Interview 58

It's been an exciting week! I completed the 58th interview last Tuesday with Petra Bachmaier of Luftwerk. Have you had a chance to check out solarise at the Garfield Conservatory? I highly recommend seeing it. They have several incredible installations inside and outside the facility. Portal is probably one of the most sublime pieces I've ever seen. solarise is up until the end of September 2016.

I know I've mentioned this before but one of my favorite writers and participants for this project, Lucy Knisley, is releasing a book in May. The trailer that she created is here: http://lucyknisley.tumblr.com/post/141902628439/the-new-animated-book-trailer-for-something-new

I also checked out Nora Moore Lloyd's work at the Thompson Center. The week long exhibition on Native American art was really lovely. Congratulations to Nora!

Joyce Owens, painter and sculptor, will be showing some of her constructions at Gallery Guichard in Bronzeville and the Cultivator Gallery in Ravenswood this month.

That's all for now!

Updates and News

I completed 56 interviews today. I met with the extraordinary Ruth Kaufman, voice over and on camera talent and a romance novelist. It was an insightful conversation.

We are getting close to the end of the interview portion. Only a few more interviews in the works! Soon I'll begin the editing and promotion process for the final product. So stay tuned!

Upcoming events and projects by women in the project:

Shanta Nurullah, storyteller and musician, will be performing in Classic Black: Southern Roots, Urban Migrations at the Pegasus Theater on Friday, March 25 at 7:30. The Theater at the Chicago Dramatists is at 1105 W. Chicago Avenue, Suite 202. The admission is $10. You should check it out.

Lucy Knisley will be publishing her book: Something New: Tales from a Makeshift Bride on May 3 about her experiences planning her wedding. I'm really keen to read this since I love Knisley's work and I have strong feelings about wedding planning. You can preorder  it  here: http://www.indiebound.org/book/9781626722491

That's all for now!

Book Releases!

Some of the oral history participants have work released or about to be released!

Anne Elizabeth Moore is having a limited edition run of her work AfterParty: A Novella described as "a sci-fi novel about disease and paradise", You can order it here: http://www.sonnenzimmer.com/#!/page/25 or find a copy at Quimby's in Wicker Park in Chicago.

You can now pre-order the entire In the Sounds and Seas by Marine Galloway that is due to come out on May 10, 2016. This wordless novel explores mythology and adventure. The first two volumes are incredible. I can't wait to read it all!

You can preorder it here: http://www.amazon.com/Sounds-Seas-Marnie-Galloway/dp/193554876X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1453132745&sr=1-1&keywords=marnie+galloway

Women in Comics

This week has seen a huge fracas over the Grand Prix d’Angouleme when the list of 30 nominees did not include a single woman. While no one has mentioned this, I can only imagine the number of minorities represented on that list as well. "The Grand Prix is a lifetime achievement award, and the winner is named president of the following year’s Angouleme International Comics Festival. In the event’s 43-year history, just one woman, Florence Cestac, has been awarded the Grand Prix."(1)

Franck Bondoux, executive officer of the Angouleme International Comics Festival, defended the decision by saying, "“Unfortunately, there are few women in the history of comics,” he said. “That’s the reality. Similarly, if you go to the Louvre, you will find few women artists.”(2)

To quote Clue, "it-it- the f - it -flam - flames. Flames, on the side of my face, breathing-breathl- heaving breaths. Heaving breaths... Heathing..."

Many people throughout the comic world and beyond have spoken out against this outrageous behavior. Groups are protesting and 1/3 of the authors who were nominated have withdrawn their names from the award. I believe there is now a move by the organization to include several women but people are calling for the award to be cancelled this year. 

It's an amazing vicious cycle. Throughout history, women's contributions in art (and everything really) are devalued and thus forgotten. Then their supposed absence is a evidence of the lack of quality. It goes round and round. Oh the flames I see.

So several lists have come out this week about women comic book artists. Here's one:  

25 Graphic Novels Written by Women, A Beginner's Guide

At the bottom of this article are some more names:

After the fracas...

