Today’s newsletter is about understanding perfectionism, and how I misunderstood perfectionism for the longest time, so I wasn’t able to detect it in myself. But the letter really began with this image: I built this collage around a drawing that my son wadded up in frustration be … | Continue reading
In today’s newsletter, I write about the new Cindy Lee triple album, Diamond Jubilee: [It] isn’t streaming — you can only listen to it, officially, via a YouTube video or by downloading the WAV files on a Geocities website. As I was drawing KBB-style diamonds on my newly burned C … | Continue reading
People often ask questions like, “Why do you have that paper dictionary in your office when you can just look things up online?” Reader, let me tell you! Walt Goggins makes me think of the word “ornery” — so I looked that word up. (As John McPhee tells us, it’s important to look … | Continue reading
Stephanie Zacharek is the film critic at Time, and Dwight Garner is a book critic for The New York Times. They’re two of my favorite writers to read, so when I found out they were friends, I thought it would be fun to interview them together for the newsletter. We had a good time … | Continue reading
In Friday’s newsletter, I shared these images from my camera roll, which capture the dread and awe of last week, between the eclipse and the hailstorm and all the cosmic static and shenanigans in between. I was somewhat cheered by reading other people’s accounts of the total ecli … | Continue reading
My April monthly mixtape is inspired by thoughts of the upcoming eclipse. The word in Texas is that it’s going to be cloudy on Monday, so I picked this 99 cent cassette from my stack, thinking I’d use the title Cirrostratus. But then I realized if I flipped the cover inside out, … | Continue reading
Today’s newsletter, on how quantity (usually) leads to quality was inspired by this NYTimes profile of Matt Farley: “If you reject your own ideas, then the part of the brain that comes up with ideas is going to stop,” he said. “You just do it and do it and do it, and you sort it … | Continue reading
Note: I cut this section from today’s newsletter because I thought it was too bitchy. But what is a blog for if not for bitching? I had a maddening experience last week reading Adam Phillips’ On Giving Up. Here is a critically-acclaimed writer I find genuinely interesting — his P … | Continue reading
I was making a collage while listening to Katherine Rundell’s Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne and found a vintage postage stamp quoting the poet: “Sir, more than kisses, letters mingle souls, / For thus, friends absent speak.” I’ve been thinking about this line … | Continue reading
These notes became item #4 in today’s newsletter: “I read in order to calm down.” Steven Soderbergh’s Year in Reading. So many things I care about get mentioned in this conversation: not being guilty about quitting books, Sarah Bakewell’s How to Live: Or A Life of Montaigne, the … | Continue reading
A highlight of my year so far: The poet Mary Ruefle doesn’t do Zoom interviews or use a computer, so we conducted an interview via our typewriters. I typed a bunch of questions on individual pieces of yellow paper and mailed them to her home in Bennington, Vermont. She typed her … | Continue reading
Today’s newsletter begins with a quote from Katherine Rundell’s Why You Should Read Children’s Books, Even Though You Are So Old and Wise: “When you read children’s books, you are given the space to read again as a child: to find your way back, back to the time when new discoveri … | Continue reading
I like the poetry of The Beatitudes, a list Jesus made in his The Sermon on the Mount. It begins: Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven. Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted. Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the Earth… I … | Continue reading
A paragraph plea from today’s newsletter: I am no saint, but I’ve been shocked lately by how saying “Hello,” “Please,” and “Thank you” to workers in service industries often elicits surprise and wonder and gets me treated like the Pope. I don’t know what is going on with most peo … | Continue reading
Since January, I’ve been making a monthly “tapeover” mixtape made a from a batch of random, pre-recorded, sealed tapes I bought from End of an Ear for 99 cents a piece. (I got the idea while reading Marc Masters’ High Bias: The Distorted History of the Cassette Tape.) Each month, … | Continue reading
