In Aaron Reynolds’ Caldecott Honor-winning picture book Creepy Carrots!, Jasper the Rabbit is terrified to learn that the carrots he loves may be stalking him. Published in 2012, the wonderfully weird story with vivid illustrations by Peter Brown spent 14 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and was such a huge hit with kids that it spawned two additional Creepy books—Creepy Pair of Underwear! and Creepy Crayon!

Over the years, Reynolds—who is the author of more than 50 other highly acclaimed children’s books—noticed that when he visited schools, kids of all ages, even those in fifth or sixth grade, wanted to talk about the Creepy books. It dawned on him that perhaps Jasper’s tales could be expanded to even creepier stories for chapter book readers.

“I’ve always wrestled with, ‘I wonder what’s gonna happen to Jasper when he grows up?’” Reynolds says. “He’s either gonna need some serious therapy, or he’s going to own this and become the next Steven Spielberg or something.”

The thought gave Reynolds the idea of making Jasper the host of standalone stories. “I thought that could be really fun for kids who have grown up with the picture books to then graduate into stories with a familiar character that they trust as a storyteller but take the stories to a weirder place. So that was where the spark of the idea came, and once I got down the road on it, I got really excited. The idea of having a series of standalone stories where they’re all tied together by Jasper as the kind of Rod Serling host of them, but each one gets to be a standalone episode of The Twilight Zone—man, the possibilities of that. I have a lot of weird ideas for stories, but I don’t always know where to put them. Not everything I come up with is a good fit for another Creepy picture book, but this new series opens the lid on that. Any weird, out-there story that I think of now, I feel in a lot of ways could work with this series.”

The first two books in the series, Troubling Tonsils! and Unsettling Salad!, were instant New York Times bestsellers. The next release, Yarn is Everything!, is due out this July and happens to be Reynolds’ favorite of the three. “I am very excited about Yarn is Everything!,” he says. “It’s about a mole who is extremely addicted to crochet. It’s the supernatural crocheting book you never even knew you needed. It’s probably the weirdest of the three and I think it’s the one I like the most.”

Reynolds chatted with me over Zoom about his writing process, the challenges of writing for kids, and his unusual career path.

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SANDRA EBEJER: I read on your website that your dad was in the Air Force, so you moved around a lot as a kid. Was writing something you were doing in those days, during all of those moves?

AARON REYNOLDS: No, furthest thing from it. I was not a kid who liked books. I was a rowdy kid, very active, very loud and obnoxious. We didn’t have a lot of books around the house growing up. My parents weren’t big readers. I knew reading for fun was a thing. I saw kids doing it. But to me, that just looked like such a quiet thing to do for fun when I could run around screaming. I don’t remember anybody ever reading a book out loud to me. I mean, maybe it happened, but I have no memory of it.

And then in fifth grade, I had an amazing teacher named Mr. Hunter. He read a chapter of a book out loud to us every day, and I had never really heard a book read out loud. I have very distinct memories of that being a light bulb moment, like, “What? This is what books are? Why didn’t somebody tell me?” I didn’t know that books were so full of possibilities and imagination. I remember him reading James and the Giant Peach and me just being like, “Those aunts just got murdered by a peach! What? You can find this in kids’ books??” You know, you don’t know your life’s being changed when it’s happening, but looking back, I can see that was a pretty life changing year, having him for a teacher.

How did you end up deciding to pursue writing as a career? And why children’s books?

I didn’t know being a writer was even a thing. I didn’t know you could grow up and become a writer. The first time it happened was in fifth grade. Mr. Hunter put on a play of Rumpelstiltskin, and he cast me in it. And again, it was another light bulb moment. I was like, “This is fun. I get to be rowdy, but in front of an audience!” From that point on, I was really into choir and drama and plays. And when it came time to be serious about what I might want to do for a living, all I knew is I wanted to do something using my imagination, and the only thing I could think of [was] you could go to college and major in theater. So, I went to theater school and graduated and moved to Chicago to do professional theater, and I was doing that for years and having some success. It was during that time that I got a chance to work with this production company, and they were creating some new theater to bring some inner-city kids in to see. And they were like, “We’re gonna write some original stuff.” They asked some of us that were part of the group to participate. I was like, “Yeah, I’ll try my hand at that.” I’d never written anything before and loved it. Again, another light bulb moment. I was just like, “This is really cool. I get to take all my sense of humor and all my imagination and all that rowdiness that I put on stage, but I get to put it into this whole story.” It was like being an actor and a director and a producer, all in one shot.

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So, I started to think maybe acting is not where I should be, maybe writing is where I should be—and writing for kids, especially, because you could do anything with kids. They’ll go with you. I mean, I could never get away with writing a story about a bunny who’s scared of his own underpants for adults. But kids will go with you on that story. I found writing for kids to be so much more exciting and full of possibility than writing for adults, so I started trying to see if I could get published.

We were huge fans of the Creepy picture books when my son was little. We actually read Creepy Pair of Underwear! first and he thought it was hysterical. How did the idea for that book first come about?

So, Creepy Carrots! had come out. It had done, surprisingly, really well, because Creepy Carrots! was widely rejected by publishers when I first wrote it. They were like, “This is not a kids’ book. This is weird. Who hurt you?” They didn’t know what to make of it, until it finally landed with my publisher, who wound up publishing it, and it did really well out of the gate. It won the Caldecott Honor, hit the New York Times bestseller list. My publisher asked me for another one and I was very resistant. I didn’t conceive of this as, first of all, a series. Second, I feel sometimes when a picture book does well, then they’re like, “Let’s strike while the iron is hot, and do as many of these as we can.” And they sometimes go on far too long. I was really resistant. I didn’t want to make another book unless I had a good story to tell.

So I told my publisher, “I’m open to doing it, but I’ve got to have a good story, and right now I don’t.” Years passed, and I didn’t think I was going to do it. I was at a school, and we were talking about Creepy Carrots!, and this kid came up to me afterwards. I’ll never forget this kid. He said [using deep booming voice], “Aaron Reynolds, that Creepy Carrots! book? Hilarious.” He was so funny. He was the weirdest little kid. He said, “You need to write a book about scary underpants.” And I was like, “That’s good.” Immediately that was very funny to me. I went home and that idea kept bouncing around in my head, and I’m like, “Huh. Creepy underwear. Creepy underwear. Okay...” And the story came in this idea of glow-in-the-dark underwear. I don’t know where it came from, but it just popped into my head, and it took shape. And if I’ve got a story that I can be happy with, then yeah, I’m excited to do another book about it. But the idea came from a kid who said I should do a book about scary underwear.

What’s your writing process? Do you plot out your books in advance?

I don’t write anything out in advance. I don’t outline a plot. I might have a sense of where it’s going, I might have some bullet points of some ideas of things I want to see happen in the story, but I really weave it together. To me, the magic happens sitting at the keyboard. My best writing happens right in front of the characters, right in front of the keyboard where I paint them into a corner and then they have to figure it out. I find my worst stories happen when I’ve done all the thinking in advance. But when I’m having to think on my feet and put myself in the mind of my characters, they tend to come up with much better ideas than I could.

I think it was Picasso who was like, “Inspiration must find you at work.” You don’t sit around and wait for inspiration; you sit down and you start making your fingers move on the keyboard, and you do the best you can. And somewhere along the way, if you’re lucky, you get swept up. To me, that’s where the best stuff happens.

I’ve interviewed a lot of children’s book authors, and the one consistent thing they say is that it’s surprisingly difficult to write picture books. What are some of the challenges you’ve faced in writing your books?

I agree with that completely. A lot of aspiring children’s authors think, “I’ll write a picture book. Anybody can write a picture book.” And it’s incredibly difficult, from a craft standpoint, to write a picture book for the picture book audience, which is a very specific audience, and you only have a certain amount of words to work with. I try to challenge myself that every picture book manuscript I write is less than 300 words, which is nothing. You sneeze and you’re done. That means every word counts. Every word has to do double and triple duty. I rarely wind up using many adverbs. When it comes to description—I always tell kids this in my writing workshops—one great verb is worth 10 descriptive words around it. So I could say, “He went to the store, and he didn’t want to go to the store, but his mom was timing him, so he ran as fast as he could.” That’s a lot of words. Or I could say, “He zipped to the store.” That one verb does the work of 12 of the words in the other sentence, and that’s how you have to think as a picture book writer. You have to think that every word counts, and every word has to do double and triple duty and heavy lifting. And the best words for that are verbs. The verbs are where the power is.

I’m very particular when I go back and comb through in my editing. I’m ruthless on trimming. I hack with a machete. I make myself cut that thing down to 300 words or less. If I can’t do it in 300 words or less, then I’ve got no business trying to write the story. So, that means getting out that machete and hacking whole sentences or halves of sentences and going, “Find one word to say the same thing.” And verbs are the only ones that can do it. Fifty descriptive adverbs and all the adjectives in the world don’t add up to one amazing verb. So, yeah, it’s a hard thing. It’s a very uniquely weird, specific thing all unto itself. Where else can you tell a whole story with a beginning and middle and end to the harshest critics of all, five-year-olds, and do it with almost no words? It’s crazy.

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And also try to teach some sort of lesson in there as well.

If you can. I try not to worry about that. People crack me up when they come up to me and go, “I love your lesson in that story.” And I’m like, “I didn’t write a lesson in that story.” I don’t worry about the lesson. To me, a good story will always have some kind of a theme built in, and it will be different to every person. People read Creepy Carrots! and they think it’s about don’t be greedy. And if that’s what you see then I’m glad you enjoyed that, because I didn’t write a story about don’t be greedy. I wrote a story about a bunny who’s being stalked by weird carrots. [Laughs]

One of the things I love so much about Creepy Pair of Underwear! is the illustrations and that weird, smiling face the underwear has. What is the relationship like with your illustrators? Do you contribute feedback in any way?

While there are certainly exceptions to the rule, by and large, the way it is done in the picture book industry is that the author writes the story, works with their editor at the publishing house to turn it into the best possible version of the story that they can, and then the publishing house, whether it’s the art director or the editor and the design team, will pick an illustrator. They will work with the illustrator to get the best possible illustrations. The artist will then go and work on the illustrations separately and completely in isolation from the author, and they will come up with the best version of what they think it should look like. And there’s a reason it works that way, and I really respect that reason: an author can be too close to their story. An author can fixate on the wrong things. The author can get back sketches and be like, “But I saw the dog as being black with brown spots.” Who cares what you saw in your head? That doesn’t matter. Nobody cares! That doesn’t mean that what you conceived of when you were writing the story is the most universal way to tell the story, the way that’s going to be the most interesting and exciting to tell a story, the way that’s going to open up the story to the maximum number of kids from the maximum number of different experiences and backgrounds. Not to mention, hopefully you’ve got this amazing artist—I’ve been very lucky—that has their own perspective and their own way of looking at the world, that will come up with things you never conceived of. You should be so lucky.

That, to me, is the secret sauce of picture books. The magical alchemy of picture books is an author writing their best story, an illustrator taking that story and interpreting it their way through their lens, and what you wind up getting is something that never would have been the same if the author had been given the leeway to go and boss the illustrator around and say, “Draw it like this. Here’s what it looks like.”

I’ll give you a story that’s a perfect example. If you read Creepy Pair of Underwear! and you don’t look at the pictures, you only read my words, you will see that I never describe the underpants in my story. I wrote the words, the manuscript, and I did not describe the underpants. The closest I get to it is that they “had a ghoulish greenish glow.” That’s all I say. Now, I think we forget that because we’re so used to seeing those classic underwear, but I never describe them with my words, and that’s very purposeful. When we were first looking at the manuscript before it got sent over to Peter, my editor was like, “This is amazing! Do you have any thoughts on what the creepy underwear should look like?” And I said, “I have no idea, but I’m sure Peter is going to come up with something brilliant.” And look what he came up with! Never in a million years would I have thought of that. Frankenstein underpants? Are you joking me right now? That is genius! What better way to make an anthropomorphic pair of underpants that have to have expressiveness?

You’ll see that in a lot of them—like in Creepy Crayon!, the crayons seemed happy to see him. Seemed happy. I didn’t say he smiled. I didn’t say he looked at him with his big, smiling face and his big, shining eyes. I keep it as vague as possible on purpose, because it gives Peter something to work with and lets him unleash the possibilities without it being locked down into something specific, because I know he’s going to come up with things that I could never imagine.

Who are your influences as a writer?

I like writers that break the rules. Roald Dahl was so ahead of his time. I really don’t think he would get published today. He let bad things happen to the grown-ups. He had bad grown-ups learn their lesson. He didn’t always have characters that modeled good behavior. It’s so fascinating to be the lens that adults look at children’s books through, because I got a lot of comments and reviews. If you look on Amazon, I’m sure you’ll find more than your share of, “This character is not modeling very good behavior.” Well, no, he isn’t. He’s not there to be a model citizen. He’s there to be an interesting, dynamic character that hopefully develops and grows and goes somewhere along the way. The model citizen rarely makes an interesting character, and that’s how Roald Dahl wrote. His characters were flawed, and bad things happen to them sometimes, and adult characters got what they deserved. I mean, look at Matilda. Trunchbull grabs kids by their ponytails and flings them around the air and then launches them across the sky. That’s just great stuff! That’s good storytelling, but it would break a lot of rules today, and I like that.

There’s a reason why kids, all these years later, still read Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. I mean, when those kids are in that factory, you’re never 100% sure if Willy Wonka’s gonna just let those five kids die. He lets the kid get shrunk and then sends him to the gum stretching machine. What? That’s insane! Augustus Gloop gets sucked up the tube and who knows what happened to him. That’s just good stuff. I like when stories break the rules and have a weird side to them. I would say definitely writers like Roald Dahl are huge influences on me, for sure.

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Yarn is Everything! comes out in July. What else are you working on? What’s after that?

I am working on a fourth Creepy picture book, to be determined when it comes out. It’ll be ready when it’s ready. You probably could hear the excitement for the chapter book series when I was talking about it earlier. I’ve got so many ideas cooking for books four, five, and six in that series, so I’m kind of all Creepy all the time right now. After I get the picture book finished, whenever that is, then I’ll turn my attention to chapter book four, five, and six and jump on those and see what happens. I never imagined so much of my time would go towards the Creepy. But, it’s worked out that way. As long as I’m still enjoying it and as long as there’s still stories to be told, and kids want them, then I’ll pursue it.

To learn more about Aaron Reynolds, visit his website.

To purchase Yarn is Everything, click here.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

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In the inspiring new documentary Artfully United, director Dave Benner and producer Chris Walters share the story of Mike Norice, a visual artist who is beautifying some of the most crime-ridden sections of Los Angeles one wall at a time. Norice, who built a following designing custom sneakers for star clients, including Elton John, Madonna, and Tom Cruise, began painting murals in 2017, with the hopes that inspirational messages and vibrant imagery would bring much-needed positivity to L.A.’s toughest neighborhoods.

