Be an Artist: A One Sentence MasterClass
My 2024 is off to the kind of start experienced by the Wright Brothers in 1903—airborne for all of 3 seconds before smashing spectacularly to ground. While I continue to sift through the wreckage I wanted to share one bright development. My upcoming book is now available for pre-order! Boston and Beyond: Discovering Cities, Harbors, and Country Charms is my first work of original photography and writing. You can easily secure a copy HERE and through any of your favorite indie booksellers (hint..hint…#shoplocal).
This book is a love letter to New England, my hometown region and a place that I find endlessly fascinating, always beautiful, and charmingly weird. In it I take readers to some of my favorite, underappreciated places around Boston as well as to unique locations within an hour or less from the city. You’ll get to see a spooky-sweet side of the infamous “Witch City” of Salem, Massachusetts; snoop around Beauport, The Sleeper-McCann House, one of the coolest, most fascinating early-twentieth century coastal mansions overrun with gorgeous, eclectic interior design marvels; and meander like Henry David Thoreau through the sleepy streets of historic Concord, Massachusetts. You don’t have to be from here to dig into this book. It’s as much about encouraging you to appreciate your own homegrown places, seeing them with new eyes, as it is about celebrating just a small amount of what New England has to offer.
This year for my birthday my partner got me a MasterClass subscription. MasterClass is to the 2020s what TED Talks were to the twenty-teens. Celebrities, public figures, and other notable experts present classes in the form of short sessions on their respective topics: Learn how to cook with Gordon Ramsey; master the art of photography with Annie Liebowitz; bone up on business and tech leadership with Bob Iger (if I were writing copy for this company I would never be able to resist using the phrase “bone up with Bob Iger.” C’mon!); and Humor Writing with David Sedaris. Are you staring into my very soul, MasterClass?
I’m skeptical of these kinds of offerings. We’re in an extremely entrepreneurial era, which is fantastic and overwhelming. Everyone has a marketable skill. Marie Kondo introduced us to the absurd job title of “professional tidying expert.” My mother was one of those. Her tools of the trade were trash bags and a sticker gun for yard sales. It seems like I’m constantly inundated with people hawking their expertise for a fee. Grow your newsletter; build your brand (blarf, gag); level up your networking game. I’m exhausted reading about all the things I’m not doing well or at all. Is there someone who can help me optimize caring less.
Most of those things don’t resonate with me, but the shiny lure of “do your creative thing better” always does. I buy the books like Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg and Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert and Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott. I hoover up anything that gives me a look inside another artist’s process and mind. For those of us who do creative work, we’re all secretly hoping to find a clue about making art that is less “keep doing it; keep sucking; keep getting better” and more “Wait for the next full moon and bury three gold coins underneath the tree in the north corner of the field.”
David Sedaris covers a lot of useful information in his course, more than I expected. I feared it would be a lot of anecdotes, “This one terrible reading I did for something like 200 people in a converted airplane hanger.” I don’t need a course on how to envy others’ success.
Instead he shared plenty of insights about how he approaches his writing and the kinds of things that work for his particular style of writing. He talked about how his writing is meant for reading, which is why most essays are maybe 12 or 13 pages tops. Anything over that is too onerous for an audience so, he shrugs in the video, “why bother?” Sedaris underscored the importance of rigorous revision. An editor working with him will get draft 14 or 17 or 20. “That’s usually when I feel I’ve taken it as far as I can and it’s for them to do what they do and help me get it the rest of the way.” This is a man who does not check Facebook. I assure you.
In another session Sedaris casually discussed how his career has unfolded. He’s had no pedigreed education or programs like the Iowa Writers Workshop. He didn’t intern at a publishing house. He’s not related to Joan Didion. Sedaris comes from a big, loud dysfunctional middle-class family who are often the subjects of his pieces. He’s worked a zillion odd jobs; picked up and later discarded a bunch of drug habits; at one point he and his very famous, funny sister, Amy, were putting on bizarre amateur sketch and theatre shows in Chicago. You get the sense that there was never a five-year plan for Sedaris and still isn’t.
The MasterClass model appeals because it hints at answering two questions: “How do you do it?” and “How did you do it?” Sedaris admits that he’s had lots of “lucky” encounters and happenings that threaded opportunities together like beads on a necklace. Before any of that came a moment when he said out loud to himself, “I want to be a writer.” He describes being in his twenties living in South Carolina riding his bike to get to work when he consciously and verbally formed the statement: “I want to be a writer.”
I took a blizzard of notes from this course, but my biggest takeaway is: Making art is intent + effort + meeting yourself over and over in your medium.
I didn’t know when I started taking my photography more seriously there would be a book. I only knew I wanted to continue taking pictures and learning as much as I could along the way. I am enormously proud of this work. I can still feel the burn from discovering a whole new set of creative muscles, and I’ll keep strengthening them to do the only kind of work I’m wired to do, to be who I am-an artist.
Lens Zen!
I have always loved the work of street and city photographers like Berenice Abbott and Alfred Stieglitz. This is a corner of the North End looking like a movie set and my tiny homage to these incredible artists.
First, I hope things get better soon (or at least to a lower DEFCON).
I saw Sedaris do a reading a while ago, and it was as hilarious as you’d expect, but there were also a few parts that were frankly harrowing. I got a ton of insight into what drives him from that talk.
P.S. the book look awesome! I just grabbed a copy. Maybe a dumb Q, but why is there such a long lead time before it’s released?
You were totally right, this was exactly what I needed to hear. It's so easy to get down on yourself and start spiraling. The root of that I think is a sense of loneliness, like you are in it alone and nobody can possibly understand. Which of course is the height of hubris, but we writers also think everything we create is brilliant, so that's just an occupational hazard.
I also have Masterclass but I haven't gotten to Sedaris' yet. Prioritizing immediately!!
Thanks for sharing this and the boost of confidence it has inspired in one writer who also started 2024 by crashing and burning.