This is a public service announcement: between January 1st and March 31st, Hugo House has open submissions for two very different positions.

The first is the Poet-In-Residence position, which is a two-year title that offers a monthly stipend and paid teaching opportunities. You can read about the current Writers-in-Residence here and apply here.

The second is the Made at Hugo House program, which offers "space and resources to four to six fellows in the Seattle area to complete a proposed project." Those writers get full access to the House's many writing classes, offices, readings, interaction with literary professionals, and a group of dedicated writers at roughly the same stage in their careers. This one is open to poets, memoirists, novelists, journalists, and just about any other literary discipline you can think of. Apply for that here.

My advice for you is this: if you're thinking about applying for either of these positions, you absolutely should. What's the worst that could happen? And if you do apply for these — which, again, you should — don't wait until the last moment. Take your time but also know when to let go of your application. Have a friend — one friend, not all of them — look it over, and then send it out. Who knows? Maybe you'll see your name on this here website when Hugo House announces their newest incoming writers.

Wednesday January 11th: Cat Rambo and Margaret Chiavetta

Two Seattle-based fantasy authors debut new work at Seattle’s best sci-fi bookstore. If you’ve been involved in our sci-fi community, you likely know Rambo’s name. Her newest book, Neither Here Nor There, is a collection of fantasy stories. You can see a tiny version of the nifty flip-cover format of the book right above this calendar entry. Chiavetta’s Sir Duffy’s Promise is the first in a new middle-reader fantasy series University Book Store, 4326 University Way N.E., 634-3400, http://www2.bookstore.washington.edu/. Free. All ages. 7 p.m.

Thursday January 12th: Leaving the Planet Opening Reception

Greg Stump’s deceptively simple comics are Seattle’s best-kept secret. From his early-2000s comic contributions to The Stranger to his magnum opus Disillusioned Illusions, Stump has been gradually stripping away all artifice to discover a kind of cartooning nirvana. Tonight, Stump kicks off his first non-comics art show with Leaving the Planet, an ink-and-watercolor extravaganza showcase. Joe Bar, 810 E. Roy St., 324-0407. Free. All ages. 6 p.m.

Friday January 13th: Indigenous London Reading

Canadian history professor Coll Thrush, who wrote a terrific history of indigenous Seattle, returns with a book about the history of native peoples from America and New Zealand who traveled to the very center of the British Empire from the 16th century onward. This is a fascinating new twist on the study of colonialism. Elliott Bay Book Company, 1521 10th Ave, 624-6600, http://elliottbaybook.com . Free. All ages. 7 p.m.

Saturday January 14th: Bring on 2017!

Open Books, under the guidance of new owner Billie Swift, has been kicking ass with its reading series lately. The store kicks off a new year of literary events with a reading from four Seattle-area poets: Samar Abulhassan, Natasha Marin, Imani Sims, and Anastacia Renee Tolbert. Come join the party. Open Books, 2414 N. 45th St., 633-0811, http://www.openpoetrybooks.com. Free. All ages. 7 p.m.

Sunday January 15th: Writers Resist: A Celebration of Free Speech

It seems impossible that this week will bring both the annual celebration of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Donald Trump’s inauguration. But here we are. To mentally prepare for the discord to come, why not attend this freedom-minded reading by writers from Bellingham (Robert Lashley) and Spokane (novelist Jess Walter, poet Tod Marshall) and Seattle (Elissa Washuta, Jane Wong, G. Willow Wilson)? Town Hall Seattle, 1119 8th Ave., 652-4255, townhallseattle.org. $5. All ages. 7:30 p.m.

Monday January 16th: Something Special

The Egyptian Theatre is so beautiful and so welcoming that I’ve always thought it was kind of a shame that nobody ever hosted a reading there. Tonight, my dream comes true: Something Special is a multimedia celebration of short films, music (from Cosmos the Band) and spoken word (from Nikkita Oliver, Troy Osaki, and Leija Farr.) Egyptian Theatre, 805 E. Pine St., 324-9996, http://www.siff.net. $10. All ages. 9 p.m.

Tuesday January 17th: Conflict Is Not Abuse Reading

See our event of the week column for more details.Seattle Public Library, 1000 4th Ave., 386-4636, http://www.spl.org. Free. All ages. 7 p.m.

