We break our [ir]regular publication schedule with just a few personal announcements:

1) this coming Saturday, September 27th, I am beyond excited to participate in a panel honoring the work of Tove Jansson. The panel is titled Small Jewels of Prose, Maria Popova, Matthew Burgess, Isabel Behncke, and me, along with moderator Sara Kramer, will discuss favorite moments in the writing of Tove Jansson and answer audience questions. 2-3:15pm.

As someone who has been reading Tove Jansson since birth, I have been waiting all of my life to celebrate her publicly. Please come!

2) another project I have been working a[ll] lifetime on is The Adventures of Cipollino - originally published in 1951, in Italian, Gianni Rodari’s whimsical novel of browbeaten country vegetables rising up against their unjust fruit overlords, under the leadership of spunky and loyal Cipollino is coming out in English for the VERY FIRST TIME! I feel INCREDIBLY LUCKY to have been able to illustrate this historic edition of my childhood favorite.

The Adventures of Cipollino is available for pre-order EVERYWHERE, but if you pre-order from Books are Magic - you can get a signed copy.

We will also be having a small pre-release party, next week, Thursday, October 2nd, at Books Are Magic, Smith St, 7pm - my darling friend Joana Avillez will chat about the book and some other things we love, I bet.

I hope to see some of you at either or both of these events! And I am working on figuring out schedule for further Cip events, so watch this space. Or my instagram. xx

My original plan was to work on this weird TV show for a couple of weeks, go see my mom in Maine and then go back to Moscow to live my life, where I was working as a freelance translator and making oil paintings of chairs and had a super nice boyfriend.

Of course, that is not what ended up happening. What ended up happening was this: I stayed on the weird TV show for five months, I became a producer, I quit producing, I went to graduate school, I illustrated a book, I WROTE and illustrated a book, I started teaching, I moved what felt like a million times, but now that I am counting it was only maybe 9 times? I fell in and out of love (maybe 3-4 times?), I got a dog, my dog died, my grandmother died, more books came out, babies were born, new friends made and lost, best friends kept, new dog, studios moved in and out of and on and on and on…

Until we are today, in the equilibrium of what life is AT THE MOMENT, in which I have been living in New York for twenty years, the longest I’ve ever lived anywhere, and it is very hot, and I am wearing linen pants I bought at a furniture store on Long Island and a linen tank top my neighbor just handed-down, and Peggy the dog is around somewhere, and my baby brother (22) is asleep still in his room so I am trying to be quiet-ish, and I am having a latte I made at home from pods, I am annoyed at my hair, and did I mention it is hot? But the ceiling fans are on and the windows are open and I am about to go to the studio to finish the last painting of a book that is due on Monday…

“When I wake up in the morning,” she said, “the first thing I think is ‘what is the good I am going to do today.” She wasn’t being cute, or self congratulatory in any way, this is just how Charlotte lives her life - by doing good every day.

Now, I am NOT a person who wakes up and thinks of the good I am going to do. I think about how little sleep I’ve had, or an annoyance from four years ago, I go through my to-do list and groan, sometimes I wake up and I am happy for the sun, or rain, or breeze through my window, every day I am happy for Peggy who requires ten minutes of belly rubs as soon as my eyes are cracked open. But never, not even once, have I woken up and thought “what GOOD am I going to do today?”

Except today. Today I woke up and thought it.

I don’t know if this is a new thing now, or if it’s a once in a lifetime event. TBD. It felt momentous enough that I needed to note it.

x

Later in the year, for math class, we had to come up with a word problem and illustrate it - THIS I remember VERY CLEARLY - I drew a large bowl of plums - it looked something like this:

and the math problem said: “if you have six plums and subtract seven plums, how many plums will you have left?” - I got a bad grade on my project. My teacher said that I clearly was not paying attention because I did not register that seven was greater than six and you could not subtract a larger number from a smaller number. And I said, that clearly she was not as smart as my dad, if she did not understand that the answer was “minus one plum” - a negative number! - A NEGATIVE PLUM!

Anyway, here’s the plum poem, ofc.

And this INCREDIBLE article about forgotten desserts that I have already shared about 75 times today with my loved ones. It’s hilarious.

The word “plum” may be my top favorite word. And if you wanted to draw a negative plum and send it to me, or put it in the comments here - I would love that.

As Peggy and I walked out of there with our purchases, kicking garbage all the way home, I tried to imagine what would be a lovely replacement for the Staples - maybe if the grossest parking lot in the world became a park? And all the former Staples employees could work there as enjoyers of the park? I wish.

