Make/work: A Rumpus Podcast

Documentarian Angela C. Villa and musician Thollem McDonas have been living on the road on perpetual tour for the past eight years. Villa has captured Thollem in improvised performance with the likes of Nels Cline, Brian Chase of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Pauline Oliveros, and countless others.

An artist and architect, Lisa Ward also has an extensive background in theater, and speaks about her work with the Brooklyn Pageant Project bringing performances to the streets of New York on a wagon that folded out into a theater. More recently, she's focused on visual work—sculpture that blends her interest in architecture and the American West, and in her own words, "exploring symbols of human habitation and infrastructure and their relationship to the surrounding landscape."

Brett Fletcher Lauer is mainly known for his work as a poet. His debut book, ,  has recently been published by Four Way Books, and his work has also been published in American Poetry Review, Boston Review, Fence, Harper's, and Tin House. He is the deputy director at the .

Composer, performer, and instrument builder  is known for creating compositions using materials she finds in the natural world—things like stones, wood, water, ice, sand, shells and feathers. She’s travelled as far as the Arctic and Antarctica in search of new sounds like calving glaciers and her set of penguin bone instruments. Leonard talks about some of the challenges of making her microscopically quiet music while living in a city, like having to wake at 3 a.m. and climb into her closet to record. She also discusses the benefits she gets from her other two serious passions, Aikido and mountaineering, and how making art doesn’t necessarily trump those things.

Trumpet player/composer Nate Wooley’s playing has been widely praised by everyone from the New York Times and DownBeat to trumpet icon Dave Douglass who called him “one of the most interesting and unusual trumpet players living today.” He’s constantly performing and recording internationally with such folks as John Zorn, Thurston Moore, and pretty much every one playing contemporary free jazz and improvised music. For his day job, Wooley is the curator of the Database of Recorded American Music and the editor-in-chief of their online quarterly journal, Sound American.  

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, , 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  with Nelson.

Artist  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 . Preorder her debut collection, Man V. Nature, . 

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

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 is currently on tour, and the new album, , which is a collaboration with the  ensemble, comes out this month on Thrill Jockey.  

Jon Bernson performs mainly with his groups THEMAYS and  and  Jennifer Welch runs the , located in the heart of Downtown San Francisco’s theater district.

Nate Query plays bass for both and , 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 . Their new album, "," 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, .  

Emily Chenoweth is the author of the novel , which was a finalist for the Oregon Book Award. She’s also a highly prolific ghostwriter. Jon Raymond has written , , and the short story collection, . 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 and , but that only makes up a small fraction of the work that he does.  

Katie Bachler is an artist/educator based in Southern California and her work is centered on our connections to place and to each other. She recently created a  or the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and is currently working on building the Women’s Center for Creative Work in Los Angeles.

Julien Nitzberg is a writer/director/documentarian most well-known for the documentary, The Wild and Wonderful Whites of West Virginia, and his musical, The Beastly Bombing, which won Musical of the Year from the LA Weekly Theater Awards in 2007. Note: At one point Nitzberg refers to my working with Tune-Yards. I didn’t work with them; they were working in my studio.

Maggie Nelson has been published, and celebrated, as a poet, a memoirist, an essayist, an art critic. It's best just to call her a writer, or a woman of letters. Her most recent book The Art of Cruelty, an examination of images of violence in fine art, was named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. She's also faculty at Cal Arts in Southern California.