Here is a mopey, gloomy, gothy, synthy mixtape for a heating earth. A cousin to Dancing in the Ruins. I made it from a sealed, pre-recorded cassette I got for 99 cents at the record store. I taped over the cassette’s protection tabs and then I taped over the music and then I tape … | Continue reading
Today’s newsletter was an excuse to write about the weird experience of binge-watching Peep Show after watching and reading about 2001: A Space Odyssey: “Do you hear an internal monologue?” | Continue reading
After I started May’s mixtape, I remembered that I never posted April’s mix. I made it from a sealed, pre-recorded cassette I got for 99 cents at the record store. I taped over the cassette’s protection tabs and then I taped over the music and then I taped over the artwork. This … | Continue reading
From a Parents.com article titled “Maycember’ Madness Is Real and Leaving Parents Even More Burned Out”: Much like the month of December, my packed calendar at the end of the school year has left me feeling like there’s not so much joy, as obligation and overwhelm. Instead of cru … | Continue reading
In Tuesday’s letter, I tried to weave together some ideas about yard work, Larry McMurtry, and giving yourself time to feel things, and I managed to articulate something I hadn’t articulated before: The computer used to mean the world to me. The computer was a portal to the world … | Continue reading
Today’s letter is titled “We’ll see!” “We’ll see” is the refrain in the Charlie Wilson’s War version of the 2000-year-old Chinese parable about the old man who lost his horse. (Bluey used the same refrain, while Alan Watts used “Maybe.”) It’s a favorite parable of mine and one I … | Continue reading
Tuesday’s newsletter was all about the wild and wonderful questions that kids ask: I really think that the best artists and scientists are grown-ups who somehow manage to retain their ability to ask child-like questions. In Harold Gardner’s Creating Minds, he writes: “I contend t … | Continue reading
This poem was inspired by listening to The Cure’s Disintegration at top volume in my studio. I put it at the top of last Friday’s newsletter, “A New Appreciation.” | Continue reading
Here is an old blackout poem I stuck in Tuesday’s letter, “Your next best friend,” which is about making good friends — with people and books. We spend a lot of our lives as readers on the search for new books. But how many great books are already waiting for us on our shelves? H … | Continue reading
“The Inflatable Man” is a metaphor Meghan came up with on one of our morning walks. I thought maybe there was an essay or a newsletter in it, and went looking for them around town. Once I shot this footage, I decided to make a Weird Little Something out of it. I believe we should … | Continue reading
Tuesday’s newsletter was “on sitting around and reading a novel” for nothing but the pleasure of it: [The feeling] that you’re getting away with something […] is really important to the reading experience. Reading should feel a little subversive… because it is! To sit around and … | Continue reading
This Easter I was reminded of this photo I took in east Austin, 2013. (The sign reads: “Don’t make your own easter eggs — ain’t nobody got time for that!“) That’s one kind of Easter egg, but the other is a hidden feature or a message. Not everybody knows this, but I hide Easter e … | Continue reading
Our local school district is considering a plan to move hundreds of students into my son’s middle school, which, like many public schools across America, is underfunded, overcrowded, and already operating well over capacity. If you live in Austin and you have a dog — or a Scottie … | Continue reading
A very nice profile of me over at Nice News covers a bunch of the stuff I practice and preach. “It’s funny. I consider myself a deeply lazy person,” Kleon answered with a laugh when asked how he manages to be so prolific. “And that’s where the discipline comes in.” He said that m … | Continue reading
The last few newsletters have shown off how obsessed I’ve become with printmaking — I can’t seem to stop! From “All is not well (but some things are”: “Not everything will be okay but some things will.” Years ago, I saw that phrase on a slide at the end of a Maira Kalman talk. It … | Continue reading
I’ve be chatting live with musician Walter Martin on Monday, April 7th at 12pm central as part of “The Substack Sessions.” (As a failed musician, I never expected to be on a list with some of these names, but there I am…) | Continue reading
Here’s another monthly mixtape made from a sealed, pre-recorded cassette I got for 99 cents at the record store. I taped over the cassette’s protection tabs and then I taped over the music and then I taped over the artwork. I wrote about the mix’s origins and shared some of my cu … | Continue reading
After I got back from New Orleans a few weeks ago we launched right into spring break mode, and pretty much all I wanted to do was listen to dub reggae and make block prints. In a Tuesday mailbag, “The point of this world,” I wrote quite a bit about music: Music is a form […] | Continue reading
Last Friday’s letter was a dispatch from New Orleans, and a few lessons I learned there. I don’t travel as much as I used to, but I find that some of my favorite newsletters come after I’ve visited a new place. (See: last year’s letters from Palm Springs, New Mexico, and Oahu.) | Continue reading
I made a new zine about the two things that motivate me: death and deadlines. | Continue reading
My friend Ryan Holiday and I had a fun chat about art, ambition, and why awful men need hobbies so they don’t spend all their time trying to ruin the rest of our lives. You can watch on YouTube or listen on the platform of your choice. | Continue reading
From Friday’s newsletter: The news is for the birds, so let’s have some news from the birds: Jackie and Shadow, the bald eagles documented by a live webcam in Big Bear Lake Forest, just had hatchlings. (Here’s a video of Jackie feeding the chicks before a big snow storm blew in.) … | Continue reading
Today’s newsletter is about the idea that sometimes writing (and art? and maybe teaching? and blogging? ) is just pointing at things and saying “whoa.” | Continue reading
Friday’s newsletter began: Last weekend I attended a retreat at Laity Lodge organized around one of my favorite topics: living seasonally. I got to spend some good time with my friend Alan Jacobs, made a bunch of variations of the linocut above in a workshop led by designer Dana … | Continue reading
