We recently connected with Clay Steakley and have shared our conversation below.

Clay, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. We’d love to hear about a project that you’ve worked on that’s meant a lot to you.

The most meaningful project I’ve worked on is the multidisciplinary work, The Fire Cycle. It comprises poetry, music, film, and live performance all in one kind of art bottle universe with its own logic and philosophies. For so many years as an artist — particularly as an actor and writer — I surrendered power to outside forces like casting directors, producers, and publishers. I spent a very long time essentially waiting for permission to be creative!

The Fire Cycle poems were already in progress in 2020 when I lost my job and found myself with a lot of time for soul-searching. I realized that I needed to disconnect my idea of making art from A) getting permission from others B) expectations of what a writer/musician/actor “should” make, C) making money. Instead, I finally gave myself permission to create whatever I wanted. And what did I want to make? I wanted to make a big, sprawling interdisciplinary (transdisciplinary? I never know the right word) piece that combined everything I love to make.

That’s one reason it became so meaningful to me. The other is the subject matter, which is centered on humanity’s interconnectedness and our interdependence with nature. It digs into deep time (geological time, astronomical time) as well as tiny details—scratches on a wedding ring, the smell of soil. When we began to bring this to life in film and live performance with my friend and collaborator Becca Hoback, it truly began to sing. Our performances became rituals, and not grandiose rituals, but simple, humble things that audiences leaned into and were moved by.

Clay, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

My career has taken a lot of twists and turns over the past twenty-some-odd years. I’ve worked as an actor in film and theatre, including the films “Walk the Line,” “Deja Vu,” and “White Lightnin'” and the tv series “The Wire.” I’ve also worked as a professional musician in bands and as a touring sideman. The throughline to my different work has always been writing. I’ve been a music and arts journalist, an advertising copywriter, a fiction writer and poet.

Today I create my multidisciplinary work by night and by day I’m an art director for content with a marketing agency.

I was born in Nashville, Tennessee, and spent quite a few years in the Washington DC area (shoutout to the DC theatre community) and Los Angeles before heading back to Nashville. I’ve had small roles in big movies and big roles in small movies, performed with large and small theatres, worked in new play development, and written mountains of ad copy, but what I’m proudest of is this new multi-disciplinary work like the Fire Cycle.

Why? Because it encourages dialogue and creates community. Suddenly people who strictly work within one discipline find themselves collaborating with and in conversation with people from other disciplines. Relationships are built, we find ways to get one another paid, to get one another work. People who find the work through the ambient music get turned on to the poetry. The same with film and dance, theatre and visual art.

I strongly, strongly feel that the best way for all of us as artists to thrive today and in the coming days of increasing AI meddling and economic factors is to band together. To collaborate and make sure that all ships rise.

What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?

That financial success equals artistic success. For years, I connected the two, thinking “the day I quit my day job is the day I’ve arrived.” Well, that day came and guess what? I didn’t feel successful. I needed a bigger acting role, a better selling record, to work with bigger artists… whatever. But that didn’t achieve anything either. And then? A dry spell. Suddenly, I’m back at my day job feeling like a “failure.”

It took a long time for me to learn two things:
1) What matters is the process. The act of creating. This is when you are truly experiencing the gift of art, the gift of the creative act. Anything that comes after is just window dressing.
2) The Buddhist idea of the 8 Worldly Winds is so important to always keep in the front of your mind. Gain and loss, pleasure and pain, praise and blame, fame and disrepute… these things are always with us and we experience them ALL to some degree. We can’t control the future and we can’t control HOW people respond to our work. All we can do is our best, and the sooner you make real peace with that, the happier you’ll be.

How about pivoting – can you share the story of a time you’ve had to pivot?

As was the case for most of us, 2020 was the major pivot moment for me. I was an early COVID layoff, dropped from the agency I worked for with no severance and with only 6 days left of insurance. I first pivoted back to freelancing as a writer and brand consultant, and was very fortunate that 20 years of work had given me a network to draw from. I also realized that I needed to truly and deeply reconnect with the arts, which I’d let go over 4 years of a very stressful job in a toxic environment. So I began an online arts journal called Outer Voice (www.outervoice.net). It’s dormant now that I’m back in a full-time gig and working on my multidisciplinary projects, but it really gave me life for 2 years. The mission of Outer Voice was to help artists learn how to talk about themselves — how to build a brand without “building a brand.” In other words, how to strategically draw on their authenticity. I interviewed a different artist from a different discipline every week, and it was really inspiring for me … and I hope it was with my readers!

I bring this up because Outer Voice was created with no real financial gain in mind. The freelancing supported me, and a Patreon account covered the basic costs of keeping Outer Voice afloat. Why does that matter? For 4 years at the agency gig, I’d completely fallen for the idea that anything worthwhile had to have a monetary value. It had to have ROI. Reconnecting with the arts and building Outer Voice made me remember that there are many kinds of ROI. For me, the biggest return on my investment of time and care with Outer Voice was giving other artists a platform.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.thefirecycle.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/claysteakley/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/claysteakley/

Image Credits
Philip Dembinski Tiffany Bessire