Emerging Form

When life gets difficult, how do we bring our best selves to meet it? That’s one of the questions we ask in this episode of Emerging Form. We continue our miniseries on creativity and COVID-19 by interviewing Peter Heller, author of The Dog Stars, a best-selling post-apocalyptic novel in which the main character has survived a global pandemic. It’s a little close to home--and we talk with Heller about how it feels to have life now mimic his book. We also talk about some of the silver linings of shelter in place, how Heller weaves poetry into his novels, his most recent books The River and The Orchard and what he’s working on now in his Denver writing studio. 

Heller is the author of seven books. He holds an MFA in poetry and fiction from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, is a former longtime contributor to NPR, and has been a contributing editor at Outside Magazine, Men’s Journal, and National Geographic Adventure.

Order Peter’s books from your local independent bookstore here.

In Emerging Form’s ongoing series, Creativity and COVID-19, we interview creatives about how they’re channeling their creativity to cope with coronavirus. In this episode, we talk with Helena de Groot, a Belgian radio producer based in New York. She is the host and producer of Poetry Off The Shelf, an interview podcast for the Poetry Foundation. She also produces and sound designs The Paris Review Podcast, and edits the opera podcast Aria Code, produced in collaboration with WQXR, the Metropolitan Opera, and WNYC Studios, hosted by Rhiannon Giddens. We’ll talk about the importance of baths, the healing power of Russian art films, how she and her husband have handled their small apartment and working from home, and the joys of exploring our art forms with no agenda. 

Rosemerry’s Live Poems on Facebook

Helena de Groot

Poetry Off the Shelf podcast

Nostalghia

In this bonus episode, we bring you a special treat: an episode of Shelter in Place, a new podcast created by our guest this week on Emerging Form, Laura Joyce Davis. This episode is titled “The Call to Create.” Enjoy!

Laura Joyce Davis

Shelter in Place podcast

This is the first of a new mini-series in which we explore this weird new reality we’re living in by interviewing a variety of creative makers about how they’re channeling their creativity to cope with the new coronavirus. In this episode, we talk to Laura Joyce Davis, a writer from Oakland, California, host and creator of a new daily podcast, “Shelter in Place: finding daily sanity in a world that feels increasingly insane.” We talk about the challenges of balancing parenting and work; how sheltering in place can change family dynamics; about disappointments and silver linings; about how a daily practice has offered her surprising freedom, trust and a different relationship with daily life; and about how a bike ride the day before Shelter in Place changed her life. 

Shelter in Place Podcast home page and on iTunes

Laura Joyce Davis

Welcome to our extended conversation with Rose Eveleth, the founder and host of Flash Forward, a podcast about the future. In this bonus episode, we talk with Rose about clarity: how she uses it to guide a project through growing pains. We’ll talk about her process for making monthly goals (so much more useful than a single New Year’s resolution!), how she organizes her goals, about her new book, pros and cons of inviting collaborators in, how ego and fear can sabotage a project, how she loves her lawyer, and about the stages of small business growth. 

Flash Forward, a podcast about the future.

Flash Forward’s Patreon page

Christie’s story, Your Inability to Do Pullups Is All in Your Head

Rosemerry’s poem about pullups

The Five Stages of Small Business Growth

In this five-minute bonus, Rosemerry reads four poems responding to the coronavirus pandemic: 

A Change in the Light

The Afternoon the World Health Organization Declares a Pandemic

Staying Home

Tucking in My Daughter in the Time of Corona Virus

Rosemerry’s Daily Poem Blog, A Hundred Falling Veils

At some point, most creatives experience growing pains--when your project is going well and now you have decisions to make about whether to grow it, to bring in collaborators, or to expand your reach. We’ll also talk about avalanches of opportunity and money grubbing poets. Our guest this episode is the inimitable Rose Eveleth. She is the producer and host of Flash Forward, a podcast about the future. We’ll ask her two questions: 1) When do you know your project has grown beyond something you can do alone and you need to bring in collaborators? and 2) When the creative project you’re doing is bringing you new opportunities, how do you decide which ones to take and what direction you want to head?

Christie’s Book, Good to Go, finalist for the Colorado Book Award! 

Christie’s Courage Camps

Rose Eveleth (photo credit: Eler de Grey)

Flash Forward, a podcast about the future.

A Change in the Light

Now while the moon

is hiding behind the clouds

now when the rain

is falling midwinter,

and now that they’ve told us

not to hug or kiss each other

for fear of contracting

and spreading disease,

yes now is the time to find

whatever light we have

been hiding inside us—

whatever measure of brilliance

we’ve managed to conceal

from each other, from ourselves—

now is the time to bring forth

that luminescence and offer it

freely to the world, now

when light matters most.

In this bonus episode we talk with psychologist and author Scott Barry Kaufman about the imagination network--the default chatter in your brain--and how valuable it is. We also talk about paradox, and the tug between a longing for external validation and the need to look inward for creative growth. We talk about openness to experience as a key driver for creativity, and how a rut can sometimes serve the greater creative process. 

Are you living up to your creative potential? Or are you stuck in a rut? Could it be that the rut is serving you? These are some of the questions we wrestle with in this episode of Emerging Form. We talk about Christie’s sweet spot between struggle and boredom, how fencing (or another new activity) might supercharge your creative process, and LOTS of tips on how to get out of a rut. We finish, as always with a guest. This episode features Scott Barry Kaufman, a psychologist at Columbia University and author of the new book, Transcend: The New Science of Self-Actualization. We ask him these two questions:

* What does self-actualization look like for a creative person?

* What’s the path to self-actualization in one’s creative life?

Episode Notes

Christie’s review of Spirit Run: A 6,000-Mile Marathon Through North America’s Stolen Land by Noé Álvarez

Christie’s review of Wired to Create by Scott Barry Kaufman and Carolyn Gregoire

Kaufman’s NPR interview on Why So Many Gifted Yet Struggling Students are Hiding in Plain Sight

Kaufman’s The Psychology Podcast

Take a Self-Actualization Test

The figure skating routine to lift you out of a rut

En Garde

--Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

Keep distance, the fencing teacher says,

and by this he means, stay close enough

to your opponent that you could, at any time,

extend, lunge and attack with your point.

All my life, I’ve tried not to keep distance.

All my life, I’ve done my best to avoid

the attack—from either side. And now,

with my silver lamé and my one white glove

and my face safe behind metal mesh, I dig

to find the part of me who craves engagement,

who seeks a bout, who wants to threaten

my target and exploit their vulnerability.

Keep distance, he says, and I understand

that this is how I show up for the game.

This is how I meet not only the opponent,

but, perhaps for the first time, myself.

In this bonus episode, we continue our conversation with USA Today best-selling author Sarina Bowen, who has written more than 30 contemporary novels and is cohost of the #amwriting podcast. She tells us the most important thing to remember when we think we are utterly stuck and shares with us tools from her “deep bag of tricks” for how to get unstuck.  We also talk about how genre writers are like chefs, and she shares stories about three collaborative writing projects and what they taught her. 

Sarina Bowen