I recently arrived home from some travels with a spectacularly awful head cold. Ugh! I have been wanting to write up a little travel report to share on the blog here, but have just been feeling too listless and unmotivated to even think about it. (I will say, however, that it involved a night with Florence!)
Last night, in a sleepless delirium of fever, it occurred to me that I have a book coming out in four months’ time and I am out here thinking about posting dumb personal stuff like a gormless chump — when I should be hyping up my newest artsy fartsy book offering!
So, here’s a thing I made for social media book marketing, and I am afraid I must subject it to you all, as well. (Mostly because it took me about four hours to make the above graphic in Canva, hehehe! A designer, I am not.)
Are YOU drawn to the art and imagery at the edges of things? The unexplained? The esoteric? The forces that persist just beyond the threshold of ordinary reality?
Do you find yourself awake at 3am thinking about parallel worlds? Visionary states? Liminal spaces? Cosmic mysteries? Restless souls? Forgotten knowledge? Sacred cycles? Corporeal energies?
Friends. FRIENDS. Have I got the book for you.
Introducing The Art of the Unknown: nearly 200 works by artists across the centuries who looked at what science couldn’t explain and picked up a brush. Painting. Photographing. Diagramming. Their way toward forces and phenomena that defy comprehension.
But WAIT. There’s more.
For the low, low price of whatever your local bookseller is charging, you too can own a visual treasury of the esoteric, the uncanny, and the unexplained. That’s right. It could be yours.
And if you order in the next fifteen minutes …okay well, you can’t, it’s not out until September, but the preorder link is here, and I cannot stress enough how much I would like you to click it.
Call now. Operators are standing by. I am the operator. I am also standing by.
(This unhinged inanity brought to you by the very busy graphic I made that reminded me of late 80s infomercials for paranormal book collections and psychic hotlines. And also the woo woo advertising nostalgia I remember for things like the Pure Moods cd, which incidentally, I listened to while I was visiting Philly.)
Vallense Source A nocturnal glamour-cryptid, cloaked in its own velvety wings, its vast buggy eyes like antique opera glasses. It lives in cultivated dark, manicured parks behind concert halls, the shadowed side of a fountain, topiaries at midnight. It has a taste for finer things and knows where to find them. You didn’t know it was on the guest list, but here you both are! Mossy and ambery and peppery, with a resinous sweetness that reads less like dessert than like the filling of some abstract turnover made with dry grasses and syrupy saps, ground and sweetened acorns bound together in something dark and flaking. Rich and musky-dry, slithery, a lurker. It unfolds slowly next to you on the bench, vast wings spreading, obscuring the moon, eyes enormous and unblinking. It means you no harm. It is simply drawn to the same things you are. It will have what you’re having.
Premiere Peau Doppel DancersThe shadow of something pale and cold against silk, light gathering at the edges, overcast. A duel with its back turned, a frozen moment of stillness, each gazing outward, away, the recognition of what lies between dissipating as each follows its gaze inward. Powdery and rooted and chilled, somber as cut stems left too long in cold water, as roots pulled halfway from dark soil, neither fully of the earth nor free of it. The same flower meeting itself from opposite sides of the membrane. Each one a version of the same thing: two that are one, neither fully one thing nor the other, caught in that charged space between. At the back, a molassesy brown sugar darkness, fungal and sweet, the earth already in quiet conversation with what stands above it. Something close to the work of an artist of constructed selves, of thresholds, of becoming and unbecoming: the white mask held to the blank sky, the foliage climbing the legs inch by inch, the landscape making its slow, patient claim on a body that moves through it. A ghost caught between breaths, already deep in tender negotiation with what waits beneath the soil, a surrender so private and so deliberate it feels indecent to witness. The presentiment of something not yet arrived but already, somehow, complete.
Rahasya Chai Addiction This is a fleeting review, much like its gorgeous but utterly fleeting top notes of ginger and cardamom. Delicate, ephemeral, and in one nostril and immediately out the other. Not even a slow fading spicy goodbye, but a chaste, wispy vanishing. After this near-instantaneous disappearing act, is almost straight-up, 100% the creamy/cozy white musk, sweet grasses and hay, and warm, breezy sandalwood of Coty Vanilla Fields… with the teensiest-tiniest inclusion of a bit of milky black tea (all latte, no tannins though). I love Vanilla Fields! So that’s not really a problem. But, that is a thing that exists at a much lower price point! However, if someone wanted to gift me a bottle of Chai Addiction, I would be super excited to receive it, and I would wear the heck out of it. I have a birthday coming up next month. Hint hint hint.
