Austin Kleon

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How much do we tell our kids?

A Smokey Bear poster

I have a friend who saw a Smokey The Bear “ONLY YOU CAN PREVENT FOREST FIRES” poster when she was a kid and took the emphasis literally. She said she started worrying all the time about forest fires because only SHE could prevent forest fires — it said so on the poster! She’d see a story about a forest fire on the news and cry, “It’s my fault!”

I think about that story a lot these days.

How much do we talk to our kids about what’s going on? How much information do you give them, especially about the things they can’t control?

* * *

Last summer, the boys had drawings published in the NYTimes. I loved working on this piece, which was about how powerful making art can be in uncertain times. “Much of the art they make is their way of processing fear and anxiety about the uncontrollable terrors going on outside our house,” I wrote.

A producer at Good Morning America saw the drawings and asked if they could interview the whole family. I said no to having them on camera, but I agreed to a solo interview. We talked for 45 minutes to an hour over Zoom. We covered lots of stuff. I tried to encourage her to think of art as a way of exploring emotion as much as expressing emotion, but she kept asking me, “Aren’t you worried about your kids? Aren’t you disturbed by these drawings?” I finally, almost shouting, said, “No, no, no! I would be more worried about them if they DIDN’T draw.”

Here is the final piece, in which they turned children’s drawing into a tool of emotional surveillance:

Pro tip: if you want your kids to be less anxious, don’t let them watch an hour of morning news waiting to see their drawings on TV! My boys had never seen TV news, and they couldn’t believe their eyes. “More tornados!” shouted Jules, who eventually left the room before his segment appeared.

The experience shook me, but it was a good lesson.

* * *

When I was reading old issues of John Holt’s Growing Without Schooling newsletter, I came across this piece he wrote in 1979. “Many things in the world around me seem to me ugly, wasteful, foolish, cruel, destructive, and wicked,” he begins. “How much of this should I talk to my children about?”

W.H. Auden, in his essay about Iago in The Dyer’s Hand, makes this life-changing distinction: Instead of asking yourself, “What can I know?” ask yourself, “What, at this moment, am I meant to know?” 

Our boys (now 5 and 8 — age makes all the difference when you’re talking about “children” or “kids”) don’t do Zoom school and we still don’t watch news on the TV, so they have no idea, really, about what’s going on, other than what we tell them.

And we don’t tell them much.

I realize this is an enormously privileged position to be in.

“I am trying / to sell them the world,” Maggie Smith wrote in her poem, “Good Bones,” but I’m not trying to sell my kids the world, I’m trying to make them a world.

I am trying to give my kids the sanest childhood I can. I am trying to give them an experience of a safe, non-judgmental home, full of love and books and art-making, arranged so that they can spend maximum time doing things like drawing and playing and dreaming.

Because I think a good, healthy childhood is something that can’t be taken away from you. Knowing that you are safe and loved is something you can carry forward, no matter what happens.

My hope is that if my boys know what it is to be loved and cared for, to be accepted and to have agency over their attention and their efforts, they won’t go looking for identity in dumbass facist ideology peddled by pathetic men who have nothing real to contribute to the world.

They’ll start knowing how insane the world is soon enough. For now, let them play.

And if it all goes bad in the future and they have to fight over a can of beans in an abandoned grocery store, they will remember what life can be like.

That knowledge is important. It’s knowledge that artists give us: They don’t just show us what life is, they show us what it can be.

Parents can be artists, too.

Photo of a bell hooks quote (from Outlaw Culture) by @museummammy, aka Kimberley Drew, author of This Is What I Know About Art.

Nobody to tell you what not to read

A poster for the ALA’s Banned Books Week, 2013 (I did not make this, btw)

Last month the Wall Street Journal reported that a school in Massachusetts has banned teaching The Odyssey and other “classics.” My friend Alan Jacobs, who wrote a whole book about the importance of connecting to the past through old books (but not a defense of the classics), wrote:

My take on this is simple: It is better for a good book not to be taught at all than be taught by the people quoted in that article. Yes! — do, please, refuse to teach Shakespeare, Homer, Hawthorne, whoever. Wag your admonitory finger at them. Let them be cast aside, let them be scorned and mocked. Let them be samizdat. Let them be forbidden fruit.

They will find their readers. They always have — long, long before anyone thought to teach them in schools — and they always will.

