JUNG CHANG

JUNG CHANG

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Historian & Author of International Bestseller Wild Swans

Writing Wild Swans was the thing that resolved the trauma for me. When I first came to Britain in 1978, I was one of the first people to leave China and come to the West. I wrote about the experience in Wild Swans. And for many years I had nightmares of the horrible things I saw and experienced. Writing Wild Swans made all these nightmares disappear. It was a wonderful process. The writing process turned trauma in memory. I am now able to talk to you about my book, my life, to read it without too much pain. I think this is a luxury people in China still don’t have.

(Highlights) AVI LOEB

(Highlights) AVI LOEB

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Harvard Astronomer · Theoretical Physicist
NY Times Bestselling Author of Extraterrestrial, The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth

If we are not open to discover wonderful things, we will never discover them. It very much depends on us allowing ourselves to explore and find new things. My mother used to tell me when I was a kid that when I was born as an infant I was very different from the other babies in the room. I was looking around with open eyes, and I should say that’s where it all started. Once I got out of the womb of my mother and I started looking around, I was very curious. The great privilege of being a scientist is that you don’t need to give up on that curiosity. You can maintain your childhood curiosity.

AVI LOEB

AVI LOEB

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Harvard Astronomer · Theoretical Physicist
NY Times Bestselling Author of Extraterrestrial, The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth

If we are not open to discover wonderful things, we will never discover them. It very much depends on us allowing ourselves to explore and find new things. My mother used to tell me when I was a kid that when I was born as an infant I was very different from the other babies in the room. I was looking around with open eyes, and I should say that’s where it all started. Once I got out of the womb of my mother and I started looking around, I was very curious. The great privilege of being a scientist is that you don’t need to give up on that curiosity. You can maintain your childhood curiosity.

RICK MOODY

RICK MOODY

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Novelist & Memoirist

Words are the oldest information storage and retrieval system ever devised…The written word will remain, scribbled on collapsed highway overpasses, as a testament to love and rage, as evidence of the wanderers in the ruin.

(Highlights) JENNY BHATT

(Highlights) JENNY BHATT

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Writer, Literary Translator, Book Critic & Host of Desi Books Podcast

People talk about the work life, the line between your work and your life and keeping them separate and keeping the balance. For me, it’s always been that my work defines who I am and who I am in my personal life also defines who I am at my workplace. I don’t know how you separate those identities because I take all my belief systems and who I am to my workplace.

JENNY BHATT

JENNY BHATT

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Writer, Literary Translator, Book Critic & Host of Desi Books Podcast

People talk about the work life, the line between your work and your life and keeping them separate and keeping the balance. For me, it’s always been that my work defines who I am and who I am in my personal life also defines who I am at my workplace. I don’t know how you separate those identities because I take all my belief systems and who I am to my workplace.

(Highlights) PETER SINGER

(Highlights) PETER SINGER

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Most Influential Living Philosopher
Author · Founder of The Life You Can Save

I would like young people to recognise that they are part of a long tradition that has been trying to the make the world a better place. A tradition that goes back as far as we have recorded history, that there are people who tried to–like Socrates, but also like Buddha and many other figures in different cultures–think more about how we ought to live in accordance with their thinking. Tried to do good in the world and that’s a tradition they can be part of. This generation really does hold the future of the planet in its hands.

PETER SINGER

PETER SINGER

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Most Influential Living Philosopher
Author · Founder of The Life You Can Save

I would like young people to recognise that they are part of a long tradition that has been trying to the make the world a better place. A tradition that goes back as far as we have recorded history, that there are people who tried to–like Socrates, but also like Buddha and many other figures in different cultures–think more about how we ought to live in accordance with their thinking. Tried to do good in the world and that’s a tradition they can be part of. This generation really does hold the future of the planet in its hands.

(Highlights) HALA ALYAN

(Highlights) HALA ALYAN

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Dayton Literary Peace Prize Winning Novelist, Poet & Clinical Psychologist

We become the stories we tell ourselves…I started writing around the time I learned English because we moved to the States soon after my fourth birthday, and so I was here for kindergarten into elementary school. I grasped this new language just as I was learning how to also put things onto the page. Those two things really happened at the same time for me. I entered this world where I felt very different and very other, for all intents and purposes I was set to be raised in Kuwait. And then that of course got turned upside down after the invasion by Saddam. I think that so much of my trying to make sense of the world had to do with the displacement, exile and these experiences that my parents had experienced but then that I had as well as we were fleeing the war. It’s hard to know because I think that language was being formed in my brain at the same time that these things were happening.

