After Raffaella Tolicetti graduated from college, she signed up to volunteer on a Sea Shepherd ship, setting off with a group of other activists to sail the high seas to prevent illegal whale hunting. She quickly was appointed the crew’s chef, despite no professional cooking experience. Her cookbook, Think! Eat! Act! shares what she’s learned about animal rights activism, veganism, and of course cooking on a tight budget on board a moving ship. She took a moment on land to answer these questions, right before boarding the Sam Simon for an anti-whaling campaign in the Faroe Islands.

Think! Eat! Act!  is an unusual cookbook—at least, I haven’t ever seen another cookbook that other than just recipes and stories also tells you how to get vegan food in prison. How did the book come to be?

Over the last ten years or so, I have had the chance to meet a lot of people that inspired me with what they were doing to address issues of social injustice, racism, animal exploitation or earth destruction. I have learnt a lot, and I felt that I wanted both to share with as many people possible the knowledge that I had acquired, but also to give back to the people that have inspired me so much, supporting their efforts and campaigns giving them a space and a voice to speak out, and giving them money to fund their cause. 

I had been a vegan cook with Sea Shepherd for three years at the time the idea of a book mixed with recipes and info on activism started to grow in my mind. On one side, a vegan cookbook to demystify the difficulties of vegan cooking, considering that during that particular campaign we had very little, I had to do all the food from scratch with no “intermediary” ingredients (no mock meat, cheeses, or eggs for example) and I had a lot of fun cooking with very simple ingredients, even when the conditions were hard (we got rammed several times during that campaign, were in the rough seas of Antarctica, and I still kept cooking the whole time!). On the other hand, one of my friends was starting his own campaign in Canada, funded by the Wildlife Defense League, and I felt I should support him somehow even if I couldn’t be there physically. 

From that moment, I couldn’t stop thinking of all the projects I wanted to give voice to, and not forget that while we enjoy a lot of our freedom in our every daily life, some people are in jail while defending the same ideals we share. I had put those thoughts into written words, hoping they would reach as many people as possible, even people that are far, far away from veganism or activism. This was my main interest from the beginning. There are so many vegan recipe cookbooks, you can find inspiration everywhere, so I wanted Think! Eat! Act! to bring something different. Having vegan info, recipes and then testimony from activism sounded like a good balance in a book, something new.

What are your favorite recipes for the following situations: While on a blockade; in the doldrums; in a storm; for a celebration; the first thing you want to eat when you get on land?

I’ll start with the easy one, first thing I want to eat when I come back to land: lettuce and fruit! Just fresh stuff, simple as possible!

In a storm, only rice, if anything. That might even be too much for my stomach.

For the blockade, something handy like a nice piece of bread with the broccoli cream. In the doldrums, garlic and chili spaghetti, and for a celebration… maybe asparagus lasagna? Or carbonara?

Do most Sea Shepherd chefs cook similar meals, or do you all have very different styles?

On the ships we come from really different countries and so far I have been working with cooks that are from Australia, Singapore, Sweden, America, Italy, France, South Africa, and more, so we all have very different styles to start from. But then we all got to work together and exchange recipes so there are classic meals that are done on all the ships. Basically the one the crew always ask for. Like seitan schnitzels, ravioli, tiramisu, pad thai, mainly all the comfort foods!

What is your next adventure?

I am heading at sea tomorrow for a new campaign in the Northern Sea. If you want some updates check the Sea Shepherd Global website!

This interview with Raffa Tolicetti is one of a series of author interviews. The last one was with Teenage Rebels author Dawson Barrett.

A whole lot of hours and days and weeks in the last year at the Microcosm HQ have gone into pouring love and effort into Teenage Rebels: Stories of Successful High School Activists from the Little Rock 9 to the Class of Tomorrow. We couldn’t be prouder of the end result, which just came back from the printer. Author Dawson Barrett kindly answered some questions about the book and his vision:

How did your original idea become the book that readers can hold in their hands today?

The story of the original idea is not especially interesting, but the punch line is that Joe Biel and I have some similar political ideas and both think the kids are alright!

The book includes about fifty short vignettes. Some of them are pretty famous (the Little Rock 9, Brown v. Board of Education), but many of them have not been thought about, by anyone, in several decades. They had been essentially lost to history, but the digitization of newspapers has given them a chance to be re-told. The stories that made it into the book were my favorites, but there were hundreds more.

