During our summer break, we are re-airing some of our favorite episodes.

In this live conversation recorded at Duke University, the indomitable Liz Gilbert (of EAT, PRAY, LOVE fame) joins Kate for a discussion about the courage to create. Listen as Liz helps us expose our exhausting American need to make everything useful and lets us embrace beauty as a way of really living.

In this episode, Kate and Liz discuss:

• Why we stop ourselves from being creative
• How we are all capable of making anything (badly! medium-well!)
• But how our creativity is best if it is for no reason whatsoever (not for impact or legacy or money or acknowledgement)
• How curiosity quiets fear and control

CW: some spicy adult language

Watch clips from this conversation, read the full transcript, and access discussion questions by clicking here or visiting katebowler.com/podcasts.

Follow Kate on Instagram, Facebook, or X (formerly known as Twitter)—@katecbowler. Links to social pages and more available at linktr.ee/katecbowler.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

During our summer break, we are re-airing some of our favorite episodes! In a world that constantly demands more—more work, more achievement, more hustle—how do we learn to pause? Kate sits down with her sister Maria Bowler, a writer, creativity coach, and spiritual director, to talk about the pressures of the “producer self,” that voice inside us all that equates our worth with what we do, fix, or achieve.

This conversation is an invitation to live differently—to embrace rest, love, and the sacredness of simply being. For the overachievers, the caregivers, and the deeply tired (you know who you are): you are already enough.

In this conversation, Kate and Maria discuss:

• How to see one another (and ourselves) through a lens of love

• How to give yourself permission to rest and procrastinate

• The difference between meaningful work and the hustle that leaves us hollow

If you liked this episode, you’ll also love:

• Oliver Burkeman: New Year, Same Me

• Liz Gilbert: Why Your Creativity Matters

• Emma Gannon: The Butterfly Era

Watch clips from this conversation, read the full transcript, and access discussion questions by clicking here or visiting katebowler.com/podcasts.

Follow Kate on Instagram, Facebook, or X (formerly known as Twitter)—@katecbowler. Links to social pages and more available at linktr.ee/katecbowler.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Sometimes, the bad thing happens—again. The kind of news that flattens your plans, your energy, your sense of who you are. And you think, surely that’s enough now. Haven’t we hit the quota for suffering? But there’s no quota, just the long middle where life doesn’t follow a script and you’re left figuring out how to be a person again.

Suleika Jaouad knows this terrain well. She’s a writer, artist, and advocate, beloved for her memoir Between Two Kingdoms and her new offering The Book of Alchemy—a creative companion for those learning to live when life doesn’t go according to plan. Diagnosed with leukemia in her twenties and now navigating her third relapse, Suleika brings a voice shaped by experience, beauty, grief, and humor.

Together again on the Everything Happens podcast, Suleika and Kate talk about:

• how illness reshapes the rhythms of a life
• the grief and freedom of falling apart—and not rushing to fix it
• the idea of “creative injuries” and why so many of us stopped making
• how small rituals can anchor us in seasons of uncertainty
• why creating something, anything, can be a way to stay human in the in-between

If you liked this episode, you might also like:

• Artist Lanecia Rouse Tinsley on “When Hope Seems Lost”
• Stacey Heale, “The Aftermath of the Aftermath”
• Suleika’s first and second Everything Happens episodes

Watch clips from this conversation, read the full transcript, and access discussion questions by clicking here or visiting katebowler.com/podcasts.

Follow Kate on Instagram, Facebook, or X (formerly known as Twitter)—@katecbowler. Links to social pages and more available at linktr.ee/katecbowler.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.