“I really do go for the big big, big, big, big idea. I’m like really like hungry for something that will just change the way people think, really challenge people.”—Roxanne Khamsi, author of Beyond Inheritance

Preview: Emerging Form Episode 167 with Roxanne Khamsi

“Writing a book is just as much about thinking as it is about writing,” says science writer Roxanne Khamsi. In this episode, out this Thursday, we talk about how she made the leap from writing articles to writing a book—and why they are so different. We talk about creating an arc for a book of essays, what to do when the structure for your book isn’t working, letting go of a project once its over, meeting our self critic, the role of obsession in writing a book, the art of going for “the big idea” and how to carry that in a nonfiction book, how writing reflects the author’s personality.

Roxanne Khamsi is the author of Beyond Inheritance: Our Ever-Mutating Cells and a New Understanding of Health and a contributing writer at The Atlantic. Her articles on genetics have appeared in a wide range of publications, including The New York Times, Scientific American, Nature magazine and Wired. Roxanne served as chief news editor for the international research journal Nature Medicine for more than a decade. She is based in Montreal.

What We’re Reading and Listening to:

Rosemerry:

• What is the difference between seeing and paying attention? In these days of the quick scroll and the limited attention span, how is technology shaping the ways we connect with the world? In this article from The Atlantic from 2019, Franklin Foer talks about Mary Oliver’s assertion that “Attention is the beginning of devotion.” How do we offer ourselves to the world? And why does it matter that we do? How is our attentiveness the doorway to falling in love with the world?

• Want to fall in love with humans? My friend Bruce sent me this video. My French isn’t good enough to understand all the lyrics, but the faces and the tune convey it all.

• I don’t always know what prayer is … perhaps that is why I love this song by Spencer LaJoye so much.

Christie:

• I found Susan Sontag’s book, Regarding the Pain of Others, on my friend Taylor’s summer reading list (which he asked me to contribute to) and immediately I reserved it at my library. The book is an exploration of the depiction of war through photographs and how photography can shape our ideas and empathy.

• I was a little bit unsettled to learn that the plague of mice depicted in Stone Yard Devotional by Charlotte Wood was not embellished, but is, in fact, happening now in Australia. Wood’s novel is a quiet, introspective story about a woman who leaves behind her husband and her work doing species conservation to go live at a covenant. She is not particularly religious and does not become more so, but she does take refuge in the daily rituals of life among the nuns. Three events upend the rhythmic sameness of the days with the nuns — a plague of mice take over the compound; the skeletal remains of Sister Jenny, a nun from the monastery who was murdered in Thailand, are returned to the sisters for burial; and Jenny’s bones are brought to the covenant by an old schoolmate of the protagonist who has now become an internet famous environmental activist. This visitor forces the narrator to reckon with her past and her present. The novel mostly focuses on how to live in the world and how to keep going when there’s so much happening to induce despair.

• There’s a new film coming out this year based on the novel DOG STARS, by our Episode 19 guest and friend of the show, Peter Heller. Watch the trailer here.

How Things Change

Most of the time, an aspen stand regenerates itself through cloning from its extensive underground connected root structure. But, sometimes, given very specific conditions, they can introduce genetic diversity through seed germination.

from Traveling Nature Journal, October 4, 2020

In the spirit of diversity
the aspen catkins
appear on the passes,
gathering low light
into acres of radiance
as they dangle
from bare limbs
in long clusters of gray fuzz
and all I want
for the rest of my life
is to be worthy of living
in a world with such
potent softness, such promise.

—Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

Give a gift subscription

A Note About Paid Subscriptions:

First, we want to thank ALL our subscribers! We are so grateful you join us in this conversation about what it is to engage with yourself, the world and others in a creative way. And a BIG thank you to our paid subscribers. You make this podcast possible. Only our paid subscribers receive our bonus episodes as a thank you for their financial support. This week, we talk with Roxanne about organization as a superpower for creativity, the importance of a good outline, an equation for how to structure the sections of an essay based on the total words the essay should be, how to not over-report for articles, the “party hostess” approach to finding sources, what does it take for a book to be a success, and a recipe for Roxanne’s special morning drink.

Two Questions:

(share your answers with us here on Substack or in our FB group)

1. How do you meet your self critical voice after a project is over?

2. What food or drink helps your creative practice?

“People think constraints will hold you back,” says poet Kelli Russell Agodon, “but they actually can feed your creativity because now your mind has a problem to solve.” This week, we talk with Kelli about the art of constraint, plus we converse about about the surprise gift at the end of Kelli’s book and how her editor helped her see what she hadn’t kn…

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“I use play as kind of a backdoor to talk about tougher subjects,” says poet Kelli Russell Agodon, “but also as a front door for the reader to be able to listen.” Her most recent book, Accidental Devotions, blends humor, vulnerability, aging, the chaos of relationships, and the art of humaning. In this episode, of Emerging form we talk with Kelli about

• Writing in service to “The Quiet Rebels”

• Finding the form for a poem or book at the end of the project

• Where to put the most vulnerable content in a book

• Learning to trust the reader

• The importance of vulnerability

• Value of human connection through the arts

• The role of obsession in art

• Creating touchstones for the reader

• The role of play in poetry

• How do we know if what we write is successful?

