Instructor Spotlight: Marnie Galloway
Marnie Galloway teaches Diary Comics Sunday, September 27 from 1:00-4:00PM. In this fun hands-on workshop, award-winning cartoonist Marnie Galloway will teach you the foundations of thinking with comics by learning how to make your own diary comics. No drawing, comics-making, or writing experience required: all levels of ability are welcomed!
About Marnie Galloway
Marnie Galloway is an Eisner nominated cartoonist who makes poetic comics about identity, motherhood, love, and rage. She is best known for her Xeric Award winning wordless graphic novel, In the Sounds and Seas. Her work has appeared in Best American Comics, The New York Times, PEN America, Cricket Magazine, Saveur Magazine, and MUTHA Magazine. Marnie lives in Chicago and teaches comics at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Tell us about your experience and key highlights of your work as it relates to the workshop you will be teaching for Artists Book House (ABH).
I am a working cartoonist and comics professor at SAIC and the heart of my comic practice for the past five years has been diary comics. I began keeping diary comics when the world started emerging from Covid lockdowns, drawing and writing straight into my sketchbook with an ink pen with no planning, and it has become a central part of how I process my days. This practice helped me loosen up and has made my drawings more fluid and confident, and the graphic memoir I'm currently working on started from patterns and thoughts I first noticed in my diary comics pages.
Where can readers find examples of your work?
Website: marniegalloway.com Newsletter: marniegalloway.substack.com
What can prospective students expect to learn in your workshop?
Students in my workshop will learn comic art fundamentals by working through writing prompts that we will turn into pages of diary comics.
If a student were to walk away with one or two key lessons, skills, or principles from your workshop, what would you hope that would be?
Through these exercises and the conversations we have through the workshop, I hope that students leave my workshop feeling liberated from burdens of perfectionism, with a new way to tell their own stories with a loose, fluid spirit of play.
Can you name an example or two of past workshops you’ve taught, and what most excited you about them?
I have taught this Diary Comics workshop for ABH a few times and this topic excites me because I think everyone should keep a diary comic, even if you don't think of yourself as a visual artist! Paying attention to little moments in your day by drawing them--your morning routine, a funny conversation you overheard, the cover of a book you just finished--is fun and also helps lock down memory in a more concrete way than just writing or taking a picture.
What are the most important features of your workspace?
My drafting table, bristol paper, tombow fudenosuke pens, and my space heater: my studio is in my home's unfinished & unheated basement!
What are some of your favorite tools in your studio?
For people interested in making comics for the first time, I recommend Lynda Barry's books "What It Is" and "Making Comics." Barry's approach
What inspires and informs your work?
I read broadly and deeply--I always have a book on my nightstand, in my bag, and an audiobook on my bluetooth speaker when I'm drawing. Right now my most important touchstones are the play Mary Jane by Amy Herzog and the long form poem Descent of Alette by Alice Notley; I have those books within arms reach while I'm working on my new book as totems of honesty and bravery. I'm also deeply inspired by my students: the depth and quality of work made by the next generation of comics superstars at SAIC is creatively invigorating and fills me with shining hope.
Other than your ABH workshop, can you name a few other key events or projects in your near future?
Right now my hands are busy working on a big graphic memoir about motherhood, love, rage, and predatory animal attacks, called "I Could Just Eat You Up."
