Happy Birthday By the Forces of Gravity!

My cartoon/poetry memoir came out a year ago today! It’s been such an amazing year, for the book, for my own creative life. This spring I’ve been on sabbatical from my professor job at Arizona State University where I’ve been teaching landscape architecture for the past twenty-five years. I’ve spent this time away obsessed with hybridity, especially the mingling of drawings and words. And last week-end I made a pilgrimage to Los Angeles to attend a one-day workshop with Lynda Barry, a goddess of making words and images one thing again, as it is for four-year-olds. I’m working on a book on drawing for writers, a craft book made to carry in your pocket to help let drawing become part of your writing life. I’ve also been writing the Books with Pictures column for DIY MFA.

Basically, everything words and drawings as storytelling.

I’ve been drawing and writing my whole life, but By the Forces of Gravity becoming a book still feels like a major milestone in my pursuit of creating a life like a monk in a scriptorium, except with kids, a partner and a houseful of dogs and cats. A monk with benefits and no pestilence. Paradise.

So, happy birthday to my sweet book! Despite it’s super sad storyline, it was such a joy to cast it into the cosmos last year and to see it every morning on my bedroom bookshelf (because, of course, I have a bedroom bookshelf). It’s liberating too to have finally told a story I carried for forty years, and now have room for others. More on that later.