Subtle Maneuvers | Mason Currey | Substack

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Jul 25, 2024 • Mason Currey

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Jun 16, 2024 • Mason Currey

Subtle Maneuvers

Subtle Maneuvers

On wriggling through a creative life—with lessons and insights from novelists, painters, poets, filmmakers, and musicians delivered to your inbox every other Tuesday. From the author of Daily Rituals: How Artists Work.

My Books

Daily Rituals: How Artists Work

Daily Rituals: Women at Work

Making Art and Making a Living

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Upcoming events and subscriber perks

Aug 21, 2025 • Mason Currey

Dec/Jan title: MITZ by Sigrid Nunez

Aug 21, 2025 • Mason Currey

Recommendations

Oldster Magazine

Oldster Magazine

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A Lie Before Its Time

A Lie Before Its Time

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Noted

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BRASS RING

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The Art of Noticing

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Rob Walker

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Five Things I've Learned...

...about "subtly maneuvering." Watch here.

Oct 22, 2025 • Mason Currey

Making Art and Making a Living

Announcing my next book, coming 3/31/26

Aug 19, 2025 • Mason Currey

My 13-part course on wriggling through a creative life

Jul 23, 2024 • Mason Currey

Get a new issue every other Tuesday

Filmmakers

The Fassbinder Method

“So: completion come what may.”

Dec 16, 2024 • Mason Currey

David Milch’s disembodied writing process

“I lie there on the floor and I talk and the words come up on the screen.”

Feb 5, 2024 • Mason Currey

Get rid of what your project needs

A peek into Céline Sciamma’s desire-driven process

Jan 22, 2024 • Mason Currey

Mike Leigh’s gloriously inefficient filmmaking process

“I can’t tell you about the character because there is no character.”

Nov 13, 2023 • Mason Currey

Musicians & composers

The person who can be uncomfortable the longest

End-of-year goals via Robyn—plus, our next Book Club pick

Dec 3, 2025 • Mason Currey

A pretty good maxim for all artists

From the visionary composer Terry Riley

Sep 16, 2025 • Mason Currey

Laurie Anderson and Lou Reed’s rules for living

“The first one is: Don’t be afraid of anyone.”

Jul 8, 2025 • Mason Currey

Courtney Love’s excellent advice for young artists

"It's really the truth."

Jun 24, 2025 • Mason Currey

Novelists

When writing your book takes thirty-eight years (and counting)

Solvej Balle’s very gradual creative process. Plus: Announcing the Subtle Maneuvers Book Club—and a workshop for the Scrivener-curious

Sep 2, 2025 • Mason Currey

A touching story of writer-to-writer support

“It was only then that he ceased to look upon his novels as youthful mistakes.”

Aug 5, 2025 • Mason Currey

Robert Plunket on the “big secret” of making art

“Every artist does it.”

Jul 22, 2025 • Mason Currey

Françoise Sagan on the power of laziness

A timely reminder from the author of Bonjour Tristesse

May 27, 2025 • Mason Currey

Painters & sculptors

Faith Ringgold’s exuberant pragmatism

Portable paintings—and a very expensive mistake for artists

Apr 29, 2024 • Mason Currey

Melly Shum Forever

“Every city needs a monument to the problem of hating one’s job.”

Mar 4, 2024 • Mason Currey

Living with art stops one wilting!

Letters from the late Austrian artist Maria Lassnig

Aug 21, 2023 • Mason Currey

Van Gogh’s advice to a young artist

“In order to write a book, do a deed, paint a picture with some life in it, one has to be alive oneself.”

Aug 7, 2023 • Mason Currey

Poets

My Baudelaire Summer

“How difficult it is to do as one ought every day.”

Sep 9, 2024 • Mason Currey

Petrarch got up every morning at midnight

“I regard sleep as a kind of death, my bed as a tomb.”

Apr 15, 2024 • Mason Currey

Sharon Olds’s huge archive of thinking and feeling

“Clouds of meaning were rolling this way and that.”

Nov 27, 2023 • Mason Currey

Louise Glück on writer’s block

“I think everything good in my own work I owe to endurance.”

Oct 16, 2023 • Mason Currey

Making art is like setting a trap

Philip Larkin on constructing “the device”

Sep 18, 2023 • Mason Currey

Henri Cole on the enemies within

And why they’re a gift

May 1, 2023 • Mason Currey

Alice Notley on getting things to come easily

Here’s the secret, if you can bear it

Mar 20, 2023 • Mason Currey

Bernadette Mayer will give you ideas

On the late American poet’s irrepressible confident weirdness

Mar 6, 2023 • Mason Currey

“Productivity”

Rip it up and start again

A bold strategy for second drafts—plus, MITZ on Sunday

Jan 6 • Mason Currey

Ghost writers in the sky

Are ideas “out there,” hovering just above our heads?

Dec 16, 2025 • Mason Currey

Lynda Barry on writing without thinking

“Is this good? Does this suck?”

Nov 19, 2025 • Mason Currey

John Cage on the true meaning of discipline

I've been thinking about it all wrong.

Jun 10, 2025 • Mason Currey

Totally insane and truly helpful

The best creativity advice I've read in ages—plus, enroll now in Worm School Extension 🪱🎓

May 13, 2025 • Mason Currey

The Fassbinder Method

“So: completion come what may.”

Dec 16, 2024 • Mason Currey

My 13-part course on wriggling through a creative life

Jul 23, 2024 • Mason Currey

Writing is bouldering, bouldering is writing

On “eking out a delicate gift laboriously”

Apr 1, 2024 • Mason Currey

The dumbest and best productivity trick

And why I’m rebelling against it anyway

Dec 11, 2023 • Mason Currey

Samuel Johnson and the art of procrastination

Or how to write 1,800 words an hour

May 30, 2023 • Mason Currey

Three tales of creative slowness

“A week is nothing, one thinks one can do so much in a week”

Apr 3, 2023 • Mason Currey

Three tales of creative incompetence

Plus: Advice on sharing your work

Mar 7, 2022 • Mason Currey

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