I took a week off to visit London. I should be back in Canada by the end of Wednesday, and there’s a lot to write about. But meanwhile, here’s another encore episode of the podcast. From 13 months ago, this is one of my favourite episodes. It’s about a book called The Work of Art, and its author is one of my career role models, the magazine editor Adam Moss.
Here’s some of what I wrote when we first posted this episode
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The Americans have an actual Magazine Editors’ Hall of Fame. In a genius move, they don’t add to it every year — because realistically, how often does a hall-of-fame magazine editor come along? But Adam Moss is in it. That’s because from 2004 to 2019 he edited New York magazine. And even though city magazines are a tightly constrained form — it’s mostly service journalism; you need to tell residents where to shop and visitors what to see, and only after you’ve nailed that stuff down do you get to tell a few honest-to-God stories about the place — Adam Moss reinvented New York, made it relevant and appealing, guided it gently into its digital future. His trademark was the back-page Approval Matrix, which maps the week’s cultural events across four quadrants: Highbrow, Lowbrow, Brilliant, Despicable. But his contribution goes way beyond a funky page. New York won six National Magazine Awards for General Excellence and four for Design while he was its editor
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He retired not long before COVID broke out all over, and now he’s come out the other side with a book. It’s called The Work of Art. It’s concerned with that irreducibly mysterious question: Where does art come from? Moss interviews 43 creators — from legends like Stephen Sondheim and the playwright Tony Kushner to architects, poets, painters, composers, sand-castle sculptors and the showrunner for Veep — about how they made specific works.
But he didn’t just interview them. He asked each one to show their work: early sketches, rough drafts, rejected efforts, diaries, text-message logs, the “creative entrails” of the process. So you find yourself going through each artist’s work week, while the artist discusses the stress, epiphanies and trade-offs of creation, and Moss stands at their elbow, refusing to let them off the hook. Here are spreads from the book’s chapters on a poem by Louise Glück, Kushner’s epic two-play cycle Angels in America, and Sheila Heti’s novel How Should a Person Be?
Here’s the rest of that original post. I’m working on a fourth season of The Paul Wells Show, but in the meantime I’m comfortable sharing these evergreen episodes. The podcast’s audience is way larger now than even a year ago, so Adam Moss will be new to most of you. This is a great episode for anyone who faces creativity challenges, which is probably anyone.
You can listen to this episode on Apple Podcasts and a bunch of other platforms via the “Listen On” button that you can see at the top of this post when you view it on your desktop browser. If you listen on a podcast platform, hit “Like” and “Subscribe” buttons, and leave a good review, to help spread the word.
In theory you should be able to find a (machine-generated) transcript of this week’s episode via a "Transcript” button you should be able to find somewhere near the top of this post, but if you can’t find the damned button I can’t help you. Substack handles the coding and they don’t make this stuff easy to find on some platforms. Life is hard sometimes.
I am grateful to be the Max Bell Foundation Senior Fellow at McGill University, the principal patron of this podcast. Antica Productions turns these interviews into a podcast every week. Kevin Breit wrote and performed the theme music. Andy Milne plays it on piano at the end of each episode. Thanks to all of them and to you. Please tell your friends to subscribe to The Paul Wells Show on their favourite podcast app, or here on the newsletter.
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