When science writer Elizabeth Preston had the chance to go from writing 3,000-word articles to an 80,000-word book, it scared and excited her. “It was really thrilling to say, okay, what’s the biggest swing I can take?” In this bonus episode, we talk with Elizabeth about human cognitive bias and how we devalue the things we achieve—and how to circumvent…

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“Sometimes I let the subconscious deal with it,” says science writer Elizabeth Preston, author of the new book The Creature’s Guide to Caring, How animal parents teach us that humans were born to care. In this interview, we talk about the evolution of a manuscript–how she went from the “Big Idea” to the actual book. Other threads include the importance of walking away, balancing parenting with a writing life, why humor helps, the invitation to be bold, and how the “gnomes in the back of my head” have helped Elizabeth solve structural problems with her creative projects.

Elizabeth Preston is a science journalist who contributes regularly to The New York Times and has written for Science, The Boston Globe, The Atlantic, Orion, Slate, Audubon, Discover, National Geographic, and others. She is a winner of the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s Kavli Science Journalism Gold Award. Preston is also a humor writer whose work has appeared in outlets such as McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Parents, and Real Simple, and was the editor of Muse, a magazine about science and ideas for kids. She lives in Massachusetts. Her new book is The Creature’s Guide to Caring: How animal parents teach us that humans were born to care

“Let the subconscious deal with it. .”—Elizabeth Preston, author of The Creature’s Guide to Caring

Preview: Emerging Form Episode 170 with Elizabeth Preston

How did we get here? That was the question that drove Elizabeth Preston’s new book, The Creature’s Guide to Caring: How animal parents teach us that humans were born to care. While the book itself is looking at biology, this week’s episode (out on Thursday) focuses on the evolution of creative process in writing and how to manifest “the big idea”—especially when you have young children. We talk about bringing value to a reader, being more bold, imposter syndrome, how personal experience can drive empathy, and how walking away for a while can be the best way to serve our creative projects, and the importance of humor. Plus Elizabeth shares about the gnomes in her head and just how they help her process.

Elizabeth Preston is a science journalist who contributes regularly to The New York Times and has written for Science, The Boston Globe, The Atlantic, Orion, Slate, Audubon, Discover, National Geographic, and others. She is a winner of the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s Kavli Science Journalism Gold Award. Preston is also a humor writer whose work has appeared in outlets such as McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Parents, and Real Simple, and was the editor of Muse, a magazine about science and ideas for kids. She lives in Massachusetts.

What We’re Reading and Listening to:

Rosemerry:

• Someone sent me this glorious blend of poetry/music/movement … it’s a transfixing four minutes of Rilke’s poetry (“let everything happen to you, beauty and terror”). The underwater scenes are so haunting and oddly lovely … and these harmonies!!!

• I had the great joy of being on a panel yesterday with Caleb “The Negro Artist” Rainey. We were at the National Federation of State Poetry Societies conference in Kansas, and the theme was Advocacy, Activism, Community. I was so moved by his heart, his clarity, his generosity of spirit, and his wisdom, that I came home and looked up his poems and loved what I found. Here’s a poem based on the children’s book If You Give a Moose a Muffin. His take, “If You Give a Black Boy a Dollar.” Check out his whole website for info about him and the film about him.

Christie:

• I really loved Nathaniel Ian Miller’s first novel, The Memoirs of Stockholm Sven, and I liked Red Dog Farm almost as much. The novel takes place in Iceland and tells the story of Orri, who grows up on a rural cattle farm. Orri leaves home to attend university in Reykjavík, where he still feels drawn back to home, where his farmer father, Pabbi, is floundering. Meanwhile, his mother, a Lithuanian Jew who teaches at a local university, is entrenched in the world of academia, and Orri struggles to find his place. There is also a romance, and a friendship and best of all, a very good dog. I am a sucker for stories where the dog does not die. Also, the cover is beautiful.

