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

"The linguists and the cognitive scientists have established that as you're exposed to language from childhood and over your lifetime, it forms literal circuits in your brain. They call them frames. So in order to communicate successfully with people, the best way is to use language that activates existing frames. So for example, when I say we need to get to net zero by 2050, nobody knows what I'm talking about. There's no existing circuitry to process that language. What the hell is net zero? Is that less than zero? Now, if I say we have to stop pollution because pollution is heating the planet, we've formed a blanket of pollution around the earth that is trapping heat that used to go back out to space. And then everybody knows what I'm talking about because they know what pollution is. That's an existing mental frame. And by the way, no one will defend pollution. You won't find anyone that thinks pollution is a good thing. So it's a universally negative frame in all languages. And then when I say it's like a blanket around the earth, there's another existing mental frame. Everybody knows what a blanket is and how it works. It traps your body heat so you don't get cold. So that's what we're doing to the earth. And yes, all that trapped heat energy on Earth has to go somewhere. So it goes to create stronger storms and droughts and floods and melts the ice."How can we effectively communicate that we're moving beyond climate change to a state of climate crisis? The trapped heat energy on Earth is equal to a million Atomic bombs going off every single day. Today we talk to someone who's been mobilizing the public mind for over 50 years. David Fenton, named “one of the 100 most influential PR people” by PR Week and “the Robin Hood of public relations” by The National Journal, founded Fenton in 1982 to create communications campaigns for the environment, public health, and human rights. For more than five decades he has pioneered the use of PR, social media, and advertising techniques for social change. Fenton started his career as a photojournalist in the late 1960s – his book Shots: An American Photographer’s Journal was published in 2005. He was formerly director of public relations at Rolling Stone magazine and co-producer of the No-Nukes concerts in 1979 at Madison Square Garden with Bruce Springsteen, Bonnie Raitt, James Taylor, Jackson Browne, and other artists. He has also helped create JStreet, Climate Nexus, the Death Penalty Information Center, and Families for a Future. He sold Fenton a few years ago to work on climate change full time. He is the author of The Activist’s Media Handbook: Lessons From 50 Years as a Progressive Agitator.https://davidfentonactivist.comwww.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Activists-Media-Handbook/David-Fenton/9781647228668https://fenton.comX / twitter @dfentonIG @dfenton1 facebook.com/davidfentonactivistwww.creativeprocess.info www.oneplanetpodcast.orgIG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcastAll photographs © 1968-2022 David Fenton

How can we effectively communicate that we're moving beyond climate change to a state of climate crisis? The trapped heat energy on Earth is equal to a million Atomic bombs going off every single day. Today we talk to someone who's been mobilizing the public mind for over 50 years. David Fenton, named “one of the 100 most influential PR people” by PR Week and “the Robin Hood of public relations” by The National Journal, founded Fenton in 1982 to create communications campaigns for the environment, public health, and human rights. For more than five decades he has pioneered the use of PR, social media, and advertising techniques for social change. Fenton started his career as a photojournalist in the late 1960s – his book Shots: An American Photographer’s Journal was published in 2005. He was formerly director of public relations at Rolling Stone magazine and co-producer of the No-Nukes concerts in 1979 at Madison Square Garden with Bruce Springsteen, Bonnie Raitt, James Taylor, Jackson Browne, and other artists. He has also helped create JStreet, Climate Nexus, the Death Penalty Information Center, and Families for a Future. He sold Fenton a few years ago to work on climate change full time. He is the author of The Activist’s Media Handbook: Lessons From 50 Years as a Progressive Agitator."The linguists and the cognitive scientists have established that as you're exposed to language from childhood and over your lifetime, it forms literal circuits in your brain. They call them frames. So in order to communicate successfully with people, the best way is to use language that activates existing frames. So for example, when I say we need to get to net zero by 2050, nobody knows what I'm talking about. There's no existing circuitry to process that language. What the hell is net zero? Is that less than zero? Now, if I say we have to stop pollution because pollution is heating the planet, we've formed a blanket of pollution around the earth that is trapping heat that used to go back out to space. And then everybody knows what I'm talking about because they know what pollution is. That's an existing mental frame. And by the way, no one will defend pollution. You won't find anyone that thinks pollution is a good thing. So it's a universally negative frame in all languages. And then when I say it's like a blanket around the earth, there's another existing mental frame. Everybody knows what a blanket is and how it works. It traps your body heat so you don't get cold. So that's what we're doing to the earth. And yes, all that trapped heat energy on Earth has to go somewhere. So it goes to create stronger storms and droughts and floods and melts the ice."https://davidfentonactivist.comwww.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Activists-Media-Handbook/David-Fenton/9781647228668https://fenton.comX / twitter @dfentonIG @dfenton1 facebook.com/davidfentonactivistwww.creativeprocess.info www.oneplanetpodcast.orgIG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcastAll photographs © 1968-2022 David Fenton