I have this romantic vision of some young, unknown artist, somewhere, either now or in the future, binging on the forbidden fruits of our past — all the taboo books and movies you’re not supposed to read or watch or talk about because they’re not appropriate or correct or they were made by the wrong people  — and stealing all the right moves from them, the stuff that other young artists won’t get exposed to because they don’t teach it in school or put it on reading lists, and mashing those good bits all together into something new that blows our minds. This artist might not even do it intentionally, but rather, out of ignorance — because they don’t know any “better,” and they don’t have anybody telling them what’s worthy of their attention. I don’t know where they’re supposed to find these materials — hopefully in a library — but maybe they’ll discover them in a trash heap like Wall-E.

It’s happened before. Ever since reading his short stories last October, I have thought a lot about Ray Bradbury, who didn’t have anybody telling him what not to read:

Bradbury never went to college — that’s one reason why he was so original. He was not indoctrinated in the mainstream assumption of the superiority of the realist mode. He educated himself. He read the books that he wanted to — from masterpieces to junk. Then he began to write children’s literature, which is to say, pulp science fiction and fantasy. But he mixed in elements from the realist tradition.

Then something amazing happened. In a 10-year period, Bradbury wrote seven books that changed both American literature and popular culture. They were mostly collections of short stories. Only two were true novels. In these books, for the first time in American literature, an author brought the subtlety and psychological insight of literary fiction into science fiction without losing the genre’s imaginative zest. Bradbury also crafted a particular tone, a mix of bitterness and sweetness that the genre had never seen before.

I’m thinking, too, of someone like Patricia Lockwood, one of the more original voices out there, who never went to college.

I have long felt that your own education is as much about the order in which you come into contact with things as anything else:

…it’s not just the holes, but the order you fill them in. For instance, if you read the canon straight through, from Homer to McCarthy (or whoever), how original would the connections in your mind be? Better to start with one author you love, who speaks to you, and move in every direction, backwards, forwards, sideways…the juxtapositions you see and the connections you make in your brain will be more unique.

For example: Did you know that Herman Melville didn’t read Shakespeare until he was 30 years old? That’s why we have Moby-Dick.

And now we try to teach it to 15-year-olds…

100 things that made my year (2020)

