Podcasts about writers

On today's program, families who lost children at Camp Mystic last year are suing Texas state officials for licensing the camp despite its lack of an evacuation plan. We'll have details. And, fundraising on commission—it may seem like a win-win scenario, but experts say the ethical issues outweigh any benefits. We'll take a look. Plus, the United Methodist Committee on Relief is closing down one of its central hubs where Methodists have been assembling relief kits since 1996 to send across the country after disasters. But first, more controversy at Bethel Church in Redding, California. The producer for today's program is Jeff McIntosh. We get database and other technical support from Stephen DuBarry, Rod Pitzer, and Casey Sudduth. Writers who contributed to today's program include Kim Roberts, Stacey Horton, Isaac Wood, David Roach, Diana Chandler, and Makella Knowles. A special thanks to Baptist Press for contributing material for this week's podcast. Until next time, may God bless you.

I am Rolf Claessen and together with my co-host Ken Suzan I welcome you to Episode 172 of our podcast IP Fridays. Today's interview guests are Co-Founder & CEO of Inception Point AI, Jeanine Whright, and Mark Stignani, who is Partner & Chair of Analytics Practice at Barnes & Thornburg LLP. https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeaninepercivalwright https://www.linkedin.com/in/markstignani Inception Point AI But before the interview I have news for you: The Unified Patent Court (UPC) ruled on Feb 19, 2026, that specialized insurance can cover security for legal costs. This is vital for firms, as it eases litigation financing and lowers financial hurdles for patent lawsuits by removing the need for high liquid assets to enforce rights at the UPC. On Feb 12, 2026, the WIPO Coordination Committee nominated Daren Tang for a second six-year term as Director General. Tang continues modernizing the global IP system, focusing on SMEs, women, and digital transformation. His confirmation in April is considered certain. An AAFA study from Feb 4 reveals 41% of tested fakes (clothing/shoes) failed safety standards. Many contained toxic chemicals like phthalates, BPA, or lead. The study highlights that counterfeiters increasingly use Meta platforms to sell unsafe imitations directly to consumers. China's CNIPA 2026 report announced a crackdown on bad-faith patent and trademark filings. Beyond better examination quality, the agency will sanction shady IP firms and stop strategies violating “good faith” to make China’s IP system more ethical and innovation-friendly. Now, let's hear the interview with Jeanine Whright and Mark Stignani! How AI Is Rewiring Media & Entertainment: Key Takeaways from Ken Suzan's Conversation with Jeanine Wright and Mark Stignani In this IP Fridays interview, Ken Suzan speaks with two repeat guests who look at the same phenomenon from two angles: Jeanine Wright, Co-Founder & CEO of Inception Point AI, as a builder of AI-native entertainment, and Mark Stignani, Partner and Chair of the Analytics Practice at Barnes & Thornburg LLP, as a lawyer advising clients who are trying to use AI without stepping into a legal (or ethical) crater. What emerges is a clear picture: generative AI is not just “another tool.” It is rapidly becoming the default infrastructure for creative work—while the rules around ownership, consent, and accountability lag behind. 1) What “AI-generated personalities” really are (and why that matters) Jeanine's company is not primarily “cloning” real people. Instead, Inception Point AI creates original, fictional personalities—characters with backstories, ambitions, and evolving arcs—then deploys them into the world as podcast hosts and content creators (and eventually actors and musicians). Her key point: the creative work still starts with humans. Writers and creators define the concept, tone, audience, and story engine. What AI changes is speed, cost, and iteration—and therefore what is economically feasible to produce. 2) The “generative content pipeline” isn't a magic button A recurring misconception Ken raises is the idea that someone “pushes a button” and content pops out. Jeanine explains that real production looks more like a hybrid studio: A creative team defines character, voice, format, and storyline. A technical team builds what she calls an “AI orchestration layer” that combines multiple models and tools. The “stack” differs by format: the workflow for a long-form audio drama is different from a short-form beauty clip. This matters because it reframes AI content not as a single output, but as a pipeline decision: which tools, which data sources, which QA, and which governance steps are used—and where human review happens. 3) The biggest legal questions: origin, liability, ownership, and contracts Mark doesn't name a single “top issue.” He describes a cluster of problems that repeatedly show up in client conversations: Training data and “origin story” Clients keep asking: Can I legally use AI output if the tool was trained on copyrighted works? Even if the output looks new, the unease is about whether the tool's capabilities are built on unlicensed inputs. Liability for unintended harm Mark flags risk from AI content that inadvertently infringes, defames, or carries bias. The legal exposure may not match the creator's intent. Ownership and protectability He points to a big gap: many jurisdictions are still reluctant to grant classic IP rights (copyright or patent-style protection) to purely AI-generated material. That creates uncertainty around whether businesses can truly “own” what they produce. Old contracts weren't written for AI A final, practical point: many agreements—talent contracts, author clauses, data licenses—predate generative AI and simply don't address it. That leads to disputes about scope, permissions, and—crucially—indemnities. 4) Are we at a tipping point? The “gold rush” vs. “next creative era” views Jeanine frames AI as “the world's most powerful creative tool”—comparable to previous step-changes like animation, special effects, and CGI. For her, the strategic implication is simple: creators who learn to use AI well will expand what they can build and test, faster than ever. Mark's metaphor is more cautionary: he calls the moment a “gold rush” where technology is sprinting ahead of law. Courts are getting flooded with foundational disputes, while legislation is fragmented—he notes that states may move faster than federal frameworks, and that labor agreements (e.g., union protections) will be a key pressure point. 5) Democratization: more creators, more niche content, more experimentation One of the most concrete themes is access. Jeanine argues AI will: Lower production barriers for independent filmmakers and storytellers. Reduce the need for “hit-making only” economics that dominate Hollywood. Make micro-audience content commercially viable. Her example is intentionally niche: highly localized, specialized content (like a “pollen report” for many markets) that would never have made financial sense before can now exist—and thrive—because the production cost drops and personalization scales. 6) Likeness, consent, and “digital performers”: what happens when AI resembles a real actor? Ken pushes into a sensitive area: what if someone generates a performance that closely resembles a living actor without consent? Mark outlines the current (imperfect) toolbox—because, as he emphasizes, most laws weren't built for this scenario. He points to practical claims that may come into play in the U.S., such as rights of publicity and false endorsement-type theories, and notes that whether something is parody or “too close” can become a major fault line. Jeanine explains her company's operational approach: They focus on original personalities, designed “from scratch.” They build internal checks to avoid misappropriating known names, likenesses, or recognizable identities. If they ever work with real people, the model would be licensing their likeness/voice. A subtle but important business point also appears here: Jeanine expects AI-native characters themselves to become licensable assets—meaning the entertainment economy may expand to include “celebrity rights” for fully synthetic personalities. 7) Ethics: the real line is “deception,” not “AI vs. human” The ethical core of the conversation is not “AI is bad” or “AI is good.” It's how AI is used—especially whether audiences are misled. Mark highlights several ethical risks: Misuse of tools to manipulate faces and content (“AI slop” and political misuse). Displacement of creative workers without adequate transition support. A concern that AI often optimizes toward “statistical averages,” potentially flattening originality. Jeanine agrees ethics must be designed into the system. She describes regular discussions with an ethicist and emphasizes a principle: transparency. Her company discloses when content or personalities are AI-generated. She argues that if people understand what they're engaging with and choose it knowingly, the ethical problem shifts from “AI exists” to “Are we tricking people?” Mark adds a real-world warning: deepfakes are now credible enough to enable serious fraud—he references a case-like scenario where a synthetic video meeting deceived an employee into authorizing a payment. The point is clear: authenticity and verification are no longer optional. 8) The “dead actor” hypothetical: legal permission vs. moral intent Ken raises a provocative scenario: an actor's estate authorizes an AI-generated new performance, but the actor opposed such technology while alive. Neither guest offers a simplistic answer. Jeanine suggests that even if the estate holds legal rights, a company might choose to avoid such content out of respect and because the ethical “overhang” could damage the storytelling outcome. She also notes the harder question: people who died before today's capabilities may never have been able to meaningfully consent to what AI can now do—raising questions about how we interpret legacy intent. Mark underscores the practical contract problem: many rights are drafted “in perpetuity,” but that doesn't automatically settle the ethical question. 9) Five-year forecast: “AI everywhere,” but audiences may stratify Ken closes with a prediction question: in five years, how much entertainment content will significantly involve AI—and will audiences care? Jeanine predicts AI becomes the default creative layer for most content creation. Mark is slightly more conservative on the percentage, but adds an important nuance: the market will likely stratify. Low-cost, high-volume content may become saturated with AI, while premium segments may emphasize “human-made” as a differentiator—especially if disclosure norms become standard. Bottom line for business leaders and creators This interview lands on a pragmatic conclusion: AI will change how content is made at scale, and the competitive edge will go to teams that combine creative taste, operational discipline, and legal/ethical governance. If you're building, commissioning, or distributing content, the questions you can't dodge anymore are: What's the provenance of the tools and data you rely on? Who is responsible when output harms, infringes, or misleads? What rights can you actually claim in AI-assisted work? Do your contracts and disclosures match the new reality? Ken Suzan: Thank you, Rolf. We have two returning guests to the IP Friday’s podcast. Joining me today is Janine Wright and Mark Stignani. Our topic for discussion, how is AI transforming the media and entertainment industries today? We look at the issues from differing perspectives. A bit about our guests, Janine Wright is a seasoned board member, CEO, global COO and CFO. She’s led organizations from startup to a $475 million plus revenue subsidiary of a public company. She excels in growth strategy, adopting innovative technologies, scaling operations and financial management. Janine is a media and entertainment attorney and trial litigator turned technologist and qualified financial expert. She is the co-founder and CEO of Inception Point AI, a growing company that is paving new ground with AI-generated personalities and content through developing technology and story. Mark Stignani is a partner with Barnes & Thornburg LLP and is based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He is the chair of the data analytics department with a particular emphasis on artificial intelligence, machine learning, cryptocurrency and ESG. Mark combines the power of artificial intelligence and machine learning with his skills as a corporate and IP counsel to deliver unparalleled insights and strategies to his clients. Welcome, Janine and Mark to the IP Friday’s podcast. Jeanine Whright: Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much for having me and fun to be back. It feels nostalgic to be here. Ken Suzan: That’s right. And you both were on the program. So it’s fantastic that you’re both back again. So our format, I’m going to ask a question to Janine and or Mark and sometimes to both of you. So that’s going to be how we proceed. Let’s jump right in. Janine, your company creates AI-generated actors. For listeners who may not be familiar, can you briefly explain what that means and what’s now possible that wasn’t even two years ago? Jeanine Whright: Sure. Yeah, we are creating AI-generated personalities. So new characters, new personalities from scratch. We design who these personalities are and will be, how they will evolve. So we give them complex backstories. We give them hopes and dreams and aspirations. We every aspect of them, their families, how they’re going to evolve. And in the same way that, say, you know, Disney designs the character for its next animated feature or, you know, an electronic arts designs a character for its next major video game. We are doing that for these personalities and then we are launching them into the world as podcast hosts, content creators on social platforms like YouTube, Instagram and TikTok. And even in the future, you know, actors in feature length films, musicians, etc. Ken Suzan: Very fascinating. Mark, from your practice, what’s the single biggest legal question or dispute you’re seeing clients wrestle with when it comes to AI and media creation? Mark Stignani: Well, I think that, you know, it’s not just one thing, it’s like four things. But most of them tend to be kind of the origin story of AI data or AI tools that they use because, you know, but for the use of AI tools trained on copyrighted materials, the tools wouldn’t really exist in their current form. So a lot of my clients are wondering about, you know, can I legally use this output if it’s built upon somebody else’s IP? The second ask, the second flavor of that is really, is there liability being created if I take AI content that inadvertently infringes or defames or biases there? So there’s the whole notion of training bias from the training materials that comes out. The third phase is really, you know, can I really own this? Because much of the world does not really give IP rights into AI-generated inventions, copyrighted materials. It’s still kind of a big razor. Then at the end of the day, you know, if it’s an existing relationship, does my contract even contemplate this? So everything from authors contracts on up to just use of data rights that predate AI. Ken Suzan: And Janine and Mark, a question to both of you. How would you describe where we are right now in the AI revolution in media and entertainment? Are we approaching a tipping point? And if so, what are the things we need to watch for? Jeanine Whright: Yeah, I definitely think that we’re at a phase where people are starting to come to the realization that AI is the world’s most powerful creative tool. But that, you know, storytelling and point of view is what creates demand and audiences. And AI doesn’t threaten or change that. But it does mean that as people evolve in this medium, they’re very likely going to need to adopt, utilize and figure out how to hone their craft with these AI-generated content and these AI-generated toolings. So this is, you know, something that people have done certainly in the past in all sorts of ways in using new tools. And we’ve seen that make a significant change in the industry. So you look at, you know, the dawn of animation as a medium. You look at use of special effects, computer-generated imagery in the likes of Pixar. And this is certainly the next phase of that evolution. But because of the power of the tool and what will become the ubiquity of the tool, I think that it’s pretty revolutionary and all the more necessary for people to figure out how to embrace this as part of their creative process. Ken Suzan: Thank you, Janine. Mark, your thoughts? Mark Stignani: Yeah, I mean, I liken this to historically to like the California gold rush right now, because, you know, the technology is so far outpaced in any of the legal frameworks that are available. And so we’re just trying to shoehorn things in left and right here. So, I mean, the courts are beginning to start to engage with the foundational questions. I don’t think they’re quite there yet. I just noticed Anthropic got sued again by another group of people, big music group, because of the downloaded works they’ve done. I mean, so the courts are, you know, the courts are certainly inundated with, you know, too many of these foundational questions. Legislatively, hard to tell. I mean, federal law, the federal government is not moving uniformly on this other than to let the gold rush continue without much check and balance to it. Whereas states are now probably moving a lot faster. Colorado, Illinois, even Minnesota is attempting to craft legislation and limitations on what you can do with content and where to go with it. So, I mean, the things we need to watch for any of the fair use decisions coming out here, you know, some of the SAG-AFTRA contract clauses. And, you know, again, the federal government, I just, you know, I got a big shrug going as to what they’re actually going to come up with here in the next 90 to 100 days. So, but, you know, I think they’ll be forced into doing something sooner than later. Ken Suzan: Okay, let’s jump into the topic of the rise of generative content pipelines. My first question to Janine. Studios and production companies are now building what some call generative content pipelines. This is where AI systems produce everything from scripts to visual effects to voice performances. What efficiencies and creative possibilities does this unlock for the industry? Jeanine Whright: Yeah, so this is quite a bit of what we do. And if I could help pull the curtain back and explain a little bit. Ken Suzan: That’d be great. Jeanine Whright: Yeah, there’s this assumption that, you know, somebody is just sitting behind a machine pushing a button and an out pops, you know, what it is that we’re producing. There’s actually quite a bit of humans still in the loop in the process. You know, we have my team as creators. The other half of my team is the technologists. And those creators are working largely at what we describe as the the tip of the sphere. So they’re, of course, coming up with the concepts of who are these personalities? What are these personalities, characters, backgrounds going to be a lot of like rich personality development? And then they’re creating like what are the formats? What are the kind of story arcs? What is the kinds of content that this this character wants to tell? And what are the audiences they’re desiring to reach and what’s most going to resonate with them? And then what we built internally is what we refer to as an AI orchestration layer. So