In this episode Rainier explores the myth that art can save us or that making beautiful things necessarily makes us better people. He travels to Córdoba, Spain, following the strange history of the Sarajevo Haggadah, an illuminated Jewish manuscript that survived expulsion from Spain, censorship in Venice, Nazi occupation, and the siege of Sarajevo. What begins as a story about the survival of a beautiful object becomes an investigation into creativity itself and what it means to build toward the kind of world we actually want to inhabit.

For More:

People of the Book: Geraldine Brooks

Create Yourself Alive: November 2-3

Join me in Charleston for Create Yourself Alive! It’s a two day immersion for creators who are ready to fully own their calling. This will be a powerful and intimate time.

Click here for more

Mary Renault (1905–1983):

Mary Renault was a British novelist best known for her historical fiction set in ancient Greece. Born Eileen Mary Challans in London in 1905, she studied English at St. Hugh’s College, Oxford, before training as a nurse at the Radcliffe Infirmary. There she met fellow nurse Julie Mullard, who became her lifelong partner. Renault worked as a nurse through much of the 1930s and during the Second World War, publishing her first novel, Purposes of Love, in 1939. Her 1947 novel Return to Night won a $150,000 prize from Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, giving Renault and Mullard the financial means to move to South Africa in 1948, where they remained for the rest of their lives. 

Renault published The Charioteer in 1953, a novel centered on relationships between gay men in wartime Britain. She then turned to the ancient world, including the Theseus trilogy. Her books brought together extensive historical research with fictional accounts. Renault was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1959 and continued writing until near the end of her life. She died in Cape Town in 1983 at the age of seventy-eight.

For More:

The Charioteer: Mary Renault

The Last of the Wine: Mary Renault

Mary Renault: A Biography: David Sweetman

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

In this episode, Rainier goes looking for the myth insisting that talent isn't earned, that it's beyond our control. He traces the story of blues legend Robert Johnson, who allegedly made a deal with the devil for his skill. The search widens to Niccolò Paganini, whose own audiences swore they saw the devil guiding his bow. And then looks at an ancient Greek legend about what happens when we claim to have talent that isn't a gift from the gifts.This is a story spanning three thousand years and asking the question: why do we need someone besides the person to take credit for the work?

For More:

Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues — Elijah Wald

Metamorphoses, Book VI: Arachne — Ovid, trans. A.S. Kline

The Devil's Violinist — dir. Bernard Rose

The Creators Collective:

Join us for our next masterclass on Anthony Bourdain and Julia Child, two of the most joyful, most enthusiastic apprentices to mastery this country's ever produced. We're talking about enthusiasm as a discipline, and delight as a skill you can build the same as any other. This is a gathering for creators who are finished performing and ready to make something worthy of their attention. Sign up today.

THE SALON

THE RECLAMATION

This September 13, I'm leading a six-week live immersion 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 that 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

In this episode Rainier explores the myths of the lone genius and the idea of authorship itself. He travels to Amsterdam to look at the work of Johannes Vermeer, discovering that what is often credited to the master is actually the work of an anonymous hand. The mystery pulls him further into the work of the Dutch realists, eventually taking him to Paris to trace the story of Alexandre Dumas, whose name alone survived a courtroom battle with his uncredited collaborator, Auguste Maquet. What begins as a search for a painter's true intention becomes an investigation into where the whole idea of the solitary author came from, and how recently, and for what reasons, we invented it.

For More:

Tim's Vermeer — dir. Teller

"What Is an Author?" — Michel Foucault, in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice

The Other Dumas--dir. Safy Nebbou

The Creators Collective:

Join us for our next masterclass Sunday August 23 at 11am Eastern, on Envy, and its importance as an engine for creative development. This is a gathering for creators who are finished performing and ready to make something worthy of their attention. Sign up today.

THE SALON

THE RECLAMATION

This September 13, I'm leading a six-week live immersion 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

Correction: the Cupid painting discussed in this episode is Vermeer's Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window, held in Dresden's Gemäldegalerie, not the Rijksmuseum 

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