The Habit of Art by Kelcey Ervick

I’m thinking less about the psychology of rejection (it sucks, we get it!) than about the strategy of submissions. And it might be worth making some quick notes about QUANTITY, QUALITY, and COURAGE in shooting your shots. Whether you want to score in the World Cup or apply for grants and fellowships, you have to shoot a lot of shots. I applied for 5 grants/awards and got 3 of them.

In conclusion! I’m continuing with my New Year’s Imperative to Think Small, which will include 10-minute daily drawings, but I’m doing a general reset: 1. Cleaning my studio/office. 2. Instead of thinking I have to decide HOW to tell the story, I’m going to do a bunch of “tiny experiments” (I have the book but haven’t read it yet) to see where it leads. 3. I’ll focus on going deeper into WHAT story I’m telling and WHY. 4. More friends and family.

The next day: I’ve been writing this while still experiencing the trip, so I’m not sure that I even scratched the surface of why it felt so transformative. One thing that strikes me is that when the idea was floated on a zoom call a while a back—let’s all meet up in Maine together—we all just said YES. I kept thinking it would fall through, but it didn’t. And I’m so glad The other thing—and this could/should/may eventually be its own post—is that we are all self-identified Type-A artists.

The answer: make nature comics! Hello dear reader: I find the idea of nature journaling pretty intimidating. Nature journals tend to be filled with beautifully and accurately drawn flowers and bird species—often accompanied by elegantly lettered dates, locations, latinate terminology, serious scientific information, and deep thoughts. So when I was invited to give a workshop on “nature notebooks” for a local park district a while back, I was excited but I was also concerned.

Dear Reader, My friend K. Woodman-Maynard is doing a great series on her Substack, Creating Comics, about her practice of making diary comics (I’ll link to it at the end), and it got me thinking about my own occasional practice and how I’d like to do it more intentionally this summer.

After each class session, I took a picture of my students’ drawings, and at the end of the semester, the peer mentor for the class (Hi, Dublin!) traced over the drawings to make digital copies in Procreate, which I repurposed here. Big thanks to Scoot McMahon for letting me share an inside look at his workshop. Check out his awesome comics here! And follow him on Instagram.

The fact is: I love April in all its Aprilness. It’s my birthday month. It’s a rainy rainbow month. I love how, as Edna St. Vincent Millay says, “April / Comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers.” April fills you with an urge to make art—then does all it can to stop you. April is so chaotic that last week I forgot to run my weekly Letters to Dead Authors & Artists post.

The book I referenced by Robert Olen Butler, From Where You Dream, has shaped how I think about the role of the unconscious in creating stories, from “dreamstorming” to drafting to revising. The book is about writing fiction, but the principles can apply to memoir and graphic narratives (which is what I’m working on). Speaking of Big Projects, the next zoom hangout for paid subscribers is next Saturday, April 11, 2026 at 11am ET. Info and links to register are under the Paid Subscribers tab.

To recap: Thinking about structure in a book or story means thinking not just about a cool idea or beautiful sentences but about your story’s length, time frame, plot/transformation, overall organization/order of information. I didn’t get have time to get into narrative distance and perspective, but this shapes the structure too. (This is the difference between Woolf’s “biographer” in Orlando vs the free indirect discourse of Mrs.

Hello, friends. Have I mentioned that I was a goalkeeper? :) These are the opening pages of my graphic memoir, The Keeper: Soccer, Me, and the Law That Changed Women’s Lives, published in 2022.