Maya C. Popa

Wheels Off with Rhett Miller

Rhett Miller

Arts, Performing Arts, Music

5.0 • 596 Ratings

🗓️ 29 October 2024

⏱️ 39 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Award-winning poet, author, editor and educator Maya C. Popa joins Rhett to explore the intricacies of the writing process, managing the artistic ego, and balancing one’s integrity with commercial pressures. They discuss the role of educators in nurturing talent, and Maya shares thoughts on the importance of taking creative work into your own hands and having faith in one's journey as a writer. Dr. Maya C. Popa is most recently the author of Wound is the Origin of Wonder, named one of the Guardian’s Best Books of Poetry. American Faith was runner-up in the Kathryn A. Morton Prize judged by Ocean Vuong and was awarded the North American Book Prize in 2020. She is previously the author of three chapbooks and has received numerous awards, including from the Poetry Foundation and the Oxford Poetry Society. Her writing has been commissioned by The United Nations and other institutions, and her poetry has been featured on a Louis Vuitton trunk for the Visionaries campaign, as well as in the Van Cleef & Arpels Spring Festival. Popa is the Poetry Reviews Editor at Publishers Weekly and teaches poetry at NYU. She works closely with established and emerging writers through Conscious Writers Collective, her online writing platform and community designed to help writers identify and meet their writing and publishing goals. Follow Maya @mayacpopa Read Maya’s Substack newsletter Rhett Miller website Follow Rhett @rhettmiller Wheels Off is hosted and produced by Rhett Miller. Executive producer Kirsten Cluthe. Editing by Matt Dwyer. Music by Old 97’s. Episode artwork by Mark Dowd. Show logo by Tim Skirven. This podcast is available on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also ask Alexa to play it. Revisit previous episodes of Wheels Off with guests Rosanne Cash, Rob Thomas, Jeff Tweedy, The Milk Carton Kids, and more. If you like what you hear, please leave us a rating or review. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Osiris.
0:04.0	Welcome to Wheels Off, a show about the messy reality of the creative life.
0:09.0	I'm Rhett Miller.
0:10.0	That's when it got wheels off.
0:13.0	We started up and he ain't gonna stop.
0:16.0	Oh, she made me feel like a good God.
0:19.0	That's when it got wheels off. Maya C. Popa, Dr. Maya C. Popa, an author, an entrepreneur, a teacher, a teacher, a wonderful communicator.
0:33.6	She's published a couple of books. Most recently, Wound is the origin of wonder, a great book of poetry. She's teaching at NYU at the moment. She has received all sorts of awards that I couldn't even begin to recount to y'all. She's got a group
0:57.1	of writers called Conscious Writers Collective that she established and runs. She's a busy human
1:06.0	being, and her whole life seemingly is in the service of creativity.
1:14.4	So she's the perfect guest for Wheels Off.
1:18.3	I met her when I started my substack.
1:22.0	Hers is an incredible substack.
1:25.5	It's just a great way to read a constant stream of her writing and to sort of
1:31.1	tap into her brain and processes and what she's doing at the moment. Anyway, she's wonderful. I think
1:39.7	the world of Maya, I'm really glad that I got to get her on a Zoom for 35, 45 minutes and pick her brain
1:49.9	about how it works and how all of this seems to work. Because I really do believe that
1:58.9	creativity is the reason we were put here on this planet to sort of make sense to shine a light on the beauty around us.
2:09.4	And I do my best to do that, you know, in my own way, but I'm really always blown away by these people that I get to
2:20.5	speak to for Wheels Off and how they, you know, have devoted their lives and made a, you know,
2:26.1	sort of a superpower out of shining a light on the beauty in the world around us.
2:32.3	So, Maya does just that. So please welcome to Wheels Off, the great Maya C. Popa. Welcome to Wheels Off, Maya C. Popa. Thank you so much for joining me. How are you? I'm well. Thanks. How are you? I'm pretty great. Thank you. I'm happy to be home for a hot minute. But you're always on the road. I think that's a cool thing.
	...

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