Intimate conversations with our greatest heart-centered minds.

Thank you for being here! Beyond is both love and labor intensive. If you value this work please consider becoming a paid subscriber. This will provide access to full interviews plus the archives and allow me to do more interviews, pay guest contributors, as well as keep a roof over my head. And now it will help support rescue dogs. Upgrade your subscription today. And please keep leaving your thoughts and insights in the comments. I so enjoy this community and love hearing from you! Rally A Posse: A Conversation With Austin Kleon On being part of something a little bit bigger than you, bike rides, writing the opposite of everything you hate, and bottling maniac creative kid energy. JANE RATCLIFFE FEB 1 Intimate conversations with our greatest heart-centered minds. photo by Clayton Cubitt Austin Kleonlikes to help as many people as possible become the best version of themselves that they can. He does so by sharing his wisdom, insight, and humor—and also by sharing the wisdom, insight, and humor of pretty much every great mind since the beginning of time. He gathers all of this wonderfulness into either one of his wildly popular books on being an artist or in his wildly popular newsletter: Austin Kleon He also really likes riding bikes, good food, drawing, being part of a crew, and hanging out with his kids. Austin began his career as a poet, using a black marker and the daily newspapers that were piling up at his house to create found poems which eventually became his first book Newspaper Blackout. The New Yorker pronounced that his poems “resurrect the newspaper when everybody else is declaring it dead.” Not bad for a twenty-seven-year-old. Austin went on to write the delightfully playful yet visionary and incredibly helpful Steal Like An Artist, which is in its 30th printing with over a million copies sold, Show Your Work, and Keep Going. The first two are New York Times bestsellers. And The Guardian selected his newsletter as one of the best of the year. He lives in Austin, Texas, with his wife and two much beloved sons. I had such a lovely time chatting with Austin. He’s kind and easy going and sees the world as a sort of magical spiderweb of creativity and adventure and unexpected connection. Enjoy! xJane If you want more Austin, he filled in the Beyond Questionnaire in September, 2023. Check it out here. When I think of you, I think of community. You’re so devoted to uplifting the voices of others. Can you talk about this impulse in yourself? What I'm devoted to is the idea that a brain is really the result of its connections to other brains. A life is really the result of its connection to other lives. So we’re the sum of our connections. Those connections can be genetic, they can be social, but usually, in my life, they're artistic or intellectual. What I'm trying to do is to bring in all these things that I see myself connected to and share them in a way that builds a network around me. It really comes down to creativity and art being the result of what Brian Eno would call scenius. Instead of what we might think of as genius, which is about the individual, Brian Eno's idea is that every great genius is the result of a scenius--of being connected to other minds and ideas and a rich lineage of things that have come before and things that are around now. I grew up in Ohio literally in the middle of a cornfield. I didn't grow up on a farm. I grew up on a plot of land that was next to farms on a busy country road. All I wanted when I was younger was to be around people who cared about the same things that I did. So, a lot of my work is about joining the world I always wanted to be part of. But you have to build the world that you want. What I've been trying to do in my books and in all my writing is to create that world. Can you describe the world that you want to live in? It was the opposite of what I grew up in. It was New York City or my idea of what New York City was. I quickly learned that the New York City I wanted was the New York City from thirty years ago. I wanted something really basic. I wanted to be around people who like to read and make music and paint and make art. I look back on my young life and, actually, those people were around in Circleville, Ohio. I just wasn't secure enough about myself to try to rally a posse together. I was too bratty and stuck up and I wanted to get out of there. That was my narrative: to get out of my environment. For better or worse, that was how I was wired. I feel like the name of this interview will be Rally A Posse. I love that! I’m a person that's always wanted to be in a gang. One of the reasons I like having a family is it's a little gang, it’s our little crew. I’ve always wanted to be part of something a little bit bigger than me. I have a bike gang that I’m in that's just a bunch of old dads and we ride around Austin. I think that part of people's problem is they're not in enough gangs. There's this great tension in life where you desperately want to belong to something else and you want to stand apart at the same time. You want to be special, but you want to be accepted, too. I, too, have posse mentality. I