If you are familiar with the bestselling novel, The Time Travelers Wife, then you are familiar with this episode’s guest. Artist and author Audrey Niffenegger has a perspective on our creative selves, practices, and minds; all of the things Eager To Know listeners love to hear about.
Music Credit: Rooftop Garden by Dee Yan-Key
Experience 086 Audrey Niffenegger on:
Additional Information:
Audrey https://www.audreyniffenegger.com
Eddie Campbell https://www.eddiecampbelldammit.com
Upcoming HBO Time Traveler’s Wife Series https://www.hbo.com/the-time-travelers-wife
Golem Girl https://www.amazon.com/Golem-Girl-Memoir-Riva-Lehrer/dp/1984820303
Daily Rituals https://www.amazon.com/Daily-Rituals-How-Artists-Work/dp/0307273601
Harley Clarke https://www.cityofevanston.org/about-evanston/arts-and-culture/harley-clarke-mansion
Artists Bookhouse https://artistsbookhouse.org
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Show Transcript
Ricky McEachern (00:02):
This episode's guest is an artist and author. If you're familiar with the bestselling novel, the Time Traveler's wife, then you are familiar with her work. Audrey Niffenegger has a perspective on our creative selves, creative practices in our creative minds. All of the things eager to know listeners love to hear about our episode begins with us talking about creativity in children.
Audrey Niffenegger (00:54):
There are children who are obviously on a path to somewhere, and those are the children that get kind of noticed and praised. What's always interesting to me are not the people who are a slam dunk, who are just so obviously destined for some kind of creative greatness, but the people who are not so obvious and maybe what their special genius is, it's kind of hidden. And then somehow they get there. Anyway, those, those people I have a special soft spot for. Do
Ricky McEachern (01:24):
You think that is something that eventually will happen to most people if they just stay with something and not get discouraged and are consistent and persistent?
Audrey Niffenegger (01:38):
I don't think necessarily staying with a thing is the key. The key is a sensitivity to asking the right questions. You know, like people say, oh, well, you know, tell me about how you had this idea for, you know, fill in the blank, a novel, whatever, a book. And it's not so much the idea like ideas or a diamond doesn't. I mean, everybody has ideas all day, every day, ideas, ideas, big whoop. The thing that's interesting is, okay, you've got the idea. How do you develop it? You know? Cause cause like I say, ideas are like air, for example, the idea for the time Traveler's wife was the title. I was sitting at my drawing board. I was drawing, which has, we all know as a totally different thing happening in your head. It's not verbal at all. And this phrase popped into my head. So I wrote it on the paper, you know, on the drawing table immediately thought, oh well, that's kind of interesting.
Audrey Niffenegger (02:35):
So you've got a time traveler and you've got a wife and who are these people? And what's it like to be the wife? Cause obviously that's not quite as active as being the time traveler and you know, what are their names? What does she do for a living? What does he do for a living for that matter since he's probably not getting paid to time travel and on and on and on. It's the questions that you feed idea with. And every time you answer one of these questions, it shuts down one whole batch of possibilities and opens up something else. And as you keep doing that, and if you do it for long enough years, you eventually end up with a book, an opera painting, whatever it is.
Ricky McEachern (03:16):
When were you aware that you were doing that? Part
Audrey Niffenegger (03:18):
Of going to art school is sitting through innumerable critiques. The critique process is like that. You know, why did you decide to do it this way? What about that way? What about this other way? What if you do it backwards? People who are really good at critiquing, they listened to what you're saying, you know, which is usually what you're trying to do. And then they look at what is in front of them. You know what they're getting from. What's actually there and they're trying to reconcile what you thought you were doing and what's actually happening to see if that matches at all. And if it didn't match, but in an interesting way, that's, we're talking about,
Ricky McEachern (03:57):
It's a way that you look at your life in general is asking, is approaching things with, uh, uh, questioning viewpoint.
