(Sidebar: Audra just co-launched a new nonfiction comics outfit called Crucial Comix with one of my very favorite human beings, Shay Mirk.)
Tag: portland
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’m an inveterate thrower of clothes on the ground at the end of a long day. Always have been. If I’ve gotten sweaty or messy enough to huck them straight into the hamper, great, I can do that. But the truth is I usually wear things more than once before putting them in the wash, and so I throw them on the ground instead.
All days have felt like long days lately. This means I find myself wading through more and more mess as the weeks drag on, until I have to dig myself out over the weekend and return to some form of sanity.
Living in Portland it used to be easier. Or rather, I had a lot more floor space to fill up before things became untenable. But now I’ve moved my expansive Portland life back into to my childhood bedroom and there is very little wiggle room in either floor space or desk space. Things devolve from “slightly untidy” to “Death Star Trash Compactor” in very short order.
A couple weeks ago, when I found myself preparing to cast yet another t-shirt onto the ground in the desperate rush to get flat, I stopped. For no apparent reason, I thought about how putting the shirt away would be a kindness to Future Lucy. A gift.
I found myself thinking: “I want to care for this person.”
I wonder if this has something to do with becoming a caregiver for my dad. So many nights I find myself exhausted and ready to be unconscious, but I rally to do physical therapy with him, or make his smoothie for the following morning, because I love him and want him to be healthy and cared for, and also because he isn’t able to do those things for himself.
There’s a certain amount of distance I need in order to extend compassion to myself. Future Lucy isn’t here. She’s hanging around tomorrow morning, readying herself to face the day. I want to make it easier for her.
So I’ve started putting shirts away—although not without a certain degree of attitude. Usually I am muttering to myself, but I’m muttering about how this is a gift, and that it’s one I want to give because I love the version of me who’ll show up and do all of this all over again tomorrow.
It works.
Even before the Pandemic, I spent a great deal of time finding connection through machines. It was part and parcel of my work, the backbone of my audience and my ability to make a living. But having spent the past year being forced to mediate all my relationships through the internet or the telephone has left me hungry for connection in space in ways I can’t fully articulate.
Don’t get me wrong: I learned so much over the past year. From Kat. From Rachel. From Erika and Danielle and Robin and James and Sarah and Zina and Jez and Tess and Kristen and Vivian and RSS and Wayward and Hyperlink and everyone. I deepened and renewed and began so many friendships. So it’s a little surprising to me that I’ve had barely any interest in opening my laptop or getting on social media in weeks.
The obvious reason is that I’m currently moving out of my home in Portland for good. My days are full of boxes and warehouses and logistics and flaky Craigslist randos. But beyond the chaos of the move, there’s also the fact that in this post-vaccine, pre-moving-to-Ojai-for-the-long-haul moment, I’m being given the chance to reengage with the physical world—with my flesh-and-blood Portland humans who can give each other hugs and cook together and dance and laugh and cry in the same space. It’s commanding absolutely all of my attention.
I don’t even miss the internet. It feels so strange after a year of feeling like it was my lifeline.
The first funeral I ever attended wasn’t for a family member; it was for a cartoonist.
Dylan Williams passed away in 2011, shortly after I’d spent a formative semester as his student in the IPRC’s Comics Certificate Program. He’d battled leukemia for many years, but I didn’t know him as someone struggling with a disease. I knew him as a generous teacher with an encyclopedic knowledge of obscure and unsung cartoonists, a champion of small press creators, and a source of quiet humor and encouragement.
I’m almost certain that the first time I met Jesse Hamm—or maybe only saw him—was at Dylan’s funeral.
I realize, looking back, that Steve was there, too. And Greg. And probably countless other Portland comics people who would come to feel like a patchwork family in the years that followed. I was just a newcomer to that crowd at the time, still trying to find my place within the medium, but the funeral left a huge impression on me. I ended up drawing my thesis comic about that year in the IPRC program, and my first convention experience, and Dylan’s death, which led to my first Kickstarter, which led to my becoming an intern at Helioscope (then Periscope Studio), which led to the career I have now, ten years later.
I remember using this portrait Jesse drew for his memorial post about Dylan as reference when working on True Believer. It was uncannily accurate and tender, as were his recollections of Dylan as a publisher and community member.
Toward the end of his post Jesse wrote:
Dylan understood that comics are really for and about people — that people are what give comics value. Like he said elsewhere in that interview: “Encouraging people is like the greatest feeling in the world.” And he did encourage people. One blogger recalls: “He was able to say …the things I needed to hear in a way that I actually heard them. [H]is support and encouragement changed my life.”
It felt so true to what I knew of this man, even if I’d only known him for a short while.
I was in the middle of writing a difficult email yesterday morning when I opened the Studio’s Discord page and saw that Jesse was dead. A blood clot in his lung. Sudden and unexpected and impossible and awful and so far away from me at this laptop in California. Far away from my studiomates. Far away from the cemetery where we had buried Dylan a decade ago—the same one where another dear friend buried his mother late last year.
