Flights of Foundry Signpost

         This weekend I’ll be participating in Flights of Foundry, an all-virtual, global, interdisciplinary convention for the speculative arts.  Since this will be my first time at Flights of Foundry, I can’t tell you much about what it will be like, but nevertheless I’ve made my usual pre-con signpost to point out more resources for anyone interested in the programming I’m on.

• Reading - Once again I’ve got my reading scheduled early in the con before I have a chance to advertise it at my other appearances!  Still, this could be interesting because I’ve got a 50 minute slot, which will give me time to answer lots of questions, take requests, and share a lot more than is usually possible.  (As long as anyone comes, of course!)

        All I’ll share here is the listing of all my published writing.

• Art Showcase - I’m not entirely sure what to expect from this one, but the resources I want to highlight are

        All my currently available work listed on my web page

        My handout of materials, tools, and instructions for making relief block prints

        Process - all the blog posts talking about my own process for particular pieces

        Step-by-Step - all the blog posts giving instructions on particular techniques

• What Makes Good Character Design - As I look through past posts on my process for particular pieces (to see them all, see the link above), I find that I haven’t much discussed the character design of humans!  But here are a few posts that may be relevant.

        Jubjub Bird

        Grand Marhoot

        Portrait of the Artist with Muses

        Billy Goats Gruff (and Troll)

• Finding Hope Through Creativity - Here are just a few posts, mostly about the importance of stories with hope, and the use of spec fic to imagine hopeful futures.

        A Desperate Little Exhortation About (Bitter)Sweetness and Light

        Happy Endings

        A Bit of Hope

        Books for Hope

        Negativity Bias

        Toxic Positivity

        The Tolstoy Fallacy

        Writing the Future

        Ursula LeGuin Says It Right

        Art Changes People

        International Peace Day

        Writing While Stressed

Schindler's Landscapes

         Here’s a linoleum block print by Deborah Schindler (USA), entitled “Medieval Forest.”  It has a very interesting blend of organic and geometric forms, and in many ways seems more African than Medieval to me.  Compare, for example, with the work of Azaria Mbatha.  On the other hand, there are medieval illuminations that use a similar style of abstract designs to fill in backgrounds and borders, while foreground elements are laid out across them.  I wonder whether Schindler was drawing inspiration from specific works, or was just evoking this from her imagination.

        In another piece by Schindler, called “Homing Pigeons,” you can see the influence of medieval art in the icon-like shape of the birds, and the rotationally symmetric arrangement as of decorative tiles.  I like the way Schindler makes a connection between the modern and medieval worlds, a theme that appears frequently in her work.  Also interesting is the background pattern of lines that suggest the shapes of roofs, as if the entire landscape were wall-to-wall houses in every inch that isn’t highway.  Visually it makes an effective background against which both light highway and black pigeons can pop, but when you look closely it seems to add a commentary about the modern landscape.

        Modern highway with birds, or medieval forest without animals, both pieces by Schindler are interesting.

[Pictures: Medieval Forest, linoleum cut by Deborah Schindler;

Homing Pigeons, linoleum cut by Schindler (Images from WashingtonPrintmakers.com).]

Lum's Spirits

         Today’s wood block prints are by Bertha Lum (USA, 1869-1954).  Lum was one of many western artists who fell in love with eastern art at the end of the nineteenth century, but unlike many others, she followed her interest seriously.  She was first exposed to Japanese printmaking through Arthur Wesley Dow, who was responsible for teaching Japanese printmaking styles and techniques to many American artists, (including Frances Hammel Gearhart and Margaret Jordan Patterson).  Lum, however, went to the source.  In a seven-week(!) honeymoon to Japan she found a tutor and bought carving tools, and then a few years later she went back to Japan to work with a block cutter for two months and a printer for another month.  A few years after that she was back in Japan for another six months… and so on.  Later she also went to China to study woodcut methods there, and eventually split her time between California, China, and Japan for the rest of her life.

