Am I an Artist? Or Am I a Brand?

Am I an artist? Or am I a brand? Am I writing something beautiful? Or something that will sell?

I took a writing course once upon a time from Tom Jenks and his wife Carol Edgarian. During our one-on-one phone conversation, Tom asked about my intentions for the book I was working on. (The book was  “Wrestling with God.”)

The words that came out of my mouth surprised me: “I want to create something beautiful,” I said.

There was a moment of silence. Tom seemed as nonplussed by my response as I was.

His reply, finally, went something like, “I can get with that.”

It was the artist in me talking that day.

Marketing Me

Several years later, at a writing conference up in the Sierra, the workshop leader, Cindy Spiegel, asked a similar question about the project I’d brought to the conference. (I was putting together a book of the “Widowed” essays I’ve been posting here since Jon’s death in 2021.)

Cindy was co-founder of Spiegel and Grau, a publishing imprint I admired. I wanted to make a good impression. I wanted to convince Cindy that the book I was working on would sell, that  hundreds of thousands of people would want to buy it and read it.

“It’s a book for widows,” I said. “There are a lot of Baby Boomer widows out there. My story will resonate with them.”

It was marketer me talking this time.

Am I an Artist? Or am I a Brand?

What am I doing here, anyway? What kind of writer am I?

When I sit down at my laptop and hours later stand up again, stiff in the joints and bleary in the eyes, what have I been doing with my time? Creating a work of art? Or generating a brand?

In this age of social media, writers are encouraged to create an on-line presence, a brand. Some publishers — including the one that originally published “Wrestling with God” — insist that their authors spend huge swaths of time promoting themselves.

I’ve Got Ten Years. Twenty, Maybe

I’m 83 years old. I don’t have a lot of time left on the planet. Ten years. Twenty, if I crush the odds. How do I spend it?

How much of my remaining time do I devote to creating something beautiful and how much to luring search engines to my blog posts with catchy headlines and strategic key words? How much time do I spend roaming Facebook and Instagram making friends with people I’ll never meet?

I’ve been thinking about time a lot lately. And I’ve made up my mind.

I’m going for beautiful.

And I’m Thinking of You, Dear Readers

And that’s where you, my readers, come in. For the coming months, I’ll be spending less time being social on social media.

I’ll also be spending less time writing these blog posts.

You will still see a post every week, but for the time being I’ll be pulling most of them from the archives. You’ll see stories written five, ten, fifteen years ago that, I believe, are still punchy, to the point, and ripe for a fresh read.

Meanwhile, artist me will be at work, turning my “Widowed” posts into a memoir-in-essays and putting the finishing touches on a book of essays written for the Oakland Tribune when Peter and Christina were little kids and Jon and I were frazzled parents.

Real-Time Updates

I’ll keep you informed on my artistic progress. And I’ll still be posting plenty of real-time riffs on my particular case of the human condition.

Meanwhile, watch for the many oldies but goodies that have been crying out to be liberated from the archives.

I came within an inch of becoming the visual artist I imagined as a girl growing up in Michigan. More about that at “Ceramics Envy — I Want to Get My Hands into that Earthy, Messy, Squishy Clay.”  As for the joy of spending long hours at the keyboard, see “My Flesh Is Weary — Too Much Book-Writing, Not Enough Yoga.”

* Some of my FB friends are considering jumping ship following Mark Zuckerberg’s decision to end Facebook and Instagram’s fact-checking programs. Don Lattin, who wrote the foreword for my book, “Wrestling with God: Stories of Doubt and Faith,” is among them.