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Cleaver Magazine

Fresh-Cut Lit & Art

 
 

Category Archives: Visual Narrative

WAR AND PEACE 2.0 by Emily Steinberg

Cleaver Magazine Posted on June 24, 2022 by thwackJuly 7, 2022

WAR AND PEACE 2.0
by Emily Steinberg

The writer, a middle-aged woman with long grey hair, is driving in car with her dog. She narrates: Since the end of February I've been watching the war on TV. CNN Breaking: "Russia Invades Ukraine. Ukraine strikes fuel depot. Putin pissed off."... And obsessively doom scrolling on Twitter. War Crimes! Odessa bombed! It simultaneously feels like 1939 and right now. Totally surreal.

Writer is driving in car with her dog, thinking. CNN: Mariupol falls. Siege ends. Russia takes City. At UN… Wait a second… the Cold War ended 30 years ago, right? Everything was cool, right? CNN: Breaking! Mass graves! … Right? [Sign: No Outlet] CNN: Mariupol in Ruins.

Four panels of a blob-like monster screaming on Russia One Feed TV: 1) “The Ukranians are the aggressors, not us! It’s all going according to plan!” 2) Denazification Live. Denazify Ukraine! Literate Ukraine from Nazi fascists! 3) War is Peace! 4) Up is down! Special Military Operation. In the bottom panel the writer’s dog is thinking, “In 2022, seriously?” Writer: Does anyone actually believe this shit? Everyday. There is a steady diet of Orwellian word salad on Russian TV.

Writer is still driving and talking to her dog: Born in 1964, the last year of the baby boom. Radio: Radio Free Europe…. Writer: I missed out on civil defense drills, bomb shelters. Radio: We’re calling out in transit. Writer: …and kneeling under desks at school. Dog thinks: Crazy town.

Writer, driving: We grew up in the last gasp of the Cold War… We mocked it… thought it was funny. Fast forward, thirty years ago. And the events in Europe are mind-blowing. Radio: Back in the USSR…You don’t know how lucky you are… boy… Writer: Is Europe… the world,, on the brink of WWIII?

Writer, driving: A newly aggressive Russia eating its neighbors. Suddenly… trust backwards into Cold War 2.0. Radio: London calling. Writer imagines the cover of MAD Magazine with two cartoon spies holding bombs: The spy vs. spy ‘toons that live in the pages of MAD Magazine, over 50 years ago, suddenly regain resonance. Radio: A nuclear era, but I have no fear…

Writer imagines a grouping of framed, black-and-white old-world photos of people in 19th and early 20th century Eastern European garb: For me, the conflict is also personal… and has echos of an older time.

Writer driving in car, talking to dog: My family came from these parts over 100 years ago. Dog thinks: Transinistria Odessa… Kiev… so familiar. Writer: In early March, Russia bombed Babi Yar, a ravine just outside Kiev where 33,771 Ukrainian Jews were shot by Nazis in 1941. Dog thinks: Assisted by Ukrainian guards. Writer: Sorry to be a downer. Dog: But that was then.

Black and white drawing of Putin sitting on a stool naked with legs crossed demurely: Now… Ukraine stands alone against a 1960’s comic movie villain with Empire on his mind.

Writer: As we slip into the sweetness of summer… CNN: Russia pushes deeper into Donbass. Ukrainian casualties very high. Dog thinks: The cataclysmic struggle of good and evil rages in Europe. David and Goliath 2.0! CNN: Zelinsky warns E.U. Dog: But it has slipped from 24/7 Breaking News. Sign: 499, 599, 699. Radio: Alles Klar Herr Commissar?

Dog thinking: Replaced by a steady feed of new and more heinous events…CNN: 18-year-old gunman. Used AR 15. Parents devastated. Writer looks down from steering wheel sadly. CNN: Breaking News. School Shooting. 19 children killed. Dog imagined writer turning off TV. Writer: So… I turn off the TV and poof! The war and all the bad things disappear.

Writer: And go about my business… grooving to old songs in the car. Radio: Games without frontiers… Dog thinks: Screw 5 bucks a gallon! Writer: Windows down, radio blasting. Radio: War without tears. Dog thinks: How is an AR 15 even legal? Radio: Herr Kommissar’s in town, oh, oh….

Writer, still driving: Bringing the past to the present… Radio: Everybody wants to rule the world. Dog thinking: The continual loop. Radio: We can be heroes. Dog thinking: The elasticity of time. Radio: Just for one day. Dog thinking: Slava Ukraini!
Emily Steinberg is a multi-disciplinary artist with a focus on painting and visual narrative and her work has been shown across the United States and Europe. Most recently, her first cartoon and Daily Shouts story were published by The New Yorker. Since 2013, her visual narratives have been regularly published in Cleaver Magazine. In 2019 she became Visual Narrative Editor at Cleaver and now curates submissions. Her memoir, Graphic Therapy, was published serially in Smith Magazine. Steinberg teaches visual narrative at Penn State University, Abington College, and Drexel College of Medicine, where she is Artist-in-Residence. She did her undergraduate and graduate work at The University of Pennsylvania where she received an MFA in painting and lives just outside Philadelphia.

To submit graphic narratives for consideration in Cleaver, contact Emily at [email protected].


WAR AND PEACE 2.0 by Emily Steinberg

The writer, a middle-aged woman with long grey hair, is driving in car with her dog. She narrates: Since the end of February I've been watching the war on TV. CNN Breaking: "Russia Invades Ukraine. Ukraine strikes fuel depot. Putin pissed off."... And obsessively doom scrolling on Twitter. War Crimes! Odessa bombed! It simultaneously feels like 1939 and right now. Totally surreal.