Through a tour he calls Artfully United (which shares a name with his nonprofit), Norice set out to paint 20 murals featuring messages such as Forgiveness, Harmony, and Dream Big. Fifteen of the 20 have been completed so far, often thanks to community volunteers who assist with painting. The journey to complete the first 15 murals is portrayed in the film, which also profiles Norice’s childhood in Watts, where he was raised by a single mother while his father served time in prison. Now available on multiple streaming platforms, Artfully United is a stunning reminder of the power the arts have to transform communities.

I recently chatted with Norice about his background, the challenges of seeing his life portrayed onscreen, and the advice he gives to young budding artists.

Creative Reverberations is a reader-supported publication. Each interview takes many hours of work. To receive new posts and support my work, please consider a paid subscription.

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SANDRA EBEJER: Inner-city neighborhoods are not typically a place where kids are exposed to public art. When did your love of the arts first take hold?

MIKE NORICE: I’ve been an artist pretty much all my life. I’ve been drawing since I was two. I didn’t understand what an artist was until I was in kindergarten, around five years old, when my teacher explained to me that I was an artist. Because I thought that the skill itself came naturally, like walking. I thought everyone can do it. It wasn’t until I was in that school setting that I knew I had an advantage over the other kids, and I asked my teacher, “Why don’t these kids know how to draw?” And she explained to me what an artist is. From then on, I started to understand what artists do and who they are and started building up who I am today.

You got a degree in fashion design and have had a really successful run in creating custom artwork on clothing and sneakers. How did that transition to the work you’re doing with Artfully United?

I’ve always been into fashion. I wanted to create a company that highlighted my art. And after doing custom clothing, custom shoes, whatnot, for 14 years, I discovered that fashion and art are very close to each other, but they don’t necessarily intertwine. I was not satisfied with the way my art career was being displayed within the fashion community, so I started to see what other options [exist where] I can highlight my own personal art career. So I started Artfully United in 2015 just to highlight my own art and do a mural.

With the Artfully United tour, you’re painting 20 murals in neighborhoods around Los Angeles. How do you go about finding locations? Are you invited to paint on specific walls?

In the beginning, I had to ask. Now it has basically taken over the city to where I turned down more walls than I accept. I’m down to the last five, and I try to better each wall each time. So if it’s not on a prominent street or it doesn’t get much exposure or it isn’t effective, in a sense, I won’t do it at this point. Some of the walls, people are inviting me. [They] say, “Hey, we want a mural on this wall.” But a lot of the good walls, I have to put a proposal together and talk to the owner or the manager of the building.

Was it difficult in the beginning to get that permission when you were first starting out?

Most definitely, yeah. Even the Forgiveness wall, the most popular wall, the owner didn’t want it up permanently. They only wanted it there temporarily. And then once we came back to paint it over after three months, because that was an agreement that he wanted us to do, his business increased so much that he said, “Let’s just leave it up.”

That’s amazing. What impact have the murals had on these communities?

It has definitely made a huge impact. It has created a sense of caring for the community and self-awareness because of these messages. You know, it’s not just art. When you pass by a street that says Believe or Hope or Forgiveness or Keep Smiling, it makes you think about something within yourself. The art is there, but it’s more about the message. It definitely reflects in a positive way to the community.

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How long does each mural take? And when do you expect to be done with all 20?

Each mural, usually at this point, takes about three days. In the beginning, it was a lot longer because I was still learning how to do large-scale murals. But as far as the finishing up of 20, I’m not sure when, because who knows when that magical wall will hit? I’m not sure. I would like for it to be done soon, but I wouldn’t know. It took us almost nine years to do 15, so who knows how long it will take to do five because, like I said, I’m trying to get bigger and better each time.

One of the things you touch upon in the film is that there is a lot of gang activity in the neighborhoods where you’re doing these murals. How was it for you to navigate that, and to make sure you’re not only able to paint in these neighborhoods but do it safely?

I have my feet really deep in the streets. I attend a group called Ceasefire, where we meet every week, and we meet with a lot of gangs and do gang intervention. Plus, these are the areas that I lived in once upon a time. And gang culture and gang activity, it’s all about respect. That’s the first and foremost thing that you have to do, no matter what neighborhood you’re in. As long as you have that, they’ll give you respect, and then it’ll go good from there. They just want to be seen. You talk to one of them before you start the project, then most of the time, it’s all good.

At one point in the Artfully United film you paint a mural on a wall that is over 90 feet long and 23 feet high. When you’re painting something like that and you can only see a small amount of the painting directly in front of you, how do you ensure that the full painting is coming out the way you want it to?

Well, this is just to show how I’ve graduated throughout the years. In the beginning, I was just freehanding it. I would measure the wall, doing it the wrong way. But there are a lot of ways to scale your art. You could do a grid and scale it. Or you can do what is called a doodle grid, where you make a bunch of markers on a wall and you incorporate your artwork from an iPad. And then you have a projector; we can stand far away from the wall and project the image. And then there’s new technology that just started. I’ve done three murals with this technology. It’s Meta Quest virtual reality glasses, where you import the artwork into the glasses, and then you have the glasses show you where the markings are. That’s the easiest and most effective way to scale your art, and that’s what I currently use, but I’ve used every single technique.

That’s interesting. I’m curious what your thoughts are on AI. Obviously the technology is helping you in those ways, but there are a lot of kids who might think that the way to make art is to use AI. Do you have any thoughts or opinions on that?

I don’t use AI to generate my art. I use the technology to project my art and scale my art. You use it as a tool to assist, not necessarily to create. I know I can see the art that is created by AI. You can easily see there’s no soul and there’s no spirit within the art. So I use it for assistance, not dictation.

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Have there been any artistic challenges with any of the murals you’ve done? Anything that was particularly hard to pull off?

Forgiveness, the first one. That was really tough in the beginning, and a lot of discouragements. In the beginning, you want to give up. I know I did. But I knew that this was something that will be big, and the city needs it, so I just kept pushing. But it’s never really easy. Even at this point, it’s still tough, because you have a lot of management and different ways of going about things. And I’m my biggest critic because I always like to do things bigger and better and constantly evolve my art. So in that sense, it’s hard on me. From the outside looking in, you would think that it’s easy, but it’s always hard on me because I’m always trying to better myself.

For the record, none of it looks easy! Your work is literally changing neighborhoods. What has Artfully United, both your nonprofit and the mural tour, taught you about the power of art and creativity?

It’s a conversation with the community. It’s taught me that I can relay a message, what I’m thinking, to everyone that passes by. And I’m glad that I’m doing a positive message, not a negative message. Some of these walls get up to 20,000 eyes on it a day. That’s power within advertisement. And I choose the positivity because we need to move forward in these communities and at least just have a positive mindset to your day to day. That’s why it’s designed that way.

How did the documentary come about?

Chris Walters was a client of mine from my store, and we started doing private commissions, me going out to Maine to do stuff for him and his household. He was right there at that fork in the road when I started to do murals. And him being a filmmaker, he said, “Let’s film this. Let’s document the process.” That’s pretty much how it came about in late 2014, early 2015.

The film not only discusses your work but paints a beautiful portrait of your family, including your dad, who was imprisoned for most of your young life. How was it for you, emotionally, to see your life up on the screen?

Yeah, it’s a very vulnerable piece. I’m very reserved. A lot of people, like friends I’ve known for years, didn’t know a lot of what was told in the documentary, because I just don’t go around talking about my personal business. But after seeing it, I knew that there’s other people that could be touched and moved by this, because they could be going through the same thing, and hopefully they could be inspired by this story. That made me feel good. I get a lot of positive responses by how they were touched—you know, their father was in prison, this is very encouraging—so I feel that it was good in that regard.

I always like to ask people about their influences or sources of inspiration. Are there any artists or works of art that inspire or influence your work?

I love Michelangelo. I started being taught as a fine artist, believe it or not, when I was 12. I started getting into oils and portraits and stuff like that. I studied him. I love Banksy. I started really getting into him in my early 20s. He definitely influenced being original and the cleverness of how I do some of my walls. I like Kehinde Wiley. He’s an artist from out here, as well. But that’s really about it. I try not to get too much into the art world, because I want to stay as original as possible. The more artists I’m around, I absorb different styles and techniques, and I don’t want to be that way. I want to be 100% me, so I try to stay just in my own path, for the most part.

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You’ve done a lot of work with kids. Is there any advice that you find yourself frequently giving them in terms of the art that they make?

I encourage them to stay original and stay consistent. Nowadays, everything is so fast paced. These kids that are like eight, nine years old, already want to start a company and go into the entrepreneur world. [Laughs] And if they don’t get it within a month or two, they’re discouraged and they want to go onto something else. I try to teach them to stay consistent and stay on the path of your dreams and what your gifts are.

Now that this film is being screened widely, what do you hope people will get from watching the film?

I hope they will be inspired and be moved to do whatever they’re here to do. We all have gifts that God has provided for us, and I want them to look within themselves and see, “Well, what gift do I have, and how can I move forward with that gift so I can live this life that I’m in a lot easier?”

You have five murals left, but is there anything beyond that—anything you haven’t done yet—that you really hope to do?

Yeah. I’m going to start a building where kids can come and practice art and be taught art as a career path. Not just arts and crafts but really do some hardcore artwork. I’m looking for buildings out here in Los Angeles to take it to the next level, where kids can have a safe haven after school and to practice art. Adults, as well. I want to create kind of like a YMCA for art. That’s the next step for Artfully United.

To learn more about Mike Norice, find him on Instagram.

To learn more about Artfully United, click here.

To watch the Artfully United documentary, click here.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

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It was such a treat to chat with Sonya Walger. I’ve loved her work for years, especially her portrayal of badass astronaut Molly Cobb in For All Mankind. So it was a huge, and pleasant, surprise to discover that she’s also an incredibly talented writer.

I devoured her latest book, Wifehouse, and am looking forward to reading last year’s Lion. We talked about both—and many other things—in our chat, but it didn’t all make it into the published piece. So, here are a couple of clips for paid subscribers.

In these videos, you’ll hear her talk about the response to Lion, as well as why she didn’t begin publishing until middle age.

Please give them a watch and then pick up her books.

And if you’re not a paid subscriber, please consider upgrading for just $5/month or $50/year. Every interview I do takes many, many hours of work, and your support enables me to continue to keep this publication going.

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Film and TV fans know Sonya Walger primarily from her work on Lost, For All Mankind, and dozens of other films and television series. But the award-winning actress is also an extraordinarily talented writer with a degree in English Literature from Oxford. Her first book, Lion—published last year in the wake of the Los Angeles fires that destroyed her home—was called “a piercing autobiographical novel” by Publishers Weekly and was longlisted for the 2026 Carol Shields Prize for Fiction. Her latest, Wifehouse, is a brilliant work of fiction in which a middle-aged married mother of two, Annie, makes the complicated choice to put her own needs before those of her family.

But despite her recent success as an author, Walger isn’t planning to give up acting. In fact, in addition to promoting Wifehouse, she’s currently juggling the writing of her third novel with her portrayal of Freya in the highly anticipated live-action adaptation of God of War. And she says it’s precisely her training as an actor that enables her to write as well as she does.

“That habit of disappearing into other people and looking out at the world through their eyes, that’s all I’ve done,” she says. “I’ve been a glove puppet for years and years, so now to get to do it with all the parts is just an absolute joy. It’s so exciting to get to pretend to be a 67-year-old solicitor from the middle of England. Or in the case of Wifehouse, 14-year-old Vita. Or Jackson, desolate because Christmas didn’t happen. It’s an extraordinary thing to do. And it has affected me in that it just deepens you. I think empathy is a muscle, and the more you work it, the stronger it is. It’s made me a better listener, actually. The writer in me is listening for the great phrase or the interesting person, but I’m not just harvesting. I’m also like, ‘What is in there? What is making you feel that or wonder that or long for that?’”

I recently chatted with Walger about her evolving writing process, her advice for aspiring novelists, and what she hopes for her career going forward.

This content contains affiliate links. I am an affiliate of Bookshop.org and I will earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase.

SANDRA EBEJER: Like so many others, I know you primarily from your work as an actress. But you’re a voracious reader and lover of books, and you studied English Literature in college. When you were at the start of your career, was the goal to be an actress? Did you aspire to be a novelist? What were your plans?

SONYA WALGER: I don’t know. Maybe some people have plans. I didn’t have plans. I just fell into things. [Laughs] I have loved acting my whole life and I’ve loved reading my whole life, and they’ve gone in tandem. I went to a very academic boarding school, and they were all very keen for me to try for Oxford. I was not opposed to the idea, but I had also had a very keen drama teacher who was very keen that I try for drama school. But when I got into Oxford, that path swerved. There was no drama school that was going to compete with getting to study English at Christ Church. So, I went to do that but quickly found a group of people that did theater. You can’t study theater at Oxford. They don’t consider it an academic discipline. So if you’re going to do it, you do it in your own time. And so we did. There was a group of us, and we put on a play every term, basically, on the side, as well as doing our various degrees. I think all of us were studying English.

I got an agent while I was still there and started work as an actor because I sort of fell into it. But I’ve never stopped reading and I’ve never stopped journaling. I did stop writing at the beginning. It didn’t occur to me to write. I just was in that horribly passive state that one begins as an actor, where you’re just waiting—waiting for the phone to ring, waiting for life to happen, waiting for all these events to come. Thankfully, I was in my twenties when I started realizing this is no way to live. So, [I had] a steady diet of journaling and then I did short story courses at UCLA. I’ve written movie scripts. I just had stayed away from the novel. Because I read as much as I do, and because I revere it as I do, I was terrified of writing a bad book, so I just didn’t do it.

Anyway, in a bid to make things and be around people that make things, I did a podcast for a long time called Bookish, where I interviewed people about the books that had shaped them most. And maybe you have an experience of this—there came a point by about episode 30 where I was like, “I am so fed up of hearing people tell me about what they’re writing.” Not fed up—that is the wrong word—but moved to do this myself. Why am I not doing this? So I came to it very late, is the long answer to your question, but I think I had to go through all the things I’ve gone through in order to get where I am.

Wifehouse is one of the best novels I’ve read in a while. Where did the idea for it come from?

