For the past seven years, I've worked on completing an illustrated novel based on my experiences as a child growing up in a sometimes violent and unpredictable home. At first, I planned only to use the details of my life as a way of grounding the story, but the more I wrote and drew, the more I remembered new events and sensations of my childhood. This paper explores the process of writing and drawing as a way of revisiting, reexamining, and making new meanings of childhood experiences. Through fiction writing, I rearrange and reinterpret the past, constructing knowledge through causality and reasoning. Through drawing, I externalize and render visible sensations of childhood that had been previously inaccessible. Ultimately, I consider the ways writing and drawing function as a form of active remembering that reconstructs and reclaims the past.
Cervantes, the Journey, and What it Tells Us About Becoming a Writer
