Utah

I am happy to report that the debut reading of my Flying Adventures book at Snow College in Utah went well! I thought I'd be nervous but I wasn't, and I really enjoyed giving a talk afterwards about the history of how the book came to be and where it's headed.  The audience was so welcoming and asked great questions that made me rethink having taken out parts of the talk in the interest of timing.  They need to go back in.  What I thought was so funny was that everyone wanted to know what pen I'd used to write the text (it's a Pilot V-Ball fine).  I had one in my bag, since it is my absolute favorite pen, and they wanted to try it out and took pictures of it with their telephones.  This cracked me up.  Someone suggested I should ask Pilot to sponsor me, and it never even occurred to me that I am a pilot using a Pilot pen.  Sorta funny.

My first audience!

Students checking out Flying Adventures after the reading

The small part of Utah that I saw was absolutely beautiful --- I've never spent any time there --- and I loved my stay at the Osborne Inn in Spring City.  After rolling in hungry late at night, I had a most delicious plate of their homemade chocolate chip cookies for dinner.  In the morning I woke up to such pretty light!

My photo-friend and art professor at Snow College, Amy Jorgensen, also runs the Granary Art Center in Ephraim. She was kind enough to give me a tour of their gallery space, which included 40 Moons, an exhibit by another photo-friend of ours, Elizabeth Stone.  I loved that I was able to see Elizabeth's work hanging on the wall after having seen it in a portfolio box when she first showed it to me last year.

40 Moons by photographer Elizabeth Stone

I also loved this installation by Stephanie Leitch called Interstices.  Long pieces of weighted string hang from the ceiling in a grid, and video is projected onto them --- the whole thing looks like shimmering rain, and you can see the window of the building through the strings.  I could have watched that all day.

Interstices by Stephanie Leitch

I tacked on an extra day to my Utah stay so that I could visit my friend Ben and his family.  When he first moved to Salt Lake, he posted these beautiful photos on Facebook of Antelope Island, and I knew I had to go!  So we took the afternoon and drove out.  The weather was moody:  on-and-off drizzle, dark clouds, sun here and there... even a rainbow.  It was perfect!  

Thank you, Utah, and everyone I met there, for making my visit so memorable!  I am looking forward to coming back again and staying a little longer :-)

"Flying Adventures" Debut

I’m pretty excited.  A few posts ago (you can read it here) I wrote about getting back to work on my Flying Adventures book.  Yes it’s been kind of a long and rough road getting this thing back on my project table, but this week is the debut of my reading and artist talk at Snow College in Utah and I thought it was time to finally start talking about my plans for the book.  I’ve been worried I’m going to jinx things if I start talking about it before I’ve gotten some exhibits/readings/successes under my belt, but I realize it’s time. Life is short!

To catch everyone up, here’s the nutshell version of the book’s history, and where I’m taking it next...

Soooo... I taught myself how to bookbind and made The Flying Adventures of Two Candy Cane Pen Friends as a gift for a friend after an adventure we had (Read a bit about that HERE.) (Or read the entire book HERE.)

At some point I realized this was going to be more than just a gift as it had turned into a huge project.  I made myself a copy too, and wondered how to share it with others.  Publishing seemed logical, but I had no idea how to publish a book, especially a not-very-mainstream one like this. So I scanned the pages & put it on my website, and also made a 40 page abridged version -- my zine -- to sell & give away. 

Things sort of fizzled after that.   Life was more important than the book for a while.  My parents died, and I’d been helping my brother take care of them.

Some encouraging news, though! … I received an Individual Excellence Award from the Ohio Arts Council for my work on the book.  This pepped me up again.  Then Chronicle Books wanted to see it!  Off it went:

Sadly, it was returned with a note: “Very charming, but we don’t see a place for it in our catalog at this time.”  I was pretty crushed.  If Chronicle - the king of quirky books - didn’t want it, what chance did it have?

Photo-friends I was with this winter said, “Hey! Your book hasn’t seen its day in the sun!  Find another way to get it out there!”   

So I thought of all the places & ways I might be able to bring the book to others.  Because, in the end, that’s what it’s about: connecting a project with people who will really love to see it.

I realized I was actually grateful that Chronicle hadn’t taken it.  It wasn’t ready to go out into the world as-is.  It had been a gift for my friend, not really intended for a larger audience.  So I am making a new book and then bringing it to others in more than one way:  I’ll offer “illustrated readings,” where I’ll read the book and project pages in a slideshow.  I’ll frame pages and create an exhibit so viewers can literally walk through the book.  I’ll self-publish a new zine.  I’ll partner with art & community centers, schools, and museums to offer workshops and availability as an artist-in-residence as I work on new book editions. I’ll bring it to the aviation community.  Who knows what other opportunities will come up?

One thing at a time. I took an inspiring workshop with bookbinding wizard Jace Graf of Cloverleaf Studio in Austin, Texas.  I left with all sorts of new ideas for how I might want to approach printing and binding and presentation.

Then later this year I spent a week at a friend's house and reworked the book layout.

Just as I was finishing it up and clearing off the table, I received an email from a photo friend/art professor at Snow College in Utah, asking if I’d like to be on their fall calendar of visiting artists.  Ever since then I’ve been hard at work on my reading & artist talk.

