“I believe that telling our story, even the story of a moment, the story of an emotion, is one of the most healing things we can do,” says James Crews, poet, teacher and speaker. His new book, Unlocking the Heart: Writing for Courage, Mindfulness and Self-Compassion blends poetry, essays and writing prompts to help readers tell their own stories. We speak about this unusual blending of genres, writing as a healing practice, and how to write titles and first lines that draw people in. 

James Crews is the editor of several bestselling books, including The Path to Kindness and How to Love the World, which has over 100,000 copies in print. He has been featured in The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, The New York Times Magazine, The New Republic, The Christian Science Monitor, and on NPR’s Morning Edition. The author of four prize-winning books of poetry and of the book Kindness Will Save the World, James also speaks and leads workshops on kindness, mindfulness, and writing for self-compassion. He lives with his husband on forty rocky acres in the woods of Southern Vermont. AND The Wonder of Small Things just won the New England Book Award for Poetry! He also hosts a monthly writing community and sends out a weekly newsletter.

To purchase signed books and join his newsletter: https://linktr.ee/jcrewsjr

More on James Crews: https://www.jamescrews.net/

For info on his monthly writing community: https://www.themonthlypause.com/

One of the most thrilling stories of creative inspiration is that of Rainer Maria Rilke writing Sonnets to Orpheus and the Duino Elegies following a time of great international and personal upheaval. Translator and poet Mark S. Burrows shares Rilke’s story with us and talks with us about the art of translation–full of creative conundrums and choices and impossible invitations. It’s a heart-opening, deeply compelling episode about how we are all translators, “listening to the deepest voice” and how life itself is our greatest creative act. 

Mark S. Burrows is an award-winning poet, translator, and scholar. An historian of medieval Christianity, he is a much sought-after speaker and retreat leader in the US and Europe. He is a past president of the Society for the Study of Christian Spirituality and currently edits poetry for the society’s journal Spiritus. His most recent translation is Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus (2024). He recently published You Are the Future: Living the Questions with Rainer Maria Rilke (2024), cowritten with Stephanie Dowrick. He lives and writes in Camden, ME. 

https://www.msburrows.com/

www.soul-in-sight.org 

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. 

www.mirabaistarr.com

www.wildheart.space

https://www.instagram.com/mirabaistarr/

https://www.facebook.com/mirabai.starr.author/

https://www.harpercollins.com/products/ordinary-mysticism-mirabai-starr?variant=41325260668962

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.