Graphic artist Ellen Forney, who has chronicled her mood disorder in two autobiographical graphic novels, talks about the creation of these works.
In Marbles Mania, Depression, Michelangelo and Me and her new graphic memoir, Rock Steady, Forney uses the graphic novel format masterfully in depicting her bipolar swings. Drawn images make the intense moods and emotions of the bipolar condition more accessible to readers. She will talk about both her memoirs, and about how words and pictures combine to create the language of comics within these works.
Forney’s Marbles was best graphic novel of 2012 by the Washington Post, Time, and Publishers Weekly. She illustrated Sherman Alexie’s Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, which won a National Book award. She is a “Genius Award” winner in Literature from Seattle’s The Stranger, a 2016 MacDowell Colony Fellow, and teaches courses in comics and graphic novels at Cornish College of the Arts. She was featured in “Ride the Tiger,” a nationally-aired PBS documentary about bipolar disorder.