MEN O PAUSE by Emily Steinberg

MEN O PAUSE by Emily Steinberg

Masterclass in Visual Narrative Memoir with Cleaver Visual Narrative Editor Emily Steinberg, October 2 to November 6, 2021

Visual Memoir

THE RECKONING by Emily Steinberg

THE RECKONING by Emily Steinberg

GRAPHIC PSYCHE: A Workshop in Visual Narrative Memoir taught by Emily Steinberg, June 5-26, 2021

GRAPHIC PSYCHE: A Workshop in Visual Narrative Memoir taught by Emily Steinberg, June 5-26, 2021

SIX DAYS IN NOVEMBER by Emily Steinberg

Monday Evening

IN THE WOODS by Emily Steinberg

IN THE WOODS by Emily Steinberg

Emily Steinberg’s QUARANTINE JOURNAL

Image of Donald Trump inside virus with caption: we have identified the virus

NEW TRENDS FOR SPRING, a comic by Emily Steinberg

Cartoon image of facemask

RING THE BELLS by Emily Steinberg

social distancing by Emily Steinberg

Mid-Century Hipster by Emily Steinberg

MID CENTURY HIPSTER by Emily Steinberg 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.

A NATIONAL EMERGENCY by Emily Steinberg

A NATIONAL EMERGENCY by Emily Steinberg

DRAWING A BLANK by Emily Steinberg

"Drawing a Blank," sketch of purple woman looking directly ahead

NO COLLUSION! by Emily Steinberg

NO COLLUSION! by Emily Steinberg

PAUSED by Emily Steinberg

PAUSED by Emily Steinberg

BERLIN STORY: Time, Memory, Place by Emily Steinberg

BERLIN STORY: Time, Memory, Place by Emily Steinberg

A MID SUMMER SOIRÉE by Emily Steinberg

A MID SUMMER SOIRÉE by Emily Steinberg

BROKEN EGGS by Emily Steinberg

BROKEN EGGS by Emily Steinberg

THE MODERNIST CABIN by Emily Steinberg

THE MODERNIST CABIN by Emily Steinberg

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Published on June 24, 2022 in Issue 38, Nonfiction, Visual Narrative. (Click for permalink.)

DESPINA by Jennifer Hayden

Cleaver Magazine Posted on March 25, 2022 by thwackJuly 7, 2022

DESPINA
a visual narrative
by Jennifer Hayden


Jennifer Hayden is a graphic novelist based in New Jersey. She is the author and artist of The Story of My Tits, a graphic memoir about her life and her experience with breast cancer, which was nominated for an Eisner Award and has been translated into Italian and Spanish, soon to be out in French. It was named one of the best graphic novels of 2015 by The New York Times, Library Journal, GQ, Comic Book Resources, Paste, Mental Floss, Forbes, and NPR. Hayden’s first collection Underwire was excerpted in The Best American Comics 2013. She has also self-published two collections of her online comic strips, Rushes: A Comix Diary and A Flight of Chickens. Recently she finished a graphic travel novella called Le Chat Noir about her disastrous yet hopeful love for France. Hayden has lectured at Princeton, Harvard, Columbia, Johns Hopkins, Drexel, and NYU, and is currently finishing her first work in color, a graphic anti-cookbook called Where There’s Smoke There’s Dinner. She is hoping to use the proceeds to hire a personal chef. Author photo by Jen Davis.

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Published on March 25, 2022 in Issue 37, Nonfiction, Visual Narrative. (Click for permalink.)

From KENNINGS, Visual Erasures by Katrina Roberts

Cleaver Magazine Posted on December 20, 2021 by thwackJuly 7, 2022

Gallery

Published on December 20, 2021 in Issue 36, Poetry, Visual Narrative. (Click for permalink.)

MEN O PAUSE by Emily Steinberg

Cleaver Magazine Posted on September 23, 2021 by thwackJuly 7, 2022

Men O Pause
by Emily Steinberg

For over a thousand years, menopause has been treated as an illness, something to be feared and fixed. Emily Steinberg’s Men O Pause visualizes the grim history of the treatment and attitudes towards menopausal women throughout history, from the Salem Witch Trials to 19th-century institutionalization for hysteria, to menopause medicalization in the early 20th century. The story ends with her own positive experience of empowerment and self-actualization. In 2021, not only do we no longer need to be ‘fixed,’ but we are quite happy to be living outside the realm of women’s historical natural function.

—Caroline Harris, from M-Boldened: Menopause Conversations We All Need to Have, Flint Books, UK

“Men O Pause” was previously published in M-Boldened: Menopause Conversations We All Need to Have, Ed. Caroline Harris, Flint Books, UK 2020


Emily Steinberg is a multi-disciplinary artist with a focus on painting and visual narrative. Her work has been shown across the United States and Europe. Most recently, her first cartoon and Daily Shouts story were published by The New Yorker. Since 2013, her visual narratives have been regularly published in Cleaver Magazine. In 2019 she became Visual Narrative Editor at Cleaver and now curates submissions. Her memoir, Graphic Therapy, was published serially in Smith Magazine. Steinberg teaches visual narrative at Penn State University, Abington College, and Drexel College of Medicine, where she is Artist-in-Residence. She did her undergraduate and graduate work at The University of Pennsylvania where she received an MFA in painting and lives just outside Philadelphia.

To submit graphic narratives for consideration in Cleaver, contact Emily at [email protected].


WAR AND PEACE 2.0 by Emily Steinberg

The writer, a middle-aged woman with long grey hair, is driving in car with her dog. She narrates: Since the end of February I've been watching the war on TV. CNN Breaking: "Russia Invades Ukraine. Ukraine strikes fuel depot. Putin pissed off."... And obsessively doom scrolling on Twitter. War Crimes! Odessa bombed! It simultaneously feels like 1939 and right now. Totally surreal.

