DIRT CLUB DIGEST #01
DIRT CLUB DIGEST #01
Hot Summer Nights, Mid July
Hot Summer Nights, Mid July
Planting Seeds
Planting Seeds
Fertilizer
Fertilizer
Monthly Harvest
Reading Tea Leaves
JULY 18 2026
JULY 18 2026
ALEXIS PEARMAN
ALEXIS PEARMAN
JULY 18
Welcome to the first installment of Dirt Club Zine’s newsletter. This is a space to give you insights into the creative process and inspirations behind each new edition and to give myself structure by imposing monthly deadlines on my creative outputs. (Type Bs say hello) Let's muse about the upcoming edition, Talk Therapy.
Welcome to the first installment of Dirt Club Zine’s newsletter. This is a space to give you insights into the creative process and inspirations behind each new edition and to give myself structure by imposing monthly deadlines on my creative outputs. (Type Bs say hello) Let's muse about the upcoming edition, Talk Therapy.
I know I promised some dirt on the upcoming Volume 3, Talk Therapy, but it feels right to first introduce the ethos behind Dirt Club itself. I started this magazine with a friend in 2023 as we were both going through break ups and were looking for someplace to put our feelings other than deep stalking our exes social media accounts. I was writing lots of sappy poetry about spring flowers, my friend was hard-core journaling, and we picked up a blank extra-large canvas from Michaels in Chelsea that required both of our efforts to carry it up the 10th Avenue wind tunnel back to my apartment. We stared at the canvas for a long time, left it bare, and instead decided to sift through these data points of feeling we had produced and compile them into something of a straight-lined narrative.
The edition started with a poem I wrote about home and my grandmother’s brooches, and Malvika’s stream of consciousness journal entries about making art. I found a poem I wrote about my ex, which I never gave to her out of fear of being known, and a note she wrote me after our first fight. We included apologies we never sent and our grand theory of situationship-based pain called Maybeland, which explores the friction in ambiguous having and ambiguous loss. One day, in our drawing, Malvika wrote “Love Letter to Life” in red pastel on a piece of paper, and we began to draw butterflies, a checkerboard pattern, and a pair of tits on the page. Before we took a picture of it to mark it complete, I placed one of the rubber ducks I purchased on a whim from the Chelsea flea market onto our creation. We laughed, and my friend instructed me to collect more trinkets from around my apartment, and she took off her amethyst necklace, to place on the page. This was it, funnily enough, the essence of what we were making. A time capsule of feelings and thoughts and belongings that we made into something singular, something with purpose.
As we compiled this edition together, it became clear we would have to give this project a name beyond simply referring to it as our Love Letter to Life. (Love Letter is a great name for a magazine though) Once, chatting as friends do, we talked about my spiritual connections to bees and how I was a founding member of my high school’s Save The Bees Club. My friend mentioned she was in her elementary school’s Dirt Club, where she and her classmates would dig in the dirt– planting flowers and playing with worms. This revelation sent a jolt through me, and I exclaimed that Dirt Club had to be the name of this project. It just made sense. I had never heard of a club where adults coordinated their children’s playing in the dirt. I had only ever rolled around in my front lawn, picking up worms, making grass and wildflower bracelets, and capturing lightning bugs at dusk, before being hosed down prior to reentering my house.
Although the name Dirt Club was picked haphazardly as an endearing ode to childhood, a compelling ethos began to form around it. I read a quote from Diane Setterfield’s novel The Thirteenth Tale that likened life to a compost heap, where every experience was thrown in as a sort of creative fuel. These pieces of compost would slowly break down into their elemental components, reorganize themselves, and eventually sprout into a fully formed idea. It's the same way we collect experiences as data points to assign meaning. Zoe wished me a happy birthday, invited me to eat lunch with her, and told me a secret: we must be friends. This is the essence of Dirt Club Zine– gathering trinkets from around your apartment, collecting work from artists of various mediums, and refashioning them into something new. All the original parts are still there, I've only just traced a line from one star to the next to make a giant saddlebag in the sky.
As we compiled this edition together, it became clear we would have to give this project a name beyond simply referring to it as our Love Letter to Life. (Love Letter is a great name for a magazine though) Once, chatting as friends do, we talked about my spiritual connections to bees and how I was a founding member of my high school’s Save The Bees Club. My friend mentioned she was in her elementary school’s Dirt Club, where she and her classmates would dig in the dirt– planting flowers and playing with worms. This revelation sent a jolt through me, and I exclaimed that Dirt Club had to be the name of this project. It just made sense. I had never heard of a club where adults coordinated their children’s playing in the dirt. I had only ever rolled around in my front lawn, picking up worms, making grass and wildflower bracelets, and capturing lightning bugs at dusk, before being hosed down prior to reentering my house.
