Let's Have a Renaissance: The DateKeepers Podcast with Itto and Mekiya Outini

Brendan Isaac Jones is an author, father, husband, Fulbright scholar, and MacDowell fellow. His first novel, The Alaskan Laundry, was published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, and his second, Whispering Alaska, by Penguin Random House. He’s now at work on a memoir about his Fulbright year in Siberia. In this episode, we discuss the memoir, the difference between provincialism and parochialism, and how a kid born in Colorado and raised in Philadelphia became an Alaskan writer. 

Joyce Kozloff’s career as a visual artist spans decades, during which her work has explored preoccupations including cartography, women, the decorative arts, and war. She’s created numerous public and transit art installations and received support from the MacDowell Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Academy in Rome, the Rockefeller Foundation, and others. In this episode, we discuss Joyce’s latest project, an installation piece that spotlights the human cost of international conflict, as well as her earlier projects and collaborations, and she shares her advice for young artists just setting out on their creative careers. 

A former division-one athlete and musician, Jeff Bender now writes fiction, comedy, and screenplays. He earned his MFA from Columbia University, and his work has appeared in The Iowa Review, McSweeney’s, Guernica, The Offing, and elsewhere. He’s also received support from residencies including the Edward F. Albee Foundation and Jentel, among others. In this episode, we discuss his current projects, a novel-in-progress about two former athletes struggling to navigate life after graduation, and a TV pilot about a priest struggling with romantic temptation, both informed by Jeff’s overlapping and oxymoronic identities: liberal, Catholic, comedy writer, ex-wrestler, and suburban dad.

Timothy Nolan is an award-winning playwright, screenwriter, actor, and educator. He earned his MFA in playwriting at Pace University and has been named an Indie Theater New Person of the Year. He now lives in Brooklyn with his wife, screenwriter Susannah Nolan. In this episode, we talk about ghosts: what they are, where they come from, how they differ from memories, what they tell us about ourselves, and why the theater needs them. 

What if someone in your family is a monster? In this episode, we read one of our stories, “The Bghlt el-Kaboor,” originally published in Afritondo and inspired by a popular Moroccan folktale, which explores this very question. 

Emma Binder has published short fiction in The Michigan Quarterly Review, The Indiana Review, The Best American Short Stories, and elsewhere and has received support from The Vermont Studio Center, Jentel, The Anderson Center, and Writing by Writers. In this episode, we discuss Emma’s latest literary venture, a novel-in-progress, as well as the narrative elements you need to hook readers and keep them from walking away.

Robert Ray Morgan is the author of dozens of novels, biographies, short stories, and poetry collections, including the bestsellers Gap Creek: A Novel and Boone: A Biography. Born in 1944 on a farm in rural North Carolina, he went on to teach for fifty-one years at Cornell University and earn heavyweight honors including a Guggenheim, an NEA grant, and a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship. In this episode, he offers some words of advice for up-and-coming writers and recalls his exhilarating journey from Appalachia to the Ivy League.

Susan Kelly-DeWitt is an award-winning poet and visual artist. She’s published collections with independent presses across the US, and her work has appeared in prestigious journals including Poetry, Prairie Schooner, and The North American Review. She’s also edited the print journal Quercus and the online publication Perihelion, and she’s now a member of the National Book Critics Circle. In this episode, Susan reflects on how her isolated upbringing in a remote corner of Hawaii has shaped her artistic practice and shares the surprising impact that a single poem can make in a noisy and fast-moving world. 

William Wallace Rose is a writer, poet, actor, traveler, printmaker, educator, and translator. He’s taught drama in Switzerland, creative writing in the US, and English as a foreign language in the Czech Republic, and his work has been supported by the Edward F. Albee Foundation. He now lives in France, where he’s immersed in the ancient regional language Occitan. In this episode, we discuss the current state of the language, its music, and its literature, contemporary as well as medieval, and William reads an excerpt from his English translation of a short story in Occitan, a comic crime drama by Florian Vernet. 