After I wrote the vignettes, Meggyn Pomerleau put the cover together and added the illustrations. I think about half of them are loosely based on actual historical photos, but for the rest she had to work from scratch. And they really bring the stories to life. The book is not quite a graphic novel, but it shares many of the same story-telling advantages.

Who is the book for? Who do you ideally want to read it?

In my mind, there are two main audiences for the book. The first is the most obvious. It’s for teenage rebels! I wrote it for young people. It’s their history. So, I hope they find it useful. I think these stories are empowering, and teens are an especially disenfranchised group. My own teen years were an exercise in correctly identifying injustices and then directing my anger almost entirely at the wrong targets. So, I hope young people will read the book and see that it is possible to vent your frustrations in ways that actually make positive changes. The future is in their hands.

The second audience for the book includes teachers and other people who work with youth or who are otherwise interested in being their allies. As I think about it, though, this is really just an indirect route to the first group!

I’m a history teacher, and all over our country, there are serious efforts to re-write the US history curriculum to downplay inequality and protest and instead promote empty patriotism and respect for authority. Those are the actual stated goals of one such campaign. I would love to counter that. My dream would be for high school teachers around the country to find themselves with a few extra minutes left at the end of class, and maybe talk about something a bit more exciting (like, say, a couple of stories from this book!). They are set up to be conversation starters: Why were the students upset? How did they try to make change? Why did they win or lose? How does this compare to your school experience?

Were you a teenage rebel yourself, or did you come to be an appreciator of teenage revolution later in life?

I was a pretty angry (and overly serious) young person, and I went to high school in a very conservative, small, and often small-minded town. Thankfully, I had a few friendly teachers and a very active punk rock scene. My friends and I primarily rebelled by putting on punk shows and through them creating our own social spaces. And that required a lot of organization. Our town couldn’t sustain a music venue, so we had to rent out American Legion halls and do all of the work ourselves—book the bands, hang up flyers, set up and clean up, etc. So, basically, just imagine a 16-year-old with a mohawk haggling with a Korean War veteran over a broken folding chair at the end of the night. That, in a nutshell, was our teenage rebellion.

Those experiences very much shaped who I’ve become, but at that time I had no real understanding of how power works. So, I really wouldn’t call anything I did “activism.” I didn’t find activist politics until a bit later on.

You’re going on tour with the book in July and August. What will happen at your tour events and why did you choose this way to promote the book?

Well, DIY punk tours were a huge part of my life at one point, but it’s now been ten years since my last one. This tour will essentially swap out basements and squats for independent bookstores and public libraries. And I’ll be accompanied by my partner and our three-month-old, instead of a band. I do think the spirit of the tour will be similar, though. The goal will still be to meet new people and see new things. Plus, I think there’s at least a discussion to be had as to whether squats or libraries are more under assault from the powers that be!

Thus far, the talks aimed at teens will be a combination of stories from the book and brainstorming sessions around who makes the decisions that govern high schools, which decisions young people would like to see changed, etc. This is really a new world for me, but teen librarians are awesome. At one event, after my talk, we are all going to make protest posters. At another, there will be a button-maker for protest buttons. I think it’s going to be a fun tour!

Anything else I should ask?

I’m not sure what the question would be, but the answer is that, honestly, the book is really fun, no matter your age. I’ve read these stories hundreds of times now, but many of them still bring a smile to my face. The kids are alright, indeed!

Also, the book makes a really great gift for the rebellious teenager (or teacher) in your life…and for the teen section of your local library…and maybe even the library at your old high school…

This has been an interview with Teenage Rebels author Dawson Barrett. It’s one of a series of author interviews; the last one was with Consensuality author Helen Wildfell. The next is with vegan cookbook author Joshua Ploeg.

Helen Wildfell came to us with a proposal for a zine about her experiences learning to build healthy relationships. We liked it so much that we asked her to turn it into a book. The result is Consensuality: Navigating Feminism, Gender, and Boundaries Towards Loving Relationships. With the help of a handful of brave coadventurers and Microcosm designer Meggyn Pomerleau’s illustrations and interactive activities, Consensuality is like a friend friend who sticks with you through the toughest times and helps you always move on to do things better. 

