J.R.R. Tolkien (1892–1973):

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was an English writer, philologist, and Oxford professor best known for The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and the mythology of Middle-earth. Born in Bloemfontein, South Africa, Tolkien moved to England as a young child, lost both parents before his teenage years were over, and developed an early fascination with languages, medieval literature, and the ancient legends of northern Europe. He studied at Oxford and served in the British Army during the First World War. After the war, he pursued an academic career studying Old and Middle English while privately inventing languages, histories, and mythologies of his own. In 1938, he challenged a German publisher's demand to establish his Aryan ancestry before translating The Hobbit, and during the Second World War he condemned Hitler's appropriation of the northern traditions he loved. With the publication of The Lord of the Rings in 1954–1955, Tolkien became one of the most influential fantasy writers of the twentieth century. 

For More:

• The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien : Edited by Humphrey Carpenter, revised and expanded by Wayne G. Hammond and Christina Scull
• J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography — Humphrey Carpenter
• The Silmarillion — J.R.R. Tolkien

Create Yourself Alive — Charleston, November 2–3

Join Rainier Wylde for the first Create Yourself Alive: a small, intimate, two-day immersion for writers and creators in Charleston South Carolina. Bring your current project, your questions, and whatever you’re ready to begin or bring toward completion. A few places remain.

DETAILS AND REGISTRATION

One-on-One Creative Mentorship

To apply for one-on-one creative mentorship:

APPLY HERE

The Creators Collective

Continue exploring the creative life through classes, conversation, and community. Get the most recent class about Tolkien!

JOIN THE SALON

William Blake (1757–1827):

William Blake was an English poet, painter, and engraver born in London. He developed a method of relief etching that combined poetry and images on copper plates. His wife, Catherine, helped print and color his books. His major works include Songs of Innocence and of Experience, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, and Jerusalem. Drawing on his reported visions and an original spiritual mythology, Blake explored imagination, religious authority, and social injustice. Largely neglected during his lifetime, he became a major figure in English poetry and art.

For More:

Songs of Innocence and of Experience — William Blake

Blake — Peter Ackroyd

Create Yourself Alive — Charleston, November 2–3

Join Rainier Wylde for the first Create Yourself Alive: a small, intimate, two-day immersion for writers and creators in Charleston South Carolina. Bring your current project, your questions, and whatever you’re ready to begin or bring toward completion. A few places remain.

DETAILS AND REGISTRATION

One-on-One Creative Mentorship

To apply for one-on-one creative mentorship:

APPLY HERE

The Creators Collective

Continue exploring the creative life through classes, conversation, and community. Class on Tolkien THIS SUNDAY!

JOIN THE SALON

Jerry Siegel (1914–1996) & Joe Shuster (1914–1992):

Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster were the writer and artist who created Superman. They met as teenagers at Glenville High School in Cleveland, and created The Superman hoping to make a comic book.. After years of rejection, Superman was finally published in Action Comics #1 in 1938. Siegel and Shuster had sold the rights to the character to Detective Comics for $130. Superman became one of the most recognizable fictional characters in the world, while his creators spent decades fighting for compensation, ownership, and eventually even the restoration of their names to the work. 

For More:

Super Boys: The Amazing Adventures of Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster-- Brad Ricca

Superman: The High-Flying History of America’s Most Enduring Hero--Larry Tye

Want even more?

Create Yourself Alive: November 2-3

Join me in Charleston for Create Yourself Alive! It’s a two day immersion for creators who are ready to fully own their calling. This will be a powerful and intimate time.

Click here for more

To apply for one-on-one creative mentorship:

GO HERE

Want to go beyond listening about creators and actually live like one? Consider joining the next Creators Collective class. This is a gathering for creators who are finished performing indifferently and are ready to make something worthy of their attention.

THE SALON

In this episode Rainier explores the myth that art can save us or that making beautiful things necessarily makes us better people. He travels to Córdoba, Spain, following the strange history of the Sarajevo Haggadah, an illuminated Jewish manuscript that survived expulsion from Spain, censorship in Venice, Nazi occupation, and the siege of Sarajevo. What begins as a story about the survival of a beautiful object becomes an investigation into creativity itself and what it means to build toward the kind of world we actually want to inhabit.

