Welcome to Practice Practice - a newsletter / work space / practice space for me to catalog, archive and share my attempts to cultivate a creative practice in the midst of Everyday Life.
What’s In a Name?
The best way to learn something is simply to practice doing it. Having this space is a way for me to develop a creative practice by writing about it.
As someone who is not a professional artist but is interested in making more time and space for creativity in my life, this newsletter is a way to keep myself devoted (a more tender word than accountable) to my practice and to share ideas for cultivating and practicing creative attention. In other words, practicing having a practice/how to practice. A practice practice.
When I first started spending more time in creative circles, I also didn't really understand the word "practice" - it felt too formal, too pretentious - to characterize the work of me just making some stuff in my shed. But I'm getting more comfortable with the idea and find it a useful container to describe what exactly it is I'm doing here (what exactly am I doing here?)
I think at first this newsletter will mostly be me documenting the meandering process of figuring how to print and distribute my project The Emergency Was Curiosity, an illustrated "book report" inspired by Jenny Odell's 2019 book How to Do Nothing. It's a personal project that started as a kind of scrapbook of my pandemic attention and has transformed into something more like a group project - it includes an exhibition and an event series and seems to be changing all the time. I’m constantly trying to figure out what it is and what to do with it.
And this question - what to do with the book report - has sent me down so many weird rabbit holes and raised all sorts of interesting questions about who gets to make art, who pays for it and how it gets out into the world and finds its people. It has also put me in touch with so many people in an entirely different way - more intimate, more interesting. So I want to write about that, too.
In many ways, the book report is a process project, about the attempts I made to pursue a creative practice where I didn’t have one, and my goal here is to make the work of practicing creativity more accessible - to insist that creativity is not precious, that everyone is capable of it. And that creative output can be centered on ideas like curiosity, reciprocity and care rather than on cults of personality, or even originality for that matter.
Practicing in Public
I've also become convinced - largely by the work of the artist, cultural worker and teacher Ayana Zaire Cotton - that it's important to practice in public, that there is value in working with the garage door open1, that we should be creating the archives we wish to see in the world ("I will honor my practice with the gift of an archive," says Ayana).
Practicing in public is a way to free myself from the purgatory of perfectionism, and I hope it will be useful to other people who want to experiment with forms2, follow a niche interest3 and work on their own small, weird projects4. At the beginning of the pandemic, I started taking classes through Case for Making, a San Francisco-based art supply store; their classes are quirky (let’s paint anchovies! let’s make portraits of rocks!) with a focus on the simple act of mark making and the value of working in community: "As we build our own creative practices, sometimes it's nice to hear about someone else's practice, have a bit of direction in the form of a new project, and to share in that process with friends."
Rather than me trying to convince you of anything, I’d like this to look closer to Andy Matuschak’s working notes5 - a space for me to document my own practice, keep myself devoted to it and maybe inspire you to practice alongside me. I’m not sure if there will be a regular cadence or not. From Substack’s placeholder post, I learned that I created this newsletter in March of 2023, so it's taken me 20 months to send my first dispatch. Maybe the time between this one and the next one will be shorter. That would be nice. I do have a goal of writing to you weekly, so I'm declaring that here.
Robin Sloan, who coined the term "working with the garage door open" writes,
"This isn’t a time for “products”, or product launches. It’s not a time to toil in secret for a year and then reveal what you’d made with a shiny landing page. Rather, I believe it’s a time to explain as you go. Our “work”, in an important sense, is to get into each other’s heads; to blast out cosmic rays that might give rise, in other minds, to new ideas."
So welcome to Practice Practice - a living archive and a play-by-play of getting the book report into your hands and the fits and starts along the way. Inspired by Annika Hansteen Izora, I’m thinking maybe I’m in my Goo Era: "As I lean into new routines, I do not fear being seen trying."
See you (hopefully) next week.
Christie
Here’s me and Justin Carder working with the garage door open (because… COVID) back in 2021. Be sure to check out his latest lovely project - Bather’s Library - in downtown Oakland.
I was really influenced by this essay from earlier this year by Elisabeth Nicula suggesting a possible way forward for writers and artists. I don’t think of myself as “into literary criticism”, but I found myself very taken with Elisabeth’s recommendations: “To engage in criticism is to think deeply about someone else’s work in relation to one’s own sensibilities, and then to contextualize it, historicize it, and sometimes to say it’s good or bad…I am not suggesting we lie about good and bad art. I am suggesting criticism can break out of its structures and draw us closer. That it can be a means of collective demystification, for mutual aid."
Elisabeth continues, “I have been thinking that it would be nice to pay careful attention to more aspects of human nature, to emphasize that art isn’t a separate nature…. It would attend to the idea that normal life deserves beauty in describing, ardent feelings, pleasurable clarity, and true likeness. It would be for elevating art through expansive tactics. It would not have rigid boundaries because we are trying to take care of our minds and bodies. At times its criticism would be unrecognizable.”
This video from internet personality (what Google calls him) Blake Kasemeier (@blakeoftoday) suggests finding a silly little hobby and making it your entire personality. This directive captures my book report’s vibes entirely.
Small Weird Projects = my current operating principle
Reading a book by Michael Meade that Christina Z gave me and this line stuck out to me today: "The awakened soul will find creative ways to express its inner pattern and will find its own weird way of being in the world." Seems like that's what you're doing, here on the "page" and as you move through the world, and it's very beautiful.
Yes!!!!!!