It is very spring-y and green in Seattle. Adam and I just arrived back in the Pacific Northwest, wrapping up two years of PCT hiking, traveling and adventures. We’re beginning the process of settling down again, figuring out where and how to live next. Lots of unknowns, lots of possibilities. I have so much writing coming to the newsletter about all the things I’ve learned and seen and the amazing people we’ve spent time with the last few months of travels.
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