Advertise on podcast: Social Justice & Activism - The Creative Process - Activists, Environmental, Indigenous Groups, Artists and Writers Talk Dive

"We need to learn from the animals how to live more gently, consume less and look out for each other in this great circle of life.": Our shared moment in time reminds us that we are one part of a vast ecosystem. Today, we explore how humanity can live in harmony with the Earth by paying attention to the land and lives of animals around us. We listen to those who translate the voices of the living world: authors Yann Martel, Georgi Gospodinov, Chiara Barzini, Erica Berry, Kristin Ohlson, Helen Whybrow, screenwriter-director Caroline Thompson and Existential Therapist Emmy van Deurzen. We reflect on our changing environment with Nobel Peace Prize-winning climate scientist Kevin Trenberth, soil expert David Montgomery, restoration ecologist Tom Crowther, wetlands conservationist Jane Madgwick, Scientist Rebellion co-founder Tim Hewlett, architect and urban designer Carlo Ratti. And Ingrid Newkirk reminds us that our survival directly depends on the health of the natural world. (0:00) Ingrid Newkirk (Co-Founder, PETA) Chiara Barzini (Author of Aqua) (3:41) Erica Berry (5:07) Yann Martel(Author, Son of Nobody) (6:20) Georgi Gospodinov (Author, Time Shelter) (7:39) Emmy van Deurzen (Therapist) (9:08) Jane Madgwick (Ecologist) (10:29) Caroline Thompson (Screenwriter) (13:00) Helen Whybrow (Author, The Salt Stones) (14:11) Tom Crowther (Founder, Restor) (14:56) Kristin Ohlson (16:10) Tim Hewlett (17:54) Kevin Trenberth(20:10) Carlo Ratti (Architect) (21:59) David Montgomery To hear more from each guest, listen to their full interviews https://www.creativeprocess.info/pod https://www.creativeprocess.info/interviews-featured/anth-circle-life

“It’s always very interesting that we have to make a case for art because we don’t have to make a case for fast food. Like, we don’t have to make a case for all of these sort of things in our lives that we do not need, and yet we have to make a case for beauty? We have to make a case for the soul? We have to make a case for humanity? We have to make a case for singing back the wounded world? That to me is fascinating” 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 Thingsand The Carryingand 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. (0:03) The Case for Beauty   (0:39) About Ada Limón (2:44) The Deepening of Roots (5:01) Reading 'On Earth As It Is on Earth' (6:08) Bearing Witness Without Surrendering to Grief (7:50) The Definition of Beauty and the Dissolving Self (9:41) Love as an Active Daily Choice (11:11) The Practice of Loving-Kindness Meditation (13:28) Reading 'Hell or High Water' (17:01) Writing Without Music and Listening to the Landscape (19:08) Dreams as Archetypes of Consciousness (21:34) The Environmental and Creative Toll of Generative AI (24:02) AI and the Future of the Arts (25:21) Stewardship, Conservation, and Faith in the Invisible Workers (28:14) The Childfree Daughter (29:57) Listening to Trees as an Act of Reciprocity (32:40) The Music of the World (34:03) The Seed of Interconnectedness Episode Website www.creativeprocess.info/pod Instagram:@creativeprocesspodcast

“Algorithms are deciding whether you are eligible for a loan, a job, an apartment or insurance. They determine what you see online, who reads your social media posts and who connects with you on dating apps. They may even decide whether you get arrested or go to jail. Your very life hangs in the balance of prophecies.” In this episode of the Speaking Out of Place podcast, Professor David Palumbo-Liu talks with Carissa Véliz, an associate professor at the University of Oxford, about her new book, Prophecy: Prediction, Power, and the Fight for the Future—from Ancient Oracles to AI.  Linking this work to her previous book, Privacy is Power: Why and How You Should Take Back Control of Your Data, Véliz writes: “ surveillance and prediction are digital technology’s original sins.” In our wide-ranging discussion, we talk about how both massive and intrusive invasions of privacy at all levels of society and false claims to be able to predict the future erode democracy, are corrosive to ethics, and undermine people’s ability to think for themselves.  Instead, we are conditioned to trust an unregulated band of “effective altruists” who claim to know better than we what kinds of lives we should prefer and the choices we should make. Véliz argues instead that we should embrace the uncertain to build resilience, to prepare for contingency but not be determined by what we cannot see, and to foster curiosity and imagination. (0:00) Digital Technology's Original Sins (3:46) How Books and Prophecies Choose Their Readers(6:52) The Link Between AI, Mass Surveillance, and Profit(9:48) Why Ethics Is the Hidden Foundation of Democracy (14:53) The Future Tense as a Tech Executive Power Play(17:21) Predictions as Speech Acts and Self-Fulfilling Prophecies (23:05) Artificial Intelligence as the Ultimate Bullshitter(27:40) Effective Altruism, Utilitarianism, and the Dangers of Infinity Episode Website www.palumbo-liu.comhttps://speakingoutofplace.comBluesky @palumboliu.bsky.socialInstagram @speaking_out_of_place

