“I think first of all that in order to have disillusion, you need to have illusion and I really want to sort of take a stand in the name of being a delusional person, you know? I do think illusions are necessary to our sense of creativity, and we need to fall in love with extreme projects, and we need to have ideas that are sometimes unsustainable. We need to dream big in order to be creative and feel alive. The illusions that are a part of Aqua are larger illusions. They're illusions that have to do with my adult life. They're connected to nature and the presence or absence of water, the illusion that we can keep sustaining a city even though the water has run out.”

My guest today, Chiara Barzini, has spent her life navigating the literal and cultural fault lines between Italy and California. Today we will discuss her book, Aqua: A Story of Water and Lost Dreams, and her life as an artist living between two countries. In her acclaimed 2017 novel, Things That Happened Before the Earthquake, she wrote about arriving in the San Fernando Valley just weeks after a catastrophic natural disaster and the illusions of the '90s.

In Aqua, she examines nature, the California water crisis and the broken dreams of the Hollywood machine. We talk about family, film, art as an act of faith and our collective ecological coming of age, where the end of empire meets the end of abundance, and the consequences of hypercapitalism and colonialism. What does it mean to stare our illusions in the eye and find the courage to imagine a better future?

(0:00) The Necessity of Illusions

(1:40) Chiara Barzini, Author, Screenwriter

(4:44) The End of Empire and Ecological Anxiety

(12:15) The Allure and Cruelty of Capitalism

(16:07)   Aqua: A Reading - On Hollywood and Water

(21:02) Screenwriter Robert Towne and the Legacy of Chinatown

(26:20) AI Consumption and Water Bankruptcy

(30:23) The Edge of Apocalypse and Bombay Beach

(33:41) The Etruscans and the Art of Dying

(42:33) Translation and Creativity

(44:28) Raising Children in a Crazy World

(47:30) Poetry, Ruins, and The Waste Land

(57:33) Scents and Sounds of Rome and Los Angeles

(01:04:17) The Connection with Animals and Nature

(01:07:35) The Evolution of Love and Compassion

(01:09:17) The Memory Museum

(01:13:00) We Are in This Lifetime Together

Episode Website

www.creativeprocess.info/pod

Instagram:@creativeprocesspodcast

Emmy van Deurzen is a philosopher, a therapist and a pioneer who has spent five decades mapping the architecture of human existence. Born in the Netherlands and trained in the radical psychiatric wards of France, she came to London in 1977 to work alongside R.D. Laing, only to realize the anti-psychiatry movement had kind of lost its way. She decided to build something new. Today, she's the founder of the New School of Psychotherapy and Counselling and the leading voice of existential therapy in the United Kingdom and founded the Existential Movement.

Her work challenges the medical model of mental illness, suggesting instead that our crises are not diseases to be cured but philosophical crossroads to be understood. Her latest book is a distillation of that life's work. Beginning To Live: The Art of Existential Freedom is her first book written for a general audience, offering a guide on how to reclaim our freedom and find meaning in the face of suffering. Emmy van Deurzen, welcome to The Creative Process.

(0:00) The Paths to Freedom

(2:03) Emmy Van Deurzen, Philosopher, Existential Therapist, Author

(3:13) AI and Artificial Wisdom

(5:03) Practicing Freedom

(7:00) Finding Inner Peace Amidst the Ruins

(8:39) The Yellow Balloon

(11:17) Multilingual Roots, Language and Translation

(13:31) The End of One Love, The Beginning of a Love of the Arts

(16:11) The Art of Loving

(17:30) The Canvas of Life

(20:20) The Purified Essence

(27:46) The AI Dependency

(30:09) Radical Psychiatry, R.D. Laing and The Divided Self

(33:48) Awakening to Beauty

(37:18) The Art of Living and Existential Freedom

Episode Website

www.creativeprocess.info/pod

Instagram:@creativeprocesspodcast

My guest today is Ada Limón. She served two historic terms as the 24th poet laureate in the United States. She has brought poetry to public parks across the US, and her words have traveled through deep space, engraved on NASA’s Europa Clipper spacecraft. In over 20 years of writing in celebrated collections like Bright Dead Things and The Carrying and her new book, Startlement: New and Selected Poems, Ada has brought a sincerity to American poetry rooted in connection to the natural world.

She’s written with inspiring honesty about the death of loved ones, trying to conceive and also the unexpected liberation of deciding to step away from societal expectations of motherhood and embrace a life happily childfree. Her latest book on craft, Against Breaking: On the Power of Poetry, asks how a poem can hold our heaviest grief without letting the human spirit fracture.

After years living in Kentucky and New York, she bought back her childhood home in Sonoma Valley, stepping back into the rooms where her poetic imagination first took root. We’ll talk about the discipline of paying attention and why poetry remains an essential act of human survival.

