I recently hosted a workshop at my local public library - shout out to Guerneville Public Library (!) - in collaboration with librarian Rebecca Salerno. The guiding principle of the workshop — How Should a Reader Read? How Might a Book Be? — was inspired by the title of Sheila Heti’s novel How Should a Person Be?. That said, we were interested in something a little less prescriptive. As Becky put it, “This workshop is an experiment. It is less of a “how to” and more of a “how might we?”:

• How might we rethink what it means to be a writer (or if you will, an author) in our ever-changing world?

• How might our reading style/identity help us better understand our relationship to writing?

• How might we use different types of writing/engagement with a text to create dialogues or conversations with other writers (living or not, published or not)?

• How might we begin to see ourselves as writers and authors, even if what we are writing does not look like what we think of as authorship [if it is not a story, or a memoir, or something we intend to publish]?

The idea was to explore together the ways that reading and writing could work more like a conversation — more dialogic (a new word for me) — and less like shouting into the void and hoping that somebody is listening. Taking as our starting point my book report project The Emergency Was Curiosity, we invited participants into their own more interactive engagement with text through the creation of "reading dossiers."

This was my first time collaborating formally with Rebecca. In addition to being a public librarian, she is also a scholar focused on “material transmission of knowledge and cultures, and print history”; so prepping for this workshop was basically a private education in the weirdo history of marginalia, illumination and annotated texts. Check out the glossary that Rebecca put together.

Like many of the events I’ve been producing lately, the event itself is almost incidental to the process of preparing for it, working closely with one or a few other people on an area of shared interest.

#Goals

Well, not goals exactly. More like some stuff we have been thinking about that we wanted to share:

• This kind of reading and writing have been around for a long time. We are part of a lineage; we are not alone.

• The reading and writing that we are talking about is simultaneously a way of both focusing and expanding our attention.

• We don’t need a reason to work on whatever a reading dossier is. We can do so because we want to and because it’s fun. Those are reasons enough.

Run of Show

The workshop itself was as hands-on as we could make it. Rebecca made buttons — each person chose one and said a line or two about why. Ice breakers are annoying, but this one was surprisingly generative, way better than the typical “pick an animal/fruit/vegetable” prompts. When in doubt, make a button.

Marginalia Everywhere

We wanted participants to be aware that we were not so much creating something new as situating ourselves within a broader intellectual history of social writing. We shared some of our favorite examples of marginalia.

This annotated edition of Ann Patchett’s 2001 book Bel Canto was re-released in 2024 with notes and commentary by Patchett:

An example of not just marginalia but really stretching the form of the book is S., a novel within a novel by Doug Dorst and J. J. Abrams (yes, that J. J. Abrams). The novel appears as an old library book, Ship of Theseus, by a fictional author, V.M. Straka. The real narrative unfolds in the margins, where two readers leave notes for each other, creating a second, parallel story as they try to solve the mystery of Straka's identity.

The book is famous for its physical design, which includes handwritten notes, postcards, photos, and other ephemera tucked inside its pages. It’s the tactility and interactivity of this book experience that we were trying to recreate with our dossier activity.

My most treasured example of marginalia is this graphic novel version of George Orwell’s 1984 that I found in a Little Free Library in Philly. The last time I read Orwell’s book was in high school and based on the notes, I presume this reader is in high school, too. I feel so much tenderness toward them.

Collating as Creation

Perhaps unsurprisingly, it took a minute for a crew of librarians to get on board with the idea of writing in books. I’ve also learned that a lot of people need permission (from themselves mostly) to write “for no reason” or to claim the mantle of “author,” even when they like writing, even when they’re good at it. I empathize with the discomfort. It took me 20 months from the time I first launched this Substack to write my first post. In the interest of being chill about the whole author thing, we tried a few things to warm people up:

• We made an exquisite corpse about collective reading and writing.

• We made yearbook pages that everyone could fill out anonymously.

It can be intimidating to create from scratch. But curating, collaging, collating are all creative acts and an easier entry point than trying to create “original” work. In making choices about what we want and didn’t want to include in our dossiers, we were discovering and practicing our unique perspective and taste.

Parallel Play

Parents of toddlers will be familiar with the idea of parallel play, a phase of development where children play alongside each other with similar materials but without direct interaction. Compiling our dossiers was sort of like that.

The dossiers were inspired by those photocopied course readers from college as well as a reader compiled by the creative and kind people at Problem Library. We laid out a table of articles and zines that participants could pick and choose from. It was reminiscent of “playing office” as a child. There was a somewhat inexplicable satisfaction in slipping a zine into a library pocket into a folder. Something like the IRL version of ASMR videos of papers in pockets (prepare to go down a rabbit hole or at least know that this specific rabbit hole exists).

Some other things - Rebecca is the consummate host, and this helped. The vibes were immaculate. There was a record player. There were snacks, including homemade bread and freshly brewed tea. It was intimate and so evidently filled with care.

If any of this sounds like something you want to try, you don’t need a workshop. Invite a friend over. Print out some things worth reading, make some notes directly on them. Talk to each other about what you did. Or just call me, and I’ll walk you through it. You don’t need a reason. Wanting to is reason enough.

⌨️ Thursday, April 30: Transcribe Harper

In collaboration with Cita Press and The Ruby

Jessi Haley and Cita Press are among my favorite new collaborators. Cita is a feminist indie press publishing open access books written by women. Along with Aku Ammah-Tagoe, we’re hosting our second Transcribe Harper event on April 30 at The Ruby in San Francisco.

In 2025, the Center for Black Digital Research at Penn State (#digblk_) facilitated cross-country commemorations of the 200th birthday of legendary author and activist Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (1825-1911): #Harper200. As part of the series, organizers launched Transcribe Harper, which invites anyone to contribute to the larger project of preserving Harper’s legacy and connecting it to a wider audience. Participants transcribe individual documents (poems, essays, letters, fiction, commentary) one-by-one, eventually creating a collection of writing by and about Harper that is fully searchable and freely accessible online. The idea here is to take on small tasks together to preserve and amplify an essential voice from our past. And if the previous events are any indication, there will be a lot of Smiling While Typing.

More info and tickets here.

💪🏾 Friday, May 1, 14 and 28: The Art of Midlife

Yoked, Sandwiched and Snatched at Local Economy

I knew very little about menopause before Sue Dominus’s landmark NYT Magazine cover story came out back in 2023. But because the physical experience of perimenopause is so specific to each individual, I’m interested in something else - the aesthetic or cultural meaning of this time of transition. The vibes I’m after are generative and joyful rather than alarmist. This series is a response to a dominant narrative of menopause and midlife that is almost entirely medicalized and loss-centered - clinical and girl-bossy and usually trying to sell me some weird tea.

Given how much we have been failed by our institutions on these topics (lack of information, lack of imagination), I figure we have to take things into our own hands. In other words, I am trying to be the speaker series I wish to see in the world. These are the conversations I’ve been waiting for with artists and writers who think seriously and generously about bodies and interdependence and beauty and whatever it is we are talking about when we talk about pants. My intention is for these evenings to be casual, intimate and, above all, communal. The only way is through…and together.

More info and tickets here for Yoked (5/1), Sandwiched (5/14), and Snatched (5/28).

📖 Wednesday, May 6: How Should a Reader Read?

While we’re at it, how could a book be?

This one’s at my local public library in collaboration with Rebecca Salerno, a fabulously creative and thoughtful scholar and librarian. We’re going to be talking about the role of reading in our lives, whether you’re a committed reader or just reading-curious. We’ll also be doing an experimental, interactive activity: curating and compiling our own “reading dossiers.” We’ve purchased secret document-looking folders; papers will go inside (think James Bond meets Reading Rainbow). It will be weird and fun.

Register for the event here.

📚 Saturday, May 30: Bay Area Book Festival

Hope is a Time Traveler with Rebecca Solnit and Saul Williams

I’ve been invited to be in conversation with Rebecca Solnit and Saul Williams at the Bay Area Book Festival — two artists whose work has genuinely shaped how I think about time, resistance, and collective memory. It’s nice to have an excuse to read their latest work closely and go deep into their back catalogs in preparation. My collaborator Jenn and I have each committed to making a book report. (Making book reports a thing: still the goal.)

Before the interview, there will be a performance by the Bushwick Book Club Oakland. The idea behind Bushwick Book Club is to create a new song (or visual art, dance, film or snack) inspired by an existing piece of work. I can’t wait to see what they come up with.

More info and tickets here.

1. Research - I focus on “me-interest research” (h/t Madebo) as in things I am interested in and in the spirit of Celine Nguyen’s viral essay Research as Leisure Activity.

2. Zines - I love the physicality of zines - something you can hold in your hand and make without anyone else’s permission. The fact that they have a beginning and an end is a comfort in the age of the infinite scroll.

3. Fan Letters - The book report which catalyzed this whole creative practice in the first place is basically one long fan letter - to Jenny Odell’s book How to Do Nothing. But I have started writing actual fan letters as part of my practice - as a way to process what I’m reading/seeing, to connect with other creators, to appreciate others for their work.

4. Participation - I have become really interested in the idea of participation (as opposed to leadership/creation). So much advice around creative practice seems to be focused on an individual person making something new in the world. What if you just want to be part of the chorus? How can we honor participation instead of — or alongside — creation?

I think I will write about each of these Parts of My Practice in future newsletters, but I’m going to start with participation. I first started thinking about “participation” as an idea after being introduced to the work of the artist Naoco Wowsugi through Prem Krishnamurthy and his project the Department of Transformation (Prem and I went to college together, and Instagram suggested I start following him, which led to us reconnecting after many years. I am now a DoT “Companion”).

P.P.P.P.P.P. (People! Practice Participating in Participatory Projects, Please.)

Naoco premiered P.P.P. (Participating Participatory Practice) in 2023 with the Department of Transformation: “Through P.P.P., Wowsugi experienced numerous participatory projects from the critical perspective of both a leader and a follower. This participation involved activities such as: writing contemplative comments and poems on a large quantity of post-it notes; bravely mingling [I love this one!], singing, and holding hands with other attendees; tasting every article of food and drink in sight; applying skills gained from both BFA and MFA experiences to artistic workshops; and touring, rallying, and protesting—all while rocking an array of custom T-shirts. Wowsugi’s enthusiastic participation made significant contributions to the success of these artworks.”

I identify as more of a producer than I do as an artist. I want to make things happen mostly so I can enjoy them myself. I don’t particularly like presenting or performing. I’d much prefer to be in the audience, but I often need to make the thing that I want to be in the audience for. So I really liked Naoco’s framing and elevating of participation as a valid artistic practice.

