Studio Days

On puttering as creative practice

My backyard experiment after six weeks of unusual and welcome rain and cool temperatures.

I feel like the last few newsletters have been excessively grumpy and it made me realize that I’ve been stretched a little thin. As always, when things get busy, what gets dropped is creative stuff — and so I took this week off work to try to get my mojo back.

Someone I follow on Substack had a piece a few weeks back about how they’d finally gotten a “studio day” and how rejuvenating it had been. I cannot for the life of me find the piece, but the gist of it involved re-entering the physical space where one does creative work, getting it set up, noodling around on ideas, and not putting big pressure on oneself to “produce”.

That last bit might be the most important.

I have a book I’ve been struggling with for over a decade, in part because enough time needed to pass to know how that story ends, and in part because it took me a very long time to be well enough to write from a voice that feels authentic to what I want to say.

I published a novel right out of graduate school, with a Big 5 publisher (I think there were still more than 5 in those days). But because academia and I were a very very bad fit, and I was up to my eyeballs in debt, I got a real job in tech, where I’ve worked full time ever since. I was also part way through a second novel when my brother Patrick was killed in a car wreck. The combination of the two meant I didn’t pursue writing novels as a career, and so, for many many years I’ve been picking this project up and putting it down.

Because the book has gone feral on me so many times, and because I might have had a tiny bit of depression around my abandoned writing career, it often takes a few days of reorganizing spaces, of moving books, of doing adjacent creative projects like playing around this morning with an herb-infused honey, or yesterday’s project of a new batch of herb salt for the year (our wet spring means I have tarragon and summer savory coming out my ears). Sometimes it’s a sewing project.

I felt really guilty about these side projects for a long time, until one day I picked up Bernard Cooper’s memoir My Avant-Garde Education. Cooper taught at Utah while I was there, and although I never studied with him directly, I remembered liking him. He was kind, a quality in short supply in that program. The thing is, Cooper went to art school, not to a writing program. This was a world about which I was utterly ignorant, not about the art so much, as about the kind of education artists undertake. The question that took Cooper’s head off as a young art student was “Is it possible to make a work of art that is not embodied in an object?” As a midwesterner, conceptual art always struck me as pretentious, a con. But reading Cooper’s sentimental education clicked something for me, something about how the concept of process could be useful for a writer. It’s not something we value much. Writers are all about publication, all about the product.

At one point, Cooper says that

“In a classroom in Manhattan, on a rainy day, my perception of art was changed forever. …Vito Acconci’s pedagogy was a mixture of persistent inquiry, faith in the invisible, and nudges toward the unknown. It struck me for the first time that art might find forms beyond painting and sculpture.”

I had a classics prof in college who often spoke to us about St. Teresa of Avila’s thinking on the dark night of the soul. About how faith required a willingness to stay in a state of “persistent inquiry, faith in the invisible, and nudges toward the unknown.” That the beauty and brilliance of St. Teresa’s work on this topic is that it is especially in the absence of faith where faith is required. Wyatt wasn’t talking about religious faith per se, but rather, about the faith we each require simply to keep going, and to do something meaningful with our lives.

Cooper’s book sent me on a kind of deep dive into books about the art world and artists. There’s a terrific series of anthologies, the Whitechapel: Documents of Contemporary Art anthologies that I’ve found enormously useful. There are volumes on topics like Memory, Ruin, Animals, Ethics, The Rural, Craft and many more. Each one contains essays putting into context the theme’s significance to contemporary visual culture. Plus, they’re gorgeous little books. This period of slight obsession with visual art and artists also coincided with Celia Paul’s two astonishingly strange books: Self Portrait, and Letters to Gwen John.

For a couple of years, most of what I was reading was about inventing new art forms, about how artists organized their lives to do so, about what worked and what didn’t, about how to keep working through these artistic dark nights of the soul.

There’s a discourse out there that crops up every so often on social media that pits those of us who don’t have to earn a living from our writing against those writers who can, or do, or are willing to risk penury to try. Since there’s no real discourse of practice among writers, no studio tours, no discussions of what your artistic project is and how the work you’re doing now is trying to accomplish those goals, the entire conversation around writerly success comes down to publication. And writers who rely on publication to make a living tend to call those of us who don’t, hobbyists. Which, since this is America, where the only real standard most people rely on is money, makes a kind of sense. But it doesn’t leave much room for people who do have serious artistic goals, but who can’t dedicate more than bits and chunks of time here and there to accomplishing them.

Once again, capitalism ruining everything. But anyway …

What I found, and continue to find useful in reading about visual art process, is that visual artists describe art as a set of practices in a way that allows me to position all the making I’ve done over these years — the learning to sew in order to define the shape I make in space, for example; or the process of building a garden that is both productive of food, full of flowers, and a place where I can find refuge while hoping to navigate the effects of climate change — all of these making projects, which for so long I thought of as stealing time from my writing — could be conceived of as a larger art practice.

As tempting as it is to claim that my 20 year experiment here in making and growing things is part of some larger performance art piece, I think that’s a stretch. However, I have learned to see the ways that these ancillary creative practices feed into the work I’m trying to accomplish.

But sometimes it takes a few days of not having deadlines, or meetings, or social events. Sometimes it takes a few “studio days” of noodling around, and writing in notebooks and playing with recipes or making a new sewing pattern or figuring out how to rehab those few beautiful family linens that survived my mother’s apartment. And so, that’s where you’ll find me this week. Dog walking and gardening and drinking tea and walking in circles and writing in notebooks and with any luck, unlocking that part of my brain that has something to say about the constellation of grief and love and making and wilderness that I’ve been wrestling with for years now, and getting another little chunk of that down on virtual paper.

So I’ve given myself a studio week — a week to make friends again with my project.