making a reading room; choosing one place to write
+ what's in my drafts folder, recs, & links to comics that made me laugh
Hello hello! First off: ANEMONE is co-organizing a Climate Crisis Reading Room as part of the public programming at Seattle Art Book Fair in May.
A place to sit, read, rest and talk during the fair, the reading room will include a selection of books, zines and pamphlets that touch on topics of climate, including publishing as a way of addressing climate, local issues, renewable energy and solarpunk, political organizing, grief, taking action, resource sharing, and community. Collaborators are organizing artist-made chairs and tables for the reading room, and Alex Barsky of Zine Hug is making a chaekgeori for community participation. Find it on the main stage.
I loved making Climate Emergency Reading Recs, the book I collaborated on with Elizabeth Case with 100 reading recommendations. (You can get a copy at the Riso Bookstore, or from us at SABF!) The reading room will be another curated collection of resources, building on those ideas, but focusing more on artist published books, pamphlets and zines, and reading and talking together. This first installation will start small, but I’m dreaming it could slowly expand over the years, getting installed at different fairs and gallery spaces around the world. For SABF, Elizabeth and I are talking about making a participatory mini-zine, and riso printed takeaways like a bookmark or pamphlet.
More details, and a call for participation coming once we sort out the logistics, but for now: heads up… Climate Crisis Reading Room! It’s in the works.
If you’re super excited already, you’re invited to write back! Especially if you have an artist publication / book / zine / pamphlet in mind that could be a good fit for the reading room, or if you a furniture-making artist interested in making a chair/coffee table for the installation.
In my drafts: musings about the money of traditional vs self publishing, with lots of numbers for sales and revenue from All Well. (Feels revealing, but also the time+money math can be much more in favor of self publishing than people assume, and it would probably be useful to share.) An essay about working seasonally on Spectrolite as a long running art project, and why it’s so fun that it’s a project we’re not aiming to make money from. Also an essay about my theories of when and why artist publishers who are doing all their own assembly burn out, and what can be done. (Like finding the point and scale that it’s time to obtain the right equipment for the job, or pacing and spec-ing your projects to a size that works for you.) I’ve been working of an essay collection of NOTES ON ARTIST PUBLISHING that I’m contemplating pulling together for SABF, although maybe it’s not time yet. But maybe all those could go in it. Or maybe they’ll be newsletters.
Working in the program Obsidian continues to be wildly generative, I’ve been going through old personal writing in Google Docs and Scrivener and it’s again obvious how my interests are lifelong, continuous and consistent. So many drafts to do a project, if it is something I am spiraling around and figuring out. Often I rewrite from memory without tracking down the older work in its fragments elsewhere. I think that I do need to do that, to some extent, but I also can save a lot of time and energy if I don’t rewrite from memory, if I have a standardized place to store work — Obsidian — that I am consistent with.
Previously I’d used Google Docs, made an incomplete shift over to Scrivener in 2018-19, found that didn’t work well for my process, and kept going in a disorganized mishmash across Google Docs and Notes. But leaving a lot of surprisingly good and further-along-than-I’d-remembered work abandoned in Scrivener. (I also do lots of writing in notebooks, which sometimes gets typed up but is mostly morning pages and bullet journals, and fine to be left where it is, having done its work just in the process of being written.) As I’ve been doing cleanup, also I found all the partial drafts being stored in Contentful and Substack, and moved them into Obsidian. I’m aiming to have Obsidian be the source of truth, the place to work, in conjunction with collaborative documents like Google Docs for work with others. Lots of reflections on how I want to write and publish in the future, now that I’m focusing more on it, and more personal work.
Secret Room is opening a physical shop!!!! 3225 SE Division Street in Portland, Oregon… on March 15th. YAY YAY YAY YAY THIS IS VERY EXCITING NEWS EVERYONE!!!! Riso things, artist publications, physical media.
Zine Hug is doing a Short Run Show Up Artist Talk this Saturday, March 9th 1:00 – 2:30 pm in Georgetown in Seattle. Alex and Zack are the absolute coolest: they make amazing comics and animations and riso things and are going to share their studio process. We will tragically be out of town (I’m dreaming of trying to sneakily FaceTime in somehow?! lol Alex please?) but if you can go, don’t miss!! Food note: You could also go to Bop Box across the street for my obsession, the spicy tofu steak bento box. Just an idea…
Robin Sloan’s Moonbound is out this summer and he’s sending out 3,000 riso printed launch zines to people who preorder. Those kind of numbers can really help tip the scale for a book — there’s more info in his newsletter.
COMICS:
READING:
Gathering Structures by Maggie Appleton, on event organizing.
How Walmart’s Financial Services Became a Fraud Magnet — ProPublica
Why finding product reviews in google search is so hard these days via the always thought-provoking A Scammer Darkly
— Amelia