I also don’t feel the need to make anything new. Recently, I put together something called Winter Club to help organize people to attend things that were mostly already happening in our community. In my own practice, participation often looks like being a cheerleader for other people’s projects - like this one with Jessi. When I see an art show I like, I try to get other people to see it, too.

I’ve started doing more events with friends when they come to town like this book event with Rachel or this one with Prem. I also really like the way Prem frames karaoke in his creative practice. Prem’s insistence that the audience is as much a part of the experience as the singer has been affirming to me as someone who identifies as “a person who does not do karaoke.”

My participation has started extending to friends of friends as well - the best example of which is me ending up as an associate producer on filmmaker Mickey Duzyj’s truly delightful animated short Confessions of a Jumbotron Addict. You may know Mickey as the director of the Netflix series Losers. By contrast, Confessions was a personal project he made as a fan letter to his best friend, Ben (the Jumbotron addict in question and a City Councilor at Large in Somerville).

I see so many connections between our weirdo projects - the reader who spends years making a book report, the basketball fan who spends months decoding Jumbotron patterns, the artist who makes a love letter to his bestie. As Mickey observed, “Live sporting events have a unique magic. You show up as one person, but before long, you’re part of something much bigger— a teeming mass of people that breathe together, cheer together, and sometimes even convinces itself that it has real influence over what’s happening on the field of play.” I have felt that way about my own project. I showed up as one person reading a book and am now a part of something else altogether. And in this particular moment, the move from solo obsession to shared experience and the collective joy that results feels like an antidote.

What I’ve learned about participation is that you don't actually need to make anything. You just have to show up with real enthusiasm, a bit of commitment. That may be enough to change what something becomes.

I'm still not sure what participation (versus creation, versus producing) looks like this year. But if you ask me to do something with you, I'll probably say yes.

I recently did my first book event of the year - Mothering as Creative Practice - with Christina Pappas of Same Page SF at Black Bird Bookstore. Black Bird is in the Outer Sunset in San Francisco where the city meets the ocean, so there was a very lovely we’re-all-in-this-together-at-the-edge-of-the-continent vibe to the whole thing.

One of the things that struck me during the Q&A and especially in the private conversations afterward is that so many questions boiled down to some version of the same thing: How did you do this? And although the this is my book report, the real this that they’re asking about is the project that is squirreled away in the back of their brains/the corner of their hearts. Kind of forever on the back burner. Or, in some cases, very close to the front burner but for a few questions that are sometimes existential (am I an artist?) and sometimes practical (how do I start?).

And because part of my own work is about making the process of creativity more legible to more and more different kinds of people, I wanted to get more specific about the actual how of getting started, keeping going and — perhaps hardest of all — finishing a piece of creative work. Think of these notes as Part 2 of my proto-manifesto on creative practice: Time, Space & Childcare.

1. Permission - I have learned that my own project is a lot about permission, mostly the permission I gave myself to work on something useless. Give yourself permission to do something that no one else asked for. Printed without demand.

2. A Simple Form - I really struggle with a blank page/empty canvas/the freedom to make whatever I want. What I prefer instead is creative constraint in a simple form. The Emergency Was Curiosity started as a response to another book, and while it became much more than that, responding to something else as a start really helped put some constraints on what would have otherwise felt too open-ended.

3. Make Up a Deadline - Since there’s no real reason for any of this, I’ve found that I’ve needed to make up fake deadlines for myself. Sometimes, I use an upcoming event as a forcing function to create something new. I always assumed that it was supposed to work the other way around: you make a thing and then host an event to share it. But in my case, the fact that an event is happening on a specific date gives me a reason to have to make (and more importantly, finish) something. So, for example, I drafted the Time, Space & Childcare talk after being invited to participate in Bathers Library’s Summer Symposium.

4. Make Something for Yourself - I was able to start my project because I was making it for myself. There was no one else I needed to please. I wasn’t worried about an external audience or how it would be received by anyone else because the audience was me.

5. Center Your Own Delight - Relatedly, paying attention to myself as the audience helped me make creative decisions throughout the project, particularly when editing. Did I like it? Keep it in. Does it need to be there? Who cares? Because the project was and is so idiosyncratic and personal (read: without a market), I got to focus on my own delight rather than say what the market needed. It reminds me of Tamara’s 365 buttons: “Hey so it actually only has to make sense to me for me to do it and I don’t feel like explaining it to anyone else.”

6. Make Something for One Other Person - More recently, I’ve been working on a project that I’ve been having trouble finishing - a zine about mothering and creativity. When I mentioned this to Christina, she said she’d love to see it and suggested that perhaps I could share a draft with her. Making something just for her took the pressure off. When I imagined the project as a bigger thing — a final draft, finding a designer, getting it printed — it was paralyzing. When I imagined making the zine for an audience of one, knowing Christina would be both interested and forgiving, it was all I needed to actually finish a good enough draft.

7. Keep the Stakes Low - For the time being, the stakes for my creative work are pretty low. It’s not how I make my money; there’s not a lot of reputational risk in it (I don’t think :). For the most part, if someone is not into my small, weird projects, it doesn’t really matter. It usually just means it’s not for them. I don’t take it too personally. I’m not aiming for a New York Times bestseller. I’m usually making just a few hundred copies of a thing mostly for people who already know me. All of this has helped me be serious about the work without taking myself too seriously.

8. Be Serious about the Work, but Don’t Take Yourself Too Seriously - It’s easy to get into your head about creative work. But even if your creative work is personal, it’s not you. You are more than your work.

These notes are specifically about starting and keeping up a creative practice. They are not about selling creative work or about making a living from creative work, perhaps topics for another day. So, in case it’s helpful, I also want to mention some things you don’t need if all you’re trying to do is make some thing.

Some Things You Don’t Need:

• A market

• An audience

• A reason

If you’re working on a creative project and want to talk to someone about it, let me know. I can give you a deadline; I’ll be your audience of one. Permission granted.

Where things stand, what I’m thinking about the book report these days and a bit about the general themes of my creative practice for 2026.

Books - Last week I got an email introduction to J.K. Fowler of Nomadic Bookshop, which opened earlier this year in Uptown Oakland. A couple of messages later, and the book report will be on their shelves. Sometimes it’s that easy, and I still can’t quite get over it when it is.

So: 400 books sold. About 20 bookstores around the country, most of which started with a cold email like that one. Books in my trunk that I sometimes sell at school pickup. And an interesting discovery over at Metalabel: the vast majority of sales are for the Pay What You Want downloadable PDF — which has me thinking seriously about doing electronic versions of some smaller projects in my queue.

Events - I’ve done almost two dozen events in support of this project ranging from exhibitions with 100+ people in attendance to an invitation-only conversation for five. It’s the smaller events (5-20 people) that have felt the best to me - less performative, more interactive and therefore more generative. This year I want to treat events as opportunities for collaboration rather than promotion. I recently did events with Christina Pappas of Same Page SF, a weekly newsletter about all things literary in San Francisco and Jessi Haley of Cita Press, an indie press publishing open access books by women. I hope to do more with both of them this year.

What’s Next? Three Themes, Two Projects

One of the reasons I love the book report project is that it gives me an excuse to explore seemingly disconnected ideas more deeply that I would otherwise. I’ve got three primary areas of inquiry/themes for the year for 2026. Or as Madebo refers to it “me-interest research”:

1. Mothering as Creative Practice - This started with my participating in Margaret McCarthy’s Art Monsters reading group at Bathers Library, continued with a number of events about the intersection of art x creativity x parenting and ended with me writing a manifesto. I’d like to tie up this work with a zine about creative practice from my perspective as a newly creative person and a mother of color.

2. Archives of Attention - Archives are about marking / commemorating / remembering moments in time. My project is an archive of my pandemic attention, but I keep thinking we need new archival models more generally — models that are more personal, collective, reflective. Otherwise all we’ll be left with are timelines and feeds to mark the passing of our lives.

3. Book Reports Everywhere - I really, really, really want to make book reports “a thing.” Not just my book reports. The reality is that I’m more interested in the book reports I want other people to make. I’m trying to solve my own problems! Number one on this secret list had been Hospicing Modernity by Vanessa Machado de Oliveira and boy did Courtney deliver. What are the metrics for success on this goal? I have no idea. Maybe I’ll know it when I see it?

   

Two projects that came out of all this

Winter Club is a time-limited series of events running January through March. It’s hard for me to motivate to leave the house in the winter, especially during the week and once I’m already home. At the same time, we live in a seasonal community whose businesses need support during the slow winter months. Some of the Winter Club events were already happening; adding them to a schedule made them a destination. In other cases, we put together something we were curious about and hoped someone else might be, too (eg two neighbors - one with a hauling business and one with a watershed nonprofit - talking at our local bar about the weirdest stuff they’ve pulled out of the Russian River). Most events have been free, open to kids and short enough to be in bed at a reasonable hour. They’ve been pretty easy to pull off and have been very sweet and fun. I recommend the format.

Togethering Lab So many of my side projects felt disconnected from each other for a long time, but through my work with Katie Donnelly, the late Jess Clark and Dot Connector Studio, I found the through lines. Colin has also been finding his own, producing a series of place-based remembering events that bring local communities into contact with their own histories. The Togethering Lab brings them together - working in person at the community level and online in the more intimate, poetic internet that is more my speed. I’m still figuring out the shape of this project, but it feels right to have everything in one place.

What to do now?

What both of these projects have in common - and what connects them back to the book report - is they’re hyperlocal, intimate, community-oriented, driven by curiosity, focused on creativity. They’ve come out of my work with the book report, but they’re not about the book report. They both offer containers to explore things I’m interested in while being invitations for others to join me. One of the things I’ve learned through the book project is that if I want to see something in the world, I may need to just make it myself. As June Jordan tells us, “we are the ones we have been waiting for.” What would you make if you weren’t waiting?

I first encountered the term “re-membering” (as in the opposite of dismembering) in Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing.1 My project The Emergency Was Curiosity is my way of re-membering and piecing back together the very surreal early months of the pandemic. I can be an unreliable narrator and often remember things way worse or way better than they really were. So the project was a way for me to remember in real time what things were like then, or at least what I thought they were like.

One reaction that some people have to the project is a feeling of regret over not having memorialized their own pandemic experience “better.” So I developed an offering called Archives of Attention: A Zine Workshop on the 5-Year Anniversary of the Pandemic. It’s a way to help people re-member and process their early pandemic experiences (without having to spend three years making a 200-page book). I most recently led the workshop at UCSC with Professor Megan Moodie and faculty from the Department of Anthropology and undergraduate students in Professor Savannah Shange’s Critical Race and Ethnic Studies class. If you want to feel hopeful for the future, I highly recommend hanging out with some college students. They have had to deal with so much and yet are still wildly creative and remarkably clear-eyed about what they are facing.

