Emerging Form: Recent Episodes

Christie Aschwanden

Emerging Form is a podcast about the creative process in which a journalist (Christie Aschwanden) and a poet (Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer) discuss creative conundrums over wine. Each episode concludes with a game of two questions in which a guest joins in to help answer questions about the week's topic. Season one guests include poets, novelists, journalists, a song writer, a circus performer, a sketch artist and a winemaker.

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“Sometimes I let the subconscious deal with it,” says science writer Elizabeth Preston, author of the new book The Creature’s Guide to Caring, How animal parents teach us that humans were born to care. In this interview, we talk about the evolution of a manuscript–how she went from the “Big Idea” to the actual book. Other threads include the importance of walking away, balancing parenting with a writing life, why humor helps, the invitation to be bold, and how the “gnomes in the back of my head” have helped Elizabeth solve structural problems with her creative projects.

Elizabeth Preston is a science journalist who contributes regularly to The New York Times and has written for Science, The Boston Globe, The Atlantic, Orion, Slate, Audubon, Discover, National Geographic, and others. She is a winner of the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s Kavli Science Journalism Gold Award. Preston is also a humor writer whose work has appeared in outlets such as McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Parents, and Real Simple, and was the editor of Muse, a magazine about science and ideas for kids. She lives in Massachusetts. Her new book is The Creature’s Guide to Caring: How animal parents teach us that humans were born to care

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“The book is about the opposite of the eureka moment,” says science writer Roberta Kwok about her new book, LOST IN CURIOSITY: Field Notes From Scientists’ Adventures into the Unknown. Join us in a conversation about the difficulties and gifts of showing up day after day. We talk about patience, wrestling with process, and the long slow path to epiphany–in science and in creative endeavors. We talk, too, about how to choose the right people to interview for a book based on research, how the body may or may not be a part of creative process, the possibility that walking is not the most important tool in a writer’s toolbox, and the thrill of collaboration.

Roberta Kwok is a science writer whose work has appeared in The New York Times, NewYorker.com, Nature, New Scientist, Audubon, and other

publications. She has received a fellowship from the Knight Science Journalism Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and awards from the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Geophysical Union. Before becoming a journalist, Kwok worked in a genetics lab at Stanford University. She lives in the Seattle area and is originally from Canada.

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“One of my superpowers is I see the nuance in everything,” says podcast host and author Eric Zimmer. “That is also sometimes my greatest weakness because I want to caveat the living heck out of everything that I say.” In this episode of Emerging Form, we talk with Eric about the process of writing his book How a Little Becomes a Lot: The Art of Small Changes for a More Meaningful Life. We cover

· how the stages of change relate to creative process,· why dedicating time is an essential part of setting ourselves up for creative success,· how to support our expectations of wanting to create something really good,· how the hardest parts of our process teach us the most,· why asking for help can help build our trust in our selves as creatives,· why it helps to identify our motivations and intentions for our creative endeavors,· the importance of trust in the evolution of our creativity, and· how the advice to “spend what’s in your pocket” can help shape a book.

Eric Zimmer is an author, teacher, speaker, and the creator of The One You Feed podcast—an award-winning show with over 50 million downloads across 800+ conversations exploring meaningful living. At 24, Eric was homeless, addicted to heroin, and facing prison. His journey from those depths sparked his lifelong inquiry into human transformation and resilience. Through his behavior coaching, workshops, and mentorship, he has guided thousands worldwide in creating sustainable habits that last—not through willpower or epiphany, but through steady change. His approach combines cutting-edge science with timeless wisdom, providing practical pathways to greater integrity and deeper meaning. His story and his work have been featured in the media, including TedX, Mind Body Green, Elephant Journal, the BBC and Brain Pickings. His new book is How a Little Becomes a Lot: The Art of Small Changes for a More Meaningful Life.

The One You Feed Website

How a Little Becomes a Lot: The Art of Small Changes for a More Meaningful Life

Instagram

LinkedIn

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“I didn’t know I enjoyed thinking so much,” says science writer Roxanne Khamsi when asked what surprised her most about writing her first book Beyond Inheritance. “I thought I enjoyed interviewing people and reading research papers and the process of finding the right verb in a sentence. What’s hard for me is once I get into that thinking space, I can’t let go of it.” In this episode we talk about how she made the leap from writing articles to writing a book—and why they are so different. We talk about creating an arc for a book of essays, what to do when the structure for your book isn’t working, letting go of a project once its over, meeting our self critic, the role of obsession in writing a book, the art of going for “the big idea” and how to carry that in a nonfiction book, how writing reflects the author’s personality.

Roxanne Khamsi is the author of Beyond Inheritance: Our Ever-Mutating Cells and a New Understanding of Healthand a contributing writer at The Atlantic. Her articles on genetics have appeared in a wide range of publications, including The New York Times, Scientific American, Nature magazine and Wired. Roxanne served as chief news editor for the international research journal Nature Medicine for more than a decade. She is based in Montreal.

Author photos credit: Brian Friedman

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“I use play as kind of a backdoor to talk about tougher subjects,” says poet Kelli Russell Agodon, “but also as a front door for the reader to be able to listen.” Her most recent book, Accidental Devotions, blends humor, vulnerability, aging, the chaos of relationships, and the art of humaning. In this episode, of Emerging form we talk with Kelli about

Writing in service to “The Quiet Rebels”
Finding the form for a poem or book at the end of the project
Where to put the most vulnerable content in a book
Learning to trust the reader
The importance of vulnerability
Value of human connection through the arts
The role of obsession in art
Creating touchstones for the reader
The role of play in poetry
How do we know if what we write is successful?

Plus, Kelli reads “Alexa, Why Am I Falling Apart” and we converse about the role of human-made art in an increasingly technological world.

Kelli Russell Agodon’s most recent book is Accidental Devotions (Copper Canyon Press, 2026). She is the author of five poetry collections. Her work has received numerous honors, including the Dorothy Rosenberg Poetry Prize, a Poetry Society of America Prize, the Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Award in Poetry, and three Washington State Book Award finalist selections. She is the cofounder of Two Sylvias Press, teaches in Pacific Lutheran University’s Rainier Writing Workshop MFA program, and cohosts the poetry series Poems You Need with Melissa Studdard. She lives in a sleepy seaside town in Washington State.

Postcards from a Poet newsletter: https://kelliagodon.substack.com/subscribe

Kelli’s website

Kelli’s YouTube channel

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Everyone gets stuck. And in this interview with writer and teacher Ramona Ausubel, we talk about why this is normal and practical, usable ways to meet a page when we don’t think we can go on. Drawing from her newest book, Unstuck:101 Doorways leading from the Blank Page to the Last Page, Ramona shares with us why certain strategies work only at certain stages of creative projects. We talk about finding patterns, ways to develop characters and create scenes, different ways to approach different drafts, the half-draft approach, finding opposition and so much more.

Ramona Ausubel is the national bestselling author of Unstuck: 101 Doorways Leading From the Blank Page to the Last Page, The Last Animal, Awayland: stories, Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty, A Guide to Being Born and No One is Here Except All of Us. She is the recipient of the National Book Foundation Science + Literature Prize, the PEN/USA Fiction Award, the Cabell First Novelist Award and has been a finalist for both the California and Colorado Book Awards and the New York Public Library Young Lions Award. Her work has been published in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Paris Review daily, One Story, Tin House, The Oxford American, Ploughshares and elsewhere. She is a professor at Colorado State University and lives in Boulder, Colorado with her family.

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A poet and a science writer walk into a podcast—and laugh, tease, joke, uplift, and ask each other tough questions about creative process. In this episode of Emerging Form, the hosts Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer and Christie Aschwanden ask each other some of the questions they like to ask their guests. It’s a raucous, fun episode in which they rib each other as only best friends can do, taking turns being in the hot seat to talk about ambition, how getting older has affected creative practice, sincerity, empathy, curiosity and, of course, wine.

Christie Aschwanden is the author of the New York Times bestseller, Good to Go, What the Athlete in All of Us Can Learn from the Strange Science of Recovery.She’s also host and producer of Uncertain, a podcast from Scientific American. She’s the former lead science writer at FiveThirtyEight and was previously a health columnist for The Washington Post.Her work has appeared in dozens of publications, including New York Times, Wired, Smithsonian, Slate, Popular Science, Discover, Scienceand Nature, and she’s received fellowships from the Santa Fe Institute, the Carter Center, and the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting. She lives on a small farm in western Colorado.

Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer is a poet, teacher, speaker, and writing facilitator. Her daily audio series, The Poetic Path, is on the Ritual app. Her poems have appeared on A Prairie Home Companion, PBS NewsHour, O Magazine, Washington Post Book Club, and Carnegie Hall Stage. Her recent collections are All the Honey and The Unfolding. In 2024, she became Poet Laureate for Evermore, helping others explore grief and love through poetry. Since 2006, she’s written a poem a day, sharing them on her blog, A Hundred Falling Veils. Her one-word mantra is adjust.

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“It feels like a radical practice not to be productive, to allow the space to guide what comes next,” says prolific poet and beloved writing teacher James Crews. “I have tendencies toward control.” In this episode, we talk about the importance of slowing down and doing less, and why a creative practice depends on this. James reads several poems from his new collection, Breathing Room: Poems of Rest and Retreat, and we talk about creating healthy boundaries around productivity, embodiment in a creative practice, and poetry as a spiritual practice.

James Crews lives on forty rocky acres in Southern Vermont, on the unceded lands of the Abenaki people, with his husband Brad Peacock, with whom he co-edited Love Is for All of Us: Poems of Tenderness & Belonging from the LGBTQ+ Community & Friends (Storey Publishing). Crews is the author of several collections of poems, including Unlocking the Heart, Turning Toward Grief and Breathing Room. To sign up for free weekly poems and for more info, visit: jamescrews.net.

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For thirty years, Dimity McDowelll made a life–and a living–with running and writing about running. Then, for health reasons, she had to stop. In this episode of Emerging Form, we talk with Dimity about how our creative identity is linked with other identities and what to do when that radically changes. We discuss her new bookThe Twenty-Seventh Mile: How to Smooth the Rough Transition out of Your Running Years, and the difference between writing a book with a partner and writing alone. We talk about embodied writing, the importance of empathy when incorporating other people’s stories, and the challenges of writing about loss.

Before focusing her career on running, Dimity McDowell was a sports journalist, holding staff positions at Self, ESPN: The Magazine, and Sports Illustrated for Women. She co-authored three running books (Run Like a Mother, Train Like a Mother, and Tales from Another Mother Runner) and co-founded Another Mother Runner, an inclusive community for all female runners, with Sarah Bowen Shea. A personal trainer and running coach, she has finished countless races, including Ironman Coeur d’Alene and the Pike’s Peak Half Marathon. Dimity is the mother of two adult children, and lives in Denver with her husband and two dogs.

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What’s the secret to making a living doing your art? “There really is no magic trick … spoiler,” says Mason Currey, author of Making Art and Making a Living. But in this episode of Emerging Form, we talk with Currey about what he learned by studying how other creatives across genres, cultures and centuries have made it work. We also talk about his own relationship to creative practice–little tricks and attitude shifts, the importance of repetition and habit, developing trust in our own practice, and which compromises can really harm our creative energy.

Mason Currey is the author of theDaily Rituals books, featuring brief profiles of the day-to-day working lives of more than 300 brilliant minds. His latest book,Making Art and Making a Living was published on March 31, 2026. Currey lives in Los Angeles and writes Subtle Maneuvers, a twice-monthly newsletter on the creative process.

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“I discovered a narrative though my journaling,” says author, creative coach and workshop leader GG Renee Hill. “Writing is a place I can be raw and honest with myself.” In this episode, we speak with GG about her new book, Story Work: Field Notes on Self-Discovery and Reclaiming Your Narrative. We talk about

How to rewrite a victim narrative
The intersections of creativity and psychology
How to build your capacity to be vulnerable
How to discern when, where and why to share your story
The role of hope in creative practice
The importance of breaking the silence around mental health

GG Renee Hill is an author, creative coach, and workshop facilitator whose work centers writing as a tool for healing, self-discovery, and creative expression. Her mission is to help others enrich their lives and communities through the transformative power of the written word. She is the author of Self-Care Check-In: A Guided Journal to Build Healthy Habits and Devote Time to You (2020) and A Year of Self-Reflection Journal: 365 Days of Guided Prompts to Slow Down, Tune In, and Grow (2021). Her most recent book, Story Work: Field Notes on Self-Discovery and Reclaiming Your Narrative was published by Broadleaf Books in November 2025. When she’s not writing, GG facilitates writing workshops for a diverse list of corporate and non-profit clients and literary organizations.

Books: allthemanylayers.com/books

Instagram: @ggreneewrites

Substack: thelayers.substack.com

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“Elation and connection” are two of the side effects of communal singing, and for over four decades, Kate Munger has been writing songs to be sung in tender and difficult moments–at the bedside of the dying, in prisons, and now at gatherings to repair democracy. We talk with Kate about what makes a good communal song, her writing process, how song can transform a negatively charged moment, and what are some of the challenges for communal singing in this moment.

Kate Munger has been passionate about community singing since she was 8 years old at Girl Scout Camp and has led community singing now for over 45 years. In 2000 she founded the first of now 200 Threshold Choirs around the world, singing at the bedsides of people who are dying. Now retired from running the Threshold Choir, Kate has returned to her passions of writing songs for medicinal use and singing for people in coma and with folks who are incarcerated she is offering monthly free sessions to learn 60 new songs to sing on the way to, at and from protests to repair democracy, called “Hate Has No Home Here.” An email to Kate (kateamunger@gmail.com) will sign you up.

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Imagine you’ve just heard an hour-long keynote full of history, statistics, personal story and social justice. And then someone comes to the stage, sits at the piano, and sings back a song that encapsulates the emotional and intellectual content you’ve just heard. That is the improvisational talent of Ken Medema, a keyboardist/pianist, singer, storyteller and performer. In this episode of Emerging Form, we speak with Ken about the importance of a “fence” when it comes to creative play, how to listen for key phrases, how to make people feel truly seen and heard through creative response, plus there’s a spontaneous mid-interview performance!

Ken Medema has shared his passion for learning and discovery through storytelling and music and has been writing and performing as a singer and pianist/keyboardist for 52 years in many different venues: churches, conventions, colleges, corporations and more. Though blind from birth, Ken sees and hears with heart and mind, improvising stories from his audience and speakers. Ken lives in the San Francisco Bay area and is celebrating the 50th anniversary of his Tree Song, which premiered at a youth convention in Princeton in 1976. He has written and produced over 30 albums.

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“I was acutely aware of not feeling part of the club,” says Alia Hanna Habib, now a leading literary agent. “As I started to become an insider, I saw other people feel that same way.” In this episode Habib talks about writing her book, Take It From Me: An Agent’s Guide to Building a Nonfiction Writing Career from Scratch, and offers ideas for where to start writing your book, how having talented friends might both inspire and intimidate you, how to choose a topic, and why she now finds ways–with her book and her work–to open the door for other creatives.

Alia Hanna Habib is a Vice President and literary agent at The Gernert Company, where she represents MacArthur Fellows, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists, National Book Award finalists, and numerous New York Times bestselling authors. Her new book, Take It From Me: An agent’s guide to building a nonfiction writing career from scratch, is a guide to nonfiction writing careers for emerging and established writers. She lives in Brooklyn, NY.

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“The least dangerous humor is to make fun of yourself and your foibles,” says comedian Chris Duffy. How might such a sense of humor help jumpstart and nourish your creative life? In this episode of Emerging Form, we talk with Chris about

what is a sense humor and why is it essential for our creative lives
why noticing specific details is an essential to both creativity and our humanity
the joy in heckling ourselves
how the feedback loop of a stage differs from the feedback loop of a reading audience
ways to laugh at yourself and why this is so important

Both silly and sincere, this is an episode for linking your sense of humor to the rest of your life in a generous, creative way.

Chris Duffy is an award-winning comedian, television writer, and radio/podcast host. Chris currently hosts the hit podcast How to Be a Better Human. He wrote for both seasons of Wyatt Cenac’s Problem Areas on HBO, executive produced by John Oliver. His new book Humor Me: How Laughing More Can Make You Present, Creative, Connected, and Happy is out now.

Image: Chris launching his book on the Staten Island Ferry on his book launch day. He’s the real deal, folks.

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After our end of the year episode, in which we talked about the words we had chosen as our theme for the year, we asked a bunch of Emerging Form guests to tell us their word. We were overwhemed by the response! We had so many great submissions that we decided to make them into a stand alone episode. Here are the contributors, in order of appearance.

Andrea BarrettBonnie TsuiMaria KelsonAlison LutermanAlex HutchinsonAdam BeckerBil LeppChris DuffyDavid BaronDavid EpsteinDiana HillKristin Pedemonti Lisa GardinierMichael Kleber DiggsSherry Richert BelulStarre VartanTodd Mitchell

Kyra Kopestonsky with us at KOTO radio recording the theme music for Emerging Form. We’re so grateful that we will continue to have a little piece of her on every show.

Litby Rosemerry

for Kyra

Tonight when I light the candle

and say your name, I notice

how you have lit me—

with your words, your voice,

the way you clap your hands

at the smallest of joys.

Because you’ve given me

light you’ve gathered from

the darkest of places,

I will never be the same.

Again and again, you have lit me

as if my life is beeswax

and love is the wick and

your courageous life is flame.

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It’s the sixth annual epiphany episode! Join Rosemerry and Christie as we look back on the highs and lows of their own creative practices in 2025, and reflect on the intentions we set a year ago. Did Christie “Create the Space?” How did Rosemerry explore “Spaciousness?” What did we learn about failure? About collaboration? Join us for laughter and teasing and good old-fashioned vulnerability.

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“I had to reassess how I approached creativity and life in general,” says author Todd Mitchell. In this episode of Emerging Form, we speak with the award-winning author about how to re-envision our creative practice, how to re-think our definition of success and what makes a creative practice sustainable. We also talk about why jelly beans might be an essential item in any creative’s toolbox, habits that help us return to the page another day, and practices that help us identify where our ego is getting in the way.

Todd Mitchell is the American Fiction Award-winning author of several novels for young readers and adults including The Namer of Spirits (Owl Hollow Press), The Last Panther (Penguin Random House), The Traitor King (Scholastic), Backwards (Candlewick), and The Secret to Lying (Candlewick). In addition to writing books and comics, Todd works with artists, teachers, and writers on ways to enhance creativity. His newest non-fiction book,Breakthrough: How to Overcome Doubt, Fear, and Resistance to Be Your Ultimate Creative Self, is the culmination of decades of research into creative practices. Currently, Todd directs the Beginning Creative Writing Teaching Program at Colorado State University. You can visit him (and learn about his squirrel obsession) at www.ToddMitchellBooks.com.

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“There are enough talented people out there,” says Julia Belluz, “but only collaborate with people you really like.” This was the advice the writer followed when deciding to work with scientist Kevin Hall on their new book, Food Intelligence. The resulting book weaves his narrative and evolution as a scientist with her narrative as a patient and journalist. In this episode, we explore what makes a successful collaboration, how to define roles—and why to do this right up front, the importance of trust, and how to communicate throughout the process.

Julia Belluz is a Paris-based journalist and co-author of the new book,Food Intelligence. A contributing opinion writer to the New York Times, she has reported extensively on medicine, nutrition, and global public health from Canada, the US, and Europe.

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“I’m a striver,” poet Alison Luterman, “still striving to grow.” In this interview with the beloved poet, we follow up on our conversation from episode 64 “It’s Okay to Not Feel Talented, Keep Going Anyway,

Alison tells us about her ongoing singing lessons and how they have changed the way she listens, not only to music but to conversations and the rest of the world. This practice is at the heart of her new collection, Hard Listening. Not only does she read from the book, but she shares about what she learned about creativity from studying the lives of her singing heroes, the interweaving of politics and creative practice, and how to explore and share pleasure in the midst of difficult times.

Alison Luterman’s four books of poems include The Largest Possible Life; See How We Almost Fly; Desire Zoo; and In the Time of Great Fires. She has published poems in The New York Times Magazine, The Sun Magazine, Prairie Schooner, Nimrod, and many other journals and anthologies. She lives in Oakland, California, where she walks her neighborhood daily, stopping at all the yards where there’s a sweet-smelling bush or tree.

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Can poetry be a form of medicine? In this week’s bonus episode, we share a guest podcast, the Wise Effort Show, hosted by our recent guest Dr. Diana Hill. In the bonus episode she did with Emerging Form, Diana shared a poem that was inspired by this interview with Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer. They discuss the role of poetry in emotional processing, grief, love, and connection. Diana shares how Rosemerry’s poetry has personally influenced her life and work. Rosemerry reads some of her poems, discusses her daily practice of writing a poem everyday, and offers insights into how poetry can help us be present with our pain and transform it. Drawing from her own experiences, especially the tragic loss of her son, Rosemerry explains how metaphors and a daily writing habit can serve as healing practices.

Join this insightful conversation to discover the therapeutic potential of poetry and how it can guide us through life’s most challenging moments.

In This Episode, We Explore:

The Power of Poetry in Therapy
Rosemerry’s Personal Journey with Poetry
Daily Writing Practice and Its Benefits
Embracing Imperfection and Truth
Sharing Personal Grief Publicly

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How do we take care of our creative selves? How do we step off the wheel of production and find ourselves in the wide-open moment with room to wonder and wander? In this episode, hosts Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer and Christie Aschwanden have a conversation about where they are at now in their well-filling cycle, the importance of creative self-care and the consequences of not doing so.

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Everyone has creative genius, says Diana Hill, PhD, and in her new book, Wise Effort: How to Focus Your Genius Energy on What Matters Most, she explores how to best explore and nurture that genius. We speak about how she battled some of her own demons while writing the book–the committee arguing in her head. We talk about wise effort–not trying too hard, and the three main practices that fuel wise effort–getting curious, opening and focusing. It’s a practical, vulnerable, lighthearted episode.

Diana Hill, Ph.D. is a clinical psychologist, international trainer, and a leading expert on Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT)—a revolutionary approach to psychology that is changing our understanding of mental health. Drawing from the most current psychological research and contemplative wisdom, Diana bridges science with real-life practices to help

people grow fulfilling and impactful lives. She is the author of four books including I Know I Should Exercise, But..., The Self-Compassion Daily Journal, ACT Daily Journal, and her latest Wise Effort: How to Focus Your Genius Energy on What Matters Most. She’s the host of the Wise Effort Podcast and her insights have been featured by NPR, Wall Street Journal, Psychology Today, Real Simple, and other national media.

Website: www.wiseeffort.com

podcast: www.wiseeffortshow.com

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“The first draft is absolute torture,” says historical nonfiction writer David Baron. And yet, he persists and his newest book, The Martians: The True Story of an Alien Craze that Captured Turn-of-the-Century America has garnered rave reviews from The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker and more. The Christian Science Monitor says, “The Martians is a fascinating tale that’s beautifully told.” We speak with Baron about the joys of research, the agony of writing, the delight in rewriting, how imagination cuts both ways, and how Truman Capote’s work has influenced his own.

David Baron is an award-winning journalist, broadcaster, and author of The Beast in the Garden, American Eclipse and his latest book The Martians: The True Story of an Alien Craze that Captured Turn-of-the-Century America. A former science correspondent for NPR, he has also written for the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, Scientific American, and other publications. David recently served as the Baruch S. Blumberg NASA/Library of Congress Chair in Astrobiology, Exploration, and Scientific Innovation. He lives in Boulder, Colorado.

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In this episode, we talk with Michael about the importance of mentors and how sometimes they transition to colleagues as we find our own footing in our creative work, stepping into our own creative identity. He reads “What Name for This,” from his book Worldly Things, and we use the poem as a launching pad to talk about creative relationships, why we write and how attentiveness to the specific can lead us to questions about the universal, and making art out of the ordinary. And, in thinking about the role of the artist in a difficult time, Michael shares his controversial idea about the role of the artist in “dark times.”

Michael Kleber-Diggs (KLEE-burr digs) is a poet, essayist, literary critic, and arts educator. He is the author of My Weight in Water, a memoir about his complicated relationship with lap swimming (forthcoming with Spiegel & Grau, 2026). Michael’s debut poetry collection, Worldly Things, won the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize and was published by Milkweed Editions in 2021. The New York Times Book Review said his poems, “see the whole, allowing daily intimacies against a backdrop of social injustice.”His poems and essays often explore themes of intimacy, community, empathy, and grace, practices he believes are simultaneously distinct and interdependent. Michael is a 2023-2025 Jerome Hill Artist Fellow in Literature, and he teaches creative writing at Augsburg University and through the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop. Michael is married to Karen Kleber-Diggs, a tropical horticulturist and orchid specialist. Karen and Michael have a daughter, Elinor, who lives in New York City and works as a professional dancer.

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One day, nationally acclaimed poet Maria Kelson hit “a poetry wall” for no identifiable reason. “It was frustrating,” she says, “because I had devoted myself to poetry. For 15 years, it was my primary focus.” What happened next–she followed an emerging passion, crime fiction. ‘As i was casting about I thought, I want to explore the dark side.” In this episode we talk with Maria about shedding layers of creative identity, finding new community, art as a way to explore and expose issues of social injustice, and the surprising ways poetry informs her new award-winning thriller.

