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NEW!
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All Things
Are Labor: Stories by Katherine Arnoldi
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Coming:
summer 2007 Preorder
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How I Became
a Cartoonist
by Katherine Arnoldi
(originally
published in Hip MaMa
and in a collection of the Best of HipMaMa
published by Seal Press)
When I started The Amazing
True Story of a Teenage Single Mom, I wasn't thinking of
a book at all. All I wanted to do was learn how to become a cartoonist.
I took out a blank sheet of paper and decided to concentrate
first on the drawing. I'll just tell the story of my life, I
thought, and that way I won't have to think about the words.
After a while, I hoped, I would teach myself to draw well enough
that I might be accepted by World War 3, to me the coolest cartoon
venue around. I had been publishing stories and reading around
New York for years. In 1991 I was the Grand Slam second place
winner at the Nuyorican Poet's Café, reading shirt fiction
about single moms, about being a Mennonite and living in the
world, about the housing crises, and about the dangers of multinationals
and their impact on the poor of the world.
The pieces that were the least-favorite of the slam audiences
were the ones I was most fervent about, the teenage single mom
pieces. Gordon Lish at The Quarterly was one of the few brave
editors who would publish them.
So, when I began the cartoon book of my life, I started
with the most life-changing event, the moment my daughter was
born, and told my day-to-day life one panel at a time. I didn't
think anyone would ever see these drawings, so I felt free to
experiment with different styles and assuage my fears about drawing
by making elaborate borders. One thing I noticed right away:
As I drew the pictures of my past, the memories came barreling
back in a different way than when I had written about these experiences.
It was as though the memory came through my arm and appeared
before me like a movie.
Often I would find myself at my drawing table, my body
racked with sobs at seeing images of myself as a young teenage
mom: On my way to work at the factory carrying a baby, a diaper
bag, a purse, and my lunch out to the car in the dead of night,
having to leave my daughter at a day care center and then being
overwhelmed all day by her cries when I left her. Seeing myself
being battered by a boyfriends and realizing, when I drew her
in the next room, a prisoner in her highchair, the horrible instability
that my child was being subjected to. As I was drawing, I was
seeing more deeply the truth of my memories, and, I realized,
the truth of other single moms and their children. As I worked,
I had sympathy for the character of myself. I saw how I had struggled
with such a limited knowledge of the world. How, at a time when
many teenagers are thinking about what they want to be when they
grow up and how they will accomplish that, I was thinking about
if I had enough money to buy the number of baby food jars I needed
to last until the next paycheck and then living with the realization
that I did not.
Time and again I was shocked to see the reality of my
life there before me, irrefutably stark. I started one drawing
with the words, "I tiptoed down the stairs." And as
I drew my feet on the stairs, the memory came back to me, as
though bursting through my arm. When I was finished, I saw the
exact steps, the exact house that was a suppressed and forgotten
nightmare. I drew my arms holding up a chair, ready to hit my
brother-in-law over the back. I drew myself on the floor of the
room which was
mine while I lived with my brother-in-law and my sister, drawing
a chair propped up against the doorknob to keep my brother-in-law
out, and remembered that the room was only as wide as the door.
As I kept drawing panel after panel, I suddenly realized: This
is the story of my struggle to go to college; this is the story
of how I found Jackie, another single mom, who told me about
financial aid and the possibility that even I could go to college.
At the time that I began the cartoon, I was running
a program at Charas Community Center on 9th and Avenue B called
The Single Mom College Program, where I would hand out financial
aid and college applications. I was trying to do for others what
Jackie had done for me. I would also go to GED programs where
I was shocked to learn that single moms graduated without ever
being told about the process of applying and the advantages of
going to college. For many years, Pat Gowens at The Welfare
Mother's Voice had been publishing articles of mine like
"College is Fun," and "The Single Mother's Bill
of Rights." I wrote that single mothers were denied equal
rights to education, to fairness in the courts, to employment
and housing.
On my trips to the GED programs, I began to notice a disturbing
fact. Just because single moms had the application, and even
though they told me they wanted to go to college, most did not
fill out the applications right there with me, as I hoped. Instead,
they politely excused themselves, said they had to run to pick
up their children, and, often forgetting their applications,
ran out the door, waving to me, repeatedly thanking me for coming.
Something was wrong.
I realized that the problem was not just having the information.
The problem was the same problem I had had: Feeling worthy to
use it. Even though it was the 1990s, I shockingly realized that
these single moms felt that they, too, had made their bed and
had to lie in it, that they had made a "mistake" that
had made them ineligible to participate in the world. In fact,
the problem of feeling worthy was even more sever than it had
been for me. These women had been bombarded with anti-welfare
rhetoric, with propaganda poised to discourage teen pregnancy
by attacking teen moms themselves. I felt I could discern on
their faces the same feeling I had had as a teen mom, the feeling
that I had ruined my life, but there was more there: These women
had the added burden of being made scapegoats for the economic
difficulties of the early 1990s. It was they, not Desert Storm
or the S and L bail-out, or global changes, that had caused the
nation's economic problems.
