Dear Somebody: How to keep going

The final essay from my upcoming book, How it Feels to Find Yourself

A year from now, here are five things from this week that I'd like to remember:

MONDAY

For a limited time, my friends at BuyOlympia are giving away a free, 5”x7” limited edition print of my How To Keep Going paint palette with every pre-ordered copy of How it Feels to Find Yourself. 

This palette, in particular, is special to me. It accompanies the final essay in the book and is a daily reminder and source of encouragement to find the inner strength and commitment to keep going. 

This illustration outlines the steps that I’ve always relied on in moments of hopelessness and discouragement: accepting life’s duality, finding meaning in the difficult and joyful, keeping what’s useful (while discarding the rest), letting go of “should”, making peace with change, and beginning again. 

Pre-order your copy and complimentary art print here.

TUESDAY

“What do you think an artist is?…he is a political being, constantly aware of the heart breaking, passionate, or delightful things that happen in the world, shaping himself completely in their image. Painting is not done to decorate apartments. It is an instrument of war.” 

—Pablo Picasso

WEDNESDAY

“There are two kinds of truth: the truth that lights the way and the truth that warms the heart. The first of these is science, and the second is art. Neither is independent of the other or more important than the other. Without art science would be as useless as a pair of high forceps in the hands of a plumber. Without science art would become a crude mess of folklore and emotional quackery. The truth of art keeps science from becoming inhuman, and the truth of science keeps art from becoming ridiculous.”

—from The Notebooks of Raymond Carver by Raymond Carver

THURSDAY

“Don’t wait for someone to tell you that your project is worthwhile. If you’re moved to write, draw, create, produce something, that’s all the permission you need to devote some time and energy to it. Make a commitment to yourself. Some of my most rewarding collaborations over the many decades have been totally homegrown, grassroots situations (like the Secret Society for Creative Philanthropy) that ended up reaching really wide audiences because—in part—they were unfettered by “too many cooks in the kitchen” bullshit or the bad advice of supposed experts.”

—10 Thoughts on Building a Life You Love by Courtney Martin in The Examined Family

FRIDAY

I.
In March the earth remembers its own name.
Everywhere the plates of snow are cracking.
The rivers begin to sing. In the sky
the winter stars are sliding away; new stars
appear as, later, small blades of grain
will shine in the dark fields.

And the name of every place
is joyful.

II.
The season of curiosity is everlasting
and the hour for adventure never ends,
but tonight
even the men who walked upon the moon
are lying content
by open windows
where the winds are sweeping over the fields,
over water,
over the naked earth,
into villages, and lonely country houses, and the vast cities

III.
because it is spring;
because once more the moon and the earth are eloping -
a love match that will bring forth fantastic children
who will learn to stand, walk, and finally run
    over the surface of earth;
who will believe, for years,
that everything is possible.

IV.
Born of clay,
how shall a man be holy;
born of water,
how shall a man visit the stars;
born of the seasons,
how shall a man live forever?

V.
Soon
the child of the red-spotted newt, the eft,
will enter his life from the tiny egg.
On his delicate legs
he will run through the valleys of moss
down to the leaf mold by the streams,
where lately white snow lay upon the earth
like a deep and lustrous blanket
of moon-fire,

VI.
and probably
everything
is possible.

—Worm Moon by Mary Oliver

xx,

M

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Dear Somebody: A simple photograph

On my desk this week: a few in-progress illustrations for my thesis project.

Hi, friends.

Thanks so much for all of the support towards my accordion book, elegy/a crow/Baand for the warm reception to the Craft series! Most of you enjoyed a look into the process behind my work, so I’ll plan on continuing that series. I’m excited to. 

A year from now, here are five things from this week that I'd like to remember:

MONDAY

This simple photograph that T took of me and N a few weeks ago, newly clad in my third-generation hand-me-down from B, and before her, J. Prior to this photograph I was living my slovenly existence in too-big sweats and T’s old tees, since nothing fits and I have no time (or desire) to shop. 

Nothing makes me feel quite as cozy or cared for as a hand-me-down. I think of all each garment has seen: the laughter and tears housed inside the body it hugged, the hands that carefully held and washed it, the wear-and-tear that adorns only the most well-loved. Like a heart, a hand-me-down shows the signs and strengths of all it’s been through—and all it’s willing to take on.

There haven’t been many photos taken of me since N was born over 2 years ago. I’m still uncertain of my own appearance, and now with baby #2, I know it’ll still be some time yet before I feel comfortable in my body again. But this photo, taken randomly by afternoon sunlight in my parents’ temporary apartment, captures much of what I’d like to remember: the walls that sheltered the people who cared for me and my family during this pregnancy, the littlest heart who is so excited to become a big sister, and the hands that insisted on capturing this moment—because he believed it was important to. 

