MARGE PIERCY - NYTimes Bestselling Novelist, Poet & Activist

MARGE PIERCY - NYTimes Bestselling Novelist, Poet & Activist

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Novelist, Poet & Activist

People who take care of sick people and AIDS and teachers and garbage collectors and people who work in daycare…all the things that have to happen in society we pay shit for. We pay an enormous amount of money to people who can throw a ball through a hoop. We pay an enormous amount of hedge fund people. All the people who take over corporations go in and destroy get immensely rich while the people who do what we actually need doing, what we must have to survive, the people who grow food, the independent farmers that used to exist…

CARL SAFINA - Ecologist - Founding President of Safina Center - NYTimes Bestselling Author

CARL SAFINA - Ecologist - Founding President of Safina Center - NYTimes Bestselling Author

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Ecologist, Founding President of Safina Center
NYTimes Bestselling Author of Becoming Wild · Song for the Blue Ocean · Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel

So we tend to take living for granted. I think that might be the biggest limitation of human intelligence is to not understand with awe and reverence and love that we live in a miracle that we are part of and that we have the ability to either nurture or destroy. The living world is enormously enriching to human life. I just loved animals. They're always just totally fascinating. They're not here for us. They're just here like we're just here. They are of this world as much as we are of this world. They really have the same claim to life and death and the circle of being.

MIA FUNK - Artist, Writer & Host of The Creative Process reads “Waiting for Dark"

MIA FUNK - Artist, Writer & Host of The Creative Process reads “Waiting for Dark"

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Artist · Interviewer · Creative Educator
Founder of The Creative Process international educational initiative, podcast, and traveling exhibition

Her varied work sees her leading workshops and mentoring students around creativity, critical thinking, environmental ethics, arts and humanities disciplines. Her work appears in public and private collections, including the U.S. Library of Congress, Dublin Writers Museum, Office of Public Works, and other museums and culture centers. She has received awards and honors, including the Prix de Peinture from the Salon d’Automne and exhibited in the Grand Palais. Her paintings of Francis Bacon have won prizes and were exhibited in Paris and Brussels for Bacon’s centenary. As a writer and interviewer, she contributes to various national publications. Funk served on the National Advisory Council of the American Writers Museum and serves on the advisory board of the European Conference for the Humanities.

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MARCIA DeSANCTIS - Author of “A Hard Place to Leave: Stories from a Restless Life"

MARCIA DeSANCTIS - Author of “A Hard Place to Leave: Stories from a Restless Life"

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Journalist, Essayist, Author of A Hard Place to Leave: Stories from a Restless Life
100 Places in France Every Woman Should Go

I started looking over the stories that I had done. I would say the majority of the essays were not really about travel. They were more about aging and marriage and memory and all of those things, but I did find in the travel essays those kernels of things that I wanted to explore - bigger kernels of things that were sort of scratching at me from the inside like a piece of sand in my pocket that was irritating me and that I wanted to explore. What I found was that the theme of coming and going, the theme of arrivals and departures, the theme of entrances and exits, and the theme of home and away seemed to repeat itself. I felt that whenever I was somewhere, there was always a tide home. And when I was home, there was always the urge for going. And so I just weeded out and weeded out and really wanted to keep this theme of home and away.

JILL HEINERTH - Explorer, Presenter, Author of “Into The Planet: My Life as a Cave Diver”

JILL HEINERTH - Explorer, Presenter, Author of “Into The Planet: My Life as a Cave Diver”

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Explorer, Presenter, Author of Into The Planet: My Life as a Cave Diver

She is a veteran of over thirty years of filming, photography, and exploration on projects in submerged caves around the world. She has made TV series, consulted on movies, written several books and is a frequent corporate keynote speaker. Jill is the first Explorer in Residence for the Royal Canadian Geographical Society, recipient of Canada’s prestigious Polar Medal and is a Fellow of the International Scuba Divers Hall of Fame. In recognition of her lifetime achievement, Jill was awarded the Sir Christopher Ondaatje Medal for Exploration from the RCGS and the William Beebe Award from the Explorers Club.