MEN O PAUSE by Emily Steinberg

MEN O PAUSE by Emily Steinberg

Masterclass in Visual Narrative Memoir with Cleaver Visual Narrative Editor Emily Steinberg, October 2 to November 6, 2021

Visual Memoir

THE RECKONING by Emily Steinberg

THE RECKONING by Emily Steinberg

GRAPHIC PSYCHE: A Workshop in Visual Narrative Memoir taught by Emily Steinberg, June 5-26, 2021

GRAPHIC PSYCHE: A Workshop in Visual Narrative Memoir taught by Emily Steinberg, June 5-26, 2021

SIX DAYS IN NOVEMBER by Emily Steinberg

Monday Evening

IN THE WOODS by Emily Steinberg

IN THE WOODS by Emily Steinberg

Emily Steinberg’s QUARANTINE JOURNAL

Image of Donald Trump inside virus with caption: we have identified the virus

NEW TRENDS FOR SPRING, a comic by Emily Steinberg

Cartoon image of facemask

RING THE BELLS by Emily Steinberg

social distancing by Emily Steinberg

Mid-Century Hipster by Emily Steinberg

MID CENTURY HIPSTER by Emily Steinberg 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.

A NATIONAL EMERGENCY by Emily Steinberg

A NATIONAL EMERGENCY by Emily Steinberg

DRAWING A BLANK by Emily Steinberg

"Drawing a Blank," sketch of purple woman looking directly ahead

NO COLLUSION! by Emily Steinberg

NO COLLUSION! by Emily Steinberg

PAUSED by Emily Steinberg

PAUSED by Emily Steinberg

BERLIN STORY: Time, Memory, Place by Emily Steinberg

BERLIN STORY: Time, Memory, Place by Emily Steinberg

A MID SUMMER SOIRÉE by Emily Steinberg

A MID SUMMER SOIRÉE by Emily Steinberg

BROKEN EGGS by Emily Steinberg

BROKEN EGGS by Emily Steinberg

THE MODERNIST CABIN by Emily Steinberg

THE MODERNIST CABIN by Emily Steinberg

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Published on September 23, 2021 in Issue 35, Nonfiction, Visual Narrative. (Click for permalink.)

THE RECKONING by Emily Steinberg

Cleaver Magazine Posted on June 29, 2021 by thwackJuly 7, 2022

THE RECKONING
by Emily Steinberg

The Reckoning is a 22-page full-color visual narrative, that illustrates our planet’s stark environmental crisis on a visceral gut level in words and images. It explores how our sustained misuse of natural resources is intertwined and connected, on micro and macro levels, impacting everything from climate change to how the Covid 19 Virus was transmitted from animals to humans. It imagines how we can do better.

The Reckoning, supported by a grant from The Studio for Sustainability and Social Action, Penn State University, was created in response to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal of Responsible Consumption and Production.

—Emily Steinberg


Emily Steinberg is a multi-disciplinary artist with a focus on painting and visual narrative and her work has been shown across the United States and Europe. Most recently, her first cartoon and Daily Shouts story were published by The New Yorker. Since 2013, her visual narratives have been regularly published in Cleaver Magazine. In 2019 she became Visual Narrative Editor at Cleaver and now curates submissions. Her memoir, Graphic Therapy, was published serially in Smith Magazine. Steinberg teaches visual narrative at Penn State University, Abington College, and Drexel College of Medicine, where she is Artist-in-Residence. She did her undergraduate and graduate work at The University of Pennsylvania where she received an MFA in painting and lives just outside Philadelphia.

To submit graphic narratives for consideration in Cleaver, contact Emily at [email protected].

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Published on June 29, 2021 in Issue 34, Nonfiction, Visual Narrative. (Click for permalink.)

FALL OF MAN, a visual narrative by Jennifer Hayden

Cleaver Magazine Posted on March 29, 2021 by thwackJuly 7, 2022

FALL OF MAN
a visual narrative
by Jennifer Hayden

Scroll down for an interview with Jennifer Hayden by Cleaver Visual Narrative Editor Emily Steinberg
"Fall of Man" by Jennifer Hayden, 2021. Sketch of two nude individuals falling with leaves surrounding them."On October thirtieth, seven months into quarantine, my husband slipped on the stairs." Sketch of man flying through air next to stairs screaming "Fuck." "I was at the post office. And can I have a roll of forever stamps?" Sketch of postal worker behind plexiglass wearing a mask and woman wearing a mask with the words "anti-droplet curtain" "sanitizing station" and "social distancing spot" in cursive around her."Without my phone. Mom? Mom, where are you? Dad just fell down the stairs and I think her really hurt his shoulder I'm calling 911." Sketch of phone left on dashboard in car."Our very-together grown up daughter who's living with us during COVID got him to the E.R. Nothing's broken or dislocated. Well, let me tell you, this shit hurts." Sketch of Dad, daughter, and doctor talking."Following up with the shoulder guy: I bet it hurts. You tore three tendons, not to mention your bicep. You're going to need surgery and several months of P.T." Sketch of Dad, shirtless, talking to doctor. "So we're down one guy for the dishes, garbage, and heavy lifting in our prison cell of three. You're not loading the dishwasher right. What, do I need a Masters for this? I said, get. Out. Of. My. Kitchen." Sketch of Mom, Dad and daughter frustrated."I'm driving to pick up takeout a few evenings later when it all stops." Sketch of Mom wearing winter hat with the word "WHOMP!" above her."Soft heavy impact. Then incomprehension. Suspension." Front view of Mom driving car."Followed by" Side profile of Mom with word "FOOSH!" floating above her."And I'm sitting in my car in a dark field and I am showered with glass." Sketch of small car in field with crescent moon in sky."My turn to call 911. I was fine. The deer that had hit me had lumbered off." Sketch of large deer saying "ow" with car in background."But the incomprehension and feeling of suspension stayed. I just dropped my husband off for surgery. They said I can't wait here, so I wanted to use your bathroom before I drive home. Let me take your temperature." Sketch of Mom in hospital next to worker."Last spring. We can't just stay in our houses for eighteen months until they come up with a vaccine... Can we? Oh God." Sketch of Mom looking out the window."Or maybe it had been there all the time." Sketch of Mom and Dad falling, nude, with leaves surrounding them."Summer. He's going to challenge the election results if he loses. They're going to have to forcibly remove him from the White House. Jesus. We're fucked." Dad looking at iPad with coffee on table."January. I believed in science. I believed in the constitution. I believed they would protect us." Mom wearing cable knit sweater, holding coffee, looking out the window. "I guess the first thing you learn in the fall from innocence is how naked you really are. I need another hug. But now pretend you're someone I haven't seen in a long time." Mom and Dad hugging.


