Thursday, July 17th, 2025, 6pm, Book Passage, Corte Madera, free!
For young people it can be easy to be idealistic and devote ourselves to art. Then reality — and responsibilities — set in. As a friend said to me shortly after we graduated from college, “Life costs money.”
Stephanie Elizondo Griest’s new book, Art Above Everything: One Woman’s Global Exploration of the Joys and Torments of a Creative Life, explores the sacrifices that artists make to pursue lives devoted to creativity and examines the gifts and challenges of these pursuits.
Her earlier book, Mexican Enough, is a revelation and is a template for what every travel book should be: It’s filled with the voices of local people and their struggles; it’s personal and honest, and it makes us care about the people profiled and the places they inhabit. It’s so much more than a travel book: Elizondo Griest considers her heritage, the nature of belonging, the toll that poverty takes on families when fathers have to go to El Norte to seek work, the risks Mexicans face for being openly gay, and so much more.
When Stephanie asked me to be her partner in conversation, my first thought was, Wouldn’t you rather ask a woman?, but I didn’t want to pass up the opportunity to join my longtime friend on the Book Passage stage.
Here’s the copy for the event from the Book Passage site:
Is the all-encompassing quest to become a self-sustaining artist worth the sacrifices it often requires? Throughout her 20s and 30s, Stephanie Elizondo Griest could not help worrying whether constantly prioritizing her writing over everything else—from postponing children to living nomadically to save on rent—was leading her to fulfillment or regret. After a break-up and health crisis in her early 40s, she decided to turn to other women artists for their perspectives on that perennial question: Is art enough?
Art Above Everything introduces us to legendary writers, visual artists, dancers, and musicians across the globe, who talk intimately about their art, what it requires, what it gifts them, and what it costs them. Opening in a classical Indian dance village, Elizondo Griest goes on to meet more than 100 artists in Qatar, Iceland, Mexico, New Zealand, Cuba, and the United States.
She discovers artists such as Rwandan playwright Hope Azeda, who navigated ethnic tensions as she attempted to bring about reconciliation through theater in the aftermath of genocide; and Romanian painter Florica Prevenda, who got assigned to a provincial factory during Ceaușescu’s dictatorship but never relinquished her brushes.
Art is inheritance, dissent, devotion, revenge, celebration, and more. Yet though the artists’ relationships to their craft is different, their need to create in the face of economic hardship, misogyny, sexual violence, and family ostracization is wholly akin. Bold and inspiring, Art Above Everything never pretends that the artist’s path is easy — but it illuminates the infinite ways we can wield creativity as a vitalizing force.
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Stephanie Elizondo Griest is a globetrotting writer from the Texas-Mexico borderlands. Her books include Around the Bloc: My Life in Moscow, Beijing, and Havana; Mexican Enough; and All the Agents and Saints: Dispatches from the U.S. Borderlands. She has also written for the New York Times, Washington Post, The Believer, BBC, VQR, and Oxford American.
Her work has won a Margolis Award for Social Justice Reporting, an International Latino Book Award, a PEN Southwest Book Award, and two Lowell Thomas Travel Journalism prizes. Professor of Creative Nonfiction at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, she has performed as both a Moth storyteller and as a literary ambassador for the U.S. State Department. Visit her @SElizondoGriest and www.StephanieElizondoGriest.com.
