Mary Austin (1868–1934):

Mary Austin was a chronicler of the American Southwest who refused the myth that the desert was empty. Born in Illinois, she moved west where scarcity, wind, and water refined both her perception and her prose. In an era intoxicated by expansion, railroads, aqueducts, and industrial ambition, she wrote about attention, insisting that the land was not backdrop but teacher. Through works like The Land of Little Rain, she articulated a radical cosmology of conservation and care for a living land. For creators, she stands as a reminder that attention itself is an ethical act, and that restraint can be a deeper form of abundance.

For More:

The Land of Little Rain — Mary Austin

The Life of Lozen, Apache Warrior

This spring, beginning April 6, I’m leading a twelve-week immersive journey: The Art of Grief: Creating Through Despair. Grief strips away what is excess. It clarifies. It refines. Through weekly transmissions, real assignments, live gatherings, and an in-person closing ceremony, we’ll explore how loss becomes language, and how sorrow can become structure for a new life. If you’re standing in the aftermath of something—and ready to make art from what remains, this is your invitation.

Sign up now!

Maxwell Perkins (1884–1947)

Max Perkins was an American book editor whose greatest work was not authorship, but fidelity. He spent thirty-six years at Charles Scribner’s Sons, where he reshaped American literature by standing beside writers at moments when their work, and their lives, were most unstable. Perkins edited and championed figures like F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and Thomas Wolfe. He believed editors should remain invisible, that the book belonged to the author, and that the highest creative labor was helping something become fully itself without claiming it. 

For More:

Editor of Genius — A. Scott Berg

Genius (The Movie)

Consider joining The Creators Collective, the community Rainier started for people who want to make art that is alive, grounded, and aligned with their deepest convictions. Inside: live teachings, historical deep dives, creative prompts, and a shared refusal to numb out.

Next class is February 22 on PRINCE!

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Arundhati Roy (1961– )

Arundhati Roy is an Indian novelist, essayist, and political thinker whose work insists that beauty and moral clarity belong to the same sentence. Born in Shillong and raised in Kerala, she emerged onto the global literary stage with her debut novel The God of Small Things, which won the Booker Prize in 1997. Rather than following literary success with market-friendly sequels, Roy turned her attention toward essays confronting nationalism, empire, caste violence, environmental destruction, and the quiet brutalities of modern power. Her nonfiction has made her one of the most influential and controversial public intellectuals of her generation. Roy is a creator who refused separation between art and conscience, choosing witness over comfort, and clarity over safety, even as that choice narrowed her life. She stands as a reminder that creativity is not merely expression, but orientation: a lifelong practice of attention, courage, and refusal to look away.

For More:

• The God of Small Things — Arundhati Roy
• The End of Imagination — Arundhati Roy
• Arundhati Roy — Encyclopædia Britannica

Want to go beyond listening about creators and become one?

Consider joining The Creators Collective, the community Rainier started for people who want to make art that is alive, grounded, and aligned with their deepest convictions. Inside: live teachings, historical deep dives, creative prompts, and a shared refusal to numb out.

Create yourself alive.

Sign up here!

Kay Parker (1944–2022):

Kay Parker became an unexpected icon during the so-called Golden Age of Porn in the 1970s and ’80s. She was widely recognized, intensely projected upon, and narrowly defined by roles she would later outgrow. In the early 2000s, Parker quietly re-emerged as a metaphysical teacher and writer, turning her attention to the nature of identity itself. Through her book Taboo: Sacred, Don’t Touch and years of intimate teaching, she explored how the self is constructed in response to fear, desire, and expectation. She passed away from cancer in 2022. 

For More:

Taboo: Sacred, Don’t Touch — Kay Parker

Archival interviews & reflections

Want to go beyond listening about creators and actually live like one?

Consider joining the next Creators Collective class. This month, we’re diving into Friedrich Nietzsche—not as meme or misquote, but as a companion for creators dismantling borrowed identities and learning how to author their own lives. A potent evening for anyone standing at the edge of change, ready to stop playing the role and start telling the truth.

THE SALON

THE INNER CIRCLE

Thomas Morton (c. 1579–1647)

Thomas Morton was America’s first banned poet and one of its earliest heretics of joy. A classically trained English lawyer with a humanist soul, Morton immigrated to New England in the late 1620s and became best known as the leader of the short-lived settlement of Merry Mount near present-day Quincy, Massachusetts. There he promoted poetry, music, seasonal celebrations, and social mixing that openly defied Puritan norms joy. Authorities raided the settlement and arrested Morton, eventually exiling him to England, where he wrote New English Canaan (1637), a satirical and critical account of Puritan society and colonial practices; the book was banned from entering the colonies. 

FOR MORE:

The New English Canaan of Thomas Morton

The Lord of Misrule

Want to go beyond listening about creators and actually live like one? Consider joining the next Creators Collectiveclass. This month, we’re diving into Friedrich Nietzsche—not as meme or misquote, but as a guide for creators dismantling borrowed values and learning how to author their own lives. A potent evening for anyone standing in the aftermath of certainty, ready to create from what’s real.

THE SALON

THE INNER CIRCLE

Are you interested in claiming one of the THREE spots for the Re-Wilding Imagination Retreat, February 12-15? If so, you can learn more here.

Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926):

Rainer Maria Rilke was the poet of inwardness, solitude, and becoming; a writer who refused answers in favor of deeper questions. Born in Prague at the crossroads of cultures, Rilke grew up exquisitely sensitive and perpetually displaced, a condition that would shape both his life and his work. He moved restlessly across Europe, apprenticing himself to lovers, artists, and places, most notably Lou Andreas-Salomé and the sculptor Auguste Rodin. His poetry and letters confront uncertainty as a vital condition of growth, urging readers to “live the questions” rather than rush toward certainty. Through works like The Book of Hours, Letters to a Young Poet, the Duino Elegies, and the Sonnets to Orpheus, Rilke articulated a radical ethic for creators: a willingness to let beauty and terror belong to the same life. 

For More:

Letters to a Young Poet — Rainer Maria Rilke

The Book of Hours — Rainer Maria Rilke

Rilke: In Paris — Documentary / biographical essays

Want to go beyond listening about creators and actually live like one? Consider joining the next Creators Collectiveclass. This month, Jan 18, we’re diving into Friedrich Nietzsche as a guide for creators dismantling borrowed values and learning how to author their own lives. Don't miss this class!

THE SALON

THE INNER CIRCLE

Lou Andreas-Salomé (1861–1937):

Lou Andreas-Salomé was born in St. Petersburg and later living across the great nerve-centers of German-speaking culture, she published novels, essays, and criticism on religion, eros, selfhood, and the inner life, writing about desire and identity decades before those subjects were culturally safe. She engaged with some of the most brilliant minds of her time: Friedrich Nietzsche, Rainer-Maria Rilke, and Sigmund Freud. Lou negotiated a form of autonomy, structure, and freedom in an age that demanded women follow rigid expectations. She was a creator of creators, a thinker who inspired other thinkers, and was a living argument that intimacy does not require ownership.

For More:

Lou Andreas-Salomé — Encyclopædia Britannica

Sigmund Freud and Lou Andreas-Salomé, Letters (Norton)

Johns Hopkins Library Exhibit: “Lou Andreas-Salomé: A Brief Biography”

Want to go beyond listening about creators, and become one? Consider joining The Creators Collective, the community Rainier started to unblock your purpose and ignite your passions. This group is filled with resources, and live teachings from Rainier. This month we'll be studying Nietzsche, on January 18. Sign up now to join us live!

Dorothy Day (1897–1980):

Dorothy Day was a journalist-turned-organizer whose greatest creation was community itself. Born in Brooklyn and raised amid the changes of early-20th-century America. After a conversion to Catholicism in her thirties she co-founded The Catholic Worker in 1933, a penny newspaper that became a rallying cry for mercy, justice, and nonviolent resistance. Alongside it, she helped establish Houses of Hospitality across the country, where the hungry were fed, the homeless sheltered, and dignity treated as non-negotiable. A committed pacifist, Day opposed war, capitalism’s cruelties, and the quiet violence of indifference, enduring arrests, surveillance, and criticism from both Church and State. By the time of her death, she had reshaped the moral imagination of American faith.

For More:

The Long Loneliness — Dorothy Day

Dorothy Day: A Radical Devotion — PBS Documentary

The Catholic Worker Movement (catholicworker.org)

Want to go beyond listening about creators, and become one? Consider signing up for the next Creators Collective class. This one's on the OG Rebel poet, prophet, creative type--Jesus Christ. Don't miss inspiring and powerful class for anyone looking to resurrect their creative life.

THE SALON

THE INNER CIRCLE

Sister Rosetta Tharpe (1915–1973):

Sister Rosetta Tharpe was the gospel virtuoso who rewrote the DNA of modern music. Born in Cotton Plant, Arkansas, and raised in the Pentecostal revivals of the American South, she became a national sensation in her teens as an electric-guitar prodigy whose fusion of sacred lyrics and blistering rhythm prefigured rock and roll by decades. In the 1930s and ’40s she recorded groundbreaking gospel hits, played the Cotton Club, toured with jazz greats, and astonished audiences with her fearless blend of church fervor and nightclub swagger. British blues musicians later traced their entire sound back to her records, crediting her as a foundational influence on artists like Elvis, Little Richard, and Johnny Cash. Though her career waned late in life and she died with little fanfare, Rosetta is now recognized as the godmother of rock and roll, an artist whose innovation, authority, and audacity shaped the world.

For More:

Shout, Sister, Shout!: The Untold Story of Rock-and-Roll Trailblazer Sister Rosetta Tharpe — Gayle F. Wald

American Masters: Sister Rosetta Tharpe — The Godmother of Rock & Roll (PBS Documentary)

Archival 1964 Manchester Performance

Want to go beyond listening about creators, and become one? Consider signing up for the next Creators Collective class. This one's on the OG Rebel poet, prophet, creative type--Jesus Christ. Don't miss inspiring and powerful class for anyone looking to resurrect their creative life.

THE SALON

THE INNER CIRCLE

Brian Doyle (1956–2017):

Brian Doyle was the joyful warrior of wonder. Born into a roaring Irish-Catholic family, he learned early that holiness hid inside the ordinary. After years in journalism, he landed in Oregon and became editor of Portland Magazine. Here his voice was transformed into one of America’s most astonishing essayists, writing in long, breathless sentences that felt like prayer and play at the same time. He died early of tragic brain cancer and left behind a body of work including novels, essays, letters, and love stories about grit and grace. Doyle believed that attention was a form of love and that praise was the only accurate response to this world. Today, he is considered one of the greatest evangelists of awe in an age of cynicism.

For More

One Long River of Song--Brian Doyle

Collected Archives--Portland Magazine

Review--New York Times

Want to go beyond listening about creators, and become one? Consider joining The Creators Collective...the community Rainier started to unblock your purpose and ignite your passions. Filled with live teachings, creative prompts, and a circle of fellow makers, it’s where you create yourself alive.

THE SALON

THE INNER CIRCLE