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Thank you Jeremy Caplan, Adam Ming, Carly Valancy, Kyrie, Sheri Handel, and many others for tuning into my live video with Grant Snider! Join me for my next live video in the app tomorrow at 12:30pm EDT.
I am sitting at my drawing board in my sweltering Manhattan apartment. Grant is sitting in his room in Wichita, Kansas. The contrast between our two environments is immediate and palpable.
His background is calm, lined with books. There is a quiet, steady, midwestern stillness to his frame that makes my own neurotic, constantly vibrating New York energy feel unhinged.
I have been a big fan of Grant’s work for a long time. If you have spent any time on the internet looking for art that makes you feel deeply seen, you’ve likely stumbled across his comics. They’re incredibly insightful, minimalist, and poetic. He manages to take complex, abstract concepts like mindfulness, anxiety, the crushing weight of the creative process, and distil them into beautiful, clean, uncluttered panels.
His style is a brilliant amalgamation of influences, echoing the whimsy of Quentin Blake and the neurotic genius of Roz Chast, yet entirely his own. But there’s a detail about Grant’s life that always manages to short-circuit my brain.
Grant is a practising orthodontist.
By day, he is literalizing the mechanics of human smiles. He operates a medical practice in Wichita. He looks into people’s mouths, adjusts wires, and fixes the geometry of their teeth. And if that wasn’t demanding enough, he also has five kids. He is managing a small, highly energetic army of children, running a medical practice, and somehow still managing to be one of the most prolific and poignant cartoonists I’ve ever met.
When you spend your life as a working artist in a city that charges you fifty dollars just to leave your apartment, you tend to view time as a hostile currency. The idea of holding down a demanding, highly technical medical career while simultaneously producing emotionally resonant art feels impossible.
During our session, I had to ask him how on earth he manages it. Does the day job drain the creative battery, or does it fuel it?
Grant’s answer completely flipped my understanding of creative burnout. He explained that his multifaceted skill set is actually the secret engine of his productivity.
“You need some kind of natural reset button. For me, my job where I straighten teeth and, you know, talk to people and, you know, do some good work is part of that for me”.
It’s a deeply reassuring concept. Instead of draining his creative reserves, his orthodontic work acts as a mental palate cleanser. It engages a completely different, highly analytical, physical part of his brain. When he’s adjusting a bracket on a teenager’s molar, he is not agonising over the narrative arc of a graphic novel. By stepping away from the drawing board to do a job grounded in the physical, real world, he allows his creative side to rest, recharge, and process ideas in the background.
We fell into a deep discussion about this, touching on David Epstein’s brilliant book, Range, which argues that generalists -people with diverse, multifaceted backgrounds and varied experiences- often triumph in a specialised world. I mentioned that I was currently reading Epstein’s other book, Inside the Box, which explores the idea of creative thinking within strict confines.
