This episode explores the enduring power of storytelling to shape our world and illuminate the human experience. Writers Neil Gaiman, Ada Limón, Jericho Brown, E.J. Koh, Marge Piercy, and Max Stossel discuss creativity, resilience, and the power of words to heal and bring people together.
Artists, Writers, Visionaries & Educators Share their Stories
How can the arts help us learn to speak the language of the Earth and cultivate our intuitive intelligence? What is the power of mentorship for forging character and creative vision? How can we hold onto our cultural heritage and traditions, while preparing students for the needs of the 21st century?
Anishinaabe Legal Theorist · Philosopher
How might we learn about, learn with, and learn from our plant companions on this Earth? Plants show signs of communication and of learning. They produce and respond to many of the same neurochemicals as humans, including anesthetics. They share resources with one another, and when under threat, emit signals of warning and of pain. While Barrows and Calvo both urge us to listen to the Earth, during this conversation we discover that these two thinkers are often listening for different things. The discussion reveals fascinating points of difference and commonality. And in terms of the latter, the point both John and Paco insist upon is that we maintain our separation from other beings at our peril and at a loss.
Discuss When “Natives” Aren’t: The Epistemic & Communal Violence & Re-storying
A lot of Pretendians lay claim to this identity of being Native American, and the universities have no problem with it whatsoever. It's indigenous people who fight against that settler colonial initiative to make this about diversity, equity, and inclusion, and not about indigeneity or indigenous rights. And so when students mark down Indigenous, they're accepted as an Indigenous person, and the university pats itself on the back for admitting yet another Indigenous person. And they happily add up those numbers that go into all sorts of reports to say, "This is how many Indigenous students we have at the moment. The numbers are rising, etc." And many of those students never attend any Indigenous events, but some do. Some will come to the support center for Native students. And some will really take on ownership of this idea that they are Native, when in fact they're not. And they actually know they're not. But let's say we have a person who's gifted intellectually. And they can get their heads around these stories. And they can get their heads around epistemic violence. And they become friends with people in the Native community. That's the beginning of their story. And that's the way in which academia produces these people.
Booker Prize-winning Author
The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida
Chinaman: The Legend of Pradeep Mathew
So this was the decision to write in the second person. A lot of people ask me: why? There are not many examples of this technique. The reason I opted for that is I was trying to figure out interviewing a ghost. And one of the challenges was: what does a disembodied voice sound like? The narrator's body has been chopped up and chucked in a lake. So, I figured that if anything survives the death of your body, it's perhaps the voice in your head. The voice in my head is in the second person. I don't know about your head or anyone else's head, but in mine, it's the second person.
What happens when we die? What happens to our memories and consciousness when our bodies cease to be? In the end, is it the things we did and the people we loved that give our lives meaning?
Shehan Karunatilaka is the multi-award winning author. He is known for his novels dealing with the history, politics, and folklore of his home country of Sri Lanka. He won the Commonwealth Book Prize and the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature for his debut novel, Chinaman: The Legend of Pradeep Mathew, and the Booker Prize 2022 for his second novel, The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida. In addition to novels, he has written rock songs, screenplays and travel stories. Born in Colombo, he studied in New Zealand and has lived and worked in London, Amsterdam, and Singapore.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
In your book, there are ghosts who go around whispering ideas into the ears of the living, so that we think the idea is in our head, but it's something that's been whispered by a vengeful or mischievous ghost.
SHEHAN KARUNATILAKA
So this was the decision to write in the second person. A lot of people ask me: why? There are not many examples of this technique. The reason I opted for that is I was trying to figure out interviewing a ghost. And one of the challenges was: what does a disembodied voice sound like? The narrator's body has been chopped up and chucked in a lake.
So, I figured that if anything survives the death of your body, it's perhaps the voice in your head. The voice in my head is in the second person. I don't know about your head or anyone else's head, but in mine, it's the second person.
It's almost like someone else telling me: Yeah, you should have worn a better shirt for this interview. You should have read a better chapter. And it's almost like someone is talking to me. And I tried this technique, and I think Maali Almeida also questions. Who is the you that's telling the story? And this is addressed. We've all had experiences where we've done something or said something and we've thought: what was I thinking? Why did I do that? And what made me do that? And so Maali also ponders: Is the voice telling the story, is that me, or is it someone else? Is there a spirit? Because he observes that spirits, because they're so bored - because I have to also figure out what ghosts do all day? Because we know in horror movies, ghosts turn up and be scary. And I don't know if there are resolutions in the book, but there is the idea that maybe are your thoughts your own? Or is someone else whispering them to you?
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
The figure of the leopard recurs in the book. And I think if you watch leopards in the savannah, you can see that they're at repose until they need to be. And then they just take off, and you can't even follow them with your eyes. So it's kind of like, we conserve our energies and our imagination and we just take off when we have an idea.
