GEORGI GOSPODINOV (Author of Time Shelter · Death and the Gardener · The Physics of Sorrow) ANGELA RODEL (Translator · Musician · Exec. Director · Fulbright Bulgaria)

We are in the middle of a labyrinth which suggests to us many fake corridors. What's the superpower of literature? Literature is like an antidote against propaganda. Propaganda explains the world easily in a two-dimensional way.  Literature gives you a more complex explanation. Literature tells personal stories.

Anjet Daanje may have written the Great Novel of Quantum Physics: a love letter spanning centuries, a spellbinding work of art and poetry and imagination that feels like a living organism, 736 pages of slippery, unpredictable particles blinking like dead stars in the darkest of nights.  This novel runs the gamut, from the brambles to the bells, the rain, the buzzing of flies, the clocks, the howling wind and the blackberries. It feels haunted and a little otherworldly. One of the best that I have ever read. 

24th US Poet Laureate ADA LIMÓN
Author of Startlement · Against Breaking: On the Power of Poetry · The Hurting Kind

It’s always very interesting that we have to make a case for art because we don’t have to make a case for fast food. Like, we don’t have to make a case for all of these sort of things in our lives that we do not need, and yet we have to make a case for beauty? We have to make a case for the soul? We have to make a case for humanity? We have to make a case for singing back the wounded world? That to me is fascinating.

In 2020, Chloe Benjamin came across the story of NASA’s Antarctic Impulsive Transient Antenna (ANITA), a cosmic particle detector in Antarctica, that had recently observed a series of unusual radio signals which appeared to be coming from below the horizon, in a manner that could not be explained. 

If we create ourselves with and through language, it seems to me that Gertrude Stein’s project was to dismantle herself and a whole century through language, to uncreate herself as she had been created by her father, by her sneering professor at John Hopkins, by her brother, to undo the manner of the nineteenth century. Get rid of commas. Get rid of question marks. She did not want to be told when to take a breath and when something was a question or who to love or how to dress. Get rid of clichés. Break through the conventions of genre. Stein was going to step out of the frame, away from the life of her mother and aunts, away from the uncomfortable femininities that had been societally constructed to keep her in her place.

AMITAV GHOSH · Author of Ghost-Eye · The Shadow Lines · The Hungry Tide · Sea of Poppies · The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable

Imagining with precision is a very fundamental part of my work. When I sit down to write about anything, whether it be The Hungry Tide in the Sundarbans, or let's say The Shadow Lines, or Ghost-Eye. It's very important for me to get the topography right, to get the outlay of the streets or the house exactly right so I can actually picture all of that in my head. It's very important for me to have a sort of pictorial sense of what I'm seeing and what I'm writing about. Before I can write about it, I need to see it, as it were. So that's absolutely fundamental to my craft. That's just how I go about it. Like the Sufis say—behind the apparent reality is a hidden or ba- reality.

He crossed to the yarn shelves. It was his favorite place in the whole world. ‘Look at all the new colours!’ The shelves were full of hundreds of yarns, all the romantic colours of Scotland: bracken and grouse, gorse and heather, rain and moss, the chafed red of a drunkard’s face, and pure, bilious whitey. Amongst these were punkish hot pinks and acid yellows, violent tones that made people recoil until they saw the finished cloth and saw how skilfully John could mix sour greens with wheats and nightshades until it was a field of spring bluebells.

Epidemiologist · Musician · Author of Our Wild Familiars

So synanthropes are animals that have adapted to human-modified environments, and the Greek translation essentially is together with humans, so synanthrope. And they're a fascinating subset of wild animals that they're all around us, but we don't really notice them. And so in this new book, I was excited about writing something that had to do with the natural world. I was excited about writing something that touched on climate change and the way that the world was changing, but maybe not with such a sort of dirgey approach or funereal approach. Something that actually explored the wonder of the world as it is and as we experience it around our communities in our cities and towns.

I was born near water.
I was born on a farm where many other dogs and other animals were born and cared for and lived. 
I would never learn what the farm was intending to do with me. Maybe nothing at all. Maybe I was supposed to grow old there. 
Or maybe I was always supposed to leave. To go work somewhere else and be with a new family.
But it was home to me. My mother was there. My brothers and my sisters. An early memory: waking up to a den of pale noses surrounding me before our mother came, the silhouette of her face looming over us in the sky, the tall triangles of her ears pocketing the smell of the coast.

Redesigning Our Relationship with Nature

We explore our changing planet, from melting ice in Greenland to the depleted soils in our farmlands. We’re joined by writers, advocates and visionaries to discuss environmental justice and the circular economy. Abrahm Lustgarten, Jon Gertner, Rebecca Tickell, Bill Hare, Rob Nixon, Euan Nisbet, Roland Geyer, William McDonough, Carlo Ratti, Jason deCaires Taylor, Jane Madgwick, Paul Shrivastava, Liza Featherstone, Osprey Orielle Lake, Ron Gonen, Louis de Jaeger, Kathleen Rogers and Yolanda Kakabadse.

Why do we write? Today we explore the practice of writing as an awakening and a bridge to memory. We hear from poets and novelists, musicians, dancers, and science writers. Hala Alyan, Andre Dubus III, Jericho Brown, Ada Limón, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Max Stossel, Sy Montgomery, Tiokasin Ghosthorse, Julian Lennon, Julia Christensen, and Erland Cooper discuss how to hold onto hope in a changing world.

One’s soul cannot escape a dying body if the feathers of pigeons or wild birds fill their bed or pillow. To hold someone back until a loved one arrives, a bag of pigeon feathers is thrust under the dying person. There were also birds of ill omen, like the robin pecking on the window signaling a coming illness. Swallows and owls told of a change in the weather. Charlotte describes, in a poem, other creatures signaling grave news, like the wolf, black bull, or the fantastical goblin hound, “Which will be a certain sign / That one beneath the roof must die / Before the year’s decline.”

TOM CHI · Physicist · Designer · Inventor · Google X Co-founder (Glass, Loon, Waymo) · Founding Partner of At One Ventures · Author of Climate Capital

In the book I spend a bunch of time basically teaching skills and frameworks of thinking. Not to indoctrinate, it's not a framework like an ideology where you need to believe exactly these things. This is a lot more about how does one use their minds effectively to solve problems that have been solved before. I work on things that have to do with investment and climate and the future of the economy and automation. The main things I'm trying to teach in the book are skills around creativity, critical thinking, community compassion and frameworks around how to go and use that on problems that should be relatively portable to a bunch of problems that are meaningful to you.

We explore the internal dialogues of artists and writers to ask what it means to step into someone else's shoes and expand our sense of solidarity through stories. Jim Shepard, Neil Patrick Harris, Katie Kitamura, Laura Eason, Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy, Benoit Delhomme, Etgar Keret, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Adam Moss, John Patrick Shanley and Nicholas Kristof share their stories.

YURI HERRERA on Benito Juarez and Today's Political Crises

Benito Juarez is a really important figure in Mexican culture, politics and history. He is probably the most respected figure in that sense in Mexico, only akin to what Lincoln is in American culture. Juarez was an orphan in the state of Oaxaca who spoke a variant of Zapotec, an indigenous language. He was sent to a seminary and was going to become a priest, but in his own words, he felt repulsed by the way the priests were manipulating the people in Oaxaca.

Author · Activist ·  Stand-Up Comedian AL KENNEDY · Author of Alive in the Merciful Country

The thing that puzzled him was why people don't agree to be fully expressed while they're alive. Why does it only happen in their last moment? Why wouldn't you live being fully expressed? If you have love, eventually you're going to win. It's not that people aren't going to die. It's not terrible things aren't going to happen. But if you stay with that and you stay centered in that, you'll get through and you will not have turned into a monster in order to overcome monsters.”

Ada Limón is a nervy and musical force, all string and woodwind and percussion, whose dealings with emotions and the world are intense and unabashedly direct. I cannot recommend this collection enough. Read her.

A Conversation with Philosopher C. THI NGUYEN · Author of The Score · Games: Agency as Art

To be in the process of making things, to be in the process of talking to people about what things mean… The creative process is actually, I think, the most meaningful part of life, but it's very hard to measure. When we get shoved towards a world that demands easy measurables, it's very hard to optimize away from the creative process and optimize towards things that are more static.

Author SIRI HUSTVEDT Remembers Her Late Husband, PAUL AUSTER

Grief happens because you don't stop loving the person who died. The person doesn't exist in your reality anymore. The everyday is not colored and shaped by this other human being, but you don't stop loving the person. So grief is a particular kind of unrequited love. And probably without that dynamic relationship with this person, I would be someone else. And he would've been someone else. I mean, Paul died before me. But we were, I think, hugely important to the drama of becoming in our own lives.

Something is unwinding. I can’t know how things will go in the time I have left. I can’t predict what will happen. My grief won’t end, but it will keep changing. I imagine myself sitting on Paul’s grave looking at his stone. I imagine the early May bloom as it was when we buried him, the cemetery wide-awake with color, and I think of Joyce’s Bloom, and I remember a wedding in Brooklyn on Bloomsday in June when the thunder sounded and the lightning flashed, and I think of Paul’s Anna Blume pushing her cart in the city that’s falling apart and my own Violet Bloom in What I Loved, dressed in the clothes of her beloved Bill after he dies. ... I held Paul’s face when he was dying, and I talked about the fun we had, all the fun, and he heard me. And, after he died, it hailed.

“You’re reading what?!” echo my literary fiction friends, lighting up my DM’s like fireflies in the summer grass. What can I say. I caved. I dipped my feet in the Zeitgeist.

How much more delicious/genius/alluring could the premise be? A tradwife selling the fantasy of life in Yesteryear (a place and an idea) to her millions of followers, finds herself waking up one day in 1855 and having to contend with how life in said yesteryear actually felt like. Genius indeed. What follows is a thriller/satire/absurdist tale of the highest order, written with fury and acerbic bite, propulsive and unputdownable. Bookish crack cocaine. Halloween candy on overdrive.

Starring CLAIRE DANES & MATTHEW RHYS · A Conversation with Showrunner, Exec. Producer HOWARD GORDON & Exec. Producer Writer DANIEL PEARLE

I think there's also something about an unfettered or uncensored id that is so captivating. We all have that fantasy of doing exactly what we want with no consequences and sort of letting that go. I think when you see an athlete at the peak of their game and living that dream, or when someone has actually done horrible things that you would never allow yourself to do, there is a fascination there.

Booker Prize-winning Novelist PAUL LYNCH
Author of Prophet Song · Beyond the Sea · Red Sky in the Morning

We narrate the story of our lives to ourselves. We narrate it in linear fashion. And I know many writers have played with time in all sorts of amazing ways, but we're storytellers. This is what we do. And if you give the brain a story, a prepackaged story, you're giving a cheesecake. That's what it wants. That's why it loves stories. That's why our society is just built on stories. Politics is nothing but stories. Everything you do in the evenings – we sit down, we're watching Netflix – just stories. We consume them all the time. We are just machines for belief.

A Conversation with Pulitzer Prize-winning Author VIET THANH NGUYEN

What I've discovered as a writer is that fear is a good indicator that there is a truth. To speak the truth in a society is oftentimes an act that requires some courage. Those processes of being an other for me in the United States were obviously very fundamental to shaping who I am as a person and as a writer. It was very difficult to undergo, but to become a writer who could talk about those issues was also a lot of fun. Writing The Sympathizer was a lot of fun, and I hope that the novel was enjoyable and humorous to read as well, despite its very serious politics. When I wrote The Committed, I also had a lot of fun as an outsider to France. In writing the novel itself, The Committed, there was a lot of humor, satire, and these kinds of tools to confront the tragedy of othering. This is very important to me as literary and political devices. I think I could do that in both The Sympathizer and The Committed because I had a lot of distance from the time periods that those novels described. My challenge right now is to try to find my sense of humor in describing what the United States is undergoing and doing to other countries, its own immigrants, and its own people of color, and minorities in the present. That's proving to be a little more challenging at this moment.

with KATIE KITAMURA · 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.

A Conversation with Author · Filmmaker ETGAR KERET
Winner of Cannes Film Festival’s Caméra d’Or · Charles Bronfman Prize & Sapir Prize

When I write my stories, I don't want to solve things in life. I just want to persuade myself that there is a way out. Maybe I am in a cell, maybe I'm trapped. Maybe I won't make it, but if I can imagine a plan for escape, then I'll be less trapped because at least in my mind, there is a way. I think that my parents are survivors. They always talked about this idea of humanity. My parents always said to me, when you look at people, don't look at their political views; that's not important. Look at the way that they look at you. If they see you, if they listen to you, if they can understand your intention, even if it's a failing one, they're your people. And if they can't, it doesn't matter.

