- Transcript
- Credits
Joe Skinner (Narration): Every once in a while you come across a work of art that is so immense, so rich in detail and craftsmanship, that it overwhelms you with its scope. Min Jin Lee’s novel, Pachinko, a 490-page tome that follows multiple generations of a Korean family who immigrates to Japan, is exactly that. Immense, in every way. I’ve wanted to have her on the show for years because of the storied and circuitous creative process behind the novel. Recently, I was lucky to be able to find some time in her busy writing schedule to have a call with her from her hometown in New York. And despite the formidable nature of her novel, Min Jin Lee is super easy to talk to.
Joe Skinner: I’m so sorry I can’t be there in person.
Min Jin Lee: No, I felt personally snubbed. (laughs)
Joe Skinner: New York is my preferred locale, but you know, I live in LA now.
Min Jin Lee: What brought you to L. A.?
Joe Skinner: My wife was relocated here for work during the pandemic and you know, I joined her out here and one thing leads to another.
Min Jin Lee: You know, I had to follow my husband to stay married – to Japan. And I ended up writing Pachinko, so sometimes it works out. (laughs)
Joe Skinner: Well, hopefully… I don’t know if I’ll quite write Pachinko, but…
Min Jin Lee: You might write something better, you don’t know! You’re young.
Joe Skinner: Never know. Never know. You know, maybe I’ll put 20, 30 years in and something will come out the other end.
Min Jin Lee: No, you’ll be faster. Everybody’s faster than me. Everybody. (laughs)
Joe Skinner (Narration): Hi, I’m Joe Skinner, and this is American Masters: Creative Spark. In each episode, our guest breaks down their creative process behind a single work of art. This week, writer Min Jin Lee talks about the 30 years it took to write her epic historical fiction novel, Pachinko. It was a 2017 finalist for the National Book Award, a New York Times bestseller, and now an ongoing television series on Apple TV+.
The seed of the idea for Pachinko began in 1989, while Min Jin Lee was studying history at Yale University. When she was a senior, an American missionary who worked in Japan with its ethnic Korean population visited her class. They told a harrowing story about a young middle school boy who was bullied because of his ethnic Korean background. The boy jumped from a building and died. This story of racial discrimination would stick with Lee and she would file it away and eventually go on to write a fictionalized account of the tragedy. But before deciding to become a writer full-time, Min Jin Lee simply needed to make a living. This is when she’d make her first major pitstop in her writing career, and after graduating from Yale, she attended Georgetown Law School in search of a steady source of income.
Min Jin Lee: So you go to law school, and because I had just come from my deep background of high-minded thinking, and creativity, that when I went to law school, I remember being in a study group, and my friends would say to me, Min Jin, we don’t care what Ezra Pound thinks about the law. (laughs) It’s very cute that you care about jurisprudence, but we got to get an A on this test. And I remember thinking, oh, right, right, the test, and I didn’t understand how important your GPA was, again, so stupid. So then your GPA pretty much determined whether or not you can get a clerkship or get a job at a law firm. There are all these different hierarchies of prestigious jobs in the law. I ended up getting a job at a corporate law firm, and then because I’m a really good reader, They would just throw me into situations in which I would have to read boxes and boxes of documents. Just imagine like a basement filled with bankers boxes. And that’s where you would find me in a nice suit. And going through dusty boxes, and at the same time after finishing all these boxes, finding and reading every single page and then finding a problem and then somehow compressing all those boxes into, let’s say, a 20 page memo, and I would dutifully bring this thing to my partner and say, we must present this to protect our clients. And then the partner would be really happy, I would get a pat on the head and then I would be sent to another room filled with boxes, because I was so good at what I did. And it’s kind of funny, it’s almost like, what is that expression? You win a pie eating contest and you win more pies? That was my life! The reason why I’m saying all this is because I didn’t dislike being a lawyer. As a matter of fact, I could have done it. I do think that what was difficult was I never learned how to set boundaries. I never knew how to say, “I can’t do anymore.” I never really understood the economics of a law firm, which was that the more I worked and the more I billed, the more the partners made. It didn’t mean that I made more money. And I remember thinking, Is that what I really want to do? Is that what I really, really want to do? And then the backdrop of all of it, despite my fear of poverty, and despite my background as a, you know, fairly working class, middle class person from Queens, I had this liver disease. And it was very clarifying for me because I thought, you know, I don’t think this is it. If I die in my 20s or 30s, which is what Dr. Rubin had told me that could happen to me when I was in college from liver cancer, I don’t think this is what I really want to do. So I thought, I think I’d like to try this book writing thing, at least one book. And that’s what happened. At age 25, I quit being a lawyer.
