What Happens When You Finally Touch Grass

On burnout, babies, and building a creative life from the ground up.

We had the pleasure of sitting down with our friends at Creator Mag to talk about our new book, burnout, parenthood, anonymity, and the creative process.

If you’re not familiar with Creator Mag, it’s part Substack, part community, and part quarterly print magazine (and yes, it’s beautiful). I’m a huge fan of what the entire Creator Mag team is building. Their mission to make the internet feel smaller is something I deeply resonate with, and I’m so glad they exist.

Here’s an excerpt from our interview in Creator Mag: Issue 7 – “Touch Grass.”

Enjoy!

Written by Nate Graber-Lipperman

Art Direction by Morgan Evans

Design by moy

Photography by Mackenzie Breeden

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In just over a month, Zack and Morgan Evans will be having two babies on the same day—and no, they’re not twins.

The first is their debut book, Create.Repeat: 365 Days of Creativity. Published by Penguin Random House, the book is an adaptation of Create.Repeat, the couple’s Internet-brand-slash-design-studio-slash-life-philosophy that’s developed a cult-like following since launching three years ago.

The second? Their debut child. Morgan found out she was pregnant just four days after learning the book’s release date.

“A lot of things in our life started to fall apart right before then,” Zack tells me over a call in September. “But I feel like the universe, life—whatever you want to call it—has a way of shedding old skin when you need it to, when you need to go into a brand new season.”

Over the course of an hour, I dove into a wide-ranging conversation with Zack and Morgan about several topics: burnout, parenthood, anonymity, creativity, and, of course, touching grass. Before Create.Repeat, the couple had never worked together (“When Vine came out, we were both doing it and almost broke up because of, like, jealousy”), but they share a kindred spirit, a palpable theater kid energy for the Internet age.

Nevertheless, don’t mistake their enthusiasm for performance. The daily essays and prompts packed into their book derive from lived experiences—whether it be the heyday of BuzzFeed, or the struggles of selling a screenplay in modern Hollywood.

I hope you find our conversation as thought-provoking as I did. And when you’re done, keep flipping for a prompt from Zack and Morgan—and a free page all to yourself.³

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This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity. Photography by Mackenzie Breeden.

Nathan Graber-Lipperman: I was curious to hear from both of y’all—what was the first thing you remember creating for fun?

Zack Evans: Like…in life?

NGL: Yeah, I’m really hitting ya with the tough ones on a Thursday afternoon.

Morgan Evans: [Looks at Zack] Oh, so you want me to start?

I feel like my journey with creativity started at a super young age. I went to a performing arts school from kindergarten to eighth grade. Zack always asks what we actually learned there—I’m like, we did math, okay?

But we did have dance classes, acting classes. In English, you’d be writing. When you’re five years old, you don’t really understand what’s going on—you think you’re just having fun. Yet the first time I really remember creating for myself and expressing myself was actually due to a death in the family. I wrote a poem for an essay assignment about what it’s like to lose a family member, and it helped me process my grief.

I think that’s why I believe in creativity so much. It helps you understand the world around you, and I feel like that was the first time art became, like, a means of survival. I couldn’t really understand the gravity of the pain, but creating something through it helped me understand what was happening, even if I was only in fifth grade.

Zack Evans: [Looks at Morgan] Wow. Mine’s not nearly as beautiful.

Like you said, when you’re a kid, you’re in Make Believe Land all the time. I was always playing games with the neighbors, throwing concerts—doing all these little things. But I remember in fifth grade, I got my dad’s old camcorder, and one of my best friends was really good at skateboarding. And I remember telling him that I could make a skate video for him.

I had never really worked the camera before. We’d go to a skate park every weekend, and then my dad showed me how to edit. We used Avid, which is, like, an OG editing software. And I set the video to a Weird Al Yankovic parody song, “Eat It.”

I thought Weird Al was the coolest guy in the world. Because I was, ya know, in fifth grade.

ME: Dude, fifth grade was so lit.

NGL: Zack, the first time we met, we kind of nerded out about our shared love of sneakers. I know for me personally, Tinker Hatfield was an inspiration to take design classes.

When you think about your teenage selves, are there any stories or inspirations you looked to as you considered turning this creativity thing into a, like, possibility?

ZE: When I was in seventh grade, my mom had a heart attack—like, a quadruple bypass—and almost died. It was a really traumatic moment for me. I was in a brand new middle school, and this was happening within the first month of the school year.

I just so happened to pick drama that year for an elective. And my drama teacher, Mrs. Roberts, really stepped up in my life during that time. She saw me as a person and really made me feel comfortable. And it was at that same moment where I was realizing that I really loved improv, and being the funny one in class.

I remember her telling my parents, He’s got a career in this. And she was the art teacher, too—a do-it-all creative person who just had such a passion for the weird kids. As I eventually did sketch comedy and all this stuff, everything was based on these principles that I learned from her in seventh grade.

I also had a screenwriting professor in college, Susan Isaacs. She was in the improv comedy group Groundlings with Will Ferrell back in the day. She was very encouraging, but also very real with us. You’re probably not gonna make it…Will Ferrell is an alien who just so happened to be the one, she’d tell us.

Both of these teachers just really empowered me. They really instilled confidence in me personally, but also prepared me to keep going, because you face so much rejection in anything you want to do.

