>> Georgia Higley: So, I'm Georgia Higley. I'm head of the newspaper section in the Serial and Government Publications Division. And we're the home of the comic book collection. So, that's why I'm up here. And I have the fortunate duty to introduce Carol. So, I want to welcome everyone to this latest program that we're sponsoring. And this program is celebrating one of our special collections, The Comic Book Collection. And it's really celebrating one piece of that collection, the SPX Collection. And the idea of the SPX Collection goes back to August, 2011. When the Library signed an agreement with SPX that lead to the creation of the collection. As many of you already know, SPX sponsors an annual festival in Bethesda, Maryland. And it gives artists, writers and publishers of comic art and its multitude of forms, the opportunity to meet and exhibit their material. The Library aquires independent comics and cartoon art from publishers and creators, appearing at the festival. As well as through the annual Ignatz Award winners. And through todays talk, we're actually recognizing the rewards of this agreement. Because to date, over 5,200 items have come to the Library, through SPX. And that has been a wonderful boon for us. Because, of course, it is something that probably we would not have received through our traditional means, which is copyright deposit. And the annual talk that we're sponsoring, such as this one today, is always held the Friday before the start of the SPX Festival weekend. So, today, we're very fortunate to have a claimed cartoonist, painter, writer, educator. And I'm sure there are a whole lot more occupations l could list, Carol Tyler, as this year's speaker. She will be discussing her creative life in "Comics To a T, The Triumphs and Troubles of Telling the Tyler Story." She's a pioneer of the autobiographical comic genre. And she uses her own experience to kind of tackle issues of human experience, with grace, humor and style. Tyler's works are too many to mention here. But they've appeared in Women's Comics, where her first works were published. Twisted Sisters, Weirdo, LA Weekly, among many other publications. She has received numerous awards. Notably named on the list of the top 100 cartoonist of the century. Tyler's 2015 book, "A Soldiers Heart, the Campaign to Understand My WW Two Veteran Father," about her dad's trauma from World War Two and its impact on her family. Exemplifies the autographical comic genre that she has really made her own. It received a host of awards and nominations. Eleven Eisner awards, two Ignatz nominations. And was twice a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize. Alex Dubin, [assumed spelling] of the Los Angeles Times Book Review, considered it, "Not just Tyler's masterpiece, but arguably one of the 21st centuries best comics." Others have compared it favorably to Art Spiegelman's "Maus." Her latest book, "Fab4 Mania," I love that name. Details her personal obsession with the Beatles. And her concert going experience, as told from her 13-year-old self's point of view. As she once described it, "It's me reconnecting with the person I was, before life came along." So, before I turn the podium over the Carol, I just want to point out that we've got a display of Carol's works. Including both "Soldiers Heart" and "Fab4 Mania," on the tables on the far side of the room. So, after the formal programs over, please go take a look. And I want to put a plug in for an exhibit over in the Jefferson building that also has Carol's work in it, "Drawn to Purpose." It's worth crossing the street to take a look at that exhibit. So, please welcome Carol Tyler. Thank you. [ Applause ] >> Carol Tyler: Thank you. Hello, everybody. And thanks for making the trip out here to the Madison Building today. It's nice to see everyone. This is such a beautiful building. And I love libraries. I love the idea of being at the Library of Congress. I want to thank you so much for inviting me to be a part of this. It's terrific. So, yeah, we'll do this PowerPoint now. [ Laughter ] Okay, I've -- I'm going to try to be relaxed, as much as possible. I'm a little bit nervous. This is a biggy. The Library of Congress, people have said whoo, because it is a deal. Anyway, "Comics to a T." So, as you heard in the intro, yes, I am an autobiographical cartoonist. And I've been doing this for what, 40 something years, maybe. I don't know, sort of. I guess. I work with my family members. This is my daughter, up there on the left. You see her a lot in "Late Bloomer," as a little tot. This is my husband Justin Green, the author of "Binky Brown." Miserable, over a cup of coffee and life. And that's my core family you see there. My original family. That would be my brother, sister, my other little brother. Me, I'm in the middle. And my mom and dad. And I've spent most of my career telling stories about this crew. One of the first stories about the family was -- in fact, one of the first stories I ever did, was this one called "Uncovered Property." And it features, mom, dad, Jenna, Joe, Jimmy and dog, like I showed in the picture before. Thank you for pointing this out. This story I did, "The Hannah Story," which was about my sisters' accidental death in 1947. I did this in 1993. I think it was published in '94. And it was named as being on the top 100 cartoonists of the 20th century. I was very honored about that. It's not here in your collection. You got to get a copy of "The Job Thing." It's everybody's favorite. This is where