What is your book about?
– My father was in Vietnam while my mother was still in high school. Pittsburgh the steeltown was booming in 1968. The industry then collapsed and so did our family. The new industry is the hospitals to take care of all the old workers. My parents divorced and both found new work in the hospitals. But they don’t speak to each other anymore. That was okay because I’d moved away to California. But when I moved back home just ”hopping fences” between them grew very frustrating. So my book is about my family in this specific region – however my story is not unique really. This book is about the decline of the Industrial USA and how that is mirrored in traditional family structures also ”rusting out”.
Describe your creative process!
– When I am making a book I work on the left and right side together and compose one spread a day and prop it up like a painting – the two together and run lines of dialogue in my head – then I make notes about where the scene can or should go – it’s like paper dolls and I move the characters around their paper dollhouse – generally a scene is then cut up and shuffled and many scenes are removed – I do not write a script but draw and write together as one thought or a collage of layers – memories – scenes – honed into tell-able stories – so many people left out – sidebars – historical context – all that is searchable now online – I just told the story like we tell these stories to each other in a regional dialect – my drawing is a short hand really – plein air studies – refined only in the studio for flow and readablity. I am not intrrested in memoir per se. It is a collision of the visual and the aural – the music of the drawings and the read as words cadence of meaning – and the personal connection to the material – the tightrope of oversharing and withholding.
– I have a very specific structure which I have applied to the two-page spread. I think time signatures and how those relate to the eighths and sixteenths of sewn books signatures. It’s too linguistically complicated to go into here, however, it’s all over orchestrated to seem spontaneous.
What do you want to achieve with this book?
– My parents are still alive, however, I missed them being in the same room together talking to each other and to me. That will never happen again, so I thought that I could conjure them being together with little stories. I actually never thought that these stories would get published and it’s been a surprise to share these very personal scribblings. It worked. I made them immortal. I put them together in a book thats on a shelf in many homes and libraries. I’m very happy about that. So I achieved something I didnt expect to achieve – not a cathartic release but more a coming home warmth of feeling towards them and our city which was not so large in my heart at times.
