Autumn is for being sad. Its not a question if I am actually sad or not, although there is much to be sad about *gestures at the last news headline you read*. My friend Katrina reminded me it is grief season in Chinese medicine sense. My running playlist feels like it was made for a woman in a 90’s film who just lost it all. I take long walks and think of the glances I’ve shared with people I see in the street, we live out whole love and lives together in those moments and I miss them all. My calendar is weirdly full for someone who does not like to not be busy. Our mad dash to socialize and hold each other before February comes and we’re too cold to leave our houses or remember we even had friends to leave our houses for. Humans are just like squirrels.
Its canonically Meg Ryan fall. It is for skirts even if you aren’t wearing them and lovers and romance even if there is no one to hold. To be a woman expressing a feeling in fall is to be alive.
I work in a little shop once a week. I thought it would be a nice break from my computer and my therapist reminded me that people don’t get jobs for a break. I hear Frank Sinatra play in my head as I open the door and turn on the lights. I feel like Meg Ryan in You’ve got mail, but really just any Meg Ryan because to be Meg Ryan in fall is to be cute in a store but also angry and pissed off at the proverbial man. Customers come into the shop and ask me their opinion on the clothing they’ve picked out, I feel like an anthropologist in the shop. I texted Jacquline last week “I think I have to work in a shop forever if I want to be a writer”
All artists are Adele, in that we must make our great works, present them on the stage, but then go live life. Years between each of our masterpieces.
This space isn’t for great essays, I mean it can be sometimes. It has been in the past. Sometimes I really nail it but most of the time I am fucking around because thats what artists do. We fuck around but we also must fuck around in public enough to see what works. Artists are historically horrible at knowing what in their work is working. There is also great work that hasn’t made it here yet – or ever. Making art is about identifying the container. An idea isn’t inherently an essay because I am a writer. It is my job to translate the idea into the medium. Working in a shop give me the time to mull that over in my head while I steam clothes and post the lastest baggu collection on instagram. To have to time sit with the idea. To research. I don’t call this the creators dispatch for nothing, I am an explorer and life is my trail. Little Shops and all.
I run and I walk and I listen to jazz and I live life. Because art is only made in the living. When I set out to distinctly not write and a poem floods my minds eye. I knit on the couch and watch horrible BBC crime dramas and a play gets written, a paitning and a song. I rush to my notes app, a flurry of half baked at best ideas.
God bless the notes app, really – the artists library of ideas.
I read a poem to a room of writers and I am told my words are “relentless” and praises for my “irreverence”. I just feel pissed off. I like my anger, I like what I do with my anger, I like what we create from our anger. Anger keeps me warm. Anger is for fall and for Meg Ryan. A cute upper lip quivering with rage at the thought of her mothers store going out of business. All of my problems are black and white in the rom com of the autumn.
It is after all, Meg Ryan fall. The mad dash to collect the nuts before we all hibernate.
Thanks for reading the Creators Dispatch. A weekly essay about the creative journey! Here I write about being an artist, human, angry woman on the internet and living in the dumpster fire of a world that says not to make your art. If what I say here inspires you (or pisses you off 🥰) share my work with the group chat, or your best friends neighbour. Word of mouth is the most special and radical way of sharing – plus it helps put the Zuck 🏄♂️ out of business 👼
FINDINGS 🗺️
TONIGHT! Rachel Smiley in our digital studio this month for How To Make Money 💸 // Book keeping 101 For Artists with New Moon Book keeping 🛸 🌚
Did you miss last weeks post? Like I said Im angry 👼
Big lvoe and many blessings for the ideas in the fall 🍂
Phoebe 💕
*typos are left to reflect the fury passion and 3D humaness of being a passionate freak in the world – and you know not a robot *beep boop* I am just a human girlie living on earth with a mortal brain 🤸♀️
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