Welcome to Wandering Grace. I will be sharing essays exploring the themes of place and (be)longing1 every other Sunday, and bonus snapshots from the road on Sundays in-between those. Read more about the project here.
Today is another bonus post. I’m sharing with everyone as I move to a Sunday-Sunday posting schedule amidst holiday breaks, so I’m not too far gone from folks’ inboxes. Consider it a teaser trailer for the full essay on ‘baggage about baggage’ coming up next week.2
This week, I wanted to share a comic3 from the 2014 archives called Packing Up Home. Click through to read.
Recently, while I was packing for a move in 2023, I was carrying a stack of boxes down some stairs, including a box of “original comics artwork” (aka neat stacks of rubberbanded index cards, each bundle the illustrations for a completed webcomic). I slipped on the bottom step, the box of index cards dropped out from under me, and paper went flying everywhere.
As this was at the tail end of my packing, I couldn’t be bothered to rearrange and reorder the index cards back into their neat stacks, as everything in the box had already been “published” online in some form. I threw all of it away into the recycling bin.4
But I did manager to take some photos of the original drawings for the comic “Packing Up Home” for this post.
The colored pencil colors are actually really nice in the originals, and don’t hold up to the scanning + color correction needed to get them ready for online publication. This would be one reason to keep the originals in my archives. (…but I don’t know what to do with those kinds of regrets after the act of unarchiving has already occurred.)
I also found this little guy — a sibling or cousin of the little turtle featured in the comic. They were nestled into a ziploc bag full of “desktop odds and ends” that never got unpacked from the last move. Back into a bag into a box into another abode they will go.
In continued solidarity and deepening context for a free Palestine, we move toward a permanent ceasefire in wild love and abiding hope.
I intend and hope to publish another essay in a week, but life might have other plans for me as I navigate continued housing sh*t! My Migration Tour and Healing Pilgrimage are not over, it seems. I will keep you updated.
In a conversation with someone at the recent East Bay Alternative Books and Zine Fest, I self-identified as a “writer of mostly essays, many of which are in comic form.” My graphic novella It’s Okay That It’s Not Okay is basically a book-length lyic essay.
An ongoing struggle/question of archives for someone who is not-middle-or-upper class, who belongs to diaspora with already-disrupted lineage, and who moves house a lot…what’s worth keeping and what is not? I think we might get into all that in the next Wandering Grace essay.