can feel it in my bones, but I don't know if I could put into words why it’s so important. Can you articulate that? Yes, I think I can. The posse satisfies those two opposites. It keeps them in tension in this really interesting way. You're belonging to a little group of people, but you're differentiating yourself from the mass of humanity. In the bike gang, there's our crew and then there's everybody else. We might meet up with other people, so there's a togetherness, but it's also a special togetherness. It's very tribal. It's that right mix of belonging and not belonging. It's one of those human things that when it's good and benign or benevolent, it leads to human flourishing. And when it isn't, you get fascism and wars and all kinds of stuff. Earlier you were saying that you’re not intentionally uplifting all these voices, but nevertheless, the result is when you give people shoutouts in your Substack or mention them in your other writings, you're changing lives. How does that feel? With the newsletter, I’m just trying to make a newsletter that I’d like to read. There’s a lot of people who send me books that I don't shoutout. There's a great documentary about Robert Gottlieb, the editor who died recently, called Turn Every Page, about his relationship with Robert Caro. In there he says, “publishing is just making public your enthusiasms.” That's what I'm trying to do, too. I'm trying to make public my enthusiasms. It’s interesting, because the thing I've learned over time is that the more I point outwards, the more people turn up to the show. On a day-to-day basis, the newsletter is the most popular thing that I do. And in some ways, it's the most personal thing that I do. But it's also the thing that's the least about me, at least the Friday one. Again, it's that tension between being an individual and being part of a collective. Being inwards and pointing outwards. There’s a Wendell Berry poem that I love called A Warning to My Readers and he says, “do not think me gentle because I sing in praise of gentleness.” In the books, for example, I'm trying to be the most helpful, nice person I can be. But if you met me on a regular day, well, that’s not necessarily the impression that the other parents at school pick up get from me. What impression might the other parents get from you? They’d probably think, “He's here every day, what does that guy do for work? Who is this freak?” In my day-to-day life, I tend to be pretty carmudgeonly. I'm not misanthropic, but I can be pretty grumpy. Basically, the way I write my stuff is I think about everything I hate. And then I try to think about what the opposite is. And I articulate that. Then I delete all the stuff I hate and I share the stuff that’s the opposite. That’s so interesting. Does that take a toll on you to first think about all the stuff that you hate? No, it's great fodder. It’s really generative. For example, Keep Going was a book that was me dealing with this kind of tech-centric productivity stuff, this relentless tech bro culture of maximizing and optimizing. I was thinking about how much I hate it. And I was thinking about Lao Tzu and Thoreau and Ursula Franklin. How do I take those voices and put them in a popular facing self-help book? Someone who does that well is Oliver Burkeman. Oliver and I are friendly and I've read him for a decade now. He's someone who's really good at doing self-help in a way where you can tell he hates most self-help books and yet he ends up writing these wonderful self-help books. I think it takes a particular kind of contrarian. There's another, the guy who ghostwrote a bunch of Regis Philbin's memoirs, he was saying that for Regis Philbin, agitation was his muse, that he became animated when he was agitated. I feel very much the same way for myself. The oyster needs some bit of grit to make the pearl. I find that my brain needs these little gritty pieces to rub up against to produce these little pearls. I'm wired to have something to be in opposition to. I feel most alive then. All the books are like that. Steal Like an Artist is in opposition to the idea of originality and perfect genius. Show Your Work is against the idea that you should be a hermit, cloistered in your studio. What's driving you nuts now? Gosh, what does drive me nuts? I don’t know! Maybe that's why I haven't written a book for a while. I tend to be fairly content. I'm creatively fulfilled by my own practice in the newsletter. I find writing books to be mostly painful. The thing that's kind of driving the next book is I really get itchy when I read parenting books about how to make kids creative because on the whole adults have a much better chance of being taught how to be creative from children than they do teaching children how to be creative. I think that on the whole, adults interject too much in their children's lives. Children have this natural ability to make stuff and to be interested in the world and they get it beat out of them. There's this magic three to six age, at least my kids had it, where they were these totally unique, interesting artists. They made stuff and they were on fire for living. There's this manic preschool, and I use that as in “before