Books & Writers · The Creative Process: Novelists, Screenwriters, Playwrights, Poets, Non-fiction Writers & Journalists Talk Writing, Life & Creativity

"I was very inspired to know that humans are not the be-all and end-all. We're just one state. But you could be in this state of consciousness, this kind of godly state, even a demonic state, but also the fact that all living creatures had souls and were affected by karma. And this is something we tend to forget, especially because animals are so tasty and therefore we have to justify slaughtering them on such a mass scale. So we want to believe that they don't count. Or they are somehow lesser souls than us. The cat doesn't believe that it's a pet. The cat believes they are the center of the universe. I'm sure the cockroach believes that they are the center of the universe, just as we do. And back to the thing you said: how our bodies inform our view. I think every living creature suffers and experiences joy. And therefore it's convenient for us to say that certain things don't have souls...whatever the soul is."What happens when we die? What happens to our memories and consciousness when our bodies cease to be?  In the end, is it the things we did and the people we loved that give our lives meaning?Shehan Karunatilaka is the multi-award winning author. He is known for his novels dealing with the history, politics, and folklore of his home country of Sri Lanka. He won the Commonwealth Book Prize and the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature for his debut novel, Chinaman: The Legend of Pradeep Mathew, and the Booker Prize 2022 for his second novel, The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida. In addition to novels, he has written rock songs, screenplays and travel stories. Born in Colombo, he studied in New Zealand and has lived and worked in London, Amsterdam, and Singapore.www.shehanwriter.comhttps://wwnorton.com/books/9781324064824www.creativeprocess.info www.oneplanetpodcast.orgIG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast

Shehan Karunatilaka, multi-award winning author, discusses the afterlife and meaning of life. He explores the motivations behind his book 'The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida' and the importance of addressing Sri Lanka's civil war. The podcast also delves into uncovering the true nature of life, exploring the identity of the complex character Maali Almeida, and the role of novelists in creating whole worlds and pursuing new ideas. It ends by discussing AI-generated novels, reading for young people, and hope for a better future.

In this episode of the Speaking Out of Place podcast, Professor David Palumbo-Liu and Azeezah Kanji talk with Anthony Arnove and Haley Pessin about their new volume Voices of a People’s History of the United States in the 21st Century: Documents of Hope and Resistance.This book is not only a beautiful archive of people's struggles in the 21st century, but also a powerful tribute to and continuation of the work of professor and radical historian Howard Zinn. We speak with Anthony and Haley about the histories of struggles and the possibilities for building a more beautiful future.Anthony Arnove is the editor of several books, including, with Howard Zinn, Voices of a People’s History of the United States and Terrorism and War. He wrote the introduction for the thirty-fifth anniversary edition of Zinn’s classic book, A People’s History of the United States.  Arnove cofounded the nonprofit education and arts organization Voices of a People’s History of the United States, wrote, directed, and produced the documentary The People Speak, and has directed stage and television versions of The People Speak in Dublin with Stephen Rea, in London with Colin Firth, and across the United States with various groups including Lincoln Center, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and the Sundance Film Festival. He produced the Academy Award-nominated documentary Dirty Wars. Arnove is on the editorial boards of Haymarket Books and Tempestmag.org and is the director of Roam Agency, where he represents authors including Arundhati Roy and Noam Chomsky. He lives in Hopewell, New Jersey.Haley Pessin is a socialist activist living  in Queens, New York. They have participated in struggles against police brutality and mass incarceration, in solidarity with Palestine, in defense of abortion rights and reproductive justice, and as a legal service worker and union delegate for 119SEIU (Service Employees International Union). Pessin has spoken at conferences in Switzerland, Australia, Ireland, Quebec, and throughout the United States on the struggle for Black liberation. Their writing has appeared in New Politics and at Tempestmag.org, where they currently serve on the editorial board."We have to create alternative institutions to understand history. And to have conversations about how we can intervene because these conversations are increasingly being criminalized, and librarians are being fired and punished. Teachers are also being fired. Whole colleges are being taken over and certain courses are being labeled as not credit-worthy and being canceled. And while conversations around critical race theory and other topics are being declared illegal, there's a long history of book banning in this country. There's a long history of criminalizing dissent in this country, but I do think we all have to recognize that we're in a much more dangerous moment right now, where a new form of McCarthyism is emboldened and we have to speak out against that."https://sevenstories.com/books/4479-voices-of-a-people-s-history-of-the-united-states-in-the-21st-centurywww.palumbo-liu.com https://speakingoutofplace.comhttps://twitter.com/palumboliu?s=20

