Dear reader,

I’m excited to share with you this essay by Kathryn Vercillo on a topic that is dear to my heart. It’s an excerpt from her new book, Creative Health Cartography Workbook (details at the end of the post).

Enjoy!

The Business Side of Creative Life Is a Creative Health Issue

Why financial and practical stress belongs in the creative health conversation, and what the Creative Health Cartography workbook says about it.

Creative culture maintains a weird, uncomfortable silence around money and business. We talk about inspiration, about craft, about community, about what the work means. And although sometimes we talk about money in abstract ways, for a lot of us, the concrete daily challenges of money as a creative go undiscussed.

The invoice that is overdue, the client who has gone quiet, the slow drift of a bank account in the wrong direction, the question of whether this is financially sustainable that arrives reliably at three in the morning: these topics are present in many creative people’s lives and largely absent from the public conversation about creative practice.

That silence carries a cost. The practical domain of creative life, the financial, administrative, and logistical reality of sustaining creative work in the material world, is deeply integrated with every other domain of creative health. Treating it as a separate concern, as the unseemly business side that exists apart from the “real” creative life, produces a systematic blind spot in how creative people understand their own situations.

How financial stress affects the whole system

Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir, in their research collected in the book Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much, documented something that has direct implications for creative health: that financial scarcity, the experience of genuinely having less than you need, produces measurable effects on cognitive capacity. The mental bandwidth devoted to managing scarcity, to the constant low-level calculations of what can be afforded and what must be deferred, reduces the cognitive resources available for everything else. Mullainathan and Shafir call this the bandwidth tax: a real and specific cognitive cost that persists as long as the scarcity persists.

For creative people, this means financial stress is physiological in its effects before it is even psychological. The narrowing of cognitive bandwidth under financial pressure affects the particular quality of attention and associative thinking that creative work requires. The practical domain’s difficulties migrate into the physical domain as cortisol and sleep disruption, into the psychological domain as anxiety and avoidance, into the material domain as difficulty accessing the quality of presence that making demands.

The creative person experiencing significant financial stress and simultaneously finding their creative work inaccessible may be encountering these effects as a single compound experience rather than understanding them as connected to each other through specific and traceable mechanisms. The connection is real. Naming it removes the self-blame from the equation. The creative difficulty is a predictable response to real conditions, which means addressing the conditions is more useful than adding the creative difficulty to the list of personal failures.

The specific shape of shame around money and creative work

The silence around money in creative culture is partly produced by shame, so it is worth examining that shame. There is a cultural story that serious artists have a particular relationship to material concerns, one characterized by transcendence or indifference, and that worrying about money signals a compromised commitment to the work. The figuring-out of the business side is framed as somehow antithetical to artistic integrity. It has many faces but one common one is the concept of “selling out.”

This story is neither historically accurate nor practically useful. Artists have always navigated the economic conditions of their practice, sometimes through patronage, sometimes through day jobs, sometimes through commercial work that subsidized the work they cared about most, sometimes through poverty that was romanticized in the telling and difficult in the living. The romantic myth of the artist above material concerns has served, and continues to serve, the interests of people who benefit from creative workers undervaluing their own labor.

Shame about the practical domain also tends to produce avoidance, which compounds the practical problems rather than addressing them. The financial situation that is unexamined generates more anxiety than the financial situation that is understood in its actual specifics, even when those specifics are difficult. Vague dread is harder to work with than concrete information.

What the practical domain exercises actually ask

The exercises in the practical domain of the Creative Health Cartography Workbook ask for direct attention to the financial and logistical reality of the creative life, without the usual layers of avoidance or minimization or catastrophizing that tend to accompany this territory.

They ask: what is the financial picture actually like right now, in its specifics? Where does avoidance live in the practical domain, and what is it protecting? How does the practical domain’s current state affect the other domains of creative health? What would it mean to understand these connections clearly rather than managing them around the edges?