By/Rosie Jane Matilda opens with passionfruit that is almost too much, funky and warm and slightly sour. A little creamy. A wet dog and her pup cup. There’s something about the scent that translates to me as a fuggy pink, road-dusted, rained-on toe bean. Or maybe Gertrude Abercrombie’s snail shell on dark sand under a crescent moon, a woman’s torso emerging from the spiral of it, dreamy and shadowed and smudged, a little begrimed? The artist’s feral cats, watching from their litter box just outside the frame. “Would you still love me if I was a worm?” energy, whimsy, sweet and alive, rolling around in something a little rank.
Escentric Molecules Molecule 01 + Champaca Heady and luminous, steamy and silky, velvety and floating, kaleidoscopic and shadowed…all of these things seem quite the opposite of one another, and yet these are all of the sensations and impressions arising from just a scant few minutes with Escentric Molecules Molecule 01 + Champaca. An opulent, intoxicating spray of creamy orange blossoms encased in glowing citrine, cloaked in dusk and shade, illuminated by a breathless summer evening’s first moonbeam. It’s stunning.
Bad Hare Day: A heavy-handed sprinkle of brown sugar crystals, golden amber molasses-lite funk, over a pillowy cloud of full-fat whipped cream, almond wisps soft and musky. A clinging cottony fluff, like a small, warm creature has just vacated the spot beside you.
Moon Rabbit: Almost-jasmine, almost-cherry, honeyed and drifting, wilting softly in the steam from a cup of green tea, grassy, restrained, a soft ellipsis of bitterness. A dewy footprint in the soil after a night of sleepwalking through the cold silver fields, frost-pale leaves.
Sunny Bunny: Somewhere on the sands underneath a striped umbrella where it is perpetually 1965, Gidget is doing the watusi at the edge of the surf, and hot dogs are a nickel, there is a beach bunny who left for spring break and is still looking to catch the perfect wave. Salt-crusted whiskers, sun-fluffed fur, a tiny dab of coconut sunscreen on its twitchy pink nose. Spring break was supposed to end and somewhere there is a fable about this.
Brown Bunny: Soft and creamy, cold and sweet, a peach that’s been syruped and jammed and ice-creamed, and is also possibly wearing a fleecy lavender bunny onesie.
400 Rabbits: A lime Peep, soft and rounded, the citrus baked into a dense, faintly powdery, sugary chew, the lime and the marshmallow fully merged into one slightly artificial, deeply satisfying thing, sitting next to the other weird novelty offerings, like the deviled egg and glazed ham Jones Cola on the Easter dinner table.
Sir Hopsalot: A glazed sweet bun served on a craquelured ceramic bunny plate, the thin crackling sheen of the pastry mirroring the aged glaze of the dish beneath it, both of them faintly dusted with musty bergamot, tea that has been sitting a little too long in a very nice cup. There is a childhood habit of ascribing inner lives to the objects in one’s house, the lamp with sassy opinions, the armchair with a dignified sadness, the sugar bowl that is simply beside itself with joy to be of service. The plate would like you to know it is pleased to make your acquaintance!
If you enjoy posts like these or if you have ever enjoyed or been inspired by something I have written, and you would like to support this blog, consider buying the author a coffee?
My latest column for Rue Morgue’s March/April issue 2026 is about the personal curriculum trend: a Gen Z TikTok thing where they assign themselves monthly syllabi on whatever they’re obsessed with, from sourdough to astrophysics. (See also “analog hobbies”, or, as us crusty old farts call them, you know, “hobbies.”)
I make the case for horror fans doing the same thing, actually studying what we love instead of just passively consuming it. In the piece, I offer four example curriculums shaped by my particular fixations: fashion in horror, grief as monster, surrealism and dread, and women directors beyond the Final Girl.
