a better world than this one often seems

It is very, very hot here at the studio.

But hello! A quick station identification: this is Matt & Erika. Studio Kirkland is our little house brand that covers different creative projects our family tackles. In this update: Dracula Daily news, yard signs, a preview of a big project we’re cooking up, and a book rec.

Here’s a thing I believe: you can have a silly idea, but ideas aren’t worth anything until you get them out into the world.

AND

I am continually intrigued by alternative delivery methods for fiction (that’s why Dracula Daily exists!). I love stories that are told with any kind of mixed-media-ness. I have an ongoing Call for Entries series about alternative fiction formats that I’d love to produce. Like; do you want to write a story for a trade magazine? An ical subscription? An e-commerce website?

WELL

One of those was alternative formats is yard signs. My original pitch from the RFP:

Libraries and Parks Departments do these ‘story walks,’ where they make small outdoor signs and place them along a pathway in a park. Sometimes they’re just printing out spreads from a picture book! I’d like to take this idea and tell a story in the form of those rainbow ‘In This House We Believe…’ signs. You can make them custom, and print one-offs. I envision a story that works by walking down a suburban block where each house has one of these. Perhaps the neighbors are in conversation with each other, or telling some Rashomon-esque take on some neighborhood disturbance.

I realized that there’s a great story that already fits this. Or well, it fits the first sentence.

SO

I made a digital version, for now. You can read it here:

studiokirkland.com/inthishouse/

It’s so dumb, and still makes me laugh. Is this a dumb joke? Will your neighbors be confused? Will you finally identify the real Austen-heads on your block? Yes to all of it. Now I just need to line up three thousand neighbors so we can do more than the first line.

Speaking of books! Matt’s doing an IRL spooky-season Dracula Daily event this October. We just put this on the calendar on October 24, at a Barnes & Noble in Kansas City. Keep your eye out for a telegram with more details…

We (Trudy and Matt, mostly) have been working on a new project - no reveals yet on it, but it’s a very different kind of thing and we’re pretty excited.

It’s a consumer product, a real thing you can buy. And while we’ve had a few cracks at this, this is going to operate at a different scale. Dumb Cuneiform, for example, is a goofy product that is very real, but literally handmade here at the studio, each time someone orders. The books we’ve designed & published were printed at a big press in Michigan, but done all at once.

This one is more complicated! We’re buying raw materials from one place (in Kansas), arranging freight shipping, doing a test run with an extrusion lab at another (also in Kansas). We’re making custom packaging. We’re packing it elsewhere. We’re designing a brand. We’re commissioning illustrations. We’re going to dip our toes into real marketing (a tiktok, maybe???)

We’re doing this because Trudy’s original idea is so great. It’s a very fun concept and we believe it should exist in the world. And of course because making stuff is fun. Even when ‘making stuff’ feels a lot like work: building a cost model spreadsheet, writing purchase orders, working with specialists, answering emails.

But even though we’re not announcing it yet, some teasers in the meantime:

• We ordered a literal ton of raw materials.

• We’re leaning into regional expertise. Our studio is in Kansas, and there’s a surprising wealth of the kind of manufacturing expertise this thing requires. We’re making the first run here.

• It’s a thing you can buy but it’s really an activity you can DO: something to add to your list of “Creative Date Ideas” or “Day Out with the Kids.”

• We had to register with the FDA (????)

More to come on the process here. By our next newsletter, we’ll be almost ready for our test manufacturing run!

Here’s the most recent book I’m trying to convince everyone to read: How to Cook a Wolf by MFK Fisher.

This is entirely charming. It’s a pseudo-cookbook, a mix of essay and recipe, about how to eat well when food (or money or fuel) is short. Thus the titular wolf here is ‘the wolf at the door,’ ie hunger. It’s got chapters of general advice broken down by topic (or sometimes dish or ingredient), but with many specifics and recipes scattered throughout. But mostly I love this book because Fisher’s a great writer; delightful and discursive and opinionated and funny.

It was first written in 1942 during WWII food shortages, and the country was full of advice about how to stretch your ingredients. This is different. Fisher tells us how to eat well, how to satisfy soul as much as body. You will read a chapter of this book and immediately want to be this woman’s friend, and go to her parties. It’s a wartime recipe book that makes you want to dine at Fisher’s table.

A few excerpts, like this paean to soup:

Probably the most satisfying soup in the world for people who are hungry, as well as for those who are tired or worried or cross or in debt or in a moderate amount of pain or in love or in robust health or in any kind of business huggermuggery, is minestrone.

On the impact of baking your own bread:

“… cut for yourself, if you will, a slice of bread that you have seen mysteriously rise and redouble and fall and fold under your hands. It will smell better, and taste better, than you remembered anything could possibly taste or smell, and it will make you feel, for a time at least, newborn into a better world than this one often seems.”

I love a fellow sojourner in Run-on Sentence Land. Here’s Fisher on fowl:

Perhaps it is an old wives’ tale; perhaps it is a part of our appetites more easily explained by The Golden Bough than by a cook or doctor: whatever the reason, a roasted pigeon is and long has been the most heartening dish to set before a man bowed down with grief or loneliness. In the same way it can reassure a timid lover, or comfort a woman weak from childbirth.

It is not easy to find pigeons, these days. Most of the ones you know about in the city are working for the government.

Reader, that’s when I knew I was an MFK Fisher convert. Working for the government!

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