  1. Having a piano in the house again.
  2. Seeing my kids’ drawings published in the New York Times.
  3. Recording an audiobook during a pandemic in my bedroom closet.
  4. The magic of solvable problems when life seems impossible. Learning to solve a Rubik’s Cube. All the things you can tighten with a $10 socket set from Home Depot. Fixing things with the screwdriver somebody used to steal my car a decade ago. Sashiko. Modding my date stamp so it can live another decade.
  5. Abandoning the notion of linear progress for circular time.
  6. The hawk that hung out in our yard for nine hours.
  7. Getting into zines again by making them for my son’s school lunch, then later staying home and making a whole flock of zines.
  8. Getting interested in quilting. Making tape quilts and letting them take me where they want to go.
  9. The calm of collage. Sticky note collages. Making houses for Meg. Making collages based on my sons’ mispronunciation, “Chronovirus.” Turning scraps into poetry. The person who mailed me extra UHU sticks. Remixing Peanuts. Thinking on the page.
  10. Blind contour drawings. Learning to spot false lines.
  11. The joy of blackout poetry.
  12. The comfort of a pencil. Buying pencil extenders and a pencil sharpener named Carl. Writing with a Mitsubishi 9852EW. (Even though “HBs are for architects.”)
  13. Having great books to read. (So many they get their own list.) Mercifully short books for when reading is hard. Books with unusual structures. Turning books into time capsules. Reading like Rossellini. Reading promiscuously. Practicing bibliomancy.
  14. Making bad art. Making ugly art.
  15. Not doomscrolling. Airplane mode.
  16. Finding nourishment instead of identifying poison. Thinking about mental gumbo and how ideas spread like the plague.
  17. Filling notebooks. Having a diary to scream into, instead of the void of social media. Reading about Mass Observation. Keeping records so you can check them later and assure yourself you’re not crazy, the culture is. When my plague journal got too dark, turning to cheerful retrospection.
  18. Schedule send.
  19. Pedernales Falls. How bright the stars are in Dripping Springs.
  20. Long date walks and lunches with my wife for the two months the kids were in school. Van’s Bahn Mi trailer. Subs at Homeslice. Sushi at Komé. Little Deli. Taco Deli. Bagels at Nervous Charlie’s. Bubble tea and Kinokuniya. Enchiladas at Mother’s (RIP). Walking to the nursery and drawing plants and pansies.
  21. Watching my kids make Valentines for their classmates.
  22. A calendar I saw in a school office captioned, “Weekly Breakdown,” and thinking, “Yeah, I should schedule mine.”
  23. School pickups and talking in the car.  How my son would pick a new song for us listen to on the way home and how he’d discover B-sides I didn’t know about by artists I love, like “Nannou” off Aphex Twin’s Windowlicker and “Watchlar” on Cocteau Twins’ Iceblink Luck. Listening to the new Four Tet and Autechre albums together.
  24. How much I miss being out in the world with the kids. Dart Bowl. Reading the graffiti and eating enchiladas in the cafe. (RIP.) Drawing at The Blanton. Hot dogs at Costco. Having a milkshake at In-and-Out and watching Owen make music in Garageband before Stuttering Institute. Going to the Ransom Center during his sessions.
  25. Drawing in the dark at Pop-Up Magazine. Meeting Esther Pearl Watson and hanging out with Liana Finck.
  26. Old friends. Dinner at Manuel’s with Edward Tufte. Tacos outside with Julien. Visiting Ryan Holiday’s new bookstore in Bastrop. (Picking up gummy worms on the way home from Bucee’s.)
  27. Our last weekend in the world before lockdown: a date day viewing of Portrait of a Lady on Fire at the Alamo Drafthouse, a dinner party at Steven and Eugene’s, and Jules’ 5th birthday party with tacos and donuts in Ramsey Park. (A lady saw the party balloons — a “5” and an “0”-shaped donut — and asked if it was my 50th birthday.)
  28. Writing a whole book proposal to Pet Shop Boys’ “West End Girls” on an endless loop. (Then throwing it out.)
  29. Music, music, music. My 2020 playlist. Cymatics! Fiona Apple’s Fetch the Bolt Cutters. Deerfhoof’s “35-minute live-in-the-studio medley of covers,” Love-Lore. Perfume Genius’s Set My Heart On Fire Immediately. Yaz, Upstairs at Eric’s. Bob Dylan’s Rough and Rowdy Ways. Yasuaki Shimizu’s Kakashi. Robert Wyatt’s Shleep. Billy Nomates. The Dirty Projectors’ 5 EPs. Daniel Lopatin’s soundtrack for Uncut Gems. Cocteau Twins & Harold Budd, The Moon and the Melodies. Ethiopiques. The new Nine Inch Nails ambient albums. Barker’s Utility. The piano of Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou. Duke Ellington’s Piano Reflections. The epic yearly surveys by Fluxblog. Aphex Twin’s piano works. Cardi B’s “WAP.” David Wise’s “Aquatic Ambience.” Christmas music on KUTX. Miumiu’s cover of “I Wish You Love.” Harry Styles’ cover of “Sledgehammer.” Owen Kleon’s single “Emoji,” and his album, Personality.
  30. The comedy of survival. How every age needs a Diogenes. Marc Maron’s standup special, End Times Fun.
  31. Lowering my expectations. Not thinking about much after dinnertime. Trying to stick to what I know works.
  32. Eating so much Cap’n Crunch I sent away for free figurines.
  33. Talking on the phone instead of Zoom.
  34. Watching skate videos as a way to travel to cities I miss.
  35. Spring. Watching our cacti blossom. Red admiral butterflies.
  36. Discovering the word “estivate.” Getting in the pool with the kids every day of summer. Listening to the “Poolside ’86” mix one the Wonderboom that Meg got me for Valentine’s Day. Floating on this dorky pizza raft like the one Andy Samberg has in Palm Springs, writing in my Rite in The Rain waterproof notebooks.
  37. Good newsletters. Sasha Frere-Jones. Laura Olin’s lists of ten.
  38. Ted Gioia and Dust-to-Digital on Twitter.
  39. Sturgill Simpson, who gave me my quarantine mantra: “Think I’m gonna just say home and make art, not friends!”)
  40. My quarantine queen and king: Mary Ruefle & David Hockney.
  41. Quarantine Book Club! Mike Monteiro’s #perfect31 record challenge on Instagram.
  42. Totally watching television: Ted Lasso. Better Things. What We Do In The Shadows. Sex Education. How To With John Wilson. Ghosts. Cobra Kai. Deutschland ’83. Teenage Bounty Hunters. Toast of London. The Great. Normal People.
  43. Good movies: Tampopo. Dolemite Is My Name. Master and Commander. My Octopus Teacher. Dick Johnson Is Dead. The Bee Gees: How Can You Mend A Broken Heart. 24 Hour Party People. The Grand Budapest Hotel. Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets. Wild Nights With Emily. The Old Guard. John Was Trying to Contact Aliens. Mission Impossible: 1-6. The Speed Cubers. The Nice Guys. Marshawn Lynch: A History. Raise Hell: The Life and Times of Molly Ivins. Lured. I Married A Witch. Arsenic and Old Lace. Kind Hearts and Coronets. Dial M For Murder. The original 1940 version of Gaslight. Apollo 11. The Life Aquatic. The Matrix. Borat Subsequent Moviefilm. That Thing You Do! What About Bob? 
  44. Watching old favorites in black and white.
