Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No it’s a real-life superheroine! in The Jewish Chronicle — an article by Sarah Lightman about Jewish women cartoonists that includes me and Tangles

Drawing the unsayable in the Irish Independent — about Tangles and Billy, Me & You by Nicola Streeten

A funny way to deal with death in The Independent – a different article about Tangles and Billy, Me & You

And why not add a drawing I did right after we got back from London?

As I’ve mentioned earlier, Nicola wrote/drew Billy, Me & You, and is also co-creator of Laydeez do Comics. So amazing that I got to meet her and talk to her! And even make fun of her silly version of a Canadian accent. Long live traumatic autobiographical comics by Laydeez!

Donimo captured us being serious artists and total dorks…

First there was an excerpt in the Observer Magazine (part of The Guardian). It’s not online but here’s a peek. I got to do a self-portrait for it, too!

There was also a lovely review in the Glasgow Herald, also not online.

Channel 4 featured Nicola Streeten’s fabulous memoir, Billy, Me and You, and included nice mention of Tangles.

And the lovely online mag It’s Nice That featured slides from Tangles and an interview. In their words they were “bowled over” by Tangles.

Watch for more coverage in The Independent and The Jewish Chronicle.

Tomorrow I leave London after a lovely two weeks here. Will be posting some photos and notes from the trip soon. Thanks so much to everyone at Jonathan Cape, Leeds Comics Forum and Newcastle University, along with all the fabulous people I’ve met here (Nicola Streeten, Sarah Lightman, Paul Gravett, Ian Williams, Corinne Pearlman, Francesca Cassavetti, etc etc). England rules.

November 12, Comiket Comics and Art Fair
I will be adjusting to the time change and hanging out at the Jonathan Cape table and no doubt freaking out about the amazing comics all around me.

November 17, Thought Bubble Festival, Leeds
Thought Bubble is the largest annual sequential art event in England, promoting comics and graphic novel as an “important cultural art form” — yay! I have been invited to give a reading and presentation during graphic medicine part of the Comics Forum.

November 21, Laydeez Do Comics, London
Laydeez Do Comics — seriously, the name alone makes me scream a little bit with joy. I will be presenting with the fabulous MK Czerwiec. They have a whole bunch of women doing comics in the UK! Seriously! And they get together and have these events and tons of people come. Every month! All the cartoonists and comics lovers I met in Chicago from the UK are huge fans of the Laydeez — both women and men. It is a very different world over there!

November 23, seminars at Policy Ethics and Life Sciences Centre (PEALS) and the Newcastle Centre for Literary Art, Newcastle upon Tyne
One of the best parts of publishing Tangles has been exploring the connections between comics and medicine and between comics and writing. On November 23 I get to do both — first with academics studying ethics and life sciences, then with creative writing students. More about PEALS and the Centre for Literary Arts — so cool!

November 26, Comica Festival, London
This is a huge festival directed by Paul Gravett, whom I met in Chicago at the Comics and Medicine Conference. Paul will be hosting a conversation between me and Nicola Streeten (OMG) — details here. Paul is not only one of the most well-known comics scholars working today, he is extremely kind and supportive. He plugs Tangles on his blog; warning: his blog will make you want to buy every single comic he discusses.

After that amazing Graphic Medicine conference in Chicago (that was summer vacation part 1), I came home for a little bit and then went to Toronto, Kingston and Montreal…

In Toronto, Julie Wilson hosted a conversation with me and Andrew Westoll at Ben McNally Books called “You Think You Know Me But You Have No Idea.” Andrew and I read from our work and talked about what it’s like to publish memoir, how the portrayal of yourself in your book is different from the Real You. The title of the event sounds a bit hostile, but really it didn’t turn out that way. Check out reports on the panel from Canadian Bookshelf and The Toronto Quarterly. Highlights of the evening included meeting the incredible Julie Wilson in person for the first time, and my agent Samantha Haywood, too! (Get a sense of Sam’s passion for publishing in this great interview on Open Book Toronto.) Andrew Westoll and I have written very different books but we think along the same lines when it comes to shaping narrative from life experience.

In Kingston, the wonderful essayist and lovely friend Susan Olding and I did a version of the same event at the tiny Novel Idea Bookstore, and managed to cram an attentive (and patient) audience into the narrow spaces between immovable bookshelves and we stacked books and small tables creatively to make a perfect stand for the projector. I love doing readings in little bookstores where you have to figure out how to make everything work with the space you have — there is always someone in the crowd with good spatial sense and/or expertise with projectors and the experience of setting everything up together creates a sweet atmosphere for reading and talking and answering questions. Highlights included seeing the wonderful art and writing that Susan’s young daughter Maia has been creating, and being in the city where Alias Grace was set. I just read Alias Grace this spring and am somewhat haunted by Grace Marks and her murdering ways.

Last but not least, I took the train to Montreal (broken air conditioning on the train + worst day of heat wave = completely hideous arrival in the most aggressively stylish city in Canada, but oh well). There I did a reading at the Yellow Door Coffeehouse with a small but extremely smart audience who asked great questions and took me out for Ethiopian food. I lived in Montreal in the late 80s and early 90s. Things are different but that electric, crackling energy that I remember is the same (that energy that made me think the people in Vancouver were in a coma or something when I first moved here). My favourite night included walking by a park where Judas Priest videos were playing on a large screen, continuing on through the dancing crowds of the Nuits d’Afrique festival, and then running back to my hotel through a wild thunderstorm.

You can read a bit about my reading on the wonderful blog, She Reads and Reads, and I had a coffee in Old Montreal with Ian McGillis, who wrote a lovely review of Tangles back in December. You can read his interview with me on the Montreal Gazette blog. I also met up with my dad in Montreal!

We went to the D&Q bookstore! And found Tangles on the shelf! I bought Ivan Brunetti’s Cartooning and Hilary Chute’s Graphic Women and a bunch of mini-comics from the awesome Life and Times of Butch Dykes series. And more! Until I regained a semblance of self-control and frugality.

Montreal + summer + comics = HAPPY

Tangles on the shelf at D&Q!

Oh, were you wondering what my cute dad looks like? Well here he is!

My dad with our Montreal breakfast extraordinaire

Ian wrote a great review of Tangles in December, as he notes below. Sometimes it’s difficult for me to put as much stock in words like this as I do in rejection letters that say I can’t draw, but oh well.

The first work of Canadian graphic literature to be short-listed for a major mainstream prize (the Writer’s Trust of Canada Non-fiction Prize), Tangles is exactly what its subtitle says it is. I reviewed it in The Gazette last winter. (Here’s a link.) The review was a rave and I stand by every word; if anything the book has grown in my estimation, rooting itself in my memory where many books I’ve read in the interim are already gone. Its greatest strength is its tacit acknowledgement that subject like Alzheimer’s, if it’s going to be tackled at all, is best dealt with head-on. Leavitt spares nothing of her mother’s suffering, nor of her own complicated response and handling of it, and in so doing does all who have been and will be involved in such struggles a great service. It’s not hard to imagine that things could get emotional at a reading from such a book, so bring a few tissues.

 

 

• July 19: You Think You Know Me, But You Have No Idea, with Andrew Westoll, Stacey May Fowles and Julie Wilson, Ben McNally Books, 366 Bay Street, Toronto
• July 20: You Think You Know Me, But You Have No Idea (Take Two), with Susan Olding, 6 pm at Novel Idea, 156 Princess Street, Kingston
• July 21:  Tangles Book Launch and Reception, 6 pm at the Yellow Door Coffeehouse, 3625 Aylmer Street, Montreal