It’s the 10th anniversary of this little book. So delighted that it’s still speaking to people. Thanks to everyone who’s read and shared it. (Especially @aliabdaal, who says it changed his life.) View this post on Instagram A post […] | Continue reading
My favorite artist turned nine this week. Here are some drawings of me he’s made over the years: | Continue reading
People always ask me for recommendations when they visit my city, so in today’s newsletter I put a few walkable downtown-centric recommendations for folks who might be coming in for SXSW. (In short: use the hike and bike trail and get tacos at Veracruz.) 6. Walk the hike and bik … | Continue reading
I made a recent batch of lifted type collages that were inspired by my friend Alan Jacobs. During the early days of the pandemic, Alan wrote a piece called “Handmind in Covidtude” that quoted a character in Ursula K. Le Guin’s Always Coming Home: It was a good thing for me to lea … | Continue reading
For the fourth year in a row, the writer Sam Anderson and I got together to celebrate Michel de Montaigne’s birthday and talk about our work, our lives, and our love for writing and drawing: SAM: The thing that unites good writing and good drawing — authentic writing and authenti … | Continue reading
Today’s newsletter is about finding joy in repetition and the generative power of doing the same thing over and over again. You can read it here. I tried writing this letter a few weeks ago and couldn’t get anywhere with it. And then I remembered this image of stacked drawings by … | Continue reading
Two Fridays ago my friend Steven visited the studio and I showed him how to make zines from a single sheet of paper. We spent a half hour or so catching up and folding, creasing, and tearing paper. At the end I said, “I haven’t made anything with my hands in a while… that’s proba … | Continue reading
Today’s newsletter is about some of my favorite writing books like What It Is, Bird By Bird, and Several Short Sentences About Writing: In attempting to practice what I preach with my own “practice and suck less” challenge, I bottomed out so bad last week that I had to do that m … | Continue reading
Tomorrow is February. Again. For a few years now, I’ve been pushing February as a month of possibility. It’s the shortest month, so it should be the easiest for a daily “practice and suck less” challenge. This year is a leap year and we get an extra day in February, so here’s a 2 … | Continue reading
Today’s newsletter is about how I got into snails and includes this bit on magical thinking: Something I learned a long time ago is that it is a great help to the artist to believe that there are no coincidences. One way to boost your curiosity is to just assume that everything i … | Continue reading
In this week’s Tuesday letter, I wrote about 7 more gardening metaphors for creative work. Even more to add to the compost heap later: 1) “Deadheading,” a kind of pruning in which you’re trying to redirect the plant’s growth 2) Grafting, which I’ve been reading about in John McPh … | Continue reading
In today’s newsletter, I write about gardening metaphors: I love living with a gardener because not only do I get to enjoy the harvest without doing much (if any) of the work, I also get exposed to gardening tips which become metaphors for my own creative work. (The “gardening” t … | Continue reading
There’s a famous story about the actors Dustin Hoffman and Laurence Olivier on the set of the movie Marathon Man, retold by Isaac Butler in The Method: How The Twentieth Century Learned to Act: Hoffman explained—or perhaps bragged about—the lengths to which he would go to capture … | Continue reading
Watching the owls in our back yard raise two owlets. Riding bikes with my friends. Sending out the newsletter. The Guardian naming it one of the best. How nice our community is to each other in the comments. Steal Like an Artist going into its 30th printing with over a million co … | Continue reading
Here are all the books I finished in 2023. I am tempted to just leave them here in this big visual pile and say nothing else about them. I’m tired of making these lists! And I often wonder if I stop making year-end lists if it will free me up even more to stop slogging […] | Continue reading
Today’s newsletter begins: It’s bleak and rainy in Texas. Yesterday was the shortest day of the year. “I look out the window and it’s so drab,” my son said. “But then I look at the Christmas tree and it’s so cheerful.” That’s the spirit! This is the season when we need more light … | Continue reading
