THE STORY OF THE POST-IT NOTE READING SERIES

Several years ago, back when he still called Chicago home, cartoonist Arthur Jones accepted an invitation from his friend Starlee Kine, then a full-time producer on the radio show This American Life, to contribute a story to a literary event she’d booked for a Friday in February at the Hideout, a bar in an old, weird house mysteriously located in the middle of a gritty Chicago industrial park. There was only one problem: the event featured actual writers, and Jones had never written anything he considered a “real story” in his life. 

At the time Jones held down a day job as a graphic designer at a marketing company. To alleviate boredom, he’d gotten in the habit of producing one drawing a day on a Post-It Note. “Mostly because it was something I could get away with,” he says. “It was pretty inconspicuous, just me at my desk doodling.” After weeks of struggling to come up with something for the Hideout show, an idea finally occurred to him: he could do an illustrated story, drawn entirely on Post-It Notes, and project it as a Power Point slideshow while he narrated onstage.  

Much to Jones’s surprise, the story he came up with — about a snowman trapped by his office job and a never-ending winter — was a crowd favorite. So in the spring of 2005, when he and filmmaker Jim Finn embarked on a tour of the U.S. with a program of Finn’s short films and Jones’s cartoons. They spent a month on the road winding their way from Houston to Toronto and Jones brought along a few more Post-It Note stories to perform live at the shows.

Not long after the tour ended, Jones moved from Chicago to New York. The following summer, hoping to build on the potential of the Post-It Note format, he reunited with Kine, who’d moved to New York a few years previous, and launched what would become a “semi-regular” event known as the Post-It Note Reading Series. Kine booked the writers; Jones illustrated their stories. Not surprisingly, considering Kine’s longtime association with This American Life, the Post-It Note shows have often featured names familiar to listeners of the program: David Rakoff, Jonathan Goldstein, Arthur Bradford, Joshua Bearman. But they’ve also included storytellers from outside the literary and radio worlds, such as comedian Dave Hill, guitarist Woody Sullender, and Marie Lorenz, an artist and ship-builder who runs her own ferrying service in New York City. 

Having labored over a number of animation projects in the past — a music video for the Philadelphia-based group Man Man, a short piece for the Nickelodeon Network’s Yo Gabba Gabba, a five-part series called Monster Team that was eventually released on the record label Thrill Jockey — Jones finds Post-It Notes a welcome change of pace. “They encourage a certain amount of looseness and sloppiness on my part,” Jones says. “I can’t get too precious about it. Partially because of how small they are and partially because they’re so flimsy and disposable. They’re not the sort of thing you can think about archiving.” 

That off-the-cuff, informal approach is something he hopes rubs off on everyone who takes part in the reading series. “Some of them are established writers who do a lot of pro work, so for them it’s an opportunity to take chances and try stuff they might not otherwise. And sometimes we have people who hardly write at all, so in those cases the slides ease the pressure. It’s not them getting up in front of a crowd to do a traditional “reading”; it’s more like they’re reading a comic book out loud.”

While Jones isn’t the first artist to create work on Post-It Notes, in his case it has become something of a calling card. Last year, as word of mouth on the reading series spread, Starlee and Arthur made a series of animated Post-It Note shorts. In September the Post-It Note Reading Series had its first out-of-town booking, at Seattle’s Bumbershoot festival. And in April Jones and Kine are presented a new Post-It Note story at This American Life live events in Chicago and New York, the latter of which will be simulcast to more than 400 movie theaters nationwide.