Plus, Kelli reads “Alexa, Why Am I Falling Apart” and we converse about the role of human-made art in an increasingly technological world.

Kelli Russell Agodon’s most recent book is Accidental Devotions (Copper Canyon Press, 2026). She is the author of five poetry collections. Her work has received numerous honors, including the Dorothy Rosenberg Poetry Prize, a Poetry Society of America Prize, the Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Award in Poetry, and three Washington State Book Award finalist selections. She is the cofounder of Two Sylvias Press, teaches in Pacific Lutheran University’s Rainier Writing Workshop MFA program, and cohosts the poetry series Poems You Need with Melissa Studdard. She lives in a sleepy seaside town in Washington State.

Postcards from a Poet newsletter: https://kelliagodon.substack.com/subscribe

Kelli’s website

Kelli’s YouTube channel

“Right now we’re in a world where I don’t know if I’m watching a video that’s real or not. But I know humanness is real. And I need more of that in my life. And I think other people do too.”—Kelli Russell Agodon

Preview: Emerging Form Episode 166 with Kelli Russell Agodon

Her most recent book, Accidental Devotions, blends humor, vulnerability, aging, the chaos of relationships, and the art of humaning. In this week’s episode (out Thursday), we talk with Kelli about the importance of vulnerability in art and how she makes a “vulnerability sandwich” in a book, how finding the form is the last part of her creative process and why it’s important that it mirrors the content, the role of obsession in art, and why play is so important to creative process. We also ask Kelli to read one of her poems that touches on the tension between technology and our humanness … and what this means to artists.

Kelli Russell Agodon’s most recent book is Accidental Devotions (Copper Canyon Press, 2026). She is the author of five poetry collections. Her work has received numerous honors, including the Dorothy Rosenberg Poetry Prize, a Poetry Society of America Prize, the Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Award in Poetry, and three Washington State Book Award finalist selections. She is the cofounder of Two Sylvias Press, teaches in Pacific Lutheran University’s Rainier Writing Workshop MFA program, and cohosts the poetry series Poems You Need with Melissa Studdard. She lives in a sleepy seaside town in Washington State.

What We’re Reading and Listening to:

Rosemerry:

• One of my favorite poems of all time is Stanley Kunitz’s “The Layers.” I recently re-read it with a group of people and it opened such rich conversation about aging, loss, the many lives we live, letting go, and how to show up. It’s one of those poems in which almost every line is my favorite.

• At the Telluride Mountain Film festival, I had a chance to see a new film called “Your Attention, Please,” a film about reclaiming our humanity in the digital age, and just how much is at stake with our mental healthy. It’s still on the festival circuit, but it plans to release sometime this summer. One of my biggest takeaways was the difference between living our lives performatively in an attempt to impress others versus living for the moment, and just how empty we can feel when our sense of self is based on “likes.” It focuses also on cyber bullying and ways we might create a more healthy relationship with our own responses to others on social media. And the biggest take away of all—just how unregulated the social media realm is, and how dangerous.

Christie:

• I spent the holiday weekend in Crested Butte at the Mountain Words Festival catching up with lots of great writers and former Emerging Form guests, like Shelley Read. One of my favorite events was a conversation with Megan Kate-Nelson about her new book, Westerners: Mythmaking and Belonging on the American Frontier. Nelson writes about the history of the West through characters not often included in the Manifest Destiny-tinged frontier mythologies. Ryan Warner of Colorado Public Radio was the interviewer and the conversation will air on CPR sometime soon.

Because You Said I Put the Holy in Melancholy

In the cathedral of my body,
I lit a candle deep within the chamber

of my heart. When my lungs glowed
like paper lanterns, I worried they’d

illuminate the sorrow I’d buried. In melancholy
I find the words—my lone ache, heal only me.

I lit a votive on the altar of the ordinary,
dripped wax and hoped for meaning. We are

messy saints—drawn to light, yet fluent in dusk.
Come with me to the confessional where we can kiss

our scars and dip our burns in holy water.
I believed depression was a cape

of feathers, but when I tried to fly, I felt hummingbirds
ablaze in my rib cage, trying their best to sing.

And those wafers in my pocket? I stole
what I needed to nourish the night,

the nightingales of me—let me understand melancholy
is a hunger I can’t feed. Let me trust the birds will live.

—Kelli Russell Agodon, from Accidental Devotions (Copper Canyon Press, 2026)

Give a gift subscription

A Note About Paid Subscriptions:

First, we want to thank ALL our subscribers! We are so grateful you join us in this conversation about what it is to engage with yourself, the world and others in a creative way. And a BIG thank you to our paid subscribers. You make this podcast possible. Only our paid subscribers receive our bonus episodes as a thank you for their financial support. This week, we talk about the surprise gift at the end of Kelli’s book and how her editor helped her see what she hadn’t known was possible, how to write a title that really serves a poem, the art of constraint, plus we ask Kelli to read us a poem that unsettles her, and she shares a whole poem of writing prompts.