• “It is not science journalism’s job to improve trust in science,” Elise Cutts writes. I agree, and I appreciated her nuanced and thoughtful discussion of the issue. I liked it enough to subscribe to her substack, Reviewer, too.

New Epoch for the Heart

I think of how the narrow blue bodies
of the dragonfly ancestors
once skimmed clear lakes—
over a hundred million years
before the great diplodocus
came to wade—
how they flew through the Permian,
the Cretaceous, through mornings,
through meteors, through floods,
through to the Holocene, to now.
How much change they have seen
before coming to balance here
on the reeds beside me,
their bodies like thin blue proofs
of resilience, endurance, constancy.
Meanwhile, the sun is disappearing
below the horizon.
Meanwhile this heart, too,
is learning to adapt, to become
something as surprising as beauty
that survives great challenge,
something as durable, as delicate
as gossamer wings.

—Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer,

A Note About Paid Subscriptions:

First, we want to thank ALL our subscribers! We are so grateful you join us in this conversation about what it is to engage with yourself, the world and others in a creative way. And a BIG thank you to our paid subscribers. You make this podcast possible. Only our paid subscribers receive our bonus episodes as a thank you for their financial support. This week, we talk about human cognitive bias and how we devalue the things we achieve—and how to circumvent this as a pitfall and help ourselves see our successes more clearly. We also talk about how having a strong sense of purpose can motivate us to keep working on a difficult, longterm project, making the leap from short form to long form projects. Plus, we talk about naked mole rats and beekeeping nuns.

Two Questions:

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

1. Tell us a story about the last time you laughed at yourself in a creative endeavor.

2. How has empathy been a part of your creative practice?

“I did go through kind of an existential crisis at one point,” says science writer Roberta Kwok, talking about the decision she made when writing the first paragraph of her book, LOST IN CURIOSITY: Field Notes From Scientists’ Adventures into the Unknown. In this bonus episode of Emerging Form, we talk about how Roberta wrested with the strongest, most …

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“The book is about the opposite of the eureka moment,” says science writer Roberta Kwok about her new book, LOST IN CURIOSITY: Field Notes From Scientists’ Adventures into the Unknown. Join us in a conversation about the difficulties and gifts of showing up day after day. We talk about patience, wrestling with process, and the long slow path to epiphany–in science and in creative endeavors. We talk, too, about how to choose the right people to interview for a book based on research, how the body may or may not be a part of creative process, the possibility that walking is not the most important tool in a writer’s toolbox, and the thrill of collaboration.

Roberta Kwok is a science writer whose work has appeared in The New York Times, NewYorker.com, Nature, New Scientist, Audubon, and other

publications. She has received a fellowship from the Knight Science Journalism Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and awards from the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Geophysical Union. Before becoming a journalist, Kwok worked in a genetics lab at Stanford University. She lives in the Seattle area and is originally from Canada.

“There’s the messy reality that intrudes after the grand ideas.”—Roberta Kwok, author of Lost in Curiosity

Preview: Emerging Form Episode 169 with Roberta Kwok

“There are months or years of mistakes and failures and doubt and uncertainty that precede the discovery,” says science writer Roberta Kwok. How do we make our way through the messy middle? How do we struggle through the realm of the unknown to the other side? In this episode of Emerging Form, we join Roberta in a discussion about the gap between the great idea and its execution—a concept equally relevant for scientists, novelists and poets. If this episode had abstract sponsors, they would be dedication, perseverance and commitment. We talk about failure, doubt, patience, untold stories and process. We also talk about the drive to be eloquent, our relationship to a reader, the role of humility and hope, our fear of failure, just how important the mess really is to a creative practice, and why a spreadsheet can be a writer’s best friend.

Roberta Kwok is a science writer whose work has appeared in The New York Times, NewYorker.com, Nature, New Scientist, Audubon, and other publications. She has received a fellowship from the Knight Science Journalism Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and awards from the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Geophysical Union. Before becoming a journalist, Kwok worked in a genetics lab at Stanford University. She lives in the Seattle area and is originally from Canada. Her new book is LOST IN CURIOSITY: Field Notes From Scientists’ Adventures into the Unknown.

