An interview with Devin Grayson

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By Shane Dingman

Continued from page 9

You have said “I love role playing games, spicy food, and damn near anything Japanese, and like to consider my bisexual, bi-coastal, comic-book-writing, role-playing, vegetarian, Buddhism practicing, cosmogony studying, 460-thread-count sheet addicted, music-loving, botany-obsessed self a fairly typical representative of my utterly unpredictable generation.” What do you mean to say about yourself when you say you’re a member of an utterly unpredictable generation?

Just that I do not feel heavily compelled by peer pressure or social norms. Everyone I know in my age group is moving through life a little differently. Within my closest circle of friends, for example, I think we cover every configuration of “family” I’m aware of, from perfectly traditional to completely experimental and self-defined. I feel like my generation grew up during a time when it was sort of obvious, politically and socially, that very few of the established institutions really worked; we are bereft of heroes (news coverage, pop cultural, and human inclinations are now such that no one can stand in the public eye and not be found wanting), skeptical of marriage (I can think of two people I know in my age group who don’t come from “broken” homes), and completely cynical about politics (it never in a million years would occur to us that a politician might NOT be lying). The downside of this is that some of us are a little shell-shocked and dangerously apathetic about our ability to initiate change, but the upside is that there’s no “right” way to do anything. There’s a lot room for, and a lot of support of, experimentation and invention. When I tell my friends that I don’t believe in marriage and don’t want to have children, they just shrug. If I’d grown up in my parents’ generation, that would not be the most typical response. I feel pretty strongly that a lot of who I am comes from the luxury of not having to answer to anyone about how I set up my life.

Maybe this is all best summed up by one of favorite refrigerator magnet quotes: “Life is not about finding yourself, life is about inventing yourself.” The possibilities for invention in my generation are fairly limitless.

Also, how does someone get obsessed with botany?

I should clarify that I’m not actually obsessed with the science of plants so much as with the meaning of plants. I’m just sort of intrigued by this species we share the planet with that is so self-sufficient and fairly, as a general rule, peaceful. I told my dad when I was 10 or something that I thought plants were the most moral beings on the planet, because their existence is so beneficial to and in harmony with the environment and also because I didn’t yet know enough about gardening to understand just how merciless plants can be (Kudzu, anyone?). I would now put the anthropomorphism aside and admit that plants are, of course, amoral, but I still think there’s something fascinating and profound about them. And, I don’t know, photosynthesis is just cool. I live in Northern California fairly near some of the world’s most gorgeous redwood parks, and standing in the shade of a 3,000-year old tree is an overwhelming experience. Hiking through hundreds of them (not all quite that old, but still up there) is awe-inspiring. I know a lot of people who derive strength and inspiration for a particular kind of landscape: the ocean, the mountains, the desert... For me it’s those redwood forests and I feel like I should know more about them than I do.

Your parents split up, and you were moved around the country. Do you think that had any impact, negative or positive, on your later avocation? Do you find the atomic family is a rare thing among comic creators?

I find it’s a rare thing among Americans! Look, according to the Census surveys, the national divorce rate hovers around 51 percent (I just jumped online to check that and found that, not surprisingly, it depends who you ask. But the lowest number anyone is giving is 43 percent and the highest I could find this evening is 67 percent). I just find those pretty bad odds. And there’s no question that divorce is hard on kids (and everyone else for that matter), but I grew up experiencing it as the norm. When I find someone whose parents are still together, I’m always surprised. It’s unusual.

My childhood specifically wasn’t really that nomadic. There was one big move from the East Coast to the West Coast before I was two, and I had grandparents I could visit in the east (New Jersey) and the south (Savannah), which was sort of cool in terms of getting to know the country a little better. But I still remember going to Idaho when I was 16 and being absolutely as mystified by them as they were by me. They sort of thought a white, ethnically Jewish girl with divorced parents and a female high school sweetheart living in Oakland and attending an arts school (“like Fame!?”) was a myth, and I was equally blown away by their slow speech, right-wing politics (their high school newspaper ran an anti-abortion editorial while I was there and literally didn’t have anyone available to write the op-ed!), rural poverty, and total lack of personal ambition. They were asking me questions like “what’s it like to talk to a black person?” and “is it true you really have horns?” (I swear to their god!), and I was equally ignorant of their culture (“But what do you do at Circle K?”). One of the girls (I was visiting a foster home) told me she loved to read, and when I asked what she was into she said, “oh, you know, I’ll read cereal boxes or anything — you know, like, the backs of cereal boxes, I just love to read.” I mean, that’s totally tragic and totally stereotypical, but it was all real.

Um...and it also doesn’t answer your question about formative experiences and avocation. I suppose you could argue that all personal events inform all creative careers. A large number of the established professionals in the comic field are older than I am, and I don’t actually know whether or not they have intact nuclear families. I guess the only ways that I can imagine it being concretely helpful to have divorced parents in the context of vocation is that 1) if you get left to your own devices a lot by overwhelmed, single working parents, you’ll probably develop some kind of creative skill, like writing or drawing, to keep yourself occupied, and 2) having a crisis in the initial set-up of your own family maybe gives you a small intimation of what it might be like to lose your parents all together, which is sort of a staple of the superhero genre origin myth.