Dear Somebody: I am not a machine.

A page from my sketchbook (September 5, 2024)

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

MONDAY 

N and F both started school this week. For N, it was after 18 weeks at home; for F, it was for the very first time, after nearly 18 months at home with me. I’ve missed my work, time, and space immensely, but a sense of overwhelm still lingers. I’m working on a few projects that I’m really excited about—illustrating a beautiful picture book manuscript, developing a few other proposals, and beginning a new accordion book—but nothing much has gotten done this week.

I sink into my ennui, hoping it will lead somewhere. Almost entirely present, I shop for groceries, enjoying the quiet of the empty early morning aisles. I go on a walk around my neighborhood and adopt a leisurely pace. I catch up with an old friend and marvel at how wonderful conversations are without a toddler shouting in my unattached ear. Sometimes I miss the girls, and sometimes I don’t. At 10:30 in the morning, I sit on the couch and read my book because I want to. I say nothing aloud for hours. I answer to no one. 

I think about what I want, and how it isn’t to be an artist on demand. It’s to be an interesting person, one who reads books and poetry, who speaks when it’s necessary and not only to fill the absence of something, even if the absence is a place inside myself. I think about what I need, and how it isn’t to be lauded for what I do or do not make. It’s to breathe air and have space. To move my body. To let that be enough.

Instead of starting on my next round of picture book sketches, I make a very messy painting in my sketchbook. I write my needs down so the pages can remind me when my mind cannot. The painting is garish, even to me, but something about it—perhaps the honesty—feels sweet, and I like it. 

Everything I make doesn’t come out beautifully—mostly, I make mistakes. When something works out, it’s usually because I worked hard at it. I am tough, but I am not a machine. 

TUESDAY

Thanks to the internet, I am painfully aware of what others are accomplishing, and it’s often a constant reminder of what I’m not. When I feel guilty for not working—for relaxing, pursuing hobbies, or simply feeling content (!), I ask myself the following questions.

• What is the source of my self-worth? My insecurity is at its highest when my self-worth is linked to something outside of myself: career success or achievements. I feel guilty if I haven't worked a certain number of hours because I believe my worth is intrinsically linked to my productivity. I believe I must earn my value as a human being.

• What if that source disappears? There is always the possibility of losing your job, being unable to pursue your goals for, say, health reasons, or simply being unable to meet your own expectations. Ensuring that your self-worth is internally rooted is necessary for enjoying yourself and your life, guilt-free.

• What do you value about yourself? For me, it is my discipline, my thoughtfulness, and my ability to empathize with other, helping them feel seen. Valuing myself for existing as a unique being in the world allows me to seek validation and self-worth from myself, rather than from others.

Society is designed to feed off our output; feeling content despite my fluctuating productivity is a continuous work in progress. I regularly remind myself of my inherent value, finding that when I do, I no longer need to frantically goal-seek to feel worthy.

—Excerpted from How it Feels to Find Yourself: Navigating Life’s Changes with Clarity, Purpose, and Heart, my book of illustrated essays

WEDNESDAY

We spend a few days in Kansas City doing the same thing we do wherever we go—finding the best playgrounds and taco shops. 

Among my personal highlights was visiting The Rabbit hOle, an immersive museum celebrating children’s literature. I’ve been wanting to go for a few years now, since I learned of the initial idea for it, and it was just lovely to experience so many beloved books brought to life.

Every exhibit we saw was beautiful, but I was especially taken by the Strega Nonaexhibit, one of the stories I read most repeatedly as a little girl. 

Outside Strega Nona’s house at The Rabbit hOle museum

Inside Strega Nona’s house, saying hello to Tomie dePaola

These photos are just less than, but inside Strega Nona’s house were several dioramas built into the wall, each one—complete with working mechanics—playing out a scene from the story, from the time Strega Nona hires Big Anthony to work for her to the very end, where the never ending pasta overthrows the entire town. N was mesmerized, watching each scene on repeat until I pulled her away to explore other exhibits. I am married to books, but I'd love to create sets for plays and exhibits one day, too. 

Related: Phoebe wrote about the depiction of Strega Nona in her Fat in Picture Books section of her newsletter last week. 

Related: one of my favorite Tomie dePaola books for artists (and their self-doubt), is The Art Lesson, gifted to me by T a few years ago. 

THURSDAY

F & N, entirely too comfortable in someone else’s studio (2024)

I also had the chance to finally visit fellow artist Sarah Walsh at her lovely studio! Sarah was gracious enough to accomodate my two tiny monsters and gifted N some gorgeous puzzles from her line with Eeboo. I haven’t been able to meet very many artists over the last few years, and it was a breath of fresh air to talk to another working mama about the mechanics of building a creative life and staying honest with ourselves, in our work and in our lives. 

If you aren’t familiar with Sarah’s work, I recommend checking out her latest zine, Horse Girl, and her latest book, Rainbow Science. 

FRIDAY

Bring me all of your dreams, 
You dreamers. 
Bring me all of your 
Heart melodies
That I may wrap them 
In a blue cloud-cloth
Away from the too rough fingers
Of the world. 

—The Dream Keeper by Langston Hughes

xx,

M

---

To sign up for my weekly newsletter, Dear Somebody, please subscribe here.

Dear Somebody: A neverending field.

Fred in a neverending field (mixed media on paper, 2024)

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

MONDAY 

Sitting in the hospital bed, F looks smaller than usual—a tiny sailor lost at sea. Her face is washed with fluorescent light, and she rustles when the heart monitor beeps every few seconds. I look around us: there are wires and monitors and shuffling feet all around us, but mostly, I see luck—great gobs of it, golden and glittering against the walls. We are in a good hospital. Our medical team is gracious, caring, intelligent. I trust them to care for my child. 

Still, though, I am stuck—frozen—for the entire duration that F is asleep, anesthetized by a medical professional who assures me he will administer only the amount appropriate for her weight and blood pressure, only the amount her heart can take. I recite my favorite poem by Gerald Stern to myself. My child is in safe hands, and I know the only reason why is luck. If life is a gamble and our family is playing the ponies, we’ve already won. 

A few moments before she’s taken into surgery, I change F into her hospital gown. Sensing a moment of transition, she begins to cry. F’s young, but I believe she knows this is the moment before and that none of us, not even her mother, knows when afterwill arrive. She sits still, a stoic little Alice—but her eyes wander curiously, full of wonder even as she prepares to fall down the rabbit hole. F’s gown gathers in folds, impatiens bunched together in a neverending field. This is winning, I remind myself.

If I close my eyes, I can erase this entire hospital from my mind. If I close my eyes, I can picture F in the neverending field, her entire face beaming at a summer breeze. In this field, bees hum around us, hunting for a sweet smell. There is bird song and chatter; the occasional plane flies overhead. In this field, we are together—and no mother ever wonders if her child will wake up. 

TUESDAY

An illustration of my family for Issue 38 of Chickpea Magazine

“Each day after school, my husband and I picked up our daughter from daycare and walked over to my parent’s apartment, where they’d have tea and snacks waiting for us. My daughter took her bowl of pistachios or kaju katli, an Indian sweet made of cashews—and settled herself in the small nook between the oven, sink, and refrigerator. There she’d sit cross-legged on the floor, chatting about her school day with my mom. My dad cut fruit—apples, mangos, or guava, sprinkled with salt, pepper, and cumin—and we’d sit on the living room floor, chatting about my school assignments and progress. On some days, dinner would be ready and waiting for us on the kitchen table; on others, I’d join my parents in the kitchen and help finish the preparations. Each evening, without fail, we’d migrate to the small wooden table and eat dinner together—all three generations of us, each with our own set of disappointments and dreams.” 

—From my latest illustrated essay, “The Biggest Dream”, for Issue 38: Ease of Chickpea Magazine. 

WEDNESDAY

On asking yourself what kind of artist you want to be by Fariha Róisín and Generation Gap by Sarah Moss; paintings by Ewelina Bisaga; showing the dissonance between what one says and what one does in visual work by Jillian Tamaki. 

THURSDAY

You shouldn’t get disillusioned when you get knocked back. All you’ve discovered is that the search is difficult, and you still have a duty to keep on searching. —Kazuo Ishiguro

FRIDAY

HEY

C’MON
COME OUT

WHEREVER YOU ARE

WE NEED TO HAVE THIS MEETING
AT THIS TREE

AIN’ EVEN BEEN
PLANTED
YET

—Calling on All Silent Minorities by June Jordan

xx,

M

---

To sign up for my weekly newsletter, Dear Somebody, please subscribe here.

Dear Somebody: The Biggest Dream

From my illustrated essay, The Biggest Dream, for Chickpea Magazine

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

MONDAY

Chickpea Magazine, Issue 38: Ease

An image of my essay, “The Biggest Dream,” for Issue 38 of Chickpea Magazine

An image of my essay, “The Biggest Dream,” for Issue 38 of Chickpea Magazine

For Issue 38: Ease of Chickpea Magazine, I wrote about meal preparation as an act of love and care, especially among immigrant and first-generation families—and in my own, as I’ve known it. 

I think about food like I think about most things: pragmatically. I always liked to eat and cook, but that’s evaporated since becoming a mother. Now, meals feel overwhelming: a neverending physically-and-mentally taxing chore necessary for nourishing my young family. I’ve resented this task for who I believe it asks me to be: a devoted mother who easily slaps together healthy, delicious meals without stress or sweat—not because I don’t want to be this person, but because repeatedly, I’ve failed at actually becoming her. 

