It’s lovely to hear from you! Thank you for reaching out to share your thoughts about our new format, including the types of things you are loving, and the types of things you’d like to see. Keep the feedback coming!

Today, we’re sending a big shoutout to our sponsor Formula Brewing, Issaquah’s local brewery that not only makes amazing beer, but also is a prime gathering place for all ages, including a number of regular arts groups! Thank you, Formula Brewing, for your support of local arts & culture!

Today we are also featuring a new section listing arts volunteer opportunities. If you’re looking to get involved, scroll down - maybe you will discover just the right thing at just the right time!

Tip: We’re working on making this newsletter short enough to not be clipped in your email. Thanks for your patience. In the meantime, try clicking the “Read Online” link in the top right corner to make sure you don’t miss the good stuff towards the end.

Artist Feature: Kat Klockow and Garima Naredi

You’re not imagining it: graphic novels are everywhere. Learn about how two amazing local illustrators got into writing and publishing them, and find some great resources for anyone at any age to enjoy this beautiful art form.

Audio Interview: Iaan Hughes, Music Director, KBCS FM

I’ll just come right out and say it.

There is no audio interview to hear this month. Read on below to find out why, and get a sense of some of the fantastic conversation that I had with Iaan Hughes. But hey, you can still become a paid subscriber and look forward to the next one!

And, surprise! We included the full audio interview from last month with Anna Sullivan for your enjoyment! Scroll down to find it.

Special Announcement: Art Up Issaquah!

Happy Time Studio is partnering with the Issaquah Creative District to offer an 8-week professional development workshop series to creatives working to increase the vitality of Issaquah’s Creative District!

This is a singular investment in the arts community’s most vital asset: artists.

Key details:

Full details and application information available here.

Do you have questions? Let’s see if we can anticipate them:

THE GRAPHIC NOVELISTS NEXT DOOR:

A CONVERSATION WITH KAT KLOCKOW AND GARIMA NAREDI

Islands in a Sea of Words

By Katie Clary

When Kat Klockow was a kid, reading a chapter book meant getting lost in a muddle of words. Later, she was diagnosed with dyslexia and ADHD—neuro-spicy, as she calls it. By middle school, Klockow realized the best way for her to take notes was to illustrate her class lectures, and as an adult she learned that this has a technical name: graphic notetaking.

When Garima Naredi moved to Seattle from India in her early twenties, she stumbled across a wordless graphic novel that depicts an immigrant’s journey in dream-like illustrations. It spoke to her; with her fine arts training and professional work as a graphic designer, she “started thinking in terms of small panels or full-page spreads.”

Both women found graphic novels to be life rafts, or as author Charlie Mackesy writes in The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse (2019): “I need pictures. They are like islands, places to get to in a sea of words.”

“That line is so beautiful,” says Naredi, “and I completely agree, because there are [illustrations in] books like The Little Prince (1943) and Jonathan Livingston Seagull (1970). The pictures do feel like islands where you can stop and take a breath, look at what the story is about, and just absorb the pages that came before.”

Graphic novels have had a meteoric rise in North America over the past two decades. According to the trade magazine ICv2, they outsold traditional comic books for the first time in 2005. The next year, graphic novels and comic books together earned $640 million in retails sales in the United States and Canada. By 2025, that figure had risen to $2.2 billion, the highest on record.

Klockow, an indie publisher and developmental editor for comics and graphic novels, says that the format continues to be a “tentpole for publishing.”

Tokyopop, founded in 1997, was one of the first major publishers to introduce manga to American readers in its original right-to-left format, around the same time that Pokémon reached a fever pitch in the United States.

“The first manga I ever read was a Japanese version of Sailor Moon (1991) given to me by my friend Yoshiko,” says Klockow, whose love for this style of Japanese comic book has been voracious ever since.

Her knowledge of the art form is encyclopedic in the way of someone who has earned a bachelor’s degree in Japanese linguistics and culture studies, and spent two years living in Nagoya, Japan, located a 30-minute bullet train ride east of Kyoto. She was studying to become a Japanese-English translator when in 2010 her father was diagnosed with a terminal cancer, and she chose to move closer to family in Indiana.

“So I went into cartooning, which was my hobby since I was 14. That’s how I became a professional cartoonist.”

Self-taught Klockow has published six books, including her most recent, Zombio: A Space Adventure (2017) and Frogmen Love Chili Dogs (2026). She also runs a publishing house, Corpse Flower Press, and has taught kids how to make comics for 15 years, including a former student whose comic was picked up by the publisher Penguin-Random House. “That was a full-circle moment.”

