NORA SMITH
Staff Writer
Author Stephanie Elizondo Griest gave up furniture, a car and even a place to live to pursue art. Yet, knowing she was put on this earth to do one thing, nothing else truly mattered as much as writing did.
Was it worth it, though?
“If [art] is your love and your passion, I do believe it is worth it to pursue it, at least try to pursue it,” Griest said. “Because it does prepare you for uncertainty, and what are we entering right now but the ultimate uncertainty?”
Although Griest has now written six books and is currently the Bowman and Gray distinguished professor of creative nonfiction at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, she didn’t always know if this pursuit was worth it.
“If I could go back to my younger self … I would have tried to find some way to tell her and wish she would have believed — which that’s a hard thing — not to stress so much,” Griest said. “Because I was so stressed about making it work financially that it compromised the pleasure of it. Because the stress was so profound.”
Griest said these financial challenges for artists have only gotten worse, and she even compared wanting to pursue writing to wanting to be an astronaut today.
“It’s really, really hard to get the career going,” Griest said. “Unfortunately, it was so hard when I did it in the early 2000s, and it is, without question, harder now. I really feel for my students, because it is instrumentally harder than what was impossible when I was their age.”
At an earlier point in her life, Griest realized that she could either create art or pay rent, but it was certainly impossible to do both.
“Eventually, having all my books in milk crates got a little depressing,” Griest said. “I either need to do one thing or another; I either need to get a job where I can have something less than a spartan existence, or I can continue doing the work that I was completely convinced that I was put on the planet to do, which is write. So, I decided to do the latter.”
Griest packed up her milk crates full of books and placed them in storage before she set out for what became a long period of living at artist’s residences and on book tours.
“As I was doing this, I was encountering other people, other women who were making similar sorts of sacrifices,” Griest said. “Women who were getting to be middle-aged, who were not getting married, not having kids. They were doing everything in the hopes and dreams that someday, their art would be sustainable.”
So, Griest decided to write a book about it.
In Art Above Everything: One Woman’s Global Exploration of the Joys and Torments of a Creative Life, she writes of traveling to 10 nations and meeting female artists of all sorts. These artists, from poets and painters to dancers and musicians, had done what she had and dedicated their lives to creating art; each woman said the pursuit is indeed worth it.
At 10:45 a.m. today in the Amphitheater, Griest will deliver a lecture in conjunction with Week Five’s “Art and Artists Against the Odds.”
“I wanted to interview someone from all the regions of the world,” Griest said. “I wanted to interview someone from all of the major art forms of the world. I wanted to interview someone from all of the major religions, all of the basic linguistic groups … I really wanted to talk to someone representing as many possible perspectives as I could.”
One of Griest’s discoveries while writing her book was that it is significantly more difficult to pursue art in the United States. For example, she met women in Iceland who are paid minimum wage to write. Meanwhile, when Griest’s first book was published, after spending ten years writing it, she received $10,000, a good percentage of which would go toward the agent and most of which would be distributed to Griest slowly over time.
“The amount of money was just pennies — probably not actually even a penny on the hour if I were to total all the hours,” Griest said. “How do you make that work, right? It’s only people that come into this with wealth or marry wealth that can actually continue the life as a writer.”
As Griest got into her mid-30s, she realized she was drowning in utter doubt. Then, the 2008 recession hit, causing her to cancel all book tours. In 2017, she was diagnosed with cancer, resulting in an unimaginable battle along with another stream of cancellations and in 2022, the COVID-19 pandemic once again had her scratching out all book tour events on her calendar.
“That’s why you have to do it for love,” Griest said.
Through Art Above Everything, Griest said she hopes she can help a variety of audiences in numerous ways. Maybe middle-aged women, she said, who had given up everything for their art and are now second-guessing themselves, can read her book and know that it is worth it. Or maybe people who didn’t end up pursuing art like they had wanted can realize it’s never too late to begin that journey.
“If you don’t really give yourself another option, if there is no plan B, you will go further than one can imagine, but not without an exceptional amount of suffering,” Griest said. “So, it’s really just a question of how bad do you want it? And it has to be all-consuming want and desire.”
