The cold never bothered me anyway
Wishes
Hello! It is school holidays and I am sneaking some quick comics in while my children have their designated screen time. I’m quite fascinated by how Violet has invented her own superstition, or perhaps ritual around managing her fears.I too was paranoid about random dreadful things happening to me when I was a child – that my eyes might explode, that my legs would snap off, that the monsters would rise up and eat me. These days my fears are too terrifying to articulate – I did consider drawing some of my own, but I was too superstitious to do so. I’ve heard it said that you should write what you most fear and that’s where your most powerful writing will come from. But I’m too scared to do that too.
Matariki
Hey, you can click on this to make it bigger and more readable if you like! If you want to find out more about Matariki you can do so here.
The other thing I wanted to share with you was that I’m going to be running a zine and comics course with Alex Wild very soon. You can come and extend your creative nonfiction and/or comics skills, and make some zines or mini-comics with a bunch of like-minded people. This course is run through Artstation in Auckland, which has just renamed itself as Studio One Toi Tu (better change my flyer!).
Home again, home again
I had a fantastic time in London and Paris. Now I’m horribly jet-lagged (do you know how far away New Zealand is from the rest of the world?!!) and unlikely to make much sense but I did want to let you know about my appearance in Five Dials magazine, where I have a short Katherine Mansfield comic after a wonderful essay by Ashleigh Young.
My conversation at the Australia New Zealand Festival of Literature and Arts was also recorded – you can stream it live if you happen to be awake at 11am Thursday UK time, or else you can wait for the podcast.
London!
This is my comic for the restaurant issue of Metro Magazine, which is still on the newsstand for another few days so I’m jumping the gun by posting it here but… I just didn’t have time to draw any new comics for the blog because I was too busy getting myself ready for London! Yes, I am going to London tomorrow morning at 6.50am, which means I have to get up at the ungodly hour of 4am to get to the airport on time. So what am I doing blogging? I’m too excited to sleep. I haven’t been to London in over 11 years, when I was pregnant with my first child, Otto. I am taking part in the Australia New Zealand Festival of Literature and Arts, on the panel with the amazing Mary Talbot (Dotter of her Father’s Eyes) and Evie Wyld, whose beautiful book After The Fire , A Small Still Voice I read a few years ago. I am also taking a workshop on autobiographical comics. Did I say I was excited? My comic I was going to draw was going to be multiple panels of me jumping around in a tizz. Maybe I’ll still draw it and post it via my phone… or maybe I’ll be too busy swanning about the Southbank. Anyway, if you’re in London and you read my comic please come along and say hi!
This is a page I’ve been playing around with from my Katherine Mansfield project. I was having fun going through my beautiful edition of Buller’s Birds, and thinking of Richard Bird in the Bush.
Of course I’m using this image as a foray into my public service announcement: This Saturday at 2pm I will be reading with some wonderful poets at the Pt Chev Library in Auckland. There will be complimentary tea and cake! The poets are Janet Charman, Bob Orr, Jo Emeney and Amanda Eason.
I’m a little bit nervous about this – I haven’t written any poetry since about 2002. My first literary success was a poem – I won my school poetry competition, and that gave me an inkling that I might be writer. In the late 90s and early 200s I had a run as a performance poet. But then I came to the realisation that I preferred to read novels, short stories and comics, and that’s what I ought to write. So I’m not entirely sure what I will be reading. A paragraph from my novels, with lots of pauses between the sentences so you might be fooled into thinking that it’s poetry? Or should I dig out the poems I wrote in my 20s? Perhaps I’ll just read poems by my friends. Please leave poetry suggestions in the comments!
Anyway, come along if you’re in the neighbourhood and support the arts. And read your own poems too – there’s an open mike session after the guest ‘poets’ read.
