Create Me Free Podcast

Episode 7 is a bridge between the Creative Process arc and what comes next. Before moving into Creative Medium, Kathryn steps back from the workbook to simply tell her story: where she came from, what happened to her, how she arrived at this work. This is a free episode, available on Substack, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.

In this episode

Kathryn's background: born 1980 in Tucson, Arizona; moved to San Francisco in 2006; oldest of three siblings; Italian heritage on her father's side

Growing up Gen X, excelling early in school, dropping out senior year, the undiagnosed depression that followed

Becoming a foster parent at 23 — and what that reckoning taught her about herself

Moving to San Francisco via a semester of law school; finding freelance writing before the gig economy had that name

The crash at 28: a debilitating, life-threatening depression that led her to therapy, medication, and crochet

How crochet became the entry point into two decades of research on creativity and health

Three books: Crochet Saved My Life (2012), Hook to Heal (2015), and Mandalas for Marinke

Living with double depression; finding Wellbutrin; what she learned about her own brain

Graduate school: a psychology master's at CIIS and a year of visual and critical studies

How all of it led to the Creative Health Cartography framework and the six areas

How the five-session mapping process works

Neurodivergence, non-linear thinking, and why the mapping metaphor resonates personally

Collaboration with Badri Balian; workshops in development; new book project in early stages

Life now: partner, two Korean rescue dogs, Bernal Heights, San Francisco

Resources and links

Subscribe on Substack (all episodes + paid articles): createmefree.substack.com

Creative Health Cartography Workbook: available as PDF or print on Amazon

Starter Package (five-session mapping): createmefree.substack.com

Navigation sessions (standalone): createmefree.substack.com

Questions for Q&A: Kathryn.Vercillo at Gmail

Coming up

Episode 8 is the overview to Creative Medium: how health and circumstance impact the materials you work with and the scale at which you work. Also a free episode. The rest of the Medium chapter will be paid.

About the podcast

Create Me Free explores how health and circumstance impact creativity, and the adaptations artists and creatives make to create anyway — within the bodies, minds, and lives they actually have. Hosted by Kathryn Vercillo. Available on Substack, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts. Most episodes are paid; free episodes are noted.

I hope that you’ve been joining in and enjoying the Create Me Free podcast so far. In the recent episodes, I have been working through what creative process is and how health changes it. Here in Episode 6 I wanted to do two things before we leave this section:

First, lay out the theoretical scaffolding under everything I have been saying: spoon theory, the four types of capacity, and a longer thought about flow that has been on my mind for a while.

Second, work through a couple more of the workbook reflection questions on camera, the way I have been doing throughout this section, so the closing of the arc lands the same way the rest of it has. Then we are ready to move into creative medium.

This episode of the Creative Process chapter is for paying subscribers and I really hope that you’ll join and support this work:

In this episode

I cover three theoretical frames that underpin a lot of how I think about creative process.

I work through two reflection questions from the workbook live.

I close the section with the connecting questions that ask how creative process touches the other five domains.

The episode is also the first time on the podcast I have laid out, in one place, the case against flow as the standard for real creative engagement.

The workbook pages we work through

Two of the eleven Creative Reflections questions in the creative process chapter, answered live:

The first: what is the creative ritual you have abandoned that you missed the most, and why did you stop? I name a morning collage practice I had for a while, and the way the rhythm of the dogs and the apartment shifted me out of it.

The second: what would your creative process look like if you stopped trying to fix it? I work through the answer in real time and end up at the realization that the difference would land in the amount of fear and anxiety around the work rather than in the work itself.

I also touch on the What’s Already Working question, which surfaces my morning routine as a pattern that fits how I wake up to the day.

The chapter closes with the Where This Connects bridge questions, which ask how creative process intersects with medium, content, productivity, identity, and sustainability.

The theory underpinning creative process + health

Spoon theory.

Christine Miserandino published the original essay in 2003. She was at a diner with a friend who asked what living with lupus was like. She gathered the spoons from around the table and handed them over. Twelve spoons. Got dressed, that’s a spoon. Made breakfast, that’s a spoon. Going to work could be several. By lunchtime her friend was out of spoons, and you only get more spoons once you replenish. The chronic illness and disability community has used the language ever since. It applies to creative work because much of the creative advice that circulates assumes stable energy. Get up before the kids and write 300 words every morning is good advice for a body that has spoons. It fails for a body that started the day already short. When we shame ourselves for falling at frameworks that were built for different bodies, we end up further from the work.

