SOMETHING’S GOTTA CHANGE
a Visual Narrative
by Michael Green
Michael Green is a physician and artist who lives and rides his bicycle throughout Central Pennsylvania. He is a founding Board Member of the Graphic Medicine International Collective, an organization devoted to the intersection of the medium of comics and the discourse of health care, and is co-author of the Graphic Medicine Manifesto from Penn State University Press. He is a Professor of Humanities and Medicine at Penn State College of Medicine, where he teaches a course on comics and medicine for medical students, and has published several landmark articles on the use of comics in medical education.
Text:
Page 1
Something’s Gotta Change…
When I awoke this morning, my iPhone was dead and all my favorite apps crashed. No email, no text, no nothing. Half asleep, my mind started to race.
Was this a massive Russian hack to sabotage the election? Was this the start of the long-predicted apocalypse? What does it all mean?
Page 2
I headed to the kitchen to settle myself with a bowl of Cheerios.
Page 3
Then borrowed my wife’s phone to contact tech support. This does not go as planned.
“I would like to be connected to customer service.”
“Customer service!”
“Connect me to a human!!!”
Page 4
The apocalypse will have to wait, because the next thing I know, my 23-year-old daughter informs me she’s moving to Philly, and would I drive the truck with her stuff? I’m concerned that relocating during a pandemic is not a great idea, but I concede and head to U-Haul.
Page 5
But when I arrive, I have a sudden rush of questions; do I need a 10’ or 15’ truck? Do these things have rearview mirrors? How do they handle on the highway?
I grew up in a large metro area and have always enjoyed driving. But having lived rurally for a while, I’m feeling anxious about city driving.
Page 6
So I reserve the smaller truck and head to my next mission.
Page 7
At the local Staples, they’re selling a noxious product and I need to protect the public from this potential hazard.
I don’t really care about the $2.00 refund, but when the store manager turns his back on me and walks away, I’m infuriated.
Speech bubble: “This smells bad.”
Speech bubble: “I can’t restock an open bottle”
Page 8
Still fuming, I return home to Zoom with my colleagues. We want to increase diversity, but how are we going to do this? Remembering our bylaws proves difficult.
Speech bubble: “we need to increase diversity”
Thought bubble: “this isn’t going to be easy”
Page 9
At lunch, I decide to take a break to clear my head.
Thought bubble: “I keep trying to do the right thing, but it’s such a struggle.”
Page 10
I head to Amish country for a bike ride. This has been my go-to way to relax during the pandemic. It’s a beautiful day—not too hot, no bugs—it couldn’t be nicer outside.
Page 11
The next thing I know, I’m fantasizing about giving up the modern world and embracing the ways of the Amish. I’m tired of all the battles and I wonder if I’d be happier living a simpler, more grounded life, savoring the soil and smell of manure.
Page 12
Maybe I’ll build that dream workshop.
Thought bubble: “is it too late to start over?”
Page 13
Or finally master that chocolate chip cookie recipe.
Page 14
I’m feeling calm and alive. The wildflowers are in bloom and I’m enjoying the solitude.
Then BAM! I’m clobbered with the unsubtle reminder that many of my neighbors don’t see the world as I do, as they fly the flag of my mortal enemy.
Page 15
This hits me hard. I’m tired of fighting battle after battle and I’m feeling worn down and depleted.
Page 16
Then I recall a bit of unsolicited advice I recently received from my dermatologist. Examining my moles, he said: “to have a successful career, you need to have fun and love what you do.”
Emily Steinberg is an artist, writer, and educator whose work has been shown across the United States and Europe. She has been named the first Artist in Residence at Drexel College of Medicine in Philadelphia, where she works with medical students to translate their medical school experiences into words and images. Her visual narratives have been regularly published in Cleaver Magazine where she has recently taken on the role of Visual Narrative Editor. Her memoir, Graphic Therapy, was published serially in Smith Magazine and her short comic “Blogging Towards Oblivion,” was included in The Moment (HarperCollins). She is a Lecturer in Fine Art at Penn State University. Steinberg earned her MFA. and BFA from the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. To submit graphic narratives for consideration in Cleaver, contact Emily at [email protected].
REPARATIONS WINE LABEL
Text by J’nai Gaither
Illustrated by Phoebe Funderburg-Moore
Click on images for full-size.
Full Text of Label:
Blacks in Wine Matter
Reparations Red Wine
United Colors of America
Nappy Valley
2020
401mL 16.19% by volume
To be acknowledged and included in this White wine industry is all people of color have ever wanted. Though wine is as global as industries come, it has never been welcoming to people of color. Even in South Africa, on the Mother Continent, most wineries are owned by White South Africans, though there has been a push to put the economic opportunities of winemaking into the hands of Black people. After 401 years, time is up. Drink and protest responsibly.
Reparations is made from Petite Sirah and Tannat, two thick-skinned black grapes that offer a hearty and savory liquid meal to the adventurous imbiber. With hints of espresso, blackberry and cocoa, Reparations gives back to the drinker what’s been stolen from them: the freedom to enjoy wine uninhibited. Aged in oak for only six months since we have already waited long enough.
Government Warning: (1) According to people of color, wine should be more accessible and less pretentious. It should not divide, and consumers and hiring managers should get used to seeing people of color in the wine space or risk losing a significant portion of the $1.2 trillion that is Black buying power. (2) Consumption of this alcoholic beverage may wake up the world to a bitter racism that has persisted in the industry for decades.
401mL Contains Anger & Indignation
J’nai Gaither is the hungriest of storytellers, always foraging for the next, excellent food and beverage story, or the most delicious of ad campaigns. When not consuming copious amounts of champagne and burgundy, she’s usually planning her next meal while listening to opera. Her work has appeared in Plate Magazine, New York Magazine’s Grub Street, Eater, Dining Out Chicago, Vinepair,From Napa With Love and other books and publications. You can see her work on Amy’s Kitchen website and packaging, as well as on current Sargento Cheese commercials. She has also been featured in the San Francisco Chronicle, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post.
Phoebe Funderburg-Moore is a Philadelphia-based illustrator, screen printer, and graphic designer. Her work is focused around self-discovery, love of nature, and observational humor. Recently Phoebe has been teaching herself animation and digital illustration. To view more of her work, visit phoebefm.com and follow along on Instagram at @phoebemakesart.
A SACK OF POTATOES, THE TIRED FARMER, & THE MIGHTY WORLD
A Visual Narrative
by Steph Jones
Steph Jones is the Assistant Farm Manager at Pennypack Farm & Education Center, a thirteen-acre non-profit organically growing vegetable farm in Horsham, PA. She majored in Studio Art at Bates College and has been working at Pennypack since 2015. Since her first summer at the farm, she has been fascinated with the natural world around her and its wonder has greatly influenced her artwork. Steph loves how her art shows her what she knows about this world and what is important to her within it. She is a farmer, she is an artist, and she believes they are the same.
Emily Steinberg is an artist, writer, and educator whose work has been shown across the United States and Europe. She has been named the first Artist in Residence at Drexel College of Medicine in Philadelphia, where she works with medical students to translate their medical school experiences into words and images. Her visual narratives have been regularly published in Cleaver Magazine, where she has recently taken on the role of Visual Narrative Editor. Her memoir, Graphic Therapy, was published serially in Smith Magazine, and her short comic “Blogging Towards Oblivion” was included in The Moment (HarperCollins). She is a Lecturer in Fine Art at Penn State University. Steinberg earned her MFA and BFA from the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. To submit graphic narratives for consideration in Cleaver, contact Emily at [email protected].
