Note: This FAQ page is a constant work in progress, as is most of the site. As I get new questions, think of things I might want to make sure my readers know, and invent new answers and/or questions for those answers, I’ll be adding them here. If you can’t find an answer to whatever it is that you’re curious about, send me an email and I might just add it here.
Check back soon!
What Is A Piper, And What Does She Do? (About Me)
It’s worth noting that you can view my "About Me" page here for most of the answers one would have to the question "Who is Piper?". For the rest, here’s this.
Who are you, exactly?
I’m Piper, and I’m a cartoonist.
I’ve worked in illustration for most of my adult life and been making scribbles of some variety for the vast majority of my life before that. I’ve also been a trucker, a chef, a programmer, a janitor, a radio DJ, a touring musician, and a bunch of other things at some point or another to pay the bills.
Mostly, I’m just a storyteller with a penchant for exaggeration and fish-stories. Hence why I call myself a cartoonist as opposed to anything else–even when I’m not drawing, I’m telling big stories and painting pictures with words and sound. Hell, given my mannerisms, I’m basically a cartoon character myself.
How old are you?
Man, didn’t your mother tell you not to ask a lady questions like that? I know I’m not much of a lady, but still.
why y'all damn kids askin me this foolishness
What do you look like?
An idiot, mostly.
As for a serious answer to that one…I go out of my way these days to try and make sure there aren’t too many photos of me online–half because I’m visibly trans and work in media, and half because I just usually don’t like how I look and don’t think it’s relevant to my work. There’s a reason why blind auditions have become the standard in symphonic music–there’s often very little correlation between an artist’s output and their physical form, and you can know me and my way of being better through my work than you ever can through the pound of flesh I inhabit in meatspace.
The little self-portrait doodle on the banner is fairly accurate, if that helps at all. I’m rarely seen without coffee, my pipe, and my headphones.
Where can I see your art/check out your music/listen to you on the radio?
There’s a bunch of links, lists, and illustration samples over here on my main website.
I tuned into your radio show. Love your voice, but what’s up with your accent?
I’ve often joked that my accent is half Saint Louis hood and half Ozark backwoods. This is mostly correct–I hail from a mix of the rougher parts of both of those places, and there’s also a bit of Mainer thrown in from my time on the East coast, as well as some other bastardizations. The reason it’s so thick, though, comes down to one factor: isolation.
The thing about accents is that they’re mostly shorthand for whatever language you happen to be speaking. I’ve spent a lot of time traveling alone, and when you talk to yourself like a crazy person as much as I do, you tend to talk to yourself exclusively in that shorthand. And if you already had an accent to begin with…well, isolation tends to make it worse. Hence why it’s a bit thicker and a bit more wonky than a lot of other Missourians.
…I’d add “hence why I sound a bit crazier than most Missourians”, but let’s be honest, we’re all kind of unhinged.
What are you supposed to be, exactly? What’s going on with the whole gender thing you got goin’ on there?
I’m a talking cat, baby. Don’t think about it too hard.
piper irl
That doesn’t help.
Skill issue.
How am I supposed to refer to you?
By name or by she/her pronouns.
But you have the femboy pride flag on your site! Doesn’t that make you a boy?
Nope.
Oh, so you’re a woman?
Nuh-uh.
Non-binary?
Negatory.
…a furry?
Weirdly enough, no.
. . . that doesn’t make any sense.
Good.
Gender is a performance and I am a cat on a piano
If none of this makes sense to you, I can’t help you. I honestly don’t really want to. If anything, you can probably assume I think it’s funny.
Thing is, to most bigots and a disturbing amount of the “well-meaning” population in general, I’m just a faggot in a skirt and nothing more. The types of ingrates who don’t care for queer folk often don’t give a shit how you got to be who you are, specifically, because they don’t care about queer folk and those details don’t matter. They’re usually just more than happy to disregard you at best or shoot you at worst just for being some flavor of queer, especially if the flavor you are doesn’t fit into whatever pre-defined category they think they can use for their self-serving purposes and nonsense hierarchies.
And because I think those folk (and their insistence upon forcing the mess that is humanity into nonsense categories for their own comfort) are rot garbage, I’m not exactly interested in making who and what i am easily quantifiable, either. If half the world is going to call me a faggot regardless of what I do, then I’m gonna be me and I’m gonna describe me as I see fit. I’m gonna reserve the right to change that explanation as I see fit. And I’m not gonna give one iota of a fraction of a fuck about whether you get it or not.
So yeah. My gender is best described as “cat”, because I’m a feral sneaky thing with mischievous tendencies who wanders about randomly, gets my claws into things I shouldn’t, and generally can’t really be arsed to behave. I’m more femmy and lithe than I am anything else, so I use she-her pronouns. That’s the sum of it.