“Provocative” has become a dirty word. As Donald Trump lurches toward the presidency and white nationalist Milo Yiannopoulos scores a $250,000 book deal, provocation has become synonymous with trolling, and trolling has gone mainstream. When Seattle authors Lindy West and Sherman Alexie very visibly quit Twitter last week, they demonstrated an exhaustion with provocation. We’ve had it with devil’s advocates and thought experiments that are intended to do nothing but get a reaction out of us.

So you might feel an instinctual aversion when I call Sarah Schulman’s new book, Conflict Is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility, and the Duty of Repair, provocative. But you should understand I mean that in the classical sense: it pokes at our untested assumptions, trying to find the breaking points in our ideology. And unlike the Gamergate hordes with their disingenuous questions designed to inspire negativity, Schulman operates from a place of positivity: she wants to heal, not harm.

Which is not to say that Conflict won’t piss you off. You likely won’t agree with all Schulman’s arguments, but that’s kind of the point. “This is not a book to be agreed with,” she writes…

…an exhibition of evidence or display of proof. It is instead designed for engaged and dynamic interactive collective thinking where some ideas will resonate, others will be rejected, and still others will provoke the readers to produce new knowledge themselves.

Her thesis in Conflict is to deflate the concept that feelings are inviolable, that, as the dust jacket suggests, too often in the 21st century, “inflated accusations of harm are used to avoid accountability.”

This is tricky stuff. Plenty of boring middle-aged white dudes have clambered up on social media platforms to sound the alarm about trigger warnings and “PC culture run amok.” Those rants aren’t worth your time; they’re the bleats of the cowardly and the closed-minded. Schulman approaches some of the same topics from a different place: “I ground my perspective in the queer,” she writes. “I use queer examples, I cite queer authors, I am rooted in queer points of view…I come directly from a specifically lesbian historical analysis of power.” Later, she notes that she “grew up in feminism.”

Schulman’s arguments are based largely in anecdotes, a method that is at once illuminating and frustrating. Her suggestion that a terse and stressful email exchange passive-aggressively stretched out over days could have been resolved by a five-minute mildly confrontational phone call is a good one. But Schulman’s story about directly engaging with a student who pursued her with behavior that could be interpreted as stalking is much less convincing; it’s out on these extremes when the theory starts to creak and groan.

Schulman’s claim that we should face the unpleasantness of conflict rather than conceal ourselves in bubbles of agreement doesn’t effectively address the 21st century’s most nonrenewable resource: attention. A human being simply doesn’t have time to engage in conflict with every available opposing viewpoint; a moral citizen of the internet has to choose her battles, and that act of selection can create its own conflicts. At some point, as West and Alexie’s exodus from Twitter proves, conflict for conflict’s sake is simply not worth it.

(Sarah Schulman reads at the Seattle Public Library with Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore on Tuesday, January 17th at 7 pm. The reading is free.)

I hope you'll keep a couple of events in mind as we approach President Trump's inauguration. At Town Hall on Sunday, January 15th, Washington writers celebrate Martin Luther King Jr's birthday and celebrate free speech with an event called "Writers Resist." They'll read their own work and the work of great Americans like Susan B. Anthony, Malcolm X, Susan Sontag, and Thomas Paine. Some of the authors reading include:

• G. Willow Wilson
• Jess Walter
• Elissa Washuta
• Robert Lashley
• Jane Wong
• Sam Ligon
• Claudia Castro Luna

And on Friday, January 20th, Town Hall hosts "We Defy: Voices and Stories from our Progressive Community," a reading produced by Planned Parenthood. This event features Sherman Alexie, Sonya Renee, Ijeoma Oluo, and leaders from the ACLU, Casa Latina, and other progressive organizations "to share thoughts, hear from our local leaders about the challenges they expect, and engage in a discussion of how we may work together in the years ahead."

Of course attending readings isn't the only thing you should do to mobilize in the time ahead. But readings are a great place to start — to meet people, to hear new ideas, and to find inspiration.

On Saturday, Heidi Groover at The Stranger reported that Seattle Times book section editor Mary Ann Gwinn was accepting a buyout and leaving the paper. Gwinn is one of nearly two dozen reporters who are being laid off or bought out.

There will be plenty of time to reflect on Gwinn's career in the weeks ahead; she confirmed that she'll sit for an interview with the Seattle Review of Books to discuss her nearly two decades as books editor at the Times. Personally, I'm very sad to see her go; she's always treated me with warmth and respect, even when I was a bratty young schmuck starting out on The Stranger's books page.