Naturally, the moment I submitted my draft, I realized … I wanted to study other things. Although I don’t know if they would have made the article any more interesting, so that’s okay. Things I’ve been circling around for years, name-dropping without really understanding, using as aesthetic shorthand without doing the work. Time to actually engage with the theory books gathering dust on my shelves! So I’m building my own curriculum around two concepts that keep surfacing in horror criticism:
Hauntology: Mark Fisher’s term for how we’re haunted by lost futures that never arrived, the world we were promised but didn’t get. It’s not just nostalgia for the past, but mourning for futures that feel more real than the present we’re stuck in. The Cold War’s end didn’t bring utopia; instead, we got a kind of cultural stasis where we endlessly recycle old aesthetics because we’ve lost the ability to imagine genuinely new futures. Is what we remember as “the past” even real, or has it been programmed into us by the culture we consume and the ideologies we absorb? There’s a deep melancholy to this, the sense that we’re living in an epilogue to history rather than its continuation. It’s why folk horror works on us, why the obsession with lost rural pasts feels so contemporary, as well as VHS aesthetics, found footage, etc., they don’t just look old, they feel like artifacts from parallel timelines that branched off from ours. They’re ghosts of possible worlds. Obsolete media becomes the language of contemporary dread because it carries the weight of futures that died before arriving. We’re haunted by what never was.
Julia Kristeva’s Theory of Abjection: The horror of what disrupts the boundary between self and other, the revulsion we feel toward what reminds us we’re just meat. It’s about things that should stay inside the body but don’t: blood, vomit, shit, the contents of a wound. It’s about corpses, which were once a living person but are now just matter, collapsing the line between subject and object. Abjection is that visceral “get it away from me” response to anything that threatens the integrity of the self, that reminds us the body is just a temporary container that will eventually fail and leak and rot. It’s why we recoil from decay, why certain textures make our skin crawl, why body horror gets under our skin in ways other horror doesn’t. Kristeva gives us the theoretical framework for understanding why Cronenberg’s transformations devastate us, why that scene in The Substance made theater audiences physically recoil, why we’re drawn to and repelled by images of the body breaking down. She gives us language for the unnamed disgust. Maybe? I could be wrong about all of that? I don’t really understand it, which is the whole point of all of this!
So that’s my current curriculum. If you’re interested in any of that, I have gathered up the books all in one place. What do you think you might study if you were building a curriculum for yourself?
If you enjoy posts like these or if you have ever enjoyed or been inspired by something I have written, and you would like to support this blog, consider buying the author a coffee?
I don’t update it as often as I used to, but once a week or so, I used to share a round-up of new art from my favorite artists (or old art from new-to-me artists) and call it “Weekly Eyeball Fodder.” I eventually slowed the rate at which I posted these collections and realized it would be a bit disingenuous to keep calling it that, so I retired the frankly aspirational “Weekly” and changed it to “Intermittent Eyeball Fodder.” I sure wouldn’t want to be accused of false advertising!
It’s been a while since I’ve shared one of these galleries of visual inspiration, so today felt like a good day to resurrect the tradition… and this particular selection has a secret connecting thread. The works themselves don’t necessarily have anything to do with one another, except they all caught my eye (and yes, they’re all a bit weird and dark and spooky, but that’s what my eye is always drawn to, and that part doesn’t mean anything here!) The thread runs through the artists themselves. If you’ve been following along lately, especially as it relates to a certain upcoming project, you may already be able to crack the code.
If you enjoy posts like these or if you have ever enjoyed or been inspired by something I have written, and you would like to support this blog, consider buying the author a coffee?
Lupercalia is Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab’s annual love letter to desire in all its forms, and I have tried a dozen from this year’s collection. Here are my notes on grave soil and honey, grapefruit tassels at full tilt, a lumberjack of indeterminate personhood with very good biceps and an armpit of blueberry porridge (this is an extremely good thing, btw), and one carb-loading bear. And more!
Drowsy Voyeur(plum-soaked black patchouli, indigo musk, poppy absolute, guava pulp, black tea, and tobacco) A friend tells me this afterward. She and a date snuck into the empty apartment in the corner of the building, the one with the perpetually broken lock and revolving door of tenants. The space smelled strange, she said. Overripe stone fruit and the dark ink watercolors of night air and the void and emptiness of a place between people. The wallpaper was intricate, spiraling, mediumistic, automatic linework, a Madge Gill drawing duplicated perfectly if Madge Gill had papered a bedroom in a building like this. In the dim light, mid-coitus, it resolved into eyes, dozens of them, staring, swiveling, seething, a shadowy shifting panopticon, humid and pulsing with fleshy plum pulp. Ma’am, this is a Wendy’s, I said.