(1:45) Silence as the Music of the World

(9:17) The Deepening of Roots

(13:19) 'On Earth As It Is on Earth'

(18:08) Bearing Witness Without Surrendering to Grief

(21:02) Singing Back the Wounded World and the Case for Beauty

(28:22) Love as an Active Daily Choice

(30:38) The Practice of Loving-Kindness Meditation

(37:34) Writing Without Music, Listening to the Landscape

(40:04) Dreams as Archetypes of Consciousness

(42:51) The Creative Toll of AI

(51:29) Embracing the Liberation of a Childfree Life

(1:01:06) Listening to Trees as an Act of Reciprocity

(1:06:44) Interconnectedness of Living Beings

Episode Website

www.creativeprocess.info/pod

Instagram:@creativeprocesspodcast

Chiara Barzini has spent her life navigating the literal and cultural fault lines between Italy and California. Today we will discuss her book, Aqua: A Story of Water and Lost Dreams, and her life as an artist living between two countries. In her acclaimed 2017 novel, Things That Happened Before the Earthquake, she wrote about arriving in the San Fernando Valley just weeks after a catastrophic natural disaster and the illusions of the '90s.

In Aqua, she examines nature, the California water crisis and the broken dreams of the Hollywood machine. We talk about family, film, art as an act of faith and our collective ecological coming of age, where the end of empire meets the end of abundance, and the consequences of hypercapitalism and colonialism. What does it mean to stare our illusions in the eye and find the courage to imagine a better future?

(0:00) Water as Power

(2:17) The Necessity of Illusions

(4:24) Aqua: A Reading - On Hollywood and Water

(7:51) The Edge of Apocalypse & Writing

(9:10) The Etruscans and the Art of Dying

(13:13) Translation and the Creative Spark

(14:38) Raising Children in a Crazy World

(16:18) Poetry, Ruins, and The Waste Land

(18:48) Scents and Sounds of Two Cities (Rome and Los Angeles)

(20:43) The Connection with Animals and Nature

(22:54) The Evolution of Love and Compassion

(24:12) The Memory Museum

(27:04) We are in this lifetime together

Episode Website

www.creativeprocess.info/pod

Instagram:@creativeprocesspodcast

“We are in the middle of a labyrinth which suggests to us many fake corridors. What's the superpower of literature? Literature is like an antidote against propaganda. Propaganda explains the world easily in a two-dimensional way.  Literature gives you a more complex explanation. Literature tells personal stories.”

Today, we have a conversation about time, memory, and the bittersweet geography of human sorrow. Georgi Gospodinovis widely considered one of the most daring voices in contemporary European literature. His acclaimed novel, The Physics of Sorrow, won the prestigious Jan Michalski Prize in 2016, blending ancient myth and quantum physics to chronicle the delicate realities of post-socialist Eastern Europe. Joining him is Angela Rodel, a brilliant linguist, musician, and translator whose profound artistic empathy carries the flowing cadences of the Bulgarian language into vivid English. Together, this extraordinary creative duo made history by winning the 2023 International Booker Prizefor Time Shelter—the first book written in Bulgarian to ever receive the honor.

Time Shelter is a masterfully dark, funny, and prescient novel. It begins with an enigmatic psychiatrist opening a clinic that treats Alzheimer’s patients by meticulously recreating past decades to match their internal clocks. But the experiment quickly escapes the clinic walls, triggering a pan-European crisis where entire nations hold democratic referendums to choose which era of the past they will retreat into. It is a book that holds up a mirror to our own world, exploring what happens when a civilization faces a deficit of meaning and tries to weaponize nostalgia.

(0:00) The Trap of Nostalgia

(2:13) The Art of Translation

(5:44) The Pandemic of the Past

(11:30) Reading from ‘Time Shelter’

(14:28) Death and the Gardener

(19:34) The Translator's Calling

(26:05) Cultural Rhythms of the Bulgarian Language

(30:00) The Nonlinear Approach to Storytelling

(34:30) Separating Personal and Historical Pasts

(42:55) Storytelling vs Propaganda

(47:19) Bodies, Animals and the Loneliness of the Minotaur

(56:00) Reading ' Eight Minutes and 19 Seconds’

(1:00:28) What makes a good life? What has given your life meaning?

(1:04:18)   Childhood, Memory and Imagination

(1:10:38) Reflections on God and the Stories His Grandmother Told Him

(1:17:20) Education and the Empathic Imagination

(1:23:25) The Museum of Memory

(1:26:15) The Importance of Hugging and Empathy

(1:28:02) AI and the Future of Humanity

Episode Website

www.creativeprocess.info/pod

Instagram:@creativeprocesspodcast

"I really do believe that the arts are critical to how we move forward together, and live performance in particular, I think, is a way of us practicing how to move across our ideological boundaries and find one another and imagine these new worlds together and create together."

