Summer Fragments

Drawing feathers, reading old books, and taking an August newsletter break.

Aug 01, 2026

Did you miss out on the summer edition of Creative Fuel Quarterly analog newsletter? I have a few extra copies left if you want to snag one. // My online shop will be going on summer break on August 10th. Between now and then you can take advantage of the summer sale: 20% off all orders.

Hello friends,

I often come into August feeling like I do at the end of the busy holiday season in December: tired and dragging myself across the finish line.

The tiredness is different than its winter counterpart. I’m not craving a 6pm bedtime, or sleeping off dark mornings. I still want to be up early, drinking coffee, feeling the fullness of the day. But I want it to have less strings attached. I want breathing room.

I’ve come to expect this of August, where the glimmering promise of summer has entirely worn off and the season is more like a weathered piece of fabric, threadbare and raggedy.

August is a feral month. There’s not too much left in the tank. Everything is a bit too much.

You can see it in the plants, the ones who in the early days of the season would stretch themselves towards the sun. Now they start to recoil, withered and drying out in the intensity of the warmth, but still trying to hold their own. They’re not done yet, but they’re starting to be a little worn out.

Earlier this month I was reading Slanting Towards the Sea by Lidija Hilje. Set in Zadar on Croatia’s Dalmatian Coast, it was exactly the kind of summer read I was after. I fell for Hilje’s description of August:

“…it’s the middle of August, the days already shorter, beckoning for slower movements and reflection. Unlike July with its never-ending merry-go-round of brightness, heightened colors, scorching sun, and hustle and bustle of tourists, August has a melancholy to it, like a party that’s dying down, and you’re torn between wanting it to last a bit longer and itching to go home and curl up under a blanket.”

The desire to stretch things out inevitably leads to getting hung up on how quickly everything is rushing to an end. You lament all the things you never got around to. All the activities that you seemed to have ample time for when the summer calendar stretched out before you now become reminds of all that you didn’t do.

There’s plenty I haven’t done. I was going to be more diligent about taking time with my notebook in the mornings. I was going to try to do more field sketching. I was going to swim more. I was going to somehow read the multitude of books that have accumulated in piles on the floor.

I was going to, I was going to, I was going to.

But you know a great solution to lamenting all the things you were going to do? Choose one and go do it.

In the midst of a day that had gone haywire and entirely out of my control, I could feel my sense of overwhelm starting to spiral. “Get the sketchbook out,” I told myself, and grabbed Kristin Link’s new book Discover the Art of Field Sketching.

I’ve been meaning to spend time with this book all summer, and now I had ten minutes which I could either use staring at my phone or pulling a pencil across paper. I opened to a random page. The instructions were for drawing an owl feather.

A page from Kristin Link’s *Discover the Art of Field Sketching*

As luck would have it, my husband had just given me a feather he had found in the yard. Was it from an owl? It turns out that U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service maintains a Feather Atlas to help you with identification. I filled out the assorted size, pattern, and color specs and scrolled through the images. It was hard to be absolutely certain, but it did very much look like a Great Horned Owl secondary wing feather.

It made sense that it would have fallen into the grass on the side of our house—the owl is often in the neighborhood.

I sometimes hear the owl at night, soft hoots as the soundtrack to the dark.

As I was drawing, I thought about a book I used to look at a lot when I was younger: Maja Tittar På Naturen by Lena Anderson, called Maja the Nature Detective in English. With blonde hair and full of energy, Maja explores the flora and fauna around her as the seasons change. I always loved how she made herself a bracelet out of a blade of grass, earrings out of tiny pinecones.

There’s a chance you may know Lena Anderson’s work from the wonderful book Linnea in Monet’s Garden that she illustrated. Yet another title that I had on my childhood bookshelf, I also had Linnea’s Almanac. Like Maja, Linnea works her way through the seasons, documenting what she finds along the way:

“The best place to go, when you want to get out of the city is the beach. What can you do there? Hunt for treasures, of course, especially after a storm, when lots of stuff has floated up on land.”

I couldn’t agree more.

I went to my bookshelf where both books still sit. They were each gifted to me in 1989, duly noted on the first pages. Flipping through them I was reminded of some of my favorite illustrations. Linnea’s collection of beach treasures, including the expected shells and stones but also a turquoise Russian pencil. Maja lounging against a tree as a bee flies around her and a butterfly lands on her toe.

On the last page about August in Linnea’s almanac, it says, “summer is soon over, if you don’t save some of it for winter. You can do that by drying cut flowers.”

I’ve been gathering marigolds, calendula, and bachelor buttons for this very reason. Sidenote: dried calendula and bachelor button petals are really fun to have on hand in the winter when you need to sprinkle some color over a cake.

It didn’t take too many pages before I start to feel a little calmer. I could even sense my breathing slowing down. Exactly as it did while I drew the feather.

What I find in these pages is the “slower movements and reflection” as Hilje phrased it. Time to look at trees and plants, find feathers and rocks, but also just to sit and feel the grass under bare legs, roughness of tree bark on your back. A moment to take a deeper, longer breath. Allow the season to unfold around me.

Not trying to turn the final weeks of summer into a checklist, but appreciating the assorted summer fragments as they present themselves.

As always, I’ll be taking a little newsletter break for the rest of the month, so this is the last one for a few weeks.

I am going to make art. I am going to write in my notebook. I am going to ride my bike. I am going to swim. I am going to see what summer fragments I can still gather.

I’m hoping that you get some time to do the same.

I will see you all back here in September.

-Anna