Although the name Dirt Club was picked haphazardly as an endearing ode to childhood, a compelling ethos began to form around it. I read a quote from Diane Setterfield’s novel The Thirteenth Tale that likened life to a compost heap, where every experience was thrown in as a sort of creative fuel. These pieces of compost would slowly break down into their elemental components, reorganize themselves, and eventually sprout into a fully formed idea. It's the same way we collect experiences as data points to assign meaning. Zoe wished me a happy birthday, invited me to eat lunch with her, and told me a secret: we must be friends. This is the essence of Dirt Club Zine– gathering trinkets from around your apartment, collecting work from artists of various mediums, and refashioning them into something new. All the original parts are still there, I've only just traced a line from one star to the next to make a giant saddlebag in the sky.
I’ve had Grace Ives’ newest album Girlfriend on repeat since its release this spring, discovering something new with each listen. The gutsy and earnest indie-pop album came out while I was in flight, escaping the cold of New York on the other side of the world. Being back after a while felt like butterflies in my tummy– going to all my favorite places, getting lost, and discovering something new on the way. This magic kind of feeling is imbued in the album’s opening track “Now I'm," whose airy melody gently glides us into the addictive world of Girlfriend. The album is dynamic in both production and tone. There are moments of pure lightness in “Garden” and those of pure seduction, in “Neither You Nor I,” which for some reason reminds me of the stories in Eve Babitz’s Black Swans. I’ve tried to list the tracks by favorite, but after each listen, different ones hum relentlessly in my head like a sweet tooth.
The album is Ives’ multilayered reflection on addiction, whose tone floats through sensuousness and severity, tenderness and play. It’s deeply introspective, reckoning with failing yourself and others, with songs admitting her shortcomings and the times she made a mess. In Fire 2, she keeps her lover up at night with the fires she starts and the promises she can't keep, confessing she’s a “shadow of a girl who’s just doing her best.”
Girlfriend is an exercise in owning your mistakes without living in them. Ives talks about missteps with levity and mischief in Drink Up and Dance With Me, while she agonizes over them in What if. The track is pure rock and incredulous, sobering up to “quite the scene when I drank”. The bridge is atmospheric and hypnotic as it doubles down into disillusionment with the repetition of “it was up to me and I tanked”. It’s a moment that feels like finally facing yourself in the mirror, which she then approaches with lightness in "Garden" singing her luck “to be with my feet on the ground.”
She eventually finds her way out of darkness and back to herself, ending the album with what feels like a victory lap. The lead single and final song, Stupid Bitches, is the most addictive of the bunch and feels like some sort of psychic release. I must have listened to it 100 times by now. Here, instead of being critical she recognizes her resilience and convalescence by repeating “it doesn't hurt me anymore.” Being a year off of some hard core friendship break ups, it spoke to something deep within me and became sort of a mantra:
I’ve had Grace Ives’ newest album Girlfriend on repeat since its release this spring, discovering something new with each listen. The gutsy and earnest indie-pop album came out while I was in flight, escaping the cold of New York on the other side of the world. Being back after a while felt like butterflies in my tummy– going to all my favorite places, getting lost, and discovering something new on the way. This magic kind of feeling is imbued in the album’s opening track “Now I'm," whose airy melody gently glides us into the addictive world of Girlfriend. The album is dynamic in both production and tone. There are moments of pure lightness in “Garden” and those of pure seduction, in “Neither You Nor I,” which for some reason reminds me of the stories in Eve Babitz’s Black Swans. I’ve tried to list the tracks by favorite, but after each listen, different ones hum relentlessly in my head like a sweet tooth.
The album is Ives’ multilayered reflection on addiction, whose tone floats through sensuousness and severity, tenderness and play. It’s deeply introspective, reckoning with failing yourself and others, with songs admitting her shortcomings and the times she made a mess. In Fire 2, she keeps her lover up at night with the fires she starts and the promises she can't keep, confessing she’s a “shadow of a girl who’s just doing her best.”
Girlfriend is an exercise in owning your mistakes without living in them. Ives talks about missteps with levity and mischief in Drink Up and Dance With Me, while she agonizes over them in What if. The track is pure rock and incredulous, sobering up to “quite the scene when I drank”. The bridge is atmospheric and hypnotic as it doubles down into disillusionment with the repetition of “it was up to me and I tanked”. It’s a moment that feels like finally facing yourself in the mirror, which she then approaches with lightness in "Garden" singing her luck “to be with my feet on the ground.”
