Well, here I am, the book is at the printer’s so what am I to do? I know, make coffee mugs with my drawings on them! Creatures by Sarah, mugs by London Drugs. So far these are the only two in the world, but I might make more.
News
Language Vermin comic in Geist magazine
This comic is in the Spring 2010 issue of Geist. Based on the Common Buggers comic I drew for my friend Terra.
Excerpts from Tangles on my Facebook fan page
Since the Easter weekend I’ve been doing (almost) the last round of edits on my book, Tangles: A Story About Alzheimer’s, My Mother and Me. I’ve been posting small drawings from the book on my Facebook fan page. I’ve been getting some wonderful, energizing feedback — thanks, everyone! Check it out and let me know what you think!
Creature Doodle
Just found these doodles in some notes from a workshop last fall about fostering sustainable behaviour. Really, I was paying attention. It’s just hard to take notes for more than a few minutes without sketching something.
Playing Prince and Princess
Two of my favourite children. Although they actually don’t really look like this, as I am not very good at a) drawing children or b) accurate likenesses. But here they are. I love talking to kids, hearing their explanations of games, their logic.
Look! I drew this for you: Word Under The Street prize winner
Way back in September at Word Under the Street (the comix part of Word On The Street), my friend Eve Corbel and I held a contest called One Panel Starring Me. People submitted short true stories from their own lives and the winner got an original framed comic based on their story (this is our sample from the last time we did the contest, in 2006). This year we had to pick two winners because they were both awesome. I did this drawing based on Roni Light’s story… Eve’s comic for the other winner coming next…
Memoir and Dementia: Presentation at UBC
On Wednesday I did a presentation at the Centre for Research on Personhood in Dementia at UBC. It was called Memoir and Dementia, and included a reading from Tangles, my graphic memoir. Over the years I’ve gotten way calmer about readings, but this one just totally stressed me out for about a month before. It was the first time I’d be talking at such length about my writing about Mom (at least in public!), and the first time reading from Tangles. Not to mention it was my first PowerPoint!
On a more serious note, November 29 was the fifth anniversary of my mother’s death, so it was quite hard to sort through my photos and writing and stuff, and pull myself out of my grief enough to focus on presenting something for other people.
This is me before the reading, faking a relaxed demeanor:
And then we got started…
I showed some slides of my mother, one from my childhood and a few from during her illness. One of the main things I said about memoir and dementia was how important I think it is to remember the person as they were when they were sick, all the specific ways in which they speak and behave, the ways they have changed, the small moments of sweetness or horror that you don’t want to forget. I talked about my mother’s hands. And here they are…
I talked about memoir and dementia– my ideas about it, the process of writing my book– for about 40 minutes, and then read for about 20. I relaxed pretty quickly once I got started– it was a small but attentive group of about 20 people, including the wonderful staff at the CRPD. I love talking about the book and I love hearing people’s stories– there were some wonderful shared laughter and tears after the question period wrapped up and some folks came and told me about their own family members who have dementia.
I have some work to do on developing a good technique for reading from the book. I ended up just showing a page at a time on the PowerPoint and reading from the printed version. It was fine, but I’d like to do something that shows the images better– hoping to get some help from my more techie friends with that stuff.
This was a fabulous experience; I’m super excited for September 2010 and more talks and readings!
All photos by Terra Poirier
Artwork for the silent auction at the DOXA fundraiser
I was going to write a post about the artwork I did for the DOXA documentary film festival fundraiser on November 21. But sugarlovegirl wrote such a heartwarming awesome sweet post about it that I will just link to hers. Thanks for doing all the work, sugarlove!
The Georgia Straight’s Best of Vancouver 2009
Another belated post: check out my contributions to the Georgia Straight’s Best of Vancouver 2009…
Food
Best little-known decadent treat
Outdoors
Best place to lose yourself in grassroots Vancouver beauty
Best place to see non-gentrified Vancouver neighbourhoods
Word Under the Street 2009: it was awesome!
Finally getting around to posting this somewhat depressed looking photo of me at WUTS. Thanks to Brian Nicol for taking it– not sure what my problem was. But look at all my stuff! I can’t believe I got it done. On the right you can see the fridge door I got from the recycling transfer station; it’s got my fridge magnets on it– two designs sold out that day! Also on the table: tiny books with my creatures in them, a new small dog story, the ever popular small dog romances. Also bookmarks! And that weird cyclindrical spotted container is for entries in Eve Corbel’s and my contest where people tell us a short story about themselves and we illustrate it. (OK, so we haven’t informed the entrants who won yet, but we will! Comics artists move slow sometimes!)
Anyway, WUTS was lots o fun. And the Vancouver Public Library bought some of my stuff for their zine collection. How awesome is that??
And one more thing– the book on the table is Whatever Happened to the World of Tomorrow? by the lovely lovely Brian Fies. I contacted Brian for advice about my book and he has been extremely generous and supportive. You should check out his book and become a fan of his on Facebook. I put the book on the table so that I could send him the photo for his collection of images of his book “in the wild.”
