Here’s a picture of Mac Barnett, my son Jules, and Jon Klassen at the Texas Book Festival. Jules has grown up with their books and loves to draw and tell stories, so this was a really special moment. #showyourwork pic.twitter.com/npp3D5JYzX — Austin Kleon (@austinkleon) November … | Continue reading
I’m back at the Texas Book Festival tomorrow, Sunday, Nov. 6th. The date and venue have changed from what’s in the paper program! I’ll be speaking at noon in Capitol Extension Room E2.036. Details here. The post Come see me at the Texas Book Festival! first appeared on Austin Kle … | Continue reading
"They're coming for every second of your life" –@boburnham pic.twitter.com/RhkYrDZbxR — Clayton Cubitt (@claytoncubitt) November 2, 2022 In this clip from a 2019 panel on “Self Esteem in the Age of Social Media,” comedian Bo Burnham explains how social media companies are out … | Continue reading
You can get downloadable, printable PDFs of these posters (and other 28, 29, 31, and 100 day variants) in yesterday’s free-for-everybody newsletter. The post 30 day challenges first appeared on Austin Kleon. | Continue reading
Ray Bradbury’s advice for being more creative Every night read: – one short story – one poem – one essay Do that for a thousand nights and you’ll be stuffed full of ideas pic.twitter.com/35d6Z2V1os — Austin Kleon (@austinkleon) November 1, 2022 Here’s a clip of Ray Bradbury’s adv … | Continue reading
My son’s 4th grade teacher asked me to come speak about publishing and book design. To try to show them that “all publishing is self-publishing” and books are just fancy zines, I spent a good portion of my Saturday making a batch of zines for them: You can read the whole thing in … | Continue reading
In last Tuesday’s newsletter, I wrote about “Comfort Work”: We talk about “comfort food” and “comfort viewing” but I’ve never heard anybody talk about “comfort work.” Comfort work is work that I do when I don’t know what else to do. I know I need to work, but I don’t know what I … | Continue reading
I think about this paragraph from David Rakoff’s Half Empty quite a bit: Creativity demands an ability to be with oneself at one’s least attractive, that sometimes it’s just easier not to do anything. Writing — I can really only speak to writing here — always, always only start … | Continue reading
Today’s newsletter is a downloadable zine about finding energy in the gap between your vision and your reality. Here’s the first page: The post Energy in the gap first appeared on Austin Kleon. | Continue reading
In today’s newsletter I wrote about Lou Reed and John Cale’s tribute to their mentor, Andy Warhol. The post Songs for Drella first appeared on Austin Kleon. | Continue reading
October is two days away. One of our favorite things to do in my favorite month is watch old spooky movies every night. We have a very specific kind of spooky movie that we love: black and white flicks from the 1930s and 1940s. A great starting point is to just make your way thro … | Continue reading
Everyone in our house is healthy at the moment, and for that I am grateful, but I can’t remember a month with more cosmic nonsense and petty frustrations. Good grief. Having to write a Tuesday and Friday newsletter brings some order to my life when everything else is chaos. We ha … | Continue reading
Some recent Tuesday newsletters have been centered around some work I’ve been doing on “creative tensions” — pairs of opposites that contain within them generative possibilities. (Inspired by Heraclitus and Iain McGilchrist.) The most recent was the “warp and weft” of weaving. (A … | Continue reading
Q: You got away with enormous technical advances, didn’t you? A: Simply by not knowing that they were impossible. Orson Welles on the genius in not-knowing: pic.twitter.com/uikbK3Q5ry — Austin Kleon (@austinkleon) September 5, 2022 In this clip, Orson Welles talks about making Ci … | Continue reading
I copied this logo off a label from a can of tomatoes I saw in a scrapbook over at @paperofthepast on Instagram. (I swapped the shovel and sickle for a brush pen and scissors.) Labor and wait, I thought, sounds like the writing process. You write something, then you put it in the … | Continue reading
In Latin, the term “ex-voto”, is described as: a votive offering of thanks to a sacred entity for a miraculous act. I first heard of ex-voto when researching the cartoonist Saul Steinberg’s bicycling habit. From the year 1992 in his chronology: August, tells Aldo Buzzi that he fe … | Continue reading
“There are two camps of wrestlers in lucha libre: the técnicos, or experts who abide by the rules, and the rudos, or rough ones who break them.” After I heard that photographer Lourdes Grobet died, I checked out a collection of her photos of Mexican wrestlers from the library. Lu … | Continue reading
In today’s newsletter, I wrote about Neil Postman’s 1985 book, Amusing Ourselves To Death, which begins: “Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us…. This book is about the possibility that Huxley, not Orwell, was right.” I schedul … | Continue reading
We took the kids to the Houston Museum of Natural Science this weekend, and afterwards, I tweeted this thread: The more I’ve gone over it in my mind, the more absurd and funnier it gets. Here is an institution dedicated to what we can learn from seeing physical objects in the fos … | Continue reading
Having fun with the outside edges of your books. | Continue reading
Nicholson Baker on Horace from his book The Anthologist. | Continue reading
Writer Ted Gioia on how important high-quality inputs are to mainting high-quality output. | Continue reading
On the origin of a parable in the book ART AND FEAR. | Continue reading
On the awful temptation to keep researching indefinitely. | Continue reading
Free tip for young writers: Go to Goodwill and buy a gigantic used paper dictionary for $5 and keep it on your desk. | Continue reading