WOW

Alison Bechdel: She’s in there.

3/5/08- Alison Bechdel spends the day being whisked around by various event organizers (urg…myself included)…I can’t help but wonder how she would draw all of this: The buildings, the faculty, the students, herself assaulted by endless questions about Fun Home. The questions persist from 2:00---questions about art, life, how you compose in graphic form, “what does this all look like in your brain?”


Sitting in Writers House during the Master Class could be likened to a first kiss. Please don’t let this end. The whole world is carrying on around us, but let’s just stay here, as we are. There were moments when it seemed no-further questions were going to be asked, and a look of panic would sweep across our faces. Somebody please ask her something….please…. as everything she said drew me in more and more to the art of her.

She calls her process “OCD”, but I have to wonder if it is the Beaty of Graphic Memoirist, that she humbly aligns with disorder. Huh…disorder, the complete antithesis of her compositions. Beautifully inked, detailed, written. Each little inch by inch moment in conversation with the one beside it, and with ideas throughout the book. There is an undeniable order to it all.

Alison begins with language, she says. Begins with the words, and then moves to the images, composing not directly from imagination or memory, but often from old family photographs, google images (for historically accurate drawings of automobiles), and even I can’t get this out of my mind from self-portraits. Tons of them, two of which she will share with us at the 7:30 event, spiraling me back to the conversation we had about these self portraits hours earlier. Spending the day Bechdel: dialog referencing earlier conversations, inside information, personal stories, fun-day.


She tells us that the physicality of people in her drawings is immensely important my words. She says, “ I kind of like, do this thing, kind of obsessively, where I, well I take pictures of myself, like getting out of a car for example, so I can see what that looks like.” She shows the digital photo of herself getting out of a car, and the corresponding drawing, even explaining that some of her drawings have attempted to capture the feeling of photographs---and they do.

This tidbit is significant on so many levels, and my mind is swirling with all of them the tidbits that is, so I’ll try to keep organized.

Technology and composition: What has become an important, and relatively instant aspect of her process is only possible NOW, with new media and digital technology. Early-graphicnovelist-man days required searching through actual archival images to find out what a parking meter looked like in the 1950’s on MAIN STREET in TOWNVILLE (to use Bechdel’s example). She can google image search for the same, and find it in five or so minutes, push on with her work.

She used to take polaroids of herself in various poses, from which she could work on the drawings. But, as Bechdel admits, “They were like a dollar a piece.”

“Now it’s free, I mean pretty much free.” She can take thousands of posed images, put them on her computer and sketch from there.

Tangent—there is an Alison Bechdel digitized font made from her handwriting. This seems to haunt her slightly, since some other graphic writers would never in a million years do this, but for us, her adoring audience, we say save yourself from hand-inking an entire book, type it in, edit it fast, the sooner you finish this novel, the better, so we can have your next one, and your next…create more, faster….it is a worthy sacrifice in our eyes.


Embodiment of the Characters: Ok so the writer creates characters, and to some extent can embody those characters. Ok so an actor takes on the role, and to some extent can embody those characters.

Bechdel, a memoirist, is embodying real people. Posing as them, or as she sees them. She even poses in that person’s clothing sometimes. Taking on their mannerisms, the faces they make. A photo comes up on the screen behind her. It is her, dressed in her fathers clothing, and donning a pair of glasses he used to wear. The shot is taken from the floor, looking up along the line of the right side of her body. She is a giant. She as her father, is a giant. She embodies her dead father, looking down at us/her/both. And then draws that selfsame image. Seems like so much intense, gut wrenching emotion to experience for a photo, turned few inches of art, on a page. But let me assure you---it’s all in there. All in that little container.

But, she reminds us after Richard Miller comments on the softness of her writing/drawings, “You know writing this book wasn’t therapy. I didn’t want to put my reader through that.”

Her work is not soft because she is. It is not complicated because she is. She sure is in her work, but it is what it is, because she made it so, obsessively, compulsively, and dis-ordered.

Alison Bechdel blogs RU !!

http://dykestowatchoutfor.com/random#more-548

creative writing and newmedia

One definition of new media includes new modes of composing, and therefore new ways of reading. In the intro to creative writing course that I teach, my students took note of the way images change meaning. Studying Alison Bechdel's graphic memoir Fun Home, students began to see that meaning is changed, enhanced, made more sophisticated than language alone would convey (in the case of this novel). Images were not added to the text, and text was not added to image. They were composed to speak hand in hand.

Yes! Indeed!

So when we take another meaning of "new media", one that includes say the multimedia blog, webpage, filmic essay, students agree that composing takes on added complexity.

But, they seem resistant to composing in an academic setting. Creative writing pedagogy is understood as composing on the literal page. Alternatives are scary. It is intimidating enough to share thoughts out loud, in a workshop setting. Something about mediating their language, or composing multimedially is even more nerve racking for them. Their role as students/artists/composers is renegotiated in the space of a classroom, since these media are new. That does not happen often, and so they resist. Squirm even.

I have to wonder though, if we push through that resistance, if pedagogy does shift---which it will---perhaps the squirming will cease.

Video Essay: For example

Can the essay go multimedia? What is crucial to composition pedagogy is teaching critical thinking, clear expression, engagement with a subject area, and study of a large body of research in order to enter into the conversation.
Here is an example of what the multimedia essay could look like:

Creativity and Collaboration 2/5

The collaborative project put before the students involves exploring, uncovering, taking a critical look at Black History Month. What does it mean historically, personally, today, etc. Through collaboration, students have been collecting primary and secondary sources from the internet, and various campus/community events. They are piecing ideas together, as they look at the sources around them. Amazing process to watch!

Students are in the gathering phase right now. Piling up images, links, texts, audio files, video files, interviews....even taking their own footage.

They are critically engaged, and all exploring very different areas of meaning in very different ways. Making their own path through the subject area. Making knowledge, after reflecting on the information.

BOG New Humanities Presentation by Richard Miller