Maria Kelson has two collections of poetry (as Maria Melendez) with University of Arizona Press, which were finalists for the PEN Center USA Literary Award and the Colorado Book Award. NOT THE KILLING KIND is her debut novel. If you're a mystery/thriller reader drawn to strong female leads, the scary beauty of the redwood country, moms who push it to the limit, or crime-fighting ESL teachers, she wrote her debut novel NOT THE KILLING KIND for you! It received the inaugural Eleanor Taylor Bland Award for Crime Fiction Writers of Color from Sisters in Crime and just won the WILLA award for best mystery/thriller. She has served as an American Voices arts envoy in Bogotá, Colombia. A Mexican-American educator from California, Maria lives near Yellowstone. She’s writing a new thriller set there.

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When Starre Varten sat down to write her book The Stronger Sex: What Science Tells Us about the Power of the Female Body, she came to the project with two things: an intellectual thesis and a very personal bodily story. In this episode, we talk with Starre about how both mind and body fueled her creative practice. We also talk about how what began as an article became a book, how to turn toward the part of the book you might rather turn away from, how an outsider’s perspective can help us see our project more clearly and what it really means to be strong.

Starre Vartan is a science writer who was raised in a family of creatives and medical professionals. She grew up in New York and now splits her time between the Pacific Northwest and Sydney, Australia. She contributes regularly to Scientific American and National Geographic and has written for CNN, the Washington Post, Slate, and New York magazine, among many others. Her new book, The Stronger Sex: What Science Tells Us about the Power of the Female Body, is a science-backed, myth-busting love letter to the female body—think endurance, immunity, and the kind of strength that doesn’t flex, it lasts.

Starre’s Website: https://starrevartan.com/Her Washington Post story why dancing is good for your body and soul. Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/starrevartan/TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@thecurioushumana

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Making something is fun. Promoting it? Not so much… On this episode of Emerging Form, Rosemerry and Christie discuss the what happens when you put something you’ve created out into the world. How do you get it to your intended audience? How do encourage people to find it without feeling like an icky self-promotional nag? We also discuss the pain of realizing that your friends didn’t and won’t read or watch or listen to your new thing, the importance of remembering why you’re doing this, and the 100 day promotion project we tried (inspired by previous Emerging Form guests Chris Duffy and Zach Sherwin) and what it taught us.

Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer is a poet, teacher, speaker and writing facilitator. Her daily audio series, The Poetic Path, is on the Ritual app. Her poems have appeared on A Prairie Home Companion, PBS News Hour, O Magazine, American Life in Poetry, and Carnegie Hall stage. Her most recent poetry collections are All the Honey (Samara Press, 2023) and The Unfolding (Wildhouse Publishing, 2024). In January, 2024, she became the first poet laureate for Evermore, helping others explore grief, bereavement, wonder and love through poetry.

Christie Aschwanden is author of the New York Times bestseller, Good to Go: What the Athlete in All of Us Can Learn From the Strange Science of Recovery and host and producer of Uncertain, a podcast from Scientific American. She’s the former lead science writer at FiveThirtyEight and was previously a health columnist for The Washington Post. Her work has appeared in dozens of publications, including the New York Times, Wired, Smithsonian, Slate, Popular Science, Discover, Science and Nature. She’s received fellowships from the Santa Fe Institute, the Carter Center and the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting. She lives in Cedaredge.

Rosemerry’s new album Risking Love on Bandcamp, Spotify and Youtube

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“I am just discovering myself as a novelist,” says international bestselling novelist Shelley Read, author of Go as a River. In this conversation, Shelley shares with us how her journey from poet and non-fiction writer shifted into fiction with a single moment of observation and wonder. She shares with us how she crafts scenes, her penchant for playing with language, why she didn’t share with anyone about what she was doing for many years, how a love affair with her main character drove the whole novel, and what she has learned about her own creative process along the way.

Shelley Read’s debut novel,Go as a River, is an international bestseller that has sold over a million copies worldwide, been translated into thirty-four languages, and is in development for film with the Mazur Kaplan Company. Winner of the High Plains Book Award for Fiction and the Reading the West Book Award for Debut Fiction, Go as a River is also a Sunday Times bestseller, a Goodreads Choice Award finalist, an Amazon Editors’ Pick Best Debut Fiction, an Indie Next Pick, and a Colorado Public Radio Books We Love selection, among other national and international accolades. Shelley was an award-winning senior lecturer at Western Colorado University for nearly three decades, where she taught writing, literature, environmental studies, and honors. She is a mom, mountaineer, world traveler, and fifth-generation Coloradan who lives with her family in the Elk Mountains of Colorado’s Western Slope.

You can meet Shelley in person at the Grand Mesa Writer’s Symposium August 8-10 in Cedaredge. The event features numerous workshops and gatherings, including an open mic. For the keynote, Christie will talk with Shelley, the poet Wendy Videlok (a previous guest on our show) and nonfiction writer Tim Winegard about their work. More info at: https://www.grandmesawriters.org/

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“I try to be really open to anything that comes my way,” says bestselling author Bonnie Tsui. Her newest book, On Muscle, isn’t a memoir, but it begins with her recounting her father encouraging her and her brother to “make a muscle.” Tsui appears in many sections of the book interacting with the various characters she introduces. Yet it’s not a book explicitly about her, and if there’s a main character it’s probably human muscle. In this episode we speak with Tsui to find the right balance of personal storytelling, history, science, experts and interesting characters. Plus why poetry is a part of her research and the value of pulling multiple disciplines into her writing.

Bonnie Tsui is a longtime contributor to The New York Times and the author of the new bookOn Muscle: The Stuff That Moves Us and Why It Matters—a vivid, thought-provoking celebration of musculature and one of the most anticipated books of the year; it is currently being translated into six languages. Her bestselling books include Why We Swim, a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice and a Time magazine and NPR Best Book of the Year, and American Chinatown, which won the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature. Her work has been recognized and supported by Harvard University, the National Press Foundation, the Mesa Refuge, and the Best American Essays series. She lives, swims, and surfs in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Links:

Website www.bonnietsui.comInstagram www.instagram.com/bonnietsui8https://www.bonnietsui.com/Rosemerry’s new album, Risking Love videos or on SpotifyGrand Mesa Writer’s Symposium

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“You have to have a lot of patience,” says science writer Jennie Erin Smith about working on a long-term creative project. She adds, “You have to have a lot of patience with eccentric people.” In this bonus episode, we talk about patience, plus about sharing work with creative heroes, the importance of taking a good long break, the art of pushing through, what to do when the words aren’t coming, and why having a “breakthrough” isn’t a necessary part of the process.

Jennie Erin Smith is the author of Valley of Forgetting: Alzheimer's Families and the Search for a Cure. She is a regular contributor to The New York Times and has written for The Wall Street Journal, The Times Literary Supplement, The New Yorker, and others. She is a recipient of the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award; the Waldo Proffitt Award for Excellence in Environmental Journalism in Florida; and two first-place awards from the Society for Features Journalism. She lives in Florida and Colombia.

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When a creative project lasts for many years, how do you create a cohesive story? How do you gather and organize that much research? At what point do you begin writing? How do you handle the changing of an editor? What happens when you don’t know the ending? And what if you hoped for a different ending? We cover all these questions with Jennie Erin Smith, author of Valley of Forgetting, a book ten years in the making, about a vast Columbian family and the Alzheimer’s researchers who studied them.

Jennie Erin Smith is the author of Valley of Forgetting: Alzheimer's Families and the Search for a Cure. She is a regular contributor to The New York Times and has written for The Wall Street Journal, The Times Literary Supplement, The New Yorker, and others. She is a recipient of the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award; the Waldo Proffitt Award for Excellence in Environmental Journalism in Florida; and two first-place awards from the Society for Features Journalism. She lives in Florida and Colombia.

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How can looking at the past help us understand what to do about a current crisis? “I’m a firm believer that history can help give us perspective here,” says science writer Lisa S. Gardiner. She’s speaking about her research with coral reefs, but it’s an apropos metaphor for how our past experiences with creative endeavors can help inform our current struggles. In this episode, we talk about the importance of the book proposal (and tips for getting one done), the art of weaving the self into a story that’s not memoir, and how essential our curiosity is to, well, everything.

Lisa S. Gardiner is a freelance writer, geoscientist, and educator. She is the author ofReefs of Time: What Fossils Reveal about Coral SurvivalandTales from an Uncertain World: What Other Assorted Disasters Can Teach Us About Climate Change. Her writing has appeared in Nautilus Magazine, Scientific American, bioGraphic, and Audubon, among other places.

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What happens when the subject of your creative practice scares you? Not only that, but what if you’re scared, too, of what might happen when you put your work into the world? We speak with physicist and author Adam Becker about his new book, More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley's Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity, in which he writes about the terrible plans tech billionaires have for the future and why they won’t work. Our conversation includes why doubt is a strength, being a planner vs. a pantser, why bringing your body into your practice is important, and why Adam spends time with trees.

Adam Becker is a science journalist with a PhD in physics. He is the author, most recently, of More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley's Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity. In addition to his books, he has written for the New York Times, the BBC, NPR, Scientific American, New Scientist, Quanta, and many other publications. He lives in California.

Adam’s first book, What Is Real?

Find Adam on Bluesky

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Knowing your audience is everything for a storyteller, and sometimes that information comes in real time. “Within three minutes I am going to know if this is going to be terrible for all of us or great,” says storyteller Bil Lepp. In this bonus episode, we talk about how to respond on stage to an audience’s laughter, what to do if you find yourself with an audience of middle schoolers, how to handle a show that doesn’t go so well, and how he got started in storytelling.

Bil Lepp is an award-winning storyteller, author, and recording artist. He’s the host of the History Channel’s Man Vs History series, the occasional host of NPR’s internationally syndicated Mountain Stage. Though a five time champion of the WV Liars’s Contest, Lepp’s stories often contain morsels of truth that present universal themes in clever and witty ways. Bil’s books and audio collections have won the PEN Steven Kroll Award for Children’s Book Writing, Parents’ Choice Gold Awards and awards from the National Parenting Publications Association. He’s also the recipient of the Vandalia Award, West Virginia’s highest folk honor. The Charleston Gazette calls him a “cross between Dr. Seuss and film noir.”

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Humor for the joy of it is reason enough, but in this episode we speak with storyteller Bil Lepp about how humor might also be a way to earn trust with an audience so that we might bring in difficult conversations. He offers techniques for how to craft toward a punchline and how to use a “Lego” approach to crafting multiple stories. We also touch on how storytelling builds community.

Bil Lepp is an award-winning storyteller, author, and recording artist. He’s the host of the History Channel’s Man Vs History series, the occasional host of NPR’s internationally syndicated Mountain Stage. Though a five time champion of the WV Liars’s Contest, Lepp’s stories often contain morsels of truth that present universal themes in clever and witty ways. Bil’s books and audio collections have won the PEN Steven Kroll Award for Children’s Book Writing, Parents’ Choice Gold Awards and awards from the National Parenting Publications Association. He’s also the recipient of the Vandalia Award, West Virginia’s highest folk honor. The Charleston Gazette calls him a “cross between Dr. Seuss and film noir.”

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“Practice teaches us to have faith in the process,” says Andrea Barrett, National Book Award winning author. In this episode of Emerging Form, we speak with her about her newest book, Dust and Light: On the Art of Fact in Fiction. It’s one of the most metaphor-rich, process-curious shows we’ve had yet. We explore the joys of rabbit holes, the importance of not knowing what we are looking for, the inevitability of false starts (and how to let go of the work we’ve done), why we shouldn’t worry about writing unreadable first drafts, how to develop the muscle of intuition, and the questionable wisdom of how we teach creative writing.

Andrea Barrett is the author of the National Book Award-winning Ship Fever, Voyage of the Narwhal, Servants of the Map, Natural History, and other works of fiction. She has received a MacArthur Fellowship, a Guggenheim Award, an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, an NEA Fellowship, and the Rea Award for the Short Story, and been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. She lives in the Adirondacks.

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“I turn to the poem, I turn to the page for a sense of hope, how to move through life, how to get through a day,” says Danusha Laméris. “I have come to a place where I trust the poem more than I trust myself.” In our second conversation with the award-winning poet, (We also interviewed her in Episode 29 on “the understory”), she shares from her newest collection,Blade by Blade, and we talk about how a writing practice grows us, how it allows us to “salvage time,” and how it helps us see how connected we other with the past and with others.

Danusha Laméris’ first book, The Moons of August (2014), was chosen by Naomi Shihab Nye as the winner of the Autumn House Press Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the Milt Kessler Book Award. A Pushcart Prize recipient, some of her work has been published in: The Best American Poetry, The New York Times, Orion, The American Poetry Review, The Gettysburg Review, Ploughshares, and Prairie Schooner. Her second book, Bonfire Opera, (University of Pittsburgh Press, Pitt Poetry Series), was a finalist for the 2021 Paterson Poetry Award and the winner of the Northern California Book Award in Poetry. She was selected for the Lucille Clifton Legacy Award, and was the 2018-2020 Poet Laureate of Santa Cruz County, California. She is on the faculty of Pacific University’s Low Residency MFA program.

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“Doing this book took me out of my comfort zone, into new fields I wasn’t comfortable with,” says Alex Hutchinson, speaking of his newest book The Explorer's Gene: Why We Seek Big Challenges, New Flavors, and the Blank Spots on the Map. And so it is we speak with the expert on exploration about his own experiences of exploring in creative practice. Why are we drawn to what we don’t know? How do we know when enough is enough? When is it better to build on what we know than launch into new territory? And what of that revelation that seems to stay just beyond our grasp?

Alex Hutchinson is the New York Times bestselling author ofEndure, a longtime columnist for Outside covering the science of endurance, and a National Magazine Award–winning journalist who has contributed to the New York Times, The New Yorker, and other publications. A former long-distance runner for the Canadian national team, he holds a master’s in journalism from Columbia and a Ph.D. in physics from Cambridge, and he did his post-doctoral research with the National Security Agency. He lives in Toronto with his family.

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How do the stories we tell become intricately involved with our identities? And how do we change the stories that are not serving us? In this episode of Emerging Form, we speak with storyteller Kristin Pedemonti, founder of Steer Your Story, about Narrative Therapy Practices. We discuss unpeeling layers of stories, how to “thicken the threads” of a preferred narrative, the importance of play, and meeting “stuckness.”

Founder of Steer Your Story, Kristin Pedemonti believes in the power of story to connect and heal. Recipient of the National Storytelling Network International Story Bridge Award, she’s presented in 20 countries across five continents. Kristin serves as Storytelling Consultant and Coach for UNICEF Ghana and for the World Bank coaching staff to mine data to tell the human story.

In 2005, Kristin sold her home and possessions to create and facilitate Literacy Outreach Belize. She donated storytelling and writing programs for 30,000 students and trained 800 teachers how to utilize their indigenous legends to teach creative writing. Her book: A Bridge of Stories chronicles this seven-year literacy project.

You can also find her on: Instagram @kristinpedemonti

Facebook: Kristin Pedemonti, Linked In Kristin Pedemonti

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How can our creative practice extend to the way we treat other people? How might we build entire careers out of our creative dreams? These questions are at the heart of our conversation with Sherry Richert Belul. We also talk about creating a “seamless life” with no delineation between work and play and how to pay attention to (and act on) the creative ideas that “just drop in.”

Sherry Richert Belul, founder of Simply Celebrate, helps people find creative, intentional, and impactful ways to celebrate life and to express love for family and friends. As a certified life coach, Sherry supports people in living their best lives, full of joy, success, engagement, and meaningful relationships. She is the author of Say it Now: 33 Creative Ways to Say I LOVE YOU to the Most Important People in Your Life, cohost of the Heart Wisdom Author Panel with Mango Publishing, and co-founder of The Secret Agents of Change kindness project. Her work has been featured in the New York Times, Town + Country, and The Wall Street Journal.

Say It Now: 33 Ways to Say I Love You to the Most Important People in Your Life

Simply Celebrate

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Artificial Intelligence now permeates our daily lives. What conversations are we not having about AI? And how can creative projects help open these discussions about what is really at stake? In this episode of Emerging Form, journalist Evan Ratliff shares with us how he cloned his voice, connected it to a chat bot, and created a voice agent that took calls and made calls–both to strangers and friends–all in a voice that sounded as if it were him. He shares the project, his questions, his concerns, his discoveries on a new podcast, Shell Game. We speak with him about the genesis of the show, how having no prescriptive ideas on the outset can benefit creative practice, how financing your own creative project offers more creative freedom, and why it was so important in a program about AI to have all the content created by humans

Evan Ratliff is an award-winning investigative journalist, bestselling author, podcast host, and entrepreneur. He’s the author of the The Mastermind: A True Story of Murder, Empire, and a New Kind of Crime Lord; the writer and host of the hit podcasts Shell Game and Persona: The French Deception; and the cofounder of The Atavist Magazine, Pop-Up Magazine, and the Longform Podcast.

Links:Shell GameEvan interviewing Christie on the Longform Podcast

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How does storytelling matter? Why might we bring in feelings about our children or a moment of being overcome with beauty into a book about, say, climate change? In this episode of Emerging Form, we speak with Auden Schendler about the power of story, about how we are drawn to tell the stories we most need to tell, and how and why it’s important to let humility be a part of our practice.

Auden Schendler has spent almost thirty years working on sustainability and climate change in the corporate world, focusing on big scale change that rejects tokenism. Currently Senior Vice President of Sustainability at Aspen One, he has been a town councilman, a Colorado Air Quality Control Commissioner, and an ambulance medic. He’s the author of Getting Green Done: Hard Truths from the Sustainability Revolution, which climatologist James Hansen called “an antidote to greenwash,” and new this year, Terrible Beauty: Reckoning with Climate Complicity and Rediscovering our Soul, which historian Naomi Oreskes called “compelling and weirdly fun.”

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There’s an art to deep listening and eliciting enlivening conversation, and in this episode we speak with celebrated interviewer Mitzi Rapkin, founder, host and producer of the literary podcast “First Draft: A Dialogue on Writing.” Join us in an exploration of how to draw out authenticity and invite conversations “with a life force of their own” that allow you to “go to a place you never thought you could go.”

Mitzi Rapkin is the founder, host and producer of the literary podcast, “First Draft: A Dialogue on Writing,” which features a new author interview each week. There, she has interviewed more than 500 contemporary writers over the past eleven years, exploring the decisions and psychology that went into the writing of featured books, writers’ themes and the human experience. Rapkin is also a journalist, fiction writer, certified integral coach, facilitator and fiction-writing instructor. Her company, Full Light Communications, helps clients articulate and achieve their vision through facilitation, coaching, and communications services. She is never far from a bar of dark chocolate.

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“If you are sitting around waiting to be inspired, you won’t get a lot of painting done,” says mixed-media artist Kellie Day. In this episode, we talk about finding inspiration, a practice of showing up, the difference between creating from the head vs. creating from the spirit, how “shadow careers” can be an attempt to get closer to our passion, the miracles that can come from mistakes, and working through self-judgment, and how to “open to greater creativity.”

Kellie Day is mixed-media artist whose paintings hold serendipitous treasures including Sufi poems, stenciled spray paint, handmade stamps and bold drips of acrylic paint applied with a paint syringe, creating rich textured layers of collage and acrylics. This unconventional approach has caught the eye of major brands like Trader Joe's, The North Face, and Alpinist Magazine who have featured her work in their collections. She’s also worked as a US Forest Service Ranger, firefighter, and graphic designer, and brings both structure and great freedom to her role as an International Art Mentor, helping women discover their artistic voices and explore their own creativity.

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It’s our annual end of the year episode, in which we review the year that was and assess how things went. We share our revelations and highlights and what we hope to do better in the coming year. We also pick new words for 2025 to help guide our process and look back on our words for 2024 and how they served us.

And we have news! Starting this month, Emerging Form is also a radio show on KVNF radio. You can hear us every other Tuesday from 6:30pm to 7pm mountain time.

Christie’s essay about living with uncertainty.

The Scientific American feature story Christie wrote about metabolically healthy obesity.

Uncertain, Christie’s limited run podcast series released by Scientific American.

The Unfolding, Rosemerry’s latest book of poetry.

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How does the writing practice help us know what we most want to say? How do we translate an intimate, interactive personal style into a practical, how-to book? In this episode of Emerging Form, we interview Rebecca Mullen who has spent decades as a marriage counselor and recently translated her experience onto the page. “My process as coach is as question asker,” she says. “When you are writing a book, it’s not a conversation, it is one way. It’s still important to me to be the coach pausing to ask questions, inviting readers to try this on. I wanted the book to have an interactive style and conversational tone.” We speak about how to organize your ideas, how to grow into an authoritative voice, how to get clear, and how writing a how-to book about marriage can profoundly affect your marriage.

Rebecca Mullen is an artist, writer, and coach. She hosts the podcast Habits for Your Happily Ever After, and her TEDx Talk invites you to create peace at the dinner table with the stories you tell. Her brand-new book is called 6 Steps to Better Marriage Communication.

Rosemerry on Rebecca’s podcast: How Does the Death of. Child Impact Your Marriage

Christie on Rebecca’s podcast: How Science Can Help Your Marriage Communication

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How does creativity help us meet a difficult time? In this episode, co-hosts Christie Aschwanden and Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer talk about ways that creative practice can nourish us, how it can help us envision a way forward, how it helps us to widen the lens and see beyond the moment, how it helps us embrace paradox, opens us to connection, and more. We hear from previous guests poet Jack Ridl and astrologer/filmmaker/novelist/musician Holiday Mathis, plus from listeners in our Facebook group, too.

Link: Charlie Jane Anders blog post

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When we asked prolific novelist Laura Pritchett to speak with us about writing fiction, little did we realize that not only would she offer us a host of practical advice about character, revision and ambition, she would also teach us about meeting our art with great self-compassion. We speak about her two new novels out this year, Playing with Wildfire (Torrey House Press) and Three Keys (Random House Books), writing without a plot outline, and much more, including why joy must be a part of a fiction writer’s practice.

Laura Pritchett is the author of seven novels. Known for championing the complex and contemporary West and giving voice to the working class, her books have garnered the PEN USA Award, the Milkweed National Fiction Prize, the WILLA, the High Plains Book Award, several Colorado book awards, and others. She’s also the author of two nonfiction books, one play, and was editor of three environmental-based anthologies. One novel, Stars Go Blue, has been optioned for TV rights. She’s published hundreds of essays and short stories in national venues, most recently in The Sun, Terrain, Camas, Orion, Creative Nonfiction, and others. She directs the MFA in Nature Writing at Western Colorado University and holds a PhD from Purdue University. When not writing or teaching, she can be found sauntering around the West, especially her home state of Colorado. She particularly likes looking at clouds and wildflowers.

Laura’s website

GOING GREEN: True Tales from Gleaners, Scavengers, and Dumpster Diver Edited by Laura Pritchett (with contributions by Christie and her mom, Ruth Friesen).

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When is lack of knowledge a writer’s best friend? New York Times bestselling author and Guggenheim winner Richard Panek has found that starting from a place of relative ignorance allows him to research and then write about complicated subjects in a way that allows the average reader to find their own way in. We speak with Richard on the book birthday of his newest title, Pillars of Creation: How the James Webb Space Telescope Unlocked the Secrets of the Cosmos. He discusses how he found the form for the book, his favorite punctuation and how it helps to create a more conversation tone, how blog writing informs his book writing, and trying creative things you haven’t tried before.

Richard Panek is the author of numerous books including The 4% Universe: Dark Matter, Dark Energy, and the Race to Discover the Rest of Reality, which won the American Institute of Physics communication award and was longlisted for the Royal Society Prize for Science Books. The recipient of fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and the New York Foundation for the Arts as well as an Antarctic Artists and Writers grant from the National Science Foundation, he is also the co-author with Temple Grandin of The Autistic Brain: Thinking Across the Spectrum, a New York Times bestseller. His own books have been translated into sixteen languages, and his writing about science and culture has appeared in publications including the New York Times, the Washington Post, Scientific American, Discover, Smithsonian, Natural History, Esquire, and Outside. He lives in New York City.

Pillars of Creation: How the James Webb Space Telescope Unlocked the Secrets of the Cosmos

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“I believe that telling our story, even the story of a moment, the story of an emotion, is one of the most healing things we can do,” says James Crews, poet, teacher and speaker. His new book, Unlocking the Heart: Writing for Courage, Mindfulness and Self-Compassion blends poetry, essays and writing prompts to help readers tell their own stories. We speak about this unusual blending of genres, writing as a healing practice, and how to write titles and first lines that draw people in.

James Crews is the editor of several bestselling books, including The Path to Kindness and How to Love the World, which has over 100,000 copies in print. He has been featured in The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, The New York Times Magazine, The New Republic, The Christian Science Monitor, and on NPR’s Morning Edition. The author of four prize-winning books of poetry and of the book Kindness Will Save the World, James also speaks and leads workshops on kindness, mindfulness, and writing for self-compassion. He lives with his husband on forty rocky acres in the woods of Southern Vermont. AND The Wonder of Small Things just won the New England Book Award for Poetry! He also hosts a monthly writing community and sends out a weekly newsletter.

To purchase signed books and join his newsletter: https://linktr.ee/jcrewsjr

More on James Crews: https://www.jamescrews.net/

For info on his monthly writing community: https://www.themonthlypause.com/

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One of the most thrilling stories of creative inspiration is that of Rainer Maria Rilke writing Sonnets to Orpheus and the Duino Elegies following a time of great international and personal upheaval. Translator and poet Mark S. Burrows shares Rilke’s story with us and talks with us about the art of translation–full of creative conundrums and choices and impossible invitations. It’s a heart-opening, deeply compelling episode about how we are all translators, “listening to the deepest voice” and how life itself is our greatest creative act.