I had stopped giving my workshop for awhile because it takes a lot out of me, but doing it again after some months and especially doing it with students (who were in high school at the beginning of the pandemic!) has reminded me how important it is for us to pause and reflect on how our lives (our health, our families, our politics) have changed over the last five years. There is value in thinking about what just happened. I am reminded of Clint Smith in his book How the Word Is Passed: “How different might our country look if all of us fully understood what had happened here?”

Sharing this project has also gotten me thinking more — and more deeply — about the idea of memorialization than I ever was when I was just cutting and pasting pictures into my own personal album.

What gets memorialized? Who gets memorialized and how? Who decides?

Traditional memorials strike me as so insufficient. They usually only capture one person’s or group of people’s story at one moment in time. They’re either weirdly triumphalist (picture a guy on a horse) or decontextualized tributes to the fallen. There are, of course, people and groups working to change this - for example, MASS Design Group’s Public Memory and Memorials Lab, the Gun Violence Memorial Project, Monument Lab, Zip Code Memory Project).

What makes the pandemic uniquely significant as an archival subject is that it happened to everyone. Unlike the kinds of political events that get selectively memorialized — or, in reality, didn’t actually “happen to everyone” — the pandemic was a universal attentional moment, experienced differently by each person who lived through it.

Some people lost whole sides of their families, while other people were leaning into new hobbies. Sometimes, these things were happening simultaneously to the same person. I think it’s important to honor the big griefs, small losses and tiny triumphs of whatever just happened over the last five years. All of these experiences deserve to be remembered, not just for collective history but for the individuals who lived them.

So what would it look like to memorialize differently? To create new commemorative models - models that are more relevant, more reflective, more accessible to the rest of us?

Zines

This is where zines come in. We could be memorializing the last five years in any number of ways and, in fact, people are trying. I find zines helpful for a few different reasons:

1. Making something with your hands connects you to your body and puts you in a different frame of mind. It activates a different kind of cognition and meaning making.

2. I also like zines because they’re small. A container this small can’t possibly hold everything you ever experienced over the last five years. A zine is a tiny thing just for you.

3. In a moment when institutional memory is being systematically dismantled, analog forms are remarkably resilient. Handmade objects resist erasure in ways that institutional records and digital archives do not. They can’t be removed by executive order, deleted from a server or manipulated by a bad actor.

Alter Archives

And these small, physical objects form a distributed archive, one that lives in drawers and on shelves across countless homes, beyond anyone else’s reach but your own (and who YOU choose to share them with). They’re too numerous, too personal and too scattered to control.

In creating space for people to document their own pandemic experiences through ritual and structure, my intention is to give us something more than nostalgia—it’s a way to ensure that what actually happened, in all its complexity and contradiction, will be remembered.

Ultimately, what I’m interested is what happens when THE ARCHIVE is reflective of our collective experiences rather than a telling of history determined by whoever has power at any given moment. We are building our future archive.

If you’re interested in this topic, here are some of my favorite archives and some reading / listening / viewing about commemoration and memorialization that has helped push my thinking:

A Few of My Favorite Archives

1. The Sitting Room Library is a library in someone’s house!2 Dedicated to work by and about women. Open by appointment. There’s a (Virginia) Woolf Wall, a Write Your Own Obituary class, all the tea you could ever want. The Lost Ladies of Lit just did an interview with co-founder J.J. Wilson.

2. Black Press @ 200 marks the Bicentennial of the Black Press. Celebrates two hundred years of Black protest, creativity and journalism and allows any user to remix and create across the history of Black newspapers. I haven’t played around with this tool too much yet, but I love that this archive encourages interaction.

3. The Prelinger Library is a research library in San Francisco co-founded by the legendary archivists Megan and Rick Prelinger and focused on the most amazing ephemera (periodicals, maps, books). It’s the kind of stuff that’s often more revealing about a particular time than any official record ever could be.

4. The GenderFail Archive Project is a socially engaged reading room that looks at archiving as a social practice. I really admire founder Be Oakley’s radically transparent and community-oriented approach to art book publishing.

5. SAADA - The largest publicly available archive of South Asian American Stories. I love this archive because I learn about communities I know nothing about — like the Mexican-Punjabi community in the southwestern US

6. Sebastopol Cookie Company Black History Month Hallway - I stumbled onto this project — in a hallway next to a cookie shop — while walking around town with my kid. What I like about it is how accessible it is, how modest, how powerful. It’s both individual and collective. Proprietor Bronwen Shears often asks her customers if there are people they’d like to see featured; and she hosts field trips (remember, it’s in a hallway) for elementary schools. All it takes is one person to make an archive.

Some Resources on Memorials

1. (Audio) Don’t Forget to Remember - Chris Colin’s audio story for 99% Indivisible about the effort to create a national COVID memorial. “Memorials tend to commemorate events that are clear and dramatic, maybe even a little cinematic. But with COVID, there was no heroic battle. No towers came down. No beach was stormed. The awfulness happened quietly…”

2. (Book) Immemorial - This is a gorgeous speculative essay by Lauren Markham exploring how we memorialize losses caused by climate change and the grief of what’s to come. It’s a small book that you can read in one sitting; and it’s the first book I have felt compelled to make a book report for since Jenny’s book. I hope to get around to that one day.

3. (Art) The National Museum for Nostalgia for the Very Moment You Are Living - from artist Pablo Helguera and part of artist Jon Rubin’s “The National Museum” project in which every few months a different artist was invited to change the name of the museum. It’s a provocative and sometimes absurd project that asks which stories, histories and futures are deemed worth saving and which are ignored or forgotten.

4. (Book) How the Word is Passed - Poet and journalist Clint Smith’s 2021 book in which he travels to a variety of historical sites (monuments, plantations, prisons, cemeteries) to examine how they remember — or fail to remember — slavery.

5. (Audio) Memory and Forgetting - an episode of Radiolab about how memories are made and forgotten. This episode has stayed with me 15 years after I first heard it though I can’t really remember most of the details :).

   

Finally, if you can spare an hour and a half and want to be schooled on zines and archives, I highly recommend this workshop by Mariame Kaba sponsored by the Avery Research Center for African American History and Culture at the University of Charleston: Reimagining the Archives with Zines.

I’m hoping to do more work in the world of archives, memorialization and commemoration in the months to come. If you have a favorite archive or memorial, please share it in the comments.

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I didn’t know where else to put this picture, so I’ll just leave you with this lovely sign from The Sitting Room.

Archives of Attention

Wednesday, October 22, University of California at Santa Cruz
A Zine-Making Workshop sponsored by the Department of Anthropology alongside The Humanities Institute, and the Abolition Medicine and Disability Justice project

I realize we’re talking about Santa Cruz, but the fact that projects and places like these exist is really giving me hope. From The Humanities Institute website: “see the forest and the trees” and “join us as we center practices of care, community and creativity.” Clearly, these are my people. I’m not an academic and, in fact, part of my own practice is to get some of the ideas I’m interested in out of an academic register and into more plain spoken/written and more relatable language. But working with professors Megan Moodie and Savannah Shange on this event has been nothing short of mind-blowing. We’re talking about collective wisdom, alter-notions of care, new forms of publishing, disability justice and deeply intersectional approaches to human difference, and it’s all been so generative and energizing.

I’m interested in what happens when THE ARCHIVE is reflective of our collective experiences rather than a telling of history determined by whoever has power at any given moment. Zines, which have a long history as artifacts of resistance, form a distributed archive, living in drawers and shelves, beyond anyone else’s reach but your own and whoever you choose to share them with. We are building our future archive.

The Interrupted Artist: Writing Motherhood

Saturday, October 25, 5 pm at Lit Crawl in San Francisco

I continue to be deeply interested in the intersection of mothering and creativity. In curating this series of readings at Lit Crawl (the world’s largest free pop-up literary event!), I’m trying to broaden the scope and composition of this discourse. From the session description:

Creative practice and motherhood flourish in community. A multi-genre group of artists and writers share work shaped by the conditions of mothering—from embracing distraction as creative fuel to finding theater in the everyday of parenting. Through conversation and community, let’s weave an infrastructure of support for parenting and creativity that acknowledges constraints while reorienting around a frame of mothering as a site of creative possibility.

And just look at these artists and writers I get to collaborate with…

Phoebe Kuo is a trained furnituremaker who now makes droopy wood sculptures. She loves to hang out with writers and sometimes gets invited to read with them. She has taught at craft schools and shown her woodworking across the US; at home, she searches for work/life balance with her wife, toddler, and two house rabbits.

Margaret McCarthy is a writer, performer, nonprofit executive, and proud mother of her favorite three-year-old. She has performed her work at SOMArts, the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Artist Television Access, and for nine years as an ensemble member of the San Francisco Neo-Futurists, where she also served as Co-Artistic Director. She is on the board of the Center for Artistic Activism.

Akasemi Newsome is a mother and political scientist who leads the UC Berkeley Institute of European Studies. She finds some academic articles thrilling and is working on translating her strong feelings about research into short conversational essays without sacrificing formality. Her last panel in May 2025 was on Decolonizing EU Law at the EU Studies Association. She has published on crisis and US-EU relations.

Jihii Jolly is a journalist who writes about care, media and technology through her newsletter Time Spent. She was the founding host of the popular Buddhist podcast, Buddhability. She’s currently writing a memoir about fertility and invisible labor alongside her two toddlers with big feelings—one human, one canine.

How Should a Person Read?

Wednesday, November 5, 6:30 - 8:00 pm in Portland
A Zine Book Report Workshop as part of Portland Book Festival’s Cover to Cover

I’m doing this workshop with my friend Kara Leibowitz, whose beautiful project — the Aftertimes Almanac — takes the form of an old-fashioned circular rolodex. We’re going to help people explore their feelings about books by making zines about them. I am very interested in book reports as a form and how they might help us process our own reading better, differently, more deeply.

Doing this workshop at a book festival at the Portland Art Museum’s Center for an Untold Tomorrow feels like a way to bring these ideas to exactly the kind of audience that might be able to take them further.

I used to think these topics had nothing to do with one another. I now see them as interrelated and having a lot to do with time and how we spend it, how we mark it. I’m interested in how to have more of these conversations, how to have them with different kinds of people in different kinds of places. If that’s something that interests you, too, let me know.

Metalabel

So far, I’ve really enjoyed the process of releasing the project this way. I’ve sold about a quarter of the edition, including a couple of care packages, and I was pleasantly surprised by how many people took advantage of the Buy One, Give One option. I’m so curious who you’re going to give the book to. Will you tell me?

