was released during PRIDE Month. Elliot confides that the release is, "about struggling with self image and identity expression as a queer person.

"I started to feel like a person who wasn't really me, in that world of being super feminine. It's definitely a night and day difference from that and when, for a while, I was super masculine and people were gendering me. Looking at me, they'd say I was a boy. Those two different worlds are very different. And how people treated me was like night and day. I definitely got more respect when I was masculine. I'd find from people, especially men, were more willing to listen to me and willing to hang out with me and all that without making it weird.

I've always been outspoken, partially because of my autism, I think, because I just don't really have a filter and I find that in a lot of my relationships, I overshare sometimes. And I talk about things that maybe weren't the right thing to talk about to that person. And I've learned to get better at that. But music has been more of an outlet for me to be okay with saying whatever I want to say. And there aren't really boundaries, so I don't have to worry about that anymore.

So in my image, I'm just kind of me, which is nice. I get to just be me and not worry about fitting into society or fitting into what people want me to be. I can overshare and I can advocate for things that mean a lot to me, and I can be open about who I am. And since I have this community of people supporting me, then I'm safe doing so."

www.elliotlee.com
https://song.space/2nldde/song/2477503

www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
IG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast

How do you find your voice? As a writer, how do you take what you know and what you believe to share your stories with the world? How do we let young writers know just how powerful they are and that what they do matters?

In How We Do It: Black Writers on Craft, Practice, and Skill Pulitzer Prize winning, and National Book Award finalist author Jericho Brown brings together more than 30 acclaimed writers, including the likes of Tayari Jones, Jacqueline Woodson, Natasha Trethewey, among many others, to discuss, dissect, and offer advice and encouragement on the written word. Brown is author of The Tradition, for which he won the Pulitzer Prize. He is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, and the National Endowment for the Arts, and he is the winner of the Whiting Award. Brown’s first book, Please, won the American Book Award. His second book, The New Testament, won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. His third collection, The Tradition won the Paterson Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. His poems have appeared in The Bennington Review, Buzzfeed, Fence, jubilat, The New Republic, The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Paris Review TIME magazine, and several volumes of The Best American Poetry. He is the director of the Creative Writing Program and a professor at Emory University.

"So you're afraid to change cause you don't want people to call you strange. So I sort of get that. But I grew up in a very different situation. I'm actually always surprised that I'm even in communication with my parents at all. I didn't think anybody in my family would want to have anything to do with me cause that was the message I got from the world when I was a kid, that people do not want to have anything to do with queer people other than queer people. That was what I understood, that queer people themselves didn't even want to have anything to do with one another. And so I was putting myself in training, you know, from the age when I figured out that I was into guys, which was very young. When I was in elementary school, I was in training for the day I leave my parents' house, they find out I'm gay and never speak to me again.

Now, that's not how things went, but if you have that idea, if you already have the idea that everyone in your life is going to reject you, then that makes it easier to write your trauma because you don't think you have anything to lose. And part of our fear about writing that which is intimate or personal or traumatic has to do with the fact that we are afraid that, yeah, I'll have the good piece of writing, but I lose this really wonderful relationship in my real life, and I don't want to lose my relationships.

Moving forward in time, I think it's different for me now. And I think it's easier for me to write into a kind of risk because I have trained myself to a point where I don't think about that risk as I am writing. I put myself in a position where I only have to think about that risk once I am at a point in a draft. And by that time the poem is so good, I don't care about that relationship. But in the beginning, as I was saying to Mia earlier, my goal is lines. Oh, that sounds good! Oh, that sounds good. Oh, this is interesting. Oh, I might be able to use this piece. If you take things down to the word, to the fragment, to the line, in some cases, to the sentence, to the paragraph, and you start putting things together, then you can begin to put them together because they go together, not cause they're about you in any particular way."

www.jerichobrown.com
www.harpercollins.com/products/how-we-do-it-jericho-browndarlene-taylor?variant=40901184684066

www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
IG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast

In this episode of the Speaking Out of Place podcast, Professor David Palumbo-Liu interviews Ching-In Chen & Kate Hao about the cancellation of the Asian American Literary Festival 2023.

This August, the Asian American Literary Festival was to take place in Washington, DC.. The longstanding event had been on hiatus because of the pandemic, so this year’s event had generated a lot of buzz.  Organized by the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center (APAC), the event had already garnered substantial investments and expectations from both national and international groups and states.

Ching-In Chen is a poet who was curating a festival event featuring books by trans and nonbinary writers. Kate Hao is a program coordinator who was on contract with the Smithsonian for the festival. They discuss the controversy and the issues it raises about art for the community vs. art that must conform to state institutional preferences and politics. We discuss why this festival is absolutely essential for the present day, where we have Asian Americans being used to help dismantle affirmative action, and where we see persistent and deadly acts of anti-Asian violence. We also hear about possible plans to go forward without the Smithsonian, and ways we can help support the artists and organizers.

https://www.chinginchen.com

www.palumbo-liu.com 
https://speakingoutofplace.com
https://twitter.com/palumboliu?s=20

"So you're afraid to change cause you don't want people to call you strange. So I sort of get that. But I grew up in a very different situation. I'm actually always surprised that I'm even in communication with my parents at all. I didn't think anybody in my family would want to have anything to do with me cause that was the message I got from the world when I was a kid, that people do not want to have anything to do with queer people other than queer people. That was what I understood, that queer people themselves didn't even want to have anything to do with one another. And so I was putting myself in training, you know, from the age when I figured out that I was into guys, which was very young. When I was in elementary school, I was in training for the day I leave my parents' house, they find out I'm gay and never speak to me again.

