đHope is a Gift You Don't Have to Surrender đ
This week's slogan comes from the Rebecca Solnit quote I printed on a risograph machine at the IPRC this week. Risograph printing is the most fun kind of art making, it's an official fact.Â
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Everyone else was in the hardware store to buy air masks. But I was there looking for carcinogens. As I crouched low in front of a rack of paint thinners, peering at one can after another to read the fine-printed hazardous materials label, I listened to a woman harangue the store owner. Â
âI called and asked if you had a box left and you said you did!âÂ
âThat was an hour ago, weâve had a dozen customers come in looking for masks since then! These three are the last masks we have in stock. I canât keep these on the shelves, Iâve sold 3,500 of them in the last three weeks.â
âMaybe Iâll just drive over to Home Depot.âÂ
âYou can try, but theyâre all sold out. Everywhere else in Portland is sold out. I can guarantee you that.â Â
   The customer grumbled while she bought the last three masks in the city, a balm against future infection by Coronavirus. Meanwhile, certain death was right in front of me, in banal four-point font. Benzene and petroleum distillate: May cause genetic defects. May cause damage to central nervous system. May be fatal if inhaled.
   I was on the hunt for a very specific chemical: trichloroethylene. This toxic chemicalâwhich causes heart defects and cancerâwas historically used as an anesthetic during childbirth (!) but was now found in industrial solvents⌠only thanks to EPA regulation, most companies have phased it out of consumer products. Iâd never heard of this chemical before three days ago, but this week my job as a web producer for Reveal involved finding the right images to illustrate an article exposing how chemical lobbying groups are trying to roll back regulations on trichloroethylene. Behind the scenes, two chemical industry groups have been muddying the science around this chemicalâfunding research that says itâs not so bad after all and leaning on the White House to stop new restrictions. On my morbid scavenger hunt, I was trying to find a product made of trichloroethylene to photograph for the story. But after perusing the paint thinners, brake degreasers, and rust removers I was coming up empty.
   Having freshly sold out of masks, the hardware store owner barked out a friendly hello to me.Â
âYou need help finding something?âÂ
âWellâŚ.â I hesitated. âIâm looking for something weird.âÂ
âTry me.âÂ
âIâm looking for any product with trichloroethyleneâitâs a chemical.âÂ
The owner eyed me rather suspiciously from under his bushy gray eyebrows. To my surprise, he knew just what the obscure chemical was.
âThey donât use that anymore. What do you want it for?âÂ
I explained my mission and he nodded, then walked around the store and grabbed an old can of brake degreaser off a dusty shelf.Â
âThis might have it⌠this was a special order a couple years ago,â he said, squinting down at the warning label. But, nope. No trichloroethylene. âHuh. They must have changed the recipe.âÂ
I thanked him and left the store empty-handed. The disappearance of trichlorethylene is bad for my photo assignment, but good for the world. There is less of this carcinogen floating around in our air and water than there used to be. And this is the way environmental regulation often is: When a toxic substance is banned or phased out, we often donât notice it at all. Weâre all just a bit safer and healthier. There is a long list of dangerous chemicals that profit-driven companies will absolutely use if theyâre allowed toâthey balk at even listening ingredients on warning labels until absolutely forced to. This is the kind of real health risk that usually doesnât make headlines. Itâs not a scary-sounding new virus. Itâs business as usual.
Around the world, air pollution is one of the leading causes of deathâseven million people die every year because of pollution. If thatâs not an epidemic, what is? What if everyone whoâs stocking up on air masks and hand sanitizer got involved in pushing for laws that create cleaner air and water? What if we reported on the climate crisis the way we report on the Coronavirus crisis? What if we saw environmental ruin as a true emergency?
A screenshot of the Washington Post homepage from Feb. 27, with every headline about Coronavirus replaced with one about the climate crisis.Â
Stuff I Made
The three books I was working onâGuantanamo Voices, my Year of Zines collection, and The Nibâs Be Gay, Do Comicsâall went to press in the last two weeks. Above is the cover of the Year of Zines book. As you can see, the back cover is on the left, the spine is in the middle, and the front cover is on the right. It's got flaps, folks! Wait a few months and Iâll be knee-deep in books:Â Guantanamo Voices comes out in October, Year of Zines comes out in April, and Be Gay, Do Comics comes out in May.
