Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures

Bryn Mawr College

“Blood from a Stone: Memory and Material in Some Works by Leela Corman”

American cartoonist and illustrator, Leela Corman (b.1972), is the author of the award winning graphic novel Unterzakhn (2012). In two recent collections of short stories, We All Wish for Deadly Force (2016) and You Are Not a Guest (2023), Corman has been using watercolors and India Ink to illustrate stories that reflect on personal loss and her family’s inherited trauma. This talk explores the way that Corman uses comics to address her ambivalence about the relationship between objects and history in the context of how she identifies herself as an artist and storyteller. Looking to the material characteristics of her medium as interpretive model, I consider how stories in her recent collection You Are Not a Guest form and echo her examination of the liquid nature of memory.