In this episode of Pain In The Arts we welcome back returning guest Skye Cusack alongside her sister, emerging writer and artist Chloe Padmore. Together, they share stories of growing up in a creative family. From their father’s childhood 'cool points' system to navigating different age gaps and living an hour apart in Tasmania.

Skye opens up about her publishing journey with Penguin Random House Australia and Magabala Books, while Chloe reflects on finding her own identity as an author and artist. The sisters dive deep into their upcoming co-authored junior fiction novel, discussing how they blend fictionalised superhero lenses with real-life neurodivergent experiences, subjective truths, and family history. They also explore sensitive topics in creative writing, the nuance of 'wokeness' and social awareness, and the power of connection in change-making art.

You might want to listen if:

• You grew up beside someone who made creativity look effortless, and you’ve wondered where that left you.

• You’re cautiously thinking about making something with a sibling, partner or friend.

• You’re a writer looking for new and unique ways to get your book out into the world.

Find Skye on Instagram: @skye_cusack

Find Chloe on Instagram: @CherryPickedCreative

Skye and Chloe both have pieces in a Magabala Books anthology coming out in February.

Pain In The Arts is a weekly podcast about the reality of creative life. Hosted by Breallyn and Lyndon Wesley. One of them never knows the topic until recording begins.

If you enjoyed this episode, the best thing you can do is share it with one person who'd love it.

Support the show on Patreon:

patreon.com/painintheartslife

Subscribe and listen:

Follow on your favourite podcast app or visit paininthearts.life

Socials:

Insta: @painintheartslife

FB: painintheartslife

Theme music by Lyndon Wesley

Produced on Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung Country.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This episode was first released on May 4th, 2026. It was so good connecting with Erik again after so many years. We hope you enjoy the chat!

Erik Parker has been a lot of things; guitarist, vocalist, live sound engineer, recording producer, guitar teacher, Nirvana tribute act, Satanic gospel cabaret performer, and teenage busker in the Frankston Mall. He joins us to talk about what a music career actually looks like when the work keeps shifting and expanding: the burnout, the reinvention, the collaborations you have to book before the beer is finished, and why he had to learn to get nervous again.

It's also a reunion - Erik was one of Lyndon's guitar students about 30 years ago - so there's a warmth and honesty here that goes deeper than the usual career chat. We cover grief, performance anxiety, the wedding gig where Erik refused to learn a Snow Patrol song (and then absolutely had to learn it), and the night his LPG gas tank fell off his car on the Calder Freeway, closing the freeway and ending a run of Adelaide gigs before they'd even begun.

You might want to listen if:

• You’re a working musician trying to figure out how to sustain a career without burning out

• You need someone to tell you it’s okay to still be figuring it out

• You’ve ever had a gas tank fall off your car on the Western Ring Road!

Find Erik Parker on Instagram

Follow the transcript click here

Pain In The Arts is a weekly podcast about the reality of creative life. Hosted by Breallyn and Lyndon Wesley. One of them never knows the topic until recording begins.

If you enjoyed this episode, the best thing you can do is share it with one person who'd love it.

Support the show on Patreon:

patreon.com/painintheartslife

Subscribe and listen:

Follow on your favourite podcast app or visit paininthearts.life

Socials:

Insta: @painintheartslife

FB: painintheartslife

Theme music by Lyndon Wesley

Produced on Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung Country.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Words are being removed from dictionaries to make room for new ones. We think some of them deserve better. Who knows what forgotten little nocturnal marsupial was erased for the word ‘floppy disc’?

This is our small attempt to restore some balance.

Word You Never Heard is a recurring series from Pain In The Arts, drawn from one of our favourite books, The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows by John Koenig - a collection of words that fill the gaps, for feelings that exist but have never had a name.

How It Works: In each episode, one of us brings a word from the book. The other has never seen it. With only a handful of clues and less than 30 minutes on the clock, they have to work out what it means, or build their own definition from scratch before time runs out.

Today’s Word: Licotic

Can you guess the definition before the clock runs out?

Pain In The Arts is a weekly podcast about the reality of creative life. Hosted by Breallyn and Lyndon Wesley. One of them never knows the topic until recording begins.

If you enjoyed this episode, the best thing you can do is share it with one person who'd love it.

Support the show on Patreon:

patreon.com/painintheartslife

Subscribe and listen:

Follow on your favourite podcast app or visit paininthearts.life

Socials:

Insta: @painintheartslife

FB: painintheartslife

Theme music by Lyndon Wesley

Produced on Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung Country.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Am I losing my ambition? And did I ever really have it?

That question had been sitting in my phone notes for months. Breallyn had no idea I was bringing it until the mics were on.

We pull apart the difference between a dream and an ambition, what it means to reconcile your past while you move into your future and why changing course can feel exactly like giving up when it isn't.

But before any of that, there's a birthday weekend in Bendigo involving a bookbinding workshop, an Airbnb review spiral and a half-hour hunt for a public toilet that Breallyn declared would never make it into the podcast. It made it in.

You might want to listen if:

• The thing you used to chase doesn't quite fit the person you are now

• Changing direction in your creative life feels a bit like quitting

• You keep measuring yourself against people who found their thing much sooner in life

Pain In The Arts is a weekly podcast about the reality of creative life. Hosted by Breallyn and Lyndon Wesley. One of them never knows the topic until recording begins.

