A beautiful artist book about the difficult subject of gun violence from Aaron Cohick’s NewLights Press. This was produced with exceptional care and we are happy to offer some copies. The background on this title is considerable so let’s shift to the author and artist’s words:

From the author:

"I have written from dream, from image, from urgency, from sound, from a beat, from a question, from a conversation with the dead, from time keeping or a desire to keep time, from grief, from scraps.

'American Weather' began in anger. I was angry that we could all so fail one of our number that that person could arm himself with long guns, walk down some blocks designed for humans to walk, shoot people, and kill them.

This happened on Halloween, in 2015. There was a girl trick-or-treating as a jellyfish that year. She wore strings of lights and stood under a clear umbrella with iridescent streamers hanging from it. Who isn’t a lantern? But there she was, so visibly a lantern, moving up and down the block, and the beauty of that, on a holiday of such trust and vulnerability—strangers begging candy from strangers—it did me in. I thought about how much worse (a familiar and grotesque calculus) it would have been had our neighbor, the shooter, walked out in the evening instead of in the morning. I tried to make sure my children didn’t even know what had happened in our neighborhood, that morning, all they needed to know was what could be, what must be: a world where they never have to hide from a “shooter,” or become a shooter, and neither do you.

To write this essay-turned-book I joined the NRA, and learned how to shoot a gun; thought about public space ('front porch' vs. 'back-yard culture'), and race; interviewed the neighbor who owned the Kwik-Mart and the one who owned Catch ’A Fade; interviewed my older sister after a mud-covered man shouting about a war broke into her home; read a great deal about District of Columbia v. Heller, and the history of the NRA; took my employer’s active-shooter training on a college campus that has since lost students to gun violence;and so forth.

A shorter form of the essay was published by VQR. As part of their editorial process, I worked with a fact-checker so thorough that she ended up fact-checking The Atlantic in the process. Only primary sources stood.

Aaron Cohick, founder of NewLights Press, noted some years later that this long-form essay remained sadly relevant, and suggested it be a book. That book—which will be published next month—became a collaboration with the artist Corie Cole, who made finely detailed monochrome underglaze paintings of guns being chopped, melted, forged, and smithed into garden tools by Mike Martin and the good people at RAWtools. I wrote the book’s afterword—another essay—after hanging around that shop, and its radiant people, and after attending a gun buyback.

American Weather is, first, an artist book. It is art, in Corie’s illustrations, made first on ceramic tiles. And it is a book-length essay, by me, in refusal of gun violence as a kind of 'American weather,' and one that points toward other ways that we might live, through the heroism, that Halloween, of an unarmed veteran of war; my unarmed sister, trained to treat violence as a public health problem; a man who enjoyed recreational shooting but gave up his arms after suffering the loss of his wife and son.”

From the artist:

"My spouse Aaron and I were on a rare weekend vacation with friends when the Halloween shooting started a few houses down from ours. The cat sitter arrived an hour after the incident and texted us that our block was cordoned off with police tape.

Mia wrote American Weather in the aftermath of that event, and for several years re-reading it had become a coping ritual while each mass shooting echoed through the news cycle. After the  shooting at the King Soopers store in Boulder, Aaron decided that he wanted to make the essay into a book and asked me to collaborate.

Working on the images for this book I realized I needed to carefully negotiate the boundary between depicting the essay ’s subject matter and neutralizing the gun as a symbol. In conversation about my artist ’s block with Mia, we arrived at the idea to weave another community member into the project. RAWtools has been reclaiming, disabling, and repurposing weapons for more than a decade. Documenting their buyback and blacksmith shop and presenting it alongside Mia’s writing felt like a little redemption — showing that people are doing this work in Colorado Springs — thoughtfully, daily, steadfastly."