I think that when I came with my mother and father, they thought there are people, there are human beings, and there are people who want to be human beings but are still struggling. And you go with humanity; you go with the person who can go against his ideology if his heart tells him something.

DAISY FANCOURT · Author of Art Cure · Director of WHO Collaborating Centre on Arts & Health · Prof. Psychobiology & Epidemiology at UCL

Within society we seem to have separated the arts out, so they’re not so much a part of our daily lives. As I’ve become a mother and I have children now, it’s been really eye-opening to rediscover lots of arts things that I’d stopped doing in my own childhood. But now coming back to them I think probably the most meaningful one for me is one I describe in the book, which is about my younger daughter, Daphne, who was premature and unfortunately got incredibly ill with meningitis and was in intensive care when she was just a few days old.

Emmy-nominated Producer, Writer, Playwright LAURA EASON on THREE WOMEN

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.

Co-writer · Executive Producer · Co-showrunner of HBO’s The Sympathizer
with Hoa Xuande · Robert Downey Jr.

I think it's central to the message of the show and of the book. This idea that there's another side to every question. That's the central quandary. There's this problem with the whole Vietnam War. It's saying, to Americans at least, put yourself on the other side, the Vietnamese side, and then recognize that that side also has two sides and then within that, there are further divisions. And if you do that, I think what it's proposing is that you have to step back. It forces a sort of objectivity and humility, and it asks you to step back and allow the bigger human questions to resonate.

Icelandic Writer & Documentary Filmmaker
On Time and Water · The Casket of Time · LoveStar · Not Ok · The Story of the Blue Planet

A letter to the future
Ok is the first Icelandic glacier to lose its status as a glacier.
In the next 200 years all our glaciers are expected to follow the same path.
This monument is to acknowledge that we know what is happening and what needs to be done.
Only you know if we did it.

If you look at the Himalayas, the frozen glaciers are feeding 1 billion people with milky white water. The real tragedy is if the Himalayan glaciers go the same way as Iceland. In many places in the world, glaciers are very important for agriculture and the basic water supply of people.

24th U.S. Poet Laureate · National Book Critics Circle Award-winning Poet

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.

President of UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network
Director of Center for Sustainable Development, Columbia University

The US signed several statements in 2021 confirming that NATO would enlarge. Russia massed troops on its border and put on the table a draft US-Russia security agreement on December 17th, 2021 based on no NATO enlargement. The Biden administration formally replied that it was not willing to negotiate over that issue in a response in January. Then Russia invaded on February 24th, 2022. Four weeks later, Zelenskyy declared that Ukraine was accepting of neutrality. In other words, the initial Russian invasion brought Ukraine to the negotiating table, and during the second half of March, with the Turkish government being the mediators, Russia and Ukraine hammered out a peace agreement. Incredibly, the United States blocked it because the United States told the Ukrainian government: you fight on.

RICHARD SENNETT Centennial Professor of Sociology · London School of Economics · Fmr. Humanities Professor · NYU
Author of The Performer · The Fall of Public Man · The Culture of the New Capitalism · The Craftsman

We look at creative work as though the very creative process itself is something good. These are tools of expression, and like any tool, you can use them to damage something or to make something. They can be turned to very malign purposes, for instance, in the operas of Wagner. So I wanted to do this set of books, I want to show what is kind of the basic DNA that people use for good or for ill. What are the tools they use, if you like, of expression that they use in the creative process?

w/ Economist RICHARD D. WOLFF
Co-founder of Democracy at Work
Author · Host of Economic Update

The position of the United States in the world, economically and politically, is the weakest it has been in my lifetime. I was born in the middle of the 20th century, so I have watched the rise of the American empire and the success of American capitalism in the second half of the 20th century. However, over the last 20 years, I have watched that turn into its opposite—a decline. The decline is visible everywhere. Unless you live in the United States and consume mainstream media, there is a level of denial that will be recorded historically as one of the great examples, not just of a declining empire, which typically has people who cannot face it and who refuse to see it. You can go to Great Britain today and find quite a few people who think we still have the British Empire, even though everyone who isn't crazy knows that is silly. But we are earlier in the decline phase than the British are; they have had to endure it for a century while we have just had to do it for a couple of decades. It is fresh.

Conversation with DEAN SPADE about 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.

Psychologist
Author of Emotional Intelligence · Optimal · Ecological Intelligence

Emotional intelligence is how you manage yourself and how you handle your relationships. Are you aware of what you're feeling? Can you use that awareness to handle emotions, to be positive, to be sure your upsetting emotions don't overwhelm you? This then helps you to tune into other people's emotions, to be empathic, and to put that all together to manage relationships well. It turns out that's what makes an engineer highly effective. I think it's what makes anyone highly effective. 

Conversation with Showrunner · Creator · Head Writer
DEBORA CAHN

I feel very fortunate that the medium I’m in is television, which is a very long form of storytelling. You're not telling a single story; you're telling a world. You're inviting people into a world and asking them to live there with you and these characters for a period of time. The best I can do is build a world where people grapple with these important questions and try their best. All I can expect from people and from myself is that we're trying to do something larger than ourselves.

A Conversation with Author & Filmmaker JAY PARINI

Poetry is the prince of the literary arts to me. It's at the very top because it's language refined to its apex of memorability. I am interested in poetry as memorability and poetry as something you live by. These are the words you live by. These words stay in your brain and guide your life. That's what I am interested in. My memoir slash autofiction is called Borges and Me, and as you know, it's a story of my time in 1970 when my best friend Billy was drafted for the Vietnam War, and so was I. He went to Vietnam, and I went to Scotland to hide out and do my graduate work. I spent nearly seven years in Scotland, but I certainly spent the next five years definitely in Scotland. I was there before as an undergraduate for a bit, too. During that time, Billy was killed in Vietnam, and I was a nervous wreck. My memoir talks about my depression, my anxieties, and then, through my friend Alastair Reid, I met Borges, the great Argentine writer. We went on a little road trip through the Highlands, and this conversation with Borges really restored me back to myself and what was important in life. I felt that I owed a huge amount to that contact with Borges… I was lucky that suddenly, out of nowhere, came a wonderful director-producer named Mark Turtletaub. He had read my book and loved it, and he approached me. We had a conversation, and he said, "Look, I want to make this movie." So off we went.

A Conversation with JEFFREY ROSEN
President & CEO of the National Constitution Center
Author of The Pursuit of Happiness: How Classical Writers on Virtue Inspired the Lives of the Founders and Defined America

That idea of planting seeds for future generations came from the Tusculan Disputations. There’s something especially empowering about Cicero. And it's very striking that Thomas Jefferson and John Adams and so many in the Founding Era viewed this manual about overcoming grief as the definition for achieving happiness. And I think it's because it's a philosophy of self-mastery, self-improvement, and self-empowerment.

A Conversation with MEGAN ABBOTT
Author of Beware the Woman · You Will Know Me · Give Me Your Hand · The Turnout · Co-creator of Netflix’s Dare Me

I always say to young writers, you need to put your heart on the page. Don't worry about being like anyone else. I would say that foremost, in any of the arts, it is self-expression at its core… I think that it all goes back to childhood. I’ve always really been writing about family. I suppose we always are. I do think that it is the original wound, and it's where we are kind of wired and built from those early years. So I think every other relationship just replicates that. It's very natural for me to go there, I suppose because the feelings are most intense there. We just keep recycling these relationships and dynamics over and over again—until maybe someday we can catch ourselves and try to break the bad patterns. It feels the most visceral and real to me, always. You're always looking for that in writing. You want everything to be at this peak intensity, or at least I do. That seems the most natural place to start.

A Conversation with Author IRVIN WEATHERSBY JR.

One of the biggest symbols of America is Mount Rushmore. This monument, right? But I think most people fail to realize where it's located and why it's located there. Even more importantly, who did it? It's on a sacred Native American mountain, a place that was central to their creation stories. But then you think about who did it, and it was a Klansman. The guy who sculpted Mount Rushmore was a Klansman. People were like, "Wait, really?" Like, how is that a thing? But it seeps into our understanding and our embrace of white supremacy. This whole notion of us using Mount Rushmore as a metric of excellence is really sad. We are honoring slave owners and people who viciously killed natives, and those who pillage other lands in the name of capitalism. That's what America is, I guess.

I think there's such a disinterest in education in America that it is sickening. We can't even agree on facts. It's up to states' rights to decide. Really? States can say that this is true in one state, but it's not true in another? Although these states are united, it's very bizarre. I'm hopeful for revolution. I'm optimistic. I want radical change. I think we are repeating history. We are going through a cycle of fascism and greed, and I think we're going to see a lot of states collapse. As a result of that, I think people are going to be forced back to their primal needs and concerns, but I think they're going to be forced to think about what makes us human. How do we become more human? Because we've lost that. We've given it up to technology. How can we figure out what makes us a really powerful species again?

Novelist · Poet · Psychologist HALA ALYAN
Author of I’ll Tell You When I’m Home: A Memoir

I want to live a life of consequence, and I want to live a life that has stakes in it because that means that things matter to you. I think, in some ways, this memoir was a project of sifting through and excavating the darkest hours, both for me and for the lineage and ancestry that I came from. I think the darkest hours were experienced by so many people I come from who have had to leave places they didn't want to leave. I live in exile and have been forced to leave behind houses, land, cities, and people. Oftentimes, this has happened more than once in a lifetime, so they have carried that trauma. Of course, it plays out intergenerationally in many different ways.

I think it's a time of fear. I don't think I'm alone in that. I am scared for people that I love. I am scared for people who are quite vulnerable. I worry for my students. I am concerned for the places that I feel are engaging in complicity because that will be such a heavy legacy to endure later on, how people, places, and entities comport themselves in moments like this. They will be remembered. There will always be people who remember it.

Author LIZ MOORE on Long Bright River starring AMANDA SEYFRIED

I've lived in Philadelphia for about 16 years.  The book itself was inspired by my time spent in the Kensington neighborhood of Philadelphia interviewing a lot of the people that I met there, both longtime residents of the neighborhood and also people who were transient,  a lot of people struggling with addiction and a lot of women doing sex work to fund their  physical addiction to opioids. You find out about their past,  their road into addiction, their aspirations, their fears.  I began to lead free writing workshops at an organization named St. Francis Inn, which is a longstanding food service organization in the community. They had a women's day shelter where I taught.  I was really able to connect with people within the community on a quite personal level and loved my experiences in Kensington. And I still go, I'm still quite close with a number of the community workers, people who run free healthcare clinics. All of it ultimately informed the writing of Long Bright River.

ADAM MOSS
Author · Artist · Fmr. Editor of New York magazine · The New York Times Magazine

 I was very interested in the state of mind of an artist as he or she goes about making. I think one of the things that artists have is not just an interest in their own subconscious, but also an ability to find ways, tricks, and hacks to access their subconscious. Over time, they understand how to make productive use of what they find there. We all have subconsciousness; we all dream and daydream. We all have disassociated thoughts that float through our head, but we don't generally know what to do with them. One of the traits that successful artists seem to have is this ability to cross borders into recesses of their own minds.

& How Can it Serve Society?
A Conversation with JAMES FISHKIN · Director of the Deliberative Democracy Lab

Deliberative democracy is itself, when properly done, a kind of democracy that can speak to the interests of a community. And we need that all over the world. The three ills of democracy that I propose to address with this method, which we've perfected over the last several decades. Democracy is supposed to make some connection with the "will of the people." But how can we estimate the will of the people when everyone is trying to manipulate it?

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.

with PAUL HAWKEN
Environmentalist · Entrepreneur
Founder of Project Regeneration & Project Drawdown

We have 1.2 trillion carbon molecules in every cell. We have around 30 trillion cells, and that’s us. So carbon is really a flow that animates everything we love, enjoy, eat, and all plant life, all sea life—everything that's alive on this planet—is animated by the flow of carbon. We want to see the situation we're in as that, as a flow. Where are the flows coming from, and why are we interfering with them? Why are we crushing them? Why are we killing them? For sure. But also, we need to see the wonder, the awe, the astonishment of life itself and to have that sensibility as the overriding narrative of how we act in the world, how we live, and how we talk to each other. Unless we change the conversation about climate into something that's a conversation about more life—better conditions for people in terms of social justice, restoring so much of what we've lost—then we won’t get anywhere.

