The Tower Show

and just being the artist I am

About a week ago I took my older daughter to a gallery space in Gowanus that apparently every year puts on something called The Tower Show— an ode to the water tower in Brooklyn that is beloved and beautiful and a strange sort of mascot to the borough. The Tower Show is an opportunity every year for artists to create their own work in response to the water tower, their own individual odes to something beloved and unique and also mundane.

The result is an exuberant show so alive with creativity I could have stayed in the single room all afternoon. The Tower Show is exactly what it promises to be— a living example of the value of voice in art, an ode to the understanding that what makes art special and unique is not the subject matter but rather the artist and their own point of view.

Here are a few of our favorite pieces:

I’ve been thinking about The Tower Show a lot lately, as I work on two new books and feel the familiar anxiety of not knowing if they are interesting enough, not knowing if they are big enough, not knowing if they have a compelling enough hook. Right now, the parts that are coming the most easily for me are the tiny details in these worlds and between these characters, and the stories themselves feel hazy and far away. I am writing and writing and finding so many little moments, but the big story is wild, impossible to pin down or fully understand, yet. The Tower Show tells me this is maybe okay. The hyper-focus on what is small and accessible, tangible and human, the belief in a million scenes eventually clarifying into a singular story is enough.

Maybe this is not exactly a profound thought. It is not a new revelation. It’s more of a worn understanding, a truth that I lose track of in the ambition and worry of sustaining a creative career. I am so often looking for something monumental that will change everything, a new step that will make me into a different (better) kind of writer, that will help me write a bigger, juicier more commercial, more important, more worthy sort of story.

This is not an uncovering of that magical thing.

One artist in the show made the water tower into a clock. Another did a whole thing with invisible ink and a special light that exposed what had been invisibly written. Yet another reimagined the water tower as a bouquet of flowers, and another as a coffee cup.

What was special about the show was understanding what each artist saw as something deeply human. Immediately upon seeing the pieces, I wanted to know more about their lives. Why does their mind work that way? Is this the way they want to see the world? Is it what they wish were there? Did it come easily, this vision, or did they play with a dozen wrong ideas first? Is The Tower Show about dreams or hope, imagination or desire, whimsy or precision? The art asks questions about the artist. And of course, has us wondering what our own tower would look like. I know immediately that mine would be something that tried too hard to tell a story, that needed too many angles and wanted to fit too much in. There would be people sitting inside the water tower, there would be an argument or the hint of a love story. There would be another tower in the distance they were looking longingly at. I’d want speech bubbles and bits of a poem. I’d get too focused on the tiny people perched on the tower and forget all about the tower itself. Then I’d go write a novel about it because I am a terrible visual artist and I’d be so annoyed that my vision wouldn’t accurately come to life on canvas.

Then there’s my daughter, who is so literal that as a preschooler, when she did watercolors, she would diligently apply the colors in the order that they were laid out in the little water color box. She would not deviate. It was as if there was some implied rule embedded in the order of those little circles of paints and she was certainly not going to mess with it.

When we got home from The Tower Show, she painted the water tower on a tiny little piece of canvas. As I suspected, it was a literal representation, and beautiful, too. It was nothing I would have ever done.

She is the artist she is. I am the artist I am. She is willing to use the paints out of order now, and I know how to edit down my books over time, narrow their focus. But as I’m first working on my novels, they get bigger, more unwieldy, the ideas piling up. And ultimately she wants to paint something that already exists, not invent a new world. Loving her art— which I do— means learning to love the limitations of my own too. It means understanding those limitations to be a certain kind of strength.

I miss my daughter’s way of using the watercolors one by one. It was such a celebration of practicality. It was a story only she could tell.

I am learning to love my own unruly process too.

News

The third book in my Zoomi and Zoe series comes on this coming Tuesday, May 12th! In this one, Zoomi and Zoe go to camp together… and experience some serious friendship jealousy while they make star friendship bracelets and eat the camp classic, s’muchmuchsmores. This series is beautifully illustrated by Anne Appert and is great for both readalouds and independent reading. My three year old will happily listen to a few chapters a night. My eight year old enjoys reading these on her own. I think of the sweet spot as Kindergarten with the series having a lot of appeal for ages 4-8. They are deeply silly and the covers have GLITTER.

I have some upcoming events-

TOMORROW Friday, May 8th at 6pm I’ll be at the Park Slope Barnes and Noble in conversation with the fantastic EJ Dickson, whose non-fiction exploration of motherhood and its representations in pop culture is absolutely FANTASTIC. Just in time for Mother’s Day we’re going to be talking about motherhood in all its fraught, confusing, impossible versions.

Next weekend, I’ll be in Gaithersburg, Maryland at the Gaithersburg Literary Festival talking about THE ORDINARY AND EXTRAORDINARY AUDEN GREENE. If you’re local, I’d love to see you there!

And of course, if you need a last minute gift for a mom in your life— mine has it right there in the title, People Magazine called it a “searing page-turner”, so what more do you need to know? If you’ve read the book, please do take a moment to review it on Amazon, B&N, Goodreads.

Also if you haven’t yet checked out my new podcast with Sara Zarr, this week is the one to listen to. We share some exciting emails we’ve been getting, and things get unexpected and hilarious.

Recommendations

For everyone in constant hair confusion, here’s a great wave spray I’ve been using to try to find some sort of space between naturally curly hair and fully straightened hair. I’ve had some great hair days with it!

I’m obsessed with this smoothie, which I make with some tweaks but is in fact exactly what I want after working out.

This incredible, breathless, beautiful YA novel, by one of my favorite writers/people.