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    One Week in January: New Paintings for an Old Diary
    One Week in January: New Paintings for an Old Diary
    One Week in January: New Paintings for an Old Diary
    Ebook67 pages20 minutes

    One Week in January: New Paintings for an Old Diary

    By Carson Ellis

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    About this ebook

    “Feels like reading a love story that doesn't quite know it's a love story yet, and a success story that doesn't know it’s made it.”
    —Emma Straub, New York Times–bestselling author of This Time Tomorrow

    Award-winning, beloved children's book author and illustrator Carson Ellis makes a stunning adult debut with an illustrated memoir that evocatively captures a specific cultural moment of the early 2000s and in her journey as an artist. 

    In January 2001, the young artist Carson Ellis moved into a warehouse in Portland, Oregon, with a group of fellow artists. For the first week she lived there, she kept a detailed diary full of dry observations, mordant wit, hijinks with friends (including her future husband, Decemberists frontman Colin Meloy), and turn-of-the-millennium cultural touchstones. Now, Ellis has richly illustrated this two-decade-old journal with extraordinary new paintings in the signature style that has made her an award-winning picture book author today.

    This beautiful volume offers a snapshot of a bygone era, a meticulous re-creation of quotidian frustrations and small, meaningful moments, and a meditation on what it means both to start your journey as an artist and to look back at that beginning many years later.

    AWARD-WINNING AUTHOR: Carson Ellis is a Caldecott award-winning author and artist known for her work in the Wildwood Chronicles, The Mysterious Benedict Society, and beyond and the longtime illustrator-in-residence for the band The Decemberists. People who love her children’s books will be thrilled to discover this new book—especially parents who are nostalgic for the days of the early 2000s.
     
    A NOSTALGIC GIFT: One Week in January is the perfect nostalgic gift for anyone who came of age in the heyday of indie rock, offering a glimpse into the lives of a particular Portland art scene.

    BEAUTIFUL, ECCENTRIC, AND CHARMING: Dry, specific, mundane, and somehow completely magical—this book is a true revelation. With gorgeous one-of-a-kind paintings by the one-and-only Carson Ellis, it’s transporting and relatable, an unglamorous homage to youthful misadventure, fun, sadness, and all the intense feelings of early adulthood.

    Perfect for:
    • Fans of Carson Ellis’s picture books and illustration
    • People who grew up listening to The Decemberists and other bands from the 90s Portland music scene
    • Millennials and Gen Xers
    • Readers of diaries and memoir
    • Art book collectors 
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherChronicle Books Digital
    Release dateSep 10, 2024
    ISBN9781797219066
    One Week in January: New Paintings for an Old Diary
    Author

    Carson Ellis

    Carson Ellis is the illustrator of a number of books for children, including the Wildwood Chronicles, and is the author and illustrator of the picture books Du Iz Tak?, a Caldecott Honor winner, and Home. Carson lives just outside Portland, Oregon, with her family.

    Read more from Carson Ellis

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      Book preview

      One Week in January - Carson Ellis

      INTRODUCTION

      A FEW YEARS AGO, I was going through a crate of letters and keepsakes and found eight typed pages documenting a single week in 2001. I don’t usually keep journals, and I didn’t remember writing this one. I read it aloud to my husband, Colin, and we laughed. It chronicled the week I moved to Portland, Oregon, and I had recorded only the minutiae of each day: what I ate (mostly bagels), what I drank (so much booze), what I listened to (Napster), whether anyone had emailed me (generally not). It was a droning catalog of my life at twenty-five, broke and unemployed, on the cusp of the digital age. I liked it.

      I wrote to my old friend Emmy, who appears in it often, and told her I wanted to illustrate this weird, boring journal. I wrote, I can’t remember the thinking behind it.

      Emmy did remember. She told me I had begun to fret about forgetting things—at the age of twenty-five—and that this obsessive record had been a brain exercise to stave off memory loss. Did I read about this strategy somewhere? Did I make it up? I don’t, of course, remember. My memory has only gotten worse. The week I moved to Portland would be sinking slowly into oblivion if not for this meticulous journal that brought it all back.

      The new house I refer to in the journal was not, in fact, a house. It was a 350-square-foot space inside a Southeast Portland warehouse. There was a shared bathroom down the hall, and I used the kitchen (also the phone, the computer, the TV, and the VCR) in the space downstairs where Colin lived with our friend Stiv. There was an additional, inexplicable toilet in Colin and Stiv’s kitchen, right next to the fridge, that we called Plan B.

      The three of us were friends from college, and a fourth college friend, Nathan, lived upstairs. Colin worked in a pizza place, and his boss, Zefrey, also a painter, lived in the space next door to mine. Over the next year, I’d get to know just about everyone in the building. My old friend and longtime gallerist, May, would move in next door to Colin and Stiv and run a bookshop and venue out of her tiny space called the Lazy Lady Lounge. This warehouse was home to Portland label Marriage Records; to the bimonthly arts journal, the Organ; to Pinko’s, a place where underresourced and unhoused people could access

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