Mark S. Burrows is an award-winning poet, translator, and scholar. An historian of medieval Christianity, he is a much sought-after speaker and retreat leader in the US and Europe. He is a past president of the Society for the Study of Christian Spirituality and currently edits poetry for the society’s journal Spiritus. His most recent translation is Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus (2024). He recently published You Are the Future: Living the Questions with Rainer Maria Rilke (2024), cowritten with Stephanie Dowrick. He lives and writes in Camden, ME.

https://www.msburrows.com/

www.soul-in-sight.org

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This week, Christie interviews Rosemerry about her new book, The Unfolding, out on October 1st. Do her a big favor and pre-order it now at this link. Rosemerry explains how the poems came together, how she structured the book and why the cover is pink. It’s a wonderful conversation we know you’ll love.

Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer is a poet, teacher, speaker and writing facilitator. Her daily audio series, The Poetic Path, is on the Ritual app. Her poems have appeared on A Prairie Home Companion, PBS News Hour, O Magazine, American Life in Poetry, andCarnegie Hall stage. Her most recent poetry collections are All the Honey (Samara Press, 2023) and The Unfolding (Wildhouse Publishing, October 2024).In January, 2024, she became the first poet laureate for Evermore, helping others explore grief, bereavement, wonder and love through poetry. One-word mantra: Adjust.

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“It took me years to reclaim my creative life as not other than my spiritual life but the very place my spirit flowers,” says Mirabai Starr award-winning author, internationally acclaimed speaker and a leading teacher of interspiritual dialogue. In this episode, we speak with Mirabai about how she created an intimate, welcoming tone in her most recent book, Ordinary Mysticism: Your Life as Sacred Ground. We speak, too, about the intersections of creative practice and spiritual practice, the importance of the imagination, dismantling the hierarchy of the mentor/protege relationship, and how she steps out of the way to let “the [creative] thing” come through.

In 2020, Mirabai Starr was honored on Watkins’ list of the 100 Most Spiritually Influential Living People. Drawing from twenty years of teaching philosophy and world religions at the University of New Mexico-Taos, Starr now travels the world sharing her wisdom on contemplative living, writing as a spiritual practice, and the transformational power of grief and loss. She has authored over a dozen books, including Wild Mercy, Caravan of No Despair, and God of Love. Starr has received critical acclaim for her revolutionary contemporary translations of the mystics John of the Cross, Teresa of Avila and Julian of Norwich. Starr continues to teach seminars, workshops and retreats, both in person and through her online community, Wild Heart. She lives with her extended family in the mountains of northern New Mexico.

www.mirabaistarr.com

www.wildheart.space

https://www.instagram.com/mirabaistarr/

https://www.facebook.com/mirabai.starr.author/

https://www.harpercollins.com/products/ordinary-mysticism-mirabai-starr?variant=41325260668962

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How can trying a new art form vitalize and fuel your creative practice? Christie and Rosemerry travel to Nashville to meet in person with their most frequent guest, Holiday Mathis, and converse about her experiences with learning about writing and performing stand-up comedy. The laughter-filled episode explores developing your creative voice, the benefits of a creative community, meeting your fears and showing up vulnerable in your creative practice, and much more.

Holiday Mathis writes the daily horoscope for The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post and hundreds of newspapers around the world. In her decades-long syndication she's published almost nine million words on luck, the stars and the human condition. She's also a multi-platinum selling songwriter with songs recorded by Miley Cyrus, Emma Roberts and more. Holiday is the author of several books includingHow to Fail Epically in Hollywood.

Previous Holiday episodes:Episode 28: The Daily GrindEpisode 28 bonus: Extended Interview with Holiday MathisEpisode 63: Reviving abandoned projects with Holiday MathisEpisode 63 bonus: Holiday Mathis on creative processEpisode 80: Holiday Mathis Wrote a NovelEpisode 80 bonus: Audio Excerpt from How to Fail Epically in HollywoodThe blog post that started our friendship with Holiday: I Know Astrology Is B*t, But I Can’t Stop Reading My Horoscope* by Christie Aschwanden**

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None

What happens when a project grows way beyond its original scope? We talk with Nicola Twilley about her new book Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet and Ourselves, originally envisioned as an article. In this episode we cover being fluid with our plans, research, rewriting, the differences between writing alone and with a partner, and how what looks like bad luck can turn into a blessing.

Nicola Twilley is the coauthor of Until Proven Safe: The History and Future of Quarantine, named one of the best books of 2021 by Time, NPR, The Guardian, and the Financial Times. She is cohost of Gastropod, an award-winning podcast that looks at food through the lens of science and history and a frequent contributor to The New Yorker.

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Ambition. Perspective. Competition. Kindness. These themes are at the heart of our conversation with essayist and cartoonist Tim Kreider. Drawing from his essay, “The Ones Who Turned Back” we talk about mid-life changes in creative practice, plus thoughts on the tension between doing what you want and doing what you are rewarded for (or what people expect of you) and why you want to stay not only young at heart, but young at mind.

Tim Kreider is the author of the essay collectionsWe Learn Nothing andI Wrote This Book Because I Love You. His Substack is called “The Loaf” and he has contributed to The New York Times, The New Yorker, Vox, Nerve, Men’s Journal, The Comics Journal, Film Quarterly, and Fangoria. His cartoons have been collected in three books by Fantagraphics Books. His cartoon, “The Pain—When Will It End?” ran for twelve years in the Baltimore City Paper and other alternative weeklies, and is archived at the paincomics.com. Tim was born and educated in Baltimore, Maryland. He lives in New York City and an idyllic compound in the Ozark woods. His cat The Quetzal died in 2013. His new cat is Richard, who is a fool, an adorable little fool.

The Referendum

The Ones Who Turned Back

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“I had built up a lot of don’ts in my head about writing,” says bestselling author Paolo Bacigalupi. In this episode, we speak with the speculative fiction novelist about how he went from wondering if he would ever write again to publishing his new book, NAVOLA. We cover daily habits, discipline, pleasure, and meeting the negative voices in your head.

Paolo Bacigalupi is an internationally bestselling author of speculative fiction. He has won the Hugo, Nebula, World Fantasy, John W. Campbell and Locus Awards, as well as being a finalist for the National Book Award and a winner of the Michael L. Printz Award for Excellence in Young Adult Literature. Paolo’s work often focuses on questions of sustainability and the environment, most notably the impacts of climate change. He has written novels for adults, young adults, and children, and his new book NAVOLA releases July 9, 2024. He can be found online at windupstories.com.

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What is our relationship with our bodies? Our past? The planet? The rest of humanity? We speak with Nadia Colburn about how she weaves together a yoga practice, mindfulness, writing, and activism to explore these questions. “Our writing, our living, our experiencing is deeper when we can come from a bigger perspective and bring all the awarenesses,” she says. We speak about common obstacles to creative practice, ways to include the body, how teaching affects her writing practice and how she came to write her most recent collection of poems.

Writer, yogi, activist and teacher Nadia Colburn is author of two books of poetry, The High Shelf and I Say the Sky and her poetry and creative nonfiction have been published in The New Yorker, American Poetry Review, Spirituality & Health, and dozens of other journals. She’s been a professor at MIT, Lesley, and Stonehill College, and she is currently the writer-in-residence at Northeastern's Center For Spirituality, Dialogue and Service. She’s also the founder of the Align Your Story School for writers which combines a traditional academic background with a more holistic, mindful approach.

Nadia Colburn

I Say the Sky

Free five-day meditation and writing practice

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What if we dropped our expectations and preconceived ideas about our creative practice? In this episode, we speak with elite runner, author Katie Arnold about how her Zen practice of “coming to whatever you do in your life with a fresh and open mind” has influenced her creative work. We explore the story behind her new book, Brief Flashings in the Phenomenal World: Zen and the Art of Running Free, which tells the story of a traumatic wilderness accident and her path to healing. Plus, we discuss the choices we make around including other people’s stories in our writing.

Katie Arnold is a longtime journalist and bestselling author of Brief Flashings in the Phenomenal World: Zen and the Art of Running Free (2024), which tells the story of a traumatic wilderness accident and her path to healing. Her critically acclaimed memoir, Running Home, was published in 2019. An elite ultra runner and student of Zen, Katie teaches writing workshops exploring the link between movement and creativity. A former managing editor at Outside Magazine, she has written for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Outside, ESPN The Magazine, Runner’s World, and Elle, among others, as well as been a guest on NPR Weekend Edition Sunday and The Upaya Zen Center Podcast. She has been awarded fellowships from MacDowell and Ucross. Katie lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, with her husband, Steve Barrett, their two teenage daughters, and two dogs.

Christie’s review of Katie’s book, Running Home.

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When fiction writer Lydia Millet found herself “preoccupied by the overwhelm of the world,” she turned to writing nonfiction. “I thought if i tried to write about it I might think more lucidly about it.” We speak with her about her newest book, We Loved It All (part memoir, part bestiary), about the challenges and joys of changing genres, about the gap between her projections about being a novelist and actually being a novelist, and how books not only save lives, but souls.

Lydia Millet has written more than a dozen novels and story collections. Her newest book is a memoir, We Loved It All, published this month. Her novel A Children's Bible was a New York Times "Best 10 Books of 2020" selection and shortlisted for the National Book Award. In 2019 her story collection Fight No More received an Award of Merit from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and her collection Love in Infant Monkeys was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2010. She also writes essays, opinion pieces, book reviews, and other ephemera and has worked as an editor and staff writer at the Center for Biological Diversity since 1999. She lives in the desert outside Tucson with her family.

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“Invest always in relationships before you need them, be vulnerable with them,” says Courtney E. Martin, journalist, author, podcaster and speaker. In this episode, she shares with us an essential question for all journalists and creatives and discusses how it shaped a specific project, plus she offers advice for living a creative life based on Parker Palmer’s thoughts on “the tragic gap.” This is an episode focused on transparency, vulnerability, community and humility.

Courtney E. Martin is the author of four books, most recently, Learning in Public, a popular newsletter, called Examined Family, host of “The Wise Unknown” podcast from PRX, and co-host of the Slate “How To!” podcast. She’s also a co-founder of the Solutions Journalism Network and FRESH Speakers, and the Storyteller-in-Residence at The Holding Co. Her literal happy place is her co-housing community in Oakland, Calif. Her metaphorical happy place is asking people questions.

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image: Eben Pariser and Molly Venter

How do we get in the zone? What does that even mean for creatives? And how do we stay in it? And how do we get back in when kicked out? We speak with musicians and marriage partners Molly Venter and Eben Pariser about using the ancient technologies of poetry and music to help people tap into their subconscious and explore what treasure they have within them.

Goodnight Moonshine is a guitar and vocal duet, and a musical marriage in all senses. The Duo combines the evocative voice and songwriting of Molly Venter, with Eben Pariser’s adventurous guitar playing. The result is folk music with a depth of improvisation and tonal subtlety usually reserved for jazz.

Molly is well known for her sublime singing in the prominent female-vocal-group Red Molly, Her voice has been called “biker-chick smoky,” and with Goodnight Moonshine she is in full force as a songwriter with a trance-induced stream-of-consciousness writing style. Eben cut his teeth as a street performer in New York City, playing guttural music of New Orleans with his band Roosevelt Dime, but he was quickly captured by classic jazz, and his improvisational skills are a hallmark of Goodnight Moonshine’s sound.

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It’s all about balance–and in this episode we speak with botanist and writer Erin Zimmerman about choices she made in her new book Unrooted: Botany, Motherhood and the Fight to Save an Old Science. We also talk about the choices she’s made as she balances motherhood and work, being an introvert and finding a writing community, pursuing her passions and finding meaningful ways to recharge. Plus how she was inspired by Charles Darwin’s parenting.

Erin Zimmerman is an evolutionary biologist turned science writer and essayist. She studied at the University of Guelph and at the Université de Montréal before traveling to South America to collect plant specimens, and then working at the Royal Botanic Gardens in England. In addition to her academic writing, her essays have appeared in publications including Smithsonian Magazine, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Undark, and Narratively.

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[image: Christie working with her Scientific American editor, Jeff DelViscio.]

We live in a society that wants to know. And yet uncertainty underlies all of science–one of our most essential tools for understanding the world. What is our relationship with uncertainty? Why is this relationship so important? And what does it have to do with creative practice? In this episode of Emerging Form, Christie Aschwanden talks about her new short-run podcast, Uncertain, hosted by Scientific American. We discuss the genesis of the project, the importance of finding people who are also passionate about your project, being receptive to opportunities, how we can be smart about creating congruent projects, how trying new media can spark our creative practice, and the importance of encouragement.

Uncertain from Scientific American https://scientificamerican.com/uncertain

Christie’s FiveThirtyEight story “There’s No Such Thing as ‘Sound Science’”

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“The day is about certainty, answers, lists, data,” says author Annabel Abbs-Streets. But at night, she says, “I felt I could put my arm through to another world” — a world of creativity, inspiration, open-mindedness and insight. In this episode, we discuss her new book, Sleepless: Unleashing the Subversive Power of the Night Self, which weaves science, memoir, and history into a powerful, intimate conversation about creativity and the night and why we (especially women) might find our empathy, creativity, and connection to the divine might be heightened after the sun goes down.

Annabel Abbs-Streets is an award-winning writer of highly researched fiction, non-fiction and memoir. Sleepless is her seventh book, and her work has been published in over 30 languages. She writes regularly for a wide range of newspapers and magazines, and has spoken at literary festivals across the world. She has a degree in English Literature, an MA in Marketing, Research and Statistics, and is a Fellow of the Brown Foundation. She lives with her family in London and Sussex.

Annabel Abbs-Streets

Sleepless: Unleashing the Subversive Power of the Night Self

Rosemerry’s album on endarkenment, Dark Praise

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When Kelly and Zach Weinersmith proposed a book on colonizing Mars, they had no idea that halfway through their research they’d change their position. Their title says it all: A City on Mars: Can We Settle Space, Should We Settle Space, and Have We Really Thought This Through? What happens when two people who eschew conflict find themselves in a position of dashing people’s dreams about space? In this light-hearted episode we talk about their research process, how they organized crazy amounts of information, their collaborative processes, negotiating critique with each other, how to make hard science more accessible and palatable to the public and how humor helps everything.

Dr. Kelly Weinersmith received her PhD in Ecology at the University of California Davis, and is an adjunct faculty member in the BioSciences Department at Rice University. Kelly studies parasites that manipulate the behavior of their hosts, and her research has been featured in The Atlantic, National Geographic, BBC World, Science, and Nature. With her husband, Zach Weinersmith she wrote Soonish: Ten Emerging Technologies That’ll Improve and/or Ruin Everything, was a New York Times Bestseller.

and Zach Weinersmith is the cartoonist behind the popular geek webcomic, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal and he illustrated the New York Times-bestselling Open Borders: The Science and Ethics of Immigration. His work has been featured by The Economist, The Wall Street Journal, Slate, Forbes, Science Friday and many others. Zach and Kelly live in Virginia with their children.

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It happens. We screw up. Sometimes, mid creative process, we realize we need to start over again. In this episode, we look at one of Rosemerry’s recent midnight bouts with “uh oh” and how it became a chance to explore trust in the process and trust in the creative self. “It was so empowering, so exciting, so revolutionary for my creative process to have this ability to be able to move forward with compassion toward myself instead of shaming of the self,” she says. In this heartfelt episode, Christie and Rosemerry explore vulnerability, authenticity, the gift of struggle, radical acceptance and the benefits of creating a cocoon of tenderness for the creative self.

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How can you build a palace in your mind? We speak with Paul Hearding, the North American Champion for Reciting Pi, about how he used storytelling to memorize 16,106 digits in February 2020. He shares how his process evolved (obey the emerging form!) so that now, as he continues to memorize more, he’s included rhyme. It’s fun episode exploring passion projects and practical applications for story.

After receiving his master's in Mathematics from the University of Delaware and teaching at the college level, Paul Hearding packed up his things and followed a lifelong dream of moving out west. That journey brought him to Telluride, Colorado, where he taught high-school math and science. Paul now runs his own tutoring business, nurturing an appreciation for the art of mathematics in his students while pursuing his own mathematical passions, including the practice of reciting digits of pi from memory. In 2020, Paul recited 16,106 digits of pi, setting the US record.He is actively doing original research in the area of finite fields and is currently researching permutation polynomials, a phenomenon in abstract algebra with applications to the information sciences, particularly cryptology. He plans to submit his dissertation this year and earn his Ph.D. from the University of Delaware.

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How can a creative practice help us to meet what Rilke named the “dark hours of our being?” How can we participate in a more self-compassionate creative practice? In this heart-opening, soul-nourishing, deeply vulnerable episode of Emerging Form, we speak with comedian and poet John Roedel about how writing helped him wonder again and again “what if I go just a little bit deeper?” We talk about how through a daily writing practice in a period of personal struggle, he was able to become increasingly vulnerable, increasingly courageous about sharing his work, and increasingly connected to his own heart.

John Roedel is a comic who unexpectedly gained notability as a writer and poet through his heartfelt pieces he shared on social media that went viral. He is the author of six self-published books that went on to become Amazon bestsellers, including—Hey God. Hey John, Upon Departure and his latest work, “Fitting In is For Sardines.”

Offering a sincere and very relatable look at his faith crisis, mental health, personal struggles, perception of our world, and even his fashion sense, John's writing has been shared millions of times across social media. He teaches at universities and retreat centers across the US.

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How does one go from writing articles to writing a full book? How does this change creative rhythms of research, scheduling and writing? In this episode of Emerging Form we speak with journalist Rebecca Boyle whose first book, OUR MOON: How Earth’s Celestial Companion Transformed the Planet, Guided Evolution, and Made Us Who We Are comes out January 16. We speak, too, about how to do creative work while parenting young children and how to find focus with a subject literally as big as the moon.

As a journalist, Rebecca Boyle has reported from particle accelerators, genetic sequencing labs, bat caves, the middle of a lake, the tops of mountains, and the retractable domes of some of Earth’s largest telescopes. Her first book,OUR MOON: How Earth’s Celestial Companion Transformed the Planet, Guided Evolution, and Made Us Who We Are (Random House, 2024) is a new history of humanity’s relationship with the Moon, which Rebecca has not yet visited on assignment. Based in Colorado Springs, Colo., Rebecca is a contributing editor at Scientific American, a contributing writer at Quanta Magazine and The Atlantic, and a columnist at Atlas Obscura. She is a frequent contributor to the New York Times, Smithsonian Air & Space, and Popular Science. Her work has appeared in Wired, MIT Technology Review, Nature, Science, Popular Mechanics, New Scientist, Audubon, Distillations, and many other publications.

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It’s the epiphany episode! Every year Rosemerry & Christie think back on the year in creative practice to see what we had hoped we might explore and do … and what actually happened. So many revelations in this episode! Full of laughter and sincerity, celebration and curiosity. We pick new words for 2024 to help guide our process, and of course, we hand out magic wands … though it’s surprising what happens with them.

Christies’s 5280m essay

Liz Gilbert interview

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Best way to tackle a creative fear? With a friend! We talk with comedians Chris Duffy and Zach Sherwin about how they offered inspiration and accountability for each other in a 101-day TikTok content creation challenge. We touch on creative habits, perfectionism, practical tips for negotiating TikTok, collaborative projects, the vicissitudes of algorithms, and metrics of success. It’s a heart-warming, laughter-full episode full of friendship, fear, birds, and success.

Chris Duffy is a comedian, television writer, and radio/podcast host. Chris currently hosts TED’s hit podcast How to Be a Better Human. He has appeared on Good Morning America, ABC News, NPR, and National Geographic Explorer. Chris wrote for both seasons of Wyatt Cenac's Problem Areas on HBO, executive produced by John Oliver. He’s the creator/host of the streaming game show Wrong Answers Only, where three comedians try to guess what a leading scientist does all day, in partnership with LabX at the National Academy of Sciences. He has performed live in venues as big as a sold out Lincoln Center and as small as a walk-in closet (also sold out). Chris is both a former fifth grade teacher and a former fifth grade student.

Zach Sherwin is a Los Angeles-based comedian and the creator and host of The Crossword Show, in which a panel of comedians solves a crossword puzzle live onstage in front of an audience. In 2022, he published his debut crossword puzzle in the New York Times. His writing for the web series “Epic Rap Battles of History” has received multiple Streamy Awards and Emmy nominations, and the Epic Rap Battles in which he’s appeared have amassed well over half a billion YouTube views and an RIAA-certified Gold record. His own YouTube videos have been viewed many millions of times, and his other writing credits range from “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend” (The CW) to MAD Magazine. As a performer, Zach has appeared on “Totally Biased with W. Kamau Bell” (FX) and “The Pete Holmes Show” (TBS), both long cancelled, as well as “America’s Got Talent” (NBC), which seems to be doing just fine! Zach has also worked extensively as a TV audience warm-up comic, including at the 2023 National Spelling Bee finals. For more information on Zach and The Crossword Show, please visit www.crosswordshow.com.

Zach’s first video of the 101 day experiment:

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Wow, it’s been a minute! Today’s episode is number 100, and we use the occasion to reflect on the origins of Emerging Form and how it has evolved since February 21, 2019 when we released episode 1. (We have been releasing bonus episodes every other week since episode 10, which means that this is actually episode 190!!)

We also discuss what we’ve learned how doing the podcast has enriched our lives and our friendship.

Episodes mentioned:

Ep 2: Is talent necessary with Jenn Kahn

Ep 76 Bonus Chris Duffy on Differentiating Between You and Your Ideas

Ep 28 The daily grind with Holiday Mathis

Ep 9: how should we think of awards and contests (live show!)

Ep 82 Bonus: Creative Pleasures with Brad Aaron Modlin

Ep 57: How play can fuel creativity with Catherine Price (and #45 protecting your creative time)

Ep 88: Emily Scott on the art of performing

Ep 19: Creativity and COVID-19 with Peter Heller

Ep 79: Lauren Fleshman on Telling Her Story to Create Social Change

Ep 40: Envy, with Cheryl Strayed

Ep 74: T.A. Barron on the Magic of Stories

Ep 93: Melissa L. Sevigny

Ep 77 Bonus: Aaron Abeyta ep. 77 bonus

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What guidance does the earth offer for creative practice? We speak with Jacqeline Suskin, author of A Year in Practice: Seasonal Rituals and Prompts to Awaken Cycles of Creative Expression about how to rest, when to push, when to engage in reflection, when to seek inspiration. We explore the rhythms of the earth and of creativity, specifically focusing on autumn and how this season might inform your creative practice.

Jacqueline Suskin has composed over forty thousand poems with her ongoing improvisational writing project, Poem Store. She is the author of six books, including Help in the Dark Season. Her work has been featured in the New York Times, the Atlantic, and Yes! magazine. She lives in Detroit. For more, see jacquelinesuskin.com.

https://www.jacquelinesuskin.com/

**

Vanessa Zoltan explains why she believes “writing a bad novel is an amazing sacred practice” in this Slate article Christie and Rosemerry discuss: Don’t Just Write a Novel This November. Write a Bad Novel. It’s good for you!

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We’ve got a quick announcement. You probably noticed that we didn’t put out a new episode today.

That's not because it’s Rosemerry’s birthday, though it is! Happy birthday Rosemerry! Nope, we are taking a short break, this week and next, to get ready for some great stuff ahead. We are one episode away from our 100th episode, which is actually more like our 180th episode, because most episodes have a bonus to go along with it.

We are going to be going over some of our favorite moments from the podcast so far. In the meantime, Rosemerry and I are going to re-listen to ep 12, about saying no.

We’ll be back on Nov 16. Catch you then!

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As a culture, we spend a lot of our time watching tv and movies and reading and popular fiction, but we rarely stop to reflect on the influence these forms of entertainment have on our lives. In his new book, You Are What You Watch, data journalist Walt Hickey takes deep, fun, rambunctious dive into all the ways that movies, television, and other forms of pop culture are fundamentally important to how we experience the world, how we see ourselves and the kind of the values that we embrace. He explains how Jurassic Park inspired him to study math in college and got people interested in paleontology while also increasing funding for the field. He graphs how movies drive tourism and influence what kind of dogs people want. Best of all, the book contains an entire chapter exploring what stories do to their creators. Turns out, writing fan fiction puts a rocket on someone’s ability to write.

Walt Hickey is the Deputy Editor for Data and Analysis at Insider News. He works on cool stories and supports the newsroom through data journalism. In 2022, he won the Pulitzer Prize for Illustrated Reporting. In Spring of 2018, he launched his creator-owned daily morning newsletter Numlock News. It’s all about the cool numbers buried in the news. It’s funny and makes you smarter. He also predicts the Oscars in the Numlock Awards Supplement, a seasonal pop-up spinoff of Numlock. He’s the author of the new book You Are What You Watch: How Movies and TV Affect Everyting.

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How could embracing change help grow and develop your creative practice? We speak with best-selling author Brad Stulberg about “rugged flexibility” and new definitions for stability, how your expectations might be inhibiting your creativity, how the way you define yourself limits or grows your creative potential, and much more. We also discuss why it sometimes sucks to succeed.

Brad Stulberg is the bestselling author ofMaster of Change and The Practice of Groundedness. He writes for The New York Times and is on faculty at the University of Michigan's Graduate School of Public Health. He lives in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Western North Carolina.

Christie’s TEDx talk about envy and how someone else wrote her book.

Episode 73: Steve Magness on Doing Hard Things

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What happens when science, spirituality and poetry weave together? We speak with heralded poet David Keplinger about his newest poetry collection, Ice, which he playfully describes as “poetry via the Pleistocene.” The book, and our conversation, explores emergence–the emergence of Ice Age animals once preserved in ice and the emergence of feelings and old versions of the self as the heart melts with age and self-compassion. We talk about how creative practice can help us move from “stuckness to spontaneity” and how it is creativity helps us “remember we are here.”

