181. Writing Through Chaos: Creativity and Resilience with Catharine Bramkamp

“I am currently deeply involved with the process and the importance of creativity in the second half of life.” - Catherine Bramkamp

In this episode of How To Write the Future, “Writing Through Chaos: Creativity and Resilience with Catharine Bramkamp,” host Beth Barany chats with fellow writing and creativity coach Catharine Bramkamp. Catharine dives into why creativity matters in the second half of life and shares resources to keep your spark going. Together, they explore how life’s chaos can actually fuel creativity and compare how artists in the past and today respond to turbulent times.

ABOUT CATHARINE BRAMKAMP

Catharine Bramkamp is a successful writing coach, Chief Storytelling Officer, former co-producer of Newbie Writers Podcast, and author of a dozen books including the Real Estate Diva Mysteries series, and The Future Girls series. She holds two degrees in English and is an adjunct university professor. After fracturing her wrist, she has figured out there is very little she is able to do with one hand tied behind her back. She delights in inspiring her readers.

Website: https://catharine-bramkamp.com/

Catharine Bramkamp books: https://www.amazon.com/stores/Catharine-Bramkamp/author/B009NI5CN0

Real Estate Diva Mystery Series: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0843TJ54Y

Future Girl: https://www.amazon.com/Future-Girls-Changing-harder-looks-ebook/dp/B07NDF21Y8

RESOURCES

GET HELP WITH YOUR WORLD BUILDING - START HERE - Free World Building Workbook for Fiction Writers: https://writersfunzone.com/blog/world-building-resources/

GET FREE WRITING COACHING LIVE ON THE PODCAST - Sign up for the 30-minute Story Success Clinic with Beth Barany: https://writersfunzone.com/blog/story-success-clinic/

• SHOW PRODUCTION BY Beth Barany
• SHOW CO-PRODUCTION + NOTES by Kerry-Ann McDade
• EDITORIAL SUPPORT by Iman Llompart

c. 2025 BETH BARANY

https://bethbarany.com/

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Transcript

181. Writing Through Chaos: Creativity and Resilience with Catharine Bramkamp

Introduction and Host Background

BETH BARANY: Hi everyone. Welcome to How to Write the Future Podcast. I'm your host, Beth Barany. I'm an award-winning science fiction and fantasy novelist. And I am a creativity coach and editor and I specialize in supporting science fiction and fantasy authors who wanna go from idea to publication of their novels. And I also work with creative entrepreneurs who want to build their creative businesses, specifically serving writers. I'm very much in the writing space and in the creativity space. And I have this podcast because I believe that what we vision as creatives, we help make so.

And this podcast is not just for creative writers, it is also for anyone. Anyone who cares about the future of humanity, and the future of us on this beautiful planet. So to that end, I love talking with other people other, thought leaders, other creatives. 

[00:54] Introducing the Special Guest: Catharine Bramkamp

And today I have a special guest, uh, my friend Catharine Bramkamp.

Catharine, welcome. So glad that you're here. 

CATHARINE BRAMKAMP: Thank you so much. It's always a pleasure to talk with you. It's great to be here. 

BETH BARANY: Oh, so wonderful. And if you could just tell people a little bit about you so they can get to know you, and then we have some really fun questions for everyone.

CATHARINE BRAMKAMP:Thank you. 

[01:15] Catharine Bramkamp's Background and Work

Hi, I'm Catharine Bramkamp. I am a writing coach and a creativity coach, and I am currently deeply involved with the process and the importance of creativity in the second half of life. I have a class going on in November, I'm doing workshops on creativity, and I'm speaking on creativity, particularly because so many writers and artists across the board are feeling very pushed with AI that this is going to destroy everything and AI is going to be able to do everything. So I've been doing a lot of deep dives into that, and so I have, uh, classes and lectures that I'm doing about that and the creative impulse that still remains uniquely human.

So that's, oh, and I have a master's in creative writing. I just, there's something there.

BETH BARANY: And you're a novelist.

