Hi. Welcome to the boston book festival and todays session. My name is christine, and i am a board member of the boston book festival, and i am just one of dozens which feels like hundreds who work behind the scenes and truly believe that the festival is a wonderful source of inspiration and eyedsharing. Idsharing ideasharing. We have been gifted a beautiful new vespa, its under the welcome tent, and all donations will go towards keeping the festival free for you all. Donations are just 10, and i would love to see one of you riding around the city in that beautiful thing. So thank you so much. One other administrative thing is we will have a book signing right across the hall where you can ask the presenters any additional questions. So please enjoy todays session. Thank you. [applause] hello. Im Alexander Danner of the writers room of boston. I will be your moderator for tonights presentation with hillary chute and Sarah Glidden. I myself am an author, im also a writer of comics with contributions to the nonfiction colonial comics anthologies, and im cocreator of the audio drama Greater Boston which is a whole other forum, but thats mostly where youll find me working these days. Our format for today will see our two featured authors giving a presentation on their work in comics and comic studies which will be followed by q a from you in the audience. First to speak will be hillary chute, a highly accomplished scholar of comics literature currently teaching in the department of english as well as in the department of design. Her published works on comics began with her 2010 book, graphic women life, narrative and contemporary comics. She then associate edited metamouse, an annotated edition of the legendary holocaust biography tracing the development of that essential work. She edited outside the box be interviews with contemporary cartoonists and coedited a critical inquiry book. Shes earned several awards for comic scholarship, and she has facilitated the contemporary inquiry in comic scholarship in general. Her most recent book is disaster drawn visual witness, comics in documentary form. Which traces the history of illustrated witness as far back as the 15th century depictions of military tactics. She looks more deeply into the techniques and philosophies of three documentarians who come to this craft by three very different pass. The first chronicling his own experience, the second as biographer recording family history, and the third is a deliberate journalist inserting himself into conflict zones for the sake of witness itself. In the course of her inquiry, hillary examines the power of comics to convey history with emotional honesty while acknowledging the problem of memory and the friction that arises between truth and fact in an artisticallyrealized historical document. Our second presenter is Sarah Glidden. Her first book, how to understand israel in 60 days or less is a memoir and a travelogue. The realities of effort life in one of the most complex regions of the world. Her latest book is rolling blackouts dispatches from turkey, syria and iraq. Another middle east travelogue. She is accompanying a pair of journalist friends as well as a veteran of the war returning to the country to see the end results of the conflict he participated in. Glidden does more than chronicle what she witnesses, she chronicles the process of witness itself and the ubiquitous cameras and microphones that accompany the travelers become betweening elements in the story itself. Glidden paints a complex portrait of the relationship between the documentarian and the subject and the fleeting nature of truth. Finally, i want to mention that after the presentations all three of us will be signing books next door in the gordon chapel, you can find us there. We are going to be rushed off the stage quickly to make room for the next people, so that will be a time for further can conversation. And now, hillary, if you would, please. Start talking. Okay. Well, its such a pleasure to be here and such a pleasure to be here with you. So the book that you coauthored, coedited which i think is called comics of global history 1968present is a really key text in terms of thinking about the kind of work that im interested in happening across the world, which is to say drawing as a form of recording and comics as a form of witnessing. And i end my book as ill describe with trying to think about this new category of socalled comics journalism. So its such an honor to be on stage with sarah who is one of the key figures in this movement. So thanks for having me. Im just going to talk pretty briefly and pretty just in a basic way about what my book, disaster drawn, is about. And that will be followed by sarahs presentation in which which she will show you beautiful images from her graphic narrative. Youll just have to bear with me only talking with no visual aids for my part of this. So this is my book, disaster drawn. This cover, which im sure is very hard to see, ill just mention briefly, is by the comics journalist joe sacco. And it is an image of the july 1995 massacre. And this is the kind of work that i got very interested in when i was a ph. D. Student in english. So i have this kind of strange specialty. I have a ph. D. In english, but i study and research comics, and i study and research comics that are nonfiction. So the more i started getting interested in certain stories like art speeg beingmans mouse and joe sack sews dispatches saccos kiss patches from the middle east and from the balkans, i started wondering why this form of comics was so good for telling certain kinds of stories about world historical conflict and about trauma and about violence and about a certain kind of mass suffering, actually. So what i wanted to do in this book was to investigate all of these references that cartoonists that i had been talking to for years, like Art Spiegelman with whom i worked on a book and like joe sacco who ive now known for years and interviewed for various publications, i wanted to figure out why they always talked about Francisco Gioia, for example. I thought i really want to know what