Rain, smoke, making climate zines
Rain, smoke, making climate zines
Plus, say hi tomorrow (Sunday 10/23) 12-4:30 at AMcE Gallery for art book / zine pop up + panel
First off — we’re doing a quick tabling event plus panel at AMcE gallery space tomorrow, on Sunday Oct 23rd! Zine tabling is noon-2pm with us: Brandon Vosika, Cold Cube Press, Colleen Louise Barry, Piggy Bank Zines , Push/Pull, Sand and Gravel Press, and Steven Miller. Then a quick break, and at 2:30pm we’re on a panel moderated by Jayme Yen and Tom Eykemans of Seattle Art Book Fair, along with Kelly Froh and Brandon Vosika.
It’s on 19th on Capitol Hill. Here’s all the info, and here’s the (free) RSVP for the panel.
The Short Run exhibitor map is out, and I got really excited looking at it! We’re in good company with lots of small press friends. Just at our little pod of tables (we’re table 47!), we’re with our friends Zine Hug, Common Area Maintenance, National Monument Press, Yewon Kwon, Frederick Doebler, Living Room Press, and Taxonomy Press.
Come visit all of us if you’re in the Seattle area on Nov 5th. Also, reminder that Short Run is masked and checking proof of vax. And wear a K94/95 mask and get that 4th boost if you can. <3
Here are some pictures of the work in progress at the studio:
Adam finished the next Reading Recs series zine: this one is 50+ book recs about how change happens, and how we can make change. Plus diatoms! Love diatoms.
We’ve finished three of the 4 passes through the risograph machine for the next climate zine collaboration between Amelia and Elizabeth. Aerial photos of glaciated terrain, botanical imagery from old texts and watercolors, glacial digital elevation models that Elizabeth generated in Matlab from her glaciology PhD research (the DEM svgs kept crashing programs on both our computers). And our writing.
The How To Pizza Night zine (tragically we decided that MIRA MI PIZZA MONUMENTA! was probably best left as a subtitle, as hilarious as we found it) is coming along too. Almost all the illustrations are done, and we’re on our 6th or 8th printed draft of the text. Twenty four pages and 6k+ words: turns out there’s a lot of pizza knowledge that we want to pass on! Adam’s writing for this cracks me up.
We’ll have all these new zines for Short Run, then online after that for people who want copies via the mail. And next week we’re moving onto finalizing the seattle adventure map.
We climbed Tomyhoi and Yellow Aster Butte last week, peaks carefully selected for being just out of the cloud of smoke that covered most of the region. Looking down from 7,400 ft elevation, the deceptively beautiful clouds in the background of the photo below are lingering smoke filling the valleys. The glaciers on nearby Shuksan and Baker look dingy, like they’ve been coated in smoke dust, which they probably have. Darker surfaces make glaciers disappear faster. The Tomyhoi glacier is icy, dirty and exposed, I can’t help think that it looks sad. We’ve brought our ice axes and crampons up to the top for the section of the climb where the guidebooks and trip reports say you need to traverse the glacier, but when we get there, the glacier isn’t covering that area anymore. The top part has receded downhill, exposing some very scraped and smoothed rocks and rubble, which we instead pick our way across with small, exposed climbing moves.
Earlier in the month, we celebrated my birthday on the London Plane patio, having a dessert that will stay in my mind forever: peaches, oat crisp, a quenelle of heavy cream with a little goat cheese mixed in, hot honey on top, flowers on top of that. I was feeling strange about the heat, and overheard some people walking by:
It’s such a beautiful day - it’s so warm.
Yes, but it shouldn’t be this warm this time of year. To be honest, I’m having a bit of climate anxiety.
Same, same. In October the air has been unsettlingly hot, and filled with smoke. Unbreathable levels for everyone, 250+ AQI the last few days. (Although I have sensitive lungs and really feel it when there’s even mild levels of air pollution, which we’ve had fairly constantly since early August this year.) It was fitting to be finishing the new climate zine that Elizabeth and I are making in late October on an 88 degree day (it should be like 60!) with air full of so much smoke that I couldn’t go outside.
Finally, yesterday the rains arrived, and everyone I spoke to seemed to have a shared experience of waking up giddy, relieved, but in a terrified sort of way. Today, we can breathe again, and it looks like the rains will continue for the week and put the wildfires out, but. As the new climate zine asks: What future?
Relatedly, Seattle/Washington people: the Stranger’s endorsements are out now, and ballots should be in mailboxes any day now if they’re not already.
Links
The latest book I read where I couldn’t stop reading parts out loud to Adam was Rats by Robert Sullivan. Literally just a book from 2004 all about rats, but also cities and people and the plague (the other one, not the one we’re in currently, although there were a lot of parallels with racism, how the “business community” responded, and newspapers covered it). I had the sense of the author as a birder, deeply observing, except with rats. Also, the narratives from all the pest control people of various persuasions he met! Oh man, those parts were like if John McPhee and Studs Terkel did an all-rat-professions-related book together or something. Truly enjoyable.
Anyways, here are some links:
Did your daddy let you drive? Some country recs.
Common misconceptions about publishing.
Please, someone pitch climate thrillers to this, I want to read them!
Ed Yong’s latest, as usual.
Better than mildew / a can do list.
Write back to me if you want. Are you coming to Short Run or the pop up / panel this weekend? What are you working on these days (project wise, cooking, otherwise)? How are you feeling the climate crisis?
-Amelia