i’m a fellow!

June 8th, 2011

No, I haven’t transitioned.
But I will be transporting myself to Chicago for the fall to be a Mellon Fellow at the new Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry at the University of Chicago.

(old file photo of me and Hol in Chicago, just for atmosphere)

This is pretty cool. The whole idea of the Center is to mix up practitioners and theorists in various fields. There’s an architect and a physicist, for example. A choreographer/dancer and composers. And me, a cartoonist, paired with my friend the comics scholar Hillary Chute. We’re going to teach a course on autobiographical comics.

I will also be drawing like crazy to finish the book I’ve been working on for the past forty years, a memoir about my mother.

It feels a bit daunting to have all of this stuff colliding, but I feel like I’ve come out of the woods on the book, so maybe it’ll be all right.

I’m kind of psyched about getting to be part of an academic community. I have a recurring dream that I get to go back to college, and it’s always a very pleasant feeling.