Seeing the outpouring of love and grief on Twitter from cartoonists who’d known Jesse through his threads of advice and educational PDFs, I found myself reaching for that old post about Dylan.
Rereading it this morning wrecked me all over again, because so much of what Jesse wrote about Dylan echoes what people have been saying about him: that he was impossibly knowledgeable, and fucking funny, and deeply opinionated in a quiet sort of way. That he wanted to encourage people. To help us see and appreciate all the thoughtfulness and knowledge that goes into practicing this craft.
I’ve felt distant from the idea of the Comics Community for a while now, trying to figure out my place in an industry that’s changing so rapidly, caught between different generations and genres of creators.
But this loss, like Dylan’s loss, feels like a smack in the face; a radical recalibration toward what brings us to this practice. What binds us to each other as a wider community. How lucky we are. What a wealth of information and knowledge there is out there. And of course, as with any death, the question of who we are. What we’re doing. How we’re impacting the people around us.
I kept thinking about how much Jesse knew, and what a staggering loss that is, but then yesterday a studiomate told me she’d just drawn a page earlier this week with a piece of his advice in mind. “I literally think of him every time I use it.”
That’s how this works, if we choose it. We share our knowledge and our enthusiasm and we welcome people to the fucking table so they can make the things they came here to make.
Dylan couldn’t have said it better. And now we have to keep saying it for both of them.
Thank you for everything, Jesse. We love you.
Perhaps it’s old age talking, but I feel like it’s not overly ridiculous to be okay with deciding that the superhero movie you thought was cool five years ago is actually a bit shit, on reflection.
Graeme revealed the existence of his blog to me as all good blogs should be revealed: in the dark of a winter’s night, through a fence, his face shrouded in shadow. I’d caught sight of him taking his dogs out to do their business in the yard while I was on a walk, so we had a brief, impromptu catchup—me on the sidewalk bouncing on my toes to keep warm, him clutching a papillon under each arm.
Anyway, I love reading his writing.
Ramble #24 (January 7th, 2021): The 7th anniversary of my arrival on Patreon! Reflections on my first solo Christmas, good quotes about solitude, writing down nice things, thinking about early internet communities, trying out anonymous audio-based support groups, picking a word for the year, stuff about birds. There’s also a bonus recording attached to the original post on Patreon from Tim Dee’s The Running Sky, which is just gorgeous.
Ramble #25 (January 21st, 2021): much shorter. Took a walk. Petted a cat. Tried to figure out how I’ve changed my relationship to being online and whether I could distill that process into replicable steps. (Also, thanks to a truly mystical service Robin turned me onto called Descript, this is the first Ramble with a proper transcript.)
(If you’re universally hot for RSS feeds—and if you’re here, let’s be real, you probably are—you can always subscribe to these directly in the podcast app of your choosing with this link.)
I’m not typically one to evangelize condiments on the internet, but I’m going to write a blog post about chili oil because we’re in the middle of a Pandemic and small businesses need all the help they can get and also I am literally eating this stuff out of the jar with a spoon as we speak so I figure I owe it to you to pass along the secret.
Hot Mama Salsa makes The Good Shit. I tried their Smoky Coffee Chilie Oil for the first time at the Portland Farmer’s Market last summer after Mara dragged me bodily into their booth and pressed a taster spoon into my hand. “This chili oil,” she said with absolute conviction, “will change your life.” 1
I’d never been much of a Spicy Condiment person…until that moment. The chili oil is indeed smoky (one of my favorite flavor profiles), but it’s also complex and salty and unexpected and tastes great on EVERYTHING??? and, whoops, now I can’t get enough of it. (I’ve also fallen for its gentler cousin, Guajillo oil.)
Its primary use these last few months has been in this recipe, which has supplanted all other breakfast meals in our house due to being outrageously fucking delicious. It makes no sense how good this meal is. We don’t bother with most of the fancy extras in the NYT version—just slap a pat of Greek yogurt on your plate, throw some charred greens on there, top with fried eggs, loads of chili oil, and a generous amount of salt and then bask in your newfound culinary paradise. 2
I lick my plate clean every time we make it and experience zero shame.
1. I got sidetracked writing this post because the jar label uses a spelling of “chili” I wasn’t seeing elsewhere. For more on the chili/chile/chilli debate, please enjoy this Merriam-Webster article on the subject. ↩2. You can also use Lao Gan Ma if you want more of a Chinese heat, but I’m plugging Hot Mama Salsa because they’re a local woman-owned Portland company that I want to support. Also they’re offering $5 shipping on orders over $25 right now. Just saying.↩
Hey friends!
Just a heads up that I’ll be giving a talk as part of Design Week Portland this Thursday evening at Figure Plant, a local design and fabrication studio. Design•Build•Business•You explores the unexpected benefits of collaboration, curiosity, and niche passions in a series of brief presentations. I’ll be joined by artist and wilderness guide Hannes Wingate and creative strategy specialist Christine Taylor to share insights about our creative practices and how you can find greater clarity and purpose in your own work.
You can reserve a free seat right here!
Hope to see you Thursday,
Lucy