Welcome to Working Over Time, the ever helpful Last Chance Kitchen to Working's illustrious

Top Chef. I'm your host Nate Chinen. And I'm your other host, Isaac Butler. So Nate, before we pack our knives and go, what are we talking about today?

You know, I think I'd like to call this one the art of refraction.

That sounds a little highfalutin and to be clear I was a terrible physics student,

but I did learn that refraction is what we call the change and direction of a wave as it passes from one medium to another.

So think of a ray of light moving through a prism or a sound wave passing through water.

Well today I'd like to hijack this metaphor for our own purposes and talk about what happens

when you shift from the medium that is your

area of expertise, maybe it's drawing or dancing or basket weaving, whatever it may be, toward a creative

discipline that's just different enough to present you with a learning

curve.

So Isaac, you are a theater director who also works as a cultural historian and an author and a podcaster so I'm

guessing that you're gonna have a few things to say on this matter yeah that's probably true

I do know that you know like when I was in graduate school studying creative writing, focusing

on non-fiction, one thing I realized was that like what I found most helpful was trying to figure out how to make the devices that I saw in other

media than pros work in pros you know like how do you do what Errol Morris does, but in prose, right? How do you do what Joe Sacco, a brilliant non-fiction journalist who published his non-fictionist comics who we've interviewed on this show.

How do you do that in prose?

You know, that whole idea of going to another sort of field

to learn something and then adapt it to the one you're working and is very near and dear to my heart.

But that's a little different than what we're talking about today because there's a translation process in what you're invoking.

Which I love. What I want to discuss is not necessarily

drawing inspiration from another medium entirely, but something that's just maybe

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