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

Dyer is the author of four novels: Paris Trance, The Search, The Colour of Memory, and Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi; two collections of essays, Anglo-English Attitudes and Working the Room; and six genre-defying titles: But Beautiful, The Missing of the Somme, Out of Sheer Rage, Yoga For People Who Can’t Be Bothered To Do It, The Ongoing Moment and Zona, about Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Stalker....

Dyer is the author of four novels: Paris Trance, The Search, The Colour of Memory, and Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi; two collections of essays, Anglo-English Attitudes and Working the Room; and six genre-defying titles: But Beautiful, The Missing of the Somme, Out of Sheer Rage, Yoga For People Who Can’t Be Bothered To Do It, The Ongoing Moment and Zona, about Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Stalker....

"I went up to Bennington, to the writing seminars, with my husband to give a talk. And while I was giving the talk, I sat in on some of the graduate lectures that the writing seminars MFA candidates have to do. And I got in the car to drive home, and I said to my husband, “I want to grad school. I want to go there.” And I had already published two books at that point. I really, there was no logica...

“Nature is my home because. It doesn't matter where I am. It’s available and it's there and it's always giving me the same sort of nourishment. All of us have had to develop a sense of home elsewhere. With me in particular, I've been traveling and living in different countries for the last 20 years since I was 22, so it's not even that I've had a geographical place that is my new home because I've...

Susan Scarf Merrell is the author of Shirley: A Novel, which is a film starring Elisabeth Moss and Michael Stuhlbarg. She is also the author of A Member of the Family, and The Accidental Bond: How Sibling Connections Influence Adult Relationships. She co-directs the Southampton Writers Conference, is program director (along with Meg Wolitzer) of the novel incubator program, BookEnds, and teaches i...

Claudia Bueno is an internationally recognized Venezuela born artist renowned for creating immersive technological wonders using light, sculpture, painting and sound. Claudia creates large scale, multi-sensory experiences that communicate a profound sense of wonderment and awe. Lights, motors, wind, and video power her creations with pulsations and movements. Detailed drawings, meticulous cutouts...

“There are some recurrent threads in indigenous cultures across the world. One of those is–We don’t own the land. The land owns us. It’s not seen as property first. It’s seen as inalienable in that sense because you don’t own it in the first place. What we’re seeing now is a kind of movement where more and more indigenous people are living kind of amphibious lives. On the one hand, they have their...

Rob Nixon is a nonfiction writer and the Barron Family Professor in Environmental Humanities at Princeton University. He is the author of four books, most recently Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor . Nixon is currently writing a book on environmental martyrs and the defense of the great tropical forests. He writes frequently for the New York Times . His writing has also appeared i...

“I’m not just taking beautiful pictures. I’m collecting their voices, collecting their movement, collecting different aspects, and preserving this moment because they will not always be here. I don’t just see myself as a photographer, an artist. I also see myself as an archiver. Someone who is archiving as a researcher.” Etinosa Yvonne is a self-taught documentary photographer and videographer bor...

A veteran composer with many high-profile film and television scores to his credit, Brazilian pianist Marcelo Zarvos was born in São Paulo. Initially studying classical music, Zarvos attended Berklee College of Music and CalArts, and later became active in the jazz world, releasing a highly praised collaboration with saxophonist, Peter Epstein called Dualism. His creative endeavors also expanded t...

“A lot of people think climate change is about avoiding the extinction of mankind. In my opinion, climate change is about putting pressure on society and disrupting society to an extent that it can't function properly anymore. So my greatest fear is that if we don't combat climate change, the weather extremes will hit us with a frequency and intensity that we will not be able to recover after each...

Sara Paretsky is the author of nineteen books, including sixteen V.I. Warshawski novels. She was named 2011 Grand Master by the Mystery Writers of America and is the winner of many awards, including the Cartier Diamond Dagger Award for lifetime achievement from the British Crime Writers' Association and the CWA Gold Dagger for BLACKLIST.  · www.saraparetsky.com · www.creativeprocess.info

“A lot of people think climate change is about avoiding the extinction of mankind. In my opinion, climate change is about putting pressure on society and disrupting society to an extent that it can't function properly anymore. So my greatest fear is that if we don't combat climate change, the weather extremes will hit us with a frequency and intensity that we will not be able to recover after each...

