Reprinted from the April 2008 issue of Columbus Monthly ©.

Capturing life on an index-card canvas

by Chuck Bowen

Jessica Hagy explains the world one 3-by-5 notecard at a time.

She draws Venn diagrams, line graphs and equations on index cards that illustrate her quirky—and witty—perspective.

A recent card showed three overlapping circles, and each bore a label: “moustache,” “gaudy jewelry” and “smells like cheese.” The place where all three circles intersected was titled “Your crazy old aunt or the Burger King.”

Hagy, who lives on Columbus’s west side with her husband, Jason Oleszcuk, a web designer, graduated from Ohio University in 1999 with a bachelor’s degree in journalism and took a job as an ad copywriter. She’s done work for clients such as Sony, Victoria’s Secret and Port Columbus International Airport. She’s producing her artwork on themes about the presidential race for the McClatchy News Service, and her cards have been featured on the New York Times blog “Freakonomics” and BBC Magazine online.

It all began two years ago, when she started to draw on some index cards at her desk. She used a secondhand scanner to upload the notecard graphs to her blog. “It was just an on-a-whim thing,” she says. “I never really thought anyone would notice.”

About two weeks after she started, she was linked to MetaFilter—a sort of giant blog compendium—that put her work in front of more people.

The next thing she knew, the phone began to ring. Agents, book publishers and Marvel Comics were interested in talking. In the end, she agreed to terms with Penguin publishing, which released her book, Indexed, in February.

“It was lucrative,” she says of the five-figure deal. “It’s still surprising how weird things have happened—but good surprising, not terrifying surprising.”

She adds that she wouldn’t have believed all it took to publish a book was some notecards, a pen and a website. “This is supposed to be very difficult and life-consuming,” she says of publishing a book. “If I had known how to do it, I would have thought it was a weird scam.”

Her notebook and pen are constant companions as she jots down interesting bits of conversation she eavesdrops on at the office or the bus stop, which, she says, is her favorite place for quirky fodder. “It’s just been sort of a habit. It’s just part of my day,” she says. “You know you have an addiction when you have the paraphernalia on you at all times.”

She says her blog—indexed.blogspot.com—has gotten hits from people in 160 countries. “I would never have thought I would make a living drawing pictures,” she says. “It all sort of jelled together. It’s sort of become my public way of thinking.”

Chuck Bowen is a freelance writer.