Loveday Funck

Every Weekend Is a Roll of the Dice One of the peculiar things about being an independent artist and author is that you can spend weeks preparing for an event without having the slightest idea how it will turn out. You can make beautiful things, arrange them attractively, promote the event until you're fairly certain everyone within a hundred miles has heard about it, and still have no idea whether anyone will show up. Fortunately, sometimes the dice roll in your favor. This

Festival Acadiens was wonderful, and I came home Sunday evening exhausted, happy, and fairly certain that I had personally relocated a small warehouse over the course of the weekend. For three days, I was surrounded by wonderful music, interesting people, and the kind of joyful atmosphere that reminds me why I love living in Louisiana. People stopped by my booth to look at the artwork, laugh at the Unbelongings, browse through my books, and occasionally take one of my strange

This has been a difficult week to be a woman on the internet. The story coming out of Cornell has been everywhere. Here in Louisiana, another story involving a student at LSU has been circulating at the same time. My social media feeds have felt angrier than usual, sadder than usual, and filled with women recognizing something painfully familiar in one another. There is a phrase appearing again and again: Jane Doe. I suspect far too many of us have a Jane Doe story, and I hav

There is a peculiar message women receive as we get older. Nobody necessarily sits us down and explains it, yet somehow we absorb the suggestion that we should make a little room for the younger women, dress appropriately, be sensible, and stop worrying so much about being seen. I appear to have misunderstood the assignment. This October, I am incredibly excited to be the Featured Artist at the Baton Rouge Art Market. Last Saturday night, I also stood onstage doing stand-up c

There are weekends when I am a reasonably sensible human being, and then there are weekends when I somehow schedule five events in roughly thirty hours. Between Friday evening at seven and Saturday night at ten, I performed, hosted, sold books, did stand-up, hauled things around, talked to a remarkable number of people, and generally tested the limits of how many different creative hats one person can wear before they all fall off. At Livingston Parish Library’s BookCon, I so

There is a strange point in making anything when it stops belonging entirely to you. Until then, it has lived in your studio, your notebook, your computer, your head. You have fussed with it, changed it, doubted it, stared at it too long and occasionally wondered why you ever thought making things for a living was a reasonable plan. Then you send it out into the world. I’ve been doing a lot of that lately. The Unbelongings are now hanging at La Divina Italian Cafe, all thirty

There are parts of being an artist that look exactly like you imagined they would. On September 11, I’ll be hanging my work at La Divina Italian Café, where it will stay through November 11. There were be framed pieces on real walls. People drinking coffee and eating gelato while my strange little creatures look down at them. That is one of the bright, shiny parts. And then there was Saturday morning. I was supposed to be at the Baton Rouge Arts Market. Instead, the rain came

I recently received a certificate for completing the six-level improv curriculum at Boomerang Comedy Theater. Which is lovely. It is also slightly ridiculous, because I have now taken the entire curriculum twice. The first time, I was learning how improv worked. The second time, I went back partly because the curriculum itself had changed over the previous year, but also because I wanted to take the classes alongside the people I was performing with. And, as it turns out, imp

When you're a kid, adults are constantly trying to get you to do things. Join a team. Take dance. Try theater. Learn an instrument. Paint something. Write for the school paper. Colleges even want to know whether you were "well-rounded," which is a strange amount of pressure to put on a seventeen-year-old who is also supposed to understand algebra. Then you become an adult and, somehow, all of that disappears. You're supposed to work, take care of the house, run errands, pay b

You Can’t Just Let the Ghosts Do Whatever They Want One of the funny things about writing a novel is how much time you can spend developing things that barely make it onto the page. While I was writing The Ninth Herb, I somehow ended up creating a fairly elaborate set of rules for ghosts. I worked out how different kinds of hauntings behaved, what ghosts could and couldn’t do, how they communicated, and how you could tell the difference between an actual conscious spirit and

