Thanksgiving

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Thank you for your words, below.
Thank you for looking at the things I make.
Thank you for reading as I write about my remarkable and ordinary daily life.
Thank you for being generous.
Thank you for thinking of me.
Thank you for suggesting things to me I wouldn’t have thought of.
Thank you for commenting and letting me read about your lives, too.
Thank you for being a community that is dispersed and distant but somehow very present just when needed.

small theaters

Films by Joseph Cornell.
Improvisations by David Shapiro.
I updated my layout here to be a bit simpler. Links are over here now and I’m going to try to update them more often. All my highest recommendations for distraction, all in one place.

persephone books

30% off orders in my shop with the code ALMOSTDECEMBER. Calendars ship free with code SHIPFREE11. Both codes valid til 2 December.

pépé and granddaughter

day

with tiny trees

I had one, and it was pink all over. Included: breakfast with flowers and friends. Walking through town and all the thrift shops with no complaints. A new coat from J. and a book he made. A long navy wool skirt from one shop. Lunch. J. off to Czech Republic for work. Many happy messages. Teaching my students (who were really great this week), preceded by picking out prizes for them for a game we’re playing. The joy of their excitement over the prizes (win!). Dinner with N. Hot-fudge sundaes with friends: a trio of handmade boxes full of shells, a piece of wood, bubbles, and candy. A length of really adorable fabric printed with bunnies dressed up for hinamatsuri (I think it will become a blouse). A shibori scarf and a little man and a picture frame. A year of milk delivery. A toadstool cookie-cutter, a hat for TOM, Small Change, and a beret. Candy, soap, tea-towels, and a manga from home. So so so so nice. And very pink, in case it wasn’t clear.

rolling out the slab

printshop

prep

I remember the smell of it and also the feeling. First on Tuesday nights and then Monday and Wednesday mornings and then an evening class again, sitting at big square tables and trying to get my brain around it: process, material, product. And my tendency, my natural way, is always to go for what seems prettiest and most immediately possible. That isn’t to say that is always where I end up. Because I do work hard against that urge (a kind of urge to the decorative or ornate or simply pretty to the exclusion of thinking work through and ideas through) and I have to consistently shore my thinking up against that urge. And this isn’t to say that I don’t value the ‘simply’ pretty, because I do. You should see my house. And also, to digress yet further, I think that an active choosing of ‘pretty’ is also about the development of a certain aesthetic, and not necessarily uncomplicated or itself uncomplex for that.  But I was talking about printmaking and the smell of gum arabic and the teacher walking around shouting  at us to fan harder and the feeling of my stiff black apron and the way the tarlatan snapped and going back after class into the grad students’ area and feeling completely out of place, out of my depths, and also quite completely and warmly welcome, and thinking now, much later (although it doesn’t seem so long, but lo, at least these five years, goodness, since I’ve been there) about how much I appreciated that, the space and the company and all of it (including a friendship that brought me to Norway a couple of springs ago to see a printshop there), and the warmth, yes, and working together, but especially the warmth.

what you said about my poems

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