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Ohio
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Ohio
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Ohio
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Jan Adkins
What is your connection to Ohio?
Ohio is the soil I came from, the hills and valleys that molded my first ideas. I was raised on the far eastern border by the Ohio River at Wheeling. (I know it's West Virginia but I'm from Wheeling Island, which sits in the middle of the Ohio River and must be Ohio, yes?) I remember the river, its smell, its color, and its urgent rush. It's a powerful river, moving faster from the sandy bank than passersby on the high bridges think. But the river I knew is not the Ohio River you have seen, not at all. Wheeling and the Ohio towns that shared the river were industrial giants, then. The air was gritty with soot and tasted like a copper penny in the mouth. The industrial smog was so heavy that we seldom saw the sun before noon. I knew that my grandfather had swum in the Ohio and had caught trout from it but I couldn't imagine the river would ever be clean again. I was wrong. The fish are returning, the Ohio is cleaner, and its color has changed to a more natural shade. Before you applaud, though, remember that part of the reason that the river runs clean is that the industry is gone &endash; all the steel garbage cans in the world seemed to be made in Wheeling! And pipe couplings and coal scuttles (antiques, now). Wheeling is a pretty little town, today, but as dead as pharaoh.
I have snapshots in my mind of the Ohio River. Seaplanes landing and taxiing to Hetzel's Seaplane Service at the base of the Wheeling Bridge. Big black and red coal or gravel barges with barge company names in big white letters being pushed upstream and downstream by river tugs. Once, miraculous, a steam calliope coming down the river on a barge, playing circus marches with white steam tooting out of its pipes louder than anything I'd ever heard, to advertise the Barnum & Bailey Circus coming to Wheeling Downs. Before the dams and locks for flood control, I remember the spring floods that covered the Island, making the streets canals like Venice, and putting everyone in rowboats. It sounds awful but it was like a yearly festival, and my father loved it.
We moved to St. Clairsville, only 12 miles west, when I was in fourth grade. From a gritty industrial area I was suddenly dropped into farm country, alone on a bare hill. A lot of me came from that bare hill and the deep forests all around it. I walked and hunted and explored those woods with as much interest and amazement as if they were the Congo Jungle or Far Patagonia. A big part of me will always need the cool, green quiet of woods trails.
I went to public school. I wasn't a football hero, and I was not a hero student, either. Why not? Aren't I smart? Sure I am: smart in some ways but slow in others. I was a dreamy, distractible, awkward kind of kid. I seemed to be saying the wrong thing all the time, and I didn't know just how to organize books and time and facts and ideas. It's still a struggle to budget my day, an hour for research, an hour for a haircut . . . and I reach the end of the day without enough done!
I went to Ohio State University, which probably wasn't a good place for a moony, awkward kid who spent a lot of time alone. It is a big place. It's easy to get lost, there, and I was.
I have old friends from Ohio and I sometimes return to visit. When I do, I remember how easy and good life is, there. How rich and green the countryside is, how pleasant the people are, and how generous with their time and thoughts. It's a good place to live and grow.
What inspired you to become an author or illustrator?
Several important things showed me how important words and images were. My father was one of them. He was a sheet-metal contractor, an inventive guy full of jokes and ideas. He would say, "Now, if a man were clever . . . " and then, mumbling to himself, he'd be off, doing whatever a clever man would do. When I was a tiny boy I would beg my father to tell me stories, not about princes and ladies and kings but about how things were made &endash; glass, concrete, steel, rubber tires, asphalt shingles. They were great stories! And he was so excited about them. "Well, Buddy," he'd say to me, "it's pretty interesting how they do it . . . " and he knew how those things were made because it did interest him. He was so excited about real life that it made me excited about it.
I had an art teacher in St. Clairsville, Eli Munas, who did a very good thing for me, even though I'm still angry with him. Eli taught me to appreciate a beauty of letters and type. Everyone was constantly asking him to letter signs for them. to get them off his back, he taught me how to shape letters with a sable lettering brush, how to space them evenly, how to form the serifs and how crisp and clean the sans-serif letters can be. It was an education in design. I'm angry because Eli was a fine painter but never taught me much about painting or composition or any of the things I had to learn on my own. But the letter-lessons are still with me and I use them every day in my design work.
Another teacher, Sam Mumley, taught me the importance of grammar and and sentence structure and composition. I still have the grammar handbook he made us all buy, English Grammar and Composition, and I still refer to it. It's on the shelf above the computer on which I'm writing at this very moment.
The St. Clairsville Public Library was a real inspiration to me. I discovered the writer Joseph Conrad, which is odd for a kid, but there was something wonderful in his sea stories that gave me a hint of distant places and the very large, very diverse world. I also discovered a book called Man Eaters of Kumaon that fascinated me. Like most of my schoolmates, I hunted in the fall and winter, and reading about a hunter helping villagers in India who were being eaten by rogue tigers was fascinating. I bought a copy of that book this year, to see if it was as good as I remembered it. It was better. And I discovered that Jim Corbett, the tiger hunter who wrote it, loved tigers so much that he persuaded the Indian government to set up tiger preserves and to prevent the extinction of the great Bengal tiger. A lot of hunters &endash; like Theodore Roosevelt &endash; are the very best conservationsts.
