Stacey D’Erasmo on Why We Keep Making Art

First Draft: A Dialogue of Writing is a weekly show featuring in-depth interviews with fiction, nonfiction, essay writers, and poets, highlighting the voices of writers as they discuss their work, their craft, and the literary arts. Hosted by Mitzi Rapkin, First Draft celebrates creative writing and the individuals who are dedicated to bringing their carefully chosen words to print as well as the impact writers have on the world we live in.

In this episode, Mitzi talks to Stacey D’Erasmo about her new book, The Long Run: A Creative Inquiry.

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From the episode:

Mitzi Rapkin: In The Long Run you talk to these seven individuals, a dancer, a landscape architect, a writer, an, actress, a composer, an artist, a musician with this question in mind, how do we keep doing this, making art? You combine your own essays and thoughts about art related to your discussion with these people. A takeaway I had was that there isn’t one revelation, that there isn’t one answer to how we keep making art, that there’s different answers from different people, and that for some people, maybe lightning strikes in a certain way, but we were just talking about abstraction and seeing things as an arc. I went to see a Mark Rothko retrospective and you could see how he evolved from making figures to his final squares and abstract paintings. But there wasn’t this lightning moment. It was like a melting, and I felt like, in the same way, your book was like this melting, you had these moments of softness, but it wasn’t lightning.

Stacey D’Erasmo: I think that’s absolutely true. I mean, sure lightning strikes sometimes, right? Do you know what I mean, like in everything in life, in love, in political awakenings, I don’t know, sometimes you might get a little money windfall. I mean, sure, lightning strikes, but then it’s the next minute and the next minute and the next minute. And I think that as human beings trying to grasp for security and an ever-changing universe, we want to believe that the lightning will strike and then, like you’re set right? There’s an aha moment, and kaboom, and you’re safe. You’re locked. One often wants to believe that materially, right? You know, there’s all this stuff, there’s been all these studies of lottery winners. You know, they win these huge sums of money, and for most of them, two years later, the money’s all gone, and they’re more miserable than they were before, right? We so much want the finale, but in fact, that’s simply not the case. And in fact, most people that I know, what they do want as artists is to keep making art. That’s what they want. We’re always running around like hoarding time, scraping up little piles of resources so that we can have time with our work because the overwhelming desire is to keep going, you know, melting. I mean, that’s a great word for being alive, right? It’s like you’re born, you grow up, and then you start to melt, slowly but surely, until you’re just like a little, little melty part. That’s true. We melt, and the art melts and shifts with us, and lightning strikes are fantastic. And, you know, by definition, they aren’t forever. We don’t live in the lightning strike. And I think that also, you know, to think of the lightning strike as separate from the melting is also maybe a mistake. You know, the lightning strike and the melting kind of go together, right? You know, you melt, you melt, you melt, and then one day for a minute, is like, boop, right? And then you continue melting in a different way.

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Stacey D’Erasmo is the author of the novels Tea, A Seahorse Year, The Sky Below, Wonderland, and The Complicities and the nonfiction books The Art of Intimacy and The Long Run. She is a professor of writing and publishing practices at Fordham University.