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I firmly believe that anyone can make compelling comics, even if they think they “can’t draw.” At the same time, I know from experience that drawing and writing comics is super hard, and there is always room to push yourself to get better. I get great satisfaction from watching beginning students fall in love with comics, set aside their fears about drawing, and compose funny, poignant, powerful works. I also love challenging more experienced cartoonists to push their writing and drawing skills further.

I’ve been teaching in the Creative Writing Department at UBC since 2012. I began with an undergraduate lecture class on comics, and have been teaching a small, graduate level workshop class in comics creation each term since 2013, both on-campus and online. As of fall 2016, I’m teaching full-time, both lectures and workshops. Exciting!

I’ve also led workshops and given presentations for conferences and for comics and literary festivals — including Thought Bubble (Leeds, UK), Talking About Jewish Women and Comics (New York), Comics and Medicine (Chicago), and Comics in the Multimodal World (Vancouver).

These are some comics from my UBC students, most of whom have never tried their hand at comics before.

Check out my post on Medium about what my brilliant students did this term in my undergrad comics class at UBC:

From my fall 2015 workshop class: Gena offers advice to small-town girls.

In my UBC workshop class this fall, Emily used the “how-to” format as a framework for discussing some deeper questions.

Sarah created this comic in my fall 2015 workshop class at UBC: a fantasy about communication between the ocean and a human.

Elizabeth is in her first year of the Creative Writing BFA program and
only began drawing comics this term. While first reluctant to draw, she
has happily discovered a medium in which she can express her wacky and
sarcastic sense of humour.