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

“ So that's what I would love for people to see and to realize is that nature is so incredibly beautiful and diverse. And so are we.”
Today, we’re looking at how the landscapes of our childhood shape the way we see the world. We explore memory, nature, and attunement to the present moment with composer Max Richter and writer and biologist David George Haskell. We’re joined by authors Kristin Ohlson and Dan Werb who revisit the freedom of youth. Novelist Amitav Ghosh shares his sensory his experiences of Calcutta. Writer and musician Eiren Caffall reflects on finding hope and living with illness, while circular economy designer Claire Potter reflects on the living world and the art of noticing.
(0:00) MAX RICHTER (Award-winning Composer & Pianist) A Continuous Stream of Music
(1:55) CLAIRE POTTER (Circular Economy Designer) Protecting What You Love
(3:55) EIREN CAFFALL (Writer & Musician) A Legacy of Generational Knowledge
(7:40) AMITAV GHOSH (Award-winning Novelist, Ghost-Eye) Sensory Discovery and Food
(9:31) DAVID GEORGE HASKELL (Biologist, The Songs of Trees) Stories to Tell the Future
(10:58) KRISTIN OHLSON (Author, The Soil Will Save Us) Learning the Power of Observation Through a Free Range Childhood
(12:42) DAN WERB (Epidemiologist & Author, Our Wild Familiars) The Undertow of the Pacific
To hear more from each guest, listen to their full interviews.
Episode Website
www.creativeprocess.info/pod
Instagram:@creativeprocesspodcast

“As a psychotherapist, I've worked with thousands of people over my 53 years of practice, and I have had to learn to love each and every one of them. There is something about opening your heart and stopping judging and arguing, and listening again, inquiring until you find what is most lovable about another person, and that is a very difficult thing to do. We're all inclined to reject one another, even the people we love. It is very difficult to systematically seek to accord the other respect, your attention, your care, your capacity for appreciating and valuing what is good in them and what is possible for them in the future.”
Emmy van Deurzen is a philosopher, a therapist and a pioneer who has spent five decades mapping the architecture of human existence. Born in the Netherlands and trained in the radical psychiatric wards of France, she came to London in 1977 to work alongside R.D. Laing, only to realize the anti-psychiatry movement had kind of lost its way. She decided to build something new. Today, she's the founder of the New School of Psychotherapy and Counselling and the leading voice of existential therapy in the United Kingdom and founded the Existential Movement.
Her work challenges the medical model of mental illness, suggesting instead that our crises are not diseases to be cured but philosophical crossroads to be understood. Her latest book is a distillation of that life's work. Beginning To Live: The Art of Existential Freedom is her first book written for a general audience, offering a guide on how to reclaim our freedom and find meaning in the face of suffering. Emmy van Deurzen, welcome to The Creative Process.
(0:00) The Art of Psychotherapy
(1:39) AI and Artificial Wisdom
(5:40) Practicing Freedom
(8:06) Finding Inner Peace Amidst the Ruins
(16:19) The Yellow Balloon
(22:36) Freedom and the Confrontation with Death
(25:31) Multilingual Roots, Language and Translation
(32:03) The End of One Love, The Beginning of a Love of the Arts
(37:20) The Art of Loving
(45:17) The Canvas of Life
(48:24) The Purified Essence
(1:01:10) The AI Dependency and the Future of Loving
(1:10:22) Radical Psychiatry, R.D. Laing, and The Divided Self
(1:17:52) Awakening to Beauty
(1:24:38) The Art of Living and Existential Freedom
Episode Website
www.creativeprocess.info/pod
Instagram:@creativeprocesspodcast

"We need to learn from the animals how to live more gently, consume less and look out for each other in this great circle of life.":
Our shared moment in time reminds us that we are one part of a vast ecosystem. Today, we explore how humanity can live in harmony with the Earth by paying attention to the land and lives of animals around us. We listen to those who translate the voices of the living world: authors Yann Martel, Georgi Gospodinov, Chiara Barzini, Erica Berry, Kristin Ohlson, Helen Whybrow, screenwriter-director Caroline Thompson and Existential Therapist Emmy van Deurzen. We reflect on our changing environment with Nobel Peace Prize-winning climate scientist Kevin Trenberth, soil expert David Montgomery, restoration ecologist Tom Crowther, wetlands conservationist Jane Madgwick, Scientist Rebellion co-founder Tim Hewlett, architect and urban designer Carlo Ratti. And Ingrid Newkirk reminds us that our survival directly depends on the health of the natural world.
(0:00) Ingrid Newkirk (Co-Founder, PETA) Chiara Barzini (Author of Aqua) (3:41) Erica Berry (5:07) Yann Martel(Author, Son of Nobody) (6:20) Georgi Gospodinov (Author, Time Shelter) (7:39) Emmy van Deurzen (Therapist) (9:08) Jane Madgwick (Ecologist) (10:29) Caroline Thompson (Screenwriter) (13:00) Helen Whybrow (Author, The Salt Stones) (14:11) Tom Crowther (Founder, Restor) (14:56) Kristin Ohlson (16:10) Tim Hewlett (17:54) Kevin Trenberth(20:10) Carlo Ratti (Architect) (21:59) David Montgomery
To hear more from each guest, listen to their full interviews https://www.creativeprocess.info/pod
https://www.creativeprocess.info/interviews-featured/anth-circle-life

