Feeling hot to rearrange the printshop! Sketching out ideas for a new flow, better paper storage using a huge vintage school cabinet, and connecting the output of the collating machine to the input of the booklet maker. So far I’ve been resisting the urge (so many other projects, it’s climbing season, I still haven’t finished re-framing those prints, do I really need to be moving furniture and hundreds of pounds of paper this very instant?? etc)… but you know what, I’m gonna begin today. Follow the energy.

Adam and I spent a week with family in St. Louis recently, and I wanted to offer some highlights to note down, in case you have a trip coming up:

1. A brioche doughnut at Damn Fine Hand Pies. Just look at this beauty…

   

2. CITY MUSEUM!!!!!! Actually, I think it is worth planning a trip

   to St. Louis sometime in your life just for this. And if you don’t have kids to go with, then go to the late night hours on Friday or Saturday night (often open til 10 or even 11pm). Next time I go I want to bring kneepads and a headlamp and get serious about even more complete exploration of the tunnels and slides.

   

3. Cherokee St.: many great taco places, ‘ssippi (an extremely charming place to be), vintage shops, and the all-cookbooks-hallway-sized bookstore Anchovy. Plus the shops/community spaces of our riso friends Swan Meadow and Melon Press.

4. Wandering the museums and islands and waterfront in Forest Park, and visiting the many pergolas and bandstands and architectural-follies in Tower Grove Park. At the (free) art museum in Forest Park, I always visit Frank Stella’s Madinat as-Salam III, a monumental 10’ high by 25’ long painting. Being in its presence really does something for me, every time.

The rest of this newsletter is…

THINGS FROM US & PALS:
I have a little piece on independent food/cooking publications in Bear Bear’s new periodical, Meal Train.

Hot off the Press is July 11 at Fantagraphics in Seattle: keep an eye out for the new Trailer Blaze Residency anthology from Short Run… I have a comic about mold in it. :)

Also Seattle: Paper Pushers is downtown this summer, and very wonderful.

In Norway, the Climate Emergency Reading Room at Oplandia Samtidskunst.

Haunting Is Just a Reason by Elizabeth Case, in minor literature[s].

Kim Kent just opened A Tiny Literature Shop in Hudson, NY.

Rachel Hays just released Soup Library.

NO NEED TO FEEL ALONE IN YOUR WARINESS ABOUT AI:

The World’s Wide Web by Rachel Hays:

We’ve been trained by billionaires to value convenience over every other thing. And, in that way, are more isolated than ever. I’ll set aside how bad and ugly AI work is, how it’s sucking all of our water, wetlands and taxing our energy grid and instead point out that WE DON’T NEED IT. We are not meant to do every aspect of every project alone or answer every question instantly with an amalgam of boiled down half truths. Asking is part of learning. Connecting is part of the human experience. […] Don’t ask ChatGPT ask Real Fucking People. It’s a way we care about each other. […] When someone has a question about canning, dog nonsense, soil blocking, thrifty ways to hunt down equipment or hyper-specific travel recs like “where are the massage chairs in this airport I’m stuck in” I hope that you ask me! […] I’m sure that your circle of friends is as talented, multifaceted and knowledgeable as mine. Ask them questions! Tap into their skills and in that way strengthen your own. Use your lifelines. Stay behind with the rest of us, stay human. Feel at home in failure and growth alike as you live your one human life.

In that spirit, if you have questions for me or Adam, reply to this newsletter, and we’ll do our best to answer. AMA!

The AI-inflected crisis artists are facing, in 4 charts:

Artists really, really hate AI. In fact, one of the Carnegie paper’s most striking findings is the sheer extent to which artists are refusing and abstaining from the technology. Sure, it’s been easy enough to intuit from any glancing contact with artists on social media that they harbor a great disdain for generative AI. But the numbers are something else. According to the survey, 99% of artists “disliked” AI; for 92%, the dislike was “strong.” And that distaste translates into action, too. Per the survey, 85% of artists completely abstain from using AI at all. And 88% percent refusal use AI to generate images. That’s about as overwhelming a rejection of the technology as you’re likely to see in any field.

If people talked about other technologies the way they talk about AI: “Is it possible that my lawnmower is making me dumber? Let me ask it what it thinks.”

And some more reading recs: AI Doesn’t Work and We All Know it Doesn’t Work / You will never win at AI / Blood in the Machine / Ed Zitron

A friend who teaches computer science had 40 middle schoolers doing a project using software where an AI assistant was available, and asked them to reflect on if they used it or not, and why. None of them did. Commentary included: “I’m not a bot-licker!” “I don’t speak with the clankers.” “I can do it myself.” “I like to think for myself.”

CREATIVITY:
Artist and technologist Angie Fan on putting in the time and thought – The Creative Independent:

I feel like when I write, it’s an encapsulation of my own thought processes. It’s sort of my little mark to say, “Hey, I was here. I’m out here. If you see me, let me know.” I think that has to do with so much of my foundational creative come-up being on the internet. The old internet felt much more like a place where you could carve out your own little world. People would leave little treasure troves around that you could find. I love getting to see into other people’s minds, into other worlds that they’ve created. That always felt so special to me. I think that’s something I’m still reaching for in my own work, whether it’s my writing or websites. They are little transmissions I’m putting out there.

Sobremesa with Kristen Pumphrey, founder of P.F. Candle Co.:

Do you have any secrets to overcome creative blocks? I physically reset my whole space. I think this works because you’re touching physical objects and dealing with very low-pressure decision-making. You’re making these really quick, rapid-fire decisions, but you’re also able to move through it in a bit of a creative flow state—like arranging books by subject or by height. The other thing I do is put timers on myself. Being aware of the clock, setting a timer for just five minutes and doing what I can in that window is usually enough to take that good flow energy and ‘rebound’ off of it back into a true creative state.

“There is no cultural production without financial support.”:

“It’s very hard to get permission to be an artist. No one’s going to give it to you. You have to decide for yourself. You have to make it up for yourself.”

The economics of self-publishing a book on Metalabel – I always appreciate posts with lots of good numbers.

GARDENING:
Adam and I are making a garden (and also learning about “psychological” fences for deer). Growing starts from seed under lights in the basement, using the seed blocker method. (Can there be “too many” tomatoes? No.) We’ve been letting the field grow to see what’s there: many daisies, poppies, cosmos, borage, yarrow, dandelions, mullein, and so many grasses and unknown plants. Serviceberry, thimbleberry, raspberry, wild roses, snowberry and lupine in the brambly areas. Doing a lot of observing. I notice myself feeling the urge to go faster or “do something” sometimes, and keep coming back to this quote from Dark Properties’ The irresistibility of a solar punk future:

The very first thing they taught us was the idea of “protracted and thoughtful observation,” i.e. don’t intervene until you know what you’re doing. As people socialized under capitalism who wanted to immediately dig in and get things done, that was important to hear. But we realized it was important to observe first, and get to know the land a little before we changed much.

As a leek-obsessed person, I liked this idea for turning leek greens into powder, and thought this article on Starting a Dye Garden from Seed was beautifully done.

GRIZZLY BEAR ADVICE:
Learned a lot from Bear Spray Is A Placebo, including:

According to Smith, the world’s foremost expert on human-bear conflict, simply going outdoors with another adult, and remaining close together, may be the simplest, most effective bear avoidance technique we have. “To the best of my knowledge, I have not seen an instance where two or more persons have remained grouped, whether standing their ground or backing from a bear, that the bear made contact,” he told me. Elsewhere in his research we can see that you’re twice as likely to be attacked by a bear in poor visibility terrain as you are when you can see a good distance. And that humans have a 90 percent success rate at terminating in-progress maulings by physically intervening, while those rescuers only have a 10 percent chance of being mauled themselves. Put all that together—travel in groups and remain tight together, avoid areas of dense brush or tree growth when in bear habitat, help a buddy if they do get attacked—and you have the simple, effective, easily communicated information you need to actually stay safe in bear country.

Some sort of metaphor in there for staying together and taking the risk of helping one another.

— Amelia (& Adam)

P.S. — Country fans: I’ve been cracking up at the Dry Spell lyrics on Kacy Musgraves’ new album. And the Southern ghost story in Luke Combs’ Seeing Someone… ooooh.

P.P.S. — Mystery fans: The 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle was fun summer reading.

P.P.P.S. — Don’t forget, just reply to this email to AMA.

In the future we plan to spin out the Tools and Contact Sheets (for riso animation) that are currently in the Mac version into their own standalone Mac + Windows apps (and make them better/cuter/more fun too).

So excited about all this — the infrastructure rewrite to make it all possible has been a huge project for us through this winter, and it feels really spring-y to get to share new work. And have a foundation for building a lot of new things next.

In the studio, I’ve been working on the upcoming all well kids sewing patterns. Tiny tops, tiny pants! Exceedingly cute and very fast to sew.

Feeling lots of creative energy with sewing lately with just playing — sewing or altering clothes for myself to wear, and for our house. I am just so horrified and angry about what America is doing in the world, and I’m finding it works keep my motivation up to keep taking action politically by also taking action with small creative things and getting energy from those. To notice when I’m feeling the urge to make something simple, and then just making the thing, as quick as I can.

I sewed a little hammock thing to hold the cords under Adam’s standing desk. I cut up some webbing and sewed the ends so they don’t fray, for yoga/stretching straps. I just thrifted another tshirt to hack into a cropped tank top for yoga, learning from my first version. I finally washed and pressed the 8 yards (!!) of Kvadrat wool deadstock I got off of ebay to finish sewing the cushion covers for the window seat. Progress! Closing open loops, finishing things, taking that energy and applying it to the next thing.

Another energizing thing lately: I checked out a bunch of sewing books from the library, and loved The Handsewn Wardrobe so much I had to immediately order my own copy — such great pattern making and sewing diagrams. (Louisa also has a wonderful newsletter.)

The book has me excited to make patterns based off my favorite jeans, edited to my taste/height/proportions even more. And to draft some knit tshirt patterns — I just thrifted some knit fabric to practice with, too. Reading not everything needs to exist as a finished piece of work was the reminder I needed: to just buy the fabric even though it’s white and I don’t really wear white (too hard to keep clean for how I live my life). But I can just practice. It cost $2/yard. And if I make a usable piece of clothing out of the white fabric, I can wear it or dye it or figure it out then. Otherwise it’s just practice. And I actually probably do need to practice first!

I also thought this post about sourcing sustainable trims & notions was great. I have been thinking about buying cotton thread to sew my garments with white/natural yardage (like silks and cottons from Dharma Trading) and then garment dying them once they’re sewn. Polyester thread doesn’t take dye in the same way as natural fibers, so I’ll need to figure that out.

So many technical challenges to figure out, to make art projects. It’s funny to see the parallels between inventing UX/UI design for apps, drafting sewing patterns and writing instructions for the public, and sewing patterns and projects just for your own use. They all have different technical challenges and satisfactions and things that block forward progress until you figure them out.

COOKING & EATING: We’ve started some seeds (mostly tomatoes) and are planning garden beds. I’m eating lots radish and onion soy sauce pickles (Alex’s mom’s recipe) and was really into this crispy shredded tofu recipe. These super seed crackers turned out great (I replaced the water and some of the flour with sourdough discard). I also really enjoyed this fermented sourdough maple pecan granola, although I did a about half sweetener it called for and it was still a bit too sweet for my taste.

WATCH: oh, the tsunami’s going to be an amazing opportunity for us. / hey raytheon, give me your fattest rocket

LOOK: Night Into Day (genuinely encouraging) \ Solar Panels That Don’t Look Like Solar Panels (cool) \ God forgives but paper grain don’t (lol) \ meet me at the flat file combo day bed on Mas Espacio (scroll down the page to find it) \ Old photos of Seattle before the Denny Regrade (a new form of spite house I didn’t know about!)

READ: A Few Motifs of Teaching (Robert Baxter) \ The Sky Is Not Falling On The Forest Service (logging info I didn’t know) \ The Invisible Kingdom Meghan O’Rourke

Off to read in the hammock because it’s SPRING,

—Amelia

P.S. — A preview of the trim / bleed / resize stuff we’re working on for Layout Department… You can click on the elements themselves (trim, bleed, document) to drag to resize visually too, it’s really fun to use.

Still sorting out the UX/UI details, so it will look different than this prototype, but that will be the next thing we release! (Then custom sizes for the sheets you’re printing on, after that.)

I make little cards for just about any idea, and pin them up on a board. It could be a drawing of a garment I want to sew, a sketch of a book/zine cover I might want to publish. A phrase, or a squiggle of ink, a pairing of colors, or really any little snippet of desire. I move things around on the boards, group them, stack them, arrange them by theme or order them by time. I simply look at them to remind myself they exist, too. (If you’re an “out of sight, out of mind” and “if I can’t see it it doesn’t exist” person as well, highly recommend trying out a pinboard to see if you like it.)