I have a little problem though. Because I put the word shitty on the cover. Stories about shitty jobs. Because at the time, I kept saying, the jobs are shitty. What other word could there possibly be? But as I've kind of matured and gone through life, it's kind of difficult to say, oh, no, I'm a distinguished cartoonist. And here's my book about shitty jobs [brief laughter]. Just the wrong word. But I don't know how else to describe it. But even in "The Job Thing," which was about these terrible jobs I've had, that we've all had. The image you see, the cartoon you see, is about my in-laws, at the time or they weren't in-laws at the time, they were my first set of in-laws. There's been many [brief laughter]. Okay, this is -- I was in this group called "Twisted Sisters," which was Aline and Diane and there's Phoebe Gloeckner in the middle. Aline Crumb, Diane Noomin. And that's me in the vest. I was wearing a vest because until maybe the, maybe the turn of the nine -- 20, 2,000, I never wore a bra. And so, I wanted to kind of cover up a little bit. So, that's me in the vest with a glass of wine, going oh, boy, I hope I'm covered. And that's that man cover. "Late Bloomer." I wanted to do a collection -- this was in like, 2005. I wanted to put together all the stories that I had done when I was -- "Late Bloomer," is a collection about all the stories I did while I was raising Julia. And felt like it was coming late because it was in the -- I was in my late forties, early fifties. And this was Kim Thompson's idea, at Fantagraphics. Let's call it "Late Bloomer." So, that became the title. It's a collection of things like "Anatomy of a New Mom," which is on display over there. A page from "Migrant Mother," where my kid is out of control at an airport. And I had a bad infection and oh. But one of the things I did here is, I was really proud to try to work panels in such a way that it moved the eye in a unique way, around the page. We always read from upper left to lower right. And I wanted to do this kind of flow technique with moving the eye. The same way that she was running around the airport. Yeah, that's our family. That's me and Justin and our kid, Julia. And this is in a story called "The Outrage." And I have me, as a horrible entity. And he's an old armadillo. And our little kid is going, ooh, stop it! You know, kids try to get in the middle. But I use animal personification a lot in "Soldiers Heart." Yeah, this is -- I'm not afraid to say anything in comics. I never have been. And this is a panel from "The Outrage." Where I get -- I had this child and I felt like she was just -- I hate to say it, but she was just like, on me on the time. And I came to a point -- now they call it postpartum psychosis. But at the time, nobody was talking about this. So, I did. And I wrote it in this. I wrote about how I saw these knives on the table. I got freaked out and threw them out and threw them out the window, really. And tried to collect myself. So, this was very common. Many women have thanked me for bringing this to the attention. This was before what's her name did. I did this in print. Here's my new book "Fab4 Mania." Whoo! So, much fun! Oh, gosh, we'll talk about that later. But first, I do want to talk about "Soldier's Heart." Because it is the book that took most of my cartooning career. And it took me ten years to do this book. It began as three separate books. A lot of people think that "Soldier's Heart," down here, which is "You'll Never Know," book three, is the "Soldier's Heart" here. But it's not -- this was Gary Groth trying to make sure that the title of the book had the right -- for new audience. So, "You'll Never Know." The title comes from my parent's sweetheart song, when they meet. And there's also other references to not knowing what the heck was going on with my dad and my parents in their lives. And as children, we always look to our parents. And they're so big and awesome. And I always had questions about what was going on with them. The first book had a wood cover. Because I really wanted to focus on my dad's building trades and his workshop stuff. The second one is more about the collateral damage or the difficulty it took on my mom and the rest of the family. That's why it has the least kind of background. And then granite, because there was so much of book three, where we come to D.C. And there's so much about the story that's written in stone. So, it started like this, where one day I picked up the phone and all I heard was "rivers of blood!" I was, like, Dad, what? Huh, what? Because at that time, my dad never really communicated well. In fact, my whole life, he just wasn't much of a -- we weren't close. He was there. He did his job. He was a great. "Give me a kiss, yeah, give me a kiss right here, yeah, okay." But he was not a smooth dude. He'd never say, "Come here and tell me about your day" or anything like that. And my mom had a stroke and he had nobody to talk to. So, he called me up and said this. So, I right away grabbed a notebook and started writing down everything he said. "Citations, North Africa," and all this kind of stuff. I didn't know what this meant. Because my knowledge about -- I knew he was in World War Two. I knew about the medals or that there was some -- I didn't know any of that stuff that you see there. Patches, I didn't know what any of that meant. Now I know, of course, because I researched. And he had a photograph album. And all the pictures in there were pretty much fun, funny. I've had a lot of