About Me

People ask me how I come up with the faces that I draw. I answer that they are self-portraits. I make a lot of funny faces, anyway, just going about my day, but when I draw, I usually make the face of the character as I draw. I never use models or photographs, except for anatomical references. As you can imagine, I look pretty funny when I draw. I was in the airport the other day, sketching out Grumpy Gloria (who had a wrinkly nosed, nasty scowl on her face), and as I glanced up, everyone in the row of seats across from me was looking at me really strangely. It took me a second to figure out why.

My Family

I come from a family of five -- mom, dad, and three girls, Tanya, Anna, and Alice.
My mom is a really cool mom. She is also a writer. You may have read her book, Only Brave Tomorrows, by Winifred Luhrmann. I am lucky that I still get to spend time with my mother, because my parents live nearby.

My Dad is a doctor. He reads a lot, and likes to collect books. When my sisters and I were little, he used to read to us from A. A. Milne's POOH books. Now, whenever I read them to my own children or to myself, I hear his voice.

My older sister Tanya went away to school when I was only seven years old, so I didn't spend too much time with her when I was little. She was always reading serious books and using big words. I guess that's what she likes to do, because now she writes serious books and uses lots of big words when she teaches at the University of Chicago. She still gets silly, sometimes, though, and we have a lot of fun when we get together. Tanya's latest book is Of Two Minds; the Growing Disorder in American Psychiatry.

Alice, my little sister, liked dressing up and playing pretend with me, and she also really liked beautiful, fancy things. Now she has a fancy store called Dragonfly Drygoods, filled with beautiful things, and she has two little kids of her own. I am lucky that she lives nearby.

This is a picture of me and Alice, playing dress-up.

And me?

When I was little, I played dress-up and listened to cool stories called "Let's Pretend" on records (there were no such things as CDs). I played for hours in my big dollhouse (which was a castle!). But mostly, I drew or read. Reading. Drawing. Drawing. Reading. That's what I did. Sometimes I played with friends. But I was a really shy kid. I'm still pretty shy, but that wears off after years of teaching thirteen-year-old boys. Now I am a busy mother of two girls, and I teach at a junior boarding school, which means that I teach boys at a school where the boys live away from home. They do that because they are dyslexic, and they need extra help learning to read and write. But they are really smart, and a lot of fun to teach.

Here's a picture of me. Now that I'm grown-up, I still do the things that I liked to do when I was a kid. I still draw and read, but instead of playing dress-up, I go for runs in the woods. I have a dog that goes with me -- her name is Radish, and she can talk (but not in English). Radish will have her own book someday; she and I are writing it now.