July 5, 2026 Elena Li Chow
Episode 10: Art Is a Choice You Make
Elena Li Chow, author of "Behind Closed Eyes", on why making art is a decision, not a gift — and what that distinction means for anyone who thinks the door is already closed to them.
Elena Li Chow has lived across continents, built businesses, and written fiction — and she arrives at a conclusion that cuts against the most common excuse people make for not making art: that it was never really available to them. In this conversation, she and host Theodore Lashmet work through the difference between talent and skill, between lived experience as prerequisite and lived experience as advantage, arriving at the argument that art is not a gift distributed unevenly at birth but a practice chosen and developed. The title of her novel could serve as the episode's thesis: making art is a decision, and most of the barriers people cite are softer than they believe.