About Kathryn
How I came to this work, and how I hold it.
Hi, I am Kathryn. I am a writer, an artist, and a researcher, and I have spent twenty years on one question: how do health and creativity shape each other? I came to it through my own life. In my late twenties, while living with a depression that flattened most things, I picked up a crochet hook, and making became both a way through and a way back to myself.
That changed how I understood creativity and health. I wanted to know how the two move together for other people too, the ways art heals and the ways health can quietly reshape the work. I have been following that question ever since.
I started by writing about it. Crochet Saved My Life and Hook to Heal grew from that work, along with other books over the years, some I am prouder of than others. Therapists, social workers, and counselors have used them in classrooms, hospitals, and rehabilitation programs. You can find my books here.
I also hold a Masters in psychology and have studied visual and critical studies at the graduate level. Across nearly two decades I have sat with hundreds of artists, writers, and makers and listened to how their health shaped their making. The patterns in those conversations became the Creative Health Cartography framework and the six areas it maps.
One belief sits underneath all of it: the answers to what works for you are already in you.
I honor the ways creativity heals while making room for the harder truth, that anxiety, depression, chronic illness, and the rest of life can complicate the work, how you make, what you make, how much, and whether you still call yourself an artist at all. Most of us keep creating anyway. My job is to help you see your own patterns clearly, so you can work with them rather than against them. The approach is strengths-based and grounded in disability justice, trauma-informed, and shaped to meet different ways of communicating and creating. I offer reflections rather than pronouncements, and you stay the expert on your own life.
I live in San Francisco, a city I love, with two dogs. I have lived a few different lives along the way, social work, teaching, writing columns, a stretch of odd jobs that included building trophies and working anime conventions, and all of it feeds this work. I also practice artistic tithing, giving at least ten percent of what I earn back to other artists, writers, and makers, because I believe in holding up the creative community I am part of.
Work with me
If any of this feels close to where you are, the Starter Package is the place to begin, and the free quiz is a gentle way in.