Consensuality is a very personal book, in which you and others share some pretty hard-learned lessons and brave levels of self-examination. Did you know the major themes of the book before you started writing, or did the insights come out in the writing process?

I initially wrote about the topics in Consensuality out of emotional necessity. I was at a place in my life where I needed to reexamine how I approached relationships, and writing was my method for sorting through my own gender and sexuality. As I continued to write, I began to notice that certain emotional themes kept reappearing. For instance, the three R’s in the book (Regretful, Resentful, and Respectful) emerged through the simple act of writing down my feelings.

There were still many more insights to be gained after I began turning Consensuality into a full-length book. I focused more on uniting the themes into a cohesive idea of Consensuality, which eventually led me to realize that consent is more than a concept, it’s a long journey with changing themes. Each time I reread the book, sit down to write something new, or just interact with my partner, I discover additional ideas about consent and how it works within relationships.

Your book is different than most other books about relationships; you don’t offer rules or formulas for having a healthy relationship but share examples instead. Can you talk about why you chose to write this way?

I think many “self-help” books reinforce the idea that there is one way to live life. Acting as an authority on a topic and creating rules for obtaining success can make the ideas in a book appear as some sort of absolute truth. But as convenient as it would be to have a formula for healthy relationships, examples of personal experiences provide more insight into the intricacies of human bonds. It was very important to me that my voice be read as one perspective in the larger conversation about healthy relationships. Including contributors as co-adventurers was also a crucial part of providing a fuller picture of consent. The other authors involved in the book offer viewpoints that extend beyond the limits of my individual experience.

The book comes out July 14th. How do you think readers will respond? How do you hope the book will be taken?I imagine that it will be easy for some readers to relate to the experiences and lessons in Consensuality, while other readers may find blind spots in how I wrote about consent. There’s so much to explore when you’re interacting with another person; I know that we are only scratching the surface in Consensuality. Regardless of whether they like or dislike, agree or disagree, with what I wrote in the book, I want the readers to feel empowered to start talking about these issues in their relationships. There are a lot of ideas about consent out there, some good and some bad, but I’m very excited that people are considering consent at a societal level with policy changes and at a personal level with stories about intimate interactions. As people read more about gender, sexuality, and boundaries, I hope they’ll begin to feel more comfortable discussing consent with their sexual partners.

What’s next for you?

The plan is to continue reading, writing, and talking about equality in relationships. I’d like for my next project to start from a personal place, like Consensuality did, and lately I’ve been thinking a lot about how money affects relationships. It was a major issue for my parents, even years after their divorce, and while my partner and I generally have healthy communication habits, the intermingling of our finances is new territory for us. It’s easy to see money issues as something that only irresponsible people face, but the reality is that as long as money is unfairly distributed, it will challenge equality in all relationships. I want to start exploring how individuals can challenge the effects of economic inequality in their personal relationships.

This interview with Helen Wildfell, author of Consensuality, is the latest in our series of author interviews. Our last author interview was with Crate Digger author Bob Suren. The next interview is with Teenage Rebels author Dawson Barrett.

In 2013, we published Andy Singer‘s Why We Drive: The Past, Present, and Future of Automobiles in America. Part history, part original reporting, and part sharp, illustrated commentary, it tells a chilling story of why the US is the way it is. There isn’t any other book quite like this one, and we asked Andy to talk about it and his other work via email.

Love what Andy has to say? Check out our superpack of his work.

Why We Drive is a unique book, combining cartoons, text-form journalism, and photographs. How did it come about?

After I did the book CARtoons in 2001, I got invitations to speak at various venues including The Village Building Convergence, bookstores and a few universities. Being a visual artist, I gradually developed a slide talk about the social, environmental, economic and political problems of transportation design in America. I used a mixture of cartoons, photographs and maps because I found it was helpful to give people real-world examples of good and bad urban design. When I got positive feedback from the talk, I became interested in turning it into a book and an interactive website. I still have to build the interactive website but Microcosm helped me create, edit and publish the book. My goal was to explain transportation design issues and politics in a simple way to college students and the general public, as well as put forward a few ideas about why I believe we’re not making more political progress at reforming our transportation system.

