The Creators Podcast

Dive into the life and work of Rainer Maria Rilke, a poet who embraced doubt and the complexities of existence. Discover how his Prague upbringing and artistic solitude shaped his identity. The influence of Lou Andreas-Salomé and his rigorous apprenticeship with Rodin reveal his commitment to creativity. Explore Rilke's philosophy of living with uncertainty and letting beauty coexist with terror. His later works and timeless letters encourage embracing questions rather than seeking quick answers, urging us all to create authentically.

Lou Andreas-Salomé (1861–1937): Lou Andreas-Salomé was born in St. Petersburg and later living across the great nerve-centers of German-speaking culture, she published novels, essays, and criticism on religion, eros, selfhood, and the inner life, writing about desire and identity decades before those subjects were culturally safe. She engaged with some of the most brilliant minds of her time: Friedrich Nietzsche, Rainer-Maria Rilke, and Sigmund Freud. Lou negotiated a form of autonomy, structure, and freedom in an age that demanded women follow rigid expectations. She was a creator of creators, a thinker who inspired other thinkers, and was a living argument that intimacy does not require ownership.For More:Lou Andreas-Salomé — Encyclopædia BritannicaSigmund Freud and Lou Andreas-Salomé, Letters (Norton) Johns Hopkins Library Exhibit: “Lou Andreas-Salomé: A Brief Biography”Want to go beyond listening about creators, and become one? Consider joining The Creators Collective, the community Rainier started to unblock your purpose and ignite your passions. This group is filled with resources, and live teachings from Rainier. This month we'll be studying Nietzsche, on January 18. Sign up now to join us live!

Dorothy Day (1897–1980):Dorothy Day was a journalist-turned-organizer whose greatest creation was community itself. Born in Brooklyn and raised amid the changes of early-20th-century America. After a conversion to Catholicism in her thirties she co-founded The Catholic Worker in 1933, a penny newspaper that became a rallying cry for mercy, justice, and nonviolent resistance. Alongside it, she helped establish Houses of Hospitality across the country, where the hungry were fed, the homeless sheltered, and dignity treated as non-negotiable. A committed pacifist, Day opposed war, capitalism’s cruelties, and the quiet violence of indifference, enduring arrests, surveillance, and criticism from both Church and State. By the time of her death, she had reshaped the moral imagination of American faith.For More:The Long Loneliness — Dorothy DayDorothy Day: A Radical Devotion — PBS DocumentaryThe Catholic Worker Movement (catholicworker.org)Want to go beyond listening about creators, and become one? Consider signing up for the next Creators Collective class. This one's on the OG Rebel poet, prophet, creative type--Jesus Christ. Don't miss inspiring and powerful class for anyone looking to resurrect their creative life.THE SALONTHE INNER CIRCLE

Sister Rosetta Tharpe (1915–1973):Sister Rosetta Tharpe was the gospel virtuoso who rewrote the DNA of modern music. Born in Cotton Plant, Arkansas, and raised in the Pentecostal revivals of the American South, she became a national sensation in her teens as an electric-guitar prodigy whose fusion of sacred lyrics and blistering rhythm prefigured rock and roll by decades. In the 1930s and ’40s she recorded groundbreaking gospel hits, played the Cotton Club, toured with jazz greats, and astonished audiences with her fearless blend of church fervor and nightclub swagger. British blues musicians later traced their entire sound back to her records, crediting her as a foundational influence on artists like Elvis, Little Richard, and Johnny Cash. Though her career waned late in life and she died with little fanfare, Rosetta is now recognized as the godmother of rock and roll, an artist whose innovation, authority, and audacity shaped the world.For More:Shout, Sister, Shout!: The Untold Story of Rock-and-Roll Trailblazer Sister Rosetta Tharpe — Gayle F. WaldAmerican Masters: Sister Rosetta Tharpe — The Godmother of Rock & Roll (PBS Documentary)Archival 1964 Manchester PerformanceWant to go beyond listening about creators, and become one? Consider signing up for the next Creators Collective class. This one's on the OG Rebel poet, prophet, creative type--Jesus Christ. Don't miss inspiring and powerful class for anyone looking to resurrect their creative life.THE SALONTHE INNER CIRCLE