Four types of capacity.

Adjacent to spoon theory and useful in its own right.

* Physical capacity is what the body can do and how long.

* Cognitive capacity is the clarity of thought, working memory, the ability to hold complexity.

* Emotional capacity is the ability to access feeling and engage with vulnerable material safely.

* Creative capacity is openness and receptiveness to making, the capacity to be surprised.

They fluctuate on different schedules. A bad day is rarely low across all four. A mixed day is more common, and if you can pull the threads apart, you can match the work to the capacity that is actually available. High emotional and creative capacity with low physical can still produce something. Low cognitive with high physical might mean today is a body-led work day. The point is that we tend to treat all four as one thing and miss the adaptations that are right there.

Flow theory and what comes after it.

Mihaly Csíkszentmihályi described flow in 1990 as a state of complete absorption in a challenging activity, with self-consciousness dissolved and the inner critic gone quiet. His own research, using the experience sampling method (pagers going off at random times asking people to log their state), found flow was rare. Most people most of the time were in some other state. The popularized version of flow that came after often skipped the part about how rare it is and how many preconditions it has, and what got handed to creatives instead was the message that real engagement is the zone, and if you are missing it, try harder.

In a 2003 paper Arne Dietrich proposed the transient hypofrontality hypothesis: flow involves reduced activity in the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain responsible for self-monitoring, error detection, working memory, and analytical thinking. The self-dissolution flow requires depends on that system going quiet. For a nervous system running in anxiety, hypervigilance, or trauma response, the prefrontal cortex stays active. It is staying active because it is trying to protect you. Holding flow up as the standard for real creative engagement asks people with fluctuating health to measure themselves against a state their bodies cannot reach, and then shames them when they cannot.

Two alternatives I find more useful:

Barbara Fredrickson’s broaden-and-build theory, which describes positive emotions like curiosity, interest, engagement, love, and contentment as states that broaden the available repertoire of thoughts and actions without requiring self-dissolution. You stay present. You stay whole. Creative access happens within consciousness rather than by suspending it.

And Ellen Dissanayake’s making special, which she argues is the core human impulse behind art-making. Taking something ordinary and marking it, elaborating it, making it matter. Cross-cultural, present in children before we teach it, present outside of professional art, and free of any requirement for transcendence or quiet inner critics or anything else.

The art history

Three artists who worked wakeful rather than in flow. Present for every choice. Fully awake to the work.

Agnes Martin

Born 1912 in Saskatchewan, navigated schizophrenia across her adult life and described her practice as waiting. She held off on starting a painting until she could see it complete in her mind, and the waiting sometimes lasted days or longer. She called the waiting itself the discipline.

Her 1973 essay The Untroubled Mind is about the active part of waiting: remaining open without forcing anything.

She left New York City in 1969, drove west, ended up in New Mexico, built a house, and waited about ten years before she resumed painting. The grid paintings she is best known for came out of that waiting. A creative life can be built around a fluctuating mind in many ways. Hers was waiting.

Toni Morrison

Morrison worked as a book editor at Random House for 18 years while raising two sons, mostly as a single mother. The time she had was the time before the kids woke up. She got up before dawn, made coffee, watched the light come in, and started. She skipped the muse entirely. She has described her process with great precision in interviews. There was a ritual, but the state inside the ritual was a working state rather than flow. It was: it is time to work now, and I am going to sit and work. Many of her famous earlier books were made in fragments in those mornings.

Audre Lorde

Diagnosed with breast cancer in 1978 and underwent a mastectomy. She declined the prosthesis and wrote in The Cancer Journals that prosthesis offers the empty comfort of nobody will know the difference, and that it was important to her that people know the difference.

She continued teaching, lecturing, writing, producing political poetry. In 1984 she was diagnosed with liver cancer, and A Burst of Light documents her looking at her creative process…

Welcome back to the podcast! We are in the thick of talking about how health impacts creative process.

In the previous episodes:

* I have told you what creative process is.

* I have worked through workbook pages on camera.

* I have shared pieces of how my own health shapes how I make.

What I had still been circling, until now, is the actual how. The mechanism. The way the body or the mind changes and the work changes with it.

So here in Episode 5 I sat down with thirteen artists and six mechanisms, and I tried to put words to the thing I have been thinking about for so many years: that for many of us, the condition is inside the process of making. It is part of the work, woven through it.

