How to Be Alive

Imagine a world where your creativity has the power to heal your past, build bridges of connection, deepen your spirituality, and dismantle systems of oppression. Fariha Róisín—-a Muslim, queer, Bangladeshi multidisciplinary artist and writer—has used their writing to do just that. Today on the podcast, they’re joining Carter to cast a vision of the true alchemical power of writing toward healing...

Filmmaker and writer Nneka Julia makes work that asks just as many questions as it answers, and that’s the hope. Nneka’s multidisciplinary work circles questions of identity and belonging, how to care for one’s inner child, and the emotional gauntlet that can be the creative process itself. In this conversational interview, Nneka tells the story of how she moved past the expectations she felt as t...

What would be different about your relationship to yourself if you thought of creativity as a place you can go, rather than simply what you make? In this spiritually-imbued conversation, author, artist, and musician Shira Erlichman offers gem after gem of creative wisdom and inspiration, talking with host, therapist, and fellow artist Carter Umhau about what the creative process has to teach us ab...

From the scooped out center of a cantaloupe to a bubblegum pink stack of hay in an Icelandic field, film photographer Megan Brady Moon’s work seeks out the sacred within the mundane. Through this exploratory conversation, Megan—who is based in Seattle— finds words for the ways in which photography was initially a place to mirror the intimate, solitary, and sometimes lonely experience of being sing...

For author and baker Stacey Mei Yan Fong, pie is more than delicious dessert: it’s a vehicle of storytelling, a place to process emotion, a study guide of the US, and a way to formulate a sense of home. In this conversation, Stacey and I explore the creative process behind her book, 50 Pies, 50 States: An Immigrant’s Love Letter to the United States Through Pie. Stacey shares how baking has been a...

One night, at 1:15am, I was stuck on writing this very episode—all about why creativity is inherently healing— when I stumbled upon an episode of another podcast that I had recorded eight years ago in which I was interviewed about my own creative process and why I believe—yep—creativity is inherently healing. I was stunned to find that I had said many of the things I intended to share here—even sh...

An obsession with sand dollars, the catharsis of dance, and getting to be a student again: these are some of the things that make Molly Wizenberg feel alive. Molly--the bestselling memoirist, James Beard Award-winning essayist, and teacher of personal narrative writing--joins therapist and artist Carter Umhau to talk about how her relationship to writing has helped her become herself and allowed h...

Caroline Winkler is a YouTuber with over a million subscribers, the co-host of the Not for Everyone podcast, and a genuine, relationally-oriented, funny-as-hell person who says she failed so hard at her "big dream" of being an actor, that everything that has come after has felt like a second life. We're chatting about what happened when she decided to let her design-oriented YouTube channel get pe...

Cody Cook-Parrott—artist, writer, dancer, and teacher—sits down with Carter Umhau to talk about what compelled them to write a memoir at nine years old; how quiltmaking has taught them to shapeshift as a trans person; and how they’ve learned to politicize their creative practice while staying far away from Instagram. Cody and Carter wonder together about the difference between making art that is i...

How do you embrace who and where you are in life, when none of it looks like you expected it to? Natalie Closner, of the band JOSEPH, joins Carter to talk about how songwriting has helped her find the words she needed to hear, rather than what she thought people wanted from her. Natalie discusses the spiritual experience of live performance; how she stepped into a more expansive and compassionate...

Welcome to How to Be Alive , a podcast that looks to the creative process as a map through figuring out how the hell to be human. Expect deep and playful conversation with folks that are about to be your new favorite artists, thinkers, and people. This podcast is for anyone that desires to be closer to themselves, anyone that has ever wondered why it’s important to listen to the creative inkling i...