On your
nightstand now:
The Surrendered by Chang-Rae Lee; Cartographies of Time: A History of the Timeline by Anthony Grafton and Daniel Rosenberg; Marion Mahony Griffin: Drawing the Form of Nature, edited by Debora Wood.
Favorite book when you were a child:
With my little clock radio resting on my pillow, I would listen nightly to Jean Shepherd spin his outrageous tales across the airwaves. When I learned that Shepherd had written books, I collected loose change scattered about my room and went to a local bookstore and bought In God We Trust: All Others Pay Cash. I read it so many times, I started to recognize how he structured his stories, how he built a scene toward its humorous payoff. That was when I began to understand the mechanics of storytelling. I shamelessly copied his style in school writing assignments. Got an A for one of them!
Your top five authors:
As of 3:47 pm on the Wednesday I'm writing this; Michael Chabon, James Marshall, David Mitchell, Kurt Vonnegut, Alice and Martin Provensen.
Book you've faked reading:
The Uses of Enchantment by Bruno Bettelheim. I've picked up the gist from listening to others, but I couldn't take more than a few pages myself. Really, it's just too much.
Book you are an evangelist for:
Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art by Scott McCloud. Best exploration of the art of telling stories with pictures. Ever. I use it when I teach and recommend it to everyone connected to books and images.
Book you've bought for the cover:
A book I took out from the library for the cover was called, I believe, Old Iron Glove. I was a preteen looking for something to read and saw this baseball book on the shelf. I wasn't then and am not now a baseball lover. But there was a very nice sketchy line drawing on the cover. I was really taken with the loose, expressive quality of the drawing, despite the subject matter. I almost didn't take it out. I mean, it was about baseball. But the cover made me do it. The story was pretty good, too.
The artists you most admire:
Oh my. Richard Serra, Mark Rothko, Neil Young, Chris Ware, Charles Sheeler, Stanley Kubrick, Jack Kirby, Joey Ramone, Giorgio Morandi, Werner Herzog, Yo La Tengo, Jean-Pierre Melville, Thomas Sgouros, Bernd and Hilla Becher....
Book that changed your life:
In the summer between my sophomore and junior years at RISD, I came across Mad Man's Drum by Lynd Ward. This wordless novel, done completely in woodcuts, crystallized ideas I was exploring relating to visual storytelling. The depth of information that it conveyed through purely visual means was--is--amazing. It also clarified for me that the book was the form within which I should work. This was a first edition that I saw and it was such a beautiful object! The feel of the leather, the smell of the paper, the richness of the ink--it was intoxicating.
Favorite line from a book:
"He's going to make you some shirts." This is the last line to a short and exquisite chapter from James Salter's Light Years. When I meet a truly remarkable person, I think to myself, "He's going to make you some shirts."
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
Issue #51 of The Fantastic Four, "This Man... This Monster!" A tremendous short story--and not just "for a comic book." I still get chills when I read it. But that first time, when I was 10, it completely and totally blew me away.