I’ve always been interested in marriage as a subject. I think it’s just made for the novel. I really do. I think they’re made for each other, this particular form and this particular topic. After Covid, I saw a couple of families splinter in ways that none of us had expected or foreseen. And when you see that happen close up, there’s a reckoning for you. I think we’ve all experienced friends breaking up, and you’re like, “Oh my God, should we? Are we? Is this us too? Is everyone doing this?” And the actor in me— I’ve had some great roles in my career, but I have spent a long time looking over being like, “But I want to play his part.” It’s usually the men’s that I have coveted. And so to suddenly try on for size a book in which I played all the parts, in which I took on the role of everyone around this incredibly fraught subject, which is sort of—I’m going to say maternal ambivalence, but I don’t think Annie is that ambivalent about being a mum. I think she loves being a mum. I think what she’s ambivalent about is the trappings that come with it. There’s a cultural hysteria around it that I was really keen to not participate in, but to try and look at why maybe people are so polarized and energized about the idea of a woman who chooses to leave her family. Because I feel it too. I’m not immune to that, but I really wanted to see it from all the points of view. That, to me, was the real challenge and the thing that made it interesting and made it a book I hadn’t read. I only want to write books that I want to read. So usually the bar I hold is, have I read this?

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Writing a novel is a daunting task. What is your process like? I saw something in your Instagram about the book Atomic Habits being helpful.

I think Atomic Habits is just a great rule for life. But I tend not to do anything slavishly. I like bits from everywhere. The one non-negotiable for me is a journal. And by a journal I mean 12. I don’t have a bag that doesn’t have a journal in it, and they are this scrapbook of everything from shopping lists to novel ideas to phone numbers. I spend my life leafing through all of them, trying to remember where I wrote that phone number down. But they’re all going all the time. I handwrite the first draft of everything, or I have to date. I’m deep into book three and I have four thick notebooks on that. Every book is different. I’m really learning that. Like having children, you’re the same person, and yet you’re not quite the same person as the one who wrote the last one, and your book is not the same thing.

[With] Wifehouse I had a few very clear images. One was that it should take place in the space of a year, and that it should begin and end with this Christmas lunch, this ritualized gathering of people, and what was the same and what was different between these two iterations. And then I had this other image that just haunted me, and I was like, “Well, then it goes in the book.” I had this image of a woman in a garden surrounded by her childhood furniture, and that there was a reckoning of who she was in the context of all this stuff. What was this stuff doing with her? What did it have to do with her? It was a bit like a dream image in that fragmented way. And so those became the tent poles for the book, and I was, with hindsight, so grateful for them, because book three, I’m much more at sea and much more like, “Where are my tent poles?” [Laughs]

One of the things I think you do really, really well is describe characters vividly. Each character in this book has their own distinct personality, their own way of being. Did you spend much time fleshing out the characters prior to writing the story itself?

Yes and no. Some of them I could hear right away, and others no. Sometimes it’s about getting the story down as much as possible, just getting it out. That’s what the notebooks are about in lots of ways. Just like, “All right, let’s imprint this. Let’s get it in.” And then in the many rewrites it’s, “Now let’s flesh out this person.” Annie was shadowy for me. I knew what she was doing; I just wasn’t deep inside her for a while. So I did many passes that were just burrowing inside Annie and sort of living with her. So, yes and no is the answer. Some of them I know distinctly, and some of them I have to keep [working at]. I feel like I want to do this gesture where you’ve got clay and you’re just working it a little harder to warm it up in your hands.

There are a couple of lines in the book that jumped out at me, both in reference to Annie. The first is “she is living in the cheap seats of her own life.” And the second is something she says in reference to her children: “I am being buried alive by the very things that keep them safe.” She is a character I was both elated and horrified to find I relate to in many ways, and she’s stuck with me after reading the book. How was it for you to create her and live with her during the course of writing?

I mean, you’re never done with these people. I think when you write a book, they’re all pieces of you. Again, it’s like a dream, writing a novel, in some ways. The experience of it is slightly dream-like, and hard and nightmarish too, but you emerge from it like, “All right, that was that experience.” But a dream is still in you. Those figments and fragments are still in your life. So I’m as much Hector as I am Vita as I am Candace as I am Annie. You just lean. It’s all about your center of gravity. You just lean more into that. I don’t think there’s a mother alive that hasn’t at some point been like, “Oh my God, can I just go to a hotel?” [Laughs] And if there is, I don’t believe her. Most of us have that and then pull back, and we keep on with the washing up or unloading the dishwasher. But just to lean a little more into that and inhabit that, and then add to it grief, bereavement, resentment, isolation, geographical isolation, and the presence of someone who listens—well, that’s a cocktail right there. That’s a thing to play with. And I’ve spent a long, long time pretending to be other people, so it doesn’t come unnaturally to me.

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Is there anything that you struggle with as a writer?

[Long pause] Hmm. I mean, I want to say all of it, but no, not really. I’m really stubborn about things. I’m really only learning the kind of writer that I am. I find out who I am on the page. I think that’s the fascinating thing about it is you keep getting to peer behind the curtain, and there’s another person driving the ship, and you’re like, “Wow. I didn’t know you were in there. Al right, let’s work with you now.” I’m endlessly fascinated by the process of writing, because to have come to it in the middle of my life as someone more conscious and more cognizant and maybe more self-aware than I would have been had I been doing this in my twenties, it’s really interesting. It’s interesting to watch your hand move across the page and be like, “Look at that. There is a thing that did not exist minutes ago. There is a sentence and a string of words.”

And each book really is different. Lion was built out of tiny fragments that I then worked and worked and worked into this book. Wifehouse had its arc from beginning to end. My third book is born from a nugget of an idea and it’s period, so I’m working in a different time frame. This third book, for instance, I’ve filled four journals with handwritten notes. I’ve never read any of them. I just had to get it out of me, and now I’m writing the book. Whereas Wifehouse I very carefully transcribed what I’d written and then worked and worked and worked that. So are there things I struggle with? So far, it sounds like uniformity is what I struggle with. [Laughs]

You’ve been very open about the fact that you lost everything in the L.A. fires last year, just before Lion was published. I can’t fathom how one rebuilds after a loss like that, let alone promotes a book while going through that experience. How was that for you to juggle those worlds?

It was a lot. I’m not going to lie. I’d waited nearly two years for Lion to be published. NYRB had bought the book, and they release so few books a year, so I had to patiently wait my turn for it to be time. The drum roll for it had been long and every friend had basically read the book in manuscript form by that point. But it was very, very unexpected to have that as the backdrop. I had not anticipated promoting Lion against that sort of desolation. I will say the outpouring of love and support—that book launch at Diesel, the little bookstore here [in Santa Monica], was just packed with loving faces two weeks after the fire. There will never be a book launch like it. That was not just friends loyally coming out to support; that was a wall of love. And that felt extraordinary. Still does.

Yeah, it feels better to be talking about a book without my house in ashes behind me, but we still live with the repercussions of it. We’ve got stuff back, but the house is not rebuilt, and we’ve only been to see it once. It’s just painful to be there. We’re going to plow on and we’ll make it work.

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You were the creator and host of the Bookish podcast, so you’ve spent quite a bit of time talking to others about their favorite books. I’m wondering if there are specific books or authors or even other works of art that have been influencing or inspiring you lately.

Yes. Whenever I’m working on a new book, I tend to be incredibly filtered about what I allow in. So Wifehouse, I just read books about adultery and women leaving for about two years straight, beginning with the obvious, Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary, but then going deep in—Tom Stoppard’s play The Real Thing, which is one of my all-time favorite plays, and poetry and essays written by female artists, and studies on Louise Bourgeois. Everything is in the pot, as far as I’m concerned, but I’m quite disciplined about not really letting in what doesn’t belong. Right now what I’m doing is set between the wars in England, so there’s been a lot of Virginia Woolf and Muriel Spark, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Barbara Comyns. They’re very English, between the war writers, women, almost all of them, and that’s been juicy and great. And then I read Flesh, which I loved, and thought was an astonishing book, and was actually helpful. I’m writing something that’s completely different, but so often writers extract the DNA of something and then weave it into the helix of their own, and there was something in Flesh that was really, really helpful.

Will there be another season of the podcast?

I can’t do it all. The podcast, as you know, is so demanding and the research is so intense, and you want to do it right, and you want to do every guest justice. And I don’t have a producer, so it was all me. I love the interaction, the human everything. The procuring the dates, the assistants, the agents, that—I don’t need to tell you—I was just like, “I’m done. I can’t.” So I did 36 episodes. Maybe I’d come back to it. What I love about the podcast is that it’s evergreen. There’s no date on it. I would love to do it again, but I can’t imagine how to do it while I’m writing novels.

The first half of your career was primarily as an actor, and you did the podcast for three seasons. Now you’re writing novels. When you look ahead, do you have any specific idea of what you might want your career to be? Are you looking to just write? Are you more interested in acting? Do you have a preference?

No. I just got an acting job. I’m working again. That was very unexpected. I’ve been so happy writing books for the last four years and I really hadn’t expected to go back to acting. I hadn’t officially retired. I still have my agents and my manager and all my people, but mostly because they’re my friends, and I wasn’t going to fire anybody, and it doesn’t cost anything to keep them on. But I think I’m probably the most surprised to find myself back on set. I think my husband was like, “Of course you were going to act again.” And so were my agents. They were like, “Yeah, we were going to do this again.”

I feel a little taken aback to find myself on a soundstage again, but I feel very differently about it now. Like, I just get to keep making things. While the cameras are rolling, I’m going to be doing that, and then I’m going to be in my trailer and I’m going to write. So to have this thing in tandem and to feel very precious about my books, like I do about my children, where I’m like, “Yeah, great. I do this thing, but I’m also there for bedtime.” I feel like that. I feel like, “Great. I do this thing, and I have to finish book three.” So, I’m hoping for a long career, I guess, of both. But if you’d asked me three weeks ago, I’d have told you that just novels were great and that that’s what I was doing. So this is a new thing I’m still trying to incorporate.

That’s great that you have both. What advice would you have for aspiring novelists?

It would be the same advice that I give to actors, which is you have to uncouple from outcome. You just keep doing it. To be an artist is such an extraordinary life to get to live, and to witness the miracle of, that thing was inside me and invisible and now it exists—there’s no one that can take that away from you, whether it’s published or not, whether it lives on your desktop or in your journal. There has to be a part of you that is doing it for the sheer love of the miracle of making things. And bills need to be paid, God knows. I know that. But I really do believe that a dogged devotion to yourself, rather than to the need to have it in the world, necessarily, reaps results and makes for great art.

To learn more about Sonya Walger, visit her website.

To purchase Wifehouse, click here.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

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I hope you enjoyed last week’s interview with the incredible, hilarious Jenny Lawson. We discussed so much—her latest book, How to Be Okay When Nothing Is Okay, her tips and tricks for handle anxiety in an overly-anxious world, her love of books and reading, and so much more.

Of course, as it so often happens, not everything could fit into the written piece, so I’m sharing a few clips now with paid subscribers. In the following videos, you’ll hear her talk about why she now always listens to her editors, what her family learned from her new book, and why she loves her Substack, Let’s Art Together. (I love it, too.)

If you’re not a paid subscriber, please consider upgrading for just $5/month or $50/year. Every interview I do takes many, many hours of work, and your support enables me to continue to keep this publication going.

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Anxiety, depression, and ADHD might not sound like topics to joke about, but fans of Jenny Lawson know that everything in her life is fair game. For more than 20 years, the author has used dark humor in her writing to address her struggles with mental health and chronic diseases. Her hugely popular website, The Bloggess, attracts tens of thousands of readers each month, while her first four books have been New York Times bestsellers.

Her latest book, How to Be Okay When Nothing Is Okay: Tips and Tricks That Kept Me Alive, Happy, and Creative in Spite of Myself, is part-memoir, part-self-help, and very funny. With chapter titles like “Let’s Kick Sadness Right in the Dick” and “Let’s Make It Easier and Give Ourselves a Fucking Break,” it’s exactly what longtime fans of Lawson have come to expect. Though she admits that she’s sometimes surprised that fans have stood by her for so long.

“I always worry that I’m going to share too much,” Lawson tells me. “And it will be the point when they say, ‘Oh, no, no. We were with you up until you got into the nitty-gritty of it.’ What I have found is that so often when I think I’m the only person who deals with dermatillomania or trichotillomania or something that is not a common sort of thing, a million people will come and say, ‘Me too! I thought it was just me,’ which is so wonderful.”

Over a recent Zoom call, Lawson discussed how the book came about, how reading saved her in her darkest times, and what she’s learned from owning Nowhere Bookshop, her indie bookstore located in San Antonio, Texas.

This content contains affiliate links. I am an affiliate of Bookshop.org and I will earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase.

SANDRA EBEJER: Congratulations on the new book! You’ve written extensively about your struggles with anxiety and depression. What made you decide to write a book focused on tips and tricks for others?

JENNY LAWSON: When [my kid], Hailey, went off to college, I fell into a really deep depression, because I felt very unmoored. One of the things I struggled with was the fact that they were leaving, and I felt like there was so much stuff I never taught them. There’s so much that I never sat down and said, “Learn from my mistakes.” And I thought, well, one of the ways I could feel more of a connection to them is if I put together a little collection of all of the tips and tricks I have learned in my time.

Technically, I’ve been working on this book for decades, because I am constantly writing in little notebooks things to remember and think about and reframe. So I was able to take these notebooks that are half-finished all around my office and start off with it, but the further I got, the more I thought, “Oh, but I left out this...” And finally, once it all started to come together, I was like, “You know what? I wish I had this book when I was younger. This would have been so helpful for me. Maybe other people will find it helpful.” And it was interesting, because I just recently got the finished copy and I handed one to Hailey, and I was like, “Look! I wrote this for you!” And Hailey was like, “I am really busy. I’m about to start pharmacy school. I’m taking all these classes. Can I read it when things slow down in a year or so?” [Laughs] I was like, “You absolutely can.” But yeah, that figures.

You’ve shared with readers that your anxiety began at a very young age. Were writing and books things you turned to as a kid in order to make sense of what you were experiencing?

Absolutely. My best friends when I was young were books and characters. I felt like I didn’t fit in when I was growing up, partially because I had a really severe anxiety disorder. And back in the ‘70s and ‘80s, that wasn’t anything that anybody talked about or knew about. My mom would say, “Oh, you just have a sensitive stomach. That’s what it is.” So reading was my way of finding people out there who I could relate to, even if they were imaginary. To me, they weren’t.

And writing was very helpful, not only to help get things out of my head that I needed to get out of my head for my own sake, but also because my shyness is so strong and my social anxiety is so strong that I have a really hard time talking to people unless it’s one on one, or I’m in a very safe place. So, I could write notes. I went to school in the ‘80s and ‘90s, and this was the golden age of note passing. It really felt like that was the way I could communicate with others and have friends, even though they weren’t friends that I would necessarily eat lunch with. I was too afraid, but I could still be a part of the group. Being able to pass those notes [allowed me to] still be a part of the community, even though I was a little removed from it.

