The Creative Process · Arts, Culture & Society: Books, Film, Music, TV, Art, Writing, Creativity, Education, Environment, Th (The Creative Process - Books, Film, Music, TV, Art, Writing, Education, Environment, Theatre, Dance, LGBTQ, Social Justice, Spirituality, Feminism, Technology, AI)
Explore every episode of The Creative Process · Arts, Culture & Society: Books, Film, Music, TV, Art, Writing, Creativity, Education, Environment, Th
| Pub. Date | Title | Duration | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 29 Apr 2023 | Oscar-winner JOHN PATRICK SHANLEY on Directing Meryl Streep, Philip Seymour Hoffman & Creating Stories from Your Life Experiences - Highlights | 00:15:20 | |
"You grow up wherever you grow up. And there are things there, and there are other things that are not there, and the things that are not there, you can imagine. And I did a lot of imagining in the Bronx because there were a lot of things that I gravitated toward that just weren't there: the fantastic, The Thief of Baghdad, magic, beautiful clothes, beautiful places, the exoticism of that. And then at another later point, I thought, I am missing my whole life from my work. I am writing about all these things that are not my life. Because I think everything that I actually saw and heard and felt is so ordinary that it's not worth repeating. And I think most of us feel that way, and we're dead wrong. That in fact, those things are gold. Those are the things that we actually have to write about. And you can write about anything when you start with those things and embrace them. Embrace your own life." John Patrick Shanley is from The Bronx. His plays include Prodigal Son, Outside Mullingar (Tony nomination), Danny and the Deep Blue Sea, Savage in Limbo, Italian-American Reconciliation, Welcome to the Moon, Four Dogs and a Bone, Dirty Story, Defiance, and Beggars in the House of Plenty. His theatrical work is performed extensively across the United States and around the world. For his play, Doubt, he received both the Tony Award and the Pulitzer Prize. In the arena of screenwriting, he has ten films to his credit, most recently Wild Mountain Thyme, with Emily Blunt, Jamie Dornan, and Christopher Walken. His film of Doubt, with Meryl Streep, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Amy Adams, and Viola Davis, which he also directed, was nominated for five Academy Awards, including Best Adapted Screenplay. Other films include Five Corners (Special Jury Prize, Barcelona Film Festival), Alive, Joe Versus the Volcano (which he also directed), and Live From Baghdad for HBO (Emmy nomination). For his script of Moonstruck he received both the Writers Guild of America Award and an Academy Award for best original screenplay. In 2009, The Writers Guild of America awarded Mr. Shanley the Lifetime Achievement In Writing. www.creativeprocess.info | |||
| 03 May 2023 | We All Live on One Planet We Call Home - Part 4 - Environmentalists, Economists, Policymakers & Architects Share their Stories | 00:22:57 | |
Listen to Part 4 of this Special Series with music courtesy of composer Max Richter. All voices on this episode are from our interviews for The Creative Process & One Planet Podcast: INGRID NEWKIRK, Founder & President of PETA - People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals JEFFREY D. SACHS, President of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network, Director of Center for Sustainable Development, Columbia University, Economist, Author JENNIFER MORGAN, Fmr. Executive Director of Greenpeace International, Special Envoy for International Climate Action, German Foreign Ministry MERLIN SHELDRAKE, Biologist & Bestselling Author of “Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds, and Shape Our Futures”, Winner of the Wainwright Prize 2021 WALTER STAHEL, Architect, Economist, Founding Father of Circular Economy, Founder-Director, Product-Life Institute ARMOND COHEN, Executive Director of Clean Air Task Force PIA MANCINI, Co-founder/CEO of Open Collective - Chair of DemocracyEarth Foundation, YGL World Economic Forum RON GONEN, Founder & CEO of Closed Loop Partners, Former Deputy Commissioner of Sanitation, Recycling & Sustainability, NYC AIMEE NEZHUKUMATATHIL, Poet & Author of “World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks and Other Astonishments” ANA CASTILLO, Award-Winning Xicana Activist, Editor, Poet, Novelist & Artist www.creativeprocess.info www.maxrichtermusic.com Max Richter’s music featured in this episode are “On the Nature of Daylight” from The Blue Notebooks, “Path 19: Yet Frailest” from Sleep. Music is courtesy of Max Richter, Universal Music Enterprises, and Mute Song. Artwork: Saudade, Mia Funk | |||
| 02 May 2023 | What Kind of World Are We Leaving for Future Generations? - Part 3 - Activists, Environmentalists & Teachers Share their Stories | 00:17:00 | |
Listen to Part 3 of this Special Series with music courtesy of composer Max Richter. All voices on this episode are from our interviews for The Creative Process & One Planet Podcast: PAULA PINHO, Director of Just Transition at the European Commission Directorate-General for Energy PIA MANCINI, Co-founder/CEO of Open Collective - Chair of DemocracyEarth Foundation, YGL World Economic Forum JENNIFER MORGAN, Fmr. Executive Director of Greenpeace International, Special Envoy for International Climate Action, German Foreign Ministry WALTER STAHEL, Architect, Economist, Founding Father of Circular Economy, Founder-Director, Product-Life Institute MERLIN SHELDRAKE, Biologist & Bestselling Author of Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds, and Shape Our Futures, Winner of the Wainwright Prize 2021 RON GONEN, Founder & CEO of Closed Loop Partners, Former Deputy Commissioner of Sanitation, Recycling & Sustainability, NYC MANUELA LUCÁ-DAZIO, Executive Director, Pritzker Architecture Prize, Fmr. Exec. Director of Venice Biennale, Visual Arts & Architecture Dept. NICHOLAS ROYLE, Co-author of "An Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory”, Author of “Mother: A Memoir” MARK BURGMAN, Director, Centre for Environmental Policy, Imperial College London, Editor-in-Chief, Conservation Biology MIKE DAVIS, CEO of Global Witness JAY FAMIGLIETTI, Fmr. Senior Water Scientist at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Exec. Director, Global Institute for Water Security, Host of "What About Water?" Podcast BRITT WRAY, Author of “Generation Dread: Finding Purpose in an Age of Climate Crisis”, Researcher Working on Climate Change & Mental Health, Stanford University RICHARD VEVERS, Founder & CEO of The Ocean Agency ARMOND COHEN, Executive Director of Clean Air Task Force BILL HARE, Founder & CEO of Climate Analytics, Physicist, Climate Scientist DAVID PALUMBO-LIU, Activist, Professor & Author of “Speaking Out of Place: Getting Our Political Voices Back”, Host of Speaking out of Place Podcast IBRAHIM ALHUSSEINI, Founder & CEO of FullCycle Fund GAIA VINCE, Science Writer, Broadcaster & Author of “Transcendence” & “Adventures in the Anthropocene” INGRID NEWKIRK, Founder & President of PETA - People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals www.creativeprocess.info www.maxrichtermusic.com Max Richter’s music featured in this episode are “On the Nature of Daylight” from The Blue Notebooks, “Path 19: Yet Frailest” from Sleep. Music is courtesy of Max Richter, Universal Music Enterprises, and Mute Song. | |||
| 09 May 2023 | DAVID J. LINDEN - Author of “Unique:The New Science of Human Individuality” “The Accidental Mind” “The Compass of Pleasure” “Touch” | 00:55:45 | |
David J. Linden is a Professor in the Department of Neuroscience at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. He is the author of Unique: The New Science of Human Individuality, The Accidental Mind: How Brain Evolution Has Given Us Love, Memory, Dreams, and God, The Compass of Pleasure: How Our Brains Make Fatty Foods, Orgasm, Exercise, Marijuana, Generosity, Vodka, Learning, and Gambling Feel So Good, and Touch: The Science of the Hand, Heart, and Mind. His laboratory has worked for many years on the cellular substrates of memory storage, recovery of function following brain injury and a few other topics. "It's a fundamental human question, how do we become individuals? It's a basic thing about being alive and thinking. Nature versus nurture is a phrase that was popularized by Francis Galton in the late 19th century. and the idea behind it is that if you were to look at a particular trait, say, shyness or height, you could say, well, to what degree can we attribute height to nature? In this case, meaning the gene variants that you inherit from your parents versus nurture in this case, meaning how you were raised by your parents and by your community. And I have many problems with this expression. Part of it is that the nature part shouldn't just mean genetics. In other words, there's all kinds of biological things that are not genetic things. If your mother fought off a viral infection while you were developing in utero, then you have a much higher chance of developing schizophrenia or autism when you grow up. Now that's biological, but it's not hereditary. That's not something that you would then acquire and then pass on to your own children. It only happens in the one generation. The other problem is when we hear the word nurture, we really focus on the family, how your parents raised you or failed to raise you, how your community was involved. And those things are very important, but they're far from everything that impinges upon you in your life. I take experience as the thing to substitute for nurture because it is much more inclusive and it includes not just social experience from your family and your peers and your community, but also experience in the more general sense." www.creativeprocess.info | |||
| 09 May 2023 | Unique: The New Science of Human Individuality w/ Neurobiologist - DAVID J. LINDEN - Highlights | 00:19:01 | |
"It's a fundamental human question, how do we become individuals? It's a basic thing about being alive and thinking. Nature versus nurture is a phrase that was popularized by Francis Galton in the late 19th century. and the idea behind it is that if you were to look at a particular trait, say, shyness or height, you could say, well, to what degree can we attribute height to nature? In this case, meaning the gene variants that you inherit from your parents versus nurture in this case, meaning how you were raised by your parents and by your community. And I have many problems with this expression. Part of it is that the nature part shouldn't just mean genetics. In other words, there's all kinds of biological things that are not genetic things. If your mother fought off a viral infection while you were developing in utero, then you have a much higher chance of developing schizophrenia or autism when you grow up. Now that's biological, but it's not hereditary. That's not something that you would then acquire and then pass on to your own children. It only happens in the one generation. The other problem is when we hear the word nurture, we really focus on the family, how your parents raised you or failed to raise you, how your community was involved. And those things are very important, but they're far from everything that impinges upon you in your life. I take experience as the thing to substitute for nurture because it is much more inclusive and it includes not just social experience from your family and your peers and your community, but also experience in the more general sense." David J. Linden is a Professor in the Department of Neuroscience at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. He is the author of Unique: The New Science of Human Individuality, The Accidental Mind: How Brain Evolution Has Given Us Love, Memory, Dreams, and God, The Compass of Pleasure: How Our Brains Make Fatty Foods, Orgasm, Exercise, Marijuana, Generosity, Vodka, Learning, and Gambling Feel So Good, and Touch: The Science of the Hand, Heart, and Mind. His laboratory has worked for many years on the cellular substrates of memory storage, recovery of function following brain injury and a few other topics. www.creativeprocess.info | |||
| 11 May 2023 | SAGARIKA SRIRAM - Founder of Kids4abetterworld, Youth Climate Change Initiative | 00:31:02 | |
Sagarika Sriram is currently a student at Jumeirah College in Dubai. She founded the organization Kids4abetterworld when she was 10 years old with a mission to educate and encourage young children to lead a more sustainable life and reduce their carbon footprint. Children are the worst affected by the effects of climate change, yet most children do not participate in climate change discussions or take actions to live more sustainably because they do not have the awareness and capability to do so. Kids4abetterworld conducts awareness workshops on sustainability aiming to Educate, Motivate and Activate young children to conserve natural resources, protect biodiversity, and positively impact climate change. As a UN Climate Advisor, she has participated in the global consultations that will ensure children are made aware of their environmental rights and that UN member states protect and uphold these. Kids4abetterworld is a platform for young children to connect across the globe as they adopt sustainable lifestyles and drive systemic solutions to the climate crisis. www.creativeprocess.info | |||
| 12 May 2023 | ANIL SETH - Author of Being You: A New Science of Consciousness - Co-director of Sussex Centre for Consciousness Science | 00:56:29 | |
Anil Seth is a neuroscientist, author, and public speaker who has pioneered research into the brain basis of consciousness for more than twenty years. He is the author of Being You: A New Science of Consciousness, as well as the best-selling 30 Second Brain, and other books. He is a Professor of Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience at the University of Sussex, where he is Co-Director of the Sussex Centre for Consciousness Science, and is Co-Director of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR) Program on Brain, Mind, and Consciousness, and of the Leverhulme Doctoral Scholarship Programme: From Sensation and Perception to Awareness. He has a TED talk on consciousness and appeared in several films, including The Most Unknown and The Search. He has written for Aeon, The Guardian, Granta, New Scientist, and Scientific American. He was the 2017 President of the British Science Association (Psychology Section) and winner of the 2019 KidSpirit Perspectives award. He has published more than 180 academic papers and is listed in 2019 and 2020 Web of Science ‘highly cited researcher’ index, which recognizes the world’s most influential researchers over the past decade. "This is a point in philosophy that the world as it is can never be directly apprehended by our minds. We are shielded from it by what's called a sensory veil. There are, for instance, no such thing as colors that are out there. As the artist Cezanne said, 'The colors are where the brain and the universe meet.' And color is, I think, a really good example because it is, in a sense, less than what's there because our eyes are only sensitive to three wavelengths of this huge electromagnetic spectrum, which goes all the way from x-rays and gamma rays to radio waves. And we live in a tiny, thin slice of that reality. But then out of those three wavelengths we experience our brains generate many more than three colors and almost an infinite palette of colors. So there's no sense in which our perception could ever reveal the world as it really is, that it reveals the world in a way that's very useful for us as organisms hell-bent on continuing to live and to survive." www.anilseth.com www.creativeprocess.info | |||
| 12 May 2023 | Being You: A New Science of Consciousness with Neuroscientist ANIL SETH - Highlights | 00:13:54 | |
"This is a point in philosophy that the world as it is can never be directly apprehended by our minds. We are shielded from it by what's called a sensory veil. There are, for instance, no such thing as colors that are out there. As the artist Cezanne said, 'The colors are where the brain and the universe meet.' And color is, I think, a really good example because it is, in a sense, less than what's there because our eyes are only sensitive to three wavelengths of this huge electromagnetic spectrum, which goes all the way from x-rays and gamma rays to radio waves. And we live in a tiny, thin slice of that reality. But then out of those three wavelengths we experience our brains generate many more than three colors and almost an infinite palette of colors. So there's no sense in which our perception could ever reveal the world as it really is, that it reveals the world in a way that's very useful for us as organisms hell-bent on continuing to live and to survive." Anil Seth is a neuroscientist, author, and public speaker who has pioneered research into the brain basis of consciousness for more than twenty years. He is the author of Being You: A New Science of Consciousness, as well as the best-selling 30 Second Brain, and other books. He is a Professor of Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience at the University of Sussex, where he is Co-Director of the Sussex Centre for Consciousness Science, and is Co-Director of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR) Program on Brain, Mind, and Consciousness, and of the Leverhulme Doctoral Scholarship Programme: From Sensation and Perception to Awareness. He has a TED talk on consciousness and appeared in several films, including The Most Unknown and The Search. He has written for Aeon, The Guardian, Granta, New Scientist, and Scientific American. He was the 2017 President of the British Science Association (Psychology Section) and winner of the 2019 KidSpirit Perspectives award. He has published more than 180 academic papers and is listed in 2019 and 2020 Web of Science ‘highly cited researcher’ index, which recognizes the world’s most influential researchers over the past decade. www.anilseth.com www.creativeprocess.info | |||
| 16 May 2023 | MADELEINE WATTS - Author of The Inland Sea - Creative Writing Professor, Columbia University | 00:50:58 | |
Madeleine Watts is an Australian writer based in New York. Her first novel The Inland Sea was published in 2020 and was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award and the UTS Glenda Adams Award for New Writing. Her essays and stories have been published in Harper’s Magazine, The Believer, The Guardian, The White Review, and The Paris Review Daily, among others. She teaches creative writing at Columbia University in New York. Her second novel, Elegy, Southwest, is forthcoming. "So the book is divided. In the first section, summer, the equivalent of summer is Heat. And then there is Flood, which in Australia does tend to happen sort of towards the beginning of autumn, particularly if there have been tropical cyclones in the north of the country. And then winter I've given Tremor. Australia is not somewhere that particularly experiences earthquakes. And so I was interested in introducing something, sort of climactic form of extremity that doesn't happen very often. And then the end of the book, the springtime is Fire. So that was how it came into form because I was interested in talking about the ways in which humans have created an idea of what nature should be in the way that we make our human culture and human meaning from the weather in our environments. And that was not the case where I was from, and it's not the case anymore. So to sort of undo some of that idea of the four seasons being harmonious." www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/667704/the-inland-sea-by-madeleine-watts www.creativeprocess.info | |||
| 16 May 2023 | The Inland Sea with Author MADELEINE WATTS - Highlights | 00:13:04 | |
"So the book is divided. In the first section, summer, the equivalent of summer is Heat. And then there is Flood, which in Australia does tend to happen sort of towards the beginning of autumn, particularly if there have been tropical cyclones in the north of the country. And then winter I've given Tremor. Australia is not somewhere that particularly experiences earthquakes. And so I was interested in introducing something, sort of climactic form of extremity that doesn't happen very often. And then the end of the book, the springtime is Fire. So that was how it came into form because I was interested in talking about the ways in which humans have created an idea of what nature should be in the way that we make our human culture and human meaning from the weather in our environments. And that was not the case where I was from, and it's not the case anymore. So to sort of undo some of that idea of the four seasons being harmonious." Madeleine Watts is an Australian writer based in New York. Her first novel The Inland Sea was published in 2020 and was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award and the UTS Glenda Adams Award for New Writing. Her essays and stories have been published in Harper’s Magazine, The Believer, The Guardian, The White Review, and The Paris Review Daily, among others. She teaches creative writing at Columbia University in New York. Her second novel, Elegy, Southwest, is forthcoming. www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/667704/the-inland-sea-by-madeleine-watts www.creativeprocess.info | |||
| 19 May 2023 | RACHEL ASHEGBOFEH IKEMEH - Whitley Award-winning Conservationist - Founder/Director, Southwest Niger Delta Forest Project | 00:43:35 | |
Rachel Ashegbofeh Ikemeh is a Whitley Award-winning conservationist and Founder/Director at the Southwest Niger Delta Forest Project, a grassroots-focused conservation initiative that has been dedicated to the protection of fragile wildlife populations and habitat across her project sites in Africa’s most populous nation. Rachel won the award in 2020 for her work on chimpanzee populations in Nigeria and is aiming to secure 20% of chimpanzee habitat in Southwest Nigeria. She is also the winner of the National Geographic Society Buffet Awards for Conservaton Leadership in Africa, a Tusk Conservation Awards Finalist. She works to protect some of the most highly threatened forest habitats and primate populations in southern Nigeria. For example, Rachel’s determined efforts has helped to bring back a species from the brink of extinction – the rare and critically endangered Niger Delta red colobus monkey, also, considered one of 25 most endangered primates in the world. She has helped to establish two protected areas and have also taken on the management of these PAs to restore habitats in these very highly threatened ecosystems which are also areas of high-security risks in the country. Rachel is the Co-Vice Chair for the IUCN/SSC Primate Specialist Group African Section and Member of the International Primatological Society (IPS) education committee. Through her strategic positions in these networks, Rachel has been committed to championing the need to increase conservation leadership amongst Africans as she co-founded the African Primatological society in 2017. She’s trained the 55 persons that make up her team from local institutions and local communities. "I think the entirety of the work we do, we are navigating a lot of embedded preconceived notions or traditions or culture. And especially in Africa, none of that is easy to navigate. You can't do without stepping on somebody's toes or upsetting the system that was in place. For example, at one of the sites where we created a conservation area, we worked there for seven years before the establishment of that conservation area. It shouldn't take that long or it wouldn't take that long normally, probably a year or two years because you've learned everything you need to know. But in those seven years, we got to really understand how the people think, what their histories are and their experiences, and then considering all that, I think is one of the most important things in navigating traditions and cultures and also respecting those people's beliefs." https://swnigerdeltaforestproject.org.ng www.creativeprocess.info | |||
| 19 May 2023 | How to Bring a Species Back from the Brink of Extinction w/ RACHEL ASHEGBOFEH IKEMEH - Highlights | 00:11:36 | |