"I remember when I picked up a book about how farmed animals were treated and understood for the first time how much animals suffered to put food on my plate. I was 16 years old. As I learned what animals went through for our food, clothes, comfort, and entertainment, I realized there was a lot I could do, even as a kid, to make the world a better place for them. And that mattered because their existence made the world a better place for me too."How can we take inspiration from our love for animals to protect wildlife and change the world? How can we take action and start making changes in our lives? What if we measured success based on happiness and on the health of communities? Stephanie Feldstein leads the Center for Biological Diversity's work to highlight and address threats to endangered species and wild places from runaway human population growth and overconsumption. Previously Stephanie worked for Change.org, where she helped hundreds of people start and win online campaigns to protect wildlife. She has years of experience in organizing, outreach and communications. She is the author of The Animal Lover’s Guide to Changing the World, and the series aimed at young adults Take Action: Save Life on Earth.https://biologicaldiversity.org/about/staff/#sfeldstein https://biologicaldiversity.org www.abebooks.com/9781250153258/Animal-Lovers-Guide-Changing-World-1250153255/plp https://cherrylakepublishing.com/series/445-take-action-save-life-on-earth https://takeextinctionoffyourplate.com/ https://endangeredspeciescondoms.com/www.creativeprocess.infowww.oneplanetpodcast.orgIG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast

How can we take inspiration from our love for animals to protect wildlife and change the world? How can we take action and start making changes in our lives? What if we measured success based on happiness and on the health of communities? Stephanie Feldstein leads the Center for Biological Diversity's work to highlight and address threats to endangered species and wild places from runaway human population growth and overconsumption. Previously Stephanie worked for Change.org, where she helped hundreds of people start and win online campaigns to protect wildlife. She has years of experience in organizing, outreach and communications. She is the author of The Animal Lover’s Guide to Changing the World, and the series aimed at young adults Take Action: Save Life on Earth."I remember when I picked up a book about how farmed animals were treated and understood for the first time how much animals suffered to put food on my plate. I was 16 years old. As I learned what animals went through for our food, clothes, comfort, and entertainment, I realized there was a lot I could do, even as a kid, to make the world a better place for them. And that mattered because their existence made the world a better place for me too."https://biologicaldiversity.org/about/staff/#sfeldstein https://biologicaldiversity.org www.abebooks.com/9781250153258/Animal-Lovers-Guide-Changing-World-1250153255/plp https://cherrylakepublishing.com/series/445-take-action-save-life-on-earth https://takeextinctionoffyourplate.com/ https://endangeredspeciescondoms.com/www.creativeprocess.infowww.oneplanetpodcast.orgIG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast

In this episode of the Speaking Out of Place podcast, Professor David Palumbo-Liu and Azeezah Kanji interview renown scholar, activist, and writer Silvia Federici about her powerful and inspiring collection of essays, Re-enchanting the World: Feminism and the Politics of the Commons. These essays, written over the span of several decades, display her abilities to diagnose and indeed predict the most important issues facing us today.Silvia Federici is a scholar, teacher, and feminist activist based in New York. She is a professor emerita and teaching fellow at Hofstra University in New York State, where she was a social science professor. She also taught at the University of Port Harcourt in Nigeria. In 1972, she co-founded the International Feminist Collective. In 1995, in the course of the campaign to demand the liberation of Mumia Abu-Jamal, she cofounded the Radical Philosophy Association (RPA) anti-death penalty project, an organization intended to help educators become a driving force towards its abolition. For several decades, Federici has been working in a variety of projects with feminist organizations across the world like Women in Nigeria (WIN), Ni Una Menos, the Argentinian feminist organization; she alsohas been organizing a project with feminist collectives in Spain to reconstruct the history of the women who were persecuted as witches in early modern Europe, and raise consciousness about the contemporary witch-hunts that are taking place across the world.Federici is considered one of the leading feminist theoreticians in Marxist feminist theory, women’s history, political philosophy, and the history and theory of the commons. Her most famous book, Caliban and the Witch, has been translated in more than 20 foreign languages, and adopted in courses across the U.S. and many other countries. Often described as a counterpoint to Marx’s and Foucault’s account of “primitive accumulation,” Caliban reconstructs the history of capitalism, highlighting the continuity between the capitalist subjugation of women, the slave trade, and the colonization of the Americas. It has been described as the first history of capitalism with women at the center."To me, the struggle should not ever be purely an oppositional action but should actually be something constructive. Struggle is also a moment in which you raise your consciousness. You take your consciousness, you express a vision of the world that you want to construct what is being denied. The struggle is at the same time negation and also affirmation of the possibility of another world, another vision. And because of it, the struggle is also transformative. It's not only a wall against your enemies. It is also reshaping the relationship with other people. It's a moment of collective reconstruction. It's a moment of collective solidarity. This, to me, has become a very important element. This is what I've learned from the women's movement. That there's so much of our comfort, when we left the male-dominated organization, had to do not only with the program but also the forms of organizing, the kind of relation that you have with people. It became very, very important to think of the struggle as something much different and far more creative, far more constructive, and this vision of the struggle is also what should attract people to look at the struggle as something in which they want to be, not as another burden, not as another piece of work added to the day-to-day misery and the day in day workload. But actually, something that you look forward to. Going to a meeting has to be something that you look forward to as you go to a party, in the sense that here are the people that you feel connected with. You're building something. You are discovering something."www.pmpress.org/index.php?l=product_detail&p=961www.palumbo-liu.com https://speakingoutofplace.comhttps://twitter.com/palumboliu?s=20

