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Thought Process

Last spring, I published my first book, Metamorphic Door. A hybrid project of poems, comics, and illustrations, it was published by Buckman Publishing, a local small press who I had collaborated with on multi-genre projects with in the past. I was grateful for the chance to work with a press that had a strong commitment to the local community, and to helping me carefully guide and release the project into the world.

As I read the poems and comics at launch events, I revisited the way that images impact me. I would describe myself as a visual person: an image is often the instigating moment for my poems, and a central part of why in recent years I’ve been drawn to creating comics and poetry comics. I was an avid Tumblr user in my teens and early 20s, and was enthralled with the way that a collection of images could be harnessed to tell a story explicitly or subconsciously, and to self-mythologize. It’s not surprising then that most of Metamorphic Door takes place in the digital world as well as the physical, a compilation of road trips, conversations in the city, texts with friends across the country, reels of baby animals positioned for scale next to pennies and iPhones. Life is layered, porous, and overlapping across platforms and places.

An aspect of this feels particularly present in the comics and drawings in Metamorphic Door, which feature layered images intersecting and overlapping in black lines. Blurring, obscuring, and transforming the scenes that they depict. I feel that these are equally a gesture to geologic time and the hyperawareness I feel to the echoes of history that haunt the present. Envisioning a world in which the present is no longer a single image but one scene layered over of all the moments that came before it.

As I worked over the course of 2023, to finalize the manuscript and plan its release, I, like many, had and continue to spend an exorbitant amount of time on my phone, a habit which has only increased in the past four years. Instagram, for the past few years, has been my app of choice. The endless feed of images, interspersed with flashes of song, advertisement, promises, calls to action—felt like a window into a more-alive world. Especially during lockdown, especially during days of seeming interminable solitude. Especially during days that often felt like an unendurable loop of routine: news reports of the sick and dying, the complete cruelty of the government and devotion to money making and power, white supremacy, fear, Clorox, flour shortages, furtive trips to the grocery store to shop among other furtive people in a way that felt haunted by stockpiling, crying at night for the future, for aging, fragile parents, at risk friends, dreams put on pause or canceled entirely—

I could encounter a webcam of an eagle’s nest deep in a forest, a compilation of musicians playing found and cobbled together instruments from around the world, tutorials on grown microgreens on a tiny ledge.

Just like the physical world, the digital is of course a landscape that is controlled and influenced, capitalized, and distorted. The ever-present awareness of the algorithm impacting what we see (baby animals) and the ‘bubbles’ that we create, communities that reinforce and isolate. It’s not like elements of these controlling forces don’t exist in the physical world, but it’s been harder to ignore their presence in the Instagram landscape since the introduction of AI, a development which feels both quiet and loud. It feels like every facet of my digital experience is now mediated by AI in some capacity, and there are increasingly few ways (if they exist at all) to opt out of this entanglement, other than the obvious: deleting Instagram itself and cutting myself off from the images that I have grown so used to and dependent on over the last few years.

Part of my discomfort with this new digital landscape is the audacity of tech companies to scrape the content of creators without acknowledgement or compensation, and part is outrage and obstinance to be offered no choice: to continue to exist in the digital realm as I have, de facto, gives my consent to participate in a system designed to disenfranchise and discourage original thought and fuel the bank accounts of millionaires in support of a technology whose output feels, at best, “mid”, as the kids say. A technology that consumes high quantities of water and electricity, as the earth teeters further toward the point of no return from the devastation of climate change and wildfires rage across LA, and a platform whose owners have decided to do away with fact checking in the wake of the 2025 election.

I’m hesitant to cut off the communities, contacts, and content I’m connected to through Instagram: I’ve discovered fellow artists book clubs, protests, and organizing movements through this app, not to mention stupid fashion trends, baby animals, and cooking hacks. It’s also been a critical source of information about organizing: BLM protests, bail funds, forums and lectures, and fundraisers, and most recently advocacy on behalf of the Palestinian people and against the genocide being performed by the Israeli state. But would Instagram’s absence in my life encourage me to find these connections and news sources in real life instead? And of course, it isn’t just Instagram. Adobe Acrobat now has generative AI features, as does Google and probably many others as well. I haven’t even begun to scratch the surface of other distressing aspects of the encroachment of AI, like the ecological impact of its huge carbon footprint, and the ways that it is changing the way we write, create, and think.

In the first days of this new year, I visited the urgent care at a local medical school and waited in a cold white room to be examined. The doctor who entered the room greeted me and then, before beginning the appointment, asked if I consented to have my appointment recorded and transcribed using AI. “It helps me focus on our conversation”, she said, “and takes perfect notes for me. It’s very intelligent. That way I can focus on you, and be a better doctor.”

I had already written a draft of this post, and had talked extensively with my friends about my discomfort with AI’s pervasiveness. But in the exam room, I consented.

