 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. |
My new Life in Comics Column is up at Publishers Weekly. It’s about how women and girls are treated in the comics community. When I turned it in, I was a little concerned that I had struck too strident a tone and was being too harsh or unfair. But then I read the comments on this interview with graphic novelist Hope Larson, and I knew that I was right. A strident tone is necessary when you want to make it clear you’re not going to take any more nonsense. I’ve been a vegetarian for fifteen years, and I don’t miss meat at all. One thing I do miss, however, is eating dishes from my childhood. Having Mateo has made me think about being a kid a lot more (though, like everyone, I always have my memories from childhood at the back of my mind), and sometimes it makes me nostalgic for food my mother made when I was growing up, especially Filipino food. Filipino food is notoriously meat-centric (also garlic- and vinegar-heavy). There is a Filipino restaurant in San Bruno that has some dishes they can make vegetarian, and I went there recently only to discover they were closed for a private party. Disappointed and still in the mood for Filipino food, I decided to call other Filipino restaurants in the area to see if they had vegetarian dishes. They had no idea what I was talking about. One offered me milkfish. The other offered me something that had “only a little bit of chicken and shrimp” in it. I’ve always felt like a Filipino outsider because I’m mestiza, but at that moment I felt like I wasn’t part of my culture at all. To counter this feeling, I have decided to start making the Filipino food I remember from my childhood, adapting the recipes so that they are vegetarian. First up: sarciado. Sarciado, as my family makes it (there are regional variations — I just discovered that this dish is also called afritada), is a stew with a tomato-based sauce, potatoes, garbanzo beans, and peas. Usually it’s made with chicken or pork, but I realized that it’s just as good without it. Here’s how I make it:
Ingredients: Heat oil in a large pan over medium heat. Add cubed potatoes. When they just begin to brown, add the onions, red bell peppers, and bay leaf. When the onions begin to turn translucent, add the garlic and the fake chicken strips (if you’re using them). Be careful not to let the garlic burn. Let the fake chicken strips brown a little, then add the diced tomatoes. Lower the heat and let the mixture simmer to draw the moisture from the tomatoes (about eight to ten minutes). Then add the can of garbanzo beans with the liquid and the frozen peas. As the peas thaw, add the tomato paste and stir to incorporate it, creating a sauce. (If needed, you can add water or vegetable broth.) Add the fried tofu at this point if you’re using it. Add salt and pepper to taste. Serve over steamed rice. (I know, I know, potatoes, garbanzos and rice? It’s a carb-fest. Just go with it, ‘kay? And make sure you don’t eat the bay leaf!) And that is vegetarian sarciado. Sorry I don’t have a picture. I’ll add one once I make it again. Next up: vegetarian lumpia! At The New Yorker, Laura Miller reviews The Hunger Games, a series of young adult novels set in a society in which teenagers are annually drafted to take part in a gladiator-like contest. But more broadly, Miller explores the genre of dystopian fiction and its appeal to teenagers. She attributes it partially to teenagers’ ability to identify with the powerless, since they are at a time in their life when they desire autonomy but are not granted it:
Miller notes that the interior logic of The Hunger Games does not hold together unless you regard it as a reflection of the adolescent mind. Of course I am thinking about this subject because of my decision to revise my dystopian novel All We Ever Wanted (Was Everything) as a young adult series. (I’ve since learned there has been a novel of that title published weekly, so I will have change the title — right now, I’m thinking I’ll call it The Zones. It’s too bad because the thread of narrative in the Bauhaus song was such an inspiration to me.) I began writing the novel when I was nineteen, just out of adolescence myself, so I feel like it has the rawness of my teenage years in it — and also the rawness of my relative inexperience as a writer. The two main characters, I admit, are a bit Mary Sue — idealized and stand-ins for aspects of my personality. (Much like the Mouse and the Minx in “Minx Mouse Monster.”) I didn’t realize it as I was writing it, but Cat, the privileged young woman with prophetic dreams, represents my desire for being a near-perfect person. (The point of the Endowment in the novel was to help society become perfect by privileging those whose genes mark them as “perfectable.”) She is pretty, smart, and nice — a little naive, too, but of course that changes. Nina, the volatile magic user, is a femme fatale — and also hot-tempered, mercurial, often mean. She’s something of my shadow self. Her flaws are mine writ large. So what I need to do is not so much change these characters, or the other characters — they fit almost exactly the “outlandish and extravagant figures” that Miller describes — but make them more into people. I also need to gather up the narrative and start making sense out of it, giving it stronger structure that has three acts. I kept changing what I was doing when I was writing it — first it was going to be a short story about Cat (I was inspired by the novella version of “Beggars in Spain” by Nancy Kress), then it was going to be a series of short stories set in the same universe. I even toyed with the idea of making it a comic book series at one point. I have so much more experience with writing with intention now that this will be something I can do. It also will be fun. I’ve