In the Studio is Cypress’s newsletter, published monthly to keep you up to date with all that’s happening. You can read it online or click here to have it delivered straight to your inbox.
Hey, Cypress friends!
Thanks for joining us back In the Studio.
Autumn has found us and so has a yearning to slow down and dive into our crafts. When we give into the changing seasons, rather than fight them, we can find a real sweetness about the shortening days inviting us to spend a little more time in our homes and at our desks. Here we are now, creating from the inspiration we’ve been stock-piling since the longest days of summer, too busy being present with the natural world lit up from dawn to dusk. Expect to see us in your inbox a little more often during the months ahead. We hope our creations inspire your own, and you spend the months of darkness pouring into your own passions and arts in a way that keeps the light of summer well alive, even as we reach the darkest months of the year.
Find Cypress in Fort Mason on October 16th
We’ll be taking the fruits of our newfound creative energy to our first in person art market! The Night Markets by West Coast Crafts at Fort Mason are such a staple in the creative community of San Francisco, and it feels like the perfect place to pop up a Cypress booth and connect with our community. You’ll find hand printed linocuts of our favorite natural features from the Bay, national parks, and the first three prints of a new ski mountain series.
We’ll also have copies of past edition magazines if you’re looking to add them to your collection before issue 3 is released!
Look for the booth with Mac’s smiling face behind it. You can find more details about the Fort Mason Night Market and see Cypress featured among the vendors that will be in attendance on October 16th here.
Now printing
Mac has been busy carving out the lines of our closest ski mountains. Think Heavenly, Kirkwood, and Palisades Tahoe. Just in time for the cold weather to make its approach and get those of us who love the mountains excited for the return of early mornings by the fire before donning our warmest gear and feeling the electric cold ignite something inside us as we breathe deeply. These prints will be available at Fort Mason on October 16th.
On the shelf
There are books that make you feel good and there are books that make you want to put them down so you can get to work making the world a better place in order to feel good. Bloom Again is the latter. Marybeth Holleman uses her debut novel to capture, in delicate, weaving prose, how it feels to love the world while watching it fall apart — and refusing to do nothing about it. The multiple narratives Holleman uses to elicit this feeling centers two women who have finished their career and have adult children who have left the house, leaving them with the question of “now what?”
The answer for both Elyse and Astrid is to use what they have learned in the first five decades of life to create change in small, concentrated ways. Because of luck or attentiveness or not giving themselves enough credit, they are able to make a genuine difference, from Alaska to India, though in completely different ways.
Bloom Again does not attempt to sugar coat the realities of climate disaster or socioeconomic realities that make some more vulnerable to its affects, but it provides a glimmer of hope that by caring, at the very least, you can create community that holds you in your grief and understands you in your anger. We must continue to live our everyday lives, but Holleman uses her novel to show us that we can weave in our ethos of care and concern for our planet with each choice we make.
Book: Bloom Again
Author: Marybeth Holleman
Genre: eco/climate fiction
Where we read this: on my couch, in nearly one sitting, while simultaneously day-dreaming of the world I want to leave behind me
For your consideration:
- How do we encourage individual people’s gifts to flourish in the face of disaster, even when they contradict our own goals?
- What role does hope play in keeping us motivated when things feel hopeless?
- Is it appropriate to justify cross continental air travel to perform climate justice work? At what point is the emissions created not worth the change being inspired? Are we as individuals even responsible for the emissions of a system we did not create?
I would recommend…
Bloom Again to anyone who wants to hold a piece of hope in their hand and remind themselves there are always opportunities ahead of us where we can enact change, connect with our communities, and make contributions that enhance the beauty of our world.
New Print Issues of Cypress Magazine are Coming!
Issue No. 3 of Cypress is in the process of being edited, formatted, and lovingly rendered as I write this newsletter. Keep it in mind as you think about holiday gifts for the readers in your life! You will be among the first to know when Issue No. 3 is available for purchase! While we finalize our exploration of the theme “Liminal,” our contributors are already developing pieces for Issue No. 04 which will be arriving in the Spring of 2027. With every issue, our love for both print magazines and the earth collide into a piece of art, ready to make its way into your homes and your hands.
That’s all for now!
Thanks for supporting Cypress. If you’d like to contribute content to an upcoming magazine issue, stories to the Journal, or book recommendations for the shelf, email us with your pitch and we’ll get in touch.
See you out there,
Ayla
