(Slightly Belated) March Bottleship
Sun! Sun is here in Portland! Oh my friends what a difference it makes. I've moved my bed back under the east-facing window in my room, and I slept with the window open for the first time this year on Wednesday. Drifting off with the smell of blossoming cherry trees washing over me is just about the greatest thing ever. But there are other great things in the world! Let me tell you about some of them from the month of March:
- I went to Denmark and had a staggeringly lovely time teaching in The Animation Workshop's Graphic Storytelling department—we even made a Twitter list of all my students, so you can keep tabs on their work! (There's also a more detailed writeup for my supporters on Patreon here.) This was my first foray into long-form teaching, and I have to say I really loved it. Exploring the city of Viborg was also a huge treat—you can scroll back through my Instagram page for highlights, including the city's splendidly-designed manhole covers.
- If you're interested in hearing some of my class content from Denmark, there's video from a talk I gave on my final Thursday up on YouTube! As you can see above, I got kinda meta about the whole thing, but I think there are also some good, practical points in there about social media and building community as an independent creator.
- A friend sent me this fantastic footage of a family's 1936 sailing voyage around Cape Horn. The period narration is what really sells it for me—how great would it have been to grow up like this?
- This essay by Diana Kimball summed up a lot of the things I ended up thinking about while teaching in Denmark. We have to be vulnerable with the people we mentor. "Freed from the expectations of knowing everything or knowing nothing, we can get closer to the truth together."
- After months (months) of photobombing every reference photo Erika Moen has taken in Periscope Studio, I decided to make a photo zine collecting our favorite moments. Introducing: Bombshells! (Both of us will also have these for sale at Emerald City Comicon if you'd like to get one in person.)
- For the economically/academically-minded among you, here's everything you never thought you needed to know about the economic transition from whale oil to petroleum in the US, and what it means for energy politics.
- And, finally, I need you all to watch this very important video of animals enjoying a holiday feast with human hands. (Between this and the Swedish Chef, I'm firmly convinced that my sense of humor is 90% Human Hands + Other Things.)
Here's more details about where I'll be.
Happy Spring to all of you! I hope your month has been a hoot.
L
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