Stacey D’Erasmo: On Perseverance, Writing Anonymously, Not Denying Yourself the Pleasure of Making Art, and Her New Book, ‘The Long Run’

Stacey D’Erasmo gets right to the point in the first sentence of The Long Run (Graywolf Press, 2024): “How do we keep doing this—making art?” It’s a crucial question, one that echoes through many biographies—why do some continue, while others stop? As The Long Run’s prologue unfolds, D’Erasmo reveals that her investment in the issue is not purely academic; various personal crises of community and creativity ignited this journey, imbuing her writing with a palpable urgency.

In the chapters that follow, D’Erasmo’s inquiry leads her through various interviews with a host of subjects whose vocations include dancer, visual artist, writer, landscape architect, composer, actress, musician, and more. Throughout, D’Erasmo’s own story intertwines with that of her subjects in a form she calls “fugitive, occasional memoir.” The result is not a book of shortcuts to artistic success, but rather a thoughtful meditation on longevity across discipline.

Artmaking can feel lonely at times—especially if what you’re creating does not fall under the mainstream spotlight—but D’Erasmo’s project reminds the reader that there’s comfort to be found in the shared journey. It is the pursuit itself that connects us, as we attempt to reflect the pain and beauty of life on our chosen canvas as best we know how. The Long Run is a fitting culmination of that togetherness, a showcase of arcs and possibilities each as unique as the person to whom they belong. Each artist has their own path, but every now and then, these paths overlap. And this is how we learn from each other, each on our own long run.

I was delighted to speak with D’Erasmo about the memory of her first publication, finding treasure in the classroom, and the undeniable staying power of a really good story.

Abigail Oswald: The Long Run has an interesting backstory, which you touch on in the prologue. Can you talk about the book’s evolution and how you came to its structure, where each chapter explores insights from the artists you interviewed while also tying back to your own creative journey?

Stacey D’Erasmo: It began as a point of interest or curiosity, lightly pressurized. Because I had published three novels by then, and I was thinking, huh, what happens next? How do we keep doing this? Because I think that part of a creative life isn’t talked about as much as it should be. So I wrote a little essay for The Rumpus where I just talked about my curiosity about this. But then a bunch of things in my life kind of began falling apart not long after I published that essay. I and another writer had thought that maybe it could be a little anthology where we would get different interesting people with long careers to write about this, but no one wanted that anthology. But Graywolf said, “Do you want to expand this idea into a book-length essay, or set of essays?” And I said I did. 

But then things were really falling apart, and I went through a somewhat protracted period where I really couldn’t write anything. I couldn’t get there. And then I really, really, really wanted to know how we keep doing this, because I felt that maybe I wasn’t going to be able to, that I was just going to be trapped forever in this state that I was in. So then it became a very urgent question. And when I spoke to people for the book, one thing that was certainly interesting to me is that in many of their lives there was some moment of tremendous crisis—as there often is in many lives, not just lives of artists and writers. But times when they were really down at various bottoms, and what their relationship to their art was in those moments. So as we often do, I wrote my way out of my dilemma—or into my dilemma, maybe. And that was really wonderful.

AO: Can you share more about how you came to your subjects? I feel like if you’re setting up a book like this as a writer, the first instinct might be to seek out only other writers. But you went across disciplines—landscape architect, composer, actress, musician…

SD: I definitely wanted to go across disciplines. For one thing, honestly, out of sheer curiosity. I know a ton of writers—you probably know a ton of writers, too—so I know us. But the experience of being someone whose primary artistic medium is writing is very different from being a dancer, composer, performer, or visual artist. These are really different paths in a lot of senses, but certainly in a material sense. I mean, dancers—there are bodily limits that they work with. Visual artists have all the stuff they have to do in terms of actually working with material, like paint, canvas, all these things. 

I really wanted to hear what other people had to say, so I didn’t want to talk to anyone who I already knew too well, because I would have too many ideas about them going in. So I looked for people who were a couple degrees of separation from me. Sometimes that was practical in the sense of getting people to talk to you, which works better if there’s some shred of personal connection. But also the little bit of distance was really, really helpful. I have all these kind of odd connections to the different people in the book. I mean, none of them is my best friend or anything, right? They’re just these odd, liminal connections. And I certainly chose people who interested me. There was something about them that I was like, who are you? What’s going on with you? So there was that in it, but we needed to be a little bit strangers to each other.

