I am was delighted to be interviewing writer Sarah Ruhl about her work and her memoir Smile: The Story of a Face this on Wednesday. You can set a reminder to watch on YouTube:
Cartoonist Lucy Bellwood drew and wrote about talk here.
Are you really helping here? My interview with Tim Kreider
This afternoon I had the pleasure of interviewing Tim Kreider, author of We Learn Nothing, about his life and work. You can watch our conversation on on YouTube.
We talked about so many things, but I loved what Tim said about Kim Stanley Robinson and Rebecca Solnit being the angels on his shoulder when he’s writing and starts feeling too cynical or grim:
Are you really helping here? That’s what you ought to be doing if you’re a writer. Or any kind of artist. Helping. Some. And it doesn’t mean cheerful or Pollyanna-ish. Francis Bacon, the painter, was helping. William S. Burroughs helps. We all help in different ways.
Here are my prep notes:
Big thanks to Tim for being game and thanks to the folks at Literati for setting it up.
Stay tuned: Next month I get to interview Sarah Ruhl about her book Smile.
Tim Kreider’s We Learn Nothing
My January pick for our Read Like an Artist book club is Tim Kreider’s We Learn Nothing. To get the book in time to join our discussion next month, sign up now.
Here’s my intro:
“Fourteen years ago, I was stabbed in the throat.” So begins this collection of personal essays from the former political cartoonist, unfairly as gifted with words as he is with pictures. Krieder’s writing will not be for everyone, but I would like to assign everyone over the age of twenty “The Referendum,” a piece about how as we age, our peers give us a “glimpse of the parallel universes” that would have resulted had we made different life choices. I love this book because the essays only get deeper and richer with each year. Interspersed throughout are Kreider’s cartoons, which take their cues from biting satirists like Ralph Steadman and George Grosz. This is a contemporary classic.
Our first @literati book club pick of 2022 is extremely appropriate, given the new year we’re facing. Join us! https://t.co/i42s5oWNwB#readlikeanartist pic.twitter.com/p7Bx8Ap2cB
— Austin Kleon (@austinkleon) December 29, 2021
To join our discussion, sign up for the club!
Interview with David Epstein
In two weeks, I’m interviewing author David Epstein about his book, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World.
I’ll be asking him about his inspiration, how he works, and how his ideas about the book have changed since he became a parent. (We’ll also probably bitch about how much we both hate writing books!)
The event will stream live on YouTube on Monday, November 29th at 3pm central. If you click through, you can set a reminder.
David Epstein’s Range
My November pick for our Read Like an Artist book club is David Epstein’s Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World. To get the book in time to join our discussion next month, sign up now.
Here’s my intro:
“A jack of all trades is a master of none, but oftentimes better than a master of one.” What does it say about our culture that we’ve hacked the ending off of that famous phrase? John Steinbeck said people don’t want advice, they want corroboration, and maybe that’s why I love this book so much: it’s both a validation of how I’ve chosen to go about my life and career and a kick in the pants to stay true to my instincts, to not get complacent, to stretch out, and go down weird paths…
Learn more about David and read what I’ve previously written about the book.
To join our discussion, sign up for the club!
Sally Mann’s Hold Still
My October pick for our Read Like an Artist book club is Sally Mann’s Hold Still. To get the book in time to join our discussion next month, sign up now.
Here’s my intro:
Sally Mann is that rare master of both pictures and words, and her memoir shows off that mastery: the visual images are perfectly woven into the text to tell her story. (While best known for her photography, Mann holds a BA in literature and an MA in creative writing.) This book covers her long, interesting life and career, including her friendship with the painter Cy Twombly (there’s a surprising scene of him people-watching outside of a Walmart) and her struggle to make art while being a mother to three children. It’s not often that an artist can tell their own story in prose that sings, and that’s what makes this book so special to me.
This book was on my list of 5 great books about art and motherhood, and a portion of the book also reads as a cautionary tale about using your children in your art:
Not only was the distinction between the real children and the images difficult for people, but so also was the distinction between the images and their creator, whom some found immoral…
On this subject, the story has a sad afterword, which I will leave readers to discover for themselves.
To join our discussion, sign up for the club!
Rob Walker’s The Art of Noticing
My September pick for our Read Like an Artist book club is Rob Walker’s The Art of Noticing. To get the book in time to join our discussion next month, sign up now.
