I have been a letterpress printer for 12 years. Sometimes I feel like I never really knew love and belonging before I found letterpress, or before letterpress found me.
This might seem strange — an art practice, one I do mostly solo and part-time, offering me a sense of belonging. But from the very first moment I touched a press, I knew, deep down in some part of me that had been mostly untouched, that it was what I was meant to do. It combines everything I love — words, meaning, social movements, design, old stuff — and allows me to immerse myself in a world of my own making.
When I was accepted to the In Cahoots Artist Residency, it was June 2019. In my application, I said that I planned to make work that was a commentary on the difficulty of being a mother and an artist. I had a 9 month old and a 4 year old and I remember thinking,
I just have to white-knuckle it and hang on until I can get this week all to myself, with no one needing me.
The day my residency was scheduled to start was March 14, 2020.
Needless to say, I did not make it to that residency. Nor did I make it the following March, before vaccines. So it was with a lot of anticipation that I set off for Petaluma, CA earlier this month, but also with a sense that so much had shifted for me since I first applied.
On the plane on the way to SFO, I finished Claire Vaye Watkin’s I Love You But I’ve Chosen Darkness. This book has received attention as part of a new reckoning with the narrative of motherhood, along with Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Lost Daughter and other works.
In both stories, an artist and a mother, struggling under the suffocation of early motherhood, leave home for a trip that represents a step forward in their professional careers as writers, and never return. They run off with other men, and in Watkin’s case, do a lot of drugs and other things considered very wayward for an english professor from Michigan.
I landed and walked down the jetway, unencumbered by a stroller. I rented a car, drove to the Mission, and had a long lunch with an old friend. I sailed across the Golden Gate Bridge and north to Petaluma. I felt free.
In Cahoots is a book arts residency on a farm in the country. The letterpress studio is in an old converted horse barn. The neighboring farm has roosters that crow all day long and a flock of Emu that are all named Dinosaur. Each artist gets their own workspace and cottage for their stay. Mine was called the Hen House.
Amanda Moore, a poet from San Francisco, was one of my fellow artists in residence. By sheer luck/ coincidence, she also makes work about ambivalent motherhood and the strictures it places on creative practice and your sense of self.
As we made art, drank wine, shared stories of what we’re reading, what we’re watching, what we’re desiring - the mothers we are and the mothers we have felt very… present. Even as, in my distance from my children, I felt the most like myself that I have in years.
I’ve always told this story, the one I opened this newsletter with, about falling in love with letterpress. How from that very first moment, I knew my life was changed. It had never occurred to me how similar it is to how many mothers talk about when they first met their babies.
So maybe it makes sense, then, that this creative work has given me a sense of belonging and true love, has nurtured connections, like the ones I made with the wonderful artists at In Cahoots, has given me purpose and comfort and distraction. Type, ink, and paper are always there for me.
And when I was able to tune out every other role I usually play — employee, mother, wife, co-parent, unofficial therapist, snack fetcher, daughter, dog feeder — I felt myself coming back to myself. I felt like just… a human.
That week was full of time for myself but also joyful connection. With artists, with old friends, with their children and homes and fancy restaurants. After two years of pandemic and lots of personal loss, it was honestly a miracle. It didn’t matter what I made in the studio. I made me.
And when I got home, 3 year old Mara grabbed my hand and led me upstairs and said, “It’s good to have you home, mama.”
And I was.
Here’s just one example of Amanda Moore’s work that rings something inside me (you can hear her reading it here):
CONFESSION In the chapel of our first days, I put you to my breast again and again and let you refuse me. Half-life half-lived and with you as my witness: I have been more mother than woman. I have stayed up all night lining the shelves of my life with your toys and books. It might be a comfort, the way my whole world spins on the tip of your smallest toe, but you will learn to be a woman from the way I am a woman in this world and this is the litany of my mistake: I did not know what I was doing. I was happy to be a martyr. This won’t be the last time I will say it. Daughter, I was wrong.
More pictures from my time at In Cahoots here:
The work I ended up making at In Cahoots is called “The Memory of Something Lost”, and I’ll probably do another newsletter about it. But here’s a preview.