Guest Post: Jean-Marc Superville Sovak (Julie Chibbaro)

For the last fifteen years, and for the rest of my life, I will be grateful to this man. A brilliant artist, a kind husband, a silly father, Jean-Marc Superville Sovak has a beautiful body of work: supervillesovak.com He also did the great illustrations for our novel Deadly.



GrAttitude by Jean-Marc Superville Sovak

I am grateful to be a guest blogger for my creative partner, Julie, and that unlike the main character of Deadly, I am not a healthy carrier of communicable disease. I am grateful that I was only without power for two days during a freak snowstorm, and that the 6 to 8 inches of wet snow did not bring a tree down onto my house or car. Now that I have power again, I’m grateful that the computer I am sitting at here is doing what I want it to do, that the little words in my head are appearing on the screen and are (hopefully) being saved somewhere and that I will (hopefully) be able to retrieve them at a later date. I am grateful to be a native English speaker and that a large percentage of the world will at least pretend to understand what I am saying, except, maybe, for the French, which is why I am also grateful to also speak French. I am grateful I was born in a country that does not have a mandatory military service because I really don’t like guns, or rather, I’m quite afraid I might like guns way too much. I’m grateful I live in New York which has some pretty tough gun control laws. I’m grateful to have had a chance to spend some time in Oklahoma (thanks to my sister) and meet some really nice people, even though their gun control laws are much looser. They really were very nice people. I’m grateful my wife is Jewish: I knew there was something vaguely Jewish on my father’s side, and now that I’ve actually had the chance to build a sukkah, I feel I’ve fully legitimized it. Really nice people. I’m grateful I live in a country where people who feel disenfranchised by the political process can go into the streets and voice their dissent without being brutalized by cops without having to rely on the financial backing of billionaire donors drumming up popular support for bogus grassroots movements. I’m grateful I live in a little town that still has clean drinking water, and that my daughter goes to kindergarten in a public school where her teacher has a classroom website set up with an email address she uses. Often. Except when there’s a snow storm or a failed power transformer. I’m grateful I remembered to hit control “S.”