Your Official SAFTA Guide to Holiday Gifts for Writers & Artists!

If you have any artist friends you will probably be needing to know what to get them, or you might not have an artist friend anymore! Also, if you don’t have any artist friends now is a good time to pick your favorite prospect and get it a gift!

A lot of artists are very sympathetic to themselves, which means they like their interests expressed in ways that transcend the finitude of their experiences, which means if they paint they probably like to look at paintings. Usually this is a kind of unilateral affinity, so you can bet that your artist friend or soon-to-be likes experiencing most art. You can fulfill this need for them with lifetime or part-time memberships to museums where they can go and be Affected.

http://www.knoxart.org/

You are not however limited to art museums. Artists like science. It’s a part of art now too, as if they were ever mutually exclusive. Pretty much everything is art to an artist if it has been made a spectacle of some sort, as one of our staff demonstrates, specifically requesting a membership to: museumofwonder.com.

For the more private homebody-oriented spectacle, you might consider a few books to expand the horizons, all of which you can find on Amazon. Joan Silber’s new collection Fools is a highly sought-after collection of stories by one of our staff.

Other important books in literature this year: http://htmlgiant.com/web-hype/25-important-books-of-the-00s/

And for the poet: http://www.goodreads.com/genres/poetry

If your artist is already inspired enough, you might consider helping it channel via equipment and space. The painter or mixed media crafter will probably have such a wide array of necessities that you’d be better off with a gift card to their favorite art supply store: Jerry’s Artarama a Knoxville favorite (I believe this is also the type of place you can satisfy the bookmaker’s list: Waxed linen cord; Good Paper; Bookmaking needles; Punching cradle).

For the writer, moleskine and impressive looking pens and/or a typewriter give their work that authentic ‘doing-it’ feeling on a platform that doesn’t support distractions like facebook and twitter and buzzfeed and other meme generators.

You can also facilitate this space with a coffee shop gift card, or like a map to somewhere really quiet where you’ve left a whole bunch of iced coffee and possibly a microwave, a mini-fridge, and a very long extension cord. For those of you without a mini-fridge and several mile-long extension cables living in Knoxville, Old City Java provides a dynamic and comfortable setting in the Old City.

If the artist you know is of the rare breed equipped with will power, Kona Coffee might suffice. The coffee also helps facilitate time: the artist is notoriously short on time due to a hyper-awareness of its mortality.

For the writer, we would highly recommend a subscription to Duotrope, a service which consolidates time by navigating the publisher selection process so the writer can spend less time upset and alone and spend more time trying to be happy.