people tell me that. That they get the funny, fun stories from their dads or grandfathers, about the war. When in truth, he was pretty raging angry. And most of the time, especially when he got older. And the older he got and the -- especially towards the end of his life, he got more and more into these fits of rage. That in this panel, the panel before this, my mother is terrified. Because he's tearing the house apart. And she calls me up and says, "Oh, come -- come over, he's going crazy, he's going mad." And he gave me the book -- I had asked him if I could please borrow that booklet of photographs. And he forgot he gave them to me. And he thought I stole them. So, he was tearing the house apart looking for them. And I knew I couldn't tell a story about dad, without telling a story about mom. Julia, our child, Justin and I's child, there's Justin and dad. And if you -- and me. If you look at the photograph here, look at the look on his face. Because I had just given him the "365 Days of World War Two" book. And he -- that photograph says it all. This was the hardest thing for him to have to deal with. It was going to take a lot of driving, along with note collecting and phone calls. That was my little driving companion, Baby. And they lived on the other side of Indiana. And I show their house, like you see there. I lived, at that time, in Oakley in Cincinnati. And I show the building like this. And this is kind of a map of the state of Indiana. Cincinnati is right close to the state line. And they lived on the other state line, towards Illinois. And so, I-74 and I-70, were my buddies. And I just drove up and down that road. It was a four-hour drive back and forth. And often had to go, at various times, without notice. But I usually went every ten days, two weeks, maybe about twice a month, to see them, for about ten years. And trying to get this stuff together. There's my house, where I ended up moving to in Cincinnati. And there's a drawing of my neighborhood, my street. There's always football playing going on. I ripped out my lawn because I didn't want to mow and planted all that [brief laughter]. Oh, that's my studio up there. You see where the American flag is. And there's -- it's a two family. And I did the whole book up just by those windows. So, let's get started. Writing comes first. When you do a big story of any kind, of course, you get your idea. And some of them come in the middle of the night. And some of them you map out in -- and I use anything. Yellow pages, backs of envelopes, anything I could find. I did a lot of research. I had to read books. And learned to read these World War Two maps. I learned all this information about what -- these campaigns and generals and official duty booklets and everything. Oh, gosh, this is just the tip of the iceberg. I have at least ten stacks of just the note taking. Just papers that overwhelm the box. And that's just the notes. And then there's little artifacts like that sheet music that has the music to my parents love song, "You'll Never Know." There was so many layout challenges to this book. Because I am a person that can't -- I have -- I'd be a good DJ. I don't like repeating, formats, songs, anything. So, I had to change it up. I feel like I have to change it up all the time. And at one point I had it out on adding machine tape. I thought, well, I'll try it. I wrote on the wall. I don't have any pictures of the wall because its since been painted over. But I would write on the wall, some of these things. And then I got into having these big sheets of paper. And I'd list everything out. And then I'd go in with a red pen and pick out the things I thought were important. And then I connected pages together. This isn't trying to figure out -- because I knew some of the story. I knew the outcome. I knew where I wanted -- sorry, where I wanted to go with this story. And I knew a lot of stuff. It was organizing and getting all the ducks in a row. Post-it-Notes. Sometimes they're helpful. Yeah, I used those. I did anything I could, to try and pull this together. This is a big giant sheet of some kind of -- it's about this big. And I just drew the double spread of all the pages. And that mark through, it means accomplished. And in this one, you'll see, like, orange Post-it-Notes and yellow Post-it-Notes. It was something like, maybe orange meant -- you know how in the book I have just the military part. I talk about just his story. Him telling me, "And then we went up over here and I got a casa in Italy." So, whenever it's just him telling a military story, that was orange. And then I think the pink down here might have been kid crisis. And then I had -- because you have to understand, I was telling mom and dad's story from World War Two. I was telling dad's story from World War Two. I was telling my parents story now, as elderly people. I was also talking about how that folded into my life now. So, I had my kid now. At the time, she was 12, 13. My older parents now. But then me as a kid, my parents as a kid. So, we're talking about really looking back at all of these decades. Trying to juggle that and seamlessly pull it through because of the story that I wanted to tell. Eventually, yeah, great, I got this table and just gridded it off. And put it all -- I think this is book two. I don't know why there's an adding machine there because [brief laughter] I don't know. But on the wall in the background, is the configuration of why a dog wags their tail, the way it does. The other day I was