Author Raina Telgemeier is often credited with popularizing graphic novels with middle grade readers (ages 8 to 12) with her breakout book Smile (2010). Island Books, Mercer Island’s independent book store, reported that in 2025, one-quarter of its bestselling children’s books were graphic novels, from the Wings of Fire (2018) series to Telgemeier’s newest, The Cartoonists Club (2025).

However, the literary form has long challenged the notion that comics were only for kids. In 1992, Art Spiegelman was the first graphic novelist to win a Pulitzer Prize for his combined works Maus I: A Survivors Tale: My Father Bleeds History (1986) and Maus II: A Survivor’s Tale: And Here My Troubles Began (1991), which the Wall Street Journal called “the most affecting and successful narrative ever done about the Holocaust.”

Garima Naredi says she used to think graphic novels meant superheroes—until she read the one that inspired her to craft her own.

“The Arrival [2006] by Shaun Tan was my major inspiration for creating my book because that was the first time I’d seen something in my style of drawing,” she says. “Everything was hand-drawn realistically, so I was blown away. I was like, yes, this is something that I can do.”

Naredi earned a bachelor of fine arts in visual communication and graphic design in India, and after moving to Seattle in 2009, she pursued Western realist art and enrolled in classes at the Gage Academy of Art. She began her graphic novel in 2015.

“For me, the biggest challenge was time, because my kids were just getting born at that time. So you can imagine the chaos.”

She encourages other time-strapped artists to celebrate the minutes they spend on creative projects—and to be persistent. Small blocks of time will add up. “If some days I would get 30 minutes at a stretch, I’d be like, wow, that was a productive session.”

Seven years later she completed a manuscript of her graphic novel, Primordial. “Like the rest of my art practice, it’s very spiritually rooted,” she says. The book begins in simple charcoal and ends in colorful watercolor and metallic paints, a nod to her home state of Rajasthan, famous for palaces and buildings painted in pink, blue, and goldenrod yellow.

“The story is about this young spirit who is born and then she is basically sent away to explore and to find her purpose in life,” Naredi explains. Yet the protagonist yearns for more, “and that is when she meets a guru who shows her the path ahead.”

In 2026, Naredi won a Shunpike Artist Residency that she hopes to use to broaden her creative work and connect with more Eastside artists. Likewise, Klockow has aspirations for Issaquah, where she moved three years ago.

“I want to make Issaquah a destination for comics, like how Portland has become a destination for comics or, of all places, Columbus, Ohio, because we have the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum, and Bill Watterson donated all of his Calvin and Hobbes originals.”

For anyone curious about the literary form, she speaks to the power of doodling.

“As you get your ideas out there, then you can start finding the story. And stories change. The characters, how you write them first, they’ll eventually evolve into something else, good or bad. So they’re living things.”

Explore more work by Kat Klockow and Garima Naredi, and seek out their classes at Happy Time Studio and Pratt Fine Arts Center! Kat has a lot of upcoming classes at Happy Time, including an adult’s watercolor class and kids’ comics this spring, and a two-week comics summer camp!

ATTEND A LOCAL EVENT

WORTH A ROAD TRIP

This month, we’re going to send you to another island. It’s not an accident - winter is truly the prime time to visit our beautiful island communities, parks, and beaches. Anyone who has ever waited in a summer ferry line knows that!

Whidbey Island is always worth going to. Not in the least because of the bucolic landscapes and ethereal light. There’s Double Bluff Park, overlooking Useless Bay; Greenbank Farm, where you might find wine, cheese, pies, and other goodies; and of course the inimitable Fort Casey, where you can explore the tunnels, fields, trails, lookouts, and lighthouse of a historic military outpost. These vistas and more inspire artists on Whidbey Island every day.

In Langley, take some time to visit Museo, a contemporary art gallery that does not disappoint. With a current exhibit called “Follow the Wind,” you’ll find representations and evocations of birds that will speak to you with humor and grace. This is our favorite spot, but there are many other galleries to visit while you are there.

Check out what’s on stage at WICA (Whidbey Island Center for the Arts) and perhaps any public events at Hedgebrook, a long-beloved literary nonprofit that champions women writers. One event coming up on March 18 is a conversation with author and Hedgebrook alumna T Kira Madden on her new release, titled, yes, “Whidbey.”

Would you like to spend a few weeks writing in a dreamy, handcrafted cottage on Whidbey Island? Hedgebrook’s Writers-In-Residence program application is open right now through April 17, 2026. There is an application fee, which we always wish could be avoided, but if you look through the FAQ, you’ll see you can request to have it waived.