Joe Skinner (Narration): The extreme hours of the profession had taken its toll on Min Jin Lee. Well before her career in law, she always had an itch to write. And not just write anything, but to write socially impactful work.
Min Jin Lee: When I was 19, I read a wonderful essay by Tom Wolfe called The Billion Legged Beast in Harper’s Magazine. And, In that article, he had this great point that social novels are something that we can do; that we could take a look at society and address them in narrative. And I thought, wow, that is so cool. And those are the books that I really like to read. And maybe one day, maybe one day I could write one in my spare time when I’m, you know, 75 or something. And then, of course, when I quit being a lawyer, I thought, I’m going to try that. I want to write a social novel.
Joe Skinner (Narration): And even before then, Min Jin Lee had been writing and publishing essays in The Korea Times as far back as high school.
Min Jin Lee: When I published essays in high school and in college and newspapers and periodicals, some nationally, they always had a kind of reverberation, which I was always surprised by, and this is a long time ago, and I think it’s because people were sort of surprised that a person like me was saying something. My father thought it was so cute. He would clip my little pieces that were written in English and put them on his wall at his tiny little store. And I remember thinking, oh, he’s really proud of me. But none of us had any illusion that it was something that people got paid for because I was never paid when I published my pieces. But I won two of the most important prizes in college for fiction and nonfiction. Even then I didn’t think that I could be a writer, which is kind of funny. But now I look back and I go, oh, I think people are trying to tell you something, but you’re so stupid! You didn’t hear it.
Joe Skinner: Why do you think you didn’t hear it?
Min Jin Lee: Well, I was really scared of being poor. I didn’t think anyone was going to take care of me. And I thought that it was something that a person who had more money and more confidence and more social support would be able to do. And when I did eventually try my own way at age 25, I did have $15,000 saved and I did have a husband who had health insurance. So I thought, okay, well, I’ll take one year of this very selfish thing that I want. And it felt very selfish to me. And I know that’s not true, but in my mind I had a moral judgment about it.
Joe Skinner: People don’t really talk about precarity enough in art making and how much you really do have to kind of take a leap of faith in a way.
Min Jin Lee: Yeah, I think there’s a kind of dishonesty about it, and I think that’s not really fair, because a lot of times people look at me and go, oh, can I just back-solve what you did? And I go, for goodness sakes, don’t back-solve what I did. Be faster, be smarter, work wiser, my young person. Dear Jedi, don’t do this. (laughs)
Joe Skinner: Well, I think conversely, you know, maybe don’t like specifically become a lawyer for X amount of years then do this that and the other thing, but like I think what’s so cool about learning about your story and what could be cool for future writers and people making art, is that there is no simple path and you can take different routes to get there and that can be encouraging in its own way certainly.
Min Jin Lee: Well, thank you. I think so. I certainly don’t regret having become a writer. I’m very proud of the work that I’ve published, especially my essays, in addition to my books. And I also am proud of the way I live. I don’t owe anybody anything. I don’t, I don’t feel beholden to institutions. I don’t feel, I don’t feel hampered in. And that meant that I had to keep a lower overhead. It meant that I had to walk away from things that were very important and prestigious. It meant that I’m not a tenured professor, for example. I understand why people do them. And I really respect that, but I’ve noticed that it can affect the quality of your work. And I don’t know, maybe they’re right and I’m wrong. I’m not quite sure if I did it the right way, but this is the way I did it. And I guess I could live with it.
Joe Skinner (Narration): Taking your own path and choosing creative independence can offer really important freedoms, but it also means everything can just take a lot longer. It took nearly 30 years from the first spark of the idea for Pachinko in 1989, until Min Jin Lee would publish the book in 2017. But the exit ramps along the way were by no means wasted time. Her experiences writing law memos and sorting through hundreds of banker boxes of law documents helped shape who she is as a writer today.
Min Jin Lee: I’m so good at compressing difficult, complicated ideas. And then somehow making it smaller. I mean, this is kind of like what we’re doing right now, right? You and I are taking a lot of information and trying to create a brief narrative that’s compelling. And a memo should also be readable. It can’t just be bullet points of the issues. They want that 20 pages to be even compressed, even down to like, five sentences, because you’re going to get ten minutes of the client’s time. So all of it had to be written very well. And that compression and that understanding of what’s important is something that I still carry with me. So I’m constantly ingesting information. I’m constantly asking myself, what’s really important? How do I not waste my reader’s time? Because that person who’s my reader has almost no time. That reader has maybe 10,000 things that he, she or they can choose from in terms of how they want to spend their time and do they really want to spend it with me?