"Advocacy starts with your story, my story, and everyone else's stories. They add up to the big story that we are telling ourselves about the Earth. Over time, our collective stories will guide us to sustainable prosperity and well-being, or to total destruction. But let's not get ahead of ourselves. And the reason I bring up stories so early in the book is because when you're actually doing lobbying, it's the stories that the decision-makers remember. So legislators have said that to me when 'I go to vote on an issue, it's the stories I remember.' It's not the data. It's not the charts and graphs. Those are important, but it's the stories that they remember and that's how they vote on these issues."How do we connect our personal stories to the big story about the environment? How can we motivate corporations and government to not just aim for profit, but include reporting on their environmental risks and impacts in their balance sheets?Sue Inches is an advocate, author, and teacher. She has worked in public policy for over 25 years, serving as the Deputy Director of the State Planning Office, and as a Director at the Maine Department of Marine Resources. She is author of Advocating for the Environment: How to Gather Your Power and Take Action, and teaches college and high school workshops on same. Her consulting work focuses on strategic planning, program development, and environmental campaigns.https://sueinches.comwww.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/670609/advocating-for-the-environment-by-susan-b-incheswww.creativeprocess.infowww.oneplanetpodcast.orgIG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast

How do we connect our personal stories to the big story about the environment? How can we motivate corporations and government to not just aim for profit, but include reporting on their environmental risks and impacts in their balance sheets?Sue Inches is an advocate, author, and teacher. She has worked in public policy for over 25 years, serving as the Deputy Director of the State Planning Office, and as a Director at the Maine Department of Marine Resources. She is author of Advocating for the Environment: How to Gather Your Power and Take Action, and teaches college and high school workshops on same. Her consulting work focuses on strategic planning, program development, and environmental campaigns."Advocacy starts with your story, my story, and everyone else's stories. They add up to the big story that we are telling ourselves about the Earth. Over time, our collective stories will guide us to sustainable prosperity and well-being, or to total destruction. But let's not get ahead of ourselves. And the reason I bring up stories so early in the book is because when you're actually doing lobbying, it's the stories that the decision-makers remember. So legislators have said that to me when 'I go to vote on an issue, it's the stories I remember.' It's not the data. It's not the charts and graphs. Those are important, but it's the stories that they remember and that's how they vote on these issues."https://sueinches.comwww.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/670609/advocating-for-the-environment-by-susan-b-incheswww.creativeprocess.infowww.oneplanetpodcast.orgIG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast

