Audre Lorde (1934–1992):

Audre Lorde was an American poet, essayist, librarian, teacher, and activist whose work explored race, sexuality, gender, motherhood, illness, and the uses of power. Born in New York City to Caribbean immigrant parents, Lorde began writing poetry as a teenager and published her first poem in Seventeen magazine while still in high school. She later worked as a librarian and taught at institutions including Tougaloo College and John Jay College, while emerging as one of the most distinctive voices in twentieth-century American poetry and feminist thought. Lorde described herself as “Black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet,” refusing to separate identities that the culture around her often treated as incompatible. Lorde argued for the necessity of difference, self-definition, and speaking what has been silenced. She died of cancer in St. Croix in 1992 at the age of fifty-eight.

For More:

POWER--Audre Lorde

The Cancer Journals — Audre Lorde

The Black Unicorn — Audre Lorde

Warrior Poet (A Biography)--Alexis Devaux

Want to go beyond listening about creators and actually live like one? Consider joining the next Creators Collective class. This is a gathering for creators who are finished performing indifferently and are ready to make something worthy of their attention.

THE SALON

THE RECLAMATION

SEPTEMBER 13 I'm leading a six-week live experience called The Reclamation. It's for anyone who senses that some essential part of themselves has been buried beneath expectation, fear, responsibility, or simply years of surviving. Together we'll explore what it means to recover your own creative voice. Through live gatherings, weekly practices, thoughtful prompts, and a community of fellow creators, we'll make room for the life and the creativity hat has been waiting for your full attention. If you're ready to reclaim your creative self, I’d love to welcome you.

FIND OUT MORE HERE

To apply for one-on-one creative mentorship:

GO HERE

Osip & Nadezhda Mandelstam (1891–1938 / 1899–1980):

Osip Mandelstam was one of the 20th centuries great poets and founder of the Acmeist movement in pre-revolutionary St. Petersburg, Osip composed his poems aloud, committing them to memory rather than paper, until sixteen unwritten lines mocking Stalin got him arrested, exiled, and finally killed in a transit camp near Vladivostok in 1938. His wife, Nadezhda, spent more than two decades in deliberate invisibility, carrying his life's work in her memory. Together their lives ask what it means to know something by heart and to commit fully to that knowing.

For More:

Hope Against Hope — Nadezhda Mandelstam

The Voronezh Notebooks — Osip Mandelstam

A Dictator Calls — Ismail Kadare

THE RECLAMATION

This August, I'm leading a six-week live experience called The Reclamation. It's for anyone who senses that some essential part of themselves has been buried beneath expectation, fear, responsibility, or simply years of surviving. Together we'll explore what it means to recover your own creative voice. Through live gatherings, weekly practices, thoughtful prompts, and a community of fellow creators, we'll make room for the life and the creativity hat has been waiting for your full attention. If you're ready to reclaim your creative self, I’d love to welcome you.

FIND OUT MORE HERE

To apply for one-on-one creative mentorship:

GO HERE

Want to go beyond listening about creators and actually live like one? Consider joining the next Creators Collective class. This is a gathering for creators who are finished performing indifferently and are ready to make something worthy of their attention.

THE SALON

The Chauvet Cave (c. 36,000 years ago):

Chauvet Cave preserves some of the oldest known works of human art. Discovered in 1994 after being sealed for more than twenty thousand years, its walls are alive with animals, many of which are now extinct, rendered with astonishing technical mastery. The cave was never a home. These paintings weren’t created for public display, but for purposes that remain profoundly mysterious. Chauvet challenges one of our modern assumptions about creativity: that art exists to be seen. Instead, it offers a vision of making as ritual, devotion, community, and participation in something far larger than recognition itself.

For More:

The Cave of Forgotten Dreams — Werner Herzog

Chauvet Cave: The Art of Earliest Times — Jean Clottes

THE RECLAMATION

This August, I'm leading a six-week live experience called The Reclamation. It's for anyone who senses that some essential part of themselves has been buried beneath expectation, fear, responsibility, or simply years of surviving. Together we'll explore what it means to recover your own creative voice. Through live gatherings, weekly practices, thoughtful prompts, and a community of fellow creators, we'll make room for the life and the creativity hat has been waiting for your full attention. If you're ready to reclaim your creative self, I’d love to welcome you.

