Podcast Summary:

Contemplify
Host: Paul Swanson
Guest: Anna Tivel
Episode: Anna Tivel on Animal Poem, Short Stories, and Checking Your Shoes
Date: March 4, 2026

Episode Overview

In this deeply engaging and soulful conversation, Paul Swanson welcomes acclaimed Portland-based songwriter Anna Tivel to explore themes that are both intimate and expansive. The episode centers on Anna’s latest album Animal Poem, the interplay of art and the contemplative life, the impact of short stories and poetry, and the profound profundity of everyday moments—including, yes, the humility of occasionally stepping in something unpleasant and needing to “check your shoes.” Through stories, laughter, and artful musings, Anna and Paul trace the contours of presence, memory, creativity, and the “examined life” in both the natural and inner worlds.

Key Discussion Points & Insights

Setting the Scene and Everyday Poetry

[02:12]

• Anna describes her neighborhood in Portland: “We live a block from the McDonald’s and there’s a coffee shop and what was once a strip club but is now an all ages rock club, an Ethiopian bakery, a record store, a bunch of colorful neighbors. So I often just like to kind of sit by the window and watch whatever goes down...”
• Her dogs (Jones and a “teen puppy” in a “rug eating, barking, humping, destruction” phase) keep her grounded and remind her of what really matters (or doesn’t).
• Memorable moment: “They remind you that nothing that you think matters, matters.” [05:32]

What Does It Mean to Be Contemplative?

[06:04]

• Anna considers “contemplative” as a practice of “noticing” and “trying to take care of your attention... pull yourself nearer to those things and kind of hold them closer and closer and with curiosity kind of wonder what they are.”
• She likens it to truly being where you are: “Trying to be in the grocery store when you’re in the grocery store.”
• Paul recalls the lesson from James Finley—being present even in a box store, which can awaken a deeper presence.

Roots, Formation & Lineage

[09:48]

• Anna discusses formative moments: working at a small town art house theater as a kid, feeling “supremely alive” sitting alone in the dark, watching Life is Beautiful.
• She reflects: “Life is so... it’s so much, and it’s so big, and it’s such a giant bucket of questions... it’s sort of this series of sensory moments and people and being moved and then forgetting to be moved and then being moved again. And you’re slowly kind of forming... this poem that you’re in.” [12:43]

The Rarity and Work of Feeling Fully Alive

[14:18]

• Both Anna and Paul reflect on how moments of awe become rarer or require more “work” as adults.
• Anna: “Maybe if you lived in that moment all the time, it would be like an acid trip or something... you need the amount of lostness and absurdity... Along with the shit on your shoe.” [15:29]
• Paul: “Can you stop your hurriedness and check my shoes for shit?” [16:46]
• The beauty of children—in their wonder and in pulling adults into presence.

The Shaping Power of Short Stories and Art

[20:45]

• Anna names short stories (George Saunders’ “Styx,” Wendell Berry’s “Fidelity,” and John Prine's “Sam Stone”) as foundational to her creative formation.
• On “Styx,” she marvels at “the amount of life and truth and weirdness and humor and wonder and, like, grief, he fits into these two paragraphs...” [21:36]
• On Fidelity: “It makes me want to live... with my eyes open so much wider to my community and to love and what that can be and to kind of stillness and solace.” [24:21]
• Music, too, can crack you open—“You leave that like I imagine you would leave the best that a church service could be. Just feeling open to everybody.” [26:32]

The Reverberation of Poetry

[29:02]

• Anna has been immersed in poets connected to Louise Glück, especially Jay Hopler (“Still Life”) and Richard Siken.
• Notable moment: Anna reads from Jay Hopler’s poem “To My Wife on our Anniversary in Castiglione del Lago,” speaking powerfully of love, illness, and the gritty beauty of ordinary things. [31:22]
• She describes Siken: “He’s got the tastiest... He’s a painter, so his way with language... it’s almost like his poems are trying to paint, and then he’s erasing and then he’s asking while he’s writing...” [31:32]