"I think the entirety of the work we do, we are navigating a lot of embedded preconceived notions or traditions or culture. And especially in Africa, none of that is easy to navigate. You can't do without stepping on somebody's toes or upsetting the system that was in place. For example, at one of the sites where we created a conservation area, we worked there for seven years before the establishment of that conservation area. It shouldn't take that long or it wouldn't take that long normally, probably a year or two years because you've learned everything you need to know. But in those seven years, we got to really understand how the people think, what their histories are and their experiences, and then considering all that, I think is one of the most important things in navigating traditions and cultures and also respecting those people's beliefs." Rachel Ashegbofeh Ikemeh is a Whitley Award-winning conservationist and Founder/Director at the Southwest Niger Delta Forest Project, a grassroots-focused conservation initiative that has been dedicated to the protection of fragile wildlife populations and habitat across her project sites in Africa’s most populous nation. Rachel won the award in 2020 for her work on chimpanzee populations in Nigeria and is aiming to secure 20% of chimpanzee habitat in Southwest Nigeria. She is also the winner of the National Geographic Society Buffet Awards for Conservaton Leadership in Africa, a Tusk Conservation Awards Finalist. She works to protect some of the most highly threatened forest habitats and primate populations in southern Nigeria. For example, Rachel’s determined efforts has helped to bring back a species from the brink of extinction – the rare and critically endangered Niger Delta red colobus monkey, also, considered one of 25 most endangered primates in the world. She has helped to establish two protected areas and have also taken on the management of these PAs to restore habitats in these very highly threatened ecosystems which are also areas of high-security risks in the country. Rachel is the Co-Vice Chair for the IUCN/SSC Primate Specialist Group African Section and Member of the International Primatological Society (IPS) education committee. Through her strategic positions in these networks, Rachel has been committed to championing the need to increase conservation leadership amongst Africans as she co-founded the African Primatological society in 2017. She’s trained the 55 persons that make up her team from local institutions and local communities. https://swnigerdeltaforestproject.org.ng www.creativeprocess.info | |||
| 24 May 2023 | ANDRI SNÆR MAGNASON - Icelandic Writer & Documentary Filmmaker - On Time and Water, The Casket of Time, LoveStar, Not Ok | 00:42:52 | |
Andri Snær Magnason is an award winning author of On Time and Water, The Casket of Time, LoveStar, Dreamland and The Story of the Blue Planet. His work has been published in more than 35 languages. He has a written in most genres, novels, poetry, plays, short stories, non fiction as well as being a documentary film maker. His novel, LoveStar got a Philip K. Dick Special Citation, and the Grand Prix de l’Imaginaire in France and “Novel of the year” in Iceland. The Story of the Blue Planet, was the first children’s book to receive the Icelandic Literary Award and has been published or performed in 35 countries. The Blue Planet received the Janusz Korczak Honorary Award in Poland 2000, the UKLA Award in the UK and Children's book of the Year in China. His book – Dreamland – a Self Help Manual for a Frightened Nation takes on these issues and has sold more than 20.000 copies in Iceland. He co directed Dreamland - a feature length documentary film based on the book. Footage from Dreamland and an interview with Andri can be seen in the Oscar Award-winning documentary Inside Job by Charles Ferguson. His most recent book, Tímakistan, the Time Casket has now been published in more than 10 languages, was nominated as the best fantasy book in Finland 2016 with authors like Ursula K. le Guin and David Mitchell. In English six books are currently available: Bónus Poetry, The Story of The Blue Planet, LoveStar, Dreamland and The Casket of Time, (Tímakistan) and On Time and Water. "When I was writing On Time and Water somebody said this is not just one book. This is about your grandmother, about glaciers. You have to focus. You can't have this mythology and glacial and ocean sites, speculations about words like ocean acidification, and your grandfather's sister who is visiting Tolstoy. You have to focus. You can't put all this into a book. And then I thought, oh yes, I forgot my favorite uncle, who was the researcher of crocodiles. I also have to put him into the book. And when I put the crocodile's story into the book, it was like a keystone. Everything fell into a whole picture. Because we live in democratic societies and literature is an art of entertainment. People want to continue reading books, and it's based on instant ways of storytelling. Of course, it's strange to live in a society where we have to entertain ourselves to understand the most important issue in the world." www.creativeprocess.info | |||
| 24 May 2023 | On Time and Water with Author, Filmmaker ANDRI SNÆR MAGNASON - Highlights | 00:12:54 | |
"When I was writing On Time and Water somebody said this is not just one book. This is about your grandmother, about glaciers. You have to focus. You can't have this mythology and glacial and ocean sites, speculations about words like ocean acidification, and your grandfather's sister who is visiting Tolstoy. You have to focus. You can't put all this into a book. And then I thought, oh yes, I forgot my favorite uncle, who was the researcher of crocodiles. I also have to put him into the book. And when I put the crocodile's story into the book, it was like a keystone. Everything fell into a whole picture. Because we live in democratic societies and literature is an art of entertainment. People want to continue reading books, and it's based on instant ways of storytelling. Of course, it's strange to live in a society where we have to entertain ourselves to understand the most important issue in the world." Andri Snær Magnason is an award winning author of On Time and Water, The Casket of Time, LoveStar, Dreamland and The Story of the Blue Planet. His work has been published in more than 35 languages. He has a written in most genres, novels, poetry, plays, short stories, non fiction as well as being a documentary film maker. His novel, LoveStar got a Philip K. Dick Special Citation, and the Grand Prix de l’Imaginaire in France and “Novel of the year” in Iceland. The Story of the Blue Planet, was the first children’s book to receive the Icelandic Literary Award and has been published or performed in 35 countries. The Blue Planet received the Janusz Korczak Honorary Award in Poland 2000, the UKLA Award in the UK and Children's book of the Year in China. His book – Dreamland – a Self Help Manual for a Frightened Nation takes on these issues and has sold more than 20.000 copies in Iceland. He co directed Dreamland - a feature length documentary film based on the book. Footage from Dreamland and an interview with Andri can be seen in the Oscar Award-winning documentary Inside Job by Charles Ferguson. His most recent book, Tímakistan, the Time Casket has now been published in more than 10 languages, was nominated as the best fantasy book in Finland 2016 with authors like Ursula K. le Guin and David Mitchell. In English six books are currently available: Bónus Poetry, The Story of The Blue Planet, LoveStar, Dreamland and The Casket of Time, (Tímakistan) and On Time and Water. www.creativeprocess.info | |||
| 26 May 2023 | BROCK BASTIAN - Author of The Other Side of Happiness: Embracing a More Fearless Approach to Living | 00:34:54 | |
Brock Bastian is author of The Other Side of Happiness: Embracing a More Fearless Approach to Living and a professor at University of Melbourne’s School of Psychological Sciences. His research and writing focus on pain, happiness, morality, and wellbeing. In his search for a new perspective on what makes for the good life, Bastian has studied why promoting happiness may have paradoxical effects; why we need negative and painful experiences in life to build meaning, purpose, resilience, and ultimately greater fulfilment in life; and why behavioural ethics is necessary for understanding how we reason about personal and social issues and resolve conflicts of interest. "In today's world, feeling happy is no longer simply a state of mind. It's become a marker of mental health and success. On the flip side, pain and sadness are viewed as signals of failure and sickness. If we're not happy, then there is something wrong with us, and we need to fix it. It is no wonder that the painkiller and antidepressant markets, already worth billions of dollars, continue their rapid expansion. We've come to treat even commonplace experiences of pain and sadness as pathological, as things that need to be medicated and eradicated." www.abebooks.com/9780141982106/Side-Happiness-Embracing-Fearless-Approach-0141982101/plp www.creativeprocess.info | |||
| 26 May 2023 | The Other Side of Happiness: Embracing a More Fearless Approach to Living w/ BROCK BASTIAN - Highlights | 00:09:00 | |
"In today's world, feeling happy is no longer simply a state of mind. It's become a marker of mental health and success. On the flip side, pain and sadness are viewed as signals of failure and sickness. If we're not happy, then there is something wrong with us, and we need to fix it. It is no wonder that the painkiller and antidepressant markets, already worth billions of dollars, continue their rapid expansion. We've come to treat even commonplace experiences of pain and sadness as pathological, as things that need to be medicated and eradicated." Brock Bastian is author of The Other Side of Happiness: Embracing a More Fearless Approach to Living and a professor at University of Melbourne’s School of Psychological Sciences. His research and writing focus on pain, happiness, morality, and wellbeing. In his search for a new perspective on what makes for the good life, Bastian has studied why promoting happiness may have paradoxical effects; why we need negative and painful experiences in life to build meaning, purpose, resilience, and ultimately greater fulfilment in life; and why behavioural ethics is necessary for understanding how we reason about personal and social issues and resolve conflicts of interest. www.abebooks.com/9780141982106/Side-Happiness-Embracing-Fearless-Approach-0141982101/plp www.creativeprocess.info | |||
| 30 May 2023 | NEIL GAIMAN - Writer, Producer, Showrunner “The Sandman”, “American Gods”, “Good Omens”, “Coraline” | 00:04:07 | |
Neil Gaiman is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of more than twenty books, including The Sandman, American Gods, Good Omens, Stardust, Coraline, Norse Mythology, Neverwhere, and The Graveyard Book. He’s adapted many of his books for television and film. Among his numerous literary awards are the Newbery and Carnegie medals, and the Hugo, Nebula, World Fantasy, and Will Eisner awards. He is a Global Goodwill Ambassador for United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). In this episode, Gaiman reads his poems “A Writer’s Prayer” and “These Are Not Our Faces”. To hear our full interview with Neil Gaiman, visit The Creative Process Podcast: Arts, Culture & Society. www.neilgaiman.com www.creativeprocess.info | |||
| 31 May 2023 | ADA LIMÓN - U.S. Poet Laureate - Author of The Hurting Kind - The Carrying - Highlights | 00:06:50 | |
Ada Limón is the author of six books of poetry, including The Carrying, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry. Her book Bright Dead Things was nominated for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. Her work has been supported most recently by a Guggenheim Fellowship. She grew up in Sonoma, California and now lives in Lexington, Kentucky where she writes, teaches remotely, and hosts the critically-acclaimed poetry podcast, The Slowdown. Her new book of poetry, The Hurting Kind, is forthcoming from Milkweed Editions in May 2022. Photo credit: Lucas Marquardt | |||
| 01 Jun 2023 | PABLO HOFFMAN - Whitley Award-winning Conservationist - Exec. Director & Co-Founder of Sociedade Chauá | 00:33:49 | |
Pablo Hoffman has always been passionate about plants and natural ecosystems, with special appreciation for research and dissemination with practical results for the production and conservation of native species. Pablo graduated in Forestry at the Federal University of Paraná (UFPR) 2002, had his Master’s in Forestry – UFPR 2014, currently he is a PhD candidate in Forestry. One of the Founders of the Sociedade Chauá, Pablo has been a board member since 2008. Currently is the Executive Director as well Coordinator of the Chauá Nursery of native species. A specialist in conservation, propagation and restoration of rare and endangered species of the Araucaria Forest, whose projects are locally and internationally recognized. As a result of Sociedade’s Chauá efforts to save endangered plant species Pablo was awarded the Marsh Award (2018), Whitley Award (2022), and Guardians of Nature (2022). As a life choice, working with conservation of rare and endangered plant species is the lifeblood of his personal and professional aspirations, to leave a positive legacy for the next generations, keeping the ecosystems alive with humans as part of it. "Most of my family are cowboys and farmers. And I was like eight or nine years old. My grandmother was getting sick, and she always had a lot of plants at home in pots, and she asked me to help her to water the plants. And it was quite a good experience because when you start to like plants, it becomes like a viral thing. After some time I was growing my own plants, and I was very interested in doing her garden. And I would go to the forest and collect plants to grow at home like orchids that were beginning my first nursery. And it's a crazy love that grows when you start to understand how plants grow, and how the ecosystem functions. And how beautiful and amazing all this is. And we as humans are part of it, and I've always loved animals as well, but plants are my passion. And, of course, my, daughter's name is Flora. My wife, she's also a botanist, and she loves plants as well. So we live in the countryside where the farm has all kinds of plants. And I think one of the things that made me love and try to preserve and conserve the ecosystems and species is when you understand how slowly a plant or tree grows, and how much it takes to keep them healthy. And the interactions between the animals and plants, the pollinators and the dispersers within the ecosystem, it's something that everybody should know and see. Not scientifically, but understand in terms of just how beautiful these natural interactions really are. And we as humans are a part of it. We can have good interactions, or we can have bad interactions in terms of destroying ecosystems. Understanding we are a part of the ecosystem is an important part to keep in mind." www.creativeprocess.info | |||
| 02 Jun 2023 | HENRIK FEXEUS - Mentalist, Author & TV Host “The Art of Reading Minds”,“Mind Melt”,“Cult” | 01:03:36 | |
Henrik Fexeus is an internationally bestselling author, lecturer, performer, and star of the TV show Mind Melt. An expert in psychology and communications, he travels the world "reading minds" and teaching others how to understand and manipulate human behavior through body language and persuasion. Henrik has studied mental skills like NLP, hypnosis, acting, and magic. “A mentalist is a kind of magician, an illusionist. And a mentalist uses whatever techniques are at that person's disposal to create the illusion of being able to read minds or being able to contact a supernatural presence…The only rule is that that part is fake, but then you can use techniques for magic or from stagecraft or from psychology. A mentalist is really someone who creates this illusion of having an almost supernatural ability. Having said that, today a mentalist sort of has come to mean something else, mainly due to popular culture TV series like The Mentalist and so on. And now there's this understanding of a mentalist as someone being able to read body language and influence behavior. It sort of ties into it all. And I've had a lifelong passion for magic, and it started when I was seven. Because I was always interested in the question: what if there's a color in the sky that we can't see? What if a handkerchief actually can vanish? What does that mean in terms of how the world works? So that was one part of it. I always longed for there to be something else. And I think one of the reasons for that was because I was quite the socially awkward child. I didn't have the skill set to interact in a frictionless way with my classmates, which meant that I was a weird guy. I was the one who got beaten up every single day at school, but I was also quite extroverted. So I didn't confine myself to my place in the corner. I was still there every Friday because on Fridays there was an open hour in class where you can perform or just show something. And I was always there to do magic because I had a skill. I could do something that the other guys couldn't. And then they beat me up again for it. But I do think that that realization that there's something going on here, that sort of set off something in my mind that this is something I needed to solve. I wanted to understand my bullies. This wasn't a conscious reflection on my part, but it was there. It basically felt like everyone else had been handed a handbook on social intelligence.” www.creativeprocess.info | |||
| 02 Jun 2023 | The Art of Reading Minds with Mentalist - HENRIK FEXEUS - Highlights | 00:10:44 | |
“A mentalist is a kind of magician, an illusionist. And a mentalist uses whatever techniques are at that person's disposal to create the illusion of being able to read minds or being able to contact a supernatural presence…The only rule is that that part is fake, but then you can use techniques for magic or from stagecraft or from psychology. A mentalist is really someone who creates this illusion of having an almost supernatural ability. Having said that, today a mentalist sort of has come to mean something else, mainly due to popular culture TV series like The Mentalist and so on. And now there's this understanding of a mentalist as someone being able to read body language and influence behavior. It sort of ties into it all. And I've had a lifelong passion for magic, and it started when I was seven. Because I was always interested in the question: what if there's a color in the sky that we can't see? What if a handkerchief actually can vanish? What does that mean in terms of how the world works? So that was one part of it. I always longed for there to be something else. And I think one of the reasons for that was because I was quite the socially awkward child. I didn't have the skill set to interact in a frictionless way with my classmates, which meant that I was a weird guy. I was the one who got beaten up every single day at school, but I was also quite extroverted. So I didn't confine myself to my place in the corner. I was still there every Friday because on Fridays there was an open hour in class where you can perform or just show something. And I was always there to do magic because I had a skill. I could do something that the other guys couldn't. And then they beat me up again for it. But I do think that that realization that there's something going on here, that sort of set off something in my mind that this is something I needed to solve. I wanted to understand my bullies. This wasn't a conscious reflection on my part, but it was there. It basically felt like everyone else had been handed a handbook on social intelligence.” Henrik Fexeus is an internationally bestselling author, lecturer, performer, and star of the TV show Mind Melt. An expert in psychology and communications, he travels the world "reading minds" and teaching others how to understand and manipulate human behavior through body language and persuasion. Henrik has studied mental skills like NLP, hypnosis, acting, and magic. www.creativeprocess.info | |||
| 03 Jun 2023 | ANTHONY JOSEPH - T.S. Eliot Award-winning Poet, Novelist & Musician, Lead vocalist of The Spasm Band | 00:17:01 | |
Anthony Joseph is a poet, novelist, academic and musician who moved from Trinidad to the UK in 1989. A lecturer in creative writing at Birkbeck College, he is particularly interested in the point at which poetry becomes music. As well as four poetry collections, a slew of albums, and three novels – most recently Kitch – Joseph has published critical work exploring the aesthetics of Caribbean Poetry among other subjects. He performs internationally as the lead vocalist for his band The Spasm Band. Sonnets for Albert is his first poetry collection since Rubber Orchestras. “Calling England Home” and “Language (Poem for Anthony McNeill)” were released in 2021 by Anthony Joseph and appear on his album "The Rich Are Only Defeated When Running For Their Lives”. | |||
| 04 Jun 2023 | CARL SAFINA - Ecologist - Founding President of Safina Center - NYTimes Bestselling Author | 00:04:44 | |
Carl Safina’s lyrical non-fiction writing explores how humans are changing the living world, and what the changes mean for non-human beings and for us all. His work has been recognized with MacArthur, Pew, and Guggenheim Fellowships, and his writing has won Orion, Lannan, and National Academies literary awards and the John Burroughs, James Beard, and George Rabb medals. Safina is the inaugural holder of the endowed chair for nature and humanity at Stony Brook University, where he co-chairs the steering committee of the Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science and is founding president of the not-for-profit Safina Center. He hosted the 10-part PBS series Saving the Ocean with Carl Safina. His writing appears in The New York Times, National Geographic, Audubon, CNN.com, National Geographic News, and other publications. He is the author of ten books including the classic Song for the Blue Ocean, as well as New York Times Bestseller Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel. His most recent book is Becoming Wild: How Animal Cultures Raise Families, Create Beauty, and Achieve Peace. "So we tend to take living for granted. I think that might be the biggest limitation of human intelligence is to not understand with awe and reverence and love that we live in a miracle that we are part of and that we have the ability to either nurture or destroy. The living world is enormously enriching to human life. I just loved animals. They're always just totally fascinating. They're not here for us. They're just here like we're just here. They are of this world as much as we are of this world. They really have the same claim to life and death and the circle of being." IG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast Photo: Carl Safina in Uganda | |||
| 05 Jun 2023 | Happy World Environment Day! Voices from the Parkinson's Community & Artpark Bridges Celebrate the Natural World | 00:02:49 | |
The Creative Process and One Planet Podcast wishes listeners Happy World Environment Day. For this special episode we celebrate the natural world with Artpark Bridges, the Parkinson's Community, independent living adults with Parkinson's disease, and People Inc, the Arts Experience, a day habilitation program for adults with developmental disabilities. Artpark Bridges is a year-round community engagement program led by interdisciplinary artist Cynthia Pegado, dedicated to empowering adults of diverse abilities and backgrounds through expressive arts workshops and performance opportunities. Serving the Buffalo-Niagara Falls region of New York State, Artpark Bridges connects citizens with a sense of inclusion and purpose, healing and creative expression. Cynthia Pegado Muriel Louveau "For me it is an artistic exchange but foremost a human experience. I cannot describe in words how this collaboration with the Artpark Bridges community inspires me, touches me, and opens my heart." Muriel Louveau, Artpark Bridges Sound Moves Me Artist-in-Residence. These recorded pieces have been developed with their students during "Our Garden " vocal workshop Poem "'Lily" written and read by Nancy (People Inc), "Nature" by Ed (PD group), "Fragile Beauty" by Nancy and Cynthia, "Garden of Love" by Cammie (People Inc). www.creativeprocess.info Flower Duet - Leo Delibes | |||
