 of the University of Tennessee Libraries to a truly unique event. I'm Stephen Smith, Dean of Libraries here at the University of Tennessee. Five years have passed since catastrophic wildfires swept through parts of Severe County and the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, destroying woodlands, wildlife, homes and businesses, and taking the lives of 14 people. To anyone in our audience who lost property, who was injured, or who experienced the loss of a loved one, we express our sorrow and condolences for your loss. Healing from such a tragedy is a long process. There were many victims and many heroes on November 23rd, 2016, the days after that tragic event, recording the experiences of those who lived through the tragic events of that day and commemorating. The heroism and compassion was the objective of Rising from the Ashes, an oral history project of the University of Tennessee Libraries with support from the City of Gatlinburg in partnership from the Antiporter Public Library. Drying inspiration from the interviews recorded by this project Rising from the Ashes, our guests this evening, illustrators Paige Braddock, Marshall Ramsey, and Danny Wilson have used their skills as graphic artists to further document the experiences of those who were impacted by these events. If you would like to see, listen and read the interviews of those individuals who were gathered as part of this project, the residents, emergency responders, volunteers, scientists, local professionals, and others, and the stories that inspired our artists, you can visit the Rising from the Ashes website at the link provided with the URL as you see it on the screen before you. Rising from the Ashes, the chimney tops two wildfires in memory and art will be a catalog featuring the creative responses of our artists along with texts by naturalists and Gatlinburg native Steven Lynn Bales which is forthcoming from the University of Tennessee Press. This work as well as the production of a forthcoming digital exhibit has been generously supported by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts and specifically their Our Town Program which funds projects that strengthen communities through artistic and creative engagement. This evening's panel is also generously supported through this program as will be future events and activities. We are grateful that the National Endowment for the Arts recognized the importance of this project and provided support for the artist's work. One of these artists, Marshall Ramsey, will serve as our moderator this evening. Marshall is a two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist whose cartoons and illustrations are syndicated nationally and whose artwork, stories, and posts are frequently shared on social media. By the way, Marshall got his start right here at the University of Tennessee working for the Daily Beacon. Marshall is editor-at-large for Mississippi Today, a non-partisan, non-profit news and media company. He also hosts a weekly radio program and a television program Conversations on Mississippi Public Broadcasting. I am pleased to turn this evening's program over to our very capable moderator, Marshall Ramsey. And Marshall will have the honor of introducing his fellow panelists. Thank you, Marshall. Thank you, Steve. I tell you what, I'm really proud to introduce my fellow illustrators that are so incredibly talented. Number one is Paige Braddock. She's best known for her Eisner-nominated comic strip, Jane's World. It's the first gay-themed comic work to receive online distribution by a national media syndicate in the U.S. Braddock concluded the comic strip after completing its 20-year run in 2018. And to celebrate the groundbreaking comic's 20th anniversary, she released a special anthology with Lion Forge in August, 2010, letters Jane's World. In 2019, it was selected as the Lambda Literary Finalist for this LGBTQ graphic novel. Braddock published the first novel inspired by a comic series in 2016 with Bold Strokes Books. It's also written a series of lesbian romance novels with this publisher under the pen name Missouri Vaughn. Two of her novels won Golden Crown Literary Society Awards in 2019. She of course works with Schultz Enterprises. I'm very envious of her on that. I grew up wanting to draw Snoopy, and by God, she gets to do it every day. And I'm pretty impressed with that as well. And also, too, Danny Wilson's joined us. He's freelance illustrator based in Knoxville. For almost 40 years, he has built a reputation for versatility, illustrating many different styles and genres. And he primarily works as a digital concept artist for event and experience. I can't even speak English today. Marketing as well. He has created work for Disney, Warner Brothers, Netflix, Amazon, Walmart, Coca-Cola, HDTV, Taylor Swift. All right. I can't compete with that, Danny. You win on that one as well. You've done several posters. You did the 2016 Battle at Bristol poster, which is pretty cool. It does a lot of stuff for the University of Tennessee as well. Danny graduated from the University of Tennessee in 1984 with a BFA degree. We met last week up in Knoxville, and it was really cool to get to meet you and your wife Jennifer, and that was a real thrill as well. And I personally hope that working on this project means that both of your talent rubbed off on me a little bit because you're both incredible. Thank you, Marshall. That was a very nice introduction. That was a very highly caffeinated introduction, and I just enjoyed that. I didn't want to take up the whole hour. That caffeine right here. Yeah, I seriously thought about just reading the bios for the whole hour because I pretty much could have covered your whole life, maybe an hour. Both of you have had an incredible career. Let's just go ahead and get started with this question. What's your connection to the Smubbies and some of your favorite memories and so forth, and what was your reaction of the day and the night that the fire swept down off the mountain and into Gatlinburg? Because I know mine, and we'll go ahead and start with you, Danny. Well, my connection with the Smubbies, I grew up in East Tennessee, grew up in Elizabethan, so coming to the Smubbies, coming to Gatlinburg was a lot of times part of our family vacations, family trips. As I started a family, we would take trips into Gatlinburg. We were hiking in the Smubbies, driving around Cades Cove, all those things that people that visit the Smubbies love to do. As a kid, going to Gatlinburg, I remember looking in the windows at the candy stores. One thing I really loved Ripley's, believe it or not. But the thing I really remember is I would look in the art galleries and I would watch the Airbrush T-shirt artists, which fascinated me. So I have a lot of good memories from Gatlinburg as a kid and then as a parent also, take our boys skiing up there and things like that. As far as the fire, when I guess I was aware that there was a fire and kind of keeping, kind of in the peripheral vision, kind of keeping up with it. But, and then just watching the news and thinking, wow, there was a lot of discussions about how did it start and all those things. But then just being really, really shocked at how it spread so quickly. And the scope of it and the amount of damage and devastation that happened. So, from then it was just keeping up with it on the local news. Following certain stories, I