The Long Run: A Creative Inquiry

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.

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.