In conversation: Carson Ellis
In conversation: Carson Ellis
On the mundane adventures of our twenties
Upgrade to an annual subscription for a chance to win my writing essentials • Forthcoming live events - details below • I took the Memoirland questionnaire about my writing life
Hello,
I have a not-so-secret love of illustrated books. I don’t really understand why growing up means that we have to we lose pictures from the pages of our books; it makes no sense to me that words are considered to be more serious than images. It’s just another weird snobbism that invades our literary experience.
For this reason, I was delighted to learn that Caron Ellis had published an illustrated memoir. Her books Home, Du Iz Tak? and The Shortest Day have been huge favourites in our house, and I love her Substack, Slowpoke. But One Week in January is a little different. Drawing on an intensely observed diary that she wrote over a single week aged 25, it captures something very special indeed: what it feels like to be on the cusp of becoming, without knowing it yet.
It’s a truly evocative book, and of course the paintings that illustrate it are beautiful. I was excited to have a conversation with Carson last week about this delightful picture book for grownups.
Katherine: Hi Carson! Nice to meet you! I absolutely loved One Week In January. How does it feel to be sharing such a personal piece? I write memoir and it always gives me the horrors in publication week!
Carson Ellis: Thanks! I feel like I share so much about my life with strangers online - maybe too much - and this seemed comparatively unrevealing. It’s a journal from over 20 years ago and it almost feels like a different person wrote it. Certainly a younger me, making different decisions than I would now. Also, it doesn’t disclose much about what I was going through emotionally at the time. It’s just kind of a stoic catalogue of my days.
It is very stoic! The world you’re inhabiting seems kind of difficult to navigate and you record it so gently - just listing what happened. It was so moving. It took me right back to that time in my own life.
Thank you. It was moving to find it and read it after so many years. I felt very tender towards that 25-year-old me.
And you wrote that at the time you were worried you’d forget. How much of it would you have recalled without the diary?
That’s a good question. The diary only covers one week - the week I moved to Portland, Oregon. My husband, Colin, who is in the diary a lot but was only my friend back then, feels like this particular week happened to be really memorable. He played the first show with his band the Decemberists that week. We began decades-long mutual obsession with Under Milkwood by Dylan Thomas that week. We got kicked out of a bar for relentless drunken singing, went to a race track to bet on horses, filmed ourselves trespassing in an old warehouse. These are all things we remembered before we found the journal. It’s hard to know if it was just a really special week or if all weeks would be that special if you happened to find a super detailed account of them in a box 20 years later.
I think it hit me particularly hard this week because I was at the funeral of a friend from my twenties, and the whole gang from that time was there. We spent the afternoon reminiscing about drunken exploits and weeks spent doing very little. I think I’d thought that no-one else found that time really significant - that it was just me - but they all did, and it’s clear that it was an important time for you too. And yet it was such a drifty, uncertain time! Are we just nostalgic? Or does something formative happen at that point in our lives?
I’m sorry about your friend. I think we are nostalgic, but also that those were really heady times for a lot of us: uncertain, trying, full of adventure and messy romantic relationships and really deep friendships. After keeping this journal I would flail around for a couple more years, but then I’d settle down and have a kid and that wild era would come to a fairly abrupt end. My art practice would turn into my job. My life would change a lot. All the partying and transience and experimentation of my twenties was such an important step. I don’t think I’d be an artist without it. It was definitely formative.
Yes! It’s a pivot point! I worry that our kids won’t get the same chance to just pause for a while before everything starts happening - it’s so much harder for them to live cheaply. You lived on bagels and pizza!
Yes, it’s true. I also don’t envy them growing up in the digital age. I am very nostalgic for a time before social media and iPhones.
We could make mistakes anonymously.
Yes! Also, my creative influences were so finite. I could list them all. I went to college in Montana - which was culturally pretty remote in the 1990s. It was before the internet, and the art that inspired me had to be encountered in a book or a magazine or in person or in class. It’s unthinkable now - these days I’m bombarded with art and visual imagery all day long. I would not want to be finding my way as an artist in that endless sea of inspiration. It’s too much.
That’s interesting - I often think how much I’d have loved to have the access to music and writing that we have now. I was hungry for everything!
Tell me about how you approached the paintings that illustrate the book.
I wanted to do something different. Rather than approaching it as an illustration job, I created a body of work inspired by the journal. The two approaches probably sound similar, but it was a really different process for me. I did not, for example, submit a bunch of sketches to an editor or art director, get notes, make revisions, etc. as I normally would. Instead I just made paintings as though I was creating work for an exhibit, using the journal as a prompt.
Some of them illustrate moments in the book. Some of them are just tonally or tangentially related to my life at the time or to Portland in 2001.
I did have a great editor - Bridget Watson Payne at Chronicle - and she helped shape the book a lot, but she did not give me notes on the art or try to guide that process at all, which was really nice. I am pretty burned out these days on all the editorial oversight of illustration work. I just want to paint.
They are SO beautiful - and I can only imagine how liberating it must be to create work solely to please your eye, and not an editor’s!
Carson, I’m so grateful for your time. Thank you. It’s a wonderful book.
Thank you! It was nice chatting with you.
One Week in January is published by Chronicle Books.
October live events
If you think a friend or loved one would enjoy The Clearing by Katherine May, gift subscriptions are available here | Website | Buy: Enchantment UK /US | Buy: Wintering UK / US | Buy: The Electricity of Every Living Thing UK / US
This newsletter may contain affiliate links.
Such an interesting read...my 20s were so very different. For the second half I was working at a large London STI clinic working with people finding out whether they had HIV AIDS (1980s - think It's a Sin - wonderful series).... All very hard and inspiring in double measures. I am sure there was ordinary fun but my work hovered over everything...however it was a key part of making me the person I am becoming!!
I tangentially know Bridget Watson Payne at Chronicle because she's also a friend of mine's editor, and she is lovely. I'll have to check out Carson's book. Thanks for this.