Abeer Hoque is a writer, poet, photographer, traveler, and educator. Born in Nigeria to Bangladeshi parents, she moved to the US when she was 13 and has since traversed much of the world, drawing on various media to document what she’s seen. In this episode, she shares her thoughts on the relationship between text and image and how her transnational perspective has informed her artistic practice, and we discuss what it means to be a writer and photographer in an age when everyone has a camera and word processor in their pocket. 

Boris Fishman is the author of three critically acclaimed novels and one memoir. His journalism has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian, and elsewhere. He’s taught at Princeton University, the University of Montana, and most recently the University of Austin. In this episode, we discuss the complex relationship between fiction and journalism and the practical challenges of teaching creative writing, and Boris shares his experience as a liberal professor at a conservative university. 

Ashley Wren Collins is a director, choreographer, producer, actor, and author of five books, both fiction and nonfiction. Her indie feature film Changing Taste won Best Comedy in the 2013 Burbank International Film Festival and the 2014 Manhattan Film Festival, her choreography for the smash hit musical Foxy Ladies Love Boogie 70s Explosion was lauded as “sensational” by Discover Hollywood, and her writing has been supported by the Edward F. Albee Foundation. In this episode, we discuss various approaches to collaborative partnerships, and Ashley shares the secrets that have empowered her to thrive as a multidisciplinary artist. 

Hailed by The New Yorker as an “unusually inventive composer” and “innovative [harpist],” Anne LeBaron has spent her long career pushing the boundaries of opera and pioneering new forms of collaborative, grassroots, comic, and electronic composition. Her work has garnered widespread critical acclaim and has been supported by the Fulbright, MacDowell, the Copeland Center, and many other foundations. In this episode, Anne shares her take on opera’s evolution across the last fifty years, and we discuss several of her works, including her latest project, LSD: Huxley’s Last Trip, which earned her the Opera America Discovery Grant and takes a new look at the strange cast of characters behind the discovery, study, misuse, and institutional control of LSD. 

Matthew Dunivan is an actor, playwright, filmmaker, teacher, and jack of all trades. The son of a drywall installer with no college degree, he beat the odds by earning an MFA from Columbia University in New York—all because God didn’t promptly answer his adolescent prayers. In this episode, he shares his journey, and we address one of the most pressing questions of our age: is it harder to get a terminal degree from an elite institution, or 300,000 followers on Instagram? Also, how many followers should your plumber have?

Julian Kreimer is an artist, critic, educator, and chair of the MFA program in Visual Arts at SUNY Purchase College. His work has been supported by the MacDowell foundation and others, shown in galleries around the US, and reviewed in publications including Art in America, Hyperallergic, and Artcritical. In this episode, we discuss strategies to help artists balance their creative practices with their administrative duties and reflect on the catalytic role that hardship and suffering play in the production of powerful art. 

Eric ‘Wally’ Wallach is a playwright, bike dancer, and innovator committed to pushing the boundaries of traditional theatrical forms in pursuit of human connection and spiritual rejuvenation. In this episode, we discuss what makes a good play, what’s wrong with modern theater, and how it can be revitalized, and Wally walks us through one of his most experimental projects, Flight 18, conceived as a way of cutting out the performative middleman and transforming audiences into communities.

In this episode, we read one of the first stories we wrote together, “To the Island and Halfway Back,” originally published in Sortes.

Joel Hoffman’s classical compositions draw from a wide range of sources, including Eastern European folk music, Chinese traditional music, and bebop. He holds degrees from the University of Wales and Juilliard and has received awards from the MacDowell Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the American Music Center, and others. In this episode, we discuss the creative benefits of life as an outsider, ways to make a living as a classical composer, and Joel's fruitful, quarter-century-long engagement with Chinese musical traditions.

Reena Shah is an author, a traveler, a public schoolteacher, a former dancer, a Steinbeck fellow, and a Fulbright scholar. In this episode, we discuss the circuitous development of her debut novel, Every Happiness, what publishing with Bloomsbury taught her, and how she learned to stop worrying and let her characters take the lead. 