  45. Opting out of Zoom school. Letting the kids go feral instead. (You could count the days they were fully dressed on one hand.) The Idle Parent Manifesto. Dreaming up a new curriculum. Reading old issues of John Holt’s homeschooling newsletter, Growing Without Schooling. Remembering that boredom is a pit stop. Thinking about how not all screen time is equal. Looking up stuff in the dictionary. (“How do I spell….”) Watching them read in patches of sunlight on the floor — the best distance learning.
  46. Getting rid of the day the best that we could. Building a climbing dome and a rope swing in the back yard. Drawing together. Making comics together. Finishing or collaging their abandoned drawings. Finishing each other’s Garageband tracks. Owen making beats out of rain drops and thunder. Each one clacking away on his own typewriter. (“I’m going to be an author like you, papa.”) Drawing them while they play. Making noise tracks on our four-track. Printmaking with vegetables. Playing Scrabble and exploring inappropriate language with Bananagrams. Watching Spongebob Squarepants. Harry Potter. Exquisite Corpse. Having a new Wayside School to read. Issues of OKIDO. Painting blocks of the Three Little Pigs. Putting a multi-colored wifi light up the noise nook. Dusting off the Wii and playing Dr. Mario and Super Mario Bros and Donkey Kong Country. (Huge mistake! They are now video game junkies.) Keeping conversation cards on the kitchen table. Floor Is Lava. What’s On My Butt? Those Usborne “See Inside” books. Sticking to the best parenting advice I’ve ever heard. The Portal. Playing hide-and-seek. Fights with fake snowballs. A parent who said to me, about lockdown, “We are learning things about them that we didn’t know.”
  47. How caring leads to loving. A heart-shaped love. The brief period in which my youngest wanted to give us “100 kisses” before bed.
  48. Acknowledging the grief of it all.
  49. Giving each other haircuts.
  50. Breakfast in bed.
  51. The $3 box of spaghetti actually tasting 3x better than the $1 box.
  52. Chicken parm sandwiches.
  53. Banana bread. (Owen: “It’s amazing how something rotten can become delicious!”)
  54. Our Bill Rebholz San Marzano tomato print.
  55. An alarm clock with big blue letters so I don’t have to reach for my phone.
  56. Watching Meg’s citrus trees grow fruit.
  57. Breaking in Sharpies.
  58. Running the numbers. Rearranging the furniture.
  59. Quarantine uppers and downers: Vitamin D in the morning and magnesium at night. Getting a coffee subscription in the mail. Gin and tonics in a pint glass full of ice. Drops from Milk Barn Farm.
  60. Simple questions for better decisions: Instead of asking, “Will this make me happy?” asking, “Will this enlarge me or diminish me?” Instead of giving feedback, simply asking, “What did you really want to say?” Instead of asking, “Can I finish?” asking, “Can I keep going?” Instead of asking, “What can I know?” asking, “What, at this moment, am I meant to know?” (That last one’s W.H. Auden.)
  61. Neil Postman’s advice for how to live the rest of your life. Emerson’s advice: “Work and learn in evil days.” Thomas Merton’s advice: “Learn to Be Alone.” Alasdair Gray’s advice to stay in touch with who you wanted to be when you were little.
  62. The poem, “Things to Do in the Belly of the Whale.” How poetry changes over time.
  63. Having something to do. Doing what you know how to do. Doing the work that’s in front of you. How every time we make something, it’s a tiny triumph. How quantity leads to quality.
  64. Knowing that not everything will be okay, but some things will.
  65. Accepting that nobody knows anything. (Eric Seidel, quoted in The Biggest Bluff: “Less certainty, more inquiry.”) Wondering over knowing. Hitting pause.
  66. Praying, whether I believe or not.
  67. Voting.
  68. How I searched in the street for my lost wedding ring, was totally distraught, and then it turned up in the washing machine.
  69. Breaking bread with the dead. Picturing history.
  70. Writing about lost loved ones. Jason Polan. Charles Portis. Bill Withers. Jan Steward. Milton Glaser. John Baldessari. Aunt Becky.
  71. Listening to music with the volume turned down low.
  72. Listening to the brush. Listening to the fog horns. Listening for hawks on our walks. Listening for another world.
  73. Pen pals. Answering letters. Addressing an envelope as a reminder to write a letter. Sending mail via USPS. Ruth Asawa stamps. Making collages out of mail.
  74. My trusty Pentel Pocket Brush Pen.
  75. The Tile thingie my wife bought me to stick in the back of my pocket notebook so I can find it when I lose it.
  76. Reading a Ray Bradbury short story every night of October.
  77. Drew Dernavich’s rejection pile. Thinking about how every piece of art I love exists because someone didn’t throw it in the fire or somebody pulled it out of the flames.
  78. Willem Defoe’s “You don’t like me cooking?!?” monologue in The Lighthouse.
  79. Learning how the days of the week got their names.
  80. Learning how to play Aphex Twin’s “Avril 14th” on piano. Getting the Phantom Thread soundtrack on vinyl and discovering it included sheet music.
  81. Learning from non-fiction books for kids. Drawing to remember what I’ve learned.
  82. How my local grocery store was more prepared for the pandemic than the federal government.
  83. How the pandemic led to experimenting with online events. Making a good Zoom rig out of stuff I already had, plus adding the Camo app, a decent ring light, and a document camera.
  84. Signing books outside Bookpeople on their picnic tables.
  85. Books I wrote that I can’t read. Seeing my books with music gear. Figuring Keep Going would be the book of mine people turned to during quarantine, and being surprised that it was actually Show Your Work! (“Nothing matters and nothing works.”)
  86. Calvin’s chickens. Bird feeders for humans.
  87. Scheduling time to make a collage so I can listen to a podcast, like Between the Covers or Recording Artists or Broken Record.
  88. Edward Carey’s daily quarantine drawings.
  89. Thor Harris starting a band with his next door neighbor Antonio.
  90. The work of Amos Kennedy, Jr. Watching him build his “pile of bricks” printmaking studio in Detroit. (And his hilarious fundraising video.)
  91. Talking about how much artist Corita Kent has influenced my work.
  92. 15 years of blogging. 14 years of marriage.
  93. Rituals, no matter how silly. Morning walks, no matter what. Morning pages, no matter what. Pizza-and-a-movie night. Spaghetti night. Starting a notebook with a weigh-in. Notebook affirmations.
  94. Every day, giving yourself a little present.
  95. Moonlight on the bedsheets. Keeping track of the moon. Seeing the Great Conjunction. My wife’s reaction to seeing the moons of Jupiter and the rings of Saturn.
  96. Coconut the Owl.
  97. Having an office to retreat to. (My dad, talking about his contractor: “He got a lot done, but nothing’s finished.”)
  98. Breathing through the nose. Doing nothing for as long as possible. (Owen: “I exist just as well as you do!”) Taking naps.
  99. Doctors who make house calls.
  100. Stayin’ alive.

