As the Kickstarter campaign for Potato Nose: 1977 enters its final hours, I find myself doing the classic artist’s hustle: sharing, posting, reminding, and hoping I’m not annoying everyone in the process. It can feel uncomfortably narcissistic, especially when the project is based on my own teenage diary. But this campaign was never launched because I had everything perfectly planned or had watched all the “how-to-Kickstarter” videos. It happened because something in me insisted: Do this now.

This has been a year of contradictions. A year of huge creative highs (releasing my first graphic novel, working on the second project) and of real personal lows, with loss in the family, denied grants, and a reckoning with my own health. In the midst of all that, this project has been teaching me something vital: stay true to my voice. Have fun. Follow the work that’s calling. And unexpectedly, Potato Nose has revealed itself as exactly the project that wants my attention right now.

I’m still deeply committed to my next major nonfiction project, which explores my Norwegian grandfather’s experience as a WWII POW, in collaboration with my dear niece, anthropologist Emma Varley, who is exploring her own grandfather’s wartime story. That research is profound, slow, and heavy. The project itself evolving, unknown… and calling us. The voices of the past feel close – they are speaking to us  through the ether – but it’s a project that will take time.

In contrast, Potato Nose has become more relevant and layered than I expected. Underneath the humor and nostalgia, I feel a darker thread surfacing – one I haven’t fully articulated yet in the Kickstarter updates, but one I’m excited (and a little nervous) to explore. There was “something off”  about who my best friend and I were back then. People have since compared us to Pauline and Juliet from Heavenly Creatures, and I understand why. There was innocence, but also something feral, dramatic, deranged in the teenage way. I’m still learning how to tell that part of the story honestly.

Will I make my goal? It would be amazing. Truly. But it might not happen… and if it doesn’t, I’m at peace with that. The support I’ve received, the generous messages, and the wonderful reactions to my first graphic novel have lifted me more than I can say. This campaign reminded me that the real gift is the work itself. I love storytelling and experimenting with visual language.

And while I wait for an appointment to see a neck/thyroid specialist at St Paul’s Hospital (possibly 33 weeks!), Potato Nose will continue to be my creative companion. If I don’t reach the funding goal, creating the prologue comic will take longer and be harder to complete… but still possible. Salt Green Death took a long time too, and it ultimately pushed me forward.

I keep circling around this question: Why should I feel embarrassed about telling my own story?
Why should any artist feel embarrassed about wanting to sustain their practice? I love when others share their creative journeys. Why should mine be any different?

Maybe the heart of this project is that I don’t want to be small anymore. I felt so small as a teen. The only places I felt big were in the dance studio and in my art. I owe so much of that early confidence to M., my best friend, who picked up a ribbon I dropped on the floor my first day at Balettakademien in Stockholm and said, “Hey, you dropped this.” And the rest was history.

So here I am, coming to terms with old friendships, old wounds, overwhelm, and the strange, beautiful process of turning adolescence into art.

Thank you for being with me in these final hours. Thank you for reading, supporting, and believing in me and in this strange little project.

Onward,
Katarina