Headshot of Jennifer HaydenJennifer Hayden is the author of The Story of My Tits, the Eisner-nominated graphic memoir about her experience with breast cancer. She wrote the webstrips Rushes: A Comix Diary, and S’Crapbook. Her first book, Underwire, was featured in The Best American Comics 2013, and she has appeared in anthologies. She is working on a graphic anti-cookbook called Where There’s Smoke There’s Dinner, and a travel novella called Le Chat Noir, about her dicey relationship with France. She has lectured at Harvard, Princeton, Columbia, and NYU, and is currently quarantining in New Jersey

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Published on March 29, 2021 in Issue 33, Nonfiction, Visual Narrative. (Click for permalink.)

SOMETHING’S GOTTA CHANGE by Michael Green

Cleaver Magazine Posted on December 17, 2020 by thwackJuly 7, 2022

SOMETHING’S GOTTA CHANGE
a Visual Narrative
by Michael Green

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?

I headed to the kitchen to settle myself with a bowl of Cheerios.

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!!!”

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.

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.

So I reserve the smaller truck and head to my next mission.

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”

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”

 

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.”

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.

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.

Maybe I’ll build that dream workshop. Thought bubble: “is it too late to start over?”

Or finally master that chocolate chip cookie recipe.

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.

This hits me hard. I’m tired of fighting battle after battle and I’m feeling worn down and depleted.

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.”

Something has got to change…


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.”

Page 17

Something has got to change…

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Published on December 17, 2020 in Issue 32, Nonfiction, Visual Narrative. (Click for permalink.)

SIX DAYS IN NOVEMBER by Emily Steinberg

Cleaver Magazine Posted on November 13, 2020 by thwackJuly 7, 2022

Six Days in November
by Emily Steinberg

Monday Evening

Election Night

Wednesday Morning

The United States of America is a Misomer

OMG! Save Us!

If you don't test you don't see the infections...Waiting in PA--Go, Philly!

Jubulation!

Thank you, Pennsylvania!


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].

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Published on November 13, 2020 in Nonfiction, Visual Narrative. (Click for permalink.)

A SACK OF POTATOES, THE TIRED FARMER, & THE MIGHTY WORLD by Steph Jones

Cleaver Magazine Posted on September 29, 2020 by thwackJuly 7, 2022

A SACK OF POTATOES, THE TIRED FARMER, & THE MIGHTY WORLD
A Visual Narrative
by Steph Jones

I'm hot. I'm sweaty, especially my upper lip from breathing hard with a mask on. My belly rumbles with hunger long empty from a breakfast before the sun rose. It's what farmers call "almost Almost Lunch", the time between 10:20 AM and 11:07 AM when you are past morning snack but really not close enough to lunch. I need to pick up this 40 LB. sack of potatoes, one of 15 bags in this load, out of 10 loads. That's a lot of taters. I roll my eyes thinking whose great idea it was to plant this many stinking potatoes.

Oh dear, it was mine...Back in February when anything growing sounded great. But now we have 6,000 Lbs. of potatoes to harvest. For farmers, hard work yields hard work. And the fact that we stick one half-piece of seed potato in the ground in May and return in August and dig out 8 full ones in its place is absolutely ridiculous.

So when I am tired as a farmer, I find strength as an artist. Both farmers and artists are expert observers of life. I want to know all of the world around me, understand its individuality, what makes it, well, IT. Pinpoint the small details that create the accurate sense of the whole. I throw my senses out into the world like echolocation, pinging on what surrounds me, waiting for the return...

I read the sky. I know the dense fog of summer mornings like walking through pea soup. The first patch of blue sky opens at 8:30 AM. When you can make sailor's britches out of blue sky, it is bound to clear up. Close after, our daily UPS flight descends into Philly. I wonder if it is the same pilot. By early afternoon, low cumulus clouds stamp the sky in repetition. Big spilling cumulonimbus thunderheads rise in summer. I know dark clouds over the sweet gum tree in the west means the storm will hit us, but clouds over the black walnut or pines means a miss to the south or north.

I am an expert water navigator. I know where all the potholes are on the farm roads and how to avoid them while driving. As I bounce along in the 1985 Toyota, I read the land's slopes and channels, ghosts of summer rainstorms past. I can tell if it's only rained a little from small pits formed in the dry road dust or rained heavily as low spots gather fine silty eroded soil.

The birds are surely entertainment. As the snowbird Juncos disappear in early spring, Canada geese flocks arrive. Turkey vultures swirl lazily in azure skies. The swallows swoop and dive as fields are mowed and kick up insects. They also sit on tomato stakes and laugh as they watch you work. Goldfinch bachelors woo their ladies on the fence. The five resident crows walk behind the disc harrow as delicious snacks are unearthed as old crops are ploughed under.

I listen to tractors. I know a cold tractor will chug for a bit and start with white smoke, and black smoke means a burst of gas and power, but blue smoke means oil. I can smell when a fuel line clamp comes off and diesel is dripping, which is different than the gas leaking out of the sediment bowl on the 1941 Farmall A. I know the purr of idling and the powerful hum of 540 engine RPM. I am not an expert tractor fixer, but I am an expert manual reader. A little elbow grease and perseverance. And a call to some experts.

I am a weed identifier. Winter is chickweed's game, and wild mustard bursts in yellow in spring, often the first flush of new life. When dandelions bloom it's time to plant those potatoes. Broad leaves like galinsoga, lambs quarter, amaranth, and smartweed are barons of the summer, with foxtails and grasses vying for top spot. I know that as daylight shortens in fall, weeds that grow to 6 feet in high summer, set seeds at only a few inches tall as they know frost is quickly approaching. Better to grow short with seeds than no seeds at all.