FIND OUT MORE HERE

To apply for one-on-one creative mentorship:

GO HERE

Want to go beyond listening about creators and actually live like one? Consider joining the next Creators Collective class. This is a gathering for creators who are finished performing indifferently and are ready to make something worthy of their attention.

THE SALON

Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806–1861): 

One of the great poets of the Victorian era. Confined for years by chronic illness, family control, and fear, she produced remarkable poetry from an isolated room. It was only after secretly marrying Robert Browning and escaping to Florence that her fullest work emerged. There she began to live a free life and sense of self, publishing Sonnets from the Portuguese, Aurora Leigh, becoming one of the defining literary voices of her century. Her life asks the question about what happens when we take the creatively courageous step of reimagining the rooms we choose to be in.

For More: 

Aurora Leigh — Elizabeth Barrett Browning 

Sonnets from the Portuguese — Elizabeth Barrett Browning 

The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning

THE RECLAMATION

This August, I'm leading a six-week live experience called The Reclamation. It's for anyone who senses that some essential part of themselves has been buried beneath expectation, fear, responsibility, or simply years of surviving. Together we'll explore what it means to recover your own creative voice. Through live gatherings, weekly practices, thoughtful prompts, and a community of fellow creators, we'll make room for the life and the creativity hat has been waiting for your full attention. If you're ready to reclaim your creative self, I’d love to welcome you.

FIND OUT MORE HERE

Jiro Ono (1925– )

Jiro Ono is a Japanese sushi master whose life's work has become one of the clearest modern examples of craftsmanship. Born in rural Japan, he began working in the kitchen at the age of seven, served in a munitions factory during the Second World War, and spent nearly two decades apprenticing in kitchens before opening the ten-seat restaurant that would become Sukiyabashi Jiro, in 1965. His uncompromising standards transformed generations of chefs. In 2007, Sukiyabashi Jiro became the first sushi restaurant to receive three Michelin stars, and in 2014 it welcomed President Barack Obama, who later called it the finest sushi he had ever eaten. At 100, he is still creating. 

For More:

• Jiro Dreams of Sushi — directed by David Gelb
• Sukiyabashi Jiro: The Pursuit of Perfection — official restaurant history

Want to go beyond listening about creators and actually live like one? Consider joining the next Creators Collective class. This is a gathering for creators who are finished performing indifferently and are ready to make something worthy of their attention.

THE SALON

To apply for one-on-one creative mentorship:

GO HERE

Varian Fry (1907–1967):

Varian Fry was an American journalist, classicist, and magazine editor who became one of the most consequential rescuers of the twentieth century. In August 1940, he arrived in Vichy France to do what his own government refused to do. Over thirteen months in Marseille, Fry forged documents, ran a safe house out of a crumbling villa, and built a footpath over the Pyrenees that would carry thousands of creators and thinkers out of occupied Europe alive, among them Hannah Arendt, Marc Chagall, and Max Ernst. He was expelled from France in 1941, and released by his organization. His unofficial and un-sanctioned work was not recognized or rewarded during his lifetime by the American government. He worked as a freelance writer and high school teacher before dying of a heart attack at fifty-nine. His country didn't honor him until twenty-four years after his death. 

For More:

• Surrender on Demand — Varian Fry
• Villa Air-Bel: World War II, Escape, and a House in Marseille — Rosemary Sullivan

• Transatlantic — Netflix limited series (dramatized)

Want to go beyond listening about creators and actually live like one? Consider joining the next Creators Collective class. This month, we're exploring shameless creativity—the courage to care deeply, create boldly, and build a life large enough to contain the things that matter most. A gathering for creators who are finished performing indifference and ready to make something worthy of their attention.

THE SALON

To apply for one-on-one creative mentorship:

GO HERE

Hildegard of Bingen was a Benedictine abbess, composer, mystic, scientist, healer, linguist, and one of the most extraordinary creative minds of the medieval world. Enclosed in a monastery from childhood, she transformed the apparent confines of her life into an astonishing intellectual and artistic career. Over eight decades, she composed groundbreaking music, wrote visionary theological works, produced volumes on medicine and natural history, invented an original language, and corresponded with popes, emperors, bishops, and kings. Hildegard articulated a vision of human flourishing rooted in vitality, imagination, and the courage to follow one's calling beyond the limits imposed by culture, convention, or authority.

