That’s the idea behind Skewed North Souvenirs.

The Souvenir Shop is now open to everyone. (Paid subscribers got in first. Thank you for that!)

These are original designs by me, inspired by the places, stories, and peculiar little details that find their way into Skewed North.

The first Souvenirs are available until October 31, only. After that, the design will be retired and added to the Skewed North archive.

New Souvenirs will appear along the way, alongside a collection of open-edition pieces that will remain available year-round.

I wanted the shop to feel less like a store and more like an extension of Skewed North, a place where something from a story can follow you home.

So, if there’s a place here that has stayed with you, this is your chance to take a little of it with you.

Visit the Souvenir Shop

Collect the places. Keep the stories.
— Jolene

P.S. If there's a piece from along the way you'd love as something custom, or a photo of your own you'd like turned into a design, I can do that too. Just reach out. I'm kind of easy to talk to.

I’m a person who loves signs, synchronicities, and learning the story behind things. So I’ve been thinking about weaving more of that into the writing, the kind of thing that, once you know it, you start seeing everywhere.

There are two directions I keep circling: the secret life of colors, and the secret life of symbols. I can’t decide, because both feel important to me.

Each week would come with the story behind a color or symbol, and one question to carry with you.

So I’m asking you. Here’s a little taste of each.

Behind the Scenes: Colors

Electric Blue

On April 26, 1986, a 24-year-old engineer at Chernobyl heard a thud. Seconds later, he realized radiation was filling the air. He later described what he saw: “I could see a huge beam of projected light flooding up into infinity from the reactor… It was light bluish, and it was very beautiful.”

Electric blue walked into history in the 19th century, showing up in a British drapers’ journal in 1874. Today we see it as the color of the future, the glow of screens in films like Minority Report. Sometimes that future feels unnerving. The image above isn’t unnerving at all. That one singular color holds the serenity of a night sky and the terror of the future

Where in your life are you holding two truths at the same time?

_{Source: Kassia St Clair, The Secret Lives of Colour. Engineer’s account as quoted in the book.}

Behind the Scenes: Symbols

The Compass

For centuries, the compass has been both a practical tool and a symbol of our search for order, direction, and meaning. On old maps, the fleur-de-lis marking north is often said to have started as a T, for Tramontana, the north wind.

A magnetic compass can be thrown off by its surroundings (hi, that’s me). Our inner compass gets thrown off too, pulled between what we know consciously and what we carry underneath. That’s why finding your direction is never one decision. It’s constant course correcting, until the parts of you finally line up. Aka, True North.

Where are you ignoring your own compass?

_{Source: The Book of Symbols: Reflections on Archetypal Images, ARAS, published by Taschen.}

So, which would you rather receive?

And if there’s a color or symbol you’ve always wondered about, tell me in the comments. It might become a Field Note.

The first one lands in October. I can’t wait to start.

— Jolene

Now I need readers. Not editors, and not c…

Read more

There are places you leave with a photograph.

Sometimes you leave with a story.

And sometimes you find yourself wanting to take a little piece of the place home with you.

That’s the idea behind Skewed N…

Read more

Her sister painted it. Her best friend painted it. Her classmates, her family, volunteers, and tradespeople all put their hands on this wall.

That was on purpose. I wanted the children to have something to do with their hands. Grief is enormous, especially for children, and they don’t always have the words for it. Art gives them somewhere to put some of what they’re carrying.

The most meaningful part for me was teaching them different techniques and skills and watching them take ownership of what they were creating. Seeing the look of accomplishment on their faces when they stepped back and saw what they had made was priceless.

The two girls on the paddle boards below are Avery and Rilyn. They are sitting beside each other looking at the horizon. Sometimes there is nothing to say and nothing to fix. Sometimes the most loving thing we can do is sit beside someone.

The dolphin represents a gentle guide forward for everyone who knew Rilyn and her family.

The volcano represents Pele, the Hawaiian goddess of fire, strength, transformation, and the ability to create something new from what has been destroyed.

Aloha Ohana reflects the core Hawaiian belief that you treat your community and loved ones with deep warmth, ensuring that no one is left behind or forgotten.

The monarch represents transformation and a journey that continues across generations. This is especially personal because it connects back to how I first knew these girls, raising monarchs together during COVID. Rilyn’s mom also called Rilyn her butterfly, so this became a very personal symbol. Rilyn’s mom painted that.

The three Sea Turtles (Rilyn her sister & mom) are symbolic of strength, protection, patience and finding your way home.

The Hermit Crab, resilience & growth. Rilyn had a hermit crab just like this. His name was Lucky Charm. He became very important in her understanding of life and death.

The cardinal below is a small symbol of the people we love who aren’t physically with us anymore, and a reminder that their presence can still be felt.

The tiki guardian stands for protection, ancestors, and strength — the idea that we are surrounded by people, both present and remembered, who help carry us. We call him Patiki, after my late husband Patrick, who also died of cancer.

The rainbow is a bridge between worlds.

I lost count of how many people volunteered to help bring Rilyn’s Corner to life. Three of Rilyn’s closest friends, Rilyn’s mom and sister, several of the other children’s moms, teachers, and friends all contributed in some way.

Standing in that hallway, what got me wasn’t the wall, the beach shack or the tiki hut. It was everyone who had shown up. Every single person came for their own reason, and they all came anyway.

That’s the thing that undoes me — how many people will gather to honor someone who’s gone.

I hadn’t seen a monarch at my house since those COVID days with Avery. Not one, in all those years.

The day I called my friend to ask if she’d help me with this, one flew past my garage while I was still on the phone with her.

I wrote about the way this all came about, the design and what it means to me here.

That's the question I got stuck on after my last post, when I couldn't quit thinking about the word metabolize and started integrating it into a digestion concept for my wo…

Read more

I was sitting in my living room on my comfy couch, going through fragments of writing to complete the rough draft of my memoir by my birthday — the end of this month. A goal I made for myself for my milestone birthday.

