Shortly before coming to camp, my friend, Big Sarah, a preschool teacher in Western Mass, was telling me how her little pupils were bringing in shoeboxes and empty oatmeal containers in anticipation of building a collaborative cardboard city.
I recalled how my 3rd grade class had done something similar—a 2D collaged city that covered one wall of our classroom, as high as we could reach. I loved that project. We were allowed to work on it whenever we completed our assigned work—heaven for an unathletic, creative, little goodie goodie like me.
I also loved my 3rd-grade teacher, a fair-minded, recently married giraffe in hoop earrings, platform shoes, and Mia Farrow’s Rosemary’s Baby haircut. It’s not her fault that classroom dynamics sent this beautiful, community-building project sideways. My primary memory involves ganging up on an unpopular, wealthy boy for attempting to dominate us with his paper department stores, all of which he’d branded with his initials—J.C. He tearfully insisted that this was a nod to JCPenney, but we didn’t buy that for a second.
That 3rd-grade city project was still on my mind as Ariel led us through a 5-part generative writing session at Wayward Writer’s camp in the Catskiills. Given a choice of topic, I picked “Secrets”, with side orders of “Utopia” and “Dystopia”. Following the prompts that came at 4-minute intervals, I came up with fragments that imagined my teacher’s attempt to keep her pregnancy under wraps at work, a classmate’s sibling’s terminal illness, some faculty lounge gossip, the wanton destruction of J.C.’s department store chain, and my own role in the 3rd grade female pecking order.
Turns out there’s a lot of juice there. I could’ve kept going well beyond the extra half hour we were given to flesh out one of our fragments. Instead of following the assignment, I imagined that my unathletic, unassuming only child self had been invited to the most popular girl’s house after school…
Mayhaps the period in which our unintentionally dystopian 3rd-grade collaborative city project was built could yield a series of interconnected short stories to be published as a chapbook? If so, might it be fortified with comics?
Why not? I’m always angling to position myself as a graphic novelist, and Alyssa Graybeal’s “comics for writers” workshop earlier that day had me hankering to simmer paragraphs down into 4-panel cartoons.
The comic shared here takes place before as we are staking our claims onto the first things we intended to “build”. Naturally, the popular girl attracted many imitators.
I really did want to make the newspaper because after 8 years of stay at home motherhood, my mother had recently gone back to work as a writer for the Indianapolis Star, with my blessing – I felt there was some reflected glamour to be had there.
The boy seated behind me is modeled on Doug H, who once complained to our beloved teacher, Mrs. K, that he couldn’t concentrate because of all the tangles in my hair.
I don’t recall what we named our city, but the school’s mascot was a panther. The adult me was kind of hoping Panther City would have some radical associations, but an online search didn’t offer much in that vein. Apparently, it’s a nickname for Fort Worth, a city I have yet to visit.
Ayun Halliday is the Chief Primatologist of the long running East Village Inkyzine. She is the author of nine books, including the self-mocking autobiography No Touch Monkey! And Other Travel Lessons Learned Too Late and, most recently, Creative, Not Famous: The Small Potato Manifesto and its interactive companion Creative, Not Famous Activity Book: An Interactive Idea Generator for Small Potatoes & Others Who Want to Get Their Ayuss in Gear. She lives in East Harlem, where she is hard at work on a dystopian novel set in her childhood branch library. Her one-woman show, NURSE!, wherein Juliet’s Nurse tries to correct everything Shakespeare got wrong, opens this June in New York City.
