Books & Writers · The Creative Process: Novelists, Screenwriters, Playwrights, Poets, Non-fiction Writers & Journalists Talk Writing, Life & Creativity

“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
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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.com
https://speakingoutofplace.com
Bluesky @palumboliu.bsky.social
Instagram @speaking_out_of_place

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

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

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