Heavy Lifting
Train for the printer heptathalon: lift a drum, a carton of paper, a riso, a paper cutter, a collator, run through an airport weighted with books and stand all day at a book fair.
Send us a submission for “Water Worship” open call for bodies of water.
After much demand at both book fairs you can subscribe to Floral Observer through the end of May. If you got a spring paper leave me a note to send you a backstock issue.
The spring issue is our best one yet! Halfway sold out.
I just got back from CAKE, Boise, and Seattle Art Book Fair. It was an explosion of springtime joy, a reconnecting with all my very best buds. Special thanks to Seattle Art Book fair for hosting my “Nourishing A Publishing Ecosystem” talk. Both fairs were so thoughtfully put together. On the way to the airport I was reflecting on how lucky I feel to get to table at events where I can talk to people about my work and watch them actually open up what I’ve printed. I’m the best kind of full.
As I’m heading back home I’m missing my sweetie, my garden, my studio, and my home gym. At CAKE a friend saw my protein shake and we laughed a little about how it’s just true that exercise helps you feel better. We’re both lifting weights again after a sad winter, feeling more like ourselves. Two sets of my printing friends were just starting their lifting journey. I got a few squats in at different people’s home gyms. Lifting heavy makes me feel very present in my body, all my parts click into place.
I am just starting to get the craving for lifting again. I am enjoying the sensations. I can easily lift cartons of my paper order off the pallet at the paper warehouse. I could help haul a riso, a paper cutter or a booklet maker. Always possibilities in this line of work.
There used to be a time where most of my relationship to my body was inextricable from wanting to reduce it’s size and trim bits and pieces into different, always smaller shapes. Exercise was attached to a sort of punishment. At some point my road to self acceptance was to aim for neutrality. I rode my bike because I didn’t drive, I walked because I lived in New York. For a while I took up running and yoga but was clear with myself that my goals were to bolster my creative juices and mental health, not to exercise because that meant losing weight . I didn’t accept my body, but I was able to set that aside in these sessions that were “purely for mental health”.
Then, around a decade ago, I got mysteriously sick with what would later be diagnosed as rheumatoid arthritis. The floor fell out from under my vanity and social conditioning. Covered in hives, wading through a fog of painful joints and steroids my wishes mutated into one daily prayer “please let this stop.” I’d hope only to be well enough to do simple errands, for the hives to throb less, or my feet and hands to stop aching in little electric jolts that kept me awake at night. During these flares a lot of my day would consist of half napping with ice packs, hoping that staying very still would help me. I stopped running, I couldn’t go to hot yoga, I mourned all the capabilities I did not appreciate about the body I had had.
Then, after a year of this isolating foggy illness, we decided to move away from New York to teach in Korea. With our first paychecks my partner signed us both up for personal training at a weightlifting gym around the corner from our house. Weights had seemed like one thing I might be able to do. Growing weaker and weaker from inactivity was starting to scare me. One of the female trainers greeted us with bulging shoulders and a big smile when we paid for our training packages. I was excited to be welcomed into a space where women were lifting alongside men. Our trainerwas a shy, sweet novice bodybuilder who delivered the day’s program in soft, halting questions using google translate: “Have.. you…… ever done…… 200 squats?”
Our first session was an assessment. I remember that he took us to the shoulder press. Again and again he downgraded the weight until, finally, I could lift the handles of the machine up over my head groaning with everything I had. It felt awful, impossible. I was sputtering that I might be hurting my joints event though I was mostly embarrassed. But we’d already paid in cash for 10 sessions. This was going to happen. A few sessions later we did 200 jump squats after a school pizza party and somehow didn’t throw up. Each session was a mini triumph. Our trainer delivered a smiling, soft“Goooood!” or smiling nod of approval and I pushed through whatever we were asked to do.
As the weeks went on we learned the various free weight “big five” compound movements: deadlift, squat, bench press, shoulder press, and pull-up/row I felt my body change. Not just in shape but in an expanded capacity. I could stand straighter, march up the apartment building’s stairs at a clip, haul grocery bags home from the E mart up the street and fall asleep more easily. I felt “the pump” as Arnold puts it. The good achy tingle of progressive overload when your muscles all sing in harmony, and finally cry uncle. This tapping in felt different than anything I had done before. The goal shifted from losing weight to gains. Something in my brain and body clicked as we adjusted our form to push, pull and carry heavier loads. I’m never going to be a small person but I am always going to strive to be someone that squat heavy.
Now, three moves and a pandemic later I get to work out in my own home. Our power rack is right next to my paper cutter, that I was able to help hulk downstairs with Robert and my sweetie. Bother are in constant use again. When I go to get reams of paper from the basement during a marathon print session I pause and do a few dead hangs and some face pulls to strengthen my neck for long sessions bent over the feed tray. Sometimes artist life can seem separate from exercise but, as an aging, rheumatic riso printer, I know that protecting and strengthening your body is lifelong work. Not just so you can heft heavy equipment and paper, but also so that you can feel at home in yourself and cultivate a wellspring of energy for your most wonderful work.
Some books that I like about the body related to art are:
Draw Stronger
The Secret to Super Strength
Some gadgets I like for fucked up body pain are:
Any stress or squeezy ball for hand pain
This Theracane
(Also maybe you should get a mini trampoline?? I did and I love it)
An exercise band tied around something strong so that you can do face pulls if you don’t have access to weights with cables.
A lot of love to my riso family and also to my fellow auto-immune disease endurers.
LUV
RAH