Gabriel Jason Dean is an award-winning playwright and screenwriter. His productions for adults and children have been performed on and off Broadway and have garnered extensive critical acclaim. He currently teaches English Literature and Creative Writing and Theater at Muhlenberg College, where he’s in the process of creating a major in musical theater. In this episode, we discuss Gabriel’s favorite and least favorite plays, the challenges facing contemporary dramaturges, how to channel traumatic experiences into art, the risks run by creatives who portray experiences that they have not lived, and the value (or lack thereof) of musical theater. 

David Biespiel is a poet, critic, memoirist, novelist, and painter. His work has earned many awards, including a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Lannan Fellowship, and a Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award. He currently leads graduate poetry workshops at Oregon State University. In today’s episode, he shares lessons collected over many decades in the arts, discusses the critical role that failure plays in creative revelation, and remembers a pivotal moment that shaped his career. 

Hugo dos Santos is a Luso-American writer, poet, and translator. Born in Lisboa, Portugal, and raised in Newark, New Jersey, he investigates questions of diaspora, memory, and belonging in his fiction and poetry, while in his translations he strives to bring the best contemporary Portuguese literature to English-speaking audiences. In this episode, we discuss his approach to literary translation and his forthcoming poetry collection, Reduction in Force, about labor, displacement, social status, and meaning. 

Laura Goode is the author of several books, most recently Pitch Craft: The Writer’s Guide to Getting Agented, Published, and Paid, developed from material that she teaches at Stanford University. In this episode, we discuss her formative influences, how the MFA system failed her, and how she learned to level up, start thinking of herself as a professional, and build a sustainable career.

Elizabeth Johnson is an artist and writer whose creative practice is fueled by a passion for highlighting the work of her peers and an enduring interest in chaos. In this episode, we discuss her creative process, the influence of her background in science and mathematics, her recurring preoccupations, and how she launched her career as an art writer, and she shares her perspective on where the art world at a whole is heading.  

Scott Pinkmountain is a writer, musician, and host and producer of multiple podcasts, including Make/Work, which was developed by The Rumpus. His work has earned support from the Wurlitzer Foundation, the Edward F. Albee Foundation, Meet the Composer, and others. In this episode, we discuss his many creative outlets, and he shares insights drawn from a long career and countless conversations with artists working across a range of disciplines about how to keep one’s creative practice sustainable. 

Fran Siegel’s drawings, tapestries, and installations can be viewed at The Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, Yale University Art Gallery, The Morgan Library Museum in NYC, the Los Angeles County Museum, and elsewhere, and her work has been supported by the Bogliasco Foundation, the Edward F. Albee Foundation, the Fulbright Program, and others. In this episode, we discuss her creative process, her sources of inspiration, and the themes that animate her work, and she explains what it takes to get work into museums and galleries, offers advice for artists early in their careers, and shares practical packing strategies for traveling with art cumbersome supplies. 

Danica Novgorodoff is a visual artist, writer, and MacDowell Fellow. Meera Subramanian is a journalist specializing in environmental issues and climate change. For years, they’ve been collaborating on a graphic novel about youth climate action, A Better World Is Possible. In this episode, they discuss their collaborative process and the innovative structure that they adopted to accommodate a complex plot as dependent on deep knowledge of climate science as on character, image, and prose. 

Peter Campion is a poet, a Pushcart Prize winner, and a professor at the University of Minnesota. He serves as Executive Editor of Unbound Press and as Editor in Chief of the literary magazine Revel. In this episode, he discusses his lifelong love of poetry, visual art and music, shares insights gleaned from both sides of the editor’s desk, and advises submitters on when to send out work and which mistakes to avoid. 

Sean Behrens is a Brooklyn-based playwright, screenwriter, and filmmaker. His work plumbs the depths of a wide range of social phenomena, often leveraging experimental techniques and applying the lens of the absurd. In this episode, we discuss the history of drama and storytelling, the ways in which various genres and media can cross-pollenate and enrich one another, and the ongoing literary conversation to which his work belongs. 