David Keplinger is the director of the MFA Program at American University, recipient of two NEA fellowships, the Colorado Book Award, the TS Eliot Award (selected by Mary Oliver), the Cavafy Prize (selected by Ilya Kaminsky), the Rilke Prize, and the Emily Dickinson Award from the Poetry Society of America. He’s a longtime translator of Büchner Preis winning German poet Jan Wagner. His new poetry book is calledIce, which combines a concern for climate change with a metaphor for inner light.

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Versatility in writing across genres can be a great blessing for a writer, and in this episode we speak with Cameron Walker who works as a journalist, writes poetry and fiction, and has two books coming out this year—one, a book of essays, and the other is an illustrated book for kids about US National Monuments. We speak about how to push yourself in different genres, the importance of trust in your process, how gratefulness became an important part of her writing practice, and the challenges of telling a complicated story in a way simple enough for kids to comprehend without sacrificing the truth of the complexities.

Cameron Walker is a writer based in California. Her journalism, essays, and fiction have appeared in publications including The New York Times, Hakai, The Missouri Review, and The Last Word on Nothing. She’s won awards for her writing from the American Society of Journalists and Authors, the American Institute of Physics, and Terrain.org. She is the author of National Monuments of the U.S.A., a book for kids beautifully illustrated by Chris Turnham. Her essay collection, Points of Light, is coming out this fall from Hidden River Press.

Links:

Cameron’s website: www.cameronwalker.net

Cameron’s Last Word On Nothing archive: https://www.lastwordonnothing.com/category/cameron/

Cameron’s beautiful book, National Monuments of the USA (with illustrations by Chris Turnham) https://www.quarto.com/books/9780711265493/national-monuments-of-the-usa

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This episode is all about passion. What happens when a curiosity takes on a life of its own? How do you juggle a passion project with a full-time job? What are the benefits to working alone? How do you determine a project has chops? We speak with Christine Laskowski, who recently launched an independent passion project, T&J, a podcast devoted to 6th century Byzantium and the greatest recorded love story on earth, between Empress Theodora and her husband, the Emperor Justinian.

Laskowski is a Berlin-based, multimedia journalist with 15 years of reporting, music and storytelling experience from around the world. Her video and audio work has appeared on CBS News, NPR, FiveThirtyEight, and Vox/Netflix. Two years ago, she pitched and then supervised the first TikTok news account for the German broadcaster, Deutsche Welle.

http://christinelaskowski.com/Christine_Laskowski/Home.html

vimeo.com/christinelaskowski

@laskowski_c

https://tandj.buzzsprout.com/

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Creative projects have a habit of taking on their own lives and bringing the creator along for the ride. In this episode, we speak with science writer Melissa L. Sevigny about how her book Brave the Wild River: The untold story of two women who mapped the botany of the Grand Canyon surprised her and required her to tell a story different from the one she set out to write. She also shares how she managed to work a full-time job while researching and writing, how she created three-dimensional characters out of archival information and interviews, how the book let her know she was done, and what she learned from this project to apply to future projects.

Melissa L. Sevigny grew up in Tucson, Arizona, where she fell in love with the Sonoran Desert’s ecology and dark desert skies. She has worked as a science communicator in the fields of space exploration, water policy, and sustainable agriculture, and has a B.S. in environmental science from the University of Arizona and an M.F.A. in creative writing from Iowa State University.

She is the science reporter at KNAU (Arizona Public Radio) in Flagstaff, Arizona and her stories have been awarded regional Edward R. Murrow awards and featured nationally on Science Friday. In addition to Brave the Wild River, she’s also written Mythical River and Under Desert Skies.

Learn more about her at www.melissasevigny.com or follow her on Twitter @melissasevigny.

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Staying Open to Meet the Moment with Rosemerry on Breathing Wind

A special surprise! This week, instead of hearing Rosemerry as an interviewer, you can hear her as an interviewee, talking about the intersection of creativity and grief on Breathing Wind, a wonderful podcast that offers “warm, honest and insightful conversations for journeying introspectively through grief and loss.”Hosts Naila Francis and Sarah Davis talk with her about poetry as a practice for meeting each moment, her unfolding journey through devastating loss, how she’s been carried by an immensity of love since the death of her son Finn, in the same year that her father died, and how grief has deepened her trust in that love while inviting her, over and over again, to say yes to the world.

For their show notes for this episode, visit here.

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Writing a memoir is so much more than writing down memories–it’s shedding layers of stories we’ve told ourselves for years, seeing ourselves in unflattering lights, opening up to compassion, and exposing our underbelly. And it’s powerful medicine. In this episode, we talk with Laura Davis about the story behind her memoir, The Burning Light of Two Stars: A Mother-Daughter Story. In her blunt, brave way, Davis tells the complicated story of how deep wounds exposed an even deeper love–and what it took to get to that place.

Laura Davis is also the author of The Courage to Heal, and four other groundbreaking books. In addition to writing books that inspire, the work of Laura’s heart is to teach. For more than twenty years, she’s helped people find their voices, tell their stories, and hone their craft. Laura has been published in Publisher's Weekly, Writer's Digest, CrimeReads, Brevity, and The New York Times, featured in Los Angeles Review of Books, and on QWERTY, Write-Minded, The Only One in the Room, and dozens of other podcasts. She's a featured speaker for The National Association of Memoir Writers and a popular craft teacher at The San Miguel Writer's Conference. Laura is teaching a special series of online summer pop-up classes this summer and will be leading her signature Writing as a Pathway Through Grief retreat in August. Next spring, she’ll be taking a group to Bali for an in-depth dive into Balinese spirituality and healing practices. You can learn about Laura’s retreats, workshops, and classes, and read the first five chapters of her memoir at www.lauradavis.net.

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For Phyllis Cole-Dai, mindfulness is “keeping my head and my heart where my body is … here and now.” In this interview with the poet, writer, community leader, and editor of the popular Poetry of Presence anthologies, we explore the role of mindfulness in a writing practice and how mindfulness helps our writing be in service to a larger community. How can our creative practice help further social justice? How can our creative practice honor “what is beautiful in every person, even the ones we have most strong disagreement with?” And how is joy an integral part of any practice, especially in a time of social upheaval?

Phyllis Cole-Dai began pecking away on an old manual typewriter in childhood and never stopped. She has authored or edited books in multiple genres, “writing across what divides us.” Originally from Ohio, she now resides with her scientist-husband and two cats in a 130-year-old house in Brookings, South Dakota. She invites you to join The Raft, her online community on Substack, where members ride the river of life, buoyed by the arts and spiritual practice (phylliscoledai.substack.com).

website: https://phylliscoledai.com

Online community (The Raft): phylliscoledai.substack.com

Poetry of Presence (both volumes): https://poetryofpresencebook.com

Exploring Poetry of Presence II: Prompts to Deepen Your Writing Practice

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What happens to our writing when we begin with an I-don’t-know mindset? Our work becomes more loose, more fresh, more playful, more true. We speak with authors and teachers James Navé and Allegra Huston about their book Write What You Don’t Know: 10 Steps to Writing with Confidence, Energy, and Flow. It’s a practical and fun episode with many tips for escaping the rational mind and allowing your imagination to take the lead.

Allegra Huston and James Navéare co-founders of Imaginative Storm Writing Workshops and the publishing company Twice 5 Miles. They have been teaching multi-day and single-day writing workshops together and separately for over 20 years. For five years they taught a creativity retreat for screenwriting students at the National University of Ireland, Galway, and both have also taught for the University of Oklahoma OSLEP program.

jamesnave.comimaginativestorm.com Instagram: @imaginativestorm allegrahuston.com Facebook: Imaginative StormLinkedIn: Imaginative Storm Youtube: youtube.com/@imaginativestorm

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Artificial intelligence is affecting creative industries–for instance Hollywood screenwriters–and frustrating creative writing instructors with papers turned in composed by ChatGPT. How dangers is AI to creative careers? Can it be helpful? How do we move forward in a world where human creativity and technology work together? What is the creative’s role in building a bridge between AI and the rest of the community? Is AI creative? Should we be scared? Our conversation with poet and engineer Uche Ogbuji gives context for the AI explosion and offers long term perspective.

Uche Ogbuji, more fully Úchèńnà Ogbújí, is a poet, spoken word performer, composer and DJ. His chapbook, Ndewo, Colorado (Aldrich Press, USA, 2013), won a Colorado Book Award and a Westword Award winner (“Best Environmental Poetry”). Uche's work fuses Igbo culture, European classicism, American Mountain West setting, Hip-Hop and afrofuturism. He is a 2022 Boulder County Arts Fellow for Literature and Music, and serves on the board of the Colorado Poets Center. Former stints include editor at Kin Poetry Journal and The Nervous Breakdown.

Uche’s Newsletter

Alan Turing

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How do we share our art with the world? In this episode of Emerging Form, singer/songwriter and incredible performer Emily Scott Robinson talks about the creativity of connecting. How do we help our audience feel seen? How can “mistakes” create bonding? How do we change energy that feels “off”? How do you make the same material feel fresh for yourself time after time? It’s a practical, heart-opening episode full of laughter.

With a quarter million miles under her belt and counting, North Carolina native Emily Scott Robinson travels the dusty highways of America's wild country, capturing the stories of the people she meets and expertly crafting them into songs. Robinson received critical acclaim for her debut album Traveling Mercies. Rolling Stone named it one of the “40 Best Country and Americana Albums of 2019.” In 2021, Robinson signed with Oh Boy records, the label founded by the legendary John Prine, and released her follow-up album American Siren. It made numerous “Best of 2021” lists including NPR, Rolling Stone, American Songwriter, and No Depression. In 2022, Robinson released a collaboration for theater calledBuilt on Bones, a song cycle written for the Witches of Shakespeare's Macbeth, featuring artists Alisa Amador and Violet Bell.

Emily Scott Robinson Website

Emily’s Instagram

Emily’s music

Built on Bones

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What business skills are most helpful for a creative career? And if you didn’t get a business degree, how might you best get these skills? Who might you rely on? How can you find play and creativity in the business side of your artistic dreams? We speak about this and more with fine art photographer Marisa S. White, owner of the True North Art Gallery.

Marisa S. White is an award-winning artist best known for seamlessly stitching multiple photographs together, weaving personal narratives through surreal and fantastical imagery. Originally a drawing and painting major, Marisa fell in love with photography in college and eventually began incorporating it into her work, creating mixed media collages.

Marisa’s work is collected internationally, and she has exhibited across the US and in Europe; most notably at the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento, California. She recently opened True North Art Gallery in Colorado Springs.

Marisa S. White website

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When Laura Tohe went to school in the Navajo Nation, there were no books by Native writers for her to read. “That was an invisibility I grew up with,” she says. She knew she wanted to be a writer, she just didn’t know how. In this episode of Emerging Form, we talk with Tohe about how she found support from writers such as Joy Harjo, Simon Ortiz and Rudofo Anaya who encouraged her to write about what she knew. Now as Navajo Nation Poet Laureate, she encourages younger Navajo writers to share their stories and poems.

Laura Tohe is Diné and the current Navajo Nation Poet Laureate. She is Sleepy Rock People clan and born for the Bitter Water People clan. She published 3 books of poetry, an anthology of Native women’s writing, and an oral history on the Navajo Code Talkers. Her librettos, Enemy Slayer, A Navajo Oratorio (2008) and Nahasdzáán in the Glittering World (2021), performed in Arizona and France, respectively. Among her awards are the 2020 Academy of American Poetry Fellowship, the 2019 American Indian Festival of Writers Award, and twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She is Professor Emerita with Distinction from Arizona State University. In 2015 Laura was honored as the Navajo Nation Poet Laureate for 2015-2017, a title given to her in celebration and recognition of her work as a poet and writer.

Laura Tohe

Tseyí Deep in the Rock

No Parole Today

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How do you create a project that at the same time reaches toward grief and toward joy? What does it ask of our creative practice? What does it take, practically speaking, to make it feel cohesive? In this special episode of Emerging Form, the co-hosts talk about Rosemerry’s new book, All the Honey, which releases April 18 from Samara Press. They talk about how to select poems for a collection and how to order them. They talk about the somewhat mysterious arrival of the title and how some of the poems were written, including a romp of a poem about a time when our audio engineer Leah asked Rosemerry to make a laugh track after an audio mishap. It’s a tender and funny episode about completing a book that touches on devastation and elation and all points in between. “At first I didn’t think both kinds of poems could inhabit the same pages,” Rosemerry says, “and then I realized, ‘Of course, they can. Because that is what we as humans are asked to do—to inhabit worlds of great joy and great despair at the same time.’”

“All the Honey is an outpouring of love from a poet who understands: the world that breaks our heart is the same world that knits it together.”

—Phyllis Cole-Dai, co-editor, Poetry of Presence: An Anthology of Mindfulness Poems

All the Honey

Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

Book Launch on April 18

“I need a chair that will make me not want want to get up and do whatever important thing I think I must do. Why is it so hard to just sit?” —Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

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Instead of sweating the small stuff, what if we honor the small stuff–with curiosity, with wonder. In this episode of Emerging Form, we talk with podcaster and video editor Flora Lichtman about her work as host for the listener call-in podcast “Every Little Thing,” which was essentially an “exercise in curiosity.” We discuss who can best tell a story? How do we most courageously and interestingly get from point A to point F? How do you build stakes? How does collaboration help? And how do we know when to switch mediums to tell a story the way it wants to be told?

Flora Lichtman is a host and managing editor at Spotify. Most recently, she created and hosted a listener call-in podcast called Every Little Thing. The show ran for 5 years and had more than 200 episodes. Previously, she wrote for the Netflix show, "Bill Nye Saves the World,” and co-directed the Emmy-nominated video series “Animated Life” on The New York Times Op-Docs channel. (They lost to Oprah.) Before that, she hosted The Adaptors podcast about climate change, worked as a video editor and substitute host at PRI's Science Friday and co-wrote a book on the science of annoyingness. And long, long ago, she worked for a NATO oceanographic lab in Italy. For the lab's research expeditions, she lived on a ship where apertivi were served on the top deck, hoisted there via pulley by the ship's chef.

Flora Lichtman’s website: http://www.floralichtman.com/

Every Little Thing podcast

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One of the best ways to support your creative practice? Try new things. In this episode, David Epstein, author of the New York Times #1 best seller Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World, talks about why many streams of interest, novelty, and beginner’s mind are important. The conversation touches on science, music, sports, art and even parenting. Highlights: Epstein debunks the 10,000 hour rule, shares how he keeps a Book of Small Experiments, navigates Christie & Rosemerry’s ongoing argument about talent, and speaks truth about luck.

David Epstein is the author of the #1 New York Times best seller Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World, and of the bestseller The Sports Gene. He has master's degrees in environmental science and journalism and has been an investigative reporter for ProPublica, thehost of Slate‘s popular “How To!” podcast, and a senior writer for Sports Illustrated. He lives in Washington, DC.

https://davidepstein.com/david-epstein-about/

David’s Substack

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How can you invite pleasure to be a part of your creative practice? In this bonus episode with professor and poet Brad Aaron Modlin we talk about his heart-opening, blood pumping, joy-raising way to start a creative day; ways to dismantle our fear of not being good enough; and how changing the genre can open surprising doors.

Brad Aaron Modlin’s book Everyone at This Party Has Two Names won The Cowles Poetry Prize. His poetry has been the text for orchestral scores; the springboard for an NYC art exhibition; and the focus of an episode of The Slowdown with U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón. The premier episode of Poetry Unbound with Pádraig Ó Tuamawas about his poem “What You Missed That Day You Were Absent from Fourth Grade.” An Associate Professor of poetry, he teaches graduates and undergrads both in-person and online; coordinates the visiting writers series; and forgets where in the classroom he left his flip-flops.

www.bradaaronmodlin.com

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What kinds of creative habits work best for you? How do different practices bring out a new flavor or new thrill in your art? We talk with professor and poet Brad Aaron Modlin, the Reynolds Endowed Chair of Creative Writing at University of Nebraska, Kearney, about various challenges and approaches he’s used with his students. We also talk about how engaging with strangers is an important part of his creative practice, resources for keeping you on track and healthy as you meet your goals, and he reads us his famous poem “What You Missed That Day You Were Absent from Fourth Grade.”

Brad Aaron Modlin’s book Everyone at This Party Has Two Names won The Cowles Poetry Prize. His poetry has been the text for orchestral scores; the springboard for an NYC art exhibition; and the focus of an episode of The Slowdown with U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón. The premier episode of Poetry Unbound with Pádraig Ó Tuamawas about his poem “What You Missed That Day You Were Absent from Fourth Grade.” An Associate Professor of poetry, he teaches graduates and undergrads both in-person and online; coordinates the visiting writers series; and forgets where in the classroom he left his flip-flops.

www.bradaaronmodlin.com

Invitation to January Writing Blitz

Joy Workout

Everyone at This Party Has Two Names from SEMO Press

@BradAaronModlin (Twitter)

brad.aaron.modlin.writer (Instagram)

The in-person/online creative writing graduate program at University of Nebraska, Kearney.

https://www.bradaaronmodlin.com/election-night-page-larger-view

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If you’ve noticed that being outside improves your creativity, you’re right. We speak with Florence Williams about the science of awe, why cultivating openness is your muse’s best friend, and specific ways to nourish your creative practice by engaging with the natural world. We also talk about the writing of her new book, in which she studies how we recover from heartbreak. It’s an episode that appeals to heart, brain and the unselved soul, exploring “the science of the ineffable.”

Florence Williams is a science journalist, author, podcaster and speaker. Her book BREASTS: A Natural and Unnatural Historywon the LA Times Book Prize in 2013, in 2017 she came out with The Nature Fix: Why Nature Makes us Happier, Healthier, and More Creative , an Audible best seller, and her new book,Heartbreak: A Personal and Scientific Journey, now just out in paperback, is nominated for this year's PEN/Wilson Award for Literary Science Writing. She’s won two Gracie awards for podcasts based on her books, and she often writes for audio as well as print. She also leads workshops and retreats on topics ranging from narrative writing to the importance of finding awe and healing in nature.

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“Put on your zeitgeist hat,” says Holiday Mathis, syndicated astrologer and author of How to Fail Epically in Hollywood, “then pour everything you can into the part of your art you can control.” In this episode of Emerging Form, we talk about how to gather “textures” from daily life for creative practice, what she’s learned from writing, editing, publishing and narrating her new novel, the importance of beta readers, dreaming big, and the healthiest relationship to rejection letters we’ve ever heard.

Holiday Mathis writes the daily horoscope for The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post and hundreds of newspapers around the world. In her decades-long syndication she's published almost nine million words on luck, the stars and the human condition. She's also a multi-platinum selling songwriter with songs recorded by Miley Cyrus, Emma Roberts and more. Holiday is the author of several books includingHow to Fail Epically in Hollywood.

Previous Holiday episodes:

Episode 28: The Daily Grind

Episode 28 bonus: Extended Interview with Holiday Mathis

Episode 63: Reviving abandoned projects with Holiday Mathis

Episode 63 bonus: Holiday Mathis on creative process

The blog post that started our friendship with Holiday: I Know Astrology Is B**t, But I Can’t Stop Reading My Horoscope by Christie Aschwanden

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Lauren Fleshman knows firsthand the challenges of being a female runner, and how some of the greatest challenges come from the system meant to support athletes. In this episode of Emerging Form, she talks about how and why she came to write her memoir, “bringing a pulse to the research.” She tells us about the challenges of trying to write a book during a global pandemic while parenting young children and how depression threatened to derail the project. Our discussion includes frank talk about her mental health crisis, how she healed, and how she found the courage and authenticity to see the project through.

Lauren Fleshman is one of the most decorated American distance runners of all time, having won five NCAA championships at Stanford and two national championships as a professional. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times and Runner’s World. She is the brand strategy advisor for Oiselle, a fitness apparel company for women, and the co-founder of Picky Bars, a natural food company. She lives in Bend, OR with her husband, triathlete Jesse Thomas, and their two children. Her new book isGood for a Girl: A Woman Running in a Man’s World.

Lauren Fleshman’s New York Times Op/Ed

Mary Cain’s story

Image: credit Oiselle Ryan Warner

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How can looking back at your creative practice over the last year help steer you forward into next year’s creative practice? Join Christie and Rosemerry as they do their annual review of things they’d hoped might happen, what really happened and where they think their creative lives are going next. The conversation reveals several epiphanies about creative practice vs. career, what really matters, and the power of planning (and changing plans). Bonus: they hand out magic wands for you to make your own creative magic.

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“Art gathers us,” says poet aaron a. abeyta. In this episode, we talk with the celebrated poet about his newest collection of poems and letters, ancestor of fire. In this episode, focus on what is the work of the writer? How do we save language? What are the benefits of writing longhand? How do we give voice to what is broken? How does repetition echo storytelling? Why is it important to write what you don’t know? Plus aaron shares many lines and bits of wisdom from his mentors and literary heroes.

aaron a. abeyta is a Colorado native and the author of five collections of poetry and one novel. For his book, colcha, Abeyta received an American Book Award and the Colorado Book Award. In addition, his novel, Rise, Do Not be Afraid, was a finalist for the 2007 Colorado Book Award and El Premio Aztlan. abeyta was awarded a Colorado Council on the Arts Fellowship for poetry, and he is the former Poet Laureate of Colorado’s Western Slope and was a finalist for the 2019 Colorado Poet Laureate. Abeyta is also a recipient of a Governor’s Creative Leadership Award for 2017. aaron has over 100 publications in journals, anthologies, textbooks and books. His most recent book, ancestor of fire, was just released by Lithic Press.

abeyta also served as mayor of his hometown, Antonito, for eight years, completing his two terms in April, 2022. aaron, his wife Michele and their daughter, Rut, call Antonito home. Michele and Aaron are co-Directors and founders of The Justice & Heritage Academy, a school based on the three pillars of Environmental, Social and Food Justice.

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Paying attention is an essential part of creative practice, and in this episode, we speak with comedian and TV writer Chris Duffy about how he transforms what he notices into a career in comedy. He also talks about why jokes and poems are versions of the same thing, how to structure a comedy set, why math is so important to comedy, how to maximize a laugh, the importance of vulnerability and how to arrange word order for maximum effect. He also offers incredible writing and performing advice, delivered with a big dose of laughter.

Chris Duffy is a comedian, television writer, and radio/podcast host. Chris currently hosts TED’s hit podcast How to Be a Better Human. He has appeared on Good Morning America, ABC News, NPR, and National Geographic Explorer. Chris wrote for both seasons of Wyatt Cenac's Problem Areas on HBO, executive produced by John Oliver. He’s the creator/host of the streaming game show Wrong Answers Only, where three comedians try to guess what a leading scientist does all day, in partnership with LabX at the National Academy of Sciences. He has performed live in venues as big as a sold out Lincoln Center and as small as a walk-in closet (also sold out). Chris is both a former fifth grade teacher and a former fifth grade student.

Chris Duffy’s website:Chris Duffy’s Newsletter, Bright Spots

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Image: Rosemerry and her daughter definitely succeeded in making a delicious chocolate beet birthday cake.

What is success? How have your ideas about success changed over time? Who is someone you think of when you think of a successful person in your field? How has their success made an impact on you? What risks have you taken for success?

In this conversation, co-hosts Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer and Christie Aschwanden explore the importance of role models, external vs. internal markers for success, and what happens when you meet your goal posts–how does that change your ideas about success?

Links:

Christie’s LWON essay about people who make their beds (Rosemerry) and those who don’t (Christie)

Judyth Hill on Emerging Form

Tim Green on Emerging Form

Rosemerry’s first poem in Rattle.com

Rosemerry’s Poetic Role Model Ellen Bass

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“There is a magic to stories well told,” says novelist T.A. Barron, and in this thoughtful, heart-opening, life-affirming episode, he explores how story weaves through every part of our lives. He talks about how he went from rejected novelist to successful business leader to best-selling author. He speaks of the story as a boat containing treasure–and of the magic not only in his stories about Merlin, but also in our daily lives and how creative practice helps us share this treasure. To close, he shares one of the best stories of perseverance and making lemons from lemonade that we ever heard–think rejection, Madeleine L’Engle and a notary–a story to inspire anyone who has ever been roundly rejected want to find a way forward.

T. A. Barron grew up in Colorado ranch country. After a successful business career in New York, he moved back to Colorado to pursue his dream to be a writer, outdoorsman, and conservationist. He is the award-winning author of more than 30 highly-acclaimed books, including the international bestselling series The Merlin Saga, which is now being developed into a feature film by Disney. T. A. Barron is an advocate for public-spirited kids, and is founder of the Gloria Barron Prize for Young Heroes, a national award that each year honors 25 young people who help their communities or the environment. In addition to writing and speaking, T. A. Barron serves on many environmental and educational boards, including Princeton University, where he helped to create the High Meadows Environmental Institute, and The Wilderness Society. He has also launched his own podcast, Magic and Mountains, on creative process, the magic of Merlin, and more.

www.tabarron.com/podcast

https://www.instagram.com/tabarronauthor/

https://www.facebook.com/TABarronFans

Rosemerry’s poem about apricots

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Creative projects are rewarding, but let’s be honest: they’re also hard. Today’s guest, Steve Magness, is an expert on doing hard things and he has some good advice on how to break through. Steve discusses the benefits of a quiet ego, how to feed and reward the positive voices in your head, how shifting to talking to yourself in second or third person can help you quiet negative self-talk, and how spending time alone and practicing boredom can foster creativity.