that allows us to pull from basically all of the different models and then all of these different really cool AI tools. And put those together in such a way and combine those in such a way that we can have the kind of output that our creative team envisions for what they want it to be. And at the end of the day, what you what the stack looks like for, say, a long form audio drama, like the combination of LLMs that we’re going to use in different parts of scripting and production and, you know, ideating and all of that. And the kinds of tooling that we use to actually make it and get it to sound good and have the kinds of personality characteristics that we want to be in an authentic voice for a podcast is going to be different than the tech stack and the tool stack that we might use for a short form Instagram beauty tip reel. And so there’s a lot of art in being able to pull all of these tools together to get them to do exactly what you want them to do. But I think the second part of your question is just as interesting as the first. I mean, what is what possibilities is this unlocking? So of course you’re finding efficiencies in the creative production process. You can move faster. You can do things were less expensive, perhaps, and you were able to do it before. But on the creator side, I think one thing that hasn’t been talked about enough is how it is really like blown wide the aperture of what creators can do and can envision. Traditionally, you know, Hollywood podcasting, many of these businesses that become big businesses have become hit making businesses where they need to focus on a very narrow of wide gen pop content that they think is going to get tens of millions, hundreds of millions in, you know, fans and dollars in revenue for every piece of content that they make. So the problem with that is, is that it really narrows the kinds of things that ultimately get made, which is why you see things happening in Hollywood, like the Blacklist, which is, you know, this famous list of really exceptional content that remains unpredited, unproduced, or why you see things like, you know, 70 to 80% of the top 100 movies being based on pre-existing IP, right? Because these are such huge bets that you need to feel very confident that you’re going to be able to get big, big audiences and big, big dollars from it. But with AI, and really lowering the barrier to entry, lowering the costs of production and marketing, the experimentation that you can do is really, really phenomenal. So, you know, my creative team, if they have an idea, they make it, you know, they don’t have to wring their hands through like a green lighting process of, you know, should we, shouldn’t we, like we, we can make an experiment with lots of different things, we can do various different versions of something. We can see what would this look like if I placed it in the 1800s, or what if I gave this character an Australian accent, and it’s just the power of being able to have this creative partner that can ideate with you and experiment with you at rocket speed. With the creators that are embracing it, you can see how it is really fun for them to be able to have this wide of a range of possibility. Ken Suzan: Mark, when you hear about these generative pipelines, what are the immediate red flags or concerns that come to mind from a legal standpoint? How about ethics underlying all of this? Well, Mark Stignani: that was not, that’s the number one red flag because I mean, we are seeing not just that in the entertainment industry, but it literally at political levels, and the kind of the phrase, to turn the phrase AI slop being generated, we’re seeing, you know, people’s facial expressions altered. In some cases, we’re seeing AI tools being misused to exploit various groups of individuals and genders and age groups. So I mean, there’s a whole lot of things ethically that people are using AI for that just don’t quite cover it. Especially in the entertainment industry, I mean, we’re looking at a fair amount of displacement of human workers without adequate transition support, devaluation of the creative labor. I mean, the thing though that I’m always from a technical standpoint is AI is simply a statistical average of most everything. So it kind of devalues the benefit of having a human creator, a human contribution to it. That’s the ethical side. But on the legal side, I see chain of title issues. I mean, because these are built on very questionable IP ownership stages, I mean, in most of these tools, there has been some large copying, training and taking of copyrighted materials. Is it transformational? Maybe. But there’s certainly not a chain of title, nor is there permission granted for that training. I mentioned SAG-AFTRA earlier, I think there’s a potential set of union contract aspects to this that if you know many of these agreements and use sub-licenses for authors and actor agreements, they weren’t written with AI in mind. So that’s another red flag. And also I just think in indemnification. So if we ultimately get to a point where groups are liable for using content without previous license, then who’s liable? Is the tool maker the liable group or the actual end user? So those are probably my top four red flags. But I think ethics is probably my biggest place because just because we can do something from an ethical standpoint doesn’t mean we should. Jeanine Wright: Yeah, if I can respond to both of those points. I mean, one from a legal perspective, just to be very clear, I mean, we are always pulling from multiple different models and always pulling from multiple different sources. And we even have data sources that we license or use for single source of truth on certain pieces of information. So we’re always pulling things together from multiple different sources. We also have built into our process, you know, internal QAing and checking to make sure that we’re not misappropriating the name or likeness of any existing known personality or character. We are creating original personalities there. We design their voice from scratch. We design their look from scratch. So we’re not on our personality side, we’re not pulling or even taking inspiration from existing intellectual property that’s already out there in creating these personalities. On the ethical side, I agree. I mean, when we came out of stealth, we came out of stealth in September. There was certainly quite a bit of backlash from folks in my—I previously co-founded a company in the audio space. I mean, there’s been many rounds of layoffs in audio and in many other parts of the entertainment industry. So I’m very sensitive to the feedback around, like, is this job displacement? I mean, I do think that the CEO of NVIDIA said it right when he said, you’re likely not going to lose your job to AI, but you will lose your job to somebody who knows how to use AI. I think these tools are transforming the way that content is made and that the faster that people can embrace this tooling, the more likely they’re going to be having the kinds of roles that they want in, you know, in content creation and storytelling in the future. And we are hiring. I’m hiring AI video creators, AI audio creators. I’m hiring AI developers. So people who are looking for those roles, I mean, please reach out to me, we would love to work with you and we’d love to grow with you. We also take the ethics very seriously. For the last few months or so, I’ve met regularly with an ethicist, we talk about all sorts of issues around, you know, is designing AI-generated people, you know, good for humanity? And what about authenticity and transparency and deception, and how are we in building in this space going to avoid some of the problems that we’ve seen with things like social media and other forms of technology? So we keep that very top of mind and we try to build on our own internal values-based system and, you know, continue to elevate and include the humanity as part of the conversation. Ken Suzan: Thank you, Janine. Janine, some argue that AI content pipelines will level the field for filmmaking, giving independent creators access to tools that were once available only to major studios. Is that the future you envision? Jeanine Wright: I do think that with AI you will see an incredible democratization of access to technology and access to these capabilities. So I do think, you know, rise of independent filmmakers, you won’t have as many people who are sitting on a brilliant idea for the next fantastic script or movie that just cannot get it made because they will be able to with these tools, get something made and out there, at least to get the attention of somebody who could then decide that they want to invest in it at a studio kind of level in the future. The other thing that I think is really interesting is that I think, you know, AI will empower more niche content and more creators who can thrive in micro-communities. So it used to be because of this hit generation business model, everything needed to be made for the masses and a lot of content for niche audiences and micro-communities was neglected because there was just no way to make that content commercially viable. But now, if you can leverage AI—we make a pollen report podcast in 300 markets, you know, nobody would have ever made that before, but it is very valuable information, a very valuable piece of content for people who really care about the pollen in their local community. So there’s all sorts of ways that being able to leverage AI is making it more accessible both to the creator and to the audience that is looking for content that truly resonates with them. Ken Suzan: Mark, let’s talk about the legal landscape right now. If someone creates an AI-generated performance that closely resembles a living actor without their consent, what legal recourse does that actor have? Mark Stignani: Well, I mean, I think we can go back to the OpenAI Scarlett Johansson thing where, you know, if it’s simply—well, the “walks like a duck, quacks like a duck” type of aspect there. You know, I think it’s pretty straightforward that they need to walk it back. I mean, the US doesn’t have moral rights, really, but there’s a public visage right, if you will. And so, one of the things that I find predominantly useful here is that these actors likely have rights of publicity there, we probably have a Lanham Act false endorsement claim, and you know, again, if the performance is not parody, and it’s so close to the original performance, we probably have a copyright discussion. But again, all of these laws predate the use of AI, so we’re going to probably see new sets of law. I mean, we’re probably going to see “resurrection” frameworks, we’ll probably have frameworks for synthetic actors and likenesses, but the rules just aren’t there yet. So, unfortunately, your question is largely predictive versus well-settled at this point. Ken Suzan: Janine, your company works with AI actors. How do you navigate the questions of consent and likeness compensation when creating digital performers? Jeanine Wright: I mean, if we—so first of all, if we were to work with a person who is an existing real-life person or was an existing real-life person, then we would work with them to license their name and likeness or their voice or whatever aspects of it we were going to use in creating content in partnership with them. Not typically our business model; we are, as I said, designing all of our personalities from scratch and making all of our content originally. So, we’ve not had to do that historically. Now, you know, the flip side is: can I license my characters as if they’re similar to living characters? Like will I be able to license the name and likeness and voice of my AI-generated personalities? I think the answer is yes and we’re already starting to do that. Ken Suzan: Let’s just switch gears into ethics and AI because I find this to be a really fascinating issue. I want to look at a hypothetical. And this is to both of you, Janine and Mark: an AI system creates a new performance by a beloved actor who passed away decades ago, and the actor’s estate authorizes it, but the actor was known to have expressed opposition to such technology during their lifetime. Is this ethical? Jeanine Wright: This feels like a Gifts, Wills, and Trusts exam question. Ken Suzan: It sounds like it, that’s right. Jeanine Wright: Throwing me back to my law school days. Exactly. What are your thoughts? It’d be interesting to see like who has the rights there. I mean, I think if you have the legal rights, the question is around, you know, is it ethical to go against what you knew was somebody’s wishes at the time? I guess the honest answer is I don’t know. It would depend a lot on the circumstances of the case. I mean, if we were faced with a situation like that where there was a discrepancy, we would probably move away from doing that content out of respect for the deceased and out of a feeling that, you know, if this person felt strongly against it, then it would be less likely that you could make that storytelling exceptional in some way—it would color it in a way that you wouldn’t want in the outcome. And I feel like there’s—I mean, certainly going forward and it’s already happening—there are plenty of people I think who have name, likeness, and voice rights that they are ready to license that wouldn’t have this overhang. Ken Suzan: Mark, your thoughts? Mark Stignani: Yeah, I mean, again, I have to kind of go back to our property law—the Rule Against Perpetuities. You know, from a property standpoint to AI rights and likenesses—since most of the digital replica contracts that I’ve reviewed generally do talk about things in perpetuity. But if it’s not written down for that actor and the estate is doing this—is it ethical? You know, that is the debate. Jeanine Wright: Well, gold star to you, Mark, for bringing up the Rule Against Perpetuities. There’s another one that I haven’t heard for many years. This is really taking me back to my law school days. Ken Suzan: It’s a throwback. Jeanine Wright: The other thing that’s really interesting is that this technology is really so revolutionary and new that it’s hard to even contemplate now what it is going to be in a decade, much less for people who have passed away to have contemplated what the potential for it could be today. So you could have somebody who is, perhaps, a deceased musician who expressed concerns about digital representations of themselves or digital music while they were alive. But now, the possibility is that you could recreate—certainly I could use my technology to recreate—that musician from scratch in a very detailed way, trained on tons of different available data. Not just like a digital twin or a moving image of them, but to really rebuild their personality from scratch, so that they and their music could be reintroduced to totally new generations in a very respectful and authentic way to them. It’s hard to know, with the understanding that that is possible, whether or not somebody who is deceased today would or would not agree to something like that. I mean, many of them might want, under those circumstances, for their music to live on. These deceased actors and musicians could live forever with the power of AI technology. Mark Stignani: Yeah, I really just kind of go to the whole—is deep-faking a famous actor the best way to preserve them or keep them live? Again, that’s a bit more of an ethical question because the deep fakes are getting good enough right now to create huge problems. Even zoom meetings in Hong Kong where a CFO was on a call with five synthetic actors who all looked like his coworkers and they sent a big check out based upon that. So again, the technology is getting good enough to fool people. Jeanine Wright: I think that’s right, Mark, but I guess I would just highlight the same way that it always has been: the ethical line isn’t AI versus human, the ethical line is about deception. Like, are you deceiving people? And if people know what it is that they’re getting and they’re choosing to engage with it, then I think it isn’t about the power of the technology. In our business, we have elected—not everybody has—but we have elected to be AI transparent. So we tell people when they listen to our show, we include it in our show notes, we include it on our socials. Even when we’re designing our characters to be very photo-realistic, we make an extra point to make sure that people know that this is AI-generated content or an AI personality. Like, our intention is not to deceive and to be candid. From a business model perspective, we don’t need to. I mean, there’s already people who know and understand that it is AI, and AI is different than people. Because it is AI, there’s all sorts of things that you can do with it that you would not be able to do with a real person. You know, we get people who ask us on the podcast side, we get all sorts of crazy funny requests. You know, people who say, “Can I text with this personality? Can I talk to them on the phone? Can they help me cook in the kitchen? Can they sing me Happy Birthday? Can they show up at my Zoom meeting today because I think my boss would love it?” You know, all sorts of different ways that people are wanting to engage with these characters. And now we’re in the process of rolling out real-time personalities so people will be able to engage with our personalities live. It is a totally different way that people are able to engage with content, and people can, as they choose, decide what kind of content they want to engage with. Ken Suzan: Jeanine and Mark, we’re coming to the end of this podcast. I would love to keep talking for hours but we have to stay to our timetable here. Last question: five years from now, what percentage of entertainment content do you predict will involve significant AI generation, and will audiences care about that percentage? Jeanine? Jeanine Wright: I mean, I would say 99.9%. I mean, already you’re seeing—I think YouTube did a survey—that it was like 90% of its top creators said that they’re using AI as material components of their content creation process. So, I think this will be the default way that content is created. And content that is not made with AI, you know, there’ll be special film festivals for non-AI generated content, and that will be a special separate thing than the thing that everybody is doing now. Ken Suzan: Mark, your thoughts? Mark Stignani: Yeah, I go a little lower. I mean, I think Jeanine is right that we’re seeing, especially in the low-quality content creation and like the YouTube shorts and things like that, you know, there’s so much AI being pushed forward that the FTC even acquired an “AI slop” title to it. I do think that disclosure will become normalized, that the industries will be pushed to say when something is AI and what is not. And I think it’s very much like, you know, do you care about quality or not? If you value the human input or the human factor in this, there will be an upper tier where it’s “AI-free” or low AI assistant. I think that it’s going to stratify because the stuff coming through the social media platforms right now—I can’t be on it right now just because there’s so much nonsense. Even my children, who are without much AI training at all, find it just too unbelievable for them. So, I think it will become normalized, but I think that we’re going to see a bunch of tiers. Ken Suzan: Well, Jeanine and Mark, this has been a fantastic discussion of an ever-evolving field in IP law. Thank you to both of you for spending time with us today on the IP Friday’s podcast. Jeanine Wright: Thank you so much for having me. Mark Stignani: Appreciate your time. Thank you again.

