Pretty Heady Stuff

Andy Brown is a publisher and writer who runs Conundrum Press in Wolfville, Nova Scotia (https://www.conundrumpress.com/). The books Conundrum puts out are immensely immersive and artful, so it was really exciting to discuss the challenges of operating in a niche market with Andy. We discuss Conundrum's beginnings in Montreal in the 90s, and the moment when Andy decided to change Conundrum’s mandate to focus exclusively on publishing literary graphic novels. The literary graphic novel is a relatively new term, so one of the things we talk about is what exactly that term means. What do books in this genre look like? What do they do? How do you edit them, and how is it distinct from editing just prose? And what kind of work does the term itself, graphic novel, do to invest the comic form with credibility?

Summer Pierre is an extremely inventive illustrator whose debut graphic novel All the Sad Songs (https://retrofit.storenvy.com/products/24567828-all-the-sad-songs-by-summer-pierre) is a text that pushes you to explore connections to the past and to think about how specific objects and pieces of art stand out and score the process of self-realization. How can an artist convey how it feels when music affects you in your body? How might the grid structure of comics serve as a kind of "safety net" for analyzing the deepest stories we tell about ourselves?

Veronica Post is a graphic novelist whose sharply drawn debut book Langosh and Peppi: Fugitive Days has just been published by Conundrum Press (https://www.conundrumpress.com/new-titles/langosh-and-peppi-fugitive-days/). In this conversation, she talks about her direct experience of the European migrant crisis, and how it shaped the narrative of this immersive and incredibly thoughtful graphic text. Langosh and Peppi is a book that blends exuberant adventure with serious reflections on the repressed relationship to history we find in nations that have borne witness to trauma. It combines roaming explorations of Central Europe with a critical perspective on injustice and the basic brutality of borders. By making these connections between racial nationalism, what she calls “emotional repression” and the continuing global refugee crisis, Veronica gives us an opportunity to consider the importance of narrative in contesting the long history of moral indifference to the other’s suffering.

Rebecca Roher is a cartoonist and educator whose captivating work of graphic memoir Bird in a Cage won the Doug Wright Award in 2017. We discuss her current project, 100 Year Old Wisdom, and its interest in making us more open to the lived realities of aging and the aged. We also talk about her forthcoming graphic biography of civil rights activist Viola Desmond, which will be out in October as part of the Nova Graphica anthology from Conundrum Press (https://www.conundrumpress.com/forthcoming/nova-graphica/). She explains how representing Desmond’s story required extensive research and intense self-reflection on what it means to be an anti-racist ally. Head to http://rebeccaroher.com/index.html to see more of her singular style of graphic storytelling.

Cassie Thornton is an artist and activist, she is also the author of the forthcoming book, The Hologram: Feminist, Peer-to-Peer Health for a Post-Pandemic Future (https://www.plutobooks.com/9780745343327/the-hologram/). All of the work that Cassie does is intensely concerned with the pervasive barriers to flourishing that are so entrenched in our late capitalist society--as such, she’s focused on preparing for a future society that generates health outside of the structures that reproduce oppression. We discuss her book and some of the claims it makes around how we can mobilize for that future. She explains how we have been taught forms of care that are individualizing and, in many ways, contrary to real care. Her message is essential because it envisions a means of lifting the curse of a deep isolation so that we can let the floodgates of peer-to-peer care open.

Liza Mandelup is a director with an uncanny eye and a deeply perceptive sense of how culture is changing. Her brilliant documentary Jawline (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AoVA0-w6VtA) premiered last year at the Sundance Film Festival, where she won the Special Jury Award for Emerging Filmmaker. The film is an invaluable study of content creation today, and it has stunned audiences due to its intimate portrayal of the aspiring and established content creators who make up a new social media ecosystem. In this conversation we talk about the intensely collaborative work that went into directing Jawline, her personal and professional commitment to making art, and the ways that gender and identity are shifting in the social media age.

Elaine Power is a professor in the School of Kinesiology and Health Studies and the Head of the Department of Gender Studies at Queen's University. She is also the co-founder of the Kingston Action Group for a Basic Income Guarantee. In this episode we discuss the challenge of making the field of food studies "inherently feminist" by stressing the importance of "power differentials" in determining who has the privilege of indulging in food and who suffers under food insecurity. Dr. Power expresses a measured hope here that the COVID-19 pandemic is creating the conditions for more empathy to emerge in political discourses around food, and points out that this may mean greater solidarity in producing a more equal future of food provision.

Dave Zirin is the sports editor for The Nation and has written many path-breaking books on the politics of sports and the legacy of radical, outspoken athletes who have used, and risked, their stature in order to resist racial oppression. Here Zirin talks about how prominent athletes are “breaking out from the corporate shackles” to help mobilize for justice in the wake of the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery, among the many other victims of police brutality. He suggests that this is a pivotal moment of collective outrage and reinforces the need for “vigilance” and “consistency” in opposing oppressive forces, for fear that we will see those in positions of power undertake a reactionary consolidation of that power. We also talk about the dangerous and disingenuous celebration of domination in Netflix and ESPN’s documentary series The Last Dance, and the urgent need for real diversity in both the coverage and performance of sports.

Trigger warning: This episode contains detailed descriptions of assault and abuse that some listeners may find disturbing. Linda MacDonald and Jeanne Sarson are feminist activists and human rights educators who have been pushing for decades to insist that the public confront the related realities of femicide and non-state torture. Their work led them to co-found the organization Persons Against Non-State Torture (www.nonstatetorture.org), a radical advocacy group that demands we recognize the everyday forms of abuse, torture, victimization, and domination in the domestic sphere that go criminally unnoticed. In response to the devastating and unprecedented act of mass murder that occurred here in Nova Scotia on April 18th and 19th, they are devoting their time and energy to a fiercely important media campaign to spread the message that we must, now, adopt what they term a “feminist lens” for understanding the misogynistic roots of the rampage, and a feminist framework for seeing this series of attacks as part of a continuum of male aggression connected to related acts of mass violence that we have witnessed in recent memory.

Priscilla Wald is a Professor of English and Women's Studies at Duke University who has written extensively on the cultural politics of pandemics, past and future. Her books Constituting Americans: Cultural Anxiety and Narrative Form and Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative are essential for understanding the current coronavirus pandemic. Wald offers powerful correctives to the distortions that tend to cloud our thinking about COVID-19 and outbreaks more broadly.