Over Time, the Spirit Moves

“THIS BOOK IS a love letter, but it is also a demand,” Stacey D’Erasmo writes in her new book, The Long Run: A Creative Inquiry. “How do we keep doing this—making art?”

For D’Erasmo, this demanding intimacy extends through interviews with eight older artists she especially admires about their wide-ranging lives and careers. She was in her fifties at the time, the author of five acclaimed novels and one book of nonfiction. Her interviewees, who range in age from their sixties to their eighties, include landscape architect Darrel Morrison, dancer Valda Setterfield, writer Samuel R. Delany, actress Blair Brown, composer Tania León, singer-songwriter Steve Earle, and visual artists Amy Sillman and Cecilia Vicuña.

Through these conversations, D’Erasmo finds kinship, a shared, decades-long artistic struggle. Of course, the question is as much for herself as it is for anyone else—and the process of writing this book, which took over a decade, starting with an essay in The Rumpus in 2010, is part of the answer. Her personal reflections wind through the text, offering a “fugitive, occasional memoir” that—however intermittent or fleeting—grounds the search for creative connection. As much as making art, this book centers around queerness, exile, and the relationships that restrain and sustain freedom.

While all of her subjects live in New York, D’Erasmo conducts most of the interviews via Zoom. It’s the first few years of the COVID-19 pandemic; questions about what propels an artistic practice assume new urgency in this context of separation.

Chapters center around individual subjects. In each, D’Erasmo provides a multivalence portrait, a deep dive into the artist’s work, as well as the circumstances, relationships, preoccupations, intrigues, and failures that challenge and inspire them over the long run. Rarely do these stories feel linear; instead, they wind around like the off-road “desire paths” taken by pedestrians—these are artists who consistently wander off the grid. And yet, this book is as much about effort as it is about inspiration, and D’Erasmo’s candor about the rough spots opens up possibilities for deeper awareness about the process of maintaining an artistic life.

In June, I chatted with Stacey over email to discuss survival skills in art and life, the limits of meritocracy, and what happens when things fall apart.

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MATTILDA BERNSTEIN SYCAMORE: This is such an elegant book—I wonder if you could talk about the process of whittling down these conversations in such a prismatic way, where one corner or one edge suddenly comes into the light, and the beams end up meeting at so many surprising angles. Or, sometimes, not meeting at all. So you create a “circle of elders,” but also everyone’s story remains autonomous.

STACEY D’ERASMO: Thank you so much. I did, in fact, have pages and pages of transcripts, and on top of that, these are folks with long, dense careers, so there were mountains of work from all of them. I couldn’t possibly be comprehensive, even if that had been my ambition. And I wasn’t speaking for anyone—I had the privilege and joy of speaking to them.

My way of moving through these conversations was associative by temperament, but also by necessity. I began to imagine it as a vast conversation among all of us, and also across time, so that Colette could talk to Darrel Morrison and Ruth Asawa and David Bowie could talk to Tania León. Which, frankly, is pretty much my idea of heaven. Or, to change metaphors, it was like each chapter was a stone thrown into a pond, because each is centered on a specific artist. But then the ripples spread through the book.

Early on you mention the urban planning concept of “desire paths” to describe going out on one’s own. And then, in your interview with the landscape designer Darrel Morrison, you mention his idea of “sweeps” of native plants instead of isolated and contained displays. You write, “These environments never tell you where to look; they never point or isolate; instead, they flow.” Your book seems to work like this too—would you say that the ideas in the book, the conversations with artists and their work, shaped the form?

Of course—everyone that I spoke to for the book had a really alive and complex relationship with the forms in their fields. The dancer Valda Setterfield, for instance, was trained in ballet, then worked in modern dance for years with Merce Cunningham, but also helped invent postmodern dance, then moved into acting as well. Form followed feeling for all of these folks, and those feelings changed over time. It was liberating to be in their company—it was sort of like: Go ahead and leap. They would. They have. Don’t bore them.

In your conversation with Amy Sillman, she talks about how the subject of her work is time, but not “linear, progressive, chronological time.” She says, “Time is not an arrow. It’s a structural container.” As a book of conversations with artists in their sixties, seventies, and eighties, The Long Run in some ways starts with a linear idea of aging, but then the paths of these artists are so wide-ranging in time and space that strict chronology becomes irrelevant. And I wonder if this is part of the answer to your question about how artists continue to make work, this rejection of linear time.