school,” magic that happened in the house. For half a decade now, I've been trying to figure out how to bottle that time for myself and for readers. How can I remember what it was like to be around those little cavemen Picassos? Because it really was like watching these unfettered creative monsters. It was so good and I learned so much from it. I'm trying to figure out how to make a book that has all the manic energy of a four-or five-year-old. How do you bottle that in a book and give it to people so they can know what it's like to be around that, if they haven't had the pleasure or been open enough to really enjoy it? That’s what I'm working on right now and have been for a long time. It's wild to think we were once the super creative maniac monsters. That’s what’s so fun about it. You get next to it a little bit and you're like, “Oh, yeah, I remember.” Carl Jung has this great question, “What did you do as a child that made the hours pass like minutes?” For me, being around my kids I knew immediately what I loved. Watching them become who they are freed me up in this interesting way to like what I like. A lot of people when they become parents, find it very constrictive. For me, it absolutely set me free. So I'm trying to figure out how to present that in a way that could be entertaining or helpful to other people. It set you free because it reminded you of what it was like for you when you were that age? It was the first time in a long time I'd been around people who are making things just for the hell of it. Just like, “What happens if we build a huge tower out of Legos and then we knock it down?” Or: “What happens if I draw a drawing and throw it away afterward?” Just the sheer joy of materials: of Lego bricks clicking together and the way a marker moves across the paper and the sound that it makes. I was talking to one of my artist friends and she has a child in her life. She’d never really been around kids before. And she was like, “Oh my God, we just play.” I looked at her and said, “But you're a professional artist. Is it not play when you sit down and draw?” And she said, “Oh no, I'm thinking about what I’m going to do with the drawing.” When you watch children at play, you think, ‘That's it. That's the state I need to be in when I work.” By playfulness, you mean tapping into the creative urge, but without an expectation of value or outcome? It's purely for the joy of creating? Well, it's interesting because there's free play and then there's playing games. You could get really technical about it. For me, it was this idea that you step into this kind of magic circle and the normal rules of life don't apply. You're in this make-believe space and you're just like, “What is this? What could it be? Oh, it's a rocket!” And doing things to be in the play, not to have an outcome, which is what you said, not to think about what the final product is, but to literally be there and be doing the thing. Beautiful. But it's very, very difficult to get in there. Musicians get the closest because they’re playing music. We call them players. Any great musician will tell you that there is that state that you get into where you're absolutely not thinking about what is happening other than what is happening. I find books by improv jazz musicians are helpful. To read about what it's like to hear a note and then think what goes next to that note. And to be there with a note and if it sounds wrong don't think about whether it's wrong just think about what note would make it sound right afterwards. It's a very improvisational thing. I find it really, really helpful. Kids have made me think about materials a lot: That pencil wants to do certain things, ink wants to do other things, paper and glue want to do other things. To worry a little bit less about what your vision is, what you want the thing to be, rather let the materials lead. You’re such a devoted father. This world is troubled. How are you feeling about having these beautiful young children in this world right now? I always think about what Kurt Vonnegut said to his kids when they would complain to him about the world. He was like, “God damn it, I just got here, too.” I feel very much like, “I deserve a better world, too.” In the grand scheme of things, I'm still a kind of kid myself. I assume that throughout history, parents have always felt like it was the end of the world. That they were pushing their children into a world that they themselves did not understand. That's why for me, one of the key things that has helped me as a dad has been to assume the role of the curious elder. What that means is that I consider my kids to be youth spies, which is a phrase that I lifted from John Waters. John Waters doesn't have his own kids but he says, “I keep young kids around. They're youth spies. They keep me up to date on different things.” The way I treat my kids now is as youth spies. They're supposed to introduce me to this new weird world. They don't have all my hang-ups so they can experience it through their own lenses and then give it back to me. In general, I’m a long-term pessimist, short-term optimist. I don't have a lot of hope for the human race. I don't have a lot of hope for