Developing Multidisciplinary Creative Practices
new podcast interview with Kalin Morrow
Hello hello! I’m so excited you’re here. Before I dive in, I want to share…
3 Quick Announcements
Structure as a Path to Sustainability is back! Dr. Katy Peplin of Thrive PhD and I will be running our workshop for academic writers on Friday April 11, 2025 11am-3pm EDT (recorded for folks who can’t attend live). You can learn more and sign up here. If you have any questions, shoot me an email!
Co-Working for paid newsletter subscribers and Success & Accountability Coaching clients is happening Sunday March 23rd 12-2pm EDT. You can learn more and access Zoom details here.
I’m at capacity for new Success & Accountability Coaching clients, but I do have a waitlist and will likely be accepting new clients in the summer. If you’d like to work together via coaching in the meantime, I’m always accepting Productivity & Strategy Coaching clients for individual coaching calls and you can sign up for a call here.
The Magic of Collaboration and Working Across Disciplines with Kalin Morrow
I’m excited to introduce you to Kalin Morrow, an actor, dancer, and teacher. If you’re a fan of horror films, you might have already seen her work: she played the villain in the film CUCKOO!
I invite you to listen to our interview and read the show notes for the episode here.
In April, I’ll begin to share my podcast episodes on the second Wednesday of the month. A key reason for running my podcast Honing In is to highlight the amazing work that creative thinkers are doing in their fields and disciplines, and I want to give you time to marinate on the episodes outside of my reflections. That being said, I am very excited to share my reflection with you today about my conversation with Kalin.
When I listened back to our interview, I was inspired to write about the intimate joy that comes with knowing a practice very well and yet still allowing ourselves to be pleasantly surprised when we learn new things.
Something that stood out to me in my conversation with Kalin was the richness and rigor she brings to her art. Whether she dialing into precision when teaching other dancers or tapping into playfulness when she is discovering how to perform a new role or persona in her dancing and acting, she’s exploring art forms that she is trained in and loves doing.
If I had to pick a few practices that I’m skilled at and love doing I would say research, writing, and teaching. I’ve spent years learning these skills, receiving training and education, practicing over and over, and honing my individual approach. Since I finished my PhD in 2020, I’ve been honing my practice as a public scholar.
One of my goals this year is to dive deep into public scholarship about Edythe Eyde AKA Lisa Ben. For those of you who don’t know, I did my PhD in Rhetoric and Composition with an interdisciplinary focus in queer archives and feminist historiography (the study of how we record history). My dissertation focused on Ben’s creative practices, including the first lesbian magazine in the U.S., Vice Versa, which she published in 1947-1948. It’s important to me to make my study of Ben available via public scholarship, so I made a website I call LisaBenography.
Here’s why this is pertinent to today’s newsletter on honing skills and loving practices: In 2025, I’m doing my own creative project of crafting a reading guide of sorts for Vice Versa. While my doctoral studies taught me many things (i.e., the historical context of anti-homosexual laws and rhetoric in the 1940s, how to perform rhetorical analysis through a queer and feminist lens, etc.), I didn’t have the space and time to be playful and creative in my scholarship. That’s what I’ll be doing this year when I create a new way of reading Vice Versa.
I’ll close out today’s newsletter on developing creative practices with one of my favorite tarot cards, the Seven of Cups. Here’s a photo of the card from a few decks I own, clockwise starting from the top of the photo: Rider-Waite-Smith deck (illustrated by Pamela Colman Smith), Affirmators! Tarot (Suzi Barrett), Golden Thread Tarot (Labryrinthos), and The Wild Unknown Tarot (Kim Krans).
The Seven of Cups represents the multitude of choices that are available to us by displaying various cups full of seemingly great or not so great options. Since the cups are in the clouds, they reference fantasies of potential futures. As Amelia Hruby notes in her short analysis of the card on my tiny tarot practice, this card is about “channeling intentions through our choices” and thinking about the possibilities of next steps. I feel like it’s a good reminder that, while imagining different futures can be freeing, focusing on one key goal at a time can lead to impressive results (I see this represented in Krans’s interpretation (on the left), where one cup stands upright at the top of a pyramid).
Perhaps my seven cups might be filled with the potential for publishing another book, training for a marathon, learning how to sew my own clothes, working my way through cookbooks, attending a meditation retreat, taking a watercolor class, or digging deep into my Lisa Ben project—but the reality is that I can’t do all of those things in great depth at the same time. I run a business, I am chronically ill, and I need blank space in my days for rest and walking my dog and catching up with my friends on phone dates. Right now I’m choosing to drink deeply from the cup of my Vice Versa project, and that feels like a good balance of honing skills I already have in a new and exciting direction.
I’d love to hear your reflections on today’s newsletter in a comment or an email if you were inspired by anything I shared or with my interview with Kalin. I’ll be back in a couple weeks to delve into a productivity practice.
Take care and talk soon,
Dr. Kate
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