Steve Magness is a world-renowned expert on performance. He is the author of the new book Do Hard Things: Why We Get Resilience Wrong and The Surprising Science of Real Toughness. He’s also coauthor of Peak Performance. The Passion Paradox, and the author of The Science of Running. Magness has served as an executive coach and a consultant on mental skills development for professional sports teams, including some of the top teams in the NBA. Steve’s writing has appeared in Outside, Runner’s World, Forbes, Sports Illustrated, Men's Health, and a variety of other outlets. He earned his undergraduate degree from the University of Houston and a graduate degree from George Mason University. He currently lives in Houston, Texas with his wife Hillary. Once upon a time, he ran a mile in 4:01 in high school, at the time the 6th fastest high school mile in US history.

Steve’s website

Steve on Twitter https://twitter.com/stevemagness

Emerging Form is a listener-supported podcast. To receive new bonus episodes and help us make this podcast sustainable, consider becoming a paid subscriber.

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit emergingform.substack.com/subscribe

Emerging Form is a listener-supported podcast. To receive new episodes and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Imagine researching a theoretical global disaster that, while you are writing your book, comes to pass. In this episode, Emerging Form welcomes Nicola Twilley and Geoff Manaugh, who were writing their non-fiction book Until Proven Safe: The History and Future of Quarantine before the COVID-19 pandemic. We talk about writing as metabolic process–how it helps to coalesce life into meaning and purpose. We talk about writing with a partner, Scrivener vs. Word, how to shape a book, how to research, and how to turn reporting into a cohesive narrative.

Nicola Twilley is cohost of the award-winning podcastGastropod, which looks at food through the lens of science and history, and is a frequent contributor to The New Yorker.

Geoff Manaugh is the author of the New York Times-bestseller,A Burglar’s Guide to the City, as well as the architecture and technology website BLDGBLOG. He regularly writes for The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, Wired, and many other publications.

Nicky and Geoff live in Los Angeles.

Until Proven Safe Website

A Burglar’s Guide to the City

Nicky at The New Yorker

Instagram: @untilprovensafe

@nicolatwilley

@geoffmanaugh

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In all of our other shows, we have talked about creative practice and how you develop your own voice, your own identity, how you make your own creative mark. And in today’s episode, we speak with poet and performer and teacher Kim Rosen, who will guide in thinking about the opposite–how we might let go of our creative identities as we age, and why that is essential work.

Kim Rosen, M.F.A., author of Saved by a Poem: The Transformative Power of Words, has awakened listeners around the world to the power of poetry to heal, awaken and disarm individuals and communities. She is a poet, spoken word artist, ritualist, and guide of inner exploration. Her current passion is weaving poetry, music, teaching and self-inquiry to invite us to turn towards aging, death and letting go. Her upcoming Fall audio release, Feast of Losses, is a collaboration on the same theme with cellist Jami Sieber. She is the co-creator of several recordings of spoken poems and music and her writing has been published in The Sun Magazine, O Magazine,The Texas Review and Spirituality and Health Magazine. In 2007, she spoke a poem to a group of Maasai girls in Kenya who had fled FGM and Early Childhood Marriage, and that moment became the seed of the Safe House Education (S.H.E.) Fund.

www.kimrosen.net

www.shecollegefund.org

Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life by Richard Rohr

Talk at Science and Nonduality Conference:

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How has creativity served us in times of trauma? Last year, Christie and Rosemerry released an episode mid-September about the very difficult life events that had occurred for them in August–Christie’s father’s nearly fatal stroke and the death of Rosemerry’s son. As we come back from a much-needed summer break, we revisit the past year to look at how things have changed–and stayed the same. In this episode, our hosts talk about how years of creative practice can be a gift we give our future selves to help us meet a difficult chapter, how sometimes when we think we already know the end of our real story we can stymie our creative process, how sharing our creative practice can be very healing and how you might know you are ready to return to a creative practice after an emotionally traumatic event.

Christie writing about visiting her dad on his birthday

Susan Tweit (Ep. 53) on reflection

Rosemerry’s poem, For When People Ask

Rosemerry’s poem, Contentment

Catherine Price (Ep. 45) on the importance of down time

Christie on finding delight in a terrible year

Finding Creativity in Times of Trauma (Ep. 50)

Rosemerry’s Chair Poem, Circumventing the Busy Self

Christie on finding Rosemerry’s unwritten poems

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Noticing and being present are two essential ingredients for creativity, and in today’s episode, writer Laurie Wagner discusses how travel can facilitate creative traits like these and help you connect with your muse. She tells us about how being in a foreign place helps her move slower and see things anew. “Our lives are passing, and we think we are going someplace,” she says, but meanwhile life is passing us by in this present moment, and that’s where creativity lies.

PLEASE NOTE: we are taking a short summer break after our Episode 69 bonus next week. If you are a paid subscriber, your subscription will be put on hold (you won’t be charged) until we’re back in late August.

Laurie Wagner has been publishing books and essays, and teaching writing for the last 25 years. She is a process guru and has a genius for holding space, helping people unzip what’s inside of them, and get ink on the page. A creative brain-stormer, she specializes in out of the box ways to tell your stories. Her Wild Writing classes are the cornerstone of her live work. She teaches weekly, small groups, and also hosts The Wild Family, a large group of writers from around the world who write together weekly. She is the author of Living Happily Ever After: Couples Talk about Long Term Love, and Expectations: 30 Women Talk about Becoming a Mother. Check out her blog at: 27powers.org

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How does a book come together? We speak with Rachel Feltman, author ofBeen There, Done That: A Rousing History of Sex, about the evolution of her book, from first inklings to years of research to organization to completion. She explains how she answered the burning question, “How do I make this a book and not just a pile of words?” Her secrets include A 500-mile ride on a tandem bike, a morning routine, a great agent and editor, the willingness to turn in her “hottest garbage,” and a three-word mantra that will help jumpstart every creative process.

Rachel Feltman’s first paying gig was organizing a bookshelf full of textbooks on vulvar disease at the age of seven, and she never looked back. She’s the Executive Editor of Popular Science and hosts PopSci’s podcast The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week. In 2014, Feltman founded the Washington Post’s Speaking of Science blog, known for headlines such as “You probably have herpes, but that’s really okay,” and “Uranus might be full of surprises.” Feltman studied environmental science at Simon’s Rock and has a master’s in science reporting from NYU. She’s a musician, an actress, and the stepmom of a very spry 14-year-old cat.

Rachel’s website

https://www.boldtypebooks.com/titles/rachel-feltman/been-there-done-that/9781668605042/

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Need inspiration? Look to other arts. This practice, known as ekphrasis–the art of making art inspired by other art, can “fill the well” and create a rich field of ideas to play with. In this episode, Rosemerry offers a provocative list of specific ways one might engage with another work of art and gives examples from her recent poems responding to the paintings of Vincent van Gogh and the music of our previous guest Kayleen Asbo (episode 27, Creative Communities). And Christie talks about novels she’s read this year by Emily St. John, Anthony Doerr and others that are teaching her new ways to engage audiences around the pandemic, the destruction of the natural world, and how to live in a broken world.

Kayleen Asbo

Love Letters to Vincent Salon with Kayleen and Rosemerry

“In the Wheat Field with Crows” by Rosemerry

“Wheat Field with Crows” by Vincent Van Gogh

“Almond Blossom” by Rosemerry

“Almond Blossom” by Vincent Van Gogh

Novels Christie recently read and loved

Emily St. John Mandel, Sea of Tranquility, Station Eleven

Benjamín Labatut, When We Cease to Understand the World

Anthony Doerr, Cloud Cuckoo Land

Richard Powers, The Overstory and Bewilderment

Lily King, Euphoria

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Some projects take on a life of their own–what begins as a side project might grow into a life-style change and new career. But how do we know if or when to end it? How do external factors influence it? What do we learn about adaptation and trust? In this episode of Emerging Form, we bring back podcaster Laura Joyce Davis, host and executive producer of the award-winning narrative podcast Shelter in Place. We talk about committing to projects you don’t know how to do, learning from failure, spin off projects, sustainability, finding closure and learning into the next chapter.

Laura Joyce Davis is the host and executive producer of the award-winning narrative podcast Shelter in Place. She and her writer husband Nate together created the Social Impact Award-winning mentorship program Kasama Collective, as well as Labs Weekender, a self-paced narrative podcasting course. Podcast Magazine named Laura in their Top 22 Influencers in Podcasting for 2022. A writer for more than twenty years, her fiction has been recognized with a Fulbright scholarship, a Poets & Writers Magazine Exchange Award, two Pushcart Prize nominations, and occasional praise from her 3 children who believe that anything is possible with a good book, a cape, and a crown (she doesn't disagree).

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Walking. So simple, and yet putting one foot in front of the other is one of the most profound things you can do for your creative practice. In this episode of Emerging Form, we speak with award-winning poet and painter Valencia Robin about how walking has inspired her practice. We bring in science to support what we all know intuitively–moving the body helps open the brain. And Robin (as we call her throughout the podcast) shares poems by contemporary poets and herself, too, that invoke the art of walking.

Valencia Robin’s debut poetry collection, Ridiculous Light, is the winner ofPersea Books’ Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize, a finalist for the 2020 Kate Tufts Discovery Award and was named one of the best poetry books of 2019 by Library Journal. Robin’s other honors include a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, the Emily Clark Balch Award, the Hocking Hills Power of Poetry Prize and fellowships from Cavé Cahnem, the Furious Flower Poetry Center, the University of Virginia, Bennington College and the Vermont College of Fine Arts. A poetry instructor as well as a co-director of the University of Virginia Young Writers Workshop, Robin has an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Virginia and an MFA in Art & Design from the University of Michigan, where she also co-founded GalleryDAAS. Also a painter and curator, Robin’s visual work has been exhibited nationally and supported by the King-Chavez-Parks Future Faculty Fellowship and the Center for the Education of Women’s Margaret Towsley Fellowship.

Valencia Robin’s website

Stanford study finds walking improves creativity

Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking

Ross Gay, “To the Fig Tree on 9th and Christian”

Ada Limón, “During the Impossible Age of Everyone”

Valencia Robin, “After Graduate School”

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“You wouldn’t yell at a preemie baby,” says poet, lyricist, playwright and teacher Alison Luterman. In this bonus episode, we talk about Alison’s “coaxing” approach for her new work, about patience, self-compassion, starting the morning without screens, the benefits and detriments of having many projects at once, and, of course, the importance of coffee.

Alison Luterman's four books of poetry are The Largest Possible Life; See How We Almost Fly; Desire Zoo, and In the Time of Great Fires. Her poems and stories have appeared in The New York Times Sunday Magazine, The Sun, Rattle, Nimrod, Salon, Prairie Schooner, The Brooklyn Review, The Atlanta Review, Tattoo Highway, and in numerous other journals and anthologies. She has written an e-book of personal essays (Feral City, originally published through SheWrites.com, now available through audible.com), half a dozen plays including a musical The Chain about a chain of kidney transplant donors and recipients), lyrics for a song cycle We Are Not Afraid of the Dark, and is currently working on two different musical theater projects as well as new poems and a longer version of her recently-published essay about learning to sing as an, ahem!, older adult.

Previous episodes with Alison: Creative Practice as Political Action and A poem and a song from Alison Luterman

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Is talent necessary? Is it possible, with devotion, hard work and help and time, to develop a creative practice that doesn’t come to us naturally? In this episode of Emerging Form, we talk again with poet, lyricist, playwright and teacher Alison Luterman. As an exuberant young girl who loved to sing, she was told by a choir director to just mouth the words. For decades the wound festered. “It is hard to do the things you’ve been told you’re bad at,” she says. And yet, we talk with her about her essay in The Sun about reclaiming her joy in a creative practice, about meeting creative shame, about how we might encourage (and not shut down) others to explore creative practices, and about some of the hidden gifts in working hard for something that doesn’t come naturally. If you’ve felt shut out of a creative practice, this is the episode to help encourage you to pick up that pen again or sing again or pull out that oboe or put on those tap shoes. Time to play–and see what happens.

Alison Luterman's four books of poetry are The Largest Possible Life; See How We Almost Fly; Desire Zoo, and In the Time of Great Fires. Her poems and stories have appeared in The New York Times Sunday Magazine, The Sun, Rattle, Nimrod, Salon, Prairie Schooner, The Brooklyn Review, The Atlanta Review, Tattoo Highway, and in numerous other journals and anthologies. She has written an e-book of personal essays (Feral City, originally published through SheWrites.com, now available through audible.com), half a dozen plays including a musical The Chain about a chain of kidney transplant donors and recipients), lyrics for a song cycle We Are Not Afraid of the Dark, and is currently working on two different musical theater projects as well as new poems and a longer version of her recently-published essay about learning to sing as an, ahem!, older adult.

Previous episodes with Alison: Creative Practice as Political Action and A poem and a song from Alison Luterman

Our first episode on talent

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Ninety-seven percent of people who begin a novel don’t finish it. But what about all the people who finish it and then set it aside? What happens to that novel in a drawer? Well … sometimes it goes to novel heaven and finds a publisher–and we have proof. In this episode we talk to Holiday Mathis (who was our guest in episode 23, The Daily Grind), and she tells us how she wrote her new novel, why she set it aside, why she picked it up again, what she learned from the experience, how the world changed since it was written, and what she would say to that younger self that hid away the project in the drawer. Other possible titles for this episode were “overcoming creative self-consciousness” and “creative seasons.” It’s an episode for all who doubt their work, for all who doubt themselves, and for all who need that little nudge to put themselves and their work out there again.

Holiday Mathis writes the daily horoscope for The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post and hundreds of newspapers around the world. In her decades-long syndication she's published over 8 million words on luck, the stars and the human condition. She's also a multi-platinum selling songwriter with songs recorded by Miley Cyrus, Emma Roberts and more. Holiday is the author of several books including the upcoming How to Fail Epically in Hollywood.

Holiday Mathis
Today’s horoscopes by Holiday
Holiday’s video Ephemera on the transient nature of horoscopes
Some of Mathis’s songs
Christie’s blog post about Mathis: I Know Astrology is B**t, But I Can’t Stop Reading My Horoscope

Here’s a Holiday horoscope that speaks to today’s topic:

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How does a poem emerge? So many ways to do it right, says Rosemerry. But in this episode, we take an intimate and critical look at one poem, “For When People Ask,” and talk about the genesis of the poem, how it changed and transformed, how the metaphors grew and how people responded to it. We also talk about saving first drafts–or not, trusting the process, leaning into uncertainty, letting our creative process be led by honesty, getting our egos out of the way, and, of course, paradox.

**

For When People Ask

I want a word that means

okay and not okay,

a word that means

devastated and stunned with joy.

I want the word that says

I feel it all all at once.

The heart is not like a songbird

singing only one note at a time,

more like a Tuvan throat singer

able to sing both a drone

and simultaneously

two or three harmonics high above it—

a sound, the Tuvans say,

that gives the impression

of wind swirling among rocks.

The heart understands the swirl,

how the churning of opposite feelings

weaves through us like an insistent breeze

leads us wordlessly deeper into ourselves,

blesses us with paradox

so we might walk more openly

into this world so rife with devastation,

this world so ripe with joy.

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How can we better navigate difficult topics when telling personal stories? In this episode of Emerging Form, we talk with podcasting host Arielle Duhaime-Ross about their podcast episode “My Cousin Baptized My Dead Relatives Into the Mormon Church” which aired on VICE News Reports. We talk about steps they took to understand the story from different perspectives, how the narrative form emerged, how the process itself helped Arielle to arrive at a difficult peace, and why having a storyteller lay out their personal views when telling a story can build more trust with the audience than the “view from nowhere” approach. Plus we talk about the idea of our creative legacy–after we die, how is our story told? And by whom?

Arielle Duhaime-Ross (They/Them) is a correspondent and the host of two podcasts for VICE News: VICE News Reports, a weekly documentary-style news podcast, and A Show About Animals.

Arielle was previously the host of Reset, a podcast about technology, science, design and power, from the Vox Media Podcast Network. Before that, Arielle was the first climate change correspondent in American nightly TV news, reporting for HBO’s VICE News Tonight, and a science reporter at Vox Media’s The Verge. They’ve received numerous awards, including the 2019 Science in Society Journalism Award, the Silver 2019 AAAS Kavli Science Journalism Award. Arielle has written for Scientific American, Nature Medicine, The Atlantic, and Quartz.

Photo of Arielle By James Bareham

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Photo of Stéphanie by @steph_stf_photography

“Is my career done?” That’s what aerialist Stéphanie Ortega wondered when her touring with Cirque du Soleil abruptly ended at the onset of the pandemic. We speak with her about the fear, anger, and loss of identity in the wake of losing her creative practice–and how she found resilience, purpose, and new ways of pursuing her art before the proverbial show got back on the road. Rosemerry also talks about getting her show back on the road–performing for a live audience for the first time since her son died, and how it taught her to trust process more than ever.

Originally from France, Stéphanie Ortega studied ballet at the Roland Petit School in Marseille and started dancing professionally in a cabaret in Paris. She discovered the circus community when she was performing in the United States and began training as an aerialist, acquiring skill after skill including trapeze, aerial silk, Spanish rope, and eventually mastering the “suspended Pole,” a moveable pole that does not touch the ground, emulating a flying effect. She worked for Disneyland Paris, Franco Dragone and Cirque du Soleil. Prior to the Pandemic, Ortega was working on the show “Corteo” performing as the sole suspended pole artist. Currently living in Colorado, Ortega is preparing to rejoin the iconic circus troupe for an international tour. She recently had a chance to perform again for the first time since the pandemic began.

Follow Stéphanie on Instagram

Watch Stephanie perform on the flying pole

Rosemerry’s poem about performing live again

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When you’re actively engaged in creative practice, what’s happening in your brain? We ask research scientist and writer Emily Willingham to talk about the science of creativity. Her clear communication about neurons and cognitive processes open up a new understanding of not only how the brain works but also the three key features of creativity, two kinds of thinking that go into creative process, plus the importance of flexibility, storytelling, openness and awe.

The business of Emily’s life has been writing and science. Her work as a research scientist led her to many cool things, including ultrasound and surgery on a spotted hyena, plastic casting of the inside of the mammalian penis, chasing tiny blazing-fast lizards around in the desert, and innumerable activities involving gonads. Her work as a writer has done the same, from stories about the black bears of Big Bend to how pregnant people will fare in a post-Roe nation. There are hundreds of adventures in between, some of them reflected in her stories published at places like Scientific American, the Washington Post, Slate, Vox, Wired, LitHub, Aeon, and others. Emily is the author of several books, including Phallacy: Life Lessons from the Animal Penis, published in 2020, and The Tailored Brain: From Ketamine to Keto to Companionship, a User's Guide to Feeling Better and Thinking Smarter, published in December 2021.

Emily’s Website

Excerpt from The Tailored Brainabout creativity and awe.

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What do you look for in collaborators? How do you find them? Is it better to collaborate with friends? We speak with singer-songwriter, multi-instrumentalist and film composer Leah Shaw about putting together her full-length album Play Beautifully, a sonic exploration of loss, healing and self-transformation. She talks candidly about the balance between control and collaboration, learning new skills, and learning to trust the input and inspirations of others as she pursued her own passion project. Leah is our new audio producer, and this episode also features a new version of our theme Leah engineered, featuring Leah on bassoon alongside Kyra Kopestonsky on cello.

Connect with Leah Shaw at:

BandCamp

Spotify

YouTube

Apple Music

Learn more about Play Beautifully.

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Image: Catherine, Christie and Rosemerry

Feeling stuck or stumped in your creative practice? Maybe what you need is more fun. In this episode we speak with Catherine Price, author ofThe Power of Fun: How to Feel Alive Again. Her definition of fun feels utterly apropos of creativity. She defines fun as the spirit of playfulness—in which you engage with no attachment to outcome; connection—in that you share the experience with another; and flow—in that you become so engaged you lose track of time. We discuss these principles, plus the role of permission and how a fun squad helped her write her book.

Catherine Price is a science journalist, speaker, and author of numerous books including How to Break Up With Your Phone, Vitamania: How Vitamins Revolutionized the Way We Think About Food, and the new book, The Power of Fun: How to Feel Alive Again. As a freelance journalist, her work has appeared in publications including The Best American Science Writing, The New York Times, Popular Science, O, The Oprah Magazine, The Los Angeles Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Washington Post Magazine, Parade, Salon, Slate, Men’s Journal, Self, Medium, Health Magazine, and Outside, among others. She's also the founder of ScreenLifeBalance.com, which is part of her mission to help people scroll less and live more.

Rosemerry’s poem Porphyry Basin

Learn your “fun type”

Christie’s New York Times story about using play to motivate yourself to exercise

Episode 45: Protecting Your Creative Time with Catherine Price

I Did It Dad! I LOVE This!, Christie’s Last Word On Nothing post about performative life in the age of social media

Catherine’s drum group

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What does a new calendar year mean for your creative process? In this episode, Rosemerry and Christie return to their creative goals from last year – did they meet them? They talk about Christie’s annual report model for creatives, about how a magic wand might help you identify your creative goals for 2022, and how they are hoping the form might emerge in the next year. Plus they offer new guiding phrases for thinking about creative process and how Christie’s radio gave her the wisdom she needed for the end of the year.

A Hundred Falling Veils, Rosemerry’s daily poems.

Is it possible to exercise too much?, Christie’s latest story in the New York Times.

Shine Theory

Emerging Form is a listener-supported publication. To receive new episodes and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

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In this bonus episode, Christie and Rosemerry read some of the new works they’ve created since the trauma of the last four months.

Finding My Friend’s Unwritten Poems, Christie at Last Word On Nothing
Digging Potatoes, 2021, by Rosemerry
Condition, by Rosemerry

Please note: after we recorded this podcast, we experienced yet another sad event and we need to take a short break to focus on self-care. We will return next month, and when we do, we will have some very exciting news to share. In the meantime, all paid subscriptions will be put on hold (you won’t be charged) until we return. See you again soon!

_

Image by Ollie Taylor

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Photo:

Photo: Rosemerry and Christie celebrating Rosemerry’s birthday on a recent sleety/snowy day in Telluride.

In this episode of Emerging Form, Rosemerry and Christie discuss how their recent traumas affected their creative output and how taking a break from writing ultimately helped their creative process.

A quick note: after we recorded this podcast, we were hit with yet another cascade of sadness and we need to take a short break to focus on self-care. We will be back in a few weeks, and when we do we will have some exciting news to share. In the meantime, paid subscribers will receive a very special bonus episode next Thursday, and all paid subscriptions will be put on hold (you won’t be charged) until we return (very soon, we promise!).

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit emergingform.substack.com/subscribe

Why invest in your creative life? In this episode of Emerging Form, we continue with our Soul Food Series with poet and teacher Jack Ridl. He talks about how our creative endeavors link us to the big history and reconnect us with what really matters. Then he brings us the news of the heart, reading poems from How to Love the World: Poems of Gratitude and Hope. An episode full of inspiration, invitation and devotion--an episode to send you to the canvas or stage or blank page with a renewed sense of what’s at stake.

Jack Ridl, Poet Laureate of Douglas, Michigan (Population 1100), in April 2019 released Saint Peter and the Goldfinch. Jack’s Practicing to Walk Like a Heron was awarded the National Gold Medal for poetry by ForeWord Review/IndieFab. His collection Broken Symmetrywas co-recipient of The Society of Midland Authors best book of poetry award for 2006. His Losing Season was named the best sports book of the year for 2009 by The Institute for International Sport, and The Boston Globe named it one of the five best books about sports. Jack and his wife Julie founded the visiting writers series at Hope College where he taught for 37 years. The students named him both their Outstanding Professor and Favorite Professor, and in 1996 The Carnegie (CASE) Foundation named him Michigan Professor of the Year. In retirement Jack conducts a variety of writing workshops, welcomes readings, holds one on one sessions, and more.

Jack’s website: www.ridl.com

How to Love the World: Poems of Gratitude and Hope

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“Learn. Fail. Grow.” That’s part of the creative action plan for award-winning writer and Susan J. Tweit. In this episode of Emerging Form, we continue our Soul Food Series and talk with Susan about the importance of reflection--how writing not only helps us to meet difficult moments, but also helps us to find “deeper levels and better understanding” as time passes. We talk about the process of reflection and how it leads our writing toward the universal. As Susan says, “Without reflection, what’s the point?”

An award-winning writer and plant ecologist, Susan J. Tweit began her career in Wyoming, studying grizzly bear habitat—collecting and dissecting bear poop—coring trees to map historic wildfires, and researching aromatic big sagebrush. Tweit began writing after realizing that she loved writing the stories behind the data as much as collecting the data. She's written thirteen non-fiction books ranging from memoir and nature writing to kids and travel, along with hundreds of magazine articles, columns, and essays. She admits to being a plant nerd focused on the intriguing lives and interrelationships that weave the West’s living landscapes. Her passion is re-storying this earth, and those with whom we who share the planet. When Tweit is not writing, she's most often outside eradicating invasive weeds—restoring nature, plant by plant. As a Quaker, she walks her talk, and she lives with her heart outstretched as if it were her hand, loving this world. Her most recent book is Bless the Birds: Living with Love in a Time of Dying.

Susan Tweit’s website.

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What Does It Really Mean to Show Up?

In this episode, we speak with Rosemerry’s mentor and beloved friend Judith Jordan Kalush about how the way we meet our daily life intimately informs our creative practice. Are we listening? Are we distracted? Are we opening? Do we feel our connection to the rest of the world? What are we choosing to tune into? It’s a powerful episode with no platitudes, but with hard-earned deep wisdom that comes from devotion.

