Editorial
Nostos is a weekly newsletter about the intersection of art and life. Editor's Notes is a regular column introducing issues, themes, and frameworks from a personal perspective.
Sometimes it happens: A couple years back I had a really hard year. I had to dig deep to find the drive to get up every day and survive it. I had to learn a lot to rebuild a foundation of what it could feel like to stay alive. Once I had the pillars in place—health, nature, connection, work—I looked around and took stock of the things I’ve done with my life, the projects, the research, the friendships, the communities, and realized that the thing I was proudest of was a little constellation of being, a pocket-sized device for turning an “I” into a “we.”
I made a home where there was none.
My friends and I, my daughter and our children, we live a pretty blessed life. We spend a lot of time in beautiful environments looking at art and talking about culture with brilliant people. I look around sometimes at the little world that we live in, surrounded by artists and writers and curators and designers and musicians and other creative people who have chosen to make homes in unlikely places and in compromised scenarios, balanced between private life and public practice, and see so many different ways of being in the world. I see so much to learn from all of them, things that I might hope to incorporate into my own life (at home, out in the world, and in the relationship between the two), and paths that I hope might somehow intersect with my own.
Nostos refers to the long road home—to the back half of the hero’s journey. It’s a recognition that there is no such thing as making it home; only making home. Never easy, never automatic. It’s a celebration of all of the ways that we can come together through or despite the traditions of kinship that we inherit, digest, and reconfigure. There is a damaging mythology of the artist that says one must choose between a life devoted to creativity and a life shared with anything or anyone else. I want to share stories of how commitment to the practice and commitment to the community can live alongside one another, and how they can sometimes be one and the same.
This will be a place to share stories of making home. I am reaching out to friends and friends of friends, creative people who choose to make homes in multicultural environments, people with unique configurations of chosen families and other intentional networks, people who operate family businesses and multi-generational studios, people who cultivate little cultural laboratories, and people who just generally do home life differently, blending work and play and sharing themselves with the world.
Nostos is a newsletter about the intersection of art and life, a place to share stories about how creative people think about their work and its relationship to everything else. This is about building creative families. We’re living the cultural moment of the family, and we want to make it the moment of the cultural family. We want to blur the boundaries between family and friends. Families can and should be safe harbors for wild creativity, little cultural laboratories where mistakes are encouraged and successes wildly celebrated. We want to expand the comfort zone of the family into the wide world beyond.
Many of us have kids and work in creative fields. We belong to a generation doing family differently, mixing work and play and letting our children see us as whole people, and watching them grow into the same. All of us want to share what it feels like to share culture across our family and friends. Family grows by reaching outward.
Over the next few weeks, publishing on Wednesdays, I’ll be sharing a personal essay on the lives and loves of some of the artists and writers who have given me the courage and inspiration to begin this work. In addition to personal essays, Nostos will include edited conversations with creative people and short takes on things happening in our culture.
For now, I borrow my sign-off from Cavafy:
As you set out for Ithaka,
hope your road is a long one,
full of adventure, full of discovery.
May your road home be a long one.