Most people I’ve interacted with seemed not to have heard of Metalabel before, so I’m happy to be introducing the platform more widely. You can learn more about Metalabel’s work here. Some people thought the release meant my project had been acquired by some big publisher; some people thought I was collaborating with Meta (aka Facebook), neither of which are true.

Pay What You Want

I’ve been particularly pleased with the Pay What You Want digital download option. I had considered setting the price at $1 just for the sake of ascribing some value to it. But the truth is that if I had unlimited funds, I’d just give the book away. That feels more in keeping with the spirit of the project. So this option feels like it lets me give it away while also giving people the opportunity to pay something. And I’ve been happily surprised at how many people gave more than what was suggested - the range has been $0-$30 so far.

Give It Forward

Very little is happening with the Give It Forward Fund, which is a fund that people can chip into, and I’ll give away free books to the people and organizations that have requested one or haven’t been able to pay. I think it was too complicated, or maybe I offered one option too many. Also, maybe it doesn’t really make sense to pay to give away someone else’s book. Or maybe it just needs a dedicated email or something. I would really love to give it away to anyone who wants one, but I can’t really pay for all that myself. That said, one person (whom I don’t know) did chip in to the fund, and I feel ridiculously warmly toward them.

Bookstores and Shoppy Shops

The most interesting part to me of this release so far is how much easier it has been to sell the book into gift shops and boutique-type places than it is to sell it in bookstores. Part of me wants this not to be true — it’s a book; it should be in bookstores. And there are certainly exceptions to this — shout out to my local bookstore Russian River Books and Letters and to East Bay Booksellers (where the process was that I wrote them an email; they responded to the email; they bought 4 books; I dropped them off; they paid me).

I think gift shops are more used to dealing with individual vendors whereas bookstores primarily get their books from wholesalers and distributors. So, in general, it’s sort of a pain for them to deal with me as an individual author. Instead of being bummed about this, I think I should lean into it. If you know of a cute store that might appreciate this book, lemme know.

For example, my book is now at our local pool club, River Electric. I get more texts about my book from visitors to this pool club than probably anywhere else. I think this mostly means that they are doing a great job of marketing, and that there is significant overlap in people who can go to a pool club and people who are interested in my project. But the sheer number of people I haven’t heard from in years who reach out after seeing the book at River Electric’s Camp Store or Neon Raspberry Art House have really made me rethink “where books should be.”

My project is something of a love letter to the Russian River area, so it makes me really happy that it’s available locally. This is also an excuse to shout out some of my favorite local spots that carry the book: Cochineal, Altamont General Store, the Guerneville Public Library.

Events

I had a party at River Electric in part because Pub Day would have been anticlimactic otherwise. It was all the best parts of having a party (eg knowing everyone there) without all the work. The people that run this place throw parties — like for their actual jobs — so all the details were perfect without my having to sweat any of them.

I had put a pause on self-organized events for a bit because they were so much work to pull off. I recently participated in a panel at Bather’s Library; in this case, it was part of a larger event, Liat organized the whole thing, and I could focus on my little piece of things. For me, this was an ideal set up, and I got so much out of listening to the presentations of the people that presented alongside me.

And the topic of that panel - creativity x parenting - has been so generative for me in the weeks since it happened that I’m excited to get back to events, albeit a little differently. I used to be so burned out on conferences that I never thought I would say that I liked being on a panel, but here we are. If you’re organizing a panel, call me!

Press and Reviews

This has been the hardest piece to figure out. At the point I decided I was going to share my project more broadly, it seemed logical (to me, at the time) to try to get someone somewhere to “review” the book. This has turned out to be misguided and maybe irrelevant. Many places no longer even run book reviews; I’m pretty sure reviews don’t sell books. I also learned that I should be looking for something more like “press coverage”, not actual reviews.

Even then it’s kind of hard to figure out the order of operations. Find an outlet that still runs reviews, convince them they should run a review of my self-published project, find someone to write the review, then that person has to actually do the writing and then submit that writing to the place that agreed to consider it even though none of these steps guarantee that it will actually run, and it’s not clear that it matters anyway.

I’m giving you all these details because it’s the kind of thing I would have taken for granted before I actually made my own project. Write book, publish book, get book reviewed, sell books. In my experience, for a project like this, it just doesn’t work like that (if you are interested in getting into the weeds about reviews, I suggest this recent piece by Lincoln Michel, the former Editor-in-Chief of Electric Literature).

In my case, I even have a couple of people who are up for writing about the project, but it’s hard for us to figure out who we should be reaching out to. It’s not like I expect to get reviewed by The New York Times, but it’s hard to understand what’s in between The New York Times (as a stand-in for all legacy media organizations) and one person’s newsletter (like this one) on Substack.

I’ve worked in media for my entire career, so I’m interested in this question not just for this project but as a case study in how our information ecosystem works (or doesn’t work) these days. And because Jenny’s book is about attention and my book report is about taking back my own attention, the challenges and ironies of trying to get the right kind of attention for this project are not lost on me.

I’ve turned my own attention to hyper-local media instead, which has felt more straightforward to navigate and has been more personally meaningful. My local paper ran a lovely and thoughtful review. I was recently interviewed by our local arts paper (we still have one of those)! These things feel good to me. In both cases, the interviews were in person at a local cafe, and I got connected to another person in my community. Does it really get any better than that? What more could I want?

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My perspective on being an art shark comes almost entirely from my experience making this book called The Emergency Was Curiosity.

It’s a somewhat unusual project. An illustrated book report inspired by Jenny Odell’s book How to Do Nothing and focused on cultivating individual and collective creative attention.

What I want to do in this talk is:

1. Tell you the story of the project

2. Highlight how making the book was intertwined with my experience of parenting

3. Offer some ideas on being an art shark from my perspective as an amateur artist

I. Context

My professional experience is in progressive media, politics and philanthropy. I didn’t go to art school or have an MFA or even identify as a capital A “Artist”.

At the beginning of the pandemic, I started working on this project as a personal creative response to Jenny’s book, having just left my job of ten years, with two small children and no childcare and never having had a creative practice to speak of before.

I had read Jenny’s book when it first came out and found myself coming back to it over and over in those early pandemic months. It predicted so many dynamics - particularly around the importance of care and maintenance over productivity - that came to define that very specific time.

At first I was simply copying by hand quotes from Jenny’s book that I liked and that I wanted to remember.

Eventually I started doodling and collaging, making watercolors and writing essays about the ways the ideas in Jenny’s book were increasingly relevant in my own life. I was living in a rural place for the first time and had a deeper relationship to nature than I ever had as someone who had lived in cities all my adult life.

Making these pages became a practice of attention for me. Over the course of the three years I spent making the book report, I made more than 200 pages that I eventually turned into a book and later, an exhibition, which led to other exhibitions and an event series. And the project has evolved so far beyond where it started as something I was working on just for myself.

As a newly creative person, there was also a really big learning curve, and I had to do all sorts of things to educate myself. What I’m trying to do in my own creative practice now is fill in some of the gaps that I found — particularly as a mother, particularly as a person of color.

The discourse on creative practice often excludes mothers.

The discourse on motherhood often excludes mothers of color.

The discourse on mother artists of color is almost entirely nonexistent.

I even had trouble making this Venn Diagram, which seems like it should have been disjointed sets - circles that don’t overlap at all. So I’m both trying to locate myself and insist on myself in the discourse about art sharks and art making more generally.

II. Mothering

My project has turned out to be about a lot of things, but it is a lot about mothering.

And I should note that I’m using mothering in the Angela Garbes sense of the word, which is to say that it is not gender-specific, and you do not have to have children in order to mother.

My own kids are all over the book. I had never spent as much time with them as I did during that first pandemic summer, and this project is intimately tied with my mothering of them.

Mothering is there in the relentless crafting I did with them to pass the time, like these binoculars we made out of toilet paper tubes.

If I wanted to take a walk, I had to take my kids with me.

There’s a lecture about creativity by John Cleese that Jenny mentions in her book. In it he talks about 5 Factors for Creativity. What struck me immediately about this list is that he doesn't say anything about childcare. I can't think of creating anything without thinking about who is going to watch my kids if it's not me. I was only able to work on my project because my partner was willing to do a lot of the childcare.

So I wanted to offer my own manifesto for creativity: Time, Space & Childcare.

Before I continue, let me just say that if you're hearing all these suggestions, and it all sounds impossible to you, that's because it is. We have to weave for ourselves and each other an infrastructure to support parenting, to support creative practice where none exists.

III. How to Be an Art Shark in 10 Easy Steps! (Mileage May Vary)

1. Time. Let’s start with time. It’s at the heart of every other suggestion. No one I know has any. But we have to try and find it, however unreasonably. I wrote most of this talk in the parking lot of my kid’s soccer practice.

2. Space. Find a door you can close. If you don’t have a door, trade space with a friend. Meet your friends at the coffee shop and then insist that everyone try to do their creative work for a little while. Or just use the time and space to zone out a bit. I worked on my project in a shed on our property. When the door was closed, my kids knew that I was working on my book report.
   
   

   

3. Childcare. Childcare can also be traded. And while this isn’t true for everyone, once they reached a certain age, I found it easier to have more kids around to play with each other than it was to watch my children alone. But also if your kids are small, it’s really hard to do anything other than take care of them. Go easy on yourself, wait a few years, things may change.

4. Make something useless. Make something just for yourself. It’s okay to be illegible. There is value in uselesslessness. Jenny writes about Old Survivor, a redwood tree that has survived for years by appearing useless to loggers as a timber tree.
   

   

5. Take a class. Here’s a somewhat embarrassing list of all the random classes I took over the years I worked on my project. Most of these were one-offs, a couple of hours, pretty cheap. A lot of times taking the class was my creative work, and that was enough.
   

   

6. Morning pages. This practice from Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way involves three pages of stream-of consciousness writing done by hand first thing in the morning. I find them useful for emptying my brain of every little thing that I wake up thinking about before my day starts. If you can manage to stick with it, you start to notice patterns - what you’re interested in, what you’re (still) complaining about, what you want, what you really want.
   

7. Find other people. I’m part of a group of creative mothers that came together at the beginning of the pandemic when we started meeting weekly over Zoom. We serve as sounding boards for each other, edit each other’s projects, sometimes pretend to be each other’s assistants. I highly recommend finding a crew of fellow creatives – it’s helpful on a practical level but also mostly on a human level.
   

   

8. Don’t work alone. Bringing in other people can be a way to lighten the load for yourself but also to give an entry point for another artist to participate when they may not have the room to be working on their own big project. There was a point in my project where I got so sick of drawing that I asked other people to draw John Cleese for me.