this means not just as a reference, but as a sort of trajectory of forms and a trajectory of trying to do the work of witnessing. So id say there are two things that my book is trying to do. One is its trying to offer a longer genealogy for contemporary work like sarahs, like Art Spiegelmans and like joe saccos. And to that end, my first chapter is actually about the printmaker who did a series of etchings about the 30 years war called the grand miseries of war that then influenced Francisco Gioia in his disasters series of war etchings which he did in the 18 teens. So i wanted to try to come up with a history of what it means to bear witness to war and violence through the work of the hand, right . So the common place idiom is that one takes a photograph but makes a picture. Is so what does it mean to be doing this kind of making with your eyes and your hands when youre bearing witness to war which is what we see in this case, in what we see in Francisco Gioias case. So i wanted to put that work in conversation with contemporary comics. The other thing i wanted to do, and this is part of the reason im so honored to be on stage with you, is i wanted to try to give a more International Dimension to a lot of the nonfiction be comics work that is coming out. And the person i had been interested in for a very long time a japanese cartoonist who just died a few years ago, actually, in hiroshima. He survived the bombing when he was 6 years old. And he, he lived, his mother lived, his mother gave birth that day. She was pregnant, induced by shock on the road. That baby lived four months and then died. Several of his siblings died, and his father diesed. And he died. And he, obviously, was deeply affected by this experience, and he went on to do a comic book in the early 70s in japan that is called translates as i saw it. Which is a direct reference to one of the etchings in Francisco Gioias disasters of war series where you have an image, and you have a caption, and some of the captions say things like this is how it happened. And one of the most famous captions about bearing witness simply says, this i saw. So he publishes this comic book, its about 45 pages about his experience and his mothers experience surviving the bombing of hiroshima. And this really changed cultures of expression in japan and opened up comics as a form of bearing witness to these kinds of stories. 1972 also the year that Art Spiegelman publishes a threepage version of what would become his twovolume work called mouse. So Art Spiegelman publishes mouse, three pages in an underground comic book the exact same year, in San Francisco in 1972, in a title called funny aminals. Im not misspeaking, the m and n are reversed. It was an underground publication. Spiegelmans piece mixed in quite awkwardly with some lascivious work by robert crumb about some foxes chasing a chicken woman and eating her for dinner. There was a real mix of different kinds of tabooshredding work happening in what was called the comics underground which was this uncensored, uncommercial space where people did comics and distributed them and published them independently. So part of what im trying to investigate in this book is whats happening in the early 70s thats giving rise to these new cultures of expression from opposite sides of the war across the globe. And as im sure you can tell, im quite interested in world war ii as an event that really reshaped how people think about how they can tell certain kinds of stories. And maybe ill just stop there, i think its about ten minutes, and turn it over to sarah. Okay. Thank you very much. I have a little Remote Control here. So, yeah, im Sarah Glidden. This is my book, rolling blackouts, ask its funny and its funny that all of the people hillary talks about in her book were people who inspired me early on, way before i started drawing comics myself, joe sacco, barefoot jen, i think, is the same yeah. So this comic book called i saw it became a tenvolume serial called barefoot yeah. And that was one of the first kind of serious comics that i read. And that was this kind of my introduction to comics as not mad magazine and not calvin and hobbs. And, you know, these were highly influential to me, but they were never things i thought i could do. Im not a journalist, i havent experienced an iranian revolution, but it did start getting me thinking about how comics can be used to tell other stories. Rolling blackouts is a work of comics journalism about journalism, but my entryway into journalism was kind of sideways through journalisms, like, second cousin twice removed memoir which is, you know, another kind of nonfiction. It was about ten years ago when i started making comics, and i started by doing autobiographical daily strips. This is a way of just kind of getting used to the language of comics. You do something every day. If its not good, it doesnt matter, you throw it away and do another one the next day. After a while, i wanted to do a longer work, and thats where how to understand us kneel 60 days or less israel in 60 days or less came about. It was sponsored in part by the state of israel and, you know, as a massachusetts, leftwing, progressive jewish girl [laughter] i thought, you know, oh, im going to go on this trip, and its going to be crazy, and its going to be propaganda, and im going to make, like, a comic about my experience, and it will be just kind of like my journal comics, only longer, and itll be a book. So thats what that book was. And it really was about my personal experience, and it was memoir, but it was also memoir that followed my interests, and my interests have always been politics can kind of contemporary issues and how my identity as an american and American Foreign affairs play into what happens in the rest of the world. So as i was working on that book, some friends of mine two of whom are on the cover of this book, theres Alex Stonehill whos a videographer and photojournalist and sarah stewedville who ease a prose journalist they started a nonprofit multimedia project called the seattle globalist. Oops. I thought i ed fitted these slides edited these