Laura Hulthen Thomas is an award-winning author and head of the undergraduate creative writing program at the University of Michigan’s Residential College. Her work has appeared in Witness, Epiphany, Summerset Review, failbetter, The /tƐmz/ Review, the Cimarron Review, and elsewhere. In this episode, she offers a sneak peak of her forthcoming novel and shares lessons learned from publishing a literary story collection with a university press without an agent. 

Yaram Yahu is the author of My Afro is a Rising Sun, out with Running Press Kids, an imprint of Hachette, in 2024. He’s now working on several other picture books and a novel for adults and developing screenplays for television. In this episode, we discuss the importance of market research and the intricacies of the children’s picture book market, and he shares tested strategies for overcoming burnout as a full-time writer. 

In this episode, we read one of our short stories, “Ten Years,” originally published in Modern Literature, a work of speculative fiction that examines the toll that societal pressures and generational trauma can take on the body and mind and asks what happens when your own country leaves you behind. We follow the reading with a discussion of these themes and share the story behind this story: how it came to be. 

David Crespy is a playwright, biographer, and scholar. He’s the founder and co-director of Mizzou’s Writing for Performance Program, and he’s played an instrumental role in establishing and shaping the trajectories of many other programs, including the Missouri Playwright’s Workshop, the Mizzou New Play Series, and Summer Rep’s Comedy in Concert Series. His latest projects include a late-career biography of the playwright Edward F. Albee, whom he considered a colleague and friend. In this episode, he reads excerpts from two of his plays, shares insights gleaned from studying Albee’s legacy, and recounts the story of a little-known 18th-century Jewish heresiarch from Smyrna who rose to fame by claiming to be the Messiah. 

In addition to his day job as a semiconductors analyst, Wesley is a Fulbright scholar, a seasoned traveler, and a storyteller. Most recently, he’s set out to try his hand at travel writing. In this episode, he makes a powerful case for the importance of stepping outside your comfort zone, and we trade embarrassing stories from Togo, India, and Uzbekistan. 

Michael Wendroff is the son of an editor, the stepson of a literary agent, and most recently the author of a debut political thriller, What Goes Around. In this episode, we discuss the hurdles one must overcome to polish, market, and sell a novel in the contemporary market. 

Luna Westish is a self-published author, parent, and wanderer whose interests include sustainability, business, motherhood, and more. In this episode, she shares the study-abroad stories that gave rise to her first novel, and we discuss the difficulties of self-publishing novels and escaping from cults.

Dipika Mukherjee is a writer and traveler. She teaches at StoryStudio Chicago and the Graham School of the University of Chicago, writes a literary column for The Edge of Malaysia, and has published eight books of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. In this episode, we discuss how her background in sociolinguistics enriches her fiction, why she chose to write in English, the role of the writer in the globalized 21st century, and more. 

Armand Rosamilia has written and published over 200 stories, including crime thrillers, supernatural thrillers, zombies, contemporary fiction, nonfiction, and more. In this episode, he shares some of the insights he’s gleaned from a long career in writing and publishing, including the red flags he’s learned to look out for in publishing contracts. 

Together, we write fiction about America, Morocco, and migrants from all walks of life. In this episode, we read and discuss three of our short stories, “The Rain Is Falling on Tangier" (originally published in Aura Literary Arts Review), “The New Sufyan" (originally published in "Gargoyle Magazine), and “A Scientific Mind" (originally published in DarkWinter Magazine), each of which dives into a different corner of Moroccan society while exploring a common theme: how do women make the best of bad options in a culture that does not have their interests in mind. You can find links to these stories and more on our website: https://www.thedatekeepers.com

Virginia Wagner is a visual artist and writer whose work takes place in zones of conflict between nature and human construction. She’s received commissions from Guggenheim Works & Process and National Geographic as well as fellowships from several residencies, and she’s a founding editor of the online journal Painters on Painting, alongside Julie Heffernan. In this episode, she shares how she got started as an artist, speaks to the value of an ever-evolving practice, and discusses her work’s core themes. 

Brownell Landrum is the author of several self-published novels, children’s books, screenplays, works of nonfiction, and songs. In this episode, we discuss the hero’s journey as it pertains to writing, reading, and life, the power of wishing, why bad things happen to good people, and more.

