Excited!! Introducing Create Me Free: A Creative Health Podcast

Podcast Episode 2: Overview of Creative Process

I decided to put creative process at the front of this workbook because process is usually where a person first senses that something has shifted. You sit down. The page stares back. The paint stays dry in the tube. The idea that was with you yesterday has gone quiet. And the story you immediately tell yourself is that you are the problem. You are “flaky.” You are “undisciplined.” You have lost the thread. This episode of the Creative Health Cartography / Create Me Free podcast walks the opening pages of Chapter One and begins taking that story apart. Process, as I use the word, covers everything around the making: the preparation, the inspiration, the routines and rituals, the making itself, the review, the sharing. When one part of that arc gets touched by what is happening in the body, the mind, or the system around you, it shows up as a block. The block is information. This episode is about learning to read it. This is Episode 2 of the Create Me Free podcast, and the first one inside the Creative Process chapter. It is free, as the opening episode of each chapter will be. Everything else in the chapter lives on the paid side. If you like the work, please support it: In this episode of Create Me Free I open Chapter One of the Creative Health Cartography Workbook and walk through the six different parts of creative process. I spend time with three of the most common signs that process has gotten tangled with health: the block of consistency, the block of completion, and the block of avoidance. Near the end, I share one of my own adaptations as a writer, the practice of coming into the work through multiple entry points instead of trying to begin at the beginning every time. The episode is an overview. The coming episodes go deeper into each area. The workbook pages we work through I’ll introduced you to the Dear Artist letter that opens each chapter, which in the Creative Process part of the workbook is addressed to the artist who can start but has trouble finishing. I talk a little bit about the composite story of a real person I interviewed years ago, a woman whose working life changed when her body changed, and whose closing line has stayed with me as a quiet motto for this whole project: she misses the long uninterrupted work sessions sometimes, but she does not miss the person who believed there was only one way to be an artist. Then I move through the signs-of-a-block and strengths-and-adaptations sections, and into the three named blocks. Reading the pages aloud on camera was a different experience than drafting them. I could hear the places where the language was being careful, and the places where it could soften. Get the workbook: The art history and theory I trace two traditions I tend to work between when I talk about creative process. The first is “the laboratory tradition.” It begins with William James and his late nineteenth-century work on the stream of consciousness, which some argue is the first named theory of how creative thought moves. About a generation later, the British political scientist Graham Wallas wrote The Art of Thought, which proposed a four-stage model of creative process [https://www.themarginalian.org/2013/08/28/the-art-of-thought-graham-wallas-stages/]: preparation, incubation, illumination, and verification. Wallas was studying mathematicians and scientists, which is part of why the model feels so tidy. It was built from the working lives of (cis white) men with stable health and institutional support. Flow theory [https://createmefree.substack.com/p/creative-flow-and-the-window-of-tolerance] sits downstream of this tradition. I use flow, I teach with flow, and I have also begun to see where it leaves people out, especially people whose nervous systems do something other than quietly cooperate. The second tradition has fewer textbook names and more lineages. Feminist, disability-informed, trauma-informed ways of looking at creative process. I place Dorothy Richardson here, the novelist who wrote thirteen volumes of Pilgrimage over roughly forty years, as stream of consciousness writing in parallel to the more famous men who later got the credit. I place Virginia Woolf here for A Room of One’s Own and her insistence that material conditions, a door that closes, money of one’s own, time that belongs to you, shape which creative work is possible. I name Audre Lorde, Alice Walker, Gloria Anzaldúa, and bell hooks as thinkers I will return to in later episodes. I mention Christine Miserandino’s spoon theory [https://www.lupusauthor.com/post/the-spoon-theory-guide-to-writing-managing-your-creative-energy-part-1], which appears throughout the workbook, as vocabulary I can no longer work without. My own framework sits between these two traditions. I take the stages and some of the nervous-system research from the first. I take the lived, embodied, systemic reading from the second. I sprinkle in some other stuff. Also in this episode * Why process goes first in the workbook and in the podcast. Content, medium, capacity, space, and renewability all touch process. Process is where a person usually first feels something is off, so it is the door people come in through. * The difference between moralized language and information. Calling yourself flaky or undisciplined is inherited vocabulary, and it is no one’s private invention. Looking at what was actually happening that week (your sleep, your breathing, the fires, the grief, the schedule, the trauma that was touched) is a different language for the same facts. * A small working adaptation I came to over years as a writer: stopping a session with a few lines still in me, and leaving a note about where the next sentence was going, so the next day’s entry point is a real door rather than a blank wall. Next episode We stay inside the process chapter and start opening up the six areas one at a time, with more theory and more of my own working life on the page. Subscribe now so you don’t miss out … Related Writing: This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit createmefree.substack.com/subscribe [https://createmefree.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2]

