Read the whole comic on The New Yorker. The anxieties of 2020 in one wailing bundle!
Sustainable Art Foundation Award
This award will help support the Middle Grade Graphic adventure I’m currently working on as well as a memoir.
The Sustainable Arts Foundation supports writers an artists with children.
From the 2020 award announcement: “Chosen from a field of nearly 1,800 applicants, these twenty artists and writers come from eighteen U.S. cities, Costa Rica, and Turkey; they are parenting thirty-four children. The world closed down while we were reviewing their portfolios, but their creativity opened the world back up to us. We are now all the more eager for the day when we can return to bookstores, galleries, museums, libraries and all the other vibrant spaces where art happens. We hope you will seek out their work.”
I applied for this award many times over the years, gave up for a while, and early this year applied again. Grant applications are a way to describe and focus my projects for myself—as well as a jury. Most of my applications have not been successful—it’s amazing when they are. I’m so grateful for this support, especially now.
In Seven Days Quaranzine
Seven Days VT editor Dan Bowles compiled stories, poems, photos and comics responding to our Covid-19 world for the May 6 issue Quaranzine. I was glad to exorcize some of my anxiety about school-at-home in this comic. SOME of my anxiety.
Featured on The Literary Ladies Guide
Joined the gang of luminaries on the Literary Ladies Guide, a site that provides of Inspiration for Readers and Writers from Classic Women Authors.
I wrote a new bit about the process of making the book especially here.
Fall Book Tour Concluded!
This was a busy fall: I traveled to SPX, MICE, the Brattleboro Literary Festival, CAB, Short Run in Seattle, and finally the NTCE in Baltimore. My last stop is the Woods Hole Public Library on Dec 30.
Both Persephone’s Garden and Charlotte Bronte Before Jane Eyre debuted at the Small Press Expo outside of Washington, DC this September. I shared a table with pals Jennifer Hayden, Summer Pierre, and Ellen Lindner.
Next was the Massachusetts Independent Comics Expo, where Dan Mazur chaired a panel on historical Biography—it was packed!
Friday before MICE I went to an evening with Lynda Barry and Chris Ware. The wave of their energy has been carrying me along ever since. I sat next to Cara Bean, friend and inspiring cartoonist and educator.
After the panel at MICE and signing some books (thanks to Million Year Picnic) I drove to Brattleboro for the Literary Festival. On Sunday AM, Amongst the Liberal Elite author Elly Lonnon and I shared a stage—and a lot of laughs—people got up early to join us! Later that afternoon Madeline Miller gave a great talk on her best selling novel Circe. How to communicate my deep connection with Greek Mythology?
At Comics Art Brooklyn I was based at the Secret Acres table with Sadyiah Abjani and Keren Katz. Summer Pierre and I went to Lauren Weinstein’s interview of Ailine Kominski-Crumb. Life is Art and vice versa—at least that’s what I left pondering. So I keep going to yoga classes at Sangha Studio in Burlington.
On Sunday Ellen Lindner and I had a great time visiting all three Mets in one day: The Cloisters, The Main Met, and Met Breuer (for the Vija Selmans show.) #threeMets.
Several days later I was on the plane to Seattle for Short Run. I was a Special Guest, invited by my old friend and board member Meredith Li-Volmer. We had met at the University of Oregon Honors College in Topics in Modern Math 30 years earlier. We both look exactly the same. Short Run takes place in a beautiful light-filled space, and it was great to be a part of a gathering of a community of west-coast cartoonists there, and to table next to Ellen Lindner and Elise Dietrich. A few months before the festival I met Dash-Grant winner Rumi Hara, and am looking forward to her book with Drawn and Quarterly next year. A page from Charlotte Bronte Before Jane Eyre is in a show at the Fantagraphics Store in Georgetown, with a lively opening party on Friday night.
The National Conference of Teachers of English in Baltimore was a revelation! It’s a gathering of teachers excited to learn and expand their curricula with new books and to meet authors excited to share their work. I’m grateful to Disney/ Hyperion for bringing me, and for luxurious accommodations in Baltimore! I signed more than 80 books and asked many teachers about their experience with the Brontes’ books. While Jane Eyre is not required reading any more (as it was for me in 9th grade) many teachers and librarians told me that it’s still their favorite book, and they recommend it to AP English students in high school. It was thrilling to meet authors Rebecca Roanhorse, Minh Le, Zetta Elliott, and Kwame Mbalia. Here we are on a water taxi after a lovely dinner with brilliant organizer Dina Sherman and a group of educators.
In the middle of December I presented the book to a group of 50 6th graders from Edmunds Middle School. About half had heard of Jane Eyre, and I was impressed by their attention and the questions they asked: “Will there be a sequel?” No, because after the book ends, everyone dies. “Who is my favorite Bronte?” I can’t decide—I love them all!
Now that a busy and challenging first semester with the bright and brilliant students at The Center for Cartoon Studies is over, I’m glad to be home and to get to work this winter on what’s next!
In Seven Days Vermont
My giant copy of Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights sure came in handy here! (John got it at Barge Canal books last year while I was in the thick of working on Charlotte Bronte Before Jane Eyre).
Thanks to Margaret Grayson for this great article about my big year!