Two Questions:

(share your answers with us here on Substack or in our FB group)

1. What is something that drives you crazy about your genre/the other writers or artists in your genre?

2. What is the role of ambition in a creative practice?

“It was it was years of of thinking and talking about this before I got brave enough to consider that it might be a book,” says Ramona Ausubel, author of Unstuck:101 Doorways leading from the Blank Page to the Last Page. In this bonus episode, we talk about overcoming imposter syndrome, the importance of accountability in creative projects and how to fi…

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Everyone gets stuck. And in this interview with writer and teacher Ramona Ausubel, we talk about why this is normal and practical, usable ways to meet a page when we don’t think we can go on. Drawing from her newest book, Unstuck:101 Doorways leading from the Blank Page to the Last Page, Ramona shares with us why certain strategies work only at certain stages of creative projects. We talk about finding patterns, ways to develop characters and create scenes, different ways to approach different drafts, the half-draft approach, finding opposition and so much more.

Ramona Ausubel is the national bestselling author of Unstuck: 101 Doorways Leading From the Blank Page to the Last Page, The Last Animal, Awayland: stories, Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty, A Guide to Being Born and No One is Here Except All of Us. She is the recipient of the National Book Foundation Science + Literature Prize, the PEN/USA Fiction Award, the Cabell First Novelist Award and has been a finalist for both the California and Colorado Book Awards and the New York Public Library Young Lions Award. Her work has been published in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Paris Review daily, One Story, Tin House, The Oxford American, Ploughshares and elsewhere. She is a professor at Colorado State University and lives in Boulder, Colorado with her family.

We all need a helping hand. “I haven’t met a writer yet who feels like, oh yeah, I know exactly how to do this. And I am fully equipped, ready.”—Ramona Ausubel, author of Unstuck

Preview: Emerging Form Episode 165 with Ramona Ausubel

Whether you’re writing your first short story or your seventeenth novel, chances are at some point in your project, you’ll get stuck. What then? Our guest, Ramona Ausubel’s newest book, Unstuck: A Writer’s Guide, which contains 101 exercises to invigorate your creative practice and help you finish your writing project. “These are the things I really use,” Ramona says. “They are not hypothetical exercises.” Nor are they one-size-fits all … as Ramona notes, at different points in a project you need different strategies. This is basically the Big Hope episode in which you remember that everyone gets stuck and there are practical, usable ways of meeting a page to help you go on.

Ramona Ausubel is the national bestselling author of Unstuck: 101 Doorways Leading From the Blank Page to the Last Page, The Last Animal, Awayland: stories, Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty, A Guide to Being Born and No One is Here Except All of Us. She is the recipient of the National Book Foundation Science + Literature Prize, the PEN/USA Fiction Award, the Cabell First Novelist Award and has been a finalist for both the California and Colorado Book Awards and the New York Public Library Young Lions Award. Her work has been published in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Paris Review daily, One Story, Tin House, The Oxford American, Ploughshares and elsewhere. She is a professor at Colorado State University and lives in Boulder, Colorado with her family.

What We’re Reading and Listening to:

Rosemerry:

• I love Laura Grace Weldon’s poems—they tend toward the humble, the humorous, the human. These two, from earlier this week in ONE ART, both made me smile and feel so seen.

• “So many of us have been taught to rush past pain to get back to productivity, praise or pleasantness,” writes K. J. Ramsey in her new memoir The Place Between Our Pains. “In doing so, we sidestep the place where joy actually dwells.” It’s a brave, funny, brutal story of life-threatening illness, travel, being stuck in a hospital bed, and finding the hope that can only arise out of misery. I love the honesty of it—how so many of us are given lives we could not have said yes to—and here we see how we might not only survive but be found by joy in the midst of great pain—not in a glib way, but in a bone-deep, life-affirming way.

Christie:

• I fell in love with Claire Boyles’s forthcoming novel, Appraisals. The story follows four generations of a farming family in Northern Colorado who are perpetually pinched by economic and ecological forces beyond their control. There’s Maggie, who is struggling to keep her small organic farm afloat amidst a recession and an unpredictable climate; her grandmother, Flora, who taught her to love their connection to the land; Fish, her husband who makes difficult choices in his quest to keep the family financially solvent; and their teenage daughter Ozzie, who is becoming politically active on issues that threaten to divide the family. Boyles creates a layered, complex story about how outsiders with money can change a place, the conflicts wrought by difficult economic times, and the struggle to maintain one’s values while also keeping the farm. The characters are as real and nuanced as the story. I’m thrilled that Boyles will be speaking at our Second Annual Grand Mesa Writer’s Symposium this September.

• Automatic Noodle by Annalee Newitz is a delightful novella that has a sense of fun to it, even as it explore some deep themes (robot sentience, memory, political conflict, the horrors of online reviews, and more). The story follows a group of lovable robots who, after been granted certain rights (they are no longer mere property, but can’t vote), open up a noodle shop in San Francisco. It takes place in the not that distant future, when California has split off from the US and climate calamities continue to disrupt infrastructure and society. As they have done in previous works, Newitz explores ethical issues around sentient robots and what happens when things that we are used to thinking of as inanimate objects start to have intelligence and feelings. The story also offers a glimpse into the ways that supportive communities develop in times of hardship.

