Within a year of giving birth I started making art to process my experience. That was the beginning of This is My Brain on Motherhood.
Seven years later, I think I’ve fully integrated the identity of parent.*
Which means I’d like to complete this collection, celebrate it somehow, and then move on to making art on other themes (like neurodivergence or perhaps chronic illness.)
One of the pieces I’ve struggled to complete is a soft sculpture brain made with baby clothes. From the first little brain noodle (the white washcloth center of the left hemisphere) I had the vision.†
But sewing through layers of fabric is hard on the hands and pretty quickly I had split my skin and it was too painful to continue. I finally realized the easy injury and slow healing was due to a connective tissue disorder (more on that soon).
I tried every thimble under the sun and none of them were dexterous enough to give me the fine motor control I wanted. I put the project down for months on end and picked it up a bit here and there – always ending up a little worse for wear after working on it.
Eventually I discovered the needle puller from Mx. Domestic (shown above!) and was able to sew the second hemisphere of the brain.
But I still felt stuck. It took a while to realize why. The form was coming together, but I was lost on its purpose. I still had no clarity on what the brain was meant to represent.
It all felt a little too sentimental to be fine art, but too weird to not be.
Sometimes my art begins with a concept I want to represent. Other times I start with the form first and find the meaning during the process.
Least week, I saw an upcoming deadline for a project about chronic illness. And I suddenly realized, with a few changes, this piece has the potential to represent brain fog. A symptom of new motherhood and hEDS (one of my new chronic illness diagnosis’.)
Instead of a complete brain my vision is now for half wool roving to spill out representing brain fog.
Ending with this piece feels very full circle.
It wasn’t my first work about motherhood, but was certainly one of the earliest. This piece held space for me to reflect as I sewed scraps of newborn onesies, toddler tees, and tiny socks.
Having a connection to chronic illness – a theme I’d like to explore next – feels right. Perhaps this will even be a work that belongs in both collections.
I’ve intended to write a blog post about ARIM for oh, six or seven years. At this point I’ll probably give it a few months and write a full retrospective.
This body of work was created with the intention of eventually hosting a solo art show. A pop up where I hung my art in my house and invited a handful of friends over to see it.
Little did I know my art would travel to galleries across the U.S. and even be exhibited in New York City.
I have other visions now, for celebrating the collection virtually, in a form that isn’t geographically limited.
But I’m still working out the details.
Would you be interested in…
“This is My Brain on Motherhood” art book / monograph
set of postcards
art prints
virtual artist talk
If so hit reply and let me know!
This project would be slotted for autumn or winter (after the summer book launch for How it Feels to Me.)
I’ll be back next week with more neurodiversity chat.
Perhaps literally! I’ve been working on a new podcasting set up.
If there’s a topic you’d like me to cover send me a note and let me know.
Thanks always for your support.
Cheers,
FOOTNOTES
* I knew autistics struggled with transitions, but this was one heck of a transition. I did NOT expect it would take this long to exit “crisis mode” and feel like I’m a person again. Nevertheless, I’m glad that making these pieces and creating Entwined & Ember were portals for me to explore the identities of mother and parent and what they means for me.
† Shoutout to Mindy Sue Meyers for hosting the soft sculpture workshop and for encouraging me – even when I completely ignored her instructions and took things in my own direction.
Over the last decade I have been neuroqueering my creative practice. Setting aside neurotypical, able bodied, and capitalist expectations for consistency, branding, and profit like the ill fitting shoes they are.*
Looking back, the times in my life I was rigidly consistent I was run deeply outside my own capacity, which over time took a toll on my health (both mental and physical.)
Allowing my creative projects to fluctuate with my capacity, as a chronically ill autistic caregiver means that they ebb & flow. Seasons when my time and energetic capacity expand so does my creative practice. When I am experiencing a pain flare or focusing on caregiving challenges my projects shift into dormancy or ideation.
Having many different mediums means there is always something to fit my capacity.
I NEED ART TO LIVE.
Art is how I self regulate, how I co-regulate with my child, and how I process lived experience and the world around me.
Without art I go to a dark place.
