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Book Reviews

Student Editors of Punctuate Present Points of View & Reviews of F(r)iction: A Literary Journal with a Difference

January 4, 2020

F(r)iction is the emboss of the international literacy nonprofit Brink Literacy Project. With a mission to escalate literacy rates and a commitment to storytelling, the magazine is by no means conservative. This literary journal is eye-catching, from its holographic cover, to its full-color pages. Each page is a visual delight and tactile treat, featuring original short comics. The artwork is well-defined and accompanies every piece. It represents young, underrepresented and diverse writers. In its wide array of genre and artwork, there are no borders, which makes the collection as a whole, highly baffling in its surprises, all for the sake of creative writing and fine art. F(r)iction takes risks with form and content in a mixed bag of goods, reveling in the unexpected, and rewarding inventiveness and insight in works from traditional literary fiction or genre-bending sci-fi, fantasy, horror poetry, and nonfiction¾all accessible to the reader.

It features edgy, gut-wrenching, and raw poetry by Nick Flynn and Alli Cruz; animalistic, wild, and weird short fiction from Annie Neugebauer, Jason Baltazar, Samantha Schmidt, Jason McCormick, Alexandra O’Neil, and Vaughn Gaston. You’ll find pleasant revelations of creative nonfiction by Patricia Horvath, a pioneering writer feature with Joyce Carol Oates, a breaking ground debut author feature with Emily A. Duncan, and a community feature with Words Without Walls Prison Writing Program. In partnership with Words Without Walls, F(r)iction stays true to their mission, giving back to the community, and with that trade-off, we get a glimpse inside the minds of writers in Allegheny County Jail and Sojourner House with important words to be shared in multiple pieces in which we would know about otherwise. In a world that puts trust in the established, F(r)iction dares to challenge this notion, welcoming new writers to emerge with celebrity writers.

Writing world: take note. Readers: hold onto your seat. F(r)iction is fresh, providing menace to the publishing world in its beyond imaginative and interesting curated work.

Review by Lejla Subašić

F(r)iction, a print journal dedicated to publishing eclectic works, began in 2015, with an aim to do things differently. A letter from the editor on the first page of the journal is a call to action that in so many words encourages the reader to not let good, weird literature die. Those experimental pieces writers keep tucked away in lonely computer files and desk drawers have a home in F(r)iction.

F(r)iction announces itself as a different-kind-of-journal from the cover. Issue No. 13 beams an iridescent image of a devious child with a mechanical glove and homework glowing and floating around him. Embedded in this image is Joyce Carol Oates’ name among others, a nod to the magazine’s clout, enough to garner big literary names while still publishing new, emerging writers. With glossy, bright pages decorated with varied art submissions, it’s a journal that could cause a riot at the book fair while it leaves adults daydreaming, connected with their inner child.

I thought, based on the cover and colorful pages, F(r)iction would be lighthearted and playful. It is, in some respects. However, shortly after diving into a story adorned with illustrated peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, I was dumbstruck and heavy. “How to Make a Peanut Butter and Jelly Sandwich” by Samantha Schmidt tells the story of a cook for prisoners’ last meals and one odd request for a PB&J. The cook grapples with how to make something ordinary extraordinary and momentous. The story draws irony from the most conventional tradition in our society of making death (a common, ordinary thing) into a grand, special event. After reading this story, I am left in my reading chair, holding my head wondering how I let a literary magazine—one that told me it would be strange and thought-provoking—convince me it would be all play.

This is perhaps exactly what F(r)iction is aiming for. The name speaks to its efforts; it goes against the grain and causes a reaction. In addition to their print issues, F(r)iction’s website is just as glossy. Its navigable format displays a log of numerous categories, a testament to its variety. They feature comics, creative nonfiction, editorial, essays, interviews, flash fiction, poetry, read-alongs, reviews, short stories, and staff picks.

Where F(r)iction’s letter from the editor might tell a story of the underdog, a magazine fighting to stay afloat, the pages tell a different story. Each page radiates vivacity and radical confidence in the power of art. F(r)iction is armed with a glimmering mechanical glove and ready to fight.