White Chocolate, Date Paste & Lime Zest I want this to be a bar cookie-like dessert, so I can nibble on it. I want it to be a gorgeously quaffable cocktail, so I can imbibe. I want this to be a fragrance, so I can — oh, wait. This one we can do. I hate to use the literal notes of a perfume when I try to describe the experience of wearing it (it seems lazy to me as a writer! I want to use the words that describe its aspects and qualities and spirit and essence, and not just that, but I want to use the most ridiculously beautiful words available to me! And tell a speculative alternate timeline diary entry, a surrealist fairytale dream about it! But as a reviewer, I get it. You just want to know if you can smell the dates and the limes. Well, yes, you can! You can smell the sugary-tobacco-y dates and the cool, slithery lime and the creamy cocoa butter white chocolate, but it smells better than any single one of those things on its own. This is rich and chewy and opulent, a serving of Lime-Kissed Sticky Date Blondies with White Chocolate Drizzle and a Date Night: dark rum, white chocolate liqueur, fresh lime, date syrup float.
By Candlelight (beeswax, wildflower honey, copal resin, vanilla bean, balsam, and frankincense) Hot beeswax and honey pooling on warm, musky skin, sticky and languid and lacquered and frothed with cream. Bodies handled like precious objects, anointed and presented and arranged, elaborate ceremonies. I can imagine this is the fragrance Anne Rice had in mind when she wrote the Beauty series.
Bakyâ Perfume Oil (polished santol wood warmed by sun, the faint sweetness of coconut husk and rice powder, crushed sampaguita blossoms, pandan leaf, and a touch of palm sugar, oud, and chocolate suman) The paradox of recognition without origin. I know this smell, except I don’t, except I do; something in the olfactory memory reaches for it and comes back empty-handed, certain it was there but wouldn’t recognize it if it was. A confectionary Saturday morning something, cottony and fruity and starchy-soft, heady-waxy florals. Turkish delight by way of circus peanuts, both and neither, made of lychee and guava, rolled in coconut powder. This smells like someone’s childhood, somewhere. Not mine. But somehow I feel the loss of it regardless.
Sal y Pimienta (salty skin musk dusted with pink pepper) A white sheet ghost of your most aspirational self. The day you did everything right, you woke up early, exercised, kept every appointment, every promise, did right by everything, and took care of yourself, too. Clean sweat and goodwill and hard-earned dopamine pride, imprinted onto freshly laundered cotton and stored in a hermetically sealed chamber for the day you wake up feeling like a big loser pile of shit. Throw the good ghost sheet over your head and take a deep breath.
Honey Dust, Patchouli, and Orris Absolute Barry Keoghan, post-Saltburn grave-humping scene, Emerald Fennell’s most deranged gift to cinema. A cheeky sprinkle of improv sweetness, speckled and spattered across freshly turned earth, loamy and dark, coffee grounds worked into the burial mound. Somewhere, twenty miles away, a pale iris sits in a funeral bouquet on a windowsill.
Rose Quartz Phallus(rose cognac, sugared pink grapefruit, iced strawberries, and creamy sandalwood warmed by skin musk, vanilla bourbon, and glowing pink amber) conjures delightful visions of a grapefruit Haribo candy burlesque performance, pearled sugar pasties, bright pinky-coral musky-soapy citrus wig. A jiggling, jellied, bouncy, exuberant, tassel-twirling, sass-and-wink-and-shimmy extravaganza.
Isis and Osiris (blue lotus incense and kyphi resin dancing in a dusk-shadowed temple, black loam of the Nile and green papyrus crushed beneath bare feet, myrrh and cassia steeped in date honey, a glimmer of lapis and gold leaf pressed into linen, and a surge of floodwater returning to parched earth) I am not sure how I am supposed to write a review that even compares to this poetic list of notes, so I can only say is that it smells like when someone who knows better murmurs, “the soil of a man’s heart is stonier, Louis.” Incense like a drifting tide of stone and honey, heavy and dripping with craggy grief and stoic matter-of-factivism.
Blueberry Chai Truffle (jammy blueberries folded into creamy chocolate and dusted with cardamom, cinnamon, black tea, and warm milk). There is a lumberjack in the backwoods mountains somewhere. I don’t know if they are a man, a woman, genderfluid, nonbinary, cryptid, or what. Doesn’t matter. They look good in a flannel and a beanie, and they have a kind heart and exquisite biceps, and sometimes in winter, with their big, strong hands, they feed you spoonfuls of blueberry porridge they kept tucked up under their armpit to keep it warm for you. Syrupy bláberjagrautur, warm grainy oats, a gorgeous bit of musk.
