The Artist Monks in “Art Above Everything”: A Conversation with Stephanie Elizondo Griest https://ift.tt/1AvfI5u
If you’ve read Stephanie Elizondo Griest’s previous books, then you know she is a fearless writer, one who is adept at mining beauty from hardship, both personal and external. If Art Above Everything is your first foray into the intrepid and big-hearted adventures Griest is known for, then you are in for a treat. Stephanie Elizondo Griest channels her frustration against patriarchal systems that devalue the work of women into a series of resilient, often uplifting accounts from a cast of uniquely talented, strong, and inspired artists.
Art Above Everything blends history, cultural criticism, journalism, and memoir to create a spellbinding narrative that is so full of love for life and curiosity that I am left breathless. Our interconnected world is big, dangerous, and beautiful. Art Above Everything is a praise song. Listen. Art Above Everything spans ten nations — from Cuba to Iceland; Rwanda to Qatar — and at the center of this incredibly precise book are fierce painters, poets, actors, dancers, and musicians whose artistic expression is the universal thrum of joy and suffering, those twin pillars of art as witness.
Stephanie Elizondo Griest is a globetrotting author from the Texas-Mexico borderlands. Her other books also include Around the Bloc: My Life in Moscow, Beijing, and Havana; Mexican Enough; and All the Agents and Saints. Her work has won a Margolis Award, an International Latino Book Award, a PEN Southwest Book Award, and a Lowell Thomas Travel Journalism Gold Prize.
What shines the most for me is the joy that you, as a writer, experience on the page. And not just because you are traveling all over the world, meeting amazing people, but because there is genuine curiosity and awe. How do you maintain your joie de vivre as a seasoned travel writer and journalist writing about challenging histories, both cultural and personal?
Thank you for such a generous reading, Matt! Whatever joie de vivre I have is a reflection of the people I’ve been so fortunate to meet on my travels. My favorite way to spend a day is roaming the streets of an unknown city and engaging as many people as possible, whether they are selling elote on a street corner or feeding pigeons at the park. Connecting with strangers is, to me, one of the higher states of joy. Especially laughing with strangers — when you both witness something crazy, lock eyes, and howl together. Pure joy. That is why I don’t wear earphones or idly scroll on my phone when I’m traveling. I don’t want to miss a thing. Our planet is full of beautiful beings brimming with stories that could move us, guide us, unite us, and possibly even save us — if only we pay attention. Our failure to do so, both historically and presently, has sparked many of the tragedies we are globally experiencing. So, my goal as a writer is to recreate as much humanity-awe on the page as possible.
Your research into place and historical context is thrilling to me: a celebrity-turned-dancer in India, theater arising from the Rwandan genocide. The balance between the inspired and tragic is so well-done. Talk to me about this process of incorporating cultural/historical context so that we know these artists in relation to the legacies of their countries.
Art Above Everything is the most research-intense project I’ve ever attempted. Not only did I study each individual artist and art form (many of which I previously knew nothing about), but also the context in which they created. How did the #MeToo Movement impact American ballet? What was the role of the secret police during the Ceaușescu regime, and how did artists evade surveillance? Finding answers to such questions required absorbing countless books, films, blogs, and newspaper reportage, as well as conducting additional interviews with historians.
What surprised me was how relevant and even applicable this research became in my own life. For much of the decade I worked on this book, my father — whom I deeply loved — was slowly succumbing to Alzheimer’s, and I spent what turned out to be his final summer researching the genocide that ravaged Rwanda. Emotionally, it was hands-down the hardest reading I had ever done, and I printed out the completed chapter the night before my father died. I had always imagined his loss would totally unmoor me, but I instead found myself feeling intensely grateful that — unlike everyone I had just read about — my father had died peacefully, and we could gather and grieve him without any risk to our own safety. How many people are ruthlessly denied such privileges today? While writing my father’s eulogy, I then found myself reflecting on the theater troupe I had interviewed back in Kigali. They routinely performed by the gravesides of hundreds of thousands of people who’d been interred at genocide memorials around the country. Surely, I could collect myself enough to orate by the urn of my father. And so, I did. This might be the lasting gift of researching this book: the stories of its heroes now serve as my guide for powering through life.
I want to ask lighter questions, too. The travel that takes place within this project is so expansive! You were able to go to places most people will never see and you were able to meet with extraordinary artists that most people will never meet. If I am allowed, I would love to ask a daytime TV question: What was the most exciting moment of your journey? What was the moment, if you can choose one, that completely altered your sense of self?
