Emerging Form

Sometimes, a project just comes together in the most organic, meant-to-be way, and nothing can stop it. What’s that like? We explore that experience in this episode with our guest, Amy Irvine, who co-wrote Air Mail: Letters of Politics, Pandemics & Place with our previous guest, Pam Houston. We’ll talk about how the form emerged--what began as an epistolary exercise became a fully fledged book. We’ll talk about how creative endeavors can create friendships. We also talk about her previous book, Desert Cabal, about backlash against women writers and more. 

Amy Irvine won the Orion Book Award and Colorado Book Award for her memoir, Trespass: Living at the Edge of the Promised Land Her next book, Desert Cabal: A New Season in the Wilderness, is a feminist response to Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire, and one of Orion’s “25 Most-Read Stories of the Decade.” It was also added to Outside Magazine’s Adventure Canon and named by Backpacker as one of its New Wilderness Classics. During the pandemic, Irvine co-authored Air Mail: Letters of Politics, Pandemics & Placewith Pam Houston; the book is forthcoming in October 2020, as is Amy’s latest essay for Orion: “Close to the Bone.” Irvine teaches in the Mountainview Low-Residency MFA program at Southern New Hampshire University. In addition to frequently teaching for Orion Magazine, she has taught at Western Colorado University, the Free Flow Institute, Whitman College’s Semester in the West, the University of Utah’s Environmental Humanities Program at Rio Mesa, and Fishtrap’s Outpost. Irvine lives and writes off-grid on a remote mesa in southwest Colorado, just spitting distance from her Utah homeland.

Amy Irvine

Air Mail: Letters of Politics, Pandemics & Place

Desert Cabal

Desert Solitaire

Pam Houston

In this bonus episode, Rosemerry reads a poem from our episode 25 guest, Alison Luterman, and then presents a song from The Chain, one of the musicals that Alison discussed on the podcast.

Links:

The Chain

In the Time of Great Fires

Alison Luterman

How can creative practice become a political act? In this episode of Emerging Form, we speak with poet, playwright, memoirist and lyricist Alison Luterman. We talk in depth about her musical The Shyest Witch--about how, when you work in so many genres, a form might suggest itself; how the project evolved from being about the 2016 election into broader feminist themes, how she worked with input from collaborators and actors; and how she, too, is evolving as an artist, learning a new skill even as she is at the top of her game in other creative realms. We also talk about artworks that inspired her, including Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues and how she deals with her political work becoming a lightning rod for contentious responses--“If I’m not going to speak up now, when am I going to?”

Alison Luterman's four books of poetry are The Largest Possible Life; See How We Almost Fly; Desire Zoo, and In the Time of Great Fires. Her poems and stories have appeared in The Sun, Rattle, Salon, Prairie Schooner, Nimrod, The Atlanta Review, Tattoo Highway, and elsewhere. She has written an e-book of personal essays, Feral City, half a dozen plays, a song cycle We Are Not Afraid of the Dark, as well as two musicals, The Chain and The Shyest Witch. Alison performs with the Oakland-based improvisation troupe Wing It! and has given writing workshops all over the country, including at Omega and Esalen Institutes. She teaches memoir at The Writing Salon in Berkeley, and is available for private coaching in writing or creativity, both in-person or on-line. 

Show notes:

Marie Howe on On Being/Write ten things

Writing Naturally by David Petersen

Alison Luterman

Alison’s poem, “Some Girls” in the New York Times Magazine

A sneak peak of the music video from Alison’s musical-in-progress The Shyest Witch. (Alison notes: The witch, Rebekah Vega, had to be their own cameraperson and used a tripod while filming.)

Photo: Carla Green

In what ways does collaboration strengthen the stories we tell? In this bonus episode, Catherine Saint Louis and Carla Green talk about a recent collaboration for Telescope, a podcast that tells stories about people living through COVID. Both our guests work for podcast production company Neon Hum, Catherine as Senior Editor and Carla as Producer. In the episode we’ll be discussing, “Rubber Bullets.” Catherine reported this story about Derrick Sanderlin and Carla was her editor. The story follows how Derrick--a man who had volunteered to work with the San Jose Police Department about implicit bias-- found himself trying to de-escalate tensions with the same police department during a peaceful Black Lives Matter protest and was shot with rubber bullets. We talk about how Catherine and Carla divided work, why trust is so important in collaborations, how details sometimes need to be separated from the dramatic arc of the story, how music can affect a listener and why one might choose not to use it, and how showing our humanness when we tell another’s story might be an essential piece to the story itself.