   

9. Get rejected. Our creative group was really inspired by Kim Liao’s advice to “Aim for 100 Rejections a Year.” (We even have a rejection leaderboard!) Aiming for so many rejections takes the sting out of them when they happen, and you don’t take things so personally. Collect enough rejections and some acceptances slip through; and in the meantime, you’re practicing.

10. Tell everyone. I applied for 11 residencies with this project, and I didn’t get any of them. And then got a residency that I didn’t even apply to, because someone else had nominated me. All because I had told them months earlier what I was working on. So tell everyone; you never know where your champions are.
    

After all the reading and research and practice I’ve done on this topic…

I think the work of being an art shark is a collective rather than an individual effort. And our collective work is to try to make time and space for creative practice available for each other and for as many people as possible.

And I’m convinced that by having more conversations like this, we are creating the conditions for there to be more sharks among us.

But then I realized I was drafting this note as a way of avoiding drafting my talk, so I stopped halfway through. And then I gave my talk but didn’t want to have to re-draft this note in the past tense, and also remembered that I am allowed to do whatever I want here, so here are some notes from before and after a presentation. I’ll post the full presentation in a future newsletter.

Before the Summer Symposium

I’m prepping for a presentation this week at one of my favorite Bay Area spaces - Bather’s Library, which describes itself as “a community-supported art book library, work/performance space, shop, and weirdo art school in downtown Oakland.”

Their Summer Symposium is a long weekend of readings, talks, workshops, panels, performances and screenings to celebrate and share and learn and grow and think together.

I’m participating on a panel about the intersection of art making and parenting with three other artist parents.

First, here’s the description of the panel:

The four of us met in a reading group earlier this year hosted by the artist Margaret McCarthy: ART MONSTERS: ON ART-MAKING & PARENTING ("How do art-making and parenthood inspire, challenge, and oppose each other?").

Art Monsters: On Art-Making & Parenting
with Margaret McCarthy

How do art-making and parenthood inspire, challenge, and oppose each other? For decades, parenthood, especially the role of the mother and/or primary caretaker, has been popularly understood as antithetical to art-making. We call bullsh*t. Let’s read extracts from some of the very recent and exciting books exploring the work and lives of artist parents current and historical, the obstacles they/we face, and how these dual, vital, roles illuminate each other.

It might be helpful at this point to offer some definitions:

Mothering

I mostly use the word mothering1 in the Angela Garbes sense of the word because it resonates with me personally. I like that parenting is more inclusive language, but there is also the fact that the only people who showed up to our reading group were mothers and (one child-curious adult) even though it was about art making and parenting.

Art Monster

The term art monster comes from Jenny Offill’s novel Dept. of Speculation.

The idea of the monstrous artist is further explored in an essay by Claire Dederer in The Paris Review: What Do We Do With the Art of Monstrous Men? (there are a couple of other art monster books that I haven’t read yet: Marin Kosut’s Art Monster: On the Impossibility of New York and Lauren Elkin’s Art Monsters: Unruly Bodies in Feminist Art; ; maybe one of you can read them and write a book report?)

Art Shark

Art shark comes from Leslie Jamison’s book Splinters: Another Kind of Love Story. You can read an excerpt in The New Yorker: The Birth of My Daughter, The Death of My Marriage.

So the general topic is art making/creativity + parenting/mothering and the ways in which combining these two things is challenging but can also be mutually generative.

One of the challenges we faced in our reading group was how culturally homogenous the art monster/art shark genre is. This is true of both the genre of people writing about creative practice and as well as the genre of people writing about motherhood. Put them together - people writing about motherhood and creative practice - and it’s like reading the same thing over and over wondering where your people are, where you are. And by you, I mean me. But also, maybe you. This is true most acutely for me in how little writing there is by mother artists of color, but it goes beyond that.

For the last couple of years, I have had an almost limitless appetite for this content, so I am both consuming a lot of it all while feeling like big things are missing. Almost like being at a party that you want to be at but feeling like all your friends are at this other party that is probably a lot more fun.

While there are lots of very good reasons to diversify narratives, there are two that feel urgent to me: 1. reading the same story over and over is boring. 2. when we read different perspectives, new ideas become available to us.

Courtney recently put the work of Rebekah Taussig on my radar. In Taussig’s case, disability has trained her to look for alternative paths and sideways routes, which also has tremendous value for me as an able-bodied reader; but when the art shark discourse is so homogenous that it doesn't include disabled experience, we all miss out.

In some ways, investing in this new writing space over the last year has allowed me to try different routes through an ever-changing landscape, to experiment with new ways of creating and connecting, to practice different ways of being in my brain and body. And if disability has trained me for anything, it’s looking for alternate paths and sideways routes.

-Rebekah Taussig

I started this post while I was prepping for the panel, and now I’m finishing this post after having participated in the panel.

After the Summer Symposium

My brain has been buzzing all week after having attended Summer Symposium. I really don’t understand how they pulled off five days of programming of 44 sessions across six venues with six weeks notice. It’s the kind of event that would have taken another kind of institution a full year to make happen, and it wouldn’t have been half as good.

And instead of taking a nap, they are making a little magazine to help people integrate their experience: “Basically anything you saw that inspired or excited or puzzled or thrilled you that happened at the symposium”. I put together some notes for them:

What I Have Been Thinking About In the Week Since the Bather's Library Summer Symposium Had a "Parenting Track"

(I’ve kind of made up the parenting track thing, but there were three sessions in a row related to parenting: In Search of a Collective Noun: On Parenting and Art Making, Art Sharks: Art Making While Parenting, Read Something Radical to a Baby)

The energy at 9 am on a Saturday at Bather's Library was unhinged in the best way. It was early, so the iPad wasn't yet fully charged, but it didn't matter because all the moms had cash (cash!) on hand to buy their tickets (and they also had band aids, and also snacks). There were a lot of babies, and many of them were acting like babies, which is to say sometimes they were crying and making noises that might otherwise be considered inappropriate at an Art Talk. But nobody seemed to mind and some people held other people's babies, so that they could listen better.

And artists talked about being mothers and mothers talked about being artists and people asked helpful questions, questions that actually moved the conversation forward instead of questions that were actually comments (and when does that ever happen)? I was left feeling very hopeful and energized about other people, and the kinds of things that are only possible when you hang out with those other people in the same room and direct your attention together.

I learned about two recent all-mom Bay Area art shows - WOW MOM and Mothers of Collaboration, spaces like HackerMoms in Berkeley, communities like Mothers in Art and Design. Someone even bought a copy of my book right out of my tote bag! Some of the questions I was left with and have been thinking about all week:

• What do you call a group of mothers? (h/t Margaret McCarthy)

• What's the difference between an art shark and an art monster?

• Where are all the art sharks of color? queer sharks? immigrant sharks? disabled sharks? And how might finding them change the conversation?

• Should we be talking about art making and parenting or art making and mothering?

Maybe we can work these questions out next summer…

If you don’t know Metalabel, it’s a new platform for releasing creative work inspired by the punk bands and indie record labels of the 80s. “Rather than wait for someone else to legitimize them, these bands legitimized themselves by starting their own labels, putting themselves out, and ultimately making scenes and something bigger than just them on their own.” I like this concept of self-legitimacy. I have learned that my project is similarly about permission - mostly, the kind we give ourselves to do things that might not have a point, just because we want to.

As part of the release, you can buy books. The first two have already been “collected” in the language of Metalabel. 98 more to go.

Special Edition Care Package

There’s also a little care package with some friendly reminders - a permission slip for you to keep in your pocket, a Quickstart guide for doing nothing, a poster like the kind you see in dentists’ offices - a little rallying cry from the river behind our house.

Give It Forward Fund

In part because there were so few copies of the book in the beginning, many of the people who have seen the project have done so because someone passed along their own copy. Katie only saw the project because I traded one with Jess, and then Katie made a whole book report about it!

I’ve also gotten a bunch of requests for free copies of the book, and if I had unlimited funds, I would always give it away. So in addition to being able to download a copy of the project for free/pay what you want, we've also created an opportunity for you to support the Give It Forward Fund. We’ll mail copies to anyone who wants one if/when funds are available.

If you donate to this fund, as a thank you, you’ll get a zip file that includes some cute wallpapers that Collin made. As I’ve mentioned before, collaboration with other people has kind of become the project. I didn’t know Collin a year ago, and now we’re making things together. And then my Colin, who I have known for a very long time, made this printable tear sheet so you can give permission to other people.

The spirit of this project has moved beyond the question of what to do with our attention and more toward what it is we can do together. Almost once a week, I am on the receiving end of Someone Else’s Google Doc. So many of you want to write your own book, but have been afraid to say it out loud. I can help you figure out how to do it. Yesterday, I got an invitation to collaborate on a shared notebook. I’m not sure what we’ll do with it, but writing together and witnessing each other feels good. Or maybe there’s nothing at all to do. Maybe doing nothing is enough.

Thanks for supporting the project.

Buy the Book Report

ps. If you’re local, come celebrate at the snazzy new neighborhood pool, River Electric.

For the rest of you, the short story is I’m releasing a special edition of the book report on Metalabel August 5, book events have been incredibly moving and a lot of work, I need a slightly more scalable distribution strategy for selling into stores… and I have a team! It’s all still weird; it’s all still interesting.

I’ll be picking up the pace of these updates over the next couple of weeks until the release and then will return to regularly unscheduled/when I can get around to it programming.

I’m going to be releasing the book report on Tuesday, August 5 in a special edition on Metalabel, a new platform for publishing creative work. I’ve been collecting — mostly books and zines — on Metalabel since the middle of last year, and I like the collective vibes and emphasis on small editions. As part of the release, I’ll be selling books, of course. But the release also includes some extras: a care package that includes a poster and permission slips. A digital version of the book will be available as Pay What You Want, and there’s also a Give It Forward fund to send free books to people who might appreciate them. Here’s a preview:

This also seems like a good time to give you an update on how things have gone so far and a little a check in on my original plan for the book report from back in January: 1. Release on Metalabel 2. Sell to Indie Bookstores 3. Go on Tour.

The book is in bookstores!

The book report is available in some of my favorite local independent shops. I recommend all of these for a visit:

• Russian River Books & Letters, Guerneville, CA

• Neon Raspberry Art House, Occidental, CA

• On Waverly, San Francisco, CA

• Bather’s Library, Oakland, CA

I’d like to get it into more stores, but it’s a lot of work to figure out which stores, reach out to them, give them the information they need to make a decision about carrying the book, figure out how to get them copies of the book and then figure out payment schedules (shout out to On Waverly who sent me a sales report like clockwork the very first month the book was for sale).

It turns out that many stores — even your most beloved indie bookstore — have policies against working with independently-produced projects. The transaction costs are high. For everyone.