Review by Brigitte Riordan

In many ways, a magazine—digital or hardcopy—constantly requires a fresh and bold adaptivity to the changing world around it. This lays heavily upon literary journals; the stories and narratives they contain represent the undertones of today’s society that are embedded in worlds either fictional, or not. In F(r)iction, the eyes are drawn in by the vivid color, images, and layout of the magazine. The most provocative section was created with the special feature “Words Without Walls,” a creative outreach program serving Allegheny County Jail, and Sojourner House, a residential drug and alcohol treatment program for mothers and their children. The visual artists for this magazine take big steps into making F(r)iction appealing to the eye, but what of its content?

The mission of this magazine is clear within the Editor’s Note, “. . . a collection of stories that would enchant us regardless of genre, where the biggest names in the industry shared a spine with brand new voices from diverse backgrounds. . . . It would be a book brimming with color and art and specialty printing.”

In other words, the magazine includes a variety of poems, short stories, interviews, and comics that all act to dismiss the quota of “traditional literature,” and although “Words Without Walls” is the special feature, the entire magazine plays off as such. Every story conspires with an image, playing off of the details within the stories. Each snippet of these give you a variety of narratives, sprouting from “Freaks” within a cruel circus, to warrior women whose bloodline are destined to kill off the beasts of their world.

The magazine does not disappoint with its inclusion of the witty, bizarre, and unique.

Review by Tracie Taylor

F(r)iction is a magazine that sees no limits and knows no boundaries, where both established and new writers have an equal opportunity to share their work. The magazine is one of the liveliest that I’ve seen, with a vibrancy that clearly encapsulates the passion of the writers and artists featured within its pages.

The relationship between story and illustration can be a challenge to navigate. It’s difficult to have those two elements coexist without one overshadowing the other, but F(r)iction found the perfect balance. The artwork not only compliments the stories, but propels them, and helps the reader become fully immersed in the writing.

“Clean Slate,” written by Jason McCormick with artwork by Enrica Angiolini, was one of the first stories that really stuck out to me. It was the bright neon graphics that caught my attention, and the first sentence, “I have purchased 28 boxes of chalk over the semester, and that is simply too much” drew me completely in. “Clean Slate” followed the story of a professor whose chalk kept going missing.

The professor waited for hours in the classroom to catch the culprit, but ended up falling asleep, and woke up at midnight to find that the new chalk that was left out had gone missing yet again. The professor rushed out of the classroom and saw a janitor pushing a cart down the hallway, and followed the janitor to the elevator and up to the roof. After stepping out onto the roof, the reason why the chalk had been going missing became apparent; the ground was covered in drawings of stars and planets, and in the midst of that, a game of hopscotch.

The illustrations that were paired with this story did the job of providing the reader with a clear image of what the narrator was seeing. A mental image could have been formed without the use of artwork, sure, but then the story wouldn’t have been the same. A drawing of the hopscotch game took up the center margin, and the outside border was filled with neon red and blue and pink graphics of flowers and stars, and the black background the words and artwork were set on, made the graphics stand out even more.

The primary goal in Issue 13 of F(r)iction was to drift away from the traditional and take risks. Dani Hedlund, editor-in-chief of F(r)iction, states, “We dreamed of something different¾a collection of stories that would enchant us regardless of genre, where the biggest names in the industry shared a spine with brand new voices from diverse backgrounds, voices we would mentor every step of the way.”

Review by Katie Turner

At first glance, “the comeback issue” of F(r)iction, published in the spring of 2019, is for Mad Libs lovers, a mischievous little boy on the cover, ready to take Thanos-style revenge on his schoolyard bullies. I entered my reading experience thinking this was a magazine geared toward youngsters like the boy on the cover, and was quickly disabused of that notion with the first story’s writhing grotesque of a main character, Centavo, also known as the shapeshifting Amorpho of the Cosmideluxe Circus and Sideshow.

Jason Baltazar’s imagery is precise within the story, describing how it feels to rearrange the muscles, arteries, and bones in time with music; how it feels to float formless on a peaceful pond; and how it feels to pander to a nameless crowd with your true self exposed many times over.

But before we even get to the opening story, “Amorpho and the Leering Freak,” we read the Editor’s Note, adoringly addressed to “Dear lovely reader.” Within, Editor-in-Chief Dani Hedlund promises “a collection of stories that would enchant us regardless of genre, where the biggest names in the industry shared a spine with brand new voices from diverse backgrounds. . . . It would be a book brimming with color and art and specialty printing. Every page would be as lush as the stories within.” Hedlund and her crew deliver.