As you were writing, you were absorbing different religious, spiritual and artistic traditions. Which were those that resonated the most?
KARUNATILAKA
I was very inspired to know that humans are not the be-all and end-all. We're just one state. But you could be in this state of consciousness, this kind of godly state, even a demonic state, but also the fact that all living creatures had souls and were affected by karma. And this is something we tend to forget, especially because animals are so tasty and therefore we have to justify slaughtering them on such a mass scale. So we want to believe that they don't count. Or they are somehow lesser souls than us. The cat doesn't believe that it's a pet. The cat believes they are the center of the universe. I'm sure the cockroach believes that they are the center of the universe, just as we do. And back to the thing you said: how our bodies inform our view. I think every living creature suffers and experiences joy. And therefore it's convenient for us to say that certain things don't have souls...whatever the soul is.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
I sometimes feel that I trust an idea more when it comes suddenly from the outside. When you're like a vessel. I feel like it's stronger and it has a momentum. I feel we can go wrong when we're the only author. It's like our ego contaminates our imagination. So I feel like there's a natural order that one becomes a vessel.
KARUNATILAKA
The notion that the idea is out there, but you just need to be in a state to receive it, that's a very comforting thought because it takes the onus off of you. You don't have to be a genius. You don't have to be this big creator. You just have to read and keep healthy and keep yourself open and the idea will arrive. And the funny thing is, usually it arrives to you and then you're typing.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
Maali Almeida is also a closeted gay man. Why did you choose that? Or did it just seem natural? You also had some inspiration from the life of a real journalist?
KARUNATILAKA
I think when the novel went through many revisions and reiterations, a lot of Richard de Zoysa's biography got shared, and Maali Almeida emerged as a character. But that one detail stayed, the fact that he was a closeted gay man. Again, you write by instinct, and also I had to explain why was this privileged Colombo kid, going to these very dangerous places and hanging out with very dodgy characters. So one reason was perhaps ego. He found something he was very good at, and he thought he was bearing witness and doing this great service.
I think another reason - and also this idealism that he thought his photographs could change the world - but also I think as a closeted gay man, he could express himself sexually in the war zone. Normal rules didn't apply. And also I think this informed his world. He just believed in being a hedonist and enjoying his sexuality. And the only way he could do that was to go to these dangerous places where no one he knew would be watching.
I don't know if I could revise it now and make him heterosexual and have the story work quite as well. So that was the reason. Since then I've been questioned because now that debate is alive and well: the cultural appropriation debate. Are we allowed to write novels from the perspective of characters of different sexualities, genders, and ethnicities?
I think we are. I think that's the whole point of being a novelist or being a storyteller is that you are allowed to inhabit other consciousnesses and see the world through other points of view. Of course, you have to do it well. You have to do it with respect. You have to do the empathy. And you have to do it responsibly.
So if I had done it, and hopefully I've done it well, because I was very careful to do my research properly and get my story read by my friends, by friends who are gay men, and get them to kind of critique it as well. So I think you need to do that, but I don't think we should be placing boundaries because otherwise, I have to write from a Sinhalese Buddhist, Sri Lankan, middle-aged dude...which is quite boring.
I'd like to explore different characters if I'm allowed to write more. So that was really the thinking. It wasn't a political decision. It just felt right for the character, and in the end, it was true to who the character was. And in the end, I think with the plot as well, it gives the novel another dimension.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
As you think of the future and new technologies like AI and ChatGBT, what for you is the importance of the humanities and their role in helping us navigate new technologies and give our lives meaning?
KARUNATILAKA
But I always think new ideas are what have led us forward. And new ideas, they come out of the humanities. They come out of understanding the classics, psychology, philosophy, and sociology, and being able to think.
I think I'm okay for a couple more books before the robots start writing Booker Prize-winning novels. At the moment I think we're okay because I've tried this technology, and I think it's at the level of a junior copywriter who works hard. The first draft and all of that. But who knows where it's going to go? And we're all reminded this technology is in its infancy. So it's conceivable that these things are going to be writing novels and writing pretty good novels. Perhaps AI can write a formulaic detective thriller? But I don't think it's going to produce a Margaret Atwood or a Salman Rushdie. I think the real challenge is to write stuff that hasn't been written before. And that's what we are all trying to do. So the technology can replicate what's been done before, but the real novels that are going to move us, the stories that are going to move us, are the stuff that hasn't been done before. And that's where I think writers come in. And that's where an understanding of the humanities and being able to come up with new ideas rather than just replicate or rehash new ideas...I think we're still going to need human brains. And there's still room for originality because we think everything's been done, but I think it's just a fraction. There are lots of ideas out there, so I'm hopeful. I'm not too worried. And if this ChatGPT will help me. Instead of spending seven years on a novel, if I can knock out a novel in seven weeks, I'll be happier. The more writing I can do.