        Lum was interested not only in the art of Japan, but also in its mythology and legends, and she made a number of wood block prints illustrating spirits of various sorts.  To my eye, these pieces look to have a strong influence from both the Japanese woodcut tradition and also western illustration of the era.  Certainly they’re pleasing to western tastes.

        Today I’ve got three beings (god, spirit, and sprite) representing three elemental forces.  First up is the Spirit of the Sea.  This one has an interesting contrast between the serenity of the spirit contemplating the perfect pearl of a bubble on the gentle rings of smooth water, while behind rises a towering, breaking wave, which paradoxically looks equally serene even though presumably it’s about to come crashing down.  Of course, the Spirit of the Sea doesn’t need to worry about it in any case!

        From water we turn to the God of Fire.  I particularly like the dark, amorphous figures dancing around the blazing god.  They seem to be connected with the black rocks as if this is a volcanic scene, and the swoop of the flaming figure implies a forward movement as if he’s not just dancing in place but striding across the earth.  The subtle variations of colors add to the drama.

        The Wind Sprite also seems to be a spirit of the sea, revelling in the waves whipped into curling crests, and the gulls swooping through the air.  Despite the streaming clothes, the spirit itself is a still figure, standing quite peacefully in the midst of the gusts.  Lum’s choices about how to portray these spirits makes me start thinking about what choices I might make if I were to try my hand at illustrating them.  Would I show spirits so comfortable with their elements that they don’t seem to be working at all, as Lum does, or would I show them actively conducting and crafting the power and movement of their elements?

       If we wanted to round out the four classical elements, we’d need a spirit of earth, as well, but Lum doesn’t seem to have done one - or at least not that I saw.  Some of her other pieces depict characters that are specific to Japanese myths and legends, but these three don’t include names or referents.  Therefore I don’t know whether Lum was illustrating specific tales, or simply imagining spirits in a Japonisme style.  In any case, I like them and will probably be sharing a few more of Lum’s pieces in future posts as the occasion arises.

[Pictures: Spirit of the Sea, color woodcut by Bertha Lum, 1913;

God of Fire, color woodcut by Lum, 1929;

Wind Sprite, color woodcut by Lum, 1917, (Images from BerthaLum.org).]

Bergen in Kansas

         Today’s one of those days when I’m just going to give you one pleasing relief block print without a ton of discussion.  This linocut by Richard Bergen (USA, 1925-2020) seems appropriate to the end of summer.  Bergen is most famous for his large-scale bronze sculptures, and although sculpting and relief block printmaking may share that they both use carving, I would think it would be a very different process both physically and mentally.  This piece doesn’t have a particularly high level of detail or precision for its size, and much of the carving is a bit stylized and impressionistic.  I like the vast swirling clouds of the sky, and the contrast of the different patterns on the ground.

        That’s it!  No deep analysis, just sharing a block print that I’m enjoying today!  What do you think?

[Picture: Kansas Farm, linocut by Richard Bergen, ca. 1955 (Image from Marianna Kistler Beach Museum of Art).]

Words of the Month - After the Odyssey

         Getting in one last outing on the Odyssey bandwagon, today’s words of the month are connected to the Homeric epics.  So of course the very first word has to be

        odyssey - Around 1600 (and possibly earlier) this was the title used in English for the epic poem that in ancient Greek was called Odysseia and in Latin Odyssea.  Apparently not until the end of the nineteenth century had the word gained a broader, more general application to describe any long, adventurous journey.