Storytelling is more than entertainment — it's a moral act. In this episode of The Storyteller's Mission, Zena Dell Lowe explores the danger of stories replacing standards — and what that means for writers. When trust collapses and authority becomes unaccountable, storytellers are often asked to shape meaning and moral judgment. But assigning verdicts before exploring truth turns story into propaganda, even with the best intentions.Learn how to:Recognize the difference between moral clarity vs. moral coercionAvoid letting your story pre-judge or manipulate the audiencePreserve complexity, nuance, and consequences in fictionTrust your audience to wrestle with truth rather than forcing conclusionsWhether you write drama, historical fiction, or speculative worlds, this episode is a must-watch for writers committed to truthful, morally responsible storytelling.Watch this episode on YouTube Free Resources for Writers:Free Video Tutorial for ScreenwritingSign up for The Storyteller's Digest, my exclusive bi-monthly newsletter for writers and storytellers. Each edition delivers an insightful article or practical writing tip straight from me, designed to help you master your craft and tell compelling stories.The Storyteller's Mission Podcast is now on YouTube.  Subscribe to our channel and never miss a new episode or announcement.

Send a textIn this episode of the Cops and Writers Podcast bonus series, retired Milwaukee Police Sergeant Patrick O'Donnell reads Chapter 32, "Wojo," from his upcoming book:Police Stories: The Rookie Years - True Crime, Chaos, & Life as a Big City CopThere were characters on the job who should have been stand-up comedians. Wojo was one of those guys.But one morning at 7:00 AM, Wojo got serious. A man barricaded himself in an apartment with a rifle pointed at his five-year-old son's head. SWAT was on the way. Hours of negotiation loomed.The way Wojo negotiated with the suspect was unorthodox but effective. All stories are real. Names and locations have been changed where necessary.

On Thursday, a community of writers came together to break the Ramadan fast, also known as Iftar, and held a public reading at Baba's Hummus House in Minneapolis. The event was organized by Mizna, which promotes the work of Arab and Southwest Asian and North African artists. Two artists shared more about the gathering on Minnesota Now — Nikki Luna, a Lebanese-American genderqueer poet and organizer of the event, and Nader Helmy, a Cairo-born, Minnesota-raised writer.

Click Here to ask your book writing and publishing questions!In this episode, I'm joined by U.K.-based bestselling author Alexandra Potter, known for Confessions of a Forty-Something F**k-Up and her newest release, So, I Met This Guy... We talk about her writing journey, the freedom (and risk) of genre versatility, and why she refuses to be boxed in (as should you!).Alexandra shares how she develops characters with depth and momentum. A friend calls her the “cork board queen,” and once you hear her plotting process, you'll understand why. We also dive into the heartbeat of her current books: female friendships. The kind that carry you through heartbreak, reinvention, and the messy middle of midlife. She makes a strong case for why we need a female equivalent of the word “bromance.” (I've been contemplating an appropriate term ever since!)We touch on the role of timing, the importance of community, and the ever-unpredictable path to bestseller status. ***************************************************************

Lasting, authentic confidence is not possible when your inner dialogue is full of threats, name calling, and a constantly downplaying of your accomplishments. Even if the way you talk to yourself isn't overtly mean, if you're not giving yourself credit for the amazing work you do–and, spoiler, it genuinely amazing to be able to write entire books–you're blocking yourself from the confidence you deserve. In the final episode in our confidence series, I'm breaking down how to shift the way you talk to yourself to build lasting confidence. *** Ready to let go of burnout, build confidence, and put fun back into your fiction career? Come work with me. Schedule a free call to discuss your goals and decide if coaching is right for you. *** Follow me behind-the-scenes as I revise my novel under deadline. Learn more here. Looking for even more author advice and notifications about upcoming workshops? Sign up for my twice-monthly newsletter, Real Talk for Writers, by clicking here. DM me on Instagram & let me know what you thought of this episode!

Rebecca N. Thompson, MD joins Let's Talk Memoir for a conversation about life-threatening pregnancy losses and  weaving her own story of navigating a challenging path to parenting with the stories of others, her decade-long collaboration with a remarkable group of women, how healing others helps us heal, imperfect love, not feeling heard, advocating for our own care, humanism in medicine, the cumulative impact of small actions, accepting help to get better, transcribing and processing interviews and forming a narrative, processing as we craft, making stories accessible to a wide audience, the moments that change everything when we least expect it, and her new memoir HELD TOGETHER: A SHARED MEMOIR OF MOTHERHOOD, MEDICINE, AND IMPERFECT LOVE.   Info/Registration for Ronit's 10-Week Memoir Class Memoir Writing: Finding Your Story https://www.pce.uw.edu/courses/memoir-writing-finding-your-story   Also in this episode: -accepting help to get better -portraying others in a positive light -Getting consent from book contributors   Books mentioned in this episode: How to Tell a Story from The Moth  Before and After the Book Deal by Courtney Maum If You Want to See a Whale by Julie Fogliano   Rebecca N. Thompson, MD, is a family medicine and public health physician from Portland, Oregon, who specializes in women's and children's health—and the author of HELD TOGETHER: A SHARED MEMOIR OF MOTHERHOOD, MEDICINE, AND IMPERFECT LOVE, published with HarperCollins in Spring 2025. In this innovative book, Dr. Thompson intertwines her personal story of life-threatening pregnancy complications with the stories of twenty-one of her patients, friends, and medical colleagues.   Through profoundly honest first-person narratives created primarily from spoken interviews, Held Together offers a space for connection, bringing comfort and solidarity to anyone touched by challenges in building or sustaining families. At its heart, this collaborative project celebrates the extraordinary moments in the lives of ordinary women, as they navigate the complexities of motherhood, family dynamics, and health and healing across generations.   Connect with Rebecca: www.rebeccanthompson.com – Ronit's writing has appeared in The Atlantic, The Rumpus, The New York Times, Poets & Writers, The Iowa Review, Hippocampus, The Washington Post, Writer's Digest, American Literary Review, and elsewhere. Her memoir WHEN SHE COMES BACK about the loss of her mother to the guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh and their eventual reconciliation was named Finalist in the 2021 Housatonic Awards Awards, the 2021 Indie Excellence Awards, and was a 2021 Book Riot Best True Crime Book. Her short story collection HOME IS A MADE-UP PLACE won Hidden River Arts' 2020 Eludia Award and the 2023 Page Turner Awards for Short Stories.  She earned an MFA in Nonfiction Writing at Pacific University, is Creative Nonfiction Editor at The Citron Review, and teaches memoir through the University of Washington's Online Continuum Program and also independently. She launched Let's Talk Memoir in 2022, lives in Seattle with her family of people and dogs, and is at work on her next book. More about Ronit: https://ronitplank.com Subscribe to Ronit's Substack: https://substack.com/@ronitplank Follow Ronit: https://www.instagram.com/ronitplank/ https://www.facebook.com/RonitPlank https://bsky.app/profile/ronitplank.bsky.social