“When we look at police brutality, when we look at violent conditions, you can't break a cycle of violence with more violence. And the prison is, if not the most profound and devastating state sanctioned and institutional expression of violence, it is a violence incubator.” In this episode of the Speaking Out of Place podcast, Professor David Palumbo-Liutalks with Elizabeth Hinton and  Elsa Julien Lora about their new book, Harm and Punishment: Incarcerated Writers on Violence and the US Prison. Along with two research assistants, Lora and Hinton pored over hundreds of essays by prisoners, found in the American Prison Writing Archive. They then selected and organized the essays found in this volume, offering illuminating introductions to each section. Our discussion moves through many topics—the brutal, dehumanizing, and punitive nature of the prison system, the damage it does to lives both inside and outside prison, and the ways prisoners find to survive and offer each other support, despite being pitted against each other. At base, we consider how we, as a society, are “addicted to violence,” and why and how it is crucial to understand that violence can only produce more violence. These essays organically blend personal observations and stories with a deep understanding of the broad, systemic nature of violence. (0:00) The violence incubator (3:03) Harm and Punishment: Essay Collection (4:18) Curating the American Prison Writing Archive (8:29) A society addicted to violence (13:00) A lack of cohesive theory (15:23) Slow violence and medical neglect (16:59) Childhood trauma and street corner refuges (21:18) Rational responses to untenable conditions (25:35) The picture of despair and heartache (30:00) Razor wire, iron bars, and the slow boil (32:47) Dancing in the penitentiary and moments of joy (37:00) No one here gets out alive (43:21) The logical response is abolition (47:57) A silenced pedagogy for the future Episode Website www.palumbo-liu.com https://speakingoutofplace.com Bluesky @palumboliu.bsky.social Instagram @speaking_out_of_place

“By pretending like science is neutral or apolitical, we're really feeding a particular discourse which serves whatever political structures are in place right now, whatever status quo is in place right now. Science can never be apolitical because it's a human activity, it's practiced in society with others, with human and more-than-human beings.” In this episode of the Speaking Out of Place podcast, Professor David Palumbo-Liu talks with Fernando Racimo, a leading scientist-activist, about his new book, Science in Resistance. This book gives a riveting account of the founding and growth of the international group Scientist Rebellion, in which now thousands of scientists from around the world have organized direct actions to draw attention to the climate crisis. Breaking through the censorship and silencing carried on by big fossil fuel companies and also scientific groups in and out of academia, which often collude with each other, members of SR have put their careers and their bodies on the line to raise public consciousness and to spur action. We talk about the connection between power and knowledge, between ecocide and genocide and the need to democratize education and research if we are going to have the kind of world we want to both live in and to pass on to other generations. (0:00) Science in Resistance(2:52) Moving to Direct Action(6:57) The Power of the Teach-In(10:58) The Climate Killjoy(11:24) The Myth of Scientific Neutrality(17:38) Fossil Fuel Complicity in Universities(23:52) Educating a World on Fire(30:41) Ecocide and Genocide(32:19) Democratizing the University(37:19) Learning from the Global South Racimo is a scientist-activist and the author of the new book Science in Resistance. He co-founded the Danish chapters of Scientist Rebellion and Academics for Palestine and works at the intersection of academia and social movement organizing. He earned his bachelor from Harvard and his PhD from UC Berkeley and is now an assoc. professor in ecology and evolution at the Globe Institute, University of Copenhagen. He has written articles and OpEds on the urgent need for scientists to join and support social movements fighting structures of oppression, as well as on strategies for transforming and democratizing academic institutions to serve positive socio-ecological needs. He teaches ecology and evolution, degrowth and socio-ecological justice, decolonizing global health and social movement theory and practice. Episode Site www.palumbo-liu.com https://speakingoutofplace.com Bluesky @palumboliu.bsky.social IG @speaking_out_of_place