*I have become one of those people - knitting a sweater was a New Year’s resolution I had been toying with, that became cemented after I saw my personal hero Chris Raschka in a sweater HE MADE, WITHOUT ANY PATTERNS, at a holiday party. And guys! I have made a sweater*! Is this the first time in the universe when someone actually completed their New Year’s resolution? And now I am addicted to knitting and fully understand how people become yarn bombers. 😳

**a book I have been working on since basically 2019 is almost ready to come out - you can pre-order (and please do!) your own copy of The Adventures of Cipollino here. Here, you can read me and my friend Roman talk about our experiences illustrating Rodari.

*the sweater in question. I used a pattern, I have some ways to go to get to Chris Raschka level.

My grandfather’s glass eye became a frequent topic for me, when I needed a quick weird story to tell my friends. My college boyfriend Matt also took it into his story rotation. He especially loved that in Russian the word for eyes is глаза - glaza - sounded SO CLOSE to “glass eye.” Whenever I went home, I would look closely at my grandfather’s face to see if I could figure out which eye was the glass eye. I both longed and was terrified to see the eye out of its socket. This never happened.

Finally, maybe ten years later, I was sitting down with both my grandparents when I asked about the eye - I said mom had told me that he had been in an accident, and that there was a fake eye, but that I had never figured out which one!

Oh, how my grandparents laughed.

Especially my grandmother. She was in stitches. I think she cried from laughing so hard.

Turns out, my grandfather had been in a bad car accident when he was in his twenties (it ended his budding college ice hockey career), and the eye was indeed dead - but it wasn’t glass - it was just his regular eye that he could not see out of. And, what kind of an artist was I (in my family, artists and writers were always admonished to look at everything super closely) that I could not tell that his eye was not glass? I was chagrined.

I told this story yesterday at the bar, to great success.

But here’s the thing - I still wonder about the glass eye. There is an entirely separate life somewhere, like a Sliding Doors situation, where there is a glass eye and it’s kept in a jar at night, on a bedside table, and it is tangible and cool to the touch (but warmed when in the socket?) - and I am still a little grossed out but also mesmerized by the whole thing.

And would you believe, this is not even the only eye injury story to have come out of my grandparents??? One time, they were mushroom hunting (they were AVID mushroomers) and my grandfather accidentally STABBED my grandmother in the eye with a paring knife! She had to get stitches. Apparently, the doctor who stitched her eye only had green thread and so the stitches were green?!! Again, when this story was first relayed to me, I thought she had been stabbed in the eye ball and was extremely confused why the insides of the eye ball did not then leak out?!

Clearly, I have a very approximate understanding of how bodies, and eyes in particular, work. I have continued to do zero research into this and instead have chosen to hold on to my delusional ideas.

Everything about the city is sounds - I went to a talk (!) earlier this week and tried to keep track of what I was hearing besides the speakers voices: the ice machine, buzzing of the blender (there was a bar in the back of the space), electricity of the projector, chairs scraping and squeaking, shoes in heels on creaky floors, breathing, pen on paper, paper rustle, pages turning, coats squishing, discrete coughs…

I find it hard to think of the words for various sounds, as I try to parse them out. The initial words often come to me in Russian (which is not usual for me) - from a different place in my mind, an earlier place.

Anyway, if you want to do this exercise - just stop where you are and close your eyes for a minute. Try to figure out what you are hearing layer by layer. Try to figure out which layers are closer to you, which are farther away. Which are sounds? Which are noises? Which are noise? What is the difference?

And HOW DO YOU DRAW ANY OF THIS?

PS the Russian word for sound is zv[ou]k (звук), and presumably the Russian word for noise is sh[ou]m (шум), EXCEPT these last two are absolutely NOT the same - noise to me is buzzy, pitchy, annoying and silvery like many small fish, and шум is massive, monolith and sepia brown.

Yesterday, I hosted a birthday party for a 12 year old. If you are feeling stuck in any way, I highly recommend hosting a party for a child. My house was full of the funniest most wonderful almost not kids, they crafted and chattered and drank SO MUCH TEA. (It was a Tea Party, “A Tea for Bea” we called it. If YOU are looking to get into tea and are an 11 or 12 year old girl - Country Peach Passion from Celestial Seasonings is the way to go.)

