Talking to Sonny Liew about Singapore and comics

Singpore-based comic artist Sonny Liew came to Seattle last Monday, promoting his new graphic novel The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye (we reviewed the book that day, as well). I sat down with him at Elliott Bay Book Company to talk about his art, the book, politics in Singapore, and his inspirations. This is an edited transcript of the talk.

We published a review of this book today, and it is so good. It's so much fun to read and it's so interesting in a lot of different ways, but one of the things I said in my review was that it really seemed kind of like a love letter to Singapore. Is that a fair thing to say?

I would think so. We did have some problems with the National Arts Council, you might have heard of. Before it was published in Singapore last year they… Initially we had gotten a grant from the National Arts Council to publish a book but when they actually saw the thing in print they decided to withdraw the grant… So it's not really like a love letter, it's like a poison pen maybe.

Do you know specifically what it was that caused them to withdraw?

The clause that they invoked cited that the book undermined government authority I think? Something like that.

But you don't know what part of the book it was?

No, I think it was different parts of it. It wasn't one particular chapter or particular panel.

I've heard you say that you did a lot of research, obviously, it's in the book, but that it wasn't necessarily something that you were taught in Singapore growing up. It was something you came to on your own and decided to do your own research?

Pretty much. Singapore has had a one party in charge for the last 50 years; ever since independence we have one ruling party, which is not unusual in the world. What does make it unusual is it is a fairly relaxed government so it does have the support of the people and been in charge 50 years, but what that 50 years means is that the party is able to tell its version of history for you know, the so-called "Singapore Story". I think a lot of us in Singapore… maybe you read that there is, I want to say, an alternative version of it? Maybe a more inclusive version of history that's been left out.

It wasn't until I started doing a book and doing research that I started to understand what this more inclusive history looked like.

Is there a history at all of comics as an art form? Maybe not speaking back to government as much as you do in yours but is there a history of that?

To some extent. I think in the '50s and the '60s there were a lot of Chinese artists making wood cuts. It turned out to be socialist, left leaning, definitely pro-independence. The wood cuts would depict the ordinary life and how difficult it was under British rule, but I think once PAP got in power they very consciously clamped down on upon cartoons especially of PAP leaders because they were very aware of the power of cartoonists to influence people. I think from '60s onwards, sort of little cutting multiple comics up to present day. I think there was a guy called, I want to say, Leslie Chew, who does an online comic called Demon-cratic and he actually ended up in jail for a couple of days when someone complained about his posting on something or the other.

What influenced you growing up then? I'm assuming lots of Western comics, Golden Age stuff?

A mixture. I used to read The Beano a lot from the UK, Dandy, Spiderman, Richie Rich. Also from Asia; things like Old Master Q from Hong Kong. There's a children's comic called Er Tong Le Yuan ["Children's Paradise"] which is featured in the book. So yeah, I think in Singapore you get books from East and West, a mixture of things.

Every book is essentially made up of semi-arbitrary rules that you set for yourself

Then it's a really interesting conceit that you had for the book, which is that you create this character who has been a comic book artist in Singapore since the fifties and commenting on current events, but also just trying to make good comics and find a life and success doing it. Was it ever your intent to… you don't pass him off as a real person but it kind of is a little bit of a wink, like you never really state anywhere in the promotional materials or anything that he's fake, or that he's made-up, I should say. In the back of the book it says it's fictional, but then I saw there was a book trailer that you made for the book and it actually had an actor, someone who looked very much like him in the comic book, who was looking around at stuff.

I think when making the book I did kind of toy with the idea whether or not to make it clear that he was fictional at some point in the book, like maybe near the end I would reveal that this is a fictional construct, but I think ultimately by trying as hard as I could to keep the illusion it gave me sort of a structure to build the book around. Every book is essentially made up of semi-arbitrary rules that you set for yourself and this is one of those rules that I made up for this book and I think it makes the reading experience more interesting for the reader. If they don't know that he's fictional they can be one way and then when they find that he is fictional they might have a different experience of it, and that has to happen quite a few times. Even Kirkus Review here describes Charlie Chan as a real person so some people have been convinced that he's real and that's pretty interesting for me to see.

I had that. I had a moment reading it too where I was like, 'Oh, this is a real comic book artist that I've never heard of!' And then I thought, well, I know nothing about art from Southeast Asia, Singapore especially, and so I wouldn't have known about him probably, especially if he'd never made a life out here. So it kind of put me in this position where it was interesting, I was like, 'Oh, I don't know if he's real or not' and that kind of changed it for a little bit and so I kind of came around, of course, but it was really kind of a cool reading experience to not know and then to have to face that, and what it means to not know. There's a scene where he goes to the San Diego Comic-Con that kind of plays like that a little bit.

You set in 1988. Why did you decide to set it in '88? Is there something special about that year at Comic-Con?

To be honest it was one of the years I mentioned finding photographs of on the internet. I googled it and found an image of the catalog for that year. It's kind of hard to find all the imagery from all different years and that year when I found the catalog and some photos I figured I could fake his trip to this Comic-Con.

I love that. Actually through the book there's a lot of taped-in photographs or examples of newspaper clippings or the comic books that look very old, that look like your shot reproductions, so from a technique point of view, how did you approach the aging of it? Was that kind of a thing unto itself I would imagine?

Making comics look old is a lot easier these days with digital tools like Photoshop. If you go online you can find at least half a dozen tutorials on how to not just add the texture to make it look old, but also to color it so it looks like it's screen-printed, the little dots and everything. So I guess the trickiest part was to find and scan and show old paper.

So I'd go to book stores and look for old books and usually it's only the front page you can scan because it's got the least text on it, so I bought like a whole bunch of old books and scan them to create textures.

What's your technique in relation to digital work? Like, you do a lot of pen and ink and then digital coloring or…?

Yeah, most of the coloring in the book is done on computer. The only exception, the oil paintings which are actual oil paintings, and the drawings themselves are usually inked, like traditional ink, so I will scan those in and then add textures and colors to make them look old.

I know you studied at RISD, Rhode Island School of Design. What influence did you find there in that environment as opposed to, I don't know, just working on your own or trying to just work only from books? You have access to some of the best teachers in the United States, teaching a pretty traditional program.

There were a lot of great teachers there, painting and drawing and everything else, but I suppose the most direct influence would be a guy called David Mazzucchelli, who worked on Daredevil, Batman and then went on to make his own more indie comics. I think his last book is called Asterios Polyp which is a really amazing book. So he was actually the first person I met who really knew the comics industry, because I didn't go into comic books for a long time before that, but in Singapore there isn't really any kind of structure for that so I was lost for a long time trying to figure out how to become a comic artist, and David was the first guy who told me what I could do to get work and get published and maybe even make a living out of it.

With Charlie Chan Hock Chye - Did he start as the seed of an idea that grew into this book? What was the kernel? It's a big undertaking, this book; it's not like you were doing an episodic comic that grew into a volume, this is all-at-once, a large graphic novel with different styles and techniques.