After we moved to the mountains, in the midst of all the big changes and furniture arranging, it took me many months to put them up again. I could really feel their absence. My brain just felt more sluggish, with one of my long-time external systems missing. Finally, I finished the project of covering some thrifted cork boards with cotton drop cloth fabric, and getting them up on the walls of my studio/office. (Somehow the white/cream background helps me visually, versus the cork.)

It’s perhaps totally over the top, but I currently have three pinboards in my office/studio, split into topic areas. 1. general creative practice 2. sewing (personal and All Well), and 3. inspiration and collage bits. (And there’s a fourth board in the printshop with all the riso projects, haha.)

Here’s a (blurry) glimpse at the personal project board last week. Lots of fragments of ideas there, a Long Calendar with big things blocked off, many project ideas.

The “inspiration” board is mostly found objects: An image of a moss-covered snapping turtle cut out of a magazine, an enamel pin from my mom that says “BE REALISTIC DEMAND THE IMPOSSIBLE”, a polaroid of a lake, foam mesh that once protected a pear, a dried leaf, a necklace, scraps of fabric, a zine, some art prints, a business card, drawings from Chaos Pictionary, a Georgia O’Keeffe postcard...

The sewing board currently has the facings patterns for a tank top (more below), a cardboard kumihimo loom with 8” of cording sticking out of it, a ziplock bag containing the grease-stained pastry bag I brought back from Copenhagen a year ago that I want to use as a pattern reference (gross? I prefer dedicated to my craft!). There are a bunch of little drawings of things I want to sew… window seat cushion covers, Clyde Trench and Vest, Helene Jeans, Andy Trousers, Bel Skirt, ironing board cover, kindle cover, cover for electronics cords, bolster pillow cover…

In parallel with all this work on paper (pinboards, plus morning pages, bullet journal, sketchbooks, notebooks) I’ve been enjoying having structured weekly/monthly notes in Obsidian. I’m using templates and the Periodic Notes plugin to fill in checklists and pre-fill stuff I want to do, review, or think about repeatedly.

Collator: Thanks to Robin Sloan, who found it on an auction and gave us the heads up, we added a used 10-bin collator to the printshop! With it, collating will take about 1/10th the amount of time, and much less repetitive motion — imagine me picking up sheets of paper for 10 hours, versus me moving stacks of paper into bins and keeping an eye on the machine for 1 hour. (This is an idealized world with no jams or feed errors, of course.)

I’m already thinking of how we can make bigger editions, and potentially run remote residencies where we print for other artists again. And we’d been holding off on doing the reprints of our out-of-stock publications until we got a collator… I’m excited!

Layout Department: Adam and I have been working on many things in Layout Department, our new app for making print layouts for books and zines. And now you can use it on Windows!

We are also offering the option to upgrade to a paid license, which adds even more features, plus the warm feeling of supporting independent, artist-made software. :) I’m excited about playing with all the new fun and weird layouts we refer to as hot dogs, long dogs, and alligators. Like look at this 4x2 layout, perfect for some long comic strips…

And just look at the cute icons for the creep direction!! (Also, we added a “both” option for adjusting the creep, which Spectrolite didn’t have before. More here.)

Spectrolite: has new and improved halftones! More tones of grey, less compression in the darkest and lightest areas of an image, and it’s faster, to boot. Thanks to Martin of Risofort for the inspiration!

And from Layout Department, you can click a button to send imposed books/zines directly over Spectrolite — and Spectrolite knows how to handle the printer’s marks that you make in Layout Department for color separation.

Also…. if you are wondering, does this Windows stuff move us one step closer to Spectrolite for Windows? It does! EDIT: Spectrolite for Windows is here!

Recently I converted a thrifted t-shirt into a boxy cropped tank top; making armhole facings from fabric left over when I cut off the sleeves and bottom of the shirt. Wore it to yoga this week and it felt great.

I also wrote about sewing custom covers for my electric heating pads, another hack-y project that’s been very satisfying to use.

SOUTHEAST RISO CATALOG: Dyanne Horgan of Ripe Ink Press in Atlanta is organizing a Southeast USA regional catalog (a companion to the West Coast and Midwest versions). → Submit yourself or other riso-related things you think are cool.

ART BOOK FAIRS DOT COM: New website rounding up fairs and fests worldwide, plus a weekly newsletter that includes reminders of application dates. Thanks, Space Type!

SOME LINKS: I don’t want to be influenced by this unholy robotic patois. / The Pit / Lynda Barry on Sagittarian Matters podcast / It seems counterintuitive, but a small tree, planted well, will outgrow and outlive the large tree poorly transplanted.

PICKLES: The Times Literary Supplement interviewed Ursula K. Le Guin in 2017, asking… If you could make a change to anything you’ve written over the years, what would it be? The response:

In The Dispossessed, I would mention the communal pickle barrels at street corners in the big towns, restocked by whoever in the community has made or kept more pickles than they need. I knew about the free pickles all along, but never could fit them into the book.

I’ve been enjoying cooking from the book The Japanese Art of Pickling and Fermenting by Yoko Nakazawa — beautiful photos, great cartoony illustrations of step by step for cutting and pickling, and very very good pickles. For a taste, this Guardian interview features three recipes from the book, including yuzu daikon amazu zuke which I loved. (And the pink radish pickles in the article were great too, and super easy — just cut the radishes in quarters, add 2-3% of sugar by weight, and a bit of vinegar, and refrigerate 3 days.) My next pickles to make: plum syrup (the “100 days later” heading made me think of SpongeBob) from frozen plums Adam gleaned last summer. And Alex’s mom’s onion-radish soy pickles, and which I think about at least once a week. Finally, I will be able to make my own stash.

Peace, communal pickles, and sending care —

Amelia

Nobody gets bored, waiting while the other team is drawing…because at all times you are either drawing or guessing! An excellent game for big gatherings with friends and/or family. Play a few rounds after a meal!

Chaos Pictionary (Cousins House Rules)

What you need:

1. You only need the deck of cards from the box. (You don’t need the gameboard, the dice, the tokens, the timer.) (See notes later on ideas for how to play if you don’t have Pictionary handy.)

2. You need at least 4 people. Split into teams of 2-3 people, or more if you want.

3. You’ll need some sheets of paper, and one pencil or pen per team.

How to play:

1. Arrange yourselves in some way that people have a flat surface to draw on, and everyone on a team can see what’s being drawn. Around a table works best, but this is living room friendly if you get creative with flat surfaces to draw on.

2. Pull a stack of cards out of the box, and make a pile in the center to choose from.

3. Start by someone picking a card, and choosing the word to draw (from the options on the card). It doesn’t matter who picks, the first round. Once someone chooses the word, they announce the letter/color to everyone at the table, and pass the card (keeping it hidden from the guessers) to the “drawer(s)” on other team(s) for that round.

4. Once all the drawing people have seen the word, put the card face down in a discard pile, and someone says “Go!” — each team’s drawer starts drawing and everyone else starts guessing.

5. All teams draw the same word, at the same time. Everyone else watches their team’s drawing person, and says their guesses out loud. The team that guesses the word first wins the round.

6. If you’re the next person to draw on the team that just won the round, pull a new card, and pick the word for the next round of drawing. This is fun, because you can be strategic and try to pick a word you think will be easiest for your team to guess, or easiest for you to draw, or you can pick what you think will result in the funniest or hardest round.

7. There’s no timer, just go until one team guesses the word. If everyone is stumped and there’s general agreement that further drawing is fruitless, then nobody won that round. (The person who picked the word draws a new card and picks again.)

8. We usually play until the group feels like stopping, but you could pick a set number of rounds or a set time, e.g. “let’s play for half an hour”…

9. If you’re competitive and need more reward for winning a round than your team getting to pick the next word to draw, you can of course keep score with tallies.

Extra gameplay notes

• At the beginning, go over the Categories on the cards with all the players. Knowing the category of the word you’re guessing can be a helpful hint if you’re in category P (Person, place animal), O (Object), or A (Action). For Difficult and All Play (the only time in regular pictionary rules where all teams get to draw at once), who knows…

• Decide amongst yourselves what counts as correct. For example, if the word is “golfing” and someone says “golf”, you have to keep drawing until they guess “golfing”… Generally it needs to be exact, but maybe if you have younger people playing, and you make different rules.

• As in regular Pictionary: NO letters/symbols, writing allowed. You can draw two lines if what you’re drawing is two words.

• It’s not cheating to sneak a peek at other team’s drawings. (Unless you decide your house rules don’t allow that.)

• Draw on the same sheet, until the page feels “too full” to draw more - then flip it over and draw on the back. So you could incorporate your past drawings and circle them or add onto them. No going back to previous pages though. Just your current sheet. Paper can be whatever size you have handy.

• If you have younger players, make sure there’s agreement that the words chosen are ones that the kids can read and/or will know what they are. (The official game says it’s for ages 8+, for reference. But very young players who don’t totally know how to read yet can be included if they love to draw — they might need the word whispered to them or explained by the drawer from a different team — just quickly sneak off into a different room to help them if needed before their turn to draw. Spread out the youngest players onto different teams and maybe have the youngest ones all be “drawers” at the same time so they’re not competing to draw quickly against an adult.

• If a card you draw has only boring words and none of them would be fun for the group to draw, declare “too boring!” and put it in the discard pile, and draw a new card. Don’t use this to your advantage though — only for the purposes of fun.

How to play if you don’t have Pictionary

First of all, if you don’t have Pictionary at home, may I recommend aiming for a vintage deck because the cards from the 80s are the best in terms of design, and they can $2-4 at a thrift store. (You might have to be patient and go a few times, but I promise, vintage Pictionary is abundantly available. It’s the navy/dark blue box with white borders, like in my photos above. Searching “Vintage 1985 Pictionary” will give you more photos.) If you like playing by these rules you can go ahead and get rid of everything but the little box of cards so it doesn’t take up much space.

Don’t have Pictionary handy and want to play, today or this weekend? Some ideas:

• Ask your neighbors/family/anyone who is coming over if they have Pictionary you can borrow.

• Give everyone a bunch of slips of paper and let people write words, put them in a bowl, and draw words from that.

• Search “pictionary word generator” online and there are a number of free apps/websites that could work, maybe like this one? (But involving electronics is of course less fun than drawing cards, I highly recommend aiming to thrift a vintage pictionary deck at some point.)

After the game, people might want to take home their favorite drawings to put up on the fridge for a little bit. Our latest fridge decor was “monsters” by Adam… Many monsters, because everyone was stumped for a while. Wow what a masterpiece. I cannot believe I didn’t guess it.

I really love pictionary because it is so fun to draw, and to see what everyone else draws. It’s just so fun to be challenged to draw fast and think of inventive ways to communicate the essence of something, to get out of your head about what drawing is or trying to make a “good” drawing and into just ~~~playing~~~ and working as a team and being silly. Anyways, highly recommend Pictionary with the Cousins House Rules.

Have fun! And if you play this weekend, and any amazing drawings occur, feel free to reply to this email and share them so I can get a kick out of them too.

—Amelia

P.S. — Do you play any drawing games? I’ve collecting descriptions of drawing games for the last few years — like Sentence-Picture, Exquisite Corpse, Draw-in-the-Dark! I would love to hear about yours. (Just write back and tell me about it, and if I put it in the zine I plan to make someday, I’ll send you a copy.)

P.P.S. — If you’re looking for another fun-chaos group game to play, there’s multi-player Solitaire where everyone plays their aces into the middle and from there, anyone else can play on them. So it’s a bit of a race to get all your cards out into the center, and not always possible, sometimes the game ends when everyone is stuck. You need a big enough table, and you need to have a different color/design deck for each person who wants to play, so you can re-sort the decks back to each player between rounds. (Thrift stores are great for this — lots of variety, and the cards are already worn in and easy to handle. Just count the deck before you buy it, to make sure they’re all there.)

You can play with two people, three people. Four to six is exciting and fast moving. We’ve gotten up to 12 people at once. I’ll never forget the family gatherings around my grandma’s extendable oval table, laughing so much, but that sometimes got very wild, since people further out have to stand and almost leap to reach to play their cards. (Also, watch out for your competitive family members with this game. Blood has been drawn, accidentally, but still! One of my uncles always cheated. My mom, sister and a cousin have been battling for the crown of multi-sol dominance for two decades.)

Gameplay goes until someone goes out, or everyone is stuck. First person to go out, or end with the least cards, wins the round. If you want to keep track of a total for the night, count the number of cards each person has left after each round - lowest number wins, or first to a number loses and ends the session. I’m not great at this game but really love it.

P.P.P.S. — Thank you so much for the enthusiastic response to the Layout Department news yesterday! And for everyone who wrote back to us, we’ll get back to you soon. :) What if someone used the Layout Department to make a little mini-zine of drawings from chaos pictionary! Now I want to do that this weekend………

First snowfall at our home in the mountains. A paper star lamp, glowing in the window. The sketchbook collage in progress at the desk, after being inspired to return to my practice by a hangout with my friend Callie Little. (I need a gluestick!) Potato leek soup. Broccoli cheddar soup. Rancho Gordo beans. Wisps of cloud on the pines. Hot tub time with friends, in the cold air. Learning CAD in OnShape with my dad. Learning how to use new types of saws, beginning the process of learning the skills to build things with wood. Designing a little shelf to go on top of the risograph, so the lightbox we use for registration has a place to sit. Feeling scared, but almost ready to cut the wood. My dad sending me encouraging texts and being ready to video chat with me.

