I fell down a rabbit hole yesterday — ironically, it started with researching Lewis Carroll. Yesterday was his birthday and I thought I was going to post one of his quotes. I might still do that later today.

The weirdest thing about this daily Commonplace Book Project I’ve been working on since the start of the year is the deeper dive into the people I quote. Sometimes, I find out things that are disturbing or even downright disgusting. Coco Chanel was a nazi sympathizer. Marion Zimmerman Bradley’s daughter accused her of raping her.

I already knew that there were allegations about Carroll and Alice Liddell, the little girl who inspired his most famous work. I already knew that there was a nude photograph of her big sister and one of him kissing Alice like a lover.

I was looking a little deeper, pressing a thumb into that bruise, to see what I might want to write about it. That was yesterday’s rabbit hole. So it was a pleasant surprise when falling down it lead me to something wonderful that I’d never heard of before.

Of course, I’ve been aware of the idea of outsider art — art created by people who are not formally trained and who are not part of the inside art world. I just never had a name for it. And I never knew that it was a thing.

It is a thing, though. Maybe one reason it is so intriguing to me is because I’ve spent most of my adult life becoming an insider artist. Pursuing formal training in the form of an undergraduate and graduate degrees, working harder than I’ve ever worked at anything to be traditionally published, celebrating every step toward being able to support my family with writing.

From the inside, looking out, I’m intrigued by the idea of art driven by mental illness or poverty or something other than money and recognition.

Earlier this month my daughter, Adrienne, and I went to see Welcome to Marwen. It’s about a man named Mark Hogancamp who creates an incredible, intricate outdoor art installation he calls Marwencol. It’s a world, set in WWII area Belgium, where he works through the trauma of a brutal attack that stole his memories, and photographs the results.

Mark Hogancamp is an outside artist. An artist who operates outside the established art world. Outside artists are often, like Hogancamp, mentally ill or unstable, and live their lives in an elaborate fantasy world. Their work, almost always, is not discovered until their deaths. Generally, they don’t seek to be discovered. Someone discovers them.

There is often a sense that art saved the artists life in some way.

Researching Lewis Carroll led me to a man named Henry Darger. Darger was a solitary man who did the same janitorial work and lived in the same one room apartment his entire adult life, until just before his death in 1973 at age 81. Darger attended Mass daily, sometimes up to five times a day, and had only one close friendship throughout his life.

When he was moved to a nursing home, his landlords went into his room and found his art.