Periodically I post an update to report what I’m up to – I think mostly to help me clear my head. Hopefully you’ll enjoy the ride.
1. Lots of teaching.
Northwestern medical students are so eager to use crayons! Who would have thought?
In addition to coloring, in our seminar we are drawing, making comics, listening to lectures, critiquing studies, reading and discussing graphic novels, thinking while drawing, drawing while thinking, and much more.
This term I’m also auditing (online) Lynda Barry’s “Unthinkable Mind” course at the University of Wisconsin which has some crossover with what I teach. She inspired me to add coloring to my doodling unit.
The opportunity to guest lecture/workshop at Chicago’s Young Women’s Leadership Charter School‘s AP art class presented itself, and that experience was fantastic. The women were enthusiastic, inspired, and inspiring. Here we are holding our newly created avatars. We also talked about knowing through drawing. And we did jam comics.
This is an awesome school. Visiting it, working with the students of this AP art class, was an honor.
Plans are in the works for a lecture to nurses and a workshop with Michael Green in Louisville. (Michael recently had a medical comic published in the Annals of Internal Medicine. What a coup!)
2. Conference Prep
Quite a few fall conference abstract deadlines. First was one for the launch of the International Narrative Medicine Network in London in June. Second was the Comics & Medicine conference in Brighton in July. (I’m also on the organizing committee for this conference.) Third was a panel proposal for the American Society of Bioethics & Humanities in Atlanta in October. Phew. All deadlines met.
4. Laydeez do Comics Chicago
We are off to an amazing start! In January, pal Riva Lehrer and I launched a Chicago chapter of this London salon. Each meeting has been well attended and inspiring. Yay comics and yay Laydeez! I presented my work last month, and you can listen to the talk on this blog.
5. Ivy
Colleague Mita Mahato and I are hard at work on our second issue of Ivy, our collaborative ‘zine. Here’s the last issue (bottom) and a sneak preview of the new issue’s cover. The production delay is all my fault, but I’m hoping we can resolve it soon and announce the new issue is available for purchase very soon.
6. Graphic Medicine Podcast
The keynotes and all but one last lecture from the Toronto Comics & Medicine conference have been posted as podcasts, also available here. These posts are quite time consuming, but I do love doing them. Next up will be a new set of interviews for the podcast. Looking forward to those.
7. Writing
Two big writing projects currently in the works. First is a chapter for the Graphic Medicine book series. I’ve been researching for months, about a year, actually, and am now ready to retreat to Michigan next week to get it done.
The other writing project is an article I’m co-authoring on Hospice Comics. Stay tuned for more on that soon. In the meantime, a short piece I wrote on Graphic Medicine did get published along side a review of the graphic novel Spot 12 in Advances in Neonatal Care. Not the first place I would have expected to publish on Graphic Medicine, but I’m still quite pleased.
8. Daily Drawing
Keeping up with all that work seems to leave little time for drawing, but I’ve been persistent in my daily sketches. I’d like to produce a few more stand-alone comics as one of my spring goals. One of them will possibly be an extended story about this:
