Rewrite Interview with Ellen Forney
By Elaine Riot
Rewrite: When you heard the topic, “We Could Be Heroes,” did you know what you would write about?
Yes, to be honest, I already knew the subject matter I wanted to cover. As I said in my introduction at Hugo House, this is material I intend to develop into a graphic novel—a graphic autobiography. It had been in my head for a long time—for a few years, actually. I figured that this was finally the time—I really needed a deadline. And it would be a taste of what it would really be like for me to share that material—how it would be for me to do it in front of an audience, and what it would be like for the audience. Would the audience be like “oh my God!” or would it have personal meaning for them, even if it's not something they went through specifically.
It was very difficult for me—very wrenching—getting the material together about my experiences of having bipolar disorder. Now, at this point, it mostly means taking my meds and keeping tabs on myself. I haven't actually had an episode in a number of years. Why would I go back to that time—why would I dwell on that? I don't, and I haven't, really, up until now—not in this depth, anyway.
So now, really looking back and looking through my journals and remembering what I was going through then had a really big input on me, and it was wrenching and difficult. At the same time it felt very important—it felt like unearthing something that it was time for me time unearth. And sit with.
And see how it fits into my life now. See if it resonates for other people. I mean, a lot of people have told me that they saw themselves in (my performance). That was important to me, that it wasn't just about me and my life, but also something other people could identify with somehow.
Another thing I'm trying to do is to make bipolar disorder—and any number of other mental disorders—less mysterious. I would really like to clarify the things that I have experience with. For instance, I think meds, psychoactive meds, are really overprescribed and underobserved by a lot of doctors. A lot of time there's no monitoring, and no talk therapy, which really has to go along with medications. There's a lot of misunderstanding about who meds are for, and why, and how they're essential, or unnecessary, or what.
I wanted to demystify that and there's a lot that I ended up leaving out because of brevity. I mean, I'm going to make this into a book, so there'll be a lot more material.
Rewrite: I like the way that you started out being on the clinical end and then being on the other side of it. A beautiful way to get in. How did drawing figure into the story?
Every one of those drawings was part of my sketchbook or my journal. I went through all my journals. I traced a couple of them so they would be pretty much the same but there was too much personal information in them, naming names, etc.—so I had to change those a little. But almost all of them came directly from my sketchbook, I just scanned them.
Rewrite: While you were in the process of writing your piece, did anything surprise you?
When I was first starting the story I didn't know what angle I was going to come from. I had pages full of notes—thinking about coming at it from the aspect of medications, or clinical studies, or episodes—describing it in a more clinical way, or in a more personal way. There were just so many ways that I could approach it. I didn't know that I would talk so much about working on the psych unit until I had already started.
For me, the drawings were integral to the presentation. When I was going through that time, it was really important to me to get those tough emotions down on paper. As an artist, that meant doing a lot of drawings in my sketchbook. So in the presentation what I was trying to do was keep my text pretty dry, and not talk a whole lot about how I was feeling, and let the drawings show how I was feeling.
Rewrite: I think that's true. I think the drawings were the more emotional aspect of it.
So, for the beginning, I started off with the diagnostic criteria for depression. Rather than talking about all the different ways that I was feeling, I recited that list, and then I conveyed the depth of feeling and personality through my drawings.
Rewrite: I wish I could have seen them longer. I wish I could see them now.
Well, when the book comes out…
Rewrite: Was it scary to tell such a personal story to an audience?
By the time I actually got on stage at Hugo House, I was still really nervous about it, but I had sort of gotten used to the idea. I made sure that there were a lot of friends of mine in the audience—I had called and asked certain people to please be there. So I felt very supported that way. I had also already practiced it enough by then, so that it was, to a significant degree, I guess, another performance of my work.
I mean, of course, it was all very heartfelt. Even most of my friends had never seen those drawings—that was the scariest part of the performance for me, showing those journal drawings. I would say that it is some of the most heartfelt, if not the most heartfelt, work that I've done. I mean, I did it for me—I did it because I had to, I did it because my heart needed it.
So you know, it was definitely opening myself up. Though, I do that in my work to some degree all the time. My artwork really reflects me and who I am. So in some ways, I wasn't completely outside the realm of what I generally do in my work anyway. And so, I mean, I wanted to make sure that it was funny.
Rewrite: It was. It was very funny.
I had to make it funny. I didn't want to be that miserable woman up on stage—that would be so just me in front of the audience, as opposed to an interaction between me and the audience. And it would have been awful for the audience! So I made sure it was funny, and that made me feel much more at ease.
Rewrite: Do you perform a lot?
Yeah. I'm in front of people talking often, because I teach at Cornish. In a way, teaching in front of a group of adults is like performing.
When my last book came out, the summer before last, I did a performance to promote that. It was a 20-minute multimedia show with Flash animation and I performed it like eight times in Seattle, including at Bumbershoot. I got a whole revue together for Northwest Film Forum and Bumbershoot. I put together a revue of me, a burlesque dancer, an emcee (at Northwest Film Forum that was Sarah Rudinoff), and a band (at Bumbershoot it was DT's). The Bumbershoot performance was at the Bagley Wright Theatre, which seats about 800. That was a blast! So you could say I'm very comfortable performing. I like it.