Emily Steinberg is an artist, writer, and educator whose work has been shown across the United States and Europe. She has been named the first Artist in Residence at Drexel College of Medicine in Philadelphia, where she works with medical students to translate their medical school experiences into words and images. Her visual narratives have been regularly published in Cleaver Magazine where she has recently taken on the role of Visual Narrative Editor. Her memoir, Graphic Therapy, was published serially in Smith Magazine and her short comic “Blogging Towards Oblivion,” was included in The Moment (HarperCollins). She is a Lecturer in Fine Art at Penn State University. Steinberg earned her MFA. and BFA from the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. To submit graphic narratives for consideration in Cleaver, contact Emily at [email protected].
Emily Steinberg is an artist, writer, and educator whose work has been shown across the United States and Europe. She has been named the first Artist in Residence at Drexel College of Medicine in Philadelphia, where she works with medical students to translate their medical school experiences into words and images. Her visual narratives have been regularly published in Cleaver Magazine where she has recently taken on the role of Visual Narrative Editor. Her memoir, Graphic Therapy, was published serially in Smith Magazine and her short comic “Blogging Towards Oblivion,” was included in The Moment (HarperCollins). She is a Lecturer in Fine Art at Penn State University. Steinberg earned her MFA. and BFA from the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. To submit graphic narratives for consideration in Cleaver, contact Emily at [email protected].
RING THE BELLS
A Visual Narrative
by Emily Steinberg
Emily Steinberg is an artist, writer, and educator whose work has been shown across the United States and Europe. She has been named the first Artist in Residence at Drexel College of Medicine in Philadelphia, where she works with medical students to translate their medical school experiences into words and images. Her visual narratives have been regularly published in Cleaver Magazine where she has recently taken on the role of Visual Narrative Editor. Her memoir, Graphic Therapy, was published serially in Smith Magazine and her short comic “Blogging Towards Oblivion,” was included in The Moment (HarperCollins). She is a Lecturer in Fine Art at Penn State University. Steinberg earned her MFA. and BFA from the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. To submit graphic narratives for consideration in Cleaver, contact Emily at [email protected].
THE CREATURE CRAWLIN’
Notes on Fatherhood in 2019
a Visual Narrative by Trevor Alixopulos
Trevor Alixopulos’ visual narrative presents a thoughtful and visceral glimpse of new-parenthood through a male lens. In this piece, he questions the very nature of existence and what it means to be human. Who is this new being? How is the parent’s life now different? As he moves through time and space, Alixopulos gives us his own take on generational shift.
Trevor Alixopulos is a cartoonist, writer and editor. His graphic novel, The Hot Breath of War (Sparkplug Comic Books), was nominated for Outstanding Graphic Novel in the Ignatz Awards and featured on tcj.com‘s “Top 100 Comics of the Decade.” His nonfiction comics essays have appeared on popula.com, where he was also a designer and editor. His various comics and illustration venues and clients include Los Angeles Review of Books, Kaiser Permanente, Fantagraphics Books, Turner Broadcasting, Seven Stories Press, Playboy, East Bay Express, North Bay Bohemian, and Scout Books. He lives in California.
Full Text:
It perhaps reveals some essential psychological fact that I experience the good things in life, falling in love, having a baby, as isolating experiences Baby: bah Father: bah
(Of course I am not alone in this, I have a partner, a family) Father: are you real? Mother: he doesn’t seem real
But in the past 11 months of fatherhood, while bringing much that is new, also revealed much that was always there, for good or ill. Into the light are dragged loneliness, inexplicable rage, and hidden resources, the good and bad alike
A rock is thrown into my subconscious, and the mind gropes in what comes up for relevant memories. My dad taking me with him in the pre-dawn to deliver papers, to the burger king he worked at, on his tractor mowing yards. Memories are distortions though, we recall the unusual, discard the typical , assign normalcy to what remains.
My father’s wisdom is lost to direct inquiry, it can only be inferred.
My paternal name, Αλεξόπουλος, means “son of the protector.” There is more to fatherhood than love and protection. With this little boy, I wonder what it would be like to raise a child in a world you knew. To set them on paths you walked, schools you attended, subway lines you rode. Perhaps the ceaseless change devalues fathers.
A child heightens the temporal vertigo of aging. The minutes fly by in a panic. He changes. We live a thousand lifetimes before the big long now of adulthood. He is not the same boy I left in the morning, when I return in the evening.
A baby is a little spaceman from beyond. A vulnerable stranger to a hostile world that is not theirs.
You get older and you become more like the world, it becomes more like you. Hip and strong, everything’s pointed at you. Every caprice, trend, draft notice.
Then some time in adulthood the world moves past you. You aren’t so much of this world anymore. You have one foot back in the beyond. Hard to say what of any value gets passed on.
These musings are likely artifacts of that mopey nature of mine, besides being drawn from a deep well of unwisdom. The parties are fixed, he’s teaching me teaching him. Baby: AAAAHHH Father: He’s like a cult leader, breaking down our personalities to indoctrinate us (Day 10 of sleeping on the living room floor in order to “sleep train” him)
It’s been interesting to observe myself in this pressurized state. Having a child sort of exposes how much of your self-involvement was situational and how much was truly hard wired. Baby: zsha Father: Why is it I only ever have one good pair of pants
Not to imply that taking care of another has to be an unselfish act. At some point, living compounds too fast for us to process. Grief and loss surrounds, pulses and gathers in the dark beyond the hearth. We feel like refugees in our own lives, we take refuge beyond our selves. Father: Jeez this is like the 10th article about “saudade” I’ve seen shared, people are fucked up!
I remember, a couple of years ago when my dad got sick. I quit my job, went on unemployment, spent most of the year driving up and down the state to check on him. I was alone on the highway. At the time it seemed hard.
Life is a series of ordeals, each more difficult than the last. Even so, we miss them when they go.
DEAR FAMILY AND FRIENDS
A Visual Narrative About Depression
by William J. Doan
Depression is a wiley adversary. Those fortunate not to know what it’s like to exist in this dark realm can’t grasp its life-sucking grip. Those afflicted are told, “ You look fine,” or “You have nothing to be depressed about. Your life is good.” But to read Bill Doan’s visual narrative Dear Family and Friends, an intimate, heartfelt account of coping strategies, is to viscerally feel what it’s like to live under the leaden sky of anxiety and depression. In a series of mostly black-and-white self portraits done in ink, Doan’s visage morphs wildly in expression and mode as he writes a letter, in elegant script, explaining how one can look outwardly fine while inwardly struggling on a minute-by-minute basis with crippling depression. Doan’s letter lifts the veil on a shrouded topic that is often spoken about yet still widely misunderstood. “Dear Family and Friends” is part of the rapidly emerging genre known as Graphic and Narrative Medicine, which combines words and images to relate personal experience with illness. Doan is a professor of theatre in the College of Arts and Architecture and artist-in-residence for the College of Nursing at The Pennsylvania State University. He will serve as the Penn State Laureate for 2019-2020. I’m am so pleased to present Bill Doan’s work in my maiden voyage as Graphic Narrative Editor for Cleaver Magazine.
William J. Doan, Ph.D. is a past president of the Association for Theatre in Higher Education and a Fellow in the College of Fellows of The American Theatre. In addition to articles in scholarly journals, Doan has co-authored three books and several plays. He has created solo performance projects at a variety of venues across the U.S., and abroad. His current work includes a new performance piece, Frozen In The Toilet Paper Aisle of Life, part of a larger project titled The Anxiety Project. Work from this project includes multiple short graphic narratives published in the Annals of Internal Medicine/Graphic Medicine. He is a Professor of Theatre in the College of Arts and Architecture and Artist-in-Residence for the College of Nursing at The Pennsylvania State University. Doan will serve as the Penn State Laureate for 2019-2020.
