My Creative CV

A hermit crab essay on the power of creative resilience

Welcome to Life after Trauma; I’m Clare Egan. I host a monthly gathering for creatives on the first Monday of the month. Would love to see you there!

My first creative memory: playing with this stamp set.

I’ve been thinking about what makes me qualified to lead a group of creatives. It’s classic imposter syndrome. As soon as I try to start something new, the ‘who do you think you are?’ voice pipes up. It has plenty of ammunition: I haven’t published a book. I’ve never produced a best-selling creative project. I make very little money from my creative work

But one thing I know I am is creatively resilient. I’m really proud of that. I might not be "successful" by a lot of metrics, but I know how to keep going through creative set-backs, isolation and disappointments.

Today’s post is a little different. I’ve written a Hermit Crab essay which uses a familiar format (in this case, the CV) to tell a story. I love writing Hermit Crab essays - there’s something about borrowing the structure of another form (like a recipe, to-do list or letter) that opens up so much room for creative expression. When I was teaching writing classes, the workshop on Hermit Crab essays was always a tremendously generative format for writers, particularly those who were feeling stuck. I thought it might be a fun topic to explore during a monthly creative session. Would you be interested in that?

Heads up that this post is long and full of images and footnotes. You’ll need to open it in your browser to see the whole thing!

Clare Egan’s Creative CV

Creative experience

Founder, Life after Trauma

I established Life after Trauma, a small social enterprise which aims to support survivors of sexual violence. Inspired by my own experience, the organisation seeks to provide information, community, and a safe space for survivor-centred conversations about life after trauma.

• Write a weekly newsletter using a mailing list I started building on Mailchimp in 2014. The list later moved to TinyLetter, then back to Mailchimp, then Squarespace mail and then Substack. After many, many years of hard work, I have less than 1000 subscribers.

• Selected for the Social Entrepreneurs Ireland Ideas Academy, and secured seed funding to expand my work. Proud of my work, though progress has been much slower than expected.

• Took a podcasting class in 2022, with a view to starting the Life after Trauma podcast. Published the first conversation (a great chat with Laura Khoudari about exercise post-trauma), before stalling due to lack of time.¹

• Developed the Life after Trauma website, though it’s been out of date pretty much since the day it went live..

• In November 2024, I received an email from Substack congratulating me for earning my first $1,000 on the platform. Checked the sums before celebrating. It would be 6+ months before I reached that threshold. (To date, I’ve made €1,16.82 before tax. I’ve spent multiples of that on working with editors, marketing strategists etc)

• Hosted The Artist’s Way. It was a deeply fulfilling experience that changed lives. But I came dangerously close to burnout and made almost no money from it.

• Started the Survivors on Screen series about how sexual violence is portrayed in TV and Film. Paused it, because readers weren’t interested in that kind of content.

• Pitched guest posts far and wide. Published two (thank you Aisling Walsh and Dana Leigh Lyons²), but most went unanswered

Freelance writer, various publications

I have been widely published as a freelance writer, with bylines in The Huffington Post, The Irish Times, The Irish Independent, The Irish Examiner, TheJournal.ie, Image Magazine, Longreads, and others.

• When pitching articles, submitting stories and applying for opportunities in 2024, my work was rejected 69% of the time.

• Spent 16 months working on an essay about coming out. It was eventually published in the Huffington Post and I was paid $150.³

• Got horribly retraumatised by an editor who asked me to write more about my experience of childhood sexual abuse, and then ghosted.

• Wrote a queer literature column for a well-known Irish publication. Was quietly dropped because nobody read it. Unpaid.

• Wrote a personal column in another Irish publication until my emails went unanswered and I realised I’d been dropped.

Non-fiction writer, countless false starts, abandoned Scrivener files and failures

Memoir of grief, trauma and recovery:

• Used a period of leave from work to start work on a memoir of trauma and recovery. Organised and filed more than 200 journals. Built the Scrivener file to hold my story. Reviewed my personal archive to begin shaping the story. Accumulated more than 500,000 words of research, messy drafts etc.

