Now that contracts are signed and backgrounds are checked, I'm so happy to share that I'm joining the faculty as a lecturer at the School of the Art Institute this fall, teaching comics! I'm signed on for one class a semester for now, eager to figure out how to balance this new schedule with my own work and my family's needs. I don't have anything quippy or protectively self-deprecating to say about this, I am just extremely excited and grateful for this opportunity.
If we’ve caught up in person at all over the past 7 years, or if you’ve read the such-loud-subtext-it’s-fully-text newsletters this last year, you know that the hardest transition for me in becoming a parent (and doubly so since the pandemic) has been creating and defending the time I need to draw and write. I’ve also deeply missed being an active part of the comics community. I miss seeing my friends at a rotating background of conference hotels and festival floors, giving hugs and talking nibs and sharing industry gossip, and being inspired and challenged to do better by their books.
This is such a dreamy opportunity to use muscles that are aching to be flexed, to join some of my favorite Chicago cartoonists as colleagues in the drawing/painting department, and to mentor & share & learn in community with a new generation of amazing artists. Those same life-transforming forces that pulled my body & attention away from writing—parenting and the pandemic—have primed me to dive in deep here. Our time is so short: we need to share an omnivorous enthusiasm for life, for art, for intergenerational sharing, for being open and creative together. Urgently.
Eternal thanks to Beth Hetland, o captain my captain, for putting my name in the hat.
Congrats, Marnie! What lucky students!