Now, that's not how things went, but if you have that idea, if you already have the idea that everyone in your life is going to reject you, then that makes it easier to write your trauma because you don't think you have anything to lose. And part of our fear about writing that which is intimate or personal or traumatic has to do with the fact that we are afraid that, yeah, I'll have the good piece of writing, but I lose this really wonderful relationship in my real life, and I don't want to lose my relationships.

Moving forward in time, I think it's different for me now. And I think it's easier for me to write into a kind of risk because I have trained myself to a point where I don't think about that risk as I am writing. I put myself in a position where I only have to think about that risk once I am at a point in a draft. And by that time the poem is so good, I don't care about that relationship. But in the beginning, my goal is lines. Oh, that sounds good! Oh, that sounds good. Oh, this is interesting. Oh, I might be able to use this piece. If you take things down to the word, to the fragment, to the line, in some cases, to the sentence, to the paragraph, and you start putting things together, then you can begin to put them together because they go together, not cause they're about you in any particular way."

How do you find your voice? As a writer, how do you take what you know and what you believe to share your stories with the world? How do we let young writers know just how powerful they are and that what they do matters?

In How We Do It: Black Writers on Craft, Practice, and Skill Pulitzer Prize winning, and National Book Award finalist author Jericho Brown brings together more than 30 acclaimed writers, including the likes of Tayari Jones, Jacqueline Woodson, Natasha Trethewey, among many others, to discuss, dissect, and offer advice and encouragement on the written word. Brown is author of The Tradition, for which he won the Pulitzer Prize. He is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, and the National Endowment for the Arts, and he is the winner of the Whiting Award. Brown’s first book, Please, won the American Book Award. His second book, The New Testament, won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. His third collection, The Tradition won the Paterson Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. His poems have appeared in The Bennington Review, Buzzfeed, Fence, jubilat, The New Republic, The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Paris Review TIME magazine, and several volumes of The Best American Poetry. He is the director of the Creative Writing Program and a professor at Emory University.

www.jerichobrown.com
www.harpercollins.com/products/how-we-do-it-jericho-browndarlene-taylor?variant=40901184684066

www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
IG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast

What happens when we die? What happens to our memories and consciousness when our bodies cease to be?  In the end, is it the things we did and the people we loved that give our lives meaning?

Shehan Karunatilaka is the multi-award winning author. He is known for his novels dealing with the history, politics, and folklore of his home country of Sri Lanka. He won the Commonwealth Book Prize and the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature for his debut novel, Chinaman: The Legend of Pradeep Mathew, and the Booker Prize 2022 for his second novel, The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida. In addition to novels, he has written rock songs, screenplays and travel stories. Born in Colombo, he studied in New Zealand and has lived and worked in London, Amsterdam, and Singapore.

"I think when the novel went through many revisions and reiterations, a lot of Richard de Zoysa's biography got shared, and Maali Almeida emerged as a character. But that one detail stayed, the fact that he was a closeted gay man. Again, you write by instinct, and also I had to explain why was this privileged Colombo kid, going to these very dangerous places and hanging out with very dodgy characters. So one reason was perhaps ego. He found something he was very good at, and he thought he was bearing witness and doing this great service.

I think another reason - and also this idealism that he thought his photographs could change the world - but also I think as a closeted gay man, he could express himself sexually in the war zone. Normal rules didn't apply. And also I think this informed his world. He just believed in being a hedonist and enjoying his sexuality. And the only way he could do that was to go to these dangerous places where no one he knew would be watching.

I don't know if I could revise it now and make him heterosexual and have the story work quite as well. So that was the reason. Since then I've been questioned because now that debate is alive and well: the cultural appropriation debate. Are we allowed to write novels from the perspective of characters of different sexualities, genders, and ethnicities?

I think we are. I think that's the whole point of being a novelist or being a storyteller is that you are allowed to inhabit other consciousnesses and see the world through other points of view. Of course, you have to do it well. You have to do it with respect. You have to do the empathy. And you have to do it responsibly. I don't think we should be placing boundaries because otherwise, I have to write from a Sinhalese Buddhist, Sri Lankan, middle-aged dude...which is quite boring.