remember the fellow that was searching for his family members, they would be interviewed. Some of the footage they would show at the, how big the flames were and talking about how the wind had picked up so much and made it spread so fast. So those are the things I remember just kind of keeping up with it on the side. And then all of a sudden just being shocked at what actually happened and here and the amount of damage that had been done. Yeah, I grew up in Atlanta and my family's from Marival, believe it or not. And I've got this wonderful picture of my grandparents. And I, we think it's from the early 30s, it's before they got married. Yeah, they're sitting there right in front of the chimney, right where the fire started, that's my grandfather and my grandmother. In fact, that's the same grandparents that my cousin Dave Ramsey and I share right there if you ever hear him talking about them. But yeah, I mean, the Smokies were always a huge part of my life growing up because I would come up to Tennessee during the summer and my grandparents would take me to Gatlinburg. And I remember when I brought my own kids up to the candy store and they were making taffies and I was telling my kids, I said, you know, when I was your age, I used to watch this guy make taffy. And the guy looked at me and went, that was me. You know, it was like 30 something years later. I'm like, man, you've been here this whole time. But we have a little cabin out toward Covely Knob, actually, on the Cot County Severe line. And so when the fire hit, you know, my sister and my aunt had been up there right before and they were just telling me how incredibly dry it was and they were predicting high winds and, but I never expected the fire to spread quite like it did. I'd lived out in San Diego, Page lives out in California. And I mean, when you see the fires out west, they're just terrifying. You know, they travel so fast and you see the people that can't outrun them and everything, but usually Eastern fires are not that bad. But I just remember sitting up all night on social media, watching this going on. I watched Russell Bivens report. In fact, I even did a drawing based on him, just how passionate everybody was reporting on that night. And it was just terrifying. I thought Gatlinburg was gone. And so it was it was just really an emotional thing. And, you know, I've been in Mississippi for 25 years, but it was just so many people here vacation there. And it just it's amazing how many people in the country love the smokies. And I think that played in down the line for how much help came. But I'm getting ahead of myself, Page. I know you, like I said, fires are not one of your favorite things because you've lived in a place that's been ravaged by them. So it had to be tough for you to sit there and watch all that happen. Yeah, well, it's like you're saying your experiences in San Diego, like we have a fire season out here. And, you know, as frightening as they are, they not that you get used to them, but you see fire in California. You see fires in the Pacific Northwest and in the West. And that I was so I think I think when I first heard about the firing down where I wasn't I was like sort of in disbelief, right? I had to like go online and start like you, like watching social media to find out what was going on. And I still have friends there from when I went to college in the area. So I'm, you know, of course, texting them and finding out if they're OK. And, you know, yeah. And then I've just sort of glued to all the photo journalism coming out of there because you just sort of couldn't believe, as Danny said, the scale of it. I don't know, just it was just sort of surprising. And then that happened in 2016 and then 2017, where I live in Santa Rosa, we had a huge fire, the Tubbs fire that burned like just so many homes. So it was it was like a weird sort of, you know, one big fire in an area you love. And then the very next year, another big fire to an area you love. Very sobering. Well, I think that that's a good place to jump into the research. And, you know, I mean, for me and, of course, I, you know, me and when they said, you know, do all these hours of research and everything. And I had back surgery, which I will use. I'll go ahead and get that out here right now, because I'll talk about that all day long. That's that's one of my favorite topics. But I started getting intimidated by it a little bit. And then once I got into it, I couldn't stop watching the videos and because the stories are so incredibly powerful. Paige, we'll go ahead and get started with you on this. When you're watching those videos and here you had gone through that personally, and I know you get out of dodge a lot of times during fire season because you don't want to deal with that. Was that triggering in any way for you when you're sitting here hearing these stories that you had literally just lived a couple of years ago? It was an interesting process. And I think maybe I was a little afraid to hear some of the stories in the beginning. Right. You sort of have to, you know, get your courage up. It we had a very scary experience two years ago where we got trapped on I-80 when the fire crossed it jumped the freeway and burned and killed a couple of people in fair review. Anyway, it just it like happened at Fairfield. It happened like so fast and we were sort of trapped in our cars. And now literally I smell smoke and I have a physical reaction like my heart rate will jump up and so listening to these stories. And there were a couple in particular where it was like, I could feel like the sort of what these people were feeling, the fear and the sort of the uncertainty and you're trying to get good information. You're trying to figure out which which routes of escape are open. Like all that stuff came back as I was listening to these stories. It was interesting to to hear them because people would sort of start slow in their interviews. They would be sort of formal and then they would sort of warm up and just be really honest about what they were feeling. And you're really drawn into their personal experiences. Some of them were really powerful. Definitely. Danny. Yeah, I would say the same thing. Very powerful stories, listen to just the emotion in people's voices. Even this long after the event. You know, things like people not knowing if their home was still standing and they weren't allowed to go in. There was a lot of that in a lot of the interviews. People because the lines of communication were down. People not able to reach level ones for periods of time. So a lot of it was just really heartbreaking. People talking to people talking about the the particular things about their home that they lost or when they did get to go to the site. Stories like my home was standing, but all my neighbor's homes were burned. And yeah, crazy mix of emotions about things like that. There were also in a lot of the stories, I think, to the people's credit, a lot of hope in in their the way they looked at it. The ways they were able to start rebuilding the the fact that they were thankful for the way they had come through it. And then something I found interesting was these stories from some of the research scientists after the fact, even though all of them made it very clear, they said, we really, you know, we wish this hadn't happened, but it did happen. And it's presented some research opportunities