How Do You Hold a Masterpiece with Dirty Hands?
What we keep, what we question, and what we walk away from.
Making art is, at its core, an act of asking:
You ask people to look. You ask them to care. You ask them to see themselves in what you’ve made.
And the hardest of all: sometimes you ask them to pay.
It’s one of the most vulnerable things a person can do: to hold up something you’ve made and say, “Here. Do you think this matters?”
When I left law and started making art full-time, I struggled with that kind of asking. The courtroom cares about facts, not feelings. I knew how to advocate, how to defend, how to argue. But to me, it is far harder to say “I made this. Would you like it?”
Then I read Amanda Palmer’s book The Art of Asking, and something shifted in me. She reframed asking not as weakness, but as a very human connection. She wrote about vulnerability and its relationship to the very heart of what it means to create and to share what you create with the world.
Her book gave me the courage to run my small business the way I do today: open-hearted, handmade, messy, human. That book shaped me.
And now…I don’t know how to feel about it.
Photograph: Growth.
When the Artist Becomes Complicated
In recent years, Amanda Palmer has come under fire, sometimes for her own actions, but more recently for her defense of, and continued connection to, her ex-husband, author Neil Gaiman, who has faced allegations that are serious and unsettling. There’s a swirl of discourse around both of them: what they’ve said, what they haven’t, what they stand for, what they should.
I’m not here to litigate the details. I don’t have enough facts, and I’m not interested in turning this into a gossip column.
But I do have to live with the discomfort. Because this book, the one that gave me language, courage, and a sense of creative belonging, now carries a weight it didn’t used to.
It asks a familiar question, one we’ve all had to face:
Can we separate the art from the artist?
And more pressingly:
When shouldn’t we?
Trailblazers With Shadows
This question isn’t new to me. In writing Trailblazers, I’ve had to ask it again and again. A number of the people that I hold up as examples have challenging pasts.
Dian Fossey, whose work with gorillas transformed conservation, also treated her local field staff terribly and condoned violent tactics.
Edward Abbey, whose books helped launch the modern environmental movement, held views that were sexist, xenophobic, and casually cruel.
And yet - and yet - the work meant something. It still does. Abbey made people fall in love with wild places. Fossey’s research helped save an entire species. They changed the way people think about wilderness. About stewardship. Most importantly, about belonging.
So what do we do with that?
The Risk of Tossing, the Risk of Keeping
I don’t have a simple answer.
If we discard every artist, writer, thinker, or activist who was flawed, selfish, ignorant, or problematic, we will have a very short bookshelf left.
But if we keep them all, unquestioned and unchallenged, we risk normalizing harm. We risk turning a blind eye. We risk saying: this work matters more than the people it hurt.
It’s a line we walk constantly as humans and creators.
How do we honor impact without excusing injury?
How do we critique without erasing?
How do we listen to the people harmed, without burning down everything that ever inspired us?
I don’t think there’s one right answer.
But I do think the asking matters.
Asking Is Still Sacred
I’ve built my life around asking now.
I ask people to read my newsletter.
I ask them to buy things I’ve made.
I ask them to believe running whatever pace you run at is enough. That a wooden token can be a talisman. That a zine can mean something.
I ask them to trust me.
And I know that means something, too.
Because the kind of asking I learned to do - the Amanda Palmer kind - isn’t about pressure. It’s about connection, relationship, and invitation.
But unlike Palmer, I don’t want to be the main character in anyone’s story. I don’t want to lead a movement or collect favors like currency. I just want to keep making things. Keep sharing them. Keep wondering aloud with people who want to wonder with me.
We Don’t Need to Know Everything
Maybe we don’t have to resolve the tension. Maybe the questions are the point.
We can hold space for the work that shaped us and also acknowledge where it falls short.
We can admire someone’s courage in one arena and still refuse to excuse their cruelty in another.
We can hold gratitude and disappointment in the same hand. Sometimes we’ll choose to separate the art from the artist. Other times, we’ll toss the whole body of work aside because the harm is too loud to ignore.
➤ If You’re New Here...
Welcome. I write about the outdoors, about art, about reinvention. I write about asking big questions with no promise of answers. I write from the middle of things, where most of us actually live.
If you’ve ever loved a book or a song or a person, and later wondered if you were allowed to love it…you’re not alone.
I’m still asking, still learning, and still creating. I know you are too.
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If this piece helped you hold something complicated a little more gently, and you’d like to help me keep writing, you can buy me a coffee here.
The tree is playing the long game here.
Asking matters. The questions are the point. Love it!