Reflecting on my creative process in a really generative way. Reviving tired sweaters with the sweater shaver. Joining my local hot yoga studio and going three times a week. Pictionary with friends, playing by the Cousins house rules. (See newsletter tomorrow for said rules; this is a GREAT activity for if you’re gathering with friends/family this week.)

Since late summer, Adam and I have been working on a new app for Mac and Windows, that you can use to make PDFs into the print files for books and zines. We’ve named it… Layout Department!

You pick what size sheet you’re printing on, how many pages you want to have on each side of the sheet (ie; the final size of your book/zine), and drag and drop your PDF in. Then, export the layout file, print it double sided, cut the pages apart if you’ve got a layout with more than 2 pages per side of the sheet, and assemble your book/zine/artist publication by folding and binding with thread, staples, etc.

Find it at layoutdepartment.com!

Also, this is the free version of the app… we’re also working on a paid version with even more features! If you’d like to test + give feedback on the paid version (in return for a complimentary license and early access to new features), just reply to this email.

Eating + cooking: Planning to make some Popping Corn and maybe watch Lynda Barry’s documentary Comic Book Confidential (our library has it on Kanopy). I want to make a grid salad with feta and Castelvetrano olives. Salad quilts! Making sourdough each week per-usual, but experimenting with different Cairnspring Mills flours. I remembered about my recipe for these chocolate chip cookies and made a batch using only 3oz bar of chocolate cut into tiny pieces (because I didn’t have any chips on hand), and they were great.

Reading: Paging through a big pile cookbooks and gardening books from the library. And lots of good articles, including: Some people don’t have children because they don’t want to. » Gathering Stardust » The Sky and Leaves as They Fall

For artist publishers: To Go Big or Come Home? & The Publishing Industry Has a Gambling Problem. And I’m still thinking about this from our friend Gerald: “There is work that I have come to love making, and there is work that I no longer want to make. What I think this points at is I want to work more privately.”

Looking: I’m doing a pickle fountain | 3d printed moulds to shape gourds into vessels | how to make objects with mycelium zine | daily drawings 2023-2025 | Bush Modern | myog embroidered (!) bike frame bag

Building this world:

• what if conservation started with berry picking

• a singular source of joy

• “Most consumer environmental policy boils down to tax rebates & impotent scolding. I think we should have more fun with it.” (←please read this comic!)

• It’s hard to drone a solar panel (Real life making me think of novels Ministry for the Future, The Deluge, The Peripheral.)

• 35+ Ways America is Resisting ICE

• The Magic of Showing Up

Sewing: Looking forward to making pants from the book The Act of Sewing with my friend Rachel (as part of her 12 Makes of Christmas) — we’re going to hang out on video chat. And I’m also going make some Elizabeth Suzann patterns this winter; the Andy Pants and a Bel Skirt. (I typically only wear pants, but somehow I feel like a skirt is calling to me for winter layering?) And the Clyde Vest, since I need a warm layer to wear over my sweaters, in the studio. Something that’s not like a coat, exactly, I think it will be nice to have my arms free, but that adds a lot of warmth to my core.

Sending care, everyone, especially this week.

— Amelia

P.S. — Behind the scenes Layout Department app design… lots more book formats coming, including “hot dog” and “alligator” ;)

So here’s a FREE ZINE to teach you:

• How to make a PDF with your pages using Google Docs.

• How to lay out the pages for printing double-sided (this is called imposition) using Layout Department, a free or paid Mac and Windows app that we make as ANEMONE. (You just pick what paper size you’re printing on, and drag and drop your PDF.)

  

• Tips for printing on a regular printer or copier.

Then, if you want (very optional!) you can read about how risograph machines work, how to lay out your PDF to get it ready to print on a risograph machine. This includes prepping the grayscale files the riso needs (this is called color separation) and printing on bigger paper. With instructions for how to use Spectrolite, a free Mac and Windows app, for that.

Make some zines with Google Docs!

Note: Photos below are from an earlier version of the process, where layouts were in Spectrolite instead of Layout Department.

Pacific Northwest people, SHORT RUN is this Saturday, Nov 1!! Adam and I are teaching a free 40 minute talk/workshop at 2pm. We will demo all the skills: make a google doc, download it in PDF form, use Spectrolite to make the print files! AND THEN! To finish, you get to collate, fold and staple yourself a copy of this zine to take home.

Here’s a picture of the risograph printing-in-progress of the copies that we’re bringing to Short Run for the workshop. We printed 4-up on 11x17” paper, then cut the stacks in half before collating. (What’s 4-up? What’s collating? Read the zine or come to the workshop to find out!!)

Even if you miss the 2pm talk, sneak up stairs to the Anemone Zine Production Tables in the hallway and make yourself a (free) copy of the zine. That will be open from 3-6pm (or whenever they run out - we made 150 copies which will hopefully be plenty).

Also new at Short Run: prints of collages I made with Elizabeth Case when we made Crossing the ice among chasms together last spring.

Two different collages, printed on four colors of sure-to-fade-in-the-sun construction paper I found at a creative reuse store.

Short Run is 11am - 6pm at the Seattle Design Center in Georgetown. (New location!) Also, the new zines we just made will be in the swag bags for the first 50 people through the doors on Saturday morning.

Find us at Table 87 in the bottom left of the map, awash in the “sea of riso” with dear print pals including Taxonomy Press (who has a NEW TOMATO DIARY BOOK OMG!!!), Living Room Press, Zine Hug, BearBear, Secret Room, National Monument, Issue Press, Yewon Kwon, Paper Press Punch. That’s just the corner near us, the rest of the exhibitor list is also awesome.

Seattle / Pacific Northwest crew, hope to see you there!

—Amelia

This newsletter is mostly links and recs and notes on what I’ve been reading and eating lately. Lots of interesting things to think about.

FIRST: Please consider Everything for Everyone for the top of your to-read list! Put it on your library holds! It’s speculative fiction set in the 2050s-2060s framed as an oral history of the New York Commune — so many ideas for an imaginative future, just what I needed right now. Dark but liberating! (I thought the first chapter started slow — press on.)

Eating: We made two batches of muhammara this summer, lots of peppers! Peach cobbler, plum cobbler; here’s the recipe we’ve been making for years. We had a few pizza nights at friends houses, and I’m still thinking about the combo of gleaned Italian plums and pears, gorgonzola, parmesan, olive oil and some basil. (Our How to Pizza Night zine is all about how to have your own pizza nights with friends.) Adam turned 20lbs of farmers market tomatoes into sauce for the freezer, and made a lot of applesauce. We have ambitions to can some whole tomatoes, and hopefully some make some jam too. Lots of projects before the fall turns cold.

There’s a batch of labneh in the fridge, from the new Good Things cookbook. I want to make a batch of Momofuku Soy Sauce or Tamari Eggs, and a fresh jar of red onion pickles. In August we went to a fancy restaurant for our anniversary dinner and had rye crackers that were so incredible that I got inspired to make sourdough crackers for the first time; I got the recipe and will report back.

Some instagram selects: rolling curtain | a pond made of plastic totes buried in the garden | a plunge pool pond for swimming with frogs by habitat-tuinen.nl | how is your detox from the moving image going?

Re: detox from the moving images; the phrase made me realize that haven’t really watched many shows or movies in 2025? I went to a matinee alone on a 100°F weekday to watch Mission Impossible 8 Part 2. (Unfortunately I must indulge my passion for the spy/heist genre.) But maybe only one or two others this year? I love reading so much that I typically don’t want to watch anything unless I’m too sick to read. Or sometimes if I’m doing a repetitive physical task (collating zine pages, feeding them the booklet maker, or ironing fabric for sewing are the main qualifiers) I can watch something. But it’s been an unusually long time since any of those were the case, and it feels weird to have not noticed it until now. I wonder what’s happening to my brain to have relatively few moving images this year? Like in the comic linked above, I have been really into lichens……….

Re: instagram, did you know that if you use an ad-blocking browser (like Brave, for example; there are others too) you don’t have to see ads on IG on the web, or elsewhere online? Potentially relevant links: Awesome adblockers + Digital hygiene: Passwords

Reading books and articles: A string of beads. I can’t tell you what’s coming. This Auntie Bulletin newsletter. So many moving pieces. We Give Us Our Roses. “I do believe a great library is both a practical asset and a personal achievement.” How much do electric car batteries degrade?

I’ve been helping my friend Rachel Hays edit the writing for Tomato Diary — so wonderful!

Department of independent publishing-related interviews: these are just for my fellow print-publishing nerds. You know who you are.

• 'It can be lazy and gross, but when it works, it feels good': NYC Small Press with Alexander Laird and Andrew Alexander

• The process of bringing The Butch Manual back into print

• Writer, publisher, and podcaster Elly Blue on following a nontraditional path

• Indie comics publisher Zach Clemente on sustaining a life-long project

Sending care,
Amelia

I’ve been feeling in “NO!” mode too. Adam and I have spent the last two months figuring out where and how to live next, as we shift back into more “regular life” after our 2,000+ mile PCT hike and long travel sabbatical. It says “Your day is clear” on the calendar most days. No meetings, nothing at any particular time. Looking out at life ahead too: Compared to a usual summer, we don’t have big plans. Not tabling with artist publications. Not applying to fairs or festivals. (Ok, besides Short Run in November, which has applications open until July 31 — small press friends, it’s awesome!) Not organizing events, or even working towards any publications with launches on the horizon. Not even the usual newsletter-ing energy?! And everything in the context of many-bad-things-happening (also NO!), and keeping-on taking action towards building positive futures.

At first I felt a little weird about finding myself in NO!-times. But then I realized that figuring out where to live — especially since we’ve been considering making a big shift — is a massive creative project of it’s own. That’s needed most of my attention, so be it!

This month Adam and I launched the new version of Spectrolite that we were working on all winter. PDF mode is the big thing that’s new. It makes color separation on PDFs a lot faster, and you can choose different colors and styles for the text/vector elements vs the image elements, which is useful for all sorts of reasons. I’m so happy (and SO impressed with how good at math and writing code Adam is… this was not easy)! And shout out to Bear Bear, Lucky Risograph, Taxonomy Press, Pocket Press, Inga Bookshop, Issue Press, Living Room Press, saylem m celeste, Pamflett, Bergen Art Book Fair and other riso pals for all the help with testing this one. Hooray for long-lived projects. This is something we’ve wanted to do since we started making the app in 2020, and now it exists!

In our liminal time of figuring-out-where-to-live, I’ve been working on things you can do without a studio with all the equipment and machines and tools. Writing in notebooks: lots of morning pages. Amy and I have been slowly working towards the next All Well patterns – a kids version of our classic Box Top, and kids play pants + shorts. I’ve been missing the hands-on sewing and sampling, but there’s lots to do on the computer. I’m writing bits and pieces of many things, dipping in and out of projects. Quite a few drafts of future newsletters moving along in parallel, brain too scattered to sit down to finish any of them quite yet, but (mostly pleasantly, sometimes chaotic feeling-ly) jumping around making progress. We hosted some dear artist friends for a few days of residency and time together. Tending an altar, adding seed pods and flowers to the shelf of natural wonders, baking loaves of sourdough bread. Returning to cooking.

Noticing that energy of being on the precipice of a very prolific bit of time. Noticing the “shoulds” and giving myself space to figure things out: spending a lot of time recharging after the big travels, resting and reading books and taking walks.

I made a bookmark for the Book’o’Mark publication by Pseudo Press, which just launched at Miss Read in Berlin. It’s a book made entirely of bookmarks, all of which are perforated to tear out and use! I’m extremely delighted by the concept and can’t wait for our contributor copies to make their way through international post so I can savor them all. What a perfect use of paper and ink.

Making the design for the book mark was also a funny reminder of the comparative difficulty of making something without the usual tools, setup, etc. The bookmark is 23 x 6 cm, and I’m designing digitally – but I still need to know: how big is that in real life? And of course I want make some initial sketches to scale on paper. But I didn’t have a ruler to figure it out, and so then I needed to wait a few days to borrow one from a friend. The process made me reflect on the years before a print studio and dedicated sewing space: Taking it easier on my past self. So many expectations of being able to execute big visions right off the bat, without the tools and skills and setup and experience.

It’s so much easier with a proper collection of tools and setup: Rulers, yes. Paint, ink, markers, post its, tape, glue, sketchbooks, scrap paper. My big computer screen lets me think completely differently than when I’m on a laptop. Using the iPad is so much faster for sketching than pencil sketch → pen and ink → camera photo → crop and edit, which is the process we used for the booklet we made for Bergen Art Book Fair while we were traveling. I also really appreciate having space+time to keep projects out in place, instead of being on the dining table or an all purpose desk, and packed away after each work session. (Especially relevant for the sewing machine; even pre-studio space, once I started leaving it out in the living room instead of putting it away in the closet after each session, I sewed so much more.)

