The Maker's Playbook

Send us Fan Mail Somewhere between the hot flashes, the brain fog, and yet another pot collapsing on the wheel, it’s easy to feel like everyone else got a manual for this season of life that you somehow missed. What if the other side of perimenopause isn’t about finally feeling less like a failure, but about refusing to take those feelings so personally? Kelli Nina Perkins of Pottery Apocalypse, a retired librarian turned RV-park studio volunteer, shares how letting her unfiltered inner monol...

Send us Fan Mail For so many of us, perimenopause shows up quietly (and often years before we expect it), scrambling the energy, focus, and follow-through our creative businesses depend on, while the people around us either miss it entirely or chalk it up to us being “cranky.” What if this season isn’t your capacity breaking down, but an invitation to finally stop pulling yourself up by your bootstraps and start asking what you actually need? In this special Kiln Me Now takeover, Commun...

Send us Fan Mail Some days the clay is calling and you still can't make yourself go down to the studio (and the story you tell yourself about why is rarely a kind one). For potters in perimenopause, that tug-of-war gets louder: bigger feelings, words that won't come, and fewer spoons to spend. It's easy to read all of that as proof you're falling apart. But what if this stretch isn't a slow decline at all, and is instead a kind of fermentation period where you're quietly becoming someone new?...

Send us Fan Mail Have you been waking up at 3am wondering where the focus and stamina you used to have has disappeared to? Did you use to accomplish 100 things in the first half of your day, and now barely manage 10 things in 3 days? What if the real conversation us small, handmade artisan business owners need isn't another productivity system, but an honest one about what's happening in our changing lives (and bodies) while we're also trying to run a creative business? In this special ...

Send us Fan Mail There's a strange kind of irony in selling something made entirely by hand using an image that wasn't. This episode sits inside that tension… What happens to the meaning of handmade work when AI creeps into how we market it, photograph it, or talk about it online? We’re not taking a moral stance on AI in this episode though. Rather, let’s consider a deeper question: Why did you start making what you make? And why did you start selling it? The real cost of forgetting tha...