The Last Day

     Today I finished cleaning up my classroom. Among other tasks, I cleared off my kidney table, took artwork off the walls, emptied and unplugged my refrigerator, and got stuff off the floor so that the custodians can do their job this summer.

    My favorite part of the day was visiting with Brett Cook, a parent of one of my students, and a vital member of our classroom community. He invited me to his studio and showed me the process of his artmaking. He works at breaking down the exclusionary nature of showing art.

     I couldn't help but wonder how the visit to his studio and our conversation will influence my work on my graphic novels. It should all be interesting!

Still There

    I went outside tonight to move the car back into our parking space in front of the house (evidently there was a Father's Day event at the nearby community center, so when I'd returned from shopping, our parking space was occupied). Anyway, the best way to handle living under a first quarter moon is to lie low. Don't make any major decisions. Probably not a good time to start a new project. So, I spent hours on the spinning wheel yesterday and continued today. As I said, I went outside to move the car, and there it was sharp and symmetrical--the first quarter moon. It hadn't changed much overnight, yet I feel great.

     Sometimes when I'm feeling unsettled and not too great, it helps to read a little bit of Lynda Barry's What It Is. This book, which explores creativity, is equally unsettling and accepting of everything that one is.

First Quarter

     It was after my dog broke through the screen door and attacked a familiar dog walking with its owner past our house. And it was after carrying an itchy unsettledness today that I looked up into the late afternoon sky and saw the first quarter moon. I almost smiled. For more than 20 years I'd noticed that, often enough, on the first quarter moon things just would go wrong. I don't know why this is so. But, today, I just wasn't surprised.

     Anyway, it may've been a first quarter when my old cat Sam was viciously attacked. Maybe Stella's adventures and misadventures have been influenced by this moon. However, working on her story today is one of the most calming things to do.     

The Edge is Near

     The last day of school, though thrilling, is exhausting. I still have to go in and clean up my room and prepare it for being deep-cleaned by the custodial staff. As a kid and most years as an adult, the last day of school marked the edge  from which I jumped into a happy, care-free, and open-ended life. But this year the end of school means the beginning of our road trip with our travel trailer. Frankly, I'm terrified. But my plan is to document the trip with quick drawings. I'm trying to figure out how to upload them to this blog. Thinking of taking my scanner and the laptop.

Refocusing

      It's been a while since I'd posted anything. We're in the last week of school, and there's been a lot to juggle: last minute assemblies and performances, assessments, yearbooks, and the taking down of the classroom. But in spite of the busyness, I'm gonna try to write on this blog daily. A couple things:

     A friend of mine, after reading Myeloma for Dummies, suggested that I might consider writing and illustrating nonfiction subjects. I'd never thought of this, but now I'm intrigued! 

     The other thing is that my next door neighbor really wants to see more of Stella. So the next postings just might be of her.

The Mechanics of Myeloma

     Interestingly enough, on the 2nd year anniversary of Susan's stem cell transplant, I finished a chapter in the Donkey book. To me this is one of the most important chapters because it breaks down the cancer into easily understood chunks. 

     I was surprised at the effect writing this chapter had on me. I found it to be quite calming. It helped to take the scariness out of the equation for a while. If I could retrace and recite the steps to her illness, perhaps it wouldn't be such a mystery.

    The difficult part for me in writing this chapter is remembering what actually happened and in which order. My sketchbook was a great help, but I hadn't recorded what myeloma is (because at the time, I didn't really know). So the Multiple Myeloma Research Foundation website was invaluable.

     

     One very important thing I learned from that time, the days soon after my partner's diagnosis, is how awkward it is for health professionals to issue a prognosis. They're not good at issuing such news. And it seems that they are (thankfully) often wrong. Whenever the palliative team arrived, I associated them with death, so I kept wondering, 'Is she dying now?'