In between pages and chapters I wander around on the internet. That night I saw a post that had an AI prompt I thought would be fun to play with. It only had what I told it — my own stories, my own words — and it came back with a sentence that literally was at my front door my whole life but I just didn’t see it because I was inside the house!

The passage was: You make things because making is how you metabolize.

I’ve never put the word metabolize and art in the same sentence, and so it reframed it in a way that I understood it differently, because I know how the body metabolizes food. I mean, we kind of all know that, don’t we?

It took me down a metaphor rabbit hole. If we put something toxic inside our bodies, our inner environment, we physically get sick. So, to me, it would stand to reason that if someone is in an actual environment where being seen is dangerous, then they have to be able to metabolize being seen. Don’t we all?

I have been asked many times, why do you make what you make? What inspires you? In so many different interactions, the question always circles back to this. I don’t feel like I have ever had a really good answer other than I am compelled. I will actually physically feel an ache if I don’t create.

Why? Welp, that obvious answer at my front door, because this is how I metabolize my life and my experiences. Good or bad.

You eat and the whole digestive system goes to work to make sure all the good and not so good get to where they need to go to keep your body going. I make things for the same reason. I go through a process of thinking about it, but it’s very intuitive. I don’t try to force it or even ask for it. It’s just a natural experience. Natural, like digestion.

It’s just so strange to me to think about when I finish a piece, I really don’t think about it again. Nobody lingers in the bathroom thinking about what just happened in there either. You flush and move on. But that’s because the part I needed is already in me. Your body takes what it needs from what you feed it, and the nutrients are what keep you going.

Making things as a metabolic function? What a concept. But I feel like I know it to be true because of what I went through years ago when the mechanism (me) got junked up because she hadn’t been making things.

I had to go through this whole big work betrayal which meant I would hardly pick up a paintbrush, even in my own private life, for almost five years. I was so wounded from this experience that I just kind of lost focus and stopped painting. It was awful to feel pain because I wasn’t painting and also feel pain when I would.

After seeing me in this state of distress and unable to resolve it on my own, Patrick, a trained photographer, came into the laundry room and set a photo down on the washer. It was an antique Ford from our most recent road trip out west, taken in WaKeeney, Kansas.

“Bet you can’t paint that.”

And that was all he had to say because he knew the best way to get me to do something was to say I couldn’t. So I said, “Yes I can,” the whole time wondering if I could.

I had never painted a car. That work experience had told me I wasn’t any good, and for a time I believed it. So when I finished, and it turned out good, I was just as surprised as he was. I remember saying to myself out loud, I am a good painter!

Because he loved seeing his small photographs on big canvases he gave me more things to paint of his. It was such an Andy Warhol move of him to use me like that. But it got me back on metabolic track.

Making things is how I process life experiences. It isn’t how everyone does it though. There are plenty of other ways. For example, I have a good friend who processes hard things by being in community. She literally needs to be around a bunch of people and ask questions. For her this is the solution to metabolizing her life and experiences, good or bad.

I feel like the next time someone asks me what inspired me to create what I made, I can answer confidently: Making is how I metabolize — my life, my experiences, even a conversation. And here I am doing it right now.

All this time I thought I had a past life as a record keeper for all the archiving I have done for years. My memoir is proof of it, photos, paintings, words and moving images stacked in pages, hard drives and painted surfaces. Numerous side quests and trips and thoughts of I will make something from this. When in fact the making was the reason, not the product.

Although the one below turned out pretty well. :)

I wonder, how do you metabolize your life? In what ways do you find yourself?

A quick stop on my way at Sahalie Falls which plunges 100…

Read more

I wasn’t prepared for the twenty degree drop in temperature when I started walking the tiny pathway to the top. All I could hear and feel was the wind whipping past me like a giant was breathing on me from one of the distant mountains. He would hide after every exhale. The clouds moving fast above me, giving me only moments of warmth on my skin.

It took me a minute to realize what was missing.

I rented a car to twist and turn through the Cascades again. There is something about a highway opening up before me that just sets my soul at ease. The way the steering wheel feels in my hands navigating hairpin curves excites me and terrifies me all at the same time. The feeling of being scared to look down is a reminder of just how fragile life is.

I was on my way back from visiting my friend who just had her first baby. How something so tiny and delicate can survive a life is nothing short of amazing to me.

Oregon has a pulse I couldn’t put my finger on until now. It’s just so quiet and paced here. There is no urgency like there is back home. First I thought it was just Corvallis, but the undertone pulse of the entire state is regulated. It feels regulated. It makes my body calm down too.

When I go into stores here, people look at me and I know why now. I move fast. I talk fast. I’m fast. And I ask questions fast.

The first time I noticed it was in a brewery. I asked the bartender about the beers. She started giving me the rundown of the hops and I had already decided what I was going to get, so I stopped her.

Only it didn’t work. She just simply said, if you give me a moment I can answer your first question. Even though I didn’t have another question.

The other time I became aware of it was walking into the grocery store. I whizzed past the lady in front of me. Another customer looked at me, then looked behind me, almost curious as to what the fire was.

My father survived Vietnam but brought the war home with him. I learned early to move fast in a house, and to read a room before I could see it. Fast was correct there.

Survival of the fittest never meant the strongest. It meant the best match — the animal that fit its environment. I fit mine. I was very good at it.

Standing on a lava field at 5,187 feet, this ground moved fast once too, and then it stopped, and now it's the quietest place I've ever stood. I’m the wrong animal entirely here. I am missing the emergency of the fire that came before.

The calmness followed me from Corvallis to Bend and now here. I am staring at 360-degree views of the Three Sisters, Mount Washington, Mount Jefferson, and distant peaks like Mount Hood.

It does strike me odd that I live on Mount Washington in Pittsburgh, and here I am staring at another Mount Washington in the distance. Is this the me I needed to get space from to write my memoir?

