The Wisdom of Dogs, Kids & Fairy Bread with Liana Finck

I just finished a fantastic hour-long conversation with

Liana Finck

. This is someone whose work I've been admiring for years—a cartoonist who makes drawing look effortless while somehow distilling entire emotional universes into a few spare lines and perfectly chosen words.

By Liana Finck

For those unfamiliar with Liana's work, she's the kind of prolific New York artist who makes the rest of us feel like we're moving through creative molasses. She's authored eight books, contributes regularly to the New Yorker (including the brilliant Dear Pepper advice column from a dog's perspective), and has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, and Wall Street Journal. She's also a Fulbright, Guggenheim, and New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship recipient, which is academic speak for "ridiculously talented person who actually deserves all the recognition she gets."

But here's what struck me most during our chat: despite this impressive resume, Liana talked about her work with the kind of practical honesty that only comes from someone deep in the actual trenches of making things. No mystical artist bullshit. Just the real stuff.

The Art of Creative Evolution (Or: When Your Tools Stop Working)

One of the most fascinating parts of our conversation centred around something every artist knows but rarely discusses openly: what happens when the thing that's been working for you suddenly... doesn't.

Liana's been known for her distinctive line work using Muji gel pens—these incredibly fine instruments that capture every tiny movement. "I'm not quite feeling it anymore," she admitted. "Do you ever work in a certain way and then you just can't anymore and you really grieve it?"

Oof. Yes. This has happened to me a lot.

It's like losing a language you've been speaking fluently for years. She described it perfectly: that organic feeling of thought-to-hand connection that suddenly goes missing, leaving you staring at familiar tools like they belong to someone else.

This led to a broader discussion about artistic evolution and audience expectations. I referenced a Zadie Smith quote about how "We want our artists to remain as they were when we first loved them. But our artists want to move." The worst thing, Smith argues, is for an artist to exist as "a feature of someone else's epiphany."

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Kids, Creativity, and the Perfect Chaos of Making Things

Having two young children has fundamentally changed how Liana approaches her work. "I'm pretty much always distracted, even when..." she started to explain, before being delightfully interrupted by her very cute son wanting apple juice. But this distraction might actually be a gift. She described how having kids has helped her see "the edges of my self-consciousness a little bit. I'm a little less self-centred about being ashamed of being strange." There's something liberating about being too busy to overthink your weirdness.