ME: What you’re saying has really affected the Create.Repeat voice so much. I do believe that greatness within artists exists within everybody, and to have the right person call it out of you is so freaking necessary.

Miss Royster, the vocal program teacher, was that person for me. Again, going to a performing arts school, in classrooms full of talented kids…to have someone see something in you and call it out of you is life-changing.

Even being pregnant now, I’m just thinking, this kid will have the most access to anything they ever want to do in this lifetime because creativity has been such a lifeline for both Zack and I.

I really don’t care what form it comes in anymore. I think that’s why Create.Repeat has been such a great collaboration for us.

ZE: I met both of the teachers I mentioned later in life, as an adult. There’s something special when you learn, Oh, you aren’t some almighty person. You have some wisdom, and you’re sharing it with us, but you’re also just a person going through it as well.

The drama teacher may be grieving the loss of their career, or they’re going home and working on the script that they’re trying to eventually get made one day—because they don’t want to give up the dream of screenwriting.

As I’ve gotten older, I realized that whatever your choice of medium, we all grow through this stuff. Morgan and I always wanted Create.Repeat to come from this spot of, like, we don’t have everything figured out. We’re down in the bunker with you.

NGL: The theme of this season is “Touch Grass.” What does that phrase represent to both of you?

ME: We’ve got a tale for you!

ZE: I mean, our life has just been completely upended this year. And it came from an actual, literal touch grass moment in April.

I wanted to do a challenge for myself. It honestly started off as thinking about how to market this book. We were really big on the “75 Hard Challenge” a couple years ago. For seventy-five days, you work out twice a day, you drink water—

ME: [Laughing] We’ve done it four years in a row. We’re obsessed.

ZE: And honestly, it changed our lives. So we were thinking, what’s the creative version of that?

One of the things I wanted to do was to give up all kinds of vices—alcohol, weed, caffeine. I was a huge caffeine head. I wanted to give that up. And I wanted to have one day a week to be a day of no phones, no internet, no TV. I was only allowed to read and listen to music. It was almost like a Sabbath.

So for thirty days, I wanted to create something every single day. That very first day, I went for a walk. I didn’t have my phone on me. And we were at this point in our lives where there was so much uncertainty, and I was really scared—not knowing what we’re going to do with Create.Repeat, not knowing stuff with our finances.

I was walking around our neighborhood, and I found a park across the street. It was completely empty, and I just went out there in the middle of the grass. I never do this kind of thing, but I took off my shoes, and I sat there and touched grass.

That was a moment for me where I was truly connected, and I could finally listen again. I guess what touch grass for me kind of means is the word surrender. I felt like that moment to me was a moment of surrendering. To just be barefoot in a park that’s just, like, covered in dog pee.

I went back feeling so refreshed. Four days later, we found out we were pregnant. The next week, we learned that the book’s release date was the same as our due date.

The universe has a way of shedding old skin when you need it to. My walk to the park was such a small moment, but to us, it was life-changing. That’s why Morgan was laughing when you said the phrase.

NGL: Sometimes all you need for your creative spark is a grass park covered in dog pee.

ZE: You need to unplug and reconnect with yourself to find your own voice again. When you’re chasing validation, it only leads to depression. Talk to any single person who is in this kind of business.

Dude, I’ve been in the hospital because of burnout when I was at BuzzFeed. I literally lost my eyesight for hours because of a crazy migraine—my body just gave up. I’ve had to learn this the hardest way possible. I’ve had crazy panic attacks. I’ve had depressive episodes.

Stepping away and going back to that kid who decided to put “Eat It” in a skateboard video, even though it didn’t make sense…I did that because that was a Zack Evans video. It was just my favorite song at the time, with my favorite thing at the time. And I made something original.

ME: Keeping Create.Repeat faceless for so long, too, really helped implement that practice of sharing exactly what we want to say.

It doesn’t really matter sometimes who says it. You just have to feel it. So, I think for me, it’s easy to want to avoid and suppress emotions because they feel too big. And feeling anxious for so long…feeling depression as creatives is so deep and dark and devastating. You feel like life has been sucked out of you.

But if you can process those emotions, if you can touch them and feel them and grapple with them, there is light at the end of the tunnel. And that’s coming from people who, again, have been in the trenches with these things.

It’s better to face the mountain and walk through it. Because on the other side, there’s something so beautiful.

So for me, I think we shouldn’t be afraid to touch the grass. Experience the grass. Feel it. If you’re allergic, great. Let’s take Claritin and move on.

We’ve got to touch the grass as creatives in order to express something that’s honest and truthful and authentic. Like, that’s the whole point.

ZE: Bars.

You can read the full conversation with Zack and Morgan in Issue Seven of Creator Mag. And check out their book, Create.Repeat: 365 Days of Creativity, which releases November 27.

Grab your physical copy of the latest Creator Mag here!

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Create.Repeat is a community for creatives.

The Create.Repeat Substack is a project designed to be a bi-weekly diary on creativity. Sharing inspiration for artists to keep creating and repeating.

Written and curated by Zack Evans & James Warren Taylor

Each week we will be sharing recent thoughts on creativity, some links helping us stay creative, and a talent show featuring an artist from the community. Thank you for engaging with us.

History repeats. Create the future.