Writing about writing about writing

& what it means to me (so far)

A comic I made in January is finally out on the New Yorker! Here's a preveiew:

Read the rest here!

Some backstory: My husband was away for a week in January. I treated the alone time like a residency, ordering takeout and furiously writing one aimless personal essay after another, trying to nail down the tone and theme of my book pitch.

unfortunately this one did not make the cut

And, surprised with how much extra time I had, I also watched the four aforementioned movies (three of them in the MOVIE THEATRE! by myself! untold luxuries!)

bundled up and walked through a snowstorm to see “The Holdovers,” a movie about being stranded alone in the snow, at the local theatre down the street. A perfect experience

The movies were truly cosmic comfort during a weird week and this comic was a welcome side-effect of my desperate attempts to find meaningful connections between any of the events in my life.

Why is it so hard to say I’m a writer when it’s not even that big a deal and I should just get over it - Being a cartoonist makes you a writer, artist, and illustrator at minimum. I’m lucky to get to do all of these things. But I only ever felt comfortable calling myself an illustrator because it’s a technical skill with obvious practical application, whereas “writer/artist” sounded outrageously fanciful and also seemed to require a degree of self-assurance and personal autonomy I didn’t believe I could possess until super recently. I’d always assumed this feeling was universal among artists, until I heard of friends who had simply never doubted that being an artist would work out, because they were middle class, or didn’t grow up with anxieties about a sudden lack of stability, or whatever. Why did I turn out the way I did (cultural/socioeconomic factors, the patriarchy, a dearth of precedent?!)? How does it impact the things I put into the world? Two things from my week feel connected to this question:

1. I am reading Virginia Woolf’s “A Room Of One’s Own”(feminist literature 101!) for the first time and behold, it resonates so hard even though it was written a hundred years ago-

“She made, by working very hard, enough to live on. The importance of that fact outweighs anything that she actually wrote … for here begins the freedom of the mind, or rather the possibility that in the course of time the mind will be free to write what it likes.” (p95)

“Money dignifies what is frivolous if unpaid for. It might still be well to sneer at ‘blue stockings with an itch for scribbling,’ but it could not be denied that they could put money in their purses.” (p97)

2. Kate Beaton gave an excellent lecture in Edmonton last month, primarily about how socioeconomic class impacts who becomes an artist, and who therefore gets to tell the stories that create our culture; and how “if working class and poor people do not write themselves into stories, other people certainly will.” - with a particular focus on Canada and Cape Breton. You can watch it for free!

Anyway, with all of this baggage and inner drama

comes a sense of responsibility that if i get to do this, then it has to be in the service of something bigger than myself. I’m now in the business of mining my personal experiences and observations and transforming them into little pictures, and the aim is for them to help clarify the human condition and expose absurdities and injustices.

And it's probably inaccurate to focus on the absolute number of words in being a writer/artist when images evoke something entirely different, like poetry. I can't easily (or at all) write two thousand effective words about gun control the morning after a mass shooting but I can draw this, which says everything I want to say.

(If you feel guilty about taking the time to write about personal experiences, and are ambivalent about whether it’s a good use of time or just an exercise in navel-gazing, please see Elif Batuman’s incredible “Proust Pep Talks” (one and two) which freed me completely!)

Niecy Nash accepting her Emmy and saying it more succinctly

thank yoooouuuuu for your support

xo Zoe