Right now, the question is: what's going to happen to books coverage at the Seattle Times? Rumors have been circulating for months that the Times is going to severely cut its readings (and other arts) calendar in print. This has led many to speculate that when all is said and done, the Seattle Times will no longer have a dedicated books beat. Gwinn has confirmed in a statement on Facebook that she will "continue to contribute regularly to the Lit Life column" at the Times and that she and Times management are "working on a plan for continuing books coverage, and I will let you know the particulars when I am able."

This is an important moment for the Seattle literary scene. When public radio station KUOW drastically cut back on its local coverage a couple years back, that meant fewer authors were getting interviewed at the station on a daily basis. And with fewer publicity outlets available to them, New York publishers became less likely to send authors to town on their book tours.

If the Seattle Times doesn't have a staffer dedicated to the book beat, that means they may publish fewer book reviews and author interviews, which means that publishers will very likely cut their Seattle-area touring author schedules again. The Times is the only paper in town that had the resources to cover a wide variety of books every week through freelance pieces. Many Seattle outlets run occasional book reviews, but Gwinn was the last dedicated print outlet book section editor in town who provided book reviews and author profiles on a consistent basis.

In the weeks, months, and years ahead, the Seattle Review of Books will do its best to fill in the blanks left by print publications. But we can't do it all; the co-founders (Martin McClellan and I) both have day jobs and a limited freelance budget. We need more Seattle-area outlets to provide consistent books coverage to keep our vibrant reading culture alive.

Of course Seattle would still have a lively scene of local authors to keep things interesting even if publishers never sent another author to town. But visiting authors provide perspectives and experiences that our own community cannot. Sometimes authors on book tour will collaborate with local authors to produce new work. And of course touring authors sometimes head up group readings with Seattle writers, which provides exposure and experience to lesser-known names. We cannot afford to lose this very important aspect of our literary life.

We've made a few changes with our weekly columns in 2017. You seem like our new Poet in Residence program on Tuesdays. I love the Saturday Seattle Writing Prompts that Martin has on tap.

And we're changing things up for Monday, too. For the last year and a half, we ran a Bookstore of the Month feature, in which we talked to booksellers, discussed bookstore histories, and talked about Seattle's strong bookstore culture. Now, every Monday we'll run a new interview. Sometimes they'll be long interviews with authors. Other times we'll check in with Seattle folks to see what they're reading. Once a month, we'll chat with our Poet in Residence. And this week, we looked inside the Seattle Public Library's Seattle Reads program.

This doesn't mean we're giving up on Seattle bookstores. In fact, quite the opposite: we hope to regularly feature booksellers in our interview series. But this opens up the day to more of Seattle's voices, the people who make the literary city work. If you have any ideas for people you'd like to see featured on the site on Mondays, please let us know.

He Fixes the Cracked Spines of Books, Without an Understudy

In room 111 of the Seattle Public Library central service center, Donald Vass works with glue, iron, paper, and wood to repair books damaged by age, overuse, and mechanical handling. With no apprentice in training, he may be the last to practice the almost medical art of book-mending on our library’s aging circulation.

And that’s a shame: not just because the craft is beautiful, but because the practice of repair reflects an attitude of compassion and care that we badly need right now.

Mr. Vass said the skills of book mending took him 15 years to master — how to diagnose a book’s ills, what to patch and what to leave alone, how to hide evidence of a repair. He uses hypodermic needles to shoot bits of wheat paste into the corners of dog-eared covers to stiffen them, and an old-fashioned screw press to hold pages in place while adhesives dry.

He talks of his repaired books — 60 to 80 a month — as if they were children heading out into a dangerous, unpredictable world.

“I’m reluctant, many times, to send them out because I know what they’re going to be up against,” said Mr. Vass, a soft-spoken man who is used to working alone.

The Detective of Northern Oddities

In another small room, this one in Anchorage, Kathy Burek practices a very different craft: she autopsies wild animals to find out how they died. Burek has an otter’s-eye view on climate change (in this case, otter 13, tagged and followed and ultimately found on a beach with no identifiable cause of death). For a few days, Christopher Solomon played Watson to this Sherlock Holmes of the Alaskan ecosystem.