looking at that. It's, like, what is that? Oh, yeah, this means, I'm really happy or something. The book took over my life. It took over my house. Kim Thompson, insisted that we work with some sort of clarity, you need to know. Because the whole book, I would do it. I would scan it. And would send it through the mail or I mean, through the -- some kind of server thing, to -- over the internet. So, I never -- in the old days, you would do artwork, like some of the early work you see over there. I would do artwork and then you'd box it up, tape it up, take it to FedEx. Ship it and then they'd receive it. So, I never once walked into Fantagraphics graphics department. It was all done by spreadsheet. And file names and file numbers. And I forgot to put numbers in those three, "You'll Never Know," books. But I did put numbers in "The Soldier's Heart." But this is all a configuration of that. All right. You start drawing with a pencil. I got one in my hair right here today. I use a yellow number one, Ticonderoga. And a good old pencil sharpener. I work on Strathmore, 500 series plate paper. The draw -- the work starts like that. And ends up looking like that. Let's have an ink party! Whoo! Because I mixed, custom mixed, the colors I would need. You see magic 50 is, blood. I think there's tank, underline color, my mom's hair, redhead. You know, different -- any color I needed, I custom mixed. In fact, I had 53 colors that I worked with. And made a chart. So, like, oh, I need, mom's hair, okay, that's going to be -- and I'd look at the chart. And I'd know which one of those little containers would have the color I was looking for. Kind of bonkers. And I drew everything with these two vehicles, the pen and this brush. The brush made the whole -- made the distance. The whole book, I did with the one brush. It's a Windsor Newton series seven-one. And the pen points are 788 Esterbrook. I was so terrified -- oh, all those pens you see over there, ignore them. Some of them have application, but mostly I did those. But I was so terrified I was going to run out of pen points, that I cornered the market on eBay of 788's [brief laughter]. So, I own them all. If you have them, they're mine. I bought boxes and boxes of them because I was so afraid. This is one of the first drawings I did. And I was so nervous about how it was going to look, you know, how I was going to do this. And I thought, well, what you do when you do any kind of story, is you start with what you know. And you start with what you want to do. And I really liked drawing objects and stuff. So, this was my dad's collection of toxic materials. That in the book, I talk about he's having -- he's getting chemo. And I tell the lady, you should of just, you know, this is Mr. Toxic. And I tell this story about how he had all of these horrible, horrible things. And I -- they were going to be moving. And I said, "Dad, you can't take this stuff to the new place. Come on, this is stupid. You're not going to be taking benzene and lead and all this stuff." "Oh, it's my stuff! Keep your hands the hell away from it!" And I said, "No, you're not -- I'm not going to allow it. You're not taking it." So, I put it all in the back of his Cadillac that he started with a screwdriver. And ran it to the toxic place. And they were like, "Oh, yeah, lady, just put it over there." Okay. So, then I went home, it's in the book. I ran back and was like, oh, wait, I forgot, there's a couple -- there's one more with something that was oozing out on the sides. You know, eating through the canister. So, I thought, I'll just run this back to the toxic place and the dump. I go back there and they went, "Oh, yeah, you need to go down here. And then when you get way to the back of the yard, you take a left and there's three buildings. It's the last final building and it's back in the corner." And I went, oh, okay. So, there's -- these buildings are empty, right? And this is at some of kind of dump. And I drive all the way back. And I go all the way back there. And there, in this huge big warehouse building, in the corner, is this little pile of stuff with caution tape all around it. Like, stay back, don't come near it. It was like, it made me sadder then anything to see it that way. The other challenge was, how am I going to draw these people that I know what they look like. But I also have an image of them in my minds eye. So, I had to tell everybody to get over it. These may not -- people may not look like you exactly. Don't hold me to account on that. It was so complicated, I had to make custom furniture to accommodate the pages and steps that I'd have to take in between. It looks like a wreck because it is. But I made tilt up tables. I made, you know, a saw, I got those skills. Just plywood, trying to think of what I needed. Build shelves for things like fake army men and stuff like that. So, I also want to -- this is funny on the wall. At the time, I thought, I need some guiding principles. So, my mom, with her stroke, was able to bang out, "Carol, you'll ever know that I love you, mom." Because she knew the book was called "You'll Never Know." But see how it always kind of stuck to the right because of her stroke. And my theory was, oh, you know, I need family support, plant-based diet. Exercise and all this stuff, good sleep. My dad's theories are smoke, drink, do everything wrong. Hope you're forgiven. Forget about it. [ Laughter ] So, here's some of the layout configurations. To tell dad's -- dad and mom's story, I went to this