I first spoke to Cara, the editor of Chickpea Magazine about this piece because I was interested in exploring the perception of care. A single act of love can communicate a wildly different message to the recipient than the message the giver intended to relay; our culture, environment, and personal histories all factor into how we give, perceive, and receive care. For many first generation children, care is not easy to receive. It takes a good deal of work to crack ourselves open enough to even see that it’s there. 

In this essay, I look back on my last pregnancy, which I carried while finishing my final year of graduate school at Washington University. I explore the inevitable clash of multiple generations and cultures living under one roof; parental love shown through the monotony of meal planning, grocery shopping, meal preparation; and how food saves us in the places where, often, language fails. 

This was also the first time I drew my father, pictured here making granola with N, while me and F (in my belly!) talk to my mom, who is, of course, of course…making chai. 

I grimace, almost daily, about my kitchen: it is small, dim, and feels crowded if there are more than two people in it. The magic of drawing is it allows me to see what my eyes cannot: the walls that opened up to let my family grow; the hundred-year-old bricks that still stand strong; the love and care blooming in this tiny kitchen that is, for now, just the right size.

You can read “The Biggest Dream” in its entirety in Issue 38: Ease of Chickpea Magazine. Many thanks to Cara for the opportunity. 

TUESDAY 

I finished Laurie Frankel’s Family Family, which I loved, and can’t wait to read the rest of her work. I wrote about This is How it Always Is in a previous letter (“Tiny miracles everywhere,” see below) and will read The Atlas of Love next. 

I finished Happiness Falls by Angie Kim and am amazed at how well her brain works. 

I’m also reading Bright Young Women by Jessica Knoll, which I am frightened by and want to put down—but I read on because of Knoll’s sharp, intelligent writing, and the truth it exposes about living as a woman, especially in America.

WEDNESDAY

To be sure, I am a forest, and a night of dark trees: but he who is not afraid of my darkness will find banks full of roses under my cypresses. —Friedrich Nietzsche

THURSDAY

I’m still thinking about these gorgeous sketches by Winsor Kinkade and the art of American illustrator Alan E. Cober, which I only discovered because he did the cover art for this thrifted copy of The Sword in The Stone that I’ve had on my dresser for over a decade.  Illustrator Fatmia Ordinola’s work is lush and makes me feel the way it looks: vibrant, buzzing. 

FRIDAY

Imagine: 
I stop running when I’m tired. Imagine: 
There’s still the month of June. Tell me, 
what op-ed will grant the dead their dying? 
What editor? What red-line? What pocket? 
What earth. What shake. What silence.

—from Hala Alyan’s Naturalized

See you next week,
M

---

To sign up for my weekly newsletter, Dear Somebody, please subscribe here.

Dear Somebody: A Love Letter to My Creativity

My latest illustration for Issue 62 of Uppercase Magazine

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

MONDAY 

For Issue #62 of Uppercase Magazine, I wrote a love letter to my creativity. I’ve wanted to write this for years, inspired by an old friend who wrote a letter to her own, but I never did. I didn’t make time for this beautiful exercise, and I know why now: I couldn’t write a love letter to my creativity because I didn’t have love for it. Where there should’ve been a commitment to nurturing and protecting my creativity, there was resentment—for the artist I wasn’t, and the art I didn’t allow myself to make. 

The past few years have been clarifying. Instead of burying my creativity six feet under, I used them to hibernate—to practice listening instead of talking, observing instead of performing, and exploring instead of sharing—to practice practicing, for myself, for my craft. For my creativity. 

The reward is a diamond. It isn’t flashy. It doesn’t look like a glamorous, shiny gemstone I can flash around or make reels about. I have less to show, there is less garnering of attention, and not much of me is left at the end of each day—but the diamond itself is real. It took years to unearth, and now that I have it, I know I’ll protect it. The diamond is greater confidence. The diamond is a belief in myself, in a knowing that I can create my dreams out of whatever I have around me. The diamond is a genuine love for my creativity—one that makes the process of writing and drawing fun, challenging, and, quite plainly, delightful. 

TUESDAY

View fullsize

View fullsize

View fullsize

“When I first became a mother in 2020, I was enveloped by the notion that I shouldn’t lose myself to domesticity: to motherhood, to my family, to my home. I didn’t want my creativity to evaporate; I loved my work and career. I wanted a clear work-life separation, I wanted a studio where I could deposit my thoughts, I wanted a room of my own. I felt a stark separation within myself—one where the artist in me perpetually fought to step out from under the shadow of the mother in me. As a tide slowly retreats from shore, my creativity, too, waned—but with no promise of return.

When I decided to have another child, I knew I’d have to approach myself differently. I couldn’t carry the resentment of not being enough—or the self-imposed pressure of keeping my career life cleanly separate from my life as a mother. I needed to redefine what my work meant to me, and I needed to redefine where creativity lived. Instead of seeing my work as a vessel for my creativity, I spent the year shaping my creativity into the vessel itself: I wanted it to live everywhere.”

—An excerpt from My Year At Home: A Love Letter to My Creativity, published in Issue #62 of Uppercase Magazine. The 12 lessons I reflected on are available in the full essay, available online and in newsstands everywhere.

WEDNESDAY

We’re in Michigan for the week, and it’s exactly what I was hoping it’d be. 

Blackbirds chase falcons in the clouds; the water chases the sky, F chases N across the sand and state lines. Every so often, N turns me to me and says, Mom, I’m so happy we’re here. 

We eat waffles on the beach, we climb rainbow stairs, we move through each mess more quickly and cleanly than before. We’re learning; we’re living; we’re all together—and not just in the physical sense of the word.  

THURSDAY

Michigan is on repeat all week, of course—as it should be—and it led me to discover the artwork of Brooklyn artist Laura Normandin, who is responsible for the album’s artwork, and who, quite frankly, I should have known about much sooner. I like her painted bottles, this woven enclosure, and the fact that it appears she’s managed to escape the internet. 

FRIDAY

Broad sun-stoned beaches.

White heat.
A green river.

A bridge,
scorched yellow palms

from the summer-sleeping house
drowsing through August.

Days I have held,
days I have lost,

days that outgrow, like daughters,
my harbouring arms.

—Midsummer, Tobago by Derek Walcott 

xx,

M

---

To sign up for my weekly newsletter, Dear Somebody, please subscribe here.

Dear Somebody: Absorbing the magic.

Pencil sketches of my girls (2023)

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

MONDAY 

Since I last wrote, all and nothing has happened—and at a pace that shows little chance of change. The days linger the way absence does; each full of popsicles, bike rides, and small conversations about death. 

Laying down in her new big kid bed, N surprises me with her thoughts. When I’m all grown, I’ll have the magic, she says. Kid, you’ve already got the magic, I tell her, but she shakes her head and brushes me away. You have magic and dad has magic, and it’s okay because you’re big. But magic comes from the ground and goes up into your feet and if you get it when you’re little, you’ll be dead.

She pauses and then adds, like Jack, as she does often these days, his name smushed against dead on her tongue. 

N, you are the magic, I want to say, mesmerized by her brain, but instead, I try to understand what she means and in trying, I almost do. I am disappointed by the deep chasm between young and old, by the misunderstanding that ripens when an adult spends too much time in worry and not enough in imagination. My thoughts aren’t as flexible as hers—they don’t stretch in directions beyond what I can see. 

When you are old, you will be dead, N informs me, in words so plain and true there’s nothing for me to do but nod. It is dusk and I am startled, not by my own impending death, but by the inevitable separation of me and my child. She is only three, but already, it feels close. One day, she will live without me—and if I am lucky, it will be only because my body is no longer here. 

N doesn’t appear concerned, but I reassure her because I think I’m supposed to. That won’t be for a long time, I say, and she agrees. Yeah, like five days, she says, and I’m stricken by her understanding of time, which feels truer than mine. With the recognition of my own mortality, time is finite. For her, time is mind-independent: a river that streams on and on, regardless of whether anyone sees or hears it.

Again, I am met with the unsettling realization that there is a gap keeping me from my child—that I will always fall short of giving her what she needs. The gap feels large, already, and it’s potential for growth is even greater. There is a magic in N that keeps her mind moving in unexpected ways. She holds room for surprise. I want to absorb her magic—just enough to keep us connected, to make her feel understood—but I’m not sure I can.

When you’re dead, what will I do without you? N asks, her sweet voice void of fear or sadness. She’s only curious, wanting to know. 

In the dark, I reach for her. We are on opposite sides of a river; I try to build a bridge. I want to be where she is, but a gap is a gap, and sometimes it doesn’t close for any amount of dedication, or effort—or even, love. 

TUESDAY

I’m smitten with the work of John and Faith Hubley, and in particular, Windy Day, which I’ve watched several times over the past few weeks. 

I’m in the middle of early concept sketches for a book I’m working on, and the loose lightness of this animated film captures the feeling of childhood’s core, like learning to whistle, simmering in summer languish, and staring at endless skies dotted with clouds that run your imagination. 

WEDNESDAY

“As it happened, my relationship with my kids has been as philosophically, spiritually, or intellectually vital as anything else I’ve done, leading to the kind of realizations we’ve long wanted to seek elsewhere, away from the home, away from the family. Through them, I’ve cultivated a healthy relationship with uncertainty, with attention, with  feeling closer to the source of life, whatever it is, with all its wonder and fragility—all moments of revelation that came by way of a mix of stress, rupture, wholeness, and ease. If I had let motherhood stay small, confined to the sidelines, then those stressful moments would have felt like forces holding me back on my way to an interesting and meaningful life. But by letting motherhood become big, those challenges…became part of a larger narrative arc.”

