A worthwhile memory

❤️

So wonderful - thanks for your look at the process of becoming you and passing it on

What a lovely experience this was

I loved reading this. It’s one of the great pleasures of my life to make sure all my friends kids have all the books that impacts me as a kid. Maybe they won’t mean as much to them as they did to me but the possibility that they will makes it all worth it

When I was 12 and visiting my grandma for 4 months, it was pretty lonely and I didn't know anyone. A kind woman at church brought me the "Emily of New Moon" series by LM Montgomery (three whole books!!) because I told her I liked to read. I still have it! What a gift it is to provide a book for someone. I loved this comic and I love the view outside of the inn ... it definitely is daydream material.

💜Thank you for this, Kate.

Love this little story. Thank you.

OMG this is so good! I could read your autobiographical comics forever.

This was so sweet, thank you for sharing it with us!

I was so touched by this, thank you.

Omg. I loved the Belgariad as a kid! And ya- I feel you I remember thinking the same thing with a babysitter I had- the biggest thing I remember about her is that she told us stuff about her life like we were her peers, and treated us like people, instead of like these inferior beings she had to care for to get to the sweet promise of cash. I also remember thinking to myself that I wanted to make kids I babysit feel like that too. - and now I’m an education assistant lol. But i think you nailed it! Kids just want to be heard

I didn't think I would get emotional about this and then the print of the painting at the end, oh my heart.

Oh I LOVED The Belgariad as a kid

I love this story. We all need people like these (and you!) in our lives, who can boost our passions and not punch down on our dreams.

This was so beautiful and inspiring! Thank you for sharing it.

This is so, so beautiful, thank you for sharing your wonderful self a little bit. I don’t know where these tears are coming from…

These comics made me so nostalgic.

Hah, oh man, this totally brought me back to the summer i worked in the food court at the mall at 14. I had to pay off a phone bill from leaving the dial up Internet connected to a long distance number overnight 🤦‍♀️. I would visit the Borders on my lunch break when I had enough saved up, being able to buy a book felt so luxurious. There were no new Magic the gathering novels out so the clerk suggested the belgariard, and I was hooked!

Thank you for this great story !

Immediately shared this with my friend as I was visiting his house with his adorable about-to-turn-one-year-old child. The friend who handed me two David Eddings books early in our friendship.

We had the same groovy covers of The Belgariad. I remember that exact feeling of reading those books for the first time, just total immersion, gobbling them up. Despite the real life horror show that David and Leigh Eddings were, I love finding other people who experienced their books so intensely, like I did!

Everything i read of yours is so impacting.

Beautifully told. When I was a teenager I used to work in our family's small, cramped cafe where, depending on the shift I worked the kitchens or served tables. One regular customer noticed me reading a Sherlock Holmes paperback in-between. We talked a little about it while I poured their coffee, and that was it. The next week they brought in their old copy of the complete collected stories for me. Bloody hard backs s well. Wouldn't take no for an answer. I was so delighted. And now I've been delighted by this. It captures the feeling of working in food service perfectly, including those snatched moments for taking breath, and thinking.

This is beautiful! It reminded me a lot of my lotr summers (post Hollywood movies, but they still weren’t really cool) when I made bows and arrows out of sticks and string, and wandered the woods imagining I was making my way to Rivendell (before the ticks got really bad) …and just a little aside, was your charity shop “the opportunity shop” on mainstreet behind the ultramar?? Lol

I know that the pace of publishing requires us all to keep looking ahead always, but I’m a bookseller and just this morning a coworker and I were raving about your work to someone who was buying a copy of Ducks. It was very nice.

l

I loved receiving books as a kid, and I love giving books out to kids as an adult with the means to do so.

What a delightful set of memories! Both the new and the old. Do you ever wander around slightly afraid of what casual interactions will be a formative life experience for the kids around you? I'd been doing ok on the policy of treating everyone with dignity and trying to meet them where they are, but I've still been surprised by both kids and adults. Like growing up heating the house with wood and firesetting being my chore from the age of 7 or so, then finding out mid-fire-laying that my older goddaughter didn't know how to strike a match and had never seen actual flames before. She clearly felt she had unlocked a magical level of adulthood when she got the knack and we celebrated by toasting s'mores (inside, but still). Little things that grow into legends from a different perspective.

