When my wife (and fellow New Yorker cartoonist) Liza Donnelly and I moved in together nearly 40 years ago, we already had a number of years under our belts as New Yorker cartoonists; we’d already developed daily work habits. Both of us had been working at home for years, but without another cartoonist in the house.
That all changed in 1986 when we rented a tumble down house (shown left) hard up against the Appalachian Trail in Dutchess County, New York. We each took a small room as our work space. Liza worked in a glassed-in porch-like room looking out over the woods behind the house. I settled into a long thin room about ten feet from her room. Our rooms were separated by a kitchen.
This arrangement lasted perhaps a week. It became apparent to both of us that my habit of listening to music, and tapping my feet as I listened, was the opposite of what Liza was used to as she worked. And so she moved her work room upstairs to a space we weren’t using, and there she happily worked until we moved further upstate to a small old farmhouse with an outbuilding, shown below.
Liza moved into the outbuilding after some wallboards and bookshelves went up, and modern electrical wiring was put in (the building once housed our hamlet’s general store and post office, established in 1812. The post office operated until 1908. The general store until the 1940s). The building’s upstairs, we were told by an elderly gent who delivered our firewood, used to be, when he was a young man, a space for boxing matches, and a dance hall. Seems like a great vibe combo for a cartoonist’s work space. Her studio is charming, but it’s not insulated. The wood stove that heats it is good for mild winters. When the temperature sinks into the teens, Liza works in our home.
Working under the same roof has changed since we worked together in the tumble down home in the 1980s. In a way, we’ve reversed habits. I play music while I work, but not anywhere as much as I once did. Mostly I prefer silence (headphones come in handy when I need to hear something). Liza’s plugged into various kinds of social media all day long. In the coldest days of Winter, she usually works no more than twenty feet from where I work. We’re in separate rooms on either side of a narrow hallway. Occasionally I’ll hear a phone conversation, or is it a podcast? — I don’t really try to hear. It’s a pleasant sound that I can work to. We established long ago that our work lives are separate. I don’t talk to her about what drawings I’m working on, and she doesn’t talk to me about what drawings she’s working on. We keep our cartoon bubble times intact, as they must be. We’ve been asked over the years What’s it like living with another cartoonist? Are you two laughing at each other’s drawings all day long? Do you compare notes?, etc., etc. The simple answer is that, while we work, we’re together alone, or alone together, under one roof, sometimes.
I was lucky to marry a writer. For 14 years we collaborated on a one page feature for Atlantic Monthly called “First Encounters.” We worked in different ends of our loft. Her space was near the refrigerator, so Nancy always knew when I was trying to avoid work by noshing.