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

"I was very inspired to know that humans are not the be-all and end-all. We're just one state. But you could be in this state of consciousness, this kind of godly state, even a demonic state, but also the fact that all living creatures had souls and were affected by karma. And this is something we tend to forget, especially because animals are so tasty and therefore we have to justify slaughtering...

What happens when we die? What happens to our memories and consciousness when our bodies cease to be?  In the end, is it the things we did and the people we loved that give our lives meaning? Shehan Karunatilaka is the multi-award winning author. He is known for his novels dealing with the history, politics, and folklore of his home country of Sri Lanka. He won the Commonwealth Book Prize and...

"And I think for so long I thought I'm only going to write about the real wolf. That's the most important thing. We've had too many stories. And yet I've gotten to a point where I just think we are living in a world where any story that comes out of my mouth is shaped by these other stories I've heard which are rooted in ecology, just like stories about biology, stories about how we name wolves ar...

The lone wolf is actually alone because it's looking for connection. They leave in order to find a mate and form their own pack. If loneliness is an epidemic, what can wolves teach us about loneliness, courage, and connection? Erica Berry is the author of Wolfish: Wolf, Self, and the Stories We Tell About Fear. Her essays in journalism appear in Outside, Wired, The Yale Review, The Guardian, Liter...

"When I was writing On Time and Water somebody said this is not just one book. This is about your grandmother, about glaciers. You have to focus. You can't have this mythology and glacial and ocean sites, speculations about words like ocean acidification, and your grandfather's sister who is visiting Tolstoy. You have to focus. You can't put all this into a book. And then I thought, oh y...

Andri Snær Magnason is an award winning author of On Time and Water, The Casket of Time, LoveStar, Dreamland and The Story of the Blue Planet. His work has been published in more than 35 languages. He has a written in most genres, novels, poetry, plays, short stories, non fiction as well as being a documentary film maker. His novel, LoveStar got a Philip K. Dick Special Citation, and the Grand Pri...

Novelists, poets, activists, translators discuss the Art of Writing and The Creative Process. This episode features: NEIL GAIMAN - Writer, Producer, Showrunner - The Sandman, American Gods, Good Omens, Coraline JERICHO BROWN - Pulitzer Prize-winning Poet: The Tradition Editor of How We Do It: Black Writers on Craft, Practice, and Skill ADA LIMÓN, U.S. Poet Laureate - The Hurting Kind, The Car...

“We have to be unwavering in our commitment to principles of justice and freedom and be harbingers of hope. So for me, this is a lifelong thing, and I think of it as ancestor work that I one day will be somebody's ancestor, and I want them to be proud of the work that we did to give them a world that’s a little better of an inheritance than the world that I was born into. And I think that is how w...

Treva B. Lindsey, PhD is a Black feminist historian and Associate Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at The Ohio State University. She is the recipient of several prestigious fellowships including the ACLS/Mellon Scholars and Society Fellowship, The Equity for Women and Girls of Color Fellowship at Harvard University, and The Woodrow Wilson Career Enhancement Fellowship. Lindsey i...

"First of all, how desperate are all of us for lightness and optimism and hope, and a sense of possibility in the people who are navigating and steering world affairs? That was really important to me to bring that in. And I think that I see all really dramatic moments as kind of streaked-through with a bit of the absurd. Those are always the moments that stand out to me. If you're not just at a fu...

Debora Cahn is the Emmy-nominated showrunner and executive producer of Netflix’s The Diplomat, a political thriller series starring Keri Russell and Rufus Sewell. She’s worked with television’s leading showrunners, including Shonda Rhymes, Terence Winter, Steven Levinson, and Howard Gordon. Her career began working on Aaron Sorkin’s The West Wing which has led to projects such as the hit Showtime...

“I was fascinated because the two people who I, as a young writer, knew best, who were sort of established writers, were Douglas Adams–because I wrote a book called Don’t Panic: Douglas Adams & The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. I’d go to spend time and work with Douglas. And I was friends with Terry Pratchett, and what absolutely fascinated me was they couldn’t have been more opposite. Dou...

