Deep Dive with George Saunders on Creativity

Kelly Corrigan Wonders

Kelly Corrigan Show

Society & Culture

4.9 • 3.3K Ratings

🗓️ 27 January 2026

⏱️ 58 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In the 4th episode of our Super Traits series, Kelly sits down with her favorite writer George Saunders—author of 12 books including Lincoln in the Bardo and his latest novel Vigil—to explore creativity as a practice of staying open. They talk about how precise language changes the way we receive the world, why specificity lowers reactivity, and what it means that neurologically speaking, we're always writing and revising. George reflects on empathy as a gateway to creativity, why foreclosure is death to the creative process, and the dream of repair—which might be the whole job of fiction. He also shares why he never decides what his books mean before he writes them and why he considers constraints to be essential. This episode was made possible by a grant from the John Templeton Foundation. To learn more, visit www.templeton.org. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Kelly Corgan Wonders. I'm Kelly Corrigan, and today I am wondering about creativity with my favorite writer, George Saunders.
0:16.5	This is the fourth episode in our Super Traits trait series exploring virtues that build a meaningful life
0:22.0	made possible by a grant from the John Templeton Foundation. My guest today is George Saunders.
0:28.0	He is the author of 12 books, including Lincoln and the Bardo, which won the Man Booker Prize,
0:32.7	and a swim in a pond in the rain, his meditation on writing and the Russian masters.
0:38.8	His latest novel, Vigil, tells the story of Jill, a spirit sent to comfort people as they
0:44.4	die and her particularly difficult charge, an oil company CEO named KJ, who lived a big,
0:52.4	bold, controversial life.
1:00.1	George teaches in the creative writing program at Syracuse, where he's known for his rigorous workshops and his refusal to let theoretical musing replace the actual work of writing.
1:06.0	He also has a very popular and very useful substack called Storytime.
1:11.3	Today we explore empathy as a gateway to creativity,
1:14.8	why foreclosure is death to the creative process
1:18.1	and the dream of repair.
1:20.4	Here's my conversation with writer George Saunders.
1:34.1	So I know that you just got this big lifetime achievement award.
1:38.9	And you said that looking back on your years in writing, so far you had two big takeaways in addition to some very specific thank you.
1:43.2	Will you talk about your two big takeaways? Yeah. Well very specific thank you. Will you talk about your
1:44.3	two big takeaways? Yeah. Well, the first one was just that, you know, when I thought about
1:49.3	what I really cherished about this whole life choice was the way that, well, I talked about
1:54.7	the first time that I ever noticed that working with language caused me to get smarter. In that
2:00.1	case, I was editing some stories really closely and took them on the bus,
2:04.3	you know, so there wasn't a whole lot of chance to be distracted.
	...

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