If you enjoyed this episode, the best thing you can do is share it with one person who'd love it.

Support the show on Patreon:

patreon.com/painintheartslife

Subscribe and listen:

Follow on your favourite podcast app or visit paininthearts.life

Socials:

Insta: @painintheartslife

FB: painintheartslife

Theme music by Lyndon Wesley

Produced on Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung Country.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Brea knew a secret guest would be arriving. She just didn't know who.

When Phil walked up to the front door Brea couldn't have been happier. That's Uncle Phil, Brea's uncle and a regular in our stories for ages.

Now he's finally in the studio. He came over to swap a guitar pedal, and I may have trapped him into co-hosting with us.

Phil teaches woodwork and builds guitars from skateboard decks in a single garage under his house. He brought one along, so we asked, 'Why do we bother making things when we can buy almost anything?'

You might want to listen if:

• You used to make things, and you can’t quite remember when or why you stopped.

• Part of you believes creativity only really counts if it earns money or finds an audience.

Visit Phil on Instagram

Pain In The Arts is a weekly podcast about the reality of creative life. Hosted by Breallyn and Lyndon Wesley. One of them never knows the topic until recording begins.

If you enjoyed this episode, the best thing you can do is share it with one person who'd love it.

Support the show on Patreon:

patreon.com/painintheartslife

Subscribe and listen:

Follow on your favourite podcast app or visit paininthearts.life

Socials:

Insta: @painintheartslife

FB: painintheartslife

Theme music by Lyndon Wesley

Produced on Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung Country.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Words are being removed from dictionaries to make room for new ones. We think some of them deserve better. Who knows what forgotten little nocturnal marsupial was erased for the word 'floppy disc'?

This is our small attempt to restore some balance.

Word You Never Heard is a recurring series from Pain In The Arts, drawn from one of our favourite books, The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows by John Koenig. Words that fill the gaps. Feelings that exist but have never had a name.

In each episode, one of us reads a forgotten or reimagined word from the book. The other has never seen it. With only a handful of clues, they have less than half an hour to work out what it means - or build their own definition from scratch. But before the clock runs out, a guess has to be made.

Today's word is Agnosthesia.

Pain In The Arts is a weekly podcast about the reality of creative life. Hosted by Breallyn and Lyndon Wesley. One of them never knows the topic until recording begins.

If you enjoyed this episode, the best thing you can do is share it with one person who'd love it.

Support the show on Patreon:

patreon.com/painintheartslife

Subscribe and listen:

Follow on your favourite podcast app or visit paininthearts.life

Socials:

Insta: @painintheartslife

FB: painintheartslife

Theme music by Lyndon Wesley

Produced on Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung Country.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

There's a Chinaberry tree on our nature strip, a Lilac in the back corner and an underlying grief knowing 'acorn' is being dropped from the Oxford Junior Dictionary to make room for 'chatroom.'

Words are disappearing and not just the weird ones. Nature words, specifically. Researchers are calling it an 'extinction of experience', a growing cultural distance between us and the world around us.

This week we talk about that loss, what it costs us and what it might mean to rewild our imaginations.

Plus: we announce a brand new spin-off series: Word You Never Heard, drawn from John Koenig's Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, a collection of invented words for feelings that didn't have a name...until now.

You might want to listen if:

• You've walked past the same tree for years and realised you have no idea what it's called

• You're curious what Breallyn and Lyndon are up to with their new series, Word You Never Heard

Pain In The Arts is a weekly podcast about the reality of creative life. Hosted by Breallyn and Lyndon Wesley. One of them never knows the topic until recording begins.

If you enjoyed this episode, the best thing you can do is share it with one person who'd love it.

Support the show on Patreon:

patreon.com/painintheartslife

Subscribe and listen:

Follow on your favourite podcast app or visit paininthearts.life

Socials:

Insta: @painintheartslife

FB: painintheartslife

Theme music by Lyndon Wesley

Produced on Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung Country.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

What does it actually take to walk away from a career that pays well but costs you almost everything?

This week we're joined in the studio by Bill Bate, a long-time listener who has quietly lived one of the more interesting creative detours we've heard in a while. Twenty years in the fly-in, fly-out oil and gas industry. A slow-burning disquiet. And on the other side of all of it: a photography degree, a music festival in regional Victoria, and a brass fountain pen he's carried every day since 2010.

We talk about what it costs to stay too long in the wrong life, how creative people find each other and why Bill thought the only real solution to missing a creative community was to go and build one himself.

You might want to listen if:

• You've spent years doing work that pays but doesn't quite fit and you want to get out, like yesterday

• You've been thinking about starting something - a group, an event, a regular gathering and you feel time is closing in

• You're at the stage of life where you've stopped trying to name what you are and you just want to live creatively

Find Bill at these links:

Clear Air Creative Instagram

Clear Air Creative Website

Bill on Instagram

Pain In The Arts is a weekly podcast about the reality of creative life. Hosted by Breallyn and Lyndon Wesley. One of them never knows the topic until recording begins.

If you enjoyed this episode, the best thing you can do is share it with one person who'd love it.

Support the show on Patreon:

patreon.com/painintheartslife

Subscribe and listen:

Follow on your favourite podcast app or visit paininthearts.life

Socials:

Insta: @painintheartslife

FB: painintheartslife

Theme music by Lyndon Wesley

Produced on Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung Country.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.