These pings fly back to me like a boomerang coming home true. My overused August muscles still have doubt, but this time I inhale the power of life around me. I grasp the rough sack and I inhale those potatoes right up over my shoulder. Yes!


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.

 


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Published on September 29, 2020 in Issue 31, Nonfiction, Visual Narrative. (Click for permalink.)

IN THE WOODS by Emily Steinberg

Cleaver Magazine Posted on June 29, 2020 by thwackJuly 7, 2022

IN THE WOODS
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].

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Published on June 29, 2020 in Issue 30, Nonfiction, Visual Narrative. (Click for permalink.)

Emily Steinberg’s QUARANTINE JOURNAL

Cleaver Magazine Posted on May 7, 2020 by thwackJuly 7, 2022

Emily Steinberg’s
QUARANTINE JOURNAL

Outrage-o-meter

March April May June

Image of Donald Trump inside virus with caption: we have identified the virus

Quarantine Journal 2

Quarantine-03

Quarantine-04

Quarantine-05

Quarantine-06

Quarantine-07

Quarantine-08

Quarantine-08

Quarantine-10

Quarantine-11


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].

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Published on May 7, 2020 in Nonfiction, Visual Narrative. (Click for permalink.)

NEW TRENDS FOR SPRING, a comic by Emily Steinberg

Cleaver Magazine Posted on April 22, 2020 by thwackApril 22, 2020

NEW TRENDS FOR SPRING
A Comic by Emily Steinberg
Cartoon image of facemaskCartoon image of facemaskCartoon image of facemaskCartoon image of facemaskCartoon image of facemaskCartoon image of facemaskCartoon image of facemask


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].

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Published on April 22, 2020 in Visual Narrative. (Click for permalink.)

RING THE BELLS by Emily Steinberg

Cleaver Magazine Posted on March 30, 2020 by thwackJuly 7, 2022

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].

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Published on March 30, 2020 in Issue 29, Nonfiction, Visual Narrative. (Click for permalink.)

THE CREATURE CRAWLIN by Trevor Alixopulos

Cleaver Magazine Posted on December 29, 2019 by thwackJuly 7, 2022

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.

—Emily Steinberg
Visual Narrative Editor, Cleaver Magazine


headshot of Trevor Alixopulos

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.

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Published on December 29, 2019 in Issue 28, Nonfiction, Visual Narrative. (Click for permalink.)

DEAR FAMILY AND FRIENDS by William J. Doan

Cleaver Magazine Posted on September 16, 2019 by thwackJuly 7, 2022

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.
—Emily Steinberg, Editor
    Philadelphia, September 2019

Download PDF Version of Dear family and friends

◊◊◊

William J. Doan author photoWilliam 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.

Love, Bill

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Published on September 16, 2019 in Issue 27, Nonfiction, Visual Narrative. (Click for permalink.)

Mid-Century Hipster by Emily Steinberg

Cleaver Magazine Posted on June 3, 2019 by thwackJuly 7, 2022

Mid-Century Hipster
A visual narrative by Emily Steinberg

MID CENTURY HIPSTER by Emily Steinberg 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 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 17: ...grabber, raised toilet, Oxycontin, ice bags!

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.


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 17: …grabber, raised toilet, Oxycontin, ice bags!

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.

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Published on June 3, 2019 in Issue 26, Nonfiction, Visual Narrative. (Click for permalink.)

A NATIONAL EMERGENCY by Emily Steinberg

Cleaver Magazine Posted on March 27, 2019 by thwackJuly 7, 2022

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.

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Published on March 27, 2019 in Issue 25, Nonfiction, Visual Narrative. (Click for permalink.)

DRAWING A BLANK by Emily Steinberg

Cleaver Magazine Posted on December 4, 2018 by thwackJuly 7, 2022

DRAWING A BLANK
A Visual Narrative
by Emily Steinberg

"Drawing a Blank," sketch of purple woman looking directly ahead
"Pipe bombs to 14 in the mail," sketch of orange woman looking to the side
"11 slaughtered at a Pittsburgh Synagogue," sketch of green woman looking directly ahead
"Kroger Grocery 2 Dead," sketch of orange woman gasping with her hands almost covering her face
"Domestic Terrorism," sketch of purple woman wearing red lipstick holding her hands on her forehead with one eye open, gasping
"Hounds of Hell Unleashed," sketch of green woman wearing red lipstick gasping with her hands on her head and her hair standing up straight
"But Beto might win over Cruz!!" sketch of pink woman cradling the word "Beto" in her arms
"But... Kavanaugh" sketch of blue woman gasping
"and Javanka are still in the White House" sketch of green woman making x around her face with her arms
"Civil War 2.0?" sketch of blue woman with one hand on her face looking to the side
"Election on Tuesday" sketch of gold woman shielding her face with one hand
"I can't look," sketch of pink woman's face partially covered by both of her hands
"Holding my breath" sketch of abstract yellow figure with legs looking to the side with one arm on top of their head and one across their stomach
Sketch of slumped person on the floor, with green and cream-colored splotched skin and short straight hair
"So We Had A Blue Ripple," sketch of green woman laying nude on her stomach on the floor with her feet up behind her
"100 women elected to congress!" sketch of pink woman with red and blue accents around her facial features
"Next day, insane post election presser" sketch of green woman with two pair of eyes holding her face
"Acosta Banned Press Pass Pulled" sketch of grey woman with her features highlighted in purple looking despondently ahead
"Sessions forced to resign" sketch of yellow woman with red outlining sitting on the ground holding her knees to her chest
"Whitaker In?" sketch of blue woman looking to the side
"Who the hell is Whitaker?" sketch of green woman frowning with dark under eye circles
"WTF??" sketch of purple woman yelling
"Creeping Authoritarianism" sketch of red woman shouting
"Then, Thousand Oaks shooting" sketch or red woman covering the lower half of her face with her hands
"Then, California Burns" Sketch of orange woman with her eyes closed
"And Then, Florida recount" sketch of purple woman looking unimpressed








Sketch of Emily SteinbergEmily 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.