What We’re Reading and Listening to:

Rosemerry:

• Need three minutes of glorious serenity? My friend John recently sent me this video by VOCES8, one of my favorite acapella groups, which has had a big shift in voices—strange and lovely how it is so different and so the same. This poem, “Quiet,” by Sara Teasdale, was arranged just for them.

  Her voice is like clear water
  that drips upon a stone
  in forests far and silent
  where Quiet plays alone.
  
  Her thoughts are like the lotus,
  a-bloom by sacred streams
  beneath the temple arches
  where Quiet sits and dreams.
  
  Her kisses are the roses
  that glow while dusk is deep
  in Persian gardens closes
  where Quiet falls asleep.

• For a small, instantaneous jolt of beauty, I recommend the Words by Winter podcast by writer Alison McGhee. I have long loved her writing but didn’t know she was doing a podcast in which she reads a poem and talks about it a bit … they’re all around 5-8 minutes, such a gorgeous invitation to step into a new lens for the day. Anywhere you listen to podcasts, but here it is on Apple.

Christie:

• I’ve already raved here about Jeff Hiller’s fabulous memoir, Actress of a Certain Age: My Twenty-Year Trail to Overnight Success, and Hiller’s recent interview with Anna Sale on Slate’s Death, Sex & Money is a a wonderful follow up. In the interview, Hiller talks about what it was like to win an Emmy for his role on the HBO show Somebody Somewhere and what it’s like to be beloved by superfans and yet still a total unknown to much of the world.

• I’m just finishing a couple of fabulous books that I will rave about next time, stay tuned!

Letter to an Unnamed Star

How could you prepare yourself
for the pressure of the wishes?
How to prepare for the burden
when any given person on earth
might choose, at last, out of desperation
most likely, to look up and notice you shining
in the great vast dark and pin on you
their greatest hope grown like a weed
from the seeds of their greatest fear?
You, formed from a cloud unimaginably cold,
were never prepared to receive such longing,
such ache, such stubborn, relentless faith.
The fact we can see you at all means
you survived a battle in which gravity
wins. What do you have to teach us
of wishes? Perhaps the wisdom of falling
in on ourselves, faster and faster;
how we must give away enormous energy
in order to stabilize our core. You model
how we must give ourselves to a process
of becoming. Are you fighting for it?
I imagine you might ask, as you, too,
battle against pressure and what’s happening
in the field beyond your control.
Have you learned yet to power yourself?
you might ask as you spontaneously fuse
hydrogen atoms to form helium. And somewhere
in the midst of the forty million years
of becoming a star, you might ask of us wishers,
Have you learned yet anything of patience,
how much brightness it can bring?

—Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, from The Wonderment (forthcoming, Wildhouse Publishing, 2026)

A Note About Paid Subscriptions:

First, we want to thank ALL our subscribers! We are so grateful you join us in this conversation about what it is to engage with yourself, the world and others in a creative way. And a BIG thank you to our paid subscribers. You make this podcast possible. Only our paid subscribers receive our bonus episodes as a thank you for their financial support. This week, we talk with Roberta about how she wrested with the strongest, most controversial opening paragraph for a book we’ve ever read. We also discuss the power of great scaffolding when carrying out an artistic plan, how teaching can be an essential part of the midpoint of a creative career, why the “eureka moment” isn’t the be-all-end-all in creative process, and using fun as a barometer for success–fun, and, um, spreadsheets.