that have never been available in the Smoky Mountains before because there had never been a fire like this in the Smoky Mountains. So I thought that was very interesting hearing the kind of some of the things that were good things that were coming out of a tragic event. Yeah, this is my second rodeo when it came to covering a disaster. Back in 2005, when Hurricane Katrina slammed onto New Orleans and the Mississippi Gulf Coast, I went down there to work quite a bit and I went down there to do some drawings. And those drawings were the second time I was a Pulitzer finalist, which is a nice way of saying I lost, but I was close. But but the thing that fascinated me about the research was hearing the voices of resilience and how the community came together, the whole mountain strong concept, how everybody pulled together. And and I'll talk about this again when we talk about our favorite pieces, because, you know, here I am. I'm completely, you know, recovering from surgery. I'm sitting there getting sucked into these interviews and there are stories like, you know, literally grabbing your Boy Scout knife at the last second as you're walking out the door into this hellscape and you're going down the hill and there's a tree over the power lines and you get out and you start cutting off the limbs one by one by one to raise it up enough to get your car out. And because there's somebody behind you who's able to save their grandmother, I mean, there were so many cases like that you hear were the fact that 14 souls lost their life. It could have been so much higher. There were just so many people because they took a right instead of a left. And you hear those stories. But the one story that that really got to me and deeply is Bob Sweeney's video and his thing, because number one, here's a guy. And like said, I'll probably go more into it when we talk about the individual drawings, but he literally lost everything. He and his wife, Stephanie, and she's got a wonderful video as well. They wanted to live the Mountain Lifestyle in Gatlinburg and they were in the process of moving out there and he wasn't there and she was there. And she had a foresight when the slope got to get out of dodge, but they lost everything. And, you know, here's this image, which I ended up drawing of him praying in the middle of these still hot ashes because he's so grateful his family's OK. You know, and the spoiler alert on this is that I'm sitting here watching this thing and he's talking about all this positivity and how it's changed his life and how he he's he helped all these other people and everything else. So I do do diligence and Google him and he died. He died like last July, just dropped dead. And I'm like, no, I mean, so I felt like that I got to know some of these people. And so I reached out to his son and his son gave me the photograph that I based the drawing on. But it just like I said, the actual research was so incredibly moving. You know, I mean, it was it was hard and you are so incredibly visual about this. And I'll go back through on this where there are times when you're watching or you're watching these that you just go ahead and the images are already in your head. I mean, I don't even think it was work. I mean, I just kind of was jotting notes saying, OK, this is what I'm going to draw right here with arrows pointing toward it. Yeah, I've got sketches along with my notes that I was taking that you can't really read because I was trying to write so fast. But there's also a little thumbnail sketches among those as well, trying to as images popped into my head. Yeah, I think I was originally I originally had this this idea that I might even try to do like a full page, almost sequential kind of comic book style rendering to go with each story. And then and then I ended up just deciding that I wanted to do image that sort of captured the feeling like like the main feeling I got from the interview. So then I ended up just, you know, sort of centering on one image. But like you guys are saying, like as you were listening, an image would clearly sort of present itself and I would just thumbnail it, you know, and then go back to it later and see if I could make it into a decent composition. Yeah, Paige, I think you touched on something pretty interesting. And if you look at the whole body of all of our cartoons together, I think they tell a really do a good job telling the story as a whole. But I think we all kind of came at it from different angles. And you and Danny are both such fantastic artists. And I mean, I think your visuals are so incredibly strong. And I'm sitting here writing these captions on there. I'm sitting here writing a book, you know, under each cartoon, because I did it probably a little bit a little bit warrior on that. When I saw your captions, though, I was like, I should have done that. I wish I'd done that because, you know, so we all are we all are envious of each other's approach to the project, I think. I think so. I mean, that was the thing. You know, and I kind of I got a late start. So y'all had already kind of gotten started on it. And I saw yours before I even started mine. And I was like, well, this is not fair that I've gotten, you know, to be able to take a peek at what you've done. But I guess because I'm so used to and I have to really talk myself out of this when I'm drawing editorial cartoon of not explaining what I just drew, you know, it's like, OK, I'm probably a better artist than that a little bit. But I guess this is probably a good time for us to start talking about the drawings and we can talk about some other things, too, a little bit. But, you know, on the images and I say, well, Paige, we'll go ahead and get started with you on it on some of your favorite drawings and tell us a little bit about what you were motivated by and what came to mind when you were drawing them. OK. Well, I guess the first one was the one I think the one I highlighted has a dog, a pet in the image. Yeah, that one. I mean, the story that originally inspired this image was Becky Jackson's story. And it was because she was at work and heard about the fire and was trying to get her husband to leave. He was still at their house. She couldn't get to the house. And the way she got him to leave was because she was worried about the dogs, the pets. So she got him to bring the pets down, but it ended up like saving his life. But there were a lot of people that talked about their animals and I have dogs that I just like are like members of the family. And it's very stressful in an evacuation situation to deal with pets and pets get left behind and it's super heartbreaking. And we actually had a local individual here who went back to get her pets and didn't make it back out. I mean, those stories happen all the time. And there were some stories similar to that in the Gatlinburg fire too. So I think I was trying to capture just the urgency and the fear and the imminent danger with this one image of the dog with the flames reflected on its face. One of the stories that I heard the woman knew that the fire was getting closer because her cat was sitting next to the vent by the door because the cat could smell the smoke coming in. And that inspired her to leave. And I was just like, wow, listen to your pets. You know, sometimes they're smarter than we are. And then one of the other images I was going to look at my notes to see the name. This