Jude Jordan Kalush is an unpindownable wonder of a human who was raised in Brazil where her father was a Baptist minister and missionary. In 2005, she received her Master’s Degree in Creation Spirituality from Naropa University. As she says,” As far as I can tell the world is held together by a glue called LOVE. The oneness of everything.” She was the founder and director of Colorado’s performance poetry festival, SPARROWS, which was held 1999-2007 and now creates poetry videos for her youtube channel, PoetJude. For decades, she has led dreamwork circles and classes and in recent years opened a Fair Trade business. She and her wife, Micah, are presently living in California.

Jude’s You Tube Channel

Jude’s Go Fund Me for the hungry in Brazil

Dream worker Jeremy Taylor

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“In our evolution, we are coming to understand nuances and in betweens are necessary to living a full life,” says poet and painter Wendy Videlock. She quotes F. Scott Fitzgerald: “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless yet be determined to make them otherwise.” In this episode, we continue to explore how life itself is the greatest creative process and how we are asked to live and create in the messy middle, and how all of us, all of us, are makers.

Wendy Videlock lives in Palisade, Colorado, on the Western Slope of the Rockies. Her full-length books of poetry include Nevertheless, Slingshots and Love Plums, The Dark Gnu and Other Poems. Her blog, Ghost Buffalo explores painting and poeming and life in the west. Her work has appeared in Poetry, Rattle, Terrain, Able Muse, New Criterion and many more. Her artwork, including alcohol inks, is sold in galleries around the West, and she teaches in a freelance capacity across the arts. She organizes poetry festivals on the Western Slope and is well respected in the formalist community.

View Wendy’s beautiful art on her instagram

Wendy’s website

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Nevertheless

The Dark Gnu and Other Poems

Slingshots and Love Plums: Poems by Wendy Videlock

In today’s bonus episode, Rosemerry and Christie discuss the poetry and music that have been getting them through this difficult time.

Fall (Herbst) by Rainer Maria Rilke

The Thing with Feathers by Chris Bursk

Let X=X, Laurie Anderson

No One, Alicia Keys

*Photo by Finn Trommer

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This is the most difficult episode we’ve ever recorded. In the span of two weeks, Christie and her family were thrown into a scary state of limbo and Rosemerry experienced an unthinkable loss. In this episode, we discuss what we’ve noticed about our relationship to creativity in this time of upheaval. Rosemerry explains how her 15-year practice of writing daily poems helped prepare her to meet this moment of grief, and Christie discusses her reluctance to solidify this experience by turning it into written words. We also talk about moving toward uncertainty and our heightened sense of noticing in this difficult time, and how to meet the tragedy and find the potential.

Previous Emerging Form episodes mentioned:

Episode 38: Kim Langley

Episode 40: Cheryl Strayed

Episode 45: Catherine Price

*Photo by Finn Trommer

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In this week’s episode (recorded in late July), we jump right in with our delightful guest, Andy Offut Irwin. One of the most sought after performing storytellers in the United States, Andy has been a Featured Teller at the National Storytelling Festival more than ten times. He has appeared fourteen times as Teller in Residence at International Storytelling Center. Among other gigs, Andy has been a Guest Artist at La Guardia High School of Art, Music, and Performing Arts in New York (The “FAME!” School); he has been a Keynote Speaker/Performer at the Library of Congress-Virburnum Foundation Conference on Family Literacy; a Guest Writer Performer with the Georgia Tech Glee Club; and a guest composer with the Amherst College Men’s Double Quartet.

Andy has held a few almost-real-jobs that include: Artist-In-Residence in Theatre at Emory University’s Oxford College from 1991 to 2007. (He continues serving at Oxford from time-to-time as Artist-in-Just-Passing-Through). A very long time ago Andy spent five years as a performer, writer, and director for SAK Theatre at Walt Disney World.

Andy is the recipient of many awards, but he is tickled as can be to have received the Oracle 2013 Circle of Excellence from the National Storytelling Network.

It all that weren’t enough, he is also a world class whistler!

Andy Offut Irwin

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Sometimes, telling a story can save you. In this episode, we speak with novelist, short story writer and journalist Charlie Jane Anders about her new book, “how writing helps us set rules, create frames, and surprise ourselves with what is possible. “Stories keep us alive,” she says. We also talk about writing and politics, writing the story you want to read, changing gears and creativity as a “saving grace.”

Charlie Jane Anders is the author of Victories Greater Than Death, the first book in a new young-adult trilogy published in April 2021,along with the forthcoming short story collection Even Greater Mistakes, and the book we’ll be talking about today:Never Say You Can’t Survive, which comes out in August. Her other books include The City in the Middle of the Night and All the Birds in the Sky. Her fiction and journalism have appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, Slate, McSweeney's, Mother Jones, the Boston Review, Tor.com, Tin House, Teen Vogue, Conjunctions, Wired Magazine, and other places. Her TED Talk, "Go Ahead, Dream About the Future" got 700,000 views in its first week. With Annalee Newitz, she co-hosts the podcast Our Opinions Are Correct.

*Please note: this episode was recorded on July 20, 2021.

Shownotes

For All Mankind Apple+ tv series

Never Say You Can’t Survive

Victories Greater Than Death

Charlie Jane’s Ted Talk on Imagination and the Future

Charlie Jane Anders website

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Have you ever felt like an imposter in your own creative life? As if you are not truly as competent as others perceive you to be? In this episode of Emerging Form, we talk about imposter syndrome with violinist, award-winning author and scholar/associate professor Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman. Imposter syndrome is not always just your crazy brain telling you that you're not good enough — sexism and racism really does hold people back, she says. Her debut book, Sounds Like Titanic: A Memoir, explores this theme, and much more that we touch on, including ambition, identity, what is fake vs. real, and what makes good art.

Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman

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Failure is, of course, a big part of life, and learning how to meet it in healthy ways is a major part of creative process. In this episode, Rosemerry presents six or more ways we might fail, drawing from Twyla Tharp’s The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life. Rosemerry and Christie talk through the different kinds of failure--their experiences and successful ways to move through each kind of failure. They also talk about second chances, change, public vs. private failure, and the importance of humility. Plus the importance of choosing titles and a two-minute creativity test.

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit emergingform.substack.com/subscribe

Two of the most important tools any creative has? Your experiences and your time to create. And your biggest impediment? Distractions. In this episode of Emerging Form, we speak with author Catherine Price about how to strengthen “the muscle of attention,” how to set boundaries for yourself, how to give your brain space and how to change your habits. She focuses on our relationship with our phones—designed to be a tool, they are often our biggest distraction, stealing not only our time but also our ability to be fully present in our experiences, the raw material for making creative connections. This is an essential episode for anyone serious about their creative practice.
Catherine Price is a science journalist, speaker, and author of numerous books including How to Break Up With Your Phone, Vitamania: How Vitamins Revolutionized the Way We Think About Food, and the forthcoming book, The Power of Fun: How to Feel Alive Again. As a freelance journalist, her work has appeared in publications including The Best American Science Writing, The New York Times, Popular Science, O, The Oprah Magazine, The Los Angeles Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Washington Post Magazine, Parade, Salon, Slate, Men’s Journal, Self, Medium, Health Magazine, and Outside, among others. She's also the founder of ScreenLifeBalance.com, which is part of her mission to help people scroll less and live more.

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit emergingform.substack.com/subscribe

Openness and curiosity--how do these attributes contribute to the success of creative endeavors? In this episode of Emerging Form, we speak with science fiction and nonfiction author Annalee Newitz. They talk about back up plans, the relationship between luck and hard work, how writing for free can really pay off, how we frame our experience, challenging our expectations, and creating opportunities.

Annalee Newitz writes science fiction and nonfiction. They are the author of the book Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age, and the novels The Future of Another Timeline, and Autonomous, which won the Lambda Literary Award. As a science journalist, they are a writer for the New York Times and elsewhere, and have a monthly column in New Scientist. They have published in The Washington Post, Slate, Popular Science, Ars Technica, The New Yorker, and The Atlantic, among others. They are also the co-host of the Hugo Award-winning podcast Our Opinions Are Correct. Previously, they were the founder of io9, and served as the editor-in-chief of Gizmodo.

Annalee’s newsletter

Our Opinions Are Correct, Annalee’s podcast with Charlie Jane Anders

Annalee’s books

Techsploitation, Annalee’s website

Christie’s book proposal workshop

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Struggle. It’s an essential part of the creative process. How do we move past the desire to give up and find the energy and time to continue? In this episode, Rosemerry and Christie talk about recent projects and their longtime experience with how to stay with a project when we’d rather give up. We speak about going back to the beginning, how community helps, ways to create accountability, deadlines, finding “what’s at stake,” and how questions are sometimes the answer.

David Petersen: Writing Naturally

Georgia Frances King

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When creatives show up for their practice, they bring a lot of tools: perhaps books and pens and paper. Perhaps canvas and paint. Perhaps a camera or a script. But all creatives have one thing in common: they bring their bodies. In this episode, we speak with poet/teacher/dancer/zen monk Brooke McNamara about body awareness and creative practice. How did her own body awareness inform her practice and what might we all do to tap deeper into our physical bodies and let our “empathetic kinesthetic awareness” help lead us.

Brooke McNamara, MFA, is a poet, teacher, and ordained Zen monk. She has published two books of poems: Bury the Seed and Feed Your Vow. She loves to create poems from 3 main ingredients: the raw material of everyday life, wholehearted and visceral listening, and the mind of meditation. For her poetry, Brooke is the recipient of the Charles B. Palmer prize from the Academy of American Poets. She has taught yoga studies at Naropa University and dance at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Brooke is creator and instructor of online courses in poetry, meditation, and creative practice, both solo and in collaboration with Lauren Beale and Lisa Gibson. She is a long-time lay Zen student of Diane Musho Hamilton, Roshi, and is empowered as a senior monk. Brooke lives with her husband, Rob, their two sons, Lundin and Orion, and two kitties, Sattva and Mowgli.

Brooke’s website

Science’s 2021 “Dance your PhD” contest winners, and the quite delightful 2019 winner.

Philip Shepard: The Embodiment Present

Emerging Form Episode 10: The Power of Play with Sherry Richert Belul.

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How long must we wait for the form to emerge? Sometimes right up to the last minute! In this episode we speak with Kate Fagan, Emmy-award winning journalist and No. 1 New York Times bestselling author. We talk about her new book, ALL THE COLORS CAME OUT, a memoir about her relationship with her father and his death from ALS. Kate shares with us the differences between writing memoir and reporting the story of someone else, the importance of communicating with the people you love who will be in the memoir and how she wrote the real story vs. the story she wish it had been. And of course, we speak of emerging form, and how for this book, it continued to emerge until the last hour.

Kate Fagan is an Emmy-award winning journalist and the No. 1 New York Times bestselling author of WHAT MADE MADDY RUN, which was a semi-finalist for the PEN/ESPN Award for Literary Sportswriting. Her first book was the coming-of-age memoir THE REAPPEARING ACT, and her third book, ALL THE COLORS CAME OUT, comes out this month from Little, Brown. She currently writes for Sports Illustrated and co-hosts the podcast Free Cookies. Kate previously spent seven years as a columnist and feature writer for espnW, ESPN.com and ESPN The Magazine. She was also a regular panelist on ESPN's Around the Horn and host of Outside the Lines. Kate covered the Philadelphia 76ers for three seasons and played college basketball at the University of Colorado. She lives in Charleston, South Carolina with her wife, Kathryn Budig, and their two dogs.

Kate on Twitter

Kate on Instagram

Kate’s website

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Have you ever felt envious of someone else’s success? In this episode of Emerging Form, we speak with Dear Sugar herself, Cheryl Strayed, and get practical, heart-opening, career-inspiring advice about how to meet this very natural and difficult feeling. We speak of abundance mentality, leaning in to our own heart’s desires, and the “all boats rise” when one of us succeeds philosophy. Strayed talks about times when she has envied and what it taught her, and she also speaks of being envied herself and how she handles others’ projection.

Cheryl Strayed is the author of the #1 New York Times bestselling memoir Wild, the New York Times bestsellers Tiny Beautiful Things and Brave Enough, and the novel Torch. Wild was chosen by Oprah Winfrey as her first selection for Oprah's Book Club 2.0 and adapted into an Oscar-nominated film starring Reese Witherspoon. Tiny Beautiful Things was adapted for the stage by Nia Vardalos in a play directed by Thomas Kail that has been produced in theaters around the world. Strayed's essays have been published in The Best American Essays, the New York Times, the Washington Post Magazine, Vogue, Salon, and elsewhere. She publishes the popular Dear Sugar column as a monthly newsletter and has hosted two hit podcasts for the New York Times—Sugar Calling and Dear Sugars, which she co-hosted with Steve Almond. She lives in Portland, Oregon with her family.

DEAR SUGAR, The Rumpus Advice Column #69: We Are All Savages Inside (Cheryl’s advice to an envious creative person)

Christie’s Oprah Magazine story about envy.

Our previous episode about how envy brought Christie and Rosemerry together.

DEAR SUGAR, The Rumpus Advice Column #48: Write Like a Motherfucker

To listen to our bonus episode with Cheryl next week, become a paid subscriber to Emerging Form at emergingform.substack.com.

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Can envy help your creative practice? The origin story of this podcast would seem to offer a resounding yes! In this episode, Rosemerry and Christie recall the strange circumstances (Christie’s word is “mortifying”) in which they first met in 2008--lots of laughter--and how play and vulnerability are now at the heart of their friendship. Christie offers insight about envy and how it can be an invitation to live into your true wishes for yourself. We also talk about STTUC (sensitivity about being the target of a threatening upward comparison), Shine Theory, and why, as the poet David Lee says, it might be important for your creative practice to surround yourself with people better than you. What began as envy became admiration and inspiration and has grown and flowered into a mutually supportive friendship and this podcast, a merging of creative energies.

Christie’s Last Word On Nothing post how she and Rosemerry met and yes, those envy poems.

Rosemerry’s TEDx Talk: The Art of Changing Metaphors

Christie’s TEDx Talk: How Envy Can Guide Your Path to Success

Christie’s Oprah Magazine story about the benefits of envy.

After Having My Manuscript Rejected by Ghostroad Press, I Read the Bio of Christie Aschwanden, Award-Winning Writer and Phenomenal Nordic Skier

Comparison is the root of all unhappiness. —Michelle Kodis

Not only is the grass greener on her side,
it’s also taller, thicker,
more nitrogen rich,
and more appealing to grazing deer.
Her snow is whiter,
her summers warmer,
her sky more starry by night.
I wish it were just the grass.
Why do I bother to breathe
knowing she breathes more deeply,
more fully into her more fertile belly.
And she’s published in O Magazine.
So I tell myself: Fertilize your own front yard.
Compost. Weed and feed.
And I tell myself she probably seeded with Kentucky Blue,
a selfish choice in this drought-prone land.
And I tell myself, she probably didn’t.
It’s probably an organic greener lawn
and she’s a better gardener with a greener thumb
and she’d probably invite me over to her yard to play
because she’s more nice, more generous, more willing to share.
To hell with grass.
I tell myself,
I’d rather xeriscape.
But man, it looks green over there.

from Holding Three Things at Once (Turkey Buzzard Press, 2008)

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In this bonus episode, Kim Langley tells us about dealing with imposter syndrome and going to not one, but two writers retreats where she couldn’t write.

Kim is the author of Send My Roots Rain: A Companion on the Grief Journey, 60 poems and brief reflections combined with suggestions for mindful activities and journaling. The book was well received by individual grievers as well as hospice, palliative care, social work, chaplaincy, and other helping professionals and so is in its second printing. Kim has facilitated numerous writing/discussion circles based on her book.

She has been president of her own speaking/training/coaching company (LifeBalance Enterprises, Inc.) for 20+ years and for more than 10 years has been leading poetry circles, using poetry as the springboard for a “deeper dive” into conversations of belonging. Kim is the founder of WordSPA, a vehicle for sharing the joys of poetry as an inclusive and healing art..

Kim Langley

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit emergingform.substack.com/subscribe

Kim Langley is the author of Send My Roots Rain: A Companion on the Grief Journey, 60 poems and brief reflections combined with suggestions for mindful activities and journaling. The book was well received by individual grievers as well as hospice, palliative care, social work, chaplaincy, and other helping professionals and so is in its second printing. Kim has facilitated numerous writing/discussion circles based on her book.

She has been president of her own speaking/training/coaching company (LifeBalance Enterprises, Inc.) for 20+ years and for more than 10 years has been leading poetry circles, using poetry as the springboard for a “deeper dive” into conversations of belonging. Kim is the founder of WordSPA, a vehicle for sharing the joys of poetry as an inclusive and healing art..

Christie’s tribute to her editor David Corcoran, “Farewell David Corcoran, Dearest of Editors.”

Christie’s Runner’s World essay about her sister-in-law’s death, “The Painful Truth.”

How poetry helped express what Christie was feeling after her sister-in-law’s death.

After we recorded this episode, Christie’s friend Kristina died, and she wrote this Last Word on Nothing post about that loss.

Kim Langley’s book, Send My Roots Rain: A Companion on the Grief Journey

Sitting Beside My Brother at the Funeral

June 1, 2018 by Rosemerry | Edit

There was a time when I’d pull his hair out

if he sat too close to me on the couch.

Now, I curl into his right side,

lean my head on his shoulder,

feel the trembling of his chest

as he weeps. How good it feels

to be close to him as we grieve.

How familiar, the shape of his head,

the heft of his hand as he reaches for mine.

How deeply right, this leaning

into sorrow together.

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In this bonus episode with author Kristi Nelson, we talk about how she transitioned her self-perception from “creativity appreciator” to “creative person.” She also talks about the gift of envy and how it has served her.

Kristi Nelson is the executive director of A Network for Grateful Living and author of Wake Up Grateful: The Transformative Practice of Taking Nothing for Granted. She has spent most of her adult life in non-profit leadership, fundraising, and organizational development. In a wide variety of roles, she has helped to lead, fund, and strengthen organizations committed to progressive social and spiritual change. In 2001, Kristi founded a values-based fundraising consulting and training, and leadership coaching business, and in this capacity worked with organizations such as the Institute for Jewish Spirituality, Buddhist Peace Fellowship, Spirit in Action, Wisdom 2.0, and The Center for Contemplative Mind in Society. During this time, she was also founding Director of the Soul of Money Institute with Lynne Twist, Director of Development at Kripalu Center for Yoga and Health, and Director of Development and Community Relations for the Center for Mindfulness in Medicine, Health Care, and Society. She received her BA from UMass/Amherst, a graduate certificate in Business and Sociology from Boston College, and her Master’s in Public Administration (MPA) with a concentration in Leadership Studies, from Harvard University.

Kristi Nelson’s book: Wake Up Grateful: The Transformative Practice of Taking Nothing For Granted

Kristi’s moving story of living through stage IV cancer

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit emergingform.substack.com/subscribe

How might gratefulness infuse your creative practice with trust, awe, acceptance and wonder? In this episode we speak with Kristi Nelson, author of Wake Up Grateful: the Transformative Practice of Taking Nothing for Granted, about the surprisingly practical ways gratefulness inspires and fuels our creativity. She offers lots of prompts and how-to steps.

Kristi Nelson is the executive director of A Network for Grateful Living and author of Wake Up Grateful: The Transformative Practice of Taking Nothing for Granted. She has spent most of her adult life in non-profit leadership, fundraising, and organizational development. In a wide variety of roles, she has helped to lead, fund, and strengthen organizations committed to progressive social and spiritual change. In 2001, Kristi founded a values-based fundraising consulting and training, and leadership coaching business, and in this capacity worked with organizations such as the Institute for Jewish Spirituality, Buddhist Peace Fellowship, Spirit in Action, Wisdom 2.0, and The Center for Contemplative Mind in Society. During this time, she was also founding Director of the Soul of Money Institute with Lynne Twist, Director of Development at Kripalu Center for Yoga and Health, and Director of Development and Community Relations for the Center for Mindfulness in Medicine, Health Care, and Society. She received her BA from UMass/Amherst, a graduate certificate in Business and Sociology from Boston College, and her Master’s in Public Administration (MPA) with a concentration in Leadership Studies, from Harvard University.

Kristi Nelson’s book: Wake Up Grateful: The Transformative Practice of Taking Nothing For Granted

https://gratefulness.org/

Kristi’s story of moving through stage IV cancer

https://gratefulness.org/resource-category/poetry/

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Wouldn’t it be great if we had a crystal ball so we could see where our creative road might take us? Or, perhaps as we discuss in this bonus episode of Emerging Form, perhaps what we really want is to just stop worrying where our path might take us. We talk with science journalist Jill U. Adams about her own creative arc and the surprising chat with a college counselor that sticks with her.

Jill U. Adams is a science journalist who reports on health, psychology, teens, and education. She lives in upstate New York and tweets as @juadams. She shares her drawings on Instagram: @juadams1.

Jill’s essay at Nieman Storyboard, “Jumpstart your writing routine: coffee, journals, sketches and postcards,” in which she explains how her morning writing rituals lifted her out of COVID malaise.

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Everyone agrees: creative routines can ignite our creative practice. But why are they so hard to maintain? How can we create more sustainable creative practices? In this episode of Emerging Form, we talk with science writer Jill U. Adams about her morning routine--how she established it, how she changes it, how it serves her, how it pushes it, and how she makes it sustainable. A sweet surprise: How postcards have become a way to engage with letting go of perfectionism.

Jill U. Adams is a science journalist who reports on health, psychology, teens, and education. She lives in upstate New York and tweets as @juadams. Check out her drawings on Instagram: @juadams1

Jill’s essay at Nieman Storyboard, “Jumpstart your writing routine: coffee, journals, sketches and postcards,” in which she explains how her morning writing rituals lifted her out of COVID malaise.

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit emergingform.substack.com/subscribe

Early to bed, early to rise, coffee and quiet--these are some of the daily routines that help drive the creative life of poet, editor and writing coach James Crews. In this bonus episode, we talk about life on the farm in Vermont with his husband, the importance of trust in our creative life, how we can sabotage ourselves by trying to know where our creative path will take us, and Crews’ mentor Ted Kooser’s advice about conditioning the mind.

James Crews is the author of four collections of poetry, The Book of What Stays,Telling My Father, Bluebird, and Every Waking Moment. He is also the editor of two anthologies: Healing the Divide: Poems of Kindness and Connection and How to Love the World: Poems of Gratitude and Hope. His poems have appeared in Ploughshares, The Sun, The New Republic, The New York Times Magazine, and have been reprinted in Ted Kooser’s American Life in Poetry and featured on Tracy K. Smith’s podcast, The Slowdown. Crews teaches in the low-residency MFA program at Eastern Oregon University and lives with his husband on an organic farm in Vermont.

Jack Kornfield

Ted Kooser

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How might stillness and a heightened sense of awareness infuse your creative endeavors? In this episode we speak with poet, editor and writing coach James Crews about how a daily mindfulness practice can help us meet creative stumbling blocks such as self-judgment and writer’s block with more clarity, curiosity, acceptance and even surprise. Can mindfulness be a hindrance to creativity? Are there “rules” for how and when to to do it? Can being quiet really help an art that depends on words? How might your creativity infuse your mindfulness?

James Crews is the author of four collections of poetry, The Book of What Stays, Telling My Father, Bluebird, and Every Waking Moment. He is also the editor of two anthologies: Healing the Divide: Poems of Kindness and Connection and How to Love the World: Poems of Gratitude and Hope. His poems have appeared in Ploughshares, The Sun, The New Republic, The New York Times Magazine, and have been reprinted in Ted Kooser’s American Life in Poetry and featured on Tracy K. Smith’s podcast, The Slowdown. Crews teaches in the low-residency MFA program at Eastern Oregon University and lives with his husband on an organic farm in Vermont.

John Kabat-Zinn

Sharon Salzberg

Jane Hirshfield

Naomi Shihab Nye

Darn Lucky

for James Crews

It happens, you know—the day opens itself

like a tulip in a warm room, and you meet someone

who amazes you with their willingness

to be a thousand percent alive, someone

who makes you feel grateful to be you.

And it’s as if life has been keeping a beautiful

secret from you—like the fact that they make

elderberry flowers into wine. Like muscadine.

Like the yellow-green floral scent of quince.

Like the perfect knot for tying your shoes.

And it turns out life does have wonderful

secrets waiting for you. Even when the news

makes you cry. Even when some old pain returns,

that’s when you will meet this new friend.

Someone wholly themselves. Someone

who makes you smile in the kitchen, a smile so real

that when you go out, the whole world notices.

It’s enough to make you want to wake up in the morning.

To go into the day. To be unguarded as a tulip, petals

falling open. You never know who you might meet.

--Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

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A few words about what happens at a writing retreat.

Good to Go: What the Athlete in All of Us Can Learn from the Strange Science of Recovery

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Photo: Rosemerry’s altar for her recent writing retreat.

What would it be like to give over completely to your creative self? To get away from daily distractions and responsibilities and just write or paint or dance? In this episode of Emerging Form, Rosemerry and Christie talk about writers' retreats--why going away somewhere to write (or create) is so important, what it might look like, and how you might plan for one. From food prep to altars to finding daily rhythms, we talk about some of the ins and outs. Do you need one? Maybe you can’t afford not to have one.

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit emergingform.substack.com/subscribe

How do we abstract our sense of self-worth from our creative work? That’s one of the themes in this bonus episode in which we converse with writer/artist/poet/editor Sarah Gilman. We learn about her reliance on small blank notebooks, the efficient layout of her office and the importance of having books around.

