Exercises in Curiosity
Flora Lichtman on creative approaches and collaboration
“There’s some magic that happens … when people have different perspectives, different skills,.” —Flora Lichtman
Preview: Episode 84 with Flora Lichtman
What do a Pixar illustrator, a horny toad expert and an executive coach have in common? They were all invited as guests for an episode on “Why do strangers approach me” for the podcast Every Little Thing, a podcast that ran for five years answering listeners questions. “We booked surprising guests,” says the host Flora Lichtman. “If you book people who look sideways, you will have unexpected answers.” In this episode of Emerging Form, Lichtman shares why divergent viewpoints create a more interesting project, why she prefers collaboration, how working with video allows for very different storytelling techniques than audio, and how to invest a project with a sense that something is at stake. We also talk about her own creative trajectory.
Flora Lichtman is a host and managing editor at Spotify. Most recently, she created and hosted a listener call-in podcast called Every Little Thing. The show ran for 5 years and had more than 200 episodes. Previously, she wrote for the Netflix show, Bill Nye Saves the World, and co-directed the Emmy-nominated video series “Animated Life” on The New York Times Op-Docs channel. (They lost to Oprah.) Before that, she hosted The Adaptors podcast about climate change, worked as a video editor and substitute host at PRI's Science Friday and co-wrote a book on the science of annoyingness. And long, long ago, she worked for a NATO oceanographic lab in Italy. For the lab's research expeditions, she lived on a ship where apertivi were served on the top deck, hoisted there via pulley by the ship's chef.
What We’re Reading and Listening to:
Rosemerry:
For a fabulous understanding of how metaphor works in poems, I LOVE the essay “The Emblem Structure” in Structure and Surprise: Engaging Poetic Turns, edited by Michael Theune (who also wrote this essay). It was recommended to me years ago by my friend Jennifer Hancock, and I have read and re-read the essay. Finally I bought the whole book, and if you love geeking out on how poems swerve and turn in free verse, it’s a great resource.
I read with interest James C. Nieh’s article on the language of bees in Vox Populi, and I was interested in the multiple “forbidden experiments,” including one in the introduction about where human language comes from. Most interesting is the social aspect—how we need each other to communicate. It feels simple, but the more I think about it, the more in awe I am of language development.
Christie:
I absolutely loved former Emerging Form guest (episode 44) Annalee Newitz’s new novel, The Terraformers. It's got thoughtful meditations on animal intelligence, colonialism, the commodification of space, homelessness, NIMBYism and indigenous DNA, and it features a bunch of cool animal characters and even a sentient train! It's also a really fun, fast-paced story.
“What if climate change meant not doom — but abundance?” writes Rebecca Solnit in a recent Washington Post column. “What if we imagined ‘wealth’ consisting not of the money we stuff into banks or the fossil-fuel-derived goods we pile up, but of joy, beauty, friendship, community, closeness to flourishing nature, to good food produced without abuse of labor? What if we were to think of wealth as security in our environments and societies, and as confidence in a viable future?”
A friend turned me on to novelist Taylor Jenkins Reid, and after enjoying Carrie Soto is Back (about a tennis pro learning to build an identity beyond sport), I dove into Daisy Jones & The Six, a story of a rock band told retrospectively through the voices of various band members and their entourage. It was a fun read with interesting insights into creative process and collaboration.
Altar Ego
Because I hate to make msitakes,
today I practice messsing up.
Spell check tries to correct me,but
I thwart it, I INsist on my errirs,
retype what is right till its wrong.
It hurts a littel. And I like it,
that it hurts. a little. SEee;
I say to my inner prefectionist,
it’s kinda fun to fook up,
and soon Im laughing in the dark,
itching to stumble out teh door
and run passed the same choices I
’ve always made, gigling
with this holy wreckless woman,
I liek her, I decid, as we blunder into the night.
—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. Starting this month, only our paid subscribers will receive our bonus episodes as a thank you for their financial support.
This week, Flora talks about taking yourself for a morning commute–even if you work at home, the importance of knowing what you don’t want, and why creative work likes it when we are earnest … but not serious. If you are not yet a paid subscriber, you can go now to our website, EmergingForm.substack.com, or by clicking the button below. Thank you!
Two Questions:
(share your answers with us here on Substack or in our FB group)
Is there a way you make your morning commute creative?
What do you know you don’t want for your creative practice?
Thanks for reading Emerging Form! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support our work.
Emerging Form is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
I work at home, but I take myself on a morning commute every day around the wild reaches of my neighborhood. I leave my place at about six-thirty am, when it is just getting light, walk the street down the hill, across the arroyo and then south until I get to the trail that winds up the ridge through the piñon-juniper woodland. I greet the plants as I go, appreciating their lives and our reciprocal breathing, and climb to a view of the Jemez Mountains to the west across the Rio Grande Valley and the Sangre de Cristos behind me. I come home two miles later, my head full of towhee songs, shadowy coyotes hunting and blue grama grass eyebrows, ready to write.