I’m so sorry to hear about your many losses. I know how that feels. insane and absurd when it happens all at once.

The photos from your trip are beautiful and i love that they are polaroids. Ive been thinking of getting a camera. I love taking photos but i don’t have decent camera. My wife and i are expecting a baby in July and i think i will want one. I have no idea what to expect, though. Im a child about to raise a child. I’d love to visit China. I work in Chinatown in Toronto and there are more mandarin spoken here than english. its great.

I’m glad you found that Ben Shahn book. i loved reading it. I got the William Kentridge book, Its a beautiful book. Im excited to read more of it.

Erin’s sketches are beautiful. Is her book written by her as well? My wife and i both love horses, especially my wife. we both were around horses growing up.

And Samson in the Snow looks fantastic too. When does that come out?
Im writing my first story right now and its set in winter. Ive been refusing manuscripts from other people (which i’m sure emily loves) and although i’m still committed to three more books I look forward to the new life of writing and illustrating for myself. but lets be honest. I haven’t proven to anyone i know how to write yet.

Maggie and I are going to Italy in March for one last trip before there are three of us. I thought i could see what the Bologna book fair is like. I’ve been told that its pretty inspiring. Before that we are going to be staying in Rome for Easter. check out el papa.

The book i’m working on right now is set in cape breton. in the 70s. Its a day in the life of a boy whose father is a miner. In the background it will show a contrast between the beautiful landscape and the struggle in the community. Slightly gritty, unglamorous but still beautiful. But that is the maritimes. I hope it works out. ive been thinking about it for a while and its important i do it right considering i’m from there.

My last book, the White Cat and the Monk, is getting some good reviews but it hasn’t got the same buzz as Sidewalk Flowers. i guess i’m still learning about this business but maybe the first thing i need to learn is not to read reviews or worry about accolades.

I’m just finishing a project with a children’s ward at a local hospital. Ive been making murals for it for the past 2 years. It’s done. im wrapping up so much stuff right now. alot of projects that have been going for the past 2 years are ending tomorrow.
Im at the studio right now. I should head home and see if how maggies feeling. Thanks for keeping in touch.

Definitely get a camera. I love my Polaroid cameras. I have three right now, although film for one is hard enough to find that it’s become more of a paperweight. My pictures from China were taken with this guy.

I guess technically this is a Fuji camera not a Polaroid, but Polaroid is more of a concept than a brand in my opinion. I think a while back Fuji bought Polaroid’s camera technology and started using their own film in the new machines. Fuji’s film is colder and bluer in my opinion than Polaroid’s used to be. It frustrated me for a few years, but I’ve made my peace with it. I just like that film cameras have limitations that force you to think before taking a shot. A film pack costs about 10 bucks and it has 10 photos, so every photo costs a dollar. There’d be a lot fewer soft focus online photos of people’s farm-to-table brunches if each shot cost a dollar. I’ve run the numbers and I end up getting 2.5 good shots out of a pack of 10. The rest are throwaways. But at the end of a year I have 20 or 30 real photos that actually represent my life as opposed to the thousands of not-real photos that only exist in ones and zeroes on a Cloud somewhere. I’ve had a thing for crappy cameras for a long time. Their results always seem more accurate to my memory of a situation. There’s something spiritually correct about the incorrectness of a Polaroid, or of any camera that struggles to get the details quite right. My senior thesis in college was a black and white photo essay on architecture in Detroit. For four years in photo class I’d been taught to take as many photos as possible on the assumption that quantity precludes quality. That always felt wrong to me though, so for my thesis I bought a half broken medium format Yashika camera from the early sixties, fixed it up, loaded it with a single roll of 12, and spent three months taking those 12 shots. I think 11 of the 12 ended up in my show. I’ve got them in a closet somewhere. Hang on…

Hmmmm. Can’t find ’em. They’re around though. Maybe some other time. I did find these other photos I took in Detroit when I was in high school though, circa 1997.

Anyway, all that is to say, if you buy a cheap camera you won’t regret it.

Erin did not write the horse book. Erin has yet to write her own text. It’s a weird story of how we ended up with that text though. We were in Nashville a few years back for a book festival. After our event we were waiting for lunch and I bought one of those street newspapers that are distributed by the homeless population. There was a poetry feature in the paper and this one poem about a milk cart horse stopped me dead in my tracks. Several months passed and (long-story-short) we convinced Macmillan to track down the rights to that poem. Unfortunately the author of the poem, a man named Ed Galing, had died just two weeks before we went looking for him. He was 96 years old. So next year Ed’s first picture book will come out, pretty damn close to what would’ve been his 100th birthday.

Samson in the Snow comes out in October (I think). I have no interesting origin story for that one.

Hey, how’d you make this image?

There’s a Pipe Dreams Head Shop in Milwaukee. Not sure if they’ve got a brunch menu.

People are always finding Jesus which makes me wonder if he even wants to be found. I suspect not.

Happy birthday! And congratulations on the new gig in online marketing. Maybe someday I’ll grow up, have a kid, buy a canoe. But I’ve got 14 months till I turn 36.

If you’re ever out of ideas let me know. I’ve got a middle grade novel (not really a novel, but I don’t know what to call it) that I think you’d be good for.

Please send pictures of Cape Breton art. By the way, did I tell you we bought White Cat and the Monk? We picked it up while we were touring in Mississippi. Great book. One of our two favorites this year so far. The other being Bunny Dreams by Peter McCarty.

Our escort in Mississippi open-carried a 9mm handgun to our bookstore reading. U.S.A.!

Erin says hi. She’s making cookies.

Ok, anything after this sentence won’t be published on Number Five Bus—stay in touch though.