I was embarrassingly pleased with myself when I came up with the subject line of last Friday’s newsletter, “Midyear in a mid year,” which began: My kids love to use the slang word “mid” to describe things that are “mediocre or of low quality” or “bad, boring, or inferior in some … | Continue reading
So many people had good replies to my letter “Working Titles” that I felt like I had to write a followup letter, “Title Matters,” which attempts to catalog some of the different methods for titling work: combining and rearranging key words, outright theft, bibliomancy, random cha … | Continue reading
“Fine art,” said John Ruskin (1819-1900), is “that in which the hand, the head, and the heart of man go together.” Many people like to quote St. Francis (1181-1226) as saying something like, “A man who works with his hands is a laborer; a man who works with his hands and his brai … | Continue reading
Last Friday’s newsletter began with a beautiful thought I had while riding my bike: It’s not that riding my bike makes me feel like I’m 10 years old again — it’s that riding my bike makes me feel the way I wanted to feel when I was 10 years old. You can read the rest here. | Continue reading
Today’s newsletter is about how hard (and how easy?) it can be to come up with titles. It begins: In My Life in France, Julia Child wrote about what a pain it was to come up with the title for Mastering The Art of French Cooking. She and her husband Paul debated “the merits of [… … | Continue reading
To celebrate summer and 200,000 subscribers, I’m offering 20% off paid subscriptions to my newsletter. A paid subscription gets you a bonus letter from me every Tuesday and access to one of the coolest creative communities on the internet — thousands of the nicest, most interesti … | Continue reading
Friday’s newsletter was inspired by this vintage stamp carousel that Meghan got me for my birthday: I didn’t even know such a thing existed, but I’m told they used to be pretty common in offices. I’ve been spinning it here on my desk, thinking about circular time, nostalgia, volv … | Continue reading
Tuesday’s newsletter was about making indexes on the fore-edge of your books and notebooks. Some truly nerdery, which was fun to write about. Read the letter here. | Continue reading
Here’s another monthly mixtape I made from a sealed, pre-recorded cassette I got for 99 cents. (Loudon Wainwright III’s Grown Man.) I tape over the cassette’s protection tabs and then I tape over the music and then I tape over the artwork. For this one, I was going for summer poo … | Continue reading
Here are a couple of blind drawings in my pocket notebook from the Joy Williams event I wrote about in last Friday’s newsletter: Last Friday [6/7/2024] I went to the Ransom Center to see Joy Williams read from her forthcoming collection, Concerning the Future of Souls. It turned … | Continue reading
Today’s newsletter is about “solar returns” and revisiting old work. Here’s Richard Linklater in the documentary Dream is Destiny, talking about the non-linear nature of time: You don’t want to come back to this exact same spot, but you can’t help it through life. It’s a spiral. … | Continue reading
Friday’s newsletter, “Ampersanding,” started with this collage that had an ampersand stuck in the middle of it. I looked it up on Wikipedia and voila: “The ampersand [&] originated as the ligature of the letters et — Latin for ‘and.’” Seemed as good of a way as any to start a new … | Continue reading
In the latest newsletter, I shared these photos of what’s helping me write, right now. On my bulletin board: a calendar page to keep track of me something small, every day a note to my son from his fourth grade teacher; a notecard he hand-lettered for the Keep Going trailer when … | Continue reading
Later this month I’m interviewing my friend Deb Chachra about her book, How Infrastructure Works. Details about the event are here. Mandy Brown wrote about the book in a recent post, “Against Optimization”: Optimization presumes a kind of certainty about the circumstances one is … | Continue reading
A few writing tips from today’s newsletter: 1. I am deep into writing at the moment and I keep repeating to myself: “It doesn’t matter if it’s good right now. It just needs to exist.” 2. “Better stop short than fill to the brim,” says the Tao Te Ching. Also helping the writing th … | Continue reading
The title of today’s newsletter was taken from cartoonist Sarah Leavitt’s talk on joyful persistence: What if you make a big pile of imperfect things? What if your job is experimentation, exploring, repeating, failing, learning,continuing? For those of you who’ve taken my classes … | Continue reading
I was running out of month so I made another monthly mixtape from a sealed, pre-recorded cassette I got for 99 cents. I tape over the cassette’s protection tabs and then I tape over the music and then I tape over the artwork. This one turned out weirder and sadder than I thought … | Continue reading
In the latest newsletter I wrote: Feeling sorry for myself after a rough morning of writing, I put on the 2003 Metallica documentary Some Kind of Monster and half-watched while making collages out of kids’ drawings. I felt what Amanda Petrusich wrote in her 9,000 word profile of … | Continue reading
Here’s a photo of my kiddos’ dresser from a few years ago, when I realized it was basically a museum of technology. I almost typed “obsolete technology,” but these things all still work — the Casio and the Sony Dream Machine were both possessions from our own childhoods. I wrote … | Continue reading
A word from Steve Albini for the “you don’t need a vision” file: I’ve lived my whole life without having goals, and I think that’s very valuable, because then I never am in a state of anxiety or dissatisfaction. I never feel I haven’t achieved something. I never feel there is som … | Continue reading
The past two newsletters have been about likability and likeness. Last week I wrote about Courtney Love and how freeing it is to shed the desire to be liked: “Being liked was never my thing,” Love says. At the same time, her ambition was enormous: She wanted to be a rock star in … | Continue reading
What kind of album would you get if you gave an 11-year-old Logic Pro and played him a steady diet of Kraftwerk and Daft Punk? The answer is TECH, the latest album from my son Owen Kleon. I’ve read and conducted so many interviews with older, established artists, I’ve always wond … | Continue reading
I usually can’t write the Tuesday newsletter until I know the image it’s going to start with, but I often start Friday’s newsletter without any idea what’s going to go at the top. Eventually, a theme emerges, or I come across something that will work, like this image of a snail o … | Continue reading
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