The Long Run: A Creative Inquiry
by Stacey D'Erasmo
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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 show more 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. As her own career stretches past its second decade, novelist Stacey D'Erasmo explores the concept of longevity within creative fields. She talks with fellow creators from a variety of disciplines, including fine artists, performing artists, and writers of many genres. In talking to others about their own career trajectories, D'Erasmo also contemplates her own influences and motivations, and redefines her notion of "success." show lessTags
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Four short passages from The Long Run:
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In the same way I envy gardeners, I have also envied people of deep religious faith, because they know that they are part of something so much bigger than themselves that is kindly disposed toward them, and they can lean back against that.
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I have long said that the experience of queerness, in the time when I was coming out, prepared me beautifully for being a writer. Like being queer, being an artist means that you are continuously insisting on doing something that maybe no one wants you to do, that very possibly isn’t going to work, that’s only going to end in defeat and humiliation, and that is unlikely to bring worldly rewards or general approval.
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“When dealing with power – the power of show more employers, the power of gatekeepers, the power of the critical establishment – being able to say no is perhaps the most crucial point of leverage. It’s a common assumption that being able to say no to authority comes only with an equivalent, or greater, amount of power, money, and fame. However, it is, of course, precisely when one doesn’t have as much power as authority that the ability to say no matters most, particularly if one is in it for the long run.
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This requires not the momentary strength of the assassin, but the deep stamina of the double agent.
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In the same way I envy gardeners, I have also envied people of deep religious faith, because they know that they are part of something so much bigger than themselves that is kindly disposed toward them, and they can lean back against that.
*
I have long said that the experience of queerness, in the time when I was coming out, prepared me beautifully for being a writer. Like being queer, being an artist means that you are continuously insisting on doing something that maybe no one wants you to do, that very possibly isn’t going to work, that’s only going to end in defeat and humiliation, and that is unlikely to bring worldly rewards or general approval.
*
“When dealing with power – the power of show more employers, the power of gatekeepers, the power of the critical establishment – being able to say no is perhaps the most crucial point of leverage. It’s a common assumption that being able to say no to authority comes only with an equivalent, or greater, amount of power, money, and fame. However, it is, of course, precisely when one doesn’t have as much power as authority that the ability to say no matters most, particularly if one is in it for the long run.
*
This requires not the momentary strength of the assassin, but the deep stamina of the double agent.
* show less
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8+ Works 759 Members
Stacey D'Erasmo was an accomplished literary reviewer before making the crossover to novelist. She was Senior Editor at The Voice Literary Supplement for seven years and has written articles for Rolling Stone, The Nation, Details and New York Newsday. She won a Stegner Fellowship in Fiction based on the first forty pages of TEA and went on to show more become the first Fiction Editor for Artforum. She is currently a contributing writer for Out. She lives in New York. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
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