TUESDAY

“My daughters have pulled back the curtain to see that I am the false wizard, that I can offer no promises to them other than to point out the courage and wisdom and heart they already possess. All parents face this moment at some point, but I would have hoped to wait.

My worries hover in the back of my mind, keeping me awake in the dark hours poetically called madrugada in Spanish — the time before the dawn, when the world is quiet. I try not to share those worries with my daughters. That is not the honesty they need. Instead, they bubble up when I break a glass or burn dinner or stumble in any one of a million ways; then I am the kettle screaming to be removed from the heat.”

—My Child Is in an Impossible Place, and I am There With Her by Sarah Wildman, a beautifully-written and heartbreaking read about life, impossibility, and parenting

WEDNESDAY

“If you take a moment to really look at any of the ‘State of Children’ studies, it can be overwhelming. You could easily be thrown into spirals of hopelessness or “overwhelming I’m just not-enoughness”. Heck, just look at your local school and it’s easy to feel the weight of the work there is to be done right in your own backyard.

There’s so much work to be done. There’s so many kids. There’s just one you. There’s just one me. This is a great place to start.

Our best hope forward is not in using our imaginations to escape reality, but using our imaginations to create a better reality. There’s the world that is and there’s the world that could be. There’s also a you. There’s also a me.”

—State of the Children Address from Brad Montague’s newsletter, The Enthusiast

THURSDAY

“Part of it is observing oneself more impersonally… When you go out into the woods and you look at trees, you see all these different trees. And some of them are bent, and some of them are straight, and some of them are evergreens, and some of them are whatever. And you look at the tree and you allow it. You see why it is the way it is. You sort of understand that it didn’t get enough light, and so it turned that way. And you don’t get all emotional about it. You just allow it. You appreciate the tree.

The minute you get near humans, you lose all that. And you are constantly saying, “You’re too this, or I’m too this.” That judging mind comes in. And so I practice turning people into trees. Which means appreciating them just the way they are.”

—How to Be Less Harsh with Yourself (and Others) by Ram Dass, via The Marginalian

FRIDAY

On Earth, just a teaspoon of neutron star
would weigh six billion tons. Six billion tons.
The equivalent weight of how much railway
it would take to get a third of the way to the sun.
It’s the collective weight of every animal
on earth. Times three.

Six billion tons sounds impossible
until I consider how it is to swallow grief—
just a teaspoon and one might as well have consumed
a neutron star. How dense it is,
how it carries inside it the memory of collapse.
How difficult it is to move then.
How impossible to believe that anything
could lift that weight.

There are many reasons to treat each other
with great tenderness. One is
the sheer miracle that we are here together
on a planet surrounded by dying stars.
One is that we cannot see what
anyone else has swallowed.

—Watching My Friend Pretend Her Heart Isn’t Breaking by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

The National Network of Abortion Funds helps ensure the bodily autonomy and reproductive rights for all people. Please consider donating if you can.

If you'd like to support me, you can pre-order my upcoming book of illustrated essays, How it Feels to Find Yourself, for yourself, a loved one, or both! My art prints, stationery, and books are available through BuyOlympia. Limited edition prints and original paintings are available in my shop. 

xx,

M

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Dear Somebody: Behind the craft #1

Painting elegy/a crow/Ba, my first accordion book and illustrated poem

Hi all,

Welcome to my first craft post, where I’m focusing on the process behind elegy/a crow/Ba, my first accordion book and illustrated poem. 

Last semester, I took a sketchbooking class with Kruttika Susarla. I was eager to develop a sketchbook practice that, I hoped, would cultivate a deep love of drawing. It sounds silly to say that I want to love drawing more, especially because I am an artist by nature and trade, but while my affection for words feels innate, drawing has always felt more like a stranger: someone I am intrigued by, but also afraid of. And like most relationships, it’s harder to love something that challenges you or is difficult to understand. 

When I write and illustrate stories, the words come first. This is because I have more of a writer-brain than a drawing-brain; I think and process in and through words. This class encouraged me to push against my natural inclinations—to prioritize illustration as the seed from which a story can grow. 

I knew I wanted to illustrate a poem that I’d written, but without having a poem written to direct me, I felt a bit lost. I chose to do something I never do, which is trust the process. I’m a Type A personality, which is conducive for running a business, but not so helpful when getting lost in creative work. I focused on drawing whatever came to me, believing that the words—that is, the entire poem and story—would somehow come to me later. 