Mangetsu(white musk, green mandarin, moonflower, oolong tea, crushed grass, ume blossom, and green amber) Eco-poet-author Robert Macfarlane writes about daylighting, the process of bringing buried rivers back to the surface, re-exposing them to sun and air and the communities who had been living unknowingly above them. And when it comes back, everything around it comes back too. Mangetsu smells like that recovered green space. The sharp green bite of new grass pushing through loosened soil. Unripe citrus, a cool, punchy idea with as of yet no focus. A powdery floral haze, waxy, something blooming in cool air for the first time in a long time, all that new growth over warming earth, something skin-close and alive underneath it all.
The Scholar’s Indiscretion (Japanese wineberries, ti leaf, osmanthus, and a dribble of plum wine) Fruity-zingy-almost-fizzy-definitely-giddy, this is a chaos of golden retriever puppies, a whole pile of them, all of them tumbling over each other, absolutely delighted with everything, no agenda beyond maximum joy and maximum destruction…translated into a very-berry-forward scent.
Nanggigigil Ako Sayo (ube candyfloss and rice paper-wrapped red bean custard candy) The ube and red bean listed in the notes are there in spirit if not in letter; what actually shows up for me is baked and grainy, the sweetness of pop tart crust and cake donut and olive oil cake, and maybe even bran muffins, baked up relentlessly wholesome, radiating warmth and carbohydrates, stacked high…and a cozy determination to snorf it all down. Lazy, nap-loving Rilakkuma in his motivated era, powerloading for Fat Bear Week!
Need more Lupercalia scents? Have a peep at my Lupers reviews from 2025, 2024 and 2023 and 2022 and 2021 and 2020. Looks like I skipped a few years but we’ve also got 2017 and 2016 reviews as well!
…PSSSST! Did you know I have collected all of my BPAL reviews into one spot? I’m about two years behind with adding new stuff to the document, but as it stands, there are over 60 PAGES of my thoughts and rambles on various limited-edition scents from Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab over the years: BPAL REVIEWS BY S. ELIZABETH (PDF download)
If you enjoy posts like these or if you have ever enjoyed or been inspired by something I have written, and you would like to support this blog, consider buying the author a coffee?
I recently purchased a new purse. I love a crossbody bag, but mine was a little too bulky, and I wanted something smaller, sleeker. I also hunted down a pair of sneakers after seeing a Japanese lifestyle vlogger wearing them (I also coveted her wallet and had to find that.) Instagram kept showing me an ad for a dress, so I finally caved and bought it. And on and on we go.
When I looked at the various random pieces I’d acquired over the past 4-5 months or so, I realized they all pull together into a pretty snazzy outfit!
If you enjoy posts like these or if you have ever enjoyed or been inspired by something I have written, and you would like to support this blog, consider buying the author a coffee?
For some reason, I got over 1,500 new followers on Instagram in the past two weeks, which is wild because, for the most part, I don’t even get 50 new followers in a year! I think it was because of the Nona Limmen art that I shared. Also, maybe the Machumayu post? Who knows! The vagaries of that app are profoundly elusive.
I thought it seemed like a good idea to leverage all those new eyeballs and do a “meet the author!” type of post, and share an inside peek at my new book… but what I did not take into account was that it would take me four freaking hours to create a fiddly, fussy thing about it in Canva, ugh! Now I feel like since I put all that work into making it, I gotta get a lot of bang for my buck and show it literally everywhere. So now I am making a blog post about it too, even though, ostensibly, you already know who I am.
But I am also sharing the first page, so even if you’re like, yeah, yeah, ok, we know who you are! Chances are, unless you were watching me over my shoulder like a weirdo creeper while I was writing this book, you haven’t read the first page yet!
Also, while you might know who I am…perhaps you might know some folks who do not, and if you search your heart further, it is possible these people might be into the idea of what I write about, and if we drill down into that even deeper, they might dig this very book? A strange and sprawling book showcasing art that spans cosmic mysteries, hidden watchers, liminal spaces, restless souls, visionary states, and forgotten knowledge? Featuring nearly 200 artworks from artists across the centuries who spent their lives investigating the ineffable, bearing witness to the impossible, and attempting to give form to the inexpressible? I bet you know some weirdos who are into that sorta thing! And I would love it if you could share the good news with them!
