Planting iris: Q&A with Austin Kleon

Whose words and work helped me to find the guts to write my first novel

Dear readers,

Chances are, if we’ve been in a room together during one of my events, or if you’ve listened to one of my interviews, or read The House That Joy Built, you’ll have heard or read me sharing stories about the influence that the work of author and artist

Austin Kleon

has had on my writing life.

In 2014, two books on creativity that I read when I was grieving the death of a family member and could read little else, were Steal Like an Artist and Show Your Work by Austin Kleon.

I was moved by many points and phrases in both books, but one that cut through the fog and blur of grief and landed in an affecting way in my mind was his instruction in Steal Like an Artist to ‘use your hands’. The chapter opens with the title in caps – STEP AWAY FROM THE SCREEN – and an observation that working on computers has ‘robbed us of feeling that we’re actually making things’.

Austin goes on to make the case for the power of creating not just from and with our heads, but from and with our bodies. ‘Bring your body into your work,’ he exhorts us, pointing out that ‘our bodies can tell our brains as much as our brains can tell our bodies’. He uses himself as an example, sharing how he reintroduced analogue tools into his process to make creating things ‘fun again’, and noticed his work start to improve as a result. Then he detailed how his office was set up, and reading this was the lightning strike for me: he wrote about having two desks in his office, an ‘analogue’ desk and a ‘digital’ desk. Anything electronic was banned from his analogue desk; it was purely for his drawing materials: pencils, markers, notebooks. On his digital desk were tech tools needed to edit and publish his work: laptop, tablet, monitor.

In the thick of grief and processing the shock of death and the totality of loss in our lives, reading about Austin’s office set-up sent pinwheels of colour shooting through my heart. I imagine that if we could have scanned my brain then, it would have been lit up like the Griswold house in December. At a time when I thought nothing would feel good again, I read about a stranger’s two desks, one for making things with his hands and the other to do digital work, and it threw me the lifeline I didn’t know I needed.

When I returned to my writing office, I got serious about getting playful with my office space and using my hands. I bought two secondhand desks online and used one purely for handwriting, and the other purely for typing. Arranging and stocking each desk brought me such deep and satisfying joy. Fountain pen, ink pot, oil burner, candles, matches, notebooks, talismans, flowers on analogue. Laptop, keyboard, printer, speakers on digital. Having both made even just going into my office feel like fun.

2014: my ‘analogue’ desk set up on the left, and ‘digital’ desk on the right, with my dogeared copy of Steal Like An Artist in situ!

Not long after, it was at the analogue desk that I sat one day, maddened and emboldened by grief, and watched my hand write the opening sentence of The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart.

Eleven years later, in a different home and hemisphere in the world, I’m setting up new analogue and digital desks, so important have the distinctions and places become to my creativity and writing.

I can’t overstate the delight that I felt to connect over email with Austin, who’s based in Austin, Texas, and ask him a few questions about his creativity to share here on The Joy Rise.

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Q&A with Austin Kleon

Holly: On the opening page of your third book, Keep Going, 10 ways to stay creative in good times and bad, you write, 'I wrote this book because I needed to read it'. You go on to offer us 10 simple rules to stay creative, focused and true to ourselves through whatever life throws at us:

• Every day is Groundhog Day
• Build a Bliss Station
• Forget the noun, do the verb
• Make gifts
• The ordinary + extra attention = extraordinary
• Slay the art monsters
• You are allowed to change your mind
• When in doubt, tidy up
• Demons hate fresh air
• Plant your garden

Which of these is resonating the most with your own creativity right now?

Austin: We're entering the most beautiful time of year here in Austin, so "Demons hate fresh air" — being outside, walking and biking, fights off the external demons and quiets the internal ones. Life is better when it's experienced in the real world, away from screens and the news.

Holly: Who or what has taught you a favourite/memorable lesson about art, or imagination, or creativity?

Austin: The cartoonist Lynda Barry has probably been the single most influential person on me, and one of her great lessons is, “In the digital age, don't forget to use your digits." I try to bring the hand into almost everything I do, because the hand knows as much as the head does. If you look at my books, all the headlines are handwritten and the illustrations are hand-drawn. If you look at my newsletter, all the artwork you see is made by my own two hands.

Holly: I recently re-read a post of yours from 2017, called Planting Iris, which I return to it whenever I feel like I need to course-correct my focus. Almost ten years later, have you found your equivalent of planting iris? How’s it growing?

Planting Iris… from Austin Kleon’s notebook and blog.

