This is the first installment in Unstable Illusions, an artist project exploring my childhood through writing and collage. The collages are currently on display in a window art installation at 221 12th Ave S in Seattle, where they can be viewed through February 4th, 2024.
You are invited to the artist talk I am hosting over Zoom on January 20th, 2024, at 2:00pm (US Pacific). Put this link on your calendar.
When it comes to writing about the place where I grew up, I struggle with where to start. The obvious places are the anchors of my memories — six specific houses — but geographically speaking, they are insignificant. The main character in the story is empty space. It’s not as empty as it was 45 years ago but still, the void prevails. And that’s where I get tripped up because a vacuum will take anything as substance. One year when I was home for a visit, I fed the nothing by cataloging wildflowers in photos and sketches. I looked up their names and seeing that they belonged to a taxonomy of known living things replaced the edges of oddity with the comforting roundness of acceptance.
Another time I walked the limit of the paved road, capturing the ribbons of tar sealing its cracks. I thought I could find a language there, some abstract calligraphy that would solve a mystery I think about all the time.
Starting when I was 3, I lived amongst a handful of houses in Sun Valley, Arizona, sandwiched between Interstate 40 and a 15-mile stretch of road active as Route 66 from 1952 to 1961. The nearest town is Holbrook, a town of 5000, around 8 miles west. There was a Stuckey’s restaurant on the way to town, a couple of roadside motels, a couple of gas stations, a service station, and for a little while, a daytime diner. My eyes could reach distant horizon in every direction I looked, and the enormity of blue sky with fluffy clouds pressed down on the parched landscape. I remember feeling both invisible and infinite in comparison depending on the shadows cast by my tiny body.
This is not the Arizona that probably comes to mind when you hear a name like Sun Valley. For starters, it’s part of the Colorado Plateau’s high desert shrubby steppe, several hours and 4000 ft higher than the Phoenix area nicknamed Valley of the Sun. It’s a pocket of open range country nestled against the Navajo Nation. The tallest trees are of the Late Triassic, petrified variety. There are no resorts, no community attractions like lush golf courses or swimming pools or activity centers, and there never have been. The houses are pre-fab from a Jim Walters catalog, and what I keep trying to puzzle out is why they were built there at all.
Maybe in 1960, the once-cute kitchenette motel and optimistic land speculation cast a sprinkle of ambitious charm across fields of sticker weeds, sagebrush, and prickly pear cactus. By that time, the rough-and-tumble character of the Wild West had calmed. It had been over a 100 years since the most violent episodes of range conflicts, commemorated every year in Holbrook with the Bucket of Blood races. The cattle were zoned out, a few roads outlined the broad strokes of a potential neighborhood, and the marketing to attract new land owners began.
Next time I’ll share more about the two blocks that made up my neighborhood and the people who called those two blocks home.
There’s an annual review process I’ve done for myself for years that I’ve made available at Savvy Pancakes, my website for copywriting, design, and editorial work. It’s a digital download and it’s only $5. The pdf includes a way of thinking about goals for the new year that assume you are a whole person containing multitudes. Check it out here. And if you’re sprucing up your website or getting a handle on your newsletter in 2024, consider hiring me to help.
Something for the people who enjoy exploring and navigating their inner worlds: I’m offering a small number of 3 Insights packages for $250. You’ll get three interpretations of your inner landscape based on symbolism, a tarot reading, and an original piece of art (around 8x10 inches). My approach to tarot is allowing what comes up to be food for thought, more mystic cheese than spiritual crystals. The art will be mixed media, which means it could contain collage, drawing, assemblage — anything that feels intuitively right when my contemplative energy is turned in your direction.
Finally, about Substack, whose founders don’t have thick enough sauce to remove harmful voices from their platform (even the people who have been kicked out of most other spaces). Sigh. I don’t charge for this newsletter and my audience numbers are modest, so it is of no consequence to Substack if I pack up Abstract Pancakes and move it elsewhere. I’m staying, at least for now, because the writing community here makes me a better human for other humans. But for full clarity on where I stand, trans rights are human rights and when you see a Nazi, put your body into it when you throw that punch.
Happy New Year, dear readers. Thank you for hanging out with me in 2023.