The Comics of Lydia Conklin [introduced by Alan Michael Parker]

The comics of novelist and cartoonist Lydia Conklin bristle with wondrous unfillable silences, à la Samuel Beckett, and wacky pointedness worthy of Roz Chast. Conklin’s especially terrific at the stare-down. But it’s her timing most of all that I love, how funny she is... wait for it... and funnier yet.

Here is a comic from her Lesbian Cattle Dogs series, expressly commissioned for this blog. 

 

Lydia Conklin is the 2015-2017 Creative Writing Fellow in fiction at Emory University. She has received a Pushcart Prize, work-study scholarships from Bread Loaf, and fellowships from MacDowell, Yaddo, the James Merrill House, the Vermont Studio Center, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Millay, Jentel, Lighthouse Works, Brush Creek, the Santa Fe Art Institute, Caldera, the Sitka Center, and Harvard University, among others, and grants and awards from the Astraea Foundation, the Puffin Foundation, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the Alliance of Artists Communities, and the Council for Wisconsin Writers. Her fiction has appeared in The Southern Review, Narrative Magazine, New Letters, The New Orleans Review, The Gettysburg Review, and elsewhere. She has drawn graphic fiction for Gulf Coast, Drunken Boat, The Florida Review, and the Steppenwolf Theater in Chicago. She holds an MFA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Comments

[Vincent Canizaro]

Paperboy's Lament

since you ask

blank pages
are those
I like best

no heroes
or golden fleece
or lice

only white,
as thin and translucent as silk

silent as dawn in winter

(Thanks to Eclectica Magazine)

[Vincent Canizaro]

I really enjoy Conklin's style.
There's a beauty and simplicity to it.

Get it, girl.