“Reading is first and foremost non-reading,” writes Pierre Bayard in his book, How To Talk About Books You Haven’t Read. “Even in the case of the most passionate lifelong readers, the act of picking up and opening a book masks the countergesture that occurs at the same time: the … | Continue reading
A “retrograde rocket” is a rocket engine on a spacecraft that helps slow the craft down enough that you can bring it out of orbit or land it safely. I’d like one for my spacecraft, please! (Collage from the newsletter.) | Continue reading
From my (de-paywalled) letter on making time and space for your art this season: Around the holidays, I often have to rely on the advice I give creative people who have new babies: “Find the one-armed, half-brained, miniature version of what you do.” Put another way: What is the … | Continue reading
Because it’s all Christmas favorites from here on out, I consulted the family pizza and a movie night logbooks and compiled a list of our favorite movies. One star = hit with everybody in our gang Two stars = total classic For (mostly) all ages: Kiki’s Delivery Service ** Padding … | Continue reading
I signed a bunch of orders at Bookpeople yesterday. They told me their cutoff for holiday shipping orders is this Wednesday, Dec. 13. If you want to pick up a book in-person, the cutoff is Friday, Dec. 15. You can order my books signed and personalized here. (Be sure to put how y … | Continue reading
Yesterday’s newsletter about the discipline of reading begins: I drew this diagram last week when I found myself reading a writer who seems to be interested in all the things I seem to be interested in, but they write about them in ways that drive me absolutely nuts. This kind of … | Continue reading
Here are 10 gift ideas for artists, writers, and other creative weirdos. | Continue reading
Here are some drawings I included in my newsletter about the joy of reading artist interviews. | Continue reading
In last week’s newsletter, I wrote about the meaning of discipline: In his book Discipline is Destiny, my friend Ryan Holiday writes that courage is “the willingness to put your ass on the line.” Discipline is “the ability to keep your ass in line.” My writing teacher, Steven Ba … | Continue reading
A few years ago I made a free zine about gratitude that you can print and fold and fill out. I’ve gotten some lovely messages from people who have used it in their classrooms and at the Thanksgiving dinnertable. Look inside and download it here. | Continue reading
Every time I’m in California, there’s at least a little bit of magic to the visit. The family and I were in Los Angeles for a few days and the nice surprise of the trip was popping down to Huntington Beach for an impromptu Dairy Queen picnic, hunting for sand dollars and playing … | Continue reading
I’m doing some of my best writing, I think, in my Tuesday newsletter. This week, I wrote about “entering into the spirit” of the holidays: For artists, we get to play at Halloween all year. That veil between the material and the immaterial stays razor thin. Every day, we get to s … | Continue reading
From Out of Sheer Rage, Geoff Dyer’s book about trying to write about D.H. Lawrence: “Films and books urge us to think that there will come certain moments in our lives when, if we can make some grand, once-in-a-lifetime gesture of relinquishment, or of standing up for a certain … | Continue reading
I’ve long been inspired by the punk band Wire’s rules of negative self-definition: “No solos; no decoration; when the words run out, it stops; we don’t chorus out; no rocking out; keep it to the point; no Americanisms.” In How Music Works, David Byrne writes about the early style … | Continue reading
“It is stupid to be categorically against technology. It is not stupid to be suspicious of technology.” —Neil Postman “Might solve a mystery / or rewrite history…” —the Ducktales theme song * * * My kids wanted me to sit and watch DuckTales with them this morning — the episode wa … | Continue reading
We had a great time on Saturday watching the annular solar eclipse. “Annular” means “ring-shaped” — when an eclipse is annular, that means the moon is centered on the sun, but it appears smaller and doesn’t completely block it out, leading to the “ring of fire” effect. We didn’t … | Continue reading
I haven’t seen any owls since May 9th when the two owlets fledged, but yesterday Meg spotted this one in the box. Thus begins another owl season. My logbook tells me that we had an owl last year on October 20th that didn’t stick around long, either, so if we’re lucky, and our his … | Continue reading