A Birthday, A Substack Anniversary, And A New In-Person Workshop This Fall

The Week in Pictures & Words

Reading backwards at my day one writings to ask myself, why did I come here? The very first piece I wrote two years ago was titled If On Your Birthday on my birthday 2023, an homage to friends who contribute tremendously to my art and writing life. In these past few days leading to my birthday this year and among the frenzy and hubbub and jubilation and heavy-lifts of Spring and birthdays and working and planning, Margaux Kent and I announced a new workshop—a retreat really with workshops, at the Highlights Foundation in the highlands of the Delaware River in Pennsylvania in mid-October.

After many attempts at naming the workshop/retreat:

Bookbinding and Story Gathering?

Well is it about stories really?

Bookbinding and Picture Finding?

Sounds weird, everyone agreed, like what does that even mean?

Bookbinding and Magic Making?

Yeah! Sounds right!

Because the gist of the three days we have planned is to stay true to what each of us loves and does best: Margaux’s passion and skill for book and journal making, pencil and ink, drawing new life into discarded bits which very few others see. The ways she fills page after page of her always present and expanding, never not on her person, under her arm, in her bags or on her busy beautiful desk journals, containers for records, sketches, scribbles, and all manner of thinkings, of looking outs and looking ins, gatherings and makings.

Jumbled with my soft spot for inviting in the process of doing and making and finding new ways to see the world slightly anew, to compose pictures that create conversations with its subjects and perhaps other humans too in puddles of water and color and finding ways of re-languaging this spit of world I inhabit, reminding others our collective heads are literally in clouds anyway so we may as well find our own singular vision to make fun and meaning and new language on the page.

We’ll take our combined love of beginnings and new processes, the stories of objects and the messy eccentricities of the natural world as place of wonder. We’ll trade what we take for memories with tenderness and care and imagination with twelve humans who wish to learn and do the same with us in the peaceful forest setting of Highlights.

In the Otherwises, there have been swans all week and on April 4th, my birthday, the flowering apple trees out our window in full blossom. Gracefulness in all its Spring has sprung. The best birthday surprise was a visit to the New York Botanical Gardens to see the orchids and where a few cherries have opened in full hearts pink. We happened upon a bright tulip patch until we got up close and it was a poppy patch and finally, fell under the spell of a full-show creamy magnolia tree, its lilting buds, its constellations, their few days on earth before poof, like a soap-bubble they go to leaf.

But truly it’s been the orchids. Everyone who’s been to an orchid show knows: it is impossible not to take a hundred thousand pictures, not be seduced by their stunning allure in the most Michael Pollen way? Impossible for us not to run around finding the best sides and open mouths of every flower in the conservatory. The Lady Slippers were my favorite, all insect mimicry and sexy accents. All come hither, all the masterful leaves of the jungle in New York City.

Finally swans dissolving into the same water that makes them, something about place and grace, accompanying a story I’m writing about a family menaced by war, how the word war itself isn’t enough of a signifier for itself, the word once it leaves the mouth, well, does it leave the body? Or does the body leave it?

An homage to trees my Studio Schmal Drawing Workout weekly practice (adore!)

Lastly the beginnings of some duckies, below, as Sophie Blackall and I prepare to teach our Milkwood Retreat this July! Still there are good things and good people in the world.

Now we are off to Cape Cod for a few days to watch the water birds, finish these duckies, swans, geese, seashells, sea air, hikes, moss, imagined jellyfish, Edward Carey’s House and any other Cape Cod recommendations by the seashore welcome!