All the Water in the World with Writer & Musician EIREN CAFFALL

All the Water in the World with Writer & Musician EIREN CAFFALL

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We are in a complex and delicately balanced relationship of connection to everything else on the planet. We begin to recognize, write into, and speak into the complex interdependence and interconnection of every gesture that we make on the planet. Most storytelling that I really respond to, whether it's from my own culture or from previous civilizations, acknowledges that we are in this complex relationship where every gesture we make is connected to the lives of every other creature on the planet. The more narratives we allow to be complex in that way and interconnected, the more we begin to change our brain chemistry around how we protect ourselves and everything that is in relation to us. The more that you have that evolving relationship with it, that's dynamic and alive to the moment you're in, and that's not afraid of the feelings of fear, hopelessness, grief, or pain that attend paying close attention to the world as it is evolving around you, the better we are able to be flexible in the relationship we need to form with fixing what we can and holding onto what we have.

Family, Addiction & Overcoming Trauma - LIZ MOORE on Long Bright River starring AMANDA SEYFRIED

Family, Addiction & Overcoming Trauma - LIZ MOORE on Long Bright River starring AMANDA SEYFRIED

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I think income inequality really greatly contributes to the rage that people might feel, even as some Americans won't. What don't recognize that a more communal society might benefit them. What they see instead is, why don't I have what that person has? Something's getting in my way. And it's not a lack of, of community, it's: somebody else is keeping me down, you know? And that's, I think that's a theme that emerges in The God of the Woods.

I think there's a certain thread in American history of, like, individualism at all costs. The Van Laars named their house Self-reliance, which is a testament to the idea that they, I think, falsely believe themselves to have, have created their own power, their own capital, their own wealth, and ignore the fact that it's really the labor of the working class community around them- that, and of the people of Albany who've invested their money in the Van Laars Bank - that that really contributed to the acquisition of this enormous wealth that they now have and this enormous power that they now have.

Art, Performance & the Illusion of Agency - KATIE KITAMURA on her new novel AUDITION

Art, Performance & the Illusion of Agency - KATIE KITAMURA on her new novel AUDITION

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Author of Audition · Intimacies · A Separation

I'm really interested in the formal aspect of characters who are channeling language, who are speaking the words of other people, and in characters who are aware of how little agency they actually have, who have passivity forced upon them, who perhaps even embrace their passivity to a certain extent but eventually seek out where they can enact their agency.

The Art of Fiction with Author, Musician, Satirist T.C. BOYLE

The Art of Fiction with Author, Musician, Satirist T.C. BOYLE

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Novelist · Short Story Writer

What I have done in my career is just try to assess who we are, what we are, why we are here, and how come we, as animals, are able to walk around and wear pants and dresses and talk on the internet, while the other animals are not. It's been my obsession since I was young. I think if I hadn't become a novelist, I might have been happy to be a naturalist or a field biologist.

Language, Music, Memory with Writer, Philosopher PATRICK HEALY

Language, Music, Memory with Writer, Philosopher PATRICK HEALY

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Writer · Philosopher · Independent Scholar

You have all the different languages interplaying with each other. Little scraps of Irish languages and idioms have stories that have been told, but how Ireland actually comes about as an idea, as to where the Irish come from. A lot of these kinds of debates are just placed, you know, in day-to-day conversation, and then they trail off. People start something; they trail off and might come back to it later. That phenomenon of speaking over each other, tales that are known and not known, I always found very interesting. It was literally like a radio that was kept on all day in the kitchen.

You would come in and out, and you would hear certain things, and you'd have to work out the context and the conversation and the speakers. In some way, one of the big personalities in the book is just a radio that’s playing, and some of these conversations are not actually taking place between characters in real-time. They're just snippets that have been overheard on radios.

THREE WOMEN starring Shailene Woodley, DeWanda Wise, Betty Gilpin: Conversation with LAURA EASON

THREE WOMEN starring Shailene Woodley, DeWanda Wise, Betty Gilpin: Conversation with LAURA EASON

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Emmy-nominated Producer, Writer, Playwright

I think the show conveys to the women watching that their lives matter. They don't have to be some gorgeous aspirational person, although Sloane absolutely fits that mold. But for others living in the Midwest, struggling and feeling unseen, hopefully, the mirrors of Lina and Maggie will help them not feel so alone and remind them that their stories are important and matter.

What are we willing to give up to find meaning & a sense of belonging? - TARA ISABELLA BURTON

What are we willing to give up to find meaning & a sense of belonging? - TARA ISABELLA BURTON

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Author of Here in Avalon · Social Creature
Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World 
Self-Made: Curating Our Image from Da Vinci to the Kardashians
So this idea that we can present ourselves as works of art, that we can create ourselves has always had a particular sort of aristocratic coding, historically associated with monarchs, who create their public image and their public persona, including through fashion. Today, if we don't self-promote, self-create, and self-brand, will we find the right partner? Get into the right college? Even secure the best job?

