Austin Kleon

Hey y’all, Here are 10 things I thought were worth sharing this week: Last weekend I found myself printing 100 snails for a little project I’m working on: You can see how I make these prints in my unofficial guide to block printing. I take a lot of joy in the repetition of this kind of comfort work. It does something to me emotionally — I think, ”Let’s do another one… until we’re dead!” I’ve made the snail the mascot for Don’t Call It Art because it took so long for me to get the book just right.

A collage made out of things people mailed me, 2020 Hey y’all, Groucho Marx said there’s no money in answering letters, but I like answering them anyway. “What does a seed look like?” is a little mini-zine I made back in 2021: You can download it here: What Does A Seed Look Like Zine 2.08MB ∙ PDF file And here’s a video of how to make it: “Sleep, creep, leap” is one of my favorite 7 gardening metaphors for creative work.

Hey y’all, Here are 10 things I thought were worth sharing this week: “One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one's work is terribly important.” How to get some cosmic perspective. (My favorite comment: “This post inspired me put down my phone and immediately go for a walk with my dog.”) “Get out now. Not just outside, but beyond the trap of the programmed electronic age so gently closing around so many people at the end of our century.

“One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one's work is terribly important.” —Bertrand Russell Hey y’all, In Judd Apatow’s Sick in the Head: Conversations About Life and Comedy, Jerry Seinfeld explains why he pinned photos from the Hubble Space Telescope up on the wall in the Seinfeld writing room. “It would calm me when I would start to think that what I was doing was important,” Seinfeld said.

Hey y’all, Next Wednesday (4/22) here in Austin, Texas I’m interviewing Hrishikesh Hirway (host of my favorite podcast Song Exploder) onstage as part of the release show for his new album. Details here. Here are 10 other things I thought were worth sharing this week: My 11-year-old’s take on crazy sock day feels deeply profound to me and relevant to contemporary life in ways I don’t want to ruin with explanation.

Hey y’all, Tim Kreider is a writer, cartoonist, and author of the essay collections We Learn Nothing and I Wrote This Book Because I Love You. I love his work and I have to restrain myself from linking to The Loaf, with Tim Kreider every time he posts a new essay there. This typewriter interview was conducted via the magic of the United States Postal Service.

Hey y’all, Let’s get right to it: I had a ton of fun over the past couple of weeks making a big batch of bonus goodies for folks who pre-order my next book, Don’t Call It Art: 10 Ways to Create Like a Kid Again. All you have to do to get them is pre-order the book wherever you like to buy books… …then take a photo or screenshot of your receipt and fill out the form on this page.

Listen to the new mixtape on Spotify, Apple Music, or YouTube Hey y’all, I had a musical Easter weekend. We watched Wayne’s World for pizza night on Friday, my band practiced for 4 hours on Saturday, and I spent most of Sunday afternoon making a new mixtape: Listen to the new mixtape on Spotify, Apple Music, or YouTube April is often a melancholy month for me.

“Concentrate,” collage, 2002 (from Collage Problems) Hey y’all, Putting down my Rubik’s Cube to type. Here are 10 things I thought were worth sharing this week: “Thoreau was saying: if you’re beginning to die within, take measures right now. There must be some cabin in the woods1 within you. There must be some space where you can regenerate yourself and remember what is most essential to you.” That’s writer Pico Iyer, a talking head in the Ken Burns-produced PBS documentary Henry David Thoreau.

Hey y’all, I’ve been teaching my teenager how to solve a 3x3 Rubik’s Cube, layer by layer. Once we got to the third layer, I realized I solve it pretty much by muscle memory, so I had to refer to my notes: What surprised me looking up these notes wasn’t the notes themselves, but where they were in my diary. The date: February 1, 2020. The narrative I’d been telling myself for years was that solving a Rubik’s Cube was one of the hobbies I picked up during the pandemic.