Pulitzer Prize-winning Journalist · NYTimes Op-Ed Columnist
Author of Chasing Hope, A Reporter's Life · Coauthor of Half the Sky · Tightrope · A Path Appears

I'm trying to get people to care about a crisis in ways that may bring solutions to it. And that's also how I deal with the terror and the fear to find a sense of purpose in what I do. It's incredibly heartbreaking to see some of the things and hear some of the stories, but at the end of the day, it feels like–inconsistently here and there–you can shine a light on problems, and by shining that light, you actually make a difference.

A Conversation with Author JAMES STURZ

Underjungle is a tale of love, loss, family, and war—set entirely underwater. Sometimes I’ll joke it’s War and Peace, but 3,000 feet deeper. And shorter. And maybe a little funnier, too. But it’s also about our deep connection to the ocean. I wrote most of it in Hawaii during the pandemic, researching it off the coast. I knew that to write it I needed to say what it was like to be underwater. Not just to dive down, but to live there and be there, and for everything you know, whether it’s food, minerals, oxygen, ideas, or mates to come to you in the currents, through this thick and intensely rich medium that covers 70 percent of the planet. So I’d go to the coast to scuba dive or free dive. Not to chase after fish, but simply to sink and to take this different world in—one I was particularly happy to spend time in, not just because I love the water, but because so much of the rest of the world was closed off, and I feel free when I’m submerged it. And then I’d come home and try to figure out what everything I saw and felt meant, because I intended the book as a love song.

A Conversation with Poet MAJA LUKIC

I was born in Croatia, in the former Yugoslavia. We left that country when the civil war broke out, and I grew up in Canada, mostly, with a lot of subsequent moves from place to place. So very early in childhood, I was confronted with complex feelings I couldn’t describe yet, and I felt a deep inchoate sense of loss. I was coming from a country that no longer existed and speaking a language that, politically, no longer existed. It made me more solitary—I had a rich inner life and retreated to my imagination as a safe place, which is fantastic training ground for a writer’s life. At the same time, living in the immigrant community in Canada and meeting kids from other cultures and other languages, I understood something about the universality of human experience. Yes, it was painful to leave home because of a war, but others abandoned their homes, too.

VIET THANH NGUYEN, ADA LIMÓN, JAY PARINI, JERICHO BROWN & ADAM MOSS Share Their Stories

How do writers develop their voice? How are writing and the arts paths back to the self, showing us what is important in life?

Katie Kitamura, Paul Lynch, Daniel Pearle, Hala Alyan, T.C. Boyle, Adam Alter, Shehan Karunatilaka, Daniel Handler a.k.a Lemony Snicket, and Ada Limón share their stories

How can we use negative spaces in fiction to engage with readers’ imaginations? How are memory and trauma passed onto us through language? How do we become more than the stories we tell ourselves?

Conversation with SVEN NYHOLM, Prof. of Ethics of AI, LMU Munich · Lead Investigator, AI Ethics, Munich Center for Machine Learning · Author of Humans and Robots · The Ethics of Artificial Intelligence

 I think we're betting on AI as something that can help to solve a lot of problems for us. It's the future, we think, whether it's producing text or art, or doing medical research or planning our lives for us, etc., the bet is that AI is going to be great, that it's going to get us everything we want and make everything better. But at the same time, we're gambling, at the extreme end, with the future of humanity  , hoping for the best and hoping that this, what I'm calling the AI wager, is going to work out to our advantage, but we'll see.

Author of People’s Power, Extreme Cities, Extinction
Professor of Postcolonial Studies at City University of New York

The political struggle is really hard today and I feel like we haven't been winning, but I think it's important not to think of this as either we win it, or there's catastrophe and that's the end. We win or lose, and there’s this big tidal wave that kills us all. That's not the way the climate crisis is going to play out. It’s going to be a long, slow, attritional crisis punctuated by forms of natural disaster that will decimate populations, but it's also going to be something that people will be impacted by for generations and that people will continue to mobilize around, so I think it's important to keep that in mind.

Author of Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor
Professor Environmental Humanities at Princeton

There are some recurrent threads in indigenous cultures across the world. One of those is–We don’t own the land. The land owns us. It’s not seen as property first. It’s seen as inalienable in that sense because you don’t own it in the first place. What we’re seeing now is a kind of movement where more and more indigenous people are living kind of amphibious lives. On the one hand, they have their indigenous cosmologies. And the other hand, in order to increase the likelihood that they can keep out big corporations, mining, logging, and so forth, their presence on the land needs to be bureaucratically recognized is to have recognition that “this is your property.” So in one sense many of these communities I find are both inside and outside private property regimes.

Lead Author  of the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report · Author of Humanity’s Moment: A Climate Scientist’s Case for Hope · Sunburnt Country · Contributor to The Climate Book, ed. Greta Thunberg · Not Too Late, eds. Rebecca Solnit, Thelma Young Lutunatabua

We're really starting to witness serious climate extremes that can no longer be ignored. And the IPCC, one of our key conclusions to that report was that effectively the human fingerprint on the climate system is now undeniable. It is now an established fact that we have warmed every single continent, every ocean basin on the planet. And again, that's a pretty serious thing to contemplate that human activity from the burning of fossil fuels and the clearing of land has led to this energy imbalance in the earth system, which is leading to a rapidly shifting climate.

APA Award-winning Author of The Art of Insubordination: How to Dissent and Defy Effectively
Curious? · The Upside of Your Dark Side
Leading Authority on Well-being, Curiosity, Courage & Resilience

We're really talking about principled rebels. And when we talk about insubordination, we're talking about most of us live in these social hierarchies, and there's the idea, this started in the military and still goes on, where if someone at a lower rank questions or challenges a command or a norm that someone of a higher rank, that's considered an act of insubordination. And one of the main problems of that, I think anyone who's listening can acknowledge, is it depends on the quality of the idea of the person who's raising the question. I just realized there was this whole body of literature on minority influence that no one had put together into a book for the general public, and considering the racial reckoning that occurred during COVID-19, the extra attention to diversity, to disadvantaged groups, every moment of society, it just feels like it's more and more relevant of what I've been working on.

Professor of Forest Ecology
Author of Finding the Mother Tree

Think of yourself as a tree. You’ve got neighbours that you live beside for hundreds if not thousands of years, and none of you can move around, so you just have to communicate in other ways. And so trees have evolved to have these ways of communicating with each other, and they’re sophisticated, they’re nuanced. They include things like transmitting information through these root networks that link them together. They transmit information to each other through the air, so they perceive each other, they communicate and then they respond to each other. And that language is complex.

President of UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network
Director of Center for Sustainable Development, Columbia University

If we’re badly educated, we’re not going to make it on this planet. If I had to put my finger on one Sustainable Development Goal above all else, it is let’s empower young people so that they know the future. They know the world that they’re going to be leading soon. They can do something about it…If you’re in elementary school up to university, you should be learning–What is climate change? What is biodiversity? What can we do about it? And this kind of learning is not only book learning, but is also experiential learning.

Writer · Filmmaker 1947-2024

What happens is a space is created. And maybe it’s the only space of its kind in the world in which two absolute strangers can meet each other on terms of absolute intimacy. I think this is what is at the heart of the experience and why once you become a reader that you want to repeat that experience, that very deep total communication with that invisible stranger who has written the book that you’re holding in your hands. And that’s why I think, in spite of everything, novels are not going to stop being written, no matter what the circumstances. We need stories. We’re all human beings, and it’s stories from the moment we’re able to talk.

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.

Biologist & Bestselling Author of Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds,
Change Our Minds, and Shape Our Futures, Winner of the Wainwright Prize 2021

Humans have been partnering with fungi for an unknowably long time, no doubt for longer than we’ve been humans. Whether as foods, eating mushrooms, as medicines, dosing ourselves with moulds and other mushrooms that might help, parasites or others helpers with infection, mushrooms as tinder or ways to carry a spark, this very important thing that humans needed to do for a very long time, and as agents of fermentation, as in yeasts creating alcohol. So humans have partnered with fungi to solve all sorts of problems and so fungi have found themselves enveloped within human societies and cultures for a long time.

Founder of Fondasyon Felicitee
Afrodescendant Ourstorian, Educator, Writer & Humanitarian

It’s true. In Haiti, to a large degree more women were involved in the Revolution, in the war, in the fighting for the nation for the very simple reason that women had more opportunities. After a certain time, we became invisible. Once you’re in your 60’s, you are missing a few front teeth, in fact, some of the women used to take a stone and break up their front teeth so that they wouldn’t be noticed anymore. “That’s just an old lady with no front teeth. Okay, she goes about her business, nobody looks at her. She can do nothing.” And those were the fighters–the greatest fighters of our revolution.

Founder & Executive Director of the Women's Earth & Climate Action Network International
Author of Uprisings for the Earth: Reconnecting Culture with Nature & Artist

There’s a wide range of reasons that we really need to understand the root causes of a lot of our social ills and environmental ills. I think we need to continue to come back to this question of how we heal this imposed divide between the natural world and human social constructs. And that healing is key to how we’re going to really unwind the perilous moment that we face right now. How do we reconnect with the natural world? Not just intellectually, but in a very embodied way.

How We Can Fight Poverty & Climate Chaos
with Environmental Journalist & Author AUDREA LIM

When I first started writing this book, it really foregrounded the problems within our land ownership system, which treats land as a commodity. The way we talk about land and issues like racial and food justice reflects this. We tend to focus on the problems, attaching big concepts to them, such as racial justice or environmental justice. I realized that my job primarily consists of going around and talking to activists and community groups about their work. I’m interested not just in the very big problems we face as a society, economy, and political system, but also in how people are trying to think through solutions or approaches to those problems.

with KAREN G. LLOYD · Author of Intraterrestrials · Wrigley Chair in Environmental Studies · Professor of Earth Sciences · University of Southern California

It's really changed my view of what life is. So many of the things that we attribute to the trappings of life look like requirements, like oxygen and sunlight. All the things that humans would absolutely die without — they’re not really necessary for life. Studying these things sort of breaks down what is necessary; what are the things that life has to have?

with TAO LEIGH GOFFE · Author of Dark Laboratory: On Columbus, the Caribbean, and the Origins of the Climate Crisis

We manage to create a poetics out of that which wishes to destroy us and the planet. How else will we be able to live in ‘the after’? We must reassess what a problem is.  Living is not a problem, as Audrey Lorde reminds us. I would add that dying is not a problem either. Decomposing is essential to the natural order and cycle of life. Living at the expense of others is a problem.

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.

Showrunner · Writer · Creator
The Rookie · The Recruit

There used to be a time when leading men were okay with falling down as a character. Harrison Ford in Indiana Jones is a prime example of that. Even going back to the fifties, they understood that failure and falling down, but getting back up, is an endearing quality. It's a universal human quality. We have gotten to a point in the last 10 or 15 years, or maybe longer, where leading men often want to win every fight. It’s in their contract: "I have to win every fight" or "I can't fail" or "I can't fall down." It's just such a mistake because the audience roots for you more if they see you fail and then get back up again. Noah is totally comfortable playing that character who's just trying to figure it out on the fly. Sometimes, he gets it wrong, but he's never going to give up. You can really feel that coming off the screen.

Writer, Director SOPHIE BROOKS on her new film OH, HI!

In reality, we're all complex people with feelings and our own sets of baggage. I do think we are very good at self-sabotage, all of us. It's a very easy road to go down. It's safe because it's comfortable, and we know it. When you can find the ways you self-sabotage and try to stop that, it will hopefully lead to a happier life and things that are meaningful. When I was in my late twenties, I got out of a serious relationship and kind of reentered the dating scene. I was shocked by the simplification of a lot of complicated feelings around dating and how women are so easily labeled crazy, and men are so easily labeled assholes.

A Conversation with Primatologist CHRISTINE WEBB

There are many ways in which I think human exceptionalism has seeped into the sciences, but one of the many ways is through the methodologies we use when we compare the intelligence of humans and other species. In particular, in my field, I’m a primatologist by training, comparing the cognitive abilities of humans with the abilities of our closest living relatives, the great apes. Many times, those studies compare the intelligence of captive chimpanzees who are living in highly restricted, manmade environments. Often, these chimpanzees have been separated from their biological mothers at birth. They're often separated from the group during testing. They're subjected to very human-centric experimental paradigms, like playing with plastic puzzle boxes or computer touchscreens, and we're measuring how they perform on these tasks.

