The Paul Wells Show - How great art gets made

Episode Date: May 15, 2024

How do people like Stephen Sondheim, Sofia Coppola or David Simon create something from nothing? And what are the threads that tie their work together with making a cookbook or a cartoon? Former New York Magazine and New York Times Magazine editor Adam Moss talked to dozens of creative people to find out how they do it. In his new book, The Work of Art, artists from a wide range of mediums break down the process behind a single piece, sharing sketches, outlines and rejected attempts they worked through along the way.  Go to paulwells.substack.com to see some pages from the book.

When does art happen? You know, at some crazy level, I'm not sure that making some meme that goes viral is fundamentally different than writing on paper a 900-page novel. This week, one of the great American magazine editors, Adam Moss. And just so you know, I couldn't be prouder of this episode. I'm Paul Wells, the Journalist Fellow-in-Residence at the University of Toronto's Munk School. Welcome to The Paul Wells Show. Okay, for this episode, we're doing something different. Last week, you met the author of a new book on Justin Trudeau, who happens to be me.

Next week, you'll meet the author of a new book on Pierre Poliev. But if you've been following me for any length of time at all, you know I'm also fascinated by art, by how creative people create, and I know I'm not alone. Today, my guest is Adam Moss. For 15 years, from 2004 to 2019, he was the editor of New York Magazine, which is a legendary piece of journalistic real estate. He gave that magazine a creative renaissance at a time when it wasn't really clear that we still had a right to expect anything like that from a magazine.

Before that, he was at the New York Times Magazine. Same deal. I assume magazine editors don't attain legendary status where you work, but in my world, holy cow, I'd have been delighted to talk to Adam Moss at any time in the last 20 years. As it happens, he's got a new book out. It's called The Work of Art. The title's a low-key play on words. It's about the work that artists do when they make art. He's reached out to 43 different creative people from legends like Stephen Sondheim and the playwright, Tony Kushner and Elizabeth Diller, the architect,

to quirkier types like Samin Nasrat, the cookbook author, and David Mandel, who's the showrunner for Veep. Moss interviews them about their work, but he also shows us their rough drafts, their sketches, early outlines, rejected first attempts. What he's trying to do is to track down the moment when great works of art are born and figure out what the artist was doing or thinking at that moment. If you head over to my show notes at paulwells.substack.com, I'll show you page layouts from the book. I'll try to give you a better understanding of what he's up to. In the meantime, here's this interview. At its most basic level, it's me, frankly, starstruck, interviewing a creative person whose work has been tremendously

important to me, as he talks about interviewing creative people who are important to him. I think anyone whose work or life ever leads them to try to make something new and beautiful will get something out of our conversation. At one point, I even asked him about his own creative process when he was editing the New York Times Magazine on one of the darkest days in that city's history. He immediately got what I was doing and the conversation took a new turn. I'm really happy to be able to share it with you. Adam Moss, thanks for joining me. Thank you for having me.

Your book will not be familiar with most of my listeners. Let's take a little bit of time to talk about the genesis of this book and what on earth you're trying to accomplish with it. Well, there's, you know, like any of these things, there's a million ways back to an origin spot. But I would say roughly that it had to do with my own frustration as a painter. I had spent all of my life as an editor, as a magazine editor, at various different magazines, New York and New York Times Magazine and a startup, etc. And then I left and I started to seriously want to paint. And I found that I just, after years of being creative in group situations, I found that I didn't really understand how to be creative in a room all by myself. And my frustration was maddening.

I mean, truly almost maddening. And it occurred to me that what I was really looking for was what I called entrance into the artist's head, trying to understand how it was that an artist was able to work through all of the obstacles that a person trying to make anything by themselves feels, frustration and despair, and a sense that it was impossible. So I went out and started to talk to some of my friends who are artists, and that encouraged me to think that maybe there was a book I could write that would help me and then help other people make sense of this. At the same time, as I said, there's a Hat, in which he includes these legal pad scrawls of his lyric writing where you can actually feel the making of the songs, his incredible songs and his incredibly complex lyric design on these legal pads. You can play along with them. It's like incredibly interactive and exciting.

