Episodes

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

    Nicholas D. Kristof is a two-time Pulitzer-winning journalist and Op-ed columnist for The New York Times, where he was previously bureau chief in Hong Kong, Beijing, and Tokyo. Kristof is a regular CNN contributor and has covered, among many other events and crises, the Tiananmen Square protests, the Darfur genocide, the Yemeni civil war, and the U.S. opioid crisis. He is the author of the memoir Chasing Hope, A Reporter's Life, and coauthor, with his wife, Sheryl WuDunn, of five previous books: Tightrope, A Path Appears, Half the Sky, Thunder from the East, and China Wakes.

    www.nytimes.com/column/nicholas-kristof
    www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/720814/chasing-hope-by-nicholas-d-kristof

    Family vineyard & apple orchard in Yamhill, Oregon: www.kristoffarms.com

    www.creativeprocess.info
    www.oneplanetpodcast.org
    IG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast

  • How can journalism make people care and bring about solutions? What role does storytelling play in shining a light on injustice and crises and creating a catalyst for change?

    Nicholas D. Kristof is a two-time Pulitzer-winning journalist and Op-ed columnist for The New York Times, where he was previously bureau chief in Hong Kong, Beijing, and Tokyo. Kristof is a regular CNN contributor and has covered, among many other events and crises, the Tiananmen Square protests, the Darfur genocide, the Yemeni civil war, and the U.S. opioid crisis. He is the author of the memoir Chasing Hope, A Reporter's Life, and coauthor, with his wife, Sheryl WuDunn, of five previous books: Tightrope, A Path Appears, Half the Sky, Thunder from the East, and China Wakes.

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

    www.nytimes.com/column/nicholas-kristof
    www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/720814/chasing-hope-by-nicholas-d-kristof

    Family vineyard & apple orchard in Yamhill, Oregon: www.kristoffarms.com

    www.creativeprocess.info
    www.oneplanetpodcast.org
    IG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast

    Photo credit: David Hume Kennerly

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  • S. D. Chrostowska is professor of humanities at York University, Canada. She is the author of several books, among them Permission, The Eyelid, A Cage for Every Child, and, most recently, Utopia in the Age of Survival: Between Myth and Politics. Her essays have appeared in such venues as Public Culture, Telos, Boundary 2, and The Hedgehog Review. She also coedits the French surrealist review Alcheringa and is curator of the 19th International Exhibition of Surrealism, Marvellous Utopia, which runs from July to September 2024 in Saint-Cirq-Lapopie, France.

    https://profiles.laps.yorku.ca/profiles/sylwiac/

    www.sup.org/books/title/?id=33445
    https://chbooks.com/Books/T/The-Eyelid
    https://ciscm.fr/en/merveilleuse-utopie

    www.creativeprocess.info
    www.oneplanetpodcast.org
    IG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast

  • As Surrealism turns 100, what can it teach us about the importance of dreaming and creating a better society? Will we wake up from the consumerist dream sold to us by capitalism and how would that change our ideas of utopia?

    S. D. Chrostowska is professor of humanities at York University, Canada. She is the author of several books, among them Permission, The Eyelid, A Cage for Every Child, and, most recently, Utopia in the Age of Survival: Between Myth and Politics. Her essays have appeared in such venues as Public Culture, Telos, Boundary 2, and The Hedgehog Review. She also coedits the French surrealist review Alcheringa and is curator of the 19th International Exhibition of Surrealism, Marvellous Utopia, which runs from July to September 2024 in Saint-Cirq-Lapopie, France.

    “I like to think of utopianism as “effective social daydreaming” because utopia is associated with consciously imagining societies. Our imagination is always involved in creating reality. The opposition between the two, reality and the imaginary, is not a stark one; they're porous.”

    https://profiles.laps.yorku.ca/profiles/sylwiac/
    www.sup.org/books/title/?id=33445
    https://chbooks.com/Books/T/The-Eyelid
    https://ciscm.fr/en/merveilleuse-utopie

    www.creativeprocess.info
    www.oneplanetpodcast.org
    IG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast

  • In this episode of the Speaking Out of Place podcast Professor David Palumbo-Liu talks with acclaimed author and activist, and San Francisco legend, Chris Carlsson about his new novel, When Shells Crumble. It begins in December 2024, when the US Supreme Court nullifies the popular vote in the Presidential election and awards the presidency to an authoritarian Republican, who proceeds to demolish democracy and install a fascistic state that hastens ecological havoc. The novel is much more than your usual dystopian tale—it focuses on how to resist political cynicism and defeatism, and rebuild on planetary wreckage. It is a world-building project filled with wisdom, sadness, and joy. We specifically put this fictional text in conservation with his brilliant non-fiction work, Nowtopia, which offers a radical redefinition of “work” that restores dignity and value to their proper places.

