In the Atelier

ATELIER SPECIAL: VARIATIONS ON A BEGINNING -- Atelier Specials feature original creative content including essays, fiction, and excerpts. For today's inaugural Atelier Special: an autobiographical essay by M. Allen Cunningham, slightly abridged. "Variations on a Beginning" was originally published in The Timberline Review (issue 3, summer/fall 2016). You can read the complete essay at medium.com/@M_A_Cunningham. Mentioned in this episode: Monterey Bay; guns; Edmond Jabes; selling for writers; narrative; secrets; Jacques Derrida; Italo Calvino; biblical story of Samuel; Zen Master Shunriyu Suzuki Roshi; Henry James. (All music used courtesy of the artists through a licensing agreement with Artlist)

WHAT WOULD LEONARD COHEN DO? : If you’re a hardworking creative soul striving to continue doing the work of the expressive imagination, striving to honor an authentic vision that resists the forces of market optimization, you could do a lot worse than immerse yourself in Leonard Cohen’s corpus and give this question your consideration: What would Leonard do? Mentioned in this episode: Leonard Cohen; Cohen's "Hallelujah"; Songs of Leonard Cohen; Cohen's 1963 debut novel The Favorite Game; CBC Television; Cohen's novel Beautiful Losers; Cohen's performance style; Bob Dylan; Cohen's "Famous Blue Raincoat"; Zen; Mount Baldy; Leonard Cohen world tour; skipping at age 78; Cohen's album You Want It Darker; Cohen's album Thanks for the Dance; Feist; Beck; Damien Rice.

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)

TIME FOR EVERYTHING: In 1825, the great English essayist Charles Lamb wrote about his unexpected retirement and his struggles adapting to his sudden overabundance of time. In some ways, this could not be more relevant right now. Mentioned in this episode: Romantic Poets; John Keats; Percy Bysshe Shelley; William Wordsworth; Samuel Taylor Coleridge; Lamb's "The Superannuated Man"; East India Company; office life; drudgery; desk job; retirement; vacation time; leisure; depression; eternity; slowness; inactivity; thoughtfulness; freedom. Music: "Hands of Time" by Narrow Skies; "Fall" by ANBR; "Sails" by Rodello's Machine (All music used courtesy of the artists through a licensing agreement with Artlist) Episode reprised from the ITA Archives