When Feeling Stuck

Sometimes I forget I’m surrounded
by whirl, forget the earth’s turning,
forget our galaxy’s spiraling nature.
But it helps me today to remember myself
as swirl, from the whorl in my fingerprints
to the curl in my hair to the twirl in my step
as I move through the rooms of a house
that somehow feels solid and stable. It helps
to think of the day as a twist,
an infinite trip on a mobius strip,
and suddenly stuck isn’t quite so stuck,
and whatever in me is wedged
isn’t quite so wedged, and I become more
like a starry night, ethereal, dreamlike,
as I start to recall the joy in the spinning,
the freedom in the churning,
and I open again to a magic that invites me to play
far beyond the frame.


—Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

Give a gift subscription

A Note About Paid Subscriptions:

First, we want to thank ALL our subscribers! We are so grateful you join us in this conversation about what it is to engage with yourself, the world and others in a creative way. And a BIG thank you to our paid subscribers. You make this podcast possible. Only our paid subscribers receive our bonus episodes as a thank you for their financial support. This week, we talk about trusting our ideas are “good enough” to deserve being put into a book, the importance of accountability in creative projects and how to find it, why a willingness to wade into the mess can be a creative superpower, and why parents might want to leave particular books lying around the house.

Two Questions:

(share your answers with us here on Substack or in our FB group)

1. What is a mantra that you have for your creative process?

2. Do you have any superstitions about your creative practice (a special place, a special cup, a special pen …)?

The ribbing and laughter continue in this bonus episode in which Christie and Rosemerry interview each other. They talk about mistakes in their creative lives that they’ve learned from (um, or not) (Christie REALLY roasts Rosemerry). They also talk about longing for approval, taking on too much, and how where we live has affected our creative practice. …

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A poet and a science writer walk into a podcast—and laugh, tease, joke, uplift, and ask each other tough questions about creative process. In this episode of Emerging Form, the hosts Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer and Christie Aschwanden ask each other some of the questions they like to ask their guests. It’s a raucous, fun episode in which they rib each other as only best friends can do, taking turns being in the hot seat to talk about ambition, how getting older has affected creative practice, sincerity, empathy, curiosity and, of course, wine.

Christie Aschwanden is the author of the New York Times bestseller, Good to Go, What the Athlete in All of Us Can Learn from the Strange Science of Recovery. She’s also host and producer of Uncertain, a podcast from Scientific American. She’s the former lead science writer at FiveThirtyEight and was previously a health columnist for The Washington Post. Her work has appeared in dozens of publications, including New York Times, Wired, Smithsonian, Slate, Popular Science, Discover, Science and Nature, and she’s received fellowships from the Santa Fe Institute, the Carter Center, and the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting. She lives on a small farm in western Colorado.

Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer is a poet, teacher, speaker, and writing facilitator. Her daily audio series, The Poetic Path, is on the Ritual app. Her poems have appeared on A Prairie Home Companion, PBS NewsHour, O Magazine, Washington Post Book Club, and Carnegie Hall Stage. Her recent collections are All the Honey and The Unfolding. In 2024, she became Poet Laureate for Evermore, helping others explore grief and love through poetry. Since 2006, she’s written a poem a day, sharing them on her blog, A Hundred Falling Veils. Her one-word mantra is adjust.

“The biggest change in my creative process is the willingness to let a poem not only reflect how messy life is, but let it stay messy, maybe even get messier.” —Rosemerry

“Yeah, I do want to have another bestseller. Yes, I do want people to read my stuff. I think it’s okay to admit that to ourselves and to the world and to want those things.”—Christie

Preview: Emerging Form Episode 164 with Rosemerry & Christie

What’s your creative super power? What creative ambitions do you still want to fulfill? How has your creative practice changed as you get older? What’s your most valuable tool for creative practice? These are the questions we often ask our guests, and in this episode, we ask them of each other … plus questions about the Emerging Form episodes that have stuck with us or changed our own practice, and a loaded “would you rather” question. It’s a raucous episode in which Christie and Rosemerry discover just how opposite and just how close they are … they call each other out, disagree, laugh, blush, tease and uplift each other.

Christie Aschwanden is the author of the New York Times bestseller, Good to Go, What the Athlete in All of Us Can Learn from the Strange Science of Recovery. She’s also host and producer of Uncertain, a podcast from Scientific American. She’s the former lead science writer at FiveThirtyEight and was previously a health columnist for The Washington Post. Her work has appeared in dozens of publications, including New York Times, Wired, Smithsonian, Slate, Popular Science, Discover, Science and Nature, and she’s received fellowships from the Santa Fe Institute, the Carter Center, and the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting. She lives on a small farm in western Colorado.

Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer is a poet, teacher, speaker, and writing facilitator. Her daily audio series, The Poetic Path, is on the Ritual app. Her poems have appeared on A Prairie Home Companion, PBS NewsHour, O Magazine, Washington Post Book Club, and Carnegie Hall Stage. Her recent collections are All the Honey and The Unfolding. In 2024, she became Poet Laureate for Evermore, helping others explore grief and love through poetry. Since 2006, she’s written a poem a day, sharing them on her blog, A Hundred Falling Veils. Her one-word mantra is adjust.

What We’re Reading and Listening to:

Rosemerry:

• Some books utterly exceed your expectations. That’s what happened when I read When the Ache Remains: Lessons on tending to the unfixable and finding beauty anyway. Because of the profound work Lisa Olivera has done to meet her own grief and depression, she offers gentle straight talk about how we, too, might tune into our own knowing—not to fix or to heal ourselves, but to turn toward our pain, integrate it, and live into the kind of ever-changing whole-hearted fullness in which our “wounds become wisdom-keepers.” It’s a nourishing book, a celebration of our individual and shared humanity.

