Sitemap - 2020 - Subtle Maneuvers

Advice on energy

Edna O’Brien on the “eminently masochistic exercise” of making art

Sarah Kempa on making artwork with a day job (during a pandemic)

What if your ambition outstrips your talent?

Your advice on ambition, talent, and burnout

Austin Kleon on being creative when your kids are home allll day

Maria Lassnig: “Living with art stops one wilting!”

Eleanor Roosevelt”s example

Paul Mpagi Sepuya on resisting “forced productivity” during the pandemic

What if you physically can’t follow a daily routine?

Creating a routine when no two days are alike

Happy birthday, Renata Adler

Hallie Bateman's guilt-free WFH routine

Edgar Allan Poe, procrastinator

Advice for a people-pleaser

Your advice for a people-pleaser

Joseph Conrad on a truly awful case of writer’s block

Rei Kawakubo on the “energy of anger”

Carl Jung on the importance of taking a break

Advice on writing and envy

Your advice on creativity and envy

Ali Smith’s “quite lazy” writing routine

Susan Chen on painting in a pandemic

Isaac Newton, backstabbing workaholic

Filmmaker Erin Lee Carr’s quarantine routine

John Ashbery’s writing process was the best writing process

Iris Murdoch on making your unconscious work for you

Ennio Morricone’s “mysterious process”

Getting away from yourself in a pandemic

Eileen Myles on writing in a pandemic

John Cage on music and mushrooms

Maxine Hong Kingston on finding “a corner of one’s own”

Christo and Jeanne-Claude's daily routine

James Baldwin on the role of the artist

Eva Hesse’s diaries

Giuseppe Verdi could only compose in the country

Grace Jones’s dressing-room necessities

How did you figure out what your "thing" is?

Angela Carter on the pleasures of distraction

Walker Evans had a hard time getting out of the house before noon

Audre Lorde's home-office “force field”

Tell me about your quarantine routine

Robert Lowell kept a double bed in his study

Anne Sexton, “secret beatnik” in the suburbs

Derek Walcott on the necessity of ritual

Was Leonardo da Vinci a procrastinator?

Joseph Haydn could not be idle

Sculptor Anne Truitt’s retreat routine

Roberto Rossellini on his ”absolutely spontaneous” filmmaking process

Judy Chicago’s system for “psychic privacy”—plus, advice for a stuck writer

“Spiritually pooping”: Kurt Vonnegut on his daily routine as a novelist/teacher

On wriggling through a creative life