Today’s newsletter is a typewriter interview with poet, writer, and student of joy Ross Gay. I really like doing these but they actually end up being a lot more work than just writing a normal Tuesday letter! You can read more here. | Continue reading
From today’s newsletter: On Instagram, a reader asked me in response to my collages: “How do you balance making fun stuff with doing business? Do you allocate time to simpl[y] make ‘pointless’ things?” I scribbled the image above into my notebook in response, and then I got so wo … | Continue reading
Today’s newsletter comes with a free zine and other love-adjacent items: “Love is not a gadget.” | Continue reading
I reformatted my Read like an Artist zine as a one-pager that you can download, print, and make for yourself or your bookclub, classroom, etc. Download here. | Continue reading
Last Friday I wrote a newsletter called “In The Soup”: It’s still soup season. Last month I tweeted, “Soup has a few lessons to teach us. One is: Sometimes things get better tomorrow.” A few days ago The Soup Peddler here in Austin, Texas posted an elegant edit: “Soup teaches us … | Continue reading
This is the first mixtape I’ve made with my brand-new Tascam deck, which was not cheap, but is pretty wonderful after a year’s worth of mixtapes on a somewhat shoddy deck whose record function was quickly deteriorating. (I made the last mix on my old Sony boombox.) I forgot how n … | Continue reading
I finished up a big draft of my manuscript and got to thinking about what’s really worked for me this time around. I thought it’d be fun to turn some of my pep talks to myself into posters you can download and print. You can download them here. The posters were drawn straight int … | Continue reading
I was delighted by how many people really liked Tuesday’s newsletter, “7 questions I ask myself” when I don’t know what to do next. | Continue reading
I do a lot of RIPs in the newsletter, and not to be grim, but this time of year… a lot of people die. Sometimes on a Thursday after I’ve finished the Friday newsletter and arranged it exactly how I wanted it, I’ll get the news that someone who merits an RIP has died and […] | Continue reading
Here’s how today’s newsletter about self-editing begins: My trouble with self-editing is that I’m too good at it. I self-edit before I even write! I’m really good at talking myself out of writing. I’ve talked myself out of many more books than I’ve actually written. In my head, t … | Continue reading
I think of my Friday newsletters like mixtapes. The latest one begins: “There are all kinds of mix tapes. There is always a reason to make one,” writes Rob Sheffield in his memoir, Love is a Mix Tape. “I believe that when you’re making a mix, you’re making history. You ransack th … | Continue reading
I thought my monthly mixtape project was complete, but I was wrong! Here is a new mix I really love: Spotify | Apple | Youtube I made it from a sealed, pre-recorded cassette I got for 99 cents at the record store. I taped over the cassette’s protection tabs and then I taped over … | Continue reading
I spent all of last year trying to write a book (it’s getting there) so a good deal of the entries in my commonplace diary were somehow related to writing. (When you’re writing, everything is related to writing.) I picked 100 of them and stitched them together for today’s newslet … | Continue reading
Today’s newsletter begins: Raymond Carver liked to quote Isak Dinesen, who said that she wrote a little every day, without hope and without despair. “Someday,” he wrote, “I’ll put that on a three-by-five-card and tape it to the wall beside my desk.” The poet Tess Gallagher said D … | Continue reading
In Tuesday’s newsletter, I wrote about my four notebooks: Before I get started, I want to say that this is my system, and I do not necessarily recommend it to others! Writing is my job, so it would make sense that I’d have a bunch of notebooks. My intention with this letter is to … | Continue reading
Riding my bike, not to feel like I felt when I was 10 years old, but to feel the way I wanted to feel when I was 10 years old. Getting the drop bars on Rocinante swapped out for straight ones. Meeting Marty at the crossroads. Riding to Manor with Christy. Riding to my PO […] | Continue reading
In yesterday’s newsletter, the last one of the year, instead of asking everyone their resolutions, I asked, “What worked for you this year?” A wonderful thread of responses. Ironically, after all my big talk about waiting until February, I went about January 1 with a sense of a f … | Continue reading
My last Friday newsletter of 2024 was a round-up of my favorite books, music, movies, TV, and newsletter issues: “Another year on the (notebooks).” So many people asked me about the photo of the stack of my logbook, my pocket notebooks, my commonplace diary, and my diaries that I … | Continue reading
“Reading is first and foremost non-reading,” writes Pierre Bayard in 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 involuntar … | Continue reading
My typewriter interview with designer Kelli Anderson is a delight. | Continue reading
My monthly mixtape project turned into a baker’s dozen (I made two tapes in August — one was a bonus mix inspired by our trip to Oahu) and is now complete. Each tape was made from a sealed, pre-recorded cassette I bought for less than 99 cents at the record store. I taped over th … | Continue reading
Here’s the last mixtape of the year, a wintry one, made from a sealed, pre-recorded cassette I got for 99 cents at the record store. I taped over the cassette’s protection tabs and then I taped over the music and then I taped over the artwork. I was feeling depressed, so I made a … | Continue reading
The subject line of Friday’s newsletter came from a postcard Warren Craghead mailed me that I turned into a collage. The first item quotes the late Nikki Giovanni: “Why shouldn’t I enjoy my own work?” she asked. “While I have always liked my career I have way more fun with it now … | Continue reading
In today’s newsletter I write about Bob Dylan and a movie I haven’t seen based on a book I have read: Dylan Goes Electric! The comments on this one are extra good. Fellow Dylan fans have much to say. In fact, the whole letter was an excuse for me to put this at the bottom: | Continue reading