podcast
The Autonomous Creative
how do they really do it?
So, are you just supposed to quit your day job? How do you actually make a living? Where do paying fans magically materialize from? Join Jessica Abel as she dives deep into the reality of life as a creative pro — the stuff no professional practice class ever really prepares you for.
Featuring cartoonists, writers, podcasters, small-press publishers, and creative professionals such as Oliver Burkeman, Alison Bechdel, Tom Hart, Alexander Chee, Gene Luen Yang, C. Spike Trotman, Tomm Moore, and many more. Listen, learn, and collaborate with us to make something great.
Host Jessica Abel is a cartoonist, author, and business coach for creatives, and the founder of the Creative Focus Workshop. She helps accomplished creative professionals finish their most important work and build expertise-based businesses that generate reliable income without consuming their creative life.
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There's no magic creative career fairy
You've got the creative skills, and you've got the ideas. How do you translate that into actually building a sustainable career?
Enter The Autonomous Creative: A talk show where we dive deep into the unseen reality of what it means to be a professional creative and to build a life around creative work.
Featuring
- Alison Bechdel
- Tom Hart
- Alexander Chee
- Austin Kleon
- Oliver Burkeman
- Sarah Firth
- Sarah Von Bargen
- Gene Luen Yang
- And many more!
— Crowdcast user APetty
"Such an informative and enriching conversation!"
All Podcast Episodes and Show Notes
Are you exploiting yourself and your own creative labor? with Tara McMullin
Listen to the episode: Labor exploitation is labor exploitation, whether it happens in the non-profit world or the for-profit world. Or in the home-work world, or the educational world. It’s all still labor exploitation. And I believe very strongly that whether we’re talking about goal setting, or we’re talking about business models, or we’re talking…
Life is more than an endless slog of tasks, with Sarah Von Bargen
Listen to the episode: “Truly, until I was like, oh god, like 34, I was working two jobs to make ends meet. I was teaching and then I was also like tutoring on the side……or I was teaching full-time plus like publishing a new blog post. And I just sort of realized like if I…
Embracing your limits in order to find creative freedom and fulfillment, with Oliver Burkeman
Listen to the episode: There’s no alternative here. It’s absolutely inevitable that things that matter will be being neglected while you do other things. And this is just built into the condition of being a finite human who will always have more goals, ambitions, demands, felt obligations…always have more of those than can be met.…
Discovering your creative system (and the perpetual motion machine), with Austin Kleon
Listen to the episode: “If I’d waited to know who I was or what I was about before I started ‘being creative,’ well, I’d still be sitting around trying to figure myself out instead of making things. In my experience, it’s in the act of making things and doing our work that we figure out…
The need to feel extraordinary, with Alison Bechdel
Listen to the episode: The thing that kind of has saved me is this awareness of my mortality. Something I’ve been really seeking out quite intentionally for most of my life. Like, I wanna really get it. I wanna really understand that I’m gonna die. And you’re only able to do that in different ways…
Transitioning from (art) school to the working world, with Brendan Keen, Mariel Capanna, and Brittany Bennett
Listen to the episode: This episode is a bit of a departure for the Autonomous Creative; it’s a panel discussion I moderated with three dynamic young artists about navigating the difficult transition from school to the working world. Each of them is following a unique path, and it was so valuable to dig into the…
From coding to comics, and what it takes to reach the finish line, with Gene Luen Yang
Listen to the episode: When I was a kid, I had this habit of just starting up a project and leaving it usually halfway through or three fourths of the way through. I just did it over and over and over again. It wasn’t until I was in my twenties that I figured out how…
Crazy artists making a living doing what they want to do, with Tomm Moore
Listen to the episode: The hard skills I have, whatever their worth…they were only a small part of it. I think building the company really was about soft skills—making connections and finding trustworthy partners and people. Tomm Moore Tomm Moore is an award-winning animator and director, and the co-founder of Cartoon Saloon animation studio in…
Publishing the almost-impossible (and rethinking creative business) with Josh O’Neill of Beehive Books
Listen to the episode: Josh O’Neill is a comics writer and editor, and co-owner of the Philadelphia-based publishing company, Beehive Books. Using Kickstarter, Josh and his business partner Maëlle Doliveux, publish books and literary objects too risky for traditional publishers. Josh shares what inspired him to pursue publishing, and how crowdfunding allows Beehive to create…
Running a creative business on your own terms, with Jenna Weiss-Berman
Listen to the episode: In 2016, Jenna Weiss-Berman quit her job and decided to launch her own podcast company a month before her first child was born. It was an almost immediate success, and Pineapple Street Studios never took an outside investment. Jenna explains what prompted her risky career leap, and how she taught herself…