It’s about a boy who breaks his arm twice, which prevents him from doing what he loves best and makes him question his luck. It includes a winter full of blizzards. There are references to the way that relationships can pull us through a dark season. And questions about destiny and fate emerge.

Mostly, I had fun making this.

Over the winter, partly because of D’s broken bones, the boys and I discovered calcium powder packs. We poured the pink dust into our ice water in the mornings and felt virtuous chugging it down. This phrase, “BONES, YOU’D BE PRETTY FLOPPY WITHOUT THEM,” came from the side of the box.  I doubt I would have even noticed it, were it not for the work-in-progress.

One of the things I love about collage is the way that repeating and colliding images that are at hand always generate surprises.

I like the spine of the notebook making another (initially unintentional) reference to bones. In the complete drawing of the befuddled-looking boy (from a book illustrated by Carolyn Haywood), he is staring staring at a chair with a jacket on it, which is how it ended up in these pages.