I didn’t set out to become a full-time artist. I started as a homeschooling mom making jewelry and selling it on eBay. I liked making things, and I kept finding new things to make. Eventually, I moved into digital collage. That became my main work for years. I used my own photography, antique images, folklore, fairy tales, and whatever strange idea happened to catch my attention. I loved building surreal scenes and creating work that felt a little mysterious and a little off-

Six Copies Is a Beginning On Thursday night, I discovered that I am apparently very good at blending into wallpaper. I was performing in a murder mystery dinner theater, where I successfully “killed” three people without attracting much suspicion for most of the evening. I quietly slipped in and out of the room while everyone else argued, investigated, and accused one another. Eventually, though, people began to notice a pattern. I kept leaving and coming back. My victims als

I was wandering around the automotive section of the store looking for a largish funnel when an employee stopped and asked if I needed help. Apparently, I was a woman alone in automotive. Ergo, I must need guidance. I told him I was looking for a funnel. He asked, “What for?” “Sand,” I said. He paused. There was a brief moment when I could see him reconsidering every possible reason a woman might need a large automotive funnel and a quantity of sand. Then he quietly led me

There is a clown among the Unbelongings now. It feels inevitable, although I did not plan it that way. The Unbelongings have always been creatures caught somewhere between categories: ghosts attempting ordinary life, skeletons with hobbies, monsters who seem more bewildered than dangerous. They are strange, earnest beings trying to find their place in a world that was not designed with them in mind. A clown fits comfortably among them, which may be the least comfortable thing

Apparently, I’m Doing Stand-Up Now On Saturday, July 18, at 5 p.m., I will perform in Kaboom at Boomerang Comedy Theater. This will be my first time doing stand-up somewhere other than an open mic, which makes the whole thing feel considerably more official. It will also be my third performance at Boomerang that weekend. On Friday, July 17, I will perform with my improv team, Something Else, at 7 p.m. Later that evening, I will perform in Risqué, Boomerang’s naughty improv sh

There are few things the book community loves more than a good phrase, something that works as a wink, a badge, a sticker on a Kindle case. A little password between strangers who understand that reading isn't just a hobby but a personality with excellent lighting. For the last few years, "Hot Girls Read" has been that phrase. It was funny and a little ridiculous in the way the internet does best, flipping the old image of the lonely, awkward reader on its head. Yes, we read.

Long ago, in the strange and wonderful early days of Etsy, you could find almost anything. Handmade earrings. Vintage teacups. Dollhouse furniture. Spell jars. Haunted objects. Possibly a cursed brooch. Definitely at least one listing that made you pause and whisper, “Wait. Is this real?” One of my favorite little internet oddities from that era was the adoptable ghost cat. For a few dollars, a seller would send you a printable certificate confirming that a ghost cat from the

When I first started doing art markets, one of my early digital collage pieces was Poe and the Raven. It featured Edgar Allan Poe, naturally, because apparently I have always been exactly who I am. A woman came into my booth one day and got excited because she recognized him. Now, a sensible artist might have said, “Yes, that’s Poe! I’m so glad you noticed.” A wise artist might have talked about the piece, the process, the antique imagery, the raven, the whole haunted literar

Why cats keep appearing in my work, and what they seem to know before I do Some stories arrive with castles, ghosts, or ruined gardens. Mine often arrive with whiskers. Cats keep finding their way into my work, and not only because people love them, though they certainly do. A cat can hold a kind of presence that feels larger than its body. It can look elegant and feral at once. It can seem perfectly at home in a velvet chair, a moonlit alley, the corner of an old porch, or t

I fell in love with New Orleans when I was young, and I think that was always how it was meant to happen. She isn’t a city you admire from a safe distance. She gets under your skin: through the old houses, the hidden courtyards, and the music drifting out of nowhere. She seduces you with the feeling that even an ordinary street corner might be keeping a secret. When I was younger, I loved her for the drama of it all: the beauty, the mystery, all the endless beautiful details