Author · Executive Producer · Showrunner
The Sandman American Gods · Good Omens · Coraline
Neil Gaiman is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of more than twenty books, including The Sandman, American Gods, Good Omens, Stardust, Coraline, Norse Mythology, Neverwhere, and The Graveyard Book. He’s adapted many of his books for television and film. Among his numerous literary awards are the Newbery and Carnegie medals, and the Hugo, Nebula, World Fantasy, and Will Eisner awards. He is a Global Goodwill Ambassador for United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). In this episode, Gaiman reads his poems “A Writer’s Prayer” and “These Are Not Our Faces”.
Artist · Interviewer · Creative Educator
Founder of The Creative Process international educational initiative, podcast, and traveling exhibition
Her varied work sees her leading workshops and mentoring students around creativity, critical thinking, environmental ethics, arts and humanities disciplines. Her work appears in public and private collections, including the U.S. Library of Congress, Dublin Writers Museum, Office of Public Works, and other museums and culture centers. She has received awards and honors, including the Prix de Peinture from the Salon d’Automne and exhibited in the Grand Palais. Her paintings of Francis Bacon have won prizes and were exhibited in Paris and Brussels for Bacon’s centenary. As a writer and interviewer, she contributes to various national publications. Funk served on the National Advisory Council of the American Writers Museum and serves on the advisory board of the European Conference for the Humanities.
U.S. Poet Laureate · Host of The Slowdown podcast
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 darkness could be useful.
I still have problems today. Some people call it stage fright. I don't know what it is, but I'm always right before a concert thinking, Why am I doing this? I should be doing this. I should be doing that. Why am I here? What am I going to do? And I walk up to the microphone, I'm still thinking this, and I start playing. And I'm still thinking, What am I doing here? Why, why, why? All the questions of how I'm going to sustain playing for 45 minutes or an hour, and I'm still playing and playing. And then all of a sudden I go, Well, Mr. Landry, you've got people sitting in the audience. You're getting paid for this. So enjoy yourself. So the next thing I know, the concert is over, and I don't know where I've been.
T.S. Eliot Award-winning Poet, Novelist & Musician, Lead vocalist of The Spasm Band
Author of Sonnets for Albert
The life of Caribbean people is not really documented. So this idea of Caribbean life being fragmented is something that I've had in my mind for a long time. So when I came to write this collection for my father, I realized that it was the same process and what I had were fragments, especially with him, because he wasn't around in a physical sense all the time. So all I had were little photographs, scattered memories, and remembrances. They're little parts of his life and parts of my experience with him... I never disliked my father. I always loved him and always was fascinated and captivated by him.
Einstein on the Beach, it's a masterpiece. America, in 1976, was to be celebrating its 200th year of existence, and Michel Guy, the French Minister of Culture, came to New York to offer a commission to Philip Glass and Robert Wilson to write an opera. This was the gift that France would give for America's two-hundredth anniversary. That was the first time I met Robert Wilson.
I still have problems today. Some people call it stage fright. I don't know what it is, but I'm always right before a concert thinking, Why am I doing this? I should be doing this. I should be doing that. Why am I here? What am I going to do? And I walk up to the microphone, I'm still thinking this, and I start playing. And I'm still thinking, What am I doing here? Why, why, why? All the questions of how I'm going to sustain playing for 45 minutes or an hour, and I'm still playing and playing. And then all of a sudden I go, Well, Mr. Landry, you've got people sitting in the audience. You're getting paid for this. So enjoy yourself. So the next thing I know, the concert is over, and I don't know where I've been.
Explorer, Presenter, Author of Into The Planet: My Life as a Cave Diver
She is a veteran of over thirty years of filming, photography, and exploration on projects in submerged caves around the world. She has made TV series, consulted on movies, written several books and is a frequent corporate keynote speaker. Jill is the first Explorer in Residence for the Royal Canadian Geographical Society, recipient of Canada’s prestigious Polar Medal and is a Fellow of the International Scuba Divers Hall of Fame. In recognition of her lifetime achievement, Jill was awarded the Sir Christopher Ondaatje Medal for Exploration from the RCGS and the William Beebe Award from the Explorers Club.
