Create Me Free Podcast

Kathryn opens the productivity domain of the Creative Health Cartography framework. She starts with the five weeks she went without recording: a trip to scatter her father’s ashes, a sore throat, a declined grant and a creeping depression. She then defines creative productivity as two dials, volume and rhythm, and traces where our guilt about unproductive days came from, through the factory clock, the bootstrap myth, the side hustle and the burnout society. The episode closes with community models of working together and a case for honoring the capacity your health and circumstances give you.

Timestamps

00:00 Welcome and why five weeks passed between episodes

01:50 The Ohio trip, getting sick, a grant that went elsewhere and a creeping depression

11:30 Support for the show (Substack subscription)

12:58 What creative productivity covers

14:54 Two dials: volume and rhythm

19:27 Three shapes of disruption: silence, surge and waves

25:05 The granny square blanket as a way to see time passing

27:28 Health and circumstance: the body and the life it lives within

31:35 A short history of the clock: E.P. Thompson, Franklin and Weber

40:31 The bootstrap, Taylor’s stopwatch and the belief that value lives in output

44:48 Productivity and the law: Buck v. Bell, Section 14(c) and Medi-Cal

48:13 Mierle Laderman Ukeles and maintenance art

51:53 Gig work, Etsy and the side hustle

55:31 Byung-Chul Han, the private ledger and shame

1:01:04 Working together: the Freedom Quilting Bee and Sins Invalid

1:04:13 Mia Mingus and access intimacy

1:07:06 Crip time

1:09:22 Honoring health and circumstance

1:14:30 Closing

People and works mentioned

E.P. Thompson, “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism” (1967)

Benjamin Franklin and the idea that time is money

Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905), and the iron cage

Alissa Quart, Bootstrapped: Liberating Ourselves from the American Dream

Horatio Alger

Frederick Winslow Taylor, The Principles of Scientific Management

Buck v. Bell (1927) and Section 14(c) of the Fair Labor Standards Act (1938)

Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Manifesto for Maintenance Art (1969), and her work with New York City sanitation workers

Byung-Chul Han, The Burnout Society

The Freedom Quilting Bee and Estelle Witherspoon

Sins Invalid and the disability justice principle of interdependence

Mia Mingus and access intimacy

Alison Kafer and Ellen Samuels on crip time

Links

Support the show: createmefree.substack.com

Contact: createmefree.com

Episode 16: The Different Ways Health Shows Up in What You Make

Create Me Free podcast, Season 1: exploring how health and circumstance shape creativity through the Creative Health Cartography framework.

The last episode focused on Kathryn's own content. This one zooms out. It's the final episode in the Land of Content section, a general survey of the plain, ordinary ways health tends to show up in creative work, before the show moves on to productivity.

What's covered

How health shows up uninvited: color palette shifts during depression, unfinished sentences, a character who never gets a mouth, and a poet who spent years writing about the ocean before realizing every poem was about her mother's dementia diagnosis

Illness as the actual subject versus illness as metaphor, using Audre Lorde's The Cancer Journals and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha's Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice

Why Kathryn resists the binary of "art heals us" versus the tortured artist myth

What a viewer brings to your work that you never put there, told through a composite story about a painter who showed hospitalization-era paintings at a small gathering and found almost no one recognized what the work was actually about

The pressure on marginalized creators, especially disabled, queer, neurodivergent creators and creators of color, to resolve painful content into something legible, inspirational, or marketable

Stella Young and the term "inspiration porn"

Eli Clare's Brilliant Imperfection and the refusal to land cleanly on either side of the cure debate

Content that outlives the health event that produced it, illustrated with a singer who adapts their range during illness and keeps the new style after recovering

The difference between illness supplying material and illness making your creative choices for you

A mapping exercise Kathryn uses with clients: identifying a piece of work that felt light, one that felt heavy, and one that couldn't be started or finished

A closing story about a landscape painter whose chronic illness meant his large-scale physical process no longer matched what his body needed, mistaken by him for creative staleness

Mentioned in this episode

Audre Lorde, The Cancer Journals

Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice (2018)

Stella Young, disability activist and comedian, coined "inspiration porn"

Eli Clare, Brilliant Imperfection: Grappling with Cure (2017)

Links

Substack: createmefree.substack.com

Instagram: @createmefree

Starter Package: https://buy.stripe.com/aFafZh6tr1IcgCV7uSgw00H

Workbook: https://amzn.to/4vQFK6S

Next up: the Land of Productivity, looking at capacity, adaptation, and what productivity even means for a creative person whose health doesn't move in a straight line.

