Piecing Ourselves Together: Creativity, Process & Integration with Mariglynn Edlins

Karen: Today I have invited Mariglynn Edlins to join me on the podcast! Mariglynn and I are academic internet friends! I have been so inspired by your ability to incorporate creativity into your everyday life. And I'm so excited for you to share your like really unique approach to creative experimentation in academic life, in family life, and in our inner lives. So welcome, Mariglynn!

Mariglynn: Awesome, Karen, thanks so much for inviting it. It's so fun to be here. And I, I love to talk about creativity and making stuff. But I also love to talk about academics and I very rarely get the chance to talk about the two together. So I'm really looking forward to our conversation.

Karen: That was fabulous. Just take a minute to introduce yourself a little bit.

Mariglynn: Yes. So I am Mariglynn Edlins. I am an associate professor at the University of Baltimore, I teach in Human Services Administration, as well as public administration. And I've just become the program director for our doctoral program in public administration. So also I think, most importantly, probably is that although I'm a scholar, and a teacher and a professor, I most quickly identify as an artist or a maker, and that is my most, I think that's what I want to be the most. And that's been a real thing to sort of wrestle with, is what does it mean to be a professor and an artist, and which one is more important or valuable, or, you know, which one rings most true for me, and that is probably at the crux of everything about me is that those two things are always overlapping.

Karen: When you are thinking about your identities, as an artist, and as an academic, I guess I'm curious about what that means for you?

Mariglynn: It's something I spend a lot of time wrestling with, because when you're an academic, you're trained as a scientist, right? And, and when even if you're the most social of scientists, which I am, I am a social scientist. But there's this dichotomy between art and science, right? That they don't, they're, they're very much on the other ends. And so you're either an artist or a scientist, and you can't be both. And I think for many years, I've really thought about myself as two people, there was a me the artist, and there was or the maker or the mom, or, you know, whatever. And then the on the other side, there was the professor and the researcher and the advocate. And I think I've spent the last number of years trying to understand, are those two separate people? Or, I mean, I keep coming to, it's just me, right? And the things have to overlap because they overlap within me.

And I think the more that I've wrestled with it—and I do mean wrestle with it, like lots of time in therapy, talking about this, and trying to figure out sort of how I identify, right, this is an identity issue, as well as it is an activity and what do you do with your life kind of issue. But I realized that what I do in my art, and what I do in my research, and my service and teaching is the same, which is something that I've really just been fleshing out and writing into a lot recently that that there's a lot of overlap and that overlap explains me.

Karen: How are you being your artist self in your teaching in your research and your leadership on campus?

Mariglynn: I think the two things where I find that these parts of me overlap is one I'm very focused on process rather than product or outcome. And I'm also very, I'm very focused on piecing together in an all areas of my work and so when it comes to teaching and, and research, both of those things are really true.

So for process, I'm thinking more about the how and the why, versus the what So I'm less concerned with like the outcomes and the products. And I'm more concerned about the experience of it. You know, so in my classroom that's less about the grades and the behaviors and more about the experience and the engagement and the collaboration, the communication, right? I'm really, and my research has always, focused on that, has always focused on the interactions that we have with each other, and not what happens and who's there and what gets said. But what's the experience like? What do we learn? What do we take away from interactions? What do we learn from them? And so for teaching, I mean, I guess it all kind of overlaps. But that's really the process stuff, and that's how I show up as an academic. I've always been less concerned about, oh, I've got to, you know, get this award, and I've got to get this many publications and like, it's exciting to get this, you know, accolade, or whatever. And more just like, what does it feel like? And am I enjoying it? And, you know, being more process minded in that way?

Karen: What about this piecing together? I love this phrase, “piecing together.”

Mariglynn: I think that came because in 2017, I had been really interested in quilting, like I just found myself, you know, I was on Pinterest at the time. And I was just collecting pictures of quilting all the time. And I didn't, I've known how so for most of my life, because my mom sewed. But I never quilted and didn't know anything about it. And so, in 2017, I, I started a 100 day project, and I taught myself to quilt. And you know, that process is like taking a piece of fabric, cutting it up and sewing it back together. And I just was obsessed with that.

