Lucy Bellwood: Recent Episodes
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We got owls! We got frogs! We got THE MOON.Yes, it’s another Ramble, coming to you live from the Meadows Preserve in Ojai, California.
For those of you new to the practice: I record these walk-and-talks every so often as a way to keep track of where my head’s at. If you’d rather read the dispatch, there’s a transcript attached to the end of this Patreon post, but Ramble #35 has particularly nice ambient noises, so I recommend popping on your headphones and maybe taking a walk of your own while you tune in.
Discussed in this Ramble: Bill Anderson’s The Idle Beekeeper* (which I still need to finish) * Helioscope, my old studio (if you’re a Bluesky user, they have a nice list of studio members and friends, basically a one-stop-shop for following comics folk in Portland) * The wise friend we phoned for translation help is the inimitable Andrew Berns, whose newsletter (New Wine, Old Vessels) blows me away every time I open it * Cartooning the Medieval at the Newberry Library with Chris Fletcher and ⤵︎ * Kristen Haas Curtis, whose By the Bones project I also mention (you can find mine in the Autobio Comics collection on Patreon) * Chris Schweizer and his new book A Dream of Swords * Mel Gillman and their foraging comics * Marge Piercy’s To Be of Use, always
Visual addenda:My sketchbook hoard! Twenty-two years of drawing!
The girl with dragon wings that Sadie requested. (Lord it has been too long since I thought about how to draw dragon wings.)
I asked Sadie’s younger sister if she’d draw me a tiny book about two squirrels named Nutty and Chewy, who were the frequent subject of improvised stories between me and my mum on long drives. I LOVE this drawing because Zina and I play a game where one person starts by saying “What if” and the other says “we” and the first person says another word and you keep going back and forth until you’ve devised a plan. GITA DIDN’T KNOW ABOUT THIS, but these squirrels are absolutely us.
My other favorite thing was this page from Sadie’s sketchbook, which baffled me until I realized that this is AN ACTUAL HAIR from her friend Abby, which she GLUED INTO HER SKETCHBOOK and then embellished with a portrait. Absolute genius. 10/10. Love it.
Many sincere thanks to my Patrons who keep me honest with this practice. A lot of this walk was about building momentum, a head of steam, a runway. I can feel it in my bones today. I sat down and wrote a twenty-page letter to an old shipmate who reached out from the mists of time to say hello!! To be clear: I have mail on my desk from 2022. This letter arrived Monday. No idea what’s gotten into me.
But we surf the wave when it comes around.
Really digging this illustrated list of values on the Worx Printing website, inspired by Spain’s Mondragon Co-ops. Gotta make this stuff sexy!
(And while I’m here, may I recommend Brick City Stickers if you’re looking for a Union shop to replace the wretched Sticker Mule? I also use—and love—Sticker Giant for my various boat-y designs.)
Somewhere around 2004 I joined a teen writers’ group in Ojai run by my now-friend Deb Norton. The rules of the group were simple: those who arrived on time got a bowl of sugary cereal of their choosing, and if we hit our self-determined goals from session to session we’d get a visit to the Prize Box.
The Prize Box, as far as I recall, was just…a cardboard box. But it was full of candy, novelty Japanese erasers, custom mix CDs, and Pilot Varsity fountain pens. Goofy shit. But it worked.
As I mentioned in my last Seacritters update post, I’ve been thinking a lot about motivation in this last quarter of the book. For many years I managed my freelance schedule by drawing these little “WHERE’S THE MONEY, BELLWOOD?” diagrams in my sketchbook.
They amused me, and helped me track down money when it was due. But there’s something telling in the facial expressions I always chose. Juggling this many jobs was draining. In my heart of hearts, I wanted to be moving from a place of joy rather than reacting in fear. Even now, when my workload is less scattered and my financial situation less precarious, I still find myself reacting more to the threat of the stick than the promise of the carrot. How do I orient toward joy?
I’ve struggled with setting (and actually implementing) rewards. When I made a NO Punchcard at a moment when I was trying to be more protective of my time, I successfully filled out all the squares, but totally stalled out when it was time to pick a prize. The accomplishment was (kind of) its own reward. Or I just couldn’t think of anything to celebrate with.
Celebration is a crucial part of motivation! It helps my animal brain acknowledge that I’ve overcome an obstacle, accomplished a goal, or moved in the direction of my values. WHY IS IT SO HARD TO THINK OF REWARDS?
This seems obvious, but I only recently thought of making myself a slightly different mind map in the ol’ sketchbook.
Okay, so some of these feel a bit too close to “satisfying chores” rather than “decadent indulgences” (that handlebar tape is REALLY GROSS, THO), and picking a prize also means grappling with the ways we’re pressured to use consumption as a reward. BUT IT’S A STEP IN THE RIGHT DIRECTION.
Having a closing party for the 100 Demon Dialogues Kickstarter was such a lovely and life-affirming thing. We crammed a bunch of people into the patio of a Portland bar and had a joint countdown for the final few seconds of the campaign. I’m pretty sure I live-streamed it on Kickstarter. There was cake. There were balloons. When I think about the memory of that night in my body, I feel joy.
The Prize Box worked because it was full of good pens and rad mix CDs, but it was also something that existed within a community. My peers would cheer when I got to visit the box. I think that was actually more important than any novelty eraser. So in the interest of involving my community a bit more in choosing a reward, I’m putting this to a vote over on Patreon.
WHAT SHOULD I REWARD MYSELF WITH WHEN I FINISH PENCILING THE BOOK?
From the Department of Niche Websites: The World of Playing Cards. (I’m specifically digging the pages on Back Designs, Mamluk Playing Cards, and other design-focused delights.)
I got to have an extensive chat with Manu Moreale a couple months ago for his People & Blogs series, which is a lovely project showcasing folks writing online and maintaining their own sites. It was a fun opportunity to examine my own blogging practice as a historical artifact (oh god, my first travel blog from 2007 is still online), financial expenditure (writing here costs me $35 a month?), and philosophical calling card (“From a branding perspective, it sometimes feels like a disaster. But I think that’s okay! A blog isn’t a billboard, it’s a garden. It can be a space for everything.”).
I’m also reproducing the following section in full because I do think everyone should know about these quality humans:
Time for some recommendations: any blog you think is worth checking out? And also, who do you think I should be interviewing next? I have a huge creative peer crush on fellow cartoonist-with-blog Reimena Yee (Especially this sprawling portrait of her work and influences.) * Mandy Brown’s blog, A Working Library, makes me add books to my to-read list faster than anything else—and* it’s lovely to look at * Reading Rob Wychert’s ongoing log of his site redesign makes me wish I knew more about building websites * Anna Iltnere is an absolute icon who’s been stewarding a growing library of sea-related books out of her home in Latvia for years * Sumana Harihareswara’s clarity and pragmatism are bracing, but also deeply human * Brendan Jerich is a good egg
I love reading cartoonist and astronomy buff Coni Yovaniniz‘s blog posts, and this recent short comic on Pluto’s fall from planetary status was a real treat. Such charming characterizations of celestial bodies. Bonus: it’s in Spanish (Coni lives in Chile) and I actually understood it!! The whole experience made me want to grab some Spanish language graphic novels from the library and see if I can improve my reading skills while also enjoying comics.
AND: Coni has actually made a bunch of downloadable zines for Planetario Chile! You can find them all here. There’s zines about Asteroids, How to Fight Climate Change, and How to Watch an Eclipse. MORE CARTOONISTS IN THE WORKFORCE! MORE COMICS FOR THE PEOPLE!
Turning toward Seacritters updates on Patreon again, which means taking stock of the work I’ve done so far on this gargantuan project. If a monthly pledge is beyond your means, you can now buy a standalone collection of development posts! These include behind-the-scenes character sketches, musings and mutterings about how I’ve been staying motivated on this massive project, and goofy GIFs. Here’s a selection of images to whet your nautical whistle:
Sometimes I’ll jot down a word I think I haven’t heard before, only to locate it in the existing Word Hoard archive on my own website. Apparently I logged bruit (sounds like “brewie”) on this site in August of 2020, possibly in response to learning more about my dad’s many vascular conditions, but it appears again in my notes from reading Excession earlier this year! Leave it to Ian Banks to shove something like that in the description of a spaceship.
[Edit: mentioned this to Zina and I actually learned the word because she was doing her MA in 2020 to become a Physician Associate!]
Still thinking about this short comic on creative practice by Laura Knetzger.
Last night I sat in a cloud of campfire smoke with a friend, talking non-stop about the balancing act of creative practice. He’s a printmaker and a bookbinder, two disciplines that require a great deal of precision and craft. We agreed that we want to encourage everyone to make art, to make music, to dance, to be unrepentantly bad at things, to understand that there is art we make because we are dedicated to a craft and art we make because it’s an expression of our innate human desire to play. How it isn’t contradictory to preach the necessity of both. Sometimes I do feel like a hypocrite, cheerleading people who believe they “can’t draw” while internally upbraiding my own ability to put pictures in boxes. But these things are not exclusive.
Lately I’ve needed the energy of 2010-era Alec Longstreth, delivering this lecture at The Center for Cartoon Studies. Alec—who had, at the time, sworn not to shave or cut his hair until he finished his graphic novel, Basewood—was a human lightning bolt. He embodied that spirit of craft and professionalism, but with a punky, DIY energy that made it all feel both radical and attainable. I was so fired up after hearing him give this talk that I actually pulled all-nighters (something I was loath to do even at the tender age of 19).
This image of his encapsulates everything I’ve come to rely on in the process of drawing Seacritters. I’m not perfect—I still occasionally underestimate the time things will take and fall prey to distraction and despair—but I’m committed to this idea.
That summer at CCS I found myself surrounded by 36 other people who wanted to take making comics seriously. I had never been in a room with people who shared that dream. It’s hard to remember what that was like now, having worked in studios full of creative professionals and lived in cities lousy with cartoonists and traveled all over the world to huge conventions and tiny festivals crammed with passionate people hawking zines and graphic novels and minis. But it felt propulsive at the time, and right now I need the creative equivalent of jet fuel.
I need the reminder that there are other people out there touching the lightning bolt for the first time, and channeling sparks into the page.
Event alert: I’m hosting an open studio gathering right after Christmas with fellow comics-makin’ powerhouse Shay Mirk!
Join us on Boxing Day (Thursday, December 26th) for an all-ages drawing meetup from 11am-1pm. We’ll provide supplies (pens, paper, zine templates, staplers, and ample table space), plus delicious coffee from Pinhole Coffee, tea fixings, and home-baked treats. I’ll also have books and plush toys on hand if anyone’s flush with Christmas cash and looking to pick up some swag to take home.
(Thanks Shay for casually walking in and taking such a lovely photo of me in my new space.)I’m so excited to bring the community into this corner of my world. Join us if you’re in the Ventura County area!
I’m joining the inimitable Carson Ellis for a conversation at Bart’s Books this month! Come help celebrate the release of her new book, One Week in January, on October 12th in the Bart’s courtyard from 6-7pm. We’ll be chatting about creative booms in funky towns, spending time with our younger selves, and finding community in rural spaces. Event details here.
Here’s a bit more about the book:
In January 2001, […] 25-year-old Ellis moved into a warehouse in the Central Eastside with a group of fellow artists. For the first week she lived there, Ellis kept a detailed diary recording only the minutiae of each day, mostly as a brain exercise to stave off what she perceived as memory loss. A couple years ago, having recently rediscovered the volume in a crate of letters and keep-sakes, she set to illustrate the two-decade-old journal with rich gouache paintings, evocatively capturing a specific cultural moment of the early 2000s.
Offering here a snapshot of a bygone era and a meticulous re-creation of quotidian frustrations and small, meaningful moments, One Week in January is a meditation on what it means both to start your journey as an artist and to look back at that beginning many years later.
You can also see all the original paintings from the book at Nationale in Portland through October 19th!
There are tons of things I love about this project, but I’m specifically delighted by it as a time capsule of the Portland that was already dissolving when I arrived there as a college student in late 2009. I know the buildings and markets Carson mentions in her diary! I’ve visited friends’ painting studios in those same warehouses! I’ve shopped at those corner stores! But the version of the city I found was slightly newer, the grime a bit less visible. The city I visit now—the one she still lives outside of—is newer still.
And then, of course, there’s the collapsing tunnel that flings me back further in my own life. A year after writing this diary, Carson would illustrate the cover of Castaways and Cutouts—the first album from The Decemberists, fronted by her now-husband (and frequent diary apparition) Colin Meloy. By the time I started high school in 2003 I was eagerly bringing their songs to play at Morning Assembly. As a tall ship sailor in the late 2000s, it was basically mandatory that one listen to a band with so many raucous, anachronistic, shanty-like tunes under their belt—not to mention the nautical art Carson made for each release. The thought of sitting down as something like peers to discuss Carson’s work from that era is surreal in the extreme.
Now that I think of it, one of my favorite reads from this year, Dear Sophie, Love Sophie, likewise begins with the recovery of a painfully earnest diary and spins it into something compassionate and affirming in the present day.
