Tag: shay mirk

Events, Ojai

Comics & Coffee in Ojai

Event alert: I’m hosting an open studio gathering right after Christmas with fellow comics-makin’ powerhouse Shay Mirk!

A flyer for Shay and Lucy's Comics and Coffee event.

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.

Lucy sitting in a sunbeam in her studio.
(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!

Brain Food, Experiments

Inventory

I signed up for another one of Jocelyn’s online classes last month, and so far I’ve found it incredibly helpful in finding my way back to bits of myself and my creative practice that have been occluded by caregiving. One of the exercises was a mind map exploring all the tools we use to access and interact with our creative selves. The four stages she suggests are Ritual, Connection, Collection, and Synthesis. Here’s a big mess of ideas around those hubs:

A mind map showing various quadrants of creative connection.

I love letting myself use little doodles to explore concepts like this. I think it started after Shay Mirk shared some More/Less lists they’d made for the year and inspired me to make my own. (Pretty sure I did one for 2022 as well but I can’t find it so here’s an old one.)

A list of Less and More goals, featuring things like equating pain and work, blogging, ocean, trying to go it alone, and other little illustrated concepts.

I see these inventories and remember that I have such a robust series of practices for doing what I do. I also see how the things I’m pursuing in my life right now have roots in this list from two years ago, which I love. It all takes such a long time.

I recorded a Ramble about all this the other night that I still haven’t edited and uploaded to Patreon, but it’s coming. Still circling the question of my job and what I think it is vs. what it actually is.

Brain Food, Reading

Five Rhymes

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