I felt very strongly that what I was doing was not investigative journalism. I wasn’t like, let me get to the core, the truth. There isn’t a truth. I wanted to hear what people had to say. It’s an unanswerable and ridiculous question. So I wasn’t looking for the answer. I was looking for the response. 

AO: Was there any particular moment that stands out to you across those interviews as something that surprised you, or changed your mind?

SD: Talking to Darrel Morrison, the landscape architect—what he does is so different than anything I have ever tried to do in my life. It’s a whole way of working that I don’t really understand and would never attempt. But his way of seeing what he described, what he saw as the difference between sweeps and drifts and spots… I began to understand how he would look at a landscape. And that really changed the way I looked at landscape and the way that I understand it and also what that kind of seeing can be. 

The visual artist Amy Sillman said a lot of things that I just thought were so unbelievably right and smart. I just loved when she described the moment—I think she was in her thirties—she knew she really wanted to paint, but, you know, the odds of being able to do it are so low. She had this moment where she thought, “Does that mean that they can tell me I’m not an artist? No, they cannot tell me that.” And I felt like that should be tattooed on all of us. Because that is so right and so liberating. And I think about that all the time, actually. I just think that’s exactly true. And if you’re coming up as a writer and an artist, or even later in your career, it’s one of the first things you forget. Because you can get very caught up in “Can I make it through this gate, can I make it through that gate? Can I get this thing? Can I be on that list?” whatever it is. Which you have to do to have a career, right? But it makes it very easy to forget exactly what she said, which is that no one can tell you that you are not this. That’s entirely in your power. 

AO: Yes! I also loved what Sillman says about the ways in which working as a teacher and co-chair became part of her artwork, how she thinks of her entire life as “the expanded field of painting.” Do you feel similarly? How has teaching changed your relationship to writing?

SD: The thing that is transformative to me about teaching and helpful in my own practice is something kind of funny on the side that actually only increases as I get older. You go in the room with students, and they’re giving you their work. And nine-point-nine times out of ten, there’s treasure in there. It may not be what they think the treasure is, but very often, no matter who it is—an eighteen-year-old undergraduate, a seventy-five-year-old person at a conference—very often there’s something in there that’s alive. Every time I see that, it makes me happy. It confirms the presence of that kind of life in almost everything. So it’s very hopeful-making, because when I sit in front of the page and think, I don’t know… I do know from spending all this time with folks in these rooms that most of the time the treasure is there. It’s just finding it. 

So in that way it’s definitely helped, because one of the things that’ll kill you as a writer or an artist is shame. That’ll just take you out, every time. And when we sit in rooms with things that are lumpy, in-progress—all the things that this stuff always is, right? You sit there with it, and if shame is kept out of the scene, then most of the time something good happens. 

AO: You wrote an anonymous weekly column called The Magpie for Catapult, which you discuss in more detail in the book. Do you think the anonymity allowed you to remove that element of shame altogether?

SD: Absolutely. That column—which was one of the most joyous things I’ve ever done, honestly—came at the end of a long period where a lot of things had happened and I had a lot of trouble really sticking with a project. I had always wanted to do a kind of funny bricolage column. But for some reason I thought, I want to do a funny bricolage column, but I want to do it anonymously. I said, look, if it doesn’t work, if you don’t like it, that’s fine, then we just won’t do anymore, but I’m just gonna do one and then you see if you like it. The folks at Catapult were like, okay! And then I ended up doing one a week for about a year. 

I discovered that there is something absolutely wonderful about taking your name off of something. There’s shame in it—whatever things you might feel shame about—but there’s also all the baggage that over many years has gotten attached to who we think we are. You get into this whole projection-transference-countertransference stew that’s sort of held in place by your name. Take your name off, and a lot of that drama… it’s not that it disappears, but it really pipes way down. I highly recommend it. I’ve done it with students in classes since the year that I did that and nine times out of ten the results are always really wonderful. They’re not writing toward what they think I want to see or what they think literary is or what they think the person across the table thinks of them. 