I began with some thumbnail sketches: 

The beginning of my process: thumbnail sketches about a nebulous story.

As you can see here, I used a 6-page template to storyboard my illustration. Together, with a front and back cover, this created an 8-page book. I knew I wanted the end product to be an accordion book, so I settled on a number of pages that felt manageable with my time constraints.

I didn’t have a story in mind, but I did have a subject: my relationship with my paternal grandmother, who lived with us and cared for me throughout most of my childhood before moving back to India when I was in high school. 

Without a text guiding me, I wasn’t sure where to begin. Instead, as I do with most of my work, I tried to pinpoint the feeling I wanted to convey: nostalgia, mostly, and the pinprick of heartache that memory evokes.

Here are a few different stories taking shape through tiny thumbnail illustrations:

I created several more sets of thumbnails before a direction became clear.

By the fifth iteration, I felt like I was getting somewhere. The concept of a panoramic illustration, drawn from a bird’s-eye viewpoint, captured the combination of awe and loneliness that I was after. Vast scenery surrounded two tiny characters, creating mystery, which is essential to every engaging story. This sketch did what I wanted it to—it asked a question: What’s the story here?

Whenever I read interviews with authors and illustrators, they talk about how, eventually, after hours of writing about them, the characters began speaking on their own. They talk about how the idea for their story came from nowhere, a shiny moon that suddenly appeared in orbit. They note how inspiration is not something that strikes like a lightning bolt, but something that visits occasionally, after you’ve been sitting at your desk discouragingly, doing the damn work. 

It’s easy to roll your eyes when you read this, especially if you’re someone like me, who wants a formula for success that they can follow. It’s discouraging when any creative you admire tells you that they don’t know how the astonishing work they made came to fruition. It just kinda happened, they say. All they know is that they showed up. They put their hands on the keyboard or their fingers around the paintbrush. They wrote words that amounted to nothing. They drew embarrassing sketches that led nowhere. And once in awhile, usually when they least expected it, something beautiful arose. 

The truth is, that is the formula that I’ve been looking for—I just hoped there was something else I was missing. But there isn’t. The formula is simple: Show up, do the work, see what happens.

I did a tiny color sketch next. Here, you’ll see that I combined elements from my fourth concept with my fifth, incorporating the bird as a third character. It wasn’t until I drew this that the bird became a crow, and it wasn’t until the bird became a crow that my story, all of a sudden, came together. This was a poem about our culture, our heritage, our relationship, and my memories. This was the poem about my grandmother that I’d been wanting to write. 

It was the first time that this strange phenomena happened to me, and it was such an important, special lesson for me to experience. Drawing is uncomfortable for me, but it’s a skill that requires mastery if I want to successfully share the stories inside me with the world of children’s literature. This unexpected breakthrough gave me the motivation to keep going. 

A final, digital sketch, and more experiments in color—which I generally use to create mood, atmosphere, and emotion.

I did a tighter sketch on Procreate, and tried a quick sepia-toned colorway. I liked it, but the blue version felt just right—cold, wintry, lost; like a story that happened many lifetimes ago. So I collected my materials and began the final drawing on 2 strips of Arches cold-pressed paper that I taped together—real fancy!

The final painting on my desk…need a bigger desk!

The completed painting is 8”x48” and was created with a combination of Holbein gouache (my underpainting and large swaths of color), Faber Castell polychromos colored pencils (detail work and texture), and Caran D’Ache neopastel oil pastels (blending, atmosphere, and texture). 

After the illustration was completed, the words slowly came. I wrote and rewrote the poem that accompanies the final page of this book several times, and then spent many weeks between October and December of 2022 revising it. 

I then added the front and back covers in Photoshop and spent approximately a week or two of my life trying to format it properly so that when printed across 4 panels and assembled, the accordion book would fold and unfold exactly the way I wanted it to. 

Here’s a photo of my shoddy version:

When I couldn’t quite figure it out, my friends at Done Depot here in St. Louis graciously took this task off my hands and printed the final panels for me. Over the past few weeks, I’ve been assembling the accordion books here and there, whenever I have small patches of time, and I’m so excited to now offer them for sale. 

elegy/a crow/Ba is an 8-page accordion book based on an illustrated poem I wrote about the memories, passing, and recollection of my grandmother. This poem was inspired by the Hindu tradition of Shradhha, in which we feed crows, the symbols of our ancestors and the carriers of our lineage. 