Joe Skinner (Narration): So Lee embraced her skill sets and she dove into heavy research and began the process of whittling away and finding the core of her story.
Min Jin Lee: I went to material archives, stacks, I went to books, articles, and I wrote an entire draft called Motherland. That book was based on archival and historical research. And the book was just so dry. So dreadful. I left that book behind. It was very angry. You know, it’s kind of like, you know when you read a sexy tweet and you’re thinking like, oh, that’s kind of cool. How do they say that in 120 characters or whatever it is, 240 characters? And it could be angry. It could have a tone. It could have an attitude. It could be smart. But you can’t have anger for hundreds of pages. Like nobody wants to be in that space for hundreds of pages. It’s kind of like when you think about Seinfeld, which is a great comedy. Really well written. I think if that show was 27 minutes, it would irritate you because there’s a snarkiness and a meanness to it that you really can’t handle anymore than whatever the allotted time is. So I think there’s a length issue and the primary thing was that Solomon was the main character of the first book and he is so boring and not important and I didn’t think about writing, going further back than Solomon. So because I had written a book about Solomon, the book was bad. I kept one chapter from it and I threw out the rest of it.
Joe Skinner (Narration): Having the first iteration of Pachinko focus entirely on the character of Solomon could have made for an interesting coming-of-age story in modern times, but it would have been missing what makes the novel connect with so many readers: at its core it is a story about multiple generations of a Korean family living in Japan and explores the cultural complexities of the Korean diaspora. Solomon’s grandmother, Sunja, for instance, is also the emotional core of the story, as the matriarch who made the first decision to leave Korea and move to Japan decades before Solomon was even born. It is this kind of intergenerational storytelling that really opens up the scope of Pachinko to be the kind of omniscient social novel that Min Jin Lee was always interested in writing.
Min Jin Lee: There are lots of people writing social novels, but I wanted to write this sort of huge world, and I don’t think I had the skills for it. It took me a really long time to figure out how to do it. But now I feel like, oh, that’s what I do. Like, that’s all I want to do. I’m not going to write that many books, I promise. But they’re all going to be the sort of omniscient world-building books.
Joe Skinner (Narration): During the early process of trying to figure out what kind of novel she wanted Pachinko to be, Min Jin Lee did end up publishing a short story in 2002 in the Missouri Review, which was also called Motherland. It would be one of the first threads in the intricate weave that makes up Pachinko. But then Lee put Pachinko aside and published her debut novel in 2007 instead, which also explores the Korean diaspora, people who have been spread or dispersed from their homeland, in a different way. It’s called Free Food for Millionaires.
Min Jin Lee: My first book, Free Food for Millionaires, is my question about capitalism and money and aspiration and career in New York City, it’s about Koreans in New York.
Joe Skinner (Narration): Even with a debut novel under her belt, Min Jin Lee kept coming back to Pachinko.
Min Jin Lee: And Pachinko is about the 20th century experience of Koreans in Japan. And I was trying to understand what it’s like to be Korean in the world, and I couldn’t do it without thinking about the Koreans in Japan in the 20th century. It makes no sense. Because we need to understand the occupation as well as the national division and that had to be done.
Joe Skinner (Narration): It’s 2007, now almost 20 years since she first go the idea for the novel and she was still trying to crack what exactly it will be and how best to write it. After the break, we’ll see the spark that finally lights up the path for Min Jin Lee and Pachinko, once she realizes that she needs to move to Japan and meet people first-hand.
Min Jin Lee: I didn’t know what I was getting into. I mean, I really didn’t know. First of all, it had never occurred to me that I would get married. It had never occurred to me that I would have a child. It would never occur to me that I would live in Japan. So, if you ask my younger self, what will your life be like when you are, what is it, 38? I wouldn’t have said any of those things. Like, if you had said to me, oh, at age 55 you’ll be in Midtown Manhattan talking to Joe Skinner. Like, it would not, that was not in the bingo card there, Joe.
Joe Skinner: Up to this point, writer Min Jin Lee had been using her research skills and her academic training to develop Pachinko. But things got a lot more personal when her husband’s job was relocated to Tokyo in 2007 and they made the decision to move.
