Desert not-so-solitaire 🌵 🌌 ⚾️

10 things worth sharing + 20% off sale

Hey y’all,

Here are 10 things I thought were worth sharing this week:

1. I don’t know how or when it happened, but I’ve somehow become a person who likes being in the desert? It started a few years ago driving from Los Angeles to Las Vegas, then developed on trips to Joshua Tree and New Mexico. Last week for spring break we took a little 3-night trip to Arizoña (I pronounce it like Matt Berry), hiked in a canyon outside of Sedona, stargazed under dark skies, looked at the sun through a solar telescope at the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, and caught a Cleveland Guardians spring training game at Goodyear Ballpark in Phoenix. (The most fun I’ve ever had at a baseball game. Highly recommended.)
   
   

2. Upon our return, we all watched the original Bad News Bears for the first time. A pizza night hit. (Baseball! “It is designed to break your heart. It begins in the spring, when everything else begins again…”)
   
   

3. A friend found out I was reading Edward Abbey’s classic Desert Solitaire on the trip and asked me what I thought. I texted back, “If it weren’t for Abbey’s sense of humor, it would be intolerable. With it, it’s just right.” Then I remembered I actually quote from the book in Don’t Call It Art, using Abbey’s words to describe my days with the kids when they were little: “Time passed extremely slowly, as time should pass, with the days lingering and long, spacious and free as the summers of childhood. There was time enough for once to do nothing, or next to nothing…”
   
   

4. Meg and I had planned to listen to Marty Robbins’ Gunfighter Ballads and Trail Songs as our road trip soundtrack, but then our oldest suggested the Stardew Valley score, and it was… kind of perfect? (I am very tempted to get it on vinyl!)
   
   

5. Maybe it was the time out in the desert, but I felt compelled on Tuesday to write about introspection.
   
   

6. Fun With Your Typewriter, a 1956 book I found via an Instagram post that friend of the newsletter Kelli Anderson sent me. (Speaking of: two years ago, I inadvertently started my typewriter interview series with the legendary poet Mary Ruefle.)

   
   

7. Random thing in our house that gives me joy: this bug catcher we bought to catch, inspect, and release bugs.
   
   

8. “My first job downstairs is to open the back door and get a big breath of fresh air – rain or shine, winter or summer – I just copy the cats and dog, that’s what they do – that’s how the ‘read’ the day, nose up, what’s in the air? What smells different? Clear out the night-lungs. Start again.” Jeanette Winterson on the spring equinox, the real start of the year.
   
   

9. RIP writer Tracy Kidder. I bought The Soul of a New Machine for my teenage coder, but I think I’ll steal it back and give it a read myself. (A quote from that book about engineers makes me think of artists, too: “Part of the fascination… is just little boys who never grew up, playing with Erector sets. Engineers just don’t lose that, and if you do lose it, you just can’t be an engineer anymore.” So many creative people are just kids who didn’t stop.)
   
   

10. This is the last weekend to take advantage of my spring 20% off sale on paid subscriptions! A paid subscription supports my work, keeps Friday free for everybody, and gets you access to a special letter every Tuesday, the nicest comment section on the internet, and the full newsletter archives.
    
    

    
    A sampling of the kind of letters you’ll unlock with a paid subscription: looks inside my notebooks; printable zines; tutorials on block printing, making collages, playing exquisite corpse, how I dive deep into a new subject, how I read the internet, and much, much more…
    

Thanks for reading!

xoxo,

Austin

Don’t Call It Art. Coming June 2, 2026 to a bookstore near you.