Create Me Free podcast, Season 1: exploring how health and circumstance shape creativity through the Creative Health Cartography framework.

A programming note up top: this podcast started as a partially paid show and is now fully free, at least for a while. All previous episodes, including the ones that were behind the paywall, are now open to everyone. If you want to support the work directly, a Substack subscription at createmefree.substack.com is the best way.

This episode is a personal one. After two episodes on how health and circumstance shape creative content in general, Kathryn turns the lens on her own work: unfinished projects, content that isn't meant to resolve, and the real questions that come up when someone else's life ends up inside what you make.

What's covered

Why some content is made to be created, not published, using the unfinished book built from her late father's letters and journals as the example

The question of consent when you're working with someone else's actual words, with a nod to Melissa Febos's Body Work and Daphne Gottlieb's F*****g Daphne

Other unfinished projects: an early manuscript about kids in the foster care system, and a Lolita-inspired novel from her twenties

Ongoing content that isn't supposed to resolve: her granny square crochet blankets, and Betsy Greer's origin story for the word "craftivism"

Content with a defined job that ends when the job is done: the crochet series Suspended Tendrils

A double exposure photography series of Georgia O'Keeffe made at nineteen, and how it resurfaced twenty years later while writing The Artist's Mind, unpacked through psychologist Dan McAdams's work on narrative identity

A personal story about meeting Judy Chicago at a de Young Museum press event, and what her career says about caring what critics think versus needing support to keep making work

How that connects to Kathryn's own decision to make this podcast free

A closing, identity-protected example from an actual Starter Package mapping session, on deciding which parts of a story are yours alone to tell

An extended closing reflection on the pressure to resolve hard content into a redemption arc, using the shift in LGBTQ+ "coming out story" culture as an example, and a note that you're allowed to leave your own content open, obscured, or covered up

Mentioned in this episode

Melissa Febos, Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative (2022)

Daphne Gottlieb, F*****g Daphne

Betsy Greer, Craftivism: The Art of Craft and Activism; Stitch Links (craft-as-healing research)

Judy Chicago, The Dinner Party (Brooklyn Museum, Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art)

Dan McAdams, narrative identity theory and "redemption sequences"

Kathryn's own books: Crochet Saved My Life, The Artist's Mind

Links

Substack: createmefree.substack.com

Starter Package: https://buy.stripe.com/aFafZh6tr1IcgCV7uSgw00H

Workbook: https://amzn.to/4vQFK6S

This episode walks through the different ways health and circumstance show up inside creative content, from work that arrives uninvited to work where the body becomes both subject and witness at once. Along the way: Anna Halprin's circles, Käthe Kollwitz's eighteen years spent making grief, Henry Darger's hidden fifteen-thousand-page novel, and a look at why some illness content gets celebrated while other, truer versions get quietly passed over. It's a full pass through the mechanisms behind this domain and what they mean for anyone making work from inside a body that keeps insisting on being heard.

I really hope that you’ll join and support this work:

The Body Insists

Anna Halprin drew circles. Huge, sweeping ones, the kind you make with your whole arm and your whole attention, in the middle of movement sessions that had nothing to do with illustration. This was 1972, after a colon cancer diagnosis sent her looking for a different way to work. She’d dance, then draw what had moved through her, then dance the drawing itself, back and forth, image into body into image. None of it was a painting of cancer. None of it explained itself. But the circles started when the cancer did, and she came to understand the whole practice as her body finding its own form of address, its own way of insisting on being heard when the usual channels weren’t enough.

That’s the plainest version of something I’ve come to think of as five different ways health rewrites what a person makes, not just what they choose to say, but the actual structure of the content itself.

