The View from the Cheap Seats: Selected Nonfiction
The basis of our humanness is in our ability to create things. Our art—in the broadest sense—is whatever we make visible in the world. Each of us has to choose the scale at which we want to be artists of our own lives. It may be your family or your job or your neighborhood.
Amy Whitaker • Art Thinking: How to Carve Out Creative Space in a World of Schedules, Budgets, and Bosses
While finishing the book, I wrote to a novelist friend and asked him whether I sounded naïve in my approach. Of course you do, he said, and that’s the only way to write anything in a dying world. In fact, to write any book is an act of practically fanatic devotion, he said, because to write a book is to insist on the possibility of a future in whic... See more
Elvia Wilk • Fandom as Methodology: On Fan-Nonfiction and Finding the Joy of Mutual Delusion
The obverse of this freedom, of course, is that your work is so meaningless, so fully for yourself alone, and so worthless to the world, that no one except you cares whether you do it well, or ever. You are free to make several thousand close judgment calls a day. Your freedom is a by-product of your days’ triviality. A shoe salesman—who is doing o
... See moreAnnie Dillard • The Writing Life
To create something is a daring, beautiful act. The architect, the author, the artist—all are building something where nothing was before. To try to create something even better than anyone has ever done it before is even bolder. Sitting down at the computer or with a notepad and committing to pour yourself onto it is a scary proposition. But anyon
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