Audrey Niffenegger (04:07):
Yes. Because I mean, I'm fairly deliberative about everything. So yeah, I think that knowing how it works and why I'm doing it and even if I have to come to that understanding after the fact, I mean, I don't necessarily know why I'm doing something every minute of every day, but to be able to take it apart later and go, oh yeah, I see I get it. You know, I'm not somebody who's ever been in therapy, although maybe that would be interesting. But thinking about what I understand to be the process of therapy, you know, to me, it sounds as though what people do is they show up to therapy and get asked questions. How can questions fix their life? You know, how can you understand through questioning? I think it's a big part of everybody's process. And I think most people don't stop and think about, you know, the, the therapeutic and artistic potential of questions. But
Ricky McEachern (05:06):
This is very interesting because obviously being someone that hosts a podcast, I am constantly asking questions and I am the name of my podcast is eager to know. So I'm curious, however, I don't apply that in my creativity. I'm not aware of it. And I am constantly coming up with crazy creative ideas that I share with my friends. Some of them happen, some of them don't happen, but none of them are fueled or unpacked by questions. It's like it's coming from inside and it's sort of like being generated. So that's such an interesting way of approaching it. So thank you so much for, for sharing that.
Audrey Niffenegger (05:47):
Well, hopefully it doesn't stop you in your tracks. Some people occasionally the minute they start to verbalize to themselves in their heads, they start to kind of, you know, stand, still
Ricky McEachern (06:00):
Go back to childhood. Uh, specifically I know that that you started creating books when you were young, like six or something and it wasn't writing books, it was creating books. It, it seems like there's an aspect to your creativity that is tactile. Can you tell me about that?
Audrey Niffenegger (06:23):
My mom is a quilter and a textiles artist. And when I was a kid, what she was doing was she was sewing and she was making dolls. I could see that grown-ups make things. It just seemed really normal to equate what I was doing with what she was doing, which of course is nonsense. But you know, there's, there's a straight line from what I was doing to the kind of thing she was doing. I was really interested in books from the time I was way before I was able to read. And if you can't read the pictures or the interesting part, um, I mean your, your adult is going to read to you and that's interesting, but the book itself becomes sometimes a beloved object and powerful when it was really small. I just thought, well, I w I will make books. And of course I did this just by folding up pieces of paper and drawing in them. Uh, but of course, things haven't really changed that much. I still fold up pieces of paper and make books out of them.
Ricky McEachern (07:28):
So there's an element to the, the books that you're creating illustrations and picture books. I forgot the word that's that you're using illustrator illustrated novels. So that's another part where you are expanding from like traditional, just written novel.
Audrey Niffenegger (07:50):
Yeah. So, I mean, I do make novels that are just made out of words and I've got a few projects where it was just pictures, but mostly I'm interested in combining them. And when I was a kid, I thought I was going to grow up and be a book illustrator. Uh, then I realized that it was almost impossible to make a living doing that in less. You wanted to just do picture books for kids, which wasn't actually my main interest. Most of my stuff is actually sort of unsuitable for kids.
Ricky McEachern (08:26):
I've seen examples of your work and writing has been either transformed into a different format, like a movie, or there was a book that you did with your husband where he did the illustrations. What is that like for, to have your creative, creative stuff being transformed or being extended?
Audrey Niffenegger (08:52):
Uh, collaborating with my husband that he, Campbell was really nice because of course we live together. And so the story is an SS already existed. And we, I just sort of put everything in a big digital heap and said here, you know, you, you see what you think you can make something out of, you know, what is inspiring to you?
Ricky McEachern (09:16):
What was it like seeing your stories being brought to life in a different way? It, it reminded me of when I do a painting and then when I'm doing a show and somebody gives me what they think of it. And it makes me see oftentimes in a whole new way. Is it something, was it a similar process? Yes,
Audrey Niffenegger (09:37):
Because in many kisses, I hadn't, uh, described everything visually very intensively. So a lot of the stories have female protagonists. And of course, if you're writing the first person, you don't stand there intricately describing your own appearance. It's sort of funny. There's a, there's a cliche in bad writing where the protagonist catches sight of themselves in a mirror. And they say, oh, my mustache looks funny today or something when, you know, it's, it's hard to get somebody to do that naturally. And so I had left it a bit vague. And so Eddie got to create the physical appearance for a lot of these characters. And maybe we'd sit there and talk about it, but he would try something on and I'd be like, ah, no. Or yeah, he, he had some interesting experiences with it and tried out some things and he wanted to do a different style for each story.
Audrey Niffenegger (10:34):
So he was trying to sort of stretch out. I meanwhile, during that time was working on my novel. So I would come over every now and then and go, oh, wow. That looks amazing. So for me, it was incredibly painless, you know, came over to say, you know, yeah, keep going and do more of that. Um, having things adapted in other ways has been kind of all over the charts in terms of how involved I've been, how wonderful it's been or not so wonderful. Um, the, the thing that's going on right now is that time travelers wife's being adopted by Steven Moffett into a series for HBO. And I mean, I have very minimal involvement because I can't go anywhere and they're filming mostly in upstate New York. Um, they're going to be here in about a little more than a month. So I finally get to say hello, I hope. And maybe go on set, but
Ricky McEachern (11:34):
Would that be weird or would that be exciting? Or we have lots
Audrey Niffenegger (11:38):
Of fun, but of course I'll have to get a COVID test, all those things. Cause you know, they got to keep everybody safe.
Ricky McEachern (11:44):
No one that's going to be out for people to see that are listening to this.
Audrey Niffenegger (11:48):
Uh, my best guess is next spring. I mean, these days can happen. So who knows, but that's my understanding sometime next spring. Okay.
Ricky McEachern (11:59):
I want to talk to you about that book, that time Traveler's wife, because obviously when you do anything, you're hoping it's going to be successful, whatever that may be. Um, it sounds like that was probably exceeded your expectations a bit. Okay. What does that, what did you learn from that? As it relates to planning and setting goals?
Audrey Niffenegger (12:23):
I hardly plan and I very rarely say goals. Um, my friend river Lara and I had a conversation a while back. That was pretty funny. She's a painter, an artist. Who's a very dear friend and she recently wrote a book and it's a memoir it's called Gollum girl. Uh, anyway, we were talking about goals and what we thought we were going to get done in this lifetime and what we actually managed to get done. And both of us felt like we had kind of, uh, we had done the things that were on our list of things to do. You know, we had had shows we've been collected by museums, w got books published and, uh, and that's all super, except for then we looked around and we went, oh, what now? And I'm not, I'm not meaning to say that I can die tomorrow and that's okay.
Audrey Niffenegger (13:17):
Or anything, but more like the bits you can strive for a plan for kind of over, with, to proceed at this point to, to go higher up in any way. In some ways it's really mostly at the behest of other people now. Okay. Um, like if somebody wants to give either mayor, we have a MacArthur high MacArthur people, um, that's not up to me. Um, the kind of things you get when you get into the rarefied air are not up to me. The things I can do is just keep making work. What I actually started to do was to, to dial it back. I realized that I was spending too much time chasing around being out there in the world and that what I needed to do to get my work done was to retreat and sit quietly and practice all the things, all the good habits that you have to have in order to actually get anywhere work done.
Ricky McEachern (14:13):
We spoke about this on the phone, and I think you referred to it as the value of the pause.
Audrey Niffenegger (14:19):
Yeah. If you can't hear yourself think, and you're not thinking anything new, probably you're, you're too out there. Most people who make stuff realize that they've got to be quiet occasionally or even most of the time in order to make it work.
Ricky McEachern (14:34):
I can relate to that. I know a lot of my creative ideas come from when I go running, which is where I am alone. I am listening to music, but I'm focusing on my breathing and I'm in this weird mental state. And, uh, that's where it's sort of like a medic meditative state. And, uh, that's where the biggest creative ideas and the biggest solutions to problems come. If I have a big problem that I see that I can't figure out, like, I'll go run six miles and miraculously, the ideas come. And it sounds very similar to what you were saying. It's like being quiet. That for me, that's, that's me being quiet. Yeah,
Audrey Niffenegger (15:23):
Absolutely. I mean, listening to a lot of different people talk about this running, walking, uh, anything to do with water being out in nature, nature is helpful, but cities are helpful. I mean, just going for a walk and not talking. Yeah. Um, but yeah, motion, um, repetition, the kind of thing where your hands are doing something, but you don't need to think about it. You're not performing brain surgery, you're driving or throwing a pot on a wheel or knitting or you know, anything where something is going on, but your brain has sort of disengaged. I mean, earlier when I was talking about having the idea for time Traveler's wife, while I was drawing, I mean, that's drawing is a great activity for having ideas that are not related to the drawing that you're actually working on. Yeah.
