Dear Somebody: Only half alone.

N eating homemade granola: a glimpse from my forthcoming illustrated essay about food + family, for Issue 38 (EASE) of Chickpea Magazine

A year from now, here are five things from this week that I'd like to remember:

MONDAY 

After spending a year with her at home, I drop F off for her first day of daycare. I told myself she’d be screaming and crying, but she leaps from my arms into her teacher’s without even a wayward glance. I disappear quietly, as we’re instructed to do. I shut the wooden fence behind me and walk home. 

There were many times over this past year when I wished for nothing more than to be alone. To feel the pulse and thought inside me, to see if there’s any brilliancy left. Any original thought. Today’s sky is my favorite sky: overcast, a rumbling heat-stricken white, a beautiful nothing. Open and waiting. I still don’t know this city, not really, but I know my neighborhood, and I feel lucky to have a 6-block radius that feels like home. Beyond familiarity, which comes with time, there’s a sense of belonging. Self-declared.

I watch wieldy dandelions sway from street traffic, their seeds blown off one by one and wished upon. N is learning about thunder and lightning, how it forms when frozen raindrops bump up against each other. I feel like that now—bumpy, knotted, pushed and pulled. Electric. The scent of space follows me. 

I once read that love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost. For so long I’ve been convinced that I’d lost this half to many places: childhood, adulthood and its suffocating responsibilities, marriage and its many compromises, my young children and the intensity of care required. 

As I walk, it occurs to me that I’ve been thinking about it all wrong. Half of me isn’t lost, buried somewhere out there waiting to be found. It’s been slivered and sprinkled, each piece tucked away in the dearest of places—for when someone might need it most. A sliver of myself to care for my childhood self, a sliver to help my present self carry on, a sliver for my marriage and its growth, a sliver left with each of my girls. Many still have have disappeared or lost themselves, forever, in people and places that didn’t pass the test of time—but they exist somewhere still, as ghosts and memories, within pages and paintings for someone else to find. 

If I could take find and take them all back, these tiny splinters and slivers would make a half and that half would—could—make me whole once again. But aren’t I lucky to have half of myself carried around in so many others? Part of me is with F, covering her small shoulders should a slight breeze come along. That small part will stay with her all day, and the rest of me will follow when collection time comes. 

I walk the rest of the way home. The tiny fingers of her absence prod me along, catching me behind the knees, hugging me close. I am only half alone. 

TUESDAY

One of the tiny books I made for graduation school was about leaving N at daycare so I could work, attend class, and do homework. It’s been two years since I made this little book, but it’s been circling my mind repeatedly this week. 

My favorite thing about art + literature is that it’s a vehicle for transportation. Books can take you anywhere you want to go—and places you’d be afraid to go otherwise, including further into yourself. 

You can read the rest of this tiny book in my journal. 

WEDNESDAY

“So many of us are thinking about love specifically because we are thinking about sorrow. How to hold it. How to survive the deathgrip of capitalism’s man-made chaos. How to bear broadcasted genocide(s), white supremacism, police brutality, our government’s incessant, deliberate dehumanization. How to stay human in the face, the grinning lustfulness, of empire. Several times a day I think, witnessing ordinary people do extraordinarily loving things, isn’t it incredible? All of these people for whom sorrow is leading them to love?” —from Shira Erlichman’s Freer Form

THURSDAY

Why creative labour isn’t always seen as “real work” and how to write the unbearable story (via Nicole Donut). 

FRIDAY

When I left, I left my childhood in the drawer
and on the kitchen table. I left my toy horse
in its plastic bag. 
I left without looking at the clock. 
I forget whether it was noon or evening. 

Our horse spent the night alone, 
no water, no grains for dinner. 
It must have thought we’d left to cook a meal 
for late guests or to make a cake
for my sister’s tenth birthday. 

I walked with my sister, down our road with no end. 
We sang a birthday song. 
The warplanes echoed across the heavens. 
My tired parents walked behind, 
my father clutching to his chest
the keys to our house and to the stable. 

We arrived at a rescue station. 
News of the airstrikes roared on the radio. 
I hated death, but I hated life, too, 
when we had to walk to our drawn-out death, 
reciting our never-ending ode.

—Leaving Childhood Behind by Mosab Abu Toha

xx,
M

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Dear Somebody: Making new paths.

A year from now, here are five things from this week that I'd like to remember:

MONDAY 

In this new year, I find myself waiting for 10:00 in the morning. I push you on the swing and you smile big, as if you swallowed the sun so its light would shine on through your face. It does. I don’t know for certain, but I imagine you feel weightless; unburdened by the demands of gravity. As if the world finally rolled backwards off your shoulders.

I carry you upstairs. First the diaper, then pajamas and a sleepsack, then back into my arms. After hours of growing teeth and army crawls, you are quiet. You drink from your bottle and pull on my hair. A chuckle escapes from your gummy smile. The light from your face speckles the wooden floors. A smattering of honey, soft and sweet. For the most part, you are happy. I see how you try to love the world. 

You fall asleep and when you do, my idling mind starts its engine once more. Which thought should I tend to first? The laundry or the meals, the manuscripts untouched. The creak of an entire house that needs a deep scrub. The emails, the phone calls, the texts waiting for response. The persistent clang of not enough. The occupation and the lives lost and the lives leaving this earth right now. All that I can’t do; all that I don’t do. 

At 9 months old, your hair is already to your shoulders. It’s a shock I love to see. The combination of coconut oil and soap reaches my nose and my head drops down to rest on yours. I hear the quivering call of a mourning dove outside my window; another bird responds. I am reminded, daily, that the earth does not need us. Nature answers itself while we remain silent. 

There are hundred-year-old trees right outside my front door. I close my eyes and they rise up around us. The light climbs higher over the winter clouds. Ghost grass grows taller; dull, deadened, sharp. I can’t see much beyond the bark engraved with age and the oldest green leaves, but you are here with me. Your breath, as great as the widest mouth of any river. My mind, finally quieter than the bottom of the sea. 

In this moment, I don’t care about all I have left to do. I breathe in your hair. I let my thoughts go. Your small body rises and falls with mine. We are cocooned. We are somewhere else. The earth cries out. It goes on without us. 

TUESDAY

I’ve spent years listening to Creative Pep Talk. I’ve often listened for hours on end— especially over the last two years in graduate school, when I often worked late nights or early mornings. Andy J. Pizza’s perspective often reassured me when I felt like an imposter, comforted me when I felt like giving up, and resonated with me when I considered (and re-considered) why I was working so hard to create a new path—and who I was doing it for. 

Naturally, I nearly lost my mind when he reached out last fall to record an episode together. On Episode #438 of Creative Pep Talk, we discuss how to push through creative ruts, escape a fixed mindset, and learn how to accept your own multiple (often competing) perspectives. 

If you listen to this episode, I’d love to hear what you think.

WEDNESDAY

In 2015, my first journal, Start Where You Are was published. I still remember how surreal it felt to finally become a published author—to have my words and drawings printed by a very real, very big publisher—to achieve a dream that I had dared to dream since I was a very young girl. 

View fullsize

View fullsize

This picture was taken sometime in 2020, I think, when Start Where You Aresurpassed 500,000 copies sold. That number is somewhere around 572,000 now. I am not confused about the success of this book. I know it has very little to do with me and much more to do with all of you—all of you who have support this book, and me, for so long. 

More importantly, it’s also a very encouraging sign of how many of us are committed to the lifelong process of exploring themselves more deeply—the effects of which we’ll see reflected back in our relationships with ourselves, our children, and—I hope, our communities. These days, that comforts me in a way little else can. 

New shelves in my studio hold some of my published books and projects.

In 2015, I felt like the luckiest person in the world to have my first book published. Two books of essays and four journals later, I still feel like the luckiest person in the world. I hope I get to make books forever. I will always try very hard to. 

THURSDAY

“There are several kinds of love. One is a selfish, mean, grasping, egotistical thing which uses love for self-importance. This is the ugly and crippling kind. The other is an outpouring of everything good in you—of kindness and consideration and respect—not only the social respect of manners but the greater respect which is recognition of another person as unique and valuable. The first kind can make you sick and small and weak but the second can release in you strength, and courage and goodness and even wisdom you didn’t know you had.”