Sarah Gilman is a Washington state-based freelance writer, illustrator and editor who covers the environment, natural history, science, and place. In her writing, she seeks to illuminate the complicated ways people relate to landscapes and other species. In her visual art, she’s most interested in the cultivation of wonder, and the ways it might help more of us come to value and make space for wildness and each other. Her current work is at the nexus of the two fields. Her writing and reporting have appeared in The Atlantic, Audubon Magazine, Hakai Magazine, The Washington Post, High Country News, BioGraphic, National Geographic News, Smithsonian.com, The Guardian, Patagonia’s The Cleanest Line, and The Last Word on Nothing. Her work has been anthologized in The Best Women’s Travel Writing, Volume 11. In 2021, she will be a Knight Science Journalism fellow. She’s also a contributing editor at Hakai Magazine.

https://www.etsy.com/shop/HiddenDrawerDesigns

https://sarahmgilman.com/

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit emergingform.substack.com/subscribe

How can working in one art form strengthen our practice in another? Our guest Sarah Gilman describes herself as a “creative smush,” and in this episode, the artist/writer/editor talks about how all these art forms inform each other--how all of them allow her to “think in terms of metaphors.” As she says, by working in multiple fields at once, she can enter into a place where “themes can combine in immersive ways that foster empathy, respect for nuance over polarization, and a sense of awe for and accountability towards the world as it is—still huge and full of mystery and beauty, however threatened or diminished.” We also talk about how to get out of our own way, the importance of going outside, and how community and connections can fuel our work.

Sarah Gilman is a Washington state-based freelance writer, illustrator and editor who covers the environment, natural history, science, and place. In her writing, she seeks to illuminate the complicated ways people relate to landscapes and other species. In her visual art, she’s most interested in the cultivation of wonder, and the ways it might help more of us come to value and make space for wildness and each other. Her current work is at the nexus of the two fields. Her writing and reporting have appeared in The Atlantic, Audubon Magazine, The Washington Post, High Country News, BioGraphic, National Geographic News, Smithsonian.com, The Guardian, Patagonia’s The Cleanest Line, and The Last Word on Nothing. Her work has been anthologized in The Best Women’s Travel Writing, Volume 11. In 2021, she will be a Knight Science Journalism fellow. She’s also a contributing editor at Hakai Magazine.

https://www.etsy.com/shop/HiddenDrawerDesigns

https://sarahmgilman.com/

South America's Otherworldly Seabird, Sarahs’ narrative and illustrations of how scientists are working to save a tiny seabird in the Atacama Desert.

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit emergingform.substack.com/subscribe

For Auld Lang Syne

—Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

We’ll drink a cup of kindness yet,

says the song, and I would give you

the cup, friend, would fill it

with whiskey or water or whatever

would best meet your thirst.

I fill it with the terrifying beauty

of tonight’s bonfire—giant licks

of red and swirls of blue that consume

what is dead and melt the ice

and give warmth to what is here.

I fill it with moonrise and snow crystal

and the silver river song beneath the ice.

With the boom of fireworks and with laughter

that persists through tears. With

Lilac Wine and Over the Rainbow and Fever.

I toast you with all the poems we’ve yet to write

and all the tears we’ve yet to weep,

I hold the cup to your lips,

this chalice of kindness, we’ll drink it yet,

though the days are cold, the nights so long.

—Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

____

The Next Storm Comes

And suddenly you know: It’s time to start something new and trust the magic of beginnings.

—Meister Eckhart

And suddenly you know it’s time

to shovel the drive. For though snow

still falls, at this moment it’s only

three inches deep and you can still push it easily

with your two wide yellow shovels.

Yes, it’s time to start something new—

though it doesn’t feel new, this

shoving snow from one place to another.

In fact, your shoulders still feel

the efforts of yesterday.

But with each push of the shovels,

the path on the drive is new again. At least

it’s new for a moment, new until snow

fills it in. Then it’s a different kind of new.

How many beginnings are like this?

They don’t feel like beginnings at all?

Or we miss their newness?

Or they feel new only for a moment

before they’ve lost their freshness?

There is magic in beginnings, says Meister Eckhart,

and sometimes we see beginnings all around us,

a new path, a new promise, a new meal.

A new prayer. New snow fall. A new song.

Is it too grand to call it magic, this new calendar year?

Too grand to call it magic, this momentary

clearing on the drive? Too grand to be magic,

this momentary clearing in my thoughts?

Or is it exactly, perhaps, what magic is—

something we allow ourselves to believe,

despite logic, despite reason, something that brings

us great pleasure, makes us question

what we thought we knew, our sense

of what is possible changed.

—Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

_____

Watching The Wizard of Oz on New Year’s Eve, I Think of a Resolution toward Peace

As for you, my galvanized friend, you want a heart. You don’t know how lucky you are not to have one. Hearts will never be practical until they can be made unbreakable.

—The Wizard to the Tin Man, The Wizard of Oz, Frank L. Baum

Give us hearts that break

when we see how cruel the world can be

and hands that extend toward others.

Give us eyes that weep when we feel

the beauty of home, and

lips to speak love, to apologize.

Give us courage to say what must be said

and ears to hear what we’d rather not hear

and eyes that will not turn the other way

from anyone in need.

Give us brains that are wired

for helpfulness, compassion

and curiosity. Yes, let us ask for hearts

that break and break and grow

bigger in the breaking. Let us

love more than we think we can love.

And the cup of kindness, may we

ever remember to drink of it,

let us share it with each other.

—Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit emergingform.substack.com/subscribe

Photo: Christie & Rosemerry shortly before the pandemic began. (Yes, that is one of Rosemerry’s poems on Christie’s tights.)

For creatives, the new year is a chance to look back on what we’ve accomplished and how we’ve grown in the past year, and also a chance to dream about our creative endeavors in the future. In this episode, Christie and Rosemerry have a conversation about how to do your own “year end report,” how a magic wand might help you identify your goals, and how two questions from Motivational Interviewing can help you verbalize why your goals are important to you. We talk about bonfires--both literal and metaphorical, a few of our own goals, some of our skepticism around goals, and our mottos and themes for moving forward.

Motivational Interviewing

A story Christie wrote about how to make New Year’s resolutions

Christie’s 2021 New Year’s resolution

Christie’s Instagram and Rosemerry’s

A little new years goal advice from our episode 28 guest, Holiday Mathis. “Do not set targets for results that are beyond your control. Keep asking yourself what can be done to help this along. Set targets for what you can produce, actions you can take, miles you can move.”

_____

Bonfire in the Heart

by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

I throw in any tallies

I’ve been keeping,

the ones that record

who did what and when.

I throw in all the letters

I wrote in my head but didn’t send.

I throw in tickets I didn’t buy

to places I didn’t visit.

I throw in all those expectations

I had for myself and the world last year

and countless lists of things I thought I should do.

I love watching them ignite,

turn into embers, to ash.

I love the space they leave behind

where anything can happen.

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit emergingform.substack.com/subscribe

If you are lucky, as an artist, you have a mentor--someone who recognizes your potential, who offers feedback, who pushes you and helps you grow. In this episode we talk with one of Rosemerry’s mentors, the phenomenal Art Goodtimes, about his relationship with his mentor, Dolores LaChapelle. We cover everything from The problem with the greek alphabet to the mushroom parade down the streets of Telluride and how ritual takes us out of our minds and into our bodies, making us “more than what we are.”

Poet, basket weaver and former regional editor/columnist, Art Goodtimes served as San Miguel County Commissioner (Green Party, 1996-2016) and Western Slope Poet Laureate (2011-13). Former poetry editor for Earth First! Journal, Wild Earth and the Mountain Gazette, currently he’s poetry editor for Fungi magazine and co-editor with Lito Tejada-Flores at the on-line poetry anthology SageGreenJournal.org. His latest book out from Lithic Press is Dancing on Edge: The McRedeye Poems(Lithic, 2019). Since 1981 “Shroompa” has been poet-in-residence at the annual Telluride Mushroom Festival in August. A recent cancer survivor, Art serves as program co-director for the Telluride Institute’s Talking Gourds poetry program, including the national Fischer Prize and Colorado Cantor Prize contests.

Talking Gourds

Fungi Magazine

Sage Green Journal

Dancing on Edge: The McRedeye Poems

www.facebook.com/art.goodtimes

Dolores LaChapelle

Art Goodtimes (right) with Emerging Form patron saint, Jack Mueller. (photo credit: Jimi Bernath)

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit emergingform.substack.com/subscribe

In this bonus conversation with acclaimed poet Danusha Laméris, we learn about her nocturnal writing habits, her leap from painting to poetry (and the advice that came with her), and the importance of “belonging” and “the tribe.”

Danusha Laméris’ first book,The Moons of August (Autumn House, 2014), was chosen by Naomi Shihab Nye as the winner of the Autumn House Press poetry prize. Some of her poems have been published in The Best American Poetry,The New York Times,TheAmerican Poetry Review,The GettysburgReview, Ploughshares, and Tin House. She’s the author ofBonfire Opera, (University of Pittsburgh Press, Pitt Poetry Series, 2020), and the recipient of the 2020 Lucille Clifton Legacy Award. Danusha teaches poetry independently, and was the 2018-2020 Poet Laureate of Santa Cruz County, California.

Danusha Laméris

The Hive Poetry Collective Podcast

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit emergingform.substack.com/subscribe

“You remind me of my humanness by talking about yours,” says this week’s Emerging Form guest Danusha Laméris. We speak with the award-winning poet about how the small stories--what she calls “the understory”--mean as much, perhaps more, as the big headlines, and the creative process around finding and sharing these stories. We talk about the importance of leaning into the complexity and not needing “to be a motivational speaker.”

Danusha Laméris’ first book, The Moons of August (Autumn House, 2014), was chosen by Naomi Shihab Nye as the winner of the Autumn House Press poetry prize. Some of her poems have been published in The Best American Poetry, The New York Times, TheAmerican Poetry Review, The GettysburgReview, Ploughshares, and Tin House. She’s the author of Bonfire Opera, (University of Pittsburgh Press, Pitt Poetry Series, 2020), and the recipient of the 2020 Lucille Clifton Legacy Award. Danusha teaches poetry independently, and was the 2018-2020 Poet Laureate of Santa Cruz County, California.

Danusha Laméris

The Hive Poetry Collective Podcast

“Small Kindnesses” by Danusha Laméris

“June 20th” by Lucille Clifton

“Bonfire Opera” by Danusha Laméris

_____________________________

Writing Haikus for Rosemerry

—Christie Aschwanden

My dear poet friend

Does not recognize that I

Wrote her a haiku

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit emergingform.substack.com/subscribe

Photo: A Holiday Mathis horoscope. [This thing you’re trying to accomplish cannot be accomplished as a linear pursuit. It’s a holistic process. So when you' feel yourself drawn “off track,” maybe you’re actually just working things from a different angle.]

**Note: Apologies! We are re-sending this episode, as there was a technical problem in the first audio file. If you haven’t listened yet, this is the better version.

In this bonus episode, we continue our conversation with writer Holiday Mathis, who writes a syndicated daily horoscope column and also happens to be a multi-platinum songwriter whose songs have been recorded by Miley Cyrus, Emma Roberts and many others. We talk about the difference between writing horoscopes and lyrics, more about attending to and chasing the muses, and about the essential quality of openness.

Holiday Mathis

Holiday’s daily, syndicated horoscopes

Christie’s blog, I know that astrology is b**t, but I can’t stop reading my hororscope

The Book of Laughter and Forgetting by Milan Kundera

Rosemerry’s poem about her birthday horoscope last year

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit emergingform.substack.com/subscribe

Photo: A Holiday Mathis horoscope. [This thing you’re trying to accomplish cannot be accomplished as a linear pursuit. It’s a holistic process. So when you' feel yourself drawn “off track,” maybe you’re actually just working things from a different angle.]

In this bonus episode, we continue our conversation with horoscope writer Holiday Mathis, who also happens to be a multi-platinum songwriter whose songs have been recorded by Miley Cyrus, Emma Roberts and many others. We talk about the difference between writing horoscopes and lyrics, more about attending to and chasing the muses, and about the essential quality of openness.

Holiday Mathis

Holiday’s daily, syndicated horoscopes

Christie’s blog, I know that astrology is b**t, but I can’t stop reading my hororscope

The Book of Laughter and Forgetting by Milan Kundera

Rosemerry’s poem about her birthday horoscope last year

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit emergingform.substack.com/subscribe

How do you “reduce the drag” and make yourself the most available to daily output in your creative practice? To help with ideas, we turn to Holiday Mathis, who has written over eight million words in her daily, syndicated horoscopes. Talk about learning how to negotiate the daily grind! In this episode, we talk about how improvisation rules help in daily discipline, about Holiday’s muses and how she serves them and great advice from a soap opera actor. We talk ambition, how she got her start, and the role of the reader vs. the process of the writer. It’s a light-hearted, metaphor-rich, treasure trove of advice for creatives of all kinds.

Holiday Mathis writes the syndicated daily horoscope column for hundreds of newspaper publications internationally including The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, and in her hometown, The Tennessean. She is working on the Guinness Book World Record for the most consecutively published words by a single author in newspapers, having currently been published every day since 2005. Mathis is also a multi-platinum songwriter whose songs have been recorded by Miley Cyrus, Emma Roberts and many others. She lives in Franklin, Tennessee with her husband, daughter and two Shih Tzus.

Holiday Mathis

Today’s horoscopes by Holiday

Some of Mathis’s songs

Christie’s blog post about Mathis: I Know Astrology is B**t, But I Can’t Stop Reading My Horoscope

Rosemerry’s poem about her birthday horoscope last year

Koko the gorilla muse

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit emergingform.substack.com/subscribe

“Marvelous things happen when you follow your heart’s truth … open doorways you can’t imagine.” So says our special guest Kayleen Asbo in this special bonus episode with the amazing Kayleen Asbo, cultural historian, composer, musician, writer and teacher. We talk about her “pillars of the day,” and her “bookends,” plus habits she has for cultivating beauty and creating anchors in an itinerant life, plus things she wishes she’d known before that she trusts now--especially about reckless generosity.

Kayleen Asbo

Christie’s upcoming workshop, Level Up: business planning for freelancers

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit emergingform.substack.com/subscribe

“Find what you long for and be brave and vulnerable enough to offer it to the world.” So says Kayleen Asbo, our featured guest on this episode of Emerging Form in which we speak about how to foster and shape creative community. Asbo is a cultural historian, composer, musician, writer and teacher who weaves myth, music, psychology, history and art with experiential learning. We talk about passion, about ways to help a group find juice, about how a group leader can encourage trust and intimacy, as Asbo says, by leading “with your own breaking open heart.” At their best, creative communities refresh, encourage, support and inspire us--and offer us discipline. This episode is full of thoughts and tips on everything from creating commitment to how to create intimacy online.

Kayleen Asbo holds master's degrees in music (piano performance), mythology and psychology. She has been a faculty member at the Pacifica Graduate Institute and the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, and the Osher Life Long Learning Institutes at UC Berkeley, Sonoma State University and Dominican University. She teaches on a wide array of topics, ranging from Jungian Depth Psychology to Dante to the History of Classical Music. As theCreative Director and Resident Mythologist for Mythica, Asbo used to spend three months a year leading workshops and retreats in sacred sites in Europe and has turned her treasury of pictures and stories from these pilgrimages into online "Virtual Pilgrimages."

Kayleen Asbo

Virtual Pilgrimages

To learn more about Christie’s freelancing workshops, visit https://christieaschwanden.com/workshops/ or email Christie@nasw.org

The Hero of the Imogene Pass Race

--Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

When I think of encouragement,

I think of Jack Pera,

who stood every year

at the top of Imogene Pass—

in snow, in sun, in sleet, in fog.

On race day, a thousand plus runners

would reach the top,

weary, having climbed

over five thousand feet in ten miles,

and Jack, he would hold out his hand

and pull each of us up the last foot,

launching us toward the long downhill finish.

I remember how surprised I was

the first time, and grateful,

grateful to feel him reaching for me,

grateful to feel his powerful grip

yanking me up through the scree.

“Good job,” he’d say to each one of us,

cheering us though we were sweaty

and drooling and panting and spent.

After that first race, I knew to look for him

as I climbed the last pitch,

trying to make out his form

at the top of the ridge.

And there was. Every time.

“Good job,” he’d say

as he made that last steep step

feel like flight.

There are people who do this,

who hold out their hand,

year after year,

to help those who need it.

There are people who carry us

when we feel broken,

if only for a moment.

When I heard today Jack had died,

I couldn’t help but imagine

an angel waiting there above him

as he took his last breath,

an angel with a firm grip and a big smile

holding out a hand, pulling him through that last effort,

telling him, “Good Job, Jack. Good job.”

And may he have felt in that moment

the blessing of that encouragement,

totally ready to be launched into whatever came next.

Good job, Jack Pera. Good job.

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit emergingform.substack.com/subscribe

In this bonus episode of Emerging Form, our guest Amy Irvine surprises us right away when we ask to describe her writing practice. “Erotic,” she says. Find out what that means, and how you, too, might want to find your way toward that answer. We also talk about terrible writing advice from a therapist, Amy’s workspace, and the advice she would give her younger self.

Mary Carr on Sacred Carnality

Amy Irvine

Air Mail: Letters of Politics, Pandemics & Place

Desert Cabal

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit emergingform.substack.com/subscribe

Sometimes, a project just comes together in the most organic, meant-to-be way, and nothing can stop it. What’s that like? We explore that experience in this episode with our guest, Amy Irvine, who co-wrote Air Mail: Letters of Politics, Pandemics & Place with our previous guest, Pam Houston. We’ll talk about how the form emerged--what began as an epistolary exercise became a fully fledged book. We’ll talk about how creative endeavors can create friendships. We also talk about her previous book, Desert Cabal, about backlash against women writers and more.

Amy Irvine won the Orion Book Award and Colorado Book Award for her memoir, Trespass: Living at the Edge of the Promised Land Her next book, Desert Cabal: A New Season in the Wilderness, is a feminist response to Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire, and one of Orion’s “25 Most-Read Stories of the Decade.” It was also added to Outside Magazine’s Adventure Canon and named by Backpacker as one of its New Wilderness Classics. During the pandemic, Irvine co-authored Air Mail: Letters of Politics, Pandemics & Placewith Pam Houston; the book is forthcoming in October 2020, as is Amy’s latest essay for Orion: “Close to the Bone.” Irvine teaches in the Mountainview Low-Residency MFA program at Southern New Hampshire University. In addition to frequently teaching for Orion Magazine, she has taught at Western Colorado University, the Free Flow Institute, Whitman College’s Semester in the West, the University of Utah’s Environmental Humanities Program at Rio Mesa, and Fishtrap’s Outpost. Irvine lives and writes off-grid on a remote mesa in southwest Colorado, just spitting distance from her Utah homeland.

Amy Irvine

Air Mail: Letters of Politics, Pandemics & Place

Desert Cabal

Desert Solitaire

Pam Houston

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Desert Cabal: A New Season in the Wilderness

In this bonus episode, Rosemerry reads a poem from our episode 25 guest, Alison Luterman, and then presents a song from The Chain, one of the musicals that Alison discussed on the podcast.

Links:

The Chain

In the Time of Great Fires

Alison Luterman

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How can creative practice become a political act? In this episode of Emerging Form, we speak with poet, playwright, memoirist and lyricist Alison Luterman. We talk in depth about her musical The Shyest Witch--about how, when you work in so many genres, a form might suggest itself; how the project evolved from being about the 2016 election into broader feminist themes, how she worked with input from collaborators and actors; and how she, too, is evolving as an artist, learning a new skill even as she is at the top of her game in other creative realms. We also talk about artworks that inspired her, including Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues and how she deals with her political work becoming a lightning rod for contentious responses--“If I’m not going to speak up now, when am I going to?”

Alison Luterman's four books of poetry are The Largest Possible Life; See How We Almost Fly; Desire Zoo, and In the Time of Great Fires. Her poems and stories have appeared in The Sun, Rattle, Salon, Prairie Schooner, Nimrod, The Atlanta Review, Tattoo Highway, and elsewhere. She has written an e-book of personal essays, Feral City, half a dozen plays, a song cycle We Are Not Afraid of the Dark, as well as two musicals, The Chain and The Shyest Witch. Alison performs with the Oakland-based improvisation troupe Wing It! and has given writing workshops all over the country, including at Omega and Esalen Institutes. She teaches memoir at The Writing Salon in Berkeley, and is available for private coaching in writing or creativity, both in-person or on-line.

Show notes:

Marie Howe on On Being/Write ten things

Writing Naturally by David Petersen

Alison Luterman

Alison’s poem, “Some Girls” in the New York Times Magazine

A sneak peak of the music video from Alison’s musical-in-progress The Shyest Witch. (Alison notes: The witch, Rebekah Vega, had to be their own cameraperson and used a tripod while filming.)

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit emergingform.substack.com/subscribe

Photo: Carla Green

In what ways does collaboration strengthen the stories we tell? In this bonus episode, Catherine Saint Louis and Carla Green talk about a recent collaboration for Telescope, a podcast that tells stories about people living through COVID. Both our guests work for podcast production company Neon Hum, Catherine as Senior Editor and Carla as Producer. In the episode we’ll be discussing, “Rubber Bullets.” Catherine reported this story about Derrick Sanderlin and Carla was her editor. The story follows how Derrick--a man who had volunteered to work with the San Jose Police Department about implicit bias-- found himself trying to de-escalate tensions with the same police department during a peaceful Black Lives Matter protest and was shot with rubber bullets. We talk about how Catherine and Carla divided work, why trust is so important in collaborations, how details sometimes need to be separated from the dramatic arc of the story, how music can affect a listener and why one might choose not to use it, and how showing our humanness when we tell another’s story might be an essential piece to the story itself.

Carla Green is a Neon Hum producer and journalist. Before coming to Neon Hum, she was the managing producer of the KCRW podcast UnFictional, where she reported and produced a bunch of different stories, including one where she trailed a juggalo across the country on a Greyhound bus. Since she moved to Los Angeles in 2016, she’s covered the city’s homelessness crisis in stories for radio, podcasts, and print.

Catherine Saint Louis is the senior editor of podcasts for Neon Hum Media, an L.A. based podcast house founded by Jonathan Hirsch. Her latest podcast that she's edited is Smoke Screen: Fake Priest, a wild story about a man who pretended to be a priest for 30 years, stealing people's money and their faith. Fake Priest is a Neon Hum original as is Telescope, a podcast that tells stories about people living through COVID and later in our first season, the twin pandemics of racism and COVID. This year, she also edited Murder on the Towpath, an eight-episode podcast set in 1964 that features two women who never met but whose lives become linked one of them is killed. Past projects include: Sonic Boom, This Land, The Thing about Pam, Larger than Life, and Break Stuff. She lives in Brooklyn where she runs with a sweaty mask.

Show notes:

Neon Hum

“Rubber Bullets” episode of Telescope

Catherine wants to encourage more POC to get into podcast editing and would love for anyone who is interested to get in touch. Catherine@neonhum.com

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit emergingform.substack.com/subscribe

Telling someone else’s story presents a host of pleasures and challenges. In this episode, we interview Catherine Saint Louis, senior editor of podcasts for Neon Hum Media, about “Rubber Bullets,” a podcast episode released on Telescope in early July 2020, about a man who had guided implicit bias workshops for the San Jose Police Department for years, then found himself trying to de-escalate the same police department at a Black Lives Matter protest. He was shot in the groin with a rubber bullet. We talk with Catherine about the process of creating the episode from conception to execution. We discuss how she considers the interview process to be “a journey” that the interviewer and interviewee embark on together, and how Catherine was able to move beyond the facts of Derrick’s story to deliver the heart of it by drawing on her own humanity.

Catherine Saint Louis is the senior editor of podcasts for Neon Hum Media, an L.A. based podcast house founded by Jonathan Hirsch. Her latest podcast that she's edited is Smoke Screen: Fake Priest, a wild story about a man who pretended to be a priest for 30 years, stealing people's money and their faith. Fake Priest is a Neon Hum original as is Telescope, a podcast that tells stories about people living through COVID and later in our first season, the twin pandemics of racism and COVID. This year, she also edited Murder on the Towpath, an eight-episode podcast set in 1964 that features two women who never met but whose lives become linked one of them is killed. Past projects include: Sonic Boom, This Land, The Thing about Pam, Larger than Life, and Break Stuff. She lives in Brooklyn where she runs with a sweaty mask.

Show notes:

Jill U Adams’s delightful comics

Last Word On Nothing

Neon Hum

“Rubber Bullets” episode of Telescope

Fake Priest

Catherine Saint Louis interview about podcast editing on Servant of Pod with Nick Quah.

Catherine wants to encourage more POC to get into podcast editing and would love for anyone who is interested to get in touch. Catherine@neonhum.com

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit emergingform.substack.com/subscribe

Hello dear listeners! We are taking a short summer break. We’ve been putting out new episodes every week, and it feels like time to slow down for a moment and reflect. We’ll be back in August with some brand new regularly scheduled episodes. In the meantime, stay well. Thank you for your support.

Christie & Rosemerry

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Putting your values into your art can be a courageous act, and in this episode we speak with poet and storyteller Sara Abou Rashed about the vulnerability and rewards that come from revealing our identity in our work. Rashed comes from Palestine but was born and raised in Syria before moving to Ohio in 2013. She is a senior at Denison University of Ohio and has performed her one-woman show, A Map of Myself, all over the country. Her show explores issues of identity, culture, immigration, belonging and finding home. She’s also given a TEDx talk and been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. We talk about distinguishing between the self who creates the material and the self that presents it and also how audiences respond. Sara also gives us two “assignments” for how we, too, might find ourselves as we move forward in this time of uncertainty and unrest. We ask her these questions, and invite you to answer them as well on our substack page or our Facebook page:

How do you align your art with your values?

