Lauren Groff on Work and Love
This week’s story, “ Between the Shadow and the Soul ,” is about a fifty-year-old woman named Eliza who has
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I was taking an online graphic narrative class and one of the other students, looking at the first page of a piece about falling from a tree and breaking my back when I was ten, said, “Don’t draw an apple, then write Apple .” I’m a writer. I’ve taught creative writing for 35 years. But this was my first comics class. The firmness with which the woman spoke made her advice sound like the comics equivalent of the standard fiction writing advice, “Show, don’t tell.” “In graphic narratives,” the teacher explained, “ideally the words and image should be doing different things. You don’t want to just draw an illustration of the words. Or use words to label the image. You don’t want a page or panel to be just Apple x Two.” She was looking at the first page of my piece, a pencil drawing of ten-year-old me, mid-air—looking, I realize suddenly, a bit too much like the Little Prince—falling from a very tall tree. The text, hand-lettered in the open space representing the 30 feet from the tree’s branches to the ground, read: “When I was ten, I fell from a tree.” Falling x Two. “Though, of course, there are times when it’s exactly what you need.” She did not say if that was the case with my page but looking at it, I was pretty sure it was not. After the class, I tried to Google, “Don’t draw apple then write apple,” but all I got was page after page of advice about Apple products. I’d only started drawing five months earlier, at the beginning of the pandemic while locked down in a rented apartment in Montevideo, Uruguay. Since then, I’d been drawing what I called a “sketch of the day” and posting it on social media—my version of sourdough. Like bread baking, I’d started drawing to do with my hands. Something that was not on my computer. I sat all day, every day, laptop in lap, writing or reading student work. But I drew standing up, at an easel, on big sheets of paper. I’d started […]
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This week’s story, “ Between the Shadow and the Soul ,” is about a fifty-year-old woman named Eliza who has
The British realist director Mike Leigh loves the term “character actor,” which he uses often and with zeal. To him,