        Many other characters in Homer’s epics have contributed to English vocabulary, as well.

        mentor - Our word meaning “wise advisor, more-experienced counselor” comes straight from the character Mentor who advised Odysseus’s son Telemachus (although actually most of the time is wasn’t even Mentor himself doing the counseling, but Athena in disguise).  The word was being used this way in English by 1750, although for at least a century it continued to be capitalized, indicating that it was still a direct reference to the character.  Interestingly, the etymology of the name itself is “one who gives or has purpose, spirit,” and is related to the word monitor, which came from Latin and appeared in English in the 1540s.  Also, although Mentor appears in this role in the Odyssey, the adoption of the word probably owes more to a popular 1699 French novel by François Fénelon, in which Mentor is actually a main character.  It became a verb in the late nineteenth century.

        hector - In the Iliad, Hector urges his fellow Trojans to keep fighting, and the first usage of his name in English (in the late 14th century) denoted a valiant warrior.  Somewhere along the line, however, English apparently got tired of his aggressive nagging, and by the mid-seventeenth century the word meant “a blustering, turbulent fellow,” and also gained use as a verb “to bluster, bully” at the same time.

        Achilles heel - This one is Iliad-adjacent, since Homer doesn’t actually include the myth about how Achilles was invulnerable everywhere except the one spot on his heel where his mother held him while dipping him in the River Styx.  That later myth, however, gave us, by the early nineteenth century, the idiomatic phrase meaning “the one dangerous weakness in an otherwise strong person.”  It also gave us the anatomical term Achilles tendon, which was coined in modern Latin in the early eighteenth century.  In the mid-nineteenth century Linneaus gave the herb yarrow the Latin name Achillea, because Homer describes Achilles’s soldiers using it to treat their wounds.

        glaucous - English had the word glauk meaning “greyish-bluish-greenish” by the early fifteenth century, but the modern form of the word arrived in the 1670s by way of Latin.  Homer’s “grey-eyed Athena” was glauk-opis Athene.  Interestingly, in Homer’s Greek the word meant “bright, gleaming, silvery,” so Athena was really “bright-eyed” rather than “grey-eyed,” and it’s not clear why the meaning changed in English.  That makes it a little ironic that this is also where we get the medical term glaucoma (in the 1640s), from the greyish-bluish appearance of cataracts that un-brighten eyes.

        siren - I covered the etymology of this word for “an alarm sound” in my prior post The Lure of Sirens, but at the time I didn't know why characters famous for the beauty of their songs should lend their name to such a hideous noise.  I’ve since discovered that the device was named by Baron Charles Cagniard de la Tour, in 1819, when he discovered that his invention could make sound underwater as well as in air, suggesting to him creatures that he obviously pictured in their less avian and more mermaidesque version.

        cyclopean - This word referring to an ancient style of construction using huge, irregular stones fitted together without mortar, comes from the cyclopes of Greek mythology, but not Homer’s version.  Rather, it comes from another myth in which the one-eyed giants built the walls of Mycenae and Tiryns.  However, the word cyclopean can also be used with the definition “one-eyed,” and that meaning appears in English in the 1640s.

        Trojan horse - This “character” also appears less fully in Homer than in other tellings of the Trojan War, but by the early nineteenth century it was used metaphorically to refer to a threat which people allow in because it’s disguised as something benign.  The first use of the word to refer to malicious computer code that sneaks past security in disguise was apparently 1974.

        And finally, a couple of other non-character words from Homer.

        necromancy - This word comes from the title of the chapter in which Odysseus visits the Dead, but already by 1300 English had a version of the word, meaning “witchcraft, black magic” as much as “communication with the dead,” and we got that word from Old French (and thence from Latin, from Greek).  It isn’t entirely clear, therefore, whether the word came directly from Homer, or whether we got it more generally from Greek for divination by means of communication with the dead.

        nepenthe - This may be a fairly obscure word in English, but it always makes me think of the line from Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven”: “Quaff, oh quaff this kind nepenthe…”  In any case, it means “something that makes a person forget all pain.”  In the Odyssey, Helen gives this anti-grief drug to Telemachus and Menelaus when they’re overcome with sorrow.  In Greek it’s nēpenthēs, but English speakers in the late sixteenth century quickly cut off the final -s because it sounded too plural.  (The same thing happened with pea.)

        kudos - This word probably entered English as university slang at the end of the eighteenth century, and it comes straight from Homer, where kydos means “glory, especially in battle.”  This is another Greek singular ending in -s, and once again English speakers have a tendency to interpret it as a plural.  For the most part, however, I think kudos functions as an uncountable noun or a plurale tantum, in which you can’t give only one kudo unless you’re being self-consciously cute.