| 05 Jun 2023 | DITTE LYSGAARD VIND - Circular Economy & Design Expert - Author of Danish Design Heritage & Global Sustainability | 00:43:48 | |
Happy World Environment Day! Ditte Lysgaard Vind is a renowned circular economy and design expert and author of Danish Design Heritage & Global Sustainability (Routledge 2023) and A Changemakers Guide to the Future. She is the Chairwoman of the Danish Design Council and founder of The Circular Way. She is known for pioneering new materials as well as business models, while sharing the knowledge gained from practice through teaching and thought leadership, and is a member of the Executive board of The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts Schools of Architecture, Design and Conservation as well as the global SDG innovation lab UNLEASH. "Putting design first, it really enables us to shape a future that we don't yet know. But we need to be super tactile and practical about it as well. And then seeing that is something that design very much has the ability to do. And at the same time, having this growing frustration that wherever you go, wherever you talk about sustainability, it was a compromise. It was something that meant uglier, less convenient, more expensive, all these different things, but then diving into the Danish Design heritage, seeing that what set them apart was that after the World Wars, they had a social purpose of democratizing and rebuilding the welfare state, and that was not something that lessened the final result. On the contrary, it heightened the ambition, the final design, and the solutions." www.thecircularway.com www.creativeprocess.info | |||
| 05 Jun 2023 | The Circular Way with Circular Economy Expert DITTE LYSGAARD VIND - Highlights | 00:11:55 | |
"Putting design first, it really enables us to shape a future that we don't yet know. But we need to be super tactile and practical about it as well. And then seeing that is something that design very much has the ability to do. And at the same time, having this growing frustration that wherever you go, wherever you talk about sustainability, it was a compromise. It was something that meant uglier, less convenient, more expensive, all these different things, but then diving into the Danish Design heritage, seeing that what set them apart was that after the World Wars, they had a social purpose of democratizing and rebuilding the welfare state, and that was not something that lessened the final result. On the contrary, it heightened the ambition, the final design, and the solutions." Ditte Lysgaard Vind is a renowned circular economy and design expert and author of Danish Design Heritage & Global Sustainability (Routledge 2023) and A Changemakers Guide to the Future. She is the Chairwoman of the Danish Design Council and founder of The Circular Way. She is known for pioneering new materials as well as business models, while sharing the knowledge gained from practice through teaching and thought leadership, and is a member of the Executive board of The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts Schools of Architecture, Design and Conservation as well as the global SDG innovation lab UNLEASH. www.thecircularway.com www.creativeprocess.info | |||
| 07 Jun 2023 | E.J. KOH - Award-Winning Memoirist & Poet - The Magical Language of Others - A Lesser Love | 00:05:02 | |
E. J. Koh is the author of the memoir The Magical Language of Others, winner of the Washington State Book Award and the 2021 Pacific Northwest Book Award. For her poetry collection A Lesser Love she received the Pleiades Press Editors Prize. She is the co-translator of Yi Won’s The World’s Lightest Motorcycle, forthcoming from Zephyr Press. Her poems, translations, and stories have appeared in Boston Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, and World Literature Today, among others. She earned her MFA in Literary Translation and Creative Writing from Columbia University, and is completing the PhD program at the University of Washington in Seattle. She is a recipient of MacDowell and Kundiman fellowships. www.miafunk.com | |||
| 05 Jun 2023 | Special World Environment Day Stories - Environmentalists, Students & Teachers share their Love for the Planet | 00:18:53 | |
Today we’re streaming voices of environmentalists, students, and teachers with music courtesy of composer Max Richter. All voices in this episode are from our interviews for The Creative Process & One Planet Podcast or reflectors of our participating students. Voices on this episode are BRITT WRAY JEFFREY SACHS EVELINE MOL, Student Barnard College BERTRAND PICCARD, Aviator of 1st Round-the-World Solar-Powered Flight, Explorer, Founder, Solar Impulse Foundation AVA CLANCY, Student MIRA PATLA, Student DARA DIAMOND, Student ARIELLE DAVIS, Student CLAIRE POTTER, Designer, Lecturer, Author of Welcome to the Circular Economy MEGAN HEGENBARTH, Participating Student, University of Minnesota GRACE PHILLIPS, Participating Student, Pitzer College BIANCA WEBER, Participating Student, Syracuse University ELLEN EFSTATHIOU, Participating Student, Oberlin College SURYA VIR, Participating Student, University of Wisconsin-Madison MACIE PARKER, Participating Student, Boston University BEILA UNGAR, Participating Student, Columbia University CARL SAFINA, Ecologist, Founding President of Safina Center, Author of “Becoming Wild: How Animal Cultures Raise Families, Create Beauty, and Achieve Peace” Max Richter’s music featured in this episode are “On the Nature of Daylight” from The Blue Notebooks, “Path 19: Yet Frailest” from Sleep. Music is courtesy of Max Richter, Universal Music Enterprises, and Mute Song. www.creativeprocess.info | |||
| 08 Jun 2023 | WORLD OCEANS DAY | 00:22:11 | |
Happy World Oceans Day! Today we’re streaming voices of environmentalists and artists with music courtesy of composer, producer and multi-instrumentalist Erland Cooper. Voices on this episode are GIULIO BOCCALETTI PAULA PINHO RON GONEN MARCIA DESANCTIS JEAN WEINER DERRICK EMSLEY DR. FARHANA SULTANA NEIL GRIMMER ALAN JACOBSEN RICHARD VEVERS BRIAN WILCOX SETH M. SIEGEL JOELLE GERGIS JAY FAMIGLIETTI, Fmr. Senior Water Scientist at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Exec. Director, Global Institute for Water Security, Host of "What About Water?" Podcast ROB BILOTT JILL HEINERTH OSPREY ORIELLE LAKE JESS WILBER BERTRAND PICCARD IBRAHIM ALHUSSEINI GARY GRIGGS Sample Credits: BBC News Excerpt, Public broadcast, 19th July. Fair usage, courtesy Simon Gurney, BBC Studios Limited. BBC News Excerpt, Public broadcast, 19th July. Fair usage, courtesy Simon Gurney, BBC Studios Limited. UN Broadcast Excerpt, Greta Thunberg, Young Climate Activist at the Opening of the Climate Action Summit 2019, United Nations license 24 October 2022. CBS News Excerpt 1970. Fair usage, archive courtesy Leah Hodge, CBS www.creativeprocess.info Artworks by Mia Funk www.miafunk.com Music from Folded Landscapes courtesy of Erland Cooper and Universal Music Enterprises. | |||
| 08 Jun 2023 | RICHARD VEVERS - Founder & CEO of The Ocean Agency · Featured in Netflix’s Chasing Coral | 00:35:20 | |
Richard Vevers is the Founder and CEO of The Ocean Agency. He is a fellow of The Explorers Club and an Adjunct Professor at the University of Rhode Island. He is best known for his leading role in the Emmy Award-winning documentary Chasing Coral on Netflix and his work has been featured in numerous publications and documentaries. Before diving into ocean and coral reef conservation, Vevers worked at some of the top London advertising agencies and then as an artist and underwater photographer. This background guides his unique creative and business-thinking approach to ocean conservation that includes inventing the camera that took Google Street View underwater, pioneering virtual reality ocean education, currently available to over 90 million kids, leading the most comprehensive underwater photographic survey of the world’s coral reefs, and developing a science-based global plan 50 Reefs. "We don't use enough good storytelling when it comes to the ocean. We tend to focus on the ocean in almost that natural history approach, rather than talking about the people. Most people wouldn't be able to name an ocean explorer or anybody really associated with the oceans, which is a huge missed opportunity. We need more characters getting actively involved in storytelling around the ocean, so they become the sort of magnet for interest in the oceans." www.theoceanagency.org www.creativeprocess.info | |||
| 03 Jun 2023 | ROBERT PLANT - DICKIE LANDRY - LIL' BAND O' GOLD | 00:03:36 | |
Robert Plant is a singer and songwriter, best known as the lead singer and lyricist of the rock band Led Zeppelin. Regarded by many as one of the greatest singers in rock music, he’s known for his flamboyant persona and raw stage performances. He’s also collaborated outside of the rock genre. Here he performs with Lil' Band O' Gold. For nearly half a century, Richard “Dickie” Landry was at the center of the New York avant-garde. Born in the small Louisiana town of Cecilia in 1938, he began making pilgrimages to the city while still in his teens in search of the city’s most cutting edge gestures in jazz, and relaxed there not long after, falling in with a close knit community of artists and composers like Philip Glass, Keith Sonnier, Joan Jonas, Gordon Matt Clarke, Richard Serra, Robert Rauschenberg, Nancy Graves, Lawrence Weiner, Steve Reich, Jon Gibson, and Robert Wilson. https://unseenworlds.com/collections/dickie-landry www.creativeprocess.info | |||
| 11 Jun 2023 | ALICE FULTON - Poet, Essayist, Recipient of MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship | 00:08:34 | |
Alice Fulton’s books include Barely Composed, a poetry collection; The Nightingales Of Troy, linked stories; and Cascade Experiment: Selected Poems. Her book Felt received the Bobbitt Prize from the Library of Congress, awarded to the best book of poems published within a two-year period. She has received an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature and fellowships from the MacArthur Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, Guggenheim Foundation, and Ingram Merrill Foundation. Her other books include Sensual Math, Powers Of Congress, Palladium, Dance Script With Electric Ballerina, and an essay collection, Feeling As A Foreign Language. She lives in Ithaca, NY. www.miafunk.com | |||
| 12 Jun 2023 | ALICE NOTLEY - Poet & Artist - Academy of American Poets Award Winner | 00:04:32 | |
Alice Notley has published over forty books of poetry, most recently For the Ride (Penguin Books) and Eurynome’s Sandals (PURH). Notley has received many awards including the Academy of American Poets’ Lenore Marshall Prize, the Poetry Society of America’s Shelley Award, the Griffin International Prize, two NEA Grants, the Los Angeles Times Book Award for Poetry, and the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, a lifetime achievement award. She is also a visual artist and collagist, and a book of her poem-drawings is forthcoming from Archway Editions. Since 1992, Notley has lived and worked in Paris, France. www.miafunk.com | |||
| 14 Jun 2023 | MARK GOTTLIEB - Vice President & Literary Agent at Trident Media Group | 00:47:06 | |
As we're entering a world of advanced AI, what is the future of books? What makes stories enduring? And what role do literary agents play in nurturing authors and bringing great stories to the world? Mark Gottlieb is a Vice President and top-selling literary agent at Trident Media Group. He represents a wide range of authors across genres, many of whom have been awarded prestigious prizes and have secured places on the New York Times bestseller list. Among other achievements, Mark has successfully optioned and sold books to film production companies where they were adapted into blockbuster hits, beloved by audiences and critics. In addition to his work as an agent, Mark lectures on his experiences and craft at such noted venues as the Yale Writers’ Workshop, Cambridge University’s MSt in Creative Writing program, Columbia Publishing Course, and Sarah Lawrence College Writing Institute. He founded Emerson College's Wilde Press, and the Stamford Literature, Arts & Culture Salon (SLACS), where he currently serves as president. "There's a lot of apprenticeship in our industry because historically it had to be that way, otherwise what you would have in publishing - there's still a lot of this - is a bunch of English majors trying to make sense of how to run a business, right? Because book publishing or working at a literary agency - a talent agency for authors like I do - is at the crossroads of creative and business. And if you didn't have that kind of apprenticeship, someone to learn from at the company where you work, then we would all just be English majors just trying to feel our way in the dark. I think that the important thing for people to really know about storytelling is that books are sort of like the oil paintings of the new media. It's a very fine art form, an old art form, and a story exists in everything, whether it's a photograph, a painting, a song, or a movie, it all began with a story. And stories have been here from the dawn of time. They're going to forever be in our existence, but I think people should just always have curious minds and seek out stories and storytelling and try to see the story in everything, not just look at things for face value." www.tridentmediagroup.com/agents/mark-gottlieb www.creativeprocess.info | |||
| 14 Jun 2023 | What is the future of books? What makes stories enduring? with Literary Agent MARK GOTTLIEB - Highlights | 00:10:00 | |
"There's a lot of apprenticeship in our industry because historically it had to be that way, otherwise what you would have in publishing - there's still a lot of this - is a bunch of English majors trying to make sense of how to run a business, right? Because book publishing or working at a literary agency - a talent agency for authors like I do - is at the crossroads of creative and business. And if you didn't have that kind of apprenticeship, someone to learn from at the company where you work, then we would all just be English majors just trying to feel our way in the dark. I think that the important thing for people to really know about storytelling is that books are sort of like the oil paintings of the new media. It's a very fine art form, an old art form, and a story exists in everything, whether it's a photograph, a painting, a song, or a movie, it all began with a story. And stories have been here from the dawn of time. They're going to forever be in our existence, but I think people should just always have curious minds and seek out stories and storytelling and try to see the story in everything, not just look at things for face value." Mark Gottlieb is a Vice President and top-selling literary agent at Trident Media Group. He represents a wide range of authors across genres, many of whom have been awarded prestigious prizes and have secured places on the New York Times bestseller list. Among other achievements, Mark has successfully optioned and sold books to film production companies where they were adapted into blockbuster hits, beloved by audiences and critics. In addition to his work as an agent, Mark lectures on his experiences and craft at such noted venues as the Yale Writers’ Workshop, Cambridge University’s MSt in Creative Writing program, Columbia Publishing Course, and Sarah Lawrence College Writing Institute. He founded Emerson College's Wilde Press, and the Stamford Literature, Arts & Culture Salon (SLACS), where he currently serves as president. www.tridentmediagroup.com/agents/mark-gottlieb www.creativeprocess.info | |||
| 15 Jun 2023 | LAURIE ANDERSON - DICKIE LANDRY - "HOME OF THE BRAVE" | 00:04:16 | |
“Home of the Brave” performed by Laurie Anderson & Dickie Landry on The Late Show. Laurie Anderson is an American avant-garde artist, composer, musician, and film director whose work spans performance art, pop music, and multimedia projects. https://unseenworlds.com/collections/dickie-landry www.creativeprocess.info | |||
| 09 Jun 2023 | Pulitzer Prize-Winner JERICHO BROWN reads "Foreday in the Morning" | 00:04:28 | |
Jericho Brown is author of the The Tradition (Copper Canyon 2019), for which he won the Pulitzer Prize. He is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, and the National Endowment for the Arts, and he is the winner of the Whiting Award. Brown’s first book, Please (New Issues 2008), won the American Book Award. His second book, The New Testament (Copper Canyon 2014), won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. His third collection, The Tradition won the Paterson Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. His poems have appeared in The Bennington Review, Buzzfeed, Fence, jubilat, The New Republic, The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, TIME magazine, and several volumes of The Best American Poetry. He is the director of the Creative Writing Program and a professor at Emory University. www.jerichobrown.com | |||
| 16 Jun 2023 | MARGE PIERCY - NYTimes Bestselling Novelist, Poet & Activist | 00:05:41 | |
Marge Piercy’s 17 novels include NYTimes Bestseller Gone To Soldiers; National Bestsellers Braided Lives and The Longings of Women; the classics Woman on the Edge of Time and He, She and It, and her critically acclaimed memoir Sleeping with Cats. She’s written 20 volumes of poetry. The most recent is On the Way Out, Turn Off the Light. Born in Detroit, educated at the University of Michigan and Northwestern, she is active in antiwar, feminist and environmental causes. www.miafunk.com | |||
| 21 Jun 2023 | JEFFREY SACHS - Director, Center for Sustainable Development, Columbia - President, UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network | 00:26:37 | |
What is the path to peace for the war in Ukraine? Is America still powerful enough to impose global order? The US has just 4.1% of the world's population, while the BRICS countries have 41.5%. In this conversation with economist Jeffrey Sachs, we discuss the origins of the conflict in Ukraine and NATO enlargement, US-China relations, and the decline of US dominance. Jeffrey Sachs is Director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University and President of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network, Sachs has been Special Advisor to three United Nations Secretaries-General. He was an economic adviser to Gorbachev, Yeltsin, and Former President of Ukraine, Leonid Kuchma. Sachs was twice named among Time magazine’s 100 most influential world leaders, received the Tang Prize in Sustainable Development, the Legion of Honor from France, and was co-recipient of the Blue Planet Prize. He is Co-Chair of the Council of Engineers for the Energy Transition, and academician of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences at the Vatican. Sachs has authored and edited numerous books, including three New York Times bestsellers: The End of Poverty (2005), Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet (2008), and The Price of Civilization (2011). "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. The basic point is the US has 4.1% of the world population. So how could it presume to be the world leader? You know, the US is a powerful country. It's a rich country, but it doesn't run the world, and it should not aspire to run the world. That's a kind of madness, and the US ideology for a long time has been that the US should run the world. It's, to my mind, unbelievable. But then again, I've spent most of my career outside the US seeing the other 95.9% of the world. And I know that the other 95.9% of the world doesn't want the United States to run the world. It's not against the United States. It just says: let us have our own part of the world. We don't want you running the world. We don't want you deciding what our government is, who we are, how we rule ourselves. You know, you're just one place. And this, the United States leaders don't understand. They're very arrogant. They're very ignorant because of the two big oceans. They're very unaware of the history of other parts of the world. And we end up with this arrogant and naive and dangerous foreign policy because, there's no doubt the United States is rich and powerful, and it makes lots of weapon systems. And I'm 68 years old and the United States has been at war almost every year of my life from Vietnam and Laos and Cambodia and Nicaragua, Afghanistan and Iraq and Syria and Libya, and now Ukraine. Come on, give it a break." www.jeffsachs.org www.creativeprocess.info | |||
| 22 Jun 2023 | ANTHONY WHITE - Artist - What is the Role of Artists in Society? | 00:38:47 | |
What role do the visual arts play in drawing upon history, activating democracy, and asking questions about what culture can do? Australian artist Anthony White lives and works in Paris. White’s artistic work revolves around the notion of reclaiming the act of dissent through the production of cultural objects. His research is situated at the intersection of several fields in the social space including, politics, human rights, and postcolonialism. His practice is centered around concepts of design and its history as a form of social and political expression. He works with painting, drawing, collage, and printmaking. Through this practice, he tackles relevant questions to our time, to encourage emancipation and new ways of thinking. Anthony White’s artwork has been exhibited in Australia, Europe, and Asia. He has received support through cultural agencies such as The Trust Company Australia, The National Association for the Visual Arts,(NAVA) and The Copyright Agency Limited (CAL). He has also received critical acclaim by recognition in the form of art prizes and reviews most notably The Marten Bequest Travelling Scholarship (2007) The Creative Art Fellowship at The National Library of Australia (2020) and acknowledgements in The Australia Financial Review, Art Collector Magazine Australia and also Elle Décor US edition. His exhibition Manifestation is on show from the 12–30 of July at Lennox Street Gallery, in Melbourne. "Not in terms of subject matter. Not in the fact that I've taken images from the Eureka Stockade. It was a point in history where there were some gold miners, and they revolted against the government because the government was enforcing licensing fees that were outrageously expensive at the time. So, I don't reproduce figurative paintings, but I wanted to take that energy of what dissent is about, and I wanted to reclaim the energy of the gestural mark as a signifier of dissent. So when I was doing the research in the library, I came across a Roman guy called Raffaello Carboni who wrote a book on the Eureka Stockade. It's actually the book that Sidney Nolan had been reading and his point of motivation for making this large mural. And I found it quite interesting that Carboni was a politically active guy. He was a supporter of Mazzini and Garibaldi who founded modern Italy. And then three years after Carboni fought in the movement that unified Italy, he went to Australia to Victoria. And he was also involved in that Eureka Stockade moment. So I thought, Oh, that's an interesting connection between my roots in Australia and my roots in Europe. So Carboni goes back, and he dies in Rome. And I see that this moment of civil disobedience is interesting and what's happening now with the rise of Fascism. It's an interesting thing that maybe there need to be other moments of civil disobedience where democracy is activated in a way. So I think that the visual arts, they have a role to play in terms of activating democracy. In terms of drawing upon history and asking questions about what culture can do." www.anthonywhite.art www.creativeprocess.info | |||
| 26 Jun 2023 | NICHOLAS ROYLE - Author, Editor, Educator reads “Mother: A Memoir” | 00:04:41 | |