CATHARINE BRAMKAMP: And I'm a novelist, yeah. I have about, I've published about twenty seven books, so I, I have experience with that in self-publishing and traditional publishing, both. And I'm a poet, novelist, and a nonfiction writer. 

BETH BARANY: Yeah. Yeah. And Catharine writes a monthly column for our blog, Writers Fun Zone, if you wanna check out her really fun, creative advice. And also, I should say funny. You are very funny.

CATHARINE BRAMKAMP: Thank you.

BETH BARANY: So one of the things I really love about your articles, not everyone can pull that off in their teaching. You know, these are little teaching articles for writers. And so funny. 

[02:43] The Role of Art in Responding to Chaos

So we're here today to really address kind of the period that we're in. And of course, our time period is not unique in the fact that it's highly chaotic. So I would really love to hear from you on-- in your experience and opinion, how does art respond to chaos?

And I, I would also be more specific, like, how do artists respond or to chaos or how can we respond to chaos? 

CATHARINE BRAMKAMP: When we first talked about this, it's an interesting question and one that when I dove into it I realized that, ironically, when the world is extraordinarily chaotic art thrives because it is one of the best ways that we have to exert some control over our own situations.

So if everything else is going crazy, my recommendation is, first of all, turn off your social media, and definitely turn off the news because it's becoming louder and shriller with very little facts to back it up. That's a little depressing, and dive into your work, which can very much be a response to what is raging around you. But the difference is with art, with our writing, with our music, with our sculpture, our visual artwork, fiber arts, we're controlling our environment. For even a half an hour, you are creating and controlling, and that is astonishingly important and huge. If you spend even a little time, fifteen, twenty minutes doing a little painting or, or even, you know, coloring a, a mandola, you come away from that, you walk away from that a lot calmer. You have exerted something and in turn created, and I think art is really an important response to chaos.

That's the very first. Art is second responders. Artists tell you, something happens like World War I-- artists, their job is to tell you what happened and deliver meaning. 

How can we create meaning for the next ten years, for the next generation about what happened? 

That's also part of an artist's job is- We have first responders in an emergency, and artists are the second responders to give that emergency some sort of container for us to understand it better. 

BETH BARANY: Wow, I, oh my goodness, so many good things you said there. One about control. I know I feel better even if I can spend twenty, thirty minutes on my writing and two being second responders. I've never heard anyone say that. I think that is so delightful. It's, it can be painful, right? We, we process our emotions through our art and so important because we help others interpret. We help others have meaning.

And kind of a sidebar to that is I listen to French radio all the time, and part of the reason I go to it is because I wanna hear them talk about the world. And they're focused on this particular channel I listen to is a lot the artists. It's, it's also politics and it's also what, what are people thinking and talking because they have fun call-in shows, but they have a fabulous news show where comedians comment on the news and make hilarious little skits.

And I know my French is pretty darn good 'cause I can get most of the humor. And over time I've now gotten most get getting better at understanding the context, 'cause a lot of it is, of course French focused, but not just. 

CATHARINE BRAMKAMP: Yeah. And context.

BETH BARANY: Yeah. And it's so great to hear them talk about the United States or other countries about what's going around on around the world because they're giving me some meaning. They're interpreting the world for me. And it's through a different cultural lens. So to me that's very interesting and inspiring also 'cause the French value the creative arts more highly. 

CATHARINE BRAMKAMP: And that's a whole, that's a whole nother conversation with our culture that we have in the US is that we, we honor commerce almost exclusively. 

I've written about this extensively, but there is that compulsion, and you know, this too, is like when you say, oh, I'm a writer, and what's the first thing, oh, if you published, how, and if you've published, then the next thing is how many did you sell? do you make a living? 

And it's like, no, that's not even the point. It's like, do you ask people who just made a baby quilt? Oh, did you sell that? I get defensive on behalf of artists. No, this isn't commerce. This is meaning, this is actually what we do is far more important than just money.

That's not even part of it. Our job is to say, oh, we just went through well, and to, let me just back up to your point. 

We're going through incredible, almost disabling chaos for us, and the best way to cope oftentimes is that laughter, is bringing in the court jesters who will say what A, we're thinking, and B, we can't express ourselves. 