One more thing about Whidbey Island: did you know that it’s world-famous for the delectable Penn Cove mussels? We pretty much can’t drive through Coupeville without stopping at Toby’s Tavern for some four-star steamed mussels in the most unlikeliest of dive bars.

But if you visit soon - the weekend of March 7 and 8, specifically - you will come across a very special event called Penn Cove Musselfest! It’s exactly what it sounds like: chowder tasting, a “Mussel Mingle,” and of course, a mussel-eating contest. Take a boat tour to learn more about mussels right at the source. Bring the kids and enjoy some pirate and mermaid storytime and crafts.

Anyone who loves the natural environment of the Pacific Northwest, values sustainable food systems and local businesses, and seeks out truly unique artists is going to love Whidbey Island. Don’t wait until the crowds find it in the summer!

LOCAL SPONSOR HIGHLIGHT

ASK A GRANT EXPERT

Dear Grant Expert,

We have been successfully running our arts program with the support of one major grant that we count on every year. I am worried about what will happen if we don’t get that grant next year.

How can we expand our options so that we are less vulnerable to losing our one major supporter?

-Living on a Prayer

If you feel like you are living within a paradox, you are not alone. Projects benefit from having anchor funding and they gain credibility when they receive it. There’s no doubt about this.

On the other hand, people who invest money typically won’t invest in a meaningful way unless you can show potential for a broad base of funding.

So what is one to do? You’re thinking - do we build a project off of one reliable, invested partner? Do we invest in seeking lots of little grants, and lots of little donations?

I like to think of philanthropy in the context of our basic human nature, i.e. the high school cafeteria. Everyone is looking around wondering who to sit with, suspicious yet hopeful that the court of public opinion might look upon them favorably…if not now, then perhaps someday.

What would be the advice you give to your kid facing this situation? Trust yourself. Hang with people who treat you well. Treat people well. Stick up for the kids who aren’t treated well. Something like that, right?

Philanthropy and the world of business (for profit and nonprofit) can largely be reduced to this same kind of social experiment. Specifically to your question, I think that you need to consider the company you keep, and decide where you want to invest your time and resources.

For some, that will be all in on a patron who truly gets you. For others, the goal is to diversify supporters because it is the best way to accomplish your mission. For most people, and most endeavors, the sweet spot will fall somewhere in between.

To expand the number of supporters you have, set a goal. If you had one supporter in 2025, perhaps make it a goal to have three in 2026. Then, get going on outreach and plan to meet with three times as many people as your goal. If you intentionally try to engage nine people/funders, and if those funders are well qualified prospects, I think you’re likely to get to your goal of three.

You might notice I did not suggest a dollar amount as a goal. You’re probably going to do that as well, but primarily you should be thinking about the number of prospects. This will keep you focused on the relationships you are building with the people on the other end of the phone.

And yes, I said phone! Pick up the phone and call someone!

In Solidarity,

Ali

Have a question about fundraising? Submit it here.

ARTIST LISTINGS:

Did you know?

There are hard-working artists and makers all over the place who are trying to get your attention. We’re going to show you some.

Please visit our website to learn more about how to be included in this section!

MAKE MORE ART!

THERE ARE A LOT OF PUBLIC GRANTS OUT THERE

WANT TO SHOW YOUR ART?

Show Your Art is a unique and amazing resource for emerging artists. You won’t regret taking the time to explore their offerings. Pre-order the 2026/27 edition now, which features 200 artist-friendly venues from Olympia to Everett!

GET DISCOUNTS TO ART AND MUSIC CLASSES

We can now offer a 20% discount off of up to three classes per year at Happy Time Studio!

To be eligible, all you need to do is become a paid subscriber to the Open Studio Newsletter. The discount can be used at any in-house art class, and for the deposit for the 12-week music classes.

You may use this perk once per calendar year, or, if you subscribe for a full year, you can use it up to three times in a calendar year.

Upcoming classes where you could use the discount:

LOOKING FOR MORE EVENT CALENDARS?

BelRed Arts District - The ONLY arts-focused calendar for the Eastside! Take a look and add your events!

Visit Issaquah - Issaquah’s most comprehensive collection of goings-ons, arts and otherwise.

King County Libraries - So many types of free arts events all around the county! Our libraries are amazing.

LOOKING FOR VOLUNTEER OPPORTUNITIES?

Upasana Dance Academy - Seeking visual artists, set designers, and prop builders for “Bhishma, The Eternal Vow,” a large-scale multicultural theatre production based on the Mahabharata.

The Original Theatre Black Dog - A professional quality nonprofit theatre company, performing on the Eastside and in Seattle for 40 years, the Original Theatre Black Dog is seeking volunteer Board members with skills in fundraising, marketing, accounting, bookkeeping, grant managing, writing and operations.