For More:

People of the Book: Geraldine Brooks

Create Yourself Alive: November 2-3

Join me in Charleston for Create Yourself Alive! It’s a two day immersion for creators who are ready to fully own their calling. This will be a powerful and intimate time.

Click here for more

Mary Renault (1905–1983):

Mary Renault was a British novelist best known for her historical fiction set in ancient Greece. Born Eileen Mary Challans in London in 1905, she studied English at St. Hugh’s College, Oxford, before training as a nurse at the Radcliffe Infirmary. There she met fellow nurse Julie Mullard, who became her lifelong partner. Renault worked as a nurse through much of the 1930s and during the Second World War, publishing her first novel, Purposes of Love, in 1939. Her 1947 novel Return to Night won a $150,000 prize from Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, giving Renault and Mullard the financial means to move to South Africa in 1948, where they remained for the rest of their lives. 

Renault published The Charioteer in 1953, a novel centered on relationships between gay men in wartime Britain. She then turned to the ancient world, including the Theseus trilogy. Her books brought together extensive historical research with fictional accounts. Renault was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1959 and continued writing until near the end of her life. She died in Cape Town in 1983 at the age of seventy-eight.

For More:

The Charioteer: Mary Renault

The Last of the Wine: Mary Renault

Mary Renault: A Biography: David Sweetman

To apply for one-on-one creative mentorship:

GO HERE

Want to go beyond listening about creators and actually live like one? Consider joining the next Creators Collective class. This is a gathering for creators who are finished performing indifferently and are ready to make something worthy of their attention.

THE SALON

In this episode, Rainier goes looking for the myth insisting that talent isn't earned, that it's beyond our control. He traces the story of blues legend Robert Johnson, who allegedly made a deal with the devil for his skill. The search widens to Niccolò Paganini, whose own audiences swore they saw the devil guiding his bow. And then looks at an ancient Greek legend about what happens when we claim to have talent that isn't a gift from the gifts.This is a story spanning three thousand years and asking the question: why do we need someone besides the person to take credit for the work?

For More:

Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues — Elijah Wald

Metamorphoses, Book VI: Arachne — Ovid, trans. A.S. Kline

The Devil's Violinist — dir. Bernard Rose

The Creators Collective:

Join us for our next masterclass on Anthony Bourdain and Julia Child, two of the most joyful, most enthusiastic apprentices to mastery this country's ever produced. We're talking about enthusiasm as a discipline, and delight as a skill you can build the same as any other. This is a gathering for creators who are finished performing and ready to make something worthy of their attention. Sign up today.

THE SALON

THE RECLAMATION

This September 13, I'm leading a six-week live immersion called The Reclamation. It's for anyone who senses that some essential part of themselves has been buried beneath expectation, fear, responsibility, or simply years of surviving. Together we'll explore what it means to recover your own creative voice. Through live gatherings, weekly practices, thoughtful prompts, and a community of fellow creators, we'll make room for the life and the creativity that has been waiting for your full attention. If you're ready to reclaim your creative self, I'd love to welcome you.

FIND OUT MORE HERE

To apply for one-on-one creative mentorship:

GO HERE

In this episode Rainier explores the myths of the lone genius and the idea of authorship itself. He travels to Amsterdam to look at the work of Johannes Vermeer, discovering that what is often credited to the master is actually the work of an anonymous hand. The mystery pulls him further into the work of the Dutch realists, eventually taking him to Paris to trace the story of Alexandre Dumas, whose name alone survived a courtroom battle with his uncredited collaborator, Auguste Maquet. What begins as a search for a painter's true intention becomes an investigation into where the whole idea of the solitary author came from, and how recently, and for what reasons, we invented it.

For More:

Tim's Vermeer — dir. Teller

"What Is an Author?" — Michel Foucault, in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice

The Other Dumas--dir. Safy Nebbou

The Creators Collective:

Join us for our next masterclass Sunday August 23 at 11am Eastern, on Envy, and its importance as an engine for creative development. This is a gathering for creators who are finished performing and ready to make something worthy of their attention. Sign up today.