Creative Reverberations is a reader-supported publication. Each interview takes many hours of work. To receive new posts and support my work, please subscribe.

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I read a recent interview you did where you said you had anxiety about doing press for this book about anxiety. And it’s interesting because you’re not a recluse; you engage with your readers and do press and you’re active on social media. Is it difficult to balance the necessary promotional aspects of your job with your mental health struggles?

It is hard, because I always get the idea that Future Jenny is going to have more energy than I actually do. And so it’s easy for me to say, “Oh, I can do this and I can do this.” And then it gets to the end of the day, and I realize that if I do three interviews in a row, the next day I will not be able to move.

So there’s been several things that have been really helpful. One is that I have figured out the most that I can possibly do and just ask for accommodations. I feel bad for publicity, because I have been asked to do a lot of really amazing things, and quite a few of them I have turned down because they’re either too energy focused or they’re maybe a little too scary. So I’m picky about what I do. Typically I will say, “I can only do two things a day before it starts to affect me mentally by the end of the day.” And my husband is always like, “Two things?? My God, how are you getting past this with two things?” But everybody has a different way of being, a different level of energy.

Also, it’s really helpful having medication that helps. In the past, I had a really hard time. I still sometimes struggle with finding that perfect spot, because I have ADHD, so I need to take my ADHD meds, but because they’re a stimulant, they can make an anxiety attack come on. But if I don’t take them, I’m definitely gonna have an anxiety attack because I’m not going to be able to concentrate, and I’m going to be completely rambling and not getting anything done. Actually, discovering beta blockers has been really helpful because they lower your heartbeat a little bit when you’re really scared. Like, let’s say you’re a violinist and you’re going to perform and your heart is pounding. If you take a beta blocker, it lowers it just a little bit. And if you don’t hear your heart pounding, you’re less likely to think, “I’m having a panic attack.” But it doesn’t make you tired or groggy in the same way that an anti-anxiety drug would when I need to be working. Finding that perfect balance is not easy.

Your writing is so funny, yet also vulnerable and open. You don’t shy away from the hard stuff. Is it a challenge to keep your writing lighthearted so that it’s not too dark, but also be honest when you maybe don’t feel very funny?

It is a very fine line. I used to be much more scared about it because I would think, “This is going to offend people.” There are a lot of people who do not understand dark humor or are not the kind of people who can find a way to laugh at a funeral. But what I have found is that who I’m writing for are the people who are going to get it. If I make a joke, it feels like all bets are off. You’re not going to offend me. You don’t have to be like, “Oh, this is so serious. Everything has to be serious, and you have to say this in a perfect way and do this in a perfect way.” It’s also a really good way to welcome in people who may not have ever gone through whatever that situation is, whether it’s miscarriages or depression or anxiety, where somebody would say, “This doesn’t have anything to do with me. Why would I read it?” But if you can get, right from the beginning, something to make you go, “Oh, that’s funny,” it invites you in.

What’s really wonderful is so often people will come to me and say, “I read this because I thought it was really funny. But after I read it, I realized I was really struggling with something and didn’t recognize it before.” Or “I read this because I thought it was humorous, and then I gave it to my kid to read, and they came to me and said, ‘I’m so glad you gave this to me. I’m actually dealing with something really hard, and this gave me a way to talk about it.’” So, yeah, if you’re the kind of person who can laugh at a funeral like my sister and I do every single time, then this is the kind of humor you will probably enjoy. If you go, “Oh no. Never. Can you ever laugh at a funeral?” then you might not love it.

Is anything off limits when it comes to your writing? Are there any subjects you don’t feel comfortable delving into publicly?

There are a few things. Anytime that I write about anyone, they get to see it first, and I’ll delete anything they say “I’m not comfortable with.” The other thing is, whenever I’m making fun of someone, I have to be the butt of the joke. I’ll make fun and find humor in a situation, but I try to do it in a very loving way, and I think that comes across. And my family generally is supportive of all of that.

There are some things I have not written about because I haven’t found a way to explore them in a way that I think is healthy yet. Before I met [my husband], Victor, I was in a really abusive relationship and every once in a while I think, “I need to write about that,” but I just have not. In spite of the fact that it was 30 years ago, I still have not found the right way to come about writing about it. A lot of the times when I’m writing, I want to be able to find an end, even if the end is just like, “And I’m still working on it,” but I don’t really have one for that yet. And honestly, it’s easier not to write about it, because it means I would have to go back and reprocess that and go, “That was a really hard time.” I don’t think there’s anything that is off limits for me to talk about, but there’s definitely some things that I don’t feel I’m ready yet to put in writing for the world.

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Your bookstore, Nowhere Bookshop, is one of the few businesses that not only opened during the pandemic but has continued to thrive. And you write in the book that “it was painfully humbling to realize that loving bookstores did not automatically make me successful at running one.” What has owning the bookstore taught you about yourself?

We opened the week of lockdown, and I was like, “Well, that’s it. We’ve just lost everything.” But luckily, we had enough people who joined our book clubs that it allowed us to pay our rent. I mean, we went almost a year before we fully opened our doors, because we wanted to make sure it was really, really safe for people. Learning how to own a bookshop is so rewarding, but it is so challenging. It is so hard. The margins are thin and everybody’s competing with you—I mean big box everybody, not other independent bookshops. And I struggled a lot with the fact that I wanted to know everything all at once. But every time I would make a mistake, I would remind myself that if I’m making a mistake, it means I’m learning, and if I’m learning, that means I’m living. Because how incredibly boring would it be to say, “Well, I guess I’m done. I know everything now”? I’d be finished.

You and your writing are a light to so many who feel stuck in the dark, and you make us weirdos feel okay about being weird. Are there any authors or works of art that do that for you?

There are a lot. Samantha Irby, all of her work. Allie Brosh I think is incredible. I really love Shirley Jackson, because not only does she write the dark and the hard, but she also wrote funny parenting stuff. I love that she was very, “Here’s life, and it’s difficult, and I’m putting out this incredible stuff” that, at the time, was very controversial. When she was first putting out her stuff, I think a lot of people were like, “Are you kidding me with ‘The Lottery’? What is wrong with you? Get out of here.” But now you look back and go, “Oh my God, it was incredible.”

I follow so many artists, and of course, I can’t think of any of them at the moment. Katie Gamb is one of my favorites. She did the oracle cards for [my book] Broken, which I really loved. My house is actually filled with original art. Books and art are where all of my money goes to, and it is the weirdest art. It’s the kind of art you walk in and people either go, “Wow!” or they go, “What? I need to get out of here immediately. What is happening? Why is this so scary? What is going on?”

You’ve had so many achievements in your career. Is there anything you haven’t done yet that you’d like to attempt?

There are a lot of things in theory, but so many of those things, if they were actually offered to me, I probably would say no because they’re too overwhelming. The one thing I really would love to do—and I’m putting it out into the universe so that maybe one day it will happen, even though I can’t imagine that it will—is start writers’ workshops. I’ll get a castle in Scotland, and everybody comes for two weeks, and every night we come downstairs and we do a Mary Shelley kind of thing where everybody shares whatever they’re working on. If I had a billion dollars, I would drop everything and be like, “Let’s do that!” And everybody gets on a train, and we all go into our little train cars and we write, and then at night, we come out to the train booze car—Is there a booze car? Let’s say there is—and we all read or share our art. I love that idea. I get so inspired by being around other people who are creative, but I also get so drained by it. So the idea of, we’re working, but we’re working in our own little rooms, and then at night, we’ve got a couple of hours, and then we run away again—ah! A dream!

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Aspiring authors often feel like they have to sound a certain way in order to be taken seriously. Your writing is full of run-on sentences and f bombs and self-deprecating humor and doesn’t sound like anyone else. Do you have advice for writers about finding their voice, even if their voice seems to be different from everything else out there?

Don’t be afraid to be weird. In fact, embrace that. The thing that you look at and go, “Oh, this might be the thing that makes people run away,” is something you should really explore. That being said, whatever you write lives forever. So you want to make sure that you are comfortable with it, that you can live with it. It’s like the child that is out there forever. And occasionally you’ll look back and go, “I don’t know what I was thinking. Why did I write this?” And other times, you’ll go, “I’m so proud of that, even though it was a slice of life that doesn’t reflect me anymore.”

The most important thing that you can do is to embrace the thing that makes you stand out in a weird way. If you shared your writing with a group of angsty teenagers, what they would make fun of, generally, is the thing that is going to make people feel seen and feel heard. A lot of times we go, “I shouldn’t write about this, because people won’t relate, or they’ll think it’s strange.” But the way I look at it, there’s maybe one in 10 people who could pick up my book and go, “Oh my God. I feel so seen. This is 100% me.” And the other nine out of 10 would pick it up and have various degrees of, “Oh, that’s interesting” to “This is not for me. How offensive.” But when it comes to putting a book out or your voice out, it is so much easier to find that one out of 10 and to realize that you don’t really care so much about getting those nine out of 10 in with you, because those are not people that you’re necessarily going to vibe with and you aren’t necessarily going to like.

Realizing that what you put out into the universe is what you’re going to bring back in can be very inspiring. Sometimes I want to write really angry things about the world or my life, or things aren’t going well, and I just want to tear it all down. And I will, but I’ll always find a way to have something uplifting or inspiring or hopeful at the end. Because I want to feel that way, and I want my readers to feel that way, and I also want to bring toward me the people who are honest about their challenges and are angry and are upset but are also looking at the good at the same time. Because those people are amazing to be with, and they’re the ones that share the best stories, and who come to me and say, “Here’s a tip that worked for me.” And really, that’s how we all get along, is by being as honest as we possibly can and giving each other those little tools of how we can make the world better for ourselves and for others.

To learn more about Jenny Lawson, visit her website.

To purchase How to Be Okay When Nothing Is Okay, click here.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

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Mason Currey has spent much of his career investigating the working habits of artists, sharing all that he’s learned in two books, Daily Rituals: How Artists Work and Daily Rituals: Women at Work, as well as his popular Substack, Subtle Maneuvers. But in his latest book, Making Art and Making a Living, he takes a deeper look into how artists over the centuries have managed to afford their creative pursuits.

Currey hopes that the stories in the book offer solace to artists who struggle with the financial aspect of their work. “I want people to see that they’re not alone in confronting this,” Currey says. “That as miserable or thwarted or overwhelmed as they might feel trying to confront the whole dilemma of making art and also paying for your life, that they are actually in great company. They’re part of a lineage of people who have confronted this problem and often didn’t have a great solution and still kept making their way forward. And maybe also they will see some solutions or attitudes that they could borrow from.”

Over Zoom, Currey chatted with me about the four-and-a-half years it took to research and write the book, his own writing routine, and why today’s creator economy isn’t as new as we think.

This content contains affiliate links. I am an affiliate of Bookshop.org and I will earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase.

SANDRA EBEJER: What made you decide to write about the financial lives of artists?

MASON CURREY: I think it’s always the question for so many of us. You think, “I want to be a writer or an artist.” And you know it’s going to take all this time and trial and error and experimentation, and yet so much of that work doesn’t attract any income, or not, at least, reliable income, especially when you’re starting out. And certainly for me, thinking about trying to become a writer as a young person, it was like, how am I going to pay for this? How am I going to find a way to do it where there’s some money attached? I’ve always been curious about that question. And in my previous books looking at famous writers’ and artists’ working habits, their daily routines, the money question was always hovering over those profiles. Yes, this is a wonderful creative life, but how do they afford it? Of course, some of them had inherited income and some of them had spectacular success at a young age, but I knew there was more to that story, so I wanted to get into it.

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The book includes so much information. What was the research process like, and how did you organize that giant body of research into something that actually made sense?

I really struggled with the structure of it. My original idea was that I would make it more of a history. I would start at the Renaissance and work my way forward and drop in on these famous moments in art and literary history and unpack what the money situation was, and I just totally overwhelmed myself. It was way too much to do, at least for me, and it also was a little dull.

I’m pretty good at telling individual stories, getting into how individual creators did their thing, what their struggles were, how they navigated around them, so I ended up focusing on which individual stories I researched that resonated with me, that I felt I could write in a compelling way, and I tried a bunch of different ways of organizing them. My editor was like, “Look, these stories fall into a few big buckets. You have jobs, you have patrons, you have government money, you have mooching off of family members. Why don’t you just try to organize it into these thematic sections?” I fought against that for a while, because I feel like you don’t want to know too much what you’re going to get in any given chapter, but what I realized is that you still don’t know what you’re going to get, because the way people dealt with their day jobs or their patrons or their family money is still very surprising. So that’s how it ended up being in these four big sections—family money, because I thought that’s the best possible scenario for an artist [laughs]; jobs, because that’s the most common thing all of us have to do; patrons, because that’s the whole other world of getting money from an outside source; and then my favorite, schemes, which is all the rich variety of other often eccentric or oddball or ill-advised ways that people cobbled together income as artists.

How long did it take you to finish the book? Because at one point you wrote that it was taking a lot longer than you anticipated.

I originally budgeted 18 months for the first draft, and then, as I was maybe five or six months out from that, realized I wasn’t going to make that deadline, and I needed to abandon the chronological history idea. I got an extension and I met that deadline, but then that version didn’t quite work, so then I wrote a different version, which also didn’t quite work. And then I wrote another version, which was closer but didn’t quite work. And then the final version finally worked. So I wrote three-and-a-half different versions of the same book with a lot of the same material, but with different ways of approaching it. All in all, it took four-and-a-half years.

Oh my gosh. How sick of it were you by the end of that four-and-a-half years?

Not actually that sick, because I love these stories. And as I was going, I was writing my Substack newsletter, and my frustration and my confusion was giving me a lot of great things to write about. I mean, partly it was procrastination avoidance, like “I can’t figure this out, so I’ll write this newsletter issue.” But also it was a way of trying to think through why this was so difficult or how I could approach it differently. Those two things went together in a nice, generative way. The regular, doable thing and the big, impossible thing energized each other, in a way.

Well, that’s nice to hear. Was there anything you learned in the writing or the research process that surprised you?

Overall, I wasn’t surprised by people’s difficulty, because I went into it thinking the money question is hard, so I felt validated to keep reading about how hard it was for how many people. For me it’s just comforting to read the journals or diaries or letters of these great figures and see they had the exact same feeling. They were just as miserable in their day job, and they worried they weren’t going to be able to make their art because they didn’t have any time or energy or they didn’t have the funding. So overall, I felt relieved that my experience is in line with what people have experienced through time.