Art on featured grid includes Virgo Paraiso, Pascal Dagnan- Bouvier, Wenzel Hablik,Richard Bober, Francisco Goya, and Anna Mond. Cover art by Linda Westin.
There is no photograph of this, as far as I know. My mother is gone, and my grandfather Boppa, and my grandmother, and just about all of our elders, and whatever documentation existed of those years is in several boxes in my sister’s houses, and anyway, this was a picture never taken. But I don’t need a photograph. My memories of it are vivid enough…I just sometimes wish one existed so that I could have a bit of proof to show myself, see! See, you once did this!
Me and my sisters at the kitchen table, drawing paper, crayons, the serious bent-head posture of children doing extremely important work. We drew little people with their little clothes and little towns and elaborate little scenarios for them to inhabit, and we made our people talk in high-pitched voices that Boppa would tease us about every time he passed through the room. It was a super huge, major part of my childhood. I loved to draw!
In second grade, the illustration of my sneakers went up on the wall for parents’ night. In sixth grade, our art teacher asked us to draw our houses, and I, thinking aspirationally, kept sneaking glances at the tattered Amityville Horror paperback I’d hidden in my desk and drew that instead. The teacher was impressed, whether by my draftsmanship or my delusion, I can’t say.
And then, somewhere not long after that, I stopped.
There was a very specific moment. I was a kid who doodled everywhere: notebook margins, assignments, the brown paper bags we cut apart to cover our textbooks. One day, someone asked me what I was doing and why. I couldn’t explain it, and the question made me feel ashamed and strange, like I’d been caught doing something that required justification I didn’t have, and furthermore, I didn’t know I needed. The surest way to deter me from something is to embarrass the crap out of me. So I stopped, just like that.
I’ve caught myself thinking that I should have been encouraged to take art classes in middle school, high school, college, and I catch myself on that “should have” every time. What I guess I mean is that I wish someone had noticed something that gave me joy and said, keep going. Not really because I needed external permission to pursue it, but because I was a kid, and kids sometimes need someone to see them before they can see themselves.
Maybe this is how I eventually came to writing about art instead of making it. Art, like anything or maybe everything, is a practice. If you don’t practice, you don’t improve. If you don’t do it at all, the muscles atrophy, the instinct dwindles, and returning to it, or arriving at it for the first time, really, gets harder. I have known this for years. I have written around it for years. I love art so extravagantly, so helplessly, that I found my way to it through the door I knew how to open, which was language. I became someone who writes about the things I could not bring myself to make.
But there has always been something in me, some part of me that knows there is a marvelous, extraordinary thing inside and wants to let it out — and maybe that is drawing and maybe that is writing, and maybe I still don’t know what the creative hole even is that lets my light into the world.
When we moved to Jacksonville, we made new friends, and one of them gave me a box of secondhand creative supplies: stamps and stickers and journaling things, some of it never used. We started having craft days. I began in the shallow end, coloring books and zentangles, before deciding I was going to pursue my actual childhood dream, which was drawing flowers. I bought a lovely flower-drawing guide, collected tutorials, and I have been practicing for months now. Alongside those kaleidoscopic zentangles. Cut-and-paste surrealist poetry collages. Decorative journaling.
I tried to go slow at first. (as this was meant to be developing a practice, not acquiring a collection, and I know how my brain works when it comes to gathering supplies as opposed to using supplies.) I will admit the journal stack has grown exponentially, and I have gone from someone who didn’t own a single marker to someone who now has half a dozen boxes of them… and also colored pencils and watercolors and pastels (So, you know. “Slow.” Hehehe.)
Another thing I started doing that makes it not scary for me: I am a quasi-hermit who doesn’t do much, which means my daily planner has historically contained entries like “take pills, pay bills, wear sunscreen.” Not exactly a rich chronicle. But on the same page alongside the basic to-do list, I’ve started doing a small illustration a day, practicing what I’ve been learning in a low-stakes way, because it’s just a doodle in a planner and not expensive art paper, which is really intimidating! Just a little drawing next to “lift weights.” (Which somehow never gets crossed off the list.) It keeps me in the practice without the pressure of treating it like capital-A Art.
I know it sounds cheesy, but…my life has felt richer? if that’s the right word? these past few months. Getting over yourself, all the inexplicable shame and embarrassment, and flabby, languishing art muscles, is a hell of a thing, and working on these projects is fun and freeing. In a way that writing (which I love and hate in equal measure sometimes) is absolutely, definitively not.