Host: Haley Van Camp Guest: Melody Jones Air date: Feb 23, 2026

This week on The Conversation, I'm thrilled to welcome the dynamic duo, Jo Dinkin and Catherine Brinkworth, also known as J.D. Brinkworth, the creative minds behind the delightful new cosy mystery, The Pie and Mash Detective Agency. Join us as we explore their unique writing partnership and the intricate process of bringing their characters to life.In our chat, Jo and Catherine share insights into their collaborative writing journey, discussing how they navigate the challenges of co-authoring while maintaining a unified voice. We dive into the importance of plotting, their approach to character development, and the joys of writing a cozy mystery set against the charming backdrop of Kent.We also touch on their experiences with the publishing process, the thrill of seeing their book come to life, and the role of humour in their storytelling. Plus, get ready for some fun anecdotes about their research adventures, including a murder mystery weekend that inspired their book!Don't miss this engaging conversation filled with laughter, writing tips, and a peek into the world of cozy crime. Jo and Catherine's chemistry and passion for storytelling are sure to inspire aspiring writers and mystery lovers alike!Follow JD BrinkworthBuy The Pie and Mash Detective AgencySupport the podcast - Buy me a cup of coffee ☕️.Buy books by my guests Bookshop.orgFollow MeBluesky | Substack | Instagram | Facebook | Threads Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode of the Game Deflators podcast, hosts John and Ryan discuss their recent game pickups, including horror titles and RPGs, and share insights on the gaming industry, including Sony's monetization strategies and the closure of Bluepoint Games. They also review Michael Jackson's Moonwalker, highlighting its gameplay and nostalgic value, while addressing broader industry trends and controversies in fast news segments. 00:00 Introduction to the Game Deflators Podcast 01:27 Recent Game Pickups and Discussions 06:00 Current Gameplay Experiences 10:12 Fast News and Industry Insights 24:53 The Necessity of Mini Games in Storytelling 27:50 Monetization Strategies for PS5 33:00 The Closure of Bluepoint Games 38:42 Michael Jackson's Moonwalker: A Retro Review   Find us on TheGameDeflators.com Twitter - www.twitter.com/GameDeflators Facebook - www.facebook.com/TheGameDeflators Instagram - www.instagram.com/thegamedeflators   The views and opinions expressed on this channel are solely those of the author. The content within these recordings are property of their respective Designers, Writers, Creators, Owners, Organizations, Companies and Producers. Copyright Disclaimer Under Section 107 of the Copyright Act 1976, allowance is made for "fair use" for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research. Fair use is a use permitted. Permission for intro and outro music provided by Matthew Huffaker http://www.youtube.com/user/teknoaxe 2_25_18

Bret Anthony Johnston is the internationally bestselling author of the novels We Burn Daylight and Remember Me Like This, as well as the award-winning story collection Corpus Christi. He edited the craft book, Naming the World: And Other Exercises for the Creative Writer. His work has been widely translated and appears in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Esquire, The Paris Review, The Best American Short Stories, and elsewhere. After directing the creative writing program at Harvard University for over a decade, he is now the Director of the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas at Austin. He joins Marrie Stone to talk about his latest story collection, Encounters with Unexpected Animals. These 12 pieces are masterclasses on managing time in short fiction, showing what dialogue can do, bringing setting to life, playing with POV (including 2nd person), and arranging a collection to read like an album. They discuss it all. For more information on Writers on Writing and to become a supporter, visit our Patreon page. For a one-time donation, visit Ko-fi. You can help out the show and indie bookstores by buying books at our bookstore on bookshop.org. It's stocked with titles by our guest authors, as well as our personal favorites. And on Spotify, you'll find an album's worth of typewriter music like what you hear on the show. It's perfect for writing. Look for the artist, Just My Type. You can find hundreds of past interviews on our website. (Recorded February 11, 2026) Host: Barbara DeMarco-Barrett Host: Marrie Stone Music: Travis Barrett (Stream his music on Spotify, Apple Music, Etc.)

James Peterson, writer, educator and host of “Evening WURDS” on WURD (900 AM and 96.1 FM) in Philadelphia, discusses the legacy of Rev. Jesse Jackson, the Supreme Court's decision on tariffs and other trending political topics.Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/tavis-smiley--6286410/support.

Today in the interrogation chair, it's Patrick "Sarge" O'Donnell, host of the Cops & Writers podcast and author of several books including, POLICE STORIES (The Rookie Years), and THE GOOD COLLAR. Join me as Sarge and I trade some fun cop stories, discuss what it's like going into writing from law enforcement, and how nice Jack Carr is in person. copsandwriters.com | thewritersdossier.com | Voice credit: Hilary Huber Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/copsandwriters/ | YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@patrickodonnell7928 

Today was one of the more fun Free For All Friday sessions we did. We hope it was okay that we went for so long. We started the show talking about all kinds of fun things. We wanted to announce to all you listeners that if you’d like, you can join our tribe of contributing […] The post Announcing The Squatty Potty Winner, Now Accepting Contributing Writers, Recent Dreams, Show Recaps, Listener Questions & Much More! appeared first on Extreme Health Radio.

Original Release Date: Monday 23 February 2026    Description:   After discussing the latest news regarding Netflix, their attempts to purchase Warner Bros, and what the current President of the U.S.A. is demanding they do, Dean and Phil talk about more of the intriguing movies coming out in 2026 (including period pieces, biopics, and crime films). Hollywood still hasn't recovered from the dual strikes of a few years back, and with the negotiations for new contracts upcoming, the Writers Guild seems to be imploding. Dean and Phil analyze the latest labor strife. The recent movie Anaconda gets reviewed, and the French classic Amelie gets re-appraised in time for its 25th anniversary. In the return of “What We're Reading” the latest by Dan Brown and a work of historical fiction about legendary filmmaker G.W. Pabst get discussed. Finally the murders of two groundbreaking physicists has Phil troubled, so he asks Dean about whether the deaths might be part of a conspiracy. And speaking of conspiracy, Dean and Phil conclude with the latest news surrounding Ryan Coogler's reboot of “The X-Files”.

Writer and director Morgan Cooper on turning a self-funded Bel-Air short into a series, building creative audacity before opportunity arrives, and staying resourceful across drafts, collaboration, and a children's picture book.You'll learn:Why “imperfect action” can be a practical antidote to creative paralysis, especially early in your craft.How he found a compelling dramatic lens by stripping away sitcom expectations and focusing on character archetypes and real-world stakes.What it can look like to invest commercial income back into self-initiated work to build a body of proof.Why “waiting for permission” often hides fear, and how starting anyway can change what's possible.Why the “angle” of your idea matters, and how recalibrating it can be the difference between a draft that stalls and a draft that lands.How identifying the “big question” of a story can give your scenes direction and your revisions momentum.Simple ways to keep the creative channel open using a notes app, project scrap bins, and a journaling method that functions like index cards.How collaboration becomes part of the craft when you treat writing as iterative perspective-building, not a solitary performance.What writing a picture book can teach about economy, structure, and building an arc inside tight page limits.How designing a kid-led mission around resourcefulness can create momentum and emotional payoff in short form.Resources & Links:

Send a textWelcome everyone as we travel to the city of brotherly love and Rocky, Philadelphia. Today on the show, we have former Philadelphia warrant squad member Tristin Kilgallon.  Tristin grew up in Philadelphia and started his career in law enforcement with the city's Warrant Unit, tracking fugitives and working the tough streets of Philly. Tristin later moved to Ohio to attend law school, earning a JD and LLM. Tristin went on to teach pre-law and criminal justice for more than a decade before joining LexisNexis, where he now works in the legal tech industry, helping law firms adopt AI-driven tools. He's also the co-author of Philly Warrant Unit, a true-crime memoir about his time working fugitive apprehension in Philadelphia.Please enjoy this fun interview about a unique and small crime-fighting unit that had a large impact on crime, which no longer exists. In today's episode, we discuss:·      Growing up in the rough part of Philly. ·      Where and how Tristin got interested in law enforcement.·      What led him to the Philly Warrant Unit, and why he didn't pursue a career with the Philly Police.·      Did his investigations ever conflict with the local PD, state, or feds?·      How they picked which warrants to execute. ·      Knock vs. No-Knock Warrants.·      The difference between a search/arrest warrant.·      The prostitute calling the police on herself.·      Meeting Sylvester Stallone.·      Why he went into a teaching career.All of this and more on today's episode of the Cops and Writers podcast.Check out the Philly Warrant Unit Facebook page. Visit the Cops & Writers Website!Check out my newest book! Police Stories: The Rookie Years - True Crime, Chaos & Life as a Big City Cop!Support the show

In this bonus episode of the Growing for Market Podcast, we hear from long-time GFM writer, farmer and Minneapolis resident Sam Oschwald Tilton about how immigration enforcement is playing out in Minneapolis. In an industry with an estimated 40% of workers undocumented, the way immigration laws are enforced probably has a bigger impact on farming than any other industry. Many farmworkers with legal status- for example those on H-2A, refugee, asylum or H-2B visas- have been detained in the current immigration enforcement.  The fact that even documented workers are being detained is disrupting both farms and families as workers wonder if their documentation can be relied upon and farm employers wonder if their employees will show up for work. We connected two articles from Growing for Market Magazine about the H-2A visa process below as both a resource for farmers and an example for how the expansion of the guestworker program could provide a framework for foreign-born workers to legally meet the demand for farmworkers in the United States.  Related articles: Article: Demystifying the H-2A program from Growing for Market Magazine Article: Navigating the H-2A guestworker visa program from Growing for Market Magazine

J.S. Park is a hospital chaplain, published author, and online educator. For ten years he has been an interfaith chaplain at a 1000+ bed hospital that is designated a Level 1 Trauma Center. His role includes grief support, attending every death, trauma, and Code Blue, and end-of-life care. J.S. has been interviewed by CNN, CBS News, Good Morning America, The Today Show, Bay News 9, and FOX13 Tampa Bay, among others, for his work in death and dying. He is the author of As Long as You Need: Permission to Grieve, and an upcoming book on contending with our family-of-origin and family dynamics.J.S. InstagramLeah Instagram

My discussion with Rebecca Rego Barry for The Overlook, the online nonprofit news outlet serving the Catskills communities of Hunter, Hurley, Olive, Saugerties, Shandaken, and Woodstock. Rebecca has had an exceptional literary journey as a book historian, a library preservationist and archivist, a magazine editor, bibliophile and publisher, as well as the author of hundreds of articles, essays, book reviews, two books, and a chapter in another. Rebecca, who was introduced to me by my friend Beth Waterman of the Phoenicia Library, lives in Chichester, a hamlet of Shandaken, with her husband Brett Barry, the host of the popular Catskills' podcast “Kaatscast.” The couple recently became part owners of Catskills book publisher, the Purple Mountain Press. In our discussion, Rebecca observed “I literally think of nothing else but books all the time.” We discussed Rebecca's books, Rare Books Uncovered, and The Vanishing of Carolyn Wells, Investigations into a Forgotten Mystery Author, Rebecca's writing process (‘bird by bird”) and routine, the challenges of writing and publishing, the books she's currently reading, including with her local book club, and finally the Purple Mountain Press. A condensed and edited version of our discussion was published in The Overlook.The complete transcript of our discussion can be found on my website, Bookworms In the Wild.(Photo credit: Dion Ogust)

S. M. STIRLING Author - Biography Steven “S.M.” Stirling is a writer by trade, born in France but Canadian by origin and American by naturalization, living in New Mexico. His hobbies are mostly related to the craft of writing. He loves history, anthropology, and archaeology, as well as interest in the sciences. Steven has published over 40 novels, at least 5 of which are New York Times bestsellers and he has won awards including the Dragon Award for his novel, Black Chamber. Steven has been a Writers of the Future Judge since 2021. “In a time in which entry for new creators is desperately difficult, WOTF is a path for identifying and nurturing excellence and giving it that first precious leg up. I received generous help and mentoring from established pros when I started out, and being a WOTF judge lets me ‘pay it forward' to the rising generation in a way that truly helps new writers and the field as a whole.” —S.M. Stirling Find out more at: SMStirling.com Jen Finelli, MD becominghero.byjenfinelli.com *Funding jungle medicines and orphanages using books: imaginary heroes create IRL ones *GOD OF MURDER is out now! Fantasy adventurers find themselves in a scifi world when they discover the gods they've worshipped are mecha-powered frauds - and they'll need a different kind of magic to take them down. *Read the NEODYMIUM CHRONICLES for sweeping space opera where freedom fighters Contaminated by an otherworldly interdimensional energy being refuse to be cured.

