The Memory Hole: Your Life in Pictures

Brian Fies has been a journalist, an environmental chemist, a freelance journalist, a science writer and, beginning early in the 21st century, a cartoonist. His first graphic novel, Mom's Cancer, won an Eisner Award, a German Youth Literature Prize, and other recognition. His graphic novel, Whatever Happened to the World of Tomorrow and his follow-up webcomic, The Last Mechanical Monster, were nominated for Eisner and other awards. A Fire Story (Harry N. Abrams) is his latest book. Early morning on Monday, October 9, 2017, wildfires burned through Northern California, resulting in 44 fatalities. In addition, 6,200 homes and 8,900 structures and were destroyed. Author Brian Fies’s firsthand account of this tragic event is an honest, unflinching depiction of his personal experiences, including losing his house and every possession he and his wife had that didn’t fit into the back of their car. In the days that followed, as the fires continued to burn through the area, Brian hastily pulled together A Fire Story and posted it online—it immediately went viral. He is now expanding his original webcomic to include environmental insight and the fire stories of his neighbors and others in his community. A Fire Story is an honest account of the wildfires that left homes destroyed, families broken, and a community determined to rebuild.

Cecil Castellucci is the author of books and graphic novels for young adults including Boy Proof, The Plain Janes, Soupy Leaves Home, The Year of the Beasts, Tin Star, and the Eisner nominated Odd Duck. In 2015 she co-authored Moving Target: A Princess Leia Adventure.  She is currently writing Shade, The Changing Girl, an ongoing comic on Gerard Way’s Young Animal imprint at DC Comics.   Her short stories and short comics have been published in Strange Horizons, Tor.com, Womanthology, Star Trek: Waypoint and Vertigo SFX: Slam! She is the Children’s Correspondence Coordinator for the Rumpus, a two-time MacDowell Fellow and the founding YA Editor at the LA Review of Books. Her latest graphic memoir is Girl on Film (Archaia), an insightful story of making art, the nature of memory, and being a teenager in 80s New York City. One thing young Cecil was sure of from the minute she saw Star Wars was that she was going to be an artisté. Probably a filmmaker. Possibly Steven Spielberg. Girl On Film follows a passionate aspiring artist from the youngest age through adulthood to deeply examine the arduous pursuit of filmmaking, while exploring the act of memory and how it recalls and reshapes what we think we truly know about ourselves.

David Heatley's comics and drawings have appeared on the cover of the New Yorker and in every section of the New York Times. His work has also appeared in Granta, McSweeney's, Best American Comics, Nickelodeon Magazine, and Time Out, among many others. His first graphic memoir, My Brain Is Hanging Upside Down, was published in the US, UK, France, Spain and Belgium.  He is the author of Qualification: A Graphic Memoir in Twelve Steps (Pantheon Graphic Library) which explores the ultimate irony: the author's addiction to 12-step programs. David Heatley had an unquestionably troubled and eccentric childhood: father a sexually repressed alcoholic, mother an overworked compulsive overeater. Then David's parents enter the world of 12-step programs and find a sense of support and community. It seems to help. David, meanwhile, grows up struggling with his own troublesome sexual urges and seeking some way to make sense of it all. Eventually he starts attending meetings too. Alcoholics Anonymous. Overeaters Anonymous. Debtors Anonymous. Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous. More and more meetings. Meetings for issues he doesn't have.  With stark, sharply drawn art and unflinching honesty, Heatley explores the strange and touching relationships he develops, and the truths about himself and his family he is forced to confront while "working" an ever-increasing number of programs. The result is a complicated, unsettling, and hilarious journey--of far more than 12 steps.

Kevin Huizenga attended Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where he started drawing the influential mini-comic Supermonster. He is the creator of two comic book series Or Else and Ganges. He taught in the Comic Art program at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design from 2015-2019. His graphic novels include Curses, The Wild Kingdom, and Gloriana. He has won five Ignatz awards and been nominated for Harvey and Eisner awards. In his latest book, The River at Night (Drawn and Quarterly) a man has trouble falling asleep and reflects on his life, marriage, and time itself. The River at Night flashes back, first to satirize the dot-com boom of the late 1990s and then to examine the camaraderie of playing first-person shooter video games with work colleagues. The story explores the simple pleasures of a marriage, like lying awake in bed next to a slumbering lover, along with the less cherished moments of disappointment or inadvertent betrayal of trust. Huizenga uses the cartoon medium like a symphony, establishing rhythms and introducing themes that he returns to, adding and subtracting events and thoughts, stretching and compressing time. A walk to the library becomes a meditation on how we understand time, as Huizenga shows the breadth of the comics medium in surprising ways. The River at Night is a modern formalist masterpiece as empathetic, inventive, and funny as anything ever written.

Kristen Radtke is the author of the graphic memoir Imagine Wanting Only This, named a best book of 2017 by Forbes, Entertainment Weekly, Booklist, The Guardian, Kirkus, and many others, and the forthcoming books Seek You: Essays on American Loneliness (2021), for which she received a Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant, and Terrible Men, a graphic novel, all from Pantheon. She is the art director and deputy publisher of The Believer magazine. Her work has appeared in The New York Times Book Review, Marie Claire, The Atlantic, The Guardian, GQ, The New Yorker, Oxford American, and many other places.