For each page—even the table of contents—is jam-packed with specially-created art (even to the detriment of not having a page number most times). For every poem, the title is blended seamlessly into the art. Snippets of the art is featured in the handful of stories featured online from each printing, but the true decadence lies in holding the physical copy in hand. The cover shines with luminescent flashes of reflective sparkles. The deep reds and vibrant greens drip off the page¾the page itself transformed into the precise artwork needed to enhance and accompany each story, interview, or poem.

While “Amorpho and the Leering Freak” is sympathetic horror, “The Reds,” by Annie Neugebauer, is the classic Little Red Riding Hood fairytale expanded—the lineage of grief and revenge left behind after little red riding hood has been digested by the big bad wolf.

Side by side with these two genre-bending stories are the real truths told by female inmates via the Words Without Walls Prison Writing Program and an interview with prolific author Joyce Carol Oates.

The F(r)iction crew’s love for this “weird little book” is palpable and brave. F(r)iction was “fueled by passion and naivety and stubbornness” when they started their strange and artful literary journal, and they still are. In Hedlund’s note she promises the magazine will expand, to find new ways to thrive because the crew “love[s] stories. We believe in their power to change the world.”

Check them out at frictionlit.org to see what they have to offer. You will be pleasantly surprised at what a literary journal can say and do with just a little bit of passion, naivety, and stubbornness.

Review by Rachel Martin

The cover of the Spring 2019 issue of F(r)iction magazine is iridescent and glossy. There is a young boy illustrated with a mischievous expression, a bruise on his cheek, and wearing a mechanical red glove. There are beams of energy expanding out from the mechanical hand. There are school lockers behind him and papers that look like worksheets from class suspended in air and outlined in iridescence. In the editor’s note, I am greeted by the Editor-in-Chief, Dani Hedlund, addressing me as “lovely reader.” They are informing me of the struggle that the literary journal industry entails: dwindling readership, mentorship not being economically viable, and the foolishness of creating an issue with emerging artists—yet they notified me of their expansion as a magazine.

I find that the cover and the editor’s letter are very intuitive. They seem to embrace the “weirdness” of our world, leading the reader to “reimagine the way you see the world.”

F(r)iction magazine is full of underdog stories and they are each “steeped in fighting spirit.” This is evidenced by Nick Flynn, whose work is presented on pages 18 through 21. His three poems involve famous musicians. The first poem is titled, “Alphabet Street” and it describes a moment between the speaker and their daughter, listening to the radio. The daughter asks why the radio is talking about a person who has just died. “Why is anyone so / important?” The poem ends by including the lyrics of Alphabet Street by Prince in italics, “No / one, nothing—if that’s / the only way—is / replaceable.” The next poem, titled, “Rock ‘N’ Roll Suicide” is about the speaker’s daughter drawing a picture and in the last lines, David Bowie’s lyrics are intertwined in the moment with promises of not being alone. The last poem by Nick Flynn is titled, “Kurt Cobain Wallpaper.” The three poems not only include classic artists, but also personal thoughts and experiences by the speaker. He gives a feeling of staying alive through mundane moments, appreciating the present, and using music as a way to bridge the gap between experience and thought.

Although F(r)iction has well known writers, such as Joyce Carol Oats whose writing took the center of the magazine, the underdog theme is carried through. The fact that they feature writers from Words Without Walls—an outreach program that serves women in jail and women in a residential drug and alcohol treatment program, I hope to see more boundaries broken by this magazine in the future. Their expansive energy is enough to keep them moving forward.

Review by Riley McFarlane

In an industry where they “see great journals go under,” F(r)iction made it a mission to maintain their momentum and put together a selection of work of varying genres and forms by writers in different stages of their careers. Literary fiction and dark fantasy, short poetry and comics—this volume has variety. All of it is accentuated by eye-catching and, at times, bombastic artwork, tailor-made to each of its featured stories.

Each individual piece is united by the theme of underdogs. They take stories of characters in an oppressing, hostile environment seemingly out to beat them down, and how they lead their lives. And each author manages to use this theme in unique ways.

