Your Very Own (JackPine Press, 2021)
Description from JackPine Press
Your Very Own is made up of erasures of pages (including both text pages and illustrations) from the 1985 children’s adventure book Choose Your Own Adventure #43: Grand Canyon Odyssey, written by Jay Leibold and illustrated by Don Hedin. By applying the erasure writing/drawing method to this text, Nyman non-linearly presents a new experience of the book through a more robust framework of choice and responsibility than that offered by the original. Through erasure and reconstruction, Nyman confronts traditional gendered and racialized stereotypes examining how the original presented the reader’s character as a white boy and an Indigenous woman as a two-dimensional supporting character.
Your Very Own is a scaled down, tiny homage to the Choose Your Own Adventure books. The cover design includes the garage-sale masking tape price tag, and everything from the pocket size to the colour of paper was chosen with that same inspiration. To expand the themes of erasure, some images are cut out. By making characters absent, Nyman replaces them with purposeful gaps in the shape of what could be or what was.