On top of an observatory made of rock that looks like a medieval castle, the wind whipping my hair, a bronze peak-finder compass set into the top of the Dee Wright Observatory.

The needle spins. The quiet doesn’t.

I’m really good at seeing problems before they exist and bringing them to the attention of people, and then I get looked at as the problem. When in fact, I’m not the problem.

When you’re on a production and there’s millions of dollars at stake, nobody really wants to hear that the color of aging that was on the other doorknob isn’t the same color that’s on the doorknob now. They just want to keep filming.

I am the last line of defense for the paint department for a the production. There’s one On Set Scenic Artist on a crew of a hundred plus people. There’s only one of me. And I have to make those calls, then go in and fix it as quickly as possible while all hundred-plus crew wait.

I remember working on a show where I got four phone calls in the hour before my call time, plus a phone call the night before, telling me this was going to take place the following morning and I had to be ready because it was first up. I went into work completely prepared. Three art directors came up to me intermittently. Camera was in the room trying to block in the scene, and I was scrambling to paint an entire countertop to match an existing one. I stood there with a hairdryer in hand, two of my Art Department supports helping me, a team of painters in the background for anything that might go wrong. I had about 45 minutes to complete the task, and it had to be done at the same time that everybody else needed into this little office space — more than 30 people needed to be in there. But to me, I had one job. I needed to make that countertop look like the existing one so it would read as if it was always there.

When they called for the actor, which I could hear on my walkie, I went up to the first assistant director and said, this isn’t an exact match yet, I need a a few more minutes to age it down. They said, “It’ll be fine.” I looked at the team of painters waiting to assist, and I started grabbing my materials and walked away defeated, because we had to start rolling.

Because of how I grew up, I was literally wired to do this job. I’m really good at putting out created fires. However, most of them are (were) not my fire.

There’s nothing like being on a show and you have your headset in and you hear them call your name — the body remembers situations like that.

I don’t enjoy chaos. I never have, although it might’ve looked like that from the outside.

2016 was the year I found out my husband had stage 4 esophageal cancer and had only a few months to live. It was also the year I turned 40. And the year he died. It was an epic year, but not in the kind of way you want a year to be.

The urgencies that came with the chemo. The emergencies that came with uncertainty. The anxiety and fear that fed into all of it.

There was literally no way to put out that fire. I just had to watch it burn. And it did. It burnt my whole world down.

After it did, I’m pretty sure I spent a couple years just trying to re-ignite the ashes to burn even more down, because I had no idea what to do.

It’s been about six months since I’ve been on a show.

I have to be careful with creating problems where there are none, and getting involved in other people’s created chaos just to fill that dopamine rush of putting something out. My body hasn’t caught up with my brain yet.

I got some really great advice this week: just because people create chaos doesn’t mean I have to create a fire.

I’ve spent decades being excellent inside other people’s emergencies. And now I’ve been working on my memoir for the past three weeks very intently, and there’s no fire here. Nobody’s calling saying Jolene, where is your memoir. It’s only me.

I’ve just spent six months without any emergency or urgency, and I kinda realize I actually prefer it. I can’t help but wonder though, is this the calm I’ve been looking for or just the part before the next fire.

I’m finishing the memoir this September. Free essays every Friday. Paid subscribers get The Atlas — the drafts, the journal pages, and the story underneath the story — starting in October.

Unless a fire comes up. Or maybe I am the fire.

A child at Northview Heights said it this summer while we were making the scenery for their production of The Wiz. She pointed at a section of a flat — one section, very specifically hers — and said:

“I painted that.”

I have been going to Northview Heights on the North Side of Pittsburgh for a summers now. The first time, I brought a mural design of the Pittsburgh skyline and a lot of buckets, and then I handed the paintbrushes to kids between seven and twelve years old, which meant handing over control of my own design. The paint did not land where I imagined it would. Colors overlapped. Somebody made a choice I never would have made.

This summer I came back for the play. Different job. Same thing happened. Somebody stood in front of a piece of scenery and claimed it out loud.

What struck me was not the pride, though there was plenty of that, and she had earned it.

It was the tense.

Painted. Past. Finished. Settled. Said about a piece of scenery that will come down when the run ends, get broken apart, and probably end up in a dumpster in an alley, the way most of what I’ve made in twenty-five years has ended up. She said it like it was permanent. And I think she was right and I was wrong about which part was the permanent part.

The flat is temporary. The sentence isn’t.

Because “I painted that” is not really about paint. It’s about I was here. My hands were part of this. Something exists because I contributed to it. That doesn’t come down with the set.

I spend a lot of time thinking about what remains after something ends. Probably too much. But I keep landing in the same place: the thing that lasts is almost never the thing I thought I was making.

What’s something you made that no longer exists — and what did you keep from making it?

A couple of summers ago, I stood outside in the heat with a group of children, ages 7 to 12, at Northview Heights on the North Side of Pittsburgh. We were painting the Pittsburgh skyline.

I had designed the mural and brought the supplies, but it was never supposed to be my painting. The point was to make something together. At least that was what Fine Art Miracles had hoped when they brought me on as their staff muralist.

So I handed the children paintbrushes. Which, I have to be honest, isn’t always the easiest thing to do.

When you invite children into a large creative project, you are also asking yourself to release a certain amount of control. The paint is not going to land exactly where you imagined. Colors will overlap. Someone will inevitably make a choice you never would have made.

But when I designed the mural concept, I knew it would be a collaboration. I accounted for this, and I also know that something much more important happens when you stop trying to make everything perfect.

The children begin to understand that the painting belongs to them, too.

Fine Art Miracles documented that first day here: Muraling with Miss Jolene.

They asked me to come back

This summer, I returned to Northview Heights to work with the children again—this time overseeing the scenic elements for their production of The Wiz. That invitation meant more to me than they probably realized.

