Your creativity is benevolent, and you can always return to it
Scenes from the summer, a new publication, an upcoming reading, a pep talk about returning to yourself
In this installment
- Publications and news
- Scenes from the summer
- Pep talk: Your creativity is benevolent, and you can always return to it.
Publications and news
Safe Face in Nightmare
To save face, run the razor along your hairline, oh so carefully, do not mar the skin. Put the face inside a velvet box with a small gold coin, a coin with its own saved face, embossed and soft and gold, only solid gold.
So thrilled to have a piece out today in Nightmare Magazine ~ a little bit of horror with some daughter diaspora mixed in…
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Reading at the North Beach Library
September 27: Join Residents past and present, and other local SF writers!! at the North Beach Open House! We’ll be at the North Beach Library reading across genres. This year’s residents will be on at 4pm. I will be channeling my inner slam poet to muster reading bravery.
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Generative session at Tin House Autumn Online
October 10: I’m excited to be running a generative session at this year’s speculative online workshop, Reactive Alchemy: Writing into the Speculative In-Between. It may or may not be inspired by certain magical bars of silver…The faculty is stacked, the other generative sessions will be amazing! Let me know if you’re attending, or if you have a lecture pass.
Scenes from the summer
My! This was a very active summer! Just a few highlights…
Tin House
As the last hurrah of our Reading Fellowship, the Fellows were invited out to Portland for a toasty Tin House Summer week of lectures and bonding IRL. I went to Winter Online, so it was my first time being at this idyllic Summer Camp for Writers™. I loved it!
Julián Delgado Lopera with facts: "a guiding principle of early drafts might be better phrased as write to know, and of revision, revise to know more. and of the final draft, I've written what I know"
Worldcon Seattle and ConCurrent
In August, I attended my first Worldcon! I always love seeing folks IRL and getting up to a tiny bit of lowkey mayhem. I was on two panels if you also attended and want to search for/catch them retroactively: Workshops and Writing Programs · Writing and Publishing in Different Genres
ConCurrent was particularly fun, and had extremely juicy panel topics. Really appreciated the community care, vulnerability, spiciness, and humor on these panels!
Flock
And just for fun, I also attended Flock Fiber Festival this year. I was demure. I bought only fuzzy yarns and unspun fiber.
I did not buy these sheep.
Besides that…
…I was mostly chauffeuring my oldest to summer camps and hanging out with the fam, working on long projects, and getting into a 2000s era U83R1337 mindset. Which brings me to our pep talk.
Pep talk
Your creativity is benevolent, and you can always return to it.
Y’all! Help! I can’t stop making boxy minisites.
In middle school and high school I made minisites for fun. In my twenties, they were my bread and butter, my career. I designed year in review sites, editorial campaigns, ad campaign sites for big brands, Flash games you’d play and then forget about. Somewhere around 2011 or so, I stopped making these professionally. The work shifted to marketing sites and bespoke apps, rather than the fun viral minisites of yore. Can’t say I miss photoshopping fake grass into a McDonalds feature background, but I have an affection for this era.
Remember the Neon Bible interactive flash video? Only viewable now on Youtube...
I think many of us are still finding our footing in this new reality post social. Between fiber stuff like knitting and spinning, and the in-person writing events of last year, I’ve found a lot of my socialization, communion with others, and creativity has moved to IRL and smaller scale impact. If you’d asked me in 2014, an introvert with a Twitter account, this is perhaps the least likely outcome I could have imagined. And, yet, I’ve never felt so fulfilled socially, or more like I’m getting my hands dirty and helping out.
What’s still remained a mystery is the question of “content”. I sort of wish I had a better word for this, but this shorthand is accurate. Besides this newsletter, what do I do with all the weird stuff I do? Social media does nothing for me anymore, and I struggle with the song and dance of being perceived (now that I’ve done enough therapy). However, I learn a lot from others sharing their knowledge, from observing what they do, from hearing their voices—in writing, in life, in philosophy, in how I clean my floors.
When you’re in an information economy, a community like this, you contribute back. You don’t hoard the wisdom you gather.
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I used to hold my writing and design practices in a tense, rigid separation. I did not want the commercialization of my design career tainting my writing pursuits in any way. When Slack was open, I was a designer. When it was closed, I was a writer. By the end of my ‘design career’, I was extremely jaded and pessimistic about both my value as a person, and where the design industry has gone as a whole.
When I first pursued design I was sixteen years old. I chased it with a willful naivety to make beautiful things that solve real problems. As my relationship with design soured, I realize just how lost I would have been over these years if I didn’t have my writing to burrow into. My writing practice helped me maintain that core of myself. It reminded me to make meaning around what is important to me, what has happened to me, what has yet to happen to me, and to be in relationship and conversation with others, with reality. It gave me a roadmap for what creativity looks like if my vision leads, if I learn to speak truths and listen to my gut.
I can sense myself starting to let design and writing intermix a bit. I’m using a sketchbook again, and doing more of my thinking in diagrams. And, I’ve been making these deeply impractical, one-off sites. I’m not in a rush to make them look nice. I’m just having fun and hammering away, building them to suit my needs in a totally bespoke manner, all on my own.
One is a digital garden or old school blog of sorts where I’m cataloguing my personal projects and diversions (including the site itself). I am still calibrating how I’m going to talk publicly about my main projects—books, stories, etc. For everything else, there’s Make Out Loud, and it’s an invitation into the messy studio space of my life. It’s growing very slowly. I update it when I have something new to update. As outlined in the aforementioned ‘busy summer’ section, I have mostly been living life, and that’s just fine.
The other is called Sparkling, which will eventually house all of my favorite or foundational media. Right now, it’s a bunch of books I like. I built this for myself for when I’m feeling mopey and uninspired, as an invitation to return to works that made me want to write. Or, if someone wants to peruse my bookshelves, I would like to have a link handy.
I could put all of this content on Instagram, or TikTok, or any number of social feeds. I don’t want to. I want to build something that’s mine, closer to scratch, a little corner of Internet. I want to be able to hear myself think when I talk about my projects without a feed sparking up notification dots for my attention. Then, when I tell someone about spinning Kent Romney and how that fiber differs from a Black Welsh Mountain sheep’s, I can send a link to this post instead of an Instagram carousel.
It’s okay if no one visits. I’m just here doing my thing. These things are messy and personal, and are my way of processing.
And it feels good. It feels healing to make stuff to document and ruminate rather than for metrics. I’m even thinking of picking up a paintbrush again, and doing some illustration for another project. I find myself wanting to show up. I am enjoying looking at type samples again, creating moodboards, wireframing, drawing little information architecture diagrams.
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As I get ever more serious about writing and other pursuits, the perspective of already succeeding and crashing out of one creative career helps me stay grounded.
It’s a warning and a balm.
The warning: your love of creating can absolutely be taken from you and twisted, especially if you must rely on it to pay your rent. While you must resist, it happens.
The balm: your love is a benevolent force. If the crashout is to happen, you can find your way back.
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