Qs&As with DoDads — The Napkin Dad Daily

Nothing a dad does is a throw away gesture for his child. Not one thing.

If you doubt how true that is, consider The Napkin Dad Daily, a sketching of life in art and comment, that owes its genesis to Marty Coleman's daughter saving a napkins' year's worth of drawing and quotes he included with the lunch he sent to school. He received the collection one Father's Day and did what any self-respecting father should do at receipt of such a gift: he cried.

And then he continued drawing all through the remainder of his daughters' high school years and beyond even as they have now gone out into the world and grown in the same (and sometimes different) way his art has.

Coleman lives in Glenpool, Okla. — known the world over as the town that made Tulsa famous — with his wife, Linda, a wiggle dog a stubby dog, and two cats who hate each other and short and long distance fathers his four grown daughters, who contribute to society in ways, including but not limited to: catching turtles; getting a Ph.D. in neuroscience; playing video games; writing and playing songs; farming organic stuff; eating same stuff; sewing and knitting; making art; voting; getting married; studying apparel design; worrying about boys; finding themselves; finding each other; losing (and finding) their religion; kicking butt as a black belt; studying midwifery; yogaizing; going to college; and making him proud in every way. Although world famous thanks to the blog and Time Magazine picking one of his images to help commemorate Barack Obama's election, Coleman took time from his blog, his store and his art to share a few moments and some of his inspiration (and how he is progressing on the formula to cure evil, at the very end).

WhinyDad: What was the biggest challenge to starting and continuing The Napkin Dad Daily?
Marty Coleman: It really wasn’t much of a challenge at first. I had been scanning the napkins for a number of years and had them posted on my flickr.com site, which I use primarily for my photography, but it allows drawings and illustrations as well. When I started the blog it was easy to simply cut and paste the code into the blog and that was that. When it became a challenge was when I decided to start writing commentary along with the napkin. In some cases I had commentary already written but for the most part I do that each day. Having to focus on the specific quote and figure out what I want to extrapolate out from it is hard work. I want it to be interesting and learning oriented, but I don’t want it to be boring or repetitive. I also want it to be interactive, to get people to comment back, to give their ideas of what the quote means as well.

WD: How has your Napkining changed? Has being a father changed your other art as well?
MC: I have a plastic bin full of the napkins I created over the years. I realized as I was going over them, scanning a few every day or so, that many of the early ones were very silly, very simple, sometimes with no quotes, only some funny drawing, other times only a quote. I started looking through and seeing that the drawing had become more sophisticated, more nuanced, and the quotes had become more connected to the drawings. This isn’t always the case, but it became more like that as the years past.

I think being a father is being an educator. In that sense my artwork , both the napkins and larger drawings as well as the photo-collages, has always been about putting out ideas, images, thoughts, ways of approaching the world and others that has some resonance with young people as they grow. Of course ‘young’ is relative so those I helped 20 years ago when they were 16 in a church youth group are now 36 and married with kids. I still hope I am helping them in the same way I did back then, by helping them to think through ideas and think for themselves.

WD: How much of the blog is directed at your daughters and how much do they influence your postings?
MC: The blog isn’t directed to my daughters at all actually. They got all the napkins originally when I put them in their lunches. Now the same napkins are going out again, this time to a different audience. My daughter’s do read the blog regularly and they do comment on occasion. I appreciate their comments quite a bit, they are usually among the most insightful.

I started drawing napkins again in 2008 after many years away from it. These drawings my daughters are seeing for the first time when the read the blog. I hope they appreciate them but at this point they are part of the audience in general, not the only audience, as they were before. So, I am aware they are reading the blog, but I don’t direct it towards them.

WD: Is there art or commentary you can remember posting that you think might embarrass your daughters when they stumble upon it via an internet search in years to come?
MC: No, I don’t see anything specific having that reaction. I do think they might have had some reticence originally in having something that was given to them now going out into the world and having a life independent of them. But I think they see the value in it and support the napkins’ exposure around the world.

WD: What is the most important thing you've learned about being a dad from working on the site?
MC: I have actually learned the most about being a dad from having been interviewed about the site and the phenomenon of the napkins by local newspapers, TV stations and your blog as well. When you are going to be interviewed you tend to try to organize your thoughts. In doing so I was able to clarify what it was I was doing all those years ago. I was attempting to teach my daughter’s a set of ideas. They weren’t a code or a set of principles I could have put my finger on right then, but looking back, trying to figure out how I was going to explain it all to someone who starts knowing nothing about it, I realized I had a number of common threads going through the napkins.

Those include: Independent thinking; Giving the benefit of the doubt and thinking the best of people; Self-esteem that is based on accomplishment, not on just wanting to think highly of yourself; Love over judgment. There are many more principles that flow through the napkins and I am exciting about pulling them out and organizing them around those principles.

I also realized that being a dad isn’t a big job. It is a series of very small jobs all strung together. You don’t have to raise them to age 18. You only have to feed them one spoonful of food, or one good and lasting idea at a time. Of course, you have to do those things over and over, as I did the napkins, but it isn’t as daunting to do it with that mindset as it is to try and hold the whole 18 years on your shoulders.

WD: Which are the two or three most interesting dadblogs ... other than yours?
MC: Truthfully, I haven’t read many dad blogs. I call my blog ‘The Napkin Dad Daily’ because of how the napkins originated. But I see my blog has being more about being an educator, an artist and an idea generator than being a dad (even though they are often overlapping). The napkins were originally about me helping my daughters’ education. Now they are about me helping anyone with their education.

WD: A few words on how you'll continue to cure the planet of evil?
MC: I actually found a cure for evil a few years ago, but I left the formula in my favorite blue blazer’s pocket and then left the blazer on a chair at a restaurant. Later I heard it was stolen from the back office by a mysterious woman in black who was last seen boarding an airplane for Peru.

I have started over on the formula and should have it completed in 2010. In the meanwhile I am doing the next best thing, which is to sell the “Napkin Dad’s Book of Absorbent Ideas, Volume 1., t-shirts, coffee mugs, greeting cards and other stuff at martycoleman.com.