LRRewind: Interview with John Guillemette

Transcript:

Lyhan

Hello, everyone.

Welcome back to another episode of the Long Review Podcast. And today, I’m with none other than the writer, artist, and cartoonist, John Guillemette.

John

Hi, I’m John Gilman. Thank you for having me. I’m super excited to be here. I’m an artist and writer, cartoonist. I like comics a lot, and I’m active in New Haven, Connecticut. I am the illustrator and collaborator in the most recently published book of Dr. Gina Bereca, who’s a distinguished board of trustees professor here at UConn, a gym of the English department, a mentor and friend to me. really helped me on my way as a creative writer. And we published a book together called Gina School, 103 Life Lessons from Gina’s Expanse of Wisdom and Wit. We published that with Woodhall Press this past October. And then I’m also active in New Haven as a historian. I work in a museum as a media coordinator and a graphic designer. I run a little writer’s workshop on State Street. every month and I just I love art I love connecting with people over art and over writing and I found New Haven to be a wonderful community for that and I found UConn and the English department here at UConn to be a home for that as well and Long River Review to be a pioneer in the sharing of student work in arts and literature. So again, a lot of gratitude being here today.

Lyhan

Yeah, we thank you so much for like enhancing Connecticut culture because people sometimes forget that there’s so much going on in New Haven. There’s so much going on in these local cities like Hartford and Fairfield and yeah, I think we should people should speak more out about that.

John

Totally. I mean, not a bad time for me to plug the Hartford Arts pages. arts newspaper, I’m A cartoonist within it. I try to have a cartoon in there each month. It’s edited by Andrew Polonsky, and it’s exactly that aim for Hartford. It’s like, here’s what’s going on artistically, culturally, from a literature point of view, every music point of view. Here’s what Hartford has to offer. And it’s a wonderful issue that comes out seasonally, and there’s plenty going on. And the New Haven arts paper put out by the Arts Council shows that as well. Not just New Haven and Hartford, but having lived in Willimantic, there’s a thriving creative scene there. New Britain as well. Connecticut as a state has a lot to offer creatively.

Lyhan

You spent your years as an undergrad here at UConn. Can you tell us more about academically how was it?

John

Yeah, it was a challenging era for me. So I think I’ll start with the things I really appreciated. and work from there. But I really liked the hip hop collective that met right here in the WHUS studio in the record room. That was like a wonderful and very welcoming community. Free press, which I hope is still going strong. It’s one of the kind of older continuous clubs on campus and it leans into the, you know, Bill of Rights, the freedom of press and the freedom to distribute and print what you’d like. So we often published a lot of edgy art and stuff that might not find a home in a more traditional publishing venue and got to distribute it around campus. And that was really fulfilling. From that group, actually, someone I met through that, her name’s Mar, and she, with her friend Zoe, started a zine in Connecticut called Kineticon Zine. And that emerged, I mean, probably more so from the Slam Poetry Club, which is another fantastic club on campus. But it also had some roots in free press and it’s doing really awesome work in New Haven right now, spotlighting local voices. So stuff that starts in kind of the grassroots scene here at UConn definitely finds its roots and makes a difference kind of beyond that. And those were some wonderful places for community for sure. But I actually, I applied as an engineering major, mostly from like a general societal pressure. in high school, I was good at drawing and physics. And when you’re good at drawing and physics, you are relentlessly encouraged to pursue the latter and abandon the former. They’re like, for your own good, but pretty soon after I got here, I transitioned to the art school, but ultimately I dropped out. I wasn’t feeling so well, to be honest, just like mentally well. So I left the university and And then I went to the West Coast and I went there kind of right in the zenith of the pandemic. And I had a certain expectation of what the magical promise of the West Coast would provide. And the reality of what was instead my life out there was so different in a way that wasn’t what I wanted, but was in some way what I needed, some sort of spiritual shakeup, I think. And I kind of hunkered down there for a year and I disinfected the rooms that were COVID positive in the ICU in the emergency room. And that was what I did for a year. And I cleaned maybe 3,000 toilets in the hospital and I was like, I should get that degree everyone’s been talking about. So I started going to community colleges. But upon my return, I really had much more interest in English writing and philosophy. And I had like this kind of half half-baked illustration concentration BFA. And when I came back to UConn, I came back as a general studies student and reached a credit threshold to get my bachelor’s. And my degree is technically in nothing in particular. So I took two years off kind of in the middle there. I fumbled A lot. So I don’t know if I could speak to the academic rigor of a consistent program all the way through. I will say that when I needed to come back for a general studies degree, UConn was very accommodating and I got to take a lot of different classes here and there. And that was how I met Dr. Gina Brecka, who’s now a very significant person in my life, a really close mentor and friend. I’m very grateful for that, absolutely. I would say when you end up with a huge university like this, with so many different schools and different majors, the student experience is not one thing. And I think it’s worth acknowledging that some people really do struggle here, you know? But other people really thrive. So I feel kind of ill-equipped to come up with a conclusion about my experience. I find something really meaningful about being a general studies student, because that is, Honestly, the most accurate degree I could ever get for my personality. I’m a very curious person, and I like to study things generally. And writers especially, like, honestly, when I came back, I published a piece in the Long River Review in 2022, I think. And I was lucky for that and it was really fun and I got the piece got received the Edwin Way Teal Award for nature writing and the piece was called Wind Treading Water Above A Bottomless Pit. So it’s probably, it is still available on the Long River Review website, but that story had like a bunch of information and I had to do like a certain amount of research about the history of Crater Lake National Park in Oregon, you know? And writers are often studying the general. You might have to have a research phase to write what you want to do, So I’ve enjoyed that. In some ways, I was equipped to be a little more lateral and free in what I choose to learn.

Lyhan

I would like to ask about your creative process. You’re both a writer and an artist. Which one would you say comes first? Or does it depend the situation?

John

That’s a great question. I would say like neither. Honestly, if I could really hone what I do, I’d say I’m A storyteller. and I open up my toolbox to tell a story. And I feel lucky that in my toolbox I do have both writing and drawing. And it does depend on the situation. There’s some full prose stories I write where there’s no images at all. And then sometimes I’m doing a comic and it’s really important for me to like plan the visuals way ahead of time. So it varies. The story will tell me what it needs is always how I feel. But I’ve been drawing for like my whole life. And I took a pause when I got to Oregon. I was drawing, I was painting like pretty consistently. Every day I would be engaged in the practice of visual art. But I hit the West Coast in like a pretty dire rock bottom zone. And I bailed on, I had expectations of my art and that was the mistake. I had expectations of my art and they weren’t, my art wasn’t going forward and fulfilling those expectations. So I felt pretty betrayed and upset about it and I quit. I made a big show of it. I had like a John Baldessari moment in his cremation project where he burned all of his work. You know, like I kind of, I gave up in a very classic dramatic fashion and said I wouldn’t do it anymore. And within a few days I had found writing and it just showed me that I’m a creative person that like needs to be kind of making something or thinking on something in a creative manner. And if I stop one medium, another will appear. But there was something so refreshing for me to start creative writing at age 22 because I got to be a white belt again. I got to be a total beginner. I got to play around. I wasn’t like, there was no expectation attached to it, which is what ultimately kind of killed the drawing. And I ended up kind of recovering drawing and painting and illustrating with a lot of joy. But it was about returning to that playful state that I had been lucky to find in writing.

Lyhan

My next question is, while I was checking your artwork, I also noticed that you play around a lot with color. Sometimes you emit it completely and it’s just black and white. Sometimes you have these bright, vibrant colors given like life to your pieces. How do you approach coloring?

John

That’s a great question because most of what I have available now is like what’s in my sketchbook. And I take my sketchbook seriously. I treat it, you know, I’m not saying that it’s, oh, just my sketchbook as a means to kind of like lighten the intention. Each spread I do treat like a little canvas, but I do work in these small books and I work on the move A lot. So I mean, a certain amount of it’s very practical. Like how much supplies can I fit in my bag? You know, as I’m walking around town, where am I going? And I would say when I do my comics kind of outside of the world of the sketchbook, I take medium very seriously. And like the project I’m working on Now, it’s kind of untitled, it’s this sprawling graphic novel, I’d say. It’s graphic memoir, but it’s so fictionalized, and I like to play with what we perceive to be truth, so I’ll say novel for now. But there are some sections of it that are like watercolor on brown-toned paper, and then another section that’s watercolor on blue-toned paper. And I like how an instant visual cue if you’re reading, can show you something. So those are different timelines. It’s almost like if you’re watching a movie and they flash back to the past and they use black and white for a minute. When you’re working with just prose, there’s a little more hand-holding with your reader. You’re kind of saying like, you know, meanwhile in Chicago in 1932, you have to kind of like, you know, paint a picture with words and kind of re-establish that scene a few times. But it’s kind of cool in comics if you turn the page and suddenly everything’s blue. you inherently know that something’s shifted. And if you’re reading a new set of characters, you’re like, okay, this is a different plot line. Or you can intuit that it’s a different timeline. And I like that intuitive component, and I try to push it as far as I can. And I think the most complicated version is in this project I have, one of the mediums I engage with is a colored pencil drawn on a translucent vellum that’s overlaid on prescription pads, psychiatric prescription pads from 1950s sanitariums. And that medium is only used when the narrator’s past, specifically as it pertains to psychiatric institutions, is what is being described in that comic. So I like being a mixed media artist because when you turn the page and the whole rule is, all the rules of the comics are different, it’s usually for a very intentional purpose in that arena. And color is just one of the many cues you can give your reader.

Lyhan

Great. I have another question regarding your work. Your work usually follows on the category of creative nonfiction. Have you ever explored around with like poetry, fiction, or theater? Or do you think your writing is just, goes beyond these like constraints?

John

I always write the thing first and then decide what it is later, you know? And I’ve written some poems. And I actually got involved in a community theater recently as a new community theater in New Haven called Rose Tent Community Theater and it was started by some friends of mine and I had a fun time like even acting in it. It’s something totally unfamiliar to me. And the most recent cabaret, I wrote a couple scenes. I’m always down to try something new and I’m always intrigued by a new genre or medium. I think that, but when I’m just kind of in maybe a bit of a flow state or I’m not overanalyzing and I’m sitting down to just express what is, what feels important. When I’m done and I ask myself, what is this? It’s usually creative nonfiction. And that asking myself, what is this is less, isn’t even for me. It’s just like, you know, it helps readers know what they’re getting into. In the blessed circumstance where a bookseller or librarian shelves it, helps them know where to put it. But I don’t know. I haven’t taken genre too seriously. And also like on the scale of like fiction to non-fiction. Yeah, it’s a spectrum. It’s not these two distinct genres. You know, like for example, the like the onion and toaster comic that I recently published with you guys at Long River Review. that is excerpted, it’s an interlude in this larger comic that I’m calling a memoir. So I’m writing a memoir, and in the middle of the memoir, a sentient onion and toaster have a long philosophical conversation on the kitchen counter. And I hope I prime my reader to accept that, it’s important to give ourselves freedom to dive entirely into imagination. even when we’re talking about non-fiction. Because how many times are you riding a bus or waiting in the office at a, in the dentist, for the dentist, and you have a total imaginative divergence? Like the imagination is part of your experience, experiencing reality as a human. As a general rule, I say that if you make a material lie in service of a spiritual truth, then I don’t have any problem with it.

Lyhan

My next question is for your sketchbook called Statement, you mentioned You engage with a creative and philosophical question about your process as an artist. And you mentioned my favorite part of it is finding fulfillment in conditions of their inversion, such as, let’s say, money, sex, and instant gratifications and kind of finding gratitude in the opposite things like poverty, sexual activity, and delayed gratifications. Do you think it’s possible to get addicted in the same way to these oppositions?

John

Totally. Oh, so glad you asked that question. Moments ago I said I was working on a fictionalized memoir, as yet unnamed. It has a name, but I think it’ll probably change. But the name is Relapse of a Recovering Ego Addict, and it’s that for that exact premise. When I was in Oregon, I think, and I was working in those kind of dire circumstances, and I had to hunker down in some way, the kind of like American dream or like materialist like a certain materialism, wasn’t, I didn’t have any possessions, I didn’t have any money, and I wasn’t having any like pop culturally codified fun. You know, if I wanted to have fun, I needed to know how to like, entertain myself in the wee hours before a really hard shift in the ICU where I was going to be paid 90 bucks net a day to be 1/2 millimeter of latex glove space between myself and a deadly virus, in a state that I didn’t know and hadn’t lived in long enough to qualify for socialized health care. So there’s a lot of instability, like in terms of my health and my wages, and then also in a really rough part of town with a lot of gun violence. And so, yeah, like, it was just a it was a situation that There wasn’t gonna be conventional fun to be had. So I started trying to wrap my head around unconventional forms of fulfillment. And it’s so funny I say unconventional because what I ended up leaning on is very traditional. But a lot of non-Western philosophy helped me during that time period. I got really interested in Daoism and I got really interested in Buddhism and was kind of like reading and learning about the middle path and I don’t know, the renunciation of ego. And that’s why I ended up having a good year. And despite all that, I had a good year in these conditions of inversion where my fun and fulfillment wouldn’t be like the American hedonism, but would instead have to be kind of like monastic. But it’s so true that I clung to that because it helped me navigate that time period well. But when that time period was over, some of that didn’t serve me anymore. It was actually, it was very confining and rigid. And it also put me in, I was judgmental of other people for a time, especially when I came back to UConn to finish my degree. It’s like I felt like I had just been through this kind of like gauntlet, you know? And I would come back to UConn and a lot of people were just happy to be social again and to be out of quarantine and have the college experience. So, you know, there might be a lot of parties going on. And I would always be like, scoff at these, spiritually unenlightened hedonists, But all that was its own kind of strategy for disconnection, its own kind of fear. So I guess I like the title, Relapse of a Recovering Ego Addict, is meant to be a play on like you can build an ego out of renouncing ego, you know? So like even if you’re kind of having some spiritual insight, be gosh darn careful that doesn’t like take over your openness. and become a rigid confinement chamber of its own.

Lyhan

Can you tell us more about previously working as an illustrator for Gina Baraka? And do you have any challenges trying to illustrate someone else’s writing?

John

Yeah, I mean, so many challenges, but the challenges are also the most rewarding, I would find. Like, you know, I got more or less, it was I think 2 batches, but in pretty rapid succession, I got all 103 of the lines that I had to illustrate in kind of one go. So Of course, I look through them and I think, maybe we’ll do batches of 10 or, just try to break up the big, behemoth of a project into these small manageable bites. And so the first ones I did were the ones that came to my mind the soonest, and then the ones I saved for the last batch was like the ones I had procrastinated on because I didn’t know how to represent them, But I don’t regret waiting until the end because that process with Gina was so collaborative that all that while we were honing a strategy and I got to apply that well-honed strategy to the most difficult of the Gina school lines by the end. And that was immensely gratifying. Like I hope everyone gets to experience this in some way, shape, or form, whatever industry or field you’re in, but some equivalent of staring at something you have to illustrate for months with no idea how to do it. And then figuring out I’m doing it is like just euphoric. It feels so good. I clicked my heels on some moments, but I would send things to Gina and she would send back wonderful feedback. And it’s really important to be able to trust your collaborator because I’ve definitely worked with people before without such a strong prior relationship with them and without having a familiarity with their canon of work and knowing that I was the right person for the job, that’s a huge one. Sometimes I’ll respect and dig a project, but I just, I’m not the guy, for one reason or another. So the first couple of drafts, the first batches of illustrations I sent, so many of them didn’t make the cut. And in the beginning, I was drawing a lot of people, physically people, and we decided that we were going to lean a little more towards the inanimate kind of objects, ordinary objects that through extra attention could become extraordinary and then pertain in some way to the line that was said and not reiterate what it was said directly but kind of offer an around the corner peak and kind of show a new depth to it, bring something new to the table. But it took a while for us to figure out, you know, what that rhythm looked like and also what medium looked like, you know, when we learned that we had a shared love for Edward Gorey’s pen and ink texture. We kind of knew that was a direction to pursue and to go in. And a lot of the early stuff was just graphite. And when we went pen and ink and crosshatch, we knew that was the right direction. We sent stuff back and forth via e-mail. We sent stuff back and forth via text, via post. We mailed packages of things back and forth. And then we met often. We met sometimes up here in Storrs Mansfield. We met a couple of times in Hartford. I’d take the train and meet Gina there. It was a pretty open and continual dialogue. And we just saw this kind of shapeless mass of wonderful lines and good thumbnails come into like a really tight project of 103 really distilled life lessons combined with 103 illustrations that did them justice. So I would say what was hardest and the lessons that were hardest upon kind of landing at the finish line there, they were also simultaneously the most gratifying. I don’t want to work on a project that isn’t hard. I just don’t, you know?

Lyhan

Yeah, there’s also something so personal about working and collaborating as two. It’s sort of this bubble that nothing can get in and nothing can get out at the same time, compared to like a big collective or even just doing anything by yourself.

John

That’s really true. I would relate to that mostly with the cover, because we worked on the interior of the book, just us. And then the cover, a lot more people are involved. It’s the cover. So the publishing house is going to take interest in it and like the marketers are going to take interest in it. The publicist is going to take interest in it. So it was this funny moment where we like drew the cover and we’re like, we’re done, you know? And then suddenly that bubble was popped and like a lot of new opinions came in. And they were really good opinions. They were like, you know, like editors and publicists, career long, like really valuable insights. Then we like redrew the The cover like four times. But the collaboration totally changes shape depending on the number of people involved. Absolutely.

Lyhan

For your next project, we left a recovering ego addict. So it’s currently under work. Do you approach this any different than any other of your works before? And I’m pretty excited to say, but when are we going to receive this? When is it going to be published?

John

Oh, so that’s, I mean, I’m going to come back to the wind later because I have no idea. But yeah, I’m approaching it totally differently. I learned A doozy of a lesson recently. Basically I was writing it in chunks and then when I had a chunk that felt good, I would start drawing it and like finalizing it. And I have like 100 pages. Some is like fully painted, some is like thumbnailed, some is, you know, just like a pencils beadboard, but some is like totally polished. And anyway, I learned that I actually need to not draw it, and I need to write it all in longhand first, start to finish, and then convert it into a comic. And the way I learned it, this won’t make sense now, but I promise at one point in time in the future it will, but a huge amount of the project takes place, like the storyline takes place at a college Halloween party. And it’s a little bit about the Dionysian dilemma we were talking about earlier. It’s a little bit about like hedonism and and prudence in conflict in the narrator as he’s at this Halloween party, which is just the epitome of letting go, letting loose, and having uncomplicated fun. But this guy is really in his head, intellectualizing everything, not having a good time. And he’s dressed as Indiana Jones. And he needs to be dressed as a UPS man. When you make a small adjustment like that in a document that’s just prose, you could literally do Command-F. Find and replace, change a character’s name from Dave to Joe, hit enter and it says 73 replacements made and you’re kind of good to go. In comics, when you draw everything, if you want to change, I couldn’t find and replace Indiana Jones with UPS man. I have to redraw everything. And I resisted that for a while. I was like, dang, I don’t want to redraw all this. And I get a little background is that I have a whole UPS man outfit, like the whole costume, because I worked for UPS for five days once. And obviously 5 days isn’t long, so you could intuit that it wasn’t a great experience. But I’ve always, I’ve been kind of like Jim Halpert in the office, not a lot of Halloween spirit. So usually when the holiday rolls around, I have no plan and I wear my UPS outfit and I do it every year. And this one year I dressed as Indiana Jones and that, and when I was, and that’s the party I was recounting. was the one that I was dressed as Indiana Jones. But the thematic relevance of the UPS outfit actually is very, it’s a lot. I had dropped out of UConn and I needed to get a job and I got one at UPS kind of, and the pandemic was breaking out and online shopping was soaring through the roof and they were training hundreds of people and rented out hotels in these rapid bursts and they would line us up kind of militaristically and I had to shave my beard and everybody had to cut their hair and you had to be kind of there was like a strict dress code and they’d line you up in ranks and they would like inspect you and I as an artist I just felt like my individuality had been stripped away and I was like oh my god I’m just delivering like you know people’s online shopping orders why are you guys taking this so seriously you know but they had a really significant operation they had to run and it just just felt so capitalistic and it felt like it robbed my individual spirit. And I ended up leaving that job in disarray after having recently dropped out and pretty instantly taking shrooms in Mansfield Hollow State Park. That was my sequence of events. And I think it speaks a lot to the distress of an American youth today facing a very uncertain future and being encouraged at every turn to sell our souls as laborers to like a giant capitalist machine that isn’t benefiting us at all. Anyway, long story short, when people ask me when I wear my UPS jacket, because it is warm, it’s a nice jacket, they’d say, oh, where’d you get that? And they’re expecting me to say like a vintage shop. And I’m like, nah, I earned this. Five days in the training program is how I got this jacket. And I just, I thought it would be a good chapter. I thought it would be a good thing to draw. And when I realized that I couldn’t let go of the idea, I was like, this needs to be in the project, it needs to be in the project. how is it going to fit in the project seamlessly? Well, it’ll fit in seamlessly if the guy is wearing, if he goes to the Halloween party as a UPS man like you do every year, you know? And I resisted that evolution of the project to a stronger stage because I had already put in so much effort at the project at a weaker stage. So I don’t know, I did, this is the first time I’ve worked on a comic that’s as long as this. And what I learned is that at least for this comic, and it might change, I don’t know if I ever learned how to do a medium or a genre. I learned how to do that project and then I have to learn process all over again for the next project and what the next project’s needs are. But for this project it’s important that I write the story longhand from start to finish and am content with the shape of the narrative and then I draw it. So that said, that was the big lesson I learned and that’s how this project’s process is different than others. And that’s also why I totally can’t answer when it’s going to be published. Because I did just kind of digest the fact that I’ll be restarting, you know. But I do strive to be the artist that like chips away at something every day and nothing is just sitting in like concept embryo forever. So even though I’m restarting, I’ll be hustling.

Lyhan

We can all trust that even if they wait as long, there will be something of quality.

John

Thank you, Lion.

Lyhan

And lastly, your comic public opinion will be published in the latest issue for the Long Review. Can you tell us more about how that came to be?

John

Absolutely. So I was at my family friend Gina’s house, different Gina, not Gina Brecca, Gina Gardella. And we were preparing for like a dinner outing and my sister, classic sister fashion was taking forever to get ready. She was just, you know, and I was like by the door like tapping my foot and she was, you know, trying on these different outfits and deciding, you know, and it was just taking so long. So I drew this in my sketchbook because I was waiting by the door in the kitchen and I saw on the counter like an onion. I literally saw an onion in a toaster. It was a bowl of onions and then a toaster on the counter. And sometimes I challenge myself to do like, I don’t know, a freestyle illustration where you just draw a squiggle and then you elaborate until it, you know, until you like it. Or a freestyle comic where you draw the first panel and you have no plan, you know? And then the second panel is just informed by the whim. of the first panel. So I was, looking at the counter and I saw this bowl of onions and a toaster. And, maybe there’s a way to include a picture of this sketchbook in the transcript of this podcast episode, but this is what I came up with. And I drew that while I was waiting for my sister to get ready. Actually, it became a good thing that it took her forever because it got me a time, gave me some time to draw that. But the first panel was exactly that. It was, I just had, I knew it was an onion and a toaster. And then the onion says, hi, I’m an onion. And then the toaster says, hi, I’m a toaster. Silly, stupid, irreverent, beginning to a comic. But then as I started elaborating, I thought like, you know, onions. that Shrek scene are famously complicated and layered, and I thought that The Onion would kind of go on a tirade about that. And I started writing that tirade, and I didn’t know how the toaster would come in until I found an opportunity for a punchline at some point, which you can read in the comic. The toaster by comparison is not so complicated. And this first draft was just these two characters talking, and they’re in the one that appears in The Long River Review. There’s like a larger, like there’s a larger world in which it takes place. At a certain point, you kind of zoom out of the conversation between these inanimate objects and there are humans interacting with the space and you learn that they’re toasting some bread and chopping an onion and that’s how these two objects became kind of prominent and in discourse with one another. And that extra layer came from from reading Understanding Comics by Scott McLeod. I was reading this book about comics and learning about panel transitions and learning about how to be a comic artist and treat yourself sort of like a cinematographer and ask yourself at each panel, where are you going to put the camera? And if you look at this one, they’re all pretty, they’re all straight on shots, kind of middle range, middle fields, shots with no background. and no kind of exaggerated foreground elements. So in other words, it was a great doodle, but when I knew I wanted to polish it up after reading Scott McCloud’s book, Understanding Comics, which is like kind of very foundational in the comics world, I wanted to imagine the weirdest places I could put the camera to exemplify the themes, you know. And that, you know, pushing of myself is what kind of gave me an opportunity, I thought, to use the broader setting to dig into the background and then to realize there was actually a kitchen plot line to be discovered. So I kind of, I elaborated it was two pages and it became three. And I got to expand and have a lot of fun with angle perspective and panel transitions.

Lyhan

You used your tools to tell the story.

John

I used my tools to tell the story. Nice call back, Lion.

Lyhan

Thank you so much, John, for being here.

John

Thank you for having me.

Lyhan

And also, thank you to the UConn radio station 91.7 storrs for letting us use the equipment. Be on the lookout for the next long review issue. We have some really good stuff coming up, like John’s comic strip. And thanks for tuning in.

John

Thank you for tuning in.