A reassuring guide for nurturing creativity.
Art for healing and self-discovery.
In 11 essays, Black reflects on the power of creativity for enrichment, help in facing loss and grief, and finding happiness. Drawing on her own experiences as a writer and teacher, she aims to encourage readers to become “generous, generative, alert, curious, complicated, and—especially—joyful.” Although she stresses the value of all creative work, she focuses most on narrative craft, particularly memoir. “Whatever story within you wanting to be told is valuable,” she writes. Her own story, which she has shared in previous memoirs, has been marked by loss: most significantly, of her leg, when she was a child, causing her to wear a prosthesis; and of her son, Ronan, who died of Tay-Sachs disease when he was 2. While she was caring for Ronan, she found she had only 10-minute blocks in which to write. But she used them with determination, generating words and images without overthinking. She calls the process “Rocket Writing,” and recommends it to writers who feel stuck. Another strategy she suggests is asking, “If I had to tell my life story in five moments, what would they be?” An appendix offers additional exercises and strategies for building and maintaining creative practice. Always circling back to creativity, Black reflects on friendship, faith, empathy, and superheroes. A visit to a pawnshop awakens her to the stories inherent in objects. A visit to a Roman crypt underscores the importance of art in the face of death. Creating art, she asserts, can help us “pass through those tight spaces where we feel lost; stories create the nets that catch us.” And art can foster connection, springing “out of loneliness and despair as a gift for someone—a light in the tunnel for someone who needs it.”
A reassuring guide for nurturing creativity.Pub Date: today
ISBN: 9781640096899
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: March 9, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2026
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
An ebullient nature lover’s paean to birds.
A charming bird journey with the bestselling author.
In his introduction to Tan’s “nature journal,” David Allen Sibley, the acclaimed ornithologist, nails the spirit of this book: a “collection of delightfully quirky, thoughtful, and personal observations of birds in sketches and words.” For years, Tan has looked out on her California backyard “paradise”—oaks, periwinkle vines, birch, Japanese maple, fuchsia shrubs—observing more than 60 species of birds, and she fashions her findings into delightful and approachable journal excerpts, accompanied by her gorgeous color sketches. As the entries—“a record of my life”—move along, the author becomes more adept at identifying and capturing them with words and pencils. Her first entry is September 16, 2017: Shortly after putting up hummingbird feeders, one of the tiny, delicate creatures landed on her hand and fed. “We have a relationship,” she writes. “I am in love.” By August 2018, her backyard “has become a menagerie of fledglings…all learning to fly.” Day by day, she has continued to learn more about the birds, their activities, and how she should relate to them; she also admits mistakes when they occur. In December 2018, she was excited to observe a Townsend’s Warbler—“Omigod! It’s looking at me. Displeased expression.” Battling pesky squirrels, Tan deployed Hot Pepper Suet to keep them away, and she deterred crows by hanging a fake one upside down. The author also declared war on outdoor cats when she learned they kill more than 1 billion birds per year. In May 2019, she notes that she spends $250 per month on beetle larvae. In June 2019, she confesses “spending more hours a day staring at birds than writing. How can I not?” Her last entry, on December 15, 2022, celebrates when an eating bird pauses, “looks and acknowledges I am there.”
An ebullient nature lover’s paean to birds.Pub Date: April 23, 2024
ISBN: 9780593536131
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2024
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