A Happy Sartorial Announcement

Very excited today to be announcing that we now have a Story Club Store.

There you’ll find t-shirt and sweatshirts and hats, embellished with some with our familiar Story Club elements (deer, bear, writing shed) and with my wacky, inept, but heartfelt illustrations, including these guys:

…and this one:

Other stuff will be forthcoming on a regular basis…

I first started making these little doodles back when I worked as a tech writer, often when I was supposed to be taking notes on a conference call. In fact, my first real writing breakthrough after grad school was connected with drawing - I wrote a series of poems called “Uncle Cloud’s Partial Lexicon of Humans” and illustrated each with a drawing, all in an afternoon, while on a (slow, uneventful) call with Kodak. Even now, there’s something about doodling like this that invokes the mindset I go into when writing - playful, unplanned, one element influencing the next - a process of discovery, without a goal in mind. The idea is that if I don’t “aim” for something, something will happen anyway and it won’t, at any rate, suffer from the sin of overcontrol.

Anyway, hope you'll check out the store if you get a chance.

Wear these items with pride and as a secret symbol of our communal obsession with narrative and in memory of the many happy hours we have spent here together. Also, this way, we can recognize one another in a crowd and exchange the Secret Chekhovian “I Love Literature/Fingers Alongside the Head” Signal:

“Are you in Story Club. I am in Story Club. But I am wondering when this Saunders dude is going to get to one of my stories.”