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

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."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?"www.ericaberry.com https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250882264/wolfishwww.creativeprocess.info www.oneplanetpodcast.org IG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcastPhoto by Andrea Lonas

"And so I did research to avoid writing. And what I would do is I would take these drives out into the desert, and I'd take notes. I went along the route of the Transcontinental Railroad east to west, west to east a bunch of times. And I went to all these history books and all these historical recovery projects that are being run.There's the project of Chinese and America and all these history books and synthesizing this sense of being in a place and time where I was not. And I think some of the things and some of the experiences that I felt while doing that research, I felt was necessary to preserve in the text because I think the text is always produced out of confluence with the body.And so in order to portray something in text, you have to pass it through the body and through the senses. And as a result, it was really important for me to go to these places and have that physical experience with the body in order that I would be able to put it down in the book and have it be true."How can we retell the story of America? In the United States of Amnesia, why does the Western celebrate cowboys but not all people who built this country? What does a Chinese-American hero look like in the 21st Century?Tom Lin is an American writer whose 2021 debut novel The Thousand Crimes of Ming Tsu chronicles the story of a Chinese American outlaw seeking revenge during America's railroad boom. The book won the 2022 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, making Lin the youngest Carnegie winner in the prize’s history. Tom Lin is currently pursuing an English doctorate at the University of California Davis.https://twotreeforest.comwww.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/tom-lin/the-thousand-crimes-of-ming-tsu/9780316542173/?lens=little-brownwww.creativeprocess.info www.oneplanetpodcast.org IG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcastImage courtesy of Little, Brown and Company & Tom Lin

How can we retell the story of America? In the United States of Amnesia, why does the Western celebrate cowboys but not all people who built this country? What does a Chinese-American hero look like in the 21st Century?Tom Lin is an American writer whose 2021 debut novel The Thousand Crimes of Ming Tsu chronicles the story of a Chinese American outlaw seeking revenge during America's railroad boom. The book won the 2022 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, making Lin the youngest Carnegie winner in the prize’s history. Tom Lin is currently pursuing an English doctorate at the University of California Davis."And so I did research to avoid writing. And what I would do is I would take these drives out into the desert, and I'd take notes. I went along the route of the Transcontinental Railroad east to west, west to east a bunch of times. And I went to all these history books and all these historical recovery projects that are being run.There's the project of Chinese and America and all these history books and synthesizing this sense of being in a place and time where I was not. And I think some of the things and some of the experiences that I felt while doing that research, I felt was necessary to preserve in the text because I think the text is always produced out of confluence with the body.And so in order to portray something in text, you have to pass it through the body and through the senses. And as a result, it was really important for me to go to these places and have that physical experience with the body in order that I would be able to put it down in the book and have it be true."https://twotreeforest.comwww.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/tom-lin/the-thousand-crimes-of-ming-tsu/9780316542173/?lens=little-brownwww.creativeprocess.info www.oneplanetpodcast.org IG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcastImage courtesy of Little, Brown and Company & Tom Lin

"EO Wilson suggested that we had to think about the world as a place that we share. And he said: Look, we always seem to need a lot of stuff. So why don't we leave half the earth to the natural environment and allow all the natural processes that we need, and then we use the other half for ourselves. And it's an interesting concept because it says to economists and to the capitalist system: you cannot use all of it. You have to leave half of it to allow the systems to produce clean air, clean water, and allow for biodiversity and ecosystems to restore themselves."Can we imagine a world where we leave half the earth to the natural environment and use the other half for ourselves? Can we change history and protect the Indigenous, the vulnerable, and the very poorest in society?Mark Maslin is a Professor of Earth System Science at University College London. Maslin is a leading expert in understanding the anthropocene and how it relates to the major challenges facing humanity in the 21st century. He has written a number of books on the issue of climate change, his most book is How to Save Our Planet: The Facts.www.geog.ucl.ac.uk/people/academic-staff/mark-maslinwww.penguin.co.uk/books/320155/how-to-save-our-planet-by-maslin-mark/9780241472521www.creativeprocess.info www.oneplanetpodcast.org IG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcastImage courtesy of Mark Maslin

