The colors of butcher paper stocked by my school change occasionally, but this beautiful lavender has never come up before. I was so excited to see it, and I knew that I would have to make this tansy aster, a common wildflower in southern Arizona. So even though I didn’t start with a theme, a theme emerged. Sort of.
After finishing both flowers I thought it would be fun to give them both little interpretive signs like it was a botanical garden. I chose the name most commonly used here in Tucson, another common name, and the scientific name (this one is Machaeranthera tanacetifolia) and I used paint pens for the lettering to save time.
I’ll save back a few feet of lavender paper for the future. No doubt, when this roll is gone, it won’t come up again for a decade or so.
Creating 3 bulletin boards that all matched was starting to feel kind of burdensome, and it occurred to me that the bulletin boards don’t all have to go together, so instead of starting with a grand theme, I decided to start with one idea. This is the Mexican Bird of Paradise (Latin name Caesalpinia pulcherrima) aka the Peacock Flower (aka a lot of other things). It’s a ubiquitous ornamental here in southern Arizona, but it seems to be native to the Caribbean, and is specifically associated with the Barbados, but also with Suriname. I couldn’t find a definitive place of origin, but I didn’t look very hard either.
Anyway, they’re very showy and stunning, very complex blossoms. The flowers begin to bloom from the bottom of the pyramid of buds and as each layer shrivels a new layer opens.
This image already seems to resonate with its audience. There are 2 Mexican Bird of Paradise bushes in the courtyard where the bulletin boards hang, and most of the kids figured it out. The actual flowers are less than an inch wide; these paper simulacra are probably 20 times larger than life.
Obviously, this was not my most creative or rigorous set of boards. I didn’t have a lot of motivation, and it was so incredibly hot and sticky that I did not want to be working outside. But everyone said they loved them.
The only thing I really have to add Is that I decided to go with red decorative elements, because when I just put up the letters on the first bulletin board, I realized I inadvertently recreated the Best Buy logo.
This one actually blew off the night before the first one blew off. And it’s the ugliest (oldest) corkboard and the one that most requires covering.
I came in the day after finishing it, and noticed right away that it wasn’t there, and crossed my fingers that someone had found it, because I didn’t see it in the courtyard. In the past, I have a few times found my blown away bulletin board in the courtyard, and a few times other people have found it and brought it in, and one time it blew away completely and was never seen again. That was sad.
So I was happy to see that it was laid out in the library, because the librarian had found it. I went to examine it more closely, to see if there was any damage, and the first thing I noticed was that there was a very healthy wolf spider just chilling between two layers of paper.
I casually mention, “Hey, here’s a big spider, here” and the librarian says something like, “I’m usually OK with spiders” in a voice that frankly did not convince me she was OK with spiders. So she comes over and sees it and adds, “I DIDN’T THINK YOU MEANT THAT BIG! I THOUGHT YOU MEANT A DADDY LONG LEGS! WHAT DO WE DO?”
I say, I’m going to take it outside, and she says, “HOW? WHERE?” And I say, “I’m going to catch it in a cup and then release it in the Mexican Bird of Paradise.” (I thought: cool spider should live in a cool bush).
So I scoop this little monster to and take it to the cool plant and the spider is like OMG YES I LOVE THIS PLANT and JUMPED out of the cup to get to the plant. So I’m like, have a nice life, then, and I go back in the library and the librarian says, “So I brought that spider inside? And it was in here with me ALL MORNING???”
Hopefully the trauma subsides.
Anyway, I hung it back up and continued decorating.
Yes, it’s that time of year again! The time of year when the monsoon winds blow so hard they tear my work off the wall before anyone even sees it 😭. This was the worst year yet. This photograph was actually taken before the whole board got ripped up by a weather system that apparently caused tornados in southeastern Arizona, a region of the world absolutely not know for the presence of tornadoes.
I spent 4 days on these 3 boards. I lost some time on the first time because they surprised me with MY OWN BOOKCASE in the library. Granted, I think the librarian was just tired of my stuff being stashed everywhere behind the circulation desk, but it was a very nice gift. After 21+ years, I actually have a space that isn’t “jammed under the circulation desk.” Anyway, I spent a while moving my stuff—all my book repair supplies, all my writing club materials, and all my art supplies—to this new space. It took a while.
The second bulletin board had already blown off (I’ll tell that story in the next post) and I had actually reinforced everything before I left Wednesday (the day before school started). Thursday, I was taking an early morning walk (really the only kind of walk you can realistically take in Tucson in the summer) when the librarian texted me a picture of my SHREDDED work.
i texted back that I was 1 minute away from the school and would be in to fix it before realizing that I was wearing a VERY GAY (like, literally advertising a queer event) off the shoulder shirt and no bra, and then quickly texted that it would actually be 20 minutes, because I had to go home and don some more appropriate attire.
I did manage to get it all buttoned up before the bell rang but it’s kind of sad looking, all stapled and taped and patched. Not an auspicious start to the best year ever.
Obviously it’s been a while (all summer) since I posted and that’s because I’m working on a HUGE commission that I had hoped to have finished already but…have not. And now school starts NEXT THURSDAY and I have bulletin boards to do. Oh, and Bonnie Jo Campbell’s new book, The Spirits, comes out in October and I’d like to finish that comic by Christmas.
But I did just make this tiny bag from a pair of shorts that I was very attached to. In fact, they wore out probably a decade ago and I pinned up the pockets with this intention all those years ago but I didn’t know how to pin the strap. And so many times over those years, I’ve thought, “Boy, I wish I had a tiny green corduroy bag to go with this outfit. Too bad I never finished that project.”
So tonight I randomly powered through. I screwed up the strap anyway: it’s twisted and I already regret my choice of glitter ribbon, because…glitter. But I can change it later. And have my tiny cool bag now.
Since it’s made from 2 pockets, it has 3 compartments, and 2 of them button. And I could probably figure out how to add another bit to close the third compartment. Since it was made from “women’s” pants, it’s not *quite* as long as my phone, so a little strap would make it more.
I’m not much of a seamstress and this is obviously well out of my regular creative expression, but I love my weird little bag.
This is obviously just the attribution to the quote, and I was kind of out of steam. But the cactus came out cool. I made the saguaros wavy because that’s actually how they look when it rains. They store up so much water they get little rolls like fat. When they don’t get any rain, they shrivel up and get skinny and look sad. I like them fat and jolly like this.
The prickly pear has one pad shaped like heart, because when you go among prickly pears, there’s always one pad shaped like a heart.
Usually I guess I go a little brighter for the summer bulletin board, but overall I’m satisfied. I know it’s not summertime for most of the country yet, but it’s definitely summertime here in the desert.
This is the second part of the Joseph Wood Krutch quote from A Desert Year. This image is also kind of minimalistic compared to my other work, and the photo also doesn’t quite do it justice.
If you zoom in you can see that the raindrops have a sort of Eric Carle thing going on. I wanted then to look sort of luminous and I thought I could use use the metallic markers on the black paper but that wasn’t bright enough. So I colored a variety of blues with a bit of green and purple to cover a bit of white paper and cut the raindrops from that, and the effect is pretty good. I added some staples to make it look wetter.
The Desert Year is a lovely piece of naturalist writing originally published in 1952, by a professor named Joseph Wood Krutch. He wasn’t a desert dweller—he was an east coast guy—but he came out to Tucson once and found himself enchanted. So when his next sabbatical came around, he took a year to immerse himself in the Sonoran Desert, joyfully observing the land, the climate, the flora, and the fauna, and recording his observations into this classic work of nonfiction.
These bulletin boards are a bit bare compared to some of my work. I’m not sure this picture does the “clouds” justice. I was trying to make them look textured , with a silver lining. It’s more clear in real life. I could have done more. But I’m presenting my comic to the American Literature Association conference this week and I needed to be reasonable with my time. I was trying to finish this Friday but I lost an hour dealing with my insurance company and that was that. I had to come in today. But this was my last day of the 2026 school year.
Letters are all cut freehand in a font I just created based on curved lines. I don’t know why H and A came out so much smaller than everyone else but it kind of works.
This is the first part of a quote he wrote about his first glimpse of the monsoon. The second part is on the the middle bulletin board. The monsoon is still a ways off this year, but they are calling for an El Niño year, which can only be good for us if it actually happens
Well, I did it again: I got 18 elementary kids so jazzed about writing that they filled a literary magazine. This is the biggest issue yet, with about 70 pages of stories, poems, plays, comics, and illustrations. The table of contents alone is 3 pages long.
We throw a little literary reading party where they each get up and share their work out loud, and I think this year’s was also bigger than we’ve ever done as well. We definitely had more people than chairs.
In the past, when I’ve shared this project with others, the most common response I’ve gotten is, “I didn’t know children could do this,” which is weird to me, because this is exactly what I was doing when I was their age, except I was doing it by myself without any social, emotional, or financial support. So I’ve always known children could do this. A blank piece of paper is more expansive than the whole of the internet. This magazine is what happens when we give kids that space.
But I think the reason it seems surprising now is that we do not always give young people space to stretch these muscles, and it’s not a secret that I think the internet is huge part of the issue, because we now have 2 decades of evidence that the proliferation of screens is negatively impacting all of us on a cognitive level. Every time we resort to the screen in place of other forms of engagement, we’re denying kids the opportunity to flex their minds and achieve the kind of intellectual expansion that allows us to produce this magazine. Which is also ironic, because many of my students would be greatly served by learning to touch type, and a lot of them definitely deserve new laptops to help them write more, and faster.
So I create a super permissive environment where the kids have license write anything (literally anything; they know that if they need to write things that are considered “inappropriate” in other aspects of their lives, they’re allowed. I don’t criticize. I don’t put it in the magazine, and if it’s upsetting to the other kids I don’t let them read it out loud, but they are allowed to write swears and violence and so on, and only occasionally do I ask the psychologist or guidance counselor if I should be worried, because this job ALSO makes me a mandated reporter) and they do.
This issue has some pretty grim moments. It’s definitely darker than the previous issues, probably because kids are canaries in the coal mine and they are sucking up all the poisonous miasma of their environment. It’s hard to see. But maybe this work helps them process. Maybe it’s a kind of antidote.
Like both previous issues, this magazine has a queer love story, anthropomorphic food, surprisingly sensitive poetry, multiple unfinished novels, and bizarre horror stories. It also has our first choose-your-own-adventure story, which is also horror, and has 5 possible endings: 1 good one where you wake up in your bed and your mom is making breakfast, 3 bad ones where you die, and 1 very bad one, where you have to spend eternity doing i-Ready, which is a standardized testing app despised by children across the country.
it’s too bad there aren’t more resources for clubs like this.
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