Blog

Activism, Ojai

Sketchnotes: For the People

An illustrated page of portraits and quotes from For The People's informational webinar on library structures.

Notes from a recent informational webinar run by For The People, a fantastic team aiming to get more people actively involved in defending and championing libraries. This was well-timed, since I wanted to check out volunteer opportunities with our local Friends of the Ojai Library organization, but Katie, Mariame, Tara, and their colleagues inspired me to dig deeper. This call was aimed at enrolling people in their incubator project, which offers weekly Zoom calls to help elected or hopeful board members navigate group dynamics, stand up for free speech, and strategize together. It’s an incredibly smart and well-run operation.

How do library boards work? In 2023-2024, For The People: A Leftist Library Project undertook a massive data survey of all 9,000+ public library systems in the United States, and collected - with the help of hundreds of volunteers - information on the governance of more than 7,000 systems, information not available anywhere else. FTP’s research showed that the majority of library board seats in the US - 83% - are appointed positions. Those appointments are usually made by other local elected officials (city councils, county boards of supervisors, etc). The remaining 15% of seats are directly elected by voters.

True to their word, I found the documentation online for the Ventura County Library board to be pretty opaque, but with a little digging I was able to locate the one board member who lives in Ojai. I reached out and she kindly agreed to give an informational interview on Friday, so we’ll be chatting about how things get done in this corner of the world. I’m very curious to see what she has to say about the process.

If you’re a library enthusiast, I can’t recommend For The People enough. Sign up for their newsletter, check out their fantastic resources page (especially the Public Libraries 101 zine), and see if you can get more involved in your own local library community.

Blog, Seacritters

Laid Low

I’m sick in bed the week of Thanksgiving, which is mostly bothering me because I was looking forward to using the holiday lull to finally get some work done.

This sounds bad, I know. But my family doesn’t even do Thanksgiving! My whole life I’ve made do with (and enjoyed, to be fair) turning up at other people’s celebrations. This year I’m starving for a secret pocket of time instead; one of those interstitial spaces that nurture creativity. I’ve been thinking of the days I’d bike to my studio in Portland having forgotten, in my freelancer’s fog, that it was a public holiday. The roads were empty. The traffic was quiet. No one was asking me to work, so I could actually work. And my work, of course, sits in the strange dip between play and purpose.

I wrote a little on Patreon this week about taking time off of penciling the graphic novel to design a new character. It has felt intolerable do this kind of thing when the spreadsheet looms and I’m constantly berating myself for how long this book has been taking and I want to see progress and I want to know how long it will take and the work of designing something new is anything but predictable.

And yet it IS predictable! I went from tentative sketches to a properly captured character in about three days! That’s barely any time at all!

Anyway, top of mind these days: how making a career of a creative practice does, eventually, impose a sense of constant dis-ease. The catch-22 of needing a sense of spaciousness in order to indulge the kind of experimentation and noodling that allows one to actually, y’know, create, but existing in a world full of deadlines and invoices that require foreknowledge of exactly how long something will take. There’s nothing new about this gripe, as evidenced by the very thoughtful and validating comments I got from other comics peers on that Patreon post, but I’m feeling it keenly right now.

At least I’m getting to draw a lot of outrageous lizards.

A dense sketchbook page full of goofy lizards.
Blog, Brain Food

A String of Letters

My friend Christopher made himself an acronym to live by (PAASH: P.E., Art, Admin, Study, Help) and I liked the idea so much I had to make my own. The general idea, as far as he described it, was to capture the things he does in any given day or week that make him feel like a whole person. If something feels off, he can take a look at the acronym and see what’s missing.

After a lot of messy note taking and backronymification I landed on CLEAR: Create, Learn, Embody, Act Up, Rest.

