🌷Plant Flowers Wherever You Go 🌷

Scattering seeds

“Can I sit here?” I asked, pointing to a seat at a picnic table full of strangers. It was Dyke Night at the Wallflower Collective in Burlington, Vermont, and the place was packed with people I didn’t know but certainly wanted to talk to. I’d already watched a group of butch preschool teachers play pool, helped a new friend fold 50 zines about the upcoming election, and been interviewed as an “elder” for a 21-year-old’s college paper. A good night. 

Outside, I recognized Celia, a cartoonist and long-distance hiker who I’d just met an hour earlier. They were sitting at the picnic table, surrounded by friends. 

“Sure!” said Celia. “We’re all answering a question: If you could make an action figure of yourself, what accessories would you have?” We went around the table and everyone gave thoughtful answers. A backpack full of camping supplies. A bicycle. A script for a play. Then they all looked at me. 

“Well…” I said. “I’d definitely have a little zine activity book that came with pencils, so the person playing with the action figure could make their own comic.” I thought about it for a moment longer. “And a packet of wildflower seeds, so I could plant seeds whenever I go.” 

“Shut up!” shouted Celia, grinning. “You’re gonna make me cry!”

“Sorry!” I laughed. “I know it’s corny as hell. But it’s true.” 

This corny-but-true idea had come from something a friend said about me this winter. I was on the phone telling them about how I was organizing a community zine workshop in a small Maine town. I was living in the remote college town for a month-long gig teaching comics. It was a tough month. My students were anxious and quiet. In the mornings, I scraped ice off my car. At night, I scrolled through heart-wrenching news from bed in my rented basement room. I felt isolated and bleak. But the highlight was setting up this free workshop at a local community arts space. Amid the bitter cold and early darkness, the space became vibrant and bright. A dozen people turned up to make collaborative zines. We passed around folded sheets of paper, each person contributing a drawing to the collective art project, laughing and admiring each other’s sketches and ideas.  

Hearing all this, my friend on the phone said, “You plant flowers wherever you go.” 

This description of my life made me feel deeply seen. It’s how I want to be. No matter how long I’m in a place or how alone I feel, I want to be always trying to plant flowers. Maybe it’s in a bar full of strangers, maybe it’s in a small town. Wherever I am, I want to feel connected, I want to feel alive, I want to help something new grow.

🌷🌸🌻

Big Exciting News 

Two exciting things are happening in my life. 

🍄 I got a journalism grant! I found out this week that I’m one of 10 people to receive a 2024 Ferris-UC Berkeley Psychedelic Journalism Fellowship. Yay! Yay! Yay! I’m truly stoked about this. The fellowship gives out reporting grants to “journalists reporting in-depth print and audio stories on the science, policy, business and culture of this new era of psychedelics.” I’m going to use the money to create a series of collaborative nonfiction comics interviewing people who use psychedelic assisted therapy to treat trauma. A lot of people have found that psilocybin and MDMA (among other psychedelics) are powerful medicines that help them reshape their experiences with trauma. 

Deep gratitude to journalist Deena Prichep, who encouraged me to apply for this grant and read over my application. Thank you, Deena! 

🍉 Cartoonists For Palestine is now live. Over the past six months, I’ve been working behind-the-scenes with my friends Yazan, Tracy, and Andy to create an archive of comics responding to the ongoing genocide in Palestine. This website, Cartoonists for Palestine, launched this week. It collects comics published in various disparate places so they can be read and shared—now and for the future. We are also putting together a print anthology of comics about Palestine. 

I feel deeply honored to work on this. It’s a project that’s been keeping me going amid the horrors of the last six months. Read this piece of the essay Yazan wrote introducing the archive: 

In the face of calamity, artists still have a role to play and are inspired by the examples of our history -- from those who used art to reckon with the death camps of the Holocaust in Europe to those who employed art to fight against Apartheid in South Africa, and more.  Their legacy to us is a message: do not stand still or stay silent.

Comics have no walls nor borders, and the youngness of our medium represents an opportunity to reject the boundaries that were assigned to us. All around the world, in newspapers, magazines and on mobile phone screens, comics speak about the most important topics of the day. We are not powerless. Through comics, we can shape the narratives told about ourselves and our world—and in that way, we hope to provoke change.  

Damn, guys. Check out the archive at Cartoonists For Palestine. If you want to get involved or submit a comic you’ve made, just reply to this email and I’ll link you up. 

Life Update: Where am I?  

Proof of life. Hello!