—from John Steinbeck’s letter to his son, Thom

FRIDAY

I know, you never intended to be in this world.
But you’re in it all the same.

So why not get started immediately.

I mean, belonging to it.
There is so much to admire, to weep over.

And to write music or poems about.

Bless the feet that take you to and fro.
Bless the eyes and the listening ears.
Bless the tongue, the marvel of taste.
Bless touching.

You could live a hundred years, it’s happened.
Or not.
I am speaking from the fortunate platform
of many years,
none of which, I think, I ever wasted.
Do you need a prod?
Do you need a little darkness to get you going?
Let me be as urgent as a knife, then,
and remind you of Keats,
so single of purpose and thinking, for a while,
he had a lifetime.

—from The Fourth Sign of the Zodiac by Mary Oliver 

*Thank you to A for sharing this poem with me this week.

xx,

M

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Dear Somebody: The start of something.

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Happy new year, everyone. 

I took the last few weeks off in an effort to not be on the computer or my phone and it was wonderful, though I missed writing. This week’s letter is a mush of end-of-year recap, more/less for the new year, and, of course, poetry. 

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A year from now, here are five things from this week that I'd like to remember:

MONDAY 

End-of-year lists are tough for me, because I tend to zoom in on what doesn’t work instead of celebrating all that does. This used to be motivating. Recently, I’ve realized how continuing to push myself without acknowledging how far I’ve come has taken a toll on my confidence, resilience, and motivation. 

I don’t want the rest of my years to continue this way. Luckily, I am reminded daily that nothing in life has to be this or that. I can celebrate some things and decide to do other things differently. I can feel gratitude for what I have and let go of what I don’t need or want. I can love well and uphold strict boundaries. 

The gray is where clarity lives. It is simple. It is both. 

My 2023 memorables: 

• Having a safe delivery and giving birth to beautiful, healthy F. She is the greatest of all gremlins, the loudest 13-pounder, the absolute apple of both my eyes, and N’s favorite lovey. I can’t wait until she can look me in the face with her gigantic moonbow eyes and say, quite clearly, “no”—just like her sister does. 

• Graduating from Washington University with my MFA and a permission to dream bigger.

• Working less. Letting social media fall away. Creating less content, less paid work, less of everything. 

• Publishing How it Feels to Find Yourself: Navigating Life’s Changes with Purpose, Clarity, and Heart, a book that was born in the pandemic and carried me through the past few years. 

• Publishing Go Your Own Way: A Journal for Building Self-Confidence, the fourth in my journal series. Remembering Start Where You Are, which began it all. Feeling grateful for my past self, who took a chance on herself. Feeling grateful for my present self, who continues to.

• Some of the best work I made this year was for my column, Being, in Uppercase Magazine. I have the freedom to experiment with full support from my editor, Janine, and I feel lucky and grateful for her trust. 

• Pushing past the overwhelm to travel with two small children: 

  • Visiting friends and family in New Jersey. Playgrounds. Laundry. Meal prep. Doing the same mundane stuff I do at home, but with my sister. Three o’clock drinks, hide and seek, splash pads. Watching five tiny people I love so much love on each other. 

  • Visiting friends and family in London. Meeting my Penguin UK family. Seeing the city through N’s eyes from the very top of a double-decker bus. Holiday lights. N’s first ice cream crone. F’s first croup. Making it through. 

  • Spending our very first cousins Christmas at my sister’s. The joy of five little adventurers. All-floor hide and seek. Evergreens. Cold walks. A warm and cozy home, supported by a inexhaustible thermostat and family who knows me well. 

  • Visiting upstate New York for the final few days of 2023. Managing expectations. Practicing flexibility. Looking for the helpers; finding them inside ourselves. Creating new traditions that will carry into each next year. 

• Joining Margaux Kent a poem-a-day project, which has been a lesson in friendship, grace, and the power of art that isn’t shared publicly. 
  *I wrote more about this project in my last letter.

• Writing this newsletter! This year, propelled by an apathy towards my work, I shifted my focus away from marketing and towards meaning. I write this newsletter for myself, first—and second, in the hopes that it will resonate with someone out in the world. Most of the time, I find that it does. If I’m honest with myself, I can also be honest with you. 

  I wanted to write Dear Somebody weekly, and I tried my best to. Instead, I wrote 32 letters and gave myself a break when I needed one. That feels just right. I feel proud of how much I wrote and I’m excited to write more this year. Both/And. 
  

TUESDAY

Now that she’s 3, N has taken on an interest in Santa. I myself don’t know how to explain the phenomena of Santa, though my childhood was also made up of The Nutcracker and Christmas trees, dreaming in the same red-and-white-and-sugarplum colors that my children do. 

I don’t feel particularly attached to the idea of Santa, but I recognize what he can bring: Joy. Innocence. The ability to believe in something you can’t see, like friendship or courage or sometimes, yourself. The skills necessary to decide, on your own, when something isn’t worth believing in anymore. 

Who is Santa? N asks. You know, I’m not sure, I reply.  Is he kind? she says. Yes, I say. I think so. He tries to make others happy. She thinks this over. I’d like red rain boots from Santa, she says. Well, I tell her: Then you’ve gotta write to him and ask. And so she does.

Her very first letter to Santa reads: 

Dear Santa,

I want to see you because I really want to see Santa. I want you to take a photo by the Christmas tree so I can see you. And I would still like my red rain boots please. 

Your friend,
N

N places her letter to Santa on the coffee table, next to all of the other letters her cousins wrote to him. She studies the table, laden with cookies and milk and carrots for the reindeer. She looks at the chimney, which definitely doesn’t have room for even the slimmest of Santa’s to shimmy through. She wonders if she’ll hear him. She wonders if the reindeer will wait for him to return. 

I hope these letters will keep him warm, she says, at long last, before climbing up the stairs to say goodnight. 

WEDNESDAY

“Racism, it seems to me, is usually not calculated but is rather a form of stupidity: it’s the absence of thought. That’s why it is very important to think and speak as clearly as we can.

Of course I do also believe in the political value of slow forms, of art-making, even if this value is quite intangible and unpredictable, and even if I fairly regularly experience crises of faith. People with different professions and temperaments might be more suited to quick action; the present extremity of violence will eventually crest (even though this is actually very difficult to think about right now) and the tempo will shift and the slow people will become useful again. And at the same time there are shorter-term things we can all do, like speak truth to power when power is lying. We can try to lift up the voices that are being suppressed or drowned out. We can insist on history, and on facts, and on humanism.

But, also, artists and intellectuals are just people of the world. We need to hold on to the very basic democratic principle that the exercise of individual agency becomes powerful en masse.”

—Isabella Hammad in conversation with Sally Rooney

”If something inside of you is real, we will probably find it interesting, and it will probably be universal. So you must risk placing real emotion at the center of your work. Write straight into the emotional center of things. Write toward vulnerability. Risk being unliked. Tell the truth as you understand it. If you’re a writer you have a moral obligation to do this. And it is a revolutionary act—truth is always subversive.”

—from Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird

THURSDAY

After seeing Elizabeth Haidle’s more/less list, I read Anis Mojgani’s and Julia Rothman’s. 

And then I made my own:

Also: more hide and seek, more lemon, more taking new paths. 

FRIDAY

i am running into a new year
and the old years blow back
like a wind
that i catch in my hair
like strong fingers like
all my old promises and
it will be hard to let go
of what i said to myself
about myself
when i was sixteen and
twenty-six and thirty-six
even thirty-six but
i am running into a new year
and i beg what i love and
i leave to forgive me

—”i am running into a new year” by Lucille Clifton

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In 2024, I wish us all health, happiness, and hope. Thanks for being here with me. It will forever mean the world to me. —M

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xx,

M

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Dear Somebody: A poem a day.

Poem-writing at my messy, neglected desk: a longed-for part of each day.

A year from now, here are five things from this week that I'd like to remember:

MONDAY 

After F goes down for her first nap, I sit at my desk to write. Since November 7th, I’ve been in the business of writing poetry, a fact that continues to startle and amaze me. This practice happened into my life because of Margaux Kent, an old friend who has been writing and sharing poetry with two friends since April of this past year. The practice is simple. Each day, I write a poem, put it inside an envelope, and post it to Margaux. Each day she does the same, which means the amount of actual mail (ie: not a bill) that I receive has gone up exponentially. The amount of poetry I read has increased. My joy? It’s skyrocketed. 

I love poetry. I’ve always wanted to write poems. When I was younger and more daring, I actually did. As the years rolled on, the desire of being good—of being a “real” poet— became more important than the practice of writing poetry itself. This desire, which was actually a fear of failure, kept me from poetry. It placed a dividing line between me and the craft. It said: you are a reader, not a writer. In this way, this fear also kept me from myself. 

Creative life can be lonely; young-child life can be, too. I spend 90% of my time with my 7-month old, inside our home. It’s rare that I venture outside of our neighborhood. I haven’t been to a happy hour in years, and since F was born, I’ve taken a step back from my work and creative practice as well. My children are small and they require so much of me. I know the cliches are true: these years will evaporate much more quickly than each day feels. Also true: In this period of my life, there is less of me for myself. 

In November, I read about Margaux’s poetry project in her newsletter. Her dedication to this practice inspired me. To me, this practice isn’t a commitment to writing good poetry or becoming a good poet, but is, instead, a commitment to the oneself. It’s a commitment to internal listening, to writing for the sake of writing, to being in community with others. 

With hesitation, I comment on the post asking to join. A few minutes later, Margaux replies yes. With excitement. With open arms. Since early November, I’ve been writing a poem most every day. I write each by hand and place it inside a painted envelope. I walk to the blue post office box a couple of blocks away, usually with F in tow, and drop each one in. 

It’s December now. I’ve been writing daily poems for over a month. Here I am: a person who writes poetry. Like me, my poems are not good or bad; they just are. I am. A person. A poet. 

It’s difficult for me to put into words just how precious this practice is because it fulfills so many present needs: the need to write; the need for creative discipline; the need to capture small moments that otherwise go unnoticed or misremembered, swept into the wayside of magnificent-yet-ordinary detritus, like an orange peel or the sunlight’s hourly change. 

It fulfills a commitment to friendship; a need for knowing another more deeply; a need for vulnerability through craft. Each day, when I sit down to write, I think about how this creative practice gives me more than I thought it would: a change of intellectual scenery, a deeper affection for syllable-parsing and line breaks, the opportunity to rekindle a fractured creativity. Respite from a lonely few years. A coming up for air. Revival.

I write today’s poem and then place it in an envelope. I write Margaux’s name on the front and my own on the back. I don’t tell her this but I think about it now: that the beautiful part of this story isn’t in the poetry or the letters or the creative practice at all. It’s much more simple. It’s that when I saw a door and knocked, someone let me in. 

TUESDAY

“I can’t think of an act more generous than an atheist at prayer, who temporarily puts aside their disbelief in a god in order to bring comfort to a friend. Loosening your position for a moment, and doing something difficult because it has been asked of you by someone you care for, demonstrates a confidence in your beliefs, and shows that they are not so prideful or absolutist that they manifest into a smallness of being. 

Of course, to some this act will seem intellectually dishonest, a sham and a lie, but to others it will appear as the purest kindness, where heart eclipses mind, a true and complex gesture of what it means to love somebody. We show that in times of need we can do whatever is required of us, with a magnanimous heart, bending to the will of those we love. Understandably, it will be difficult for you to pray, but that is the very reason to do it. What is true friendship if we are not tested at times, if we are not prepared to soften our cherished ideals as an act of fidelity and commitment to those we love. In the end, this act of friendship may be the most eloquent prayer of all.”

—Nick Cave on praying as an atheist, which I interpreted as practical advice on being a human, a civilian, a friend. 

WEDNESDAY

John Hendrix, the chair of my MFA program in Illustration & Visual Culture, writes to ask if I’d consider sharing what I loved about our program. I’m nearly 8 months postpartum, which means it’s also been 8 months since I graduated from Washington University here in St. Louis. I live a stone’s throw from campus, so I think about school quite often. I miss being a student terribly; I knew that I would. 

Attending this program unlocked a lot for me, the most important being that it forced me to get out of my own way. I’ve always believed that if I could pick a vocation—either writing or drawing—I’d excel at one instead of chugging away, moderately, at both. This program gave me permission to not choose sides. It showed me the unique potential of being an artist who can share multiple perspectives of a story, through written and visual language. It gave me the strength—and the time—to begin working towards a new chapter of my career in children’s literature. 

I learned a lot about storytelling, developing a reliable creative practice, and creative discipline, but mostly, I learned more about myself: Who I am, what my values are, and the philosophy that will guide my work. I discovered what I want to make, why it matters, and who it is for. 

What you’ll get out of a graduate program is likely dependent on what you’re willing to put in. This program didn’t tell me what to think or believe or do—it didn’t give me a road map to follow, though I often wanted one. Instead, I was taught how to think: about storytelling, myself, and the impact this combination can have on the world. 

*If you have questions about this program or my experience at WashU, feel free to comment or email me.

THURSDAY

We watched Minari, finally, after the kids were asleep and the house was quiet and it was every bit as beautiful as we’d heard it was. An immigrant story can never not be beautiful, I think, because it always contains the full breadth of human experience: perspiration and heartbreak, incalculable risk; a heart now split in two, half of which can never be recovered from the country it was left in.

I watched most of Minari with my hands covering my eyes, which is how I watch any film worth watching these days. When it was over, I felt emptied, disappointed that life is so arduous for so many. T was mystified by my reaction. He beamed as the credits rolled, exhilarated by watching a family nearly broken by life’s difficult choices sew themselves back together. 

Willingly, I changed my perspective. 

FRIDAY

Suppose I say summer,
write the word “hummingbird,”
put it in an envelope,
take it down the hill
to the box. When you open
my letter you will recall
those days and how much,
just how much, I love you.

—Hummingbird by Raymond Carver

xx,

M

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Dear Somebody: Creating joy.

A year from now, here are five things from this week that I'd like to remember:

MONDAY 

Still tiny, a small comic about the large joy in tiny things.

Still tiny, a small comic about the large joy in tiny things.

TUESDAY

I graduated with my MFA last May, though it only feels like a few days between then and now.

During my defense, my professors ask me how I’m going to continue my education post-graduation: How will I nurture and encourage my continuous learning? How will I ensure that I wouldn’t lose sight of my pursuit—drawing and writing for children—amidst the chaos of ordinary life? 

Easy, I reply, because I’ve got it all figured out. I’m going to draw a four-panel comic every week. This will solidify a regular drawing practice, improve my ability to draw from life, and ensure that my love for drawing not only remains, but flourishes. I am determined. I think to myself, with certainty: Yes. My love will keep this work alive.

That was five months ago. 

As you’ve probably guessed, I spent those five months relearning an old familiar lesson: that love, alone, can’t keep anything alive—not a burgeoning skillset, not an inspired state of mind, and certainly not a five-month old baby.

I’m not sure if it’s all children, but mine requires regular feeding and rocking, every two hours—still, seven outfit changes a day, and constant mopping. She’s a mess and apparently, also sentient. This little bowl of mush needs serious eye contact, tickling, and someone to giggle with. She likes being read to aloud and often. She likes when her older sister is near, which comes to absolutely no surprise to younger siblings everywhere, across the entire spectrum of humankind, for as long as siblings have existed. She likes having her limbs examined. She does not like when I put her down to draw.

So here I am, five months later, with my first four-panel comic—and it’s only three panels. It took me 10 hours to make, from conception to sketch to final coloring, and several revisions—spread out over seven naps, each ranging from 30 minutes to 1.5 hours. If I think about how many days it took me (seven, a full week!) I lament, especially when I compare my speed to my life pre-children. 

But none of that really matters because the entire time I was drawing this comic, I was full of joy. Real joy. The kind I text my friends about because I can’t believe it’s real—that the feeling I’m always chasing is here, right now, swimming inside me. 

I feel joy flood down every avenue. I feel joy because I’m drawing and because I feel joy while I’m drawing. I feel joy because I’m pushing myself to try new things within my work, however slowly, however little by little. I feel joy because I’m getting somewhere. I feel joy because I’m trying. 

I feel joy in drawing my children, in having children who are so sweet and so round, in knowing that someone out there may recognize their own child in these drawings. In knowing that maybe a child will even recognize themselves. 

I feel joy because for a little while, my mind is quiet and my blood is steady—and that although joy is a feeling I am always chasing, it’s also something I know how to find. Joy is something I know how to create. I created it here for me, for my children, for you. 

WEDNESDAY

“My hunch is that joy is an ember for or precursor to wild and unpredictable and transgressive and unboundaried solidarity. And that that solidarity might incite further joy. Which might incite further solidarity. And on and on. My hunch is that joy, emerging from our common sorrow — which does not necessarily mean we have the same sorrows, but that we, in common, sorrow — might draw us together. It might depolarize us and de-atomize us enough that we can consider what, in common, we love. And though attending to what we hate in common is too often all the rage (and it happens also to be very big business), noticing what we love in common, and studying that, might help us survive. It’s why I think of joy, which gets us to love, as being a practice of survival.”

—from Ross Gay’s Inciting Joy

THURSDAY

My new 2024 calendar, still in its plastic wrap, lest I spill something on it before the calendar year turns.

In case you missed it last week, my new 2024 planners and calendars are now available! 

These are now available through Buy Olympia, directly through Amber Lotus Publishing, or in bookstores everywhere. 

FRIDAY

It is difficult to know what to do with so much happiness.
With sadness there is something to rub against,
a wound to tend with lotion and cloth.
When the world falls in around you, you have pieces to pick up,
something to hold in your hands, like ticket stubs or change.

But happiness floats.
It doesn’t need you to hold it down.
It doesn’t need anything.
Happiness lands on the roof of the next house, singing,
and disappears when it wants to.
You are happy either way.
Even the fact that you once lived in a peaceful tree house
and now live over a quarry of noise and dust
cannot make you unhappy.
Everything has a life of its own,
it too could wake up filled with possibilities
of coffee cake and ripe peaches,
and love even the floor which needs to be swept,
the soiled linens and scratched records . . .

Since there is no place large enough
to contain so much happiness,
you shrug, you raise your hands, and it flows out of you
into everything you touch. You are not responsible.
You take no credit, as the night sky takes no credit
for the moon, but continues to hold it, and share it,
and in that way, be known.

—So Much Happiness by Naomi Shihab Nye

xx,

M

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Dear Somebody: Go Your Own Way

Hi, everyone—

I’m writing to you today, on a Monday morning, with an exciting reveal: the cover for my upcoming journal, GO YOUR OWN WAY: A JOURNAL FOR BUILDING SELF-CONFIDENCE, which will be published on October 24, 2023 by TarcherPerigee (Penguin Random House)!

Go Your Own Way is a journal for building self-confidence. The pages of this book will help you in outlining your personal values, feeling more comfortable in your skin, and gaining confidence in who you are. You will cultivate the strength necessary to recognize and speak your truths, while creating healthy boundaries that protect your sense of self. Most importantly, Go Your Own Way offers guidance in developing inner trust—necessary for taking risks, facing challenges, and progressing in the direction of your dreams. 

PRE-ORDER GO YOUR OWN WAY

A spread from Go Your Own Way

I wrote this book while completing my final year of graduate school. I painted all of the art for it while working on my thesis project, pregnant with my now-five-month old daughter. I created the journal I needed at the time: the one that would help me as a new mother—a new student—a person in a new city—who felt incredibly lost, insecure, and uncertain…see herself once again. 

If you’ve enjoyed my previous journals, this book is for you. If you find yourself thrown by a new chapter in your life, this book is for you. If you know someone who could use a little help finding their way back to themselves, this book is a thoughtful way to let them know you’re on their side. 

PRE-ORDER GO YOUR OWN WAY

Pre-orders are vital to the success of any book. All publishers rely on pre-orders (and sales, in general) to see whether the books we write resonate with people and whether they should continue supporting us in creating them. Strong pre-orders for this book indicate strong interest. Strong interest encourages my publisher to buy my next book. 

More than that, pre-orders signal to my publisher—and the larger world of book publishing—that the work I’m making is important. That talking about emotions, vulnerability, and the complexity of the human condition is important. That a person’s self-confidence will be shaken, time and time again, and that it is natural. That we all need help sometimes. That learning to like and love ourselves is integral in raising children who will like, love, and respect themselves, too. 

That creating books of value, with the intent of widening a reader’s mind and heart, is more important than a book designed to simply look good on the Internet. 

So, how can you support me and this work?

• Pre-order a copy (or five!) of Go Your Own Way: A Journal for Building Self-Confidence

• Forward this newsletter to someone who will appreciate this book!

• Ask your local library to carry the book if you can’t afford to purchase it—knowing that your entire neighborhood will now have access to it!

• Ask your local bookstore to carry the book. I love local bookstores and want to support them as much as possible throughout this launch. 

• If you want to review or write about Go Your Own Way (or know someone who might), feature it in your publication/podcast/etc., or interview me — just reply to this email to reach me. Every little bit helps.

THANK YOU for reading and for all of your support. I wouldn’t be doing what I do without y’all. I’m incredibly lucky to have this community; that is never lost on me.

See you on Friday with a new edition of Dear Somebody! 

xx,

M

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Dear Somebody: The way it is.

A year from now, here are five things from this week that I'd like to remember:

MONDAY 

“There’s a 23-year-old girl in my MFA cohort that I secretly admire. Daniela’s an excellent illustrator, very technically skilled, and her work shows an emotional depth that resonates deeply with me. We begin sitting together at lunch, and though her company is welcome, it quickly becomes clear that we couldn’t be more different. She’s outgoing and open-hearted; I am reserved and overly critical. She drips with the confidence only youth can bestow; I am anxious, intimidated by my own expectations and what a younger cohort thinks of me. Motherhood has stripped me of my confidence. The reality of being thrown into a powerful role that’s impossible to prepare for has me questioning what, if anything, I’m qualified to offer—to a friend, fellow student, and of course, my own child.

Daniela is comfortable with vulnerability. In each conversation, she invites me into another part of herself—her dreams, her ambitions, her own insecurities, and mistakes. She asks me for advice about relationships and building her career. She is genuinely curious about my experience with marriage and parenthood. I’m not familiar with a lot of her vocabulary—like a true millennial, I have trouble understanding the shorthand Generation Z slips into so easily. When I ask her to define a word she uses, she laughs at me gently, like a sibling. I feel at ease, comfortable in her company, starkly aware that the only person she wants me to be is myself. 

Often, I think about how easily this friendship could’ve passed me by; it was only through a small crack in the door of my heart that she came through.”

—excerpted from An Open Heart, an essay on friendship I recently wrote for issue #57 of Taproot Magazine

TUESDAY

This embroidered version of The Wind in the Willows by Rachel Sumpter that I bought months ago. I have yet to begin my own embroidery project, but this sits on our dining table (buried under a heap of N’s own paintings) patiently waiting for me; reminding me there is still time. 

WEDNESDAY

My days pulse with an air of desperation: I am uncomfortably aware that time is passing with rapid speed—that although the days feel long, full of to-do lists and diapers and laundry and tears—they are, in fact, steamrolling right through me. 

My child turns into a young girl before my very eyes, my infant into a curious baby; my body fails me not because it is weak but because it is neglected; my art won’t make itself and no one, other than me, needs me to make it; I will always, always fall short of my own aim and expectation; I cannot have it all, full stop, most likely—but I definitely cannot have it all at once. My brain agrees that there is a season for everything; my body does not physically understand it. My blood courses with agitation. 

I find comfort, as always, in all the familiar places:

“People always ask me how I managed to paint when my two boys were small. My children were a joy to me, and there was no problem working with them around—I just let them play at my feet as I painted. They would even run toy fire engines up and down my easel, but it didn't bother me. The only problem was how to keep them safe when we were doing field work, such as plowing with the horse. Once on a TV interview I was asked about this and I said, "Oh, we just tied them to a tree." When I listened to the program later, I was horrified.” —Dahlov Ipcar

“It’s my belief that even the freest, most single and childless writers rarely do more than four hours of intense writing a day. I do the same, but I just have much less spare time to waste. In order to write, I cut out a lot of things: reading the newspapers, for example. I listen to the radio, because you can do that while cleaning. And I have to avoid all social media and most daytime emailing. But I have also absolutely given up on the idea of peace and quiet as being necessary to writing. I just don’t allow myself to think about that.” —Zadie Smith

“I used to have these acres of time. And I didn’t particularly realize that until they went away. But one of the things that I at least have found from having a child is it’s not ever just one way. For a while it will feel like there’s no time, and then time will feel expansive again. And then there will be times when I don’t even want to write because it’s just kind of completely compelling to me to be doing other things. And then there will be other times where I feel like if I can’t write and have time to myself, I’m going to scream. But kids are so funny, too. They’re much more fun than most of the things I did when I was just a depressive-freak single person.” —Jenny Offill

THURSDAY

“To love, to be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and vulgar disparity of the life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never power. Above all to watch. To try and understand. To never look away. And never, never to forget.” 

—from Arundhati Roy’s Azadi

FRIDAY

There’s a thread you follow. It goes among
things that change. But it doesn’t change.
People wonder about what you are pursuing.
You have to explain about the thread.
But it is hard for others to see.
While you hold it you can’t get lost.
Tragedies happen; people get hurt
or die; and you suffer and get old.
Nothing you do can stop time’s unfolding.
You don’t ever let go of the thread.

—The Way It Is by William Stafford

xx,

M

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Dear Somebody: When the ceiling becomes the sky.

The bound dummy book for my MFA Thesis project, When the Ceiling Becomes the Sky.

A year from now, here are five things from this week that I'd like to remember:

MONDAY

Two days ago, I successfully defended my Master’s Thesis in a room full of faculty, all of whom are working illustrators, writers, and historians. I presented my critical essay, Mothering as Feminism, which proposes a new theory of feminism centered on the liberation of all people through the fundamental viewing of a mother as, first and foremost, an autonomous person worthy of value and care. I also presented my picture book dummy, When the Ceiling Becomes the Sky, which follows a child as she navigates the uncertainty that accompanies the birth of her baby sister and her mother’s postpartum depression.* 

I felt strange. Although the notion of discussing the work I’ve agonized and toiled over for the past year is exciting and opportune, I don’t like being the center of attention. On top of that, I was barely three weeks postpartum, didn’t fit into any of my clothes, and hadn’t slept more than three hours at a time since F was born. In the ten months leading up to this moment, I’d fretted about defense day. I’ll mess up, I told myself. I was convinced I wouldn’t be able to talk about my work in my postpartum haze—hormones surging through me, brain addled, body rearranged. I knew I’d probably cry.

As most postpartum people will tell you, birthing a child doesn’t automatically revert you back to your old self; instead, it catapults you into becoming someone new—someone you haven’t met yet, someone you’re not certain you’ll even like. This new person feels oddly present—and even more oddly—at peace. This new person feels confident, certain of her capabilities and her power to create change. 

The birth of my child also birthed a new me: one who can not only start over, but who does, and always has—again and again.

* P.S. I am interested in publishing both my picture book and my critical essay. If you know a publisher who may be a good fit for either project, please let me know. 

TUESDAY

Now that my picture book pitch is nearly finished, I’ve moved onto feeling both intimidated and excited at the prospect of pitching to children’s book agents and editors—along with a fair amount of post-adrenaline despair. The following interviews with artists I admire has brought some levity to this next stage of work:

• Michaela Goade on cultural respect, representation, and advocating for Mother Earth in her work. I also appreciated how open and honest she is about her path into the picture book world. 

  I recommend: Berry Song by Michaela Goade

• Jericho Brown on small truths and other surprises, and a wonderful look at how he constructs a poem (first: cut them apart).

  I recommend: Bullet Points by Jericho Brown

• Cátia Chien on the not-balance between motherhood and work, and again on how beautiful art blooms from creative struggle. 

  I recommend: Things to Do by Elaine Magliaro and Cátia Chien

WEDNESDAY

What I’ve been reading lately:

A look into Beatrix Potter’s journals, where her fascination with nature—particularly mushrooms and rabbits—influenced her illustrations and ultimately, the development of characters for her Peter Rabbit books. 

Inside Out & Back Again, a novel in verse by Thanhhà Lại, about a young girl fleeing Saigon for the United States during the Vietnam War.

Lisa Olivera on the ongoing practice of being present. 

THURSDAY

When I stepped outside after my defense, T was waiting for me. 

We’d agreed to quickly celebrate by grabbing margaritas at our local taco place for a few minutes before picking N up from school. Sitting on picnic benches in the warm sunshine, I filled him in on how it’d gone—the advice my professors had given me; the praise that had fallen out of their mouths and seeped into me, warming my bones; how I felt about next steps; what I wanted from my work and career moving forward. How it was all finally over.

It’d been 2 years since I first started graduate school; it was difficult to believe it had all come to an end. I’d sat through full days of class after waking up at 4 am with N; I’d written a book during each year of school, working nights and early mornings to fit it all in; I’d endured another difficult pregnancy while developing my thesis work, and I’d given birth to my second child a few weeks before my Thesis exhibition and defense. It was a lot, and often, I didn’t have faith I’d actually get through it. 

Me and T are both lucky enough to work for ourselves. While this means we have immense flexibility, it also means we work constantly—out of necessity, yes, but also out of a deep love for what we do. During the first year of graduate school, we argued out of sleeplessness, fatigue, both feeling our work had been deprioritized. During the second year of graduate school, we’d settled into a healthier rhythm: both prioritizing each other’s work and each other’s health, with the understanding that each stage of compromise was temporary and for our family’s greater good. The hard year gave way to the healthier year: we learned and grew from our own fallacies.

T moved us from Nashville to St. Louis, driving a 36-foot U-Haul. He renovated a condo for my parents to live in so they could help care for us; for 2 years, he did every single diaper, nap time, school pick-up and drop-off; he took N to the playground or zoo while I wrote my books, he made lunches while I did homework, he cleaned the house while I studied and wrote papers. He listened to me gripe about pregnancy, gestational diabetes, the body leaks, the brain fatigue. He thought through story plots with me, studied my character development, my concepts, my sketches. He told me to rest; he told me to stop working; he told me when he believed I could—and should—do better; he told me to try again. 

In the sunshine, we sit across the table from each other for 23 minutes. Since having children, time is allotted to us in minutes—a few here and there—usually less than 60, in which to shower or write or make a meal. T tells me how proud he is of me; I thank him for helping us all get through the past few years. My eyes well up and when his do, too, I finally understand it—what he has told me over and over again, what has been so difficult but necessary for me to believe—that my win is not my win alone. It is also his, and ours, and our family’s. No one at this table is alone. 

FRIDAY

May they never be lonely at parties
Or wait for mail from people they haven’t written
Or still in middle age ask God for favors
Or forbid their children things they were never forbidden.

May hatred be like a habit they never developed
And can’t see the point of, like gambling or heavy drinking.
If they forget themselves, may it be in music
Or the kind of prayer that makes a garden of thinking.

May they enter the coming century
Like swans under a bridge into enchantment
And take with them enough of this century
To assure their grandchildren it really happened.

May they find a place to love, without nostalgia
For some place else that they can never go back to.
And may they find themselves, as we have found them,
Complete at each stage of their lives, each part they add to.

May they be themselves, long after we’ve stopped watching.
May they return from every kind of suffering
(Except the last, which doesn’t bear repeating)
And be themselves again, both blessed and blessing.

—Prayer For Our Daughters by Mark Jarman

Guns are now the #1 killers of American children and teenagers. We will continue to demand action; please donate to Everytown to support those trying to keep our children safe. 

The National Network of Abortion Funds helps ensure the bodily autonomy and reproductive rights for all people. Please consider donating if you can.

If you'd like to support me, you can pre-order my upcoming book of illustrated essays, How it Feels to Find Yourself, for yourself, a loved one, or both! To receive a free archival art print from the book, please pre-order through BuyOlympia. My art prints, stationery, and books are also available through BuyOlympia. 

See you next week!

xx,

M

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Dear Somebody: Our mothers and fathers.

Maja, gouache and colored pencil on 16”x20” Arches paper. Currently on view at the Washington University Graduate Center

A year from now, here are five things from this week that I'd like to remember:

MONDAY

Most days after lunch, I go for a walk with my dad. I put on my shoes and coat and wait for him by the door. I’m impatient, feeling like a little kid waiting to be driven to school. Sometimes my dad does drive me to school, just like he did when I was growing up, the only differences being that it’s now 25 years later, I’m in graduate school and married with a kid, and he’s retired. 

I’m in my mid-thirties and he’s nearing 70, so it feels a little silly that my dad still takes care of me. It makes me feel even more childlike than I normally do. I get frustrated when he won’t let me carry a heavy bag home or cautions me against walking too fast. He frequently reminds me of things that are impossible to forget, namely that there’s a baby in my belly and I need to take care of myself. Before dinner he slices guava into pieces, sprinkling each with salt, pepper, cumin, and red chili. We eat them in silence, crunching the seeds.

Most evenings after dinner, I power walk around my parents’ apartment in an effort to lower my blood sugar. I start by the living room window and walk straight into the kitchen, around the tiny dining table replete with folding chairs, past the cabinet filled with dozens of glass jars holding seeds, nuts, and flours, past the couch where T and my mother sit talking or reading the news, and straight back towards the window again. If N has already taken her bath, she joins me. “We’re doing exercise!” she shouts with glee, running faster with each lap, cajoling me to keep up with her. She holds my hand with one hand and her belly with the other, mimicking the way I support the baby swimming inside me while waddling around the cozy apartment. 

These walks are the markers of my days: the one I take alone after breakfast, the one with my dad after lunch, the one with my daughter after dinner. They will come to an end quickly, I know. In a few months, the baby will come, and after that, graduation. My parents will move back home and there will be no more walks with dad—after lunch or at any other point during my days. 

I consider this small sorrow daily, usually while putting on my shoes. And then I wait for my dad by the door. 

TUESDAY

“Care is like ephemeral art—an Andy Goldsworthy sculpture of mac and cheese and baby wipes and no tears shampoo and socks that never match and chore charts that never work and all that just gets blown away with the winds of time. And like art that isn’t static, isn’t permanent, can’t be put up on a wall and admired in a museum—care is devalued. We stumble on it sometimes in the wild and it takes our breath away, a momentary glimpse of the tenderness with which we hold and protect and nourish and delight in our loved ones; just like one of Goldsworthy’s mandala’s, there’s a divine structure to it, a feeling of inevitability. It’s as ordinary as dirt and as sacred as the kind found at Chimayo. It’s here, there, and everywhere, so kind of nowhere.

Caring for someone you love is, of course, a reward on to itself, the deepest of them, but it need not be labor that happens in such embattled circumstances. It could be absorbed and still revered, invisible and still funded, ephemeral and still prized. It could be held as the center of our existence, rather than the thing we rush through to get to our “real work.” We could see and honor the seasons—caring for children, caring for elders—and the variable capacities—the neurodivergent and disabled and chronically and temporarily ill.”

—The art of care mostly disappears from Courtney Martin’s The Examined Family

WEDNESDAY

The perfect way to begin this morning is by listening to the Our House demo with Graham Nash and Joni Mitchell while making N’s lunch and rubbing the sleep from our eyes. 

THURSDAY

We’ve heard a lot about quiet quitting lately, but this post by my friend and artist Lisa Congdon, about loud quitting, really stayed with me. In it, she writes: 

So far in the past 9 months, I’ve quit alcohol, food restrictions, teaching college, my podcast (more on that to come), two boards of directors, working on Fridays, working on umpteen client projects at once, coffee dates with people I don’t know, most public speaking, writing any more books, several friendships, and most weekday evening plans. I have not felt as happy, “balanced” (if such a thing exists) and such a sense of spaciousness in nearly 20 years. 

I’ve begun to think of this as “loud quitting” — intentional, communicated, assertive (as opposed to passive), and unapologetic. So, to be clear, this not necessarily the opposite of “quiet quitting,” which is about not going above and beyond in the workplace (which I also support) — just simply my way of overtly claiming and taking control over my time in a way I haven’t in my entire life — because, for most of my 55 years, I thought it was literally my duty to please/serve others. 

I contributed a comment about my own long string of things I’ve quit this year, and it’s obvious that neither Lisa nor I are the only ones. The past few years have all added up to this one, where we’re rediscovering what our values and boundaries are—and that’s always something worth celebrating. 

FRIDAY

whose influences, we said,
    made us passive and over-polite
whose relationships with our fathers
    we derided at consciousness-raising groups
whose embroidered pillowcases still accuse us
    on the shelves of our modern lives

they have become interesting old women
they are too busy to write often
they wish we wouldn't worry about them
they are firm about babysitting
they are turning out okay

—Our Mothers by Leona Gom

If you'd like to support me, you can pre-order my upcoming book of illustrated essays, How it Feels to Find Yourself, for yourself, a loved one, or both! My art prints, stationery, and books are available through BuyOlympia. You can also pledge your support for this newsletter by becoming a future paid subscriber. 

xx,

M

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Dear Somebody: Time is strange

A glimpse of Maja, the painting I’ve spent my mornings working on.

A year from now, here are five things from this week that I'd like to remember:

MONDAY

Time is strange. It is both urgent and painstakingly slow. 

Today, it strikes me that I have less than 3 months to finish my thesis picture book, my dissertation, and my final exhibition. Less than 3 months to prepare a nursery. Less than 3 months until my next book is released. At the same time, I have almost 3 more months of medication, of uncomfortable sleep, of monitoring my blood sugar, of remembering to take half a dozen pills. 3 more months of sharing my body with another person. 

Time is strange. It is what I govern my days by, despite knowing that it is entirely made up. It is both urgent and painstakingly slow. 

I read Otis Kidwell Burger’s diary entry and something about her experience, so familiar and unlike mine at the same time, eases the restless in me:

But surely everyone, at one time or another, has awakened thinking himself in some other place or in some earlier time. The conception of time depends, then, I suppose, upon the perception of continuity, and for this reason a woman's sense of time must be quite different from a man's. Her sense of continuity is internal and natural, not the external and easily interrupted continuity of clocks and calendars. She connects directly to the source of time, and the moon that pulls the tides around the world also pulls the hormone tide within her; her months are marked off without need of calendar. She carries her months, her years, her spring and winter within herself.

TUESDAY

I’m very excited by Violeta Lopez’s work, and I’ve been eagerly awaiting her latest picture book, At the Drop of a Cat (Enchanted Lion Books) ever since I first caught glimpses of it last year. I’m someone who becomes easily trapped in thinking rather than doing: I mull over my process. I think through ideas and experiments without actually just…trying them. This is rooted in fear of failure—I’m aware of that, yes, but having the awareness hasn’t made it any easier to change. 

Watching Violeta’s process of creating this book is eye-opening. Instantly, it becomes clear that there are particular perspectives that are attainable only through our hands, that can only be conjured by the grit of paper and pencil on our fingers, inaccessible entirely to our minds. 

In my own thesis project, I’ve finally finished re-writing the manuscript to my picture book. It took me over a dozen rewrites, 3 entirely different storylines, and many months to finally hear my own voice throughout the book. As I begin to paginate and create thumbnail artwork for the book, I find myself leaning forward, excited and nervously, by Violeta’s method for putting together a story. Rather than our own thoughts or ideas or even the stirring of our own hearts, it is the doing that continues to surprise us the most. 

WEDNESDAY

“I also have a full life outside. I work from home, but I travel a lot. Those two things mean I have to be very routine based, which sometimes means knowing when to stop writing. Every day, if I’m not done working by like five or six, I give myself a hard stop and I step away from my computer and usually don’t return to it. I call it quits for the day and any emails can wait until the next day. For me, knowing when to stop writing was a problem a couple years ago. I would work late into the night. I was telling myself I did my best writing at half ‘til midnight and then work deep until like 2am, and that wasn’t really serving anything. I’m much more excited about the idea of waking up and getting to writing now. The fact that I can wake up and know that I can put words on a blank page is more exciting to me than feeling like I have to put words on a blank page in order to earn the right to sleep.”

—Hanif Abdurraqib on avoiding burnout in creative work

THURSDAY

“…While we wait we must remain prepared and alert, and one way to do so is to write things down, in order to advance the idea, as this indicates a readiness to receive. Beware, however, of the idea that comes too easily, as this is often a residual idea and only compelling because it reminds us of something we have already done. We don’t want an idea that is like something we have done before. We don’t want a second-hand idea. We want the new idea. We want the beautiful idea.

One day, you will write a line that feels wrong, but at the same time provides you with a jolt of dissonance, a quickening of the nervous system. You will shake your head and write on, only to find that you come back to it, shake your head again, and carry on writing — yet back you come, again and again. This is the idea to pay attention to, the difficult idea, the disturbing idea, shimmering softly among all the deficient, dead ideas, gently but persistently tugging at your sleeve.”

—Nick Cave on how to recognize when something you’ve written is worthwhile

FRIDAY

I never knew I loved the sun
even when setting cherry-red as now
in Istanbul too it sometimes sets in postcard colors
but you aren't about to paint it that way
I didn't know I loved the sea
                             except the Sea of Azov
or how much

I didn't know I loved clouds
whether I'm under or up above them
whether they look like giants or shaggy white beasts

moonlight the falsest the most languid the most petit-bourgeois
strikes me
I like it

I didn't know I liked rain
whether it falls like a fine net or splatters against the glass my
   heart leaves me tangled up in a net or trapped inside a drop
   and takes off for uncharted countries I didn't know I loved
   rain but why did I suddenly discover all these passions sitting
   by the window on the Prague-Berlin train
is it because I lit my sixth cigarette
one alone could kill me
is it because I'm half dead from thinking about someone back in Moscow
her hair straw-blond eyelashes blue

the train plunges on through the pitch-black night
I never knew I liked the night pitch-black
sparks fly from the engine
I didn't know I loved sparks
I didn't know I loved so many things and I had to wait until sixty
   to find it out sitting by the window on the Prague-Berlin train
   watching the world disappear as if on a journey of no return

—from Things I Didn’t Know I Loved by Nâzim Hikmet

(This poem was sent to me by Stephanie, a subscriber. My favorite gift to receive is a poem. If you’d like to share your favorites, please do so in the comments below for us all to enjoy.)

If you'd like to support me, you can pre-order my upcoming book of illustrated essays, How it Feels to Find Yourself, for yourself, a loved one, or both! My art prints, stationery, and books are available through BuyOlympia.

xx,

M

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Dear Somebody: Listening to yourself.

from Listening to Yourself for Issue 56 of UPPERCASE Magazine

A small note: next week, this letter will come from Substack instead of Flodesk. Please set your inboxes to accept email from meeraleepatel@substack.com to prevent your spam filter from intercepting them.

This weekly letter will continue to be free, but moving to Substack will allow me to foster community: you'll be able to comment on letters and engage in conversation if you wish. As I prepare to graduate from school this semester, I'm re-evaluating what I want my business and career to look like. Being able to offer a paid tier for my work (some possibilities I'm considering are process tutorials, personal comics, illustrated poetry, or guided journaling workshops) will allow me to sustain my business while stepping back from work that I've outgrown. 

I've spent the past two years deep in transition and 2023 will include even more change, both personally and professionally. I'm strictly prioritizing writing and illustrating books, including a new beginning in picture books––and caring for my young family. I want to be more present; I want to continue growing; I want to uncover the work inside my heart. I imagine many of you share these same goals. 

If there is an offering you'd like to see from me in the future, please let me know! Just hit reply to write to me. Thank you, always, for supporting me and my work. 

A year from now, here are five things from this week that I'd like to remember:

MONDAY

When K, C, and their daughter M arrive to spend New Year's Eve with us, I am both excited and nervous. It's one thing to have a good friend visit, but another to mesh your families together for the first time. As an adult, long-term friendship requires more than the friendship of youth: more emotional investment, more depth and deliberation, more evaluation. I take friendship seriously; I cull my garden regularly; I become more protective of my heart and my time. 

The days pass easily. Time slips by like water. We start each morning with a long, meandering walk through St. Louis, stopping only to grab coffee or watch our girls hold hands. The conversation dips between music, culture, and parenting before sloping into relationships, families, finances. Nothing feels too intimate to share. I watch our families lean into each other and feel my friendship with K widen. 

The four of us sit on the couch long after December disappears into January, our laughter occasionally, slowly, shaping into yawns. The future is open; I watch the possibilities multiply; my heart swings against itself. I take note of how lucky I am.

TUESDAY

On listening to yourself:

"Over the last few weeks, I’ve prioritized myself again. I’ve begun meditating, spending time with a notebook and pencil, and consciously separating my own thoughts from the ones externally projected onto me. I’ve protected my vulnerability by only sharing myself with those I trust to understand and support me. I’ve begun writing, though it is difficult, and though the words come much more slowly than they used to. I paint for how it makes me feel, not for what the final image looks like.

I do all this with the understanding that learning to hear myself again is a continuous practice, and one that I won’t always be able to sustain with regularity. Life will happen, again—as it always does, and as it should. I will stumble again, possibly succumbing to self-doubt, much to my own disappointment. If I can continue to create, however—if I can reach down and discover what else there is inside me, to listen to myself more closely than I have before, and to write and draw what I believe to be in my heart, then there is a chance that someone out in the world will see it—and that it, too, will be what they need most in that moment."

––An excerpt from my latest column, Being, for Issue #56 of Uppercase Magazine 

WEDNESDAY

A holiday gift to myself: surrounding myself with strong, unapologetic women––including this new studio inspiration from Her Name is Mud to guide me through this upcoming year of creating, transition, and challenge:

“I've been absolutely terrified every moment of my life and I've never let it keep me from doing a single thing that I wanted to do.” ––Georgia O'Keeffe

THURSDAY

“If we are sincere in wanting to learn the truth, and if we know how to use gentle speech and deep listening, we are much more likely to be able to hear others’ honest perceptions and feelings. In that process, we may discover that they too have wrong perceptions. After listening to them fully, we have an opportunity to help them correct their wrong perceptions. If we approach our hurts that way, we have the chance to turn our fear and anger into opportunities for deeper, more honest relationships. The intention of deep listening and loving speech is to restore communication, because once communication is restored, everything is possible, including peace and reconciliation.” 

––Thich Nhat Hahn, from Fear: Essential Wisdom for Getting Through the Storm

FRIDAY

you owe it to yourself to quit being the apology. to

hold your hand and sing your favorite song. to

love another and see how far that will go. to love

yourself and forget where you were headed in the

first place. love is a funny story. it wakes up and

builds a plot. it wakes up and shapes you into the

kind of woman your mother studies. i am not per-

fect in it. i am not even remotely articulate. but it

is big, this love. it is airborne and triumphant. i am

no easy show. i hurt like the climb of my lineage. i

hurt on purpose. i hurt to not be hurt. no, none of

this is an excuse. just a blueprint. a map. come

find me when the day is bronze and the sorrow is

full. i am building my poem in this here heart. all

of it is a working title.

––Until the Stars Collapse by Tonya Ingram

xo,

M

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Dear Somebody: Running into a new year.

A glimpse of the art from “Elegy/A Crow/Ba”, an illustrated poem (forthcoming)

A year from now, here are five things from this week that I'd like to remember:

MONDAY

While you are sleeping, I consider your breath, wait for it beside my own, measure each one by the slow climb of your stomach against blue linen sheet. 

You are round; the moon. You love me, for now. I try my hardest to keep you curious, believing there is more—ocean floor under sea under twilight under sky under cloud under bird under song, I try my hardest not to undo you.

Your eyes, closed. The moon, alone. No one sees it come and go, its great back against the persistent sky, its face turned this way or that, with no mother to watch or wait for it. 

TUESDAY

N and I watch a handful of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood episodes on repeat, especially Episode 47 from 1985 which features Yo-Yo Ma, so I was especially interested in learning more about Ma's latest collaboration which unites music, culture, connection––and America's national parks.

“Culture is able to look at the macro universe and the micro universe and bring it back to a size that we can see, feel, touch and analyze. What if there’s a way that we can end up thinking and feeling and knowing that we are coming from nature, that we’re a part of nature, instead of just thinking: What can we use it for?"

––Yo-Yo Ma is Finding His Way Back to Nature Through Music by Joshua Barone

WEDNESDAY

Holding this sentiment close as I move into the final semester of my MFA program, work on my thesis project + defense, and remind myself why I do the work I do: 

“The books I’m writing are houses that I build for myself." ––Etel Adnan via Shira Erlichman

THURSDAY

The reflections I'm considering as we move into 2023:

1. What do I want to prioritize in the next 12 months? Are these pursuits rooted in an internally or externally-motivated sense of self-worth? And: If no one sees what I'm making, do I still want to make it?

2. The relationships I'd like to prioritize, cherish, and foster: the people that make me feel like enough, who celebrate my successes, and who aren't afraid of life's messiness. Making an effort to create community in my new city, continuing to be honest about life's joys and disappointments, and understanding that not everyone is for me.

3. What are the feelings, fears, and habits I'd like to leave behind? Especially: What cycles of thought and convictions am I better off without?

4. Recalling the impermanence in all things.

FRIDAY

i am running into a new year
and the old years blow back
like a wind
that i catch in my hair
like strong fingers like
all my old promises and
it will be hard to let go
of what i said to myself
about myself
when i was sixteen and
twenty-six and thirty-six
even thirty-six but
i am running into a new year
and i beg what i love and
i leave to forgive me

––i am running into a new year by Lucille Clifton

xo,

M

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Dear Somebody: Together at last.

From Three Shooting Stars, a tiny comic about the life of an artist. 

A year from now, here are five things from this week that I'd like to remember:

MONDAY

When we board the plane to New Jersey, a switch goes off. I don't know where the switch was, or is, but it must exist because something flips it from ON to OFF. 

I refer to it as The Sea Switch. This switch controls the space between me and N, a swath of distance that rose between us when I crossed the Atlantic for France back in June, and has remained between us for the 8 weeks since. This sea is full of rocky waves. Thrashing storms. A constant swallowing of debris.

When the plane begins taxiing, N‘s eyes open wide. She immediately shuts the window shade and crawls into my lap. I’m wedged into the middle seat, a sleeping stranger to my right, T to my left. N takes my hand in hers and burrows her face into my neck. I’m surprised by the intimacy in her actions: something so traditionally mother-and-child, that for us, has become foreign. Forgotten. I’m so pleased that I ask T to take pictures of us, and he does. 

When I send the photos to my sister later that evening, she tells me I’m beaming, the light shooting out of my face. I study the photos and it’s true: mother and child, in each other’s arms, together at last—even, if only, for a little while.

TUESDAY

"A merging of two people is an impossibility, and where it seems to exist, it is a hemming-in, a mutual consent that robs one party or both parties of their fullest freedom and development. But once the realization is accepted that even between the closest people infinite distances exist, a marvelous living side-by-side can grow up for them, if they succeed in loving the expanse between them, which gives them the possibility of always seeing each other as a whole and before an immense sky.” 

––Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

WEDNESDAY

For those wondering if art school is necessary, I enjoyed this series of interviews:

“I think college is important if you want to learn specific skills. But later I prioritized making art — I didn’t go into an M.F.A. program after I got my bachelor’s degree, because I really wanted to think about what I was doing. That’s when I made a U-turn — I stopped taking assignments, decided to make use of what I had learned, went home to Jamaica for a while and began making work about the Caribbean, a marginalized place, but a place of opportunity nonetheless. And that’s what a lot of my work still deals with: Caribbean ecosystems, their issues, what’s beautiful. School taught me to write down my dreams and attack them, that they turn to dust if you don’t.” ––Paul Anthony Smith, from Art School Confidential by Noor Brara

THURSDAY

A simple ink-on-bristol comic titled Three Shooting Stars: Chronicling the Life of an Artist, now up on my blog.

FRIDAY

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

––The Peace of Wild Things by Wendell Berry

xo,

M

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Dear Somebody: Where has all the time gone?

In the sixth month, a collage illustration for Ilya Kaminsky's We Lived Happily During the War

A year from now, here are five things from this week that I'd like to remember:

MONDAY

“Probably the best thing my parents did—two simple things that don’t seem to occur to many people—was to give me my own desk just for art and to let me use professional (or at least good) art supplies from a very young age. My father was a printmaker in the 1980s, so he had all of his stuff lying around and was very generous about it. Other than that, I did not have after-school art classes or trips to museums or things that people assume are key to inspiration. In the 1980s, art was seen as an optional thing in the sidelines of life, so you got to make “creative stuff” at school if you happened to get a teacher who was personally into it. That was about once every three years. I would say that, instead, boredom was the key to inspiration. My family didn’t have any money to spare, didn’t go many places, and therefore my brothers and I had loads of unstructured time, our own desks, and a backyard with plants and dirt. We didn’t have vacations, other than driving to a river or a beach once in a while, so I figured that exploring ideas in the far reaches of one’s imagination was perhaps the best way to travel.”

–from Elizabeth Haidle's interview with Haley Laningham in Southeast Review

P.S. Elizabeth (who is as lovely on the phone as she is on the internet) has a new needle felting course out that I'm excited to take this summer. Maybe you'd like it, too!

TUESDAY

Today marks the last day of my first year of graduate school. It feels anticlimactic; I knew it would. Significant days have a way of doing that: feeling like a terrific storm that took a wrong turn somewhere, forgetting to arrive. The body fills with an anticipation so large that there is very little room left for the prospect of satiety.

In preparation for my final review, I finished illustrating Ilya Kaminsky's We Lived Happily During the War, and bound my illustrations for William Bronk's The Tell into a neat little book. I thought about how much I love poetry, and how poetry has always loved me back, the way only books or paintings or music can, without reason or knowing how.

This summer, I'll write and illustrate some of my own poems. I want them to be good. I want them to be so good, so badly, that I often think about not writing them at all. The one thing graduate school has taught me is the one thing I already knew. In life and love and art and parenting, you can't really plan on it being good. The only thing you can plan on––all you can really count on––is trying.

WEDNESDAY

"The Ama divers of Japan are all-women divers. The women dive tankless making them free divers, and while they also collect seafood and seaweed, their main focus is pearls. Ama means ‘woman of the sea’ or ‘sea women.’

The world of the ama is one marked by duty and superstition. One traditional article of clothing that has stood the test of time is their headscarf. The headscarves are adorned with symbols such as the seiman and the douman, which bring luck to the diver and ward off evil. The ama are also known to create small shrines near their diving location, where they will visit after diving in order to thank the gods for their safe return."

–on the Ama divers of Japan, from Erin Austen Abott's newsletter, Field Trip

THURSDAY

It's 6:45 am and we are downstairs in the kitchen, Mr. Morale & the Big Steppersplaying on the stereo, N shoveling fistfuls of granola into her face. Her head hinges at the neck like an L-shaped bracket and she moves corpse-like to the beat. She is, by far, the best dancer under this roof.

I laugh aloud and the future flashes behind my eyes: N at 14 slamming the door in my face, N at 3 giving me a soaking wet post-bath hug, N at 22 calling me on the phone, I hope, just to say hello. I laugh aloud and her voice fills the space between my ears like crickets' song, beautiful against the early morning stillness.

It's 6:48 am and I'm back downstairs, standing in the kitchen while she bops along to Kendrick Lamar. “MA-ma!" she shouts, beckoning me to dance, but I feel exhausted, having traveled to the future and back. She's only 18 months, I know, but it was yesterday that I brought her home from the hospital.

Where has all the time gone, I wonder.

FRIDAY

I like the lady horses best,

how they make it all look easy,

like running 40 miles per hour

is as fun as taking a nap, or grass.

I like their lady horse swagger,

after winning. Ears up, girls, ears up!

But mainly, let’s be honest, I like

that they’re ladies. As if this big

dangerous animal is also a part of me,

that somewhere inside the delicate

skin of my body, there pumps

an 8-pound female horse heart,

giant with power, heavy with blood.

Don’t you want to believe it?

Don’t you want to lift my shirt and see

the huge beating genius machine

that thinks, no, it knows,

it’s going to come in first.

–from Ada Limón's How to Triumph Like a Girl

xo,

M

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