It’s more graphic novel than pairing of painting and text, but equally heartfelt and charming. (I’m just a big fan of Sophie Lucido-Johnson, generally speaking. Her newsletter is great.)
Oh, Carson has a newsletter, too! It’s called Slowpoke.
Okay, I think that’s it for promotion. See you at Bart’s!
I wish I could be in the Pacific Northwest to attend one of these screenings for Dark and Tender, a film exploring the work of Aaron Johnson and the Chronically UnderTouched (CUT) Project.
From their website:
The Chronically UnderTouched (CUT) Project is a movement supporting People of the Global Majority — people of color — to recover healthy, nourishing, platonic touch in a culture that, in the United States, denies it at every turn.
Born out of the development and tracking of the Chronically UnderTouched trauma story, the CUT Project develops accessible practices — deep listening, song, access to nature — as antidotes to the Black Brute archetype. […] Tender, thoughtful touch and holding, to the Black male body, is so dangerous to white supremacy that they use all matters of violence to erase this practice.
I’m watching my dad decline and trying to stay present for the version of him that remains and always, always thinking about grief in this country. How we drown it, gloss over it. We’re starved of the emotional technology that helps us process any of this. Our rituals fall so short. Aaron’s work illuminates the ways this deprivation disproportionately impacts people of color, making it all the more timely.
These days my ears perk up when someone speaks with the candor that come from living through immeasurable loss. I find myself gravitating to places I never would’ve called home before: grief circles, mortality workshops, books and books and books about mourning, death, and ceremony.
Touch is a cornerstone of survival in this season. The older I get, the more deeply I know it. I know it because I want it. I want lingering hugs that last a full breath. I want leonine forehead to forehead greetings. I want a hand on the shoulder, a back scratch, the reassuring weight of leaning into someone side by side. I want to feel us shoring each other up, reminding one another that we are warm and breathing and alive, even as we hold everything that breaks us.
There’s a delicate, industrious ticking at my left-hand side. A tiny golden hand advancing second by second around the upturned face of a watch from 1969. My grandfather’s watch. A watch I didn’t know existed before this month, belonging to a man I’d never met, whose personal effects I just traveled 5300 miles to retrieve after 30 years in storage.
I’ve always been a sucker for tiny, functional items; things that carry the evidence of daily activity and the particular devotion of the mundane. A monument may dazzle, but it’s the sealed jar from Pompeii that sticks with me after all these years, its lid lifted to reveal the scooped impression of three fingers in white cream.
How many times have I scooped lotion from a jar? Fidgeted with a ring? Buttoned on a coat?
How could I have known that winding this watch would bring it back to life as if no time at all had passed?
It’s happening again, the thing that happens when I get back to drawing after a slump.
The transition was abrupt. I woke up two weeks ago, went to the studio, queued up Neil Gaiman’s live reading of The Graveyard Book (my habitual comfort food of many years), cranked out four pages, rode my stationary bike for a half hour, and then took it upon myself to begin eating a whole head of lettuce every day to finally get ahead of our CSA box. The transition was shocking in its ease, especially when I hold it up beside weeks and weeks of disruption and self-judgement. I’ve been torn between dog-sitting gigs, two different living situations, visits from friends, heart procedures at the hospital with my dad, studio moves, traveling out of state for events, and passing obsessions with whittling, ultralight backpacking, and quilting scattered in between.
Writing it all out, I soften. Of course I’ve struggled to sink into the kind of flow state needed for real progress on my book. There’s been no consistency! No ritual! No routine! My poor little animal brain doesn’t know how to make sense of it all.
But now that the gears have clicked into place and I’m suddenly off to work every morning like clockwork, the other thing happens: I lock down. I become superstitious and squirrelly, prone to evading all well-meaning attempts at conversation from the people I love.
“How’d it go at the studio today?”
“What’s your page goal this week?”
“When are you heading to work?”
Too much scrutiny makes me fearful. The ease of transition is suspicious. How did this happen? Why did I magically wake up and find it simple to return to work on this day of all days? If I don’t understand it, anything might switch it off again. So I err on the side of secrecy, and remain a jealous guardian of my time.
It’s been two weeks of consistent creative flow. It’s working for now. I’ll bask in it for as long as it lasts.
A month ago, encouraged by this wonderfully clear explainer comic from Maia Kobabe, I bought an eSim for someone in Gaza via Connecting Humanity. Like Maia, mine took a while to get assigned and activated, but this morning IT HAPPENED.
(This is just an excerpt from Maia’s full comic. You can read the rest here.)I try to pay a lot of attention to how taking various actions makes me feel. Not because activism shouldn’t include things that are difficult or painful, but because I’m a human creature and I know that I gravitate towards things that bring me pleasure or fulfillment. If I can embody my values in a way that’s rewarding, I’m going to be far more effective in my work. I see this in the people I admire: a kind of joyous integrity that drives fundraisers and community events, art projects and experiments.
The feeling I got seeing that eSIM activated and streaming data was very similar to what Maia describes in her comic. A burst of hope! A jolt of delight! The understanding that a stranger across the world, in unimaginably horrifying circumstances, has the chance to reach out and be heard—to connect.
In a season where everything about the internet feels poisoned, I’m reminded that data can mean hearing a loved one’s voice, subscribing to updates from emergency personnel, letting your children distract themselves with a cartoon on YouTube, or sharing the lived reality of life in a war zone. These are all means of spiritual and physical survival, and we can gift them to others.
If you feel moved to give it a go yourself, there’s an ongoing 5% discount code for Nomad Middle East eSims (NOMADCNG) and I have a personal code for 25% off (LUCYUADYUW) anyone’s first order. The full instructions for purchasing and donating eSims can be found on Connecting Humanity’s eSim page.
(Enormous respect to Mirna El Helbawi, the organizing force behind Connecting Humanity and Maia Kobabe, for always sharing such clear and humanizing comics. The title of this post comes from a chapter about the internet in Dan Nott’s fantastic book Hidden Systems.)
Lemme tell you a story about an eagle.
Our town (~9,000 people) has a couple garages, but there’s a big one on the main drag. My family has been going there for decades. I drive past it every day.
There used to be a huge pine tree on the corner of their lot, but last year it became a hazard and had to be taken down.
Shortly thereafter I drive by and see they’ve hired a guy to chainsaw sculpt the stump into a bald eagle.
Birds own my heart, but nationalism makes me twitchy. I withhold outright condemnation of the eagle, but I’m skeptical. (The original owner—an objectively Good Dude—sold the business to a younger couple a few years ago, and I don’t have any knowledge of their whole deal.)
Then it turns out someone on staff is really into making costumes for the eagle. Every holiday. Every month. Stuffed turkey, witch costume, menorah headpiece, bunny ears. These people love to dress their bird.
The changing of the eagle suit becomes a source of joy every time I drive through town.
Until June, when the eagle is bare.
Now look, maybe I’m expecting too much asking my garage to celebrate Pride. But this is a small town. Every time I drive by that stupid eagle—this thing that has previously brought me so much joy—I feel hurt. I feel reminded that there are plenty of people in my liberal bubble who don’t consider my community worthy of celebration. I drive to work, I feel bad. I drive home, I feel bad. The eagle is mocking me.
Then my A/C quits working.
So I book an appointment to bring my car in—and realize what I have to do.
I pick all this up at a thrift store for under ten bucks. I print the shirt with some weird heat-transfer fabric crayons I find in a cupboard. I loop gold elastic around the sunglasses and pray they’ll fit on the eagle’s head. (It is also important to draw your attention to the price of the feather boa.)
Nice.
My reasoning is thus: if I show up with a complete costume ready to go, someone will have to look me in the eye and say “We don’t believe in that,” at which point I’ll be finding a new garage. But if they let me dress the eagle, then people in town get to have the joy I’ve been missing since the start of the month.
I listen to a lot of hype-up jams on my way over. I hate confrontation. I also don’t wanna have to find another garage. I want to believe that this decision isn’t actively antagonistic, but I’m not particularly hopeful.
I talk through the A/C issue with the guy at the desk, hand over my keys, then take a deep breath.
“Who’s in charge of the eagle?”
“Oh, that’s all Dylan. Second bay from the end.”
I walk down the row of hydraulic lifts and find a disarmingly smiley middle-aged man pouring fluid through a funnel. I introduce myself and explain that, since the Pride parade is this Sunday and the eagle seems to be missing a costume, I have taken the liberty of making one myself, and can I get his blessing to go put it on?
Dylan grins this absolutely giant grin and goes:
“Oh hell yeah.“
So that’s what’s up now.
Happy Pride.
Back in 2016 I had the pleasure of working on a piece for The Nib about renewed efforts to bring wind-powered shipping to the international trade scene. I chatted with a handful of passionate, fascinating people and just got to scratch the surface of what was happening at the time. Somewhere in the years that followed, between multiple changes in hosting and ownership, the comic disappeared from The Nib’s archives, so I’m re-posting it here on my own site to make sure it stays up for future readers to investigate.
(I’m still mucking around with the best way to format this kind of thing for my own site, but this’ll do for now. You can use the arrows to scroll through thumbnails, or click the image to read in a bigger carousel viewer.)
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Between the disruption of the Pandemic, the rigors of caregiving, and the long tunnel of working on a new book, conventions have felt like a thing of the past for me. The travel, the crowds, the need to produce and sell and be ON have all seemed difficult to reach in this phase of my life. But there are some shows you just know in your heart are worth the bother, and I’m happy to say that I listened to my intuition and applied for this one back when they announced the deadline.
The Ann Arbor Comic Arts Festival is a lovely, kid-specific show that’s FREE (we love a free show) and takes place at the Ann Arbor District Library (WE LOVE A LIBRARY) from 11-5 (WE LOVE A SHOW WITH REASONABLE OPENING HOURS) this Saturday the 15th and Sunday the 16th. My previous visits to A2CAF have always left me feeling so revved up and grateful to be working in comics, and I’m sure this one will be no exception.
Here’s a handy map of where I’ll be (Table #1), unless I’m off doing one of the lightning Quick Draw events, which are scattered throughout the weekend:
Some other folks I’d recommend checking out are:
- Cara Bean (Table 25), with her new mental health for kids book Here I Am, I Am Me (this is going to be the first thing I buy)
- Alec Longstreth (Table 3), one of my earliest comics teachers, who continues to inspire and delight with his series Basewood and a host of other projects
- Lauren Houser (Table 11), who I had the pleasure of collaborating with on a story for Spitball #7, the CCAD comics anthology that pairs working pros with up and coming student artists
- Vera Brosgol (Signing at Green Brain Comics, Tables 8-10), celebrating her new book Plain Jane and the Mermaid (the second thing I’m going to buy), which I had the pleasure of contributing to in a small way by getting on FaceTime to puzzle out some Boat Issues
- Jen Wang (Signing at Green Brain Comics, Tables 8-10), whose first graphic novel, Koko Be Good, continues to shape the way I think about character, story, and expressive acting on the page
I also have some original pages appearing in Drawing Worlds: The Art of Comics and Beyond at the Ann Arbor Art Center. The opening reception will take place Friday from 6-8pm, but the show runs all the way till July 3rd. (I believe they also have some of my stuff for sale in the gift shop!)
Hope to see you there.
Dennis Rice, former headmaster of my eccentric, much-loved little high school, wrote some thoughts about the Morning Assemblies we used to hold. I’m reproducing it here because I haven’t written anything in a long while and it touched me and what is a blog for if not to collect things that touch us?
The choice is always ours. Then, let me choose
The longest art, the hard Promethian way
Cherishingly to tend and feed and fan
That inward fire, whose small, precarious flame,
Kindled or quenched, creates
The noble or ignoble men we are,
The worlds we live in and the very fates,
Our bright or muddy star.
Aldous Huxley
The 17 students of my first Happy Valley year slowly grew to 30 then 40. The new buildings wallowed on a muddy hillside, waiting for many Project Days to come before they could be planted and green. Like much of the experimental nature of what we did in those years, we did not pave the paths of the school until people had walked on campus for two years. The paths designated themselves.
To the chagrin of some alums, I admitted other than classical music to Morning Assembly.
When my mind drifts back to HVS, it often lands on Morning Assembly. Each day, rain or shine, students and teachers would gather together—at first in the new Commons, but by the mid-eighties, in a large yurt—seated in a circle on zafu cushions, having all removed our shoes before entering. A selection of gentle music was played, often orchestral or single instrument, on occasion played live by Eddie Guthman and the Advanced Band, and then there would be a reading.
I still have a dozen books that are severely dog eared for morning readings (Huxley’s Perennial Philosophy or The Choice is Always Ours), as I would read on Monday and then solicit volunteers for the remainder of the week. It was rare that anything trivial was chosen. In fact, we had a shelf in the library dedicated to good quotes and readings for assembly. After the reading, we would all sit in silence—a remarkable feat for a room full of teenagers, but it happened every morning. Morning Assembly was an important time for the community, a time to start together before we began the challenges of the day.
I realize that it was not all that popular with every student at the time—some of those mornings were cold—but I would like to think that more than a few look back on those mornings fondly. I understand that Morning Assembly was one of the first things to go after my departure, as David Anderson, who followed me, generally looked on it as a waste of time. It moved to mid-morning and met only on selected days. I would wager that the school still gathers in some way and there are a few old timers still on campus who attempt to keep part of the old flame alive, but the magic of those often cold mornings, sitting in a circle with colleagues and students, still lingers with me after these long years. My gaze drifts around that circle, bringing an endless chain of faces and voices, 27 years’ worth.
I reach over to one of those dog-eared tomes, open to a random page, and read:
Any friendship—between two or a hundred—entails a new emergent unity, where each of the constituent selves is far more in its functional oneness with the rest than it ever was in its apartness.
Gregory Vlastos, 1909, Canadian professor of philosophy
I was hanging out with some new friends recently and the conversation turned, as it inevitably does, toward books. Someone asked me to guess who read the least out of the assembled company. (Weird move, but okay.) I guessed that one person had grand bookish intentions, but really only read one “big ideas” book a quarter, another escaped into lengthy fantasy series, and the third was a wild card bouncing between fiction and pop psych. Not far off, it turned out. But that’s subject matter, not quantity. Someone said they had a hunch I went through books “like food,” which is true. “A book a month?” someone suggested. I looked shifty. “A book a week?!”
I had to pull up this list to check. It feels off to make that claim when I read so many graphic novels, but it’s true. I love books. I love devouring them. I love thinking about them and talking about them and letting them change and shape me.
Interesting that so many of my top favorites this year were comics! Getting back into working on Seacritters has me wanting to explore the medium more than I usually do, and I found some real gems. I love looking over the list and remembering where I was while reading each of these. It’s a strangely vivid experience. Getting lost in Hilary Mantel at Christopher’s was otherworldly. Plowing through Aidan Truhen at home was a riot. Being bewitched by Trung Le Nguyen’s lines on a beanbag in the Ojai Library kids’ section was nostalgic and peaceful.
I look at these lists and struggle to explain to new people what and how I read. In some groups it’s a shorthand for belonging—in others it’s a gateway to somewhere else.
(Previously: 2022 in Reading, 2021 in Reading, 2020 in Reading)
| Legend | Rough Guide to Ratings | | --- | --- | | 🎭 – Plays📝 – Poetry📖 – Books (Fiction)📓 – Books (Nonfiction)💬 – Graphic Novels🔄 – Reread🎙️ – Audiobook | ❤︎ = Yes❤︎❤︎ = OhYes❤︎❤︎❤︎ = Oh Hell Yes |
- 📖 Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow – Gabrielle Zevin ❤︎❤︎
- 📓 The Quiet Eye – Sylvia Shaw Judson
- 📓 Soundings: the Story of the Remarkable Woman Who Mapped the Ocean Floor – Hali Felt
- 🔄 💬 Diary Comics – Dustin Harbin
- 🔄 📖 This is How You Lose the Time War – Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone ❤︎❤︎❤︎
- 📓 The Wisdom of Insecurity – Alan Watts
- 📓 Also a Poet – Ada Calhoun ❤︎❤︎
- 💬 The Well – Jake Wyatt, Choo
- 💬 The Magic Fish – Trung Le Nguyen ❤︎❤︎
- 📝 The Wrecking Light – Robin Robertson ❤︎
- 📓/💬 Solutions and Other Problems – Allie Brosh
- 💬 Snapdragon – Kat Leyh ❤︎❤︎❤︎
- 📝 Four Reincarnations – Max Ritvo
- 💬 It’s Okay That It’s Not Okay – Christina Tran ❤︎❤︎❤︎
- 💬 Queenie: Godmother of Harlem – Elizabeth Colomba & Aurélie Levy
- 💬 Garlic and the Vampire – Bree Paulsen
- 💬 Garlic and the Witch – Bree Paulsen
- 💬 Lightfall Book 1: The Girl & The Galdurian – Tim Probert ❤︎❤︎
- 📓 A Sacred Shift – marlee grace
- 💬 The River – Alessandro Sanna
- 🔄 📖 The End of Mr. Y – Scarlett Thomas
- 💬 Skim – Mariko & Jillian Tamaki ❤︎❤︎
- 💬 Lightfall Book 2: Shadow of the Bird – Tim Probert ❤︎
- 💬 Grass of Parnassus – Kathryn & Stuart Immonen
- 📓 Facing the Wolf – Theresa Sheppard Alexander ❤︎
- 📖 Hamnet – Maggie O’Farrell ❤︎❤︎
- 🔄 📖 A Wizard of Earthsea – Ursula K. Le Guin
- 📖 White Cat, Black Dog – Kelly Link ❤︎
- 📓 Recollections of my Nonexistence – Rebecca Solnit ❤︎
- 📓 Art + Faith – Makoto Fujimura
- 💬 Ducks – Kate Beaton ❤︎❤︎❤︎
- 💬 I Thought You Loved Me – MariNaomi
- 💬 Dear Sophie, Love Sophie – Sophie Lucido Johnson ❤︎❤︎❤︎
- 💬 The Gigantic Beard That Was Evil – Stephen Collins
- 📖 Wolf Hall – Hilary Mantel
- 📖 Bring Up the Bodies – Hilary Mantel ❤︎
- 📓 The Old Ways – Robert Macfarlane ❤︎❤︎
- 💬 Tales of a Seventh-Grade Lizard Boy – Jonathan Hill
- 💬 Equinoxes – Cyril Pedrosa ❤︎❤︎❤︎
- 💬 Feeding Ghosts – Tessa Hulls ❤︎❤︎
- 📖 The Mirror and The Light – Hilary Mantel ❤︎
- 💬 Hoops – Matt Tavares
- 📓 The Book Lover – Ali Smith ❤︎
- 📖 /📓 Kick the Latch – Kathryn Scanlan
- 📖 The Big Over Easy – Jasper Fford
- 💬 Himawari House – Harmony Becker ❤︎
- 💬 Always, Never – Jordi Lafebre ❤︎❤︎
- 📖 Just Like Home – Sarah Gailey
- 📖 The Fourth Bear – Jasper Fford
- 📖 To Rise Again At a Decent Hour – Joshua Ferris
- 📓 Giving Up the Ghost – Hilary Mantel
- 🔄 📖 Thief of Time – Terry Pratchett
- 🎙️ 📖 A Magic Steeped in Poison – Judy I. Lin
- 🎙️ 📖 A Venom Dark and Sweet – Judy I. Lin
- 📓 Enchantment – Katherine May ❤︎❤︎
- 📖 Fugitive Telemetry – Martha Wells
- 🔄 🎙️ 📖 Thud – Terry Pratchett
- 📖 System Collapse – Martha Wells
- 🔄 📖 Carpe Jugulum – Terry Pratchett
- 📖 The Price You Pay – Aidan Truhen
- 📖 Seven Demons – Aidan Truhen
- 📓 Mending Life – Nina and Sonya Montenegro
Given that they were the standout delight of 2023, I planted wildflowers again for 2024. The frontrunner is still Nemophila menziesii (Baby Blue Eyes), opening its first flower on March 16th. (Last year’s arrived on March 29th.)
Most of what reseeded this year was Elegant Clarkia. It is out of control. Every patch that held five plants last spring now holds triple the amount of seedlings. The lupins were much-beloved by gophers, so no more of them for now. I sowed a lot of Purple Vetch (with seeds harvested from El Nido Meadow in 2023). They’re currently putting forth tiny tendrils around the agave bed. The local high school’s native plant sale yielded more Narrowleaf Milkweed for the butterflies, Sticky Monkeyflower for under the oaks, Island Snapdragon for the cursed bed out front that gets too much sun. We were liberal with the California Poppies, with varied success.
There’s so much greenery this year that the seedlings often can’t complete, but they’re made for this land. They’ll keep coming back.
Remember when I used to do events? Me neither.
BUT I’M DOING ONE NOW!
I’ll be at Bart’s Books in Ojai, CA next Thursday, March 21st at 6pm to interview my genius bike-touring, adventure-having, genre-bending cartoonist friend Tessa Hulls about her new graphic memoir Feeding Ghosts. The book explores three generations of her family’s tumultuous history from Maoist China to America and beyond. It’s rich and cathartic and unbelievably gorgeous. Tessa’s spent the last nine years bringing it to life. You can read more about it in the San Francisco Chronicle or the New York Times.
Given the lengthy isolation and emotional toll required to craft a book like this, I’m very keen to have a packed house to help celebrate its emergence into the world. Bart’s has a gorgeous outdoor courtyard and an absolutely amazing selection of used titles. Well worth the visit. I’ll also be bringing some of my own books along, so if you’ve been wanting to get your hands on some copies from the second printings of 100 Demon Dialogues and Baggywrinkles, you can do a one-stop shop!
Photo by Jennelle Fong for the New York TimesWant to get your hands on the book, but don’t live in Southern California? Great news! You can order Feeding Ghosts from wherever books are sold. Personally I’m a fan of using Bookshop.org or requesting it at your local library. Tessa’s book tour also ranges widely, so if you have friends around the country who might enjoy this project, take a peek at the list of other stops.
Hope to see you soon!
This is a fraction of the items currently in my to-do list app, which functions more like an underpass covered in graffiti tags these days than a tool for productivity. I’m passing through, jotting down names of people I meet, frantic reminders of deadlines, books to read, errands to check off. The chaos of it gives me shivers.
As my dad loses access to words, memories, faculties, ranges of motion, I lose access to inspiration, strength, sensuality, executive function. We mirror each other. My losses aren’t from infirmity, but from emotional exhaustion. Caregiving life is often a life of attrition, and the marathon is taking its toll. I got away for four days last month and came back with a deeper awareness of what’s actually been happening. There’s the kind of burnt out where you can still write about it, and then the kind of burnt out where you can’t. There’s no paper trail from these last few months. The calendar, the blog, my Patreon, my newsletter: all blank. This is how it is sometimes, but it can’t be how it is all the time.
That break was a full breath—an influx of oxygen that look me from 2% on Low Power Mode to a wedge of green battery. Not fixed, but functional. Maybe 38%. Enough to catch little pockets of joy with. Enough to open the “New post” tab and not just want to take a nap.
marlee grace says “I think Summer plays its cursed trick on me to speed me up when I want to go just as slow as October reminds me to.” It gives me chills to read that, because my body feels that way too. In summer I need stillness. The heat and the light and the chaos push me to overextend, when what I really need is five deep breaths face down on the ground, forehead to the earth, painfully aware of the size and shape of my nose as it mushes into the carpet. In the winter the studio is cold in the mornings and I want to dance and I love to dance and it’s not so hot that the idea of riding my bicycle makes my eyes water. But when I’m as tired as I am from a summer of doing Too Much, the movement is hard to come by.
Back to School energy is real, but/and it’s not the same as summer’s altogether-too-brightness. I’ve written here before about how school was often synonymous with spacious, silent mornings that stretched on forever. I can have both the stillness and the movement. I’m chipping away at the space for it. I am trying. I know my body remembers the moment I give it space to do so. (I feel like this is all I say these days, but it’s still true.)
I just saw a punchcard someone made for saying “No” to things the other day. I need to make one.
There. I made one.
Add cardboard (carbon), gently torn, to some dried leaves (carbon), and the leftover zucchini bits and broccoli floret (nitrogen) from dinner, and you’ll end up with a singularly useful and generative substance (“soil”), from which all other life now stems. Is that not amazing? And it’s available to you. The earth’s deepest and most primal incantation.
I lost track of Cassie for a year or two but I’m now I’m subscribed to her newsletter about compost and it’s great.
The inclination to capture, even imperfectly, the feeling of swinging on a porch swing while I write and how pleasurable and correct it feels to be writing while in motion.
"You're a phantom in both worlds and a god of sorts in the world that is not exactly the one the author wrote but some hybrid of her imagination and yours."
Exactly one year before I started drafting this post (which then languished for a little while, so technically now it’s more than a year ago, but whatever you get the idea) I wrote a short thread on Twitter about feelings and impermanence. I dug it up because I came across this photo and couldn’t remember what the hell I was doing that led me to group these little slips of paper in this kind of configuration. I’ve copied the thread verbatim below.
“Did an exercise in therapy this morning where my therapist asked me to list all the feelings running through my brain/body on bits of paper. Spent the rest of the session sorting them into affinity stacks while we talked.
It got me thinking about Chronic Feelings vs. Current Feelings. These are current, influenced by the hospital visit this week, the slow return to stability after a trauma, my anxiety about understanding my family’s finances, an impending trip, a disappointing career decision.
The Chronic Feelings are things like anticipatory grief, professional burnout, climate anxiety, hatred of capitalism, Pandemic Fatigue. The stuff we’re all collectively steeping in that constitutes a full emotional plate on its own.
But to try and be present with the feelings in my body right NOW requires a different sort of lens. It requires understanding that all of this passes.
I get reliably down most afternoons. Eating lunch triggers a slump of despair and exhaustion that isn’t the end of the world. It’s rare that I feel dreadful while I’m having my tea and scrawling pages into my journal outside in the sun first thing in the morning, so whatever’s coming for me today will, at the very least, abate for a half hour tomorrow. This helps to remember.
