The Creative Process · Arts, Culture & Society: Books, Film, Music, TV, Art, Writing, Creativity, Education, Environment, Theatre, Dance, LGBTQ, Climate Change, Social Justice, Spirituality, Feminism, Tech, Sustainability

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 Things and The Carrying and 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.
(1:45) Silence as the Music of the World
(9:17) The Deepening of Roots
(13:19) 'On Earth As It Is on Earth'
(18:08) Bearing Witness Without Surrendering to Grief
(21:02) Singing Back the Wounded World and the Case for Beauty
(28:22) Love as an Active Daily Choice
(30:38) The Practice of Loving-Kindness Meditation
(37:34) Writing Without Music, Listening to the Landscape
(40:04) Dreams as Archetypes of Consciousness
(42:51) The Creative Toll of AI
(51:29) Embracing the Liberation of a Childfree Life
(1:01:06) Listening to Trees as an Act of Reciprocity
(1:06:44) Interconnectedness of Living Beings
Episode Website
www.creativeprocess.info/pod
Instagram:@creativeprocesspodcast

“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 Things and The Carrying and 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.
Episode Website
www.creativeprocess.info/pod
Instagram:@creativeprocesspodcast

“Lincoln Center is multiple stages. I think probably over three dozen stages across 16 acres. It is a vast canvas in and of itself. And then we have this beautiful plaza that leads to this beautiful campus, and that’s the visual I think that most people have when they think of Lincoln Center is this beautiful fountain in the center and these three gorgeous buildings.It’s New York’s biggest plaza, and it feels very vibrant and beautiful. In the summer, we really take that plaza and we transform it into a dance floor. So this idea of also interrupting what people’s notion of Lincoln Center is because it’s a space that is very aspirational, which is a great thing.”
Shanta Thake is the Chief Artistic Officer at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts—the nation's largest performing arts complex. Before stepping into this role, she spent nineteen years at The Public Theater, shaping the city's cultural landscape through Joe's Pub and expansive community initiatives. Today, she is tearing down walls—both the literal barriers separating Lincoln Center from its neighbors, and the figurative ones that dictate who belongs in our cultural spaces. She views the arts not as a luxury, but as essential civic infrastructure. We are pleased to have Shanta Thake to discuss her journey, the power of radical curation, and the future of public performance.
(0:00) Reimagining Lincoln Center
(2:27) Art and the Human Experience
(4:40) The Curiosity of Childhood
(5:44) Alvin Ailey and the Pivot
(8:29) The Invisible Arts
(9:06) The Power of Public Theater
(17:03) Curation, Programming and the Art of Listening
(23:42) San Juan Hill and The Wall
(31:23) Art as the Oldest Technology
(35:02) globalFEST: Music and Connection
(38:20) Finding Universal Belonging
(41:20) The Gift of Pause
(54:27) A Collective Caretaking
Episode Website
www.creativeprocess.info/pod
Instagram:@creativeprocesspodcast

"I really do believe that the arts are critical to how we move forward together, and live performance in particular, I think, is a way of us practicing how to move across our ideological boundaries and find one another and imagine these new worlds together and create together."
Shanta Thake is the Chief Artistic Officer at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts—the nation's largest performing arts complex. Before stepping into this role, she spent nineteen years at The Public Theater, shaping the city's cultural landscape through Joe's Pub and expansive community initiatives. Today, she is tearing down walls—both the literal barriers separating Lincoln Center from its neighbors, and the figurative ones that dictate who belongs in our cultural spaces. She views the arts not as a luxury, but as essential civic infrastructure. We are pleased to have Shanta Thake to discuss her journey, the power of radical curation, and the future of public performance.
"I really do believe that the arts are critical to how we move forward together, and live performance in particular, I think, is a way of us practicing how to move across our ideological boundaries and find one another and imagine these new worlds together and create together."
Shanta Thake is the Chief Artistic Officer at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts—the nation's largest performing arts complex. Before stepping into this role, she spent sixteen years at The Public Theater, shaping the city's cultural landscape through Joe's Pub and expansive community initiatives. Today, she is tearing down walls—both the literal barriers separating Lincoln Center from its neighbors, and the figurative ones that dictate who belongs in our cultural spaces. She views the arts not as a luxury, but as essential civic infrastructure. We are pleased to have Shanta Thake to discuss her journey, the power of radical curation, and the future of public performance.
(00:00) Reimagining Lincoln Center
(03:09) A Collective Caretaking
(03:47) The Technology of Human Creation
(04:20) The Curiosity of Childhood
(09:25) San Juan Hill and The Wall
(14:20) globalFEST: Music and Connection
(16:06) The Gift of Pause
(17:20) A Collective Caretaking
Episode Website
www.creativeprocess.info/pod
Instagram:@creativeprocesspodcast
Episode Website
www.creativeprocess.info/pod
Instagram:@creativeprocesspodcast

“We are in the middle of a labyrinth which suggests to us many fake corridors. What's the superpower of literature? Literature is like an antidote against propaganda. Propaganda explains the world easily in a two-dimensional way.  Literature gives you a more complex explanation. Literature tells personal stories.”
Today, we have a conversation about time, memory, and the bittersweet geography of human sorrow. Georgi Gospodinov is widely considered one of the most daring voices in contemporary European literature. His acclaimed novel, The Physics of Sorrow, won the prestigious Jan Michalski Prize in 2016, blending ancient myth and quantum physics to chronicle the delicate realities of post-socialist Eastern Europe. Joining him is Angela Rodel, a brilliant linguist, musician, and translator whose profound artistic empathy carries the flowing cadences of the Bulgarian language into vivid English. Together, this extraordinary creative duo made history by winning the 2023 International Booker Prize for Time Shelter—the first book written in Bulgarian to ever receive the honor.
Time Shelter is a masterfully dark, funny, and prescient novel. It begins with an enigmatic psychiatrist opening a clinic that treats Alzheimer’s patients by meticulously recreating past decades to match their internal clocks. But the experiment quickly escapes the clinic walls, triggering a pan-European crisis where entire nations hold democratic referendums to choose which era of the past they will retreat into. It is a book that holds up a mirror to our own world, exploring what happens when a civilization faces a deficit of meaning and tries to weaponize nostalgia.
(0:00) The Trap of Nostalgia
(2:13) The Art of Translation
(5:44) The Pandemic of the Past
(11:30) Reading from ‘Time Shelter’
(14:28) Death and the Gardener
(19:34) The Translator's Calling
(26:05) Cultural Rhythms of the Bulgarian Language
(30:00) The Nonlinear Approach to Storytelling
(34:30) Separating Personal and Historical Pasts
(42:55) Storytelling vs Propaganda
(47:19) Bodies, Animals and the Loneliness of the Minotaur
(56:00) Reading ' Eight Minutes and 19 Seconds’
(1:00:28) What makes a good life? What has given your life meaning?
(1:04:18)   Childhood, Memory and Imagination
(1:10:38) Reflections on God and the Stories His Grandmother Told Him
(1:17:20) Education and the Empathic Imagination
(1:23:25) The Museum of Memory
(1:26:15) The Importance of Hugging and Empathy
(1:28:02) AI and the Future of Humanity
Episode Website
www.creativeprocess.info/pod
Instagram:@creativeprocesspodcast