And also I had in my life loved all kinds of artifacts and entrails of creative making sketches and doodles and outlines and notes and journal entries. And I had wanted to do a book of those. So at some point, and it was kind of a ridiculous moment when it all kind of came together for me, I thought maybe there was a book that would be like a museum of creative thinking where you'd have a kind of audio component. You'd have people talking to you about how working through the particulars of how they made one thing, both practically and psychologically, get into their head as they made a thing.

And that I would supply all of this kind of physical artifacts of the process to accompany in it and to help the artist remember truthfully what it felt like to make something out of nothing, which is the subtitle of the book. That's essentially the origin of the book. What I hope to accomplish with it, I hope to have people experience what I experienced, which is, you know, some sense of reassurance, I think, that failure and frustration is part of every artist's journey i hate that word but okay journey um and that you know in some ways you know like the old us magazine slogan they're just like you you know they just uh you know artists who i venerate go through the same process no matter

how gifted and skilled they are so you can go through the same ups and downs and uh the same process, no matter how gifted and skilled they are. So you can go through the same ups and downs and the same sort of topography of madness that an amateur does. So there's that. Also, it's incredibly, the story of going from something to nothing is just kind of a riveting narrative saga. It's just stories, fantastic stories of making things. And then finally, you know, I hope the book is kind of beautiful and I hope that you can relish the beauty of the unfinished and the unmade. That's a big part of my excitement about this. That's a very, very long answer to your first question. I promise I'll be briefer next time. I don't mind at all because I usually skip that stuff. And then I learned later that people wanted to know it uh and when I saw the cover of the book I thought well this is going to be an excellent

coffee table book uh whatever else it is but now I've defaced it with all my notes and everything so to hell with that um the painting thing was that when you left New York Magazine which is a great institution that you defined for you redefined for more than a decade. Did you know what you were going to do on the other side of that? And was, was painting part of not thinking too hard about what you're going to do next? Or, I mean, how did this fit into your life? I have a place in Cape Cod, which used to be a painting school. And it has kind of like all the ghosts of the painting school kind of still around it. There's a lot of years of history of people making things in this barn that we have on the property. And it just kind of moved me at some point,

this is when I was still working in New York, try to make images the image part of magazine making was always a big part of what I loved about magazines I was um back in the days of print but also uh at the beginning of kind of um the digital thing I was kind of always interested in how you tell stories with an interplay of words and images. And so, you know, I started just as a lark painting, picking up a paintbrush. I never did it before. I had no training at all. But I just started to sort of splash paint on a canvas and I found I liked it. And so then when I left New York, it was like, hmm, maybe I'll paint for a while and see how that goes. I kind of need to do something. And in a way, unfortunately, I was kind of good at the beginning. I had a very good start,

as many people do. And I was kind of amazed at what I was able to do. And then I just fell right off the cliff. But that good start made me think huh well maybe I can actually be a painter which was you know unbelievable delusion but it was kind of thrilling to me so I suppose I didn't know what I wanted to do afterwards but I also had I wouldn't I wouldn't express this to anyone else because I was embarrassed by it but I had a little bit of a fantasy that I might actually be a painter. Yeah. I mean, I started playing piano again during COVID lockdown

after not having ever played very seriously and not having taken the lesson since middle school. And immediately my teacher starts talking about recitals and stuff. And I'm like, what? It's in your head, right? And then you remember that you are who you actually are. When you started working on this, did you know it was going to be a book? I mean, each chapter could reasonably be a spread in a magazine.

Did you just start talking to people and figure it out later? Well, actually the origin of the book was it was going to be a kind of zine. The imagery was what drew me to this in the first place. I kind of always wanted to look at a book like the one I'm describing, you know, that was full of, didn't have to be contemporary accounts, but that it would be in the same way that you like books of journals or books of letters. that it would be in the same way that you like books of journals or books of letters.

