Art/Work

New Directions

Art/Work: A short introduction

I recently worked with the talented Jessie Broom to redesign this Substack. New name, new look! I’m so grateful to have a talented friend like Jessie who can read my mind and funnel my unfiltered spirit into imagery.

I got the idea to reconfigure this Substack last summer at Mudhouse Residency in Greece. The residency is hosted in a small village nestled high in the Cretan mountains. Agios Ionnais contains a series of homes so interconnected it’s difficult to distinguish where one ends and the other begins. Half of the village lies in ruins. A forlorn and crumbling building, home only to feral cats and broken blue bottles, abuts another glistening, renewed mudhouse. The effect is that when you’re walking its narrow and winding paths, you feel you’re meandering the halls of a giant abandoned castle.

Mudhouse Residency

On the few occasions I rode the winding road up from the sea and back to the residency, the sight of the village, revealed at last, astonished me. It looked so precarious! A trick of the wind and the stone creature would slip off the edge the mountain.

This place was not of the real world; it was the stuff of Miyazaki.

The visiting artist for my session was the Iranian artist, Amitis Motavalli. Ami is a true, glamorous beauty who, even in her regular clothes and without make-up, appeared at dinner every night like Cher at the Opera in Moonstruck.

Her work balances the passionate and explosive, the rage, with the deeply thoughtful and introspective.

As part of her residency, she offered to read coffee grounds for us. So, on a windy afternoon, we sat together at the cafe and I drank Greek coffee while holding the tablecloth, my notebook, firmly to the table to keep them from being whipped away. She saw a lot in the sludge at the bottom of my cup, mostly different types of birds. A peacock, swallows swarming, a little sparrow. But what stayed with me was her interpretation of a cat, poised above the little bird. She said it was a sickness or an illness or some darkness that had been preventing me from really moving forward.

Ami told me, “Let it go, it’s no longer there. You don’t have to worry about it anymore.”

We started talking about art and my fear of death, and how it’s always been there but accelerated after I had an emergency, life-saving surgery during the pandemic. I have been so worried that I’ll run out of time, I rush and rush and try to do whatever I can as quickly as I can.

To this, Ami replied. “Yes, but you also want quality.” Her voice was stern and a little reproachful.

Ami is a prolific artist and it’s hard to imagine generating the amount of work she’s created in her lifetime, and yet all her work is a testament to her talent and integrity. To hear her tell me to value quality over quantity felt prophetic and a little bit like being chastised by the teacher for your half-assed homework.

I often use this Substack to subvert the frustrations and impatience ignited by submitting my work to formal institutions like agents, editors, and lit mags. Submitting your work is a long, arduous, and rejection-riddled process. Not to mention my deep urge to feel witnessed! Stuck alone in my office I imagine myself struggling in vain, and I feel existentially tortured when I think of myself spending each day going to work at a tech company where no one really knows me. I want to shout from the rooftops, Hey! I am here! I am an artist! Look at all this art! (More on this coming in a few weeks). But that urge is not dissimilar to someone posting on Instagram or Facebook. It’s a desire to be liked! To be validated! And that rushing, impulsive desire to be liked RIGHT NOW, while human and understandable, can come at the cost of life itself.

So, Art/Work is my attempt to put quality over the impulsive desire for the NOW. Because, sure, I could die tomorrow, or next week, or in five years, and most likely when I die, at 85 or 45, I will still have ideas that will die with me, unrealized. But I don’t want to be driven by fear any longer.

Our culture of news push notifications twenty-four seven, podcasts where you need to come up with something interesting and world-altering to talk about every week, and Substacks that flow into your inbox at an ungodly pace, is creating an intense pressure to have something to say at any given moment, even for regular people like me, people who don’t have a giant following, people aren’t famous or regarded intellectuals. George Saunders said a recent Substack:

It’s interesting the way that the world these days seems to make us feel that we need to have an opinion on everything, even when having a certain opinion may not change anything we do, or anything about the way the world responds.

We seem to be losing the ability or desire to just be silent on certain questions. (Silent and sad; silent and interested; silent and alert.)

Sometimes silent curiosity is the best thing we can offer the world. And if we are working on a thought, it takes time. Ideas take time. Art takes time. And sometimes we won’t have the time to finish them. But that doesn’t mean they’re not worth our time.

What to expect next

Going forward, I’m only going to share something if I feel I have something worth your precious time and attention and I have given the idea my full time and attention.

Right now, what I have to share is a thought exercise titled, The Myth of Instagram and the Artist.

This series will be released in four parts:

• January 12th: Part 1: The Work of Art, and The Artist and Instagram

• January 19th: Part 2: Instagram and Addiction

• January 26th: Part 3: The War for Your Attention, and No One Will Read Your Book Anyway

• February 2nd: Part 4: So Why Even Make Art? And Why Share it? (This has already been discussed here and here)

Other News

• I was lucky enough to be the winner of Cutbank’s Big Sky, Small Prose contest. You can subscribe to their lit mag here.

• My memoir, Oracles, was longlisted for Dzanc Books 2025 Non-fiction Contest. The winning book, Ghost Maps by Annalisa Bolin, looks so good, and I can’t wait for it to come out!

• Half Mystic, the publisher of my book The Family That Carried Their House on Their Backs, is having a holiday sale! You can get 20 percent off their entire bookshop with the code BYE2025!