[Intro music]
Hey everybody, and welcome to the Little Oracles podcast, an oracle for the everyday creative. I’m Allison Arth.
Heavens to Murgatroyd, here we are at the end of Season Two! [laughs] Can you believe it? I kinda can’t, honestly. [laughs] As I look back on the last 22 episodes of this season centered on this idea of Play as Practice, and the importance of iteration, and experimentation, and discovery, and fun within creative practice and process, I’m honestly so grateful — that’s the first thing that I think about. I’m grateful to all of you, to the incredible creators who joined me for Creative Chats, and let’s just do a roll call so we can recognize these genius folks once again: game designer & the creator of Girl by Moonlight, Andrew Gillis; narrative director & DM to the stars, Kate Welch; video editor & the Creative Director of Indie Bard, Suzanne Wallace; podcaster & the man the gaming content coming from Third Floor Wars, Craig Shipman; writer & game developer, Nychelle Schneider; multimedia artist Sabrina Sims; graphic artist & game designer John Harper; writer & the co-creator of Thin Places Radio Kristen O’Neal; Emmy-winning writer & performer Shannon Joy Rodgers; and, of course, artist, producer, & the other co-creator of Thin Places Radio, Kaitlin Bruder. And you can find all of these chats wherever you get your podcast, and also in the brand new archive at little oracles dot com. Check that out if you’ve missed any of these Creative Chats, or Everyday Creative audio-essays, or big book energy episodes featuring Little Reviews of books cherry-picked from my reading list; they’re all collected and collated for you at little oracles dot com slash archive.
I also wanna shout out the folks who aren’t in front of the microphone: the people who are reading along with the Asynchronous Book Club, or just getting inspired by the ABC’s monthly themes, and any and all of you who’ve shared your enthusiasm for Little Oracles on social media, or in DMs, or on our tiny little Discord, or over a coffee or lunch or in a video chats with me personally. (Mom, thank you for listening to every episode of this podcast; you’ve always been my biggest fan. [laughs]) And, you know, it feels a little bit trite to say, but I’m just so humbled and happy that we’ve architected this little corner of creative theory and thought here on the Internet, and I just hope this show has offered you some new perspective, or some creative oomph, or just a moment of pause or peace every week to sit with some musings about what it means to make, and to be a maker.
For me, this season has been such a boon: it’s been the catalyst for some really meaningful collaborations — some of which you’ve already heard, and some that are still to come — and it’s also been this massive sandbox for me to explore and to test new formats and formulas, and to iterate on what quote-unquote “works” — and not in market-focused terms of raw enumerability, but in terms of what I look forward to concepting and curating and creating for all of you every week.
And what’s so wonderful is that I’m still in the process of learning what that is. [laughs] It’s like I’m in a constant state of creative flux that, at its core, is powered by curiosity, and I’m just kind of leaning into that willingness — and that hunger, really — to learn and to refashion and to reimagine that in an of itself is so critical to creative practice.
And, to that end, I’ve got something completely new cooked up for Season Three. Little Oracles as you know it (and hopefully love it) is morphing for an end-of-year miniseries called Divinations: seven episodes featuring an ongoing conversation and collaboration with one of my mentors and oldest friends, working poet and host of the Cultivating Voices Live poetry series, Sandra Yannone. Sandy is just eminently generous and inspiring, and her insights into creative practice and process are absolutely invaluable, and so I’m so thrilled that she’s comin’ on the show for seven whole episodes.
So, over the course of these episodes, we’ll be talking about creativity and constraints, and the vitality of poetry, and the necessity of community in the context of being a creator and a maker; and we’re debuting new work in progress — so these are new poems written in an epistolary-style exchange, and they’re based on the original Little Oracles lexical fractals and fragments that I exhibited at Orcas Paley last fall, which I talked about way back in the very first episode of this podcast — and I link that in the show notes in case you missed it.
And, as an offering to all of you, I’m gonna have some interactive elements available: I’ll be reviving the Little Oracles digital installation that Sandy and I are drawing from, and, to sum up, the Little Oracles digital installation is poetic fragments, photographic triptychs, and also tiny little musical soundscapes — so it’s got all kinds of stuff that you can draw from if you so choose, and you can use them for your own poetry exchange, or to inspire a piece of art, or some other creative project that you’re rolling around in your head.