How did you start drawing cartoons about bikes, cars, and related issues? What was the first cartoon you made?

I use cartoons as a way to experience and understand life, the way a writer might use words or a photographer might use photos. I make cartoons about everything—personal experiences, relationships, art, philosophy, politics, religion and anything else I am experiencing or thinking about. In college and after college I was trying to give myself as much time to draw as possible so I was trying to live as cheaply as possible. Not owning a car and getting around by bicycle and walking was part of that attempt to live cheaply. 

Starting in high school I was aware that there were too many cars and our landscape was being decimated to provide space for cars, particularly in urban areas. I think I drew my first cartoons or drawings about it in college. They were the drawing the guy being overwhelmed by tiny cars that became the cover of CARtoons and the drawing of the globe surrounded by cars that became the cartoon “The road to hell is paved.” 

When I graduated from college, I sought out the cheapest rooms or apartments I could find. One of these put me next to a freeway interchange in Oakland California. The experience of living there, biking everywhere and reading the book The Power Broker by Robert Caro, changed my life and made me appreciate all the issues associated with transportation. I saw exactly how and why the freeway interchange gutted my neighborhood and how the main obstacle and danger to bicycling in urban areas was cars and drivers. This was the early 1990s when many people were waking up to these same issues. I participated in some of the first Critical Mass rides in San Francisco and the East Bay and started giving them my transportation cartoons for flyers and posters. I also discovered the (now defunct) “Auto-Free Times” and Alliance for a Paving Moratorium in Arcata, California and started sending them cartoons as well. By 1994 it had become a major theme in my work.

Most people in the US still see bicycles as a sport or something kids do. Do you have a lot of awkward conversations about what your work is actually about?

Not really. Most of my friends and family appreciate where I’m coming from. They’ve been around me and see how I live or have ridden bicycles in urban areas and appreciate what that experience is like. Also, everyone in America has driven somewhere and understands what driving is like. Because many of my cartoons are true to that experience, even most car-drivers will acknowledge the reality of what I draw. Now days, city planners, elected officials and many people in the general public are hip to these issues and trying to figure out how to make their cities less car-dependent or reduce the amount of driving in their lives. Since 2008, for the first time in American history, Vehicle Miles Traveled (the measure of how much we drive) has actually gone down slightly, despite an increase in the country’s population. So people are trying to drive less.

Your work covers a lot of big issues like sprawl, climate change, transportation policy, pollution, economics… What can ordinary people with busy lives and not a lot of political access do to address this stuff?

You can try to address it in your own life. You can try to set up your life so you have to drive as little as possible. In so doing, you vote with your feet and your wallet. When more people bike, walk and use public transit, there is greater pressure on elected officials and government agencies to improve these modes of transportation. It thus increases the profitability of public transit and makes cities more desirable places to live. It also helps reduce your carbon footprint and reduces the amount of money going to automobile manufacturers, oil companies and highway agencies.

In a globally connected capitalist world, cities and countries are competing for highly skilled labor—programmers, engineers, scientists, etc. To some degree, these people can live anywhere they want. So San Francisco or my current city in Minnesota aren’t just competing with other U.S. cities but are competing with cities in Europe for the best and brightest talent. Polls and statistics show that more and more skilled people want to live in cities that are walkable, bikeable and have good public transit. Also our population is aging and realizing that they don’t want to be trapped in automobile-oriented retirement communities in Florida or the southwest USA. They also want improved walkability and transit. Finally, there’s been an explosion of obesity in the USA with resulting increases in healthcare costs. Many factors contribute to this but increased amounts of driving and a lack of daily exercise are major factors. City, state and business leaders in the US are increasingly aware of all this. It is part of Gil Peñalosa’s “8-80” message (the former parks commissioner of Bogotá, Colombia) and many other leaders.

So how you live your life has an impact on the larger world. Driving less also frees up more of your time to do other things, like participate in the political process at both a local and national level—in school boards, city councils, planning commissions or even political campaigns. If you don’t have to spend two hours a day driving to work or driving your kids to school, you might have time to help organize a “safe-routes-to-schools” program in your school or get walkability or bikeability improvements to your neighborhood.