    Chris Carlsson, co-director of the “history from below” project Shaping San Francisco, is a writer, publisher, editor, photographer, public speaker, and occasional professor. He was one of the founders in 1981 of the seminal and infamous underground San Francisco magazine Processed World. In 1992 Carlsson co-founded Critical Mass in San Francisco, which both led to a local bicycling boom and helped to incubate transformative urban movements in hundreds of cities, large and small, worldwide. In 1995 work began on “Shaping San Francisco;” since then the project has morphed into an incomparable archive of San Francisco history at Foundsf.org, award-winning bicycle and walking tours, and almost two decades of Public Talks covering history, politics, ecology, art, and more (see shapingsf.org). Beginning in Spring 2020, Carlsson has hosted Bay Cruises along the San Francisco shoreline.

    His latest novel, When Shells Crumble was published by Spuyten Duyvil in Brooklyn, NY at the end of 2023. At the dawn of the pandemic, he published a detailed historical guidebook of the city, Hidden San Francisco: A Guide to Lost Landscapes, Unsung Heroes, and Radical Histories (Pluto Press: 2020). His full-length nonfiction work Nowtopia(AK Press: 2008), offers a groundbreaking look at class and work while uniquely examining how hard and pleasantly we work when we’re not at our official jobs. He published his first novel, After The Deluge, in 2004, a story of post-economic utopian San Francisco in the year 2157. He has edited six books, including three “Reclaiming San Francisco” collections with the venerable City Lights Books. He redesigned and co-authored an expanded Vanished Waters: A History of San Francisco’s Mission Bay after which he joined the board of the Mission Creek Conservancy. He has given hundreds of public presentations based on Shaping San Francisco, Critical Mass, Nowtopia, Vanished Waters, and his “Reclaiming San Francisco” history anthologies since the late 1990s, and has appeared dozens of times in radio, television and on the internet.

    www.palumbo-liu.com
    https://speakingoutofplace.com
    https://twitter.com/palumboliu?s=20
    www.instagram.com/speaking_out_of_place

  • “One thing people don't realize is that the goal of disinformation is not simply to get you to believe a falsehood. It's to demoralize you into giving up on the idea of truth, to polarize us around factual issues, to get us to distrust people who don't believe the same lie. And even if somebody doesn't believe the lie, it can still make them cynical. I mean, we've all had friends who don't even watch the news anymore. There's a chilling quotation from Holocaust historian Hannah Arendt about how when you always lie to someone, the consequence is not necessarily that they believe the lie, but that they begin to lose their critical faculties, that they begin to give up on the idea of truth, and so they can't judge for themselves what's true and what's false anymore. That's the scary part, the nexus between post-truth and autocracy. That's what the authoritarian wants. Not necessarily to get you to believe the lie. But to give up on truth, because when you give up on truth, then there's no blame, no accountability, and they can just assert their power. There's a connection between disinformation and denial.”

    Lee McIntyre is a Research Fellow at the Center for Philosophy and History of Science at Boston University and a Senior Advisor for Public Trust in Science at the Aspen Institute. He holds a B.A. from Wesleyan University and a Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Michigan. He has taught philosophy at Colgate University, Boston University, Tufts Experimental College, Simmons College, and Harvard Extension School (where he received the Dean’s Letter of Commendation for Distinguished Teaching). Formerly Executive Director of the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University, he has also served as a policy advisor to the Executive Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard and as Associate Editor in the Research Department of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston. His books include On Disinformation and How to Talk to a Science Denier and the novels The Art of Good and Evil and The Sin Eater.

    https://leemcintyrebooks.com
    www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/730833/on-disinformation-by-lee-mcintyre
    https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262545051/
    https://leemcintyrebooks.com/books/the-art-of-good-and-evil/
    https://leemcintyrebooks.com/books/the-sin-eater/

    www.creativeprocess.info
    www.oneplanetpodcast.org
    IG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast

  • How do we fight for truth and protect democracy in a post-truth world? How does bias affect our understanding of facts?

