Subtle Maneuvers

Subtle Maneuvers

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Totally insane and truly helpful
 • Mason Currey
101
The truest thing I’ve ever read about making art
 • Mason Currey
76
Van Gogh’s advice to a young artist
 • Mason Currey
32
Know your creative cycle
 • Mason Currey
46
David Milch’s disembodied writing process
 • Mason Currey
71
Get rid of what your project needs
 • Mason Currey
36

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Subtle Maneuvers
Subtle Maneuvers
A fortnightly newsletter on routines, rituals, and wriggling through a creative life, from the author of Daily Rituals: How Artists Work
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Poets

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My Baudelaire Summer
“How difficult it is to do as one ought every day.”
 • 
Mason Currey
20
Petrarch got up every morning at midnight
“I regard sleep as a kind of death, my bed as a tomb.”
 • 
Mason Currey
30
Sharon Olds’s huge archive of thinking and feeling
“Clouds of meaning were rolling this way and that.”
 • 
Mason Currey
62
Louise Glück on writer’s block
“I think everything good in my own work I owe to endurance.”
 • 
Mason Currey
41
Making art is like setting a trap
Philip Larkin on constructing “the device”
 • 
Mason Currey
40
Henri Cole on the enemies within
And why they’re a gift
 • 
Mason Currey
26
Alice Notley on getting things to come easily
Here’s the secret, if you can bear it
 • 
Mason Currey
41
Bernadette Mayer will give you ideas
On the late American poet’s irrepressible confident weirdness
 • 
Mason Currey
24

“Productivity”

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John Cage on the true meaning of discipline
I've been thinking about it all wrong.
 • 
Mason Currey
17
Totally insane and truly helpful
The best creativity advice I've read in ages—plus, enroll now in Worm School Extension 🪱🎓
 • 
Mason Currey
101
The Fassbinder Method
“So: completion come what may.”
 • 
Mason Currey
18
The Complete Worm School
My summer course on wriggling through a creative life has now concluded—read the entire series here.
 • 
Mason Currey
Writing is bouldering, bouldering is writing
On “eking out a delicate gift laboriously”
 • 
Mason Currey
41
The dumbest and best productivity trick
And why I’m rebelling against it anyway
 • 
Mason Currey
104
Samuel Johnson and the art of procrastination
Or how to write 1,800 words an hour
 • 
Mason Currey
75
Three tales of creative slowness
“A week is nothing, one thinks one can do so much in a week”
 • 
Mason Currey
58
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