Go into the studio and play

10 things worth sharing this week

Hey y’all,

Here are 10 things I thought were worth sharing this week:

1. On a bike ride last weekend I chanced upon a neighborhood stop on the West Austin Studio Tour. One of the potters who makes under the name Mud Alchemy said about her work, “I just go into the studio and play.” I drew her words the next morning in my diary and I’ve been thinking about them since.
   
   

2. “Your work is play” is a section in my book Keep Going. The ebook of my guide to staying creative in chaotic times is still only $1.99 in the US, but it’s a lot prettier on paper. If you want to gift a copy or get any of my other books signed and personalized for the holidays, now is the time to place your order with Bookpeople. (My friends at The Painted Porch also have a good supply of signed stock.)
   
   

3. You need to have the right conditions in order to be able to play, and one of them was the topic of Tuesday’s letter: having room to think. (I somehow forgot to include one of the best essays ever written on the topic, Virginia Woolf’s “A Room of One’s Own.”)
   
   

4. As much as I love my “Little Room,” it feels good to get out of it now and then. This is such a beautiful time of year here in Austin, Texas and two of my favorite events are going on this weekend: The Texas Book Festival and The East Austin Studio Tour. (A happening that bridges the two is The Austin (Used) Book Collective.) The idea of “being local” is becoming more and more important to me: In times like these I crave the company of humans living near me who care about the same things that I do. I’ll probably just ramble around for a few hours on my bike and see what I bump into, but one stop I plan to visit for sure is #429 to pick up a copy of Greetings from Slack Town, a comic about exploring “the melancholy and burnout of living in a rapidly changing city.”
   
   

5. Despite all the tech money and toxic bros, one positive thing about my ever-growing city is that people I like are always passing through — Chase Jarvis posted a short chat we had over tacos that touched on many of the things I’ve written about here recently: why I love “comfort work,” the importance of friction and resistance, and how to harness the energy of “creative tensions.” 
   
   

6. Local treasure Elizabeth McCracken visited every library branch in the Austin Public Library system and wrote a beautiful essay about it, “Texas Libraries are Engines of Optimism.” (She writes some of the best sentences around — her newsletter about her morning swims in Barton Springs is a prime example of how a great writer can make anything interesting.)
   
   

7. I couldn’t figure out why Freya Gowrley’s Fragmentary Forms: A New History of Collage seemed so familiar to me until I realized she wrote an essay for the wonderful show I saw when I was in Edinburgh in 2019, Cut and Paste: 400 Years of Collage. I love this idea of growing the history of collage, pushing further back from the modernists, and including stuff like this Victorian Blood Book and a collage album by a young girl named Helen. (For contemporary collage, check out the newsletter Collé — every week I discover a new collagist like Rochelle Voyles.)
   
   

8. English magic: I have fallen in love with the work of artist Jeremy Deller after watching his film about house music, Everybody in the Place: an Incomplete History of Britain 1984-1992. This video of kids playing on his Stonehenge bouncy house to a steel band soundtrack was exactly what my soul desperately needed this week. After all that and listening to his appearance on Desert Island Discs, I ordered his retrospective, Art is Magic.
   
   

9. “I believe that storytelling can be a strategy to help you make sense out of your life.” RIP writer Dorothy Allison, author of the classic Bastard Out of Carolina.
   
   

10. RIP jazz giant Roy Haynes, who drummed with John Coltrane, Lester Young, Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, Charlie Parker, and so many more. “The human manifestation of whatever it is that the word ‘hip’ was supposed to mean” died at 99. “Do drummers live longer?” asks Ted Gioia. If they do, maybe it’s because they keep playing… 

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xoxo,

Austin

The promotional postcard we made for Keep Going