Journal On!

Last year, I designed a logo for a program I love: Journal On!, a collaborative project between the Portland Art Museum, Portland Public Schools, and OK You to assemble "one enduring art journal, made up of many, to capture our shared story of this unique moment in history." They offer up a new prompt every week all summer long for kids and adults to use to create their own entries in this living journal. In fact, I took one of last year's prompts (How Would You Capture this Moment in Color and Form?) and made an entry of my own using paper, pens, and paint. I made it during a particularly bad period in my last summer and something about putting my feelings down in art, in a way that didn't call things by name but spoke to my mindset, was a helpful exercise for me.

This year I was invited back to Journal On!, this time to create their web and social media graphics. At first, I was just thinking of the job as an opportunity to work for an organization I love, but it soon became a really fun project. One thing I love doing in design is taking a known quantity and making it different. With these Journal On! graphics, I got to take their existing style in shape and font and color palette and expand on it. 

Whereas last year their prompts contained video blocks at the right side...

...this year there would be simple illustrations instead. I wanted something that would help explain but not overpower the text, something super kid-friendly but also adult-friendly too. I started working with lines. Simple illustrations created out of linework, as well as letting my lines run all over the prompts, maybe circling or underlining important words, adding little touches of illustration here and there.

One element I liked from last year's design was the hatched lines in the background circles for the prompt numbers on the left side. This became a central element in my design and it was fun to see the different ways I could use it.

Journal On!'s first prompt goes up today. I highly recommend following along and even joining in with some art of your own. You can see all the prompts on their website here, or follow on Instagram @journal_on_everyone.

Or, here: I happen to have the very first prompt for you. From the website, and from Instagram. I hope you'll join in.

a moment in the day: jazz

It's night on the third of July and Nicholas and I are camped out in the upstairs bathroom with the door closed and the overhead fan on: his safe place in fireworks weather.

As the fan and closed door aren't quite enough to keep the sound completely out, I'm singing to him. It's our fireworks ritual going back I-don't-know-how-many years. Well, probably as long as we've owned this house.

I generally sing him old jazz standards. Mean to Me. Lush Life. Don't Smoke in Bed. When the firecracker sounds kicked up into high gear a while ago, he got agitated. Started panting, looking distressed, so I grabbed my phone and dialed up YouTube to add backup to my singing.

Now, we've sung our way through the entirety of Peggy Lee's Blues Cross Country, Nicholas curled on his pillow, me on the floor next to him, my hand going down his back. I'm getting tired of jazz. I poke some letters into YouTube's search bar and bring up some Beatles tunes. Start one playing.

It won't be long, yeah

(yeah)

Yeah

(yeah)

Yeah

(yeah)

Nicholas's head comes up. He starts panting again. 

I don't think he likes rock 'n roll.

a moment in the day: enough

Birthdays in the social media era. Stephen is downstairs whipping cream (I can hear that scraping buzz of beaters against bowl) and I'm sitting at the computer going through my newsfeed, thanking people for their sweet greetings. 

There's a lot you can say about the negatives of social media, but on your birthday, it's a lovely parade of people. You scroll and like, scroll and comment, and it's a little like getting birthday cards but moremoremore, and all I can think is, look at all of these people I've been privileged to know. It's kind of like when they say your life flashes in front of your eyes, but it's all your people flashing in front of your eyes. And you don't have to die. 

When I was a kid, when I was a young adult, all I felt like was a loser. I wonder how I would have felt about myself had I had the chance to sit and watch this parade of people each stop by to say hello.

Hello.

I keep thinking about that thing President Biden said in his inauguration speech. It's funny. The pomp and excitement of that day is a blur now, but I always remember three words he said. Enough of us. 

I can't even remember exactly what he was talking about, now, but I remember how that phrase made me stop. And think. And write it down.

Alright, I'm looking it up now. He said, "In each of these moments, enough of us came together to carry all of us forward."

He was talking about the Civil War, the Great Depression, World Wars, 9/11. He was talking about racism and nationalism and maybe the pandemic too. With all the negativity in the country, with all the negativity in all the people in the country, there's always been enough of us who strive to do the right thing. Just those three words made me feel better about the country I was living in. And now, sitting here scrolling through, watching this parade of lovely people, I think, yeah, you all are the enough of us.

a moment in the day: group

Steve and I walk down the hall to Liz' loft just like old times, just like before the pandemic, heading to writing group together. 

Everything in this corridor looks crisp and new. The bright raspberry-painted wall at the end by her door: is that the same color as it used to be? Every step of this familiar walk, that Steve and I have taken once a month for years, seems both beautifully old-hat and utterly new somehow.