Min Jin Lee: I get to Japan, we live in expat housing in an expat community and somehow I become a wife. Like, it was so strange because I had never seen myself as the wife. Like, of the two of us, I’m the one with the advanced degree. And I never really saw myself as a dependent, but I became a dependent, not just financially, but also just a language. It was almost like being a child because I couldn’t speak Japanese. And if I had a headache, I couldn’t go into a pharmacy because a lot of Japan, it’s not very English friendly. I mean, there’s some English, but you have to go to the different places, and I didn’t know how to navigate, so I felt even more dependent on my husband, which I really didn’t like as a feminist and as a woman. And then also as a mother, I couldn’t protect my child in the same kind of way, because I didn’t have language skills. So these were things I could not have anticipated. And I think all that helplessness, in a way, helped the novel. Because I knew what it was like to be a stranger in a new country. So it wasn’t just about the fact that historically my characters back then experienced a kind of hostility that they could not have imagined. It was more about helplessness. It was very specific to the fact that I became somebody’s dependent and also a weak parent. I think everybody now has this experience of having to relocate and relearn new cultures. And I think that if you approach it with humility, it’s possible, rather than, I’m owed something. But then once I was there, I thought, Oh, you know what? I’m going to go back to my abandoned novel. I’m going to make lemonade out of a very difficult situation. So that’s what I started to do. And once I was there, I realized, oh, the reason why your first book Motherland sucked the way it did is because you don’t even know Korean Japanese people. Like, what are you thinking? Like, I’d met a couple, but I didn’t really know them. And then when I was living in Japan, I met so many. Like, I went to where they were, I talked to tons of them, I became friends, and I was like, Oh, got it, you really were looking at it from the point of view of a Western academic, you really did not know.
Joe Skinner: Korean immigrants represent the third largest ethnic minority group in Japan. So Min Jin Lee visited these communities all around the country. At their homes and at their businesses.
Min Jin Lee: Yeah, I did meet many Korean Japanese people. And when I did meet them, very often, it’s the first meeting that’s really difficult, because they’re trying to suss you out. Like, are you for real? Are you going to be a jerk about who we are? Who do you think you are anyway? There is a little bit of this kind of suspicion. And then once they realize that you’re just a big Labrador Retriever, which is basically what I am, they start thinking, oh, okay. You write fiction, who cares? No one’s going to read your book. And then, um, they start introducing you to everybody else. And with the Korean Japanese people, it’s very important to remember there’s Korean Japanese who become Japanese citizens, which is a growing population. There’s Koreans who are South Korean citizens, even though they’re fourth generation Koreans. And there are also Koreans who are North Korean identified. So there’s three different Korean ethnic populations in Japan. I’ve met people from every group and spent time and immersed myself in their cultures. And that experience really made me think, oh, this is so much more complicated than I thought.
Joe Skinner (Narration): Pachinko in Japan is kind of like the popularity of slot machines in America. It’s a form of gambling that kind of looks like pinball machines. And it’s loud. A pachinko parlor might have thousands of small metal balls randomly clinking down a series of pegs, with some gamers walking away as winners and many as losers. In Min Jin Lee’s novel, the game is not just a metaphor for life’s unpredictability and randomness, but also parlors were a place for many Koreans in Japan to find economic freedom as business owners. Meeting people at establishments like these would be critical to understanding her characters.
Min Jin Lee: So one interview, I went to Yokohama and I went to a Japanese owned pachinko parlor, which was really interesting because they were very clear, like, we’re not Korean. We are not Korean. And I was like, okay, you’re not Korean. And I remember that sort of insistence was like, you protest too much, sir, but okay. And, um, but at the same time, he was so generous because he had a lot of Korean friends. Like, I met so many Japanese people who loved their Korean friends. And it was one of the first things they would tell you, like, I really am so sorry for what we did to your country. I’m like, you didn’t do anything. You’re 22. This is something that happened in history. It’s fine. And then they would tell me over and over how much they enjoyed Korean culture. And I always felt like we had to have this bizarre throat clearing. And I thought, oh, how unnecessary. You’re just another person like me. We’re just trying to figure this thing out. Like we’re just fumbling like everybody else. But it was really sweet. And they really tried. So I went to this one pachinko parlor where I met this Japanese pachinko parlor owner and I mentioned that because of course I met many Korean Japanese pachinko parlors and owners and went to the back rooms and I looked at how people count money and the balls and all of it. And the more I did the more I realized that just it wasn’t any different than when I would visit my friend’s pizza parlors in New York City in Queens. You know, you go to the back, there’s always a little office, there’s a little safe, there’s a messy desk, and there’s usually a bottle of like, you know, oil somewhere, and there are cans of tomato sauce. I mean, you just, when you think about the way people have lives to try to survive, you feel a real profound tenderness for people. And then, so I remember meeting this one Korean Japanese woman, I remember she was saying how her grandfather worked in a fish roe preservative factory. You know, and apparently the Japanese population loved this sort of specific kind of fish roe, but then it was the Koreans who made it. Or you’d have oden factories, or you’d have these tofu factories, like things that require so much labor and require a kind of messiness. And so people talk about the mining and all those things, but you had Koreans doing so many different kinds of jobs. And then sometimes the second generation, third generation, fourth generation, they would end up working at a Western bank. So I met people who worked at Fortune 100 US companies and they were Korean Japanese. And very often they would say to me: I graduated from Tokyo University, Todai, and I couldn’t get a job at, let’s say, the most important newspaper in Japan, because they do hire Korean Japanese, but usually one or two. They can’t hire that many of us.