—from Elissa Strauss’ essay, It’s Weird Times to Be a Happy Mother. I don’t agree with everything in her essay, but this passage resonated sweetly.

THURSDAY

I am reading: Cass McCombs on songwriting, The Many Assassinations of Samir, the Seller of Dreams, the 1984 archive, and A Million Kites. 

FRIDAY

At night, Freud says, we hide things from ourselves:
dreams wear disguises. All right. But also there's
an intimacy and acceptance there: we take
it all as it comes. We don't explain away
or correct the irrational, we believe the real
terror, the horror, the sweet tenderness.  

—Night and Day by William Bronk

xx,

M

---

To sign up for my weekly newsletter, Dear Somebody, please subscribe here.

Dear Somebody: I wouldn’t have without you.

T and Jack, May 2024.

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

MONDAY 

I turn the kitchen light on around 5:45 am. Most days, Jack stirs and watches me while I brush my teeth in the half-bath, careful not to wake our sleeping family. Then he waits by the door and we go out. The past few weeks, he doesn’t move—his sleeping body just rises and falls while I brush my teeth, while I count out vitamins, while I go downstairs for a Peloton ride. I return 30 minutes later, sweaty. His eyes slowly open but he doesn’t move. Let’s go outside, Jackie, I say, and he steps away from me. He retreats, watching me quietly. I feel like a stranger, almost an intruder. Somebody he used to know. 

After some time, I coax him outside. The sky is far more than what I can ordinarily imagine. Over our wooden fence and the neighbors trees and beyond the curves of our busy street, the sun rises eagerly, the fruit of it red and new. Dang, it’s a beautiful morning, isn’t it, Jack-o?, I ask, but when I look for him, he’s already at the door wanting to go back in.

The girls and I go to the library, but when we come home through the back door, T is waiting for us. He sits on the floor with Jack sweetly, the way close friends do—casually, with little inclination towards boundaries or good posture. What he tells me I don’t want to hear, so instead my mind wanders to friendship and how golden it is. Through good friendship, you can transcend your own reality—you have the chance to grow into a person you can one day even admire. I’ve known T for 7 years and his friendship with Jack for just as long. All the cliches about man’s best friend are true: they’re better friends than most, and they try harder, too.

We sit on the porch Saturday morning, me, T, and Jack. It’s a gorgeous Spring day, the morning not warm yet, the trees billowing with post-rain breeze. It’s early enough for quiet. We listen to the robins and grackles, I hear the occasional woodpecker. It’s supposed to be peak cicada season, but I’ve yet to hear or see one. Jack stand with us uncertainly. I think of him snapping at bees, romping around the yard and playing chase. He’s an old man but he still acts like a puppy, we always joked, but now I can’t remember the last time we did. 

I take a photo of Jack and T, his sleek wolf’s shape finally slackened against T’s body, his head in T’s lap. They are handsome together, a softness in each of them that only appears when the other is around. There’s an ease in the way they lean on each other—the way good friends always do.

T holds Jack’s head and I hold his hand. I don’t see either T or Jack, not quite—I only see them, unable to see one without the other. When it happens, it happens quick—but softly, too, like when the sun sinks down at the end of the day. The sky is a blur of rainbow while it goes, and then it’s gone. The sky is a blur, still, and then it is only still, and then there is only you and the sky and no sun.

T looks at Jack and Jack looks at him and I am only a witness to their friendship. How did we get here?, their eyes seem to ask, and in my heart, I know one will always say the same as the other: I wouldn’t have without you.

TUESDAY

How it Feels to Find Yourself was featured in theSkimm’s Best Products to Support Your Mental Health; I am pleased and proud. 

WEDNESDAY

“Being an artist means: not numbering and counting, but ripening like a tree, which doesn’t force its sap, and stands confidently in the storms of spring, not afraid that afterward summer may not come. It does come. But it comes only to those who are patient, who are there as if eternity lay before them, so unconcernedly silent and vast. I learn it every day of my life, learn it with pain I am grateful for: patience is everything!” 

—from Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet

THURSDAY

I just finished listening to Lara Love Hardin’s The Many Lives of Mama Love and so greatly admired the way Hardin confronted her own demons. 

I started listening to Ann Patchett’s Tom Lake; I’m reading Under the Tamarind Tree by Nigar Alam; I’m asking myself what kind of artist I want to be.

FRIDAY

Woke up early this morning and from my bed
looked far across the Strait to see
a small boat moving through the choppy water,
a single running light on. Remembered
my friend who used to shout
his dead wife’s name from the hilltops
around Perugia. Who set a plate
for her at his simple table long after
she was gone. And opened the windows
so she could have fresh air. Such display 
I found embarrassing. So did his other
friends. I couldn’t see it. 
Not until this morning. 

—Grief by Raymond Carver

xx,

M

---

To sign up for my weekly newsletter, Dear Somebody, please subscribe here.

Dear Somebody: A tiny hand in mine.

A tiny glimpse of my current project.

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

MONDAY 

The clouds are in fine form today, puffs of thick white acrylic smears. Occasionally, the sun pierces through. I don’t see the birds as I shuffle along with my head down, but I listen to their music. Morning walks are like this: the sky bobbing over me while I retreat further into myself. We moved to St. Louis in June. It’s October now and I haven’t made a single friend. 

I turn the stroller onto Des Peres and navigate the cracked sidewalk towards the playground. Up ahead is a young woman with her baby. I slow down, hoping she’ll leave before I get closer. No such luck.

Hello! Do you live nearby?  She asks me. My heart turns clockwise, tightening.

Yes, I say politely, just down the street. I unstrap N and watch her toddle over to the slide. I feel resistant. I’ve met many people in this city, but none that I connected with. I’m tired of trying.

My heart spins, quietly reminding me that it is there. There are many people to love, it says, but you have stopped looking for them. 

The children play together. I ask the woman questions and listen intently to her voice. I engage my curiosity, studying her face: her long eyelashes and curly hair, the way her eyes crinkle when she smiles, her soft laugh. She looks at N with the love only a mother can feel for a stranger’s child. Opening your heart is like learning a foreign language—it feels self-conscious and clumsy until it doesn’t.

Stepping outside of yourself, that’s what an open heart is. A story that invites you to first look and then listen. A morning at the playground, an unexpected conversation, smears of cloud, a tiny hand in mine.

—from How it Feels to Find Yourself: Navigating Life’s Changes with Clarity, Purpose, and Heart, my book of illustrated essays

TUESDAY

I love it when it’s just you and me, mom, N says once, and then again. She doesn’t smile, just looks at me with her serious, thoughtful face, and I know she means it. 

We’re having a picnic at the little playground near our home. She eats a peanut butter and honey sandwich, I have peanut butter and jelly. It’s the perfect weather—not a lick above 74 degrees, breezy, our picnic blanket dappled with sunlight under an old playground tree. 

A few days later, she’s reading with T in her room before bed. Dad, I love it when it’s just you and me, she says and though I can’t see her thoughtful face, I know she means it. 

WEDNESDAY

Several weeks ago, T and I celebrated our 5-year anniversary at Bulrush, a truly incredible reparative restaurant that explores Ozark cuisine through the values and vision of Chef Rob Connoley. With their menu, 80% of which is radically foraged locally, Chef Connoley explores the late 18th and early 19th century—”the moment in time when the indigenous people first encountered the settlers, who often brought enslaved individuals. These three cultures came together at one particular time to create what has evolved into the food that we eat today.” 

I find myself still thinking about this night. It encourages me to see a person with strong core values actively living in accordance with them—and building his business and community deeply around them. In a world where fitting in and being well-liked is valued more than critical thought, it’s comforting to see someone deliberately go their own way.

THURSDAY

I am: discovering free zines for a free Palestine, donating to the perinatal project, learning more about Rod Serling, wondering if I have enough self-compassion?, and listening to poems as teachers. 

FRIDAY

In those years, people will say, we lost track
of the meaning of we, of you
we found ourselves
reduced to I
and the whole thing became
silly, ironic, terrible:
we were trying to live a personal life
and yes, that was the only life
we could bear witness to

But the great dark birds of history screamed and plunged
into our personal weather
They were headed somewhere else but their beaks and pinions drove
along the shore, through the rags of fog
where we stood, saying I

—from In Those Years by Adrienne Rich

xx,

M

---

To sign up for my weekly newsletter, Dear Somebody, please subscribe here.

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

---

To sign up for my weekly newsletter, Dear Somebody, please subscribe here.

Dear Somebody: A birthday wish.

Me and my birthday girl (2024)

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

MONDAY 

On my birthday, I set out to make F’s birthday cake. She was born the day after I was and I choose to believe that this consecutive sequence of celebrations will bind us for the rest of our lives. It makes me happy. 

F is turning one, and I wish for her cake to be beautiful and healthy. Making a birthday cake for my children each year is important to me. For my sixth birthday, my mother made a cake for me that I remember with great affection: a magic school bus cake with a jellybean-filled top layer and Oreos for wheels. I think about this cake often; maybe this is why. I love cake; maybe this is why. I cook and bake for my family multiple times a day, an act of care—and therefore, an act of love; maybe this is why. Baking is an art and I want my ability to extend past the written and painted page; maybe this is why. All of these reasons are the reason why and because I’ve taken on the task, it’s something I want to do well. What I really wish for is to surprise myself. 

