Imagination State

What might an imagination curriculum look like? How is learning the art of interruption a key part of that? 

This week's guest is Barbara Leckie, professor at Canada's Carleton University, author of Climate Change Interrupted: Representation and the Remaking of Time, and host of the podcast Commons Sense. Barbara’s work moves between Victorian literature, climate communication, and environmental humanities, and she is one ...

César Jung-Harada has a wildly adventurous life: He’s a justice-oriented philosopher-inventor traversing the world’s oceans to help humanity adapt to climate change. He has built oil-spill robots, shape-shifting boats, floating cities, and hydrogen devices. The inventions range in technology and scale, but the heart and soul remains the same. César uses imagination and inclusion to scaffold all he does, believing that children, stu...

Daniel Tam-Claiborne is a writer, producer, and nonprofit leader whose work bridges cultures and builds belonging. His debut novel Transplants (Simon & Schuster, 2025), a finalist for the PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction, follows two young women navigating borders, responsibility, and the search for home. A former Fulbright Scholar and NEA Fellow, Daniel is now Deputy Director of The Serica Initiative, where he...

This week on Imagination State, we are joined by Amelia Hruby - feminist writer, podcaster, and creator of Off the Grid, a podcast and community for people reclaiming their attention from social media. With Off the Grid and as the founder of Softer Sounds, Amelia helps artists and entrepreneurs build thriving creative lives beyond the extractive attention economies of social media. A former philosophy professor and the author of Fi...

Why wouldn’t we want all stories together? We miss out when we’re segregated.

Marcie’s stories open the door to her home and her heart - and, somehow, to your own. She once wrote that newsletters are like the Off-Broadway productions of what’s happening in Midtown. Her recent Love Letters on Substack feel like the main show: intimate, arresting, and something you carry with you long after it’s over. She doesn’t turn away from sorrow...

Hello again, and a warm welcome to new listeners! This is the first episode of a new season and, in a way, the first chapter of an entirely new story. Old friends will remember The Heart Gallery; now, we’ve stepped out into the wider - and wilder? - landscape of the imagination.

In this short opening episode, I share the tale of a matrescence-sparked imagination awakening, the first beginning of a curriculum experiment drawn from wo...

In this episode, we step into the world of ethnomusicology with Angela Impey. Angela is a researcher, author, and senior lecturer at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, where she explores the links between music, culture, and social change.

Angela shares her experiences during apartheid in South Africa, where music became a powerful form of political expression, along with stories from several ethnomusic...

In this episode launching on Juneteenth, come on a trip down the road from Selma, Alabama - home of the 1960s Selma Voting Rights Movement and the Selma to Montgomery marches - to the tiny little enclave of Gee’s Bend, situated in a bend of the Alabama river. This is the home of the famous Gees Bend quilters.

The community of Gee’s Bend, Alabama, traces its roots back to the enslaved individuals who toiled on Joseph Gee’s cotton pla...

Did you know that the average person encounters 10,000 commercial images in a day? That neighborhoods where people have lower incomes tend to have more advertisements for unhealthy foods and have more stores selling and advertising commercial tobacco? That the majority of images we see of the African continent are mostly from Western sources? This is some of what I’ve learned from the new book, The Digital Detox, by Marine Tanguy, ...

A recurring theme on the podcast is the climate crisis and the ways in which artists are addressing it in their work, whether they're focused on showing ways forward for society, making the issue more concrete for individuals and specific communities, or inviting people sideways into the issue through art that is focused on elements of celebration, curiosity, care. If you listen to the podcast often, you know the last one is m...

This episode of The Heart Gallery will take you into the history and ongoing realities of Indigenous affairs in Canada. Recent years have shed light on a painful and violent history, as well as present-day systemic challenges. From the harrowing legacy of the residential school system, which remained active until the 1990s, to the continuous struggles over land rights and cultural preservation, these unfolding revelations have spar...

In today's episode, Justin Cook takes us into the evolving world of climate storytelling where he's been a journalist and photographer covering "communities living along the edges in America" for the past several years. Justin's work stands in stark contrast to the conventional climate storytelling landscape that's so often dominated by dire predictions and a sense of impending doom.  In today's c...

In today's escalating humanitarian crises, the term itself is complex, influenced by various factors. The United Nations reports 235 million people needing humanitarian help, nearly double from a decade ago. These crises and the treatment of them, often rooted in colonialism, affect everything from resources to power structures, and, as discussed in the episode with Patrick Gathara, may perpetuate biased narratives by overlook...

For the 12th episode of The Heart Gallery, I am in conversation with Gaelynn Lea.  Gaelynn, a violinist and songwriter who won NPR Music’s Tiny Desk Contest in 2016, has a unique perspective on the challenges and opportunities in the music industry, especially for disabled artists. She has performed over 600 shows in 45 states and 9 countries, but her path hasn't been without obstacles. And according to Gaelynn, 26% of America...

This is the second part of my conversation with Patrick Gathara. In this segment, we continue to dissect inclusive storytelling and its critical role in understanding humanity - both that of the world as well as our own.  We cover the genocide in Gaza, inclusive stories from other context, the problems of western media today, and how to go beyond "the single story".

HW from Patrick: "The one thing I would as...

For the first episode of The Heart Gallery Season 2, I talk to Patrick Gathara, The New Humanitarian's Senior Editor of Inclusive Storytelling.  Patrick talks about what inclusive storytelling look like in a context where the news is changing by the minute, where echo chambers are swirling with recycled talking points, where mainstream media is saturated with dehumanization of whole groups of people, and all while a literal ge...

For the 10th episode (and the season finale!) of The Heart Gallery Podcast, I connect with my wonderful friend Taylor Freesolo Rees.

Taylor is a filmmaker, documentarian, storyteller and photographer. She has won numerous film festival awards for her work exploring environmental justice, natural resource issues, the outdoor adventure industry and its various players, nonhuman creatures and our relationships with them, and...

For Episode 9 of The Heart Gallery Podcast, Rebeka Ryvola de Kremer talks to climate story consultant Alisa Petrosova.

This episode explores how the film and TV industry is doing on climate messaging.
According to research from Good Energy and The Media Impact Project that analyzed 37, 453 scripted television episodes and films released from 2016 through 2020, less than 3% acknowledge climate change.Alisa works at Goo...

For Episode 8 of The Heart Gallery Podcast, Rebeka Ryvola de Kremer talks to artist and writer John Kazior.

Today’s guest on The Heart Gallery sparks imagination incredibly well. He is John Kazior, an American artist and writer based in Sweden. John's writing also reveals the depths of these dark arts and shares how we can come to see these efforts more clearly. He talks about how we can learn to go deeper below the s...