And over time as my art practice, my creative practice has shifted and expanded. I've done a lot of collage. I've done a lot of painting. When I started with my partner in 2018, we had a project called Thinkery, which was a creative curiosity studio where we offered process workshops for kids and families. And so much of that was I noticed my process there was collecting ideas and supplies and techniques and piecing them together into a workshop. And I realized when I think back on my writing process, both of my dissertation, this was a very big sort of discovery at the time, and even currently, I collect ideas and text and even sentence format to collect things into sort of databases. And then I pick and choose and piece them together. So it's experiment, it's like both.

And obviously, that's how you create a class, right, you come up with the ideas that you need to cover in a class, you pull the readings together, then you add in the assignments, you talk and think about how you're going to talk about it with your students. And so I started to recognize that what I do, is this collection and this curation, and then this assembling, whether it's a quilt or collage or a class or research project that this piecing together, I'm looking for patterns, I'm putting things in context, I'm connecting small things to larger things. And that process extends my art practice and my scholarship in such a way that has started to give me a more unified identity as a creative scholar who is focused on process and piecing together. Which is nice because you don't have to be an artist or a professor, right? You don't have to be these isolated things. It's like we can see and I think this is where, you know, we think about scientists. This is where all academics can really embrace the creative side is recognizing the process, like how you do your work, is where the creativity is.

You don't have to create a masterpiece. You don't have to be an artist that, you know, that shows in galleries, because we're always trying to see the art and the creativity in what we do. Right. It's creativity. What is it, Monty Python, what's that guy's name? I can't remember his name right now. But creativity is not talent, right? It's a way of operating. And I think that's what I've started to recognize is that my creative practice is the way that I operate in all the areas of my life.

Karen: I love how this moving away from the labels of artist and scientist seems to have helped you focus on the how, on the process on the piecing together. And that by embracing that, and really thinking about what you're doing, how you're being, that's kind of bringing your identity into this more and more integrated place.

Mariglynn: Yeah, it's, I think it's hard to move to integration. You know, we currently have this world that's like pulling you all directions. And for most people, the best we can do is compartmentalize and rigidly sort of block out our identities or our task or how we spend our time. And for me, that's really how I got in my, you know…I have always been creative and made a lot of stuff. But when I became a professor, when I was having kids, and going through hard times, when the world sort of turns upside down, there was this, I needed, I needed to be able to flip a switch from like, the danger of all the things I was facing during the day, to a safe place. And, you know, amazingly working with fabric and bright colors and the sensory feel of cutting and ripping and stitching and ironing it was so, it was so tactile, that I could drop. I wasn't very good at the time of getting out of my head and into my body, and quilting and sewing and making was as close as I could get to dropping in my body.

But that was not a very integrated part of my life, I was making a lot of art and I was doing a lot of research and I was excelling at my job. But I was exhausted. Because I had compartmentalized these two parts of me. And I would just flip a switch, and over the last number of years trying to identify the inherent dysregulation in that way of being and trying to find a way of being that is more regulated, and can still kind of more flow between the states, between these activities, between these identities, rather than have a rigid switch. And that's a real challenge, right? Integration is just a real challenge. It takes time.

Karen: How do you think, as you've been working on this integration of creativity across all these aspects of your world, how do you think that's impacted the people around you?

Mariglynn: Good question. I think other people benefit so much when we are dysregulated and overperforming and showing up and keeping everybody happy. And sometimes, you know, I think we would love to say, oh, it helps everybody when I'm more me, right. And that would be the ideal answer. And the truth is not that, the truth is so much harder, is that anytime we're trying to protect ourselves, and to get more healthy and get more rest and be more integrated, there's, that's more of us for us. Which means that there's less of us, for other people, which can be very challenging for other people to say, I'm used to getting all of you or, you know, I'm used to you burning the candle at all ends and sacrificing yourself. And when you say, Well, I really want to be integrated, and I want to be rested. And I want to, you know, have these things flow back and forth, I want to feel the flow, right, I don't want to feel blocked. And that's, that really does mean that other people get less of you. And you know, that's also hard. There's a grieving process of not being everybody to everything, you know, are everything to everybody. Because if I don't, if I don't take care of myself, if my various needs, like my intellectual needs, my creative needs, if those things aren't met, I'm not the best version of myself. And so I think in the long run, it benefits people who get me because they get a better version, a more fully integrated version of me. But it's true that not everybody, or not as many people get parts of me as they did before. But I get a lot more of me.

Karen: When you were talking about your teaching, and thinking about process and piecing together, I was thinking about what a joy it would be to be in your classes.

Mariglynn: It's very fun.

