On My 'To Do' List: Work and Play

In which I return from a summer hiatus with notes on a few projects.

A weird thing happened over the last year, a realization that dawned on me shortly after launching this Substack newsletter: There’s no longer any objective, meaningful distinction in my life between work and play.

Like the confluence of autumn and art as a marketing tool (you’ve seen it, the “Fall Arts!” headlines around this time of year in what’s left of newspapers) the “work” and “play” that consumes my waking hours have more or less fused. Other words and phrases that describe the cessation of paid labor — “relaxing,” “going on vacation,” and “taking a break”— don’t mean what they used to.

As a product of the 20th century 9-to-5 ethos in which one “goes to work” in a building owned by someone who pays me for what I produce, I still find this strange. Mostly, it feels like I’m getting away with something. Other times, such as when I check how many subscribers I’m up to here or when I do my taxes, it feels like I’m deluding myself.

Art, broadly defined, is among the most important things humans do, and this vast realm is both sufficiently fascinating (and inter-disciplinary) to me that my natural instinct is to engage with it, one way or another, pretty much all the time: By doing it (performing in or directing a play), “using” it — i.e., watching a film, listening to music, or reading a novel or poem—and/or studying or investigating it, either out of some “personal” interest and/or with the intention of reporting or commenting on it for pay.

The latter is the “work,” but it’s not hard to see where the lines get blurry.

For example: In the last week I’ve been reading the Brothers Grimm folk and fairy tales in the evening. Fairy/folk literature is a fascinating topic, and the reason I’ve been wallowing in it is because on Thursday I’ll join around 50 others from around the world for a 5-week online class on fairy tales, taught by Weird Studies co-host and arts theorist J.F. Martel. It’s been years since I’ve read those stories, so I wanted to get reacquainted.

It’s a non-credit course, but there will be “work” to do at home, though it will hardly feel like the homework my 15-year old high school student complains about. Spending time with these stories is relaxing and fun, even when they are frightful.

So, pop quiz: Is this activity: 1) School/education, 2) Play/recreation, or 3) Work?

The correct answer is all of the above—with play loosely defined as the pursuit of enthusiasms.

At some point, I’m certain, the experience and material covered there will show up, somehow, somewhere, in my work. Perhaps as a full-length essay here on Substack, or maybe just embodied in a single paragraph or sentence in one. Maybe it will inspire a question I put to an artist in an interview for a paid assignment a few months from now. Certainly, it will inform my experience next summer when my family and I see the Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s production of Into the Woods. I may write about that here, or report on it for Oregon ArtsWatch, or possibly some other outlet I don’t even know about right now.

Or perhaps my immersion in fairy tales will afford some insight that informs my next involvement with a theatrical production—a purely “for fun” activity that’s both 1) A tremendous amount of work for which I’m not paid (the theater is a non-profit), and 2) Possibly a topic I’ll write about for my “work.”

See? It’s complicated.

So with that as a preface, here’s a snapshot of some of things I’m “working” on as we head into fall:

THEATER — I can finally announce this! I will direct a production of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? here in McMinnville in October 2025. So in addition to continuously wading through the text, I’m also reading Woof’s novel Orlando (which is fascinating and a lot of fun … she was SO ahead of her time!), and Notes on Directing, by Frank Hauser and Russel Reich. During walks, I’ll sometimes listen to an unexpurgated recording of the original 1962 Broadway production, which is, amazingly, available on Apple Music. On deck is Philip Gefter’s book Cocktails with George and Martha, published earlier this year to great reviews.

FAIRY TALES - Includes perusing The Complete First Edition of the Original Folk & Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm, translated by Jack Zipes—who was apparently the young lad, I recently learned, Albert Einstein told to “read fairy tales” if he wanted to be as smart as him. Also, Robert Kirk’s The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns and Fairies, and J.R.R. Tolkien’s 1947 essay On Fairy-Stories (that one is a re-read for me).

POETRY - My conversation with Portland poet Valerie Witte for Oregon ArtsWatch earlier this year was so satisfying for both of us that we’re hoping to reconnect when her next book is published, with the intention of doing something on it here. So I’ll occasionally dip into a couple of her previous collections, The Grass Is Greener When the Sun Is Yellow and A Game of Correspondence, while also reading a galley copy of the forthcoming book on my iPad. I also recently discovered a local author whose poetry and personal background struck me as the perfect occasion for a conversation about the links between art, spirituality and religion. I reached out, and she’s game. So that’s simmering on a back burner …

FOLK ART — Later in September, the Hallie Ford Museum of Art in Salem, which has become one of my favorite stomping grounds, will unveil its final big exhibition of the year: Indie Folk: New Art and Sounds from the Pacific Northwest, curated by Melissa E. Feldman. To get acclimated, I’ve been grazing in Outsider Art from the World of Art series, by Colin Rhodes, and—though the connection is less evident—Lisa Slominksi’s Nonconformers: A New History of Self-Taught Artists.

TREES — The appearance of Richard Powers’ novel The Overstory on the New York Times list Sunday of The 100 Best Books of the 21st Century reminded me that I’ve had this book sitting on my shelf unread for years now, despite friends urging me to read it. So I’m finally reading it. This is “pleasure” reading for sure … but in the back of my mind I also know of a tree-centric art exhibition I’ll probably report on next year. And this syncs up nicely with that.

COSMOLOGY — My work on the Dennis Evans retrospective exhibition at the Hallie Ford Museum of Art for ArtsWatch this summer may lead to a collaborative project with the Seattle artist in 2025: Given that the exclusive focus of his work (“for the rest of my life,” he told me this summer) is cosmology, I’m doing a self-directed slapdash course on the topic. Hopefully this will convince me that it is, in fact, impossible for the CERN in Switzerland to create a black hole that devours us all.

ART AND WINE — A few years ago I picked up Jonathan Nossiter’s book Cultural Insurrection: A Manifesto for the Arts, Agriculture and Natural Wine. I started it, and then got distracted. I’ve circled back to it because the time is right: I’m working on a story about a local winery that employs artists. The conflation of art and wine in the book’s subtitle just strongly suggests this book may be useful, though the jury is still out on that. It’s quite good, though I’ve not yet arrived at the point where I see how the dots are connected. In the meantime, of course, there’s also a couple more interviews and the actual writing of it. That piece will appear at ArtsWatch later this month.

PURELY FOR “FUN” — My “leisure time” recently has been spent with Amazon’s The Rings of Power, muddling through my 46-year-old paperback copy of Robert Foster’s The Complete Guide to Middle Earth to determine how much of it is “canon,” and reading short stories from two anthologies: The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories, and Collected Fictions by Jorge Luis Borges.

Some of my favorites from those last two: Clive Barker’s In the Hills, the Cities (I re-read this bizarre nightmare of a story every few years, the imagery and the very idea of it blows my mind every time), Thomas Ligotti’s The Town Manager, and (by Borges) A Survey of the Works of Herbert Quinn, which reminded me of Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher. It’s not a stretch to say that virtually any of the stories by the fabulist Borges could justifiably have appeared in the Weird anthology—and, in fact, one is: Alpeh, first published in 1945.

So that’s what I’m up to. What are you reading? Watching? Listening to?