Slow Stories - Bette A

Send us Fan MailThis week Bette A stops by the show to discuss her book Slow Stories which she collaborated with legendary musician, Brian Eno. We also talk about art and creating as well as AI. One of the other major topics we cover is her charity work to help empower woman and help the world. *****As artist/writer BETTE A. explains: “As I developed these stories during two decades, rewriting them from memory, they grew shorter. Strange details persisted and gained significance, while what once seemed like a central plot line or meaning disappeared. I ended up with stories that feel deeper than my ideas - simpler, more layered, and more surprising.”The book inspired an expansion of the stories with a multimedia collaboration with BRIAN ENO, centered on the concept of slowness.Brian Eno’s ambient compositions cradle Bette A.’s voice as she tells two stories of the stories included in her upcoming story collection, “The Endless House” and “The Other Village.” The calm pace of the story is a deliberate choice: “When a story is told slowly, every sentence becomes more vital,” explains Bette.“Usually when we hear stories read, we expect the pace of the reading to be fairly even,” adds Brian, whose only instruction to Bette as she recorded her short stories was: “Slow, slower, even slower, yes, more slow’.”For both artists, slowness functions not only as a stylistic decision but as an act of resistance. Giving thirty minutes of your attention to something that is not urgent, not loud, and not passive, is rare. Putting on a record is a physical gesture to enter that mode, engage with art and, maybe, your inner world.“My stories take place in strange and imaginary towns and villages from pasts that never happened and futures that will never occur," explains Bette. "These worlds exist without an elaborate background description, like islands in a misty sea."“What we discovered when we were making these stories is that leaving longer spaces gives your mind a chance to imagine the detail that is hinted at in the story,” explains Brian. “The music creates a suggestive atmosphere which supports you in doing that. You don't want a lot of action in the music: what you want is to create an evocative space that leaves you, the listener, in a creative frame of mind.”Bette notes, "When everything is fast, fragmented and designed to grasp your attention, attuning to one very slow story can be a radical act. This record is a guided daydream, a space for rest and imagination."The hand-painted artworks accompanying Slow Stories art bundle extend this collaboration into a shared visual world. The paintings by Bette and Brian depict immersive, dreamlike terrains - birch forests with graffiti, lunar mountain ranges, floating eggs, geometric color fields. Like the stories, the paintings leave room for the viewer to enter and make the work their own.The artist’s proceeds of the sale of the bundle will go to their charities; The Heroines! Movement, a global storytelling movement around women role models, co-founded by Bette, and Earth Percent, a charity that channels funds from the music industry to organizations that do the most impactful work around the climate emergency, co-founded by Brian.About Bette A Bette A. is an artist, born in Amsterdam. As a child, she liked to write plays and her primary school teachers allowed her to practise them in the gymnasium. She joined a youth theatre group in her hometown. Bette continued to study Image and Language at the Gerrit Rietveld Art Academy of Amsterdam, where she learned to follow wild ideas. After doing a Master in Creative Writing at Oxford University, she started writing in both English and Dutch, and published her novels Rus Like Everyone Else and What’s Mine. Aside from writing novels, Bette makes short stories and drawings, and teaches in art schools. In 2019 Bette co-founded TRQSE- a network of artists and scientists who work together on social projects.****If you would like to contact the show [email protected] us on Social MediaYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCX0ETs2wpOHbCuhUNr0XFTw?view_as=subscriberInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/author_d.m.needom/Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/bettertopodcastwithdmneedom©2026 Better To...Podcast with D. M.NeedomSupport the showSupport the show