This episode of the Creative Process chapter is for paying subscribers and I really hope that you’ll join and support this work

In this episode

I name six mechanisms through which health alters creative process and walk through thirteen artists who exemplify them.

Some of the artists are well known. Some are less known. They span six continents and four centuries. The conditions range from progressive deafness to spinal injury to schizophrenia to terminal illness.

By the end of the episode I am working toward an argument I am still refining: that we have been told these artists made work in spite of their conditions, and what I see in the record is something else.

The workbook pages we work through

This episode steps away from the workbook for the most part.

Instead of working through a section live, I use the lists in the creative process chapter as the jumping-off point. The two lists I reference are the signs that health is impacting creative process (blank page as wall, ADHD-related disruption to organizational sequencing, mood swings altering capacity, medication side effects like brain fog and fatigue) and the adaptations people develop in response to those blocks (such as building multiple entry points into the same project so an interrupted process has more than one way back in).

At the end of the episode I point listeners toward the Mapping Your Process exercise in the workbook chapter that pairs with this material.

The art history

Six mechanisms, thirteen artists.

Sensory recalibration.

What happens when a primary sense used in the making of a work is altered or lost?

Evelyn Glennie, born 1965 in Aberdeenshire, was profoundly deaf by 12 and was told a deaf student could be denied admission to the Royal Academy of Music’s percussion program. She was admitted, graduated with the highest honors of her class, and built a method of hearing music through the body rather than through the ear. She performs barefoot. She feels bass frequencies in her legs and lower body, mid-range in her chest, and higher frequencies in her face, neck, and arms. The deafness produced the methodology.

Francisco Goya went profoundly deaf at 46 after a severe illness in 1792. He kept doing court commissions for years, but during the French invasion of Spain and the war that followed, what was accumulating in him eventually emerged as the Black Paintings, made in solitude on the walls of his house with no audience planned. The deafness-enforced isolation, layered with witnessing the war, created the conditions the late work came from.

Georgia O’Keeffe began losing her central vision to macular degeneration around 1971. She stopped painting, then moved to clay, then returned to painting at a much larger scale with someone else setting up the canvases and mixing colors. She said she could see enough to put a little paint on the edge of things, and that she enjoyed doing that very much. She was 98 when she died, still making.

Physical reinvention.

What happens when the part of the body that executes the work changes?

Frida Kahlo, after the 1925 trolley accident that fractured her spine, collarbone, ribs, and pelvis, painted from bed using a custom easel and a mirror her family installed for her. The horizontal position, the mirror, the limited reach of her arms became the conditions the work was made inside of. The self-portraiture is partly a story about subject availability, beyond psychology alone.

Django Reinhardt burned his left hand badly in a 1928 caravan fire and lost the use of his ring and little fingers, which fused into a curled position. He rebuilt his relationship to the guitar from the ground up using just two fingers for the melodic work, and he made deliberate use of his fused fingers for chord shapes an undamaged hand would have no reason to find. The technique cannot be fully replicated by an undamaged hand. The reinvention is the art.

Dorothea Lange had polio at age seven, which left her with a permanent limp. Late in her life she said it was the most important thing that happened to her, that it formed her, guided her, instructed her, helped her, and humiliated her all at once. The way she moved through migrant camps with a camera, slowly, less threateningly than a striding healthy man would have moved, shaped what she could photograph and how the people she photographed could be present to her.

The condition as direct source.

When the symptom itself is the starting material of the work? The input rather than the theme.

Yayoi Kusama, born 1929 in Japan, has lived with neurological hallucinations of dots and nets across surfaces since childhood. The infinity nets and the dots are her experience translated into paint, fabric, mirror room. She has described the making as a way to surround the hallucination with itself until the fear of it reduces. Since 1977 she has lived by her own choice in a psychiatric facility, walking each day to her studio and back.

Martín Ramírez, born in Mexico in 1895, immigrated to the U.S. in 1925, stopped speaking around 1930, and spent the rest of his life institutionalized at DeWitt State Hospital in Auburn, California, with what was then called dementia praecox. He drew on whatever was available: brown paper bags, kraft mail, toilet paper, breadcrumbs, saliva, sheets, shoe polish. The drawings are tunnels, arcades, mazes, landscapes receding into impossible depth. He had no language. The drawings were the communication.

Temporal restructuring.

How does illness reshape the rhythm of a creative life: the duration of a session, the time between sessions, the distribution of productive periods across a career?

