About Brontosaurus Illustrated:
Content Warning: Sexual Violence
Brontosaurus Illustrated is the story of a rape, now fifty years old, and its effects over five decades. Nina Gold was a 19-year-old Stanford sophomore riding a full math scholarship to the American dream. But her avid quest was trampled one spring break-like an ant by a boot-when she was kidnapped and raped at gunpoint on a Baja beach, a trauma the size of a brontosaurus.
It began when two armed men in ski masks slithered out of the shrubbery as Nina and her friends were enjoying a joint and the sunset. They were tied up and stowed in the back of their own van, then raped on the sand. Of course, everything was different after that. Or was it? How could she know?
Brontosaurus Illustrated is a graphic rendition of this story and Nina's consequent spin-out that lasted for decades as she searched for reasons, meanings, antidotes. And a way forward. Is Nina Gold a lucky victim, rife with muscular resilience, because she created a seemingly "normal" life? Or is she warped and ruined forever? Is she a better person for having been raped? Stronger? Tougher? Brighter? More empathetic? More poetic? Kinder? Or is she worse? Meaner? Colder? And much more detached? There is no way to know. But with a rape occurring every second of every day, there are millions of stories that need to be told. Brontosaurus Illustrated is one of them... with drawings. And jokes.
With musical accompaniment by Steve Sander.
About My Husband’s Eyebrows:
My Husband's Eyebrows is a humorous examination and honest celebration of Grabel's long marriage-its good, its bad, its ugly-told through a collection of prose poems and poetry, punctuated by the author's richly colored, exuberant, exaggerated illustrations.
Author bio:
Leanne Grabel is a writer, illustrator, and performer in love with mixing genres. Her first collaboration was with a bongo player and sax player in the mid-70s and her most recent collaborations were with filmmaker Penny Allen and dancer/choreographer Gregg Bielemeier. She has written & produced numerous multi-media shows, including “The Lighter Side of Chronic Depression” and “Anger: The Musical.” Grabel’s graphic novel, Brontosaurus Illustrated, recently serialized in The Opiate, was published by The Opiate Books in 2022. Grabel is the 2020 recipient of the Bread & Roses Award for contributions to women’s literature in the Pacific Northwest. She and her husband started and ran Cafe Lena, a poetry hub and restaurant, throughout the 90s. Grabel is a retired special education teacher, the mother of two daughters and the grandmother of two nubbins, Ophelia and Elliot.
Tiffany Lee Brown is a writer, editor, and interdisciplinary artist from the woods of Oregon. Author of a book of prose-poetry, A Compendium of Miniatures, she is also an astrologer and Tarot reader with a podcast called Burning Tarot. T uses she and they pronouns, and is both neurodivergent and partially disabled. Her writing has appeared in Tin House, Oregon Humanities, Bookforum, Bust, Wired, Portland Monthly, and other publications. T was one of six Northwest poets selected for inclusion in The Human Growth Experiment. More recently, her poem "Listicle" was called a "furious, chilling, compassionate" response to misogyny and violence against women. Under the byline T. Lee Brown, she reports for The Nugget newspaper in Sisters, Oregon, which also features her column, "In the Pines."