Joe Ollmann

My guest on this episode is Joe Ollmann. Joe is an artist and writer from Hamilton, Ontario, and the author of more than a half-dozen acclaimed graphic novels and collections of graphic stories. His book This Will All End in Tears, published by Insomniac Press, won the 2007 Doug Wright Award for best book.

Joe’s most recent graphic novel is Fictional Father, published in 2022 by Drawn & Quarterly. In a starred review of Fiction Father, Publishers Weekly wrote that "Ollmann’s funny, faux-meta memoir… is a complex look at an artist’s evolving relationship to the past." 

The book won the 2022 Hamilton Literary Award for fiction, and was nominated for a Governor General’s Literary Award.

Joe and I talk about his creative process—specifically how that process becomes less creative and more mechanical the closer a book gets to being finished—about how he is much more mellow and zen than he was when he wrote his visceral and emotionally raw early books, and about the time he successfully argued with a former Ontario premier over the work of fellow graphic novelist Kate Beaton.

 

Joe Ollman: wagpress.net

Music: "simple-hearted thing" by Alex Lukashevsky. Used with permission.

Contact Nathan Whitlock at nathanwhitlock.ca/contact