How can making help you tap into your own need to be in charge of your survival?

Why does making increase our empathy for others and how is it essential for our collective wellbeing?

What do you need to be able to ditch your life so you can follow your creative dreams?

In this episode, learn how to make the paper box that was a lightbulb moment for Melanie on her creative path.

About Melanie:

Melanie Falick is an independent writer, editor, and creative director—and a lifelong maker. She is the author, mostly recently, of Making a Life: Working by Hand and Discovering the Life You Are Meant to Live and she is currently working on a new book tentatively titled The Makers Way. She is the former publishing director of STC Craft/Melanie Falick Books, an imprint of Abrams, and the current creative director and editor of Modern Daily Knitting Field Guides. Her goal is to inspire as many people as she can to recognize and participate in making by hand as a pathway to individual, community, and environmental wellness.

Melanie's website: melaniefalick.com. Melanie's mailing list:

Melanie Falick

Makers Way survey:

The Maker's Way

Making a Life: The Conversation (an online interview series):

Melanie Falick - Author of Making A Life: Working by Hand and Discovering the Life You Are Meant to Live

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/melaniefalick/

Music credit: "Song We Came To Sing" by Living Roots livingrootsmusic.com

Learn about how to harvest wild clay wherever you are – in the country, city or suburbs. Understand how wild clay ties us to the past of the place we harvest from – both of the earth, the industry and the humans who lived there. How Wild Clay can help us have more grace for our own "organic material" and how to work with ourselves.

This is Part 1 of a three-part making exercise over the season of the show – harvesting wild clay, processing wild clay (Part 2) and firing your wild clay (Season finale and Part 3).

About Andrew:

Andrew Sartorius is the program manager at the Oki Doki studio and a full time wood fire potter living in Germantown NY with his fiancé and fellow ceramic artist Tanya Lee Hamm, and his pup named June. https://www.andrewsartoriusceramics.com/ https://www.theokidokistudio.com/

Connect with Andrew on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/asartoriusceramics/

Music credit: "Song We Came To Sing" by Living Roots livingrootsmusic.com

From a kid's blanket fort in an old barn, Psychotherapist and Flower Farmer Gretchen Winterkorn invites you to join her in finding the "Maker" in you that can take your life into your own hands. Think you aren't a Maker – someone who creates with their hands?

Gretchen will challenge that belief. For thousands of years, humans have created their whole lives - their homes, food, clothes, and children - by their own hands. Tapping into this powerful lineage of using our hands has helped her improve her own life and inspired her to start this podcast.

Gretchen shares her journey towards this moment - how trapping herself into the role of Psychotherapist was ultimately the best decision ever - and how she left an unfulfilling life in the city to become a flower farmer and now the creator of this show.

Begin this journey towards taking more responsibility for your life and the fulfilling, joyful happy experiences you want to have in it.

About Gretchen

Gretchen Winterkorn is a Psychotherapist, Flower farmer, and fellow human being working through the muck of life with her family and on her farm BIRDESS in the Hudson Valley of New York. She previously founded and led a large private group practice of therapists working in her relational style "Winterkorn Counseling & Psychotherapy" in New York City. Her work and thinking about using one's self as a therapist has been published in the Journal of Gay & Lesbian Mental Health which she has presented in numerous juried conferences including at Catholic University and the New School for Social Research.

Music credit: "Song We Came To Sing" by Living Roots livingrootsmusic.com

Welcome to the Into Our Own Hands Podcast.

Gretchen Winterkorn is a Psychotherapist and Flower Farmer residing in the Hudson Valley of New York. Gretchen believes using our hands creatively is essential to our mental health. Our hands - our personal tools for survival for millennia - are no longer something we engage in in adult life. Reconnecting to our hands, handwork and the process of making can help us reconnect to feeling responsible for our own lives.

Join Gretchen as she shares more about her journey to making more by hand and taking more responsibility for human life.

Tune in to conversations with the artists and makers of Hudson Valley about how handwork impacts their lives. In each episode, you will learn a way to take a process of making into your own life in some small way so you can begin to connect to handwork as well.

We are all the makers of our own lives. Let's live that way. Again.

The first three episodes will be released on Friday, May 27th 2022.

Follow the show so you'll be notified when a new episode goes live.

Learn more about Gretchen via her website www.gretchenwinterkorn.com