One
of my goals for today is to write my inaugural blog post, which has been
swirling around in my head for quite a while now, long before I actually set up
the blog. I've been thinking about writing a blog for a while now.
Ever since I self-published my first comic at SPACE in
2011, people have been asking me if I have a website. As I've continued
to write more comics, I figured maybe it was time to get something set up, so
that I can say, yes I have a website.
I've
been writing for most of my life - poems, journals, personal essays, and such
(not to mention the writings I did as assignments). These have largely
stayed hidden away in boxes in my closet, only a few of them ever being shared
with another person. One of the firmest, deepest lessons of my childhood
was the need to be secretive, to never talk outside the walls of our house
about what went on inside of it. In some ways all of the talking I needed
to do as a child came out in what I wrote, most of which I burned up in the
alley when I was sixteen.
For a
very long time I have toyed with the idea of breaking that silence, of telling
my story. For a while I imagined it as a book of personal essays, but
even though I wrote some, I never shared them. For the last 6 and a half
years, though, I've been working with the same therapist, struggling (and
largely succeeding) to understand and not be trapped by my tendency towards
depression. I took four and a half years to get around to telling him
about the central trauma in my life, and since then we've also been working on
therapies designed to treat PTSD.
Somewhere
along the line, thanks to my younger daughter's interest in comics, I began
reading comics - both fiction and nonfiction, and I found myself drawn to
graphic memoirs. When I started reading them, I wasn't really
thinking I'd write my own. In October of 2009, I attended my first
24-hour comic event, primarily as a chaperone for my younger daughter, who was
then 15. As I sat there and watched the others work on their comics,
I decided that I’d like to try. What I ended up with was a 14-page
script for a memoir of the year I turned 16, two whole pictures, and a desire
to write more comics.
In
October, 2010, I attended another 24-hour comic event, this time at Packrat
Comics in Hilliard, Ohio. This time I went with the intention of
writing a comic, not sure about what other than it needed to be a simpler story
than I scripted that first time. I wrote about something I knew and
called it The Care and Feeding of Cats….or How to Train Your Human.
Since
then I’ve branched out to write comics at other times than when staying up all
night in a caffeine-fueled frenzy of creativity. I’ve written two mini
comics in a series I entitled Ruminera, from the Italian word for
“she will ruminate” because I will – it’s a hobby of mine. I've also
written some shorter pieces for anthologies, including my first non-autobio
comic for an anthology I edited called A
Bowl Full of Happiness.
Someday
I will return to that script I started in October, 2009, and I will write the
graphic memoir I envisioned while I was sitting there. For now I’m
enjoying learning more about the art and craft of writing comics and finding
the stories I want to tell.