Podcast Episode 1: Introduction to Creative Health Cartography

Welcome to the very first episode of the Create Me Free podcast where I share my own experience working through, researching and thinking about my Creative Health Cartography framework. I’ll tell you about me and my work over time, I’ll try to answer questions from the Creative Health Cartography Workbook in real time, and I’ll share some of the art history and theory that have helped me develop my thinking. This episode is free but the podcast will be for paying subscribers. Support that work here: In this first episode Get to know me and how I ended up here with this framework. The short version: Crochet helped me [https://createmefree.substack.com/p/the-early-days-of-my-depression-story] through one of the worst depressions of my life, and then I got curious about why. And then curious about when it stopped helping. And then fascinated by what happens when creative practice harms rather than heals. I interviewed people who had developed hand injuries from compulsive crocheting, driven by anxiety or OCD. I became interested in the full picture: art and health, in all directions, including the uncomfortable ones. That curiosity became a master’s degree in psychology, well over 100 interviews with musicians, writers, performers, and visual artists, my book The Artist’s Mind [https://createmefree.substack.com/p/a-look-back-at-the-artists-mind-virtual?utm_source=publication-search], and the framework I call Creative Health Cartography [https://createmefree.substack.com/p/what-is-creative-health-cartography]. This first episode covers where all of that came from, what this podcast is going to do, and then actually opens the workbook. The workbook pages we work through The opening two sections of the workbook are called “What I Already Know” and “Your Creative Health Snapshot.” They function as a before-picture. Before the framework has a chance to complicate anything, you put down the story you’re already carrying: the shorthand version, the one that runs in the background when you’re trying to create. I answer the prompts on camera, and it ended up being more honest than I planned. That’s probably how it should go. The six areas of Creative Health navigation Your health and circumstances touch your creativity across six areas: process (how you make), medium (what you make with and the physical experience of making), content (what you make about and what you reveal), productivity (how often you create and what that means for you), identity (how you see yourself as a creative person), and sustainability or business (how all of this intersects with money and longevity). Most people arrive with a sense of which areas feel fine and which feel difficult. That going-in story is exactly what we’re capturing in these opening pages. If you want a head start on which of these areas might be most alive for you right now, the archetype quiz [http://tinyurl.com/createmefreequiz] gives you a first idea. The art history and theory I bring in art history and theory throughout this Creative Health Cartography series because that’s where I actually get my thinking, and because I believe knowing who came before you in this territory changes how you hold your own experience. Some of what I share in this episode: Louise Bourgeois kept three simultaneous diaries for 84 years: written, spoken into a tape recorder, and a drawing diary. She also underwent 30 years of psychoanalysis and produced over a thousand loose pages of writing about her dreams, her symptoms, and her creative process. She said the diaries kept her house in order. She studied her emotional states. She used what she learned. That investigation was the foundation of her work, never peripheral to it. Audre Lorde’s journals from her years living with cancer, published as A Burst of Light, tracked what was happening in her body as she tried to keep working as a poet, essayist, activist, and teacher while undergoing cancer treatment. She described that practice as political necessity rather than self-indulgence: knowing your real capacity, rather than the capacity you believe you should have, is a form of resistance. From disability justice, the concept of the bodymind: the argument that body and mind are one system, and treating them as separate has real costs for how we understand ourselves as creative people. Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha opens Care Work by naming that it was written from bed, on a heating pad, and places that in a lineage of sick and disabled artists who have developed expert knowledge about their own bodyminds that the culture routinely dismisses. The argument is that it is a form of genius. Knowing your body, your actual capacity: that is the practice. Also in this episode * Why I landed on cartography as a frame after years of searching for the right word, including a tangent into the history of mapping and how feminist theorists and artists have subverted it. The core of it is simple: a map shows you where you are. That is the beginning of any navigation. * My own going-in story, including how the double depression narrative [https://createmefree.substack.com/p/is-the-depression-spectrum-really] has evolved at 46, what I actually believe about my creative health right now, and why I’ve stopped needing a name for everything. * Some housekeeping: this is a free episode. Once a month there will be a free overview. The rest will be for paid subscribers. If you subscribe before May 17th, the annual rate is $60. It goes to $80 after that. Founding members get additional discounts and some other things I explain in the episode. Next episode: creative process We’ll begin working through the workbook section on how health and circumstance impact creative process. I’m curious what I’ll learn about myself as I do! I hope you’ll join me! Related Writing: This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit createmefree.substack.com/subscribe [https://createmefree.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2]