The Body That Won’t Stay Out of the Frame

Call the first one the involuntary autobiography. It isn’t a choice. Carolee Schneemann, whose whole career had already been built around the body as instrument and subject, took a bad fall in 2017 on top of an existing cancer history. Her late installations and writing turned toward fragility, toward the closeness of death, toward what it means to keep desiring and sensing inside a body that has started to fail you in specific ways. The commitment to the body as a site of knowledge never left. It just kept reporting different news.

Halprin and Schneemann didn’t decide to make illness the subject. The body decided, and the work followed. It’s something you may find yourself sitting with if you’ve ever noticed your own work drifting toward something you didn’t mean to make about, again.

The Gift You’d Never Ask For

Then there’s what happens when you’ve lived inside something long enough that it stops being research and becomes knowledge nobody outside the experience can fully reach. This is uncomfortable to name, because naming it can feel like being asked to be grateful for something you’d give back in a second if you could. But it’s real. The maker who has spent fifteen years inside a chronic condition, or years inside grief, or a lifetime inside a body the world wasn’t built for, has access that no amount of interviewing or imagining can substitute for. The work made from that access has a density to it, a refusal of falseness, that work made from the outside tends to reach for and miss.

It shows up differently depending on how close the maker’s own experience runs to the subject. Sometimes the access is direct, lived from the inside out. Sometimes it’s closer to what Diane Arbus had with the people she photographed, giants, conjoined twins, people whose bodies drew a second look. She wasn’t living their exact experience. What she had instead was proximity, real relationship, the kind of closeness that earns a different quality of image than a stranger with a camera could get. That’s its own version of the gift, and its own responsibility: the material is real, and it still isn’t entirely yours.

Going Inward When the World Gets Smaller

Sometimes health doesn’t hand you a subject. It just shrinks the room you’re working in, and the work follows the room. Joseph Cornell rarely left his house in Queens. He cared for his mother, then his disabled brother, and built a life that mostly happened inside four walls with things delivered to his door. What came out of that was decades of small glass-fronted boxes filled with European ballerinas, hotel labels, star charts, birds, an entire vocabulary of places he’d never been and never would go. The boxes are interior geography. They’re what imagination does when the outer world has gotten small and the inner one has to expand to compensate.

If your own content has gotten stranger or more inward during a period when your circumstances shrank your world, physically, financially, however, this is the mechanism at work. What you take in changes what you make. Less room outside tends to mean more room inside.

The Subject With No Place to Land

Some content doesn’t have anywhere to go because the culture around the maker never built a container for it. Henry Darger spent decades as a hospital janitor in Chicago, and after his death in 1973, his landlord found a fifteen-thousand-page illustrated novel in his room, along with hundreds of paintings, all telling one long story of child heroines enslaved and fighting for their freedom. Darger had survived early trauma and years in an institution that was, by most accounts, brutal. He never showed the work to anyone. He made it because there was nowhere else for what he was carrying to go, and making it was the only available room.

Most of us aren’t making anything on Darger’s scale or in his isolation. But the mechanism shows up in smaller ways too, whenever you notice you’re circling a subject you can’t quite bring yourself to name directly, because there isn’t yet a place in the world, or in your own life, willing to receive it plainly.

When the Body Is Both the Subject and the One Reporting

The last mechanism collapses a distance most work keeps intact. Hannah Wilke built a career around the body as subject, and when she was diagnosed with lymphoma in 1987, she kept working. Her Intravenous series, made in the early 1990s, documents her body through treatment without concealment, bald from chemotherapy, photographed as it was. She died in 1993, and the photographs were shown after. What’s different here is that the person making the work and the person the work is about are the same body, in the same moment, with no retrospective distance between the living and the reporting. It isn’t back then I was sick. It’s this is happening right now, and I am both in it and showing it to you.

What Culture Does With Any of This

None of these five mechanisms guarantee an audience wants what comes out of them. Johanna Hedva named this directly in an essay called Sick Woman Theory, written in 2015 from the floor of a bedroom during a flare that kept them from a protest they wanted to be at. The essay asks what political participation looks like for a body that can’t get up, and grows from there into a study of whose suffering gets witnessed and whose doesn’t. Some illness content reads as moving and gets celebrated. Other content, sometimes truer, sometimes harder won, gets called too much and quietly passed over. That sorting has nothing to do with whether the work is honest; it has to do with what an audience has been trained to receive.