I push open Liz' door and we walk through. Voices inside. My breath swells against my ribcage. This is our first non-Zoom meeting and my first unmasked, undistanced gathering since the before times. I hurry my step down the short front hall and then here we are—Steve, Liz, Kathleen, me—all fully-vaxxed, all crowded together at the edge of the kitchen doing something we haven't done in so long. Hugging. 

Liz' black curls tickle my face. Kathleen holds too tight and too long and too wonderful. I don't want to let go. 

When I do, she tells us she and her son hugged so hard once that it started to cut off the circulation in her neck and, still mid-clasp, she told him, "I think I'm going to pass out." And did.

Stories bounce back and forth between us as we move into the living room where Robert is waiting remotely on Zoom from his home out of town. "Robert!" I say. His face so small on the little laptop screen.

I drop my bags and take the plastic container of appetizers back across the room for warming in the kitchen nook where Liz and Kathleen have returned, chatting as they try to work the top off a bottle of pink wine. I come around behind them at the counter. Their backs to me. 

"No, we used to do it all the time when I was a kid," Liz is saying. "For fun. Like all the time."

"And there's that thing," Kathleen says, "where people do it for a sexual high."

I pull the top off my tupperware container just enjoying listening to snippets of their conversation. I realize they're still on the ways in which cutting off the circulation can make someone pass out.

"There's a name for that."

"Autoerotic... asphyxiation."

I dip my head in between them. "So, here I am, my very first unmasked, undistanced get-together, and what are we talking about? Autoerotic asphyxiation."

And this might be—not sure but might be—even better than the hugs. Laughing together in person again.

a moment in the day: crown

Stephen and I are just back from getting our second covid shots. We have a few moments before I need to be off upstairs to get on Zoom for my writing group. He's going to head out into the studio to get to work, but I make him wait and I run from the room, coming back with two Christmas crackers, one gold foil paper, one silver. I hand them both out to him and he laughs. I tell him to take his pick.

It will be two weeks before we're fully vaccinated, but I feel like we should celebrate, just a little. With as precious as these shots are, with as difficult as it has been for many to get appointments—and more so in other places in the world—I've tried to think of the vaccination wait as one, long, rolling Christmas or Hanukkah or whatever big holiday people would wait for, all year, when they were kids. Something to try to anticipate with excitement rather than impatience. I used to think about erecting a tree in the house with lights and putting names underneath it, a new name each time someone I loved got vaccinated.

But who puts up a Christmas tree in the spring? So these will have to do.

We each take the ends of our Christmas crackers in our hands. These ones are the kind that don't make a pop sound when you open them, but still, Nicholas runs from the room. We count one, two, three. Yank our crackers open. The loot falls on the floor. The paper crown, the slip of paper with a joke on it, and for each of us, a little prize like from a Crackerjack box. Wait. Is that why they call them Crackerjacks?

My prize is a weird, little keychain with a bottle opener shaped like a dead fish.

We put the paper crowns on our heads. Shiny gold foil. We ask each other Christmas jokes. 

What do you call Santa Claus when he goes down the chimney and the fire is lit?

Krisp Kringle.

"That's kind of violent," I say when Stephen reads me the answer.

When I turn to go off to writing group, my paper crown falls off my head and floats to the floor. I pick it up. Put it back on. Head upstairs.

a moment in the day: ready

I head to our front door, to go out into the world, to pick up something for work. Stephen follows to say goodbye.

"Got what you need?" he asks.

These weird days, when we go out so seldom. When every simple excursion feels like an event. Something you've got to plan for, dress up for, think about. It's been so long since going out into the world was a regular thing. 

I pat my pocket to make it jingle.

"Got my keys."

Raise the crumpled bit of cloth in my hand.

"Got my mask."

Look down. 

Look at my sock feet.

"Don't got my shoes."

Book Cover: Quint

Recently, I finished the book cover design for a novel called Quint. It's based on the lives of the Dionne Quintuplets and is written by an author named Dionne, a fact that somehow I didn't even notice when I was first talking to 7.13 Books editor Hasanthika Sirisena about the project. 

I knew of the Dionne quintuplets from features I used to see of them very early in their lives when I was paging through newspaper clippings and microfilm, doing research for an abandoned book project years ago.

Dionne Irving's novel takes the lives of its quints, the Phalene Quintuplets, from their birth through... well, let me let Hasie's words, from an early email detailing the project, explain it:

Told from a variety of narrative perspectives, the novel, set starting in the 1940s details the quintuplets’ birth, their removal from their parents’ home and their rise to fame, which coincides with the construction of Quintland, a “theme park” where thousands of paying visitors observe the girls as they go about their daily routines—playing, bathing, eating, sleeping—performing their lives more than living them.