We arrived at a lab at the University of Alaska Anchorage, where Burek is an adjunct professor. The room was small, with white walls, a steel table at the center, and a drain in the floor. Burek pulled on a pair of rubber Grundens crabbing bibs the color of traffic cones, stepped into the tall boots from the minivan, and pulled her hair back. She could have been headed for a day of dip-netting for sockeye on the Kenai. An assistant laid out tools.

A big pair of garden shears sat on the counter, as foreboding as Chekhov’s gun on the mantle.

“You’re probably gonna want to put on gloves for this,” she said.

The Media’s Favorite ‘Millennial’ Is 55 Years Old

Midrank comedian and ex-Intel engineer Dan Nainan lied about his age to the media. And then again, and again, and again, until the lie itself became news. In this Moebius strip of a story, Ben Collins tracks Nainan’s protean public personas and confronts him with the truth. But the truth is no match for Dan Nainan …

Finally, I laid it all out. I have official state documents with his real age on them. They’re public records. His timeline with Intel doesn’t make any sense. He gives different ages at different times depending on which publication he’s talking to. It’s all over. It’s OK. The jig is up.

So tell me, are you 35 or 55?

Then a pause.

“I’m 35,” he said. “The mistake is in my birth record.”

Curtains fall on arts critics at newspapers

An excellent perspective from Jed Gottlieb on how the migration of arts criticism out of newspapers and into niche publications affects the audience for art itself — and why show reviews should continue to appear side-by-side with the score from Friday’s homecoming game.

Arts publicists see the scope of the problem with even more clarity than writers. For decades they have used radio, TV, and newspapers to break clients in new markets. Radio and TV cater to eager fans—people who listen to alternative rock radio want to hear new alternative rock; viewers who tune into Conan are willing to embrace an unknown stand up comic. But papers traditionally speak to a wider audience ...

“Newspapers are where most investigative journalism originates from, so it’s scary,” music publicist Jim Flammia of All Eyes Media says. “But it’s also scary for me professionally because I need places for our artists to get covered. My artists make their money on the road, so regional coverage is more important than national coverage, and that regional coverage comes from newspapers.”

The dazzling and depressing architecture of density in megacities

To close on a slightly different note: This week Jason Kottke highlighted photographer Michael Wolf, especially the series Architecture of Density, which captures “the immense scale of [Hong Kong’s] apartment buildings and the smallness of the apartment they contain,” and Tokyo Compression, images of Japanese train commuters, “smushed into cars dampened by the heat of humanity.” These are great images that — a little like Edward Burtynsky’s — lead us right into the uncanny valley of our increasingly crowded, increasingly globalized world.

New column! Seattle Writing Prompts are intended to spark ideas for your writing, based on locations and stories of Seattle. Write something inspired by a prompt? Send it to us! We're looking to publish writing sparked by prompts.

Did you know that someone lives atop Smith Tower? Petra Franklin Lahaie holds the lease. She cleared the space after a water tower was removed, converted it into an apartment, and made her home there with her family and her massive Chihuly chandelier. The New York Times did a great piece, with photos, and Evening Magazine took their cameras inside in 2011.

What a stellar piece of Seattle skyline that building is. A wood frame skyscraper 38 stories tall, the tallest building "west of the Mississippi", as we like to say in Seattle, when it was built, Smith Tower opened in 1914. Its builder, Lyman Cornelius Smith, whose moniker you may know when attached to the company name Smith Corona, bought the land when on a trip out west from his native New York in 1909. Did you know the building still employs elevator operators?

Ivar Haglund once owned the building, as did the property holding firm Samis, a company started to control the interests of that other Seattle iconoclast, Sam Israel (somebody really should write a book about him), a few years after their namesake died.

But it's that apartment at the top that has always captured my fancy. Here are five writing prompts based on that pyramid, and Smith Tower.

Today's prompts

1. It's 1915 and the newly opened building was built with the apartment up top. Who lives there? What is their daughter like? Does she get into trouble and go on adventures?
2. It's 1975, and an elevator operator in Smith Tower witnesses a murder through the door cage as he is going down. Worse yet, the murderer saw him. Was he alone in the car? Does the story all take place inside of one hour? Does it spark something bigger? Do they end up in the pyramid as it was, with the decaying water tower?
3. It's 2000 and the Kingdome is about to be demolished. What does a young street hustler have to do to get up to the top to watch the destruction? Can they even make it? Can they make it to the glass bulb at the very top?
4. It's 1941 and German and Japanese aircraft are bombing Seattle. What can people in the building do to keep it safe? How can they fight back against air-strikes, like London saw during the Blitz. What if there's a German traitor in the building?
5. It's 2025 and the big one hits. Who works on floor 15, what part of Seattle do they need to get amidst the rubble, and how will they get there? Do people die? Does the building go down?