When talking with my partner about the appointment later, I struggled to determine why I consented. I didn’t want to make the doctor’s job harder for her, I decided, and she said this app was a huge help. I was also worried that if I declined and did make her job harder, she might feel less inclined to listen to my symptoms, or refuse to advocate for my care.

“She’s not being a better doctor,” my partner said. He argued that taking notes is a method of processing information, and active listening. By offloading that labor to an app, a doctor might actually be less ‘present’ in thinking through my description of my symptoms. It’s possible that both analyses of the situation are true. The AI app might help my doctor in the moment of my appointment, but my partner’s point about what is lost in the process resonated across conversations I’ve had with friends who are artists, writers, and teachers. Our worries, fears, anger, and dreams travel across digital space and envision new futures.

While chatting with a fellow artist and friend who is grappling with the same concerns, she suggested we return to the land of personal blogs. Platforms that we can control, geared toward our own networks, however we define them, that we update and curate as we want. Of course, if we do this, personal blogs and the images and writing uploaded to them could get scraped too. But, as another friend pointed out, there is a difference between existing passively in a platform in which you do not control the terms of your participation and in at least attempting to carve out a space of your own.

Carolyn

Spring Comic (by Carolyn Supinka)

New Year Newsletter 2023: Time is a Hybrid Animal

Thank you for reading, writing, and collaborating with us during Conjunction’s first year of existence! Since we started this project in January 2022, time seems to have passed in the weird, hybrid animal way that it does: fast and slow, inching, racing, constricting, and occasionally flying.

I hope that some time during the past year, you read an issue of Conjunction and learned something new about eels, mayflies, deep time, or fungi. Maybe you enjoyed using some of our writing prompts or experimented with poetry-comics, pressed flower art, block printing, or felting. We hope something in these seasonal packages invited you to pause, wonder, and create.

Karah and I started this project partly as an invitation. Conjunction encourages us to collaborate with each other and dedicate time to pursuing new creative endeavors. It also invites our readers to join us as we figure things out, learn new skills, and respond to quarterly prompts.

Most importantly, Conjunction is an invitation to consider time—especially creative time—in a different way. Someone once told me that being a poet is a long game. I think you can replace the word “poet” with any other in that phrase. You can even omit “poet” altogether: being is a long game. And it’s not, at the same time. Practicing any art takes time, and through Conjunction, I’ve been open to seeing the ways that this practice ebbs, flows, and evolves, over the course of seasons and years. Instead of thinking of my writing practice as a trajectory, I try to think of it as a season: a cycle full of of beginnings, endings, and returns

I’m excited for 2023. I secretly drafted one of those in / out lists that I’ve been seeing on Instagram and something that I’d like to invite in is more classes and learning. I want to practice more types of artmaking. I want to get weirder with poetry-comics and book arts and maybe start to sew. We also want to facilitate more opportunities to connect and collaborate with Conjunction subscribers through readings and virtual workshops.

In 2023, we are changing our subscription pricing to make the workflow around this project a little more balanced for us. There are now two tiers of subscription to Conjunction. You have the option to sign up for a Solstice Subscription ($30), which includes a handbound zine featuring original content from Karah and myself once each quarter. Or you have the option to sign up for a Celestial Subscription ($50), which features our quarterly collaborative zine as well as original artwork (prints, posters, stickers, comics, and more).

We’re looking forward to continuing to create with you this year!

Carolyn

Spring Tarot Inspiration: King of Wands

The vernal equinox is finally here. After a challenging winter filled with grey skies and grief and devasting headlines, I'm very much looking forward to a change in the seasons. It's rainy here in Portland this weekend, but spending some time repotting my peperomias and spiderlings has reminded me that sunnier skies are on their way. That's not to say spring won't be without its challenges, but I'm trying still to make art sometimes, to spend time outside, and to dwell longer in the moments that ground me.

To celebrate the equinox, I drew a tarot card to serve as inspiration for the spring. Maybe it'll be the spark you need to start a new project.

To represent the king, I chose a nudibranch called the Spanish shawl. Growing up, I loved exploring tide pools in northern California, which are full of brightly colored animals like these sea slugs. With neon rhinophores and graceful underwater movements, they always seemed incredibly regal to me. And although they're technically water creatures, Spanish shawl nudibranchs look awfully fiery to me—an excellent representative for the suit of wands.

Like a flame, the king of wands is bright and charismatic. They draw others in with their warmth, dynamic presence, and impressive know-how. This is a trustworthy leader with creative ideas who follows through on their commitments and inspires other people to join them.

This card asks you to think about the projects you've invested in and relationships you've made. Which tasks & people in your life truly inspire you? How can you dedicate yourself more fully to things that light your fire?

Writing Prompt

Imagine the force that animates you. Is it fire? Saltwater? Starlight? Electricity? Try to describe it using all five senses.

Now that you know what you're made of, tell us your elemental origin story. When, where, how, and why did you first recognize this life force in yourself?

Wishing you all a transformative, rejuvenating spring—spend some time with plants, if you're able!