Journalist, Essayist, Author of A Hard Place to Leave: Stories from a Restless Life
100 Places in France Every Woman Should Go
I started looking over the stories that I had done. I would say the majority of the essays were not really about travel. They were more about aging and marriage and memory and all of those things, but I did find in the travel essays those kernels of things that I wanted to explore - bigger kernels of things that were sort of scratching at me from the inside like a piece of sand in my pocket that was irritating me and that I wanted to explore. What I found was that the theme of coming and going, the theme of arrivals and departures, the theme of entrances and exits, and the theme of home and away seemed to repeat itself. I felt that whenever I was somewhere, there was always a tide home. And when I was home, there was always the urge for going. And so I just weeded out and weeded out and really wanted to keep this theme of home and away.
Artist · Interviewer · Creative Educator
Founder of The Creative Process international educational initiative, podcast, and traveling exhibition
Her varied work sees her leading workshops and mentoring students around creativity, critical thinking, environmental ethics, arts and humanities disciplines. Her work appears in public and private collections, including the U.S. Library of Congress, Dublin Writers Museum, Office of Public Works, and other museums and culture centers. She has received awards and honors, including the Prix de Peinture from the Salon d’Automne and exhibited in the Grand Palais. Her paintings of Francis Bacon have won prizes and were exhibited in Paris and Brussels for Bacon’s centenary. As a writer and interviewer, she contributes to various national publications. Funk served on the National Advisory Council of the American Writers Museum and serves on the advisory board of the European Conference for the Humanities.
Ecologist, Founding President of Safina Center
NYTimes Bestselling Author of Becoming Wild · Song for the Blue Ocean · Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel
So we tend to take living for granted. I think that might be the biggest limitation of human intelligence is to not understand with awe and reverence and love that we live in a miracle that we are part of and that we have the ability to either nurture or destroy. The living world is enormously enriching to human life. I just loved animals. They're always just totally fascinating. They're not here for us. They're just here like we're just here. They are of this world as much as we are of this world. They really have the same claim to life and death and the circle of being.
Novelist, Poet & Activist
People who take care of sick people and AIDS and teachers and garbage collectors and people who work in daycare…all the things that have to happen in society we pay shit for. We pay an enormous amount of money to people who can throw a ball through a hoop. We pay an enormous amount of hedge fund people. All the people who take over corporations go in and destroy get immensely rich while the people who do what we actually need doing, what we must have to survive, the people who grow food, the independent farmers that used to exist…
Poet
It's all-inclusive – poetry– and everything is poetry in a certain way, and poetic measure is like what we're composed of. It's what we are. I mean, we're poetry.
Alice Fulton’s books include Barely Composed, a poetry collection; The Nightingales Of Troy, linked stories; and Cascade Experiment: Selected Poems. Her book Felt received the Bobbitt Prize from the Library of Congress, awarded to the best book of poems published within a two-year period. She has received an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature and fellowships from the MacArthur Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, Guggenheim Foundation, and Ingram Merrill Foundation. Her other books include Sensual Math, Powers Of Congress, Palladium, Dance Script With Electric Ballerina, and an essay collection, Feeling As A Foreign Language. She lives in Ithaca, NY.
Award-winning Memoirist & Poet
The Magical Language of Others · A Lesser Love
I had delayed speech, and I had quite a bit of trouble with speaking. I think I must have been five before I was uttering some of my first words and trying to articulate. Simple communication was very difficult for me and my family, especially in a family where we were speaking several languages. They hoped to instill English. It’s the language of survival. There was a lot of frustration and fear in my relationship to language, and the relationship these languages had to each other, that was something I felt very sensitive to since I was young. Since before I could speak.
An extended creative essay for The Creative Process and One Planet podcast
Growing up in Zimbabwe to British parents, Doris Lessing often imagined herself into the landscape of modern England. In it, she saw the possibility of freedom, the horizon of an emergent literary life, and the promise of a prodigal return to the homeland.
The real issue with the island was his wife. She had never known it as well, perhaps not appreciated it as much either. She was a bit slower now, her memory was no longer what it once was. As much as it pained him to admit it, he knew that this could be their last trip.
In my dreams there are no clocks, only shadows and cries of love, and arguments which end in lovemaking. In my dreams there are no mornings, only nights and late afternoons…
Nino Sarabutra · Artist
There is a proverb from the North Eastern region of Thailand where I come from that says ‘Death follows you every step. Until waking up in the morning and seeing each other’s face, it’s uncertain we are still alive’. It reminds people to be aware of the present. To be thoughtful about their actions and responsible for what they are doing at every moment.
Artist
My two most recent installations, Driven From Their Homes and Arrival: The Rohingya, are anti-war travels and stories and a call to mercy.
