{"id":43410,"date":"2025-01-18T00:01:32","date_gmt":"2025-01-18T08:01:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/barbarafalconernewhall.com\/?p=43410"},"modified":"2026-06-05T09:16:04","modified_gmt":"2026-06-05T09:16:04","slug":"am-i-an-artist-or-am-i-a-brand","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/am-i-an-artist-or-am-i-a-brand\/","title":{"rendered":"Am I an Artist? Or Am I a Brand?"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"am<\/a>
Am I an artist? Or am I a brand? By the looks of my Facebook* page, with its follower stats, I’m a brand. Photo by Barbara Newhall<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Am I an artist? Or am I a brand? Am I writing something beautiful? Or something that will sell?<\/p>\n

I took a writing course once upon a time from Tom Jenks<\/a> and his wife Carol Edgarian. During our one-on-one phone conversation, Tom asked about my intentions for the book I was working on. (The book was\u00a0 “Wrestling with God.”<\/a>)<\/p>\n

The words that came out of my mouth surprised me: “I want to create something beautiful,” I said.<\/p>\n

There was a moment of silence. Tom seemed as nonplussed by my response as I was.<\/p>\n

His reply, finally, went something like, “I can get with that.”<\/p>\n

It was the artist in me talking that day.<\/p>\n

Marketing Me<\/strong><\/h5>\n

Several years later, at a writing conference<\/a> up in the Sierra, the workshop leader, Cindy Spiegel, asked a similar question about the project I’d brought to the conference. (I was putting together a book of the “Widowed” essays I’ve been posting here since Jon’s death in 2021.)<\/p>\n

Cindy was co-founder of Spiegel and Grau<\/a>, a publishing imprint I admired. I wanted to make a good impression. I wanted to convince Cindy that the book I was working on would sell, that\u00a0 hundreds of thousands of people would want to buy it and read it.<\/p>\n

“It’s a book for widows,” I said. “There are a lot of Baby Boomer widows out there. My story will resonate with them.”<\/p>\n

It was marketer me talking this time.<\/p>\n

\"am<\/a>
The beauty I found during my childhood summers on the shores of Lake Michigan inspired a desire to be an artist when I grew up — a writer, as it turned out. \u00a0Photo by Barbara Newhall<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
Am I an Artist? Or am I a Brand?<\/strong><\/h5>\n

What am I doing here, anyway? What kind of writer am I?<\/p>\n

When I sit down at my laptop and hours later stand up again, stiff in the joints and bleary in the eyes, what have I been doing with my time? Creating a work of art? Or generating a brand?<\/p>\n

In this age of social media, writers are encouraged to create an on-line presence, a brand. Some publishers — including the one that originally published “Wrestling with God” — insist that their authors spend huge swaths of time promoting themselves.<\/p>\n

I’ve Got Ten Years. Twenty, Maybe<\/strong><\/h5>\n

I’m 83 years old. I don’t have a lot of time left on the planet. Ten years. Twenty, if I crush the odds. How do I spend it?<\/p>\n

How much of my remaining time do I devote to creating something beautiful and how much to luring search engines to my blog posts with catchy headlines and strategic key words? How much time do I spend roaming Facebook and Instagram making friends with people I’ll never meet?<\/p>\n

I’ve been thinking about time a lot lately. And I’ve made up my mind.<\/p>\n

I’m going for beautiful.<\/p>\n

And I’m Thinking of You, Dear Readers<\/strong><\/h5>\n

And that’s where you, my readers, come in. For the coming months, I’ll be spending less time being social on social media.<\/p>\n

I’ll also be spending less time writing these blog posts.<\/p>\n

You will still see a post every week, but for the time being I’ll be pulling most of them from the archives. You’ll see stories written five, ten, fifteen years ago that, I believe, are still punchy, to the point, and ripe for a fresh read.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, artist me will be at work, turning my “Widowed” posts into a memoir-in-essays and putting the finishing touches on a book of essays written for the Oakland Tribune when Peter and Christina were little kids and Jon and I were frazzled parents.<\/p>\n

Real-Time Updates<\/strong><\/h5>\n

I’ll keep you informed on my artistic progress. And I’ll still be posting plenty of real-time riffs on my particular case of the human condition.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, watch for the many oldies but goodies that have been crying out to be liberated from the archives.<\/p>\n

I came within an inch of becoming the visual artist I imagined as a girl growing up in Michigan. More about that at “Ceramics Envy \u2014 I Want to Get My Hands into that Earthy, Messy, Squishy Clay.”<\/a>\u00a0 As for the joy of spending long hours at the keyboard, see “My Flesh Is Weary \u2014 Too Much Book-Writing, Not Enough Yoga.”<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

* Some of my FB friends are considering jumping ship following Mark Zuckerberg’s decision to end Facebook and Instagram’s fact-checking programs. Don Lattin<\/a>, who wrote the foreword for my book, “Wrestling with God: Stories of Doubt and Faith,” is among them.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"toad-bishiops-ranch-california\"<\/a>
Just so you know — beauty is not always pretty. Sometimes it’s a toad. Photo by Barbara Newhall<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\"am<\/a><\/p>\n

What kind of writer am I anyway? When I sit down to the keyboard, is it to write something beautiful — or something that will sell?\u00a0 Am I an artist? Or am I a brand?\u00a0 Read more.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":48617,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,50,14],"tags":[376,1345,2943,134,2944,2945,2946,2947,34,1026,383,1694,503,2948,575],"class_list":["post-43410","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-a-case-of-the-human-condition","category-on-writing-reading","category-widowed","tag-art","tag-artists","tag-book-publication","tag-books","tag-brand","tag-branding","tag-cindy-spiegel","tag-cow","tag-dont-miss","tag-jeanie","tag-lake-michigan","tag-marketing-books","tag-narrative-magazine","tag-tom-jenks","tag-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43410","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=43410"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43410\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":48621,"href":"https:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43410\/revisions\/48621"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/48617"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=43410"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=43410"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=43410"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}