The year of writing the column was tremendously freeing and incredibly fun and I would just go around and look at whatever and do whatever and pull whatever off the internet that interested me. I didn’t tell anyone for a really long time. The only people who knew were me, my editor, and my partner. There were low-to-no stakes. And I think that’s something that can be very hard to come by, especially as you go on down this path. And it’s wonderful. We often think of anonymity as like, you know, “I have to write this anonymously because it’s so salacious,” but it really doesn’t have to be that. It doesn’t have to be a kind of hiding. It can just be a kind of a venturing out of your usual ideas of who you are. And why not? 

AO: A lot of things about technology and the publishing industry are shifting—you write about changes in the media landscape and difficulties freelancing, for example. But what would you say remains the same?

SD: One thing I’ve noticed in my time on the planet is that people really like novels and they really like longform. Those things might change in terms of the mediums through which we get them, but we will park ourselves in front of story forever. And one thing that I have found incredibly interesting about the millennial generation and the kids coming up after is that there is this world of immersive, never-ending story. Harry Potter, Percy Jackson, all these series. In terms of literary culture, there’s still been a cult of the short story that kind of rises and falls, but people still love a novel. And when we look at what’s happened in television, we all just want it to go on and on and on. I think that hunger will stay the same; it seems to be part of human nature.

AO: Is there any one particular piece of advice you’ve picked up during your career that you want to pass on to writers and artists who’re still finding their footing?

SD: At any given moment in an artistic culture, there’s always a lot of noise about something. That is always going to be true. And once in a while that maybe intersects with what you’re doing, and most often it doesn’t. So you really don’t want to mistake that noise for what is most important to you. There’s always something massive happening that may or may not be anything you’re actually interested in as a writer or an artist. And you just have to not worry so much about that.

AO: There was a certain classroom exchange you included where the teacher told his students, “This is a profession for somebody who has no choice.” Did you ever try to quit? Can you share more about what’s kept you going through the difficult stretches?

SD: I did quit, I guess—not exactly consciously. The first short story I ever published, I was in my mid-twenties and they published it in the Voice Literary Supplement, which was part of The Village Voice. And I’ll never forget—I picked up the Voice on the corner as we did then, and I was sitting in this coffee shop, and I opened it up and I saw my story and I was completely freaked out, and I closed the paper. I didn’t think, “Oh, I should quit.” It was just like, oh my god, oh my god, oh my god. I sort of ran away and did other things. I went to graduate school in English lit and was incredibly miserable. I ended up going to work for the Voice and was incredibly happy. But then a little later, in my late twenties, the itch to write fiction came back. And I sort of didn’t tell anyone. I was like, “I’m just gonna creep over here to this workshop,” you know what I mean? So that’s what happened. I think I was alarmed about the sense of exposure, and then came back into it when I was a little more emotionally ready. Because if you want to do this seriously, there will be exposure. That will happen. Unless you’re going to be Emily Dickinson, making your fascicles in your house, you’re gonna be in public and it’s gonna be exposing and that’s the deal.

The person who said that quote in the book was the artist Matthew Weinstein, a painter friend of the actress Blair Brown, who was talking to students. One of the students said that if you didn’t have a solo show by the time you were thirty, you might as well just get out. And Weinstein said to that person, “So [some of] you could get out? Because if you could get out, you should get out now… This is a profession for somebody who has no choice.” And that’s true. I can’t quit. I’m hardwired for this. I would sit in my house and type the alphabet. I would. 

I do think there is a very rough thing that happens, where people are incredibly devoted to this, and they’re good at it, and there comes a moment where for whatever reasons—usually just the industry moving around—they can’t get anywhere. And that is extraordinarily painful. Usually unjust. And I do think there is a way in which you are then asked to draw on your own belief, your own joy, your own meaning-making, and your own right to what feels meaningful to you. 

In the past I’ve gotten very interested in people who walk away from certain scenes or public parts of their career and then come back. Patti Smith is a big example of this; the artist Lee Bontecou is an example of this. There are actually a lot of examples, especially women in the visual arts—which is like a terror dome—where women not only walked out, but kind of got pushed out of the scene, and would go off for decades, and they’d just be making art. And then they get rediscovered at ninety and brought back out. But why would you deprive yourself, you know? Screw the industry; screw the market. Why would you deprive yourself of this tremendous pleasure?

AO: You talked to the actress Blair Brown about her experiences with fame. How do you think celebrity status shapes an artist’s journey?

SD: I don’t have that kind of fame, which is probably more a blessing than a curse, honestly. I think that especially at this moment of internet media, fame is usually much too big for any human being. The scale of fame is so massive in our current technological moment that it is very, very difficult for any one human being to metabolize. Think about anyone who has been tossed into a Twitter storm. It’s too much. I think it’s very hard on folks in writing particularly. Like, I write out of my privacy into the reader’s privacy. But if there’s suddenly a huge thing, that delicate relationship is really blown apart.

So on the one hand, do I want to win all the prizes and make a ton of money? Yeah. Sure. Why not? That’d be great. I have a lot of places I wanna go, things I wanna do. But at the same time, my primary relationship is with what I’m trying to make. Feeling that a billion people might be looking, that’s rough. Unless you’re an insane narcissist, it’s usually too much. You can ask anyone who’s gotten a MacArthur, a Nobel—one of these big, big things. Often there’s a period when they retreat. When they sort of pull back. And with someone like Blair Brown, with people in the acting profession, I think they’re great to talk to because being in the public eye in that way is such a bizarre, surreal experience, so overwhelming. They know a lot about the weirdness of that.

AO: At one point, the dancer and performer Valda Setterfield tells you that she disposed of decades of papers and artifacts from her life, saying she wants to “be part of now, part of this time.” Do you find it personally useful to keep an archive? What are the merits of letting go?

SD: The reason I sort of clutched my pearls at her getting rid of that stuff actually wasn’t for her, it was for us. Because given who she danced with and the world that she was in and everything that happened, I thought, for her, fine, fine. Burn it down, do whatever you want. But for the rest of us, I want that archive. I want to see that stuff. Because she was amazing, the world that she was in was amazing, and all that stuff is so precious. And I think maybe that would be the distinction. You personally might actually be freed if you were like, “I’m gonna take all this stuff and just drop a match,” right? Rather than carting it around or having it where you can see it. But I think that in terms of those who come after us, my personal feeling is if they want to—and no one might want to—but they get to see all our stuff. Leave it for the ones to come. This is such a morbid thing to say, but because of mortality, save it for someone else to look through. 

I once had the great pleasure of seeing what they had in the Jane Bowles archive at the Harry Ransom Center. She didn’t leave much behind, but there were all these weird things in the boxes. I think there was maybe a dress in there that she had worn. There were these strange things. And I just wanted to see all of that, the scratched-up pages. It’s so tender. So that’s the reason to save it—because we die.

AO: Can you say more about the connection between the long run and mortality? How does knowledge of our end fuel creation?

SD: Not everyone gets to have a long run. Illnesses take them out, sociopolitical conditions can crush people, all kinds of things happen. The thing that I find incredibly moving about long runs is not that these people are so bulletproof and super productive. What I find incredibly moving and beautiful is that all of these trace the arcs of lives, and those lives are vulnerable. The art reflects the vulnerabilities and the things that happened to these people, that happened within them. 

What makes a long run so incredibly beautiful is absolutely that it ends. It is so moving to me, seeing the arc of the work that people make and especially a lot of the work that they make in their later years. Because they’re letting us into the relatively brief arc of their lives. And I find that incredibly powerful. We end, we do. It’s like that moment when a play ends and the last person walks off stage. That is a moment of tremendous power.

Stacey D’Erasmo is the author of the novels Tea, A Seahorse Year, The Sky Below, Wonderland, and The Complicities. She is also the author of the nonfiction books The Art of Intimacy: The Space Between and The Long Run: A Creative Inquiry. D’Erasmo’s work has been published in The New York Times Book Review, New York Times Magazine, Ploughshares, Interview, The New Yorker, and the Los Angeles Times. She was a Stegner Fellow in Fiction at Stanford University, received a Guggenheim Fellowship in Fiction in 2009, and won the Outstanding Mid-Career Novelist Prize from the Lambda Literary Foundation in 2012.