Writing vs. Having Written
+ Upcoming Workshops for Kids and Adults
They say some writers love writing, some love having written. I am more the former. I really enjoy solving the puzzle of a story. Sometimes I feel like it’s garbage, but even on the bad days, I’ll usually stumble across something that gives me hope and energizes me to keep going. I’m in the early stages of something new right now, and everything about panel three above is ringing true.
Weekly Cartooning Lessons at The Barron Arts Center
Starting Tuesday September 19th, I’ll be teaching a series of weekly one-hour cartooning workshops at The Barron Arts Center in Woodbridge NJ. There are still spaces available, so if you have an aspiring cartoonist at home and live in Middlesex or Monmouth County, I encourage you to sign them up. The easiest thing to do is contact me directly. This workshop will be heavily focused on helping kids to use the language of comics to tell their own stories. We won’t worry so much about drawing skills, we will instead learn how to control a reader’s eye as it moves across the page, and experiment with juxtaposing words and images to achieve different results. It will be a lot of fun!
Project Write Now - 90 Minute Comics Workshop for Teens and Adults
Another fantastic upcoming opportunity will be this 90-Minute Cartoon Workshop intended for older teens and adults, to be held at The Woman’s Club of Red Bank on Thursday, September 28th. My Cartooning Workshop was initially developed for middle-grade readers, but I’ve had many instances of parents or librarians sitting in and making their own comics, it made me very interested to try to run my program for older participants. Such a large part of my program is about overcoming the fear of not being “good” at drawing or making comics, and to see cartooning as simply a language you can learn to express yourself in. These fears seem to run deeper in grown-ups, which is why I think it would be so much fun to work with a group of adults and to see what kind of results we can achieve.
Get In Touch
If you are a librarian or educator or otherwise work with groups of children or teens who might enjoy learning about comics, please reach out. I am booking new school assemblies and cartooning workshops all the time, and I would absolutely love to work with you! Additional information about my programs can be found here.
I hope everybody enjoys the last few days of Summer and has an awesome Back to School transition! Thanks for reading along.
Mike