Off-Leash Arts: Conversations on Creativity

Tanya Shaffer
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Host Tanya Shaffer talks with artists from a wide range of disciplines about their creative process: what excites them, ignites them, and helps them get to that free-flowing creative state where they feel they’ve slipped the leash.

  1. 05/08/2025

    Author Jennifer Steil

    Jennifer Steil is a British-American writer currently living in France. She’s the author of the novel Exile Music, which won Grand Prize in the Eyelands 2020 Book Awards and the Multicultural and Historical International Book Awards. It was also a finalist for the Lambda Literary Lesbian Fiction Award. Previous books include the novel The Ambassador’s Wife and the memoir The Woman Who Fell From the Sky. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, New Orleans Review, Kenyon Review, World Policy Journal, Mslexia’s Best Women’s Short Fiction 2023, Gay & Lesbian Review, Time, Life, The Washington Times, and Vogue UK. She writes a weekly Substack newsletter called Liminal, about living between cultures, languages, and illness and health. In this interview, she talks with Tanya about her journey from reporting in New York to becoming the editor of a newspaper in Yemen, how being held hostage when she was six months pregnant inspired her first novel, and the seeds of inspiration for her second novel, about Jewish Holocaust refugees in Bolivia.

  2. 01/10/2023

    Writer and Writing Teacher Laurie Wagner

    Laurie Wagner has been publishing books and essays and teaching writing for the last 25 years. In her Wild Writing classes, she helps people unzip what’s inside them and get ink on the page. Laurie teaches online and takes people around the world to places like Kathmandu; San Miguel de Allende and Oaxaca, Mexico; and Taos, New Mexico. Her books include Living Happily Ever After: Couples Talk about Lasting Love, and Expectations: 30 Women Talk about Becoming a Mother. She was also a writer on the Oscar-nominated documentary For Better or For Worse. Laurie was a teacher and mentor of Off-Leash Arts host, Tanya Shaffer. In this conversation, the two women talk about the trajectory that led Laurie from journalism to work in the publishing industry to leading Wild Writing workshops, her strategy of “lowering our gaze,” and the transformational power of naming things exactly as they are.

    Writer and Writing Teacher Laurie Wagner

  3. 21/06/2023

    Writer-Translator Mara Faye Lethem

    Mara Faye Lethem has received numerous international awards for her translations of contemporary Catalan authors, including the inaugural 2022 Spain-USA Foundation Translation Award for Max Besora’s The Adventures and Misadventures of Joan Orpí and the 2022 Joan Baptiste Cendrós International Prize for her contributions to Catalan literature. Her translation of Irene Solà’s When I Sing, Mountains Dance was shortlisted for the 2022 National Book Critics Circle Barrios Book in Translation Prize, and is currently longlisted for the 2023 Oxford-Weidenfeld Prize. In addition to many novels, she has translated shorter works that have appeared in The Guardian, Best American Non-Required Reading 2010, Granta, The Paris Review, Tin House, A Public Space, McSweeney’s and more. She’s also the author of the novel, A Person’s A Person, No Matter How Small. In this conversation, she discusses with host Tanya Shaffer how became a literary translator, the different ways people approach the task, the particular challenges of the translator’s job and the lessons they hold for all creative endeavors.

  4. 06/02/2023

    Actor Kelly AuCoin: Ferocious Listening

    Kelly AuCoin is best known for playing cult favorite “Dollar Bill” Stearn on Showtime’s Billions and Pastor Tim (known to fans as Pastor Groovyhair) on FX’s iconic drama The Americans. Last year he starred in Hulu’s The Girl from Plainville and AppleTV+’s WeCrashed and is currently filming the FX limited series The Sterling Affairs. He has a host of other television, film and theater credits, including playing Octavius Caesar in Julius Caesar on Broadway opposite Denzel Washington. In this episode, Kelly talks with Tanya about his process of developing a character, his “tortoise-like” career path, the intersection between art and activism, what it’s like to work with Denzel Washington (“He’s got gravitational pull”) and the moments that truly thrill him as an actor.