Andrea Harrison is a retired educator turned content marketing writer and editor. She’s published her first children’s book, The Selfish Shellfish and the Sick Sea, and she’s currently working on a debut romance novel. In this episode, we discuss the challenges faced by aging women in business, romance, and life and how literature can restore the human connections that betrayals and tragedies have taken away. 

Rachel Whalen is a writer and translator from Buffalo, New York. She earned her MFA in creative writing from NYU in 2021 and her BA in English from Cornell in 2019. She speaks English, Spanish, Italian, and a little bit of Russian and currently lives with her partner in Mexico City. In this episode, we discuss the joys of multilingual partnerships, the fascinating challenges of writing in a foreign language, workshop cultures in the US and Mexico, and whether it’s possible to pursue both happiness and literary excellence.  

JD Adler has been an EMT, a bartender, a ski lift operator, a bookstore manager, a cook, a reporter, a librarian, a haunted pub crawl guide, and a vagabond. He holds an MA in communication, writes poetry, fiction, and journalism, gives performances as an oral storyteller with the Suncoast Storytellers, and runs his own publishing platform. In this episode, we discuss how written and oral traditions differ and converge, what factors make a work of science fiction “literary,” and the roles that stories play in our cultures and lives. 

Douglas Boyce teaches music at George Washington University and writes compositions that draw heavily on medieval and renaissance traditions while integrating modernist aesthetics. He holds a PhD in composition from the University of Pennsylvania, and his awards include a residency at MacDowell. In this episode, we discuss the power of enstrangement, highlight the parallels between avant garde chamber music and punk rock, and talk through how to tell a visionary from a fraud. 

After spending twenty years as an educator, Susan Carlisle joined a writing group and started penning romance novels. She hasn’t looked back since. She’s now published dozens of books, many with Harlequin, an imprint of HarperCollins. In this episode, we discuss the art of the romance novel, the importance of writing communities, how the publishing industry is evolving, how to make a perfect cucumber sandwich, and more.  

Siavash Golkar is an NYC-based visual artist, physicist, and neuroscientist whose work interrogates the economics of social exchange. His paintings render impossible anatomies—a head replaced by a human hand; a torso split open, revealing a hollow interior; a mouth disembodied—highlighting the clash between internal pretenses and superficial interactions.  In this episode, we discuss how we, as individuals, can better value art, each other, and ourselves against the backdrop of an expanding and increasingly globalized population. We also touch on concrete steps that artists and artistic communities can take to support one another and enrich each other’s creative practices. 

After serving on the editorial staff of The New York Review of Books from 1988 to 2017 and founding the literary magazine Little Star, Ann Kjellberg launched her own Substack newsletter, Book Post, which she describes as “a bite-sized, newsletter-based book review delivery service.” In this episode, Ann shares stories from her long career, and we pick her brain about book reviews—why they matter, how they’ve evolved, common beginner’s mistakes to avoid, and what it takes to write a good one—before touching on trends in the writing and publishing industries writ large. 

Kai Franz is an artist with a background in computer science and architecture. For the past five years, he’s been collaborating with a machine he designed and built called the Dual-Axis Precision Deposition System—or plopper. The plopper primarily fabricates sculptures, but also produces prints, drawings, and films. Kai describes it as “the bad conscience of formal idealism.” This is but one of his many collaborations.  Kai has taught at Princeton University and the Rhode Island School of Design, and he now splits his time between Berlin and Providence, Rhode Island, where he lives with his wife and children.  In this episode, he recounts his journey from Europe to North America, and we discuss his creative process, his expansive approach to collaborations, and more. 

Elizabeth Sylvia is a poet and high school English teacher. Her first collection of poetry, None but Witches, offers a series of reflections on the women in Shakespeare’s plays and female experiences present and past. She is also the author of a chapbook, My Little Book of Domestic Anxieties, and she’s now working on poems about Marie Antoinette and the end of the world.  In this episode, we discuss Elizabeth’s creative process, Titus Andronicus’s bloody conclusion, Marie Antoinette’s Potemkin farm, and more.