Arthur Frank named something adjacent in The Wounded Storyteller: the culture rewards the restitution story, the one where you got sick and then got better, because it resolves cleanly. Chaos doesn’t resolve. Quest turns the experience into something offered to others. None of the three is better than the others, but only one of them tends to get applauded on sight.

Naming What’s Already There

Every one of these mechanisms is doing something whether you’ve noticed it or not: shaping what shows up in your work, why it shows up that way, and what happens to it once it leaves your hands. Naming the mechanism doesn’t change what you’re making. It changes your relationship to it, which sometimes matters more.

That kin…

I’ve decided to try audio-only for the Create Me Free podcast. We’ll see how that feels for a little bit. We are entering the new territory of how health impacts our creative content. I hope you find something inspiring in the words.

What Your Work Keeps Circling Back To

You paint a hospital room. You write a poem about someone who has passed away. You put a piano into a collage and cannot say why. On the surface, that’s subject matter: the thing your work is about. Underneath it sits something else, a set of questions the work keeps opening whether you meant it to or not.

I’ve come to think of that underneath layer as the real content of the work, and the surface layer as just the entry point. A painting of a hospital room might be about a hospital room. It might also be about waiting, or about what it feels like to be observed by people whose job is to observe you. Both are true at once. The second one is usually the reason the piece got made at all.

The Symptom That Becomes the Subject

Say your skin has given you trouble for years, the kind of thing that felt enormous at fourteen and still shows up in how you see yourself now. You are not likely to paint a self-portrait titled Acne. What shows up instead is a preoccupation with visibility. Faces, close up. The gap between how you feel on the inside and how you’re read from the outside. Shame, self-examination, the act of looking closely at something you’d rather look away from.

None of that requires you to name the skin condition anywhere in the piece. The symptom supplies the terrain and the content is what grows in it.

Detachment works the same way, from a different direction. Emotional distance can come from trauma, from a health condition, from the particular stage of an illness you’re in. It doesn’t usually show up as a piece about detachment. It shows up as a character who watches a room instead of joining it. A dance where one figure never quite crosses into the group that’s moving together. Cooler colors, cooler materials. You may be writing directly about what it feels like not to feel, or you may be writing an observer who wants in and can’t manage it, and only later recognize the two as the same story.

Why This Isn’t Always Visible From Inside

Both of these examples share something worth naming: the maker often can’t see the connection while they’re making the thing. The link between symptom and subject tends to become legible in retrospect, when you lay a body of work out and look at what you kept returning to across a stretch of time you weren’t paying close attention to while you lived through it.

That retrospective view is exactly what a written creative health map is built to do. It’s a different exercise than journaling or reflecting alone, because it holds the whole terrain in one place at once, rather than one piece or one week at a time. This is the kind of pattern that’s hard to see from inside your own practice and much easier to see from outside it, which is a lot of what mapping sessions are built to do: sit with someone across their body of work and name what keeps showing up, what it seems to be reaching toward, and what it might mean that it’s still there.

Content Isn’t Only What You Say Directly

There’s a version of this domain that assumes health-related content has to be autobiographical and explicit: the memoir, the illness narrative, the piece that names the diagnosis. Plenty of meaningful work does exactly that. But abstract work carries content too, even when nothing in it points at a subject in any literal way. If you’re writing fiction, dancing something out, building a piece with no representational image in it at all, there’s still a territory the work is circling. It’s just less obvious, which sometimes means it’s more honest, because you weren’t managing how it would read while you made it.

Where Other People Enter the Work

Content is also the place where other people show up in a way that doesn’t happen much in how you make or what materials you use. If the subject matter of your work is your own experience, and other people were present in that experience, questions of ethics and consent tend to follow close behind. Do you change names and identifying details. Do you ask before you put someone into a piece, or after, or not at all. There isn’t one right answer, and the question itself is part of what makes this domain different from the others: it’s the one most likely to involve someone besides you.

Learn more from the podcast episode.

Related:

Get the workbook:

Hand a carpenter a hammer and something shifts in where she feels herself end. Researchers who study how the brain maps the body have shown that a well-used tool gets folded into that map. The reach of the hammer becomes the reach of the arm. A cane user feels the world at the tip of the cane, out on the pavement, rather than in the palm. A cellist feels the string through the bow. Over years of practice, your instruments stop being objects you pick up and become parts of the body you think with.