The initial spark for the book was I was reading a book called Comics, Comix & Graphic Novels: A History of Comic Art by a guy called Robert Sabin, and it was just a history of comics in the US, UK, Japan and France, and while reading it I realized that any kind of history of comics required sort of a background information of the history and culture of the creator at the time was in. So for some reason I thought if I flipped that around, if I consult the history of Singapore through a fictional comic's history, it would be really interesting and it would be a way of drawing the reader in, and they wouldn't realize what was happening until maybe five or ten pages in. They thought they were reading about a comic's history when in fact they were actually reading about Singapore's history.

The initial books was supposed to be a lot thinner, I was thinking 120 pages maybe? The format was going to be a lot closer to traditional art book formats where you have long essays and picture on the side, but when I started drawing the book I realized that the books that I own like that — the coffee table books of Art of Art Spiegelman, Art of Jack Kirby — I would never actually read them from page 1 to page 50 and I would kind of dip in at random points and just read little sections. I didn't want that to happen to this book.

I wanted the readers to read it in a linear way from start to finish. So ultimately I was able to turn the essays into comics, influenced maybe by Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics, he was one of the first people with the genius idea to turn a book about comics… true comics and while it happened it kind of became a lot longer, because to decompress essays into comics really meant you had to draw a lot more images, and also I think even in a formal sense, a book that's only 120 pages wouldn't feel like an art book. Most art books are just thicker in the hand. In some way that kind of drove the decision to make it a longer book, although I think that the time spent also required that kind of longer book.

There's a character in the book that I kind of loved, Bertrand, who is Charlie's writer and partner for a number of years, and then they go their own way, so he's interviewed later at a park, and he has grandkids with him. He chose a much different life, which was kind of an interesting thing. What was it about him that was showing something about your artist?

I guess Bertrand represents the more conventional route that people will take in Singapore. I don't want to say the safer route but it's just the more stable route, to focus on making a living, raising a family, whereas Charlie kind of goes the other way and earns very little money to do his comics on his own. I think with Bertrand my biggest worry was if he would appear like a caricature, like he would be sort of a stock figure who just wouldn't seem real, but I haven't heard a lot of responses that seem that way so I'm kind of relieved that he hasn't come across that way in general.

No I don't think so, he was a character you kind of rooted for. They're young, and they're working together, they're idealistic and they're going to make it! You're really rooting for them and it creates some of the drama of — like you said — reading this as a one-piece, through as a single story instead of as snippets in an art book or something. I thought it was really interesting. He was an interesting character to see different sorts of lives, and also Charlie's parents who had other opinions about what he should be doing with his time and his life. He's kind of a rebellious character, an iconoclast, right?

To some extent. I guess I based him on sort of different artists out there like Wally Wood, Jack Kirby to some extent. I think a lot of artists, especially first generation artists in the US and Japan, even those were very rarely successful careers in the beginning of their careers because of bad financial planning and bad contracts, would struggle a lot in the middle of careers and so in that sense Charlie's sort of artist's life is based a lot of on first generation cartoonists.

Speaking of those artists, you work in a huge variety of styles in the book. Was there one artist that you liked working as more? Or one that was more fun than working in others?

They're all really challenging! Whenever I finish one section and go on to the next section of a new artist a new style, I wouldn't know if I could pull it off. Some parts, like when I was drawing the artwork that he was supposed to have done when he was 5 years old as a kid, I would draw with my left hand so it would look really rough. When I was doing the Tezuka stuff I use for the first time nib pens, sort of look as if I was learning how to draw with those tools… but you know every section of it was interesting to figure out how to make it work, not just of the art style but the story-telling structure. For example there's a part that's based on Harvey Kurtzman's War Stories, and he has a very particular kind of story-telling rhythm so I had to try to capture that structure as well.

It's interesting you mention the tools because you have this lovely page in the book of panels that just show his tools, his pens and his brushes, and you list them in the back which one each was. Was that drawn from your experience, the ones that you used?

Some of it. I think some of the things and some of the materials he used are a little bit older, I've never used them myself, but I know the people of his generation would have used them, so a bit of both I think.

Audience question: If you had to, like, guesstimate, how much time have you put into making this book?

Guesstimate is a good word because I started doing the book while working on The Shadow Hero so it's not quite clear for me exactly how much time I spent doing that first part but maybe two-and-a-half years, in total? I think probably the drawing itself took a year and a half, and a year of research and sort of planning the book before that.

Audience question: What were your experiences getting this book published? What's your view on publishing today?

When Pantheon first approached I thought it was really incredible news for me because they had done books like Maus and Persepolis, and the Chris Ware books, so they're one of the best publishers out there for graphic novels, but what I discovered is they're kind of more focused on the book market and not so much on the so-called direct market, which is the comics market. So in that sense I feel like we are not quite focusing on both ends. The book might potentially lose some readers because of that.

Like people who would read comic books traditionally aren't going to get it?

Yeah. Might not hear about it just yet. But you know the book industry is complicated, I think. Especially with eBooks coming in and all that. For the most part my own focus is just doing the actual book itself and hoping that the publishers and the distributors can take care of the rest of it.

Your publisher in Singapore, too, I saw on your blog there, they're doing a call for comics and for other artists to come up and put out more, so is there a pretty vibrant scene in Singapore of modern comic book artists?

Yes and no. A lot of people who love comics and want to make comics, but then not many full-time creators in Singapore. There aren't many here either, but I think a lot less. Probably three of us who do it full-time, in Singapore? The rest, we do work on the side and teach, they have a 9-5 job, because comics doesn't pay well in general and Singapore especially if you are doing books just for the local market, it's just really tough.

Audience question: You talk about how you started off with sort of a shorter book and came to this. Was there a point where it was a much larger book and you had to edit it and how would you do that for graphic novels as opposed to literature?

I suppose no matter how long or short it is, for me at least I look at the thumbnails on the right, so it's very similar to what a studio like Pixar would do for their movies, they would do story-boarding first and only when those are in place would they actually make their animation. If I had gone ahead to draw before those were ready then any change can be very time-consuming and a lot of work, so I think if you work on the thumbnails first and figure out the structure of the book and sort of how it needs to be, then it's a lot less painful to move things around before you do the final book.

Audience question: We're actually reading your book for our graphic novel book club, and a couple of meetings ago we read a book by Jeff Lemire who also sort of bridges the world between graphics writing and longer format stuff, and so for an author in your position or in his position, when you're promoting different work, when you're working on different things, do you find yourself speaking to different crowds in different places? Is it all kind of the same sort of people?

I guess there is some quite specific crowd that maybe reads more superhero mainstream stuff, so for those they'd be more interested that I'm doing Doctor Fate than this book, right? Speaking to them, I don't notice a big difference. You still talk about comics. If they ask me about Doctor Fate I wouldn't be able to tell them much about his history because I haven't read any Doctor Fate prior to doing the book. I guess I just hope that more readers will kind of be willing to try all different genres and be willing to see comics as a medium as opposed to being focused on other genres.

Audience question: Do you think that your book has had some influence on maybe the opening of the discussion and conversation in Singapore about expanding on the official view of Singaporean history? What's your sense of that?