Neil Gaiman’s contributions to practically every literary genre have earned him a place in the Dictionary of Literary Biography as one of the top ten living post-modern writers. His series The Sandman is widely credited with reinventing comics. His books include American Gods , Stardust, Coraline, The Graveyard Book, The Ocean at the End of the Lane, and many have been adapted for television, film...

"So I have a background in conservation biology and have been a science communicator for well over a decade and a half now, and of course, doing that work you're confronted with climate, environmental reports and studies, which were a consistent part of my emotional baseline, just being aware of the fact that this is not all going well, which every now and then would make me feel low, for sure, in...

Britt Wray is the author of Generation Dread: Finding Purpose in an Age of Climate Crisis. She's a writer and broadcaster researching the emotional and psychological impacts of the climate crisis. Born and raised in Toronto, Canada, she is a post-doctoral fellow at Stanford University and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, where she investigates the mental health consequences of e...

Today we’re streaming voices of environmentalists, artists, students, and teachers. Enjoy Part 1 of this Special Series with music courtesy of composer Max Richter. All voices on this episode are from our interviews for The Creative Process & One Planet Podcast: MAX RICHTER INGRID NEWKIRK, Founder of PETA BERTRAND PICCARD, Aviator of 1st Round-the-World Solar-Powered Flight, Explorer, Founder,...

"I knew Philip Seymour Hoffman for several years. We went on vacation together. He produced a play of mine. Before we did Doubt, we worked in the same theater company together, and he was, you know, very committed to excellence. And so he could become impatient with anybody who was not committed to excellence, and that could make him a volatile person to deal with. Phil cared. He cared a grea...

John Patrick Shanley is from The Bronx. His plays include Prodigal Son, Outside Mullingar (Tony nomination), Danny and the Deep Blue Sea, Savage in Limbo, Italian-American Reconciliation, Welcome to the Moon, Four Dogs and a Bone, Dirty Story, Defiance, and Beggars in the House of Plenty. His theatrical work is performed extensively across the United States and around the world. For his play, Doub...

"My relationship with improvisational music is something that I'm still trying to theorize and trying to understand exactly why it is that it works. So all I know is that, in approaching a poem, it's about form and content. It's about matching process to content. And for me, the act of writing poetry is kind of like a jazz soloist puts together a solo. It's related in that way because as a writer,...

Anthony Joseph is a poet, novelist, academic and musician who moved from Trinidad to the UK in 1989. A lecturer in creative writing at Birkbeck College, he is particularly interested in the point at which poetry becomes music. As well as four poetry collections, a slew of albums, and three novels – most recently Kitch – Joseph has published critical work exploring the aesthetics of Caribbean Poetr...

"I was really familiar with Arnold through bodybuilding. I became a weight trainer myself after meeting him at the 1981 Mr. Olympia contest, but I largely knew him through his movies like everyone else. And when you see him in the movies, he's famous for these very short one-liners that make it seem as if he is nonverbal, that he's not particularly intelligent. You don't get his humor. The first t...

“Why I was different from all the other boys in my town I cannot tell you. I was simply born with the gift of vision.” – ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER Is there any better example of the American Dream than Arnold Schwarzenegger? What does it take to make your vision a reality? How do you cultivate iron focus to overcome any obstacle and realize your dreams? On the publication of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s li...

"This poem was written when I was having a real moment of reckoning, not that I hadn't had it earlier, but where I was doing some deep reading about the climate crisis and really reckoning with myself, with where we were and what was happening, what the truth was. And I felt like it was so easy to slip down into a darkness, into a sort of numbness, and I didn't think that that numbness and darknes...

Ada Limón is the author of six books of poetry, including The Carrying, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry. Her book Bright Dead Things was nominated for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. Her work has been supported most recently by a Guggenheim Fellowship. She grew up in Sonoma, California and now lives i...

"I put this craft book together to create an opportunity for that advice, for those role models, for that access. And I think that what I'm grateful for about this book is that it is the book that I would have wanted back when I was a 19-year-old kid telling people I wish I was a writer. So, I think that's the real crux of the book." How do you find your voice? As a writer, how do you take what yo...