INTO THE WILD...

My first recollection of Tennessee as a tangible concept is of a day trip I took with my parents and two siblings when I was either six or seven years old — I can’t remember which. We drove through the stretches of strip malls and miniature golf courses of Pigeon Forge, where we then sat and ate pizza. I raced go-karts with my father and my older brother. We moved months later, bringing my grandmother on my mother’s side with us so that we could more easily care for her as her Alzheimer’s progressed.

We moved because my father was offered a position in another state at a company that he no longer works for. During a recent conversation with my mother, she revealed to me that she never wanted to move. She was upset about it. She argued with my father about it. She seemed half-surprised-half-amused that I hadn’t noticed her displeasure when I was younger. I had known back then that we’d moved out of necessity — that my father would earn more money working in Tennessee than he would at his current position in South Carolina — but I hadn’t realized we hadn’t had a choice.

We moved to a small rural town. Usually, when I tell people where I’m from, their face twists ever-so-slightly in confusion, or they have that blank sort of look behind their eyes that suggests no familiarity. “It’s just outside that other town,” I’ll say, “it’s in the same county,” and they’ll nod vaguely.

By the age of ten, I’d moved on from Webkinz, which was far too juvenile for someone now immersed in the worlds of Pokémon and Erin Hunter’s Warriors. The strange isolation of living in the rural American south was further exaggerated by the fact that I was homeschooled. A vast majority of my peers were people that knew each other outside of the confines of extracurricular activities and get-togethers. I often felt like the people around me were in on some unspoken joke that I could never dream of comprehending. In this period of my life, then, it's no wonder that I explored the internet as a means of engaging my interests in things like art and writing. The art I discovered online as a child is one of the largest influences in the visual art and writing I create today. A considerable number of my friends are people I first met online that I began speaking to over shared interests in television shows and video games. This website itself is inspired by web art installations and personal websites I discovered while browsing the web.

An example of the sorts of videos that made me want to start drawing as a hobby — I think I stumbled across this specific video when I was nine.

I drew a lot of cats as a kid.

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