This month I have been making an effort to make a drawing a day in my sketchbook of recent work from the wood kiln. These are ten minute sketches with pen or pencil and a bit of watercolor. Later, I often add some acrylic paint to give the object a sense of place. The habit of drawing always teaches me more about the art of looking. I have been photographing these drawings and importing them to our iPad where I can hand letter bits of text. On one sketch of a Blade Moon I inscribed a T.S. Eliot quote, “between the idea and the reality is the shadow.” I shared these images with a group via Zoom on Saturday. I felt the images come alive as I read the words and my audience saw them. An organic understanding grew between teller and listener as I read and they responded.

“Stories don’t exist on the page or in the mouth,” she [Jane Yolen] told The Boston Globe in 1987. “They exist between — between writer and reader, between teller and listener.”

—Jane Yolen in Clay Risen, obituary for Jane Yolen in New York Times, 6/14/2026

“The teaching of drawing is the teaching of looking.
—David Hockney