Musings of the Artist: (Honest) Conversations with Montse Andrée

Madeleine Morlet is an Australian-born British-American artist. She is particularly interested in the concept of the female gaze, especially as it relates to motherhood and sexuality. Working primarily in medium format and 35mm film, she often combines portraits, landscapes, and close crops to explore character and place. Her photographic practice is grounded in research and, more recently, paired with creative nonfiction. We talke...

Darius Atefat-Peckham is an Iranian American poet and essayist. He is the author of Book of Kin, which won the 2023 Autumn House Poetry Prize, and the chapbook How Many Love Poems (Seven Kitchens Press, 2021). He is also the editor of his mother Susan Atefat-Peckham’s posthumous poetry collection Deep Are These Distances Between Us (CavanKerry Press, 2023). 

We talked about and kindness, poetry, dogs, language, crying on planes… and...

Odette England is an artist, photographer and writer. She has published five award-winning books and has two books coming out in 2025 including her first novella Isn’t X Beautiful. Odette received her Ph.D. in 2018 and was a 2022 Guggenheim Foundation Fellow. She teaches at Brown University and the Rhode Island School of Design, and is working on her second novella, Once I Was A Photograph.

This episode was audio produced by Katie M...

Gabrielle Bates is a poet, visual artist, and co-hosts the podcast The Poet Salon. She is the author of the poetry collection, Judas Goat (Tin House, 2023).

Patrycja Humienik is a Polish-American writer, editor, and performance artist. Her poetry collection, We Contain Landscapes (Tin House, 2025) is out now.

This was such a deep, nourishing conversation on art, language and friendship. This episode was audio produced by Katie McMurr...

Anne Eder is an interdisciplinary artist and educator. Much of her work is experimental and research based, combining historic processes, science, and contemporary conceptual thinking. She is well known for her sustainable photographic practice, and for innovative discoveries regarding both photographic chemistry and integrating media. Throughout her career she has been an advocate for increased access to the arts, and the creation...

Kaveh Akbar is a poet, novelist and editor. He is the author of two poetry collections: Pilgrim Bell and Calling a Wolf a Wolf, along with the chapbook, Portrait of the Alcoholic. He is also the editor of The Penguin Book of Spiritual Verse: 100 Poets on the Divine. His novel Martyr!, is a New York Times bestseller and National Book Award finalist.

In this episode, we talked about identity, obsession in art making, fan mail, memory ...

Matthew Zapruder is a poet, editor, and teacher. He is the author of six collections of poetry, most recently I Love Hearing Your Dreams (Scribner 2024), as well as two books of prose: Why Poetry (Ecco, 2017) and Story of a Poem (Unnamed, 2023). He is editor at large at Wave Books, and from 2016-7 he held the annually rotating position of Editor of the Poetry Column for the New York Times Magazine, and was the Editor of Best Americ...

Amina Cain is Los Angeles based writer. She is the author of the novel Indelicacy (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2020), and two collections of short stories, Creature (Dorothy, 2013) and I Go To Some Hollow (Les Figues Press, 2009). Her latest book is A Horse at Night: On Writing (Dorothy, 2022).

In this conversation we discuss friendship, writing, class, ambivalence around motherhood (an article she wrote on this can be found here), emb...

Sue William Silverman is an award-winning author of eight works of nonfiction and poetry and  her most recent book is Acetylene Torch Songs: Writing True Stories to Ignite the Soul. This conversation, just like her book, is centered around writing personal narratives. We discuss putting our most vulnerable selves on the page, the fluidity of memory, writing about other people and much more. If you are a writer of memoir and persona...

Ross Gay is the author of four books of poetry: Against Which; Bringing the Shovel Down; Be Holding, and Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude. In addition to his poetry, Ross has released three collections of essays—The Book of Delights (a New York Times bestseller), Inciting Joy, and his newest collection, The Book of (More) Delights.

This conversation, much like Ross’s work, is about joy, curiosity, belonging and caring for one another....

Gregory Orr is a poet who is known to be a master of the short, personal lyric. About Gregory, Mary Oliver wrote “He speaks now, in these many short poems, which in their entirety are really one long poem, of mysteries, of those things –emotions, situations, mind and heart states–which are beyond the definitive.” 

Gregory is the author of more than 10 collections of poetry. He has also published a beautiful book about lyric poetry c...

Philip Metres is a poet, translator and director of the Peace, Justice and Human Rights program at John Carroll University. He is the author of ten books, including Shrapnel Maps, The Sound of Listening: Poetry as Refuge and Resistance, Pictures at an Exhibition, and Sand Opera.

Tomás Q. Morin is a poet, translator, and editor. His books include the collection of poems Machete and the memoir Let Me Count the Ways, as well as the poe...

Laura Warrell is a writer based in Los Angeles. "Sweet, Soft, Plenty Rhythm" is her first novel. The story follows a 40-year-old jazz musician and womanizer Circus Palmer–but this book centers the women in his life. It is a telling of their stories, not only his.

Laura and I talk about her wonderful debut and her path to publication which is an inspiring tale of persistence. And, from a bit of a different angle, we muse on that pere...

Ama Codjoe is a poet based in New York City. She is the author of Bluest Nude and Blood of the Air. Her poems and essays have been published in many outlets and her work has twice appeared in The Best American Poetry. Her poems often engage with visual art—especially art by Black women artists. 

This conversation is much about the body. On how we relate to nudity and nakedness, on being in the body as an artist and on living a fully...

Diana Khoi Nguyen is a poet and multimedia artist. She is the author of the poetry collection, Ghost Of (Omnidawn Publishing, 2018) which was a finalist for the National Book Award and L.A. Times Book Prize. In this episode we talk about grief, complex emotions, silence, and breaking that silence through art. 

Note: There is a bit of static in the beginning on my end that I wasn’t aware of while recording - but it gets better!

This e...

Ingrid Rojas Contreras is a writer who was born and raised in Bogotá, Colombia and now lives in San Francisco, California. Her first book was the novel Fruit of the Drunken Tree and her most recent book is a family memoir called The Man Who Could Move Clouds.

In this episode we chat all about language. On writing between two languages and cultures, and the evolution of language. We also talk about anxiety, dreams (what they can tell...

Elinor Carucci is an Israeli-American Fine Art Photographer based in New York City. Her photographs are included in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art New York, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, Houston Museum of Fine Art, among others. Her work has been published in The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, W, Aperture, and many other publications. She has published four monographs: Closer, Diary of a Dancer, MOTHER and Midl...

Victoria Chang is a poet, writer and editor. Her new book of poetry is The Trees Witness Everything (2022). Her other books include Dear Memory: Letters on Writing, Silence and Grief (2021) and OBIT (2020).

In this episode, we chat about collaboration in art, her wonderful and varied use of form in her writing, and her current role as poetry editor at The New York Times Magazine. 

We also talk about growing up between cultures, and t...

Melissa Febos is the author of the critically acclaimed memoir, Whip Smart, and the essay collections, Abandon Me and Girlhood. Her craft book, Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative, will be published on March 15th.

In this episode, Melissa and I chat about her wonderful book Body Work. We talk about writing as a spiritual practice (and mode of discovery), learning to quiet that pesky voice saying “who cares?” while mak...