Last week, Yvan and I were watching something on YouTube when Lucy needed to go outside to pee, or poop, or perform some unknown third dog operation, and when we came back in, he asked if I wanted to keep watching. No, I had to get back to my project. “My art is very important,” I loftily informed him.
Yvan nodded sagely (because he is on my level and he gets it.) “That sounds like something you should write about,” he said. He’s right. But immediately after I do, I am gonna draw a flower about it, too.
If you enjoy posts like these or if you have ever enjoyed or been inspired by something I have written, and you would like to support this blog, consider buying the author a coffee?
For folks who were asking if there are other places than Amazon to order my new book, The Art of the Unknown, there sure are!
My publisher has a page listing several options: Amazon, Bookshop dot org, Waterstones, Indigo, and Barnes and Noble.
But here are a few more ways to support the book that you might not have thought of:
✷Ask your local independent bookshop to order a copy for you, or better yet, ask them to stock it. A customer request goes a long way toward getting a book on the shelf.
✷ Request it at your local library. Libraries purchase based on patron requests more than people realize, and a library copy means the book finds readers who might not otherwise stumble across it.
✷ Buy it as a gift for an artsy-fartsy weirdo. Most platforms allow gifting, and trust me, you definitely know a weird art person!
✷ If you have a connection to a museum, an art school, occult shop, witchy boutique, or independent bookshop with a dark and esoteric bent, put in a word. Bulk and institutional orders count toward first-week sales and genuinely move the needle.
✷ Are you a teacher, professor, or workshop leader whose students might find this useful or inspiring? Desk copies exist and I will help you get one.
✷ Are you someone with a very large and enthusiastic following who just genuinely loves books about strange art? No formal arrangement necessary. I just want you to have it.
✷ Add it to your Goodreads shelf and follow it there too. Following means you get notified of updates, and it helps with visibility.
✷ Do you do gift guides, round-ups, or “books I’m obsessed with” posts? September is coming fast and I would love to be on your list.✷If you think it might be a good fit for a subscription box or a holiday gift guide (gift guide season starts earlier than anyone expects!) please say something to the person who runs it. A mention to the right person now could mean a feature later.
✷Are you a Jacksonville (or north Florida area) bookstore with a local authors shelf? I’d love to be on it.
✷ When your copy arrives, photograph it, hold it, put it next to your cat, your crystals, your little bug friends, your collection of teeth. Tag me. I reshare everything!
✷ If you’re a bookstore that showcases employee recommendations and this looks like something your staff might love, I’d be so honored to end up on that shelf.
✷ After you’ve read it, a review on Amazon, Goodreads, or StoryGraph makes a big fat difference to the algorithm and to readers deciding whether to take a chance on something new.
✷ And finally…. I am available for podcasts, interviews, collaborations, and conversations of all persuasions. If you have a platform, a publication, a newsletter, or a podcast, I would be delighted to come and talk about art, mystery, and the glorious, vertiginous pleasure of not knowing things. You know where to find me.
✷✷Every single one of these things matters big time! Thank you for asking, and thank you for caring enough to look for ways to help. ✷✷
Last summer I wrote a blog post musing on the green slime that got unceremoniously dumped on your head if you uttered the words “I don’t know.” (80s babies remember You Can’t Do That On Television, right?)
If at the time you read it and thought, this feels like it’s going somewhere … you were right. That was a plant. A deliberate, sneaky little entree designed to get you thinking about uncertainty and not-knowing, so that when I finally announced this, you might feel the satisfaction of having seen it coming.
This book has been a long time coming, and it grew from a handful of frustrations that had been rattling around in my head for years. People I know, generally smart and interesting people, making shit up rather than simply saying “I don’t know, but I’d love to find out.” Decades of images circulating on Tumblr and Pinterest and a thousand fashion blogs captioned “artist unknown,” and nobody bothering to wonder who or taking a few seconds to search around. The creeping cultural sense that not knowing something is either A. just the way it goes because it’s too hard to find an answer or B. a failure best not admitted, rather than a starting point to find potentiall something really cool.