Academy Award · Tony · Pulitzer Prize-winning Writer/Director
Doubt starring Meryl Streep, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Amy Adams
Moonstruck · Wild Mountain Thyme · Danny and the Deep Blue Sea · Joe Versus the Volcano

I knew Philip Seymour Hoffman for several years. We went on vacation together. He produced a play of mine. Before we did Doubt, we worked in the same theater company together, and he was, you know, very committed to excellence. And so he could become impatient with anybody who was not committed to excellence, and that could make him a volatile person to deal with. Phil cared. He cared a great deal. And he worked really hard. They're very committed. Like with Viola Davis. Viola had done a decent amount of big work before Doubt, but she was not recognized yet. And she was careful. You know, she certainly wasn't throwing weight around. She was, I'm the new kid on the block, and I'm just here to work and be serious and do my job, keep my head down, and get out. And pretty much that's what I was doing too, you know, because I've got Meryl Streep, I've got Philip Hoffman, who I was friends with, but Phil's not an easy guy to be friends with or was not easy to be friends with. He's a very prickly person prone to getting pissed off about things that you might not expect. And then Amy Adams was somebody who, you know, tried to get along with everybody and Phil would say like, 'You just want everybody to like you.' So, you know, you're in the middle of that group, and you just, you don't want to put yourself in a position where you're trying to prove something. You have to let them...they're very, very smart people, and they're going to figure out whatever it is that you're doing. They're going to figure out whether you are in any way trying to handle that. And that's not going to go well. And so I didn't do that.

Biologist · Author
The Science Delusion · The Presence of the Past · Ways to Go Beyond and Why They Work

The idea that the laws of nature are fixed is taken for granted by almost all scientists and within physics, within cosmology, it leads to an enormous realm of speculation, which I think is totally unnecessary. We're assuming the laws of nature are fixed. Most of science assumes this, but is it really so in an evolving universe? Why shouldn't the laws evolve? And if we think about that, then we realize that actually, the whole idea of a law of nature is a metaphor. It's based on human laws. I mean, after all, dogs and cats don't obey laws. And in tribes, they don't even have laws. They have customs. So it's only in civilized societies that you have laws. And then if we think through that metaphor, then actually the laws do change. All artists are influenced by other artists and by things in the collective culture, and I think that morphic resonance as collective memory would say that all of us draw unconsciously as well as consciously on a collective memory and all animals draw on a collective memory of their kind as well. We don't know where it comes from, but there's true creativity involved in evolution, both human and natural.

Award-winning Screenwriters · Exec. Producers · Directors
American Rust · The Looming Tower
Capote · The Outsiders musical

We're all culpable in some way of being both good and bad, being virtuous and also questionable at times in our own lives. And I think when you start answering questions on either side of that too firmly, I think it allows the audience to disconnect from it. And then you just have this sort of a good and bad guy narrative that is oversimplified all too often in our culture. I think viewers will relate to this nature versus nurture versus DNA, raising all the questions of psychological and biological inheritance.

Author of The Activist’s Media Handbook: Lessons From 50 Years as a Progressive Agitator
Founder of Fenton Communications: The Social Change Agency
JStreet · Climate Nexus · The Death Penalty Information Center

It sounds like a cliche, but it really is true that history moves in pendulums and waves. And whatever is happening today is not going to last. It will change. So you have periods of concentrations of wealth and power, and then you have periods of rebellion. And I'm quite sure we're headed for another period of rebellion. You can see it a little bit now in the labor strife in the United States and the strikes. You can certainly see it in the massive demonstrations in France and Israel. Excessive concentrations of power breeds rebellion, and that's just inevitable. And the climate crisis is going to cause a lot of rebellion as people figure this out. And I think it's coming very soon, actually, because as you've noticed, the weather is getting very bad. It's become a non-linear accelerating phenomenon. And people will wake up to that. I just hope they wake up in time.

Award-winning Climate Activist
Author of Spinning Out: Climate Change, Mental Health and Fighting for a Better Future

There's that old saying, “blessed are the cracked for they shall let in the light.” For a lot of people like myself, I think it's true that losing your mind can be a proportionate response to the climate crisis. Those of us with mental health issues are often branded as being in our own world. But paradoxically, being in our own world can actually be a result of being more connected to the outside world rather than less. And in the context of climate change, it may be fairer to describe people who fail to develop psychological symptoms as being in their own separate anthropocentric world, inattentive to the experiences of the billions of other human and nonhuman beings on the planet, unaffected by looming existential catastrophe…

with Neurologist · DR. GUY LESCHZINER
Professor of Neurology & Sleep Medicine · King's College London
Author of Seven Deadly Sins · The Nocturnal Brain · The Man Who Tasted Words

 I'm fascinated by the extremes of the human experience, partly because it is so far removed from our own experience of life. In another way, when you look at people who have neurological disorders or diseases, these are really nature's experiments. They are ways of trying to understand how the brain works for all of us. By extrapolation from looking at these extremes, we can learn about the workings of our own brains. That's very much the case across all the areas of my work, whether it be sleep disorders, neurology, or epilepsy—how we regulate our emotions, how we move, how we experience the world.

A Conversation with Writer ERIN BYRNE

The first book that captivated me at six years old was I See the Sea, in which a girl goes to the beach and finds a world of wonder. After I went to the beach, I yearned to capture on paper the scents of the sea and of the air, the sand between my toes, seagulls’ cries, and the wind lifting my hair. This is the same feeling I have when I write now.

A Conversation with Writer BRIAN ARNOLD

I was born and raised in Denver, CO, and do think of this as an important part of my education and worldview. There is nothing like the American West, and living here taught me to appreciate light, space, and history (especially as encoded in landscapes). This sense of place is an important part of the work I do today.

A Conversation with Poet ROQUE RAQUEL SALAS RIVERA

My parents were political activists during a period known as the "carpeteo," in which the Puerto Rican government actively persecuted, blacklisted, and harassed activists. Information often had to be protected. This has shaped my writing style into one that moves between open, direct language to one that is more obscure and coded.

A Conversation with Writer KATE WISEL

In a news article about his restaurant Rocco’s, my dad lays out the highly specific three-day endeavor of building a gumbo. He talks about waiting for the meat to arrive and unwrapping it like a present. The way the ingredients guided him, the physical feel of chopping vegetables and how that spoke to the needs of the gumbo. So, in terms of influence, my instincts as a writer mirror the process of cooking. And I was raised to witness and revere that process as not just a job but as a spiritual discipline.

A Conversation with Writer ADDIE TSAI

I've always loved reading. My father acted in a Chinese theater group my entire childhood and during the many hours he rehearsed (in a language I wasn't fluent in) I would read books. There was a lot I didn't learn directly from parents or other family members, and so I also reached out to books to help me with what I needed to learn as a child and adolescent. The book that made me want to be a writer was Lois Lowry's first novel, A Summer to Die.

A Conversation with Writer REMICA BINGHAM-RISHER

I also spent countless hours in libraries and historical archives, piecing together the contextual lives and times of women who are often left out of the archive. Much of the work was writing persona poems in the voices of these women, writing formal verse to try to get some emotional distance from things that would leave me spent and broken, having to recount the hardest circumstances of their lives over and over. I was also determined to build in joy whenever we could because their stories are really a triumph.

A Conversation with Writer DIONNE FORD

I was born in Maine, the whitest state in the country, and raised in what abolitionists called the slave state of the North, New Jersey. New Jersey is one of the most diverse states demographically, but it’s also highly segregated. All of these tensions and dichotomies have shaped me and influenced my writing, which is always circling around how a place affects and motivates people's actions and beliefs.

A Conversation with Writer NATHAN DUNNE

We lived in a run-down part of Bangalore with no electricity, TV, or a working toilet. My parents were Protestant missionaries, and God was always present: at the dinner table, rickshaw station, or cheese shop. Each year during the Diwali festival, our family gathered on the roof to watch the fireworks. In the morning, I joined the local children to collect the colorful paper shells.

A Conversation with Writer CHARLES BLACKSTONE

Chicago gave my perspective an urban lens. The politics, the architecture, the culture of empiricism, the privileging of intellect over return on investment, I think it all informed my enduring aesthetic. I feel different about it now that I've been in New York for over a decade. The Midwestern reserve that masks deep interiority doesn't exist here, so the way I perceive people, place, and the quiet complexities of human relationships in my writing is a lot different.

A Conversation with Writer MICHELLE GURULE

I spent all of high school reading whatever memoirs I could find and began dreaming of writing one myself. I journaled religiously and often shaped my own experiences into little stories. That journaling habit was a huge gift to my writing—it trained me to capture dialogue. If my mom said something funny, I’d jot it down. That impulse to document became second nature.

A Conversation with Poet MICHAEL BAZZETT

I didn’t know that people growing up among the cornfields of southern Minnesota could end up as poets. But I did know my mundane world of asphalt streets, maple trees, and split-level ranch houses was only a thin veneer laid over what used to be the bed of a huge inland sea. I knew the world existed in layers, and that the world we see is not all there is.

A Conversation with Writer CHRIS HOSHNIC

As a child, I was captivated by the polished dreamscapes of television and literature; the nuclear families with their summer camps, road trips, and Rockwellian kitchens. I longed for that kind of stillness and scripted joy. But my reality was one of caretakers and cousins, of being left in the trusted hands of others while my parents worked hard to sustain us. All of this migration, longing, caretaking, has left an imprint on my writing. It’s taught me that home is not always a fixed structure, but a series of returns.

A Conversation with Poet RUFO QUINTAVALLE

Seeing these people leading a life completely different from my own was fascinating to me and left a big mark. A sense I still have that another life is possible - and maybe even preferable.

A Conversation with Poet EDDIE KIM

When I write poetry, it feels like an explosion of sorts, a desperate need to share, explore, or get out a feeling––it's obsessive. When I write prose, I have a bit more room to meander and excavate as I write. I find the process therapeutic. Often, I end up digging up some subconscious memory or realizing the true impact of an experience. I enjoy that process. It's empowering. It feels special, vulnerable and haunting.

A Conversation with Poet LYNNE THOMPSON

I was born and raised in Los Angeles as the adopted daughter of Caribbean immigrants. These circumstances set up a kind of plurality that allowed me to see the City as both an insider and an outsider, as my parents often sought ways to bring and sustain memories of their childhoods in me, and I fought to find my birth history. My writing often embraces these multi-layered ways of being.

A Conversation with Poet CYNTHIA DEWI OKA

I was born, and lived, in Bali, Indonesia for the first decade of my life. On a visceral level, the land that I grew up in, which in many ways exists now only in my memory, is the lifeblood of my body of work. It is the origin of my sense of color, size, time, texture, and scent; it is the source of my fidelity to salt and bitterness; it is where I gained my specific literacy of shadows and distances, of cadences and the ways that myths realize themselves through bodies.

A Conversation with Writer NKOSI NKULULEKO

I don't have something to say every day, but staying idle is not an option. Sitting in silence, amongst the trees, watching a bird is not being idle either. That's also a kind of research before looking up the kind of tree it perched on.

A Conversation with Writer SALLY BAYLEY

One of the key factors of where I came from is that it is a terminus: a railway terminus. I think that the idea of a terminus is very important, the end of the line. So, it’s a place easy to write about in relation to elsewhere because, as a child growing up there, you were always dreaming of leaving and going elsewhere.

A Conversation with Writer D.C. FROST

My father was a football coach, so we moved around: Atascadero, Palmdale, San Luis Obispo, Quartz Hill, Montclair, Upland. The geography and diversity of Southern California and Los Angeles have infused my writing with an appreciation of a vast and ecologically varied landscapes and a vast appreciation of a diverse population of people.

A Conversation with Writer SAHAR DELIJANI

I’m drawn to how concepts such as resistance, the endurance of memory, and inherited trauma are reimagined and explored visually. This gives a new dimension to my own thinking.

A Conversation with Writer EMILY JON TOBIAS

I begin when an image arises from a spontaneous feeling created by sensory input. Often, this happens with a memory, a photo, a song, a scent. The image has an entire universe embedded in it. I see the whole piece. Then, I must write through each layer. I never work in a linear fashion in either time or space. In this way, I can say I am a vertical writer rather than horizontal.