I’m looking forward to setting the studio up again, getting our things out of storage, making house again. It’s such a creative thing too, to be getting life in order after a move: unpacking and arranging, figuring out the flow of where things go, figuring out what projects to tackle and when, learning a new place, meeting new people. We’re out of print of many of our most popular publications, so there will be lots of reprinting to start with, for working out the setup and organization of the print studio. And I’m excited to make new books and prints. And so excited to sew again! And carve wooden spoons, and marble fabric and paper, and, and, and.

Via Subtle Maneuvers: instead of saying "I have to do X today," I say "it would be nice to have X today." So instead of "I have to do laundry today," I think "It would be nice to have fresh clean clothes today." It turns mundane, dreadful, and/or unavoidable demands of life into pleasant perks l'm more motivated to obtain.

Looking

There are lots of good danger stairs at Frida and Diego’s studio. This slideshow montage House: After Five Years of Living of vignettes of Ray and Charles Eames’ case study home. 10 low budget home upgrades with a big visual payoff. Some good process shots further down the page for Ingo Maurer’s Floatation lamp.

Some ANEMONE work is included in Bainbridge Island Museum of Art’s summer exhibition, Back to Nature, which runs through September 21st. Riding the ferry to Bainbridge is a classic Seattle summer thing; $10.25 round trip & BIMA has free admission.

Swan Meadow’s god bless the Pansies!

Reading

Visiting Lauria and Johanna at Pseudo Press + Colorama in Berlin in March was glorious! Since then I have been greatly enjoying the Pseudo Newsletter which is just brilliant. (If you get the Book’o’Mark, I highly recommend adding the entire set of the print versions of the newsletters to your order too. Also, heads up that shipping shows just Germany options until you put in your address.)

Currently reading several books on paleontology and geology, lots of cookbooks, lots of non-fiction. Last summer I really got a lot from reading Less is More by Jason Hickel. The Raven’s series on what would degrowth look like in practice has me excited to follow that book up with Kohei Saito’s Slow Down: The Degrowth Manifesto. And this Lux Magazine review has me excited to read What’s Left: Three Paths Through the Planetary Crisis by Malcolm Harris.

Also re: climate, did you know that fossil fuel billionaires are bankrolling the anti-trans movement? An independent analysis of 45 right-wing groups advocating against trans rights found that 80% have received donations from fossil fuel companies or billionaires. Vivian Taylor, a climate policy expert who co-authored the analysis, said the fossil fuel industry has a real interest in funding panic over transgender people: It distracts the public from "the very real and ongoing risks that climate change creates.”

• Carvell Wallace: All Of Life Works If…

• Show Don’t Tell is Broken

• these collective refusals that are gathering steam

• eating more beans

• Interspecies Library + Observatory of Radical Empathies

Eating

Last month we had a nine person dumpling extravaganza at Dough Zone with friends in town after Seattle Art Book Fair. It was the first time I’d been in a while, and it rekindled my desire to eat Persian cucumbers spiral cut with sweet and sour chili at home. I think that somewhere between this Din Tai Fung sucumber salad copycat and Kat Lieu's Easy Asian Cucumber Salad Recipe might do it to try making a version.

Other recipes on my mind: Trying to recreate the BCD brand of quick Sundubu at home with just a packet of soft tofu and this Korean Sundubu Paste. And this french lentil salad looks excellent.

More later. Sending care,

Amelia

P.S. — Serious question: does anyone have a recommendation for a place to buy cowboy boots? When I moved to Seattle, I left my thrift store tooled-black-leather-and-snakeskin tonkin’ boots in Nashville (where they belonged) but I’ve come to realize that I need a pair in my life again.

First: because Seattle Art Book Fair is this weekend, I want to share about the new collage-poem-book Elizabeth Case and I made together when we visited them in the Netherlands. (And there’s a big selection of links/recs at the end.)

crossing the ice among chasms is a 12-page collage-poem-book, piecing together bits from old Dutch science books about hydrology and atmospheric phenomena, scans of algae, birds and words from one of the first descriptions of the Scandinavian arctic, published in 1555. Gosh, I love it so much.

This is the third publication Elizabeth and I collaborated on, and our first time making something together in person. It was SO FUN. We took over the dining table of their house for days while we cut and pasted. (Eventually resorting to eating dinners on the living room floor: in service of ART MAKING.)

Once everything was arranged and lightly glue-sticked in place, we made the stencils directly from the scan-bed of Elizabeth’s risograph machine.

Processing our thoughts on climate crisis and nature and beauty, the need for building a different world, hope and despair and wonder and awe. All pathless territories.

Come see crossing the ice among chasms in-person at Seattle Art Book Fair this week (we’ll also have an 8.5x11” risograph print of the centerfold “all pathless territories” for framing or sticking on your fridge).

Or get it in the mail from RISO Bookstore.

(Also, don’t miss Elizabeth’s Process Pending newsletter. It’s SOOOOOO good.)

Apparently some posts have been making the rounds claiming that “changing one’s lifestyle—growing a garden, learning to sew and mend, preserving food, dropping out of consumer culture—should not be considered resistance.” Marta Rose of Spiral Lab’s thoughts to the contrary really spoke to me:

I think in fact that changing the ways we live must be at the heart of how we resist. It’s not enough to tear things down; we need to also be growing gardens in the rubble. Literal gardens, but also metaphorical ones. Of course we need to build a labor movement, and ultimately tear down the whole rotting system, but we also need to find ways to live that depend less on income from exploitative jobs and more on mutual aid and community, ways to live that allow us not just to survive now, but also model what flourishing might sustainably look like in the long term.

A big part of my motivation for publishing sewing patterns and books about how to sew clothes as part of All Well is my belief that the act of becoming a person who sews fundamentally changes who you are and how you relate to the material world. You start to see clothes and textile objects with a lens of figuring out how they are made and how you might make them, you learn so much about quality and fit and fabrics, you mend things, you find secondhand fabric, you swap and share and find new uses for scraps. Once you have the appreciation of sewing you generally consume less, better and differently: you have higher standards for what you wear and how it fits, and that often translates into the rest of what you buy and use too.

When you viscerally understand the work that goes into making something it changes how you interact with it and appreciate it.

And it changes what seems possible. If you can imagine it, you can probably sew it, if you want to. Makes me think of the David Graeber quote: “The ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently.”

This goes for gardening, cooking, baking bread, fermenting and preserving, seed swaps, community sharing. This goes for making books and zines and prints by hand, and building networks of communication and distribution and discussion and ideas that build and bounce off one another. The way we live and what we make is political and part of the project of building a better world.

We can’t be afraid to live differently.

And a few random links:

• Loved the description of the labor intensive mapmaking process behind the "Olympics In Relief" 1956 map and the Cascades Maps in Summit Journal’s 1965 issue: Pargeter’s Peregrinations. Hand drawing and painting for 993 hours (!), three people spending an entire weekend using Letraset to stick on labels on clear sheets, the agony of having to redo earlier work as you get better in the process of making something… so here for that kind of detail.

• My ad-blocker got turned off for a few days, resulting in seeing the internet with ads for the first time in ages. Horrifying. So non-functional. If you’re not already using an ad-blocker and/or privacy-oriented browser, I highly recommend it! There are lots: u block origin, Privacy Badger, Adblock Plus, etc, as well as more privacy oriented browsers, like Brave, Firefox, and so on. And you can get them set up on your phone too. Just search for options and setup instructions. You deserve an ad-free internet experience! It’s worth the setup time.

• Lost Loops on architecture and heating, cooling, and airflow.

• I added Top of Mind, April 25, 2025 to my personal blog. I really like using “top of mind” as a prompt: put it at the top of a page and begin writing whatever comes up; interesting (to you) things are likely to appear.

Some SEATTLE / PNW locally relevant recs:

• Seattle Art Book Fair is free, 11am-5pm Saturday and Sunday, at Washington Hall. We’ll be downstairs on the first level in the back corner, along with many amazing friends nearby, like Living Room Press with the new Erin Tanner silent comic, Jorbuckle’s Day, and Zine Hug’s Froggy Gets Fuel, and the new Floral Observer and other prints from Taxonomy Press (love Rachel’s writeup on packing for a fair).

• I’m looking forward to the fair programming, particularly the panel organized by Alex Belardo Kostiw (“Printing for the Public: Our Readers and How We Reach Them”) and Zach Clark’s report about mimeograph printing in Estonia.

• Designer and SABF co-organizer Jayme Yen’s Reading the Room, Mapping the Gaze event is 6-9pm at the Frye tonight. There’s also a Pre-Press party in Pioneer Square (free with RSVP) tomorrow night in Pioneer Square.

• You can read our ANEMONE zines, including How to Pizza Night, at Olympia’s Timberland Library.

• Eco-printing with leaves and flowers workshop with Crescent Calimpong is Sunday May 17th, in Everett, just north of Seattle. I LOVE eco printing with Crescent, truly a delightful way to spend time and make beauty. If you haven’t tried it yet, this could be your moment.

And perhaps locally relevant elsewhere:

• Berlin: you can get Climate Emergency Reading Recs at Zabriskie Buchladen für Kultur und Natur, and they have some copies of the original printing of crossing the ice. Such an amazing bookstore.

• Bergen, Norway: Tekstallmenningen has a selection of our ANEMONE titles we left with them after the Bergen Art Book Fair. (Lots of BABF reflections coming later.)

• Midwest: BearBear has the Midwestern companion to the RISO West Coast catalog in the works! Are you or anyone you doing Risograph printing related stuff in the Midwest? Artist, press, publisher, book shop, community space, educational hub, book fair, zine library, event organizer, or any other connection to RISO... please fill out and share the form!

On a walk last night I found a package of Mother of Pearl Poppy seeds from Baker Creek Heirlooms in a seed and plant swap little free library, and it felt like a very specific to me in this moment good sign from the universe.

Yours in poppies, and the sound of unceasing chatter among geese,

Amelia

We’re in Norway for the Bergen Art Book Fair this week, and we’re co-organizing a Climate Emergency Reading Room as part of the fair programming. In addition to browsing books, visitors may fill out cards to add to the community altar, and you’re invited to participate:

Share your wishes for our collective future.

Del dine håp og ønsker for vår felles fremtid.

If you reply to this newsletter, I’ll transcribe your wishes onto a card to be included in the reading room & altar this weekend. Just a word, a few words, a sentence or two is good. The cards are palm-sized, like this:

The Climate Emergency Reading Room is a roving physical and digital archive of climate- and earth-related zines, artist publications, books, and related materials. This edition at Bergen Art Book Fair is April 3-6, and is co-curated by the artist and curator Jessica Williams. Attendees are invited to bring books, writing, or other objects to add to the community altar, as a symbol of our values, gratitude to each other and our planet, and wishes for our collective future.

Adam and I also hosting two workshops about Publishing with Google Docs & Spectrolite, one a demo for all levels, and part 2 is smaller group workshop for hands-on help from us with working on your own project to turn it into a book.

So please say hello to us if you’ll be in Bergen this weekend, and everyone — you’re invited to write back if you’d like: Share your wishes for our collective future.

—Amelia

P.S. — This edition is supported by Vestland fylkeskommune and The Royal Norwegian Embassy of New York, and organized by Bergen Art Book Fair and Pamflett. Thank you to our ongoing climate collaborators Alex Barsky and Elizabeth Case. Here’s a look at the first reading room we installed at Seattle Art Book Fair in 2024.

P.P.S. — Do you have a shelf of natural wonders or an altar going at your home/workspace? I love how it creates space for noticing the world and looking deeper at the detail, and also it’s just so nice to make little arrangements.

P.P.P.S. — I love making little bookmarks as free takeaways… these are the ones for the reading room visitors this weekend.

I’ve been thinking about resistance, happiness, change and the value of art and artist publishing. Here’s Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez:

Genuinely: a conscious choice to be happy is a form of resistance. This is something that I culturally feel a little disjoined from the American left, I almost feel a little more at home in the Latin American left, culturally, because there’s almost this idea that you’re not allowed to be happy in the U.S. when there is suffering going on. And that is the opposite… When you actually look at people who are enduring some of the deepest, most brutal regimes, they are sometimes the most conscientious about cultivating happiness, joy, music, dancing. My number one thing I want people to know is: You’re allowed to be happy! You’re allowed to cultivate joy. In fact, you need to, because our job is to build the world that we want. If we do not allow ourselves to gather with friends, to be happy, then we are not reminding ourselves of why we’re doing any of this. We cannot be joyless people, we will not sustain ourselves, we will not last long. And I think about this specifically in a Latino context, and a context of immigrants, everything that they are trying to get us to do, is to get us to hide, to not express ourselves in public.

I also keep coming back to Ursula K. Le Guin1:

Hard times are coming when we'll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now and can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine some real grounds for hope.