For years, I had inflexible routines and self imposed deadlines that did not serve me. But the newly discovered fluidity of my creative ecosystem has allowed me to flourish in unexpected ways.
This meander map is based on my 2025 Artist’s Log which tracked the time spent on each creative project over the course of the year.
These undulating ribbons represent the four main streams of creativity I pursued in 2025.
Yellow: visual art
Green: self publishing and writing
Blue: redesigning website & blogging
Purple: zines
The process of crafting these prints took several months. Calculating stats, making a graph, drafting the meanders, testing printmaking techniques, paper & inks, creating collagraph plates with unraveling cotton twine, and printing each plate onto wet paper using the Provisional Press.
The prints were digitally combined for the zine cover and overlaid with a key on transparent vellum. This layer can be removed to display the zine as a diptych. The zine was hand typed on my 1950s Smith-Corona typewriter.
The concept and color palette were inspired by the meander maps of geologist and cartographer Harold Fisk.
The above text is from February’s zine. If you’d like a copy you can subscribe for $5 a month or buy a single zine in my shop.
Here’s a peek at how the layers work together with the transparency.
Here’s a peek at how the prints are coming out (ignore the buckled untrimmed paper). They will all be flattened, signed, and numbered. Each print is unique. Remaining prints will be added to my shop, and will be priced at $65.
Collagraph is a printmaking process I learned in university. It feels good to return to it after so much time. I shared more about the process (along with a few other test prints) on the blog a few weeks ago.
Thank You
To everyone who sent kind messages and preordered books after last week’s post about illustrating neurodivergence. Gracie & I really appreciate you and very excited to get this picture book into your hands.
If you’d like to preorder a limited edition hardcover you can do so here.
(Paperbacks will be coming soon at a lower price point.)
In Case You Missed It
If you’re having a hard time with the state of the world I wrote this for you a couple weeks ago.
* Neuroqueering is used here as the verb meaning, “the practice of queering (subverting, defying, disrupting, liberating oneself from) neuronormativity and heteronormativity simultaneously” as coined by Nick Walker Ph. D.
My neurodivergent experience includes time blindness, which is magnified when working on a creative project and reaching flow state. This has some benefits, but one downside is that I have no idea how much time I’m sinking into individual projects.
UPDATE: After writing this one of you kindly sent me the EARLY time tracker app which does almost the same thing with much less friction. I’ve been playing with it for January and honestly it will save a ton of time that I spent tinkering with spreadsheets. (Thanks Katie!)
Spoiler alert, my pie chart has become a north star for my creative process.
My January spreadsheet started out by tracking writing and self publishing time like I do during NaNoWriMo. (Which is why zines don’t show up below.) When I reached days that I didn’t write because I was making visual art I added more columns.
I can guarantee this pie would be almost all admin if I had not seen how big those wedges were and made the choice to dedicate more time to personal projects. Like my Artist’s Residency in Motherhood (ARIM) and my fantasy novel which I made a mood board for.
When I saw how powerful this was I realized I wanted to track all of my creative projects this way. So you’ll see more categories moving forward including Mawd which is a working title for my novel.
At the same I time I decided to migrate and completely redesign my website. Needless to say these were not the most balanced months, but I feel strongly about using this data to course correct and not to judge myself.
With that in mind, I fully believe this awareness did keep the web design wedge from completely taking over the circle. And I managed to carve out nearly a quarter of my time to zine making.
I was still deep in the weeds of web design during March, but I knew I couldn’t continue the pace. I was noticing screen induced migraines and trying to spent more time on other projects. I also added a column for gardening.
By April I realized my dream of republishing all of my blog posts within a single year was not healthy. I’ve archived everything, but I use so many images and videos that simply importing them didn’t work and everything has to be reformatted by hand. I’m not sure when or if I’ll ever move everything. So I decided to focus on any blog posts I wanted to link to and have been moving those.
This freed up a lot of time for various projects. The big pink wedge is work on my gleeman’s cloak to prepare for meeting Sharon Gilham, the costume designer for the Wheel of Time.
May was incredibly balanced looking back. The weather was nice so we spent plenty of time outside. I made a zine about Chaos Gardening. Chipped away at my website. And kept working on my cloak.
