All four books of my year-and-a-half long project, Maneater.

Maneater started as a panicked 2 AM conversation with my roommate. I had only a week to scrape something together for the printmaking portion of Thinking Through Making (the Book and Paper program’s crash course on Columbia’s facilities and expectations), and I had extreme artists’ block.

“I don’t know,” she finally said, exasperated. “Make a book about a guy turning into a tiger.” So I did.

That was the tail end of my first semester at Columbia, and that artists’ block was not an isolated event. I’ll be honest; my first year here was rough. I had been working abroad in South Korea before moving straight to Chicago. I had never lived in the heart of a city before, and right before I started school, I experienced the death of a close family member. My reverse culture-shock, grief, and trepidation about starting graduate school combined to form a big, oozy ball of self-doubt and depression that overshadowed just about everything else in my life, art included.

But don’t worry, that’s as sad as this post gets. It’s all uphill from here. After that late-night conversation with my roommate, I sketched out a few pages of Maneater to show my professor, in hopes that he would give me some of the approval that I was having a hard time finding within myself. “It’s an interesting story,” he said. “But this is a semester-long project, not a week.” I set those sketches aside, made something completely different, and didn’t think about them again until the next semester.

By that time, I was feeling much better. I had started using Columbia’s Counseling Services and was much more comfortable in Chicago—and in my own skin. I started completing Maneater slowly, outside of class (although I scheduled many appointments to discuss its progress with the professors I had grown close to.)

A half-finished page… slow progress!

By the time I started my second year at Columbia, I was tired of working on Maneater as a background project. I decided to take a Directed Graduate Projects class—a 3-credit-hour course where the student decides the curriculum and a professor provides guidance and check-ins. My goal? To secure the resources and funding to print 50 copies of the book.

Under the advice of the professor guiding my progress, I began applying to grants. Some I got, and some I didn’t, but with help from the Caxton Club (a bibliophile organization here in Chicago) and Columbia College’s own Albert P. Weisman award, I soon had the funds I needed to go into production.

Finished screen-printed pages, all laid out on the table!

And that’s where I am now – finishing up printing at Spudnik Press, a nonprofit print cooperative that provides significant discounts to independent artists like me. I expect the book to be finished next month. My project has gone from one week, to one semester, to a year and a half, but I’ve grown immeasurably as an artist in the meantime. I hope that the story of this project has served as an introduction to me and my time here at Columbia—and as proof that the old adage stands: “any art project takes three times what you think it will.”