A limited edition of the book, assembled, signed, and numbered by hand, is now available in my shop.

xx,

M

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Dear Somebody: Life is infinitely inventive

One of the panels from elegy/a crow/Ba, my 8-page illustrated poem, now available as a hand-assembled accordion book

Hi, friends.

Once a month or so, I’ll be sending out a newsletter focusing on craft. These posts will highlight the inner workings of specific projects I’ve made or am working on. It’ll be an opportunity for you to ask questions about my process and for me to share the thoughts and inspirations behind certain decisions. 

A process post detailing the behind-the-scenes making of elegy/a crow/Ba, my accordion book (highlighted below, in Monday’s section of today’s post) will go out to all subscribers on Monday, March 6.

A year from now, here are five things from this week that I'd like to remember:

MONDAY

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elegy/a crow/Ba is an 8-page accordion book based on an illustrated poem I wrote about the memories, passing, and recollection of my grandmother. This poem was inspired by the Hindu tradition of Shradhha, in which we feed crows, the symbols of our ancestors and the carriers of our lineage. 

A limited edition of the book, assembled, signed, and numbered by hand, is now available in my shop.

TUESDAY

I grew up listening to Simon & Garfunkel’s version of Blues Run the Game, but when Laura Marling’s version came on the radio today, T reminded me that this beautiful song was originally written and recorded by Jackson C. Frank. 

Of course, that sent me reading, and I was excited to learn that Paul Simon produced Frank’s first (and only) album, and that Frank used to live with both Simon & Garfunkel in England for some time. Can you imagine having these people as your roommates?I’ve got a lovely husband and toddler as my own, personally speaking, but geez louise the envy has taken hold.

I’ve been listening to Frank’s eponymous album on repeat all day, and of course, the original Blues Run the Game has already played more than a dozen times.

WEDNESDAY

“I grew up mostly happy, in relative poverty, using colorful paper food stamps to buy salty potato chips and sugary twenty- five- cent juice from the corner store and then trekking up to our second- floor apartment, belly satiated and heart full. And. As an adult, I’ve flown business class across the world (many times) and enjoyed meals that cost more than a month’s rent at that childhood apartment. This and that. Both true. As a kid, I spent rainy summer days climbing inside of plastic milk crates so that my brothers could push me alongside the curb on our city street, my tiny vessel floating along the current of backed- up rainwater that would quickly take me down the hill on Smith Street. It was glorious and exhilarating. And. As an adult, I’ve spent lush sunny days on a steep hillside in Italy, enjoying a private pool overlooking a vast vineyard, wine in one hand and a laptop in the other. This and that. Both true.

With full clarity, I understand the uniqueness of my position, which exists because of, rather than in spite of, how I grew up. Living both sides of the same coin has gifted me the insight to never take my experiences for granted. And to be certain, all of these experiences are etched into the happiest places deep inside of my soul. I can still instinctively feel the delight of simpler times floating down rainwater on a city street, just as much as I can feel the deep exhale and warmth of an afternoon in the Tuscan sun.

Though some may perceive poverty as bad and prosperity as good, I know that neither is absolutely true. That clarity has taught me to accept life as it is and still find joy wherever I am.”

—For Richer or Poorer, excerpted from Cyndie Spiegel’s MICROJOYS: Finding Hope (Especially) When Life is Not Okay

THURSDAY

“Sitting in a windowless room in Times Square, scrolling from library to library, state to state, we were unexpectedly moved by the color, light and joy at our fingertips. These glimpses into lives of strangers were a reminder that copies of the books piled on our desks at the Book Review will soon land on shelves in libraries across the country and, eventually, in the hands of readers. You’ll pass them to other people, and on and on.

We all know that books connect us, that language has quiet power. To see the concentration, curiosity and peace on faces lit by words is to know — beyond a shadow of a doubt, in a time rife with shadows — that libraries are the beating hearts of our communities. What we borrow from them pales in comparison to what we keep. How often we pause to appreciate their bounty is up to us.”

—A Love Letter to Libraries, Long Overdue by Elisabeth Egan and Erica Ackerberg 

FRIDAY

More amazed than anything 
I took the perfectly black 
stillborn kitten 
with the one large eye 
in the center of its small forehead 
from the house cat's bed 
and buried it in a field 
behind the house. 

I suppose I could have given it 
to a museum, 
I could have called the local 
newspaper. 

But instead I took it out into the field 
and opened the earth 
and put it back 
saying, it was real, 
saying, life is infinitely inventive, 
saying, what other amazements 
lie in the dark seed of the earth, yes, 

I think I did right to go out alone 
and give it back peacefully, and cover the place 
with the reckless blossoms of weeds.

—The Kitten by Mary Oliver

xx,

M

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