Painting Cocktails, Floral Flings, and the Bee Gees
Seth Rogen makes pottery now.
Seth Rogen is probably the only ceramicist to have 8 million Instagram followers. He got into ceramics the way many of us get into art--by following his interests, his enthusiasm, his curiosity. If you scroll down his Instagram feed, you'll see that he's a longtime collector of ashtrays--don't laugh! They're really interesting ashtrays!--and then he went to a pottery studio and made something, and then, being Seth Rogen and having all the money, he had his own studio and kiln built, and now there's no stopping him.
The most high-flown artist statement you'll get from him is something like, "I made this thing and I like it." When he made some pots he wrote, "I made these pots and planted these plants in them."
In this lovely interview he says, "I do like tactile things; I like to produce tangible work. With movies, we spend years on them and then they’re very intangible. They don’t have weight, they don’t occupy a physical space... I do really like being able to create an artistic expression that is a thing that I can pick up, hold, show to people. It is just so different from what I normally do which has no mass to it."
In other words, he's doing it because it scratches an itch for him. It's personally satisfying. He's obviously not trying to build a business or win any awards. He says, "It’s been fun because I can just explore and play around and try different things. If something turns out terribly, it’s not ultimately damaging to my overall reputation as a ceramicist."
Be Seth Rogen, everybody. Just go make your pots. Explore and play around and try different things, and don't worry about your overall reputation as a ceramicist, which is just another thing that has no mass to it.
So It Looks Like I'm Really Doing this Zoom Thing
I had such an astonishing response to my first Zoom event that I did upgrade my Zoom account for the month! As long as I have the extra capacity, I'm going to hold more events, in response to your suggestions. These are FREE and--so far, at least--only open to those of you who subscribe to this newsletter. I very much enjoy getting to know you and I'm so glad that you're interested in doing this. We'll see how it goes...consider it a trial run!
Here's the BIG EVENT--and it's going to be such a treat!
On Tuesday, February 9 at 5 Pacific/8 Eastern, I'm going to have a chat with the delightful and charming Teresa Sabankaya! Teresa is the florist I interviewed for Flower Confidential. Here we are together in those days, back when we were young and cheerful and our hair more closely matched the color we were born with.
Teresa and I felt an immediate bond because we are both Texans. The joke is that if you meet somebody from Harvard or Texas, you will know it within five minutes because they will tell you. That was true of me and Teresa. But I also adored her seasonal, garden-grown bouquets, which at the time she sold from a flower stall in downtown Santa Cruz, where I used to live.
Now she's written a gorgeous book of her own, The Posy Book, in which she explores the old-fashioned language of flowers and tells us how she makes her delightful posies (which she also ships!)
This chat is quite deliberately timed for Valentine's Day and will certainly be a floral-themed lovefest. Please join us to talk about the flower business, to learn more about Teresa's sentimental posies, or just to hang out with your gal pals for an evening.
Please register here! We can't wait to see you.
But that's not all! I've also scheduled a writers' chat on Tuesday, Jan 19 at 5 Pacific/8 Eastern. We're going to talk about book proposals, plus whatever writerly questions you'd like to ask. Future topics chosen by you! Go here to register.
And by popular demand... an art demo with cocktails! Paint along with me, or just...you know, drink. Tuesday, January 26 at 5 Pacific/8 Eastern. Go here to register for that one.
Are you thinking about decluttering?
Hoo boy, did this stir up some opinions! I wrote this post on my blog about how we're getting to the time of year when everybody's thinking about decluttering.
I had some things to say about going paperless, either for your household or your home office or both, then I went on a bit of a rant about this idea that many of us get in our heads that "I'd better go through all this stuff so my kids don't have to do it after I'm dead."
I'm of the opinion that you don't have to declutter for your heirs. Do it for your own well-being if that's important, but if you can't be bothered, don't worry about it.
Your heirs don't have to do it, either. I explain why in this post.
But wow, a bunch of people on the interwebs got really upset, and thought I was giving terrible advice that could not possibly apply to their particular situation! And I did address all those particulars, but after hearing such an uproar, I went back and put a few things in bold to make the point more clearly.
Sheesh! Talking about STUFF and DEATH sure does stir up some feelings!
Some Thoughts About the Bee Gees, The Little Prince, and What Exactly Is the Point of It All
I loved the Bee Gees documentary on HBO, so much so that I would consider it worthwhile to pay for a month of HBOMax just to watch it. I am not ashamed to admit that I love their music, which takes me back to happy moments in my childhood. I also loved learning about their songwriting process, and I found it to be a moving and complex story about siblings working together. (I am literally only just now realizing the parallel to the Kopp sisters story. I'm not real insightful sometimes.)
One thing struck me: Over and over, through the years, you hear them say that their very specific goal was to be FAMOUS. And you know, when that's your goal, you make very particular career decisions. You see this play out time and again as their fortunes rose and fell.