In this episode of the Speaking Out of Place podcast, Professor David Palumbo-Liu speaks with poet and physician Fady Joudah about his stunning new book– Exhibit G: Poems, Essays, and Photographs of Gaza. Along with powerful and demanding texts, Exhibit G features a collection of photographs of Gaza presented in collaboration with Hani Almadhoun and the Gaza Soup Kitchen. Together, we are confronted with a demand to witness without translating the experience into what Joudah calls “Palestine in English.” The totality of the experience is at once devastating, horrifying, but also at times beautiful and literally beyond words. Along with reading portions of the essays and poems, Fady Joudah offers his usual probing readings of Palestinian history, culture, literature, and social life. No other document so forcefully and comprehensively expresses this genocide. Fady Joudah is a Palestinian American physician, poet, and translator. He was born in Austin, Texas, and grew up in Libya and Saudi Arabia. He was educated at the University of Georgia, the Medical College of Georgia, and the University of Texas Health Sciences in Houston. In 2002 and 2005 he worked with Doctors Without Borders in Zambia and Sudan, respectively. Joudah’s debut collection of poetry, The Earth in the Attic (2008), won the 2007 Yale Series of Younger Poets competition, chosen by Louise Glück. Joudah followed his second book of poetry, Alight (2013) with Textu (2014), a collection of poems written on a cell phone wherein each piece is exactly 160 characters long. His fourth collection is Footnotes in the Order of Disappearance (2018).  In 2014, Joudah was a Guggenheim Fellow in poetry. As critic Charles Bainbridge observed in a 2008 Guardian review of The Earth in the Attic, “Joudah’s poetry thrives on dramatic shifts in perspective, on continually challenging received notions.” Joudah translated  several collections of Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish’s work in The Butterfly’s Burden (2006), which won the Banipal prize from the UK and was a finalist for the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation; and in If I Were Another, which won a PEN USA award in 2010. His translation of Ghassan Zaqtan's Like a Straw Bird It Follows Me (2012) won the Griffin International Poetry Prize in 2013. His other translations include Amjad Nasser's Petra: The Concealed Rose and A Map of Signs and Scents. Joudah lives with his family in Houston, where he works as a physician of internal medicine. Episode Website www.palumbo-liu.comhttps://speakingoutofplace.comBluesky @palumboliu.bsky.socialInstagram @speaking_out_of_place

That need to reclaim our voice often starts in the very spaces where we feel most silenced. We live in an era where institutional decay and asymmetrical class power have made social consent seem almost irrelevant to the ruling class. To understand how we change those incentives, we have to look at the systems designed to silence us, and the movements successfully disrupting them. Today, we hear from scholars and educators rewiring our institutions—Jesse Hagopian, Eunsong Kim, Tim Hewlett, and Sara Ahmed. We turn to the authors documenting the human cost of these systems—Benjamin Moser, Viet Thanh Nguyen, and Yuri Herrera. Finally, we hear from journalists, researchers, and legal minds analyzing climate delay and political dysfunction—Ben Franta, Bill McKibben, Ben Tarnoff, Liza Featherstone, and Aziz Rana. To hear more from each guest, listen to their full interviews: https://www.creativeprocess.info/speaking-out-of-place Episode Website www.palumbo-liu.comhttps://speakingoutofplace.comBluesky @palumboliu.bsky.socialInstagram @speaking_out_of_place