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Published on December 4, 2018 in Issue 24, Nonfiction, Visual Narrative. (Click for permalink.)

NO COLLUSION! by Emily Steinberg

Cleaver Magazine Posted on September 5, 2018 by thwackJuly 7, 2022

NO COLLUSION!
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, 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 @ the Charité, Berlin, Germany. 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 2012) and her visual narratives Paused (2018), Berlin Stories: Time, Memory, Place (2017), A Mid Summer Soirée (2015), Broken Eggs (2014), and The Modernist 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.

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Published on September 5, 2018 in Issue 23, Nonfiction, Visual Narrative. (Click for permalink.)

PAUSED by Emily Steinberg

Cleaver Magazine Posted on June 6, 2018 by thwackJuly 7, 2022

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 Eggs were 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, Blogging Towards 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 The Modernist 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.

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Published on June 6, 2018 in Issue 22, Nonfiction, Visual Narrative. (Click for permalink.)

BERLIN STORY: Time, Memory, Place by Emily Steinberg

Cleaver Magazine Posted on December 15, 2017 by thwackJuly 7, 2022

Sketch of woman with brown hair and face that's painted yellowBERLIN STORY: Time, Memory, Place
by Emily Steinberg
with an introduction by Tahneer Oksman

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

1. Woman wearing jeans and a t-shirt with a happy face on it. Text: "Hello! I was born on September 8, 1964 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. To say I'm obsessed with Nazis and the Holocaust is a gross understatement. The Nazi terror reached into my suburban, North East American, 1970s childhood in large and small ways. Exactly 20 years before, in upper Austria, about 12 miles East of the city of Linz, a transport arrived at Mauthausen Concentration Camp carrying 83 persons of German, Hungarian, Polish and Russian nationality. Persecution status: Jew, Ethnic targets and Other. So... twenty years before I was born, this unbelievable shit was going down."

2. Profile of person's head with sections of their brain labeled as, "Obsessions, Depression, Feeling Weird, Anxiety, Fear, More Anxiety, Despair, and Bullshit." Below this floating head is a small woman stuck in a clear box, looking up at the head. Text: "In grainy black and white films in Hebrew School, we saw images of Death, Murder and Gratuitous Nazi Sadism. Gym class morphed into 1930's GYMNASIA peopled with the cool, stern rectitude of Aryan Youth. I was anxious, analytical, depressive and completely uncomfortable and awkward in my own physicality. The idea of Nakedness for me, was tied up in Naked Women, in recoiling in fear, being shot into pits. There was nothing remotely romantic or sexy about it. Organized sporting events of any kind brought the rapturous crowds at Nuremberg to mind. Anything to do with authority made me scared and uneasy. I couldn't understand how anyone could be happy and carefree when this had happened, in the world. Eventually, I managed to push these images to a less central part of my brain. But Never Completely...And to this day, when I'm in a crowd of people, I always make sure I know where the Exit is."

3. Woman sitting at a table with a lunch tray and cup of coffee. Text: "Against this Psychic Backdrop I went to Berlin. The Belly of the BEAST, the Epi-Center of all things THIRD REICH."

4. Sketch of woman wearing track pants and a sweater that says "Ich Bin Ein Berliner." Text: "I wandered the city streets where Hitler and his Henchmen MOTORED around in their over the top 1940's MERCEDES. So many levels to Unpack here... The Glorious History. The Nazi History. The Soviet History. Such a Mass of Strange Juxtapositions."

5. Sketch of three large gargoyles on top of a building. Text: "But, I was most struck by my visit to the WANNSEE VILLA, in the Far Western Lake District of Berlin, where on Tuesday, 20 January 1942, at Noon, REINHARD HEYDRICH, S.S., unveiled the extermination policy, for Europe's Jewish population to Leaders of the Nazi Party over a PLEASANT lunch."

6. Sketch of courtyard with large stone fountain in front of a stone house. Text: "The Villa was built in 1914 by Ernst Marlier, a wealthy Berlin businessman. He commissioned the well known architect Paul D.A. Baumgarten to create to Neo-Classical confection which sat gracefully on the edge of the large lake. Grossen wannsee."

7. Cherub statue holding a bouquet of flowers in a garden. Text: "The 16,000 S. ft. house has 2 floors and is surrounded by 7.5 acres of Wooded areas. from each room are Spectacular views into the gardens and onto the Lake."

8. Side profile of a life-size sculpture of a man. Text: "Around the house and grounds are several good Neo-Classical Replicas of Greek and Roman figurative Sculpture and Urns."

9. Fountain made up of several life-like figures holding up the bowl of the fountain in front of a stone house. Text: "In 1940, Marlier's Lakeside Villa was Sold to Heydrich's S.S. to be used as a Guest House retreat and a place of "comradely interaction" for S.S. officers."

10. Living area inside an ornate mansion with a nude sculpture to the left. Text: Heydrich, Chief of the Reich Main Security Office, Age 38, invited 13 high ranking Nazi officials, all men, between the ages of 32 and 52, to the villa and presided over the 90 minute meeting. Adolph Eichmann, age 36, Director of the Reich Security Main Office, Section IV, B4, Jewish Affairs and Expulsion, took minutes. 8 of the 15 men present held doctorates in their fields."

11. Stone carving of a fountain next to a walkway. Text: "The men vigorously debated what constituted a REAL JEW. Should a MISCHLINGE, a person of MIXED blood, be deported? Sterilized? Evacuated to the East?"

12. Corner of stone house with bay window. Text: "They discussed various methods of execution, such as, the recently tested gassing vans and the great successes on the Eastern front of the Einsatzgruppen, mobile killing squads who committed mass murder primarily by shooting."

13. Stone staircase leading to a pathway in the forest. Text: "The men stressed the necessity of not ALARMING local populations and all agreed that the liquidation process needed to be streamlined, bureaucratized, and made less messy, so, that everyone involved, both victims and perpetrators, be spared excess trauma."

