Alice Costas writes the following lovely reflection about Thursday’s confusing and wonderful printing day which was followed by a sustaining Conversation on Creative Practice “Breathing Praxis: Humanizing the Rhetoric of Leadership. “

So, yeah, no it was… well, you sort of had to be… wait, ok, fine, lemme tell you about Thursday. So, we printed yesterday. A lot. A three-layer 75 edition cake of juicy, rich, book covers. Rob Pecchia, local bike enthusiast and well-groomed handlebar moustache beholder came and lent his mad registration and printing skills to the project. And I was there (I’m Alice, an artist mentor, good-for-nothin’ writer hippy baker chickadee).

We started the day off with waffles (duh) courtesy of Noel, who also expressed strong opinions regarding whipped cream, but quickly moved into making ourselves into a Super! Human! Copy! Machine! with Emmy’s help. We started by illustrating images from the book, and then went crazy with carbon paper, repeating out drawings in a whirling dervish (read, circle around a table) of pressing down really hard on #2 pencils until each book (yeah, all 50!) had a custom drawing nestling inside it’s pages. We took a break to ride around in the shopping cart and peal some bananas…

And then we talked title. We had some thoughts about ovaries, and brilliant minotaurs, and maybe tea, but settled on a phrase from the book. So, the magnicifent text, the magical binding this week can crazy community building this week has been leading up to is officially titled

“You and All the Other Creatures”

At this point, I checked my brain out a little to mix inks after some group-think about gold and peacock colors for the first two layers of the silkscreen. But then I checked back in, in time to get our printing on

The title was furiously sketched out, and burnt onto an acetate along with a wonderful exquisite corpse drawing with the help of genius silkscreen banditas Bridgette, Maddie, Naomi and Molly… then, we printed them. Like, a lot of them. They were EVERYWHERE. CJ rigged up an insane chicken-wire drying rack cum jail cell for books over out library, and we got registering, pulling, flooding and printing. There were prints pinned to a bike-wheel somewhere too? And taped to the walls in the other room? Seriously, this was a whole bunch of big-thinking heads running around together to get something done. It was like watching the most delicious cake rise out of the loosest recipe, but it worked cause everyone was all about supporting each other. You know? You know.Major major thanks to Maddie, Katie, Molly, Max, CJ, Rob, and all of the many hands that dipped into the process for a little bit. After printing, we sort of trickled out of the studio and did our own thing. I can only imagine that everyone went home and had really good sun-naps, but I stuck around to see Anna West and Michael Cirrelli talk about the youth spoken word movement while surrounded by the prints we had made. And it felt full, and like we had spent the day doing this work together. And my cheeks were red and warm even though Providence had gotten cold outside by then…

-Alice Costas