One thing you realize from trying to reorient your life and get around using your own human power is that no one is going to help us or save us but us. It’s a do-it-yourself world. If we want to prevent environmental destruction, live better lives, get campaign finance reform, peace or justice, it’s up to us to organize and take action. We are the government and we are the world.

This has been an interview with Andy Singer, author of Why We Drive. It is one of a series of interviews with Microcosm authors. The last interview was with Lisa Wilde, author of Yo, Miss. The next one is with Crate Digger author Bob Suren.

Last month, we felt lucky and stoked to publish Yo, Miss: A Graphic Look at High School, Lisa Wilde’s nonfiction graphic novel about teaching at an inner-city second chance high school. Since then, the rest of the world has been falling in love with the book just like we did—it’s been getting glowing reviews, and readers are quickly picking it up and keeping it close. I asked Lisa some questions over email about her road to publication and some back story and updates to the stories in the book. 

Before Yo, Miss was a book, it was a series of comics zines. What led you to start making those, and what was the transition to traditional format publishing like?

Yo, Miss is my first book. I’d never drawn cartoons before, and I turned 60 this past summer – all of which fits with why I teach at Wildcat. In many ways, what the school is about (and what I hope the book is about) is confronting stereotypes. In other words, the potential that is inherent in all of us that just needs a little help or the right circumstances to allow it to come out.

In society’s eyes, I have no credibility in terms of making a graphic book, much less getting it positively reviewed. In society’s eyes, most of our students are perceived a little like Ellison’s invisible man—either as a threat or not seen at all. What we at Wildcat try to do is to allow our students’ potential to come out, and challenge whatever stereotype society wants to place on them, along with the stereotypes they may place on themselves.

The idea for Yo, Miss was always as a graphic book. This choice may have been because I was inexperienced, but I also had nothing to lose by dreaming big. And once I started making Yo, Miss, the process was so interesting that finishing it was never in question.

Publishing was a whole other deal. During most of the process, there wasn’t time to think about anything beyond what I was doing. But at a certain point, I realized I wanted to see if I could get this out into the world in some way. I was given Microcosm’s name by another publisher, so I contacted Joe and he asked if he could publish Yo as a series of zines. I said yes immediately, and then went to the Internet to find out what a zine was. Once I found out, I was thrilled.

Joe, for me, was someone who saw my potential outside of stereotypes, and for that I am eternally grateful. And then he took the next risk, which was to publish it as a book. Having Yo come out as zines before it came out as a book was incredibly helpful for me in many, many ways. Between the performances and other promotion, I got a much better idea of how to move this book out into the world, which is something very different than making the book.

What next? Will you be drawing more Yo Miss comics? Will you continue (or are you still) teaching at Wildcat, the second chance high school depicted in the book? Other big projects on the horizon?

What’s up next? I always feel like the air space above Kennedy Airport around 7:00 in the evening – all those planes circling around waiting to land. My second book—Lacunae: a Diary in Pictures—is just about ready to send out. It’s another book with words and drawings, though it isn’t in comics form.  (And unfortunately it’s not up Microcosm’s alley. All the drawings are color, and there are a lot of them.) The images are visceral, emotional and archetypal—kind of a combination of Charlotte Salomon, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Jung. I hope to get the dummy of my third book, Noah and the Boa Dance Round the World (a children’s book), completed by the end of summer. I’m not going to even mention the idea for the fourth book (but it is great!)  My biggest issue is time. I still work full-time at Wildcat – and love it, though (as I described in the book) I am almost always tired.

There’s a tug of war right now about the future of public education in the US. If you were spirited away today to Washington to give policy recommendations to the president, what would they be?

If I was asked to give policymakers advice in terms of public education, I would say three things: 1) use standardized tests as one narrow measure of success instead of the defining concept, 2) do the math and see that standardized testing and technology are not cheaper solutions in terms of improving educational performance (and recognize that their connection to improving performance is also questionable.) and 3) take some of the money poured into standardized testing and technology and use it to reduce class size, increase noncore classes like art, music, dance, school sports, etc., and provide meaningful classroom support to improve classroom teaching.

