Showing Your Art Love

Kindness to your work as a creative practice

Hello, Deep Feelers!

Do you show your art love?

we met in the maze
found peace in the twists and turns
made our own escape

Showing Your Art Love

Everyone was annoying me. I was working hard to keep a grip on my patience, but I could feel it slipping away. I made a jokey comment to my children about how everyone must have gotten up on the annoying side of the bed. My kids, almost in unison, repeated back something they have heard me say a million times, “If you’re annoyed with everybody, the problem might be you.”

They said it with love, and they were right.

I was in a funk, and I wasn’t sure why. I flipped through an old notebook and saw a quote I had written that just said, “Show your books some love.”

I don’t remember writing it, and I’m not sure where it came from. But at that moment, it felt like the right thing to do.

Over the past few years, I have published several books and zines. However, I have felt a little embarrassed by a couple of them.

A poorly lit family portrait of my books.

It’s the pocket-sized ones in the middle.

They aren’t like most of my other work. The art is different from what you usually see in this newsletter. It’s much more abstract. The haiku are a bit different as well. They tend to be—well surreal. I have a category of haiku in my spreadsheet called, “Small Haiku Stories”. These are poems that tell some kind of story, often fantastical or borderline nonsensical, but not always. These zines were my first foray into publishing haiku comics.

Following the admonition I had left for myself long ago, I flipped through these zines and realized I did love them and I am proud of them. A few of the poems in these books are among the best I’ve ever written, and the art works well with the haiku. It’s also a style I realized I want to revisit again.

The reason I was embarrassed by these zines was that they had not sold well. I remembered making these zines and how uncertain I was of the entire enterprise. I was self-conscious of my art. Because of all of these insecurities, I abandoned the project of making pocket-sized, surreal haiku zines.

Everything about my craft has improved since I released I Stare at the Sea and The Joy of Nothing, but that doesn't make these publications unworthy of my love. In rereading these zines, I realized that I was in a funk because I still carry so many insecurities around with me about the entire Weirdo Poetry enterprise. I needed to love myself by loving my art.

Continuing on with the idea of loving my art, I pulled a haiku out of my “Small Haiku Stories” list and illustrated it for this post.

We like to think of artistic efforts as being linear. But creative journeys are messy things, and if we cannot be kind to our older work, we limit our growth. We saddle our future work with our judgments about our past.

Today is about showing my two weird little Surreal Haiku zines some love. I am reclaiming them and down the road will publish some more zines in that series.

Here are a few comics from those zines:

If you’re interested in reading the full zines, they are available in paperback and ebook formats. They’re designed to be about the size of a smartphone so that you can flip through them instead of doomscrolling on social media.

Click here to see buying options

Click here to see buying options

Take some time today to show some of your older work some love. It will brighten your outlook.

Be the weird you want to see in the world!

Cheers,

Jason