Often, I have to draw in order to write. Church School Blues would still be struggling to become a book if I couldn't draw. This is partly because I didn't want to go back to that awful time in my life. Drawing helped me see it in color even though my drawings were mostly black and white.
Drawing helped me see the ridiculous clothes of the seventies, Drawing helped me get on my bike in my 11-year-old body and FLY! Drawing helped me see Willie Swan even though I didn't have a photograph of him and never saw him again after I was twelve and the scandal blew all over our community.
I didn't have photographs of many of people in my story, but my hands remembered. Like a crime sketch artist, I kept tracing and re-tracing my memory until I got a fair likeness in my mind.
My getting-in-touch sketches were face-on, but the sketches in the finished book are all in profile. I did this partly in honor of my younger self who was fascinated by Egyptian wall murals where everyone is in profile. Partly, I did it because profiled faces flattened the look of the scenes. When one is abused, the world goes sort of two-dimensional. You don't look out of your eyes in a normal fashion. You lose all sense of eye-contact as you lose touch with other human beings. When one is abused, life becomes a cartoon where one seems to be the indestructible wabbit whose wounds don't bleed from the outside.
In about half of the illustration panels my character, Jade, seems to be trying to walk or project herself out of the scene. In one of my favorite panels, Jade has turned into a sphinx which has also positioned itself looking away from the action in the school room toward whatever alternative is beyond the edge of panel.
Through drawing, I was able to get in touch with my sense of humor about those times. There is nothing funny about being bullied and isolated, but the world itself and people's quirky personalities contain unexpected gifts of humor that can make hard times bearable. I had a well developed sense of humor as well as a sense of the absurd as a child, and I think that this aspect of my character helped me retain a measure of perspective. The worst outcome of being bullied is that both the bullied and the bullies tend to lose their sense of humanity -- their own and that of other people. But humor keeps one in touch so that one can survive with a spark of self intact.
A sense of humor, and the ability to draw, took me back to those haunted days without turning me inside out, and allowed me to see past the flat panels of pain to the color and the humor that accompanied me on my difficult journey, so that there were times as I wrote and as I drew, that I laughed out loud.
