When I grow up…

I was slow with words as a child. My father and mother read me piles of bedtime stories (and bathtime stories and lunchtime stories and ‘I don’t have time for stories right now’ stories) but when it came to actually learning how to associate the squiggles on the page with speech, I had real trouble. I was one of the last in my class to pick up reading. I remember my mother telling me that she was beginning to get really worried – and then something just clicked. It was like I’d been blindly stumbling my way through a soupy word-fog and suddenly stepped out into the bright sunlight. Once I realised I could do it, I couldn’t get enough of it.

It occurs to me that, in a way, we’re conditioned from the beginning of our lives to consider employment and personal fulfilment in the same breath. ‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’ For the first twelve years of my life I answered that question by saying, ‘I want to be an artist’. (My brother James: ‘A Collingwood football player and train driver.’ My friend Eloise: ‘A pony. I also remember throwing money into a fountain and wishing to be Lady from Lady and the Tramp.’) I remember very specifically making a decision in Grade 6 that given the choice between artist or writer it was actually going to have to be the latter. Not because I felt some deep calling to the power of the written word, but because I thought I was more likely to be able to make money from writing (I know, right?) which would enable me to do it more often. It wasn’t the activities or materials themselves that hooked so far under my skin; it was the freedom they gave me in their own ways to venture past the restrictions of reality and into the endless possibilities of the imagination.

The ArtPlay events at the Melbourne Writers Festival this year offer parents a chance to give their younger children ways to engage with stories that go beyond just reading and writing in a colourful, enthusiastic atmosphere. In ‘Traditional Stories from Around the World’ kids can listen to stories from Indigenous, Sudanese and Chinese communities. Author and football enthusiast Michael Panckridge will be talking about sport and stories on August 30, while author and illustrator Briony Stewart (who was ‘either going to be an entomologist or the next Picasso’) will be encouraging kids to be brave on August 31.

For those budding young authors, Deborah Abela is hosting a Mystery Writing Workshop on September 3, and later in the afternoon, Gabrielle Wang has a bunch of stories she needs help to get finished in her Story Starter Workshop. And for those kids who just can’t get enough of the whole process, there’s The Book Factory: a three-hour start-to-finish interactive workshop that allows kids to get a taste of being writer, illustrator, reader and publisher of their very own book that they can take home at the end of the day.

See here for the full list of events at ArtPlay and here for all of MWF’s children and young adult programming for 2011.

A Week of Writing with Pictures: Bernard Caleo’s MWF diary

Bernard Caleo has been making – writing, drawing and publishing – comics since 1990. He collaborates on comics with friends, creates solo books and – since 1997 – has compiled, edited and published the giant Australian romance comics anthology Tango via his own imprint, Cardigan Comics. He also runs comic classes and workshops. You can visit his website at www.cardigancomics.com. Bernard shared his MWF itinerary with MWFblog.

So, okay, I’m pretty much always reading comics or making comics or talking about comics or thinking about comics (that is, when I’m not making theatre for museums), but this week is HUGE!

On Wednesday and Thursday I will be sharing MWF stages with other fine makers of comics, as part of the Schools Program.

From 12.30 to 1.15pm, Pat Grant and I will be discussing the topic of ‘Seeing the World Differently‘ in an illustrated talk.  Pat is one of the most dedicated cartoonists I know, both in the time he spends at the drawing board but also in his thinking about comics: comics theory, I guess.  It’s no surprise that he is doing postgraduate study through Macquarie University and that a long comic book (‘graphic novel’, if you’re a fan of the term) will be the outcome, with a thesis examining the process of making the book submitted alongside.  Go, Pat!

We’ll be talking about the way that the mode of drawing things in a comic – the simplifications involved – can amplify meaning. Also the way that the sequencing of pictures (we call them ‘panels’) in a comic builds a world in a different way to a single complex picture.

We’ll be talking about the difference between drawing:

And comics:

(two versions of me by me)

These are interesting questions for cartoonists but also for people who read comics: just how do these things WORK? So, a bit of comics theory for kids…

On Thursday 2 September at 11:15am, I will be discussing The Alternative Hamlet with Nicki Greenberg. Nicki’s graphic adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (2006, Allen and Unwin) was a knockout, and her version of Shakespeare’s Hamlet (published this year) – as the cover says, ‘staged on the page’ – will literally knock you out if it is hurled at you. 420 pages! Massive! And she has created incredible worlds on those pages, both of the action of the play and of the inky actors who play the parts. It is the connection between these two worlds which I particularly look forward to discussing with her.

From the great speech. Words by William Shakespeare, pictures/comics adaptation by Nicki Greenberg © 2010

I’m striking out on my own with an MWF presentation called Picture This!‘ at ArtPlay from 12.30 to 1.15pm.  In this one I’ll be show-and-telling about the different forms of comics – comic strip, comic book, graphic novel. These formalities out of the way, I’m hoping that we’ll be able to make a large comic strip together, with me drawing up the front on a big piece of paper. My experience with these things is that they usually end up being about death or poo, sometimes both, so I’m looking forward to that.

Later that very night it’s off to the launch of Going Down Swinging #30. This is of interest because GDS has been incorporating comics into its lit lineup for many a year, and good on them for that, and this issue features the ‘graphic novella’ (I like the humility of that term, whereas ‘graphic novel’ seems a bit jumped-up and fancy-pants, don’t you think?), Itinerant Fighting Monk by Michael Camilleri. Now yes, Michael is a very close friend, but that does not influence me in the slightest when I say that this story/comic/illustrated fictional blasphemous autobiographical tale is the greatest statement on fatherhood and subjectivity that I have ever seen.

On the Saturday afternoon for MWF, I will be launching a long comic book by Gregory Mackay, Francis Bear, which is also being published in French this year by, well, by a French comics publisher, The Hootchie Kootchie.  Fear not however, my monolingual friends: the version I am launching is in English. And pictures. The venue is Feddish, in Federation Square, launch time is 2.30pm, with me doing a bit of a hoo-hah around 3pm. Come and pick up this book, ‘an intriguing study of an inventive drunken bear’s pathway to oblivion’. Gregory has been drawing the misadventures of Francis for many a year, and doing some fine work with comic book rhythms along the way – I can’t wait to see Francis tackle oblivion. It will no doubt be hilarious.

From there I will go to work (I’m a projectionist) on Saturday night – and, you know, relax.

What a week: comics, comics and comics – pretty darn fine.