Nicholas Royle is Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Sussex, England, where he has been based since 1999. He has also taught at the University of Oxford, the University of Tampere, and the University of Stirling; and has been a visiting professor at the universities of Århus, Santiago del Compostela, Turku, Manitoba, and Lille. He is a managing editor of the Oxford Literary Review and director of Quick Fictions. He has published many books, including Telepathy and Literature, E.M. Forster, Jacques Derrida, The Uncanny, Veering: A Theory of Literature, How to Read Shakespeare, and Hélène Cixous: Dreamer, Realist, Analyst, Writing, as well as the novels Quilt and An English Guide to Birdwatching, and Mother: A Memoir. In addition, he is co-author with Andrew Bennett of three books: Elizabeth Bowen and the Dissolution of the Novel, This Thing Called Literature: Reading, Thinking, Writing, and An Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory Sixth edition, 2023. Royle’s current projects include a detective novel, a collection of essays about new approaches to narrative theory, and a collaborative work with Timothy Morton on Covid-19. His latest book, David Bowie, Enid Blyton and the Sun Machine, is due to be published in November 2023. Mother: A Memoir “Pre-word In my mind's eye she is sitting at the circular white Formica-top table in the corner. Morning sunlight fills the kitchen. She has a cup of Milky Nescafé Gold Blend and is smoking a purple Silk Cut. She is dressed for comfort in a floral bronze-and-brown blouse and blue jumper with light gray slacks and blue slippers. She is absorbed in a crossword (The Times) but not oblivious. She does what always takes me aback. She reads out one of the clues. As if I would know the answer. Her gift for crosswords is alien to me. I get stuck at the first ambiguity or double-meaning. Whereas she sweeps through all illusions allusions red herrings and anagrams and is done most days by lunchtime. But her fondness for crossword puzzles is inseparable from my interest in words. Where they come from. What they might be doing. Earliest recorded use of 'In my mind's eye': Shakespeare's Hamlet (around 1599). Referring to the Ghost. My mother died years ago. What has induced me to write about her after all this time remains mysterious to me. It is connected to the climate crisis. As the natural historian David Attenborough says: 'the collapse of our civilizations and the extinction of much of the natural world is on the horizon.' In ways I cannot pretend to fathom I have found that writing about my mother is bound up with writing about Mother Nature and Mother Earth. And no doubt it has to do also with my own aging and the buried life of mourning. The strange timetables of realization and loss. A memoir is 'a written record of a person's knowledge of events or of a person's own experiences'. 'A record of events written by a person having intimate knowledge of them and based on personal observation.' So the dictionaries tell us. But this memoir of my mother makes no attempt at a comprehensive record.” www.routledge.com/An-Introduction-to-Literature-Criticism-and-Theory/Bennett-Royle/p/book/9781032158846 www.creativeprocess.info | |||
| 27 Jun 2023 | MARCIA DeSANCTIS reads A Hard Place to Leave: Stories from a Restless Life | 00:03:33 | |
Does becoming a mother mean forgetting who you were before? How can we reclaim our lives as women, while still being mothers to our children? What does traveling alone teach us ourselves and those we love? Marcia DeSanctis is a journalist, essayist, and author of A Hard Place to Leave: Stories from a Restless Life, 100 Places in France Every Woman Should Go, a New York Times travel bestseller. A contributor writer at Travel + Leisure, she also writes for Air Mail, Vogue, BBC Travel and many other publications. She has won five Lowell Thomas Awards from the Society of American Travel Writers and is the recipient of the 2021 Gold Award for Travel Story of the Year. Before becoming a writer, she was a television news producer for ABC, NBC and CBS News, for most of those years producing for Barbara Walters. She lives in Connecticut. "I started looking over the stories that I had done. I would say the majority of the essays were not really about travel. They were more about aging and marriage and memory and all of those things, but I did find in the travel essays those kernels of things that I wanted to explore - bigger kernels of things that were sort of scratching at me from the inside like a piece of sand in my pocket that was irritating me and that I wanted to explore. What I found was that the theme of coming and going, the theme of arrivals and departures, the theme of entrances and exits, and the theme of home and away seemed to repeat itself. I felt that whenever I was somewhere, there was always a tide home. And when I was home, there was always the urge for going. And so I just weeded out and weeded out and really wanted to keep this theme of home and away." www.miafunk.com Photo credit: Elena Seibert | |||
| 28 Jun 2023 | FABRIZIO MANCINELLI - Composer, Songwriter, Conductor | 00:40:18 | |
What is the role of music in cinema and why it is such an important part of the storytelling process? How does music increase our capacity for empathy and wonder? Fabrizio Mancinelli is an Italian-American composer, songwriter, and conductor, best known for his musical contributions to the world of cinema. As a songwriter, he has created original scores for The Land of Dreams,The Snow Queen 3, The Boat, and the upcoming animated drama Mushka, among others. In 2017, he led the orchestral recording for the Academy Award-winning Green Book, and he recently scored the documentary Food 2050, which premiered at the UN Climate Change Conference in 2022. "I'm always trying to find my place here because, yes, I'm American. I'm an immigrant. I don't want to talk about the difficulties I face in my coming here, but it was not easy. So when I was writing the song called 'Give Up', and it's like a song that I'm singing to myself. Those are things, like there is a lot of personal experience. I was a luxury immigrant on a Fulbright grant on a J-1 Sponsor Visa, you know, with a solid family I could go back to in Italy in case anything went wrong. But at the same time, it was not easy. I want to do my job with a smile on my face, and it brought me to write the lyrics like: 'It's my turn. My time is now.' It's like something that I'm trying, we all try to get our turn to be our moment, to shine our moment. We're all waiting. We don't know if it will happen, but we need to try at least. We need to grab our life with our hands and make it work one way or another. So that's what I mean in my song 'Orlando Dreams.' I always have hope because I've been always on the other side of the world, you know, searching for inspiration, and I've always been like, you know what, I have to recognize there have been special people in my life that have given me their hands at the right moment. There have been also people that slammed the doors. I forgive, I don't forget. But there have been multiple people, way more that have given me their hands and a smile. Like even a compliment from a composer that I admire, you know, those things made a difference in life. A nice inspiration, like, yes, you can do it. It's difficult. I'm not going to say it's easy, but the right attitude can make it easier." https://fabriziomancinelli.us www.creativeprocess.info | |||
| 30 Jun 2023 | DOMINIC McAFEE - Marine Ecologist, University of Adelaide - Restoring Lost Oyster Reefs | 00:35:45 | |
We have lost around 85% of oyster reefs. That’s not only the loss of oysters but also the habitat they provide other marine animals and plants. Oysters are amazing, not only do some create pearls but as sequential hermaphrodites, they can switch between male and female almost on a daily basis. Dr. Dominic McAfee is a researcher at the University of Adelaide in Australia. His work centers around restoring lost marine ecosystems, specifically shellfish reefs. Along with employing novel technology and reef restoration projects, he seeks to understand how oysters enhance the resilience and function of coastal ecosystems. He seeks to develop conservation messaging strategies that enhance public engagement via conservation optimism. "There's this real emergence of young people doing incredible things enabled by bio-modern technology and a more globalized and connected world and access to amazing educational resources about what the environment does and means for humanity. People typically have quite a dire view of the state of the world but have a positive view of the local environment, which is very interesting. So it's the potential of every individual to make an impact and to spend a little bit of time thinking about their actions and, and how they can influence the way that other people also care about the environment. Because when you have young, impassioned people involved in environmental work, there's a magnetism there that draws other people in, and that's what I've seen from the young pioneers and the emerging scientists that they can generate a lot more excitement and momentum within their peer groups and their age groups." https://researchers.adelaide.edu.au/profile/dominic.mcafee www.creativeprocess.info | |||
| 30 Jun 2023 | Restoring Lost Oyster Reefs w/ Marine Ecologist DOMINIC McAFEE - Highlights | 00:16:19 | |
"There's this real emergence of young people doing incredible things enabled by bio-modern technology and a more globalized and connected world and access to amazing educational resources about what the environment does and means for humanity. People typically have quite a dire view of the state of the world but have a positive view of the local environment, which is very interesting. So it's the potential of every individual to make an impact and to spend a little bit of time thinking about their actions and, and how they can influence the way that other people also care about the environment. Because when you have young, impassioned people involved in environmental work, there's a magnetism there that draws other people in, and that's what I've seen from the young pioneers and the emerging scientists that they can generate a lot more excitement and momentum within their peer groups and their age groups." We have lost around 85% of oyster reefs. That’s not only the loss of oysters but also the habitat they provide other marine animals and plants. Oysters are amazing, not only do some create pearls but as sequential hermaphrodites, they can switch between male and female almost on a daily basis. Dr. Dominic McAfee is a researcher at the University of Adelaide in Australia. His work centers around restoring lost marine ecosystems, specifically shellfish reefs. Along with employing novel technology and reef restoration projects, he seeks to understand how oysters enhance the resilience and function of coastal ecosystems. He seeks to develop conservation messaging strategies that enhance public engagement via conservation optimism. https://researchers.adelaide.edu.au/profile/dominic.mcafee www.creativeprocess.info | |||
| 03 Jul 2023 | JASON deCAIRES TAYLOR - Sculptor, Environmentalist, Creator of Underwater Museums | 00:28:26 | |
What if museums weren’t confined to buildings but could be part of the natural world? What if sculptures could not only celebrate our oceans, but also provide habitats for marine life? Jason deCaires Taylor is a sculptor, environmentalist, and underwater photographer. His works are constructed using materials to instigate natural growth and the subsequent changes intended to explore the aesthetics of decay, rebirth, and metamorphosis. DeCaires Taylor's pioneering public art projects are not only examples of successful marine conservation but also works of art that seek to encourage environmental awareness and lead us to appreciate the breathtaking natural beauty of the underwater world. "The sculptures get claimed and almost owned by the sea. And the textures that form the patterns, all things that could never be reproduced by human hands. And it's entirely unpredictable in many cases. I go to some of the 'museums' expect to see this type of colonization or this type of growth, and it's nothing like how I've seen it envisaged it. It's completely different. Other times something has been made at its home, and there's an octopus that's built a house around it, or there's a school of fish that have nestled within the formations. There have been many, many different surprises along the way. I first started in the West Indies on an island called Grenada, which has a tropical reef system. And I expected the works to be sort of colonized. And I knew hard corals took a very long time to get established, to build their calcium skeletons, but actually, they were colonized within days. We saw white little calcareous worms, pink coraline algae, and green algae literally appeared sort of overnight. And then they had these incredible sponges. You know, you see a lot of sponges on the reefs and you don't really take a lot of notice, but actually, some of the formations and the patterns, they sort of blanketed the sculptures with a network of capillaries and veins, and these incredible sorts of scarlet reds and pinks. And it was something that I had no idea would colonize in such a way. And sponges are really interesting because they actually filter water, so they almost breathe the water in and then exhale it out once they've taken the nutrients. And, for me, that was when the work really became living and part of the ecosystem. And I thought it was a really nice metaphor that we are nature. We are part of the system and we're all connected. And I think we lose sight of that a lot." www.creativeprocess.info | |||
| 04 Jul 2023 | What if museums were part of the natural world? with Sculptor JASON deCAIRES TAYLOR - Highlights | 00:10:18 | |
"The sculptures get claimed and almost owned by the sea. And the textures that form the patterns, all things that could never be reproduced by human hands. And it's entirely unpredictable in many cases. I go to some of the 'museums' expect to see this type of colonization or this type of growth, and it's nothing like how I've seen it envisaged it. It's completely different. Other times something has been made at its home, and there's an octopus that's built a house around it, or there's a school of fish that have nestled within the formations. There have been many, many different surprises along the way. I first started in the West Indies on an island called Grenada, which has a tropical reef system. And I expected the works to be sort of colonized. And I knew hard corals took a very long time to get established, to build their calcium skeletons, but actually, they were colonized within days. We saw white little calcareous worms, pink coraline algae, and green algae literally appeared sort of overnight. And then they had these incredible sponges. You know, you see a lot of sponges on the reefs and you don't really take a lot of notice, but actually, some of the formations and the patterns, they sort of blanketed the sculptures with a network of capillaries and veins, and these incredible sorts of scarlet reds and pinks. And it was something that I had no idea would colonize in such a way. And sponges are really interesting because they actually filter water, so they almost breathe the water in and then exhale it out once they've taken the nutrients. And, for me, that was when the work really became living and part of the ecosystem. And I thought it was a really nice metaphor that we are nature. We are part of the system and we're all connected. And I think we lose sight of that a lot." What if museums weren’t confined to buildings but could be part of the natural world? What if sculptures could not only celebrate our oceans, but also provide habitats for marine life? Jason deCaires Taylor is a sculptor, environmentalist, and underwater photographer. His works are constructed using materials to instigate natural growth and the subsequent changes intended to explore the aesthetics of decay, rebirth, and metamorphosis. DeCaires Taylor's pioneering public art projects are not only examples of successful marine conservation but also works of art that seek to encourage environmental awareness and lead us to appreciate the breathtaking natural beauty of the underwater world. www.creativeprocess.info | |||
| 04 Jul 2023 | SERGEI GURIEV - Economist - Provost of SciencesPo - Co-author of Spin Dictators: The Changing Face of Tyranny in the 21st Century | 00:38:42 | |
What is a spin dictator? What does tyranny look like in the 21st century? Why is populism on the rise? And how do we reinvent democracy? Sergei Guriev is the co-author of Spin Dictators: The Changing Face of Tyranny in the 21st Century. Guriev is Provost and a professor of economics and at Sciences Po in Paris. He is a former Chief Economist of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, London, and a former Rector of the New Economic School in Moscow in 2004-13. "In Russia, I ran a university, a new economic school. And as an economist and a public intellectual, I was engaged in interactions with the government, including with Vladimir Putin. And there, of course, the situation was that Russia was already a nondemocratic country, meaning that it was a country where elections were not free and fair and partial censorship was already in place. Yet in those years, we could express ourselves openly, not on national TV, but at least in newspapers and on radio. And that eventually brought me into trouble with Vladimir Putin, who at some point suggested that I talked too much and I should not be in the same country. He's never expressed that clearly to me. He passed this message through various common friends. I was also interrogated. My office was searched. And at some point, common friends told me, 'Look, you shouldn't be here.' And I bought a one-way ticket for the next day and just left Russia." https://sites.google.com/site/sguriev/ www.creativeprocess.info | |||
| 05 Jul 2023 | Spin Dictators: The Changing Face of Tyranny in the 21st Century w/ Economist SERGEI GURIEV - Highlights | 00:11:04 | |
"In Russia, I ran a university, a new economic school. And as an economist and a public intellectual, I was engaged in interactions with the government, including with Vladimir Putin. And there, of course, the situation was that Russia was already a nondemocratic country, meaning that it was a country where elections were not free and fair and partial censorship was already in place. Yet in those years, we could express ourselves openly, not on national TV, but at least in newspapers and on radio. And that eventually brought me into trouble with Vladimir Putin, who at some point suggested that I talked too much and I should not be in the same country. He's never expressed that clearly to me. He passed this message through various common friends. I was also interrogated. My office was searched. And at some point, common friends told me, 'Look, you shouldn't be here.' And I bought a one-way ticket for the next day and just left Russia." What is a spin dictator? What does tyranny look like in the 21st century? Why is populism on the rise? And how do we reinvent democracy? Sergei Guriev is the co-author of Spin Dictators: The Changing Face of Tyranny in the 21st Century. Guriev is Provost and a professor of economics and at Sciences Po in Paris. He is a former Chief Economist of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, London, and a former Rector of the New Economic School in Moscow in 2004-13. https://sites.google.com/site/sguriev/ www.creativeprocess.info | |||
| 07 Jul 2023 | Erland Cooper - Nature’s Songwriter - Composer of “Folded Landscapes” | 00:57:51 | |
How has music transported you? Where do you find inspiration from the natural world? Where do you find moments of every day magic? "I recently wrote a classical piece of music, and I went up to Glasgow, and we recorded this piece of work with this wonderful ensemble called Studio Collective. These fantastic musicians all gathered in one room. And I told them that once I'd put it onto the magnetic tape, I would delete all the digital copies so there only existed one copy. And all of a sudden, this piece of music, this process of creativity became incredibly precious to the people that made it. And somebody said, 'Are you going to bury it?' And I replied, 'I'm going to plant it in the earth somewhere in the Scottish Islands. And I'd like the soil over the next three years to collaborate with the music. So it's my final collaborator.' I like this idea to compose, decompose, and then recompose. So the final piece of work when it comes out of the earth will reticulate the score with the new sounds, these new artifacts of decomposition that have been created by Mother Nature. For me, it's a kind of meditation on value and patience in a world of instant gratification." www.creativeprocess.info Photo by Alex Kozobolis | |||
| 07 Jul 2023 | Exploring Landscapes through Sound with Composer ERLAND COOPER - Highlights | 00:14:08 | |
"Music has the ability to transport you to a place and create a sort of internal landscape. And we all have life-changing things that happened to us. And I remember I made it as a way to kind of ease a busy mind. And perhaps I was missing home. I still call Orkney home, even though I'm not there every day. I'm a thousand miles away today, and I still call Orkney home. For example, when I hear the voice of the curlew, it transports me back to Orkney with such a jolt. In a heartbeat. And music can do that too. It's very transformative. Visual arts have the ability to do that too. And you could stare at a Rothko painting and cry and not quite know why. It can take days to figure out perhaps certain meanings from it. But music I think is quite instant. It can really do that." How has music transported you? Where do you find inspiration from the natural world? Where do you find moments of every day magic? www.creativeprocess.info Photo by Alex Kozobolis | |||
| 13 Jul 2023 | MARK MASLIN - Author of How To Save Our Planet: The Facts - Professor, Earth System Science, University College London | 00:45:07 | |
Can we imagine a world where we leave half the earth to the natural environment and use the other half for ourselves? Can we change history and protect the Indigenous, the vulnerable, and the very poorest in society? Mark Maslin is a Professor of Earth System Science at University College London. Maslin is a leading expert in understanding the anthropocene and how it relates to the major challenges facing humanity in the 21st century. He has written a number of books on the issue of climate change, his most book is How to Save Our Planet: The Facts. "I think the most important thing is realizing how much impact humans have had on the planet. For example, did you know that we move more rock and sediment than all the natural processes put together? We also have created enough concrete already to cover the whole world in a layer that's two millimeters thick, and that includes the oceans. We have also created and make something like 300 million tons of plastic every single year, which we know ends up in our rivers. It ends up in our oceans. And we've also found that microplastics have been found in human blood. So this is the impact we're having all around the world. We've also cut down 3 trillion trees, that's half the trees on the planet. We have doubled carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. We've increased methane by about 150%, which has led to a warming of the planet of about 1.2 degrees Celsius. And If you weigh the land mammals, 30% of that weight is us humans. There are 8 billion of us, and I have to say a few of us could lose a few pounds, but 67% of that weight is our livestock. And just 3% is those wild animals. So in less than 5,000 years, we've gone from 99% being wild animals to less than 3%. That's how much impact we humans have had on the planet." www.geog.ucl.ac.uk/people/academic-staff/mark-maslin www.creativeprocess.info All images courtesy of Mark Maslin | |||
| 13 Jul 2023 | How To Save Our Planet: The Facts - MARK MASLIN - Highlights | 00:21:20 | |