For More:

• Scivias — Hildegard of Bingen

• A Feather on the Breath of God — Gothic Voices (recording of Hildegard's music)

• Vision: From the Life of Hildegard von Bingen — directed by Margarethe von Trotta

Want to go beyond listening about creators and actually live like one? Consider joining the next Creators Collective class. This month, we're exploring shameless creativity—the courage to care deeply, create boldly, and build a life large enough to contain the things that matter most. A gathering for creators who are finished performing indifference and ready to make something worthy of their attention.

THE SALON

Ted Lucas (1939–1992) was a Detroit-born guitarist, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist whose music blended folk, blues, psychedelia, raga influences, and intimate singer-songwriter traditions. Emerging from Detroit’s vibrant 1960s underground scene, Lucas first gained attention as a member of the psychedelic folk-blues band The Spike Drivers before releasing his now-cult 1975 solo album OM, a private-press acoustic record later hailed by collectors and musicians as a lost masterpiece of American folk music. Though admired by peers for his extraordinary guitar work and melodic sensibility, Lucas struggled with the music industry and never achieved widespread recognition during his lifetime. Decades after his death, renewed interest from archivists, collectors, and Third Man Records helped introduce his work to a new generation. 

***

This episode would not exist without the extraordinary archival work of Detroit historian and record collector Mike Dutkewych, whose years of dedication to recovering, preserving and championing Ted Lucas's music helped bring this overlooked artist back into the public consciousness. His care and commitment to Ted's legacy are deeply felt throughout this story.

FOR MORE

Third Man Records--Ted Lucas' Images of Life

Detroit Free Press

Creative Mentorship

Currently Rainier is enrolling for several 1x1 mentorship spots. This is for people who are looking to recover their sense of creative passion and purpose. A 3-4 month container, combining individual time, community, and independent study, all working towards bringing you to the next stage in your artistic identity.

To Apply

The Creators Collective

If you want to go beyond listening about the lives of creators and take your next steps in becoming one, consider signing up for the Creators Collective, the membership for people who want to be artistic with living. Monthly masterclasses, craft workshops, co-creation spaces, and open mics, as well as hundreds of archived hours of teaching, and ongoing community prompts.

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Jean Genet (1910–1986) was a French novelist, playwright, poet, and political provocateur whose life and work transformed twentieth-century literature. Genet spent much of his youth in reformatories, prisons, and on the margins of European society as a thief, drifter, and sex worker. While imprisoned during World War II, he began writing novels such as Our Lady of the Flowers and The Thief’s Journal, works that praised criminals, outsiders, and the condemned and elevated them into figures of beauty and almost religious significance. Championed by intellectuals like Jean-Paul Sartre and artists such as Pablo Picasso, Genet became one of France’s most influential literary figures despite never abandoning his fascination with transgression, betrayal, and rebellion. In his later years he aligned himself with radical political movements including the Black Panther Party and Palestinian liberation groups, remaining an uncompromising outsider until his death in Paris in 1986.

FOR MORE:

Encyclopedia Britannica

The Works of Genet

Want to go beyond listening to creators and become one? The Creators Collective is for individuals who are looking to transform their own life through art and creation. Writers, poets, painters, and ordinary radicals wanting to take the next steps and make a difference. With monthly masterclasses, craft workshops, co-creation studios, open mic salons, hundreds of hours of archived teaching, and an ongoing community of others engaged in the same work. This is a deep dive into your creative soul.

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George Sand (1804–1876), born Aurore Dupin in Paris, was one of the most prolific and influential writers of 19th-century France. She married Baron Casimir Dudevant before leaving the marriage to pursue an independent literary life in Paris. Adopting the male pseudonym “George Sand,” she published novels, essays, plays, and political writings that explored class, gender, rural life, love, and social freedom. Known for wearing men’s clothing in public and moving within radical artistic circles, Sand became a major cultural figure and had a highly publicized relationship with composer Frédéric Chopin. Over her lifetime she produced more than seventy novels and maintained correspondence with many of the leading intellectuals and artists of her era, remaining a central voice in French literature until her death in 1876.

FOR MORE:

Frederic Chopin & George Sand

George Sand Books

The Creators Collective is open for enrollment. This is the membership where you create your self alive. We have monthly masterclasses, craft workshops, co creation spaces, open mic salons, a dedicated community chat board to connect with others, and hundreds of hours of archived teaching, helping you establish your own creative voice. Take the next step!

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