Download The Long Run: A Creative Inquiry

1
The
Long
Run
A
Creative
Inquiry
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 this8213maing art? Stacey D8217Ersmo
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
2
wondering what to expect8213ho to stay alive in
her vocation8213inthe decades ahead.She began
to interview older artists she admired to find
out how they8217ddone 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 L233on 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 practitioner8217sco
nversations, 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.