I have spent a lot of my life passing through places. Homes. Schools. Cities. Film sets. Jobs. Temporary rooms. Temporary worlds. You get pretty good at arriving. You also get used to leaving.

So there was something unfamiliar and lovely about walking back into Northview and realizing that I had not completely disappeared when I left the first time.

The children remembered me. I remembered some of them. The adults remembered what we had made together. There was already a history there. A small one, sure. But it existed.

I was no longer just some artist who had shown up one summer with buckets of paint. I was Miss Jolene.

There is something strangely tender about being remembered in a place you thought you had only passed through.

This time, I wasn’t designing a collaborative mural. I was helping them build a world for their play: The Wiz. The children were creating the environment in which their own story would unfold. At the end of it, they could look at the scenery and say:

“I painted that.”

There is power in that sentence.

It means: I was here. I helped make this. Something exists because I contributed to it.

That is exactly why it matters so much to me. When so much of life is temporary, making something gives us evidence. Leaving a mark, a real one like a painting or a mural. Something that says: you passed through here, but you were not invisible.

Read more

Well, technically I wrote about my house. Really, I was writing about myself.

As I’ve been working on my memoir and sifting through years of pages, notes, fragments, a…

Read more

That was when I stopped counting.

People like to talk about moving as a fresh start. A new beginning. A chance to reinvent yourself. Try doing it every year. Sometimes two or three times.

Eventually, starting over stops feeling hopeful and starts feeling like a way of life. Home becomes wherever you happen to land, and you learn not to get too attached to the idea that anything—or anyone—is going to stay. Even yourself.

Maybe you know that feeling even if you never moved thirty times. One day you look around and realize the life you built fits a version of you who is no longer entirely there.

By the time I graduated from high school, I had been to at least eight different schools. From the outside, I probably looked like a force to be reckoned with. Stubborn. Angry. Unruly. There was nothing you could tell me that I didn’t already think I knew.

Inside, of course, was another story.

I was scared. Hurt. Confused. And every time we landed somewhere new, I had to figure out who I was going to be there.

What version of me would work in this place? How much could I show? What would make people leave me alone? What might make them like me? But the gift in this was that I really started not to care about any of those questions the longer time went on.

But the moving ritual itself never changed: pack as much as you could into as little as you could. Land somewhere new. Set up camp.

No one really knew how long we would be there or when we might have to leave again, but while we were there, I needed some small part of it to feel like mine.

So I unpacked the boxes every time. I shared a bedroom with my sister, but I claimed my half. I arranged my things. I taped pictures to the walls and made collages out of places I wanted to go, things I wanted to have, and versions of myself I imagined I might someday become.

I took whatever had survived the move—old photographs, scraps, hand-me-downs, leftover pieces of things—and made something out of them.

I didn’t have language for any of this then. But I think I was building evidence that I existed beyond whatever was happening around me.

I couldn’t control where we lived. I couldn’t control how long we stayed. I definitely couldn’t control what happened inside the house.

But I could decide where my things went.

I could make one little corner look like me. Or at least look like the person I hoped might eventually be me.

I think we all do some version of this. We arrange the shelf. Hang the photograph. Keep the chair. Paint the wall. Sometimes we are not decorating at all. We are leaving little clues for ourselves about who we are.

Maybe that was the first time I learned that a room could do more than hold your belongings.

It could hold you.

Years later, I ended up painting worlds for a living.

Scenery. Sets. Rooms that needed to convince you they had existed long before you walked into them. Places that might only be there for a day, or a week, or until somebody yelled, “Wrap!” and we tore the entire thing apart.

Which, now that I think about it, was probably a very logical career choice for someone who had spent half her life becoming emotionally attached to temporary structures.

I knew how to make a place believable. I had been practicing forever. What I wouldn’t know yet was that I had also been practicing something else.

Ten years ago, after Patrick died, I emptied my house. Not because I wanted a different house. Because I had absolutely no idea who lived there anymore.

I knew the person I had been before him. I knew who I had been with him. But the person without him? TBD, my friends.

So I did what, apparently, I have always done when I don’t know where I am. I started moving things. Actually, first I got rid of almost everything.

Looking back now, I wish I had made a time-lapse of that house over the next ten years. It would probably explain me better than I could.

The house went from stuffed full of things to almost empty and then, slowly, full again.

At one point, there was basically a rug and a yoga mat in the living room.

For a while, I turned the entire living and dining room into my paint studio, which I loved until I realized I had created a place to make things but nowhere to actually sit down and rest.

The couch was gone. That couch had belonged to the life Patrick and I had together, and every time I looked at it, I remembered him sick. It had cancer all over it. It stopped being furniture. It became a place I had to revisit every time I walked into the room. So I tossed it. Because what is the use of trying to be happy when what you are looking at is just making you sad?

For years, the house kept changing. I feel like it went from a home to a prison, keeping all the sadness in with no way out. Then a prison into an empty space where I could sort out those feelings. And when I was ready, it went from a space to a studio where I could create something new of myself. A storage unit for various versions of myself.

And then, eventually, I bought another couch.

A proper couch.

That sounds like a ridiculously ordinary thing to mark as progress, but grief has a strange way of making ordinary things enormous. A couch meant I expected to sit somewhere. Maybe rest. Maybe have people over. Maybe stay awhile.

I could practically date different versions of myself by photographs of the rooms. Here was the woman who needed everything gone. Here was the woman who needed to create. Here was the woman who could tolerate a few things coming back.

Here was the woman who could finally sit down.

And somewhere during those ten years, I began to realize I wasn’t just decorating. I was trying to answer a question. The question I thought I was answering was:

How do I become myself again?

Except that actually wasn’t the question at all. Because you don’t become yourself again. Not completely. Life doesn’t always give you that option. Sometimes something happens, and the old way of being simply doesn’t work anymore.