He heard the woman yelling his sister’s name. The yelling was shrill. The next thing he knew, his mother was rushing him out into the fenced backyard.
Dance Video
One thing the crisis has made us all appreciate more is the importance of the arts. I’m so honored to be a small part of this great big community whose whole purpose is to encourage us to feel, to think…and to love.
Etiuda Wspomnienia Klaudia Folga
from our Collaborators at Łódź Film School
You are an old fashioned person. You believe in keeping things and not forgetting the old ways. You are honest. You always said exactly what is on your mind. At a time when being an immigrant and being a woman wasn’t easy, you became a businesswoman. You didn’t succeed by making yourself invisible, you spoke out and spoke up. You are a spontanous speechwriter, never at a loss for words - everyone knows this about you.
In the fading twilight,
Everything in the world becomes one and the same,
Silhouettes of the same shade
In her face, he sees the moon, serene and still. Inching closer, Lucas carefully pulls their covers up around her shoulders, so her sleep turns sweeter, as morning blooms.
Come, have a seat!
Would you like to sip from the glass I just have had drank water?
Or shall we begin without it?
In my dreams I became mad too many times,
Interview with Mariam Al-Ali
When one thinks of calligraphy, the first words that come in mind are preciseness, distinctness, measure, and beauty.
At the crossroads of Africa, Europe and the Middle-East, Morocco’s musical culture is at the image of the country’s ethnical diversity. In his Tableau de la musique marocaine, Alexis Chottin reminds us of Morocco’s unique spot as both a “member of the Muslim family” and Northern-African country. As such, its musical culture bears witness to its complex history of slavery, racism and Islamic spirituality, interwined in Gnawa culture.
As the entire globe experiences the difficulties and dangers of Covid-19, many areas of life are being affected. Not only have restaurants and malls closed to promote social distancing and prevent further spread of the virus, art galleries, museums, and artist all around the world are struggling to show their work.
I open John Ruskin’s “Work” which he delivered at the Working Men’s Institute at Campbell. I try to tempt myself with the deception that I would enjoy preparing for this class as the topic of class disparity is close to my heart.
Time is one of the elements that everybody in the world experiences. As we encounter time in the present, this moment instantly becomes the past and the future becomes the present. However, according to the spacetime continuum, time is relative to space on a constant world line.
During this quarantine period, the world seems extra surreal. The outside is unsafe, close contact with other human beings are discouraged and the digital world is taking over our lives more distinctly than ever. All of these resulted in forming hyper realistic but highly stressful and disruptive dreams.
For me, I like that I can create images that connect with other people as well as educate them on the forgotten history of American History. I focus on Black history and the Black experience because that is the history I grew up with but as I got old I realized that others around me had no idea what I was talking about.
Artist
Art will remain important after the era of transition to digital sources. Again, the price will be created by the hands of art.
Artist
Art and the creative process allowed me to return to a deeper identity than the one I had built for myself to survive. In doing so, I was able to discover the energy that inhabited me beyond the vicissitudes of life.
Painter · Videographer
The questions of movement and fiction are at the heart of my practice. Throughout my projects, I wonder about the very technique of animation, going from experimental video to creating complex stories.
I believe deeply in art as a tool of transformation, both individually and socially. Contemporary artistic practices enable dialogue with issues that affect all of us as inhabitants of the same world, affected and affecting by the same imaginaries, symbols and dreams.
Artist
Yumiko Ono’s theme is utopia/utopian architecture, an ideal world that exists in imagination.
Painter · Engraver
It is the desire to express my emotions through my works that makes me the creator that I am. For this I left Japan to fully live my passion: creation.
I am artist because I can not not other things. My artwork is the fruit and the result of an art research. I try to give to see what can be in the order of feminine.
Artist
My country is a country of legend
It’s the land of wind, sand and sun
This is the region of Sistan and Baluchistan
The women of my land are beautiful, kind
What do we know about Mary Shelley? Do we know that she was nineteen years when she wrote Frankenstein novel?
You are covered in a thin layer of sleep
At any minute the eyes in your skull may open
In the asphalt-paved night you open a door for us
I am pregnant with myself
Pregnant with my master who lies sweating in my cocoon
The details of rain when it wails on tired faces take me
The ocean seethed like molten lead. It could disfigure your heart.