+

We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable – but then so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.

I feel so much anger and dread and grief and determination in these hard times, as this extreme oligarchic / Christian / fascist / fossil fuel powered2 takeover of the US ramps up, with so much purposeful cruelty and destruction. I read a lot of books on climate / collapse / authoritarianism. Reading these worlds we’re in now, and careening towards — reading them predicted and then watching variations come to life from the pages of fiction is strangely helpful. Feeling less alone in seeing the patterns, where it’s going, feeling connected and energized to keep on working for better, with other like-minded people. Understanding how fights have been won in the past.

I want to keep imagining a better future, supporting and talking and working collectively with other people who are also envisioning a better future. Fascism hates art, artists, and writers because it knows we’re powerful.

I’m guessing that most of you reading this are artists, publishers, writers, poets, sewing people, and so on: people who make things. I really resonate with Beth Pickens’ definition of an artist: “Artists are people who are profoundly compelled to make their creative work and when they are distanced from their practice, their life quality suffers.” There’s some tie here: to continuing to make work and build community and resist suffering in the midst of all this oppressive horror: to be conscientious about cultivating joy for artists means continuing to make art. In expressing ourselves in public — and potentially in publishing.

What are our visions? How can we share them? How can we make them real in some way in the here and now, with whatever time and tools and money and resources we have at hand? How can we fight the destruction and keep building towards things that will take lifetimes to achieve? What are we grieving, what are we loving, what are we dreaming, what are we feeling? Let’s have fun together. Let’s write, draw, sing, play, sculpt, build, host, organize. Let’s keep making art, experiences, community, structures. Building networks, planting seeds.

If you’re not near Seattle, you may want to stop here; as the rest of the newsletter is local recs!

There’s a lot of cool stuff going on that I wanted to share for Seattle area readers — opportunities for having fun together in arts community:

• The Sea Slug Animation Festival—a new Pacific Northwest hub for independent animation—is March 7–8 at SIFF Cinema Uptown! The inaugural festival will showcase local and international short films, a new and a retrospective feature, an Artist Alley of local artists, and mixers for audiences and artists to connect.

• Zine Hug silkscreened posters on clear sheets (!!!!) for the SIFF Cinema Uptown’s screening of the classic Ghost in the Shell on Sunday. (I’m obsessed with transparent, translucent things so these make me sooooooo happy.)

• Loud & Smart & In Color book tour is in Ballard on March 6th, with readings from Alex Krokus and other comic artists. I laughed so hard last time they were on tour, live comics readings with dramatic voices are amazing. Go, if you can!

• March 6-9th is Emerald City Comic Con, with lots of friends tabling with riso stuff, including Natalie Andrewson. I went by the artists alley last year and had a blast.

• Short Run is organizing free monthly Show Up artist talks all year. Everyone looks awesome and I especially want to highlight that ANEMONE BFF Jackson Barnes is on July 19!

• Yewon Kwon is offering special pay what you want commissions for local WA music scene flyers, details here… and they are starting a newsletter, here’s the first issue!

• Brett Hamil’s Doom Loop comics perfectly capture Seattle politics, and there’s a new print collection of all the 2024 weeklies out now. If you need to laugh-cry at the neoliberal madness we’re living through… Personally, the curb character really does it for me.

• Seattle Art Book Fair is May 11-12! (!!!!!!!!) Mark your calendars!

More soon,

— Amelia

In case you’re needing some gift-guide inspiration, here are a few print/creativity related holiday present ideas from cool people we know:

• A 2025 subscription to the Floral Observer. The first issue arrives in the spring, and you could also add a copy of one of the back issues or a print. (I have an essay/ PCT hiking diary in the fall 2024 issue that just came out.)

• A botanical / nature print from swan meadow, lovely riso people who we just met in St. Louis. I really like this one.

• A print from Lucky Risograph — I particularly admired their Working Hours and "i love you" without saying it when we got to hang out at Short Run this fall.

• The beautiful small book Wayfinder, the large colorful “Year of the Snack” calendar, and/or this riso manifesto tote from the bears at Bear Bear.

• Futuro or Ya No Quiero Ser Fuerte, two brilliantly colored and funny-sad-cute comics published by our CDMX pals S.A.R.A. for the existential creative.

• Zine Hug’s Color Chart Vol. 3 has all the cute characters drawn in all their risograph ink colors.

And here are a few ideas from us: Taking Care of Yourself as an Artist Publisher and Notes on Artist Publishing pair perfectly together. For people who like to see the entire year at a glance, there are just a few copies of Long Calendar 2025 left! The RISO West Coast catalog, for friends looking for places to print, take workshops, buy art, and otherwise participate in the west coast land of risograph. And Getting Started with Making Electronic Music or How To Pizza Night could also be good gifts for music or cooking friends!

For the person who wants to sew in your life: a copy of the book I co-wrote, How to Sew Clothes, which is on a big sale on the bad store right now (only $22!) as well as being available in most other bookstores. My co-author Amy just texted a me a screenshot of this review:

You can also browse all our PDF sewing patterns on the All Well site and on Etsy. Related: I also enjoyed reading Things I like: Sewing aspirations edition!

Adam and I are in St. Louis spending time with family, and last weekend we wandered the excellent Cherokee St. Print Bazaar and bought art for holiday gift giving. We got to see risograph art from swan meadow, Sarah Wang, PSA STL and Melon Press. Hopefully in some future year, we can time a St. Louis visit to coincide with the comics and small press expo SLICE.

I’ve been working on an interior design project: helping furnish an apartment using almost entirely free and/or secondhand furniture, plus a trip to IKEA for things that are tricky to find used. I love the creative process of designing spaces and thinking how they are used, how things flow, what is beautiful and useful. What do people need at different times of day, for different activities? How is the light? It’s making me want to re-read the old Apartment Therapy: The Eight-Step Home Cure book with the oh-so-2008 orange-painted walls on the cover. Softness! Light! Flow! (Actually, that book could be a good creative gift for a person in your life who is wanting to work on their home design a bit! Used copies abound, for $5-ish.)

Adam has been deep in Spectrolite code, making all the developer tests run much, much faster, which will help us with making and testing the app — plus some things that will make it faster to use for color separation and other common tasks. We’ve been doing the budget for 2025 for life and business. Planning out spending is a creative/fun project IMO; it’s always interesting to think ahead for the year and figure out what’s coming and make tradeoffs and reflect on what worked last year, what we want more or less of.

We’re also plotting the trips coming up in the next few months, as we near the end of our current big travel adventure. We’re going on a MIDWEST ROAD TRIP in January-early February, to visit friends and see some cities we haven’t spent time in. We’re in the early planning stages: if anyone in Chicago / Milwaukee / Detroit and thereabouts wants to meet up for coffee/tea or a studio visit, or go on walk or bike ride in your favorite neighborhood / park / museum, please hit reply and send us an email! We’d love to meet some fellow artists / small press people / sewists / bike riders / walkers etc.

I love posts that go into the numbers of making publications, like these two: Why We Are Self Publishing the Aviary Cookbook and The (surprising) economics of cookbook publishing. Also publishing related, here is Anne Trubek with some logistics notes relevant to self publishing:

Many American paper mills have switched to cardboard (hello online shopping) and thus there is a chronic paper shortage. Some stocks—some weights or colors of paper—are increasingly hard to find. A publisher might have to change the plans they had for a book—move from 60 pound paper to 50, say—because the printer didn’t have enough 60 pound paper to do a print run. You might be buying books on very flimsy paper because there simply wasn’t enough of the sturdier stuff.
Paper cost has increased 50% or so over the past five years. That sturdier stuff costs a lot more than it used to. This is a major reason why many publishers are raising their prices (readers seem to me much more understanding about this economic reality when it comes to restaurant prices than they are about book prices). Publishers might choose lighter paper to prevent raising the price of a book, or to lower unit cost.

Some other collected links from the past month:

• Let's talk about BOOKS

• soup season ideas

• how to have a low carbon adventure

• Abigail Helene Buzbee | FRAMES: at The Art Institute of Chicago, 2024 plaster, paper, gold leaf, ink, glue

• communal luxury: the public bathhouse

• the subprime AI crisis — (FWIW, I think the current wave of generative AI is a variation on the same old VC pump-and-dump scheme that gave us crypto, NFTs, the “metaverse”, AR, VR, and web3. That it is not actually useful, it’s not something there’s demand for, and of course that’s even before we talk about AI’s atrocious energy use, carbon emissions, leading to climate disaster, etc. Also the current AI focus in tech companies might cause a stock market crash.)

• Author Lauren Groff on allowing for time and space to create (different spaces for different projects!)

Hope you’re hanging in there. I’ve been reading dark books, including Nuclear War: A Scenario (whew) the first three books of Game of Thrones series (??) and am about to join Rachel Hays in a re-read of The Left Hand of Darkness. Drinking a lot of rooibos chai (the powder one from blue lotus) and taking a lot of IRL hot/warm yoga classes. And we’ve been making that creamy tortellini soup recipe that’s going around.

— Amelia

I have an essay in the new fall issue of the Floral Observer about hiking on the Pacific Crest Trail, in good company with other writing, comics, classifieds and nature things, all risograph printed in Detroit by the wonderful Rachel Hays of Taxonomy Press.

Adam and I dropped off our ballots for Harris/Walz and democrats down the ballot last week. Did you vote already? iwillvote.com or vote.gov both have info if you need help sorting out a plan, and early voting is open in most states. (Washington state people, the Stranger and the Progressive Voter Guide have explainers on the initiatives and other down ballot races.)

Ok — so, Short Run! The free festival is at the Seattle Center Fisher Pavilion this Saturday Nov 2nd from 11am-6pm. We’ll be at table A-5 on the very far left side from the entrance, in the area labeled “Sea of Riso” on the map. And tons of our small press friends will be tabling too, with amazing new work we can’t wait to get to see in person. This year we made two new publications, some prints, some bookmarks, and scrapped a few overly-ambitious-for-while-we-are-traveling projects along the way. Here’s a run down on everything:

Taking Care of Yourself as an Artist Publisher

The second book in the Artist Publishing series, Taking Care of Yourself as an Artist Publisher has practical tips on paying attention to what your body needs when you’re making books, improving your process, and enjoying it more. It’s 56 pages of writing, with essays on paying attention, getting a sense of time, working at your own pace, money and care, and making your workspace feel good. Plus some journaling prompts and reading recommendations.

Order a copy at the riso bookstore (more images of the insides there too!) or pick one up at Short Run.

RISO West Coast

The new and expanded RISO West Coast is here! There's so much happening with risograph printers and publishers that can be hard to keep track of it all. Last fall we made a catalog covering 50 presses, places, print shops and events. We wanted something to be able to hand to people and say here! This is a place to start! This new one is twenty four pages and about 200 entries!

We’d just ran out of the first edition at Seattle Art Book Fair 2024 when we met writer and editor Alexander Matthews, who was visiting from California. He volunteered to collaborate on the next version — and besides adding California (!!), this expanded Second Edition of the catalog covers Baja California, Yukon, Alaska and Hawaii in addition to Oregon, Washington and British Columbia. We hope you find some good connection, collaborators, and inspiration.

We added goldenrod and light yellow papers to the interior, along with white pages. And Adam did some wild stuff in Typst for the spreadsheet-powered two-column layout, which I’ll write more about later.

For the cover, I used Sketch to make layered gradient fills of fluorescent pink, bright red, and orchid inks for the background. The display typeface Biceps Grotesk for the title and interior headings, and Alex Barsky made the incredible biceps-inspired doodles for the cover.

There are only about 250 copies available, so don’t wait super long on these ones if you want a copy.

We’d also love to send off some wholesale batches to shops/bookstores on the West Coast — just reply to this (or come snag them from us at Short Run).

Northwest Rivers Map

Adam printed off a new run of Northwest Rivers Map, with the major rivers of the NW and the terrain they flow through, with handwritten labels. It’s folded and printed double sided, so that it opens into other views of the northwest.

New Prints & Bookmarks

We made some bookmarks to give away with zine purchases at Short Run, which will remain a surprise for the first couple hundred people. No new lichen themed publication this year (I know, tragic!) but to tide us over, we did make a new Lichen print set of two photos from the summer. Here’s a peek at one:

We also finally made a print of the Loowit (Mt. St. Helens) eruption in 1980, as photographed by the USGS, with black ink on pale grey coverstock.

(Both prints in person only, sorry!)

Long Calendar

Get ready for the Long Calendar 2025. Three months at a time in a tall, vertical format. “I love it so much. I feel like it’s made me visualize time on a bigger scale.” The calendars include phases of the moon, meteor showers, and US holidays. Each 5.5 x 17 inch page is three months, printed single sided with the each year on four pieces of paper. Comes folded in half. The 2025 color scheme is violet and black inks printed on pale orchid paper.

These are my favorite for fridge and/or pinboard, to put all the plans out at a long term glance. Really helps me zoom out on a year and see what’s coming and how we’re spending time.