was from Charlie Anderson's interview. You know, this was a very similar, this is the long line of cars leaving down basically a back dirt road. Yeah. And this is something that happens a lot in where I live in California. We're in the wine country. We have a lot of people who come here who aren't familiar with the area. And I think the same thing happened in the Gatlinburg fire. And I heard a couple of interviews to that effect where you've got, as you said, Marshall, people go there to vacation, but maybe they don't know all the back roads and the ins and outs. And this story was about one of the local young guys like leading a whole line of like tourists basically out of back road in his pickup truck and they saved all these people by getting them out of a road that they would have never known to go down because the main road was blocked. So those kind of scary stories about, you know, when you're in a rural area, more mountainous, narrow two lane roads, which is, you know, similar to here, like evacuation is hard. I can't remember which I think the other image I picked was the one of the, maybe the playground. It's the swing set. This was, Leslie Ackerson was a reporter and she was talking about the sort of eerie beginning stages when the fire was just getting going and no one really understood the scope of it. And nobody was, the kids weren't allowed to play outside because the air was so full of smoke. And so I just thought, oh, there's nothing more haunting than empty playground equipment, right? Because of some environmental disaster. So I think that's why I settled on that image. And then I think maybe one of the other ones I highlighted had a piano in it. Yeah, this was also from Leslie's reporting. She had a lot of good just as the person sort of watching everything go down and she was saying she was watching all these people like load their cars and it is a very surreal experience to pack up what are, so it's like, take all your valuables. Well, when it comes right down to it, what is valuable to you? What holds meaning? It's not actually money, right? It's your great-granddad's pocket watch that he used when he was on the train. It's like a dish that belonged to your mother. It's like all these really. I've been through this so I'm just going to tear up even talking about it, but people talking about the things like photographs, things you can't replace like your photo of your grandparents. You know what I mean? Those things end up, you sort of go through this path of realizing what has true value to you. And a lot of these interviews had that sort of thing. And she was watching some woman who really wanted to save her piano and couldn't because it was one of the most important things to her. So anyway, it's really hard to hear people talk about the things that are irreplaceable they lost that really have high sentimental value, not monetary value, I guess. I listened to Charlie Anderson's also, his interview. And number one, he kind of reminded me of my dad, so I kind of got sucked into it just for that reason. But here he's a guy that had literally built this beautiful resort and thrown his whole life into something. But the way he handled it and the way he was able to take care of his employees and he's since passed away also on that. Oh, I didn't know that. That's really sad. Yeah, I mean, like Cindy Ogles' husband, Bud, passed away. And I mean, there's so many people that it since the fire have we've lost. But that was, I mean, I'd say I loved all of your pieces on that. And it's really kind of cool to get to hear some of the stories what caused you to pick that idea and to draw that. Danny, on yours, yours were like pages so incredibly visual and so vivid. You kind of like what I could imagine what it looked like is what your drawings ended up, what they looked like. Well, thanks. So the way I approached this, when I was asked to participate, my first question was, is it okay if I work digitally? Because I know you guys were using real pen and ink and watercolor. And I've been working digitally for a long time. And that was kind of a criteria that I needed to have to be able to pull this off. So all my drawings are digital. They're digital paintings where I work on a digital tablet in Photoshop. And so the way I decided to approach it is I used to do a lot of magazine illustrations. So I decided like when I would do a magazine illustration, I would get an advanced copy of the article and I would read through it and find little phrases that prompted some kind of visual in my mind. So I did that same thing when listening to the interviews and then I would base my sketches off of those things that were in the content. So, and with a magazine illustration, it was meant to hint at what's in the content but maybe not tell the whole story. So that's kind of the way I approach these. I guess the first one I'd like to talk about was called Lone Cabin. I mentioned this earlier about how there was a lady, I think her name was Francis. She and her husband, they lost their home. And you know, after a few days they were able to go in. They lost their home but they also owned a rental cabin further up the mountain. And then when they went up to it, it was still standing untouched and all the other homes around it had burned. So that was kind of the inspiration for that image right there. Another one was an animal story like Paige talked about a particular cat named Topper that was mentioned by a couple of different workers from the UT Vet Clinic where a lot of the animals, I think there were maybe around 20 animals that had been injured, that had been rescued from the fire, that were brought to the UT Vet Hospital. But Topper was the most injured, I think, of all that came in. And both the people that mentioned talked about what a fighter he was and what a trooper he was. And he had been separated from his owner. And I think she saw him on when his picture was posted on Facebook and she had lost her home and everything. And they talked about the reunion of when she came to pick up Topper. But as far as that image, when I just had a drawing of Topper in there, it didn't seem to tell the whole story. So I added two people's hands, two of the workers into the picture just to talk about the people who gave, who spent so much time and caring for these animals. And that seemed to tell the whole story a little bit better than just showing Topper like I first intended to. Another one is called Motorcycle. This was from Buddy McLean's interview. And he owned the lodge at Buckbury Creek, which was mostly burned. But he said that the last two people to leave that night was, I think, a chef and a manager. And the chef had a motorcycle. He didn't want to leave there. She had stayed behind so they could leave together. And he wanted to get his motorcycle. And when they came down the mountain, it was basically flames on both sides. And that image to me, I don't know if you guys saw the, in the days following the fires, there was a video, a YouTube video posted by somebody who had driven out through that. That was the inspiration visually for that illustration because that was one of the most terrifying things I've ever watched. Watching that video. Let's see. There's one called Kindness of Strangers that I did. This came up in so many interviews. People just talking about the community, how the community surrounded them, how churches, people they