In last week’s newsletter, I filmed a 15-minute walkthrough of my spring diary.
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Thoreau’s birthday
Here’s a quick birthday drawing of one of my favorite writers, Henry David Thoreau, born July 12, 1817.
Thoreau is one of those writers everybody thinks they know already without actually reading any of his work.
As a great Indoorsman, I stayed away from him for ages until I fell in love with his journal and spent a few years reading the entries every day. (He was a huge influence on my book Keep Going.)
My “Thoreau” tag on this blog is now 35+ posts deep.
Some highlights:
If you’ve never read him before, try downloading the “Walking” zine from Keri Smith’s Wander Society pocket library.
Then go for a long walk and come back and write about it.
Homework every night for the rest of your life
Filmmaker Lawrence Kasdan once said, “Being a writer is like having homework every night for the rest of your life.”
That’s the thing about the job: you’re never “off.” If “everything is copy” (Nora Ephron) then you’re always “on,” even when it looks like you’re doing nothing. (Arm yourself with Gertrude Stein, if only as a joke: “It takes a lot of time to be a genius. You have to sit around so much, doing nothing, really doing nothing.”)
“All things are potential paragraphs for the writer,” wrote Shirley Jackson in her lecture, “Memory and Delusion” (collected in Let Me Tell You):
I cannot find any patience for those people who believe that you start writing when you sit down at your desk and pick up your pen and finish writing when you put down your pen again; a writer is always writing, seeing everything through a thin mist of words, fitting swift little descriptions to everything he sees, always noticing. Just as I believe that a painter cannot sit down to his morning coffee without noticing what color it is, so a writer cannot see an odd little gesture without putting a verbal description to it, and ought never to let a moment go by undescribed.
The “always on” thing can feel like a curse, but it’s also a blessing: it means that any boring old experience (grocery shopping, getting stamps at the post office, picking your kids up from school) can become potential fodder for the work, so you’re “always on,” always paying attention, alert, awake to life, alive, casing the joint, looking for stuff to steal.
Sometimes I collage my kids’ homework in my diary pic.twitter.com/4PdS14Smgb
— Austin Kleon (@austinkleon) December 19, 2021
Read Like an Artist Zine + Independent Bookstore Day 2022 events
To celebrate Independent Bookstore Day 2022 and the 10th anniversary of the Steal Like an Artist, my publisher Workman and I produced a free 12-page glossy zine called “Read Like an Artist,” with 10 tips for a better life with books.
Here is a very short list of the bookstores who ordered a ton (250+) of copies:
- Books and Mortar, Grand Rapids, MI
- Skylark Bookshop, Columbia, MO
- Highland Books, Brevard, NC
- Mojo Books & Records, Tampa, FL
- hello again books, Cocoa, FL
- Books Around the Corner, Gresham, OR
- Commonplace Reader, Yardley, PA
- Afterwords Books, Edwardsville, IL
- The Bookstore of Glen Ellyn, Glen Ellyn, IL
- Sweet Reads Books, Austin, MN
- Octavia Books, New Orleans, LA
- Aesops Fable, Holliston, MA
- Next Page Books & Nosh, Frisco, CO
- Reads & Company in Phoenixville, PA
- Round Table Bookstore in Topeka, KS
- The Magic of Books Bookstore, Seymour, IN
There are literally hundreds of bookstores participating, so check with your favorite local indie to see if they got copies!
If you live in Austin, Texas or nearby, on Saturday, April 30, I’ll be at two of my favorite bookstores here in town, signing and drawing in my books and hand-selling my favorites.
10AM-12PM – I’ll be at Bookpeople, our flagship store in town. Get there early — they should have around 100 zines.
2PM-4PM – I’ll be at Black Pearl Books, my hyper-local neighborhood shop. They’ll have about 25 zines, so they might be out by the time I show up.
Our friends at Bookwoman should have about 100 copies, too, so that might actually be your best bet for snagging one in the 512 area code. (If you’re down south, I just found out that Reverie Books has a handful, too.)
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Stolen plants always grow
In a letter to a friend, Beatrix Potter wrote about her recent adventures in “proplifting,”
Mrs Satterthwaite says stolen plants always grow, I stole some ‘honesty’ yesterday, it was put to be burnt in a heap of refuse! I have had something out of nearly ever garden in the village.
Elsewhere, she said she was relieved when people offered her plants. “I don’t feel like such a robber of the village gardens.”
(h/t @brookemackey, Source: Beatrix Potter’s Gardening Life)
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