This is a Peabody Award-winning guide to what's happening in pop culture and the arts, Studio 360 is produced by Public Radio International and WNYC. Hosted by novelist and journalist Kurt Andersen, the show is broadcast on 140 stations, and is heard by 500,000 listeners each week. For ten years, Studio 360 has probed the depths of creativity with influential figures from diverse fields who are shaping contemporary culture. Now, Studio 360 creator Julie Burstein takes the experience further, tracing the roots of the creative process with some the inventive thinkers and creative talents who have appeared on Studio 360 over the past 10 years-novelists Joyce Carol Oates and Isabel Allende; directors Ang Lee, David Milch and Mira Nair; musicians Rosanne Cash, Yo-Yo Ma, Robert Plant, and Joshua Redman; artists Chuck Close and Richard Serra-and others. In Spark, Burstein pulls back the curtain to reveal sources of inspiration for these creators, and explores the strategies they employ to bring their work into being. Each chapter considers a particularly resonant facet of life from which creative minds draw: childhood adventures, a spouse's deathbed, conflicts with parents, the streets of a beloved hometown, seductive materials, a learning disability, and the natural world. Through Spark's stories about these contemporary alchemists, we, too, can learn how to bring creativity into our lives. These artists may not change lead into gold, Burstein writes, but they lift materials from their familiar contexts, combining, reshaping, transforming them into works of art that change the way we see the world.