Excited!! Introducing Create Me Free: A Creative Health Podcast

I’m so excited to finally share this with you. I am launching a creative health podcast here on Substack that significantly supplements the writing I’ve been offering for years, and I’m so thrilled that the work has reached this point. For a while I’ve been offering everything on my Substack for free, no paywalls, with a totally optional paid annual subscription at $30 a year. A handful of you have been paying that, and I’ve been genuinely grateful for every single one. But I want to be honest: I never quite knew what to do with a paid tier. I tried different kinds of paywalled content and it never felt right. I tried sliding scale donations for a year and loved the spirit of them, and then Substack started auto-renewing people at the then-full rate of $100 and it got confusing and problematic and I let that go too. The truth is it took me several years on Substack to figure out what I actually wanted to build here. Now I know. Although it was really in development all along; I just couldn’t see it clearly from the messy middle. I’ve spent the last few years developing the Creative Health Cartography framework and the recently released workbook, and I’m genuinely excited about it in a way that’s different from how I’ve felt about other projects … at least different from how I’ve felt in a long time. The workbook maps the relationship between health and creative life across six domains. It’s practical and personal and built from more than two decades of research and conversation with artists. And I want to share the process of working through it in public, on camera, in a way that’s useful whether or not you ever buy the workbook itself. That’s what the podcast is. Create Me Free: The Podcast This is a weekly video podcast via Substack where I share my own personal experiences, as well as the research, about how health and circumstance impact creativity and the adaptations that we make to continue creating anyway. This coincides with the launch of my new Creative Health Cartography Workbook [https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GQLXLW16], so that’s where we’ll be starting. In the podcast, I work through sections of the workbook using my own creative life as the primary material. This isn’t a course or a tutorial or anything. It’s a demonstration of what’s going on in my own creative world, how this applies to a real person, what long-term mapping of the creative process actually looks like. Art history, theory, and research come in where they’re genuinely useful. That said, this sounds pretty professional … but I’m going to be showing up as I am. I plan to have notes but not scripts. I tend to ramble a little bit. Think of this as part podcast, part studio tour, part vlog, part informational/educational/instructional? Ish? You’ll see when you get a chance to take a look at a few episodes. Prices are changing, there will now be paid content, let’s get transparent … What stays free: The Sunday Dear Artist letters and Wednesday newsletters continue exactly as they have. You don’t need to pay anything to keep receiving them. You can always opt out of the podcast using your Substack settings so you don’t even see those emails if you hate them. The podcast also has a free layer. The first few episodes are free while the series gets started, and going forward one episode per month will always be free. Those are the overview episodes: the ones that lay out the full landscape of each section before we go deeper. The other weeks require a paid subscription. What’s paid: All the other podcast episodes. That content is behind a paywall, available by subscription. The subscription price is going to be $8 per month or $80 per year. This is an increase from the previous $30 annual price, and I want to be straightforward about why: the podcast adds a substantial amount of new content and time investment, and $80 reflects that honestly. I hope you’ll find it of value. What you get for paying: All paid subscribers: * All paid podcast episodes Annual paid subscribers: If you pay for the year, instead of by the month, you also get … * 10% discount on the PDF Workbook [https://tinyurl.com/CHCworkbook] * 10% discount on the print version of the book if you purchase the signed-and-shipped-by-me copy [https://buy.stripe.com/4gM6oH2db9aEbiB2aygw00G] instead of the Amazon version * 10% discount on your first Creative Health mapping [https://createmefree.substack.com/p/new-the-art-meets-health-creative] or navigation session [https://kathrynvercillo.substack.com/p/11-creativity-conversations-and-guidance], if used within 6 months * Discounts on future products and services as they become available * Promotion of your work. Paid members can opt in to send me one link per quarter for a roundup post celebrating your work which will also be promoted to social media. Founding members: * All paid podcast episodes * 25% discount on the PDF Workbook [https://tinyurl.com/CHCworkbook] * 25% discount on the print version of the book if you purchase the signed-and-shipped-by-me copy [https://buy.stripe.com/4gM6oH2db9aEbiB2aygw00G] instead of the Amazon version * 25% discount on your first mapping or navigation session, if used within 6 months * Discounts on future products and services as they become available * Promotion of your work. Founding members can opt in to be part of an initial post sharing your work, which will be permanently linked to from the about page, as well as to submit up to 3 links for the quarterly roundup and social media promotion. DISCOUNTS: Subscribe by May 17th for the best price and most perks Between today and May 17, you can get the first year at a cheaper rate! Anyone who subscribes to an annual plan before May 17 pays $60 for the first year instead of $80. Until May 17th, I’m turning on Flexible Founding Member Pricing for anyone interested in founding membership, which means you can select an amount less than suggested, but more than the annual plan. After May 17th, that turns off and the founding member rate is a flat $150. If you do nothing: Your Sunday letters and Wednesday newsletters keep coming. Nothing changes unless you want it to. If you decide you want the paid options later, you can always upgrade at the then-current rate. I’ve spent a long time figuring out the right shape for this. I think this is it. I’m glad you’re here for it. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit createmefree.substack.com/subscribe [https://createmefree.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2]