THE SALON

THE RECLAMATION

This September 13, I'm leading a six-week live immersion called The Reclamation. It's for anyone who senses that some essential part of themselves has been buried beneath expectation, fear, responsibility, or simply years of surviving. Together we'll explore what it means to recover your own creative voice. Through live gatherings, weekly practices, thoughtful prompts, and a community of fellow creators, we'll make room for the life and the creativity hat has been waiting for your full attention. If you're ready to reclaim your creative self, I’d love to welcome you.

FIND OUT MORE HERE

To apply for one-on-one creative mentorship:

GO HERE

Correction: the Cupid painting discussed in this episode is Vermeer's Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window, held in Dresden's Gemäldegalerie, not the Rijksmuseum 

Audre Lorde (1934–1992):

Audre Lorde was an American poet, essayist, librarian, teacher, and activist whose work explored race, sexuality, gender, motherhood, illness, and the uses of power. Born in New York City to Caribbean immigrant parents, Lorde began writing poetry as a teenager and published her first poem in Seventeen magazine while still in high school. She later worked as a librarian and taught at institutions including Tougaloo College and John Jay College, while emerging as one of the most distinctive voices in twentieth-century American poetry and feminist thought. Lorde described herself as “Black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet,” refusing to separate identities that the culture around her often treated as incompatible. Lorde argued for the necessity of difference, self-definition, and speaking what has been silenced. She died of cancer in St. Croix in 1992 at the age of fifty-eight.

For More:

POWER--Audre Lorde

The Cancer Journals — Audre Lorde

The Black Unicorn — Audre Lorde

Warrior Poet (A Biography)--Alexis Devaux

Want to go beyond listening about creators and actually live like one? Consider joining the next Creators Collective class. This is a gathering for creators who are finished performing indifferently and are ready to make something worthy of their attention.

THE SALON

THE RECLAMATION

SEPTEMBER 13 I'm leading a six-week live experience called The Reclamation. It's for anyone who senses that some essential part of themselves has been buried beneath expectation, fear, responsibility, or simply years of surviving. Together we'll explore what it means to recover your own creative voice. Through live gatherings, weekly practices, thoughtful prompts, and a community of fellow creators, we'll make room for the life and the creativity hat has been waiting for your full attention. If you're ready to reclaim your creative self, I’d love to welcome you.

FIND OUT MORE HERE

To apply for one-on-one creative mentorship:

GO HERE

Osip & Nadezhda Mandelstam (1891–1938 / 1899–1980):

Osip Mandelstam was one of the 20th centuries great poets and founder of the Acmeist movement in pre-revolutionary St. Petersburg, Osip composed his poems aloud, committing them to memory rather than paper, until sixteen unwritten lines mocking Stalin got him arrested, exiled, and finally killed in a transit camp near Vladivostok in 1938. His wife, Nadezhda, spent more than two decades in deliberate invisibility, carrying his life's work in her memory. Together their lives ask what it means to know something by heart and to commit fully to that knowing.

For More:

Hope Against Hope — Nadezhda Mandelstam

The Voronezh Notebooks — Osip Mandelstam

A Dictator Calls — Ismail Kadare

THE RECLAMATION

This August, I'm leading a six-week live experience called The Reclamation. It's for anyone who senses that some essential part of themselves has been buried beneath expectation, fear, responsibility, or simply years of surviving. Together we'll explore what it means to recover your own creative voice. Through live gatherings, weekly practices, thoughtful prompts, and a community of fellow creators, we'll make room for the life and the creativity hat has been waiting for your full attention. If you're ready to reclaim your creative self, I’d love to welcome you.

FIND OUT MORE HERE

To apply for one-on-one creative mentorship:

GO HERE

Want to go beyond listening about creators and actually live like one? Consider joining the next Creators Collective class. This is a gathering for creators who are finished performing indifferently and are ready to make something worthy of their attention.

THE SALON

The Chauvet Cave (c. 36,000 years ago):

Chauvet Cave preserves some of the oldest known works of human art. Discovered in 1994 after being sealed for more than twenty thousand years, its walls are alive with animals, many of which are now extinct, rendered with astonishing technical mastery. The cave was never a home. These paintings weren’t created for public display, but for purposes that remain profoundly mysterious. Chauvet challenges one of our modern assumptions about creativity: that art exists to be seen. Instead, it offers a vision of making as ritual, devotion, community, and participation in something far larger than recognition itself.

