Sweetness and The Roller Coaster
Sarah and I.
How do we ride the roller coaster of a lifetime of creativity? That’s what I talked about with Marika Reisberg in episode #199 of her podcast Sustaining Creativity (almost #200—way to go, Mari!) It was a great discussion and I hope you dip into it here: https://www.buzzsprout.com/1028026/13695538.
The topic is close to my heart as I finish hundreds of pages of comix that have not seen publication yet. My quarantine folly—a short graphic novel about my unrequited love for France—is still on the operating table for edits. And by the end of the year, I’ll hand in my full-color anti-cookbook Where There’s Smoke There’s Dinner to Top Shelf, pub date TBA.
Last month I got wildly creative and self-published a new 32-page minicomic The Sweetness That Remains for my table at The Small Press Expo, my favorite comix festival of the year, where I tabled with the wonderful cartoonist Summer Pierre, alongside our distinguished graphic comrades Glynnis Fawkes and Ellen Lindner. With a color cover and black-and-white interior, The Sweetness That Remains is a collection of my comix published over the last few years, embracing new goddesses, fresh accidents, electric funeral music, words dissolving in the well of inspiration, the ambush of emotional memory, and includes a survivor’s coda to my breast cancer memoir, The Story of My Tits. You can buy your copy of Sweetness here.
The topic of sustaining creativity resonates for me especially because the burst of creativity that followed my mastectomy in 2004 was what inspired me to write and draw my graphic memoir The Story of My Tits. It’s a book for pink October, created as a way to reach out to other women and their families going through breast cancer as a way to make them feel less frightened, less alone. The graphic novel has now been translated into Italian, Spanish, and French, and I couldn’t be more delighted at how many more women it has reached around the world. Here’s a preview, and you can buy a copy here.
I started my breast cancer memoir when I was forty-three years old and finished it eight years later. I’d been a frustrated writer and illustrator first, as well as a mother. I’d been biding my time, getting my background training, waiting for my creative roller coaster to reach the right stop.
This year, Small Press Expo got even more exciting when my old classmate and friend of many years, Sarah Rosen Wartell, arrived on Sunday for a hug and lunch and a copy of my new mini. A Washington dynamo, she’s totally supportive of where this blackboard-doodling class clown ended up. “You used to cover the whole board before class started,” she remembered (I’m paraphrasing—sorry, Sarah.) “I remember a drawing where you were making fun of one of the male teachers. Gently. But we all knew.” I love it that Sarah holds this memory for me. We all need our believers.
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