Collaborations
After completing the second book of All Over Coffee, I wanted to take the strip in different directions. From the start, the strip has been about telling stories with text and image, and so I decided that by involving other storytellers, I could begin rethinking work patterns I may have settled into too comfortably, while still maintaining the personality of the series.

I began approaching writers and posed a collaborative process where we create at least two pieces: One where I draw an image then present it to them to write for, the second where they write a story and I respond with a drawing. As usual for All Over Coffee, the relationship between text and image is not meant to be literal, and so I asked that the writers think about the images as visual metaphors rather than direct illustrations.

The results so far have been wonderful, and so for an unknown period of time I will be working with a variety of writers to create All Over Coffee strips, while also continuing to write and draw new strips of my own. Below are links to recent collaborative strips and bios on the participating authors. Beneath each strip there is also a note citing which came first, the image or the text.

Lou Beach
Lou Beach is an illustrator, artist, and writer. He recently published 420 Characters, a book of short fiction which also features 10 original collages. He inhabits many states of mind but is most at home in Los Angeles where he lives with his wife, the photographer Issa Sharp. Their days are spent hob nobbing with celebrities and the literary elite, heads of state and captains of industry. Lou is debonair, fluid in twelve languages and an expert marksman.

Matthew Dickman
Matthew Dickman is the author of All-American Poem (American Poetry Review/ Copper Canyon Press, 2008). The recipient of The Honickman First Book Prize, The May Sarton Award from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Kate Tufts Award from Claremont College, and the 2009 Oregon Book Award from Literary Arts of Oregon. His poems have appeared in Tin House Magazine, McSweeny's, Ploughshares, The Believer, BOMB online, and The New Yorker among others. W.W. Norton & Co. will publish his second book in 2012. He lives and works in Portland, Oregon.

Daniel Handler
Daniel Handler is the author of four novels, and as Lemony Snicket, far too many books for children.






Photo by Meredith Heuer

Andrew Sean Greer
Andrew Sean Greer is the author of four works of fiction, most recently, The Story of a Marriage and The Confessions of Max Tivoli. He is the recipient of the Northern California Book Award, the California Book Award, the New York Public Library Young Lions Award, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York Public Library. Greer lives in San Francisco.

Isaac Fitzgerald
Isaac Fitzgerald has been a firefighter, worked on a boat, and been given a sword by a king, thereby accomplishing three out of five of his childhood goals by the age of 25. He has also written for AlterNet, The Bold Italic, McSweeney's, and Mother Jones. He is currently the managing editor of The Rumpus.

Cheryl Strayed
Cheryl Strayed's memoir, Wild, will be published by Knopf in 2012. Her debut novel, Torch, was published by Houghton Mifflin in 2006 and was a finalist for the Great Lakes Book Award and was selected by The Oregonian as one of the top ten books of the year by writers from the Pacific Northwest. Strayedís personal essays have appeared in more than a dozen magazines, including the New York Times Magazine, the Washington Post Magazine, Allure, Self, Brain, Child, The Rumpus and The Sun. Sheís won a Pushcart Prize and her essays have twice been selected for inclusion in the Best American Essays. She lives in Portland, Oregon.

Richard Lang
Richard Lang is a poet, short story writer, painter, and printmaker. He can sometimes be seen performing poetry as The Poetry Jukebox.
He is a recipient of the Marin Arts Council Individual Artist Grant in poetry which funded the production of his "Restaurant Stories." Zyzzyva Magazine featured two of his stories in its Fall 2010 issue.
Richard is President of Electric Works, a gallery, store and fine art printmaking and photo studio located in San Franciscoís SOMA district where he helps to realize the artistic and literary visions of such writer/ artists as David Mamet, William T. Wiley, Sandow Birk, Kay Ryan, and Enrique Chagoya.
He lives in western Marin County with his wife, Judith Selby Lang. The Langs, as a collaborative team, combine their devotion to art-making with a love of nature and science to produce an ongoing series of art works about the oceans and the environment. One Beach Plastic has produced 42 exhibits concerning ocean born plastic.