The Long Run

Description

The Long Run
by Stacey D’Erasmo

ISBN: 9781644452929
Softcover, new

Brief Description:
How do I 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 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.