The humble writing prompt is such a great device. When you're stuck, as a writer, often times the perception is that there aren't any ideas, and that the world is bereft of good plots.

Given the idiosyncrasies of human thinking, what's maybe going on is that you are stuck in your own loops. Prompts, from the brain/emotion loops of other humans, can be helpful to spark an idea. Other's ideas surprise you, like the punchline to a good joke, and in that surprise comes a stepping out of yourself into another possible imagination. A good prompt, taken in at the right time, can enlarge our ability to write. Or, at the very least, help us find momentum until our true work interrupts to call to us.

When we started the Seattle Review of Books, Paul wrote a couple Seattle Writing Prompts. We both love the idea, but they kind of fell by the wayside, and the other work of the site took precedence.

So when the Kickstarter Fund Project was coming to an end, I decided this would be a perfect form to run on Saturdays. First, because a lot of people only get to write on the weekends, and as they're sitting at their desk, or coffee shop bench, or room with a view, or library to write that day, maybe they're in need of some inspiration. Second, because I've lived in this city a long time, and I love talking about different parts of it.

The form the new column will take is to show a picture of a Seattle location, talk a bit about it, then list five potential prompts. The whole thing is to get you thinking of ideas, concepts, and places that you might be outside of your immediate purview. Maybe some thing in the post will spark an idea, and maybe the idea itself will come not from any of our writing, but from your own loops, newly engaged.

Look for the first of the Saturday Seattle Writing Prompts to go live later this morning. And get to work!

Every Friday, Cienna Madrid offers solutions to life’s most vexing literary problems. Do you need a book recommendation to send your worst cousin on her birthday? Is it okay to read erotica on public transit? Cienna can help. Send your questions to advice@seattlereviewofbooks.com.

Dear Cienna,

I just got dumped. I need some inspiration — what’s the greatest love story you’ve ever read? One friend gave me a book of Leonard Cohen poems and I almost killed myself.

Heath, Wallingford

Dear Heath,

I'm honored that you are turning to me for advice – and your timing is impeccable. Over Christmas I was sharply criticized for gifting my teenage sister a copy of the mortician's bible, Corpse Makeup for Beginners, because I thought her face could use some humanizing. This has caused many to question whether I am indeed an empathetic human being qualified to dole out free advice, or whether I am simply a lipsticked Chupacabra who enjoys fucking with strangers and attends family gatherings for the free taquitos.

I am eager to redeem myself.

First off: Why are you torturing yourself with love stories? Your heart and liver are allowed to wallow at a time like this; it is your brain's job to try and distract your other squishy human organs – all of which I can name because I am definitely human – from grieving too hard.

Here is what you need to read: Flannery O'Connor's Good Country People, followed by Voltaire's Candide. Good Country People illustrates how flawed our judgment can be when it comes to evaluating other people and their motivations, and Candide is a good antidote to all your friends who will tell you, post breakup, bullshit like "there's a perfect someone out there waiting for you" and "everything happens for a reason."

I'm sorry you were dumped. Whenever I have been dumped by my human boyfriends, or when my mailman asks to be reassigned because he finds my weekly orders of goat's blood and human magazines to be excessive, I remind myself that I wouldn't want to be around anyone who doesn't think I'm tops, and I move on. I encourage you to do the same.

Kisses,
Cienna

• The final paragraph of this Seattle Times story about layoffs at KOMO by Rachel Lerman really hammers home how absolutely screwed the Seattle media scene is these days:

NBC News shut down its Seattle-based Breaking News startup, and The Seattle Globalist, a nonprofit news site, is working to raise money from subscribers after the University of Washington announced it would no longer fund the site. Northwest Cable News is scheduled to go dark at the end of this week. The Seattle Times said late last year it is planning newsroom cuts.

• With regard to that last item, it's important to note that Seattle has some terrific independent media, and you should support it. Small, dedicated sites like Seattlish, Seattle Transit Blog, The South Seattle Emerald, and many more are out there, covering beats that corporate news simply won't deign to cover. You should support these independent news outlets as best you can this year; 2017 is going to be a bloodbath for the media, and you can help your favorite outlet survive.