It is so bitter that I have begun to ignore the darkness. The metaphor which has played the role of almost an eternity for my mortality. I cannot even see, rather sense, darkness anymore.
An investigation on time
As we move forward, time in a physical sense changes with us, but our mind can still be trapped within a certain time.
When I’m painting I don’t think about gender. When I’m doing artwork, it’s about the only time I get to forget that I’m a woman, that I’m Asian, and I belong to a certain social class. These things that define me in my waking life disappear when I’m painting.
The first time I saw her she was in a window. Under her left breast was taped a cardboard sign: Love, For a Limited Time Only. That’s what caught my eye, the sign, not her breasts, though those were nice too. I stared at the sign a moment, reading it over like a poem, to reveal its secret meaning.
If someone asked Mother what she thought Daughter would grow up to be, she wouldn’t in a million years have guessed this.
And when this will be solved in a believable and natural way, it will create new forms of narratives, unlike anything we’ve ever seen before.
The woman sits on a bench overlooking the sea. Below, the child runs along the deserted beach, arms outstretched…
When she was young it was the sick room, post-war green painted walls you could chalk on, where you were quarantined if ill. She’d sit at the open window singing to the house next door – she loved folk tales.
‘Do you know where dead birds are?’ the child asked the stone, because no one could answer her question.
Almost all the passengers / stare at their cellphones / solemnly attentive / to kindling screens
Drive the brain into books like nails
Fix the heart to the Muse's chest
Golden sepia shades
goodbye trains leaving my thoughts
I meet people
I observe their shoes.
They say a lot.
None. No one is not connected to someone else in the city who was hurt that night or dead. It is
the no-degrees of separation or escape. Or times we’ve been borne to. Everyone knows someone
The shiny red leather. The silky red ribbons. The silver toe and heel taps. At school she pictured herself wearing the shoes and imagined how they would sound on the old wooden floor of her dancing class.
That’s how the child fed the stone to let it live.
I was a very active child. My mom said that I started walking very early when I was young. I loved to go to long hiking with my father and dogs. I remember that I just loved being physically active.
She scrambles over rocks to where a solitary rowan survives – a rowan, shaped by the wind, spindly, struggling. She runs her hand down its smooth silvery bark, ties red thread to its branches and, between arriving and leaving, stops for a moment.
She opens the door to the library and walks barefoot, following the arrows marking the way; turn right, turn left, straight ahead. Row after row of memories, stacked, classified, catalogued, labelled – shelved. Her fingers, playing moments like a harp, release the fragrance of sweet peas, damask roses. She has brought ribbons with her.
I favor the left side a smidge.
I read with my left eye, write with my left hand,
So that my friends / might love me more / perhaps I should stop / writing about them
The Creative Process is collaborating with film schools and universities on intensive workshops and 4th-year courses combining film and literature. Multi-disciplinary artist Bronka Nowicka is directing one such program at Łódź Film School, and we are honored to showcase the imaginative works of their students and faculty.
I am in love / Without you / Infatuated with a thought / Born and raised within fiction / I am in love with a story
Intimacy requires time and closeness. Intimacy emerges when we dare to surrender to ourselves and each other with no need to defend or judge.
The Creative Process is collaborating with film schools and universities on intensive workshops and 4th-year courses combining film and literature. Multi-disciplinary artist Bronka Nowicka is directing one such program at Łódź Film School, and we are honored to showcase the imaginative works of their students and faculty.
I should have loved you when I had a chance. When the time was right and, as they say, all the ducks were lined up, and it would have all been so easy. That small window, open just a crack, but with a crowbar and this thing growing in me–was it even then love?–I could have got down there and pried it open.
I hear the slamming of a door, bolted shut, which belongs to a house with a weather-beaten chimney. On the street tinkles the sour moaning of the windows’ metal bars. Street lamps are shining in a depressive state. A seventy-two-year-old helpless loner walks past me.
They made love in the dunes by the old Air Force base—gone the war games there, gone the men who played them. Miles of high dunes, as in old films where some sunburnt Brit garbed in white has come to set things straight.
For years the young man had passed them—she had, too—he in his gray car, she in her red. They met one night at a blues bar, had their first date on a weekday.
Was it hard to get the day off? he asked.
Don’t have it off. Had to switch shifts.
What’d you tell them?
She looked at him.
I told them I ached. That knocked him back, & for a long time he was mute as they walked those dunes, turned once in a while to see their tracks. They chose a smooth dune to spread their quilt on.
