By Katie Hanson ’25
In spring 2020, during what Briana Loewinsohn ’02 initially thought would be a two-week COVID-19 shutdown, she sat down and drew a comic. After sharing her first comic on social media, Loewinsohn and a fellow graphic artist committed to a challenge: post a hand-drawn comic to Instagram every day for 100 consecutive days. Three years later, her rekindled love of comics has led to a newly published graphic memoir, Ephemera, which has received rave reviews.
“These daily comics were the impetus for the memoir; they got me thinking about a personal narrative,” Loewinsohn says. “My mother had been gone, and it had been a long enough time that I felt like I could tell that story, and I knew how I wanted to tell it.”
Ephemera chronicles Loewinsohn’s reflections on her childhood and relationship with her mother, who is managing mental health issues. The book weaves together three settings—a garden, a forest, and a greenhouse—and incorporates magical realism to portray Loewinsohn’s adolescence. It also moves in and out of two color palettes, one based in rust tones and a second, blue-based scheme. For Loewinsohn, the blue shades represent the fogginess of childhood memories.
From choosing the colors to designing the plants on the front cover, Loewinsohn says her creative process was overwhelmingly organic. She worked without a script, sketching characters and creating drawings, later exploring different possibilities for weaving her ideas together. As an art teacher at an Oakland, California high school for the past 17 years and mom of two young children, she had to find time to draw between classes and parenting. Throughout the writing and drawing process, Loewinsohn’s commitment to magical realism helped guide her.
“Magical realism has always been one of my favorite types of writing,” Loewinsohn says. “I love the idea that we’re living in this mundane world where there can be this bit of magic. Because this book is all about memory, those memories can be embellished in this ambiguous, dreamy place.”
After working through a substantial portion of her book, Loewinsohn began pitching to different publishers, eventually garnering several offers. She chose to publish with Fantagraphics, her “dream publisher.”
“They make really beautifully made books,” Loewinsohn says. “For me, it was important how the book looked and felt when you held it in your hands.”
While Loewinsohn is now basking in praise from outlets such as NPR, she is quick to connect her success with her time at Scripps. As a fine arts major, she explored a variety of mediums, experimenting with drawing, painting, digital art, and photography before focusing her thesis on pen and ink drawings. Outside of her major, she credits the Core Curriculum in Interdisciplinary Humanities with helping her develop her worldviews.
“Once I got to Scripps, I just fell in love,” Loewinsohn says. “I found the Core classes really influential to me as I was starting out. Those classes were mind-boggling to me, coming from an underfunded public school. They really shaped my broader interest in the world.”
Outside of the classroom, Loewinsohn took on a variety of roles, running the Scripps Art Society with a friend, organizing an annual wearable art show at the Motley Coffeehouse, working at a nearby preschool, and interning at the Ruth Chandler Williamson Gallery. After graduation, she continued exploring her interest in art, working at a New York art supplies store while selling comic books, a medium she had focused on during her senior year to cope with change.
“My very first comic was a project for a Scripps art class, and it was about a breakup with a boy,” Loewinsohn says. “It was self-inspired, and then I did a book about a bunch of breakups that a bunch of us had. After that, everything was surreal, sad, and dreamy. That’s what interests me about comics and what eventually led me to my memoir.”
Now, Loewinsohn is already drafting a second graphic memoir. Her upcoming book, also under contract with Fantagraphics, details her 1990s high school experience through the format of notes passed between classmates. Loewinsohn, who kept all her own notes from high school, tells the narrative while including details accurate to her childhood.
“It’s a very different story because the character looks like me, the people are all people I knew, the house is my house,” Loewinsohn says. “I’m working on that, and it’s been really fun.”