Brian Doyle (1956–2017):Brian Doyle was the joyful warrior of wonder. Born into a roaring Irish-Catholic family, he learned early that holiness hid inside the ordinary. After years in journalism, he landed in Oregon and became editor of Portland Magazine. Here his voice was transformed into one of America’s most astonishing essayists, writing in long, breathless sentences that felt like prayer and play at the same time. He died early of tragic brain cancer and left behind a body of work including novels, essays, letters, and love stories about grit and grace. Doyle believed that attention was a form of love and that praise was the only accurate response to this world. Today, he is considered one of the greatest evangelists of awe in an age of cynicism.For MoreOne Long River of Song--Brian DoyleCollected Archives--Portland MagazineReview--New York TimesWant to go beyond listening about creators, and become one? Consider joining The Creators Collective...the community Rainier started to unblock your purpose and ignite your passions. Filled with live teachings, creative prompts, and a circle of fellow makers, it’s where you create yourself alive.THE SALONTHE INNER CIRCLE

Leonora Carrington (1917–2011):Born into English aristocracy she rejected domestication and fled to Paris, falling into The Surrealist movement. Her paintings were characterized by dreamscapes of witches, wild animals, and rebirth. In 1940 she suffered a nervous breakdown, was declared insane and institutionalized in Spain. She was able to escape and remade herself in Mexico City among exiles, mystics and poets. Carrington’s art is a record of a woman who turned exile into alchemy. Today, she is considered one of the most celebrated and enduring Surrealist artists.For More: Down Below — Leonora Carrington Leonora Carrington: Museum of Modern ArtWant to go beyond listening about creators, and become one? Consider joining The Creators Collective...the community Rainier started to unblock your purpose and ignite your passions. Filled with live teachings, creative prompts, and a circle of fellow makers, it’s where you create yourself alive.THE SALONTHE INNER CIRCLE

Georgia O’Keeffe (1887–1986)Georgia O’Keeffe was the woman who chose to be both the maker and the muse. She came of age in a world that wanted women to be owned, creatively, emotionally, and relationally. She refused to be anyone's possession. Her paintings were less about what they showed and more about what they stripped away. Each one was a reclamation of selfhood. She became both legend and lover in the orbit of photographer Alfred Stieglitz, whose vision of her nearly consumed her. When that life grew too small, she left it all to find herself in the desert. There in New Mexico, O’Keeffe built a world from her own silence. This episode asks what she teaches us about love and identity, when creativity and intimacy collide, who owns the story?FOR MORE:Georgia O’Keeffe, Georgia O’Keeffe: Art and Letters (ed. Jack Cowart & Juan Hamilton)Roxana Robinson, Georgia O’Keeffe: A LifeThe Georgia O’Keeffe Museum – Santa Fe, New MexicoIf you're ready to create, I built The Creators Collective as a home for artists, writers, and tender rebels who believe in living wholeheartedly. Through poetry, story, and creative work of every kind, we dare to live out loud. For just $44 a month, you can join The Salon, our first tier, and get monthly live classes, full access to the creative archive, weekly sparks to keep your fire alive, and a community of fellow makers at the table with you. Or, you can take a deeper dive into The Inner Circle, giving you access to more engagement, behind-the-scenes insights, private interactive calls, and opportunities for direct mentorship. It’s the space where we move past inspiration and into true creative transformation. THE SALONTHE INNER CIRCLE

