My 1.5-month hiatus has been due to an eyebrow-deep miring in revisions to my children's book illustrations and other projects*. As anyone who has finished a creative project knows, revision work spreads like sticky mud over everything one touches, often binding one in a standstill, while seldom beading into neat, polished units suitable for publication. I will attempt to knead some of this stickiness into a little lump and so give it the value and emphasis it deserves. I received feedback about my illustrations for the children's book, Lucy's Dance , from my cultural consultant about a month ago. One of the most challenging of the revisions required me to redraw the qasgiq huts that show up at the beginning and end of the book in the historical Yup'ik moments. My reviewer urged me to make the huts appear as though they were made of sod, and not of grass. This request puzzled me a bit at first, considering the definition for sod is grass rooted in earth clumps. I
Visuals and words