Anyone looking for useful insight into the creative process will find it in Stacey D'Erasmo's stimulating The Long Run: A Creative Inquiry. In this brief but impressively substantive exploration of the lives and work of eight artists who have sustained enduring careers, D'Erasmo also interrogates her own path as a novelist, literary critic, and teacher as she searches for the answer to one pressing question: "How do we keep doing this--making art?"
D'Erasmo (Wonderland, The Art of Intimacy, The Complicities), who teaches creative writing at Fordham University, selected a group of subjects in their late 60s or older--all of whom she interviewed at length--for her investigation: dancer Valda Setterfield, landscape designer Darrel Morrison, writer Samuel R. Delany, actress Blair Brown, composer and conductor Tania León, artist Amy Sillman, singer-songwriter Steve Earle, and visual artist Cecilia Vicuña. Though most of these artists are not household names, each has produced a substantial, critically praised body of work and, crucially for D'Erasmo, has maintained a highly visible presence over decades.
As one would expect from such a diverse collection of talents and careers, no single explanation is comprehensive enough to provide an answer to D'Erasmo's central question. As a result, her book is less interesting for formulating some grand theory of long-term creativity than it is for how it succinctly excavates the often hard-earned lessons learned from each artist's life. León's career, for instance, has been deeply influenced by the decision she made to leave her native Cuba at age 24 in 1967, but a chance encounter while she worked as a substitute rehearsal pianist in New York City set her on an unexpected course. After reading D'Erasmo's brief account of Steve Earle's drug and alcohol-drenched life, most people understandably will wonder how he's still alive; he somehow overcame that dissolution to reinvent himself as a writer of short stories and a novel and, most recently, a composer for musical theater. Episodes of challenge and response like these surface in the lives of each of D'Erasmo's subjects.
In what D'Erasmo refers to as a "fugitive, occasional memoir," she also generously describes her own creative struggles, tracing the early stages of her career in the '80s and '90s, when she publicly identified herself as queer, and the crisis she confronted when she was denied tenure in 2014, after a decade teaching at Columbia University's School of the Arts. She's now in her early 60s and, like all of the artists she admiringly profiles, her ability to survive doing creative work displays a combination of grit and adaptability. In all of these lives, there's inspiration aplenty for anyone with the courage and determination to set out on the artist's way. --Harvey Freedenberg, freelance reviewer
Shelf Talker: Novelist and critic Stacey D'Erasmo explores the work of eight longtime successful artists while reflecting on the arc of her own creative life.