In my twenty years working where creativity meets health, that quiet fact is what makes a medium change land so hard. When arthritis, or fatigue, or a neurological shift takes a medium away, you lose more than a skill. You lose a piece of your extended body. That is why it grieves like a loss rather than reading like a scheduling problem, and why “just switch materials” lands as a small insult when a maker is in the thick of it.

Here is the more useful news, and the reason a medium change is rarely the end of the story. The same map that folded the old tool in can fold a new one in. The body’s map of itself is built to be revised. A maker who moves from oil to collage, from the loom to the needle, from the stage to the page, is asking the body to redraw its edges again, and the body, given time and repetition, does exactly that. The knowledge you spent years building has somewhere to go.

I really hope that you’ll join and support this work:

Most of the pain around a medium change comes from treating it as a single yes-or-no: push through, or give up. There is far more terrain between those two than it looks from inside the panic. Before you decide anything, it helps to name what is actually creating the friction, because each source asks for a different move.

* If the friction is the tool, the answer may be an adaptation: a fatter grip, a lighter frame, a mounted version instead of a handheld one.

* If the friction is scale, the concept can often survive at a smaller size. A globe-sized sculpture and a palm-sized one can carry the same idea.

* If the friction is stamina, the medium may be fine and the pace is the problem, which is a question of rhythm rather than materials.

* If the friction is the environment, the fumes or the light or the hours on your feet, then the studio is the thing to change.

* If the friction is meaning, if the medium has come to stand for a self you can no longer be, then the work is grief, and grief keeps its own timeline.

Sorting which one you are facing turns a vague sense of loss into a set of clear, workable questions. It also saves you from switching mediums when the real trouble was a chair, or forcing a chair fix when the real trouble was grief.

What I want you to carry from this is that your creative capacity lives in you rather than in any single tool. The tool was always a place the capacity passed through. Chart your own medium history and you will watch that capacity move across instrument after instrument, carried by the same hands and the same eye, redrawing its edges each time the body asked. Navigating the next change gets easier once you have seen yourself survive the earlier ones.

This podcast episode spends the full hour on the deeper story, the neurology of the thinking hand and the artists who lived this. My Creative Health Cartography Workbook turns it into exercises you can move through at your own pace.

In this episode:

* Frank Wilson’s The Hand: the hand as a cognitive organ, how the hand and brain evolved together, and why the intelligence in your hands relocates rather than disappears when your body changes

* Where Wilson’s argument came from: his clinical work with performing artists, and with textile designers in San Francisco whose hands were failing, which ties the book to fiber and craft directly

* Susan Wendell’s The Rejected Body: the cultural ideal of the invisible body, and why a forced medium change reads as the body paying attention rather than the body failing

* A recap of the Medium section: affordances (James Gibson), fitting and misfitting (Rosemarie Garland-Thomson), sensory integration (Jean Ayres), and the artists we spent time with, including Henri Matisse, Sargy Mann, and Louise Bourgeois

* The workbook’s Medium exercises and reflections: the accessibility audit, the letter to a lost medium, an experiment in making one idea at three levels of physical demand, and a set of creative reflection prompts

* How the Medium area connects to the other five areas of the framework: process, content, productivity, identity, and business or sustainability

If you want to map your own medium terrain, the Creative Health Cartography framework is built for this kind of pattern-recognition.

Get the workbook:

Related:

PODCASTS:

ARTICLES:

In this episode: a continuation of the theory-focused series on creative medium. Covers misfitting and fitting more deeply, Frank Wilson's framework of the hand as a cognitive organ, Jean Ayres's sensory integration theory, the Expressive Therapies Continuum, Chuck Close's post-1988 work, William Utermolen's self-portrait series continued from Episode 10, and the Accessibility Audit from the workbook.