Here’s my intro:
The quickest way to improve your creative life is to learn to pay better attention to your everyday world. I love Rob Walker’s mind and the marvelous newsletter he has spun out from this volume. It might be a risky and unconventional choice for a book club because there is no real narrative here—it’s a smorgasbord of 131 exercises and inspirational quotes designed to get you looking and listening and exploring and discovering the extraordinary in the ordinary life around you—but I thought this would be the perfect read to dip in and out of throughout September, a month when we all get busy again after the lull of summer. I hope we can share our favorite quotes and exercises and all the curious things that we notice…
To join our discussion, sign up for the club!
Tamara Shopsin’s Arbitrary Stupid Goal
My August pick for our Read Like an Artist book club is Tamara Shopsin’s Arbitrary Stupid Goal. To get the book in time to join our discussion next month, sign up now.
Here’s my intro:
This is a wonderful illustrated memoir of writer and illustrator Tamara Shopsin’s childhood in 1970s Greenwich Village, growing up with her brothers and sisters in their parents’ grocery store and restaurant, Shopsin’s. The “arbitrary stupid goal” of the title is a bit of the unconventional practice and wisdom of her father (the legendary Kenny Shopsin), which is sprinkled throughout the book. Like almost all memoirs by artists, it is partly the story of how the author became an artist. I love the way this book is written with pictures and words. Reading a Shopsin book gives me the same jolt I get when I read something like Kurt Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions: “I didn’t know a book could do this!”
Shopsin is quite simply one of my favorite creative people around, and I’ve written about her work several times on this blog. Really excited for people to fall in love with this book, and I’m even more excited for her first novel, LaserWriter II, which comes out in October.
To join our discussion, sign up for the club!
Tove Jansson’s The Summer Book
My July pick for our Read Like an Artist book club is Tove Jansson’s The Summer Book. To get the book in time to join our discussion next month, sign up now.
Here’s my intro:
Tove Jansson, the writer and artist best known for creating the Moomins, spent her summers on an island in the gulf of Finland with her lifelong partner, Tuulikki Pietila. She wrote most of her books there, and she wrote The Summer Book, about a girl and her grandmother living on an island, at the age of sixty, after losing her mother. I love this book because it’s what I wish all my summers would feel like, deep and just a little dark and surrounded by the sea…
The timing couldn’t be better: a new festival is starting in the UK called The Woman Who Fell in Love with An Island. (Inspired by a letter she wrote to Tooti in 1963, asking her partner if she’d read the D.H. Lawrence story, “The Man Who Loved Islands”: “How about ‘The Woman Who Fell in Love with an Island’?”)
The Guardian recently published “How Tove Jansson’s love of nature shaped the world of the Moomins,” with more about their life on the island, including this passage about their “hut” and routine:
Like the lighthouse that the author hymned in Moominpappa at Sea, the hut’s one room had windows facing in all directions so that Tove and Pietilä could watch the horizon from 360 degrees, and see the winds and storms coming and going. Seated at separate desks (in Helsinki they lived in separate apartments joined by an attic corridor), they “got a lot into the day”. While Jansson wrote, Pietilä drew, or filmed with her 8mm camera. Occasionally they had a joint project, constructing scenes from the Moomin books, with Pietilä making the 3D models and Jansson painting them: “That was their play time.”
Back in April, I watched a (rare) documentary made up of footage Tooti shot on 8mm: Haru, Island of the Solitary.
Jansson wrote a piece called “The Island” that is, according to translator Hernan Diaz, “at once a short story, an essay, and a prose poem,” which “reads both like a sketch for The Summer Book (published eleven years later) and a vignette of Klovharu, the island where Jansson and Tuulikki Pietilä, her partner, built a summerhouse in the mid-60’s.”
It begins: “There is a surprisingly large number of people who go around dreaming about an island.”
I am one of them!
Sign up for the club to join the discussion.
Literati unboxing
One of the fun things about my new monthly bookclub is that I get the books sent to my house, too! I took a video of what you get in the mail when you sign up for the premium subscription:
The first @literati unboxing!https://t.co/UjNAFFIIbP#readlikeanartist pic.twitter.com/chJNkHO3TT
— Austin Kleon (@austinkleon) May 24, 2021