All they wanted was to disappear. How well I understood
that!
The distance between having a pen in hand and putting it to the
application form for these women is an epic journey, filled with
as many demons, monsters, temptations and obstacles as any superhero
in any literature. That was when I realized I was making a cartoon
book about my own struggles to feel worthy, to put the pen to
paper, to move from a life of limitations, of wanting to be invisible,
to a life of possibilities.
It was my friend Jackie Ward, a single mom with two children,
who had helped me traverse the great divide, who had somehow
convinced me that not only was I worthy, but education was a
right I was being denied and that I had to fight for. Jackie
had empowered me enough thatwhen I got
to the University of Arkansas and they denied me financial aid,
I marched over to the Legal Aid office and returned with my lawyer.
The BEOG grant that I was told there was "no way" I
could get suddenly became available. But how many had been turned
away?I began to see my cartoon book as a way to do for single
moms what Jackie had done for me. I Xeroxed copies of it, stapled
them together and handed them out at GED programs and at my readings.
"The perfect gift for the single mom in YOUR family,"
I ranted. I showed on to my friends Steve cannon and Mia Hansford."This
should be in the BAD GIRLS SHOW at the new museum," Mia
said.The show was already up, but I was there the next day and
Felix, Marcia Tucker's assistant, exclaimed with intakes of breath,
"We love it! Of course we'll put it in!"
My art career, now only four months old, was coming along
nicely. Already I was in a museum show.
As time passed, though, I became discouraged. Several friends
made fun of my interest in single moms, telling me I needed "to
wake up and smell the ______," that I should get on with
my life, or, actually, "get a life." I was a writer,
what I needed was a novel, they said.I kept working on the cartoon
book, kept going to GED programs, kept my dream. I just stopped
talking about it so much. Feelings of unworthiness again overwhelmed
me. In a positive moment, I took out the
cartoon book and used it to apply to the Blue Mountain Center
in the Adirondack mountains.
Once there, I was surrounded by support. Harriet Barlow
welcomed us to the center, telling us the Blue Mountain Center
believed that social change emanated from the culture and that
artists, writers and poets were at the heart of cultural change.
That was why we were here, she
told us, because they believed in our mission, our power to make
significant cultural and social change.
First Jackie had empowered me with the belief that I could
go to college, then the Blue Mountain Center with the belief
that I could do for others what Jackie had done for me. One home,
I put the Xeroxed book in the mail for a New York Foundation
of the Arts Award in Drawing. To my surprise, I won. That helped
me to add to the book. It was now 170 pages. In a burst of motivation,
I took it to my agent, Jennifer Hengen. She had called me many
years before and wanted to represent me after reading a piece
in FICTION. She had been patiently waiting for a novel.
Instead I gave her the cartoon book.
She sent it out. Within an hour, she had an offer. It
looked ike The Amazing True Story of a Teenage Single Mom might
have a chance to reach not only those I could take copies to,
but truly the single mom in YOUR family.
I sent a letter to Jackie to tell her the good news. I
did not hear back. Finally, I called. Her husband answered the
phone.Jackie had been killed in a car accident several months
before. Although she had seen the little Xeroxed copy of the
book and knew of my gratitude, of how she changed my life, she
would never know how her acts of generosity, her patience toward
my feelings of unworthiness, and her
insistence that I had an equal right to education would, like
a ripple, or like some divine pyramid scheme for good, effect
first me, then maybe more than either of us could have dreamed.
Maybe there'll be a national bring-your-child-to-class-day to
protest no day care. Maybe there'll be a bring-your-child-to-the-dorms-day.
Maybe single moms will go en masse to college.
My daughter, the little girl imprisoned in the high chair,
traumatized in the beginning of the book, did not grow up to
be a teen mom, battered by boyfriends. Instead she chooses the
images at the end of the book. She chooses to see herself on
the back of the bike, in paroxysms of giggles and laughter, while
her mother speeds off to college classes. She chooses to wonder,
too, what her purpose might be, what contribution she might make.
After graduating magna cum laude, she is spending the summer
taking the MCAT, applying to med school. She is hoping to give
the right of health care to communities where single moms now
often go without. She is hoping to find the happiness of a meaningful
life, the gift of healing. She wants to give her own child not
beds to lie in, but footsteps and the feeling of worthiness to
step into and then out of, going as far as their potential will
allow, as far as their purpose might lead them.
For non-fiction article,
Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Education click here
For more non-fiction (review of Emily Carter's Book, other
essays) go to: Tribes.org
All Illustrations and photos by Katherine
Arnoldi
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