Gene V. Baker is an immensely talented multi-instrumentalist and singer, as well as a composer and songwriter. He speaks candidly about the challenges he’s faced moving from the Bay Area to New York, and about the difficulty he’s had finding time for his creative practice outside of his all-consuming day job teaching music to kids.

In Episode 40 of Make/Work, host Scott Pinkmountain speaks with writer and activist Kate Schatz, author of the New York Times bestselling Rad American Women A-to-Z and Rad Women Worldwide, which she did in collaboration with illustrator Miriam Klein Stahl. Schatz is also one of the founders of the nationwide feminist resistance network Solidarity Sundays, which she started with Leslie Dotson Van Every and Jennye Garibaldi, and which has grown from a house party back in early 2016 to over one hundred chapters with more than eighteen thousand Facebook members. Likely, you know her for both of those things.

Dorian Wood is a musician, vocalist, and experimental performer. Much of Wood’s music and performance is an intensely visceral celebration and embrace of the body, often his own, which he fearlessly exposes while rendering gorgeous and virtuosic melodies. The effect is a powerful and intimate expression of his singular beauty that simultaneously reveals the more universal beauty of each of us as individuals.

Pinkmountain and Wood discuss the impact of the election on a personal level and Wood’s reluctance to directly address political matters through his creative work. Wood points out bluntly that as a self-identified “overweight, queer person of color,” being singled out and antagonized by those in power is not exactly a new experience.

Photograph © Pablo Almansa.

Beth Pickens is an LA-based consultant for artists and arts organizations. Pickens’s background is in Counseling Psychology and she applies those skills to her work, specializing in supporting queer and trans artists, women, and artists of color.

After the election Pickens wrote the how-to guide—Making Art During Fascism—and started running a free weekly drop-in workshop at the Women’s Center for Creative Work in LA. The workshop recently finished up, but Pickens is expanding the pamphlet into a book, which will be published by The Feminist Press as part of the Feminist Survival Series that author Michelle Tea is editing.

Photograph © Tammy Rae Carland.

Melody Parker composes intricate chamber songs, and Archipelago is her imaginative debut record. It invites the listener to inhabit an otherworldly place and time, yet it evokes the familiar as much as the fantastical. She has created these songs with mourning and celebration for this watery home we know—and for the paradoxical richness of our experience within it.

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Photograph of Melody Parker © Andria Lo.

Author and photographer Abeer Hoque lives in New York, has Bangladeshi roots, was born and raised in Nigeria, and identifies home in several different places. She captures this kind of simultaneous global existence beautifully in her new collection of linked short stories, The Lovers and The Leavers, which was recently published by HarperCollins India.

Scholar Dru Farro is currently finishing his PhD at the Center for the Study of Theory and Criticism in London, Ontario. He is also the Chief Deputy Editor of the journal Chiasma: A Site for Thought, and head administrator of the blog Song, and Sin. Farro talks with Pinkmountain about his role on the fringes of academia, his deeply ingrained American reluctance to seek medical attention, his eventual and abstract creative goals, and lots of Faulkner with some highfalutin references to someone named “Husserl.”

Joy Castro works in memoir, nonfiction, both literary and so-called commercial
fiction, and poetry. And she’ll also be directing the Institute for Ethnic Studies at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln this fall. Castro speaks about her somewhat unorthodox writing process, the course of her career, the distinctions (real or false) between literary and commercial fiction, and whether or not she’d feel comfortable leaving her child with the “slutty drunken” narrator of her crime thrillers.

Back in January, artists Daniel G. Baird and Alex Chitty sublet their apartment, quit their jobs, packed what they could into their van, Bosco, and left their home base of Chicago to travel around for a year with the intention of figuring out how to make it all work better. They speak to host Scott Pinkmountain about their goals, fears, hopes, and their desire to avoid being perceived as slackers. And of course the value of “Wiggly Time.”

Several years back Nathan Langston schemed up a “gimmick” to meet other artists when he landed friendless in New York City. In April, he launched Telephone: An International Arts Experiment with the Satellite Collective, linking 315 artists from 42 countries. Langston speaks about the origin and development of this ambitious project as well as the effect it’s had on his creative and personal life.