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Advice you were given as a youth, “Oh, no…Nobody makes a living at art. You should major in something else. Something that can earn some money. Do art on the side.” You must feel vindicated to have triumphed.

Several of my lectures to my MFA classes had to do with Myths of the Artist.

F scott hess biography sampler list

Society sets up several “models” of how an artist should be, and we artists oblige by fitting those expectations. I realized in doing some research that for years the story of my career I’d been telling in lectures and interviews followed the course of The Hero’s Journey.

It was a perfect narrative fit and completely unintentional. This memoir also follows that outline, and the teachers and guidance counselors who told me “don’t go into art” are the guardians between the Known and the Unknown, sitting at the threshold and telling me not be so foolish as to proceed.

Of course, I’d not be writing this memoir if I hadn’t pushed through that advice.

The section about the broken plaster head being a