Happy Birthday Katherine Mansfield!
Today is Katherine Mansfield’s 128th birthday party, and it also happens to be the day after my book was officially published. That means you can buy it now! But I also encourage you to go to your local bookseller and buy it there, so they feel like reordering it.
In honour of KM’s big day, I am having an opening this evening at her birthplace. I drew my very first comic for this project set in this Victorian villa, but it didn’t make it into the book.
The house did, though, in a few different places:
Also, here, depicting when I first visited her house:
There’s a new museum director now, and all the velvet cordons have been thrown away and you actually can go into the rooms, standing in the places Katherine once stood. Also, I’ve been allowed to place some of Mansfield’s possessions alongside my manuscript pages – the hei tiki she wore to Queen’s College in London, the pounamu pendent belonging to her brother, Leslie. Also, I have her father’s gun hanging on the wall, as a Chekovian lesson in narrative.
Come along! Katherine Mansfield House & Garden, 25 Tinakori Road, Wellington. I also have all my notebooks piled up on her father’s desk, and you are free to flick through and discover all of my secrets.
Press and lo-fi book trailers!
It’s school holidays, so I have been making claymation movies with the kids today. Gus and Violet also made me a trailer – Gus’s Mansfield ended up squashed between the pages of my book, and Violet’s Mansfield turned her head upside down to become a bearded hipster and my future boyfriend.
The book is about to be launched – tomorrow, in fact – and the press is beginning to come in. I really liked this photo taken in the Katherine Mansfield House & Garden by Anna Briggs. It accompanied an article by Sarah Lang, a journalist I am always trading identities with.
I was also interviewed the latest Listener by Paula Morris, who was wondering why people were still interested in Katherine Mansfield.
And I was interviewed by Kim Hill – one of my life goals! – and you can listen to the audio here. I was terrified leading up to the interview, but it was a lot of fun talking to her.
Finally, I answered some questions for the wonderful WordPress word wrangler, Cheri Lucas Rowlands, and you can read my answers here. Thank you so much for featuring me!
Show your workings
It’s now only three weeks until Mansfield and Me is officially published, and I thought I’d show some of my workings – the drawings I did to get to the drawings I made for my actual book. It was easy to write my own story, as I remembered it all (although of course memory is very unreliable!) For Katherine’s story, I had to do extensive research, and one of my favourite ways to get inside her head was by reading her letters and journals and then drawing pictures based on them. Part of this drawing is based on this letter.
Katherine manifests the food and weight anxiety that we imagine to belong to our era alone – she was a plump child, and her mother drew attention to the fact, and then she was obsessed with food thanks to her TB-related weight loss.
These drawings are all done quickly, with a bit of paint splashed on top of them, and messy handwriting. Can you read what she says in that last panel? “I don’t feel right unless I can play on my bones.” I always have this sense of loss doing a good copy – the first draft has a looseness and lack of self-consciousness that the final drawing never has. On the plus side, you can read my handwriting in the second draft – or at least I hope you can.
Oh, and this sequence never made it into my book! Comics take up so much room and I had to set aside a lot of material.
Book launch!
My graphic memoir, Mansfield and Me, is going to be published in October, and I am having a book launch! It’s at 6pm, Thursday 6 October, at Unity Books, Wellington. If you are a Facebook user, you can RSVP to the event over here.
I hope some of you can make it. I will even draw pictures in your copy of the book if you do! And of course, there will be wine and cheese, and Jonathan will play his ukulele, because it’s a tradition.
Journalling and teaching
Before this year started, I imagined something entirely different for it. This was going to be my year of aimless creativity – I was going to set up an artist’s studio in my (leaky) garage, I was going to spend time in the garden and on my sewing machine. I was going to achieve a state of blissful zen, in tune with the universe, not racing to complete my next big project, instead hoping the perfect project would organically present itself thanks to my daily creative practice.
Of course – of course! – it didn’t turn out that way. I did lots of headless chickening about, finishing big projects. My Masters of Design. My graphic memoir. Various freelance jobs. I took on some more freelance jobs – a tutoring position at Massey, a social media role for a literary festival. I looked after my kids, I did the shopping, made the appointments – you know how it goes. In my downtime, rather than meditatively drawing in my journal, I tried to read the entire internet, and watch stuff on Netflix. I read some books, but not as many as I might have done if I didn’t have an OCD relationship with my phone.
Last night, in between trawling Twitter, I was reading Lynda Barry’s Syllabus. Do you know Lynda Barry? She is amazing. She takes a course, What It Is, about writing and drawing. I would love it if she came here to take it. You don’t have to draw to take it – in fact, she celebrates the spontaneous drawing that comes from students who haven’t tried to draw since primary school. As part of her homework, she makes her students write in their journals for four minutes. I thought I can do that. Four minutes takes the pressure off. The reason why I don’t journal is because I imagine that it takes too much time. That’s also the reason why I don’t draw regular comics anymore. But I think something wonderful happens when you do. All the little fragments add up to something – a narrative of your life, a net to catch all those encounters and observations that seem so profound at the time but then evaporate into nothing in your brain.
The other reason why I was reading Lynda Barry was because I have to take a workshop this weekend, in Auckland, with the incredible cartoonist Toby Morris. To be honest, I’d prefer to sit in the audience and be Toby’s student. Our workshop is called The political is personal: autobiographical and political comics. It’s part of a whole weekend of workshops about writing and publishing and trying to make it in the book world. I think it’s going to be amazing, and I’m looking forward to having a little micro-break away from my domestic reality.
Flowers for the teacher
I am reading Violet Beverly Cleary’s Ramona The Brave at the moment, for the second time – the first time I read it to her she was four, and hadn’t been to school yet. Ramona has a teacher who she feels doesn’t like her, who is always calm, who cares for order and numbers. Ramona would prefer her to be more emotive and creative. Violet worries a lot about her new teacher, even though it’s a whole four months before she will get one. The problem is I can’t control this situation – just like I can’t control so many. All I can say is that I had a teacher who didn’t much like me and then I had another one, who was a bit bored, and had a giant mole he revealed every time he perched on a desk and his walk shorts rode up. I remember some cool stuff I did with the grumpy teacher though – posters of Ulysses driving a stake into the Cyclops’ eye, making Danish open sandwiches. That was the year John Lennon was shot, and all the standard ones and twos sang ‘Imagine’ on the striped mat.
I was struck by Violet’s conviction that her teacher would take every single flower home, that she would place them on a windowsill, or perhaps put them in a room with all the other flowers, and when she opened the door they would avalanche out, already turned into potpourri.
Hey, it’s only a month until Mansfield and Me is published now – I shall try to blog more so you don’t forget about it! I got an advance copy – here are a few sneaky pictures.
I heart David Bowie
I made a little zine to go with my ‘At The Bay’ one to sell at Auckland Zinefest this weekend (11 am-4 pm at the Auckland Art Gallery). I will give you a sneak preview of some pages:
It’s the same genre as Mansfield and Me – part biography, part memoir – except it’s only 16 pages long!
But of course I want you all to come and get a copy of ‘At The Bay’ as well!
