Think of This Book as the Best Dinner Party in the World

THE LONG RUN: A Creative Inquiry, by Stacey D’Erasmo

I do not believe there is an artist in history who hasn’t asked themself — at least once — “Why do I do this?” The designation of “creator” may make for a glorious calling card, but as an occupation, it involves a disproportionate amount of spirit-crushing struggle and relatively few rewards.

And yet, day after day, year after year, century after century, we do it. We closet ourselves in our studios and workrooms and thrust our vulnerable selves onstage in order to produce art in the hopes that, to quote the poet Frank O’Hara, “someone, some day, may find it beautiful!”

And if that “some day” doesn’t come? We do it anyway. That doing — that creating, that wrestling with ourselves to exceed our limitations while, simultaneously, bracing to be ignored, misunderstood and possibly ridiculed by a public we long to reach — is quite simply who we are.

So, accepting that beleaguered state as a given, the author and critic Stacey D’Erasmo poses another, seemingly more pragmatic query: “How do we keep doing this — making art?” It is a question she attempts to answer in her raucous and exhilarating “The Long Run: A Creative Inquiry.”

“The Long Run” is, in fact, less a book than a dinner party that D’Erasmo has generously invited us to attend. At the table are eight creators — the visual artist Cecilia Vicuña, the dancer Valda Setterfield, the landscape designer Darrel Morrison, the writer Samuel R. Delany, the actor Blair Brown, the painter Amy Sillman, the musician Steve Earle and the composer Tania León. D’Erasmo interviewed them all separately, but their voices converge so often that they appear to be talking to and over one another amid a cacophony of cutlery and wineglasses.