Pub Day!

One Week in January: New Paintings for an Old Diary

It is always wild when a half baked idea becomes a book and then the book goes on sale. Welcome to the world, One Week in January!

This book is out today. I’ll be at Powell’s tonight at 7:00 reading it and talking about it with one of the book’s main characters, Colin Meloy.

Art Show

One Week in January has about thirty paintings in it and we’ll be exhibiting most of them at Nationale in a show that opens on Saturday. The opening is from 2:00-5:00 and the show is up through October 19th.

Here is a collector’s preview for you, cherished Slowpoke subscribers: framed work is here and unframed work is here. A preview is an early look at the art along with pricing and availability. It’s an opportunity to purchase work before the show opens to the general public. Especially useful for curious out-of-town people who won’t make it to Portland. May at Nationale requests your patience as her staff is small and it can sometimes take a moment to respond to inquiries. But rest assured, they’re on it.

Book Tour

Typically when I do bookstore events I put together a powerpoint about the book and I give a talk. I did put together a powerpoint for this book, and then I realized - yesterday - after all that work - that I was a little bored by the idea. Also, I’ll be “in conversation” with smart, interesting people at these events and don’t want to make those conversations redundant by saying all the stuff I want to say about the book beforehand. So I’m not going to give a proper talk, but I will have lots of images at my disposal to share during the conversation and Q&A portions of the evening.

Here are some things that I was going to talk about and still probably will but who knows:

• How, before I moved to Portland, I lived in a cold warehouse in San Francisco with the artist Kal Spelletich and two computer hackers named Eric; how one of the Erics was my boyfriend and is the guy on the motorbike in the song Grace Cathedral Hill.

• How, when I went searching online for a nighttime photo of the facade of My Father’s Place to use for painting reference, I only found two, and one of them was on the totally obsolete mapquest website, and Colin’s bandmate Chris Funk was in it.

• How there was a toilet next to the fridge in the kitchen of Colin and Stiv’s warehouse space that we called Plan B; how I wanted to put a blurry photo of myself using it somewhere in this book but the idea was met with confusion and mild disgust.

• How it was a total dream to work on One Week in January until we had to figure out the cover and nobody could agree; how I owe a debt of gratitude to the great early twentieth century Black artist Horace Pippin and his painting Amish Letter Writer for helping me work out a solution.

If you’d like to hear me read from this book and talk about it, I’ll be visiting some bookstores this fall on the west coast with some brilliant conversation partners.

We also just added a Seattle date:

Friday, November 8 at 7pm at Elliott Bay Books with JON MOOALLEM, who I like to refer to as the Beyonce of long form journalism. So don’t miss that!

And regarding that SF litquake thing on October 15th: It’s open to the public and ticketed, doors at 6:30, program at 7:00. I assume you can get tickets on the litquake website.

Press

I was on a live local morning show yesterday but I’m not going to link to it because I did a bad job on my lipstick and my dress choice was questionable and I’m vain.

Here’s something I do love: I was on the cover of the Portland Mercury, smoking a cigarette at age twenty-five.

This was last week. I don’t mean I was on the cover of the Portland Mercury when I was twenty-five, though that is almost true too. The last time I had art on the cover of this alt-weekly was twenty years ago. They used a dirty painting I made of two people making out in a room strewn with empty liquor bottles and underwear. It was called “Lucky Green Dress.”

A few other things I’m happy about:

• This feature in Portland Monthly. Thanks Matt Trueherz!

• I’ll be on an upcoming episode of Creative Peptalk with Andy J. Pizza, who I like a lot.

• I’m going to talk to Debbie Millman for Design Matters!

• Colin reviewed One Week in January on The Machine Shop today.

Okay

I’m done celebrating myself for now. Thanks for all your love and support, Slowpokes. See you around.

xo
Carson

---