What do you think?
Rate this book
The Long Run: A Creative Inquiry
How do I keep doing this―making art? Stacey D’Erasmo had been writing for twenty years and had published three novels when she asked herself this question. She was past the rush of her first books and wondering what to expect―how to stay alive in her vocation―in the decades ahead.
She began to interview older artists she admired to find out how they’d done it. She talked to Valda Setterfield about her sixty-year career that took her from the Merce Cunningham Dance Company to theatrical collaborations with her husband to roles in films. She talked to Samuel Delany about his vast oeuvre of books in many genres. She talked to Amy Sillman about working between painting and other media and between abstraction and figuration. She talked to landscape architect Darrel Morrison, composer Tania Léon, actress Blair Brown, and musician Steve Earle, and started to see connections between them and to artists across Colette, David Bowie, Ruth Asawa. She found insights in own experience, about what has driven and thwarted and shaped her as a writer.
Instead of easy answers or a road map, The Long Run offers one practitioner’s conversations, anecdotes, confidences, and observations about sustaining a creative life. Along the way, it radically redefines artistic success, shifting the focus from novelty and output and external recognition toward freedom, fluidity, resistance, community, and survival.
She began to interview older artists she admired to find out how they’d done it. She talked to Valda Setterfield about her sixty-year career that took her from the Merce Cunningham Dance Company to theatrical collaborations with her husband to roles in films. She talked to Samuel Delany about his vast oeuvre of books in many genres. She talked to Amy Sillman about working between painting and other media and between abstraction and figuration. She talked to landscape architect Darrel Morrison, composer Tania Léon, actress Blair Brown, and musician Steve Earle, and started to see connections between them and to artists across Colette, David Bowie, Ruth Asawa. She found insights in own experience, about what has driven and thwarted and shaped her as a writer.
Instead of easy answers or a road map, The Long Run offers one practitioner’s conversations, anecdotes, confidences, and observations about sustaining a creative life. Along the way, it radically redefines artistic success, shifting the focus from novelty and output and external recognition toward freedom, fluidity, resistance, community, and survival.
192 pages, Paperback
First published July 9, 2024
60 people are currently reading
2950 people want to read
About the author
Stacey D'Erasmo
16 books115 followersStacey D’Erasmo is the author of the novels Tea, (a New York Times Notable Book of the Year); and A Seahorse Year (a San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of the Year and a Lambda Literary Award winner). Her writing has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, the New York Times Book Review, and Ploughshares. She is currently an assistant professor of writing at Columbia University.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 33 reviews
March 9, 2024
What a mysterious (stealth memoir, inquiry of example, collapse of interviews into wide-ranging meditations) and crucial book for me at this moment in my life. What a stellar mind. I can't wait until everyone can read this one.
Desire paths! This life and book travels them.
Some glimpses:
"Now I knew what it was like to sustain a vocation over decades. Now I knew, viscerally, that losing one's sense of vocation is like being in hell. My curiosity had become bloodier and more insistent: How do we keep doing this? What happens over a lifetime of doing this? In urban planning, the habitual paths taken by people on foot or on bicycle rather than the paved roads, which either don't exist or are too linear and awkward, are called "desire paths."
"(It was complicated.) (Which you can’t say anymore.) (But it was.)"
"Delany tells me, "For all the forty-odd books I've published ... I've had between two and ten ideas lasting for ten minutes to ten years on other projects I would like to do. A very few of them have been completed. I think of myself as somebody who has not written far more books than I have." Even now, that seems a paradise to me, that way of seeing presence everywhere, a never-ending invisible library of potential works."
"That sense of having no choice is the one thing that truly can-lot be taught. Talent can't be taught, either, but it can be nurtured or suppressed. The nearly unbearable sense that your life somehow depends on making art isn't something anyone else can inculcate in you. It's a quality you must recognize in yourself, if you have it, and then decide if you want, or can bear, to heed it. Students and others who are interested in writing often talk about their failures of "discipline" or "commitment," but my own experience is more Moreau than Grace Kelly. I couldn't leave it for Monaco."
"My inner townspeople were threatening to riot, but once again, and with no small amount of reluctance and trepidation, I followed my desire path."
Desire paths! This life and book travels them.
Some glimpses:
"Now I knew what it was like to sustain a vocation over decades. Now I knew, viscerally, that losing one's sense of vocation is like being in hell. My curiosity had become bloodier and more insistent: How do we keep doing this? What happens over a lifetime of doing this? In urban planning, the habitual paths taken by people on foot or on bicycle rather than the paved roads, which either don't exist or are too linear and awkward, are called "desire paths."