I also know that just because a book is out in the world doesn’t mean you’re going to find it in your local bookstore. One of my favorite essays on publishing a book is For Me, With Love and Squalor by Lauren Markham: “But more often than not, it’s not on the shelves at all”. I think I’ll probably bite the bullet and try to figure out how to distribute my book through Ingram, so that things are easier (?) all around.

Lessons From a Dozen Events

Since this whole project started, I’ve done about a dozen events ranging from very public to very private — at a traditional gallery, a public library — with groups ranging from a dozen to more than 100. They’ve all been satisfying in different ways, but as I move forward with the project, I am most interested in the extremes - either events that can include lots of other people and justify the work involved or events that are low key and intimate where I can actually talk to everyone in attendance and where neither I nor the host has to do too much ahead of time.

I have a team!

Perhaps the most surprising (to me) aspect of the project is that I have a small team of people working with me on the Metalabel release: Jolie is interning with me for the summer; Collin and Katie are colleagues with whom I am doing a work trade; Colin is married to me and therefore has to help out but seems to be enjoying himself. We have a weekly meeting on Mondays where we’re mostly giggling about nonsequiturs and sometimes getting things done. Since I’m on the East Coast for the summer, we all met up at a bowling alley for a “team offsite”. I’m not entirely sure how all this happened, but it’s lovely and feels very much in keeping with the spirit of the project.

What’s Next?

This next phase of the project - in advance of the August 5 release - involves trying to convince other people to write about the project, and this has turned out to be both easier and harder than I thought. I’ve done interviews for a number of Substack newsletters including:

• Nancy Reddy’s Write More, Be Less Careful about writing and motherhood

• Kristin Merrilees’s PHONE TIME about internet culture, technology and media

• Nikki Summer’s We’re A Lot about feminism, pop culture and midlife

I’ve really enjoyed these conversations because they allow me to explore different aspects of the project. The writers have been gracious and supportive. And these independent outlets feel like the kind of media ecosystem I want to be a part of and contributing to. I also did my first podcast about the project with Igor Schwartzmann and Johannes Kleske of Follow the Rabbit, which I wrote about last week.

Most of these have happened pretty organically and/or as a result of sending one email. I send an email, they respond, and we either have a conversation or they send me a list of questions that I respond to over email. In part because I am such a slow writer, I have been particularly impressed when these writers have been able to take our conversation and weave it into a broader narrative.

Press Coverage - Still Trying to Figure It Out

I haven’t yet been able to figure out how the review process works in more traditional outlets, but I’m working on it. I’ve looked up the submission policies of various literary journals, and many go something like we only consider reviews of books that have been published within the last six months, and we are primarily interested in work that is under the radar/isn’t covered elsewhere but we don’t publish reviews of self-published work, and we won’t get back to you for four months. Don’t call us, we’ll call you!

I’m not complaining; most of these journals are run on volunteer labor on nonexistent budgets. I’m thrilled they exist at all. But I do wish it were easier to figure out how to interact with them. All of which is to say if you’d like to write about the book, just reply to this email. I’ll send you a copy.

What About the Books?

I decided to print 500 copies of the book after I kept running out of books while printing them 25 and 50 at a time, so I finally decided to do a proper print run in anticipation of the August 5 release. Between the bookstores and the events and selling them out of the trunk of my car, those 500 books I ordered are now 368!

Action Items

If you’ve made it this far and are looking around and wondering what to do now, let me make some requests/suggestions:

• If you’d like to write about the project, I’d love that. Just reply to this note, and I’ll send you a digital copy.

• If you can get yourself to the River Electric on August 5 for Happy Hour, come hang out with me. From what I can gather, Pub Days are anticlimactic, so I thought I should have a party.

• Please consider supporting the project on Metalabel by buying one of the editions on August 5 when the book is released.

Erin is a pioneering social change strategist - the co-founder of the Milarepa Fund, the Tibetan Freedom Concerts, and Revolutions Per Minute. She is producing and hosting a podcast to take listeners behind the scenes of the groundbreaking Tibetan Freedom Concerts and the movement for a Free Tibet. The weekly podcast - Freedom Needs a Soundtrack - will launch on June 15, 2026, the 30th anniversary of the first concert.

Erin: How do you think about maximizing your impact as a creative, especially as it relates to making the transition from activist to creative?

Christie: I think there are as many different ways to think about how to be a creative as there are creatives. For example, I’ve met creatives who are trying to maximize impact, but for better or worse, I am trying to do something else, at least in this phase of my creative journey. So I am partly answering your question directly but also partly using it as a prompt to explore my own practice/push my thinking. Maybe by the time we hop on the phone, I won't even agree with what I've written below.

At the beginning of my project, I wasn't thinking about audience at all. Or, perhaps better said, the audience I was optimizing for was myself and what I liked, what felt good, what sounded good, my own delight. That is probably also because of the nature of the specific project I was working on, which was essentially a glorified Cliffs notes / journal - who else would be interested in such a thing besides me (and maybe my partner Colin)?

I have now come to think that making something for yourself is actually a great organizing principle - you don't get hung up on how things sound/how they will be received because you're not worried about what anyone else will think/what impact it might have. I think that "minimizing" impact - focusing on the smallest feeling of joy or delight is actually great.

One other challenge that occurs to me about the transition from professional activist to creative is a feeling of guilt you might have over not maximizing your impact, a fear about creative work being self-indulgent. I don't even subscribe to this framing anymore, but I do think it's a real and understandable feeling.

Erin: How have you navigated creative collaborations?

Christie: Collaboration has really ranged from effortless and magical to a lot of effort with a kind of small result, but I have been open to all of it. Only recently have I decided I need to be more targeted/efficient with my collaborations. And you are correct that collaboration has kind of become the project. This question is probably easiest discussed, so I'll just include some examples and notes here.

Because my book report wasn't a commissioned project (ie, I didn't have an editor or publisher, etc), I needed to kind of organize my own collaborators. I joined a writing group that gave me people I could run things by without having to explain much. One of the people in my group edited the whole book, another one helped me redesign some of the pages, another one rewrote some of the descriptive copy.

Then there was the actual "making" of the book. I had to throw money at this problem. The book was handmade in part because that was the point of the project but also because I didn't have technical skills to make it any other way. The whole thing would have gone a lot faster if I had just made it digitally. When it came time to properly digitize the 200+ pages, I realized I had hit the wall in terms of what I could do on my own and what I could ask my friends to do for free. Eventually, this was design work I had to find and pay for.

Finding someone to do this took forever and was a very frustrating process. Eventually, I found the absolute perfect person (who was perfect partly because she had never done it before and therefore was willing to work with my budget), but it also meant there were lots of avoidable mistakes we made along the way. The mistakes part doesn’t really matter because the best outcome of our collaboration is that we became friends. So stay open, stay patient.

This is also to say that part of the process of collaboration in my experience is about money - people don't talk about this very much. I was able to make my project happen because I didn't need money from it or in order to work on it and also I was willing to spend money in order to make it the way I wanted to. There is/will be a limit to this; in fact, I'm probably right now up against my own limits in terms of how much more of my own money I can spend on this thing.

Some other kinds of collaboration:

• unexpected ones - this person who was supposed to make editorial comments on my book report and then wrote me a 17-page book report

• annoying ones - people who have very sweetly offered to help but neither of us is sure what that means exactly, and then they get busy or their bandwidth changes, and I end up sending dreaded “just checking in again” emails; it’s all part of the process

• formalized ones - I'm experimenting now with a barter collaboration - I am advising an organization and in return they are supporting me on getting the project out in the world

Last point: if your collaborations are more about your own projects, you are the one who is going to be doing the vast majority of the work (as it should be). There are exceptions to this, of course. But mostly no one else has the time or energy to care about your stuff the way you do. Unless it's someone’s job in some way, most of the hustle will be up to you.

Erin: You posted something about the importance of making your creative practice public. Can you talk more about that? It’s a pretty exciting and nerve-wracking part of what I’m trying to do.

Christie: Totally nerve-wracking, totally exciting. The first 3 years of my project were private - just me in my shed tinkering away. I started to share it with people as a way to get feedback, and the experience of getting feedback from Elizabeth was so moving/gratifying/generative that I understood in a completely different way the importance of making the work public. It's become a virtuous circle, flywheel kind of thing. I am not naturally inclined this way, but in general, it has been so rewarding that I keep forcing myself to do it. I’m working with the garage door up because "working on niche, personally-meaningful projects brings weirder, more serendipitous inbounds."

For example, you and I probably wouldn't be emailing were it not for me making the work more public. I have so many different examples of people I am in touch with that I wouldn't be were it not for pushing myself in this direction. So I’m going to keep doing it.

Erin: Are you making a living from your creative practice? I know that you have applied and gotten grants and residencies and such, but that never seems to be sustainable nor enough. How do we handle the financial part of our lives as we are trying to focus on our creative life more? Any advice? Should I just make money elsewhere and do the creative outside of the need to pay the bills?

Christie: To your first question, absolutely not. Not even close. Not tracking it super well. Because the biggest expense is my time, by that metric, I am almost certainly losing money. But at least up until now, I haven't cared because it's been so satisfying. I should also say that my goal was not to make a living from my creative practice. I still advise foundations and family offices as my paid work.

I haven't received any grants for the project. I just decided to pay for it myself because I wanted it to exist. There is a lot of freedom and privilege in that. I also believe that I could have wasted years applying and waiting for some gatekeeper to decide my project was worthy instead of just doing the project. You are so well connected philanthropically - especially in the cultural space - that you probably could get your creative projects funded. In my case, even though I am connected philanthropically, my project was so idiosyncratic and personal, it's not particularly fundable - particularly as it was first conceived and realized.

Right now there are offshoots of the project that I think could/should be bankrolled externally, and I am trying to work on that. We'll see. I still go back to the idea of just making what I want to see in the world and doing it in a scrappy way if I can't get someone to underwrite it. I think I could easily crowdfund some of these things, but as you know, crowdfunding campaigns are also a lot of time/effort. Effort that could be spent just doing what I want to do.

I think it's important to talk about the money aspects. I like keeping my creativity as an expensive hobby. For a certain kind of person who doesn't understand why I'm doing all this when it takes so much time and costs me money, I liken it to golf.

Erin: You seem to have created an amazing community around your practice (it’s almost like community is the creative practice sometimes). Can you talk more about why that is important to you, how you did it, what you are learning from it, etc.?

Christie: This is the most interesting, exciting, fun, generative part of the project. The reason I keep doing it is mostly selfish and a little bit selfless. It is interesting, exciting, fun and generative ... for me. That it also often helps other people is also very very satisfying and rewarding. But I don't think I would keep iterating on this aspect of it if it wasn't also feeding me.