Of course, there were all sorts of outrageous stories throughout the book, both ones that I could imagine myself trying to do and ones I could never do in a million years. I was really interested in Jeff Koons. There’s a famous story about him as a young aspiring artist working at the Museum of Modern Art membership desk. He was such a natural salesman and so charming and outrageous that people kept offering him jobs. Somebody offered him a job selling mutual funds, and he ended up selling mutual funds on Wall Street. And for the art community in the 1970s in New York, it was like, how could you go work on Wall Street? Working at a museum was obviously understandable. And he was like, “I need more money to make the kind of art I want to make.” And he pulled it off. So that’s the kind of person where I can never see myself being that much of a bold salesperson, but also I love that energy and find it inspiring.

Creative Reverberations is a reader-supported publication. Each interview takes many hours of work. To receive new posts and support my work, please subscribe.

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We live in this creator economy, and we all like to think that what we’re doing now is new. But something I learned from your book is there was a poet, Alexander Pope, who was selling a subscription model back in 1713, and he wasn’t even the first to do it. Nowadays that seems to be the route we’re all taking. You have a Substack; I have a Substack. Pretty much every creative I know has some sort of platform that they’re using to trying to monetize their work. How do you feel about that? Do you feel like it’s a sustainable way to make a living as an artist?

I wonder that all the time, as I’m sure you do. I’m in a group chat of other Substack writers and we all are constantly texting each other, “Here’s a story where this person’s doing this. Does that seem like the way to do it?” Again, it’s comforting to know that writers have always struggled with this. I was comforted to read about publishing in the 1700s because it was like the Wild West—it was both prestigious to publish, and also people thought of it as a lowly thing. It was in the league with vagrants and prostitution, this not particularly polite society thing to do, to be engaged with publishers. And Alexander Pope was someone who was like Jeff Koons, just really good at making influential friends and making himself someone they wanted to support, which is a gift that I personally wish I had. [Laughs]

But back to Substack... I don’t know. It’s like the more people come into the zone, the harder it is. But then, what are the alternatives? I mean, a lot of the things that used to be routes for writing in particular aren’t really financially sustainable anymore. I would like to think we’re at the cusp of some new solutions or some new innovations, but it’s hard to guess what they might be.

It’s very easy, as I’m sure you know, for artists to have a million ideas of things they want to accomplish but lack the organizational or time management skills to get it all done. You write very in-depth books, you publish regularly in your Substack, you run a weekly Zoom call for your subscribers. How do you manage your workload? Are you fairly regimented? Or is it like playing whack-a-mole?

I’m fairly regimented, only because I fear that my true self is deeply lazy and a procrastinator [laughs], so I hold myself to a routine for fear of what lurks just beneath the schedule. I get up early and I actually have a daily Zoom call—which I’m starting to think is an insane thing to do—for paid subscribers to the newsletter, every morning, 6 a.m. my time, for two hours. We all say, “Good morning,” we turn off the cameras, and we work separately together on our projects, and then we have a little check-in at the end. It’s a really cool group and has a lot of really nice supportive energy. I am starting to feel, after more than 400 days of this, a little burned out on always having to be on Zoom at 6 a.m., so I’m debating how to manage that. But that’s one thing that does keep me showing up for my work and for myself.

I set an every other Tuesday deadline for my newsletter, and for whatever reason, I feel incredible pressure to stick to that self-imposed deadline. I don’t think people really notice if I don’t make it, but I feel like they’re going to notice and be upset, so that keeps me going. I am in the very fortunate position of being able to afford to be a full-time writer, although it always feels like I’m just barely affording it, so I have to keep things in different stages of progress. I want to always have, if I can, a book project, and also a lot of smaller, short-term things, and if they can all bring in some amount of income, they can all add up to a sustainable practice. I mean, that’s the idea, at least.

One of the things that jumped out at me during the course of reading this was how much we, as a society, love the arts but how little we’re willing to support the artists. The Federal Art Project is something I’d never heard of, but it was an enormously impactful program run by the U.S. government. For those who aren’t familiar with it, can you share a bit about that program?

The book that really clued me into that program was Mary Gabriel’s Ninth Street Women, which is a truly fabulous history of the women artists at mid-century in New York. But the story is that when FDR was launching the WPA [Works Progress Administration], somebody was like, “What about artists?” And he was like, “Okay, sure. Yeah. We can give artists money, too.” [Laughs] And so the Federal Art Project was born, and all these downtown New York artists [who] often lived these barely subsistence-level lives all of a sudden were getting regular paychecks and could afford painting supplies and studio space and restaurant meals. It galvanized the whole community. I mean, all of a sudden they were all meeting to talk about what they were doing and they unionized, and they were making work for public murals. The whole art world as we know it, at least in the United States, was born from this one off-the-cuff act of government generosity. It didn’t last terribly long, but it had a huge impact. So many of the people we think of as monumental figures from that era, like Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, Lee Krasner, in one way or another got project funds or were part of this world that it birthed.

That’s incredible. When you were starting out as a writer, what career did you envision for yourself? Were you looking towards journalism or fiction? What did you hope your trajectory would be?

I’ve been writing about this a little in my newsletter, actually, so it’s fun to think about. The thing I most love to read are novels, and I thought, “If that’s what I most love to read, that must be what I need to write.” I had a few years right after college of trying to write the Great American Novel while working at a library and truthfully, writing almost nothing. I had a professor who told me, “If you’re serious, get an easy day job and live someplace cheap and just write in your spare time.” I got the easy day job, and I got a cheap place to live, and then I wasn’t writing.

So after a while, I thought, “Maybe I need to find a way to get paid to write or be forced to write as part of my job.” So I ended up moving to New York and doing the summer program in the publishing industry, which got me a job at a small architecture magazine, where I did end up on the editorial side, where I was doing a lot of writing, and that was really great training. I learned a ton. I learned how to edit and write on deadline and write in different formats at different lengths, but it wasn’t really the kind of writing I wanted to be doing. So as a hobby, I started this blog about writers’ and artists’ daily routines, and I ended up getting a book deal to do my first book. So, in a funny way, all my confusion about how to be a creative person and how to make yourself do this thing that you want to do but you’re maybe not doing led into this writing niche, which is writing about that and trying to understand how we can help ourselves do interesting, creative work.

Are there any artists that you turn to for inspiration or who have influenced your work?

My whole life is drawing inspiration or strength or sustenance from these different lives. I feel like it keeps me moving forward. My newsletter title is inspired by this letter that Franz Kafka sent in 1912, I think, where he’s complaining about his day job and his living situation and how he can’t write. It’s this really great, over-the-top complaint, and he has this line where he says, “If a pleasant, straightforward life is not possible, then one must try to wriggle through by subtle maneuvers.” And when I first read that, it hit me so hard because I thought, “Yes! Of course! Wriggle through by subtle maneuvers. That’s the goal.” So often you can’t actually fix all the big picture stuff about your life, but you can try to make your way forward little by little and do whatever things help you navigate that. So that’s why my newsletter is called Subtle Maneuvers, and that’s why I look to these people’s biographies, because I think I’m always trying to pick up little habits or attitudes that I can borrow or learn from.

Are there any tips or tricks that you’ve picked up from these artists that you utilize on a regular basis?

I’ve always written best first thing in the morning, the earlier the better. If I can get up really early before the sun is up and no one else is awake and no one expects anything from me, I feel like I have this special kind of focus that I just don’t have later in the day. But as a younger person, I never liked getting up early and actually struggled to not snooze the alarm. Doing the first book, I was also working full-time, and the only way I could do it all was to get up early. And I learned that if that is the window of opportunity I have each day, I should really try to seize it every day and not just when I’m in some deadline crunch. And so I was inspired by seeing how the people in those books arrange their lives around when they could do this kind of work or when they had that kind of focus, and it made me want to do the same thing. I do still get up at 5:30 every weekday morning all these years later, even though I still don’t like getting up early. It is my one stupid writer trick. [Laughs]

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I think it’s safe to say that the worst kind of stress is financial stress and the fear of not making ends meet. And there are a lot of people who don’t pursue a creative path even if they want to because they’re so afraid of that aspect of it. Given all that you’ve learned in your work, what advice you would have for somebody who has the desire to do something creative, but is reluctant due to the financial aspect of it?

I would say they should listen to the voice or the instinct that is wanting to do something that may seem impractical. For one reason, I don’t know what qualifies as practical at this moment in time. I mean, so many careers, so much of the world, seems very uncertain. At the very least, if you’re following your pull towards doing something that really interests you or that you feel called to do, at least you’ll always have the satisfaction of that. I don’t quite believe in the phrase I often heard growing up, which was “Do what you love and the money will follow.” I don’t necessarily think the money will follow, but at least you’ll be doing something that you like or you’re interested in, and you may be surprised at how you find ways to pay for it. So don’t ignore whatever that impulse is, because it’s a really good compass.

To learn more about Mason Currey, visit his website.

To purchase Making Art and Making a Living, click here.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

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I hope you had a chance to read my interview with award-winning filmmaker Kim A. Snyder. Her latest film, The Librarians, is an infuriating but important exploration of book bans and the school librarians whose jobs and lives are literally at risk for simply doing the job they were hired to do.

Just hours after I watched the film, which is currently streaming on PBS, I learned that a nationwide book ban bill, H.R.7661 or the “Stop the Sexualization of Children Act,” had been introduced and is now advancing in the House of Representatives.

I asked Snyder about the bill, but due to space limitations this part of our interview didn’t make it into the full written piece. I’m sharing the clip now with paid subscribers.

Please give it a watch and then check out her film.

And if you’re not a paid subscriber, please consider upgrading for just $5/month or $50/year.

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For more than two decades, Kim A. Snyder has directed and produced more than a dozen films on critical social justice issues, including gun violence, homelessness, and immigration, earning a Peabody Award and an Academy Award nomination. Her latest film, The Librarians, delves into the heated debate over book bans, as it follows a group of school librarians in Florida, New Jersey, Louisiana, and Texas who face job loss and death threats for the simple act of doing the work they were hired to do.

“I saw this news that broke back in the fall of 2021,” Snyder says. “State Representative Matt Krause in Texas issued a list of 850 books that became known as the Krause List for school librarians to review and remove from their shelves. This list was in some ways surprising and random to many librarians, but very much targeting, almost exclusively, books about and by LGBTQ+ authors, authors of color, books about race, history, Black history, and sex education, and really any marginalized voices. I learned that there was this group of librarians calling themselves the Freadom Fighters in Texas that were beginning to organize, and to their surprise, they began to get a reaction, not just across the state of Texas, but throughout the country. And librarians were traumatized because this list was being used as a boilerplate in so many places, and they were being put in this Sophie’s choice of whether to comply or do what they knew was right.”

Executive produced by Sarah Jessica Parker, The Librarians premiered at Sundance in 2025 and over the past year has been screened for audiences around the world, winning numerous awards and generating significant praise. In addition to dozens of screenings scheduled in theaters and libraries nationwide throughout the spring, the film is also available to stream on PBS through May 9th.

I recently spoke with Snyder about the bravery of the librarians, challenges facing documentary filmmakers, and how she handles burnout.

Creative Reverberations is a reader-supported publication. Each interview takes many hours of work. To receive new posts and support my work, please consider a paid subscription.

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SANDRA EBEJER: The librarians in your film are literally risking their lives to do their jobs. One of them chose to stay anonymous and have her identity hidden. Was it difficult to get them to trust you and agree to tell their stories?

KIM A. SNYDER: In the beginning, there was a lot of reluctance. We had to gain their trust. I think having former work helped. They vetted me. They’re librarians and could see the kind of films I’d done. We were partnering pretty early on with PBS’s Independent Lens, and that has a certain built-in trust when it’s public television. It’s not likely to be a salacious, exploitative process. And it’s the ethics of how I go about my documentary work, where I make it clear that I understand their welfare needs to come first, their livelihoods, their safety. That continues till this day, and I’ve been lucky that those values are very much shared by my team. So there were a lot of conversations early on about, yes, there’s an appearance release, but one of the things people may not know about the threat to our public television and a strand like Independent Lens is they actually require that the filmmaker have copyright. So the buck stops with me, and I’m able to say to a librarian, “You’re signing a release, but if there’s a point where you feel threatened, I will honor that first. The contracts don’t matter if you feel in any way threatened.” I think that went a long way. And we did have those situations of someone saying, “I’m no longer comfortable” with this or that, and we honored it.

The film has screened at festivals across the country and is currently streaming on PBS. What has the response from audiences been like?

Beyond anything we could have expected. It has struck a nerve across not only this country, but beyond our borders. That was not something that was a given. I’d say maybe the given would have been librarians would feel a catharsis, emboldened, empowered—that has definitely happened. There’s the core libraries and teacher communities that have been so responsive, thankful, enthusiastic, and then there’s what I call the choir of people who are interested in stories of resistance in the times we’re living in. We did not expect 200 theaters to book this throughout the country. That doesn’t usually happen.

We’ve heard from across the partisan divide, from Republicans and people of faith, that this is something that they are aligned with. They’re not down with the idea of censorship and what’s behind it. So that’s been heartening. We’ve gotten direct evidence that those kinds of audiences are being reached across the country. The international audiences wasn’t a given. We’ve screened in so many countries outside of this one. Europeans, in particular, are like, “We understand what this can mean. We understand the historic precedent, maybe more than a lot of Americans.” That’s been really strong.

And I did not necessarily expect young people. I mean, there are a lot of middle aged women in our film and there are some voices of youth, but they’ve been totally on track with understanding the importance of this and what it means for marginalized voices to be taken off the shelves. And then there’s been conferences where we’ve screened it, like a publisher’s conference or film commissioners from around the world. That’s been exciting because even though authors and publishers are not in the film, we know it’s part of the bigger ecosystem of censorship and media, so it’s exciting when you have the head of Penguin Random House and Macmillan and these important voices saying, “This film’s important, and we need all of our agents and all of our editors to see this film so they are aware of succumbing to a chilling effect.” And then there’s the whole legal field. We’ve screened at law schools. What’s exciting about this film is it has so many tentacles because the issue of censorship affects so many aspects of society.

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I used to work in Advancement at the American Film Institute and one of my biggest donors was CPB—the Corporation for Public Broadcasting—which funded AFI DOCS. Now, thanks to the gutting of federal funding, CPB is gone and PBS is at risk. As a documentary filmmaker focusing on social justice issues, how do these cuts impact your ability to have your work seen by audiences?

I’ve partnered on three projects now with Lois Vossen at Independent Lens. She’s a hero to me. She’s got to remind people, yes, CPB is gone, but Independent Lens is here this season, and she’s determined to keep that going. The game’s not over there. On the other hand, yes, with the advent of the consolidation of streaming, this news about the merger and Paramount, we as documentarians are suffering from a chilling effect. I would be lying if I said I am not thinking, how am I going to sustain myself? How do I stay viable financially and have these things funded? Because the Open Call [funding] that we were so honored to receive from PBS and ITVS is gone right now. There is no pipeline. They’re trying to keep that open with funding that would come from private sources, but right now, as you well know, the streamers are not going for political fare. So these projects, some of which I have in the vault, where will they get seen? Do I spend more money trying to continue it and revive that project? That’s a chilling effect. Do I say I need to take a break and do a true crime or a music doc? That’s what I would consider a chilling effect. I’m being very transparent, but I think that we have to be crafty if we want to continue to document the times.

