Design Matters with Debbie Millman · Design Matters Media

20th Anniversary celebration with renowned poets Eileen Myles, Elizabeth Alexander, Sarah Kay, and Amber Tamblyn

January 12, 2026·55 min·5 clips

Eileen Miles performs 'Rampant Muse,' a poem exploring lesbian identity and the fear of growing old.

Design Matters pauses at twenty years and lets poets carry the anniversary. Debbie Millman uses their earlier conversations to revisit the questions the show keeps asking: what art does to memory, what family sets in motion, and how a person slowly becomes able to make the work they make. The mood is close and unhurried. A remembered fear about mistaking writing for lived experience opens into a sharper concern: once language gets hold of memory, it can polish, bend, and maybe overdo the truth. Debbie does not rush past that. She keeps the talk tied to the actual life underneath it, asking how one guest moved from fiction toward poetry through teachers, family, and nerve. The mother arrives first, noticing that Derek Walcott teaches at Boston University and nudging her child with a challenge dressed up as doubt. It lands. The guest applies to the fiction track with short stories from college, even after swearing off more school. Then Walcott changes the weather. Debbie follows the path through Yale, John Hershey, Boston University, and the moment a diary starts to look like poetry instead of private overflow. Showing it to Walcott feels small and huge at once, less performance than trust. Around those fragments, poetry comes through as a way to live with contradiction and with a self that keeps revising the story. Debbie stays measured, giving each memory room before asking the question that opens it a little wider. The episode honors what the show has always done well: ask artists how they became the kind of people who could make what they made.

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