a nutrient-dense action for your spiritual interior
an interview about writing through anxiety & what writers can learn from other artists
Today we’ve got an interview with the smart and funny Beth Pickens, a counselor and consultant who works with artists and art organizations. Her new book, Make Your Art No Matter What, is a practical, warm, and encouraging guide to strategies for working through many of the obstacles that can get in the way of creative practice. It includes the topics you might already know you want help with, like time and fear, as well as other issues that might not be as immediately obvious, like money, marketing, and asking. The book has a really lovely mix of stories from Beth’s work with her clients, who are a fascinating bunch of writers and artists working across media and art forms, practical tips, and exercises you can try out at home. I read my copy basically straight through, then made up a list of a bunch of friends I thought would like it, too.
When I started your book, I flipped through the table of contents to get a sense of the different "creative hurdles" you'd be writing about and thought, oh, the anxiety chapter, I definitely need to read about anxiety. And it turns out there is no "anxiety chapter" per se, though it is kind of indirectly addressed in the "fear" chapter, so that probably tells you something about where I am in my writing and my life. (Though I do love what you write about fear: "I don't recommend trying to conquer fear. Instead, I advocate that you live with fear, get acquainted with it, understand its consequence in your life, and take action even when you're scared.") I'm curious if anxiety - about producing creative work, about sharing it, about rejection, and on and on - is something that shows up often with your clients, and what suggestions you might have about managing it.
I considered a chapter called Depression + Anxiety because these are the twin psychological experiences of life in modernity that seem ubiquitous. I chose, instead, to call it Thinking + Feeling as a way to capture these experiences without explicitly pathologizing them. Some of us have diagnosable mood disorders that are depression and/or anxiety but almost all of us simply experience anxiety and depression because we are humans living in the digital era. I cannot recall a single artist that I've worked with who did not describe themselves as anxious or tell me about a group of symptoms that point to anxiety! There are many, many ways to treat and manage anxiety, whether it's a diagnosed disorder or related to a phase of life or simply one's neurotic soul. Personally, I manage my own spirited anxiety through 10 mg of Lexapro a day (I call it The Lexapro Glow), a lot of exercise, a 12-step program for people affected by other people's alcoholism, much spiritual and contemplative work, therapy, and swapping out my beloved coffee for matcha about 3 years ago. It takes a village of solutions to manage my anxiety! Each person benefits from trial and error; there is a constellation of solutions that can help you manage yours!
One of the things I love about your book is how wide-ranging it is in terms of your perspective and the clients you've worked with, that it's both writers and artists of all kinds. What have you learned from working with artists in such a range of fields? Is there anything you think writers in particular could learn from visual artists?
Because I work with artists and writers in every discernible discipline and beyond, I get to indulge private over-generalizations which are simply fun for me! Choreographers are like this, poets do that, painters are like this, multidisciplinary artists are into that. I don't use this reductive understanding to actually work with my clients; it's just entertaining to me in a vague Maslow's Hammer kind of way.
That said, there is SO MUCH writers can learn from visual artist friends, learning about visual artists past and present, and even engaging in a visual practice themselves.
I love to give prompts and recommendations gleaned from one discipline and offered to another. For example, dance makers and musicians have a culture of warming up. They learn, often early on, that they first have to warm up on their instrument/themselves before they can get to work. A lot of visual, writing, media and other kinds of artists don't have this default setting: to warm up. Writers, for example, may believe they should sit at their word document or notebook and just, like, get back into the novel but that's like asking a kitten who just woke up to be brilliant and make you money. You need to warm things up! Lynda Barry, patron saint of all us weirdos, writes the alphabet in calligraphy as an opening warmup. Every writer, every artist benefits from finding some warm up practices.
Community is something that comes up at several points in the book, and I'm always interested in how writers and artists build connections that help sustain their creative life. The pandemic has been such a wild time in terms of community - I've been to lots of great zoom events that likely wouldn't have been possible if we all had to gather in person, so there are some positives, but for the most part, it's been pretty isolating. I wonder if there's anything you've seen your clients do, or that you've suggested they do in terms of building community and seeking out and bolstering relationships during the pandemic that you'd suggest, or if you have good ideas about what we can do to renew those connections going forward.
Building, investing in, and deepening relationships to other artists is vital and I give my clients explicit artist community homework all the time. It seems so complicated to do that when one is sitting in their isolation, peering out, unsure how to be with other people and feeling unwilling to do so. But truly, just pick any artist in your town who you think is smart and friendly. Invite that person to do anything with you, in person ideally. While you're together, talk a little bit about what is going on with you creatively. What's happening and not happening in your studio, in your writing, in your projects. Be together as artists. This is a nutrient-dense action for your spiritual interior. Ask the vaccinated artists you know but maybe haven't seen in 15 months to have a little potluck gathering and talk about what went wrong in your creative lives during covid. Call it Disappointment Fest!
Your website describes a great program you run called Homework Club. It's something I think so many writers feel the need for - "a framework for keeping their projects and practices a priority." Could you talk about the need you saw that the homework club fills, and how you've seen it help the folks who join?
I have limited capacity for my one-to-one consultation practice and many people can't afford the fee. A strategy to serve more artists (besides advice on Instagram, writing books and pamphlets, and doing organizational consultation) emerged from my friend, the artist Carolyn Pennypacker Riggs - an affordable group experience that gives light structure, opportunity for more artist community, and deep focus in areas that all artists have tension with: money, time, asking, community, fear, etc. It's $15/month making it way more accessible financially than my consultation practice, people can go at their own speed, and no one is ever graded on the monthly homework. They can do all of it, none of it, or try just one thing and see how it helps. There are many, many workshops and structured groups for artists to try, mine is just one! I blend my specific skills - counseling training, art world and fundraising experience, queer and feminist politics - to create something that can serve people beyond my consultation practice.
Thanks so much, Beth, for this interview. You can read more at her website, where you can also find the info to join Homework Club! You can buy her book online at Bookshop, or at your local indie. (I spotted a copy at the lovely Joy Shop in my little town, so it’s out and about in the world!)
A few notes and reading suggestions:
Though I’m often a little skeptical of headlines promising to help you “unlock your productivity,” I loved this piece by novelist Ingrid Rojas Contreras, in which she describes how she uses self-mesmerism in her writing practice.
I’ve got a couple poems, all about motherhood and marriage and sex oh my, newly up this week - A Universe Composed of Solely Light at SWIMM Every Day and Goodnight Mother, Goodnight Moon and The Good Enough Mother at the new journal Poetry is Currency.
Pragya Agarwal’s essay for Lit Hub on writing about motherhood during a pandemic resonated with so much of my own experiences in this past long year. I really loved this section:
What I have learnt through all this is that, even when we are not writing, we are thinking, dreaming and imagining. Beyond the act of actually writing words is the time that really makes us writers. I have read and folded pages, underlined words and paragraphs, and this created space for thoughts that sometimes get buried or forgotten. In some strange ways, this period of intense mothering and writing about motherhood and mothering at the same time has made me more willing to take risks, to allow myself to be more experimental and to find out what writing means to me.
(She has a new book, (M)otherhood: On the Choices of Being a Woman, and the essay above makes me really excited to read it!)
My friend Rebecca Hazleton’s The Man: A Compilation, about literary bad men and how they get away with it, was published by Kenyon Review this week.
How is your writing going? I’d love to hear about your projects, challenges you’re facing, and tools or tricks that are helping you keep going through it all. You can always reply to this email, or find me on twitter (@nancy_reddy) and instagram (@nancy.o.reddy).
Great! Just shared this with a writer friend who often feels some anxiety about getting her work out there.