right-size

or, how to, gently, be prolific // and, a new chapbook!

BIG ANNOUNCEMENT: My new poetry chapbook, Ordinary Time, is out now!
You can buy it in print here, or in digital/printable here!

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and now some very candid personal thoughts on art and money and work — this is very self-reflective, but hopefully some of my self-reflection could help give context to some of the things you are reflecting on within your self too. It has really helped me in the past to hear self-employed artists reflect on what is working and what isn’t working within their practices, so sharing in that spirit! (P.S. wrote this very quickly while my baby napped and toddler watched Zoboomafu, so sincere apologies if any parts of it don’t make sense but not ideal conditions for coherence!):

I’ve been feeling a little vulnerable in my working life. A bit adrift. Living and attempting to work as an artist means constant reinvention. Any time I think I know “what I’m doing” or what my “career” is, either I change or the world around me changes and the old solutions no longer work. This is maddening. This also is part of what makes the art art. I have learned to stop questioning this process. I am becoming more like a floating twig and less like a rock in this stream.

Some context: when I became pregnant with my second son, I could feel the part of my brain that designs sewing patterns slipping away from me. That was a big pillar of my work for a long time, designing sewing patterns. I loved it. It was exciting. It still could be my work, if that part of my brain decides to return. I have ideas. I have plans. (Children’s clothing?! Soft toys?! Home goods?!) But I’m not there yet. It felt like a fact, not a choice. The way I needed to find something else to do, the way I couldn’t do that work anymore while pregnant and postpartum. Designing a sewing pattern involves so many steps, and I can only hold very simple processes in my mind these days, can only work in very short increments. So, I spent the middle part of my pregnancy promoting the book my collaborator Amelia and I wrote about sewing (such a huge career milestone, but ultimately a hard and exhausting project), and then once the book came out I allowed myself to lay it all down. This was scary but needed.

Amelia had been slowly building her and her husband’s risograph small press project for a few years at that point (Anemone, it’s amazing! You can subscribe to their newsletter here). I was watching, asking lots of questions, inspired. Making little books and paper ephemera has always been a part of my art process, even in high school. I was an avid art-journaler, collaging my experiences in my diary, making private zines from my life. Likewise, I have been steadily writing essays on the internet for a decade now. (Shoutout to my first real blog!) The writing was still coming. This part of my work was growing in intensity and, through my newsletter, in readership. Pregnancy and motherhood have made me want to write more than ever before. I wrote my second full-length poetry book in a burst while pregnant with my first son (it’s coming out soon with a small poetry press, just finished copy edits!) and started this newsletter soon after. Late in my second pregnancy, it came to me sudden what I needed to do — I wanted to make my own small press as a place to publish my writing about caregiving in print. Writing that I felt was important and some of my best work, but that I knew (from experience) would be very difficult to publish anywhere more “official.” Publishing the first zine felt astonishingly easy. Not because it was easy, but because it was the right project for that season. And on the stream flowed from there.

Oh, the relief of finding the work! The way, as an artist, you can release the tension in your shoulders for a moment, take a full lung-filling breath, and make things without so much resistance. It feels so bad to do work that doesn’t fit anymore. I liken it to a “too tight shoe.” You can fight through it for a while, but at a certain point you, almost involuntarily, have to rip off the shoe and throw it across the room. Would rather go barefoot! Oh, the pleasure of the right size!

It’s not so simple though. Trying to get “back to work” after having Ben has felt so tricky, juggling two kids and ever changing nap schedules and exclusive breastfeeding and sickness and constant innovation. The time to work always seems to disappear. Publishing zines is very doable work for me, but it still takes time and focus. Sometimes, even with help, working does not feel possible. The push-pull of being an artist/mother, of my artist-residency-in-motherhood, which is how I would describe this season of my work (wrote about it here), is often exhausting. Plus, zines make far less money than sewing patterns, and we do depend on my income. The money from selling all well’s existing patterns dwindles by the month. I need to figure out how to make more money. I have so little time — I take care of our kids for the vast majority of their waking hours, working during naps or screen time or help from my mom. We live so simply, but everything is more expensive than it ever was before. We just received a surprise $1000 bill from the birth center seven months after Ben’s birth, apparently forgotten by all involved. I don’t say any of this to induce pity (goodness no), just to illustrate the problem. Needing to making more money as a self-employed artist person is always such a pinching, panic-inducing feeling. It keeps me up at night. Especially because, in keeping with my values and capacity, I can’t just make a cash cow new thing that will pay all our bills. That’s not how my brain or my practice works. It has to come from somewhere genuine. It has to be “the work.” And I always try to trust that the money will follow the work, which — sometimes it does, and sometimes it really doesn’t. Zines have been such an interesting endeavor, because it’s honestly the most money I’ve ever made from my writing (besides the All Well book), and it’s still so little. But I love the work I’m doing. And I believe it’s the right work for this moment. So what am I to do?