   The next chapter I'm working on now is about the steps taken to immobilize my partner's back. I documented this part pretty clearly, and my memory is sharp. I just can't seem to settle on a title page for this chapter. It'll just have to keep percolating, I guess.

Grateful

     It's been a while. The end of the school year is near, and you would think that things would be winding down, now that standardized testing is over. But no...there's the mad dash of field trips, more assessments, cocooning silkworms, and then of course one of my students swallows a foxtail.

     But none of this affects me today because today is my partner's rebirthday! Two years ago today she received the bone marrow transplant that has extended her life a year beyond the initial prognosis. I am so proud of her. She went through hell and now has a life that she is enjoying to the fullest. To celebrate, we went out to dinner at our favorite vegan restaurant, aptly named: Cafe Gratitude.

All Three Again

     This weekend my partner and I bought a small travel trailer. A cute little thing for hitting the road with without having to stay in a motel with our three dogs. After we towed it home, we needed some help pushing it into our driveway, so my partner called our son-in-law, and he and his dad came and within seconds, our adorable trailer was perfectly situated close to the house, right where we wanted it. 

I felt extremely grateful. Anyway, this son-in-law and dad are the main human characters in Stella. I realized that I want to continue working on this graphic novel for them.

Stella about to be captured

     As my partner and I plan our road trips with the travel trailer, it dawns on me that I don't want to work on Donkey and Stella since they are now on computer. Instead I guess I'll be working on St. Nicholas. Looks like I'll, once again, be working on all three! There's a reason I named this blog Restless Boots.

     Stella is a wordless graphic novel. As I began drawing it out from the beginning, I noticed how well the images told the story. One of my favorite wordless graphic novels is Robot Dreams by Sara Varon. With gorgeous line and subtle color, Sara tells the story of friendship and the struggle to keep it.

Hospital Detail

     I never paid attention to the furnishings of a hospital room until I had to draw them. It's amazing the amount of clutter there is in a hospital! Thankfully, by the time of my partner's second hospitalization I had begun to take photographs of the details that normally go unnoticed by patients and their families: the mechanisms underneath a hospital bed, how the iv tubing is strung, biohazard and sharps containers...

Aaaah...

     I love when I make some headway!  Just finished revising a whole chapter that explains what multiple myeloma is and what initial treatment my partner received to combat the disease. Oddly, this was one of my favorite chapters to work on. It was surprisingly calming to break down multiple myeloma into easy to understand, digestible parts. Maybe working on this chapter made me feel as if I had some kind of control. 

     I just scanned several sketchbook pages of the next chapter into Photoshop. Already, I can see how the final drawing style is beginning to seep into these sketches. I'm getting closer to easier revisions.

Impatience

     As I chip away at revising the first two sketchbook drawings of The Donkey in the Garden, I can't help but feel a bit impatient. I began drawing the third sketchbook around the time my partner came home from the hospital. This is after she came home from the hospital the first time and then within a week was readmitted with pneumonia. I'm still revising the part where she is bedridden after her diagnosis.

     Fortunately, when I'm drawing I can get completely lost in the present line, and I don't think any further than the cell in front of me. I have to just remember this.

Bone Tired

     It's Friday, and am I beat! It's been a very long week. First of all, the weather is absolutely gorgeous, plenty of sunshine and late morning warmth after a couple days of light rain. Unfortunately, this makes for a crazy high pollen count. Students and I are congested. Sneezing. Coughing. Asthmatics wheezing.   That by itself is tiring. 

     But also, I know a young man who is dying of colon cancer. He's in hospice, and us knowing that he will soon be leaving us, while we still hang on to every moment of life with him is intensely wearying. I wouldn't have it any other way. Yesterday, on the way home from visiting with his mother, there was so much beauty in the pollen-filled air, golden from sunset.

     Anyway, the strong combination of human tragedy with unmistakeable beauty reminds me of Eric Drooker's graphic novel Blood Song. A gorgeous wordless book.