SHEHAN KARUNATILAKA - Booker Prize-winning Author of The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida

SHEHAN KARUNATILAKA - Booker Prize-winning Author of The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida

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Booker Prize-winning Author
The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida
Chinaman: The Legend of Pradeep Mathew

So this was the decision to write in the second person. A lot of people ask me: why? There are not many examples of this technique. The reason I opted for that is I was trying to figure out interviewing a ghost. And one of the challenges was: what does a disembodied voice sound like? The narrator's body has been chopped up and chucked in a lake. So, I figured that if anything survives the death of your body, it's perhaps the voice in your head. The voice in my head is in the second person. I don't know about your head or anyone else's head, but in mine, it's the second person. 

TOM LIN - Author of The Thousand Crimes of Ming Tsu - Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction 2022

TOM LIN - Author of The Thousand Crimes of Ming Tsu - Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction 2022

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Author of The Thousand Crimes of Ming Tsu
Winner of the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction 2022

When I was growing up, it was all about representation. I think that was the thing that was being championed: we need more people of color in books, movies, across all media. And then I think what we saw was an extremely cynical and capitalistic-minded ruthless optimization of that, where someone said: Oh, you want representation? Then we'll just throw in token people of color into projects. And then we'll check that box. And I think that became so prevalent in so many pieces of media that that became what we thought of as representation. I think it's a salvageable concept because, I mean, when I encountered books growing up, they were all with white people in them. Front to back, start to finish. It was just white characters. And so when I started writing stories of my own in school as a middle schooler they - surprise - they had white people in them, right? There were just white people talking about other white people. I went to public school in Queens. I knew very few white people. And so I think what representation does at its best is that it informs the boundaries of possibility. By seeing yourself represented in media, you become able to imagine your own stories transpiring in media and being made available for everybody else to witness.

And so I think the point of representation is not just if we do a checklist of this piece of media, can we find a person of color. But I think the idea of representation is more that we want to be expanding the realm of storytelling, expanding what's possible by telling these stories that are not normally told.

NICHOLAS ROYLE - Author, Editor, Educator reads “Mother: A Memoir”

NICHOLAS ROYLE - Author, Editor, Educator reads “Mother: A Memoir”

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Co-author of An Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory
Author of Mother: A Memoir · Managing Editor of Oxford Literary Review

My mother died years ago. What has induced me to write about her after all this time remains mysterious to me. It is connected to the climate crisis. As the natural historian David Attenborough says: 'the collapse of our civilizations and the extinction of much of the natural world is on the horizon.' In ways I cannot pretend to fathom I have found that writing about my mother is bound up with writing about Mother Nature and Mother Earth. And no doubt it has to do also with my own aging and the buried life of mourning. The strange timetables of realization and loss. A memoir is 'a written record of a person's knowledge of events or of a person's own experiences'. 'A record of events written by a person having intimate knowledge of them and based on personal observation.' So the dictionaries tell us. But this memoir of my mother makes no attempt at a comprehensive record.

JERICHO BROWN - Pulitzer Prize-Winning Poet, Author of "The Tradition", "The New Testament"

JERICHO BROWN - Pulitzer Prize-Winning Poet, Author of "The Tradition", "The New Testament"

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Pulitzer Prize-winning Poet
Author of The Tradition & The New Testament

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.

E.J. KOH - Award-Winning Memoirist & Poet - “The Magical Language of Others”, “A Lesser Love”

E.J. KOH - Award-Winning Memoirist & Poet - “The Magical Language of Others”, “A Lesser Love”

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Award-winning Memoirist & Poet
The Magical Language of Others · A Lesser Love

I had delayed speech, and I had quite a bit of trouble with speaking. I think I must have been five before I was uttering some of my first words and trying to articulate. Simple communication was very difficult for me and my family, especially in a family where we were speaking several languages. They hoped to instill English. It’s the language of survival. There was a lot of frustration and fear in my relationship to language, and the relationship these languages had to each other, that was something I felt very sensitive to since I was young. Since before I could speak.

ANTHONY JOSEPH - T.S. Eliot Award-winning Poet, Novelist & Musician, Lead vocalist of The Spasm Band

ANTHONY JOSEPH - T.S. Eliot Award-winning Poet, Novelist & Musician, Lead vocalist of The Spasm Band

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T.S. Eliot Award-winning Poet, Novelist & Musician, Lead vocalist of The Spasm Band
Author of Sonnets for Albert

The life of Caribbean people is not really documented. So this idea of Caribbean life being fragmented is something that I've had in my mind for a long time. So when I came to write this collection for my father, I realized that it was the same process and what I had were fragments, especially with him, because he wasn't around in a physical sense all the time. So all I had were little photographs, scattered memories, and remembrances. They're little parts of his life and parts of my experience with him... I never disliked my father. I always loved him and always was fascinated and captivated by him.

ADA LIMÓN - U.S. Poet Laureate - Host of The Slowdown podcast

ADA LIMÓN - U.S. Poet Laureate - Host of The Slowdown podcast

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U.S. Poet Laureate · Host of The Slowdown podcast

This poem was written when I was having a real moment of reckoning, not that I hadn't had it earlier, but where I was doing some deep reading about the climate crisis and really reckoning with myself, with where we were and what was happening, what the truth was. And I felt like it was so easy to slip down into a darkness, into a sort of numbness, and I didn't think that that numbness and darkness could be useful.