    Lee McIntyre is a Research Fellow at the Center for Philosophy and History of Science at Boston University and a Senior Advisor for Public Trust in Science at the Aspen Institute. He holds a B.A. from Wesleyan University and a Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Michigan. He has taught philosophy at Colgate University, Boston University, Tufts Experimental College, Simmons College, and Harvard Extension School (where he received the Dean’s Letter of Commendation for Distinguished Teaching). Formerly Executive Director of the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University, he has also served as a policy advisor to the Executive Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard and as Associate Editor in the Research Department of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston. His books include On Disinformation and How to Talk to a Science Denier and the novels The Art of Good and Evil and The Sin Eater.

    “One thing people don't realize is that the goal of disinformation is not simply to get you to believe a falsehood. It's to demoralize you into giving up on the idea of truth, to polarize us around factual issues, to get us to distrust people who don't believe the same lie. And even if somebody doesn't believe the lie, it can still make them cynical. I mean, we've all had friends who don't even watch the news anymore. There's a chilling quotation from Holocaust historian Hannah Arendt about how when you always lie to someone, the consequence is not necessarily that they believe the lie, but that they begin to lose their critical faculties, that they begin to give up on the idea of truth, and so they can't judge for themselves what's true and what's false anymore. That's the scary part, the nexus between post-truth and autocracy. That's what the authoritarian wants. Not necessarily to get you to believe the lie. But to give up on truth, because when you give up on truth, then there's no blame, no accountability, and they can just assert their power. There's a connection between disinformation and denial.”

    https://leemcintyrebooks.com
    www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/730833/on-disinformation-by-lee-mcintyre
    https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262545051/
    https://leemcintyrebooks.com/books/the-art-of-good-and-evil/
    https://leemcintyrebooks.com/books/the-sin-eater/

    www.creativeprocess.info
    www.oneplanetpodcast.org
    IG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast

  • “Bookselling captured my imagination and my heart as soon as I started working at the bookstore because I could see the potential for this great, amazing community-oriented work. Of course, it's a thrill to be around books, to meet authors, to read all this stuff, and to spend all day with people who love books, but what I think I really fell in love with was the sense of community, the people behind it, and the way a bookstore can really be an engine for positive social change within its community and in a broader sense as well. My whole nonfiction book project started with a tweet thread. It was about how every bookseller has to be prepared to have this discussion: a customer comes in, and they're like, this book is 50 percent off on Amazon. Why should I buy it here? So, I don't think about it quite as withholding from Amazon as much as contributing to these local community-oriented businesses.
    The thing that unites my poetry and the nonfiction writing is my main obsession as a writer. It's the question of, how do you live meaningfully in late capitalism? As corporations and global capitalist forces take over the world, what does it mean to try to have a meaningful human life? I think the proliferation of objects might reflect that. A lot of what we do in this world is collect objects, and regardless of whether it's good or bad, you build a nest. I think that in Picture Window in particular, I wanted to write about the domestic in a way that I hadn't written in so far. And then the pandemic happened, so I was forced into this weird, uneasy, claustrophobic domesticity. When your attention is so focused within your own home and within your own family, every object in your house takes on a new resonance. So, when a tennis ball that you've never seen somehow shows up in your house, that's weird. It's poetic. It feels dreamlike.”

    Danny Caine is the author of the poetry collections Continental Breakfast, El Dorado Freddy's, Flavortown, and Picture Window, as well as the books How to Protect Bookstores and Why and How to Resist Amazon and Why. His poetry has appeared in The Slowdown, Lit Hub, Diagram, HAD, and Barrelhouse.  He's a co-owner of The Raven Bookstore, Publisher's Weekly's 2022 Bookstore of the Year.

    www.dannycaine.com
    www.ravenbookstore.com

    www.creativeprocess.info
    www.oneplanetpodcast.org
    IG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast

  • What is the future of literature in the age of generative AI? How can bookstores build community and be engines for positive social change? What does it mean to try to have a meaningful human life?

    Danny Caine is the author of the poetry collections Continental Breakfast, El Dorado Freddy's, Flavortown, and Picture Window, as well as the books How to Protect Bookstores and Why and How to Resist Amazon and Why. His poetry has appeared in The Slowdown, Lit Hub, Diagram, HAD, and Barrelhouse.  He's a co-owner of The Raven Bookstore, Publisher's Weekly's 2022 Bookstore of the Year.

