Books & Writers: Novelists, Screenwriters, Poets, Journalists, Playwrights, Non-fiction Writers & Showrunners Talk Writing, Creativity & The Creative Process · Novelists, Screenwriters, Poets, Playwrights, Non-fiction Writers, Journalists & Showrunners Talk Writing - Creative Process Original Series

Trust, Education & Writing as Resistance w/ AL KENNEDY - Highlights

·34 min·2 clips

A.L. Kennedy says writing must be “essential” so the reader can fit their own voice into the narrative.

1. Creative Processes presents A.L. Kennedy discussing trust, education, and writing as resistance, with a focus on voice, democracy, and love. 2. Kennedy is the guest, described as a writer, activist, stand-up comedian, and the author of Alive in the Merciful Country, and the interview is supported by the Jan Michalski Foundation. 3. The episode asks what writing is for when fear, misinformation, and political pressure shape public life. 4. Kennedy explains the “voice method” she uses and says writing should be “essential” so the reader can fit their own voice into the narrative. 5. She links that approach to Alfred Wolfson, a soldier in the First World War who heard people “screaming for their lives.” 6. Kennedy says the battle with fear is “quite fundamental” to putting marks on paper and that writers need “a space within which the fear can’t get you.” 7. She argues that education teaches people how to read, how to read “really,” and how to express themselves with nuance rather than violence. 8. Kennedy says education “underpins democracy,” and she describes undereducation as a path to being “de-educated and misinformed and misled.” 9. She links attacks on education in the UK to Thatcher and says “what you have to do is destroy education” if you want to diminish resistance. 10. Kennedy says the government’s habit of infiltrating opposition groups includes spy cops, citing Greenpeace, radical bookshops, and Mark Kennedy. 11. She says one famous London demo involved two spy cops, one in each front row, who ended up punching each other and helping trigger violence. 12. Kennedy describes online persuasion as a fast system that repeats “bing, bing, bing” until people are pulled down “the rabbit hole.” 13. She says lockstep manipulation reaches “mum’s net,” 40-plus audiences, and people who are lonely, vulnerable, or already primed to believe false stories. 14. Kennedy frames love as something that is always “evolving and flowing and flexible and moving,” not fixed or dead. 15. She says lockdown briefly made people pay attention to dance, music, paintings, leaves, and the people they loved, and she calls that awareness “simple and specific and beautiful and strong.” 16. Kennedy says governments failed by not supporting people through loneliness and silence, while tech billionaires and political actors accelerated fear and division. 17. Her style is forceful, fast, and densely argued, with long runs of spoken language that move between politics, art, and personal ethics. 18. The interview format is conversational and reflective, with the host asking broad questions about childhood, truth, teachers, and the meaning of writing. 19. Readers interested in writing craft, education, and anti-fascist politics will get a lot from this. 20. Listeners wanting a light, surface-level author chat may skip it.

As heard by us

A literary conversation about writing, movement, and being fully expressed.

A.L. Kennedy treats writing as an ethical act, shaped by a wish to be essential while still leaving room for the reader's own voice. The discussion then moves through voice method, belief, migration, and public life.

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Why you'd press play

You want a voice that treats writing as essential, fully expressed, and open enough for the reader to enter.

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