By the time he was three years old, just as he was learning his first words, he could recite the full alphabet backwards and forwards. Soon after that he could read.

And his love for this rhythmic and accessible structure for representing and understanding the chaotic world around him only grew from there.

Today, he sees the shapes of letters everywhere, even when they’re not written out explicitly. He’s spent many hours studying different alphabet books, having memorized both the traditional and more creative representations of the letters.

“‘D’ is for dog, that’s been done,” he said.

He even makes collages that organize brand logos, or cartoon characters, according to where their name falls in the alphabet.

“‘A’ is for Audi. ‘B’ is for Burger King. ‘C’ is for Chips Ahoy,” he offers, off the cuff, as an example. And he could go on.

What he loves, he says, is the shape of the letters, and the catchy tune used to help children memorize them.

This summer, the Campbell’s Bay artist transformed his lifelong passion for the alphabet into something that he is soon hoping to share with others, by way of his first children’s book, called A is an Alien, W is a Witch.

The book, written and illustrated entirely by Kensley, offers 26 creative interpretations of what each alphabet letter could be.

“We all know the alphabet, from A to Z, but there’s something special about it you can’t plainly see,” writes Kensley in the book’s introduction.

“Every letter is a character with a role to play, from the comfort of your home to far, far away.”

From there, readers meet all sorts of characters that have been secretly designed to take on the form of the letter they’re representing.

An alien stands with its legs hip-width apart to shape the letter ‘A’; a bat with a belly shapes the letter ‘B’; a Christmas elf sitting at a table with its legs and arms extended in front of it, and its pointed hat bending towards the table, forms the letter ‘E’, and so on.

Not only does each letter take on a unique character not often found in alphabet books, but every two lines of the book are written to rhyme.

So when “E is an elf making lots and lots of trains, F is a fox snow-diving in the plains.”

Kensley said every letter is inspired by something he loves.

“As soon as we’re born, we’re immediately pushed into the education system, and one of the first things we have to learn is the alphabet,” he said.

“And what better way to interpret [the alphabet] than by depicting each and every letter of the alphabet as a funny little cartoon character, like stuff that not only I love, but kids love.”

Drawing, like reciting the alphabet, is something Kensley has been doing since he was a child.

He turned to it as a way of processing his world and communicating with others, which he sometimes has difficulty doing as someone with autism.

“Sometimes I like to use drawing to vocalize my thoughts,” he said.

Over time, he developed what he believes is his signature aesthetic using wax crayons.

“I got this ideal style. Simple shapes. Flat, bright colours,” he said, noting he was intentionally drawing in a style that might feel familiar to young artists.

Kensley had the first copy of his book printed at Pontiac Printshop, and is now working on securing copyright for it before printing more copies he then hopes to sell in local stores.

And he’s got more stories brewing already, such as one about a short man named Tick Tock, from Syracuse, New York.

“The only thing shorter than him is his temper,” Kensley said, explaining he is writing the story as a way of processing some of his own anger challenges.

“Some people tend to get really really frustrated over the smallest things, myself included, so I decided [this story] was maybe a way to interpret that.”

He said he has often gotten very angry at small things he sees online that get under his skin, but it’s something he’s working on.

“I just focus on the better things of life, something more people should do,” he said.

Garrett Kensley shows the first page of his alphabet book, titled A is an alien, W is a witch!

The ‘D’ page was inspired by The Simpsons TV show, in which Homer often enjoys a donut, and his wife Marj wears pearls.

One of Kensley’s favourite pages in the book is the ‘E’ page, for which he contorted an elf to take the shape of the letter it represents, and detailed a bead of sweat on the elf’s brow to indicate how hard he is working.

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