“Book 2”, “Life after Trauma: the Book”, various iterations of the same idea

• Irish defamation laws prevent me from sharing my full story, but I wanted to write about the long tail of sexual trauma and how it has shaped my life. Outlined what that project could be, created the Scrivener file(s), started the research process and began reviewing more than 10 years worth of rough drafts toward this project.

Essays (so many..)

• A short book’s worth of essays in various stages of completion.

Fiction writer, various attempts

I have been writing fiction for more than a decade and have published, ehh, nothing. Not a short story, not a flash piece, not a poem, nothing…

Untitled Novel Project

• Wrote two drafts of a novel during the pandemic. Haven’t made the time to complete revisions on the draft. Has been languishing in a digital drawer for 4+ years.

Second Untitled Novel Project

• Got inspired to write a Dark Academia thriller/love story in early 2024. Wrote the first part by hand. Vowed to polish and revise the first section before continuing the draft. Never opened the folder again.

Short Stories (several)

• Wrote my first short story since school in 2024. Shared it with an editor who gave lovely feedback, but nobody wanted to publish it.

• Wrote a second story, which I thought was even better. Again, no-one wanted to publish it.⁴

• Started and abandoned multiple other stories/flashes/scenes. All currently residing on my hard drive.

Co-founder and Editor, Queer Connections

• Founded a small independent publication which sought to celebrate the lives of queer women and non-binary people with my pal Karina. Loved working with other queer writers, but the project was mired in funding difficulties.

Writing teacher and facilitator

• Designed and delivered writing workshops both online and in person. The folks who came along really enjoyed them, and found them generative and helpful in their creative lives. But I could never sell enough tickets to make them financially sustainable.

Creative Education

Completed 15+ writing courses over the last five years, including:

• How Dialogue Works workshop, led by Claire Keegan⁵ (September 2024)

• In person storytelling workshop, led by Clare Murphy⁶ (Autumn 2024)

• Tons of Substack workshops, led by Sarah Fay⁷ (throughout 2024)

• Land Big Bylines by Writing for Columns, led by Courtney Kocak⁸ (April 2024)

• Be Your Own Best Editor, led by Lilly Dancyger (February 2024)

• Screenwriting Workshop, as part of the Gaze festival (Summer 2024)

• What Can the Short Story do?, led by Victoria MacKenzie (Spring 2024)

• Generative Flash workshop⁹ (Spring 2024)

• Climate writing workshops, led by Kerri ní Dochartaigh (Spring 2024)

• Nonfiction intensive on the New York Times’s Modern Love column¹⁰ (Spring 2023)

• Telling Stories Through Food, led by Hannah Howard (Autumn 2022)

• Generative Non-fiction Seminar, led by Hannah Greico (Autumn 2022)

• Nonfiction seminar on essay revision, led by Haley Swanson (April 2022)

• From The Fragments, led by Roe McDermott (Spring 2021)

• Introduction to Creative Non-Fiction class, led by Orla Tinsley (Spring 2021)

Self-directed learning:

• Read dozens of craft books. Only a handful were any good!¹¹

• Morning Pages daily for 15+ years

• Countless creative experiments in the privacy of my journal..

Non-writing creative experience:

Fashion & Textiles:

• Moved to New York in 2013, and felt horribly lonely. Knit a scarf during that frigid winter which people laughed at, but I was very proud of. To be fair, it was more of a triangle than a classic scarf shape. I ended up ripping it and have been moving the same ball of beautiful mustard yarn from home to home over the last 12 years.

• Experimented with customising my clothes as a teenager. I dribbled my black jeans with bleach and fabric paint, tie-dyed tops to make them more unique and (like many teens before me) used the safety pin as a form of adornment.

• Added (almost) every item of clothing to Indyx. Makes getting dressed so much easier.

• Transformed all my tired old white tops into new vibrant navy versions of themselves, using fabric dye in the washing machine.

Embroidery as a form of therapy during the first Trump years

Cooking:

• Got more into cooking as a form of creative expression when I moved in with my partner in 2022.