• I can barely believe it took me so long to watch Come Meet Me in the Good Light, the Oscar-nominated documentary about Colorado’s immediate past poet laureate Andrea Gibson and the ways in which the wildly popular performance poet met her cancer diagnosis and eventual death with her partner, also a popular poet, Megan Falley by her side. It’s intimate, generous, funny, heart breaking, heart opening. Such skillful weaving of poetry, real life struggle, deep love and meeting our mortality. The kind of film that makes you want to hug everyone you love and live more openly into every moment.

Christie:

• I loved the Richard Powers’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel, The Overstory, about the lives of trees, and his latest novel, Playground, is a similar, yet different look at the ocean. The descriptions of the rich abundance of biological diversity in our oceans were mesmerizing. The story is also about friendship, how much people are willing to give up for their work, and most of all, AI. At its core, the book is a thought-provoking exploration of AI’s promises and dangers, and what we lose when we give ourselves over to this technology.

• Where to begin with Naomi Klein’s fantastic book, Doppelgänger: A Trip into the Mirror World? It grew out of Klein’s experience of being confused for Naomi Wolf, a writer who first made her name as a feminist and author of The Beauty Myth. Somewhere along the way, Wolf went off the rails. During the covid pandemic, and she became a conspiracy theorist and regular guest on Steve Bannon’s podcast. Poor Klein was being so regularly conflated with the other Naomi that someone created an internet mnemonic to disambiguate them: “If the Naomi be Klein you’re doing just fine / If the Naomi be Wolf, oh, buddy. Ooooof.” If the book were just about this doppelgänger problem it wouldn’t be all that interesting, but instead, Klein uses her doppelgänger experience as a springboard to explore what the hell happened to public discourse during the pandemic. It’s one of the best things I’ve read about the ways that information became polarized and mis- and disinformation spread during and beyond covid. Klein looks at what she dubs the “mirror world” —an alternate universe of conspiracy theories and false histories about everything from covid to the January 6 insurrection. She coins a term, “pipiking” (a reference to Philip Roth’s Operation Shylock) to describes a specific form of bad-faith communication that has become ubiquitous, where nuanced, serious issues are trivialized and transformed into a farcical mirror of themselves as a way of dismissing them. Throughout the book, her critiques are sharp and deeply researched. Highly recommend.

Christie Sends Me a Photo

Her head is pasted onto my body
wearing a very plain black dress.
My head’s pasted onto her body
wearing a flamboyant jumpsuit
with pixilated technicolor chaos,
a jumpsuit she’s tried to get me
to wear for months.
She knows wearing patterns
makes me queasy. And what
is it in us that loves to make
our beloveds squirm?
I’m an easy target.
She knows I will squeal and
splutter and rail, so when I call
in a righteous outrage
over how she’s dressed my likeness
in a blenderized rainbow,
she laughs and I laugh
and something is so right
with the world then—
this goofy, giddy moment
when the stakes are low
and I am uncomfortable and prickly
and feel so deeply seen,
so able to laugh at the lines I draw.
I fall inside the laughter,
feel it wrap around me
bright as that flashy jumpsuit.
And I, who crave what is solid,
I dissolve into that brightness.

—Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

Give a gift subscription

A Note About Paid Subscriptions:

First, we want to thank ALL our subscribers! We are so grateful you join us in this conversation about what it is to engage with yourself, the world and others in a creative way. And a BIG thank you to our paid subscribers. You make this podcast possible. Only our paid subscribers receive our bonus episodes as a thank you for their financial support. This week, Christie and Rosemerry continue our interview and touch on creative mistakes we’ve made that we’ve learned from (um, or not) (Christie REALLY roasts Rosemerry). We also talk about longing for approval, taking on too much, and how where we live has affected our creative practice. We also each name our three dream guests … let’s hope to hear them on Emerging Form soon!

Two Questions:

(share your answers with us here on Substack or in our FB group)

1. How does where you live affect your creative practice?

2. How has your creative practice changed as you get older?

Emerging Form is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Success comes with its own set of challenges. “Be ready for this blossoming, it is going to be a teacher,” says poet James Crews.“It is going to ask things of you that you don’t feel equipped for or equal to. Enjoy the ride of that.” In this bonus episode, we talk about finding self-compassion for our younger (and present) creative selves. Plus, James C…

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“It feels like a radical practice not to be productive, to allow the space to guide what comes next,” says prolific poet and beloved writing teacher James Crews. “I have tendencies toward control.” In this episode, we talk about the importance of slowing down and doing less, and why a creative practice depends on this. James reads several poems from his new collection, Breathing Room: Poems of Rest and Retreat, and we talk about creating healthy boundaries around productivity, embodiment in a creative practice, and poetry as a spiritual practice.

James Crews lives on forty rocky acres in Southern Vermont, on the unceded lands of the Abenaki people, with his husband Brad Peacock, with whom he co-edited Love Is for All of Us: Poems of Tenderness & Belonging from the LGBTQ+ Community & Friends (Storey Publishing). Crews is the author of several collections of poems, including Unlocking the Heart, Turning Toward Grief and Breathing Room. To sign up for free weekly poems and for more info, visit: jamescrews.net.

