Teaching the Magpie Memoir
Adventures in Making Comics with Strangers
Last night I was invited by a students’ association at the University of Fribourg (where I completed my MA) to give a comics workshop. I had given my first one for them the previous year and it was wonderful to be invited back!
Last time, the students seemed to really enjoy experimenting with autobiographical work, so I devised another exercise in autobio for this year. Previously we did “A Day in Three Moments” and this year we tried “Magpie Memoir.” This exercise grew, in part, out of my current obsession with a couple books I have read that use literature (medieval or otherwise) as a way into memoir and autobiographical writing. (Fierce Appetites by Elizabeth Boyle is an incredible example that I loved and already look forward to rereading.)
One thing I love to do in workshops is make single-sheet folded minicomics. This format offers a limited amount of space to work with (which helps to keep projects from ballooning too much) and results in a Finished Thing students can walk out the door with (which gives everyone a sense of accomplishment). Whenever I am feeling a bit stuck in a rut in my creative work, I like to return to this format to shake things up and make myself rethink.
I designed last night’s exercise back in December during one of these ruts. ‘Fear of the blank page’ is a real thing and this fear has a way of often killing off projects before they are even begun. It was this difficulty I had in mind when I put together this exercise. Rather than starting from scratch and trying to cobble a tiny story together, I based the exercise on finding a resonant phrase in a poem and using this phrase as a starting point. The concept of ‘resonance’ (meaning “a quality of richness or variety; a quality of evoking response” in addition to its original auditory-relevant definitions) has been dominating much of my creative and academic work recently and it served me well yet again in this process. For me, resonance signifies a gut reaction to something: maybe positive, maybe negative, but something you physically sense. Something that sends a shivering vibration down your spine. I’ve found that if a phrase invokes this kind of bodily response, it’s going to give you a lot of material to work with if you give it the time.
Once the resonant phrase is selected, the exercise moves through a series of steps to brainstorm, question, dig deeper, sum up, and finally loop back in closing. These steps take anywhere from 2-10 minutes (depending on the time available) but going a bit slower is always nice. I think it works best if each step is completed before reading the instructions for the next step: I’m one of those people that always reads all the instructions first before starting, but with an exercise like this, that can actually make it more difficult because your brain can get hung up on ‘constructing a narrative’ rather than just letting things come together organically.
This exercise is one in connecting dots and trusting a process and it can be a bit uncomfortable for people who are more attuned to working in a logical or goal-oriented manner. When it came time to share this exercise, I had tested it on myself but had not yet taught it to others - always a nerve-wracking sensation! I created a couple examples on my own and timed how long it took me and then doubled the suggested time and did my best to clarify the instructions. As we worked through the text-creating steps, I could see some students struggling with the freewriting and brainstorming and, I must admit, I began to get very nervous about whether this exercise would actually ‘work’ after all! I knew it should work and I knew why it should work, but I still started to question myself.
I didn’t need to.
After we finished the writing stage, we all took a well-deserved cookie and hot tea break. Ten minutes later, everyone returned to their scribbled notes and reread them. Shoulders relaxed and heads nodded and I breathed a huge (but subtle because I am a Very Professional Cartoonist) sigh of relief. Caffeinated and freshly sugared, we moved on to the book creation stage.
Our next step was to transfer the text generated in our writing exercise to a blank single-page folded zine. Once the text is written in the book (one step per page), the book is illustrated and this is the stage that still, for me, feels like alchemy. As we add images to the pages, the book begins to draw together into a coherent whole. The images and text work in support of each other to bring meaning and depth to our texts and to help the future reader to understand the connections being made.
Creating a cover and a back cover for the books is always the final stage. For a cover, I encourage participants to flip back through their book and look for 1-3 words that, again, resonate and to use this for their title. We then revisit our images and look for a single simple image, item, or person from our text and use this to illustrate our cover: this primes the reader to know what to look for as they read our minimemoirs. The back of the book is whatever each participant thought the book needed to feel complete: I like to do a silly self-portrait and include contact info. One participant included a translation of her resonant phrase. Another offered a short explanation of the text. Still another got a praise-filled “blurb” for a fellow participant and I think that might have been my favorite!
The best thing about these comics is the ease with which they can be shared and traded. All it takes is one inexpensive trip to a copy machine, a few minutes of cutting and folding and you have self-published your book.
And with that, I have an offer for you!
You can find the instructions to this exercise here. If you give it a try and make a Magpie Memoir, I would love to trade! Make your comic and get in touch with me though e-mail, comment, or over social media. In exchange for a printed copy of your Magpie Memoir, I will send a couple of my own as well as a tiny original painting just for you. I hope you will try it out!
Happy comicking!