I'd like to explore different characters if I'm allowed to write more. So that was really the thinking. It wasn't a political decision. It just felt right for the character, and in the end, it was true to who the character was. And in the end, I think with the plot as well, it gives the novel another dimension."

www.shehanwriter.com
https://wwnorton.com/books/9781324064824

www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
IG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast

Photo credit: David Parry/Booker Prize Foundation

"I think when the novel went through many revisions and reiterations, a lot of Richard de Zoysa's biography got shared, and Maali Almeida emerged as a character. But that one detail stayed, the fact that he was a closeted gay man. Again, you write by instinct, and also I had to explain why was this privileged Colombo kid, going to these very dangerous places and hanging out with very dodgy characters. So one reason was perhaps ego. He found something he was very good at, and he thought he was bearing witness and doing this great service.

I think another reason - and also this idealism that he thought his photographs could change the world - but also I think as a closeted gay man, he could express himself sexually in the war zone. Normal rules didn't apply. And also I think this informed his world. He just believed in being a hedonist and enjoying his sexuality. And the only way he could do that was to go to these dangerous places where no one he knew would be watching.

I don't know if I could revise it now and make him heterosexual and have the story work quite as well. So that was the reason. Since then I've been questioned because now that debate is alive and well: the cultural appropriation debate. Are we allowed to write novels from the perspective of characters of different sexualities, genders, and ethnicities?

I think we are. I think that's the whole point of being a novelist or being a storyteller is that you are allowed to inhabit other consciousnesses and see the world through other points of view. Of course, you have to do it well. You have to do it with respect. You have to do the empathy. And you have to do it responsibly. I don't think we should be placing boundaries because otherwise, I have to write from a Sinhalese Buddhist, Sri Lankan, middle-aged dude...which is quite boring.

I'd like to explore different characters if I'm allowed to write more. So that was really the thinking. It wasn't a political decision. It just felt right for the character, and in the end, it was true to who the character was. And in the end, I think with the plot as well, it gives the novel another dimension."

What happens when we die? What happens to our memories and consciousness when our bodies cease to be?  In the end, is it the things we did and the people we loved that give our lives meaning?

Shehan Karunatilaka is the multi-award winning author. He is known for his novels dealing with the history, politics, and folklore of his home country of Sri Lanka. He won the Commonwealth Book Prize and the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature for his debut novel, Chinaman: The Legend of Pradeep Mathew, and the Booker Prize 2022 for his second novel, The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida. In addition to novels, he has written rock songs, screenplays and travel stories. Born in Colombo, he studied in New Zealand and has lived and worked in London, Amsterdam, and Singapore.

www.shehanwriter.com
https://wwnorton.com/books/9781324064824

www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
IG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast

In this episode of the Speaking Out of Place podcast, Professor David Palumbo-Liu and Azeezah Kanji talk with Sara Ahmed about her new book, The Feminist Killjoy Handbook. How and why is it that complaining about sexism, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, and other forms of bigotry, is considered impolite? How is civility uncivil, and the mandate to be “happy” a tool for silencing grievances? Sara Ahmed tackles all those questions, and gives us strength and courage to keep on killingjoy and speaking truth.

Sara Ahmed is an independent queer feminist scholar of colour. Her work is concerned with how power is experienced and challenged in everyday life and institutional cultures. Her first trade book, The Feminist Killjoy Handbook is coming out with Seal Press next month. Previous books (all published by Duke University Press) include Complaint! (2021), What's The Use? On the Uses of Use (2019), Living a Feminist Life (2017), Willful Subjects (2014), On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life (2012), The Promise of Happiness (2010) and Queer Phenomenology: Objects, Orientations, Others (2006). She is currently writing A Complainer’s Handbook: A Guide to Building Less Hostile Institutions and has begun a new project on common sense. She blogs at feministkilljoy.com.

"She often said I was the daughter she didn't have. And I was the daughter she had, in fact, because I'll say that to you. And I got a lot from her. She was very much willing always to speak her mind. And I would watch her tell my father off. It would be just like, yeah, this is possible! And she was outspoken, but also very loving. She's no longer with us. I never came out to her in the sense of saying 'I am a lesbian' or whatever, but I think she kind of knew. We had conversations, and I think she would have been okay with it. And because she was just a very, very curious and creative person and an enormous influence in my life."

https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/454793/the-feminist-killjoy-handbook-by-ahmed-sara/9780241619537

www.palumbo-liu.com 
https://speakingoutofplace.com
https://twitter.com/palumboliu?s=20

Photo credit: Sarah Franklin

 Dean Spade is an organizer, speaker, author, and professor at Seattle University's School of Law, where he teaches courses on policing, imprisonment, gender, race, and social movements. Spade has been organizing racial and economic movements for queer and trans liberation for the past 20 years. Spade's books include Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, and the Limits of Law and Mutual Aid, Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the Next). In 2002, Dean founded the Sylvia Rivera Law Project, a non-profit law collective that provides free legal services to transgender, intersex and gender non-conforming people who are low-income and/or people of color, and which operates on a collective governance model. His writing has appeared in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Out, In These Times, Social Text, and Signs.

