Creative, Not Famous: The Small Potato Manifesto

I’m so thrilled to announce that I am among the Little Engines That Could whom Ayun Halliday interviewed for her great new book Creative, Not Famous: The Small Potato Manifesto, from Microcosm Publishing.

Don’t let the title fool you — some estimable folks contributed to this tome: not just Ayun (co-founder of Theater for the Apes and curator of Necromancers of the Public Domain) and her husband, Urinetown‘s Greg Kotis, but also lot of folks I’ve worked and collaborated with like Sabrina Chap, Bob Laine, and Ellia Bisker of Charming Disaster, as well as folks I know by reputation like Todd Alcott, Winter Miller, and Nick Balaban, and about a dozen others. It’s a book about artists who’ve struggled for decades, and have loads of accomplishments, but aren’t necessarily household names (yet) or anywhere near it. I’m no spring chicken, but I always take heart when I meet the octogenarian poets and painters and actors who do what they do and go their own way and say “To hell with them that don’t like it”. Don’t get me wrong: as Loudon Wainwright III sings “Fame and wealth, that’s what I’m after”. But they’re not the primary goal, and (sh!) not even a conditional outcome for my doing what I do. Birds do it, bees do it. No, not fall in love, silly — make art. For its own sake. I look forward to reading what the other folks in the book say. I reckon there’ll be insight and inspiration, and not just because that’s what it says on the cover, but because I know Ayun Halliday. Anyway, I just got my copy. To get yourn, go here.