I took a six-week online graphic essay class last winter. A graphic essay is a story told through a combination of text, images and visual metaphor. It was a challenging class taught by Kelcey Ervick, author of the graphic novels “The Keeper” and “The Bitter Life of Božena Němcová.” For the class, we were encouraged to think of a story from our lives that tugged at us. I created an essay called “The Fallingness of Things: Brief Tales from Dementia-land.” It was the story of my mother’s fall a year or so ago and how, after breaking her hip, she suddenly saw other objects in her environment as falling or about to fall.
“Watch that, it’s falling,” she was always saying, and “Catch that!”
By the end of class, there were beautifully rendered tales of familial relationships; hard stories of addiction, grief and loss; a lovely story about becoming an artist; and one in particular that has stayed with me, a story about the birds of Los Angeles, by Melissa Fitzpatrick.
Fitzpatrick’s graphic essay was published on Crucialcomix.com, but I’ll shorthand it for you: Many beautiful, non-native birds, including parrots and parakeets, have made Los Angeles their home, integrating peaceably and seamlessly into the local flora and fauna and contributing to the diversity of the region. Running alongside Fitzpatrick’s story of the birds is another story: that of immigrants who likewise became part of the fabric of Los Angeles, yet who, in the era of immigration raids, were being uprooted and disappeared. Fitzpatrick wrote about one street vendor who sold ice cream from his cart in the same spot for 20 years. He was taken away by federal immigration authorities, but his cart remains like a ghostly reminder of his fate.
I thought about Fitzpatrick’s essay the other day. I was walking my dogs and ran into an acquaintance. She was looking around at the trees and seemed agitated. I asked how she was.