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Backyard mushroom tour- part 3

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Backyard mushroom tour- part 2

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Backyard mushroom tour- part 1

I don’t know what any of these are! But here are the mushrooms that I could find in my yard one sunny afternoon in late December.

I didn’t touch any of them, so whatever you see if how I found them.

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“ooh” sounds in English

thought this up when I couldn’t sleep one night

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coronavirus mini essays

coronavirus mini essays / August 2020 / $3

19 short responses to the first few months of life in the coronavirus pandemic. folded and stapled binding.

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Love By Many Shapes

Love By Many Shapes (Anthology zine) / Summer 2020 / $7+ all proceeds to CARDV

7 writers and 6 artists created original writing and art exploring alternative structures for community and relationships. cover is cardstock with color illustration; inside illustrations are black and white.

pdf download also available.

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Reflections After Sunday’s Vigil

Reflections After Sunday’s Vigil: A Framework for Big Change / June 2020 / $2

an essay exploring how complex societal changes can happen. folded and stapled binding.

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13 mini essays

13 mini essays / July 2019 / $3

13 short essays that are mostly about community building. vertical stapled binding.

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The Joy of Gathering

The Joy of Gathering / May 2019 / $3

creative ideas for fun and inclusive meetings, workshops, and classes. hand-sewn binding.

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Garden Solutions

Garden Solutions / March 2019 / $3

organic solutions for garden pests and reflections from a first-time community gardener. hand-sewn binding and hand-colored cover

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Chloe

Chloe / January 2019 / $1 all proceeds to Safehaven Humane Society

a collaborative zine made by 7 artists all drawing the inimitable chloe. single-page folded mini-zine

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mini essay mini collections

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some surprise common plant species ‘round here

Portland is the third PNW city I’ve lived in. Moving here, I anticipated discovering some new plant species that were unique to this place. Even still, I was surprised at how much a few new plants stood out. Today I want to introduce you to three new acquaintances.

The first surprise plant of Portland is this beauty!

It’s called Harlequin Glorybower. Around my neighborhood, it is a common ornamental tree, although apparently it grows naturally as a shrub. It’s native to China and Japan. The binomial is Clerodendrum trichotomum and it’s in the Lamiaceae (mint) family. By design, common names should be easier to remember than Latin ones, but for this species, it’s a toss up!

The second new-to-me species is this invasive vine

Clematis vitalba. At first, I thought it was a tree species that I remember from childhood that my dad called “Mr. Fuzzy.” But then I realized it wasn’t a tree, it just climbed all over trees. And bushes. And fences. And gardens. Some common names are old man’s beard and traveler’s joy. It is native to Eurasia. The Oregon Department of Agriculture lists it as a noxious weed and asks residents to remove it. Winter is apparently the easiest time to recognize it, which bears out with my experience: it is truly everywhere!

The seed heads are sometimes fluffier

and sometimes looser

and this is what the vines and leaves look like with no seed heads. 

I have my work cut out for me in the yard.

The final plant to share is actually kind of an old friend from “back east.” 

It’s Poke or pokeweed. It’s binomial is Phytolacca americana, in the Phytolaccaceae (pokeweed) family. It’s native to the eastern US and as a child, this grew all over the place. In the fall we would always crush the berries and use them to dye rocks or our fingernails. But I don’t remember encountering it elsewhere in the Northwest, but here in Portland, it’s pretty common. In this picture it’s a little sad at the end of it’s season, but still so pink!

These were just the first three species I’ve gotten to know here. Stay tuned for more.

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Book webs (part 2)

There are so many ways to play with book webs. Now for a few more.

Here are the ten oldest books/series that I read.

And here are the books I read that were published in 2020.

But here’s where we really get into the web of things. I used the format to explore relationships. Questions like: how do all the genres that are not straight-out realism relate to one another?

I have a feeling my arrangement of these books would be different on any given day. In this version I imagined that the little air plant in the center represented the world we live in and was like the hub of a wheel. The categories were like spokes on the wheel, getting more different as they went out. 

And here is the book web that inspired this all!

I was trying to understand the relationship between dystopian fiction, memoir & historical fiction about governmental abuse, speculative fiction about governmental abuse, nonfiction around gardening and resilience, and the real world events we’ve all been living in 2020. The center of the web around resilience. I read the introduction to the The Resilient Gardener and it read like a non-fiction version of the The Fifth Season (Broken Earth trilogy). Ideas likeL there will always be major hard times, if not in our life times then in the future. We ought to learn survival skills, even if we never need them, so that we can pass them on to future generations. The Hard Tomorrow and The Seep, both written just before the pandemic, felt eerily prescient. Mark Zuckerberg becomes president and owning a megaphone becomes an arrestable offense. Aliens technology “seeps” into earth and after saying “I just can’t believe it!” everyone has to adapt to the new normal. Reading memoir and historical fiction felt chilling. It isn’t all made up-- it happens every day. Governments imprison people, shoot them, steal their land. A repeated theme of exile was a constant reminder of ‘it can happen anywhere.’ A Long Petal of the Sea and Lucky Broken Girl both touched on double exiles. The former from Franco in Spain and then again from Pinochet in Chile. The latter was about a Jewish family leaving Castro’s Cuba for the US and included a grandparent character that had arrived in Cuba from Nazi Germany. Genocide of Native people and removal from their lands is also exile. And the books that dealt with this also spoke to how we as humans connect to the land, the plants, and the animals. And these books, in turn, circled back to some of the ways humans can cultivate resilience through those relationships. 

Phew! It was fun to play with this medium and there are endless ways to arrange and rearrange the tiles. To finish off though, here were some of my favorites from the first 11 months of the year:

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Book webs (part 1)

Over the pandemic, I’ve been reading even more than usual. Going through multiple periods of library closures (two for pandemic lockdowns and one for the fires and hazardous air quality) this year I’ve read a lot more of “whatever I can get my hands on.” 

I’ve been thinking about connecting points between books. Like when a fiction and non-fiction have a lot in common. Or two books that seem quite different, but a third book unites them, like a mutual friend. 11 months into 2020, I thought I’d try to make sense of my reading for the year. Here is my take on a reading list, but in a visual format I’m calling a book web.

All the books I read in random order.

Here’s all the books I read again, sorted by where I got the physical copy from.

Now for a few short lists:

Graphics (novels, memoirs, manga)

Kids’ and teen books

Fiction in translation

“Book club” (books from across the Muslim world)

Native American authors

PNW authors

Anthologies

Stay tuned for even more book webs!

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tulip tree

At our new house, we have a tulip tree.

Before living with one, I though tulip tree leaves all had four lobes, like this one

In fact, in college I remember learning that the only tree whose leaves had varying numbers of lobes was the sassafras. But I could have misheard or misremembered.

Because sometimes, our tulip tree leaves have an extra pair of lobes. Or they’re missing a pair.

But! Tulip tree leaf lobes don’t just come in even numbers. Here are leaves with 3, 5, and 7 lobes!

And just for fun, here is a really big leaf

And here is a small one