Text for Dear Family and Friends
Panel One: Dear Friends and Family. Text bubbles around the figure read from left to right: 1. It was as if I had brain worms constantly moving around in my head. Changing my mood and making me feel afraid of something all the time. 2. Fear responses. 3. Amygdala 4. Neural Circuitry. 5. Hippocampus 6. Prefrontal Cortex 7. I’m screwed 8. Where’s the off switch?
Panel Two: Seventeen million adults had a major depressive episode last year. And the numbers for children are staggering. The personal, social, economic, and ethical cost of anxiety and depression is almost impossible to imagine but is certainly real. Seventeen million adults had a major depressive episode last year and I was one of them. Text bubbles in image: 1. 17 million adults had a major depressive episode last year. 2. No shame if you were one of them.
Panel Three: Seventeen million adults had a major depressive episode last year and I was one of them. Text bubble in image: It’s one thing to think the unthinkable. It’s something very different to say it.
Panel Four: If you’re going to write about a life lived with anxiety and depression, you have to take a hard look at the past. But how do you do that without judging yourself, others, or all the social circumstances not of your own making? There’s nothing to be gained from blame. But there’s no moving forward without an honest look at the varied and complicated events that brought me to this confession.
Panel Five: There’s nothing to be gained from blame. But for me, there was no moving forward without an honest look at the varied and complicated events that brought me to this confession.
Panel Six: Sharing what it’s like to live with anxiety and depression is like undressing in front of strangers. It’s awkward, and I’m sure I’ll get tangled up, stumble, and fall into something.
Panel Seven: But how to confess, how to tell this story? I tried doing it in my head like I did as a boy in church, bless me father for I have sinned… But the fact is, hiding it was actually one of the ways I survived.
Panel Eight: Maybe I should try a letter. I sat for days in front of a blank page. I couldn’t remember the last time I wrote a letter. Dear Family and Friends.
Panel Nine: When anxious and depressed, which was most of the time, I would laugh a lot. My laughter was fake as often as it was honest. I knew that laughing and smiling were key to hiding the truth.
Panel Ten: Don’t’ misunderstand, it’s not that I didn’t feel happy, or experience joy. It’s that I figured out how to use a smile of a laugh to mask feeling anxious or depressed.
Panel Eleven: The fact is I can be surrounded by a thousand people and feel completely alone. Text inside the image from top to bottom: Ingredients of Anxiety and Depression, Luck, Evolution, Brain Stuff, Shit Happens, Brain Stuff, Gender, Trauma, Brain Stuff, Class, Childhood, DNA.
Panel Twelve: I always felt like the whole world was going one way while I went another. I laughed it off as often as I could.
Panel Thirteen: Over time I developed an advance ability to pretend everything was OK. This made it possible to show up for social events, work, whatever was required. I mastered “fake it til you make it.” Often, once I was present, I could find a way to enjoy myself for a time. But the cycle of dreading having to be somewhere, followed by regret, anger, or feeling guilty was exhausting. I just knew I had to keep moving.
Panel Fourteen: Pretending easily became lying, which became telling people what I thought they wanted to hear. I could pretend my way through almost any situation by lying to myself, convincing myself that I was the problem.
Panel Fifteen: Just push it away and keep moving. Text inside the image: series of words about being above and below the threshold of awareness, fighting feelings, blocking feelings.
Panel Sixteen: Inside I was slowly dying.
Panel Seventeen: As I got older, I grew angrier. And as I grew angrier I grew desperate to keep what I was feeling inside. Sometimes I thought my brain was on fire and I would never be able to hold back my rage. It became increasingly difficult to keep all this hidden.
Panel Eighteen: I’ve barely reached the heart of the matter in this brief letter. But it’s a start. What I know for certain is that it’s no longer possible for me to pretend I don’t live with anxiety and depression and I hope this helps you understand why I need to talk openly about it. My mental health, my well-being requires me to tell the truth. Especially to my family and friends.
Mid-Century Hipster
A visual narrative by Emily Steinberg
Emily Steinberg is a painter and graphic novelist. She has shown her work in the United States and Europe. Most recently she was named Artist in Residence at Drexel College of Medicine. Her memoir, Graphic Therapy, was published serially in Smith Magazine and her short comic Blogging Towards Oblivion, was included in The Moment (HarperCollins: 2012). She earned her M.F.A. and B.F.A. from the University of Pennsylvania and is currently a lecturer in Fine Art at Penn State Abington. You can see more of her work at emilysteinberg.com
Full Text:
Panel 1: It’s been quite a year. Last June I went under the knife. And got a new hip. 6.5 years ago dancing like a 20-something freak at my niece’s wedding, my left hip snapped.
Panel 2: Yeah, I know, brilliant move. This led to bursitis, joint trauma, bone-on-bone, and physical therapy. Then guided steroid injections, to limping badly. Every step excruciating, and, finally, walking with a cane.
Panel 3: Doc said I would know when I was ready for hip replacement surgery. What? But I’m only 48…. March 2018, age 53, I knew. Complete physical breakdown.
Panel 4: Couldn’t walk. Became immobile. Blew up round as a full balloon.
Panel 5: The night before surgery was a stunningly beautiful June evening. The last night with my old, crumbly, irregular, jagged hip joint. I was scared.
Panel 6: I saw this commercial: If you had hip surgery between 2009 and 2016 and it went BAD, call this number! Very reassuring. And I took a shower with weird special orange antibacterial soap… Remember! Don’t get it in your eyes or genitals.
Panel 7: I needed to pack a bag. Looked at the moon. Can’t sleep. Heart racing. Wake up 4:30. Hospital 5:30. Surgery 7:30.
Panel 8: Surgery is otherworldly, from the disinfection shower the night before to the mysterious phone call the day before surgery telling you when to show up to the hospital.
Panel 9: The reception desk was quiet. But once they wheeled me back to pre-op there was a buzz of professional gaiety.
Panel 10: The chipper drug nurse waived her giant syringe with a grin and assured me all would be fine. Then, like at a pit stop, enrobed docs swarmed me, cut me open, sawed out my gnarly old hip, and put a new part in.
Panel 11: I woke up. Swam out of the anesthesia on the verge of rebirth, like Lazarus crawling out of the dark tomb and back on the road.
Panel 12: Day one. Don’t remember much. Fainted on the way to the bathroom. Alarm went out. 30 people rushed in to help.
Panel 13: First night. Slept on my back, not allowed to move. Legs in compression hose and wrapped in compression sleeves that palpitate your calves to keep them from clotting. Giant yellow foam-cheese wedge-like thing strapped between my legs.
Panel 14: Bathroom 5:00 am. Nauseous, clammy, sweaty, anesthesia mucking up the works.
Panel 15: June days, long and gorgeous, pass. Peering out from my swanky private room it looked like the lavender fields of Provence through my Oxycontin haze.
Panel 16: Day 3 Post-op. Friday, 3:00 pm I went home with all of my gear. Walker, compression hose…
Panel 18: Hip replacement precautions: No twists! No bends! Don’t cross legs! Knee can’t be higher than hip or it might dislocated!
Panel 19: Day 4 Post op. Obsessed that I haven’t pooped in 5 days. Monday morning, 6 days out, fixated on lack of poopage. Amazing, how it all comes down to poop. Tuesday morning, 7 days out, still not a sliver of poop in sight. No one tells you that Oxy equals constipation. Finally, late Tuesday… redemption, deliverances, joy. When the machinery works, it’s a beautiful thing.
Panel 20: 8 days post-op. Feeling better; still sleeping on my back. Can’t bend. Limited movement. Went outside for the first time in 5 days. One week and three days post-op. Sleeping better… exercises… more exercises… bridge… lift butt….
Panel 21: Weaning off pain meds. More exercises. The clam! Progress, progress, progress.