I don’t want to take private money if the film can’t get seen. So the idea of where will it be distributed—I think one thing that’s interesting is [because] this film has had such resonance abroad and in Europe, to go back to an older model of looking at partners from broadcasters over in Europe and at least have the light being shown from afar, either the funding or the distribution. I think we’re seeing it in the media, where people who are being purged from our regular mainstream media are going to Substack. We [documentary filmmakers] have to do the same. We have to find work arounds.

I had a part early in my career where I was very involved in post-communist Central European film, and I think a lot about, what did those creators do? Artists have found a way, under the most repressive circumstances, to continue to generate art that is a commentary, and they do it sometimes through animation, they do it through code, they do it through metaphor. So I do find myself looking at scripted things, looking at history, looking at stories that are important because they resonate. It doesn’t have to be, at this moment, necessarily a verité film. I’m considering all options.

I like to ask people about their influences or sources of inspiration. Do you remember the first documentary film you saw that made a big impact on you?

There have been so many, but I do remember being really struck with Capturing the Friedmans. I know Andrew [Jarecki, director] well now, but I remember learning the story about how he set out to make a story about a clown, and it just went in a whole different direction. And that’s something that we’ve talked about, having the flexibility and the nimbleness to not have a prescribed script in documentary of what you think the story is going to be, but the openness to let it take you where it leads.

A lot of my references have been scripted. I think story’s story. I think a lot right now with [The Librarians] about a film that I loved, The Lives of Others, that was about East Berlin in the end of the communist era, because someone wrote about our film that censorship is not only an affront to democracy, but to personal integrity. I think about that because the Sophie’s choice that these librarians are facing has to do with their integrity and the things that they’re being asked to do, to take books like How to Be an Antiracist or The History of the Ku Klux Klan off the shelf. Are you going to do it or not? That’s about personal integrity. That’s about a change in people’s behavior, and that is what happened in the most repressive communist countries.

And then the snitching part, these policies that are about “report your librarian.” We remind audiences all the time that this phrase of “parental rights” has been commandeered. There have always been parental rights. The protocol was always there for people to go to their librarian and say, “I have an issue with this book. I’m not sure this is appropriate for my kid.” And they would talk about it or they would challenge it, and there was a committee, and the committee was comprised of partly librarians who are trained and have master’s degrees in the selection of age-appropriate materials. And now that’s been completely thrown out, with the objective to have it being taken over by church members who have a certain agenda.

In the beginning of this, how librarians get hired and fired might have seemed arcane, but it became fascinating in understanding there’s workarounds in the policy of pitting the principal against the librarians. Like the school board decisions that reestablish some of these criterion is what makes this kind of snitching thing, where you could land in a place where Martha Hickson is in our film and is called a pedophile. How did that happen, where her principal, who had known her for 17 years, stood idly by and said nothing? Why is that? It’s because these things were being configured so that they would be isolated and singled out and attacked. That’s what happens in authoritarian [politics]—it seeps in. It’s a reign of fear. People become afraid and they start to comply, and that’s what they count on.

Do you ever go into a project thinking one thing and then having your viewpoint changed?

All the time. [In the] short film I did, which was nominated last year for an Oscar, Death By Numbers, we follow a young gun violence survivor from Parkland who has to go to the murder trial of her shooter and confront him, and she’s compelled to show up and testify. Because it was in Florida, it was a death penalty case. I would tell you that I went in being a person that is not for the death penalty. I wouldn’t tell you that I came out of that film feeling like I’m for the death penalty—I am not—but it definitely gives you a completely nuanced view about what does justice look like. It wasn’t a treatise on the death penalty, and he didn’t get the death penalty. But you can feel a lot of things at the same time. You can feel that maybe the verdict was complicated in that we both came out feeling that there were problems in why he was defended the way he was.

Or even in the film I did back with Independent Lens on immigration, which feels more relevant than ever, in a small Bible Belt town in Tennessee called Welcome to Shelbyville. It’s easy to be a liberal sitting in Manhattan and in theory have all these liberal feelings. I still have the same feelings about welcoming immigrants, certainly now in light of what’s happening. But when you go to a small town and you understand why they might be challenged with suddenly having a whole new contingent of people, it’s like, okay, I have some new understanding of what it might be like for them. It doesn’t mean that I would change my opinion about immigrants being welcomed into that community, but you understand that it’s complicated and there’s nuance in everything.

And the gun issue—I’ve sat in hot tubs in hotels where I’ve traveled with my films and been curious, “Why do you have an AR-15?” I ended up talking to a guy in Texas and learning stuff. Doesn’t mean that I think people should have assault weapons. Didn’t change my mind. I think there should be a ban on assault weapons. But I come out of it understanding where he’s coming from, and actually having hope that there can be conversations where you’re not like, “You’re an idiot.” It’s like, “Okay, I get where you’re coming from. I have other facts that I would love for you to hear.” It makes you think there is a place for civic dialogue. People talk about having been more present in our country in years back and the polarization—I think a lot of that is the media. I mean, I’ve been around naysayers of the mass shootings of Newtown, who believe that it was all made up and constructed. It’s because they don’t even understand what documentary is, that I actually was on the ground with those parents. They think everything is kind of an AI world where you can just fake everything and construct it. So it’s about exposure. I love being in the field for that reason alone. If you really want to understand what’s happening in America, go to a school board in the heartland, and you will get a better idea of what’s happening.

The films you make cover heavy subjects. Newtown, for example, is one I haven’t been able to bring myself to watch. The reviews of it alone made me cry. How do you take care of yourself to ensure that you don’t get burnt out from your work?

It’s interesting you asked. I just returned from Kenya, where I was at an impact storytelling retreat, and I was asked to give a talk on the greater body of my work. I’d never actually put them all together. And it was a real epiphany, because the listeners in the group were like, “Oh my God. How have you...?” And It’s true, I do have secondary trauma, and I’m not proud of the fact that I don’t think I’ve acknowledged or gotten enough professional input around that. I think as a community of independent filmmakers, we should have that support. We don’t have it. You take in a lot, and you end up wearing these hats that sometimes go into [being a] community therapist. The kinds of films I make are a lot about bearing witness. I like to think the trauma part of it is mitigated by knowing that there’s a healing that goes on for the subjects. That helps a lot, to feel like you’re living a life that’s so involved in meaning.

But it is hard, and I have to do better at the self-care part. I’m getting better as I go along. There was this term I learned when I made Newtown from some mental health professional. The term was existential trauma, when everybody’s experiencing trauma all at once, and that happened to me with Newtown. It’s like, who am I to say that I have trauma when you’re around these people who are just at the epicenter? I think we feel that looking at Minneapolis. “Who am I to say I feel traumatized getting up in the morning and learning about the war in Iran? Look at those people in Minneapolis.” There’s always this survivor’s guilt, if you will, of “I can’t be complaining. I’m privileged, I’m white.” Whatever it is. But I’m also a journalist, and it can come to my door in a different kind of way.

I think right now as a nation, it requires everyone understanding that unless you’re a white Christian nationalist, this will come to your door in any which way. I think, being that kind of citizen, where we realize that you can’t turn away from our fellow immigrants and you can’t turn away from our young trans people who are being exiled because they can’t get care, all those groups that are on the front lines of target. In terms of the self-care, it’s everybody right now realizing, how do you get up in the morning? I say to young friends that part of resistance right now is finding joy in each day—proactively working on it. That’s part of the self-care is knowing that if you can do it, and you’re fortunate enough to do it, you should, and not feel bad about it. You can’t spend 24/7 fighting the fires. I’m not always good at it, but I do think that’s a good prescription right now is finding your joy every day. Because part of what the evil other relies on is wearing people down so that they’re just so exhausted that they spin into a depression.

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What advice would you offer to filmmakers who want to work in the social justice documentary field?

We need young people doing it. It’s just so rewarding to feel like you’re part of history and fighting the good fight. The part about the distribution—I think we have to rely on younger people and their far better understanding of social media to start to think creatively about how to [have films seen]. We know there are ways to get messages to people. So I would say, if you have a real yearning to express yourself with social impact, don’t let the times we’re living in and all of this doom and gloom talk dissuade you. If there’s a will, there’s a way for this stuff to get out, and it might be beyond these borders.

To learn more about The Librarians, visit the film’s website.

To stream the film, click here.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

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I’ve been dragging my feet for two years on the whole social media video thing, for a few reasons. One, I’m not a huge fan of my face being plastered all over the internet. Or anywhere, for that matter. I think I’ve taken two selfies in my life. I’m just not someone who enjoys being on screen. Two, I prefer the written word. And three, editing a written piece comes easily to me. Editing video…not so much. (I went to film school as an undergrad, but that was back in the day when editing meant literally cutting and splicing film strips. And if you ever questioned how old I am, well, now you know. Old enough to have cut my finger editing actual 16mm film that was shot on a Bolex.)

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Anyway, I’ve avoided it for a long time, but have come to accept (begrudgingly) that kids these days like their videos. The algorithm favors chatty faces, and we live in a world where you must feed the algorithm if you wanna have your work seen.

I will admit I’m proud of myself for learning how to create a short clip, and more so, for putting myself out there. I’ve done four so far—two with Ani DiFranco, one with editor Michael P. Shawver, and one with casting director Jamie Ember.

You can find them on the Creative Reverberations YouTube channel or on my Instagram. When new clips are ready, that’s where they’ll live. Feel free to subscribe to the YouTube or follow me on IG to see the latest. I’m hoping they’ll drive more people to Creative Reverberations. We’ll see how that goes.

But one other bonus to all of this cutting: BONUS CONTENT!

Going forward, if there is additional material from an interview that doesn’t make it into the written piece, I’ll share the video with paid subscribers. Keep an eye out for emails—I’ll share the footage once it’s ready.

In the meantime, I hope you’ve enjoyed the recent round of interviews. I’m sad that none of my Oscar nom interview subjects—Michael Shawver, Ruth Carter, and Nicholas Kraus—won this past Sunday, but I’m sure they’ll be nominated again in the future. I also had an amazing chat with my icon, Ani DiFranco, and learned a ton about the casting process from Jamie Ember.

Later this week I’ll share my chat with documentary filmmaker Kim A. Snyder, whose latest work, The Librarians, has been generating quite a buzz.

Well, gotta get back to editing. Hope you’re good!

Til next time!

As a kid growing up in the heart of the entertainment industry with a screenwriter-producer father, Jamie Ember knew she wanted to be an actress. Her parents weren’t supportive of her being a child star, but they encouraged her to take acting classes and try out for school plays, and said that once she turned 16, she could audition for television. But while in high school, she began to realize that perhaps acting wasn’t her calling after all.

“I went to this high school in Los Angeles called Harvard Westlake, where a lot of actors go and everyone is incredibly talented,” Ember says. “And I realized very quickly that I was not as good as people like Ben Platt and Beanie Feldstein.”

Rather than give up her dream entirely, she pivoted, stage managing school plays while assisting the actors with their lines. “I turned 16, went on two auditions—one for Criminal Minds and one for the short-lived 10 Things I Hate About You TV show. I didn’t get either of them, and I realized, ‘Oh, I wanted to show up and be told I was special. I didn’t actually want to do the work. I didn’t want to prep the lines and learn about the character and develop something.’ I realized I didn’t love acting enough that the judgment was worth it and the rejection was worth it.”

Ember’s father saw how much she enjoyed working with actors and suggested she try out casting instead. He introduced her to a colleague whose wife, Terri Taylor, was, at the time, the head of casting at Paramount. Ember reached out to her, and between her junior and senior year of high school began working as Taylor’s intern. The experience set her on a path that has continued to this day. Before setting out on her own, she worked for a number of notable casting directors, including Carmen Cuba and Wittney Horton (Magic Mike), Alyssa Weisberg (Ginny & Georgia), and Joseph Middleton (The Recruit).

Today, Ember is moving up the ranks as a highly sought-after casting director, with three movies opening this weekend alone: the Colleen Hoover drama Reminders of Him, the Lauren Noll comedy Same Same But Different, and the Russell Goldman thriller Sender, starring Jamie Lee Curtis and Rhea Seehorn.

Over Zoom, she spoke with me about social media for actors, the pros and cons of today’s self-tape audition process, and her advice to those aspiring to work in casting.

Creative Reverberations is a reader-supported publication. Each interview takes many hours of work. To receive new posts and support my work, please subscribe.

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SANDRA EBEJER: When you take on a project, what are the first steps? Is it just a matter of going through the script to figure out what is needed? Do you have conversations with the director about their vision?

JAMIE EMBER: Someone reaches out to me or my agent and says, “We have this project. We saw that Jamie worked on something similar. We like what she does.” I always ask to read the script first, because I need to start to see people in these roles. Then I get on a call or meet with them in person, and I present ideas. “When I was reading it, here are the actors that I saw.” If that aligns with the kinds of people they’re looking for, then it’s probably the right match. If they say, “Actually, we wanted to go with this kind of person,” and that’s not what I saw, then it’s not [a match] because we all have to be on the same page and looking to make the same thing. You don’t want it to be a push and pull, where I’m insisting that people are right that I love and you don’t love them.

That’s mostly for indies. It doesn’t really matter as much for already financed, green-lit studio projects. I’ll take those no matter what because then I’m just a cog in a wheel. But on the independent projects that I do, I’m usually the first one in after a writer, director, producer. I can really help to shape what this project is going to become, so it’s important that we enjoy talking to each other and have the same vision for how to do it. So it’s a conversation, and then I make a deal and start to reach out to agents and managers and say, “I’m working on something. Here are the people I’ve started to think of that are at your agency. Who else do you have that’s similar?” We build a list, and I go through the list with my team, and we figure out if we want to offer it to somebody, or if we want to do auditions, or what the process will be.

Are there ever moments when a producer or director really want a specific actor in a role, but you don’t think it’s a right fit?

Always. I think that’s part of the reason why this is the first year that casting has an Oscar. Because at the end of the day, it’s not us making the decisions, it’s us helping someone else’s vision come to life. So, yes, that happens a lot. I remember Joseph Middleton telling me, “Jamie, sometimes you need to choose what fights are worth it, because you don’t want to fight so hard for everyone all the time. It loses meaning.” So yes, there’s often times where they want to go with someone I don’t want to go with. I always express what my reservations are, why I would choose somebody else, and at the end of the day, if they want to go with who they want, I work in a service job. It’s my job to help them make their vision come to life. So if that’s their vision, fine, but that’s why the first conversation is important, because hopefully the vision aligns enough that even if it’s not my first choice, they were in my top five.