These questions tend, hopefully, to produce useful visibility. The practical problems most disruptive to creative health are often the ones least clearly seen: ambient financial anxiety with no specific shape is harder to work with than a specific understanding of the actual numbers, the concrete gap between income and expenses, the real options for addressing it. Specificity reduces the dread that vagueness generates, and reduced dread tends to free cognitive bandwidth for everything else, including the work.

The visibility the workbook offers is the starting place. The specific circumstances, resources, and choices available to you are yours to navigate. What changes with visibility is the quality of navigation: responses based on clear understanding of actual conditions tend to be more effective than responses organized around avoidance and ambient fear.

You already have the answers within you. I hope the workbook helps you see them better. And I hope this essay starts opening a conversation around the honest, complex and nuanced relationship that creativity and finance are entangled in.

This is a guest post from Kathryn Vercillo as part of her Creative Health Cartography Workbook tour. Follow the full tour at createmefree.substack.com. Follow Kathryn’s writing and the new podcast at createmefree.substack.com. If you’re curious about your Creative Health archetype, take the free quiz here. And if you decide to purchase the workbook or Kathryn’s Creative Health Cartography services, use WorkbookTour20 for a 20% discount.

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Dear reader,

Just a short post today. I’ve decided to re-jig a post I wrote for my paid subscribers back in 2022. I think it’s worth revisiting. And, at the end, I have a special announcement.

A reflective prompt…

… inspired by the following quotation from Light the Dark: Writers on creativity, inspiration, and the artistic process (edited by Joe Fassler. New York: Penguin Books, 2017).

“It also describes what a monumental work of art does: takes the pieces of you, reassembles them, and hands them back to you in all the right order. Literature can also heal us relationally. If a relationship with a person, someone we know for just a short time, can forever alter our lives, then why not a book?” – Junot Diaz,

So, I want to ask you this: How are you all in pieces?

For example, I could describe myself as the following right now:

Bad temper + generosity of spirit + lethargy + fierce work ethic + wild imagination + intemperate gloom = me.

You are not constrained to describe yourself as a mathematical formula, of course. But what are the pieces of you, and how would you describe them or represent them?

And what, for you, puts those pieces back in order? And what was the last work of art that did so?

Let me know!

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Announcement

This Sunday I will be publishing a guest post by Kathryn Vercillo. It’s an excerpt from her new book, The Creative Health Cartography Workbook.

This book is a self-guided framework for understanding how your health shapes your creative life. Built from twenty years of research and interviews with more than one hundred artists, writers, and makers, it works through six domains of creative practice with reflective exercises, composite real-world stories, and a six-archetype pattern system. It’s available as a PDF download and in print. And because, as a reader of this Substack, you are special you get to use the WorkbookTour20 code for a 20% discount.

I’m sure you’ll enjoy Kathryn’s essay!

Dear reader,

The quotation above came from a YouTube clip featuring Dr Frank Yeomans, an American psychiatrist and psychotherapist who specialises in treating personality disorders. I enjoy how articulate and interesting a speaker he is and I’m particularly struck by his humane attitude towards his patients. They include those who suffer from Narcissistic Personality Disorder or Borderline Personality Disorder - people most of us would find to be somewhat unlovely and perhaps even alarming. Dr Yeomans seems to be able to find compassion for them, however, speaking of their awful behaviours as stemming from psychic pain. But he also is able to speak to the dangers of disordered personalities at both an individual and societal level.

In one short clip he has this to say:

“I think the challenge we all face as therapists, as human beings on the planet, is to develop a narrative that gives us meaning without it being at the expense of others, and there are a lot of ways to do that. And I just find it frustrating that so many people fall into that simplistic … it’s almost like not making the effort to create your own narrative where you can feel good about yourself without somehow being negative about another. The easiest way to say ‘I’m good’ is to say somebody else is bad. That’s cheap, that’s not honest, and I just hope people can work on developing a satisfying self-narrative without damaging others. We all have to find a way to feel good about ourselves. It’s our responsibility to do that by creating a personal narrative. If we’re lazy we latch on to the narrative that somebody else offers us and we can be duped that way.”

