It’s Which-Craft

All our lives we circle through the same interests and hauntings, struggles

and inspirations, around and around, sometimes recognizing more of the

truth, sometimes forgetting we ever learned it. And one of the privileges of

age is becoming more conscious of this and surrendering to our

unconscious choices to revisit a story we left unfinished, an interest we

don’t remember why we dropped, music we meant to play, languages we

meant to learn.

All this I have done, but this past February as I turned sixty-five I noticed I

was doing it more than ever before.

I loved crafting as a kid and started young, since my mother sent me to art

school when I was two. Drawing possessed me pretty early and crowded

out my urge to craft with the noble challenge of paper and pen.

When my kids were small, right before I started to get work as an

illustrator, my urge to craft resurfaced. I made my daughter a dollhouse

out of cardboard boxes and furnished it entirely with stuff made out of

tossed and recycled objects. She loved it, and making it was my great

escape (a birthday cake made out of a painted marshmallow decorated

with dried flowers, a framed painting made of a cut-out magazine image

trimmed with glued rickrack), though it was sadly disposable in the end.

I believe I was tunneling down to the source of my creativity before trying

to become a professional artist.

This winter, amid the record-breaking ice and snow and freezing cold, I got

the urge again. The decades-dormant nudge to start making little things.

In December I made stars and hearts out of clay, painted white and blue,

tied with ribbon to a stick from our yard. As I made it, I asked it to comfort

me by reminding me of the beauty of winter. Then I hung it on my wall.

In January, I bought some felt and embroidery thread and sewed a small

stuffed owl as a reward for my wise choice to quit the booze. The owl now

sits on the bar where my husband makes his martinis, and I plan to make

one for each month I’m dry. Crafting as sobriety chip.

In the month of my birth, I wanted to express my longing for spring. To

coax it out of the ground that is becoming a bog from the rain and melting snow.

I’ve been sewing, beading, and embroidering very small felt flowers in a

row along a crushed velvet ribbon the color of both dried and melting

mud.

Come, flowers, I murmured in my head as I sewed each differently-

designed blossom in place. Let these flowers pull you up from nature’s

depths. Can’t you feel our longing for spring?

Can’t you feel how I’d like our nation to find its sanity, for the projects I

work on in the months ahead to flourish as they see fit? Can’t you feel the

desire of my loved ones for healing, growth, opportunity, joy?

This murmuring, and the peace I get from crafting right now, the lack of

any desire for a perfect outcome, the mental silence, are all liberating for a

professional artist and storyteller, but beyond that, they return me to the

power of art in childhood, which is absolute.

Spells and rituals remind our childhood selves of this. A village elder now,

a crone, I am witchcrafting as I turn sixty-five. Slowly I’ve allowed my

spiritual leanings to appear in my work. But how much more obvious they

are to me in my crafting. What is it that I see and feel before the words,

before the conscious drawing? What is the meaning that travels through

the clay that sticks to my fingers and the felt I draw my thread through to

hold these different colors together?

No surprise, I guess, that my birthday present to myself was a trip to the

Surrealist show at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. One of my favorites was this one,

Creation of the Birds, painted by Remedios Varo in 1957.

My unconscious had a lovely outing that day.

Make meaning. Make beauty. The way only you know how.

And now I pluck you from the world inside my head and place you in the

extra chair (for guests) in my studio so that I can tell you what I’ve been up

to as I share my new graphic kitchen memoir Where There’s Smoke, There’s Dinner:

Confessions of a Cartoonist Cook (available here).

2/27/26 - Hosted a virtual comics workshop on the theme of “Your Worst Food Experience” at Friday Comics Night with the Sequential Artists Workshop (SAW)

2/10/26 Hopewell, NJ - Public Library cookbook club, potluck & signing (private event)

1/27/26 Mutha Magazine, “The Apple and the Hermit Mother,” my new food story/belated introduction to Where There’s Smoke, Where’s Dinner

And many thanks to…

—Alex Dueben at The Comics Journal for selecting Where There’s Smoke,

There’s Dinner as one of his staff picks

—Nora and Amaris at Autobiographix for including The Story of My Tits in

their recommendations for “Reading Breast Cancer Comics in the Waiting Room”


As always, if you’d like to contact me about or have an idea for an event,

talk, reading, signing, interview, or podcast with me, reach out via my

website and let’s make some magic happen!