Austin: That "Planting Iris" story about Leonard Woolf is really important to me, which is why I ended Keep Going with it. I think if you're a writer, every time you show up to the page, you're planting seeds. It takes a while to know whether your words are going to grow into anything of substance. A lot of seeds don't take root, but some seeds, if you give them the right soil and water, turn into beautiful flowers. A seed is planted in my notebook, I grow it into a newsletter or an essay, then I gather those flowers up and arrange them into a bouquet of a book.

Holly: I’ve just done a count around my office, and I have 24 blank notebooks scattered throughout my shelves. Once upon a time I might have felt guilty/bad about this. More recently, I adore them, collect them and treasure them for the demonstrative acts of faith that they are in giving my future ideas a home. Do you feel similarly? How many blank notebooks do you have in your office at any one time?

Austin: Well, I'm a creature of habit, a bit of a hoarder, and I have 3-4 notebooks going at one time (my diary, my logbook, my commonplace book, and my pocket notebook) each one has its own particular brand that I like to use. I buy a half dozen of them at a time, and the minute I finish one I start a new one. So I probably have several dozen blank notebooks in the studio at the moment, but they're all still in the plastic wrap.

Holly: Do you have go-to music that’s part of getting to work and play at your analogue and/or digital desks?

Even though I'm a musician, I really like working in silence. If I feel like listening to music, I often put on one of the old-fashioned analog mixtapes I've been making every month for the past year or so. Occasionally, I'll put on a record — I love working to jazz like Miles Davis, Bill Evans, or John Coltrane, ambient stuff like Brian Eno or Aphex Twin, or classical stuff like Mozart's clarinet quintet or Beethoven's late string quartets. Because so much of my art has words in in it, I don't usually listen to music with lyrics when I work.

Holly: Very important addition to my last question… where are you most likely to have work snacks - analogue desk, digital desk, or both? And… favourite snack while working?

Austin: I don't snack much in the studio — I get up and go to the kitchen for a snack and bother my wife for a bit — but I drink tea all day and occasionally I'll bring out a banana or a few bits of cheese and some walnuts. (I'm getting old and boring and have to watch what I eat.)

Holly: The Neverending Story destroyed me (in the best way) as a kid, and continues to destroy me as an adult (and feature in my work). Is there a story - film, book, song, poem, artwork - that has consistently moved/floored/taught you throughout your life?

Austin:

Music: I have Boomer parents, so I grew up listening to the oldies station and Beatles and Motown, and that stuff still knocks me out — Motown, in particular, seems to me the best America could do, something like Martha and the Vandellas' "Dancing in the Street" or Marvin Gaye's "I Heard it Through The Grapevine.” (I remember loving The California Raisins and Will Vinton's Claymation Christmas Celebration.)

Comics: I read Charles Schulz's Peanuts in the paper when I was a little kid, so that's probably the single piece of American art that means the most to me. I still can't believe how good that strip is and how Schulz managed that level of artistry for half a century.

Movies: I love Indiana Jones — especially Raiders of the Lost Ark and I still do. When I was a kid, he was everything I wanted to be: smart and bookish, tough and adventurous, sexy and funny. Harrison Ford is probably the actor I will mourn the most when he passes. (Also: I went through a period of my young life when I wanted to be the composer John Williams — I found myself getting really emotional watching the documentary about him.)

Holly: Maybe an Indiana Jones quote from Raiders of the Lost Ark is the perfect note to end on: “I don’t know, I’m making it up as I go.” Thank you so much for your work, and for your time, Austin.

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Post-script: magic happened while I was putting this issue of The Joy Rise together with Austin’s interview. I’ve recently moved in to the first house that is my own to make a home, and the experience has blown my mind in countless moments and ways. One of the most recent happened while I was writing this post. I came into my new writing office (which has both analogue and digital spaces that I’m slowly tending to, making them more and more my own) and looked into our small back garden, full of plants that I’m still getting to know. My jaw dropped as I registered what I was seeing: a dozen or so bursts of purple iris that had bloomed overnight. Finding them in what is now my garden… planted by someone else and now in my care… was such a moving, weird, serendipitous high / delight / thrill especially in the wake of Leonard Woolf via Austin Kleon and now via me to you. All I could do was gawk and sit in awe and stare for a while. And then get to work at my desks.

May we all plant and keep planting our irises.

Find all of Austin’s work through his website and of course his Substack.

Thanks as ever for reading.

With a light left on,

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Coming soon to The Joy Rise:

• A little tour of my new writing office;

• My May Notes to Self;

• The stack of books that I keep close to my desk while I’m writing;

• On My Corkboard: what’s inspiring me at the moment;

• How I use the internet to help, not hinder, my daydreaming and idea developments.

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