Hi, I’m Stephen, from Bend, Oregon. And Bend was a very bright, desolate place of endless possibilities when I was a boy; entertainment included walking along the highway, “going into town”, digging in the dirt and conducting anthropological explorations of the surrounding BLM land, DRAWING and DRAWING and using the blender or the telephone (back then, the phone could ring and ring and ring and ring and ring forever until the caller had to give up and find something else to do), or calling the oldies station to request an obscure song like Sam the Sham & the Pharaohs’ “Little Red Riding Hood” under the assumed identity of an undervalued classmate or something like that.
The movie theater was the best place to go, either to really watch a film (from not the widest selection) or to walk around the strip mall and browse comic books or punch each others’ shoulders in the Kmart. Riding bikes on the rural routes or stapling copper wire to the roof or hiding behind an elk pelt until discovered or betrayed or wrestling the dogs or pushing one another into the clay-bottom pond or drinking Stewart’s ginger beer or walking in the pasture with the horses and other transient and assorted livestock or listening to bootlegged records or, jeeze, anything – we did anything. My favorite thing was writing and producing bad movies with Ryan Richardson, my best friend. There was a lot of pretending, creative engineering and misappropriation, and we were the experts at it.
Eventually, a driver’s license let us to do all of the above things AND MORE, but in a moving car, often in neutral downhill over snow or with the headlights off at midnight on sheets of ice.
Of course I went to college, and got my BFA in art and music theory/composition (double-majored; impressive, no?) from Linfield College, where I held the coveted, much-envied and (thanks entirely to my unique form of brilliance) consternation-inducing title of Cartoonist at the college paper, The Linfield Review, for all 4 years.
It’s not at all an exaggeration to say that I’ve always drawn and I’ve always written stories. Even in Europe I drew and wrote stories. Even during a 5-year period of post-college early retirement and adriftment in an attic in Portland, Oregon, working as a project assistant (read: making copies) for a fantastic bunch of engineers and freelancing for The Oregonian and getting married and doing other things, I drew and wrote stories.
I live in Berkeley, California now, still writing and still drawing, and getting my MFA in illustration at The Academy of Art University in glorious San Francisco. Katheryne Aurora is my daughter’s name and we named the cat Marcus. It suits him.