BRUCE EVAN BARNHART

BRUCE EVAN BARNHART

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Author of Jazz in the Time of the Novel: The Temporal Politics of American Race and Culture
Temporal Experiments: Seven Ways of Configuring Time in Art and Literature
Co-director of University of Oslo’s Literature, Rights & Imagined Communities

I really admire how James Baldwin always talks about jazz as a kind of model for his writing style. But music has certainly had a profound influence on the way I see the world, especially in terms of the social world. One of the big problems we have in all sorts of different places around the world is the question of how to coordinate difference. All sorts of people have different modes of living, different cultural rhythms, and different ideas about the future. Jazz is brilliant at a lot of things, but it notably brings together different people and allows them to retain their own sense of time and rhythm while playing together. It's a really profound model of social coordination. Now, of course, it says something particularly pressing about the United States, but I think as a model for how differences go together, jazz is perhaps unparalleled.

NICHOLAS ROYLE

NICHOLAS ROYLE

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Co-author of An Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory
Author of Mother: A Memoir · Managing Editor of Oxford Literary Review

My mother died years ago. What has induced me to write about her after all this time remains mysterious to me. It is connected to the climate crisis. As the natural historian David Attenborough says: 'the collapse of our civilizations and the extinction of much of the natural world is on the horizon.' In ways I cannot pretend to fathom I have found that writing about my mother is bound up with writing about Mother Nature and Mother Earth. And no doubt it has to do also with my own aging and the buried life of mourning. The strange timetables of realization and loss. A memoir is 'a written record of a person's knowledge of events or of a person's own experiences'. 'A record of events written by a person having intimate knowledge of them and based on personal observation.' So the dictionaries tell us. But this memoir of my mother makes no attempt at a comprehensive record.

MAX STOSSEL

MAX STOSSEL

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Award-winning Poet, Filmmaker & Speaker
Creator of the Stand-Up Poetry Special Words That Move

Technology has very much changed the way we read and take in information and shortened it into quick bursts and attention spans. We're living in a new world, for sure. And how do we communicate in this new world? Not just in a way that gets the reach, because there are whole industries aimed at what do I do to get the most likes or the most attention, and all of that, which I don't think is very fulfilling as artists.

It's sort of a diminishing of our art form to try and play the game because then we're getting the attention and getting the hits, as opposed to what do I really want to create? How do I really want to create it? How do I want to display this? And can I do it in a way that breaks through so that if I do it my way, it's still going to get the attention, great. But if it doesn't, can I be cool with that? And can I be okay creating what I want to create, knowing that that's what it's about. It's about sharing in an honest, authentic way what I want to express without letting the tentacles of social media drip into my brain and take over why I'm literally doing the things that I'm doing.

JANE MADGWICK

JANE MADGWICK

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Ecologist & CEO of Wetlands International
Co-author of Water Lands: A vision for the world’s wetlands and their people
Wetlands naturally absorb twice the amount of carbon than all the world’s forests combined.
I think everybody at school learns about the water cycle. That rings a bell with everybody. Maybe this is a good hook to show the place of wetlands in capturing and purifying and the story of water. And then in turn how this links to what we’re seeing every year: droughts, floods, fires, heat waves which are devastating and life-threatening. I think this may be one of the easiest routes in educating people, connecting wetlands with water and the direct impact of that.

DEBRA J. FISHER

DEBRA J. FISHER

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Showrunner of Netflix’s Ginny & Georgia
Writer · Exec. Producer · Director · Alias · Criminal Minds · The OC · Charmed

I need a balance of light and dark. It can't be just one thing. I want you to be laughing one minute and by the end I want you to be crying. For me, character study is what is the most important. It all comes down to the characters. It's less about action or things like that, which you can have some of that, but it tonally, has to be female-centric and you have to be crying and laughing. There's so many interesting shows that walk that line of light and dark. I want to always live in the gray area with characters. Always. Nothing is ever black or white. It's always a weird gray area.

ETGAR KERET

ETGAR KERET

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Cannes Film Festival Award-winning Director
Author of Fly Already · Suddenly a Knock on the Door · The Seven Good Years

For me, there is something about art, it's not a monologue, it's a dialogue. Some people, it doesn't matter who they speak to, they will speak in the same way they would speak to a five-year-old or to an intellectual or to somebody who doesn't speak the language very well. They would speak the same way and they don't care because this is what they have to say, but I think that the natural thing in the dialogue is really to look into the eyes of the person you speak to and see when he understands or when she doesn't understand or when she's moved or when he's angry. And basically out of that, kind of create your own language.

ABBY AJAYI

ABBY AJAYI

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Creator of the Amazon series Riches
Writer/Producer on Inventing Anna · The First Lady · How to Get Away with Murder

I do feel that if one has the desire and the ability to be a much more big-picture showrunner, I think that's to the best. That benefits the show because there's a creative voice running all the way through. This isn't a movie, where it's a director's medium. It is the writer's medium, so I think the writer should be across producing and also empowering the director, but there is a clear vision. I think Riches has all the hallmarks of the things I've worked on before in terms of complex, slightly subversive women. At the heart of it, it is negotiating power dynamics. And at the heart of it, there are two very complex and yet vulnerable black women, but I've always loved family drama shows and particularly family businesses, whether it's fictional ones or in real life.

DEAN CRAIG

DEAN CRAIG

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Writer/Director of The Estate starring Toni Collette, Kathleen Turner, David Duchovny
The Honeymoon · Death at a Funeral · Love Wedding Repeat

So, you have my rhythm on the page, and then David Duchovny brings his rhythm and his attributes. And then you get this sort of hopefully wonderful collaboration between writer and director and actor. The Estate is the film that I directed most recently, and that's with Toni Colette, Anna Faris, David Duchovny, Kathleen Turner, Rosemarie DeWitt, Ron Livingston, Keyla Monterroso Mejia. Some really wonderful actors and I think a very fun ensemble that we were able to do there. I had a very strange year where I got to do The Honeymoon and The Estate pretty much back to back with no break in between, which was challenging, but also amazing to be one minute in Venice with these fantastic actors. Really, I can't tell you how much I loved working with Maria and Pico and Asim and Lucas. They were all totally different people and personalities, but all fantastic in their own way. And then I jumped onto the set and had those fantastic actors to work with. So it's been quite a year, I have to say.

ROB NIXON

ROB NIXON

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Author of Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor
Professor Environmental Humanities at Princeton

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 indigenous cosmologies. And the other hand, in order to increase the likelihood that they can keep out big corporations, mining, logging, and so forth, their presence on the land needs to be bureaucratically recognized is to have recognition that “this is your property.” So in one sense many of these communities I find are both inside and outside private property regimes.

RICHARD D. WOLFF

RICHARD D. WOLFF

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Founder of Democracy at Work · Host of Economic Update
Author of The Sickness is the System: When Capitalism Fails to Save Us from Pandemics or Itself

You can criticize many things in the United States, but there are taboos and the number one taboo is that you cannot criticize Capitalism. That is equated with disloyalty…This story about Capitalism being wonderful. This story is fading. You can’t do that anymore. The Right Wing cannot rally its troops around Capitalism. That’s why it doesn’t do it anymore. It rallies the troops around being hateful towards immigrants. It rallies the troops around “fake elections”, around the right to buy a gun, around White Supremacists. Those issues can get some support, but “Let’s get together for Capitalism!” That is bad. They can’t do anything with that. They have to sneak the Capitalism in behind those other issues because otherwise, they have no mass political support.