An exercise in creativity
Partners develop ‘Endless Beautiful’ podcast to flex their brain muscles
Lucas Pralle and his partner Carolyn Decker were feeling a bit of culture shock when they came home after a lengthy stint in China as English teachers.
The aspiring writers needed a meditative way to ease back in, and so they began brainstorming techniques to unlock their feelings and stimulate their imaginations.
Soon they were recording random sounds – sounds from nature, machines, people working – and stringing them into 15-minute loops. They began listening to the recordings and writing simultaneously – and they realized they had hit on something: Sounds could become a
catalyst for unexpected creativity and reflection – a sort of gym class for the brain.
It was an auspicious discovery for the couple, who have since formalized the audio-inspired writing sessions and opened them to the public in a regular podcast dubbed “Endless Beautiful.” The podcasts are available on an assortment of digital media outlets, including Player FM, which ranked Endless Beautiful as the “top creativity podcast” of 2017.
With a grant from NeighborWorks Blackstone River Valley, Pralle and Decker are planning to hold a live Endless Beautiful workshop at 40 South Main St. on Aug. 12 from 4-6 p.m. Participation is free, but endadvance registration at lessbeautiful.com
is suggested.
Thanks to the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts, this won’t be Endless Beautiful’s only live session. The couple has received a grant to stage more open workshops in the future.
“Something magical happens at these workshops when we listen, write and share,” says Decker, a poet. “The sounds of the audio session open up the flow of creativity from that headspace out onto the paper. Whether it’s a memory or a wholly new concept, the result is always a surprise.”
A native of Wisconsin, Pralle met Decker at a private teaching institution outside Shanghai, and they resettled in Rhode Island – initially in North Kingstown – last year. That’s when they began experimenting with how sounds could influence writing – and more.
“It can inspire a story, a poem – sometimes people just start crying,” Pralle says. “It can jog memories.”
Now the couple lives in Providence and Pralle, 34, works as an employment specialist with Woonsocketbased Community Care Alliance. Pralle is also a Marine veteran who served two tours of duty in Iraq before teaching abroad.
Decker and Pralle have now produced more than 30 of the regular podcasts, which can be accessed online at endlessbeautiful.com and an assortment of digital media outlets, like Apple Podcast, Stitcher and SunCloud, as well as Player FM.
Don’t expect a string of random noises on the podcasts. The podcasts focus as much on an individual who has been selected to participate in the auditory experiment as the sound selections. Decker and Pralle introduce listeners to the individual before the sounds begin. Afterward, their guest listener reads the finished product, and they all have a discussion about the process and the results.
The live workshops, like the one next week at 40 South Main St., will follow a similar model, except there will be more interaction among multiple participants when it’s over.
You don’t have to be a writer to get something out of an Endless Beautiful session, says Pralle. It might be a useful technique for helping a writer stretch his or her imagination, but the mix of listening and writing can also be therapeutic, social or just entertaining. And the more diverse the group, “the better it is,” he says.
Pralle, who is certified to teach English as a foreign language, had been working at a private school in the city of Sujo, not far from Shanghai, when he returned to Rhode Island with Decker last summer. He met Decker in a writers’ group in Sujo, where the culture appears to be greatly informed by the West. “There’s a western rock scene out there,” Pralle says.
Pralle had been in Sujo about two years and coming home, he found out, was harder than he expected.
“I’ll be honest, I was hav- ing a little bit of a culture shock,” he says. “I wanted to write and do something creative to deal with the anxiety.”
Soon, he and Decker were carrying digital recorders with them everywhere they went. They began recording snippets of all sounds imaginable – a tattoo artist’s buzzing mechanical ink-pen injecting color into a human canvas; Decker sloshing around in the mud at Purgatory Chasm in Sutton, Mass.; industrial machines.
They got used to funny looks in the workspaces and shops they visited, asking for permission to collect sound bites.
“People are very accepting when we tell them,” said Pralle. “We don’t get into the details much, but they’re usually very receptive and very positive.”
Before their unique combination of writing against an auditory backdrop was given a name, Decker and Pralle weren’t sure where their explorations were headed. Pralle says Endless Beautiful “kind of just happened and we’ve been building on that framework ever since.”
It’s anyone’s guess how much Endless Beautiful’s audience of inspiration-seeking followers will grow, but Pralle is sure of the need for the podcast.
“I think creativity is something that’s very undervalued in our society,” he says. “Our minds need that exercise. Just like our body needs physical exercise our minds need to be exercised, too.”