Two Questions:

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

1. What frequently offered bit of advice about creative practice simply does not work for you?

2. If someone looked behind the curtains of your creative process, what would they see?

“My willingness to be bad allowed me to play guitar,” says author and podcaster Eric Zimmer. “It allowed me to learn to write songs, and the songs that I wrote are songs that only I could have written.” In this bonus episode of Emerging Form, we talk with Eric about the super power of letting ourselves not be very good, developing resourcefulness, the i…

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“One of my superpowers is I see the nuance in everything,” says podcast host and author Eric Zimmer. “That is also sometimes my greatest weakness because I want to caveat the living heck out of everything that I say.” In this episode of Emerging Form, we talk with Eric about the process of writing his book How a Little Becomes a Lot: The Art of Small Changes for a More Meaningful Life. We cover

· how the stages of change relate to creative process,
· why dedicating time is an essential part of setting ourselves up for creative success,
· how to support our expectations of wanting to create something really good,
· how the hardest parts of our process teach us the most,
· why asking for help can help build our trust in our selves as creatives,
· why it helps to identify our motivations and intentions for our creative endeavors,
· the importance of trust in the evolution of our creativity, and
· how the advice to “spend what’s in your pocket” can help shape a book.

Eric Zimmer is an author, teacher, speaker, and the creator of The One You Feed podcast—an award-winning show with over 50 million downloads across 800+ conversations exploring meaningful living. At 24, Eric was homeless, addicted to heroin, and facing prison. His journey from those depths sparked his lifelong inquiry into human transformation and resilience. Through his behavior coaching, workshops, and mentorship, he has guided thousands worldwide in creating sustainable habits that last—not through willpower or epiphany, but through steady change. His approach combines cutting-edge science with timeless wisdom, providing practical pathways to greater integrity and deeper meaning. His story and his work have been featured in the media, including TedX, Mind Body Green, Elephant Journal, the BBC and Brain Pickings. His new book is How a Little Becomes a Lot: The Art of Small Changes for a More Meaningful Life.

The One You Feed Website

How a Little Becomes a Lot: The Art of Small Changes for a More Meaningful Life

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LinkedIn

“I wanted the challenge of it.”—Eric Zimmer, podcast host and author of How a Little Becomes a Lot

Preview: Emerging Form Episode 168 with Eric Zimmer

When Eric Zimmer set out to write his book, How a Little Becomes a Lot: The Art of Small Changes for a More Meaningful Life, he knew that in the year that he had to write it, “there’s no way I’m going to scale the writing tower.” So he asked for help. A lot. “I trusted that if I ask for help and I keep putting in the work, I will get to a place that is at least good enough that I can say, okay, I did my best here. And and that was really what the trust process was.” In this episode, we talk with Eric about motivation, stages of change, supporting our expectations to create something we’re proud of, and how the advice “spend what’s in your pocket” helped him find his way out of an avalanche of research and “defensibility” mindset to write a truly helpful, important book, and the importance of trust.

Eric Zimmer is an author, teacher, speaker, and the creator of The One You Feed podcast—an award-winning show with over 50 million downloads across 800+ conversations exploring meaningful living. At 24, Eric was homeless, addicted to heroin, and facing prison. His journey from those depths sparked his lifelong inquiry into human transformation and resilience. Through his behavior coaching, workshops, and mentorship, he has guided thousands worldwide in creating sustainable habits that last—not through willpower or epiphany, but through steady change. His approach combines cutting-edge science with timeless wisdom, providing practical pathways to greater integrity and deeper meaning. His story and his work have been featured in the media, including TedX, Mind Body Green, Elephant Journal, the BBC and Brain Pickings. His new book is How a Little Becomes a Lot: The Art of Small Changes for a More Meaningful Life.

What We’re Reading and Listening to:

Rosemerry:

• I’m a sucker for a good poetry anthology … it’s so great when I find one that feels as if it hits page after page … and I don’t know when I got 100 Poems That Matter, edited by Poets.org, but last week I got really into it and love the blend of poems old and new and read old favorites and some that were new to me and felt all around deeply steeped in poems that move me, that remind me what it is to be alive.

