Technically

Milo would like to clarify.

Hello, slowpokes. It’s been hot in Oregon. We had an unusually wet, verdant spring that we all complained about. Too much rain. We wanted summer. And then, in the blink of an eye, summer came and it was too hot. Last week, all the plants were electric green and you could practically see them growing. This week, they are wilting and crispy. When oh when will life be perfect?

Snail Fight, Leo Putz, 1904, via @mepaintsme

Thanks, by the way, for indulging those chapters of Egg Sisters the past couple of weeks. Thanks especially to those of you who liked them and said so. I’ve been holding that close to my chest for years, thinking I might eventually finish it and try to publish it. I still might, but in the meantime it felt good to let it go, off into the world. Like Effy and Estelle, this story is now wandering a disappearing and reappearing animal trail in a darkening forest.

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Currently, I have no deadlines, which is a disorienting state of being for me. I was supposed to be working on a book this summer, but I had to step back from a lot of projects this year to address some intense family stuff and it’s on hold until the fall. So I have the summer off for the first time in my adult life. Unless we’re counting the summer of 1997 in Missoula when I was an occasional artist’s model and mostly survived by selling two oil paintings and mooching off my friends. But I don’t think we are counting that because I was broke, and you’re always hustling when you’re broke, even if you don’t have a job. This summer I’m not hustling.

I am doing a little freelance work here and there. I recently illustrated a story about swamps by Annie Proulx for The New Yorker. I couldn’t say no to this because I love Annie Proulx and, even more so, I love swamps.

The sketch, which I like better than the final (it’s often the case)

But mostly I’m doing nothing and gently grappling with my inability to comfortably do that. I wake up and wonder what I should work on now that I don’t have anything I have to work on. I’m experimenting with having no projects, with being an available summertime mom, a gardener, and a person who can read a book in a hammock for an hour. I tried the last thing yesterday and it was nice. I started reading Trout Fishing in America by Richard Brautigan, an iconic hippie text that was hugely formative to me when I was a teenager. I wondered if I would still like it. I do! A lot.

I also started a patchwork quilt with all the scraps I’ve been saving. Quilts are good projects to work on when you’re experimenting with having no projects. They take so long. You can put a quilt aside for two years and, when you come back to it, it’ll be no less relevant or useful than it was when you put it aside. You can spend the rest of your life plugging away on one massive patchwork quilt and nobody will be mad at you for taking so long.

humble beginnings

How’s everyone doing out there? How do we feel about Slowpoke? What would you like to see more of here? I’m all ears.

Love,
Carson