I'm going to add my two cents to these lists since I've been most fortunate to interview several comic book artists for the project:

Sarah Becan is the creator of Sauceome, a great webcomic about food and body image. She also wrote the Complete Ouija Interviews and ShutEye. Check her out here: http://www.sarahbecan.com/

Marnie Galloway is the creator of the incredible trilogy In the Sound and the Seas along with other works. Check her out here: http://monkeyropepress.com/

Lyra Hill is the founder of the late Brain Frame, a performative comic series. She creates zines, films, and much more. Check out her work here: http://lyrahill.blogspot.com/

Lucy Knisley is mentioned on the list above but I can't stress enough how awesome her work is. Relish is one of my favorite books; it's a graphic novel of short stories about food and memory. Check her out here: http://www.lucyknisley.com/

Isabella Rotman writes important comics about social issues, such as sex, consent, and more. She wrote the wonderful informative You're So Sexy When You Aren't Transmitting STD's and Animal Sex. FInd out more about her work here: http://www.isabellarotman.com   

These are just a few of many amazing artists in comics in Chicago. 

That's all for now!

(1) http://robot6.comicbookresources.com/2016/01/angouleme-grand-prixs-male-only-long-list-sparks-call-for-boycott/

(2) http://robot6.comicbookresources.com/2016/01/nine-creators-withdraw-names-from-angouleme-grand-prix-list/

Hot Chocolate with Marnie Galloway

I recently sat down at a cafe to talk with Marnie Galloway, comic artist and cartoonist. She is the author and artist behind the incredible award winning wordless comic In the Sound and Seas.

I asked her about her choice of medium of the wordless novel. She said while she was aware of the tradition of wordless novels, they weren’t her source material. Instead, she explained, “I grew up in a sometimes chaotic environment and took a lot of refuge in literature. I’m also a pretty staunch materialist, an atheist, so if there is anything sacred to me, it’s literature. I’m intimidated by language. There are all the other reasons. I think the more restrictions on a work, the more creative you have to be in a lot of ways. You have to be so thoughtful about communication in a different way. Everything has to be intentional. Not to say that it isn’t intentional [in comics with text], but there are so many challenges with not having words. When I very first started working on it, I deliberately chose not to have words cause I didn’t want to mess it up. I wanted to dip my toe into that world that is so powerful to me and has meant so much to my life.

“I’m starting to get braver with that. The next big book I’m working on is going definitely have language in it, I’m sure informed by wordlessness. Taking this idea of secular sacred, I think silence is very powerful. And those things that are not easily communicated with language, that’s what I want to think about and that’s what I struggle to communicate with one other human… If something is ineffable, by definition it can’t really be described. You can only create impressions of it. I’m starting to learn more about poetry to learn how language can capture that ineffability. Frankly, I’m still a little intimidated.” I love this notion of the secular sacred. What a phrase!

Marnie Galloway also co-hosts a new podcast called “Image Plus Text” with fellow cartoonist Sam Sharpe. I asked her about the origin of the podcast: “It was a happy accident that there were two cartoonists at Ragdale at the same time; it was Sam. I got a whole lot out of talking with [Sam] and I realized that I didn’t have a lot of opportunities in my daily life to truly talk shop. I think hard about these questions but they spin in circles in my head. So having someone else to talk to about them and a different insight was really valuable…

“It was his idea to start the podcast; he’d been thinking of doing it for awhile. He has a lot of friends in radio and I’ve been listening to podcasts for years. I remember packing up my dorm in college almost a decade ago and listening to early Ricky Gervais podcasts. So it’s a familiar media for people who do visual work for sure. It’s been terrific. The format... we talk to other creators, so far it’s been other cartoonists since that’s what our social network has been mostly made up of. We want to talk to sculptors, novelists, anybody who spends their life thinking of art, in order to test the metal of what we think.”

As always, this is just a short section of our conversation. It was an absolute pleasure to talk to Marnie Galloway about her work.

Check out the podcast here: http://imageplustext.tumblr.com/post/115028411322/i-t-01-welcome-to-image-plus-text

Check out her website: http://monkeyropepress.com/

Conversation with Lyra Hill with Bonus Workshop!

This past week, I was fortunate enough to sit down with Lyra Hill and to participate in a workshop by her and her MCA students at the Zine Fest. Lyra Hill wears many hats; she’s a cartoonist, filmmaker, and performer. She was the founder and curator of Brain Frame, a performance comic series that ran for three years. While I did not have the pleasure of attending Brain Frame, it was a wonderful artistic experiment. Lyra Hill served as curator, performer, promoter, bookkeeper and so much more for the show.

