Fulbright Program

And you may remember that I used to live in Germany.

I lived there for a year during my Fulbright in 2006.

I have been to Hamburg before.

The Elphi, which is what they call it, this concert hall, wasn't built until 2017.

I'm Brittany Mihalik, and today I'm interviewing Leah Purpura, author of An Object Arrived in Image Issue 129.

Leah is the author of nine collections of essays, poems, and translations, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for her collection On Booking, Her awards include Guggenheim, NEA, Fulbright Fellowships, as well as five Pushcart Prizes, the Associated Writing Program's Award in Nonfiction, and others.

Her work appears in The New Yorker, The New Republic, Poetry, Orion, The Paris Review, The Georgia Review, Agni, Emergence, and elsewhere.

She lives in Baltimore, Maryland, where she served as

And then on the cultural side, the educational and cultural side, we had exchange programs we could offer.

We had Fulbright scholarships we could offer.

We had a variety of, at that time, we really thought they were just tools to fight communism.

After the collapse of the Cold War with the consolidation of USI into state, I came to see these things as a lot more than tools, but freestanding things we had developed because they work effectively.

And then [laughs] I, out of spite, I just wanted to, I needed to, I needed to leave that environment at the time.

So I applied to the Fulbright program [laughs] and I applied to University of Oxford.

[laughs] And I, thinking that, okay, maybe one of them will stick.

I mean, I also applied to places nearby and stuff.

I applied to just, like, obviously, local grocery store and everything else as, like, a normal person as well.

And, [laughs] and then, but I ended up getting into both, and the Fulbright program-

Wait a second.

So you, you get pissed off at your friends and you say, "You know what? Screw you guys.

Carolyn Finney-Paisdy is a storyteller, writer, and cultural geographer who works at the intersection of the arts, education, and lived experience to confront the truth of our past so that we can stand in better relationship with each other, this earth, and our collective possibility.

She has been a Fulbright Scholar, Cannon National Parks Science Fellow, a Mellon recipient, and served on the National Parks Advisory Board under the Obama administration.

Her work includes numerous essays, documentary film work, a performance piece, and her first book, Black Faces, White Spaces, Reimagining the Relationship of African Americans to the Great Outdoors.

She is a scholar, artist in residence in the Franklin Environmental Center at Middlebury College.

The more self-questioning we are, often the more self-doubting we are because we're not sure if the assumptions we're making are actually grounded in evidence or they're...

I remember when I was doing my Fulbright in the US and I went to the conference of Fulbright scholars in DC, all of us were wandering around saying, how come they chose us? There was this generalized level of like, what the hell am I doing here? And I think in an organizational setting, That can get in the way, and often some of the worst decisions are made by the people who think they're absolutely watertight, indestructible, that they are the visionary, they know the answer.

They might carry a lot of charismatic power that tends to override evidence to the contrary.

And I'm thinking that the immunity to change can come from, you know, embedded, baked in things around identity and hierarchy and routines and power structures and the history.

Marisa is a creative and life coach, award-winning author, and a teacher who helps people reconnect with their creative genius and their truest self as a doorway to greater purpose and meaning, and abundance.

She's a Fulbright Fellow and a graduate of the prestigious Iowa Writers Workshop.

She's the founder of Live Your Creative Genius and the author of the Nautilus Gold award-winning Loyal to the Sky and her forthcoming Sanctuary.

Marisa's teaching has taken her to Stanford, Split Rock, Esalen, and Gaia House in the UK.