  5. 13/12/2022

    Author-Columnist-Political Commentator Steve Phillips

    Steve Phillips suspected there would be no “red wave” in November. One of the most astute political thinkers of our time, he showed us, in his book Brown is the New White: How the Demographic Revolution Created a New American Majority, that people of color in combination with progressive whites comprise the majority in this country, a majority that put a Black man in the White House twice. In his new book, How We Win the Civil War: Securing a Multiracial Democracy and Ending White Supremacy Forever, he sheds light on the forces that seek to undermine our democracy, drawing a straight line from the Confederacy to Donald Trump, and illuminates the path forward by highlighting the organizations and individuals whose sustained efforts have transformed the political landscape in Georgia, Arizona, and beyond. In this conversation, Steve shares his core motivation for writing this book, which he describes as a culmination of his life’s work up to this point. We also discuss his writing routine, the surprises he uncovered in his research, and the examples, past and present, that inspire him to continue the fight.

  6. 06/10/2022

    Visual Artist Donna Alena Hrabčáková

    Artist and art therapist Donna Alena Hrabčáková has dedicated her life to the healing capacities of art. She has lived and worked in Ohio, California, Slovakia, and the Red Lake Nation Reservation in Northern Minnesota. Her exquisitely colorful paintings are dreamlike, vivid, and profoundly moving, often evoking joy, sorrow and hope within a single canvas. Her work has been exhibited in many places throughout the US and Eastern Europe. She had recently relocated from the US to her ancestral village of Gigloce, Slovakia, 27 miles from the Ukrainian border, when the pandemic struck. She weathered much of it there, creating extraordinary new work both on canvas and on the walls of her great-grandfather’s home. She then returned to the U.S. to manage her visa when the war in Ukraine broke out. This led her to create a series of paintings titled Guardians of the Border, which have been widely shared all over the world. Here she talks with host Tanya Shaffer about her childhood, her dreams, her connection to her ancestors, and her belief in art’s transcendent power to heal.

  7. 09/05/2022

    Poet-Playwright-Essayist Alison Luterman

    Alison Luterman is a writer of extraordinary passion, power, courage and depth. Her work is both timely and timeless, engaging with contemporary issues in profound and complex ways while simultaneously probing the fundamental question of what it means to be human. In this conversation, we talked about her childhood—she started writing poetry when she was six!—her writing process, her recent poetry collection In the Time of Great Fires, her song cycle We Are Not Afraid of the Dark (with composer Sheela Ramesh—song excerpts included!), and the young activists who inspire her. She also reads her stunning poems “Some Girls” (selected by Naomi Shihab Nye for the New York Times Sunday Magazine) and “Insatiable.”

  8. 06/03/2022

    Writer-Podcaster Debra Gipson

    Debra Gipson is the creator of the award-winning podcast Dear Michelle, a memoir framed as a series of letters to former First Lady Michelle Obama. In her podcast, Debra manages to be both laugh-out-loud funny and deeply moving as she discusses her rise from poverty and abuse to the hallowed halls of academia and beyond. “Michelle Obama was everything that I could have been, had I not made bad choices,” Debra explains. “She represents everything you can be if everything goes well, and I represent everything that could potentially go wrong if you make the missteps that I’ve made.” In this episode, Tanya and Debra discuss the ways in which the neighborhood where Debra grew up inspired her writing, her philosophy of human relationships, and the extraordinary resilience that continues to define her path. “I think the magic in our lives happens not when we choose to stay stationary, but when we have the courage to move.” says Debra. “Because that movement, that getting out of your comfort zone, opens up an entire world of possibility. I always say it shakes the universe.”

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Host Tanya Shaffer talks with artists from a wide range of disciplines about their creative process: what excites them, ignites them, and helps them get to that free-flowing creative state where they feel they’ve slipped the leash.

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