A Love Supreme with Dae Bryant
Talking to Dae feels like rewiring my thoughts. When he described the connection between philosophy and music, I immediately related to his lived experience. He is someone who is creating his own way of living.
Category The Artist Life
Life is art, but how can we live in the world as artists do?
The Artist Life examines the daily realities, challenges, and choices that shape creative practice over time. These stories explore process, vocation, community, resilience, and the many ways artists sustain meaningful lives, bringing art to life and offering examples of how to live in authentic and creative engagement with the world.
Sama and the Practice of Deliberative Listening
I became the sole child member of a Sufi whirling group. I was introduced to “Sama,” a word that translates to “listening” and, in my experience, involves the redirection of attention to achieve deeper connection.
We Are All But Humble Mice: Anatomy of a Small-Press Passion Project
When I realized that I wanted to be a writer, comics criticism became an outlet for the point of view I had developed over a lifetime. In 2019 Daniel Elkin, Alex Hoffman, Ryan Carey, and I formed Fieldmouse Press.
Photo © by CydScottPhotoMaking a Life, Not a Career: Listening for the Life That Wants to Grow with Paul Hansen
Paul Hansen is the person who inspired me to explore this theme I call Art of Life. When we last talked on Zoom, he said something that stayed with me: artists have to find their own way to live because no two lives unfold the same way. In this interview, Paul repeated that the essence of life is a long chain of decisions made based on one's own aesthetic sense, and that is what it means to be an artist.
Freedom to Flow with Todd Marston
No one ever actually told me how to live as a musician. There are many ways, and you have so much freedom to create your own way. And that’s not easy because the choices are endless. So, I started this series of interviews to ask my friends how they live as artists. This first interview was with Todd Marston, my long-time friend and a keyboard player, composer, and educator.
Photo © by Dirk VerheRema Hasumi: Finding Inspiration and Connection in Music and Motherhood
Rema Hasumi’s music rises to higher ground, but it navigates deep and turbulent waters to get there. That journey has taken on new dimensions in recent years, as her journey through motherhood has reshaped both her life and art, leading to the release of her new album, Mothers.
Photo © by Christopher PelhamFor Every Work Has Several Faces: A Conversation with Yoko Tawada about Writing and Translation
I had the honor of introducing Yoko Tawada’s seminal lecture “Every Work Has Several Faces: A Conversation with Yoko Tawada about Writing and Translation,” delivered at the Lenfest Center for the Arts, Columbia University School of the Arts, on March 27, 2025. In this article, I expand on that introduction, exploring how Tawada, a borderless wordsmith, shatters linguistic confines through writing and translation: her language erases frontiers and reconfigures reality, existing not as the ruins of Babel, but as a thriving, pulsating, organic entity.
Born in Tokyo and now residing in Berlin, Tawada is a celebrated writer of fiction, poetry, and a deeply engaged thinker on the nature of language. Writing in both German and Japanese, she is recognized as one of the most distinctive multilingual voices in contemporary literature.