Panel 22: Walker, 3 weeks, roughly. Used a cane through the fall. Now, a year later, walking 10,000 steps a day. Humbled and grateful for each pain-free step.
A NATIONAL EMERGENCY
A Visual Narrative
by Emily Steinberg
Emily Steinberg is a painter and graphic novelist and has shown her work in the United States and Europe. Most recently, she has been named Humanities Scholar in Residence at Drexel College of Medicine where she will teach medical students how to draw their own stories in words and images. Her visual narratives No Collusion! (2018), Paused (2018), Berlin Story: Time, Memory, Place (2017), A Mid Summer Soirée (2015), Broken Eggs (2014), and The Modernist Cabin (2013) have been published in Cleaver Magazine. Her graphic novel memoir, Graphic Therapy, was published serially in Smith Magazine, and her short comic, Blogging Towards Oblivion, was included in The Moment (Harper/Collins). She earned her M.F.A. and B.F.A. from the University of Pennsylvania and is currently a lecturer in Fine Art at Penn State Abington. You can see more of her work at emilysteinberg.com.
DRAWING A BLANK
A Visual Narrative
by Emily Steinberg
Emily Steinberg is a painter and graphic novelist and has shown her work in the United States and Europe. Most recently, she has been named Humanities Scholar in Residence at Drexel College of Medicine where she will teach medical students how to draw their own stories in words and images. Her visual narratives No Collusion! (2018), Paused (2018), Berlin Story: Time, Memory, Place (2017), A Mid Summer Soirée (2015), Broken Eggs (2014), and The Modernist Cabin (2013) have been published in Cleaver Magazine. Her graphic novel memoir, Graphic Therapy, was published serially in Smith Magazine, and her short comic, Blogging Towards Oblivion, was included in The Moment (Harper/Collins). She earned her M.F.A. and B.F.A. from the University of Pennsylvania and is currently a lecturer in Fine Art at Penn State Abington. You can see more of her work at emilysteinberg.com.
Emily Steinberg is a painter and graphic novelist and has shown her work in the United States and Europe. Most recently, images from her visual narrative Broken Eggswere featured in an exhibit titled Sick! Kranksein Im Comic: Reclaiming Illness Through Comics at the Berlin Museum of Medical History @ the Charité, Berlin, Germany. Her graphic novel memoir, Graphic Therapy, was published serially in Smith Magazine, her short comic, BloggingTowards Oblivion, was included in The Moment (Harper/Collins 2012) and her visual narratives Paused (2018), Berlin Stories: Time, Memory, Place (2017), A Mid Summer Soirée (2015), Broken Eggs (2014), and TheModernist Cabin (2013) have been published in Cleaver Magazine. She currently teaches painting, drawing, graphic novel, and the History of Comics at Penn State Abington. She earned her M.F.A. and B.F.A. from the University of Pennsylvania and lives just outside Philadelphia.
PAUSED by Emily Steinberg with an introduction by Susan Squier
My own menopause was a surgical one. It surprised me over the course of several months, with excruciating pain, then finally a diagnosis of ovarian torsion, then a hysterectomy/ovariectomy. It announced itself so dramatically that I felt entitled to give it the proper respect. To pause. To rethink everything (which is what I did, which is another story.)
But reading Emily Steinberg’s remarkable comic Paused, what grabs me is her remarkable recognition: her gripping ability to see the Dark Horse Menopause approaching (“unbidden and unwelcome”) amidst the dailyness of a young woman’s life, to envision Menopause announcing herself in her calamitous lability, her flow of symptoms (waking, drenched, freezing, stuck, and then raging heat surges/broiling/sweating), and finally her mythic multiplicity.
…she’s a banshee; she’s La Belle Dame sans Merci in her fully cloaked and unwelcome glory; she’s a desiccated Madame Frankenstein (in academic jacket) lurching towards us and yearning for the lube that love requires…
Steinberg’s wonderful, witty comic reintroduces us to our manifold ways of unknown knowing (sorry, Rumsfeld) about what menopause is, culturally and personally: she’s a banshee; she’s La Belle Dame sans Merci in her fully cloaked and unwelcome glory; she’s a desiccated Madame Frankenstein (in academic jacket) lurching towards us and yearning for the lube that love requires; she’s the fabulously trans-Tin Man, hoping for that oleaginous elixir; and she’s even the marvelous girl-golem, a Mummy prostrate but ready to display her power, even in her full body cast, nose-cone bras fully extended.
The passion, the power, the colorful claiming of what menopause is for women, for women artists, for those of us deeply attached to both science and culture in the Western world, is the wonderful gift of Emily Steinberg’s comic, “Paused.” But more than that, it’s the example that Emily Steinberg offers us: of using our colorful imaginations, our mythic archives, and our gutsy ability for backtalk to counter the greying, damping, muting effect of an unchallenged menopause. I love her closing words: “I will vanquish you yet, sucker. You, and your bony horse too.”
—Susan Squier, June 2018
Emily Steinberg is a painter and graphic novelist and has shown her work in the United States and Europe. Most recently, images from her visual narrative Broken Eggswere featured in an exhibit titled Sick! Kranksein Im Comic: Reclaiming Illness Through Comics at the Berlin Museum of Medical History @ the Charité, Berlin, Germany. Her graphic novel memoir, Graphic Therapy, was published serially in Smith Magazine, her short comic, BloggingTowards Oblivion, was included in The Moment (Harper/Collins 2012) and her visual narratives Berlin Stories: Time, Memory, Place (2017), A Mid Summer Soirée (2015), Broken Eggs (2014), and TheModernist Cabin (2013) have been published in Cleaver Magazine. She currently teaches painting, drawing, graphic novel, and the History of Comics at Penn State Abington. She earned her M.F.A. and B.F.A. from the University of Pennsylvania and lives just outside Philadelphia.
Susan Squier is Brill Professor Emerita of English and Women’s Studies, Penn State University, and Einstein Visiting Fellow at Freie Universität, Berlin, where she collaborates on the PathoGraphics Project. She is co-author of Graphic Medicine Manifesto (PSU Press), and author, among many other books, of Epigenetic Landscapes: Drawings as Metaphor.
Like fresh snow covering over a messy urban landscape, there’s a kind of concealing but also unifying quality to the fourteen central images of Emily Steinberg’s “Berlin Story.” Following a four-panel introduction, in which our narrator introduces herself as having grown up an anxious, fearful depressive, lost in the grip of, among other things, the “images of death, murder and gratuitous Nazi sadism” shown to her in Hebrew school, we are presented with still portrayals of an uninhabited, idyllic setting.
Each drawing, contained in an unframed rectangle, presents its viewers with a narrowed angle, or point of view, proximate to or regarding the famous Wannsee Villa, a mansion located in the suburbs of Berlin. The drawings are in black and white, cramped with details composed from demarcated lines, some of them even slightly wobbly marks. From four cherubs adorning the villa’s rooftops to two tree trunks gracefully tilting somewhere in the vicinity of the house grounds, we glimpse this locale as either a deliberately or unintentionally naive visitor might; this is a structure embodying decadence and wealth, good taste and fine craftsmanship. Here is a sculpture to admire, swaddled in a bouquet of well-groomed foliage. Here is a fine urn, hefty, ornamented, inviting contemplation. We walk its grounds, invited to by our guide. We revel in its beauty.
Still, none of this history seems teachable, transmittable. Steinberg’s sequence reveals how, despite all efforts to the contrary, despite all inclinations to conceal, the horror nonetheless lives on.
The handwritten dispatches, scrawled sometimes beneath and sometimes beside these postcard pictures, interrupt our reverie. “On Tuesday, 20 January 1942 at noon, Reinhard Heydrich, S.S., unveiled the extermination policy for Europe’s Jewish population, euphemistically known as the Final Solution of the Jewish Question, to leaders of the Nazi Party, over a pleasant lunch.”
