Today’s episode of Common Shapes is about creating creative containers for our work and convening the spiritual committees that help us make and share our art.
“Artists need each other. We need to be in community with other artists and other writers to feel less alone and like we can put our work into the world and trust that it’ll be received.”
Tune in to hear me share
🧷 The many shapes my work has taken
🧷 How I select and gather my spiritual committee for each creative project
🧷 Why you need an email list
🧷 All kinds of containers your work can take
🧷 The importance of being in community with other artists
Then grab my free Creative Ideation Portal and start gathering your committee and outlining your first project today.
Links
🔼 Get the Creative Ideation Portal
🔼 Sign up for my weekly newsletter, Monday Monday
🔼 Join Flexible Office, my digital co-working space
🔼 Teachers I shared: Bear Hebert of Marketing for Weirdos & Amelia Hruby of Off the Grid
Find all these links & more at marleegrace.space/commonshapes
Want more support for getting your ideas and projects off the ground? Join me for class on Sunday May 28 Live on Zoom (recorded for those who can’t make it live)
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Description text go[0:00] Hello, and welcome to Common Shapes, a podcast about practices, rituals, and systems for a creative life. You are listening to episode two. I'm Marlee Grace, and I'm so happy to be with you.
[0:10] Music.
[0:28] Again. On episode one, we talked about our projects and our visions for the world, and we let ourselves dream into being what those things could be. So I'm going to remind you to grab the Creative Ideation Portal if you haven't yet, and you can go to marleegrace.space slash common shapes. That's where the episode archive is, the show notes, and the guide that is free to download. So that will help you as you're listening to these first few episodes and you're and you're like, I need a little more structure, a little more guidance, that guide is there for you, that portal.
[1:02] So today I wanna talk about containers and I wanna talk about the spiritual committees that help us to make things and put things into the world.
So something I think a lot about, talk a lot about, and teach a lot about is our containers and the shapes that we make, right? So I named this podcast Common Shapes because I love thinking about the ordinary things, the ordinary magic in the world, the mundane, as mysterious, and the shapes that we make. And as a dancer and a quilter, as someone tattooed with lots of drawings, I think a lot about shapes and shape making and shape shifting and all of the many things that we do. So if you're listening to this podcast, I imagine, you might make many shapes as well. You too might identify as a shape shifter of sorts.
And so I welcome you into this next step of visioning that's about the containers that hold everything that we do, as well as the spiritual committee that helps us along the way, right? So.
[2:18] When you're listening to Common Shapes, you might hear me talk about God or the universe or spirit, and I want you to just insert whatever feels correct to you. If you're like, I'm a complete atheist, I don't believe in any God, spirit, universe, etc., that's great.
You can plug in whatever feels good to you. I love to use clouds and earth and the lake and waves and the cosmic mysterious fourth dimension of existence. So I wanna start with thinking about our containers and I wanna start by saying something that you might bristle at a little bit, which is I want you, dear listener of the Common Shapes podcast, to have a email.
[3:06] I'm not even going to say the word newsletter yet. I just want you to be collecting emails of your readers, your fans, your students, your future collectors of your art. I want you to have their emails somewhere.
The first email list I ever had was on a clipboard at the checkout counter at Have Company.
And it said, add your email if you want to get email updates.
And that is slowly how I built an email list, which now, for me, has over 22,000 people on it. For many, many years, I built it up, it only had 8,000 people, just a year and a half, almost two years ago.
And then with my consistent writing practice, it got even bigger.
But this is an example of you can have an email list with 10 people on it, and you are going to have a direct channel to reach those people, those people that are going to read Read your writing, take your class, take your medicine, whatever it is, right?
They're going to show up and be available to you for you to share your beautiful, beautiful work with them.
So that is container number one. So we're going to talk about the different containers today, and I'm going to just go through a little bit about what my containers are. So I write books.
[4:26] I teach classes. I send out a weekly newsletter. I have a weekly podcast, right?
This podcast comes out every Wednesday while we're in season.
And I host a digital co-working space that meets on Tuesdays and Thursdays.
It's called Flexible Office.
If you're listening and wanna join us, I would love to have you.
[4:48] I post things on social media. I market things in my newsletter.
I teach in my classrooms, right? It's like little things happen in this sort of business ecosystem.