"(It was complicated.) (Which you can’t say anymore.) (But it was.)"
"Delany tells me, "For all the forty-odd books I've published ... I've had between two and ten ideas lasting for ten minutes to ten years on other projects I would like to do. A very few of them have been completed. I think of myself as somebody who has not written far more books than I have." Even now, that seems a paradise to me, that way of seeing presence everywhere, a never-ending invisible library of potential works."
"That sense of having no choice is the one thing that truly can-lot be taught. Talent can't be taught, either, but it can be nurtured or suppressed. The nearly unbearable sense that your life somehow depends on making art isn't something anyone else can inculcate in you. It's a quality you must recognize in yourself, if you have it, and then decide if you want, or can bear, to heed it. Students and others who are interested in writing often talk about their failures of "discipline" or "commitment," but my own experience is more Moreau than Grace Kelly. I couldn't leave it for Monaco."
"My inner townspeople were threatening to riot, but once again, and with no small amount of reluctance and trepidation, I followed my desire path."
September 9, 2024
Four short passages from The Long Run:
*
In the same way I envy gardeners, I have also envied people of deep religious faith, because they know that they are part of something so much bigger than themselves that is kindly disposed toward them, and they can lean back against that.
*
I have long said that the experience of queerness, in the time when I was coming out, prepared me beautifully for being a writer. Like being queer, being an artist means that you are continuously insisting on doing something that maybe no one wants you to do, that very possibly isn’t going to work, that’s only going to end in defeat and humiliation, and that is unlikely to bring worldly rewards or general approval.
*
“When dealing with power – the power of employers, the power of gatekeepers, the power of the critical establishment – being able to say no is perhaps the most crucial point of leverage. It’s a common assumption that being able to say no to authority comes only with an equivalent, or greater, amount of power, money, and fame. However, it is, of course, precisely when one doesn’t have as much power as authority that the ability to say no matters most, particularly if one is in it for the long run.
*
This requires not the momentary strength of the assassin, but the deep stamina of the double agent.
*
*
In the same way I envy gardeners, I have also envied people of deep religious faith, because they know that they are part of something so much bigger than themselves that is kindly disposed toward them, and they can lean back against that.
*
I have long said that the experience of queerness, in the time when I was coming out, prepared me beautifully for being a writer. Like being queer, being an artist means that you are continuously insisting on doing something that maybe no one wants you to do, that very possibly isn’t going to work, that’s only going to end in defeat and humiliation, and that is unlikely to bring worldly rewards or general approval.
*
“When dealing with power – the power of employers, the power of gatekeepers, the power of the critical establishment – being able to say no is perhaps the most crucial point of leverage. It’s a common assumption that being able to say no to authority comes only with an equivalent, or greater, amount of power, money, and fame. However, it is, of course, precisely when one doesn’t have as much power as authority that the ability to say no matters most, particularly if one is in it for the long run.
*
This requires not the momentary strength of the assassin, but the deep stamina of the double agent.
*
March 28, 2024
Thanks to Graywolf Press for sending me this book. Lots of interesting artists here. I was especially impressed not only by the author, Stacey D’Erasmo, but by Ruth Asawa, Tania Leon, Valda Setterfield, Merce Cunningham, David Gordon, Darrel Morrison and Steve Earle. I looked all of them up online watching them perform, give interviews, accept awards, and view their art. Impressive all. This is a book of numerous dropped names that enhanced the reading, rather than fill up space. Liked the book a lot!
dnf
January 14, 2025DNF'ed @ page 39.
If this book delivers on its premise, I would've loved it. Instead, it's a weird mixture between biographies of various artists as well as the author's musings. There aren't many attempts to dig deeper into the creative practices of the artists she interviewed. Disappointing.
If this book delivers on its premise, I would've loved it. Instead, it's a weird mixture between biographies of various artists as well as the author's musings. There aren't many attempts to dig deeper into the creative practices of the artists she interviewed. Disappointing.
July 24, 2025
Pink pony read
September 4, 2024
Graywolf sent this in a recent Galley Club mailing, and this was especially interesting to me to read in the light of the overall twists and turns that the creative landscape of our capitalist hellscape have taken lately, and people younger than me aren't sure if they can make a sustainable living doing creative jobs, or if it only becomes possible once they're in a situation where there is a second person who can provide a stable income, or even entire fields disappearing (journalism, video games, video game journalism) to the regurgitating maw that is AI. Seeing Miss D'Erasmo frame her interviews with other older creatives through her own experiences as also interesting as well (though it got a touch autobiographical memoir at times). Definitely worht a read.
