The Story Behind the Image That Inspired My New Book

Logan’s Corner writing prompt response: “It all started with a photograph”

Last spring I found a pile of frames for 4x6" photographs in the “free stuff” pile in my apartment where people in the building sometimes leave items they no longer want. As an artist, I’m always grabbing free frames. I took them upstairs and dug out my old photos from the late ’70s through the early 2000s, and I picked out some stuff to hang on my walls.

I hung them all over the apartment. All the 4x6 photos on the wall are by me, but some of the art and larger photos are by other artists I’ve purchased from. Most of them were taken in the early 2000s, but a couple of them are from the ’90s, including one I hung in the kitchen of World Youth Day 1993. It was shot in a Colorado desert.

That was how my creative vision started. Last spring I was busy working on an art exhibit at Out Of The Blue Art Gallery which had two in-person shows in May and June, and then I spent the summer finishing up my autobiography, “I Write the System.” I published my autobiography in late August with no plans for any more books except maybe a children’s book about my cat.

I was cooking in the kitchen one day over the summer and looking at the picture from World Youth Day, fascinated by the size of the crowd. We walked seven miles into the desert on a hundred-degree day to reach a festival bigger than anything I’ve ever seen. We were all there to see Pope John Paul II give mass. I couldn’t even begin to guess how many people were there. I just Googled it and it was somewhere around “a million young people.” I don’t know if that counts for the adults who went too, but the desert was a sea of people as far as the eye could see in every direction, and tourists like myself were not prepared for the altitude and dehydration, along with the extreme temperature drop after the sun went down. People were passing out all over the place.

I mentioned my two-week cross-country trip to see the pope as a teenager in my autobiography. It was a profound experience. I was a troubled fourteen-year-old, already dealing with addictions and PTSD, plus my confusing sexuality. It was on this trip to see the pope that I began to question whether I might be gay because I had strong sexual feelings for some of the girls on the trip. I also had my first psych hospital admission just a couple of months after returning, and I left my suburban public high school to attend an alternative school in the city.

As I looked at the photo and thought about the trip and what a crazy story it all was, I thought to myself “I’m gonna write a fiction book strongly based on what I can remember from that trip, and I’ll call it ‘Good Catholic Kids.’” It’s an ironic title because I got into all kinds of trouble.

I also had the idea that I wanted to turn it into a screenplay someday because it would make a great movie, much more so than my autobiography. This was just a two-week trip. I envisioned that it would be kind of like “Almost Famous,” “Dazed and Confused,” “Mid90s,” “But I’m A Cheerleader,” and “Saved!” all combined… a rebellious Catholic coming of age/coming out story.

I started writing it right around Christmas and I finished the first draft a few weeks ago. I’ve been working on some other projects while I let it breathe so I can come back to it with fresh eyes, but I’m excited about it. So far it’s 64,000 words but I’m planning to beef up the scenes with more dialogue. I just wanted to write down the foundation. I’m excited about it though because it’s the first fiction book I’ve written, and I wasn’t sure I’d be able to write fiction. I mostly write true stories of my life, but I wouldn’t have been able to remember enough details from a two-week trip in 1993 to fill an entire book. I had to make it fiction, but I used a lot of truth too. I feel a sense of freedom and excitement about all the potential books I can now write knowing that I can still make shit up. It felt almost like playing make-believe did when I was a child. It was so much fun and I think the readers are gonna enjoy it more than my other stuff too. I’m hopeful.

One of the things I’ve been doing is trying to come up with a cover for it, even though it won’t be published for quite a while. I still have a long way to go, but I wanted to use the photo that inspired me as the cover because it’s worth a thousand words. The problem with it, however, is that by itself with the title, “Good Catholic Kids,” kind of looked like a religious book and would likely attract the exact wrong people and turn the exact right people away.

I made the picture kind of psychedelic looking but that still wasn’t quite enough.

I thought to myself, what can I do to make people see that it’s not a religious book?

I thought about my famous Smoking Nuns drawing which is one of my biggest selling product designs.

By itself, it was lacking the feel of the book, but I thought if I could somehow put the smoking nuns on a big screen at the festival, that might work.

I’m not 100% sure if this will be the final product but after about a dozen variations, I decided that I liked this best…

And so that is the story of how “Good Catholic Kids” came to be. I don’t wanna give too much away, but while I did not explore my queer sexuality or come out as gay or trans on the actual trip (even to myself as I was questioning it) the character in the book very much does. It will be relatable for many queer people who were raised in the church, for better and for worse. While it is not an attack on religion in any way, extremely religious people might not like it. At the same time, while it is not religious, it does explore the ideas of spirituality and faith.

Thanks to Logan’s Corner for this awesome writing prompt. I knew exactly what I was going to write when I saw the topic “It All Started With A Photograph,” because the biggest project taking up the last few months of my time was once just an idea sparked by a photo.

Peace.