Books & Writers · The Creative Process: Novelists, Screenwriters, Playwrights, Poets, Non-fiction Writers & Journalists Talk Writing, Life & Creativity

How do writers develop their voice, showing us what is important in life? ADA LIMÓN (24th U.S. Poet Laureate, Startlement, The Carrying ) explains that her poetry begins with a bodily sensation or curiosity, not an...

How can we use negative spaces in fiction to engage with readers’ imaginations? How are memory and trauma passed onto us through language? How do we become more than the stories we tell ourselves? KATIE KITAMURA...

“ I think we're betting on AI as something that can help to solve a lot of problems for us. It's the future, we think, whether it's producing text or art, or doing medical research or planning our lives for us, etc...

As we move towards 2026, we are in a massive “upgrade moment” that most of us can feel. New pressures, new identities, new expectations on our work, our relationships, and our inner lives. Throughout the year, I've been...

“ People today are so used to Basquiat's prices being extraordinarily high and rising that it's almost hard for people to understand that wasn't always the case. In the year he died, 1988, a terrific painting by...

“ All of the great artists are there for a reason: because they rebelled in some way. They created a visual vocabulary that felt fresh and new, which excited people. So, the great artists are not built on sort of...

“How do you render something interior filmically? How do you communicate the details of the lost child, of the amount of time of the stuck creative process, and even the exterior, or the externalization of the house as...

“And I think there's also just something about an unfettered or uncensored id that is so captivating. We all have that fantasy of doing exactly what we want with no consequences and sort of letting that go. I think when...

Today’s episode is about something most of us long for: feeling healthy in our bodies and calm in our minds – not by pushing harder, but by letting the body restore itself. Our guest today is LD Chen, an...

“ Oneness is actually not about learning in the usual way. Most teachings tell you how to learn – how to let go, how to calm down, how to manage anger. Oneness does the opposite: we stand, we train the body to correct...

How do our environments shape who we are and how we care for the world and each other? There are many solutions to climate change, inequality, and poverty around the world. How can we learn from them and transform our...

“There are many ways in which I think human exceptionalism has seeped into the sciences, but one of the many ways is through the methodologies we use when we compare the intelligence of humans and other species. In...

“Poetry is like one of the great loves of my life, and I think it's probably the longest relationship I'll ever have. I read a lot of poetry. I also wrote these short stories even when I was pretty young, like in second...

“My book is called Empire of AI because I'm trying to articulate this argument and illustrate that these companies operate exactly like empires of old. I highlight four features that essentially encapsulate the three...

“ I feel that when you don't tell your story, it's as if you have a limited existence. We can always have some kind of choice, but I'm saying that the story we choose may be the most crucial choice that we make, because...

“When I write my stories, I don't want to solve things in life. I just want to persuade myself that there is a way out. Maybe I am in a cell, maybe I'm trapped. Maybe I won't make it, but if I can imagine a plan for...

“I'm Lebanese. I grew up in Lebanon during the Civil War, and I came to the United States as a graduate student with the intention of going back. I never wanted to stay here. I really thought that my life would happen...

“One day, I woke up with this concept of oil being tied up in our lives in ways that we don't talk about. It’s sort of a value-theoretical approach to climate change and the climate crisis. Something that's impersonal...

“As I was reading Hooks and Freire, a colleague recommended Adrian Rich's essay "Teaching Language in Open Admissions." It was in that essay that I first read about her experiences teaching at CUNY during open...

“The origin was really trying to make sense of that 2016-2017 moment and to ask whether the alt-right was, as we were being told, a return to the 1930s, a kind of awakening of the sleeping beast of white supremacy armed...

In this time of rapid technological change, how do we hold onto our humanity? How do stories, traditions, and community help us find meaning in loss and face an uncertain future? How can science, art, and spirituality...

“I work in between archeology and anthropology in this field called either historical archeology or contemporary archeology. At the heart of that is the relationship between objects and humans. How do we write about the...

“If we look at the entire history of the human experience, if you saw some text or you heard some spoken language, you could 100 percent reliably infer that there was a human who created that. Our experience of having...

“There's a word for this brain rot, right? I think that's very real. There are studies coming out now that are showing that the more and more of our cognitive labor we offload to AI systems, the less creative we become...

“I had to become the father of my family very young because my parents divorced when I was 12. My situation was a little bit unusual in that my father kind of disappeared, and I had been making a fair amount of money as...