“Life inspires me.  Right now I spend a lot of time drawing birds: sometimes in imagined situations, sometimes in an eighteenth century engraving kind of way – sometimes they are Nature, sometimes they the Wings of Time or the Broken Heart of a Poet, but usually they are just birds.  The landscape around here is slowly driving me crazy, because every time I look at it, after looking at it for thirty years, I see it moving like a live thing, just a series of slow undulations, studded with trees and potato fields.

For years I drew people interacting, in supermarkets and streets.  I drew high school kids, simultaneously terrified and deeply self-assured.  And I drew thousands of cartoons, and published some of them in the Salon Section of the Telegraph Journal for a decade – historical, topical, linguistic – really anything but overtly political.  I don’t hate enough to be a political cartoonist.

I draw constantly.  I doodle on paper, in books, over shopping lists, throughout my teacher planning book.  I have done it since grade one.  I have been a nanny, a bookbinder, a used bookseller, a warehouseman, a handyman, and now I am a teacher, but it’s all to support my doodling habit.  If I wasn’t selling anything, I would still be drawing.

When I was eight, I found a copy of Syd Hoff’s “How to be a Cartoonist” in the Saint John Public Library.  That, along with Jim Corbett’s “Maneaters of Kumaon” and the Freddy the Pig Detective books, was my Bible. Syd Hoff claimed you could make a living as a cartoonist, so I started in third grade.  I filled notebooks with comic strips, and mailed some cartoons off to Playboy, which they politely returned. My rejection notice collection is still growing.

I have a sketchbook with me always, which I fill with phrases or doodles or ideas of what I see around me, and what I am thinking about.  If I don’t set them down, they are lost.  I roughly block out a drawing in pencil, usually working from these sketches, and then have at it with pen and ink. I like the finality of ink – once you put the mark on the paper, it is there. It encourages a mix of fluidity and improvisation.  I tried technical pens, but I prefer the dip pens.  The ink is usually richer, and the line of a dip pen modulates – it gets thinner and thicker as you go.  The drawing is crosshatched and toned in with pen lines, then sometimes coloured ink washes or watercolour are added.  A lot of my tonal squiggles have come from old engravings, where shading and tone were built up with marks, then a flat wash would be added to finish it off, and the ink and the wash would work together to create a strange volume.

I draw everything.  It is, after all, a way of seeing.”