No. 42 – Chambermaids and Strippers, Redux
A cheater's guide to posting content
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Because I’ll be away when I need to send out Feed the Monster at the end of August, I’m going to cheat and resurrect an installment called Chambermaids and Strippers from 2019 in order to make my life a little easier. It’s about my first foray into the world of graphic memoir—a world I had no idea was going to lead to the Life’s Work project I’ve been working on for a year and a half now.
It happened something like this: When my mother went into care in 2014, I had to empty out the house she’d lived in for over 50 years. It took me seven months. I didn’t want to leave that amount of detritus for my daughter, so I started streamlining my own house, which included dealing with 72 journals started at the age of 17. So began The Journal Project, where I read through each of my journals (getting as far as No. 63), took photos of the covers, saved pertinent pages, and tore up the rest (which I still have in a large vat). NORMAL, RIGHT? Partway through the project, I had a very sincere thought: “Oh my God, is this my life’s work?” As in, okay, I didn’t find the cure for cancer—in fact I didn’t have any kind of real career at all—but for what it’s worth these journals represent a ton of important work. Important to me at least.
After taking a graphic memoir workshop in 2019 called The Power of Memoir Comics (described below), I started to envision creating a memoir that would include not only graphic memoir but writing, paintings, photos, journal excerpts… the whole shebang. At first I pictured something that encompassed my entire life, and would be rich with visuals, ephemera and documentation. Then I started to read books on memoir writing and was quickly disabused of that notion: the memoir would have to be narrowed down to something more specific. Well I had just the thing. My mother’s dementia, and my difficult relationship with her—which much of the journal writing had dealt with anyway. Hence the name of the project: Life’s Work.
Who am I to judge what my life’s work has been?
I applied for and got a show at the Victoria Arts Council for the project (now bumped to June of 2022), and I applied for a Canada Council grant so that I could afford to make the visual memoir into a book. I didn’t get the grant, so at some point down the road I’ll organize a fundraiser in hopes of producing the book I’m envisioning.
Thank you Jill Margo for hosting the graphic memoir workshop (and for being a positive influence in so many other ways), and thank you Sarah Leavitt for continuing to be an inspiration. Please find the pillaged FTM below.
CHAMBERMAIDS AND STRIPPERS
In October of 2019 I took part in a Victoria Festival of Authors workshop called The Power of Memoir Comics, taught by Sarah Leavitt and hosted by Jill Margo and Andrew Templeton at GOOD. During the six and a half hour workshop, we had a crash–course in comic styles, did rapid–fire writing and drawing exercises, and each ended up with an autobiographical comic. Sarah had us accomplish an incredible amount in the time we had. Some people in the workshop had no experience drawing and were scared, but so was I! I'd never done anything like this before. Everyone presented what they'd done at the end of the day; the range of stories (and their delivery) was fascinating.
I chose to illustrate an embarrassing story from when I was 19 years old. I saw too late that I didn't give myself enough room to tell the story properly—it needed more than nine panels to be coherent. I'll know next time.
"I had little sense of what I could do, or should do". Indeed. There wasn't much interest in my interests growing up, and I was given no guidance as to career possibilities. I was just supposed to "get a job". No-one who'd come before me had gone to University, and the reading of books was not particularly encouraged—I came to that on my own around the age of twenty-one. I'm not complaining... just looking back with wonder. I might as well have been raised by wolves at that point, for all the help I had navigating the world.
"Finally my ride arrived" is the point where I could have fleshed out the story so that it made more sense. I didn't know what kind of vehicle was picking me up; when a car arrived and a woman got out of the back, I assumed this was to allow me space. So I crawled in. Once in the back seat, I looked around and didn't recognize anyone in the car, as this was not a car full of chambermaids. Needless to say, the people in the vehicle were pretty surprised too, and I crawled out again, wanting to die. I was already feeling awkward and conflicted as I waited for the chambermaids to pick me up, and this little episode only intensified my storm of feelings for the evening—now I was deeply rattled. I don't remember how much longer I had to wait before my real ride appeared.
It's also true that I don't remember much from the rest of the evening, apart from drinking horrible beer in a loud, cavernous bar with obnoxious co-workers. And, I presume, strippers stripping somewhere in the room. Strippers gonna strip.
Just as a point of interest... when I got to the panel where I had to draw a complete stranger in the front seat of the car turning to look at me, I wanted a reference picture so I'd know how to draw it convincingly. All I could think of was John Travolta in Pulp Fiction, in the scene where he accidentally shoots a guy sitting in the back seat. So I did a Google search for that scene—et voilà.
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This is great story telling Betty Ann! I’m not sure I could divulge my tumultuousness teen years!
This…all of it! Your practical no-nonsense lens that you look through is just such a great fit to your words. I can smell it, feel it. I sort of feel like I might have been there too somehow!