How much cast iron is on your stove?

How do you keep it all from boiling over?

Jun 27, 2023

I am beginning to write this newsletter from the balcony of a tenth-floor apartment overlooking Broadway in the Upper West Side. Below me are yellow taxis, electric scooters, a woman stopping to unwrap her child’s granola bar, and two dogs pissing on either side of the block. It is surprisingly quiet. I can hear the echoes of someone shouting, but not what they’re saying. Sometimes, a car honks. There is construction, but it is only a hum, likely a few streets and avenues away. From here, I have noticed a winding path that runs down the middle of a green median I walk past at least a dozen times a week. From the sidewalk, it just looks like bushes of leaves and long grass.

It feels weird to be sitting down at this moment to write about creativity when my life is in upheaval. My partner and I have been priced out of our beloved apartment and have started the extremely annoying task of looking at other properties - the market in my neighborhood is now much more expensive than the last time we relocated. I am trying to navigate student teaching in the fall and the possibility of instead teaching in a charter school (a system that does not align with my ethics) to circumvent four months without a paycheck. Every weekend until September has been claimed by something or other. It’s a lot.

And yet, I’ll persist, primarily as I work towards the end of the first week of participating in Marlee Grace’s Artist’s Way Book Group.

I’ve been working hard to initiate discussions about creativity with other artists. Because it fills my well. Because it feels good. And I’m working hard not to be embarrassed by my want to connect with others on specifically creative levels.

Last weekend, I spent a night in a cabin in Pennsylvania with my friend Billie, who is also my co-organizer with Pretty Good Collective. We talked a lot about how difficult it can be to have so many different practices, especially when it sometimes feels like other artists have one thing. I never know what to say when people ask, “What type of artist are you?” I say, “Oh, I don’t know. Right now I like paper clay. I like oil and gouache and poetry and I’m working on a few fiction projects.” However, within this uncertainty lies a sense of liberation, a freedom to explore and experiment without confining myself to a singular artistic label. How can one accept their process while also confronting it?

Marlee Grace calls these different practices “containers”. Twyla Tharp called them “boxes.” I recently discovered that my mother calls them her “cast irons”. She pictures them all sitting on the stove burner, constantly being reheated, rotated, filled, and emptied.

So, recontextualizing something I wrote in my morning pages this week: When can we know how to step back and say, “I’m good at this but I don’t want to do it all the time - I want to do something that fills more of my cast irons at once and I don’t know what that looks like and that’s scary as hell”.

That is where I’m at this week. I’m scared as hell, but I am more driven than ever to combine my creative practices. I just don’t know how. But we’ll get there, right?