Sōetsu Yanagi (1889–1961)Sōetsu Yanagi was the quiet heretic who declared war on speed. In the 1920s, alongside potters Shōji Hamada and Kanjirō Kawai, he founded the Mingei (“folk craft”) movement: an act of philosophical resistance that insisted usefulness, humility, and imperfection were the true teachers of beauty. He preached a gospel of anonymity. This episode asks how we create honest art in an age when visibility has replaced value, and speed itself has become a religion. What does it mean to make something that doesn’t scream for attention?FOR MORE:The Unknown CraftsmanMingeikan – Japan Folk Crafts Museum (Tokyo)If you're ready to create, I built The Creators Collective as a home for artists, writers, and tender rebels who believe in living wholeheartedly. Through poetry, story, and creative work of every kind, we dare to live out loud. For just $44 a month, you can join The Salon, our first tier, and get monthly live classes, full access to the creative archive, weekly sparks to keep your fire alive, and a community of fellow makers at the table with you. Or, you can take a deeper dive into The Inner Circle, giving you access to more engagement, behind-the-scenes insights, private interactive calls, and opportunities for direct mentorship. It’s the space where we move past inspiration and into true creative transformation. THE SALONTHE INNER CIRCLE

Arthur Rimbaud (1854–1891)Arthur Rimbaud was the teenage prodigy who detonated modern poetry and then walked away before his twentieth birthday. Born in a small French town to a devout mother and absent father, he fled to Paris during the chaos of the Franco-Prussian War, where his hallucinatory verses and scandalous affair with poet Paul Verlaine made him both legend and pariah. In just a few feverish years he wrote The Drunken Boat, A Season in Hell, and Illuminations; works that reshaped language itself and foreshadowed everything from surrealism to punk. This episode asks what his vanishing act reveals about our own obsession with permanence: why we believe art, life, and love must last to matter, and what it might mean to burn brightly and let the fire go out.FOR MORE:Rimbaud Complete Works | Translated by Wallace FowlieEnid Starkie, Arthur Rimbaud: A Biography“The Drunken Boat” and “A Season in Hell,” public domain translations at Poetry FoundationIf you're ready to create, I built The Creators Collective as a home for artists, writers, and tender rebels who believe in living wholeheartedly. Through poetry, story, and creative work of every kind, we dare to live out loud. For just $44 a month, you can join The Salon, our first tier, and get monthly live classes, full access to the creative archive, weekly sparks to keep your fire alive, and a community of fellow makers at the table with you. Or, you can take a deeper dive into The Inner Circle, giving you access to more engagement, behind-the-scenes insights, private interactive calls, and opportunities for direct mentorship. It’s the space where we move past inspiration and into true creative transformation. THE SALONTHE INNER CIRCLE

Renato Casaro (1935–2025):Renato Casaro is the Italian painter who gave cinema its mythic face.He began painting movie posters as a teenager outside his local theater and rose through Rome’s Cinecittà Studios to become the go-to artist for filmmakers like Sergio Leone and Dino De Laurentiis. His brush created the worlds of Conan the Barbarian, The NeverEnding Story, Dune, and The Last Emperor—images that turned films into modern icons. Eventually his work was replaced by computer design and cheaper software. This episode asks what his story reveals about our own age of automation: why make anything by hand when a machine can do it faster, and what do we lose when beauty no longer needs a human heartbeat to exist?FOR MORE:The Michelangelo of Movie Posters, NY TimesThe Last Movie Painter (Documentary, 2021)Renato Casaro’s official site: www.renatocasaro.comIf you're ready to create, I built The Creators Collective as a home for artists, writers, and tender rebels who believe in living wholeheartedly. Through poetry, story, and creative work of every kind, we dare to live out loud. For just $44 a month, you can join The Salon, our first tier, and get monthly live classes, full access to the creative archive, weekly sparks to keep your fire alive, and a community of fellow makers at the table with you. Or, you can take a deeper dive into The Inner Circle, giving you access to more engagement, behind-the-scenes insights, private interactive calls, and opportunities for direct mentorship. It’s the space where we move past inspiration and into true creative transformation. THE SALONTHE INNER CIRCLE