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Notes to Self

Photography by Maisie Crow

Susan Orlean’s Notes to Self

By Susan Orlean, Photography by Maisie Crow

Fall 2016

A library, of course, makes for a stubborn protagonist in a work of narrative journalism. “The reality is, it’s just different writing about something that has all of the complexity of bureaucracy. I don’t do a lot of stories where I have to go through channels to get the material I want, and I’m not somebody who knows how to game a system to get access to stuff.” Doggedness helped, both in chasing leads and, later, arranging them—fittingly, with one of the indispensible tools of the librarian’s trade.

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Marc Burckhardt’s Notes to Self

By Marc Burckhardt, Photography by Valerie Schmidt

Summer 2016

Recently, painter Marc Burckhardt has been in a deep “visual conversation” with literature—specifically, with Petrarch’s Triumphs, a sequence of poems from the Italian Renaissance in which Love, Chastity, Death, Fame, Time, and Eternity each overcomes the other. Burckhardt first came across Triumphs nearly a year ago, while working on a series based on Dante’s Inferno. As he often does with literary works, he looked into their visual history, and in doing so found “a deep well of imagery—stuff I recognized through a kind of peripheral appreciation.” Since then, working between studios in Austin, Texas, and Bremen, Germany, he’s has been studying, sketching, crumpling sketches, starting over, and taking notes for a series of allegorical paintings that reflect his personal connection to Petrarch’s themes, to be included in an October show at Gallery Shoal Creek, in Austin, Texas.

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Drawings of the twelve labors of Hercules, part of Tinti’s thematic map for her new novel.

Hannah Tinti’s Notes to Self

By Hannah Tinti, Photography by Kirsten Luce

Spring 2016

Tinti recognized herself in Barry’s portrait of the lapsed artist. “I took her lecture to heart,” she says, and decided to commit herself to doodling, sketching, drawing.

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Photographs by John Wray

John Wray’s Notes to Self

By John Wray

Winter 2016

John Wray sees novels as falling into one of two categories—arrowheads or fruitcakes—whose modus operandi are distinct. “There’s the kind of novel that’s formed on the principle of exclusion, in which your goal is something very flinty and sharp and generally not very long. Those would be the arrowheads.” (See A Farewell to Arms, for example.) “Then there are the fruitcakes, which accrue on the basis of inclusion, in which almost anything could potentially be incorporated into the narrative as long as it’s interesting or amusing or bizarre.” (See Moby-Dick.)

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