I think I worried some of you with yesterday’s late night post, so I want to reassure you that a good piece of the angst was just late-night-posting.
I mostly feel fine — a little frantic and overwhelmed in the run-up to the store launch (less than two weeks!), with a billion things in my head and the suspicion that I’m forgetting several important things at once, but generally still fine. Happy and excited, even. 
Tomorrow, I’m planning to spend the whole day sitting on the couch and dealing with e-mail and paying bills and such, which should be both reasonably restful and will also dim some of the bright blinking to-do lights in my head.
There were a lot of different things wrapped up in yesterday’s post, and while I think I did reasonable justice to the Kevin appreciation part, some of the rest could probably use further explication. If I were going to break it out, I think it’d be mostly:
*****
a) real concerns about writing / publishing / what we’re teaching our writing students in terms of publishing — that all deserves its own post, but I’m going to want to take some time to think it all through, because I think I may end up telling some of my much-loved colleagues that I think they’re doing it wrong (with the best of intentions), and that’s something you want to do with care and thought. So put a pin in that for now.
*****
b) the therapy bit — most of what is stressing me isn’t really anything a therapist can help with. What I could really use is a senior mentor in the field (fields, really, both writing and art), and I’m not quite sure how to make that happen, but I honestly don’t even know whom I’d want to ask some of my questions.
I don’t know anyone else doing what I do, so maybe I just have to figure it out on my own. Or maybe I’ll find people who can help me with at least some of the professional aspects. (I recently had conversations with Benjamin Rosenbaum and Andrea Hairston and SJ Sindu, and they were all helpful in their own ways.) But figuring out the professional stuff is not a job for a therapist.
The therapist WOULD be useful for helping me figure out why I feel so compelled to do the art / studio / store thing, but I mostly think I know the answer to that. It’s complicated, so that’s probably also a separate long post.
The short version is cancer / awareness of mortality –> frustration with the publishing industry today –> the therapeutic value of making art with my hands –> the joy I get from working in community + the stimulation of learning new things every day, which is GREAT for the ADHD brain.
I’ll try to do a longer post on that soon.
*****
c) the art fair bit — and I think this one is simple enough I can cover it here pretty quickly. Some commenters suggested I stop doing art fairs if I don’t enjoy them, and just concentrate on the store. But there are two problems with that:
Problem 1: It’s not that I don’t enjoy fairs — I actually do like talking to people about art, and having strangers tell me how pretty my work is, and it’s especially fun as a resin artist to have guys who were otherwise just there to hold their women’s bags (literally, I saw a LOT of bored guys doing that yesterday) get excited about the resin work and ask me lots of questions. That’s all fun!
I just don’t like the selling bit, and fairs *are* physically strenuous (woke up this morning, and I can definitely feel some of the muscles I worked out yesterday), so if I get to the point where I can regularly have a helper with me at fairs, then I can leave the heavy lifting to them (young people are great!) AND most of the selling, and just hang out working on my laptop and chatting with people about art. (But also, some heavy lifting is good for me.)
For some of the fairs, I could just hire someone to do it all for me, and I might do that eventually, occasionally, but it’s an art fair — people like to actually talk to the artist.
Problem 2: Yesterday, something like 500 people walked past my booth, many of them stopping, some of them buying. I was slow signing up, so I had pretty much the worst location (and definitely the smallest booth), and shoppers were kind of exhausted by the time they made it all the way to me (you could see it in their faces), so sales weren’t as good as I think they could have been.
BUT, I had lots of interest, lots of compliments, lots of people taking flyers for the grand opening, several people asking me about custom wedding bouquet work, a couple people who were very interested in getting a table at some point, and a dozen or so good sales. I haven’t quite made back my booth fee, but fingers crossed, I will today, and then some. It’s my first indoor fair, and the most expensive fair I’ve done so far — I learned a lot.
In contrast, my store was (soft) open from 12-4 yesterday, and it had a few people stop in, but I think no sales (unless Izzy did cash sales; I’ll have to check with her). There’s going to be a stretch building up the store traffic and sales before it even breaks even, I suspect, and I think doing fairs will help a lot with that transition period.
But that said, I’m probably going to mostly stick to smaller local ones for a while, which are less effort.
*****
Whew! That was long — thanks for reading if you made it this far.
Chicago Artisan Market in Ravenswood – Sat-Sun, Feb 14-15