Altered States
I felt a little bit guilty after drawing this comic – like I hadn’t represented the truth, rather a version of the truth. Not all the middle class families have high fences. And lots of them let their kids play on the street. But it does seem to me that my generation of middle class parents are particularly neurotic, unwilling to let our children roam independently for fear of all the dangers out there. Sometimes I think it’s the news media’s fault. Every day I check the local paper, meaning to read about politics and the world, about things that I can engage in and perhaps take action on. Instead I find myself compulsively reading the stories about children who’ve drowned in puddles, got lost down manholes, gone missing for days, been run over by their dad’s SUV backing out of the drive. They’re what the website has decided is the most important, usually up in the top 4 stories. And then, when you’ve clicked on an article, there’s a helpful list of related stories – tales of child cancer victims and men who’ve murdered their ex-wives and children. It seems like these things are happening all the time, all around us.
Maybe they are, maybe they’re not. What’s happening all the time is we’re ferrying our kids from school to home, we’re squeezing in paid work, we’re vacillating between trying to raise renaissance kids (she can dance! She can play the piano accordion! She can solve algebraic equations!) and relinquishing them the TV or computer so that we can get the dinner on or finish that job that was due this afternoon. We’re all so busy, and lonely. Or perhaps I’m using the royal we. It feels to me that I don’t just hang out with friends nearly as much as my mother’s generation did, thanks to scheduling issues and plain exhaustion. Being a writer/illustrator who works from home while the kids are at school doesn’t help.
And yes, you see right. Most of the kids living in the state houses below the poverty line are Polynesian. My neighbourhood makes the socio-economic divide really obvious. I want to write more about this. But I’m going to have to think carefully first.
Anyway, that was last month’s Metro comic – this month I’ve gone back to restaurant angst:
Oh! And randomly, my sister Melissa Laing has been on the radio talking about the performance ethics podcasts she’s making. They’re very interesting – you should check them out.
Order your copy of LMBF #5!
Let Me Be Frank #5 is finally here, and it’s the memoir issue, filled with coming-of-age stories. You’ve read lots of the comics here but I’ve coloured them all in watercolour, so they look different from how you’ve seen them before.
I’ve had few enough orders of Let Me Be Frank #5 that I’m still able to paint little postcards to send out with them – order yours soon and I’ll make you one too! If I get too many orders I can always set up my sweat shop – my daughter has proved to be quite a good little colourist:
Anyway, I’d love it if you did order a copy – I have a few in stock and more coming – you can either email me: sarahelizabethlaing@gmail.com, or else you can visit my felt shop, which also has international shipping prices.
Green lemons
*Dan Arps is a New Zealand artist.
This comic was meant to be longer but the kids’ DVD finished and then they started fighting so I thought I should quit while I was ahead.
I really do get very tetchy at unstructured time. Most public holidays drive me into a grump. I don’t much like lounging about doing nothing – I want to be going somewhere, making something, talking about interesting stuff. I’m sure my friends would recommend mediation to still my monkey mind.
I’ve just finished Janet Malcolm’s The Silent Woman, a book about the nature of biography, and Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes’ lives in particular. Malcolm talks about the melancholy boredom that is necessary for creativity, but I don’t think she means the melancholy boredom that is brought on when you’re on your hands and knees pretending to be a mummy llama. I have had some interesting ideas, but I’ve been warned off getting up at 5am to write them down after reading about Sylvia and that oven, those towels to protect the children from the gas, the glasses of milk and sandwiches she prepared for them. But I have so much to do! How am I going to get it done?
Perhaps it doesn’t matter. Perhaps I don’t really need to do all those things I think I do (the chairs in the shed! The peeling paint on the windows! The vegetable garden! The Katherine Mansfield book!) and instead I should enjoy the moment… those endless moments… stretching out for eternity…
Oh, and if my mother is reading this, Violet says I drew you looking too old. You look younger than that.
Comics from the crypt
I drew this comic for a Pecha Kucha a number of years ago – 2011 – and it’s about something that happened in 1995. I’ve had it sitting around ever since then and haven’t really known what to do with it, so I thought I would share it with you. The text is a touch on the small side but you can zoom in to read it. I didn’t think it was a comic – I thought it was more of a story – but then, when I was reading Dylan Horrocks’ Incomplete Works I noticed that he had comics that worked like this too.
Do you see on my side bar that you can pre-order issues of Let Me Be Frank #5? I’m getting copies sent to me as I type. The Felt link should go live soon, if it isn’t live already.
LET ME BE FRANK 