ROBERT PLANT - DICKIE LANDRY - LIL' BAND O' GOLD

ROBERT PLANT - DICKIE LANDRY - LIL' BAND O' GOLD

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I still have problems today. Some people call it stage fright. I don't know what it is, but I'm always right before a concert thinking, Why am I doing this? I should be doing this. I should be doing that. Why am I here? What am I going to do? And I walk up to the microphone, I'm still thinking this, and I start playing. And I'm still thinking, What am I doing here? Why, why, why? All the questions of how I'm going to sustain playing for 45 minutes or an hour, and I'm still playing and playing. And then all of a sudden I go, Well, Mr. Landry, you've got people sitting in the audience. You're getting paid for this. So enjoy yourself. So the next thing I know, the concert is over, and I don't know where I've been.

PHILIP GLASS - DICKIE LANDRY - "EINSTEIN ON THE BEACH"

PHILIP GLASS - DICKIE LANDRY - "EINSTEIN ON THE BEACH"

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Einstein on the Beach, it's a masterpiece. America, in 1976, was to be celebrating its 200th year of existence, and Michel Guy, the French Minister of Culture, came to New York to offer a commission to Philip Glass and Robert Wilson to write an opera. This was the gift that France would give for America's two-hundredth anniversary. That was the first time I met Robert Wilson.

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.

LAURIE ANDERSON - DICKIE LANDRY · "HOME OF THE BRAVE"

LAURIE ANDERSON - DICKIE LANDRY · "HOME OF THE BRAVE"

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I still have problems today. Some people call it stage fright. I don't know what it is, but I'm always right before a concert thinking, Why am I doing this? I should be doing this. I should be doing that. Why am I here? What am I going to do? And I walk up to the microphone, I'm still thinking this, and I start playing. And I'm still thinking, What am I doing here? Why, why, why? All the questions of how I'm going to sustain playing for 45 minutes or an hour, and I'm still playing and playing. And then all of a sudden I go, Well, Mr. Landry, you've got people sitting in the audience. You're getting paid for this. So enjoy yourself. So the next thing I know, the concert is over, and I don't know where I've been.

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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.

MIA FUNK - Artist, Writer & Host of The Creative Process reads “Yes"

MIA FUNK - Artist, Writer & Host of The Creative Process reads “Yes"

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Artist · Interviewer · Creative Educator
Founder of The Creative Process international educational initiative, podcast, and traveling exhibition

Her varied work sees her leading workshops and mentoring students around creativity, critical thinking, environmental ethics, arts and humanities disciplines. Her work appears in public and private collections, including the U.S. Library of Congress, Dublin Writers Museum, Office of Public Works, and other museums and culture centers. She has received awards and honors, including the Prix de Peinture from the Salon d’Automne and exhibited in the Grand Palais. Her paintings of Francis Bacon have won prizes and were exhibited in Paris and Brussels for Bacon’s centenary. As a writer and interviewer, she contributes to various national publications. Funk served on the National Advisory Council of the American Writers Museum and serves on the advisory board of the European Conference for the Humanities.

NEIL GAIMAN - Writer - Producer - Showrunner “The Sandman”, “American Gods”, “Good Omens”, “Coraline”

NEIL GAIMAN - Writer - Producer - Showrunner “The Sandman”, “American Gods”, “Good Omens”, “Coraline”

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Author · Executive Producer · Showrunner
The Sandman American Gods · Good Omens · Coraline

Neil Gaiman is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of more than twenty books, including The Sandman, American Gods, Good Omens, Stardust, Coraline, Norse Mythology, Neverwhere, and The Graveyard Book. He’s adapted many of his books for television and film. Among his numerous literary awards are the Newbery and Carnegie medals, and the Hugo, Nebula, World Fantasy, and Will Eisner awards. He is a Global Goodwill Ambassador for United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). In this episode, Gaiman reads his poems “A Writer’s Prayer” and “These Are Not Our Faces”.