As a performer, her work evolved as the show went on. For the first Brain Frame, she started to think about adding props, lights, and more to enhance the comics. One of the first stories she performed was about a breakup that she wanted to impart the discomfort of it to the audience. She had an audience member read her ex-boyfriends part, incriminating the entire  audience in her story. That was only the start.  In Brain Frame 2, she debuted her Llama Man character where she dressed up as this “evil child stealing force” from her nightmares in a terrifying costume. She was 10 feet tall on stilts. She spoke in a menacing, sometimes undecipherable voice that went along with her projected comics. This performance really helped up the ante of Brain Frame. Overall, she worked to encourage people to push themselves and try new things by example. She’d push herself even harder and faster as a way to support others’ exploration of their work. Some of her performances were “ramshackle” (her words) but have become more polished over time.

As the curator, the best part was working with the artists. For her, it was important that at least half of the performers be women, which was hard at first. She found that many women were reticent or nervous at first; however, towards the end, more and more women submitted pieces and eventually outnumbered men in performances. Overall, Lyra Hill wanted Brain Frame to “constantly expand… the idea of what could be comics or could be related to comics.” People really responded to it. Collectives, groups and collaboratives, were formed from Brain Frame performances such as Pup House, a shadow puppet group, and more. She had a saying for her performers: “It's better try something crazy and fail, then succeed at something boring." I can certainly tip my hat at that.

In addition to her work at Brain Frame, Lyra Hill is also an experimental filmmaker. She had always loved movies but she hadn’t taken courses in film or comics until college. She just fell in love with experimental film. She learned to work with 16 mm film, which she called “a highly technically, unwieldy, otherworldly spectral experience.” One of her films, Uzi’s Party, shot on 16mm film, is debuting this week. The film is about teenager party where a Ouija game has a supernatural surprise. It’s part teen comedy and horror with an experimental twist. Check it out at 7pm on Friday May 15th.  More details here: http://cuff.org/program/ I’m bummed that I won’t make it but you should go.

In addition to our conversation, I was able to attend a workshop that she ran at Zine Fest at Plumber’s Hall on Washington Avenue, in the same week. She and her students at the MCA ran the workshop called “Horrormones: Performing Coming-of-Age Comics with the Teen Creative Agency.” The idea was to create a comic to perform in an hour as a group. It was tremendous fun. Lyra Hill’s students from the MCA teen program drove the session. We had four possible groups to join, each with their own theme. There groups were: Romance, Changes, Cliques, and Hormones. We chose the group that we wanted to work in so there were about 6-8 people in each, I’m fairly certain I was the oldest in my group by a decade but that was fine. It was neat to work with teenagers. In groups, we each talked about our life and how it related to the theme. We then drew our story on one or more clear plastic slides with a frame, like a comic frame. Then we had to combine the stories into one long story and develop a performance. It was tremendous fun.

The end result was wonderfully messy and inspired. The four groups did their piece very differently. One combined the stories as images in three acts. Another group presented theirs as a series of short stories one right after another. We combined our stories based on age (kindergarten to high school) and ended on a high note about transcending cliques. It was really thrilling! Kudos to Lyra Hill and her amazing teens for running the session.

I look forward to seeing the new films, comics and other performances of Lyra Hill in the future!

Interview with Sarah Becan

For my sixteenth interview, I met up with Sarah Becan, comics artist, writer, illustrator and more, to talk about her work. She has the amazing webcomic Sauceome (rhymes with Awesome) that talks about body image and food in very meaningful ways. Her treatment of weight and self-perception really resonate with me. I also love how she talks about food and relishes in the diversity of food in Chicago. It’s an important and witty comic.

She's also published The Complete Ouija Interviews, a collection mini-comics based on Ouija conversations in Nantucket and Shuteye, a comic exploring dreams in a compelling and novel way. Both are well worth checking out. We talked about her work as a comic artist and her work as an illustrator, often creating designs for restaurants and other businesses around the city.

Then we had one of those amazing Chicago moments. At one point during the interview, Sarah asked me if I smelled smoke. I had remarked that there had been a strange smell when I walked to our meeting place but I didn’t. Not long after, a fire truck with sirens blaring pulled up in front of the building. I paused the interview so Sarah could investigate.

There was a dumpster fire in a nearby alley! So we resumed the interview as the firemen worked to put it out. At one point, I noticed one of them was standing on top of the fire engine, gazing into the alley. Hilarious. I love this strange and wonderful city. Sarah provided me with this image of the dumpster fire from this morning. Thanks Sarah for the photo!

What a wonderful interview! Looking forward to seeing more great work from Sarah Becan.