“I began taking [the term art monk] more seriously when I entered a stage of total nomadism that was precipitated,” Stephanie Elizondo Griest says, “by the realization that I could either write or I could pay rent—I couldn’t do both.”
Griest, a professor of creative nonfiction at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, is describing how she arrived at a term that’s the driving force in her propulsive new book, Art Above Everything: One Woman’s Global Exploration of the Joys and Torments of a Creative Life. Released in June, the book blends memoir, journalism, and cultural criticism. Griest has welcomed me into her Carrboro condo (on her birthday, no less) to have tea. Her home brims with color, travel mementos, and books, several of which she has written.
The realization she is referring to came back in the early 2000s. Griest chose writing. She put her belongings into storage and hit the road for the next three years.
While living in Querétaro, Mexico, and working on the book Mexican Enough, Griest says her fellow artists began teasingly calling her a nun for the way she would hole up for hours at a time, writing. The term stuck: later, while visiting the Lebh Shomea House of Prayer in South Texas, Griest began to reflect on the overlap between monasticism and her chosen vocation. There were two canonized Catholic nuns in the Lebh Shomea community she was staying at—women who had taken vows of silence in the 1980s and maintained them over decades.
“I began thinking, ‘Okay, they go to their cabin and spend 12 hours a day in silence, praying for the souls of the world,’” Griest, the author of six books, says. “How different is that from what writers do? [Writing] is our devotional prayer, also, in a form. I found so many analogies, parallelisms, to the lives they were living.”
Maybe, she thought, by choosing to choose art above everything, she was living like an art monk.
“They had taken vows of poverty, chastity, obedience. And, I mean, what do artists do but chastity?” Griest adds with a laugh.
Art Above Everything explores the premise of the art monk across ten far-flung countries, from Rwanda and Iceland to Romania and Cuba, as Griest talks with women artists who have taken critical risks and sacrifices in pursuit of being an artist. The result is a sprawling, big-hearted, existential journey through the power of art.
In India, Griest introduces readers to gurus Protima Gauri Bedi, Surupa Sen, and Bijayini Satpathy, who have devoted their lives to a classical dance style called Odissi—a sensuous, lyrical dance that requires exacting discipline. Mesmerized, Griest writes that watching two dancers split out of a pose is like “watching a cell divide.”
Such dedication requires giving up a traditional family life, for Sen: “Every decision I make,” she tells Griest, “I am aware that other decisions might not work out.”
The chapters in Art Above Everything are structured in response to the question “Is Art Enough?” The title of the chapter set in India, for instance, answers it thusly—yes, art is enough because “Art is a Spiritual Orgasm.”
The next chapter, “Art is Reconciliation,” follows several women in Rwanda who create performance art in response to the 1994 Rwandan genocide. Pursuing this line of art has meant defying gender bias and, alongside addressing national trauma, engaging over and over again with their own trauma. And yet, as artist Malika Uwamahoro tells Griest, “There were some things that couldn’t be said, so we moved our body.”
Subsequent chapters bear out attendant theses: Art is medicine. Art is lineage. Art is revenge. Art is a house of your own. The latter chapter (a particularly luscious read) trains its lens on Sandra Cisneros, author of the beloved novel The House on Mango Street. She may be one of the more commercially successful subjects in the book, but she, too, has lived a life of sacrifice.
“The artist’s struggle is not something that people talk to me about, and it has been so much a part of my life,” she tells Griest. “It takes a lot of courage to go against societal expectations, gender expectations, cultural expectations. We have to invent our own camino.”
Women making these kinds of choices about the life they want to live shouldn’t feel radical, and yet it does. Women’s rights have seen a global regression; in a recent report from UN Women, “a quarter of countries surveyed note a backlash against feminism and gender equality.”
Political and cultural tides in the United States have seen a strong push toward pro-natalism and the nuclear family. My Instagram algorithm, meanwhile, is dead set on feeding me Farmer Wants a Wife, a reality show that is as politically straightforward as it sounds: A doe-eyed farmer seeks a stay-at-home wife. A bevy of women with cascading hair try out for the gig, attempting to nail the ineffable nexus of spitfire and submissive.
Art Above Everything is both an antidote to those regressions and a good handbook for anyone who wants to know what kinds of caminos other artists have created. It’s a different kind of road manual.
Each chapter is rigorously reported, and you’ll learn plenty of historical and cultural context along the way. And while Griest’s voice sings with curiosity about the worlds of each of her subjects, her own story, and the vulnerability with which she handles it, is the book’s binding agent. She is in search of her own answers, as she slips between decades and wonders whether the sacrifices she has made—like a stable income or the decision not to have a child—are worth it for art.
Decisions like these are hard, and Griest doesn’t presume there is a right answer for everyone, nor does she sidestep the material difficulties that artists face today. At the end of Art Above Everything, readers will find a list of resources: residencies, fellowships, grants, and sources of inspiration—the kinds of knowledge most people, in an atmosphere of mounting scarcity, might keep close to their chest. Art, you might say, is sharing.
“If I’m going to be an art monk and live in this intellectual art monastery, I want to know there are other people there,” Griest says of the decision to write the book. “I thought, ‘Well—let’s see if there are others?’ And I was lucky to be able to find them everywhere I went.”
Follow Culture Editor Sarah Edwards on Bluesky or email [email protected].