Rewrite: And how do you like teaching?
I adore it. I think it's a real honor to be a teacher.
Rewrite: Is there anything else you wanted to tell me about the process? What about the feedback—did people come up to you afterwards?
Yeah. Well, a lot of people came up and told me I was brave.
Another kind of comment I got was “I laughed, I cried,” which I think is a really high compliment. There was one woman who came up to me, she was struggling a lot and undergoing a lot of therapy and thought she might be bipolar, and it seemed to mean a lot to her that I dealt with that.
It was only in the process of writing it that I realized I'm trying to be a hero for myself. I don't know that I would actually use the word “hero,” but it works well enough for me for the theme. I've been told by my friends, my therapist, my family that I take really good care of myself and that I'm very strong. It's difficult for me to give myself credit for that.
So that's the dynamic that came into play for me in dealing with the theme. But you know, one of the drawings that was really difficult for me to show in the performance was the last image, of me as a superhero. And not because it was a superhero and I'm not a superhero cartoonist.
The hard part for me was kind of jumping off the ledge, and saying how strong I am. You know? Sometimes it's really hard to give yourself credit for what you do, because you know how you got there, you know what you did. It's easier to be amazed by something that somebody else did, because you can't see the workings behind it. And even if you saw the workings behind it, you'd just see what an amazing thing it was for something to come together so well. But from the inside, the process seems a lot sloppier. It's messier—like any organic process, it's just messy.
And also, I'm aware there's no cure for bipolar disorder. I handle it and it's with me always. It's not gone. I haven't defeated it. Unless they come up with some kind of cure that no one is predicting, it's something that I'm going to have to handle, one way or another, for the rest of my life.
Rewrite: You said you're in the process of writing a book—an autobiographical graphic novel. This presentation is a part of that work?
I've batted the idea around for a long time but hadn't actually put something coherent together like this before. Mainly it' just been really rough ideas and lists.
I'm really thankful to Hugo House for giving me that showcase. I've really been struggling with getting started on it. To be seen as a writer, to begin with—to be a cartoonist that's seen as a writer—is a wonderful thing. It's changing now with graphic novels becoming popular, but a lot of people still look at my comics and say—“oh, she can draw,” and I tend to get a lot of illustration jobs that way. But being seen as a writer at Hugo House, and this past year, being a writer-in-residence for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, has been deeply satisfying to me, to be recognized on that level. It's a relief.
It was also important that I was going to have a forum for this work that I really respected. I knew there would be an audience that was expecting something that was going to be moving and maybe difficult.
So I'm really thankful for all of those things coming together to really inspire me to make my first foray into this material. Dipping my toe in the water and touching on some of the subjects I wanted to deal with. Putting together the elements in a relatively brief story that made sense and got across a lot of the ideas that I wanted to get across.
In the book, I want to take a lot of these ideas and deal with them on a more complex level. When you tell a story that's short, you have to be crystal clear about certain things that are actually more complicated. In the book I'll have more time to deal with the nuances.
Jack Hitt presented the kind of work that I was trying to do. I was really trying to channel the kind of work that David Schmader does and David Sedaris and Julia Sweeney—I watched “God Said Ha” again. [Sweeney] was talking about her brother's cancer and her own cancer and she was funny! All of those people tell stories that are really heavy, to one degree or another, and tell them with humor. I really identify with that kind of storytelling. Humor is really disarming so you can get more difficult messages across. That kind of story brings your listener to you.
My big fear was that I wasn't going to be able to do it “right.” That I wasn''t going to be able to do it in a way that felt safe and effective. I was afraid I was going to go up there and be a mess. I was afraid I was going to cry. For what it's worth, it came out in a way that I was satisfied with. In the beginning stage of any piece of art that I'm working on there's a period of time where I just really struggle, and it seemed like there was just no way that I was ever going to shape this—I was so overwhelmed with trying to figure out how to tell this story that has such a huge emotional impact on me.
I remember one night when I had been working all day long at the computer and really plowing through—trying to come up with verbs and adjectives and metaphors for some really, really heavy stuff that I had gone through in my life. Using the thesaurus. Going back there and exploring it, and trying to find the right verb—“okay, rats in my head. Were they 'scrabbling' or 'scrambling'?” Trying to pin down that metaphor that I actually had in my head back when I was experiencing it. I was like, “okay, do I say the rats are dark and slippery, or should I skip that because that's overdoing it?”
I was really immersing myself in those emotions and episodes. Later that night I went for a long walk and cried really hard—I needed to get it out. I had just been delving into it and delving into it, and it was all dredged up. I just knew I had go outside—it had been so hard to express in words what I was feeling. I didn't need to cry on someone's shoulder, I just needed to cry as I was walking outside in the cold air.
When you get to the other side of something like that—it does make you stronger. Not that I would choose to go through anything like that, but I did, and I came out of it. And I really feel at this point it's an important story to share. For people who have gone through it, for other people who are struggling, it might help to know I was waiting for the light at the end of the tunnel, and, you know, it came.
