Elegy for the Wild at Heart pokes fun at the dicey situations that love throws us into, and how we react to those bumps in the road. My research for this book consisted of asking friends and colleagues two questions: 1) “What’s the worst breakup line you ever gave someone?” followed by 2) “What’s the worst breakup line someone ever gave you?” The results were interesting, indeed. A couple of the lines featured in the text are mine…but in the spirit of collaboration, I used some of the most colorful ones I collected. In doing this project, two pieces of sage advice were cemented into reality for me: one, people get weird when they start itching to leave you. Two, you probably shouldn’t date a writer unless you want to be made (in)famous in a book someday.

The premise is simple. The deer captured in these pages are going about their daily business of grazing and frolicking, but as they speak to each other, they are parroting the breakup lines that they have seemingly overheard from their human counterparts.

A few choice lines:

* “Your mother hates me, and your sister hates me more.”
* “Your clock is just ticking too fast, baby.”
* “I’m breaking my own heart, and now I’m going to go home and write a song about it.”
* “Right now, your father is deciding what caliber to use on me.”

Elegy is an accordion book with a hardcover. It is 4″ x 5″ closed and opens to 32″ long. It is letterpress printed using carved MDF and photopolymer plates. Edition size is 25. 2010. $35.

Like many of my books, Two-dollar Dogs is based on real events–a memory from years ago that is persistent. It started with a date at the dog track. At the time, I thought this was a kooky event, a whim, but something hit me that day at the track, watching the dogs fidget in the minutes before they went onto the dirt to chase Sparky, the ball of fluff that passed as a rabbit. It was a subtle realization–not like a bolt of lightning that some folks have. It seemed to happen slowly, like a blurry image coming into focus. But it made an impression on me, watching the dogs and picking the winners, and when I looked at the guy next to me, he came into focus, too. I picked three winners that day, put two dollars on three different dogs. A dog might be a bad metaphor for love, but there were some striking similarities that day, and the most haunting thought that struck me ended up as the heart of this book.

Letterpress printed on Somerset Velvet paper, Two-dollar Dogs is a hard-cover accordion printed with photopolymer plates made from drawings. When opened, it measures 42″ long. Closed, it measures 3″ x 5″. It comes in a wrapper made of 100% cotton handmade paper. Edition size is 35. $95.

I Want a Crayfish’s Heart began as a simple idea: if my heart was broken, and I could choose from a catalog of replacements from different creatures, what would I choose? Which heart would be strong enough to withstand another crushing blow? The narrative explores the hearts of a fish, a horse, and an octopus, among others. The above spread features the tortoise and reads, “I want a tortoise’s heart, so I can take my time with you.” Printed on Ingres paper, this pamphlet is 16 pages, a sewn softcover. Images are printed using photopolymer plates. Size is 5″ x 6″. Edition of 35. $25.

Specimens is a book in four parts. The narrative compares the speaker’s romantic relationship to the behaviors of poisonous and carnivorous insects. Or, more accurately, the speaker relays the ways in which her lover, an entomologist, compares her behavior to that of said insects. The idea came to me one day when I’d retreated outside to soak up some sunlight and await the muses. The original story is here, but the short version is that I was bitten in the yard by an unidentifiable insect, and somehow that led me to thinking about other things that came along to bite me, like love, and well, the rest is in the edition. The mantis was an obvious choice, but I was itching to carve a praying mantis, and the way my original statistics presented themselves made me laugh out loud. My source was in defense of the female mantis, who had such a bad rap, and came to her aid by saying, that in this particular study, which included a large sampling, males were devoured less than 5-31% of the time.

I knew I had to incorporate the carnivorous species of firefly, because it’s still so surprising to me that they have this behavior. The monarch butterfly was another good candidate, and of course the grasshopper nymph, which was the mysterious creature who bit me so fiercely each time I went sunbathing in the yard.

