Dan Nelson and Lexa Walsh are both interdisciplinary artists with too many different pursuits to list in full. Nelson is perhaps best known for his book, All Known Metal Bands, but he’s also made a lot of visual work and he records music under the name Boron. Much of Walsh’s work is socially-rooted and based around fostering community and, as she says, “working to create a hospitable democracy.” She’s also a musician and plays in the band Toychestra, as well as in The Pleasure Class with Nelson.

Artist Vanesa Zendejas has recently been dealing primarily with Modernist sculpture and her habit to decorate, perfect, and balance, which she says may or may not be related to being a woman.

Zendejas speaks about the value that value she gets from totally immersing herself in a community of artists and blurring the lines between her domestic and creative life. She also talks about growing up with a strong awareness of her Mexican-American heritage taught to her from her father who is a traditional communist painter, and her successful mother who expects her to “be smart” about the choices she makes.

Writer Diane Cook was a producer at This American Life for years until she quit to pursue her own fiction writing. She’s since had work published or forthcoming in places like Harper's, Granta, and Zoetrope, and in 2012 she won the Calvino Prize for fabulist fiction.

Cook speaks about what she learned from her time at This American Life, how she ultimately had to leave the job to develop her own identity as a writer, and her need to focus exclusively on her writing for the last couple of years.

Check out Diane Cook's story, "Moving On", in the latest issue of Tin House. Preorder her debut collection, Man V. Nature, here. 

Aaron Siegel is one of the co-founders of the New York-based organization Experiments in Opera, and his own opera, “Brother Brother,” has its full-length premiere coming up in New York City on May 2^nd and 3^rd at the Playhouse at Abrons Art Center.

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.