Emerging Form

“There are enough talented people out there,” says Julia Belluz, “but only collaborate with people you really like.” This was the advice the writer followed when deciding to work with scientist Kevin Hall on their new book, Food Intelligence . The resulting book weaves his narrative and evolution as a scientist with her narrative as a patient and journalist. In this episode, we explore what makes...

“I’m a striver,” poet Alison Luterman, “still striving to grow.” In this interview with the beloved poet, we follow up on our conversation from episode 64 “It’s Okay to Not Feel Talented, Keep Going Anyway , Alison tells us about her ongoing singing lessons and how they have changed the way she listens, not only to music but to conversations and the rest of the world. This practice is at the heart...

Can poetry be a form of medicine? In this week’s bonus episode, we share a guest podcast, the Wise Effort Show , hosted by our recent guest Dr. Diana Hill. In the bonus episode she did with Emerging Form, Diana shared a poem that was inspired by this interview with Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer. They discuss the role of poetry in emotional processing, grief, love, and connection. Diana shares how Rose...

How do we take care of our creative selves? How do we step off the wheel of production and find ourselves in the wide-open moment with room to wonder and wander? In this episode, hosts Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer and Christie Aschwanden have a conversation about where they are at now in their well-filling cycle, the importance of creative self-care and the consequences of not doing so. This is a pub...

Everyone has creative genius, says Diana Hill, PhD, and in her new book, Wise Effort: How to Focus Your Genius Energy on What Matters Most , she explores how to best explore and nurture that genius. We speak about how she battled some of her own demons while writing the book–the committee arguing in her head. We talk about wise effort–not trying too hard, and the three main practices that fuel wis...

“The first draft is absolute torture,” says historical nonfiction writer David Baron. And yet, he persists and his newest book, The Martians: The True Story of an Alien Craze that Captured Turn-of-the-Century America has garnered rave reviews from The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker and more. The Christian Science Monitor says, “ The Martians is a fascinating tale that’s beauti...

In this episode, we talk with Michael about the importance of mentors and how sometimes they transition to colleagues as we find our own footing in our creative work, stepping into our own creative identity. He reads “What Name for This,” from his book Worldly Things , and we use the poem as a launching pad to talk about creative relationships, why we write and how attentiveness to the specific ca...

One day, nationally acclaimed poet Maria Kelson hit “a poetry wall” for no identifiable reason. “It was frustrating,” she says, “because I had devoted myself to poetry. For 15 years, it was my primary focus.” What happened next–she followed an emerging passion, crime fiction. ‘As i was casting about I thought, I want to explore the dark side.” In this episode we talk with Maria about shedding laye...

When Starre Varten sat down to write her book The Stronger Sex: What Science Tells Us about the Power of the Female Body , she came to the project with two things: an intellectual thesis and a very personal bodily story. In this episode, we talk with Starre about how both mind and body fueled her creative practice. We also talk about how what began as an article became a book, how to turn toward t...

Making something is fun. Promoting it? Not so much… On this episode of Emerging Form, Rosemerry and Christie discuss the what happens when you put something you’ve created out into the world. How do you get it to your intended audience? How do encourage people to find it without feeling like an icky self-promotional nag? We also discuss the pain of realizing that your friends didn’t and won’t read...

“I am just discovering myself as a novelist,” says international bestselling novelist Shelley Read, author of Go as a River. In this conversation, Shelley shares with us how her journey from poet and non-fiction writer shifted into fiction with a single moment of observation and wonder. She shares with us how she crafts scenes, her penchant for playing with language, why she didn’t share with anyo...

“I try to be really open to anything that comes my way,” says bestselling author Bonnie Tsui. Her newest book, On Muscle , isn’t a memoir, but it begins with her recounting her father encouraging her and her brother to “make a muscle.” Tsui appears in many sections of the book interacting with the various characters she introduces. Yet it’s not a book explicitly about her, and if there’s a main ch...