I felt that no one had really ever made a book of creative entrails or artifacts, whatever you want to call these kind of documents. And so that was kind of my first impulse. And then the words were going to be like little captions. And then when I had my first conversations with some of the artists, the first one I think was Kara Walker, the painter, sculptor, painter, visual artist of all kinds. It was wonderful. kind of inspirational and also surprising about how she made the sugar sculpture called A Subtlety that I had seen and was deeply moved by. And so I began at that point to think of the book as, you ever read the book Studs Terkel's

Working? It's an old book about how people work of various kinds. But it's a book that I had remembered, which were accounts, almost oral history accounts of people's working lives. And so then it began to be about sort of artists' working lives. And it sort of took off from there. And then I constructed it into some kind of proposal. and then I constructed it into some kind of proposal. I had seen the Beatles documentary that Peter Jackson did, Making of Let It Be. Oh, the one that made all the waves a couple years ago.

Yeah. Yeah. And there was a marvelous moment in it, kind of a famous moment at this point, in which Paul McCartney is riffing the first chords to the song Get Back and you see it you see it come to life you see the emergence of a creative idea and I I was just deeply knocked over by that and I thought well if I can do a book at this

point that tries to if not summon if deliver that, because how could you do that in the pages of a book? You could summon it and you could take it apart. And then at that point, okay, I have a book. And to some extent, it's something you can only do retrospectively because what you're trying to get a look at through like laser beams and particle accelerators is the moment that creative people are most defensive about, which is the moment they create something. I'm just a journalist, but I felt it sometimes it's a terribly vulnerable moment and you hate anyone who tries to look at it.

Maybe later you can talk about it. And yeah, well, they even later it's kind of, people are reluctant to talk about it because they're deeply superstitious about it and they're very secretive about it. And they think that it's a, a kind of fragile covenant that can easily be broken and i would you know there were a number of people i wanted i was interested in doing chapters on that

were like no no no i won't go near there i'm afraid my whole kind of working relationship with my creative thing, sometimes people think of it as this sort of deity, something outside themselves. Sometimes it's a kind of relationship with their own subconscious, but that fragile wiring will get severed, you know? And so that also became a kind of requirement for being in the book. You had to actually be as interested as I was in exploring your own creative path. And some people were. Some people were, you know, no one asks them about this sort of thing at all. And some people were like, yeah, all right, let me

try to figure it out. Where did I get that idea? Where did that come from? Can I trace that back to something? It's a little bit like therapy. Early on, you write in a footnote where a lot of the action of this book is in the footnotes. You write, not everyone is equally introspective about their work. I was really surprised that anyone was. I admit to being surprised at that sentiment. Surely you would expect there to be at least some artists who just drone on and on about their inner lives. Well, no, they don't drone on about their inner lives. They drone on. It's become a kind of trope that artists use that have to do with their missions, the meaning of their work.

They're encouraged by audiences who really want this and dealers and record producers and whatnot to have a spiel and that spiel is typically what the thing means but as to the actual kind of introspective I was struggling over this character's voice and here's why I was struggling over this character's voice and here are the various things I tried that didn't work. And here's the thing that unlocked the thing that did work. And here's the story I was able to tell after. That is not a conversation most people are comfortable having. And it's also not one that they're used to having. So it was kind of virgin territory for a lot of people I talked to, which was very interesting for me and often interesting for them one of the ones who i found had the most success explaining what's going on in his head as he makes a thing is michael

cunningham the novelist you talked to him about the hours which is probably his most um well-known novel and um he says that at some point, at some point in the process, it's just got to break down entirely. He says if a novel is any good, it's going to defeat the idea that took you into it. But he's also eerily okay with that. He is.