Virginia Woolf tracked her cycles of severe depression and intense creative energy in her diary with remarkable precision. The Waves came out of an electric high period. Mrs. Dalloway came out of relative stability after a breakdown. To the Lighthouse was written in fits and starts across fluctuating health. In acute illness she stayed away from novel writing because she knew the capacity was missing. She wrote letters and reviews instead. The shape of each book is partly the shape of the mental state she was in.

Nina Simone had a career marked by performances that ran two hours long or stopped mid-song. Bipolar depression, undiagnosed until her 50s, shaped the pacing of her work, the long fallow periods abroad after she left the United States in 1974, the audible difference between a night when something was working and a night when it was off. The temporal shape of her life is in the recordings.

Urgency in the compressed timeline.

When a diagnosis collapses the future, the question of what to make next becomes the question of what to make at all.

Charlotte Salomon, hiding from the Nazis in the south of France in 1939 with a family history of suicide that had already taken her mother, uncle, and grandmother, painted Leben? oder Theater? across about two years: 1,325 small watercolor sheets layered with text and references to music. She gave the stack to her doctor, said keep this safe, it is my whole life, and was deported to Auschwitz in 1943 at age 26. There was no editing in her process. There was no waiting. It was getting it out.

Keith Haring was diagnosed with HIV/AIDS at 30. In the year between diagnosis and death he founded a foundation, completed major mural commissions, opened the Pop Shop to fund the foundation, kept a studio practice running, and made the Silence = Death collaboration with ACT UP. The figures stayed the same as before. The lines stayed the same. The urgency lives in the scale, in the prolific output, in the choice to keep being public.

Collaborative necessity.

What happens when health requires the creative process to include other people?

Judith Scott, born in 1943 in Columbus, Ohio with Down syndrome, was institutionalized at age seven. Her twin sister Joyce found her after 35 years and became her guardian. In 1987 Joyce enrolled her at Creative Growth Art Center in Oakland. Judith was non-speaking and deaf. For about a year she stayed at Creative Growth without making anything. Then the fiber artist Sylvia Seventy began offering classes there. Judith began wrapping objects in yarn and thread. She did this for 18 years, producing the person-sized wrapped sculptures she is now known for. The work needed Joyce, the sister who searched. It needed the studio. It needed the staff. It needed Sylvia and the fiber. It existed because the collaborative infrastructure existed. Many people in similar institutions never made work because that infrastructure was missing.

Also in this episode

* The argument I am working toward: the cultural narrative of overcoming puts the condition on one side and the work on the other. What the record actually shows is that the condition was inside the process of making for these thirteen artists. Glennie’s deafness produced the methodology. Kahlo’s bedrest produced the position and the subject. Reinhardt’s hand produced the technique that we now study. The work emerges from inside the conditions rather than around them.

* The thirteen artists are different in almost every other way. Six continents. Four centuries. Mediums from percussion to painting to photography to guitar to sculpture to writing to filmmaking. Conditions across deafness, vision loss, spinal injury, burned hands, polio, neurological hallucinations, schizophrenia, bipolar, Down syndrome, HIV/AIDS, and the urgency of war.

* This episode is the longer art-history-as-research episode of the creative process arc.

Next episode

Episode 6 closes the creative process arc. I bring in some theory I have yet to cover, including spoon theory, the four types of capacity, and an argument about why flow theory falls short for those of us with fluctuating health. Then we are ready to move into how health impacts creative medium.

Get the workbook: https://amzn.to/4ejLAaX

We are four episodes into the Create Me Free podcast.

If you have been with me since Episode 1, welcome back. If this is your first time landing here, a quick orientation: I am Kathryn Vercillo, and I work at the intersection of creativity and health. This podcast walks through my new Creative Health Cartography Workbook a little bit at a time. Creative Health Cartography is the framework I have built over many years of writing, researching, mapping, and working one to one with other creatives on how our bodies, minds, and circumstances shape the way we make.

So far ... Episode 1 opened the full framework. Episodes 2 through 6 live inside the first section, creative process. Episode 2 introduced process and named three common blocks. Episode 3 mapped a good day and a hard day for me creatively. Today, this episode moves into the first real exercise in the workbook: The Creative Threshold Scan.

