The Long Run
A Creative Inquiry
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4.0 • 2 Ratings
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
The author of The Art of Intimacy asks eight legendary artists: What has sustained you in the long run?
How do we keep doing this—making art? Stacey D’Erasmo had been writing for twenty years and had published three novels when she asked herself this question. She was past the rush of her first books and wondering what to expect—how to stay alive in her vocation—in the decades ahead.
She began to interview older artists she admired to find out how they’d done it. She talked to Valda Setterfield about her sixty-year career that took her from the Merce Cunningham Dance Company to theatrical collaborations with her husband to roles in films. She talked to Samuel R. Delany about his vast oeuvre of books in many genres. She talked to Amy Sillman about working between painting and other media and between abstraction and figuration. She talked to landscape architect Darrel Morrison, composer Tania Léon, actress Blair Brown, and musician Steve Earle, and started to see connections between them and to artists across time: Colette, David Bowie, Ruth Asawa. She found insights in own experience, about what has driven and thwarted and shaped her as a writer.
Instead of easy answers or a road map, The Long Run offers one practitioner’s conversations, anecdotes, confidences, and observations about sustaining a creative life. Along the way, it radically redefines artistic success, shifting the focus from novelty and output and external recognition toward freedom, fluidity, resistance, community, and survival.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Novelist D'Erasmo (The Complicities) takes a rewarding deep dive into why—and how—artists are able to go on making art. Driven partly by a painful and protracted spell of writer's block, the author consulted and researched late-career painters, writers, composers, and others to find out how they've sustained their creativity. Landscape design artist Darrel Morrison draws inspiration from the earth itself ("Who needs human beings when nature is this polymorphous and sensual?" D'Erasmo muses). Critic and science fiction novelist Samuel R. Delany uses life's "chance encounters" as a "wellspring of rich possibility" from which to create fantastical worlds, in the words of critic Matthew Cheney, while actor Blair Brown credits her ability to "traverse genres from sci-fi to high lit and mediums from the stage to the small screen to film" for her remarkably durable career. What emerges from these and other interviews is less a creative blueprint than an admiring portrait of the perseverance, talent, and drive that fuels creatives. While D'Erasmo's self-reflections sometimes detract from the focus on her subjects, the final product inspires. Artists seeking inspiration would do well to check this out. Correction: An earlier version of this review misidentified one of the profile subjects. The actor interviewed was Blair Brown, not Bonnie Blair.