Today I was listening (again) to this call to create a narrative that resists that lazy impulse to define ourselves through othering those who are different (surely a sort of psychological double negative) and instead build a personal narrative grounded in a loving sense of self. As I listened, Mary Oliver’s poem, Wild Geese, came to mind.

This short poem is a favourite of mine; I go back to it again and again. I’m sure I’ve shared it here before so forgive me for the repetition. But I think that I thought of it because one way of reading it could be to consider how it touches on the necessity of building a psychologically and spiritually healthy narrative of the self.

Of resisting self-flagellation or martyrdom as a defining characteristic:

“You do not have to be good.

You do not have to walk on your knees

For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.”

Of embracing the need to

“let the soft animal of your body

love what it loves.”

Of inviting the other to

“Tell me about despair, yours,”

And knowing that you can tell of your own despair in turn. That both the hearing and telling of despair have an equal place.

That “... the world offers itself to your imagination” and in your loneliness, you still have that imagination with which to build a self-narrative.

And, in considering nature, including the wild geese calling “harsh and exciting” as they fly in the “clean blue air”, you can see yourself in the context of the larger, wilder world, and as belonging within the family of things.

Yeomans says that “there are a lot of ways” to build or find your narrative. Oliver’s poem suggests that this is only limited by one’s imagination.

Where do you turn to find that narrative that speaks to your place in the world, in the family of things? What parts of the world offer themselves to your imagination? Are they the narrowing and embittering anger of populist politics or the murkier areas of social media? Or are they something that lifts you up into the clean blue air of your imagination?

Thanks for reading.

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Dear reader,

The Conversation recently published an article entitled Poetry for an anxious world: 5 experts share poems of grief, hope and restoration. Alongside the enjoyment of being introduced to new poems, I was jolted out of my doldrums by the resonance of some old favourites.

Interestingly, one of the aforementioned experts, Aiden Coleman, writes that

“Poems can be ‘amulets against the darkness’, as the poet Molly Peacock noted. It’s another good reason to commit them to memory.”

I actually wrote a creative prompt in the early days of this Substack inviting people to memorise poetry. This exercise was fresh in my mind at the time of writing as I had been reciting memorised poems to myself during the daily one-hour walk we were allowed during Melbourne’s lockdowns. Coleman refers to one of Gerard Manly Hopkins’ terrible sonnets - terrible because they depict the dark night of the soul. And John Kinsella, in his contribution to the article, nominates Manly Hopkins’ God’s Grandeur as one of his go-to poems.

“And for all this, nature is never spent;

There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;

And though the last lights off the black West went

Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —

Because the Holy Ghost over the bent

World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.”

This is actually one of the poems I silently recited to myself on my daily lockdown-walks beside Merri Creek. I have loved it for years. I was introduced to Manly Hopkins by my late mother who, when she was dying of cancer, asked me to read God’s Grandeur at her funeral.

Coleman nominates Wendell Berry’s lovely The Peace of Wild Things as his poem of choice.

“When despair for the world grows in me

and I wake in the night at the least sound

in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,

I go and lie down where the wood drake

rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.”

I also love, very much, Berry’s Rain Light:

“All day the stars watch from long ago

my mother said I am going now

when you are alone you will be all right…”

Another poem I find to be restorative is David Whyte’s What to Remember when Waking:

“You are not a troubled guest on this earth,

you are not an accident amidst other accidents

you were invited from another and greater night

than the one from which you have just emerged.”

Of course, to share my favourite poems with you meant that I searched for them on the internet, re-read them, and, for the hundredth time, had to stifle a sob as I sat writing this article in Melbourne City Library. I am in the Quiet Room, which asks people not to talk to each other or on their phone; I wonder what the policy is on people having a quiet cry as they read beloved poetry? I have left a long line of startled strangers in my wake due to the countless times I have been sitting on a tram or in a library or a reception room, silently reciting poems inside my head, and suddenly realising that tears are trickling down my face.