One of the unmistakable throughlines of the second Trump administration is how it's overhauling policies that directly affect African Americans, most notably by targeting programs and initiatives that promote diversity, equity, and inclusion, or DEI. For journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, it's an attempt to take the country back to an era before the civil rights movement. “A lot of folks are saying, you know, that this administration is rolling back the '60s, but I'm like, he—this administration's actually going back further than that.” The administration is also removing references to Black history from the nation's museums, parks, and schools. When history itself is being erased at the highest levels, who's left to tell us where we've been and where we're headed? This week on Reveal, as part of Black History Month, we're bringing you conversations from our sister podcast, More To The Story, with three prominent Black writers who are fighting to tell a more inclusive American story. Support Reveal's journalism at Revealnews.org/donatenow Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to get the scoop on new episodes at Revealnews.org/weekly Connect with us onBluesky, Facebook and Instagram Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Charlotte and Jo revisit Rebecca Novack's Murder Bimbo before taking a quick tour of the Russian Civil War and comrade crushes through Nikolai Ostrovsky's How The Steel Was Tempered. They're then joined by the scintillating Brittany Newell, who meditates on contemporary fiction, cities at night, and Samuel R. Delany's indelible Times Square Red, Times Square Blue. Also discussed in this episode: Emma Cline's The Guest and Vincenzo Latronico's Perfection.Brittany Newell is a writer and performer living in San Francisco. Her debut novel Oola was published in 2017 at the age of 21 in the US, UK, and Germany. You can find her written work in Granta, n+1, McSweeney's, The New York Times, and others. Her second novel Soft Core was published by FSG in February 2025 in the US, UK, and France. She is at work on a third novel about love addiction, emotional vampires, and cannibalism. Please consider supporting our work on Patreon, where you can access additional materials and send us your guest (and book!) coverage requests. Questions and kind comments can be directed to readingwriterspod at gmail dot com.Charlotte Shane's most recent book is An Honest Woman. Her essay newsletter, Meant For You, can be subscribed to or read online for free. Her social media handle is @charoshane.  Jo Livingstone is a writer who teaches at Pratt Institute. To support the show, navigate to https://www.patreon.com/ReadingWritersAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Free Video Tutorial for ScreenwritingWhat happens when a storyteller decides the conclusion before the story has earned it?In this episode of The Storyteller's Mission, Zena Dell Lowe explores the subtle moment when storytelling shifts from truth-seeking to narrative control. Many well-intentioned writers don't set out to create propaganda—but when a message matters more than reality, story becomes an instrument of persuasion instead of investigation.Using examples from The Dark Knight and a manuscript case study, this episode examines:The difference between moral clarity and moral coercionWhy forcing a moral weakens your storyHow propaganda enters narrative craftWhy antagonists must make sense to themselvesThe five commitments of truthful storytellingIf you are a novelist, screenwriter, playwright, or serious storyteller wrestling with theme, message, and responsibility in your work, this conversation will challenge and strengthen your approach to character, conflict, and narrative integrity.Story is powerful. And power requires restraint.

With over three million books published a year, how do you get your voice heard above the din of everyone else? Discovery remains one of the greatest challenges for both new and established writers. Whether it's delivering your reader magnet, sending out advanced copies of your book, handing out eBooks at a conference, or fulfilling your digital sales to readers, BookFunnel does it all. They are in the business of building author careers, no matter where an author is on their journey. Damon Courtney, creator of BookFunnel, discusses why it was built and how it has been used globally to help build successful author careers.

Tom Rosenbauer, longtime Orvis employee, writer, and host of the Orvis Fly Fishing Podcast, joins Reid for a wide-ranging conversation about his nearly 50 years with the company. They talk about the early days at Orvis, the great outdoor writers who shaped the culture around Manchester, Vermont, and how a lifelong fly fisherman found his way, occasionally, behind a shotgun. Along the way Tom shares stories, history, and a perspective on the outdoors that few people still carry.

“The meaning of the river flowing is not that all things are changing so that we cannot encounter them twice but that some things stay the same only by changing” - Heraclitus, The Cosmic FragmentsToday is just some musing over art, philosophy and life while I get started on my projects for the year. Be prepared for many tangents and a casual monologue on life and Italy. As always, a beautiful stream to float down. Every book and side note is in the show notes or you can read the transcript too. Michelle xMichelleJohnston.life for the ShownotesA Writer in Italy InstagramSubstack - At My TableMichelle's BooksMusical Scores by Richard Johnston© 2026  A Writer In Italy - travel, books, art and lifeMusic Composed by Richard Johnston © 2026Support the show

This week we continue shining a light on the lesser known elite secret society that's possibly running the world...under astrological signs. Want more? Join the Frightday Society, at http://thefrightdaysociety.org   The conversation delves into the enigmatic Zodiac Group, a secret society with historical ties to influential figures like Robert Maxwell and connections to the Epstein scandal. The discussion explores the group's origins, its members, and its potential involvement in UFO research, as well as the interplay between wealth, power, and intelligence. The hosts also touch on the legacy of figures like Tesla and JP Morgan, and how these connections shape our understanding of modern conspiracies.   As a Society Member, you'll have access to all Screamium content (Behind the Screams, It's Been a Weird Week, A Conversation With..., Toast to Toast PM with Wine Kelly, Cinema Autopsy, the Writers' Room, bonus episodes of Captain Kelly's Cryptids & Conspiracies, Byron's Serial Corner, and so much more! You'll also be part of our interactive community dedicated to the advancement of horror, hauntings, cryptids, conspiracies, aliens, and true crime. All things frightening. Keep our mini-fridges full of blood...I mean...not blood...normal things that people drink...by going to http://shop.frightday.com Theme music by Yawns Produced by Byron McKoy Follow us in the shadows at the following places:  @byronmckoy @kellyfrightday @frightday This is an Audio Wool Original.   Zodiac Group, Epstein, secret societies, UFO research, Robert Maxwell, Tesla, JP Morgan, intelligence, finance, conspiracy theories, historical connections

EP 21 - Healing Through Creativity | Jacquese Armstrong | writer, poet, mental health advocateIn this powerful and profoundly moving episode, Nicole Thomas sits down with Jacquese Armstrong—a poet, writer, expressive arts facilitator, and mental health advocate—whose work weaves creativity with recovery, healing, and empowerment. From hearing voices to finding strength through poetry, Jacquese's journey is both extraordinary and inspiring.

A new season begins with a full house, a generous conversation, and stories grounded in land, memory, and care. Last fall at the Cambridge Public Library, Kahstoserakwathe moderated a sold-out evening with celebrated author and media creator David A. Robertson of Norway House Cree Nation. This was TAD's first episode recorded with a live audience.Together, they explored how land shapes emotional health, how identity unfolds through writing, and how family stories guide us across time.David is a two-time winner of the Governor General's Literary Award, recipient of the TD Canadian Children's Literature Award, and the Writers' Union of Canada Freedom to Read Award. In this conversation, he shares tender memories of his father, Dr. Donald Robertson, a pioneering educator whose influence continues to shape his work and life.We also speak about David's powerful six-part podcast Kiwew (S/he returns home), which became an unexpected and moving tribute to his father after he passed away during its creation. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

"Not every opportunity is equal, and you don't have to chase everything." ~Tim Minneci ISBW 22.2 What do you need to have when you're wrangling several pro writers? What can a writer expect from an assistant? Meet Tim Minneci, writer, podcaster, musician, and my assistant. (And Ursula's, and Kameron's.)  We discuss the challenges of being a writer, the importance of having an assistant, and the various tasks that come with supporting authors in their creative endeavors. Tim covers social media, the publishing industry, and the balance between creativity and administrative work.  (This post went live for supporters on February 16, 2026. If you want early, ad-free, and sometimes expanded episodes, support at Patreon!) Links Tim Minneci and his Dig Me Out podcast Evergreen Links Like the podcast? Get the book! I Should Be Writing. Socials: Bluesky, Instagram, YouTube, Focusmate Theme by John Anealio Support local book stores! Station Eternity, Six Wakes, Solo: A Star Wars Story: Expanded Edition and more! OR Get signed books from my friendly local store, Flyleaf Books! — Some of the links above may be affiliate, allowing you to support the show at no extra cost to you. You can also support by leaving a Spotify or Apple review! CREDITS Theme song by John Anealio, art by Numbers Ninja, and files hosted by Libsyn. Get archives of the show via Patreon. February 18, 2026 | ISBW 22.2 | murverse.com "The Art of Juggling Writers (as an assistant)" by Mur Lafferty is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 In case it wasn't clear: Mur and this podcast are fully supportive of LGBTQ+ folks, believe that Black Lives Matter, and trans rights are human rights, despite which direction the political winds blow. If you do not agree, then there are plenty of other places to go on the Internet.

This archival episode (2015) is dedicated to Bobby Hart, one of the most iconic songwriters and record producers of our time who passed away this week. Along with his partner Tommy Boyce, their music has sold over 40 million records. Best known for writing and producing the many number one hits of the legendary Monkees, our conversation about his book, “Psychedelic Bubble Gum,” gives us more to chew on than you could ever imagine. The heavens are rocking now and you will be forever missed on this planet. mosaic: Exploring Jewish Issuesmosaic is Jewish Federation of Palm Beach County's news magazine show, exploring Jewish...Listen on: Apple Podcasts SpotifySupport the show

Noah has a conversation with author Cynthia Beach about gender justice, abuse & trauma, and writing serious fiction. Cynthia talks about what led her to weave these important issues into her novel The Surface of Water, and how our stories can bring about change and transformation in ways standard approaches can't.    Cynthia Beach authored The Surface of Water: A Novel (IVP, 2024) and a writing book, Creative Juices for Writers, 2nd edition. She was a longtime professor of English and Creative Writing and now serves as an Artist in Residence in Scotland. She co-founded and offers Scriptoria Workshop with Newbery winner Gary D. Schmidt. Her sequel, A Thousand Wings of Light, is forthcoming. (See CynthiaBeach.com)   You can also watch this episode on YouTube: https://youtu.be/deGP0XDbj98   Flip Side Notes: Join an upcoming Beyond the Battle online group at www.beyondthebattle.net   Support Flip Side sponsor Angry Brew by using promo code FLIP at angrybrew.com or fivelakes.com to pick up some Angry Brew or Chris' Blend coffee at 10% off.   Get a free month of Covenant Eyes at www.covenanteyes.com using promo code BEYOND   Get a free month of Accountable2You keyword accountability: a2u.app/beyond (do not use “www”)   Your recurring gifts make Noah's ministry & The Flip Side possible. Get some sweet swag by becoming a patron at www.patreon.com/noahfilipiak – includes exclusive access to Noah's episode commentary, interaction, and email access. (Not tax-deductible)  Tax-deductible recurring gifts can be given at www.noahfilipiak.com/give.      Purchase Beyond the Battle and Needed Navigation by Noah Filipiak.

