Common Shapes

Making this podcast brought me into a business ecosystem crisis. Very little of my output changed, but my inner understanding of my work needed to shift.

So in today’s episode, I’m sharing how my job description has changed since I launched this show. And I’m exploring how shifting your job description can transform your relationship to your work.

Tune in to learn about—

• How to discover what you’re devoted to
• What are the themes of your job
• What is not your job
• How to write your job description
• Aligning your job with your values & interests
• What’s next for Common Shapes podcast

Links

• Get my mini-workshop Your Everchanging Job
• Book a Creative Advising Sessions
• Get the Creative Ideation Portal
• Sign up for my weekly newsletter
• Find all these links & more at codycookparrott.com/commonshapes

🔶 Interested in finding out more about placing an ad? I'm not placing ads in Common Shapes at this time, but you can purchase a classified ad in my newsletter right here.

If you'd like to support the show, please send it to a friend, leave a 5-star rating & review, and download the Creative Ideation Portal.

Your offer ecosystem is how your creative offerings branch out of your artistry, fit together in the world, increase your income, and expand your reach.

In this episode, I share how I’ve crafted my offer ecosystem over the past decade, and I tell you the stories of how a few of my offers have evolved and even ended.

Tune in to learn about—

• What an offer ecosystem is
• My favorite ways to get ideas for your offer ecosystem
• How to choose a container for an offer
• Why one-on-one work can be a great place to start
• Charging for your offerings

Links

• Learn more about Teaching As A Practice
• Get the Creative Ideation Portal
• Sign up for my weekly newsletter
• Find all these links & more at codycookparrott.com/commonshapes

If you'd like to support the show, please send it to a friend, leave a 5-star rating & review, and download the Creative Ideation Portal.

Teaching online classes is how I’ve made the majority of my income since 2017. And it is a great joy of my career to have had such amazing, invested, weird, inspirational students.

In this episode, I’m going to share my approach to creating an online class by walking us through how I teach my class A Quilt Is Something Human.

I hope that this inspires you to become the teacher that you are meant to be. 

Grab a pen & paper, then tune in to learn about—

• How to decide what to teach
• Reasons to teach online
• Pricing your online class
• 5 reasons the world needs your online class
• Some of my favorite tech for selling online classes

Links

• Learn more about Teaching As A Practice
• Get the Creative Ideation Portal
• Sign up for my weekly newsletter
• Learn about Melissa Word’s class Grief Threads
• Find all these links & more at codycookparrott.com/commonshapes

If you'd like to support the show, please send it to a friend, leave a 5-star rating & review, and download the Creative Ideation Portal.

This week on Common Shapes podcast, I’m joined by my internet friend Sky Fusco to discuss dedicating your life to art.

Sky is an artist, writer, deep thinker, question asker and truth teller. Her practice consists of writing her Substack newsletter and making drawings.

Together we talk about our daily list practice, creating a gallery show, the challenges of pricing your work, and what it means to be a full-time artist.

Tune in to learn about—

• The List aka Project Miracle
• Making art & having art shows
• Pricing your work
• Newsletters & Substack
• How to get started as a self-employed artist

Links

• Make Miracles in Forty Days by Melody Beattie
• Visit Sky's poster shop, Lord Cowboy
• Subscribe to Sky's Substack newsletter, Unsupervised
• Follow Sky on Instagram
• Get the Creative Ideation Portal
• Sign up for my weekly newsletter
• Find all these links & more at codycookparrott.com/commonshapes

If you'd like to support the show, please send it to a friend, leave a 5-star rating & review, and download the Creative Ideation Portal.

I think the great fear of most creative people is that we’ll run out of ideas and not know what to do next.

I come up against this time and time again in my own work, so I’ve developed a series of practices for releasing fear, removing blocks, returning to center, and discovering what’s next.

Tune in to this episode to learn my six favorite tools for when I don’t know what to do, including—

• Morning pages & artist dates
• Movement
• Phoning a friend
• Setting up an easy practice
• List-making
• Recovery & spiritual practice

After you listen, go get my free Creative Ideation Portal, and join me in dreaming up what’s next for you and your work.

Links

• Get the Creative Ideation Portal
• Sign up for my weekly newsletter
• Get Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way
• Find all these links & more at codycookparrott.com/commonshapes

If you'd like to support the show, please send it to a friend, leave a 5-star rating & review, and download the Creative Ideation Portal.

This week on Common Shapes podcast, I’m sharing the mic with my friend Tamara Santibañez for a conversation about oral histories, tattooing, freelancing, and art as activism.

Tamara is an interdisciplinary artist and oral historian living and working in Brooklyn. Their work is rooted in storytelling and the visual language of identity construction, exploring subcultural semiotics and the meanings we make from bodily adornment.

