Author Archive
June 18th, 2006
Friday night I read at the University Bookstore here. Another delightful audience who asked questions that ranged from the intimately emotional to the delightfully technical. (What does your family think? What kind of pen do you draw with?) But that’s the cool thing about graphic storytelling. You can’t avoid talking about the physical product as well as the content.
And last night Bailey-Coy, the LGBT bookstore here, set me up to read at the Wild Rose Bar. God, it was nice to be in a lesbian bar. And it’s so nice that this one is still here. I did a Dykes to Watch Out For slide show here in 1988!
Here’s Maggie, who had the most remarkable comics tattoos.
Driving back to the hotel at dusk, I got a heart-stopping glimpse of Mt. Rainier. Or rather a tiny slice of Mt. Rainier, between the clouds. God! It was all pink and ghostly and floating impossibly high up in the sky. You can’t possibly see it in this terrible photo I took from the car, but I’m posting it anyway.
June 17th, 2006
I’m afraid things have been so crazy with the book tour that I wasn’t able to do new DTWOF episodes this month. I feel very bad about that, because it’s the second time in a year I’ve done this. But I’ll be back on track soon. Here’s an archive episode. Click the image to go to the bigger version (thank you, Nichael!) [Strip is now visible here without having to go to Flickr]
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June 17th, 2006
Okay. You know that scene in Broadcast News where the William Hurt character says “What do you do when your real life exceeds your wildest fantasies?” And the Albert Brooks character says, “Keep it to yourself.” You know that scene? Right now I feel like a peculiar amalgam of both those characters. But I’m not going to keep this to myself: Fun Home just got an excellent, if not lavish review in the New York Times Book Review.
If the theoretical value of a picture is still holding steady at a thousand words, then Alison Bechdel’s slim yet Proustian graphic memoir, “Fun Home,” must be the most ingeniously compact, hyper-verbose example of autobiography to have been produced. It is a pioneering work, pushing two genres (comics and memoir) in multiple new directions, with panels that combine the detail and technical proficiency of R. Crumb with a seriousness, emotional complexity and innovation completely its own.
Well, the R. Crumb thing is a bit over the top. But I can’t tell you what a strange sensation it is to get all this establishment recognition after spending my whole career on the fringes of acceptability. I feel depressurized or something, like I’m getting the bends.
June 16th, 2006
The Portland airport has free wi-fi. Such a civilized, community-spirited city. I’m posting this on my way to Seattle. The thing I’ve always hated about travel is the unfamiliarity of everything. But when you travel a lot, the unfamiliarity itself becomes familiar, if not routine. Here I am in the Kafkaesque security line just a few minutes ago.
June 16th, 2006
Man! What a day. Up at 6 to fly from SF to Portland. A radio interview at KBOO. A pit stop at my hotel for a shower. A trip to In Other Words, the very pleasant women’s bookstore here. Then to the Powells.com warehouse building, where I had a really fun conversation with Craig Thompson, comix wunderkind, which will be published in the Powell’s newsletter at some point. Then off to Powell’s proper, the downtown bookstore, where there was a frickin’ HU-UUGE crowd to hear me read. What an audience! What a city! But whenever I say that to people from Portland they get all nervous and tell me not to move here because there’s already too many people.
That’s me in the middle of the room, running my powerpoint show. This was a good setup. Standing in the audience, or behind them, works better than standing up front. Because up front I have to look at my laptop. In the back, I’m looking at what the audience is looking at, which feels better.
Now it’s almost midnight. I just had my room service dinner. And I’m starting to crash.
June 16th, 2006
New dates are up for Alison’s Fun Home tour in Minneapolis, Milwaukee, Madison and Chicago. Also, you can catch an informative interview from The Forum on KQED San Francisco on Realplayer right here. (posted by Katie)
June 15th, 2006
Now I’m in Portland, but I’m posting about last night’s reading at Cody’s in Berkeley.
We had to rig another impromptu screen, because they didn’t know I was going to be doing a visual presentation. But it worked out just fine. There was a large, very engaged audience.
They had questions not just about Fun Home but about the trajectory of my Dykes To Watch Out For career, and were coming up with all kinds of business strategies about how to make the strip more sustainable. It was a surprisingly un-Berkeley-ish sort of discussion.
Driving back to the city across the Bay Bridge, I took this picture of Mt. Tam. God, what a beautiful place.
June 15th, 2006
Last night a whole buncha wonderful people came to my reading at the community center in SF. The building is this huge handsome place, all very well-appointed. They had excellent equipment too–look how big they could project the pictures from my book.
I’m sorry this is such a brief post. Maybe I’ll elaborate later, but right now I have to race off to my reading in Berkeley at Cody’s.
June 13th, 2006
A sizeable crowd came to my reading at A Clean, Well-Lighted Place for Books tonight. They had some particularly good questions. Martha, my literary escort, counted 83 people in the audience. It’s so wild being on a book tour with a big publisher. I’ve published books for years with small presses, and either they didn’t send me on a tour at all, or they sent me on a tour that I had to partially fund myself. And of course I’d be on my own, renting cars, finding bookstores, staying in peoples’ houses.
But with Houghton Mifflin, they have a literary escort in each city who ferries me around to things. Plus they’re putting me in really nice hotels. Here I am having my room service dinner after my reading tonight.
Earlier today I went by the Cartoon Art Museum to see the No Straight Lines exhibit. It was very cool seeing peoples’ actual original artwork. Here I am looking at a piece by Jen Camper. 
June 10th, 2006
Here I am last night at A Different Light, helping the bookstore guy to rig up an impromptu screen for my “reading.” Man. I thought I was done with the techno-geek stuff when I finished all the complicated computer work on Fun Home. But apparently not. Now in order to read, I have to lug around all this equipment–my laptop, a projector, cables–and I have to make sure bookstores are set up for me to do this powerpoint presentation.
It’s worth it, though. It’s really cool to project the story and narrate it to an audience. A very nice crowd came last night to A Different Light, even though the Dyke March was amassing at the same time. Soon after I finished, there was this tremendous roar of motorcycles from Santa Monica Boulevard. It was the Dykes on Bikes starting off the march. But I couldn’t even run to the door and watch because I had to finish signing books then rush off to the airport to catch a 10:20 flight to San Francisco. Which ended up not taking off until nearly midnight.
God, air travel is torture. Here I am as we sat on the tarmac waiting to go. At least I had all three seats to myself.