I make a frosting with no sugar, which tastes good but has low viscosity. I worry it won’t support the five layers of this cake, but I’m pressed for time. N and her cousins want to help. They take turns frosting each layer and one by one, I stack them high. The cake leans to the right and refuses to stop. I straighten it repeatedly but instead of a cake, it resembles a sloppy pile of pancakes. My brother-in-law, sitting across from me at the kitchen island, raises his eyebrows at the mess. He makes eye contact but says nothing. 

What is that? my dad asks as he walks in and settles himself at the island. It’s F’s birthday cake, I say, obviously frustrated. My dad’s eyes widen and he tries not to laugh. Don’t ask her what that is, he loudly warns each person who walks into the kitchen. It’s supposed to be a cake.

I roll my eyes, but all of the insecurities I’ve grappled with over the past year flood my eyes. I don’t have good instincts; ordinary tasks are difficult for me; I’m not a real artist—it’s just something I work hard at; I don’t know how to be a good mother; I will never measure up. These thoughts are gauzy, shadow-like. Threatening. But I also have another thought: that tomorrow, F will be an entire year old—and everything I didn’t know how to do for her, I eventually figured out. 

I start over. I take each layer off, scraping the icing off and back into a bowl. Masi, what happened? my oldest nephew asks, seeing the cake he had just frosted now fully disassembled. I know, I tell him. But I’m gonna figure it out. I add corn starch to the icing and stick it in the fridge. After 20 minutes, I take it out and begin again. I decide the cake needs additional support, and my dad, who has finally stopped laughing at me, neatly saws a chopstick in half.

When the layers are all iced and assembled, it looks like a cake. An adorable, small-and-tall cake, perfect for a one-year-old. My younger nephew sets out all the sprinkles and we call N and Z over. Go wild, we tell them and they do. Z pours all the sprinkles within reach on top and N eats the rest. My nephew and I watch them. We look at each other and smile. 

It’s not the rainbow cake I’d wanted for F; it’s something better. My sister baked the layers so I didn’t have to; maybe this is why. My nephews helped me start over; maybe this is why. My dad heckled me and then offered support; maybe this is why. My daughter and my niece listened to themselves, which is the most honest form of creativity—while decorating F’s cake; maybe this is why. I want to be a good mother and I will always try, very hard, to be one; maybe this is why. 

All of these reasons are the reason why and because I want to do the work, it’s something I will do well. On my birthday, on the eve of F’s birthday, what I really wished for, I got: I surprised myself. 

TUESDAY

“The lens is a black eye, and a camera has an aperture. That’s easy enough; but it’s not easy, because the metaphor has blossomed the camera into the brown poet, into we brown poets (the recipients of the instructions): black-eyed aperture. To be black-eyed, yes, perhaps, to have the eyes of a black person, and we can have a lot of conversations about what that means, but at the very least, it means to see black people. Since her earliest poems, Finney’s model for us has been to see black people. To lay her eyes (and pencil) on her beloveds.

But to be black-eyed also means to have bruised eyes, hurt eyes: eyes that have been hurt by what they’ve seen, and eyes that have been hurt maybe for what they’ve seen. And an aperture, in addition to being a part of a camera, is a hole or an opening through which the light comes. Be a black-eyed opening for the light to come through. Be this. It’s my first final instruction. It’s the best I can say first and last. Let’s start here.”

—Ross Gay on the poetry of Nikky Finney for The Sewanee Review

WEDNESDAY

We finished the black comedy Beef a few weeks ago and I still find myself thinking about it. To me, this short series manages to capture a particular flavor of darkness: the self-loathing and self-destructiveness that blooms inside a first-or-second generation child who realizes they’ll never achieve a level of achievement or happiness that can neutralize the many sacrifices their parents made. Beef digs into this internal grappling, in all its complexity and absurdity, with poignancy and humor. 

THURSDAY

I’m reading The Magic Words by Joseph Fasano and helping N write her first poems; I’m listening to Ghibli Sleep, my current writing playlist which doubles as car/calming music for F.

FRIDAY

Never ran this hard through the valley never ate so many stars I was carrying a dead deer tied on to my neck and shoulders deer legs hanging in front of me heavy on my chest People are not wanting to let me in Door in the mountain let me in

—Door in the Mountain by Jean Valentine

xx,
M

---

To sign up for my weekly newsletter, Dear Somebody, please subscribe here.

Dear Somebody: Being here.

An illustration for my column, Being, in Issue #61 of Uppercase Magazine

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

MONDAY 

When T pulls handfuls of weeds away from our hydrangea bushes, we discover a mourning dove sitting quietly, her back against the brick of our house. T stops pulling weeds; N stops eating; I stop talking. Is she nesting? Is she hurt? How can we help? We didn’t mean to expose her, but we have. We go inside. From the window I watch her two small eyes blinking in the sun. 

When F contracts an illness, I know the week ahead will be gutted, and it is. The sitter is canceled, my work is placed on hold indefinitely. The deadlines pile up, as does the laundry, the dust. My inbox groans; my daily poem practice falls further behind.

I don’t optimize. It doesn’t make sense anymore. In the past, I have worried, having convinced myself that worrying is doing something and therefore, at least, still productive. Of course, I was wrong; each day, I continue to be. If there’s a purpose to life, maybe this is it—to constantly unlearn until, at the end, I am stripped of all belief, leaving the way I came in: honest, unharmed, full of possibility. 

I don’t optimize. I have worked too hard at letting go. There are no to-do lists in my head. I don’t write poems while F takes her bottle, I don’t clean the house while she eats oatmeal. I spend time leisurely, as if I have boatloads of it, as if someone out there is making more of it for me. We sit outside and listen to the world. I ask F if she remembers the eclipse and the way the sky moved like a movie. She wails in response. She cries a lot. She coughs a lot. I sit with her and together, we do nothing. I am here. 

More than once, she crawls into my lap, buries her face in my shirt, and falls asleep. I wish I had my phone, I think to myself, so I could do something. Old habits die hard, but I recognize the impulse, however warily. I don’t retrieve my phone. Instead, I do what I am doing: I sit on the second-floor landing and rub F’s back with my hands, staring at our hallway walls. I am here. 

I rock F to sleep, something I haven’t done for the past 8 months, and in this act, she feels like a baby in my arms once more. I admit, I am nostalgic. Maybe it’s because she’s turning one next week, maybe it’s because I am turning decades older than that. Maybe it’s because there is no match for a moment sweeter than this one, where a child sleeps safely in my arms. Maybe it’s because there’s safety in these moments for me, too. I am here. From above I watch her two small eyes blinking with sleep.

TUESDAY

I read Go to Sleep (I Miss You) and Kid Gloves by Lucy Knisley; I read Tokyo These Days by Taiyo Matsumoto (that cover!); I started Sunny by Jason Reynolds. I am re-reading James Marshall’s eulogy for Arnold Lobel, one of my favorite children’s writers and illustrators, and a fellow devotee of friendship. 

WEDNESDAY

For my latest Being column in Issue #61 of Uppercase Magazine, I wrote about how the themes in our creative work change shape and expand, evolving as we do, but ultimately remain the same—they are fragments of our foundational selves that we will always explore. 

View fullsize

View fullsize

View fullsize

I touch on the importance of revisiting past work, even if it’s difficult to do so: 

“Revisiting old work is clarifying. It brings you closer to the person you were at that time—the person who felt pulled to capture a feeling, thought, or question through their art. It’s also a chance to notice how much you and your work have changed—a chance to acknowledge the creative obstacles you’ve puzzled through and the personal ones your artmaking pulled you through.”

—from The First Work I Make is the Last Work I Make for Uppercase Magazine #61, available now. 

THURSDAY

Today, it was pointed out to me that my emotional vocabulary is pretty limited(!). I was both bowled over and energized by this comment. I’ve spent the past decade helping others identify and process their own emotions, only to quietly realize that my knowledge has plateaued. I am humbled and, quite honestly, enthused by how far there is to go.

I am reading How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain by Lisa Feldman Barrett in an immediate effort to remedy my own cause. I welcome further reading! If you have a book recommendation, please do share.

FRIDAY

Years do odd things to identity.
What does it mean to say
I am that child in the photograph
at Kishamish in 1935?
Might as well say I am the shadow
of a leaf of the acacia tree
felled seventy years ago
moving on the page the child reads.
Might as well say I am the words she read
or the words I wrote in other years,
flicker of shade and sunlight
as the wind moves through the leaves.

—from Leaves by Ursula K. Le Guin

xx,
M

---

To sign up for my weekly newsletter, Dear Somebody, please subscribe here.

Dear Somebody: Good is in the gray.

F and I by the sea (March 2024)

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

MONDAY 

While F naps off her fever, N and I go to the beach. She builds sand castles and makes seagull soup; I comb the shoreline for shells. The water is cold but I jump in anyway. Under nearly 5 feet of water, I see my toes. The sea is turquoise, a mermaid’s glittering tail. I’ve never been to the Gulf before. 

We walk along the beach and stumble upon some two plastic toy crabs, one yellow, one blue. They’re buried under the deserted white blanket of the beach, with just a claw or two peeking out. I ask N if she wants to add them to her collection but she shakes her head no. “Well, we can play with them for a little while,” I say, and make several crab shapes. 

I want N to love the water. I’m beginning to feel a specific pressure of parenthood I thought I was immune to: wanting my children to experience the beauty of my childhood without the aches; wanting them to feel affection for many of the same things I do; wanting them to share some of the same philosophies. I want N to understand that among its many mysteries, the sea can wash most any despondency away. 

