We are thrilled to be back this year for another year of conversations with artists, writers, and creatives in residence at Centrum’s Artist Residency Program.

This year, we bring you a series of five conversations held in October 2022 among our cohort of Emerging Artists and Writers who took a moment out of their residencies to pair up and talk process and share experiences related to their various practices.

Overlaps and kinship abound in this nourishing conversation between Christi Krug and Alyssa Graybeal, whose respective careers in writing, memoir, and coaching yields a generous conversation full of juicy advice and heart.

Alyssa Graybeal

Alyssa Graybeal (she/her) is a queer writer and cartoonist whose work explores chronic illness and disability. In particular, she is fascinated by questions of creativity and entrepreneurship, and how navigating the world in a disabled body increases creative capacity. Her first memoir, Floppy: Tales of a Genetic Freak of Nature at the End of the World, explores the emotional landscape of connective tissue disorders Ehlers-Danlos and Marfan syndromes. This book won the 2020 Red Hen Press Nonfiction Book Award and will be released in spring 2023. She lives in Astoria, Oregon.

 Christi Krug

Christi Krug (she/her) experienced invisibility as a child in foster care, and today helps writers of all ages to feel seen. In poetry, memoir, fiction, and creative nonfiction, she honors the inner human experience. She blends modalities as a poet, presenter, visual artist, outdoor enthusiast, and yoga teacher, and is the author of Burn Wild: A Writer’s Guide to Creative Breakthrough. A Pushcart nominee for poetry, she has performed in vineyards, libraries, ballrooms, Portland’s Alberta Rose Theater, Waterstone Gallery, and Yosemite National Park. She served as Creative Resident for North Cascades Institute in 2019. Recent writing has appeared in The Saturday Evening Post, Kosmos Journal, Halfway Down the Stairs, Nightingale & Sparrow, Nat. Brut, Griffel, The Good Life Review, and The Sun. For 25 years, she has been teaching writers at Clark College in Vancouver, Washington and continues to do so virtually after a recent move to the Oregon Coast.