The Living Library is a community of readers who like grappling with complexity and humanity and new paradigms—but, you know, in a fun way.
We ask: how may we resource ourselves so we may resource the world?
Hello! I am Katie, a coach and consultant for highly sensitive and gifted adults, and a multi-disciplinary artist. You can learn more about working with me 1:1 here.
I created The Living Library to share work in the vein of Dan Pink’s concept of symphony: a right-brain mode of connecting the dots between disparate things, and seeing what’s good at the intersections.
Living in a time of complex change, whether at the global level or the individual level, means finding new dots to connect, and new ways to join the new dots to old dots.
We look in different books, articles, and arts, and add to our collection of dots. We then carry them about, like the living libraries we all are.
Living in a time of complex change also means finding good company and contexts that support you with all that damned grappling.
When you are part of the Living Library, you receive 2-4 posts per month that take an idea or excerpt and expand on it, or synthesise it somewhere else, often using a complex systems lens. A surprising amount of these are about ideas and artifacts that are simply fun (an underrated piece of the complex existence puzzle).
In joining The Living Library, you receive a lovely (and blessedly short) form of intellectual and emotional company.
Paid subscribers receive:
Two to four posts a month showcasing an idea, expanding on it or synthesising it into something else;
Membership in the Living Library community, including the ability to comment and converse among ourselves.
It’s readers like you that make it possible. At a discounted rate of $60NZ per year, an annual subscription to Symphonia costs less than you might pay for a couple of paperbacks at you independent bookshop of choice. I am so grateful to my paid Library members for supporting my independent work, and independent writers more generally.
Free subscribers receive:
Public posts.
About me
I am a complex systems and humanity enthusiast. I am also a coach and consultant for gifted and highly sensitive adults, and a multi-disciplinary creative. I live with complex chronic illnesses and a little dachshund named Ween, in Christchurch, New Zealand.
I have also been called (kindly?) “the living library”.
I’m a happy little magpie for compelling ideas and perspectives on a million things (the dots to connect to other dots), so I am always reading books and foraging in the internet’s undergrowth on topics I could never exhaustively catalogue. As I prepare my posts for the newsletter, I draw on the following experiences and themes in particular:
Life in the heart of capitalism as a big firm lawyer
Life far outside capitalism as someone with complex and chronic illness
Creativity, creative work, and the bits of living that go out beyond words (I love 21st century Danish jigs as much as I love dumb procedural TV)
The human culture changes needed in the face of climate crisis (or all the crises)
Our relationship to the self, and to our emotional and sensory worlds
The need for fun, joy and pleasure in all of the above
I am the author of The New Lawyer Companion: Essays on Life, Law and Humanity, and the creator of Dark Songs with Katie, a narrative entertainment show about complex humanity. My essays have appeared in The Dominion Post, LawTalk, and LexisNexis’ Learn Law Life platform. My multi-disciplinary project The Waiting Room, about experiences of medical limbo, is forthcoming in 2024.
When I’m not doing all of that, I’m singing little songs about sausage dogs and trying to get better at relaxing.
Won’t you join us?