After potentially too much travel between Vermont, California, Portland, and Maine over the past three months, I’m back in Vermont until the end of May. I’m the applied cartooning fellow at the Center for Cartoon Studies, which means I’m occasionally teaching but mostly taking classes on making comics from people like Dan Nott, Tillie Walden, and Jason Lutes. At the farmhouse where I’m living, I can hear coyotes out the window every night. My life here is very nice. 

Upcoming Events 

I’m organizing two low-key event series in Vermont this spring. 

My friend Becca Schuchat and I are hosting a monthly very chill Drink and Draw at Babe’s Bar (which just got a really lovely feature in the Washington Post!). Just show up at the bar and draw during the last Wednesday of the month.

A local go-getter teenager and I are also organizing three zine workshops at Junction Arts Media in White River Junction. RSVP here. All of those events are free and all-ages! 

I’m taking a break from tabling at conventions because I find them exhausting, but I’ll be attending the NYC Feminist Zine Festival on April 6th—holler if you’ll be there, too! 

What I’m Making 

A lot of my work is in-progress. For example: a book! My friend Eleri and I finished the thumbnails for the epic book we’re collaborating on. The book, Making Nonfiction Comics: The Field Guide to Graphic Narrative, will hopefully be finished in August and then debut in 2025. Working on a book project is hard for me because we’re knee-deep in drawing but have nothing to show for it.

In other hard-to-document art, I’ve been excited doing weird, ephemeral collaborative stuff just for fun, like about making zines with groups of strangers in bars. 

Also, I’ve gotten into making zine templates for people to fill out. Why didn’t I think of this earlier in life?! They’re so fun and a nice way to get started zine-making if you want to keep things easy. Here’s a printable template for making a zine about friendship. 

Here’s my current Notes app list of ideas I need to get started on. These are all good ideas, right? 

What I’m Listening To 

• Handsome podcast - I’m usually not into podcasts of the “friends sitting around chatting” genre but I got hooked on Handsome. I already love each of the hosts—Tig Notaro, Mae Martin, and Fortune Feimster—and the more I listen to the show, the deeper I fall in love. 

• Thistlefoot by GennaRose Nethercott - A very fun audiobook, in my opinion. It starts out as a magical romp involving Baba Yaga’s house traveling from Russia to Vermont to New Orleans and then gets into grim human history. 

• Jessie Ware and Sofi Tukker - I asked the 20-something students at school for music recommendations and these two have been solid gold. Drop ‘em into your Spotify and see what happens. 

What I’m Reading: Zine History  

Last spring, I had a simple idea: Make a zine about the history of zines. How hard could that be? Well, a year later, I have a mountain of research and no zine. On the plus side, the pile of books about zine history covering my bedroom floor are quite aesthetically pleasing. One thing that’s frustrating to me about researching zine history is that most of the books on the topic are weirdly expensive, academic, and published more than 10 years ago. I’m hoping this zine can be accessible and affordable—I’m going to publish it under a Creative Commons license on my website so teachers and libraries can use it for free. 

I attended the really interesting and inspiring show on zine history at the Brooklyn Art Museum, Copy Machine Manifesto (which closes at the end of March and you should check out if you’re in New York), and bought the actual last copy of the book documenting the show. This $50 book is 448 pages long, which is making my idea for a $5, 40-page zine about zine history seem extra ambitious by comparison.  Other zine history books on my floor right now: 

• Notes from the Underground: Zine and the Politics of Alternative Culture (originally published in 1997, new edition published in 2017)  

• Stolen Sharpie Revolution (originally published in 2002, new edition published in 2020)

• Girl Zines: Making Media, Doing Feminism (2009)  

• Punk Fanzines and DIY Cultures in a Global World (2019, available online for $160!!) 

• The World of Fanzines (a real throwback to 1973, available online for $150!!) 

Hopefully I’ll finish this zine… soon? Wish me luck!

Something to Do 

Make a Mad Lib 

A friend of mine recently celebrated one year on testosterone by hosting a T party in a park. In addition to serving tea and snacks, they asked everyone to put together a “gender presentation” for the event—some kind of show-and-tell reflecting on your own gender. In the spirit of fluidity and chaos, I wrote a gender Mad Lib for the event. You remember Mad Libs? They’re a collective form of storytelling, where someone writes a short story with lots of blank spaces left for words and then asks someone else for nouns, verbs, and adjectives without them knowing what the final story will be. I think this is a really playful approach to gender: it’s fill-in-the-blank. My mad lib is above. Please take this as inspiration to write your own mad lib, if not about gender then just as a cute way to collaborate with friends.