“A writer’s heart, a poet’s heart, an artist’s heart, a musician’s heart is always breaking. It is through that broken window that we see the world…” – Toni Morrison

Poetry - and any art form - are so important right now, putting into form our anxiety and dread when words fail us, slyly sliding in a little hope when we need it, and restoring us to ourselves. As Whyte put it:

“To be human is to become visible

while carrying what is hidden as a gift to others.

To remember the other world in this world

is to live in your true inheritance.”

What hidden gift do you carry? What calls to you inside the privacy of your own head when the outside world presses its anxiety upon you?

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Dear reader,

Today (15 April here in Melbourne) is World Art Day according to UNESCO. And I just found out that I missed out on World Poetry Day (21 March). So, to honour both days I have re-written an old piece that I published on a now dead blog years ago. It’s about a poem about an artist. I hope you like it.

“I have but one job:

to keep you looking, though I’ve snatched the breath

from your throat.”

These lines come from a wonderful poem by Danielle DeTiberus. The poem – The Artist Signs Her Masterpiece, Immodestly - comes from “a series of poems about the artist Artemisia Gentileschi’s work and life.” This particular poem was inspired by Gentileschi’s striking painting Judith Beheading Holofernes.

“Because I know what rough work it is to fight off

a man.”

The poem is as stunning and immediate as the painting itself. It references Gentileschi’s own history as a survivor of rape (and an ensuing court case) and reflects the mastery of her painting technique in the way she so vividly depicts a violent act. I particularly love the way DeTiberus works into this poem ideas about the role of the creator and their relationship to their work. It’s a neat thing for a poet imagining an artist thinking about her work to do.

“I have thought it all through, you see. The folds

of flesh gathered at each woman’s wrist, the shadows

on his left arm betraying the sword’s cold hilt.”

These lines, and others, in the poem show us how detailed and specific art making (in any discipline) must be. Many people assume art making to be done in a welter of disinhibition – the artist as anarchist chucking paint at a canvas or toking on a joint in front of a typewriter or throwing a tantrum during a rehearsal. To be sure, too much inhibition will kill the creative process, and playfulness and experimentation are important parts of arts practice. But alongside the moments of instinct and imagination, art making is about choice making. You have to think it all through. You have to get the details exactly right: choice of adverbs, shades of colour, angles of limbs, the inflection in your voice on a certain word at a certain beat. If you don’t make the right choices about bringing the right details to life, then your inspiration cannot be conveyed to your readers / viewers / audience.

“Some say they know her thoughts by the meat of her

brow. Let them think what they want.”

These lines are talking about viewers assuming they know what Gentileschi’s Judith is thinking. DeTiberus’ Gentileschi is unconcerned with this in this poem: “Let them think what they want. / I have but one job: to keep you looking…”

The truth of the matter is that you cannot ever control what an audience is going to think or how they will interpret your work. That is simply not within your power. DeTiberus’ Gentileschi is right: an artist has one job and that is to engage their audience. What the audience does with that engagement is up to them. And as a woman, the Gentileschi in this poem is assertive and businesslike in tone; she is not concerned with minding our sensibilities for us. The emotional labour she performs is as an artist portraying a scene, not as a woman pandering to others.

The closing lines are pure defiance:

“Ergo Artemitia. I made this—I.”

DeTiberus writes that in painting, Gentileschi, working in an era where female artists were less likely to be supported much less celebrated, and also working as the survivor of rape, “… reclaims her agency through making and naming. Ultimately, then, this poem is an ode to survivors and to Gentileschi’s exquisitely manicured middle finger to the idea that she could be erased or silenced.”

DeTiberus’ Gentileschi has done her one job: she made us look.

DeTiberus has done her one job: she made us think.

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