didn't know came and brought food and water and clothing and hugged them and prayed with them. So that seemed to be a thread through so many of the interviews. So I did this illustration just to try to capture one of those moments, people reaching out to strangers and loved ones just to help comfort them. And then one of the, they had me do listen to some interviews with the Hispanic community which they thought had been maybe not been represented enough so they went back and got some additional interviews and one of those was a lady named Julia Rodriguez and she told this story about a friend of hers who had evacuated and had had gathered all their things but forgot her Bible. And her Bible was where she kept her savings. She kept her money in that Bible and she just left and forgot it because it was so in all the chaos of trying to evacuate her family. So that's what this image was based on. And then I've got one more that was kind of, when I talked about the research, there's one called Table Mountain Pines and this was from one of the researchers from UT talked about just the life starting to sprout and come back to life after the fires and the hope that that brings and also just the new phases of research that they were able to cultivate through that. So those are some of the ones I picked out as kind of my favorite ones that I did through the listen to those interviews. I agree with you about that video watching that of those guys trying to get down the mountain. I just, it was scarier than any movie that I think I'd ever seen because it was real, you know. And you realize that scene had been played out over and over and over by so many people and I remember going to parties up in Schleyville you go up in the hills for parties and some of those condos and I mean I couldn't get out of there when it wasn't on fire and I can't even imagine trying to do that when you literally to quote Eric Dobel that works as an illusionist at the Space Needle he said it looked like a cartoon hell, you know. And so which I thought was the line of the year on that one and that was one of my drawings too but yeah I don't see how they got down out of the hills on that. So, you know my drawings and there were individual stories and people and part of me is like I'm sitting there illustrating this and I'm thinking is it okay for me to tell this story? Is it okay? Is it getting too personal? It's like Bob's story, you know and telling that. Russell Biven's story really jumped out at me because when I was down covering, you know and I didn't cover Katrina initially but I went down there and worked quite a bit and was down there a lot and the destruction was so overwhelming that when I would get home I would have literally nightmares about what I'd seen down on the coast and Russell really is very passionate in his interview talking about how you know it completely you know he had covered Katrina so he had seen that destruction too but when it happens in your home you know people that you love and you're seeing this happen and it's like he drove home every night to just go home and hug his feelings and he got tired they just told him finally go home get some rest because you don't even realize the people that are covering it too are getting completely worn out too and I thought that was a strong story. Charlie Anderson's story I don't know if I included that drawing or not I can't remember what I turned in to show his story was really you know here he is looking at the ruins of what he'd built his whole life and that was strong Eric Dobles and I think I did include that one of the cartoon hell drawing he literally opened up his front door and there's nothing flames shooting up everywhere and I hope I did him justice on the caricature if not he may make me disappear on that but it was a very good interview and his voice didn't get burned down but the flames came right up to the road across the street from it and he did get you know he went down the mountain and survived as well I thought that like I said the Bob Sweeney Stephanie Sweeney story and I think I did include that drawing that's probably the one I'm most proud of not because the drawing is super great but the story behind it and this was this quote he said we just set a prayer for thankfulness that we still had each other that we still had the means to move forward and to make a better path forward out of this and that was a direct quote that he said in his in his interview and his son Stanton was an Eagle Scout just a great guy he's a student up at UT now and so like I said I had watched Bob's story and I mean you talk about seriously I challenge everybody who's watching this right now to go and watch Bob's story you will literally want to live a better life after you listen to him and his optimism and his faith and the strength that he showed and you know here he passes away and so I reach out to Stanton and I was like hey Stanton you don't know me from Adam I'm working on this project and I was incredibly moved by both your mother and your father and I just wanted to let you know how much your dad's life meant to me even though I'm a total stranger and he said oh thank you Mr. Ramsey I appreciate that and he said let me show you this picture that I took of him praying on the ashes and he had mentioned it in the actual you know like I said in his testimony but I couldn't have ever imagined that and it was just and I tried to capture it the best I could because I felt like that Bob's life was was worth it and Danny you talk about drawing digitally I switched over to the iPad with Procreate about three years ago to do my editorial cartoons just because I'm on the road a lot it's just easier but I mean I've been doing pin and ink my whole life you know that's kind of for an editorial cartoonist but it was really weird because there were so many different effects like the flames and stuff like that I know I could have done better digitally but I was trying to recreate them you know in with just crayons and everything else the one that cracks me up the most though I did one of the smoke in downtown Gatlinburg and the picture that I had to use as a reference you know you can see the smoke and everything looks kind of yellow so I'm sitting there making it kind of yelling it's like well that doesn't really look right so I went out into the garage of my drawing and got a can of silver spray all over the top of the drawing and I said if I screw this up I'm gonna cry like a baby but it turned out to actually look pretty cool and it kind of looks like what it was going to do so it's I felt like that my my multimedia approach to this was pretty you know it's almost hilarious I felt like I was back in kindergarten again calling around with crayons and stuff on the process how long did it take y'all to do the drawings on that because I'm like I said I got a late start to it but once I got started you know I mean it was an obsession with me I'd be working late in the middle of the night doing these drawings and you know I mean once I got cranked on it it didn't seem like I wanted to stop yeah I think the biggest channel is like it's funny listening to you talk about not overworking the smoke I mean two things that are really hard to draw and paint fire and smoke right and to make them feel like real like they have dimension yeah so I think for me it was like a challenge not to overwork some of the pieces I wish I