“It almost doesn’t matter what comes. What matters is making the space for what comes. And allowing it to be the truest version of itself.” —poet James Crews

Preview: Emerging Form Episode 163 with James Crews

“I was facing my own moment of burnout,” says much beloved poet James Crews. He’d just returned home from a work trip and found he felt numb. “Too much of a good thing can be exhausting. I needed to change the way I was viewing productivity and framing my own creative work.” What is the role of rest in a creative practice? How do we listen to the inner voice that tells us “this is too much”? How do we create healthy boundaries around our productivity? We also talk about embodiment in creative practice, poetry as a spiritual practice, and James reads several poems from his new collection, Breathing Room: Poems of Rest and Retreat

James Crews lives on forty rocky acres in Southern Vermont, on the unceded lands of the Abenaki people, with his husband Brad Peacock, with whom he co-edited Love Is for All of Us: Poems of Tenderness & Belonging from the LGBTQ+ Community & Friends (Storey Publishing). Crews is the author of several collections of poems, including Unlocking the Heart, Turning Toward Grief and Breathing Room. To sign up for free weekly poems and for more info, visit: jamescrews.net.

What We’re Reading and Listening to:

Rosemerry:

• While on vacation, I got most of the way through HumanKind: A Hopeful History. Rutger Bregman debunks many of the stories we’ve been fed about how terrible humans can be to each other and shows us how they were manipulated or fabricated to show us the worst of ourselves. With meticulous research, he retells the story of Easter Island, the Stanford Prison Experiment, the real story of Lord of the Flies, and so much more. It was uplifting, humanizing, provocative. Filled with goodness. It challenged me and made me see our future and present in a much brighter light.

• A poem that has knocked my socks off recently is from Texas’ poet laureate ire’ne lara silva, “i didn’t eat the sun.” There is so much epiphany in it—so embodied, so full of elation and connection and freedom. It made me want to play more with form on a page.

Christie:

• The NPR show Planet Money is publishing a book, and they did a terrific series looking into the economics of the book business. They explain everything from book auctions (where publishers compete for the right to publish an author’s book) to book deals and the ways book stores decide which books to stock.

• Hamilton Nolan pretty much summed up my feelings about AI in this piece, “Go Ahead And Use AI. It Will Only Help Me Dominate You.”

How to Listen

Listening is a form of worship,
but you don’t have to kneel
on the floor with folded hands
or mouth the perfect prayer.
Just open the door of yourself
to another, become the space
they step through to show you
who they are. This is holiness:
two people seated together
on the pew of a park bench,
at the altar of a kitchen table.
Even if no one says a word
for a while, receive the silence
until it’s like a new language
only the two of you can speak.

—James Crews, from Breathing Room: Poems of Rest and Retreat (Mandala, 2026)

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A Note About Paid Subscriptions:

First, we want to thank ALL our subscribers! We are so grateful you join us in this conversation about what it is to engage with yourself, the world and others in a creative way. And a BIG thank you to our paid subscribers. You make this podcast possible. Only our paid subscribers receive our bonus episodes as a thank you for their financial support. This week, James Crews reads us three poems from his new book, Breathing Room, and we launch from them into conversation about our relationship with silence and how that fuels creative practice, finding self-compassion for our younger (and present) creative selves, blossoming beyond what we ever expected, and how to be gentle with ourselves when we meet difficult experiences in our creative practice.

Two Questions:

(share your answers with us here on Substack or in our FB group)

1. How is your writing a spiritual practice?

2. What happens in your body when you are writing (or singing/dancing/painting …)

“I do best when I have structure around me,” says Dimity McDowell, author of The Twenty-Seventh Mile: How to Smooth the Rough Transition out of Your Running Years. In this bonus episode, we talk about establishing creative habits, vulnerability as a creative superpower, finding time for joy and pleasure, why it’s important to tell the stories of the eve…

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For thirty years, Dimity McDowelll made a life–and a living–with running and writing about running. Then, for health reasons, she had to stop. In this episode of Emerging Form, we talk with Dimity about how our creative identity is linked with other identities and what to do when that radically changes. We discuss her new book The Twenty-Seventh Mile: How to Smooth the Rough Transition out of Your Running Years, and the difference between writing a book with a partner and writing alone. We talk about embodied writing, the importance of empathy when incorporating other people’s stories, and the challenges of writing about loss.

Before focusing her career on running, Dimity McDowell was a sports journalist, holding staff positions at Self, ESPN: The Magazine, and Sports Illustrated for Women. She co-authored three running books (Run Like a Mother, Train Like a Mother, and Tales from Another Mother Runner) and co-founded Another Mother Runner, an inclusive community for all female runners, with Sarah Bowen Shea. A personal trainer and running coach, she has finished countless races, including Ironman Coeur d’Alene and the Pike’s Peak Half Marathon. Dimity is the mother of two adult children, and lives in Denver with her husband and two dogs.

