The Creative Process · Arts, Culture & Society: Books, Film, Music, TV, Art, Writing, Creativity, Education, Environment, Theatre, Dance, LGBTQ, Climate Change, Social Justice, Spirituality, Feminism, Tech, Sustainability

“We become the stories we tell ourselves…I started writing around the time I learned English because we moved to the States soon after my fourth birthday, and so I was here for kindergarten into elementary school. I grasped this new language just as I was learning how to also put things onto the page. Those two things really happened at the same time for me. I entered this world where I felt very different and very other, for all intents and purposes I was set to be raised in Kuwait. And then that of course got turned upside down after the invasion by Saddam. I think that so much of my trying to make sense of the world had to do with the displacement, exile and these experiences that my parents had experienced but then that I had as well as we were fleeing the war. It’s hard to know because I think that language was being formed in my brain at the same time that these things were happening.”Hala Alyan is the author of the novel Salt Houses, winner of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and the Arab American Book Award and a finalist for the Chautauqua Prize, as well as the forthcoming novel The Arsonists’ City, and four award-winning collections of poetry, most recently The Twenty-Ninth Year. Her work has been published by the New Yorker, the Academy of American Poets, Lit Hub, The New York Times Book Review, and Guernica. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband, where she works as a clinical psychologist.· halaalyan.com · www.creativeprocess.info

Hala Alyan is the author of the novel Salt Houses, winner of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and the Arab American Book Award and a finalist for the Chautauqua Prize, as well as the forthcoming novel The Arsonists’ City, and four award-winning collections of poetry, most recently The Twenty-Ninth Year. Her work has been published by the New Yorker, the Academy of American Poets, Lit Hub, The New York Times Book Review, and Guernica. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband, where she works as a clinical psychologist.· halaalyan.com · www.creativeprocess.info

James Fallows has been a national correspondent for The Atlantic for more than thirty-five years, reporting from China, Japan, Southeast Asia, Europe, and across the United States. Winner of the National Book Award and National Magazine Award, he’s the author of twelve books and his work has appeared in numerous publications and on public-radio. For two years he was President Jimmy Carter’s chief speechwriter.Deborah Fallows is a linguist and writer. The author of Dreaming in Chinese and A Mother's Work, she has written for The Atlantic, National Geographic, and The New York Times, among others and has worked at the Pew Research Center, Oxygen Media, and Georgetown University.Following the success of their NYTimes bestselling book Our Towns and HBO documentary based on their reporting on around 50 towns around the country, they formed the Our Towns Civic Foundation to promote reporting from under-served areas across the US, connect innovators and give Americans a fuller and more realistic picture of their country’s challenges and opportunities.Our Towns (HBO Movie):  https://www.hbo.com/documentaries/our-townsOur Towns (book): https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/550194/our-towns-by-james-fallows-and-deborah-fallows/ Our Towns Civic Foundation: https://www.ourtownsfoundation.org/ Our Towns Civic Foundation is a new non-profit organization that promotes reporting from under-served areas across the United States, to connect innovators dealing with the problems of this era, and gives Americans a fuller and more realistic picture of their countries challenges and opportunities."Deb Fallows, Dreaming in Chinese   https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/dreaming-in-chinese-9780802779144/Deb Fallows, A Mother's Work   https://www.amazon.com/Mothers-Work-Deborah-Fallows/dp/0395362180Jim Fallows, More Like Us  https://www.amazon.com/More-like-Strengths-Traditional-Challenge/dp/B0010HBVYQOther books https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/authors/8383/james-fallows/ Substack: https://fallows.substack.com/Photo © Michael Shay Polara Studio

Artist Donald Sultan rose to prominence in the late 1970s as part of the “New Image” movement. Sultan has challenged the boundaries between painting and sculpture throughout his career. Using industrial materials such as roofing tar, aluminum, linoleum and enamel, Sultan layers, gouges, sands and constructs his paintings—sumptuous, richly textured compositions often made of the same materials as the rooms in which they are displayed. He lives and works in New York City.“I always feel that you can never fail if you don't know what you're doing. The best work is what you do when you don’t know what you’re doing…A lot of the images that have struck me, that I get drawn to, a lot of them were from painting. Some of them were from early movies. Some of them were from places I visited, but mostly gardens or wild gardens that had things in them I’d never seen before, and then learning what that was when I'd been working on it. Generally speaking most of what I do had to do with my feelings about other artists work that I admired. A lot of the industrial materials that are use, floor tiling and things like that came from site specific artists, sculptors, people who built into the buildings, Arte Povera. Using works that were just found, the poor materials, that kind of thing. Tar I kind of got from working in my fathers tire shop with the grinding of the rubber and so on. Things come together and I wasn’t even aware of it until people start asking me about it. I remember telling them about this man, being in black room with all this rubber, smoking Camels. It was a very cool image. I’ll never forget the guy, but when I was doing it myself, that’s not what I was thinking. I was really thinking about the materials I was using and inverting them.”· donaldsultanstudio.com· ryanleegallery.com · www.creativeprocess.info · www.oneplanetpodcast.org