“You have to have a lot of patience,” says science writer Jennie Erin Smith about working on a long-term creative project. She adds, “You have to have a lot of patience with eccentric people.” In this bonus episode, we talk about patience, plus about sharing work with creative heroes, the importance of taking a good long break, the art of pushing through, what to do when the words aren’t coming, a...

When a creative project lasts for many years, how do you create a cohesive story? How do you gather and organize that much research? At what point do you begin writing? How do you handle the changing of an editor? What happens when you don’t know the ending? And what if you hoped for a different ending? We cover all these questions with Jennie Erin Smith, author of Valley of Forgetting, a book ten...

How can looking at the past help us understand what to do about a current crisis? “I’m a firm believer that history can help give us perspective here,” says science writer Lisa S. Gardiner. She’s speaking about her research with coral reefs, but it’s an apropos metaphor for how our past experiences with creative endeavors can help inform our current struggles. In this episode, we talk about the im...

What happens when the subject of your creative practice scares you? Not only that, but what if you’re scared, too, of what might happen when you put your work into the world? We speak with physicist and author Adam Becker about his new book, More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley's Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity , in which he writes about the terrible pla...

Knowing your audience is everything for a storyteller, and sometimes that information comes in real time. “Within three minutes I am going to know if this is going to be terrible for all of us or great,” says storyteller Bil Lepp. In this bonus episode, we talk about how to respond on stage to an audience’s laughter, what to do if you find yourself with an audience of middle schoolers, how to hand...

Humor for the joy of it is reason enough, but in this episode we speak with storyteller Bil Lepp about how humor might also be a way to earn trust with an audience so that we might bring in difficult conversations. He offers techniques for how to craft toward a punchline and how to use a “Lego” approach to crafting multiple stories. We also touch on how storytelling builds community. Bil Lepp is a...

“Practice teaches us to have faith in the process,” says Andrea Barrett, National Book Award winning author. In this episode of Emerging Form, we speak with her about her newest book, Dust and Light: On the Art of Fact in Fiction . It’s one of the most metaphor-rich, process-curious shows we’ve had yet. We explore the joys of rabbit holes, the importance of not knowing what we are looking for, the...

“I turn to the poem, I turn to the page for a sense of hope, how to move through life, how to get through a day,” says Danusha Laméris. “I have come to a place where I trust the poem more than I trust myself.” In our second conversation with the award-winning poet, (We also interviewed her in Episode 29 on “the understory”), she shares from her newest collection, Blade by Blade , and we talk about...

“Doing this book took me out of my comfort zone, into new fields I wasn’t comfortable with,” says Alex Hutchinson, speaking of his newest book The Explorer's Gene: Why We Seek Big Challenges, New Flavors, and the Blank Spots on the Map. And so it is we speak with the expert on exploration about his own experiences of exploring in creative practice. Why are we drawn to what we don’t know? How do we...

How do the stories we tell become intricately involved with our identities? And how do we change the stories that are not serving us? In this episode of Emerging Form, we speak with storyteller Kristin Pedemonti, founder of Steer Your Story, about Narrative Therapy Practices. We discuss unpeeling layers of stories, how to “thicken the threads” of a preferred narrative, the importance of play, and...

How can our creative practice extend to the way we treat other people? How might we build entire careers out of our creative dreams? These questions are at the heart of our conversation with Sherry Richert Belul. We also talk about creating a “seamless life” with no delineation between work and play and how to pay attention to (and act on) the creative ideas that “just drop in.” Sherry Richert Bel...

Artificial Intelligence now permeates our daily lives. What conversations are we not having about AI? And how can creative projects help open these discussions about what is really at stake? In this episode of Emerging Form, journalist Evan Ratliff shares with us how he cloned his voice, connected it to a chat bot, and created a voice agent that took calls and made calls–both to strangers and frie...

How does storytelling matter? Why might we bring in feelings about our children or a moment of being overcome with beauty into a book about, say, climate change? In this episode of Emerging Form, we speak with Auden Schendler about the power of story, about how we are drawn to tell the stories we most need to tell, and how and why it’s important to let humility be a part of our practice. Auden Sch...