Karen: So I'm wondering if there if there aren't ways that I don't know, you know, sure, maybe you're Like you said, less, less available in some ways, but more more present, more empathetic, perhaps or, you know, attentive to that piecing together and others in other ways.

Mariglynn: Yes, there's some part of making priority and where you think your time is best invested. You know, when my husband and I had this studio called Thinkery, the premise was that thinkering is this idea of working, it's thinking with your hands, it's working with your hands. And the science behind it really is just that, when you're fiddling with something or kind of almost mindlessly doing something with your hands, your brain is able to rest in a way that it can process things, that it can't when you're actively using it. So, for instance, if you are thinking about a problem, or trying to work through something, you know, going to sleep, for instance, is one that people do often but also, you know, cutting and gluing or sewing or stitching or something where you're working with your hands, allows your brain to, to process it in a more safe way.

And I think in my classes, that's been a lot of my focus is the corollary there is students who are actively engaged in their coursework, and I don't just mean like hands on, or even just talking in a discussion, but who feel belonging and they feel heard. And there's a responsiveness and they have direct access to the people and the information that they need. That level of hands on engagement, allows for a deeper, deeper level of working, I would certainly love to give everybody in my class collage materials and have done that, to some degree. But like, I'm always telling my students like, go ahead and color go ahead and doodle, like whatever you need to do to to take some pressure off of your active brain. But I find that the emotional aspect there of just feeling, you know, my students always have 24/7 access to me by text, which I think people are like you do what, and I'm like, they don't want to talk to you all the time. They don't want to text you pictures of every little thing. But when they need you, they need you. And you know, if if they can pick up a phone and you know, swipe out a message to you and get a direct answer, that level, they stay more engaged, right, their brain is able to more quickly come to answers. And honestly, it's easier for me because I don't have to answer a bunch of email. Their questions are pretty small. And I can swipe at a response really quickly. So again, it's just this overlap of the thinking about process, right? Thinking about the how and the why, versus the what is, for me has really radically changed the way I interact with students and like, it's really radically changed how I interact with everybody is thinking about things through this process lens.

Karen: This is starting to sound a little bit like a lifestyle.

Mariglynn: Right? Creativity is not a talent, it is a way of operating, and I agree. And I think the more that I wrestled with my creative practice as a separate thing from my work, and thinking, oh, gosh, it's actually not like the way I show up to my professional work is the way I show up to my art practice. It's the way that you know, I have led workshops and sewing classes and all the other things I've done it there's just a consistent and I'm starting to recognize there's a consistent flow there. Which in a lot of ways, it's great because it's really accessible.

I think the people who are so hard to access are the people who have these very isolated, rigid things, that you think, I can't do that because I'm a professor, because I'm a stay at home mom, because I work 80 hours a week. And when you start to realize that these things aren't hobbies that are separate, they can become a way of being.

I think that the way I interact with my kids, and the way that we structure our life at home, is thinking about process and piecing together. And at the end of this at the end of all things you can almost always come back to thinking about the process rather than the outcome at any situation. You go okay, is this about outcome? Or is this about process?

And for those people who are really interested in reading more about things like this, there's a book I love called Finite and Infinite Games, which has been a really great sort of philosophical background for this, just breaking down the difference between being more finite focus versus infinite focused, and has given me a lot of deeper understanding about because I, for a long time was studying process art, and what does it mean to be an art teacher who's focused on process rather than product? And looking at that in the artists world, but it's nice to sort of switch over to academics and philosophy and think about how this shows up in different fields and different ways.

Karen: What does this actually look like? In your home? Like, how do you make this work? For kids, you know, I've just started thinking about, like, how am I bring this more into our daily lives? For my whole family?

Mariglynn: Well, it's, it's always changing. You know, my kids are a little bit older now. And I, when I had little, little kids, we had lots of art supplies out and lots of free time. And lots of everybody at the table just doing, you know, whatever kind of struck their fancy, because the supplies were always there. And as my kids have gotten a little bit older, they have very distinct interests, and really, at the heart of piecing together and process is curiosity, which is why when we started Thinkery, it was a curiosity studio and my kids educated at home, meaning that they we have sort of an unschooling or child led philosophy, which means that my kids are really identifying what it is they're interested in, and then we're following it. That is a process, that is a process-focused model, right?