There's lots more to say about this, but I've gotten tired of typing, and i'm also realizing this will be exhausting to read and it's probably a lot easier to just chat about all this, but it was nice for me to take some time to reflect on all this. I can’t wait to hear about your projects.

I did my first podcast interview about the book report with Johannes Kleske and Igor Schwartzmann of Follow the Rabbit, a show exploring “emerging trends and cultural phenomena to help our listeners update their mental models of how the world is changing.”

I was interested in Follow the Rabbit for a couple of reasons:

1. These two guys in Berlin happen to be interested in the very specific set of intersections that I am also interested in — “We delve into the intersections between technology, society, and culture — from the transformation of health into a luxury good to the return of ‘third places’ after the pandemic.”

2. I’ve also been really intrigued by the form of their podcast. It started as a series of Instagram Lives before migrating to YouTube. Their entire first season was about a single article - Toby Shorin’s 2002 essay Life After Lifestyle. A podcast about an article is very related to a book report about another book.

Each week, Johannes and Igor would explore a different aspect of Toby’s article — things like community-first brands, third places, gyms and spirituality. And they tracked these connections on a Miro board that they would share on screen - visualizing the threads between these topics and the rabbit holes they went down.

Making Connections Clearer

I find this approach - where the connections are as important as the content - to be so kindred with my own attempts to make process more visible from the very beginning of my project. In my first/only prototype of the book report, I tried so many different ways to physically represent the project’s references. These attempts mostly failed, but my favorite was a folder stapled to the back of every page of the book report that had print outs of all the source material that went into that page - the articles I read, the drawings I was copying. I know myself enough to know that when I came back to these pages, I needed the references to be right there, already printed out, available. In practice, the pages became so heavy from their reference packets that I couldn’t turn them easily, so I abandoned that idea.

When I’m reading other books, I usually don’t follow footnotes because it takes me out of the flow of my reading; in the case of endnotes, I never remember the original reference, and I am usually too lazy to go back and check. But I also newly subscribe to the belief that a lot of “the action” is in the footnotes, so I am interested in forms that make references/footnotes/endnotes/sources more legible and easier to access. If you’re interested in these ideas, I highly recommend this lecture by the curator and writer Legacy Russell (Glitch Feminism), which shifted my thinking on footnotes as spaces of possibility (and spaces of decolonial practice!).

When it came time to actually print and bind the book report, I tried a few other things. For example, printing out references on different colored paper or different sized paper to distinguish them from the “main” book. Most of what I tried ended up being too expensive to print at scale. In the end, I settled on noting the references by keeping in the blue underlined hyperlinks even though they’re not actually clickable; they’re like little blue ghosts throughout the text. Then at the end of the book, I included QR codes and full URLs of the links as a kind of bibliography of the book report. By the time I got to this stage in the process, I was so over it that they’re not even numbered. Good luck!

Better Living with AI?

Back to Johannes and Igor. I’m also really interested in the toolset they use. Johannes and Igor have a fluency with AI tools that made the production experience feel seamless (for me) and the turnaround quick (for them). They used Riverside for the recording, which makes the final output seem more dynamic than just a straight video chat (which it was). The episode is an hour long, but the summary and chapter marks make it easy to check out the sections that you might be interested in and skip ahead.

If You’re Interested in Someone, Just Email Them

I connected with Johannes and Igor by just writing to them. In a future post, I’ll write a little more about fan letters as part of my practice. That email led to another email which led to a conversation which led to us trading notes on some side projects which led to this podcast episode. So I guess this post ends where most of these posts end, which is some version of “just try it” on whatever it is you are considering. You never know what might happen.

Listen to Follow the Rabbit

[Note: Usually, when someone says something like this to me, I'm kind of rolling my eyes on the inside. Ooooooo, your work is sooooooo complicated that it defies explanation. So, for the record, it’s not that my project is so complicated; it’s just that I’m still working it out.]

My project is a book. About another book. It's also an exhibition. And an event series. Colin helped me make this website to tell the story of what it is. Ta da!

This site started as just a Google Doc with pictures from my phone. In general, I’m very into formats that combine image and text (The New York Times does this kind of thing very well), and I’m always looking for ways to execute simply.1 I found this template that already existed (thanks Quinnton Harris!) that I could just dump the text and images into. I feel pretty pleased with this thing, both because it came out pretty much the way I wanted it to and gave me and Colin and opportunity to collaborate on something more formally and gives a pretty good sense of the vibes of the project and is not just a website trying to sell you my book.

Making this was also a way of practicing (“Do nothing, in real life, with other people.”). The other people being Colin. But the other people also being various people who I asked for feedback. Asking people for feedback on a thing and offering feedback on their things is an excellent way to cultivate attention and to find potential collaborators.

For a long time, before I decided to actually print my book, I considered distributing it one on one in perpetuity, in essence asking for feedback forever. I have found that people pay a different kind of attention to a thing when they have agreed to offer feedback on it. It’s very different from someone saying, “I liked your book” or not saying anything at all. Given how limited the audience for this project is in the first place, the whole feedback forever thing seemed like it could be a reasonable distribution strategy.

This site is solving a kind of practical problem for me and was fun to make, which feels like a bonus. Now instead of trying to explain the project and feeling badly for my inability to explain it "correctly", I can just send someone this link and hope for the best. I hope you like it.

My book report was and is, shall we say, a little much: 200+ handmade pages that I worked on off and on for four years. No one asked for it. There was no deadline. So I just kept going. And going. And going.

By continuing to futz with it - to practice - it somehow just happened, but I have also come to believe that book reports are a really promising form. I’m never going to read all the books I want to read. The TBR (To Be Read) pile on my nightstand will probably topple over and wound me in my sleep.

There are also lots of books I want to have read while simultaneously knowing that I will never read them. These books are usually too long or too academic or too pretentious (or all three!) for me to read, but it’s not that I’m not interested in them at all. Cue…the book report. Ideally, it is written by someone I know and respect who might explain the book to me and why they care about it (and, therefore, why I might care). For the book report writer, it’s a way of processing a book’s ideas and sharing them with someone else.

A book report is different from a book review though they are, of course, related. For a review, I can read The New York Times Book Review or go to Goodreads. If I just want a summary, I guess I could ask Claude. I’m often looking for something slightly different. A way of understanding the book, but also a way of understanding the person making the book report, too.

I think the structure of a book report needs to be simple, or else no one will do it. One of the reasons I think some people don’t write reviews is the pressure to write something witty or funny or deep. Who has time for all that? I like zine book reports because they don’t take too much work. Copy a couple of quotes, include an anecdote that a passage reminded you of, maybe a weird sketch of the author. Boom! Book report. Maybe that book report will spur someone else to read the actual book, as in the case of this book report that Courtney wrote about Naomi Klein’s book Doppelganger.

Doppelganger came out in 2023, and while I had read about it, I didn’t think I needed to actually read it because I figured I had the gist - Naomi Klein is often mistaken for Naomi Wolf. Weirdness ensues. But after reading Courtney’s book report about the ways that Klein’s book made Courtney feel “more grounded and clear-sighted in a world that has become so mystifying and fear-inducing”, I decided to read it, and I think Doppelganger is the best book about attention that I’ve read since How to Do Nothing.

Book reports are a way of understanding a book but they’re also a way of understanding the people writing them. That’s certainly true for my project which is about Jenny’s book, but which is mostly about me - what I think about Jenny’s book, what I think about all sorts of things.

I’ll be writing a lot more about book reports and more collective forms of reading and writing. And in the meantime, if you want to give it a shot, here are some instructions for making your own book report in the form of a one-page zine. If you make one, let me know; I’d love to read it.

I went to New York a couple of weeks ago to share the book report with friends, family and strangers. My sister came. So did my sister-in-law’s sisters. How nice is that? I highly recommend making a project that will cost you some money but will compel people to come see you and celebrate with you even when they have other things to do. It’s incredibly moving and motivating. It makes me want to make other things, so I can do this all over again.

A project like this is also a group effort. As you know, there’s no publicist or publisher. Distribution happens via the (mycelial?) network. Here’s my cousin’s husband Shawn who delivered me (and my books) to Brooklyn on his day off from work. I stayed with my college roommate all week; she had my favorite cookies waiting for me and threw me a book party…on her own birthday! A former board member hosted a lunch for me at her office. This whole thing is collective.

I did four events in New York, which might have been three events too many in terms of logistics. There were so many details to figure out in advance:

• How many boxes of books should I mail to each of the events?

• What do I do with the extras if I don’t sell them all?

• How do I get from one place to another with all those books?

• Do I really have to pay to make an invite on Paperless Post?

The events each had a different vibe and allowed me to explore a different aspect of the project — sometimes by design, sometimes by accident. Most interestingly, I got to hear from you about what you’re interested in, about the projects you have in the back of your minds.

Re-Membering

One reaction that people sometimes have to the project is a kind of regret over not having memorialized their own pandemic experiences “better”. This is obviously not my intention with the project, but this reaction is common enough that I understand it as an effect of my sharing.

So I've been trying to help people make their own archives of pandemic attention in the form of zines, and I hosted a workshop with the School of Radical Attention. It works best with a small group. Throw on some music, have some snacks and let people unleash their inner kindergartener. I’ve done this workshop several times now, and it is ALWAYS so moving to be with people in their own process of “re-membering” (re-membering as in the opposite of dismembering, an idea I first heard about in How to Do Nothing).

What we talk about when we talk about attention

The week of events was sort of like being in an episode of This is Your Life (which I’ve never seen, but I get the idea). What felt like my entire freshman year dorm showed up. So did my first landlords in New York (from 1999!). And someone I know only from the internet. At least one reason to do a project is to see people and talk about stuff with them and to be in solidarity with them.

The week of events was also a good opportunity to exercise the muscle of asking for help. Help driving me and my books around. Help to pay for the snacks. Help to get to the airport. Some of my best conversations happened in the car with one person while they drove me to the airport. Try skipping the Lyft on your next airport run and ask someone to take you. I know it can feel awkward to ask, but I highly recommend it.

In New York, people were often taking the train home from these events. That’s a very different experience from driving home after a book event and then never getting around to reading the book you just bought in spite of best intentions. I have to drive everywhere these days, so I had forgotten about the glorious solitary/communal liminal experience of reading on the subway. I now have a little folder of emails that start, “I started reading your book on the train on the way home….”

Before this trip happened, I had resolved to try to move on to less high-maintenance, more scalable (?) strategies for sharing this project with the world (uh, if anyone knows what those are, lemme know). Then I got to see all of you. And I remembered this post I had read years ago by the writer and artist Éireann Lorsung who wrote about her own book tour, “the way I want to get my work out there is to sit in small rooms with a small number of people and read to them while looking them in the eyes.” I had forgotten for a minute. That’s the point. Thanks, New York. See you next time.