For More:

The Cave of Forgotten Dreams — Werner Herzog

Chauvet Cave: The Art of Earliest Times — Jean Clottes

THE RECLAMATION

This August, I'm leading a six-week live experience called The Reclamation. It's for anyone who senses that some essential part of themselves has been buried beneath expectation, fear, responsibility, or simply years of surviving. Together we'll explore what it means to recover your own creative voice. Through live gatherings, weekly practices, thoughtful prompts, and a community of fellow creators, we'll make room for the life and the creativity hat has been waiting for your full attention. If you're ready to reclaim your creative self, I’d love to welcome you.

FIND OUT MORE HERE

To apply for one-on-one creative mentorship:

GO HERE

Want to go beyond listening about creators and actually live like one? Consider joining the next Creators Collective class. This is a gathering for creators who are finished performing indifferently and are ready to make something worthy of their attention.

THE SALON

Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806–1861): 

One of the great poets of the Victorian era. Confined for years by chronic illness, family control, and fear, she produced remarkable poetry from an isolated room. It was only after secretly marrying Robert Browning and escaping to Florence that her fullest work emerged. There she began to live a free life and sense of self, publishing Sonnets from the Portuguese, Aurora Leigh, becoming one of the defining literary voices of her century. Her life asks the question about what happens when we take the creatively courageous step of reimagining the rooms we choose to be in.

For More: 

Aurora Leigh — Elizabeth Barrett Browning 

Sonnets from the Portuguese — Elizabeth Barrett Browning 

The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning

THE RECLAMATION

This August, I'm leading a six-week live experience called The Reclamation. It's for anyone who senses that some essential part of themselves has been buried beneath expectation, fear, responsibility, or simply years of surviving. Together we'll explore what it means to recover your own creative voice. Through live gatherings, weekly practices, thoughtful prompts, and a community of fellow creators, we'll make room for the life and the creativity hat has been waiting for your full attention. If you're ready to reclaim your creative self, I’d love to welcome you.

FIND OUT MORE HERE

Jiro Ono (1925– )

Jiro Ono is a Japanese sushi master whose life's work has become one of the clearest modern examples of craftsmanship. Born in rural Japan, he began working in the kitchen at the age of seven, served in a munitions factory during the Second World War, and spent nearly two decades apprenticing in kitchens before opening the ten-seat restaurant that would become Sukiyabashi Jiro, in 1965. His uncompromising standards transformed generations of chefs. In 2007, Sukiyabashi Jiro became the first sushi restaurant to receive three Michelin stars, and in 2014 it welcomed President Barack Obama, who later called it the finest sushi he had ever eaten. At 100, he is still creating. 

For More:

• Jiro Dreams of Sushi — directed by David Gelb
• Sukiyabashi Jiro: The Pursuit of Perfection — official restaurant history

Want to go beyond listening about creators and actually live like one? Consider joining the next Creators Collective class. This is a gathering for creators who are finished performing indifferently and are ready to make something worthy of their attention.

THE SALON

To apply for one-on-one creative mentorship:

GO HERE

Varian Fry (1907–1967):

Varian Fry was an American journalist, classicist, and magazine editor who became one of the most consequential rescuers of the twentieth century. In August 1940, he arrived in Vichy France to do what his own government refused to do. Over thirteen months in Marseille, Fry forged documents, ran a safe house out of a crumbling villa, and built a footpath over the Pyrenees that would carry thousands of creators and thinkers out of occupied Europe alive, among them Hannah Arendt, Marc Chagall, and Max Ernst. He was expelled from France in 1941, and released by his organization. His unofficial and un-sanctioned work was not recognized or rewarded during his lifetime by the American government. He worked as a freelance writer and high school teacher before dying of a heart attack at fifty-nine. His country didn't honor him until twenty-four years after his death. 