our civilization. But I have enormous hope in the potential of the day as a unit of time. I've never actually been an addict, well, not for any destructive substances, I've never gone through a twelve step program, but I have always felt that language to be enormously helpful. The idea that you take things one day at a time. The day is a unit that I can get my head around. The sun comes up, the sun goes down; it did it yesterday, it'll probably do it today, it'll probably do it tomorrow. I believe in the potential of a day. I believe in the potential of people you bump into, trying to have a decent experience, trying to put a couple of words together that might help or entertain someone else. But in the long term, I have no real sunny visions. I've never had any deep near-death experiences. I always joke that my reading the obituaries is a near death experience for cowards like me. But my kids have awakened me to my own mortality: the idea that one day I won't be here. We’re a culture that avoids that on the whole. I'm a big Ernest Becker fan. I love his book The Denial of Death. I very much sign up with his idea that art and culture are our way of dealing with our creatureliness; the fact that we're animals with brief lifespans. But with my kids, there's a tension between wanting your kids to know about the world and also providing them an alternative to the world. I have friends that try to make sure that their kids know about everything going on in the world and they watch the news and all that. For me, I err on the side of let them have a childhood, let them live a good, happy life, if possible. All that other stuff will trickle in and they'll get enough of it. In your books and on your Substack, you touch on the importance of self-care and rest, but you don’t go into great depth. Would you feel comfortable sharing how you care for yourself? Do you sleep well? Nap? Eat well? Take supplements? I have a pretty low stress life. I've been blessed, really. I have a great job. I have people who like to read me. I have income that comes in. I live in a place that's pretty nice to live: Austin, Texas. The sun's out right now and it's sixty-five degrees. Self-care-wise, what do I do? I lost twenty pounds last year, so I try to eat decently. I grew up with a mom who is a spectacular cook. My wife is a baker. I mean, I just love to eat. So that's something I have to watch. I ride my bike a lot. I have a pretty strict sleep schedule. During the school week, I go to bed around 9:30 or 10 get up at 6. One thing I've been doing lately that's really helpful is charging my phone in the kitchen. I got a new phone and it has a charger that doesn't work with the one that's in the bedroom. Not having a phone in the bedroom has been great for me. I just have my little Kindle. I listen to a lot of music. I play music. I play a lot of records here in the studio. I keep a diary. I make a lot of collages. It’s weird because some of that’s work. That’s one thing about my life: I work all the time. I'm never not working. That's kind of the trade-off of doing something that you really love to do and having a creative life; even when I'm watching TV at the end of the day, I'll think, “Oh, is this good enough to put in the newsletter?” It’s always in the back of my mind and I'm always scribbling stuff. I love the idea of a Sabbath. My friend Beth Pickens talks beautifully about the importance of taking a day off. Sometimes I do, sometimes I don't. Basically, I’m always going. I probably should take time off more. But then in the summer, I'll spend all afternoon in the pool reading. And that’s nice. Everything is seasonal for me. This is the season of long walks and being in the studio a lot and the kids are in school. Summer is the season of the kids are home, it's a hundred thousand degrees outside, read a lot of books, laze around in the pool, try to get as much down time in as you can. I guess that's my self-care tip: What Thoreau said, which is, “live in each season as it passes.” Or what Katherine May suggests in Wintering, to live in the seasons. It's funny because people talk about how Austin doesn't have seasons. It's just hot and hotter. There are absolutely seasons, you just have to dial into them. The more I pay attention to seasons and think of what I do as being seasonal and circular and repetitive, the more it's changed my life. I love this time of year. One of my new things is to build a fire outside and sit and look at it. Don't really do anything else. I burned my Christmas tree the other day and that's what I did for the afternoon. I just burned my Christmas tree and thought about death and then thought about what I wanted to do. It was really good and I really enjoyed it. As with most writers, you spend a lot of time on your own. Could you talk about your relationship with yourself. Do you get along with yourself? Are there are things you've really grown to like about yourself? Things you struggle with? Oh, what self? Who are we talking about today? I'm a Gemini, so it's like, who showed up today? The name of Robert Louis Stevenson’s biography is Myself and That Other Fellow. That's the name of his biographer's book about him. My