This sea’s too blue, she said, as they laid out their food, poured the red wine, leaned back.
This is an old bomb range, you know, he said. They’ve cleaned it up, but I bet if we looked hard we could find some shells.
So how would the headline read, she asked: “Two Felled by Sheathed Shells at the Seashore?” I’ll pass. But I guess if you make a pass at me…
Late that day he said You know, I could just stay, end my life right here, let gulls pick me clean, let sand blow past my bones for years, and I’d be gone—all of me, gone. I mean, don’t you just feel it? The thrill of it?
Oh, for Christ’s sake, she said. I’m late for work.
They picked up their things, found their tracks, walked back to the car.
–
Psychologist
Author of Emotional Intelligence · Optimal
Ecological Intelligence · Destructive Emotions
Emotional intelligence is how you manage yourself and how you handle your relationships. Are you aware of what you're feeling? Can you use that awareness to handle emotions, to be positive, to be sure your upsetting emotions don't overwhelm you? This then helps you to tune into other people's emotions, to be empathic, and to put that all together to manage relationships well. It turns out that's what makes an engineer highly effective. I think it's what makes anyone highly effective.
Psychologist
Author of Emotional Intelligence · Optimal
Ecological Intelligence · Destructive Emotions
Emotional intelligence is how you manage yourself and how you handle your relationships. Are you aware of what you're feeling? Can you use that awareness to handle emotions, to be positive, to be sure your upsetting emotions don't overwhelm you? This then helps you to tune into other people's emotions, to be empathic, and to put that all together to manage relationships well. It turns out that's what makes an engineer highly effective. I think it's what makes anyone highly effective.
Author of The Wandering · Apple and Knife
Editor of Deviant Disciples: Indonesian Women Poets · Co-ed. The Routledge Companion to Asian Cinemas
The Wandering is a choose your own adventure novel, and the reader is situated in the shoes of this brown woman from the Global South. She's 27 and in a way, she is stuck with her life. She aspires to be middle class, but her job doesn't allow her to achieve this social mobility. In her condition, she makes a deal with a devil, a reference to the story of Faust and Mephistopheles, finally getting a pair of red shoes that will take her anywhere. But that means she will never be able to find home—that's the curse of the shoes. The title in Indonesian is Gentayanga, which is a word used to describe ghosts who exist in a liminal state.
Author of The Wandering · Apple and Knife
Editor of Deviant Disciples: Indonesian Women Poets · Co-ed. The Routledge Companion to Asian Cinemas
The Wandering is a choose your own adventure novel, and the reader is situated in the shoes of this brown woman from the Global South. She's 27 and in a way, she is stuck with her life. She aspires to be middle class, but her job doesn't allow her to achieve this social mobility. In her condition, she makes a deal with a devil, a reference to the story of Faust and Mephistopheles, finally getting a pair of red shoes that will take her anywhere. But that means she will never be able to find home—that's the curse of the shoes. The title in Indonesian is Gentayanga, which is a word used to describe ghosts who exist in a liminal state.
Environmentalists, writers, artists, activists, and public policy makers explore the interconnectedness of living beings and ecosystems. They highlight the importance of conservation, promote climate education, advocate for sustainable development, and underscore the vital role of creative and educational communities in driving positive change. Music courtesy of composer Max Richter.
Electronic Musician · Fmr. Computational Biologist
As technology becomes more dominant, the arts become ever more important for us to stay in touch the things that the sciences can't tackle. What it's actually like to be a person? What's actually important? We can have this endless progress inside this capitalist machine for greater wealth and longer life and more happiness, according to some metric. Or we can try and quantify society and push it forward. Ultimately, we all have to decide what's important to us as humans, and we need the arts to help with that. So, I think what's important really is just exposing ourselves to as many different ideas as we can, being open-minded, and trying to learn about all facets of life so that we can understand each other as well. And the arts is an essential part of that.
Electronic Musician · Fmr. Computational Biologist
As technology becomes more dominant, the arts become ever more important for us to stay in touch the things that the sciences can't tackle. What it's actually like to be a person? What's actually important? We can have this endless progress inside this capitalist machine for greater wealth and longer life and more happiness, according to some metric. Or we can try and quantify society and push it forward. Ultimately, we all have to decide what's important to us as humans, and we need the arts to help with that. So, I think what's important really is just exposing ourselves to as many different ideas as we can, being open-minded, and trying to learn about all facets of life so that we can understand each other as well. And the arts is an essential part of that.