It's like, we're interested in one, I want my kids to come out of their schooling years with a deep love for learning and a deep curiosity rather than some, you know, some of the things that people get in traditional schooling is learning how to identify a task and complete a task, it's very, you know, pass this test meet this deadline. It's this rigid kind of structured, so the way it shows up in our in our family is very fluid, and it changes every single day. And so it's hard to just fully describe that.

But I think, in my classroom, as well as at home, some of the philosophy is open access in lots of different ways. So in my college students, you know, everything is written, videoed, or recorded, and it's shared in multiple places. In my home, we have art supplies, in many places, and different we have books and art supplies, and you know, free play material kind of all over the place that there's this open access to, to materials and to information and to other people. And then then it comes to piecing together, right, it's just like, What are you interested in now? And then what are you interested in the next day? And then how did those things start to connect, right, and I see my kids start to mash up, you know, different types of play. Like I have one kid who is very into Dungeons and Dragons right now. And they're also very into Star Wars. And then they'll also be playing chess. And so then you've got this mash-up, right? And kids are so good at this, which I learned so much from how they pieced together the different things that they're exploring.

So that that's sort of I think, the answer, I think, a couple of years ago, I would have had a much more defined answer because my kids were smaller. And so we were sort of just like, all trying to manage staying alive. And now that we're everybody's a little bit older, they're currently, let's say, almost 7 and 10 and a half. And so, you know, they're, they're self-directed and they're doing these things, and then my partner, Jeff, and I are following them and supporting them and giving them access, you know, to various information or opportunities.

Karen: It seems like there's kind of multiple creative feedback loops around your world right now.

Mariglynn: Yeah, my kids often say, they'll describe something and they say, I'm really interested in that right now. And that is the way that we operate. I’m not gonna say we're a certain type of people, I'm gonna say the way that how we operate is on curiosity, and you know, my partner has a lot of creative and also academic interests, and then my kids have their own creative and academic interests, and then between the four of us, there's just ongoing conversations and collaborations. And it is it is messy, and I sort of calm way, I guess. But there's always a lot happening, there's always a lot happening. And it is it is very fun. And they're usually just art supplies and unfinished projects. kind of all over the place.

Karen: The image I'm getting is of this beautiful collage.

Mariglynn: The beautiful part at different parts, I might have said, I think, you know, going back to this idea of rigid and isolating and kind of compartmentalizing when I felt very unsafe at work and in the world, I needed my home to be very clean and structured. Otherwise, I felt very dysregulated. And in doing all this work of integrating, and trying to find the overlap and seeing how these parts of me are isolated, but are more overlapping, I've gotten a little bit safer in my body and my home in a way that I recognize we don't live in a house, we live in a laboratory.

And this is the prime you know, especially during COVID, early COVID days, and even now, at this stage in the pandemic, really thinking about your home as the primary place where you're learning and exploring and growing and integrating. And so I've gotten a little bit more freedom in, in seeing it and feeling it as beautiful as a beautiful sort of tapestry of curiosity and learning. Also, my kids are a little bit older, so we do a better job of actually cleaning up, which is also nice. But so yes, I would say it's beautiful. And the state of my nervous system sort of gauges how much I can say that I feel like it's beautiful. Rather than feeling a little panicky that there's like a million you know, there's always markers everywhere. I mean, that's just the reality of it, always markers…

Karen: You've brought together, you’ve pieced together, so many fascinating concepts: open access, curiosity, process, all of these things. And you know that that I advocate for good enough all the time. That's my thing, right? And I'm wondering, how this patchwork of ideas, how this set of concepts really contributes to helping you move toward good enough?

Mariglynn: I think my creative practice has always been me grasping for survival, in the sense that in my academic world, and you know, being a firstborn, and an overachiever, I've always needed to be I mean, I probably would never have said this. But the truth is, I've always felt like I needed to be perfect or really, really good. And, you know, as life got harder, and things happened that were out of my control, my creative practices were this place where I could very much embrace good enough.

When I was teaching, when I do teach sewing classes, you know, that, that sewist who put something together and they say, this is wrong. And, I say, here's the beautiful thing about sewing or really any kind of art is you get to decide what's wrong or right. And some people really need it to be perfect. And some people are sort of like, I don't care. And you get to play in that range of figuring that out.

And so I think when I was having full control in your professional and academic life, you often don't have full control to decide what is good enough, because someone else is often mandating it. When you're making stuff, you’re in control and quote, unquote, “bad art” is amazing. And I think that's what process art is all about, is not thinking about or working towards a finished product that is quote unquote, “good”. It's just about engaging in the process, right? It's just about feeling the materials and engaging in the process and enjoying the time that you're there. And the more that I engaged in that creative practice, those late nights learning to quilt and doing 100 Day projects over the years and showing my work and standing behind it, saying this was really fun to make rather than I think this is good.

