This year, Calhoun debuted its Common Read program. The selected text was Thi Bui’s The Best We Could Do, a graphic memoir exploring her family history as a Vietnamese immigrant and a refugee of the Vietnam War. Our main Common Read event was Thi Bui visiting our campus for two days to talk about both her book and the medium of comics as a whole.
The first event was on the Huntsville campus and was a beginner friendly workshop about creating comics. The first part of the workshop centered around breaking down a scene into its “key images” – aka panels. We watched a brief scene of a woman cooking breakfast, and then decided which moments would be the most important to include in a comic based off of the scene. Then, we each did little thumbnail sketches of the key moments on Post-it notes. It was decided that roughly eight panels was the right amount: not too many, not too few.
The second part of the workshop centered on the relationship between text and images in comics. Thi Bui firmly believes that words and images should juxtapose against each other, rather than the text serving as obvious captions to what the images already show.
We were challenged to take the thumbnail sketches we had just created and create an internal monologue for the woman in the scene that had nothing to do with the images.
Results varied, from frustrations with her job, to parental stress involving her kids, to mourning a lost relationship. This text was then used to caption each panel, creating a completely new tone.
The next day, Bui met with students again at the Alabama Center for the Arts in Decatur.
This meeting began with the reading of a passage from Bui’s book. Audience volunteers provided the voices of the characters. The specific scene involved the experience of Thi Bui and her family living in a refugee camp while escaping the Vietnam War, ending with her family’s arrival in America.
At the end of the presentation, Bui took questions from members of the audience. Questions ranged from inquiries about her current family life to further curiosities about her writing process.
After the speech segment in the auditorium, everyone queued up to get their book signed. Bui was incredibly engaged and had a brief personal conversation with every attendee while she signed their book.
