YANDAVA | Fictions of the Self

“Write what you know” is one of the writing clichés I have come to despise. Often, I find that I don’t know what I think or feel until I write, and even then, in the very moment of writing, I have a vague sense that perhaps I am only making things up, only pouring my experience into the mold of a voice congealed out of everything I’ve ever read or watched or heard, that none of this is really “me” at all, and in the last analysis, I am forced to concur with Montaigne: Que sçais-je?

CHAZAN | What Ever Happened to the Graphic Memoir?

A few weeks back now, I was perusing the pages of the print edition of this very paper, when I happened upon a surprising sight. Among the crossword puzzles and the regular newspaper comic reprints was a cartoon I had not seen in the paper before, or any paper for that matter. The contents of the cartoon were unremarkable — apparently kids say the darndest things — but I was surprised to see that the artist was none other than Jeffrey Brown. Woah, I thought to myself, that’s a blast from the past. See, back in the mid-’00s, Brown used to be a high profile figure in the then-bustling genre of graphic memoir.