The Impact of Music & Authenticity

[33:05]

• Paul reflects on formative albums—especially Jeff Buckley’s Grace—and the way certain artistic moments open “a trust in the fragility of authenticity.” Anna replies:
• “One that I come back to again and again is this Nina Simone album Nina and Piano... It just comes from... she just has to... let her soul out of her mouth, out of her fingers.” [34:27]
• On the transformative power of such art: “There’s no way you need to be for these people in this room... If you can be the most yourself, then... people might feel welcome to do that with each other...” [35:33]

Audience Response & the Artist’s Experience

[40:44]

• Paul shares how Animal Poem “opened another portal” for him. Anna responds:
• “That just means more to me than I can ever put in words... I feel like I’m learning it always through other artists and other people that are looking for that thing also or making things that remind me... the most unhealthily scrabbling my way toward... is any sort of moment where something is expressed between people that is understood and it’s kind of subtlety and sharedness. I feel like a 10 year old in that... you have to give yourself over and over again, even when yourself is this ugly little stepped on snail.” [42:23]

The Writing Life, Mystery, and Creative Devotion

[48:34]

• Paul wonders how Anna crafts such cosmic and earthly songs. Anna frames her songwriting as an effort to believe in the best of “a big chaos of messy thoughts.”
• “I often think about writing... as a form of an attempt to believe... if I can describe it or if I can get at the images and the stories that make it feel true, maybe I might believe it or I might learn it or I might find a new bit of it that I haven’t come upon yet.”
• The challenge of containing immensity and pain in words: “There’s something so immense about the things happening... it’s like the urge to try to get at it with writing... I feel very... like I can’t begin.”

The Ordinary and the Sacred

[53:43]

• Paul brings up “thinking that’s below thinking,” a mystery of being that arises beneath conscious linear thought.
• Anna: “It also feels so ordinary and unspecial... I went to get my oil changed the other day... you just come upon people and they feel so solid... they didn’t need to prove what he means by that. It just lives in him.” [56:32]

Practice, Presence, and Place-Making

[57:42]

• Referencing Gary Snyder’s idea that “practice is just the intensification of life,” Paul and Anna reflect on the solidness of craft—whether as a mechanic or artist—and its radiance.
• Anna describes longing to connect through specificity of place in her lyrics, e.g. Badlands Howe Ave 66, as “trying to write myself into real life and maybe eventually I will.” [62:32]
• Experiences on a train tour and a 10-day silent retreat led her toward greater presence and awareness of hiding from the discomfort of being alive: “I was so amazed... at how much I was trying to hide from myself even... just sitting in there...” [59:53]

Nature as Metaphor, Mirror, and Mystery

[67:30]

• Anna: “Everything that’s happening in the human world, which we feel is so separate from the natural world, but isn’t at all because there’s these, like, biological angles also... It’s where we are, like, reflecting always the kind of wonder and the brutality and the confusion and asymmetry...”
• “I often find it really... it just resonates to, like, be where I live... everywhere there’s just insane amount of crows right now... they’re doing their nature thing in the midst of the sirens and the exhaust... everything that I’m experiencing in my human life is being taught to me there tenfold.” [67:30]
• Paul: “[Seeing a coyote in the city] pulled back the time continuum to just almost look at it with, like, eternal eyes...” [71:00]
• Pilgrim at Tinker Creek as a portal: “The things that you could notice in this stretch of yard... it didn’t feel separate from humanness. It felt so informative of why the inside of yourself feels so intense.” [72:01]

Memory, Love, and “The Humming”

[75:29]

• Paul describes The Humming as “one of my all time favorite closing songs on any album,” feeling it embodies the mystery of love. Asks, “How does memory stoke the mystery of love for you?”
• Anna: “I just feel like such an eternal kid student of this sort of gathering of true moments that make you realize how far love can go and... it’s never ending... the language of trying to really know somebody or see somebody... will unpeel you before each other forever as long as you’re willing to do that work... it always feels like a new discovery every time you turn another page in that place.” [76:02]