And that's also what artists do, is that we bring the words, the poems, the picture, the art that then helps the viewer manage their feelings or understand what's going on. 

I was at the, um, the Wayne Thiebaud exhibit at the De Young and a friend of mine said, we looked at one of the big vertiginous pictures that he does of, of the San Francisco streets, and they're just up and down lines. Okay. They're just like on a flat plane and they're just like straight up and little dots on it, that must be the street. And my friend commented, and he is not an artist, but he commented and he said, well, that's not accurate, but it is how it feels.

And I thought, yeah, it's not accurate. It's not even supposed to be accurate, but it is how it feels. 

And any moment that we can deliver as artists to someone else who says, oh wow, that's how it feels. That's what we're here for. That's what our job is. 

BETH BARANY: I'm so with you. You know, art is about emotion and feelings. I know both you and I as writing teachers, we, we focus on that. And I help my writers key into that. Let's jump to the examples that you mentioned.

CATHARINE BRAMKAMP: Yeah.

BETH BARANY: Can you give us some examples, three artists who have responded to chaos and how did that help? How did that help the people who received that art? 

[09:05] Historical Examples of Art Responding to Chaos

CATHARINE BRAMKAMP: This is not in chronological order, but the first example and a very interesting, very crazy examples are the artists who followed World War I. Studying this has just turned me on all sorts of interesting artists and interesting responses.

So World War I between 1914 and 1918 was or ended up being fairly pointless. Okay, there you go. There's your quick history lesson on a four year war. Nothing much was gained. It was a trench of warfare. They didn't make it across No Man's Land very often, and it was billed as something easy to do and we could deep dive into the male hubris of that, but men went to war, countries went to war, and they said, okay, we're gonna knock this out of the park. We're gonna start up in August, we're gonna be outta there by December, by Christmas. No, no problem. It was a problem. One of the defining features of this particular war is the influx of machinery.

So it was won by modified Gatling guns from the Civil War forty years earlier into machine guns. And think of that word, machine gun. Tanks were starting to come in, not successfully, by the way, if you really want some hilarity read about the first tanks that tried to get over the mud in No Man's Land. Did not work out well.

Bombs, mustard gas-- all sorts of really dehumanizing systems. So the response then from artists was like a Max Ernst, where you start seeing collages, photo montages, where they're using photography to mess around and create different art. 

They're melding human parts, human bodies into machine bodies as an expression as to how people were treated, how the soldiers were treated just as fodder. And that was the reality coming out of this war. It wasn't glorious artists like Owen, um. Like Owen marched into the war thinking it was gonna be glorious. And after a year in the trenches started writing poems and saying, no, no, not so glorious, this is pretty bad. 

And the poets started to express what was going on, so that's where you get the Flanders Field and the poppy icons. All of that is coming from the artist saying, oh, this is not working out at all. 

What's interesting was that it was so fast. So by the 1920s the art was in full bloom, and the expression and the dissatisfaction was being expressed.

As we move into World War II, the Vietnam War and even 9/11, it took the artists more than just a year to turn that around, which is interesting as well. They needed to process it. 

So you get something a little bit later, Hemingway aside, with the Spanish Civil War. Those traumatic experiences usually took some time to digest.

Sometimes it's a fast turnaround, like Guernica was, was created in 1921 right after the bombings in Guernica. And that was in 1937 ish. Don't quote me. Picasso was responding, you know, to that very quickly and wanted to express how awful that was. And we still go and stand in front of that mural size painting and say, how can we not do that?

The question is, who's standing in front of it saying, how can we not do that? Because there are some people who will remain nameless, who have not seen a piece of artwork probably ever in their lives. But it's interesting to watch how the artists are looking at the world and responding to the world, so off during the twenties and the thirties, you have literary, poetic, and visual responses to what's happening in the world and how that is destroying. 

And I'll finish up with this segment is with, F. Scott Fitzgerald with The Great Gatsby. What is the quote the, the villain in this book is his car, the machine.