A big change like death, marriage, kids, or nothing dramatic at all can elicit being lost. You just wake up one day and realize the life around you was assembled by a version of you who isn’t entirely here anymore.

And then what?

I think I have been answering that question with rooms since I was a kid. Back then, I taped pictures to my half of a bedroom because I needed some evidence of a future.

After Patrick died, I emptied a house because I needed enough blank space to discover one. Same instinct. Different room. Same way of interpreting a life, different decade.

It also explains something about the work I have always been drawn to.

Yes, I can paint a wall, design a set, move furniture around, build an entire imaginary world, or take apart a room and put it back together differently.

But, for me, the interesting part was never really making things pretty.

I’ve spent most of my life watching what happens when people—and places—have to become something else.

I’ve done it professionally. I’ve done it personally. I’ve done it badly. And I’ve done some truly weird shit! But I know the territory. I have mapped out this terrain and set flags along the way.

Because I know we leave evidence everywhere.

Not just in dramatic things. In ordinary things. In what we keep, what we move, what we avoid, and what suddenly starts bothering us for reasons we cannot quite explain. Sometimes our spaces reveal the change before we do.

In the couch we cannot stand to look at anymore. In the boxes we keep moving from house to house without opening. In the room that somehow became storage instead of a spare room. In the photographs still taped to a wall. In the empty corner. In the thing we finally bring back.

I spent years thinking I was trying to make myself feel at home in a place.

I wasn’t.

I was trying to figure out how to feel at home in myself, even when I kept changing.

Funny enough, I stopped counting the houses at thirty.

I’m still counting the versions of me.

Ten Years of One Living Room

Almost 15 years ago, we moved into this house. The photo on the left is

Read more

I honestly don’t know why I went to Nova Scotia.

Something happened to me somewhere between the end of June and the beginning of July, and I guess I just kind of hit a breaking point.

It had been about two years since I had traveled anywhere internationally, and for anybody who knows me, you know this is not good for me. Like, borderline I’m-going-to-lose-my-shit territory.

A little backstory: I have been looking for a church to buy because I want to start my own creative church. And Nova Scotia kept popping up in my searches with these tiny white churches and red roofs, and I think that is probably what first piqued my interest.

But I didn’t really know anything about Nova Scotia.

I just knew I wanted to get out of town. I wanted to go international, but I didn’t want to go too far. And I love coastal towns.

AKA I needed a reason to use my passport!

One of my favorite places I have ever been is Anstruther, a little fishing town in the East Neuk of Fife on the east coast of Scotland. It is the kind of place with a working harbor, old fishing buildings, boats, and narrow streets that makes me immediately start wondering what happened here. It is also home to the Scottish Fisheries Museum, housed in a collection of historic buildings, some dating to the 16th century.

That is the kind of place I am drawn to. Places at the edge of things. Places that show me time has passed with their old buildings and hand tied knots.

So maybe I thought Nova Scotia would give me some of that.

But instead, what I found seemed to be people who were standing in transitional doorways themselves.

First there was Tim, who was writing his memoir.

Then there was Margaret.

Margaret had recently put her husband into a care facility because of his dementia. She sold antiques out of her house, and I just happened upon her while driving down a back road. I walked out of there with a pound of old newspapers and ephemera I want to use to make art from.

Then there was Sara, the daughter of Martinique, who ran the tiny bed-and-breakfast where we stayed.

Martinique had fostered more than 80 children. I said: eighty.

Sara was one of her biological children, and now she is forging her own way—literally—as a blacksmith in Nova Scotia.

Then there was the church theater.

I happened to see this enormous moose outside and obviously needed to know what the hell was going on in there.

So I went inside.

And I couldn’t believe what was happening.

Here was this church being used as a theater, filled with people making something together, a scarecrow village for the fall. Another strange little place I had accidentally walked into because something outside made me curious enough to stop.

And then, as I made my way to the other side of Nova Scotia, I met Dena.

I was on a short walk, just checking out the coastline, when I started talking to her.

Her mother had just died.

It was the first day she had gone outside.

I can’t tell you how many times in my life I have been traveling and some stranger I met along the way somehow got me through whatever I was trying to process.

My airplane strangers.

My train strangers.

My standing-in-line-at-the-checkout strangers.

My crying-in-a-bathroom strangers.

Literally. All of those things have happened.

There is something about strangers.

Maybe it is because they don’t know the story you have already told everyone else about yourself.

They only know the person standing in front of them.

And maybe that gives us permission to be someone slightly different for a minute.

Or maybe we’re almost always meeting people in the middle of becoming someone they have never been before.

At least I seem to meet those people. Maybe because I recognize them.

I feel like my whole life has been about transformation.

I’ve had to transform myself over and over again. Like a phoenix rising from the ashes, knowing full well I’m probably going to keep burning.

And strangely, I’m actually okay with that. (Yay, bring it on!)

Turns out I have Scorpio in my chart. Scorpio is associated with death, rebirth and transformation, and Pluto shows up pretty loudly in my chart too. If you are into that kind of astrology stuff.

Apparently I was built for this.

I mean, truly.

I went to Nova Scotia not even knowing why I was going.

I just knew I was tired of doing what I had been doing.

And somewhere along the way, I ended up at the Bay of Fundy.

The Bay of Fundy has the highest tides in the world. At the head of the bay, the difference between high and low tide can reach about 16 metres—the height of a four-story building. When the tide goes out, whole stretches of ocean floor are exposed. You can literally walk where, hours earlier, there was an ocean.

And it is wildly weird.

It feels a little like walking into the apocalypse.

The water is just...gone.

Boats sit where boats should absolutely not be sitting. Mud and rock and seaweed stretch out in front of you. The entire landscape has been emptied of the thing that normally defines it.

And underneath is this whole other world that was there the entire time.

You just couldn’t see it.

Read more

Read more

Being the person in front has always been much harder.