I have many weird/bad feelings about Twitter but also I think a lot about the people I know on here who’ve been generous enough to share their complex emotional stuff over the years. Folks grieving in public, folks naming anxiety, folks sharing their affirmations. It’s important.
A big cornerstone of how I’ve carried myself online for years has been an emphasis on sharing clear, proactive, hopeful things. Sometimes I fear this season of my life is going to break that, because it’s HARD. But I do think there are still ways to approach it with that ethic.”
Weird to still be chewing on the same stuff a year later. Weird to still be in an endless rollercoaster of absurdity and grief with my dad. Weird, also, to see the cadence of tweeting transposed onto my blog. Writing like that doesn’t belong here! But also I engaged in it for so many years on that platform. Every container nurtures its own syntax.
A friend asked if I’d signed up for Bluesky and the wave of exhaustion I felt in response washed the flesh clean off my bones. It’s not just that Twitter seems to be continually on fire these days, it’s the broader truth that social media feels hollow to me now. The ADS! There are so many ads. Why did I ever put up with a space that was so aggressively trying to sell me things at every turn? (The answer is that it was giving me the Good Brain Chemicals when I interacted with people I care about, but these days I don’t post enough to get notifications, so I’m trading my attention for NOTHING! No wonder the shine has worn off.)
I’ve been thinking about this installment of Holly Whitaker’s newsletter ever since I read it a couple weeks ago. I haven’t even dug into the links, but the dislocation theory of addiction latched onto my brain stem and has yet to let go.
Our modern social arrangement, Alexander argues, means that we have to sacrifice “family, friends, meaning, and values” in order to be more “efficient” and “competitive” in the rat race. In this framework, addictive behaviors are adaptive responses meant to fill that void of meaning and purpose. Using substances can provide a temporary sense of community (with other users), purpose (to acquire the substance), and meaning (feelings of euphoria or calm from using the substance). Substance abuse and addiction help to fill the gaps in meaning and purpose left by modern society.
None of this is news to me, really, but the articulation slotted something into focus. Reflecting on consumerism as an addiction (or maybe….everything as an addiction?) this month has been a valuable touch point.
And then here I am hitting go on a reprint of my graphic novel! A product I must then sell! A product I might even sell on the premise that it will make people feel less alone! HNGNNNGNNHHGHHH.
(I was going to expand on stuff in that tweet thread in this post too, but I got sidetracked and now it’s time to make my dad his breakfast so I’m hitting post because there are no ads here and nobody needs to buy anything and it’s one of those days where I want to move to the woods and eat grubs for the rest of my life so byeeeeee)
Jacob wrote six very good sentences today about jealousy and being an artist. I needed them this morning because there’s nothing like moving back in with your parents and mostly disappearing from the face of social media and undergoing a massive gear shift in the trajectory of your career to bring up feelings of unworthiness and comparison; but that’s not what I wanted to write about.
The fifth sentence (“The purpose of an artistic star system is to undermine solidarity”) brought me up short because I interpreted “star system” as “constellation.” The constellation is one of my favorite metaphors for how creative people—all people, really—exist in the world. On these grounds his statement didn’t seem right at all. On second reading I realized he meant “star system” as “a system in which certain people are held up as shining exemplars while the rest fade into obscurity,” to which: absolutely yes. The dangers of worshipping celebrity.
I’m flying solo this week while my mum attends my godfather’s funeral in England, but I’m not really solo. We’re trying overnight caregiver coverage for the first time; something I advocated for because loss of sleep is infinitely more disruptive to me than structuring my days around changing my dad’s Depends and making him meals and bathing him and metering out the distribution of pills.
There are so many gifts to trying overnight care, but one of the biggest has been getting me back on my early to bed, early to rise rhythm. I’ve been waking up of my own accord at 5:30 or 6, feeling more rested than I have in months. It grants me a gift my dad taught me to love: an hour and a half of luxurious time to myself first thing in the morning.
Many of my happiest memories of being with him are around this time of day. In high school, we’d listen to Erik Satie on my boombox in the kitchen while he made me eggs. In middle school, we’d drive to the tennis courts at Libbey Park and hit balls back and forth under the amber sodium lamps until the sun came up. (Neither of us knew how to play tennis, but it didn’t matter.) Earlier still, I’d wake up to the sound of him tapping away at the keyboard with two fingers in the corner of the bedroom, writing.
Those hours felt like secret time. Sacred time.
I still treat it as such. This morning it was dark enough when I got up that didn’t realize the valley was shrouded in mist. Now I can see that the lawn outside my window is spangled with a galaxy of dew-soaked spiderwebs.
All this is to say that in the blissful hour I’d been granted this morning, I dove back into Recollections of My Nonexistence, Rebecca Solnit’s memoir. She writes a great deal about context, and the way subcultures and communities act as greenhouses for culture, so when I read Jacob’s post, the string layer came back online. Solnit writes:
In a way, this has been my life’s work, the pursuit of patterns and the work of reconnecting what has been fractured, often fractured by categories that break a subject, a history, a meaning into subcompartments from which the whole cannot be seen. […] The art of picking out constellations in the night sky has cropped up again and again as a metaphor for this work.
Elsewhere she quotes the poet Diane di Prima: “You cannot write a single line w/out a cosmology.”
I believe this with all my heart.
There is no content creation without context creation.
The Terra Nova Expedition is the Millennials’ polar expedition. We’ve worked really hard, we’ve done everything we were supposed to, we made what appeared to be the right decisions at the time, and we’re still losing. Nothing in the mythology we’ve been fed has prepared us for this. No amount of positive attitude is going to change it. We have all the aphorisms in the world, but what we need is an example of how to behave when the chips are down, when the Boss is not sailing into the tempest to rescue us, when the Yelcho is not on the horizon. When circumstances are beyond your power to change, how do you make the best of your bad situation? What does that look like? Even if you can’t fix anything, how do you make it better for the people around you – or at the very least, not worse? Scott tells us: you can be patient, supportive, and humble; see who needs help and offer it; be realistic but don’t give in to despair; and if you’re up against a wall with no hope of rescue, go out in a blaze of kindness. We learn by imitation: it’s easy to say these things, but to see them in action, in much harder circumstances than we will ever face, is a far greater help. And to see them exemplified by real, flawed, complicated people like us is better still; they are not fairly-tale ideals, they are achievable. Real people achieved them.
I am leaping out of my chair and whooping and cheering and hollering about this passage from Sarah Airriess’s latest Patreon post. (The whole essay was released early for Patrons, so you can either become a supporter to read the whole thing today or just wait it out until it becomes more widely available in a month. Personally I’d recommend the former, because Sarah’s Patreon is one of the best around, but I’m biased.)
This talk originally accompanied the launch of The Worst Journey in the World, Vol. 1, Sarah’s graphic novel adaptation of Apsley Cherry-Garrard’s account of the Terra Nova Expedition. I’m holding my copy right now, and it’s one of the most beautiful comics I’ve ever seen. Again: my appreciation is probably heightened by the fact that I’ve been following along on Patreon for years as she’s shared the process behind every page, but even without that context it’s a beautiful, beautiful book.
In the microcosm of caregiving, I’m learning this lesson over and over again: it isn’t the systems that make it bearable; it’s the people. It’s Gabriela texting to say she’s bringing over a rotisserie chicken. It’s Jim coming by in an hour to take my dad out for a visit to his favorite coffee shop. It’s Jen holding space for our cohort of young caregivers to show up and commiserate with each other over Zoom because she went through what we’re going through and wants to pay it forward. It’s Hayley texting a loving thought from across the country when I somehow need it most. It’s Sarah picking up my watch from the place in Ventura that I keep forgetting to stop at and then coming to help me build a bed frame. It’s also whoever left a free mattress in the parking lot behind Vons.
I think back on the way I lived through the first ten years of my career and it feels so different. I was bolstered and supported by community, it’s true. I was even asking them for help at every turn to make my books and my work possible! But somehow the ways I’m relying on others right now feel so different. I’m humbled so much more thoroughly by letting people in during this season of my life because it’s not just creative anxiety anymore. That’s peanuts. That’s easy.
This is the real shit.
It’s not freezing to death in Antarctica shit, but some days it feels real close. I’ve feared and loathed the thought of anyone seeing me like this for so long, but time and time again I see that people want to help each other. Or, at the very least, my people want to help me. And my dad’s people want to help me. And my hometown wants to help me.
I just have to let them in.
If queerness can be understood as a longing, a technology that allows us to glimpse something new that we sense before we can see it, a dowsing rod, a black light, then water might be the catalyst that dissolves our attachment to whatever is keeping us from it, from ourselves.
It’s very hard not to quote the entirety of this essay by J Wortham, which manages to articulate so many angles of my obsession with getting into bodies of water. I wrote a fair bit about my plunge habit when I first moved, but there were many more beyond what I covered. This week it was the frigid Pacific Ocean under a drizzly Santa Barbara sky, then the broad arroyo of the Ventura River, then Thacher Creek in Horn Canyon.
It’s been a winter blessed with unusual—almost unprecedented—amounts of rain.
Part of the reality of searching for queer respites is that they are fleeting, ever-evolving, a question without a resolved answer.
Their writing makes me think of Heraclitus.
Queer time is a sensate way of life, the kind treasured by people who perhaps understand with crackling urgency how circumstances can change in a moment, and the importance of pleasures that even in small doses can sustain you for weeks, months, years after the moment has passed.
Both times I’ve been at Wayward (a decidedly queer space) I’ve swum more frequently than any other time in my life, and yes: those pleasures have sustained me for the last three years. The daily naked plunges in the lake woke me up after naps and started me off right on foggy mornings; they soothed and refreshed and coaxed and shocked. They gave me a touchstone of what it felt like to be fully embodied, fully held. Given the self-obliterating caregiving role I find myself in now, I’ve needed it.
This total immersion of my body into water, repeatedly, without fear, allowed for a total surrender of the illusion of separation between self and the natural world, the universe, whatever you want to call it. If you don’t believe in god, say ocean. Diving nude into the ocean in broad daylight, without fear of reproach, opened a portal to a higher consciousness. Ordinary, and then extraordinary. To be near the sea is to be humbled by its magnitude, to watch your priorities be reordered to its scale. What are self-consciousness, fear of the future, existential worries, to the ocean?
The last night we were on the island, after the main cohort of retreat attendees had gone, we hiked through the forest and over the cliff to the sea. After warming up by a bonfire on the beach, there was no more reason to wait. Two of us waded out into the freezing black water, stepping gingerly over beds of oyster shells until it was deep enough to paddle. I was shuddering and staring, willing and wishing, just about ready to turn around and admit defeat when I began to see it: the water beneath me erupting in stars, bioluminescence eddying around my limbs, all of it too beautiful to seem real.
Each time I allow myself to be enveloped, something is remembered for me: a place, a feeling, a fluency. I can’t always name it, but it’s too powerful to deny. It’s almost as if the parts of myself that have gone missing are recollected in water.
The stars that night were glinting, and the bonfire on the shore waited like a beacon, but the brightest shimmer was running down my forearms, spiraling behind my palms, reminding me of everything I could be.
Hello, hello, hello.
(Previously from this spot: 2022, 2021)
It’s been hard to get out of the house recently.
Our neighbor of 31 years died in February, followed by my godfather in March. They each meant very different things to me, but both occupied an archetypal permanence that’s hard to reconcile with death. And all grief is linked, isn’t it? This thread pulls on that one and so on and so on until the tapestry unravels and you’re left holding a mess of snotty string.
The last two weeks of my wall calendar are utterly blank. I’ve learned to read these gaps in my paper trail as markers of total emotional exhaustion (although sometimes they correlate with the thrill of a new relationship). In this case, I know the data is missing because I’ve been too tired to track whether I wore my mouth guard, too forgetful to know if I attended a Zoom meeting, too frazzled to write Morning Pages. Too much. Too much.
Last night I finally turned my phone all the way off and threw it behind the bookshelf. I buried my laptop in the couch cushions. I hid my iPad in the closet. I hucked all this technology out of my room because I was drowning in it, trying to get away from everything.
Instead, today, I walked. Not for long, but enough to remember what my legs are for. Enough to see how everything has changed from storm after storm of rich rainwater filtering into the hillsides since January. You can stick a finger in the earth and water pours out. Every divot in the trail is a spring.
We’ve passed the equinox. Life is coming back.
Hey! The gorgeous double-hulled voyaging canoe Hōkūleʻa and her sister ship Hikianalia are setting off on another circumnavigation!! LOOK AT THIS VOYAGE MAP!!!
I’m heartbroken this year’s trip to Juneau falls a month before the launch date, but also so excited to see these upcoming plans. I hope I can catch the vessels when they’re further down the US coast. (If you’ve never heard of Hōkūleʻa before, it’s worth skimming through her history on the Polynesian Voyaging Society’s website.)
Here are some drawings I did back in 2017 when I got to visit Hawai‘i for the first time and fell in love with the history of wayfinding. (Ask me sometime about why Disney’s Moana is basically a true story.)
We think of people as settling down when they get older, getting more set in their ways. But that hasn’t been my experience. Instead as I get older, I’m itching to get weirder. I think that in my twenties, I was so determined to carve out space for myself in the world. And now that I have that space, I don’t really feel like I have anything to prove. So it’s safe to ask some big questions about who I actually am. I’m more up for rethinking what I thought I knew. I like the idea of not being content with the apples you can grasp.