The more I did that, the more I could show up in my academic life, to recognize the places where I was requiring myself to be good or perfect, and to start to ease up and also recognize where other people were asking me to be good or perfect, or not giving me what I needed or deserved because I wasn't good enough in their eyes, I could start to recognize that and push back on it. So I think my creative practice created an awareness. It also allowed me to feel safe in the good enough, in the messy, in the quote unquote “bad.”

Because I think, you know, our nervous systems are regulated to the idea of clean, orderly, good, perfect, right, where we feel safe there. But when the kid colors outside of the lines, for a lot of us, we feel that in our nervous system, we feel that in our body, we go, oh, no, because it feels wrong. And so it can be very dysregulated and unsafe to just engage in the process. And we saw that so much when we had this project in 2019, the parents would look at their kids engaging in process art. And they'd say, Oh, they're probably not supposed to do that, or I'm really sorry that they're doing it that way. Or they're being really…And we would just be able to say, it's okay, that's what we're doing here. We're engaging in the process. And sometimes that means painting on the walls, painting on the ceiling, spilling paint getting paint all over your face. Right.

And so I think, the more that I've learned, I've explored this, and have built up my, you know…in the literature, it's the window of tolerance, right…the more I've built up my window of tolerance for imperfection. And the more I've allowed, I can really allow my students, who are having life struggles or who are struggling with material or just struggling to do something technical, like upload an assignment to the learning management system, I'm able to say, that's what we're doing here, right, that's similar to getting paint on the walls or paint all over your face, right? And just go, that's what we're doing here, we're learning this, and there's a lot less pressure on them to perform, because I put a lot less pressure on myself to perform.

And if people are putting pressure on you, you need to back up, because we're not doing that whole, I'm going to be perfect. And I can juggle all the things. Because the truth is we can't, we are finite beings, that, you know, in the way it's defined currently, none of us are good enough. And why would we want to be? Because that version? Well, yeah, none of us are good, I should say. But that version of good is a robot, it is impossible to have all the things that they say we should be wanting, and that we should be juggling and all the things we should be accomplishing. It's impossible, so good enough, and being in the process is and just piecing together, right? You're just taking all the little things that you collect along the way and piecing a life together that you hopefully feel like is beautiful, beautiful tapestry of curiosity and exploration.

Karen: That's a really beautiful place to end. But I do want to ask you one more question, which is, what is your next project?

Mariglynn: Oh, such a good question. You know, if you'd asked me a couple of weeks ago, I might have had a blank stare. But I've been writing a lot more recently and trying to piece together my big emotions to other things in a broader context, or really trying to create a quilt or an assemblage of ideas and experiences with some version of a tangible art. So obviously, that's hard to understand, what I just said, because I am trying to figure that out. But I recently have found myself back with my fabric with my sewing machine with my design wall.

And even as we've seen some of the events in the world it feels a lot like 2017, when we were all newly despairing in new and different ways, and I have found myself despairing and a little lost. My self-care doesn't currently cover this, this level of despair and and I just have found myself going, I need to sew some fabric together. Like I need to cut it and I need to sew it and so right now on my design wall, I have an improv piece that was trying to be, is trying to be responsive to what's happening and how I'm feeling and trying to channel some of that despair and, and frustration into my hands right to thinker so that I'm processing this while I'm working. And then also have an external a tangible item to use to talk about the process, the experience, right.

So I'm excited to be back in that place and really just new and trying to figure out making it this stage in my life is very different than making in that past age. I'm not making for survival in the way I was in those early years, I'm making for expression and for exploration and, and for response, to make a statement. And that's a new, it's a new way of being and working. And I'm very excited. But I'm also very scared and apprehensive about what this means. But when you're in the process, it doesn't matter. I'm just showing up. If you make something ugly, awesome. If you make something that you like, awesome. But the point is to keep your hands moving.

Karen: Mariglynn, I am so so grateful for everything that you've shared, all of these wonderful ideas that I'm going to be thinking about, and “thinkering” with. Thank you so much!

Mariglynn: Thank you. It was so fun to get to talk about how these things and to be on your podcast, and thank you so much for having me.

Karen: Of course, of course!