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Fun Home touring the Midwest

July 6th, 2006

If you live in the Twin Cities, Madison, Milwaukee, or Chicago, come see me this weekend. Or tell anyone you know in those cities to come. Here’s where I’ll be reading:
Minneapolis
Thursday, July 6

• Amazon Bookstore – 4755 Chicago Ave. So. Minn, MN (612-821-9630) 7pm

Madison
Friday, July 7

• A Room of One’s Own – 307 W. Johnson St. Madison, WI (608-257-7888) 6pm

Milwaukee
Saturday, July 8

Moving right along…

July 6th, 2006

Man, I’m totally crazed. I know it might seem like lately I’ve just been sitting around musing on the ethical implications of success, but I’ve actually been hard at work. Doing my comic strip, for one thing, plus an ongoing barrage of Fun Home interviews. And tomorrow morning I set out on another leg of my book tour, this time to the Twin Cities, Wisconsin, and Chicago.

My email has reached a state of advanced entropy. There’s stuff from three weeks ago I haven’t even had a chance to open yet, let alone answer. But I promise I’ll buckle down to that after I get back from the Midwest.

For now, here’s the latest Dykes episode, a week early, as evidence of my industry. A slight disclaimer: because I’ve been so busy, I had to abandon any attempt to squeeze current events into the strip. Normally I spend a lot of time trying to figure out connections between what’s going on in the world and what’s going on with my characters. But I just couldn’t keep up with the news properly this month. So you’re spared any mention of military atrocities, constitutional amendments, and limitless executive power.

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On recognition

July 4th, 2006

Uh…I feel like my last post might sound kind of ungrateful, like I somehow had a problem with the NPR piece. That’s SO not the case. In fact, I’m insanely, ecstatically happy about every droplet of mainstream recognition that Fun Home, and incidentally DTWOF, have received. But at the same time, I’m disturbed about just how happy it makes me. Over the years, I convinced myself it was something I didn’t need or want. So perhaps my ambivalence is seeping out as whininess.

It seems to me there are two major pitfalls one faces upon escaping the ghetto. One is to leave and never look back, to consider it your own individual achievement and willfully ignore the power structures that hold everything in place. Two is to refuse to leave, to cling in a nostalgic way to your own marginalization. I think I’m in danger of the latter, and will try to stop it immediately.

There has to be some kind of middle way, of acknowledging the whole cultural sausagemaking process (what kind of stories cross over from ghettoized subcultures, what kind don’t, who gets let in, how much of it is about the inherent quality of the work, stuff like that) while taking advantage of the new opportunities it brings.

Hey, as I was writing this post, I heard a crackling in the yard and went to see what it was.

A young moose! The yearling males get sent off on their own when the mothers have new babies, so often at this time of year you can see them wandering around bewildered in the big wide world. Kind of like me. Here it is next to my Subaru, for scale.

Revisionism

July 4th, 2006

I started this as a comment to the NPR post, in response to some of the topics people raised there. But then it got really long so I’m making it into a post of its own.

1. Yes, Liane Hansen mispronounced my name, to the great annoyance of my mother. (It’s BECK-dull) I didn’t notice during the interview. I think they pasted it in later.

2. Yes, they edited the bejeezus out of what I said! I had lots of cliffhanging pauses and rambling digressions which they snipped right out, to my great relief. I wish I could do that in real life.

3. Yes, it was very cool to hear Liane say “Dykes To Watch Out For” right there on the radio. But it’s peculiar to me how all of sudden, DTWOF is being perceived as some kind of established cultural fixture. Liane Hansen said that I’ve “received quite a bit of critical acclaim” for my Dykes cartoons. Huh. No one sent me that memo. It’s true I’ve gotten my fair share of acclaim in the LGBT universe. But I don’t think that’s what she meant, or what other reviewers who’ve alluded to my “success” have meant. There’s a strange revisionist mechanism at work, I think, the culture attempting to right itself by saying, “we didn’t notice you before but now that you’ve attained a measure of respectability, we’re going to pretend that we did.”

What do you think?

Maybe I should just shut up and enjoy it while it lasts.

Fun Home is out of stock

July 2nd, 2006

But it’s gone back to press. I guess this is kind of a good thing, because it means people have been snapping the book up. But it’s also kind of a bad thing, because now other people won’t be able to get it for a while. You can probably still find it in lots of stores, but if not, more are coming July 9th.

Fun Home on NPR

July 1st, 2006

I recently did a short interview about Fun Home with Liane Hansen for Weekend Edition, and it’s going to air on tomorrow morning’s show. It was originally supposed to run two Sundays ago, on Father’s Day, but it got bumped. I liked the Father’s Day connection, since the book is all about my dad. But tomorrow’s even better, because it happens to be the anniversary of his death. 26 years.

Here’s th’link.

Thanks for all the spam advice

June 30th, 2006

But I think I’ve got things under control now.

Fuck. Me.

June 29th, 2006

Okay. I sorted out the email problem. Now I’m sorting out the email. Jeeziz! There were 533 messages sitting there. It’s extremely confusing trying to figure out which ones are spam and which ones are legit. See above. The first “congratulations” is real. The second one is not. And “Don’t expose your intimate life!” is probably good advice for anyone who’s just published a memoir about their family, but it turned out to be a Cialis pitch.

There’s stuff here from childhood friends, relatives, people I went to high school with, people who’ve been to my readings, people who want to interview me…I’m feeling a little overwhelmed. Especially considering that I lost control of my personal, non-website inbox some time ago. I guess all this is to say, please be patient if you don’t hear right back from me. I’m on the job.

Uh…if you’ve been trying to email me through this site…

June 29th, 2006

I just found out that people are getting “mail delivery returned” messages after emailing me at dyke@dykestowatchoutfor.com. I’m really sorry about that, and am trying to get to the bottom of it. I guess when we moved over to this new site from the old one, we didn’t set up that address to forward mail to me like it used to.

The really scary thing is that there must be a frickin’ huge pile of messages there that I haven’t been getting for over a month. Apologies to everyone who’s written to me and not heard back. And I’ll try to get this fixed immediately.

Cartoonist-to-cartoonist interview with Craig Thompson

June 27th, 2006

When I was in Portland earlier this month, Powell’s Books set up a conversation between me and Craig Thompson. Craig’s beautiful graphic novel Blankets crossed over and got a lot of mainstream readers when it came out in 2003. He lives in Portland, and both our books are about growing up in small towns with, um, kind of dysfunctional families. So Powell’s thought we’d have an interesting conversation together, and indeed we did. Although perhaps we both overdid the self-deprecation a tad.