14. Two trees inside a fence. Text: "All of the participants acknowledged that they must be strong in the face of such a difficult task, and they all pledged their full cooperation. It was at Wannsee when the trajectory of the Nazi terror pivoted from Organic Mass Murder to Mechanized Genocide. The House itself is a crime scene."

15. Close-up of cherub statue holding grapes and other fruits. Text: "I imagine that as the 90 minute conference wore on, attendees might have looked out the windows, stretched their legs, thought about their wives and children, or, maybe gone outside for a breath of fresh lakeside air."

16. Terrace of a stone mansion, with life-size lion gargoyles. Text: "I imagine walking on the slate patio just off the conference room, having a smoke, and taking in the sight of the classical statue of Bacchus under the portico."

17. Indoor terrace of a stone mansion. Text: "There is no record of what was served for LUNCH that day. Elchmann later testified that it was conducted very QUIETLY and with much courtesy, with much friendliness, and it did not last a long time. The waiters served Cognac, butlers and adjutants gave out Liquor, and in this way it ended."

18. Four statues of cherubs on the roof of the stone mansion. Text: "8 Putti, fleshy baby boys carved out of stone, stand on the roof of the Villa. 4 watch over the entrance, 4 watch over the lake. They take in the comings and going of the House. Haunting Totems, Momento Mori to the Slaughtered."

19. Woman slouched in airplane chair, with headphones in. Text: "On the plane the next day, contorting in ever more challenging yoga like positions, the themes of time, memory and place resonated. How could that even have happened? What dark worn hole of humanity allowed and embraced it? Then they served lunch."


Sketched headshot of Emily SteinbergEmily 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.

Sketched headshot of Tahneer Oksman

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.)

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Published on December 15, 2017 in Issue 20, Nonfiction, Visual Narrative. (Click for permalink.)

THE EMPATHY MACHINE, Part Two by Kelly McQuain text version

Cleaver Magazine Posted on March 16, 2016 by thwackJuly 7, 2022

Empathy-Machine-Bee-Header, hand-drawn bees flying with text saying 'the empathy machine part 2'

THE EMPATHY MACHINE, Part Two
Text Version
written and illustrated by Kelly McQuain

Find Part One of this essay here.
Find the comics version here.  

1.
Tweet No Evil

Tweet-No-Evil, hand-drawn copy of Gone with the Wind by Margaret MitchellIn 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.

Michael-Derrick-HudsonI 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.

The-Nude-joker, hand-drawn cover of The New Yorker with man in bowtie and top hat taking selfieIt’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.

Playful-really, sesame street character holds exploded chemical beakerAs critic Cathy Park Hong writes 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 Stefans puts 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, cartoon illustration of woman using pottery wheel with speech bubble saying 'sigh'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.

cartoon illustration of people and bees trapped in a glass jar with text saying 'hermetically sealed environment'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. cartoon illustration of woman wearing glasses talking into mic with text saying 'do you ever see things that aren't there?'

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

blue illustration of mirrored heads of keats with golden chalice in middleWorking 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:

  1. 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?
  2. Feeling: Am I adding to the pain of the disenfranchised? If this project causes pain, does it also offer healing?
  3. Aestheticism: Does the work provide a visceral aesthetic experience?
  4. 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?
  5. Forgiveness: Have I allowed room for doubt and uncertainty, for the making of mistakes—both my own and those of others?
  6. 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?
  7. Accountability: Am I willing to put my name on this creation?

handwritten text saying 'dear reader, the questions you ask may be different than mine' on notebook paperA 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?

–Kelly McQuain, March 2016


Citations:

Alexie, Sherman. “Sherman Alexie Speaks Out on The Best American Poetry 2015.” Blog.BestAmericanPoetry.com. 7 Sept. 2015.

Garber, Megan. “Who Decides What Makes a Poem Great?” The Atlantic.

Hong, Cathy Park. “There’s a New Movement in American Poetry and It’s Not Kenneth Goldsmith.” The New Republic. 1 Oct. 2015.

Keene, John. “On Vanessa Place, Gone With the Wind, and the Limit Point of Certain Conceptual Aesthetics.” J’s Theater. 18 May 2015.

McQuain, Kelly. “Crosstalk—What Can a Canceled Berkeley Poetry Conference Learn from the San Francisco Theater Scene?” www.KellyMcQuain.wordpress.com.

Place, Vanessa. “Artist’s Statement.” Drunken Boat.

Stefans, Brian Kim. “Open Letter to The New Yorker.” Free Space Comix: the Blog. 4 October 2015.

Waldman, Katy. “Frontiers of the Stuplime.” Slate.com.

Wilkinson, Alec. “Something Borrowed.” The New Yorker. 5 October 2015.

Young, Cathy. “To the New Culture Cops, Everything is Appropriation.” The Washington Post. 21 August, 2015.


Footnotes:

[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 Author PhotoKelly 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.

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Published on March 16, 2016 in Craft Essays, Issue 13, Nonfiction, Poetry Craft Essays, Visual Narrative. (Click for permalink.)

THE EMPATHY MACHINE, Part Two by Kelly McQuain

Cleaver Magazine Posted on March 16, 2016 by thwackJuly 7, 2022

THE EMPATHY MACHINE, Part Two
A Visual Narrative
by Kelly McQuain

[slideshow_deploy id=’22381′]

Read a text version of the essay here.
Find The Empathy Machine, Part One here.

Play the Bee an Artist game!
Surrealism Cards (and a tangible board game!) coming soon.

"Bee An Artist" game board

Click on the game to see it in a higher resolution.


 

Headshot of Kelly McQuainKelly 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.

All images © Kelly McQuain, 2016

 

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Published on March 16, 2016 in Issue 13, Nonfiction, Visual Narrative. (Click for permalink.)

THE EMPATHY MACHINE: A Visual Narrative on the Poetics of Kenneth Goldsmith by Kelly McQuain

Cleaver Magazine Posted on September 16, 2015 by thwackJuly 7, 2022

THE EMPATHY MACHINE
A Visual Narrative on the Poetics of Kenneth Goldsmith
by Kelly McQuain

Empathy-headerEmapthy1

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“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.