    “Bookselling captured my imagination and my heart as soon as I started working at the bookstore because I could see the potential for this great, amazing community-oriented work. Of course, it's a thrill to be around books, to meet authors, to read all this stuff, and to spend all day with people who love books, but what I think I really fell in love with was the sense of community, the people behind it, and the way a bookstore can really be an engine for positive social change within its community and in a broader sense as well. My whole nonfiction book project started with a tweet thread. It was about how every bookseller has to be prepared to have this discussion: a customer comes in, and they're like, this book is 50 percent off on Amazon. Why should I buy it here? So, I don't think about it quite as withholding from Amazon as much as contributing to these local community-oriented businesses.
    The thing that unites my poetry and the nonfiction writing is my main obsession as a writer. It's the question of, how do you live meaningfully in late capitalism? As corporations and global capitalist forces take over the world, what does it mean to try to have a meaningful human life? I think the proliferation of objects might reflect that. A lot of what we do in this world is collect objects, and regardless of whether it's good or bad, you build a nest. I think that in Picture Window in particular, I wanted to write about the domestic in a way that I hadn't written in so far. And then the pandemic happened, so I was forced into this weird, uneasy, claustrophobic domesticity. When your attention is so focused within your own home and within your own family, every object in your house takes on a new resonance. So, when a tennis ball that you've never seen somehow shows up in your house, that's weird. It's poetic. It feels dreamlike.”

    www.dannycaine.com
    www.ravenbookstore.com

    www.creativeprocess.info
    www.oneplanetpodcast.org
    IG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast

  • It is said that people never die until the last person says their name. In memory of the writer and director Paul Auster, who passed away this week, we're sharing this conversation we had back in 2017 after the publication of his novel 4 3 2 1. Auster reflects on his body of work, life, and creative process.

    Paul Auster was the bestselling author of Winter Journal, Sunset Park, Invisible, The Book of Illusions, and The New York Trilogy, among many other works. He has been awarded the Prince of Asturias Award for Literature, the Prix Médicis étranger, an Independent Spirit Award, and the Premio Napoli. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and is a Commandeur de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. He has also penned several screenplays for films such as Smoke (1995), as well as Lulu on the Bridge (1998) and The Inner Life of Martin Frost (2007), which he also directed.

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

    We apologize for the quality of the recording since it was not originally meant to be aired as a podcast. Portrait of Paul Auster by Mia Funk, inspired by his novel 4 3 2 1.

    www.penguinrandomhouse.com/authors/1045/paul-auster
    www.creativeprocess.info
    www.oneplanetpodcast.org
    IG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast

  • “The Wandering is a choose your own adventure novel, and the reader is situated in the shoes of this brown woman from the Global South. She's 27 and in a way, she is stuck with her life. She aspires to be middle class, but her job doesn't allow her to achieve this social mobility. In her condition, she makes a deal with a devil, a reference to the story of Faust and Mephistopheles, finally getting a pair of red shoes that will take her anywhere. But that means she will never be able to find home—that's the curse of the shoes. The title in Indonesian is Gentayanga, which is a word used to describe ghosts who exist in a liminal state. This is a metaphor for people who travel. I came up with the idea for this novel in 2009 when I was an Indonesian international student studying for my PHD in New York. When I went back to Jakarta, I felt like I was not at home, but New York wasn't my home either, so there's a feeling of being neither here nor there. I wanted to capture the sense of being everywhere, which is liberating, but also the sense of displacement.”

    Intan Paramaditha is a writer and an academic. Her novel The Wandering (Harvill Secker/ Penguin Random House UK), translated from the Indonesian language by Stephen J. Epstein, was nominated for the Stella Prize in Australia and awarded the Tempo Best Literary Fiction in Indonesia, English PEN Translates Award, and PEN/ Heim Translation Fund Grant from PEN America. She is the author of the short story collection Apple and Knife, the editor of Deviant Disciples: Indonesian Women Poets, part of the Translating Feminisms series of Tilted Axis Press and the co-editor of The Routledge Companion to Asian Cinemas (forthcoming 2024). Her essay, “On the Complicated Questions Around Writing About Travel,” was selected for The Best American Travel Writing 2021. She holds a Ph.D. from New York University and teaches media and film studies at Macquarie University, Sydney.

    https://intanparamaditha.com
    www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/626055/the-wandering-by-intan-paramaditha/9781787301184

    www.creativeprocess.info
    www.oneplanetpodcast.org
    IG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast

  • How are writing and travel vehicles for understanding? How can we expand the literary canon to include other voices, other cultures, other experiences of the world?