Carla Green is a Neon Hum producer and journalist. Before coming to Neon Hum, she was the managing producer of the KCRW podcast UnFictional, where she reported and produced a bunch of different stories, including one where she trailed a juggalo across the country on a Greyhound bus. Since she moved to Los Angeles in 2016, she’s covered the city’s homelessness crisis in stories for radio, podcasts, and print.

Catherine Saint Louis is the senior editor of podcasts for Neon Hum Media, an L.A. based podcast house founded by Jonathan Hirsch. Her latest podcast that she's edited is Smoke Screen: Fake Priest, a wild story about a man who pretended to be a priest for 30 years, stealing people's money and their faith. Fake Priest is a Neon Hum original as is Telescope, a podcast that tells stories about people living through COVID and later in our first season, the twin pandemics of racism and COVID. This year, she also edited Murder on the Towpath, an eight-episode podcast set in 1964 that features two women who never met but whose lives become linked one of them is killed. Past projects include: Sonic Boom, This Land, The Thing about Pam, Larger than Life, and Break Stuff. She lives in Brooklyn where she runs with a sweaty mask.

Show notes:

Neon Hum

“Rubber Bullets” episode of Telescope

Catherine wants to encourage more POC to get into podcast editing and would love for anyone who is interested to get in touch. [email protected]

Telling someone else’s story presents a host of pleasures and challenges. In this episode, we interview Catherine Saint Louis, senior editor of podcasts for Neon Hum Media, about “Rubber Bullets,” a podcast episode released on Telescope in early July 2020, about a man who had guided implicit bias workshops for the San Jose Police Department for years, then found himself trying to de-escalate the same police department at a Black Lives Matter protest. He was shot in the groin with a rubber bullet. We talk with Catherine about the process of creating the episode from conception to execution. We discuss how she considers the interview process to be “a journey” that the interviewer and interviewee embark on together, and how Catherine was able to move beyond the facts of Derrick’s story to deliver the heart of it by drawing on her own humanity. 

Catherine Saint Louis is the senior editor of podcasts for Neon Hum Media, an L.A. based podcast house founded by Jonathan Hirsch. Her latest podcast that she's edited is Smoke Screen: Fake Priest, a wild story about a man who pretended to be a priest for 30 years, stealing people's money and their faith. Fake Priest is a Neon Hum original as is Telescope, a podcast that tells stories about people living through COVID and later in our first season, the twin pandemics of racism and COVID. This year, she also edited Murder on the Towpath, an eight-episode podcast set in 1964 that features two women who never met but whose lives become linked one of them is killed. Past projects include: Sonic Boom, This Land, The Thing about Pam, Larger than Life, and Break Stuff. She lives in Brooklyn where she runs with a sweaty mask.

Show notes:

Jill U Adams’s delightful comics

Last Word On Nothing

Neon Hum

“Rubber Bullets” episode of Telescope

Fake Priest

Catherine Saint Louis interview about podcast editing on Servant of Pod with Nick Quah.

Catherine wants to encourage more POC to get into podcast editing and would love for anyone who is interested to get in touch. [email protected]

Hello dear listeners! We are taking a short summer break. We’ve been putting out new episodes every week, and it feels like time to slow down for a moment and reflect. We’ll be back in August with some brand new regularly scheduled episodes. In the meantime, stay well. Thank you for your support.

Christie & Rosemerry

Putting your values into your art can be a courageous act, and in this episode we speak with poet and storyteller Sara Abou Rashed about the vulnerability and rewards that come from revealing our identity in our work. Rashed comes from Palestine but was born and raised in Syria before moving to Ohio in 2013. She is a senior at Denison University of Ohio and has performed her one-woman show, A Map of Myself, all over the country. Her show explores issues of identity, culture, immigration, belonging and finding home. She’s also given a TEDx talk and been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. We talk about distinguishing between the self who creates the material and the self that presents it and also how audiences respond. Sara also gives us two “assignments” for how we, too, might find ourselves as we move forward in this time of uncertainty and unrest. We ask her these questions, and invite you to answer them as well on our substack page or our Facebook page:

* How do you align your art with your values? 

* What role does art have in creating “the new normal?”