had included this one I did this one that was a before and after because I was also interested in how like fire changes the ecosystem and like the scientists who are studying the effects of it and that one I think I remember I think I did that one more than once to get the fire the flames right and the smoke and make it feel right but yeah it is a little scarier to do it on on board rather than doing it digitally but I as is everybody in the land you know in the time of COVID I've spent so much time looking at a screen I just really wanted to try to do the pieces by hand and whatever happened that I didn't plan was sort of a happy accident maybe that added to the the composition or the color so yeah but once like you said once you got into them it was it was it went pretty well it went pretty easy you know once you figured out what the images were going to be but yeah it was like in the zone you know you're sort of in that headspace after listening to those interviews for so many hours also I can't remember if you said this or Danny said this but you worry that you're giving you're doing justice to the person's personal history and story so you feel like a pressure to get it right I guess yeah I'm gonna throw Jack Davis and his name out there real quick just because one thing about Jack when he would do caricatures he would always do really hone in on the main caricature and then all the other stuff was really loose in the background and on that and so some of the people's caricatures I really tried to hit pretty hard pretty carefully and close and other ones I'm just kind of like I just make it I just make it real light you know depending on what time it was and so forth on that but yeah you know I mean I don't know about y'all but when I by the time I got done drawing them I'm like I want to meet some of these people I really do I mean I feel like I know them and I'm family and all this kind of crazy stuff and that's what I get for watching so much television I guess you know one thing I one thing I did was I I started out and did black and white thumbnail sketches of all of all of them before I started doing any finished pieces and in fact I had I had these thumbnails out and that was about the time Page had emailed some preliminaries and I had one the one of that you had Page with all the cars lined up I had one that almost looked exactly like that and I thought okay I can't do that one now uh-oh I messed you up yes you beat me to it but no yours you did a wonderful job on that but but yeah I did I worked out all the sketches first and then just kind of started one by one going in and tried to complete the color version and then moved on to the next one I did the same thing and I was really hoping I wouldn't mess up like if I got a black and white composition I really liked I was hoping I wouldn't mess it up when I started trying to paint it so yeah yeah I tried to capture fire by sending one of them on fire but I decided that was not probably not a good long-term strategy for all of them that would definitely on that but um yeah it like I said it was um it was it was just a fun project just because I mean I I created artificially some real serious deadline pressure on me but I mean I I guess if I had it to do over again I wish I could take about nine months to just give each drawing the justice I each story the justice that deserve not the drawing itself but they were just so incredible was there anything that you learned out of the I mean obviously we learned a lot about the fire that we didn't know was there anything that just jumped out at y'all that you learned that you said not I never heard this I this is new to me or anything like that you just I guess I just you just wouldn't think a fire that big could happen in that area yeah but I mean that's just I don't know it's just hard to believe I know when I was listening to some of the um you're listening to these interviews and people are talking about it so calmly now and they have some distance on the experience and and I was like so I after I heard some of the interviews I went you guys probably did this too I went online and looked up like photos from you know the newspaper and TV and magazine like all the news coverage just to see some of these specific places in the moment when they were you know when they were burning and things and I was just sort of shocked at what I what I saw just the scale of the fire it was it was hard to get your head around it yeah I think for me I just the way it caught everybody by surprise just me think about maybe being a little more prepared yeah for the unexpected I mean you know one of the drawings that I did was I took from a researcher who talked about she she researches and studies businesses after disasters and she was talking about how none of the businesses had any kind of natural disaster plan that if it was anything it was a an unused manual on a shelf and that was it so I think that's one thing that's probably changed in that community now but I think that's a lesson for all of us just to maybe spend a little time thinking ahead of time just to prepare for for the unexpected the best that you can yeah my my wife and I only lived in Texas we had to evacuate like immediately from a flood and I just remember going around trying to pick out stuff that was important you know like Paige was talking about earlier about the pictures and everything else and you know we we were very fortunate our house survived most of our neighborhood did not from the flood but that said you know that was one of the things that you know there were people that you'd listen to and they had like a little box you know of stuff and they were able to put it in the car and they were able to get out that but you're right I think everybody it seemed like if you had a plan it wasn't a good plan and you know even from the city down to the national park down to individuals and and I think the thing that struck me about this and it did remind me the same one about Katrina was that the very richest and the very poorest suffered equally on this fire it just it showed no mercy it didn't just hit you know this section of town or the back you know it literally and how downtown did not burn is beyond me it's literally like the fire just did this and went around it you know and so that was kind of what I walked away from I mean walked away from it with number two and Dolly Parton should be queen of the world um yeah yeah no Dolly you know you know as we're recording this right now she just announced she's gonna pay you know for any of her workers to go to college you know it's like okay what else is she gonna do she gonna cure cancer next year I mean she's she's amazing but her help in the fact that I think so many people around the country have had wonderful experiences in the Smoky Mountains I think that helped the area a lot too because that's what caused everybody to say I'm gonna send then a check to help the people of the Smokies and I think that that good will toward the area helped them recover too I'm told the mountain strong thing is nothing but the truth yeah yeah so um I like said was there any other thoughts we'll we'll open it up here in just a few minutes for some questions from the audience we'd love I saw those hearts come up for Dolly Parton I'm just gonna every three minutes I'm just gonna say Dolly Parton and then we'll we'll get lots of lots of love on