        A few of those words, including odyssey, of course, are quite obviously related to the Homeric epics, but did any of them surprise you?

[Pictures: Mentor and Telemachus, engraving by Jean-Baptise Tilliard after drawing by Charles Monnet, from Les Aventures de Télémaque, 1785 (Image from Rijksmuseum);

Yarrow (Achillea), rubber block print by AEGNydam, 1997 (Image from George Fox and the Valiant Sixty by Elfrida Vipont);

The Trojan Horse, wood block print from the Strasbourg Virgil, 1502 (Image from Wikimedia Commons).]

Momentum on the Leyline Express

         This is another of those personal posts about what I’m working on and struggling with and excited about these days.  But first I have to go back and review The Story So Far…  The prologue to this saga is that I published my last novel (The Extraordinary Book of Doors) in 2014.  At that time I had another novel in progress, plus I plunged right into ideas for a sequel to Doors, and I was raring to go on both projects.  But then… I sputtered out.

        Chapter 1 of today's story sees me full of ideas and enthusiasm, but somehow not making much progress.  Every time I sit down to write I can’t seem to make any headway.  It’s beyond frustrating, right on into infuriating and heartbreaking.

        In Chapter 2, however, I decide to make a little book out of my series of block prints celebrating the “hours” of the day, so I take a tangent to pull together a small anthology of poetry excerpts and block prints, This Holy Day, which came out in 2017.  Meanwhile, I’m still desolate with my inability to get much of anywhere on my own writing.  However, throughout this period I’ve been getting more and more serious about a pipe dream that had been floating around in my heart for ages: a lavishly-illustrated book of magical creatures inspired by medieval bestiaries.

        Chapter 3 is the triumphant birth of On the Virtues of Beasts of the Realms of Imagination, in which I launch a Kickstarter campaign simply in order to discover whether there’s anyone else in the world with the slightest interest in my weird niche idea - and find, to my astonishment and delight, that lots of people actually love it.  It was deeply satisfying to be able to create this book, even if I still couldn’t write the novels.  Virtues was published at the end of 2019, just a few months before covid hit the scene and left us all sitting at home all day… with lots of time to write novels, right?

        Chapter 4: Turns Out, No.  Or at least, I had the time for writing, but it still felt as impossible as wading through molasses in a lead coat.  Thank goodness I still had block printing to keep me creatively engaged!  But then finally in 2021 I began to write short stories and poems.  You can read more about this breakthrough in my post What’s New (and Some Old) in the Studio.  Now, I’d written loads of short stories and poems long long ago, but that had fallen by the wayside when I started writing novels, so it took me a while to polish off the rust and pick up steam.  The satisfaction of being able to write these shorter pieces, however, finally prompted me to make the connection about the toll stress was taking on the world.  You can read all about my diagnosis of my writing progress at my post Bite-Sized Writing.

        Chapter 5: In Which I Get Serious About Short Form Writing.  At the end of 2021 I started submitting short stories to magazines, and after a little while longer I started submitting poetry, as well.  The handful of acceptances, and larger list of really positive feedback (including lots of Glowing Rejections) encouraged me to think about putting together a collection…  Bittersweetness & Light came out in 2025, and Beyond Pomegranate & Thorns in 2026, and I continue to write (and submit) lots and lots of short stories and poems, all of which feels fabulous!