One more important influence and inspiration came from my best friend David Moyes. We lived across the street from one-another on Wheeling Island. His father was a newspaperman and got two movie passes every week. So every week David and I would walk the length of the Island to the suspension bridge, walk all 1010' across it, and turn right. There was the Capitol Theater, one of the old art-deco movie palaces. In the grand, dark cathedral of the Capitol we saw the movies, and whatever we saw, we became &endash; Vikings, knights, soldiers, spacemen, doctors, explorers. American movies are the most powerful storytelling I have ever seen or heard, and they affected the way I thought about drama and life, for better and for worse.
What advice do you have for a young author or illustrator?
For an illustrator, the advice is easy: DRAW. Draw every day but draw only what you see. Keep a sketchbook and draw the simple things around you &endash; jars, plates, mailboxes, appliances, lights, chairs. Draw small unimportant things with important shapes and clever construction. Draw things for several years, and then start to draw people but, once again, only what you can see. Don't worry about color for several years. Color will come. The single most important part of being an illustrator is learning to draw what you see. Only by this route will you ever be able to draw what you DON'T see. "Creativity" is misunderstood to mean "wildness." When you draw a kitchen chair that looks like the kitchen chair you see, then you are communicating your feelings and perception of that chair, and that in itself is a fine creative act. Don't be misled by "artistes" who can't be bothered to draw well. They're pouting. Draw every day; draw what you see.
Advice for writers is more difficult. An easy answer might be to tell you to READ, and this is essential. You must read hundreds of authors to learn the difference in voices, how one author bellows and another author whispers, and the loudest isn't always the most powerful. Yes, reading &endash; again, every day &endash; is important. But there is more.
A writer must SEE and WRITE. You must learn to see with all your senses: to smell the morning, taste it, feel it, hear it as well as see it. And you must learn to see what's important about it. On some mornings, the most important thing is the sound of a bumblebee outside your window. On other mornings, importance lies in what people say and do. Once you learn to see powerfully and deeply, then you must learn to express what you have seen, to be an honest reporter. My advice for young readers is to look hard and try to understand certain days, certain trips, then to express in written words what you have found out. And yet again, only what you see. If you write about fantastic scenes on Mars, you can't sharpen your ability to report plain facts, and even the fanciest writing is mostly plain facts.
If you truly want to be a writer, then read other writers to learn how they shape their written "voice," learn to see carefully and with deeper vision, learn to reach for the importance of moments or days, and learn to report truthfully and gracefully what you have witnessed. It doesn't sound hard, but I'm still trying to get it right.
One more piece of advice: write letters to friends and talk about the important parts of your inner and outer life &endash; what you see outside yourself and what you feel inside yourself. Letter-writing is every writer's test-track. The necessity to report the truth and make it interesting will sharpen your abilities like nothing else.
What do you like to do for fun?
Though I was born in Ohio, I am a sea-person. I love the water and most of all sailing. When you read my books, The Craft of Sail, Solstice or A Storm Without Rain, you can hear how excited I am about it. For me it is like plugging my heart into the electric socket of the world and driving my boat with the current. Every summer I sail on the East Coast with my old friend John Carter (I named the boy in A Storm Without Rain after him) on his wonderful sailboat Albacore. I've owned several boats, myself, and will again. Water is magic.
I love to cook for people and to have friends sitting and laughing, arguing, joking, reading and singing around my table. My son, Sam, always cooked with me and now he is a chef. My daughter Sally and my stepson Web are also good cooks. We all love to share our recipes and talk about dinners we've fixed. Talking over a good dinner is where civilization began.
The trails of California are spectacular. I hike several times a week, alone and with friends. Taking long hikes in the hills and mountains makes me peaceful and happy, being in Nature's lap. Every trail seems to have a secret for me, and I want to know them all.
I also like to ski, to SCUBA dive, and to build things. I don't have a woodshop at my new place and I miss it. I also love to sing.
Some of your other questions ask for advice, so I will give more advice here, unasked. Get out. Get out on the water. Get out on the trails, deep in the woods. Get out in the weather. Feel the greater world around you and under your feet. Get a good pair of hiking boots and take care of your feet. Learn to read maps.
Make your own music. Plugging into a WalkMan can be enjoyable but making music is creatively wonderful. Play an instrument and sing songs with real stories.
Learn to cook a few great things. Then everything else will come easy. Learn to be a good host at a dinner table so your friends will always want to sit down with you. Eat like a civilized person and try new things. You'll do fine.
Some of your most popular books are:
- John Adams, young revolutionary (2002)
- Bridges: from my side to yours (2002)
- Dream spinner: the art of Roy Andersen (2000)
- Hunting the osage bow: a chronicle of craft (2000)
- The wonder of light (1997)
Links:
www.janadkins.com