What’s startling is that with these words, the images don’t suddenly transform; no visible traces of that exchange, or its consequences, are apparent in the pictures here, even in the intimate and exhaustively rendered tiny lines, the single- and cross-hatches of our once-depressive guide, who has “never completely” let go of those horrifying images presented to her in her youth, part of her Jewish heritage. The words tell us not only, or simply, of the terribleness, but instead fill us in on details presumably meant to help us picture what is, in fact, impossible to conjure up. Thirteen men, officials, ranging from thirty-two to fifty-two years old, gathered for a ninety-minute meeting dedicated, in part, to discussing the eradication of Jews. A thirty-six year-old Adolph Eichmann was charged with taking minutes. “There is no record of what was served for lunch that day,” another narrative accompaniment tells us. “The waiters served cognac, butlers and adjutants gave out liquor.” Ultimately, neither images nor words, here or elsewhere, can fully convey to us what took place, can help us imagine what is unimaginable.
On the fiftieth anniversary of the conference, the Wannsee Villa was finally made into an educational and memorial site. Another quarter of a century has now passed. Still, none of this history seems teachable, transmittable. Steinberg’s sequence reveals how, despite all efforts to the contrary, despite all inclinations to conceal, the horror nonetheless lives on.
—Tahneer Oksman, December 2017
Emily Steinberg, a painter and graphic novelist, has shown her work widely in New York and Philadelphia. Most recently, images from her visual narrative Broken Eggs were featured in an exhibit titled Sick! Kranksein Im Comic: Reclaiming Illness Through Comics at the Berlin Museum of Medical History at the Charité in Berlin, Germany. She is also a founding member of Fieldwork International, an improvisational diaristic collaboration between herself, Damon Herd and Sarah Lightman. Her graphic novel memoir, Graphic Therapy, was published serially in Smith Magazine. Her short comic, Blogging Towards Oblivion, was included in The Moment (Harper/Collins.) Her visual narratives A Mid Summer Soirée,Broken Eggs, and The Modernist Cabin appear in previous issues of Cleaver. She currently teaches painting, drawing, graphic novel, and the History of Comics at Penn State Abington. She earned her M.F.A. and B.F.A. from the University of Pennsylvania and lives just outside Philadelphia.
Tahneer Oksman is a writer, teacher, and scholar based in Brooklyn, NY. Her criticism on women, visual culture, and memoir, as well as some personal essays, have appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, The Comics Journal, the Forward, Public Books, The Guardian, and Lilith. An Assistant Professor of Academic Writing at Marymount Manhattan College, her first scholarly monograph is “How Come Boys Get to Keep Their Noses?”: Women and Jewish American Identity in Contemporary Graphic Memoirs (Columbia University Press, 2016). She is currently working on a book exploring memoirs of absence, loss, and grief. (Author portrait by Liana Finck.)
In an effort to get my head around what I consider the purpose of art-making, I attended three writing conferences during summer 2015. The first was at U.C. Berkeley and was supposed to commemorate the influential 1965 Berkeley Poetry Conference fifty years prior, inspired by a student Free Speech Movement earlier that year. But poet Vanessa Place’s inclusion on the bill caused the commemoration to implode.
Place, whose current project uses Twitter to disseminate instances of the “n-word” from Gone With the Wind, has been the subject of controversy before.[1] Place’s name on the Berkeley schedule caused many invitees to drop out in protest. The organizers canceled the conference and replaced it at the last minute with Crosstalk, Color, Composition: A Berkeley Poetry Conference.
I made it from Philadelphia in time to attend the last day. There was a lot of talk about colonization theory, and at the end of the day people sat in circles discussing race and their feelings in ways that were careful not to offend. I learned that the organizers kept notice about “conference 2.0” largely on the down-low out of fear of protests. Ironic, I thought: How do you create a platform for change when safety concerns limit the conversation to members of the Berkeley phone tree?
What I know of Ms. Place comes from her controversies and the strange fact that on the Internet she likes to pose for pictures in Salvador Dalí drag, with pineapples. Like Goldsmith, Place has become another poster child in the debate over who is allowed to say what.
Cathy Young, writing for The Washington Post about the dangers of appropriation, recently observed, “When we attack people for stepping outside their own cultural experiences, we hinder our ability to develop empathy and cross-cultural understanding.” I agree in principle, but I don’t think it applies to Vanessa Place or Kenneth Goldsmith.
In a statement on an earlier version of her project, Place wrote that her intention was to “[steal] Margaret Mitchell’s ‘niggers’ and claim them as my own.” Place, a practicing lawyer, is spoiling for a courtroom showdown. Her goal is to get the Mitchell estate to sue her, pitting Mitchell’s appropriation of black lives against Place’s own appropriation of Mitchell’s text—and too bad if contemporary African-American sensibilities get hurt in the process.
I also don’t think Young’s statement applies to writers like poet Michael Derrick Hudson, who gave Place and Goldsmith a reprieve from public acrimony in September 2015 when he emerged as a self-styled martyr for embittered white male poets. Hudson, writing under the female Chinese name of Yi-Fen Chou, had a poem selected for Best American Poetry 2015 by Native American guest editor Sherman Alexie. Hudson’s assumption of a Chinese nom de plume was vilified as an act of “yellow-face” that stole a slot Alexie admits he would have favored for another writer of color.
Alexie himself was attacked for letting the poem stay. Removing it, he wrote, “would have cast doubt on every poem I have chosen for BAP. It would have implied that I chose poems based only on identity.”
This controversy sheds new light on how identity politics affects the way writing gets vetted and published, and it raises objections about the defense of such systems. Certainly it was wrong of Hudson to game the selection process, but isn’t the fact that he did so a sign that the straight white male hegemony is on the run? On the other hand, the skeptic in me can’t help thinking that some of Hudson and Alexie’s most vocal detractors are less interested in razing the hill upon which the old king stood than in colonizing it for themselves.
The truth is, it’s hard for all writers and artists, but even harder for those who are marginalized. We work in a broken system: It’s called the world. What goes missing in our recent debates is how cultural and political functions of art sometimes trump notions of beauty.
2.
The Nude Joker
“All poetry is experimental poetry,” Wallace Stevens famously noted.
It’s probably also true that “lyric poets tend to be allergic to conceptual poetry.” At least that’s the opinion of writer Alec Wilkinson of The New Yorker. In an October 2015 profile, he portrays Kenneth Goldsmith as an aging enfant terrible, misunderstood by the poetry world and an object of jealousy among his contemporaries.
“I tried,” Goldsmith says in reference to The Body of Michael Brown controversy. “I’m an experimental artist, and I failed, on a very big stage. I wanted to work with hotter material, and this was so hot it blew up in my face…. I’m an avant-gardist. I want to cause trouble, but I don’t want to cause too much trouble. I want it to be playful.”
Playful? Really?
Michael Brown aside, what irritates people like me is that Goldsmith brands his work as poetry rather than a kind of performance art. But he’s as much a poet as the fashionistas in “The Emperor’s New Clothes” are expert tailors. A provocateur for provocation’s sake. Performance art is only fun if you’re in on the joke, not if someone’s running away with the gold of the kingdom.[2]
Some of Goldsmith’s endeavors, like printing out the Internet, mine a vein of bizarro stunt poetry where each new endeavor must outdo what came before. Other forms of conceptualism, like Place’s Gone With the Wind project, are so enamored of their concepts that they end up perpetuating the injustice they rail against.
