Emerging Form

This week, Christie interviews Rosemerry about her new book, The Unfolding, out on October 1st. Do her a big favor and pre-order it now at this link. Rosemerry explains how the poems came together, how she structured the book and why the cover is pink. It’s a wonderful conversation we know you’ll love.

Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer is a poet, teacher, speaker and writing facilitator. Her daily audio series, The Poetic Path, is on the Ritual app. Her poems have appeared on A Prairie Home Companion, PBS News Hour, O Magazine, American Life in Poetry, and Carnegie Hall stage. Her most recent poetry collections are All the Honey (Samara Press, 2023) and The Unfolding (Wildhouse Publishing, October 2024). In January, 2024, she became the first poet laureate for Evermore, helping others explore grief, bereavement, wonder and love through poetry. One-word mantra: Adjust.

“It took me years to reclaim my creative life as not other than my spiritual life but the very place my spirit flowers,” says Mirabai Starr award-winning author, internationally acclaimed speaker and a leading teacher of interspiritual dialogue. In this episode, we speak with Mirabai about how she created an intimate, welcoming tone in her most recent book, Ordinary Mysticism: Your Life as Sacred Ground. We speak, too, about the intersections of creative practice and spiritual practice, the importance of the imagination, dismantling the hierarchy of the mentor/protege relationship, and how she steps out of the way to let “the [creative] thing” come through.

In 2020, Mirabai Starr was honored on Watkins’ list of the 100 Most Spiritually Influential Living People. Drawing from twenty years of teaching philosophy and world religions at the University of New Mexico-Taos, Starr now travels the world sharing her wisdom on contemplative living, writing as a spiritual practice, and the transformational power of grief and loss. She has authored over a dozen books, including Wild Mercy, Caravan of No Despair, and God of Love. Starr has received critical acclaim for her revolutionary contemporary translations of the mystics John of the Cross, Teresa of Avila and Julian of Norwich. Starr continues to teach seminars, workshops and retreats, both in person and through her online community, Wild Heart. She lives with her extended family in the mountains of northern New Mexico. 

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How can trying a new art form vitalize and fuel your creative practice? Christie and Rosemerry travel to Nashville to meet in person with their most frequent guest, Holiday Mathis, and converse about her experiences with learning about writing and performing stand-up comedy. The laughter-filled episode explores developing your creative voice, the benefits of a creative community, meeting your fears and showing up vulnerable in your creative practice, and much more. 

Holiday Mathis writes the daily horoscope for The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post and hundreds of newspapers around the world. In her decades-long syndication she's published almost nine million words on luck, the stars and the human condition. She's also a multi-platinum selling songwriter with songs recorded by Miley Cyrus, Emma Roberts and more. Holiday is the author of several books including How to Fail Epically in Hollywood.  

Previous Holiday episodes:Episode 28: The Daily GrindEpisode 28 bonus: Extended Interview with Holiday MathisEpisode 63: Reviving abandoned projects with Holiday MathisEpisode 63 bonus: Holiday Mathis on creative processEpisode 80: Holiday Mathis Wrote a NovelEpisode 80 bonus: Audio Excerpt from How to Fail Epically in HollywoodThe blog post that started our friendship with Holiday: I Know Astrology Is B******t, But I Can’t Stop Reading My Horoscope by Christie Aschwanden

What happens when a project grows way beyond its original scope? We talk with Nicola Twilley about her new book  Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet and Ourselves, originally envisioned as an article. In this episode we cover being fluid with our plans, research, rewriting, the differences between writing alone and with a partner, and how what looks like bad luck can turn into a blessing. 

Nicola Twilley is the coauthor of Until Proven Safe: The History and Future of Quarantine, named one of the best books of 2021 by Time, NPR, The Guardian, and the Financial Times. She is cohost of Gastropod, an award-winning podcast that looks at food through the lens of science and history and a frequent contributor to The New Yorker. 

Ambition. Perspective. Competition. Kindness. These themes are at the heart of our conversation with essayist and cartoonist Tim Kreider. Drawing from his essay, “The Ones Who Turned Back” we talk about mid-life changes in creative practice, plus thoughts on the tension between doing what you want and doing what you are rewarded for (or what people expect of you) and why you want to stay not only young at heart, but young at mind.  

Tim Kreider is the author of the essay collections We Learn Nothing and I Wrote This Book Because I Love You. His Substack is called “The Loaf” and he has contributed to The New York Times, The New Yorker, Vox, Nerve, Men’s Journal, The Comics Journal, Film Quarterly, and Fangoria. His cartoons have been collected in three books by Fantagraphics Books. His cartoon, “The Pain—When Will It End?” ran for twelve years in the Baltimore City Paper and other alternative weeklies, and is archived at the paincomics.com. Tim was born and educated in Baltimore, Maryland. He lives in New York City and an idyllic compound in the Ozark woods. His cat The Quetzal died in 2013. His new cat is Richard, who is a fool, an adorable little fool.