N plays for a few minutes and then pushes the toys away. “Mom, I don’t want these. They belong to another child and that child will miss them.” Standing in the stark black and white of N’s morality, I feel shame. I’m envious, too. I want more of life to clarify in front of me, I want more of it to appear so obviously right or wrong. My conviction, at one point solid, made of stone, is porous now and has been for years. It’s wrung through with the realization that most days, I learn I am wrong about something I once believed. 

I ask N if she’d like to bring the toys to the beach lost and found; she does. We watch as both crabs are placed inside an enormous beach shed, then closed and locked, where they succumb to a much darker life among their fellow comrades—each of whom has been misplaced, forgotten, or abandoned. Lost.

N asks me to close my eyes and walk backwards. I do. We take good care not to look once, not at the sand or the sky or the shells. Not at each other. We use our other senses. We take good care to sense the sun’s warmth on our backs, to hear the gull shrieks in our ears, to feel the powder of Gulf sand between our toes. We stumble along, and as we do, I mildly wonder what people think of us.

“Mom, are your eyes closed? You cannot surprise yourself if your eyes are always open.” N’s voice is small and perfect; I can hear the ocean inside it. You can’t surprise yourself if your mind is always made up, either, I remind myself. The whole world is endless behind my eyes. Maybe gray is OK—maybe even, gray is good. 

My eyes are still closed. I turn my mind off, too. Together, N and I walk backwards into the sea. 

TUESDAY

I’m reading To the End of the Land by David Grossman as part of Ruth Franklin Israeli/Palestinian reading group, I’m donating to the KidLit4Ceasefire fundraiser, I’m attending Palestine Charity Draw #3 hosted by Sarah Dyer; I’m remembering this poem by Gottfried Benn and this essay on divorce by Emily Gould; I’m looking at these illustrations by Nikki McClure which accompany Rachel Carson’s Something About the Sky. 

WEDNESDAY

In-between client work and book projects, whenever I get a moment or two, I’m beginning to rework the illustrations for my picture book proposal. 

I’m reading about the making The Bird Within Me Flies by Sara Lundberg as I prepare to do this. Lundberg is one of my favorite book artists working today, and reading her thoughts, always imbued with such genuine honesty and humility, has been a comfort:

“It was important for me to allow myself to be inconsequent. The characters didn’t have to look the same on each spread, I didn’t have to stick to a specific style or technique. So I just did each scene intuitively, and with the intention of bringing out the most interesting – the essence in each.

I felt confident that everything would tie up in the end anyway, so I might as well have fun on the way there, and avoid trying to do something perfect.” —Sara Lundberg

I’m also deeply interested in the pen-and-ink work of Patrick Benson, who illustrated one of our family’s favorite books: Owl Babies.

“The most important thing that an illustrator has to do is provide lots of visual clues, bits of information - rather like snapshots - that will act as a sort of springboard for the imagination.” —Patrick Benson

I’m keeping his advice close to me as I rework my illustrations, remembering that my job as an illustrator (and a writer) is never to provide the entire story, but to sprinkle just enough light so the reader can find their own path through it. 

THURSDAY

Nicola came to visit last week with her little one in tow, and between the gardens and meals and messes, we managed to take some new studio shots. There’s no one in the world I’d rather be photographed by than this particularly talented friend. Working together is easy: comfortable, classic, no frills—just like our friendship. 

My website requires a long-overdue update, and these new photographs will lead the way. So much has changed since the last time she photographed me in my workspace: a move to a new city, an MFA, a baby who is almost an entire year old. My own tiny studio with a door; a room of my own. 

My work has changed tremendously. I have, too. It feels good to capture some of this new. 

A tulips update: positively blooming. These little guys are bringing so much joy to us and all who walk by our home. 

FRIDAY

Dear waves, what will you do for me this year?
Will you drown out my scream?
Will you let me rise through the fog?
Will you fill me with that old salt feeling?
Will you let me take my long steps in the cold sand?
Will you let me lie on the white bedspread and study 
the black clouds with the blue holes in them?
Will you let me see the rusty trees and the old monoplanes one more year?
Will you still let me draw my sacred figures 
and move the kites and the birds around with my dark mind?

Lucky life is like this. Lucky there is an ocean to come to.
Lucky you can judge yourself in this water.
Lucky the waves are cold enough to wash out the meanness.
Lucky you can be purified over and over again.
Lucky there is the same cleanliness for everyone.
Lucky life is like that. Lucky life. Oh lucky life.
Oh lucky lucky life. Lucky life.

—from Lucky Life by Gerald Stern

xx,

M

---

To sign up for my weekly newsletter, Dear Somebody, please subscribe here.

Dear Somebody: The sound of my creativity.

Combing through the paintings from my picture book and starting all over again

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

MONDAY 

It’s harder to wake up this week but I do it anyhow—to exercise, to sit, to write. I take on an essay assignment I could’ve (should’ve?) passed on—and now the question of it lingers, imploring when I’m going to write it, how I’m going to illustrate it, if it’ll be good enough, as if anything we make ever feels good enough. 

It’s harder to keep my eyes open this week, the tug towards bed so great after the girls are tucked in and quiet, but I do it anyhow—curled up on the couch, typing away, striking out my thoughts, rewriting clumsy sentences multiple times. Far past the hour of sleep, I paint the faces of my family. Our skins are too orangey-red or peachy and our shadows reach all the wrong places for I need light to gauge color correctly, and the sun has long said goodnight. 

T keeps me company. He looks over every now and then, silently measuring progress, wondering why I took on an assignment that doesn’t pay my rate and that I don’t have time for. I could be sleeping. I could be reading. If I choose to work, I should be working on my upcoming book deadline, and if I wanted to do something for me, there are plenty of poems waiting to be written—for myself and for Margaux Kent. I could’ve; I should’ve; I did not. 

One at a time, the poems are written. How? Slowly, that’s how. The essay, long fleshed out in my mind, is finally typed out for unknown eyes to read. How? One sentence at a time. This newsletter, which I’d almost abandoned for next week—because surely, something has to go—is, too, written, and with care. How? In the early hours of the morning, when F just begins to stir and the mourning doves mourn so loudly that I stop every few minutes to listen. 

It’s harder to find time this week, but I find it because there is a picture in my heart that wants to be drawn. At first it is nothing—a blank page that frightens me. But line by line, I begin to build and slowly, it takes shape. I correct skin color, I draw in each crumbling brick, I draw and redraw faces until they come alive, until they come into their own. I take more than one hour I don’t have to figure out how to draw my mother’s hand. This used to be a slog, but now it’s just fun. 

I didn’t have to take this assignment, it’s true, but I heard the sound of my creativity and chose to follow. I’ve lost her before, almost completely to the pressure of achievement, the demands of paid work, the tangle of self-worth. I’d lost her so deeply that it took me years to quiet the sound of everything around me so I could hear her once again. 

The sound of a picture in my heart is the sound of an essay in my head. The sound of my creativity is the sound of my own voice. When she speaks, I listen. 

TUESDAY

I’m currently listening to Dave Eggers’ The Eyes and the Impossible audiobook while drawing or doing my chores. The book is read by Ethan Hawke, who reads it like a very good actor in a very good performance. At first I was put off by the listening—it almost seemed like too much, a sensory overload, but after I read Taylor Sterling’s thoughts on picture books as performances, I started listening again, and now each time I listen, I am alone in an auditorium watching Ethan Hawke perform in a play as Johannes, a free dog. It is bewildering, encompassing, joyful.

“I don’t know if the love of a friend is more powerful than that of a family member, but it’s definitely less talked about. That’s why, in art, depictions of committed friendships hit us so hard. Johannes and his friends show up, and don’t ever question whether any of their group will show up. It’s a given that they will be there. A lot of friendship is just a matter of presence over time. Being there year after year, showing up at good times, at banal times, and times of great struggle. The animals in the book are all adults, alone but for each other, and best of all, they’re united by a common purpose. Nothing is better than that—having something urgent to do, and doing it with the people you love.”

—Dave Eggers on The Eyes and The Impossible

WEDNESDAY

"This is what you shall do; Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body."

—from the preface of Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman, filed many years ago under List of Quotes I’d Like to One Day Paint and Preserve

THURSDAY

Last November, N and T planted tulips in the cold, hard ground and hoped for the best; this is a photo of the second bloom that pushed her way through the earth. 

Each day, N comes home from school and counts how many new faces are showing. Like her, it is always a surprise.

FRIDAY

I have spent a year mostly alone.
Walking a lot.
With a poetic attachment
to street drawings.
Staring at concrete.
My shoes.
And going over my life.
Situations.
Walking
and sitting in my room.
Or movies.
Or reading.
Working. Practicing the 
new patience.
The year has been good.
With long thoughts.
Care to myself.

—from Six Poems by Aram Saroyan

xx,

M

---

To sign up for my weekly newsletter, Dear Somebody, please subscribe here.

Dear Somebody: The things I'll miss.

From my illustrated version of William Bronk’s The Tell

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

MONDAY 

I wake up before dawn and listen to the smooth, velvet call of darkness. I wake up before the rest of my family and it feels like waking up before the rest of the world—there is only me and in the morning I see, quite clearly, myself as someone to love. I wake up to write, I wake up to ponder, I wake up from all the people I’m not. I wake up. 