You can see the wedge for self publishing where I was ordering proofs from various printers (the very definition of “hurry up and wait.”)
This wedge is even more well balanced than May!
Almost a full color wheel which is funny considering June’s zine was Spectrum.
I’m now in a place where I see these kind of projects as essential to both my creative process and my mental health.
This reset over the summer (when my energy is the lowest) was key to being able to self publish Entwined & Ember without burning out.
Moving into August I was designing a lot of visual schedules and modular calendar elements for home education. I also started sinking some serious time into Entwined & Ember working alongside our copy editor. But I still reserved over 25% of the pie for other projects including zine making and gardening.
I spent a huge amount of time making zines I did not sell at NWA Maker’s Faire (which I blogged about here.) It was mostly a great experience, but also exhausting. I pretty much crashed directly after even though it was only half a day.
I keep wanting to attend more events, but when I do I’m reminded how hard they are on my autistic nervous system and chronically ill body. I don’t think I could manage a full day event – much less a whole weekend.
Suddenly Entwined & Ember were in final edits. Past years this would have been all encompassing, but you can still see 40% of my time put into other things: zines, gardening, blogging, even a bit of ideation for my novel (which was definitely a back burner project this year.)
Launch month! Some of this was final proofing and the rest was fulfilling orders. I balanced the admin with zine making and two Wheel of Time related projects.
When I started this anthology and art journal I had no idea how much energy they would take. I truly wish I’d tracked my hours since the beginning.
If you somehow missed book launch Entwined & Ember are now available worldwide in hardcover and paperback. As well as free community copies to anyone experiencing financial hardship.
I’m typing this on December 29, but I’ve estimated the time I’ll put in the next couple of days. (I’m getting much better at realizing how long things take.) The biggest wedge this month is actually visual art! Which is something I haven’t had much capacity for this year.
I’m actually working on diagram of my creative process based on this data for ILSSA’s open call. It’s inspired by a meander map showing the ebb and flow of various projects through the year. I’m still in the experimental phases, but if all goes well this will be the next art print for subscribers.
What’s next?
We recently decided on a printer for the limited edition hardcovers of How it Feels to Me – a picture book about neurodivergence and sensory processing I’m creating with illustrator Gracie Klumpp.
We’re a little behind schedule (due to the print quality issues), but are aiming to release the book next Spring!
Here’s a peek.
I’m not a spreadsheet wizard, but if you’d like to take a look at my Artist Log template and copy it for yourself you can see it here. If you’re fiddling around with it I recommend typing in numbers to make sure everything is adding up correctly. I changed mine every month so this isn’t really a template as much as a working model you can make your own.
If your creative process was a pie chart (or another shape) what would it be?
Cheers,
P.S. I “should” proofread this, but it’s nearly 1 am and I’m nearing migraine trigger territory. I may come back or I may not. Honestly, there are more important ways to spend my time this week. 💫
Even as a kid I would collect notes and information, magazine pages, booklets. I think it’s something of a neurodivergent impulse. Autistic folks often love collecting things and I’ve only just realized that part of that drive for me is in collecting information. I love learning things, but I also love cataloguing what I’m learning.
(Important to note this is not a universal love among autistics. There are a lot of different ways our passions and interests can show up.)
Through the years I’ve tried on different styles of note taking, but I’ve always loved the idea of a centralized system. The problem is I kept trying on other people’s systems and they were never the quite right fit.
Recently, I’ve been working out how to create my ideal note taking system.
A caution, dear reader, not to try and recreate my own system for yourself. But I hope by sharing this it can shatter some misconceptions about research and note taking and open up the realm of possibilities to you.
If you’ve been around for a while you’ll notice this is kind of an amalgamation of several different note taking projects I have had. Gathering up everything under one roof as it were. Over the years I have tried: physical notebooks, file folders, the Pocket app, Evernote app, traveler’s notebooks, blog posts, podcasts, Notion, and finally a library card catalogue drawer. Each of those attempts was, in a way, trying to create a system that I saw outside of myself and they were all too rigid.