Oh yes, let’s go daytime drama! So, my extra-thrilling moment was cruising down Havana’s bay-front boulevard in a van full of belly dancers passing around a bottle of rum and singing along to the Egyptian sha’abi blasting through the speakers. I had arrived to Cuba four months after undergoing cancer treatment. Shimmying alongside 80 belly dancers at the Havana Habibi Festival resurrected my femininity at the cellular level.
What most altered my sense of self, meanwhile, was the weekend I spent with author Sandra Cisneros at her home in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. Crossing her threshold was like stepping inside her poetry: Chihuahuas pranced around the tile floor, marigolds filled the alcoves, tin lanterns lined the stairwell, bookshelves extended to the ceiling. Colored light from stained-glass windows spilled across my desk each morning, beckoning me to write. It was an art-monastery, basically, and it emanated the purest creative energy. As fate would have it, just two weeks prior to my arrival in San Miguel, I purchased my very first home, and was harboring a lot of guilt and anxiety about spending that kind of money on myself. Sitting among the tasseled pillows of Sandra’s Moroccan-style parlor, sipping mezcal from gem-colored glass, rid me of that notion entirely. My work was worthy of being composed inside an art-monastery, too! And so, I marched down to Mercado de Artesanías and bought a suitcase-worth of decor.
I understand that you visited more countries and spent time with more artists than were allowed to fit into the final version of Art Above Everything. I thought maybe we could take a moment to talk about some of the places and people that didn’t make it into the book.
Every nonfiction writer’s favorite question! I conducted sit-down interviews with 75 artists and chatted with scores more in a dozen countries over the course of the decade. My books typically run about 125,000 words long, and I had been working toward a similar count when I sold the book to a publisher with a firm 90,000-word limit. So yes, many luminaries got cut. Karina Canellakis, the first woman to conduct such landmark performances as the 2018 Nobel Prize concert. Dohee Lee, a shamanistic drummer and dancer from South Korea. Sandra Ramos, a visual artist whose work embodies the rage, loss, and hope of Cubans fleeing their homeland.
I was especially sad to lose the chapter about Pauchi Sasaki, the Japanese-Peruvian composer best known for her “speaker dresses,” or garments composed of hundreds of speakers she wires together. (The first time she “played” her inaugural dress — meaning: amplified the music from her hand-made violin through the garment — her hair caught on fire!) The moment I glimpsed Pauchi descending the steps of a North Carolina amphitheater in 2014, simultaneously creating, performing, and broadcasting a sonic experience through croons and whispers, I knew I must feature her in this book. Truly, her art was singular. Her dilemma, however, felt universal. Pauchi longed to have a baby, but — like most artists — hadn’t yet found a way to make her art financially sustainable. Should she settle down with a family in Lima, and risk stunting her artistic development? Or should she freeze her eggs and pursue a DMA (Doctor of Musical Arts) in New York City? The indecision was overwhelming, and the proverbial clock was ticking.
Then, a few months before enrolling in a DMA program, the sky ripped open and Pauchi got struck by a bolt of career lightning. She won a slot in the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative, where she got paired with the most influential composer of the late 20th century: Philip Glass. Suddenly, Pauchi was premiering new work at Carnegie Hall. And then she fell madly in love, got married, and had a baby. Boom, boom, boom: every wild dream came true!
I find Pauchi’s story compelling not just because of her genius artistry, but also because she exemplifies how quickly an artist’s fate can change. This is a profession in which one person in a position of power can completely alter your destiny. What distinguished the self-sustaining artists I interviewed from the “starving” artists I interviewed was that the former had all been struck by career-lightning, and the latter had not. That was it. Talent, hard work, commitment, resilience, grit — none of that mattered as much as the sheer luck of being in the right place at the right time when lightning fell from the sky. Of course, there is nothing novel about this observation. It meant a lot to me personally, though, to witness how suddenly and even randomly “success” could spring upon an artist, because I had experienced a lot of heartache earlier in my career from not obtaining the kind of success necessary to make my own work sustainable. Lightning either strikes you, or it doesn’t. That doesn’t mean it’s pointless to try to conduct it, however. By all means, when the storm clouds roll in, you absolutely should run out there and dance your ass off. In fact, you should have been dancing out there all along. But you can’t get upset when the storm ends, and you’re merely sopping wet. No. You were bold enough to dance in the rain! You believed in something so much, you threw caution, health insurance, and a 401K to the wind and freaking DID IT. That reckless love is, to me, what makes art glorious.
Thank you so much for this interview, and especially for the reminder that a “reckless love” of art and humanity is the necessary driving force for us all.
NONFICTION Art Above Everything
By Stephanie Elizondo Griest
Beacon Press
Published June 10, 2025
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