How I Created, Funded and Launched My New Podcast (while the World Was in Meltdown‪)‬ The 21st Century Creative

Welcome to Episode 10 of the Creative Disruption season of The 21st Century Creative, where we are hearing stories of creatives around the world who came up with a creative response to the challenges of the pandemic.



It’s been my most ambitious season yet, with creatives from 5 continents and probably the closest I’ll ever get to releasing a concept album, because all the interviews have had a common thread - how creators around the world were disrupted by the Covid-19 pandemic.



And each interview tells the story of how one creative, or team of creatives, rose to the challenge by doing something new and different, that opened up new possibilities for their future.



I focused on the arts and creative industries that experienced some of the biggest disruption, such as theatre, music, art, film and TV production.



I also had stories from some creative fields that didn’t necessarily get so much media coverage, but which were also severely affected, such as personal development, experiential marketing, street photography and tattoo art.



And one thread that runs through every single interview this season, is the extraordinary, creativity, courage and resilience shown by my guests, in creating new types of artwork, new products, new services and even entirely new companies, in the face of a global crisis.



And finally, today, I am going to close the loop by sharing my own story of my journey through the pandemic.







So there’s a bit of a different format for this episode, in the first part, I’m going to tell the story of my pandemic, and how it affected our company, The 21st Century Creative. I’ll talk about the challenges I faced, the discoveries I made and the lessons I’ve learned.



Then in the second part, Joanna Penn, who you have previously met as a guest on The 21st Century Creative, has kindly interviewed me about the inspiration behind my poetry podcast, A Mouthful of Air, and how I conceived, funded, launched and produced it against the backdrop of the pandemic.



Mark McGuinness



Mark McGuinness with 'Elegy for Moss', co-created with Sheena Devitt



After 6 seasons of The 21st Century Creative, it’s quite possible that you already have a pretty good idea of who I am. But on this show, I’m mostly talking in my role as a coach for creatives, so you may not be as familiar with my poetry.



It’s also possible that this is the first episode of The 21st Century Creative you’ve come across, in which case an introduction is definitely in order.



So my name is Mark McGuinness and I’m an award-winning poet from the West Country of England, which Anglo-Saxon historians and Thomas Hardy fans know as Wessex. I currently live in Bristol, which is the big city compared to where I grew up, in rural Devon.



My mother is from Devon and my father is Scottish and his family goes back to Ireland, so there’s a mixture of Saxon and Celt in my ancestry and my cultural inheritance.







I'm also the host of A Mouthful of Air, which was recently selected as one of the 9 Best Podcasts for Poetry Lovers, by Podcast Review, published by The Los Angeles Review of Books.



The photos on this page are of ‘Elegy for Moss’, a concrete poem I co-created with the artist and sculptor Sheena Devitt, and exhibited at The Lettering Arts Trust; I tell the story of this collaboration in the first part of today's episode.



Outside of poetry, I've spent the last 25 years as a coach for creatives, which led to me writing several books for creatives, contributing to two international best sellers published by 99U, and hosting this podcast, The 21st Century Creative, since 2017.



'Elegy for Moss' by Sheena Devitt and Mark McGuinness



My interviewer: Joanna Penn