About the Author:
Janna Malamud Smith is the author of three books, My Father is a Book: A Memoir of Bernard Malamud, A Potent Spell: Mother Love and The Power of Fear; and Private Matters: In Defense of the Personal Life. Her titles have been New York Times Notable Books and A Potent Spell was a Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers” pick. She has written for the New York Times, the Boston Globe, and the Threepenny Review, among other publications. A practicing psychotherapist, she lives with her husband and two children in Massachusetts.
Review:
Praise for An Absorbing Errand
an elegantly conceived book Smith writes about fear, shame, creative solitude, and something she calls artistic ruthlessness. She does so beautifully, integrating with seeming effortlessness references to the words of others.” Psychology Today
Writer and psychotherapist Janna Malamud Smith has found her calling An Absorbing Errand: How Artists and Craftsmen Make Their Way to Mastery offers a comprehensive, insightful, and articulate guide for everyone who has ever attempted to make art in depicting the numberless ways artists must become apprentices over and over, An Absorbing Errand proves itself a worthy inspiration for us all.” San Francisco Chronicle
’One pleasure of art making is its resolute inefficiency.’ This is an insight in a book bursting with insights, and recognizing its truth may help writers stop regretting the hours that a single sentence requires. Making art often requires ruthlessness, too; and the remembrance of and reenactment of shame (the chapter on Charlie Chaplin is one of the best in the book); and the avoiding of friends and even family. Janna Smith both warns and reassures us as she explores these difficult truths with compassion and wit.” Edith Pearlman
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