    Intan Paramaditha is a writer and an academic. Her novel The Wandering (Harvill Secker/ Penguin Random House UK), translated from the Indonesian language by Stephen J. Epstein, was nominated for the Stella Prize in Australia and awarded the Tempo Best Literary Fiction in Indonesia, English PEN Translates Award, and PEN/ Heim Translation Fund Grant from PEN America. She is the author of the short story collection Apple and Knife, the editor of Deviant Disciples: Indonesian Women Poets, part of the Translating Feminisms series of Tilted Axis Press and the co-editor of The Routledge Companion to Asian Cinemas (forthcoming 2024). Her essay, “On the Complicated Questions Around Writing About Travel,” was selected for The Best American Travel Writing 2021. She holds a Ph.D. from New York University and teaches media and film studies at Macquarie University, Sydney.

    “The Wandering is a choose your own adventure novel, and the reader is situated in the shoes of this brown woman from the Global South. She's 27 and in a way, she is stuck with her life. She aspires to be middle class, but her job doesn't allow her to achieve this social mobility. In her condition, she makes a deal with a devil, a reference to the story of Faust and Mephistopheles, finally getting a pair of red shoes that will take her anywhere. But that means she will never be able to find home—that's the curse of the shoes. The title in Indonesian is Gentayanga, which is a word used to describe ghosts who exist in a liminal state. This is a metaphor for people who travel. I came up with the idea for this novel in 2009 when I was an Indonesian international student studying for my PHD in New York. When I went back to Jakarta, I felt like I was not at home, but New York wasn't my home either, so there's a feeling of being neither here nor there. I wanted to capture the sense of being everywhere, which is liberating, but also the sense of displacement.”

    https://intanparamaditha.com
    www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/626055/the-wandering-by-intan-paramaditha/9781787301184

    www.creativeprocess.info
    www.oneplanetpodcast.org
    IG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast

  • Environmentalists, writers, artists, activists, and public policy makers explore the interconnectedness of living beings and ecosystems. They highlight the importance of conservation, promote climate education, advocate for sustainable development, and underscore the vital role of creative and educational communities in driving positive change.

    00:00 "The Conditional" by U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón

    01:27 The Secret Language of Animals: Ingrid Newkirk, President of PETA

    03:03 A Love Letter to the Living World: Carl Safina, Ecologist & Author

    04:11 Exploring the Mysteries of Soil and Coral Reefs: Merlin Sheldrake, Biologist, Author of Entangled Life

    04:47 Exploring Coral Reefs: Richard Vevers, Founder of The Ocean Agency

    05:56 The Importance of Climate Education: Kathleen Rogers, President of EarthDay.org

    07:02 The Timeless Wisdom of Turtles: Sy Montomery, Naturalist & Author

    07:38 Optimism in the Face of Environmental Challenges: Richard Vevers

    08:32 Urban Solutions for a Sustainable Future: Paula Pinho, Director, Just Transition, Consumers, Energy Efficiency & Innovation, European Commission

    08:57 The Circular Economy: Walter Stahel, Founder & Director of the Product-Life Institute

    09:39 The Power of Speaking Out for Sustainability: Paula Pinho

    10:16 Empowering the Next Generation Through Education: Jeffrey Sachs, President of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network

    www.creativeprocess.info
    www.oneplanetpodcast.org
    IG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast

    www.maxrichtermusic.com
    https://studiorichtermahr.com

    Max Richter’s music featured in this episode are “On the Nature of Daylight” from The Blue Notebooks, “Path 19: Yet Frailest” from Sleep.

    Music is courtesy of Max Richter, Universal Music Enterprises, and Mute Song.