Want to post here? Email [email protected].

FEBRUARY’S LOST INTERVIEW

By Ali Marcus

Earlier this month, I was lucky to sit down with Iaan Hughes, the Musical Director at KBCS 91.3FM Radio.

KBCS is a community radio station, run on the campus of Bellevue College. I first got to know Iaan in the aughts, during the years I would visit KBCS for on-air interviews and performances to promote my album releases and local shows. I am a longtime listener of their wonderfully eclectic and thoughtful programming. Real DJs!

Iaan and I had a glorious and wide-ranging conversation. I’ll share what I can remember the most vividly:

We talked about why noncommercial radio is different from commercial radio. Despite the obvious differences (one is a business run for profit, the other is community-supported through volunteerism, donations, and sponsorship), I remember him sharing a shocking – and amazing – statistic. Whereas a commercial radio station has a playlist of about 250 songs in rotation, determined by pop music charts, KBCS played over 78,000 different songs in 2025. By over 50,000 different artists and bands.

To me, this shows a few things: KBCS is one mighty little station, and they are dead serious about their mission to be community supported in every way.

……

Iaan and I also talked about musical genres. The origins of what we call “rock” and “soul” are just marketing labels from a hundred years ago made by companies who were positioning music towards White consumers or Black consumers, respectively. We shared our feelings of pure flabbergastedness that this system is basically still upheld.

……

I remember Iaan talking about what it felt like to hop in a friend’s car and have to move the pile of CDs out of the way first. A singular kind of sense memory. The CDs would be diverse – say, the Beatles, the Fugees, and Bonnie Raitt.

……

We discussed how live radio is wildly different from podcasts. Is the world so accustomed to the asynchronous experience that we struggle to describe how and why it feels good to have a live broadcast connection? I noted Dar Williams’ song “Are You Out There?” - a monument to the power and promise of alternative radio. Her lyrics are etched in my soul:

……

Very important: I asked Iaan how people can participate in community radio. He says that KBCS is always looking for volunteers, and they even have open spaces for new DJs to pitch shows!

Iaan emphasized tenacity; if someone reaches out to him with a show idea, or if they want him to play their music on air, persistence is what will cut through the noise. He described how many submissions and inquiries he gets each day, and the number is pretty astronomical. Was it 50 submission emails a day?

……

Readers, I confess: the reason I have written down bits and bobs of this conversation is because after I recorded such a lovely interview, I discovered the audio file was thoroughly corrupted, and no amount of backup history or version history was going to help me recover it.

I am a longtime recording artist; I learned sound production in professional, major label studios early on in my career. In college, as an intern for Dave Matthews’ management company, I had the privilege of learning from a female sound engineer – the only one I ever came across in practice for the next 20 years.

You don’t see a lot of female artists in charge of their own destiny. I was resolved from the beginning to learn the skills it takes to be a sound engineer. I play my own instruments. I learned what it means to produce an album. I learned from sound engineers and producers at the top of their game. I recorded many albums in my studio apartment on Capitol Hill. And I recorded my own records in the same rooms as R.E.M., Nirvana, Neil Young. I always retain producer credits. I always own my work.

With this newsletter, I recently – and joyfully – found my way back to audio production and cannot believe how easy it has become. USB microphone, free recording software, new laptop, and bing-bang-boom, we’re on the air! But, I am rusty. I have had to get back in the habit of checking inputs and outputs, recording and playback. How much storage space I have and where it is – on a hard drive? In the cloud?

When I learned that my interview with Iaan was irretrievably corrupted, I realized I made a rookie mistake: I wasn’t saving my work as I went. I’ve gotten so used to relying on autosave, I omitted this most basic of steps. And, it turns out, saving ginormous audio files to the cloud as if they are a word document is a terrible idea anyway. Confidence is an important tool, but humility also comes around to remind you that there is always more to learn.

……

Accepting loss is hard. This was a conversation that I wish you could hear. I feel a bit like Iaan and his never-ending pile of great music. But I also find it inspiring that he is so committed to his project, and that so much good comes from it, even if it’s not the Maximum Amount of Good that Exists in the Universe. Against a lot of odds, he tries his best. The thing that matters most is that we try.

I’m going to make something great out of this experience. Check out the new Beginner Sound Production workshops we are starting to offer for kids ages 7-12. There’s nothing like teaching to bring us hope for a brighter future!

Listen and donate to KBCS 91.3FM! They have open spots for new DJs!

As promised, please enjoy the full audio interview from January’s newsletter with writer and artist Anna Sullivan!

THANK YOU TO OUR SPONSORS: