Pia Leichter, founder of Kollektiv Studio and author of Welcome to the Creative Club, talks with TW creative director John Vogel about her experience transitioning from the advertising world to the artistic path. A big shift happened in her life about ten years ago, and Pia delves into some very personal details about the events that brought about that shift. As she said in our conversation: “I wasn’t expecting to share such vulnerable stories at all. I mean, I shared stuff some of my closest friends didn’t even know about me.”

The two discuss Pia’s experience with self-promoting her book, the role of the brain’s default mode network in the creative act, and the presence of the cosmos in all people. Also included in the episode are three tracks from her collaborative spoken word album Famished with electronic composer Tyler Bodkins. All the music in the episode came from that album.

In today’s episode author Molly Gaudry sits down with TW founder and publisher Martha Nichols. Molly holds degrees in fiction, poetry, and experimental prose, and her new book that just came out last week is aptly titled Fit Into Me: A Novel, A Memoir. The book weaves a fictional narrative into Molly’s own story along with fragments from a wide range of other authors in an effort to create a sense of self via the combination of different elements. With this format Molly explores her experience as a Korean adoptee raised in the US, meeting her birth family as a teenager, and recovering from a brain injury as an adult.

In this TW conversation, Fit Into Me provides a jumping-off point for big questions about self-creation and the holes in memory that writers inevitably confront when telling their own stories. Martha and Molly discuss how she blended its nonfiction sections with the fictional story of a character (the “tea-house woman”) taken from her two previous works, We Take Me Apart (Ampersand, 2009), which was a finalist for the Asian American Literary Award; and Desire: A Haunting (Ampersand, 2018).

In this week's episode, TW Creative Director John Vogel sits down with drummer and author Nic Brown to talk about his memoir Bang Bang Crash (Counterpoint, 2023).

Despite being accepted to Ivy League colleges, Nic opted to pursue his band Athenaeum straight out of high school. They signed to Atlantic Records, landed a few hits, and played extensively before Nic decided to leave to group in 2001 to pursue different styles of music and reclaim his opportunity to go to college.

While attending Columbia University, he joined up with the band Skeleton Key, headed by bass player Erik Sanko, who played in John Lurie’s Lounge Lizards. Nic also played in several other bands, including Falcon! and Longwave. This episode is scored with that first Falcon! album, The Early Year.

Nic then left NYC for the Iowa's Writer's Workshop, sending him down the writing and teaching path that he's followed over the last almost 20 years.