So you visioned your projects, you have all these beautiful things, and we're gonna start sort of tying together, like what does your business, creative art practice ecosystem look like?
And how do you tell people that it exists?
That's sort of the starting framework for the Common Shapes podcast.
It's sort of the starting framework for my own work.
And it, I think, will help you to sort of make a beginning, right, and craft a beginning.
We're gonna really look at, like, what is the art of starting?
What is the art of beginning again, right?
I imagine many of you listening have made beginnings. You're like, I made a beginning already, and then I stopped.
[5:46] And I love this idea that it's not if we stop, it's when we stop.
I think for those of us who are tornado people, I love that the people at Holisticism, Michelle uses squiggly brained, neurodivergent, however you identify, right?
It's like we're piecing things together and we're floating a little bit.
And so we wanna have these containers where we come back to ourselves and our work.
And we don't have to do that by ourselves. So I want to share about containers.
I want to share about how we don't have to do any of this by ourselves.
And we're just gonna dig in, dig in. So welcome to Common Shapes.
Welcome to episode two. Thank you for listening to episode one.
I love to have you here. And I love to think about all of the shapes that we make together and apart.
I want to say that you can invite your ancestors into this process with you.
And so in the Creative Ideation Portal, you'll have this writing exercise where you get to look at like, who are my chosen ancestors?
Who are my blood ancestors? Who do I want to invite into this process?
Can I bring us through this part first a little bit?
[7:10] It can be magical to start an email list. It can be magical to start a newsletter, right? It can be a magical experience to log into Flowdesk and be like, yes, I'm going to send emails to people. We'll talk about Flowdesk later on in this episode.
But I want to share that because it can feel really lonely to be an artist and someone who makes things in this world, a writer, a painter, a knitter, a quilter, whatever it is that you are, a lawyer, a nurse, maybe a therapist.
Maybe you don't have a job that you necessarily name as creative.
Maybe you have a nine to five and you're trying to figure out how to just share more about something that you're passionate about, like gardening or painting houses or making a watercolor sunset painting of your yard every morning.
I don't know what it is that you are necessarily doing, but you're looking for a way to share that, and it can be lonely, but you don't have to do it alone. You can do it by yourself, right?
That's something I think a lot about is like, oh, my little house projects, I do them by myself, but I don't do them alone.
I do them with the help and the visioning of other people who are better at it than me.
[8:28] Who have done it before me, right?
Who can guide me in that way. And so I invite you to bring in your well ancestors, chosen ancestors.
I love talking about like Marty Mann is a big one. For me, she was the first woman to get sober in Alcoholics Anonymous. She was a lesbian and lived sober for many years and did a lot of activism around.
The public's understanding of addiction and alcoholism. So I often invite her into my process, right? I didn't know her. We're not actually related, right? But you can sort of pick these.
[9:05] Chosen ancestors in this way. Others of mine are Octavia Butler, Joan Didion, Zona Gale, James Baldwin, and Attel Adnan, right? So those are other writers and artists and thinkers that inspire me, that I wanna invite them into my process of making and living and living out my values and weaving my values into my work.
I don't do that alone. I do that with the guidance of ancestors such as those.
So when I'm working on my next book, which I'm sure I will talk about the process as it happens.
[9:43] I've written two books that have come out with a major publisher and two that I've self-published.
Those two first books are How to Not Always Be Working and Getting to Center.
And then I self-published a catalog about my dance project, Personal Practice, that's called A Sacred Shift.
And then I made another book that is all of the advice transcribed from my radio show, Friendship Village, which is named after a book from the small town that my dad is from in Wisconsin called Friendship Village by the writer Zona Gale.
So you heard she was on my ancestral committee of guidance. So this next book I'm working on, which is really about reclaiming our attention in our artistic practices, I invited my four grandparents, one of which I never met, one of which was only alive until I was three, one of which was only alive until I was nine, and the other of which died about six years ago.
And so I share.
All of these modes of sort of connecting with the dead to give you an opportunity to call in sort of their bright spots. And so I thought a lot about each of my grandparents and sort of like, what would they have me write about in this book, right? Like, what were they.
[11:03] Practicing and thinking about? I was thinking about one of my grandparents, Eldon, who who was amazing with money, something I did not inherit.