"I think the most important thing is realizing how much impact humans have had on the planet. For example, did you know that we move more rock and sediment than all the natural processes put together? We also have created enough concrete already to cover the whole world in a layer that's two millimeters thick, and that includes the oceans. We have also created and make something like 300 million tons of plastic every single year, which we know ends up in our rivers. It ends up in our oceans. And we've also found that microplastics have been found in human blood. So this is the impact we're having all around the world. We've also cut down 3 trillion trees, that's half the trees on the planet. We have doubled carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. We've increased methane by about 150%, which has led to a warming of the planet of about 1.2 degrees Celsius. And If you weigh the land mammals, 30% of that weight is us humans. There are 8 billion of us, and I have to say a few of us could lose a few pounds, but 67% of that weight is our livestock. And just 3% is those wild animals. So in less than 5,000 years, we've gone from 99% being wild animals to less than 3%. That's how much impact we humans have had on the planet." Can we imagine a world where we leave half the earth to the natural environment and use the other half for ourselves? Can we change history and protect the Indigenous, the vulnerable, and the very poorest in society? Mark Maslin is a Professor of Earth System Science at University College London. Maslin is a leading expert in understanding the anthropocene and how it relates to the major challenges facing humanity in the 21st century. He has written a number of books on the issue of climate change, his most book is How to Save Our Planet: The Facts. www.geog.ucl.ac.uk/people/academic-staff/mark-maslin www.creativeprocess.info Image courtesy of Mark Maslin | |||
| 14 Jul 2023 | TOM LIN - Author of The Thousand Crimes of Ming Tsu - Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction 2022 | 00:41:56 | |
How can we retell the story of America? In the United States of Amnesia, why does the Western celebrate cowboys but not all people who built this country? What does a Chinese-American hero look like in the 21st Century? Tom Lin is an American writer whose 2021 debut novel The Thousand Crimes of Ming Tsu chronicles the story of a Chinese American outlaw seeking revenge during America's railroad boom. The book won the 2022 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, making Lin the youngest Carnegie winner in the prize’s history. Tom Lin is currently pursuing an English doctorate at the University of California Davis. "When I was growing up, it was all about representation. I think that was the thing that was being championed: we need more people of color in books, movies, across all media. And then I think what we saw was an extremely cynical and capitalistic-minded ruthless optimization of that, where someone said: Oh, you want representation? Then we'll just throw in token people of color into projects. And then we'll check that box. And I think that became so prevalent in so many pieces of media that that became what we thought of as representation. I think it's a salvageable concept because, I mean, when I encountered books growing up, they were all with white people in them. Front to back, start to finish. It was just white characters. And so when I started writing stories of my own in school as a middle schooler they - surprise - they had white people in them, right? There were just white people talking about other white people. I went to public school in Queens. I knew very few white people. And so I think what representation does at its best is that it informs the boundaries of possibility. By seeing yourself represented in media, you become able to imagine your own stories transpiring in media and being made available for everybody else to witness. And so I think the point of representation is not just if we do a checklist of this piece of media, can we find a person of color. But I think the idea of representation is more that we want to be expanding the realm of storytelling, expanding what's possible by telling these stories that are not normally told.” www.creativeprocess.info Image courtesy of Little, Brown and Company & Tom Lin | |||
| 14 Jul 2023 | How can we retell the story of America? with Author TOM LIN - Highlights | 00:11:05 | |
"When I was growing up, it was all about representation. I think that was the thing that was being championed: we need more people of color in books, movies, across all media. And then I think what we saw was an extremely cynical and capitalistic-minded ruthless optimization of that, where someone said: Oh, you want representation? Then we'll just throw in token people of color into projects. And then we'll check that box. And I think that became so prevalent in so many pieces of media that that became what we thought of as representation. I think it's a salvageable concept because, I mean, when I encountered books growing up, they were all with white people in them. Front to back, start to finish. It was just white characters. And so when I started writing stories of my own in school as a middle schooler they - surprise - they had white people in them, right? There were just white people talking about other white people. I went to public school in Queens. I knew very few white people. And so I think what representation does at its best is that it informs the boundaries of possibility. By seeing yourself represented in media, you become able to imagine your own stories transpiring in media and being made available for everybody else to witness. And so I think the point of representation is not just if we do a checklist of this piece of media, can we find a person of color. But I think the idea of representation is more that we want to be expanding the realm of storytelling, expanding what's possible by telling these stories that are not normally told.” How can we retell the story of America? In the United States of Amnesia, why does the Western celebrate cowboys but not all people who built this country? What does a Chinese-American hero look like in the 21st Century? Tom Lin is an American writer whose 2021 debut novel The Thousand Crimes of Ming Tsu chronicles the story of a Chinese American outlaw seeking revenge during America's railroad boom. The book won the 2022 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, making Lin the youngest Carnegie winner in the prize’s history. Tom Lin is currently pursuing an English doctorate at the University of California Davis. www.creativeprocess.info Image courtesy of Little, Brown and Company & Tom Lin | |||
| 18 Jul 2023 | ELLIOT LEE - Alt Pop Singer/Songwriter, LGBTQIA+ Openly Non-binary - Autism Awareness Advocate | 00:29:44 | |
Have you ever experienced the feeling of being alone and not having a community? How can we build an atmosphere of inclusion and greater understanding? Brooklyn-based artist Elliot Lee fuses dark pop melodies with edgy vocals and innovative electronic-rock soundscapes to create an unpredictable sound, acting as a voice for the voiceless. Elliot Lee holds an awareness of what music that is unhindered by norms can do for the underrepresented. Elliot’s single "Easy To Be You” is dedicated to the LGBTQIA+ community and was released during PRIDE Month. Elliot confides that the release is, "about struggling with self image and identity expression as a queer person. "I struggle a lot with the feeling of being alone and not having a community. And I did even more as a teenager. That's kind of what my music is about, finding those people who get it so you don't feel like you're alone anymore. And that's why I talk about things that maybe I wouldn't talk about outside of music, because in music it's a safer and easier way to find people who really get it." www.elliotlee.com www.creativeprocess.info | |||
| 19 Jul 2023 | ERICA BERRY - Author of Wolfish: Wolf, Self, and the Stories We Tell About Fear | 00:46:07 | |
The lone wolf is actually alone because it's looking for connection. They leave in order to find a mate and form their own pack. If loneliness is an epidemic, what can wolves teach us about loneliness, courage, and connection? Erica Berry is the author of Wolfish: Wolf, Self, and the Stories We Tell About Fear. Her essays in journalism appear in Outside, Wired, The Yale Review, The Guardian, Literary Hub, The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, and Guernica, among other publications. Berry has taught workshops for teenagers and adults at Literary Arts, the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology, the New York Times Student Journeys in Oxford Academia. "And I think for so long I thought I'm only going to write about the real wolf. That's the most important thing. We've had too many stories. And yet I've gotten to a point where I just think we are living in a world where any story that comes out of my mouth is shaped by these other stories I've heard which are rooted in ecology, just like stories about biology, stories about how we name wolves are rooted in human choices. Science is tied to colonialism. Stories about how people interact in the landscape are very tied to who those people are and how they feel. Are they meant to feel that they belong there?" www.ericaberry.com www.creativeprocess.info Photo by Andrea Lonas | |||
| 21 Jul 2023 | JERICHO BROWN - Pulitzer Prize-winning Poet - Editor of “How We Do It: Black Writers on Craft, Practice, and Skill” | 00:49:13 | |
How do you find your voice? As a writer, how do you take what you know and what you believe to share your stories with the world? How do we let young writers know just how powerful they are and that what they do matters? In How We Do It: Black Writers on Craft, Practice, and Skill Pulitzer Prize winning, and National Book Award finalist author Jericho Brown brings together more than 30 acclaimed writers, including the likes of Tayari Jones, Jacqueline Woodson, Natasha Trethewey, among many others, to discuss, dissect, and offer advice and encouragement on the written word. Brown is author of The Tradition, for which he won the Pulitzer Prize. He is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, and the National Endowment for the Arts, and he is the winner of the Whiting Award. Brown’s first book, Please, won the American Book Award. His second book, The New Testament, won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. His third collection, The Tradition won the Paterson Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. His poems have appeared in The Bennington Review, Buzzfeed, Fence, jubilat, The New Republic, The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Paris Review TIME magazine, and several volumes of The Best American Poetry. He is the director of the Creative Writing Program and a professor at Emory University. "I would like for young people to understand just how powerful they are, just how much what they do matters, that they really can make changes that change themselves and change their communities. Change readership, change what a readership can be. Change people's ideas about what a writer might look like, for instance. That we do have agency, that we do have power, that we can make differences." www.jerichobrown.com www.creativeprocess.info | |||
| 24 Jul 2023 | The Playbook: How to Deny Science, Sell Lies, and Make a Killing in the Corporate World with JENNIFER JACQUET | 00:32:24 | |
In this episode of the Speaking Out of Place podcast, Professor David Palumbo-Liu interviews Jennifer Jacquet, who is an Associate Professor in the Department of Environmental Studies and Director of XE: Experimental Humanities and Social Engagement at NYU. She is also deputy director of NYU's Center for Environmental and Animal Protection. Her research focuses on animals and the environment, Agnotology, and attribution and responsibility in the Anthropocene. She is author of The Playbook: How to Deny Science, Sell Lies, and Make a Killing in the Corporate World-- a work of 'epistolary non-fiction' that makes the business case for scientific denial. Among other things, we learn how corporations create an arsenal of experts and pseudo-experts at prestigious universities to create misinformation and disinformation for corporate profit, and at great cost to the public. At the end, we make the case for a partnership between the sciences and the humanities to fight such lies and violence. Jennifer Jacquet’s research focuses on animals and the environment, Agnotology, and attribution and responsibility in the Anthropocene. She is author of The: How to Deny Science, Sell Lies, and Make a Killing in the Corporate World (Pantheon/Penguin, 2022)-- a work of 'epistolary non-fiction' that makes the business case for scientific denial. She also wrote Is Shame Necessary? (Pantheon/Penguin, 2015) about the evolution, function, and future of the use of social disapproval in a globalized, digitized world. She is the recipient of a 2015 Alfred P. Sloan research fellowship and a 2016 Pew Fellowship in Marine Conservation. https://jenniferjacquet.com www.palumbo-liu.com | |||
| 03 Aug 2023 | DAVID FENTON - Founder of Fenton Communications, Author of The Activist’s Media Handbook: Lessons From 50 Years as a Progressive Agitator | 00:49:41 | |
How can we effectively communicate that we're moving beyond climate change to a state of climate crisis? The trapped heat energy on Earth is equal to a million Atomic bombs going off every single day. Today we talk to someone who's been mobilizing the public mind for over 50 years. David Fenton, named “one of the 100 most influential PR people” by PR Week and “the Robin Hood of public relations” by The National Journal, founded Fenton in 1982 to create communications campaigns for the environment, public health, and human rights. For more than five decades he has pioneered the use of PR, social media, and advertising techniques for social change. Fenton started his career as a photojournalist in the late 1960s – his book Shots: An American Photographer’s Journal was published in 2005. He was formerly director of public relations at Rolling Stone magazine and co-producer of the No-Nukes concerts in 1979 at Madison Square Garden with Bruce Springsteen, Bonnie Raitt, James Taylor, Jackson Browne, and other artists. He has also helped create JStreet, Climate Nexus, the Death Penalty Information Center, and Families for a Future. He sold Fenton a few years ago to work on climate change full time. He is the author of The Activist’s Media Handbook: Lessons From 50 Years as a Progressive Agitator. "So a lot has been corporatized. That is certainly true, but not everything. And 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." https://davidfentonactivist.com www.creativeprocess.info All photographs © 1968-2022 David Fenton | |||
| 03 Aug 2023 | The Activist’s Media Handbook: Lessons From 50 Years as a Progressive Agitator - DAVID FENTON - Highlights | 00:10:09 | |
"So a lot has been corporatized. That is certainly true, but not everything. And 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." How can we effectively communicate that we're moving beyond climate change to a state of climate crisis? The trapped heat energy on Earth is equal to a million Atomic bombs going off every single day. Today we talk to someone who's been mobilizing the public mind for over 50 years. David Fenton, named “one of the 100 most influential PR people” by PR Week and “the Robin Hood of public relations” by The National Journal, founded Fenton in 1982 to create communications campaigns for the environment, public health, and human rights. For more than five decades he has pioneered the use of PR, social media, and advertising techniques for social change. Fenton started his career as a photojournalist in the late 1960s – his book Shots: An American Photographer’s Journal was published in 2005. He was formerly director of public relations at Rolling Stone magazine and co-producer of the No-Nukes concerts in 1979 at Madison Square Garden with Bruce Springsteen, Bonnie Raitt, James Taylor, Jackson Browne, and other artists. He has also helped create JStreet, Climate Nexus, the Death Penalty Information Center, and Families for a Future. He sold Fenton a few years ago to work on climate change full time. He is the author of The Activist’s Media Handbook: Lessons From 50 Years as a Progressive Agitator. https://davidfentonactivist.com www.creativeprocess.info All photographs © 1968-2022 David Fenton | |||
| 08 Aug 2023 | ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER: Athlete, Actor, American, Activist - Conversation with Editor DIAN HANSON | 00:58:04 | |
“Why I was different from all the other boys in my town I cannot tell you. I was simply born with the gift of vision.” – ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER Is there any better example of the American Dream than Arnold Schwarzenegger? What does it take to make your vision a reality? How do you cultivate iron focus to overcome any obstacle and realize your dreams? On the publication of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s limited edition two-volume book published by TASCHEN, we sat down with Senior Editor and Writer Dian Hansen to discuss Schwarzenegger’s life, accomplishments, and history of unforgettable performances. The book has been a decade-long collaborative process and along with portraits by leading photographers Richard Avedon, Annie Leibovitz, Robert Mapplethorpe, Herb Ritts, Francesco Scavullo, and Andy Warhol, it is also filled with photos from Arnold’s private archive and exclusive interviews. Dian’s other works include The Art of Pin-up, Masterpieces of Fantasy Art, and The Fantastic Worlds of Frank Frazetta. "It's not just that he grew up in a rural environment too. He was born on July 30th, 1947. And most of us today don't have any understanding or relationship to what Europe was like right after World War II. The winter of 1946/1947 in Austria was the most brutal in decades. The people already had too little food. They were in an occupied country. The summer potato crops failed. As Arnold has said, his mother had to go from farm to farm to farm, begging for food to be able to feed her children. His father, like all the men in the village, was defeated by the war. I mean, they were not just defeated by their side losing, but realizing what their side had stood for, that they were the bad guys. And he saw them all physically, emotionally, intellectually defeated and taking it out on their wives and children, that he was beaten and his mother was beaten. All the neighbor kids were beaten, and they were beaten into a kind of placid defeat. And he alone would not accept that. He could not see that life for himself. And he was, as a child, searching for ways to get out of that. And bodybuilding became that when he learned about bodybuilding as a very poor boy. They lived on the top floor of a house. They had no plumbing. They all bathed once a week in the same tub in the kitchen. And his brother and he had to bring the water in. His mother heated it, and they took baths one by one. Mother first, father second, older brother third, Arnold last in the tub of dirty water. And so he wanted out of that. And as a poor boy, he had nothing but his body to work with. That was it. There was not going to be any college. There was not going to be any of that. There was going to be some kind of menial job, or he could use what he had - his body - to get him out of there." www.taschen.com/en/limited-editions/film/03105/arnold-collector-s-edition www.creativeprocess.info Images courtesy of Taschen. | |||
| 08 Aug 2023 | ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER - From War-Torn Austria to Hollywood Success - Highlights | 00:10:23 | |
"It's not just that he grew up in a rural environment too. He was born on July 30th, 1947. And most of us today don't have any understanding or relationship to what Europe was like right after World War II. The winter of 1946/1947 in Austria was the most brutal in decades. The people already had too little food. They were in an occupied country. The summer potato crops failed. As Arnold has said, his mother had to go from farm to farm to farm, begging for food to be able to feed her children. His father, like all the men in the village, was defeated by the war. I mean, they were not just defeated by their side losing, but realizing what their side had stood for, that they were the bad guys. And he saw them all physically, emotionally, intellectually defeated and taking it out on their wives and children, that he was beaten and his mother was beaten. All the neighbor kids were beaten, and they were beaten into a kind of placid defeat. And he alone would not accept that. He could not see that life for himself. And he was, as a child, searching for ways to get out of that. And bodybuilding became that when he learned about bodybuilding as a very poor boy. They lived on the top floor of a house. They had no plumbing. They all bathed once a week in the same tub in the kitchen. And his brother and he had to bring the water in. His mother heated it, and they took baths one by one. Mother first, father second, older brother third, Arnold last in the tub of dirty water. And so he wanted out of that. And as a poor boy, he had nothing but his body to work with. That was it. There was not going to be any college. There was not going to be any of that. There was going to be some kind of menial job, or he could use what he had - his body - to get him out of there." “Why I was different from all the other boys in my town I cannot tell you. I was simply born with the gift of vision.” – ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER Is there any better example of the American Dream than Arnold Schwarzenegger? What does it take to make your vision a reality? How do you cultivate iron focus to overcome any obstacle and realize your dreams? On the publication of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s limited edition two-volume book published by TASCHEN, we sat down with Senior Editor and Writer Dian Hansen to discuss Schwarzenegger’s life, accomplishments, and history of unforgettable performances. The book has been a decade-long collaborative process and along with portraits by leading photographers Richard Avedon, Annie Leibovitz, Robert Mapplethorpe, Herb Ritts, Francesco Scavullo, and Andy Warhol, it is also filled with photos from Arnold’s private archive and exclusive interviews. Dian’s other works include The Art of Pin-up, Masterpieces of Fantasy Art, and The Fantastic Worlds of Frank Frazetta. www.taschen.com/en/limited-editions/film/03105/arnold-collector-s-edition www.creativeprocess.info Image courtesy of Taschen. | |||
| 01 Aug 2023 | SIMON DALBY - Author of Pyromania: Fire and Geopolitics in a Climate-Disrupted World | 00:39:28 | |
Wildfire season is starting earlier and lasting longer due to global warming across the world. What will we do to save the world on fire? How can we cure our addiction to fossil fuels which is verging on pyromania? Simon Dalby is author of Pyromania: Fire and Geopolitics in a Climate-Disrupted World and Professor Emeritus at Wilfrid Laurier University. His other books are Rethinking Environmental Security, Anthropocene Geopolitics: Globalization, Security, Sustainability, and Security and Environmental Change. He’s co-editor of Achieving the Sustainable Development Goals, and Reframing Climate Change: Constructing Ecological Geopolitics. "We also need to note most people move locally rather than globally. In the discussions about climate refugees, people are going to be dislocated. There are obviously going to be places that are going to become quite literally uninhabitable because they're too hot and too dry, or they've been flooded so frequently that they're just not sustainable. That said it is also worth pointing out that this climate change process is playing out in a global economy, which is also changing where people live and how people live very rapidly. the migration from rural areas to urban systems has been massive over the last couple of generations. We became an urban species." https://experts.wlu.ca/simon-dalby-1 www.creativeprocess.info | |||