"I was really familiar with Arnold through bodybuilding. I became a weight trainer myself after meeting him at the 1981 Mr. Olympia contest, but I largely knew him through his movies like everyone else.And when you see him in the movies, he's famous for these very short one-liners that make it seem as if he is nonverbal, that he's not particularly intelligent. You don't get his humor. The first time I went to Arnold's house, I saw that this man is the greatest storyteller, the greatest entertainer ever.He is funny, he is witty, he is quick. He can tell a story like no one else, and not just tell it, he would act it out. He would get up and stomp around and make noises with his mouth. He told me a simple story about a woman in the gym who was not working out, who was just sitting on a bench and talking on the phone to her friend and eating a bag of potato chips. And he was able to replicate the sound of eating potato chips just with his mouth. He is underappreciated. I guess that's what it is. And as I started going through his archive, I saw that there are certain photographs that show him and his facial expressions like none other. And those photographs are always when he is interacting with children or interacting with animals and all pretense drops away. His face just lights up. It is real, it is genuine, it is open. And that's something that I tried to include as much as possible, particularly in the small book that is more personal, to show that human, affectionate, warm side of Arnold."“Why I was different from all the other boys in my town I cannot tell you. I was simply born with the gift of vision.” – ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGERIs there any better example of the American Dream than Arnold Schwarzenegger? What does it take to make your vision a reality? How do you cultivate iron focus to overcome any obstacle and realize your dreams?On the publication of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s limited edition two-volume book published by TASCHEN, we sat down with Senior Editor and Writer Dian Hansen to discuss Schwarzenegger’s life, accomplishments, and history of unforgettable performances. The book has been a decade-long collaborative process and along with portraits by leading photographers Richard Avedon, Annie Leibovitz, Robert Mapplethorpe, Herb Ritts, Francesco Scavullo, and Andy Warhol, it is also filled with photos from Arnold’s private archive and exclusive interviews. Dian’s other works include The Art of Pin-up, Masterpieces of Fantasy Art, and The Fantastic Worlds of Frank Frazetta.www.taschen.com/en/limited-editions/film/03105/arnold-collector-s-editionwww.schwarzenegger.comwww.creativeprocess.infowww.oneplanetpodcast.orgIG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcastImage courtesy of Taschen. Photo credit: ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER IN VENICE, CALIFORNIA. PHOTO BY ALBERT BUSEK, 1980

“Why I was different from all the other boys in my town I cannot tell you. I was simply born with the gift of vision.” – ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGERIs there any better example of the American Dream than Arnold Schwarzenegger? What does it take to make your vision a reality? How do you cultivate iron focus to overcome any obstacle and realize your dreams?On the publication of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s limited edition two-volume book published by TASCHEN, we sat down with Senior Editor and Writer Dian Hansen to discuss Schwarzenegger’s life, accomplishments, and history of unforgettable performances. The book has been a decade-long collaborative process and along with portraits by leading photographers Richard Avedon, Annie Leibovitz, Robert Mapplethorpe, Herb Ritts, Francesco Scavullo, and Andy Warhol, it is also filled with photos from Arnold’s private archive and exclusive interviews. Dian’s other works include The Art of Pin-up, Masterpieces of Fantasy Art, and The Fantastic Worlds of Frank Frazetta."I was really familiar with Arnold through bodybuilding. I became a weight trainer myself after meeting him at the 1981 Mr. Olympia contest, but I largely knew him through his movies like everyone else.And when you see him in the movies, he's famous for these very short one-liners that make it seem as if he is nonverbal, that he's not particularly intelligent. You don't get his humor. The first time I went to Arnold's house, I saw that this man is the greatest storyteller, the greatest entertainer ever.He is funny, he is witty, he is quick. He can tell a story like no one else, and not just tell it, he would act it out. He would get up and stomp around and make noises with his mouth. He told me a simple story about a woman in the gym who was not working out, who was just sitting on a bench and talking on the phone to her friend and eating a bag of potato chips. And he was able to replicate the sound of eating potato chips just with his mouth. He is underappreciated. I guess that's what it is. And as I started going through his archive, I saw that there are certain photographs that show him and his facial expressions like none other. And those photographs are always when he is interacting with children or interacting with animals and all pretense drops away. His face just lights up. It is real, it is genuine, it is open. And that's something that I tried to include as much as possible, particularly in the small book that is more personal, to show that human, affectionate, warm side of Arnold."www.taschen.com/en/limited-editions/film/03105/arnold-collector-s-editionwww.schwarzenegger.comwww.creativeprocess.infowww.oneplanetpodcast.orgIG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcastImages courtesy of Taschen. Photo credits: CoverArnold Schwarzenegger for the film End of Days. Sante D'Orazio, 1999Governor Schwarzenegger with the Lincoln Memorial · Photo by Peter Grigsby, 2009 Arnold Schwarzenegger and Lulu at his Los Angeles home · Photo by Tracy Nguyen, 2021