In the Atelier

In the Atelier

By Atelier26 BooksArts
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In the Atelier episodes

  • Atelier Visit: Writer Bess Winter

    ATELIER VISIT WITH WRITER BESS WINTER: Atelier Visits take you into the creative workspaces of artists we admire. We're asking writers, visual artists, musicians, and filmmakers to bring you right inside their respective ateliers and share a bit about their process, their creative preoccupations, whatever is on their minds lately. It's an opportunity to spend a little while with various brilliant people who are busy doing good imaginative, artistic work. They'll speak to us directly about what life and creativity is like for them. Bess Winter's debut short story collection, Machines of Another Era, appeared from Gold Wake Press in January 2021. Her work appears in American Short Fiction, Gettysburg Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Ecotone, W.W. Norton’s Flash Fiction International, and elsewhere, and has been awarded a Pushcart Prize and the American Short[er] Fiction Prize. An Assistant Professor of English at Eastern Illinois University, she’s Editor-in-Chief of Bluestem Magazine. Visit BessWinter.com. Mentioned in this episode: Urbana, IL; Roger Ebert; David Foster Wallace; Stanley Elkin; William Gass; old dolls; ghosts. Music: "Deep Brown Eyes" and "Grace" by Raccoon Racoon (Music used courtesy of the artist through a licensing agreement with Artlist.) This episode reprised from the ITA archives.

    10 min
  • Why It's Desirable to Be Eccentric
    WHY IT'S DESIRABLE TO BE ECCENTRIC: "Originality is the one thing which unoriginal minds cannot feel the use of." In 1859 the great English thinker John Stuart Mill published, in Chapter Three of his treatise On Liberty, one of history’s most cogent essays on the subject of Individuality, originality, genius, and eccentricity. To Mill’s view, mass opinion (what we might call “mass culture” these days), is an undeniable blight to individuality, and therefore directly threatens freedoms civic and intellectual, cultural, and democratic. While explicitly political, Mill’s argument reaches down to the foundations of human nature and culture, articulating many of the challenges artists and writers face in a media-driven society fixated upon dollars earned, hits per day, and “going viral.”
    Mentioned in this episode: John Stuart Mill; Mill's "On Liberty"; Victorian England; keeping up with the joneses; Ray Bradbury; bestseller lists; Billboard charts; Oprah endorsements; culture vs. commerce; becoming valuable to oneself and to others; despotism; John Gardner; the National Endowment for the Arts; the tyrannical majority; unpopular vs. uncommercial; persons of genius; arts funding. 
    Music: "Hands of Time" by Narrow Skies; "Interspacing" by Yehezkel Raz; "Fragments" by Borrtex; "Birds & Daisies" by Racoon Racoon
    (All music used courtesy of the artists through a licensing agreement with Artlist.)
    22 min
  • Atelier Visit: Writer Amy Lee Lillard
    ATELIER VISIT WITH WRITER AMY LEE LILLARD: Atelier Visits take you into the creative workspaces of artists we admire. We're asking writers, visual artists, musicians, and filmmakers to bring you right inside their respective ateliers and share a bit about their process, their creative preoccupations, whatever is on their minds lately. It's an opportunity to spend a little while with various brilliant people who are busy doing good imaginative, artistic work. They'll speak to us directly about what life and creativity is like for them. Today: award-winning fiction writer Amy Lee Lillard at home in Des Moines, Iowa. Lillard's debut book, the kick-ass short story collection DIG ME OUT, is coming from Atelier26 Books in October 2021 and available for preorder now at Atelier26Books.com. 
    Mentioned in this episode: election seasons; rad Raygun tees; living on your own; old houses; bats; feral cats; maintenance calls; rainbow fire; working from home; Broads and Books podcast; Sleater Kinney; Bikini Kill; Nine Inch Nails; Trent Reznor; Iggy Pop; profane cross-stitch; owning your creative identity.  
    Music: "Wellington Joke" by Manos Mars; "Du Da" by Ian Post; "Broken Radios" by Stanley Gurvich; "Start Over" by Skygaze; "Just Right" by Generation Lost (All music used courtesy of the artists through a licensing agreement with Artlist)
    13 min
  • About Discouragement (Bonus Installment)
    ABOUT DISCOURAGEMENT: Artists and writers, at some point (or several points) you're going to receive the message that your work is insignificant. You're going to wonder what use there is in continuing to do and share your work. It's unlikely that you will escape this unpleasantness. But when it arrives, remember that almost nobody escapes it -- that you've come to a new threshold. This is a bonus Installment of IN THE ATELIER. Check out our longer episodes too. IN THE ATELIER is produced by the award-winning literary publisher Atelier26 Books and hosted by M. Allen Cunningham. www.Atelier26Books.com / www.MAllenCunningham.com. Music: "For the Broken Hearted" by Yehezkel Raz (All music used courtesy of the artists through a licensing agreement with Artlist) This installment reprised from the ITA archives.
    5 min
  • The Value of Travel

    THE VALUE OF TRAVEL: Reflections on travel and inspiration, on travel and parenting, on travel and expense, and on travel as a personal, creative, and maybe even moral responsibility. Mentioned in this episode: where ideas come from; spurring inspiration; child-rearing; American passport holders; innumerable (and numerable) benefits of travel; the "go while you're young" mindset; travel and affordability; travel as excessive expense; prioritizing travel; serendipity; artists on national currency; small cultural differences; Adam Gopnick; Gopnick's Paris to the Moon; unquantifiable value; bringing a child abroad. Music: "Mood" by We Are the Good; "Flight of the Inner Bird" by Sivan Talmor; "Lives" by Angel Salazar (All music used courtesy of the artists through a licensing agreement with Artlist.)