What else we’ll have at Short Run…

A quick overview for anyone who likes to preview things before the busy-ness of a fair. (I hate feeling rushed and get overwhelmed easily, so I always want something like this!) The links go to more photos/info, and where you could get them online.

• Notes on Artist Publishing. A collection of advice, opinions, lists, and notes from our studio practice as ANEMONE, and conversations with friends and peers making risograph books. It’s an argument in favor of making things as an artist publisher, rather than waiting on traditional publishing. For making books that are art, and seeing the act of publishing as an art practice.

• Lichens of the Pacific Crest. Colorful RISO printed photos of lichen, paired with stories of the people we met while hiking the Pacific Crest Trail. Thoughts on growth, community, being out of the usual routine, and walking 20+ miles a day for months.

• Climate Emergency Reading Recs. This is a list of (mostly) books we (Amelia Greenhall and Elizabeth Case) have read and vetted. It’s a list of what has stuck with us, and some notes on why. We hope some of these stories recommended within can help turn climate despair into something less stagnant, that others will fill you with wonder and incredulity, and still more will remind you of the power we all have to grow a sustained, thriving, equitable, and extravagantly joyful world. (Elizabeth also writes Process Pending, one of my favorite newsletters.)

• How Change Happens. How do we make change? What might changes in the future look like? This zine, edited by Adam Greenhall, collects 50+ books that have shifted the way he's thought about those questions.

• Words for the Print Studio — A sketch that I drew when we visited S.A.R.A. in CDMX, with Lucía’s collaboration on translating. S.A.R.A. will be tabling next to us at Short Run and their work is so awesome! You can also get two of our favorite publications from them on the riso bookstore.

• How To Pizza Night. A guide to making pizzas with friends at home: how to invite everyone, get ready, make the pizzas, and make it a party. There are recipes and illustrated instructions for making the dough and the sauce, along with detailed advice on how to get started making your very first pizzas.

• Sourdough Cheat Sheet. Notes on how I make sourdough in a simple pamphlet form. Incudes my cheat sheet for the Tartine method, drawings of the process and tools, favorite book recommendations.

• Getting Started with Making Electronic Music. Have you've ever listened to electronic music and wondered how you could make something like that? A new printing, with orchid ink on goldenrod yellow covers!

Here’s a treasure map for how to find us at table A-5!

—Amelia

We also printed a collection of bookmarks and art prints, including these iphone camera photos of lichens from our hikes and climbs last summer.

And we have the print files ready for RISO West Coast, so that’s next on the press. Using Typst for laying out the text for both that and Taking Care was fun in a nerdy way. All these will be new for Short Run, which is November 2nd, Seattle: mark your calendars!

Also, USA based people!! Do you have a plan to vote? I Will Vote or vote.gov can help if you haven’t figured out the logistics yet.

The rest of this newsletter is about what’s new with Spectrolite, so feel free to stop here and carry on about your day if it’s not interesting to you!

There’s a new Spectrolite version out today!

I really love working on Spectrolite. Because it’s so fun to use, and so fun to design and build with Adam. It’s really cool that we are able to make a free piece of software specifically for artists and artist publishers working with risograph that’s 100% nonsensical-level specialized for such a super specific use case. Our first public release was Halloween 2020 so it’s almost Spectrolite’s 4th birthday!

Here’s what’s new today:

Dithering

Dithering creates a style of image that is pixelated into small black and white patterns. Like halftoning, it is a process for taking a grayscale image and converting it into areas of pure black and white. But instead of forming dots on regular grids, it creates small varying patterns of black and white pixels. Each black pixel is the ink at full opacity (unless you adjust it, see Opacity). Here’s an example with The Letter by Mary Cassatt:

There are many different methods of dithering, each will result in a slightly different pattern. Different configurations will also result in images with different perceptual brightness or contrast. In general, the Jarvis Judice Ninke and Atkinson methods tend to produce “finer grained” looking results. We also added options so you can also change the block size and density:

The dithering configuration that looks best will depend on your image and the visual effect that fits your artwork’s content, the size it’s printing, the style of the print/publication, and so on… there’s not one “right” answer, so experiment!

There’s also a new Color Separation section in the How-to on the website.

Trapping

Trapping is when you change your design in a very small and subtle way so that registration is easier in areas where two+ colors are next to one another. (This article has some good visual explanations.)

I first learned to do trapping for printmaking in screen printing classes in college. We did it manually in Photoshop by selecting areas of ink and expanding them, although sometimes I’d trap by using the wacom tablet to draw under the key lines on certain layers. Spectrolite does trapping automatically by checking all the areas where ink colors are next to each other, and then expanding the lighter color into (or “under”) the darker color by a few pixels. Spectrolite previously had trapping for posterized images, but now there’s Trapping for regular separations!

For example, in this design below, on the left the pink layer is directly next to the black layer so anytime the registration shifts a little, you might see a flash of the paper color that’s distracting. A good candidate for trapping!

On the right side in the Preview, it’s zoomed in to show what it looks like with 4px of trapping applied. Trapping “grows” the pink layer underneath the black layer so that even if the layers shift around a little bit on the page as they’re being printed, it’s less likely the mis-registration will be noticeable. (We also turned down the opacity of the black ink to 60% in this example, to make the trapping easier to see.)

Trapping is best for graphic work — not for photos or areas of smooth gradients — and this first version in Spectrolite is Experimental! It will work best when the original design is in the same colors that as the inks you’re going to be printing with. (Right now Spectrolite tries to make it’s best guess to match the colors, but in the future we want to make a “snap to color” style processing that’s more focused on flatter and more vibrant areas of color versus an exact match.)

You can pick between 2, 4, 6, 8px (about 0.1 to 0.35mm) or custom amount for trapping. Drag and dot the ink colors to adjust the trapping order, and choose how much “edge cleanup” Spectrolite should do to handle fuzzy edges.

More 8-up zine orientations

We also added more 8-up options to the Layouts, so that you have all four combinations of short or long edge spine, and portrait vs landscape orientation. This works for printing onto sheet sizes A2, A3, A4 for metric, and Ledger (11x17" in), Legal (8.5 x 14 in) and Letter (8.5 x 11 in).

Here’s a little behind the scenes of developing these new imposition layouts (plus some ones that are coming later):

PSD Exports

Now you can export the color separations as channels in a PSD file. This makes it easier bring the separations from Spectrolite into Photoshop to do more edits. Sometimes you want to post-process with curves, or add or erase information, or just tweak the defaults to your liking. This could also be useful for those who working in InDesign for publication design — just embed the PSD into an InDesign project.

Big thank you George Wietor of Issue Press for helping with this!

Resize images

A small feature: now you can type in the pixels or inches/cm dimensions boxes in the inspector (on the right sidebar) and resize the exported image. The little back arrow ↺ will appear when you have made edits; just click it to reset to the original size.

This can be extra handy when you’re adding a halftone, dither, or posterize style separation, since those are so pixelated it’s good if you can make the image the exact size you want to print. (And not resize it later, because then it might get fuzzy.)

Reminder of other new things

If you missed the new stuff from last winter/spring’s releases:

• Flexible sizes for PDFs into layouts! You can now add a PDF of almost any size (larger, smaller, different orientation, ...) and Spectrolite will try to fit it on the page.

• Page position and sizing view for setting up zine layouts — resize your artwork, resize the margins and change the crop marks.

• You can add sheet and page numbering for zine layouts, to help you be sure you’ve got the pages in the right orientation and you’re putting the correct designs on the back when you’re printing, and help make sure sheets are in the right order when collating.

• HEIC images straight from iPhone can drop right into the Canvas to color separate now.

• You can change the Ink Opacity for all types of separations.

As always: reminder that this is an art project so things may be wonky or weird — please send us bug reports using the form in the app (or the popup notification if an error happens) if you find anything broken, strange or unexpected!

To get the new version, open Spectrolite app and it will check for updates automatically. Or if you already have the app open, go to Spectrolite in the top menu bar, then click “Check for Updates” and it will find it for you. And if you need to download Spectrolite for the first time, you can get it free for Mac here: spectrolite.app/download

And if you make anything cool with any of these new features and want to show us, send it our way! We love to see how people are using Spectrolite as part of their projects.

—Amelia (& Adam)

Hello hello, today is mostly a gigantic round up of things to read online! But first, a few programming notes and studio process updates.

1. BOOKLUCK is happening tomorrow, Sunday Sept 15th, 12-3pm, at Gasworks Park in Seattle. Here’s the RSVP form. I made some sourdough to bring!

2. Add yourself / a printshop / press / community space / event / library / etc to RISO West Coast — the deadline is SEPTEMBER 30, 2024 and here’s the form! It is free to add yourself, and you may submit multiple things!

   

3. Adam and I have been working on Spectrolite again as the weather cools. He’s been coding: adding one-ink-color dithering options, as well as TRAPPING (experimental) where you can automatically expand colors by a few pixels, to extend underneath a key color(s), making it easier to register and align inks. A few changes making a few things faster and more consistent visually. I’ve been working on a bunch of new imposition layouts too, for making books of different orientations, shapes and sizes.

4. New: digital PDF copies of Getting Started with Making Electronic Music.

5. I just re-read my guide to making a Shelf of Natural Wonders (a throwback to the winter 2013 issue of Open Review Quarterly) and in the process rediscovered Adam’s short climate fiction I’m the king of this sidehill.

6. I’ve been using the circular bowl from this set of wooden spoons and bowls I carved four years ago to hold my pencil sharpener and catch the shavings while making sketches for my comic about pika. (PIKA!!) Just feeling so much gratitude for the beauty of things I’ve made / things that friends have made. I like when things made by hand that ease into daily life so much you almost forget their origins, while also feeling so connected and appreciative of their materials.

6. I’m working on Taking Care of Yourself as an Artist Publisher, the follow up to Notes on Artist Publishing. Little essays with bits of advice, opinions, ideas, and questions that focus on the physical and mental and emotional labor of producing artist publications, and being kind to yourself as you do it. Covering time, money, when to professionalize, accommodating sensory sensitivities, and also things about occupational noise exposure and common causes of burnout like continuing to make do without proper equipment when you’ve scaled up enough to need it. And taking shipping seriously. I’m really letting myself nerd out with all the combinations of my electrical engineering / math / engineering management / product management / public health and occupational safety background that I accumulated over the course of college, grad school, and work that I have been trying to apply to printmaking and making artist publications.

Now, onto the links, so many links:

Climate Reads

I really enjoyed reading A Note on Hope, an excerpt from Ayana Elizabeth Johnson’s new book, What If We Get It Right? I identify so so much with:

The world is full of delights even as it may also be spiraling toward conflagration and deluge. So when people perceive me as hopeful, I think what they are actually seeing is that I am joyful. […] If not hope, then what? Truth, courage, and solutions. Love. Collaboration and community. And all the sweetness along the way. That’s what can get us there. Possibility. That’s a word I can wholeheartedly race ­toward. I find motivation for action in glimpses of what could be, and in values instilled by my parents that say it is my responsibility to try, without any guarantees of success. The force that propels me is a simple and deep desire to be useful.

and:

“What we need is mega-pragmatic utopianism — utopianism plus a lot of detail. We need to go all-­in on that.”

Speaking of detail and possibility, the paper The momentum of the solar energy transition in the journal Nature Communications was really interesting:

We find that, due to technological trajectories set in motion by past policy, a global irreversible solar tipping point may have passed where solar energy gradually comes to dominate global electricity markets, without any further climate policies. Uncertainties arise, however, over grid stability in a renewables-dominated power system, the availability of sufficient finance in underdeveloped economies, the capacity of supply chains and political resistance from regions that lose employment. Policies resolving these barriers may be more effective than price instruments to accelerate the transition to clean energy.

I liked looking at their projections of the percent of energy produced over time in the future — look at all that change in the coral color… that’s electricity produced by solar panels. We’re early in the graph, in 2024, on the verge of huge change.

This huge momentum that solar has now, and what’s coming in the very near future is really driving a lot of the right wing dark money / Project 2025 / fossil fuel companies in this presidential election — Here Comes the Sun by Bill McKibben is great take on it:

[we’re entering the s-curve exponential growth with solar, and it’s…] why the fossil fuel industry is so freaked out about this year’s election. They can read these charts as easily as anyone, and they know what’s coming. If it keeps happening at this pace, it will quickly start reducing demand for their products—they have vast reserves of, say, natural gas in the Permian Basin that will stay there forever simply because there’s no market. They have to lock in customers right now, or else watch their whole business start to slowly, and then quickly, fade. And with that fade will come, inevitably, reduced political power. Right now they can still frighten politicians—hence the fact that Kamala Harris, with Pennsylvania on the line, has to insist she supports fracking. But four years from now, not so much.

I also recommend:

• If Trump Wins in November, Life on Earth Is Likely to Get Far, Far Worse – Mother Jones 🫠

• Kamala Harris is making climate action patriotic. It just might work. (It’s a side note in the article, but I hadn’t realized that the slogan “Don’t Mess With Texas” started as an anti-littering campaign in the late 80s. The aim was to get young men to stop throwing their beer cans on the side of the road, and it worked, reducing roadside litter 70% in four years.)

• Circular battery self-sufficiency (Gravity batteries!)

• How Indigenous Peoples Are Fighting the Apocalypse — Julian Brave NoiseCat

Culture + Reading

• There’s something sapphic in the air this summer, and it all started with Chappell Roan

• ‘Right to Repair for Your Body’: The Rise of DIY, Pirated Medicine

• Trump's child care comments appear to have broken a dam

• the internet as a creative practice — kening zhu

• A Less Rigorous Version of Friendship

• The Second Life of Books by Abigail Oswald really made me want to read Amy Krouse Rosenthal’s work.

• Handmade Things are Made By Bodies

• Bebop: Quick Notes

I Tried an "Intention Tray" as Mindful Decor, and It Works | Apartment Therapy

[Make an] “intention tray” by filling it with items that serve as a visual reminder of the goals or desires you’re trying to achieve in your home or a given room. “Something physical in our environment reminds us to honor our practice,” she writes. “Something beautiful in the ceremony of that practice invites us to honor ourselves within the ritual.”

The Gang's All Here!

“Somewhere on the seafloor of an oceanic canyon near Vancouver Island in 2022, scientists dropped a bundle of video and audio recording gear and a carousel loaded with 24 bottles. Each bottle contained a hefty sardine bathed in vegetable oil, and the carousel was programmed to release one sardine every two weeks to attract the deep-sea fish skulking in the area. The muddy bottom served as stomping grounds for sleek sablefish, noodly eelpouts and hagfish, and flabby snailfish, all of whom roam in nearly absolute darkness, aside from glimmers of bioluminescence.”

Food

• Growing the perfect tomato by Kristina Thorne

• The Best Chocolate Chip Cookies In Seattle, Ranked

• Tamar Adler, author of An Everlasting Meal, one of my favorite pieces of food/cooking writing, has an advice column! (!!!) I started with: The Quandary of Quinny Poo + The Suffering of Slow Down in the Kitchen

Politics

• Kamala won by being all the things by Anand Giridharadas

• Trump is such a f—king loser

• I Attended Trump Political Rallies. Here's What I Saw. (“Being outside a Trump rally venue is like being at a giddy but dystopian carnival — like something you would find in a haunted video game.”)

• I'm Rural. I Vote Against My Self-Interest + Why Don't They Pay Attention? + Blue Missouri

Noodly eelpouts roaming in nearly absolute darkness,

— Amelia

P.S. — Don’t forget, please add yourself / a printshop / press / community space / event / library / etc to RISO West Coast — the deadline is SEPTEMBER 30, 2024: https://forms.gle/Fnmq4jbo6Pj1Agt4

The fall-feeling trip has me thinking its time to make a Winter Happiness Plan. I always make a list of things to do to stay happy in the dark time of year. A list of what would be fun, and I try to get specific: things to cook/bake/ferment, books to read, movies and shows to watch, places to go (like I want to get the ricotta croissant at Honoré, visit an indoor garden or Conservatory, drop in on a few cute design shops). Dinners to host, letters to write, and other cozy activities. I also list of types of trips, like snowshoeing and mushroom hunting and bike rides and so on.

I started this tradition in 2009 with my friend Michael, and every year since I’ve taken great joy in making my plan in the end of fall or beginning of winter. It’s not a to-do list or goals or a list I intend to do all of; rather, it acts as a menu of things to pick from when the days are short.

Here’s how to make your own Winter Happiness Plan.

The visual planning for fall publications (using Short Run on November 2nd as a deadline) has moved from paper into Sketch, and now looks like this:

That design will likely be printed up as an 8-page mini-catalog; I take great delight in making a little printed bit of ephemera to hand out across the table and tuck into packages in the mail. The text/image work will also inform the design of our in-progress /publications page on the ANEMONE website. Doing this part early, I find very helpful in overall planning what to make, too. I’m a visual thinker at this stage.

(Sketch is a vector-based design app that I use instead of Illustrator; see my other favorite tools to use here — I just updated it with all my very specific favorite pens and notebooks also!)

Sitting down with our calendar, plus this continued visual planning also helped Adam and I realize that we’re going to push off almost all the reprints we’d been thinking about for fall until later, and focus just on making new stuff now. ANEMONE is a business in the sense of making and selling useful things, filing taxes and whatnot — but it’s an art project first. And especially the riso publications part, which is so physically and time-demanding, I want to continue to be careful not to direct myself into labor that doesn’t matter. We are still traveling and not in our usual print-studio setup; it’s ok to let some things keep being out of print for now, as much as I’d like to have them out circulating in the world. There is some sense that businesses should always have things in stock, that I think it’s ok for artist-publishers to ignore as a should. (Part of what I’m writing about in the forthcoming Taking Care of Yourself as an Artist Publisher, too.) Time and energy is finite: gotta follow the joy, the energy flows, the sparks of interest.

It’s exciting to be settled down for a few months of creative work coming up next. Reunited with my big 24” monitor computer for the first time in almost a year! My brain is very happy. In this travel era, it’s been very clear that I need longer swaths of days in a row to do creative work. And I need several hours of time I know I won't be interrupted. And I do different kinds of work when I have a big screen: Phone is not good for anything but collecting fragments, laptop is ok, big monitor is best. Of course I also need notebooks and pens. And an uncluttered, dedicated work table that doesn't need to be cleared away for work, where I can make some piles and arrange little altars and have some art supplies. Yesterday and today I spent many hours in Obsidian organizing notes and projects and todo lists; today I want to continue to go through a bunch of notebooks and scraps of ideas and make a clear plan.

I also got my website code setup working again (thanks to Adam helping me sort out new SSH keys for git) and did some updating to the footer for ameliagreenhall.com, so now it looks like this:

I added a Looking For page to complement the Uses page, with a list of things and recs I’m on the look out for. I love building my little website.

The long read for this issue is from The Paris Review. At the Great Florida Bigfoot Conference is worth perusing just for the descriptions of the aesthetics alone:

I saw her the next day at the conference wearing a BIGFOOT SPECIAL FORCES tank top. Against a setting sun, the tank’s Bigfoot walked holding an assault rifle. “He always sees you,” the shirt read, “But you will never see him.”

I admired the passion of the bigfoot-fan artists:

At the happy hour, I sat down next to Thomas and Todd, who’d driven down from Mississippi. In his free time, Todd designs Bigfoot-themed coasters. He doesn’t have an Etsy shop and wasn’t a vendor for the conference. “I just make ‘em for myself and for friends,” he told me. “Take one.” He handed me a coaster which read “Florida Skunk Ape: The Original Florida Man.” The coaster, disintegrating beneath the ring where his beer had been, was red, green, yellow, and black—the same colors you might find on a head shop ashtray.

And I really enjoyed reading (electrical engineering nerd 🤓) this analysis of how much does it REALLY cost to keep charging an electric bike — the conclusion is basically that it’s so little you can think of it as free, but in a longer form:

To charge a 500Wh battery (0.5 kWh), you would multiply the battery capacity by the cost per kWh: 0.5 kWh × $0.16 per kWh = $0.08 So, it costs around 8 cents to fully charge a 500Wh e-bike battery, on average. Assuming a range of roughly 30 miles would result in a cost per mile of 0.2 cents per mile, or one penny per every five miles of riding. If you live a couple of miles from work, your daily commute would cost a single penny.

If you ride 10 miles to work and back on the same bike, five times a week, then your monthly electricity cost would be closer to sixty cents. Basically, most people are going to struggle to spend more than a dollar on electricity per month to charge their bike, unless they’re riding long distances every day. In other words, electricity costs associated with charging an e-bike are so close to zero that most people could probably consider them “free”, for all intents and purposes.

It also compares ebikes to an electricity cost of around $0.04/mile for electric cars. Our vehicle has gotten 42 miles per gallon of gas on average in the 8 years we've had it. (Most of the driving Adam and I do is for trips to climb mountains, not in the city, where we mostly walk, bike and transit.) At $4.50/gallon in WA this year, that's about $0.11/mile for gas before insurance, maintenance, etc.

Here’s another picture of the melting glacier we drove our gas car to visit last week:

These also caught my attention lately, reading wise:

• We're in danger (from NASA re: climate, ahhhhhhh)

• WHAT IF WE GET IT RIGHT? (also re: climate)

• and Getting What We Deserve (also re: climate… I’m looking forward to reading the cli-fi novel BETS when it comes out)

• I Got Snipped: Notes after a Vasectomy

• CHALANT! and thoughts on masking, Buster Benson’s annual review on his 47th birthday

• The Revolution Will Be Well Fed is coming up from our friends Raspberry Bow Press; you can order it from their very cute bookstore Book Shucker.

• Elizabeth Case on doing art and science together

Listening + Looking

• BREAD by Sofi Tukker

• Rachel Bitecofer, Ph.D. talking about takeaways from her book Hit ‘Em Where It Hurts (which I just got from the library and am excited to start reading, politics, baby!)

• Textile artist Pauline Caulfield's home and studio

• Agustín Berzero, Atelier Workshop, 2022

• 2007-core nostalgia extravaganza on McMansion Hell

• Long distance riso bestie Rachel Hays has some print specials right now if you want to get a set of your artwork risograph printed.

Also, if you’re looking for things to do for the election, Common Power is organizing lots of events to register voters, canvas, and meet online and locally with other volunteers. Maybe it’s all the art book fair tabling, but sitting at a table doing voter registration seems like just my jam.

That’s it for now,

—Amelia

P.S. — I just realized I’ve written 50 newsletters! If I don’t know you, feel free to hit reply and introduce yourself. I always love hearing what people are working on, send me links to websites, publications, blog posts or newsletters you’ve made. And if you have a friend who might like this newsletter, send it their way?

P.P.S. — Speaking of business things — do any of you small business people have a Solo 401k provider you recommend? (Or one you really don’t recommend?) Vanguard just sold that part of their business to Ascensus, which, yikes, so we’re on the hunt for something new for ANEMONE, like Schwab or Fidelity, maybe?

I drew this at Sketchers, a new drawing + craft meetup that Jackson Barnes of Living Room Press is organizing on Tuesday nights in north Seattle. If you’re in Seattle and want project time and creative community, check it out!

We climbed Mount Forgotten and Kyes Peak recently, and got to hear some little pika in the rock piles and talus. Eeeeep!

The Columbia Glacier below Columbia / Monte Christo / Kyes cirque is not in good shape, lots of bare ice:

Adam and I have been mountaineering together in the Pacific Northwest for fifteen years, and in that time we’ve really watched the glaciers and permanent snowfields disappear, shrink, or turn into new lakes or naked rock where the 1970s USGS topo rocks show ice. Distressing.

Fall/ winter is coming, and we are starting to think about what our new additions to Spectrolite for the season will be. More than 4 inks for color separation? Trapping? Picking a key color for line work, or “snap-to” color matching? Dithering? Allowing custom ink colors for the screenprinters and offset printers who are using the app for non-riso purposes? An option for Halftone/Screen Covered to only apply to certain ink layers, like just the Key layer, or all colors except yellow? Duotoning? Lots of possibilities.

We made the first version of the app in 2020, so we're in the fifth year working on it seasonally. It’s great to have a big, seasonal, long-running project. Highly recommend trying this format — intentionally only working on a project some of the year, putting it on autopilot the rest of the time — for big efforts of your own.

We’ve started thinking of of potential plans for Short Run in 2024. (Saturday November 2nd, 11am-6pm!) I like doing little sketches like these to start planning a season’s work:

What’s on my mind? What seems interesting? What is logistically possible? What feels good?

I am very close to done with the writing for Taking Care of Yourself as an Artist Publisher, a companion to Notes on Artist Publishing, so I’m pretty sure I want get that printed. I am working on a small, short (8-16 page?) pika comic (hence drawings above). And I’m considering if I want to pull together my Pacific Crest Trail flower journal this fall, with collaged photos and maybe writing, or if I want to wait until we’ve totally finished the PCT. (We’ve hiked about 2,200 miles so far, 400 to go… we wanted to totally finish this summer but got stymied by wildfires and fire closures! Again!)

I think it would be fun to have a fresh bookmark to go with the Climate Emergency Reading Recs zine, with a list of some of the books that have been published since we made it. And practically, we need more ANEMONE business cards and Spectrolite takeaways. And more double-sided Long Calendars for 2025.

Adam took a bunch of new lichen photos on our 600 miles on the Sierra section of the PCT this summer, so we’re thinking of an art print set to accompany Lichens of the Pacific Crest. Or maybe postcards?

Reprints! Since we’ve been traveling so much, right now we only have five publications still in print. (Of about 60 ANEMONE publications to date; not all of which are intended to stay in print indefinitely.) We’ve been talking about reprinting Sensitive, Getting Started with Making Electronic Music, and the Rivers of the Northwest map. (I’m a maybe on the Seattle Adventure Map, because it’s not just a simple reprint… I’m not sure if I want to do all the updating of locations that have opened and closed at the moment.) It seems like about 500 copies is the right edition size for most of those reprints.