October 12, 2024
Disjointed and somehow there was no clear thread tying everything together even though the whole point of the book was to explore the sustainability of long-run creativity. DID NOT ENJOY.
Read
December 14, 2024😭 my genre kryptonite #1: memoir / essays / interviews about artistic practice.
This book was so good on what D’Erasmo calls the “skin to skin” contacts — the intimate relationships, the sustained connections — that inform most long-haul creative careers. (It seems to me from my time in the genre that queer writers tend to engage this better / in more interesting ways than straight writers, which is probably not surprising. There were so many times I thought about Ali Smith as I was reading this, and also Lindsay Freeman’s Running: Practices.)
It also had a chapter on US-based artists’ relationships to the university that I could hardly bear to read because it somehow made me feel so raw to look at it.
I’ll probably reread this one day. So grateful I stumbled on it at the public library this summer.
This book was so good on what D’Erasmo calls the “skin to skin” contacts — the intimate relationships, the sustained connections — that inform most long-haul creative careers. (It seems to me from my time in the genre that queer writers tend to engage this better / in more interesting ways than straight writers, which is probably not surprising. There were so many times I thought about Ali Smith as I was reading this, and also Lindsay Freeman’s Running: Practices.)
It also had a chapter on US-based artists’ relationships to the university that I could hardly bear to read because it somehow made me feel so raw to look at it.
I’ll probably reread this one day. So grateful I stumbled on it at the public library this summer.
March 24, 2025
I had so much hope for this book. Even though I found it while looking for another book with the words “The Long Run” in it, and the other book was actually about a long run while this one is about sustaining creativity in artistic careers over a lifetime. The author is a good writer but her writing is too literary for my tastes, to the extent that I had difficulty following the stories of the people she interviewed for the book. I’m sure they are very interesting people, but the writing style caused me to lose interest. I would summarize this book as “well done but not for me.”
November 9, 2024
I mite need to read againe to get into it.
January 12, 2025
Really enjoyed taking my time reading an essay and then taking a break. I do think it could have benefitted from some photos of the artwork/environments mentioned.
March 2, 2025
This was okay. A little dry, at times, but probably better for those in more creative professions who may find themselves burned out. I did have some takeaways for my decidedly non-creative career path. It's well-written, but at times it did feel like a bit of a slog.
December 7, 2024
A for concept and research, D for that poetic droning academic-literary voice that renders each braided topical memoir identical
October 19, 2024
The premise of exploring what decades-long creative sustainability looks like across disciplines is intriguing, and the author has a beautiful mind that processes complexity in careful, layered, perceptive ways. For my taste, though, there was simply too much content and context crammed into this slim volume.
Eight different artists, each with their own personal history and cultural context and artistic trajectory, in addition to the author’s own experiences woven in— for my brain, it was all too much synopsis, too many fleeting references, and what felt like constant transitioning between different topics and themes and time frames.
I would have enjoyed sinking more immersively into the world and words of each artist.
Eight different artists, each with their own personal history and cultural context and artistic trajectory, in addition to the author’s own experiences woven in— for my brain, it was all too much synopsis, too many fleeting references, and what felt like constant transitioning between different topics and themes and time frames.
I would have enjoyed sinking more immersively into the world and words of each artist.
June 8, 2024
Thanks to NetGalley and Graywolf Press for the ARC!
Stacey D’Erasmo’s The Long Run is an engaging—albeit cluttered—collection of essays about what sustains artists in the twilight of their careers.
The premise of the book is simple: D’Erasmo asks successful artists to share what keeps them going. It’s the kind of question that many aspiring artists would love to ask their heroes, so there’s a pulsing momentum throughout the book, even in its weaker moments. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the answer to the question is also simple—it’s almost always some form of intimacy, whether that is with other people, nature, or the work itself. It’s a testament to the author’s skill that this feels like a robust theme to explore rather than a trite simplification. It might be the kind of cliché refrain that appears in artist talkbacks, but in D’Erasmo’s hands, it feels like an earth-shifting revelation worthy of prolonged attention.