I don’t have my own kids. For a long tedious list of reasons I wasn’t able to have kids. For many years I was alternately ashamed, sad, enraged, relieved etc about this. I thought about it so much of the time, most of the time if I am being honest. I wanted to write a book called Not a Mother. I felt outside of society. Recently, something shifted. Maybe it’s just being fully planted in the middle of my life now - when a delightful thing happens and you start to shed so many layers that are not serving you and become a distilled, crystal version of yourself.

And my version is not being mad at not being a mom, anymore. But instead, being delighted to have the closest friends in my life, ages 0-100, and being able to host them and 11 of their friends for a tea party.

On a different note, please remember your veterans today. Every family has veterans.

xxd

PS just as it was with Comfort Soup - you may chose to be a paid subscriber, and thank you so much if you are! But there will NEVER BE A PAYWALL on this newsletter. If substack is sending you emails asking you for money, I am truly sorry - I have now tried to turn off every way they can do that - it is one hundred percent not what this newsletter is about and I hate that they do it. ♥

[image source: Wikipedia]

I think I am Slug No. 3. Which slug are you?

On an unrelated note, I’ve been thinking about changing the name of this mailing - maybe to discomfort soup? Or just newsletter? Comfort soup is starting to chafe.

*“Aga Saga” is a term coined (or at least made known to me) by my friend Kim. In refers to a particular kind of 1980s British novel that takes place over a hundred year span and spends a lot of time around a British version of a Nancy Meyer-esque kitchen, complete with an Aga stove. See The Shell Seekers, by Rosamunde Pilcher. The Shell Seekers was first presented to me by my college boyfriend’s mom for a train trip. I have since given out dozens of copies to friends in need of a cozy time. [should this publication be called A Cozy Time? Or is that basically the same as Comfort soup? GAAAAHHHHH. This is exactly what happens when you have slug brain.]

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PS - I’ve turned on paid subscriptions. I can pretty much guarantee that I will not be making any special posts for paid subscribers. But people have asked me about having option to pay for this newsletter and now you can. Truly, it will be more of a donation than something that gets you anything extra. Do with that what you will. <3

Yesterday, I took Peggy to the excellent and cozy Upstairs Cocktail Bar in Jackson Heights - and Peggy was a big hit, allowed even to walk across the bar. One of Peggy’s new friends asked if Peggy was her full name or if she was, in fact, a Margaret. “She is actually Princess Margaret Muffin,” I said. “Good for you,” said Peggy’s new friend. And I agree.

The world continues to be awful and complicated. My internet is a dizzying mix of war footage and people promoting their lovely work. I’ve been taking a lot of naps. But also I read someone say (the creative director of Gucci, actually) “I am not searching for another world to live in, but rather of ways to live in this world” and I resolve to really live in this world - carnage and beautiful pictures mixed together, and honestly, is there really any other option?

But puppies definitely help. Even as they chew their way through your house.

I don’ think I learned anything. But obviously I am currently working on a short story/novel called “Transit”.

Anyway, I am back now.

x

So let’s make this short and sweet. Goodbye 2022. You were…. variable. You know what you’ve done. Let’s leave it at that.

Some of the things I have been doing [to avoid to avoid etc etc] is making various lists of things to look forward to and do. I like lists. My friend Julia likes to make a list of things to do more of and things to do less of. My friend Haley likes resolutions and starts drafting hers in November. She recommends picking something achievable that you can stick with - which will make you feel good. One of hers is “paying with exact change” - “and then every time I pay with exact change I say to the cashier - this was my New Year’s resolution.” I like to Burn the Year (with all the lists that entails).

If you forgot how it works - here’s ye old booklet unfolded and ready to print:

One of the things I always always want to do more of is read more books and do more kindnesses. Something that contributes to both is donating to the Unruly Kickstarter.
Unruly is a new picture book imprint for adults and teens from the inimitable and wonderful Enchanted Lion Books. ELB is truly a cultural institution - publishing beautiful, thought provoking, sometimes challenging and strange (this is a compliment!) books that you will ALWAYS want to treasure. Picture Books (capital P and B) in their essence, in their best iteration, are poems and what ELB is doing with Unruly is making a place for that poetry to take form, separated from the constraints of the prescribed misconception that only children like books with pictures. So if you are looking to do something kind and meaningful, might I suggest donating to them as well. Their deadline is December 31st, but if you donate until midnight of December 21st your pledge will be matched (up to 15K) - so NOW is the perfect time to do it.

And of course it doesn’t hurt that one of the rewards is this awesome tote with logos designed by moi:

And now let me leave you staring into the eyes of my loved one

while I go and mend some sweaters. Have a lovely holiday season! See you in 2023!