  • "I think the reason for success of the novel The Sympathizer was the very unique voice in the book. It's told in first person with this kind of raconteur who's very intelligent. It's satiric. It tackles big issues, and it's very lively and fun at the same time. It's quite and it's also complicated where it's coming from. It's a confession. It's written in theory under duress. It's very hard to replicate because it's sort of very freewheeling, and we didn't want to weigh the show down with just a lot of voiceover, you know, that feeling of a literary adaptation you get where you just have a voiceover quoting the book all the time. So, the first thing we tried to do, well, the first thing we did was get Park Chan-wook involved because he has a very similar visual language. We tried to replicate that voice visually, and we've tried to come up with parallel visual narrative devices that would give that feeling that the book had."

    Don McKellar is a highly accomplished writer, director, and actor. He has written films including Roadkill, Highway 61, Dance Me Outside, The Red Violin, and Blindness. He won the Prix de la Jeunesse at the 1988 Cannes Film Festival for his directorial debut, Last Night, which he also wrote and starred in. He is an eight-time Genie Award nominee and a two-time winner.

    He wrote the book for the acclaimed musical The Drowsy Chaperone, for which he received a Tony Award. Most recently, Don served as writer, executive producer, and co-showrunner on The Sympathizer, a television adaptation of Viet Thanh Nguyen's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of the same name. The series was co-created with Park Chan-wook.

    www.imdb.com/name/nm0001528/mediaviewer/rm2411273728/?ref_=nm_ov_ph
    www.imdb.com/title/tt14404618/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0_tt_8_nm_0_q_the%20sympa

    www.creativeprocess.info
    www.oneplanetpodcast.org
    IG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast

    Photo courtesy of HBO

  • What are the stories we tell ourselves to justify our actions in times of war? How can the arts convey complexity and foster understanding?

    Don McKellar is a highly accomplished writer, director, and actor. He has written films including Roadkill, Highway 61, Dance Me Outside, The Red Violin, and Blindness. He won the Prix de la Jeunesse at the 1988 Cannes Film Festival for his directorial debut, Last Night, which he also wrote and starred in. He is an eight-time Genie Award nominee and a two-time winner.

    He wrote the book for the acclaimed musical The Drowsy Chaperone, for which he received a Tony Award. Most recently, Don served as writer, executive producer, and co-showrunner on The Sympathizer, a television adaptation of Viet Thanh Nguyen's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of the same name. The series was co-created with Park Chan-wook."I think the reason for success of the novel The Sympathizer was the very unique voice in the book. It's told in first person with this kind of raconteur who's very intelligent. It's satiric. It tackles big issues, and it's very lively and fun at the same time. It's quite and it's also complicated where it's coming from. It's a confession. It's written in theory under duress. It's very hard to replicate because it's sort of very freewheeling, and we didn't want to weigh the show down with just a lot of voiceover, you know, that feeling of a literary adaptation you get where you just have a voiceover quoting the book all the time. So, the first thing we tried to do, well, the first thing we did was get Park Chan-wook involved because he has a very similar visual language. We tried to replicate that voice visually, and we've tried to come up with parallel visual narrative devices that would give that feeling that the book had."

    www.imdb.com/name/nm0001528/mediaviewer/rm2411273728/?ref_=nm_ov_ph
    www.imdb.com/title/tt14404618/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0_tt_8_nm_0_q_the%20sympa
    www.creativeprocess.info
    www.oneplanetpodcast.org
    IG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast

    Photos courtesy of HBO
    Susan Downey, Robert Downey Jr., Don McKellar
    Robert Downey Jr. in The Sympathizer, photo by Beth Dubber/HBO
    Hoa Xuande in The Sympathizer, photo by Hopper Stone/HBO

  • "You can't choose your family. You know, I hear that all the time. I'm always amazed when I see families that stick together and wind up being friends at the second, third, fourth decades of their lives. I didn't grow up with that. I didn't see that. I've only seen it as an adult, and it's remarkable when I see it. So I think viewers will relate to this nature versus nurture versus DNA, raising all the questions of psychological and biological inheritance."

    "Philipp Meyer wrote a very, very beautiful book and it was the reason that made me want to do it. Jeff Daniels gave me the book. He'd been having trouble getting it made, getting a script that he liked. And he said to me, "Will you read this and just remind me what I love about it? And if you feel that way?" And I read it very quickly and felt that it was terrific. And there were a lot of possibilities in making it. So just kudos to Philipp Meyer. He wrote a beautiful novel. And if anybody's listening is looking for a great novel to read, there's that and there's Adam Rapp's novel Wolf at the Table."

    Dan Futterman is creator, executive producer, and writer of Amazon Prime's American Rust, the acclaimed crime drama starring Jeff Daniels, Maura Tierney, and David Alvarez. Previously, Dan has written screenplays for Capote, Foxcatcher, In Treatment, and Gracepoint. He served as executive producer on The Looming Tower. Dan is also an actor, director, and two-time Oscar nominee.

    Adam Rapp is the executive producer and writer of American Rust. He has written plays, films, and series, including Red Light Winter, The Sound Inside, In Treatment, Blackbird, The Looming Tower, and Dexter: New Blood. His latest novel is Wolf at the Table. He recently wrote the book for the new Broadway musical, The Outsiders. 

    www.imdb.com/name/nm0001246
    www.imdb.com/name/nm1452688/?ref_=fn_al_nm_1
    www.imdb.com/title/tt1532495/
    https://outsidersmusical.com/
    www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/adam-rapp/wolf-at-the-table/9780316434164/?lens=little-brown

    www.creativeprocess.info
    www.oneplanetpodcast.org
    IG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast

  • What role do the families we’re born into or the traumas we experience shape the people we become? Do good deeds offset bad deeds? How can the arts increase our capacity for empathy, understanding, and kindness?

    Dan Futterman is creator, executive producer, and writer of Amazon Prime's American Rust, the acclaimed crime drama starring Jeff Daniels, Maura Tierney, and David Alvarez. Previously, Dan has written screenplays for Capote, Foxcatcher, In Treatment, and Gracepoint. He served as executive producer on The Looming Tower. Dan is also an actor, director, and two-time Oscar nominee.

    Adam Rapp is the executive producer and writer of American Rust. He has written plays, films, and series, including Red Light Winter, The Sound Inside, In Treatment, Blackbird, The Looming Tower, and Dexter: New Blood. His latest novel is Wolf at the Table. He recently wrote the book for the new Broadway musical, The Outsiders.

    "You can't choose your family. You know, I hear that all the time. I'm always amazed when I see families that stick together and wind up being friends at the second, third, fourth decades of their lives. I didn't grow up with that. I didn't see that. I've only seen it as an adult, and it's remarkable when I see it. So I think viewers will relate to this nature versus nurture versus DNA, raising all the questions of psychological and biological inheritance."

    "Philipp Meyer wrote a very, very beautiful book and it was the reason that made me want to do it. Jeff Daniels gave me the book. He'd been having trouble getting it made, getting a script that he liked. And he said to me, "Will you read this and just remind me what I love about it? And if you feel that way?" And I read it very quickly and felt that it was terrific. And there were a lot of possibilities in making it. So just kudos to Philipp Meyer. He wrote a beautiful novel. And if anybody's listening is looking for a great novel to read, there's that and there's Adam Rapp's novel Wolf at the Table." 

    www.imdb.com/name/nm0001246
    www.imdb.com/name/nm1452688/?ref_=fn_al_nm_1
    www.imdb.com/title/tt1532495/
    https://outsidersmusical.com/
    www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/adam-rapp/wolf-at-the-table/9780316434164/?lens=little-brown

    www.creativeprocess.info
    www.oneplanetpodcast.org
    IG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast

  • "All creative writing is that act of reaching for the pieces to put it back together again. And with the memoir, the essay, it's human memory. Your memory for your own existence. With fiction, it’s a dream world where you're reaching for the shards. And I find it's so moving because that's what it feels like when I feel that I might be writing well. It's just uncovering and uncovering.
    Writing is a free fall into the writer's psyche, and if you want some clarity on what you believe, just write something sincere and emotionally naked and read it back to yourself, and you'll see a lot of what you believe, what you think, what you fear, regret, and desire, etc." 

    Andre Dubus III’s nine books include the New York Times’ bestsellers House of Sand and Fog, The Garden of Last Days, and his memoir, Townie. His work has been included in The Best American Essays and The Best Spiritual Writing anthologies. His novel, House of Sand and Fog was a finalist for the National Book Award and was made into an Academy Award-nominated film starring Ben Kingsley and Jennifer Connelly. His most recent books are the novel, Such Kindness and a collection of personal essays, Ghost Dogs: On Killers and Kin.
    Dubus has been a finalist for the National Book Award, and has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, The National Magazine Award for Fiction, two Pushcart Prizes, and is a recipient of an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature. His books are published in over twenty-five languages, and he teaches at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. 

    www.andredubus.com
    www.andredubus.com/ghost-dogs
    www.andredubus.com/house-of-sand-and-fog
    www.andredubus.com/such-kindness

    www.creativeprocess.info
    www.oneplanetpodcast.org
    IG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast

  • What can reading teach us about loss, healing, and survival? How can we transform anger into empathy? What can we learn from the creative act about turning personal setbacks into opportunities for self-discovery and growth?

