Let's Have a Renaissance: The DateKeepers Podcast with Itto and Mekiya Outini

Susan Kelly-DeWitt is an award-winning poet and visual artist. She’s published collections with independent presses across the US, and her work has appeared in prestigious journals including Poetry, Prairie Schooner, and The North American Review. She’s also edited the print journal Quercus and the online publication Perihelion, and she’s now a member of the National Book Critics Circle. In this episode, Susan reflects on how her isolated upbringing in a remote corner of Hawaii has shaped her artistic practice and shares the surprising impact that a single poem can make in a noisy and fast-moving world. 

William Wallace Rose is a writer, poet, actor, traveler, printmaker, educator, and translator. He’s taught drama in Switzerland, creative writing in the US, and English as a foreign language in the Czech Republic, and his work has been supported by the Edward F. Albee Foundation. He now lives in France, where he’s immersed in the ancient regional language Occitan. In this episode, we discuss the current state of the language, its music, and its literature, contemporary as well as medieval, and William reads an excerpt from his English translation of a short story in Occitan, a comic crime drama by Florian Vernet. 

Abeer Hoque is a writer, poet, photographer, traveler, and educator. Born in Nigeria to Bangladeshi parents, she moved to the US when she was 13 and has since traversed much of the world, drawing on various media to document what she’s seen. In this episode, she shares her thoughts on the relationship between text and image and how her transnational perspective has informed her artistic practice, and we discuss what it means to be a writer and photographer in an age when everyone has a camera and word processor in their pocket. 

Boris Fishman is the author of three critically acclaimed novels and one memoir. His journalism has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian, and elsewhere. He’s taught at Princeton University, the University of Montana, and most recently the University of Austin. In this episode, we discuss the complex relationship between fiction and journalism and the practical challenges of teaching creative writing, and Boris shares his experience as a liberal professor at a conservative university. 

Ashley Wren Collins is a director, choreographer, producer, actor, and author of five books, both fiction and nonfiction. Her indie feature film Changing Taste won Best Comedy in the 2013 Burbank International Film Festival and the 2014 Manhattan Film Festival, her choreography for the smash hit musical Foxy Ladies Love Boogie 70s Explosion was lauded as “sensational” by Discover Hollywood, and her writing has been supported by the Edward F. Albee Foundation. In this episode, we discuss various approaches to collaborative partnerships, and Ashley shares the secrets that have empowered her to thrive as a multidisciplinary artist. 

Hailed by The New Yorker as an “unusually inventive composer” and “innovative [harpist],” Anne LeBaron has spent her long career pushing the boundaries of opera and pioneering new forms of collaborative, grassroots, comic, and electronic composition. Her work has garnered widespread critical acclaim and has been supported by the Fulbright, MacDowell, the Copland House, and many other foundations. In this episode, Anne shares her take on opera’s evolution across the last fifty years, and we discuss several of her works, including her latest project, LSD: Huxley’s Last Trip, which earned her the Opera America Discovery Grant and takes a new look at the strange cast of characters behind the discovery, study, misuse, and institutional control of LSD. 

Matthew Dunivan is an actor, playwright, filmmaker, teacher, and jack of all trades. The son of a drywall installer with no college degree, he beat the odds by earning an MFA from Columbia University in New York—all because God didn’t promptly answer his adolescent prayers. In this episode, he shares his journey, and we address one of the most pressing questions of our age: is it harder to get a terminal degree from an elite institution, or 300,000 followers on Instagram? Also, how many followers should your plumber have?

Julian Kreimer is an artist, critic, educator, and chair of the MFA program in Visual Arts at SUNY Purchase College. His work has been supported by the MacDowell foundation and others, shown in galleries around the US, and reviewed in publications including Art in America, Hyperallergic, and Artcritical. In this episode, we discuss strategies to help artists balance their creative practices with their administrative duties and reflect on the catalytic role that hardship and suffering play in the production of powerful art. 

Eric ‘Wally’ Wallach is a playwright, bike dancer, and innovator committed to pushing the boundaries of traditional theatrical forms in pursuit of human connection and spiritual rejuvenation. In this episode, we discuss what makes a good play, what’s wrong with modern theater, and how it can be revitalized, and Wally walks us through one of his most experimental projects, Flight 18, conceived as a way of cutting out the performative middleman and transforming audiences into communities.

In this episode, we read one of the first stories we wrote together, “To the Island and Halfway Back,” originally published in Sortes.