This is so touching and beautiful.

These are good tears welling up in my eyes. Thank you for the memory of being unafraid to be seen with the things I loved.

I also really enjoyed the Belgariad as a kid, although it can be tough to read as an adult. There were so many important books set in my path by caring grown-ups, it's a noble calling.

This is such a wonderful memory! Thank you for sharing it, and for encouraging those camp kiddos!

That is an awesome story. Good on you encouraging that kid! I had a librarian in middle school who took that kind of care with me- got me on to Andre Norton and Susan Cooper, amongst others...

😍 My first memory of LotR is of my dad’s set of Ballantine paperback editions with the Barbara Remington covers. I loved the images and, later as a teen, I had a wall-sized poster of them in my room. I’m lucky that my dad was a sci-fi nut; I got introduced to a lot of great writers through him, but, despite dad’s Tolkien collection, it was my D&D buddies that turned me on to most fantasy!

Absolutely fantastic. Thank you for experiencing, creating, and sharing.

It’s times like this that I wished I had a summer job as a teen though I know now I wouldn’t have made it through.

🥹

Not one dry eye in the house.

Love this story, and it is always nice to hear from you, you are amazing

What a really lovely story!

Thank you. Thank you now, thank you always. You take your time, phoenix.

thank you, Kate ♥️

Well, this for sure made me cry, which I was feeling a bit silly about until I read the comments and learned that I am very far from alone. Which honestly seems like a very fitting addendum to the comic. “I didn’t know I could just be myself and it would be fine.” 😭 Thank you, Kate!

Perfectly stated. Nearly all of us had an adult who took interest in us and encouraged us. Now we have the joy of paying that forward.

Your autobiographical stuff is so beautiful. So deftly observed. Thank you for sharing.

It is such a special thing to participate in that chain: being a young person who is seen/initiated into important cultural touchstones by an older person, and then later on getting to be the older person seeing and initiating. Thanks for sharing your gorgeous account of this phenomenon.

This is lovely and very relatable to me. As a kid I could struggle to relate to people and learning that shared interests were potentially an end-around the social complexities I didn't understand was a powerful and important discovery

I didn't want this comic to end. <3

you're the best.

just gorgeous. and i mean, i'm living proof that you've been practicing what you preach since at least the livejournal days. you've always, from my vantage, modeled and displayed an overwhelming respect for fellow humans and how important even the smallest available connection is worth presenting in trade, with love and gratitude. it's gorgeous to glimpse a facsimile of its roots, like a unicorn-tracing of yggdrassil. - 🩵evin (they made me merge my subscriber and publisher names, i am grumpy but dont care enough to fiddle with it).

That is lovely and wonderful and very worthwhile indeed.

What a lovely story!

This was such a lovely memory. Thanks for sharing it with us, Kate. I have no doubt that you are an inspiration to the next generation💜

Beautiful!!! Loved this.

Kate this is fantastic. Whatever creative doldrums you might be feeling, know that you just moved a 43-year-old man to joyful tears as he rode the subway. Thank you. Also, my own version of this "being seen through book recommendations" was this one comic shop clerk who nudged me away from only superhero stuff to Vertigo and other books in the early 90s. I'll never forget when I was 12, he handed me the TPB of J O'Barr's The Crow and said "I think you'll really get this." And that vote of confidence from an adult meant so much and made me feel so seen.

That's a great story. I like the incorporation of photos with the drawn images, especially the one with cartoon-Katie looking up at the painting in the inn.

It honestly feels ridiculous that for the minuscule amount I signed up for each month that I get such touching, impactful stories. Thank you!

Wonderful that you are encouraging the next generation.

Kate I didn't need to get emotional before work 😭😭😭😭

Lovely story Kate, thank you!