Brian Laird on WNYC. And to close the show, we're turning now to a new book, and we're going to have another call in,

because the new book is called The Long Run by Stacey DeRasmo.

In it, she seeks to answer a tough question.

How do artists manage to keep making art over a long period of time?

What does it take to have a decades-long career as a creative or just be productive for decades?

What's the secret ingredient?

It probably doesn't come as a surprise that there no one secret ingredient according to the book, but it does offer insight

in too many different paths an artist's life can take and what we can learn from those paths

if we are artists trying to keep creating. So listeners, you can answer that question right off

the bat. If you're an artist who's had a long career in any creative field, what has enabled

you to continue making whatever your art is? 212-433, WNYC, 212, 433, 9692. Some of you know that Stacey DeRasmo herself is a creative, a writer who has written

novels, including a seahorse year, the sky below, and T, and it was her own complex creative journey that prompted the question many years ago

about how artists managed to keep going. Again, the book is called The Long Run. Comes out today.

Stacey, congratulations. Thanks for joining us for this. Thank you so much for having me.

You want to tell us more about what inspired the topic?

Because you're known for your novelist. This is a nonfiction book. Sure. I had published three

novels by 2009, 2010. And I started to think about, well, you know, sort of how do we keep doing this?

What happens?

We're very good at talking about the beginning of careers and also the kind of end of careers,

but all this long period, which is one's life in art, we don't talk about as much.

And I was very curious.

And so I started thinking about it and I wrote an essay about it.

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