Seeing Allison Bechdel - Entrepreneur Generations

Bechdel reading with images from Fun Home behind her.

When Alison Bechdel won the MacArthur Genius Grant in 2014, the foundation called her "a cartoonist and graphic memoirist exploring the complexities of familial relationships in multilayered works that use the interplay of word and image to weave sophisticated narratives." When I read Fun Home a few years ago, I was similarly entranced by the text's complexity, its interplay between classic literature and modern family dynamics, between drawing and words. It's certainly one of my favorite works of literature I've read in the last ten years, and, while I haven't seen the musical yet, it's on my list.

Therefore, I was so thrilled o see Bechdel was speaking at the General Assembly at NCTE on Friday. After navigating a crowd that was lining up shortly after 7am (NCTE didn't let people in until 7:50 or so), my colleague and I found seats about 10 rows back from the stage. After an introduction by Laura Julier of Michigan State University (Go Green!), Bechdel was captivating for nearly an hour onstage, as she described parts of her life, her career, and her creative process. Witty and engaging, Bechdel began her speech by saying, "I'm so honored to be standing in front of a auditorium full of English teachers!" She shared that both of her parents were English teachers, and both were NCTE members, with her mother attending conferences in the 1980s (we learned at the onset of the program that 2015 is the 105th NCTE annual convention!). She shared an anecdote that her mother, who loved grammar, was proud of her for being a writer, but perhaps more proud of her for being on a panel deciding which words go into the (Oxford?) Dictionary; Bechdel described debates about whether the word "impact" can be a verb, something she's standing strong against.

Bechdel speaks.

Bechdel then described the experience of having her father as her high school English teacher, sharing panels from Fun Home and giving some more background information on what was going on in her life at this point. Fascinatingly, Bechdel showcased several pieces of her writing for us, from high school, with teacher comments, from a poem she read during a weeklong unit taught by a guest poet in her father's class, to a paper swimming in red ink that her mother had commented on, to a college professor who critiqued her writing and fascinated her with the comment "ww" over certain words. This meant "wrong word", and for Bechdel, "just the idea that there was a wrong word and there was a right word was a call to adventure."

From the program

In her last paper in that professor's class, she felt like she finally got it, and this was punctuated by the "astonishing" comment in the margin next to her last sentence: "good." The paper delved into the last line of Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man: "Old father, old artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead." Bechdel shared that she struggled for years with how to access the story of her and her father, and she realized, in reflection, that her father was her "artificer." She shared that writing Fun Home was kind of like re-writing that essay she had written in college about the Joyce novel.

After college, Bechdel shared that she needed to see a reflection of women who look like her in the world, which led to Dykes to Watch Out For, the comic strip she wrote for 25 years. In was also a response to her father's life, she says: "My father had lived a deeply closeted life that ended badly, and I wanted the opposite... I wanted to destigmatize gayness."

Much of her work, Bechdel says, focuses on the tension between being an outsider and being a citizen. Bechdel liked being an

Dykes to Watch Out For

outsider; she says, "It gave me a power I didn't feel like I would have if I was on the 'inside.' Yet I had a yearning that my gayness be seen as 'normal.'"

Bechdel described the irony of achieving "normalcy" within the LBGT community. With battles like gay marriage now won, it ironically makes some LBGT movements "obsolete," in a way. There might not be a need for LGBT papers, for example. "It's probably," Bechdel says, "why I stopped drawing Dykes to Watch Out For." Gay people are now mainstream, and she says (in response to a woman in the audience who married her wife recently and went to a coffee shop that used to be a gay bar and who wonders, 'what were we fighting for again?') she's ambivalent about the issue and "holding" onto her ambivalence. Bechdel says she doesn't want to go back to what we had, but does miss it -- the community, even the feeling of superiority and specialness (she joked) she used to have.

Bechdel shared a paper her mom bled with red ink.

Bechdel wrapped up by sharing that her parents' judgment of her probably caused her to become a graphic memoirist. "I found a way to express myself in a way that my parents couldn't judge. I didn't become an artist or a write; I became an artist and a writer. And, somehow, I managed to write a book that gets taught in a lot of English classes."

The talk was one of the best I've ever seen, revelatory even. I left with inspiration, and hopeful that someday I might be able to teach Fun Home (to seniors, which would require Bechdel to be added to the IB List of Authors, which I think is a possibility at some point in the future).