Anna Deavere Smith - Letters to a Young Artist: Straight-Up Advice on Making a Life in the Arts--For Actors, Performers, Writers, and Artists of Every Kind

This book consists of a series of letters to an imaginary young artist whom Ive called BZ. Who is BZ?

If you are an artist of any age, if you are learning the ropes of your art form, and if you want to learn more about the rules of the road in the business of making and selling art, BZ is you.

In my own life as an actress and playwright I have been influenced by many artists, teachers, students, scientists, scholars, and activists; Ive been influenced by audiences, and by people whom I never met but only read about in history books. Now I want to pass along to you some of the things Ive learned.

Ive written this book for the next generation of artists. Art should take what is complex and render it simply. It takes a lot of skill, human understanding, stamina, courage, energy, and heart to do that. It takes, most of all, what a great scholar of artists and educators, Maxine Greene, calls wide-awakeness to do that. I am interested in the artist who is awake, or who wants desperately to wake up.

I am writing to you if you are thinking of taking your rightful position as an artist, a position that is both inside and outside of the daily activities of your immediate world. If you read the newspapers, or if you travel and if you talk to people outside your own circle of friends and family, you may be trying to find some kind of a position that allows you to rub up against the very huge and overwhelming world at large. Dare to do it. Great artists have, and they have walked where politicians and lawmakers and even educators wouldnt dare go.

I am addressing you if you are interested in change, in social change, and if you see yourself, potentially, as one of the guardians of the human spirit. In fact, Im not just addressing you; I am calling you out asking you to make yourself visible. We need you here!

Maybe you are in ninth grade and trying to get a group together to make a musical at your school, or are at a school with no arts program whatsoever, or are in your bedroom with the door shut in a small town somewhere where everyone thinks youre weird. Maybe you are in a claustrophobic dorm room at college, or in an MFA program feeling kind of low because of the competition after a long day with a disturbing critique. Maybe youve just arrived in New York or LA or Paris or Buenos Aires or Shanghai, one of the many arts capitals of the world, and you just need a way of getting focused or calming down in this new place. Im writing to you.

And maybe you have the good fortune to go to a private school with a fantastic arts program with everything anyone could possibly need and a really neat chorus director; yes, I would like to talk to you too. Maybe you are in a field someplace looking up at the sky, like the great poet Edna St. Vincent Millay must have been when she wrote her extraordinary poem Renascence, or maybe you are angry about something that is not fair, the way she must have been when she wrote that bold poem Conscientious Objector, in which she said, the password and the plans of our city / are safe with me; never through me Shall you be overcome. I am writing to you.

Im writing to you if you just plain like to singthe way my eight-year-old niece does, in the back of her parents car, as they drive along the Arizona highways under those extraordinary stars, singing in perfect pitch and with an amazing sense of rhythm to anything that happens to be coming out of the sound system. I am writing to you if you love the way the sunset looks wherever you live, and I am writing to you if you are in a housing project somewhere doing the latest dance steps with a group of friends on the breezeway. I am writing to you if you are far enough along that you are already making art somewhere, like my friend the painter Ellen Gallagher, who told me she went to Africa and plopped herself down in the middle of the road and started drawing and attracted a crowd. And I am writing to you if you would like to go to Africa or southern Asia or Latin America or to a rural town on the Mississippi Delta, or anywhere in the world where you think you could use your art to draw people together and to make a difference in their lives.