Robert James Russell
I always fashioned myself a storyteller to some degree—before writing it was with pictures, drawings. I wanted to be an animator at Disney when I was a kid: I drew methodically, wrote and sold comic books at lunch in elementary school, made my own cartoon trading cards in middle school. But then something changed. It was the writing around the pictures that began to draw me in. I gobbled up everything I could, especially old copies of National Geographic we had around the house and John Bellairs’ Johnny Dixon book series from our school library. I was hooked: Words, so powerful, could tell a story better than I could illustrate! It was a marvel—I was marveled. And I’ve never looked back. To me, writing is about place—where we are in relation to others, to other things—and that’s a powerful notion, how we move through this world, seen or unseen. Drawing gave me some of that, but writing immersed me deeper, more fanatically, and, a shy child, I needed that. And, much like Johnny Dixon (or, maybe I’m more like wily Professor Roderick Childermass?), I find myself, flashlight-in-hand, stumbling through the dark mystery of writing, through the story forming in my brain, until I can piece it together and make some sense of it, and then, hopefully, the world around me.