What\'s helping me write now

What’s helping me write now

Wednesday, June 5, 2024

In the latest newsletter, I shared these photos of what’s helping me write, right now.

a calendar page to keep track of me something small, every day
a note to my son from his fourth grade teacher;
a notecard he hand-lettered for the Keep Going trailer when he was six

On my desk:

A sage stick Meg bought me at the witch store that I like to sniff
a cube timer I use to get my hour of writing in
my beloved cigarette pencil (I buy them at Toy Joy)

All that is helping me keep my ass in the chair and quitting when the going is good is helping me make sure I show up tomorrow and do it again.

More in the latest newsletter on “Sticking With It.”

I’m interviewing Deb Chachra at Bookpeople

Friday, May 31, 2024

Later this month I’m interviewing my friend Deb Chachra about her book, How Infrastructure Works.

Details about the event are here.

Mandy Brown wrote about the book in a recent post, “Against Optimization”:

Optimization presumes a kind of certainty about the circumstances one is optimizing for, but that certainty is, more often than not, illusory…. Another way to look at this is that you cannot optimize for resilience. Resilience requires a kind of elasticity, an ability to stretch and reach but then to return, to spring back into a former shape—or perhaps to shapeshift into something new if the circumstances require it. Resilience is stretchy where optimization is brittle; resilience invites change where optimization demands continuity.

This is exactly the kind of thing I’ve been writing about in another project about building creative environments, so it’ll be fun to revisit the book and come up with good questions for Deb.

RSVP here.

A big pile of imperfect things

Friday, May 24, 2024

The title of today’s newsletter was taken from cartoonist Sarah Leavitt’s talk on joyful persistence:

What if you make a big pile of imperfect things?

What if your job is experimentation, exploring, repeating, failing, learning,
continuing?

For those of you who’ve taken my classes, you know that I am always encouraging you to waste paper. You will not be the reason that our forests disappear. Take up the whole page with your drawing. Write everything, don’t worry about who will like it, stop editing in advance! Write every day! Draw every day! Worry less about each individual word or picture. Identify the things you want to get better at and do them over and over.

The finished pieces that we share – they’re dependent on these messy piles of imperfection…

You can read the rest of the newsletter here.

He’s the gardener (a May mixtape)

Wednesday, May 22, 2024

I was running out of month so I made another monthly mixtape from a sealed, pre-recorded cassette I got for 99 cents. I tape over the cassette’s protection tabs and then I tape over the music and then I tape over the artwork.

This one turned out weirder and sadder than I thought it would? The title wasn’t planned — I just saw the headline in a magazine and switched around a few words to suit the vibe.

I used a bunch of snippets of songs from Cindy Lee’s Diamond Jubilee faded in and out to bookend it, so it can’t really be replicated on a streaming service, but you can listen to an approximation on YouTube.

SIDE A
– cindy lee, “dracula” (snippet)
– grandaddy, “hewlitt’s daughter”
– cate le bon, “sad nudes”
– james brown, “i don’t mind”
– king geedorah, “fazers”
– lee moses, “hey Joe”
– cindy lee, “dracula” (snippet)

SIDE B
– cindy lee, “always dreaming”
– yukihiro takahashi, “flashback”
– stevie nicks, “bella donna” (demo)
– yeahyeahyeahs, “y control’
– judy mowatt, “the gardener”
– the zombies, “tell her no”
– ketty lester, “love letters”
– cindy lee, “stone faces”

I’ve made these mixes five months in a row now, so I guess I’m going to keep going for the rest of the year…