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Please can you tell us a little about your childhood and background?
I was born in Kansas City, Missouri, the oldest of three children. As a toddler, I was diagnosed as being profoundly deaf, the result of my mother contracting rubella, or German measles, during her pregnancy. As a child, I was fitted with my first hearing aid and enrolled in a special preschool for hearing-impaired and deaf children, during which time I learned to speak and lip-read with the help of my mother, who by that time had gone back to college to earn her master’s degree in audiology. I was mainstreamed into a regular classroom in the fourth grade and remained in the public school system until I graduated from Olathe (Kansas) North High School.
Was it difficult to adjust to that?
It wasn’t all that much of a challenge for me because I already felt very comfortable around most hearing people, especially my family. I have rarely ever had any problems communicating with most people, and vice versa, and that carried over into a mainstreamed classroom. If I had grown up using sign language as my main form of communication, it would have been considerably more difficult to become integrated into a hearing environment – but since my parents insisted that I learn how to speak and lipread, I didn’t have all that much trouble adjusting.
How were you treated by hearing children? Were you picked on for being deaf?
Yes, this happened more in grade school, especially with boys who made fun of me, but they were pretty isolated incidents for the most part. Once I got into junior high school, I was treated pretty much like anyone else and nobody made my deafness an issue then.
Did you study further than high school?
Yes, I went on to Washington, D.C., where I earned a B.A. in English at Gallaudet College, the world’s only liberal-arts institution of higher learning for the deaf and hearing-impaired.
When and how did you first become an illustrator?
It was at a very young age when I discovered my passion for art and horses, two loves that naturally went hand in hand. Quite often during class I would take a pencil and draw realistic sketches of horses in the margins of my notebook when I was supposed to be paying attention to the teacher. It wasn’t until I was a sophomore at Gallaudet that I found out I could draw cartoons, and Hayseed was “born” in 1981 on the college campus there. I have been drawing him ever since.
What is the inspiration behind Hayseed?
Well, Hayseed is loosely based on an Appaloosa gelding I owned as a teenager, named Rainbeau Shayne, or Shayne, as I called him. Hayseed actually has a number of influences. The one thing that inspired me to draw him in the first place was a Bernard Kliban cartoon of a cat wearing tennis shoes on all four feet. I also have a very old birthday card with a horse on the front that must have been in the back of my mind when I drew Hayseed for the first time. When I came across it after Hayseed was created, I was amazed at the similarities between Hayseed and that greeting card horse.
Who and what has influenced you artistically?
My early artistic influences came from Walt Disney’s classic animated films, and more recently, Pixar Animation Studios’ brilliantly innovative 3D comedies and Japanese animation director Hayao Miyazaki (“Spirited Away”