It was 2011 and Ashlyn, an illustrator and adventurer, packed up her life in Toronto and moved to Los Angeles. She didn’t know anyone in the city, and thought she’d start volunteering with a local nonprofit organization, called 826LA, inside an old building next to a little garden on Venice Boulevard. Little did she know, her journey would take her through leaps in her creativity and career, enable her to build a community of friends, inspire her to lead her own creative workshops for young students, and, at one of those workshops, meet the love of her life.
13 years later, as Valentine’s Day approaches, Ashlyn reflects on what it means to live and love in LA, and how spending time with kids in the community to nurture their creativity helped her create her own “big little world.”
When I moved to LA, I started working for Jibjab and making eCards. I really wanted to tell longer stories and get a chance to explore characters more deeply. I started working for animation studios like Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network, and have published and contributed to almost a dozen picture books and graphic novels. Getting someone to give money for my stories has been a real thrill!
My favorite animation project is a show called Jessica’s Big Little World, on MAX. It’s super funny and diverse and we got a chance to just allow Jessica to be quirky and weird. I also did a show at Netflix that I really enjoyed, an interactive choose your own adventure show, called We Lost Our Human. The process of creating that show is way harder and weirder than you think it’ll be. Whenever kids ask me what TV shows I’ve worked on, I say, ‘a lot of stuff you’ve never heard of. But I know people who worked on Spongebob’ and they’ll be like “Yeahhhhhhh!”
Ashlyn wrote and illustrated her first book, “Are We There, Yeti?” about a group of kids on a bus (driven by a yeti) who just can’t wait to get to their destination. When they do, adventure awaits! She also published a series about a duo, Shelby & Watts, that embarks on many adventures and uses their deductive skills and scientific knowledge to solve environmental mysteries. Thinking back to her earliest creative endeavors, Ashlyn says, “when I was a kid, I had this long-running comic series in elementary school about two bank robbers. I’ve always really liked animals, so a lot of my stories have animals in some form or another.”
Ashlyn started volunteering at 826LA at the same time as she entered the publishing and bookmaking world. “My mom is a librarian, and I missed books. And I really like kids. I wanted to do something outside of work. And there was a period of time when I first moved to LA that I missed community a lot. In LA, especially if you’re a transplant, you can feel like you’re not connected with any type of community. I first heard of 826LA at a Fiona Apple concert, when she started singing that gummy bear song from Chickens in Love, an album written by 826LA students. It was so strange and cool, and the song was so catchy!”
Immediately drawn in by Fiona Apple’s concert interlude and the discovery of 826LA’s Time Travel Mart, Ashlyn started volunteering at workshops – her first one was working with students to make a recipe book for witches.
I thought, ‘this is so fun! It’s not even work!’” Ashlyn ran multiple workshops after that, and worked independently to develop 10 different creative curriculums and fun projects for students and volunteers to immerse themselves in.
One such workshop was her first ever “Create Your Own Superhero” project at UCLA’s Hammer Museum, where she met Grant Pardee, a writer, who would soon become a co-facilitator in workshops and (romantic) co-partner in life. Ashlyn recalls:
I was wearing a Superman outfit. I was the goofiest.
He was a volunteer.
He had been through a bad breakup and was looking for something to do.
He did the worksheet with the kids and made a superhero called Minus Man, who was brilliant at subtraction.
I thought that was so fun and creative.
He was a great volunteer.
He messaged me after and asked if he could take me on a date.
I thought, “YES!”
Ashlyn and Grant, a match made in 826LA-Volunteer-Cohort-Heaven, connected over their love of comics, and they did numerous workshops together and even created one of their own, centered on journaling through making comics. They married on November 3, 2018 at the Women’s Twentieth Century Club in Eagle Rock.
“In a big city like LA, it’s hard to meet and connect with people. The people I’ve volunteered with through the years are now my friends. My sense of community has grown a lot. The nature of being young in LA can be quite isolating, because LA is a sprawling city of cities. But it offers such a variety of stuff – it’s so hard to put into words. It is not an easy place to love. You have to put in work to get stuff back. But when you do, there is so much to discover, hidden gems everywhere.”
Recalling some of her favorite memories, Ashlyn said, “I just love the moment when the kids staple their comic books and run off to share it with their friends. When [they] are excited to share something they’ve created, it’s such a good feeling.”
Ashlyn is also a proud member of the Future Bestsellers Club. “It is my favorite. I would do covers for the chapbooks and [826LA] would send them to me. I love the books. They are so inspiring, and there is always a story in each book that makes me smile and laugh out loud. They are such a joy to have in my home.”
Ashlyn and her husband Grant live in a home that is just about equidistant from both of 826LA’s Time Travel Marts with their eight cats (you read that correctly), and continue finding joy in volunteering and creating together.