Photo Courtesy of Martha Moyer
Aseel Rafat
News Reporter
“I was telling my students to follow their dreams, and I realized I had to follow my own.”
Martha Moyer, once a math teacher here at South for twenty-two years, has created her own graphic novel called The Broken Meditation Garden. This novel is a memoir encapsulating memories of Moyer’s life, greatly inspired by her experiences as a teacher, and by her family and friends that have surrounded her throughout her life.
In the novel, there is dark humor that primarily surrounds the bipolar episode Moyer had in the beginning of her teaching career and the journey that led her to recovery. The character that embodies her journey, Claire Wilcox, finds herself having to recuperate through an extremely difficult time in her life dealing with mental illness. After time spent with her family in Oregon, Moyer decided to write and draw her experiences to shape her novel over the course of twenty five years, on and off. Her character, Claire, soon realizes she’s not the only one who is going through a difficult time, especially when she sees her loved ones also going through emotional distress.
When asked whether she preferred getting up on stage and tell a story or tell a story through graphic art work, Moyer revealed that she loves the immediate response and the sound of laughter from the audience.
“It inspires me to make them laugh even more and carry out the amusement,” Moyer said.
That being said, she also loves the calmness and the enjoyability of drawing, writing the dialogue, and especially getting to crack jokes to herself when turning people from her real life into transformed characters within her book.
Moyer worked extremely hard on this novel, spending up to twelve hours a day on every single page (the book being around seventy five pages). Each page has meticulous attention to detail, allowing readers to become fully immersed in the story. Moyer even took cartooning classes to enhance her talent, which is very evident through the detail on every page. She has even started a graphic novel group to work with other writers and artists cooperatively on their work.
Beyond the immense effort that was put into this story, Moyer also plans to release a second edition of it by February and hopes to write a children’s story revolving around her cats (so stay on the lookout!).
Last weekend Moyer was at the Massachusetts Independent Comics Expo, selling many copies of her book and sharing her story on a panel, attracting lots of peoples’ interest. Today, October 28th, you can watch Moyer on WGBH for Stories From the Stage from 9:30 pm to 10:00 pm, performing an excerpt of her memoir to a live audience.
Please tune in tonight and show your support!
Thank you ! I appreciate the article and I definitely miss all my previous students. They must be seniors now? I would tell them the same thing, “follow your dreams” Hugs to everyone at South.
Lovely lovely article. Thank you so much