I learned early how to read a room. My childhood was shaped by chaos and domestic violence, so I became highly attuned to what was happening around me—the energy, the tension, the things being said without words. That awareness eventually made me very good at creating environments and telling stories visually. It also made me very good at staying useful behind the scenes without allowing myself to be fully seen.

That is something I am trying to change.

This past February, I attended a Chinese New Year celebration where an intuitive was answering questions onstage. I had been challenging myself to do more things that made me uncomfortable, because I believe those same things make me feel most alive.

So I stood up in front of a room full of people and asked my question.

When I spoke about the work I am building now—bringing aesthetics and awareness together, helping people read their own rooms, understand what their spaces are revealing, and create environments that better reflect the lives they are trying to live—Jenny D was listening.

Afterward, she approached me and invited me onto her podcast.

That small act of bravery led to this podcast conversation.

We talked about art, grief, signs from the other side, rebuilding a life, working behind the scenes in the entertainment industry, and what it means to finally step forward and tell your own story.

This conversation was not simply about my work.

It was part of the work.

It was me practicing what I am still learning: I do not have to disappear in order to create something meaningful.

Thank you, Jenny, for giving me such a warm and honest place to step forward.

Listen to our conversation here—and please follow Jenny while you are there. She tells real stories about real people, and I believe we need more of that type of honesty out there.

New here?

That line, from the children’s book by Glenn Ringtved, recently came up in my Facebook memories. I had posted it eight years ago.

My response to it today was:

That is like asking the sky to show us the sun, but not the shadows.

I am standing inside an elementary school about half an hour from my house. I am surrounded by two little girls and their mothers, and together we are creating a mural.

I am showing the girls how to paint with a toothbrush—how to load it with paint and pull a finger across the bristles so that tiny flecks scatter across the wall. It is a great way to make sand.

They are watching me closely, paying attention to every word. Their excitement over using a toothbrush for something other than teeth is palpable. They practice on a piece of cardboard before I cut them loose on the actual wall.

You would have thought I had handed them magic wands.

Standing there, I feel the full resonance of what art can do in our most devastating moments.

It can create a doorway where there was none.

It can become words for things that were never spoken.

It cannot keep a heart from breaking. But sometimes, slowly and imperfectly, it can help stitch together what remains.

The Two Sisters

I met two extraordinary little girls during COVID. They were sisters, two and a half and five years old.

The older sister, Avery, loved science and art. Their grandmother, who is a good friend of mine, told me that the younger sister, Rilyn, was undergoing cancer treatment.

She was only two and a half.

I could feel that her older sister needed an outlet too. She was trying to remain a little girl while her family’s life revolved around hospitals, treatments, and uncertainty.

Around that time, their grandmother told me they had tried to raise a monarch butterfly, but the caterpillar had died.

I immediately reached out to my Facebook community and asked whether anyone had monarch caterpillars growing in their gardens.

Many messages and several hours later, I located thirteen of them more than an hour away.

I met the girls’ grandfather in the parking lot of an Olive Garden to make the exchange, which is the kind of wonderfully strange thing people did during COVID to create moments of connection.

For the next several weeks, Avery and I raised our separate groups of monarchs together.

Everything was virtual. Through video after video, we both learned about the magic of the monarch. Admittedly, I think I was more excited than any of them.

Other families began following the adventure through the photographs and videos I posted on Instagram. I had never raised monarch butterflies before, and I became completely fascinated by them—their transformation, their fragility, and their almost impossible migration. And by the fact that I could successfully raise something other than mold in my paint buckets.

The monarch's journey happens across generations. Several generations move north, each continuing a journey it will never complete. Then one remarkable, long-lived generation travels all the way back south to Mexico.

None of them is given the entire map. Each one simply carries the journey as far as it can.

Navigation began appearing everywhere in my work and thinking: how we know where to go, what guides us, and what happens when the map we were following suddenly disappears. During that same period, I was even commissioned to create a painting that would be auctioned to support monarch conservation.

Avery and I also began doing art classes together online. She called me “her artist.” I have to tell you, it was the best feeling when I started Zoom one day, and there was little Avery dressed in an artist’s outfit, complete with a tiny beret.

She was ready to paint.

When Rilyn eventually became stable enough, they both came to my house and painted with me in person.

It was a beautiful day.

Rilyn had spent so much of her life going in and out of Children’s Hospital. Her sister had spent those same years trying to have something resembling a normal childhood. That afternoon, in my little Casa Petita garage, they were simply two sisters making art.

Rilyn’s Corner

Now I am standing inside their elementary school, painting Rilyn’s Corner.

Rilyn died on November 29, 2025, after courageously fighting neuroblastoma for five and a half years. But she was not only a little girl with cancer. She was a joyful, loving light and full of hope. Her love for Lilo & Stitch, Taylor Swift, stuffed animals, and fluffy dogs was unmatched.

Her grandmother, my dear friend, called me in March to ask whether I would design and paint a mural in her memory. She told me the family had been given a small amount of money to help cover the supplies.

Now Rilyn’s sister, Rilyn’s best friend, their mothers, and I are standing together in front of this enormous wall.

We are painting sea turtles on a sandy beach.

From the beginning, I designed the mural so that anyone who loved Rilyn and wanted to help could place their own hand inside its creation.

They will remember this for the rest of their lives. They will know that they helped make something beautiful for a little girl who touched so many lives during her very short life.

I cannot begin to imagine what it takes for these girls to stand here and paint after something so traumatic. But I also know from my own experience that resilience is a muscle—one built slowly through love, support, and the courage to keep showing up.

I cannot help but wonder who these children will become because of the strength, tenderness, and connection being formed around Rilyn now.

Children are often asked to carry enormous things while adults search for the right words. Art does not demand that we find them. It gives our hands somewhere to place what we are carrying.