In this episode of the Speaking Out of Place podcast, Professor David Palumbo-Liu interviews award-winning novelist and activist Susan Albuhawa about a major literary festival she is organizing entitled “Palestine Writes,” which will take place in Philadelphia from Sept 22 to Sept 24.“Palestine Writes” is the only North American literature festival dedicated to celebrating and promoting cultural productions of Palestinian writers and artists. Born from the pervasive marginalization of Palestinian voices in mainstream literary institutions, the festival brings Palestinian cultural workers from all parts of historic Palestine and in exiled diaspora together with peers from other marginalized groups in the United States. Crossing multiple borders dash geographic linguistic and cultural boundaries--writers, artists, publishers, booksellers, scholars, musicians, and thinkers hold conversations about art, literature, and the intersections between culture and power, struggle, politics, climate change, sexuality, human rights, animal rights, food sovereignty, and more. Albuhawa gives us an inside look at the genesis of the festival, and its motivating ethos and politics.Susan Albuhawa is a novelist, poet, essayist, scientist, mother, and activist. Her debut novel Mornings in Jenin, translated into 30 languages, was an international bestseller and is considered a classic in Palestinian literature. Its reach and sales has made Albuhawa the most widely-read Palestinian author. Her second novel, The Blue between Sky and Water, was likewise an international bestseller. Against the Loveless World was published in August 2020 by Simon and Schuster to much acclaim. Albuhawa is the founder of Playgrounds for Palestine, a children's organization dedicated to uplifting Palestinian children.“Palestinians have been facing erasure for decades. There's the physical erasure of our villages, the names of our villages, the erasure of the word Palestine from the map, erasure of our identities. And now there's this kind of colonization of our narratives, of our stories, and our history.And Palestine Writes is part of a counterforce against this new form of colonization. The Zionist colonial narrative has always shifted with shifting wind, depending on what's in vogue at the time. Initially, it was a sort of romantic ending to Europe's genocide of its own Jewish population. And there was this epic myth of "a land without people for a people without land". And of course that was unsustainable.”https://palestinewrites.orgwww.simonandschuster.com/authors/Susan-Abulhawa/165673902www.palumbo-liu.com https://speakingoutofplace.comhttps://twitter.com/palumboliu?s=20Photo credit: Roy VanDerVegt

Wildfire season is starting earlier and lasting longer due to global warming across the world. What will we do to save the world on fire? How can we cure our addiction to fossil fuels which is verging on pyromania?Simon Dalby is author of Pyromania: Fire and Geopolitics in a Climate-Disrupted World and Professor Emeritus at Wilfrid Laurier University. His other books are Rethinking Environmental Security, Anthropocene Geopolitics: Globalization, Security, Sustainability, and Security and Environmental Change. He’s co-editor of Achieving the Sustainable Development Goals, and Reframing Climate Change: Constructing Ecological Geopolitics."We also need to note most people move locally rather than globally. In the discussions about climate refugees, people are going to be dislocated. There are obviously going to be places that are going to become quite literally uninhabitable because they're too hot and too dry, or they've been flooded so frequently that they're just not sustainable. That said it is also worth pointing out that this climate change process is playing out in a global economy, which is also changing where people live and how people live very rapidly. the migration from rural areas to urban systems has been massive over the last couple of generations. We became an urban species."https://experts.wlu.ca/simon-dalby-1www.agendapub.com/page/detail/pyromania/?k=9781788216500www.creativeprocess.infowww.oneplanetpodcast.orgIG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast

In this episode of the Speaking Out of Place podcast, Professor David Palumbo-Liu interviews journalist., activist, and public intellectual Jeff Chang. Jeff’s most recent book, We Gon' Be Alright: Notes On Race and Resegregation (Picador), was called by the Washington Post “the smartest book of the year,” and inspired a four-episode digital series adaptation for PBS Indie Lens Storycast. He was named to the Frederick Douglass 200, as one of “200 living individuals who best embody the work and spirit of Douglass.”They discuss Supreme Court’s recent decision on affirmative action. The plaintiffs of that case, “Students for Fair Admission,” an organization started and led by non-student Ed Blum, made particular use of Asian Americans as a kind of stand-in for whites. Jeff and I talk about the history of that tactic, which dates back the late Sixties, and especially the 1980s, the years of the Reagan presidency. They also talk about the ways in which many liberal and progressive Asian Americans and others took shelter under Harvard University’s defense of “diversity.” Jeff points out that such a move effectively erases the long-term bias Harvard and other elite universities have displayed toward Jews and Asian Americans, and backs away from a true and historically honest confrontation with America’s racism.Jeff Chang's Can't Stop Won't Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation won the American Book Award and the Asian American Literary Award. His most recent book, We Gon' Be Alright: Notes On Race and Resegregation, was named the Northern California Nonfiction Book Of The Year. His bylines have appeared in The Guardian, the Washington Post, the New York Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the Los Angeles Times. He was previously the Executive Director of the Institute for Diversity in the Arts at Stanford University and led the Butterfly Lab for Immigrant Narrative Strategy.https://jeffchang.net/www.palumbo-liu.com  https://speakingoutofplace.com https://twitter.com/palumboliu?s=20

In this episode of the Speaking Out of Place podcast, Professor David Palumbo-Liu interviews Ching-In Chen & Kate Hao about the cancellation of the Asian American Literary Festival 2023.This August, the Asian American Literary Festival was to take place in Washington, DC.. The longstanding event had been on hiatus because of the pandemic, so this year’s event had generated a lot of buzz.  Organized by the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center (APAC), the event had already garnered substantial investments and expectations from both national and international groups and states.Ching-In Chen is a poet who was curating a festival event featuring books by trans and nonbinary writers. Kate Hao is a program coordinator who was on contract with the Smithsonian for the festival. They discuss the controversy and the issues it raises about art for the community vs. art that must conform to state institutional preferences and politics. We discuss why this festival is absolutely essential for the present day, where we have Asian Americans being used to help dismantle affirmative action, and where we see persistent and deadly acts of anti-Asian violence. We also hear about possible plans to go forward without the Smithsonian, and ways we can help support the artists and organizers.https://www.chinginchen.comwww.palumbo-liu.com https://speakingoutofplace.com https://twitter.com/palumboliu?s=20

In this episode of the Speaking Out of Place podcast, Professor David Palumbo-Liu interviews Jennifer Jacquet, who is an Associate Professor in the Department of Environmental Studies and Director of XE: Experimental Humanities and Social Engagement at NYU. She is also deputy director of NYU's Center for Environmental and Animal Protection. Her research focuses on animals and the environment, Agnotology, and attribution and responsibility in the Anthropocene. She is author of The Playbook: How to Deny Science, Sell Lies, and Make a Killing in the Corporate World-- a work of 'epistolary non-fiction' that makes the business case for scientific denial. Among other things, we learn how corporations create an arsenal of experts and pseudo-experts at prestigious universities to create misinformation and disinformation for corporate profit, and at great cost to the public. At the end, we make the case for a partnership between the sciences and the humanities to fight such lies and violence.Jennifer Jacquet’s research focuses on animals and the environment, Agnotology, and attribution and responsibility in the Anthropocene. She is author of The: How to Deny Science, Sell Lies, and Make a Killing in the Corporate World (Pantheon/Penguin, 2022)-- a work of 'epistolary non-fiction' that makes the business case for scientific denial. She also wrote Is Shame Necessary? (Pantheon/Penguin, 2015) about the evolution, function, and future of the use of social disapproval in a globalized, digitized world. She is the recipient of a 2015 Alfred P. Sloan research fellowship and a 2016 Pew Fellowship in Marine Conservation.https://jenniferjacquet.com https://as.nyu.edu/faculty/jennifer-jacquet.htmlwww.palumbo-liu.com  https://speakingoutofplace.com https://twitter.com/palumboliu?s=20