Shay
Is it that we actively pull ourselves into being by our very actions, our choices laying the foundations brick by brick for who we are and who we will become…?
Or is it that what pulls us into being, what pushes us toward action, is the ache, is our future selves, is the wisdom in our present yearning, foretold and prophesied by a future world who wants us to become who we inevitably need to become to create itself…?
Yes.
Christina
Maybe this swirl of awe and marvel and good intent for the world and gratitude for ourselves in it is where all the religions came from. That is where our feel for the sacred in the world is conjured, surely, the ordinary, staggering mystery of where it all comes from before it is born here among us and where it all goes after it dies away from us, the starry midnight courtship of the heart that whispers, “What is gone is still with you, still here. As you will be.”
Stephen
Not every experience needs to be put in the basket of “turn this into a beautiful piece of writing for the people”, but everything goes in the basket of – perhaps there is more to this than meets the eye.
Marlee
This is the inheritance that no one ever told you about—wild and curious, unblinking, sorrow-eyed and courageous chested, shuddering the rain from its feathers, ready to launch into the dusking light.
Martin
I joked with my partner that this behavior feels like stacking my pocket change. “Look! I can make a pyramid! Or a square! Ooh this one has rust on it, but the other one doesn’t! I WILL CATALOGUE THEM.” It’s fun, but at the end of the day it doesn’t change the fact that I’m just stacking five pennies as many ways as I can.
BUT THIS IS DIFFERENT, I PROMISE. IT REALLY MIGHT HELP.
[Unpublished draft from October, 2021]
I’ve been having batshit dreams all week. Exhausted, unable to sleep, restless when I finally go down. But last night I got a reprieve and had some really fun ones, most of which I’ve now forgotten. The last remaining vestige was a hardboiled detective saying “The dame walked into my office. She had a face like four cubed beans coming out of a boat.”
Okay, Brain.
I just went and spent some time with Roget’s Thesaurus trying to figure out how I’d classify that distinction. Community vs. audience? Supporter vs. spectator? I’m still chewing on it. And the “support” I’m referencing isn’t always material! It’s just “people with a more pronounced interest in being close to the work,” and I’m trying to remember how to put them first in everything I do.
Is it gauche to quote your own writing from a different platform on your own blog? I don’t care! Heck the rules!! This is what I’m up to right now!!!
I’ve been reading J.B. Priestley’s book Delight during my morning excursions to the lavatory for the last couple months. Maybe this is a sign I’m turning into my father as I age, but I’ve really embraced the art of reading in the loo. I have yet to achieve his ability to stay in there for a half hour every morning, but I’m learning the ins and outs of the practice. You can’t, for example, just pick any old book! You need something with short enough chapters to remain enjoyable and engaging even if you’re only reading a page or two a day.
When I look back at 2022 in reading I realize a lot of my favorite books from this year happened to be Loo Reads. 100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write, The Timeless Way of Building, A Primer for Forgetting, Notes from Walnut Tree Farm, Delight, 300 Arguments…I’m sure I enjoyed them for their own merits, but I also wonder if the pace of consumption didn’t have something to do with it as well. They kept me company for far longer than books typically do, and with far more consistency.
Anyway, Priestley is marvelous. So many of these entries feel like they could’ve been written yesterday; I’ve been resisting the temptation to write about them all. (It does, however, give me great pleasure to see Robin blogging about bits from the copy I sent him. I love it when a gift finds its mark.)
Got to catch up with the inimitable Matthew Bogart on the phone the other day after an embarrassingly long lull in communication (although his Patreon updates make me feel like we’re good pals just chatting away on the regular, so maybe that’s why I lost track). At one point he said “That’s the entirety of comics for me: turning story into space” and I think that’s a REAL GOOD LINE! I wrote it down immediately because YES! EXACTLY! What a great form of wizardry to practice.
But now I’m thinking about why it is that pictures occupy spatial real estate for me in a way words…don’t?? I’m tired and it’s the end of the day so I’m not going to dig into why right now. Just chucking it into the posterity machine.
Anyway: Matt’s a good dude. The last time I saw him he was letting me borrowing his corner rounder during the Pandemic. That’s a real friend.
Forgot I’d never finished Queen’s Gambit, so I went to wrap up the last few installments yesterday. This song plays over the end credits of Episode 5 and it just transported me. Dinah Washington’s voice is unreal, and this lilting 50s arrangement is to die for.
This is more to do with the content of the episode than the song, but I’m such a sucker for media that captures the thrill of finding a worthy sparring partner—someone who’ll make you work to keep up for a change. Someone who’ll play. My friend Sarah calls it “air guitaring,” which I absolutely love, but there’s also the general purpose “yes, and…”, like you’re both in on a joke that’s being written in real time.
I didn’t always keep up with Octopus Pie during the ten years Meredith spent making it regularly, but every time one of these standalone followup stories comes out, I’m blown away. Seeing webcomics creators approach characters they first started crafting in their 20s with the added life experience of becoming 30-somethings is just…it rules. It’s magical to see characters age as we age, becoming concerned with the types of life transitions and regrets and hopes that meet us with each passing decade.
And even beyond the content: THE STORYTELLING! I yelled when I saw these three panels because they’re magnificent. The tones, the panel borders, the scale, the expressions—all of it comes together to create this perfect denouement after a raging argument. And the van? The fuckin’ long shot crafted from a tiny space that shouldn’t by any rights work the way it does but it works so well??? I love seeing things like this. I miss seeing things like this.
I hear people talk about missing webcomics because Google Reader died, but the truth is there’s still plenty of RSS reader technology out there. There are more webcomics than ever. So why do I still fall prey to that feeling? Is it that I don’t have what it takes to invest in new stories or characters? That the selection has gotten too overwhelming? That I spend all my time making comics so I can’t relax by reading them anymore?
I’m not sure. I just know that reading this reminded me of what it felt like to be a kid in college with a bookmark folder of ten different stories I would gladly immerse myself in every day of the week, week after week, year after year. Stories that made me think I could do this too. Stories made by people who became my colleagues and friends.
Stories that it’s nice to return to every now and again, just to peek through the window and make sure everyone’s doing okay.
People keep asking me about AI and I really think how you feel about AI comes down to whether you believe art is about producing things (images, objects, data files, “content”) or about a way of operating in the world as an intellectual, spiritual, and emotional creature.
Austin Kleon
There it is again! Indentured spiritual servitude! Gotta beware that shit.
As far as the dude goes, he’s secondary. A closed door is always secondary to the prayer you say in front of it. Go back to your prayer instead. Ask what’s in your prayer. What did you want from this closed door? What did you imagine behind it? All of the beauty and light and fun and passion that you are imagining lives inside your cells already. You are a creative force in this world and you can make art using this lonely, intense feeling you get from your prayer.
Heather Havrilesky (as Ask Molly)
(Cleaning out old notes in Bear, found this one under a tag I never used for anything else.)
An added benefit of Brendan’s Christmas thread of appreciation: an enormous slew of new blogs to follow! Honestly too many. I get overwhelmed easily these days. But I lingered over his tweet about Nadia, because it mentioned experimentations with microgrants (HELLO), which then led me to her very clean and pleasing site.
I bopped around for a while, delighting in the short-form Notes and reading a few blog entries before adding the feed to my RSS reader. The joy in doing this (depending on how often someone updates their blog) is getting to jump back a few months or years in the timeline to see what they were up to before. That’s how I landed on this post about The Creator Economy from 2021. There are so many gems in here; things I think about all the time, but also things I don’t! She probes further beyond where this conversation usually ends, asking the kinds of questions the post suggests we should all be asking.
When I imagine a cultural renaissance that inspires me, I think about working together to address unsolved questions, tugging on threads in conversations that need unraveling, creating enduring artifacts for generations to pore over and iterate upon. The “publish or perish” model that nudges people to rack up more followers is not the pinnacle of creative freedom; it’s indentured spiritual servitude.
Indentured spiritual servitude! Hot damn!! This is precisely the situation so many of us cartoonists find ourselves in. Precisely the reason I feel so much resistance to the simple act of sharing a photograph or a passing thought on social media. However trivial, it still feels like something I have to do. It’s a matter of survival.
Towards the very end of Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow (which I finished in a glut yesterday morning), one of the protagonists gives a little speech about luck, and the circumstances of birth that led to their company being able to succeed at making video games where and when they did.
“[…] I think, because of the internet, we would have been overwhelmed by how many people were trying to do the exact same things we were. We had so much freedom—creatively, technically. No one was watching us, and we weren’t even watching ourselves.”
And just before that:
“It’s so easy to make a hit when you’re young and you don’t know anything.” “I think that, too,” Sadie said. “The knowledge and experience we have—it isn’t necessarily that helpful, in a way.” “So depressing,” Sam said, laughing. “What’s all of this struggle been for?”
They almost felt like too much, these tidy conversations at the end of the novel, because they’re exactly the conversations I have with my peers about “making it” in comics. But they were also so accurate I found myself nodding along.
I don’t have a tidy wrap-up for this. I just want to be watching myself less. I want to go unsurveilled.
I stopped off to download my Twitter data yesterday and caught a notification from this lovely thread that Brendan had put together sometime around Christmas:
I appreciate a good list, commitment to a self-imposed bit, the poetic repetition of joe brainard's "I remember" (kindred form, adopted here), the magic of the internet, and the spirit of @threadapalooza — in that spirit I begin this thread of 100+ mutuals I appreciate & why…
— Brendan Schlagel (@schlagetown) December 23, 2022
Down among the thinkers and tinkerers and connectors, said the notification, he’d written some very sweet things about me. It came as something of a surprise.
It was a mention of “unselfing” by Helen Macdonald that drove me back to blogging in 2020. Since then I’ve heard it surface in other places. Annie Dillard describes it at length in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, saying “[…] I have often noticed that even a few minutes of this self-forgetfulness is tremendously invigorating. I often wonder if we do not waste most of our energy just by spending every waking minute saying hello to ourselves.”
Both women have their fingers tangled up in something true.
I feel it when I’m driving the highway, lost in dark thoughts of mortality, only to abandon every thread for a glimpse of a hawk on a telephone pole. The moments before sleep when a barn owl’s screech pulls me out of my own body. The day I left the house in a foul mood to pace the gravel drive, stomping up and down until the lifeless body of a hummingbird stopped me short and lifted the needle of my displeasure.
I know the value of unselfing more than I ever have before, living here, doing this work, marinading in the near-depth of near-death.
But this thing that Brendan gave me feels somehow the same—an inverted twin sensation: being reminded out of the blue of Who You Are (or Were) Perceived to Be. It comes to me in a season where I’ve stopped saying hello to myself quite so often, possibly to the point of forgetting who that self even was before now. I say hello to death, I say hello to loss and calibration and labor and tending, but I don’t always say hello to me.
And the minute I type that I’m thinking of Sarah Ruhl, and these lines from the first essay in her book 100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write:
I’ve written about that line here before, and the mantra repeats in my head as I walk through the meadows near my house.
All right, then, annihilate me; that other self was a fiction anyhow.
All right, then, annihilate me; that other self was a fiction anyhow.
All right, then, annihilate me; that other self was a fiction anyhow.
And yet, and yet, and yet…
I miss her. I miss that Lucy. And so Brendan’s tweet feels like a kindness. Perhaps the kindness that social media kept drawing me back in with for all those years: a whole realm of people who could look at every passing thought and doodle and hard-won victory and low moment and interview and blog post and reflect back someone cohesive and true.
True only to what I’d shared, maybe, but still.
Something I couldn’t see with my own eyes.
Something the hawk sees when it’s looking back at me.
Back at it and even less able to provide commentary than I was this time last year, but hot damn I love books.
(Previously: 2021 in Reading)
| Legend | Rough Guide to Ratings | | --- | --- | | 🎭 – Plays📝 – Poetry📖 – Books (Fiction)📓 – Books (Nonfiction)💬 – Graphic Novels | ❤︎ = Yes❤︎❤︎ = OhYes❤︎❤︎❤︎ = Oh Hell Yes❤︎❤︎❤︎❤︎ = Priestdaddy |
- 💬 Five Worlds: The Sand Warrior – Mark Siegel, Alexis Siegel, Xanthe Bouma, Matt Rockefeller, Boya Sun
- 📖 Pirate Freedom – Gene Wolfe
- 💬 Thirsty Mermaids – Kat Leyh ❤︎❤︎❤︎
- 🔄 📖 Going Postal – Terry Pratchett ❤︎❤︎
- 📖 A Dark and Starless Forest – Sarah Hollowell
- 📖 Northanger Abbey – Jane Austen
- 🔄 📓 The Do-it-yourself Guide to Fighting the Big Motherfuckin’ Sad — Adam Gnade
- 💬 The Daughters of Ys – M.T. Anderson, Jo Rioux
- 📓 How to Live, or A Life of Montaigne – Sarah Bakewell
- 🔄 📓 Burnout – Emily & Amelia Nagoski
- 🔄 📖 Small Gods – Terry Pratchett ❤︎❤︎
- 📓 At the Center of All Beauty: Solitude and the Creative Life – Fenton Johnson ❤︎❤︎
- 📖 A Psalm for the Wild-Built – Becky Chambers ❤︎❤︎
- 📖 Luster – Raven Leilani ❤︎❤︎❤︎
- 📓 A Primer for Forgetting – Lewis Hyde ❤︎❤︎❤︎
- 📓 The Artist’s Way – Julia Cameron ❤︎❤︎❤︎
- 📓 Tiny House Living – Ryan Mitchell
- 💬 Amulet Book 1 – Kazu Kibuishi
- 💬 Amulet Book 2 – Kazu Kibuishi
- 💬 Amulet Book 3 – Kazu Kibuishi
- 💬 Amulet Book 4 – Kazu Kibuishi
- 💬 Amulet Book 5 – Kazu Kibuishi
- 💬 Amulet Book 6 – Kazu Kibuishi
- 💬 Amulet Book 7 – Kazu Kibuishi
- 💬 Amulet Book 8 – Kazu Kibuishi
- 📖 Doctor Zhivago – Boris Pasternak
- 📖 River of Teeth – Sarah Gailey ❤︎
- 📓 The Four Agreements – don Miguel Ruiz
- 📖 The Echo Wife – Sarah Gailey ❤︎❤︎
- 📓 When Strangers Meet – Kio Stark
- 📖 Sing, Unburied, Sing – Jesmyn Ward ❤︎
- 🔄📓 The Sabbath – Abraham Joshua Heschel ❤︎
- 📓 On Imagination – Mary Ruefle
- 📓 The Timeless Way of Building – Christopher Alexander ❤︎
- 🔄 💬 Mighty Jack – Ben Hatke
- 💬 Dancing at the Pity Party – Tyler Feder
- 💬 Zita the Spacegirl – Ben Hatke
- 📖 A Gentleman in Moscow – Amor Towles ❤︎
- 📖 The Decagon House Murders – Yukito Ayatsuji
- 💬 Salt Magic – Rebecca Mock & Hope Larson
- 📖 Lies Sleeping – Ben Aaronovitch
- 🔄 💬 Mighty Jack & Zita the Spacegirl – Ben Hatke
- 💬 Making Comics – Lynda Barry ❤︎❤︎❤︎
- 📖 A Master of Djinn – P. Djèlí Clark
- 💬 Coyote Doggirl – Lisa Hanawalt
- 🔄 💬 Mighty Jack and the Goblin King – Ben Hatke ❤︎
- 💬 Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant? – Roz Chast ❤︎❤︎
- 📖 Fair Play – Tove Jansson ❤︎
- 📖 Plus One – Christopher Noxon
- 💬 Berlin – Jason Lutes ❤︎❤︎
- 💬 Your Illustrated Guide to Becoming One with the Universe – Yumi Sakugawa ❤︎
- 📖 Matrix – Lauren Groff ❤︎❤︎❤︎
- 💬 Belonging – Nora Krug ❤︎❤︎
- 💬 My Depression – Elizabeth Swados
- 💬 This Woman’s Work – Julie Delporte ❤︎❤︎❤︎
- 📖 Shadowshaper – Daniel José Older
- 💬 Genderqueer – Maia Kobabe
- 📖 Full Dark House – Christopher Fowler
- 📓 Polysecure – Jessica Fern
- 💬 Dying for Attention: a Graphic Memoir of Nursing Home Care – Susan MacLeod
- 📓 300 Arguments – Sarah Manguso ❤︎
- 📓 More Than Two – Franklin Veaux & Eve Rickert
- 📖 Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls – Alissa Nutting
- 📓 Notes from Walnut Tree Farm – Roger Deakin ❤︎❤︎❤︎
- 📓 Unmastered, A Book on Desire, Most Difficult to Tell – Katherine Angel ❤︎❤︎
- 📖 Maxwell’s Demon – Stephen Hall
- 📖 Magic for Liars – Sarah Gailey
- 📖 A Prayer for the Crown Shy – Becky Chambers
- 🔄📓 Pilgrim at Tinker Creek – Annie Dillard ❤︎❤︎❤︎ (last read in 2017)
- 📓 Everybody: A Book About Freedom – Olivia Laing ❤︎❤︎
- 📖 Detransition, Baby – Torrey Peters ❤︎❤︎❤︎
- 📓 The Joy of Small Things – Hannah Jane Parkinson
- 📖 Fisher of Bones – Sarah Gailey
- 📖 The Spy Who Came in from the Cold – John le Carré
- 🔄📓 100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write – Sarah Ruhl
- 📓 Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again – Katherine Angel ❤︎
- 📖 Toad – Katherine Dunn ❤︎
- 📖 No One is Talking About This – Patricia Lockwood ❤︎❤︎
- 📖 The Impossible Us – Sarah Lotz ❤︎❤︎❤︎
- 💬 Sheets – Brenna Thummler
- 📓 Priestdaddy – Patricia Lockwood ❤︎❤︎❤︎❤︎
- 📖 Upright Women Wanted – Sarah Gailey ❤︎
- 📖 When We Were Magic – Sarah Gailey
- 📓 Emergent Strategy – adrienne maree brown ❤︎❤︎
- 📖 The Daughter of Time – Josephine Tey
- 📖 Fantasian – Larissa Pham ❤︎
- 📓 A Handbook of Disappointed Fate – Anne Boyer ❤︎
- 📓 Love – Leo Buscaglia
- 📓 Delight – J.B. Priestley ❤︎❤︎
(All these quotes are from A Handbook of Disappointed Fate, Boyer’s collection of essays on poetry, illness, avant-garde creative movements, mutual aid, reading, and crushes.)
After I got sick in late summer 2014, I followed U.S. poetry only from afar, as if walking by a shop window and glancing at it through a glass, even the most necessary uproar too expensive to my health for me to even think of buying […]
This rang so true to how these last two years have changed my relationship to the comics industry—a space I never felt particularly enmeshed in to begin with. Every discussion of online drama or publishing upset or new technology costs far more than I have capacity or inclination to spend. A relief, in some ways, to have that decision taken away from me.
My time in the time of illness has been unmeasurable or ir-measured or a-measured. Yet despite how this time can no longer steadily or predictably submit itself to clocks and calendars, for survival’s sake I still have to try to measure it.
Underlined this because I’m doing my annual workbook on the couch right now, surrounded by a corona of calendar pages and journals and sketchbooks, trying to piece together the fragments of a lost year.
The harm can be studied like anything, every wept tear a textbook, every minute of shallow breathing a monograph, seven hours and fourteen minutes of a sleepless night a textbook a tedious-to-read but potentially useful dissertation on having existed.
It is not as if what is true, right, urgent, and necessary is a light, and what is harm is the darkness. They are both darkness: they are both lights.
yes yes yes yes
- There will be a lot of sewing last year’s fragments with this year’s threads.
And also:
Poetry is revenge porn against the self by the self.
And finally:
As grim as reading has been for me, reading is not only the private amplification of the human worst. Reading is not merely escapism and militant solitude and everything shirked–that is, reading is not an act exclusive to words and books–and a person can also read the patterns of migrating birds or the lines in a soon-to-be-lover’s palm or the buds of oak trees or the damaged look in an eye or the danger headed this way or the people amassed in the streets. The world existed before books, and it always exists outside of them, and how a person should read is how a person must read, which is at least in duplicate, both always in this world and looking for another.
💛
Another old thought from my to do list app, now going the way of other Old Thoughts and finally getting added to the site:
There are lots of reasons I used to be “more effective” in my life, more capable of generating output or crossing off tasks, but part of me wonders if the lack of travel since 2020 is part of it. I got so much done before leaving for Wayward in September—far more than I really needed to. Tasks and projects that could very easily wait until my return became impossibly urgent. Items that had sat unattended in my notebook for months suddenly leapt to the head of the queue. It got me thinking about how often I used to travel for conventions and book tours and residencies, and what effect that must’ve had on my ability to Get Shit Done.
Any impending departure drives me to put my affairs in order as if I’m about to set out on a doomed expedition to the South Pole. It’s an old act-out, but one that’s served me for a long time.
It stands to reason that traveling less often robs me of these false bottlenecks of urgency.
What can I replace them with?
To paint the sea: is it a process or is it a state? Maybe one leads to the other?
Anna Iltnere, discussing Philip Hoare’s Risingtidefallingstar
How do we celebrate when there is nothing to show for? Where do we turn when “to show for” is our work and our work is our art but we have turned towards watering the plants and painting the kitchen and building the fire? How do we fasten ourselves toward proving nothing to no one and sinking into the privacy of life?
Marlee Grace
Back at the start of March I uncovered this cookbook in our overstuffed kitchen shelf. It’s incredibly upsetting, even for something designed in the 60s.
NOBODY WANTS THAT ON A BOOK ABOUT FOOD.
But the original text, I should mention, is from 1939. And when I cracked it open I was surprised to find that the illustrations were incredibly cool.
Look at those lines! So stylized! So energetic! And the compositions!
Turns out the interior artist is one Mathurin Méheut (1882-1958), a French painter I’d never heard of before. When I went searching for more of his work, I found a treasure trove. Méheut had spent two years before WWI working with naturalists at the Roscoff marine biology station—a collaboration that resulted in two enormous volumes of gorgeously-depicted marine life.
And, to my immeasurable delight, both of them are available online via RISD’s library.
I love stumbling on illustrative work like this. It feels so modern! There’s a level of stylization that really reminds me of Jemma Salume’s animal studies.
I also can’t help thinking about the work of Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka, the father-son team known for creating the most exquisite glass models in human history. Their success lay in capturing the shapes and colors of marine invertebrates at a time when methods of preservation typically left specimens looking like so much indistinguishable mucus.
This octopus? GLASS.
This cactus? ALSO GLASS.
Unreal. (And well worth a visit if you ever find yourself near the Harvard Museum of Natural History.)
In the process of writing this post, I learned that Leopold fell in love with marine invertebrates in 1853, when the ship carrying him to America was becalmed for two weeks near the Azores. His wife and his father had just died within a few years of each other. The trip was something of an escape.
I think about him, adrift and grieving in the middle of the ocean, with nothing to do but stand on deck in the night and pay attention.
Hopeful, we look out over the darkness of the sea, which is as smooth as a mirror; there emerges all around in various places a flashlike bundle of light beams, as if it is surrounded by thousands of sparks, that form true bundles of fire and of other bright lighting spots, and the seemingly mirrored stars.
✵
Little wonders all around.
In caregiver support group, someone says “I would like to sit longer with joy,” and my body responds with an instantaneous shower of chills.
There is an urgency to life right now. It feels like nothing can wait.
At dinner immediately after, I catch myself leaping out of my seat at soon as the last forkful of food has entered my mouth. I stop, sit back down, close my eyes, take a deep breath. More chills. I feel my gut unclench.
I did it again this morning at breakfast, jumping up like there’s a fire in the kitchen and I have to rush to put it out. But there’s no visible fire, just the slow, underground burn of his decline. Miles and miles of it stretching under everything.
But still.
I would like to sit longer with joy.
I'm toying with the idea of Dunbar's Digital Number. How many meaningful online relationships can I maintain?
I've wondered with increasing frequency whether it makes the most sense to start consolidating everything on my own site, but the fact is there's something valuable about maintaining these different tonal environments.
These days when I see exhortations to conserve power or water or any other communal resource, I'm alarmed by how cynical I've become.
It's the shift when weeks of broken promises to myself stop feeling like impenetrable, sticky guilt and instead alchemize into rocket fuel.
Everything feels foreshortened today. Hands, legs, heart, head too close to the camera, grotesque. Nothing where it should be, every line misplaced. The disquiet of thinking “That can’t possibly be right,” only to line up the landmarks and learn (too late) that it is.
I kept chickening out about committing to a single composition to have up for the rest of the year. Something about the imagery I was choosing scared me.
Do you want poetry? Do you want bureaucracy and eroticism and also existential horror? Then boy do I have two phone lines for YOU.
Nothing on the internet has ever transported me back to a state of childlike delight so quickly.
(Prefacing this post by saying I’m safe, just processing what’s happening and trying to keep tabs on what it all looks like on the inside. I’m too scattered to make art about it, so a list will do for now.) I’m on a zero-to-sixty short fuse, which is uncharacteristic for me. Screamed at my phone … Continue reading Things I’m Noticing After Last Week
I lost track of how many plunges I took last year, I just know it’s been a minute since I marked the two little wavy lines on my calendar that indicate “Had the opportunity to get in a body of water and took it.”
Wait, no, I do remember the last time: New Year’s Eve!
Oh man, it was frigid and perfect and early enough in the morning that I just got to the river and stripped down and flung myself in and then screamed and jumped up and down and dried off and walked home as the sun was rising.
Bliss.
Anyway, all this to say that I dropped James at the airport yesterday and then immediately took myself to the beach next door (Santa Barbara, you outrageous creature) and Got in The Sea. We’ve got a horrible heat wave on this week, but the wind was also blowing somethin’ fierce so I didn’t stay in long. Still: every time I take those first strides across the sand, feel the water on my thighs, mutter to myself until I can’t deny it any longer and plunge under—it’s like I’m coming home to a part of myself I didn’t know was missing. And the more I come back to it, the more it works. Every return heeds the voice in my head that says “You want this. You’re made of this exuberance. It will enlarge you.” while ignoring the one that says “You don’t have a change of clothes. It’s too cold. Ew, there’s seaweed.”
The “ew, there’s seaweed” voice can take a hike.
A good line from Sumana:
Marketing is an outbound chore that increases the frequency of inbound inquiries.
This sums up a lot of my aversion to being visible (and easily reachable) in online spaces right now. There’s a negligible line between “marketing” and “posting photos on Instagram” (irrespective of what those photos show) because my work and my online selfhood are largely the same. If people remember that I exist, they might send an inbound inquiry. “Inquiry” here can mean anything from a simple heart emoji in response to an Instagram story, to a complex email asking for advice. Both elicit the same sense of panic: someone needs something from me, and I don’t have what it takes to give it to them.
What’s worse is that I often don’t even have what it takes to tell them I don’t have what it takes.
This is embarrassing. I feel shame around it. I know a lot of people deal with it! But I feel shame all the same.
The other thing I catch myself thinking about is that this is totally a Me Issue. I mean, yes: I can make direct requests that people not message me in certain places. I can turn off comments. I can ask loved ones to let me make the first move in initiating conversation. But I’m not sure that’s actually the solution I want.
I want a list of readily available texts or emails I can send that let people know where I’m at without needing to draft them from scratch when I have no spoons to do so.
Take the little autoresponder texts that Apple offers when someone’s trying to call you: “Sorry, I can’t talk right now.” “I’m on my way.” “Can I call you later?” I finally found the menu to change them to something in my own voice the other day because I was so sick of going through the same cycle: getting an incoming call, thinking “AAAAAAAAA I CAN’T TAKE THIS RIGHT NOW,” looking at the available autoresponder texts, thinking “UGH THESE ARE ALL TERRIBLE AND ROBOTIC,” and then taking the call despite not being in the right place to do so.
And of course by the time the call is over I’ve forgotten about finding the menu to change the text response options.
It’s the tech equivalent of only remembering that you need to buy a new shampoo bar while you’re in the shower and unable to do so.
Anyway, I’ve had some truly delightful inbound inquiries lately. I don’t want them to stop. But I do want to build more internal trust around this: that I’ll respect both my own time and other people’s when I step into conversation.
Shing wrote a very perfect post-mortem about their epistolary keepsake game, Remember August. It is personal and statistical all at once, just as much about the logistics of running a very unique kind of mail-based narrative as it is about the decline of once-cherished relationships. I strongly recommend reading the whole thing, but this sentence in particular hit me in the chest:
I felt a little bit like by making games like this, I was tricking strangers and friends into telling me that I would be okay.
I feel this so keenly when I listen to messages from The Right Number. Much like the handwritten letters players posted during their interaction with Remember August, the human voice carries so many layers of intimacy. The current prompt is about refuges, and people have been calling to describe, in gorgeous detail, their chosen temples and cherished landscapes. I lie in the dark and let their accents and words wash over me, one by one. A house in the mountains of northern New Mexico. A warm beach. A particular couch in a family room.
I never listen to too many at once, so there’s actually a backlog of messages I haven’t gotten to yet, but they feel timeless. There’s no response forthcoming, just the knowledge that I’ll listen to them and keep them safe somehow. And in return, they keep me safe, too.
Going through my father’s private papers and files after he died, a well-worn folder slipped to the floor. Faded to a pale blue, I could only imagine how thickly covered it was in my father’s prints. I picked it up gingerly and breathed it in – it smelled like Dad – a stab of grief. It was chock-full of pithy quotes written on various scraps of paper, match book covers and the backs of random envelopes; my dad had kept these over a lifetime. If my father had religion, then this was his bible and I was holding it in my hands.
—Meredy Benson-Rice
Bobbie’s on a roll right now.
Social media is built on ambient relationships. You post, you tweet, you share; I read, I listen, I see. Maybe we interact briefly. But I can feel closeness to you without actually having it.
To make things even more complicated, we can exist on both sides—creators and consumers of other people’s thoughts, and each other’s. But so often I see what you’re doing, you see me, but we’re never quite talking to each other.
Ambient friendship.
aaaggghhhh
I haven’t historically been someone who reads a lot of books simultaneously, but I won’t lie: it’s doing a lot for me right now. My brain is scattered and anxious and burnt out and overwhelmed and uncertain, but allowing pattern recognition to come into play as I’m reading across genres and timescales…that I can manage. It helps things feel as if they make sense.
Of course, sometimes the patterns I recognize are massively uncomfortable. Here’s three about habit, practice, belief, and enthusiasm:
Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way:
Terry Pratchett’s Small Gods:
Fenton Johnson’s At the Center of All Beauty:
I think I’ve listed these in the order I encountered them, but I can’t be sure. I just know I read the Cameron passage and felt personally attacked in that good, awful way that means something true is surfacing. I love daily drawing challenges. Arguably I’ve built a whole career on them. But I also, deep down, know that they can become a kind of ego trap. Fortunately there are all these other rhyming passages that offer alternative paths and approaches. Johnson underlines a truth I’ve already folded into large parts of my brain: that there’s a fundamental difference between a habit and a practice.
Bonus Kicker: I read Zina that passage from Cameron and she immediately latched onto the etymology of enthusiasm. “Did you know?” she asked. And I had to reply that I did, because there’s a phrase rattling around in my brain:
“The Greeks said that to be enthusiastic was to be filled with God.”
Why do I know this? Why do I know it with this specific wording? It feels like something I know through repetition, like I’ve heard it read aloud many times or included in a talk. I dig around in the filing cabinets of surface memory and find nothing.
At 11:30 that night I finally find it: a single quote pulled from a series of small stories written by Frank Chimero in, as far as I can tell, 2010. I’d written it down in 2016 in an old notes document where I kept links and things to include in my newsletter. A quick spin through the archives suggests that I never actually wove it into an update, but every time I went to write one I’d skim through that list of quotes and links and there it would be: a phrase.
I suppose this is how we learn.
Mike mentioned this pricing structure for selling art that his partner Erika came up with and it made me scream it’s so good:
Cost of art = the number of hours it took to produce x the hourly wage of the buyer.
Doesn’t work for everything, but I love the idea of meeting people where they’re at in this regard. Granted, if I’m making a living off of selling my work, and most of my friends are broke cartoonists, that’s going to take a lot of hustle to make ends meet, but it really makes the case for befriending people outside one’s own socioeconomic bracket. (And as a patron—especially one with a day job—it offers a great guideline for compensating people fairly. Got into this on Twitter a while ago and several people talked about tipping artists based on the knowledge that were probably almost always undercharging. I love those people.)
Anyway Mike’s auctioning off this gorgeous piece to benefit Ukraine. Good guy.
A few rhyming pieces from this week:
- Sarah wrote a lovely, somewhat bittersweet post about finally closing her Photobucket account, which touched on a lot of what I find difficult about maintaining an archive of one’s creative work online as an artist, rather than just a writer:
I’ve never been sentimental about my childhood homes, but I imagine this is how it feels to leave one. I invested a lot more emotion into these drawings and writings than I ever did any actual geography; it was a (virtual) dwelling and a social life and autobiography all rolled into one. My blog archive and my long-defunct website, cosy and reliable home bases for so long, foundational in so many different ways to my identity, will be floating out there in the deep web without their illustrations, like abandoned buildings with hollow windows; it feels like I’ve pressed a button that sent them instantaneously into ruin.
-
Earlier this week, Brendan linked to Wesley’s writing, which led me in turn to their exploration of How Websites Die (which, in turn, referenced Winnie’s writing, whose work I only found recently through strange, roundabout blogging connections—did you know I love this game?). Timely to see that there’s a group of people all wondering about how we can (or if we should) make these spaces more enduring. Are they even built for that?
-
All these things led to thinking about how I do know someone who, out of a sense of love and duty and grief and stewardship, ensures that Chloe Weil’s site remains online, even eight years after her death.
I think the web is full of these silent acts of affection, but they can be hard to see.
This week I relaunched The Right Number, the confessional voicemail box I started in 2020. I’ve been sitting at the kitchen table for the last 15 minutes listening to the messages people have left so far and it’s just…so nice. It’s so nice. I really like this project. It’s warm and small and human and noncommercial and I want to nurture that.
A friend who’d called said their motto for this year was going to be “every step forward,” and that in addition to their own movements (large and small), me restarting the phone line also felt like a step forward.
I can’t think of higher praise.
(Also, SIDEBAR: when I went to find the first mention of the project here so I could link to it, I learned that announcing it in August of 2020 marked my actual return to blogging on my own site! Holy shit! My relationship to writing and existing online has changed so much since I started prioritizing sharing thoughts in this space. I love it. Here’s to a year and a half of being back in the corner of the internet that’s mine.)
Caught an excellent, all-too-brief conversation between Austin Kleon and Sarah Ruhl on YouTube earlier today and took some sketchnotes:
I particularly love seeing this emergent theme of authors and creators starting to meld their own weird secular practices with ideas of the sacred. Sometimes it’s stuff they were raised with and other times it’s new systems they’re exploring. All of it fascinates me.
I came to Sarah’s work in high school via her play Eurydice. I’ve managed to see it performed a couple times over the years, but it was the written stage directions I first fell in love with, so the real joy has been knowing they’re there, unspoken, in any mounted production.
(They put on a whole season of her work in Portland one year and I somehow only managed to catch one play! I have a hard time getting over that. But it was In the Next Room, Or The Vibrator Play and it was stellar.)
Since 2016 I’ve found that she’s actually leaping between all sorts of spaces, writing essays and poetry and now a memoir and also a collection of correspondence called Letters from Max which was one of my favorite things I read in 2020. I even drew it as part of a year-end round up, but never actually wrote the blog post. Oops. Here, look, my favorite reads from two years ago:
(I still stand by all of these. God, 2020 was good for reading.)
There’s a tenderness and a generosity and an absurdism to Sarah’s work that I adore. Nice when you finally get to see an author you’ve long admired speak and they reflect those qualities in conversation.
Fun Postscript: Apple now does this text recognition thing in photos that can be very helpful for generating accurate alt text. Unfortunately it’s more of a challenge when dealing with something as complex as a page of illustrated notes. Here’s how much it managed to find in this photo:
And here’s what it looks like pasted into a text document:
I actually love this? Doesn’t help with alt text, but it does make a cool new artifact.
FUE SPINT INTO FLIE, Y’ALL.
~~Four~~ Five! places to poke around when the sight of another bland-looking personal website or social network makes me want to launch my brain into low orbit:
- Multiverse: A CONSTELLATION OF INTERNET CORNERS HELLO HELLO HELLO
- Secret Room Press built a Google Doc guest book for their website and it’s v cute
- Meatspace, the friendly little chat website that pairs outgoing messages with 2-second GIF recordings of participants faces, still exists
- thoughts, a quiet microblogging space
- The joyous surge of personal website action happening on Neocities
I don’t even know that this 90s revival aesthetic is my aesthetic (at least on this go around), but I still love seeing it come back because of what it stands for. It’s reminding me of how much I thought about anonymity as a feature of my early web experiences while reading Better Than IRL. Post-Facebook, it felt as if anonymity became synonymous with cruelty, trolling, and lack of accountability. The real move was to be Extremely Online under one’s own name—especially if one hoped to make a career out of making creative work on the web.
But that stifling trajectory has also led to a culture of fear. Fear of imperfection, fear of unprofessionalism, fear of everything and everyone. I’d forgotten all about the freedom and exuberance of being anonymous. The weirdness. Now it feels like a liberation.
And maybe that’s the root of the fear: if you’re someone who believes people are inherently shitty, then a liberation looks like a return to one’s worst impulses. If you believe in altruism and basic goodness, maybe it’s something better. A weirder web, yes, but also a kinder one.
Last year I took a photo in this spot on April 11th. Happened to end up here again today while I was talking on the phone with Nia and realized I should do the same thing again. I lay in the grass under the valley oak at the bottom of the hill, stroked the velvety neon leaves unfurling at the end of every twig and branch, and thought about coming here in 5th grade after endless games of Predator/Prey in the groves further up the Saddle.
If the grass is still this green in April I’ll be very surprised, but I’ll take a photo that day and see. We had early rain this year—a rich rush of green. Maybe it’ll hold on. I’m still becoming acquainted with being here for a full year’s cycle.
Everyone is making so much stuff so well all the time and I’m just as guilty of it as anyone else but also I am so tired. I tire myself when I sit down to list my accomplishments with Erika and Danielle during our monthly check-in meetings. There’s surprise and pride, yeah, but also this reflexive sense of embarrassment at how much I’m doing. Knowing that I’d rather be present than productive, but still falling prey to the urge to do make distill grasp learn post share.
I know that social media is a big part of this. I know my own perfectionism is part of it too. And capitalism, that’s in the mix.
There are a lot of ways to do what I do, none of them necessarily right or wrong, but all different, all with their own pros and cons. I’m looking for a space on the web that isn’t shackled to a particular platform, but at the end of the day every avenue for getting paid for my work is owned by somebody.
(This site, at least, is mine.)
What am I asking for when I ask my audience to support me financially? Freedom and permission.
It feels selfish to take that without giving anything in return. (Just two months ago I was yelling lovingly at a comics friend for saying something similar, as if her work isn’t achingly personal and helpful and vulnerable and funny. As if she’s not giving back via her art. I guess I’m guilty of thinking that way, too. Worrying I’m a mooch.)
I’m tired of packaging myself and I know I need to share what’s going on under the hood in order to welcome people into the tribe that makes my life and my work possible. I know I am braver creatively when I have that community around me.
I know the way we’ve built an industry around producing graphic novels burns people out fast fast fast.
I don’t want to get burned.
Hourly Comic Day is an annual tradition in the comics community where folks set out to draw a panel (or two, or three) for every hour they’re awake on February 1st.
It took me a couple weeks to get through finishing my pages from this year because it was a) hard to fit in inking and watercoloring and posting around caregiving, but also b) just exhausting to deal with emotionally. Still: I’m so glad I did it. In 2021 I was right on the cusp of uprooting my life in Portland to move down to Ojai and look after my dad. Now I get to have a record of what the rhythm of these days has been like, and I’m sure I’m going to appreciate it more and more as time goes on.
There’s more to say but I’ve been formatting and posting these pages in various ways all day as I spread them across my internet haunts and I am wiped, so I’ll just get on with sharing them. If you’re finding this through an RSS reader, be warned that the gallery won’t work! Ya gotta click through to read it easily. (Also! An accessible edition with panel by panel alt text is available here thanks to a collaboration with various folks from the Friends of the Space Gnome Discord server. Blessed be their name.)
You can read previous Hourly Comic Day installments at the following links: 2021, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011.
I’m starting to think I have a knack for digital bibliomancy—an uncanny ability, given the vastness and improbability of the internet, to stumble upon just the right input at just the right time.
To set the scene: I finished watercoloring my hourly comics tonight, and have been thinking a great deal about repetition and sameness and grief and depicting the people and places you love. I’ve also been picking apart why, having made this intimate portrait of what it looks like to care for my aging father day in and day out, I feel more comfortable with the idea of sharing the comic online with an audience of thousands than I do showing it to my own mother.
Tonight, the knack looked like going on Twitter to follow someone I’d just met through a private Slack, reading the last few tweets in her timeline, seeing a link she’d posted in early 2021 to a now-archived blog, clicking through and laughing at the blog and then feeling like the curator‘s name was familiar, realizing I’d read a book she’d cowritten some years ago, perusing a list of essays on her website, and finally clicking on the first one because it was about “death, mourning, the artist Pierre Bonnard, and how to make a vital life out of repetitions and sameness, rather than newness and adventure.”
Here she comes:
There is a deep, dark, endless feeling to representing one’s insides. What appears in your writing changes the objects and people around you; they take on the qualities of how you portrayed them. A friend drawn ugly becomes ugly. A life drawn sweet becomes more sweet. To draw your life is to attempt to transform it with your magic. Your life invariably comes to resemble the depiction layered on top of it, because you now look at it through the lens of how you depicted it. This is why some artists run away from their lives; because who among us can live forever in our own dream?
I threw that bold in there, because that was the point I sat up straight and thought “OH SHIT.”
Of Bonnard’s working method the curator Dita Amory wrote, “Only when he felt a deep familiarity with his subject—be it a human model or a modest household jug—did he feel ready to paint it…. Asked if he might consider adding a specific object to his carefully circumscribed still-life repertoire, he demurred, saying, ‘I haven’t lived with that long enough to paint it.’”
I have repeated that phrase in my mind so often since encountering it, twisting it this way and that: I haven’t lived with it long enough to paint it. I haven’t lived with it long enough to write about it. I haven’t lived with it long enough to love it. What does it mean to distrust the novelty of experience? To say instead that what one needs in order to create are not new things—not new grand adventures, not new wives or husbands or cities—but the same thing over and over again until a Platonic form of the thing builds up in the mind and becomes the model for what is written about, or painted?
There were many moments in the course of penciling and inking my hourlies that I found myself drawing things without reference and feeling surprised—as if I haven’t interacted with them daily my entire life. As if I haven’t seen the exact pattern of my father’s behaviors day in and day out for an entire year.
I keep thinking about fixed action patterns in animals.
I keep thinking about what is being cemented in me during this season.
We all know that there is a quality of duration that must be harnessed, which seems to be not only a way of working against the fickle intrusion of inspiration but the only way of living after a certain age: understanding the humdrum repetitions of life to be a kind of balance; refusing to chase the tsunami of inspiration that comes with each new falling in love, each new city; having only the same walls around us, and the same plates, and only one wife, who will always dislike our friends, and spend day after day in the bath.
(I even have a wife who loves the bath! It’s not relevant to the main thrust of this, but I do love my wife and my wife loves the bath.)
There it is: the delight of finding something that speaks so precisely to the moment I’m in—down to the second. And then the wondering about whether reading it on any other day would’ve left me cold.
(The first time I read Ali Smith I bounced off her work entirely. And now I’m reading everything of hers I can get my hands on.)
Walking in the forest with my dog a few weeks after my father died, I noticed the green of the fir trees; the colors were so muted and beautiful. And up above was a flat gray sky, easy to look at, the sun dimmed at midday by a thick layer of clouds. All I could see were the colors in nature and their perfect harmony. I could have stood there staring for much longer if my dog hadn’t been impatient, and if my shoes hadn’t been wet. Everything was dripping, the previous day’s snow already melting. And because I felt in that moment as if I had never really looked at colors before, I stood wondering beneath the shadowless sky whether, when my father died, the spirit that had enlivened him passed into me, for I had held him as he died; as perhaps when his father, a painter, died, his spirit went into my father, so that now I had the spirit of my father and the spirit of my grandfather both inside me. And I wondered whether this influence—the spirit of my painter grandfather inside me—was why I was suddenly noticing colors.
What a gift.
I’d never even heard of Infinity Zines before, but this one Kori made is just stunning:
"every morning, we ache." An infinity zine of meditation on some sad and cyclical feelings about the current moment. 4×4 inches, digital print with spot color, hand assembled.
I love you. pic.twitter.com/DOKZo6pn7Y— Kori Michele (@korimichele) February 5, 2022
Then there’s a tiny essay Anne sent me in the mail that’s modeled on a cootie catcher. It’s about care and capitalism and giving and receiving, but it’s more complicated to photograph than I have the energy for tonight, so this is just to say that I am having a lot of feelings about unusually-formatted zines lately. I think they’re very good.
I’m inking my entries from Hourly Comic Day, which knocked me on my ass this year. It’s not that it was a lot of work (I mean, it was), but more that it forced me to really look at what’s happening in my life during this season. To examine the monotony and poignancy and fear and humor of caregiving. To feel as if part of me is still trying to maintain a life like the life I had when I did Hourly Comic Day last year (and the year before that, and the year before that, and so on x 10).
Not wanting to draw my dad because to draw someone you have to really look at them and sometimes it’s too painful to look at him.
And then also understanding that sometimes the best thing I can do is look at my pain.
I hosted another Chill Drawing Hangout on Zoom earlier today and it was lovely. I’m grateful to know so many people who are willing to gather and be generous with each other and enjoy making art together. I’m going to do my best to make it a monthly practice, which means next one’s March 4th from 12-2pm Pacific. (That’s one day before we’re due to open a show of the collages I’ve been making with my dad, so I’m anticipating that I will be a mess, but that probably also means a couple hours friendly drawing will be much-needed.)
I want to write properly about how long it’s taken me to realize that one of the MANY reasons I’m in love with Lewis Hyde’s A Primer for Forgetting is that it’s basically a blog in book form. So many small chapterlets subdivided into loose categories, all titled with brief words or phrases, all circling similar themes. It’s how I think about what I’m doing here (or with my Rambles)—building a database over the course of many months of Stuff I Am Thinking About so that someday I can surprise myself by finding out the seeds of the next thing have been germinating for longer than I’ve known.
Nisabho’s been recording meditations and sharing them online, which I only realized recently while trying to Google the name of the monastic community he’s working to establish up in Seattle. We went to college together (he features very prominently in True Believer, the first comic I funded on Kickstarter) and he’s remained one of my lighthouse humans. Anyway, Wednesday this week was rough and so I found myself listening to this half-hour talk on grief and mourning to try and cope. It was so lovely—like we were still walking together in the early dark of Portland in October 2020. He recited the same Mary Oliver poem for me on the sidewalk there. I got to share my 100 Day Project with him and his parents.
This post is basically Sarah Ruhl’s 100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write, although she was caring for small children when she wrote it, but I feel an increasing affinity with anyone who’s doing 24/7 care work these days.
Okay that’s enough small things, back to doing dishes.
[Apparently I drafted this in April of 2021 and never posted it? Found it this morning while searching for something connected to the introduction to my 100 Day Project, which I’m planning to launch sometime in the next couple weeks.]
I gave a lot of talks in 2016, and the one I usually point to is the Big One at XOXO in September, but much earlier in the year I was in Viborg, Denmark for my second stint of teaching at The Animation Workshop. At the time I was feeling very much in love with having an online community, as evidenced by this screenshot from the talk:
hollow laughter I find myself wondering if this is some kind of cicada-esque situation. Six years of being a dedicated luddite, six years of being a massively social and enthusiastic online extrovert, six more years of burying myself in a nice, quiet, mud flat and then emerging to abandon my chitinous shell and begin the cycle anew.
But I think it’s more complicated than that.
All these thoughts I’ve been having lately about social media and going away from it and coming back to it and then hating that I’ve come back to it but also wondering if I can sustain my career without it has me reflecting on this conversation I had with doreen in May of 2020.
The talk wasn’t actually about the experience of being a creator on social media, but when I was reading doreen’s book Deviced, a concept that really leapt out at me was the idea of having an internal vs. external locus of control. Turns out I’ve been remembering the definition incorrectly. The term technically applies to the degree of control we feel we have over the outcomes of our actions. Having an internal locus of control translates to a sense of personal agency, feeling like your efforts matter, that kind of thing. Having an external locus of control generally means you feel like the universe is largely random and all your efforts will come to naught, regardless of what you try.
The way it had lodged in my brain was more to do with feeling like I could validate my own efforts, which is what I was writing about yesterday. I talked about not wanting to “give away that kind of power.” What am I talking about there?
I’m good at social media. I mean, not in the growth-hacking sense, but in the “sharing enthusiastically and consistently over time in order to welcome people into my process and build meaningful connections” sense. So far it has served me extremely well. I’ve built a career that’s largely self-determined, raised a lot of money to make things I’m proud of, and gotten to go on amazing expeditions and meet incredible people all around the world.
The danger is figuring out where to draw the line. Historically I haven’t been “good at social media” because I’ve gotten a degree in digital marketing or taken endless online workshops or adhered to a rigorous schedule. I’ve been good at it because my goals and behaviors and socio-physical traits have happened to align with the ways these platforms work.
The two words I’ve kept coming back over the past year are reminders and permission. Social feedback reflects the self back to the self. I need reminding of who I am, and I need permission to take the next step. To feel brave or foolish enough. And, ideally, I would like to be able to give those things to myself. Throughout Deviced, doreen is really diving into that concept: how we seek the type of self-soothing we’d usually learn to cultivate in ourselves on the external playing field of social media, and how that can create a distorted sense of self.
I don’t find myself drawn into the manic cycle of posting and scheduling and refreshing and responding because I think my efforts don’t matter. Far from it. I fall into that hole because I come to feel like they’re the only thing that matters. That the only thing standing between me and building the crowdsourced career of my dreams is effort. (But, crucially, it has to be effort expended by me. There is no room in this mental model for the idea that other people might champion my work when I’m not in the room. This is why hearing anyone say “Oh, I told my friend about your book” or “I was just thinking about this thing you wrote/said a few years ago…” is so deeply meaningful. I genuinely struggle to understand that any of this endures.)
doreen says:
“[…] we must tell ourselves the truth about how our interactions in digital space may shape our unconscious assumptions about communication in general and how they might lead us to act in ways that don’t get us what we need or want.”
I was trusting the process, rolling along with the understanding that as long as I kept sharing what caught my eye, things would work out. It felt like being a toddler learning to run away from my parents, looking back over my shoulder less and less, but whenever I did look it was because I was worrying that they might not be there the next time I turned around, because I could only keep running if there were still people standing behind me.
Social media asks the toddler to become owl-like, constantly cranking her own head around 180º, permanently craning towards her source of validation, unable to orient herself towards her own goals because she can never let the audience out of her sight.
When is it going to be enough?
I think a lot of what I’m testing with the harebrained scheme I have for sharing my Very Private 100 Day Project from 2020 is the idea that I actually do have enough people in my corner who will trust me to make…whatever I wanna make. Small, weird things.
A vote of confidence in financial form.
An ever-increasing spiral of enoughness.
A moving target.
Just one of those weeks where every time I feel overwhelmed I start reading another book.