Book Project with Clara Boza

I'm starting a new collaboration with my friend Clara Boza that I'm really excited about. I've taken 3 different bookmaking classes with Clara over the years. She is a writer, book artist, and printmaker who lives in Asheville, NC.

Here's Clara with me and Tessa in Santa Fe for Laura Wait's bookmaking class this July.

We are starting with a bunch of folded blank book pages. This month, I gave Clara a word and she gave me a different word to illustrate through image or text on the left sides of our blank pages. Then for September, we will trade pages and respond on the right side to what the other person did with their word. The month after that, we will start over with new words. And after a while we will bind them into books!

For August, Clara gave me the word Susurrus which I had to look up for a definition.

su·sur·rus

so͝oˈsərəs/

noun literary

whispering, murmuring, or rustling.

"the susurrus of the stream"

I don't think I've ever read this word in a book, but poking around online, it seems like most people use it to describe water flowing or trees rustling. And these images really stuck with me, so I decided to draw my little girl playing in the creek like we did a few weeks ago. I'm happy with how my first page of this collaboration turned out and I can't wait to see what Clara did with the word I gave her!