 

bio

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.

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Published on September 16, 2015 in Issue 11, Nonfiction, Visual Narrative. (Click for permalink.)

A MID SUMMER SOIRÉE by Emily Steinberg

Cleaver Magazine Posted on June 10, 2015 by thwackJuly 7, 2022

A MID SUMMER SOIRÉE
A Visual Narrative
by Emily Steinberg

Introduction by Tahneer Oksman

 

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-SteinbergEmily 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.
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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.

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Published on June 10, 2015 in Fiction, Issue 10, Visual Narrative. (Click for permalink.)

TURNING RIGHT ON CASSADY by Miriam Libicki

Cleaver Magazine Posted on March 18, 2015 by thwackJuly 7, 2022

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-LibickiMiriam 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.

oksman image

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.

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Published on March 18, 2015 in Issue 9, Nonfiction, Visual Narrative. (Click for permalink.)

DR. ZAUZE’S XYLOPHONE by Heinz Insu Fenkl

Cleaver Magazine Posted on December 11, 2014 by thwackJuly 7, 2022

DR. ZAUZE’S XYLOPHONE
A Visual Narrative
by Heinz Insu Fenkl

 

 

 

“Dr. Zauze’s Xylophone” began as a postmodern prose piece in one of the many notebooks I kept while I was doing my master’s work at the University of California, Davis, back in the early 1980s. I was inspired by Sasha Sokolov’s A School for Fools, which I had read in Professor Daniel Rancour-Laferriere’s Soviet Literature course. Sokolov’s novella is told in the enjambed voice of a narrator who might have formerly believed he was more than one person—the entire narrative is characterized by multiple layers of reality and the malleability of time and identity. It had a profound impact on me as a writer, and so it was no surprise that “Dr. Zauze,” a name that comes up in Sokolov’s story, made it into my dream world nearly a decade later.

The comic book version of “Dr. Zauze” was inspired by my study of Chester Brown’s production method on his Yummy Fur comics. While I lived in Rochester in the early 1990s, I was working with James O’Barr and John Bergin, both very talented artists with remarkable and distinct styles. I was especially struck by their collaborative thumbnail sketches, and I decided to try my own hand at drawing a short comic book story for a journal called Brain Dead, which Bergin was editing at the time. I wasn’t very proficient as an artist, so I would spend weekend mornings practicing my drawing at the glass table in the huge dining room of the Victorian my wife and I had rented on Church Street.

I used a rubber-tipped brush pen, from which I could get incredible line variation, and I began to draw with the brush tip without doing any initial pencils underneath.

1991-Sketchbook

When I was drawing from photos, I could do a decent job, but I found myself to be a pretty dismal failure at doing anything resembling mainstream comic book art. That’s why Chester Brown’s idiosyncratic indie style appealed to me, especially when I learned that he would work on one panel at a time and then paste the panels on larger sheets of paper to lay out his pages.

The narrative of “Dr. Zauze” came to me in a semi-lucid dream. It wasn’t a cartoon, of course, but I couldn’t draw it realistically. Dr. Zauze, as a character, felt to me like a cross between Freud, a mad-scientist Einstein, a Gary Larson Far Side scientist, and Robert Crumb’s Mr. Natural, so I stylized him that way.

I finished around nine pages of the story, but then I got some paying freelance work adapting a movie into a comic book, and then I had no time to get back to it. “Dr. Zauze” was going to be the opening of a graphic novel about a character who lapses into a dream coma and has to make his way through a bleak dreamscape America to find his sleeping body and wake it up. I think I was going to call it Dreaming America, but those initial nine pages sat in my old portfolio until two years ago, when I used them as examples of Chester Brown’s production method for the comics course I teach at the State University of New York at New Paltz. Most of the scripting was gone—only a few word balloons had text in them, and I had largely forgotten what the fictional dialogue was supposed to be.

This fall I finally had the impetus to revisit the pages and resurrect them in their original form, not as fiction, but as a recollection of one of the many strange dreams I had had during the year I spent researching for Professor Aram Yengoyan. The Dreaming is very difficult to talk about, and I think the “Dr. Zauze” you read here will probably be the beginning of a book-length memoir about my experiences of researching dreams and practicing lucid dreaming.

Eventually, I would discover that lucid dreaming, the technology of remote viewing, and the phenomena of astral projection and near-death experience all converged in the same “place.” That would take me to a more sustained engagement with meditation practice and qigong, which I continue today. But in the meantime, I have this preliminary relic, a sort of souvenir of more naive times in the past filtered through my more current (and, I hope, more thoughtful) self.

And the xylophone? In the dreamscape, it was the distinct sound that would indicate the presence of the “Dr. Zauze” figure. Sometimes he behaved like the one in this story. Sometimes he was an archangel who threw me out of the world, and sometimes he was an old Taoist sage. The periodic refrain in my pomo novel would have been “The mellifluous madness of Doctor Zauze’s xylophone.”


FenklHeinz Insu Fenkl is a writer, editor, translator, and folklorist. His first novel, Memories of My Ghost Brother, was a Barnes & Noble “Great New Writer” selection and a PEN/Hemingway finalist. He serves on the editorial board of AZALEA: the Journal of Korean Literature & Culture, published by Harvard’s Korea Institute, and as a consulting editor to the internet translation journal, Words Without Borders. He is best known for his deconstruction of the Starbucks logo and his translations of North Korean comics. He teaches creative writing, comics, and Asian studies at the State University of New York at New Paltz.

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Published on December 11, 2014 in Issue 8, Visual Narrative. (Click for permalink.)

BROKEN EGGS by Emily Steinberg

Cleaver Magazine Posted on September 10, 2014 by thwackJuly 7, 2022

BROKEN EGGS 
A Visual Narrative
by Emily Steinberg
Introduction by Tahneer Oksman