My sense is that it's become one of the touchstones that people refer to when discussing questionable censorship or freedom of speech in Singapore. I think in the last year this book and a movie by a director called Tan Pin Pin, her work got banned in Singapore, so a lot of articles do cite these two works as being sort of examples of how things are still a little bit repressive in Singapore. I'm not sure if these discussions do actually change the government's position on things because the thing about the PAP in Singapore is that once they have made a decision about something it's very hard to change to shift the needle where they stand. They're very clear-eyed as to what good governance means and very strong views about what freedom of press entails, so interviews with ministers and politicians in the past year, they are not considered any kind of ground, they have their position and say, "This is what you have to live with in Singapore."

Audience question:I saw on Twitter that you visited RISD again. What was it like to go back to your old alma mater?

Well it's been I think more than twelve, fourteen years since I've been back there, so it was interesting to see the old illustration building which has been renovated quite a bit. The town itself hasn't changed that much I think, it was kind of cool to see that you can go back and still recognize things. It was cool to see my old teachers as well, those that were there for the talk. It was nice.

It must be fun to go back with a book.

Well you know when we were in our school, all the students think that they're going to be the next superstar and it's taken me like 14 years to get to a place where I feel like I'm starting to be able to do what I want to do.

I'm assuming you still do — as you mentioned — a lot of collaboration where you're doing the art and other people are doing some writing. Do you like working alone? What is it about working alone?

Well I prefer working alone I think just because the ideas expressed in the book are more personal I think? Working on Doctor Fate for example, which features a sort of Egyptian-American superhero struggling with his identity. I mostly thought we could have dealt a lot more with you know, the Arab Spring, political issues, but it's impossible. DC itself is very reluctant to go into that kind of sensitive area so there's no way we could really tackle those things.

I guess making one book and it's not a DC, Marvel thing then you have a lot more freedom to explore the ideas that you find interesting.

Audience question: Can you describe more the 14 years after RISD? No, just I'm always curious about how do people go through the journey of wanting to be an artist and how do they get there and what are the ups and downs along the way, if you could tell us your story or career story.

Well I guess the thing that strikes me is that every book that I worked on I had hoped that it would be sort of The Book that would get me where I wanted to go, but when I got Eisner nomination I thought that this would surely mean that I would get a lot more work and my career would be in the right place, but what I have found is that all the things are sort of incremental advancements. Every book you make you kind of learn a little bit more why it works and why it doesn't work, and why people like it and why they don't like it. Also how you feel about it. So I would probably not do another Jane Austen book again because that kind of adaption for me is so tied to the original source you can't break out too much, especially if it's Marvel publishing more traditional.

So, my ambition has always been to have the kind of career that someone like I would say Chris Ware or Daniel Clowes has, where they do really personal work that is still financially viable for them. It's taken a long time to even get close to that, I think. This book for me, when I started it 2 and a half years previous ago, my career was kind of on a plateau, I felt like I was stuck in gear. So doing this book for me was sort of, I call it a moonshot — something that has really low chance of succeeding but you just hope that it does? I mean the publisher in Singapore paid me I think $8000 for the project which meant I had to live off that for 2 years — so my savings were kind of down, down, down, every other month.

But I think while I was drawing it, especially the first 30, 40 pages, somehow I had this sense that this was a book that somehow worked. A lot of stuff you work on you think you know, it's okay but it's not great, but this book, the first quarter of it I felt just really worked. I knew that I had to push through whatever problems came my way.

I've got slides I can send you another time if you want to see the visual progression from university to here.

I think you can kind of see it in your work, too. Like the style in Malinky Robot, I mean obviously the styles are going to be different between the story you're telling but even the style in there is very different, it's sketchier, it's a little bit more experimental or something, it's a little grittier, you know? The art in this book is much crisper, much cleaner, the lines are stronger, it feels more "traditional" comics, with quotes around traditional.

Part of the problem back then was I couldn't really ink. My first project with DC Vertigo was a comic called My Faith in Frankie, I was supposed to have inked and drawn the whole comic but when I turned in the inks for the first volume I got a call from my editor saying — they're very nice about it — saying "it's pretty good, but I think we need to bring someone in to ink over your drawings." So it's the same thing with the early stories from Malinky Robot, Wonderland, I just didn't feel competent in actually doing the inking. So I found a way to use the pencils to manipulate them so that they looked reasonably interesting? So that look was just based on having limitations on inking back then.

When you look back at that is that something that is like, "Oh that's cool, I managed to get around this limitation." Or is it like, "I wish I could go back and fix it"?

No, I like it. I still use that style once in a while for certain kinds of illustrations, especially children's illustrations, so that pencil look has a nice feel to it that I still really like.

Audience question: Can you talk about maybe what you're working on now? Are you on small things or are you…

I'm still working on Doctor Fate for a few more issues, it's supposed to have ended at twelve but they extended another six issues so I'm working on at least four of those. I do have a new book in mind, I tell people that it's set in 1980s Hong Kong, that it's going to deal with things like capitalism and our place in modern society, but it's very vague right now, it probably will change a lot during the development.

Thursday Comics Hangover: The Fix is in

Last week’s big book news was obviously the first issue of the Black Panther from Ta-Nehisi Coates and Brian Stelfreeze, but there was another debut that deserves your attention, too. Nick Spencer and Steve Lieber’s new series The Fix is a crime comic with relatively small stakes, but it’s entertaining as hell — funny, dirty, and charming all at once.

Spencer and Lieber earned a cult following with their work on Marvel’s Superior Foes of Spider-Man series, which was a funny heist comic featuring some D-List Spider-Man villains. Foes was for a while my favorite book from the big two superhero publishers, with its self-effacing sense of humor and twisty plot. Spencer’s script doesn’t skimp on the words; the pages are full of word balloons and captions that amplify our understanding of what’s on the page. (He never over-explains, or steps on the artist's job.) And Lieber’s art is clear, character-based, and packed with fun details.

The Fix is a heist comic starring a pair of terrible human beings. It’s basically Foes with all the superhero pretenses taken out. (And let’s be honest: the superhero trappings were the worst part of Foes; the story only fell apart when characters had to explain why they were dressed up in funny outfits.) And because it’s published by Image, Lieber and Spencer get to cram all the sex talk and violence and swearing they want in there.

I can’t give away too much of what The Fix is about without ruining the fun, but it opens with a heist gone wrong, continues with a character study of a dirty cop, and then raises the stakes into a caper that can’t possibly end well, with a perfect little cliffhanger ending. Every twist has a second twist layered on top of it, and none of those storytelling reversals feels manufactured or cheesy. Spencer’s dialogue — kind of Elmore Leonard-y, though with more semen jokes — keeps things running smoothly. (Seriously, there’s a lot of sex talk. You should be warned that occasionally the chat leans in the direction of gay panic, but it always skitters away at the last minute.)

The Fix is at the very crest of a tidal wave of heist comics coming at us. This week saw the first issues of Jackpot (a decent heist comic that suffers a bit from terrible art) and Heartthrob (a very promising ghost story/heist comic), and the next few weeks will see the debut of another series called 4 Kids Walk Into a Bank. The question has to be whether an ongoing serial medium like comics can sustain the amped-up pressure that the crime genre demands. I’d expect at least half of these series to flag after a few issues, but Lieber and Spencer proved with Foes that they could keep a crime story going for at least three fairly thick trade paperbacks. I’d expect The Fix to keep running on high power for the next few years.

