The Spark File with Susan Blackwell and Laura Camien
Your one stop shop for creative ideas and inspiration. Sign up for our newsletter HERE. Each week on The Spark File podcast, Susan Blackwell and Laura Camien reach into their spark files and share stories, ideas and fascinations to ignite your imagination. Obsessed with creativity, Blackwell and Camien also talk with artists and makers, movers and shakers who have taken the spark of inspiration and fanned it into a flame. Hear from inspiring creatives like Lin-Manuel Miranda, Sara Bareilles, Eric Stonestreet, Jonathan Groff, Julianne Moore and Bart Freundlich, Zachary Quinto, Leslie Odom Jr, Bobby Lopez and Kristen Anderson-Lopez, Billy Eichner, Celia Keenan-Bolger, Karen Olivo, Sutton Foster, Michael R. Jackson and many more about their passions and their failures, their inspirations and their aspirations. Refill your creative fish pond with new ideas and fresh perspectives. Listen, then take it and make it! Learn more at thesparkfile.com.
Episodes
May 27, 2026 • 35 mins
What if one of the greatest creative gifts you could offer someone… was your attention?
In this episode of The Spark File Podcast, Susan Blackwell and Laura Camien explore the transformative work of Nancy Kline and her groundbreaking book Time to Think. Together, they unpack the idea of “thinking environments” — spaces where people can think clearly, creatively, and courageously because they are being listened to without interrupt...
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May 20, 2026 • 43 mins
Feeling stuck, numb, overwhelmed… or just weirdly “off”?
In this episode of The Spark File Podcast, Susan Blackwell and Laura Camien explore the brain’s four major feel-good chemicals — dopamine, serotonin, endorphins, and oxytocin — and the surprising ways creativity helps activate every single one of them.
What starts as a conversation about burnout and anhedonia turns into a hopeful deep dive into creativity, connection, movem...
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May 13, 2026 • 35 mins
What if the people in our lives came with warning labels, gift receipts or invisible instruction manuals?
In this episode of The Spark File Podcast, Laura and Susan explore the invisible “rule books” we all carry — the hidden needs, sensitivities, communication styles, expectations, and emotional landmines that shape our relationships and creative collaborations.
From feedback preferences to friendship dynamics to the phrase “I m...
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May 6, 2026 • 32 mins
What if the muse isn’t something you wait for, but something you meet?
In this episode, Susan and Laura explore the evolution of the creative muse — from ancient Greek mythology (yes, daughters of Zeus included) to modern-day metaphors like demons, geniuses, broccoli, and even… a monkey driving a speedboat.
Along the way, they unpack a powerful truth: The most creative people aren’t waiting for inspiration, they’re showing up – c...
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April 29, 2026 • 41 mins
What if the reason you can’t stop obsessing over that one random thing… is actually because something in your life is going really right?
In this episode of The Spark File Podcast, Laura and Susan dive into Expansion Anxiety – the sneaky psychological pattern that shows up when you’re leveling up creatively, professionally, or personally. Just as things start to expand, your brain tries to pull you back into familiar (and often un...
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April 22, 2026 • 45 mins
What’s the difference between a teacher who changes your life… and one who almost shuts you down for good?
On this week’s episode of The Spark File Podcast, Susan brings a spark from A Tree Grows in Brooklyn — a story about a young writer learning the difference between truth and storytelling, and the teachers who shape (or try to silence) her voice. From a compassionate mentor who helps Francie harness her imagination, to a misgu...
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April 15, 2026 • 41 mins
What if the parts of yourself you’ve been hiding from yourself… are actually the key to your creative breakthroughs?
In this episode, Laura takes us into the world of Carl Jung—by way of a late-night deep dive into Jungian psychology (and yes, just the tip of the iceberg). Along the way, she breaks down the difference between Jung and Sigmund Freud in the most Spark File way imaginable, using everything from Freudian slips to shad...
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April 8, 2026 • 37 mins
What if the thing your creativity needs most… isn’t more effort—but more delight?
In this episode of The Spark File Podcast, we’re diving into the deceptively simple, wildly powerful practice of The Artist Date — a concept from Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way that might just change your creative life.
If you’ve been pouring energy into making, producing, solving, and showing up — but feeling a little… creatively dry? This one’s ...
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April 1, 2026 • 43 mins
What is creativity… really?
In this episode of The Spark File Podcast, we dive headfirst into one of the most slippery — and surprisingly limiting — questions in the creative world: how do we define creativity in the first place?
Along the way, we unpack why so many traditional definitions leave people out, explore the difference between “revolutionary” lightning-bolt ideas and the quieter, powerful force of evolutionary creativi...