For More:

• Surrender on Demand — Varian Fry
• Villa Air-Bel: World War II, Escape, and a House in Marseille — Rosemary Sullivan

• Transatlantic — Netflix limited series (dramatized)

Want to go beyond listening about creators and actually live like one? Consider joining the next Creators Collective class. This month, we're exploring shameless creativity—the courage to care deeply, create boldly, and build a life large enough to contain the things that matter most. A gathering for creators who are finished performing indifference and ready to make something worthy of their attention.

THE SALON

To apply for one-on-one creative mentorship:

GO HERE

Hildegard of Bingen was a Benedictine abbess, composer, mystic, scientist, healer, linguist, and one of the most extraordinary creative minds of the medieval world. Enclosed in a monastery from childhood, she transformed the apparent confines of her life into an astonishing intellectual and artistic career. Over eight decades, she composed groundbreaking music, wrote visionary theological works, produced volumes on medicine and natural history, invented an original language, and corresponded with popes, emperors, bishops, and kings. Hildegard articulated a vision of human flourishing rooted in vitality, imagination, and the courage to follow one's calling beyond the limits imposed by culture, convention, or authority.

For More:

• Scivias — Hildegard of Bingen

• A Feather on the Breath of God — Gothic Voices (recording of Hildegard's music)

• Vision: From the Life of Hildegard von Bingen — directed by Margarethe von Trotta

Want to go beyond listening about creators and actually live like one? Consider joining the next Creators Collective class. This month, we're exploring shameless creativity—the courage to care deeply, create boldly, and build a life large enough to contain the things that matter most. A gathering for creators who are finished performing indifference and ready to make something worthy of their attention.

THE SALON

Ted Lucas (1939–1992) was a Detroit-born guitarist, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist whose music blended folk, blues, psychedelia, raga influences, and intimate singer-songwriter traditions. Emerging from Detroit’s vibrant 1960s underground scene, Lucas first gained attention as a member of the psychedelic folk-blues band The Spike Drivers before releasing his now-cult 1975 solo album OM, a private-press acoustic record later hailed by collectors and musicians as a lost masterpiece of American folk music. Though admired by peers for his extraordinary guitar work and melodic sensibility, Lucas struggled with the music industry and never achieved widespread recognition during his lifetime. Decades after his death, renewed interest from archivists, collectors, and Third Man Records helped introduce his work to a new generation. 

***

This episode would not exist without the extraordinary archival work of Detroit historian and record collector Mike Dutkewych, whose years of dedication to recovering, preserving and championing Ted Lucas's music helped bring this overlooked artist back into the public consciousness. His care and commitment to Ted's legacy are deeply felt throughout this story.

FOR MORE

Third Man Records--Ted Lucas' Images of Life

Detroit Free Press

Creative Mentorship

Currently Rainier is enrolling for several 1x1 mentorship spots. This is for people who are looking to recover their sense of creative passion and purpose. A 3-4 month container, combining individual time, community, and independent study, all working towards bringing you to the next stage in your artistic identity.

To Apply

The Creators Collective

If you want to go beyond listening about the lives of creators and take your next steps in becoming one, consider signing up for the Creators Collective, the membership for people who want to be artistic with living. Monthly masterclasses, craft workshops, co-creation spaces, and open mics, as well as hundreds of archived hours of teaching, and ongoing community prompts.

Find out More

Jean Genet (1910–1986) was a French novelist, playwright, poet, and political provocateur whose life and work transformed twentieth-century literature. Genet spent much of his youth in reformatories, prisons, and on the margins of European society as a thief, drifter, and sex worker. While imprisoned during World War II, he began writing novels such as Our Lady of the Flowers and The Thief’s Journal, works that praised criminals, outsiders, and the condemned and elevated them into figures of beauty and almost religious significance. Championed by intellectuals like Jean-Paul Sartre and artists such as Pablo Picasso, Genet became one of France’s most influential literary figures despite never abandoning his fascination with transgression, betrayal, and rebellion. In his later years he aligned himself with radical political movements including the Black Panther Party and Palestinian liberation groups, remaining an uncompromising outsider until his death in Paris in 1986.

FOR MORE:

Encyclopedia Britannica

The Works of Genet

Want to go beyond listening to creators and become one? The Creators Collective is for individuals who are looking to transform their own life through art and creation. Writers, poets, painters, and ordinary radicals wanting to take the next steps and make a difference. With monthly masterclasses, craft workshops, co-creation studios, open mic salons, hundreds of hours of archived teaching, and an ongoing community of others engaged in the same work. This is a deep dive into your creative soul.

