Katy Sewall and Tiffany Parks, the two creative goddesses that host the Bittersweet Life Podcast join us for this vulnerability in the creative process episode. They are childhood friends who met again in Rome, Italy about 5 years ago and started this project together. In the Bittersweet Life Podcast they capture the nuances of Rome, expat life and the connections that make personal passion projects like this rewarding and difficult simultaneously.

Six year podcasting veteran Jessica Kupferman joins us for a creative vulnerability episode. Jessica and Elsie Escobar run She Podcasts, a women’s podcasting Facebook group that also has a podcast and starting this year, a conference. In her podcasts and her savvy marketing posts she is 100% exposed, vocally and soul-ly (if that isn’t a word, it should be). Her authenticity and honesty is grounding, especially because it is not easy to retain when you know people are listening.

In August we are spelunking through our creative input and output in a two part episode. In this second part of this pairing, we are following work our way through the creative cave to find accountability, companions and solace in the realization that just taking one step after another will get us somewhere.

In August we are spelunking through our creative input and output in a two part episode.

This episode is where we are stumbling around in a dark creative cave, trying to figure out how to turn our creative flashlights (creative flow), what spotlight is best (quality), and which tunnel to follow (audience feedback). Was that analogy a step too far (pun intended)? Maybe. But it feels like a lot of this creative talking out of things is such a new skill

Many people say that working on your creative project every day is the only way to achieve success but is it realistic for us to write every day, create podcasting content every day, etc? In this episode we grapple with this consistency conundrum in our creative process.

Is consistency the thing that makes or breaks creative success?

Swedish cheese, Chinese fiction and letting go dance a pretty mean tango in this episode. How do we know when to let go of a project? Does stopping before reaching whatever we originally thought was the project goal make any of these efforts a complete loss? Why don’t we have a word like “sunk cost” for creative project’ss changing and often temperamental lifespan?

In this episode Summer and Steph are both on European soil. Summer is at home in Nuremberg, Germany and Steph is traveling in Lake Como, Italy. This travel sparks off a discussion about how when we travel a significant distance AND to a different enough culture, our brains can disconnect and let go. This release can (at least for these two expats) create space for creativity to flow through us and even create a brain frenzy of ideas.

In this episode we take a step back and try to notice patterns in our own creative struggles, uncovering both disturbing and comforting truths about our creativity. For both of us, the creative juices flow when we are doing mundane tasks not related to our own passion projects. What is wrong with us? Is it the lack of creative pressure or the act of being productive that makes this happen?

Why is the beginning of a creative project so torturous? Two expats living in different countries explore the concept of the creative gap and how it has effected their own creative lives.

In this episode, we do a 100% brain dump of how this podcast started. We also are actively trying to grok the difference between “creativity” and “sharitivity” (yes, we made up the word “sharitivity” & we encourage frequent usage of said word) because to us creativity has a strong element of not found anywhere else newness to it but sharitivity has a curious, playful reviewing or reenvisioning instead. To dig into these ideas we even delve far back into our childhoods: be very afraid.