CCS Appeal: In Any Era Remarkable Talent Needs Help to Take Root
What if the Charlotte and Emily Bronte, instead of going to school in Belgium, arrived in Vermont to study cartooning? The Center for Cartoon Studies really ups anyone’s game, whether you’re small, plain, and obscure from Yorkshire, or mighty and popular from anywhere else.
Read the whole comic HERE. Or stop by CCS in White River Junction, VT to pick one up! Or apply for your own creative experience! And donate to help support this remarkable institution.
Charlotte Bronte Before Jane Eyre Review in the New York Times
This review in the New York Times one is the best yet! It appears in the print edition on Sunday Dec. 1st.
“This emotionally nuanced and visually stunning biography, illustrated in deft pencil strokes colored with moody shades of blue and featuring an insightful introduction written by Alison Bechdel, is the latest venture from the Center for Cartoon Stories…”
Stuck in Vermont and a Book Launch
Join me and Jason Lutes at Phoenix Books on Sept 26th for a launch of Charlotte Bronte Before Jane Eyre and Houdini: the Handcuff King. We’ll have a discussion about historical biography and creating graphic novels.
If you can’t wait for that, here’s Episode 591 of Eva Solberger’s Stuck In Vermont, where I talk about making the book about Charlotte Bronte, the great cartooning weather in the state of Vermont, and a theme park idea. (hint: there will be gruel.)
Joining the Center for Cartoon Studies
This fall (2019) I am joining the faculty at the Center for Cartoon Studies, that offers a two-year MFA and certificate program in creating comics. It’s so exciting to come out of my hermit cave and to be a part of this community dedicated to providing the highest quality of education to students interested in creating visual stories.
Not Actually the Center for Cartoon Studies!
This is Roe Head School where Charlotte Brontë studied and taught. If only they had offered comics as a subject—would we be reading Jane Eyre the graphic novel?
Vermont Arts Council Grant
I’m very pleased and grateful to have received a Vermont Arts Council Creation Grant for $4000 to complete the book I’m working on now, a middle grade graphic novel about a family of artists set in Late Bronze Age Thera, Crete, Egypt, and Cyprus.
The New Yorker: Nineteenth-Century Novels, with Better Birth Control
If our fave literary heroines of the Nineteenth-Century had access to birth control, many of the plots are solved almost before they begin. Or maybe it’s the institution of marriage that is the problem? Read all ten panels on The New Yorker.
Interview on The Comics Journal
Sloane Leong interviewed a bunch of people who had residencies at La Maison des Auteurs in Angouleme for The Comics Journal— including me. I was there in 2015 and 2018, and though I’m not there now, I haven’t unsubscribed to the group messages (because being au fait to when residents are going out for coffee/beer helps me concentrate) and so when she appealed there for people to talk about their experiences at the MDA, I answered the call.
Read the Interview on The Comics Journal.
Thanks to Alan Francois for the photo!
Parenting Books for the Privileged Throughout the Ages
Parenting books have given me so much. Now it’s time to give a little back. Thanks, The New Yorker!
A Cartoonist's Diary on The Comics Journal
The week I chose to write about happened to encompass Latin Day, High School Info Night, and a Crisis for the Liberal Arts at the University. Read all five days at The Comics Journal.
August Garden on Spiralbound
I wrote this comic last May from notes I’d taken the August before, and drew, inked and colored it in December. A year and a half later, the disease has progressed.
Read all 3 pages on Spiralbound.
Travel Anxieties Flow Chart of Popula
I drew this comic for Popula in June after a surprisingly eventless trip to the UK and Angouleme, France. Fortunately, I’ve had plenty of anxiety-inducing travels to draw upon for this—and I’m certainly not alone! See the whole thing here.
Meanwhile I’m finishing the book about Charlotte Brontë—I’m doing nothing else these days in order to get it done! It will be out in Sept 2019.
Aqualitt in the New Yorker
Several people have asked me if this European Literary water park is a real place. There is a place sort of like it in Ayia Napa, Cyprus, Water World Themed Water Park, where the slides have a Greek Mythology theme, such as "Drop to Atlantis," "Aeolos Whirlpool," "Fall of Icarus," "Quest of Herakles," and more. I started thinking of the slides they could add that would make the place too sinister to visit—who would go on “Scylla and Charybdis”, “Kronos’ Catapult,” “Medea’s Moshpit,” or “Cyclops’ Cavern”? We went for Helen's 11th birthday, and she was thrown into conflict by her aversion to Greek Mythology and her enthusiasm for sliding.
Review of Alle Ego on High-Low
Rob Clough reviewed Alle Ego on High-Low on August 29, 2018.
It's a blast from the past to read this thoughtful thorough review of a project that I was working on 3 years ago! It's always in the back of my mind that I plan to edit, revise, and expand the book after this coming year--but I have several exciting projects to finish before I can get to it. The themes of the book are still relevant, while my working methods, writing, and drawing, have evolved in the last few years. Inshallah, I plan to return to working on Alle Ego with new eyes in 2019.
My Life with Charlotte Bronte in SevenDaysVT
This one page is in the annual Cartoon Issue, with a great cover by Alison Bechdel.
