Exploded View

"Exploded View: A Memoir with Diagrams is exactly that. Using public domain images altered to hold the text, these "graphic" essays play with the conventions of telling a life story, and with how illustration and text work together in print. Like a graphic novel, the story is in not only the text, but also in how that text interacts with the images that accompany it. Diagrams were an important part of Parsons's childhood. His father was an oilfield mechanic, and in his spare time he is also a woodworker, an automotive mechanic, a welder, and an artist. His shop has countless manuals with "exploded view" parts directories that the author would flip through constantly. Whether it was a transmission he was putting back together, a diesel engine on location, or the woodworking instructions for a baby cradle, he had a visual guide to help him along. The individual essays in this memoir attempt to do the same thing. This memoir distinguishes itself from others in its "graphic" element--the appropriated diagrams, instructions, and "exploded view" inventory images--that Parsons has used. They help guide the reader's understanding of the piece, giving them a visual anchor for the story and add a technical aspect to the lyric essays that they hold. This mixture of the machine-like and the lyrical, I hope, helps the reader understand the author's world more fully--a world where art comes in the form of a welding torch, where creativity involves finding new ways to use old machines, where it isn't so easy to delineate between right-brain and left-brain thinking"--