Graphic Essay

A Free Range Brain is a brain that’s been given permission to wander, explore, and play—without self-imposed limits. It’s what happens when you stop bullying yourself. It’s the way I’d like to experience the world.

 

Have you ever gone shopping with a teenaged girl? It can be a grueling process…

I spent a week at the Sequential Artists Workshop learning from cartoonist Laura Park. I got really excited about this project and started thinking, wouldn’t it be fun to turn lots of my friends’ bad date stories into cartoons? Let me know if you’d like to contribute. I’m thinking Big Book of Bad Boyfriends. Or maybe…

The night before my mother’s PET Scan I watched my parents bicker. Their spoken words were about an old family friend’s dog. Their tones, harsh. But after 50 years of observation, I’ve cracked their code. Their impatience and annoyance are a mask. What they are really feeling is fear. I roll my eyes at the…

Everyone has a moment of shame and humiliation that they revisit now and then. A place they go back to whenever they’ve done something they wish they hadn’t. For me, that big moment occurred late in the fall of 1979 when I was 15 years old. What made this moment so memorably awful was two-fold.…

Creating something new is often a process of connecting the dots. You start with something you see or hear, which reminds you of something else, which makes you remember a third thing you stored in your brain ages ago and—voila—an idea is born. The inspiration for my demons was a passage in Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert.…