In her graphic memoir Where the Mountain Gods Live, Aurore drew inspiration from Craig Thompson’s book-length graphic memoir, Blankets. At first it may appear that the two stories have little in common: one is set in snowy Wisconsin and the other in lush Japan; one is about a sexual and romantic relationship and the other is about a friendship. However, they both reflect on journeys of religious disillusionment, and both use rich natural imagery to communicate emotion.
As Aurore explains in her reflection, she was inspired by a formal element in Blankets: Thompson draws many meaningful blankets (his brother’s bedclothes, a handmade quilt, a blanket of snow) to bind together disparate parts of his story. Aurore decided to use repeated images of incense to create a visual backbone to her own narrative, to great effect.
Our WR152 class spent about four weeks creating these graphic memoirs, moving through brainstorming, imitation, draft and revision steps. Students had prepared for the project since the beginning of the course through their detailed study of the graphic memoir genre and an independent research project on a memoir of their choosing. While Aurore is clearly a talented artist, her memoir is successful primarily because of elements that do not depend on a realistic or beautiful drawing style; it is successful because of her expert handling of time (in panel transitions and page layout, for example), her excellent visual and verbal repetition, and her ability to use quiet and absence.
Aurore’s memoir is an excellent teaching model for anyone exploring imitation, adaptation, or graphic genres. To use Aurore’s graphic memoir in your classroom, you might do the following:
A) Reverse-“Outline.” In writing instruction, we sometimes take a fully-formed paper draft and perform a reverse outline exercise to get a better sense of its organization. In this way, we can see how strong papers work or see possibilities to improve weaker ones. Students studying graphic genres could perform a similar exercise on selected pages of Aurore’s memoir. Keeping the same panel layout and words, return Aurore’s fully-formed imagery to its “sketch” version, made up only of stick figures and other simple shapes. Discuss what (if anything) is lost between the two versions. Is anything gained in the simpler version? Can students see the inner workings of the comic genre more clearly in its simpler form?
B) Taking Inspiration. Aurore was drawn to Thompson’s religion experiences and his repetition, but in the process of creating her own memoir she brought in many new elements that were not central to Thompson’s memoir, such as close friendship, the magic of nature, grief, and so on. As a creative exercise, students could take Aurore’s short memoir as inspiration for their own adaptation. Working fairly quickly in or outside of class, students could sketch a graphic response to Aurore’s memoir, in the form of their own true-life story or fiction. What did students take from Aurore’s story? What did they borrow to transform into something new? Where did their imaginations take them that a reader couldn’t have predicted from looking at Aurore’s original? Answering questions like these will also help students prepare to write reflections on creative alternative genre pieces in any course level.
— JESSICA KENT
WR 152: Writing, Research, & Inquiry with Digital/Multimedia Expression