Knock at the Sky: A Creative Journey with Liz Charlotte Grant and Jeremy Grant

Liz and Jeremy discuss the end of the artist process: release.  This is the very hard task of relinquishing control of your art. How do you decide when the work is done? How do you interact with your audience? What does the art mean, in the end, and who gets to decide what it means (creator or audience)? And how do you make peace with wrong interpretation? And what does the Bible have to do with any of this? (A lot, apparently.) Liz and Jeremy wax poetic on the role of audience and talk about the freedom that comes from letting go of your creation.  We also discuss the fine art collages that precede Chapters 10 and 11 in the book that has inspired this podcast. - Notes: View the art (in color) from chapters 10 and 11, and read an edited transcript of the episode at the Empathy List. Buy the book: Knock at the Sky: Seeking God in Genesis After Losing Faith in the Bible by Liz Charlotte Grant. Preorder fine art risograph prints of Jeremy Grant's collages (in black and blue).    Connect with Liz and Jeremy online. Many thanks to our friend, Carin Huebner, for recording and editing this podcast.

Let's kill our darlings. Because, as Queen Annie Dillard says, “The path is not the work.” (The Writing Life, Dillard) Liz and Jeremy discuss the discernment required to weigh feedback - whose matters? And which feedback is a distraction? When does a collaboration become a commission? Jeremy also recalls that time when Liz offered feedback that resulted in trashing and/or dramatic revision of 3 out of 11 of the finished collages for this project (oops!), and Liz discusses the insane number of editors required to bring this book to print. And we're tackling one of Liz’s favorite topics: audience! How do you keep the readers and viewers of your art in mind as you revise? We also discuss the fine art collages that precede Chapters 7, 8, and 9 in the book that has inspired this podcast. - Notes: View the art (in color) from chapters 7, 8, and 9, and read an edited transcript of the episode at thEmpathyList.com. Buy the book: Knock at the Sky: Seeking God in Genesis After Losing Faith in the Bible by Liz Charlotte Grant. Preorder fine art risograph prints of Jeremy Grant's collages (in black and blue).    Connect with Liz and Jeremy online. Many thanks to our friend, Carin Huebner, for recording and editing this podcast.

Let's get to work--by which we mean, get thyself to the nearest studio/desk to create the work you need to make.  Jeremy and I are talking about developing your craft…. by so much practice. And we discuss what it really means for each of us to really sit in the chair and put down a first draft and/or a first pass at a collage. Because making art requires sweat! We talk about how our artistic collaboration as a couple worked in the book, Knock at the Sky, which was not always smooth, and required a lot of communication and boundaries to make things work. And we talk about why the practice of art-making is worth it... even if you have less than 1,000 instagram followers and even when you write the shittiest of shitty first drafts. (Like Liz does.) We also discuss the fine art collages that precede Chapters 4, 5, and 6 in the book, Knock at the Sky. - Notes: We discussed Art and Fear by Ted Orland and David Bayles in this episode, and we highly recommend you buy and read it ASAP. View the art (in color) from chapters 4, 5, and 6, and read an edited transcript of the episode at THEMPATHYLIST.COM  Buy the book: Knock at the Sky: Seeking God in Genesis After Losing Faith in the Bible by Liz Charlotte Grant. Preorder fine art risograph prints of Jeremy Grant's collages (in black and blue).    Connect with Liz and Jeremy online. Many thanks to our friend, Carin Huebner, for recording and editing this podcast.

Let's talk about beginnings. Liz and Jeremy discuss how we find our ideas, begin creative projects, and cultivate our unique writing voice and/or artistic style. We also discuss the fine art collages that precede Chapters 1, 2, and 3 in the book that has inspired this podcast. - Notes: See the art (in color) from chapters 1, 2, and 3, and read an edited transcript of the episode at ThEmpathyList.com.  Buy the book Knock at the Sky: Seeking God in Genesis After Losing Faith in the Bible by Liz Charlotte Grant. Preorder fine art risograph prints of Jeremy Grant's collages (in black and blue).    Connect with Liz and Jeremy online. Many thanks to our friend, Carin Huebner, for recording and editing this podcast. 

From idea to craft to revision to release, each creative process follows a similar path into the world. Take an artistic journey with creative collaborators and life partners, Liz Charlotte Grant (essayist) and Jeremy Grant (visual artist).  Liz and Jeremy are two working artists who collaborated on the book project, Knock at the Sky: Seeking God in Genesis After Losing Faith in the Bible. And in this podcast series, we follow the steps of the creative process to discuss the ups and downs of making art with your partner in tow. We're inviting you into our living room where you can participate in our deep and funny conversations about the artistic life, particularly about the way that this multidisciplinary book came into being. Just as the book of Genesis is a book of origins, so this podcast gives you the origin story behind the book. (See what we did there?)    In a time of political unrest, we hope this podcast is inspires you to create art as resistance, a way of making a life that builds beauty even where there is none.    /About Liz and Jeremy/ Liz Charlotte Grant is an award-winning essayist who has published in the Huffington Post, Hippocampus, Brevity, Religion News Service, and elsewhere. Her substack, the Empathy List, has twice been nominated for a Webby Award. Jeremy Grant is a multidisciplinary artist who works as a designer and has shown his paper collages, illustrations, assemblages, and sculptures in galleries across the American West.