Thematically, this is a gorgeous book; structurally, though, it’s a little muddled. Each chapter begins as if it’s about a particular late-career artist, but as soon as they share what sustains them, D’Erasmo makes a grinding shift from biography to autobiography. Her personal reflections are wonderful and insightful in their own right, but they constantly obscure the ostensible subject of each chapter. In a stronger book, it might feel conversational, but here it reads like a competition between two separate books. The issue is compounded by almost too much intertextuality, where it starts to feel like the author is listing everything she’s read on a subject, rather than forming a focused argument.
It’s like watching someone run through a museum, shouting disordered facts across the galleries.
That said, even when it doesn’t quite work, The Long Run is still exciting, sustained by Stacey D’Erasmo’s energetic voice and passion for art—it’s impossible to not share her enthusiasm.
Stacey D’Erasmo’s The Long Run is an engaging—albeit cluttered—collection of essays about what sustains artists in the twilight of their careers.
The premise of the book is simple: D’Erasmo asks successful artists to share what keeps them going. It’s the kind of question that many aspiring artists would love to ask their heroes, so there’s a pulsing momentum throughout the book, even in its weaker moments. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the answer to the question is also simple—it’s almost always some form of intimacy, whether that is with other people, nature, or the work itself. It’s a testament to the author’s skill that this feels like a robust theme to explore rather than a trite simplification. It might be the kind of cliché refrain that appears in artist talkbacks, but in D’Erasmo’s hands, it feels like an earth-shifting revelation worthy of prolonged attention.
Thematically, this is a gorgeous book; structurally, though, it’s a little muddled. Each chapter begins as if it’s about a particular late-career artist, but as soon as they share what sustains them, D’Erasmo makes a grinding shift from biography to autobiography. Her personal reflections are wonderful and insightful in their own right, but they constantly obscure the ostensible subject of each chapter. In a stronger book, it might feel conversational, but here it reads like a competition between two separate books. The issue is compounded by almost too much intertextuality, where it starts to feel like the author is listing everything she’s read on a subject, rather than forming a focused argument.
It’s like watching someone run through a museum, shouting disordered facts across the galleries.
That said, even when it doesn’t quite work, The Long Run is still exciting, sustained by Stacey D’Erasmo’s energetic voice and passion for art—it’s impossible to not share her enthusiasm.
August 24, 2025
I sampled this a month ago, and read 90% in one very long sitting on a plane ride. Much like Twyla Tharp and Natalie Goldberg, D'Erasmo casts a life of creative work as a spell, a lifelong conversation with the thread of the sublime in each of us; unlike them, and improving on that tradition, she consults with artists of many genres and reflects on the uglier, darker, and less optimistic angles of creative work. fame is fleeting, inconsistent, circumstantial, and limiting, *if* you get it; sources of income are necessary to live but dull your creative temperament, all in their way; your body fails you, and then your mind; loves and friendships may be necessary fuel for your work, and yet also burn it out. Marriages start and end in the background. children grow up, some under lucky stars, some less so. And the work continues.
In taking this long view, and adding plenty of D'Erasmo's own lifelong wisdom, this slim yet well-researched book, interviewing primarily lifelong artists in their 70s/80s, stands out among the many, many reflections on art-making by artists out there. (Others I especially recommend: "The Work of Art", "The Creative Habit"). I expect to hold it close as I continue to puzzle out how the configuration of my own life will support my creative practices.
In taking this long view, and adding plenty of D'Erasmo's own lifelong wisdom, this slim yet well-researched book, interviewing primarily lifelong artists in their 70s/80s, stands out among the many, many reflections on art-making by artists out there. (Others I especially recommend: "The Work of Art", "The Creative Habit"). I expect to hold it close as I continue to puzzle out how the configuration of my own life will support my creative practices.
August 25, 2024
This excellent book looks at the question of what keeps creators creating over the long run of a life. The chapters take up examples from different arts, and sometimes interesting mixtures of arts in the career of a single artist, including what artists end up writing about themselves and their work. So we get a mix of dance, performance art, painting, gardening/landscape architecture, poetry, music, novels, journalism, and stuff I must be leaving out despite having finished the book last night - this book is packed with riches, and will certainly reward multiple readings. The author's own story is also in the book, and I give her great credit for having done such a good job of combining the outward search for answers to the question of how folks keep creating with her own lifetime of living that question. Highly recommended!
December 11, 2024
"...I remembered that fame is perhaps best understood as a fun house mirror reflection of ourselves --out fantasies, our contradictory impulses. The talent belongs to the player, but the size and character of the projections often belong to us."
