Josh and I will be teaching a week-long workshop in creating graphic novels at The Fine Arts Work Center in early July--we're calling it At the Intersection of Writing and Drawing. I'm excited about this chance to collaborate and each bring our expertise to fellow practitioners. The graphic novel is such a fluid and remarkable form, with such creative potential for convergence of our crafts.

I'm hoping that we get interest from the creative writing community as well as the comics community, so that we can explore entry into the form on the prose side. Truth is, though Josh and I have done numerous collaboration, I often feel like I'm just starting to explore the interplay of the visual and text that is comics. I find the challenges deeply fascinating both for themselves, and for the creative muscles engaged as we visually represent through words.

It'll exciting to see what will emerge.


Click this link to find out more about the program and how to register.

Folding Chair Reading Series

I recently got the chance to read from the completed draft of my novel at The Folding Chair reading series, a great newish series about a brick-wall and rustic wood-table wine bar on Bergen Street in Brooklyn. The upstairs room where the readings take place has the feeling of a renovated attic, or a studio at a well-funded artist's colony.

Every month curators Oana and Prudence put together an eclectic, engaging and--sometimes provocative--showcase for Brooklyn artists (musicians and artists, as well as writers).

One of the challenges of dealing with the material of this novel is how to evoke the weird beauty of ballet and, at the same time, what goes on--uh--behind that. So I chose an early scene and one from later in the book. And I read edited versions of two scenes, with an eye toward showing the paradoxes of "onstage" versus "backstage." The draft was so fresh, it felt good, if odd. And clarifying.

The Sexual De-evolution

Erica Jong recently wrote in the NYT about how this generation of women has given up on sex. She quoted her 30-something daughter Molly Jong-Fast's essay "Your Generation Had Sex So Mine Didn't Have To" in nerve.

I was surprised not to be surprised. At issue is not the sex itself, but the wildness, the unpredictability sexual desire requires--or unleashes. How it can subsume the tightly monitored managerial impulse. I get it. We are a generation consumed with management--of families, careers--yes, men.

Sex requires an avenue for the libidinous to overflow. Its essentially anarchic nature was so attractive--represented freedom?--to the the 2nd-wave of feminists.

I don't hear much talk of freedom now--only of choice--mostly measured and responsible. With the dam that kept us out of the workplace largely burst, it feels like we're striving to harness our creative potential for productive purposes (career, family management). And sex is not productive from this standpoint (umm,or is it?).

Does choice turn out to be as much a burden, and a prudish one at that, as it is exhilarating?

Playmate & Me: Feminist at Playboy

Josh and I recently finished our collaboration for The Big Feminist BUT, an anthology of comics exploring feminism in our backlashy era. Editor Shannon O’Leary put out questions like these to the contributors.

Specifically, why is there so much discomfort with the idea of feminism?

Does feminism have an image problem, or are we living in a post-feminist era? And if we’re not living in a post-feminist era, what are the aims of a third-wave feminist movement?

What do women really want for themselves, each other, and the men in their lives nowadays? Can feminism provide it for them?

And what kind of effect has the women’s movement had on men?

All good questions. In response, I wrote a meditation in the form of a short comic memoir on my experience as a young feminist working for Playboy magazine in the 1990s. In the many iterations of the piece, my gratitude to editor Joan Reilly, what emerged through the many iterations of the piece was my own ambiguous feelings about the omnipresent Playmate (and by extension sex, sexuality, body image, feminity) who literally (since images of various Playmates through the ages hung in the office corridors) filled my days in the office. Here’s a sample page from the forthcoming anthology.

Operation Les Subsistences

I wrote this post several days ago, but due to technical difficulties am just posting now, the final day of the festival.

Until three days ago I hadn’t known that Lyon, France has zucchini the size of footballs and golf ball-sized peaches like that taste of candy. The air is crisp and burns with high-desert heat after three o’clock. The city has not one but two rivers—the Soane and the Rhone—that Phoebe calls the “Run” and the “Sun.

Phoebe and I are lucky enough to be tagging along with Josh on his artist gig as a resident at Les Subsistences, an “international artistic lab.” It’s a bizarre place for an American—a well-funded, avante guarde cultural compound outside of Lyon, housed in a very old monastery. They do love their artists in France.” For this week, Les Substistences has invited seven writers and performance artists (and one cartoonist—Josh) to create performances in response to the day’s news. (The festival is sponsored by Agence Press France). On Thursday, Friday, and Saturdays eves, Josh will be performing some aspect of the day’s news.

Just how—and wearing what—was the subject of our conversation as we hike up in the blazing afternoon sun up through the Jardin du Rosaire to the immense and elaborate cathedral Notre Dame de Fourviere.

Comics in Collaboration

I was happy to see that The Oxford American is featuring our collaboration--mine and Josh's--on its website. We chose to explore the future by crafting a Deepwater origin myth of sorts. (This issue has a great fiction piece by Victor LaValle in it--did I mention that already?) I love collaborating with Josh and getting to put on the hat of comics writer. Working in the comics form helps me clarify and experiment with narrative strategies because visual narratives have to be so much more distilled. Because this piece was so imagistic, this one did not feel like as much of a stretch as some more action-driven collaborations...

Notes on Black Swan

What lies between the Apollonian and Dionysian? The reality of the Bunhead, captured in the modern fairytale Black Swan.

Shocking to find ballet a metaphor that men relate to.

So read! Read more. A great new book about ballet—not an oxymoron it turns out: Jennifer Homan’s astonishing, lucid Apollo’s Angels.

From Apollo’s Angels: “At the origins of ballet lay two ideas: the formal mathematical precision of the human body and the universality of human gesture.”

So? So. But, then:

“Most people’s idea of ballet is that it’s a big puffy pink glittery nightmare,” --Christopher Wheeldon, The New York Times

What I’ve learned so far:
1. Maria Taglioni, great Romantic era ballerina, was considered in her youth ill-shapen, ugly. She created new paradigm around her "defects." So there, Twiggy, Madonna!
2. Ballet steps are codified court dances: a blueprint of the "gestures" performed by the aristocratic and royal courts as far back as 1500s.

When we watch a ballet today, what do we see? Why are we interested? We are watching a moving diaorama, the archictecture of a vanish(ing?) society: aristocracy. Is our interest, our fascination, atavistic?