Neuroscientist turned Environmental Journalist
Author of The Weight of Nature: How a Changing Climate Changes Our Minds, Brains, and Bodies
I want to be wowed by the world. I want to gaze at it in awe and wonder. And I think when we take a step back and begin to appreciate the complexity of the interactions around us. We're taking note of a very porous between the self and the rest of the world. We are literally observing our enmeshment in our environment. And it's that kind of a reference frameshift that I think is going to help us move out of some of the darkness. My mother is an artist, and I think growing up surrounded by her practice exposed me to the creative process and is probably that which afforded me a certain sympathy for those tools and those modes of exploring the world later in life.
Neuroscientist turned Environmental Journalist
Author of The Weight of Nature: How a Changing Climate Changes Our Minds, Brains, and Bodies
I want to be wowed by the world. I want to gaze at it in awe and wonder. And I think when we take a step back and begin to appreciate the complexity of the interactions around us. We're taking note of a very porous between the self and the rest of the world. We are literally observing our enmeshment in our environment. And it's that kind of a reference frameshift that I think is going to help us move out of some of the darkness. My mother is an artist, and I think growing up surrounded by her practice exposed me to the creative process and is probably that which afforded me a certain sympathy for those tools and those modes of exploring the world later in life.
Co-writer · Executive Producer · Co-showrunner of HBO’s The Sympathizer
I think it's central to the message of the show and of the book. This idea that there's another side to every question. That's the central quandary. There's this problem with the whole Vietnam War. It's saying to Americans, at least put yourself on the other side, the Vietnamese side, and then recognize that that side also has two sides and then within that, there are further divisions. And if you do that, I think what it's proposing is that you have to step back. It forces a sort of objectivity and humility, and it asks you to step back and allow the bigger human questions to resonate.
Co-writer · Executive Producer · Co-showrunner of HBO’s The Sympathizer
I think it's central to the message of the show and of the book. This idea that there's another side to every question. That's the central quandary. There's this problem with the whole Vietnam War. It's saying to Americans, at least put yourself on the other side, the Vietnamese side, and then recognize that that side also has two sides and then within that, there are further divisions. And if you do that, I think what it's proposing is that you have to step back. It forces a sort of objectivity and humility, and it asks you to step back and allow the bigger human questions to resonate.
Award-winning Screenwriters · Exec. Producers · Directors
American Rust · The Looming Tower
Capote · The Outsiders musical
We're all culpable in some way of being both good and bad, being virtuous and also questionable at times in our own lives. And I think when you start answering questions on either side of that too firmly, I think it allows the audience to disconnect from it. And then you just have this sort of a good and bad guy narrative that is oversimplified all too often in our culture. I think viewers will relate to this nature versus nurture versus DNA, raising all the questions of psychological and biological inheritance.
Award-winning Screenwriters · Exec. Producers · Directors
American Rust · The Looming Tower
Capote · The Outsiders musical
We're all culpable in some way of being both good and bad, being virtuous and also questionable at times in our own lives. And I think when you start answering questions on either side of that too firmly, I think it allows the audience to disconnect from it. And then you just have this sort of a good and bad guy narrative that is oversimplified all too often in our culture. I think viewers will relate to this nature versus nurture versus DNA, raising all the questions of psychological and biological inheritance.
Author of Eco-Travel: Journeying in the Age of the Anthropocene
Snr. Researcher · Trinity Centre for Literary & Cultural Translation
The idea of a kind of inert world that is simply there for our pleasure, enjoyment, and exploitation has proved to be catastrophically mistaken because we see it with flooding, we see it with forest fires. We see it with acidification of the oceans. We see it with the continuing rise in temperatures that the world itself, the more-than-human world is fighting back. It has taken on its own agency. And therefore, the idea of a pyramid, a hierarchy, is no longer operative.
Author of Eco-Travel: Journeying in the Age of the Anthropocene
Snr. Researcher · Trinity Centre for Literary & Cultural Translation
The idea of a kind of inert world that is simply there for our pleasure, enjoyment, and exploitation has proved to be catastrophically mistaken because we see it with flooding, we see it with forest fires. We see it with acidification of the oceans. We see it with the continuing rise in temperatures that the world itself, the more-than-human world is fighting back. It has taken on its own agency. And therefore, the idea of a pyramid, a hierarchy, is no longer operative.
