Mary Paul
Designer, multidisciplinary artist, and recovering academic based in New Haven, Connecticut — seeking a rich, fulfilling, and curious life, and writing it all down along the way.
Professional multi-hyphenate
An ex-professor at Wesleyan, I ran away from academia and professional theater to follow my own path. By day, I design. The rest of the time I'm somewhere between mediums, but happiest when I'm exploring or creating — composing at the piano, painting a study, decorating a cake, or sewing a new costume. Most recently, that's meant writing: I started my first novel in May, hoping to finish the draft by September.
Before any of that, there was the road: twenty years of freelancing and travel that turned into this site's name and, eventually, into a habit of looking closely at wherever I happen to be. That instinct — pay attention, then make something — is the throughline between all of it.
I'm also a parent, which has a way of reorganizing every other item on this list without actually removing any of them.
The rules for a good family life have changed — what used to work doesn't always get us where we want to be anymore. Part of what I'm doing here is finding the new rules, tools, and techniques, and sharing the ones that actually work as soon as I find them.
You'll find all kinds of things on this site, and that's a feature, not a bug. It all feeds the same idea: a creative, rich, and satisfying life, in the limited time we get. My three core values are integrity, generosity, and curiosity — you'll find them reflected here in abundance.