Create: make something with your hands, has to be tangible, no computer shit

Learn: engage the conspiracy string brain, read a book with a pencil in hand, take a class, listen to a podcast

Embody: move in any capacity, whether concerted exercise or rolling around on the floor like a pill bug

Act Up: engage in some form of activism, ideally connected to community, that pushes you outside your comfort zone

Rest: the hard one, zero input time, staring into space, lying on the ground, generally after lunch

They’re not so different, really, but I think it does add something to have to come up with your own. I’d be very curious to see other people’s down the line. Maybe we all, deep down, want the same five things out of a day. (There’s a thought: should it be limited to five letters? That’s just how these two examples shook out, but I see no reason to limit the parameters.)

Delights, Ojai

Encounter

I don’t know how long she’s been there when I spot her.

A pointed muzzle. Massive, soft ears swiveling in the dusk. Slender legs perched on the rock wall. She’s close to the orchard, but leaving the shelter of the trees. The comet of her dark-tipped tail follows her to the lawn.

We’re close, maybe twenty feet from each other. The dogs don’t like it one bit, growling and barking in a defensive fury, but she saunters forward, unconcerned. I’m frozen, attuned, waiting for something. She holds steady until I stand and shatter her confidence against the edge of my movement.

In seconds both the coyote, and the brief unselfing she brings, are gone.

Blog, Brain Food

Noodling in the Dark

There’s something undeniably different about finding a community via blogs.

Social media spoiled us for feeling like we were all in the same giant room—liking, replying, reblogging, DMing and so on—but when I go to quote a friend or draw attention to a project on my own site, I find myself applying a higher standard of stewardship. How do I want to introduce other people to this person? What work of theirs really sings to me? I always try to do my due diligence with tags and links and properly formatted images, because we’re making our own internet out here and we owe it to each other to get it right.

I have a richer picture of the group of people in my feed reader than I did of the people I regularly interacted with on social media platforms like Instagram. There are also fewer people to keep up with overall. I’m more likely to unfollow feeds whose updates I don’t leap at the chance to consume. I’m more aware of nuanced opinions, annual projects, and the inner thoughts of relative strangers.

Because blogs are much quieter than social media, there’s also the ability to switch off that awareness that Someone Is Always Watching. I’m far more likely to write or make things just to please myself on my site. I’m also always genuinely delighted and startled when someone tells me they’ve read a post.

I don’t want to lose that feeling of noodling around in the dark.

Panels & Talks

The Long-Awaited Tessa Hulls Interview

Just in time for my next event at Bart’s Books, I’ve finally finished cutting together the audio of my previous conversation there with creative powerhouse Tessa Hulls! This talk was recorded on her whirlwind book tour for Feeding Ghosts, a stunning matrilineal graphic memoir that rocked me to my core and has remained on my mind all year.

Tune in to hear us talk about sustaining ourselves during interminable creative projects, insights from Tessa’s seven-month isolated wilderness residency, and some Patented Bellwood Questions about money in publishing under a springtime sunset.

A bright collection of pink and green folding chairs set up in the courtyard of an open air bookstore.

Tessa also read us an excerpt from the book, which I’ve included in the audio because the words absolutely hold up on their own (although obviously the ideal way to experience the book is to get your hands on a copy).

A sample page from the graphic novel Feeding Ghosts.

Longtime readers might remember this chat we recorded back in 2018. Many themes in this more recent conversation are the same, but the intervening years have changed us both in some pretty significant ways. I hope we get to cross paths again and answer all these questions anew another six years down the line.

I have so much admiration for Tessa as a fellow uncategorizeable creative force. She continues to remind me what it can look like to blend all the disparate passions of our lives into something rich and strange. I hope that affection and enthusiasm come through in this conversation, and that you’re able to read her book soon.

Brain Food, Ojai

“What I’m having is fun.”

A vibrant painting by Christopher Noxon showing a riot of pink and green undulating fields, buildings, mountains, and rivers.

After looking over the Big Weirdies at a recent show, a friend said with a wink-wink laugh, “I’ll have what he’s having.”

He’s welcome to it! What I’m having is fun.

I really like this post from my pal Christopher about his approach to “super-saturation and world-building” in his paintings without the use of psychedelics (despite what many people seem to think upon viewing them).

A vibrant painting by Christopher Noxon showing a riot of pink and green undulating and radiating fields, buildings, mountains, cacti, and lakes.