“Know first of all that we are not separate from nature, but that we are part of it. To not even think of what is the benefit for me from it. I find it a very beautiful the concept of the food forest. Like you're actually building soil, and then the surplus is that you get some food back. To focus more on giving than on taking, especially for children. What I like to teach my children–really look...

Since 2014, Rowin Snijder has been designing and building with his company Le Compostier “worm hotels” for community composting projects. A worm hotel is a structure in which an ecosystem of compost organisms work together to transform organic waste into beautiful worm compost. With a garden on top of each worm hotel, they give space to nature in neighborhoods and show us we can use organic waste...

“A lot of people when you think of sharks, you think of hammerheads, great white sharks, tiger sharks, but there’s so much more diversity than just that. There’s over 500 different species and on average we’re discovering new species every two weeks, not just of sharks, but also their cousins, the stingrays, skates and sometimes the chimeras as well. And so knowing that diversity exists, for me it...

Melissa Cristina Márquez is a multi-hyphenate Latina in STEM. Currently a PhD candidate at Curtin University, Márquez is interested in what environmental factors influence the composition and distribution of elasmobranchs using a variety of marine technology. She has become a household name via her Scholastic books (the "Wild Survival" series), freelance environmental issue articles, and TV presen...

“As a culture, how do we approach the environment? How do we approach the planet? Within our education systems are we emphasizing our arrogance? Or are we emphasizing our humility in the face of planetary-scale challenges? I think at the moment, from what I’ve seen in a number of countries, this huge focus on the natural sciences, hard science as a way of mastering nature. And perhaps less of a fo...

Peter Sutoris, PhD is an anthropologist, educator, writer, filmmaker and development professional whose research examines the ways various societies imagine the future differently. He is a Research Affiliate at the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at SOAS, University of London as well as visiting lecturer at the University of Bath and supervises at the University of Cambridge. He is the au...

“I don’t think there is anything in our history that prepares us for what we have to do next. I think we have a lot of promising signs. It seems like the real work is still ahead of us. To me it feels that we’re making this up as we go along, we’ve made a couple good steps, we know the problem really well. We know what to do or at least what is needed, but those questions of policy and politics an...

Jon Gertner is a journalist and historian whose stories on science, technology, and nature have appeared in a host of national magazines. Since 2003 he has worked mainly as a feature writer for The New York Times Magazine . He is the author of The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation and The Ice at the End of the World. A frequent lecturer on technology and science hist...

“If you go fill up your car with gas in the United States, chances are high that probably about 10% of your gas is not actually coming from fossil fuels. It's coming from ethanol. You don't even contemplate the fact that there's ethanol in your gas. And I think that meat maybe come like that, where people will obtain meat. But the norm will be for that meat not to be totally animal in its nature....

Paul Shapiro is the author of the national bestseller Clean Meat: How Growing Meat Without Animals Will Revolutionize Dinner and the World , the CEO of The Better Meat Co. , a four-time TEDx speaker , and the host of the Business for Good Podcast . · www.bettermeat.co · www.oneplanetpodcast.org · www.creativeprocess.info

"As a filmmaker, what you are selling and your primary asset is yourself, so the clearer you are about yourself, the clearer you can “play yourself”, the more effective you’re going to be in expressing the ideas that you are particularly gifted to do. So that clarity of voice is as important for a writer or a director or producer as it is for a performer or a musician or anybody else. You want to...

Marian Macgowan is a producer with a global imprint, working across film, documentary and television mediums.  As principal of the independent Australian production company Macgowan Films, her company develops, finances and produces feature films, television, and documentaries. Currently preparing for Season 3 of the critically acclaimed Emmy, Critics Choice nominee for Best Comedy Serie...