Tune in to hear us discuss—

• Tamara’s studio practice
• Oral histories & oral traditions
• Tattooing as liberation work
• How to balance many projects as a freelancer
• Making time for movement work
• Coalitions & political responsibility
• The different feelings/functions/forms of Instagram vs Substack

Links—

• Visit Tamara’s website
• Follow Tamara on Instagram
• Subscribe to Tamara’s Substack
• Get Tamara’s book, Could This Be Magic? Tattooing as Liberation Work
• Get the Creative Ideation Portal
• Sign up for my weekly newsletter
• Find all these links & more at codycookparrott.com/commonshapes

If you'd like to support the show, please send it to a friend, leave a 5-star rating & review, and download the Creative Ideation Portal.

This week on Common Shapes, I share four practices for checking in with your creative pace — internal seasons, intuitive sharing, weather systems, and the earning pathway.

This episode feels like an updated version of How to Not Always Be Working, and I hope it serves your practice, your pace, and your deepest alignment.

Listen in to learn—

• Why lists are how I orient myself in my life
• How to identify & live by your internal seasons
• What it means to share intuitively
• How to cultivate your earning pathway
• Why it’s so important to find your own pace

After you listen, go get my free Creative Ideation Portal, and join me in making our art and pacing ourselves.

Links

• Get the Creative Ideation Portal
• Sign up for my weekly newsletter
• Take my class, Organizing A Day
• Find all these links & more at codycookparrott.com/commonshapes

If you'd like to support the show, please send it to a friend, leave a 5-star rating & review, and download the Creative Ideation Portal.

This week I’m welcoming Common Shapes’ very first guest, Lukaza Branfman-Verissimo.

Lukaza (they/them/Lukaza) an artist, abolitionist, educator, storyteller, cultural worker and person of multitudes. Through a practice based in the printed multiple, community-based work and installation building, they invite the viewer to recall and share their own lived narratives, offering power and weight to the creation of a larger dialogue around the telling of B.I.Q.T.P.O.C. (Black, Indigenous, queer, trans, people of color) stories.

Listen in to hear us discuss—

• The web shape for creative work
• How to craft a studio practice
• Claiming our work as our main income stream
• How to weave your values and your activism into your sharing practices
• The radical history of newsletters

Links

• Get the Creative Ideation Portal
• Sign up for my weekly newsletter
• Find all these links & more at codycookparrott.com/commonshapes

More from Lukaza

• Visit Lukaza’s website
• Follow Lukaza on Instagram
• Subscribe to ROOTS WEBS NETS BRANCHES BULLETIN BOARDS

If you'd like to support the show, please send it to a friend, leave a 5-star rating & review, and download the Creative Ideation Portal.

This week’s episode of Common Shapes is about the fact (yes, it’s a fact) that your art is of service, no matter what you create.

I also share my four containers for connecting with the why behind your work. And I offer many, many ideas for how to market your art in creative, fun, meaningful ways.

Listen in to learn—

• Why all art is of service
• How to figure out who your art is for
• My favorite creative marketing practices
• Practices for visioning our work in the world
• A spell for hitting send

After you listen, go get my free Creative Ideation Portal, and join me in sharing your work with the world!

Links

• Get the Creative Ideation Portal
• Sign up for my weekly newsletter
• Take my Newsletter class
• Sam Slupski’s I LOVE TO FAIL
• Find all these links & more at codycookparrott.com/commonshapes

If you'd like to support the show, please send it to a friend, leave a 5-star rating & review, and download the Creative Ideation Portal.

Today’s episode of Common Shapes is about why I love newsletters and why you (yes, you) should have one.

Together we’ll explore the marketing side and the creative side of newsletters. I’ll also share—

• My journey starting my newsletter
• How to choose your email service provider
• The newsletter tech I recommend
• What to put in your newsletter
• Examples from my favorite newsletters
• How to decide if your newsletter should be paid or free

After you listen, go get my free Creative Ideation Portal, and get ready to hit send on your first (or next) newsletter today.

Links

• Get the Creative Ideation Portal
• Sign up for my weekly newsletter
• Take my Newsletter class
• Click here to get 50% off your first year of Flodesk
• Newsletters I mentioned in this episode: Fariha Roisin’s Substack How to Cure a Ghost, Liz Migliorelli’s Sister Spinster newsletter, Kevin Morby’s Substack
• Off the Grid episode, “To Substack or Not to Substack”
• Find all these links & more at codycookparrott.com/commonshapes

If you'd like to support the show, please send it to a friend, leave a 5-star rating & review, and download the Creative Ideation Portal.