     Look for his art on the cover of the latest New Yorker magazine. 

Home Sick

     Started catching a cold yesterday at school. Not surprising...my kids've been dropping like flies from flu and strep, and of course, no matter how many tissues and hand sanitizer I set out strategically around the classroom, those little fingers just somehow wind up in their noses and mouths. 

     I can't say that I'm disappointed being home from work. After treating myself to a hot bath and ginger-laden chicken soup, I'm happy as a clam working on Donkey, and I'm even feeling better. 

     I've also had some time to go through my bookshelves, finding my favorite graphic novels. When I buy graphic novels, I usually don't go past the artwork. I know...sad...because I know I'm missing some great stories (and it has occurred to me that someone just might not get past my artwork). Anyway, it's the quality of line that pulls me in. And once pulled in, if the story is just as compelling, I'm in love! Here's a couple of my favorites:

     And after reading the graphic novel Laika by Nick Abadzis, I cried and cried.

Focus

     Just got home not too long ago from a memorial for a friend of my partner. Turns out that this friend died of the exact strain of blood cancer that my partner had. The memorial was beautiful and complete with a ritual smashing of ceramic myeloma cells. During the celebration I decided to devote my graphic novel time to finishing A Donkey in the Garden.

Therapy

     My health coverage only covers a very finite amount of one-on-one counseling sessions, and I knew that I was gonna need more than that with my partner having a deadly cancer and all. So I attended a couple sessions with a wonderful therapist and then got to work on A Donkey in the Garden. It was a productive way for me to wait in the hospital, and drawing the nightmare was a way to be present with it while having a little bit of space from it at the same time.

     It's been two years since the cancer diagnosis, and some drawings bring the horror right back. To this day, my partner can't bear to glance at them.

Work

     Most of the drawings in the first two Donkey sketchbooks have to be completely redrawn during the revision process in Photoshop--mostly because the sketchbooks are the documentation of the cancer year. Now, they have to turn into story. Some elements had to go, but more often than not, more connecting scenes had to be created. Anyway, here's today's little bit...

Eeking out little bits

     The great thing about being an elementary school teacher is that you learn to be productive within short spaces of time. This did not come naturally to me. When I was a first-year teacher, I felt like I finished nothing! I would spend too much time planning, too much time explaining, too much time deciding, too much time worrying. As the years passed, I learned how to streamline and preserve my energy. This, in turn, helped me give up some control so that the students could own their own learning. 

     Anyway, this all comes in handy when I'm working on the graphic novels for minutes each day. I surprise myself by how easily I know which cell should come next, and I'm able to make lightning quick decisions about composition. It's all just flowing!

Back to the Salt Mines

     Well, Spring Break is over, and I'm back at school. Fortunately, I love my class of second-graders, so going back is not too horrible. What going back to work means for my graphic novels is that I don't have long stretches of time to devote to them. During the week, I only spend 30 minutes on the comics when I get home. Yeah, I know--it's not much. But I just keep plugging away at it. Since the beginning of last school year, I've managed to finish 160 cells of the Donkey in the Garden book, just by working a half hour a day, longer on weekends.

     The great thing about going back to school is our school library. Because our librarian purchases as many graphic novels as she can, there's always some great graphic novels to read, like this one: Little White Duck--A Childhood in China, written by Na Liu and illustrated by her husband Andres Vera Martinez. A beautiful book.

A Year As St. Nicholas

     So, this past winter, while in our little home in New Mexico, I finished the last page of Stella. Now, I'm editing and revising that graphic novel on computer. This meant that I'd have nothing to work on in hard copy. In other words, I had room to begin another one.

     One of my partner's and my traditions during the winter holidays is to read Christmas stories aloud. She reads them aloud to me from a book called A Treasury of Christmas Stories or something like that. Some of the stories are religious. Those are okay. But the stories I like the best are ones about Santa Claus. I grew up reveling in the magic of Christmas trees, holly, and mysterious presents that showed up on Christmas morning, given to me by some guy just because.