This series was letterpress printed using a variety of materials–some are reduction linoleum prints, some incorporate photopolymer plates. The text is printed using metal type. I’d never done a project using this simple single-sheet book before, and so for this project, it seemed like a good fit. I wanted these to read a bit like the captioned illustrations that I remember from science textbooks from my youth–the old “Fig. 1″ style of describing processes in the natural world. The result is tiny slices of a love story, told in four illustrations that make use of the “figure” and caption.

I found that I quite like the single-sheet booklet structure. I like that you can fold it out and see a large image, then read it as a tiny codex that only reveals bits of the whole image (not unlike a young relationship, right?). This let me play around with how much to reveal at any given moment–something else I like to think about with books. As an added challenge, I told myself I would make these in miniature, which means that, closed, they must measure less than three inches in every direction.

I did a split edition for this book: the size of the main edition is 35. These are printed on four different colors of ingres paper. Each sheet is just under 6″ x 12″ and folds down to just under 3″ square. These are $20 each, or $70 for the whole set. The deluxe edition is the same size, printed on Japanese Sakamoto paper. The deluxe edition comes in a cloth-covered box with an origami butterfly pinned inside (see top picture). There are 10 copies of the deluxe edition, priced at $165.

With apologies to Tom Robbins, this book was based on a trip that I took through Texas, Colorado, and New Mexico in 2011. The seeds for this book were printed a couple of summers before, when I visited two sites in particular that I found particularly inspiring. One was Ghost Ranch, in Abiquiu, NM. Ghost Ranch is famous for a variety of reasons, including a connection to Georgia O’Keeffe. But it was particularly inspiring to me because what was once a dude ranch has now been transformed into a place that benefits the surrounding community (and arguably a global one) in a meaningful way. The same is true of the Southwest School of Art in San Anonio, TX (featured above). Once a convent, and then an academy for nuns in training, it was saved from destruction by a truly inspiring group of women who had a vision of creating a school for artists.

The Jingu Tea Garden, also in San Antonio, was the place that sparked the idea for this book. I first went in 2007, and learned the haunting, yet remarkable story of how this abandoned rock quarry was transformed into a Japanese Tea Garden in the 1940s. You can read more about the history here, but suffice it to say that I was struck by the history and the power of this place, and what it says about our human nature. And so I started a project, funded by kickstarter, and raised enough funds to go back to Texas an dNew Mexico, and seek out more places that preserved significant historical structures in a way that benefited the surrounding community. I found that there were a lot more places than I expected: my travels took me to Roswell, Los Alamos, and Santa Fe–through national parks, famous landmarks, and hidden patches of desert.

From the Introduction: “In the summer of 2011, I traveled to historical sites in the southwest that inspired me because of the way they had been revived. The history and integrity of the buildings had been preserved in a way that now benefits the surrounding community. Often it seems that historical and cultural landmarks are preserved in a way that makes them more like museums – they become shells of the buildings they once were, and stand silent as tombs. But some of the sites I found on this tip have been resurrected – they maintain their histories while acting as a relevant and vibrant part of the community. I was moved by this transformation, and the people behind it. This book highlights eight locations that are a testament to the spirit of innovation and preservation.”

This book is 5.5″ x 6.5″, printed on Jerry French paper, bound in drumleaf fashion with a soft cover, 20 pages. It makes use of pressure prints based on drawings that I did on site and from photographs I took while traveling. My handwriting was reproduced using photopolymer plates. While most copies went to kickstarter contributors, there are a few set aside for sale, priced at $150.

Migration makes use of two parallel voices that work together to compare the narrator’s romantic encounters to bird behavior. The narrator describes a series of encounters that shaped the way she views love and partnership. Each memory described is paired with a second voice, like that of a birdwatcher or outside observer, describing a similar behavior exhibited by a bird.

Excerpt from the above spread: The cowbird pushes the eggs from other birds’ nests, replacing them with her own.

