About

Jennifer de Guzman is a writer and comics editor living in the San Francisco Bay Area. She writes stories about sad girls, seawater, bottomless wells, airborne plagues, and horses. You can find links to some of them them in the Selected Works section or read them at her Scribd page.

She also writes "Life in Comics," a monthly column for Publishers Weekly Comics Week, and collaborates on "Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now," a comics column on Robot 6, with her husband, artist Brian Belew.

Portrait by Brian Belew.

What Are Possible Impossiblities?

“The Poet ought rather to chuse Impossibilities, provided they have Resemblance to the Truth, than the Possible, which are Incredible with all their Possibility.”
- Henry Fielding, quoting Aristotle in The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling

Art Arising Out of Craft

All Things Considered, which, along with Morning Edition, makes up the entirety of my non-satiric news consumption, is having a short story contest. Stories for the “Three-Minute Fiction” contest have to be no more than 600 words and based on the photograph at the link. I’m intending to write something for it, but, unfortunately, the picture [...]

Hypatia of Alexandria

I’m excited about the new movie about Hypatia of Alexandria, Agora, starring Rachel Weisz and directed by Alejandro Amenábar. Here’s the teaser trailer (if you can’t see it, here’s the link):

The brief scene with what looks like Hypatia teaching is lovely — it reminds me of a J.W. Waterhouse painting. Also seen — the Pharos lighthouse, [...]

From Words, to Songs, to Pictures

Check out Tobias Wolff rocking out to John Darnielle singing his much-beloved Mountain Goats song “Woke Up New.”

Via GalleyCat, where there’s a brief disussion of song lyrics as literature. “What have song writers learned from regular writers?” it asks, but when it comes to song writers like John Darnielle, I think there is a great deal [...]