In that moment, surrounded by sea turtles and beaches, I watched Rilyn’s best friend—dressed in a Lilo & Stitch outfit—come alive as she flicked paint from a toothbrush. Beside her, Avery gently showed her how to hold it, how to aim the paint, and encouraged her to keep going.

Watching them, I could see the big sister Avery had been to Rilyn being carried forward into this moment.

Designing an Escape

Rilyn loved Hawaii. She loved Lilo & Stitch, a story about family, belonging, and the promise that no one should be left behind or forgotten.

Hawaii also has a deep personal meaning for me.

When her family told me I could design the mural however I wanted, the connection felt immediate. Her mom sent me one of her favorite photographs of the two girls on the beach for inspiration.

I completed what I thought was the final design last Thursday. But something did not feel right.

I kept returning to it—shifting the landscape, simplifying some elements, moving others, and trying to understand what the wall itself was asking for.

The first version was cute, but it felt impersonal. It needed more than decoration. It needed symbolism. I wanted every element to feel like part of the same story, each one carrying some piece of the larger idea that nothing exists alone.

The finished design contains a beach, calm blue water, distant land, palm trees, sea turtles, dolphins, a rainbow, a friendly tiki figure, and two children sitting side by side on paddle boards, facing away from us and looking toward the horizon.

Each piece carries something.

The water creates movement without chaos. It gives the eye somewhere to travel.

The horizon suggests that something still exists beyond the moment we are standing in, even when we cannot reach it yet.

The turtles carry endurance, protection, and the ability to find their way home across enormous distances.

The rainbow is both weather and promise: light and water meeting after a storm. A bridge between this life and whatever may come after it.

The two children on the paddle boards are together, but they are not being asked to speak. They are allowed simply to sit beside each other and look outward.

The dolphin in the water before them is a gentle, playful guide toward healing.

The cardinal as a symbol for all of those who continue to speak to use from the other side.

The butterfly connects the mural to those early COVID days, to transformation, and to a journey continued across generations. Rilyn’s mom also told me that she had always referred to Rilyn as her butterfly.

This could not feel like a memorial children were afraid to touch. It needed to feel alive. I wanted to create a place where children could feel transported for a few moments. A decompression space made from paint.

Here is a glimpse of that little world beginning to take shape.

The mural is near the cafeteria, in the middle of all the noise and movement of an elementary school. Just down the hall, there will now be a small hidden world where a child can pause and feel held by the space—not singled out, not watched, and not required to explain why they need it.

My background in scenic art, color theory, visual storytelling, and feng shui all came into the design. I wanted the colors to feel calm without being dull. I wanted the landscape to move the eye gently through the wall. I wanted the space to feel protective without feeling closed in.

I wanted children to feel that they belonged there. A children’s mural must hold joy first. But sometimes joy is a secret gateway into healing grief.

Continue Reading

Below, I am sharing the more personal layer beneath this mural: why creating a place for grief feels so connected to my own loss, what this project has taught me about the ways people measure pain, and why I believe making something beautiful can help us live beside what cannot be fixed.

Read more

This story.

My story.

When I sat down and dedicated one month to writing a memoir, I didn’t know over 80,000 words were going to come out. Letters spilled onto the page, sentence after sentence, and for the first time it felt intentional. Not like the folders upon folders of writing I already had on my computer. Not like the poems, fragments, journal entries, and things I wrote only when I felt inspired or desperate or cracked open enough to get something down.

This was different.

I sat down on purpose, and more than 80,000 words came out of my mouth.

It is a really weird thing to see your whole life on paper.

I did that in one month.

It was November, which was probably a dumb idea. November is the worst month of my life. It comes right on the heels of my wedding anniversary on Halloween. Then my husband’s birthday. Then his death anniversary a few weeks later.

Why I chose November, I’ll never know. But let me just tell you, there was no dry December in my house after I saw all those words in front of me.

I think I kind of just short-circuited.

Then I thought, I can never publish this. So I sat on it. And then I kept writing anyway. Because I still don’t know how to tell this story. And that is what I am supposed to be good at.

Story.

But this one covers marriage and travel and art and illness and death and grief and survival and becoming and lions and tigers and bears, oh my.

Okay, maybe not tigers and bears.

But definitely lions.

I had a lion when I was a child. Well, it wasn’t really mine. It was my dad’s. But it definitely belongs in the memoir.

Anyway. Getting back to what I was saying.

The real story, for me, starts when I met my late husband. And that story still feels way too alive to hold in a straight line.

It has been really hard to structure this memoir. And structure is definitely something that challenges me. I have to trick myself into thinking structure is a path to freedom, because if I don’t use the word freedom somewhere near the word structure, I will automatically not sit down and do any of it.

A friend once told me my life was a journey that should only be taken on paper.

She wasn’t wrong.

The question is: how many papers?

I told another friend recently that my life has been heavy-fated. And I mean, come on. In the past nine months alone, my father was killed head-on in a car crash and my mother just got out of brain surgery.

That is only nine months. I have been alive for a long time. Heavy. Fate.

Someone asked me the other day how I got so talented, and I’ll be honest, the answer is pain.

I have been through a lot of pain. I have been through a lot of loss. I have also been through a lot of adventures. And I am resilient AF. The pain forced me to create. I was like a Jedi using the force.

And I still am.

At some point, I realized I had been documenting my whole life with art.

Everything I have ever created is a visual document of what I have endured. I have documented my life through photography, everywhere I have ever been. I have documented it through writing, too. In the beginning, most of it was poems.

I wrote a lot of poetry.

A lot.

I have a stack of printed poetry in my house that sits almost three feet tall. I am not lying, folks.

I am not saying it is all good. Some of it probably reads more like a journal. But it was all those letters, all that pain, all that trying to make something out of what I could not understand, that helped me foster creativity, art, and writing.

My house used to feel alive when Patrick was here. And part of it died along with him. I had to resuscitate something from within myself to become the woman I am now. That does not mean the reminders are gone. They live in every corner of every room I walk through.