“I expected it to be easy and it wasn’t.” —author Dimity McDowell on writing a book without a partner after writing books with a partner

Preview: Emerging Form Episode 162 with Dimity McDowell

After thirty years of running and building a writing career around running, Dimity McDowell suddenly found herself, for health reasons, unable to participate in this passion that had been such a huge part of her life and your livelihood. In this week’s episode (out this Thursday) we talk with Dimity about her crisis of creative and physical identity and how she explores it in her new book The Twenty-Seventh Mile: How to Smooth the Rough Transition out of Your Running Years. We discuss the embodiment of writing and writing about embodiment, writing a book on her own after writing with a partner, writing about loss, the importance of getting multiple perspectives, and much more.

Before focusing her career on running, Dimity McDowell was a sports journalist, holding staff positions at Self, ESPN: The Magazine, and Sports Illustrated for Women. She co-authored three running books (Run Like a Mother, Train Like a Mother, and Tales from Another Mother Runner) and co-founded Another Mother Runner, an inclusive community for all female runners, with Sarah Bowen Shea. A personal trainer and running coach, she has finished countless races, including Ironman Coeur d’Alene and the Pike’s Peak Half Marathon. Dimity is the mother of two adult children, and lives in Denver with her husband and two dogs.

What We’re Reading and Listening to:

Rosemerry:

• How does profound change happen? That’s the question that drives Eric Zimmer’s new book, How a Little Becomes a Lot: The Art of Small Changes for a More Meaningful Life. Zimmer is the host of the popular podcast The One You Feed, a podcast I love to listen to. In this book, inspired by Zen Buddhism, modern psychology, and Zimmer’s own story of battling a heroin addiction thirty years ago, Zimmer speaks of self-compassion and how we make choices congruent with our core values. There are simple practices, big questions, straightforward writing and compelling stories.

• While the news does its best to tell us the facts, the poet meets the news with humanity. In The Radio Poems: Transmissions from Colorado, David J. Rothman approaches public events in Colorado with humor, paradox and musicality, honoring the complexities and nuances of our time. And though the poems are a few years old, reading them now we see how the adage rings true, everything old is new again—especially when told through poetry.

Christie:

• You really must take a moment to read this delightful story by Katie L. Burke and Rebecca Byerly about people who love and want to protect hermit crabs. It’s far more interesting that it sounds!

• My friend Julie wrote a stunning essay for the New York Times Modern Love series about her friend’s decision to end her life at Julie’s home. The essay, “May I End My Life With You?” is also about friendship and the burden of chronic disease. Sit down before you read it.

Give Up Rosemerry, He Wrote in His Letter

with thanks to Zhim


In fact, he didn’t write my name.
In fact, he wrote his own.

Inserting my own name came naturally.
Give up Rosemerry.

How thrilling the sentence became.
“A balancing counterweight,” he wrote,

“for a being who has extreme passion.”
The words swirl in me like a storm.

On a day when the news is of conquering
arrives this simple direction toward surrender.

I become a student of snow.
Give up Rosemerry. Give up.

What beauty arrives as I let go?

—Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

Give a gift subscription

A Note About Paid Subscriptions:

First, we want to thank ALL our subscribers! We are so grateful you join us in this conversation about what it is to engage with yourself, the world and others in a creative way. And a BIG thank you to our paid subscribers. You make this podcast possible. Only our paid subscribers receive our bonus episodes as a thank you for their financial support. This week we talk with Dimity about vulnerability as a creative superpower, finding time for joy and pleasure, why it’s important to tell the stories of the everyman who doesn’t conquer the world, and writing a book with a long shelf life.

Two Questions:

(share your answers with us here on Substack or in our FB group)

1. How has your creative identity changed over time?

2. What is your creative superpower?

“Making art is not about you, it’s about your project,” says Mason Currey, author of Making Art & Making a Living. “How can you be in service to it … that is an important mind shift.” This week we talk with Mason Currey about how he founded Worm School, finding accountability in your creative life, the difference between creativity to get something out …

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What’s the secret to making a living doing your art? “There really is no magic trick … spoiler,” says Mason Currey, author of Making Art and Making a Living. But in this episode of Emerging Form, we talk with Currey about what he learned by studying how other creatives across genres, cultures and centuries have made it work. We also talk about his own relationship to creative practice–little tricks and attitude shifts, the importance of repetition and habit, developing trust in our own practice, and which compromises can really harm our creative energy.

Mason Currey is the author of the Daily Rituals books, featuring brief profiles of the day-to-day working lives of more than 300 brilliant minds. His latest book, Making Art and Making a Living was published on March 31, 2026. Currey lives in Los Angeles and writes Subtle Maneuvers, a twice-monthly newsletter on the creative process.

“So much of any creative act is the tension between making it happen and not making it happen.” —Mason Currey, author of Making Art and Making a Living

Preview: Emerging Form Episode 161 with Mason Currey

Mason Currey deeply wanted to be writing. But he wasn’t. “I had ambition but wasn’t doing it,” he says. It made him wonder, “Why can’t I do this thing I want to do? I was hungry for stories of how others did it. How did they make themselves do it when they didn’t feel like it? Could I borrow the right routine?” And from this confusion and earnest longing, his newest book Making Art and Making a Living was born. In this episode (out this Thursday) we talk about

• the power of repetition,

• creating the right conditions—or not,

• the big creative impact of making small shifts in our habits,

• the strangest stories of other’s creative habits,

• staying on track,

• and the relationship between the soul and creative practice.