slides, but i guess i didnt. Sorry. So they i knew them from new york, but they moved back to seattle to, you know, kind of make their journalism collective happen. Journalism was in disarray at the time that they started this, and they really wanted to just, like, do their own work at a time when institutions werent really providing jobs for new journalists who are, like, optimistic about reporting underreported issues. So most of their work revolved around social justice issues, detention in the seattle area. But about once a year they were able to get Grant Funding to do larger Scale International reporting projects such as on the left there you see they went to east africa to report are on water scarce the city and how that affects conflict scarcity and how that a affects conflict. They went to pakistan a year later to report on madrassas and education. I would visit them in seattle, and they would always have these stories about their reporting, you know, brushes with the taliban or, like, having to sleep outside when there are lions prowling around in kenya and just stories about finding their stories, and i was just fascinated. Journalism sounded like this amazing, exciting career where, like, youre doing this heroic work of telling stories, and youre seeing these amazing places and, you know, they were also telling me about how difficult it was and how hated journalists are and all of, you know, the kind of annoying logistical things they had to deal with, but those or were not the parts i listened to. I just listened to the exciting parts. And it really made me think about how i didnt really know much about where my journalism came from, you know . Like, i use the metaphor all the time think of it like when you turn on the faucet and your water comes out of your sink, like, you just never really think about where it comes from. You dont think about the pipes or the reservoir or how the reservoir stays clean. You just, you know, you kind of take it for granted, and thats how i had treated journalism for so long. I just kind of opened up my web browser, and there was the New York Times for free at the time. [laughter] and so i thought, like, wouldnt it be interesting to go with them on one of their large reporting trips and do a book about how they do their jobs, how do you find an interpreter, how do you find your stories and, like, what is a fixer . Because i really didnt know. So they said yes, and in late 2010, november and december, we went on a reporting trip to the middle east starting in turkey. So in turkey we were interviewing iranian refugees and i should say they were interviewing. I was really just there as a shadow to watch them work. And from turkey we went over the border into Northern Iraq to a town called assume man ya which is near the border with iran. And in turkey in iran sorry, in iraq we were there because they were doing a documentary about this man who has a very interesting story. He was an iraqi kurd who was drafted into the iraqi army during the iraq iran war in the 80s. He deserted with his pregnant wife to iran. She committed suicide, tragedy create tragically, he was left with his daughter, went to pakistan. They were refugees for eight years there. He got remarried, started a new family, and finally they were granted asylum in the United States in seattle where everything was looking fine until he was brought in for questioning because the fbi had connected him to an alqaeda terrorist who was part of the bombing of the world trade center. So although they couldnt find any actual evidence connecting him to these terrorists, he was deported back to iraq where hes from, and we went there to interview him and talk to him now separated from his family. He feels unjustly accused of this crime and kind of just newly in us isolation. The focus of their reporting trip, although had been to talk to iraqi refugees, because they the way they saw it and the way i agreed with them is that after barack obama was elected, i think the United States and especially liberal americans kind of decided to turn the page on the iraq war. It was so much easier to be optimistic about obamas term starting and to kind of forget that, you know, this war which we had all been against in the first place had really affected millions and millions of people and left a country shatteredded and, you know, started the conflict that we see now in syria. And so they felt and i felt that our generation especially who were young when that war started needed to really look at what the effects of this war were, the human fallout. And that would be iraqi refugees, half of whom were live anything syria at the time and half of whom were living in jordan. And most of the refugees in syria were in damascus. It was a very different syria at the time. This was about three months before everything started falling apart. And we werent there to report on the Syrian Government or what they were up to, we were just there to talk to iraqi refugees. The other wrinkle in this story was that sarah, the lead journalist, decided to invite along a childhood friend of hers named dan obrien who was, like her, raised in a very progressive seattle, hippie environment. His mother founded an organization that tried to ban war toys. And his response to the iraq war starting in 2003 was to join up in 2005. He joined the marines and went over there to fight in the war. And this is something that his family and his friends couldnt really understand at the time. And i think still bothered sarah to that day. So she invited him on the trip to kind of revisit the country as a civilian, to meet the people who had been displaced by this war he had been a part of. And her idea was that she would interview him as he went along on this trip and kind of see how a marine returns to iraq. And she would write a story about him. You know, i think for her it was a little bit like showing some reallife journalism. Like, the idea of journalism is that someone goes into an issue with kind of preconceived notions, they think they know something. You read something new or you see something new, and then you chan