Emmy Award-winning · Oscar-nominated Composer · Musician
1 0 0 1 · Silfur · Transparent · Lion
It's really like a journey from our connection with nature to where we are now, in this moment where we're playing with technology. We're almost in this hybrid space, not fully understanding where it's going. And it's very deep in our subconscious and probably much greater than we realize. And it sort of ends in this space where the consciousness of what we're creating, it's going to be very separate from us. And I believe that's kind of where it's heading – the idea of losing humanity, losing touch with nature and becoming outside of something that we have created.
Emmy Award-winning · Oscar-nominated Composer · Musician
1 0 0 1 · Silfur · Transparent · Lion
It's really like a journey from our connection with nature to where we are now, in this moment where we're playing with technology. We're almost in this hybrid space, not fully understanding where it's going. And it's very deep in our subconscious and probably much greater than we realize. And it sort of ends in this space where the consciousness of what we're creating, it's going to be very separate from us. And I believe that's kind of where it's heading – the idea of losing humanity, losing touch with nature and becoming outside of something that we have created.
President & CEO of the National Constitution Center
Author of The Pursuit of Happiness: How Classical Writers on Virtue Inspired the Lives of the Founders and Defined America
That idea of planting seeds for future generations came from the Tusculan Disputations. There’s something especially empowering about Cicero. And it's very striking that Thomas Jefferson and John Adams and so many in the Founding Era viewed this manual about overcoming grief as the definition for achieving happiness. And I think it's because it's a philosophy of self-mastery, self-improvement, and self-empowerment.
President & CEO of the National Constitution Center
Author of The Pursuit of Happiness: How Classical Writers on Virtue Inspired the Lives of the Founders and Defined America
That idea of planting seeds for future generations came from the Tusculan Disputations. There’s something especially empowering about Cicero. And it's very striking that Thomas Jefferson and John Adams and so many in the Founding Era viewed this manual about overcoming grief as the definition for achieving happiness. And I think it's because it's a philosophy of self-mastery, self-improvement, and self-empowerment.
Intimacy Coordinator · Founder of Intimacy on Set
Author of Intimacy On Set Guidelines
For years, people spoke about how awkward or embarrassing it was to perform the intimate content. And what they're speaking about is feeling horrible. If something's awkward, that squirm, that ring in the body, it feels embarrassing. That's actually an emotion that is not professional. That is not allowing the actor to stay feeling listened to, heard, empowered, autonomous. And so that they can just get on without any of those concerns and do their job to their best ability. And that's the awareness that we brought. So, we're saying, it is not suitable in our workplace for anybody to feel harassed or abused.
Intimacy Coordinator · Founder of Intimacy on Set
Author of Intimacy On Set Guidelines
For years, people spoke about how awkward or embarrassing it was to perform the intimate content. And what they're speaking about is feeling horrible. If something's awkward, that squirm, that ring in the body, it feels embarrassing. That's actually an emotion that is not professional. That is not allowing the actor to stay feeling listened to, heard, empowered, autonomous. And so that they can just get on without any of those concerns and do their job to their best ability. And that's the awareness that we brought. So, we're saying, it is not suitable in our workplace for anybody to feel harassed or abused.
Author | Illustrator
I did know that I wanted this book about turtles to also be about time. It's one of two big questions in philosophy. The one big mystery that I had tackled in a previous book, Soul of an Octopus, was the mystery of consciousness. The other big hard problem in philosophy is time. And I felt, you know, who better to lead me in this exploration than turtles, who live in some cases for centuries, who've been around...they arose with dinosaurs, yet they survived the asteroid impact. They are the embodiment of patience and wisdom.
Author | Illustrator
I did know that I wanted this book about turtles to also be about time. It's one of two big questions in philosophy. The one big mystery that I had tackled in a previous book, Soul of an Octopus, was the mystery of consciousness. The other big hard problem in philosophy is time. And I felt, you know, who better to lead me in this exploration than turtles, who live in some cases for centuries, who've been around...they arose with dinosaurs, yet they survived the asteroid impact. They are the embodiment of patience and wisdom.
NYTimes Bestselling Author
House of Sand and Fog · The Garden of Last Days · Ghost Dogs · Townie
All creative writing is that act of reaching for the pieces to put it back together again. And with the memoir, the essay, it's human memory. Your memory for your own existence. With fiction, it’s a dream world where you're reaching for the shards. Writing is a free fall into the writer's psyche, and if you want some clarity on what you believe, just write something sincere and emotionally naked and read it back to yourself, and you'll see a lot of what you believe, what you think, what you fear, regret, and desire, etc.
