The folks at Confab just posted video of my chalktalk based on Show Your Work! It’s my last talk of the year, the culmination of all the speaking I’ve done for the past eight months or so. It’s about 50 minutes long, there’s a drawing lesson at 8:14, and the real meat of the talk begins around 13:44. Enjoy!
Powers of Two: A conversation about creativity with Joshua Wolf Shenk
Last weekend at the Texas Book Festival I had the pleasure of interviewing Joshua Wolf Shenk, the author of one of my favorite books of the year, Powers of Two: Finding the Essence of Innovation in Creative Pairs. I had a hunch that we’d have a lot to talk about, so I recorded our discussion and edited it down (liberally) to the post below. Enjoy.
AK: Let’s start out with The Lone Genius Myth.
JWS: I argue in the book that the lone genius is a mythical creature. Which is not to say that we don’t require solitude and it’s not to say that we might not take sole ownership over our work as you and I both do — we don’t have anybody else’s name on the covers of our books. Yet, there are very often characters offstage who are not acknowledged.
Teaching blackout poetry at the Texas Teen Book Festival
In some ways, I’m probably the worst person to teach blackout poetry. I’ve done it for so long, I don’t even really think about it any more. Making art and teaching art are two different skill sets, and a quick Google search for “blackout poetry lesson plans” shows that there’s a small army of English teachers already doing it better than me, anyways.
That’s not to say I don’t like teaching, it’s just that I’m never sure I’m any good at it.
I’ve done some workshops with a lot of instruction and timed activities, but those always seem just a little bit off. So, this weekend at the Texas Teen Book Festival, I found myself in an auditorium full of teens, and the festival folks had already set out newspaper and markers in front of them, so I just thought, “You know what? Forget it. I’m going to give them as little instruction as possible, and we’ll just see what happens.”
I told the story of how I started blacking out, showed a timelapse video of how I make one, read a few, then told them they should just go for it. I spoke for another 10 minutes, showed some more examples, then I asked if anybody wanted to read theirs.
This is always the moment where I kind of hold my breath and think, “Uh oh. This is gonna be bad if nobody reads.”
But these teens! They started lining up at the microphone. And they read their poems like it was nothing. And they were great. And they would’ve kept lining up and reading if we didn’t run out of time.
It’s easy for an old fart like me to get jaded about everything, especially my work. Doing that workshop was a jolt of energy. It reminded me of Patti Smith, quoted in the book Please Kill Me:
Through performance, I reach such states, in which my brain feels so open… if I can develop a communication with an audience, a bunch of people, when my brain is that big and receptive, imagine the energy and intelligence and all the things I can steal from them.
I stole a lot from everybody in that room. So thanks, y’all!
Show Your Work! Tour Diary #6: Tour is over!
Last week I wrapped up the Show Your Work! tour with a packed homecoming at BookPeople in Austin, Texas. Here I am passing out some of my wife’s chocolate chip cookies beforehand:
My wife and I went out and celebrated after — 20 cities in two months made for a pretty hectic home life. Not that I’m complaining TOO much: there wasn’t ONE single dud on this tour. The turnouts were amazing. Thank you to everyone who came out.
If I didn’t come to your town…maybe next time! You can still get a signed copy of the book from BookPeople.
Show Your Work! Tour Diary #5: Houston, Milwaukee, and Minneapolis
I’m winding down my book tour promoting Show Your Work! See all upcoming dates or follow me on Twitter or Instagram for daily updates.
Minneapolis: Probably had a little too much fun. Hit up Nye’s, had breakfast at Hell’s Kitchen with my friend Chad Hagen (and once again with my buddy Hawk — great food), signed books at Magers and Quinn, saw the Hopper process show at the Walker and did an interview with Rain Taxi, visited Aesthetic Apparatus and got a test print, then Dan Ibarra took me to the Matisse show at the MIA, gave the keynote at Confab (really awesome conference), and then went record shopping with my friends and ended up signing at the fantastic Electric Fetus.
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