It's like I also, in that chapter, there's a moment when I was just, he's a friend, so i was just talking to him i was on sitting on a beach with him one day and he was writing this book that he just published called day or he published it in the fall and um this was like many iterations of that book ago and he just came to the beach sitting down on the beach and it was like ah just had this conversation and i had showed this book to i think it was his agent or his editor. I think it was his agent. And she said, oh no, the second half of this book is just completely wrong. I believe it was the

second half, but in any case, one huge chunk of the book was just completely wrong. And I realized now I have to throw it away and start over. And I was like, you're so blasé about that. Working on this for a year, at least, how could it be of such little trauma to you? And he said, well, there's more of that where that came from. And there's more of that where that came from. I mean, that to me was such a shocking thing to say, but he meant it. And because he had sort of fundamental faith, and this came from a lifetime of writing, that this is the way things go. You have to have failure after failure after failure in order to have success, and that's just part of the process. And I just found that both amazing and extremely reassuring.

Part of the fun of this book is that you go through all the various incarnations of these great works before they became what they are. So he was going to translate Mrs. Dalloway into Manhattan gay culture in the current day. And he went very far down that path before he decided whatever the hell he wanted to do with Mrs. Dalloway, that wasn't it. Yeah. And the astonishing thing about this is that, you know, the novel is so associated with

its sort of beautiful rendering of Virginia Woolf herself as a character in the book, you know, played by Nicole Kidman, who won an Oscar for the part in the movie. And Virginia Woolf was not in the book in the first place. It was based on a book she wrote, but it was a completely different book. Yeah. And you talked to other people who have sort of

done some of the iconic work of the 20th, 21st century. So you talked to Tony Kushner about Angels in America. You talked to Stephen Sondheim about one of the big showstopper tunes in the musical company. And you also talked to the showrunner for Veep, David Mandel, and Roz Chast, who's a very distinctive New Yorker cartoonist,

but wouldn't be in most people's sort of pantheon of the arts. Is that a statement about how all creative work equals all creative work? Or were you just wandering through your Rolodex? How did you select the people who are in the book? Well, okay, so the first two were just two works. I mean, Michael was a friend of mine, Tony Kushner, Angels in America is just a play that I revere. And also heard Tony talk in other contexts about the creative process, in particular about failure. And I knew he thought a lot about this and thought well about it.

So I wanted to talk to him. They're all kind of individual answers. David Mandel, I had gone, Frank Rich, who is a producer on the show and is also a writer for New York Magazine, where I last worked, and as a friend, had invited me onto the set of Veep, just as a game, a lark. And I watched as he spent, as David Mandel, spent really a long, long time, like hours, fine tuning a single joke that would go by in, you know, that would go by in, you know, 14 seconds on the show. And I was just so impressed with the rigor that they approached anything. And also the actual process was amazing.

It was a process called the alts in which they tried different versions to sort of calibrate a joke to its finest level. With Roz Chast, I knew a cartoon was made very quickly and I was curious about the, first of all, I love Roz Chast, but second of all, I was curious about the, you know, a play like Angels in America takes years and years and years to make and a cartoon is made in 15 minutes and i was curious whether the essential dynamics were any different and they're not fundamentally and then it occurred

to me that really i have there also in a footnote in that chapter it's like when you crack a joke at a dinner table it's essentially the same thing it's just a crazy sped up metabolism that all making is really somewhat the same it just has different manifestations in different contexts a lot of the book feels to me like an extended ode to a certain period in american culture which is the period between the arrival of the macintosh and the arrival of social media which is your turf right you? Your, I love that idea. Yeah. I mean, I always think of it.

I talk about it with friends as the spy magazine era, right? When you had this amazing tool to produce something, but it was going to last and it was going to not be so freaking evanescent the way Twitter is, you know? And so a lot of this stuff feels in the best way, like museum exhibits, like here's what was happening during the French revolution or during the writing of angels in America. Yeah, I guess that's true. I mean, it's, you know, that you're right.

That is my era. I'm 60, almost 67 years old. That's, this was the, you know, this was the era I lived through. But I'm not sure. You know, at some crazy level, I'm not sure that making some meme that goes viral is fundamentally different than writing on paper a 900-page novel. It's a little different. But not really. So that as modes change as to how we express ourselves and make different kinds of art, if you want to call it art, I became very loose with that phrase. It's about creating period.

