Landscape In Brown Paper Stock

We packed up Nellie and set off early in the morning for our workshop today at the San Francisco Center for the Book. SFCB is in a convenient part of San Francisco: close enough to the freeway to reach it quickly provided you have a map, but far enough from downtown so that there’s no problem parking. Our teacher, Karen Holden, is a poet as well as a book artist, and we did several writing exercises in addition to making a couple of quick books. She believes in letting the outside world flow into one’s writing as easily as possible. In our first exercise she primed this by randomly mentioning phrases to incorporate into the middle of a free writing exercise. Here’s a bit from mine:

The river sits under the fog, cleaning the air with thoughts floated up by fish. The field is a brown book, the furrows lines of type upon which is written the leavings of the plow.

We then made a landscape book, bound together with a simple stitch. Pica of course makes books like this all the time, but I’m much newer at such things, and found it to be a lot of fun. Above is my little California landscape book: our instructor gave us wonderful paper to work with.