"I put this craft book together to create an opportunity for that advice, for those role models, for that access. And I think that what I'm grateful for about this book is that it is the book that I would have wanted back when I was a 19-year-old kid telling people I wish I was a writer. So, I think that's the real crux of the book."How do you find your voice? As a writer, how do you take what you know and what you believe to share your stories with the world? How do we let young writers know just how powerful they are and that what they do matters?In How We Do It: Black Writers on Craft, Practice, and Skill Pulitzer Prize winning, and National Book Award finalist author Jericho Brown brings together more than 30 acclaimed writers, including the likes of Tayari Jones, Jacqueline Woodson, Natasha Trethewey, among many others, to discuss, dissect, and offer advice and encouragement on the written word. Brown is author of The Tradition, for which he won the Pulitzer Prize. He is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, and the National Endowment for the Arts, and he is the winner of the Whiting Award. Brown’s first book, Please, won the American Book Award. His second book, The New Testament, won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. His third collection, The Tradition won the Paterson Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. His poems have appeared in The Bennington Review, Buzzfeed, Fence, jubilat, The New Republic, The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Paris Review TIME magazine, and several volumes of The Best American Poetry. He is the director of the Creative Writing Program and a professor at Emory University.www.jerichobrown.comwww.harpercollins.com/products/how-we-do-it-jericho-browndarlene-taylor?variant=40901184684066www.creativeprocess.infowww.oneplanetpodcast.orgIG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast

How do you find your voice? As a writer, how do you take what you know and what you believe to share your stories with the world? How do we let young writers know just how powerful they are and that what they do matters?In How We Do It: Black Writers on Craft, Practice, and Skill Pulitzer Prize winning, and National Book Award finalist author Jericho Brown brings together more than 30 acclaimed writers, including the likes of Tayari Jones, Jacqueline Woodson, Natasha Trethewey, among many others, to discuss, dissect, and offer advice and encouragement on the written word. Brown is author of The Tradition, for which he won the Pulitzer Prize. He is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, and the National Endowment for the Arts, and he is the winner of the Whiting Award. Brown’s first book, Please, won the American Book Award. His second book, The New Testament, won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. His third collection, The Tradition won the Paterson Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. His poems have appeared in The Bennington Review, Buzzfeed, Fence, jubilat, The New Republic, The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Paris Review TIME magazine, and several volumes of The Best American Poetry. He is the director of the Creative Writing Program and a professor at Emory University."I put this craft book together to create an opportunity for that advice, for those role models, for that access. And I think that what I'm grateful for about this book is that it is the book that I would have wanted back when I was a 19-year-old kid telling people I wish I was a writer. So, I think that's the real crux of the book."www.jerichobrown.comwww.harpercollins.com/products/how-we-do-it-jericho-browndarlene-taylor?variant=40901184684066www.creativeprocess.info www.oneplanetpodcast.orgIG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast

"And I think for so long I thought I'm only going to write about the real wolf. That's the most important thing. We've had too many stories. And yet I've gotten to a point where I just think we are living in a world where any story that comes out of my mouth is shaped by these other stories I've heard which are rooted in ecology, just like stories about biology, stories about how we name wolves are rooted in human choices. Science is tied to colonialism. Stories about how people interact in the landscape are very tied to who those people are and how they feel. Are they meant to feel that they belong there?"The lone wolf is actually alone because it's looking for connection. They leave in order to find a mate and form their own pack. If loneliness is an epidemic, what can wolves teach us about loneliness, courage, and connection?Erica Berry is the author of Wolfish: Wolf, Self, and the Stories We Tell About Fear. Her essays in journalism appear in Outside, Wired, The Yale Review, The Guardian, Literary Hub, The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, and Guernica, among other publications. Berry has taught workshops for teenagers and adults at Literary Arts, the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology, the New York Times Student Journeys in Oxford Academia.www.ericaberry.comhttps://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250882264/wolfishwww.creativeprocess.info www.oneplanetpodcast.orgIG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast