The first time I held a printed copy of Learn to Let Go (Saint Louis, 2025)
A year from now, here are five things from this week that I'd like to remember:
MONDAY
I am excited to reveal the cover for my upcoming journal, Learn to Let Go: A Journal for New Beginnings! This cover came together after many, many rejected concepts and sketches, and after much back and forth between me and my design team.
In the end, I am pleased: it is bright, joyful, and reinforces the beauty in letting go: only by relinquishing our attachment to the emotions, relationships, and dynamics that weigh us down can we create the space necessary for new, evolutionary growth.
I will speak a lot more about this journal in the upcoming months—I have a slew of comics and interviews (all about letting go!) that I’m excited to make and share with you. Releasing the unfair expectations I have of myself—as a mother, artist, and general human-person—has been a reoccurring lesson over the past few years and I’m strangely excited to dip into these reflections and share how I’ve grown.
If you have the means to pre-order and support this journal, please do—pre-ordering now will make a huge difference in the success of this book!
As I’ve written before, 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 will be required to let go of that which hurts them, but that sometimes, they’ll have to make peace with the loss of a thing, or a person, or a place they loved, too—and that it’s okay to need help.
Below are links to the regulars; I’ll update this list as the book becomes more widely available:
Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop.org, Books A Million, Hudson Booksellers, Target, Walmart
As always—thank you for reading, engaging, pre-ordering, and supporting my work. Every little bit helps, and I am ever so grateful.
TUESDAY
“On returning from a walk today I said to myself that I would not be like some girls, who are comparatively serious and reserved. I do not understand how this seriousness comes; how from childhood one passes to the state of girlhood. I asked myself, "How does this happen? Little by little, or in a single day?" Love, or a misfortune, is what develops, ripens, or alters the character.
If I were a bel esprit I should say they were synonymous terms; but I do not say so, for love is the most beautiful thing in the whole world. I compare myself to a piece of water that is frozen in its depths, and has motion only on the surface, for nothing amuses or interests me in my DEPTHS.”
—from artist and writer Marie Bashkirtseff’s diary, Marie Bashkirtseff: The Journal of a Young Artist, 1860-1884
WEDNESDAY
As I continue to research, practice, and begin to incorporate various methods of collage and printmaking into my art, I’ve been unable to get the work of María Berrío out of my head.
Aminata Linnaea, 2013 by María Berrío, courtesy of Victoria Miro
Berrío works primarily by layerring hundreds of torn, cut, and collaged pieces of Japanese paper on top of each other. She then adds light, shadow, and detail using watercolor or acrylic washes, pencil, and ink. The effect is dazzling. I love her use of color and pattern, and especially how her figures remain starkly flat throughout.
THURSDAY
“Satori is kind of enlightenment in life. These moments of illumination: Lying in bed at night, and all of a sudden you realize, I need to be a better partner, a better brother, be more patient, stop being petty. Then you wake up and life happens — a bad work email, someone’s being annoying — and you lose sight of all of that. So satori is a brief window, and the idea for Buddhists is to allow the understanding in that brief window to alter your life.”
—from an interview with Ocean Vuong in The New York Times
FRIDAY
Look, the trees
are turning
their own bodies
into pillars
of light,
are giving off the rich
fragrance of cinnamon
and fulfillment,
the long tapers
of cattails
are bursting and floating away over
the blue shoulders
of the ponds,
and every pond,
no matter what its
name is, is
nameless now.
Every year
everything
I have ever learned
in my lifetime
leads back to this: the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other side
is salvation,
whose meaning
none of us will ever know.
To live in this world
you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it
against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it
go,
to let it go.
—In Blackwater Woods by Mary Oliver
See you next week!
xx,
M
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