It may be some nonsense, but so is this whole “gender” thing to begin with, and at least this makes more sense to me than any of the other “available options” in this kyriarchal society.
You don’t have to “get it” and I’d honestly prefer it if you didn’t try to. The crux of the biscuit is that if you’re willing to listen to and value what I have to say, and if you’re willing to describe me as I wish to be described regardless of whether you “get” it, then you’re doin’ great and we’ll probably get on like a house on fire.
Okay, but I think you’re cute. What does that make me? I’m having a crisis here!
It makes you gay, bud. Congratulations. No, your gender presentation doesn’t matter. You’re just gay now and you’re gonna have to live with that. Mazel tov. Your card is in the mail.
me irl
Are you single/available? I must know!
Am I single? At the moment, yes.
Am I available? As far as you–a random person who I’ve probably never interacted with save this blog or my work–are concerned? Probably not, no. Sorry, tiger.
A Damn Fine Cup Of Truck Stop Coffee (A Bit About This Blog)
Why make a blog?
To paraphrase the Allman Brothers Band, I was born a’ramblin’, man.. I have a lot to say that doesn’t neatly fit into the thematic bonds of my books, paintings, or records. I also know full well through experience that I’m at perpetual risk of watching things I say disappear off the Internet if I don’t self-host it.
There’s a lot of reasons for that, and a good portion of those reasons have to do with the walled garden nature of the Internet these days. To put it bluntly, I check a lot of boxes that the Silicon Valley kids make a habit of shadowbanning and de-platforming, the three biggest ones being “visibly trans”, “vocally anarchist”, and “says ‘fuck’ a lot”. Besides, a lot of what I have to say isn’t “advertiser friendly”, doesn’t fit neatly into 240 characters, or isn’t something I want to leave to the mercy of the algorithm to begin with. Hell, the fact that I’m visibly queer is in and of itself an argument against having social media at all. Twitter specifically isn’t exactly kind to girls like me.
I’m also a huge proponent of the free and open web/indie web movements, and I’ve spent most of my life hacking around on Linux systems. It seemed a reasonable jump to just make a lil’ website to put it all on.
Why isn’t your blog on your main website anymore?
I swear too much and that’s my professional portfolio site. That’s about 99% of it.
I also wanted to talk about things that aren’t just about my work. While I am of the school of thought that holds that the things an artist surrounds themselves with, the places they have been and are planning on going–the things that shape their way of being in the world–define their oeuvre, I’m fully aware that isn’t a common outlook, especially among folks that would be reviewing my portfolio for professional reasons.
For that reason, I wanted a clear line of demarcation drawn between “here’s what is functionally my resume” and “here’s me”, and putting it on a separate website with a name I’ve never used for any other project was the easiest way to do so.
What happened to all the old stuff on here? Wasn’t there like, twenty articles back a few years ago?
It’s gone now. Starting over. I’ll probably go through the old work and port over stuff I still like, but I just wanted a fresh start, so here we are.
Why all the footnotes?
I have gotten a LOT of complaints from human editors and grammar-check software alike that my sentences are too wordy and that I go off in too many directions. There’s a lot of times where I want to add tangents to things I’m saying, but when I do an editing pass a few days later I take a look at it and realize it adds nothing to what I’m trying to say, or that it adds something but in an inefficient way. I’ve found that turning those passages into footnotes still keeps the color of the addendum without breaking up the flow of the thoughts I’m trying to convey.
Also, sometimes I just wanna make sure you all have context that you might otherwise miss. I make a lot of random in-jokes and dated references in regular conversations because I’m just one of those types of nerds. (I mean, hell, the titles of these sections are a Homestar Runner reference, a Neil Gaiman short story, and a line from Twin Peaks, respectively.) I also read way too much, and I happen to enjoy dropping random slang, colloquialisms, and antiquated phrasings that I find fun into my ramblings.
For better or for worse, those random references and ten-dollar words are just kind of part of my literary voice at this point. I don’t really want to neuter that part of myself for the sake of readability, but I also want folks to know what that archaic word I just used meant or what that reference was to. Sometimes I just put a link to a dictionary entry, Youtube video, or Wikipedia article directly in place, and sometimes it’s easier to just use a footnote.
What’s up with the domain name?
It fits what I’m on about. Simple as.
I drink a LOT of coffee. As in, an unreasonable amount. Being American and self-employed by most definitions of the word, I don’t have health insurance. And, like most professional artists, I have fairly severe ADHD (among other things that put me squarely in the realm of “neurodiverse”.) Coffee and pipe tobacco are more or less how I self-medicate, and they’re both habits that kind of define me–you very rarely see me without a cup of coffee and either a briar or corncob pipe, a cigar, or my weird pipe/e-cigarette hybrid that I use to get around no-smoking regs.
dale cooper just gets me, maaaaaan
That’s not entirely unique, though; a lot of artists are obnoxiously loud about their coffee drinking problems. Why not “latte.coffee” or something?