Annie Neugebauer’s “The Reds” tells a chillingly dark story of girl born into her role as a “Red”, forever bound to her duty of hunting beasts by a legacy of women before her. The bloody, graphic imagery contrasted with the protagonist’s cool and at times beaten voice captures the imagination. Vaughn Gaston’s “Snargle Fox” experiments masterfully with point of view, head hopping from one character to another, never content to remain in the same place for more than a few paragraphs at a time, ending with a surprisingly beautiful narrative.

As for poetry, I’d like to direct the reader’s attention to “A Dog Ran Down the Highway” by Kim Chinquee. For a poem less than fifteen lines, Chinquee’s work tells a far too familiar story of a woman’s relationship through implication alone. The last line, “Oh, no. I said. You’re not.” ends the poem on a note that, while not a conclusion to the woman’s story, is a gut-punch that I think everyone needs to read in context.

The work discussed above barely scratches the surface of F(r)iction‘s spring 2019 issue has to offer. The comics are beautiful, the poems, concise, the non-fiction, revealing. But, there’s something more magical about F(r)iction magazine’s spring volume that goes beyond the stories that it includes—something that may well apply to F(r)iction as a whole. It’s devotion to making each of its contributing author’s stories the star of its own show, is truly what makes F(r)iction a joy to read. I’ve read many anthologies that include sparse amounts of artwork, aside from the obligatory cover photo, that will draw in a reader browsing a rack of magazines. F(r)iction on the other hand has incredibly detailed artwork for every one of its stories, accompanied by pages accented by border, page breaks, and art in the margins that fit its aesthetic. If there is anything to take away from F(r)iction’s spring 2019 volume, it’s that they will spare no expense in making sure everything they publish is as polished and detailed as humanly possible. Some of the stories mentioned in this review are available on their website, and I highly recommend that you check them out.

Review by Elijah Abarbanel

Interviews

Punctuate in Conversation with Elizabeth Kadetsky

March 17, 2019

Elizabeth Kadetsky is not afraid of venturing into the varied ways of storytelling or to different parts of the world. She is the author of a memoir First There Is a Mountain (2004), a story collection The Poison that Purifies You (2014), and a novella On the Island at the Center of the Center of the World (2015). An associate professor of fiction and nonfiction at Penn State, Kadetsky is publishing her first graphic essay in Punctuate. In this interview, she shares her thoughts and experiences about writing in diverse genres; traveling; and yoga.

Juliana Ravelli: Your work in this month’s issue of Punctuate. is your first published comic, right? When did you start writing and designing comic and graphic essays? How and when did you start working on this form?

Elizabeth Kadetsky: A few years back, I wanted to get back into drawing, and I had a crazy idea to revisit and write about this place where I’d studied art in Greenwich Village as a teenager with my mother. Well, that idea didn’t take off because I realized that it would be much cheaper to audit a drawing class [where I teach] at my university, Penn State, instead. My teacher turned out to be a wonderful artist and graduate student from China who drew Manga. I showed her some sketches that I’d been doing from photographs, images of family members with text scrawled in the white spaces, and she suggested that I work on a comic. I had an aha! moment: I shouldn’t be writing about drawing, I should be drawing (and writing) that story about Greenwich Village and my mother. I’ve been working on that graphic memoir ever since—I had no idea the difficulty of the task I’d set for myself.

The other thing I’d recently dove into without ever accepting its difficulty was motherhood. Suddenly I had long stretches of time with my baby during which I didn’t have the presence of mind to practice my usual craft, writing. I was suffering sleep deprivation and could barely string together sentences—I think it was a fairly normal postpartum, a-verbal, semi-psychosis. It was as if language had left me. But I was able to draw and paint. I painted birds over and over, and number cards to photograph with my baby to mark the monthly anniversaries of his birth, which was four and a half years ago.

Living with a young child makes your world more visual. Language becomes more elemental—you see the world through the eyes of someone glimpsing it for the first time. As my son grew older, I encountered the rich text/image world of children’s literature and wonderful artist-writers such as Oliver Jeffers and Molly Bang. Now my son and I are reading Tintin and the original Batman’s.

I love existing in the space and flow of visual art. The mind attuned to visual art is so different from the one that writes—it is less linear; it requires long pauses; it doesn’t require one to formulate a literal idea and keep it in the head over a long stretch. I’d always loved the idea of a non-verbal mind space, and over the years, I had used drawing and drawing classes as a kind of meditation and escape from regular life. As a teen, drawing had been my first love, but I’d shied from art school. Today it’s back in style thanks to comics.