Joe Skinner: Can you describe an instance in one of these interviews where you can specifically remember this moment leading to a character that ended up in Pachinko? Or is it more, way more complicated than that? Are the characters that culminated in Pachinko more of like a collage of these experiences that you had?
Min Jin Lee: Noa didn’t exist until I talked to a CEO of a very important company and he kept on talking about his brother. I would ask questions about him. He kept on talking about his brother. And I thought, oh, Moses has a brother, and he’s always living in the shadow of this brother.
Joe Skinner (Narration): In the many threads that make up Pachinko, Moses is Solomon’s father. He grew up as a troublemaker, and beats up anyone who mocks his Korean identity. He goes on to become a millionaire pachinko parlor owner in Yokohama. Moses’ brother, Noa, is quite different: he is obedient and strives to blend into Japanese society and shed his Korean identity. They are both Sunja’s children, the matriarch of the family. But these characters didn’t exist at all in Min Jin Lee’s first pass at the novel.
Min Jin Lee: So believe it or not, in Motherland, there’s no Sunja, there’s no Noa. I wouldn’t have those characters unless I lived in Japan. They wouldn’t have even occurred to me. So I figured Sunja out after interviewing so many third or fourth generation Korean Japanese people because they always talked about that first generation and almost invariably about that matriarch who had to put up with so much difficulty. Because often their husbands couldn’t find jobs, like they’re prohibited from having jobs. Like certain municipalities in Japan would have jobs to give out to let’s say day laborers, but they would only let the men work three days, not four, not five, which meant that they would be at subsistence level always. And then the wives would have to do things like make bathtub gin. But then if you made bathtub gin, like moonshine or whatever equivalent you have, you’d be arrested. And then you’d have your still taken away from you. It’s very often you are raising pigs in your own house. So people often think that the characters in Pachinko are poor. They’re not poor. They’re actually middle class compared to the actual people in the first generation. The first generation people were really, really, they really had it tough. Like their kids were collecting garbage for the pigs that they were sleeping with. So can you imagine what the majority culture must have thought about the people who are living with pigs in their little tiny rentals?
Joe Skinner: Do you think it’s a good thing or a bad thing for people to write outside of what they have directly lived? I could see arguments for both sides of that conversation.
Min Jin Lee: Oh, I don’t think I know any serious writer who doesn’t think that one can write outside of his or her or their experience. I think what one must do is to be profoundly sympathetic, profoundly empathetic, profoundly accurate. So you need to do the homework. You need to really do the work before you write it. But I think we would limit art tremendously if we only wrote specifically about our little lane. So, you can argue that I had no right to write about the Korean Japanese people. But I’ve had many Korean, actually Korean Japanese people around the world have told me that they’re so grateful that I wrote this book. And um, two years ago I had a lot of nice sort of laudatory things happen in Korea. And this really important literary critic came up to me and said, you know, I nominated you for this prize. And I said, well, thank you so much. Like, I just didn’t know what to say because, you know, it’s such a nice thing someone did for you. And then she goes, I nominated you because I realized that you must be, like, kind of dumb about this and, I should just leave now and just like, you know, like hand her my flowers. (Laughs) And she said, um, well, I realized that you couldn’t have really understood what you were starting. You had to be an American to take this topic on. And I knew what she meant, because a Korean person would understand better how complex and what a minefield this topic would be. So it would have been so easy for me to get into trouble with, I don’t know, 50 groups. But because I did the work, I feel like I could live with myself. If someone doesn’t like it, or if someone did have criticism, they have every right to say that. I believe so much in the freedom of expression. And I think that art can’t exist without the sort of vital discussion and respectfulness in discussion. However, there are things I want to say, there are things I have questions about, and I think that our curiosity is what is going to, in the end allow us to have a higher quality of, dare I say, love.
