by Kelly Harrison
July 9, 2024
The Long Run by Stacey D’Erasmo; Graywolf Press; 184 pages, $17.00.
In her essay collection The Long Run, D’Erasmo asks how creatives sustain productive efforts throughout life. She’s feeling around for a secret, not just to attaining something like a book, a play, a TV series, an art exhibition, but for persisting, for creating, for showing up and doing the work throughout a long career.
Her search takes her through interviews with creatives like writer Samuel Delay, actress Blair Brown, dancer Valda Setterfield, among others. Along the way, D’Erasmo weaves large parts of her life into the essays—more than what she calls an “occasional memoir”—and taps into art, theater, dance, photography, poetry, film, painting, landscape design, and a multitude of topics that span the arts, the politics of queerness, the classroom, aging, and...so many others that summarizing the collection is a struggle.
As she writes about the artists, the artistic, and the experiential, she goes meta, pulling away from the story to tell us how she’s navigating the process of writing the book, from interviewing via Zoom during COVID-19 shut-downs to writing in a heatwave to introducing her student research assistant for the book. These glimpses also serve a function: we get a sense that she’s navigating herself through a creative nadir, through her own artistic struggle where she’s not sure she can keep going, and the various interviews are propellers moving her through the subject matter, sometimes pushing, sometimes pulling. Readers who are themselves creatives may find a form of solace while reading both D’Erasmo’s experiences and those of her subjects, recognizing the blocks, the luck, the paths less traveled to come away with a renewed vivacity for their own practices.
In the first essay, “Freedom,” more than a bit of irony lurks among the subjects. We have a couple in a 61-year marriage contrasted with D’Erasmo’s experiences with the sexual exploration of lesbians and their community in New York City in the late 1970s. The marriage of dancer Valda Setterfield to choreographer David Gordon forms the stage set in front of which D’Erasmo performs her examination of self, her queerness, coming out, living large in NYC, and how that all ties in with writing: “Like being queer, being an artist means that you are continually insisting on doing something that maybe no one wants you do.” In contrast to this insistence is Samuel “Chip” Delany, author of over forty books, whose queerness and writing never seemed to be acts of subversion, and yet he was out and doing this work before AIDS. D’Erasmo reveals some surprising connections; one of her past lovers was “an ex-lover of [Delany’s] ex-wife, poet Marilyn Hacker.” This “daisy chain of execs” is the catalyst for D’Erasmo’s introspection of desire and the not-quite gossip of the literary world, of lovers who might have or might not have been muses or teachers or mentors.
Sometimes, D’Erasmo’s work reads like art criticism or a review. Sometimes the artist’s home life is contrasted with D’Erasmo’s own. Sometimes an essay, as in “Garden,” is less about sustaining a life of art as it is about other subjects, like gardening or her pairing up later in life with a man instead of a woman. This isn’t to suggest that the collection doesn’t do what it sets out to. It does. But D’Erasmo just doesn’t take a direct route.
In “Garden,” she interviews landscape artist Darrel Morrison, compares his passion to that of French author Colette, and has one direct moment about her subject: “If my question is, What sustains artists over the long run?, then the answer from Morrison and Colette might clearly be: earth, which sounds so charming.” The essay doesn’t say much more on the topic directly. Instead, D’Erasmo paints by inference, giving readers glimpses into the lives of the artists and their thinking. With Morrison, we’re told that “architecture…gets worse as it ages…but a landscape…gets better.” To Morrison, a “painting is two-dimensional, sculpture and architecture are three-dimensional, but landscape architecture is four dimensional and the fourths dimension is time.” D’Erasmo then turns to time and how people tend to “see differently” as they age, how her own sexuality shifted again, how she questioned her identity.
In “I’ll be your Mirror,” D’Erasmo summarizes several TV series to construct the backdrop for Blair Brown’s long career. D’Erasmo overcomes one of the most boring activities, of listening to people talk about a TV show you’ve never watched, by interjecting insights and humor to keep the longer theme of the artist’s practice centered. For example, after a brief summary of Continental Divide, a rom-com starring Brown alongside John Belushi, D’Erasmo whips through the gargantuan feats performed by the female protagonist to rescue the man, ending the paragraph with “…he married her. Who wouldn’t?” The question functions on several levels. Situationally, we see Brown as this accomplished actor whose past includes key roles of women so accomplished the marriage trope flips, even if a bit comically. The question also resonates with D’Erasmo’s own sexual attractions for strong women, as in the next paragraph wherein she describes Brown: “Vitality, strength, sexuality, and intelligence.” If the humor in this question-as-punchline feels light, D’Erasmo’s insights turn heavy. She notes the “shocking” sexism in older movies, wondering how she forgot this quality of not just film but lived experience. Sexism takes the stage while D’Erasmo directs us through yet another role of Brown’s where the male characters exhibit a slightly milder sexism, accepting a woman’s strength but only insofar as it aids the man’s quest.
D’Erasmo’s writing often takes us on side journeys like this. If readers want a straight path of introspection on what keeps an artist working past the usual retirement age of those with desk jobs, they’ll be disappointed, but in these divagations D’Erasmo is crafting an image using a broader brush. The artist’s life has ups and downs, shifts that follow or create cultural changes, paths that fit no clear patterns.
As she worked on the book people asked her for the secret to a long run in the arts, but D’Erasmo “dodged the question” because she didn’t have an answer, not so much because she couldn’t find the secret but more that a life of productive artmaking doesn’t seem to have a secret. By the end of the book she does, however, reveal some themes. D’Erasmo writes that for those with long careers “surrender is often what leads the artist where they find they must go.” Artists and creatives seem to have both a will and a willingness, a desire to keep going and the attitude to walk through the doors that open along the way.__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
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Stacey D’Erasmo's The Long Run: How Artists Make the Long Run Through Creativity
NONFICTION REVIEW
Image by Dmitry Daltonik from Pexels
Kelly A. Harrison, MFA, teaches technical communication at Stanford University and works as a writer and consultant in San José, CA. She edited West Winds Centennial, an anthology of works by the California Writers Club, for which she won the Ina Coolbrith award. Her works have appeared in literary journals and anthologies, including Reed Magazine, Hidden Compass, and Celebrate Creativity, and she writes for Technical Communication. She is the Associate Editor for West Trade Review.
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