• And since we're talking about supporting local independent media, thank you for reading our independent literary news site. If you'd like to support us, all I ask is that you check out our sponsor once a week; our sponsors are terrific because they allow us to pay our wonderful contributors, like our January Poet in Residence, Elisa Chavez. You don't have to buy every book that sponsors our site, but we'd much appreciate it if you'd give them a bit of your attention. And if you've published a book, or if you're throwing an event, or if you own a bookstore and you want to get the word out, we hope you'll consider buying a sponsorship with us. We believe in this model, and we're happy to report that it's working.

• In non-Seattle media news: at the New Yorker, Rozina Ali writes about how and why Islam has been stripped from Rumi's poetry.

• Is your library revealing your browsing information to Amazon? Find out through the tutorial on this site.

Each week, Christine Marie Larsen creates a new portrait of an author for us. Have any favorites you’d love to see immortalized? Let us know

Shirley Jackson
Last month would have been Shirley Jackson's 100th birthday (b. December 14, 1916.)

Sunday January 8th:
Stories from the Saturday Evening Post
It seems likely that this year will bring with it even more magazine closures, and that’s a goddamn shame. This reading of popular Saturday Evening Post pieces — in which local performers read work by P.G. Wodehouse, Robert Heinlein, and Shirley Jackson — ought to demonstrate what magazines, at their very best, are capable of promoting.
Town Hall Seattle, 1119 8th Ave., 652-4255, http://townhallseattle.org. $10-13. All ages. 2 p.m.

Sponsor Northwest Associated Arts is bringing David Sedaris to the Broadway Performance Hall for eight performances over seven days. This is astonishing on its own, but even better? Sedaris will be workshopping his new novel Theft by Finding — this is your chance to see inside his creative process.

There's more information on our sponsor's page, or you can buy tickets — we suggest you grab some before all the performances are sold out, as of this writing, half the dates already are.

Our thanks to sponsors like Northwest Associated Arts. They make this site available to you for free. We just released a new block of sponsorships for the new year — grab the date you want to promote your upcoming event or book. Take a look for more dates and details here.

A free Brooklyn-based comics newspaper called Smoke Signal — the same magazine that partially inspired Seattle's late, lamented Intruder comics paper — is publishing a special anti-Trump comics paper called Resist! Published in time for Inauguration Day and with a print run of over 30,000 copies, Resist! ought to make a splash as one of the first artistic protests of President Trump. Resist! is edited by Raw co-founder Françoise Mouly and Nadja Spiegelman, and it seeks to publish (mostly women-produced) comics "on the theme of political resistance to the forces of intolerance."

Some of the strips to be published in Resist! are already up on the paper's site. Margaret de Heer's cartoon of two women in bed discussing the future of freedom in Donald Trump's America is a gorgeous cartoon that charms with its specificity — one of the women is nude while the other is in a t-shirt and underwear, which feels like a dash of realism — even as it makes a hopeful point. On the darker end of the spectrum, My Ngoc To's strip demonstrates the difficulty of getting out of bed in the days since the election. Shreya Chopra's surreal strip depicts a world awash in menstrual blood. (Menstrual blood is a recurring theme, which makes sense, given our incoming president's commentary about Megyn Kelly bleeding "out of her wherever.")

One of the high points of the Resist! comics featured on the site so far is Seattle cartoonist Tatiana Gill's "The Stages of President Trump." The black and white comic consists of tiny panels illustrating the 15 steps Gill experienced after Trump's election, including "Grief" and "Anger" and "Frenzy" and "Excessive Dog Cuddling." The tightly drawn panels evoke the kind of emotional constriction that many of us in Seattle have felt since November, a kind of claustrophobia of the mind that keeps our thoughts cycling through tiny circles of despair. It's a terrific example of emotional representation through the form of comics, and it echoes the larger themes of addiction and recovery that power Gill's strongest work.

Copies of Resist! will be given out at the women's march on Washington DC on Inauguration Day, while other copies will be shipped to comics shops around the country. But if you'd like to support the publication and distribution of Resist!, you can order a copy for $10 — shipping included — on the Resist! site.

Comics aren't going to erase the Trump presidency from American history. But by publishing smart, funny comics by a diverse group of women, Resist! is laying out a blueprint for the future of artistic resistance for the four years to come. This is accessible protest art, a clear message that travels far and wide on sheets of cheap newsprint.