My new system is a digital analogue hybrid.
I love handwriting notes. Typing them. Shuffling around papers. For years my ideal system (the one of my university mentor) was a series of matching composition notebooks. (1)
Then it was digital. I went “all in” on Evernote and it didn’t take long to reach the threshold where they wanted to charge a monthly fee. I think I was between degrees at this point and couldn’t imagine paying for that so I pivoted back to paper again.
Austin Kleon blogged about commonplace books and I was hooked. I tried to create a color coded indexing system. I tried numerical systems.
The trouble with notebooks is no matter what kind of system you use it can be hard to find what you’ve recorded in the past. (2)
After a while I gave up on that and started sharing monthly updates on Patreon. A round up of everything I’ve read, watched, or listened to with some of my favorite quotes.
I always circle back to physical though. Early 2019 I tried a physical notebook to document what I wanted to share to Patreon. This was shortly before Davy was born and it quickly went out the window.
But the digital format survived. It lives on as my newsletter.
The trouble is when I’m really in research collecting mode I have more than I can reasonably share in this format. And it’s also not easily search-able.
So in 2020 I started a Notion. That also has stuck with me, but there are some caveats.
It’s a third party app that could disappear or start charging at any moment.
And I haven’t kept up with cataloguing the details like I did in the beginning and it’s starting to become a bit of a tangled mess.
Part of the problem is I created this system when Davy was still napping in my lap a lot. So I had ages to poke around on my phone. Now I have other things to do and this type of cataloguing is not at my top of priorities. Here’s a screenshot where you can see I no longer take the time to fill out “by” and “type” which are kind of essential when it comes to finding what I’m looking for.)
So I swing back analogue…
When Davy started school I read yet another book about note taking and I fell in love with the idea of writing or typing up all my notes on index cards in my “free time.” But Davy was only in school for half days and by the time you take the commute into account I was lucky to get a couple of hours each day. I spent most of them writing a book and making art.
Now we’re home educating so it’s all a muddle of life and creativity without any clearly delineated “studio time.
If you’re neurodivergent you may have a similar cycle…
Get excited by a project.
Find a creative spark to create a system.
Abandon system.
Feel guilty.
But something was different this time around.
In all of the research about neurodiversity and autism to support David I am learning to support myself. And to reframe my perceived “deficits” as differences.
Instead of feeling guilty I got curious.
Why did some methods work better than others? What would really work best for me?
When I switched up my Substack schedule I freed up some mental bandwidth.
That extra capacity is really key here. I rarely innovate when I’m at capacity.
The second magic ingredient was playing around.
I was reading a new book and wanted to take notes. Instead of using Notion I followed my impulse and wrote them up on index cards. I knew it wasn’t something I could maintain, but I did it anyway.
Meanwhile I’d been thinking about how to document and share content in a more casual way online. The weekly Substack posts had been too time consuming, but I knew if I slowed my publishing schedule to monthly (or even fortnightly) I would have so much I wanted to share and document in the in between.
Then Austin Kleon linked to his Tumblr. I played around with a Tumblr account for a couple weeks and fell in love with the ease of it.
Find something lovely.
Share it.
Type in some tags.
It didn’t take long for me to see the caveats though.
Mostly I was still creating content for someone else’s machine. Tumblr is old (in internet years) and who knows how long it will be around. Also, people started seeing and liking my posts and I was afraid I might start feeling social media feels about the value of posts based on their engagement.
But there were also things I loved about it! One of which was how visual it was! My brain loves scrolling through a visual archive versus something that looks like a giant excel sheet (no offense Notion.)
What I needed was a private Tumblr. Somewhere I could archive notes, images, even videos or podcasts. With a simple tagging system.
Enter the microblog.
I’m not sure how long it took me to realize that I could just make this on my own website.
Not a blog, but a microblog. My blog is a place to share long form writing with other people. Whereas this microblog is a collection of bits and bobs. A place to archive research and document my creative process as a tool for myself. Which I might sometimes point to.
I love it.
It feels like such a simple way to make a visual record of my thoughts and ideas. If you scroll through it’s essentially like taking a peek inside my brain. What am I reading? What am I thinking about? What was the obsession of the day?