Can we imagine a world where we leave half the earth to the natural environment and use the other half for ourselves? Can we change history and protect the Indigenous, the vulnerable, and the very poorest in society?Mark Maslin is a Professor of Earth System Science at University College London. Maslin is a leading expert in understanding the anthropocene and how it relates to the major challenges facing humanity in the 21st century. He has written a number of books on the issue of climate change, his most book is How to Save Our Planet: The Facts."EO Wilson suggested that we had to think about the world as a place that we share. And he said: Look, we always seem to need a lot of stuff. So why don't we leave half the earth to the natural environment and allow all the natural processes that we need, and then we use the other half for ourselves. And it's an interesting concept because it says to economists and to the capitalist system: you cannot use all of it. You have to leave half of it to allow the systems to produce clean air, clean water, and allow for biodiversity and ecosystems to restore themselves."www.geog.ucl.ac.uk/people/academic-staff/mark-maslinwww.penguin.co.uk/books/320155/how-to-save-our-planet-by-maslin-mark/9780241472521www.creativeprocess.info www.oneplanetpodcast.org IG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcastAll images courtesy of Mark Maslin

In this episode of the Speaking Out of Place podcast, Professor David Palumbo-Liu interviews Cynthia Franklin about her new book, Narrating Humanity: Life Writing and Movement Politics from Palestine to Mauna Kea. Taking on pivotal historical moments like the murder of George Floyd and the emergence of #BlackLivesMatter, the on-going struggle of the Palestinian people against the ethno-nationalist Zionist state, and the fight for Indigenous rights in Hawai’i, Franklin asks the question, what requirements to people have to meet in order to fit into the human narrative?  And what are the possibilities of creating alternate stories of the human that can accommodate individuals who identify more as members of political collectives, and also narratives that exceed the normative category of the human? This powerful book asks fundamental questions about the relationship between art and activism.“I posit narrated humanity as a lens through which to study how narratives participate in struggles to conceive human being beyond juridical and narrative humanity.”Cynthia G. Franklin is Professor of English at the University of Hawai'i, and coeditor of the journal Biography. She is the author of Narrating Humanity: Life Writing and Movement Politics from Palestine to Mauna Kea (2023), Academic Lives: Memoir, Cultural Theory and the University Today and Writing Women’s Communities: The Politics and Poetics of Contemporary Multi-Genre Anthologies. She has coedited special issues of Biography including “Life in Occupied Palestine” and “Personal Effects: The Testimonial Uses of Life Writing.” For the past ten years, Cynthia has been on the Organizing Collective of the US Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (USACBI) and she is a founding member and faculty advisor of Students and Faculty for Justice in Palestine at UH (SFJP@UH). She serves on the Editorial Collective for the newly established initiative EtCH (Essays in the Critical Humanities).https://english.hawaii.edu/faculty/cynthia-franklin/www.palumbo-liu.com  https://speakingoutofplace.com https://twitter.com/palumboliu?s=20

"The dictators in the 20th century used military or paramilitary uniforms to project brute force and fear. Today, the situation is different. Successful dictators pretend to be democrats, so they put on civilian suits and travel to Davos to talk to the business elite. They talk to democratic counterparts to pretend that they are like them. And that's exactly the challenge to understanding that these are still non-democratic regimes. We still need to. do something about them because otherwise, we see the encroachments on democracies. And we see also the weakening of our democratic world.If you think about Viktor Orbán, he started off as a democratic leader, but eventually turned his country into a place where the opposition doesn't have an equal chance to come to power. Another one would be Donald Trump. Trump will very much try to come back and basically, these leaders build a spin dictatorship, want to gain power and stay in power using propaganda and misleading and false information. And so far, American institutions have stood up to those challenges, but who knows what happens next?"What is a spin dictator? What does tyranny look like in the 21st century? Why is populism on the rise? And how do we reinvent democracy?Sergei Guriev is the co-author of Spin Dictators: The Changing Face of Tyranny in the 21st Century. Guriev is Provost and a professor of economics and at Sciences Po in Paris. He is a former Chief Economist of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, London, and a former Rector of the New Economic School in Moscow in 2004-13.https://sites.google.com/site/sguriev/https://spindictators.com/www.sciencespo.fr/department-economics/en/researcher/sergei-guriev.htmlwww.creativeprocess.infowww.oneplanetpodcast.orgIG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast

