The Long Run

April 15, 2024
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.

May 1, 2024
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.

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