I was a little nervous about demonstrating a somatic exercise as one of the first practices I walked through here. I live mostly in my head, for reasons both chronic and old, and teaching body-based exercises has never felt like my area of expertise. But the Threshold Scan is the one I wanted to show first, because it sits at the front of everything else I do. It is the pause before you begin your creative work, the pause almost none of us take, the pause that makes the rest of the work possible. It’s a terrific place to sit in as we think about creative process.

This episode of the Creative Process chapter is for paying subscribers and I really hope that you’ll join and support this work: https://createmefree.substack.com

The workbook pages we work through

Each chapter of the workbook has a Try This Week prompt (a small practice you can sit with for a time), a With a Witness prompt (sharing one thing you learned with a trusted person), and a set of deeper exercises. In the Creative Process chapter, those deeper exercises are Mapping Your Process, the Permission Slip, and the Threshold Scan.

Mapping Your Process asks you to draw your creative process on a large piece of paper. I suggest marking the false starts, the place you usually get stuck, the detours, and the parts most affected by your health. The Permission Slip asks you to make a physical object in any medium that gives you permission to have the process you actually have, rather than the one you think you should have or used to have. The Threshold Scan is the one I walk through live in this episode.

The Threshold Scan asks you to sit in the place you create, with your materials nearby, and wait to begin. Close your eyes. Scan from your feet to the top of your head. Notice what is happening in your body. Then ask your body what it needs in order to cross the creative threshold today. Maybe it needs two minutes of silence. Maybe it needs to move. Maybe it needs a smaller entry point: a single sentence rather than the whole essay. Maybe it is telling you to wait. The workbook suggests trying it three times over the course of a week. Patterns emerge.

I do the scan on camera, which felt a little strange to me for reasons I name in the episode. It landed on something useful. Before the scan, I thought I was calm. After it, I realized I was nervous, and that my chest had been holding the nerves the entire time. This is the kind of thing sitting inside of our bodies can reveal.

The art history and theory

Four researchers form the theoretical ground under the Threshold Scan, so I share a bit about that.

Antonio Damasio is a Portuguese-American neuroscientist whose somatic marker hypothesis argues that the body is continuously providing input to every decision the mind makes. Physical signs register emotional information as bodily states before we are conscious of them. His work with patients who had damage to emotion-processing regions of the brain showed that pure reasoning, stripped of the body’s emotional signal, leads to consistently poor decisions. His research stood against the long Western habit of treating reason as the higher faculty and emotion as the lower one, a split that has always been gendered and has always been wrong.

Daniel Siegel’s window of tolerance names a range of nervous system arousal where a person can access their full cognitive, emotional, and physical capacity. Outside the window in one direction is hyperarousal (anxiety, panic); in the other direction is hypoarousal (shutdown, dissociation, or, in my experience, depression). Creative work happens inside the window. The window shrinks when you are in grief, in illness, or in the aftermath of trauma, and it widens when you are well. Recognizing that you are outside your window is the first step to coming back inside it.

Polyvagal theory, which I talk about often, describes three states of the autonomic nervous system: ventral vagal (safety, social engagement, openness), sympathetic (fight or flight), and dorsal vagal (shutdown). Creative work lives in the ventral vagal state. If you are stuck in fight or flight or in shutdown, you have to come back before the work is available to you. There are people questioning aspects of the theory now; I share it here with that caveat, and with the acknowledgment that it has been useful to me as a working frame.

Ann Graybiel, a neuroscientist at MIT, researches the basal ganglia and has shown that habits and rituals function as chunking mechanisms. They compress a series of separate decisions and actions into a single automatic sequence, which reduces cognitive load. For people whose cognitive and emotional resources are already stretched by chronic illness, grief, or caregiving, a reliable creative ritual protects what is already thin. That is the reason the Threshold Scan can become its own ritual: it lowers what it takes to enter the work.

Also in this episode

* A safety note about somatic practices. If you have trauma that makes being in your body feel unsafe, the advice is to do these exercises only with the support you need. The exercises in this workbook are designed to stay at the surface, rather than take you anywhere deep without a guide. You go as far as feels safe to you, and you stop when you need to.

* A small aside about mapping and why I call this framework Creative Health Cartography. I have fallen in love with maps, with the subversive history of mapmaking, and with the question of how to draw where you actually are rather than where you are supposed to be. I offer mapping as a paid service (both an AI-generated version and a handmade one), and mapping your creative process on a large piece of paper is its own version inside the workbook.

* A body-based observation from the live scan. The first thing I felt was that my feet were cold. The last thing I noticed was that my chest had been tight the whole time, and I only knew I was nervous once I paused to ask.