“The legal system is a colonial legal system that is designed to preserve capitalist extraction and all the racial dynamics required to produce racial capitalism. The system is already completely captured by our opponents. And anything that looks like it's good for us is probably actually not. People don't get what they're supposed to get. It's undermined in several ways, or it can get flipped all the time. Like the law in the books is not happening on the streets. The police are not supposed to kill people all the time, and they just do. There is no rule of law. We live in lawless, brutal domination under a set of systems that are incredibly resilient and can reframe and sometimes be extra-legal, and that works out fine for them.”

www.deanspade.net
www.southendpress.org/2010/items/87965

www.deanspade.net/mutual-aid-building-solidarity-during-this-crisis-and-the-next/
https://srlp.org

www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
IG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast

“The legal system is a colonial legal system that is designed to preserve capitalist extraction and all the racial dynamics required to produce racial capitalism. The system is already completely captured by our opponents. And anything that looks like it's good for us is probably actually not. People don't get what they're supposed to get. It's undermined in several ways, or it can get flipped all the time. Like the law in the books is not happening on the streets. The police are not supposed to kill people all the time, and they just do. There is no rule of law. We live in lawless, brutal domination under a set of systems that are incredibly resilient and can reframe and sometimes be extra-legal, and that works out fine for them.”

 Dean Spade is an organizer, speaker, author, and professor at Seattle University's School of Law, where he teaches courses on policing, imprisonment, gender, race, and social movements. Spade has been organizing racial and economic movements for queer and trans liberation for the past 20 years. Spade's books include Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, and the Limits of Law and Mutual Aid, Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the Next). In 2002, Dean founded the Sylvia Rivera Law Project, a non-profit law collective that provides free legal services to transgender, intersex and gender non-conforming people who are low-income and/or people of color, and which operates on a collective governance model. His writing has appeared in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Out, In These Times, Social Text, and Signs.

www.deanspade.net
www.southendpress.org/2010/items/87965

www.deanspade.net/mutual-aid-building-solidarity-during-this-crisis-and-the-next/
https://srlp.org

www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
IG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast

What does learning another language and living in another culture do for your humanity and creative process?

Alan Poul is an Emmy, Golden Globe, DGA, and Peabody Award-winning producer and director of film and television. He is Executive Producer and Director on the Max Original drama series Tokyo Vice, written by Tony Award-winning playwright J.T. Rogers and starring Ansel Elgort and Ken Watanabe, as an American journalist in Japan and his police detective mentor. Poul is perhaps best known for producing all five seasons of HBO's Six Feet Under, all four of Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City miniseries, My So-Called Life, The Newsroom, Swingtown, and The Eddy, which he developed with director Damien Chazelle. His feature film producing credits include Paul Schrader's Mishima and Light of Day, and Ridley Scott's Black Rain.

“I was fortunate to be able to be out in Hollywood in the 90s and to be able to work early on seminal LGBT-presenting shows like Tales of the City series, and Six Feet Under with Alan Ball. When it comes to Tokyo Vice, I did push hard for there to be a queer storyline because in the late 90s, in Japan, there was a huge thriving gay subculture. But it wasn't on the table to come out because your sexual orientation was considered irrelevant to your obligations to society.”

https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0693561
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2887954/

www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
IG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast

“I was fortunate to be able to be out in Hollywood in the 90s and to be able to work early on seminal LGBT-presenting shows like Tales of the City series, and Six Feet Under with Alan Ball. When it comes to Tokyo Vice, I did push hard for there to be a queer storyline because in the late 90s, in Japan, there was a huge thriving gay subculture. But it wasn't on the table to come out because your sexual orientation was considered irrelevant to your obligations to society.”

Alan Poul is an Emmy, Golden Globe, DGA, and Peabody Award-winning producer and director of film and television. He is Executive Producer and Director on the Max Original drama series Tokyo Vice, written by Tony Award-winning playwright J.T. Rogers and starring Ansel Elgort and Ken Watanabe, as an American journalist in Japan and his police detective mentor. Poul is perhaps best known for producing all five seasons of HBO's Six Feet Under, all four of Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City miniseries, My So-Called Life, The Newsroom, Swingtown, and The Eddy, which he developed with director Damien Chazelle. His feature film producing credits include Paul Schrader's Mishima and Light of Day, and Ridley Scott's Black Rain.

https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0693561
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2887954/

www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
IG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast

What are we willing to give up to find meaning, connection, and a sense of belonging? What happens if we don't self-promote, self-create, and self-brand on social media? Will we find the right partner? Will we get into the right college? Or find the best job?

Tara Isabella Burton is the author of the novels Social Creature, The World Cannot Give, and Here in Avalon, as well as the nonfiction books Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World and Self-Made: Curating Our Image from Da Vinci to the Kardashians. She is currently working on a history of magic and modernity, to be published by Convergent in late 2025. Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in The New York Times, National Geographic,  Granta, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and other publications.