And then there was the Richard Bober mystery. Some of you were there for it! In 2023 I wrote a blog post about a A Wrinkle in Time paperback cover I had been obsessed with for years, lurid, hypersaturated, genuinely nightmare-inducing, and could not for the life of me find an artist credit for. That post took on a life of its own: Reddit ran wild with it, WBUR’s Endless Thread podcast picked it up, the New York Times covered it, and eventually the mystery was solved. The artist was Richard Bober. I wanted that image for The Art of Fantasy but couldn’t use it because I didn’t know who made it until after the book was published
Well, guess what friends? It’s in this book!!!
Mystery, curiosity, the refusal to shrug and move on, and the extraordinary things that happen when you sit with and marinate in the not-knowing long enough to let it become something. That’s what this book is about.
Twelve chapters. Four parts. Forces Beyond, Realms Between, Remnants, Relics and Revelations, and The Human Mystery: cosmic forces and hidden watchers, parallel worlds and liminal spaces, restless souls and forgotten knowledge, visionary states and sacred cycles. Everything that lives at the edges of what we can explain, and the artists who went looking for it anyway.
Inside its pages: Wenzel Hablik painting the cosmos like a living, crystalline, pulsing thing. Agnes Pelton alone in her converted windmill, layering gossamer veils of translucent color until her surfaces pulse with starlight. Jan Konůpek building cosmic architecture that follows dream logic rather than physics. Ionel Talpazan, Romanian refugee and self-appointed ambassador between worlds, devotedly documenting extraterrestrial craft in feverish techno-spiritual blueprints that are part technical manual, part cosmic philosophy. Léon Spilliaert on his nocturnal wanderings through a desolate seaside town, drawing staircases that spiral into the abyss until your inner ear and your intrusive thoughts reach perfect, terrible agreement.
Louise Bourgeois transforming the human torso into a living panopticon, a constellation of watching eyes. Pamela Colman Smith painting what music looked like to her, unlocking what she called “a beautiful country” that existed somewhere between her ear and her eye. Penny Slinger, feminist Surrealist, starring in her own ghost story as both haunter and haunted. Frida Kahlo splitting herself into two competing identities on a lonely bench against churning skies, blood spilling onto pristine fabric, both faces maintaining identical, unnerving composure. Which version of ourselves do we nurture, and which do we allow to bleed away?
And many, many more artists and creators who have ventured into the realms of the impossible and ineffable and returned with field notes from the other side of whatever it is we think we know.
The front cover is Linda Westin’s staggeringly sublime work. Infrared photography revealing colors that exist beyond human sight. A shadowy Swedish forest where the branches create a perfect oculus. A lush, kaleidoscopic vortex of a thing that feels less like a photograph of a forest and more like what a forest dreams about itself.
The back cover is Nona Limmen, whose photographs arrive like transmissions from memory or dream, impossible to recount and equally impossible to forget. That figure on the staircase, enshrouded in diaphanous white, five candles held aloft in the dark. It feels less like art and more like evidence. (If you haven’t read my recent profile of her work, that’s your next stop!)
Both artists appear inside the book alongside hundreds of others spanning centuries and cultures, and I’ll be introducing them properly over the coming weeks and months. They trusted me with their work, and I am so deeply grateful.
…Now, can we talk about pre-orders for a moment?
I know it can feel like a small gesture, clicking a button months before a book arrives, but I want to be honest with you about what it actually does, because it matters more than most people realize. Pre-orders are counted in a book’s first-week sales figures, and that first week is disproportionately important. It’s the number that tells booksellers how many copies to stock, that signals to publishers whether a book has momentum, that influences everything from front-of-store placement to whether an author gets offered another contract. The algorithm that determines visibility on retail sites weights early sales heavily. A strong pre-order showing can mean the difference between a book that gets hand-sold by booksellers who believe in it and one that disappears.
Publishers don’t promote books the way most people imagine. The work of actually getting this book in front of readers is on me. That’s on most authors, at every level. If this book, or any of my books, has ever meant something to you, pre-ordering is the single most effective thing you can do to help it find the readers it’s looking for. More than sharing, more than reviewing, more than telling a friend, though please also do all of those things.
The pre-order link is here (and peppered liberally throughout this post, as I am sure you have noticed). Thank you, genuinely, for being here for all of it.
I went down so many deliriously art-drenched, visually stupefying, aesthetically overwhelming rabbit holes while researching this book, and like any good rabbit hole, The Art of the Unknown will not offer certainty or even clarity. That’s not what you go down one for. (At least that’s not why I go down rabbit holes! I go to get lost!)
Anyway, what it will offer you instead is wonder — and wonder, I’ve come to believe, is the better deal.