As critic Cathy Park Hongwrites in The New Republic, “Goldsmith, who previously exhibited zero interest in race, saw that racism was a trending topic and decided to exploit it… and people roared back in response.” Or, as UCLA professor and poet Brian Kim Stefansputs it,“When did it become the job of the enlightened ‘avant-garde’ artist to fuck with the minds of people of color (and not their classic targets, the bourgeoisie)?”
On the other hand, Marjorie Perloff brings up a different point in The New Yorker piece. “Now a poet is an activist who writes in lines,” she complains. “That has nothing to do with poetry. It’s just provocation and proclamation.”
In terms of adding to a broader understanding of the avant-garde, I think Goldsmith is simply repeating concepts we already know, uploaded long ago into the cultural zeitgeist by such popular sources as Calvin & Hobbes, circa your childhood.
For his part, Goldsmith is reportedly lying low. “He has shaved his beard,” Wilkinson writes in The New Yorker, “so that he won’t be recognized.”
It’s not lost on me that there is more than one kind of beauty to consider in all this:
• the aesthetic beauty of sensory experiences
• and the beauty of ideas, the truth of which is sometimes unpleasant
When Perloff dismisses activist poetry as mere provocation, she implies it falls short aesthetically. But there is beauty also to be found in empathy. Empathy is the way we imagine ourselves into the position of the “other”. Empathy is an artistic and political act—and our failure to harness it results in a myriad of ethical and political problems.
But how to do it?
3.
Art & the Appropriation of Identity
Avant-garde “appropriation” techniques of the late 20th century have now become 21st century “colonialist” bad art practices—and it’s not just the poetry community that is experiencing the growing pains of identity politics.
In the fiber arts world, men and women fight over who gets to do what. Male quilters hate women-only exhibits. Women go nuts that men make work that talks about gender—even if it’s a man who is transgender. In the jewelry realm, it’s all about indigenous people and colonialism and tribal identities, with fights going on about who gets to make what. Woodworkers get into fights about ethically sourced materials and who’s more ecologically legit. With ceramics, it’s a tiresome argument about whether what we do is art or craft, and how some people who’ve never worked with clay before are suddenly getting shows in big-name galleries in NYC. We have debates over skilled versus de-skilled work, about whether materiality matters or not. I’m not aware of what, if any, contentions glassblowers have. Sigh. –A Pondering Ceramicist
Clearly an issue to consider is power: whether a person appropriates “down,” taking from those with less power; or “up,” taking from those with more power; or “laterally,” taking from those with roughly equal power. Appropriation should strive to be appropriate—that is, suitable to the circumstance. What complicates this on the personal level is that there are usually multiple markers in play: person A may have racial privilege but person B has monetary, age, or ability privilege.
Art-making has always been a way of identity-claiming. The tools, objects and ideas we create have long been the way cultures get built. It’s only natural we guard these things, for they describe who and what we are. We’re right to question if we’re being poached. Yet art-making is also about the exchange of ideas and a deepening of shared humanity. It doesn’t always have to be about colonization; it can be about cross-pollination. It can be communion.
In this way, art surpasses the limits of time and identity, serving as a virtual reality mechanism immersing us in the lived or imagined experiences of others. We should be careful not to dismiss this worthy exchange as a monstrous and unhealthy form of appropriation, but instead see it as one of the ways in which appreciation and respect can grow—a path by which obstacles can be overcome.
This in no way excuses Michael Derrick Hudson’s falsities, or the insensitivity that Place and Goldsmith have shown. Their lack of empathy underscores the fact that empathy can actually enhance logic, deepening it by providing a checkpoint for accountability.
I think today’s true avant-garde poets fuse advocacy for social change with aesthetically rich work that is more than mere diatribe. They reject language’s supposed “non-meaning” and the snarky irony that has for too long reigned as a default baseline for registering experience—and this may not sit well with experimentalists who have painted themselves into a corner. They acknowledge the human response to beauty and understand we are attracted to the expressions of other cultures because we are attracted to beautiful things. They realize none of us exist in a hermetically sealed environment, that the people we meet and interact with change us, become a part of us. While respecting the identity of the other, we can also embrace it.
4.
What Do Our Selves Draw Upon?
Last summer I also attended the Lambda Literary Retreat and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. In Los Angeles, at Lambda, I met Vanessa Place’s wife, editor Teresa Carmody, at a reading. Carmody was attempting to give away thick copies of a book of monographs the two had published. Even for free, the books weren’t exactly selling themselves. I thumbed through a copy and spoke with Carmody, telling her about my experience at Crosstalk. She told me she wouldn’t have let Place go to Berkeley even if the invitation hadn’t been rescinded. Too dangerous, she worried. Despite my concerns about Place’s project, I was glad to learn she had a partner looking out for her—and saddened too that in the fight for social justice anonymous hashtag warriors could bully a couple into fearing for their safety.
Overall, the Lambda Retreat was a time of growth. Yet it was no queer utopia. The sixty-plus writers who attended may have been united under a rainbow banner, but our perspectives weren’t all the same. It hasn’t taken hitting middle age for me to realize the concerns of Gen X queers like myself are not the end-all of the movement, only part of its evolution. Trans issues are now at the forefront, alongside a new sense of sexual liberty made possible by prophylactics like PREP. I wouldn’t wish on anyone the trauma I experienced coming of age in the AIDS years: the anxiety and fear, the lives lost along the way. Gay and lesbian Boomers and Gen Xers worked hard to forge a world where younger generations wouldn’t have to endure such fear, and by many measures, though certainly not all, it’s been achieved. At the same time, I didn’t think those struggles would be so quickly forgotten.
Each evening we would gather in a different venue to listen to the Lambda Fellows read. As I got to know the group through their vast and varied voices, I was reassured that the queer community is collectively stronger for our differences. That I am stronger for having met such people. What they said became a part of me, became a part of all of us—their words working as agents of change, charging the particles of our future selves.
Isn’t that, as writers, exactly what we want our words to do? To send new ideas into the hearts and minds of others, to transform them?
But wait! What stops you from making art? It’s different for everyone: Green-eyed monsters… Disability… Discrimination… Thinking it’s easy… Making excuses… Fakers… No money… Procrastination… Snake oil… Confusion… No vision… Leg pullers… No buzz… Religious a-holes who destroy art… No support system… Self-doubt… Indifference… Thought police… A dead albatross around your neck… Not practicing… Distrust… People casting shade… Worry—time is running out… Freak-outs… The fear it’s all a game…
5.
Art as an Empathy Machine
Working among serious writers at Lambda, and later at Sewanee, affirmed for me that art-making shouldn’t be a Rube Goldberg machine, an elaborate prank designed to pat you on the back as you piss on old graves.
What I’m interested in is refining the code I create by—but I’m also wary of claiming certainty. I see value in what Keats called “negative capability,” the ability of individuals to perceive beyond predetermined capacities, to marvel in doubt and mysteries unconstrained by pure logos. I believe we need new modes of perception that inspire thought as opposed to curtailing it.
To be clear, I’m not in favor of a “tsunami of silencing” poets, as one social media poster accused me of recently. I wouldn’t dare tell “experimentalists” to quit making art, only to quit foisting failed experiments onto the world. I’d tell them to self-regulate their output, to use their network of friends and fellow artists to provide critical feedback.
What I’m in favor of is artists asking themselves better questions, of examining their personal motives. It’s not that we shouldn’t question aesthetics, identity, or privilege—or even poke fun at, rant at, or dethrone the guardians of the hegemony. Rather, I’m saying that our identities are exceedingly complex. I do not claim we are living in a “post-identity” or “post-racial” culture. Instead, I believe we each encompass multiple identities, and when the focus narrows onto a singular aspect we tend to forget the impact our other identities also play in this messy enterprise of sharing the planet.