"I think that we always try to find ways of defining ourselves against culture, archetypes, and narratives. And one of the things that interests me most is the process of trying to figure out what story we're in, to try to figure out who we are relative to stories. I don't think we are reducible to archetypes exactly, but I think that constant trying on the different hats, metaphorically speaking, and saying: Am I this? or Am I that? Am I a vamp? Or am I an ingenue? I would say that probably, as a woman, I am very, very aware of it. I think there is actually some kind of self-knowledge that is linked to knowing something true about ourselves."

www.taraisabellaburton.com
www.simonandschuster.com/books/Here-in-Avalon/Tara-Isabella-Burton/9781982170097?fbclid=IwAR30lnvlXMrDJtCq_568jUM3hvzr6yUz_GUUZSkbR2RarreOF6PMcvhabBg

www.amazon.com/dp/B07W56MQLJ/ref=sr_1_fkmr0_1?keywords=strange+rites+tara+isabella+burton&qid=1565365017&s=gateway&sr=8-1-fkmr0

www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
IG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast

How can the arts help us examine and engage with social issues? How do our families shape our views, memories, and experience of the world?

From her role as Dr. Lisa Cuddy on the hit Fox series House, to her starring role as Abby McCarthy in Bravo's first scripted series Girlfriend's Guide to Divorce, Lisa Edelstein's range of roles are as diverse talent. Some of Edelstein's feature credits include Keeping the Faith, What Women Want, Daddy Daycare, As Good as It Gets, and Fathers and Sons. She played a Holocaust survivor and adopted mother in the drama television series Little Bird. The story centres on a First Nations woman who was adopted into a Jewish family during the Sixties Scoop, as she attempts to reconnect with her birth family and heritage.

Lisa’s career began by writing, composing, and performing an original AIDS awareness musical Positive Me at the renowned La Mama Experimental Theater Club in New York City. In the wake of COVID, Lisa began to paint using old family photographs as starting points. Her incredibly detailed paintings capture intimate relationships and spontaneous moments with honesty and compassion.

"I had the first ever lesbian makeout scene on network television on a short-lived show called Relativity. That was another role where I felt really honored to be asked to do that, having been in and around the gay community my whole adult life. In the club scene, it was like all my friends were gay. So I was really happy to represent doing that. When I did my show Positive Me, we were in the middle of a horrible crisis. The AIDS crisis was very real to me and my friends and not real to the people that I knew from New Jersey. They thought it was government hype. They didn't believe in it. And so I couldn't even fathom that. And I had taken a class with Elizabeth Swados about writing satire, and she was very encouraging in terms of what I was doing. And so maybe it was just gumption. I just thought, Okay, then this is what I'm going to do!"

https://lisaedelstein.komi.io/
www.lisaedelsteinpaintings.com/
www.imdb.com/name/nm0249046

www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
IG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast

Photo credit: Mitch Stone
Courtesy of the artist

"I had the first ever lesbian makeout scene on network television on a short-lived show called Relativity. That was another role where I felt really honored to be asked to do that, having been in and around the gay community my whole adult life. In the club scene, it was like all my friends were gay. So I was really happy to represent doing that. When I did my show Positive Me, we were in the middle of a horrible crisis. The AIDS crisis was very real to me and my friends and not real to the people that I knew from New Jersey. They thought it was government hype. They didn't believe in it. And so I couldn't even fathom that. And I had taken a class with Elizabeth Swados about writing satire, and she was very encouraging in terms of what I was doing. And so maybe it was just gumption. I just thought, Okay, then this is what I'm going to do!"

From her role as Dr. Lisa Cuddy on the hit Fox series House M.D, to her starring role as Abby McCarthy in Bravo's first scripted series Girlfriend's Guide to Divorce, Lisa Edelstein's range of roles are as diverse talent. Some of Edelstein's feature credits include Keeping the Faith, What Women Want, Daddy Daycare, As Good as It Gets, and Fathers and Sons. She played a Holocaust survivor and adopted mother in the drama television series Little Bird. The story centres on a First Nations woman who was adopted into a Jewish family during the Sixties Scoop, as she attempts to reconnect with her birth family and heritage.

Lisa’s career began by writing, composing, and performing an original AIDS awareness musical Positive Me at the renowned La Mama Experimental Theater Club in New York City. In the wake of COVID, Lisa began to paint using old family photographs as starting points. Her incredibly detailed paintings capture intimate relationships and spontaneous moments with honesty and compassion.

https://lisaedelstein.komi.io/
www.lisaedelsteinpaintings.com/
www.imdb.com/name/nm0249046

www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
IG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast

Artworks:
“Beach Day”, “Marsha”, “Karen” Courtesy of the Artist

Lisa Edelstein in the Studio
Photo credit: Holland Clement, Courtesy of the artist

How can intimate scenes be brought to the screen in ways that respect the emotional well-being and privacy of the artists themselves? How do we make sure that we can create a story about abuse without anyone being abused in the process?

Ita O’Brien is the UK’s leading Intimacy Coordinator, founder of Intimacy on Set (and author of the Intimacy On Set Guidelines). Her company, set up in 2018 provides services to TV, film, and theatre when dealing with intimacy, and is a SAG-Aftra accredited training provider of Intimacy Practitioners. Intimacy on Set has supported numerous high-profile film and TV productions including Normal People & Conversations With Friends (BBC3/Hulu), Sex Education 1&2 (Netflix), I May Destroy You (BBC/HBO), It’s A Sin (Channel 4), (Neal Street Prods / Searchlight Pictures).

