Delve Guide Q&A: Lois Leveen

Delve Guide Q&A: Lois Leveen

Leveen will be leading Delve Readers’ Seminar ILLUSTRATING IDENTITY IN THE AGE OF THE GRAPHIC NOVEL. The seminar is five weeks long, Thursdays, JULY 15–AUGUST 12, 2010, 6:00–8:00 P.M.and takes place at the Portland Art Museum, 1219 SW Park Ave. Tuition includes a private tour of The Bible Illuminated: R. Crumb’s Book of Genesis exhibit and admission to Art Spiegelman’s Portland Arts & Lecture.

SEMINAR DESCRIPTION: Explore Crumb’s work in the context of Spiegelman, Joann Sfar, and Harvey Pekar. We’ll deepen our understanding of how and why author-illustrators use the medium of graphic novel to plumb questions of identity.

GUIDE: Lois Leveen earned degrees in history and literature from Harvard, USC, and UCLA. Her work has appeared in Bridges, Monkey Puzzle, and the book Queer Portland.

Q&A:

Literary Arts: You have degrees from three big-time universities and call yourself a “recovering academic.” What prompted that shift for you? What sorts of work are you currently engaged in/excited about?

Lois Leveen: A member of one of my Delve seminars once said, “Each week, at the end of our session, I go home feeling more like myself than any other time all week.” I love that description, because it applies to me as well.  I really love teaching, as well as research, and when I went to graduate school, I anticipated spending my entire career as a college professor. But I also love Portland, the sense of community and thoughtfulness here. Unfortunately, to be a professor, you have to move wherever a job is. I moved to Portland to take a three-year job at Reed—ten years ago. During those three years, I thought about how I could take my passion for education and translate it into work that would let me stay here. I’ve been really lucky, reinventing my career at several different steps, and currently I work in education philanthropy. I’m part of a nonprofit that helps grantmakers—at community foundations, large foundations, family foundations, corporate giving programs—understand critical issues in philanthropy and in education, so they can have the maximum impact in what they fund. It’s great work, but it doesn’t offer me a chance to teach, which is why I have stayed involved with Delve. It’s so energizing to be in a room of committed, caring readers, talking about how literature connects us. To be honest, one of the things I like best about Delve is the deep level of friendships I’ve seen develop among participants. For better and for worse, in sickness and in health, Delvers really are there for each other.  It really confirms what studying the humanities is all about: there is something about emotional and intellectual connection that makes us quintessentially human. That makes us, to allude to what that one participant said, who we really are.

LA: Marjane Satrapi, author of Persepolis, eschews the term graphic novelist, saying simply, “I write comics.” Her contemporaries seem torn between the two terms. Can you talk about the distinction between graphic novels and comics?

LL: True confession: I am not a huge reader of either comic books or graphic novels. In fact, I’m a bit surprised that I ended up designing this seminar rather than something focused on the literature I love most—nineteenth century American literature, African American literature, those sorts of things. And I confess that in the hopes that other folks who may not be huge fans of this genre will think about joining the seminar as well. For every Delve I lead, I want to share a great learning experience with participants—not show off my expertise. One of the great things about Delve is that people come to the reading with such varied life experiences—architects, anthropologists, historians, lawyers have all contributed to Delve conversations based on what they know and have done, in ways that enrich our collective understanding of the literature. So rather than offer my own thesis on what term to use, I’m more interested in leading some deep discussions about what is distinct, and what is not, when it comes to reading these kinds of texts. How do illustrations shape our interpretations of words, and vice versa? What’s the difference between illustrating a very familiar text, as R. Crumb has done, and choosing to tell a new story using images as well as words, as the other authors we’ll read have done? And what about Pekar—what does it mean to “author” a graphic or comic when you are not actually drawing? Isn’t drawing as integral to authorship as writing, at least in this genre?  As you can see, I like to raise questions, and this genre offers rich opportunities for wondering and pondering.

LA: How have the authors in your upcoming seminar brought their genre(s) greater respect and attention from the traditional literary world?

LL: The first graphic novel, if that’s what we’re calling it, I ever read was Maus, and I read it in the context of thinking about memoir and autobiography, and particularly about how people write about traumatic  events such as slavery or genocide. Clearly, the critical response to Maus opened up a new understanding of this genre; I think it really was the breakthrough book in that sense. And I might as easily have paired it with Frederick Douglass’ slave narrative (a work I keep meaning to bring into a Delve seminar—I swear, I’ll get to it one of these years). I guess I’m interested both in what’s unique to the genre and what it has in common with other types of literature.

LA: In his Book of Genesis, R. Crumb illustrates the search not for a personal identity, but the identity of Christian humankind. How does this work relate to the more personalized search for identity illustrated in Sfar’s or Pekar’s work?

LL: No fair! I’m not telling what I think. My goal as a Delve guide is to lead the group to think through these questions together. So if you really want an answer—sign up, speak up, and we’ll figure it out together.

LA: And most importantly, what are you reading these days?

LL: Well, the last novel I read was The Help, by Kathryn Stockett. I read it because I’m revising a novel of my own (you know, in my spare time), and my agent said she thought my novel is sort of a prequel to Stockett’s, although it’s set in the nineteenth century, in Richmond and Philadelphia. Actually, reading The Help made me think of another Delve I’d love to teach, using a very wonderful but unfortunately little known collection of stories by Alice Childress called Like One of the Family, from the mid-twentieth century, as well as Our Nig, by Harriet Wilson, the first African American woman to publish a novel, in the 1850s. But what I’m reading right now is London guidebooks. I’m supposed to be on vacation this week, but a certain Icelandic volcano has thwarted my plans. Hopefully it will pipe down in time for me to take a holiday in the land of Dickens and Shakespeare before I’m back for R. Crumb and company! 

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