        And now, finally, we reach the climax of today’s story.  Nearly two years ago I wrote a short story set in a version of Earth in which magic flows through the world in ley lines.  The story was a mystery set on the Leyline Express in the 1890s, and it ended up somewhat too long to submit to most short story markets.  This is partly because it was written in an 1890s style, when short stories ran much longer than today, and partly because when you write a mystery in a world that involves magic you have to include not only all the normal clues and red herrings, but also enough information that readers can reasonably understand what is or isn’t possible in this universe.  In fact, the feedback I got from one of the few places I did submit the story was that, although they liked it a lot, they didn’t think the reader could quite know the rules of the magic.  I had tried cutting the story shorter so I could submit it more places, but last fall I decided to go the other way and write out all the incidents and details that would build the world more fully.  By the time I stopped, my short story was about 11,300 words long, which isn’t quite a novella, but is a novelette: the longest single piece I’d written since 2014.  It felt like a real personal victory - even if there’s really nowhere much to publish a novelette!

        But the story continues.  I really love the world I’ve been building and I began a second story set in the same time and place, but with different characters.  That, too, stalled out for a little while as I worked on other things, but in the last couple weeks I’ve pulled it back out and made huge progress.  So huge, in fact, that it, too, is now a novelette.  It’s about 12,600 words so far, and still needs the final chapter.  I feel like a runner who’s finally been allowed back off the bench after a long injury.  (Meanwhile I have an actual foot injury keeping me on the literal bench, but that’s another story.)

        I’m sure in the future I’ll be sharing more information about the world of the Leyline Express and the stories therein, but this post is just a crow of triumph about my ability to make genuine progress on a sustained, larger project.  Does this mean I’m no longer stressed?  Alas, no.  In many ways my stress about the world just gets worse and worse with every passing news item, but perhaps my brain is finally learning to loosen itself from perpetual fight/flight/freeze mode and dig into the creativity.  Who knows?  I do know that I’m very grateful for this respite, and I do hope that someday I’ll be able to share the Leyline Express with you!  To be continued...

[Pictures: Porter, color relief print by Percy Cruikshank from The Railway ABC, 1877-85, (Image from University of Washington);

Office, Station, Tunnel, hand-colored wood block prints from Cousin Chatterbox’s Railway Alphabet, 1850 (Images from University of Washington).

You can see more from each of these Railway Alphabets at my prior post Ribbans Railway.]

What's with All the Birds?

         I am not what you would call a serious birder: I don’t travel to spot rare species for my life list, nor buy fancy equipment to maximize my ability to find them; I don’t participate in birding tours or hang out in blinds or have a membership in the Audubon Society or partake of any of the other activities in which serious birders feed their obsession.  And yet nevertheless, I apparently have a bit of a bird obsession!  How do I know?  How about the fact that so many of my block prints feature birds?  At my rough count I’ve done at least 30 block prints with birds as the main subject, plus another 10+ featuring mythical or fantasy birds, plus another 5+ in which birds appear as part of a larger scene.  Or how about the fact that so many of my poems feature birds?  At a rough count I have about 15 published poems that mention birds (some more centrally than others), and of my poems that are currently in rotation being sent out on submission, I count 9 out of about 16.  So what’s with all the birds?

        For me birds just seem utterly magical.  There are the beautiful, intricate, colorful feathers, sometimes sleek, sometimes fluffy, sometimes iridescent, always amazing.  There are the diverse songs and calls, ranging from beautiful liquid musical passages, to cheerful twitterings, to haunting evocative cries, to the ability to mimic every other sort of sound from creaky hinges to human speech, always amazing.  There are the nests and the eggs, always amazing; the behaviors that combine familiarity with otherness, always amazing.  And then, of course, there’s flight, which seems like a metaphor or embodiment of joy, always amazing.  I’ve written a little more about this in my prior post F is for Forgotten How to Fly (featuring a poem that I didn’t even include in my count above, because even though it’s about flight, it never actually mentions birds).