    17 min
  • Atelier Visit: Writer Woody Skinner
    ATELIER VISIT WITH WRITER WOODY SKINNER: Atelier Visits take you into the creative workspaces of artists we admire. We're asking writers, visual artists, musicians, and filmmakers to bring you right inside their respective ateliers and share a bit about their process, their creative preoccupations, whatever is on their minds lately. It's an opportunity to spend a little while with various brilliant people who are busy doing good imaginative, artistic work. They'll speak to us directly about what life and creativity is like for them. Woody Skinner's debut short story collection, A Thousand Distant Radios, was published by Atelier26 Books and was a semi-finalist for PEN America's  PEN/Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction. His work has won the Sherwood Anderson Fiction Award and appeared in Mid-American Review, The Carolina Quarterly, Hobart, Booth, Another Chicago Magazine, and elsewhere. Mentioned in this episode: chalkware cowboys; 1950s beer cans; cluttered desk-space; mid-century masculinity; Arkansas; Cincinnati, OH; Chicago, IL; objects and the imagination; Luke Geddes' novel Heart of Junk; Bess Winter's Machines of Another Era; Skinner's short story "The Knife Salesman"; writing in coffee shops; crust punks; scones; the value of corporate environments; the virtues of boredom. Music: "Winner" by Ofrin; "Tunnel Vision" and "Memories" by Stanley Gurvich; "Lost in the Future" by Swirling Ship (All music used courtesy of the artists through a licensing agreement with Artlist) This episode reprised from the ITA Archives.
    12 min
  • It Is Natural to Need Help
    IT IS NATURAL TO NEED HELP: Once upon a time I relished the idea of “making it” on my own. I didn’t foresee the hazards. Mentioned in this episode: Being a lone wolf; acting versus writing; self-reliance; the rat race; grants and fellowships; Malcolm Gladwell; Gladwell's "Outliers"; Thornton Wilder; meritocracy; Alain de Botton; Botton's "Status Anxiety"; Andrew Carnegie; success myths; moral debts; editors Music: "Killing Time" by Stanley Gurvich; "Drift" by Be Still the Earth (All music used courtesy of the artists through a licensing agreement with Artlist) This episode reprised from the ITA Archives.
    11 min
  • Atelier Visit: Filmmaker Brian Padian
    ATELIER VISIT WITH FILMMAKER BRIAN PADIAN: Atelier Visits take you into the creative workspaces of artists we admire. We're asking writers, visual artists, musicians, and filmmakers to bring you right inside their respective ateliers and share a bit about their process, their creative preoccupations, whatever is on their minds lately. It's an opportunity to spend a little while with various brilliant people who are busy doing good imaginative, artistic work. They'll speak to us directly about what life and creativity is like for them. Brian Padian is the writer/director of the award-winning web series Microagressions, which played at NYC Webfest, the feature-length film The Black Sea, the forthcoming web series Man of La Mansion, and the forthcoming feature-length film Sister/Brother. Mentioned in this episode: telecommuting; breakfast for the kids; day jobs; something to push against; laziness; the problems with monomaniacal ambition; monotony and the "meaningless"; Final Cut; Padian's first feature film The Black Sea; American Film Institute; Ingmar Bergman; Mike Leigh's Naked; David Lynch's Lost Highway; Jim Jarmusch's Dead Man; artist Noah Nakell; Sight & Sound magazine; Film Comment magazine; Filmmaker magazine; American Cinematographers magazine; naivete; Padian's short film "The Big Black Dark"; bookshelves as totems; screenplay versus finished film; budget limitations; screenwriting as travel planning; primacy of image, cast, and crew; the hazards of the artist's waiting and wanting; power in the doing; the Oregon coast; sneaker waves; dolly tracks; letting go; aspiration versus reality; tiny miracles. Music: "Retrospecting" by Yehezkel Raz; "Per Paura Che Si Rompa" by Bottega Baltazar; "Momentum" by Borrtex; "Roots" by I Am Fowler (All music used courtesy of the artists through a licensing agreement with Artlist)
    14 min
  • Soul School (with John Keats)
    SOUL SCHOOL WITH JOHN KEATS: The English poet John Keats died unknown to the world at age twenty-five. The odds were against him from the start. Today his poetic mastery is often cited as being second only to Shakespeare. In this episode we look at a letter Keats wrote in 1819, in which he called the world "the vale of Soul-Making."  Mentioned in this episode: John Keats; Shakespeare; Christianity; Rilke Music: "Another Green World" by Loyla; "Papyrus" by Kyle Preston; "Ballo in Casa Capuleti" by Bottega Baltazar. (All music used by courtesy of the artists through a licensing agreement with Artlist.) Episode reprised from the ITA archives.
    9 min

About In the Atelier

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In the Atelier is a creativity podcast for writers & artists that explores the life of the imagination. Each installment brings you real talk on subjects like the highs & lows of making art,…