Dear EverMore: Building a Personal Curriculum
Dear Readers & Listeners,
In honor of back to school season, Episode 2 is an ode to the thread of curiosity.
With declining literacy rates and using AI to think, we wanted to learn for the sake of learning. So, we decided to build our own personal curricula for the Fall.
Building a Personal Curriculum
We didn’t overthink the process—We both journaled on something that was interesting to us, and then we researched ways to flesh out that initial spark.
Reflection
Here are the questions we reflected on and discussed:
What new energy do you want to call in?
How can you keep growing to help your life?
What do you want to understand better for fun?
Most importantly, what are you so curious about right now that you're constantly looking it up?
We decided to take the rest of the year to pursue our individual curriculum leveraging books, videos, and other experiences to deepen our understanding.
Drumroll, please…Our Curricula…
Courtney
I decided to study the concept of beauty and its ties to camp.
I turned 40 this year, so the entanglement of age and beauty in our society is my brain’s background noise. Who gets to decide what's beautiful? What clues do we reveal about our culture and values when certain things become beautiful?
I also see the genre of camp as a way to deal with the "ugly" in an exaggerated and playful manner, which I find beautiful. Yet, it can oft be derided or devalued as an art form. So, I wanted my curriculum to indulge my interests in beauty and camp in a way that played to my philosophy and art education.
Books:
Kant on Beauty and Biology (Interpretation of the Critique of Judgment)
Essays by Susan Sontag (incl. Notes on Camp, Against Interpretation, On Style)
Other Media:
Movies: Drop Dead Gorgeous, Heathers, Edward Scissorhands
TV shows: Pushing Daisies, The Summer I Turned Pretty
Kelsey
Kelsey is exploring the concept of past lives and how hypnosis + psychic readings could help her tap into her past lives.
It plays to her belief that souls are repurposed, so we're sharing the Earth with old and new souls. And hypnosis plays into this season of letting go of control.
Books:
Experiential:
Past Life Regression Therapy (This is the hypnosis therapy Kelsey is trying.)
Kelsey also considered studying art history and gender inspired by the book, The Mirror and the Palette, which highlights that until the 20th century most art history was written about white men by white men. But women have always made art.
How does that erasure from history impact our present day?
Other Bits & Bobs
No Dear EverMore episode is complete without our musings, including (true to theme)—What did this past week teach you?
We discuss topics like:
The value of treating optimism as an intentional practice.
Getting okay with reinvention, rediscovering, and letting fear sit beside you.
Society is losing the nuance that two thoughts can co-exist. Fiction is one of the few places left where we’re comfortable holding contradictions.
Work isn’t separate from the world it inhabits, so we’re forever interested in what’s happening in culture, policy, sentiment.
Beauty and the mystical are part of these happenings, so we look forward to sharing our takeaways from our personal curricula in Season 2 of Dear EverMore.
xoxo,
Courtney @ EverMore
Dear EverMore is a new podcast hosted by Courtney Branson & Kelsey Peterson. It explores how work shapes our humanity, identity, and futures. Season one features diary-esque confessions, guest speakers, and career advice plucked from their collective three decades in HR, hiring, and leadership.