        I’m far from the only person to be fascinated with birds and especially with the magic of their flight.  From Daedalus to daVinci and beyond, people have dreamed of the ability to fly like birds.  (A poem about Daedalus is one of those currently out on submission - also not actually counted among my bird poems, because it’s people flying, not birds, however bird-inspired.)  Plenty of other artists and authors have also taken inspiration from birds.  Back in May I wrote my monthly Poet Laureate column about bird poems.  Here’s what I shared:

        "A robin is nesting on an arbor in my yard this year, and although I don’t want to spend too much time snooping lest I disturb her, it gives me joy to know she’s there.  What is it about poets and birds?  Perhaps we feel a particular kinship with birds: their song, their flight, their beauty, their strangeness… They seem like metaphors for everything from Hope (Emily Dickinson) to Despair (Edgar Allan Poe).  Poems about birds keep coming up: one of three poems shared at last year’s Juneteenth commemoration was all about a bird, three of the four winter gift poems given out at the library in December featured birds, and I keep finding birds in my own poems.  (In 2020 another robin nested right outside my door, and the poem inspired by that appears in my book Bittersweetness & Light.  Or you can read another of my poems with a bird theme here.)

        Just to get you started on bird poems, “Ode to a Nightingale” by John Keats is one of the most famous, although its style is not very accessible nowadays.  In “The Windhover” Gerard Manley Hopkins lets raw emotion overwhelm mere grammar.  Wallace Stevens finds “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” while Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s “The Eagle” is as simple as a thunderbolt.  Mary Oliver comes back to birds over and over, and Bashō wrote this famous haiku (as translated by Daniel C. Buchanan):

     Hark to that cuckoo,

     Singing, singing while flying,

     How very busy!

        Do you know any poems about birds?  Or perhaps you could try writing a bird-inspired poem yourself.  What is it that strikes you the most about the many birds that share the world with us?  From wild turkeys to chickadees, hawks, geese, and of course those robins, how about hatching a little bit of poetry this spring?"

        Of course it’s not spring any more, but I stick with my encouragement above to try writing a poem inspired by birds – or of course if visual art is more your thing, that’s excellent, too!

[Pictures:  Birds of a Feather, rubber block print with watercolor by AEGNydam, 2023 (originals sold out);

Chickadee, rubber block print by AEGNydam, 2006 (originals sold out);

Nectar, rubber block print by AEGNydam, 2023 (one left, see it at NydamPrints.com);

Carolina Wren, rubber block print by AEGNydam, 2006 (originals sold out);

Tufted Titmouse, rubber block print by AEGNydam, 2006 (originals sold out);

Pelican, rubber block print by AEGNydam, 2023 (at NydamPrints.com).]

Hometown Block Prints

         This year I’ve turned to local points of interest and done two block prints depicting scenes from the town where I’ve now lived for the past 27 years.  The first is the cupolas from three of our important public buildings: the library, Town Hall, and the high school.  All three buildings began life with a Colonial Revival style, although all three have also acquired modern additions.  These cupolas, however,  are part of the original, beloved landmarks, and all three of these institutions have used their cupolas in their own logos.

        I just finished a second local landmark piece, and this one depicts Echo Bridge over the Charles River.  This majestic bridge was built to carry an aqueduct over the river, and it also carries a pedestrian trail along the top.  When it was built in 1876 its main arch was the second longest masonry arch in the USA and was apparently quite famous.  It was something of a tourist attraction because there’s a small platform at the base of the arch where one can stand to listen to the impressive echo that gives it its name.

        My depiction of Echo Bridge uses some artistic license.  For one thing, the bridge actually has seven arches and I wanted to give some suggestion of those arches even though they are not actually very visible in the summer.  On the other hand, I don’t go walking by the bridge very often in the winter when the leaves are down and the structure of the bridge shows better, so I’ve fudged my view a bit to place my scene in summer but still show multiple arches.  I’ve also used artistic license to clear away some shrubbery in the foreground in order to give a better view.  In fact it would be hard to get exactly this view these days, with lots of small trees and bushes sprouting up on the outcroppings where you’d have to be standing.  In any case, though, even if Echo Bridge is no longer a famous tourist attraction, it’s still a wonderful local spot and I wanted to capture its beauty for anyone who holds affection for it.