JR: Could you tell us about how you came up with the idea for your piece in Punctuate.?

EK: I was participating in a panel on text/image memoir at the NonFictioNOW conference, and I started “graphic note-taking” at the other panels and talks. I’d seen people doing this earlier in the year when I attended the Comics and Medicine Conference at the Comics Studies Society in White River Junction, Vermont. There, the organizers set aside seats at each panel for “graphic note-takers,” and there was a hashtag for their uploads. The conference also had an official graphic note-taker. When I looked over my notes from NonFictioNOW, I realized I should publish some, especially since it would give me a break from my longer project–not to mention feel good to finish something.

JR: What are the challenges of a comic/graphic essay? How, for instance, do you play with conciseness, drawings, text, and the arrangement of these elements on the page?

EK: It’s its own form, that’s for sure. There’s always so much less room for text than I expect there to be; the prose writer has to condense beyond comfort. Of course, if I don’t want to condense, I can always add another page and spread out. The give-and-take between writing and drawing is fun and dynamic. Adding another page because there’s not enough room for the text must be the craft equivalent of writing oneself into a corner and then drawing oneself out of it. Shifting brain-modes from writing to drawing and then back again provides a healthy mental calisthenics.

JR: You worked as a journalist, and you write fiction, personal essays, and comic/graphic essays. What motivates you to venture into all these different genres?

EK: It’s been intuitive, but I do really admire other artists who constantly shift modes, and are open to the modes that are getting the most attention at whatever moment. If you have a story to tell, the goal is to find an audience for that story. The mainstream publishing industry has gone bankrupt a dozen times and in a dozen different ways since I started publishing my writing. It’s terrible to feel trapped in the idea that there is only one outlet for one’s creativity. Writers have historically been at the mercy of publishing and production trends.

So, I admire writer friends who have gone into film or even TV. If TV is experiencing a renaissance, why not apply your craft in that field, where you’ll encounter other inspiring artists and gain support for your most creative output? Not that I’m going into TV. But in a weird way comics feel very vital right now—I have no qualms about trying to hop on that train.

JR: How do the different experiences that you have in writing influence one another?

EK: Journalism teaches pragmatism—the clear sentence, the chronological storyline, economy of prose, writing on deadline, overcoming perfectionism, developing a thick skin for feedback. It’s a great training for any writer.

Working visually teaches metaphor. In a comic, when you want to depict your character as birdlike, you draw her as a bird. It’s kind of obvious, but getting your writer brain to think of metaphor as real pushes your imagination. Even in nonfiction, one can probably take greater creative liberties than one thinks. The blank canvas is unencumbered—one has to think in several dimensions, and directions, at once—not just left to right, up and down, and within a palette of just 26 letters. If I think of my character as a bird, and I mean in text, why shouldn’t I get her squawking on the page?

JR: Traveling is a huge part of your life, right? In which moment did you find out that you wanted to know the world? And what are your memories about your first trip abroad? When did it happen?

EK: That is such a great question! It happened when I was nineteen and I was majoring in Latin American Studies. I got it in my head that I wanted to go to Cuba because of some of the films and writing in my classes. I found a program to send me there for free—it was sponsored by the American Friends Service Committee, a Quaker organization—and I was chosen as one of a team of two Canadians and two US citizens to act as mediators between Marxists and Christians out in the fields, planting yucca trees.

Someday I will go back and rewrite (or draw) the diary I kept from that one-month trip. It was a life-altering, coming-of-age journey, in part because Communism had so completely shaped the culture of that place that there was hardly any common ground between my hosts and me. At the time, the US embargo on Cuba was total and included a news blackout going both ways. As it turned out, I knew nothing about the lives of the people there, and they knew nothing about mine—there had been a misinformation campaign on both ends. And yet, there was music, dancing, and singing bringing us together, things that transcended politics.

I remember coming home and having to break up with my boyfriend at the time because I’d changed so much as a person. Then, for several months, I was very depressed, wanting to get back to that feeling of living life so fully moment to moment, having heated discussions about every little thing, questioning and debating everything down to one’s most minute daily habits.

JR: Many of your trips are connected to your work, your writing. What is the difference between traveling for writing and traveling as a tourist? Is there a place that you have been to but haven’t used in your writing?