It's a Sin - Telling Stories About the HIV/AIDS crisis:

"That production was really close to my heart because I was a musical theater dancer in the eighties and so that whole storytelling was something that I personally had lived through and really understood. You know, I was that kid at the Pineapple Dance Studios. And gradually, as friends around me sort of began to become unwell, and actually, one of the first people that I knew who died from HIV was my singing teacher at the time, a guy called Chris Edwards. He was the first person that contracted HIV that I knew, and he died within 18 months. So Russell T. Davies. Peter Hoar, the amazing director, and myself were of the generation who had lived through this, but for the young cast it was something that was about history, so that work of really exploring it was important. And also then, there was a cast member for whom the experience of HIV was a lived experience. I worked with two fantastic intimacy practitioners who were both under mentorship at that point in time, Elle McAlpine and David Thackeray."

www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
IG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast

"That production was really close to my heart because I was a musical theater dancer in the eighties and so that whole storytelling was something that I personally had lived through and really understood. You know, I was that kid at the Pineapple Dance Studios. And gradually, as friends around me sort of began to become unwell, and actually, one of the first people that I knew who died from HIV was my singing teacher at the time, a guy called Chris Edwards. He was the first person that contracted HIV that I knew, and he died within 18 months. So Russell T. Davies. Peter Hoar, the amazing director, and myself were of the generation who had lived through this, but for the young cast it was something that was about history, so that work of really exploring it was important. And also then, there was a cast member for whom the experience of HIV was a lived experience.”

Ita O’Brien is the UK’s leading Intimacy Coordinator, founder of Intimacy on Set (and author of the Intimacy On Set Guidelines). Her company, set up in 2018 provides services to TV, film, and theatre when dealing with intimacy, and is a SAG-Aftra accredited training provider of Intimacy Practitioners. Intimacy on Set has supported numerous high-profile film and TV productions including Normal People & Conversations With Friends (BBC3/Hulu), Sex Education 1&2 (Netflix), I May Destroy You (BBC/HBO), It’s A Sin (Channel 4), (Neal Street Prods / Searchlight Pictures).
https://www.itaobrien.com/
https://www.itaobrien.com/intimacy-on-set-guidelines.html
https://www.imdb.com/name/nm1357677/

www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
IG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast

“So for me, it just kind of removing a lot of the shame and then a lot of the energy that I was wasting trying to fit myself into a neurotypical process or framework or way of thinking or being. So, you know, some people call that unmasking, just kind of removing. I was wasting a lot of energy, basically trying to be someone else and function in a different way. And then just beating myself up internally for not being able to do that. And throughout my healing journey, as I really realized, Oh, that's actually what's happening. Like there's not actually anything wrong with me being able to...That's why it's called Love Your Brain. It's not just, you know, tolerate your brain. Or, fine, you can work with this brain that you have. It's like, no, I genuinely love the weird experiences that my brain can give me and the incredibly rich, deep experience I have of the world. Like I experience nature so deeply and so intensely. I have really strong connections with animals. I have really great intuition, which I think is just from picking up all this sensory data and putting it together. All these experiences that I get to have, but I don't get to have those experiences if I'm just trying to make myself be something else, which I think is most people who are late diagnosed, I feel like that's their experience. It's just like I've been trying to be someone else for so long. It's exhausting. And then you don't have the energy then to be creative, the carving out the time, making the time to actually create.”

Mattia Maurée is an interdisciplinary composer whose work centers around themes of perception, body, sensation, trauma, and resilience. Their scores for critically acclaimed films have been played in 13 countries. Their poems have been featured in Boston City Hall as part of the Mayor's Poetry Program, Guerrilla Opera, and Arc Poetry Magazine. Mattia composes and performs on violin, voice, and piano, and has taught music for over 20 years. They have received a Master's of Music in Composition at New England Conservatory and a Bachelor's of Music from St. Olaf College. They also are an AUDHD coach, host the AuDHD Flourishing podcast and help other neurodivergent folks heal and find their creative flow in their course Love Your Brain.

http://mattiamauree.com
https://studio.com/mattia
https://mattiamauree.com/love-your-brain
https://www.audhdflourishing.com/hello

www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
IG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast

How can we learn to flourish because of who we are, not in spite of it? What is the sensory experience of the world for people with autism and ADHD? How can music help heal trauma and foster identity?

Mattia Maurée is an interdisciplinary composer whose work centers around themes of perception, body, sensation, trauma, and resilience. Their scores for critically acclaimed films have been played in 13 countries. Their poems have been featured in Boston City Hall as part of the Mayor's Poetry Program, Guerrilla Opera, and Arc Poetry Magazine. Mattia composes and performs on violin, voice, and piano, and has taught music for over 20 years. They have received a Master's of Music in Composition at New England Conservatory and a Bachelor's of Music from St. Olaf College. They also are an AUDHD coach, host the AuDHD Flourishing podcast and help other neurodivergent folks heal and find their creative flow in their course Love Your Brain.