Why you're about to see fewer words on the internet

This quote, from BuzzFeed chairman Ken Lerer, positively smacks of protesting too much:

“Anyone who thinks that this isn’t a terrific time to be in digital content is dead wrong,” Lerer said. “It’s a fantastic time.”

Lerer, of course, is talking about the reports that BuzzFeed had to cut its revenue goals for this year by half. Also of note is this line, from Re/Code reporter Peter Kafka, later in the piece:

Lerer wouldn’t discuss BuzzFeed’s performance last year, and he wouldn’t talk about the company’s financials in any further detail.

Huh.

Anyone who works with Facebook knows that Facebook sharing is down significantly as of late. This is a huge problem for media companies, because media companies have basically accepted Facebook as the sole portal to their sites. Nobody goes to blogs or news sites as destinations anymore; they go there from Facebook. Let me ask you this: have you ever intentionally gone to buzzfeed.com, just to click around? Do you even know what the landing page at buzzfeed.com looks like?

The internet is an economy that is powered by bubbles. Someone has a good idea, and then everyone floods the space with similar junk, and then the whole thing implodes and one or two shrewd survivors manage to claim all the scorched earth as their own. It happened with Amazon, with Google, and Facebook. It's happening right now with media sites. The bubble is, eventually, going to pop. Maybe not this month. Maybe not this year. But it will pop, and a whole lot of writers are going to be out of work because of it.

In the beginning was "content." BuzzFeed, using a lot of money from a lot of investors, took over the content space. They had listicles, yeah, but they also hired real reporters to do real reporting. Ask any social media person at any media company, though, and they'll tell you that actual news stories and opinions — you know, groupings of words ordered in sentences and paragraphs — are not sharing on Facebook as well as they used to. People are interested more in memes, by which I mean little pictures with a small amount of words printed on them. They're more share-friendly, they take no time to digest, they're simple.

And now, BuzzFeed is betting big on live video because Facebook has decided that the future of Facebook is video. Video is a different kind of business than writing. It requires more money, more time, and a completely different skill set. I wouldn't be surprised to see some other company steal BuzzFeed's buzz on video. If that happens, Facebook will likely do what Facebook does best: start favoring the more efficient and popular content provider and ignore the one that does not perform as well. That would be the beginning of the end for BuzzFeed.

Please note, though, that none of this has to do with the Seattle Review of Books. We don't rely on the traditional advertising model — we have a better model — and so we don't need to score ever-higher numbers of clicks. We're scaled right for the kind of site we want to be, which means we don't have to compromise our values or our mission because Facebook tweaked an algorithm and all of a sudden two million fewer people are visiting the site every day or something like that.

So what does this mean for you and the Seattle Review of Books? Nothing much, really. If you find us on Facebook or Twitter, you can keep doing that. We love it when you visit. If you come to our site directly through seattlereviewofbooks.com, you're who we had in mind when we designed the site. That makes us tremendously happy and we hope we make it worth your while to visit.

But what does this mean for you and the internet? It means your Facebook feed is about to get a lot more loud and video-centric. It means these content mills — BuzzFeed, Upworthy, Gawker — are about to get a lot more desperate to attract your eyeballs, and they're going to use a whole range of off-putting strategies to do that. It means that long articles might get a little more scarce on the internet over the next few months or years or however. It means a lot of writers will probably be out of work.

What can you do to stop the bubble from bursting? Nothing, probably. Facebook doesn't listen to anyone; it's the creepy overlord of the internet, and media companies are desperate to do its bidding. Just keep reading things you like, and sharing it with your friends however you share things with friends — Facebook, Twitter, e-mail.

The happy news is that writers will not stop writing just because some outlet or another collapsed. And maybe those writers will come together and start something newer and better after the bubble bursts — something sturdier and less prone to the fidgety compulsions of a few Silicon Valley jerks. Don't panic. You'll always have something to read. You might just have to work a little harder to find it.

Book News Roundup: Octavia Butler-themed contest winners, a poetry judge, and Rachel Dolezal

  • Seattle author Nisi Shawl announced the winners of the Seattle Public Library's Octavia Butler-themed flash fiction contest. The winners are MB Austin, Steve Arntson, and Geetanjali Dighe. You can read all their stories, and all the honorable mention stories, for free on Seattle Public Library's website.

  • Hugo House Executive Director Tree Swenson is a judge in the poetry category for the 2016 National Book Awards. The Capitol Hill Times interviewed her about the honor.

  • Speaking of Hugo House, they're still looking for writers in residence. This will be for the term when Hugo House is sharing space with the Frye Art Museum, so technically, you'd be the writer-in-temporary-residence, which is kind of a cool distinction. Deadline for that is April 30.

  • And while we're at it, poets should be advised that the Red Lineage Hackathon is coming up on April 23rd at the Hugo House. It "gives poets an opportunity to create web-based poems for Red Lineage, a global collaborative poetry project created by local poet and conceptual artist, Natasha Marin," using whatever technology is available to them. To learn more about Red Lineage, visit their website.

  • Last summer's hot mess, Rachel Dolezal, is apparently going to write a book about her controversial statements that she identifies as black. Let me remind you right now that you don't have to buy this book when it comes out. In fact, it would probably be better for everyone if we all agreed to not buy this damn book.

  • Some 90 Mississippi authors — including bestsellers like John Grisham, Donna Tartt, and Kathryn Stockett— have signed a petition protesting their state's new anti-gay law. You never see authors signing petitions in favor of anti-gay laws; that's part of the reason why books are so terrific.

Your Week in Readings: The best literary events from April 13th - April 19th

Wednesday April 13: Hope Jahren

Lab Girl is a memoir about sexism in the sciences — the STEM fields are still an old boys’ club — and what it’s like to follow a lifelong love of science. To Jahren, math and analytic thinking isn’t the most important part of being a scientist; having a question is what counts most. Town Hall Seattle, 1119 8th Ave., 652-4255, http://townhallseattle.org. $5. All ages. 7 p.m.

Thursday April 14th: Noir at the Bar

Writers of pulp, noir, and mystery fiction get together in Seattle’s classiest bar to read new work, drink a lot, and celebrate the city’s burgeoning crime fiction scene. Readers include Robert Dugoni, Tom Kelly, Skye Moody, and Jim Thomsen; your host is prolific pulp writer Will “The Thrill” Viharo.
Sorrento Hotel, 900 Madison St., 622-6400, http://hotelsorrento.com. Free. 21 and over. 7 p.m.

Friday April 15: Hugo Literary Series

A cliché can destroy a piece of writing. Case in point: if I were to follow that first sentence with a sentence claiming that “Writers should avoid clichés like the plague,” you would, rightfully, stop reading right there. Clichés are more than just over-exhausted expressions made meaningless by repetition; they’re signifiers that a writer hasn’t put enough thought into their argument. They identify a piece of writing that has not endured any editorial scrutiny. It’s fine for a writer to insert a cliché in a first draft but by the time they get around to the third draft, that cliché had better be replaced with an original thought, stated originally. Otherwise, it’s not writing, it’s just putting words on a page.

