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AI can produce words in seconds. But what happens to our voices, attention, and creative courage when we hand over the messy, human process of making something true?
In this episode of The Ode to Joy Podcast, Elena Box sits down with longtime friend, creative mentor, non-AI conversion copywriter, book muse, and screenwriter Elyssa Jakim for a conversation about artistry, surrender, motherhood, grief, and creating in the age of “robot writing.”
Elyssa shares why convenience is not the same as creativity, what it has been like to navigate a “void” season in her business, and how hyperachievement can become a survival response. She also reflects on birth trauma, financial insecurity, receiving support, and the death of her father, renowned translator Boris Jakim, whose devotion to language and literature shaped her own creative path.
Together, Elena and Elyssa explore what AI cannot replicate: lived experience, shared history, human witnessing, and the unexpected insight that can spark something entirely new.
Elyssa also shares what she is building now, including the Temple of Venus and her Own Your Artistry Salon for writers and soulful entrepreneurs ready to reclaim their voices and creative process.
This conversation is an invitation to stop outsourcing your expression and return to the beauty, difficulty, and aliveness of making something real.
As Elyssa says, “If we can’t be bad and get better, then we don’t get transcendent human creativity.”
There is nothing like the real thing.
Connect with Elyssa
Learn more about Elyssa’s work:
https://www.elyssajakim.com/
Explore the Own Your Artistry Salon:
https://www.elyssajakim.com/own-your-artistry-salon
Follow Elyssa on Instagram:
https://www.instagram.com/elyssajakim
Read The Dressing Room on Substack:
https://dressingroom.substack.com/
If this conversation resonates, subscribe to The Ode to Joy Podcast, leave a review, and share the episode with a friend who is tired of the AI haze and ready to return to their own creative process.
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Buy your copy of Elena's book "Grieve Outside the Box"
Follow on IG @elenabox