“The United States has this mentality that if somebody is serving a prison sentence or if somebody is in jail, they somehow deserve whatever happens. Whether it is medical neglect, whether it is abuse by staff or the other incarcerated people, whether it is terrible food, whether it is not being able to communicate or see their family members and loved ones. What happened in 2020 is that being incarcerated became a possible death sentence. Because we saw that prison deaths jumped 77% compared to the previous year where there was not a pandemic in the United States.” In this episode of the Speaking Out of Place podcast, Professor David Palumbo-Liu speaks with veteran journalist Victoria Law.  She is the author of such books as Resistance Behind Bars: The Struggles of Incarcerated Women, Prison By Any Other Name: The Harmful Consequences of Popular Reforms (co-authored with Maya Schenwar), and “Prisons Make Us Safer” and 20 Other Myths about Mass Incarceration. Today we talk about her new book, Corridors of Contagion: How the Pandemic Exposed the Cruelties of Incarceration. In this devastating study, Law shows how instead of focusing on care during the outbreak of COVID, prisons took the pandemic as an opportunity to amplify their inhumanity, cruelty, and violence.  We hear how contagion spread through ventilation systems and through guards who spread viruses from outside to the prisoners, we learn how things like solitary confinement and strip searches only intensified their worse aspects, and how extractive communications systems preyed on those hungry for news from their loved ones. Law also tells us of the personal stories she was able to track that give a human dimension to the statistics of the pandemic, and also remarkable stories of self-sacrifice and solidarity, as prisoners gave each other the care and support so badly needed. We end by learning about organizations that are at the forefront of fighting for decarceration and restructuring of parole boards, and other actions to fight against the inhumane and cruel practices of the prison industrial complex. (0:00) Corridors of Contagion(4:17) Pre-Pandemic Prison Conditions(10:13) Global Releases vs. US Incarceration (14:32) The Horrors of Solitary Confinement(18:17) Punished for Seeking Safety(20:23) Dehumanization Through Video Visits(28:06) Extractive Electronic Messaging(35:22) Humanizing the Statistics(45:25) Solidarity Behind Bars(53:30) The Fight for Decarceration Episode Website www.palumbo-liu.com https://speakingoutofplace.com Bluesky @palumboliu.bsky.social Instagram @speaking_out_of_place

“I think one of the things that we have to acknowledge and repeat over and over again is that the general narrative that there has been no resistance or protest to the current regime is absolutely untrue. People in India have been protesting and protesting consistently across the country. What we've seen is a lack of media attention. But what you've also seen is a kind of violent, disproportionate crackdown by the state, accompanied by a legal regime that now makes it absolutely possible to disappear anyone into the legal system.” – Suchitra Vijayan The so-called “Cockroach” protests that erupted in India this past July grew quickly, gathering around them a number of different activist groups and individuals from various walks of life. These protests were met with tremendous state repression and censorship. In this episode of the Speaking Out of Place podcast, Professor David Palumbo-Liu talks with Raaz and Sarthak, two student activists and organizers from Delhi, about the broad background to the struggles for education and a decent life, and how the fight has grown to encompass broad sectors of Indian society. Despite the attempts of the State and mainstream media to disappear these protests from the global mediascape, we learn how and why the protests and organizing has continued unabated, and what some of the key goals are.  Along with Raaz and Sarthak, we are joined once more by Suchitra Vijayan, director of the Polis Project and seasoned activist and journalist, who was also there as the protests unfolded. (0:00) The Myth of No Resistance (4:44) Media as an Arm of the State (8:49) The Origins of the Cockroach Protests (17:03) Education as a Commodity (19:13) Centralization and Unemployment (21:44) The Erasure of Data and Jobs (25:16) Caste, Capital, and Marginalized Students (29:15) Anti-Establishment Youth & United Front Politics (33:31) The Strategy of Imperfect Allies (40:23) A Shared Struggle Against Imperialism (43:39) The Rejection of Propaganda Episode Website www.palumbo-liu.comhttps://speakingoutofplace.comBluesky @palumboliu.bsky.socialInstagram @speaking_out_of_place