I think the basic outline remains similar. Do you feel like you know more about the creative process than you did or do you know 43 fantastic anecdotes about the creative process oh that's such a good question um i guess i feel i know more and of course i know more about what i don't know that's you know you learn anything you you like you you understand well i'm never going to understand that that's you know i i think this so i was just crazily obsessed with the idea of like where does one get one's voice you know why does ross chast sound like she sounds why does michael cunningham sound like what he sounds why does a painter like amy sillman paint the way she does, which is so distinctively, or Kara Walker, or there's a wonderful photographer named Gregory Crutzen,

who all his pictures look like they're all, he's a, I should explain, I guess, who he is. He's a photographer who makes these sort of giant photographs, which are like stills for movies,

which look like they have a before and after the way that a movie still might, but they don't. They're just meant for the viewer to fill in him herself, what's kind of happening in the picture. They're wonderful. Anyway, all of his pictures, even though they're all sort of separate projects, look like they could fit into a single movie. The sensibility is that in common. And this is true for, you know, musicians, etc. They sound like themselves. So why do you sound like yourself? Why do you paint like yourself? Where does one get that individual imprint or sensibility? And this is a question I asked everybody. And of course, nobody can answer that question. It's like where does personality come from? You can trace it a little bit you can you've certain

Personality tics that are like your parents or something like that, but fundamentally these things are mysteries So I'm both more informed and more Intrigued by the mysterious aspect of all this After the break I'll ask Adam Moss about his own creative process, putting together the iconic 911 edition of the New York Times Magazine. I'd like to tell you about a podcast called Higher Ed Spotlight, hosted by veteran journalist and higher education policy expert, Ben Woldawski. In each episode, Ben engages the brilliant minds of the people

shaping the future of academia. It's now in its third season, which features guests such as New York Times bestselling author, Ethan Mollick, and the vice chancellor of Australian National University, Genevieve Bell. Whether you're an academic, student, parent, or policymaker, if you care about higher education, this show is for you. It's sponsored by Chegg's Center for Digital Learning. Subscribe to Higher Ed Spotlight anywhere you get podcasts. Let's see if this works. I want to ask you about one of your own masterpieces.

Okay. This is a deep cut, but I've been following, I mean, I worked in magazines until, until I had to work in Substack. And one of the most extraordinary moments in your career was the 9-1-1 issue of the New York Times Magazine. You've been back at the Times for a couple of years, running the magazine,

trying to find your own style with a newspaper magazine insert. Suddenly a chunk of lower Manhattan falls down and you've got about a 10 day lead time before your issue is going to come out. Right. And you don't, you have no idea what the future is going to look like.

And to some extent that issue of the magazine was about that. Do you remember that moment? Do you remember? Oh my God, yes. So 9-11 was a Tuesday and the magazine closes on a Friday and that Friday is for the following sun for the not the immediate Sunday but the following Sunday 10-day lead time and we had you know it's Tuesday we had the whole issue planned everything was

I wouldn't say nearly done but it was certainly very much in motion. And we got to the office with great difficulty, of course, because it was 9-11. And then while we were at the office, we saw the second tower fall. And it began to occur to me that everything that we were doing had to be jettisoned and that we had essentially several hours to figure out what we could make that would last that would say something about what we had just experienced and what we were going to experience um that could just sit there for 10 days and not be useless. And we gathered everyone together. And what we realized was that that day itself was of such enormous historical interest and was so unlike any other day that anyone had ever experienced that we would concentrate on the day. So we did an issue called Remains of the Day.

And, you know, if a journalist is worth anything, they want to write about what is important or what is significant or rich or moves them unusually. And so our entire world of contributors was extremely eager to join in this project, as well as some extraordinary photography that Kathy Ryan, who was the photo director of artists that they were trying to raise money and get permission to beam two towers of light into the sky where the world trade towers had fallen we put this all into an issue in 48 72 hours um then we liked what we had done. It was really kind of extraordinary to us inside. And this is, you know, 2001. So this was a very uncommon thing. But we went, the Times did have a warning website.

