"The thing that puzzled him was why people don't agree to be fully expressed while they're alive. Why does it only happen in their last moment? Why wouldn't you live being fully expressed?"

My guest today is AL Kennedy. She is one of Britain’s most acclaimed and versatile literary voices, a writer who can inhabit the internal life of a soldier in a POW camp, as she did in her Costa Book Award-winning novel Day, as easily as she can navigate the "professional lying" of a modern civil servant.

Her latest novel, Alive in the Merciful Country, takes place during the 2020 lockdown. It tells the story of a primary school teacher who receives a confession from an undercover police officer who infiltrated her life decades earlier. It’s a provocative investigation into state power, the "Spy Cops" scandal and the search for mercy in an age of surveillance. It’s a book about the breakdown of trust. We talk about her life, her activism, and why she believes fiction is the only way to tell the truth when the facts are forbidden and how she balances the truth of her novels with the relief of stand-up comedy.

(0:00) Finding Your Voice

On the Alfred Wolfsohn voice method and the power of being fully expressed

(2:30) Reading from Alive in the Merciful Country

Kennedy shares a passage from her latest novel, exploring hope and resilience in dark times.

(4:43) The Myth of Shrinking Attention Spans

Challenging the narrative that modern audiences cannot focus, and the importance of engaging storytelling.

(6:22) Education and the Foundation of Democracy

The dangers of dismantling education and how critical thinking protects us from fascism.

(10:26) The Spy Cop Scandal and State Surveillance

Unpacking the reality of undercover police infiltrating peaceful protests and intimate lives.

(13:59) Lockdown: A Global Pause and the Inrush of Empathy

The fleeting moment of unified humanity during the pandemic and how it was ultimately betrayed.

(17:34) Writing Without Theft: The Ethics of Character Creation

Kennedy explains her imaginative process and why she refuses to steal details from real people's lives.

(28:16) AI, Digital Slop, and the Loss of Trust

Reflections on artificial intelligence as an unstable plagiarism machine and its impact on truth.

(30:03) Nature, Spirituality, and the Merciful Country

Finding healing in the natural world and navigating the future with love and awareness.

Episode Website

www.creativeprocess.info/pod

Instagram:@creativeprocesspodcast

What happens when the state infiltrates your most intimate relationships? How do we protect the innocence and imagination of children in an increasingly authoritarian world? “"If you have love, eventually you're going to win. It's not that people aren't going to die. It's not terrible things aren't going to happen. But if you stay with that and you stay centered in that, you'll get through and you will not have turned into a monster in order to overcome monsters.”

My guest today is AL Kennedy. She is one of Britain’s most acclaimed and versatile literary voices, a writer who can inhabit the internal life of a soldier in a POW camp, as she did in her Costa Book Award-winning novel Day, as easily as she can navigate the "professional lying" of a modern civil servant.

Her latest novel, Alive in the Merciful Country, takes place during the 2020 lockdown. It tells the story of a primary school teacher who receives a confession from an undercover police officer who infiltrated her life decades earlier. It’s a provocative investigation into state power, the "Spy Cops" scandal and the search for mercy in an age of surveillance. It’s a book about the breakdown of trust. We talk about her life, her activism, and why she believes fiction is the only way to tell the truth when the facts are forbidden and how she balances the truth of her novels with the relief of stand-up comedy.

(0:00) Finding Your Voice
On the Alfred Wolfsohn voice method and the power of being fully expressed

(2:17) Education and the Foundation of Democracy
The dangers of dismantling education and how critical thinking protects us from fascism.

(5:14) The Myth of Shrinking Attention Spans
Challenging the narrative that modern audiences cannot focus, and the importance of engaging storytelling.

(8:23) Reading from Alive in the Merciful Country
Kennedy shares a passage from her latest novel, exploring hope and resilience in dark times.

(17:45) The Spy Cop Scandal and State Surveillance
Unpacking the reality of undercover police infiltrating peaceful protests and intimate lives.

(22:07) AI, Digital Slop, and the Loss of Trust
Reflections on artificial intelligence as an unstable plagiarism machine and its impact on truth.

(28:29) The Power of the Powerless: Radical Whimsy
How absurdity, humor, and inflatable costumes can disrupt authoritarian mindsets and potential violence.

(33:13) Lockdown: A Global Pause and the Inrush of Empathy
The fleeting moment of unified humanity during the pandemic and how it was ultimately betrayed.