Shanta Thake is the Chief Artistic Officer at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts—the nation's largest performing arts complex. Before stepping into this role, she spent nineteen years at The Public Theater, shaping the city's cultural landscape through Joe's Pub and expansive community initiatives. Today, she is tearing down walls—both the literal barriers separating Lincoln Center from its neighbors, and the figurative ones that dictate who belongs in our cultural spaces. She views the arts not as a luxury, but as essential civic infrastructure. We are pleased to have Shanta Thake to discuss her journey, the power of radical curation, and the future of public performance.

"I really do believe that the arts are critical to how we move forward together, and live performance in particular, I think, is a way of us practicing how to move across our ideological boundaries and find one another and imagine these new worlds together and create together."

Shanta Thake is the Chief Artistic Officer at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts—the nation's largest performing arts complex. Before stepping into this role, she spent sixteen years at The Public Theater, shaping the city's cultural landscape through Joe's Pub and expansive community initiatives. Today, she is tearing down walls—both the literal barriers separating Lincoln Center from its neighbors, and the figurative ones that dictate who belongs in our cultural spaces. She views the arts not as a luxury, but as essential civic infrastructure. We are pleased to have Shanta Thake to discuss her journey, the power of radical curation, and the future of public performance.

(00:00) Reimagining Lincoln Center

(03:09) A Collective Caretaking

(03:47) The Technology of Human Creation

(04:20) The Curiosity of Childhood

(09:25) San Juan Hill and The Wall

(14:20) globalFEST: Music and Connection

(16:06) The Gift of Pause

(17:20) A Collective Caretaking

Episode Website

www.creativeprocess.info/pod

Instagram:@creativeprocesspodcast

Today, we have a conversation about time, memory, and the bittersweet geography of human sorrow. Georgi Gospodinovis widely considered one of the most daring voices in contemporary European literature. His acclaimed novel, The Physics of Sorrow, won the prestigious Jan Michalski Prize in 2016, blending ancient myth and quantum physics to chronicle the delicate realities of post-socialist Eastern Europe. Joining him is Angela Rodel, a brilliant linguist, musician, and translator whose profound artistic empathy carries the flowing cadences of the Bulgarian language into vivid English. Together, this extraordinary creative duo made history by winning the 2023 International Booker Prizefor Time Shelter—the first book written in Bulgarian to ever receive the honor.

Time Shelter is a masterfully dark, funny, and prescient novel. It begins with an enigmatic psychiatrist opening a clinic that treats Alzheimer’s patients by meticulously recreating past decades to match their internal clocks. But the experiment quickly escapes the clinic walls, triggering a pan-European crisis where entire nations hold democratic referendums to choose which era of the past they will retreat into. It is a book that holds up a mirror to our own world, exploring what happens when a civilization faces a deficit of meaning and tries to weaponize nostalgia.

(0:00) The Trap of Nostalgia

(1:22) The Nonlinear Approach to Storytelling

(3:53) Translating the Atmosphere

(4:31) The Pandemic of the Past

(6:37) Death and the Gardener

(9:49) The Translators Calling

(11:00) Slowing Down Time

(13:14) Storytelling vs Propaganda

(15:54) Translating the Atmosphere

(18:19) What makes a good life? What has given your life meaning?

(20:56) Reflections on God and the Stories His Grandmother Told Him

(23:43) The Importance of Hugging, Empathy and Storytelling

Episode Website

www.creativeprocess.info/pod

Instagram:@creativeprocesspodcast

If you live in a city, you’ve probably had that moment in the middle of the night. You hear a scratching in the walls, or you catch the glowing eyes of a raccoon peering out from a dumpster, and for a second, the concrete world feels a lot less 'controlled' than we like to pretend. We’ve been taught to think of cities as 'biological deserts'—places where nature goes to die. But my guest today, Dan Werb, says that’s a myth we tell ourselves to feel safe. Dan is an award-winning epidemiologist and a musician, and in his new book, Our Wild Familiars, he explores the 'synanthropes'—the wild creatures that aren't our pets, but aren't quite strangers either. They are the coyotes, the bats, and even the octopuses that are learning to use our cities as laboratories for their own rapid evolution. He’s also the author of The Invisible Siege and City of Omens.

(0:02) The unexpected biodiversity of urban areas and wild familiars

(1:18) What is a Synanthrope?

(4:15) The Myth of the Biological Desert

(8:04) The Ancestral Bond between early humans, ravens, and foxes

(9:15) Crows and Grudges

(12:42) Stepping Stones in the Concrete

(14:20) The Epidemiological Triangle

(17:58) The Illusion of AI Connection

(19:56) The Museum of Memory

Episode Website

www.creativeprocess.info/pod

Instagram:@creativeprocesspodcast