And it's beautiful. So you have this car that's says artwork, that's it's yellow, it's gorgeous. It's the reason that there's even a mechanic with a wife who's having an affair with Daisy's husband. 

Daisy, who is a careless, rich person. That's another fabulous line. The careless rich-- is driving the machine, runs over a woman, doesn't take the blame because the machine is linked to Gatsby and he's the one who gets killed. Sorry, spoiler alert. 

I found that link fascinating in the light of this first great war was emphasized and was one not by, it was one through exhaustion and, and a last minute entry by the Americans who also brought over the Spanish flu because, you know, we'd like to be a full service operation here, and then only that killed more people. Oh, yay. That was the response on a big historical level. 

[14:10] Personal Stories of Art and Resilience: Mary Delany

On a more personal level, one of the artists who I've studied, Mary Delany, grew up exactly in the 18th century. She was born in 1700 and died in 1789. She covered the 18th century and one of my favorite quotes was "There was a little bit of trouble in the states in 1776."

They were, they didn't really, they were in Bath, they didn't care. Whatever. She had a, you know, a typical upper class, British life in that she was living on an estate in Ireland. First marriage, terrible, second marriage, a love match. And when she lost that husband, in those times, the women had very little recourse. They didn't inherit and in fact, he was gonna make a will. Never got around to it. Died first. A typical Jane Austen plot kind of situation for Mary. Well, she had a lovely friend who, it was a Duchess and Duchess of Portland. Yes, who put her up in, in her house, which isn't too bad if you have a, you know, one hundred and fifty room house, you know, it's pretty easy to put your friends up. No one notices you.

So Mary has nothing. She's at the whim of friends. What does she do? She starts collaging, essentially. She sees plants like a flower, and says, oh, I could reproduce this with tissue paper, with colored paper, and starts to cut. And you think about this, she cuts tiny little petals, glues them down. She cuts tiny little stems, glues them down. She cuts over nine hundred of these. They are so interesting that the Duchess says, oh, guys, you need to come over and see this, including King George and Queen Charlotte, who loved the work. The Curator of Kew Gardens sends her exotic examples of flowers so that she can reproduce them.

A lot of the flowers she reproduced over the course of this, and she's seventy when she started this, okay? For fifteen, twenty years, she's like the darling of these botanists saying, hey, reproduce this, hey, reproduce this. Some of those flowers, some of those plants have gone extinct and her representations of them are the only thing that is left.

So, one would think, okay, you're famous, that's nice, but that still doesn't put bread on the table. King George and Queen Charlotte liked her so much, she was in a, a gregarious woman and very friendly, they liked her work and her so much that when the Duchess of Portland passed away and now Mary doesn't have a place to live, they found a cottage for her on the Windsor complex and she lived the rest of her life out in a very comfortable situation next to Windsor Castle.

So there's an example of someone who takes what could be construed as complete chaos in her own personal life, but gets herself out of it through her art, and she loved doing it.

So that's the other thing to remember is-- and I tell this to clients all the time, it's like, okay, yes, you wanna be famous or known for your work, but like a musician with a hit song, do you wanna play that all the time?

I mean, I look at, you know, popular musicians and they are stuck with their greatest hits. And it's like the fortitude of being able to reproduce that over and over again with the same enthusiasm is truly astonishing to me.

So, but Mary was doing something different. She was getting information, she was doing something that wasn't the same repetitive thing, the style was, but the object wasn't. And if you wanna see these, you can go to the British Museum and ask, and they will, you can go in and see 'em, that's one of my plans for 2027 is to go see those cutouts, she called them mosaics. So that's an example of how personally, that art can help you and get you out of a situation and into something that maybe you didn't even realize you needed, but there it is. 

BETH BARANY: I love that. And, and so you have two examples you gave us primarily what, what we had the Great Gatsby, you called out and Mary Delany but you also mentioned Max Ernst, Guernica, Picasso. Was there another example? I mean, we covered, these are wonderful. 

[18:21] Modern Artists and Their Responses to Chaos

CATHARINE BRAMKAMP: You have Salvador Dali who, you know, drips things with persistence of memory. What does that really mean? You have artists who are responding to trends in psychology in new systems of thinking.