A Conversation with Writer LISA MECHAM

I try not to edit until a draft is done, because the perfectionist in me is always searching for a way to sabotage the vulnerability it takes to write in the first place.

A Conversation with Writer M LIN

The artist’s body, in addition to their mind, forms a relationship with the work, as well as the physical space. Language, by nature, lacks that, or it’s almost the antithesis of body - it takes you out of your own body, out of the physical space you’re in. Nevertheless, it does have the power to evoke a visceral feeling.

A Conversation with Writer KERRY DONOGHUE

Maybe my goal will be grand, like finishing a scene, but I also count submitting, marketing, and posting book-related content on social media. By breaking it down into one attainable achievement, I’ve found that I actually get more done.

A Conversation with Writer YUKTI NARANG

In fact, sometimes it’s not knowing that generates the most compelling stories. The wondersome quality of art. The what-ifs. The buts. And I think readers sense that. They engage differently when they know the story was written by another person, someone who has felt strongly about the moments, even wriggled at some level.

A Conversation with Writer YASMINA DIN MADDEN

I do not outline stories, but do have a quasi-outline for my novel-in-progress. When I write I edit as I go--can't fight nature, I've tried. The beauty of being an edit-as-you-go writer is that when you finish a manuscript, it's pretty polished and doesn't need a ton of revision. The beast is that I write excruciatingly slowly.

A Conversation with Writer YVONNE CONZA

And in uncovering what shimmers beneath the surface, I’m reminded that discovery itself is connection, that even in solitude, we’re part of a shared pulse.

A Conversation with Writer VICTORIA SPIRES

I am drawn to the idea of water as the dominant force that shapes a landscape, and the contrast to the ways it does this, through seeping, sifting, trickling and torrenting. I also think about the fens as a place of great compression, conversely for a place which is so flat and where the sky is such a dominant force. It's almost as if the weight of all that sky cramps you, forces you into yourself.

A Conversation with Poet ELISE POWERS

I think it’s vital that humans remain at the center of the creative process because stories are how we better understand ourselves and each other. They remind us that we are, above all else, alive.

A Conversation with Writer TINA CARTWRIGHT

In terms of the process I usually write the first draft quickly, seek feedback around the third or fourth draft, but this one is only ready for feedback now. It's taken much longer than I anticipated.

A Conversation with Writer VERONICA TUCKER

I balance writing around my full-time work in emergency and addiction medicine and the rhythm of raising three kids, so I have learned to be flexible. Sometimes I write in bursts between shifts or during short pauses in the day. I rarely outline in a traditional way; I tend to discover the work as it unfolds, following an image, phrase, or emotion until it finds its form.

A Conversation with Writer NOAH FALCK

I have too many notebooks. They are filled with sketches of language. Things I see when I'm on the bus, at the park, in the car driving to the store. Some have collages inside them. Some hold the language of other writers.

A Conversation with Writer RAECHEL ANNE JOLIE

Most art I've hung on my own walls have been radical activist printmaker stuff that looks kind of zine-like, but painting is so bold, so certain in a totally different kind of way.

A Conversation with Writer KYUNGHEE KIM

You have to listen to your own creative rhythm and carve out spaces of time where you are able. 

A Conversation with Writer RANDALL J. TYRONE

I will have a song playing on repeat for a few hours and use that background noise to create a mental echo chamber. The song becomes a drumming or bass strumming that allows me to play/stretch myself over instrumentation. I become the varying noise in the room.

A Conversation with Writer SELENA MERCURI

The creative process involved a lot of sitting with uncomfortable emotions—the exhaustion of depression, the confusion of growing up and not understanding your own desires or sexuality, the way people closest to you often hurt you the most. Fundamentally, it's about the difference between surviving your life and actually inhabiting it.

A Conversation with Writer BROOKE SHAFFNER

My years of immigrant justice work in New York City, from which COUNTRY OF UNDER draws, were a way of staying connected to a home I remain deeply grateful for.

A Conversation with Writer CAL HOFFMAN

I have an idea about the other characters and the main event of the novel, yet I work without an outline and I go hour-by-hour, page-by-page. I astonish myself every time I sit down to write. I keep this daily process fresh and spontaneous.

A Conversation with Poet MAYA WILLIAMS

Because I was raised by a Biracial, single mom who was raised to move around as a third culture kid, it makes sense that she raised me in three different states in the South: Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina. It influenced my writing and thinking about the world by making me sit with the identities I hold amidst different settings of migration.

A Conversation with Writer KENNETH MAITLAND

In third grade I got a cassette tape of highlights from Tchaikovsky's 'Nutcracker' and rapturously analyzed the photo inserts: Russian ballrooms at midnight, with parquet floors, velvet draperies, and crystal chandeliers, and I wondered how much marvels could possibly exist. It was like looking at photos taken on a distant planet.

A Conversation with Writer MANTHIPE MOILA

Then, I transcribe and begin manipulating the poem on my laptop until it takes proper shape. This could take a day, a few days or weeks. Finally, I give that draft some space and return to it as a later time, as I am better able to see the poem if I approach things in this manner.

A Conversation with Writer TIAN SANCHEZ-BALLADO

Poetry became the only language where I could stop translating; where queerness, cultural specificity, faith, and illness could coexist without needing permission.
I write from that intersection: between gratitude and interrogation, inheritance and refusal.

A Conversation with Writer CONNOR WATKINS-XU

With many poems centering on the complicated relationship I’ve had with my mom, part of the process has been sharing poems with her. At first it was quite painful and she naturally didn’t enjoy reliving some of the stories, or getting a fuller picture of my perspective on them, or seeing my pain on the page.

A Conversation with Writer MARIA L MECHAM

I grapple with duality, grief and joy. How the world can be burning, but I can find my heartbeat in the Alaskan forest. I believe we must hold all truths. The working title is “Searching for Sky” from a line I wrote “Everywhere I go, I search for the sky.”

A Conversation with Writer GRACE TALUSAN

Sometimes I write something and realize I need to research in order to develop and deepen the writing and sometimes a piece will come from the serendipity of doing research. It’s always engaging and interesting to me to have a project to think about and research, no matter what happens to the piece in the end.

A Conversation with Writer RACHAEL HOLLIDAY

While I read my Bible and tried to behave, I found it impossible to stop searching for answers to questions I had that dogma couldn’t answer. Reading illuminated my world by giving me the opportunity to encounter different ideas and people in spite of my parents efforts to keep me sequestered.

A Conversation with Poet · Composer · Editor · Educator MALIK AMEER CRUMPLER

My creative process always starts with automatic writing or recorded improvisations. I listen back, read over, and then craft those into final projects. By “craft,” I mean revise and find more unique, effective ways of showing details or elaborating stories—building complexity through addition and subtraction. In the case of my current AI collaborations, there’s very little revision. We want to maintain a sense of immediacy and spontaneity. I set time limits for each interaction, prompting the AI until I feel it can begin prompting itself. Then I just conduct the direction of the focal points, encouraging them to go further.

For human collaborations, like my recent project with Bastien Keb, he sent me rough drafts. I wrote poems to them, sometimes recorded improvisations, and then revised my performance to coalesce with the music. If his rough draft didn’t fully express what I imagined, I’d listen to Ravel or Gil Evans & Miles Davis to influence my word choice and delivery. After writing to something like Sketches of Spain or Boléro, I’d return to his drafts and adjust my delivery to sync better with his work. It became a time-traveling process, with all four of those voices—mine, his, Ravel’s, Gil’s—contributing to the generation of words.

A Conversation with Author MATTHEW JAMES JONES

I was the kid who hid in books. Nestled on a window sill, the sun made the red curtain glow pink - no one could find me. Only the yelling would cut through, or my brother's hand would find my ankle for more lessons of the fist. I skipped a grade and discovered loneliness, escaped deeper into stories of dragons and wizards and dragon-wizards. One night, Mom woke me up and pushed a book in my hands. "Read so loud your Dad can hear you," she said. He waited with bloody knuckles in the hall, so my little voice went up. I'm not sure if I fell in love with reading that day, but we needed a shield.

Author CHRISTINA BERKE on Memory and Imagination

It was important to my father that I learned to type. After school, I looked forward to clacking out short stories and reading them aloud, sometimes acting them out. He was always teaching me about the world; an atlas by his bedside, a world map in the kitchen, the news radio on all the time. It gave me an expansive outlook on the world; that writing could be a way to reach far corners. It also planted seeds about time travel and the infinite universe and astrophysics, parallel universes, what happens when a body dies, memory, and time.

A Conversation with Author KAREN POWELL

Fifteen Wild Decembers is a reimagining of the life of Emily Brontë, so my first step was to return to Emily’s one extraordinary novel, WUTHERING HEIGHTS, and to become more familiar with her poetry. The latter was particularly useful when it came to finding Emily’s voice. I also reread the novels written by her sisters, Charlotte and Anne, and then immersed myself in all the work that has been carried over the years by various biographers and historians. When researching any famous person, a lot of the hard work has already been done for you. Still, it’s important to approach that work with a rigorous eye, and in the knowledge that even the most consciously objective history can only ever be one person’s interpretation of events. As a novelist, there also comes a time when your imagination wants to work its way into the intriguing spaces between the facts, seeking the stories as yet untold.

A Conversation with Author CHRISTINA COOKE

I was born on the island of Jamaica. My early upbringing there was foundational to my creative obsessions and narrative imagination. Jamaican characters and language and cultural inflections are ever-present in my work—even if I don’t intend them to, even if they never take center stage. “Jamaican” is the first among the many hyphenations that make up my geopolitical identity. This is intentional. “Jamaican” is the bedrock of all that I am. Historical research and critical inquiry are two key tenets of how I approach writing. I am primarily a writer of realist, literary fiction—a genre that often finds greater resonance and meaning through expansive research. Engaging with historical collections helps me identify all the poignant details that will make the story’s setting and circumstances seem recognizably “real”, whereas critical inquiry helps me in adding nuance to the themes and ideas the story explores. Basically, research is the scaffolding that gives shape to my stories, ensuring forward movement, cohesion, and relevance.

A Conversation with Author KAT TANG

I was born in Hangzhou, China, moved to Sendai, Japan when I was young, and then settled (though I use the word settled lightly because we moved 3 more times) in the Bay Area. The constant moving meant that I had to learn how to navigate different cultures and languages from a young age. Maybe this is why I've never really been interested in taking part in the predominant culture, because to me it has always shifted. The humanities are how we hold a mirror up to ourselves and examine the best and worst that we have to offer. How we sort through all that to create the art worth sharing is fascinating.

A Conversation with Author MICHAEL IDOV

The Collaborators started with the main character, Ari Falk, and with identifying my own wants as a reader. I remember watching some iteration of Jack Ryan when something struck me here’s an iconic character who’s been played by some of the most iconic actors in Hollywood, and I don’t know what his favorite band or movie is. And I thought of this as a challenge. I wanted to create a spy character in his thirties, with relatable millennial interests, perspectives, and a healthy skepticism about what his organization does. I also wanted the book to be exciting but authentic in its settings. Since I myself am not a spy, this meant tapping into my own peripatetic life: my time in Latvia, Portugal, Berlin, Moscow, New York, Thailand. As a result, my first "genre" novel ended up being my most autobiographical.

The Radical Poetics of NOAH DAVID ROBERTS

In the modern political landscape, I think art is the most powerful mechanism. How else to explore living? How else to conceptualize alternatives to the systems that oppress so many? How else to experience other perspectives, some that might possibly be diametric to those of the viewer / reader? I believe, as corny as it sounds, that good art changes minds. Good art evokes a feeling, a relation, a recoil. Poetry, I think, is extremely important right now. I believe fully that the syntax of our day-to-day language perpetuates these systems of oppression. We must break through. Thoughts burst at the seams of our communication tools. It is impossible to relate a true, full queer experience through a poem without breaking some rules to burst from that box a hopeful individual self-created; impossible to relate a queer story with heteronormative language & language structures. I think about this a lot. In a world overcome with fascism, to express queerness through art is to create one's own singular way of expression. This is a revolutionary act. Queerness is hyperpersonal. Poetry is hyperpersonal, as is all writing. It's vulnerable & cannot be taken away from us.

