A desert road trip journal
updates on life, friends, and making books: from portland, sf, berkeley, oakland, phoenix and a big storm
Hello, ANEMONE newsletter friends! Writing to you from the desert, where Adam and I are rambling in Utah for the next few weeks.
Pacific Northwest
In March we returned to the Seattle after spending the winter months in Mexico. The PNW was appropriately rainy and misty; we saw our friends and packed for a road trip. We visited Zine Hug and Natalie Andrewson at a comic con, and had an afternoon brunch with some of the riso crew. Obsidian the kitten slept on my nap during a big round of sentence-picture drawings — an overdose of satisfaction, as Dalí would say!
Car packed with camping gear, canyoneering ropes, books, and a box of art supplies, we headed south on a big desert road trip to see friends and family and be in the canyons and hang out with the cactus.
First stop was a quick visit to Portland where we got to hang with our friends Cielle and John James and help them paint the walls of the new Secret Room store, which is open now. It’s so cool!Then we saw some other family in Oregon, slept in a treehouse, and made the long drive down I-5 to the Bay Area.


San Francisco
We spent a week in the Bay Area hanging with friends and wandering nostalgically around some of our favorite places from our years living in San Francisco. I found two indie-published books about cooking at Green Apple Books and General Store. Holding them, reading them, makes me feel very inspired for my ongoing writing project about cooking and eating. Kindred objects to what I’m imagining: they’re small! Not full color, no styled photos of food — more about the writing than a typical recipe-based book with headnotes. We ate at Tartine, walked the length of Golden Gate Park, sat in the tree grove by the California Academy of Sciences, climbed the little hill in the middle of the lake, stared at the foamy breakers at Ocean Beach. I bought a glowing fluorescent green eraser at Case for Making.
Oakland
In Oakland, Zach Clark brought us some Cheese Board alum takeout pizza and showed us around the new location of Chute Studio. He and Amy Burek have this huge old Singer sewing machine in there, with a tremendously mighty looking needle that was punching through a quarter inch thick book. They just got a new mini-tower collator for Chute, which was fun to see. I’m dreaming of the life of a printshop with a collator — it’s our next big equipment wish, along with an electric, motor-driven guillotine stack cutter like we got to use at Secret Room last fall. (Half of the Lichens of the Pacific Crest were cut there, ka-chunk!)

We blew Zach’s mind when he really grasped how we were laying out all the ANEMONE books and zines without Adobe Suite.
“Everything is mostly designed in Google Docs?!!?”
“Yea — why not? Well and Sketch too, and Google Slides some, and Procreate some. But yeah, no Adobe Suite, besides the free Lightroom Mobile for photo editing.”
Then he got out the collection of ANEMONE zines he had from trading with us over the years flipped through the pages in pure wonderment. I swear I’ve never seen anyone so impressed by Google Docs Heading styles and a tiny bit of typography.
But more seriously, that’s a big reason we’re making Spectrolite. In general1: simple tools are plenty for many artist-publishing projects! Done is better than perfect! Anyone can make a zine or small book!
Berkeley
Last year Sarah Casson and I had brief exchange over email about the tradeoffs of traditional publishing vs artist publishing, and I sent some encouragement to start her own press and check out Ingram Spark for print and distribution to bookstores. (This is my go-to encouragement! If you have something you want out in the world, why wait for traditional publishing when you can be an artist publisher instead?) Since we were in town, I wrote to see if she’d be down for a coffee, and I was delighted to find out that Dair Press now exists, and has two books out! We traded books and I enjoyed reading Good Nonsense and thinking about my own adventures in the mountains and water and how I think about the climate crisis through that.
Berkeley was blooming, sunny and warm, with views across the bay of the bridges and an abundance of produce at Monterrey Market. Kellianne and I spent a perfect day hanging in her backyard garden, and we cooked a very delicious taco night. Acme makes a perfect foccacia mushroom-shallot-olive pizza bread.
Arizona
Next, more driving, a long afternoon took us to near Joshua Tree, then a half day to Arizona, where we spent two weeks camping with my parents at some desert lakes. One of the campgrounds was inhabited by herds of wild burros who made the most ridiculous mating-season sounds. Poppies were blooming in the washes, the ocotillo had bright green leaves, the cholla had fruits.
We played a lot of Rummikub and multi-player solitaire and rode my parents’ e-bikes. My dad taught me some CAD in OnShape, which is the first CAD program that’s made sense to me. It’s a bit like google docs, where you can have multiple people working on something in real time together. With my dad’s mobile hotspot, I also snuck in some writing time on the potential new book(s) for Seattle Art Book Fair. Lots of thoughts on artist publishing.