EK: I love this question, too, because it forces me to take stock. As a writer, one must always be working, but, in life, sometimes the imagination and the urge to document shuts down—from exhaustion, or overload. I can’t remember ever taking a trip and not feeling that I had to come away with something to say and write from it, but in reality, many of my work and vacation trips have yielded nothing aside from greater wisdom (one hopes).

I can’t even say I gained relaxation because it’s so stressful to feel one should be writing or interviewing instead of sitting on that beach. I think back on trips I took to Egypt, Morocco, Israel, and Spain as not having been particularly fruitful even though they were meant to be.

The work of the writer who travels, really, is to shake things up in one’s mind. Obviously, the outsider is not going to be the last word on any place she or he encounters. I remember reading Thomas Pynchon’s V, set in Malta, one time when I was feeling very stuck while spending the summer in Nicaragua working and presumably writing my senior thesis for college.

Later, I published a novella set in Malta, so perhaps it wasn’t a waste. Recently I recovered an old photo of myself reading The Brothers Karamazov in a hotel in Spain during a trip where I felt completely aimless, but Dostoyevsky taught me so much as a writer, and when else would I have had time to read him? I read David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest in France, and that book was life changing for me.

JR: Aside from the stories themselves (characters, settings, etc.), in what other ways does traveling influence your craft?

EK: Traveling ratchets up the desperation impulse, at least for me. The finances of it all can be terrifying. Most of my international trips have been seat-of-the-pants—funding the plane fare by subletting my apartment, living on the largesse of a boyfriend’s language-study grant, stringing together freelance magazine assignments and arts residency fellowships. Even when I had the Fulbright grant to India to study and write about yoga, I had no home, job, or bank account to soften the landing when I came home.

That feeling of living on the edge can either make things feel exaggerated with meaning and importance, or simply crushing. Luckily the former describes most of my trips. I would say that each piece of successful writing that I’ve come away with from abroad bestows upon its protagonist either that desperation (in fiction), or an all-consuming and worry-obliterating single-mindedness and focus on a topic (in nonfiction).

JR: You lived a year in India working with Yogi BKS Iyengar and from this experience you wrote First There is a Mountain. In which ways do you apply yoga to your craft?

EK: Studying and researching yoga in India taught me to think of yoga as a kind of hygiene, a practical approach to living. A man I met at the Krishnamurthi Foundation in Chennai put it this way: “Yoga is like brushing your teeth. You do it every day. If you don’t do it one day, then you don’t eat that day.” Lately I do the yoga poses less than before because of injuries, but I exercise and meditate pretty much daily.

What I learned about focus and concentration from yoga applies to writing. And let’s face it, yoga, as we know it, even the Indian version, is an amalgam of dozens of Eastern and Western philosophies and ancient and modern practices, including psychotherapy and Jack Lalanne fitness. It’s all really a mash-up. So, yoga, mindfulness, techniques from cognitive behavioral therapy—call them what you like, on a good day, they completely shape how I live and write and work. Concretely, they help me attain the cognitive sharpness and flexibility to be creative—to make mental leaps, to silence the self-editor within, to take risks.

JR: What are your next literary and travel adventures?

EK: Funny you should ask! I recently found out that I was awarded my second Fulbright research grant to India for the 2019–2020 school year. The award is to research a novel dealing with the politics of cultural patrimony surrounding antiquities ownership and preservation. I don’t think anyone would mind if I came away with comics reporting on the topic. Whoops! Don’t tell anyone I said that. I’m definitely bringing my drawing pads, pencils, erasers, India ink, and brushes—and Photoshop. I hope I can find a scanner.

Juliana Ravelli is the Assistant Managing Editor for Punctuate. A Nonfiction Magazine.

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Elizabeth Kadetsky is the author of a memoir (First There Is a Mountain, Little Brown), a story collection (The Poison that Purifies You, C&R Press) and a novella (On the Island at the Center of the Center of the World, Nouvella). Her fiction has been included in the Pushcart Prize, Best New American Voices, and in Love Stories For Turbulent Times — a best of the previous 25 years of the Pushcart Prize, and her personal essays have appeared in the New York Times, Antioch Review, and many other venues. She is nonfiction editor at New England Review and associate professor of creative writing at Penn State University. This is her first published comic.