Read my top 100 lists from previous years here.

The assembled artist

My apologies to Frederick Wiseman — they sent me two magazines in last week’s New York Times and I needed a guardian spirit for my notebook and I got a little carried away.

The profile these images came from — “What if the Great American Novelist Doesn’t Write Novels?” is well worth reading. It reminded me of the Ross Brothers and the film editor Walter Murch.

The words I mutilated went like this:

He sees himself, he told me, like an artist who makes work from found objects, except in his case, the art is assembled from found events.

Many of Wiseman’s films are on the Kanopy streaming service and the new one, City Hall, is streaming on PBS.

Lynda Barry’s What It Is

In the spring of 2006, the writer Dan Chaon invited my wife and I to Oberlin to see a cartoonist named Lynda Barry speak. She took off her boots in the middle of a chemistry lab and read from a book named Cruddy:

this is how I drew in 2006: making fake woodcuts with a Wacom stylus and Macromedia Flash

Afterwards, my wife and I spent a few hours at a bar with her and Dan and a few other students afterwards, and I feel very much like I’ve run my whole career off that encounter. The way Lynda thinks about images and pictures and words just snapped everything together for me, showed me a path forward I didn’t know existed. She was the first artist who taught me the value of thinking and exploring on the page with your hands.

I read everything of hers I could find and What It Is was a book I anticipated like no other.

I bought the Tin House issue with an excerpt later that fall. (A side note: That amazing issue also intro’d me to Graham Rawle and Mary Ruefle.)

In 2007, I got in line early at the comic shop to snag a copy of the activity book excerpt Drawn and Quarterly put out for Free Comic Book day.

a spread from the Tin House issue, hinting at the brilliance to come

When What It Is came out in 2008, it was overwhelming — every page a handmade collage, blowing my mind.

Later, Lynda would find an even more perfect merging of form and content in the books modeled on her composition books, Syllabus and Making Comics, but What It Is holds a special place in my heart. The book changed me forever and Lynda is my hero.

Every Saturday I put one of my favorite books on the Bookshelf. To see more favorite books, check out my reading years.

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