Ducks, Cartoons, Ants

I’m thrilled to have a guest blogger today: MARGARET HAMILTON, a longtime friend, author, and recently coauthor of a collection of short stories, SIX SCATTERED STORIES. Her story THE RETURN OF MARCUS CASTEEL is featured in the July 11 issue of New Realm magazine.

Murder Along the Mississippi - Margie and Friends

from Margie:

About twenty years ago I ran across a crayon drawing on one of my mother’s hallway shelves. My best guess is that I drew it in kindergarten. The picture was of three ducks in an almost vertical pond. Each duck had a conversation bubble that read: “QUICK”. Was the drawing an intended cover of a book I planned to write?

Chapter 1: Three ducks swim in a pond.

Chapter 2: Something threatens the ducks, maybe a fox or a hunter.

Chapter 3: The ducks warn each other to quickly fly away from the impending danger.

Or maybe I meant to print “QUACK” in the bubbles. In any case, I wish I had that drawing.

Most of my third through fifth grade artistic efforts were encouraged and nurtured by Miss Mattocks, my art teacher in the St. Louis school I attended. My first big project (it might have been for extra credit) was a story with pictures, kind of like a comic strip. I cut strips of butcher paper, taped them edge-to-edge, made vertical lines to denote frames, then drew and captioned my story. As I recall, it was about ten feet long. Miss Mattocks must have liked it because she let me tape it across a wall.

Around the same time, the boy next door and I published a newspaper of original cartoons (i.e., we made them up). We drew our cartoons on both sides of a large sheet of paper, then copied our work, by hand, onto a supply of same-sized paper. Then we hit the street, selling our latest edition to parents, neighbors, and relatives. The price per edition was probably a nickel.

At some point, I wrote the play I mention on my web site. I titled it Alice in Ant Land. The characters included a girl heroine and several ants. The plot had conflict, tension, and resolution. (However, in re-reading Chapter Four of Elizabeth Lyon’s A Writer’s Guide to Fiction, I think it fell short of the Heroine’s Journey.) Though Alice in Ant Land was set in present time, a few friends and I put on the play in our history class. As playwright, I assumed the role of Alice.

It was interesting and fun to think about my early attempts to draw and write fiction. Best of all, it made me recall the teachers, parents, friends, relatives, and neighbors who inspired and appreciated the budding little artists I suspect we all were.

 

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