No Star Knows the Shape of Its Constellation ✨

Someone asked me this week what my artistic process is. “I don’t really have a process,” I said, thinking. “I just make what I feel like I have to make.” It’s less like a well-honed practice and more like a compulsion, an itch I have to pay attention to. These days, it’s easy for me to spin out and feel powerless. I try to not get into a mental swamp where fear and anger make it impossible for me to create what I want to in the world. I try to see it as a victory against all the oppressive forces in our country when I live my life freely and create art that’s not making any billionaires any money.

Two comics for this month

Stuff I Made

• With input from a good group of friends, I finished this sweet and sincere simple guide to emergency preparedness. The idea for this zine is to start with what is totally doable, focused on communal action rather than individualism. You can buy a copy for $10 or download it for free.

• I’m coordinating all the workshops for Crucial Comix and am proud of the lineup we have this spring. We’ve got comics workshops on grief, climate anxiety, and fatphobia. Also sexy comics for shy people, if you want to have some fun.

• I don’t know where else to put this so I’ll stick it here. I got a nice shout-out in Comics Beat’s write-up about 2024 comics innovators: “Shay has been making waves in the indie and nonfiction comics world for a long time but this felt like a breakout year for them.” 🙂 

Spring Festivals

Here’s the rundown on where I’ll be selling comics in-person over the next three months. I want to make international zine connections. So if you’re in any of these cities, please say hi for real!! We can probably get coffee.

📍 Portland, Oregon, March 29 - Reed Zine Fest: A free zine festival on the campus of Reed College that is a really good time!

📍Portland, Maine, April 5 - Comic Arts Maine Portland: I just thought it would be funny to do two comics fests in Portlands on opposite coasts.

📍Berlin, Germany, May 3 - Comic Invasion Berlin: I’ve been to this festival twice before and absolutely love it. I’ve met some of my favorite comics artists in the world here! I’m going to be in Berlin for all of May and will run a public zine workshop that I promise I’ll let everyone know about.

📍Vienna, Austria, May 16-18 - Fanzineist Vienna: I’ve never been to Vienna and don’t know what I’m getting into, but this festival looks rad.

📍Toronto, Canada, June 6-8 - Toronto Comic Arts Fest (TCAF): A legendary indie comics show that I’m thrilled to be tabling at for my first time!

How people are using my “how to make a zine” zine this month

Every day, I get emails from people who download my “how to make a zine” template. Here are just a handful of things people are doing with my zine template this month. Let this be your inspiration to go make a zine! 

• I'm a co-creator of Pride Plus Joy, which is creating and distributing educational zines for (mostly cisgender) parents of trans, nonbinary, and gender-expansive kids. A lot of our zines are in the 1pg format, so it's helpful to be able to share this guide to how it's done! — Boston 

• I am teaching a group of sophomores in my creative nonfiction class. We are doing a unit on transforming one of their personal essays from the semester into a zine.  — Houston 

• The library I work at is having a zine crafting night! I'll be making a few copies of this for people to use or to take home. — Virginia 

• I work with LGBTQ+ youth and want to help them make a zine. — Iowa

What I’m reading 

Cry When the Baby Cries - A spot-on documentation of parental plights, ranging from fat-shaming doctors to sleep deprived brain fog. I bought this way-too-funny book by cartoonist Becky Barnicoat for my brother and sister-in-law who have a six-month old baby (and I read it first and only spilled a small amount of soup on it).

You Are a Sacred Place: Visual Poems for the Climate Crisis - Madeleine Jubilee Saito is an artist whose work always teaches me how to make more profound and resonant comics. I got an advance copy of her gorgeous and reflective new book, which anyone would be lucky to read.

Sharks Don’t Sink - I absolutely forget who recommended this biting marine science memoir to me, but it’s right up my alley. My alley is full of sharks!!

Buried Deep - I’m including this in here so that any other Naomi Novik fans out there will reply and tell me who their favorite Scholomance character is. I don’t have time to do this, but someday (when I retire) I would love to write Naomi Novik fanfiction.

Something to do  

Send some mail art.

This is your reminder that you can make art just for fun and not for money or any big serious reason. I printed these absurd postcards with photos of peoples’ hometowns and have been trading them through the mail. Things I’ve gotten in exchange for postcards: zines, stickers, really nice notes, Chinese papercuts from the 1970s!

Thanks for reading. Remember to say hi if you live in Maine, Berlin, Vienna, or Toronto.