“It’s always very interesting that we have to make a case for art because we don’t have to make a case for fast food. Like, we don’t have to make a case for all of these sort of things in our lives that we do not need, and yet we have to make a case for beauty? We have to make a case for the soul? We have to make a case for humanity? We have to make a case for singing back the wounded world? That to me is fascinating”
My guest today is Ada Limón. She served two historic terms as the 24th poet laureate in the United States. She has brought poetry to public parks across the US, and her words have traveled through deep space, engraved on NASA’s Europa Clipper spacecraft. In over 20 years of writing in celebrated collections like Bright Dead Thingsand The Carryingand her new book, Startlement: New and Selected Poems, Ada has brought a sincerity to American poetry rooted in connection to the natural world.
She’s written with inspiring honesty about the death of loved ones, trying to conceive and also the unexpected liberation of deciding to step away from societal expectations of motherhood and embrace a life happily childfree. Her latest book on craft, Against Breaking: On the Power of Poetry, asks how a poem can hold our heaviest grief without letting the human spirit fracture.
After years living in Kentucky and New York, she bought back her childhood home in Sonoma Valley, stepping back into the rooms where her poetic imagination first took root. We’ll talk about the discipline of paying attention and why poetry remains an essential act of human survival.
(0:03) The Case for Beauty  
(0:39) About Ada Limón
(2:44) The Deepening of Roots
(5:01) Reading 'On Earth As It Is on Earth'
(6:08) Bearing Witness Without Surrendering to Grief
(7:50) The Definition of Beauty and the Dissolving Self
(9:41) Love as an Active Daily Choice
(11:11) The Practice of Loving-Kindness Meditation
(13:28) Reading 'Hell or High Water'
(17:01) Writing Without Music and Listening to the Landscape
(19:08) Dreams as Archetypes of Consciousness
(21:34) The Environmental and Creative Toll of Generative AI
(24:02) AI and the Future of the Arts
(25:21) Stewardship, Conservation, and Faith in the Invisible Workers
(28:14) The Childfree Daughter
(29:57) Listening to Trees as an Act of Reciprocity
(32:40) The Music of the World
(34:03) The Seed of Interconnectedness
Episode Website
www.creativeprocess.info/pod
Instagram:@creativeprocesspodcast

“Algorithms are deciding whether you are eligible for a loan, a job, an apartment or insurance. They determine what you see online, who reads your social media posts and who connects with you on dating apps. They may even decide whether you get arrested or go to jail. Your very life hangs in the balance of prophecies.”
In this episode of the Speaking Out of Place podcast, Professor David Palumbo-Liu talks with Carissa Véliz, an associate professor at the University of Oxford, about her new book, Prophecy: Prediction, Power, and the Fight for the Future—from Ancient Oracles to AI. Linking this work to her previous book, Privacy is Power: Why and How You Should Take Back Control of Your Data, Véliz writes: “ surveillance and prediction are digital technology’s original sins.”
In our wide-ranging discussion, we talk about how both massive and intrusive invasions of privacy at all levels of society and false claims to be able to predict the future erode democracy, are corrosive to ethics, and undermine people’s ability to think for themselves. Instead, we are conditioned to trust an unregulated band of “effective altruists” who claim to know better than we what kinds of lives we should prefer and the choices we should make. Véliz argues instead that we should embrace the uncertain to build resilience, to prepare for contingency but not be determined by what we cannot see, and to foster curiosity and imagination.
(0:00) Digital Technology's Original Sins
(3:46) How Books and Prophecies Choose Their Readers
(6:52) The Link Between AI, Mass Surveillance, and Profit
(9:48) Why Ethics Is the Hidden Foundation of Democracy
(14:53) The Future Tense as a Tech Executive Power Play
(17:21) Predictions as Speech Acts and Self-Fulfilling Prophecies
(23:05) Artificial Intelligence as the Ultimate Bullshitter
(27:40) Effective Altruism, Utilitarianism, and the Dangers of Infinity
Episode Website
www.palumbo-liu.com
https://speakingoutofplace.com
Bluesky @palumboliu.bsky.social
Instagram @speaking_out_of_place