Austin Kleon

I mean, I was making, I think my first book I did in the basement of the law school where I was a web designer and riding the bus back home.

I mean, that's how a lot of that first poetry book was made.

And then, you know, as I kind of like continued on and on, I think I had a nice office in our house when my kids were little.

And then we had another kid and I had to move out to the garage.

And then I worked in garages for a while.

And so this place that we're in right now, I actually built this.

This is in my backyard in Austin, Texas.

And it's the first space I've ever actually created for myself.

There's a funny story about this.

When I had this built and it was pristine, it had like, you know, nice new floors and new walls.

And it just, it was like, wow, look at this place.

Like all this nice natural light.

I said to my wife, I said, I will never make anything decent in here.

And I didn't really feel like I deserved the space.

You know, it was too nice.

And she looked at me and she said, oh, that's okay.

You just have to mess it up.

And that was really true.

It's like, so now what I'm trying to do is I'm trying to make like a comfortable environment where I come in here and it's playtime.

A lot of my work requires that sense of play we just talked about.