the video but I'd like to said I hope someday I get to meet her and just say you are amazing thank you so much what you did for you know even though I don't live there my area my people you know I love that on there um trying to see what what else on this I need to cover I think I got like I said you know when you got asked to do this did you did you anticipate that this project would have the impact that it did on your lives no I I didn't really know I didn't really know what to expect you know only only when I started watching and listening and realizing you know this is not just a story that I'm gonna hear about but seeing the actual person telling the story about their own family and their own property and their own experience it became way more real than I guess what I was expecting so it was it was riveting in in that way it was heartbreaking to hear some of the stories but also like I said earlier very hopeful to see their people's attitudes and their resilience yeah definitely yeah I think the project was initially really like intimidating just like I said because you you are afraid you aren't gonna do the stories justice or you know do enough I guess but I don't know I walked away feeling what it is like I think Marshall you said you feel like you know these people now like you like it was like you're sitting in the living room listening to them talk about their personal experiences and personal stories anyway you wanted to reach through the camera and like give a few of them a hug yeah yeah yeah I think the thing that and I'm I'm worried about this to this day and I know there's there were a couple different videos there was one of one of the teachers that teaches at one of the elementary schools talking about he's the same guy that had the knife you know that was cut in the tree and his I thought his interview was really good and he had like you know you would watch these interviews they'd be an hour long and there would be two or three little diamonds in the middle of it one of them was obviously the next story which I thought was a brilliant story and the other was he'd be teaching a class and his kids just out of nowhere would just start crying and you know the the PTSD that the kid suffered and you know and so it'll be fascinating to see and we have one of the a sociologist in a council are talking about that too of some of the ramifications it'll be interesting to see what the long-term consequences not only of the environment of the people too of that area the last time I guess it's been two years since I've been up you know this this little thing called the pandemic kind of slowed us down a little bit on travel is probably why we're not meeting on a stage right now talking about this to be honest with you but I gotta say I've been really impressed at the community I think about like not to give a shout out to Alamo Stakehouse I just remember this story where he had had like interruption insurance so he's able to continue to pay his employees through the shutdown and as they rebuild and that that Alamo is not real far away from our cabin so I was like that one that one kind of hit hard and then to you know you start hearing you know the individual stories and so forth so like I said I just got into watching it and you know because you watch a news story like the Gatlinburg Fire on the national news and you hear about it for two days and you don't hear about what happens for the next six months to a year to four years after that and I I felt like that these oral histories really helped me understand that that much more and I want to give a quick shout out to the UT library folks um who have been absolutely delightful and wonderful to work with on yeah definitely I second that I was going to say Marshall just to to uh echo something a person's question that I see in the comments wondering about whose idea was it to have this artist archivist collaboration yeah that is a good question well I don't know the answer so I don't know the answer either but I remember I said to the folks who were working with at UT that whoever's idea was was kind of genius because images give people an entry point right to then take it a step further and and learn about all these oral histories so I don't know I thought it was I thought it was a great way to make this this huge library of interviews feel accessible and approachable it just gave I think it'll give people an entry point I hope that's what it does anyway yeah I think well I guess just generally credit goes to Steven Smith and his staff I mean yeah that's where the the idea came from and I like you I'm I was I thought it was really innovative I've never seen or heard anybody do that to have cartoonists illustrators to come in and help depict an event like that yeah I've you know I've actually talked to my boss with my day job I'm going to start doing some like storytelling graphic storytelling like that around Mississippi because I just fell in love with the whole concept of of creating taking that research it's not it's a lot different than just doing an editorial cartoon which is the one and done and you're gone I like telling that narrative long-term story so I thought it was just a brilliant idea and I can't wait to see all of our work together in a show and because I mean like I said I think the combination of all of our work together is really going to hit about every angle on this and it's going to be really cool to see it one piece and big too John B's got a really nice question here were there any scenes or images that you would have liked to capture but couldn't are drawings that failed all my drawings failed I mean that's that's right there I think I was trying to capture I was trying to do in the image I was trying to do the before and after I was trying to get at what it feels like to be like in a stand of Timber after a blaze that hot has gone through and and what's left or what they call the standing dead and I just I couldn't quite get that to look the way it felt to me or you know I couldn't quite capture the loss of that sort of scene that sort of loss of ecosystem but so that was kind of a fail and I had to sort of pivot and do a different approach I think also I tried to do I'm not as good at caricatures as you are Marshall and I think initially I had tried to do some drawings of the actual people doing the interviews and then I sort of aborted that and decided to focus more on their sort of outward facing experience of the things they were talking about rather than them personally so yeah that was another thing I learned yeah after Brussels probably gonna agree that I probably didn't get his caricature down really well on that on that on that you know what I ended up doing on drawing because I joke that I've living in Mississippi I've gotten really good at drawing you know debris you know from hurricanes tomatoes and all the things that we get hit with then you are really good at that yeah no I mean like said you know that's my fourth yay you know but um I wish I didn't know how to do that but I what I how I approached it was I would get really thin pens for the stuff up close you know didn't make it super black or I would make it black and then I would did pencil for anything off in the distance and I would light it and then I would take pencil and just kind of smear it over the top of it with my fingers to kind of give it a smoky haze look on that and so I think