About Us

Kim & Betsy in our superpower aprons (photo Lee Meredith)

Everybody has a creative life, and some of us decide to live it to the fullest. When we do that, when we decide that living creatively is a priority—and more likely a deep-down need—we effectively ditch the rules, constructs, institutions, and systems we took for granted since we were kids. It’s liberating and exhilarating, but it’s also daunting and sometimes downright terrifying.

Here on The Creative Life, we write, share, lament, ponder, explore, celebrate, and vent about the paths we’ve chosen, the destinations we strive to reach, and the wheels we’ve decided to reinvent to get us safely there.

The idea for this project came out of a conversation that began on Twitter and quickly moved to email, and slowly grew into a welcome and cherished correspondence between new friends. The first several posts are copies of those initial exchanges, and we’ll continue the conversation here.

We’re setting out to be honest, sometimes brutally, and especially about our mistakes, our fears, our pains. We found great comfort when we discovered we weren’t alone in feeling them, and we hope that by bringing them to light you might feel a little less alone, too. That said, neither of us is out to wallow, whine, or otherwise imply that that the pain isn’t worth it. We’ll try very hard to make sure we share our joys and successes, too.

We hope you’ll join us for a while as we share this path, and we’re very much looking forward to getting to know you.

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Betsy Greer thinks too much. After spending much of her life thinking this was a bad thing, she was happy to learn that such curiosity and wonder could actually be used for good when it came to analyzing things like society, culture and creativity.  She thinks life really is a journey and enjoys exploring its alleyways, train tracks, busy streets and hiking trails. And she knows that looking for the blur in the connections between seemingly disparate things is the surest way to magic.

Kim Werker is an astigmatic expat writer, blogger, and big-picture concocter. She writes about whatever pops into her head and when she’s not writing she reads good books, flits in and out of pop culture, walks her dog in the woods, and tries to learn how to use her crappy sewing machine. The first editor of Interweave Crochet magazine (2006-2008) and the founder of CrochetMe.com, Kim wrote or co-authored six books about crochet before she burnt out on yarn. She lives in Vancouver, BC, which isn’t too small and isn’t too big and wonderfully lacks humidity during the summer; she blogs, tweets, photogs, and blathers.