Just Making

A Guide for Compassionate Creatives

You must sign in to see if this title is available for request. Sign In or Register Now
Send NetGalley books directly to your Kindle or Kindle app

1
To read on a Kindle or Kindle app, please add kindle@netgalley.com as an approved email address to receive files in your Amazon account. Click here for step-by-step instructions.
2
Also find your Kindle email address within your Amazon account, and enter it here.
Pub Date May 06 2025 | Archive Date Not set

Talking about this book? Use #JustMaking #NetGalley. More hashtag tips!


Description

"Creativity can be a powerful tool for 'alleviating suffering and fighting injustice,' according to this graceful guide from children's author Perkins.... Even those who've never picked up a pen or a paintbrush will be inspired."
Publishers Weekly

From award-winning author Mitali Perkins comes an essential companion for writers, artists, and other creatives who long for a more just world.

Why should we make art while injustice and suffering wreak havoc? How can we justify making beautiful things? Author Mitali Perkins isn't afraid of hard questions about justice and art. She knows that the creative life can seem selfish. As the daughter of immigrants, she studied toward a career of eradicating poverty and knows the internal voice that challenges: "How dare you retreat to your studio to create?"

Yet Perkins learned that writing fiction wasn't setting aside her passion for a better world but pursuing it. In Just Making, she offers a justice-driven perspective unique among books on creativity. "My ancestors are village Bengali women who made beautiful things but didn't dare to dream of art as a career," she writes. Women across the globe have crafted beauty and order amid chaos, war, and deprivation, and Perkins turns our attention to what we learn from them.

Just Making introduces us to strategies such as forgetfulness in flow, tenderness in trauma, and crossing borders. In conversation with creative guides like Nikki Grimes, Chad Somers, and Carol Aust, Perkins offers ten practices that help creatives keep making. Persevering through pushback from within and without, we can keep making art that heals human suffering, transmits truth, and confronts the oppressor.

Here are dispatches for young and not-so-young creatives, crafted by a writer committed to shalom: the flourishing of all. We must keep making art infused with truth, beauty, and goodness, not to ignore a world in distress but for the sake of loving it. With vivid stories, practical ideas, and reflection and discussion questions, Just Making will inspire you to keep making beauty in a broken world.

"Creativity can be a powerful tool for 'alleviating suffering and fighting injustice,' according to this graceful guide from children's author Perkins.... Even those who've never picked up a pen or a...


Advance Praise

"Creativity can be a powerful tool for 'alleviating suffering and fighting injustice,' according to this graceful guide from children's author Perkins.... Even those who've never picked up a pen or a paintbrush will be inspired."
Publishers Weekly

"One of the essential joys of reading is finding that 'yes!' on the page, that 'aha!' Nothing is better than encountering that anecdote, that thought, that idea with which you resonate deeply. If you are a creative, you'll discover many such moments tucked between the covers of Just Making. There are whole libraries of how-to books dedicated to craft-building, and to the pursuit of commercial success as a creative, but fewer that lean into the necessary steps to secure what is good, what is healthy, what is healing for the artist's heart. This is one such book. . . As creatives, we must fortify ourselves daily if we're to survive the journey. Perkins suggests intuitive perspectives and practices that can guide us. Readers will thank her for them. I certainly do."
Nikki Grimes, bestselling and award-winning author of Ordinary Hazards and other books

"By inquiring into the relationship between the making of art and the performance of justice, Mitali Perkins foregrounds questions that any serious creative has to grapple with. By identifying and clarifying the kinds of questions that need to be asked about that relationship, and by setting them in such a winsome and vulnerable and engaging form, she has done those serious creatives an enormous service. This is a book to be read with gratitude."
Gary D. Schmidt, Newbery Honor and Printz Honor author of The Wednesday Wars and other books

"Just Making is a balm to every soul wrestling with how to pursue beauty in a weary world. With tenderness and wisdom, Perkins compassionately reminds us that our art is not separate from justice, but intertwined with it. She offers a compassionate commissioning for us to make art justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with our God. This expansive offering of hope reminds us that in the work of our hands, we hold a sacred call to co-labor in the renewal of all things. I needed this book."
Kayla Craig, author of Every Season Sacred and To Light Their Way and creator of Liturgies for Parents

"Mitali Perkins is an exceptional teacher and writer, and in Just Making, she brings her immense gifts and wide experience together in a book that is both rich in ideas and pragmatic in application. In engaging, accessible prose, Just Making provides theological and practical insights to give readers ways to understand that creativity--in all its forms--is not a luxury or a move away from a faithful life, but deeply connected to justice and shalom."
Dr. Jennifer L. Holberg, chair of Calvin University English Department and author of Nourishing Narratives

"Creativity can be a powerful tool for 'alleviating suffering and fighting injustice,' according to this graceful guide from children's author Perkins.... Even those who've never picked up a pen or a...


Marketing Plan

National and online publicity campaign targeting social justice and creativity/art media

Trade and Christian advertising

Social media and digital campaign targeting creatives, artists, writers, progressives, those interested in faith and social justice, and librarians and educators

Seasonal promotional opportunities such as Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month, graduation season, and back-to-school shopping

National and online publicity campaign targeting social justice and creativity/art media

Trade and Christian advertising

Social media and digital campaign targeting creatives, artists, writers...


Available Editions

EDITION Hardcover
ISBN 9781506485539
PRICE $22.99 (USD)
PAGES 178

Available on NetGalley

NetGalley Reader (PDF)
NetGalley Shelf App (PDF)
Send to Kindle (PDF)
Download (PDF)

Average rating from 1 member


Featured Reviews

Just Making by Mitali Perkins asks and answers a lot of great questions. The ability to be creative and become wrapped up in the projects we work on is a feeling like no other. However, that joy can quickly seem frivolous and even selfish seeing what else is going on in the world.

Perkins draws on her own life and experience growing up in an immigrant family to sort through mixed feelings of creative and justice.

Just Making is a deep, thoughtful, and encouraging to spur you on to finding peace and purpose in your own creative practice.

Was this review helpful?