So I think about like channeling that. I also have on my mom's side, my uncle Don, who is married to my Annie artist, did my parents' taxes for years.
And he did them all on like yellow legal pads. Like he had this office that was just like stacks and stacks of legal pads.
And his office, I thought, was like the coolest spot in his house.
The Virgo rising in me was just like, Oh, this man's office is so cool.
And so I can think about that when I'm doing my own taxes or when I'm thinking about writing money is to think about my uncle Don and like all of the magic that was around him.
And these people weren't like people I was necessarily really that connected with when they were on earth or if I was, I was such a young child that we didn't necessarily have a connection in adulthood, I get to choose to be connected to them now and invite them into my creative practice.
And you can also have an archetypal committee. So maybe there's living people or writers or artists.
[12:18] Who you wanna embody their energy, right?
You wanna embody something about them or something that they bring to the world.
Like I remember after watching the Lady Gaga documentary, like wanting to bring the work ethic of Lady Gaga into some of what I do.
Yeah, so maybe there's someone who you've watched a documentary about them recently or you read their memoir.
Definitely relate to Pamela Anderson's documentary that recently came out.
I know she wrote a memoir, I haven't read that, but I've also like really attached myself to a few Pamela Anderson quotes about when she left social media for a while.
I believe she's returned probably to promote her documentary and her memoir.
And that's something I wanna bring into my book writing, right, is like what Pamela Anderson says about social media.
And so they might be these sort of like random offshoots where you're sort of like, Mar, what?
Like, what are these people? Why are these the people that you're thinking about inviting in?
But it's just anyone who's bringing sort of like a spark of what you wanna be bringing in to your work.
So we have our spiritual committee, ancestors, archetypes.
[13:35] Spiritual chosen ancestors, queer ancestors, whatever they are, artist ancestors, and we're writing about them and inviting them into our committee of makers.
And this is gonna help us put our projects into the world. We don't have to do this all by ourselves, right?
We might do it alone, but not by ourselves.
The next thing we're going to do is start outlining our projects. And so I want to pause here because I want to talk about outlining our projects and I want to talk about moving the projects forward. But I'm going to pause to bring us back to our containers.
There's so many containers, right? You could be wanting to have a newsletter. You could be thinking about writing a book. Maybe you're writing a play. Maybe you're making a television show. Maybe you're making a series of one-off works, like a series of paintings or.
[14:33] Textile installation work. You might be teaching an online class. Maybe you're working on a class syllabus for a university. Maybe you're self-publishing a zine or a book. Maybe you are, let's see what else, making a bumper sticker, or making, sewing pillows, or making clothes.
I mean, maybe you're starting a dog walking business. There's, I could go on and on and on.
Maybe you're making your own membership site using Mighty Networks or Patreon.
I imagine if you are listening to this podcast, you might be trying to shape the offering.
You are making the common shape of your work and you are figuring out what it is.
And it is my hope that I can share some of my containers so that you can figure out like, what are all my pots on the stove? How do I want all of these things to exist?
And I wanted to start with get an email.
[15:30] List because especially if you're familiar with any of my writing, something I think a lot about is social media and how painful it can be to use it, but how so many of us do keep using it. And the thing about email marketing, and yes, I will continue to use the word marketing and we will bristle, but we will accept it and celebrate it as a place to be creative and have fun, right?
It's like we weirdly at some point stopped thinking of like using Instagram, Twitter, TikTok as quote marketing, but it is, we're sharing ourselves.
And so I wanna get comfortable both myself as the host and you as the listener with using the word marketing and not hating it every time, right?
I really believe in marketing as a creative practice. I wanna name, you know, one of my teachers, I took the class Marketing for Weirdos with Bear A. Bear, a class I definitely recommend.
I think they'll be teaching it again this fall.
And just many, many other people who have reminded me that marketing doesn't have to be a bad thing.
[16:43] Okay, the email newsletter. So I mentioned this on episode one.
I've been sending an email newsletter for 10 years. In many ways, it has been a marketing tool.
And then at some point it shifted into a writing tool.
So I don't want you to get too far ahead of yourself. In episode three, we will talk about, the bones of the newsletter, like which one to pick and how should I do it and what should I do it with?
But for right now, pick anything, right?
