Rally A Posse: A Conversation With Austin Kleon
On being part of something a little bit bigger than you, bike rides, writing the opposite of everything you hate, and bottling maniac creative kid energy.
Intimate conversations with our greatest heart-centered minds.
Austin began his career as a poet, using a black marker and the daily newspapers that were piling up at his house to create found poems which eventually became his first book Newspaper Blackout. The New Yorker pronounced that his poems “resurrect the newspaper when everybody else is declaring it dead.” Not bad for a twenty-seven-year-old.
Austin went on to write the delightfully playful yet visionary and incredibly helpful Steal Like An Artist, which is in its 30th printing with over a million copies sold, Show Your Work, and Keep Going. The first two are New York Times bestsellers. And The Guardian selected his newsletter as one of the best of the year. He lives in Austin, Texas, with his wife and two much beloved sons.
I had such a lovely time chatting with Austin. He’s kind and easy going and sees the world as a sort of magical spiderweb of creativity and adventure and unexpected connection.
Next week, I’ll be sharing some fantastic craft advice from Austin: seasonal writing habits, how to keep notebooks, editing your work, and more!
Enjoy!
xJane
If you want more Austin, he filled in the Beyond Questionnaire in September, 2023. Check it out here.
When I think of you, I think of community. You’re so devoted to uplifting the voices of others. Can you talk about this impulse in yourself?
What I'm devoted to is the idea that a brain is really the result of its connections to other brains. A life is really the result of its connection to other lives. So we’re the sum of our connections. Those connections can be genetic, they can be social, but usually, in my life, they're artistic or intellectual. What I'm trying to do is to bring in all these things that I see myself connected to and share them in a way that builds a network around me.
It really comes down to creativity and art being the result of what Brian Eno would call scenius. Instead of what we might think of as genius, which is about the individual, Brian Eno's idea is that every great genius is the result of a scenius--of being connected to other minds and ideas and a rich lineage of things that have come before and things that are around now.
I grew up in Ohio literally in the middle of a cornfield. I didn't grow up on a farm. I grew up on a plot of land that was next to farms on a busy country road. All I wanted when I was younger was to be around people who cared about the same things that I did. So, a lot of my work is about joining the world I always wanted to be part of. But you have to build the world that you want. What I've been trying to do in my books and in all my writing is to create that world.
Can you describe the world that you want to live in?