The Referendum

The Ones Who Turned Back

“I had built up a lot of don’ts in my head about writing,” says bestselling author Paolo Bacigalupi. In this episode, we speak with the speculative fiction novelist about how he went from wondering if he would ever write again to publishing his new book, NAVOLA. We cover daily habits, discipline, pleasure, and meeting the negative voices in your head. 

Paolo Bacigalupi is an internationally bestselling author of speculative fiction. He has won the Hugo, Nebula, World Fantasy, John W. Campbell and Locus Awards, as well as being a finalist for the National Book Award and a winner of the Michael L. Printz Award for Excellence in Young Adult Literature. Paolo’s work often focuses on questions of sustainability and the environment, most notably the impacts of climate change. He has written novels for adults, young adults, and children, and his new book NAVOLA releases July 9, 2024. He can be found online at windupstories.com.

What is our relationship with our bodies? Our past? The planet? The rest of humanity? We speak with Nadia Colburn about how she weaves together a yoga practice, mindfulness, writing, and activism to explore these questions. “Our writing, our living, our experiencing is deeper when we can come from a bigger perspective and bring all the awarenesses,” she says. We speak about common obstacles to creative practice, ways to include the body, how teaching affects her writing practice and how she came to write her most recent collection of poems. 

Writer, yogi, activist and teacher Nadia Colburn is author of two books of poetry, The High Shelf and I Say the Sky and her poetry and creative nonfiction have been published in The New Yorker, American Poetry Review, Spirituality & Health, and dozens of other journals. She’s been a professor at MIT, Lesley, and Stonehill College, and she is currently the writer-in-residence at Northeastern's Center For Spirituality, Dialogue and Service. She’s also the founder of the Align Your Story School for writers which combines a traditional academic background with a more holistic, mindful approach. 

Nadia Colburn

I Say the Sky

Free five-day meditation and writing practice

What if we dropped our expectations and preconceived ideas about our creative practice? In this episode, we speak with elite runner, author Katie Arnold about how her Zen practice of “coming to whatever you do in your life with a fresh and open mind” has influenced her creative work. We explore the story behind her new book, Brief Flashings in the Phenomenal World: Zen and the Art of Running Free, which tells the story of a traumatic wilderness accident and her path to healing. Plus, we discuss the choices we make around including other people’s stories in our writing. 

Katie Arnold is a longtime journalist and bestselling author of Brief Flashings in the Phenomenal World: Zen and the Art of Running Free (2024), which tells the story of a traumatic wilderness accident and her path to healing. Her critically acclaimed memoir, Running Home, was published in 2019. An elite ultra runner and student of Zen, Katie teaches writing workshops exploring the link between movement and creativity. A former managing editor at Outside Magazine, she has written for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Outside, ESPN The Magazine, Runner’s World, and Elle, among others, as well as been a guest on NPR Weekend Edition Sunday and The Upaya Zen Center Podcast. She has been awarded fellowships from MacDowell and Ucross. Katie lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, with her husband, Steve Barrett, their two teenage daughters, and two dogs.

Christie’s review of Katie’s book, Running Home.

When fiction writer Lydia Millet found herself “preoccupied by the overwhelm of the world,” she turned to writing nonfiction. “I thought if i tried to write about it I might think more lucidly about it.” We speak with her about her newest book, We Loved It All (part memoir, part bestiary), about the challenges and joys of changing genres, about the gap between her projections about being a novelist and actually being a novelist, and how books not only save lives, but souls. 

Lydia Millet has written more than a dozen novels and story collections. Her newest book is a memoir, We Loved It All, published this month. Her novel A Children's Bible was a New York Times "Best 10 Books of 2020" selection and shortlisted for the National Book Award. In 2019 her story collection Fight No More received an Award of Merit from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and her collection Love in Infant Monkeys was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2010. She also writes essays, opinion pieces, book reviews, and other ephemera and has worked as an editor and staff writer at the Center for Biological Diversity since 1999. She lives in the desert outside Tucson with her family.

“Invest always in relationships before you need them, be vulnerable with them,” says Courtney E. Martin, journalist, author, podcaster and speaker. In this episode, she shares with us an essential question for all journalists and creatives and discusses how it shaped a specific project, plus she offers advice for living a creative life based on Parker Palmer’s thoughts on “the tragic gap.” This is an episode focused on transparency, vulnerability, community and humility.

Courtney E. Martin is the author of four books, most recently, Learning in Public, a popular newsletter, called Examined Family, host of “The Wise Unknown” podcast from PRX, and co-host of the Slate “How To!” podcast. She’s also a co-founder of the Solutions Journalism Network and FRESH Speakers, and the Storyteller-in-Residence at The Holding Co. Her literal happy place is her co-housing community in Oakland, Calif. Her metaphorical happy place is asking people questions.