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A Creative Inquiry
by Stacey D'Erasmo
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.
BookBrowsers ask Holly Gramazio
Oh yeah, for sure, reading is my main hobby and if anything I do more of it now that I can go "ohhhh actually this kind-of counts as work". Sometimes I read stuff specifically for research or to go "hmm, here's a problem with something I'm writing that I'm dealing with, I wanna see how other peop...
-Holly_G
"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." ―Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"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." —Publishers Weekly
"In this brief but impressively substantive exploration of the lives and work of eight artists who have sustained enduring careers, D'Erasmo also interrogates her own path as a novelist, literary critic, and teacher as she searches for the answer to one pressing question: 'How do we keep doing this--making art?" ―Shelf Awareness
"What sustains creative people over the long run? What allows certain people to continue to learn and grow, both as artists and as humans Those are the kinds of questions at the heart of Stacey D'Erasmo's book The Long Run: A Creative Inquiry, which is all about living a creative life." ―Ann Douglas, Psychology Today
"Oh, how I needed this book! Stacey D'Erasmo has given us a tender and fascinating lineage of artists who demonstrate the myriad ways to build a life around an artistic practice and sustain it. Between their stories emerges her own gorgeous and intimate memoir, a queer künstlerroman that had me rapt. Every moment of reading these pages felt like ingesting a delicious, life-saving tonic. What a gift of a book." ―Melissa Febos, author of Girlhood, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award
"Stacey D'Erasmo is one of my favorite writers, full stop. For years, I've been learning from her, admiring her wisdom and style, attempting to emulate her cool. I suspected she held secrets about how to really live, and I was right. Here she offers wisdom in the form of portraits―appreciations―each one precise, wondrous, meditative, often sexy, and exquisitely wrought. The Long Run is a revelation. A book about sustaining an artistic practice, yes, but also a book that offers sustenance itself." ―Justin Torres, author of Blackouts, winner of the National Book Award
This information about The Long Run was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Stacey D'Erasmo is the author of the novels Tea, A Seahorse Year, The Sky Below, Wonderland, and The Complicities, and the nonfiction book The Art of Intimacy. She is a professor of writing and publishing practices at Fordham University.
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