You have artists who are responding to two back-to-back wars. You could even call it a, the sixty five year war essentially. You have a little piece of depression in the middle. They're responding to this constant rattling around. Somebody like Virginia Wolf who wrote Between The Acts. That was written right before World War II exploded, and there's a number of artists who predicted that idea because they were in this quiet trench saying the other shoe hasn't dropped. You know, what are we doing and what is going to happen? 

Frida Kahlo is another example of an artist who works her way through trauma and very personal, um, very intense. She led a very intense life as you guys are probably all familiar with, but she found a way to keep herself going with that kind of expression. 

And that's exactly what we do. And you can do it in the middle of a city. You can do it like, a Natalie Goldberg or like, Georgia O'Keefe, where you get yourself out of the city because you need a space that's going to be calmer.

You can do it dead center in the middle of New York City, like, a Lee Krasner or, I am totally spacing on my 1950 beatnik women who have made incredible work. 

You have uh, Max Ernst again he's the one who ha- --if you ever see a, a kind of a Victorian gentleman image with a bird head on him, that's a Max Ernst thing. He's really good at creating extraordinarily disturbing things because he was dealing with an extraordinarily disturbing time in the middle of the wars, in between the wars.

[20:16] Host's Personal Response to Chaos Through Writing

BETH BARANY: I think this perspective is so helpful, and it actually makes me think about, well, my choices, how I have responded.

I had a very specific choice to make and did make, in 2016, with the US Presidential elections. My response was to commit to a writing project. And I did. I wrote four novels in seven months that then I went on to publish over the next few years, which is my science fiction mystery series.

CATHARINE BRAMKAMP: Right. 

BETH BARANY: Talk about justice and rich versus poor and, life, death and, and all the things that you get to do when you do murder mysteries with a young woman who's dealing with her own personal tragedy and past tragedies. So, that was my particular response. And my response in general is to commit even deeper to my work because I know that it helps me and that it's gonna be a catharsis for others.

CATHARINE BRAMKAMP: Yeah. 

[21:09] How Art Helps Artists and Writers

BETH BARANY: So I was wondering if you could also address that, or how can art and how does art really help the artists? And if you could speak specifically for writers. 

CATHARINE BRAMKAMP: I'm in a writing group, of course, I'm in a writing group. I'm in a number of writing groups. One of the women in one of my writing groups commented that, and this is since 2016, that's kind of a watershed for a lot of us. Her comment was, she said, she's responding to what's going on in the world by writing a novel about how it all could be better. She's reconstructing like a her land, like a utopian kind of book, it's like, all right, what does it look like if it is completely different? And exploring that because that is a more positive outlook for her. Here's something else to consider as artists, as writers particularly, how much do you wanna spend in that world that you're creating?

Are you creating something that's a little lighter? That can be funny. That's how I write. Do you want to create characters who you love, or are you creating despicable characters? How does that work for your psyche?

There's definitely considerations about that. And I talk about that too with clients who are working with memoir as like, how much of this do you really wanna revisit? You know, is it going to work for you? I always say, if you're gonna write a memoir, make sure you've got a therapist on call because you know, to make it real, you have to make it real and, how is that gonna work in the time you're in? Maybe you're better off moving, saying, okay, like you did Beth, where you say, okay, I'm in this space historically and politically. What am I going to create that will help me? And we'll put the hard stuff maybe in another time, because this isn't the time for it. 

So we're not only responding, but we need to respond to what our own, our own psyches desire at the time. 

BETH BARANY: Absolutely. And there was a lot of factors that lined up that led me to write the Janey McCallister Mystery series, including the ability to articulate the storyline in a sentence, which let me know as a writer that it was mature enough to move forward. 'Cause it had been a story idea that had been in the back of my mind for over ten years. So I tend to marinate ideas for a very long time before they're ready to go, and also it's about someone who has all the skills, and I'm writing a, a, a near future. It's one hundred and thirty years in the future where I get to imagine a lot of things that are better and some of the things that are the same. And then I get to put a, a justice person in the center. She's an investigator, she's a cop, essentially, and she's smart and kick ass and she's got her science background and she's got her humanist background and she's got her personal background that drives her. So I, I really got to create a person who gets to be active on. 