And if you’re on the fence about whether or not you wanna start a creative project, may I recommend episodes 15 and 18 from this season — I’ll link them in the show notes — where I talk about running up that hill of starting a project, and feeling bolstered in that boldness to just do it; just go for it; and to just trust yourself (and maybe your collaborators, too, if you’re going group-style) — but just trusting yourself to create.
So, I’d call this Divinations miniseries a full-circle moment if it weren’t so clearly a complementary facet, or an intersecting plane, or even a reflexive trajectory for Little Oracles. [laughs] You know, whatever word we might use, whatever playful expression, I couldn’t be more excited to share this season with all of you.
And, so you know, I’m planning to take a short break after the last episode of Diviniations drops mid-December, so today we’re gonna reveal our ABC reading themes and book club picks for November and December.
So, November’s theme is Lost & Found: Family Stories, and I’ve got three picks for you: The Bird Artist, by Howard Norman, one of our original set from the top of the year, kind of an inverted murder mystery that takes places in a very close-knit — and possibly claustrophobic — community in Newfoundland in the early 1900s; Memphis by Tara M. Stringfellow, a legacy novel that chronicles three generations of a Southern Black family — it was called “a rhapsodic hymn to Black women” by the New York Times Book Review; and Chilean Poet by Alejandro Zambra, a novel the L.A. Times called “a tender and funny story about love, family and the peculiar position of being a stepparent.”
And, for December, we’re gonna close out the year with a phrase you’ve heard me say on every single episode of this podcast, I’m pretty sure: Big Book Energy is gonna be our December ABC theme. And I’ve got just one pick for you, because she is a mighty, mighty boss tome, coming in at around 700 pages, and about 28 hours in her audiobook form: Winter’s Tale by Mark Helprin, the final pick from our original Immortal Beloveds lineup from January that we dispersed over the course of the year. So I’ve read this one already, and I’ve listened to it, and if you follow me, or you follow Little Oracles on Instagram, you might remember my micro-review, which was, “Epic, magical, dynastic; a love-letter to New York City for fans of the fantastical and a 19th-century verbosity in modern dress.” And I think that kind of sums it up [laughs]; it’s a truly beautiful read and a beautiful listen, too, and I think it’s just the perfect book to round out our first year of the Little Oracles Asynchronous Book Club.
As ever, check content warnings before you dive into anything we talk about here on the podcast, because reading should be a safe and enjoyable experience for you, and also, remember that this is an asynchronous book club, so you can read what you want, when you want, and if you don’t want, you can just use the monthly themes to curate your own reading list or watch list or listen list — so, for example, what does the concept of Lost & Found in the context of family mean to you? How does family manifest in your life? What does it look like, what does it act like, how do you fit within your own definition of family?
And, by the same token, what does Big Book Energy bring up for you? How would you breathe life into that phrase? You know, maybe you’d break it up; maybe focus on only one of the components: the vastness or breadth implied by the word “big,” or the motivity or electricity implied by the word “energy.” It’s totally up to you, and I encourage you to put your own spin on it; reinvigorate it; redefine it; poetize it; create within and around it — you know, whatever works for you.
And that’s it; that’s the close of Season Two of Little Oracles: Play as Practice. Once again, I wanna thank you all for joining me here at Little Oracles, week after week; I look forward to more and more weeks with all of you in the future. You can listen to the Divinations trailer right now wherever you get your podcasts, and as a special treat for y'all this week, I’m dropping the first episode of the series on Thursday, November 9th — so it's a two-episode-drop week! — followed by episodes every Tuesday, from November 14th through mid-December. I will see you all there. In the meantime, if you’re loving Little Oracles and everything we do, share some episodes with somebody who might love us, too; leave a rating or a review wherever you listen, and for a steady stream of big book energy and creativity content, follow along on Instagram (at) little oracles, and the blog at little oracles dot com. And, as always, take care, keep creating, and stay divine.
[Outro music]
[Secret outtake]
[cat meows] [laughs] Okay. You’re– [cat meows insistently] Yeah, you’re gonna keep going, aren’t ya? Okay. Let’s do it. [cat trills] Come on! [cat trills] Thank you. [cat trills, meows] Uh-huh.