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March 25, 2026 • 36 mins
What happens after the big creative push?
In this episode of The Spark File Podcast, Susan and Laura dive into the all-too-real experience of the creative hangover — that strange, tender, sometimes disorienting crash that can come after a big creative risk, milestone, performance, launch, or emotional lift. One minute you’ve done the brave thing. The next? You’re flattened, fragile, weirdly ashamed, or unable to answer a single em...
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March 18, 2026 • 39 mins
What do we do with the grief that doesn’t come with a funeral, a clear ending, or even a name?
In this tender and powerful episode of The Spark File Podcast, Laura shares a spark about “Ambiguous Grief” — the kind of loss that lives in the in-between. It can show up in a relationship that ended without closure, a loved one who is here physically but no longer fully here, a dream that never quite got to live, or the loss of a futur...
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March 11, 2026 • 44 mins
What happens when the thing you reach for to soothe yourself starts quietly stealing your time, your attention, and your creative life force?
In “Dopamine Reset”, this week’s episode of The Spark File Podcast, Susan shares her deeply personal experience of getting hooked on TikTok during a season of illness and exhaustion — and what helped her find her way back. Using insights from Dr. Anna Lembke’s book, Dopamine Nation, Susan an...
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March 4, 2026 • 38 mins
Our latest episode of The Spark File Podcast, Flip the Script, is a dark spark with a bright creative payoff. When Laura has a vivid, unsettling dream she perceives as a warning about allowing strangers into her life, it sends her spiraling into the cultural storytelling we’ve been fed about “charismatic monsters”… and the powerful, necessary work of changing perspective. Using Jessica Knoll’s Bright Young Women as a jumping-off po...
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February 25, 2026 • 43 mins
This episode of The Spark File Podcast, Creating Community is your reminder that creativity doesn’t thrive in a vacuum — it thrives in connection. This week, Susan and Laura talk about why community isn’t just “nice to have”… it’s essential to our mental health, our physical health, and our creative longevity. They dig into the U.S. Surgeon General’s advisory on loneliness, the heartbreak of creative communities that dissolve when ...
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February 18, 2026 • 39 mins
What if creativity isn’t a lightning bolt… but a mashup?
In this episode, Laura shares a Blue Man Group–born concept that can instantly dissolve the “I’m not original enough” spiral: Creation by Recombination—the idea that most innovation comes from connecting existing things in a way no one’s connected them before.
From Blue Man Group’s paint-splattering, percussive “existential hang,” to hip hop turning turntables into instrume...
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February 11, 2026 • 34 mins
In this week’s episode of The Spark File, “I Love You vs. Small Talk,” Laura opens up a BIG spark (100 pounds of topic in a five-pound bag): love—romantic love, friend love, family love, self-love, love of strangers, love of pets… the whole sprawling, life-saving universe of it.
Along the way, Susan and Laura tumble into the brave stuff: why “anything other than I love you is small talk” (thank you, Andrea Gibson), why saying it o...
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February 4, 2026 • 39 mins
In “Making for Minnesota,” we’re asking a question that feels both tender and urgently practical: when the world is loud and scary, what can you make?
Susan shares what happened after our free workshop Be the Change, But How—and how (per Martha Beck) creativity can interrupt anxiety by flipping a different switch in the brain. From there, we follow the sparks straight into Minnesota: community action in bitter cold, a heartbreakin...
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January 27, 2026 • 39 mins
This week on The Spark File, we’re cultivating delight with an episode we’re calling “Words We Love.” Susan went spelunking through her massive digital spark file and emerged with a glittering haul: words that crack us up, words that soothe, words that make you feel—dare we say—carbonated.
We talk effervescent, herkle-durkle, mudita (the joy we feel for someone else’s good news), glugaveder (window weather), mangata (moon street),...
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January 21, 2026 • 40 mins
In this episode of The Spark File, Laura and Susan celebrate the art, science, and deep humanity of a good cry. Sparked by poems, personal stories, and a lovingly unofficial “research study,” they explore why tears are not a weakness—but a powerful form of emotional intelligence and creative release.
You’ll hear why emotional tears literally help flush stress from the body, how “easy criers” may actually process feelings faster, a...
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January 14, 2026 • 31 mins
This week on The Spark File, we’re asking a question that might just unclench your whole nervous system: How Easy Can It Be?
Susan shares a beloved Spark from our brilliant colleague Kate Kayaian (“How would this feel if I let it be easy?”), then takes us on a joyride through filmmaker Cyrus Bates (aka The Mental Level), NBA legend-in-the-making Tyrese Haliburton, big-wave surfing wisdom from 100 Foot Wave, and a simple magic phra...
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