My lower back cracks first, then my knees, then my neck. I see the bridge between ankle to leg, I see each weathered toe—evidence of a body that continues to show up, that does what’s asked of it and does not ask for much in return. These are the sounds of loyalty; these are the sounds of my oldest friendship. The mourning doves chatter outside my window and our tired 100-year old house invites their conversation in. I listen and I am lucky to listen and I feel the luck well deep inside me like a river. I wonder who these birds were before they were birds, I wonder who I was before I knew I was someone worth knowing. The radiators come to life, abruptly. They clang and hiss. The dog bristles in his sleep and occasionally, a car drives by.

Cutting the fruit, buttering the toast, making the lunches—even these chores are sweeter in the morning stillness. The creak of the stairs as T comes down, earlier these past few days, with all of his teeth and a smile. I put Tea for the Tillerman on and Stevens’ familiar voice washes through the kitchen and hovers above the island with mine. 

N turns away when I wake her, her body longing for more silence, more rest, more; the light streams into her bedroom in strings, beguiling. F’s generous smile—immediate upon waking, the way she finds me as soon as I leave the room, her small hands clinging to my knees. N singing along to the Frozen soundtrack, hoping she didn’t miss any let it go’s. I clean the floor, the walls, the cabinets after F eats, my hands and knees satisfied from use.

The first deep breath outside, the cold air rushing into my lungs; the crack of twig or tree branch, everything growing, everything going. The first sip of coffee, well-earned and deeply wanted, the changing light on my child’s tiny face, the agony of push and pull between too-much and never-enough: these are the things I’ll miss when they are gone. 

TUESDAY

“What do we want from our mothers when we are children? Complete submission. Oh, it's very nice and rational and respectable to say that a woman has every right to her life, to her ambitions, to her needs, and so on—it's what I've always demanded myself—but as a child, no, the truth is it's a war of attrition, rationality doesn't come into it, not one bit, all you want from your mother is that she once and for all admit that she is your mother and only your mother, and that her battle with the rest of life is over. She has to lay down arms and come to you. And if she doesn't do it, then it's really a war, and it was a war between my mother and me. Only as an adult did I come to truly admire her—especially in the last, painful years of her life—for all that she had done to claw some space in this world for herself.”

—from Swing Time by Zadie Smith

WEDNESDAY

I spent the last couple of weeks working on a new welcome illustration for Dear Somebody. I was inspired to do this by Adam Rex’s header, which I’ve loved ever since I saw it. This newsletter has been through several evolutions over the past few years, and I haven’t felt like it visually reflects where I am in my work, and who I am as a person, for awhile now. 

Mine’s not perfect but it does feel a lot more like me (perhaps for that very reason!). Also: I was able to experiment using mixed media (my dream is to work more like N—”a little bit of everything”), I learned a few things, and I showed myself, again, that doing something for no reason (other than I want to) is usually worth the effort—which is just plain ol’ nice. 

THURSDAY

View fullsize

View fullsize

As a longtime fan of Cal Newport’s work, I was pleased to provide a few words for his latest book, Slow Productivity. Here’s what I had to say about it:

The belief that the process of creating art should, and can, be completed quickly is the artist’s greatest source of discontent. It is the reason many artists develop imposter syndrome and become disillusioned with their work and their own abilities. Often, it is why artists stop creating work at all. In Slow Productivity, Cal Newport effectively charts the birth and growth of productivity culture, and explains how it led to the removal of personal values, deep focus, and deliberate care in our work and communities. His book is an opportunity to understand why we so often feel frustrated with the demands of the world we live in—and what we can do if we choose to turn inward, once again.

Slow Productivity was published this week and is available everywhere books are sold.

FRIDAY

Poetry is not made of words.
I can say it’s January when
it’s August. I can say, “The scent
of wisteria on the second floor
of my grandmother’s house
with the door open onto the porch
in Petaluma,” while I’m living
an hour’s drive from the Mexican
border town of Ojinaga.
It is possible to be with someone
who is gone. Like the silence which
continues here in the desert while
the night train passes through Marfa
louder and louder, like the dogs whining
and barking after the train is gone.

—The Presence in Absence by Linda Gregg

xx,

M

---

To sign up for my weekly newsletter, Dear Somebody, please subscribe here.

Dear Somebody: On dreaming.

UNTITLED #1: A collaboration between me (age 6) and my child (age 3)

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

MONDAY 

N and I sit at the dining room table and color a gigantic set of fabric butterfly wings for her to wear. She’s been working on them since the beginning of January. She hasn’t worn them once; I’m not sure she ever will. She’s more interested in the making, and so we color: her, a medium heart, mostly outside the lines, and me, a small circle, mostly inside the lines. Hers is better. 

We chat a little here and there, but mostly we are each lost to our thoughts. 

As an author who wants to write for children, and as a person who has children, I find myself returning to my childhood often—perhaps too often. I mine my past for particular memories and recall the feeling of experiencing them. For a handful of scenes, I am transported viscerally: even after 30 years, my body holds onto the feeling. It’s chosen to, though I don’t always understand why. For the rest of my childhood, I am simply a member of the audience, watching a tape that has been rewound and replayed so many times that the quality is beginning to wear. 

When I feel nostalgia for childhood, it’s mostly for a period of life where I had an abundance of time: time to practice whistling; time to wake up and read, half falling out of bed, letting the blood rush to my head; time to run until the breath caught in my chest, astonished at how my own body worked; time to think about nothing and no one or everything and everyone; time to take multiple hours to eat a lollipop, and then still wrap it back up for later; time to mush and mix—sand, flour, water, spices, broken glass, tin foil, paint, grass, mud—just to see how it feels. Time to be bored. Time to dream.

For many, childhood is a harrowing time, full of unknowns and a loss of control. It is impossible to become—a big kid, a grown-up, an author, a mother, no matter how badly you want to—until one day, you are. There is no guarantee; there never is. Children understand that, but children also know how to dream, and dreaming provides immunity. 

For the last 15 years, I’ve cast off dreaming in favor of pragmatism—and in all truth, this method has served me well. I am practical and (mostly) disciplined. I set achievable goals. But when N came home from school and told me she’d used a very tall ladder to climb into the sky and take a nap in the clouds, I found myself in awe of her imagination and disappointed in my own, unsure of when I’d lost my ability to dream. 

I color another circle. I think about how dreams are barriers that stands between the crags of life and hopelessness. I think about how believing in a different world is essential to creating any change: to changing the way we think, feel, and behave. I think about how expansive dreaming is, how it becomes easier to remain open—and accepting, if you can consider alternate possibilities, even those unknown. 

I think about how N was my dream and now she is her own, and how much good I’ll have done if I can teach her to remember that. I think about how open and forgiving she is. Her unprejudiced spirit gives her more clarity than I could ever hope to have.

“I like this color blue,” I tell her. “It’s soft but also bright.”

“I like that one, too,” N tells me. “I love all of the colors that I know.”

TUESDAY

UNTITLED #1. Cut paper collage and acrylic paint on paper. Begun in 1993, completed in 2023.

I made this paper dinosaur when I was six, and N painted this acrylic landscape toward the end of 2023. A few days ago, I collaged them together. Our first collaborative painting. 

It is the first, I hope, of many collaborations—paintings, books, choreographed dances, and of course, building our relationship. The biggest collaboration; the best dream.

WEDNESDAY

“I love America more than any other country in the world and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.” —James Baldwin

THURSDAY

Today I sat on a panel discussion with a few peers to discuss book publishing and how books have helped build our brand. The conversation was interesting for me, and I enjoyed learning more about my peers, each of us with our own distinct paths and challenges. A career in book publishing is not simple or easy for most of us, but it is possible—and if you love books, that’s what matters most.

My own experience with my brand and how I view creativity has changed so much, especially in the last two years. The conversation moved quickly, and I didn’t get a chance to speak about what I really wanted to, which was: treating your brand as a living, breathing thing. 

If enough of you are interested, I’ll write about this topic for the next edition of my Craft series. 

If you missed yesterday’s panel talk (with Katie Daisy, Rebecca Green, Jenny Sue Kostecki-Shaw, Jane Mount, and Meenal Patel), you can watch the replay here. 

FRIDAY

To be a good
ex/current friend for R. To be one last

inspired way to get back at R. To be relationship
advice for L. To be advice

for my mother. To be a more comfortable
hospital bed for my mother. To be

no more hospital beds. To be, in my spare time,
America for my uncle, who wants to be China

for me. To be a country of trafficless roads
& a sports car for my aunt, who likes to go

fast. To be a cyclone
of laughter when my parents say

their new coworker is like that, they can tell
because he wears pink socks, see, you don’t, so you can’t,

can’t be one of them. To be the one
my parents raised me to be—

a season from the planet
of planet-sized storms.

To be a backpack of PB&J & every
thing I know, for my brothers, who are becoming

their own storms. To be, for me, nobody,
homebody, body in bed watching TV. To go 2D

& be a painting, an amateur’s hilltop & stars,
simple decoration for the new apartment

with you. To be close, J.,
to everything that is close to you—

blue blanket, red cup, green shoes
with pink laces.

To be the blue & the red.
The green, the hot pink.

—When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities by Chen Chen

xx,

M

---

To sign up for my weekly newsletter, Dear Somebody, please subscribe here.

Dear Somebody: A lesson in unconditional love.

A Lesson in Unconditional Love from How it Feels to Find Yourself

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

MONDAY 

I wake up tired. 