It’s interesting, then, that Hugo House, a writing center, has for the last year been celebrating cliché in its Hugo Literary Series events. The Literary Series has always employed the writing prompt, that most classic of writing-class conventions, as its primary conceit. Three writers — a mix of local and nationally celebrated authors — and one local musician create new work based on a theme. Writers like Sherman Alexie, Nicole Hardy, and Kevin Sampsell and musician Rachel Flotard responding to vague-but-intriguing phrases like “While You Were Sleeping” create a through-line for the evening, adding a sense of discovery and play that is not unlike what you’ll find in a particularly good writing class.

But the inclusion of cliché into this year’s Literary Series has added another little kick of drama to the formula. Writers understand that clichés are taboo, and so when they’re forced to incorporate them into the work, they approach them nervously and from interesting angles. The last event’s cliché — “what goes around comes around” — inspired interesting work from musician OC Notes and poet Sierra Nelson, along with a funny, alarming essay by Heidi Julavits about her fears that her son might one day grow up to be a rapist.

This week’s Literary Series event is centered around the cliché “all’s fair in love and war.” Novelist Claire Vaye Watkins, Seattle electronic music stalwart Alex Osuch, novelist Andrew Sean Greer, and Seattle poet and slam performer Roberto Ascalon will all try to embrace the cliché without covering themselves in the stench of bad writing.

These writers should do just fine with the task. Ascalon is nimble and thoughtful and fun. Greer’s writing can be off-putting — a little too polished — but he’s never at a loss for cleverness. Osuch is a founding member of Old Growth Northwest and ran their reading series, so he’s bringing a writer’s eye to the challenge. But Watkins is the one to watch. She’s having a bit of a moment right now; her dystopian novel Gold Fame Citrus devastated readers with its weird beauty last year, and for her next trick, she published an essay titled “On Pandering: How to Write Like a Man” that pretty much burned the publishing industry to the ground. This is a writer who is physically unable to think an uninteresting thought. The clichés should fall like dominoes, or a house of cards, or toy soldiers, or, you know, something else that falls down easily.

Hugo House, 1634 11th Ave, 322-7030, http://hugohouse.org. $25. All ages. 7:30 p.m.

Saturday April 16: Chester Brown

Brown launched from the autobiographical comics scene of the late 1980s, but he’s gone on to embrace a very particular cause as his life’s work. In his memoir Paying for It, Brown advocated, through personal experience, the legalization of prostitution. His new book, Mary Wept Over the Feet of Jesus, studies the history of prostitution in the Bible.

Hugo House, 1634 11th Ave, 322-7030, http://hugohouse.org. Free. All ages. 7 p.m.

Sunday April 17: Eric Morse

Morse’s What is Punk? is a children’s book explaining punk music to kids, from the Sex Pistols to the Talking Heads. Told in rhyme and illustrated in photos of clay sculptures by Anny Yi, it’s probably the world’s first history of punk intended for an elementary school audience. Third Place Books Ravenna, 6504 20th Ave NE, 525-2347 http://thirdplacebooks.com. Free. All ages. Noon.

Monday April 18: Shawn Vestal

Vestal is about as Spokane as they come. His short stories, collected in a book called Godforsaken Idaho, are about religion and drugs and desolation. His new book, a first novel titled Daredevils, revels even more in its essential Spokane-ness, throwing in Evel Knievel and a polygamy cult for good measure. Elliott Bay Book Company, 1521 10th Ave, 624-6600, http://elliottbaybook.com . Free. All ages. 7 p.m.

Tuesday April 19: The Lost Neruda

Last year, literary archivists discovered unpublished poems by the greatest love poet of the 20th century, Pablo Neruda. Tonight, Washington publisher Copper Canyon Press celebrates the publication of those poems in a book titled Then Come Back: The Lost Neruda. Author Forrest Gander hosts an evening of bilingual readings, a panel discussion, and more. McCaw Hall, 925 E. Pike St., 709-9442,http://lectures.org . $15. All ages. 8 p.m.

"Everybody is dying, so you shouldn’t waste people’s time."

David Schmader is a goddamned Seattle treasure. From his one-man shows to his Last Days column at The Stranger to his new job as Creative Director at the Bureau of Fearless Ideas, he has improved life in this city by roughly 1000 percent. I worked with Schmader for eight years at The Stranger and I'm proud to call him a friend, but the truth is that I still nurse a fan's awe of his writing. A Schmader sentence — crisp, fast-moving, and laced with wit — is entertaining in the same way a Wodehouse sentence is entertaining. Last week, Schmader published his first book, Weed: The User’s Guide, and he's about to celebrate with a few Seattle events: a mind-blowing video montage event with Collide-o-Scope at the Egyptian on 4/20, a reading at Town Hall on April 22nd, and a reading at Hugo House on May 1st. We talked about Weed, about weed, and about whether or not it's too soon to make fun of Nancy Reagan.

I really enjoyed the book and I learned a lot from it. Thank you for writing it. Could you talk about how it came to be?

Yes. [Sasquatch Books] approached me and said, “Do you want to write a book about pot for us?” And I said yes. How this happened, why they picked me, I think so much of it has to do with being at The Stranger — I was able to write openly about being a pothead. It started with my plays; there’s a scene in Straight where pot is a character, and it gets me through these support group meetings for ex-gays. I’m nervous enough that if I was at a place where I hadn’t actively gotten high with my publisher and editor, I would be worried they would be waiting to use that against me for some reason, because I would think “oh, they have something on me.” But because I was at a place where they not only encouraged radical truth-telling, but also smoked with me, I was like, “okay, I get to do this.” It just provided an unusually safe environment to do that type of writing. Someone eventually was like, “hey, you’ve written about pot — write this book.”

That leads to another question: were you ever worried about being stereotyped as “the pot writer?” Because pot has always had a stigma to it; obviously this is changing now with legalization, but it used to be that this stuff followed you around for your whole life.

Yeah. My big thing was to be more complete about it. Usually whenever I talked about pot, pot wasn’t what I was talking about. I was talking about doing pot and then doing something else.

I had been approached by other people to write pot books before, and I was like: “it can’t have stoner puns, it can’t have tie-dye.” I totally worshiped him, but I didn’t want a foreword by Tommy Chong. It needs to be like a book about scotch — you know, a grown-up pleasure, for people who might like this thing. Other people ran away when I said that, and Sasquatch was like “this is exactly what we’re thinking.”

I bet you’ve seen some of those cookbooks about cooking with weed. [A friend’s] mom sent her one as a gift, because it’s kind of naughty. That bullshit naughtiness has no place in it anymore. When you get over being gay, you stop pretending it’s naughty.

So you’d be okay being the Dr. Ruth of pot, like if someone offered you a pot etiquette advice column?

I guess. I care about etiquette — how you move in the world. You know, I probably would write an advice column about weed because if I got bored, I could make it about anything else in the world. Although I think I’d be better at tying pot to art. I feel I would be better at writing about pot experiences; I would love to be the go-to person for art pairings.

Do you see yourself as a full-on advocate for pot?

The one thing that I’m proselytizing about is shooting down the War on Drugs bullshit that lots of people — especially people who don’t like pot — still hold onto because they have had no personal reason to challenge those [assumptions]. I think the little girl whose seizures are stopped by CBD is the kind of thing that will make non-pot-smokers care about pot. That’s what any proselytizing I have is about: don’t believe the stuff we were all rigorously told over and over by our government.

