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.

ISBN: 9781644452929
Format: Paperback
Pages: 192
Publisher: Graywolf
Published: July 09, 2024

**The New Yorker's "Best Books of 2024 So Far"**

“Gutsy. . . . D’Erasmo plants her subjects together in unexpected arrangements, throwing in some favorite seeds of her own—a reference to Colette or Roberto Bolaño here, a look at Ruth Asawa’s sculptures there—and then steps back to see what patterns emerge.....The page glows.”—Alexandra Schwartz, The New Yorker

“Through its fusion of interview and memoir, The Long Run offers a model for what we can provide each other as we nurture the long run of our art-making lives.”—Tony Trigilio, On the Seawall

“D’Erasmo explores not just what it means to have a long career in the arts, but what it means to be an artist, to be queer, and to be a citizen of the Earth, making this book a unique contribution to the canon of work about the life of an artist. Artists of all kinds will find inspiration and good company within these thoughtful essays.”— Kirkus (starred review)

“Novelist D’Erasmo (The Complicities) takes a rewarding deep dive into why—and how—artists are able to go on making art. . . . Artists seeking inspiration would do well to check this out.” —Publishers Weekly