My guest today is Carla Kaplan, the author of Troublemaker: The Fierce, Unruly Life of Jessica Mitford (Harper, 2025). In Troublemaker, Kaplan tells the wild and unlikely story of Jessica Mitford, fifth of the six famous Mitford Girls, a British aristocrat-turned-American Communist, famous for exposés like The American Way of Death. This biography brings her astonishing self-transformation to life with a riveting, often hilarious account of trading wealth and status for a life of radical activism. Jessica Mitford, always known as Decca, was brought up by an eccentric English family to marry well and reproduce her wealth and privilege, not to advocate for the rights of others. Decca ran away to America to forge a rebel's life. As this richly researched book details, Decca broke the Mitford mold. Instead of settling for life as a professional Beauty, she fought fascism in the Spanish Civil War, became an American Communist and pioneered witty, hugely popular journalism, including her 1963 blockbuster The American Way of Death. Decca dedicated her life to social justice and proved herself an immensely effective ally, but she also injected laughter into all her political work, annoying some activists with her relentless antics but encouraging many others to find joy in the struggle. Mining extensive, untapped sources, and with nearly fifty new interviews, Kaplan's passionate biography beautifully illuminates how Decca's hard-won and self-taught social empathy offers a powerful example of female freedom, the dramatic, novelistic story of an extraordinary woman of her time who is remarkably relevant and resonant today. Carla Kaplan is an award-winning professor and writer who holds the Stanton W. and Elisabeth K. Davis Distinguished Professorship in American Literature at Northeastern University. She has published seven books, including Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters and Miss Anne in Harlem: The White Women of the Black Renaissance, both New York Times Notable Books. A recipient of Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Humanities “Public Scholar” fellowships, Kaplan has been a fellow in residence at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and the W. E. B. Du Bois Research Institute; is a fellow of the Society of American Historians; and serves on the board of Biographers International. She divides her time between Boston and Cape Cod. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

Bees, and After by John Liles by Poets & Writers

True Mistakes by Lena Moses-Schmitt by Poets & Writers

Mele by Kalehua Kim by Poets & Writers

A Love Tap by Bernardo Wade by Poets & Writers

Reality Checkmate by Daniel Ruiz by Poets & Writers

The Museum of Unnatural Histories by Annie Wenstrup by Poets & Writers

Beyond the Watershed by Nadia Alexis by Poets & Writers

Cold Thief Place by Esther Lin by Poets & Writers

Second Nature by Chaun Ballard by Poets & Writers

Death Does Not End at the Sea by Gbenga Adesina by Poets & Writers

Welcome back to another episode of The Writing Community Chat Show, recently ranked number 3 in the top 10 writing podcasts in the UK for 2025. In this special “eve of Valentine's Day” edition, hosts Chris and the team dive into the messy, complicated, and wonderful world of intimacy with the internationally recognized sexologist and best-selling author, Dr. Trina Read. Trina Read With over 25 years of experience helping people navigate the world of pleasure, Dr. Read joined us to talk about her journey from a syndicated sex columnist to a pioneer of the “self-help fiction” genre. Her latest novel, The Taboo Show, is set to challenge perceptions and make us laugh while rethinking what we know about pleasure.Trina answers the questions we want to know. How much sex in a relationship is normal? What should couples do after 10 years of marriage, and much more. Plus, listen to CJ reading Chris Hooley some ai generated suggested sext texts. From Non-Fiction to “Self-Help Fiction”Dr. Read's transition into fiction was born from a desire to reach women who might find traditional non-fiction a “slog”. After the success of her bestseller Till Sex Do Us Part, she developed a five-step program that she eventually wove into the lives of four fictional characters in The Sex Course.Her new book, The Taboo Show, continues the journey of these four women as they explore the “Taboo Sex Show”—a trade show experience Dr. Read knows well from her years as a mainstage speaker. From tantric skepticism to “Wiccan sex magic,” the story uses relatable characters to demystify complex topics.Expert Advice for Writers and Couples.One of the most enlightening parts of the episode was Dr. Read's advice on the craft of writing intimacy. She admits that writing sex scenes is “incredibly difficult” and requires a delicate balance. Her top tip? Edit out the “darlings.” To keep fiction engaging, she often removes up to 80% of the educational content to focus on the character's emotional reaction rather than the instruction itself.Advice for couples at every stage:* New Couples: Slow down and enjoy the courtship; don't rush the buildup.* The 6-Month Mark: This is when bad habits form. Start having conversations now before the “newness” wears off.* The 10-Year Veterans: Focus on “erotic threads” outside the bedroom—small acts of kindness and desire throughout the day to help bridge the “delayed sexual response”.Demystifying the “Taboo.”Dr. Read also breaks down the common misconceptions around Tantra, describing it simply as an exchange of energy and a way to build pleasure through connection. She encourages couples to lean into the awkwardness of talking about sex, noting that most people can share their bodies for decades but still struggle to share their words.Final Thoughts & Pre-Order Info.Whether you're looking to spice up your Valentine's weekend or looking for tips on writing authentic, “classy” intimacy in your next novel, this episode is a must-watch.Dr. Trina Read's new novel, The Taboo Show, is available for pre-order now and officially launches on February 28th. Visit her website at trinaread.com for pre-order bundles and free educational resources..Watch the full episode here: Enjoying the show? Subscribe to our Substack for more interviews with NYT best-sellers, celebrities, and indie authors. Together as one, we get it done! This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thewccs.substack.com/subscribeBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-writing-community-chat-show--5445493/support.

Blair Glaser joins Let's Talk Memoir for a conversation about her time on a Catskills ashram during her twenties in the 1990s, yearning and the thrilling and perilous idolization of other human beings, spiritual development, group think, revisiting our experiences with curiosity and excitement, navigating writing about others, pitching agents and digesting their feedback, writing in scene in a sustained way, growing thematically, digging deeper, allowing the unconscious to inform our writing process, being the stewards of our stories, and her new memoir This Incredible Longing:Finding My Self in a Near Cult Experience. Info/Registration for Ronit's 10-Week Memoir Class Memoir Writing: Finding Your Story https://www.pce.uw.edu/courses/memoir-writing-finding-your-story   Also in this episode: -composite characters -working with smaller presses -our foundational, formative experiences Books mentioned in this episode: -Permission by Elissa Altman -Seven Drafts by Allison K. Williams -Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg   Blair Glaser, MA, is a writer, speaker, leadership consultant and licensed psychotherapist who helps create collaborative cultures and increase bottom lines across sectors including finance, law, healthcare, entertainment, and nonprofits. She has run a variety of workshops at renowned retreat centers, including Women Writing to Change the World. After working for six years for V's (formerly Eve Ensler) nonprofit V-Day, a movement to stop violence against women and girls, she developed and facilitated The Vagina Monologues Workshop, a creative approach to sexual empowerment for women, and later worked with actor-activist Jane Fonda on an empowerment workshop for teenage girls.    Glaser earned her B.S. in theater at Northwestern University and received her master's in Drama Therapy from Vermont College and The Institutes for the Arts in Psychotherapy, where she eventually served as a senior faculty member.  She was a New York-licensed creative arts therapist from 1998 to 2022, when she left therapy to work full-time with leaders and organizations. Glaser was the first ever online actor-advice columnist when her weekly column “Ask Blair” appeared on Playbill On-Line.    More recently, her work has been published in the Los Angeles Times, Longreads, Quartz, The Muse, HuffPost, Shondaland and literary publications such as Dorothy Parker's Ashes, Brevity, and the Mantlepiece. Her new memoir is This Incredible Longing:Finding My Self in a Near Cult Experience.   Connect with Blair: Website: www.blairglaser.com LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/blairglaser/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/blair.glaser Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/blair_glaser/ Substack: https://thehistack.substack.com/ Books: www.blairglaser.com/books Events: www.blairglaser.com/events   – Ronit's writing has appeared in The Atlantic, The Rumpus, The New York Times, Poets & Writers, The Iowa Review, Hippocampus, The Washington Post, Writer's Digest, American Literary Review, and elsewhere. Her memoir WHEN SHE COMES BACK about the loss of her mother to the guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh and their eventual reconciliation was named Finalist in the 2021 Housatonic Awards Awards, the 2021 Indie Excellence Awards, and was a 2021 Book Riot Best True Crime Book. Her short story collection HOME IS A MADE-UP PLACE won Hidden River Arts' 2020 Eludia Award and the 2023 Page Turner Awards for Short Stories.  She earned an MFA in Nonfiction Writing at Pacific University, is Creative Nonfiction Editor at The Citron Review, and teaches memoir through the University of Washington's Online Continuum Program and also independently. She launched Let's Talk Memoir in 2022, lives in Seattle with her family of people and dogs, and is at work on her next book. More about Ronit: https://ronitplank.com Subscribe to Ronit's Substack: https://substack.com/@ronitplank Follow Ronit: https://www.instagram.com/ronitplank/ https://www.facebook.com/RonitPlank https://bsky.app/profile/ronitplank.bsky.social