        On the down side, I didn’t capture quite the sense of lofty scale that’s part of what makes Echo Bridge so special, but on the other hand, I’m especially pleased with how all the trees turned out.  I experimented with quite a few different patterns and textures, and I studied the trees in blocks by a number of other artists I’ve shared here before (especially Charles William Taylor) to try to pick up some tips.  On the whole I think it was pretty successful.  I especially like the branches above the bridge at the top left!

        I recently heard of a call for art depicting the Charles River, and I was excited to submit this piece because it sounds like a very cool show that’s being put together and I’d love to be part of it.  But then I read the fine print and discovered that there’s a submission fee, so I will not be submitting after all.  I’ll take a little tangent right now to explain why I refuse on principle to submit to anything - art or writing - that requires a submission fee.

        1. Yes, I’m stingy and I dislike throwing money away.  I know that lots of people would consider this part of their publicity budget, but I don’t want to spend money that probably gets me nothing in return.  Short story and poetry submission fees are usually fairly low, in the $5 range, and one could certainly submit to a few of those things without breaking the bank, but art shows are much more expensive, regularly charging $20-50 per piece just to submit.  That adds up fast.

        2. It’s basically gambling, and I could just as well spend that money on a lottery ticket (another thing I don’t do, because I don’t want to spend money that probably gets me nothing in return.)  The call for artists or authors may be framed as if it’s not random like a lottery ticket, but in fact having my work selected is really pretty much a matter of chance.  Sure, there’s an element of basic intrinsic quality which, if you don’t have it you’ll definitely not be accepted, but it largely comes down to a matter of the judges’ taste.  I could be the most towering genius the world has yet known, but if the juror happens to have a taste only for pop art, or color photography, or edgy political art, or abstract mark-making, then my work is not going to be selected.  Moreover, most of these contests receive a lot more excellent work than they can accept, so even if the judge does really like my piece, they’ll be balancing it against everything else they want to accept.  Was there another black and white block print?  Was there another view of Echo Bridge?  All factors over which I have absolutely no control, so yes, I could just as well be buying a lottery ticket.

        3. To me, charging for submission is the mark of a scam.  Yes, I know that it’s pretty standard in the art world, and in the literary world there are a number of very prestigious, highly regarded, supposedly legitimate journals that charge submission fees.  (And contests pretty much always charge.)  But I don’t care how prestigious you are; if you fleece desperate artists and authors with no intention or expectation of giving anything in return, that’s a scam.

        4. Yes, I do understand that most arts and literary organizations aren’t rolling in cash, either.  If they’re going to pay editors or guest jurors, the money needs to come from somewhere, and maybe it sounds perfectly logical to charge the artists who want to be chosen.  But everything in me rebels at the injustice of taking money from the poorer, less successful, most desperate artists who will never benefit, in order to subsidize the successful, famous ones who are the darlings of the art world.  See point 3 above.  This is why we need public arts funding, private patrons, grants, and fund-raisers, and indeed an entire overhaul of the arts economy.  (Add the tsunami of AI “art” to the mix, however, and it’s pretty clear that things are going to get a lot worse for artists and authors before they get better.)

        Well, as I said, that rant was just a tangent, and the real focus of this post was meant to be sharing my two new prints!  Do you have any favorite local landmarks you’ve commemorated in art (whether that’s photography, watercolor, poetry, or whatever your medium may be)?

[Pictures: Points of Needham (Library, Town Hall, High School), rubber block print by AEGNydam, 2026 (Image from NydamPrints.com);

Echo Bridge, rubber block print by AEGNydam, 2026 (Image from NydamPrints.com).]