SCRAPS AND SCRIBBLES
Viewing entries tagged
books
Every holiday season, Alison Lang of And So There curates and runs a holiday pop-up shop out of an historical Shell gas station space in downtown Issaquah. This year, Water’s Edge as well as a special framed winter artwork by yours truly are on sale there!
Since moving to the PNW in fall 2018, I’ve been capturing, processing and curating thousands upon thousands of images across Washington and Oregon, chasing views of seas, sounds, falls, lakes, rivers, and reservoirs - and especially the thrilling sense of personal insignificance that they tend to inspire. These curated images have now become Water’s Edge.
While a proper site page is under construction and yet to be published, I wanted to use the blog for an initial party post about finally having brought this 5+ year project to a point where it feels to me finally complete.
Water’s Edge comes in landscape hardcover format, storm gray linen-bound, with a glossy dust jacket. It features 88 full-color pages and is ready to grace any coffee table or home library shelf. While it is not yet available for purchase online, after this weekend’s book deliveries, in the days to come it will be available in select indie bookstores local to Seattle, Washington.
Seattle - Fremont - Ophelia’s Books
Seattle - Ravenna - Third Place
+ more locations coming in September
Bainbridge Island - Eagle Harbor Book Company
Lake Forest Park - Third Place
Sammamish - Mail Post gift shop
In 2017 I reconnected with a childhood friend I hadn’t corresponded with regularly since the early 2000s, when we delighted in sending each other long-winded, subject-jumping letters and unspeakably nerdy drawings (we loved Lord of the Rings before it was cool, okay).
Something we shared as children besides our general lack of coolness (which I say with fondness) was our Taiwanese heritage, and in our young adult years we’ve commiserated on social and political issues that, as kids, we didn’t realize were pushing and pulling on our lives in ways out of our control. The way we processed the anxieties and challenges of growing up Taiwanese American was to, well, have conversations.
We’re still all about conversations, all about productive exchanges.
Chrysanthemum, a print anthology of literature and artwork, was partly a result of that conversation orientation. In affiliation with the nonprofit TaiwaneseAmerican.org, it shares young creatives’ perspectives on the currently not-so-widely-visible Taiwanese diasporic experience.
Cover art by Aster Hung, typography and arrangement by Andrea Chu.
On this project, we faced bandwidth challenges, but the thing about a labor of love is it demands to be finished, limitations be damned. We Kickstarted volume I (“liminality”) to unexpectedly enthusiastic support and have taken the finished product to the Taiwanese American Cultural Festival in San Francisco, among other places.
Currently in flight in its submissions stage, volume II is inspired by concepts of “geography” and the part it plays in lives and perspectives of members of the Taiwanese diaspora.
