My 10-year-old daughter got a set of tools for her birthday last month to make her own jewelry—and now she doesn’t want to use it.

‘I can’t be any good. Who’s going to want to wear my necklaces?’ You know the drill. And it gets worse if your child has self-esteem problems in spades already.

I tried to explain to her why she shouldn’t give up—that there are many different reasons to create, but the most important is that they should come from within.

I’m not sure I did a good job, but then again, I was never good at taking my own medicine. With my drawing.

I stopped, as you know, long ago. I even faltered back in school for some periods when it was all I wanted and when I had all the time I wanted. I always started again, though. Until life got me.

What happened back in school? Why punch through then? I guess deep down I wanted to keep drawing, even if I had to invent stupid reasons to do so—back when I wanted to be the next Colleen Doran, I mean. 

That’s what love for your art does. It doesn’t give up. 

If you are afraid to do art because of what other people think or whatever—the part of you that is wedded to art will make you do art but for another reason. 

That was 20 years ago but I can feel all those ‘other reasons’—good reasons—stir again. 

If I can help Emma not give up, to find her reason, I can also help myself start again.

Not to mention my brother-in-law who is in the same fix, just with writing. But we talk a lot, so maybe … So many doors can open!

‘Help your child.’ 

That’s not a bad reason at all. 

*

1996

Carrie threw down her pen again. “CrapcrapCRAP! ”

“It’s just a sketch.” Lin said in a low tone, but firmly.

“Nobody—” Carrie pulled back the chair “—is ever going to read this. Even if we printed it ourselves and paid people money to open it!”

“Stop,” Lin said. “It’ll be good enough. Carrie—you’re good.”

“No, I’m not.”

They were sitting by Carrie’s tiny desk in her half of the two-room Cleveland apartment, and it felt like a very long way to the stadium-size San Diego or New York Comic Book Conventions.

“You just have to believe in it—” Lin retorted, giving Carrie that determined, slightly unsettling look.

“Okaay! Watch me belieeve!” Carrie snapped. She started for the third time on a character sketch. 

Lin didn’t say anything. She just sat on her chair watching Carrie nimbly doodling away with her Faber Castell mechanical pencil.

They had been there all afternoon, Lin calling suddenly saying she had to come over because she had a new idea.

This usually meant Lin had had a new row with her mom and needed the distraction. But it was just the reason for the timing.

Carrie was never in doubt that Lin wanted to be the greatest storyteller ever—in as many genres and forms as possible. It wasn’t just confined to churning out the next Great American Novel!

One of the crazier things Lin had talked about wanting to do since they first became friends was a real comic book—or graphic novel, as Lin insisted on calling it. 

It was the un-girl thing to do, so that’s why they had to do it. Together. It would also show Denise and her clique that Carrie Sawyer and Adeline Alexandra Kouris didn’t give a fuck what anyone thought about them.

It wasn’t a decision to come out of the blue, though. Both Carrie and Adeline—Lin—considered themselves certified “nerds”.

And like that handsome senior, Alan Stockdale, who wrote games for roleplaying conventions, they relished being both “nerdy” and smart at the same time.

When it came to comics, Lin had some but mostly European albums like John Difool and such. She even had a collection of Corben’s more salacious Heavy Metal mags crammed in a drawer. But that was it.

Lin was, Carrie suspected, more interested in the idea of a comic book than the actual medium. Lin had plenty of ‘normal’ books, including many classics, which were her one-and-all. 

Carrie for her part wasn’t that choosy, having grown up on her step-brother’s mailorder X-Men comics, more out of necessity than choice. 

Not much else to read on a Scottish island, when you had been through the boring school library. Often she had felt there was no other way to make time pass in that lonely house back when her mom and dad lived together. 

Not long after Carrie started in her new high school in Cleveland she ‘accidentally’ showed Lin her drawings. Two seconds later Lin suggested that they do a comic book together.

And Lin had had just the idea for a story. 

She always had ideas for stories. 

“It doesn’t matter if anyone reads it—” Lin droned on, firmness in her voice up a notch. “What matters is creating it.”

“That’s ridiculous,” Carrie shot back. “If no one reads what you’ve made, then it doesn’t matter at all.”

Lin looked down. “It matters to us … ”

For a moment there was only the white noise from Carrie’s worn loudspeakers because the CD had stopped.

Lin looked up again and Carrie looked at her and they stared at each other like it was a Mexican standoff.

“Okay,” Carrie said, crossing her arms, “Why?”

Lin inhaled deeply. “Because …. that’s the first reason you create something. I know I’m not, like, Virginia Woolf, yet, but I’ll get better. Even if I don’t get published—I would still be writing. I would do it—for my own sake.”

Carrie threw up her arms in exasperation. “That’s stupid. You write—or draw—something for other people to be interested in!”

“They will be! … ” Lin protested. “You love the story, right?”

” … Like everything else you have written, I love it.” Carrie looked like she had bitten a sour grape.

“Then we should do this!” Lin exclaimed. “You draw. I write. We’re already the top two weirdos of Cuyahoga High, so we might as well be even weirder!”

Carrie left the desk chair and slumped on the creaking bed instead. “I don’t want to be a weirdo. I want to be a comic book artist. Or just an artist, I guess. But … I don’t know if it’s … what I should do.”

“What else is there than art?”

“I dunno … law school or something.”

Now Lin looked like she had bitten in something sour. “You should pursue art. Your passion.”

Carrie frowned. “Look around this dump, Lin. My mom pursued her passion, waiting tables for 10 years while she smoked cannabis and did meditation. How did that work out?”

Lin looked down.

Carrie looked out the window. And sighed.

It was supposed to be spring in Cleveland. Still, this Saturday was so thick with gray clouds and occasional bursts of cold, clammy rain that it might as well be autumn.

Either that or somebody had beamed her mom’s minuscule apartment back to Scotland, where they had lived until she was 16.

Carrie heard Lin tap the CD player, and then the Backstreet Boys woke up.

Lin dropped down on the bed beside Carrie. “Sometimes,” she chirped, “you just have to do it.”

“Right, very deep.” Carrie kept looking out at the clouds. “I was afraid that you were about to say something daft … like, ‘Boldly they rode and well … Into the mouth of Hell’ .”

Lin shook her head. “I love the classics but never could understand Mrs. Lane’s Tennyson worship. Correction: Dead-white-males-war-story-worship. Do you think she was a man in her previous life?”

They snickered. But the inevitable decision still had to be made.

Should they continue Lin’s “graphic novel”—her innovative pairing of Blade Runner and obscure Japanese art movies?

Or try to find a way to fit in that was more, well, normal.

For a few minutes, they just listened to the music.

Carrie was lying down on the bed, eyes closed. She had folded her hands on her stomach. But there was something serene on her visage now, like an aura of clarity. 

Lin, for her part, sat straight up … expectantly.

“Promise me one thing”—Carrie opened her eyes—“We do this comic book because we want to be weird and weird is cool. Not because we’re pissed that nobody’s going to read it.”

“I promise,” Lin said and grinned.

It was going to be one of the best gray afternoons in Cuyahoga Heights. 

*

CARRIE, June 2016

CARRIE & LIN, March 1996

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Cover photo by Kinga Howard on Unsplash

Necklace photo by FANQI on Unsplash

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47-160324.1147

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