Oh, of course it will all be alright. I have lots of privilege and marketable skills, I can make money somehow if I need to. Thank goodness for that. But of course I want to make a living from my work and the things I have to offer. When that became possible after starting All Well, it really felt like a dream come true. It still is, it’s just not simple. So, I’m choosing for now (before too much pinch or panic), or press forward making the work that flows. And remaining hopeful, and diligent, despite truly not knowing how or if things will work in the future.

So, “what is the work?” I got this little card that asks this simple question inside a playbill at a really incredible play at the House Theater in Chicago (RIP!), and it has been one of my most precious possessions ever since. I look at it daily. What is the work? The work is writing, poems and essays. It’s taking care of my children and myself. It’s making containers for my writing that make it something beautiful and comprehensible to offer to the world. Right now, the work is not designing sewing patterns (though I hope it will be again someday.) It is not working outside the home. It is not working full time. It is not publishing other people’s worthy work (though that’s also a hope for Imaginary Lake in the future). The work is small and kept close to both my own body and to home. The work is quiet, and light on its feet. The work fits into very small spaces, very short time. The work is almost a secret, passed between friends. It’s what makes sense to me right now, what feels possible. And I’m proud of it, amidst all the challenges.

While walking around on the top floor of the Seattle Public Library with Amelia while we were in the thick of All Well work, I remember a conversation where we both resolved, “I want to be prolific.” I think about that a lot, proliferation. I think it’s one of my skills as an artist. No matter what, I make things. In great numbers! I have wanted to be prolific, and I have been. Amelia has too. We resolved it then, I think because we could sense our capacity, and the vastness of what we had already made. But I believe that my best work is still ahead of me. That there is more to plant and harvest. And I hope that what I have begun to make now is part of that stream of work that just keeps flowing. Of course it is, right? But I need to remind myself sometimes. Nothing is a sidetrack or distraction from the true work. All of it belongs and is part of my small legacy as an artist in the world. And that’s encouraging to me, to think of it that way. Even if it doesn’t all feel like it adds up to very much within my day to day. Even if most of the day is spent taking care of kids and maybe stealing thirty minutes to finish a work task, feeling like my real work is thousands of miles away. That’s the work too, I think. Because I’m prolific in my caregiving too. Prolific in midnights and mornings and cutting up apples and sucking snot out of noses and attention and answering questions and reading picture books and cleaning up millions of small toys and persevering through tantrums and changing diapers and giving hugs and kisses. By taking care of my kids, I lose the capacity to make more products to sell, more money, more career robustness. But I gain so much of my life, which I think I value more. It’s such a delicate balance that I never feel I master, but keep wading through.

All of this to say — I am really loving slowly publishing work for Imaginary Lake right now. I love the new poetry chapbook I just wrote and published. (Buy it here! I would love for you to read it!). Could I have saved up this poetry to try to publish it “for real,” to seemingly further my career as a very obscure poet? Yes. But, do I want to? No! Not right now! All of this is not a plea for you to buy the chapbook (I only want you to buy it if you want to read it! And if you want to read it and you don’t have money to buy it, just send me an email, I’ll send you the digital version for free! <3). I’m writing this trying to take stock of my work as it is in this moment. How is it going? Am I doing what I am capable of? What should shift? What is working? I’m asking myself these questions, and I think, for the most part, I’m on the right track. Some gentle self-affirmation, despite some unanswered questions and murky logistics.

So, I’m excited. I think this work is beginning to feel like small success. I love the ideas I have for new zines, the process of writing about what I’m learning in my life as a parent who is also an artist, and making little beautiful books to send in the mail. I love knowing they will be read and kept and cherished, differently than something written on the internet, and different than a book too. I don’t want this work to be published differently. I don’t want to share it too much more widely to people who won’t understand or actually want to read it. I like folding each piece of paper myself. I like having my toddler help me peel the stamps for the envelopes. I like fiddling with my silly little laser printers, and figuring everything out. I like being small right now, I think. Small bites of power and agency amidst so many things that feel out-of-control. My writing in this season is so close to the bone and about some of the most vulnerable times in my life. I want to do right by it. This work is worth cultivating slowly and carefully, so I’ll keep doing that. I think I have a lot to feel proud of, in the midst of feeling confused and like I never have enough time to accomplish what I hope. That’s all baked in I guess. That’s the work too. I owe such a debt of gratitude for all the support and enthusiasm and readers who have come alongside me, telling me to keep going. I want to offer more. I want to expand in time. But right now, I don’t think that’s possible yet. Here in the small right size of work in this season, pressing on! Gentle proliferation, one short hour of work at a time.

I invented Imaginary Lake to be a safe harbor for me and my work, and I really think it has been. In a time of great upheaval, I needed water. Big water. I feel so often like I’m free falling, like everything is out of control. What if there is gentle surface tension holding me up? A sensation of floating? A place to make small ripples that can radiate out gently from my own small body? Quiet, big, wide, deep. What if work could feel like that, even just for a short time? What if life could? I imagine this lake when I need to feel that I am safe and I know where I am. I wrote a poem about this, it’s in the chapbook. I’ll share it below. It’s such a simple image, but it’s so important to me. Maybe the big water can hold you up too.

Much love, from my water to yours.