Photo credit: David Parry/Booker Prize Foundation
This interview was conducted by Mia Funk with the participation of collaborating universities and students. Associate Interviews Producers on this episode were Sam Myers and Aaron Goldberg. The Creative Process is produced by Mia Funk. Additional production support by Sophie Garnier.
Mia Funk is an artist, interviewer and founder of The Creative Process & One Planet Podcast (Conversations about Climate Change & Environmental Solutions).
Scholar · Educator · Feminist Activist
Author of Caliban and the Witch
Re-enchanting the World: Feminism and the Politics of the Commons
When I came to America I had a shock. I never knew what it meant to be in a country that seems to have no history, being in a place where you feel like you are nowhere, you could have been dropped by a plane in a cultural, historical desert. In the United States, they're destroying historic buildings. They've paved over cemeteries of African slaves. They're changing the environment so that memory is destroyed.
Because you are placing yourself in a broader arc of time, I asked a woman from Guatemala: how can women keep fighting for so much power? And she said, "Because, for us, the dead are not dead." This gives them the courage to go on when everything seems to be lost. I think that this is the kind of struggle that we need to make against war, against the destruction of nature.
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.
Icelandic Writer & Documentary Filmmaker
On Time and Water · The Casket of Time · LoveStar · Not Ok · The Story of the Blue Planet
A letter to the future
Ok is the first Icelandic glacier to lose its status as a glacier.
In the next 200 years all our glaciers are expected to follow the same path.
This monument is to acknowledge that we know
what is happening and what needs to be done.
Only you know if we did it.
If you look at the Himalayas, the frozen glaciers are feeding 1 billion people with milky white water. The real tragedy is if the Himalayan glaciers go the same way as Iceland. In many places in the world, glaciers are very important for agriculture and the basic water supply of people.
Icelandic Writer & Documentary Filmmaker
On Time and Water · The Casket of Time · LoveStar · Not Ok · The Story of the Blue Planet
A letter to the future
Ok is the first Icelandic glacier to lose its status as a glacier.
In the next 200 years all our glaciers are expected to follow the same path.
This monument is to acknowledge that we know
what is happening and what needs to be done.
Only you know if we did it.
If you look at the Himalayas, the frozen glaciers are feeding 1 billion people with milky white water. The real tragedy is if the Himalayan glaciers go the same way as Iceland. In many places in the world, glaciers are very important for agriculture and the basic water supply of people.
Author of The Inland Sea
Professor of Creative Writing at Columbia University
I was reading ecological history and also reading about violence against women and how violence perpetuates itself over many generations. And there was something about this European sort of supremacy of ideas about nature, their ideas about rationality, all of this stuff that sort of came from the Enlightenment. John Oxley's diaries made no mention of the Indigenous Australians who were at the time subject to genocide. So I was interested in these ideas about how they tried to tame the land, which is often talked about as "a woman" and the way that the kind of violence that comes from a particular kind of European colonial project that is enacted on the land intertwines with the way that violence is enacted upon women. And it was something that I felt growing up in Australia.
Author of The Inland Sea
Professor of Creative Writing at Columbia University
I was reading ecological history and also reading about violence against women and how violence perpetuates itself over many generations. And there was something about this European sort of supremacy of ideas about nature, their ideas about rationality, all of this stuff that sort of came from the Enlightenment. John Oxley's diaries made no mention of the Indigenous Australians who were at the time subject to genocide. So I was interested in these ideas about how they tried to tame the land, which is often talked about as "a woman" and the way that the kind of violence that comes from a particular kind of European colonial project that is enacted on the land intertwines with the way that violence is enacted upon women. And it was something that I felt growing up in Australia.
Writer, Public Speaker, Facilitator · Founder of Reclaiming Nature Writing
So much of the travel industry was built on the idea of colonialism which really makes us all inherit this idea that whatever we need in life is going to come from seeking it elsewhere and grabbing it from somewhere else, I think looking at that, really deeply thinking about what is lost from that mindset and the harm that is caused by it has been something I've been trying to do over the last few years. And a lot of that has to do with land trauma, right? Like really acknowledging where our settlement of land comes from and how we can heal that in the ways that we travel.
Writer, Public Speaker, Facilitator · Founder of Reclaiming Nature Writing
So much of the travel industry was built on the idea of colonialism which really makes us all inherit this idea that whatever we need in life is going to come from seeking it elsewhere and grabbing it from somewhere else, I think looking at that, really deeply thinking about what is lost from that mindset and the harm that is caused by it has been something I've been trying to do over the last few years. And a lot of that has to do with land trauma, right? Like really acknowledging where our settlement of land comes from and how we can heal that in the ways that we travel.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