    Andre Dubus III’s nine books include the New York Times’ bestsellers House of Sand and Fog, The Garden of Last Days, and his memoir, Townie. His work has been included in The Best American Essays and The Best Spiritual Writing anthologies. His novel, House of Sand and Fog was a finalist for the National Book Award and was made into an Academy Award-nominated film starring Ben Kingsley and Jennifer Connelly. His most recent books are the novel, Such Kindness and a collection of personal essays, Ghost Dogs: On Killers and Kin.
    Dubus has been a finalist for the National Book Award, and has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, The National Magazine Award for Fiction, two Pushcart Prizes, and is a recipient of an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature. His books are published in over twenty-five languages, and he teaches at the University of Massachusetts Lowell.

    "All creative writing is that act of reaching for the pieces to put it back together again. And with the memoir, the essay, it's human memory. Your memory for your own existence. With fiction, it’s a dream world where you're reaching for the shards. And I find it's so moving because that's what it feels like when I feel that I might be writing well. It's just uncovering and uncovering.
    Writing is a free fall into the writer's psyche, and if you want some clarity on what you believe, just write something sincere and emotionally naked and read it back to yourself, and you'll see a lot of what you believe, what you think, what you fear, regret, and desire, etc." 

    www.andredubus.com
    www.andredubus.com/ghost-dogs
    www.andredubus.com/house-of-sand-and-fog
    www.andredubus.com/such-kindness

    www.creativeprocess.info
    www.oneplanetpodcast.org
    IG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast

  • The Making of Moon Man
    “So, as we started talking and going through what this could look like. I run a creator-owned superhero universe at Image Comics called the Massive-Verse, which is spearheaded by the main book I write called Radiant Black. I like to describe it as it's like Power Rangers with adult problems. It's very contemporary kind of reimaginings of superhero storytelling for the 2020s. So in that context, talking about what any type of new superhero and, in this case, what a new black superhero in 2024 could look like, what the threats would be, what the world might look like if it's maybe not even five minutes in the future. I would argue it's like two and a half minutes in the future. And then what kind of really complex, emotionally layered journey we could put this character through?”

    Kyle Higgins is an Eisner award-nominated #1 New York Times best-selling comic book author and award-winning filmmaker known for his work on DC Comics’ Batman titles as well as his critically-acclaimed reinventions of Mighty Morphin Power Rangers for Boom! Studios/Hasbro, Ultraman for Marvel Comics, and his creator-owned series Radiant Black, NO/ONE and Deep Cuts for Image Comics. Kyle is the founder and creative director of Black Market Narrative and The Massive-Verse.

    Karina Manashil is the President of MAD SOLAR. After graduating from Chapman University with a BFA in Film Production, she began her career in the mailroom at WME where she became a Talent Agent. In 2020, she partnered with Scott Mescudi and Dennis Cummings to found MAD SOLAR. Its first release was the documentary “A Man Named Scott” (Amazon), and she then went on to Executive Produce Ti West trilogy “X,” “Pearl” and “MaXXXine” (A24). Manashil received an Emmy nomination as an Executive Producer on the Netflix animated event “Entergalactic." She also produced the Mescudi/Kyle Higgins comic book “Moon Man” which launched through Image Comics. She is next producing the upcoming Mescudi/Sam Levinson/The Lucas Bros film “HELL NAW” (Sony) and the animated feature “Slime” from auteur animator Jeron Braxton.

    moonmancomics.com
    https://imagecomics.com
    https://www.imdb.com/name/nm3556462/?ref_=fn_al_nm_1
    www.creativeprocess.info
    www.oneplanetpodcast.org
    IG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast

    Audio of Scott Mescudi courtesy of Mad Solar and Moon Man Comic Book Release and Revenge Of (Eagle Rock, CA, Jan 31, 2024)