missed these people and this world. Lately I have been thinking about what my English degrees have done for me, not so much in their specifics but in regards to the skills I acquired while studying literature. Then this morning I heard the story “Aspiring Writer Questions Value of English Degree” on the radio. The subject of the story, Heather Lefebvre, says that “her English studies have helped her to be analytical,” and that is exactly the skill I was focusing on. (Lefebvre also became an English major because her mother suggested being a writer as her “back-up plan” if being an actress didn’t work out. I admit that I snorted when I heard that.) I think a lot of people think of English as a kind of touchy-feely area of study, for people who swoon on misty moors and recite poetry and the like. But the reality is that in order to be a successful English major you have to be able to both understand the emotional content of literature and wield logic with rapier-sharpness. You have to be keenly observant and care about how other people think and act. You must know your own mind well enough and have enough command of language to express your thoughts in an organized, clear, and eloquent manner. And you have to have a creative mind. These are the skills you need to recognize themes and strategies when you encounter them in literature, come up with compelling theses for essays, and to write those essays and take part in classroom discussions. These aren’t skills that lead to accomplishments that are clear for a lot of people outside the English major community: you’re not building anything tangible or receiving an education that has a clear career path (unless you’re going into teaching, which everyone will assume anyway). However, they are skills that are immensely transferrable to a variety of careers. I regularly imagine how my English skills would help me if I had decided to become a lawyer or an advertising executive or even a police detective. I didn’t decide to enter those careers, though. I chose to be a writer and an editor, so the benefit of my education has been pretty obvious, but I think what I learned as an English major would help me no matter where I ended up in life. About ten years ago, after a couple of bad jobs and something of an emotional meltdown, I took a little more than a year off to work on my writing. The result was about a score of short stories of varying quality (a couple of them received honorable mention in their respective years of The Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy) and a sprawling, dystopian novel called All We Ever Wanted (Was Everything). All We Ever Wanted is thirty-three chapters long, 150,000 words, and rather heavy-handedly deals with themes of biology, destiny, and death-and-resurrection. It’s set in a world where the “genetically perfectable” live in fancy “Endowment Communities” and everyone else fends for themselves outside of them in an urban wasteland called the Unincorporated Zones. The main characters are Nina, a mercurial magic-using young woman who is the dead-and-resurrected god figure (she tries to retrieve her beloved friend Luna from the dead, Orpheus-style, gets stuck in the realm of the dead herself, and is resurrected some twenty-five years later); and Cat, a young woman from an Endowment community who has to run away to the Zones. But there are tons more characters, all with quirky names (Trout, Zoe, Gibson, Spark, Romero, Noah, a creepy guy called The Messiah). I finished it in 2001, when I was twenty-three years old. Warner Books offered to publish it as an e-novel, but I turned them down. I thought I would find an agent, find a publisher, and be a critically-acclaimed young author by the age of twenty-five. I was wrong. The novel was rejected by agents and publishers alike. A few agents expressed interest, only to balk at the novel’s format when they received partials. It’s told in both third person and in several first-person voices, something I was not willing to change. After about a year of rejection, I trunked the novel and regarded it as an unpublishable exercise — an important part of my development as a writer, but ultimately not destined for public consumption. I’ve been thinking about All We Ever Wanted lately. It started as just thinking about the characters and the world when I had insomnia, kind of inhabiting a place and spending time with people that I created. And then I started thinking that perhaps there was something I could make out of it after all. After almost ten years, the characters and world were intriguing to me again. Dystopian fiction is popular in young adult fiction now and I could perhaps make a three-volume series out of it. It’ll be interesting to look at it and see what has changed and what remains of my writing style. The multiple points of view — that has stayed. I remember that the novel starts out fairly melodramatic and then mellows into the more quiet conflict that I write now. And it begins with horses — they remain as well. The most recent short story I wrote has horses in it. |
 The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende  One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez  Wet Moon Volume 1: Feeble Wanderings (v. 1) by Ross Campbell  The Illustrated Jane Eyre (Penguin Illustrated Classics) by Charlotte Brontë  The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath by Sylvia Plath, Karen V. Kukil  Wuthering Heights (Norton Critical Editions) by Emily Brontë, Emily Bronte, Richard J. Dunn  Amrita by Banana Yoshimoto  Mozart: A Life by Maynard Solomon  Disintegration by The Cure  Siamese Dream by Smashing Pumpkins |
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Copyright © 2010 Jennifer de Guzman - All Rights Reserved |
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