It’s finally ready to go!  At first I thought I’d just run through a “how I made this book” chronology, but I wanted it to be better than that.  I’m hoping to inspire people to think outside the box when it comes to getting a project out into the world.

After I’m back from Utah -- and a trip to Seattle to take some other photographs for the book -- I’ve got studio work to do!  I have to start testing out papers, both for the new book and for the exhibit.  I've got a whole stack of samples to get through:

The Greater Columbus Arts Council awarded me a grant to help me purchase a printer, for which I am ever so grateful. I’ve also found shadowbox frames which will be perfect for showcasing book pages in a three-dimensional format. 

And - Yes! - my new business cards came!  I’m excited to finally be able to hand out a card that represents more of what I do.  

Well, I'm off to the great wide-open West! I have never spent any time in Utah and I can't wait to see more than the view from the airport.  Come along for the ride on Instagram & FB...

A Homemade Artist Residency

This spring I applied to a residency program at an art center in Florida. As I should have suspected, the universe had other plans for me.  Yes, I was disappointed to get that “We’re sorry, but thank you for applying...” letter, but after grumbling about it for a couple of days, I realized it was ridiculous to wait for an artist residency to get to work.  As it is, my Flying Adventures book has been on a long and rough road to get back onto my studio table, and putting it off until November — even for a residency — was still just putting it off.  Sometimes it’s easy to know when you’re stalling.  When I start vacuuming and doing the dishes instead of working in the studio, I know something’s up.  This was harder to figure out though.  I liked the idea of spending a chunk of time with other artists who are also working on projects. I liked the idea of getting some feedback and guidance on the structure of the story.  I also liked the idea of being accepted into my first residency.  BUT I realized, finally, that all of that wasn’t as important as just getting to work.

I did, however, want to leave my own space and daily life to work elsewhere.  Sometimes that makes a huge difference in how you approach and focus on a project.  Enter Lynn, my college roommate-turned-dear-friend many years ago.  A writer and educator with plenty of creative projects on her own plate, she told me to come visit, and off I went to upstate-ish New York via this lovely view of the city.

Lynn’s house has always made me happy.

Even here though, I stalled. I had emails to answer and phone calls to make and shouldn’t I be working on my next blog post and balancing my checkbook, etc, etc.  Finally I asked Lynn if I could borrow the dining room table and then wound up staring at my pages of words and thumbnails for an hour:  Is the story too long?  What should I cut out?  I have too many images.  How long does it take to read it out loud?   Do I stay true to the facts of the story or to the spirit of the story?  Will scans of pages look right on a slideshow screen for the reading or should I show single images?  Will I go broke buying frames for all the pages when I make the exhibit for wall spaces? Do I edit the story with the book in mind or the reading?   Is Lynn’s table big enough?

One step at a time.  I knew the first thing I had to do was cut up those papers, so I started there.  No thinking involved.  Soon enough, at least one of my questions was answered: yes, it did fit on Lynn’s table.

Images were next, and this is where I got stumped.  Do I lay it out as it looked in the original book, then rearrange?  Or do I just start from scratch?

I decided to group images with relevant text, regardless of where they’d gone in the first edition.  I figured I’d put down what I knew for sure and hoped that the rest would fit itself together later.
 
From there I methodically worked on scenes. I lost track of time.  When I moved my first photo from the wrong place to the right place I got goosebumps!  Putting the layout together was like working on a puzzle. I scribbled notes in the margins if there was something I needed to think about: Fix wording… Get a photo of… Cut this part…? Switch this with…

In between time at the table, Lynn and I took a field trip to hear her friend sing with a jazz trio (which put the singing bee back in my bonnet — although that’s another post), and spent an afternoon at the Mohonk Mountain House in New Paltz, where I wandered over fairy bridges and had tea on the giant porch.  The whole place felt like Hogwarts but in upstate New York.

While exploring the hotel, I passed the “Naturalist’s Office."  People are invited to leave notes on the bulletin board on the door if he’s not in. My favorite: “We had a small snake visit our room…”

We also took a field trip to the city.  Except for the night sky itself, is there anything as magical as Grand Central's ceiling of stars? 

It was an amazing week. (I even met up with a relative I didn’t know I had!) When all was said and done, I had my layout finished, a shortlist of things that still need attention, and I even started working on the slideshow format for my reading. 

To put icing on the cake — how weird is this?! —  after I finally cleared the table and packed up all my little strips of paper and tiny photos, I checked my email to find a note from a photo-friend/art professor at Snow College in Utah, wanting to add me to their schedule of visiting artists in the fall.  It will be the debut of the book’s “illustrated reading” AND my first paid gig — Yes!!  *October 27... come if you can*

As I left New York for crazy gorgeous skies, I felt so thankful.  I thought about how different I felt from the week before when I arrived.  I am excited again, hopeful, purpose-full, and clear about what the next steps are to get this project out to the world.  Stay tuned… 

Many, many thanks to the Ohio Arts Council and the Greater Columbus Arts Council for funding that is helping to facilitate further work on this project.  Find out more about the book, view the original edition, and purchase one of the last remaining copies of the mini paperback version HERE.