How do you stay audacious in a world that's noisier and more saturated than ever? How might the idea of creative rhythm change the way you write? Lara Bianca Pilcher gives her tips from a multi-passionate creative career. In the intro, becoming a better writer by being a better reader [The Indy Author]; How indie authors can market literary fiction [Self-Publishing with ALLi]; Viktor Wynd's Museum of Curiosities; Seneca's On the Shortness of Life; All Men are Mortal – Simone de Beauvoir; Surface Detail — Iain M. Banks; Bones of the Deep – J.F. Penn. This episode is sponsored by Publisher Rocket, which will help you get your book in front of more Amazon readers so you can spend less time marketing and more time writing. I use Publisher Rocket for researching book titles, categories, and keywords — for new books and for updating my backlist. Check it out at www.PublisherRocket.com This show is also supported by my Patrons. Join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn Lara Bianca Pilcher is the author of Audacious Artistry: Reclaim Your Creative Identity and Thrive in a Saturated World. She's also a performing artist and actor, life and creativity coach, and the host of the Healthy Wealthy Wise Artist podcast. You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below. Show Notes Why self-doubt is a normal biological response — and how audacity means showing up anyway The difference between creative rhythm and rigid discipline, and why it matters for writers How to navigate a saturated world with intentional presence on social media Practical strategies for building a platform as a nonfiction author, including batch content creation The concept of a “parallel career” and why designing your life around your art beats waiting for a big break Getting your creative rhythm back after crisis or burnout through small, gentle steps You can find Lara at LaraBiancaPilcher.com. Transcript of the interview with Lara Bianca Pilcher Lara Bianca Pilcher is the author of Audacious Artistry: Reclaim Your Creative Identity and Thrive in a Saturated World. She's also a performing artist and actor, life and creativity coach, and the host of the Healthy Wealthy Wise Artist podcast. Welcome, Lara. Lara: Thank you for having me, Jo. Jo: It's exciting to talk to you today. First up— Tell us a bit more about you and how you got into writing. Lara: I'm going to call myself a greedy creative, because I started as a dancer, singer, and actress in musical theatre, which ultimately led me to London, the West End, and I was pursuing that in highly competitive performance circles. A lot of my future works come from that kind of place. But when I moved to America—which I did after my season in London and a little stint back in Australia, then to Atlanta, Georgia—I had a visa problem where I couldn't work legally, and it went on for about six months. Because I feel this urge to create, as so many of your listeners probably relate to, I was not okay with that. So that's actually where I started writing, in the quietness, with the limits and the restrictions. I've got two children and a husband, and they would go off to school and work and I'd be home thinking, ha. In that quietness, I just began to write. I love thinking of creativity as a mansion with many rooms, and you get to pick your rooms. I decided, okay, well the dance, acting, singing door is shut right now—I'm going to go into the writing room. So I did. Jo: I have had a few physical creatives on the show. Obviously one of your big rooms in your mansion is a physical room where you are actually performing and moving your body. I feel like this is something that those of us whose biggest area of creativity is writing really struggle with—the physical side. How do you think that physical practice of creativity has helped you in writing, which can be quite constrictive in that way? Lara: It's so good that you asked this because I feel what it trained me to do is ignore noise and show up. I don't like the word discipline—most of us get a bit uncomfortable with it, it's not a nice word. What being a dancer did was teach me the practice of what I like to call a rhythm, a creative rhythm, rather than a discipline, because rhythm ebbs and flows and works more with who we are as creatives, with the way creativity works in our body. That taught me: go to the barre over and over again—at the ballet barre, I'm talking about, not the pub. Go there over and over again. Warm up, do the work, show up when you don't feel like it. thaT naturally pivoted over to writing, so they're incredibly linked in the way that creativity works in our body. Jo: Do you find that you need to do physical practice still in order to get your creativity moving? I'm not a dancer. I do like to shake it around a bit, I guess. But I mainly walk. If I need to get my creativity going, I will walk. If people are stuck, do you think doing something physical is a good idea? Lara: It is, because the way that our body and our nervous system works—without going into too much boring science, although some people probably find it fascinating—is that when we shake off that lethargic feeling and we get blood flowing in our body, we naturally feel more awake. Often when you're walking or you're doing something like dance, your brain is not thinking about all of the big problems. You might be listening to music, taking in inspiration, taking in sunshine, taking in nature, getting those endorphins going, and that naturally leads to the brain being able to psychologically show up more as a creative. However, there are days, if I'm honest, where I wake up and the last thing I want to do is move. I want to be in a little blanket in the corner of the room with a hot cocoa or a coffee and just keep to myself. Those aren't always the most creative days, but sometimes I need that in my creative rhythm, and that's okay too. Jo: I agree. I don't like the word discipline, but as a dancer you certainly would've had to do that. I can't imagine how competitive it must be. I guess this is another thing about a career in dance or the physical arts. Does it age out? Is it really an ageist industry? Whereas I feel like with writing, it isn't so much about what your body can do anymore. Lara: That is true. There is a very real marketplace, a very real industry, and I'm careful because there's two sides to this coin. There is the fact that as we get older, our body has trouble keeping up at that level. There's more injuries, that sort of thing. There are some fit women performing in their sixties and seventies on Broadway that have been doing it for years, and they are fine. They'll probably say it's harder for some of them. Also, absolutely, I think there does feel in the professional sense like there can be a cap. A lot of casting in acting and in that world feels like there's fewer and fewer roles, particularly for women as we get older, but people are in that space all the time. There's a Broadway dancer I know who is 57, who's still trying to make it on Broadway and really open about that, and I think that's beautiful. So I'm careful with putting limits, because I think there are always outliers that step outside and go, “Hey, I'm not listening to that.” I think there's an audience for every age if you want there to be and you make the effort. But at the same time, yes, there is a reality in the industry. Totally. Jo: Obviously this show is not for dancers. I think it was more framing it as we are lucky in the writing industry, especially in the independent author community, because you can be any age. You can be writing on your deathbed. Most people don't have a clue what authors look like. Lara: I love that, actually. It's probably one of the reasons I maybe subconsciously went into writing, because I'm like, I want to still create and I'm getting older. It's fun. Jo: That's freeing. Lara: So freeing. It's a wonderful room in the mansion to stay in until the day I die, if I must put it that way. Jo: I also loved you mentioning that Broadway dancer. A lot of listeners write fiction—I write fiction as well as nonfiction—and it immediately makes me want to write her story. The story of a 57-year-old still trying to make it on Broadway. There's just so much in that story, and I feel like that's the other thing we can do: writing about the communities we come from, especially at different ages. Let's get into your book, Audacious Artistry. I want to start on this word audacity. You say audacity is the courage to take bold, intentional risks, even in the face of uncertainty. I read it and I was like, I love the sentiment, but I also know most authors are just full of self-doubt. Bold and audacious. These are difficult words. So what can you say to authors around those big words? Lara: Well, first of all, that self-doubt—a lot of us don't even know what it is in our body. We just feel it and go, ugh, and we read it as a lack of confidence. It's not that. It's actually natural. We all get it. What it is, is our body's natural ability to perceive threat and keep us safe. So we're like, oh, I don't know the outcome. Oh, I don't know if I'm going to get signed. Oh, I don't know if my work's going to matter. And we read that as self-doubt—”I don't have what it takes” and those sorts of things. That's where I say no. The reframe, as a coach, I would say, is that it's normal. Self-doubt is normal. Everyone has it. But audacity is saying, I have it, but I'm going to show up in the world anyway. There is this thing of believing, even in the doubt, that I have something to say. I like to think of it as a metaphor of a massive feasting table at Christmas, and there's heaps of different dishes. We get to bring a dish to the table rather than think we're going to bring the whole table. The audacity to say, “Hey, I have something to say and I'm going to put my dish on the table.” Jo: I feel like the “I have something to say” can also be really difficult for people, because, for example, you mentioned you have kids. Many people are like, I want to share this thing that happened to me with my kids, or a secret I learned, or a tip I think will help people. But there's so many people who've already done that before. When we feel like we have something to say but other people have said it before, how do you address that? Lara: I think everything I say, someone has already said, and I'm okay with that. But they haven't said it like me. They haven't said it in my exact way. They haven't written the sentence exactly the way—that's probably too narrow a point of view in terms of the sentence—maybe the story or the chapter. They haven't written it exactly like me, with my perspective, my point of view, my life experience, my lived experience. It matters. People have very short memories. You think of the last thing you watched on Netflix and most of us can't remember what happened. We'll watch the season again. So I think it's okay to be saying the same things as others, but recognise that the way you say it, your point of view, your stories, your metaphors, your incredible way of putting a sentence togethes, it still matters in that noise. Jo: I think you also talk in the book about rediscovering the joy of creation, as in you are doing it for you. One of the themes that I emphasise is the transformation that happens within you when you write a book. Forget all the people who might read it or not read it. Even just what transforms in you when you write is important enough to make it worthwhile. Lara: It really, really is. For me, talking about rediscovering the joy of creation is important because I've lost it at times in my career, both as a performing artist and as an author, in a different kind of way. When we get so caught up in the industry and the noise and the trends, it's easy to just feel overwhelmed. Overwhelm is made up of a lot of emotions like fear and sadness and grief and all sorts of things. A lot of us don't realise that that's what overwhelm is. When we start to go, “Hey, I'm losing my voice in all this noise because comparison is taking over and I'm feeling all that self-doubt,” it can feel just crazy. So for me, rediscovering the joy of creation is vital to survival as an author, as an artist. A classic example, if you don't mind me sharing my author story really quickly, is that when I first wrote the first version of my book, I was writing very much for me, not realising it. This is hindsight. My first version was a little more self-indulgent. I like to think of it like an arrowhead. I was trying to say too much. The concept was good enough that I got picked up by a literary agent and worked with an editor through that for an entire year. At the end of that time, they dropped me. I felt like, through that time, I learned a lot. It was wonderful. Their reason for dropping me was saying, “I don't think we have enough of a unique point of view to really sell this.” That was hard. I lay on my bed, stared at the ceiling, felt grief. The reality is it's so competitive. What happened for me in that year is that I was trying to please. If you're a new author, this is really important. You are so desperately trying to please the editor, trying to do all the right things, that you can easily lose your joy and your unique point of view because you are trying to show up for what you think they all need and want. What cut through the noise for me is I got off that bed after my three hours of grief—it was probably longer, to be fair—but I booked myself a writing coach. I went back to the drawing board. I threw a lot of the book away. I took some good concepts out that I already knew were good from the editor, then I rewrote the entire thing. It's completely different to the first version. That's the book that got a traditional publishing deal. That book was my unique point of view. That book was my belief, from that grief, that I still have something to say. Instead of trusting what the literary agent and the editor were giving me in those red marks all over that first version, I was like, this is what I want to say. That became the arrowhead that's cut into the industry, rather than the semi-trailer truck that I was trying to bulldoze in with no clear point of view. So rediscovering the joy of creation is very much about coming back to you. Why do I write? What do I want to say? That unique point of view will cut through the noise a lot of the time. I don't want to speak in absolutes, but a lot of the time it will cut through the noise better than you trying to please the industry. Jo: I can't remember who said it, but somebody talked about how you've got your stone, and your stone is rough and it has random colours and all this. Then you start polishing the stone, which you have to do to a point. But if you keep polishing the stone, it looks like every other stone. What's the point? That fits with what you were saying about trying to please everyone, you end up pleasing no one. I also think the reality of what you just said about the book is a lot of people's experience with writing in general. Certainly for me, I don't write in order. I chuck out a lot. I'm a discovery writer. People think you sit down and start A and finish Z, and that's it. It's kind of messy, isn't it? Was that the same in your physical creative life? Lara: Yes. Everything's a mess. In the book I actually talk about learning to embrace the cringe, because we all want to show up perfect. Just as you shared, we think, because we read perfect and look at perfect or near-perfect work—that's debatable all the time—we want to arrive there, and I guess that's natural. But what we don't often see on social media or other places is the mess. I love the behind the scenes of films. I want to see the messy creative process. The reality is we have to learn to embrace the messy cringe because that's completely normal. My first version was so messy, and it's about being able to refine it and recognise that that is normal. So yes, embrace it. That's my quote for the day. Embrace the cringe, show up messy. It's all right. Jo: You mentioned the social media, and the subtitle of the book mentions a “saturated world.” The other problem is there are millions of books out there now. AI is generating more content than humans do, and it is extremely hard to break through. How are we to deal with this saturated world? When do we join in and when do we step away? Lara: I think it's really important not to have black and white thinking about it, because trust me, every day I meet an artist that will say, “I hate that I have to show up online.” To be honest with you, there's a big part of me that does also. But the saturation of the world is something that I recognise, and for me, it's like I'm in the world but not of it. That saturation can cause so much overwhelm and nervous system threat and comparison. What I've personally decided to do is have intentional showing up. That looks like checking in intentionally with a design, not a randomness, and then checking out. When push comes to shove, at the end of the day, I really believe that what sells books is people's trust in us as a person. They might go through an airport and not know us at all and pick up the book because it's a bestseller and they just trust the reputation, but so much of what I'm finding as an artist is that personal relationship, that personal trust. Whether that's through people knowing you via your podcast or people meeting you in a room. Especially in nonfiction, I think that's really big. Intentional presence from a place where we've regulated ourselves, being aware that it's saturated, but my job's not to be focused on the saturation. My job is to find my unique voice and say I have something to bring. Be intentional with that. Shoot your arrow, and then step out of the noise, because it's just overwhelming if you choose to live there and scroll without any intentionality at all. Jo: So how do people do that intentionality in a practical way around, first of all, choosing a platform, and then secondly, how they create content and share content and engage? What are some actual practical tips for intentionality? Lara: I can only speak from my experience, but I'm going to be honest, every single application I sent asked for my platform stats. Every single one. Platform stats as in how many followers, how many people listening to your podcast, how many people are reading your blog. That came up in every single literary agent application. So I would be a fool today to say you've got to ignore that, because that's just the brass tacks, unless you're already like a famous footballer or something. Raising and building a platform of my own audience has been a part of why I was able to get a publishing deal. In doing that, I've learned a lot of hard lessons. Embrace the cringe with marketing and social media as well, because it's its own beast. Algorithms are not what I worry about. They're not going to do the creativity for you. What social media's great at is saying, “Hey, I'm here”—it's awareness. It's not where I sell stuff. It's where I say, I'm here, this is what I'm doing, and people become aware of me and I can build that relationship. People do sell through social media, but it's more about awareness statistically. I am on a lot of platforms, but not all of them work for every author or every style of book. I've done a lot of training. I've really had to upskill in this space and get good at it. I've put myself through courses because I feel like, yes, we can ignore it if we want to, but for me it's an intentional opting in because the data shows that it's been a big part of being able to get published. That's overwhelming to hear for some people. They don't want to hear that. But that's kind of the world that we are in, isn't it? Jo: I think the main point is that you can't do everything and you shouldn't even try to do everything. The best thing to do is pick a couple of things, or pick one thing, and focus on that. For example, I barely ever do video, so I definitely don't do TikTok. I don't do any kind of video stuff. But I have this podcast. Audio is my happy place, and as you said, long-form audio builds trust. That is one way you can sell, but it's also very slow—very, very slow to build an audio platform. Then I guess my main social media would be Instagram, but I don't engage a lot there. So do you have one or two main things that you do, and any thoughts on using those for book marketing? Lara: I do a lot of cross-posting. I am on Instagram and I do a lot of creation there, and I'm super intentional about this. I actually do 30 days at a time, and then it's like my intentional opt-in. I'll create over about two days, edit and plan. It's really, really planned—shoot everything, edit everything, put it all together, and then upload everything. That will be 30 days' worth. Then I back myself right out of there, because I don't want to stay in that space. I want to be in the creative space, but I do put those two days a month aside to do that on Instagram. Then I tweak things for YouTube and what works on LinkedIn, which is completely different to Instagram. As I'm designing my content, I have in mind that this one will go over here and this one can go on here, because different platforms push different things. I am on Threads, but Threads is not statistically where you sell books, it's just awareness. Pinterest I don't think has been very good for my type of work, to be honest. For others it might. It's a search engine, it's where people go to get a recipe. I don't necessarily feel like that's the best place, this is just my point of view. For someone else it might be brilliant if you're doing a cookbook or something like that. I am on a lot of platforms. My podcast, however, I feel is where I'm having the most success, and also my blog. Those things as a writer are very fulfilling. I've pushed growing a platform really hard, and I am on probably almost every platform except for TikTok, but I'm very intentional with each one. Jo: I guess the other thing is the business model. The fiction business model is very, very different to nonfiction. You've got a book, but your higher-cost and higher-value offerings are things that a certain number of people come through to you and pay you more money than the price of a book. Could talk about how the book leads into different parts of your business? Because some people are like, “Am I going to make a living wage from book sales of a nonfiction book?” And usually people have multiple streams of income. Lara: I think it's smart to have multiple streams of income. A lot of people, as you would know, would say that a book is a funnel. For those who haven't heard of it, a way that people come into your bigger offerings. They don't have to be, but very much I do see it that way. It's also credibility. When you have a published book, there's a sense of credibility. I do have other things. I have courses, I have coaching, I have a lot of things that I call my parallel career that chug alongside my artist work and actually help stabilise that freelance income. Having a book is brilliant for that. I think it's a wonderful way to get out there in the world. No matter what's happening in all the online stuff, when you're on an aeroplane, so often someone still wants to read a book. When you're on the beach, they don't want to be there with a laptop. If you're on the sand, you want to be reading a beautiful paper book. The smell of it, the visceral experience of it. Books aren't going anywhere, to me. I still feel like there are always going to be people that want to pick it up and dig in and learn so much of your entire life experience quickly. Jo: We all love books here. I think it's important, as you do talk about career design and you mentioned there the parallel career—I get a lot of questions from people. They may just be writing their first book and they want to get to the point of making money so they could leave their day job or whatever. But it takes time, doesn't it? So how can we be more strategic about this sort of career design? Lara: For me, this has been a big one because lived experience here is that I know artists in many different areas, whether they're Broadway performers or music artists. Some of them are on almost everything I watch on TV. I'm like, oh, they're that guy again. I know that actor is on almost everything. I'll apply this over to writers. The reality is that these high-end performers that I see all the time showing up, even on Broadway in lead roles, all have another thing that they do, because they can still have, even at the highest level, six months between a contract. Applying that over to writing is the same thing, in that books and the money from them will ebb and flow. What so often artists are taught—and authors fit into this—is that we ultimately want art to make us money. So often that becomes “may my art rescue me from this horrible life that I'm living,” and we don't design the life around the art. We hope, hope, hope that our art will provide. I think it's a beautiful hope and a valid one. Some people do get that. I'm all for hoping our art will be our main source of income. But the reality is for the majority of people, they have something else. What I see over and over again is these audacious dreams, which are wonderful, and everything pointing towards them in terms of work. But then I'll see the actor in Hollywood that has a café job and I'm like, how long are you going to just work at that café job? They're like, “Well, I'm goint to get a big break and then everything's going to change.” I think we can think the same way. My big break will come, I'll get the publishing deal, and then everything will change. The reframe in our thinking is: what if we looked at this differently? Instead of side hustle, fallback career, instead of “my day job,” we say parallel career. How do I design a life that supports my art? And if I get to live off my art, wonderful. For me, that's looked like teaching and directing musical theatre. It's looked like being able to coach other artists. It's looked like writing and being able to pivot my creativity in the seasons where I've needed to. All of that is still creativity and energising, and all of it feeds the great big passion I have to show up in the world as an artist. None of it is actually pulling me away or draining me. I mean, you have bad days, of course, but it's not draining my art. When we are in this way of thinking—one day, one day, one day—we are not designing intentionally. What does it look like to maybe upskill and train in something that would be more energising for my parallel career that will chug alongside us as an artist? We all hope our art can totally 100% provide for us, which is the dream and a wonderful dream, and one that I still have. Jo: It's hard, isn't it? Because I also think that, personally, I need a lot of input in order to create. I call myself more of a binge writer. I just finished the edits on my next novel and I worked really hard on that. Now I won't be writing fiction for, I don't know, maybe six months or something, because now I need to input for the next one. I have friends who will write 10,000 words a day because they don't need that. They have something internal, or they're just writing a different kind of book that doesn't need that. Your book is a result of years of experience, and you can't write another book like that every year. You just can't, because you don't have enough new stuff to put in a book like that every single year. I feel like that's the other thing. People don't anticipate the input time and the time it takes for the ideas to come together. It is not just the production of the book. Lara: That's completely true. It goes back to this metaphor that creativity in the body is not a machine, it's a rhythm. I like to say rhythm over consistency, which allows us to say, “Hey, I'm going to be all in.” I was all in on writing. I went into a vortex for days on end, weeks on end, months and probably years on end. But even within that, there were ebbs and flows of input versus “I can't go near it today.” Recognising that that's actually normal is fine. There are those people that are outliers, and they will be out of that box. A lot of people will push that as the only way. “I am going to write every morning at 10am regardless.” That can work for some people, and that's wonderful. For those of us who don't like that—and I'm one of those people, that's not me as an artist—I accept the rhythm of creativity and that sometimes I need to do something completely different to feed my soul. I'm a big believer that a lot of creative block is because we need an adventure. We need to go out and see some art. To do good art, you've got to see good art, read good art, get outside, do something else for the input so that we have the inspiration to get out of the block. I know a screenwriter who was writing a really hard scene of a daughter's death—her mum's death. It's not easy to just write that in your living room when you've never gone through it. So she took herself out—I mean, it sounds morbid, but as a writer you'll understand the visceral nature of this—and sat at somebody's tombstone that day and just let that inform her mind and her heart. She was able to write a really powerful scene because she got out of the house and allowed herself to do something different. All that to say that creativity, the natural process, is an in-and-out thing. It ebbs and flows as a rhythm. People are different, and that's fine. But it is a rhythm in the way it works scientifically in the body. Jo: On graveyards—we love graveyards around here. Lara: I was like, sorry everyone, this isn't very nice. Jo: Oh, no. People are well used to it on this show. Let's come back to rhythm. When you are in a good rhythm, or when your body's warmed up and you are in the flow and everything's great, that feels good. But what if some people listening have found their rhythm is broken in some way, or it's come to a stop? That can be a real problem, getting moving again if you stop for too long. What are some ways we can get that rhythm back into something that feels right again? Lara: First of all, for people going through that, it's because our body actually will prioritise survival when we're going through crisis or too much stress. Creativity in the brain will go, well, that's not in that survival nature. When we are going through change—like me moving countries—it would disconnect us a lot from not only ourselves and our sense of identity, but creativity ultimately reconnects you back into life. I feel like to be at our optimum creative self, once we get through the crisis and the stress, is to gently nudge ourselves back in by little micro things. Whether it's “I'm just going to have the rhythm of writing one sentence a day.” As we do that, those little baby steps build momentum and allow us to come back in. Creativity is a life force. It's not about production, it's actually how we get to any unique contribution we're going to bring to the world. As we start to nudge ourselves back in, there's healing in that and there's joy in that. Then momentum comes. I know momentum comes from those little steps, rather than the overwhelming “I've got to write a novel this week” mindset. It's not going to happen, most of the time, when we are nudging our way back in. Little baby steps, kindness with ourselves. Staying connected to yourself through change or through crisis is one of the kindest things we can offer ourselves, and allowing ourselves to come into that rhythm—like that musical song of coming back in with maybe one line of the song instead of the entire masterpiece, which hopefully it will be one day. Jo: I was also thinking of the dancing world again, and one thing that is very different with writers is that so much of what we do is alone. In a lot of the performance art space, there's a lot more collaboration and groups of people creating things together. Is that something you've kept hold of, this kind of collaborative energy? How do you think we can bring that collaborative energy more into writing? Lara: Writing is very much alone. Obviously some people, depending on the project, will write in groups, but generally speaking, it's alone. For me, what that looks like is going out. I do this, and I know for some writers this is like, I don't want to go and talk to people. There are a lot of introverts in writing, as you are aware. I do go to creative mixers. I do get out there. I'm planning right now my book launch with a local bookstore, one in Australia and one here in America. Those things are scary, but I know that it matters to say I'm not in this alone. I want to bring my friends in. I want to have others part of this journey. I want to say, hey, I did this. And of course, I want to sell books. That's important too. It's so easy to hide, because it's scary to get out there and be with others. Yet I know that after a creative mixer or a meetup with all different artists, no matter their discipline, I feel very energised by that. Writers will come, dancers will come, filmmakers will come. It's that creative force that really energises my work. Of course, you can always meet with other writers. There's one person I know that runs this thing where all they do is they all get on Zoom together and they all write. Their audio's off, but they're just writing. It's just the feeling of, we're all writing but we're doing it together. It's a discipline for them, but because there's a room of creatives all on Zoom, they're like, I'm here, I've showed up, there's others. There's a sense of accountability. I think that's beautiful. I personally don't want to work that way, but some people do, and I think that's gorgeous too. Jo: Whatever sustains you. I think one of the important things is to realise you are not alone. I get really confused when people say this now. They're like, “Writing's such a lonely life, how do you manage?” I'm like, it is so not lonely. Lara: Yes. Jo: I'm sure you do too. Especially as a podcaster, a lot of people want to have conversations. We are having a conversation today, so that fulfils my conversation quota for the day. Lara: Exactly. Real human connection. It matters. Jo: Exactly. So maybe there's a tip for people. I'm an introvert, so this actually does fulfil it. It's still one-on-one, it's still you and me one-on-one, which is good for introverts. But it's going out to a lot more people at some point who will listen in to our conversation. There are some ways to do this. It's really interesting hearing your thoughts. Tell people where they can find you and your books and your podcast online. Lara: The book is called Audacious Artistry: Reclaim Your Creative Identity and Thrive in a Saturated World, and it's everywhere. The easiest thing to do would be to visit my website, LaraBiancaPilcher.com/book, and you'll find all the links there. My podcast is called Healthy Wealthy Wise Artist, and it's on all the podcast platforms. I do short coaching for artists on a lot of the things we've been talking about today. Jo: Brilliant. Well, thanks so much for your time, Lara. That was great. Lara: Thank you.The post Audacious Artistry: Reclaiming Your Creative Identity And Thriving In A Saturated World With Lara Bianca Pilcher first appeared on The Creative Penn.