Find out more here

George Sand (1804–1876), born Aurore Dupin in Paris, was one of the most prolific and influential writers of 19th-century France. She married Baron Casimir Dudevant before leaving the marriage to pursue an independent literary life in Paris. Adopting the male pseudonym “George Sand,” she published novels, essays, plays, and political writings that explored class, gender, rural life, love, and social freedom. Known for wearing men’s clothing in public and moving within radical artistic circles, Sand became a major cultural figure and had a highly publicized relationship with composer Frédéric Chopin. Over her lifetime she produced more than seventy novels and maintained correspondence with many of the leading intellectuals and artists of her era, remaining a central voice in French literature until her death in 1876.

FOR MORE:

Frederic Chopin & George Sand

George Sand Books

The Creators Collective is open for enrollment. This is the membership where you create your self alive. We have monthly masterclasses, craft workshops, co creation spaces, open mic salons, a dedicated community chat board to connect with others, and hundreds of hours of archived teaching, helping you establish your own creative voice. Take the next step!

Learn More

Anthony DeMello (1931-1987)

Indian born Jesuit priest and trained psychologist. He was the founder of Sadhana Institute in Pune. DeMello spent his life trying to wake people up. His method was short, funny, disorienting stories and his core teaching was awareness. He taught that human suffering comes from unconscious conditioning, from clinging to identity, beliefs, and outcomes. He was an inter religious pioneer and training in Buddhism. He considered the teachings of Christ as valid as those of Buddha or Laozi, a position that eventually drew a Vatican censure. He died in the middle of teaching a course in New York in 1987 at 55 years old.

FOR MORE:

Awakening to Reality As It Is

Awareness by Anthony De Mello

Want to go beyond listening to stories about creators and become one? Consider joining the Creators Collective--a school and community for those who want to create their own life. Sign up and receive access to monthly masterclasses, craft workshops loaded with practical how-to's, co-creativity sessions, open-mic nights, and ongoing community with other creators.

Find out more here

Jack Gilbert (1925–2012) 

An American poet born in Pittsburgh, he published his first collection, Views of Jeopardy, in 1962; it won the Yale Younger Poets Prize, was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, and brought him immediate recognition. Gilbert left the United States on Guggenheim Fellowships and spent nearly twenty years living mostly in Greece, as well as in Italy and Japan, often in deliberate poverty, writing slowly and refusing the machinery of literary fame. His marriage to Japanese sculptor Michiko Nogami and her death from cancer in 1982 became the emotional center of much of his later work, especially in The Great Fires (1994), followed by Refusing Heaven (2005), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award. His final major publication, Collected Poems (2012), arrived near the end of his life as a summation of a career built on radical attention, grief, eros, and delight. 

For More:

Collected Poems

Poetry Foundation

Creators Collective:

Consider going beyond listening, and start creating. This a membership dedicated to deepening your creative potential, unlocking your purpose, and unblocking your passion. Masterclasses, craft workshops, open mics, and creative co-working spaces, as well as hundreds of hours of archived teachings, along with the amazing community of others, doing the work, just like you! Join us!

Be a Creator

Rainier sets out on a journey to uncover the origins of the novel. Starting in Madrid, researching Don Quixote and Miguel de Cervantes, he ultimately follows the trail around the world to Japan in the 11th century. He discovers the story of a woman known as Murasaki Shikibu who began to write in a very different way, long before the West named it as the novel. What starts as a search for a literary birth place, becomes something much stranger. The question of how history is shaped. Who gets remembered. And what gets left out. 

FOR MORE:

The Tale of Genji:

The Novel: A Biography:

The Diary of Lady Marusaki:

The Creators Collective:

Consider joining the next Creators Collective masterclass. This month we’re stepping into the life and work of Johnny Cash in a class called Sacred Rebellion, an exploration of the man in black not as myth, but as a creator who refused certainty, and respectability in favor of real whole hearted living. A session for anyone drawn to the edge… and ready to make something honest from the parts of themselves that don’t quite fit.

SIGN UP NOW