CATHARINE BRAMKAMP: Yeah. 

BETH BARANY: And who gets to be snooping around and who gets to put the handcuffs on the bad guys and who gets to speak for the dead also 'cause she's investigates murders, so, and then also gets to create a really interesting team and gets to lead that team. So it has all these factors that I was interested in and still am interested in exploring. 

CATHARINE BRAMKAMP: I think to that point, and, we were talking about what do you read to relax? What do you read to get yourself back together? And, my go-to probably like yours is murder mysteries and not extreme violent ones because that's doesn't help. 

But it's an odd answer for some people because they're gonna say, well, why not romances? Why not, fantasy? What is it about murder mysteries? Because the bad guy gets caught. That is hugely satisfying and does not happen in real life. And that's why I like to write 'em, and that's why I like to read them.

I just flashed on a character that I could put in my next Sexy by Sixty series and it's like, oh, I can make this really repulsive person and then they'll have their comeuppance. That never happens. Let's do it in fiction And again, that's what we're offering. 

BETH BARANY: Yeah. Yeah. 

CATHARINE BRAMKAMP: As writers. 

BETH BARANY: I love that so much. And it's funny, I actually watch a ton of murder mysteries. 

CATHARINE BRAMKAMP: Sure. 

BETH BARANY: I tend to gravitate towards action adventure, romance or sci-fi, or I did just read a romantasy by Kate Johnson, and she's a writer who does a broad range of stories, and it did turn out to be also action adventure. I've moved away from reading only romances. I used to, I've read a ton and I've written a handful. But what I love is the action adventure, quest. People and women becoming really powerful with magic and things like that, or- 

CATHARINE BRAMKAMP: Oh, yeah. 

BETH BARANY: Just having a particular set of skills like in her Max Seventeen series, you know, her badass heroine. So, I need to kick butt somehow in my stories, both the ones I write and the ones I read.

CATHARINE BRAMKAMP: Oh, I think that's huge. I mean, the K-pop Demon Hunter movie is incredible because that is exactly what those young ladies are doing is they're kicking ass, they've got their materials, they've got their, their-- 

BETH BARANY: Spoilers. I haven't seen any of any of it yet.

CATHARINE BRAMKAMP: It's worth an hour and a half of your time. 

[26:04] Final Thoughts and Conclusion

BETH BARANY: So I wanna wrap up I have a question, which is, what does it mean for you to write the future? 

CATHARINE BRAMKAMP: I think it means that I can create it for myself, that's something that writers end up doing. So, I've written books, way back a long, long time ago where it's like, oh, that actually came true. Oh, I put that into the universe. So like with my, my creativity book that I'm working on, my premise is the universe is expanding. So I think it's expanding through our art. I think it expands when we bring it more joy, more interest, more introspection, and that's important.

Creating something is important because it starts pushing the boundaries out a little bit more. That's how I look at it when I'm creating my art, it's just adding. Everything we do adds in a positive way. 

BETH BARANY: Hmm. I love that. I love that. So how can people find out about you if they wanna check out your books, your programs, where can they go?

CATHARINE BRAMKAMP: They can go to my website. It's not beautiful, but it's informative. It's like it's how I'm working with it. I'm at Catharine -Bramkamp.com. Yeah, super easy. Just my name. 

BETH BARANY: Well, Catharine, I know we could go on and on and I love talking with you and from the moment we met at that writer's conference many, many years ago-

CATHARINE BRAMKAMP: Yeah. 

BETH BARANY: It was so fun. I love hearing your perspective and also bringing your humor out into the world. I love sharing that with folks through our blog. 

CATHARINE BRAMKAMP: Thank you. 

BETH BARANY: So I just wanna say thank you so much for being a guest. 

CATHARINE BRAMKAMP: Thank you- 

BETH BARANY: On How To Write The Future and everyone listening. Write long and prosper.