This week we welcome director/writer team Kevin and Matthew McManus on the show to talk about how they got into directing, directing their older sister Michaela in their films and how they got their latest film Redux Redux made. After that I'm going to share some thoughts on filmmaking based on this interview with the McManus Brothers and some of our other recent interviews, enjoy! Don't forget to support us on Patreon! www.patreon.com/mmihpodcast Leave us a Review on Apple Podcasts! https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/making-movies-is-hard-the-struggles-of-indie-filmmaking/id1006416952 Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

At last, the audio from December's Bookforum x Reading Writers live holiday event! The justly celebrated novelist Stephanie Wambugu joins Charlotte and Jo to talk about the controversial and inescapable Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico.Stephanie Wambugu is the author of the novel Lonely Crowds. Her work has appeared in The Drift, The Nation, Granta, Frieze, Bookforum. She lives and works in New York. Please consider supporting our work on Patreon, where you can access additional materials and send us your guest (and book!) coverage requests. Questions and kind comments can be directed to readingwriterspod at gmail dot com.Charlotte Shane's most recent book is An Honest Woman. Her essay newsletter, Meant For You, can be subscribed to or read online for free. Her social media handle is @charoshane.  Jo Livingstone is a writer who teaches at Pratt Institute.To support the show, navigate to https://www.patreon.com/ReadingWritersAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy