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7 books match the query 'Creative Life'

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Artists as Writers

Edited by Seph Rodney and Steven G. Fullwood

Intellect Books, 2025

A masterclass on living as a writer and developing your writing craft.

Part of the Living and Sustaining a Creative Life series, Artists as Writers joins the tradition of books designed or intended to inspire would-be writers to write. Yet, it distinguishes itself by offering succinct first-person narratives by writers of varied genres about the day-to-day life of writing for a living.

Artists as Writers offers accounts of the journeys that thirty-two writers have taken, including what decisions were made; which paths were taken, rejected, and charted; and why. It answers the question: What magic keeps a writer writing?
Writers from Ethiopia, Guatemala, Nigeria, Palestine, Poland, and Sweden, as well as several American artists, contribute their stories. They each provide vividly detailed accounts of the circuitous roads that each individual took to earn the title “writer.” These are richly descriptive stories from writers who write consistently, relating how they came to the writing life, who helped them get there, and what sustains them as writers.

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Creative Life

Music, Politics, People, and Machines

Bob Ostertag

University of Illinois Press, 2008

In this eloquent and passionate volume, Bob Ostertag explores the common ground and points of friction among music, creativity, politics, culture, and technology. In terrain ranging from the guerrilla underground in El Salvador's civil war to the drag queen underground in San Francisco and New York, these essays combine journalism and autobiography to explore fundamental questions of what art is and what role it can occupy in a violent and fragmented world, a world in which daily events compromise the universality toward which art strives.

Drawing on his intimate engagement with political conflict in Latin America and the Balkans, Ostertag identifies an art of "insurgent politics" that struggles to expand the parameters of the physical and social world. He also discusses his innovative collaborations with major modern performers, filmmakers, and artists around the world. Part memoir, part journalism, and part aesthetic manifesto, Creative Life is a dazzling set of writings from a musical artist who has worked on the cutting edge of new music for thirty years.

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Fifty Cents and a Box Top

The Creative Life of Nashville Session Musician Charlie McCoy

Charlie McCoy

West Virginia University Press, 2017

From Ann-Margret to Bob Dylan and George Jones to Simon & Garfunkel, Nashville harmonica virtuoso and multi-instrumentalist Charlie McCoy has contributed to some of the most successful recordings of country, pop, and rock music of the last six decades. As the leader of the Hee Haw “Million-Dollar Band,” McCoy spent more than two decades appearing on the television screens of country music fans around the United States. And, as a solo artist, he has entertained audiences across North America, Europe, and Japan and has earned numerous honors as a result. Fifty Cents and a Box Top: The Creative Life of Nashville Session Musician Charlie McCoy offers rare firsthand insights into life in the recording studio, on the road, and on the small screen as Nashville became a leading center of popular music production in the 1960s and as a young McCoy established himself as one of the most sought after session musicians in the country.

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Lincoln's Poetry

The Creative Life of a Leader

Christopher Sullivan

University of Illinois Press, 2026

Drawn to poetry throughout his life, Abraham Lincoln read verse for comfort and pleasure, used it in his writings and speeches, and looked to it for insights into spiritual matters and politics, and spontaneously recited it in dark moments to lift his spirits.

Christopher Sullivan’s engaging exploration focuses on the role of poetry in Lincoln’s life and thought. As Sullivan shows, the poetic prose of Lincoln’s most famous writings and oratory drew on an ear for verse he began to cultivate during his frontier youth. Full versions of Lincoln’s own published and unpublished poetry provide fascinating context for his work before and during his political career while shedding light on his state of mind during the crisis of an existential war. Sullivan also considers Lincoln’s relationship with poetry against a backdrop of what poetry is, how it operates, and how it may resurface in prose.

A journalistic look at the crossroads of art and leadership, Lincoln’s Poetry adds a surprising yet vital dimension to our perceptions of the sixteenth president.

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Living and Sustaining a Creative Life

Essays by 40 Working Artists

Edited by Sharon Louden

Intellect Books, 2013

In this day and age, when art has become more of a commodity and art school graduates are convinced that they can only make a living from their work by attaining gallery representation, it is more important than ever to show the reality of how a professional, contemporary artist sustains a creative practice over time. The forty essays collected in Living and Sustaining a Creative Life are written in the artists’ own voices and take the form of narratives, statements, and interviews. Each story is different and unique, but the common thread is an ongoing commitment to creativity, inside and outside the studio. Both day-to-day and big picture details are revealed, showing how it is possible to sustain a creative practice that contributes to the ongoing dialogue in contemporary art. These stories will inform and inspire any student, young artist, and art enthusiast and will help redefine what "success" means to a professional artist.

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Storytellers of Art Histories

Living and Sustaining a Creative Life

Edited by Yasmeen Siddiqui and Alpesh Kantilal Patel

Intellect Books, 2021

An anthology amplifying the voices of the figures reshaping art histories across disciplines and a range of fluid practices.

With a focus on gender, race (including whiteness), class, sexuality, and transnationality—all of which are often marginalized in dominant art histories—each individual has provided short, often personal contributions detailing how they become passionate about their practice. The contributors’ offerings are varied and surprising, appealing equally to people enmeshed in the field through their work as well as those with a beginner’s interest. Their pieces take various forms—epistolary, children’s fable, interview, coauthored narrative, pastiche, memoir, manifesto, and apology—and a number of the essays perform in their structure or content the theories they explore about publishing, curating, and archival work.

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To Hell with the Critics

The Creative Life of Claire Falkenstein

Marin R. Sullivan

J. Paul Getty Trust, The, 0

A riveting biography of a California modernist artist-designer that asks what it means to commit to a creative life.

In the summer of 1951, Claire Falkenstein faced the greatest decision of her life: remain in Paris and pursue her artistic ambitions or return to her husband in California? She was just shy of her 42nd birthday, did not speak French, knew almost no one in Paris, and had nowhere to live, but she did know this: “If I come home now,” she wrote her husband, “it will be the end of me as an artist.”

Drawing on extensive archival research, Marin R. Sullivan chronicles the extraordinary life and career of Falkenstein (1908–1997), one of the most innovative and iconoclastic artists of the 20th century.

Features more than 75 reproductions of Claire Falkenstein’s work and photographs of her life.
Explores her role in shaping San Francisco’s modernist scene.
Chronicles her years in Europe, where she created the celebrated entrance gates to the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, Italy.
Traces Falkenstein’s rise as a prominent public sculptor in Southern California.
Vividly written by Marin R. Sullivan, an art historian and expert in 20th-century sculpture.

Discover the powerful and captivating story of an artist who defied convention, challenged expectations, and dedicated herself to a creative life.

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