About the Book:

Falling Off the Sidewalk reflects on a college freshman’s fall / jump from his upper-story dormitory window.   Three texts (a poem, a scripted monologue, and a newspaper account) are interwoven to explore and mythologize this singular event.  Constructed from handmade paper and specially-crafted hardware, the book implies a concrete landscape of isolation.  

This text began in book arts class, with an assignment to create a book that utilized Shel Silverstein’s well-known “Where the Sidewalk Ends” poem as the text.  As most readings I had seen of the poem were highly sentimental, I was cranky about the assignment – but that led me to seek alternative ways to construct meaning, and in pairing that text with two others for this book, the actual depth of Silverstein’s poem came forward and helped to tell a different story.  My eyes were opened then to the vast potential of artist’s books to do exactly that – change the narrative we think we know into something complex, layered and newly meaningful.

About the Texts:

Shel Silverstein’s iconic poem was published when I was in elementary school, and rumor had it that the eponymous book soon became the volume most likely to be stolen from libraries.  What a great compliment!  And his ability to be irreverent and subversive – and real, and relevant - within the confines of children’s literature still stands as a testament to what kids might really like to read.

My husband Christopher provided another text – a monologue that he had written during a graduate playwriting seminar – which I edited just a bit to make its length work with the poem.  He also provided a yellowed copy of the clipped-out story from the newspaper in Santa Cruz that had reported on the original incident, which was also edited for length and expanded with a few additional details.

About the Materials and Processes: 

Falling Off the Sidewalk uses handmade paper cast from newsprint pulp.  The two sides of each page were cast and prepared separately before being glued together with Yes paste, with 19-gauge steel wire and pieces of wire from industrial snowplow brushes running between the pages.  The wires are wrapped around threaded rods and held in place by a series of nuts.  My memory of the fonts used departed with an old laptop, but my best guess it that they are Baskerville, Skia, Marker Felt, and American Typewriter.  The text was digitally typeset, laser printed and transferred using a xylene solvent.