MADELEINE WATTS - Author of The Inland Sea - Creative Writing Professor, Columbia University

MADELEINE WATTS - Author of The Inland Sea - Creative Writing Professor, Columbia University

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Author of The Inland Sea
Professor of Creative Writing at Columbia University

I was reading ecological history and also reading about violence against women and how violence perpetuates itself over many generations. And there was something about this European sort of supremacy of ideas about nature, their ideas about rationality, all of this stuff that sort of came from the Enlightenment. John Oxley's diaries made no mention of the Indigenous Australians who were at the time subject to genocide. So I was interested in these ideas about how they tried to tame the land, which is often talked about as "a woman" and the way that the kind of violence that comes from a particular kind of European colonial project that is enacted on the land intertwines with the way that violence is enacted upon women. And it was something that I felt growing up in Australia.

NICHOLAS ROYLE - Co-author of "An Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory" - Author of “Mother: A Memoir”

NICHOLAS ROYLE - Co-author of "An Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory" - Author of “Mother: A Memoir”

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Co-author of An Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory
Author of Mother: A Memoir · Managing Editor of Oxford Literary Review

My mother died years ago. What has induced me to write about her after all this time remains mysterious to me. It is connected to the climate crisis. As the natural historian David Attenborough says: 'the collapse of our civilizations and the extinction of much of the natural world is on the horizon.' In ways I cannot pretend to fathom I have found that writing about my mother is bound up with writing about Mother Nature and Mother Earth. And no doubt it has to do also with my own aging and the buried life of mourning. The strange timetables of realization and loss. A memoir is 'a written record of a person's knowledge of events or of a person's own experiences'. 'A record of events written by a person having intimate knowledge of them and based on personal observation.' So the dictionaries tell us. But this memoir of my mother makes no attempt at a comprehensive record.

Anthony Joseph - Award-winning Writer & Musician - Author of “Sonnets for Albert”

Anthony Joseph - Award-winning Writer & Musician - Author of “Sonnets for Albert”

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Award-winning Poet, Novelist & Musician, Lead vocalist of The Spasm Band
Author of Sonnets for Albert

The life of Caribbean people is not really documented. So this idea of Caribbean life being fragmented is something that I've had in my mind for a long time. So when I came to write this collection for my father, I realized that it was the same process and what I had were fragments, especially with him, because he wasn't around in a physical sense all the time. So all I had were little photographs, scattered memories, and remembrances. They're little parts of his life and parts of my experience with him... I never disliked my father. I always loved him and always was fascinated and captivated by him.

David Farrier - Author of “Footprints: In Search of Future Fossils” - Prof. U of Edinburgh

David Farrier - Author of “Footprints: In Search of Future Fossils” - Prof. U of Edinburgh

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Author of Footprints: In Search of Future Fossils · Anthropocene Poetics
Professor of Literature & the Environment · University of Edinburgh.

Just thinking about how our actions play out over multiple generations who will have to live with the consequences of these decisions. I think we need to stretch our sense of time, and within that stretch our sense of empathy. The philosopher Roman Krznaric talks about that in his book The Good Ancestor, that we need a more elastic sense of empathy that can encompass not just those close to us or living alongside us, but those who have yet to be born will have to inherit the world that we passed down to them. But I think in stretching that sense of empathy and stretching that sense of the times that we touch, if you like, because all of us are engaged in activities that will lead long legacies, long tails, in terms of the fossil fuels we're consuming. And so, alongside that, I think we need to accept that the time we live in is a strange one, and time itself is doing strange things in the anthropocene.

Claudia Forestieri - Brigitte Muñoz-Liebowitz - “Gordita Chronicles”on HBO Max

Claudia Forestieri - Brigitte Muñoz-Liebowitz - “Gordita Chronicles”on HBO Max

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Claudia Forestieri (Creator) & Brigitte Muñoz-Liebowitz (Showrunner)
Gordita Chronicles

When you immigrate, it's kind of like you're going through adolescence because you're in a new place. You feel weird in your own skin. You're learning new things. Everything is changing. You feel awkward. So that also helped us connect the adult stories to the children's stories.

Ellen Rapoport · Creator, Exec. Producer & Showrunner of “Minx” for HBO Max

Ellen Rapoport · Creator, Exec. Producer & Showrunner of “Minx” for HBO Max

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Creator, Executive Producer & Showrunner of Minx
starring Ophelia Lovibond & Jake Johnson

What drew me to the time period of the 70s was the real story of these magazines Playgirl, Viva, Foxy Lady, all the magazines that existed in this period. So it was a natural outgrowth of trying to tell a story that was inspired by, to some extent, real-life events. When I started developing Minx, what struck me about the 70s, in particular, is just how similar it was to our time. It seems like the magazines were covering all the same issues that we're now talking about. Obviously, we all saw with the leaked decision in Roe vs. Wade just how close we are to that time period and how far we haven't come.