For this special “Inside Commonplace” episode, Rachel Zucker speaks with her son Judah, her mentee Yanyi, and her husband Joshua Goren. These conversations help Rachel examine the history of Commonplace and reveal more about her work, her personal life, and the pleasures and challenges of making this podcast. Rachel and her guests (or is it the other way around?) discuss teaching, gender, listening, marriage, mental health, privilege, and much more

Rachel Zucker speaks with poet CAConrad about their Somatic poetry rituals, their childhood in rural Western Pennsylvania, becoming an avid reader, running away from home, the AIDS epidemic, writing The Book of Frank over an 18 year period, anti-efficiency, marketing research, the 1998 murder of CA’s boyfriend, Earth, using a somatic ritual to cure a pernicious depression, and CA’s recently published book, While Standing In Line for Death. CAConrad describes their writing process, how to get ahead of one’s internal editor, revision, combating misogyny, animal rights activism, ACT UP, ecological disaster, ecopoetics, the vibrational absence of extinct species being replaced by the din of humanity, white rhinos, Walmart, the end of empire, teaching, the myth of writer’s block, how to write inside the hardest things, roadkill memorials, being alone, and accepting the elements.

They talk about their particular interests—writing about women of color, writing about place, writing from unknowing or from knowing to unknowing, writing about the relationship between humans and animals, working with found texts, writing about assimilation and loss of culture, bi-linguality—and about their shared experiences at MacDowell. They offer advice for folks who might be headed to a residency, talk about various writing processes, and about what was wonderful and what was challenging about being at the residency including their feelings about being selected and about the selection process and not having to do the kind of labor one does in normal life.

Host Rachel Zucker talks with textile artist Erin Riley about how she started weaving, the importance of making work no one saw, promiscuity, risky behavior, addiction, how her work became more detailed and came to have more depth, learning things without learning them, pornography, selfies, the loss of meaning when images are repeated, slowing down, being deliberate, girlhood obsession with one’s body, yeast infections, UTIs, menstruation, using images of her own body in her tapestries, tattoos, long distance image-based relationships, the mental and physical stamina required to make tapestry, the pleasure of making tapestry, ego, velcro, labor, deliberately choosing not to do something in a traditional mode and the pushback from people who like to tell other people how to do things “right,” not behaving, non-erotic nudity, trichotillomania, representing things in tapestry, the mediation of reality that tapestry affords, the strength of vulnerability, dick pics, privacy, dildos, how skill can restrict the content, how to keep work from getting stagnant, not feeling responsible for other artist fellows and other wonderful things about meeting and being at the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire.

Host Rachel Zucker speaks with poet, programmer and professor, Allison Parrish. They talk about Articulations, Parrish’s first book of poetry, why she wanted to publish a book, “the threat of permanence,” Allison’s background in linguistics, machine learning, artificial intelligence, and how she made the poems in Articulations. They discuss phonemes, word vectors, semantic and phonetic similarity and proximity, and the post-processing procedures she used, as well as the ways in which computer-generated language is the same or different from “intention-typical poetry.” They also discuss J.R.R Tolkien and Gertrude Stein, not being very interested in narrative, and what Parrish hopes practitioners of computer-generated poetry will do next and what she hopes they will not do.