| 11 Aug 2023 | SUE INCHES - Author of Advocating for the Environment: How to Gather Your Power and Take Action | 00:41:32 | |
How do we connect our personal stories to the big story about the environment? How can we motivate corporations and government to not just aim for profit, but include reporting on their environmental risks and impacts in their balance sheets? Sue Inches is an advocate, author, and teacher. She has worked in public policy for over 25 years, serving as the Deputy Director of the State Planning Office, and as a Director at the Maine Department of Marine Resources. She is author of Advocating for the Environment: How to Gather Your Power and Take Action, and teaches college and high school workshops on same. Her consulting work focuses on strategic planning, program development, and environmental campaigns. "Advocacy starts with your story, my story, and everyone else's stories. They add up to the big story that we are telling ourselves about the Earth. Over time, our collective stories will guide us to sustainable prosperity and well-being, or to total destruction. But let's not get ahead of ourselves. And the reason I bring up stories so early in the book is because when you're actually doing lobbying, it's the stories that the decision-makers remember. So legislators have said that to me when 'I go to vote on an issue, it's the stories I remember.' It's not the data. It's not the charts and graphs. Those are important, but it's the stories that they remember and that's how they vote on these issues." https://sueinches.com www.creativeprocess.info | |||
| 11 Aug 2023 | Advocating for the Environment: How to Gather Your Power & Take Action - SUE INCHES - Highlights | 00:11:36 | |
"Advocacy starts with your story, my story, and everyone else's stories. They add up to the big story that we are telling ourselves about the Earth. Over time, our collective stories will guide us to sustainable prosperity and well-being, or to total destruction. But let's not get ahead of ourselves. And the reason I bring up stories so early in the book is because when you're actually doing lobbying, it's the stories that the decision-makers remember. So legislators have said that to me when 'I go to vote on an issue, it's the stories I remember.' It's not the data. It's not the charts and graphs. Those are important, but it's the stories that they remember and that's how they vote on these issues." How do we connect our personal stories to the big story about the environment? How can we motivate corporations and government to not just aim for profit, but include reporting on their environmental risks and impacts in their balance sheets? Sue Inches is an advocate, author, and teacher. She has worked in public policy for over 25 years, serving as the Deputy Director of the State Planning Office, and as a Director at the Maine Department of Marine Resources. She is author of Advocating for the Environment: How to Gather Your Power and Take Action, and teaches college and high school workshops on same. Her consulting work focuses on strategic planning, program development, and environmental campaigns. https://sueinches.com www.creativeprocess.info | |||
| 21 Jul 2023 | How We Do It: Black Writers on Craft, Practice & Skill w/ JERICHO BROWN - Highlights | 00:15:16 | |
"I would like for young people to understand just how powerful they are, just how much what they do matters, that they really can make changes that change themselves and change their communities. Change readership, change what a readership can be. Change people's ideas about what a writer might look like, for instance. That we do have agency, that we do have power, that we can make differences." How do you find your voice? As a writer, how do you take what you know and what you believe to share your stories with the world? How do we let young writers know just how powerful they are and that what they do matters? In How We Do It: Black Writers on Craft, Practice, and Skill Pulitzer Prize winning, and National Book Award finalist author Jericho Brown brings together more than 30 acclaimed writers, including the likes of Tayari Jones, Jacqueline Woodson, Natasha Trethewey, among many others, to discuss, dissect, and offer advice and encouragement on the written word. Brown is author of The Tradition, for which he won the Pulitzer Prize. He is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, and the National Endowment for the Arts, and he is the winner of the Whiting Award. Brown’s first book, Please, won the American Book Award. His second book, The New Testament, won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. His third collection, The Tradition won the Paterson Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. His poems have appeared in The Bennington Review, Buzzfeed, Fence, jubilat, The New Republic, The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Paris Review TIME magazine, and several volumes of The Best American Poetry. He is the director of the Creative Writing Program and a professor at Emory University. www.jerichobrown.com www.creativeprocess.info | |||
| 19 Jul 2023 | Wolfish: Wolf, Self, and the Stories We Tell About Fear with ERICA BERRY - Highlights | 00:12:35 | |
"And I think for so long I thought I'm only going to write about the real wolf. That's the most important thing. We've had too many stories. And yet I've gotten to a point where I just think we are living in a world where any story that comes out of my mouth is shaped by these other stories I've heard which are rooted in ecology, just like stories about biology, stories about how we name wolves are rooted in human choices. Science is tied to colonialism. Stories about how people interact in the landscape are very tied to who those people are and how they feel. Are they meant to feel that they belong there?" The lone wolf is actually alone because it's looking for connection. They leave in order to find a mate and form their own pack. If loneliness is an epidemic, what can wolves teach us about loneliness, courage, and connection? Erica Berry is the author of Wolfish: Wolf, Self, and the Stories We Tell About Fear. Her essays in journalism appear in Outside, Wired, The Yale Review, The Guardian, Literary Hub, The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, and Guernica, among other publications. Berry has taught workshops for teenagers and adults at Literary Arts, the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology, the New York Times Student Journeys in Oxford Academia. www.ericaberry.com www.creativeprocess.info | |||
| 18 Aug 2023 | MARK HOWDEN - Vice Chair, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change - Director, Climate Change Institute at The Australian National University | 00:29:32 | |
Our window to adapt to a warming world is narrowing quickly. What it will take to avert the climate crises? "One of the things we have to do is we have to increase the rate of learning. We are entering into increasingly uncharted territory and not just in terms of climate change, but in many other areas of activity, AI being one of those, of course. And I think what we need to do is we need to find ways to learn more quickly, as a society, as communities, as villagers, as professional groups. And there are advantages of using some of those technologies in terms of accelerating that learning. We need to be discerning about the technologies we use, and we need to think about the relationships between those technology and social outcomes, environmental outcomes, how to redesign our systems, and how to redesign our governance. So I think there's going to be a need for a lot more thought and creativity in the future." https://iceds.anu.edu.au/people/academics/professor-mark-howden www.creativeprocess.info Photo credit: Lannon Harley/ANU | |||
| 22 Aug 2023 | STEPHANIE FELDSTEIN - Author of The Animal Lover’s Guide to Changing the World & Take Action: Save Life on Earth | 00:40:32 | |
How can we take inspiration from our love for animals to protect wildlife and change the world? How can we take action and start making changes in our lives? What if we measured success based on happiness and on the health of communities? Stephanie Feldstein leads the Center for Biological Diversity's work to highlight and address threats to endangered species and wild places from runaway human population growth and overconsumption. Previously Stephanie worked for Change.org, where she helped hundreds of people start and win online campaigns to protect wildlife. She has years of experience in organizing, outreach and communications. She is the author of The Animal Lover’s Guide to Changing the World, and the series aimed at young adults Take Action: Save Life on Earth. "Pretty much everything we do in our lives from the moment we wake up and take a shower, we're using water – that's shared resources. We're using energy that, for most of us, unfortunately, still comes from fossil fuels. We are making decisions about what we eat. We're making purchases that have an impact on the planet and on other animals based on where they came from and what they're made of. There are so many entry points for people to take action and start making changes in their own lives. And that's really important for people to start with what feels right to them. That's a great way to start getting involved in this." https://biologicaldiversity.org/about/staff/#sfeldstein www.creativeprocess.info | |||
| 22 Aug 2023 | How can we take inspiration from our love for animals to protect wildlife & change the world? STEPHANIE FELDSTEIN - Highlights | 00:12:39 | |
"Pretty much everything we do in our lives from the moment we wake up and take a shower, we're using water – that's shared resources. We're using energy that, for most of us, unfortunately, still comes from fossil fuels. We are making decisions about what we eat. We're making purchases that have an impact on the planet and on other animals based on where they came from and what they're made of. There are so many entry points for people to take action and start making changes in their own lives. And that's really important for people to start with what feels right to them. That's a great way to start getting involved in this." How can we take inspiration from our love for animals to protect wildlife and change the world? How can we take action and start making changes in our lives? What if we measured success based on happiness and on the health of communities? Stephanie Feldstein leads the Center for Biological Diversity's work to highlight and address threats to endangered species and wild places from runaway human population growth and overconsumption. Previously Stephanie worked for Change.org, where she helped hundreds of people start and win online campaigns to protect wildlife. She has years of experience in organizing, outreach and communications. She is the author of The Animal Lover’s Guide to Changing the World, and the series aimed at young adults Take Action: Save Life on Earth. https://biologicaldiversity.org/about/staff/#sfeldstein www.creativeprocess.info | |||
| 25 Aug 2023 | Actress CATHERINE CURTIN (Stranger Things) & Artistic Director KATE MUETH (Neo-Political Cowgirls) | 00:57:16 | |
Why do we make art? What can the performing arts teach us about how to engage in dialogues to overcome conflict and division? Our guests today are actress Catherine Curtin and artistic director Kate Mueth. Curtin is known for her roles on Stranger Things, Homeland, and Insecure. She played correctional officer Wanda Bell in Orange Is the New Black, and for this role she was a joint winner of two Screen Actors Guild Awards for Outstanding Performance by an Ensemble in a Comedy Series. Mueth is the Founder and Artistic Director of the award-winning dance theater company The Neo-Political Cowgirls that seeks to deepen and challenge the ways in which audiences experience stories and awaken their human connection. Based in East Hampton, New York they have performed to audiences in America and Europe. "I don't know why we would really want to tell stories without being connected to the meaning. And I think that's especially for women, but I do think for human beings, that is how we can work as hard and be able to get up the next morning and keep going. Because we are working through the meaning, and it feeds us as we're like making sense of it all, trying to make sense of it, and for being in community and communion, if I dare say that, as an ex-Catholic too. Like sharing as a witness what it is to be human and what it means, and through this work, tell our story. So yeah, I feel like it's a bit of a crushing experience, as an industry goes. And I often feel like I'm way flung out to the side in the process of how I do the work versus how the industry wants it done, expects it done, and how the money is made and having it done. And there's an unhappy marriage between art and commerce right now. We've changed as a society, and the internet and AI have changed the world. But I kind of don't care because I get one life that I'm aware of, and I just want to do it in a way that feels good and the art feels true for me." -Kate Mueth www.imdb.com/name/nm0193160/ www.creativeprocess.info | |||
| 25 Aug 2023 | Can Art Heal Society’s Divides? - CATHERINE CURTIN (Stranger Things, Orange Is the New Black) & Artistic Dir. KATE MUETH - Highlights | 00:18:11 | |
"I don't know why we would really want to tell stories without being connected to the meaning. And I think that's especially for women, but I do think for human beings, that is how we can work as hard and be able to get up the next morning and keep going. Because we are working through the meaning, and it feeds us as we're like making sense of it all, trying to make sense of it, and for being in community and communion, if I dare say that, as an ex-Catholic too. Like sharing as a witness what it is to be human and what it means, and through this work, tell our story. So yeah, I feel like it's a bit of a crushing experience, as an industry goes. And I often feel like I'm way flung out to the side in the process of how I do the work versus how the industry wants it done, expects it done, and how the money is made and having it done. And there's an unhappy marriage between art and commerce right now. We've changed as a society, and the internet and AI have changed the world. But I kind of don't care because I get one life that I'm aware of, and I just want to do it in a way that feels good and the art feels true for me." -Kate Mueth Why do we make art? What can the performing arts teach us about how to engage in dialogues to overcome conflict and division? Our guests today are actress Catherine Curtin and artistic director Kate Mueth. Curtin is known for her roles on Stranger Things, Homeland, and Insecure. She played correctional officer Wanda Bell in Orange Is the New Black, and for this role she was a joint winner of two Screen Actors Guild Awards for Outstanding Performance by an Ensemble in a Comedy Series. Mueth is the Founder and Artistic Director of the award-winning dance theater company The Neo-Political Cowgirls that seeks to deepen and challenge the ways in which audiences experience stories and awaken their human connection. Based in East Hampton, New York they have performed to audiences in America and Europe. www.imdb.com/name/nm0193160/ www.creativeprocess.info | |||
| 28 Aug 2023 | Voices of a People’s History of the United States in the 21st Century with ANTHONY ARNOVE & HALEY PESSIN | 00:52:52 | |
In this episode of the Speaking Out of Place podcast, Professor David Palumbo-Liu and Azeezah Kanji talk with Anthony Arnove and Haley Pessin about their new volume Voices of a People’s History of the United States in the 21st Century: Documents of Hope and Resistance. This book is not only a beautiful archive of people's struggles in the 21st century, but also a powerful tribute to and continuation of the work of professor and radical historian Howard Zinn. We speak with Anthony and Haley about the histories of struggles and the possibilities for building a more beautiful future. Anthony Arnove is the editor of several books, including, with Howard Zinn, Voices of a People’s History of the United States and Terrorism and War. He wrote the introduction for the thirty-fifth anniversary edition of Zinn’s classic book, A People’s History of the United States. Arnove cofounded the nonprofit education and arts organization Voices of a People’s History of the United States, wrote, directed, and produced the documentary The People Speak, and has directed stage and television versions of The People Speak in Dublin with Stephen Rea, in London with Colin Firth, and across the United States with various groups including Lincoln Center, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and the Sundance Film Festival. He produced the Academy Award-nominated documentary Dirty Wars. Arnove is on the editorial boards of Haymarket Books and Tempestmag.org and is the director of Roam Agency, where he represents authors including Arundhati Roy and Noam Chomsky. He lives in Hopewell, New Jersey. Haley Pessin is a socialist activist living in Queens, New York. They have participated in struggles against police brutality and mass incarceration, in solidarity with Palestine, in defense of abortion rights and reproductive justice, and as a legal service worker and union delegate for 119SEIU (Service Employees International Union). Pessin has spoken at conferences in Switzerland, Australia, Ireland, Quebec, and throughout the United States on the struggle for Black liberation. Their writing has appeared in New Politics and at Tempestmag.org, where they currently serve on the editorial board. "We have to create alternative institutions to understand history. And to have conversations about how we can intervene because these conversations are increasingly being criminalized, and librarians are being fired and punished. Teachers are also being fired. Whole colleges are being taken over and certain courses are being labeled as not credit-worthy and being canceled. And while conversations around critical race theory and other topics are being declared illegal, there's a long history of book banning in this country. There's a long history of criminalizing dissent in this country, but I do think we all have to recognize that we're in a much more dangerous moment right now, where a new form of McCarthyism is emboldened and we have to speak out against that." www.palumbo-liu.com Photo credit: Francesca Ruggiero and Eric Soucy | |||
| 29 Aug 2023 | SHEHAN KARUNATILAKA - Booker Prize-winning Author of The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida | 00:53:05 | |
What happens when we die? What happens to our memories and consciousness when our bodies cease to be? In the end, is it the things we did and the people we loved that give our lives meaning? Shehan Karunatilaka is the multi-award winning author. He is known for his novels dealing with the history, politics, and folklore of his home country of Sri Lanka. He won the Commonwealth Book Prize and the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature for his debut novel, Chinaman: The Legend of Pradeep Mathew, and the Booker Prize 2022 for his second novel, The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida. In addition to novels, he has written rock songs, screenplays and travel stories. Born in Colombo, he studied in New Zealand and has lived and worked in London, Amsterdam, and Singapore. "So this was the decision to write in the second person. A lot of people ask me: why? There are not many examples of this technique. The reason I opted for that is I was trying to figure out interviewing a ghost. And one of the challenges was: what does a disembodied voice sound like? The narrator's body has been chopped up and chucked in a lake. So, I figured that if anything survives the death of your body, it's perhaps the voice in your head. The voice in my head is in the second person. I don't know about your head or anyone else's head, but in mine, it's the second person. It's almost like someone else telling me: Yeah, you should have worn a better shirt for this interview. You should have read a better chapter. And it's almost like someone is talking to me. And I tried this technique, and I think Maali Almeida also questions. Who is the you that's telling the story? And this is addressed. We've all had experiences where we've done something or said something and we've thought: what was I thinking? Why did I do that? And what made me do that? And so Maali also ponders: Is the voice telling the story, is that me, or is it someone else? Is there a spirit? Because he observes that spirits, because they're so bored - because I have to also figure out what ghosts do all day? Because we know in horror movies, ghosts turn up and be scary. And I don't know if there are resolutions in the book, but there is the idea that maybe are your thoughts your own? Or is someone else whispering them to you?" www.shehanwriter.com www.creativeprocess.info Photo credit: David Parry/Booker Prize Foundation | |||
| 29 Aug 2023 | What happens when we die? What happens to our memories & consciousness? Booker Prize-winner SHEHAN KARUNATILAKA - Highlights | 00:12:43 | |
"So this was the decision to write in the second person. A lot of people ask me: why? There are not many examples of this technique. The reason I opted for that is I was trying to figure out interviewing a ghost. And one of the challenges was: what does a disembodied voice sound like? The narrator's body has been chopped up and chucked in a lake. So, I figured that if anything survives the death of your body, it's perhaps the voice in your head. The voice in my head is in the second person. I don't know about your head or anyone else's head, but in mine, it's the second person. It's almost like someone else telling me: Yeah, you should have worn a better shirt for this interview. You should have read a better chapter. And it's almost like someone is talking to me. And I tried this technique, and I think Maali Almeida also questions. Who is the you that's telling the story? And this is addressed. We've all had experiences where we've done something or said something and we've thought: what was I thinking? Why did I do that? And what made me do that? And so Maali also ponders: Is the voice telling the story, is that me, or is it someone else? Is there a spirit? Because he observes that spirits, because they're so bored - because I have to also figure out what ghosts do all day? Because we know in horror movies, ghosts turn up and be scary. And I don't know if there are resolutions in the book, but there is the idea that maybe are your thoughts your own? Or is someone else whispering them to you?" What happens when we die? What happens to our memories and consciousness when our bodies cease to be? In the end, is it the things we did and the people we loved that give our lives meaning? Shehan Karunatilaka is the multi-award winning author. He is known for his novels dealing with the history, politics, and folklore of his home country of Sri Lanka. He won the Commonwealth Book Prize and the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature for his debut novel, Chinaman: The Legend of Pradeep Mathew, and the Booker Prize 2022 for his second novel, The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida. In addition to novels, he has written rock songs, screenplays and travel stories. Born in Colombo, he studied in New Zealand and has lived and worked in London, Amsterdam, and Singapore. www.shehanwriter.com www.creativeprocess.info | |||
| 30 Aug 2023 | Scientist Rebellion with Activist, Astrophysicist TIM HEWLETT | 00:22:01 | |
In this episode of the Speaking Out of Place podcast, Professor David Palumbo-Liu interviews climate activist, astrophysicist and co-founder of Scientist Rebellion Tim Hewlett. Scientist Rebellion is a growing climate activist group with 1000+ scientists and academics across 32 countries. Members range from science students and professors to IPCC contributors and leading climate-related scientists. Through disruptive nonviolent action, Scientist Rebellion demands emergency decarbonization via economic degrowth. During acts of civil resistance, members wear lab coats, and volunteers organize the vast majority of the campaign activity. "I think the more pernicious aspect is the way that science as a set of institutions fits into a paradigm that is doomed from the outset. For instance, if you look at the framing of the science within the IPCC reports and how that informs the construction of policy related to the climate around the globe, well, it's foundationally dishonest. If you frame an entire report around the need to keep temperatures below 1.5 degrees or 2 degrees, and all of the efforts that societies are going to make to do that, and you omit from the public discussion the fact that we have no chance whatsoever of achieving those goals...there's a really commonly used measure within climate science called the equilibrium climate sensitivity sample, which says basically how much heating do you expect per doubling of greenhouse gas and concentrations in the atmosphere? It's a robust metric, and that suggests that if you double the greenhouse gas concentrations, you should get at least two and a half, probably closer to five degrees of heating. So we're double impacting the world. We've doubled greenhouse gas concentration. So in what scientific world is it reasonable to construct your arguments around a fantasy like 1.5 degrees? So that's the kind of more pernicious aspect of it that allows corporations, the fossil fuel industry, and the government to keep on polluting, and the idea that the scientific community is saying, yeah, we can still reach these goals.” www.palumbo-liu.com | |||
| 05 Sep 2023 | JAMES BROWNING - Founder of F Minus: Calling for Divestment from Fossil Fuel Lobbyists | 00:44:22 | |
Why are fossil fuel lobbyists also allowed to work for communities, schools, businesses, and nonprofit organizations being harmed by the climate crisis without declaring their conflict of interest? Why divestment from fossil fuels should include divesting from lobbyists which play for both sides. James Browning is the founder of F Minus, a research and advocacy group that tracks the extent to which fossil fuel lobbyists also represent victims of the climate crisis. He is also a writer and game designer, and his novel The Fracking King was named one of the best 100 books of 2014 by Amazon. "I have two kids. And what I love about kids is how they can immediately spot an adult who is lying or is just saying something that is not real. And I think it's a beautiful thing to have. And young people going to work on the climate crisis or as artists or whatever passion you have - it is just so important to hold on to that. That sense of truth, your north star, what is right for you is the most important thing to hold onto." www.creativeprocess.info | |||
| 05 Sep 2023 | Unmasking Fossil Fuel Lobbyists who Play for Both Sides of the Climate Crisis with JAMES BROWNING - Highlights | 00:10:41 | |
"I have two kids. And what I love about kids is how they can immediately spot an adult who is lying or is just saying something that is not real. And I think it's a beautiful thing to have. And young people going to work on the climate crisis or as artists or whatever passion you have - it is just so important to hold on to that. That sense of truth, your north star, what is right for you is the most important thing to hold onto." Why are fossil fuel lobbyists also allowed to work for communities, schools, businesses, and nonprofit organizations being harmed by the climate crisis without declaring their conflict of interest? Why divestment from fossil fuels should include divesting from lobbyists which play for both sides. James Browning is the founder of F Minus, a research and advocacy group that tracks the extent to which fossil fuel lobbyists also represent victims of the climate crisis. He is also a writer and game designer, and his novel The Fracking King was named one of the best 100 books of 2014 by Amazon. www.creativeprocess.info | |||
| 08 Sep 2023 | LESLEY HUGHES - Lead Author of IPCC 4th & 5th Assessment Reports - Director of Climate Council of Australia | 00:37:23 | |
Now in the 21st century, with an abundance of renewable technologies, why is the world still using 18th-century energy technology? How can each of us harness our unique skills to help solve the climate crisis? Lesley Hughes is a Distinguished Professor of Biology and Interim Executive Dean of the Faculty of Science & Engineering at Macquarie University. She is an ecologist whose main research interest has been the impacts of climate change on species and ecosystems, and the implications of climate change for conservation. She was a Lead Author of the IPCC’s 4th and 5th Assessment Report, Director for the WWF Australia and federal Climate Commissioner and is now a Councillor and Director with the Climate Council of Australia. She is also a member of the Wentworth Group of Concerned Scientists. "It's certainly not the case that scientists should be the only people communicating. We have to have everybody in this mix because we're all in this together. So we have to have good science that's communicated. We have to have smart engineers who can work on the technological solutions. We have to have lawyers who are undertaking climate litigation. We have to have creative artists who can tell stories and appeal to people's emotions. No one group should have a responsibility to solve the climate crisis. It's got to be all of those groups bringing what they call the time, the talent, and the treasure to work together on this. We are all in this together, and we've all got a suite of different skills that have to be harnessed to solve this problem." https://researchers.mq.edu.au/en/persons/lesley-hughes www.creativeprocess.info | |||
| 08 Sep 2023 | Harnessing Diverse Skills to Tackle the Climate Crisis with IPPC Lead Author LESLEY HUGHES - Highlights | 00:10:09 | |
"It's certainly not the case that scientists should be the only people communicating. We have to have everybody in this mix because we're all in this together. So we have to have good science that's communicated. We have to have smart engineers who can work on the technological solutions. We have to have lawyers who are undertaking climate litigation. We have to have creative artists who can tell stories and appeal to people's emotions. No one group should have a responsibility to solve the climate crisis. It's got to be all of those groups bringing what they call the time, the talent, and the treasure to work together on this. We are all in this together, and we've all got a suite of different skills that have to be harnessed to solve this problem." Now in the 21st century, with an abundance of renewable technologies, why is the world still using 18th-century energy technology? How can each of us harness our unique skills to help solve the climate crisis? Lesley Hughes is a Distinguished Professor of Biology and Interim Executive Dean of the Faculty of Science & Engineering at Macquarie University. She is an ecologist whose main research interest has been the impacts of climate change on species and ecosystems, and the implications of climate change for conservation. She was a Lead Author of the IPCC’s 4th and 5th Assessment Report, Director for the WWF Australia and federal Climate Commissioner and is now a Councillor and Director with the Climate Council of Australia. She is also a member of the Wentworth Group of Concerned Scientists. https://researchers.mq.edu.au/en/persons/lesley-hughes www.creativeprocess.info | |||
| 11 Sep 2023 | ROB VERCHICK - Leading Climate Change Scholar - Author of The Octopus in the Parking Garage | 00:51:15 | |
Rob Verchick is one of the nation’s leading scholars in disaster and climate change law and a former EPA official in the Obama administration. He holds the Gauthier-St. Martin Eminent Scholar Chair in Environmental Law at Loyola University New Orleans. Professor Verchick is also a Senior Fellow in Disaster Resilience at Tulane University and the President of the Center for Progressive Reform, a research and advocacy organization that advocates for solutions to our most pressing societal challenges. He is the author of numerous articles and books, including The Octopus in the Parking Garage. A Call for Climate Resilience. “I was an English major in college. But here's the thing. I believe that the strongest machine we have, the strongest empathy machine that we have is literature. The best way to get people to feel what someone else is feeling is through literature and stories. And I also think that feeling and emotion are an important part of reasoning and governing too. It's not the only part, but I think you have to understand how people see the world and how they feel about the world. So in my classes, I teach law classes. I teach policy classes. I often assign novels. We read in one of my classes Their Eyes Were Watching God, the case about a hypothetical hurricane in Florida written by Zora Neale Hurston. We read Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood, which is a kind of dystopian novel that involves climate change. We've read The Handmaid's Tale in my classes. But I think what these books do is they, number one, certain books that are speculative, like Margaret Atwood's work, Joyce Carol Oates has written some things like this too. What's interesting about them is that they make us, they open up our imaginations and say, Oh, I never thought something like that could happen. We hope it doesn't, but it could, right? And so how do we change the way we look at the future? And it also changes, I think, the way that we understand people's lives. So even in a book like Their Eyes Were Watching God, which takes place in the early 20th century, and obviously involves race issues and a whole lot of other things. It leads us to think and see the world through a young black woman's perspective in the early 20th century. And there's something about that exercise of being able to some extent put yourself in the shoes of somebody else that I think is really important for governance. I think it's really important for policy. I think it's really important for advocates of any kind because listening and trying to understand what another person is perceiving...You can never do it completely, obviously, but I think it is really one of the most important parts of collective action of working with other people.” Twitter/X/Instagram/Facebook: @robverchick @robsoctopusbook www.creativeprocess.info | |||
| 15 Sep 2023 | BENOIT DELHOMME - Cinematographer of At Eternity’s Gate w/ Willem Dafoe, The Theory of Everything w/ Eddie Redmayne - Part 1 | 00:30:33 | |
What makes films memorable and meaningful? Great cinematographers are not only translators of a director’s vision but are involved in a dance between director and actor. When combined with personal techniques like handheld, the camera itself can become a character, bringing us back in time and behind the eyes of well-known figures like Van Gogh and Stephen Hawking, which is what Benoît Delhomme did in the films At Eternity’s Gate and The Theory of Everything. Benoît Delhomme studied cinematography at the École nationale supérieure Louis-Lumière and went on to make his breakthrough as a director of photography for the movie The Scent of Green Papaya directed by Tran Anh Hung. The film went on to win the Caméra d'Or Award at the Cannes Film Festival and was nominated for an Academy Award. Benoît has established himself as an international cinematographer and has worked with creatives such as Al Pacino, Julian Schnabel, and James Marsh. Over the years, Benoît Delhomme has worked on a wide array of films where his focus has been to tell a strong story through the visual. This focus has shined not only through his work as a cinematographer, but also his work as a painter. "I certainly like a handheld camera, It's a bit like playing a saxophone. It's like the pace of walking or how I stop or I decide to go closer to the actor or to take more distance is so free. No one is telling me to go one step forward or one step back. I have to decide on the spot. So there certainly a freedom like a painter with a brush. It's nice because you have even the vibrations, your rhythms, the actor's rhythms. It's this dance." www.benoitdelhomme.com www.creativeprocess.info | |||
| 19 Sep 2023 | The Feminist Killjoy Handbook with SARA AHMED | 00:46:47 | |
In this episode of the Speaking Out of Place podcast, Professor David Palumbo-Liu and Azeezah Kanji talk with Sara Ahmed about her new book, The Feminist Killjoy Handbook. How and why is it that complaining about sexism, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, and other forms of bigotry, is considered impolite? How is civility uncivil, and the mandate to be “happy” a tool for silencing grievances? Sara Ahmed tackles all those questions, and gives us strength and courage to keep on killingjoy and speaking truth. Sara Ahmed is an independent queer feminist scholar of colour. Her work is concerned with how power is experienced and challenged in everyday life and institutional cultures. Her first trade book, The Feminist Killjoy Handbook is coming out with Seal Press next month. Previous books (all published by Duke University Press) include Complaint! (2021), What's The Use? On the Uses of Use (2019), Living a Feminist Life (2017), Willful Subjects (2014), On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life (2012), The Promise of Happiness (2010) and Queer Phenomenology: Objects, Orientations, Others (2006). She is currently writing A Complainer’s Handbook: A Guide to Building Less Hostile Institutions and has begun a new project on common sense. She blogs at feministkilljoy.com. "She often said I was the daughter she didn't have. And I was the daughter she had, in fact, because I'll say that to you. And I got a lot from her. She was very much willing always to speak her mind. And I would watch her tell my father off. It would be just like, yeah, this is possible! And she was outspoken, but also very loving. She's no longer with us. I never came out to her in the sense of saying 'I am a lesbian' or whatever, but I think she kind of knew. We had conversations, and I think she would have been okay with it. And because she was just a very, very curious and creative person and an enormous influence in my life." https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/454793/the-feminist-killjoy-handbook-by-ahmed-sara/9780241619537 www.palumbo-liu.com Photo credit: Sarah Franklin | |||
| 20 Sep 2023 | JIM SHEPARD - Author of The Book of Aron, Project X, The World to Come starring Casey Affleck, Vanessa Kirby, Katherine Waterston | 00:48:09 | |
How can literature help us extend our empathic imaginations? How can writing and reading expand our curiosity and compassion for people in situations distant from our own? Jim Shepard is the author of seven previous novels, most recently The Book of Aron (winner of the 2016 PEN New England Award, the Sophie Brody medal for achievement in Jewish literature, the Ribalow Prize for Jewish literature, the Clark Fiction Prize, and a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award) and five story collections, including Like You’d Understand, Anyway, which was a finalist for the National Book Award and won The Story Prize. His short fiction has appeared in, among other magazines, The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, McSweeney’s, The Paris Review, The Atlantic, Esquire, Tin House, Granta, Zoetrope, Electric Literature, and Vice, and has often been selected for The Best American Short Stories and The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories. He lives in Williamstown, Massachusetts, with his wife, three children, and three beagles, and he teaches film and creative writing at Williams College. His story “The World to Come” was adapted into a feature film starring Casey Affleck, Vanessa Kirby, and Katherine Waterston. "In terms of what I'm writing, I'm always trying to make myself a more interesting human being. And so that means I'm coming across these human dilemmas where I'm like what would it have been like to be in that position? And that snags my emotional imagination. I do think that literature is all about extending the empathetic imagination. And so I'm always looking to educate myself in emotional terms, too. Because I'm very interested in the way we respond in those situations where it feels like we both have responsibility, and we don't have responsibility." https://jimshepard.wordpress.com www.creativeprocess.info | |||
| 20 Sep 2023 | The Power of Empathy: How Literature Expands Our Worldview with JIM SHEPARD - Highlights | 00:11:39 | |
"In terms of what I'm writing, I'm always trying to make myself a more interesting human being. And so that means I'm coming across these human dilemmas where I'm like what would it have been like to be in that position? And that snags my emotional imagination. I do think that literature is all about extending the empathetic imagination. And so I'm always looking to educate myself in emotional terms, too. Because I'm very interested in the way we respond in those situations where it feels like we both have responsibility, and we don't have responsibility." How can literature help us extend our empathic imaginations? How can writing and reading expand our curiosity and compassion for people in situations distant from our own? Jim Shepard is the author of seven previous novels, most recently The Book of Aron (winner of the 2016 PEN New England Award, the Sophie Brody medal for achievement in Jewish literature, the Ribalow Prize for Jewish literature, the Clark Fiction Prize, and a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award) and five story collections, including Like You’d Understand, Anyway, which was a finalist for the National Book Award and won The Story Prize. His short fiction has appeared in, among other magazines, The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, McSweeney’s, The Paris Review, The Atlantic, Esquire, Tin House, Granta, Zoetrope, Electric Literature, and Vice, and has often been selected for The Best American Short Stories and The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories. He lives in Williamstown, Massachusetts, with his wife, three children, and three beagles, and he teaches film and creative writing at Williams College. His story “The World to Come” was adapted into a feature film starring Casey Affleck, Vanessa Kirby, and Katherine Waterston. https://jimshepard.wordpress.com www.creativeprocess.info | |||
| 21 Sep 2023 | NAN HAUSER - Whale Researcher - President, Center for Cetacean Research & Conservation - Director, Cook Islands Whale Research | 00:37:08 | |
Nan Hauser is the President and Director of the Center for Cetacean Research & Conservation and the Director and Principal Investigator of Cook Islands Whale Research. Currently she's in the field studying the migration of the Southern Humpback Whale population that is currently passing through the Cook Islands, where she resides on the main island of Rarotonga. Her research includes population identity and abundance, acoustics, genetics stable isotopes behavior, and the navigation of cetaceans. "I remember years ago, my Ph.D. advisor had asked me, 'How do you get such incredible footage of the whales and get them to stay with you?' So I said, 'unconditional love.' It's this whole sort of intuitive thing. And I can say this very comfortably as a scientist because it makes sense for anybody who works with these animals or any animals. And when you trust them, you emit this unconditional love, and they pick up on that, and they are going to respond. Believe me, every species of cetacean has its vibration, personality, and habits. And I'm just so fascinated by humpbacks and their beauty and their acrobatic abilities and their level of consciousness. Whales communicate with you constantly. It's like you have this relationship with them that you don't even have to use words. So it's reflections of the beauty and the wonder of the natural world, but it's also a reflection of the beauty of ourselves and nature and wildlife, and it's like awakening to to your true self." https://whaleresearch.org www.creativeprocess.info | |||
| 22 Sep 2023 | How Do Whales Communicate and Express Love? - NAN HAUSER - Highlights | 00:22:23 | |
"I remember years ago, my Ph.D. advisor had asked me, 'How do you get such incredible footage of the whales and get them to stay with you?' So I said, 'unconditional love.' It's this whole sort of intuitive thing. And I can say this very comfortably as a scientist because it makes sense for anybody who works with these animals or any animals. And when you trust them, you emit this unconditional love, and they pick up on that, and they are going to respond. Believe me, every species of cetacean has its vibration, personality, and habits. And I'm just so fascinated by humpbacks and their beauty and their acrobatic abilities and their level of consciousness. Whales communicate with you constantly. It's like you have this relationship with them that you don't even have to use words. So it's reflections of the beauty and the wonder of the natural world, but it's also a reflection of the beauty of ourselves and nature and wildlife, and it's like awakening to to your true self." Nan Hauser is the President and Director of the Center for Cetacean Research & Conservation and the Director and Principal Investigator of Cook Islands Whale Research. Currently she's in the field studying the migration of the Southern Humpback Whale population that is currently passing through the Cook Islands, where she resides on the main island of Rarotonga. Her research includes population identity and abundance, acoustics, genetics stable isotopes behavior, and the navigation of cetaceans. https://whaleresearch.org www.creativeprocess.info | |||
| 28 Sep 2023 | RICK BASS - Environmentalist & Story Prize Award-winning Author of “Why I Came West”, “For a Little While” | 00:42:09 | |
Rick Bass, a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist for his memoir Why I Came West, was born and raised in Texas, worked as a petroleum geologist in Mississippi, and has lived in Montana's Yaak Valley for almost three decades. His short fiction, which has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Esquire, and The Paris Review, as well as numerous times in Best American Short Stories, has earned him The Story Prize, multiple O. Henry Awards and Pushcart Prizes in addition to NEA and Guggenheim fellowships. He’s an organizer and speaker at Climate Aid: The Voice of the Forest, a fundraiser event to benefit the grassroots environmental movement of Protect Ancient Forests & The Montana Project. Featuring Maggie Rogers and more great performers and speakers. The evening will advance the efforts to protect the Black Ram forest by designating the region as the nation’s first Climate Refuge. Portland, Maine, on Sunday, Oct. 15 at 7 p.m. ET, at the Merrill Auditorium. Tickets available at the Merrill’s box office and online at PortTIX.com. "I grieve the changes to the four seasons that are happening here in Montana. One of the great things about this place is having four distinct seasons, and now they're tilted. Some are short, some are long, and some don't exist anymore. And that's unsettling, to say the least. It's not a fear of what's coming. It's a grief for what's gone away. I'm mindful of the pressure that we are putting on the generations who follow us and the mandate to have fun, to be fully human, to be joyous, to celebrate, and to enjoy being in the midst of nature's beauty." www.rickbass.net www.creativeprocess.info | |||
| 28 Sep 2023 | The Voice of the Forest - Author RICK BASS on Climate Aid & the Writing Life - Highlights | 00:11:43 | |
"I grieve the changes to the four seasons that are happening here in Montana. One of the great things about this place is having four distinct seasons, and now they're tilted. Some are short, some are long, and some don't exist anymore. And that's unsettling, to say the least. It's not a fear of what's coming. It's a grief for what's gone away. I'm mindful of the pressure that we are putting on the generations who follow us and the mandate to have fun, to be fully human, to be joyous, to celebrate, and to enjoy being in the midst of nature's beauty." Rick Bass, a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist for his memoir Why I Came West, was born and raised in Texas, worked as a petroleum geologist in Mississippi, and has lived in Montana's Yaak Valley for almost three decades. His short fiction, which has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Esquire, and The Paris Review, as well as numerous times in Best American Short Stories, has earned him The Story Prize, multiple O. Henry Awards and Pushcart Prizes in addition to NEA and Guggenheim fellowships. He’s an organizer and speaker at Climate Aid: The Voice of the Forest, a fundraiser event to benefit the grassroots environmental movement of Protect Ancient Forests & The Montana Project. Featuring Maggie Rogers and more great performers and speakers. The evening will advance the efforts to protect the Black Ram forest by designating the region as the nation’s first Climate Refuge. Portland, Maine, on Sunday, Oct. 15 at 7 p.m. ET, at the Merrill Auditorium. Tickets available at the Merrill’s box office and online at PortTIX.com. www.rickbass.net www.creativeprocess.info | |||
| 28 Sep 2023 | IAN ROBERTSON - Author of How Confidence Works: The New Science of Self-belief - Co-Director of the Global Brain Health Institute | 00:40:36 | |
How important is confidence? Psychologists say confidence is a series of mental, physical, and emotional habits that can be learned. What makes some people overconfident while others are realistic about their abilities and why are both outlooks important to succeed in life? Ian Robertson is Co-Director of the Global Brain Health Institute (Trinity College Dublin and University of California at San Francisco) and Co-Leader of The BrainHealth Project at University of Texas at Dallas. A trained clinical psychologist as well as a neuroscientist, he is internationally renowned for his research on neuropsychology. He has written five books and numerous newspaper and magazine articles and comment pieces in the Guardian, Times, Telegraph, Irish Times, Time magazine and New York magazine, amongst others. He has appeared on BBC Radio and featured in several major television documentaries. He is a regular speaker at major futurology and business conferences in Europe, the USA and Asia. “The book probes the science and neuroscience behind the idea that confidence can be learned, or whether it is something you inherit. Optimism, hope, and self-esteem are all concepts that are easily confused with confidence. But, as I show, they differ in one fundamental way - confidence empowers action. You can be an optimist who is hopeful that things will work out okay in the end without ever believing that you can play a part in that outcome, or indeed have any realistic grounds for that optimism. And you can have high self-esteem and feel good about yourself without feeling confident that you can achieve a particular goal.” https://ianrobertson.org www.creativeprocess.info | |||
| 28 Sep 2023 | How Confidence Works with Co-Director, Global Brain Health Institute, IAN ROBERTSON - Highlights | 00:11:27 | |
“The book probes the science and neuroscience behind the idea that confidence can be learned, or whether it is something you inherit. Optimism, hope, and self-esteem are all concepts that are easily confused with confidence. But, as I show, they differ in one fundamental way - confidence empowers action. You can be an optimist who is hopeful that things will work out okay in the end without ever believing that you can play a part in that outcome, or indeed have any realistic grounds for that optimism. And you can have high self-esteem and feel good about yourself without feeling confident that you can achieve a particular goal.” How important is confidence? Psychologists say confidence is a series of mental, physical, and emotional habits that can be learned. What makes some people overconfident while others are realistic about their abilities and why are both outlooks important to succeed in life? Ian Robertson is Co-Director of the Global Brain Health Institute (Trinity College Dublin and University of California at San Francisco) and Co-Leader of The BrainHealth Project at University of Texas at Dallas. A trained clinical psychologist as well as a neuroscientist, he is internationally renowned for his research on neuropsychology. He has written five books and numerous newspaper and magazine articles and comment pieces in the Guardian, Times, Telegraph, Irish Times, Time magazine and New York magazine, amongst others. He has appeared on BBC Radio and featured in several major television documentaries. He is a regular speaker at major futurology and business conferences in Europe, the USA and Asia. https://ianrobertson.org www.creativeprocess.info | |||
| 03 Oct 2023 | RALPH GIBSON - Award-winning Photographer - Leica Hall of Fame Inductee | 00:56:18 | |
How does the mind influence the mind? The mind cannot function without memory. And memory is just the mind aware of itself. So how do images tell us how we see and who we are? Ralph Gibson is one of the most interesting American photographers of our time. His international renown is based on his work, which is shown and collected by some of the world’s leading museums, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the J.P. Getty Museum in Los Angeles, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Creative Center for Photography in Tucson, the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris, the Bibliothèque Nationale de France in Paris, and the Fotomuseum Winterthur in Switzerland. Gibson’s works reveal a meticulous aesthetic and visual territory edging on the surreal. His recent books include his memoir Self Exposure, Sacred Land: Israel before and after Time, and Secret of Light, which accompanied his exhibition at the Deichtorhallen House of Photography in Hamburg. He is a Leica Hall of Fame Inductee and has been awarded the French Legion of Honor. In 2022, The Gibson | Goeun Museum of Photography devoted to his work opened in Busan, South Korea. "The way I measured time for a very large part of my life was I was always in preparation. I remember as a child I was preparing to make my first communion, then I was preparing to go to junior high. There are always these lapses that existed ahead of us, where we were progressing through time predicated on noteworthy events. So I was always functioning as though there was going to be a significant event, which occurred in some kind of concept of the future. And that coincided in parallel with the fact that when you're young, you feel essentially immortal because the idea of being old or dying is so abstract. It's so far away. So now that I'm in this phase of my life where all I'm interested in doing is maintaining my health, doing my push-ups, and profiting from as much time as I have left. Because now I'm at the very peak of my powers as a photographer. I'm getting pictures much faster and in greater ratio, and I'm moving through the experience at a rate that I always had yearned towards. And in terms of exhibitions and publications and all that I had everything I wanted when I was 40." www.ralphgibson.com www.creativeprocess.info | |||
| 04 Oct 2023 | How does the mind influence the mind? How do images tell us who we are? - RALPH GIBSON - Highlights | 00:14:19 | |
"The way I measured time for a very large part of my life was I was always in preparation. I remember as a child I was preparing to make my first communion, then I was preparing to go to junior high. There are always these lapses that existed ahead of us, where we were progressing through time predicated on noteworthy events. So I was always functioning as though there was going to be a significant event, which occurred in some kind of concept of the future. And that coincided in parallel with the fact that when you're young, you feel essentially immortal because the idea of being old or dying is so abstract. It's so far away. So now that I'm in this phase of my life where all I'm interested in doing is maintaining my health, doing my push-ups, and profiting from as much time as I have left. Because now I'm at the very peak of my powers as a photographer. I'm getting pictures much faster and in greater ratio, and I'm moving through the experience at a rate that I always had yearned towards. And in terms of exhibitions and publications and all that I had everything I wanted when I was 40." How does the mind influence the mind? The mind cannot function without memory. And memory is just the mind aware of itself. So how do images tell us how we see and who we are? Ralph Gibson is one of the most interesting American photographers of our time. His international renown is based on his work, which is shown and collected by some of the world’s leading museums, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the J.P. Getty Museum in Los Angeles, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Creative Center for Photography in Tucson, the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris, the Bibliothèque Nationale de France in Paris, and the Fotomuseum Winterthur in Switzerland. Gibson’s works reveal a meticulous aesthetic and visual territory edging on the surreal. His recent books include his memoir Self Exposure, Sacred Land: Israel before and after Time, and Secret of Light, which accompanied his exhibition at the Deichtorhallen House of Photography in Hamburg. He is a Leica Hall of Fame Inductee and has been awarded the French Legion of Honor. In 2022, The Gibson | Goeun Museum of Photography devoted to his work opened in Busan, South Korea. www.ralphgibson.com www.creativeprocess.info | |||
| 06 Oct 2023 | ALLEN STEELE - Hugo Award-winning Science Fiction Author of the Coyote Trilogy, Arkwright | 00:43:55 | |
What does the future of space exploration look like? How can we unlock the opportunities of outer space without repeating the mistakes of colonization and exploitation committed on Earth? How can we ensure AI and new technologies reflect our values and the world we want to live in? Allen Steele is a science fiction author and journalist. He has written novels, short stories, and essays and been awarded a number of Hugos, Asimov's Readers, and Locus Awards. He’s known for his Coyote Trilogy and Arkwright. He is a former member of the Board of Directors and Board of Advisors for the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. He has also served as an advisor for the Space Frontier Foundation. In 2001, he testified before the Subcommittee on Space and Aeronautics of the U.S. House of Representatives in hearings regarding space exploration in the 21st century. "I'm really very glad. I was happy to see that within my lifetime that the prospects of not just Mars, but in fact interstellar space is being taken seriously. I've been at two conferences where we were talking about building the first starship within this century. One of my later books, Arkwright, is about such a project. I saw that Elon Musk is building Starship One, I wish him all the best. And I envy anybody who goes. I wish I were a younger person and in better health. Somebody asked me some time ago, would you go to Mars? And I said, 'I can't do it now. I've got a bum pancreas, and I'm 65 years old, and I'm not exactly the prime prospect for doing this. If you asked me 40 years ago would I go, I would have said: in a heartbeat!' I would gladly leave behind almost everything. I don't think I'd be glad about leaving my wife and family behind, but I'd be glad to go live on another planet, perhaps for the rest of my life, just for the chance to explore a new world, to be one of the settlers in a new world. And I think this is something that's being taken seriously. It is very possible. We've got to be careful about how we do this. And we've got to be careful, particularly about the rationale of the people who are doing this. It bothers me that Elon Musk has lately taken a shift to the Far Right. I don't know why that is. But I'd love to be able to sit down and talk with him about these things and try to understand why he has done such a right thing, but for what seems to be wrong reasons." www.creativeprocess.info | |||
| 06 Oct 2023 | Science Fiction & The Future of Space Travel with Hugo Award-winning Author ALLEN STEELE - Highlights | 00:10:33 | |
"I'm really very glad. I was happy to see that within my lifetime that the prospects of not just Mars, but in fact interstellar space is being taken seriously. I've been at two conferences where we were talking about building the first starship within this century. One of my later books, Arkwright, is about such a project. I saw that Elon Musk is building Starship One, I wish him all the best. And I envy anybody who goes. I wish I were a younger person and in better health. Somebody asked me some time ago, would you go to Mars? And I said, 'I can't do it now. I've got a bum pancreas, and I'm 65 years old, and I'm not exactly the prime prospect for doing this. If you asked me 40 years ago would I go, I would have said: in a heartbeat!' I would gladly leave behind almost everything. I don't think I'd be glad about leaving my wife and family behind, but I'd be glad to go live on another planet, perhaps for the rest of my life, just for the chance to explore a new world, to be one of the settlers in a new world. And I think this is something that's being taken seriously. It is very possible. We've got to be careful about how we do this. And we've got to be careful, particularly about the rationale of the people who are doing this. It bothers me that Elon Musk has lately taken a shift to the Far Right. I don't know why that is. But I'd love to be able to sit down and talk with him about these things and try to understand why he has done such a right thing, but for what seems to be wrong reasons." What does the future of space exploration look like? How can we unlock the opportunities of outer space without repeating the mistakes of colonization and exploitation committed on Earth? How can we ensure AI and new technologies reflect our values and the world we want to live in? Allen Steele is a science fiction author and journalist. He has written novels, short stories, and essays and been awarded a number of Hugos, Asimov's Readers, and Locus Awards. He’s known for his Coyote Trilogy and Arkwright. He is a former member of the Board of Directors and Board of Advisors for the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. He has also served as an advisor for the Space Frontier Foundation. In 2001, he testified before the Subcommittee on Space and Aeronautics of the U.S. House of Representatives in hearings regarding space exploration in the 21st century. www.creativeprocess.info Photo from a field trip to Pease Air Force Base in Portsmouth NH, now closed. Photo credit: Chuck Peterson | |||
| 10 Oct 2023 | ANTHONY LEISEROWITZ - Founding Director of Yale Program on Climate Change Communication - Host of Climate Connections | 00:43:26 | |
Anthony Leiserowitz, Ph.D. is the founder and Director of the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication and a Senior Research Scientist at the Yale School of the Environment. He is an internationally recognized expert on public climate change beliefs, attitudes, policy support, and behavior, and the psychological, cultural, and political factors that shape them and conducts research globally, including in the United States, China, India, and Brazil. He has published more than 250 scientific articles, chapters, and reports and has worked with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the National Academy of Sciences, the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History, the Harvard Kennedy School, the United Nations Development Program, the Gallup World Poll, and the World Economic Forum, among others. He is a recipient of the Friend of the Planet Award from the National Center for Science Education, the Mitofsky Innovator Award from the American Association of Public Opinion Research, the Stephen H. Schneider Award for Outstanding Climate Science Communication from Climate One, and an Environmental Innovator award from the Environmental Protection Agency. In 2020, he was named the second-most influential climate scientist in the world (of 1,000) by Reuters. He is also the host of Climate Connections, a radio program broadcast each day on more than 700 stations nationwide. "At the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, we study how people respond to climate change. So what do people around the world understand or misunderstand about the causes, the consequences, and solutions? How do they perceive the risks: the likelihood and severity of different types of impacts from sea level rise to the health impacts? What kinds of policies do they support or oppose? And then what kinds of behaviors are people engaged in or willing to change to be part of climate solutions? There are lots of different things there, but our ultimate question is answering why. What are the psychological, cultural, the political reasons why some people get engaged with this issue? While others are kind of apathetic and some are downright dismissive and hostile, or at least they are in the United States, which thankfully is not the case in most of the rest of the world." https://environment.yale.edu/profile/leiserowitz www.creativeprocess.info | |||
| 11 Oct 2023 | How Cultural & Political Factors Influence Climate Action - ANTHONY LEISEROWITZ - Highlights | 00:15:02 | |
"At the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, we study how people respond to climate change. So what do people around the world understand or misunderstand about the causes, the consequences, and solutions? How do they perceive the risks: the likelihood and severity of different types of impacts from sea level rise to the health impacts? What kinds of policies do they support or oppose? And then what kinds of behaviors are people engaged in or willing to change to be part of climate solutions? There are lots of different things there, but our ultimate question is answering why. What are the psychological, cultural, the political reasons why some people get engaged with this issue? While others are kind of apathetic and some are downright dismissive and hostile, or at least they are in the United States, which thankfully is not the case in most of the rest of the world." Anthony Leiserowitz, Ph.D. is the founder and Director of the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication and a Senior Research Scientist at the Yale School of the Environment. He is an internationally recognized expert on public climate change beliefs, attitudes, policy support, and behavior, and the psychological, cultural, and political factors that shape them and conducts research globally, including in the United States, China, India, and Brazil. He has published more than 250 scientific articles, chapters, and reports and has worked with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the National Academy of Sciences, the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History, the Harvard Kennedy School, the United Nations Development Program, the Gallup World Poll, and the World Economic Forum, among others. He is a recipient of the Friend of the Planet Award from the National Center for Science Education, the Mitofsky Innovator Award from the American Association of Public Opinion Research, the Stephen H. Schneider Award for Outstanding Climate Science Communication from Climate One, and an Environmental Innovator award from the Environmental Protection Agency. In 2020, he was named the second-most influential climate scientist in the world (of 1,000) by Reuters. He is also the host of Climate Connections, a radio program broadcast each day on more than 700 stations nationwide. https://environment.yale.edu/profile/leiserowitz www.creativeprocess.info | |||
| 13 Oct 2023 | DEAN SPADE - Author of Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, and the Limits of Law | 00:48:23 | |
Dean Spade is an organizer, speaker, author, and professor at Seattle University's School of Law, where he teaches courses on policing, imprisonment, gender, race, and social movements. Spade has been organizing racial and economic movements for queer and trans liberation for the past 20 years. Spade's books include Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, and the Limits of Law and Mutual Aid, Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the Next). In 2002, Dean founded the Sylvia Rivera Law Project, a non-profit law collective that provides free legal services to transgender, intersex and gender non-conforming people who are low-income and/or people of color, and which operates on a collective governance model. His writing has appeared in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Out, In These Times, Social Text, and Signs. "The belief that marginalized and hated populations can find freedom by being recognized by law, allowed to serve in the military, allowed to marry, and protected by anti-discrimination laws and hate crime statutes is a central narrative of the United States. Politicians, primary school textbooks, and the corporate media tell us the story that the United States left ugly histories of white supremacy behind through a civil rights movement that changed hearts, minds, and especially laws to eradicate racism and bring freedom to all. This simplified narrative is relentlessly reiterated in US culture and has played a starring role in the past four decades of lesbian and gay rights advocacy where the analogy to the Black civil rights to the Black civil rights movement has been a consistent rhetorical tool. 1. I argue that social movements must abandon the widely held belief that oppressed people can be freed by legal recognition and inclusion if we are to truly address and transform the conditions of premature death facing impoverished and criminalized populations in this period." -Normal Life www.deanspade.net www.deanspade.net/mutual-aid-building-solidarity-during-this-crisis-and-the-next/ www.creativeprocess.info | |||
| 13 Oct 2023 | Mutual Aid, Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the Next) with DEAN SPADE - Highlights | 00:18:01 | |
"The belief that marginalized and hated populations can find freedom by being recognized by law, allowed to serve in the military, allowed to marry, and protected by anti-discrimination laws and hate crime statutes is a central narrative of the United States. Politicians, primary school textbooks, and the corporate media tell us the story that the United States left ugly histories of white supremacy behind through a civil rights movement that changed hearts, minds, and especially laws to eradicate racism and bring freedom to all. This simplified narrative is relentlessly reiterated in US culture and has played a starring role in the past four decades of lesbian and gay rights advocacy where the analogy to the Black civil rights to the Black civil rights movement has been a consistent rhetorical tool. 1. I argue that social movements must abandon the widely held belief that oppressed people can be freed by legal recognition and inclusion if we are to truly address and transform the conditions of premature death facing impoverished and criminalized populations in this period." -Normal Life Dean Spade is an organizer, speaker, author, and professor at Seattle University's School of Law, where he teaches courses on policing, imprisonment, gender, race, and social movements. Spade has been organizing racial and economic movements for queer and trans liberation for the past 20 years. Spade's books include Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, and the Limits of Law and Mutual Aid, Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the Next). In 2002, Dean founded the Sylvia Rivera Law Project, a non-profit law collective that provides free legal services to transgender, intersex and gender non-conforming people who are low-income and/or people of color, and which operates on a collective governance model. His writing has appeared in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Out, In These Times, Social Text, and Signs. www.deanspade.net www.deanspade.net/mutual-aid-building-solidarity-during-this-crisis-and-the-next/ www.creativeprocess.info | |||