I am fascinated by the process of ideas unfolding and layering and coming alive. It’s something I’m always unraveling when I look at other people’s work and it’s part of why I love following artists and creators online. (3)
What I got stuck on was the name. At first I called it scraps, but that didn’t really fit. Eventually I realized the answer had been there all along.
Welcome to the Chronofile
Sometime along the way I started calling my notes “The Chronofile.” You can see the hashtag in early Instagram posts and a note taking folder on Notion.
The name come from one of my creative muses – Buckminster Fuller.
He was a brilliant inventor and artist and writer and is known largely as the creator of the geodesic dome. I could go on and on about him (and I probably will some other time) but for now I’ll explain that he too was an obsessive notetaker. He documented everyday of his life in something he called the Dymaxion Chronofile. His file includes “more than 140,000 papers and 1,700 hours of audio and video” (all of which are archived in physical form and take up 1,400 linear feet.) (4)
Google Search results for “dymaxion chronofile” December 4, 2023
All the more reason to go digital! I do not have that kind of space. 😂
But there’s something about analogue.
Writing things down engages a different part of the brain than typing. (5)
Not to mention the physical record and embodied act of moving around notes and seeing them in visual conversation with each other.
Physical notecards of my favorite quotes – in a card catalogue drawer, and a searchable digital archive – hosted on my own website.
I can easily type up notes on my phone (using the Squarespace app) and then later jot them down or type them onto a card for my physical file. This also adds a layer of curation for my physical chronofile.
It also means the letter and number codes (used above) are largely irrelevant due to the search-ability of my digital chronofile. Which is quite a relief because they never felt natural – just another outside system I was trying to use to reinvent the wheel. Why create analogue reference systems when digital search does that so easily?
I fully accept this process will shift and change. But what I’m trying to do is to utilize the best features of each medium.
Analogue for muscle memory. For embodiment. For serendipitous connections. And for aesthetic share-ability.
Digital for search-ability. For time lord technology (fitting a lot in quite a small physical space). And for the ability to include photos, videos, and audio files.
Embracing my inner Magpie
The real delight here is that scaling back my Substack publishing schedule has freed up bandwidth to rekindle my passion for research.
This hybrid system feels in alignment with my brain and the way it works and that makes all the difference.
The Saga Continues
One of the coolest things about Substack (or blogs) is that you can update posts as you have more information. Here’s a space I’m creating to do that as I evolve my note taking practice.
2/9/24: I’m experimenting with adapting this method to Obsidian. It resolves a few problems I was having with the Squarespace app and hosts everything locally instead of using my web hosting space. I may still use the Chronofile on my website occasionally as a microblog, but I’ve taken it off the site navigation for now.
I’ll be honest I was drawn in by the constellation visuals (these are called graphs.) I saw this twitter thread from Morgan Harper Nichols and was immediately enchanted.
My own graphs are still small for now, but it’s cool seeing how ideas connect.
There are lots of aesthetic reasons I’m really enjoying the app, but from a practical side it makes sense too. Instead of uploading your data into an app you’re creating text files and nesting folders on your own computer.
This means if Obsidian goes defunct you’ll still have all of your notes.
And that’s the main reason I’m transitioning away from Notion.
The stars are just a bonus. 💫
Still here? You must be a creative kindred.
How do you collect notes and information?
Do you prefer analogue or digital or a bit of both?
Thanks for being here.
FOOTNOTES
I might have stuck with this one for simplicity sake, but around this time the paper and binding quality of composition notebooks went right down. I still remember the gummy goo of one particular notebook binding that peeled up. *shudders*
2. At least it is for me. Kudos to you if you’ve figured it out.
3. After watching every single one of the Vlogbrother’s videos I finally read John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars. And it felt like reading a book by a friend. I could see all of the random obsessions he’d had over the years come together in his book. The same for Hank Green’s An Absolutely Remarkable Thing.
4. Dymaxion Chronofile:an archive of nearly every day of Buckminster Fuller’s life. Atlas Obscura. July 11, 2013.
Reconnecting to The Wheel of Time has reminded me what creativity felt like before it got all tangled up in career and profession and entrepreneurship.