There is a moral imperative to creating or to correcting the perception of what this drug is, and just the insidiousness of why the government can still say it has no known medical benefits. The key word there is “known,” because [scientists] haven’t been able to do the research, because [government agencies] have kept it classified as a Schedule 1 drug. You have to be deputized by the DEA to do research.

The reason people argue “we don’t know what it does” is because people aren’t allowed to research it through the channels that would add up to government knowledge. That is where I get lit up on fire: we need to change the scheduling because just colloquially we have so much powerful evidence of what it can do medically.

And how far does your advocacy go?

You should be able to kill yourself with your pleasure. That’s where my radical side goes, because I think all drugs should be legal. Everyone is killing themselves with their pleasure, whether they admit it or not. That’s a great American gift.

One of the things I was worried about with this book was that with the informational mission that it wouldn’t be funny, or that it wouldn’t sound Schmader-y. I was relieved to see that your voice came through. You still have your entertaining sentences throughout and it’s a funny book. Was there a challenge in balancing your voice with the mission?

No. The closest thing to a challenge was I misjudged how long I had to shovel information from at least three different sources and let it stew long enough until I could export a non-sucky original sentence about it. It was like doing a book report on weed. I didn’t go in the world and research history about weed. I read everybody else’s research of weed and was like, “here is the funny sentence version of that.” What I thought I had to offer was that I can distill information into sentences that aren’t terrible, and so I thought that is the only thing that will make this book special.

My thinking is that everybody is dying, so you shouldn’t waste people’s time. If they sit still and look at your book for hours, that’s an incredible gift they’re giving to you. And when smart people tell me that they didn’t suffer when reading it, it’s like, “oh great.” Because it could have been of no interest to people like you.

Well, for me, I started late on pot. I had some very bad experiences when I was younger where I would just shut down when I smoked, and so as a consequence, I didn’t learn all of this stuff that everybody else did. I had a lot of questions that were finally resolved by reading your book, so it was very useful to me.

Nice. I love it.

Yeah, and it was entertaining. I think it did exactly what it was supposed to do for me. I was almost the exact intended audience for it because I’m an adult who was afraid to ask questions about pot because by the time I got around to it, everybody else had seemingly already figured it out. You explained it really well.

Yay!

Changing the subject: Do you regret making the Nancy Regan joke, or at least the timing of the Nancy Regan joke? I read the book right after she died and then I came across the part where you called her a…

Faulty wig stand?

Yeah. Do you regret that?

No way!

Oh, no, wait. I just found the quote. You called her a “diabolical wig stand.”

I think I went “diabolical” because of the AIDS stuff, because really she was more than just a faulty wig stand. No, I’m fine with “diabolical wig stand.” I stand by it forever. It should go on her tombstone. Do you think I should have gone harder?

Maybe.

I know. I did not know she was still alive until she died. She lasted longer than Abe Vigoda?

Yeah, and I bet you because she was an actor she’ll get in the Oscars death reel next year and Vigoda didn’t make the cut this year.

Oh gross!

Yeah. Next year. Just wait for it.

Her best work was with ALF.

You’ve already talked a little bit about the research, but there was so much on different fronts. There was the biological stuff and the historical stuff and the legal stuff. You figured out which presidents were most likely to have smoked, which I really respected as a fan of presidential history. Was it really just reading different books?

The big thing with all pot talk is because it hasn’t been overt, there is lore and then if you look a little deeper, there may be an actual fact that you can report. I couldn’t ignore lore. Hopefully in the tone you got a sense of what was lore and then what was provably true. A lot of it was just finding enough examples and then getting to find a close enough thing to a consensus.

If there wasn’t a consensus, I would just offer the various lore. I don’t feel bad about that; if something is kept contraband and bootleg for so long, it’s going to have an amazingly rich lore that you’re going to want. You don’t want to pretend it doesn’t exist.

You recently did a video essay about writing in films as part of the APRIL Festival.

True.

And you’re working at the Bureau of Fearless Ideas, which is a nonprofit youth writing education center. It seems like you are thinking a lot about the process side of writing right now in your career. Am I making that up or is process something that you are thinking a lot about right now?

I have just done a couple of performances, that were all about, like: “why do you believe me?” When I come out on a stage, why do you believe me? I’m fascinated with that. That might be tied to working in a newspaper, where you’re wondering what do people respond to? What do people care about now? How do you tell a story that people care about?

I think you’ve always been interested in process. You changed my whole perception of my own job forever in Short-Term Solution to a Long-Term Problem when you referred to blogging as “good noticing.” You kind of ruined blogging for me for a little while...

If you’re a good noticer, you are good noticer. You’re the best at the sport.

You seem to be continually curious about how all that writing stuff works. For a lot of writers that internalized thinking about process gets paralyzing, but you use it to explore some interesting ideas.

I think it’s tied to the idea of writing what you know and just being honest about stuff and shining a light on things that people don’t shine a light on, whether it’s talking about being a smart person that smokes weed, or what are the doubts that a solo performer has, or why it feels gross to put yourself out there, and asking why do you believe me?

God! I wonder if it’s tied to white guilt. Why does this work? How does this work? What is the currency we are all working on in the storytelling culture? Yeah, interesting.

As much as process is the through-line for things, and maybe this is just because it makes my heart leap, but if I love something enough, I can write about it and other people will love it — like Axl Rose, Showgirls and hopefully, now, weed. I had no idea anyone would see the same thing that I saw when I saw Showgirls. That was just a delight. When your experience is mirrored by other people it’s like, “oh I’m not alone on Earth.”

The place where you work recently blew up. How is that going for you?

Prior to that we had an indoor flood, so we’re awaiting the locusts. First of all, everyone loves a place when it blows up. And everyone is like, “how the fuck can we help?” There are tons of challenges but it’s heartening to see what a well-loved place and what a well-loved neighborhood can bring out in people.

Nobody at the Bureau of Fearless Ideas had a problem with your writing a book on pot?

No. I was like, “hi, this is what I plan to do” and they were like, “okay.” Nothing in my BFI world acknowledges Showgirls or Weed. It’s just something I do afterwards. It’s like that girl who goes to school in a van and is a hooker. We’ve all seen that movie. Walking the Halls, it’s called.

Please note that we didn't publish this review at 4:20

Published April 12, 2016, at 11:30am

Al Olson review David Schmader's Weed: The User's Guide.

David Schmader's new book about weed is here. Is it worth cracking? What if you're a weed expert? What if you're a weed newbie?

Read this review now

Triumph

I always forget who lives
in my city.
No comment on them —
my memory’s bad.
Or good
for certain things.
Like faces.
Or items
on a grocery list.
Or the precise feelings
a book produced
in me once,
although perhaps not
its phrases or ideas.
But people, you
lovely impenetrables,
too often I forget
you exist.
I don’t find it hard
to reach out to you
in moments —
to recognize
your flesh and flutter
as mine.
Still, the grocery
list lengthens.
Somewhere
a party commences.
It occurs to me
I store a vast reserve
of sympathy for myself
inside myself.
I don’t know whether
this is a triumph
of compassion or greed
but I guard it like passion
or grief.

Growing pains for Emerald City Comicon?