A Conversation with Author OLUFUNKE GRACE BANKOLE

The movement between worlds—Nigeria and the US, Ifa and Christianity, inner longing and cultural constraint—is the dynamic upon which I have based my storytelling in The Edge of Water, and the one with which I have always been familiar. Three weeks after I was born in Maryland, my parents took me to Ibadan, our ancestral home, where I lived for eight years, before returning again to the US. Throughout my childhood, I was Nigerian at home—steeped in traditional Yoruba culture; American and spiritually wandering outside of it. I wanted to be a doctor to make my African mother proud, though somewhere in my core, I was lured by the transformational power of words. Fluidity between clashing desires has been foundational to my work.

A Conversation with Poet · Translator · Editor MIRIAM CALLEJA

I was born and spent 40 years on the island of Malta in the Mediterranean. I grew up bilingual and am now trilingual, speaking Maltese, English, and Italian. Malta is steeped in history, surrounded by the sea - an entity which is beautiful and scary in equal measures. My dreamscapes, even after living in the US for more than 3 years, often involve the sea and underground spaces.

as Deep as the Sea and as Wide as the Sky
A Conversation with Author NANA EKUA BREW-HAMMOND

I was born in Plattsburgh, NY, and raised mostly in Queens, NY, until, at twelve years old, my parents sent me to live and school in Ghana. That changed everything for me. Abruptly, my world expanded--exploded, really. Not in the sense that it was destroyed--though, it kinda was--but it got SO big so fast that I had to become new, and so I did. In Ghana, I lived with my maternal grandmother, a born-again Christian. Our days started with Morning Devotion, and were woven throughout with prayer. Through worship songs, she taught me the Twi and Fante I had willfully eschewed in America, plus Ga, translating lyrics for me line by line. When my great-grandmother came to live with us, I learned the little Ewe I still have now, both of us determined to decode the sounds that came out of our mouths.

A Conversation with Author FABIENNE JOSAPHAT

I was born and raised in Haiti and it has shaped my identity greatly. I write works that seek to challenge the current perceptions of Haiti, but I also explore themes of migration, identity, consciousness, which means everything I write leans toward opening my readers' eyes. I always think of the world in its entirety, so I'm interested in sharing stories that take us deeper into the human experience beyond borders. Growing up in Haiti, I read a lot of Haitian literature, but also European and African writings in addition to American writing. I think this has colored my perspective in ways that are exciting and I want to keep sharing these experiences in my work.

A Conversation with Author CHRISTIAN TERESI

It was generous and talented teachers who introduced me to Robert Frost, Marianne Moore, and William Carlos Williams. It was teachers who made me read Hamlet and King Lear. So, when I consider how Albany, New York influenced my thinking about the world, I think about how important well-funded public schools are to creating an informed populace. I think how K-12 teachers are not paid nearly enough and how they make real sacrifices to do that virtuous work. I wonder why the significant benefits of a quality K-12 public education are not available to everyone in the United States.

A Conversation with Author ALISHA DIETZMAN

I think of myself as Southern-adjacent and Czech-adjacent. I don’t really feel American in the truest sense. In terms of influence, this is a multifaceted question for me, but certainly one I’ve considered; the harder it is to answer the question “where are you from?” the more you tend to consider the subject/self formed in that confusion. I think the loneliness of existing comfortably in neither culture—or uncomfortably in both—has impacted my writing more than closeness, or intimacy with either culture, though I love both deeply. (And maybe its easiest to see them clearly from a slight distance, and this might be true, generally.) I definitely sense an undercurrent of alienation in my writing, but I don’t mind that, and increasingly, I heighten and interrogate this alienation, subtly. The strangeness of being outside isn’t always a bad strangeness.

A Conversation with Poet TIM RICH

A poem may have begun sub-consciously years back, but it can emerge at any time of day. I stop whatever I’m doing and get down as much of that first shape as possible—words, phrases, anything that’s arrived. It’s like stopping mid-walk to photograph a butterfly. A poem often begins for me with a phrase that opens up into an idea, atmosphere, or story. I revisit my rough notes soon after, adding depth and form, shaping lines. Usually, by the next evening, I’ll sit with those lines and push at their structure, trying to figure out what I’m really saying. I’m a better editor than writer, so a draft generally takes off once I start to work and work and work and work it. It’s rare that I do fewer than 50 edits of a poem.

JOAQUÍN ZIHUATANEJO on Language, Lineage & Resistance

My tío Tino, used to tell me when I was a mocoso, “Mi’jo, if you ever make something of yourself, make sure you tell them you were born on the mean streets of East Dallas, because your mom was in the back seat and we were flying up Gaston Ave toward Baylor Hospital and you we’re…happening back there.” A story…and I understand what the word story implies, but I love that story. So much. I’m from East Dallas. I’m from the streets of my city. My first poems sound like the streets of my city. My early poems sound like el jardín de mi abuelo…my grandfather’s garden. They sound like stories bouncing off the walls of Roy Hernandez’s Barbershop over off Henderson Ave. They sound like laughter in the produce aisle of Jerry’s Super Mercado. When I heard Jonathan GNO White’s poem, “Street Poet,” and the opening line…”I am a street poet / and I write about bad things,” I knew that’s what kind of poet I am…I am a street poet.

A Conversation with Author MICHAEL FARRIS SMITH

I work without a net, discovering as I go. My typical day is go into my studio around nine in the morning and go right to it. When I'm going good on something, I have a goal of 1,000 words a day. Sometimes that comes in a lightning bolt and sometimes it comes in a grind, but when I get there, I stop. No matter if I know what's next. I like to keep the fire lit for the next day. I'll make myself a couple of notes for where to start tomorrow, and that's pretty much it. I'll reread what I wrote the day before (not the entire manuscript) to get the words flowing and then I'll begin. It's a process that has gotten me through eight novels and I can't see a reason to change. There is an impulse to it, a notion of discovery to it. Sometimes it causes some desperation, but that fuels itself into the story (hopefully). I just believe that if I'm feeling that sense of discovery along the way, that the reader will also feel it when the time comes.

Poet SAÚL HERNÁNDEZ ON Lineage, Language & Power

Exploring literature, the arts, and the creative process allows me to connect deeply with others. I believe our stories—no matter how different—carry the potential to resonate across boundaries. For me, storytelling is not just personal; it’s communal. Sharing my experiences is essential, especially because I rarely saw myself reflected in the narratives I encountered growing up. It wasn’t until my undergraduate studies that I finally read stories that spoke to my own identity and upbringing. This absence raises a critical question: if we grow up in a world where only certain stories are told, are we truly being inclusive, or are we simply reinforcing the narratives society has deemed worthy? As both an educator and a writer, I am committed to challenging that imbalance. I work to ensure that all voices—especially those often overlooked—are heard, valued, and given space to thrive.

A Conversation with Author ROB MCLENNAN

Exploring literature, the arts, and the creative process connects me to empathy, experience and deeper human comprehension. It connects me to better thinking. I was born in Ottawa, but raised on a dairy farm in Eastern Ontario. Growing up on a farm provided an example of community thinking everyone helped each other, whether assisting with harvest, plowing driveways in the winter or repairing machinery. Everyone helps each other, and this is how I've always approached literary activity, whether writing, organizing events or publishing, working hard to participate in an ecosystem far more expansive than purely my own, individual work.

A Conversation with Author · Lawyer KRISTIN KOVAL

I had a long-standing desire to write about forgiveness because I’ve had powerful experiences with forgiveness, both being forgiven and forgiving others. I used to think of forgiveness as a gift a wronged person gave to wrongdoer, but I’ve realized that when I’m able to forgive someone, it’s a gift that’s given to me, not from me. There’s an old saying—sometimes attributed to Buddha, sometimes to Nelson Mandela—that holding onto anger or resentment is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die, and I think it’s accurate. Forgiving a wrongdoer, while complicated, can have an incredible and lasting impact on the person doing the forgiving, and I wanted to write about that experience—essentially, the gift the wronged person receives—in a way that might inspire others to re-think forgiveness. I struggled with how to do so until I realized the story of a family in crisis after a fratricide would enable me to highlight how complicated forgiveness can be, yet how rewarding, because a fratricide put the parents in both the hardest and the easiest position possible to forgive.

Author · Poet · Screenwriter ROCHELLE POTKAR

I have a small-town heart that always aspired for the city of Mumbai. This slow small town of the 90's gave me my earliest impressions of people from my large joint family, community, school, and society - many of whom became characters in my stories, in refracted ways as if they were endless reservoirs of humanity. I soaked in this microcosm before attempting to understand macrocosms. Even before I was a storybook reader, I read people like books, curious of where they had come from, where were they going to, why they did what they did, and the difference between their preaching and their practice. Even now in the present, my newly released first novel The D'Costa Family, has the wayward cock-and-bull concoction of those yesteryears and yesterpeople, written in a slapstick style.

A Conversation with Author · Editor · Teach­ing Artist LARA MIMOSA MONTES

Exploring literature, the arts, and the creative process connects me to the elemental experience of creation. My writing tends to blur the boundaries between life and art. It is so easy to feel cynical and hardened. So much of our everyday lived experience is becoming flattened via our reliance on social media and screens. We know these technologies are harming us and not only are they affecting our abilities to think, but to perceive. Art restores our dignity as perceiving-beings.

A Conversation with Author AIDEN HUNT

Exploring literature, the arts, and the creative process connects me to the literary community. As a disabled person, it’s important for me to feel like my life has some purpose to it other than quotidian inanity. The arts and humanities are that purpose for me. After years of being unable to work and being unhappy, I decided to read my way to a literary education, even though I never graduated high school. It isn’t exactly like I imagined as a child, but I’m living my dream of contributing to the artistic landscape with my writing.

A Conversation with Writer SONYA HUBER

I got sick with rheumatoid arthritis in 2009, and then gradually collected impressions and phrases as I tried to figure out how to live with it. After I'd written a few essays that felt very strange, and after it looked like I might be putting a book together, I gave myself the assignment of writing several more essays, each on a different aspect of my life with chronic pain.

A Conversation with Writer LUCY SANTE

My memoir I Heard Her Call My Name required two timelines--one six months in length, the other a lifetime. So I decided to interleave them, and furthermore required the sections to be seven pages in length. That not only solved the engineering problem but created a spur for both writing and reading. I wrote the book in about two months, while also writing four fairly large unrelated essays and promoting my previous book. I was compelled to write, morning, noon, and night, and had to order myself to go to bed when I started flagging. This was because both of the repressed matter I was finally releasing, and the seven-pages constraint. That constraint--interrupted narrative--also acts as a spur to reading; it's a dodge often employed by suspense writers.

A Conversation with Writer LORI JAKIELA

I was born in Roselia Home for Unwed Mothers in Pittsburgh, Pa. in the mid-1960s. The mid-1960s in the U.S. are called the "baby scoop" years. This was a time when unwed women were encouraged/coerced to give their children up for adoption. I was born with a defect--some things wrong with my legs--and so I remained in Roselia for a year until I was adopted. I like to joke I was a bargain-basement case, a blue-light special, a coupon kid. My parents who raised me were lovely, but considered too old to adopt a healthy baby, so in a way they were on sale, too. My mother was a nurse, and so we were a match--me with my bad legs, her with her medical skills and patience. All of this is to say I write about adoption a bit--what it's like to have essential gaps in a life, what it's like to come from a background grounded in loss and then gratitude. That sounds very sad-sacked, I know, but it's not necessarily sad. It's just something I'm interested in exploring in my work. I think that initial, primal experience has lead me to write a lot about family in general, and about how important it has been for me to find my own place in the world. I'm a mother, with two almost-grown children now. I write about them--with their permission and, mostly, blessing. My husband is a writer, too, and so our married life is totally fair game for both of us. Other subjects I'm interested in--friendship, health, genetics, womanhood in all its crazy-quilt forms--probably trace back to my origins, too. As for my thinking about the world, I'm very conscious of how everything is temporary in every way. I often quote E.B. White's Charlotte the Spider: "We're born. We live a while. We die." The terrible truth and humor of that. This is all probably something to unravel in therapy.

A Conversation with Writer MICHAEL JEROME PLUNKETT

I was born and raised on Long Island in a town called Brookville where the ruins of Gold Coast mansions still litter the woods. Others have been repurposed as country clubs, event halls, and schools. I went to middle and high school in one. The ghosts, history–they are everywhere but Long Island (and New York in general) is such a fast-paced place that I think a lot of people miss them. It’s constantly changing and developing. The previous worlds are always on the brink of being torn down and built over. So I think I have this curiosity, maybe even a longing, for these disappearing worlds. I am always interested in what was there before the current thing. What might have happened here. How it might still be affecting us in our here and now. History, in a word. I am always writing about history in some form or another.

