February Bottleship

Hello, friends!

The most important update I have for you this month is that the daphne bushes in our neighborhood have finally started to bloom, which means the air is beginning to smell like spring. It feels like a miracle every single year.

We're moving into the season where I get to go out into the world and meet a load of readers, which is always an exciting time. Here are the places you can find me over the next month:

I've got an exhibit of original art up at the Hillsboro Brockwood Library for the entire month of February! Stop in on the second floor to see pieces from Cartozia Tales, Baggywrinkles, 100 Demon Dialogues, and more.
Next weekend, February 10th and 11th, I'll be at I Like Comic Con in Vancouver, Washington—my first show of the year.
On February 15th you can find me in the Portland Ballroom at the Oregon Convention Center for part of the Ocean Sciences Meeting. OSM is a HUGE conference for marine scientists, and Thursday at 6pm they're having a free screening of two documentaries, plus an exhibit of the work I did while at sea aboard R/V Falkor last year. Come get a free copy of the finished comic and talk shop about the wonders of the ocean!

January was surprisingly fruitful, and there's a lot of stuff to share. Here's a list of things that I've worked on, read, and generally thrilled to over the past month:

I was really happy to share To Be Strong, a short autobio comic I drew on a whim last week about power, self-love, and growing into the people we want to be.
I appeared on not one, but TWO great podcasts in January: ComicLab and The Unmistakable Creative. Tune in for discussions about childhood, vulnerability, keeping secrets, financial transparency, and more. (I also wrote a little bit about appearing on The Unmistakable Creative and feeling weeeeeeird, if you want some background.)
"Essentially, the best work that I do is when I say something I really believe to people that I care about." Frank Chimero has an uncanny knack for articulating things I've been thinking with perfect clarity whenever I encounter his writing. I love his goal of creating situations "that allow us to have more in common," and, in doing so, "to somehow harness the auspicious wonder that I think lies at the heart of making".
Last year I quietly threw my hat in the ring along with 13,000 applicants for a coveted Writer-at-Large position for the New York Times. While I didn't land the gig in the end, I'm very proud to say that I was a finalist, and appeared very briefly in this video compilation of entries from a selection of their favorite candidates.

Emily Riley of Rx Letterpress produced some amazing limited edition, two-color prints for the 100 Demon Dialogues Kickstarter campaign, and now they're up for general purchase! That blue is metallic ink. Yeah. Super rad. (Also, if you backed the Kickstarter: the books are arriving in just a couple weeks! More on that in this project update.)
Hands down the best thing I read this month was how to do nothing, a transcription of a talk given by Jenny Odell at EYEO in 2017. It's a long read, but totally worth it (also kind of the point—meandering through space, meandering through thoughts: this is how I like to think and read and talk and live). It's got BIRDS and ARCHITECTURE and SPACIOUSNESS and LABYRINTHS and LINGUISTICS and GOOD BLOBS. I really would love if you found some time to read it (and maybe even told me your thoughts afterward).
I feel contractually obligated to share the fact that there's a new video game out now based on Moby-Dick.

This month's closing quote comes from We, the Drowned, a massive tome by Carsten Jensen which follows the fortunes of a Danish seafaring village over the course of 100 years. I'm about halfway through and really loving it, but this quote in particular just grabbed me by the hair and wouldn't let go:

There comes a time in the life of a sailor when he no longer belongs ashore. It’s then that he surrenders to the Pacific, where no land blocks the eye, where sky and ocean mirror each other until above and below have lost their meaning, and the Milky Way looks like the spume of a breaking wave and the globe itself rolls like a boat in the midst of the sinking and heaving surf of that starry sky, and the sun is nothing but a tiny glowing dot of phosphorescence on the night sea.

So...we're going, right?

Let's go.

<3
Lucy

P.S. If you enjoy this newsletter, you might also enjoy buying some of my comics or supporting my work on Patreon! This kind of assistance keeps the lights on and the adventures possible, and I'm super grateful for every little bit of it <3

Feb. 1, 2018, 4 p.m.

Lucy Bellwood's Bottleship