At a time now when identity cannot be stripped from art-making, when art is increasingly being used as a vehicle for social change, perhaps what is needed is an Empathy Credo writers and artists can use to help shape their ideas. Maybe we should look at:
Intention: What am I fighting for, and how does this work help? If I’m declaring open season on sacred cows, am I killing for sport or does something’s survival hang in the balance?
Feeling: Am I adding to the pain of the disenfranchised? If this project causes pain, does it also offer healing?
Aestheticism: Does the work provide a visceral aesthetic experience?
Motive: Am I doing this only to show off? To prove I’m the smartest, funniest, or most daring? Why am I pushing these limits? Is it for personal vanity, or to expand the boundaries of human experience and understanding?
Forgiveness: Have I allowed room for doubt and uncertainty, for the making of mistakes—both my own and those of others?
Identity: Am I open to transformation and the porous nature of who we are, the idea that humankind overlaps and learns from each other, that there is fluidity in the self? Have I respected that?
Accountability: Am I willing to put my name on this creation?
A sense of humor may help with these. (I’ll also add that I think these questions might serve to guide critics as well.)
Dear Reader, the questions you ask yourself may be different than mine. But I hope, as artists and writers, you will ask them. If we don’t look closely at what we are doing while engaged in the very act of creation, it will be very difficult to save face later. Who knows what might be overlooked? Who knows what will be brushed aside?
[1] In May, a Change.org petition called for Place’s removal from the review board of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs. In less than two days, the petition garnered 1500 signatures. AWP removed Place, resulting in shouts of victory by some and cries of censorship by others, most notably poet Ron Silliman.
[2] Certainly there must be room for play in the art and literary worlds. Some of Goldsmith’s students have said they find appeal in the “Zen-like” practices that his conceptual (often algorithmic) uncreative writing approach offers (and which are described in detail in the Slate.com piece by Katy Waldman, who sat in on Goldsmith’s “Wasting Time on the Internet” class). Yet when such play comes at the undue expense of someone else, I have to ask: Is the game worth it? Procedural poetry, at the best of times, offers formal restrictions that can lead to surprise and innovation: a fun starting point. As an end to itself, I worry this kind of art does indeed result in wasting time—on the Internet or elsewhere. It often proves a recipe for producing robotic, unreadable texts. At its worst, slavishness to rote procedures can eclipse conscientiousness and implicate motive. I’m left to wonder, Why should the means of creation supersede content? I say experimentation is best viewed as a mix of educated guesses and happy accidents measured against an ongoing series of value judgments.
A Note About the Illustrations:
The images were inspired by numerous sources, among them: the creatures of mythology who continue to haunt me; various online photographs; Calvin & Hobbes cartoons; the colony collapse of the honeybee (and all that implies about our precarious relationship with the world); the art of activist Rini Templeton, whose brilliant drawings I happily discovered by way of Christopher Soto’s Sad Girl Poems (Sibling Rivalry Press—check it out!); the stories of Ganesh taught to me over the years by colleagues at the Center for International Understanding as well as my college buddy, Deepak; favorite wild minds of the past; The Great Wave off Kanagawa, a woodblock print by Hokusai, which I saw once in the Michener collection at the Honolulu Museum thanks to the benevolence of the East-West Center; the strange workings of Rube Goldberg’s funny-bone mind, to which my father first introduced me; memories of protests and AIDS quilt displays in the late 1980s; the art of the late Keith Haring, who once kindly drew a sketch for me when he didn’t have to; my own sketchbook full of the faces of the beautiful and inspirational people I met during the summer of 2015 at the Crosstalk, Color, Composition conference, the Lambda Literary Retreat and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference; people alive enough to make art, fail at art, succeed at art and argue about art—but most of all the people who want art to do the world good; The Muppet Show; the Superman comics of my childhood; the brilliant cartoonist Lynda Barry; and, finally, the musician David Bowie, who passed away during the creation of this but whose songs have always been essential.
Kelly McQuain’s chapbook, Velvet Rodeo, won Bloom magazine’s poetry prize. He was a 2015 Fellow at the Lambda Writers Retreat for Emerging LGBTQ Voices and a 2015 Tennessee Williams Scholar at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. McQuain has published poetry and prose in Painted Bride Quarterly, Redivider, The Philadelphia Inquirer, A&U, The Pinch and Weave. He has served as a contributing editor to Art & Understanding and The Harrington Gay Men’s Fiction Quarterly, and his poetry and prose have appeared in numerous anthologies: Between: New Gay Poetry, Drawn to Marvel: Poems from the Comic Books, The Queer South, Rabbit Ears: TV Poems, and Best American Erotica. He has worked as a pretzel maker, a comic book artist, and a professor of English. He hosts Poetdelphia, a literary salon in the City of Brotherly Love. His poem “Jam” appears in Issue No. 1 of Cleaver. Read more at his website.
Play the Bee an Artistgame! Surrealism Cards (and a tangible board game!) coming soon.
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Kelly McQuain’s chapbook, Velvet Rodeo, won Bloom magazine’s poetry prize. He was a 2015 Fellow at the Lambda Writers Retreat for Emerging LGBTQ Voices and a 2015 Tennessee Williams Scholar at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. McQuain has published poetry and prose in Painted Bride Quarterly, Redivider, The Philadelphia Inquirer, A&U, The Pinch and Weave. He has served as a contributing editor to Art & Understanding and The Harrington Gay Men’s Fiction Quarterly, and his poetry and prose have appeared in numerous anthologies: Between: New Gay Poetry, Drawn to Marvel: Poems from the Comic Books, The Queer South, Rabbit Ears: TV Poems, and Best American Erotica. He has worked as a pretzel maker, a comic book artist, and a professor of English. He hosts Poetdelphia, a literary salon in the City of Brotherly Love. His poem “Jam” appears in Issue No. 1 of Cleaver. Read more at his website.
THE EMPATHY MACHINE
A Visual Narrative on the Poetics of Kenneth Goldsmith
by Kelly McQuain
“How did you spend your summer?” is the theme my schoolteachers used to ask us to write on when September came and we shuffled into our wooden desks with new lunchboxes and freshly sharpened No. 2 pencils.
As summer 2015 winds to a close, I’m reflecting on the what’s preoccupied me for so much of it: the purpose I find in art making, and the specters of poets like Kenneth Goldsmith and Vanessa Place, whose recent projects have cast a pall over the field of poetics this year due to their clumsy handling of identity politics—at a time when the country is still smarting from recent wounds and suffering new traumas on what feels like a daily basis.
Goldsmith, the MoMA Poet Laureate, is a champion of what he calls “uncreative writing.” He’s printed out the Internet. He’s transcribed news reports of famous disasters and retyped an entire issue of The New York Times. He’s read for Obama and been a guest of Stephen Colbert.
Last March Goldsmith ran into trouble after performing a poem called “The Body of Michael Brown” at a conference. Goldsmith read a somewhat edited version of the autopsy report for Brown, the African American teenager who died in Ferguson, Missouri, after being shot multiple times by a police officer the previous August.
Goldsmith’s “poem” ends not where the coroner’s report actually ends, but with the coroner’s description of Brown’s genitals and the observation “unremarkable.” The Twitter-verse erupted in howls of protest. Goldsmith pulled his poem from the Internet and won’t talk about it, even when other poets have pressed to interview him.
What’s worse? That Goldsmith never accounted for context, or that he simply chose not to?
As a white male making a big fat salary at an elite institution, he should have been aware of how his position of privilege would open him to charges of exploitation. Where was Goldsmith’s empathy for Michael Brown’s family?*
I live in Philadelphia, where Goldsmith teaches a course called “Wasting Time on the Internet” at the University of Pennsylvania. In it, students watch YouTube videos, create a daisy chain of typing on each other’s keyboards, and generally waste time (of course!). Meanwhile Goldsmith reportedly relies on an ambitious TA to do the academic heavy-lifting.**
I spoke to someone who took the course who told me Goldsmith seemed deflated after the “Body of Michael Brown” fiasco, that he had essentially lost faith in himself.