This year was the first Emerald City Comicon under the management of national convention chain ReedPOP, and the local comics community was understandably nervous about what that might mean for the region’s largest convention. ECCC director Jim Demonakos assured the media last year that ReedPOP wouldn’t affect the flavor of the convention at all, but comics people are resistant to change and prone to worry, so everyone had their feelers out for problems.

Speaking personally as an ECCC panel moderator, a few problems materialized. When I showed up to pick up my badge, I wasn’t on the list. This happens at shows all the time, and it’s not a big deal; I eventually got everything in order, and the window staff was friendly and helpful. However, when I showed up at the first of two panels that I was confirmed to moderate, another moderator was there. We had been double-booked. The second panel went off without a hitch. But on Sunday, I got a call from ECCC; the panel that I was scheduled to moderate was about to begin. Problem is, nobody at ECCC had told me I was supposed to moderate that panel. It wasn’t on the official schedule sent to me by ECCC staff. It went on without me. I’m sorry to any panelists and audience members who were expecting me to be there; I wish I had known about it.

So that’s my experience, but maybe I was a fluke? Moderators, after all, are small fish in the convention food chain. I’ve seen evidence from a few of the smaller vendors that ECCC was very successful for them. A few cartoonists I follow on Twitter sold out of their books before the end of the show, which is wonderful.

But a few conversations with other vendors — none of whom wanted to be identified, for obvious reasons —indicated other problems: a lack of communication between staff and vendors, scheduling issues, double booking, authors not knowing where they were supposed to be at any given moment. None of the vendors I talked with were outraged — nobody was calling for anyone on ECCC staff to be fired — but they were disappointed to find that the personal touch was missing from their interactions with the convention. With the larger apparatus of ReedPOP behind the scenes at ECCC, vendors believed that if anything the convention process would be more efficient and streamlined than in years past; for many, the exact opposite experience was true.

Again: I’ve not heard any nightmarish stories from ECCC. Nobody I talked with is threatening to ban the convention next year or anything extreme like that. But I did hear stories that indicated ECCC’s first full year under ReedPOP’s organizational umbrella suffered from some growing pains that made the convention-vendor dynamic more problematic than in years past. Hopefully these concerns will be addressed before next year.

If you’d like to share your Emerald City Comicon experience — good, bad, or other — with the Seattle Review of Books, please send us an email. We'll be happy to maintain your anonymity.

Isn't Easter already past? Not if you're in the Orthodox church

If you're in the Orthodox church, Easter is still ahead, on May 1st this year. We're welcoming back sponsor Charlotte Riggle, whose children's book Catherine's Pascha follows a little girl's quest to stay awake for the overnight Pascha, or Easter, service.

If you're not Orthodox, maybe you'll be wondering why the family next door are loading up the car with sleepy children all dressed up come April 30th. This book is a great way of understanding the faith of your neighbors and friends, and introducing children to the many ways that different people in the world worship. See a full-color sample from the book on our sponsor's page.

If you're a small publisher, writer, poet, or foundation that is looking to back our work, and advertise your own in an inexpensive and expressive way, take a look at our open dates. We'd love to talk to you about opportunities to sponsor us. It's our way of making internet advertising something to look forward to.

The man who paints tigers on an island

Published April 11, 2016, at 12:00pm

Martin McClellan review Sonny Liew's The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye.

Sonny Liew sold out his first run of the Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye in Singapore, and no wonder. He's one of the first artists to grapple with Singapore's recent history in such a modern medium. What does this book say to us in the West?

Read this review now

The readings that helped make Open Books

As Open Books owner John Marshall prepares his poetry bookstore for a new owner and a new future, he can’t help but reflect on the past. Between the old friends sending their best wishes on news of Marshall’s retirement and the prospect of retirement, he describes himself as feeling a little “sentimental.”

“I’m getting lovely memories,” Marshall says. In particular, he’s been remembering some of the liveliest events Open Books has hosted over the last two decades. “Ben Lerner’s first reading in Seattle was here and it was just brilliant,” re recalls. After that event, Marshall says, Seattle poet Molly Tenenbaum walked up to Marshall and identified Lerner’s event as one of those rare readings where one day she’ll look back and “say, ‘I was there.’”

Talking about one reading opens a floodgate of memories: When Mary Ruefle first read at Open Books, Marshall says she didn’t want an introduction, and she wanted the store lights off during the reading. National Book Award-winning poet Nikky Finney “read here twice and was devastating both times.”

“Sherman Alexie’s first or second reading in Seattle was at our old site,” Marshall says, “and he paced and was angry — doing less standup and more snarl. And that was among the best readings I’ve ever seen.” He says Alexie demonstrated “a certain star quality” from the very beginning, a sense that he was bound for big things.

Some of Marshall’s favorite Open Books moments aren’t even readings. “Gwendolyn Brooks came in here and we met her and she wrote in books that we own,” he says, his voice filled with wonder. Then he points over to the middle of the store. “John Ashbery sat on those benches,” he says. “I held Seamus Heaney’s gold card in my hand! We told him he didn’t have to buy anything, and he insisted.”

Since it looks — knock wood — as though Open Books will have a life after Marshall, what kind of advice does he have for the next owners? What makes a good poetry event? Obviously, “a good writer who can read well,” he says, one who “doesn’t explain too much between poems.” What else? “An attentive audience who’s there to listen to poetry. A curt and intelligent introduction — with an emphasis on intelligence, because curt is not enough. I’ve seen some people just read the back of the book” as an introduction, Marshall says, and that’s always a disappointing start to a reading.

It’s telling that Marshall’s favorite moments at Open Books involve the presence of authors. A bookstore with a reading is a bookstore that is full of people. The words pace the room and fill the space, are applauded, are celebrated. Poetry collections, more than other kinds of books, come alive when the author is near. They’re such personal objects, so full of the author’s own voice, that something special is sure to happen when book and author come together to share the same space.

The Sunday Post for April 10, 2016

The Voyeur's Motel

Let's talk about Gay Talese. When asked last week to name female journalists he admired, he balked, then doubled-down. Not using Twitter, or any social media, a New York Times piece reported that Talese was unaware of the controversy his words inspired until informed a few days later. After that reporting, the New York Times Public Editor responded to the Time's executive editor Dean Baquet talking smack about the very artice.

Then, deputy editor of the Washington Post's Outlook section, Marisa Bellack, published a piece saying she was Talese's teaching assistant, but quit due to his sexism.

All this in the same week that the New Yorker published Talese's first long article in years. It raises so many isseus that the Post came back to Taleseland to question the ethics of it.

Once you finish investigating the planets colliding in orbit around the article's author, you may have time to turn to the article itself, which is an absolute doozy.

I know a married man and father of two who bought a twenty-one-room motel near Denver many years ago in order to become its resident voyeur. With the assistance of his wife, he cut rectangular holes measuring six by fourteen inches in the ceilings of more than a dozen rooms. Then he covered the openings with louvred aluminum screens that looked like ventilation grilles but were actually observation vents that allowed him, while he knelt in the attic, to see his guests in the rooms below. He watched them for decades, while keeping an exhaustive written record of what he saw and heard. Never once, during all those years, was he caught.
The Reckoning

Pamela Colloff offers a long look at Claire Wilson, a victim of the 1966 shooting at the University of Texas, and how that tragic day affected her life.