Joe Skinner: And certainly I imagine that all of the different first person interviews and time you spent in Japan kind of put some wind in your sails and some confidence of empathy towards your characters I imagine too, right?
Min Jin Lee: I think it was more humility than confidence. (Laughs) More like, wow, I did not know, okay. But now I know, thank you. You have schooled me again. Yes, so, in a way it’s good though, because at least you have the right lesson. You finally get it. Like, you got it wrong the first time. You failed the test. But the second time you get a 70. And you’re like, you know what? 70 is okay. It’s not failing. And then you’re kind of inching towards the 85.
Joe Skinner: Well, I always think if something’s really difficult, and you’re just banging your head against the wall, that’s growing. I mean, that’s growth to me.
Min Jin Lee: Well, you know, growth is, it’s so sexy. Like, I think growth is probably the sexiest thing that I can see in a person. And yeah, it’s totally hot, Joe. Growth is hot. Like when I meet people who are really invested in growing and trying and stumbling and hitting your head against the wall, I kind of think, yeah, I want to be on your team. I don’t want to be on the smug bastards team. I want to be on the team that says, you know what, somehow, like, you know, among the four of us or the five of us, like, our IQ is at least 130, you know, and that’s what we’re going to get somewhere like you’re good at this and I’m good at this and we’re going to build this ship and get the hell out of here.
Joe Skinner: You had a clearly unusual path into fiction writing, and what advice would you give for writers out there that might be trying to also pivot from a different field or people in general who are considering different career changes in their life?
Min Jin Lee: You know, it’s so strange because I feel like neoliberal capitalism, this thing that everybody calls late stage capitalism, which I guess it could be true, too, people always talk about this word that I can’t stand, networking, and I don’t think that’s what you want to do. I don’t. I think people often think it’s networking that makes a person able to get a contract or publishing or all those things. No, I actually think you have to do the work. I think doing the work is what makes you a writer. It’s not wanting to be a writer. You have to actually write, and you have to write terrible things, and you have to look stupid. And I think it’s the vulnerability of exposing how bad your work can be. Like, I’ve had so many rejections, and I think that it’s that sending things out, and having people laugh in your face. And it’s terrible. People are so mean, and I’m so sorry. Like, if I could apologize on behalf of a lot of people who are not going to give you the time of day, I’m really sorry, but I have good news. The good news is that there’s so much amazing published work already that tells you how to write better, tells you how to tell a story, and it’s all there. And almost all of it’s free. It’s in the library. Like in America, you could go to a library and there are at least a hundred books that’ll tell you how to be a better writer. But then, this is the hard part, is, you have to ask yourself, what is the only thing that you can say, that only you can say? And then say that. Not what anybody else wants. And then you become part of the team. We need you.
Joe Skinner (Narration): That’s our show for this week. Thank you to Min Jin Lee for the great conversation. You can check out Pachinko now at your local library right now, or listen to the new version of the audio book that just came out, they have Sandra Oh as narrator. And don’t forget, if you like what you heard, please rate and review the show, it really helps. And tell your friends to listen to American masters: Creative Spark wherever you listen to podcasts. You can also listen on our site at pbs.org/americanmasters.
American Masters: Creative Spark is a production of the WNET Group, media made possible by all of you. This episode was produced by me, Joe Skinner and Diana Chan. Our executive producer is Michael Kantor. Original music is composed by Hannis Brown. This episode was mixed and mastered by Josh Broome. Funding for American Masters: Creative Spark was provided by the Rosalind P. Walter Foundation, Thea Petschek Iervolino Foundation, the Anderson Family Fund, the Marc Haas Foundation, Sue and Edgar Wachenheim III, the Charina Endowment Fund, the Ambrose Monell Foundation, and the Kate W. Cassidy Foundation.
Joe Skinner – Host and Producer
Diana Chan – Producer
Michael Kantor – Executive Producer
Hannis Brown – Composer
Josh Broome – Sound Mixer
Art was created by Digital at The WNET Group.
Special thanks to Cristiana Lombardo, Chris Wilson, Julie Sacks, Maggie Bower, Lindsey Horvitz, and Jennifer Nguyen.
American Masters: Creative Spark is a production of The WNET Group, media made possible by all of you.
