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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. To close the show, we're turning now to a new book, and we're going to have another call-in, because the new book is called The Long Run, by Stacey D'Erasmo. In it, she seeks to answer a tough question, how do artists manage to keep making art over a long period of time? What does it take to have a decades-long career as a creative or just be productive for decades? What's the secret ingredient?

It probably doesn't come as a surprise that there's no one secret ingredient, according to the book, but it does offer insight into many different paths an artist's life can take and what we can learn from those paths if we are artists trying to keep creating. Listeners, you can answer that question right off the bat. If you're an artist who's had a long career in any creative field, what has enabled you to continue making whatever your art is? 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692.

Some of you know that Stacey D'Erasmo herself is a creative, a writer, who has written novels, including A Seahorse Year, The Sky Below, and Tea, and it was her own complex creative journey that prompted the question many years ago about how artists managed to keep going. Again, the book is called The Long Run, comes out today. Stacey, congratulations. Thanks for joining us for this.

Stacey D'Erasmo: Thank you so much for having me.

Brian Lehrer: You want to tell us more about what inspired the topic? Because you're known for your novelist; this is a nonfiction book.

Stacey D'Erasmo: Sure. I had published three novels by 2009, 2010, and I started to think about, well, how do we keep doing this? What happens? We're very good at talking about the beginning of careers and also the end of careers. All this long period, which is one's life, in art, we don't talk about as much, and I was very curious. I started thinking about it, and I wrote an essay about it. Then, actually what happened is that a number of important things in my life fell apart over a period of a few years.

Now, I really, really wanted to know, and the question became much more urgent, much more bloody in a way. After a little while, I began talking to people, interviewing people who are alive and working now, who have had long careers in the arts, to just say, "Tell me your story. Tell me what has sustained you. Tell me what has impeded you. Talk to me about what this is, what this looks like." Then I was--

Brian Lehrer: Is it more about how people stay creatively productive, that is creatively inspired, making great work, or is it more about how to continue for a long time to have a career and be able to pay the bills as an artist? Or both?

Stacey D'Erasmo: Right. It's both. It's absolutely both and the physically sustaining. What pays the rent? What puts food on the table? All of these things are incredibly important, and they absolutely shape artists' lives and, in some cases, probably shape the work that we make. The more subtle question is the first thing that you said, which is how we stay alive in our work, how we don't keep on doing the same tap dance because it's moderately successful.

I think that both of these dilemmas face everyone who is in this for the long run. I think it's important to say that while the book is very much about artists and art-making, it's also about vocation. Anyone in a long career, people making radio shows, we all think about this. How do we keep doing this? How do we stay alive, both literally and figuratively, in what we choose to do?

Brian Lehrer: Let's take a phone call. Tina in Harlem, you're on WNYC with Stacey D'Erasmo, author now of The Long Run. Hi, Tina.

Tina: Hi, Brian. This is a great topic. Thanks for discussing it. I was explaining to your screeners that when I was in grad school studying for my master's in art education, this was a topic that I was really intrigued with, and I was doing a lot of research on it for some paper for some class. I stumbled on a video of Chuck Close discussing his creative process later in his career, but not when he got a little nutty.

He was very cogent about this point of just, "I don't show up every day with inspiration at the studio. The trick is to show up." The trick is to show up. That just was a breakthrough for me, and it reminded me of artist's block and all of those things, like writer's block, and you just got to confront it.

Stacey D'Erasmo: Sure. No, I think that's absolutely true. A lot of the images that we see suggest that you're walking down the street and then a lightning strike hits you and you run to your studio and etch a masterpiece or whatever. I think that for nearly everyone I know, and certainly for the people that I spoke to for this book, it is a matter of going to the space, whatever that is, literal or figurative, and allowing whatever is going to come in to begin to come in.

I think one of the things that I find really moving about Chuck Close is that he famously had face blindness, and yet, the work that he did was these enormous portraits of faces. You can see that he was coming into his-- He's going there every day saying, "I can't see faces. I'm going to see faces really, really, really big. I can't remember faces." That's absolutely true. We go there and we hope that something will come into the room, and very, very often, something does.

Brian Lehrer: Beethoven, when he wrote his greatest symphonies, was deaf.

Stacey D'Erasmo: Right, absolutely. He was hearing it in-- By the time he was writing the symphonies when he was deaf, he had all of that music in his head that he was still bringing out for the rest of us to listen to, which I find so spectacularly moving and wonderful, really. It's a miracle.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, who else has a story, or for that matter, a question about staying creatively inspired, and I guess also being able to pay the rent as an artist in any medium, in the long run? The Long Run being the title of novelist Stacey D'Erasmo's new nonfiction book, exploring how artists can stay creative and productive over many, many years of a lifetime. Here's Rick in Trenton with a story, I think. Rick, you're on WNYC. Hi.

Rick: Oh, thank you very much, Brian, for taking my call. Yes, I'm a jazz musician, and I had an early career going back into the '70s. Played with people like Sonny Stitt, had a nice run a couple of times with Dexter Gordon. As time went on, and I'm older now, I'm going on 82 now, I'm still functioning, I'm still playing. How do we get by? Great question. If it wasn't for the Jazz Foundation of New York City, which I don't know whether you know that organization or not, but it's been tremendous helping musicians in a tight squeeze.

I had an apartment in Manhattan, in back of Strand Bookstore, which was 77 East 12th Street. I got forced out of there because I couldn't afford to pay the rent. I'm living in Jersey in the Trenton area and getting by by playing as many gigs as I can, some students, and I mentor young musicians. That's it. It's rough, just let me tell you that. It is-- I claimed that capitalism, third-stage capitalism, has wiped out art. Of course, unless you're Beethoven or Haydn, you could always make money off of that.