New Spectrolite
On a brief stop in Phoenix, we spent a morning in a coffee shop and released the new version of Spectrolite that we’d been working on for the past month or so. This was a really tricky interaction design for us to figure out. Usually I can just draw what something should be and how it works, but this took a lot of trial and error. Adam had to make us several iterations working prototypes to play with until we made something that made sense.
This new thing for Spectrolite makes laying out your books and zines for print (aka imposition) even easier, because now the sizing for your original PDFs can be really flexible. Make your words and pictures in Google Docs, or Word, or Pages, or Google Slides (or wherever you make it) and export a PDF. Pick a layout based on the paper size you’re printing on and how you want to bind it, and then Spectrolite will do its best to fit your PDF on the page of the print layout. And then, this is new too, you can type in exactly how big you want the book and it will resize it. And you can add trim marks, and change where they are if you need “bleed” for artwork that prints to the edge. (Here’s a little how-to tutorial on all that.)
Phoenix
In Phoenix we visited Wasted Ink Distro, which is so lovely: a shop of artist publications, a reading library, community space and a garden. (Phoenix newsletter readers, we added a copy of Climate Emergency Reading Recs to their zine library!) The crew at Paper Jam + Print — Charissa of Wasted Ink, Angie of Shut Eye Press and Vic of SATURNHEX — hosted us for a studio visit and some shop talk. They all have risographs, plus other presses and printers, and came together to share space and bindery equipment. (Here’s a story in their local weekly about it!) Felt super inspiring to be there and hear about the work they’re doing and what they’re doing with artists who want to publish.
Mom and I spent an afternoon at the Phoenix Botanical Gardens, a cacti paradise, with cute little round-tailed ground squirrels and quails. And, unexpectedly, Botero! There were two huge sculptures, a show of paintings and drawings, and a documentary. (I still feel so inspired by the Botero interview in Apartamento magazine #22.) On the recommendation of Cielle and John James, my Dad and I watched Dune Two on the big IMAX screen, quite the visual and sound experience.
Storm
Adam and I hiked a few miles up into the desert hills before we got caught by the dark storm that had been hanging ominously to the west all morning.
First the wind picked up, then drops of rain and pea size hail, which turned into spats of clumpy snow and a hard, cold rain. We ducked into our rain jackets and ran most of the three miles down the ridge. Lightning was crashing on the higher ridges all around, and the thunder wasn’t long after, nature felt truly powerful. When we got back to the road, my mom was just driving up. She had driven our car over to where the loop ended, to save us the last half mile of road walk back to the campground, so we even got to avoid mild hypothermia at the end. Mom saves the day!
Roaming
Adam and I are almost a full year into traveling now — we left Seattle last May to start on the Pacific Crest Trail, then decided to keep going after that — and it’s really been a huge reset and adventure. I miss the things I thought I’d miss. I miss having the riso and bindery equipment near at hand, a really nice setup for writing and sewing and designing things and making work. I miss reading in the bright windowseat in our old place, and the stacks of books by the reading chair. I miss cooking with our kitchen tools. A few good knives and cutting boards, a Le Creuset dutch oven, two sauce pans, a couple cast iron frying pans and a stock pot. And an immersion blender and a cheese grater. I can picture them exactly; I almost want to pack that up and carry it all around with us. And I really miss our huge sprawling crew of Seattle friends that we’ve gotten to know over the past fifteen years, being in the misty green Pacific Northwest that feels like home. But I’m equally loving this wandering, exploring life, and visiting all the places and people along the way.
My favorite thing I read online recently was this Austin Kleon interview with Mary Ruefle, conducted via typewriters and the postal service.
On writing and publishing
Workbench (I like this idea of work in progress on your personal website.)
Vector Halftone Maker - Interactive PNG/SVG halftone pattern generator
On scams
Incognito Darknet Market Mass-Extorts Buyers, Sellers (A good look at exit scams in dark markets; if you like scams, the book Lying for Money was also a great one.)
On the climate emergency
The Quickening by Elizabeth Rush was great, also just finished a re-read of The Deluge by Stephen Markley
I want to make a book of “drawing games” for playing with your friends after dinner parties; please hit reply and tell me about your favorite group drawing games?
Any road trip podcast or album recommendations?
Amelia
P.S. — In the next newsletter, more on how you can participate in the Climate Emergency Reading Room & Community Altar. (Even if you’re not there for its initial installation at Seattle Art Book Fair in May!)
Sometimes I want to do even more, like sidenotes, or to have something more programatic to take in structured data. Our next foray into layout will probably be Markdown / Obsidian files that go through a script pipeline to make them into epubs, and also LaTeX-style formatted PDFs, which can get processed further in Spectrolite for riso printing or IngramSpark distributed print-on-demand.