Artists discussed:

Chuck Close :  photorealistic to post-collapse grid work, macular degeneration and late formal changes

William Utermolen :  self-portrait series continued; read through the lens of the Expressive Therapies Continuum

Scholars and frameworks discussed:

Frank Wilson :  The Hand: How Its Use Shapes the Brain, Language, and Human Culture (1998)

Jean Ayres :  sensory integration theory; Sensory Integration and the Child (1979)

Expressive Therapies Continuum :  framework organizing creative media from kinesthetic through cognitive processing levels

Rosemary Garland Thompson :  misfitting (continued from Ep 10)

Antonio Damasio :  somatic marker hypothesis (referenced briefly in relation to Wilson)

Research referenced:

Lancet Neurology (2001) :  paper on Utermolen's self-portraits as neurological documentation

Workbook exercise: Accessibility Audit (Choice of Media section)

Concepts covered:

The hand as a cognitive organ; embodied knowledge that outlasts physical capacity changes

Sensory properties of materials: wet vs. dry, repetitive vs. unpredictable, resistive, open-ended

Expressive Therapies Continuum: kinesthetic, sensory, perceptual, affective, cognitive levels

Mismatch between nervous system state and medium as a source of creative difficulty

Misfitting and fitting as active processes of adaptation and redesign

Coming next: One more episode on creative medium before moving to the next section: how health impacts creative content.

Connect: createmefree.substack.com | createmefree.com

In this episode: a theory-focused episode examining seven mechanisms through which health changes a maker's relationship with their creative medium. Includes discussion of disability studies scholar Rosemary Garland Thompson's concept of misfitting, and examples from seven artists.

Artists discussed:

Henri Matisse :  late cutouts following illness-related change in physical capacity

Francisco Goya :  late Black Paintings following progressive hearing loss

Paul Klee :  late work following scleroderma diagnosis

David Hockney :  iPad work alongside and in relation to large canvas painting

William Utermolen :  self-portrait series documenting Alzheimer's progression (introduced; continued in Ep 11)

Two additional artists discussed in relation to nervous system regulation and material accessibility

Scholar discussed:

Rosemary Garland Thompson :  "Misfits: A Feminist Materialist Disability Concept," Hypatia (2011)

Concepts covered:

Misfitting and fitting as modes of the body-world relationship

Seven mechanisms: tactile restructuring, sensory substitution, scale compression, duration change, nervous system regulation, material accessibility shift, cognitive restructuring of the visual image

The new body-material configuration produces formal properties the original could not

Workbook: Creative Health Cartography Workbook, Choice of Media section

Connect: createmefree.substack.com | createmefree.com

In this episode: I walk through my own medium biography in real time using six prompts from the Creative Health Cartography Workbook. Topics include how and why my creative mediums have shifted throughout my life, the relationship between those shifts and my recurring depression, why I gravitate toward mediums that involve self-expression connecting to other people, and the concept of the comfort medium.

Mentioned:

The Creative Health Cartography Workbook :  available on Amazon (print) or as PDF at createmefree.com

Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way and Vein of Gold :  medium biography-style exercises

Crochet Saved My Life by Kathryn Vercillo

Concepts covered:

Medium biography: a chronological account of creative mediums laid against a health timeline

The comfort medium: the medium with the lowest threshold that remains accessible across different health states

How health change and medium change often run parallel, sometimes invisibly

Workbook pages: Choice of Media section, Medium Biography prompts, Comfort Medium exercise

Connect: createmefree.substack.com | createmefree.com

Episode 8: How Health Shapes the Medium You Work In

In the Creative Health Cartography framework, medium means more than materials. It includes the full physical, sensory, cognitive, emotional, and financial relationship with how you make — and health shapes every dimension of that relationship.

This overview episode covers:

The five dimensions of medium: physical, sensory, cognitive, emotional, and financial/logistical

James Gibson's concept of affordances, and why it matters for creative practice and health

Signs of a block in the medium area

The comfort medium: why the body reaches for certain forms during difficult periods, and why that's worth paying attention to

Adaptations: developing fluency across mediums, creating systems for alternating based on daily capacity, and building deep material knowledge through renegotiation

Three exercises in the workbook: sensory recall, accessibility audit, and grief letter for medium loss

What's coming in Episodes 9-12 (paid): personal story, art history mechanisms, theory, and exercises

Resources mentioned:

Creative Health Cartography Workbook: available on Amazon

Creative Health Cartography services: createmefree.com

Full podcast archive: createmefree.substack.com

Questions or stories about your own medium and health? Leave a comment or email [email protected].