NYTimes Bestselling Author
House of Sand and Fog · The Garden of Last Days · Ghost Dogs · Townie
All creative writing is that act of reaching for the pieces to put it back together again. And with the memoir, the essay, it's human memory. Your memory for your own existence. With fiction, it’s a dream world where you're reaching for the shards. Writing is a free fall into the writer's psyche, and if you want some clarity on what you believe, just write something sincere and emotionally naked and read it back to yourself, and you'll see a lot of what you believe, what you think, what you fear, regret, and desire, etc.
Explorer & Aviator of the First Round-the-World Solar-powered Flight
Founder of Solar Impulse Foundation & Climate Impulse
UN Goodwill Ambassador for the Environment
The goal with Climate Impulse is to revolutionize aviation and show that we can decarbonize aviation. We can make it more efficient. Of course, it's not yet a jumbo jet with hydrogen. It's a two-seater airplane. But I want to make the ultimate flight to shake a little bit the certitudes of the people. If we go around the world nonstop with two people on board, this project can become like a flagship of climate action.
Explorer & Aviator of the First Round-the-World Solar-powered Flight
Founder of Solar Impulse Foundation & Climate Impulse
UN Goodwill Ambassador for the Environment
The goal with Climate Impulse is to revolutionize aviation and show that we can decarbonize aviation. We can make it more efficient. Of course, it's not yet a jumbo jet with hydrogen. It's a two-seater airplane. But I want to make the ultimate flight to shake a little bit the certitudes of the people. If we go around the world nonstop with two people on board, this project can become like a flagship of climate action.
Paleoanthropologist · Author of The Naked Neanderthal: A New Understanding of the Human Creature
This book is not just about Neanderthals. It's a book about us. I wanted to warn humans, to say there is something in us that is so efficient and dangerous. We've effectively collapsed many things and are now inducing the collapse of natural environments on the planet. And after that, we might even cause the collapse of ourselves as Homo sapiens.
Paleoanthropologist · Author of The Naked Neanderthal: A New Understanding of the Human Creature
This book is not just about Neanderthals. It's a book about us. I wanted to warn humans, to say there is something in us that is so efficient and dangerous. We've effectively collapsed many things and are now inducing the collapse of natural environments on the planet. And after that, we might even cause the collapse of ourselves as Homo sapiens.
Coordinator, Phd Programme, Environmental Sustainability & Wellbeing · University of Ferrara
Co-editor of Cultures of Sustainability and Wellbeing: Theories, Histories and Policies
The humanities are all about representing the world, while the sciences are all about knowing the world. But I believe the roles are deeply intertwined, and that literature, the humanities, philosophy, history, and the arts are all ways of knowing the world. They do exactly the same thing in our understanding of the world. And it is really important to try to put these things together to bring people closer in talking to each other.
OTHER VOICES
The traveling exhibitions are augmented by projection elements (a variety of interviews, stories, poems, artworks, essays, creative insights, short films and dance) by contributors from over 50 countries, alongside documentation of art and educational initiatives The Creative Process is involved in. Below is a brief selection.
IN CONVERSATION
I have been trying over the past twenty years to balance the serious and disturbing information I absorb at my job about human suffering, the earth's failing environment, and the atrocities of unnecessary wars, in a way that allows me to also, sometimes, feel joy.
I think what is going on now is we are being forced to recognize that this paradigmatic Western civilization, what we are part of, that we have been indoctrinated with, has fundamental flaws. And the most fundamental flaw is this automatic assumption that everything coming from the West always came from the West, had no other origins, whereas it’s almost the opposite.
The English way of saying, well, you meet a new person and what was he like? "What was he like?" is a very strange thing to say. It's saying: don't tell me how he was. Tell me what he resembles. Isn't that weird? It says: tell me a story.
PURE IMAGINATION PROGRAM for YOUNG WRITERS
OUR VOICES, OUR STORIES, OUR LIVES
"IMAGINATION is not only the uniquely human capacity to envision that which is not, and, therefore,
the foundation of all invention and innovation. In its arguably most transformative and revelatory capacity,
it is the power that enables us to empathize with humans whose experiences we have never shared." –J.K. ROWLING
It is for the profound originality of this approach that the Panthéon-Sorbonne University is pleased to showcase the inaugural exhibition.