We recently connected with Lancelot Schaubert and have shared our conversation below.

Lancelot, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today We’d love to hear about a project that you’ve worked on that’s meant a lot to you.

Rather than talk about the most meaningful project in my life I want to take a minute to talk about the most meaningful project in your life — you, the reader.

Here’s the thing. Almost everyone in this country values money as the ultimate good. And it’s not. It’s a proximate good. Someone with all the money in the world doesn’t have all the power: certainly the gangs of Haiti and the former monarchs of Haiti have proven that true. It’s also true the other way: someone with tons of power or honor could go absolutely broke. And other proximate goods exist: as we’ve seen, Harvey Weinstein ruined the moral beauty of whatever art he could have created on the altar of base, temporary “pleasure.” And the question for him: was it actually even pleasing? Or did he feel shame even in the acts? Similarly, plenty have torched their ethical goodness on the pyre of many, many people knowing their name.

Fame, honor, power, money, base pleasure: all of these are insufficient, proximate goods.

And yet most people create for all of these.

But to get to meaning, we really have to strive towards the total truth, the total Beauty, the absolute goodness, the fulfillment of ALL desires — not merely one or two — the fundamental reality of the mystery of life.

And to kneel in awe before it and serve that fundamental mystery.

So what will it take for you to make meaning the fundamental goal of all of your work? For you to reorient your work around what is most meaningful, not what will make you the most money or hookups or get you the most political favors or win you the most awards or gain you the largest following?

What do you — yourself; your true name — mean?

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

With that in mind, I write and film and think about desire. All of the books and films and photonovels and songs and installations and theatrical productions I work on ask the question, “What do you want?” And then, “Why do you want that?”

Then again, “Why do you want THAT?”

I believe that art should not merely entertain or sell product. I believe art should cause us to change our minds, soften our hearts, and motivate our activism to be true and good. And therefore artists manual and fine alike should not seek first to be richer, smarter, sexier, cooler, more relevant, more tech savvy, or more powerful. They must seek to be better and to make things that will make others better: this — virtue — is the soul of true renown and is my one and only goal with all of my work.

So here’s what you need to try:

I am the author of the novel BELL HAMMERS, which Publisher’s Weekly called “a hoot.” That sounds suspiciously as if they’re secretly run by owls. I also wrote THE GREENWOOD POET, INCONVENIENCES RIGHTLY CONSIDERED, OVERMORROW, THE VALE SHORT STORIES, and TAP AND DIE.

I edit The Showbear Family Circus (which, in its heyday, published over 500 works from 400+ renowned academics, artists, and authors) as well as the award-winning anthology series Of Gods and Globes.

I compose and performs songs from my albums H.A.L.T.S. and All Who Wander.

For those looking for a speaker or comedian, I deliver keynote speeches, narrate audiobooks, produce various short films and theatrical productions and graphic novels.

How can we best help foster a strong, supportive environment for artists and creatives?

Eliminate competitions. Entirely. The point of art is to reach out and find someone struggling through something hyper specific, find them, and encourage them.

In order to bolster that laser targeting unique to the arts, you have to stop thinking as if you’re creating a scarce money pile or that you’re competing or creating competitions for artists. There’s no “best artist” because the arts don’t work hierarchically, but more like a mesh or a spiderweb. Each work of art touches all of the others that inspired it and all of the others it will inspire.

So, for instance, if you have a theater in a small town, the single best thing you can do is help someone start another one. Because theaters grow like grape clusters and if you create a culture that’s proud of going to the theater, you will improve the number of tickets and therefore the quality of shows at BOTH theaters.

Or if you create a commons of all of the artists who have ever made derivative works from, say, a specific novel and reinvest the licensing fees in the global economy, paying out the earnings in a dividend to everyone who ever licensed it, it will encourage more and more licensing, therefore more and more derivative works, therefore a proliferation of the original work as well as a whole body of future works.

We must think of culture as a new kind of compounding interest that predicates proximate goods, one of which is money.

There’s a reason that all of these real estate developers in NYC follow the artists: they know that nonprofits contribute a tenfold for-free return on any invested capital and that arts contribute literally priceless value to the communities they invest in.

What do you find most rewarding about being a creative?

Speaking about the fundamental mystery of everything that is. The mystery of life is the plainest part of life and when you think — long enough — about anything, you’ll realize that the further you think, the closer you come to this ever-moving horizon of mystery at the center of everything and beyond everything.

Speaking to that — to that Seinsucht, to that longing for a home we’ve never known — can often give people a specific kind of joy, a specific kind of hope, a specific kind of thrill somewhere in the middle spine that they cannot find elsewhere.

Contact Info:

• Website: http://lanceschaubert.substack.com
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@LancelotSchaubert/releases
• Other: http://lanceschaubert.org
  https://songwhip.com/lancelotschaubert
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