I succeeded in in a but there's two or three of the drawings I was kind of happy with how they turned out like that I didn't resort to spray paint on all of them so that one that one was I'm not quite sure was a success but it was still fun to try so on that but but that was the thing it was it was all about storytelling and it was just trying to figure out what was the best way to be able to to tell see yeah I I usually if if there was something I couldn't quite depict I would kind of figure that out in the sketch stage that that angle or show and that was not going to work yeah um and as far as showing caricatures of people I avoided that from the beginning but I did have one caricature and that's Topper the Cat I did do that from a an actual photo of Topper the Cat Topper ended up being a local celebrity and had his on Facebook page for a while after that so there were some photos on there I was able to look at yeah I really love that drawing and that was great I don't like so I want to meet Topper the Cat now after seeing your drawing so I think Topper may have passed away a couple years ago not not for me thank you sorry thanks man we were going great and then you had to drop that okay well now that everybody just signed off because they're sad I tell you also too and like I said I you know I love the UT Library folks they're just great I really in page you know everybody you've got to understand everywhere page has been been there about six months after she has in her career you know I'm looking forward to my own chance to work at Children's Enterprise that one had to come back there I guess I have to better work on art skills a little bit but um you know I lived in Atlanta she was in Atlanta I was at UT she was at the Charlie Danny it is kind of funny it is kind of funny it's like following each other around yeah I'm a stalker but I knew you right and I've interviewed you and it's been fun and I came up for the UT galleries had a wonderful art exhibit of pages work and then they had Danny's work up and so I drove up on Friday and got to meet Danny and I really regret Danny that I did not meet you about senior work for so long and I told Jennifer this the other day I said you know I've always known at some point I will be friends with Marshall Ramsey so but for some reason I've always thought that we would eventually know each other so I'm glad we finally met I hope it didn't turn out to be a huge disappointment you know kind of like getting socks for Christmas or something I just wouldn't want to do that to you and and everybody too you need to understand that Danny's wife went to the same high school as my wife so it's just it's completely two degrees of separation amongst the three of us so that's right yeah this was fun yeah Danny was the Danny was the guy that I looked up to when I was at UT because he was one class ahead of me and he seemed to have figured it all out and his like I was so envious of how great an illustrator you were so it was super fun to get to work on this project with you after all these years you know what it scares me that some of my cartoons that I did at UT are still in the UT library and someday I'm gonna find them because Steve you better hide them because I don't want anybody to see him hey I heard there were a couple of questions about how the project originated I think everything like every good idea it's really a team and really credit goes to the National Endowment for the Arts when we saw the our town program as we were beginning to think about collecting oral histories and looking for grant opportunities we thought hey wouldn't it be neat to see if we could engage our artists some way with these oral history interviews to see you know again the creativity that could come from it and also just as another creative way of documenting such an important historic event so really I think credit should go to the National Endowment for the Arts so the taxpayers you you can feel good about this so and the book that is coming out with help of the UT press will be available later this spring which will collect all of the art that you've seen tonight and many other images by these great artists plus two special images from Charlie Daniel oh that's great yeah I wouldn't be sitting here right now for for Charlie Daniel so I got a oh it's it's always good to give him love Kayla Clark had a question here will you create a mountain strong series showing how Gatlinberg and survivors rebuilt after the community I think I touched on that on a few of my drawings a little bit in fact I haven't written right here mountain but I mean I thought that was just great it was such a great rallying cry and you know everybody kind of fell and I was the school superintendent I believe was who said that I originally and I can't remember his name but yeah I think that Gatlinberg's grit and resilience is something that we all should and you know people of faith really came together and lifted everybody up and it was a you know we live in a cynical time now and so it's incredibly comforting to know that when push comes to shove that we can we can come together and help each other agreed yep I'll quit preaching now well I'll just do a quick shout out to David Dotson with the Dollywood Foundation he gave he and his colleagues gave a great interview that's in the archive about the mountain strong effort and Dolly's involvement and also very generously donated the archive that they put together documenting their activities so he's just you know one of many people who were so generous with their time and telling us their stories definitely definitely well I don't I mean is there anything that I have not touched on to the panelists about this project I mean I feel like we you know we all sat and hard together probably at the same time watching this we all love the smokies because we probably when we were in school I don't know about you I would I would go up to Kate's Cove and go run just on Tuesday Thursdays when I didn't have classes I mean it was just always my escape route yeah when I was in college and to see someplace you love like that in peril it's it's hard and but it just was fun not fun it was just really meaningful and important to get the work on this project and I'm really thankful Steve that that every that you asked me this was just a huge honor yeah same well thanks to each of you it was really so inspiring when each of you said yes so it's just really wonderful was it inspiring when I missed my deadline I Marshall I never thought you missed your deadline I knew we had money in the bank with you you'll always come through yeah I've never missed one but boy I kind of definitely stretch that one pretty kind of like my pants after the pandemic it just was a it was a tough one but I got it done so well I think that wraps us up and I just want to thank our panelists and Danny and Paige and Marshall just it's been great to hear from you this evening and thank you also for for giving so much of your time to help you know interpret and express this this the history of this important event and to help commemorate and remember those who suffered and who lost but but you know with every story of loss there are stories of resilience and I think that you all helped us see that so thank you so much well thank you and thank you Marshall for moderating oh good job as they say my pleasure but I can't remember who says that but anyway