relationship with myself is one of constant trying to love him. I very much had to get out of the people pleasing mode. When I was a kid, I was a typical nineties gifted child: I go to school and I get good grades and I have divorced parents. If I’m a golden child and do everything I'm supposed to, everyone will love me and leave me alone. I get all my self-worth from getting A's and being smart. That's something over time that I've had to shed. I worry about that with my own kids. My oldest is really good at school, naturally gifted, his teachers love him, and he's a very people pleasing person. I'm trying to figure out language to use with him that's kind of Mr. Rogers. You know, “I like you just the way you are. I'd like you if you were a D student. I like being around you.” To further complicate my Gemini nature, Milton Glaser said, “I had the perfect gifted and talented program when I was a kid. I had a mother who told me I could do anything. And a father who said prove it.” And that was very much my upbringing. My mom was a high school principal. She was like, “you're brilliant, you're bright. Get good grades and you can do anything.” And my dad was like, “no one gives a shit how smart you are. What can you do for the world? Are you kind to people? Are you helping others?” Those two work each other out. That touches upon what you were talking about earlier. Yes, standing apart versus being part of the collective. Which, again, is that very human impulse: you want to feel special but you also want to feel you’re part of something. I read these great books this summer by a Jungian analyst named James Hollis. They're midlife crisis books. He probably writes a little bit more for men, but I think women can get a lot out of those books, for sure. One of the questions that Hollis asks is who are you without your history and your achievements? He asks you to strip down to that six-year-old you were before you were anyone. His idea is that the midlife crisis is inevitable because we build our life up into adulthood and then when we get it together we have to question it all and ask ourselves who we really are. That’s where the kids come in because they were helpful for me to realize: “You were the kid who played the piano for hours on end. You were the kid who recorded music for hours and hours. You were the kid who read and scribbled in notebooks and dreamed.” So much is hard in the world right now. Where are you finding joy? Riding my bike around in the world, taking walks. People are on their phones too much, they are watching the news too much. You need to get outside on your own two feet or your own two wheels; you need to ride around with other people or take walks with other people. Get out in the world and talk to human beings. Experience it with your own senses. Gary Snyder said, “you have to fall in love with the world before you can save it.” I really think that if you get out every day, if you take a walk with someone you love or just with yourself you’re out in the world, it makes life better. That’s very in keeping with your predilection to write about the ordinariness of life: you bump into this person out walking the dog and have a quick chat, and then you run that errand and are able to help someone in some small manner. It always reminds me of the poem, What the Living Do by Marie Howe where she's recalling all the things that her dead brother left behind. I wasn't always that way. I had to train myself. Living in this part of Texas helps because it’s not grand. It's not the West, with its majesty and sweeping vistas. It can be very bleak and harsh. You have to look harder for beauty, so you train yourself to find it. Thoreau helped me a lot. People say, “Oh, his mom did his laundry.” Which is the dumbest dismissal, as if no writer in history ever had their laundry done for them. Reading Thoreau has helped me so much. Not his books, necessarily — I still haven’t read Walden! — but his diary. He's really into the minutia and the noticing. And that's the kind of poetry I like to read: finding the extraordinary in the ordinary. It’s important to juice the ordinary for your work. It’s all that we’re made of. And to honor it. To honor your weird, little, silly life. Beyond with Jane Ratcliffe is a reader-supported publication with the goal of bringing as much light as possible into this world of ours. If you enjoy the work, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. Upgrade to paid Thank you for being here, dear Beyonders! ❤️ Your comments (and hearts) mean so much to me. I read each and every one. Leave a comment Beyond is published every Thursday by veteran journalist Jane Ratcliffe. It’s reader-supported, so if you’re enjoying the newsletter, please consider becoming a paid subscription for $5 a month or $50 a year. You help keep Beyond afloat and create access for others. Upgrade to paid This is a public post, so feel free to share links to Beyond on social media or forward it to someone who might benefit. Thank you for reading! SHARE LIKE COMMENT RESTACK © 2024 Jane Ratcliffe 548 Market Street PMB 72296, San Francisco, CA 94104 Unsubscribe Get the appStart writing ... [Message clipped] View entire message