Kid me was, you know, like I said, very into school and academic and, you know, anxious about everything, and the drawing was a release from that. And one of the things that made me anxious was simple communication simply because it’s so difficult for me. And lip reading, which is how I do communicate, takes up a lot of brain power, and it’s exhausting at the end of the day.
And drawing is something that’s just between you and the paper, and everything else gets blocked out. So that was probably why I was doing so much of it. As far as storytelling or storytellers in the family, I’d have to say my mom and then her mother, my grandmother, were both just, oh my gosh, foul, foul storytellers. I mean they just, you know, very much into the potty humor and all these — they like to play with language, and they would come up with nicknames and funny rhymes and funny — I mean it was always funny.
So there weren’t any real — I mean they weren’t like big stories of substance or anything. It was just all goofy, and that’s very much a part of the work I do now I think.