“I think that Jews have become extremely solipsistic in a way that is embarrassing. It's very much contrary to the way I was brought up, which was not to talk about yourself, which was to talk about other people and to serve other people. That was part of the heritage that I received from the Holocaust and from my family's background as refugees was, “You're not a refugee. You've got it pretty good. You live in America.” We were very much exhorted against that and exhorted to serve other people and to try to do something good in the world. And so I hope this will be one tiny little part of something that will make a change for the Palestinians.” In this episode of the Speaking Out of Place podcast, Professor David Palumbo-Liu talks with Benjamin Moser about his new book, Anti-Zionism: A Jewish History. A book of immense historical and geographic reach, Anti-Zionism conveys its arguments through the lives of twelve Jewish anti-Zionists. From the 19th century Polish-Jewish rabbi Aaron Samuel Tamares to the contemporary photographer and activist Nan Goldin, we learn how Jews have fought against the reduction of the traditional, expansive notion of Jewishness open to and in service to the world, to a form of narrow ethno-nationalism, closed off to all how do not subscribe to its genocidal settler colonial logic. We learn how many of these figures foretold precisely the perpetual cycles of violence Zionism has unleashed. One of the reasons Moser wrote this book is contained in this statement. I offer it as a contribution to the movement by so many noble people who are working to construct an alternative vision of Jewish life, one that is free from racism, nationalism, and militarism. It is an attempt to say, especially to younger people, that we are not the first, and that we do not need to start afresh. (0:00) The Jewish Heritage of Service vs. Solipsism (8:10) Theodor Herzl's Zionist Writings (16:29) The Sensitive Rabbi: Aaron Samuel Tamares (22:16) The Tragic Fate of Jacob Israël de Haan (27:53) Hannah Arendt and the Backlash to Eichmann (41:25) A Spiritual Catastrophe for Judaism Episode Website www.palumbo-liu.com https://speakingoutofplace.com Bluesky @palumboliu.bsky.social Instagram @speaking_out_of_place

“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

“You can see how important storytelling is to fascism and to MAGA and to ICE. And that type of narrative is seductive to a whole lot of people, not just white people but to a lot of other people as well, and it's yoked to many other narratives around what is the United States, what is American power, what is going to benefit American power, what's going to erode American power. So there's a tremendous amount of phobia around who constitutes the other or the others to the United States, and it goes way, way back, obviously, to the origins of the country.” –Viet Thanh Nguyen “This really is such a thread throughout the book. Solo el pueblo salva al pueblo, only we the people can save the people, has become a theme. Because what happened in 2025 through now is people were realizing, Who's coming to save us? The state is attacking us. When the state is attacking us, who do we turn to? We can only turn to one another. This was really remarkable, and I think it was such an important aspect to showcase because what it did was it gave people confidence. –Sonali Kolhatkar In this episode of the Speaking Out of Place podcast, Professor David Palumbo-Liu talks with Sonali Kolhatkar and Viet Thanh Nguyen about a new book edited by Sonali entitled Breaking ICE: Community Defense Against State Terror and MAGA Fascism. The book is comprised of interviews Sonali conducted with activists, organizers, intellectuals and artists from a rich diversity of locations—from Chicago, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, and other major cities, to small towns in Georgia, Maine, the Carolinas, and elsewhere.  We talk about the broad ideological formations that support State Terror and Fascism, as well as the ways people have wielded soft power with tactics and strategies such as mutual aid, Know Your Rights, power mapping, networking, and rapid response. Viet specifically talks about the power of counter-narratives that tap into radical imaginings and utopian thinking. We speak of the ways people from all walks of life have risen to the task of keeping each other safe. (0:00) ICE, MAGA, Fascism, and American Power (3:34) The Origins of the Anti-ICE Movement (11:47) Soft Power and the National Day Laborer Organizing Network (15:15) The Role of Social Media in Humanizing Immigrants (19:43) Demographic Shifts and the Rise of Authoritarian Panic (26:15) Individualism vs. Collectivist Culture (32:19) Reevaluating Democratic Party Platforms and Abolition (38:57) Challenging the United States in the Inter-American Courts (42:40) Divesting from Militarism and Investing in Safety (46:11) The Cyclical Nature of History and Enduring Resistance Episode Website www.palumbo-liu.comhttps://speakingoutofplace.comBluesky @palumboliu.bsky.socialInstagram @speaking_out_of_place

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

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

“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