There are a lot of different reasons to make music or art, and they don't have to be about fame or fortune. Just look at Seth Rogen and his ceramics.
Most of us WANT to make some money doing the thing we love, or...well, doing something, but what is the money FOR?
I mean, it's to put food on the table, obviously. We all have long lists of things we'd do or buy if we had more money, but underneath all of that is the idea that if we had more money, our days would look different. We would do something other than what we're doing right now.
I guess this wasn't the case for the Bee Gees. Fame was the point. As long as they were doing "fame," they got what they wanted. But I think that for a lot of us, we struggle with what we actually want and what we'll do now to get what we want someday.
So it's kind of like...we spend our days doing this thing that earns money so that someday we'll have enough money to be able to stop spending our days doing that thing and instead spend them doing something else.
I think a lot of self-employed people in particular struggle with this: We get an idea to do something, but then there's this question: Am I doing this because it's something I genuinely want more of in my life, or am I doing it in the hopes that I'll make enough money that I can then stop doing it and go on to do whatever I genuinely want more of?
Sometimes it's hard to know the difference. And the difficulty is that if you put a lot of time and energy into doing a thing, you'll generally get more of that thing. But maybe what you're really hoping for is the freedom to have less of that thing.
It's been such a hard year that I've been thinking a lot about how to fill my days with activities that are pleasurable in the moment, with no future outcome in mind.
And that got me thinking of this passage from The Little Prince, where a man is selling pills that quench your thirst, so you can save fifty-three minutes a week by not having to drink.
The little prince replies, "If I had fifty-three minutes to spend as I liked, I should walk at my leisure toward a spring of fresh water.”
I guess my point, which I admit is half-baked, has to do with finding the intrinsic value in doing the thing you're doing, or finding a way to do more of the thing that has intrinsic value. I'll leave that for you to ponder and I'll do the same.
I've Been Doing a Lot of Virtual Traveling Lately
Over on Instagram I've been posting some virtual travel sketches, often based on suggestions from friends. This has led me to discover some new travel destinations, and it also fed into some ideas I'd been contemplating for a while about landscape painting. Now I have a class on mixed media landscapes. Join me on a little virtual travel?
Asked and Answered...
Ask me a question, and if I answer it here, I'll send you the book of your choice! This month's winner is Jenny from Montrose, CA. She asks:
At what point in your writing process do you allow others to read your work? Do you have any hard and fast rules about who (or who doesn't) read your work- in -progress?
Ooooh, I have so many opinions about this! Answered in the video above, and you can see answers to a lot of other art and writing questions on YouTube.
Ask a Question, Win a Book
Most of you know the drill by now. Ask me a question and tell me which book you'd like to win. If I pick your question to answer in the next newsletter, I'll send you the book you chose. Please head over here to enter, and if you've entered before, ask the same question or a different one! I love all your questions and hope to get to all of them eventually. Only 23 people entered last month. Your chances are good!
Hey, I have a new book out this week and I wrote this essay about it.
Epistolary novels--novels told through letters and diaries--are harder to write than you might think. Here's an essay I wrote about that.
Also, DEAR MISS KOPP is available everywhere books are sold, in every format--hardcover, paperback, audio, ebook--and if you don't buy it at your local bookstore, may I suggest Bookshop.org, which supports independent bookstores.
New Art in My Shop
New York! San Francisco! Feel free to stop by my little art shop anytime and have a poke around. You can always see new stuff on Instagram, too.
Book Club Chats and Virtual Events:
No Zoom? No Problem!
As you are by now quite well aware, I have my own damn Zoom account now, so if your book club would like to have a chat about one of my books, but nobody has a Zoom account...we can host it on my account. I'm always happy to do an online chat with a book club, and these days I'm also doing actual presentations, like the sort of thing I used to do on the road in the Before Times. So if you run a lecture series or any sort of event series and you need a virtual speaker, you can go here to see four types of virtual events I'm doing now. Feel free to pass this on if you know someone who's putting on these types of events right now.
I Can Send (Some) Signed Books to You
Some of you have written to me and asked if I have signed books for sale. Well, I do have small quantities of a few titles...or rather, my husband does. Supplies are limited, so get them while they last, and thank you sincerely for your patronage. Go here to browse and order.
What Are You Reading?
I'm not actually a huge fan of Fredrik Backman's books, but this one was available at the library and I just wanted something lighthearted to read. It's about a bank robber who takes hostages, but, in the way of all Backman books, turns out to just be an ordinary person facing difficulties. Which made me think that he's a lot like Anne Tyler, but not as good as Anne Tyler. So then I grabbed the next available Anne Tyler novel from the library, which turned out to be about...a bank robber who takes a hostage, but, in the way of all Tyler novels, turns out to be an ordinary person facing difficulties.
I'm not saying Backman copied Tyler. I am saying that if you like one of these, you'll like the other.