Next episode

Episode 5 leans further into theory and art history. I have spent years studying artists whose work lived alongside chronic illness and mental health struggles, and I bring some of their lives onto the page alongside the framework. I hope you’ll join me:

Get the workbook: https://amzn.to/4mSZxyS

Related Writing: https://createmefree.substack.com/p/creative-flow-and-the-window-of-tolerance

I tried to record this episode yesterday and had to set it aside. I was tired in the way that means something other than tired, and being on camera was asking more of me than I could give. So I closed the laptop and wrote Substack book tour emails instead, which is still the work, just through a different door. This episode is about that door.

We are continuing to talk about Creative Process as I work through this first section of the Creative Health Cartography workbook.

This is the first paid episode of the Creative Process chapter and I really hope that you’ll join and support this work: https://createmefree.substack.com

In this episode, for the first time I work through the mapping pages of the workbook on camera, which means I am answering live two of the questions I most often ask my Creative Health navigation clients: what does your creative process look like on a good day, and what does it look like on a hard one. I didn’t prep for this and offer it in the moment vlog style today. Some of what comes out is messy. Some of it surprised me. That’s kind of what I love.

In this episode of Create Me Free …

I walk through the opening mapping pages of Chapter One of the Creative Health Cartography Workbook, which ask you to describe your creative process on a good day and on a difficult day. I answer both out loud as myself, breaking each one into different stages: starting, sustaining, finishing ... By the end I land on one small huge insight that has held true for me for years: A good creative day is one where I want to engage with the work and I do engage with it. A hard day is one where I am avoiding. Where the avoidance lives is the useful question.

The workbook pages we work through

The first page of Chapter One asks you to map your process on a good day. The prompt is careful about this: a good day, real, available, already part of your life, rather than an imagined ideal day where nobody needs anything from you and money is no concern. Then it asks you to map a difficult day. Difficult means a day that is hard in a way you recognize, rather than the worst day of your life. After those two pages come the process patterns prompts (current challenges, recurring thoughts and emotions, lessons learned) and a “what is already working” prompt, which asks you to name one small habit that serves you creatively.

The art history and theory

This episode is light on theory. Two threads come through.

The first is Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way and the morning pages practice, which I have used at different times over the years and which sits in my history as one of the first places I was invited to treat writing as the thing that oriented a day rather than the thing that had to earn its place inside the day.

The second is what could be called rubber band theory, which I first heard from a teacher who was applying it to a different area of psychology. The idea is that you can stretch yourself for a long time, longer than most people think possible, and then at some point the rubber band snaps. I use it here to talk about what happens when we try to keep our old creative process running past the point our health can support it. The snap is information. It usually shows up in process before it shows up anywhere else.

I also name Frida Kahlo briefly, as the best-known example of an artist who made work from bed, in the context of telling a story from the workbook about someone who tried that adaptation and whose body refused it.

Also in this episode

* My actual good-day process: coffee, the morning round of NYT word games, reading for about half an hour, a morning planning session, creative work before noon, and wrapping by three or four in the afternoon. Twelve-hour straight-through days drain rather than serve me, even when they produce a lot of output.

* My actual hard-day process: the TV I turn on before I should, the matching games on the phone, and the flavor of tired I have come to recognize as avoidance rather than as rest. The tired has a texture. Once you learn it, you can tell it apart from the tired your body actually needs.

* A composite story from the workbook about a mixed-media artist whose working process changed after a diagnosis and medication. She grieved the old way. She tried adaptations her body refused, including working from bed. She eventually changed her material and her approach so she could work in layers rather than in long, sustained sessions. The layering took the place of the long sustained pull.

* The small honesty at the center of this episode: even when I know productivity culture has shaped me, I still want to cross things off the list. Naming that, rather than pretending I have outgrown it, is part of the work.

Get the workbook: https://amzn.to/3OoVe1r

Next episode

We stay inside the process chapter and move into the first of the deeper process exercises, with more of the workbook open on camera.

Related Writing:

https://createmefree.substack.com/p/do-we-create-from-the-ill-or-the

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: 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 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, 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:

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 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, and the framework I call 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 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 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:

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, 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

* 10% discount on the print version of the book if you purchase the signed-and-shipped-by-me copy instead of the Amazon version

* 10% discount on your first Creative Health mapping or navigation session, 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

* 25% discount on the print version of the book if you purchase the signed-and-shipped-by-me copy 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.