This is where you can get a deeper sense of what I write about. Follow the links to the various posts in the areas that interest you!
Welcome to Create Me Free where I share all of my deep research into and musings about the complex relationship between art and mental health. While I touch on art as therapy and the benefits of creativity, I also look at the times when creativity exacerbates mental health symptoms. Moreover, I really dig into the ways that our mental health symptoms can impact our creative process, content, productivity, medium choice, and more. I’ve organized my writing into categories here, which you can follow to find the pieces that are of most interest to you.
I try to keep things as customizable as possible so that you can receive the types of writing you want from me without any extra noise. You can see how to opt in and out of receiving emails about these different categories here, including the option to receive only a monthly recap.
Essays, Often In The First Person, From the Perspective of An Artist-Writer
This is where you’ll find all of the essays that I’ve written on topics including depression, grief, my experiences as a full-time writer, struggles and joys of creativity, and a variety of other things. Mostly in the first person.
I have spent well over a decade developing an expertise in crochet as therapy and extending that to other craft as therapy. Click above and you’ll find essays/interviews/exercises on this topic, organized into the following categories:
Excerpts from Crochet Saved My Life
Therapeutic Crochet Exercises from Hook to Heal
Interviews about Craft as Therapy
Craftivism
Other Essays on Craft as Therapy
Mandalas for Marinke awareness raising
And more … (podcasts, audio, other stuff)
My Visual Art
I am a lover of words but sometimes words aren’t sufficient or won’t come or, on a good day, it’s just fun to play with images. So sometimes I share less words and more visual art. My art consists of collage, crochet, found poetry and photography. See it here.
On Books and Mental Health
Here's where you can find what I'm writing about the books I'm reading, the books I've written, and the broader world of books as experienced by a voracious reader/writer.
Also, you can learn how to host a virtual book tour on Substack (or elsewhere online) and see the month-long tour that I did for the Artist’s Mind here.
Where Art History Meets Psychology
This is where you will find links to all of the essays that I’ve written exploring the complexities and nuances of how mental health and creativity have intersected in history. This includes biographies of artists through this lens as well as broader topics such as which asylum-institutionalized artists did and didn’t create during their stays and what outdated pysychological diagnosis such as hysteria and neurasthenia have to tell us.
Where Contemporary Art Meets Psychology
links coming soon
On Music and Mental Health
link coming soon, see essays here
Artists Talk Psychology: Interviews About the Relationship Between Art and Mental Health
This is a collection of collections: links to roundups of excerpted interviews organized to explore how mental health intersects with creative process, medium, content, productivity, identity, business, and wellness.
Visual Interviews
I also invite people to respond to questions about the relationship between art and mental health using images or videos instead of (or in addition to) text. There are many reasons why sometimes words aren’t sufficient for responding including neurodiversity, learning challenges and potential trauma triggering. There are other ways to express our responses and I want to honor and celebrate those. See all visual interviews here.
THREADSTACK
In addition to Create Me Free, I launched THREADSTACK, a directory and community of people on Substack who write about/ love all things fiber and fabric, yarn and thread. It’s for the knitters, crocheters, quilters, sewists, needle felters, dyers, spinners, weavers … That publication now lives here:
But before it was its own publication, it was a section of Create Me Free, and you can see all of those original posts for and from the community here:
Dressember
Dressember is an annual December fundraiser project to raise awareness and money to combat human trafficking. The idea is seemingly simple - wear a dress (or a tie, or something handmade) every day of the month of December, share that with others, and spread the word about the project. People join teams, do really creative fundraising projects, and share lots of great fashion to soften the blow of learning about some of the really horrifying truths about human trafficking. In 2023, my contribution was to interview participants about why they found it important to participate. See all related articles here.
My own interview responses are here:
Our expenses reflect our values and writers should be paid for their work. It’s also true that we each have financial limitations. I offer a sliding scale rate at $10 per year so that you can support this work at a rate that works for you.