I began making collage postcards a few years ago with two friends, one who collages regularly and graciously shared her material with us, and one who routinely makes progressive, feminist crafts. Our “collage days,” as we came to call them, were collaborative, joyful, and affirming—an opportunity to step away from calls for productivity and to instead simply enjoy each other’s company and art.

I am a writer, drawn deeply to place, place-making, and environmental justice, but I also once practiced the visual arts. In high school, I straddled wooden planks in drawing class, my forearms blackened with charcoal, and in college, I spent evenings in the printmaking studio, pressing paper over etchings and linocuts. Creating collage postcards felt like a return to that self, as I sifted through magazine fragments and pieced together images and words.

Many of my collages engaged climate change—a topic that has pressed on me with increasing urgency, but also often felt too complex to tackle in writing. It is too large, too looming, and my knowledge of earth systems too limited. The immensity of the problem—and my own complicity in the cultures and ideologies that have created it—silenced me whenever I thought of picking up a pen. Climate change, I found, was a topic I could only approach in fragments. Fragments of images, and fragments of words, that could capture grief, longing, reality, resilience, resistance, beauty, and perhaps even hope.

The more postcards I made, the more appropriate collage-making became. I liked the fact that I was making art out of scraps from trade magazines—scraps that would likely otherwise have been thrown away or at best recycled. I was giving images and words another life, interrupting a cycle of consumerism and consumption, and using those words to support community.

I have sent collage postcards to friends and fellow writers—to artists, activists, teachers, instructors, community makers, and caretakers. I hope the postcards buoy each individual and remind them of interconnectedness and the importance of their work. Even small gestures can have impacts.

I have also sent postcards to government officials and policymakers. Although I live in Arkansas, and few of my county and state’s current representatives have particularly good track records when it comes to environmental justice, you never know. Maybe the postcards will reach them or their staff members. Maybe the postcards will communicate something that I alone cannot say.