Create Me Free Podcast

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 i...

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...

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 wh...

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...

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 p...

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 workb...

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...

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...

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, a...

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...

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 thou...

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...

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...

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...

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 th...

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 m...

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 hav...