kind of office supply look from the 40s. I noticed that all the paper had this kind of double black and red line thing. And I got some stamps to do the numbers. And then I would do four across. And this is the fourplex. And since it's "Kid Crisis," the -- it's in black and white. And everything is outlined in red. Six packs, I made a lot of books that has a lot of six packs. It's not just random crazy stuff. I got an order here. A six pack means there are six panels on a page. And if I'm looking back, I often did the wavy line, like, from the old photograph technique. Or sometimes I would put a strip between the panels. Or sometimes I would actually put the quarter inch gutter between the panels, margins, sorry. This is a variation on a 12. So, one and two are together. This is about a trip to the archives in Saint Louis. And they wouldn't let my dad in. They wouldn't let my mom in, to see his own records. I had to go through Freedom of Information Act. It was crazy. You can read about it in the book. But this is 12th. This is a variation on the four, where what I wanted to do was show me talking to them. And I put them in color and I'm over here in black and white. Because I had just come out of a kid crisis thing. And down the middle is the destination. I was asking dad to come to the memorial. And he's like, "What? I don't want to go there." And I said, "Yes, you do. Come on, I got a personal invitation here from Tom Hanks." He said, "Who's Tom Hanks?" And my mom is, with her stroke, she's thinking, "Hanks, a star, let me think. Private. Private something." I'm like, "Oh, no, he's that silver screen dude." Okay, here's Hanks. "Please join me in honoring the achievements of our greatest generation, which includes you, Charlie." My moms thinking, "Ryan?" "Form letter." "Okay, form letter or not, we're going dad." "Connotation and archivist." And like that marine said, "It will take us a while, but we're doing this. Are you in?" "Yes," he said, "I guess so." And so, you see the memorial, the stars, Tom Hanks and part of the memorial features there. And then my mom, it comes to her. "Saving Ryan Seacrest." [ Laughter ] I always have surprises for you readers, in all of my work. You just have to read it closely. Sometimes I would do full page panels. For some reason, there's something missing. But had the pencil drawing behind it. God, I hope this is not a problem. But here we are at the National Archives out in College Park, doing some research. Came up bust. And this is the drawing about how it goes from pencil to ink, from the left side. Pencil to ink on the right side. And then the double spread of both of them. And what I wanted to show here was the feeling you get when you walk into the World War Two Memorial. You get this -- you kind of walk down in there. But then you get this uplifting, especially when you walk into the two sides, Atlantic, Pacific. And I wanted to pull those beautiful elements that are up in the building structure. I wanted to pull them up into the space. So -- and that's how -- I was just like, oh, my God. It just so moving. And for dad, too. I took a lot of pictures, when we were here and used them. And you can see his hat there, him looking. That's all I had. But I had to construct the drawing, you know, kind of in a different way, using a photographic reference. I also knew in the back of the book I wanted to have a lady swinging a kid. So, I random found a lady and asked her permission and used that for that. This was a made up -- you know, when you're in Indiana and it's bleak and it's Christmas time, there's nothing on the roads. But these -- I call them "Prairie pop ups, that anchor freeway offramps, like rivets on dungarees." And then it was funny because I went to Kroger, not too long after and it was like, oh, I drew that out of my imagination. Sometimes I just make shit up. Sorry for the cussing. But I was trying to convey that everybody that I was highlighting in the book, the five of us all had issues going on in the mind. I wanted to talk about that. And this is a page where before texting or whatever that is, talking, bloop, bloop. I was trying to show -- I drew this before then. I was trying to show a conversation that my mom and my sister and I were having about the time that dad's Cadillac caught on fire on the way back from chemo. And so, I have anything that she says, with her green headband, in green. My mom's is in red. And mine's in blue. And we're trying to weave together the details of what happened and who was where and what was going on. And this is another example of trying to keep everybody -- keep the action flowing. You go from left to right, in the first. And then it goes down and you go across back the page backwards the other way. And then it comes back through and you go through here. Because I wanted to show the action of driving across the country. Or driving across the state of Indiana. Now this one is very interesting. Because there's a panel that starts here and, of course, it ends at the bottom right. But what I wanted to do, was to spell out the thesis of the book. This was the infamous page five. I was laying out the book, I was like, I don't know what I'm going to do with page five. I had something that lead up to it. And everything else behind it. And page five just stuck, stuck, stuck, stuck. One morning I woke up and I went, I got it, page five. Start at the bottom. Dad gets the plywood and he puts it in the truck. And then he's going to drive up through the landscape. You