Dear Sarah - 019

Apocalyptic watercolour - Lessons from the Lifeboat

Dear Sarah - January 19, 2025

I love the fact we don't have a strict plan to follow, that we are exploring and simply staying committed to making a drawing of some sort each day. I admire your discipline and willingness to tackle the fundamentals. I feel as though I'm in a bit of a feverish mode - I'm blaming the lingering effects of jetlag and the overstimulation caused by my readings for class. This week, we are taking a look at T. S. Eliot's The Wasteland and that has impacted my middle-of-the night visions. I keep having these lines of ... something (poetry? prose? nonsense?) crowding into my head, which seem to be deeply meaningful at 3 am and which I can barely decipher the next morning.

Various apocalyptic visions have been haunting my dreams and last night, these lines insisted on being captured in my Notes app:

Has anyone escaped

the sea change

rising?

So, I decided to attempt to illustrate the emotion underlying those words.

Easier, I think, than trying to draw the truly disturbing dream that followed - described in this cryptic note to self:

Woman has 7 babies, one of which is a puppy. They were as cozy with cats on a sofa as anyone.

What the heck? I do wonder, sometimes, what goes on in my subconscious.

It was great to see you again today (Zoom is not as good as across the table with tasty bakery treats, but a balm for my soul nonetheless). Getting back to work on our novel felt great! Who knew a real-time voice-changing app could be so easy to find and straightforward to use? Sometimes, research is the most fun part of the writing process.

Dear Nikki - January 19, 2025

I was inspired by your vibrant drawing/painting of your dream (Not Waving but Drowning?) to get up off the couch and use the watercolour pencils Kianna lent me. Unfortunately, she did not lend me a yellow pencil, so I had to sub in orange on the inside of the jug, which was unsatisfactory. I don't have any watercolour paper yet so there was a sogginess factor to deal with as I experimented with the pencils (after watching a YouTube video). Not an entirely successful effort, but I learned some things: orange is not the new yellow; I need watercolour paper and better brushes; it's not as easy as it looks.

I'm excited about getting back to the book, now that things between Randy Rose and Dirty Don are heating up. Can't wait to read what you just wrote! And will try to get some writing done in the coming week. I call this "pushing the pram"--moving the baby forward.

I keep an actual notebook and pen beside my bed to jot down the random words and phrases that come to me in the night. They usually make perfect sense in the moment but defy interpretation in the morning. I think we could both use a sleep untroubled by violent apocalyptic visions.

Glad you are only one timezone away now, even if, as you say, Zoom is no substitute for bakery treats on a converted lifeboat. If we ever run a workshop for writers who want to explore co-writing, we could call it Lessons from the Lifeboat.

(Just joining us? These letters chronicle our full year of daily drawings and accompanying correspondence/conversation. Learn more about Sarah Harvey here. More info about me can be found here.)