I keep thinking the memoir should begin neatly. Like I should be able to take my own life and make it into chapters and arcs and outlines and something people not only chew on, but something they don’t want to stop eating.

That is a lot of pressure. And I try not to think about it too much, because if I think about it too much, I won’t do it.

But what am I supposed to say?

Here is where I was born. Here is what happened. Here is who I loved. Here is how I became this version of myself. P.S. Insert dying husband here.

That is not how memory works.

Memory doesn’t arrive in chapters. At least not for me. It arrives in flashes.

A room. A song. A smell. A place. An old video. A photograph I can barely look at. A voice I still expect to hear. The feeling of coming home to someone who made the world make sense.

This house used to pulse with creativity.

Private Friday night dance parties. Music downstairs. LED lights flashing disco from the front window when I pulled up to the house. A bottle of Jameson on the counter with a shot glass next to it.

I could hear the music from the garage before I even got inside. I knew he was down there working on something he thought was a fantastic painting. I knew there would be some ridiculous energy already waiting for me, maybe in the form of a canvas, maybe in the form of dinner on the grill gone wrong.

I knew before I even opened the door.

Man, we had fun.

Two kids running around the world together. Making movies. Traveling to faraway places. Emptying our bags into the trash just so we could fill them with artifacts we found on the Thames River in England. I swore TSA was never going to let us through.

But they did.

It is strange how cancer can erase some things in your mind. Sometimes it is hard for me to remember him before the grief, before the hospital rooms, before the panic, before the quiet that came after, when there was so much life here.

The walls went silent.

The cancer did not just consume him.

It consumed us.

It consumed what we were.

Sometimes I go through his old journals and things he left behind, and I laugh because I remember how much fun we had. And when I read the pages I have written about our life together, I am sadly and happily reminded of how good it was.

Cancer made me forget that for a while because it was so fucking hard.

I don’t walk through my house the same way anymore.

But I can still hear some things in my mind.

Patrick just had a way about him. Everyone said he was big. Big presence. Big laugh. Big energy. Big love. And a big smile.

He was the kind of person who changed the temperature of a room just by entering it. The kind of person people still talk about because of all his antics and way of being.

He has become a reference point here. On jobs. In rooms. In stories. In the way people still say his name.

I found a Post-it note the other day from when we first met. He said: I feel alive with you, Jols.

So I guess we did that for each other.

We lived on a little dead-end street in a tiny house we called Casa Petita. A tiny house with a big life inside of it. I don’t know how this house didn’t burst from all the music and plans and paint clothes and stories and laughter,

And Ideas. So many ideas. Whether it was a new painting, movie script or the next wild road trip.

That is where part of this memoir lives.

Not just in what happened at the end.

In what existed before the ending.

I think that is why it has taken me so long to know how to tell it. Because people understand tragedy quickly. They understand the sentence: my husband died. They understand cancer. They understand loss, at least from the outside.

But how do you explain the size of the love before the loss?

Read more

I ask because bricks are one of those ordinary things we stop seeing, even though they are holding up half the visual world around us.

As a scenic artist, that is part of my job — to look around and notice all the little nuances of everyday things in order to make them believable.

I almost want to say, before you read any further, I need you to go outside and walk around your block. I need you to actually look at the surfaces of the houses, or the bricks specifically, if you have any. Notice all the tiny details that make up each and every brick. The things that make them believable as, well, bricks.

One of the things I wish I had started doing a long time ago, when I began my art career, was measuring every single piece of brick I had ever painted. I am pretty sure it would be well over 10,000 feet.

Did you know that most of what you see in movies and television, especially façades in closed areas, is fake? We make it look real.

When I paint brick, I am not painting rectangles. I am painting evidence.

Here’s a great example.

Here is some brick I painted from the theater performance of August Wilson’s Fences.

Here is another image of a police station. I can’t remember what it was for, but it was a television show.

And here is yet another example of brick from a different movie called Sorority Row. The photo on the left is of the real house with a fake facade being built so the house would match the script. The photo on the right was what I had to paint to make it match.

One of my favorite things to do while traveling is take photographs of bricks.

It is amazing to me how many different variations there are. Everywhere you look. Especially in European countries. My whole camera roll is filled with images of bricks.

And when I think about them in the deepest sense, as I zoom in, we make these little squares, surround them with bricks, and then we live inside them. We create our little lives inside our little squares, and they become a reflection of our minds.

Yeah, I’m going deep here.

Bricks are not just bricks. They hold memory for some. They hold meaning for others. They are the façade, the face of what you might see as you travel down a city block. Each one holds a story. Everything you see on it holds a story.

That splash of mud from someone’s shoe when they stepped in a puddle.

That can of Coke that got opened and splattered all over the side of the bricks.

The salt from the trucks as they came through and tried to clear off all the ice in the winter.

The gum from that little boy’s mouth that he carelessly pushed right onto the brick.

They become a canvas for graffiti artists and other artists alike. They become a canvas for kids with chalk and markers and whatever else they can get their hands on.

If you think about it, bricks can also be weapons. We’ve seen it in movies, where somebody gets slammed up against a brick wall and hurts their head.

One of my favorite things about working on movies is that we get to be in places nobody else dares to go, or wants to go.

For instance, I think I have seen every single alley brick within a 30-mile radius of Pittsburgh. I love alleyway bricks. They tell so much more of a story, especially if you are in an alley where there are a bunch of restaurants. You walk back there and look around, and it is crazy what you can find on those bricks. I won’t go into detail here, but next time you are out and about, you should check it out. Walk down an alley or two.

Occasionally, cars crash into them. The UPS truck, with its back door swung open by the wind, smacks into the brick and knocks it out.

Like I said, bricks have a story.

You would be surprised how many different colors are in bricks.

Which is probably why, when I needed to find my way back into painting, I started with bricks.

Read more