She eventually finds her way out of darkness and back to herself, ending the album with what feels like a victory lap. The lead single and final song, Stupid Bitches, is the most addictive of the bunch and feels like some sort of psychic release. I must have listened to it 100 times by now. Here, instead of being critical she recognizes her resilience and convalescence by repeating “it doesn't hurt me anymore.” Being a year off of some hard core friendship break ups, it spoke to something deep within me and became sort of a mantra:
As a part of my Volume 3 research, I’ve been reading Susan Sontag’s essay, Against Interpretation. She examines how interpretation, or the assignment of meaning, to a piece of artwork creates something entirely new that sits between the original work and the viewer. Sontag advocates for a little less interpretation, especially from the critic milieu, and opts for a simpler and more sensory approach to viewing art. The essay was written in 1964, before Instagram was even a thought, but it reminds me of today’s photo dumps. The same process that changes a work of art from its content and form to an intent, takes us away from presence towards “preserving memories” and producing “content.” We take pictures we cannot taste of food, and plan candid photos.
This is not morally reprehensible and I don’t believe the mass of people filming the Clairo concert should be stoned. There’s a natural human urge for interpretation. Artists are known to take their surroundings and inner lives and create work that exists outside themselves, in the form of a song, a painting, or a piece of clothing. What is an Edward Hopper painting but an interpretation of an experience? What is impressionism? This phenomena exists within philosophers, conspiracy theorists, and individuals experiencing crush-induced psychosis alike.
“They watched my story, what do you think that means?”
Although not punishable by death, I do think it’s worth investigating our propensity for interpretation, especially when it encroaches on our ability to have a present experience. Kylie Jenner is now selling Meta glasses, a concept I truly loathe and don’t see utility in other than for a low budget indie film. These glasses promise to capture everything you see as long as the recording is on. Now, instead of one or two (depending on the lighting) phone-eats-first photos of your pasta, you can film the dinner until your plate is clean. Again, I don't believe owners of digital representations of their lives should be flogged– I was raised on Tumblr, I made a memoji. But why should we continue to move more and more of our lives online rather than invest in the real thing?
On a sunny day in June, I headed to Chinatown to visit the tattoo shop Vacation Forever, to interview its founder Kee Kee James about her approach to creativity, her inspirations, and her zodiac sign. Check it out here: Kee Kee James- Aries Sun, Artist Rising
"Life is compost. You think that a strange thing to say, but it's true. All my life and all my experience, the events that have befallen me, the people | have known, all my memories, dreams, fantasies, everything I have ever read, all of that has been chucked onto the compost heap, where over time it had rotted down to a dark, rich, organic mulch. The process of cellular breakdown makes it unrecognizable. Other people call it the imagination. I think of it as a compost heap. Every so often I take an idea, plant it in the compost, and wait. It feeds on that black stuff that used to be a life, takes its energy for its own. It germinates. Takes root. Produces shoots. And so on and so forth, until one fine day l have a story, or a novel."
-Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale
"Life is compost. You think that a strange thing to say, but it's true. All my life and all my experience, the events that have befallen me, the people | have known, all my memories, dreams, fantasies, everything I have ever read, all of that has been chucked onto the compost heap, where over time it had rotted down to a dark, rich, organic mulch. The process of cellular breakdown makes it unrecognizable. Other people call it the imagination. I think of it as a compost heap. Every so often I take an idea, plant it in the compost, and wait. It feeds on that black stuff that used to be a life, takes its energy for its own. It germinates. Takes root. Produces shoots. And so on and so forth, until one fine day l have a story, or a novel."
-Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale
Stupid bitches can’t hurt me
Yeah, I’ve been through the needle now I see
I won’t shatter in the aftermath
I’m a bullet on an arrows path
It doesn’t hurt me anymore
Stupid bitches can’t hurt me
Yeah, I’ve been through the needle now I see
I won’t shatter in the aftermath
I’m a bullet on an arrows path
It doesn’t hurt me anymore
Signs of life in the East Village
In:
Greek salad
British Lovers
A friend sending u the same meme over and over
The New York Knicks
Making highly specific screen printed T-shirts
In:
Greek salad
British Lovers
A friend sending u the same meme over and over
The New York Knicks
Making highly specific screen printed T-shirts
Out:
Being in the middle of your cat’s turf war
French lovers
Beauty routine maxxing
Posting on Instagram
Big swings over consistency
Last Week's Dirt
Last Week's Dirt
Last Week's Dirt
Brace for Leo season. I’m unsure if its the stars or the air in NYC, but it’s a Back In Love summer. I’ve been doing heart opening yoga and listening to poetry in the park. Also the Full Moon in Aquarius July 29th. This feels like the time to define the line between authenticity and performance, the self and others.