Ricky McEachern (16:14):
Yeah. Another one is chopping vegetables for cooking because I go to whole foods and they have these containers filled with chop celery. And I'm thinking that's why would you buy chop celery, like chopping celery and onions for cooking is one of the best parts of cooking because it's exactly what you just said. It's, you're doing something and your hands are busy. Um, and your mind is able to think about other things, but it's distracted enough that it's sort of anchored
Audrey Niffenegger (16:45):
In a way. Yeah. There's a book called daily rituals. What it is is it's a couple of pages on 200 and some different artists, composers, scientists, poets, all kinds of creative people. And it's just talking about their day, what they did, you know, they got up at X time of day and they eat this for breakfast. I mean, Balzac apparently would have like 20 cups of coffee a day and died of heart failure. But, um, the prevalence among this group, that's in the book of, uh, heavy amphetamine use and, you know, learning as I don't recommend that, but I've noticed that almost, I don't know too many creative people who are not caffeine dependent. Yeah. Well, I'm definitely one of them. Yeah, me too.
Ricky McEachern (17:31):
I'm obviously not an expert in this area because I've never written a novel, but it seems like something that would take a significant amount of time and you kind of have to stay with the thing, the same thing for a long time, for a long duration. What do you have to say about, do you have any, any, what are your comments has been
Audrey Niffenegger (17:53):
Fairly slow? Um, I can get a lot done in a small amount of time, but typically I work on these vast projects that are lots of these small accomplishments accruing. Um, the book I'm working on right now, I started in 2012. I expect to finish it maybe by the beginning of next year. So that would be 10 years almost by the time it's edited. It will be 10 years. The thing that took the longest was a book called the three ancestor sisters that I worked on for 14 years. But the thing that I tell myself that makes this okay, um, it's taking a long time, okay. That it's taking a long time, you know, okay. That I'm not, you know, Dickens flipping out, you know, bleak house in 10 seconds. I went to grad school at Northwestern and one of my professors was ed Passkey.
Audrey Niffenegger (18:44):
He took us, uh, to a studio which was, uh, on Howard street. He had six paintings going at the same time and somebody asked him, well, how long does that take? Y Y all at once? And he said, well, I could do a painting in a week, or I could do six paintings in six weeks. And if I do the six paintings in six weeks, I will have time to have more ideas about them that, that, you know, his point was, there's no rush if you tackle this thing over a long period of time, and I've added to this in my head, you know, not only will you have more ideas, but more things will happen to you during that time, the world will change. I mean, in the time that I've been working on this novel of mine, it's a SQL to the time Traveler's wife, it's set somewhat in the future.
Audrey Niffenegger (19:39):
And I originally set out to write about climate change. Well, in the time since 2012, I mean, there's been a significant, um, speeding up. It seems of the climate change, but also there's been like all this political craziness and a pandemic and so many huge issues that if I had been able to finish this in five years, I would have missed, I wouldn't have had the chance to write about that or think about it in this book. And for a book that ends in 2098, it would be a major oversight to not have things like the pandemic or the current wildfires and all the, all the political crazy. So I thought, well, all right, you know, this is, this is obviously why it's taking me so long because the world hasn't resolved. And my ideas about what's going on in this book are also unresolved because of it. There's a kind of tension between what I want to talk about and what I understand.
Ricky McEachern (20:42):
So it sounds like what he, your big lesson was, don't be afraid of out the project plans, so to speak, because it could ultimately benefit you.
Audrey Niffenegger (20:53):
Yeah. And I think what he was also talking about with synergy, you know, it's not just these six paintings will take six weeks. It's about these six paintings in the studio together in some ways are kind of one painting because they're all going to bounce off each other.
Ricky McEachern (21:08):
That makes sense. Yeah. That makes sense. Okay. That's a great, that's a great lesson. I like this idea of synergy because I can definitely relate to that where a creative project can be influenced by other things that are happening in my life that seem completely unrelated, but it will ultimately feed in. You know, I come from a background, I studied like math and science and engineering. So that is a very different way of using your brain. And I've only been doing this creative work for the past 10 years. So I'm always surprised when these things happen, where things that seem completely unrelated to what I'm working on creatively will somehow will affect it. It's such a, it's a surprise to me. And it's kind of amazing.
Audrey Niffenegger (21:59):
Although I think that the sciences and certainly mathematics, I think that the way they're taught in schools, perhaps doesn't, uh, help people to understand that they too, our creative processes, it takes such a long slog in mathematics before you get to the wild and wooly creative parts. And I am not a mathematician, but my father who was an engineer assured me that there were creative aspects to math. And I can see it. You know, when, when you read people who do math at a very low high level talking about what they do, they talk just like artists. And so I think that maybe our culture for heaven only knows what reason keeps separating us out like that. I mean, for a while I was dating a scientist and we would go to these parties and, oh my God, the projects these people were doing, the experiments were wild.
