Amy Stewart is an accomplished writer. She’s perhaps best-known for the New York Times best-seller "The Drunken Botanist," a kind of mixed-media love letter to cocktails and plants. But she’s also written 16 other books, including her most recent, "The Tree Collectors," a combination of stories and her own original watercolor paintings.
Stewart is, by any definition, a successful artist. But in a recent post on her Substack, she makes a provocative claim: “There’s No Such Thing As Talent.”
The title comes from an experience she frequently has when she’s sitting in the park with her paints or her sketchbook. People often come up to her and say, “I wish I could do what you do — I just don’t have the talent.”
As Stewart recently told The Show, people who say that are depriving themselves the pleasure of their own artistry.
Full conversation
AMY STEWART: On one hand, that makes me sad, because I want people to know that something like drawing and painting is a technical skill and anyone can learn it. But also it sort of negates the 20 years of taking classes and practicing that I had to do to learn how to make a passable sketch of some trees in the park down the street from my house.
SAM DINGMAN: Yes, so this is my favorite part of the piece. And I think, in a way, saying someone has talent is a little reductive, and one of the ways that you make that argument is in your essay, you trace the origins of the word talent, which is very surprising and quite illuminating. So tell us what you found.
STEWART: Yeah, well, you know, I'm a writer, so I love thinking about what words really mean. And what I was wondering was, when did we get the idea that if someone's doing something with a great deal of skill, they were born with that ability? So you look back at the meaning of that word, and you start to see people being described as talented going back a few hundred years, but before that, there's a definition of talent as the amount of wealth that a person earns over their working life. And I thought, well, that's very interesting, because if you think of what someone has accumulated over their working life, and we call that a talent, then if you apply that to someone's skills and abilities, it means not that they were born with it, but that they worked for it and earned it.
DINGMAN: Absolutely. And I'm quite drawn to it because it offers an interpretation of the word talent as a stand in not for some innate ability, but rather a stand in for like decades of dedication and honoring of impulse, and it felt, to me, like one of the things you were gesturing at in this essay. And I'm curious to know if you agree with this, is that there's a difference between talent and craft?
STEWART: For sure. Look, I think what we think of today, when we think of talent, is someone who's just born with absolute bonkers genius ability to do some particular thing, like play the saxophone. And, you know, instead, I think what is really true is that someone who's incredibly good at playing the saxophone has been playing it for an incredibly long time with a lot of interest and commitment.
It's in the back of your mind all the time. For me as a painter, I'm walking down the street and I'm looking at the fall colors in the trees and thinking, that's not so much a yellow ochre, but if I took, like, a deep cadmium yellow, and I mixed a little bit of red into it, but also a little blue, just to knock that back a bit, I could get that color.
DINGMAN: Yeah, if I'm hearing you right, the only motivation in wanting to find that color is that it will satisfy something very deep within you. It's not like, “ah, then I can finally sell that painting.”
STEWART: It's more about it's the thing that you're interested in that your brain tends to want to go ruminate on when it's not doing anything else. You know, when you when your brain is at rest, what does it start thinking about like when you're on a long road trip, right? What do you naturally gravitate towards?
DINGMAN: Yeah, well, and one of the things about this new framework that you're proposing, I think, is that it moves away from something that particularly American culture does a lot, which is to treat talent as a commodity. And I think that's a big part of what's behind this inclination that we have to say that it's this gift that is either bestowed or not bestowed.
STEWART: Oh yeah. And I mean, I think people literally do this. And I can't remember if it was the same essay or the one I wrote the next week. I told a story about a woman who struck up a conversation with me like this one day. And she said, “Oh, I can't paint. My sister's the artist. She's the one who got that gene.”
And I just looked at her and said, “your sister didn't take art away from you.” And she just stopped and stared at me and she repeated it. She was like, “my sister didn't take art away from me?” And I'm like, no, she didn't, and she goes, “I'm gonna go tell my therapist you said that.” I said, go right ahead, but enroll in an art class.
DINGMAN: Yeah. Well, and I can confirm that that story about the woman going to talk to her therapist was in the essay that I read, because I remember being very moved by that exchange that you just described. And I think what's so beautiful about it is, again, what you're proposing is this idea that talent isn't a gift that some people get and others don't. It's actually a gift that you can give yourself. You mentioned in the piece, and you even mentioned in our conversation, this idea that hearing people express the idea that talent isn't available to them, makes you sad. And what makes you sad about that?
STEWART: Well they're telling kind of a sad story about themselves. They're saying, “I would love to have the experience that you're having right now. I would love to sit in a park with a sketchbook and some watercolors, that looks wonderful, but I can't.” And you know, I think this is kind of what people really mean. Like when people walk by and see me out making art in the outdoors, doing air painting or whatever, and they say, “I wish I could do that.” What they really mean is do.
Like, I want to be sitting on that rock on the edge of the river with a sketchbook. What a nice way to spend time. They mostly just want to do it, rather than what you get out of the sketchbook. But that's one of the reasons I love working in a sketchbook. None of it's for sale, but it's that daily practice, kind of like running. You know, runners, they get out and they run every day because it's satisfying to run and it makes them feel good. And it's the daily-ness of running that feels so good, and I think it's the everyday kind of regularness of playing the guitar or drawing pictures or sewing or whatever it is that it's about kind of building a life that has this really satisfying, inherently satisfying component to it.
DINGMAN: Yeah, yeah. So can I ask you, so far, for you personally, we've been talking about your relationship with painting and drawing. How do you think about this when it comes to your writing, which is another thing that you are extremely skilled at, and which, if I'm not mistaken, does pay.
STEWART: Yeah, I know, right. I mean, writing does pay all my bills. I'm a full-time writer. It's the only thing I do to earn a living. So I, you know, and I have to say, I kind of have a different relationship to it, because I generally don't start writing a book until I have a contract from a publisher. But also I write on Substack because I'm free of the constraints of a book contract, and I can bang out any idea I have and send it out into the world. And there it goes.
And this essay on talent is actually one of those, so I do still kind of write as a hobby in a way, like, that's what substack is, and I think that's what so many writers love about it, is like, I'm going to write this today and hit send tonight and move on to the next thing. And that is not how it works when you're writing a book for a publisher.
DINGMAN: Yeah. But this is such an important distinction that I think you're pointing out is, yes, you're a professional writer in that maybe you would not write an entire book absent a contract, but that doesn't mean that you wouldn't write.
STEWART: Exactly.