What is a spin dictator? What does tyranny look like in the 21st century? Why is populism on the rise? And how do we reinvent democracy?Sergei Guriev is the co-author of Spin Dictators: The Changing Face of Tyranny in the 21st Century. Guriev is Provost and a professor of economics and at Sciences Po in Paris. He is a former Chief Economist of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, London, and a former Rector of the New Economic School in Moscow in 2004-13."The dictators in the 20th century used military or paramilitary uniforms to project brute force and fear. Today, the situation is different. Successful dictators pretend to be democrats, so they put on civilian suits and travel to Davos to talk to the business elite. They talk to democratic counterparts to pretend that they are like them. And that's exactly the challenge to understanding that these are still non-democratic regimes. We still need to. do something about them because otherwise, we see the encroachments on democracies. And we see also the weakening of our democratic world.If you think about Viktor Orbán, he started off as a democratic leader, but eventually turned his country into a place where the opposition doesn't have an equal chance to come to power. Another one would be Donald Trump. Trump will very much try to come back and basically, these leaders build a spin dictatorship, want to gain power and stay in power using propaganda and misleading and false information. And so far, American institutions have stood up to those challenges, but who knows what happens next?"https://sites.google.com/site/sguriev/https://spindictators.com/www.sciencespo.fr/department-economics/en/researcher/sergei-guriev.htmlwww.creativeprocess.infowww.oneplanetpodcast.orgIG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast

Nicholas Royle is Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Sussex, England, where he has been based since 1999. He has also taught at the University of Oxford, the University of Tampere, and the University of Stirling; and has been a visiting professor at the universities of Århus, Santiago del Compostela, Turku, Manitoba, and Lille. He is a managing editor of the Oxford Literary Review and director of Quick Fictions. He has published many books, including Telepathy and Literature, E.M. Forster, Jacques Derrida, The Uncanny, Veering: A Theory of Literature, How to Read Shakespeare, and Hélène Cixous: Dreamer, Realist, Analyst, Writing, as well as the novels Quilt and An English Guide to Birdwatching, and Mother: A Memoir. In addition, he is co-author with Andrew Bennett of three books: Elizabeth Bowen and the Dissolution of the Novel, This Thing Called Literature: Reading, Thinking, Writing, and An Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory Sixth edition, 2023. Royle’s current projects include a detective novel, a collection of essays about new approaches to narrative theory, and a collaborative work with Timothy Morton on Covid-19. His latest book, David Bowie, Enid Blyton and the Sun Machine, is due to be published in November 2023.Mother: A Memoir“Pre-word In my mind's eye she is sitting at the circular white Formica-top table in the corner. Morning sunlight fills the kitchen. She has a cup of Milky Nescafé Gold Blend and is smoking a purple Silk Cut. She is dressed for comfort in a floral bronze-and-brown blouse and blue jumper with light gray slacks and blue slippers. She is absorbed in a crossword (The Times) but not oblivious. She does what always takes me aback. She reads out one of the clues. As if I would know the answer. Her gift for crosswords is alien to me. I get stuck at the first ambiguity or double-meaning. Whereas she sweeps through all illusions allusions red herrings and anagrams and is done most days by lunchtime. But her fondness for crossword puzzles is inseparable from my interest in words. Where they come from. What they might be doing. Earliest recorded use of 'In my mind's eye': Shakespeare's Hamlet (around 1599). Referring to the Ghost.My mother died years ago. What has induced me to write about her after all this time remains mysterious to me. It is connected to the climate crisis. As the natural historian David Attenborough says: 'the collapse of our civilizations and the extinction of much of the natural world is on the horizon.' In ways I cannot pretend to fathom I have found that writing about my mother is bound up with writing about Mother Nature and Mother Earth. And no doubt it has to do also with my own aging and the buried life of mourning. The strange timetables of realization and loss. A memoir is 'a written record of a person's knowledge of events or of a person's own experiences'. 'A record of events written by a person having intimate knowledge of them and based on personal observation.' So the dictionaries tell us. But this memoir of my mother makes no attempt at a comprehensive record.”www.routledge.com/An-Introduction-to-Literature-Criticism-and-Theory/Bennett-Royle/p/book/9781032158846 https://myriadeditions.com/creator/nicholas-royle/ https://quickfiction.co.uk/www.creativeprocess.info www.oneplanetpodcast.org IG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast