‘Maybe making comics is a way of trying to recreate what happens when you’re dreaming’

In Spring 2025, we met with Roz Chast, 2024 recipient of the National Humanities Medal and2015 National Books Critics Circle Award for Autobiography for her graphic memoir, Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant? Chast is known for her New Yorker cartoons as well as her long-form comics works including Going Into Town: A Love Letter to New York and I Must Be Dreaming. When we spoke with Chast, we learned about her early relationship with comics, we shared our love of MAD magazine, and we even met her birds! She reflected on the relationship between comics and dreaming and other media such as film, the intrigue and limitations of generative AI, and some of her favourite cartoonists, including our fellow Clevelander, Derf Backderf. Chast described the process of making I Must Be Dreaming while offering a sneak preview of her forthcoming collaborative work with Jason Allen Katzenstein, Two Sad Kitchens

Aesthetics · Art · Comics · Literature · Media studies · Sociology · Visual arts · Comics and Graphic Narratives · Psychology