On the list of those killed, she located the name of her boyfriend, Thomas Eckman. Her gaze fell on Tom’s picture, in which he sat in the formal pose of all mid-century yearbook photos, smiling broadly, his tie tucked into his V-neck sweater. Claire stared into his eyes, tracing the contours of his face. Holding the magazine in her hands, she felt some reassurance that what she had witnessed on campus that day had actually happened.
‘He Brutalized For You’

Michael Kruse looks at the odd friendship, and mentorship, between McCarthy sideman Roy Cohn, and a young Donald Trump.

Over a 13-year-period, ending shortly before Cohn’s death in 1986, Cohn brought his say-anything, win-at-all-costs style to all of Trump’s most notable legal and business deals. Interviews with people who knew both men at the time say the relationship ran deeper than that—that Cohn’s philosophy shaped the real estate mogul’s worldview and the belligerent public persona visible in Trump’s presidential campaign.

She Changed Comics - Kickstarter Fund Project #14

Every week, the Seattle Review of Books backs a Kickstarter, and writes up why we picked that particular project. Read more about the project here. Suggest a project by writing to kickstarter at this domain, or by using our contact form.

What's the project this week?

She Changed Comics. We've put $20 in as a non-reward backer

Who is the Creator?

CBLDF (Comic Book Legal Defense Fund).

What do they have to say about the project?

She Changed Comics tells the untold story of the pioneering women who changed free expression in comics!

What caught your eye?

The Comic Book Legal Defense Fund has been fighting censorship, and for free expression in comics since 1989. By offering legal support to indie creators who find themselves looking at potential lawsuits, the CBLDF can be a life-saver, sometimes stopping potential lawsuits before they start.

As if that wasn't cool enough, this project She Changed Comics is a book that tells the story of women's influence in comics, from the Golden Age, to working under the Comics Code, on to underground and indie comics of all kinds.

It will feature a look back and the history of the women who made comics in the past, and interview working artists today.

Why should I back it?

If you love comics, this is a must-back. No doubt you've heard of some of the women who will be covered — Marjane Satrapi and Alison Bechdel, say — but you'll learn about women who didn't get as much public attention, but still were incredibly influential on comics, and these artists and creators.

How's the project doing?

They're kicking ass. 357% of their $10,000 goal. But man, they are well worth backing. They've killed three stretch goals, but there are still two to go....

Do they have a video?

Kickstarter Fund Stats
  • Projects backed: 14
  • Funds pledged: $280
  • Funds collected: $240
  • Unsuccessful pledges: 0
  • Fund balance: $760

Over at The Inlander, I wrote a piece about Seattle memoirist Elissa Washuta, who'll be reading at Get Lit!, Spokane's wonderful annual book festival. We talked about the distinction of being a memoirist versus being an essayist, whether people got mad at Washuta for the way they were presented in her memoir, and what the most surprising thing about publishing a memoir. I love introducing Seattle's authors to new audiences; I hope you'll go take a look at the piece.

Book News Roundup: Squids, Young Animal, and the Anti-Trillin Poetry Squad

  • Here's a fun writing contest, from Sierra Nelson's Facebook page:
CEPHALOPOD WRITING CONTEST! (Deadline April 17th): In conjunction with a special cephalopod-inspired photography exhibition by Jen Strongin up now in the Hugo House gallery through the end of April, the Cephalopod Appreciation Society is having its first-ever writing contest. Write a piece inspired by one or more of the images on display in the gallery for a chance to present your writing at this year’s Cephalopod Appreciation Society meeting on April 29th at Hugo House. (Plus prizes!) Contest Guidelines: Open to poetry, short prose, comics, and hybrid forms. Submit 1-3 pieces (no more than 8 pages max) to cephalopodcontest@gmail.com as one Word or PDF file. Be sure to include your name, contact info, and title of your piece(s) in the email, but do not include your name on the submission itself. Winners selected from a Youth Category (up to 18 years old, indicate “YOUTH” with your submission email) and General Submission Category. -- Please share widely!
  • This wonderful appreciation of the library card as an object unfortunately has a click-baity headline — "Is the Library Card Dying?" — but it links to some beautiful online library card collections, and so it's worth your time.

  • Last night at Emerald City Comicon, DC Comics announced that My Chemical Romance frontman Gerard Way will be overseeing a mature-readers imprint called Young Animal for the company. Titles include Doom Patrol, Shade the Changing Girl, and — this is maybe the best title in the history of comicsCave Carson Has a Cybernetic Eye.

  • Here's a headline that says it all: "Adult colouring book craze prompts global pencil shortage."

  • Calvin Trillin's obnoxious, poorly written, and racially insensitive poem in the New Yorker was a bad situation and a black eye for the New Yorker's much-vaunted editing process, but it has given rise to some very good response poetry. Fatimah Asghar dedicates her poem "To the White Men Who Fear Everything," to "you who reminded me no sidewalk or park/would ever be mine." Craig Santos Perez wonders, "Have they run out of franchises yet?/If they haven’t, our health has reason to fret." Franny Choi asks "Have They Run Out of White Poets Yet?" ("But then Ezra looked toward the East/to spice up his post-War can of meat...") Talya Zax responds, "Oh Trillin, our food-focused, sharply-phrased poet,/You’ve bungled, you’ve mis-hit, we’re sure that you know it." And Eddie Huang tweeted his response poem:

The Help Desk: Literature and longing on Link light rail

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 ride the new Link light rail from Husky Stadium to Pioneer Square (it's pretty great). I've seen this same girl on the train nearly every day, our schedules are so close. And she's always reading the best books. Seriously, like this manga series I've been following for years, that I thought nobody else was into.

But, I know that harassing women who want to be left alone in public isn't cool, and she's probably just going to work. Is there something I can say to her, not a line, but just a little opening, to see if I get any response? I mean, is it out of line to say something about our shared tastes?

Tremulous on the Train

Dear Tremulous,

Everyone who reads enjoys being complimented on their taste in books. Many years ago I was flipping through a copy of one of my favorite books, A Confederacy of Dunces, at a garage sale and a shirtless man with a chest tattoo of a swastika knifing a black panther (one of the swastika arms was an actual arm with a knife in it) said to me, "That's a great book," to which I smiled and thought, "what a nice man." Such is the mighty power of literature.

Striking up a conversation with a woman is not harassment if you follow basic social cues:

  1. Wear something non-psychotic, like a shirt and pants.

  2. If she's got headphones in, leave her alone.

  3. If she's not making eye contact with anyone around her, leave her alone.

  4. Wait until there is a natural interruption to her reading, such as when you're both disembarking from the train. Then it's fine to tap her on the shoulder and say something like, "That's such a great book! Have you read TKTKTK?"

  5. If all goes well and you get her contact information, do not send her an Evite for a party in your pants.

Kisses,

Cienna

Portrait Gallery: Sonny Liew

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

Sonny Liew is the author of the acclaimed The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye, a fictionalized history of a comic book artist in Singapore. Liew will be appearing, in conversation with our own Martin McClellan, at Elliott Bay Book Company Monday, April 11th, at 7:00pm. Come on down!