For a hundred years, parents attempting to undertake creative endeavours have had a ready-made excuse, courtesy of Cyril Connolly: “The enemy of art is the pram in the hall.”
Kids, the thinking goes, are where creativity goes to die. But Austin Kleon thinks Connolly got it exactly backwards.
This month on the podcast, I sat down with Austin—author of the New York Times bestselling trilogy Steal Like an Artist, Show Your Work! and Keep Going—to talk about his new book, Don’t Call It Art: 10 Ways to Create Like a Kid Again. This book is a love letter to his two sons, and a collection of everything they taught him about creativity.
Austin spent his career helping people tap into their creative potential. Then his kids arrived, and he realised he wasn’t the teacher anymore. He was, in his words, “the apprentice to the beginners,” the studio assistant in his own home, saving the drawings, keeping the paper trail, and watching two small artists figure out how to “let it rip.”
We talk about why children aren’t an obstacle to your creative life but an opportunity for it to grow, the gentle art of benevolent neglect, and how watching your kids create might be the best way to quiet your own inner critic—and re-parent the artist you used to be.
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Where to Find Austin Kleon
Read his blog, especially the parenting tag
Follow him on Instagram
Episode References
Books & Essays
The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything by Sir Ken Robinson
The Idle Parent Manifesto by Tom Hodgkinson
Bringing Up Bébé by Pamela Druckerman
Several Short Sentences About Writing by Verlyn Klinkenborg
100 Essays I Don’t Have Time To Write by Sarah Ruhl
The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson
Hold Still: A Memoir with Photographs by Sally Mann
Playing With My Son by Andy Baio
Heidi’s Horse by Sylvia Fein
American Elf by James Kochalka
Featured Artists, Musicians & Innovators
John Baldessari – Conceptual artist whose revolutionary “Post-Studio Art” teaching style shaped a generation of creators.
Lynda Barry – The MacArthur-winning cartoonist, author of What It Is, and professor of interdisciplinary creativity.
Ruth Asawa – The San Francisco wire sculptor who believed art education should be accessible to all children.
Eleanor Coppola – The documentary filmmaker who balanced her own creative life alongside an iconic filmmaking family.
Brian Eno – The ambient music pioneer whose philosophy centres on answering the ultimate creative question: “What is it that I actually like?”
Michel de Montaigne – The Renaissance essayist whose father instituted a spartan pedagogical plan, including being raised by peasants and learning Latin as a first language.
Misc
Timestamps
03:10 — Pre-publication anxiety and “the gulp”: Austin’s advice for a first-time author
05:03 — Why a second book is like a second child
06:04 — Austin’s family: Megan, two boys, and a houseful of weirdos in Austin, Texas
07:12 — A love letter to his kids: bottling the energy of two “cavemen Picassos”
09:55 — Growing up in rural Ohio: pigs, county fairs, and a broad definition of creative work
12:10 — Ken Robinson’s “I’m drawing a picture of God” story
13:29 — Puberty and the arrival of the inner critic
14:31 — Milton Glaser’s perfect combination: a mother who says “you can do anything,” a father who says “prove it”
16:11 — Parenting tension as a guitar string: freedom, constraint, and Bringing Up Bébé
18:50 — The story of how Owen held his pen—and the magic line that disappeared
22:31 — Benevolent neglect: D.H. Lawrence, The Idle Parent, and butting out
25:25 — “I was the apprentice to the beginners”: becoming the studio assistant in his own home
25:59 — Where Don’t Call It Art comes from: John Baldessari and why the title disarms the critics
27:40 — Capture mode: diaries, one-liners, and drawing comics of your kids
30:57 — Save the drawings: Heidi’s Horse, Dahlov Ipcar at MoMA, and keeping a paper trail
39:03 — What Owen’s music taught Austin: Brian Eno and “what do I actually like?”
41:41 — Unrepeatable experiments: Montaigne’s Latin, Kraftwerk over The Beatles, and Andy Baio’s video game history
44:37 — Scarcity vs. abundance fatherhood: Kevin learns piano alongside his daughter
45:58 — The pram in the hall is wrong: what mother-artist memoirs taught Austin about integration
52:09 — “Go to therapy before you have kids”: what children reflect back at you, and re-parenting yourself with Fiona Apple
Credits
Host: Kevin Maguire
Managing Producer: Elizabeth Van Brocklin
Sound Editor: Sam Williams
Theme Music: SOHN