“So for me, it just kind of removing a lot of the shame and then a lot of the energy that I was wasting trying to fit myself into a neurotypical process or framework or way of thinking or being. So, you know, some people call that unmasking, just kind of removing. I was wasting a lot of energy, basically trying to be someone else and function in a different way. And then just beating myself up internally for not being able to do that. And throughout my healing journey, as I really realized, Oh, that's actually what's happening. Like there's not actually anything wrong with me being able to...That's why it's called Love Your Brain. It's not just, you know, tolerate your brain. Or, fine, you can work with this brain that you have. It's like, no, I genuinely love the weird experiences that my brain can give me and the incredibly rich, deep experience I have of the world. Like I experience nature so deeply and so intensely. I have really strong connections with animals. I have really great intuition, which I think is just from picking up all this sensory data and putting it together. All these experiences that I get to have, but I don't get to have those experiences if I'm just trying to make myself be something else, which I think is most people who are late diagnosed, I feel like that's their experience. It's just like I've been trying to be someone else for so long. It's exhausting. And then you don't have the energy then to be creative, the carving out the time, making the time to actually create.”

http://mattiamauree.com
https://studio.com/mattia
https://mattiamauree.com/love-your-brain
https://www.audhdflourishing.com/hello

www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
IG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast

How can we free ourselves from fear and social barriers to live more fulfilling and meaningful lives? What does it take to overcome trauma and turn it into triumph, and failure into reinvention? How can we shine a light on the marginalized and misunderstood to create social change that transforms the lives of women?

Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy is an Oscar and Emmy award-winning Canadian-Pakistani filmmaker whose work highlights extraordinary women and their stories. She earned her first Academy Award in 2012 for her documentary Saving Face, about the Pakistani women targeted by brutal acid attacks. Today, Obaid-Chinoy is the first female film director to have won two Oscars by the age of 37. In 2023, it was announced that Obaid-Chinoy will direct the next Star Wars film starring Daisy Ridley. Her most recent project, co-directed alongside Trish Dalton, is the new documentary Diane von Fürstenberg: Woman in Charge, about the trailblazing Belgian fashion designer who invented the wrap dress 50 years ago. The film had its world premiere as the opening night selection at the 2024 Tribeca Festival on June 5th and premiered on June 25th on Hulu in the U.S. and Disney+ internationally. A product of Obaid-Chinoy's incredibly talented female filmmaking team, Woman in Charge provides an intimate look into Diane von Fürstenberg’s life and accomplishments and chronicles the trajectory of her signature dress from an innovative fashion statement to a powerful symbol of feminism. Her other notable projects include A Girl in the River: The Price of Forgiveness, Transgenders: Pakistan’s Open Secret, and the television miniseries Ms. Marvel.

“As a filmmaker, I've always made films about extraordinary women whose lives are faced with extenuating circumstances who've had adversity thrown at them and who've risen to the occasion. And when I began to look at Diane's story, for me, Diane is a fashion designer, but she's so much more. Her central ethos is woman before fashion, and we felt it was very important to take that ethos and weave it into the spine of our film, and make it about the woman.
In making this film, every single person who we called whose voice we wanted to include wanted to contribute. They wanted to say something about Diane, because she had left such a mark on their lives. Our producers’ jobs, Tracy and Fabiola, was to juggle those schedules. How do you juggle the schedule of secretary Hillary Clinton with Oprah Winfrey? How do you make sure that Anderson Cooper and Mark Jacobs, you know, in the filming time that we had, that we could put all of these people together? But Diane's friendships run deep with people, and people made sure to make time.

You know, she was a single mother, and I think that young single mothers watching this film will feel for Diane, especially single mothers who are trying to be entrepreneurs, and creating businesses, and trying to find their way into the world to be able to raise a family. To do that as an immigrant in a new country is challenging, and Diane shows you just how challenging it is. In making choices about living her life, in being with her children or expanding her business, there were sacrifices that were made, and those sacrifices are boldly put on the screen for viewers to watch.”

www.hulu.com/movie/diane-von-furstenberg-woman-in-charge-95fb421e-b7b1-4bfc-9bbf-ea666dba0b02
https://www.disneyplus.com/movies/diane-von-furstenberg-woman-in-charge/1jrpX9AhsaJ6
https://socfilms.com

www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
IG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast

“As a filmmaker, I've always made films about extraordinary women whose lives are faced with extenuating circumstances who've had adversity thrown at them and who've risen to the occasion. And when I began to look at Diane's story, for me, Diane is a fashion designer, but she's so much more. Her central ethos is woman before fashion, and we felt it was very important to take that ethos and weave it into the spine of our film, and make it about the woman.
In making this film, every single person who we called whose voice we wanted to include wanted to contribute. They wanted to say something about Diane, because she had left such a mark on their lives. Our producers’ jobs, Tracy and Fabiola, was to juggle those schedules. How do you juggle the schedule of secretary Hillary Clinton with Oprah Winfrey? How do you make sure that Anderson Cooper and Mark Jacobs, you know, in the filming time that we had, that we could put all of these people together? But Diane's friendships run deep with people, and people made sure to make time.