• I had the great fortune to be with Benedictine nuns at the Monastic Congregation of St. Scholastica’s Chapter meeting. It was so humbling to be with these women who devote their lives to contemplation, prayer and service. I was sharing with them a process for how to think of their current and future circumstances—and how to meet these circumstances—in terms of metaphor. And they shared with me a depth of integrity, longevity, community, reflection, generosity and devotion that humbled me to my core. And they gave me a book—Everyday Sacred, Everywhere Beauty: Readings from and Old Monk’s Journal. Turns out Old Monk is the alter ego of Benedictine Sister Mary Lou Kownacki, and the journal entries, which were part of her 12-year blog, are filled with such openness, curiosity, wonder, courage, and willingness to explore the terrain between who we are and who we wish we could be. Funny. Wise. Tender. It’s a beautiful book I would never have picked up but I am so glad to be reading.

Christie:

• I love this episode of the How to Be A Better Human podcast in which frequent Emerging Form guest Chris Duffy interviews Simone Stolzoff about his new book about how to live with uncertainty (one of my favorite topics!)

Our Birthright

Don’t say, don’t say
that no one can help us now—
there are hands all around us,
all of them reaching,
in every corner appears
bright wings,
and, like a miracle
that’s always been waiting
to happen, out of the stump
of yourself emerges
your own open hand.

—Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

Give a gift subscription

A Note About Paid Subscriptions:

First, we want to thank ALL our subscribers! We are so grateful you join us in this conversation about what it is to engage with yourself, the world and others in a creative way. And a BIG thank you to our paid subscribers. You make this podcast possible. Only our paid subscribers receive our bonus episodes as a thank you for their financial support. This week, we talk with Eric about the super power of letting ourselves not be very good, developing resourcefulness, the importance (or not importance) of talent, how to evaluate “success” of our creative endeavors, the role of self-compassion in creative practice, and the dangers of comparison.

Two Questions:

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

1. What are essential small choices you make in service to creative practice?

2. What is the role of self-compassion in your creative process?

“I have this system I’ve been dying to talk about in a public way,” says Roxanne Khamsi, science writer and author of the new book Beyond Inheritance: Our Ever-mutating Cells and a New Understanding of Health. This week, we talk with Roxanne about organization as a superpower for creativity, the importance of a good outline, an equation for how to struc…

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“I didn’t know I enjoyed thinking so much,” says science writer Roxanne Khamsi when asked what surprised her most about writing her first book Beyond Inheritance. “I thought I enjoyed interviewing people and reading research papers and the process of finding the right verb in a sentence. What’s hard for me is once I get into that thinking space, I can’t let go of it.” In this episode we talk about how she made the leap from writing articles to writing a book—and why they are so different. We talk about creating an arc for a book of essays, what to do when the structure for your book isn’t working, letting go of a project once its over, meeting our self critic, the role of obsession in writing a book, the art of going for “the big idea” and how to carry that in a nonfiction book, how writing reflects the author’s personality.

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

Author photos credit: Brian Friedman

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

Preview: Emerging Form Episode 167 with Roxanne Khamsi

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

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

What We’re Reading and Listening to:

Rosemerry:

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

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

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

Christie:

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

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

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

How Things Change

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

from Traveling Nature Journal, October 4, 2020

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

—Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

Give a gift subscription

A Note About Paid Subscriptions:

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

Two Questions:

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

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

2. What food or drink helps your creative practice?

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

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

• Writing in service to “The Quiet Rebels”

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

• Where to put the most vulnerable content in a book

• Learning to trust the reader

• The importance of vulnerability

• Value of human connection through the arts

• The role of obsession in art

• Creating touchstones for the reader

• The role of play in poetry

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

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

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

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

Kelli’s website

Kelli’s YouTube channel

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

Preview: Emerging Form Episode 166 with Kelli Russell Agodon

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

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

What We’re Reading and Listening to:

Rosemerry:

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

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

Christie:

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

Because You Said I Put the Holy in Melancholy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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A Note About Paid Subscriptions:

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

Two Questions:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Preview: Emerging Form Episode 165 with Ramona Ausubel

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

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

What We’re Reading and Listening to:

Rosemerry:

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

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

Christie:

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

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

When Feeling Stuck

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


—Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

Give a gift subscription

A Note About Paid Subscriptions:

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

Two Questions:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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