Getting Through It
Upcoming comic festivals, a sticker chart, and things that work
First, some business: I have two more comics shows this year, and I’d love to see you!
OCTOBER 4, 11-6: Pretty Good Fest, Chicago Athletic Association (12 S. Michigan). Local friends, come say hi this Saturday!
NOVEMBER 15, 11-6: Nonfiction Comics Fest in BURLINGTON VERMONT! I’m bringing my 7 year old and a preview of my new book in progress. Can’t wait!
Book Update
My main goal this month has been to keep up the momentum I gained at my artist residency in August. When I’ve got a good rhythm I average about a page a week (from blank page to finished ink), and in my 2.5 weeks at Ragdale I got a literal 3 months worth of work done. I was working around the clock: wake luxuriously late around 7 or 8, eat breakfast, draw until dinner at 6, take a walk in the prairie to get fresh air and move stiff legs, return to the desk to draw from 8 til midnight. Lather, rinse, repeat. It was a dream, and also that pace is obviously unsustainable now that I’m back in my beautiful, densely intertwined life. I can’t do another residency again soon; my kids had a hard time with me away, plus the residency application cycle is usually more than a year out even if I wanted jump right in to another one. So how do I make more time magically appear in my week? Where can I streamline? What can I cut?
I used to be a disciplined time blocker when I had more tasks to juggle, but the problem I’m facing isn’t managing the challenges of task switching. What I’m trying to figure out is: when I say “a page a week,” what does that actually mean? It certainly doesn’t mean 40 hours. My week has set time when I can work: the same as a public school day, minus my teaching day, minus kid doc appointments and sick days and teacher work days and 504 plan zoom calls, minus all the other reasons time can slip away, like horrible sleep, like managing the many bureaucracies we get entangled within. So the question I’m starting with: many hours am I *actually* drawing? I need data.
I was inspired by Lisa Hanawalt’s recent newsletter where she shared that she keeps a sticker chart to motivate herself. It made me laugh and think of the many sticker charts we kept when trying to motivate potty-training toddlers. Well, it turns out my inner potty-training toddler is VERY into sticker charts. I set an hour timer when I sit down ready to make marks on paper and pause the timer if I have to go to the bathroom or get more coffee or pace around with frustration. When I reach a full hour of mark-making, I get a silver star sticker! When I finish a whole page, I get a gold star!
Even just waiting to the end of the hour timer to take a little coffee-and-pace-around break has been helpful, and I was sure I’d get more than a page done a week with this new toddler-approved motivation system. And yet, here approaching the end of September, I’m still at…about a page a week. It’s also surprising to see how few hours of actual drawing happen in what feels like a disciplined, full day of working. Ugh.
To be fair, the pages are dense (artist statement “lush maximalism as a trojan horse for something darker and weirder” my ass), and I’m very happy with the pages as they’re slowly churning out, but I feel like this needs to be done sooner. Some of that urgency is because I’ve been hungry to make something I’m proud of for a long time, and now it’s on my desk and I’m impatient. Some of it is wanting to publish a book about the feelings around parenting young children before my kids are literal teenagers. And some of the urgency is a response to the crumbling world. This book will take what, 5 years at this pace? What even will 5 years be??? Can’t do it. Needs to be done sooner. The knife of time is at my freaking throat. Harder and harder on poems. Etc. I’ll share when I figure out how to create more time out of thin air. Wouldn’t that be amazing?
Also
So. It’s been a while since I wrote. How…are y’all doing? How are you getting through? What acts of solidarity or resistance are feeling meaningful for you? I’ve been focusing all my attention on local news, getting more involved in neighborhood-level community care and protection, continuing to engage in activism and resistance in ways that are no longer wise to discuss publicly. It doesn’t stop the feeling of reality becoming sand slipping through my fingers, but action is the antidote to anxiety, or whatever the saying is. What actually has been getting my heart through this daily dissonance is focusing on something beautiful or moving or funny, something that actually works when so much else feels irreparably broken. Usually that is captured in my diary comics, but the sticker chart is a cruel taskmaster: I’m hoarding all my drawing time for my book. In case it would help you, here are a few things that work around me:
This pitcher plant that I bought for myself on a whim last year that I thought would be a neat novelty to show the kids and would likely die because (I presumed) bog plants would be hard to keep, but it is absolutely thriving, probably my happiest plant! You can see a pitcher sitting in the pot to the left:
This sculpture in the North Garden at the Art Institute (“Sharifa,” 2022, by Simone Leigh). I have loved her since she was first installed. I walk past her on my way to class every week, and this past week she made me cry.
Learning more about Elizabeth Catlett by stumbling into a retrospective exhibition at AIC. I was familiar with her work in passing—Sharecropper is in every elementary school history textbook, and I read a little about her when learning about 20th C arts in Mexico—but it was overwhelming and moving to be surrounded by her work. An urgent call to action, a reminder of the power of art to call for international solidarity and human dignity in the face of racism and misogyny and fascism all the forms it takes.
Sharing things I love with my kids. My 9 year old is now old enough to read not-just-kid fiction books (though still preferring optimistic themes) and it has been a delight to put books into their hands that I know they’ll like: Project Hail Mary, Watership Down, Jeeves and Wooster. I love long bike rides, and my 7 year old does too: she and I have been going on weekend rides together. My 4 year old asks to sit and draw with me because I need pointers; he teaches me how to draw better.
In These Times it is a good idea to go to an outside concert with friends where a song invites you to scream at the top of your lungs. Wet Leg under the moon: yes.
Good books: all my hours drawing have me plowing through audiobooks on Libby. Best one I’ve read in the past month is Buffalo Hunter Hunter by Stephen Graham Jones, following a Blackfeet Indian man who becomes a vampire; the way the book talks about being dehumanized (by colonialism, by alienation from your people & traditions, by violence, by revenge) was deeply affecting and upsetting in a very good way. Not sure it sticks the landing, but I really liked it.
Kid art. Always. Here is “the powerfulest pig in the WORLD that can even move SPACE:”
This sunflower in my garden, which the kids have named the Eye of Flor-on. It’s Sauron’s sister and she looks right into my living room window and has startled me more than once because I thought I was being watched:
This cube timer, that has helped me stay on task through long hours of drawing:
What is working for you?
Will read “Buffalo Hunter Hunter” soon- it’s in my Libby holds! Getting through L.M. Montgomery’s “The Blue Castle” for the third time- it’s funnier than I remembered and a sweet diversion.
We saw Wet Leg outside on this tour -- so great.