The PEN Pod: Creating Inner Worlds with Deborah Feldman
“Use this opportunity to learn to create this rich inner self and this inner world, because later. . . those skills will remain very valuable.” More
The PEN Pod: Tough Questions with Suzanne Nossel
“We are absolutely dependent on the role of journalists in helping us sort through fact from fiction, understand the science, know how to keep ourselves safe.” More
The PEN Pod: Singing About Dark Times with Carolyn Forché
“People have always turned to poetry in moments of extremity, because poetry arises—it’s deeply sourced, it’s memorable, it’s musical, and it offers us awareness.” More
The PEN Pod: Conveying Collective Trauma with Brandon Shimoda
“We’re in this moment where we’re all collectively undergoing this extraordinary trauma. . . in a way in which it’s not entirely visible.” More
The PEN Pod: Tough Questions with Suzanne Nossel
“It’s a new normal, where all kinds of actors. . . around the world have recognized that they can, incredibly cheaply, purvey propagandistic messages.” More
The PEN Pod: Finding Hope in Endurance with Emily St. John Mandel
“This is something that our ancestors endured, and something that our descendants will endure, and our society. . . has endured through all of that.” More
The PEN Pod: Confronting Science Fiction and Our Reality with N.K. Jemisin
“None of us could have written a story that had this kind of subplot because our editors would have been like, ‘It's unrealistic, go back and do it again.’” More
The PEN Pod: Forecasting the Future of the Film Industry with Franklin Leonard
“Seek out the full flower or the full bloom of cultural and artistic expression in the world right now, because we have a lot of time.” More
The PEN Pod: Tough Questions with Suzanne Nossel
“I always think back to this famous Rahm Emanuel phase, ‘Never waste a crisis’—it’s sort of the idea that in crisis, there lies opportunity.” More
The PEN Pod: Connecting through Translation with Ali Araghi
“One function of translation we could think about is the way it shows how literature of other cultures have reacted to similar problems we are dealing with.” More