You learn early that you are not maternal. Take refuge in the fact that you know this about yourself—it will save you from men who want to be fathers more than husbands. Your mother will remind you that your clock is ticking, but it isn’t. Hers is. You’d known for years—since your friends first started having baby showers, since your cousins first asked you to baby-sit—that you were not mother material. You didn’t know how to hold babies, how to talk to them, what to do with them. It wasn’t that you didn’t like children, you just didn’t want any of your own. You couldn’t give a good reason why—and people always asked.
It just seemed to you that if you were meant to have a brood, you would have felt some impulse, some urge, and the truth was, you didn’t feel anything.

Like much of my work, these stories are taken from my life. They are true in many ways, and yet probably a fiction. Thought parts were real and parts were imagined, they all touched on an emotional truth that had real resonance at the time. Seeing the behavior mirrored in that of birds made it seem more natural at times, like it might not be so strange after all, and to me that was both intriguing and comforting. This book was printed solely with photopolymer plates, using my handwriting at times. The bird images are made from carving photopolymer plates. All of the paper in this edition is handmade by me–some pages are made from kozo, abaca, corn husks from my father’s garden, and my old clothes (and yes, some of them I would have been wearing when the moments I describe took place). Migration is 5.5″ x 8″ and is a hardcover case binding, 72 pages. Edition size is 45. $375.

This book (a collection of three volumes) was inspired by the Greek Furies. I’ve always been enamored by mythology, but something about the way they champion the lovelorn and heartbroken  stuck with me–especially their tendencies toward the devious and mischievous. Sometimes books come together in unusual ways for me, and this was one of those times. The text is an excerpt from a short story that I’d written a couple of years before (yes, it had to do with heartache…also a fire-eater), and the image of the fox came to me first. It seemed that one image wasn’t enough to tell this particular story, and I knew I wanted to experiment with a larger format. The more I pondered the vixen, the more she reminded me of the infamous Furies, and I began to see this as a series of three.

The crocodile came to me next, by way of the “eater of souls” in Egyptian mythology. (That one always stuck with me, too–this idea of a creature waiting for you in the afterlife, eager to weigh your heart against a feather. As the tale goes, if your heart was lighter than the feather, you passed. If it was not, you were devoured on the spot. Somehow she seemed appropriate for this story.) I’m not quite sure how the rooster came to be. I’ve always had a thing for fur, feathers, and scales–so I suppose a bird had to end up here somewhere. I kept seeing a rooster–it had to have a comb and impressive feathers. I’ll admit, I thought briefly of putting a rooster’s head on a female body, but that seemed too much of a stretch. Also, people may think I didn’t know the difference between a rooster and a hen, which may cause them to revoke my small-town Southern girl badge. At any rate, I took the liberty of throwing in a male. After all, this is an updated tale of the Furies. And in my “Fire Eater” story, the guy gets a little burned, too.

The result was three 18″ x 24″ woodcuts called “Smolder,” “Galvanize,” and “Devour.” I carved 3/4″ plywood, a mistake I won’t make again anytime soon (beware the ‘ply’ in plywood), and letterpress-printed them as three-color reductions. It made sense to do a larger edition, since these are reductions and can’t be reprinted, so I set aside 70 prints to be cut and folded into book form, and left 20 to remain uncut prints. Both versions are still available for sale.

A note about the binding here: this is yet another serendipitous moment. As I was thinking of the best way to engineer these prints to fold down into book form, I remembered a maze-like structure I was shown in graduate school that vaguely resembles a Z shape when opened out. It was called a “boustrophedon,” which no one could remember how to spell. When I looked it up online, I learned it comes from the Greek, meaning “the way the ox plows.” How perfect, that it would all come back to the Greeks.

Each boustrophedon folds down to 6″ x 6″ and has a hard cover, and together they are housed in a cloth-covered clamshell box. It seemed like a no-brainer to use a heart image for the covers, but it also made sense to create a bit of a puzzle. When all three books are arranged with the case, you can see the entire anatomical heart. Years later, this is still my favorite book.

Full sheet prints (19″ x 25″): $85 each. Set of 3 books with case (edition of 70): $325.