• Have had some big wins - ice-cream cake, mushroom wellington, lots of great vegan recipes but also some monumental failures: 1kg of bitter boiled onions (a failed attempt at french onion soup) and “buckwheat burgers” (texture of tarmacadam, tasted like nothing).

Gardening:

• 3 seasons of attempting to grow herbs and vegetables. Nothing survived more than 3 days.

• Decided to take a class so I can learn what I’m doing wrong.

Art therapy:

Rage doodling, illustration classes, a perpetually messy desk and DIY art

• Developed an illustration practice inspired by Mari Andrew’s work. Really enjoyed it, but didn’t sustain it.

• Created scrapbook style art pieces to help process my trauma. Found it to be tremendously useful, but haven’t maintained the practice

• Couldn’t afford art for my apartment. DIYed some things to make it feel more like home.

Digital creation:

• Redesigned my personal website again, and again and again and again.

• Created a personal social media strategy. Started trying to use it as a form of creative expression. Quit all social media. Needed space away from the internet to heal.

• Digitised all my photos. A sobering experience.

• Got professional headshots taken for the writing career I thought I’d have. Never used the images.

Professional headshots I bought but never used (summer, 2014)

Miscellaneous:

• Bought a pottery kit to sustain me through a bout of Covid. Made a bunch of things. Most of them ended up in the bin.

• Graffitied under a bridge as a teenager, just to see what it’d feel like.

• Got really into lego after Budino died and I needed a way keep my hands busy in the evenings

• Told the story of the night my mother died at a live storytelling event in Dublin. Didn’t win, but also didn’t die which I considered to be a success..

• Responded to an ad looking for board members of the Irish Writers Centre. Was rejected.

• Started a writing group. Met some lovely people and we met regularly for a year, but it wasn’t destined to go the distance.

• Made a horribly lit BookTube video because I loved reading and watching BookTubers. Never published it.

Various creative pursuits: storytelling, YouTube, graffiti and pottery

Awards

• Received the Simon Cumbers Media Student Award, which funded a reporting trip to report on human rights abuses in the Malawian justice system. I was so triggered by the experience that it took me 18 months to publish the final piece (871 words). By then, the original publication partner’s business model had changed and I had to find an alternative. I talked about that trip in therapy for years afterwards. Unpaid.

Despite it all, I keep going. I keep showing up at the page each morning to write, and find my way through the day. I keep sending newsletters, and hoping to reach people who’ll resonate with my work. I keep trying, experimenting, failing and trying again.

Creativity isn’t just about building a career. It’s a way of life.

I’m not even sure this “counts” as a Hermit Crab essay? Does it really tell a story, or is it merely a collection of things I’ve tried? I’m not sure, but I’m still proud to share it. I’m proud of this awkward, misshapen creative career I’ve built. And I’m excited to see where it might take me next…

Thanks for being here,

Clare x

If you enjoyed this essay, you might also appreciate:

The healing power of creativity

What I learned growing my Substack to 500+ subscribers

💕 If this piece resonated with you, please tap the heart below to help spread the word.

💬 In the comments, I’d love to hear about your creative wins and losses. How have you bolstered your creative resilience over the years? Or perhaps this is a skill you’re trying to develop? Either way, I’m looking forward to hearing from you:

1. This is such a pity as the feedback on that first conversation was so lovely. I hope to get back to podcasting someday soon..

2. I wrote about The Lion King for Aisling Walsh and shared my experience of sobriety in the Sober App newsletter.

3. How could it have taken 16 months, you ask?

4. Made the mistake of asking AI for feedback. It was both hurtful and completely unhelpful! Don’t do this!

5. Best writing workshop I’ve ever done. Must share my learnings in a post soon!

6. Best speaking training I’ve ever done. Clare Murphy is a genius.

7. Some really useful, some not so much.

8. This was a great premise for a course, though I never made the time to action my learnings.

9. Bought 3 sessions. Only went to one. Didn’t vibe with the instructor.

10. Horrible experience with this instructor. Referenced it here.

11. Let me know if you’d like a list of recommendations!