Austin Kleon

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Show Your Work! Tour Diary #4: San Antonio, LA, Salt Lake City, and Phoenix

I’m on book tour promoting Show Your Work! See all upcoming dates or follow me Twitter or Instagram for daily updates.

Air conditioned! Oliver Jeffers and me

Chip Kidd giving me a look Owen chases a duck

San Antonio: talked to some super-smart booksellers with my friend Julie Wernersbach from BookPeople, had dinner with one of my heroes, Chip Kidd (here’s a Vine of us goofing around), then I had breakfast with another one of my heroes, Oliver Jeffers. (Check out this photo of my son Oliver took with a Texas-sized cinnamon roll.)

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Vampires and human spam: video of my SXSW keynote

Austin Kleon at SXSW

I was too sick then to remember much of it, and too lazy now to write much about it, so I’ll let Omar Gallaga recap:

In his keynote presentation on Friday, local author and artist Austin Kleon tackled the big themes: death, creativity and, most importantly, “Has SXSW gotten too big? Is it over?” (…) In tackling the subject of SXSW’s growth, Kleon suggested making more human connections, sharing instead of self-promoting all the time… he suggested SXSW attendees stop chasing the new, next big thing and think about longevity, the creative work that will stand the test of time.

Here’s the video:

Here are sketchnotes of the talk by Eva-Lotta Lamm:

sketchnotes-eva-sxsw

Thanks to Shawn O’Keefe and the SXSW gang for giving me the stage.

Photo above by Rodolfo Gonzalez

My interview with The Great Discontent

great-discontent-1

I was delighted to talk to Tina and Ryan Essmaker for their awesome interview series The Great Discontent. They’re fellow Midwestern ex-pats, so we talked forever and ended up at a bar singing karaoke later. They’re also amazing editors, and trimmed my blathering into a great read.

My favorite bit:

The newest challenge I’m facing is continuing to make things and not just talk about making them. I’m in a very dangerous position right now; I could shave my head, put on a robe, and become the guru. I could be the guy who flies around, talking about being creative, gets a nice paycheck, and goes home. That’s not interesting to me. If there’s a reason people like my books, it’s because they came out of my practice and what I learned while I was working. Now that Show Your Work is out and doing okay, the next big task is making sure that I stay connected to my work. How do I ensure that I don’t lose my desire for wanting to make stuff?

Read the whole interview here.

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