Power of the creative spirit

When he was 7, Jeff Koterba swore at Snoopy.

Koterba, who would grow up to become the editorial cartoonist for the Omaha World-Herald, ran across a display of Snoopy-as-astronaut dolls and a sign reading “Snoopy — First Dog on the Moon!”

Koterba’s beef with everyone’s favorite beagle? He’d been drawing a character called Dogie the Doggie since he was 6, and Dogie had already been to the moon.

The Dogie-vs.-Snoopy tale is just one of the small moments that make Koterba’s new memoir, “Inklings,” a memorable read. In the book, Koterba recounts his relationship with his family, his drive to become a professional cartoonist and his grappling with Tourette’s syndrome, a nervous system disorder that causes involuntary tics.

But don’t think “Inklings” (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $25, 264 pages) is a “How I Overcame Tourette’s” memoir.

“Certainly, Tourette’s has always played an important role in my life,” Koterba said in a recent interview. Sitting across from him at a local pizzeria, his occasional hesitations or tilts of the head are hardly noticeable, certainly nothing like the involuntary tongue twitches that earned him the nickname “Cobra” in grade school.

“I didn’t want that (Tourette’s) to be the focus of it, but I wanted it to be in there enough to show how important it is in my life.”

Besides, Koterba considers Tourette’s part of the foundation of the creativity that has allowed him to succeed in so many different venues. (In addition to working as a cartoonist, Koterba is leader of the swing band Prairie Cats.)

“It’s sort of a double-edged sword,” he said. “I really do believe that there is a creative component to Tourette’s.” Koterba said he’s seen, heard or read about many people with Tourette’s syndrome who work in some creative medium — architecture, music, sculpting, photography.

“If I didn’t have that imbalance, maybe I still would do all the things I do, but I really feel like there’s a connection,” he said. “I can’t quite verify that, but it’s a theory I fully believe in.”

The road to getting published was a bumpy one, Koterba said.

“If I thought getting a cartooning job was difficult, I was just naive enough to think that I could do this, too. It’s one of those things, if I’d known how difficult it was to become a cartoonist, maybe I wouldn’t have tried it. Same thing with this.”

Koterba got a helping hand from an old friend, best-selling novelist Alex Kava, who was once Koterba’s boss at the Papillion Times. She introduced Koterba to her agent.

“It’s one thing to get an agent, but to get an agent who gets it and understands it, that’s key,” he said.

Koterba has been writing the memoir for more than five years and originally planned it as a novel. But as he delved further into his “fictional” story of a creative little boy, he decided to embrace the fact that he was writing about himself.

The challenge that followed, of course, was that he was also then writing about his whole family, including his father, Art, a one-time musician who pushed his son to be creative and musical but often seemed unsatisfied with the results.

“I dedicated the book to my father,” Koterba points out when asked about the relationship. His father still lives in Bellevue. “He ultimately was my greatest inspiration, still is. He had all these hopes and dreams and chose to give them up to raise a family, and that’s a huge sacrifice, and I just decided I’ve got to follow my dreams.”

And his biggest dream, which the book chronicles, is his road to becoming an editorial cartoonist.

The book follows his early efforts at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, when the thought that he could actually get paid for drawing was striking in its novelty, to his freelance work and to his attempt to syndicate a series of sports cartoons — an attempt that, he says, changed his life.

He came home from working at a Baker’s supermarket one day in 1989 and found a voice message from the Los Angeles Times on his answering machine. They were interested in his sports cartoons.

“I’ll never forget that phone call,” Koterba said. “You know in that moment your life has just changed.”

He likened it to winning the lottery.

“I was sacking groceries,” he marvels. “Not that everything immediately was figured out, because we were struggling financially and everything else, but it certainly was a turning point, and it gave me a lot of hope.”

That’s when the job offer finally came through.

In his book, Koterba recounts how he began crying when Frank Partsch, then the editorial page editor of The World-Herald, offered him the cartoonist job, a job he still holds 20 years later.

“I believe you do make your own luck,” Koterba says now. “You can’t just sit around and have things happen to you, obviously. And I also believe that if you work hard toward something, you can pursue your dreams.”

Even if those dreams start out as a “Dogie the Doggie” comic strip and mere inklings of future success.

Contact the writer:

444-1074, john.keenan@owh.com