But we would probably be wise to to make 1,000 copies of the fourth printing of Bike Rambles Around Seattle. Trying to find a number that won’t sell out sooner than 2-3 years from now, but also won’t take up too much storage space or so much production time that it starts to feel exhausting. Starting to make spreadsheets to sort out paper orders and costs, and update prices since paper and ink costs have gone up a lot. And then dialing how many to print based on the number of pages in the publication, the trim size and resulting number of pages per sheet, and how many sheets of paper are in a ream to create less leftover paper. And taking stock of what paper we have on hand to use.

I love the math and planning and business bits of planning publications too. All the possibilities, but what will we choose?

A favor to ask: Are you working with riso on the West Coast, or do you know someone who is? Send us info to be included in a new RISO West Coast print catalog! Here’s more about the project, or just submit the form right here!

Watching + Listening

• lol at We Ride at Dawn comedy special, so glad feminine raunch is being platformed more now, thank you Netflix

• LABOUR - the cacophony - Paris Paloma

• This 10 min core on Peloton app

Eating

Crescent made corn ice cream for a party and now I have cron brain. There are also corn popsicles at H Mart… plus, regular reminder that Soon Du Bu packets from H Mart are awesome. AND! A friend made us a box-pancake-mix-into-cake hack and it was extremely delicious, what a mochi texture: Trader Joe's Hawaiian Ube Butter Mochi Recipe. Heidi Swanson's Black Sesame Otsu on my mind. Adam and I went to San Fermo for our wedding anniversary and had a burrata on grilled Sea Wolf baguette with peaches, stone fruit, mint, tarragon, and salt and pepper on top — an overdose of satisfaction.

Looking

• ANTI-SUBSCRIPTION SOFTWARE CATALOGUE (ASC)

• “ugly” drawings from korea

• Hot Rat Summer

• bookmaking handouts by Olivia Fredricks (who also has Cowboy Ezra the outlaw riso)

Reading

I've been on a big climate fiction rereading kick the past few months and really enjoyed revisiting The Year of the Flood and Madd Addam from Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake trilogy. They well paired with The Peripheral by William Gibson, and The Deluge by Stephen Markley. Contemplating rereads of The Fifth Sacred Thing by Starhawk, The Water Knife and The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi, and Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness. (More book ideas in Climate Emergency Reading Recs!)

The biggest reading success recently: after several read-throughs of the classic children's book Everyone Poops by Taro Gomi with a two year old friend this week, I just got an exciting text from their parents: "— pooped in the potty!!!" Books are powerful! Speaking of children's books, now I want to read some Chirri & Chirra.

Here are some other reads, all online:

1. Walking the Wrong Way Through Mary Cassatt

2. How Heather Lanier balances motherhood with her career as a writer

3. Apocalypse Now

4. How the Ultra-Wealthy Think About Money

5. the revolution starts by building with poor folks in your own backyard

6. An Ex-Trad Wife On What the Insta Photos Don't Show

7. Religious Trauma Resources

8. Germans Combat Climate Change With D.I.Y. Solar Panels

9. Nobody Puts Baby in a Corner (at Comic Con)

10. Tim Walz might be a pivotal climate leader

I’m looking for fun sci-fi or detective novels for some page turning fun reading this winter, or writing/books/blogs or videos about building houses. OR music to dance to! If you want to share a recommendation, or otherwise say hello, just hit reply.

Hope you are well,

—Amelia

Like, I’m inspired by political campaign ads?? We Choose Freedom and Fearless are worth watching! The speeches have really been energizing me too — here are some links to the first day at her Delaware election headquarters, the first presidential rally, and yesterday's rally in Atlanta. And I'm loving the energy on TikTok (@kamalaharris and @kamalahq) and Instagram (@kamalaharris @kamalahq).

I think we can win this now, but it's going to take all of us doing what we can.

We are not going back

Let's get organized, friends. Here are some ideas for things we could do:

1. Voter registration - Get registered yourself if you're not yet, or check your registration. You can also help others get registered and get their questions about voting logistics answered.

• Register to vote in your state | Vote.gov

• Everything You Need to Vote - Vote.org

• I Will Vote

• For Washington people: here's the link directly to Register to Vote in Washington State. (We get to vote by mail and you don't even need a stamp, it is awesome.)

2. Donate to the Harris Campaign
The link is kamalaharris.com and wow it felt good to do that! It was so awesome to be part of the over 1.5 million individual donors raising over $200 million for Harris in the first week. I'm going to keep donating — wanna join me?

3. Get organized
Sign up for phone calling, text banking, door knocking, postcard or letter writing — find something that suits you, and maybe even do it with friends. If you’re looking for places to start, here are a few ideas:

• Mobilize has Volunteer Opportunities, Events, and Petitions you can look for near you or online

• Showing Up for Racial Justice on Mobilize and White People for Harris has specific actions for white people to step up and take responsibility and fight racism in white communities

• Send Postcards to Swing States, which is organized through the Progressive Turnout Project! Signups for the presidential race start August 5th, and you can already sign up to get postcards for competitive House districts (we have three in Washington)

• Write letters to encourage voter turnout with Vote Forward

The last few elections Adam and I have organized with friends to write postcards letters. This year our goal is to work with our friends to send 500 or more Postcards to Swing States. Writing that many cards is a lot of work but they don't go in the mail til Oct 24th so there’s time… and it's fun to do it together with friends at dinners, and hand out batches for friends to take home. (Seattle crew, get ready, I'm gonna be in touch — also, please invite us to do stuff you're organizing!)

4. Share with friends and people you know
Talk about it! It's easy to be silent, or be mad that the dems don't have perfect politics (I know there’s a lot more I want!), but this is what we've got and there’s less than 100 days left, so let's go! Especially all my white dudes, I want to see you get out there doing stuff and donating, and being a role model and inspiration to all your other white dude friends!

Artists: let's make art, make posters, make tote and sticker and t-shirt designs, make video edits, make music! Writers, let's write — and post in all the places you usually share. People who like cooking, let's feed people! What uniquely suits your personality, resources, skills and talents? What do you want to do? And let's invite everyone along with us.

Ours is a fight for the future

We're still in the early years of this climate crisis jackpot era but I have really been feeling it lately. The fires, the smoke, the heat, the floods, the news of the AMOC slowdown and hitting 1.5C last year. I think this election is a make or break one for a lot of climate tipping points. This Bill McKibben newsletter put it well:

The climate catastrophe is now playing out in real time. She may be the last president able to truly help stem the tide.

The climate stuff is all tied together with the attacks by the Republicans on well, almost all of us. In Everything You Need to Know About Project 2025's Plan for the EPA, Drilled points out how all the awfulness is coming from the same people:

Once again we see that those pushing against climate action are not just aligned with those attacking trans rights, racial justice, labor rights and reproductive rights, but are in the same organizations, being funded by the same universe of backers.

Let's get to work, y'all!

Riso Bookstore is freshly updated with a bunch of new publications, including Ya No Quiero Ser Fuerte and Futuro, two of my favorites from our friends S A R A — Sociedad Anónima Reproducción Autogestiva! And more from Living Room Press, Cold Cube and Secret Room Press!

LOOKING

• Chappell Roan's Tiny Desk Concert

• Where there’s smoke… I feel this toxic swirl of dread and fear every day about the future

• Elena Yu's Staff Bulletin: The Founding of Black Studies

• Another good Pen and Eye comic on prison and cop abolition

• For horror fans, a TV Writers-Led Super PAC just released an ad called These Guys Are Just Weird … I need to scrub my brain now.

READING

• "Abundant pickles"

• Notes of Tomatoes

• Choosing an Offline Life

• If you haven't read about Project 2025's objectives yet, wikipedia has a decent summary.

• And if you're wanting a round up of JD Vance's creepy views on women, read Salon's article GOP's "incel platform" repels voters.

I'm going to send a longer newsletter on summer reading in a bit, with lots of book recs — but two to put on your radar right away are Less is More about degrowth and post-capitalism, and The Chaos Machine about how the algorithms radicalized so many people into conspiracy and hateful beliefs. They both gave me a lot of hope too. It's a week for hope!

EATING

Alex grilled homemade pitas(!!), feta dip, tomato-cucumber salad and other delights for a little dinner party. I've been eating lots of soups this week, and tomatoes… and I really want to make Alice Waters' Tomato Confit.

For sending a bunch of get out the vote postcards with friends, it's going to take some parties for sure - pizza nights and soup nights for sure, and picnic potlucks. I'm getting inspired by:

• Throw yourself a grilled cheese party this summer

• The Secret(s) to Throwing a Good Party 

RESOURCES

• Better support for markdown in google docs (finally!)

• Watch Duty - Wildfire Maps & Alerts — I also made a 2021 post about wildfire and smoke resources

• Storytelling to Accelerate Climate Solutions (I just downloaded this free ebook, excited to read.)

💙💙💙
—Amelia

P.S. — Here's the link to donate to Kamala Harris!!

Since I last wrote, Adam and I hiked in the Sierras for 600+ miles, on the Pacific Crest Trail from Tehachapi to Truckee. We took Amtrak to skip around that section last year during our PCT hike, since it was covered with tons of snow. We wanted more of a frolic through the granite and lakes rather than a hike-at-night-to-avoid-postholing mountaineering trip that was the scene last summer. This year’s conditions were solidly in the frolic category — we barely needed the ice axe and micro-spikes for the high passes, and had great weather besides some heat-wave induced hail & thunderstorms.

It was amazing, beautiful country. I love the rhythms of hiking all day, the simplicity of sleep-food-water-electrolytes-views, the conversations with other hikers. And the flowers! And lots of spicy ramen and granola bars and eating as many vegetables as we could, when we got to towns to resupply.

Also! I had zero blisters the entire time!? Because the Sierras has so much elevation change and a lot of it is above 10k feet, we took it slow (for us, for a thru-hike), going 17-22 miles a day usually, and taking more rest days than on prior hikes. I think that helped, and also really having our shoe/foot care systems dialed in now. (A future blog post!)

I took some notes on creative projects in a tiny journal along the way, and made some videos and photos of pika and ground squirrels for reference for a comic in the works. But mostly it was a thinking and not-thinking-at-all time. Refilling the well of inspiration and visuals and energy. And just enjoying the mountains and being outside moving all day.

Reading Recs

Although I brought a kindle, I was usually so tired by the time we’d put up the tent and had dinner that I barely read the past month and a half. (Also, we usually fell asleep at 9pm!!) But here are a few recs:

• The Great Displacement by Jake Bittle, about climate migration in the US, really spoke to me. Esp. recommend if you liked McPhee’s The Control of Nature or Kolbert’s The Sixth Extinction.

• I reread The Peripheral, published 2014 and it still holds up.

• Enjoyed reading Bee Wilson’s The Secret of Cooking — love a readable cookbook!

• Also, if you missed it, Adam wrote about our hike last year, along with lots of pictures of lichen, in Lichens of the Pacific Crest.

That’s all for now! Hope you are staying cool.

—Amelia

P.S. —Reminder: If you’ll be at SF Art Book Fair on Saturday, July 20th, and want to meet up with me (Amelia) reply to this email and say hey!

In November 2023, RISO Pacific Northwest's first print edition of 325 (or was it 350?) went out in the world at Short Run. Six short months later, after Seattle Art Book Fair… it is out of print! Fear not: You can now get a copy of the digital edition (PDF and epub), starting at $2. 🥰

Get RISO Pacific Northwest

RISO WEST COAST

NEXT UP: we’re making a new, expanded edition: RISO West Coast — likely in Fall 2024, and with the help of Alexander Matthews!

RISO West Coast will highlight risograph focused printshops, community spaces, publishers, artists, events, zine libraries and shops across the northern West Coast: California, Oregon, Washington, BC, Yukon Territory, Alaska, Hawaii, Baja California and Baja California Sur.

Please submit things to go in the next edition of the catalog!!

The goal is a print and digital catalog to spread the word about all the cool things going on with risograph based printing, zines and small press publishing, with a specific focus on helping people find places to print, get started publishing, buy and sell zines, and make artist friends.

We’re looking for:

• Printshops & Community Spaces

• Risograph-Based Publishers & Presses

• NEW! Individual Artists Working with Risograph

• Zine and Art Book Fairs, and Events

• Zine Libraries

• Places to Buy and Sell Zines

• Other riso-related things you think people need to know about

Submit to RISO West Coast

You can submit something you’re involved in, or submit something cool you know about! Think of it as a curated combo of an old school catalog, the classifieds, an event listing calendar, and a city guide.

— Amelia

P.S. — It’s a huge help to spread the word, by sending the submission form or forwarding this newsletter to friends who might want to submit something too!

P.P.S. — This might be our last newsletter for a little while, since Adam and I are about to take off for some more PCT hiking! (SOMEONE has to collect all those lichen pictures.) Also, I made a new top-of-mind post on my personal blog about summer intentions, hiking self care, creative projects.