Subtle Maneuvers

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Petrarch got up every morning at midnight
“I regard sleep as a kind of death, my bed as a tomb.”
 • 
Mason Currey
29
Writing is bouldering, bouldering is writing
On “eking out a delicate gift laboriously”
 • 
Mason Currey
38
Kathy Acker was against creativity
“I set up this task, this nutty task basically, and I’d do it!”
 • 
Mason Currey
11
Most Popular
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The dumbest and best productivity trick
 • Mason Currey
107
The truest thing I’ve ever read about making art
 • Mason Currey
76
Van Gogh’s advice to a young artist
 • Mason Currey
33
Why it’s so hard for writers to ask for money for their work
 • Mason Currey
132
Three tales of creative slowness
 • Mason Currey
58
Making art is like setting a trap
 • Mason Currey
40

Recent posts

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Melly Shum Forever
“Every city needs a monument to the problem of hating one’s job.”
 • 
Mason Currey
33
Jane Bowles was vulnerable and strong
“I’ve got to do it my way and my way is more difficult than yours.”
 • 
Mason Currey
18
David Milch’s disembodied writing process
“I lie there on the floor and I talk and the words come up on the screen.”
 • 
Mason Currey
69
Get rid of what your project needs
A peek into Céline Sciamma’s desire-driven process
 • 
Mason Currey
35
Finding “the flux” in 2024
With some help from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, circa 1969
 • 
Mason Currey
24
Subtle Maneuvers
Subtle Maneuvers
A fortnightly newsletter on routines, rituals, and wriggling through a creative life, from the author of Daily Rituals: How Artists Work
Recommendations
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Oldster Magazine
Oldster Magazine
Sari Botton
Noted
Noted
Jillian Hess
Austin Kleon
Austin Kleon
Austin Kleon
Lonely Victories
Lonely Victories
Hurley Winkler
The Art of Noticing
The Art of Noticing
Rob Walker
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Filmmakers

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David Milch’s disembodied writing process
“I lie there on the floor and I talk and the words come up on the screen.”
 • 
Mason Currey
69
Get rid of what your project needs
A peek into Céline Sciamma’s desire-driven process
 • 
Mason Currey
35
Mike Leigh’s gloriously inefficient filmmaking process
“I can’t tell you about the character because there is no character.”
 • 
Mason Currey
38
Chantal Akerman’s methodology
“If you start with no ideas, something happens.”
 • 
Mason Currey
51

Musicians & composers

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Viv Albertine’s brilliant memoir of creative frustration
“Every day the task seems hopeless and I feel like giving up.”
 • 
Mason Currey
26
Pat Metheny’s compulsive productivity
The jazz guitarist’s amazing pre- and post-show routine—plus, a request for your patronage!
 • 
Mason Currey
21
A megalomaniac with extremely low self-esteem
Nick Cave’s songwriting routine
 • 
Mason Currey
4
Erik Satie: “An artist must regulate his life”
Presenting the composer’s “precise daily schedule” on this 155th anniversary of his birth
 • 
Mason Currey
4
Get a new issue every other Monday

Novelists

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Kathy Acker was against creativity
“I set up this task, this nutty task basically, and I’d do it!”
 • 
Mason Currey
11
Jane Bowles was vulnerable and strong
“I’ve got to do it my way and my way is more difficult than yours.”
 • 
Mason Currey
18
Clarice Lispector’s paradoxical certainties
“What gets in the way of writing is having to use words.”
 • 
Mason Currey
43
Robert Walser’s day jobs
And some news: I turned in my book draft!
 • 
Mason Currey
38

Painters

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Living with art stops one wilting!
Letters from the late Austrian artist Maria Lassnig
 • 
Mason Currey
14
Van Gogh’s advice to a young artist
“In order to write a book, do a deed, paint a picture with some life in it, one has to be alive oneself.”
 • 
Mason Currey
33
The mantra issue
Smooth as butter
 • 
Mason Currey
45
The artist’s life is the hardest life of all?
“Everything up in the air and working hopeless"
 • 
Mason Currey
64
New issues are free for all—paid subscribers get the full archive of 130+ back issues

Poets

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Petrarch got up every morning at midnight
“I regard sleep as a kind of death, my bed as a tomb.”
 • 
Mason Currey
29
Sharon Olds’s huge archive of thinking and feeling
“Clouds of meaning were rolling this way and that.”
 • 
Mason Currey
63
Louise Glück on writer’s block
“I think everything good in my own work I owe to endurance.”
 • 
Mason Currey
41
Making art is like setting a trap
Philip Larkin on constructing “the device”
 • 
Mason Currey
40
Henri Cole on the enemies within
And why they’re a gift
 • 
Mason Currey
26
Alice Notley on getting things to come easily
Here’s the secret, if you can bear it
 • 
Mason Currey
41
Bernadette Mayer will give you ideas
On the late American poet’s irrepressible confident weirdness
 • 
Mason Currey
24
Robert Graves’s writing paradise
A visit to the English poet and novelist’s home in Majorca
 • 
Mason Currey
16
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Subtle Advice 🐛

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Advice on starting projects (and sticking with them)
Plus, your reading recommendations for an artist and new mother
 • 
Mason Currey
30
Advice on writing and love!
“I’ve spent most of my adult life resisting the possibility of romantic love because I feared how it would distract me from my writing work.”
 • 
Mason Currey
12
Advice on writing, fear, and shame
For a writer who worries readers will think, “What the hell is wrong with this person?”
 • 
Mason Currey
15
Mega advice column, plus an announcement
This weekly newsletter is going every-other-weekly
 • 
Mason Currey
14
Advice on building creative stamina
“I’d love to pour more of myself in . . . but I lose focus, get tired, get frustrated, feel disappointed in my progress.”
 • 
Mason Currey
15
Advice on marketing and fame with guest columnist Ron Hogan
The author of Our Endless and Proper Work fields this month’s creative dilemma.
 • 
Mason Currey
4
Advice on insomnia
Can you convert sleeplessness into a creative asset?
 • 
Mason Currey
3
Advice on art paralysis with guest columnist Beth Pickens
The author of Make Your Art No Matter What fields this month’s creative dilemma.
 • 
Mason Currey
4
Advice on impostor syndrome, procrastination, and getting to your real work
“Every time I sit down to do work, my feelings of inadequacy take over.”
 • 
Mason Currey
27
Advice on post-project depression
"I can’t find the juice and then I just feel terrible."
 • 
Mason Currey
Advice on jumping off the deep end
A new freelancer worries about challenging days ahead.
 • 
Mason Currey
Advice on energy
Two very different dilemmas with—perhaps—the same solution
 • 
Mason Currey
10
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