Sara Abou Rashed’s website

Sara’s show, Map of Myself

Trailer for Map of Myself

Hidden Treasures of a Refugee’s Journey TEDxColumbus

image of Sara via Instagram

Could a book really save a life? Poet Aaron Abeyta is living proof. In this episode of Emerging Form, part of our miniseries about creativity and COVID-19, we talk with him about how Truman Capote helped transform him from trying to get kicked out of school to being the MFA Poetry Director at Western Colorado University. We also talk about his work as mayor in Antonito, Colorado, and how the pandemic is affecting the small town. We talk about his goal to give voice to others who don’t have one, how Pablo Neruda inspired him to be both poetic and political, and how a story from the Bible has helped guide him in the most difficult times. 

Show notes:  

Aaron Abeyta

In Cold Blood by Truman Capote

Pablo Neruda

Antonito, Colorado

untitled or breathing in a time of covid

--aaron a. abeyta

dust veils the valley like dust in spring

every day wind

every day this place a personification

of ache aching that is a falling

from this horizon into another

poverty does not create character

this   the myth of some false

lying book whose mirrors do not

shine back at us nor for us

in a denver hospital Robert Limon cleaves

at life this breath then another

breath     his lonely isolation

the machine a dire metronome

perhaps one day   we will

all point back to this isolation

the aloneness that wrought this line

or that line into air   and by air

i mean human hearts   this is a prayer

for change for life and breath

for loved ones to recover   to breathe

without laboring or without thought

i am reading Auden   cross of the moment

he does not include in his collected the line

we must love one another or die the poem

absent altogether this wind

isn’t a lie   what seems broken   is

lies are less expensive

than anything we have saved  

here among our hats and buttons  

gathered then shelved toward what we

know will always come for us  

we survive   our ancestors have made it so

their voices   you hear them too

they ring of fidelity   live

endure be    persist return

breathe yes fill your lungs

let the wind breathe may dust

swing from cottonwoods to water

to meadow   may we be

lifted from our veils   all of them

let   too   the broken

those walking toward home

in their swollen and inebriated day

may they   too here in this isolation

serve as an aspect of truth

why did he write these lines

he wrote them in isolation

in the days where the dead multiplied

beyond the wars of books and story

the dead   the dying the swollen

the broken and the barely breathing

they are a form of truth   the living

ache of this place   yes

the wind too brief breaths

that fluttered then flew

as if being alone was a

breath which formed itself  

out of our requisite and stored faith

into song

Hula hooping story tellers on street corners? That’s one topic of discussion in this episode of Emerging Form, part of our miniseries on how creatives are responding to the pandemic. We speak with our friend, author and adventurer Craig Childs, whose new book, Virga and Bone: Essays from dry places, is a celebration of the primacy of land. We talk about the pleasures and challenges of staying in one place, postcards to our pre-pandemic selves, what earthquakes have in common with pandemics and also how to place our present predicament in big time--both future and past. We talk about how cultures repeat themselves, how to move forward, and how to welcome what comes. 

Craig Childs

Virga and Bone: Essays from Dry Places

Craig’s postcard to his 2010 self on Last Word on Nothing

Christie’s postcard to her 2010 self at Last Word On Nothing

Rosemerry’s poem on resilience 

Christie's 100-mile habitat project

Rose Eveleth’s Flash Forward episode: Imagine Better Futures

Are there any trends in how the pandemic has affected creative output in America? In this episode of Emerging Form, part of our miniseries on how creatives are responding to the pandemic, we speak with Timothy Green, editor of Rattle, one of America’s most popular poetry magazines. Timothy has worked as editor of Rattle since 2004 and is the author of American Fractal (Red Hen Press), a contributing columnist for the Press-Enterprise newspaper, and co-founder of the Wrighwood Literary Festival. He lives near Los Angeles with his wife, Megan, and their two children.

In this conversation, we talk about how the stages of grief seems to be showing up in the submissions Rattle is receiving. We also talk about how for creatives, our name is our brand, how administration is also creative act, how Poe’s poem Eureka predated the Big Bang Theory by 70 years, how it feels to be the one writing the rejections, how even editors can get impostor syndrome for editors, and how to trust a process.

Rattle: www.rattle.com

Rattle’s YouTube Channel

Timothy Green

“Eureka” by Edgar Allen Poe

American Fractal by Timothy Green, review

Rosemerry’s poem on missing touch

Christie’s purple sourdough starter (photo below)