Episodes
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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, Science and 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 book The 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 the Daily 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 ([email protected]) 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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