Stuff Iâm Doing
This week Iâm heading to the biggest writing conference in the United States. The Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) is in San Antonio, Texas. Iâm excited to bike around the city in search of the best honkytonk music. On Friday evening, Iâm hosting a drink and draw with cartoonist Shelby Criswell. If youâll be at AWP or happen to know anyone in San Antonio, come to the drink and draw at La Botanica on Friday, March 6, from 5-7pm. It's ADA accessible and has vegan snacks.Â
Stuff I Love
âProtect Trans Kidsâ Shirt - Pace Taylor is one of my favorite artists and they printed these perfect new shirts. I got the long-sleeve one and Ben got the short-sleeve one and now weâre going to be one of those matchy matchy couples.Â
The View from Somewhere - I am officially obsessed with this book and podcast by Lewis Raven Wallace about the myth of journalistic objectivity. I love his approach to journalism and he talks about many of the moral questions that I think about in my own work.
ÂBrass Taxes - For literally an entire year, I have been dreading doing my taxes. Being a freelancer has made my tax process excruciating chaos. To make things worse, the companies I turned to for helpâH&R Block and Turbotaxâare absolutely horrible and actually lobby the government to keep taxes complicated! Someone recommended I use Brass Taxes, a relatively new company thatâs focused on doing taxes for artists and freelancers. OH. MY. GOD. It was wonderful! A very patient writer talked me through my taxes and for the first time ever, my taxes were not overwhelming at all. Seriously, ditch Turbotax and use Brass Taxes!
ÂLibraries Going Fine Free! I didnât really realize this was a possibility until the Philadelphia library system announced recently that they are doing away with overdue fines. This prompted me to read a bunch of studies about the ineffectiveness of library fines. I made a zine about the whole idea of making libraries fine-free.
ÂLupa - Whenever someone asks whether I speak Spanish, I say, âYes, sort of, but Iâm always learning.â Iâm excited about Lupa, a new Spanish-language learning app made in partnership with Radio Ambulante. They post the audio and transcripts of short stories, then you can click on each word to see a definition. Itâs $10 a month and totally worth it so far.
ÂQuarantine cuisine - This comic about Chinese people doing what they can to cook elaborate and interesting meals while under citywide quarantine is a lovely slice-of-life in a grim situation.
ÂNooworks - I wore my new shirt from Nooworks this week and three people came up to ask me where I got it. Love this store.
What Iâve Been Reading
Severance by Ling Ma - The perfect Coronarvirus reading! This intimate story follows a young woman who flees New York after a mysterious plague spreads around the world. Severance is less about armageddon and more about survival of all kinds, as it blends together a story of immigration, grieving the end of a romantic relationship, and starting anew in an impossible world.
Blackfish City by Sam Miller - This was a Powells employee pick that I snatched up because it sits right in the middle of the Venn diagram of my literary interests: ecological collapse, future cyberpunk civilizations, and queer narratives. It felt like a modern voice set in the corrupt floating-trash-island-oligarchs world of Neal Stephensonâs Snow Crash.
The Plotters by Un-Su Kim - This quiet, patient book following a depressed South Korean assassin reminded me of the movie Drive. Itâs a thoughtful, sometimes inscrutable stroll punctuated by moments of vivid violence that took me by surprise.  Â
American War by Omar El Akkad - Omar wrote the introduction to Guantanamo Voices and so of course I wanted to read his book! Itâs a dark story set in the American South in the midst of a new civil warâthis one over the use of fossil fuels. The deeper in I got, the more engrossed I became.
On a Sunbeam by Tillie Walden - Holy cow, this is one of the most beautiful graphic novels I have ever read. I could frame every single page of this gorgeous, tender space-age romance. This book inspired me to immediately go out and buy a set of colored pens to bring some dreamy colors to my own artwork.
Something to Do
Appreciate the Subconscious Art of Graffiti Removal
Maybe 10 years ago, I watched this short film by Matt McCormick about the color-block canvasses created when people buff off graffiti. As I was biking home a few nights ago, the golden-hour light caught a particularly beautiful set of buffed walls. I snapped a photo and spend the next 20 minutes biking in circles around a few blocks in Portlandâs industrial Southeast, looking for more interesting walls. It was nice to meander and stare at walls while rush-hour traffic poured around me. Everyone else seemed in hurry to get somewhere. So waste a few minutes in a wonderful way by strolling around your neighborhood looking for unintentional art.
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I'll send out another update next month. In the meantime, you can follow me on Instagram and Twitter. You can also support my work on Patreon and receive wonderful things in the mail. The archive of past newsletters is right here.Â