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I know an actress who struggled with the fact that she was being pushed to do more social media. She was told she couldn’t get the same level of roles if she didn’t have more followers, even though she’d been a regular on a TV series. Does that type of thing factor into your decision making?

I don’t enjoy that part of it. I’m pro actors and pro good performances. I don’t care how you came about this. If you’re good and you’re interesting to watch, I want you in my movie. So I try and steer away from that when I can or point out other things that are just as important. Like, they may not have the followers, but they were on this show, or they are a musician, or here’s a fan base they could bring in otherwise. But, unfortunately, it is important to a lot of people.

It’s a balance, right? Because if someone is really big on social media, they also come with baggage. You know who they are. I think it’s part of the reason why we don’t have as many movie stars anymore, because we know too much about people. I think Timothée Chalamet is an incredible actor, but every time I watch him, it’s Timothée Chalamet doing something. I don’t get lost in that performance because I know so much about him. And so I like people that nobody knows because you can put whatever you need onto them for the performance.

So for me, it’s not important. For producers, it’s important because you need to guarantee that people are going to come see your movie and you’re going to make your money back. The hardest part about what we do is we’re all artists working in a business. And it sucks, because you realize, at the end of the day, the point is to make money, not to make art. Hopefully you can do both.

The Musical, one of your recent credits as casting director, premiered at Sundance earlier this year. Was there anything about that particular project that stands out?

I just cast the kids. The adults were packaged and put together by the producers before I came on. I’ve worked on a few things with kids—I worked on the first two seasons of Stranger Things; I did Ginny & Georgia—so I feel like I know tweens and teenagers as well as one can. It was really cool because the director of that movie, Giselle Bonilla, was a child actor, and she didn’t want actors that people knew. She didn’t want Disney kids. She didn’t want someone that had been on a show that people would recognize. So what was really special about that is we cast kids for who they were, not for who they could play.

The audition process was interesting. I would go through the submissions and the breakdowns and pick people whose faces I liked, but I didn’t watch any demos or anything. Then we asked them to tape an audition where they talked to us for a couple of minutes about a piece of art they had made recently, what they liked about it, what they would have done differently, so we could get a sense of who they were and what they liked. And we also asked them to do a little dance, because we needed to make sure people could dance. Then we brought 30 kids for a day of callbacks where we just played games and ran the scenes a couple times with different pairings, mostly just to see which groups came together. Because that’s what people do is find little groups and we wanted it to feel like a real group of friends. So we saw who started to congregate together throughout the day, who ate lunch together, what their vibes were, and then we were able to come up with an ensemble.

Interesting. So you’re part spy, part casting.

I also have a psychology degree, and I use it a lot. [Laughs]

I can see that. Casting has changed substantially in recent years. The days of actors driving all over Hollywood from audition to audition are over. Now a lot of auditions are self-taped. How do you feel about how things are done now?

I think there are upsides and downsides to both. I feel incredibly lucky that I started when I did, and I did get traditional casting. I was in the office from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. We would have days full of auditions. For that, it was really hard for actors to also have a day job if they needed it, because you had to be free to be driving across the city. Now you don’t. You don’t even have to be here if you don’t want to be here or if you can’t afford to be here. You can be at home if you need to live with your parents or if you need to live in a cheaper city. The upside for me is I get to see a lot more actors. In person, you can see 20 people a day. Now, I can watch as many tapes as I want to watch in a day.

But it’s also hard, because I don’t get to give immediate feedback. I don’t get to adjust people and see how they take notes. If you’re a new actor to me, I don’t know if it took you 700 takes to get there and this great tape was just a fluke. I generally don’t like to cast directly off of self-tapes unless it’s a very small role. I usually do self-tapes first to narrow it down, and then either just me or me and the director will do a callback session with five to 10 people, because then you can at least get a vibe. You can work with them a little bit. You can see what they can do. And then we cast off of that.

You have a long list of upcoming productions—the Colleen Hoover adaptation Reminders of Him, Sender with Jamie Lee Curtis, Guiding Stars with Andie MacDowell, a short film called Last Laugh. How do you balance all of the many projects, from feature length thrillers to comedies to short films?

I take a lot of notes, and then one or two projects will solidify into something that is becoming real very quickly, and those get my full attention until they’re finished. A lot of what I do is putting together indies for financing and that has no real schedule. It just happens as it happens, people read it when they can read it, that kind of thing. So I just have a lot of notes. I have a notebook always next to me where I write down where I am with all of my projects, which ones need my attention this week, which ones are going forward right now, and which ones can be put on the back burner for a second and then be revisited when I’m freer.

When casting a project, do you turn to other works of art for inspiration?

I usually go back through all of my old auditions and my old lists and my old projects when I’m starting a project. I like to think I get hired because of what I do, which is generally smaller interpersonal dramas and comedies with one or two leads, but it’s an ensemble. So I can look back at other projects I’ve done and pull from the same kinds of vibes. Usually, my inspiration is when I read something, I start to think of actors, and then I go back through old projects and say, “I really liked this person.” Or, for instance, to go back to what we talked about a few minutes ago, “This is who I wanted to hire for that project that we didn’t get to hire. Maybe they’re right for this.” That’s more what I do. Because otherwise, watching things is not relaxing for me, it’s work, and I need some way to turn my brain off at the end of the day.

Have you ever had a moment where you cast someone and then later realized it wasn’t the right choice?

I think everyone has. But what I tell myself when that happens is there was something that made it feel like the right choice at the time, so remember that. What was it that was right? And then just grow from that and think, “If that keeps happening, what is it that I’m bumping against that I can deal with when I first start reading a role, so that this doesn’t happen again?” I’m in a very lucky position where I don’t have to take every job that I get offered. I really only take things that I believe in, that I can see a path forward with, that I can see actors in, that I think actors would enjoy being in.

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Are there any casting directors you look to as an example of the career you’d like to have?

Carmen Cuba’s who I want to be. I met her when I was 16. I interned with her. She shaped who I am from a very fundamental level. She is, for me, God. I love her approach—a balance between finding new actors in interesting ways and putting established actors into roles you wouldn’t have expected. The way she approaches gathering an ensemble is what I want to do. I would probably murder someone to work for Francine Maisler. I think she’s incredible. But I’ve been really lucky to actually work with a lot of the people who I admire. I started with Carmen and Terri [Taylor]. Taylor cast my favorite movie of all time, Catch Me If You Can, and she was first casting person I ever worked for. Joseph Middleton cast all of the teen movies I grew up watching. So I want to be all of my mentors. I’ve been lucky enough to work for people whose careers I want to follow.

As you know, the world of production is topsy-turvy at the moment. What advice would you have for people who want to enter into the industry and follow in your footsteps?

That’s so hard because you can’t go to school for casting. I got really lucky that when I started, you could still do unpaid internships. You didn’t need to get paid and you didn’t need college credit. Now you do. So if you’re out of college or if you didn’t go to college, what are you supposed to do? How are you supposed to get an internship? I get asked that a lot and actually don’t know how you would enter casting now, aside from just do it. There are so many short films, local theater productions, things that need to be cast. Just find those people and figure it out as you do it.

There is no clear path forward, which as a very anxious person, I don’t like. I like to know exactly what steps I need to take, and there isn’t that. When I was an assistant at Carmen’s office, I did a lot of USC and UCLA and AFI short films. That was 10 years ago. Now, we are all adults making real things and hopefully they remember that I did their short film for free 10 years ago, and they bring me along. So it’s really just finding the people that you want to collaborate with and then learning together.

To learn more about Jamie Ember, find her on IMDb.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

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For the first two decades of her career, singer-songwriter Ani DiFranco was exhaustingly prolific. Amid a relentless touring schedule that had her performing upwards of 120 shows a year, the DIY icon released two dozen albums between 1990 and 2008, all of them on Righteous Babe Records, a label she’d launched when she was just 19. Back in those early years, it was not uncommon for her live setlists to include a new song or two she’d just written that day.

Now 55, DiFranco has slowed her output, choosing to focus on longer-term projects rather than adhere to the ambitious performance and album release cycle of earlier years. She still tours and releases the occasional solo album, but at a much slower (at least, for her) pace. It’s been two years since her most recent studio album, Unprecedented Sh!t, and she’s said in recent interviews that it may be her last for a while.

And though it may seem to the casual fan that DiFranco is doing less these days, she’s actually busier than ever. At the moment, she’s putting her energies into creating for film and the stage, contributing the music for an upcoming documentary based on the popular Telepathy Tapes podcast series, while simultaneously writing a stage musical—or as she refers to it, playsicle—of her own. The challenge of creating work in an entirely new format is, she says, precisely what brings her the most joy these days.

“I still have all the same growing and amazement and changes happening and evolution in my thinking and my spiritual growth,” DiFranco says. “But sharing it all? That’s where the motivation has dwindled for me. When I was younger, I was so excited to rush out there and grab any microphone I could find and share everything that I just learned or that I just imagined is possible. Now I’m not as compelled to share it in that way, to rush out there and let everybody know on a microphone what I’m thinking. It’s more that I’d like to put it into the art and offer what I can in the way that I have practiced my whole life but keep myself, personally, more to myself.”

This new approach to her work is one of the many topics DiFranco explores in The Spirit of Ani, a recently released book coauthored with cultural anthropologist Lauren Coyle Rosen. Written as a series of conversations between the two women, the book delves into DiFranco’s creative process and explores her thoughts on feminism, spirituality, and consciousness.

Over Zoom, DiFranco and I had a wide-ranging conversation about her newfound love for collaboration, her current influences, and her desire to be behind the scenes.

This content contains affiliate links. I am an affiliate of Bookshop.org and I will earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase.

SANDRA EBEJER: The Spirit of Ani is a fascinating deep dive into your songwriting and creative process, which can be difficult to define or explain. How was it for you to engage in these conversations with Lauren?

ANI DIFRANCO: It was easy. The conversation between us just flowed. Lauren is a very thoughtful person, an academic and a scholar, but also a very witchy, spiritually questing, and aware person, and so I didn’t feel like there was anything I could say that she would look at me sideways. I didn’t feel like I had to build a big, long bridge to explain my world to her. So yeah, the conversations just flowed.

That’s great! For a long time, you were the sole person controlling your work. Which is not to say that you didn’t collaborate with others, but you wrote all your own songs and produced your own records. In recent years, you seem to be handing over the reins a bit more. BJ Burton produced your most recent album, Dana Flor released a documentary about you last year, and Lauren has written this book. Was there a conscious shift at any point where you began to feel more comfortable letting others have more control?

Yeah, I think so. I’ve been saying for a few years now, I’ve entered the age of collaboration. It’s like a new world for me. Which is and isn’t true because, of course, all along I’ve collaborated. I haven’t really done anything on my own in that sort of way that the mythology might have one believe. But yeah, really handing over the microphone to allow other people to step in and describe my world, like the way Dana did in the movie. That’s her movie and her perspective on me in that moment, or me in general. And that’s a tough thing, you know. It’s a tough thing for any of us, I guess, to not have control over how we’re seen or portrayed or defined. This is not an experience alone to me. I guess it escalates when you’re a public person, but we’re all at the mercy of other people’s perceptions of us. That’s something people are exploring a lot these days. But yeah, it feels like a different way of being vulnerable in the world. It’s definitely something I’m exploring. The Spirit of Ani book was Lauren’s idea, and she got in touch. And just saying yes to somebody else’s project and getting involved but not being at the helm necessarily—that was truly a collaboration that started as conversations and then we edited it together, but her voice is in there, as well as mine. So, yeah, that’s just something I’ve been doing more lately.

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I just turned 50 a few months ago, and I feel a big shift in how I think about everything—my work, especially. It’s like everything that happened the first 50 years has prepared me for whatever is happening now, and this next chapter is going to be totally different. Does that resonate with you? Did you feel that as well?

Totally. Deeply. I’m like, quaking. [Laughs] Fifty, there’s a line. There was a line for me, too. And whatever happened before 50 may or may not be relevant.

Yeah, it’s almost like a rebirth of sorts. Going back to Dana’s documentary, one of the things the film touched upon was the economic realities of being an artist. It’s something I don’t think is talked about enough. Just because you’re known to the public doesn’t mean you’re set financially. You’ve often talked about following your spleen when it comes to your art. As an independent musician, how do you walk that line of following your spleen and putting out work that moves you while also ensuring that you’re able to pay the bills?

That’s always one of the factors in all the myriad decisions that go into my daily life. But the cool thing, from my perspective, is that those sort of decisions we factor in subliminally. You know where your bumpers are, and you steer accordingly. Like, why am I not hell bent on having a horn section in my band and a lighting designer that can help the lights move with the music? Because I can’t afford it. So I think about other things, and I enjoy the band that I have and the help that I have on the road. And all of those fractal parameters, my creativity just naturally attempts to operate within them. I have a sense of what I can afford at any given moment, and so I allow my dreams to bloom within that awareness and don’t get hung up on all the other possibilities.

You say in The Spirit of Ani that the songs come less frequently now. I interviewed Dar Williams last year, and she said that as she gets older, songwriting becomes more difficult. She said she’s more interested in being, which is living, rather than doing, which is ambition. Does that ring true for you, as well? Are you more interested in marinating in longer-term projects?

Yeah, for sure. I mean, songwriting getting harder—I can so relate to Dar’s perspective on that. It’s crazy that something you practice your whole life doesn’t get easier in that general sense. I think it’s just a fact of age. We sort of move away from the town, the sidling up to the bar and saying all the things on your mind, and we go out to the woods and keep our thoughts to ourselves. That’s a super generalization, but that feels like me in this new era. I have to remember to go and engage.

Yeah. It’s a nice change from the social media noise where everybody wants to give their opinion all the time. It’s nice to step away from that.

Yeah, right. Totally! That escalation of noise and chatter. Social media—I was always resistant from the beginning of its inception, but definitely having all of us collectively be pushed further into constant chatter makes me recoil, probably more so.

It always feels like I’m walking into a huge stadium full of people screaming at the same time. It feels very tense.

Totally. Yeah, and as I get older, getting quiet seems like a prerequisite to a lot of things. And so yes, with this environment, this din that we’ve created around us and our attention and our ability to be present, I think it can be really toxic.

And exhausting, for sure. In the book, you say that making music is a form of meditation. I’m curious about other forms of art. You’re a painter, you’re a poet, you’re working on your own musical. How do these forms of creativity compare to songwriting? Are they just as meditative?