(42:53) Writing Without Theft: The Ethics of Character Creation
Kennedy explains her imaginative process and why she refuses to steal details from real people's lives.

(1:29:40) Nature, Spirituality, and the Merciful Country
Finding healing in the natural world and navigating the future with love and awareness.

Episode Website

www.creativeprocess.info/pod

Instagram:@creativeprocesspodcast

“Grief happens because you don't stop loving the person who died. The person doesn't exist in your reality anymore. The everyday is not colored and shaped by this other human being, but you don't stop loving the person. So grief is a particular kind of unrequited love. And probably without that dynamic relationship with this person, I would be someone else. And he would've been someone else. I mean, Paul died before me. But we were, I think, hugely important to the drama of becoming in our own lives.”

Today, we are honored to welcome a writer whose work has long explored the intimate landscapes of the mind, memory and the heart. Siri Hustvedt’s writing moves between the personal and the philosophical, the literary and the deeply human. Her work bridges collections of essays, non-fiction, poetry, and seven novels, including the international bestsellers What I Loved and The Summer Without Men. Recipient of the Princess of Asturias Award for Literature and the Gabarron Prize for Thought, her work has been translated into over thirty languages. Her new memoir, Ghost Stories, is a reflection on forty-three years shared with her late husband, the writer and filmmaker Paul Auster. In its pages, we encounter not only love and loss, but the quiet persistence of presence, memory, and language itself.

(0:00) Grief as Unrequited Love

Siri explores the emotional reality of living without Paul Auster, noting that grief occurs because love does not stop when a person dies.

(4:00) Facing Death with Courage

The importance of not hiding from mortality and how discussing end-of-life wishes offered a necessary perspective.

(12:37) Reading from Ghost Stories

Siri reads the opening passage of her memoir, detailing how the loss of her husband deranged her sense of time and bodily rhythms.

(18:41) The Phantom Limb: ” The beloved is taken away and it feels as if you're amputated or gutted.”

(21:50)  Grandfather, Father and Son: Generational Traumas Behind Paul Auster's Writing

(24:11)  How Powerful Emotions and a Person's Life Can Play a Role in Illness

(30:09) Feeding the Earth

"Paul very pointedly told me that he wanted to be buried in the Jewish mode. And the phrase he used was, “I want my body to feed the earth.”

(44:23) Physical Love in Marriage

On the importance of physical intimacy in long-term marriages, a reality often left out of grief memoirs.

(54:00) The Philosophy of the Between

How relational existence is foundational to life.

(1:00:16) The Hubris of Controlling Nature

(1:12:00) The Dark History of Statistics

(1:32:12) The Art of Learning vs. AI and Automated Outcomes

“I think we have to ask ourselves, what is education? What do we want from it? How do we want people to learn?

Episode Website

www.creativeprocess.info/pod

Instagram:@creativeprocesspodcast

Can curiosity and empathy be taught? How can we expand our sense of solidarity through stories? In this episode, we explore the internal dialogues of artists, actors and writers to ask what it means to step into someone else's shoes.

(0:00) Novelist Jim Shepard discusses Literature as a Tool for Emotional Education and Exploring History

(2:05) Tony Award-winning Actor Neil Patrick Harris on Being Moved by Theater and its Ability to Bridge Worlds

(3:55) Novelist Katie Kitamura on How a Book is Made in Collaboration with the Reader

(5:00) Screenwriter, Playwright Laura Eason on Inhabiting the Hearts of Characters Different from Ourselves

(6:03) Academy Award-winning Director Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy on the Art of Visual Storytelling

(6:37) Cinematographer, Director Benoit Delhomme on the Freedom of Handheld Cinematography

(7:19) Author Etgar Keret on Looking for Humanity through Shared Intention

(8:18) Viet Thanh Nguyen – Opposing Power through Expansive Solidarity

(9:27) Adam Moss – Author, Fmr. Editor New York magazine on “The Work of Art”

(10:29) John Patrick Shanley – Tony & Academy Award-winning Writer, Director on Finding Value in Ordinary Experiences and the Creative Power of Daydreaming

(11:56) Pulitzer Prize-winning Journalist Nicholas Kristof on Why Individual Stories are Necessary to Generate Connection

To hear more from each guest, listen to their full interviews.