The idea of a theme park dedicated to you, celebrating you, imprisoning you was so powerful that I knew it had to be part of the imagery for the cover. 

As for visual style, Hasie and Dionne were interested in the cleanness of silhouettes and cut-out art, like that of artist Kara Walker.

You can check out more about Kara Walker here.

I loved her art and the idea of cut-out silhouettes and started gathering fodder for my own silhouette vignette representing the book and its stars. The five sisters would be front and center, of course, surrounded by the trappings (pun intended) of their amusement park. I pictured the fancy entranceway to the park with maybe the book's title emblazoned across the big welcome sign. One of those ornate, old signs like this one I found:

Without the severed-head-wielding cyclops, of course.

And below the entryway sign and surrounding the quints would be the ghoulish, delighted faces of the public. Oversized, carnivallike. Claustrophobic.

In looking online for examples for my Quintland entrance, I stumbled upon photos of the actual Quintland where the Dionne Quintuplets lived and performed their lives before the public.

Oh my god, it was a real place! 

I'd had no idea. I thought the amusement park was the author's own invention. I gathered some of the pictures and put them into a file folder, mostly to just have them, because wow. I named the file folder oh my god, it was a real place.

My first version of the cover had the girls represented as older. In talking back and forth with Hasie, I'd asked what age would be good and she suggested pre-teen. I found photos of a girl of that age in various different positions to use as I drew my silhouettes out in illustrator.

When I sent off the early samples and Hasie sent them on to Dionne for her look, Dionne preferred younger sisters. I went back and found a girl of five to use as my model. And I added in the big hair bows the Dionne sisters used to wear all the time—sort of a signature look in their younger years. 

Hasie, Dionne and I talked a lot about color, about placement of the giant faces of the public (how close in or far away from the girls to put them), and Dionne asked for a more straight-up font for her name. They liked the light behind the girls and I added a hint of light behind the sign/title as well to bring it out. And we finally had a cover we liked.

Quint will be out on August third. More info on this book and others in the 7.13 lineup can be found here. Here's an excerpt from the opening of the book.

Mother

When she started bleeding, she thought for certain she’d lost the child. The blood was bright red, the kind the midwife had warned her about. The kind that meant surely this child, like the others before it, had died inside her. Again, her body had failed her, had shown her that she wasn’t really a woman. In a month or so, he would climb on top of her and do it again. And she would get pregnant again. And they would do this bebe/non bebe ritual again. At least that’s how it’d been before. She looked to the picture of the Virgin on the wall and was reminded of how Notre Dame had failed her time and time again.

So, she was surprised an hour later when after she had hoisted her mass into the kitchen for water, she felt that flutter. The hint of an elbow or knee, she couldn’t be sure, pressing against her from the inside. That thing that told her that this was life. She looked again to the picture of the Virgin Mary hanging over the bed. She could see her from the sink, like the virgin was calling to her, like she was beckoning her and she floated, wet hands, back onto the bed where she spent most of her days.

The next thing she remembered he was shaking her, and, when she opened her eyes and saw him, her husband, standing there, it was like she had been waiting for him all her life. Or at least waiting for someone like him.

“Are you alright?” he kept saying and then finally, “Answer me!”

“Yes,” she said. “Of course, of course.”

But she couldn’t get up, couldn’t sit up in the bed. She remembered the blood and her hand flew between her legs. She drew that hand up to her face to inspect it for any hint of red, but there was none.

“What is it?” he asked. The hard edge in his voice gone. He sat at the end of the bed smoking a cigarette and watching her.

“There was blood today. Earlier. But I think I felt the baby move after that.”

He stared at her with large, unblinking eyes and she couldn’t tell what he was thinking, or what he understood.

“This happens with the cows too.” He dropped a bit of ash on the floor, and she tried to imagine when and how she would be able to clean it up. “Sometimes they bleed a little at first, a little blood, but then later on, a perfectly healthy calf.”

There were only two rooms in the little house, and it felt like his? cigarette smoke filled them both. She wanted badly to open a window, to breathe in clean, crisp January air that cut right through her lungs in a way that both stung and felt delicious.

He got up finally and went into the front room, lighting a second cigarette on the stove, a wedding present ordered from Sears & Roebuck. It was the newest thing in the house and took cords after cord of wood to heat. And while the house was wired for electricity, money came too infrequently to keep it on regularly.