And we said, look, what if we put this up right now as a digital issue? So that as soon as we were finished with it, we were able to publish it. it's a digital issue so that as soon as we were finished with it we were able to publish it and it was fine with us to scoop the physical version of the thing that would appear 10 days later and we did and that was obviously a first and you know to this day it's still one of the most satisfying creative experiences as a magazine maker, I can imagine. And, you know, the fact that we were able to do it in 72 hours was kind of shocking in retrospect, it was like much more complex issue than the things we had taken months and months and months to do before. But you know, it was largely because of the adrenaline of the moment. And because we had so much practice,

you know, as a as magazine makers you just week after week after week you make practice and then and just to bring it back to the themes of the book now I mean I'm happy to talk all you want about magazines I love magazines but so much of what you're able to do has to do with what you have previously done and what is in your bones and what is in your experience and um and And that's why all these people in the book, for the most part, they started making things very early and they had certain skills and habits that were ingrained very early in the same way as an athlete. Athlete has body memory, training is really important. In almost all of these cases, their training as artists were very

important as well. You also clearly have a soft spot for collaborative creation i mean yeah the whatever the moment the magic is a secret locked up in someone's head but they've also got to get a play on or they've got to get an issue out or they've got to have something on tv next tuesday that's an interesting dynamic too well there's two different issues, just maybe worth untangling just a bit. So one of them is, yes, the group. There's a chapter about David Simon who made The Wire in which someone describes, you know, David Simon really creatively got off on the bounce, this phrase, the bounce, which is basically, you know, creative ricochet, the way one idea passes to another and gets better and better and better, which is basically, you know, creative ricochet, the way one idea passes to another and

gets better and better and better, which I recognize very, very much from my own career, and which I have a tremendous amount of affection for. Although most of the people in the book made work by themselves, you know, novelists and playwrights and painters and songwriters, even at some crucial point, they're by themselves in a room, even if later they go into a studio with producers and musicians, etc. So that's one aspect. And the other aspect is the deadline. You know, the constraint of having to make something for something that almost scary obstacle of yikes, I have to let it go by Tuesday, was really very, very common that people are very, very moved and do their best work often

when there is a cutoff, when there is constraints. Just back to Tony Kushner for a second. Constraints of all kinds. When he was writing Angels in America, which of course is a play, it's kind of a, call it a gay play. It was commissioned by the the eureka theater company

who had a standing company they had to employ and there were just four straight actors so he had to actually write the play and to construct the play in a way that these four actors made sense as the actors playing them and that you know wasn't just a a kind of practical solution it became a kind of creative impetus because the play was written, there were characters written because of these four specific individuals. So constraint as a rule proves to be very, very significant.

There's a hilarious and beautiful moment in that chapter when he and Oscar Eustace, the head of the company, get the check from the National Endowment of the Arts. Right. And he looks at the check and it's got an American flag or an eagle, you know, watermark on it. And he says, well, I guess the American people want me to write a play,

so it better be something big. Right, right, right. That's great. It's always kind of amazing where we get our inputs from. Yeah. Because a hell of a lot of people cash that check without really looking at it. Although really, one of the, you know, certainly universal aspects of artists is that they pay attention. They just see things that just go by very quickly for most people.

One of the things I like about this book is that it doesn't really work as a transactional how-to book. I mean, I'm going to press it from now into the end of the day into the hands of people who are struggling with the creative dilemma, but it doesn't sit well on the self-improvement shelf. No, no, no. It's not a YouTube video. That's for sure. Yeah. Do you have any desire to do a sequel? Would a second installment make any sense? It could.

I'm going to try. I want to do it. But I could see there was a long and pretty hilarious conversation I had with Warren Beatty. This was also in Footnote. I was trying to get him to participate and talk about the making of Shampoo. It's one of my favorite movies. And also a movie that I happened to know had gone through a lot of creative turmoil

on its way to being. And I thought that was interesting. I wanted to explore it. And he was like, he was like talking to me over the course of, uh, two, two and a half hour phone calls almost,

I think. And I must've said three words in those. There was just one long monologue. And, and, and after the first one, I really thought he was going to do this by the second. It was clear. He didn't want to do this.