Audrey Niffenegger (22:54):
I remember having dinner once. And I said to somebody quite, you know, blindly, oh, so what are you working on? And he was describing this insane experiment where he was teaching goldfish to run amazes through sense of smell. I was like, whoa, okay, great. You got a grant for that. That is amazing. And it wasn't just frivolous. He was trying to prove something, but Lord knows what it was, the hard science-y people and the supposedly not so hard art people. I think the science-y people are astonished when they realize what the artists are up to these days in the way of very complicated and huge projects that take engineering and chemistry and every other kind of thing. And then you turn around and you watch, uh, these marriages in the sciences between disciplines, everything is getting more and more interdisciplinary. And the more it does that, the more you start realize that it's a bit of a lie really that, that there is a hard separation between the left and the right brand. You know, they were really always talking to each other and there's this, there's this point where everything touches and just goes, boom. And that's where, that's where all the ideas are. Not just the art ideas. Yeah.
Ricky McEachern (24:04):
I feel like this reveals itself to me in like advertising where it's all about, right, right. Brain left brain completely because you're dealing with the psychology of humans, with the mathematics of looking at data and analytics and patterns and behaviors. And then you have like the visual, creative or copywriting, and it all kind of comes together
Audrey Niffenegger (24:32):
In order to make anything really big. You have started to need lots of people, you know, you, you can't just have the lone genius in the studio anymore. You've got to have teams of people because it's become so complicated. Yeah. But still, you know, Tim's people are good. Why not? Yeah. Um, I mean, I just sort of, you know, sit there typing by myself, but eventually it'll take editors and my agent and all sorts of people at the publisher. And I mean, I don't see it, but I, I see the result, you know, how I make something and it sort of spreads out and eventually you're watching it on HBO, which is pretty wild. That is wild.
Ricky McEachern (25:15):
The second time you and I met, because the first time we met, we were supposed to do this interview. We're in a studio right now. We were supposed to do it at the Harley Clark house, which I went to, am I calling it the right thing? Okay. So I went there, it was amazing. Um, and the acoustics were echoey, which was going to be incredible. And then I had a technical issue with, I brought the wrong cord. So now we're here in a studio, but why don't you tell listeners about that, uh, home,
Audrey Niffenegger (25:45):
The Harley Clark mansion in Evanston, Illinois for more than 50 years or actually exactly 50 years was the home of the Evanston art center. And I first came there in 1978 as a high school student to take an etching class. And I continued taking all sorts of classes. I eventually ended up teaching there for 15 years and I loved it very, very much. And eventually the Evanston art center moved to a different building and the house stood empty and nobody knew what was going to happen to it. And the city of Evanston tried and tried. And, uh, at one point it came very close to being torn down, but Valliant activists in the community. Uh, got the, um, question put on the ballot. There was a as to whether the house should stand and more than 80% of the people who voted voted, please let it stand.
Audrey Niffenegger (26:52):
And so, uh, in the meantime, my MFA program at Columbia college, uh, which was for book arts had closed in 2019. So I created a new group called artists book house, and we made a proposal to the city and we were selected and it is so amazing and they gave us keys. It was incredible. And so for the last three months, we have been going over there and we have been cleaning and taking all the garbage out of it and just, uh, revving up to try to raise the money that we're going to need to renovate it. And when it is all renovated, it's going to be a center for literary and book arts. And you'll be able to take classes in not only writing, but also bookbinding and paper-making and printing. And there will be writers coming to give readings. And there will be all sorts of lovely group activities, like, you know, Xen, fests and comics days and all sorts of stuff for kids. And for grownups, we're going to have a cafe. So all the things, coffee and books, all in one beautiful building
Ricky McEachern (28:07):
And yeah. Making books, making books, writing books, everything. Yeah. Yep.
Audrey Niffenegger (28:11):
All the things. And so the only thing standing between us and that beautiful reality is a unbelievable mountain of money. So, uh, anyway, we do have a website and, um, if anybody wants to go and look up the website, if you fall in love with it, get in touch with us and, uh, you can volunteer, but you can also give us money, money, and
Ricky McEachern (28:33):
I will put the, you'll find the link in the show notes. Well, Audrey, thank you very much for hanging out with me today. Well, it was so fun. Thank you.