Press release from Red Bank Regional High School
Sara Van Ness, an English teacher at Red Bank Regional High School, is a very accomplished young woman. She acquired her masters in English from Monmouth University and is currently enrolled in doctoral program at Rowan University for Educational Leadership. She spends her summers as a therapeutic horseback riding instructor for children with special needs. And, she is about to have her third scholarly work published on the graphic novel — a love she nourishes at RBR where she teaches a rare high school course on the subject.
Van Ness describes the graphic novel, a genre that really gained mainstream popularity in the mid 1980s, as an interactive medium that combines visual images and words in a form that resembles a long comic book. Some popular graphic novels include Watchmen by Alan Moore and David Gibbons, Maus by American cartoonist Art Spiegelman, and The Dark Knight Returns by Frank Miller.
This has evolved to become a very popular English elective at RBR (a course established four years ago from Ms. Van Ness’s proposal to administration). Sara continues, “It has been wonderful to see students, who may not be avid readers outside of school, taking an interest in reading and even checking the graphic novels out of the library. These books are terrific, especially for visual learners.”
Sara describes her foray as a published author as serendipitous. As a writing assistant in her undergraduate days at Monmouth University, she was also a hobby artist who earned money during her college years with a small portrait business. So when a professor introduced her to graphic novels, which combined her skills and passions, and recommended she read Watchmen, she was hooked.
Upon her graduation summa cum laude from Monmouth University in 2008 (a year in which she was awarded the New Jersey Distinguished Student Teacher Award from the state’s Department of Education), the highly commended graduate delayed her career in education to write a book. Published by McFarland in 2010, Watchmen as Literature: A Critical Study of the Graphic Novel is a book of literary of criticism which analyzes the text from a variety of angles.
While working at RBR and studying for her graduate degree, she discovered that the late Beat Generation author William S. Burroughs had intended to publish a graphic novel in collaboration with artist Malcolm McNeill, but the work was never produced as originally intended. She contacted Mr. McNeill to learn more. Their professional relationship grew, and he asked her to review his memoir Observed While Falling: Bill Burroughs, Ah Pook, and Me.
Soon, thereafter, he requested that she write a historical narrative to accompany the long awaited release of the original artwork from the Ah Pook project. This became her second publication, included in Fantagraphic’s The Lost Art of Ah Pook is Here: Images for the Graphic Novel, which was published in 2011.
Her third publication, a paper on Alison Bechdel’s memoir Fun Home, sprang from an Advanced Placement workshop she attended as an RBR teacher. There, she met Dr. Alex Romagnoli, who was very impressed to discover an English teacher, who taught an elective in the graphic novel in a public high school that offered such a course. He introduced her to the Indiana University of Pennsylvania’s scholarly journal Work and Days, which will publish her paper in the spring of 2015 in a special journal featuring the graphic novel.
Recently Ms. Van Ness received a heartwarming email from a former student, Dillon Stambaugh who wrote, “I just wanted to let you know that our graphic novels class, three or so years ago, has really helped me out in college. I’m taking a class and Maus is the focal point. Having already read Spiegelman’s work and learned the ability to analyze individual panels, I have a distinct advantage. I name dropped Scott McCloud and now my professor is using the text in class.
“Oh, and I read Watchmen again. I had to. So I just wanted to say thank you and I hope that course is still going strong!”
“It has been really wonderful to see my students learn to love books,” comments Van Ness. “That is very cool.”
