A peek inside the machinery. / Dustin Renwick

The act of completing a piece art necessarily removes the mess from its creation. A final product -- whether it's a written piece of journalism, an oil painting, a three-hour film -- arrives with polish and without process. Readers and viewers don't have access to the bits and bytes that the creators swept away. 

Plenty of arguments support this method, not the least of which is avoiding confusion. But I love the process as much as the product, and this month I found myself craving the notations, the marginalia, the backstory.

The story behind a giant canvas of playable art connected pretty quickly in my mind to the insiders' oral history of the NBA mascot that never happened. 

Visuals dominate our communication methods, but we don't often learn how a ubiquitous picture was made. Peeking at the gears and sprockets of a human brain becomes even less obvious in writing, which is why I so thoroughly enjoy a series of annotated journalism: "We had no idea what we’d find in the shop, or that Eric would get a late-night call from a woman with a secret trove of feathers."

The same reasons drew me to an essay that delivers an exquisite technique -- a mom writes about her daughter, who then adds comments. The print layout produces a better effect for that piece, but digital content allows for hyperlinks that can share context. I didn't see enough of that extra info in an interview with my kick-ass cousin, who works on monarch butterfly conservation. More from her: 

"Urban landscapes, including residential yards, can and do provide important pollinator habitat," she wrote in an email. "The collective impact of cities east of the Rocky Mountains with 50K or more people could contribute nearly 20 percent toward the national goal of planting 1.8 billion milkweed plants needed to stabilize the monarch population."

Spring still can't find its way to DC, but my cousin says the first monarchs were flying north into Texas and Arkansas last week.
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Before you search for blossoms or butterflies, dig into a half dozen poems with handwritten edits and insights. Then welcome the daylight.