And he was kind of disputing the entire point of the book which was to be working about talking about the solo act of creative making which he thought was never happened and he gave a long long story that he had a conversation with Stanley Kubrick which was you have to have an on a film set, which of course is the experience he knows best, you have to have at least one argument a day. And then of course, that was a big theme of the David Simon chapter two was arguing. And I think if I was to do a sequel, or someone else should do this book, it would be about do a sequel or someone else should do this book it would be about making creative work in a group making creative work in an institution or it would be about argument and compromise and

one person spurring the other on two things but it would be about the interconnectivity of creative work which is not really something this the that my book much gets into. My book is very interested in the inner dialogue as opposed to the outer dialogue. That aspect of working in a company is a little iconoclastic because the mythology of art has so much to do with the tortured soul. Yeah. And yet so much of the manifestation of it is social. Yeah.

Hey, you've done a lot of things in your career. How does it feel to have a book out? Weird. It's very weird. I mean, at the making of a book itself, it really is more the weird part, which is that you're, like, you're returning to certain themes,

but you're in a room by yourself for so long. And I'm not used to that. I'm just used to playing with other people. And I really enjoy that. So the making of the thing by myself was torture, really. I mean, I really enjoyed the, really loved the interactions with artists. Loved that.

And I also really loved, well, you'll understand this as a magazine person. I really loved the making of the book. The working with the designers and the, you know, the project manager I had and getting the images to play with the text and to try to do something maybe interesting with the book form that was not something that people had ordinarily done. But in between that was the writing. And I found it maddening and scary. And I had to really teach myself how to write because I had some terrible ideas about how to write and how to be a writer when I first started to write the thing. So it was a very lonely experience. And now the great thing about publishing a book is that it's public facing. And so, you know, the book's out there. And as a

consequence, I've had a gazillion conversations with people about what they're responding to in the book. And actually, they're constantly surprising me. And, you know, they love this chapter, X chapter, because of this reason and that reason. It reminds them of this. I love that conversation. And that sense of the book being in people's lives and in their minds is deeply satisfying. It's really nice. It's just also fun.

I love holding the book. I mean, there's something about making something. I mean, I always loved holding a magazine. I always loved that, you know, back in the grand days of print, when you could hold the physical object of a magazine, it was deeply satisfying. But a book's even more, because it's meant to last. I love this cloth cover. I love feeling the texture. I love all that stuff that I'm sure most people wouldn't care about, but I love.

It deals with a lot of stuff that has been created only in the last few years, but the artifact, the book itself, when I saw photos of it and then when I picked it up, it feels like a really cool book that you discover on someone's bookshelf that's been around since the seventies. You know, it's funny because I did part of the book in Yaddo, the Writers and Artists Retreat. Do you know what that is? And they have a library.

And, you know, as I was writing the book, I went into the library and I thought, wow, you know, what I really want is 50 years from now somebody to be kind of walking in this room and they just see it on the shelf and they, you know, maybe never have heard of it. And they take it down and they just see it on the shelf and they, you know, maybe never heard of it and they take it down and they pour over and maybe, maybe it means something to them, I hope. But in any case, they, you know, they enjoy the discovery of this kind of long lost thing. And I liked that idea.

Adam Moss, it was a great pleasure to catch up to you and to talk about creativity. The name of the book is The Work of Art and it's everywhere. And I look forward to seeing what you come up with next. Thank you so much. Really enjoyed it. Thank you. Thanks for listening to The Paul Wells Show. The Paul Wells Show is produced by Antica in partnership with the University of Toronto's Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy.

Our producer is Kevin Sexton. Our executive producers are Laura Reguerre and Stuart Cox. Our opening theme music is by Kevin Bright. And our closing theme music is by Andy Milne. Go to paulwells.substack.com to subscribe to my newsletter. You'll also get a premium version of this show with bonus content. We'll be back next Wednesday. Thank you.