Beth Pickens
Beth Pickens is a consultant, and has provided career consultation, grant writing, fundraising, and financial, project, and strategic planning services for artists and arts organizations throughout the U.S. She is the author of Make Your Art No Matter What: Moving Beyond Creative Hurdles and Your Art Will Save Your Life. She created HOMEWORK CLUB, a structured monthly support system for artists. Beth also has a podcast (“because every human is required to”, she quips) called Mind Your Practice.
If you could recommend 3 books to anyone, what would they be?
Valencia by Michelle Tea
Michelle Tea's epic writing career has inspired me for 20+ years. Years ago, when I was a young queer lesbian, I read one of her early books, Valencia, about six times in a year. It inspired me to go seek out queer community and artists, to be with the people making the kind of world I wanted to live in. So I moved to San Francisco in 2007 to feel what it was like to live in a queer-majority community.
I recommend Valencia (and all of Tea's writing) to young queer people who want a vibrant rush of energy propelling them toward the life they want to live. Toward excitement and love and heartbreak and confusion and adventure and all the crushing blows that happen in your 20s but ultimately shape the incredible person you will become.
Sula by Toni Morrison
Sula deepened my lens into relationships, especially among Black women. Morrison let me linger in Black worlds and lives even though I was not her intended reader. Her books generously opened up universe after universe to me, allowing me to stay up all night finishing her novels, sobbing and missing these people when they were gone from the story or the story simply ended. Sula cracked open an aching desire to reckon with girlhoods across place and time as a way into seeing gender and feminism in the world of adults.
This passage has haunted me since I was 20:
"They acknowledged the innocent child hiding in the corner of their hearts, holding a sugar-and-butter sandwich. That one. The one who lodged deep in their fat, thin, old, young skin, and was the one the world had hurt. Or they thought of their son newly killed and remembered his legs in short pants and wondered where the bullet went in. Or they remembered how dirty the room looked when their father left home and wondered if that is the way the slim, young Jew, he who for them was both son and lover and in whose downy face they could see the sugar-and-butter sandwiches and feel the oldest and most devastating pain there is : not the pain of childhood, but the remembrance of it."
That last line.
Role Models by John Waters
John Waters is quite possibly my favorite art writer. I mean I love his films and persona and live shows and everything else about him but have you considered John Waters as an art collector and art writer? Everything John Waters is obsessed with, the reader/viewer cannot help but become obsessed with, too. He brings me people, artists, porn, and books that I otherwise would NEVER encounter and makes them formative to my life!
Never forget it's John Waters who gave us these wise words to live by: “If you go home with somebody, and they don't have books, don't fuck 'em!”
What are you reading now?
I always read many books at one time, usually 4-6 so here's what's happening now and next: 1. A Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance by Hanif Abdurraqib, 2. Black Futures by Jenna Wortham and Kimberly Drew, 3. A Bite-Sized History of France: Gastronomic Tales of Revolution, War, and Enlightenment by Jeni Mitchell and Stephane Henaut, 4. From #Blacklivesmatter to Black Liberation by Keeanga-Yamahtt Taylor, 5. Sarahland by Sam Cohen (just finished), 6. When in French: Love in a Second Language by Lauren Collins (just finished)
ON DECK: Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner, Likes by Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum, More Was Lost by Eleanor Perényi (I'm a NYRB obsessive).
Whose reading list are you most curious about?
“I want recommendations from: independent booksellers, librarians, books editors, and all my favourite writers And then I'll be anxious about how to finish 6000 books in one lifetime!”
— Beth Pickens