A Conversation with Writer LAURA CARNEY

We discovered my dad's bucket list in 2016, 13 years after he was killed by a distracted driver—a teenager making a phone call at a red light. I was 25 when he died, and 38 when my brother uncovered the bucket list. I imagine most people would see that and think, oh, that's nice. Not me. I saw it and immediately decided to finish the 54 undone items for my dad and write a book about it.

I had success with getting articles published about my endeavor early on, and also managed to get an agent, through a connection at the magazine where I worked. He jumped the gun and tried to sell my memoir about completing my dad's bucket list on idea alone—at that point, I was only writing a blog—and was unsuccessful. So I turned my in-the-moment blog posts, a history-laden style with some wit I'd developed while recapping smart TV like Mad Men and Lost, into a blend of present-day travelogue and essay-style creative writing. I found the more whimsical elements of the adventure I was on balanced out the more emotional flashbacks that were surfacing. Ultimately each experience in the book was what helped me grow and heal from the trauma of my dad's death and my depression diagnosis and my dad's secret life—I had labeled myself as a variety of negative things up to that point and unfairly limited what I thought I could feel or do in life. As I learned the list lessons meant for my dad, I became a more confident, stronger version of me...and this comes through in the story, even though I am the one telling it. I think this was why it was a good idea for me to write the book while I was still completing the list. Typically a year has gone by when I was writing each chapter—so enough time to reflect on what that experience meant, but not enough time to forget the minutiae needed to tell detailed story. I kept notes on my iPhone avidly...as I did this, after some time I also started noting revelations I was having and omens/symbols in the world around me. It was almost like my life had become a TV show and I was the star and I was recapping it and analyzing it for myself. That makes it not surprising that the book would be optioned for TV. It already reads like it's a show. 

Most of my research was on the list items my dad wanted to do, and this in itself was healing as in remembering my dad's passions and interests, I began to associate him more with being alive and less with being tragically dead at a young age. I took something senseless and made it into something meaningful.

A Conversation with Writer AHMED NAJI

I was born in Mansura, Egypt, but my childhood was scattered across Kuwait, Libya, and Egypt itself. I began my career as an Arabic writer, working in Cairo for over fifteen years as a journalist and documentary filmmaker. I published several books—both fiction and nonfiction—until 2014, when my novel Using Life was released. That book changed everything: I was accused of “disturbing public morality” and sentenced to two years in prison. I was released in December 2016, and soon after, I was forced into exile. By August 2018, I had arrived in the United States, setting out on a new and uncertain journey.

A Conversation with Writer · Filmmaker MAYA KESSLER

I come from film, so I naturally draw inspiration from visual storytelling. Lately, I’ve been working on adapting the novel into a screenplay, which feels like coming full circle: the novel was written from the perspective of a filmmaker—my heroine is one, and I am too—so the writing already had a cinematic rhythm. I describe scenes in short lines that set the tone: light, time of day, weather—just like in a script. So now, in the adaptation process, I enjoy finding the ways in which the text transforms into a new medium. A significant part of the book is made up of the heroine’s thoughts and reflections—some concrete, others abstract. The concrete parts shift easily from language to image. The abstract ones take a different route: the words go underground and become subtext, a kind of quiet recipe for how to direct the scene.

A Conversation with Writer · Illustrator · Literary Journalist · Educator BRIAN GRESKO

My parents grew up working class in Philadelphia and raised me the same in the suburbs just outside the city. They admired my creativity, but didn’t encourage me to pursue writing or art making with any seriousness. On the contrary, they told me to get my head out of the books and learn a trade, or, when younger, play sports. You know, “normal” pursuits, especially for a boy. I refused. I attended Catholic school till ninth grade, an oppressive environment where I was picked on by students and teachers alike for my nonconformist attitudes and genderqueer weirdness. I never fit in, and in my family, that was literal – around the age of eight or nine my parents revealed that my dad wasn’t my biological dad, though we didn’t talk about it after that, and for more than ten years I carried on pretending I was my dad’s son. Pretending to be what I was not was one way I learned how to survive. All of this led to a distrust of authority in general, an attitude I found reflected in the literature and art I loved. In many ways, the world of books, comics, music, movies, and video games provided more of a home to me than the embodied house where I lived. Art has always played a powerful, central role in my life.

A Conversation with Author JASMIN ATTIA

When I decide to write a story, I will spend a lot of time researching before I plot because I need to understand the possibilities. I research through reading, watching film, interviews, old news reals, radio from the era, music, literature, whatever I can get my hands on.

The next step is plotting, and I buy partitioned notebooks like the ones our English teachers used to make us buy, and then I write out my detailed plot broken into sections. This is what I will use when I start writing. Next come the sticky notes on which I write out the questions to myself or other options for where the story can go. I have a column where I list all the world events that were taking place when my characters are in certain stages of their lives.

24th US Poet Laureate ADA LIMÓN
Author of Startlement · Against Breaking: On the Power of Poetry · The Hurting Kind

It’s always very interesting that we have to make a case for art because we don’t have to make a case for fast food. Like, we don’t have to make a case for all of these sort of things in our lives that we do not need, and yet we have to make a case for beauty? We have to make a case for the soul? We have to make a case for humanity? We have to make a case for singing back the wounded world? That to me is fascinating.

Celebrating the Performing Arts with Chief Artistic Officer SHANTA THAKE

Lincoln Center is multiple stages. I think probably over three dozen stages across 16 acres. It is a vast canvas in and of itself. And then we have this beautiful plaza that leads to this beautiful campus, and that’s the visual I think that most people have when they think of Lincoln Center is this beautiful fountain in the center and these three gorgeous buildings.It’s New York’s biggest plaza, and it feels very vibrant and beautiful. In the summer, we really take that plaza and we transform it into a dance floor. So this idea of also interrupting what people’s notion of Lincoln Center is because it’s a space that is very aspirational, which is a great thing.

GEORGI GOSPODINOV (Author of Time Shelter · Death and the Gardener · The Physics of Sorrow) ANGELA RODEL (Translator · Musician · Exec. Director · Fulbright Bulgaria)

We are in the middle of a labyrinth which suggests to us many fake corridors. What's the superpower of literature? Literature is like an antidote against propaganda. Propaganda explains the world easily in a two-dimensional way.  Literature gives you a more complex explanation. Literature tells personal stories.

Artists on Creativity · Improvisation & the Search for Meaning

Peter Weller, Chayse Irvin, Lee Jaffe, Eric Fischl, Adam Moss, Anthony White, Dickie Landry, Bruce Evan Barnhart, Benh Zeitlin, Richard Sennett, Donald Sultan, Gloria Pacis, Paul Levinson and Julio Ottino share their stories.

NACHO DE GREGORIO · Author of TheWhiteBox

 I'm a believer in this technology. I believe that the cheaper it is, the more people will use it. So, even if we assume that models will get smaller for the same level of intelligence, the demand to actually have more compute is going to be enormous. And the reason why you want to have the compute close to you is not only in terms of performance. As a national security threat, I'm not saying this will happen, but it could happen that China or US or whoever decides to stop exporting compute to the rest of the world. If that happens today, Europe has zero AI at the scale of data the data center.

Epidemiologist · Musician · Author of Our Wild Familiars

So synanthropes are animals that have adapted to human-modified environments, and the Greek translation essentially is together with humans, so synanthrope. And they're a fascinating subset of wild animals that they're all around us, but we don't really notice them. And so in this new book, I was excited about writing something that had to do with the natural world. I was excited about writing something that touched on climate change and the way that the world was changing, but maybe not with such a sort of dirgey approach or funereal approach. Something that actually explored the wonder of the world as it is and as we experience it around our communities in our cities and towns. And I had come across this word synanthrope in the research for my last book, The Invisible Siege, which was about the rise of coronaviruses and the long scientific journey to find cures for COVID-19, and it just kind of stuck with me. There is this connection, of course, between wild animals and viruses and lots of questions about the origin of SARS-2, the virus that spread COVID-19 and caused the pandemic. And while that's touched on in the book a little bit, the vast majority of what I was excited to write about was just what these animals are doing in our cities. How is it that wild animals, raccoons, coyotes, all kinds of birds and animals as fragile as bats… These are not just insects and earthworms and things like that. These are very large predators that have nevertheless found a way to survive among us. And that in and of itself I think is just an amazing story and what I explore in this book.

It is an ordinary human impulse to find a reflection of ourselves in the machines we build. But what happens when the lifeless begins to talk back, to paint, to compose and to simulate our emotions? How do we hold on to what makes us human? Siri Hustvedt, C. Thi Nguyen, Bayo Akomolafe, Jonathan Yeo, Laura Eason, Max Richter, Ralph Gibson, Catherine Curtin, Liad Mudrik, Jacob Ward, Chris Dercon examine the power of imperfection, imagination, intuition, and how to avoid getting lost in the machine.

AMITAV GHOSH · Author of Ghost-Eye · The Shadow Lines · The Hungry Tide · Sea of Poppies · The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable

Imagining with precision is a very fundamental part of my work. When I sit down to write about anything, whether it be The Hungry Tide in the Sundarbans, or let's say The Shadow Lines, or Ghost-Eye. It's very important for me to get the topography right, to get the outlay of the streets or the house exactly right so I can actually picture all of that in my head. It's very important for me to have a sort of pictorial sense of what I'm seeing and what I'm writing about. Before I can write about it, I need to see it, as it were. So that's absolutely fundamental to my craft. That's just how I go about it. Like the Sufis say—behind the apparent reality is a hidden or ba- reality.

I guess that's always been something of great interest to me. How do you square these two realities and make them come together on a page? And really that is what, in some sense, the work of the imagination is. We know that we're in the grip of an intensifying planetary crisis. We can see signs of it everywhere.

How much of our consciousness is actually shaped by our bodies? We explore embodied cognition and the idea that we think with our limbs, breath and physical interactions, with Siri Hustvedt, Guy Leschziner, Daisy Fancourt, Helen Whybrow, Marie Nipper, Arash Abizadeh, David Linden, Bayo Akomolafe, Master Shi Heng Yi, Anil Seth, Robert Waldinger, Noelani Pantastico and Sean Curran.

Redesigning Our Relationship with Nature

We explore our changing planet, from melting ice in Greenland to the depleted soils in our farmlands. We’re joined by writers, advocates and visionaries to discuss environmental justice and the circular economy. Abrahm Lustgarten, Jon Gertner, Rebecca Tickell, Bill Hare, Rob Nixon, Euan Nisbet, Roland Geyer, William McDonough, Carlo Ratti, Jason deCaires Taylor, Jane Madgwick, Paul Shrivastava, Liza Featherstone, Osprey Orielle Lake, Ron Gonen, Louis de Jaeger, Kathleen Rogers and Yolanda Kakabadse.

Journalists, Writers, Political Scientists, Economists, Filmmakers on Democracy & The Fight for Truth · We explore the collapse of journalism, the rise of spin dictators and how disinformation is the new censorship. As media consolidates, journalism remains an act of hope. Nicholas Kristof, Abrahm Lustgarten, Lee McIntyre, Richard Black, Richard Wolff, Jeffrey Rosen, Sergei Guriev, James Fishkin, Viet Thanh Nguyen, T.C. Boyle, George Pelecanos, Jacob Ward, Dean Spade, Debora Cahn, Daniel Susskind, Mike Davis, Michael Maren.

DR. KEITH SAWYER · Author of Learning to See: Inside the World's Leading Art and Design Schools · Explaining Creativity · Group Genius

 I've discovered in my studies of creativity in general that creativity is not about starting with a brilliant idea and then following a linear path to an execution of your idea. What I see in art and design is a much more iterative, wandering, exploratory process where the ideas emerge from the act of engaging in the work.

Architect · Engineer CARLO RATTI
Director of MIT's Senseable City Lab
Curator of Venice Biennale’s 19th Int’l Architectural Exhibition

What we need to do is learn from nature. If you think about how nature progresses through trial and error. I'm really a fan of how we can do open designs that citizens can respond to, and use the feedback in order to create similar systems to what happens in nature.