So there's Tiny Letter, there's MailChimp, there's MailerLite, there's Flodesk.
Flodesk and Substack are the two things that I use.
I'll say that and I'll get into them more next episode, but just pick something to start collecting people's emails and then get ready to maybe share some of your writing or use that list to share what you're making.
So it's not too late.
You don't have to have a fancy newsletter that you put out every week.
That's not what this is about. It's about collecting emails so that you have a list that you can share with when you birth these projects into the world, okay?
So pick something and you can always migrate that list, right?
So for years, my list was hosted on MailChimp and then it switched to Substack and now I use a mix of Substack and Flowdesk to collect those emails and send my thoughts out into the world, right?
[18:12] So pick something, collect the emails, and have that so that you can get ready to sort of share the work into the world. So container number one is going to be a newsletter or an email list, right? I'm going to sort of put those into one container right now. That is both part of the ecosystem that is part marketing and part the offering, right? It's sort of similar to this this podcast, I might share my work that I want you to be a part of.
I might say, hey, this class is coming up. I'd love to see you there.
Or hey, read my newsletter, right? But it's also the podcast itself is an offering.
It's a teaching space. It's a space that I'm sharing with you.
I definitely wanna shout out the editor of this podcast and a podcast that I love so much, Off The Grid with Amelia Hruby.
And that is a podcast that I feel like I have learned so much about marketing and sort of the channels and the offerings and the things that I am thinking about around how I share my work and where I share my work and how I do that.
So again, it's important to me to name teachers and name where I'm getting information and how I'm thinking about things. So container number one, the newsletter slash the email list.
[19:30] Other containers would be a podcast or a place to share your voice.
I could also see this being like a YouTube channel or on somewhere like Substack or different newsletters.
You can embed video or embed audio. So there's places for you to talk and teach in that way.
Maybe one of the projects that you visioned was like, I want to talk about swimming and teaching people how to swim.
So we have the project, we have like, I wanna teach people to swim, that's my big idea.
And then that could exist in so many ways.
You could write a book about swimming, you could make a weekly podcast about swimming, you could make an interview series in your newsletter where you interview people about their swimming practice.
There's so many different containers that these things and the shapes that they can start to make.
[20:22] Books are a long form container, something that we deeply do by ourselves, but that we don't have to.
Although people write books with other people. So that's to be determined.
Maybe we don't have to write things alone. Maybe we don't have to write books by ourselves.
But a book is another container that your work can be in. I shared a little about the different books I've made, and I hope those give you some examples of making a catalog of another project in book form is a beautiful way to sort of like cross the containers, right?
So I had a radio show for a year when I lived in Madrid, New Mexico called Friendship Village.
And I would take those episodes and the amazing Isabel Osgood Roach of Feeling Space would transcribe those episodes and then helped me edit and take those transcriptions and put them into a book that Rose Zinnia then laid out and made into a beautiful book.
[21:23] That I self-published and printed using Lulu.
[21:27] And then I did a pre-order, people ordered them, I had enough money to put them out into the world, voila. That is an example of a project that I lost money on. I don't even know if I ever made money. Like the radio show was a community radio show. It was free. I paid Isabel to transcribe.
I paid Rose to lay out the book. By the time I made sales, I maybe broke even. But it was a passionate project that I had. And I really wanted there to be a physical piece of this beautiful thing that I had done for a year. So that's just an example of a container.
And I also just want to be so abundantly transparent on this podcast about where my own money comes from and where it goes and how I use it and spend it, my debt, my income, et cetera. So I don't come from money. I don't have any generational wealth and I don't have a partner with wealth.
I don't have sort of any ties to wealth personally.
And I have created all of these different containers that have allowed me to have an income that I was able to buy a house, I'm able to support myself, raise my dog in the North, things like that.
So I just like to be really clear and transparent about all of those things.
Other containers, obviously art objects, right? So a big part of my ecosystem.
[22:55] An example is I don't sell quilts, but I do make money teaching other people how to quilt, right?
So that could be a part of your ecosystem is maybe you're feeling really burnt out on making the thing and you wanna try teaching.
You don't have to wait to feel like you're this perfect expert to teach the thing, right?
So that brings me to teaching, the object, kind of all these different containers, right?
Maybe you're a little bit tired of teaching and you want to actually start making more work.