It’s 4:35 am and the baby is crying. I sit up, swing my legs over to the edge of the bed, and stumble towards the door. Jack has been up for some time now, waiting for us to wake. He dances around my feet, tip-tapping excitedly, wanting me to sit down and play with him. “I need a minute, Jackie,” I mumble, stepping over him and into the bathroom. He watches as I brush my teeth and splash cold water on my face. I feel irritated for no reason. After a few minutes, I close the door.

By 6:00 am, the baby has been changed and fed and cried a few more times. We’re sitting on the floor playing peek-a-boo, waiting for the sun to show her face. Jack sits by the bedroom door, waiting. Every so often, he looks over to see how we’re doing.

Around 6:45, I get dressed. Jack bounces around my heels as I pull on pants and a hoodie. “Jack. Jackie. I need some space,” I say, more gently than I have before. When we reach the back door, he’s there, waiting. I let him out and he races around the yard, joyfully feeling the cool air on his face. The trees are dropping their leaves now, and the crinkle of each one fills my ears. The scent of morning dew after a long fall from the sky passes over us in waves. I breathe in deeply and will myself into feeling new. I want to be better—patient, kind, more appreciative of all the good I have. 

Jack walks over and sits down next to me, so closely that his body is on my feet. His head rests under my hands. He waits. 

—from How it Feels to Find Yourself: Navigating Life’s Changes with Clarity, Purpose, and Heart, my latest book of illustrated essays

TUESDAY

I loved this comic by Gavin Aung Than that illustrates an excerpt from Stephen King’s On Writing—namely, the difficult work/life balance of most artists, and the larger, more balanced perspective that’s only available to us in retrospect. 

Of course, that led me to Bill Watterson’s advice on inventing your own life’s meaningand Stanley Kubrick’s on life’s purposelessness—both encourage me to continue taking the road less traveled.

WEDNESDAY

I’ve always been reluctant to celebrate holidays, especially ones that make it easy to gloss over honest sentiment for sparkles and gifts. This changed when I became a mother. I want my children to experience the joy of thoughtfulness—to understand what a gift it is to know someone well, and to make them feel known. I also realize how much challenge life will give us—and what a strength it is to find reason, still, to celebrate. 

N made these seed packets for Valentine’s Day. She painted and glued each one. She filled them with Zinnia seeds. For over a week, she sat at the dining table and asked to decorate seed packets until she had one for each person in her world. In the end she made nearly 25. She’s three. 

She turned an ordinary Wednesday into something less ordinary—something special, perhaps—for so many. It had nothing to do with Valentine’s Day and everything to do with her heart—which, as I’ve suspected for awhile now, is far too big for her tiny body.

THURSDAY

I’m enjoying these paintings by Ulla Thynell, this book by Rashmi Sirdeshpande and Ruchi Mhasane, and these rules for a creative practice by Carolyn Yoo.

FRIDAY

Cook a large fish — choose one with many bones, a skeleton
you will need skill to expose, maybe the flying
silver carp that’s invaded the Great Lakes, tumbling
the others into oblivion. If you don’t live
near a lake, you’ll have to travel.
Walking is best and shows you mean it,
but you could take a train and let yourself
be soothed by the rocking
on the rails. It’s permitted
to receive solace for whatever you did
or didn’t do, pitiful, beautiful
human. When my mother was in the hospital,
my daughter and I had to clear out the home
she wouldn’t return to. Then she recovered
and asked, incredulous,
How could you have thrown out all my shoes?
So you’ll need a boat. You could rent or buy,
but, for the sake of repairing the world,
build your own. Thin strips
of Western red cedar are perfect,
but don’t cut a tree. There’ll be
a demolished barn or downed trunk
if you venture further.
And someone will have a mill.
And someone will loan you tools.
The perfume of sawdust and the curls
that fall from your plane
will sweeten the hours. Each night
we dream thirty-six billion dreams. In one night
we could dream back everything lost.
So grill the pale flesh.
Unharness yourself from your weary stories.
Then carry the oily, succulent fish to the one you hurt.
There is much to fear as a creature
caught in time, but this
is safe. You need no defense. This
is just another way to know
you are alive.

—How to Apologize by Ellen Bass

xx,

M

---

To sign up for my weekly newsletter, Dear Somebody, please subscribe here.

Dear Somebody: It is good.

Part of this past week’s progress

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

MONDAY 

I wake up at 5:30 to have some quiet before the rest of the house stirs. In the living room, I stretch. The sun comes up behind the maple trees on our street; pink and yellow push against the sky. Our street is lined with strange plants, all beautiful and mysterious in their own ways. I know I’ll live in the world for my entire life without really becoming one with the earth. It’ll still be a win if I learn how to become one with myself. Like a kaleidoscope, the sky keeps turning. It is good.

After breakfast, I lose my temper with N. The agitation courses through my body. We are both frustrated, but I am the adult. There isn’t good reason for my loss of control. I want to be different and I work hard at it, but I know when it happens, I’ll just want to be someone else. It is not good. 

I mix peanut butter with banana and yogurt for F. I add chia seeds. N quells her frustration and I do, too. We look into each other’s eyes and I lose myself in the vastness of hers. I see straight into her plum-sized heart, and there is only goodness in there. I’m not perfect, but I’m beginning to understand that I don’t want to be. I want to be a parent who apologizes to their child. I do, and it is good. 

After N leaves for school, F and I finish breakfast. We listen to the Beauty and the Beast soundtrack and she watches with interest as I sing along. When I don’t remember the words, I make them up. I laugh at myself and F laughs at me, too. I slip on the yogurt-covered floor but I don’t fall. This is an achievement. F chokes on her own laughter but keeps laughing anyway. I start to worry but then I laugh instead. It is good.

During F’s nap, I draw. I work on a new illustration for my Uppercase column and it challenges me in all the right places. I’m using colors that feel fresh but still like me. I’m excited by my work; I’m working on projects I care about. I’ve tried to listen to myself for years now, and it’s finally paying off. I hear my voice again. I’m saying nomore often. I don’t feel like any particular opportunity will be the one that determines my future. This lesson took me a long time to learn; it’s freeing to finally learn it. It is good.

When F wakes, we sit outside. It’s 56 degrees and the bare branches scrape the stars. I can’t see them but I know they’re there. F scoots around on her stomach and eats dead grass. I pull some of it out of her mouth and then stop bothering. I think about how distracted I feel all of the time—how the more I work on staying still, the less successful I am. 

Years ago, a friend sent me an email about a word they thought I’d like: apricity, which means the warmth of the sun in winter. I feel it now, the sharp knife of sun cutting through winter. Cutting it in half. Sunlight glints off of the dead grass, off of the dead branches, off of my small child’s small nose. It warms the shaking part of me. It is good. 

TUESDAY

“It’s incredibly comfortable and nice when you can look at your own work and say to yourself, “I did a good job.” And then you let it go, because anything else is going to make you crazy, and anything else, you’re going to be trying to impress people who don’t even like you. That’s the truth! You have to be very careful of letting people who not only don’t know you, but don’t understand you, don’t like you… you can’t let those people determine who you are.

When I did the conversation with Jimmy, there were people standing in line for that—it was more Jimmy than me. I’m very fortunate to have a publisher; I’ve been with HarperCollins now for 40 years. I haven’t jumped around. Poets don’t make money. If you’re not looking for, “Oh, I want to write a book, and there’ll be a movie, and I’ll become rich and famous,” you’ll be happy. There can be a kind of freedom, when the reward is itself the work.”

—Nikki Giovanni in The Creative Independent

WEDNESDAY

I’m thinking about The Dumpster Fire and the Garden by Brad Montague, To Destroy is to Create by Jiddu Krishnamurti, and Breaking My Own Silence by Min Jin Lee.

THURSDAY

“Once upon a time there lived a woman who wanted to exchange her present for her daughter’s future. Little did she know that, if she did so, the two of them would merge into one ungainly creature, at once divided and reconstituted, and time would flow through both of them like water in a single stream. The child became the mother’s future, and the mother became the child’s present, taking up residence in her brain, blood, and bones. The woman vowed that she had no need for God, but her child always wondered, Was the bargain her mother had made a kind of prayer?”

—from A Mother’s Exchange For Her Daughter’s Future by Jiayang Fan 

FRIDAY

Still not believing in age I wake
to find myself older than I can understand
with most of my life in a fragment
that only I remember
some of the old colors are still there
but not the voices or what they are saying
how can it be old when it is now
with the sky taking itself for granted
there was no beginning I was there

—No Believer by W.S. Merwin

xx,

M

---

To sign up for my weekly newsletter, Dear Somebody, please subscribe here.

Dear Somebody: Letting go.

Page 150 from my book of essays, How it Feels to Find Yourself 

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

MONDAY 

I’m reading more middle grade these days, both because it’s good reading (for the most part) and because I’d like to write a middle grade novel one day. I just finished Pax: Journey Home by Sarah Pennypacker.

On recommendation from Margaux Kent, I started reading Martyr! this week. So far, so good. I also enjoyed watching this interview with author Kaveh Akbar and Arian Moayed, where Kaveh speaks generously about how he crafted the book and what it feels like to live in the in-between, a topic I am perpetually interested in.

I pre-ordered Montana Poet Laureate Chris La Tray’s Becoming Little Shell and honestly can’t wait to receive it. I love Chris’s writing. It’s very clean. It’s precise. Something about it feels warm, alive. Maybe because he lives in accordance with the earth? Maybe because he writes with all of his senses? Maybe because he has a wonderful grasp on language and rhythm? Maybe because his thoughts appeal to me and give me something to reach for? Likely, all of the above. Give it a try. 

