Response to Miami Book Fair Event #2

     Today, Sunday the 20th, I attended the Child's-Eye View: Memories and Memoirs of Youth panel, where Emil Ferris, Tom Hart, and Meags Fitzgerald discussed this subject and relating it to their most recent works. Towards the beginning of the session, Emil Ferris provided a great response to the opening question "Why kids?"; she responded with, "The perspective of a child is a very pure perspective, they get to see things in the periphery." I highly agree with this statement and can relate to it because I've been spending a lot of time with my two younger cousins lately (one is two and the other one is five) and just being around them and observing how they interact with their surroundings is rather refreshing. They remind me that a lot of these superficial things that we worry about is 100% fiction. I was interested in the the different backstories of the authors' that inspired these memoirs. All three of them approached the task of telling a story differently but they could all agree on one thing when it comes to boiling all of the ideas that they're trying to convey down to one piece, they all agreed that one must keep the hand and mind busy, live in the moment(in the work) and find a way.
     Hearing each of the three of the authors explain their method approach and choices of mediums further informed me about our current topic. They all tailored their mediums to best portray his narrative as effectively as possible. Emil Ferris' story is about a young girl living in 60s Chicago so she chose to use regular paper and a ball point pen to illustrate her whole book to give it a diary-like quality. Tom Hart acknowledged that he was technically not the most talented illustrator so he relied on his strong sense of drive to carry his narrative all the way through, he said that he enjoys letting "the brute attempts work its way out". In her graphic novel "Long Red Hair", Meags Fitzgerald uses duo-tone to color her story; she chose to do so because the her main character deals with two sense of self and the duality of things, that's why I think it's so interesting that she considered the push and pull factor that the duo tone would create.