So meet Katie Donnelly, through some excerpts (shared with her permission) from her response1 to The Emergency Was Curiosity.

Christie,

Hi. Hello. I’m so glad we met (or re-met?) and uncovered our parallel lives and are finding new ways of joyful collaboration and connection in a sometimes very terrifying world. When I started writing this, I had no idea what I would write or how open I would be or what form it would take. It’s been an interesting journey, to see all the things I had to say but didn’t have a place to say them until now. So thank you for that.

The number one thing that stuck out to me most from the book report was the question, “What would you make if you weren’t trying to be understood by anyone else?”

This is one of the fundamental questions of the time we live in. At least for me it is. As you know, I have trouble writing anything at all now because I don’t trust the platforms and I don’t know who the audience is and I don’t want to twist myself into something that makes sense for them and then figure it all out again once we’ve all moved to a new system.

I don’t even journal, because when I do I imagine my daughter reading what I wrote when I’m dead and then I find myself writing through her (imagined, older) eyes and then I subtly contort myself into the role of Wise Dead Mom. But it feels pointless to write for nothing and no one but myself. Why would I do that, when I could be talking to a dear friend or doing the endless maintenance work of cleaning or earning money to support my family or eating a delicious sandwich in the sunshine? So I am writing this response to you, directly. I think the voice that is coming through is my actual voice. I hope so, anyway. I hope you like it.

***

How to Do Nothing

I first read How to Do Nothing in the summer of 2020, while sheltering in place at my parents’ house in the woods of eastern Connecticut, after spending several fraught, dystopian months in an 800some-square-foot Philadelphia row home with only a concrete patio for outdoor space and a very spirited three-year-old who couldn’t understand why she was suddenly not allowed to see anyone or touch anything. The book was getting quite a bit of buzz at the time, especially among thoughtful, type-A professionals who were confronted with slowing down for the first time ever.

I can see why it resonated with so many people, but it didn’t really resonate with me, personally. The thing is, I am already EXCELLENT at doing nothing. I have never fit in with the rhythms of work or capitalism. I don’t care about productivity, AT ALL. I always try to fill my days with meaningful, human connection. I have never prioritized work over relationships. I try to shrink work into the smallest corners of my days unless it’s something or with someone I am especially passionate about, in which case I let it expand as big as it needs to be. Not to brag but I am probably better at doing nothing than Jenny Odell, even, because I would never do anything as ambitious as write an entire book!

The weird thing is, though, I probably am one of the most productive people I know. I can crank out a week’s worth of work in a few hours, if I have the freedom to pace things out the way I work best. I need to spend the majority of my time taking long walks and long showers and going to movies in the middle of the day and letting all the thoughts marinate in my head until I hit the moment where it all comes together and then I am extremely prolific in a fairly effortless way. But, like everyone else, I work in a structure that doesn’t allow for me to work that way. I spend much more time and energy pretending that I can work like a regular person than I do actually working. I wonder what it would look like if everyone could work according to their own natural rhythms?

It’s not just how I work, or don’t work. I can’t even take regular-person vacations. I need like three weeks to sink into a place and figure out where my grocery store and coffee shop are, and just kind of absorb the local culture through osmosis. I don’t mean this to brag about how great I am at being under scheduled and not caring about the capitalist machine. I WISH I was more structured and ambitious! I imagine most of the people I ever worked with wished I was as well! Sometimes I can feel (or imagine, more likely) their disappointment and the disappointment of every teacher I ever had who thought I was really going places.

And even though I try to live by my own values and my own work style, it’s not like I know how to relax or anything. I am generally wracked with anxiety and frustration. I feel like I am failing my daughter, and setting her up to fail, by not being driven more by money, which would give her more resources and opportunities. One of the main internal struggles of my life is how little I care about conventional systems and structures and refuse to play by their hoop-jumping rules, and how frustrated I am that the conventional rewards of participating in those systems haven’t just fallen in my lap anyway.

***

Katie’s response: Even though sometimes I can be harsh and bitter and jealous, when I read about all of the classes you took during the pandemic I didn’t feel jealous, not a single bit. I felt so happy for you that you got to explore all that. I felt admiration for you and for your spirit of being completely willing to place yourself in the position of learner rather than expert. That is so exceedingly rare, you know? It’s vulnerable. Most people will do anything to avoid doing that. I think it’s amazing that you did all that. I feel tender towards you, too. I feel tender towards you and myself and all of us who are trying.

(This is Christie again). My whole project started because I wanted to talk about Jenny's book with people, but I couldn't really figure out how to casually drop into conversation, "How are you wrestling with the attention economy?" I want to be in conversation with people who are wondering about the same things, and asking questions of their own. Which in turn helps me to figure out answers to my own questions, gives me new questions to think about. It’s all so different from whatever I am fed by the algorithms that are allegedly “for me”, than the “big ideas” that are forced on me by people who look, act, think nothing like me, or maybe more accurately, who seem a little like me but then turn out not to be. Katie’s response has been a gift, and it’s why I keep going with this thing.

Katie and I just spent the last week in the Azores, at what might be called a work retreat but resembled no work retreat I’ve ever been on. During a Show & Tell session in the schedule, she read her words out loud in a small room of people. It’s so hard to convey what Katie’s words (inspired by my words which were inspired by Jenny’s words) did to that room. As I’ve been working to schedule and produce and execute events for the little book tour I’m going on, I realized this is all I ever want to be doing—to be in conversation and community with small groups of people, present to our collective trying.

Check Out The Emergency Was Curiosity

1. Packing books was not as annoying as I thought it would be. In fact, packing the books was the easiest part. My operations manager (aka my mother-in-law) did most of the work.

2. I need new envelopes. I packed the books in a combination of old envelopes (because recycling) and these tiger-print mailers that I bought because they looked cute. But reusing envelopes requires more work and also wastes so much new tape that I’m pretty sure the recycling benefits are canceled out. They do make me smile though, like little defective Mondrians. This is related to the general operating principles of the project - what sounds fun? what looks cute?

   

3. It takes a village. My neighbor has been saving all her old packaging for me and periodically leaves it on my doorstep. As it turns out, so have her parents. I’m not even sure they know what it is I’m shipping out. Another neighbor gave me a label machine. My content manager (aka my 9-year-old) made this stop-motion reel of us packing the books.

If you’ve been reading these posts, you’ll know that when faced with a choice about how to do things - easier but impersonal, difficult but intimate - I usually choose the latter, and that has served me well with this project.

For example, I made this little (entirely unnecessary) spreadsheet counter for myself. I type the name of the person who bought the book after I ship it out. I could just export a list of orders, but something happens when I type each of your names - I think about you, I remember the last time I saw you, I wonder how you’re doing. Plus, as a bonus, after I type in your name, the counter goes down by 1 in the most satisfying way.

And that whole 500 thing. It’s not really about the number. I’m pretty sure I’ll sell all the books eventually. Or I won’t. And that would be fine. But this list of names - it’s the list of my life: someone I went on a date with, a woman I was in a mother’s group with after my first child was born, a former board member. Making this project - and more recently - starting to promote (ugh! yay?) this project - has put me in touch and back in touch with people in the most unusual and beautiful ways. One friend who I haven’t seen in 10 years wrote, “I don’t like to read if given a choice, but I’m making an exception.” Could any review ever be more flattering?

I wouldn’t get to experience any of this if I were just getting a quarterly sales report from Amazon or from a publisher. I would have no idea who was buying the book. I told a friend of mine I was shipping the books out myself, and the look on her face was pure aghast - a combination of horror and pity. But while my way - packing books with my mother-in-law, taking goofy videos with my kid - is definitely more onerous, what else is there?

This project is often about the tension between the more efficient thing and the more personal thing. You may have noticed that efficiency has been in the news lately, but I have come to be suspicious of the idea. I’m also increasingly interested in friction. Friction makes you slow down; forces you to pay attention.

And this whole friction thing doesn’t have to be complicated, or heavy, or arty either - cook instead of takeout, go to the library instead of ordering online. I liked this way of thinking about friction from the psychologist Tracy Dennis-Tiwary:

“By friction I mean things that require us to slow down and put in effort, or that aren’t particularly smooth or efficient, but reflect our values…These things have friction - they slow us down, offer up resistance, and require effort and energy. But they also bring joy and make us feel alive….the avalanche of ways we can reduce effort has tricked us into believing that life hacking IS THE goal. Frictionless efficiency has become our ends, not the means to a better life.

I’ve been reconsidering friction as a value and have become more curious about projects that are doing the same - like this non-artificial-intelligence-generative art model (basically a guy painting sketches by hand based on prompts from the public).

Are you doing anything to bring friction back into your life? Chime in in the comments or, better yet, just call me. 1

Order the Book Report

I had originally sent a version of this post to a small subset of friends and colleagues, some of whom had mentioned to me in passing over the years that they wanted a copy of the book report when it was available. That note was so “successful” - with such lovely messages in return, a bunch of incoming book orders - that I thought I should maybe share it more broadly.

It’s my birthday this week! And I finally have books!

For so long, if someone wanted a copy of the book report, I had to say some version of “Sorry. I don’t have any. But check back in with me…uh, some other time.” The book reports are expensive to print. They’re oversized, hardcover, full color. I’ve had more than a few friends who know more about these things than I do scold me for making things hard on myself. They tell me I should make the book a more normal size, with a soft cover, in black and white. That would make it much easier and cheaper to print and ship. What can I say? The heart wants what the heart wants.

But, now, just in time for my birthday, I have the books! And while I get ready to do a formal release of the project this spring - starting with the launch event in New York in April at the School of Radical Attention, I thought I should do a little trial run of shipping the books out.

Until this moment, my process has been, let’s call it, casual. Because I’ve only ever had a few books on hand at any one time, I can get away with using scrap paper for the labels, hand writing addresses, reusing those Amazon mailers that I’m supposed to be recycling somewhere. A little unprofessional, but also…scrappy (!) charming (!), environmental (?).

I don’t think my current methods are going to cut it when I have to ship out 50 books at once, so I thought I would do a little trial run.

This week through Sunday, March 2, if you want a physical copy of the book report, you can buy one here. If you order your book this week, we'll pack them up and get them in the mail next week.

Buy the Book Report

There will be lots of other opportunities to buy the book in a couple of months - in a special edition through Metalabel (maybe bundled with some cute postcards and other things), at a few local bookstores (there's 5 copies at Russian River Books & Letters right now). So this isn't at all your only opportunity, just one with a (slightly) more reliable shipping plan.

As always, thanks for following along.