Me & The Moon
Out:
Being in the middle of your cat’s turf war
French lovers
Beauty routine maxxing
Posting on Instagram
Big swings over consistency
I know I promised some dirt on the upcoming Volume 3, Talk Therapy, but it feels right to first introduce the ethos behind Dirt Club itself. I started this magazine with a friend in 2023 as we were both going through break ups and were looking for someplace to put our feelings other than deep stalking our exes social media accounts. I was writing lots of sappy poetry about spring flowers, my friend was hard-core journaling, and we picked up a blank extra-large canvas from Michaels in Chelsea that required both of our efforts to carry it up the 10th Avenue wind tunnel back to my apartment. We stared at the canvas for a long time, left it bare, and instead decided to sift through these data points of feeling we had produced and compile them into something of a straight-lined narrative.
The edition started with a poem I wrote about home and my grandmother’s brooches, and Malvika’s stream of consciousness journal entries about making art. I found a poem I wrote about my ex, which I never gave to her out of fear of being known, and a note she wrote me after our first fight. We included apologies we never sent and our grand theory of situationship-based pain called Maybeland, which explores the friction in ambiguous having and ambiguous loss. One day, in our drawing, Malvika wrote “Love Letter to Life” in red pastel on a piece of paper, and we began to draw butterflies, a checkerboard pattern, and a pair of tits on the page. Before we took a picture of it to mark it complete, I placed one of the rubber ducks I purchased on a whim from the Chelsea flea market onto our creation. We laughed, and my friend instructed me to collect more trinkets from around my apartment, and she took off her amethyst necklace, to place on the page. This was it, funnily enough, the essence of what we were making. A time capsule of feelings and thoughts and belongings that we made into something singular, something with purpose.
Monthly Harvest
On a sunny day in June, I headed to Chinatown to visit the tattoo shop Vacation Forever, to interview its founder Kee Kee James about her approach to creativity, her inspirations, and her zodiac sign. Check it out here: Kee Kee James- Aries Sun, Artist Rising
Signs of life in the East Village
Reading Tea Leaves
As a part of my Volume 3 research, I’ve been reading Susan Sontag’s essay, Against Interpretation. She examines how interpretation, or the assignment of meaning, to a piece of artwork creates something entirely new that sits between the original work and the viewer. Sontag advocates for a little less interpretation, especially from the critic milieu, and opts for a simpler and more sensory approach to viewing art. The essay was written in 1964, before Instagram was even a thought, but it reminds me of today’s photo dumps. The same process that changes a work of art from its content and form to an intent, takes us away from presence towards “preserving memories” and producing “content.” We take pictures we cannot taste of food, and plan candid photos.
This is not morally reprehensible and I don’t believe the mass of people filming the Clairo concert should be stoned. There’s a natural human urge for interpretation. Artists are known to take their surroundings and inner lives and create work that exists outside themselves, in the form of a song, a painting, or a piece of clothing. What is an Edward Hopper painting but an interpretation of an experience? What is impressionism? This phenomena exists within philosophers, conspiracy theorists, and individuals experiencing crush-induced psychosis alike.
“They watched my story, what do you think that means?”
Although not punishable by death, I do think it’s worth investigating our propensity for interpretation, especially when it encroaches on our ability to have a present experience. Kylie Jenner is now selling Meta glasses, a concept I truly loathe and don’t see utility in other than for a low budget indie film. These glasses promise to capture everything you see as long as the recording is on. Now, instead of one or two (depending on the lighting) phone-eats-first photos of your pasta, you can film the dinner until your plate is clean. Again, I don't believe owners of digital representations of their lives should be flogged– I was raised on Tumblr, I made a memoji. But why should we continue to move more and more of our lives online rather than invest in the real thing?
Me & The Moon
Brace for Leo season. I’m unsure if its the stars or the air in NYC, but it’s a Back In Love summer. I’ve been doing heart opening yoga and listening to poetry in the park. Also the Full Moon in Aquarius July 29th. This feels like the time to define the line between authenticity and performance, the self and others.