Everything I did became fodder for “content” on Instagram, YouTube, or (eventually) Substack.
I love documenting the process, but the frame of creative business definitely impacted the types of things I chose to make and spend my time on. This was particularly tangled up in “positioning” myself as a professional artist & author.
Certain parts of my identity got lost along the way. I’m in the process of untangling it all which I wrote about a few months ago: I’m not a brand. I’m a human. 🫀
What I didn’t share then is that rediscovering my humanity was largely tied up in a book series called The Wheel of Time.
14 Blue Wheel of Time Books (image credit: Juniper Books)
During my teenage years I had basically no friends my own age. What I did have was The Wheel of Time. I logged in to a fansite called Wotmania every morning and later on a fan fiction site called Silklatern. The interactions I had with other fans was the one place that I really “fit in”.
Navigating two degrees as an undiagnosed autistic took pretty much all of my social energy. During that time I completely lost touch with fandom and reading for fun. By the time I finished my postgraduate studies I’d pretty much forgotten what it felt like to get lost in a book.
Enter 2020. I had a one year old baby. The world was chaos. And I turned to… The Wheel of Time. I pulled the Eye of the World off my shelf and fell into a world of magic that I knew and loved. The characters were old friends and the story was comforting in its familiarity, but that wasn’t all.
Rereading the books awakened something in me.
A creative spark. It is no coincidence that these are the books I was reading when I starting writing my first book, Discover Your Creative Ecosystem.
The writing of Robert Jordan just has this effect on me. I love other authors and other books, but the Wheel of Time is etched into my bones.
Myself in a multi colored patchwork gleeman’s cloak at WotCon 2023. Thanks to the volunteer photographers at WotCon for this shot.
It’s hard to explain. It’s… ineffable.
But there must be some kind of soul connection to something in this story for me. Why do we love the stories we love?It’s something I’m really curious about. It always feels flat and superficial when I try to explain.
The Wheel of Time has always inspired me to create. I high school I filled notebooks and notebooks with world building. I made sketches of costumes and drafted stories and put myself to sleep imagining characters in worlds of my own.
I gave up writing somewhere along the way, but after self publishing my first book I’ve also started writing fiction again. I’ve been working on a fantasy story that I’d like to tell for the last two NaNoWriMo’s and I’m ready to start working on it year round.
Meanwhile I have felt the ta’veren tug (if you know you know) pulling me deeper and deeper into WoT fandom community.
It’s becoming an important part of my life so you can probably expect to hear more about it here.
It all started in March when I created a muppet style puppet for a song parody contest… an in world version of These are the People in Your Neighborhood. The first project I’ve done purely for creative joy in YEARS. 🤯
Fluffy purple Ogier puppet with large ping pong ball eyes, a wide purple nose, and tufted ears. Ogier are book loving creative souls and I feel a deep kinship with them.
This was in no way for my portfolio, content marketing, or even something for my family. It was a gift for the Wheel of Time community and complete joy to make.
I really loved the challenge of creating in a brand new medium (I’d never made a puppet before) and figuring it out through trial and error. I drew on various creative skills in a way I haven’t done since working on set and props during my undergraduate degree.
Almost immediately after finishing it I jumped into another project. A gleeman’s cloak.
Something I noticed about making something for me was that I didn’t have to fuss over setting up a camera to film or creating perfect process photos.
I wasn’t making this for DIY content. I was making it for me.
Because of this I worked for many hours at the kitchen table (much less photogenic than my studio) simply because I could cut squares or I could sew while Davy role played as Link from Zelda.
Multicolored and textured patches for my cloak. These are 209 out of 350 patches required.
I sat down to write about the cloak itself today, but instead I found myself wanting to share the story behind how it came to be.
The shift that opened up “time” for something like this. News flash: I didn’t actually have more time. I just used my time differently. I spent a similar amount of time last summer making this.
And the value I’m finding in creative joy.
Let’s discuss.
What would you make if you had a dedicated period of time where you couldn’t do anything productive and had to let yourself play?