Episode Website

www.creativeprocess.info/pod

Instagram:@creativeprocesspodcast

In this special edition, we hear from our guests from across the arts and sciences. From composers and poets to forest ecologists and climate envoys, they tell the story of our planet. Moving beyond the data of destruction, we explore the intelligence of nature, the ethics of what we eat, and the empathy required to save our future.

MAX RICHTER, Composer, Sleep, The Blue Notebooks

CARL SAFINA, Author, Becoming Wild

ADA LIMÓN, 24th US Poet Laureate

CYNTHIA DANIELS, Grammy Award-winning Sound Eng.

SUZANNE SIMARD, Finding the Mother Tree

JOELLE GERGIS, Lead Author, IPCC 6th Assessment Rpt

NOAH WILSON-RICH, CEO, Best Bees Company

INGRID NEWKIRK, PETA Founder

BERTRAND PICCARD, Solar Impulse Foundation

DAVID FARRIER, Author, Footprints

KATHLEEN ROGERS, Pres, Earth Day Network

ODED GALOR, Unified Growth Theory

PETER SINGER, Philosopher

GEOFF MULGAN, Another World Is Possible

CLAIRE POTTER, Welcome to the Circular Economy

CHRIS FUNK, Dir. Climate Hazards Car.

JENNIFER MORGAN, Special Envoy, International Climate Action

To hear more from each guest, listen to their full interviews.

Episode Website

On Music, Trust and Connection with the Animal World

“Mostly I’ll play in a minor key, something sad, which I think can work for an animal because they can sense the sadness, and they try to reassure me and comfort me. I chose love songs because I'm convinced they are very intuitive and they can sense what I am trying to say to them, and profess my love in a way. I think there's always a way to connect, and if you're being cautious and don't threaten the animals, something beautiful can happen.”

Musician Plumes takes his guitar to the world's most unlikely concert halls—farms, sanctuaries, and wild habitats. A passionate advocate for veganism and animal welfare, we discuss what animals hear, how trust forms, and what music can reveal when it enters a world not made for humans alone.

Episode Website

www.creativeprocess.info/pod

Instagram:@creativeprocesspodcast

How is music a pathway to understanding animals?

Musician Plumes‍ takes his guitar to the world's most unlikely concert halls—farms, sanctuaries, and wild habitats. A passionate advocate for veganism and animal welfare, we discuss what animals hear, how trust forms, and what music can reveal when it enters a world not made for humans alone.

“Mostly I’ll play in a minor key, something sad, which I think can work for an animal because they can sense the sadness, and they try to reassure me and comfort me. I chose love songs because I'm convinced they are very intuitive and they can sense what I am trying to say to them, and profess my love in a way. I think there's always a way to connect, and if you're being cautious and don't threaten the animals, something beautiful can happen.”

Episode Website

www.creativeprocess.info/pod

Instagram:@creativeprocesspodcast

On the urgent need to reclaim our political voices, the forces that silence dissent, and how art and poetry are crucial tools for survival

Our guest today is an activist scholar who believes the classroom is inseparable from the public square. David Palumbo-Liu is the Louise Hewlett Nixon Professor of Comparative Literature at Stanford University and a founding faculty member of Stanford’s Program in Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity. But his work has long reached beyond the academy. Through his book, Speaking Out of Place: Getting Our Political Voices Back, and his podcast of the same name, he insists that the great global crises of our time—from escalating wars and democratic failures to environmental collapse—are fundamentally crises of value and voice. His recent work has put him on the front lines of campus activism, challenging institutions, resigning his membership from the MLA, a move that highlights the ethical cost of speaking truth to power. We’ll talk about what he calls the "carceral logic" of the modern university, why art and poetry are crucial tools for survival in times of war, and what he tells his students about preparing for a future defined by uncertainty. His perspective is rooted in literature, but his urgency is all about the world we live in now. We will discuss the forces that silence dissent, the "imperial logic" of AI, and what it means to be a moral, active citizen when the systems we rely on are failing.

“There is a dispute about what the American Dream is or how it would play out in different circumstances. The American dream has essentially been narrowed into a white Christian nationalist notion of things so that everything that falls outside what they imagine that to be is not only undesirable, but should be the subject of extermination, deportation, and detention. I am heartened by the fact that more of our 'better angels' are emerging with a more capacious and expansive notion of what the American dream could be.”

Episode Website

www.creativeprocess.info/pod

Instagram:@creativeprocesspodcast