This is an ambitious and amazing book. Part memoir, part reflection, part first person interview of elders in various art feilds. It is also a story of being gay in a heterosexist world. Each chapter is a deep dive into the artist- their lives, their work and their challenges. And then, the reflection turns back onto D'Earasmo herself and how she incorporates what she has learned.
Without a doubt this is my *favorite book* of 2024. It reads like fiction- itself sustaining and educating the reader. I highly recommend it. 5/5
This is an ambitious and amazing book. Part memoir, part reflection, part first person interview of elders in various art feilds. It is also a story of being gay in a heterosexist world. Each chapter is a deep dive into the artist- their lives, their work and their challenges. And then, the reflection turns back onto D'Earasmo herself and how she incorporates what she has learned.
Without a doubt this is my *favorite book* of 2024. It reads like fiction- itself sustaining and educating the reader. I highly recommend it. 5/5
July 5, 2024
What a gift of a book! The author began with interviews with artists in different media-- like music, landscape design, dance, writing, sculpture-- asking the question, "How do we artists keep doing this-- making art?" But quickly, D'Erasmo brings her life into conversation with what she hears, and the reader finds themselves drawn in, too. All of us can find wisdom in this slim volume, but artists will find particularly apt gems here.
Many thanks to Graywolf and NetGalley for a free copy for review.
Many thanks to Graywolf and NetGalley for a free copy for review.
December 1, 2024
""You need to teach people that they're important enough to say what they have to say." He begins to cry, the only moment in the documentary when he shows any raw emotion. "If you don't do that," he goes on, taking off his glasses to wipe his eyes, "then you're not going the right thing as a teacher.""
Read this if you like stories about artists, reflections on art, and insights into sustaining an artistic life.
StoryGraph: https://app.thestorygraph.com/reviews...
Read this if you like stories about artists, reflections on art, and insights into sustaining an artistic life.
StoryGraph: https://app.thestorygraph.com/reviews...
January 2, 2025
I saw this book in several gift/book shops of art museums in Berlin and then in the US as well and I was curious about the subject. A book about how artist deal with the question of “what’s next” sounded great and I was excited to read it once it was available at the library. But I found the book very disappointing. A great deal of the book is filled with essentially just biographies of the artists interviewed as well as the author D’Erasmo’s own biography. There are some insights and good quotes from authors, but mostly the conversations D’Erasmo recounts feel a bit empty.
Read
September 19, 2025#countingthebooksididntfinishbecauseican
I wanted something slightly different out of this book than what it gave me, but overall would recommend.
I wanted this book to go further into the creative’s practices than it did. I didn’t need to hear as much about the author. But it was an interesting concept and there were parts that I found interesting and meaningful.
My apologies to the Free Library of Philadelphia I have to return your book it is so overdue.
Xoxo
I wanted something slightly different out of this book than what it gave me, but overall would recommend.
I wanted this book to go further into the creative’s practices than it did. I didn’t need to hear as much about the author. But it was an interesting concept and there were parts that I found interesting and meaningful.
My apologies to the Free Library of Philadelphia I have to return your book it is so overdue.
Xoxo
September 27, 2024
A thoughtful inquiry into how artists might keep doing art their whole lives. D'Erasmo doesn't come to definitive answers but through interviews with artists from several genres (Samuel Delany, Steve Earle, Valda Setterfield, etc.) explores the calling of art and its evolution. She weaves in bits of her own artistic memoir, and I found it an intriguing read.
January 7, 2026
An honest, intimate look at why do artists do what they do. The text portraits of each artist highlighted was so well accomplished, woven through with D'Erasmo's own experience and reflections that it feels like a deep well I'll be returning to again and again as I make my own "long run" with my own work - spirit willing.
Want to read
May 15, 2024#GoodreadsGiveaway
August 31, 2024
Needed this. Excellent.
October 27, 2024
DNF.
Wanted to be introduced to the unfamiliar names of people.
Could not find a thread to follow.
Wanted to be introduced to the unfamiliar names of people.
Could not find a thread to follow.
December 6, 2024
I loved this book! Learned so much about fascinating people and art.
December 30, 2024
A beautiful series of essays that I found extraordinarily thought provoking. A wonderful meditation on the artistic life. A book to come back to again and again.
January 22, 2025
artist life
Excellent book on the artist drive of a life time. For artists everywhere, and the artist in everyone. For the understanding.
Excellent book on the artist drive of a life time. For artists everywhere, and the artist in everyone. For the understanding.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 33 reviews