Notable Quotes and Memorable Moments

• On Presence and Contemplation:

  • “Maybe that’s how I think about it right now. Trying to be in the grocery store when you’re in the grocery store.” – Anna [06:24]
  • “This is being in the box store when you’re in the box store.” – Paul [07:42]

• On the Work of Feeling:

  • “Maybe the work is like being ready when [the big moments] come...” – Anna [15:29]

• On Short Stories:

  • “[‘Styx’] blew my mind...I just love. It’s just these two paragraphs that let you see this whole world.” – Anna [21:36]
  • “For me, a complete stranger, to be sitting in my car on tour reading that story and just thinking, oh, I've got to call my sister. And love the hell out of her right now.” – Anna [25:41]

• On Artistic Dialogue:

  • “I feel like I’m learning it always through other artists and other people that are looking for that thing also or making things that remind me and then... there’s a conversation going. And without that conversation, you’re a solo afloat.” – Anna [42:23]

• On Nature and the Human World:

  • “It just feels like everything that I’m experiencing in my human life is being taught to me [by the crows, the city] tenfold.” – Anna [67:30]
  • “Then you get reminded and it pulls you back out into this wider brief. You’re just a tiny brief part of this thing.” – Anna [74:54]

• On Love and The Humming:

  • “I’m just so hungry to know how. Where that goes. I want to show up for it. And it’s so terrifying. And it feels new always.” – Anna [76:02]

• On the Gift of Art:

  • “To me that is the gift of art, the gift of being able to be porous enough to receive.” – Paul [40:46]

Timestamps for Important Segments

| Timestamp | Topic/Quote | |-----------|-------------| | 02:12 | Anna paints a picture of her Portland neighborhood and the role of dogs in daily presence. | | 06:04 | Anna contemplates the meaning and practice of being “contemplative.” | | 09:48 | On formative experiences: art house theater, childhood awe, “forming this poem that you’re in.” | | 14:18 | The rarity and “work” of being moved as an adult. | | 20:45 | Anna’s essential short stories and the power of narrative compression. | | 29:02 | On poets Louise Glück, Jay Hopler (“Still Life”), and reading one of Hopler’s poems. | | 33:05 | Formative albums and the “fragility of authenticity”—Jeff Buckley, Nina Simone. | | 42:23 | What it means to receive and reciprocate artistic resonance. | | 48:34 | Songwriting as “an attempt to believe,” struggling to express the immensity of being. | | 53:43 | “Thinking that’s below thinking” and ordinary human moments as practice. | | 57:42 | The radiance of craft—whether as an artist or mechanic. | | 59:53 | Place-making in songwriting, the desire to “write myself into real life.” | | 62:32 | Impact of a train tour and 10-day silent retreat on presence and awareness. | | 67:30 | Nature as metaphor and teacher for human experience. | | 75:29 | The mystery of love, memory, and the song “The Humming.” |

Further Reflections and What’s Next

• Anna on Upcoming Projects: She’s writing “really long bad versey songs,” intentionally slowing her creative process and seeking unpolished, long-form work—craving “the conversation to stretch out” as a counterbalance to our culture’s brevity. [83:35]
• Drink Pairing (Closing Ritual): Anna’s choice: “Maybe some mint tea, the kind that your friend gives you, who has a green thumb... it’s this gritty, sweet, earthbound thing that you drink together that they picked with their hands.” [88:36]

Final Takeaways

The episode is a luminous, meandering meditation on presence, art, memory, the natural world, and mutual recognition—both in creation and in relationship. Anna’s characteristic humility and poetic articulation leave listeners not with tidy answers, but with potent invitations: to notice, to wonder, to “hold on to the coyotes,” and to show up—snail-shell, heart, and all—for the mysterious business of being alive.

For show notes, more about Anna Tivel—including tour dates and to purchase Animal Poem—visit annativel.com and contemplify.com.