“How do we silence our inner critic?” Dana asks softly, almost like a whisper to each of us.
She stands with an ease that comes from deep familiarity with storytelling. Two pairs of glasses, one dangling from her neck, another shifting between her fingers, reflect her layered worlds. Her long black shirt, sprinkled with white prints, flows beneath a black dotted overcoat. An intricately woven belt cinches at the waist, its metallic buckle etched with delicate design. A Peruvian bracelet glimmers on her left arm, while a large blue Mexican bag rests by her chair. Draped around her shoulders, a colourful stole gifted by her son adds another story to her presence. Dana is talking to us at the week long writing retreat on the theme, ‘Graphic Storytelling, Power, and Change’.
Dana Walrath, a Senior Atlantic Fellow, is an Armenian-American writer, artist, and anthropologist who believes in the transformative power of art. Her award-winning books include Aliceheimer’s, a graphic memoir about her mother and dementia; Like Water on Stone, a verse novel on the Armenian genocide; and The Book of Genocides, an interactive art installation turned “disaster comic” (forthcoming from Harvard University Press).
On Dementia, Laughter, and Memory
“Dementia became my happy work,” she says with a half-smile. Before that, her focus was genocide, the atomic bomb, and intergenerational trauma. When her mother developed dementia, she asked Dana to stop working on those heavy themes and become a full-time artist. Their work began to overlap in unexpected ways.
Her mother taught her to laugh. Her mother moved from New York City to Vermont to live with her. She mimics her mother’s soft tunes, her voice rising into a lyrical rhythm as she moves lightly across the room. Then she stops, chuckles, and calls it “the Alzheimer’s theme song.” Her laughter is contagious.
“Losing memory dehumanises us,” Dana reflects. “Stories bring us back. They help us remember who we are.”
As she flips through slides, occasionally adjusting her glasses, her voice quickens, almost breathless, her hands carving the air as if to grasp the threads of her thoughts. On the screen, her graphics glow, fragments of life turned into comics, visual essays, whispers of resilience.
Why Comics? Why Images?
“Writing,” she says, “has been the tool of masters.” But when combined with images, “they become powerful.”
She poses the eternal question that still rings in my mind: What came first, language or image?
“As we embraced writing, we forgot the language of visuals,” she says. “But images live in us. Before we spoke words, we read faces.” She brings her hands together, cradling an imaginary infant, and explains how a baby first recognises the person who holds them, the curve of a face, the warmth of eyes. She tilts her head gently, imitating that gaze.
“Rock paintings of early civilisations tell stories thousands of years old,” she reminds us. “They are our first comics.”
Exercises in Silence and Spiral
She passes sheets of paper. “Draw a spiral without the lines touching each other,” she instructs. Her voice softens. “Slowly. Let the lines guide you inward.” Spirals, she explains, are meditative. They connect us to the inner self.
Then, she hands us another sheet of bigger, this time slightly bigger, and graphite and says: “Close your eyes. Write. Draw. Use both hands. Trust your hand; trust your process.”
Her whispers wrap around us, pulling us closer. We hear the rustle of paper, the soft scratch of pens, our breath syncing with motion. Prompt after prompt flows from her lips. She wants us to feel the body in art, to loosen the grip of the thinking mind.
“Writers,” she laughs, “are different from other artists, who use their mind and imagination mostly. Others, painters, guitarists they use their other senses too a lot freely. We must do the same. We need to connect with other senses, and graphics does that for us.”
Comics as Alchemy
She calls comics “alchemy” the act of turning trauma into human connection. Genocide, war, erasure made visible, made speakable. Through words and images, she opens a space for healing.
Her projects keep evolving, text takes new forms: redacted poetry, visual overlays, layered cut-outs. She demonstrates how blacking out words in a text becomes an act of reclamation. As she moves her hands - mimicking scissors, slicing air - we feel the weight of history: the Armenian genocide, the Holocaust, the Rohingya crisis.
“Separate people from states,” she insists. “Stories are the basis of peace,” as she continues to take us on journey from Rohingyas in Bangladesh to her exhibitions or projects in Australia, Japan and other places.
Images, she argues, can soften the violence of memory. Photographs can be harsh, even violating; comics create gentler access points. “They let us see without breaking us.”
Expanding the Practice
She shares experiments, collaborations with musicians on silent films, VR projects exploring memory, layered works merging science diagrams with ancestral motifs. “Trust your hand,” she tells us. “Trust your ancestors.” In her gestures, in her whispers, we sense presence of her mother, ancestors guiding her lines.
When she speaks of her mother, grandmother, father - their survival of genocide - her voice wavers. Yet her work refuses despair. It brings us in, then lets us breathe with hope.
Closing Reflections
As the session drew to a close, I realised how deeply we had been pulled into that interplay of words and images. Time itself felt fluid, stretching and compressing, an unfamiliar yet exhilarating sensation. Perhaps it was Dana’s constant invocation of memory and time, or the way her voice shifted with every image she shared, drawing us in and out of different worlds.
We began to see how texts are images too, and how comics, with their unique language, carry meaning without effort, blending words and visuals to speak across boundaries. They hold immense power to make sense of complex ideas, racism, genocide, justice through form as much as content.
Scott McCloud’s Making Comics came up as a reference, a reminder of the craft behind this alchemy, and Shaun Tan’s The Arrival as an example of how images can tell stories words never fully can. By the end, we were spellbound. What started as a workshop had become an emotional journey, one that left us reflecting on the possibilities of graphic storytelling, not just as art, but as a tool for truth-telling and connection. An hour and a half had passed, though it felt like both a fleeting moment and an eternity. Dana’s intensity, her art, her generosity took us on a rollercoaster of emotions and reflections, leaving behind a spark to create, to trust our hands, and to see stories in a whole new light.
This post is from my time, July 20-25, 2025 at Hawkwood’s Writing for Change Retreat, where 13 Senior Atlantic Fellows for Social and Economic Equity from around the world gathered to write, reflect, and reimagine the stories we tell.
Impressive Madhuresh!
Thank you for evoking that powerful session with Dana in such a vivid way.