QUINN SLOBODIAN & BEN TARNOFF on why understanding Elon Musk’s computational worldview is essential for protecting the public sphere and fighting back against cyborg conservatism

 Musk interestingly has this way of excluding the majority of the population from consideration, what he variously calls non-playing characters or NPCs, which is a category from video games, or sometimes bots, vampires. And this is a much more stark version of insider and outsider group creation than even hierarchies of race because it takes this one step further by taking very seriously the idea that other people are not only not human, but they in some way don't even exist, which is the literal reading of Musk's adoption of Nick Bostrom's simulation theory, which is that most people are simply programmable parts of a simulation, and only a small number of people are actual players.

As artificial intelligence reshapes our visual culture and cognitive habits, we investigate the profound costs of offloading our reason to algorithms with Trevor Paglen, Jaron Lanier, Henry Ajder, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Antonella Wilby, C. Thi Nguyen, Carl Safina, Jeffrey Sachs, Etgar Keret, April Gornik and Iain McGilchrist.

Author SIRI HUSTVEDT Remembers Her Late Husband, PAUL AUSTER

Grief happens because you don't stop loving the person who died. The person doesn't exist in your reality anymore. The everyday is not colored and shaped by this other human being, but you don't stop loving the person. So grief is a particular kind of unrequited love. And probably without that dynamic relationship with this person, I would be someone else. And he would've been someone else. Paul died before me. But we were, I think, hugely important to the drama of becoming in our own lives.

Architects SALWA & SELMA MIKOU

Architecture should bring a true sensation of wellbeing. We were really lucky to experience that as children, and now as architects, we try to bring all that we learned into our practice.

Creativity is an infinite conversation. The impulse to speak and be heard is what keeps us tethered to each other and to the world. Max Richter, Andre Dubus III, Iain McGilchrist, Ana Castillo, Albert Serra, Daisy Fancourt, David George Haskell, C. Thi Nguyen, Cherien Dabis, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Ami Vitale, April Gornik, Carter Burwell, Hala Alyan, Jericho Brown and Hans Ulrich Obrist explore creativity as a window into reality and a tool for connection.

We hear from Andre Dubus III, Etgar Keret, Paul Lynch, Megan Abbott, Katie Kitamura, Liz Moore, A.L. Kennedy, Siri Hustvedt, Yann Martel, Intan Paramaditha, T.C. Boyle and Ada Limón on finding beauty in chaos and how writing helps them make sense of the world.

A Conversation with Documentary Filmmaker REBECCA TICKELL

Today, we explore the work of a filmmaker whose lens is consistently turned toward the most critical issues facing our planet. Rebecca Tickell, in collaboration with her husband Josh Tickell, has created a powerful cinematic catalog of films that are not merely observations, but catalysts for change. They've taken on the complexities of our energy systems, the deep-seated problems within our food supply, and now, with her latest work, Bee: Wild, they explore the essential, fragile, and often unseen world of pollinators.

Their film Kiss the Ground sparked a global conversation about regenerative agriculture, leading to tangible shifts in policy and public understanding. Common Ground continued this exploration, unraveling the intricate web of our food systems. Now, with Bee: Wild, narrated by Ellie Goulding and executive produced by Angelina Jolie, Rebecca brings her characteristic blend of journalistic rigor, personal narrative, and solutions-driven storytelling to the urgent plight of bees, asking us to reconsider our relationship with the natural world.

Musician & Activist PLUMES

Mostly I’ll play in a minor key, something sad, which I think can work for an animal because they can sense the sadness, and they try to reassure me and comfort me. I chose love songs because I'm convinced they are very intuitive and they can sense what I am trying to say to them, and profess my love in a way. I think there's always a way to connect, and if you're being cautious and don't threaten the animals, something beautiful can happen.

FRED PEARCE · Environmental Journalist · Author of Despite It All

Observing the world and talking to people around the world, I find a huge amount of spirit and optimism and hope among communities around the world. That really helps. And it's fabulous also to see how nature recovers from almost the worst things that we are doing.

On Earth Day, we explore the Living World—a reality where we are not merely on a planet, but are a moving part of its metabolism. We travel from the High Sierras with Paul Hawken to the glowing forests of Costa Rica with Thomas Crowther. Guided by Paul Hawken, Merlin Sheldrake and David George Haskell, we explore policy and poetry with guests Paula Pinho, Hans Bruyninckx, Bill Hare and Alice Schmidt. Alongside Tiokasin Ghosthorse, Tom Chi, Erland Cooper, Rebecca Tickell and Britt Wray, we ask what happens when we stop trying to dominate and start trying to collaborate with the Earth?

CARISSA VÉLIZ · Author of Prophecy: Prediction, Power & the Fight for the Future · Privacy is Power: Why & How You Should Take Back Control of Your Data

Algorithms are deciding whether you are eligible for a loan, a job, an apartment or insurance. They determine what you see online, who reads your social media posts and who connects with you on dating apps. They may even decide whether you get arrested or go to jail. Your very life hangs in the balance of prophecies.

If you are unlucky, a prediction will be what kills you. Forecasts can determine your place on a waiting list for an organ transplant or whether you get medical care in an emergency. Policymaking hinges on predictions. War and peace and whether someone lives or dies are decided based on forecasts about the strength of an adversary, the impact of a mission or the identity of a person. And yet no one has asked your permission to make those guesses. No governmental agency is supervising them. No one is informing you of the prophecies that shape your fate. Prophecies are the grounds on which fights over the future take place.

TOM CHI · Physicist · Designer · Inventor · Google X Co-founder (Glass, Loon, Waymo) · Founding Partner of At One Ventures · Author of Climate Capital

In the book I spend a bunch of time basically teaching skills and frameworks of thinking. Not to indoctrinate, it's not a framework like an ideology where you need to believe exactly these things. This is a lot more about how does one use their minds effectively to solve problems that have been solved before. I work on things that have to do with investment and climate and the future of the economy and automation. The main things I'm trying to teach in the book are skills around creativity, critical thinking, community compassion and frameworks around how to go and use that on problems that should be relatively portable to a bunch of problems that are meaningful to you. The way that education needs to change is that people need to actively be working on things that truly matter to them so that over time they end up being able to go make that difference.

Biologist · Author DAVID GEORGE HASKELL on Deep Time, Plant Intelligence & Listening to the Living World

For at least 150 years biological sciences emphasized individuality and aloneness. So individual species, individual genes, individual organisms. And that's a useful view, up to a point. I mean, it is true that I am an individual organism. I've got a skin, and then the air begins and there's a gap between me and the next person over. But that view is also utterly false in many ways, in that the human body is not just comprised of human cells. There are bacteria, fungi, and viruses, all these other creatures that we now know are essential to our health. Our minds are not solitary. They're formed in relation to other beings. Ecosystems work only through relationship. So relationship and interconnection, not separation. And atomism is in fact the fundamental nature of life. Even from the very, very first fossils that we have of living organisms way back more than 3 billion years ago, these little cells are sitting next to one another.

I want to be wowed by the world. I want to gaze at it in awe and wonder.

Clayton Page Aldern, David George Haskell, Yann Martel, Carl Safina, Martín von Hildebrand, Richard Black, Tom Chi, Paula Pinho, Osprey Orielle Lake, Bill Hare, Fred Pearce reflect on Climate Change & The Rights of Nature 

YANN MARTEL · Booker Prize-winning Author of Son of Nobody · Life of Pi
Storytelling, which is a very whole person kind of activity, is one that delivers all kinds of truths. Facts are just the ground upon which we build the edifices that we actually live in. And those are not just made of facts. They're made of other kinds of truths that make the stories of who we are, the cities we live in, the languages we speak—these are made of fact and fiction together, and those are the stories that define our lives.

Journalist FATEMEH JAMALPOUR

Then I started to write about the interrogation sessions. I knew that writing is jumping over the death row. I knew they couldn't shut down my mind. I had all these notes about returning and the interrogation sessions because I was facing the whole ideological core of the regime. We realized that to tell the full, human side of the story of our people, we needed a book.

Actress · Director CHERIEN DABIS discusses All That's Left of You

For me, we Palestinians are so much more than our pain and suffering, and the world often sees only our pain and suffering. I wanted to show other facets of who we are, no matter whether we're on the activist side of the spectrum or audience members who don't know very much about the situation. At the end of the day, we all have to choose humanity. In many ways I was inspired by observing the different generations of my own family and how our identities were shaped by everything happening in Palestine. That became the first idea for this film, to really show how it is a collective trauma for all Palestinians. That trauma is being passed down from generation to generation. Even if you're not a direct descendant of Nakba survivors, you still have that trauma. I wanted to explore that passage of trauma, that inheritance of my own trauma and take a look at how history and political events shape people.

A Conversation with Author JAMES STURZ

Underjungle is a tale of love, loss, family, and war—set entirely underwater. Sometimes I’ll joke it’s War and Peace, but 3,000 feet deeper. And shorter. And maybe a little funnier, too. But it’s also about our deep connection to the ocean. I wrote most of it in Hawaii during the pandemic, researching it off the coast. I knew that to write it I needed to say what it was like to be underwater. Not just to dive down, but to live there and be there, and for everything you know, whether it’s food, minerals, oxygen, ideas, or mates to come to you in the currents, through this thick and intensely rich medium that covers 70 percent of the planet. So I’d go to the coast to scuba dive or free dive. Not to chase after fish, but simply to sink and to take this different world in—one I was particularly happy to spend time in, not just because I love the water, but because so much of the rest of the world was closed off, and I feel free when I’m submerged it. And then I’d come home and try to figure out what everything I saw and felt meant, because I intended the book as a love song.

A Conversation with Poet MAJA LUKIC

I was born in Croatia, in the former Yugoslavia. We left that country when the civil war broke out, and I grew up in Canada, mostly, with a lot of subsequent moves from place to place. So very early in childhood, I was confronted with complex feelings I couldn’t describe yet, and I felt a deep inchoate sense of loss. I was coming from a country that no longer existed and speaking a language that, politically, no longer existed. It made me more solitary—I had a rich inner life and retreated to my imagination as a safe place, which is fantastic training ground for a writer’s life. At the same time, living in the immigrant community in Canada and meeting kids from other cultures and other languages, I understood something about the universality of human experience. Yes, it was painful to leave home because of a war, but others abandoned their homes, too.

A Conversation with Author JOSÉ VADI

For my most recent book, “Chipped”, the creative process was skateboarding. The book is entirely about my relationship with that lovely toy, so I tried to regularly skate while writing it because 1) I love it and 2) it helped fuel a lot of the energy I was trying to put on the page.

A Conversation with Author MAI SERHAN

I am in the early conceptual phase of a new novel, which is inspired by the ongoing genocide in Gaza. Being Palestinian, watching this hell unfold from afar, live on my phone day-to-day, has left me struggling to find the words. Even the word “hell” feels reductive. It’s always hard to write about an event that is still unfolding, this one being particularly tough.

A Conversation with Author LAUREL SNYDER

I've spent the last eight years telling people I would never publish a sequel to that book, but now, an exciting idea has presented itself. I'm coming out of yet another low period in my writing. So it certainly feels like the right thing to do is to go back to my paints and crayons and get a fresh legal pad and a good, sharp pencil and tackle this draft by hand the way I did the first.
Though I also have arthritis now, and writing by hand hurts, so I may have to go more slowly...

A Conversation with Author MELISSA STUDDARD

My current project is a collection of poems told from the perspective of the severed tongue of the mythological character Philomela. The manuscript is built so far from woven threads that include original tongue twisters, a glossolalia (speaking in tongues) series, opinions from a Greek-tragedy-style chorus that represents a flawed society, a noir-style narrative arc in which the tongue hires a (private) eye to try to find Philomela, another narrative thread in which the tongue adopts an abused child and tries to save other victims (such as Prometheus's liver and Frankenstein's monster), Sappho-style fragments, lyric meditations on pain and suffering, and redux poems that complicate various passages and translations of the original myth with blackouts and added or rearranged text material.

A Conversation with Author TAYLOR BRORBY

I grew up in Center, North Dakota, which is the center of nothing--other than my imagination. My home is nine miles south of where Lewis and Clark met Sakakawea, which is an hour north of where George Armstrong Custer last lived before he went west and had the worst day of his life, which is about one hundred miles east of where Theodore Roosevelt fled when his wife and mother died in the same house on the same day, and is about two hundred miles downstream from where Sitting Bull surrendered his rifle. It seems I grew up in the heart of what was originally called "Westward Expansion," which is something I continually come back to in my thinking and writing. It's a history I reckon with in my sentences.