see? He drives past a sign that says, "not." It's up there, Arby's sign, "not." And then there's a tire store that says "all." And you see "scars," the cars have letters on the top of them, "scars." "Not all scars." The cow says, "are" urgh. And then in the sky it spells out "visible." "Not all scars are visible." Which was the post-traumatic stress disorder. Otherwise known as shell shock, for World War Two Veterans. And some pages, I just had to build impact. This is the most stunning statistic I came across. Was that if you take the 60 million people that died in World War Two and you break that down, that's 25,462 people a day. Now, can you imagine the 24-hour news cycle dealing with that today? Every day for six years. Trouble. And I'm going to apologize in advance because this part makes me cry. But I will go on. So, my companion, throughout the whole book, Baby. One day, she was like this. And I realized that I had to put her down. And this was at the same time that it turned out that mom, at 93, was diagnosed with lung cancer. A good long life, but still mom, you know. So, now, it changed that -- I didn't have the book done yet. So, it changed that I would be caregiving at a four-hour distance. Along with teaching. Along with trying to get the book done. Mom had a contribution in the book. I made her, because she's the original art person. I mean, gosh, where do you get things from? She -- I made her sit down and gave her some color. And she -- and I said, "You got to draw this page, mom. It's got to be in the book." She's like, "No. Why do you have to reveal so much about our personal lives? It's nobody's business." It's, like, kind of too late for that, is what I told her. So, she made this drawing, "Out of War Came My Children." And she drew this. And you can see it goes off to the right because of her stroke. But the four -- her four living children are on the right side. And then the one who passed away, Hannah, that I told you about from "The Hannah Story." She's on the left with tears coming out. She said, "They're not flowers, they're stars in bloom." See, they were married in 1943. And then she has that -- she says, "That's the fog of war," that splotch below the flowers. Flowers, I mean stars. The trouble with doing family stories, is they die on you. And you have to come back to the studio and finish the job. So, this particular panel, that's in "Soldier's Heart," I wrote a date underneath it. Because she passed away on 2-4-2012. And I depicted here as a manatee. My sister, who was my stalwart helper and fun friend my whole life, who did all my editing. Always calling me out for bullshit. Although, she was a former nun. She never used that word. She thought I cussed too much. I had to -- I got this call, come here, something's wrong. So, I went over there and they put her in the operating room. They found stage four ovarian cancer. This is before my mom passed away. But my sister was also caregiving her daughter with autism and her husband with Alzheimer's. And there's Justin there. We would -- I had lots of flowers. Like I said, I ripped out my lawn and grew roses and stuff. And I was taking flowers everywhere I went. Now, it started to be I'd take my art pages and I'd take these flowers to scenes like you see here. And everywhere I went, people were laid out in recliners, sick. And I'd have to run these pages back and forth from my house. I did these pages for "Soldier's Heart," in lobbies, waiting rooms. There's elevators. I got -- I finally figured out what the elevator buttons mean, as I rode them so much. Every -- anywhere, hospital -- doctors offices, anyplace. I was just dragging my pages along. Those little tray table things on -- by the table, are really good for drawing. I just come in, hey, mom, how you doing. And just clear it off and set the pages out and just draw away. And then I got this e-mail from Kim Thompson. He's my editor and publisher of these books. So, it's like, oh, gosh. In the meanwhile, at home, my daughter had some sort of goofy -- oh, it was horrible. Had to have surgery on her sinuses and her -- everything was bad. Her boyfriend was a heroin addict. He was sweet, though. I mean, we liked him. He was living with us. But I'd come home and the house would look like this. So, I'd be caregiving over here, running up and down the freeway. I'd come home and there would be -- look at the mayonnaise splotch on the table. Just everything was always chaotic, gross. Look, I'd have to -- I'd have to board up the windows in the basement. Because guys that he owed money to, were trying to break in all the time. Or he'd pawn my stuff. So, I was taking pictures of everything, before I'd go anywhere. This is just the nonsense that was going on in the neighborhood. There'd be all this noise and turmoil and crap going on. I'd see needles everywhere. But my life was, either school, at home trying to clean up that mess. Or get on the freeway, take my pages. I'd go take care of the people, in conditions like this, often. Or how about coming to school, starting another semester and they said, oh, we don't have a classroom for you. How am I supposed to teach? Well, okay, I'll go down and I got the janitor to help me find some tables. I had a pop-up classroom in the hallway. I had to teach in the hallway. And hide the stuff every time and drag it back out. This is me. I broke out in this virus, all over my body. I couldn't move. I was in bed. I couldn't move. I couldn't lift up my feet, nothing. Some kind of strange thing. Thirty days of fever. I had a fever every single day. And all through this, I'm writing this book about my dad. And he turned. In my -- in his mind, I was the enemy. He accused me of stealing his money and all this kind of stuff. I'd come in the house, "What do you want now?" I mean, he was terrible. But I stayed the course with Chuck. I just kind of put up my Spartan shield. And while I'd be making soup and serving it to somebody else. I was pretty much a wreck. My sister thought I looked good here. I said, I don't feel good. But I wasn't going to say anything to her. I could absolutely relate to this guy [brief laughter]. But sometimes I'd come home and there's be a deer in my living room. That's the heroin addict, God bless him. He was really cute. We really liked him. And then a cute new dog showed up on the porch. It was, like, hey, yeah. And I was able to get my mom and my sister together. To do this -- to get to this moment, you have no idea. It involved me driving, fending off my dad. Getting a truck. Getting mom out of her nursing home, into this car and taking her to the hospital. Ugh. My sister, bless her heart, such an education stalwart. She had a PHD, despite all of her troubles. And here was the day when, just before she passed away, they gave her an Emeritus Status. And here -- and I'm trying to give her my hair. I used it in an art show. I cut my hair off in solidarity. So, yeah, she was on her death bed and I had a deadline. Because I was doing work for Cincinnati Magazine. And so, this is a story about -- she used to love to swim. And she was a teacher. So, this is about me teaching a kid to swim. And then when she passed away, of course, I had a deadline. And before I went to the funeral, I had to talk about -- I had to come up with this month's installment. So, this is about Rosemary Clooney, at a park singing "I'll Be Loving You, Always." And dad, we knew he was going to get going. And I knew that "Soldier's Heart," that big fat book was coming out. So, I had him do signature cards. And by the way, Georgia, I have a signature card for the library. Dad's last Christmas. He didn't realize it was his last Christmas. I knew that. So, kind of lonely. Everybody was gone. So, I said, "Hey, why don't we write down all the people from moms, that you can remember, from moms address book, your Christmas card list, on these papers." And so, we made this chain. And so, he was writing down everybody's name, that he could remember. And then I went to the funeral on Tuesday, his funeral. And I got back, I think it was Tuesday or Wednesday. I got an e-mail from Fantagraphics, "Oh, we need the artwork drawing for your dads -- for the cover, by Friday. So, after all of this, okay, I had to sit down and knock out a portrait of dad. I had just put him in the ground. It really does take a toll, doing this kind of work. It's really hard. This is the hardest to talk about. Because when I did this, this is from "The Hannah Story," I told you about. It got to me that my sister had this terrible burn accident. And so, I was leaning over the drawing, crying. And the drops were falling. I wanted to use red ink, you know, to show the lines, I made these lines. But it was -- I was dropping tears on the page. So, I took a tissue and I was dabbing it. And it made that smear technique that you see there. It's from me crying. No wonder I did the Beatles book. Oh, it was time, it was time. My new book is about mourning, though. It's about all this stuff I've been telling you about. Losing everybody, living with a heroin addict. Everything that entails, the impact it had on my life it's called the "Ephemerata." And I began, right after mom died, with kind of for me, traditional page art, making grids. And this is -- I've got a bunch of these little booklets that I get at thrift stores and stuff. Nonsense books. You probably have one in your Library of Congress. "Hex Signs and Barn Decorations." But I'm asking probing questions about death. And I call it a "Book Report." But I've also been gravitating towards just art with words on it, trying to free myself. You have to understand, ten years of making -- using 53 colors, is very limiting and tough. And so, this when my sister was just at the end. It says, "These are the only thoughts I have." And I have the grim reaper carrying her off. But still, I'm wondering down here, if this is a legitimate drawing, is it legitimate for me to do this? Maybe I should make a table or something. Something more purposeful, make furniture. I'm very hard on myself. And I also tell my students, and this is true. When you can't do anything else in your life, do a self-portrait. At least your pencil's working. And you know that what's going on with that head of yours. So, I started doing -- exploring this new thing. Like, all these objects and mourning and deaths. This is my great grandmothers mourning bonnet. She tended to both Union and Confederate soldiers, during the Civil War. She was -- they called her the "doctor." That's -- I have her mourning bonnet. And in this sequence, it comes on me and knocks me down. So much that I have to process. I almost can't function. There's days where I just can't. Because I've got mom and dad's stuff. I got my sisters stuff. I got my own stuff. My best friend down the street, Rose, she passed away. I got a bunch of her stuff. My brother-in-law. Sometimes I just sit there. Hey, there's dad's army uniform. There's Jimmy's bike, when he was seven years old. And this has become kind of an expression of how I feel right now. I'm holding the impossible Trident. And there's pain. I'm kind of focused on that, but yet, I'm lost in it, in this weird landscape. And this -- you know, that Grant Wood painting, "Woman with Plants." And she's holding plants. There's nothing coming out of that flower pot. I've been making sculptures out of thorns because I have thorn trees on my property. And doing stories on saw blades. Using some of dad's old saw blades tell us -- and then this is from this exhibit. I'm going to show you and we're going to watch it. I'm going to show you a link in a minute. But these stumps represent all the people I lost in a three-year period. These were close to me. So, finally I got mom settled. She wanted to be near a young tree. And that's my sister, in the basket. I was able to help her with her final wishes. Which was to be -- she was in the convent years ago. She died -- she went back to the convent at the end of her life, as an associate. And so, I -- my brothers and I, distributed her ashes at the sister's cemetery. I got my dad buried. And in the coffin with him, are some tools, a pipe. And that chain of all his friends. I put that in there at the end. This past June, I went back to visit his grave. And make sure they had the Veteran, his stone. And there it was. And as I was walking up, I thought, oh, no, I have nothing to give. I have nothing to bring. You know, whether it be a shot of whiskey or some flowers. But I realized I had a pencil, right? So, I wrote on the stone, I wrote -- I did some of the drawings from the book. And made a little American flag for him. And I love you. Miss you, dad. And that's his flag flying. I was able to get a house in Kentucky, a farm with money he got from being a disabled Veteran. Because the Cincinnati Zoo is buying my house, so I have to move. And so, I had to get this other place to get started on. So, I got this farm house. And there's his flag. And my little companion, Tue. I call her Tue, T-u-e. We're having -- she's wearing a fascinator. And we're having tea at the royal wedding. But bless her heart, she had just gotten hit by a car a week before. And as she was laying in the street, when I saw her, I thought, oh, God, she's gone. I went up to her and I said, "Tue." And she raised her head up and said, "If you can just get me to an emergency vet, I promise I will stay the course with you. Because you've lost too many people." And then there's farmer Jones Justin there, with the truck that we did all the driving with. And Saint Francis in the garden, from my parents. And they've always had that yellow thing that flops around in the wind. And the farmhouse, which I actually had visions of, during my period of mourning. I imagined a space where I could do this work the "Ephemerata." And this is the room that I'll be doing this in. I've already started. So, now, I want to show this video. This is my art show that I had with all the pages of the book. [ Music ] >> I feel this is one of the best exhibits that the Meyer Gallery has really had. And I've come here for years. [ Music ] It's creative, it's innovative. It uses the space well. You want to stay and you want to read. [ Music ] >> Well, I think it's wonderful in a variety of ways. But mainly because, you know, I'm a book person. So, it's really unusual to see an entire book laid out like this. [ Music ] >> What I think about this show is so beautiful, is that Carol actually shows every single page of the book that she drew by hand very meticulously. [ Music ] >> I think the other thing I really like about this, is that the other, the second room, I love the way she's done the -- she's opened her head to the world. Which is cleverly done here with the doorway. [ Music ] >> It does kind of feel like you're sort of coming into sort of like a mind field with her, with what she's doing here. [ Music ] >> The interior acts as her studio. And it also acts as her fathers' workshop. But kind of beyond that, it really acts as her mind. And the things that are in her mind and preoccupy her mind and her thoughts. And the things that she's thinking about, when she's generating her work. [ Music ] >> It's so amazing, reading the story and sort of the pathos that she's been through. I mean, the books kind of show that. But seeing it here with all the 3D, you know, objects and found things, really kind of packs a punch. You know, I mean, kind of really feel the grief and you know, what she's been through. And what her families been through. You know, especially, particularly the handwritten stuff on the walls here, it's just, you know, heartbreaking. [ Music ] >> Another thing that I admire, is that Carol worked out her personal experience with her family and her father's history. By going through all of her life's experiences with him. And documenting that. And working it through in her own way, telling a story about her dad and her experience with her dad. Painting it all, drawing it all and reporting it all. And working it through. So, to me, this is like a poetry. It is literature. It is psychology. It is art. It is drawing. And for students, this is wonderful to see, that an artist can have such a breadth of information. That with her own talent of being able to write and being able to draw, work that out. And I feel like that joy that she had doing this book, is expressed in this exhibit. [ Music ] >> Carol Tyler: Okay. [ Applause ] There you go. [ Applause ] There you go. That's all [brief laughter]. Good bye. [ Applause ]