Sara Hendren has a new book (that I had the pleasure of blurbing!) coming out in about a week, and I told her, “Oh, you’re in ‘The Gulp.’” The Gulp is that weird time in between when a book is finished and when it’s published. It’s always been a nerve-wracking time for me, but Hendren’s editor, Rebecca Saletan, says it’s her favorite time — it’s like “having a secret before the world knows.” I like that (much sunnier) take and I am stealing it.
Today we honor Jan Steward, who passed away on July 1. Jan was a friend and student of Corita, as well as the co-author of "Learning by Heart: Teachings to Free the Creative Spirit."
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Photograph by @pixtakerirfan for the @latimes. pic.twitter.com/GAfBVODTLD— Corita Art Center (@coritaartcenter) July 22, 2020
Just a few weeks after I shot this video about how Corita Kent has impacted my work, I found out that her former student Jan Steward died. Steward was an artist and photographer in LA, but she’s also responsible for Learning By Heart, the book of Corita Kent’s teachings that sort of fizzled when it came out in 1992, but has now become a kind of cult classic for folks like me.
In the 2008 foreword to the book, she wrote:
It was in 1979 on a trip to Little Tokyo in Los Angeles when Corita asked me to write this book. We would work together. It would be quick and easy. It was neither. She lived in Boston and I in Los Angeles. We worked by letter and phone and progress was painfully slow. We worked for hours on content and every few meetings the concept would change—sometimes radically.
They went back and forth about titles. Corita insisted it be in black and white so it was affordable. She didn’t want any of her own work in the book. (Imagine!) Corita died in 1986, with the book unfinished.
In a great 2009 interview with the LA Times, Steward went into more detail about how she wrote the book. She said she wanted the book to feel like being in one of Corita’s classes. (True to her name, she was a steward of Corita’s teachings.)
“Corita was loath to formalize things,” noted another one of Corita’s students. “She thought something would become calcified the moment it was written down.”
So Steward had to come up with the right approach:
She scribbled her teacher’s thoughts on pieces of paper, found copies of her lessons and collected stories from other former students. Then, she threw each into a cardboard box that most closely matched a particular part of Corita’s curriculum. The contents of each box turned into chapters such as “Looking,” “Sources,” “Structure” and “Connect and Create.”
(I’m reminded of Twyla Tharp’s banker boxes.)
Steward wrote of the book,
The process I want to describe is living and squirming and very difficult to pin down. The process is one of teaching, learning, growing, and doing things to make the world a better place. Whether that world is within you or as great as infinity.
RIP.
I started Sarah Schulman’s The Gentrification of the Mind this morning, but I had to stop and copy out this passage from her introduction, explaining why she likes to use collage and juxtaposition to build up her text:
But as a reader myself, I have always most enjoyed books that I can be interactive with. I like to fiercely agree with one idea—and fiercely disagree with the next. That kind of dynamic relationship requires a lot of ideas coming at once, from which the reader can pick and choose. Nothing bores me more than the one-long-slow-idea book, and I promise to never write one.
Yes! That’s it! The “One-Long-Slow-Idea Book.” What a snooze.
I, too, promise never to write one, not on purpose. (Though, I don’t begrudge anyone who does — it can be quite lucrative.)
I would like to write a One-hundred-Short-Fast-Ideas book.
Better get back to it…
This weird little book turned 10 years old this month. Kind of hard to believe. I made most of the poems on the bus to work and on my lunch break at my office job. Years ago I thought for sure it would probably be remaindered and go out-of-print. And yet, it’s still around after a decade. (Perhaps even more amazingly, I get a modest check for it once in a while…)
A few years ago I wrote about what I’ve learned from a decade of publishing. Not much to add to that, except:
1) Make sure when you publish a book you think you can live with it for a while.
2) Try to write books you want to read, yes, but also, if you can, ones only you can write.
3) Have a little fun with it, if you can.
There really is nothing like that first book…
It is strange to look at a pile of books that you wrote that you can’t read. People often ask me about the quality of the foreign editions or complain about a translation and I have to admit them that even though the books have my name on them, I had absolutely nothing to do with any of them. Like, nothing. I wrote them, sure, but I can’t vouch for what’s in them! Who knows?!? Translation is weird. (Especially for a hick American who only speaks English.)
And yet, I’m so grateful to my translators and foreign publishers. Every time a new translation comes in the mail it’s a little thrill. For example, look at the gigantic Russian editions in hardcover! So fun. (I’ve lost count of the number of languages. Several are not shown in these pictures — including the foreign editions of Keep Going.) Getting your words in the world is a crazy thing. I wish I could be in all the places my books have been…
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