Because of what has happened with computers, the world is in a seismic shift in terms of using data to inform decisions. However, society is still in the early phases of this shift and too often data is seen as meaningful simply because it is data i.e. a score on a standardized test = what someone knows, whether the test is meaningful or not. Going along with that (and this is why I begin the first chapter with the quote attributed to Einstein) is the idea that things that aren’t easily measured must not be valuable.

If academic growth is the only value for education, society loses.

Reading Yo Miss, it was easy to get attached to a lot of the students. Can you share any “where are they now”s with us?

As you probably know, the students in Yo, Miss are fictionalized composites. I did that for confidentiality, but also I tried to be as true to who our students are as possible, and most characters had many models. We have had many students like Danny, the boy who kept calling me “Snowflake.” One student, Joe Garcia (who called Oedipus “stupid”) is now a union electrician, making more money than me. I spotted another Danny model on the subway awhile back. There was a kid sitting across from me, deeply involved in a thick hardback book. It looked like one of our graduates, but the kid wouldn’t look up—he was so into the book—so I couldn’t be sure. Finally, when he reached his stop, our eyes met and it was indeed Keith Wooten—former bane of every Wildcat staff member. Tyrell Bramble, whose poem Life and Times of Young Rellington is recited by Will, was back visiting Wildcat a few weeks ago. He’s now a nurse. However, I don’t mean to give the impression that it’s all positive. Another model for Will—a student who we all loved who dropped out before graduation—was killed by 23 bullets in a gang hit.

Jessica De La Rosa, the model for Janis Diaz (the student who has osteogenisis imperfecta), graduated from John Jay College and on April 16th she and I are going to be at CWE, a branch of City College, talking about the book and the importance of challenging stereotypes. Jessica is an inspiration and a force of nature—foster parenting three disabled children, competing in national rowing events, and promoting disability rights. She is also a dear friend.

This interview with Yo, Miss author Lisa Wilde is part of a series of interviews with Microcosm authors. The last interview was with Katie Haegele and the next one is with Andy Singer.

Long ago, Joe handed me a book and said “you’ll like this.” It was Katie Haegele’s White Elephants: Yard Sales, Relationships, and Finding What Was Missing. I did like it; I still haven’t really gotten over how much. I emailed Katie to ask some questions about her writing and her experiences promoting it. True to form, she replied with her trademark combination of thoughtfulness and profanity. 

You have two books out with Microcosm: White Elephants and Slip of the Tongue, but you’ve also written a tremendous amount as a journalist, writer, and zinester. Can you give us a sense of what sort of writing work you’ve put out there and what sort of themes tie together the many different topics you’ve tackled? 

Thanks for asking! If it looks like a tremendous amount of writing at this point, that’s only because I’ll be a million years old on my next birthday. But let’s see. When I was in high school and college, I longed to grow up to become a newspaper writer. I thought that seemed really glamorous. I still do, actually, and it is, sort of. In the office of a good paper or magazine, the energy is really alive and the people are excited about what they’re doing. I started pursuing that kind of work after I graduated, and I have always considered myself a non-fiction writer of some kind, never a writer of fiction. I grew to love interviewing artists about their work and writing book reviews, and these have continued to be a source of work and income for me. But at some point in my 20s I found that I had more I needed to express than I was able to satisfy with this kind of work alone. So I started making zines of what I called my “personal” writing, and have been devoted to that as a mode of expression for years. Zines are still an important component of my writing life, the place where my mind goes when I need to write something too unusual to belong to a more traditional category (like poem, essay, article, whatever). 

I guess now that I’ve been doing memoir-style writing for several years, important themes that I’ve returned to are ideas about language, memory, nostalgia, and—at the risk of sounding really pompous—material culture. I like looking at different facets of our culture, like the way we speak and the way we dress, and mining them for a deeper meaning. I never get tired of thinking about how objects, like personal belongings that we buy, inherit, or receive as gifts, can be a way to look at so much else in life, including larger ideas like gender expression, family, and home, as well as loss and grief.


You’ve gone on several book and zine tours. How did you organize those? Were they straight-up readings? How did they go?

I’ve done a whole lot of readings at this point, but I haven’t planned too many tours. I’d like to do more. Two years ago my husband (then boyfriend) Joe and I planned a road trip, just for fun, to go see David Bazan play a show in Illinois. Then I had the idea, Hey, why don’t we book some reading dates for the cities and towns we’ll pass through, and call this a tour! (Joe is a writer and zine maker too.) So we did some research online and asked folks we know for help, and booked readings at a cafe, a record store, a bookstore, etc. In Bloomington, Indiana we read at a beautiful little bookstore called Boxcar Books; this was during the summer, and we did the reading on the porch.   

This tour was one of the most fun and rewarding things I’ve ever done, and it went a long way in helping me to get over some of my terror of public speaking. We kept showing up to these different places all sweaty and exhausted and trying to find parking, so I didn’t have the luxury of spending the whole day dreading the reading. I had to find some bathroom and splash a little water on my face, then hop up and do the show. I got better at going with the flow and now have a much more relaxed and confident attitude about performing. When we find enough time and money, Joe and I would like to go to California and do a mini-tour of readings there. 

What are the best ways you’ve found to promote your books and other work? Any tips for first-time authors?

I don’t know how good I am at promoting myself, because I’m not sure how to evaluate the amount of attention any of my writing has gotten and where that attention came from. I do think that publishing my work in mainstream publications has led more people to my zines and books than would otherwise have found them, so to someone who doesn’t already write for magazines or websites, I would recommend doing some of that to coincide with the publication of your book. You can also offer an excerpt or chapter of your book to be published in a magazine or journal, with the permission of your publisher. 

Get on Goodreads, too! I was already using that site, to keep a log of books I’m reading and want to read, when I found out about their Authors program, which is free and really nice. I set up a separate Author account and did a giveaway for my new book when it came out a few months ago. Several hundred people signed up to win a copy, which I think represents mostly people who didn’t already know who I am because folks shop that website to find new things to read. The people who win know they’re not obligated to review the book positively, or at all, but it seems that a lot of them participate in this program with the idea to write about any book they win, and a bunch of folks reviewed mine. Reviews of your book, whether they’re glowing or not, are very important to getting it sold and read. Goodreads has set the whole thing up really well, too; when I log on to use my normal account, I can see a thumbnail of my book along with some information about it, but not the number of stars it’s gotten from reviewers on the site. That way I don’t even feel tempted to peek. I don’t read any reviews my books receive, for what that’s worth, but when one is published (like in a magazine or something) I’ll use my blog to thank the writer for doing it and link to it for others to read. 

Besides all that, I think doing things like selling my zines on Etsy, making my modest little DIY website several years ago, and doing blog projects that are not directly related to my writing but are a creative outlet in other ways (like Portrait of a Closet, which I do with my friend Nadine), has given me a web presence that makes me easy to find. As a reader, I’m disappointed to find some forgotten blog that hasn’t been updated for 4 years when I go looking for a writer whose work I’m interested in. I like getting to know writers a bit through their internet writing—blog, twitter, Thought Catalog, whatever. It’s a good way to get writing practice (and publishing experience, of a kind) and to build a readership. That said, if you’d rather unplug all this shit and keep your head calm and just concentrate on your writing, you have my full support on that too. 

What are you working on next?

I am scheduled to do an illustrated book with you guys next year, which I am very excited about! At home here I’m a member of a print collective called the Soapbox, and I participate in things with them. This month they’ll bring member work to the second annual Philadelphia Art Book Fair, which I didn’t know about last year but looks exciting. I’ve also challenged myself to contribute to at least one comp zine, art show, or other group project every month. It makes me feel so good to send my zines to a library for donation, or contribute a piece of writing to a themed zine—that way, I’m not sitting here by myself hoping that someone will care about my writing. I’m part of a community, and we do things together to share our work with the world. 

Anything else I should have asked or that you want to say?

Just the same thing I always say, like a broken record: If you’ve ever had anything you wanted to write, even if you don’t consider yourself a writer, make a zine! Participating in the culture of zines has brought so many good things into my life, including several dear friends, a lot of really beautiful and interesting pen-pals, my beautiful and interesting husband, even unexpected but very nice “professional” opportunities, such as interviews with major publications. Making zines is the thing that, when all is said and done, helped me to feel like the artist I always knew I was.

This is one in a series of Microcosm author interviews. The last one was with Ben White of the Snake Pit books, and the next one is with Lisa Wilde of Yo, Miss. You could also think of this as part of the Self-Promotion for Introverts series.