Yeah, but maybe less outward because, of course, the moment you write a song, what good is a song unless you go play it for somebody? Music is such a social art form by its nature. Painting, for me, anyway, because I’m not a professional visual artist, [is] just a process and a product that I keep to myself. It’s just an activity for my own discovery or creativity. And yeah, the playsicle... Theoretically I’m not going to be on stage if this play ever does—I should not say that—when this play is on a stage, it won’t be me up there. That just feels better to me now to be more behind the scenes.

Does it change the process much when it’s deadline driven? For example, if you’re working on something like the Telepathy Tapes documentary where there’s a deadline, is the creative process different than when you’re writing your own solo music?

It’s totally different, both with the playsicle and certainly the documentary. Maybe I should just start with the documentary. I’m so not in control. I’m so at the mercy of the people whose film it is, and that’s been really tricky. Like, “Oh, right, I remember why I didn’t collaborate [laughs] in a deep way all along,” because then you’re just at the mercy of other people. You’re waiting on them, you’re deferring to them, you’re trying to find that place where your visions meet. And there’s often a dynamic tension, which can be great energy to fuel art, but it’s also so much harder emotionally and psychologically. I mean, one of the things I’ve always said is I did it all on my own, quote-unquote, and there’s a lot of mistakes, but they’re all mine. That’s emotionally easier, just having only myself to wait on, to count on, to blame, to thank, to try to get right with. So, yeah, it’s been super humbling at this age to be involved with other people and their input and their needs and their schedules, but I think I feel ready for it.

Does it feel like starting over, in a sense? I mean, you know how to write a song. You’ve written thousands of songs by this point. In this new era that we’re in, in our fifties, do you think, “I have no idea how to write a score for a documentary”? Is it like you’re beginning again?

It all is totally beginning again. The documentary project, which is really on deadline right now—is like, “Oh, right. Make music without a focal point. Everything that you do instinctually as a musician, turn that off. This is totally different. The focal point is the person talking. You want the music not to draw attention to itself at all, ever.” It’s instrumental, of course, no lyrics, so all of the parameters have changed. And it’s been a learning process for me, for sure. And even sonically darken everything more than you would in a mix of just something to listen to, so that only the vocal has the high end, so there’s no other distracting frequencies. Everything changes. So that’s been really interesting to explore.

And yeah, the musical... I just have no idea. I feel like I have no idea about anything to do with this. I’m going to do a workshop in a few weeks and get a bunch of people in the room, and we’re going to try to build and run act one of this thing I’m writing, at which point I will discover the most basic stuff, like how long is this act one? What’s the percentage of these acted scenes versus the music? What’s the flow? I have no idea as I’m writing this what any of this really looks like or feels like.

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How is it for you, emotionally, to go into that room like that? It’s already vulnerable enough to present your art, but you’re aware you don’t completely know what you’re doing.

Super scary. Because these people that are going to get in this room, they work in the theater space, and they probably know a lot more than I do about a lot of things. And so my imposter syndrome is already raging before I even get in the room. I feel super vulnerable. And of course, the documentary, which has pushed past every deadline, is now fiercely demanding my attention right as I’m trying to prepare for this workshop that, again, not only takes a lot of effort to gather together for five days with a dozen people in New York, it’s very expensive. So that puts the pressure on.

I feel I’m having the experience of having birthed a couple of kids. I’m in one of those moments as an artist where you’re nine months pregnant, it’s your first kid, you don’t know if you’re going to die, or they’re going to die, or what’s going to happen, but it’s going to happen. And all you can do is just project yourself a month and a day forward and be like, this baby’s coming out! Chances are we’ll all survive. So you just gotta have faith and give over to the fear and the pain and the mystery of the process.

You say in The Spirit of Ani that when you write a song, it’s because you’re trying to get something out of your body. You’re trying to address something in your life or work through a problem. What is driving the newer projects you’re working on? What do you get out of them personally?

Within myself, there is that same ingredient. It’s not so much exorcizing the demons or the pain within me, per se, but I still do feel super urgent about, “I have to let everyone know this thing that I just found out!” I still feel compelled to share and to give, to pay forward what I’ve been given. Like we talk about in this book, I’m understanding more and more the creative process. I grew up within the model of, artists are these inspired people who create things. But now I understand it as being a collaboration with spirit, if not sort of a download. That art, when it’s really working, you, the artist, is in touch with something that is unseen and unheard by our ears. Messages come through artists. I’ve always felt that way. I love the term gifted, the word used to describe a very creative person, because that’s how I experience it now. How I understand it is I’m a person who’s given gifts from spirit, and they’ve been so valuable and life changing to me, I just want to share them. So, yeah, the playsicle and also throwing all of my weight behind this documentary that is not mine, that is somebody else’s work, but that I feel as strongly about as my own. It is my own work in my heart. That’s the same thing as feeling really urgently that I want to connect and give away everything I have to anyone who needs it. I know there’s somebody who will love this as much as me.

In that same vein of receiving gifts, one of the things you touch upon in the book is that we’re all interconnected and we aren’t the labels that are applied to us. You joke in the book that “Ani DiFranco is an illusion.” You’ve written about this in the past, with songs like “The Thing at Hand” and “The Knowing,” among others. Has viewing the world through that lens helped you to navigate these fraught times we’re living in? Do you find that it’s easier to deal with someone’s opposing political opinions when you don’t see them as a specific thing but as just consciousness?

I think so. It really does help me to more and more deeply understand that, actually, we are all on the same team. We all came here with the same purpose—to evolve the mind of God—because we are God and the mind of God is awake and alive and thoroughly conscious in everything, all the time. And it’s hard to accept that God needs to learn the hard way, too. That us coming down here and really fucking up and causing harm and hurting, that’s part of the learning process. And I do believe, as Martin Luther King so beautifully put once, that the arc of the moral universe bends towards goodness. That all of these missions that we’re on, the point is to move the needle towards unconditional love, the God love that we’re actually made of. And even these exercises in explorations of darkness are all about informing the whole and moving the needle towards love. And yeah, it does help me to deal with the outrage and the anger and the sadness of bearing witness to so much harm and so much unnecessary suffering and trouble in this world. It really does help me to know that we are all on the same team.

I always ask people about their influences or who they turn to for inspiration. As you work on your various projects, are you turning to other artists or pieces of art?

Well, I guess the truest answer would be, who I’m turning to these days is not other artists, per se, but people who have a connection across the veil, people who are in real clear connection with spirit. I think there’s such a spectrum of experiences to be had while we’re embodied, and one of them is to be really connected across the veil. I have glimmerings where I know what my partner just thought in their head, or I have intuition about my child, or my pet is in pain or I get an idea for a song or a lyric—these things, I think, are all connections across the veil. My teachers and the people that I’m studying and reading and listening to these days are non-speaking autistic folks who have learned to spell, and do facilitated communication and are offering their experience. Which is, on a really large scale, much more metaphysically advanced than us neurotypical or typically embodied humans.

There’s also NDE survivors, near death experience survivors. Like potato chips, I listen to interviews at night, one after the other, of people who have died. It’s funny to me that the term is “near death” experience, because you actually do die and leave the body. It might be for just a minute or 10 minutes, it might be for 30 or 40 minutes. People’s bodies shut down and die, and there’s no heartbeat for extended periods of time, and then the spirit reenters and the body revivifies. It’s incredible what can happen and the knowledge that this person brings back with them when they reintegrate with source, when they tap into the akashic record of every experience and every thought that consciousness has ever had. So, yeah, this humbling journey of this new life that I’ve started in midlife is really all about the teachers out here I didn’t even see before, and they come in the form of trees and plants and animals and water and people who can’t speak.

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In keeping with the spirit of the book, what advice do you have for those who feel as though they have something to say creatively but are afraid to put it out there?

My advice would be refocus on yourself. As long as you’re thinking, “What will people say? What will people think? What will they make of this?” the fear is always going to pound you down and hold you back. To make the audience an afterthought is very helpful for me, that really what you’re expressing and you’re sharing, you’re doing it for yourself. So find that reason within yourself, and whether it’s thrilling or unburdening or challenging—whatever it is that drives you within yourself to make that thing or share that thing—do it for that reason. Try to keep it out of the room long enough for you to play the song or dance the dance or share your poem. You could deal with that next phase later.

To learn more about Ani DiFranco, visit her website.

To purchase The Spirit of Ani, click here.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

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It’s been a minute since I’ve sent out a recap of who and what inspires the artists I’ve interviewed. Here’s a peek back at the folks I spoke to in January and February, and a reminder of the books, movies, songs, and other works of art that inspired their creativity. Two playlists are included, along with links of fun things to check out.

Perhaps you’ll be inspired by these works of art, too.

To refresh your memory, the artists I interviewed during this time period were singer-songwriter Courtney Hartman, editor Michael P. Shawver, composers Joy Ngiaw and Jeff Toyne, costume designer Ruth E. Carter, illustrator Christopher Eliopoulos, and authors Brad Meltzer, Elizabeth McCracken, and Paul Rees.

Without further ado, let’s jump in!

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First up is the January Mixtape. Most of the songs are tied back to the interviews, and some I included because they’ve been inspiring me lately. Here’s a quick overview of the playlist:

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Over the course of his decades-long career, journalist Paul Rees has served as the editor-in-chief of the U.K. music magazines Kerrang! and Q, has written for countless music publications, and has interviewed some of the biggest names (and egos) in the entertainment industry, much of which he dishes on in his entertaining Substack, Access All Areas. In recent years, he’s turned to writing books, penning biographies on Elliott Smith, John Mellencamp, Robert Palmer, and The Who’s John Entwistle, while co-writing memoirs with Toto’s Steve Lukather, Foreigner’s Mick Jones, and UFO’s Pete Way.

In his latest, Raised on Radio, Rees provides a thoroughly researched and fascinating oral history of AOR, or “album-oriented rock,” a genre that you might not know by name, but would certainly know if you heard it. Dominating the FM airwaves from the mid-1970s through the mid-80s, AOR was radio-friendly rock at its finest. And in Raised on Radio, Rees talks to many of its k…

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Social media is rarely associated with positivity and friendship, so it’s surprising that a hugely popular children’s book series that promotes kindness, compassion, and empathy might not exist if it weren’t for, of all places, Twitter.

It started when New York Times bestselling author Brad Meltzer and comic book illustrator Christopher Eliopoulos connected on the site. “[Brad] had started his show on the History Channel,” Eliopoulos says. “We were following each other on Twitter, and he started doing a viewing—you know, nights where they would view the show, and he’d tweet out what was happening. I would respond. I was a history buff from day one. I just love history. At one point [Brad and I] were going back and forth, and then he started sending me direct messages, as opposed to out in public.”

The two developed a friendship and soon began working together on a series of picture books called Ordinary People Change the World. Each release in the…

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Over the past 25 years, Jeff Toyne has amassed an impressive list of credits in film, television, documentaries, and animation. As a composer, a few of his many projects include the police drama Rogue (starring Thandiwe Newton), the sitcom Hit the Road (starring Jason Alexander), and the coming-of-age film Dirty Girl (starring Juno Temple). He’s been the orchestrator on more than 100 Hollywood releases, including The Super Mario Bros. Movie and Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio, and did string arrangements for Fall Out Boy’s 2023 album So Much (for) Stardust.

And in 2024, he finally received long overdue recognition for his work, when he won an Emmy Award for Outstanding Main Title Theme Music for the Apple TV+ series Palm Royale. But the award was just a bonus on top of what he says has been an incredibly fulfilling career.

“It’s funny—I was asked to go back and talk to the students at USC,” Toyne says. “I’m an alumnus of the scoring for motion pictures and tel…

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In the 1980s, Ruth E. Carter was working toward a career in theatrical costume design when a friend introduced her to an up-and-coming filmmaker by the name of Spike Lee. The two hit it off, and Lee convinced Carter to design the costumes for his second feature, School Daze. Fast forward 38 years, and Carter is now one of the most sought-after costume designers working today. With more than 70 credits to her name, she has contributed her talents to a mind-blowing array of projects, including Do the Right Thing, Malcom X, Amistad, Selma, and How Stella Got Her Groove Back. An exhibit of her work, “Afrofuturism in Costume Design,” is currently on display at the African American Museum in Philadelphia, and a collection of her stories and sketches was published as a gorgeous coffee table book, The Art of Ruth E. Carter, in 2023.

Most notably, she is a trailblazer. In addition to being the first Black costume designer to receive a star on the Hollyw…

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Malaysian-born composer Joy Ngiaw graduated from Boston’s Berklee College of Music just a decade ago, yet she’s already amassed an impressive list of professional credits. A 2024 BAFTA Breakthrough honoree, Ngiaw has provided the scores for Skydance Animation’s short film Blush, the Netflix series Glamorous, and the horror short The Pigs Underneath, produced by Jordan Peele’s Monkeypaw Productions. A current Emmy nominee for her work on Apple TV’s animated series WondLa, she’s become known for her inventive compositions. (IndieWire referred to her work on WondLa as “magnificent” in its 2025 list of “Best TV Scores of the Year.”)

On February 6th, her work can be heard in theaters, when Solo Mio—a romantic comedy starring Kevin James, Alyson Hannigan, and Jonathan Roumie—premieres on the big screen. Creating the score for the film, Ngiaw says, was a nice return to her roots.

“Solo Mio’s great,” she says. “It’s such a sweet film. It’s about a guy who got sto…

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Hi friend.

I have no idea what that subject line means. It just popped into my head. This year—what with the country being a heaping dumpster fire—I’ve just been going with the flow. Email subject line doesn’t make sense? Who cares? Nothing makes sense these days.

(Apologies, BTW, to Alan Sillitoe for butchering your story title.)

Anyway, hi! I hope you’re doing as well as can be given, you know, everything. I hope you’re healthy and safe and are taking time away from social media and maybe even making something. Personally, I’ve been doing a LOT of painting. I actually sold one! On a whim, I submitted one of my paintings to a members exhibit at a local gallery and it’s up now, hanging on their walls!

When I shared this piece of news in a Facebook writing group I’m in, one of my fellow writers reached out and ask…

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When Michael P. Shawver was a student at USC, he met a fellow student whose films were unlike anything being made at the college level. “Most student films are about death or breakups, because that’s the only conflict that people know at that point in their lives,” Shawver says. “But Ryan was making stuff about society, class, family—situations that were very unique and very specific. I recognized that this person is better than me at what I want to do. I wanted to help him, so I went up to him and said, ‘I don’t know how, but I’d love to work with you.’ Everything in my gut just said, ‘Work with this guy. It’s going to be a great situation.’”

The Ryan he’s speaking of is Ryan Coogler, who hired Shawver to work on his student film Fig. “It was actually a production design job that I did,” Shawver says. “I saw him at 10 o’clock one night after class, and he said, ‘You know how to production design, right?’ And I was like, ‘Yeah. Totally.’ [Laughs]…

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