Wichita cartoonist’s new book centers on inspiration in the details of everyday life

Wichita cartoonist Grant Snider finds inspiration in the ordinary details of everyday life: walks with his children, morning light and the way his mind tends to wander.

Once a week, Snider shoehorns his observations into the confines of a comic, usually multi-panel and one or two pages. It’s a practice he has observed for more than a decade. Some of his comics first appeared in publications such as the New York Times Review of Books and the New Yorker. All of his work is collected on Snider’s website, Incidental Comics, which he has maintained since 2009.

Snider’s third collection, “The Art of Living: Reflections on Mindfulness and the Overexamined Life” collects more than 100 of these comics. It will be available for sale nationwide Tuesday, and Snider will mark the occasion with a virtual event hosted by Watermark Books.

The book documents Snider’s attempts to stay present despite the challenges of a busy life — he’s both a working orthodontist and a married father of five — and the persistent distraction of technology.

“Mindfulness has different connotations, for different people” Snider says, “but one definition I like is, ‘paying attention on purpose.’ My spin on that is ‘being intentional about intention.’

“When I sit down with a pen and paper, a lot of the time I’m looking inward and being attentive to what I’m thinking and feeling at the time.

“The flip side of that … is trying to look more outside myself. Going on a walk, jotting down an interesting bird, or a tree I saw, and taking those and connecting them later in a comic strip.”

The book isn’t proscriptive, Snider says. Instead, “I see it as (documenting) my fight to reclaim my own attention through poetry, through walking, through running, through writing and drawing.”

Snider’s cartooning career began when contributed cartoons to the school newspaper when he was a student at the University of Kansas. Later, while studying orthodontics at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, he contributed a weekly comic to the Kansas City Star.

The weekly habit stuck with Snider, though he changed his approach when he and his wife, Kayla, began having children.

“When my daughter was born, almost 10 years ago now, I was like, ‘OK, I have to hunker down and find the time when it’s gonna happen, otherwise it won’t happen,” he says.

For years thereafter, he made himself be a morning person. In 2019, he became a part-time orthodontist in order to devote more daylight hours to creative work. He still enjoys the switching of gears between creating comics and the challenge of orthodontics, which he likens to playing chess. Besides, time at an artist residency and the enforced pause of the pandemic taught him that more time doesn’t necessarily translate into getting more work done.

However, Snider discovered that extra time did open the possibility of projects longer than a single-page comic. Now Snider spends part of his work week barricaded in his art studio (which doubles as a child’s bedroom), his laptop and phone out of reach. When he completes a comic, the first person to see it is Kayla, always his first reader.

Before the Sniders started a family, he worked on “weekends and random evenings.” Snider worried that his creative output would be diminished, but “it actually just got more focused,” he says.

His growing family also also changed his perspective on the world. “Simple Pleasures” is a comic inspired by taking a walk with his three-year-old.

“That can be a really frustrating experience, because you’re trying to go on a walk … but the three-year-old keeps looking down and saying, ‘Oh, there’s this rock, there’s this leaf, here’s this big stick I can swing, here’s this puddle I can stick my foot in(to),’” he says. “It’s almost like they’re the most mindful creature or person there is. Their nose is in every significant and insignificant thing, and you’re forced to step out of yourself and be with them for a second….

“I think there’s some humor there, the pull between the kid wanting to be into everything and the parent trying to go about their day.”

Snider makes his weekly comics about whatever is on his mind, but when he began to look back on his body of work, he found “though lines” reflected in the themes of each of his collections: “The Shape of Ideas: An Illustrated Exploration of Creativity” was published in 2017. His literary-themed comics are collected in 2020’s “I Will Judge You By Your Bookshelf.”

Snider has also illustrated five children’s books, two of which he wrote. The lyrical “One Boy Watching” will be released in June. It is Snider’s “most ‘Kansas’ book,” which he based on his memory of riding the bus to grade school in Mulvane. He jokes it could have been called “Two Boys Watching,” but he left out his twin brother, Gavin, a Brooklyn-based illustrator and designer. The brothers have been drawing together since they were small, and they still look to each other for editing and feedback.

Snider plans to write more poetry books for children, which seems like a natural progression for someone who describes himself as a longtime fan of Shel Silverstein and a regular reader of poetry.

Mary Oliver, Naomi Shihab Nye and Langston Hughes are among the poets who inspired work in “The Art of Living,” Snider frequently uses rhyme, slant rhyme and wordplay in his comics, which might strike some readers as illustrated poems.

“They’re organized pretty similarly: poems by lines, comics by rows and panels.,” Snider says. “I think a lot of it is just trying to find a structure to put these various thoughts into.

“And rhyming is kind of fun, too.”

If You Go

What: Virtual Pub Day Event with Grant Snider hosted by Watermark Books

When: 6 p.m. on April 5

Tickets are $18.99 and include a signed copy of “The Art of Living.” More information at watermarkbooks.com/event