Mason Currey is the author of the Daily Rituals books, featuring brief profiles of the day-to-day working lives of more than 300 brilliant minds. His latest book, Making Art and Making a Living was published on March 31, 2026. Currey lives in Los Angeles and writes Subtle Maneuvers, a twice-monthly newsletter on the creative process.

What We’re Reading and Listening to:

Rosemerry:

• I want to join the Nice Lady Revolution. That is what I thought after listening to Rebecca Solnit’s amazing interview with The New York Times about her new book, The Beginning Comes After the End. It’s a remarkably positive interview in which she points to the new hero our country needs—and it’s not a single person. It’s collective. And it includes “the nice ladies” who are behind the scenes making things happen. “Changing the world is a lot more like caregiving than it is like war,” she said. Time to rely on kindness more than muscle. To trust that what we do matters. Time to be the hero we need—together.

• James Crews’ new book, Breathing Room: Poems of Rest & Retreat, is a gorgeous book. Literally. It has a window in the cover. It’s soft. It has a blue ribbon the color of hyacinths. And the poems inside are filled with spaciousness and generous attention. “The world is so much larger than what’s locked inside head and heart,” Crews writes in “Cardinal.” It’s a book filled with invitations to be more present, to find the sacred in the ordinary. “It all counts as practice,” he writes in “Spiritual.” That includes “the way you stack clean dishes in the drainer so they won’t break, how you wipe down the counter and fold the towels…” In true James Crews style, the book also includes brief essays and invitations for you to do your own writing or thinking. It’s the kind of book that would be a great gift for anyone who needs to rest, or anyone who already values what might happen in a pause.

Christie:

• I love Sigrid Nunez’s novels and Mitz: The Marmoset of Bloomsbury is one of her most unusual. Here Nunez tells the story of Mitz, a marmoset that Leonard and Virginia Woolf adopted in 1934, based on historical documents and some imagined details. As the narrative progresses, so does the march to war. In one scene, Mitz provides a welcome distraction that allows the Woolfs to escape a close call with a Nazi gathering that’s taking place during their trip through Germany on the cusp of World War II. The book is about the bond between humans and their animal companions (several dogs also feature prominently in the story) as well as the ways the Woolfs endured the fascism and war creeping in around them (yes, it feels very timely). I particularly loved the passages about Virginia Woolf’s struggles to write. She worries that she had lost her gift. How could she publish such “feeble twaddle?” “Her friends would be ashamed for her and her enemies would gloat.”

• It’s giving nothing away to say that someone dies in How to Commit a Postcolonial Murder by Nina McConigley, but this isn’t a murder mystery. Instead, the novel is an exploration of how childhood sexual abuse divides and damages individuals and families. It superbly lays out the multitude of ways society expects women to comply and acquiesce and to absorb trauma without complaint. The story takes place in 1986 and is narrated by Georgie, a 12-year-old growing up in the fictional town of Marley, Wyoming. As the daughter of an Indian mother and White father, Georgie and her sister, Agatha Krishna, are often treated as outsiders, even though they were both born and raised in Wyoming. When their aunt, uncle and cousin arrive from India to live with them, things get complicated. Georgie is clever and funny, and my favorite aspect of the book was the relationship between sisters. I especially liked the sections where Georgie spoke directly to the reader, addressing the expectations that are placed on girls of color and the stories they are allowed to tell. I’m excited to hear McConigley speak at Mountain Words in May!

For This, I Walk Outside

Not to escape the world,
but to be more wholly in it.
Sharp cold stings my cheeks—
not like a slap, but like the thrilling burn
of whiskey as it blazes down the throat—
the kind of wild aliveness
that brooks no choice
but to wake up to life,
to champion it, to know life
as the most wondrous thing
even as I steep in the ugliness
we humans commit.
This is what life asks of us.
I walk outside to be more wholly here,
here the way the Stellar’s jay is here.
Even on the coldest day,
its every fluffing, every peck, every head bob,
every flight is in service to life.
It’s never confused about its purpose.
I want to be in service.
Outside, everything is teacher:
the cold, the snow, the bird, the day,
this fallible, fabulous human race,
this improbable, beautiful planet in space.
To serve life, I must inhabit it wholly
and be inhabited by it, too.
As if it all could end tonight.
As if it goes on forever.

—Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

Give a gift subscription

A Note About Paid Subscriptions:

First, we want to thank ALL our subscribers! We are so grateful you join us in this conversation about what it is to engage with yourself, the world and others in a creative way. And a BIG thank you to our paid subscribers. You make this podcast possible. Only our paid subscribers receive our bonus episodes as a thank you for their financial support. This week we talk with Mason Currey about how he founded Worm School, finding accountability in your creative life, the difference between creativity to get something out of it vs. give yourself to it, plus stories about the creative lives of musician Brian Eno, sculptor Augusta Savage and composer John Cage.

Two Questions:

(share your answers with us here on Substack or in our FB group)

1. What is the role of accountability in your creative practice?

2. What artist’s story inspires you to do your own creative work?

“Writing helps us acknowledge there are stories we have been told that are not true,” says author, creative coach and workshop facilitator GG Renee Hill. “What is our part? How do we look at the impact of these false stories?” This week we talk with GG about the importance of aligning our daily habits with what we’re discovering in our writing, the role…

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