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
0:00 — welcome to this episode
03:59 — advice for a first-time author
06:45 — Austin’s houseful of weirdos in Austin, Texas
08:03 — bottling the energy of two little kids
10:36 — growing up in rural Ohio cornfields
17:45 — Owen’s magic line
23:50 — being your kids’ apprentice
27:17 — young parents, keep a dairy
36:00 — kids know what they like
40:56 — scarcity vs. abundant fatherhood
42:36 — read some mother artist memoirs
47:17 — kids as a source of creative energy
47:52 — go to therapy before you have kids
Credits
Host: Kevin Maguire
Managing Producer: Elizabeth Van Brocklin
Sound Editor: Sam Williams
Theme Music: SOHN