TUESDAY

Three years into motherhood, I’m just now beginning to understand why many parents are unable to separate themselves from their children. After swimming in your child’s vomit and tears for the better part of 20-something years, becoming ridiculously invested in even the most benign of their milestones (F and I are currently working on her wave), and using the better part of your brain and heart to shape theirs? After all that, it’s difficult to let go. 

As research for my own well-being, I’m reading a lot about letting go. In The Power of Now, Eckhart Tolle talks about how our only true reality is whatever we’re experience at this very moment. He says, “…to surrender is to accept the present moment unconditionally and without reservation. It is to relinquish inner resistance to what is.” 

My brain knows all this but it still likes to live in the future, in a place that has never existed and never will—a place where my current grievance has disappeared and no new complaint has arrived to replace it. I want to change my brain, so I practice living in the now.

When N wakes up with the worst toddler stomach illness going around, I try to be present. Nothing I want to get done is going to happen, I say and open my arms to the now. This resignation sets me up for success. I find myself present through the tears, the laundry, the crackers, and the soup. T vacuums N’s room; I open a window and light a candle. When I walk in a few hours later, I’m overwhelmed by how beautifully clean it smells. Like a field of watered flowers ready for bloom. Not only is my nose working, but I’m paying attention to it. 

When F goes for her morning nap, I set N in front of the television and sit next to her to take notes for the essay I’m writing. After a few minutes, N announces that she’s done watching and wants to play. Right, I say, putting down my book and pen. Let’s play. We play Zingo and Genius Square. I study N’s strategy through the moves she makes. I see her concentration through her brows, but only the left one. She’s getting better at placing pieces without knocking others over. 

The day continues. F wakes up and N goes for her nap; N wakes up and F goes for her second nap. I drink a little coffee, I eat a cookie for comfort, I ask my editor for an extension on my deadline. The coffee is good, the cookie too sweet. I know my interest in sugar is emotional, so I only have one. Only occasionally do I find myself frustrated with all that is out of my control. I work on letting go.

By all measures, it’s been an ordinary Tuesday: a sick toddler, a restless baby, and two parents struggling to work from home. But as I make dinner for my family, it starts to feel a little special. It’s true that I didn’t get time to work on my assignments or keep up with my daily poem practice. It’s true that my book deadline is growing closer and closer. It’s true that there was no moment of quiet or solitude. But I did practice something notoriously difficult for me: I practiced letting go. 

Ooowee N, what a Tuesday!, I say, pouring myself a glass of wine. I read about tortoises aloud to her while smashing chickpeas and carrots for F’s screaming mouth. I don’t remember what the wine tasted like, only that it was perfect. The day is, finally, almost over. 

Mom, N says, looking at me with her big, serious eyes. I loved spending this Tuesday with you.

WEDNESDAY

I was interviewed by Avani Patel for Sahaj Kaur Kohli, MA, LGPC’s Culturally Enough, where we spoke about confidence being a skill you can build, the magic of poetry, and how so much of parenting our children is re-parenting ourselves. You can listen here. 

I haven’t shared too much about the Little Revolutions podcast episode I recorded with Freeda in London this past November, but only because I feel so many things about it and want to write about the experience properly. I hope to do that next week. In the meantime, you can listen to me and Masuma talk about redefining feminism as a mother. 

If you missed it last week, I talked with Andy J. Pizza of Creative Pep Talk about pushing through creative ruts and learning how to accept your own multiple (often competing) perspectives in Episode #438. 

THURSDAY

“HAVE FUN. I spent years focusing on skill development and losing the spark that made me feel so connected to my art. Remember that the joy is what will always drive you to make the best work—not money, success, or likes.”

—My advice to artists/my advice to myself, for Petya K. Grady’s How to Work Like An Artist. Lots of good advice from fellow artists and writers here. 

FRIDAY

The whole idea of it makes me feel
like I’m coming down with something,
something worse than any stomach ache
or the headaches I get from reading in bad light–
a kind of measles of the spirit,
a mumps of the psyche,
a disfiguring chicken pox of the soul.

You tell me it is too early to be looking back,
but that is because you have forgotten
the perfect simplicity of being one
and the beautiful complexity introduced by two.
But I can lie on my bed and remember every digit.
At four I was an Arabian wizard.
I could make myself invisible
by drinking a glass of milk a certain way.
At seven I was a soldier, at nine a prince.

But now I am mostly at the window
watching the late afternoon light.
Back then it never fell so solemnly
against the side of my tree house,
and my bicycle never leaned against the garage
as it does today,
all the dark blue speed drained out of it.

This is the beginning of sadness, I say to myself,
as I walk through the universe in my sneakers.
It is time to say good-bye to my imaginary friends,
time to turn the first big number.

It seems only yesterday I used to believe
there was nothing under my skin but light.
If you cut me I could shine.
But now when I fall upon the sidewalks of life,
I skin my knees. I bleed.

—On Turning Ten by Billy Collins

xx,

M

---

To sign up for my weekly newsletter, Dear Somebody, please subscribe here.

Dear Somebody: Paying attention.

An illustration for Issue #60 of Uppercase Magazine

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

MONDAY 

I bundle F up into a navy blue sweater onesie with a giant yellow smiley face on it, Mulan socks that are too big for her tiny rabbit feet, and a white snowsuit. She’s wailing, already, and we haven’t yet left the house. 

After a leisurely fall season, which is, hands-down, my favorite part about living in St. Louis, it’s finally cold. Uncomfortably so. I remind myself that the discomforts in life refresh us in all the ways a new year only promises to, and zip my coat up to the throat. 

It’s 8:30 in the morning and I haven’t had coffee, but as soon as the icy wind smacks me in the face, I feel invigorated, even giddy. To me, the most beautiful part about nature is that she doesn’t coddle. She can’t wait for us to keep up; she has far greater things to do. She thrashes and stomps and lingers. She doesn’t stop to think or wait for a better time. She heals herself the best she can. She considers the larger picture. She goes on.

F’s protests have quieted, subdued by all there is to digest. She looks at the bare arms of maples, dogwoods, and elms; she stretching her own. Branches scrape against buildings and the sky. The wind whistles as it passes through our clothes and hair, searching. Birds rummage against the wind, finding their way towards food or home. We listen to them sing while they work or play. Song is something that has a place almost anywhere. I want more of it. 

When I turn the corner towards our little free library, I feel a bolt of panic. Sharp and quiet. Since the first of January, I’ve noticed it more and more: the way the years are running away from me. The way they look back at me and laugh, remembering that I once worried that things would never change. 

N rides a bicycle and takes showers. She strips off her coat and sweaters to be closer to Sister Winter. She’s learning how to manage her own temper; I’m learning, too. She’s not in any rush; she takes a long time. She is quiet, observant—but now and then, she steps outside of herself to dance and laugh maniacally. In these moments, she is so uninhibited that my heart splinters. 

In the fall, she’ll start at a new school, maybe, and F will, too. They will reach for each other; I will have more time for myself. I know that this is what I’ve looked forward to, but it doesn’t feel satisfying. Raising children is such a mournful affair—a rush of head and heart, a constant coming up for air. Other than affection, what I’ve felt most over the past few years is internal conflict and a desire for solitude. Now, for the first time since becoming a mother, I feel a little lonely. 

The robins sing. F waves at them, then becomes distracted by her own hand. I see the miracle of song and wave. I see the miracle of ten tiny fingers on two tiny hands. I see the old years and the new years chasing each other, faster now, and then a blur.

I see the entire world standing before me. She says the same thing she always says, the same thing I know she’ll always say: I hope you’re paying attention.

TUESDAY

View fullsize

View fullsize

“This practice of rewriting my personal color story is useful in a few ways. I am more intimately privy to the inner workings of my own mind, able to discern why an individual shade, or an entire spectrum of a single hue—affects me in the way it does. I am able to pair and detach certain colors with specific memories, and therefore, emotions. I also find myself largely immune to the effects of commercial color marketing. Rather than feeling agitated by the color red, for example, which is routinely found in conjunction with extreme feelings of stress and urgency (stop signs, red lights, sirens, and all combinations of warnings), I feel interested, almost eager. All three of these emotional states—agitation, interest, and eagerness—are based in excitement, but only agitation (which is the combination of excitement and anxiety), has a negative effect on my body and mind.”

—An excerpt from “Emotional Color,” my latest Being column for Issue #60 of Uppercase Magazine

WEDNESDAY

I had the joy of speaking to Andrea Scher on the School of Wonder podcast, where we discussed confidence, creativity, and courage. This episode is available for streaming here. 

THURSDAY

I am: re-reading A Separate Peace, enjoying this artwork—especially as N learns her letters, watching Reservation Dogs, and thinking about love. 

I can’t stop thinking about this cover artwork, created by Tolkien to accompany a series of letters he wrote for his children. 

F and I listen to Joni Mitchell during breakfast. 

FRIDAY

The world is not simple.
Anyone will tell you.
But have you ever washed a person’s hair
over a tin bucket,
gently twisting the rope of it
to wring the water out?
At the end of everything,
dancers just use air as their material.
A voice keeps singing even
without an instrument.
You make your fingers into a comb.

—Tin Bucket by Jenny George

xx,

M

---

To sign up for my weekly newsletter, Dear Somebody, please subscribe here.

Dear Somebody: The start of something.

---

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. 

---

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

---

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

---

xx,

M

---

To sign up for my weekly newsletter, Dear Somebody, please subscribe here.

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

---

To sign up for my weekly newsletter, Dear Somebody, please subscribe here.