I know I felt that I've had a goal of like, maybe I'll have a quilt show.
Maybe that would feel good. And then I'm like, will I sell them?
[23:35] More to be revealed. These are sort of the different ways that we can be pivoting kind of within the shapes.
Bumper stickers, right? that's a classic, like stickers, T-shirts, different wearable, usable objects.
Of course, if you're making ceramics or have a shop of other crafts, maybe you wanna make a PDF ebook that goes with it or something like that, right?
So I could go on and on forever about all the different containers that these projects can go into, but I really wanna just put into your head, have an email list, think about having a newsletter, and in the next episode, we'll really talk about it.
[24:17] The next step of making this beginning, creating these containers, bringing our project into the world is making a project outline.
So when you're making a project outline, it's an opportunity to really look at the beginning, middle and end of what you want your project to be.
So in the Creative Ideation Portal are two things. There is a project database.
So it's a notion page. So for any of you who are new to Notion, it is an online digital website system.
I'm not perfect at explaining these things, but it is a place where you can start to organize your ideas and your projects, and the Creative Ideation Portal is hosted in Notion.
So you can make your own Notion account and duplicate the Creative Ideation Portal into it, and then you'll have this project database.
And it's the exact way that I organize my own projects. So you can sort of put your projects in there.
[25:17] And then open them and there's a little template for how to outline your own project.
So I love thinking about, let's say this podcast is a project that I was outlining, right?
So I might use the outline to think about my why, to think about the timeline, to think about the name, the subtitle, who's it going to be for, right?
So the outline is both a place for me to really dream up, Like, who is this project for?
It goes deeper into the why that we talked about in episode one.
[25:49] Who is this project for? Where do I want it to be in the world?
What's it gonna feel like, right?
I love thinking about that. When I was thinking about making this podcast, thinking about like, what will it feel like to like drive and listen to the podcast or to like be cooking and listen to the podcast, right?
And so this is an invitation to really start outlining this project that you want to put out into the world.
And then the last step in this sort of part of visioning the project and the containers we've invited in our Ancestral Spiritual Committee is...
[26:31] Taking another step forward. So what's one thing that you can do in the next 24 hours to move the project forward?
Maybe that's emailing a collaborator.
Maybe that's even just texting one friend to say, hey, I'm gonna do this thing.
I would love, as always, to invite you to join Flexible Office, which is open at any time.
Your first two weeks are always free. That is my experimental digital coworking group, and we meet on Tuesdays and Thursdays at 8 a.m. PST, which is 11 a.m. EST for two hours of uninterrupted co-working.
So you'll be in a room with other queers, weirdos, freaks, artists, writers who are doing amazing things and putting amazing work into the world.
And it's a beautiful place to find accountability and community.
It's hosted on Mighty Network, so you have an opportunity to chat with each other outside of co-working.
If not that room, find somewhere to find community and accountability.
I love something that Beth Pickens always talks about and writes about that I love so much is artists need each other.
We need to be in community with other artists and other writers to feel less alone and like we can put our work into the world and trust that it will be received.
And here's the thing.
[27:56] I always love to say, not everyone will like your work and in fact, some people will hate it.
Something I love to do is share my Goodreads reviews that are really, really bad about my books because they make me laugh.
They make me feel joyful that someone was so honest with what they didn't like or something.
It's an opportunity for me to like, you know, Jesus take the wheel a little bit and be like, yeah, people are not gonna like what you make and we still show up to make the work.
[28:30] So keep moving, keep moving that needle forward on all of these projects.
In episode one, I talked about breaking all of your projects down to three and then maybe picking one to three to really focus on while you're doing the creative ideation portal or while you're listening to this podcast.
I want you to just think about like, OK, cool. So this is the project that I'm working on right now, and I'm moving this through these different steps.
And I'm gonna think about how to talk about it and put it into the world.
So on episode three, we're gonna talk about the art of the newsletter and in episode four, we're gonna talk about our art as service in the world.
And I'm just so grateful that so many of you have tuned in to Common Shapes.
I'm so grateful to share this podcast with the world.
Thank you for all your support. I'd love it if you subscribed and wrote a review or rated it in wherever you listen to podcasts. Thank you so much to the team who makes this podcast possible.
[29:32] Music. es here
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