The Autonomous Creative

On this episode of The Autonomous Creative, I sit down for a super fun conversation with Ronald Wimberly. Ronald is best known for his graphic novel Prince of Cats , which is currently being developed as a film by Legendary Entertainment. His other works include a giant tabloid journal and art magazine on identity and visual culture, LAAB, Sentences: The Life of MF Grimm, Black History In Its Own...

Are you in a healthy relationship with your business? With your creative practice? Or is it unrequited love? On this episode of The Autonomous Creative, I talk to psychologist, author and business therapist, Nicole Lewis-Keeber. As a business therapist, Nicole uses her eighteen years of experience as a clinical social worker to help small businesses owners and entrepreneurs break the cycles of abu...

Julia DeWitt spent most of 2020 at a Zen Buddhist monastery and is currently pursuing a master’s degree in social work. So...why is she on the Autonomous Creative? Because for the prior eight years, she had an incredibly successful career in podcasting. I met Julia in 2012, while she was l interning at “Snap Judgement,” and I was working on my book,  Out on the Wire. In this episode, Julia wa...

What does it actually take to find 1000 True Fans? Seriously, where are they hiding? Your work is amazing. You’re constantly promoting on social media. You already know that your creative business isn’t bringing in the kind of money you need...especially in a reasonable time frame. So, why is that? Finding a thousand people willing to spend $100 on your one-of-a-kind work should be easy. I mean, y...

I’ve been thinking and talking a lot with creative people about how they make a living, how they struggle with money, and what they might do differently to bring in a reasonable income. It comes up in virtually every coaching call. I talk about it with friends. I ask people rude questions about it on this podcast! ...and it’s a subject of conversation around the dinner table pretty often—my husban...

Cartoonist and publisher Spike Trotman publishes books she considers “strange and amazing.” Her company Iron Circus specializes in “underrepresented voices, underrepresented themes, stuff that has not got a big audience quite frankly or a lot of people catering to it right now.” Sounds like a recipe for struggle. Yet they’re KILLING it. “For the first time in my career, it feels limitless. It feel...

Cartoonist and graphic recorder Lisa Frühbeis has made bold moves that have led to an incredibly rapid career trajectory in the last few years, starting with pitching a comic strip to a newspaper straight out of school...and then parlaying the end of that strip into a book deal, and then much more. But Lisa isn't bold because she's free from fear. Far from it. Although she long felt a strong pull...

Martha Rich is commercial and fine artist who took a long and circuitous route through many day jobs (Workman's comp insurance. Hotel front desk clerk. Repo woman?) to pivot to an art career at the age of 37. Now Martha makes a full-time living as an artist making work that brings her joy. Her secret to building an absolutely custom autonomous creative life? When bad things happened in her life (a...

"What theories about myself and my creativity am I willing to test? Am I willing to fail?" Sarah Firth is an awesome cartoonist and graphic recorder, among many other things. Sarah takes a bit of a mad scientist approach to her creative life. She embraces experimentation and testing to try to discover new ways to organize her life around her creative interests, always looking to answer the questio...

Tom Hart is a cartoonist, and he’s the founder and executive director of a comics school, The Sequential Artists Workshop. His 2016 memoir, Rosalie Lightning , debuted at number one on the New York Times bestseller list. Tom offers amazing, valuable insights about the path to creative career success—and that what “success” looks like must be self-defined, always. For Tom, that means freedom is num...

The only thing more challenging than using frenetic DIY self-publishing to springboard a career in children's books might be running a commercial salmon fishery on the Alaskan tundra from a cabin with no electricity, no toilet, and four kids. That's why I was so excited to talk to Robbi Behr and Matthew Swanson, the illustrator-author-married-with-4-kids duo. Robbi illustrates, Matthew writes, and...

In this interview, Alexander and I talk a lot about money, and specifically, about how asking for money and negotiating for what you want and need is a key piece of building a healthy relationship with your work and career. We also talked about the myth of the solitary artist, and the reality: that community and relationships are key to not just success, but survival. Finally, Alexander is the sou...