Play Time

For the last six months, I’ve been going through a change.

No, not THE change—fuck you! Thank the Goddess, I went through that a while ago. This is a work change, involving the idea of play.

Lately I got sick of winter and visited one of my favorite local parks. And I started to play in the playground. Nobody was there—it was too windy— so I didn’t worry about scaring the little kids (“Mooooom, who’s that WITCH on the spinny thingie?!”)

I spun my heart out, and then I leaned back on the lying-down spinny thingie, and then I walked over to a tree in a circle of stones and worshipped the sun with my arms spread wide.

Artists start their creative lives with an immense sense of play, which as they become professionals—under deadline, getting paid, perfecting their process—can often disappear. “Play” is supposed to be for points on a tennis court, for numbers on a Fitbit, tossing back the umbrella drinks at a resort.

But play is putting your body and mind in a different space and seeing what happens.

Last summer I finally visited the Edward Gorey House Museum in Yarmouth, Massachusetts and it was just as amazing as I’d hoped. The museum IS his house, and it’s where he died (appropriately), and where he played, as an artist, without apparently a care in the world.

The collection of his work is so vast that it’s stored offsite and changes annually in the museum’s glass cases. He made dolls, animals, 3D paper theaters, decks of “story” cards, wrote plays, the fun goes on and on.

Exiting through the gift shop, I bought some stellar trinkets, shown here.

It’s a fabulous demonstration of what you often find when you scratch the surface of a famous or not-so-famous artist. They don’t have just one area of interest or talent. They may not even have one voice. And their voices inevitably change over the course of a life. Roz Chast’s needlepoint and ukelele-playing. Steve Martin, banjo virtuoso. Michelangelo, card shark. That last one may not be true.

This past winter I’ve been performing at a local open mic, which I described in my last post here. I became intrigued with the basics of storytelling, without pictures in the supporting role. And so far I’ve written three stories intended to be listened to, not read (other than by me, because I can’t memorize SHIT.)

But they’re meant to be spontaneous flashes of inspiration shared only in that moment with the audience in that room. This has give me a sense of play I haven’t had in a long time.

And here’s the kicker. I am finding a new voice. A written voice, which I never found when I tried to be a writer in my twenties.

In my thirties, I gave up looking for that voice, returning to my first love drawing, and became an illustrator. Then, in my forties, I discovered comix, that seemingly bottomless medium which gave me a way to tell a story using BOTH of my favorite methods. This November, when my third graphic novel comes out, a full-color anti-cookbook called Where There’s Smoke, There’s Dinner, I will have been making comix for twenty years.

Now, suddenly: words. Words are coming out of me, alone, by themselves, without any pictures, telling a very old story I’ve sat on for a long time. Fifty pages into this project, I know it marks a change for me.

Not a permanent departure—I already have my next graphic novel in mind. But for a moment, my voice is only in the words.

So, this is just to let you know: I’m playing. Welcoming the change. Missing my old process. Getting to know the contents of my head in a different way. I’ll let you know what happens...

Here's The Story