objects

an essay about stuff, made into an object (!!!)

Via my postpartum publishing project, Imaginary Lake, I have just published a new zine called Objects, and it’s available now! The zine is an essay about stuff. In particular, the stuff in domestic spaces — kid stuff, mom stuff, hand-me-down and new stuff, special stuff and junk stuff, stuff that lasts forever and stuff that fades away. The zine is a personal essay mixed with some literary criticism and gentle philosophy and it’s all pleasingly folded into the “object” of a palm-sized zine. I come to you here, on the immaterial internet, offering something you can hold in your hand, and that makes me happy. I can send it to you in the mail! With a stamp! We can still do that! It’s sublime!

If you’re a new reader, know that Imaginary Lake is sort of my version of a “paid” tier of this newsletter. I like to make the writing I’m most excited about into little books and send them to readers. Digital writing is awesome, I love to read and write it, but there’s something truly magical about holding, reading, and keeping a little artist-made pamphlet. Your purchase of Imaginary Lake zines helps me keep writing this newsletter for free and keep making zines and buy groceries, etc!

(P.S. I am now sending zines worldwide, they used to only be available in print in the US! So if you’re an international reader, Imaginary Lake is ready!)

Buy Objects here! And, you can use the code OBJECTS for $1 off any order until 7/4 :)

---

(Here’s a short excerpt from the zine:)

Our house is very small, and completely overrun by the children. I guess I knew this would happen, but couldn’t have known how intense this annexation would be. As my eldest’s toddlerhood advances, it only becomes worse. He is a confident child, and clearly regards the house as fully his personal property. It’s the children’s house, my husband and I just live in it. I can’t relate to the people who keep their house looking like children hardly live there. To enter our house is to step straight into an immersive 360 degree playhouse experience.

The sheer amount of objects in our house is overwhelming, and yet I can’t seem to get rid of pretty much anything. It is all already deeply sentimental to me, even the garbage. The little trinkets that should be thrown out immediately instead get sorted into a growing collection of baskets and boxes. This is my way of coping — buying more storage containers, and then moving all those storage containers around endlessly, as if I’m making any sort of progress. It’s sisyphean, and maddening. Soon, I will pack myself into a storage container, where it will be quiet, and I will be the only object to sort or store – I’m joking. Am I?

My three-year-old has also now entered the realm of imaginary play where his toys MUST NOT BE MOVED OR TOUCHED. I allow this sometimes, and other times ruthlessly put it all away anyway, depending on my level of overstimulation. This has reminded me of my own childhood, parts of it I’d forgotten, dredging up the memory of spending full days setting up homes and scenarios for my Barbies all over the living room, and forbidding my mom to mess it up or put it away. This would go on for days. She must have been so annoyed! I was taking up so much space. But I was playing. I was so happy, so entrenched in play. And my mom gave me that space in our house to do that. I can see now how that wasn’t nothing, wasn’t even a given or a reasonable demand. Giving children space to play, and the autonomy to have their belongings stay where they put them is a gift we can give them — alongside boundaries for how much space the play can take up or for how long it can be undisturbed or not “cleaned up”. I hadn’t thought about this at all before having children.

But I think this is an area of tension for me — because I give this gift to my children, but it’s a privilege I no longer possess in this season of my life. I can’t take up space in my own home in the way I used to. Can’t keep things the way I like them and expect precious objects to not get moved or used or broken. My piles of books get rifled through, my coffee cup gets spilled. My sewing basket is overturned, the arrangements on the shelves slowly undone. Sometimes even walking into the room and seeing my three-year-old sitting in “my chair” is startling to me. Childish of me, maybe, but also so human. To want my own space within my home, to want my own play to be undisturbed just like his.

It makes me wonder: what kind of materiality do I owe to my children? What was given to me? My small children have no money, they only own whatever is given to them. I bestow objects upon them. For all the time we spend talking about overconsumption, I am not sure we often enough truly allow ourselves to experience our relationship to the things that we own, and what it means to live among them. I love objects. Like that Olga Ravn passage, I feel myself slowly settling into the objects in my home, the ones that are mine. The clothes I’ve sewn, the sweaters I’ve knit. My favorite thrifted mugs. My growing collection of quilts, both vintage and made by me. My books, my notebooks, my small wicker box of washi tape. All my papers, my candlesticks, my dried flowers. A few different sizes of bowls, for a few different sizes of food. The secondhand orange velvet sofa, the antique wood secretary desk we bought from a friend who was moving abroad. Photographs, art, potted plants. My sewing machine and sewing tools, my printing supplies, my fountain pens, my fabric. I don’t have much money to spend and I try not to buy too much. No, I don’t own a lot but what I do own is deeply felt, intermingled with some of the innermost parts of me. You can’t tell me that materiality is insignificant — I think it’s deeply human. Linked to cultivation, to love for the world and the things it holds. Just as I seep into the acre of land we live on, our big tree out front, I seep into the objects in my house, and they seep into me. An object among objects. A living thing.

---

This zine has been extra pleasing to make because it’s small. Almost all of the Imaginary Lake zines so far have been half-size, but this is quarter-size and something about it just feels really delightful to me. It also offered the opportunity to do some light tinkering to figure out how to get everything to work to print at this size. There’s something so satisfying about creating and then solving small problems when so many of life’s problems feel too big to even begin to scale.

Really, publishing zines has felt like such a lifeboat in this first year postpartum with my second baby. I feel really confused about work in general, except when I’m working on Imaginary Lake projects — which feels like a sign to keep going. I have so many hopes and ideas about the future, and even the pipe-dream of slightly scaling up into a press that publishes other people’s writing too (wow!), but for now I tend to only have less than two hours each day for work. That is so little, I can do so little in that time. So I’ve been doing this. Writing, designing and publishing zines. And feeling freedom within the little hours of their making. It’s hard to be a hybrid stay-at-home-mom / writer / entrepreneur person. I don’t really know what I am. But I will let the work speak for me, be the story I am telling about how it all feels. It feels amazing to have kept a record that will leave a paper trail behind me. Little books on your shelf, little books on mine. That’s something. So many things feel like my life’s work. This too.

---

Want to read more Imaginary Lake zines? You can find them all on my website! Here’s a catalog of our current library of zines. If there’s something you want to read a zine about that seems like something Imaginary Lake would publish, let me know! Maybe it will become a little book you can hold in your hand in the future!