What are your questions?

A open Q&A thread, The Interrogative Mood, and other adventures in the art of inquiry...

One of my lifted type collages

Hey y’all,

Happy new year! I wanted to start 2022 off by making things a little more interactive and opening up a thread for any questions you might have for me:

If it’s a little question, I’ll try to answer it right in the thread. If it’s a Big Question, I might dedicate a whole Tuesday email to it.

(If you’re too shy for comments, you can send me an email directly, but you might not hear back for a bit, as I’m currently hacking away at the inbox I’ve neglected for the past 3 weeks…)

Laurie Anderson’s 5 questions

Chekhov said that the role of the artist is to ask questions, not answer them.

Whenever I am bottomed out in my own work, I try to make a big list of what questions I have and go from there.

A question I heard years ago that I still think about

Sometimes a question haunts me for years, and going about answering it leads me to something new.

One method is to take a rhetorical question literally, like when my friend Steven once asked me, “What does a seed look like?”

Asking the right question will often solve whatever problem is at hand.

For example, after my wife has read a first draft of mine, she will sometimes simply hand the pages back to me and ask, “What did you really want to say?”

When my children were little and fussy, I diagnosed them with 3 questions: