Turn The Table Over: Sarah Gulish on Creativity, Agency, and Academic Publishing

Thu, 06 Aug 2026 10:00:00 GMT

Give a room of elite music students a genuine creative choice — no right answer, no rubric — and a lot of them freeze. Dr. Sarah Gulish has spent her career asking why, and what to do about it.

Sarah is an assistant professor of music education at West Chester University, where every course she teaches centers on creativity: improvisation, student-centered learning, progressive methods. Before that she spent sixteen years teaching in public schools, including a high school course called Creativity and Collaboration that she co-taught with an art teacher. She's a working songwriter and performer, a card-carrying devotee of The Moth, and the founder and CEO of F-flat Books.

In the academic half, Sarah traces her big questions — student agency and autonomy — back to the students she couldn't serve, and walks us through her current research on improvisation and confidence. Two findings stand out: students' creative self-efficacy grew dramatically over a semester and they credited the environment for it, and their own sense of how creative their playing was didn't match an outside judge's — but their confidence still gave them real pride in the making. She also talks honestly about being a qualitative researcher doing a quantitative study on purpose, because numbers are the language administrators speak.

Then the turn. In 2015, Sarah got her first academic book contract and was stunned by the terms — 2% royalties, no marketing, and the loss of rights to her own work — and more stunned that everyone told her this was normal. So she built something else. F-flat Books turns seven this week, with more than 200 resources, over 80 creators, and hundreds of thousands of dollars paid to authors who keep their rights. Her hardest-won lesson: the people who resonated weren't other academics, they were classroom teachers doing the work. Her question for anyone sitting on research is the one that gave this episode its title — if the people you want to reach aren't reading journals, where are they, and how do you get there?

Plus: why creativity isn't just an arts problem, what happens when a university partnership rescues master's projects from a shared drive, and the case for public funding of arts research made to actual policymakers in DC.

Links:

https://www.pexelab.org

https://seanisdwelling.substack.com

https://matthewkr.substack.com

Sarah Gulish — https://www.sarahgulish.com

Thoughts with Sarah Gulish — https://sarahgulish.substack.com

F-flat Books — https://fflat-books.com

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Trash Data: Megan Fork on Trash, Watersheds, and Plastic Bans

Thu, 23 Jul 2026 11:00:00 GMT

We believe the work happening inside universities should be a public good — not locked behind paywalls or buried in language no one wants to read. So we're sitting down with scholars to ask two questions: who are you in the academy, and how does your work show up in the world?

For episode one, we talk with Dr. Megan Fork, associate professor of biology at West Chester University and an ecosystem scientist who studies urban watersheds — and treats trash as data. Megan walks us through a massive study of single-use plastic bans across nine Pennsylvania watersheds: 18 months of sampling and nearly 16,000 individual pieces of trash. The surprising result? The bans show no measurable effect on the trash in local streams — and her explanation for why says as much about how communities are built as it does about plastic.

We get into what a watershed actually is (she scales it from the Delaware River all the way down to the roof of a house), why "urban ecology" is real science, and how a null result can be the most interesting finding of all. Then Megan makes the turn we're chasing on this show — from the academic self to the public one. For her, the public isn't only the person on the street; it's the borough councils, sustainability boards, and state legislators who turn research into policy. They also makes a pointed case that the guilt we're handed about personal recycling was manufactured by corporations to dodge their own responsibility.

If you've ever wondered whether your reusable bag is doing anything, why your groceries come wrapped in plastic no matter what you choose, or why a scientist would spend a career counting trash in a creek — this one's for you.