Aaron Dworkin is a multifaceted artist and entrepreneur with passion for diversifying and amplifying the arts. Epitomizing how art, leadership, and diversity all play a vital role in advancing our society, Dwokin founded The Sphinx Organization, a non-profit organization that molds Black and Latinx classical musicians, and he serves on the advisory board for several prestigious arts organizations. Dworkin is an educator of both Arts Leadership and Entrepreneurial Leadership at his alma mater, the University of Michigan. Aaron Dworkin, decorated in awards and accolades, continues to be a force in his community, driving the need for diversity, arts education, and leadership. aarondworkin.com · www.creativeprocess.info

Aaron Dworkin is a multifaceted artist and entrepreneur with passion for diversifying and amplifying the arts. Epitomizing how art, leadership, and diversity all play a vital role in advancing our society, Dwokin founded The Sphinx Organization, a non-profit organization that molds Black and Latinx classical musicians, and he serves on the advisory board for several prestigious arts organizations. Dworkin is an educator of both Arts Leadership and Entrepreneurial Leadership at his alma mater, the University of Michigan. Aaron Dworkin, decorated in awards and accolades, continues to be a force in his community, driving the need for diversity, arts education, and leadership. aarondworkin.com · www.creativeprocess.info

Trish Sie is a multi-talented director whose work spans the realms of music videos, commercials, and short and feature films. After spending a decade as a professional dancer, championship ballroom competitor and choreographer, she built a successful and championed career in filmmaking. The first music video that she produced, “Here it Goes Again” for the band OK Go, won her a Grammy award. Her success expands to the world of films, where she has directed the likes of PItch Perfect 3 and Step Up: All In, using her dance and choreography experience to make magic happen on camera. Along with the Grammy, Trish has won a number of awards such as the Youtube award for most creative video, the smithsonian ingenuity award, and multiple accolades for best short film at various film festivals. www.bigbadtrish.com · www.creativeprocess.info

Trish Sie is a multi-talented director whose work spans the realms of music videos, commercials, and short and feature films. After spending a decade as a professional dancer, championship ballroom competitor and choreographer, she built a successful and championed career in filmmaking. The first music video that she produced, “Here it Goes Again” for the band OK Go, won her a Grammy award. Her success expands to the world of films, where she has directed the likes of PItch Perfect 3 and Step Up: All In, using her dance and choreography experience to make magic happen on camera. Along with the Grammy, Trish has won a number of awards such as the Youtube award for most creative video, the smithsonian ingenuity award, and multiple accolades for best short film at various film festivals. www.bigbadtrish.com · www.creativeprocess.info

“These were my bedtime stories stories. I remember listening to them before I could speak. I had delayed speech, and I had quite a bit of trouble with speaking at all and with learning and also just simply getting into school. I think I must have been five before I was uttering some of my first words and trying to articulate.Simple communication was very difficult for me and my family, especially in a family where we were speaking several languages. They hoped to instill English. It’s the language of survival. Once they immigrated to the States. And my grandmother, my father’s mother, who raised me was speaking Japanese, that was her private language. It was a remnant of the past and sort of the past of the occupation with Korea being occupied by Japan. My mother and father spoke in Korean, and this was a much more intimate language that I wanted to have access to but would also keep me away from the English that they hoped me to get. And all of this was compounded by my difficulty with speech. So there was a lot of frustration and fear in my relationship to language, and the relationship these languages had to each other, that was something I felt very sensitive to since I was young. Since before I could speak.”E. J. Koh is the author of the memoir The Magical Language of Others, winner of the Washington State Book Award and the 2021 Pacific Northwest Book Award. For her poetry collection A Lesser Love she received the Pleiades Press Editors Prize. She is the co-translator of Yi Won’s The World’s Lightest Motorcycle, forthcoming from Zephyr Press. Her poems, translations, and stories have appeared in Boston Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, and World Literature Today, among others. She earned her MFA in Literary Translation and Creative Writing from Columbia University, and is completing the PhD program at the University of Washington in Seattle. She is a recipient of MacDowell and Kundiman fellowships.IG @thisisejkoh · www.instagram.com/p/CRB8O69BWQJ/ · www.creativeprocess.info

E. J. Koh is the author of the memoir The Magical Language of Others, winner of the Washington State Book Award and the 2021 Pacific Northwest Book Award. For her poetry collection A Lesser Love she received the Pleiades Press Editors Prize. She is the co-translator of Yi Won’s The World’s Lightest Motorcycle, forthcoming from Zephyr Press. Her poems, translations, and stories have appeared in Boston Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, and World Literature Today, among others. She earned her MFA in Literary Translation and Creative Writing from Columbia University, and is completing the PhD program at the University of Washington in Seattle. She is a recipient of MacDowell and Kundiman fellowships.IG @thisisejkoh · www.instagram.com/p/CRB8O69BWQJ/ · www.creativeprocess.info