For better and for worse, we can’t reject linear time. The body has limits. But time, the experience of time, is quite deep. You can’t get to the bottom of it. And while the years may tick by in the linear way they always do, the relationships that these artists are having with their work are multidimensional. They can, and do, go everywhere—there is no predetermined path or subject matter for the artist. Who could have predicted, say, that Steve Earle, who came up as a country musician and rocker, would be inspired by plays like Spring Awakening and turn later in his life to musical theater? There’s a banal discourse about aging that usually goes along the lines of, Wow, that person can almost still get into those tight pants! They have an excellent wellness routine! But what I see in these artists is a polymorphous, metamorphic spirit, and an openness to that spirit. Over time, the spirit moves. How could it not?

This openness also feels so present in the glimpses you offer of your own queer formation in New York in the 1980s, as part of a generation “disowned, pulled out of school, shamed, variously punished or pathologized”—and yet there is such an excitement to these moments of self-formation and communal possibility. You say that coming out was like having “magic glasses.” What did those glasses allow you to see?

Everything. Remember, in the 1980s there was still so, so much that wasn’t visible in the mainstream. The place where you saw queer life was on the street, or around the edges and in the subtext of culture. If you came out in those years, you became an excellent close reader and spotter of the coded—it was a survival skill. The magic glasses allowed me to see the “what” of queer lives and queer desires. But equally as importantly, they taught me a way of seeing, a how. To this day I feel that queerness is a way of seeing, a doubleness or tripleness—or more—of perception, on all levels. The referent, we might say, is always unstable, always shifting, always prismatic. It’s never an either/or, but a both/and. As the line in the song [“Milkshake”] goes, “I can teach you / but I have to charge.” There was a cost in those years, but the teaching was spectacular.

You offer snapshots of a circle that coalesced around your friendship with author Michael Cunningham, and expanded to something like a chosen family for about a decade, from 2002 to around 2011, when most of you were in your forties or early fifties. The dissolution of this support network caused a crisis in your own life and creative practice. I wonder if you would say this was a genesis of The Long Run.

There were many things that fell apart around that time, but, yes—though in a peculiar way. When things fall apart, the constitutive pieces become more visible. I was very much worried about how I was going to survive, in many ways, when so much in my life fell apart, but I also became quite curious about how it had all fit together in the first place. What made me? What ideas shaped me? What was my relationship to the culture in which I grew? We don’t choose the cultural moment that we’re born into; it’s the medium in which we bob around, sometimes really … ungracefully. So, I wanted to hear how other people survived as artists over time, but I also really wanted to know what they did with the cultural ocean in which they found themselves.

Initially, you conceived of this project as an anthology of interviews, but publishers were not interested. This seems typical of a publishing industry that can view collective work as a threat, and often embraces the myth of the lone genius as the key to marketability. As you write, “The angel I have had to kill in order to write again and survive generally is my belief in meritocracy.” Can you talk more about what the rejection of this belief has made possible?

“Kill your darlings” is the truism, right? I loved the idea of meritocracy, because it made me feel so special and unique when things worked in my favor, and it also assumed the existence of justice. What’s not to like? But coming to understand that I’m not such a rare gem and more like a very mixed vortex composed of expectations, biases, interactions, talents—my own and that of others—history, blind spots, misreadings, and equally complex desires—what you get with all that is connection. You’re part of the mess, and the mess is part of you. Again, it’s a different way of seeing that’s ultimately liberating. It’s also vulnerable. I don’t win everything, and I’m far from bulletproof. I don’t see any need anymore to pretend that I am.

You write that “there is no real art-making without the risk of heartbreak.” Your conversations in The Long Run show the risks, and the heartbreak, and the pathways through—what did these conversations change about your artistic practice?

They led me to the joy of writing nonfiction, which is to say, they led me from seeing myself as pretty much only one kind of writer in any serious way to seeing myself as a writer, full stop.

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Stacey D’Erasmo is the author of five novels and two books of nonfiction. She is currently co-director of creative writing and professor of writing and publishing practices at Fordham University in New York City.