I doubt Goldsmith will bury his head in the sand very long. But if he did, would that be so bad?
Art pundit Ted Hash-Berryman has been taking Goldsmith to task for years, accusing him of manipulating people “in order to increase his own stature and sphere of influence.”
“a textbook psychopath” “no better than a terrorist or rapist” “He’s a vampire, sucking the creative energy out of his students in order to feed his own ego.”
Do ad hominem attacks move the conversation forward? These are just some of Hash-Berryman’s accusations, and they were echoed again this year by Goldsmith’s detractors, one of whom allegedly sent him a death threat, which Goldsmith gamely reposted on his Facebook page. I don’t know Goldsmith and can’t attest to the validity of such statements (histrionic, for sure), but I do know Goldsmith’s methodology offends my sense of what it means to be an artist and a poet.
What do I consider art’s aim?
The heroes of my literary education have left me with conflicting ideologies. In ancient Greece, poetry literally meant “making.” But for decades now, poetics have been preoccupied with deconstructing. What is the purpose of making?
“To entertain and educate,” says Horace.
“All art is quite useless,” opines Oscar Wilde.
If we apply Horace’s idea, Goldsmith is pretty much just telling us stuff we already know. Further, he’s admitted that people don’t have to actually read his work to “get it,” so pleasure can be thrown out the window, too. At first glance, Oscar Wilde’s observation might seem to be in keeping with Goldsmith’s stance on the mundane nature of art. But Wilde, as a proponent of the Art for Art’s Sake movement, was advocating that beauty is its own end. Goldsmith, in contrast, forsakes beauty.
As a writer and artist myself, what do I look for in beauty? Stay tuned for Part 2, coming in Cleaver’s Issue 13, March 2015!
*After the fact, Goldsmith donated his speaker fee for his performance to Michael Brown’s family. **Read “Frontiers of the Stuplime” by Katy Waldman on Slate.com for a full account.
Kelly McQuain spent summer 2015 as a Lambda Literary Fellow in Los Angeles and as a Tennessee Williams Scholar at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference in Tennessee. His chapbook, Velvet Rodeo, won the BLOOM Poetry Chapbook Prize and two Rainbow Award citations. His poetry and fiction have appeared in The Pinch, Eleven Eleven, Painted Bride Quarterly, Philadelphia Stories, and numerous anthologies: Drawn to Marvel: Poems from the Comic Books; Rabbit Ears: TV Poems; Best American Erotica; Men on Men; and Skin & Ink. He has twice held fellowships from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. McQuain used to illustrate sexy superhero comics but now works as a writing professor in Philadelphia. His book reviews and essays on city life appear from time to time in The Philadelphia Inquirer. Learn more at his website. Read his poem “Jam” in Issue No. 1 of Cleaver.
A MID SUMMER SOIRÉE A Visual Narrative
by Emily Steinberg Introduction by Tahneer Oksman
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First sort through Emily Steinberg’s A Mid Summer Soirée in quick succession. Then go back and read it slowly. This appealingly energetic set of captioned images is a storyboard of sorts. Each slide displays a beguiling creature or character, and sometimes a pair, pictured just above a crisply worded sentence encased in a neat, if bourgeois, font. We are presented with a simple trajectory: the individuals, spotlighted in medias res, are about to attend, or are attending, a party. These experiences do not clearly build on each other: “He’d been out of circulation a while.” “They argued just before arriving.” “She rooted through her closet and was dismayed.” Trying to fill in the narrative gaps is part of the pleasure of the journey, as is, on the contrary, moving past those gaps in favor of experiencing the piece’s seductive rhythm.
The artworks—some fashioned in delicate colors, some in black-and-white—are offset by clean white backgrounds. Many of the images are clearly collages, intricately inked cut-ups of crossword puzzles, newspaper articles, and cartoons. “I’m interested in the idea of chance, and what happens when you don’t control the situation,” Steinberg explained about the piece’s composition.
Viewing A Mid Summer Soirée, one is cast into a framework in which whimsy and fantasy meet a morning coffee-and-newspaper ritual. To transform daily minutiae into otherworldly events, to dive into the looking glass: therein lies the delight of this piece.
—Tahneer Oksman, June 2015
Emily Steinberg, a painter and graphic novelist, earned her M.F.A. and B.F.A. from the University of Pennsylvania and has shown her work widely in New York and Philadelphia. Most recently, she exhibited in a solo show at SFA Gallery, Frenchtown, NJ, and at the Woodmere Museum in Philadelphia. Her graphic novel memoir, Graphic Therapy, can be read online at Smith Magazine. Her short comic, Blogging Towards Oblivion, was included in The Moment (Harper/Collins 2012). Her visual narratives Broken Eggs (2014) and The Modernist Cabin (2013) have been published in Cleaver. She currently teaches painting, graphic novel, and the History of Comics at Penn State Abington. She lives in Philadelphia. .
Tahneer Oksman is the Graphic Narrative Reviews Editor for Cleaver Magazine. Her book, “How Come Boys Get to Keep Their Noses?”: Women and Jewish American Identity in Contemporary Graphic Memoirs, will be published in February 2016 by Columbia University Press. She is Assistant Professor and Director of the Academic Writing Program at Marymount Manhattan College.
TURNING RIGHT ON CASSADY A Visual Narrative
by Miriam Libicki Introduction by Tahneer Oksman
The cover image of Miriam Libicki’s five-page comics essay, “Turning Right on Cassady,” shows an oversized and emptied pair of sandals superimposed on a street map of Columbus, Ohio. Sandals, and feet more generally, feature prominently in this short but evocative piece, which recalls a teenager’s fitful and defiant walk across town to get to the north end of a street that touches home.
Those familiar with Libicki’s work will recognize in this short essay the themes of alienation, rebellion, and rootlessness that wind their way through her semi-autobiographical serial comic, jobnik! As in “Turning Right on Cassady,” the protagonist of jobnik! is often in search of a tangible connection to place, a place whose absence expresses itself through an intangible sense of longing and disconnection. Here, in short bursts of colorful images, the narrator’s observations of the sights and scenes that surround her, each bound in symmetrical rectangular panels, blur the distinctions between front and back, up and down, inward and outward. We are plunged into the point of view of a teenager whose conflicting needs—for independence and safety, adventure and refuge—dissolve conventional notions of time and space, and expose us to a world that feels, somehow, alluringly out of scale.
In discussing her process of putting this comic together, Libicki explained that she used Google Street View to help her reimagine the journey. As she described it, “One afternoon at my computer I virtually reenacted the whole walk.” In “Turning Right on Cassady,” the reader, too, is invited on a virtual reenactment, one that deploys the power of comics to allow you to walk a mile (or seven) in someone else’s Tevas.
–Tahneer Oksman, March 2015
Miriam Libicki was born in Columbus, Ohio. After living in Jerusalem and Seattle, Washington, she is now based in Vancouver, BC. She completed her B.F.A. from Emily Carr University of Art and Design and is currently completing her M.F.A. in creative writing at the University of British Columbia. She is the creator of the autobiographical comic series, jobnik!, which recounts her service in the Israeli army during the Second Intifada. Her other nonfiction comics have been published by Rutgers University Press, Alternate History Comics, The Ilanot Review, and jewcy.com.
Tahneer Oksman is the Graphic Narrative Reviews Editor for Cleaver Magazine. Her book on Jewish identity in contemporary women’s graphic memoirs is forthcoming from Columbia University Press. She is Assistant Professor and Director of the Academic Writing Program at Marymount Manhattan College.