While looking through some old boxes a few years ago, Carson Ellis found several pages of diary entries from 2001, documenting her first week living in Portland. The journals detailed the 25-year-old Ellis new life in the city, as she moved into a “scrappy but cheap and fabulous” Southeast Portland warehouse, smoked a lot of cigarettes, and hung out with her housemates and fellow artists, including her future husband and Decemberists frontman Colin Meloy. (In January 2001, Ellis and Meloy were “bickering but inseparable friends on the verge of hooking up for the first time.”)
Ellis—now an award-winning artist, illustrator, and author—got a kick out of the old entries, which offer a snapshot of Portland during a time of creative abundance and cheap rent. She painted 30 new pieces of art to go along with the diary entries from 23 years ago, and compiled them into a book, One Week in January: New Paintings for an Old Diary, which Chronicle will publish on September 10.
During a recent Zoom call, Ellis talked to the Mercury about her journaling practice, the creative process behind illustrating old diary entries, what her new book says about Portland, and more.
