The long run A creative inquiry

Stacey D'Erasmo

Book - 2024

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.

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Subjects
Genres
autobiographies (literary works)
Informational works
Essays
Biographies
Autobiographies
Published
Minneapolis, Minnesota : Graywolf Press [2024]
Language
English
Main Author
Stacey D'Erasmo (author)
Physical Description
168 pages ; 21 cm
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references.
Includes bibliographical references (pages 159-168).
ISBN
9781644452929
  • Prologue: The Question
  • Freedom
  • Garden
  • Desire
  • I'll Be Your Mirror
  • Exile
  • The In-Between
  • Descent
  • Epilogue: The Red Thread
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

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. (July)Correction: An earlier version of this review misidentified one of the profile subjects. The actor interviewed was Blair Brown, not Bonnie Blair.

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

A rich meditation on the artist's life and work over time. Two decades into her writing career, D'Erasmo, author of The Sky Below and Wonderland, contemplates a question so many artists have likely posed: "How do we keep doing this--making art?" Seeking the answer, she presents the results of her interviews with a variety of artists including musicians, photographers, dancers, and sculptors, as well as her personal experience and research. The result is a lyrical exploration of life and art. "In my own long run, one of the main things I have always reached for to sustain me is company," she writes. "The company of lovers. The company of friends. The company of other writers and artists, living and dead." D'Erasmo's essays invite readers to be part of that company, to find themselves in her pages, and, in turn, to invite other artists into the conversation. Though each essay stems from an artist the author interviewed, D'Erasmo's associative genius takes her into new and surprising territory. For example, in "Garden," the author wanders from queer landscape designer Darrel Morrison to Colette and climate change: "If my question is, What sustains artists over the long run?, then the answer from Morrison and Colette might clearly be: earth, which sounds so charming. However, one can't garden, or be in a garden, or a forest, or on a prairie very long before one notices the death." In musical sentences such as these, D'Erasmo explores not just what it means to have a long career in the arts, but what it means to be an artist, to be queer, and to be a citizen of the Earth, making this book a unique contribution to the canon of work about the life of an artist. Artists of all kinds will find inspiration and good company within these thoughtful essays. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.