Oddball Sock Critters

Creative check-in, affirmations project

Mar 10, 2024

Week 10 diary list comic with sock critter in colorful palette

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love, For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting. Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought: So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing. — T. S. Eliot

Happy Sunday!

We are always walking our own path of discovery and growth, walking even when it seems we are not moving, even when the movement is a crawl, but it is almost always a path others have walked. It is also a path others may someday walk. The path may be the same, or similar, a reflection, or a mirror. There may be echoes and overlaps, layers and transparencies. There may be convergences and points of branching, eddies in a stream that swirl in circular patterns before they come back again to the main. It is our path and yet not ours alone. None of us discovered the wheel.

I try to keep in mind the wheel.

I seem to be a half-step from spilling wide, a phrase that is deliberately oblique. I thought I might not write a letter. I feel like the mail isn’t making it. What color was the ink? Was there enough postage? Are you sure you taped the flap? A thousand fireflies remind me I am in a forest that has never been on the map.

Writing a letter is a bit of an opening, a siren’s call. Even so, I am laying just a few crumbs. I am not sure everything is okay.

Today:

Thank you for reading.

Amy

(Note: The lead image is part of a series of weekly summaries rendered as a list comic. I am really enjoying this “52 weeks” project and the weekly marker and overview it provides. I also really love this sock critter.)

(There are a number of images today. If this is cut off in email, you can click through to read in the app or a browser.)

Illustrated Journal Week 10 for 2024

This is a glimpse of part of my pages for Week 10 for Illustrate Your Week 2024. This week held several birthdays that are important to me, and portraits of those people appear on the next pages. The pages shown here hold the portrait from our weekly drawing group, a sock critter, and a few odds and ends from the week. There is a lot of messy paint here. That’s okay. I didn’t leave myself much room, but my weekly self-portrait still needs to be worked into the blank space at the top.

Page from illustrated journal with sock critter. A Cowen 2024

There was a sock monkey day on the calendar this week.

I remember drawing a sock creature last year. I remember talking about sock critters through the years. I have a basket of socks I’ve stashed, loners, shrunken socks, socks with holes, always thinking I would someday sew my own oddball (but lovable) creatures. I taught myself to knit (25 years ago) because I wanted to knit a teddy bear. I crocheted a large bear with gangly arms and an overalls dress even before that. I’m notorious for sewing arms and legs on backwards, but when my oldest was little, I sewed Jack, a doll with an assortment of homemade clothes, including an adorable flannel shirt and elastic waist pull-on pants.

I wonder what happened to Jack. I am sure he must still be in a bin somewhere. I need to find him.

Here are last year’s sock monkey and sock creature pages.

These were weeks apart, and it surprises me now to see them. I don’t remember offhand why the first sock monkey appeared (although “whimsical” and “soft” or “stuffed” things are often among my personal go-to prompts). The sock monkey is next to a Little Prince drawing that still makes me smile. The second image, from a spread in process, was from the week with the actual sock monkey day.

Sock monkey and sock critter images from illustrated journal pages, early 2023. A Cowen

You know what I’m thinking, right? I’m not good at imaginative drawing, but I can totally see myself with a series of these soft/sock characters in my journal. I mean….totally. (Why did I just have a moment of deja vu?)

I share my pages at Instagram on Sundays, along with a number of other people who keep an illustrated journal using #illustrateyourweek prompts as filler. I would love to have you follow there.

The 100 Day Project — Three Weeks In

It is hard to believe we are three weeks in! I feel really good about this.

I have been logging my Diary Comic Affirmations each day in weekly running-log posts, which has worked well for me as a simple rubric and a way to stop and reflect a bit on each panel. Here is a look at the first three weeks.

I am awkwardly happy with this project. The affirmations are both exciting me creatively and sinking me emotionally. The art itself is a challenge, a good one. I am notoriously bad at visualization, and I can’t simply turn a head in space. Adding arms or shifting a body and understanding if you do or don’t actually see an ear or actually see hair is something that is a challenge, but I am enjoying the process and spending a lot of time on these daily panels. Too long. But this is an easy project to sink into… and, like my journal, couch- and TV-friendly, which makes it perfect. I am also exploring color and pattern and shading, things that come up for me in digital that are very different than my work in my illustrated journal (or with drawn portraits).

On the “word” side of the puzzle, this challenge is proving to be a different kind of Tetris, an emotional one. I tend to overthink the words and what I am willing to publicly say. Most of these statements are abbreviated, but they feel weighted and emotionally charged. My inner voice has the “counter” to every line (unwritten). It’s a dialogue that is exhausting but also important.

I look at the finished panels as not simply about me. These are statements, I hope, with much broader reach.

That the character I seem to be honing in on seems inherently “melancholy” adds unexpected nuance to even a simple phrase. Similarly, I know that these are intended as affirmations (which may involve reinforcing what you hope to be true rather than what is currently true), but putting these statements out there with some loosely-based comic me feels, at times, like I am being cocky or pretentious. Or, on the flip side, feels like I am revealing too much.

I didn’t intend for her to be sad. What is it? The eyes? I have puzzled a bit over why this sadness, this loneliness, is what seems to have come out in her. Maybe she doesn’t read that way to others at all.

I am learning a lot. I’m honing in on a palette I like. (As someone who wears almost all black, this use of color always feels a bit random. It’s playful. The color softens the experience, but I’m still working on making it fit.)

I do have some favorites here, some real favorites. My most favorite one, in terms of the face, I have been somehow unable to replicate, which continues to perplex me. But I have some overall favorites, days where I really see what I’m after happening. There have been days where I wanted to simply continue and tell a story or expand a thought. There was one day that I allowed a few additional panels to emerge, and there are still more that need to follow to complete the sequence. There are some faces that are squashed, and some backgrounds that miss the mark. I don’t expect every day in a long series to be a win. I just go with the process. It’s all a learning experience.

I appreciate those who have commented here and there or at Instagram. It’s a risky series. It requires lots of mental bandaids, and I’m not even going near the real stuff. So thank you to those who have been generous with your comments.

Graphic Novels from the Week

I read several graphic novels in the last week (or so). This was overall a heart-wrenching set.

(Note—these titles deal with loss of a child and chronic health conditions and disordered eating. Scroll past if reading about these issues is triggering for you.)

Ronan and the Endless Sea of Stars (Rick Louis and Lara Antal)

Ronan and the Endless Sea of Stars was a heartbreaking read. It is the story of Rick and his wife Emily, whose son, Ronan, had Tay-Sachs disease. Everything seems relatively normal and happy until it becomes clear Ronan isn’t meeting milestones (and has “global developmental delays”). An ophthalmologist detects spots on his retinas that suggest Tay-Sachs. Further tests confirm the diagnosis. Tay-Sachs is a neurological disease for which there is no cure. Ronan died before reaching age 3.

Ronan’s diagnosis, and the challenge of raising and loving a child that you know will not reach milestones or even birthdays, breaks Emily and Rick apart. The story is beautifully and tenderly told in comic art from Antal. The final panels give us these words:

“Being Ronan’s father was the greatest thing that ever happened to me. Sometimes I think taking care of him was the only truly important thing I ever did in my life. If it meant that I could see him just one more time, I would do it all again. Even knowing I had to lose him.”
“Ronan was only alive for 1,059 days. He’s already been gone for longer than he was here. But this is not a story about grief. It is just the story of a little boy who was only here for a short while and what he was like and what he meant to us.”

Nervosa (Hayley Gold)

Nervosa tracks the author’s life with anorexia—and the host of other medical problems she experienced as a result of her eating disorder. Nervosa peels back layers of living with disordered eating and gives an inside look at what goes on in medical treatment programs and the ways in which someone with an eating disorder often works around the system. Many of the stories are shocking. As a reader, you are trapped right along with Hayley, with no resolution in sight. Through her story, you get a clear sense of the complicated inner landscape that fuels the cycle. As treatment becomes more and more about numbers, the person slides away, unseen. After years of being in and out of treatment programs, there is a seemingly endless stream of doctors (most of which are not helpful). Nervosa also offers an unflinching look at her family life and parents who love her but are caught in patterns that seem incredibly oppressive.

It’s a staggering story to read and told with exhausting detail. In the end, it feels like there may be no hope. There is no turnaround in the book or conclusion that lets readers know that everything ends up okay. And yet the existence of the book is hope. The existence of this book is Hayley being seen. On the art side, the sheer depth of the book is amazing to consider. This is a really densely-written and densely-drawn graphic novel, one that is even at times hard to follow, a style that fits the story, with overlapping dialogue that captures both real-world conversations and simultaneous inner conversations with herself (portrayed as a character of the night).

Reading this brought to mind Lighter Than My Shadow (Katie Green). That, too, was an autobiographical account of disordered eating and incredibly long and immersive.

Another graphic novel that comes to mind is Last Things: A Graphic Memoir of Love and Loss (Marissa Moss). That was the story of Moss’s husband, Harvey, after being diagnosed with ALS. It is one of the most moving and haunting graphic novels I’ve ever read.

Several others come to mind, including Notes from a Sickbed (Tessa Brunton) (which I summarized here) and One in a Million (Claire Lordon), which I read a few weeks ago.

I also read The Magic Fish (Trung Le Nguyen) this week. This is a beautifully drawn story that blends fairy tales with identity, coming-of-age and coming out, immigration, language, and family history.

The Weekly Bits and Pieces

📕 Sidewalk Oracles reading notes, Weeks 9 and 10

💭 100 Day Project / Diary Comic Affirmations 8-14

🎯🖋️ Week 11 prompts for your illustrated journal

Writers to Read

Here are some posts from other writers that I enjoyed in the last week or so and posts about events that might be of interest:

When Diary Comics Become Graphic Memoir (
Background Noise Comic
)
A Gash in the Sky (
Jason McBride
; partial paywall)
Your March Invitation: WORDPLAY Book Club for Writers and Curious Readers (Evelyn Skye)
A Downton Abbey Draw-Along! (
Kaly Quarles
)

Made It?