What role does art have in creating “the new normal?”

Sara Abou Rashed’s website

Sara’s show, Map of Myself

Trailer for Map of Myself

Hidden Treasures of a Refugee’s Journey TEDxColumbus

image of Sara via Instagram

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Could a book really save a life? Poet Aaron Abeyta is living proof. In this episode of Emerging Form, part of our miniseries about creativity and COVID-19, we talk with him about how Truman Capote helped transform him from trying to get kicked out of school to being the MFA Poetry Director at Western Colorado University. We also talk about his work as mayor in Antonito, Colorado, and how the pandemic is affecting the small town. We talk about his goal to give voice to others who don’t have one, how Pablo Neruda inspired him to be both poetic and political, and how a story from the Bible has helped guide him in the most difficult times.

Show notes:

Aaron Abeyta

In Cold Blood by Truman Capote

Pablo Neruda

Antonito, Colorado

untitled or breathing in a time of covid

--aaron a. abeyta

dust veils the valley like dust in spring

every day wind

every day this place a personification

of ache aching that is a falling

from this horizon into another

poverty does not create character

this the myth of some false

lying book whose mirrors do not

shine back at us nor for us

in a denver hospital Robert Limon cleaves

at life this breath then another

breath his lonely isolation

the machine a dire metronome

perhaps one day we will

all point back to this isolation

the aloneness that wrought this line

or that line into air and by air

i mean human hearts this is a prayer

for change for life and breath

for loved ones to recover to breathe

without laboring or without thought

i am reading Auden cross of the moment

he does not include in his collected the line

we must love one another or die the poem

absent altogether this wind

isn’t a lie what seems broken is

lies are less expensive

than anything we have saved

here among our hats and buttons

gathered then shelved toward what we

know will always come for us

we survive our ancestors have made it so

their voices you hear them too

they ring of fidelity live

endure be persist return

breathe yes fill your lungs

let the wind breathe may dust

swing from cottonwoods to water

to meadow may we be

lifted from our veils all of them

let too the broken

those walking toward home

in their swollen and inebriated day

may they too here in this isolation

serve as an aspect of truth

why did he write these lines

he wrote them in isolation

in the days where the dead multiplied

beyond the wars of books and story

the dead the dying the swollen

the broken and the barely breathing

they are a form of truth the living

ache of this place yes

the wind too brief breaths

that fluttered then flew

as if being alone was a

breath which formed itself

out of our requisite and stored faith

into song

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit emergingform.substack.com/subscribe

Hula hooping story tellers on street corners? That’s one topic of discussion in this episode of Emerging Form, part of our miniseries on how creatives are responding to the pandemic. We speak with our friend, author and adventurer Craig Childs, whose new book, Virga and Bone: Essays from dry places, is a celebration of the primacy of land. We talk about the pleasures and challenges of staying in one place, postcards to our pre-pandemic selves, what earthquakes have in common with pandemics and also how to place our present predicament in big time--both future and past. We talk about how cultures repeat themselves, how to move forward, and how to welcome what comes.

Craig Childs

Virga and Bone: Essays from Dry Places

Craig’s postcard to his 2010 self on Last Word on Nothing

Christie’s postcard to her 2010 self at Last Word On Nothing

Rosemerry’s poem on resilience

Christie's 100-mile habitat project

Rose Eveleth’s Flash Forward episode: Imagine Better Futures

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Are there any trends in how the pandemic has affected creative output in America? In this episode of Emerging Form, part of our miniseries on how creatives are responding to the pandemic, we speak with Timothy Green, editor of Rattle, one of America’s most popular poetry magazines. Timothy has worked as editor of Rattle since 2004 and is the author of American Fractal (Red Hen Press), a contributing columnist for the Press-Enterprise newspaper, and co-founder of the Wrighwood Literary Festival. He lives near Los Angeles with his wife, Megan, and their two children.

In this conversation, we talk about how the stages of grief seems to be showing up in the submissions Rattle is receiving. We also talk about how for creatives, our name is our brand, how administration is also creative act, how Poe’s poem Eureka predated the Big Bang Theory by 70 years, how it feels to be the one writing the rejections, how even editors can get impostor syndrome for editors, and how to trust a process.

Rattle: www.rattle.com

Rattle’s YouTube Channel

Timothy Green

“Eureka” by Edgar Allen Poe

American Fractal by Timothy Green, review

Rosemerry’s poem on missing touch

Christie’s purple sourdough starter (photo below)

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When life gets difficult, how do we bring our best selves to meet it? That’s one of the questions we ask in this episode of Emerging Form. We continue our miniseries on creativity and COVID-19 by interviewing Peter Heller, author of The Dog Stars, a best-selling post-apocalyptic novel in which the main character has survived a global pandemic. It’s a little close to home--and we talk with Heller about how it feels to have life now mimic his book. We also talk about some of the silver linings of shelter in place, how Heller weaves poetry into his novels, his most recent books The River and The Orchard and what he’s working on now in his Denver writing studio.

Heller is the author of seven books. He holds an MFA in poetry and fiction from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, is a former longtime contributor to NPR, and has been a contributing editor at Outside Magazine, Men’s Journal, and National Geographic Adventure.

Order Peter’s books from your local independent bookstore here.

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit emergingform.substack.com/subscribe

In Emerging Form’s ongoing series, Creativity and COVID-19, we interview creatives about how they’re channeling their creativity to cope with coronavirus. In this episode, we talk with Helena de Groot, a Belgian radio producer based in New York. She is the host and producer of Poetry Off The Shelf, an interview podcast for the Poetry Foundation. She also produces and sound designs The Paris Review Podcast, and edits the opera podcast Aria Code, produced in collaboration with WQXR, the Metropolitan Opera, and WNYC Studios, hosted by Rhiannon Giddens. We’ll talk about the importance of baths, the healing power of Russian art films, how she and her husband have handled their small apartment and working from home, and the joys of exploring our art forms with no agenda.

Rosemerry’s Live Poems on Facebook

Helena de Groot

Poetry Off the Shelf podcast

Nostalghia

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None

In this bonus episode, we bring you a special treat: an episode of Shelter in Place, a new podcast created by our guest this week on Emerging Form, Laura Joyce Davis. This episode is titled “The Call to Create.” Enjoy!

Laura Joyce Davis

Shelter in Place podcast

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This is the first of a new mini-series in which we explore this weird new reality we’re living in by interviewing a variety of creative makers about how they’re channeling their creativity to cope with the new coronavirus. In this episode, we talk to Laura Joyce Davis, a writer from Oakland, California, host and creator of a new daily podcast, “Shelter in Place: finding daily sanity in a world that feels increasingly insane.” We talk about the challenges of balancing parenting and work; how sheltering in place can change family dynamics; about disappointments and silver linings; about how a daily practice has offered her surprising freedom, trust and a different relationship with daily life; and about how a bike ride the day before Shelter in Place changed her life.

Shelter in Place Podcast home page and on iTunes

Laura Joyce Davis

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Welcome to our extended conversation with Rose Eveleth, the founder and host of Flash Forward, a podcast about the future. In this bonus episode, we talk with Rose about clarity: how she uses it to guide a project through growing pains. We’ll talk about her process for making monthly goals (so much more useful than a single New Year’s resolution!), how she organizes her goals, about her new book, pros and cons of inviting collaborators in, how ego and fear can sabotage a project, how she loves her lawyer, and about the stages of small business growth.

Flash Forward, a podcast about the future.

Flash Forward’s Patreon page

Christie’s story, Your Inability to Do Pullups Is All in Your Head

Rosemerry’s poem about pullups

The Five Stages of Small Business Growth

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In this five-minute bonus, Rosemerry reads four poems responding to the coronavirus pandemic:

A Change in the Light

The Afternoon the World Health Organization Declares a Pandemic

Staying Home

Tucking in My Daughter in the Time of Corona Virus

Rosemerry’s Daily Poem Blog, A Hundred Falling Veils

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At some point, most creatives experience growing pains--when your project is going well and now you have decisions to make about whether to grow it, to bring in collaborators, or to expand your reach. We’ll also talk about avalanches of opportunity and money grubbing poets. Our guest this episode is the inimitable Rose Eveleth. She is the producer and host of Flash Forward, a podcast about the future. We’ll ask her two questions: 1) When do you know your project has grown beyond something you can do alone and you need to bring in collaborators? and 2) When the creative project you’re doing is bringing you new opportunities, how do you decide which ones to take and what direction you want to head?

Christie’s Book, Good to Go, finalist for the Colorado Book Award!

Christie’s Courage Camps

Rose Eveleth (photo credit: Eler de Grey)

Flash Forward, a podcast about the future.

A Change in the Light

Now while the moon

is hiding behind the clouds

now when the rain

is falling midwinter,

and now that they’ve told us

not to hug or kiss each other

for fear of contracting

and spreading disease,

yes now is the time to find

whatever light we have

been hiding inside us—

whatever measure of brilliance

we’ve managed to conceal

from each other, from ourselves—

now is the time to bring forth

that luminescence and offer it

freely to the world, now

when light matters most.

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In this bonus episode we talk with psychologist and author Scott Barry Kaufman about the imagination network--the default chatter in your brain--and how valuable it is. We also talk about paradox, and the tug between a longing for external validation and the need to look inward for creative growth. We talk about openness to experience as a key driver for creativity, and how a rut can sometimes serve the greater creative process.

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Are you living up to your creative potential? Or are you stuck in a rut? Could it be that the rut is serving you? These are some of the questions we wrestle with in this episode of Emerging Form. We talk about Christie’s sweet spot between struggle and boredom, how fencing (or another new activity) might supercharge your creative process, and LOTS of tips on how to get out of a rut. We finish, as always with a guest. This episode features Scott Barry Kaufman, a psychologist at Columbia University and author of the new book, Transcend: The New Science of Self-Actualization. We ask him these two questions:

What does self-actualization look like for a creative person?

What’s the path to self-actualization in one’s creative life?

Episode Notes

Christie’s review of Spirit Run: A 6,000-Mile Marathon Through North America’s Stolen Land by Noé Álvarez

Christie’s review of Wired to Create by Scott Barry Kaufman and Carolyn Gregoire

Kaufman’s NPR interview on Why So Many Gifted Yet Struggling Students are Hiding in Plain Sight

Kaufman’s The Psychology Podcast

Take a Self-Actualization Test

The figure skating routine to lift you out of a rut

En Garde

--Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

Keep distance, the fencing teacher says,

and by this he means, stay close enough

to your opponent that you could, at any time,

extend, lunge and attack with your point.

All my life, I’ve tried not to keep distance.

All my life, I’ve done my best to avoid

the attack—from either side. And now,

with my silver lamé and my one white glove

and my face safe behind metal mesh, I dig

to find the part of me who craves engagement,

who seeks a bout, who wants to threaten

my target and exploit their vulnerability.

Keep distance, he says, and I understand

that this is how I show up for the game.

This is how I meet not only the opponent,

but, perhaps for the first time, myself.

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In this bonus episode, we continue our conversation with USA Today best-selling author Sarina Bowen, who has written more than 30 contemporary novels and is cohost of the #amwriting podcast. She tells us the most important thing to remember when we think we are utterly stuck and shares with us tools from her “deep bag of tricks” for how to get unstuck. We also talk about how genre writers are like chefs, and she shares stories about three collaborative writing projects and what they taught her.

Sarina Bowen

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Like a lot of life plans over the past few weeks, this episode veered from our original schedule. We’d planned to discuss the joys and challenges of creating things with friends, but instead we found ourselves talking about these strange times. In this emergency episode of Emerging Form, we talk about how COVID-19 is changing what and how we write, and how it’s affecting all kinds of creative careers. Warning: we get a bit emotional at times. Topics include toilet paper hoarding, coronavirus anxiety, the importance of the arts, financial insecurity, online alternatives to in person events and how our lives are different now. We check in with our fabulous audio producer, Rob Dozier, and then we talk with our scheduled guest, Sarina Bowen, a USA Today best-selling author who has written more than 30 contemporary novels and is cohost of the #amwriting podcast.

Read Rosemerry’s daily poems

Future of Another Timeline by Annalee Newitz

Rob Dozier

Sarina Bowen

amwriting podcast

coronavirus image by pixabay

Tonight I Pray for All the Doctors, the Nurses

the Healthcare Workers

And tonight I think

of the seventeen Italian doctors,

dead. And the hundreds

of thousands of people

whose test results were positive.

And all the doctors, nurses,

health care workers—

some right here in our town.

I think of them eating breakfast,

reading the same discouraging news,

then kissing their loved ones,

putting on their shoes,

and walking out the door,

though resolution’s as elusive

as last month’s peace—

the peace we didn’t

even know we had.

—Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

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In this bonus episode, we talk with memoirist and essayist Claire Dederer about the role of ambition in a writer’s life. She also discusses the different ways she responds to rejection, and how it differs when it comes from a professional source versus from a reader. She also talks about the writer’s imperative to write about difficult subjects, why it’s important it is to have clarity and distance before sharing difficult personal stories, how domestic labor can affect a writer’s work life and how devoting time to her work has, at times, made her feel monstrous.

Claire Dederer (photo courtesy Claire Dederer)

Claire Dederer’s essay “What do we do with the Art of Monstrous Men?”

Claire Dederer’s essay “Eclipsed: In our two-writer household, my husband's literary star shines all too brightly”

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“We’re sorry, your work does not suit our needs at this time.” These words are so common. Rejection is a difficult reality for most (all?) writers and artists. So how do we handle rejection? Can we use it to improve our work? What does it have to tell us and teach us? In this episode, we talk about a useful phrase in the face of rejection, Christie’s Southeast Asia Problem, and one of the poetry worlds’ best rejection letter writers. Then we’ll talk with memoirist and essayist Claire Dederer and ask her two questions: 1) How do you process rejection, especially when it’s a work that feels very personal? And 2) What have you learned from rejection? We’re interested in your feedback on these answers, too!

Episode Notes:

Halcyon Poetry Prize

Christie’s article on mammography in Mother Jones

Christie’s report for the Pulitzer Center on Agent Orange in Vietnam

Colorado’s New Poet Laureate Bobby LeFebre

Most Rejected Books of All Time

Claire Dederer (photo courtesy Claire Dederer)

Claire Dederer’s essay “What do we do with the Art of Monstrous Men?”

Claire Dederer’s essay “Eclipsed: In our two-writer household, my husband's literary star shines all too brightly”

**

Tim Green’s Outstanding Rejection Letter

Dear Rosemerry—

Thanks for sharing this. The subject matter is perfect for the series, but we receive over 100 poems every week, and I can only pick one (or occasionally two). This week I ended up choosing something else—check our website tomorrow morning to read it.

This decision is, of course, no reflection on the importance of the event you were writing about, or of your response. It's great to read poets reacting in a meaningful way to current events, and very difficult to choose just one.

I'm sorry that I can't reply individually, though many poems make me want to—reading all these every Saturday morning is a lot of work! We do have a closed Facebook group, where you can safely share your poems with each other, if you'd like—just join: https://www.facebook.com/groups/poetsrespond/

Anyway, don't hesitate to try again whenever you have another timely one—or to send general submissions any time.

Best,

Tim

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In this bonus episode, Sarah Knight talks about the four kinds of yessers, how she went from overachiever to having a fully operational no muscle, how to build “the gates of hell no” and then cultivate your own private “okay corral,” the calming effects of pina coladas, how her daily tweets might help you discover and maintain your own boundaries, and more. **Please note that this episode contains language that may not be suitable for kids. (See title of Sarah’s book…)

Guest: Sarah Knight

JUST SAY F*CK NO! No is an acceptable answer. It’s time to start using it.

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It’s only two letters long, but the word “no” can be one of the hardest words to say out loud. In this episode, we talk about why no is every bit as important a word for a creative as yes. We’ll talk about earthworms, the trifecta of yes, how to strengthen your no muscle and Christmas candles. Then we interview the international bestselling “anti-guru” Sarah Knight, author of the No F*cks Given guides and ask her these two questions: 1) How do you decide when to say no? And 2) What’s the best way to say no? We’re interested in your answers to these questions, too.

Episode Notes:

The Craft of Science Writing: Selections from The Open Notebook

Poetry of Presence: An Anthology of Mindfulness Poems

Rosemerry’s book Charity: True Stories of Giving and Receiving

Rosemerry’s book Celebration: The Christmas Candle Book with Poems of Light

Veronica Dewey, costume designer extraordinaire

David Plotz’s trick for saying no (which he admits he stole from his wife, Hanna Rosin, and her friend, the writer Margaret Talbot)

Sarah Knight (photo of Sarah by Alfredo Esteban)

Sarah’s article Just Say F*ck No!

Sarah’s F*ck No page

To buy her most recent book, Fck No: How to Stop Saying Yes When You Can’t, You Shouldn’t or You Just Don’t Want To:* visit Amazon, Barnes & Noble or Indiebound.

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F*ck No!: How to Stop Saying Yes When You Can't, You Shouldn't, or You Just Don't Want To (A No F*cks Given Guide, 5)

In this bonus episode, we continue our conversation with Thea Deley about creating on emotionally difficult topics. Thea talks about the one woman play she created about her struggles with her family and their religious belief system and about the issues that arise when addressing personal issues through art.

Thea Deley (photo of Thea by Mike Maxwell)

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As Mentioned in the Podcast:

In this week’s podcast, we mentioned a poem I wrote about my dear friend Sally Estes when she was told she had three months to live. Here I am reading the poem. It’s also printed below.

They Say It’s the Best Bloom in Ten Years

—Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

She wants to go see the bluebonnets, she says.

This is after she tells me they’ve said she has three months to live.

And I want to find her vast fields of bluebonnets,

acres and acres of white-tipped blue bloom.

And I want to send her more springs to see them in,

more days to live one day at a time. I want to remove

the pain in her belly, the pain that aggressively grows.

I want to make deals with the universe. Want to say no

to the way things are. I want to tell death to wait.

I want to tell life to find a way. I want to hug her

until she believes she’s beloved. I want to give her

the pen that will write every brave thing

that she’s been unable to say. There are days

when we feel how uncompromising it is, the truth.

How human we are. There are days when the bluebonnets

stretch as far as the eye can see. There are days

we know nothing is more important than going to see them,

a billion blue petals all nodding in the wind, teaching us to say yes.

—forthcoming in Hush, Middle Creek Publishing, 2020

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Engaging in a creative project can be hard enough when the subject matter is fun. But what about when it’s emotionally taxing, too? In this episode, we talk about many techniques for working with topics that make us uneasy—from changing perspective to creating rituals. Then we talk with Thea Deley, speaker, writer and improviser, and ask her two questions: 1) When do you know you are ready to write about something difficult—what is the role of perspective, and 2) How do you navigate stories that might hurt someone? We are interested in your answers to these questions, too!

Episode Notes

Christie’s farewell to David Corcoran on Last Word on Nothing

Opening Up: The Healing Power of Expressing Emotions, by James W. Pennebaker, PhD

Pablo Neruda: Tonight I Can Write

American Psychological Association: Writing to Heal

Harvard Health Publishing: Writing About Emotions May Ease Stress and Trauma

Thea Deley (photo of Thea by Mike Maxwell)

Christie’s ode to Holiday Mathis, “I Know Astrology Is B**t, But I Can’t Stop Reading My Horoscope.”

Simple Tools

—Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

I am so grateful for the rubber spatula,

the way it sits quietly in the drawer

yet is always ready for action—

is game to scrape the walls of the blender

or to fold chocolate chips into cookie dough.

It evens and swirls the frosting on cake

and welcomes the tongue

of a child. In a sharp world,

it knows the value of being blunt;

it knows that to smooth is a gift to the world.

Some people are knives, and

I thank them. Me, I want to belong

to the order of spatulas—those

who blend, who mix, who co-mingle

dissimilars to create a cohesive whole.

I want to spread sweetness, to be a workhorse

for beauty, to stir things up,

to clean things out. I want to be useful,

an instrument of unity, a means, a lever for life.

first published in Braided Way, 2019

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In this bonus episode, Sherry Richert Belul, happiness coach and founder of Simply Celebrate, talks with us about co-founding Secret Agents of Change, how even the way you walk to the office can be playful, and how it is that she came to find herself a happiness coach.

Want to make sure you receive every bonus episode? Subscribe to our newsletter!

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit emergingform.substack.com/subscribe

What does play have to do with creativity? Could a hula hoop help you finish your book project? In this episode, we argue about what is play, anyway—is it something you set time aside for? Or something that is always available to you? And how might it help your creative life? Then we are joined by author and happiness coach Sherry Richert Belul to get her take on our two questions: 1) How does play inform your creative process? and 2) What’s an example of a project that has been shaped by play? We’d love your feedback on these questions, too!

Episode Notes:

Meet our new production wizard, Rob Dozier

Play: How it shapes the brain, opens the imagination and invigorates the soul by Stuart Brown, M.D.

Playing at Work: Organizational Play as a Facilitator of Creativity, dissertation by Samuel West

Christie’s spam poetry on Last Word on Nothing

Rosemerry’s collaborative book of three-line poems, Even Now

Snark Week: The Wrath of the Sloth on Last Word on Nothing

Slaughterhouse Five, by Kurt Vonnegut

Sherry Richert Belul and Simply Celebrate

Say It Now: 33 ways to say I love you to the most important people in your life

Secret Agents of Change Facebook Group

Wild Rose Shops for a Bathing Suit

—Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

Not the full-coverage shorts.

Not the black one-piece

with the ruffle around the hips.

She wants to show off some skin.

She doesn’t care who’s looking.

Or who’s not.

She’s got flesh and a lot of it.

A woman needs weight in the world.

Damn, she is getting hot just thinking

about the way the sun likes to touch her.

She finds a strapless bikini

in her favorite color, brilliant magenta.

Barely a bottom. Perfect.

Another suit in hunter orange.

She plans to be swimming with sharks

and wants them to know she is there.

God, she loves shopping for bathing suits.

She could do it all day with that long tri-fold mirror

that knows she gives squat

about who’s the loveliest of all,

but dang, how could she not notice

how great it is to have hips, like hers,

how fine to have some real meat to swing around.

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Why should you enter a contest? Even if you don’t win, how might it help you? And what are downsides of entering? In this special episode, recorded live at the Telluride Lit Fest just before the announcement of the Fischer and Cantor Prizes, w talk about big juicy tomatoes, how judges make decisions, why the … Continue reading Episode 9: How Should We Think About Awards & Contests? →

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In this bonus episode, Luis Lopez, poet laureate of Colorado’s Western Slope, and Rafael Jesús González, poet laureate of Berkeley, each read a poem and talk about their writing process. And that’s not all! Below, we present a poem Rafael Jesús González wrote about judging the Fischer poetry prize. We think his poem should be prerequisite … Continue reading Episode 9 Bonus: Luis Lopez and Rafael Jesús González on Creative Process →

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Working with a partner on creative projects can be incredible! And incredibly frustrating. In this episode, we will discuss whether collaborations need leaders, why listening is an essential skill for working with other creatives, Chinese food, the Jabberwocky, and how spontaneity can enhance a creative collaboration. And then we’ll wrap up our conversation by talking with musician/songwriter/video … Continue reading Episode 8: Collaboration–Are We In This Together? (with guest Christine Laskowski) →

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What can you do to evolve your creativity? How do your practices fuel or sabotage your muse? In this episode of Emerging Form, we talk about creative habits—frequency, accountability, flexibility and more. We’ll cover Rosemerry’s four promises she makes for her daily practice, Christie’s philosophy on not taking yourself too seriously, a new approach for … Continue reading Episode 7: Creative Habits (with guest Helen Fields) →

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“Quitter” is sometimes an insult, but in this episode we explore how quitting can be underrated. Anyone involved in a creative project has likely wondered at some point if they should suck it up and continue the fight or move on. We’ll also discuss the dangers of the sunk cost fallacy, insights from Clue, the … Continue reading Episode 6: Quitting (with guest Pam Houston) →

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Who needs an editor? Everyone. In this episode, we discuss feedback: who to ask, how to ask them, and how to respond to what they say. Also important: at what point in a project do you ask for feedback? We’ll tackle all these questions, plus we’ll talk about the sinking of the Titanic, how praise … Continue reading Episode 5: Feeback (with guest Andrea Jones-Rooy) →

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What keeps us from getting started on our creative projects? We have great ideas, but then we keep putting them off. In this episode, we explore how to dance with high expectations and paralysis of analysis. We talk about tricks for getting yourself past square one, and we have an outrageously good interview with poet, … Continue reading Episode 4: Getting Started (with guest Judyth Hill) →

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So you’re writing. Or painting. Or dancing. And you’re struck by this horrible feeling: what am I doing? How am I ever going to find the form and create something beautiful out of this tangled mess that I’ve assembled? Or you start to feel that your work doesn’t matter. That in fact, nothing matters. Your … Continue reading Episode 3: Existential Despair (with guest Andrea Bird) →

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If you’re a poet or a painter or a musician or a dancer, you have to have talent, right? Maybe, maybe not. In this episode of Emerging Form, we explore talent. What exactly is it? How do you know if you have it? Is it necessary? Can you make up for it if you don’t … Continue reading Episode 2: Is Talent Necessary? (with guest Jennifer Kahn) →

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Emerging Form is a podcast about the creative process. It’s a discussion between a poet and a science journalist, recorded over wine. Episode 1 introduces hosts Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer and Christie Aschwanden as well as the podcast’s patron saint, poet Jack Mueller. And the hosts wrestle with what it really means to be in service … Continue reading Episode 1: Introducing Emerging Form →

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit emergingform.substack.com/subscribe