Creative Recommendations from April

What I'm reading, learning, watching, and making art with!

Hi friends,

It’s time for my Creative Recommendations from April! These are just for my lovely ~patrons~ aka my paying subscribers. 

Each month, I curate my favorite things I’ve been reading, learning, watching, and making art with. If you want to upgrade to receive these once a month, you’d make my day 🥰

Before we dive in, I have a few special announcements:

• For my New York friends, I’m hosting another Quiet Car event on June 27th. It was such a hit last time, we’re doing it again! We’re taking over the 96th St Q train and turning it into an Amtrak quiet car-like experience. RSVP here!

• My next cohort of Climate Art 101 starts on June 22nd. If you want to tap into your creativity and learn how to use art as a tool for climate communications, you can learn more here.

Reading

If you’ve been reading this for a while, you know how much I love Becky Chambers. I have been saving her last series called Monk and Robot because I don’t want it to end.

I listened to the audiobooks of Psalm for the Wild-Built and A Prayer for the Crown-Shy and loved them. They are meditative, hopeful, and wonderfully narrated.

It is set on a moon where robots reach consciousness and then decide to leave the built world and live in the wild. Humans spend time rebuilding their society to heal and create a holistic regenerative future.

Then, one robot is sent from the wild to report back to see how humans are doing. It encounters a monk, and they go on a tour of the planet together. In a time when AI is changing everything so quickly, I found this quite comforting and beautiful.

I am also reading more graphic novels and enjoyed the Cartoon Introduction to Philosophy. It uses illustrations to break down the complexities in classic philosophy into playful visuals.

Like the Gemini that I am, I usually have a reading rotation going. Here are some others I’ve been circling between.

• Blue Mind by Wallace Nichols. It’s about the benefits of being around water on our creativity and physical and mental health.

• Good Omens by Neil Gaimen and Terry Pratchett. I’m listening to the full cast audiobook of this and the narration is fantastic. It’s apparently a fantasy comedy, a genre I didn’t know existed and am quickly loving. There is so much world-building it’s hard to keep up, but it’s about an angel and a demon teaming up to stop the apocalypse.

• How to Be Okay When Nothing is Okay by Jenny Lawson. I love Jenny Lawson. She is able to write about mental health in the most hilarious way possible. This book is filled with practical tips for taking care of yourself in stressful times.

Making Art With

I’ve been knitting at night (which sounds like a crafty version of Nick at Nite- my millennial friends know). I’m using screens less before bed and find that listening to an audiobook while I doodle, knit, or do a puzzle has been a great way to wind down.

All the books I mentioned above are audiobooks. I’m very picky about finding good narrators when I read fiction (and I always choose to listen to audiobooks when they are memoirs).

My trick has been to knit the skinniest scarf ever (it’s like 30 stitches wide) so that it’s easy to go through many rows and feels like I’m making progress each time I knit, even if it’s for a short period of time.

I’ve also been making some watercolor doodles in a new lettering style. I’ve turned this one into my phone background, and it’s been an excellent reminder to be gentle with myself.

Inspired by

I went home last month and saw the Eric Carle exhibit at the Michener Museum, a local museum by my parents. It had original art from his books, including the cover from The Very Hungry Caterpillar.

I loved seeing his use of mixed media. I was surprised by the scale of some of his art, it was much larger than I expected. He painted acrylic paint on tissue paper and collaged it. It’s inspiring me to try mixed media, something I keep saying I’ll do but haven’t actually gotten around to.

Learning

Last week, I started an Artist’s Way group with some friends and am committed to actually finishing it for the first time ever. I’ve started it and not completed it 3 times. The furthest I’ve got was to chapter 3 or 4.

I’m looking forward to having some accountability to get through it and explore nontraditional art-making for myself. I’ve been mainly focused on watercolors for a while now and want to see what it’s like if I broaden my definition of art.

I’m in a bit of a transition period where I’m zooming out and thinking about how I want to spend my time and reclaim my art practice for myself, not just for work. I think doing the Artist’s Way will be the perfect exercise to discover that.

Dreaming about

Being off social media. I’ve spent the past few weeks not posting on social media and lovinnng it. I’m trying to think of ways that I can be less on social media and that requires shifting my work to make that possible.

I love Substack and will continue writing here because that feels like my happy place on the internet. But I’m hoping to find new ways to decentralize my need to post on Instagram.
It takes a lot of energy to be externally facing most of the time, and I’ve been feeling called to go more inward these days. Writing here in long-form pieces is something I’m looking forward to. I’d like to take my time, edit pieces, and share more vulnerably. That might be a new chapter to come. We shall see!

Watching

Jury Duty presents: Company Retreat. Oh my god, this show is funny. It’s like the Truman Show meets The Office meets Punk’d.

The premise is that there is a fake hot sauce company called Rockin’ Grandma’s, where the entire company is made up of actors except for 1 real person who has no idea that the rest of the company is fake.

The whole show is scripted and the cast does the most absurd things during a week-long company retreat. At the end, they reveal to the main character that it’s all been fake.

It ends up being incredibly wholesome and heartwarming. It made me laugh out loud so many times and cry at the end, the perfect combo for good television in my book.

Listening to

To be totally honest, I’m feeling quite burned out these days. I’ve been sprinting the past year with work projects and feel like I'm finally slowing down to catch my breath.

In the past 1.5 years, I wrote and illustrated Quietest Places in New York City, illustrated a children’s book for the Building Decarbonization Coalition called the Clean, Green Neighborhood, and built and launched an app called Free Time. Plus I was doing client commissions on top of that.

It has been a lot of energy and I am so proud of everything I’ve created, but whoof I am tired!

So I’ve been listening to some podcasts on burnout and this one from the Liz Moody podcast I found particularly helpful. It’s called