HALA ALYAN

HALA ALYAN

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Dayton Literary Peace Prize Winning Novelist, Poet & Clinical Psychologist

We become the stories we tell ourselves…I started writing around the time I learned English because we moved to the States soon after my fourth birthday, and so I was here for kindergarten into elementary school. I grasped this new language just as I was learning how to also put things onto the page. Those two things really happened at the same time for me. I entered this world where I felt very different and very other, for all intents and purposes I was set to be raised in Kuwait. And then that of course got turned upside down after the invasion by Saddam. I think that so much of my trying to make sense of the world had to do with the displacement, exile and these experiences that my parents had experienced but then that I had as well as we were fleeing the war. It’s hard to know because I think that language was being formed in my brain at the same time that these things were happening.

(Highlights) DAVID HOLLANDER

(Highlights) DAVID HOLLANDER

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Showrunner · Writer · Director

They are very different skill sets and very different ways of approaching storytelling. Writing is very private. I find writing to be very difficult. I have an idea. I have a feeling, and then I write into it. That part of the process is the most painful and the most demanding. Directing is easier. It’s a very different skill set. It’s applying a story to the technique of how you film it, how it’s going to work. That part is so simple. The writing is brutally hard. There’s an architecture to every season that you write in television. I have to see the whole story. This big twelve-hour story. There’s a lot of math in that. There’s a lot of Where am I going? and How is it going to feel? Because at the end of the day, all I’m doing is trying to make people feel something.

DAVID HOLLANDER

DAVID HOLLANDER

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Showrunner · Writer · Director

They are very different skill sets and very different ways of approaching storytelling. Writing is very private. I find writing to be very difficult. I have an idea. I have a feeling, and then I write into it. That part of the process is the most painful and the most demanding. Directing is easier. It’s a very different skill set. It’s applying a story to the technique of how you film it, how it’s going to work. That part is so simple. The writing is brutally hard. There’s an architecture to every season that you write in television. I have to see the whole story. This big twelve-hour story. There’s a lot of math in that. There’s a lot of Where am I going? and How is it going to feel? Because at the end of the day, all I’m doing is trying to make people feel something.

(Highlights) DANIEL HANDLER a.k.a Lemony Snicket

(Highlights) DANIEL HANDLER a.k.a Lemony Snicket

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Writer

I think what is most exciting is that it is a very passionate readership. You never love a book the way you love a book when you are ten. And I think to be a part of that sacred space and that kind of sacred exchange between a reader and literature is very exciting.

DANIEL HANDLER a.k.a Lemony Snicket

DANIEL HANDLER a.k.a Lemony Snicket

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Writer

I think what is most exciting is that it is a very passionate readership. You never love a book the way you love a book when you are ten. And I think to be a part of that sacred space and that kind of sacred exchange between a reader and literature is very exciting.

ROXANE GAY

ROXANE GAY

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Writer

As seductive as the virtual world can be – where there are fewer boundaries, where you can be anything, and you can be anyone – there's something very important about the tactile world and being grounded in the tactile world. And so far humanity has not lost sight of that collectively. And I do not think that we will.

(Highlights) ROXANE GAY

(Highlights) ROXANE GAY

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Writer

As seductive as the virtual world can be – where there are fewer boundaries, where you can be anything, and you can be anyone – there's something very important about the tactile world and being grounded in the tactile world. And so far humanity has not lost sight of that collectively. And I do not think that we will.

RICK MOODY

RICK MOODY

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Novelist & Memoirist

Words are the oldest information storage and retrieval system ever devised…The written word will remain, scribbled on collapsed highway overpasses, as a testament to love and rage, as evidence of the wanderers in the ruin.

CAROLYN WATERS BROE

CAROLYN WATERS BROE

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Founding Conductor of the Four Seasons Orchestra
Principal Violist of the Scottsdale Philharmonic

I feel that the earth is like a classroom for soul growth and we’re put here to overcome challenges, and we may be working on something like humility or compassion or love of humanity. The challenges might be something like war or cancer. Everybody gets a challenge to work on in their lives, but they also get a great gift to help them through those challenges. You just have to know how to use those gifts.

(Highlights) CAROLYN WATERS BROE

(Highlights) CAROLYN WATERS BROE

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Founding Conductor of the Four Seasons Orchestra
Principal Violist of the Scottsdale Philharmonic

I feel that the earth is like a classroom for soul growth and we’re put here to overcome challenges, and we may be working on something like humility or compassion or love of humanity. The challenges might be something like war or cancer. Everybody gets a challenge to work on in their lives, but they also get a great gift to help them through those challenges. You just have to know how to use those gifts.

(Highlights) EIMEAR McBRIDE

(Highlights) EIMEAR McBRIDE

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Eimear McBride trained at The Drama Centre in London. Her debut novel A Girl is a Half-formed Thing received a number of awards, including the Bailey Women’s Prize for Fiction, and the Irish Novel of the Year. She occasionally writes interviews for The Guardian, TLS, and The New Statesman.

This interview was conducted by Justin Hayes and Mia Funk with the participation of collaborating universities and students. Associate Interviews Producer on this podcast was Reagan-Koffink. Digital Media Coordinator is Yu Young Lee. 


Mia Funk is an artist, interviewer and founder of The Creative Process.