The Month Books grew out of a moment of crisis that turned into a long year, then years, of struggling with chronic illness. In 2021, I was diagnosed with vestibular neuritis and a severe case of vestibular migraine disorder. Without any family history or prior experience with these conditions, the first weeks, before I understood what was happening, were alarming. Migraines presented themselves as total, room-spinning vertigo, beginning so abruptly and forcefully that I would fall over in chairs, crawling my way to the bathroom through a blur of color, to throw up and lie sweating and shivering on the floor for hours. This happened once a week, twice a week, three times, then once or twice a day. It felt like falling out of orbit. It felt like being betrayed.

Writing was gone, too, for a while. But I still wrote small scraps, a line here or there when I could, in one good moment of the day, or one good hour in a week. After I eventually found a diagnosis, and began treatment in earnest, it still took two years to recover enough to come back to the studio and begin working on this project. I wanted to honor the first year I spent with this illness, somehow, and I also didn’t want to live with the burden of those experiences anymore. So I collected the fragments of writing, separating them into the months they were written, and enclosed them within a set of twelve books. That year was one of the loneliest years of my life, but I’m happy to see all twelve books together now, happy that it could produce some kind of abundance. I also created four monotypes, centering a calendar design of the moon cycle, with full and new moons throughout a year’s progression. Again, I wanted to tell the same story, but in a different language, one more expansive and saturated. Both monotypes and book covers were made with a restrictive red and blue palette and combine rolled ink, painted ink, and abstract shapes created with torn paper.

This project was also created at the same time with another, which I view as a kind of sibling, or perhaps two sides of the same coin. You can find it here.