Introduction to The Work Between

Hi. I'm Nic Steenhout, and this is The Work Between.

Before I get into what the show is, I want to say whose land it's made on. This podcast is recorded on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territory of the Stó:lō Coast Salish peoples: The People of the River, whose presence in the Fraser Valley stretches back thousands of years. I name this territory because it belongs with what this show is about. The ways we decide whose lives are valued, whose work is taken seriously, and whose experiences are treated as problems to be managed. Those decisions shape everything. This show sits inside that. This is, was, and always will be First Nations land. That's not a formality. It's consistent with everything I and this show stand for.

So. What this show is, and what it is not.

A lot of shows about artists follow a familiar shape. Someone faces hardship. The hardship changes them. The change makes the work better. You come away feeling inspired. It's a satisfying arc. It's also a version that tends to flatten the work, and tidy up lives that aren't typically tidy.

The question I keep coming back to is this: how does your life and your creative practice shape each other? Both in motion. Pushing, pulling, sometimes in conflict, neither one staying still long enough to be a fixed point. That's The Work Between.

And understanding that means getting into the actual work. If someone's a sculptor, we're talking about materials, form, and process. If they're a musician, we're getting into sound and structure. If they paint or quilt or cook, I want to understand how they actually do it; the decisions, the constraints, the techniques. The craft isn't background. It's half the conversation. And it’s often where these questions about identity and experience show up most clearly.

These are long-form conversations. Unhurried, sometimes a bit uncomfortable, and specific. I'll ask questions, I'll follow threads, and I'll leave space when it matters. Not everything needs to resolve cleanly.

I'm not interested in turning people's lives into neat narratives, or using difficulty as a way to make the work more palatable. And I'm not interested in presenting disability — or anything else — as something to be admired from a safe distance. What matters here is what people actually think, and how they actually work.

I make things. I sketch and paint in watercolor. I quilt. I photograph birds and wildlife. I spent years working as a professional chef before changing direction entirely. I tried several other creative endeavours. Some of it stuck. Some of it didn't. But I've been asking myself the questions I'm bringing to this show for a long time.

I've also spent nearly three decades working in web accessibility. My other podcast, A11y Rules, has been running since 2017, with over 160 interviews across two series. What that work taught me — slowly, and sometimes the hard way — is that the most useful thing you can do is listen to someone's actual experience rather than your assumptions about it. That's the discipline I'm trying to bring to every conversation here.

This show is for people who make things, and for people who want to understand how creative work actually happens — especially when it doesn't fit a clean story. A lot of these conversations sit at the intersection of creativity and disability — but you don’t have to be disabled yourself for the work to resonate.

I'm talking to painters, sculptors, fiber artists, musicians, photographers, writers, and chefs. People who work with their hands, their bodies, their materials. People making things that didn't exist before they made them. The work might be visual, physical, edible, wearable, or something that lives in sound. What connects them is that they're all trying to make something that matters to them.

Some guests will have a clear sense of how their disability shaped their work. Some will push back on the question. Some won't have worked it out yet. And that's all right.

They get to be complicated. They don't have to arrive with a lesson. They don't have to leave you feeling uplifted. They just have to be honest about what they actually think.

Every episode has a full, human-edited transcript. That's not a nice-to-have. That's just how the show works. I'll also provide extensive show notes.

Episodes will be released every 2 or 3 weeks.

I'm Nic Steenhout. This is The Work Between. If this sounds like your kind of conversation, subscribe — and I'll see you in the next episode.