By Amanda Moses
Last month, the US Book Show hosted a four-day hybrid extravaganza introducing seasoned as well as emerging authors whose work is set to be published in the coming months.
For the first in-person event on May 23rd, attendees were invited to the NYU Kimmel Center near Washington Square Park to celebrate illustrators of children’s and adult comics as well as meet graphic novel authors.
In a conversation with National Book Critics Circle Award Winner and New Yorker staff cartoonist, Roz Chast and Emily Flake, a cartoonist and writer living in Brooklyn, the pair discussed Chast’s upcoming graphic novel, Must Be Dreaming.
“The title of the book is Must Be Dreaming and it is a book about my dreams and also a little bit about various theories of dreams. I’ve been kind of curious about dreams since I was a little kid, I think partly because it’s such a sort of strange state. You are yourself but you’re not yourself and everybody experiences this state,” Chast said.
“I’ve always on and off throughout my life kept a little journal of dreams…I started remembering my dreams again thinking about them. And some of them were so funny that I would just sort of extrapolate the things that were illustratable or that seemed hilarious to me and do a little cartoon about them. And I did this for a while and then thought, well, maybe this could be a book. So that’s really the start of it,” she added.
Chast is an award-winning cartoonist, earning the Kirkus Prize, the Heinz Award, and the Reuben Award. She has published over 800 cartoons and her graphic memoir, Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant?, won the National Book Critics Circle Award.
During the US Book Show, both Chast and Flake discussed the various types of dreams we have and the interpretations surrounding them. Chast shared that some may have dreams about teeth or falling, while Flake added there are the nightmares that we have that seem so terrifying at first and then ridiculous once we analyze it.
Chast shared a silly nightmare where she imagined there was a creature, she called a Pringle that had a long, stretched out body about three feet in length. If this creature was spotted in your home, you would have to leave and never come back. In the dream she was terrified, even wailing her arms in her sleep, but upon waking up she laughed about it.
“It was absolutely terrifying, but then writing it down, I remembered it very clearly, and I could see in my head,” Chast recalled.
Chast shared there are more odd and funny dream-based stories in her book that readers will enjoy. Must Be Dreaming will be released in October.
Photos by Amanda Moses