Brian Lehrer: Rick, I'm going to leave it there, but thank you very much. Wow, I didn't think we'd get to a critique of third-stage capitalism there. Do you in the book?

Stacey D'Erasmo: [laughs] [unintelligible 00:09:05]. A critique of third-stage capitalism? That's a little beyond [crosstalk].

Brian Lehrer: Or put it in the context of our capitalist economy.

Stacey D'Erasmo: Right. Well, one of the things that Rick is pointing to, that he is absolutely right about, is that the rent and the material circumstances, particularly in this city, absolutely have to do with how much art gets made, who gets to make it. One of the things that I do talk about in the book is, the painter Amy Sillman talks about her early years living and working in New York, and what her rent was, and what she was getting paid doing layout work for newspapers. That was in the '80s and early '90s.

In fact, that way that she lived, that we all lived then, is no longer possible in the city. Those spaces cost much more now than they cost then, those jobs don't exist. You can really track the flowering of art very often through what kind of openings were possible economically and materially, so Rick is--

Brian Lehrer: Where are those places now, if you documented at all? They say first come the artist then comes the gentrification, right?

Stacey D'Erasmo: Right.

Brian Lehrer: The gentrification at this point is so widespread in New York that there aren't many of those creative opportunity for rent communities. Where are they?

Stacey D'Erasmo: That's a really good question. One place that I think they are actually is online. People find tremendous communities on-- You can't actually live and cook your dinner online, but the internet, one thing that it's genius about for better and for worse is connecting people. I think that we're used to thinking of artistic communities as geographical spaces, but they're also obviously virtual spaces.

Brian Lehrer: Right. Interesting.

Stacey D'Erasmo: Yes. In fact, people are being pushed. There are all the neighborhoods; Queens, Bushwick, all of these things where the gentrification question is a very thorny and difficult one.

Brian Lehrer: I'm thinking about Rick, the caller, the jazz musician, bringing up the Jazz Foundation as something that helps support a musician. You write in the book about how community and connection are really important for artists to stay inspired. That can come in the form of romantic relationships or friendships or mentors. You also have a chapter called Exile where you talk about how being estranged from one's country or community or family is also a key factor in how artists stay inspired.

I think about the dynamic of, yes, we all say community is so important, but then there are a lot of artists who say, "Just leave me alone to paint. Leave me alone to write." There's the kind of push and pull of other people.

Stacey D'Erasmo: Absolutely. One thing that we certainly need is solitude. We need that time, that unreasonable amount of time and space to create. We say the word community as if it's a neutral word, but obviously, communities can be wonderful. They can also be terrible, they can be restrictive, they can be punitive. The writer Roberto Bolaño, I talk about an essay that he wrote where he's basically saying exile is fantastic, which I think is not always entirely the case.

Being thrown into another world, maybe a less conventional world, or seeking a less conventional world, is often very, very wonderful for artists because for one thing, what we do is generally not reasonable. It needs unreasonable amounts of time or unreasonable amounts of space. Being in some more liminal or even precarious place can actually be wonderful for making art. As I said, I do think that people are able to find communities online, and that's wonderful.

Brian Lehrer: One more. Allie in Ridgewood, you're on WNYC. Ridgewood, Queens. Hi, Allie.

Allie: Hi, Brian. Thank you for taking my call. I always love listening to your show, and this is my third time calling in. [chuckles] I just was calling to say I was born and raised in Queens, not in Ridgewood, but Jackson Heights. I've lived here most of my life and feel really lucky to have found a way to piece it together to survive as an artist, mostly through teaching. That's my main livelihood. I was just calling to say how important I found community to be.

I have experienced what the guest was just talking about with being, I don't know if I call it exile, maybe miniature exile, at an artist residency and the immense benefits of that. In terms of my day to day, I feel really lucky to be a part of a couple of different artistic communities. I'm a part of this community through the Jalopy Theater School of Music in Red Hook, Brooklyn. That's a place where just lots of different artists who have their own independent careers come and gather and find a place to perform but also just be together.

It's really helped me to know other artists and see how they're making it work and know other artists who also have families or do it all sorts of different ways, but it just helps to have other models and people that keep reminding you, "You're an artist."

Brian Lehrer: That's great. One more vote for community. We've just got 30 seconds left, but there's one question I'm dying to ask you if you can give a quick answer. That is if you think different media are more conducive to staying creative over the long term. I love music, many kinds of music, but it seems to me like a lot of musicians do their best work maybe in their 20s and then they do the same thing over and over again.

I don't want to overgeneralize, but that people in your medium, novel writing, can maybe more tend to grow over time. I'm curious if you have had any thought or research like that. We have 15 seconds.

Stacey D'Erasmo: [chuckles] Okay. The 15-second answer is, I honestly think that the less money that there is in the field, the better chance people have often of staying creative over the long term because when the financial stakes get high, people tend to repeat themselves because it's harder to take the risk. That's actually what I think. Books of all of the different arts forms that I talk about in the book, probably writing novels is the least lucrative. I think that may be part of why we keep staying lit for the-

Brian Lehrer: Oh, that's so interesting.

Stacey D'Erasmo: -longest.

Brian Lehrer: Stacey D'Erasmo's new book is called The Long Run. Listeners, if you want to see her and hear more, she will be in conversation with the writer James Hannaham tomorrow 7:00 to 8:00 PM at P&T Knitwear, the bookstore, 180 Orchard Street in Manhattan. Great conversation. Thank you so much.

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