Announcement: Sarah is a Famous Orphan*

It’s called Beyond the Pull of Gravity, and it’s part of Cosmographia Books’ Famous Orphan series.

Here’s the synopsis from their official announcement:

Beyond the Pull of Gravity by Sarah Tavis(coming Autumn 2027)

Max is dead. The baby growing in Stella’s belly is Max. Her daughter Wren already knows this. Organized alphabetically from Absence to Zero-sum, this hybrid lyric novel mixes reality, fantasy, dream, and memory to explore grief, single motherhood, drug abuse, and the space occupied by a lover/parent after suicide and before rebirth.

This book has a wild backstory that I’m excited to hear Sarah tell us someday. For now, I want to celebrate this news!

If you’ve been here for a while, you may know that Sarah and I run the Scrap Heap in 8 - 10 week seasons, and then take a breather where we revisit older posts.

You might also know that we’re working on a book: The Joyful Practice Handbook: analog play for dark times, and that we’re in a bit of a push to finish it this summer. With that in mind, we’re embracing the idea of editorial chaos. We’re in the work and have fun stuff to share, but want to unlock from scheduling rigor. So, in other words, we’ll post weekly at irregular times and in irregular formats. We might randomly post a prompt portal video or a page-in-progress from the book, or a short podcast episode that strays from the normal format. This is one version of the principle: PLAY!

We’ll get back to the regular format and schedule sometime in August.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the word devotion this week as I work on pages for the book that deal with drawing and our experience of time. I’ve got two things to share.

1. This is the back of a page in progress. I’ve been making pages out of chicken feed bags (one of my favorite materials) and I’ve been hand stitching them for decoration. I’ve become interested in the backs of the pages as their own little process document.

   In this one, the final page is on the other side of an earlier draft. (The sizing is specific and I didn’t feel like cutting a new one.) When I pulled off a decorative element, several layers of paper came off with it, so I created a repair patch.

   I kind of love the accidental art of this rejected draft / backside.

2. Sitting on my floor stitching pages has me thinking about devotion. I think about how little devotion AI-generated ‘art’ requires and it makes me sad. I think about how enriching it has felt to have to slow down and work with physical materials. Below is a little meditation I typed out, trying to put some thoughts together. I’m not sure yet if it will go in the book.