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. 

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. 

PORTLAND MERCURY: You write in the introduction to this work that you’re not a regular journal-keeper. Is this diary really one of the only journals you’ve ever kept? 

CARSON ELLIS: My journal-keeping history goes back to being a kid, but it’s super sporadic. I think I’ve tended to get rid of them because they’re things I wrote in a moment of emotional fervor that I then looked back on, felt embarrassed about, and chucked. So, I’ve dabbled, but I don’t have that many surviving journals. When I found the record of this week, I was so grateful that I had done it, because it was such a clear snapshot of that moment in my life, and I don’t have anything else like that. 

After you found this old journal, were you inspired to start keeping one again? 

Maybe I would do the same thing [I did in 2001], you know, keep a very meticulous record for a week. Or, you know what, I kept one of those five-year diaries from about 2017 to 2022. You just write down a couple sentences that happen each day. When it comes to journaling, I think that’s as much as my attention span would allow. Either a couple sentences a day for many years, or a lot of sentences a day for one week. Then I’m done. 

One Week in January is set during your first week living in Portland. I don’t mean this as a loaded or political question, but could you describe how Portland has changed since you first moved here? 

My life has changed so much in the past 23 years, and my relationship to Portland has changed so much. I live on a farm in Tualatin, and when I visit Portland, it feels really different to me. But I’m also really different, and it’s hard to determine where one thing ends and the other begins—what’s me being a middle-aged woman with kids in the suburbs, and what’s Portland changing?

What was it like being an artist in Portland when you first moved here? What was the impact of the city on your art? 

I feel really grateful to Portland in terms of my art. I was so struck by how welcoming people were, and how much people wanted to create community, get involved, and have parties and art shows. I have a lot to be grateful for in how much people embraced me as an artist and let me figure out how to make a living here. 

And I made a book series [The Wildwood Chronicles] with my husband that was set in Portland, and Laika is making it into a movie. So I absolutely feel like a Portland artist. 

The book contains diary entries from 2001, as well as recent paintings to accompany them. Can you describe the process of making art for this book? 

As an illustrator and author of kids’ books, I’m constantly thinking about how pictures and words interact and communicate with each other. The basic idea for this was to feel the feelings I was seemingly not letting myself feel when I was keeping this journal. 

As a diarist, I revealed nothing about what I’m feeling, it’s just the bare facts of what I’m doing everyday. The prose is so spare and so stoic; I feel like there’s a lot of pent up emotion that shines through. So I wanted to make some paintings where I did reveal things, and that maybe were a little more emotionally resonant than what was going on in the text. 

You’ve created illustrations for books written by other people and for your own children’s books like Home and Du Iz Tak. Was it a different experience to illustrate your own diary entries, especially years after you wrote them? 

It was a very free experience where I was allowed to follow my instincts in a way that I don’t think I ever have when illustrating a book. It’s an illustrated book, but in a way, it’s almost more like an art exhibit catalog where the paintings are there, and then here’s the corresponding text that goes with them.

I’ll also say it was a very moving experience to work on it. It brought back a lot of memories, and put me back in touch with lots of people. So many people in the book are still my friends, but not people I see all the time. It was really poignant and sweet to be in middle age, still in touch with all those people, and be able to look back with them on this life we all lived together so many years ago. 

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Carson Ellis appears in conversation with Colin Meloy at Powell’s Books, 1001 W Burnside, Tues Sept 10, 7 pm, free, all ages. The paintings of One Week in January will be on display at Nationale, 15 SE 22nd, Sept 14-Oct 19. Reception on Sat Sept 14, 2-5 pm.