Here are two pages from my delightful typewriter interview with Kate-Bingaman Burt.
To your bliss stations!
I put this Joseph Campbell quote from Keep Going at the top of my newsletter, “The World Is Too Much With Us,” the title stolen from the Wordsworth poem:
The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;—
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not. Great God! I’d rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.
The one-hour studio
How I’m making art in times like these:
At some point in the day, I go into the studio. I don’t touch my computer. I set a timer for one hour. I try to make some art. When the timer goes off, I either stop or keep going, depending on what’s on my calendar.
Read more: “The One-Hour Studio.”
Succulents
I have been drawing succulents. As I explain in my letter, “For no good reason”:
I continue to wear down my new Caran d’Ache pastels. Right now I’m drawing succulents that I see on my morning walks onto old sheet music and pages from thrifted books. I’m not sure what I’m doing or why I’m doing it or what I’m going to do with these drawings. “It’s a good way to do stuff,” Ralph Steadman says. “For no good reason.”
Not included in that letter is my attempt at a much larger drawing:
Writing about editing
In my letter “Just cut stuff” I wrote about working on the copyedits of the manuscript for Don’t Call It Art, and how you don’t have to rewrite what’s not there:
Whenever I find myself snagged on a suggested edit, the first thing I ask myself is: Does this even need to be here?
I find the easiest thing to do with something that isn’t working in a piece of writing is to just cut it out completely.
In my letter “All publishing is self-publishing,” I shared my 3 tips for self-editing:
The best editor is you… tomorrow, print your work out and edit it by hand, and record the audiobook before you finish the manuscript!
The easiest thing to write about when you’re writing is writing and the easiest thing to write about when you’re editing… is editing.
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