John Colpitts, aka Kid Millions, is a founding member of the band Oneida, but he’s toured and recorded with tons of bands including Yo La Tengo, Spiritualized, Akron/Family, Marnie Stern, The Boredoms, and the Rumpus’s own Rick Moody. More recently, he’s focused on his solo percussion project, Man Forever. Man Forever is currently on tour, and the new album, Ryonen, which is a collaboration with the So Percussion ensemble, comes out this month on Thrill Jockey.

Musician Jon Bernson performs mainly with his groups THEMAYS and Exray’s and actor/director Jennifer Welch runs the Tides Theater, located in the heart of Downtown San Francisco’s theater district.

Nate Query plays bass for both The Decemberists and Black Prarie, and has made playing music with nationally touring bands his main job for around twenty years.

You can check out Query playing live with Black Prairie on KEXP here. Their new album, "Fortune," comes out April 22 on Sugar Hill Records.

Writer LuLing Osofsky’s work ranges from intimately personal lyric essays about her love and sex life, to investigative journalism and researched history, which she also manages to approach with a personal, revealing perspective.

You can read LuLing's essay "Chop City," published in Orion Magazine and mentioned at the end of the episode, here.

Emily Chenoweth is the author of the novel Hello Goodbye, which was a finalist for the Oregon Book Award. She’s also a highly prolific ghostwriter. Jon Raymond has written The Half-Life, Rain Dragon, and the short story collection, Livability. His screenwriting credits include Wendy and Lucy, Meek’s Cutoff, the HBO miniseries Mildred Pierce, and several other films.

Italian musician Jacopo Andreini is mainly known as a drummer and composer in bands like Squarcicatrici and L’Enfance Rouge, but that only makes up a small fraction of the work that he does.

Katie Bachler is an artist/educator based in Southern California and her work is centered on our connections to place and to each other. She recently created a Map of Home or the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and is currently working on building the Women’s Center for Creative Work in Los Angeles.

Julien Nitzberg is a writer/director/documentarian most well-known for the documentary, The Wild and Wonderful Whites of West Virginia, and his musical, The Beastly Bombing, which won Musical of the Year from the LA Weekly Theater Awards in 2007.

Note: At one point Nitzberg refers to my working with Tune-Yards. I didn’t work with them; they were working in my studio.

Maggie Nelson has been published, and celebrated, as a poet, a memoirist, an essayist, an art critic. It's best just to call her a writer, or a woman of letters. Her most recent book The Art of Cruelty, an examination of images of violence in fine art, was named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. She's also faculty at Cal Arts in Southern California.