The Art of Exploring through Creative Practice

Going past the known with NYT best-selling author Alex Hutchinson

“We need to figure out when does it make sense to explore, when does it make sense to stick with what we’re doing.” —Alex Hutchinson

Preview: Emerging Form Episode 135 with Alex Hutchinson

Every writer knows this feeling—the thrill of how writing allows us to stretch beyond what we know into some new revelation, new territory. “There is a feeling of excitement,” says science-writer Alex Hutchinson, “when all these threads that you have researched are all converging to give you this important message, and it usually comes at two in the morning and dissipates before you write it down. I don’t think it is an illusion.” In this episode of Emerging Form, we speak with Hutchinson about his new book, The Explorer's Gene: Why We Seek Big Challenges, New Flavors, and the Blank Spots on the Map. The book itself is an exploration of why we are attracted to new ideas—that itch for the unknown. We apply his thoughts on exploration to creative practice—when is enough enough? When does it make more sense to build on what you know than go off in new directions? How do we know a project is done? How do our dreams for our work change?

Alex Hutchinson is the New York Times bestselling author of Endure, a longtime columnist for Outside covering the science of endurance, and a National Magazine Award–winning journalist who has contributed to the New York Times, The New Yorker, and other publications. A former long-distance runner for the Canadian national team, he holds a master’s in journalism from Columbia and a Ph.D. in physics from Cambridge, and he did his post-doctoral research with the National Security Agency. He lives in Toronto with his family.

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What We’re Reading and Listening to:

Rosemerry:

• I love the Reflections of Life videos from Green Renaissance, and recently my friend Michael sent me this one—a story of love and grief and how, after terrible things happen, we go on. It’s a brief and potent glimpse into one family’s life, a glimpse that broke my heart open in all the ways.

• How might we flourish not despite devastation, but because and through devastation? That impossible ask is at the heart of Walking the Burn, a new collection of poems by my friend Rachel Kellum of Crestone, CO. If the life lived is the burn, then these poems are paths through the charred landscape of divorce, mental illness, betrayal, guilt, and anger that allow us to not only see what is scarred and wounded, but also the astonishing beauty of how landscapes—and people—heal. It’s a book that invites us to walk through the burn of our own lives toward forgiveness, mindful action, and love. I love this book.

Christie:

• I found a copy of Snow Country by Yasunari Kawabata in a little free library in my parents’ neighborhood, and was curious to read this story, first published in the 1930s, by the winner of a Nobel Prize in literature. The novel is about the relationship between a provincial geisha and a wealthy dilettante. I was less captivated by the characters than I was of the setting. The book contains beautiful descriptions of the landscape in the snow country of Japan, and some of the most evocative passages are about the old art of snow bleaching, in which hand woven fabric is laid out on the snow to bleach in the sun. I loved the sense of place in the novel and the final scene with its vivid descriptions of the Milky Way, left me thinking of it for a long time.

• I read my first Allegra Goodman novel earlier this year (Intuition, which I loved), and when I heard she had a new novel out I put it on library reserve. Well, I loved Isola too. It’s the tale of Marguerite de La Rocque de Roberval, a real French noblewoman who lived in the 16th century. Her parents die when she is young so she’s left to live according to the whims of her older cousin, who spends most of her substantial money and eventually takes her with him on a ship to “New France.” There, he abandons her with two others on a small, rocky island in Newfoundland. Marguerite, who has always had servants, is forced to learn to live a subsistence lifestyle that involves fish and polar bears, among other things. The story shares a few plot similarities to Suddenly, an another novel about people stranded on a remote island, but I liked it a lot more. Goodman does a wonderful job of developing the main characters, particularly the transformation of Marguerite.
  

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Space Exploration

Perhaps one day they will find the way
to take all the empty space out of our atoms—
condense us to our essence. Then
the whole of the human race would fit
inside a sugar cube. It would serve us right,
expansive buggers that we are, we who stamp
our atoms all over the earth, we who now
leave our footprints in space.
Like our electrons, we exist too many
places at once. Or, perhaps one day,
we’ll learn to embrace all that space within us,
and instead of plundering, conquering, developing out,
we’ll go in, travel in, enter grace.

—Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

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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. Starting this month, only our paid subscribers will receive our bonus episodes as a thank you for their financial support.

This week, we talk with Alex about the importance of telling personal stories (even in factual presentations), how we become more confident in our creative work, and what the dry cleaning district has to teach authors. 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!

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Two Questions:

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

1. How do you know when a creative project is done?

2. What’s the most interesting rabbit hole you’ve gone down recently?

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