On the Many Paths Artists Take to Sustain Their Creative Practice

How do we keep doing this—making art? My question can be read in two ways: What keeps us alive in our art; on what do we draw, year after year and project after project, to keep doing this? And, what happens to us as we keep doing this? In what manner do we keep doing this? This is the question that inspired my book The Long Run: A Creative Inquiry . When I began asking this question in an essay that I published in The Rumpus in 2010, I had never felt more alive in my own vocation. I was working on two projects that were dear to my heart and all I wanted was more time and space to finish them. I had an official community in my teaching life, and a thick community in my personal life that was fundamental to my work. So when I asked back then, How do we keep doing this? my interest was keen, but a little academic. I wanted, more or less, a map of the road ahead that would show me what to expect and what to do. My friend the writer Andrew Altschul and I thought that a good book could be made from my essay by soliciting essays on the long run from various writers and artists who were older than we were. We lined up some great folks, and started shopping the anthology around. What do the desire paths look like of writers and artists who have done this over a lifetime? Then things changed. For different reasons, first my personal community and then my official community fell apart. I did finish the two projects and launch them into the world, but while they were well-received, they didn’t live up to the expectations with which they were published. For about five years—beginning in 2010, funnily enough—things kept breaking. Relationships broke, friendships broke, promises broke. Where I lived, who I lived with, who I counted on, who counted on me, and where I worked all changed, sometimes quickly and vertiginously. Many facets of my identity shattered. About four […]

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