a trip to Secret Room, mind maps, and 7 newsletters we like to read
plus food notes from eating on our trip to Portland, and links & recs
Hello! We spent the early part of the week in Portland, hanging out with Cielle and John James of Secret Room. Their pop-up in the Lloyd Center Mall is so cool: a gallery, bookstore, movie screening venue, open print studio, and workshop! It runs through the end of December — here’s the event calendar, info about their drop-in open risograph print times, and tickets for workshops.
Secret Room is carrying a few copies of Lichens of the Pacific Crest, RISO Pacific Northwest, Climate Emergency Reading Recs, and the 2024 Long Calendar for shopping in person.
PDX food notes: We cooked a secret feast — pasta with marcella hazan tomato sauce and smoked ricotta (!), salad with pear and gorgonzola, roasted leeks, and avocat vinaigrette french style salad. And Cielle and John James introduced us to the sesame grinder, which is quite darling; it gently crushes some of the sesames as it dispenses them. I plan to obtain one someday. We had seedy rye bread and egg and salad at Sweedeedee, and I had “the bowl” at Güero — arugula, lime rice, pinto beans, esquites corn, cotija cheese, poblano crema, fresh and pickled onion, watermelon radish, lime, cilantro, and sesame. So good.
A rest & hangout with friends week, besides helping with RISO Bookstore’s first two batches of shipments. The most “studio” part of the week for me was two 3-hour writing sessions at a coffee shop. Seeing what is top of mind with some morning pages, updating my bullet journal. I made a mind map of ideas for the next few years, the little bubble and linking line diagram variety. This time I made little notes on what format fits most naturally for the topics — should it be a book, a zine, a pamphlet, a blog post, a newsletter, maybe a PDF or epub digital publication?
Topics that are coming up for me: Cooking and Eating, Financial Independence/Money, Sensitive, Adventure, Printing & Small Press, Recommendations in general and Reading Recs in particular. Ah, I love writing how-to and process-talk so much.
In honor of process talk: this week here are seven publishing-related, studio-process-ish newsletters we love to read, that you might want to subscribe to:
Also! Robin Sloan’s 2023 Gift Guide (always a treasure trove, both the annual gift guides and Robin’s newsletter in general) featured the Long Calendar:
I’ll begin the durable goods section with a semi-consumable: a calendar.
I’m a huge fan of the Seattle-based studio called ANEMONE. They offer an array of breathtakingly beautiful zines but/and their simplest offering might be my favorite: the Long Calendar, showing three months at a time, a tall stretch rather than a squat rectangle.
You know I appreciate things that frame time differently, more deeply. It might be fun and interesting to start the year ahead with a new perspective.
There are only five three year 2024-2025-2026 Long Calendars remaining, and less than twenty of the 2024 Long Calendars. Heads up, if you were wanting to pick one up!
This story is so rad — Jeff Hashimoto and Langdon Ernest-Beck of Ellensburg “are the 89th and 90th people to complete the Bulger List, a compilation of Washington’s 100 highest peaks. Hashimoto and Ernest-Beck are just the third and fourth people to complete the list in a calendar year… and they rode their bikes to every trailhead.”
Also for your attention:
This podcast episode with the author of the book Die With Zero, a book about being intentional with retirement saving and spending. Aimed mostly at people who might over-save or not spend enough; the author is quite the character.
Where does all the rage go now? (Also, that reminds me to recommend the book All the Rage: Mothers, Fathers, and the Myth of Equal Partnership, which I took a lot away from reading as a non-parent.)
My Cheesecake-Shaped Poverty, new short fiction by Haruki Murakami
The latest BearBear newsletter: “Is it worthwhile to travel for an art book fair”
We made two more batches of focaccia this past week, and each one was messed up in some way but still tasted great — that recipe is so fun to make, and quite forgiving. A re-reccommend!
JUST HIT REPLY: If you have a studio-process type newsletter, please write back and send me a link to where I can find it! Also, fellow readers, please send recs for fun easy reads, page turners, thrillers, heist or spy or detective stuff! I am well stocked on nonfiction but so low on entertainment reading. 🌟
—Amelia
P.S. — Our friend Alex’s new RISO Animation: Zine Hug’s How To Guide is out now. It’s a primer on how to create animations like these. It’s so cool!
P.P.S. — Hello from these ginkgo leaves!