     I've been curious about this guy, and the stories in the Treasury actually answer some of my questions. Santa Claus is this humble, laid back, joyous guy whose only goal in life is to end people's suffering and make everyone, especially children, happy. Cool. 

     I was so taken with this being, I wondered, "What would it be like if I tried to be humble, laid back, and joyous? What if my main drive was to end people's suffering whenever I could? What if I could be St. Nick for a year?"

     So, A Year As St. Nicholas is a diary of my attempt to embody the spirit of the guy. Unlike Stella and A Donkey in the Garden, A Year As St. Nicholas has no wrapped up story I'm merely retracing. Because I'm recording my "saintly" responses to incidents as they occur, I can't predict what the next page will be like. I'm not in control of this one.

Me leaving the store with new St. Nicholas outfit.

The Donkey Process

     What I'm doing now with the Donkey sketchbooks is scanning them into photoshop and editing and revising the drawings. It wasn't until the third sketchbook that I realized the style that I would use for telling this story. Basically just line drawings, no cross-hatching or anything...It all has to be fast because my partner's original prognosis was 6 months to a year. Although my partner is cancer-free, multiple myeloma is a cancer that often comes back. I want to finish this comic book while we are still together.

A Donkey in the Garden

     I was 3/4 of the way finished with the pen and ink drawings for the Stella graphic novel when my partner fell mysteriously ill. Suddenly she couldn't stand for more than 10 minutes. Her back was in excruciating pain, and a numbness was creeping up bilaterally from her toes to her waist. Eventually we discovered that she had multiple myeloma, a kind of blood cancer.

    Well, naturally, all work on Stella came to a halt! As a way to keep myself sane and to document this nightmare,  I began sketches for my second graphic novel A Donkey in the Garden. It tells of her journey from diagnosis to stem cell transplant. I filled four and a half sketchbooks.

Another favorite

Am reading this book by Rutu Modan. Not only are her stories complex, I LOVE her drawing style. Read Exit Wounds and was transfixed.

Wait--Maybe this is the real beginning!

      About 15 years ago, I typed up my parent newsletter on computer as we teachers all did to communicate with the parents of our students. When the computer froze on me, I decided never to use the computer again for these weekly communications. Instead I drew them in comic form on copier paper with a crayola waterbased marker.

     Years later, a parent who admired the newsletters suggested that I start creating graphic novels. I didn't really take the suggestion seriously until I received a pink slip from our district. It was then that I began to think, 'Hmmm...time to think of what else I would like to do besides teach.'

The Sarita's Weekly News

A Year As St. Nicholas

The most recent of my graphic novel ideas.

One of My Favorites

Welcome to GoRaina.com! - Home
 My students were taking turns checking out Smile from the school library. The copy finally landed into my hands. I loved it! It's also the first graphic novel I've read that alludes to the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake and the subsequent rain storm.

First, there was Stella

Stella is the subject of the first graphic novel I'm working on. My nice black cat Sam got mauled by raccoons. One morning before school I'd gone out back to let the chickens out, and there he was in the driveway...a pile of gore with black fur.

So after a few weeks of grieving, I went in search of a kitten. I adopted Stella, a pure white kitty, from the SPCA. In fact, now that I think about it, I got her during Spring Break so that we'd have time to bond before I went back to work. Because she wasn't feral like Sam was when he was a kitten, Stella was very affectionate, and I soon learned that she could be taught to fetch.

But life has a way of painting its own masterpieces. Two years later, I threw our lives into upheaval with a relationship breakup and a move. I couldn't keep Stella, but fortunately my son-in-law's father could. With him, Stella's life became one of deep connection and narrow escapes...perfect for a cat.

Take Two (or three or four)

Aaah. Finally, with the help of several people, including my tech-savvy brother, I think I've managed to create a real blog for myself and my many projects! Thank you!