Well, to put it simply, I’m working class. I used to be a trucker, and when I haven’t been a trucker I’ve been either nomadic or generally poor. I also spent a lot of my life in and around America’s highway systems in general, including in the I-70 corridor in rural Missouri where most of my accent comes from. I’ve never met a Starbucks whose coffee I enjoy (including during my brief stint as a barista) but I have a fairly sizable collection of Flying J, Pilot, Love’s, Casey’s, and other branded travel mugs from truck stops and fuel stations I’ve been to in my travels.
Hence, truckstop.coffee.
(Also, “damnfine.coffee” was taken. No Twin Peaks reference for me, unfortunately.)
Your work is usually somewhere between “relatively straightforward” and “deadly serious”. What’s with the tone in this blog?
My work’s as serious in its tone as it is because I’ve had a pretty rough life. The vast majority of my personal/solo work is my way of working through the types of difficult emotions and portraying the beauty and pain I’ve seen during a life’s worth of loss and traumatic experiences.
With that stated…wearin’ nothin’ but a hair shirt is no way to dress, man. And this blog is (mostly) about the relatively unserious approach I take to life despite the rough road I’ve had, rather than a depiction of the more fuarrked portions of my life as portrayed through the more serious lens of my art.
Hell, if you’ve missed my foolishness in my work entirely, you’re not looking hard enough. You’re talking to someone that back-ended a relatively serious neo-classical live recording with a sample from the sound check where I tell the sound booth guy I’m planning on playing nothing but Rhianna and then scatted my way through a Bee Gees track.. I regularly open my weekly block on datafruits.fm with samples from old TV shows, Youtube meme mashups (my favorite being this one) and random other nonsense back to back with whatever random tracks I’ve been listening to that week.
As a human being, I’m not known for being serious. Excitable, sure. Overly analytic, absolutely. Obsessive at times, definitely. Do I get far too deep into techniques and theme analysis on here? Darned tootin’. But this website is for me as a human being to talk about my life, my interests, my process, and my way of being in the world, as well as how all of that comes together to influence the final output. A large part of that mix involves me being a goofball.
If you’re expecting nothing but the academic wankery, obscene amounts of gravitas, tightly wound symbolism and narratives, and dry-as-nails studiousness that frames a lot of my other work, I’m afraid I’m going to disappoint you here. This is me writing about my life, and in real life I’m a bit of a goober. Expect some color.
What is a “cartoonist-errant”? Is that like a knight-errant?
Kinda.
er·rant
adjective
-
formal/humorous. erring or straying from the proper course or standards.
eg., “he could never forgive his daughter’s errant ways” -
archaic/literary. traveling in search of adventure.
eg., “that same lady errant”–Oxford Languages
The suffix itself I stole from my sister, Autumn Redacted, who describes herself as a “bioethicist-errant”. It fits me quite well, and that’s why I use it.
I’m not exactly known for doing anything the right way. Or, to put it more accurately, I’m most known for explicitly going out of my way to do things the wrong way on purpose as a joke, or to intentionally figure out how to do things in the “wrong” way in order to create a unique result.
I’m also not exactly what you’d call a typical professional in this field. I got kicked out of high school instead of going to college for art, and spent a lot of my early adulthood getting into some manner of trouble. Most of my “career” experience is in either culinary or some variation of logistics work instead of marketing or communications, and I’m not exactly known for my subtlety or camera-friendliness in a career path monopolized by “personal brands”.
I’ve also spent a good portion of my adult life trying to find new and interesting ways to solve whatever issues the pieces I’m working on are facing. Most of my career output doesn’t fit neatly into any major category as a direct result, and I’ve spent a lot of my career in places you wouldn’t expect to find someone with my profession.
There’s a reason the sidebar of this page displays the glider; I have more in common with hacker culture than I do with most other folks in my field. If there’s a way to break something, I’ll find it just to see how it ticks. And if there’s something interesting to be found in the dissection process, all the better.
(It’s also worth noting that I used to refer to myself as a “professional jackass”–a moniker which works ever so slightly better if the reader knows to use the “playful, chaotic prankster” definition of “jackass” popularized by the television show of the same name. Issue is, most folks don’t, and you could argue that Johnny Knoxville and crew didn’t either. So, cartoonist-errant it is.)
Alright, well, what’s with the rest of the tagline? Why “foolishness”?
My foster grandfather was a fairly big influence on who I grew up to be. He had a farm in rural Missouri on the topmost part of the Ozarks, and that came with it all of the colloquialisms one would expect it to. (Those colloquialisms and his particular accent is the reason I have roughly half of mine, as well, but that’s another topic.) “Quit yer foolishness” was his way of angrily telling me to quit fuckin’ around and being a goofball when I was a kid.
Surprising literally no one, I have never quit either my foolishness or my rambling. Hence, the tagline, as well as my raison d’être in general.
How To Talk To Cartoonists At Parties (How To Get Ahold Of Me And Some Boundaries About Doing So)
The drawings you have on here look pretty dope/Your music sounds pretty cool/I’m a fan of your radio work. Can I hire you to draw stuff for me/compose music for me/narrate my next audiobook?
Sure. Check out my main website for my rates, policies, professional work samples, and all that.
Your blog is dope and I wanted to tell you that/I found something cool you should check out/I wanna send you something. Where can I get ahold of you?
Email is more than welcome if you want to talk about something I’ve written or want to share somethin’ dope with me. If I get enough letters or I end up with a letter that I feel I could write a shitton about, I’ll probably put it in a letter column on here.
If you wanna send me some snail mail, you can do that as well. My current mailing addy is on my website. No pipe bombs or arsenic, please.
plz don't
I think you suck and are wrong and stupid. Where can I get ahold of you to tell you about it?
You can’t. If you send me hate mail, I’ll probably block you. You aren’t making it into the mailbag in a “dunking-on” section, and I probably won’t even read it at all the second I’ve read enough to catch on to your lack of good faith.
As good as I am at writing insults, I didn’t delete my Twitter account just to give that kind of soykaf a soapbox via a different medium. If you wanna say weird, ignorant shit about how angry you are at me for whatever reason, do it into your pillow. I just can’t be arsed these days, man.
You’re hot/I’m confused about why I think you’re hot/I want to be a creep to a random trans person. I also don’t know what boundaries are. Where can I put my thoughts about that?
You can do that into your pillow too, buddy. Just keep it out of my inbox.
We knew each other/dated/were some form of “related” years ago and I haven’t heard from you in a while. Can I email you to get back in touch?
Look, I hate having to put this section here, but I’ve had this happen enough that I want to draw a boundary.
As much as I’d love to put a blanket statement here that states “sure!”, the fact is that I’ve had enough uncomfortable interactions with folks trying to reconnect using my professional contact info that I can’t tell you that. In fact, you should probably assume that all “seeking to reconnect” emails will be blatantly ignored. This is my professional email, after all. I’m sure if you told your therapist or whoever that you decided to pop into someone’s work because you missed them and wanted to regain contact they’d give you a talkin’ to.
If you actually want to get in touch with me and wish to do so in a relatively healthy manner for both of us, comment on one of my social media posts. Odds are, if I want to talk to you or miss you, I’ll respond with something to the effect of “OH SHIT IT’S $NAME” and if we talk back and forth a bit and the vibe’s chill I’ll probably give you one of my many handles I use on various messaging services and we can chat a bit that way. If I don’t, I’ll block you, and you’re free to go about your day. Low stress for everyone involved.
And–at the risk of getting very personal here–if you happen to be a member of the foster family that raised me or my birth family…don’t contact me, for any reason, ever. I don’t know how you’d read my work and think I want to interact with you all these years down the line.
You seem cool, you’re visibly trans which is neat, and I’m having questions about gender stuff. Can I message you about your experiences/ask you for advice?
You can, but I’m going to be honest, I’m not the best person to ask about that.
I’ve unintentionally cracked quite a few eggs in my time, sure, but to be quite frank I haven’t had the best time trying to play mother hen. The vast majority of my experiences as a trans femme have been overwhelmingly negative, both socially and medically, and if you come to me for advice I’m not going to have much life experience that isn’t going to reflect that.
I’m not going to tell you that you shouldn’t transition–hell, I’d be dead if I hadn’t. I will, however, warn you that, if you ask me for advice, I won’t exactly have any warm-and-fuzzies to give you. Add into that the fact that my autistic ass is a bit more blunt than it needs to be in the most mundane of conversations, and you have a recipe for disaster.
There’s plenty of wonderful folks in the trans community that are more than happy to assist newly hatched eggs in coming into their own, and if you need a “mother hen” figure there’s plenty of girls in the community for you to look to. Sadly, as much as as I wish I was, I’m afraid that I’m not the best person for that.
Best I can tell you is that however you feel is more than likely worth exploring, and that, for whatever it’s worth, I’m proud of you for having the courage to confront it and work out those feelings and emotions for yourself. It takes a lot of courage to tackle these types of core questions about one’s identity, and that courage is worth something. You’re worth something too, and don’t let anyone tell you that you’re not.
That about sums it up. If you have any more questions, or just want to say hi, email me. I might just add them to the list here, or I’ll answer ’em in a mailbag post at some point.
me answering mailbag questions
Either way, thanks for spending some time with me today. Stay safe out there, folks.