You know, she was a single mother, and I think that young single mothers watching this film will feel for Diane, especially single mothers who are trying to be entrepreneurs, and creating businesses, and trying to find their way into the world to be able to raise a family. To do that as an immigrant in a new country is challenging, and Diane shows you just how challenging it is. In making choices about living her life, in being with her children or expanding her business, there were sacrifices that were made, and those sacrifices are boldly put on the screen for viewers to watch.”

Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy is an Oscar and Emmy award-winning Canadian-Pakistani filmmaker whose work highlights extraordinary women and their stories. She earned her first Academy Award in 2012 for her documentary Saving Face, about the Pakistani women targeted by brutal acid attacks. Today, Obaid-Chinoy is the first female film director to have won two Oscars by the age of 37. In 2023, it was announced that Obaid-Chinoy will direct the next Star Wars film starring Daisy Ridley. Her most recent project, co-directed alongside Trish Dalton, is the new documentary Diane von Fürstenberg: Woman in Charge, about the trailblazing Belgian fashion designer who invented the wrap dress 50 years ago. The film had its world premiere as the opening night selection at the 2024 Tribeca Festival on June 5th and premiered on June 25th on Hulu in the U.S. and Disney+ internationally. A product of Obaid-Chinoy's incredibly talented female filmmaking team, Woman in Charge provides an intimate look into Diane von Fürstenberg’s life and accomplishments and chronicles the trajectory of her signature dress from an innovative fashion statement to a powerful symbol of feminism.

www.hulu.com/movie/diane-von-furstenberg-woman-in-charge-95fb421e-b7b1-4bfc-9bbf-ea666dba0b02
https://www.disneyplus.com/movies/diane-von-furstenberg-woman-in-charge/1jrpX9AhsaJ6
https://socfilms.com

www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
IG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast

Why is it that we find the courage to boldly confront mainstream societal norms and structures, yet are so often unable to treat romantic partners with care and generosity? Why do we lose our principles when we become insecure, disappointed, or jealous? Why do we act our worst in sexual and romantic relationships? And why do we prioritize romantic connection above other types of relationships, like friendship?

Dean Spade is an organizer, speaker, author, and professor at Seattle University's School of Law, where he teaches courses on policing, imprisonment, gender, race, and social movements. He is the author of Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During this Crisis (and the next) and Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics and the Limits of Law. His latest book is Love in a F*cked-Up World: How to Build Relationships, Hook Up, and Raise Hell Together.

“This book has a lot of the wisdom of things that feminists and queers have learned in the community about sexuality, but the book is really for anybody who is political, even those just starting out and beginning to realize that there is something wrong with the systems they live under. I want to be in movements. Our movements are made of relationships. So, if you're just getting into our movements, or if you've been here for years and have been watching the ways we hurt each other and fall apart relationally, this book is about identifying these common patterns.”

Episode Website

www.creativeprocess.info/pod

Instagram:@creativeprocesspodcast

“This book has a lot of the wisdom of things that feminists and queers have learned in the community about sexuality, but the book is really for anybody who is political, even those just starting out and beginning to realize that there is something wrong with the systems they live under. I want to be in movements. Our movements are made of relationships. So, if you're just getting into our movements, or if you've been here for years and have been watching the ways we hurt each other and fall apart relationally, this book is about identifying these common patterns.”

Dean Spade is an organizer, speaker, author, and professor at Seattle University's School of Law, where he teaches courses on policing, imprisonment, gender, race, and social movements. He is the author of Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During this Crisis (and the next) and Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics and the Limits of Law. His latest book is Love in a F*cked-Up World: How to Build Relationships, Hook Up, and Raise Hell Together.

Episode Website

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In this episode of Speaking Out of Place podcast Professor David Palumbo-Liu talks with Maya Schenwar and Kim Wilson on their new book, We Grow the World Together: Parenting Toward Abolition. They talk about what inspired them to commission a wide range of amazing activists, artists, scholars, and organizers to write whatever came to their minds about the topic of parenting and abolition. The result is a rich mosaic of unique insights expressed in diverse forms, but each one touching deeply on the interdependency of living beings and the importance of caregiving in all its forms. It is this commitment that leads us always to imagine an abolitionist future for ourselves, and all children.

Maya Schenwar is Truthout's editor-in-chief, author of Locked Down, Locked Out: Why Prison Doesn’t Work and How We Can Do Better, and co-editor of Who Do You Serve, Who Do you Protect? Police Violence and Resistance in the United States. 

Kim Wilson is an artist, educator, writer, and organizer. She is the co-founder, cohost, and producer of Beyond Prisons, a podcast on incarceration and prison abolition. A social scientist by training, Dr. Wilson has a PhD in Urban Affairs and Public Policy, and her work focuses on examining the interconnected functioning of systems, including poverty, racism, ableism, and heteropatriarchy, within a carceral structure. Her work delves into the extension and expansion of these systems beyond their physical manifestations of cages and fences, to reveal how carcerality is imbued in policy and practice. She explores how these systems synergize to exacerbate the challenges faced by under-resourced communities, revealing a deliberate intention to undermine and further marginalize vulnerable populations.

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