CHIMACUM — New Yorker cartoonist Roz Chast faces it often: rejection.
Every week now for a few decades, she’s sent a half-dozen works of art to the magazine.
So hasn’t Chast, who will speak in a free program in Chimacum on Tuesday, grown a thick skin when it comes to “no”?
Not so much, it turns out.
“Oh, my God. It’s horrible. Every week. It never gets better,” the award-winning artist said from her home in Connecticut.
The thing that keeps a cartoonist going, Chast added, is that she “really wants to do it . . . and has no other skills.”
It helps, of course, that she’s published some 1,275 black-and-white cartoons, color spreads, back pages and covers of The New Yorker by now.
Truth be told, Chast has other abilities, including sharing a personal story that has resonated with people across the country.
Her new book, Can’t We Talk about Something More Pleasant?, is a kind of hardcover comic book for grown-ups, especially those with parents who are growing frail.
Can’t We Talk is the tale of Chast’s mother and father, George and Elizabeth, who lived into their 90s in their Brooklyn apartment in New York City.
It’s not pretty, what with her dad’s dementia and both parents’ unwillingness to throw anything away.
Along with this memoir, Chast will discuss her life as a cartoonist and observer in “Theories of Everything: An Evening with New Yorker Cartoonist Roz Chast,” the Jefferson County Library’s annual Huntingford Humanities Lecture, this Tuesday.
Admission is free to her program at 6:30 p.m. in the Chimacum Schools auditorium at 91 West Valley Road.
Chast recently collaborated with Steve Martin on a children’s book, The Alphabet from A to Y with Bonus Letter Z!, and last year, she was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
She has nine collections of cartoons, including Theories of Everything: Selected, Collected, and Health-Inspected Cartoons of Roz Chast, 1978-2006.
Chast sold her first piece to The New Yorker in 1978, just two years after finishing at the Rhode Island College of Design.
She still feels a rush of excitement when one of her pieces shows up.
As she’ll talk about Tuesday night, ideas come from many sources: things people say out of the blue, stuff she reads and just random thoughts that have her seizing the pen.
Chast is known for her drawings of people coping with guilt, anxiety, aging, their families, friends and money — subjects that aren’t ripped from the headlines but timeless.
When her parents became ill, Chast wanted to bring matters of aging and death — and especially denial — into broad daylight.
This wasn’t easy.
Panic attacks
The book is “definitely not something I had done before,” she said, “and as much as I wanted to tell this story, I had panic attacks along the way.”
The response to Can’t We Talk has been “overwhelmingly positive,” Chast said. “So many people have gone through this” with their folks.
“Every once in awhile,” though, “I’ve heard from someone who thought I was too honest.”
Watching one’s parents grow old, Chast said, is fraught with so much emotion, love and exasperation. And yet, let’s face it: “Some of these things are funny.”
After her talk Tuesday night, Chast will stay to sign copies of her books.
She’s one in a long tradition of writers who have come to Chimacum to give the Huntingford Humanities Lecture.
The Jefferson County Library established the annual program in 2001 in memory of Sara L. “Sally” Huntingford, who helped form the Library District in 1978. A teacher and mother, Huntingford believed in the power of the public library in a rural place.
Huntingford lecturers in past years have included David Guterson in 2012, Sherman Alexie in 2008 and Timothy Egan in 2007.
For more about Tuesday’s lecture and other Jefferson County Library programs, visit www.JCLibrary.info, phone 360-385-6544 or visit the library itself at 620 Cedar Ave. in Port Hadlock.
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Features Editor Diane Urbani de la Paz can be reached at 360-452-2345, ext. 5062, or at diane.urbani@peninsuladailynews.com.
